Therapy didn’t happen today. Phone SNAFU. Will happen tomorrow.

---

Like all nerds, there’a times I feel like an alien.

I might have a slightly stronger case of it than the average geek because I have not worked a job or had a commute or even had a boyfriend, so my attachment to this mortal plane is quite weak.

And from a cluelessly “spiritual” point of view, that sounds great. I mean, we’re all looking to transcend the physical limitations of this earthly plane and move into a higher state of being in the perfect world that lies beyond the illusion of the real, right?

Wrong. I am not a transcendentalist and I do not believe in a hidden and superior reality where all is perfect and all things come together as one.

That’s just mystic bullshit. Like all mystic bullshit, it thinks the world of the mind is another plane of existence when it is actually the world between our ears. Sure, it seems like a perfect existence if you are already biased towards the intellectual side of things because it is the world of abstraction and mentation unsullied by emotions, instincts, or other messily material things like that.

But it’s an illusion. Now where was I? Dammit, I wandered off my point again.

That’s my own intellectual bias playing tricks on me as usual.

Oh right. It might seem like being so poorly attached to reality could be a good thing. but in reality it’s a nightmare.

Because it means my mind is ungrounded. Unmoored. Untethered. Were I better grounded in reality, I would not be at the mercy of the random fluctuations of the chaotic and unstable world of my mind.

For as long as I can recall, I have had this nightmare vision in my mind of myself floating away from the ground and disappearing into the sky, never to return to Earthm trapped forever in the icy cold stratosphere.

It’s a potent metaphor for what I fear world happen if I lost my tiny grip on the real world, and surrendered completely to the deranged mad scientist within with whom I fight a daily battle just to keep what few marbles I have left.

Switching metaphors, it’s like I am constantly boosting to escape the grip of a black hole’s gravity well, but to all the world, it looks exactly like I am doing nothing.

And there are times when I am sorely tempted to just stop all engines and let the gravity take me and do with me what it wilt.

At least then it would be over.

But that path leads to annihilation. And I don’t want to die. Not really.

Most depressives don’t want to die. They just want the pain to stop. If there was a way to do that without dying, they would do it.

And there is. It’s called alcohol. Or drugs. Or video games. Or any of the other ways we self-medicate in order to get away from the pain.

There has to be a better way to deal with this shit. Some way to heal the spirit. Something that solves the problem of the pains that are too big to bear and therefore never ever heal.

Maybe someone will invent a catharsis pill that will open the mind and dull the pain enough so that these wounds, at long last, can be healed.

Or maybe we will just learn to be better to each other.

Either way, I will still be stuck with a head full of shrapnel. trying to make it through life despite the pain, stumbling all the way.

More after the break.

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The Demon at the Door

It’s called fear. And it is my jailer.

My captor. My tormentor. My prosecutor. And my judge, jury, and executioner.

And it is, of course, me.

Everything in your head is you. You wearing different disguises. Different hats. Playing different roles. Having different jobs.

But it’s still all you, baby. One hundred percent. You are alone in there.

We’re all alone in there.

My demon is my doorman except that he is there to keep me from getting out of my cell and into the big bad world that it is sure I can’t handle and that would destroy me.

Oh no, destruction. That might result in me having a really crappy life.

My demonic doorman is my primary defense against the infinite hallway of infinite doors(IHOID). By keeping me locked in to this extremely limited and limiting lifestyle, it keeps me from having to figure out what the heck to do with myself.

I’ve never been able to answer that question. There are just too many possibilities. Too many to be rationally assessed, and that’s the only way I know how to process things.

Trapped by my own rationality.

Other people don’t have this problem. Even highly intelligent and creative people who probably see at least as many possibilities as I do do not have this problem.

They have something – call it an X factor – that propels them forward and keeps them trying new stuff until they figure out what works from than and that quite possibly actively prevents them from looking at more of the big picture than they can handle as any one time.

And yet, I also feel like the IHOID is bullshit. A smokescreen like all the rest. Something the bad part of my mind has found to be an effective way to shut me the fuck down and keep me from wanting to go outside to play in that big bad world out there.

If so, I do not yet know how to circumvent it. It’s easy to say “Just pick something and try it! If it doesn’t work, try something else!” but it is nowhere near that simple.

If I could pick something, I wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.

There’s always lots of things I could be doing. Things that sound logical and doable and productive and enriching and all the rest.

I could be writing a novel. Or trying to sell a script. I could be entering contests. I could be applying for online writing jobs. I could be collaborating with people. I could be making my own videos in order to share my talents with the world.

And those are just off the top of my head.

But I know I won’t do any of them.

My demon won’t let me.

And he won’t disappear until I don’t need him any more.

And Lord knows when the fuck that will be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still pretty fucking sick and tired of this bad sleep.

Every day, I have to go through this bullshit. Feeling all wiped out, lightheaded, and confused. It’s like every day, at least once, I wake up with a thick dense choking fog filling my mind, and I have to wait for it to slowly dissipate before I can be me.

And I know the solution. CPAP. The machine is about two feet from my right elbow, and I am sure it still works even though I haven’t even turned it on in like five years. I could lay down right now and put the mask over my face and turn it on, and then compressed air would keep my airways open so I can breathe properly.

Wouldn’t even have to go to sleep, necessarily. Just lay there and read or just mellow out and listen to music. Let the machine help me clear the bad air out of my lungs so I can breathe properly and feel better.

And who knows, I might do that when I am done blogging.

But probably not. I would have to overcome a whole lot of inner resistance to do it, and that is not an easy think to do.

It’s like once I develop an aversion to something, it’s all over, because from that point on the rust settles in and doing that thing becomes harder and harder because the resistance gets stronger and stronger until before long, it’s effectively impossible.

And I wish I could get in there with a can of WD40 and loosen things the fuck up.

Maybe that’s why so many depressives self-medicate with alcohol. I can see it acting as that exact kind of lubricant.

I could see myself getting addiction to anything that makes me more productive.

Then again, maybe I would be better off chilling out and trying to enjoy my life as it is. This eternal struggle within isn’t doing me any good. And my life isn’t all that bad. I have tasty food to eat, a roof over my head, some very good friends whose company I treasure, and of course, video games to play as much as I like.

But is “relax and enjoy” even an option for me? I have a deep down restlessness from all my frustrated ambitions and broken dreams that seems to make chilling out about it all nearly impossible.

You can’t relax and enjoy life when everything is always in flux. I would have to somehow tame the chaos within before I could truly relax.

And that’s a pretty tall order. Exercise might help if I could get myself to do it. Or really any intensive activity that drains a lot of my energy.

Maybe I should write another novel. The NaNoWriMo people have been sending me emails suggesting that this age of quarantine is a great time to write a novel, and I can see how that makes sense for healthier folk.

I don’t currently have an idea for a novel. But I am sure I could come up with something if I really wanted to.

I will think it over.

More after the break.

---

The latest from Wikileaks!

Well it’s come to this. Time to face the facts and set them down here so I can’t pretend they never happened or “forget” them.

I have started to leak.

Just a little bit,. But it’s getting worse. So I am going to have to face up to it and take it do my doctor in order to have any hope to nip this in the bud before it’s Depends time.

I am speaking, obviously, of urinary incontinence. .Lately, when my bladder is very full, a little pee leaks out when I stand up or move.

The dam which has served me faithfully all these years is now damp.

Surely catastrophe lurks nearby.

At first, I stupidly ignored it because the amount of leakage was so small that it didn’t even make it out of my foreskin. Thus, it did not make me feel like there was a seious problem per se.

It was almost cute.

But I just had an incident which threatened to become true leakage, visible and very very embarrassing, and that has acted as one powerful wake up call to tell me that the problem is getting worse and needs to be attended to ASAP.

So I will make an appointment with Doctor Chao as soon as I can. Might not be until Friday because he only works alternate Thursdays.

Losing control of one’s bodily functions is such a horrible, humiliating thing for humans beings because it triggers that potent and very primitive part of our brains that got programmed during toilet training and that contains a potent and potentially extremely volatile combination of instinct and early socialization that extends back to our very birth of ourselves as conscious beings.

I mean, think about it. Kids get toilet trained when they have barely learned to walk. It’s our earliest ever lesson. It happens when we have only recently started forming conscious memories, for crying out loud.

So that is as deep and wounding as shame can get.

I still (too) vividly remember the time I was at a sushi place and used the toilet and ended up clogging it to the point that it overflowed and the water ran all the way into the kitchen because the walls to the kitchen didn’t go all the way down to the floor.

The spectacular explosion of shame, guilt, depression, anxiety, and self-loathing that this triggered led me to flee to Joe’s car because I simply could not deal with anything other than my fireworks factory inferno of emotions right then.

And then there was the time that I flooded the toilet at our old place on Francis and One Road and a clearly extremely distressed father knocked on the door to say that the water was leaking through the roof onto his baby daughter and yup, I had a nuclear meltdown then, too.

As I look back on that memory now, and think about who I was back then, and realize that I barely recognize that person anymore.

It seems like they were so much stronger and more vital and engaged than I am now.

Where did I go wrong?

That’s a topic for another time, though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I sometimes wonder how much of me is real.

It’s a basic existential question than any human might ask of themselves because we all have a social persona that is not exactly the same as the person we are on the inside.

And yet, it’s also an integral part of ourselves. So to stay that is “not who we really are” can lead to a lot of confusion about who the heck is that person who deals with the world of strangers, then?

In this field, I am luckier than others, because one of the few benefits of being so socially isolated is that I have never had much of a reason to pretend to be someone I am not. I didn’t have to modify my actions in order to fit in anywhere. I had workplace to conform to, no relatives I had to act a certain way around, and I never had to try to convince a stranger than I am perfect in order to get them to have sex with me.

I’m looking at you, straight dudes.

And while this had led me to be undersocialized and socially awkward and all that jazz, it also means I am a very genuine and “real” person compared to my better socially adjusted and “normal” peers.

I might be weird, but it’s a sincere weirdness. And I always mean well.

Still, I wonder about my own social shield sometimes. I know it’s there, I can feel it distinctly if I try. I know that there is a side of me devoted to shielding and concealing e and protecting me from the harsh cruel world and the gaze and judgment of others.

And I know there’s still a lot of shame in me. Shame that leads me to conceal the real me, even from myself. Shame that makes me desperate to entertain and please people because it keeps them from seeing who I really am. Shame that runs so deep that sometimes it makes me feel like the world would be a better place without me.

Don’t worry. I know that’s not true. There are an awful lot of people who would really miss me if I was gone, not to mention the incredible emotional violence suicide would do to those I love.

But I still feel it sometimes. I just would never act on that feeling.

As to the question. “shame about what?”, I couldn’t really say. It runs too deep for there to be any sort of logical answer to that question.

I have a deep down feeling that I am a horrible, nasty, disgusting, vile, toxic, terrible, shamefully awful thing and that if anyone ever saw the real me, they would run away screaming and hate me forever because now they know how awful I really am.

So I act like the funny, silly, deep, and quite frankly a little amazing dude everyone knows and loves, and he is me and I am he, but he’s not the real me in the sense that he is not who I would be if all my defenses were down. Nor is he the unedited version of me, or the person I would be if I didn’t know who I was.

The real problem is that I like him a lot better than I like the “real” me.

If one of us had to go, it wouldn’t be him, I can tell you that.

More after the break.

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Now With Genuine Simulated Flavour

There’s been a hot rumour in the media that the CDC is going to start recommending that everybody wear a mask when outside.

It doesn’t have to be the genuine N95 mask in such hot demand these days. That would be impossible. There’s barely enough of those for vital medical personnel, let alone every Tom whose Dick is Harry,. Forget about it,

No, improvised masks are fine. Surgical masks, a handkerchief over your face, a scarf, pretty much anything that traps moisture but allows breathing will do.

But no matter what it is, I just plain cannot do it. I cannot stand to have anything blocking my nose and mouth. It immediately triggers my claustrophobia (or whatever it is) and i start hyperventilating and freaking out at like, maximum intensity.

The problem is so bad that I have had panic attacks while wearing an oxygen mask because my stupid phobia thinks I am smothering when in fact I am actually getting the best air I have ever had.

So if it gets to the point where you are not allowed to go out in public without a mask, I will have to stop going outside. I will become completely housebound. No more going out to shop or have meals with Felicity. I would stuck home until the crisis is over.

My only hope would be if my therapist. Doctor Costin, could get me some kind of medical waiver that I could show people when outside maskless.

I’m freaking out a little just from talking about this.

Phobias are horrible and not particularly amenable to reason because reason only works when you are calm and phobias make you very very not-calm immediately.

I still remember the terrible panic I had one day when I was on the Skytrain on the way home from VFS and was reading a part of a book where the hero has to go through a tight, narrow space and even gets caught a couple of times and that could not have been more triggering if it had started to bully me.

Part of the problem was that to take the Skytrain in jam-packed cars during rush hour was a major challenge to my claustrophobia already. I dealt with this in true characteristic fashion : I buried myself in media consumption. I would read 24 and do the crossword. I would listen to MP3s via my tablet.

And I would, of course, read books.

So I have to admit, I felt kind of betrayed.

That was one of my most acute panic attacks ever and I went through eleven different flavours of hell in that Skytrain car.

But you know what? Then I got over it, and was able to hold my fudge for the rest of the trip home without much of a problem.

These things end. The thing about the past is that it has passed. You will not always feel this way. Things will get better. They always do.

And that’s a good thing to hold on to when you are in anxiety hell.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling quite dark and depressed right now.

As usual, there is no particular cause except maybe bad sleep. Right now, I feel hopeless and miserable. Nothing seems worth doing and I am just going through the motions right now. I hate everyone and everything.

I’m in a lot of pain.

Luckily, I know for a fact that this will change. That this is temporary, and that once I have been awake for a while, all this darkness and pain will evaporate and I will feel a lot better than I do right now.

Like I said, I know this to be true.

But I don’t feel like it’s true.

That’s because one of the hardest things for human beings to imagine is being in an emotional state other than the one they are in right now.

Every mood feels like it will last forever. We’re largely not conscious of this effect, and if someone asked us if we thought we would feel different later, we would probably grudgingly admit that yeah, probably. we would.

But we wouldn’t really mean it because it wouldn’t feel true. Imagining ourselves in another mood is so hard that it can be downright painful.

Why is this? I am not sure. Perhaps there is only room for one mood in our minds. So when we try to imagine another, we get an error.

If so, it would be that way in order to maintain emotional continuity and stability. If we could truly and fully imagine being in another mood, we would shift to that mood, and if shifting mood was that easy our moods would shift wildly all the time and we would be incapable of anything like rational or even coherent thought.

So we’re all like dogs who whine when their master leaves because as far as they know, you will be gone forever.

In most people’s lives, this is no big deal. They are mentally healthy and so even very bad moods are relatively short lived and unlikely to drive them to do anything dire.

In fact, the fact that they can’t imagine being in any other mood might be a factor in their being mentally healthy because it means they stay with an emotion until they are one hundred percent done processing it instead of hitting that emotional override switch and leaving most of the emotion lingering around unprocessed indefinitely.

I mean, that’s what I do, and trust me, it’s not good.

As a result, it’s taken me a long time to develop the ability to believe that this too shall pass. And like I indicated above, I don’t really feel it or believe it.

I just know it, in a cold detached kind of way. And that’s just barely enough to keep me from drawing conclusions about my life from my poor mental state, thereby hopping onto that downward spiral of depression that, if unchecked, could lead to dire acts.

It gives me enough emotional breathing room to be able to more or less ignore a bad mood until it goes away.

And it always does.

And it always will.

And when it does, I will still be here, making it through the day.

And that, my friends, is victory.

More after the break.

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Tiny Little Peeves

Some people have big major life-altering pet peeves.

I am not one of those people.

Instead I have dozens, if not hundreds of tiny peeves that only I understand or would even think of in the first place.

Like my beef^[1] with Subway. Don’t get me wrong : I love eating there. It’s one of my favorite fast food places. I’ve loved it since I was at UPEI^[2] and there was one that was the closest place to eat to the campus.

My beef is with their slogan : Eat Fresh.

YOU CANNOT VERB AN ADJECTIVE, SUBWAY.

That’s just plain not the way words work.

You can eat freshLY or freshER or fresh THINGs, but you cannot eat fresh.

This bugs me every time I go there. I keep praying that they will get a new slogan. One that doesn’t crash the English language.

Another one : I hate it when the author’s name takes up 7/8 of the cover page of a book.

Not only does that make it hard to find the specific book you are looking for, it heavily implies that as far as publishers are concerned, it’s the name that sells the book and the actual specifics of the content are irrelevant.

And while that might be true in the brutal world of marketing, as a writer myself I would hate to think someone bought my book just because I wrote it.

I want them to love the book, not me. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I crave glory and adulation as much as any other person. I have a latent huge ego that I am really hoping I can justify one day.

But if I had to choose, I would rather people love the book more than they love me. The book is my baby. I’m proud of it. I want it to do well.

And the book is the best representation of who I am as a person. It’s a much better indicator than, say, some stupid thing I said in an interview that one time.

Finally, and admittedly this one is rather big : I hate that journalism has become so debased and craven that the mainstream media now treats entertainment news as though it is real news.

The real news is actually relevant to the audience’s lives. It’s serious stuff, and should be treated that way.

Entertainment news is merelya euphemism for celebrity gossip, and unless Geroge Clooney is running for public office, his love life is definitely not news.

“Oh, but it’s what people want to hear about!” whines the mainstream media.

Well call me old-fashioned, but I think the news should tell people what they need to know, not what they want to know.

You wouldn’t want to go to a doctor who treats every disease by writing a prescription for heavy painkillers, and justifies it by saying “But it’s what the people want!”.

Take some fucking responsibility, Doctor Feelgood.

I could go on. Like I said, I have dozens of these.

But that’s enough for tonight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

.

I just got off the phone with my mom. So I have a happy little halo of warmth and affection around me now.

I love hearing her voice, and this time, I told her so. She’s still my favorite person in the entire universe and hearing her voice and getting the news from back home from her always makes me a happy little boy.

Also kind of homesick, but I am quite used to that now.

Still, I wish I had the money to go back home some time this summer. I want to experience Prince Edward Island in the summer again. It’s a time of sun soaked pavement and green everywhere and is pretty much my vision of what happiness looks like as a place since I was a wee little thing.

That’s because not only was I out of school, so was my mother. That’s one of the benefits of having a teacher for a mother. So during the summer, we reverted back to what it was like before my mother went back to work when I was three.

And the family was more relaxed and fun in general. Even my Dad was easier to get along with. And we kids would play outside and we would do things as a family ;like to to Rainbow Valley or go see Anne of Green Gables or go to one of the many provincial and federal parks that PEI has to offer.

Oh, or we would go to Linkletter Beach, one of the many, many beaches on Prince Edward Island and my siblings would go swimming and I would go wading (never did learn how to swim) and then we’d go lie on the beach to dry out, then have to sit on towels for the drive home, where we would dump out the sand from our shoes and our clothes along with the little bits of seaweed we’d picked up swimming.

One of the happiest moments of my life occurred at the beach. Nothing in particular had happened. But the heat from the sand felt very good, and my family was all there, and I was there contently soaking it all in, and everything was wonderful.

The older I get, the more I treasure memories like that. And I think it does me good to remind myself that my childhood wasn’t all bad.

There were good times too.

One thing I have just got to share from back home : apparently, there is a Catholic priest there who was started doing drive by confessions.

Can you believe it? The very words delight me.

He has a little booth set up behind his church and people drive up to the six foot limit and tell him their sins.

But the thing is, they are still six feet apart.

So people have to yell their sins!

When my mother told me that I laughed and laughed. Apparently all the Catholics in the tiny PEI community of Woodstock know each other’s sins now.

Of course, in a community that small, they probably knew each other’s sins anyway.

I picturing someone shouting their confessions and the people behind them in line shouting helpful reminders.

A : (shouting from car) Tell them about telling Chuck to go eff himself at the bar!
B : (shouting from different car) Yeah, that was a good one.

More after the break.

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On being the asshole

it has been occurring to me lately that there are times when, just being myself, I become the asshole in the situation.

For good and for bad. Sometimes, the situation needs someone to volunteer to be the asshole who upsets the applecart and makes waves and gets shit done to resolve the problem and make everyone’s lives better.

They are then free to resent you or hate you now that doing so in no way means they might have to solve the problem themselves.

I’ve been that guy. I’ve taken the flak. I’ve fixed things. And more often than not, I have either gotten no thanks or outright hostility.

But I am talking more about the ways I accidentally become the asshole

The inciting incident happened tonight when I was grocery shopping with J&J. I brought up the subject of the recent tussle between the US and Canada over N95 masks.

Basically, Canada ordered 3 million masks from 3M before this whole corona debacle began, and Trump intervened and kept 3M from exporting those masks on the grounds that America needed them more.

I offered my opinion, knowing it would be unpopular : the Americans might be right. They might need them more than us. They have ten times our population and their response has been far, far worse. Those masks might save more lives in their hands than they will in ours.

And Joe and Julian got super mad at me for this. And I stuck to my guns. In doing so, i said a lot of unhelpful things about herd mentality and lynch mobs and being a heretic, which only added fuel to the fire.

And now that I am home and calm and feeling reflective, I have to ask myself what was really going on there.

Nothing I said was anything other than the truth as I see it, and yet I am not so ignorant as to pretend I bore no responsibility for the ensuing shitstorm.

I knew going in that my honest opinion would not be taken well. But I am a creature of principle and i stick to my principles no matter the consequences.

And there can be some pretty heavy consequences, especially when my honest opinion challenges the dominant dogma of the time.

99.9 percent of Canadians are all on board with the “fuck America, these are our masks!” sentiment, and that puts me in a very lonely position as the one person saying that the masks should go wherever they will save the most lives.

To hold such a position publicly is to be trampled by an angry mob. Even if the position I hold is the one history will eventually embrace, like in the case of lynch mobs.

History still does not record the one guy who said “Wait, aren’t black people…. people?”

Still, I think I am now mature enough to take responsibility for the ruckus I create with my opinions instead of clinging to a disingenuous claim of “having no idea” what would happen when I opened my mouth.

Bullshit. I knew and I said it anyway. And I accept that this means I am going to have large numbers of people getting super mad at me from time to time.

And some of those people are going to be people I love and care about. And I owe it to them to think about how I am going to come across when I state my opinion and to try to figure out how to minimize the disruption I cause.

I will still be a person of unwavering principle.

But I don’t have to be a dick about it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Getting the urge to run far, far away again.

It would be so nice to be able to shed this crappy life of mine and start over again somewhere where nobody knows me and I can reinvent myself.

Including inventing a whole new past for myself. Nobody needs to know what a loser I have been. I would be perfectly willing to lie in order to get my fresh start.

The only problem being that I do not lie much and might have a hard time keeping my story straight. Perhaps the simplest thing would be to tell people I was in the hospital for a long time. I dunno.

I guess even when starting a new life, I can’t dodge the “what have you been doing for your entire adult life” question and I just don’t have a good answer for that.

What have I been doing? Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. Playing video games, hanging out online, wasting my life, hiding from the world.

And the thing is, that question is always going to come up sooner or later. And every single time, I will not have a decent answer, and in that moment, I will be crushed.

And that’s a big deal. It’s the hot nexus of my social anxiety. It’s one of the main reasons I fear associating with normal people. It’s where all my feelings of being unworthy, contaminated, and broken come to a head.

Because most people have done something with their time on Earth. They might not have gotten their dream job, but they have had jobs. They might be divorced but they have had relationship. They have gone places. They have had a family and a group of friends and co-workers and all the rest.

But all I have done is avoid reality. I have next to nothing to show for my time on this planet. I’ve certainly not produced anything of real note.

And that makes me feel like I am not even here. Because I mean, what is the fucking point of it all? Why do I even bother getting out of bed every day when all that is going to happen is more wasted time? What’s the use in going around and around on the same merry go round again and again when I know it won’t get me anywhere and there’s no such thing as real progress and all I have to look for is a truly pathetic death at far too early an age?

I get so tired of everything sometimes. I just want to slip my skin and run away from the mess I have made of everything and find a nice clean place to lay down and die.

Or at least get some decent sleep for once. Actually wake up refreshed. Maybe then, I would have the strength to face my problems and improve my life.

I know i should forgive myself for how badly my life has done. And I want to.

But I just can’t.

More after the break.

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On negative thinking

And pessimism in general.

So I go to Foodora.com to order tonight’s delivery meal and uh oh…. the website says that delivery is not available in my area, and that it will be back in 15-20 minutes.

Totally did not believe them. Thought there was basically no chance that it would actually come back. Jumped immediately to the conclusion that this was another way the world had dreamed up to fuck with me when I try to order food.

But I decided to wait and check the site every now and then just so that I could, essentially, say “I knew it!” when the time came.

A sad reason to do anything, really.

But much to my surprised and eventual delight, it actually did come back. It took half an hour not twenty minutes, but it came back.

So now I find myself wondering what the hell is wrong with me that makes me jump to such irrationally negative conclusions.

The quick and unhelpful answer is, of course, “depression”. That’s what is wrong with me. That’s why I jump to negative conclusions so easily.

But that doesn’t really address the problem. What I really want is to be able to block the negative conclusions before I jump to them.

I might never be an optimist, but I am determined to at least get myself to neutral. No assumptions or predictions except those based on facts and evidence, not some cockamamie notion that I somehow know the nature of the universe.

Because that’s the thing about both optimism and pessimism, folks. They are both equally irrational assumptions about what it is even possible to know about the nature of life, the universe, and everything.

The main difference is that the optimists are happy.

I would vastly prefer to be an optimist. I aspire to optimism. But I am pretty sure it’s not an option for a rational materialist pragmatist like myself.

For better and for definitely worse, I am just not capable of fooling myself into believing something irrational, no matter how good for me that belief might be.

So, neutrality. No assumptions. No predictions. The Zen state of readiness, where there is no past and no future, only the infinite present, eternal and perfect.

Well, okay, that might be a little over-ambitious. Then again, I have always said that my spiritual ambition is without limit. I will keep striving to perfect myself until my dying day.

I honestly can’t imagine living any other way.

Grow or die. Stasis is not an option.

Update : I was so excited to see Tandoori King Cafe on Foodora. I’ve ordered my beloved Lamb Rogan Josh from them many times via Skip, so I was excited to do so again via Foodora.

So I got what I always get : the aforementioned curry, and chicken samosas.

And the curry was fantastic as usual. But something is seriously wrong with these samosas. They came with this weird black sauce I have never seen before, and the filling is dark and very gross and doesn’t taste like any samosa I have ever had before, and I have had a lot of samosas.

What can I say? They’re delicious.

But these ones are so bad that I am wondering if they are even samosas, or if I got something else that looks similar instead.

Either way, they are beyond gross and I am very disappointed.

But damn that’s good curry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I have emotions that want to be expressed right now.

But they are lurking below the surface of my consciousness and eluding my attempts to catch them and bring them into the light, so for now, I will just improv like usual.

Still playing lots of ESO. Finished my adventures in Murkmire, a swamp home to the lizard-folk known as Argonians, or Saxhleel in their own language.

Now I am just kind of bumming around Vvardenfell, the land you start in, while I make up my mind about where to go next.

It will probably be Orsinium, land of the Orcs.

It’s kind of amazing that I have a game I enjoy so much that I can play it for five hours in a row without it even feeling like work.

And while that’s a far cry from actual productivity, at least it keeps me awake, active, and engaged, and thus drains off a lot of the excess energy that tends to make me anxious and depressed if left unchecked.

All that energy has to go somewhere and do something. If not vented externally, it wreaks havoc internally.

And yet, depression makes it so very hard to argue with the energy miser inside me. No matter what the reality of the situation is, depression insists that the only way to be safe is to do as little as possible at all times and in all situations.

I mean, what’s the end game here…. total immobility? Absolute stasis? Living the blissful lifestyle of a quadriplegic?

I’ve tried to imagine being crazy rich and therefore able to have exactly the oral retentive wet dream of a lifestyle I crave.

And it’s not a pretty picture. I picure myself being pushed around in a wheelchair not because I was sick but because I was just that lazy.

And that assumes I haven’t managed to arrange everything so that I do everything I want to do from my bed.

At that point, the only thing that would be holding back a total collapse of all dignity and self-respect would be my refusal to use a bedpan.

I’d like to think that at some point, I would get bored enough with all that passive indulgence and want to do things. Energetic things. Things that exercise my body for a change and not just my mind.

Working out, for example. I would love to have a Universal Gym type set up so I could work off bodily stress and tighten and tone my body whenever I felt like it.

I would lose weight and get a healthier body out of the deal too. But the main thing I would want is the stress and tension reduction and the pleasure of strain.

The bull needs the harness.

And I would hope that I could at least work up enough ambition to have sex. If I have enough money to have a mansion, you can bet your life I am going to be hiring a lot of young men of negotiable virtue for some seriously intense orgies.

After all, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Then again, maybe all I would do is play video games all day.

Just on a much bigger screen.

More after the break.

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The New Normal

So as you know, I used Foodora to order from 7-11 recently. ^[1]

And it was awesome.

But there were some little compromises, and one of them was that I could not find Diet Coke on 7-11’s Foodora menu. So I ordered Coke Zero instead.

And I grumbled a bit about that. Coke Zero is okay but I definitely prefer Diet Coke. Coke Zero tastes odd to me. Not horrible, just weird.

Like it has cinnamon in it. And a sort of generic berry flavour.

So I got it, and drank it, and it tided me over till tonight’s stop at 7-11 on the way home from our hanging out with Felicity, corona-style.

So of course, I got my usual pair of 2L bottles of Diet Coke. But then, when we got home and were unloading our purchased, I realized that I now felt disappointment that I was going to be drinking boring old Diet Coke and not the new and exciting Coke Zero.

And that was…. strange. Not normal. I was disappointed to get the thing that on paper, I like more than the other. Does not compute.

So I figured I would beg my audience’s indulgence and parse it out here.

Clearly, what we are dealing with is two different needs : continuity, and novelty.

Coke Zero was the new exciting thing, and that made it seem preferable in that moment because right now my life is quite monotonous and this tiny variation has injected some much needed novelty into my life.

I have always done a poor job of addressing my need for real novelty in my life. Sure, there is the inherent novelty in media consumption. A new movie, a new episode, a new book, a new game, and so on.

But as is becoming abundantly clear to me, there is a hell of a lot more to life than media consumption, and if I want to be a happier person, I am going to have to shake things up in order to wake myself up from the walking coma my life has become.

I’ve had this thought before. But before now, it has always gotten washed away by the general chaos of my head before it could take root and result in action.

My mind is extremely good at preventing things from resulting in action.

So that is why I am putting it in my blog entry for today. By typing it here, I will make it more permanent and therefore more real in my mind.

And that will remind me to think in these terms more often.

Everyone needs some change in their life. What persists disappears. We walk around in a daze because we don’t recognize this fact.

Shake up and wake up, people.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s Therapy Thursday, and I just got off the phone with my shrink.

I talked a lot about feeling like all I do it go in circles. Like a hamster in a wheel, I do a lot but none of it gets me anywhere.

All it does is pass the time.

I’ve passed a LOT of time. My entire adult life, in fact. All I really know how to do is pass the time by entertaining myself, and I do it as if I am waiting for something.

Like all this time, I’ve just been sitting in life’s waiting room, reading the magazines and waiting for my name to be called.

Obviously, that’s never going to happen. Nobody is ever going to come to me and say “It’s time for life now. Let me help you get started. Here’s life’s tutorial level. ”

Life does not have a tutorial level. Or walkthroughs, strategy guides, help screens, online assistance, or even a lousy instruction manual.

In some ways, I wish I had been dumber. Sometimes I feel like I am the only claustrophobic ant in the ant farm. I have the dubious advantage of knowing how small our little ant world is compared to the three dimensional world out there and I want out.

Then again, if I actually did get out, option paralysis would kick in and I would collapse under the weight of trying to handle a nearly infinite number of variables.

Other people don’t have that problem because they don’t see the crazy amount of possibilities that I do. All they see is the everyday mundane realities of life. They don’t have a supercharged imagination magnified to the power of a sky high IQ and focused by the high precision lens of a highly disciplined mind like I do.

And it gives me a lot of power. But without the will to wield it, all it does is make life harder for me.

There has to be a way to change that, though. When it comes to the currency of the mind, I am rich beyond belief. I have an extraordinary level of imagination. I can write all kinds of wonderful things. I can make people laugh. I can organize people. I’m charming and lovable. The list goes on and on.

There has to be some way to connect all that to reality in a way that lets me support myself and feel like a real live grownup type person and not… whatever I am now.

A sad, lonely, and very ill disabled person, I suppose.

I mean, it’s a tragedy. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, etc. It’s such a waste of human potential. I have so much to give to the world. So much to contribute.

The only thing holding me back is my fear. My damage. The truth is that the door to my cage has never been locked and I have been free to go all this time.

But I am scared spitless of that big bad world full full of overstimulation and chaos and complications out there.

And until that changes, nothing else will either.

More after the break.

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The Seven of the Eleven

Well I finally did it. I ordered 7-11 via Foodora.

And I have to say, I am loving it.

I am currently feasting on a Cheddar Smoke, a Jamaican Patty, and of course, my beloved crinkle cut fries.

I got all that, plus a bag of these (the Macaroon ones) and a 2L of Coke Zero for $20.77, tax and tip included.

I am used to paying a minimum of $25 for a meal ordered in, and that does not include a 2L and dessert.

So I get the feeling I will be doing this a lot more in the future.

The Good Bites are not one hundred percent Good. They do have some sugar in them, but only in the chocolate chips, and I figure that will probably be okay, given all the other healthy stuff in there that will slow down the metabolization of the sugar enough so that it doesn’t hit me quite so hard.

That’s how it works for my beloved carrot muffins at McDonald’s. As long as I eat them after a full and relatively healthy meal, I can get away with it.

One funny little thing : My deliveryperson called up. I buzzed them in. Then I went to the door to wait.

And wait. And wait. I waited long enough to get painful flashbacks to times deliverers couldn’t find the place and had to call back a bunch of times.

Then suddenly it hits me. Contactless delivery! The dude probably had already been and gone. I open the door, and voila, like magic, there’s my stuff.

I could get used to this. And it has to be amazing for the drivers because now, they don’t have to slow down to futz with change or wait for the person to put some pants on or any of that.

All they have to do is drop off your order and knock on your door or whatever and then it’s off to the next delivery.

Reminds me of how I loved people who paid at the office when I was a paperboy. Didn’t have to bug them for money.every Thursday. Just deliver the paper to them on time.

I used to fantasize about all my customers being people who paid at the office. Would have made my life a lot easier.

Not that I particularly hated collecting the money every Thursday. It gave me a little glimpse into people’s lives, which I loved.

But the job would have been so much easier if I didn’t have to do it.

Verdict : the Good Bites are…. okay. Ish. Not nearly as sweet I would like them to be… damn the whole dark chocolate thing all to hell on that score.

And I have never been huge into coconut. But the Macaroon variety was the only one available on Foodora.

In fact, 3/4 of the flavours are based on coconut. Including Coconut Lemon, which sounds quite disgusting to me.

I can’t imagine how that could not end up being horribly bitter.

Anyhow, mission accomplished. Got my stuff. Probably going to order this way many times more in the future.

Heck, just being able to get Diet Coke delivered on demand for only $0.99 for delivery alone is a killer app to yours truly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well that was stupid.

I just spent a grueling three hours playing ESO when I had only meant to play for an hour and then have lunch.

Why? Because I has formed the intention, “I am going to finish this quest line before I eat” and it ended up being really, really, really long.

And that meant, sadly, that in my little world, I was almost totally incapable of doing anything else until I fucking finished the damn thing.

Why? Because I got pit bull teeth.

Back in the day, part of the common lore about pit bulls was that their jaws were shaped in a way that once they bit down on something, they could not let go.

They had to bite all the way through it or be stuck there forever.

This is probably not true, but it’s true enough for a metaphor.

Because I, too, have that problem. Once I sink my teeth into something, my Taurus (aka non-pit bull) need to finish what I started kicks in and I just can’t let go of the task until I finish it, no matter what happens or how good the reasons to stop are.

A classic example would be that time, many years back, when I took on this crazy ass job of rewording and cut n’ pasting these bits of trivia about various forms of collectibles in this huuuuge spreadsheet.

It was such an insane job that I had to work on it for nearly all of my waking hours for ten days just to get it done in time.

But I had agreed to do it. So I did it. The whole thing paid like $90, but the lady in charge topped it up to $120.

Not nearly enough for how much work it was. But I had agreed to do it. So I did it.

A sane person would have looked at the amount of work and said “Um, no thanks, you are not paying nearly enough for the amount of work this is going to be” and saved themselves a lot of effort, time, and toil.

But nope. I did it.

The lady in charge of it told me, when I asked about the workload. that other people had done it without any problems.

I have thought about this and I can only conclude that these people cheated somehow. Like they didn’t actually read the entries at all, just did a find and replace to change key words into their synonyms and that was enough to fool her.

Or they were really, really desperate for cash. But even then, there are so many wyas to make more for less work.

Me, I did the job as described. Lunacy.

So yeah. I know all the sane reasons why I should have stopped way before I did, including but not limited to : my blood sugar was dropping, I was getting sleepy from all the mental calories I was expending and that was making things even slower because I kept getting killed by boss monsters over and over again, I hadn’t gotten dressed yet and was feeling cold, the muscles in my right hand were starting to spasm, and so forth and so on.

But none of that mattered. I just had to finish it. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t even pause. And going backwards was doubly impossible. I do not have a reverse gear.

It was finish it, or nothing.

One day this sort of thing will get me into serious trouble.

But on the plus side, it means I can do amazing amounts of work.

And that’s a good thing, right?

More after the break.

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Dispatches from Elsewhere continues to be an astoundingly good show. But I don’t want to talk about that right now.

For one thing, it would take forever to even begin to explain the plot.

But there’s a character in it named Octavio with whom I am utterly fascinated.

I could try to explain why, but it’s far easier to show you.

He is the guy you see at the very beginning of this :

The actor is Richard E. Grant and I find every single frame of him absolutely riveting. It’s an extraordinary performance which packs so much power that when he leaves the screen I feel like I just woke from a very strange dream.

Now here’s the scary bit : I feel that way because I identify with him.

The icy intellectualism, the calm controlled demeanor, the great precision with which is communicates and acts, the eccentricity, the whole strange head space he occupies…. I feel like he is a side of myself made flesh.

And yes, this means I identify with the villain in the show. The big bad whose shadowy machinations are behind everything and who controls the whole shebang.

Believe me, it ain’t the first time I have had more in common with the villain than the heroes. People like me are almost never the heroes of the tale.

Whether we’re the evil sorcerer, or the flamboyant supervillain, or the Machiavellian patriarch of a rich and powerful family, and even when we are just the asshole boss at work, somehow being good at organization and systems building is always seen as being evidence of moral inferiority.

Another example : Trevor Goodchilde from Aeon Flux.

Here’s an audio sampler :

He is the villain of the series though not an entirely unsympathetic. The world of the show does not allow such easy moral clarity.

Not to me, at least.

Aeon is the heroine of the show but her reflexive, emotional anarchism and blanket defiance of everyone and everything is not always right.

And finally, my ultimate alter ego, Adrian Veidt.

Another eccentric icy intellectual who is good at planning and organization.

And I admire him greatly. He saw Armageddon coming and knew he was the only one who could stop it and did whatever it took to do so.

Including a lot of things which are massively offensive to all common morality, including killing millions of innocent people.

Sacrificing millions to save billions. It’s not something most people would do. It’s not the sort of thing most people would even be capable of doing.

And the fact that Veidt is capable of doing it and does it makes him an unspeakable monster in most people’s eyes, including those honest enough to admit it was the right thing to do.

But to me, he’s a hero, one hundred percent.

He saved the world.

He just had to get his hands (very) dirty to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just woke up. Sleepy, hazy, confused, and so on.

Tried playing some ESO before sitting down to lunch and blogging. Pretty rapidly realized that I was too sleepy for that shit so I quit, got my lunch together, and sat down here to blog at you lovely, lovely people.

Right now, in ESO, I am doing quests in a place called Murkmire, which is a swampy area (ick) home primarily to Argonians, a race of amphibious lizard people.

I like them. They are an interesting people. Alien in some ways, very human in others. I don’t care for hanging around in a swamp much. I hate swamps. They are so gross.

But it’s worth it for the plot and the lizards.

One thing about my current character is that he dies way more than my previous Sorcerer ever did. Life is tough when you are a stabby thiefy type, it seems.

Of course, as a Sorcerer, I had my summoned creatures to help me, and I suspect that spoiled me somewhat. It’s way easier to let my critters engage the enemies while I hang back and make with the zapping than it is to engage the enemies myself with just my two daggers to protect me.

So right now, I am getting crushed by the learning curve. I have to learn such novel techniques as blocking and dodging.

I never had to do much of either of those as a sorcerer. I just blasted away at the enemy from a distance.

I have also had to learn what we will call “discretion”. As in the better part of valour. As in, knowing when to fight an enemy and when to just sneak quietly past it and hope like hell it doesn’t notice it.

It’s a humbling experience, and I am enjoying it. My own hubris and lack of caution amuse me to no end.

There was one moment I have to share : there is a plant in the swamp called a “catapult cabbage”. It’s a complicate lily-like flower about the size of a man, and it gets its name because of how it flails out if anyone comes near it.

So once, I saw one, and decided to run up to it to trigger it. I had triggered them before without any harmful effects, so I thought nothing of doing it again, on purpose.

Well it turns out that if you are close enough when it happens, the lashing out hits you and knocks you on your ass.

It was so unexpected and so slapstick that I couldn’t help but laugh.

Admittedly, I don’t use my stealth abilities as much as I could. It’s a struggle to rein in my usual bloodthirsty instincts and slow down long enough to sneak up.

Part of the problem is that it’s not that rewarding. The best result so far for sneaking up on an enemy successfully is them being stunned for a couple of seconds.

I prefer games where that results in a massive damage bonus, sometimes letting you take out the enemy with one shot.

Now that’s some quality stabbin’.

More after the break.

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LOL. I just checked the balance on my reloadable VISA to discover that…. quelle shoq, quelle horrer…. I went an entire 66 cents over my weekly budget!

Well clap me in irons and lead me to the pillory for being the profligate wastrel I am.

I have, in a rare bit of insight, put a link to the website for said reloadable VISA’s website on the bookmark bar of my browser because I know that, as part of this new card based lifestyle, I am going to be jonesing to know how much money I have and seeing as I can no longer count it, the next best thing is checking my balance online.

Another odd little fillip to my transition to paying with plastic is that now my monthly bills come out of my spending money.

In the before time, I would put $60/month or so on my card to pay my bills and that was it. The cash in my pocket was entirely mine to spend, so to speak.

But now that I am keeping most of my money on the card, those bills come right out of the monthly money, and that’s going to throw off my bookkeeping for a little while.

Oh well. I am sure I will make the adjustment.

Now, to talk crap about democracy.

Me : (Over a PA system) Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention please for the following announcements.

Me : (Over a PA system) Number one : You do not live in a democracy. You have never lived in a democracy. There has never been any democracy.

How can this be? It’s simple : one vote with two choices every four years is not democracy. I repeat, it is not democracy. It is not even close. It might call itself a democracy and you have definitely been raised to think it is democracy, but that is a lie.

It is’ at best, democracy flavoured tyranny, and has about as much relationship to real democracy as orange Kool-aid does to oranges. It may contain traces of democracy. Democracy might be what gives it its characteristic flavour. It might even say democracy on the boxes and tins it comes in. But it is not democracy. 

You have been lied to. You have been hoodwinked. You have been conned into thinking you have democracy by powerful elites who know the best way to oppress people is to tell them that they are already free.

But you’re not. You are a hamster in a wheel running your paws off to make money for people who think of you as less than nothing.

In a system like that, does it really matter that you get to decorate your own cage, and what kind of pellets you eat, and what hamster wheel best expresses you as a person?

Because let me level with you, people : freedom and democracy are not just concepts. They are also emotions, the kind you can feel in your gut. The kind that come from deep in our collective hearts. So let me ask you this :

Do you feel free? Does commuting and working and hating it like everyone else does make you feel free? Does having no choice in the really big things in your life, like what you do with half the waking hours of the day, say “liberty” to you?

And do you feel like you live in a democracy? Do you feel like the people are in charge of what their own governments do to them? Do you feel like your politicians represent your best interest and not just their own? Do you feel that your government is currently being run by people who think and feel like you do?

It’s time to wake up, everybody. You are not free. You do not have to take this. You can stands up and demand real democracy, with no tricks, and raise holy hell until wem the people, get to determine our own fates.

No more fake democracy.
No more politicians.
Mo more capital city.
No more lobbyists and special interests.

The people will be the parliament. The citizens must become the Congress. The whole pathetic farce of representative “democracy” has to end.

We want MORE DEMOCRACY NOW.

And we will not be satisfied until we get it.