Let’s take another kick at this one.

I have towered above others in many categories for my entire life, and I have never been comfortable with it.

The main example, of course, is towering over others intellectually. I am not bragging when I say that I am way, way smarter than most people.

It’s simply a statement of fact.

And while this conveys many benefits – like, for example, never having sweated a test or assignment in my life – it also comes with a lot of problems that I have never really addressed or even wrapped my oversized brain around.

Because as patient readers know, I don’t want to tower above people. I want to be with people, on their level, so I can relate with them. Understand them. Get where they are coming from. Add their perspective on my own.

But I need to be realistic about how much of a possibility that is. No matter how empathic and understanding I am, I am still a giant among pygmies, and a certain lack of connection and understanding is inevitable.

And it hurts. It really does. It’s cold up here, and the air is so thin. I look into the warm safe world that most people live in and I feel a great and terrible longing for it, I wish with all my being that I could join that warm and wonderful world.

But I can’t. I don’t fit. I’d be better off looking for a home fit for a giant, but I don’t know if such a thing even exists, let alone how to find it.

But something has to give. I’ve lived this hunched over life for far too long. It’s time I straighten up and stand proud of my gifts, and to hell with people who can’t handle the weird and wondrous wizard that I am.

Part of that, I think, will be learning to somehow project who and what I am, without illusion or subterfuge, in such a way that it gives people some place to start when it comes to dealing with me.

I am not even sure what that means yet, but I think it has something to do with making peace with the fact that I can be opaque and enigmatic to some people, and that there is only so much I can do about that and past that point, people are just going to have to deal with it.

This, in turn, is going to require certain modulations of the way I deal with people. These involve giving myself a certain amount of permission to be aloof, detached, and even superior, instead of trying to blend in with the pygmies.

I suppose it really boils down to the advice central to life in an individualistic society :

Just be yourself.

It sounds so simple but it can be so incredibly hard to do. Especially for those of us whose fluid sense of self makes it so much easier to be someone else.

Or even nobody in particular. A cipher. A mystery.

Or maybe some kind of alien.

---

On being an alien

It’s not so bad, if you just own up to it and stop trying to be a human.

I’m working on it.

The bitter, bracing truth is that it is impossible for me to be like others. And I think I have always known that intellectually, but I have fiercely resisted and denied it emotionally.

There is no possibility of my becoming just like everyone else. There is no series of moves I could possibly make to achieve that outcome. It’s a null set, a non-starter.

Because even if I could wipe depression from my mind completely and forever, I would still be an alien because I would still be hyperintelligent and imperfectly socialized and temperamentally devoted to being myself with neither compromise or conformity.

I couldn’t conform even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.

So it’s time for me to fess up and own it : I am a very weird dude and there’s nothing I can do to change that so I might as well stop hating myself for being hard to reach and focus instead on being the best very weird dude I can be.

Sure, I’m an alien. Or a robot. But that doesn’t mean I can’t connect with you fleshy Earth creatures in my own alien robot way.

And that starts with throwing away the cloak of dissembling and illusion and being myself for a change,. Let the world see me as I am, with no ambiguity to hide in, no shame to turn me away from the light, and no rabbit holes for me to bolt down the moment I get scared.

Total exposure, in other words. Emotional nudism. Sentencing myself to be exposed before my peers.

TEAR DOWN THE WALL!

I’d link the video but I already linked it quite recently.

And the thing is, when that wall comes down, the sunlight can get in. The emotional warmth I need to badly can make it through the ice and melt my heart. Those deep dark shadows with their shameful hiding and life-destroying chill are chased away, because I don’t need them any more.

You can’t connect with others if you are not being yourself. It’s like trying to collect your Nobel Prize while operating under a pseudonym. You can’t send s surrogate and expect that to connect with others for you.

True connection can only happen between individuals. Not ghosts, or shadows, or doppelgangers, or false twins, or holograms, or any other false self – only the true self can connect with the rest of humanity, and all those false selves have to go.

Maybe that’s the problem with being Fruvous some of the time. He’s a version of myself as I would like to be, not the real me.

A mask like all the others, albeit the best one I have ever made.

Maybe I need to spend more time just being Michael John Bertrand for a while.

It’s a terrifying thought, but I’m going to be him whether I like it or not.

Might as well get used to the idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I read a news clipping from some small town’s Police Blotter that stated that a woman had come home from work to find that someone had broken into her home, made and baked a blueberry pie, eaten once slice, and then left.

The woman then called the cops, of course. After all, that’s what you are supposed to do when someone broke into your house. It’s your civic duty.

But I also think she just desperately needed to tell someone about it. I mean, it’s just too weird. So why not kill two birds with one stone and tell the cops?

I love this story. It’s so marvelously picayune. And I have so many questions. Like :

1. Who does that? Who breaks into a stranger’s house just to bake a pie and eat one slice? Someone who really, really wanted some pie, I guess. I mean, I know some people have extremely strong feelings about pie – not me, I’ve always been a cake man – but most people would not commit larceny to get some.
2. Did they have the recipe on them? Because that would indicate intent. Or did they have the recipe memorized? If so, you have to admit, that’s pretty impressive. I’ve always been amazed by the people who can bake without a recipe. I wouldn’t make tea biscuits without a recipe and I have made those a dozen times, easy.
3. Is there an alternate theory of the events? Well yeah. One. It’s just barely possible that this woman bakes the pie and at a slice herself then somehow managed to completely forget she had done so. I’ve done similar things myself. But the crime based theory is still the most likely.
4. Is this even a crime? I mean, obviously, it’s a crime in the strictly legal sense to break into someone house and mess with their stuff. But morally speaking, is it a crime? I mean, technically, she’s up most of a pie. Is it still a crime if you leave the victim better off than before?
5. What was that thought process like? Like, how does one decide on this course of action? “I sure could go for a slice of pie right now. But I’m a homeless person with no money. What to do,what to do. Oh hey, I know. I will break into that friendly looking house and bake one myself. Good thing I have my Hobo’s Home Cookbook on me. And I mean hey, what’s the worst that could happen to me? They catch me and throw me in jail. You know what they have in jail? Pie. ”

Then again, if my amnesia theory is correct, I can just imagine that poor women suddenly remembering making the pie while in the middle of phoning the crime into the police and then being way too ashamed to admit it.

That kind of thing has happened to me as well. Being absentminded makes life into a never ending stream of improbable humiliations and tricks your mind plays on you.

If only I could forget those!

More after the break.

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The Wrong Reaction, Part II

I had other ideas for what I was going to talk about in this segment, but this one needs doing, so I am doing it.

Let’s revisit the subject of my disappointing and confusing people by not giving them the reactions they want or expect, shall we?

Because that was very hard to write about, and what I am about to say about it is even harder, so it should do me a fair bit of good.

I felt a large section of my deep shame move last time I talked about this and I am eager to keep things moving in that direction.

To wit : If people are not getting the right reactions from me, they will stop trying to reach me. That, we covered before.

But what if those people are my family?: What if one of those people is…. my mother?

What if my ineffable strangeness interfered with my maternal bond?

See, I read in an article about how autistic babies don’t give their mothers the right feedback in terms of smiles, laughter, or even a warm look of recognition. Healthy kids reward their caretakers with these warm gestures, but autistic babies do not.

And it’s these rewards that reinforce the child’s bond with the caretaker. And it’s self-sustaining when it’s working. A mother who gets warm smiles from her baby will work harder to keep the baby happy and healthy to get more of those awards. A baby who is well looked after and cared about will naturally produce said rewards.

But if the infant is autistic, the right behaviour is not rewarded, and the caretaker will eventually stop trying to reach this seemingly unreachable child.

This, in turn, means that the autistic child gets even less of the social connect that they need to get out of their autistic isolation, and becomes even more withdrawn.

Now like I have said, I do not consider myself autistic, or even Asperger’s. But I do wonder if the same sort of vicious cycle might apply to me. I definitely feel like at some point, my mother gave up on me, and now I have to wonder how much that had to do with me and my issues.

I don’t doubt that my mother loves me with all her heart.

But I was, in many ways, an unreachable child, eerily self-possessed, independent, and articulate, and I have to wonder how many people just gave up trying to reach me after getting no real response for so long.

Including my mother, and the rest of my family.

And the thing is, I seem like I am present, and people can definitely talk to me and see me and get intelligent replies to what they say. I make for a very convincing and lifelike hologram of a person.

But I am, in many ways, emotionally absent. I don’t give the right emotional responses and that opens up a strange gulf between me and others that is all the more confusing for how lifelike I seem.

In some ways, I would be better off acting like a weird alien. That way, I would clearly communicate to people what they can expect of me and give them some kind of heads up on how best to deal with me.

As it is now, I am a walking talking advertisement for the Uncanny Valley.

And if I am to finally shed this shell of mine, I am going to need to figure out how to deal with this problem.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Like it says above : I’ve had more bad sleep.

And man, am I getting sick of this shit.

And to think, I didn’t even take my sleeping pill this morning, I shudder to think what my sleep might have been like if I had.

Then again, maybe I would have slept more, but slept better. Woken up actually feeling rested and refreshed and ready to take on the world.

Yeah right. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

I am obviously not in the best of moods. If my life was a comic strip, there would be a little black cloud of smoke over my head, indicating my being in a cranky funk.

This too shall pass, however. By the time I do the second half of my blogging later today, I will feel a lot better.

I always do.

Still looking for my next big game. Got some very useful feedback from my feline friend Maelkoth about some of the items on my Steam Wishlist this morning.

I have a LOT of stuff on said Wishlist. Way more than I thought I did. So I have a lot to think about right now.

No hurry. In the meantime, I can play a silly game called Murder By Numbers.

It’s a game that combines two things I like : murder mysteries, and picross puzzles.

Picross is a sort of logic game where you have to figure out which squares on a grid are filled and which are empty. When you are done, the end result forms a picture, although said picture generally takes a certain amount of imagination to see.

Kind of like a constellation.

The murder mystery half of the equation is more like a simple text adventure, or what is called a “visual novel” these days. It has the superficial trappings of choices but it’s pretty much totally linear underneath.

And boy, is it trying way too hard to be quirky. The main characters are an actress who plays second fiddle to the bitchy prima donna star of a TV detective show, and her amnesiac flying computer screen robot friend.

The plot is unraveling more like a soap opera than a mystery, and sometimes there is just way too much text to get through to go to the next picross puzzle.

And that’s the content I enjoy : the puzzles. The rest is kind of annoying. It sounded good on paper but I probably would have been better off just buying a straight up picross game and not this odd but amusing hybrid.

Still, it’s kind of fun, despite how much it insists upon itself. So odds are, I will keep playing through the silliness and doing the puzzles.

I will also keep trying to find my Next Big Game. I’d love to find another open world with lots of quests type game, but preferably one that isn’t MMO at all.

So a lot more like Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 than Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV Online, the two I have played most recently.

Makes me wish Fallout ’76, the latest installment in the series, hadn’t turned out to be a clusterfuck of Biblical proportions.

You remember all those clusterfucks in the Bible, right?

Like the ones on Noah’s Ark? Shit got freaky, y’all.

Of course, you have to kind of read between the lines…. but it’s in there.

More after the break.

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The Wrong Reaction

All right, time for another bold attempt to kick one of my issues in the taint.

As patient readers know, for my entire life, I have disappointed people by not giving them the reaction they wanted or expected.

I really wanted to give them what they wanted. My high degree of empathy made it painfully clear that my response was not the correct one. I could feel their frustration and confusion and disappointment.

But whatever it was they wanted, I did not know how to give them. And I took this very personally. It was hard not to. I felt like I was a crushing failure of a human being who couldn’t give a normal reaction even if he tried.

And oh, how I’ve tried.

And I have to wonder what effect this lack of proper response has had on my life. Because when people do not get the right response, sooner or later they stop trying. The fact is that when they interact with you, it causes them pain and confusion, and there’s only so much of that anyone can take before they conclude that you are just to unpleasant to endure.

The fact that I was just innocently being myself made precious little difference. If dealing with someone is a punishing experience, people are going to stop doing it, and what you “deserve” doesn’t enter into it.

The fact that you are getting something “wrong” on a social level of which they are not even consciously aware only makes it worse.

They can’t even put a name to their pain. They just know you’re “weird”.

Well that ends tonight. No, I don’t think I can suddenly acquire all the socialization I missed as a child and start giving people the reactions they want.

So broadly speaking, that issue is beyond my control.

What ends tonight is my taking these failures to connect personally. I will no longer beat myself up over them. Nor will I assume they mean I am fundamentally defective.

I mean, I am. But that’s not important.

What is important is that I cannot do better. It’s not in me to be normal. I’m a strange man with strange ways and my operating system is only partly compatible with the standard one everyone else gets.

That’s who I am. And I refuse to blame myself for it any more. People get the reactions they get from me, and if that means they are disappointed or confused, tough.

Yes, I really want to connect with people. But I will no longer take my frustrations at not being able to do so out on myself.

I will never stop looking for people and places that can interface well with the strange little moonlet on which I reside.

But until then, it makes no sense to hate myself for being lonely.

Being lonely is pain enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This just happened :

Wanted some ice water. Got a tray of ice cubes from the freezer. Noticed that I had somehow managed to overfill the thing again and now there’s a solid gnarylt sheet of ice over the left hand edge of the tray.

That makes it hard to crack the tray to get the ice out. I pit forth a Herculean effort and the tray cracks. This sends ice cubes every which way. Lovely.

I bend down to pick up the cubes that ended up on the floor. Straighten up… and whack my head hard on the still open freezer door.

I really did not need that.

And yeah, I know that in the grand scheme of things, it’s not big deal. Excrement occurs. These things happen to everybody from time to time.

And at least I’m not super sleepy any more.

But still, I am not very happy with my own little world right now. And my world sucks on the best of days, which this is not.

There has got to be more to life than playing video games all the god damned time. It keeps me busy but it also keeps me down. Keeps me trapped in a life which is far too limited and constrained to satisfy a great and mighty soul like mine.

But it gets me through the day. Like I have said many times before, while I am playing a video game, I am not depressed. I’m not anxious. I know what to do. I am not overwhelmed by options. My actions are purposeful, as false as that pruporse might be. I feel competent,. And safe.

And I barely hate myself at all.

To exit this tiny little comfort zone of mine is to have to face the great big world outside of it and actually figure out what the fuck to do with myself. As long as I stay “inside”, I don’t have to face the Infinite Hallway of Infinite Doors, as illusory as I know that to be. I don’t have to face my feelings of total inadequacy, utter unfitness for existence, and pervasive physical incompetence.

I don’t have to face anything as long as I obey the fear.

But it’s killing me, both physically and spiritually. I need more than this. I need a position in the world where I am paid for my labour and where I actually create things with all this raw power of mine, things that are seen, things that have substance and value.

I need a job, god damn it. Something to add value to my existence. Something to do with my time. Something to take me out of my grotty grotto and into the bright and shining world where all those emotional nutrient I lack can be found.

But the fear holds me back. Freezes me in place. Suck the light and the heat and the life out of my intentions. Keeps me from reaching out in even the most minor ways.

And yet, it’s not some alien force acting on me from without. It’s the enemy within, and it works for me. I could stop it if I really wanted to.

But I am too scared of what would happen if I did.

More after the break.

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Peter Pan is Doomed

Here’s the thing about never growing up : it sucks.

Take it from one who knows : remaining a child inside comes at a terrible price. Because all the energy that was supposed to take you all the way to adulthood is still inside you. The only difference is that with you, it has no way out.

Because people like me – you know, us “failure to launch” types – for whatever reason, when we approached the precipice of adulthood, we balked. It’s like we reached the end of the high dive board and froze there, too scared to jump.

Why? I am not sure. There probably isn’t one unifying answer. But I think it has a lot to do with not getting what we needed out of previous stages of development.

Call it self-confidence. Call it faith. Call it the result of being smart enough to know you have a choice. But something went drastically wrong and we failed to evolve to the next stage of life. The stage that’s supposed to last from college graduation to middle age, the longest of all the stages, the one that defines us as organisms and as people.

We didn’t make it. We failed to launch.

And I hate it. I hate that I have a particularly humiliating form of arrested development. I hate that everyone else my age has been all the way through the adult phase and has moved into middle age, with kids and spouses and careers and everything else, while I am not even sure I finished puberty on anything but the purely physical level.

I hate falling behind. I had being left behind. I hate missing out on life. I hate feeling like the world’s oldest tadpole. I hate looking out at all the other kiddies playing in the sun and enjoying life while I am stuck here like a housebound invalid wishing like hell that I could leave this cell of mine and go be part of the living, breathing world but knowing that I can’t because there is something very very broken in me, and I just plain can’t.

Not until I heal, and there are days – like today – when it feels like that is never going to happen. I missed the bus to the real world and now I am lost and forgotten in a world where that bus doesn’t even stop here any more.

If I had known the stakes, I would have foguht much harder not to lose out on life and worked like hell to keep proving to the world that I was worth something instead of just fading way into the background of life, content to be forgotten.

But I’m not content. Not any more. I am pissed off and enraged by the massive inustice of my current life and I am going to use my powers to amplify my voice till it is so loud that nobody can ignore it any more.

Because I am fucking amazing, god damn it.

And I deserve a better life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the update :

The money I put on my reloadable VISA posted at around 7:30 pm last night, so no worries there. It’s all there ready to be spent.

That means that by now I have bought Borderlands 3…. kinda.

I bought it, downloaded it (which took 14 hours), and tried to play it. But it hangs on the very first loading screen, and I am pretty pissed off about that.

So far, I have tried two of the things the internet suggested and neither of them worked. Three if you count “just wait a real long time” as a solution. Right now, the cute little robot whose name escapes me is dancing across a black screen over and over, and that’s it. It is hung there.

And it’s been twenty minutes. And I don’t hear any activity from the hard drive, so I somehow doubt it’s loading anything. So I think I may be officially fuct.

And that pisses me off solid because I have wanted this game for ages and it took so long to download and I was so happy to see it for sale for 50 percent off, and now it looks like I will not get to play it.

Son of a bitch.

I hope it’s not just an issue of my computer being a few years too old to keep up with this fairly new game.

The solution to that would no doubt be expensive. I can afford it, but it would still suck to have to take all my extra cash and put it into upgrades.

But I might have no choice if I want to be able to play newish PC games. And I do.

I mean, to say playing video games is my main hobby is an understatement along the lines of “many fish like to swim”.

So it would make sense to invest in said hobby. But I would rather not.

Of course, if I can’t get Borderlands 3 to work, I will have to return it, and get my $40 CDN back. And then look for something new to entertain me.

Which will be a pain.

---

Wow. I totally forgot that I wasn’t done writing. Between trying to make Borderlands 3 work and watching YouTube videos, this little blog o’ mine got forgotten.

Too many irons in the fire, I guess. Lesson learned.

Anyhow, so yeah, I will have to find another game in which to invest, and that’s very annoying at this point because that means facing all those options again.

Oh well. I am sure I will find something. And who knows, maybe I will get the damned thing running. I am not out of options yet.

But the prognosis is poor. Reminds me of when I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 at full price, only to find it ran incredibly poorly on my machine.

Turns out, it was a legendarily bad port to PC and at the time there was nothing to be done about it except return the damned thing.

I wonder if they ever fixed all those issues.

If they have…. maybe I will try it again.

More after the break.

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God damn fucking son of a bitch!

For full effect, imagine that statement spat out in a rush of French Canadian fury, with accent, and with such fluency that it makes it almost seem like one word.

So, no luck with Borderlands 3. I was pondering trying a few more things when I noticed that according to Steam, my time “played” (hah) was 118 minutes, and that kind of decided it for me because the cutoff for returns is two hours, or 120 minutes.

Of course, I’ve never played the game. It hung (as in, listed as Not Responding in Task Manager) before even getting to the main menu, let alone playing it, but whatever. I will buy something else.

In the meantime, I reinstalled a kickass older game called Dishonored which I haven’t played in a long time and which is very up my twisted little alley, because it’s full of darkness, brutal violence, revenge, killing the fuck out of bad people, bringing harsh and final justice to the bastards who betrayed you, and lots of room to explore once you get far enough into the game to have the run of Dunwall.

It also has excellent controls for doing things like climbing on top of things, jumping gaps, peeking around corners, climbing up walls, and all the other things that make me love games like Shadow of Mordor so much.

Basically, I love games that let me use the full range of humanity’s monkey-like climbing and scrambling abilities instead of expecting me to believe that my protagonist knows how to use a zillion guns but has not figured out how to scale a fence or walk on a narrow ledge without falling.

Plus, I have always wanted to be able to move around like that, but even if I had ever been fit enough, I have the wrong body type for it.

You don’t get a lot of bear shaped ninjas.

Dunno what I will end up buying for myself. I will take a look over my Steam Wishlist and ponder my options. No rush, I have Dishonored to keep me busy till I find something new to acquire.

Stealth plays a fairly large role in Dishonored, and as patient readers know, I am not good at stealth. I lack the patience and attention to detail required.

But I am getting better. I don’t blunder into situations as much. I have learned to go a bit slower and give myself a chance to assess a situation before attacking.

It’s hard to restrain my basically bloodthirsty and battle loving nature. My instincts still tell me to just kill the motherfuckers already.

Well my food is here. I got the good sushi from Toku. Apparently they won’t come into the building any more so Joe had to go down and get it for me.

Noted. Next week I will be ready,.

Damn I miss going to restaurants.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got back from cashing my monthly cheque. Between getting in line outside the bank to leaving the bank with my transactions complete probably took around 45 minutes, with me standing the whole time.

So my leg muscles are not happy with me right now.

Plus, my blood sugar is getting low. I can tell because I am slightly lightheaded and my muscles are beginning to twitch.

Which means I should totally be eating right now. After all, I haven’t eaten since 6 am and it is now 3 pm which means it’s been nine hours since I ate.

That’s three hours too long. At least.

But I can’t eat right now because the unaccustomed exercise has killed my appetite. So I have to wait till I am no longer in an adrenal state and can start feeling hungry again.

That said, if that doesn’t happen soon, I will make myself eat anyway. Never a pleasant chore, but it beats having my blood sugar crash on me.

Annoyances at the bank : there were two lines which converged at the door. One went down one side of bank, the other went down the side perpendicular to that. One line was much shorter than the other.

But they were letting people in without regards to which line they came from, so suckers like me who got in the longer line waited a lot longer.

I just assumed the longer line was the “real” line. Why? Basic pessimism, I suppose.

As a result, I resented those who got in early by going to the “wrong” line.

Yeah, I know that’s illogical. So am I.

Then, when I was in the bank, I make it to the front of the line and then the teller calls some blonde lady who wasn’t even in the line over ahead of me.

That’s the thing about waiting in line. You have to wait in line to do it. You don’t get to just go off and do your own thing.

On the other hand, I’m rich now. Or will be.

Because not only did I get a check from the federal government for $290, my monthly check from the province had an extra $320 or so in it, so I have an extra $600 to play around with right now.

Only I can’t access most of it because I loaded $1200 onto my reloadable VISA, which seemed like a smart move until I got home and realized that it can take a day for those transactions to actually post to my account and until they do, that money is in limbo.

And today’s Friday, so that means the money might not be accessible til MONDAY.

And that’s going to make life kind of complicated for me this weekend.

Ya do what seems like the smart thing and it still bites you in the ass. Right now, my cash reserves stand at around $130, so cash wise, I am fine.

But a game I really want, Borderlands 3, is on sale for 50 percent off right now, and I was really looking forward to pouncing on that deal.

But I forgot all about the costs of putting my money in financial limbo like that.

So yeah. Direct deposit is looking pretty good to me right now.

Oh, and here’s a kickass Leonard Cohen video directed by David Lynch.

More after the break.

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I used to live for music

Every time I listen to Leonard Cohen, I reconsider my decision not to be a poet.

I used to write poetry. It wasn’t very good, but it was mine. But I decided at an early age that there was simply no future in poetry. It’s a niche market and there are very very few people in the world who can call themselves professional poets and I did not like my odds at becoming one of them.

But Cohen makes me reconsider. Granted, he turns his poetry into songs, and songs are way more commercially viable than poems.

What makes me reconsider, though, is how much his poetry speaks to that dark, deep, mysterious side of me,. the Mars in Pisces side that means so much to me yet fits so poorly with that big bad bruiser of truth machine that is my rational mind.

That’s why I say confusing things like “I am the world’s only rational materialist mystic poet”. What I mean is that I have a lot of attributes that would fit quite well into any number of mystic traditions, including a capacity to feel things very deeply,. but I have no mystic tradition to fit them into.

Instead, I have rationality, which is the coldest of comforts. Sure, it was great to conquer my fear of the dark via telling myself there was nothing there in the dark that wasn’t there in the light. but for the most part, rationality makes a very poor substitute for all the emotional nutrients that I should have been getting.

No wonder so many people in my situation become bitter, cynical misanthropes. They are in a lot of pain from needs that often cannot even admit they have, let alone meet.

Myself, I made a conscious decision to reject that option. It didn’t seem to me like it could lead anywhere good. And indeed, I have seen formerly good and sane people get trapped in the ever-tightening coils of that world-view and to put it very mildly, it does not seem to make them happy.

They just end up bitter and alone and miserable, yet still convince they are “right”.

Well, would you rather be right, or happy?

That’s always what it comes down to, isn’t it? Is it better to be right and miserable or wrong and happy?

Put that way, it seems quite obvious that it is better to be wrong and happy.

And if you take a good look at the world, you realize that it’s the most popular choice. Most people would rather be objectively wrong and happy than right and unhappy.

It’s only mental mutants like myself who try to live on truth alone.

And it’s just plain not enough.

There has to be more.

And I will move heaven and earth to find it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve likened depression to life in a fascist state before, and one of the ways in which this is true is the fanatical obsession with safety.

Safety is all. Safety is everything. Safety is the only thing that matters. Safety is the prime variable that is to be maximized at all times no matter what the cost or what it does to all the other important variables.

Variables like, say, happiness. Which should be the prime variable, the one that controls and supersedes all others. The only one that matters, really, because if maximizing others doesn’t make you happy, who frigging cares?

But being obsessed with safety tends to seek out justifications for itself, and is not exactly fussy about whether or not those justifications are true or even make sense.

The aim is to justify a fixed belief, after all. What they call “motivated reasoning” these days. And like the ancient Greeks who declared that the only use for logic and reason was to verify what “common sense” told them was true, the safety obsession only seeks information that verifies and justifies it.

Hence the apparent absurdity of a nation like North Korea obsessing over the remote possibility of foreign influence and pouring enormous amounts of money and other resources into the search for a very low number of not particularly dangerous spies.

If you already believe that the whole world is trying to destroy North Korea and its Glorious Leader, and this belief is important and central to your world view (how could it not be, given the circumstances?), then even the total lack of catching any spies or dissidents can’t change that belief.

It just means they got away. Obviously, we need to crack down even harder.

Same with the safety obsession of the depressed and/or anxious. Sure, maybe nobody hurt you today, but that’s only because you put yourself where they can’t reach you by isolating yourself from most of the world.

Like I said to my therapist, as solutions go, it’s like treating a hangnail by cutting off your arm. I mean yeah, problem solved, but the solution was far far worse than the problem.

A net loss, for sure.

As far as I can tell at this moment, the only way out of that trap is to wrap my head around the concept of dangerous happiness being better than safe misery.

That it is better to rise and fall and rise again than to stay face down in the mud. That risking disaster is better than guaranteeing despair. That nobody ever learned to walk by staying on the floor.

This is a hard subject for me to think about because the emotion of being absolutely terrified deep inside and willing to do whatever it takes to feel safe is still with me and struggles mightily against any attempt to calm it down.

Yet I know that I am safe. Too safe, really. So I am conflicted.

But you know what? i know which side I want to win, and that’s the one I am backing.

To hell with safety. I want to be happy.

More after the break.

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The limits of safety

Wow, I am actually resuming the previous topic. Maybe I am finally growing up as a writer. Maybe one day, I will actually talk about the same thing for an entire blog entry with no asides, diversions, or total shifts of focus.

Nah. That sounds super goddamned boring.

Anyhow, you can’t talk about safety without including what you are supposedly safe from, and that gets to the very heart of illusion of safety.

Because what am I safe from? Certainly not depression. Or sadness. Or anxiety. Or self-loathing. Or really any of the things that really matter.

So what’s the frigging point? I have sacrificed my entire adult life on the altar of sacred safety. And all that time, all the things that would actually hurt me were locked in with me and had me all to themselves.

The ultimate disease is one that blocks all things which might cure it. There are so many potential cures for my depression. Like exercise. Or more social interaction with people outside my little circle of friends. Or improving my diet. Or just taking a little walk out in the world now and then to sample the fresh air and remind myself that there is a big beautiful world out there just waiting to lead me out of the depths of depression and into the real world, warts and all.

I want to find my way out of this shark cage of an existence, and to do that I need to find a way past all the guardians I have invented to keep myself in.

You know. For “safety”.

These demons of mine come in many forms, but they are all made of the same substance : fear. And fear only has power over you if you give in to it.

That sounds downright magical, as if saying it makes the monsters disappear, but it’s not that simple. Giving in to fear is a very hard habit to break, especially when you have been doing it for a long long time like I have.

And the thing is, the fear has a potent reward to give you if you give into it : relief. Fighting the fear is stressful. Your mind is in conflict with itself. The moment you give in to the fear, you are flooded with relief and the stress disappears.

Sure, giving in to the fear might be bad in the long term. But the reward is immediate and the long term is hard to hold onto even when you know better.

The temptation to just go for the immediate reward is very, very strong.

So it’s like an internal addiction. You are addicted to your own endorphins and other parasympathetic neurochemicals that produce that sensation of relief when the stress and pain that triggered them suddenly disappears.

Unlike external addictions, this is one you can’t quit cold turkey. Nor will a lifestyle change fix it.

All I can really do is turn and face the strain.

And no matter what, not let the fear win.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s where I feel like I am right now due to bad sleep. On Venus, with all its pressure and acid and heat.

I’d prefer Bradbury’s genius, which was an Earth type planet covered in dense rain forest where it rained all the time.

Sure, all that raining would get depressing. I should know, I survived El Nino, when it rained hard for almost a whole month without pause and with cloud cover so thick and low that it felt like being trapped under a low black roof. It was so dark under the roof that it was hard to tell day from night.

But at least I could frigging breathe.

Bitching about it does make me feel somewhat better. So thanks for indulging me in this, folks. Reading about this over and over can’t be fun but it’s something I need to do in order to deal with my precarious health position.

The words are not coming easy right now. Hell, it’s hard enough to just stay focused on what I am doing. I feel like I swimming as hard as I can just to keep from being swept away by the waves.

It kinda sucks.

Have played more Final Fantasy XIV Online. Finished the first segment of the main plot. Things got sort of interesting in the process. Now I have been packed off to a new country on a diplomatic mission. Got there by airship, of course.

Final Fantasy always has airships. Often, you get one of your own. Not true for me yet, but I have hope.

I love, love, love having my own ship in video games. The ability to roam the world (or galaxy, or whatever) really appeals to me.

Kind of like having a car in the real world, I suppose. Suddenly you have the ability to go wherever you want. It’s very empowering.

Bought Joe’s birthday gift off of Amazon late last night. It will be here tomorrow. Not bad. Makes paying for Amazon Prime vaguely worth it.

I don’t do anywhere near enough shopping on Amazon to justify paying for Prime, but I just can’t seem to make myself get rid of it.

It’s just so nice to have.

Took another crack at my tough old liberal character in part 2 of yesterday’s blog entry. Turned out way better than the first time. I attribute that to the fact that I have a lot more to say about taxes.

Got to stick to topics I have enough material on, I suppose.

I miss doing standup. It was going pretty good there at the end. But I will find some other way to use my talents to make people happy again.

Then again, my political side might take over and instead of making people laugh, I willl be trying to wake them up to the truth.

Kind of hard to reconcile those two. I mean, the obvious solution is to do political satire, and that might be where I end up.

But my political thoughts are so angry and strident that it’s hard to imagine how I would make them funny.

Oh well. Time to go back to the surface of Venus.

More after the break.

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There’s Got To Be A Morning After

They were talking about music for our times and this popped into my head :

It’s one of my favorite inspiration songs of all time, and I think I have figured out why.

Unlike some other inspirational type songs, it acknowledges that things have been very bad for a long time. And not in some abstract and offhand way, like talking about “troubles” or “sorrows” or the like.

Every word of the song resonates with the message that “things are bad now but we will get through this together and finally find our long lost dawn”.

I’ve been looking around for a place that’s safe and warm for a long long time. Since the time when that song was on the air, more or less.

And it gets me thinking about optimism and hope in darker times. It’s no coincidence that so many songs of hope and happiness came out of the Great Depression. That was an era when only great hope could defeat the great sorrows of the era, and optimism was not optional.

It was a survival skill. You found hope or you lay down and died.

It also gets me thinking about something the fantabulous Felicity said to me last night. A lesson I feel like she’s been trying to teach me for years but I was not yet wise enough to learn it until now.

She described something I said as being “logically true but not in a helpful way” and my instinctive response was to wholesale reject this clearly illogical sentiment and insist that something is either true or it isn’t, whether it helps or not.

But, to my credit, I stopped myself from going down that road and thus both avoided a no doubt worse than useless argument and gave myself the space I needed in order to truly try to get what she was telling me.

And that, in turn, gave me a glimpse at the profound and soul-destroying errors to which my Brutal Truth Machine of a mind is prone. How the drive to arrive at the “truth” can eliminate a lot of valuable information and perspective in its drive to solve everything.

No…. that’s still too cold. What I am trying to say is that this merciless engine of a mind of mine kills and freezes what it studies and that if I am to have any hope of growing as a person and becoming a real live actual grownup at long last, I am going to have to learn to see, understand, and integrate into myself far more than such computronic thought processes can ever encompass.

That means I have to learn to slow down that machine gun mind of mine long enough for me to look around, smell the roses, see the sights, and take a long walk in the warm sunshine, and try to remember what it means to be alive.

It doesn’t matter what is “true”. Truth cannot sustain me.

What I need is happiness.

And that’s way more important than having the right answer all the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Bad sleep. This is getting old quick. Having to fight to stay awake sucks. And I didn’t even take my sleeping pill today.

Save me, Diet Coke.

Anyhow, I have now played enough Final Fantasy XIV Online to form a meaningful opinion of it, and I am not impressed.

I’m underwhelmed, if that’s a word.

The game is very repetitive and grind-y.

It’s repetitive in that nearly every quest boils down to “go kill X number of creature Y”. That’s just so goddamned boring. Sure, there’s a minimal amount of exposition justifying it, usually along the line of “Y creature is multiplying out of control and needs culling!”, but the formula remains the same.

And it’s a grind because the combat is so goddamned easy. Sure, I have a ton of abilities, but few of them are useful. In fact, most of them seem to have little real impact on combat. And absolutely none of them are necessary except for the first one they give you, which is basically just a more damaging version of your standard attack.

So all I end up doing in combat is hitting that heavy attack button every second or so. Works every time. I throw the other skills in there now and then just to break up the monotony but I definitely don’t need to.

What makes it worse is that once I complete a quest, the quest-giving NPC goes on about how brave and amazing I am for having done the quest, which given how retarded easy it was comes across as downright patronizing.

So I don’t think I will be pay for the full version when the free trial runs out. For now, I will keep playing, because according to my good buddy and frequent feline head warmer Maelkoth says it gets better once you get through the game’s base content it gets better, but I dunno how long that will last.

Oh, and one annoying nit to pick : The magic user class Conjurers are actually… healers? Then what the fuck do they conjure? Gauze?

On the other hand, I am pondering investing my current surplus getting the game Borderlands 3. I am a huge fan of the series and the reviews for the latest installment are pretty good.

But it’s $80 CDN. Ouch. So I am not quite sold on the idea, to put it mildly. The game would have to be pretty damned good to justify that price.

To be honest, I will probably wait for a sale.

Then again, I might just re-install Skyrim. I am fairly sure that I won’t lose my mind and fall into it so deep that I stop eating this time. I have played lots of moddable games since my deep collapse and while none were anywhere near as moddable as Skyrim, I am still pretty sure that I have developed enough resistance to remain sane.

And even if I did fall into it deep again, it’s not like I would lose much. I already play video games all the damned time so it’s not like I would be losing productivity.

As long as I remembered to eat, sleep, excrete, and blog, my life would be more or less the same. And I am curious to see how much of the game I remember.

Or maybe I will reinstalled Witcher 3 for the fifth time.

God damn that’s a good game.

More after the break.

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The hard truth about taxes

All right, listen up, chuckleheads, because I am only going to say this once :

If you hate paying taxes, you are not a patriot.

Any idiot can see that you can’t say you love your country if you don’t want to have to pay for it. When you bitch and whine about taxes, you are basically saying that the country you supposedly love is not worth what you are paying for it.

Grownups know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that everything costs money and that money has to come from somewhere.

Only over-indulged spoiled brats think the government only charges taxes because they are big meanies. Real men and women get that taxes are the price you pay for having a country (or a province, or a town, or whatever) and that to act like taxes are the worst thing ever is to out yourself as the petulant whiny brat that you are.

Tell me, Einstein : why do you think your taxes are too high? Take your time, God knows we wouldn’t want you to pop a brain cell or something. Exactly why do you think your taxes are too high? How do you even know?

Ya don’t, do ya? You don’t know jack shit. The real reason you think your taxes are too high is that you’d like to have more money. That’s it.

Well let me invite you to an exclusive little club called absolutely fucking everybody.

Everybody wants more money. The only difference is that actual, real, grown up type people know that money comes from somewhere and that from the point of view of the public purse, tax cuts and spending increases are the same damned thing.

Voting the person who promises to lower your taxes is exactly the same as selling your vote. Well, except for one little difference :

Taxes never actually go down. Think about it. When was the last time your taxes went down? Half past never, am I right? So you sold out your country to some big shot politician who promised you a tax cut and you never even got the tax cut.

All you got was less services from the government. Any savings in expenses those program cuts produce sure as fuck weren’t handed down to you. Instead, they went to your elected official’s billionaire buddies, and you got screwed.

So don’t come crying to me about your god damned taxes. If you hate taxes so much, move to another country. We don’t need your kind around here anyhow.

And if you decide to stay, quit bitching about the rent.

Because people who love their countries don’t try to get out of paying for it.

I’ll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been having one of my sleepy days. And those can be rather stressful.

Because this isn’t the fun kind of sleep. Oh no. This is the twisted, tormented, heavy REM cycle sleep that leaves me feeling like I just barely managed to swim to shore after being shipwrecked far, far away.

So right now I am in a sorry state of being. Sweaty, confused, lightheaded, dizzy, and finding it hard to stay focused on what I am doing.

Frogs don’t have nipples.

Oh, I almost forgot : I also feel like I have been lightly pummeled over every inch of my body. And then there’s that wacky feeling like I am a cartoon character who has been rolled flat by a steamroller and needs to blow into his thumb to re-inflate himself.

My life is so much fun. Really.

Have given Final Fantasy XIV Online a try. Not much of one, because I was so sleepy, but enough to get a bit of the way into the tutorial phase.

So far, I am extremely impressed by the quality of the graphics. Everything is just plain gorgeous, and looks surprisingly real for a fantasy world.

And I am not even running it at full resolution yet. Mainly because when I went to bump the resolution up to the max for my monitor, 1920 by 1080, it wanted to know what refresh rate I wanted.

I don’t frigging know. Whatever my monitor is currently using.

Of course, now that I have had some more sleep, I remember that my monitor supports many refresh rates and even a dynamic refresh rate in some circumstances, so the next time I play, I will be able to fix the problem and play at full res,

Graphics aside, I am enjoying the world but finding the controls a bit weird and hard to use. This is probably because I am so used to ESO that using a different kind of 3D controls feels alien, and nothing to do with any problem with the controls in FFXIVO.

We will see.

Mood has been okay. Not great. Feel like I am treading water. But on a deeper level, I am looking for a way out of my deadly doldrums still, and trying to keep my recent ego trip going long enough to get myself into trouble.

Or at least troubled enough to be productive.

I mean, there’s always this here blog of mine as a creative outlet. And it helps, it really does. I would be much crazier without it.

But like I said before, it’s not enough. I need more.

So I have been trying to find my rinky dink little webcam so I can get back into making videos. If i can’t find it, I might invest some of my savings in a new one.

Or maybe get a tablet or laptop or something. I dunno. Something that shoots decent quality video. My fancy microphone can take care of the audio.

Or maybe I will start a podcast instead. I already know how to produce audio. I am confident in my ability to put a show like that together.

It’s how to get people to listen to the damned thing that mystifies me.

But that’s always been my problem, hasn’t it?

I can make it but I can’t promote it.

I guess I need an agent.

More after the break.

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That Subtle Taste

The Ten Can Challenge continues. Tonight I am having one of the cans of baked beans I bought last Friday, and while I definite tasty tomatoes, beans, and a certain subtle hint of sweetness, mostly what they taste like is the can they came in.

So, ick. Beginning to understand why they were such a bargain. Next time I see some outrageously good price for something, I am checking best before dates.

Caution is the sort of thing you can only learn by not having it.

Now, were I a sane person, I would have tasted the beans once then thrown them out as unfit for human consumption and picked something else to eat.

But I am not a sane person, so I am eating them anyway. There uis a good chance this will make me sick at some future point, but, well, couple how hard I find it to throw out food with not wanting to have to choose something else, and multiply that by my compulsion to finish what I start, and, well, here we are.

Actually, fuck that, though. I just had another bite and it was so gross that I can’t eat any more of it. So, victory! I am changing my plan of action.

There, done. Evil food disposed of. The usual crappy food put in its place. Thus, I got around having to choose a different can of whatever to eat. I’ll just count this as a learning experience and tomorrow I will try something else.

Pondering returning the unopened other can of said baked beans. I don’t really care about getting my 79 cents back, I just want to tell them that they might be selling poisoned food to people.

I mean, I don’t know exactly what ill effects can be caused by eating baked beans that taste like the can they came in, but it can’t be good.

I’ve played more FFXIVO now. Enough to get some sense of the combat. I am mostly withholding judgment on the game as a whole because I am still adapting to the new controls, environment, and such, and so right now, I am grumpy and bitchy and hate everything about it.

That’s true of most games though. I hate them till I get used to them. And that includes a lot of games I have gone on to love. So I bitch and moan as I keep playing long enough to adapt to the damned thing.

After all, if you don’t endure, you don’t adapt. Everything sucks at first, when it’s brand new and strange and very hard to deal with compared to all the things you are used to.

But all those familiar things that now seem so attractive compared to the new thing were new and hard to deal with once too.

You can’t judge things by how hard they are at first. That would be mindless of you, like you had no sense of the future where it would be easier.

Luckily, we’re all way too smart for that. Right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.