CONTENT WARNING : The following is extra crazy.

So late last night, I was playing Doom Eternal when I came upon an area that I found to be super difficult. All kinds of enemies coming at me from all kinds of directions in an area with not a whole lot of room to maneuver.

And it was bumming me out. So I was going to quit playing. After all, I had already made it through two or three checkpoints, so I had made a modest amount of progress in the game.

I could retire with honor.

But then an angry butch voice inside of me said, “No, fuck that, that’s the loser option. ”

So I kept playing, kept trying. And something extraordinary began to happen.

I began to feel that cold sensation in my chest that I have learned to associate with emotional healing. It’s the same feeling I get when I am in a really good therapy session or when I am really digging deep and bringing the bad stuff into the light as I blog.

Only it was way more intense. And it hurt, but hurt in a way that felt soooo good.

This is where the crazy kicks it up a notch.

As I kept trying to clear that part of the game over and over, the feeling grew and grew until I was cold and numb from my nipples to my navel. And I began to imagine this magnificent cold pain as an icy knife cutting dead tissue away from my mind.

Or maybe my soul. Whatever.

And as I died over and over, a crazed little voice in my mind started saying things like “KILL THE FLESH” and “I LIKE IT” and “CUT IT, CUT IT!”

And at the risk of over-intellectualizing, I found this whole thing fascinating. I’d never experienced anything like this before. This was brand new territory.

But it was more than just interesting. It was also…. sensual. The cold pain really did feel amazingly good. It felt good in the way that the pins and needles sensation you get when a body part that has fallen asleep is waking up can feel sort of good.

Like underneath the numbness and the coldness was something wonderfully warm and soothing and invigorating.

Something very much alive.

So while there was pain in the metaphorical cutting away of dead flesh, there was an even greater pleasure in freeing the living flesh underneath.

This went on for hours. I was determined to keep going until this marvelous new experience reached some kind of conclusion. And every time I chose to try again despite how often I was getting my ass kicked, I felt strong and more powerful.

Because fuck pain. It has neither value nor meaning. I can choose to keep going despite the pain, and that means pain, and its buddy fear, no longer rules me.

I did, alas, have to stop eventually, without clearing the area. You kind of have to stop playing when it gets hard to make your eyes focus.

But before I quit, I also noted how good it felt to use up all my energy like that. It reminded me of the sort of punch-drunk feeling I would get after an exam. IOR the happy feeling I got when I was doing my Million Word Year,.

Sometimes it feels good to utterly deplete oneself.

And that’s a lesson I really want to hold on to. I am going to remember how good tired can feel and use that memory to spur myself to deplete myself again and again.

Because it turns out that when I am sufficiently depleted, the majority of my depression and anxiety just melts away.

And that seems like the kind of thing I want to pursue.

More after the break

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T

The Ballad of Suzy Lu

Came across this fascinating train wreck on YouTube today :

It’s a fairly typical story of a minor YouTube star whose mild success goes straight to their tiny little heads and makes them thin-skinned narcissists who then get themselves in a world of trouble when they lash out against their critics.

Which, of course, not only does not stop the critics, it attracts more critics who are only there because of her lashing out, and she lashes out against THEM and from then on the train ride to Crazytown is on its way and gaining speed.

But what makes her tale a lot more problematic than the usual tragic narrative is that this time, the minor YouTube celeb is a hot white chick.

This gives her power and influence (and a lack of accountability) unavailable to the usual pasty faced geek with a video game reaction channel.

Thus, she can do a hell of a lot more damage.

Luckily, she is that special brand of clueless narcissist who is so far gone that she is unable to imagine any action of hers, past, present, or future, as being in any sense wrong, and that means she can be relied on to keep running into the exact same wall over and over again then try to sue the wall.

This leaves us innocent bystanders free to just sit back, eat popcorn, and watch a terrible person ruin their lives.

It’s free schadenfreude. Safe in the knowledge that there is no connection between you and this gorgon, you can enjoy their pratfalls and faceplants, guilt free.

I have to admit, though, if I had some way of recording video right now, I would be very very tempted to make my own video needling her for being such a crazy bitch,

“See, I know that as a good looking white chick, you have never experienced a single moment of accountability, but it still exists. There are people out there who are legally and morally able and willing to tell you “no” and there is not a damned thing you can do about it. That doesn’t mean you are being persecuted. In fact, it means the opposite : that for once in your life, you are being treated like everyone else. Oh, and seeing as I am a total nobody with like five subscribers, I know that you would never bother to justify yourself to a nothing like me. So I won’t hear a thing from you about this silly little video of mine. Right?”.

And I would be using my powers for good. Ish.

OK, I would be using my evil powers against an evil person.

That works out to being more or less good, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sleepy. Hard to think. Mental fog. The usual.

But I am not in a lot of pain, which is nice. This is the nicer form of being fucked up by sleep. I don’t have a headache and there’s no body ache or that fun feeling like I have been run over by a cartoon steamroller.

But the mental fog is pretty thick.

The words are not going to come easy in this state. In general, I have been having trouble coming up with something to say lately.

Not sure why. Maybe my brain is trying to go into summer mode now that the weather is getting nicer and all that sunshine out there is starting to call to me.

Keep calling, sunshine. Maybe one of these days I will listen. Go for a nice little walk in the sunshine. Maybe get a Slurpee at 7-11 or something.

Or pick up the drugs that have been siting at my pharmacy for a week. The pharmacy is only a block away but somehow, I just can’t find the motivation to get dressed and go get the damned thing.

Well I will have no choice soon because I am almost out of Paxil. Got four days’ worth left and then that’s it.

And yet, I have a ton of Wellbutrin left. And I have no idea how that is possible. I always, always, ALWAYS take the two of them together.

Yet somehow, they are out of sync. Weird.

Man, is it hard to think of things to say right now. All I really want to do is go back to bed. I am behind on sleep because when I lay down to go to sleep this morning, that rare yet detestable thing happened where suddenly I am super tense all over my body and I have to get up and do stuff because it makes sleep or even just laying in bed relaxing downright impossible.

Thank goodness that doesn’t happen often because it’s maddening as fuck.

Feeling pretty depressed. I will probably feel better after some more sleep.

But I have promises to keep
And 149 words to go before I sleep
And 143 words to go before I sleep

Oh, get this : there’s sugar in Tic Tacs! In fact, they are mostly sugar. And here I have been eating the fucking things like they’re… well, Tic Tacs.

Turns out that they can claim to be sugar free because, at least in the US, because the US says that something is sugar free if it has less than half a gram of sugar per serving and the bastards at Tic Tac consider one serving to be one Tic Tac, and Tic Tacs weight less than half a gram, and voila, via corporate doublethink, what amounts to a tiny lozenge shaped sugar cube is sugar free,

And I am so mad about this. I distinctly recall them being advertised as the sugar free zero calorie mint at one point.

But nope. Lies. All lies. And these are the kind of lies that could kill someone.

And I am going to miss my happy silly little candies.

And I feel betrayed.

Fuck you, Tic Tacs!

More after the break.

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What I want for my birthday

Oh boy, this again.

Yup, looks like it’s time for me to figure out what the fuck I want again.

And I have to blog about it because that seems to be the only way I can marshal my thoughts and focus enough to actually make decisions.

Otherwise, I end up completely poleaxed as I try to process a quasi-infinity of options all at the same time.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere about the difference between being a parallel processing person as opposed to being a linear processing person, but that’s not the topic of this hunk of bloggage, so we shall move on.

So what o I want? Well, there’s always cash. But cash is so impersonal.

I mean, I definitely appreciate it when I get it, but you know how they say “It’s the thought that counts?”

Well, cash is the most thoughtless gift imaginable. It requires absolutely no knowledge of who the recipient is as a person. It basically abdicates all responsibility for choosing a gift and makes the recipient choose instead.

Hmmm. That sounded on point. But it wasn’t.

A step up from cash would be a Steam gift card. That, at least, requires the person to have some idea that I like video games.

What else… anything that helps relax my back. So like, a back massager of some sort, or even just a good back scratcher.

Extra long in either case, though, ’cause I am a big dude and I have a lot of real estate to cover back there.

Relatedly, I would appreciate anything that makes sitting in front of this computer all day more comfortable. Cushions, backrests, that sort of thing.

Hugs. Lots of them. I really crave human touch.

If that’s a bit too much to ask, a gift certificate for a masseur would be very nice.

Or a masseuse, I suppose. But only if she is a real, honest to goodness massage therapist. I have no use for a “masseuse” is really just a prostitute.

A masseur who is actually just a prostitute, however, has possibilities. Especially if he has big strong hands and a gentle touch,.

I am deliberately not choosing gifts that come with dreams attached. So nothing to do with my writing or anything of the sort.

I am through with thinking a purchase can set me free. In reality, they only set me up for feeling like I am a loser and a failures when I don’t make use of the “opportunity”.

What else… oh, sugar free candy is always a huge hit. Especially chocolate. Of all the things diabetes has taken away from me, I miss chocolate bars the most.

That, or hard candy. What can I say…. I love having something to suck.

I guess that’s about all I can think of right now. I am sure that I will think of a ton of other things once it’s too late.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lately I have felt haunted.

And not in the general sense, where I am just kind of spooked and alienated from myself and feeling unreal.

No, this is the more active form, where I feel like there is a large mass of fear and dread and anger in me that I have been dodging via distraction for a long time while it gets closer and closer and bigger and bigger.

Well to hell with that. Time to turn and hold out my hand to the ghost that haunts me.

Me : Hello little ghost. Sorry I have been so hard to reach. I guess I was too scared to deal with you. For that I apologize. Now, what is it you want to tell me?

Ghost : …I’m scared.

Me : Okay. Scared of what?

Ghost :…dunno. Nothing. Everything. Too much everything.

Me : Too much everything? You mean…. too much stimulation?

Ghost : …yes. And no. Too much in. Not enough out.

Me : I see. Do you mean…. too much stimulation and not enough emotional outlet?

Ghost : (nods) So much feels to do, so little feels done. Feels build up, clump together, turn into me. Then you ignore.

Me : I understand. And again, I apologize. I will try to keep it from getting this bad again. Because the truth is, little guy, that I love you. And you deserve to be listened to instead of having me pretending you don’t even exist. No wonder you became a ghost. I was treating you like one.

Ghost : (nods sadly)

Me : Well that’s all over, little buddy. Now come give me a hug, and tell me all the things you need to say.

We embrace, and as the ghost whispers in my ear, we both slowly fade away,

---

Well that kind of worked. I get the feeling that there is a lot more that the ghost needs to say to me, but that’s about as far as I can take this experiment right now.

The important lesson, I think, is that when I am feeling depressed and down and angry, I should ask myself whether there is a ghost for me to embrace.

Because once I realize that I am avoiding dealing with my emotions and, as a result, I have a serious backlog built up, I will immediately deal with it.

I don’t like letting problems grow big due to my neglect. That doesn’t keep it from happening, in fact it happens all the time.

But I still don’t like it. And in my private moments, I like to think of myself as someone who is not afraid to face harsh truths.

And that’s true…. for certain values of “harsh”. It’s true that I do not consciously deny the truth and that I do my best to see thing as they really are, no matter what.

But there’s also tons of shit – most of life, to be honest – that I just plain don’t think about because thinking about it makes me feel scared and confused and lost and so I stuff my mind with my distractions instead.

And that gets me through the day, I suppose,

But I am running out of room for new ghosts.

And that’s something I am just going to have to deal with.

More after the break.

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Tear down the walls

I feel like that is what I am up to right now : ripping out the senseless and toxic walls that convolute and complicate the free and healthy expression of who I am.

I know why the walls are there. I put them there in order to shield myself from the world. And over the years, I have added a lot of layers to those walls.

That’s because adding a layer has been my go-to defense mechanism whenever I feel like life and reality are getting too close for many, many years.

Just like an oyster. Oysters secrete the chemical that can become a pearl in response to an irritating object lodged between its flesh and its shell. This has the immediate effect of wrapping the object in a thin layer of pearl and thus makes it less rough and jagged and therefore less irritating.

And presumably, most of the time, that lets the oyster flush the irritant out of its system without it doing too much damage on the way out.

But when the object is too big or too intractable, the oyster just keeps pumping out the pearlescent fluid and the pearl just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

I’ve got some pretty big pearls that I need to dislodge in order to free myself from the death spiral I currently call my life.

The challenge, then, in ripping down the aforementioned walls is not just the usual problem with making any large change to oneself, namely dealing with the chaos and uncertainty that comes with big change, but also the subtler and more insidious issue of having to keep myself from adding more layers to replace the ones I am removing.

After all, this adding of layers is my primary involuntary response to the feeling that reality has gotten too close to me. It’s a reflex action. Those are hard to prevent.

So I need to go into this with the firm knowledge that it will be scary at first and I will want to run and hide and put as many layers between myself and the real world as possible no matter the cost.

But because I know this is going to happen, I can choose not to obey. To stick with the scary thing long enough to get used to it and see that it is really not so scary after all, and then it can fade into the background to be part of the new normal.

You must endure long enough to adapt. Amazing things can unfold when you resist the urge to flee for a few extra seconds.

It’s trick when you have a mind that can move very fast, because you can put so much distance between you and the thing you are fleeing in just a few moments.

But if you hang in there, I swear, it will change your life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Most peculiar, mama.

Well, I found my New Game at last.

It’s called Doom Eternal and it kicks a truly royal amount of ass.

It’s fast paced, intense, hardcore, dark, brutal, and drips blood and testosterone.

It’s basically heavy metal in video game form. Including an entirely appropriate heavy metal/industrial soundtrack.

Also, it’s from Bethesda and it’s been out for less than a month, so clearly they are not completely incapable of putting out a decent product yet, Fallout 76 notwithstanding.

My only quibble – and it’s a great quibble to have – is that the game is so intense that I can’t play it for more than half an hour without getting completely worn out by it.

Because I am old.

I had high hopes for the game because I enjoyed the previous game, creatively titled Doom (2016), and the game has not just exceeded those expectations, it’s blown them into tiny twitching chunks of devastated demon flesh..

My first session of playing it, I found myself saying “Fuck yeah!” over and over again.

That’s a very good sign.

The whole game feels like it was made by people who got it. People who understood what made a game like Doom good and turned those things up to eleven, then set them on fire with a 20 foot electric guitar shaped like Satan’s cock.

In other words, I kind of like it.

In other local news, I finished my re-play of Dishonored. God damn, that’s a good game. I had forgotten just how good it is.

I had also forgotten what a delightful little treat the game has for you when it comes down to what looks like it will be the end of the game(long story) : taking out the Lord Regent, aka the former Royal Spymaster who framed you for the death of the Empress you loved and were sworn to protect.

There’s two ways to take him out: you could be boring and just kill him, OR you can broadcast a recording of him confessing to his crimes over the public PA system.

Obviously I chose the latter, but not out of mercy. Quite the opposite. I know it will hurt him far more to be publicly revealed to be a horrible bastard, arrested, and thrown in jail to rot than it would if I simply killed him.

Death takes but a moment. Shame lasts a lifetime.

I have now re-downloaded the sequel, Dishonored 2, and have started a new playthrough of that. And I am very excited to be doing so.

Because Dishonored 2 is one of those rare sequels that is actually even better than the original. It keeps everything that was good about the first game but adds so much more.

My only snag is that, having just saved the kingdom by killing the fuck out of a lot of people in order to put the Empress’ daughter Emily on the throne in the first game, it kind of sucks to have everything go to shit again at the beginning of the second.

Granted, in-game, 15 years have passed, but still.

And I am trying to be less murderous this time. But it’s not going well.

Killing people is just plain easier than taking them down nonlethally.

Plus these fuckers conspired against me (you get to play as Empress Emily this time).

So if it’s just one on one, or two against one, I will just knock them unconscious.

But if they swarm me, motherfuckers gonna die.

More after the break.

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Misadventures in therapy

Had therapy today and it was terrible.

My fault. I was incredibly sleepy throughout the whole thing. As in, I was so sleepy I would forget what I was talking about in mid-sentence.

And I tried so hard to prevent this exact happenstance. I got up at around noon, and had my lunch immediately so I would also be fortified by my usual Diet Coke ration, and I stayed out of bed and tried to keep my mind activate with video games.

But nope. Caffeine once again failed me, and my therapy session was atrocious. I sure as hell didn’t make any progress psychologically.

How could I? I was barely conscious.

So that was pretty depressing.

My fatal mistake was taking my sleeping pill at around 7:30 am. One would think that it would have relaxed its grip on me five and a quarter hours later. I certainly did.

But nope! Zonk city.

Oh well. I did get some pretty good sleep afterwards, and my mind feels more relaxed than it has in weeks, so some good came of it.

I’ll be taking the pill again tomorrow morning. Clearly, I need it.

Weird how the need doesn’t manifest consciously though.

I get the feeling that there are a lot of things I screen out of my consciousness without even knowing I am doing it.

Recovery will therefore mean making myself conscious of a lot of unpleasant realities of which I was heretofore blissfully unaware.

Dirty work – but it has to be done.

I have done a lot of damage to myself via my ability to hyperfocus on what I wish and ignore everything else.

It’s a heck of an ability to have, but it occurs to me that I use it as a crutch. By filling my mind with a video game or a book or whatever, I shut out the rest of reality and thus create this tiny little safety zone that none of the things which make me anxious or depressed can touch me.

It’s a great trick for survival, but deadly as hell if you want anything more than just making it through the day.

And I do. I want so much more than survival. I want to thrive. I want to succeed. I want to live a full, healthy, meaningful life instead of being this absurdly gifted person tucked away in society’s deep background because he is too scared to deal with anything.

The fear is so damned strong.

But I will become stronger.

This, I swear.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I guess this is the new normal. Am I right?

All this staying in. Par for the course for me, though I do miss going to restaurants with my friends. But a weird time for the world in general.

For one thing, we are seeing the limits of individual liberty illustrated every day because we are in a situation where letting people come and go as they please can actually get people killed, and thus, fairly strong restrictions are actually justified.

Of course, you have the protesters. These people fail at civilization. The soul of civilization is rational restraint, and these people are having none of it.

Thus we all suffer from the effects of an overly permissive atmosphere.

But I can’t get too mad at these people because they are just reacting the way their culture has programmed them to react. There’s a reason places like Hong Kong are very hard to oppress, and that’s because free people instinctively resist.

It’s nothing we need to be told to do. It’s baked into the nature of free peoples itself.

So I can forgive these people for not quite making it to the level where they can restrain their instinctive reaction based on sobering but rather remote and theoretical truths.

And besides. These people are a very tiny minority of the population. Most people get it. We might not like it, but we get it.

But there is a reason (beyond mere sensationalism) the media gives these nutbars so much attention, and that’s because these people, wrongheaded as they are, are expressing something that everyone is feeling.

People don’t like being cooped up and told what they can and cannot do. Cutting people off from their jobs is very traumatic as most people derive most of their sense of purpose and their sense of having a place in their society from their jobs.

I mean, that’s the formula, isn’t it? You are what you do. Society tells us that as long as you are gainfully employed and paying your own way, you’re good. That is the sum total of what you owe the society that supports you.

Well, that and paying taxes, but you don’t exactly get a choice in that, so it’s hard to list that amongst one’s virtues.

Doesn’t keep people from trying, mind you.

But now, suddenly, everyone is on the dole. The whole damned world is facing the same struggle I face : how to find personal meaning without employment.

And I clearly don’t have any answers there. I just play video games all the time.

But I feel their pain. I think that there is a gently simmering spiritual crisis underneath the surface of the collective subconscious.

We have a world full of people feeling increasingly lost and directionless without their employment. This, historically, sets the stage for the rise of movements of all kinds, good or bad, left or right, freeing and fascist.

So the real legacy of this strange era might be a period of social and political instability that brings profound change to the very roots of modern society.

Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen.

More after the break.

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Son of a bitch. Now I can’t order from 7-Eleven because for some reason, I can’t log in to my PayPal any more.

And I would love to report this problem to PayPal, but I can’t, because you have to be logged in to do that.

This is downright Kafkaesque,

I am beginning to think I need to start looking for a new reloadable/secured VISA because shit like this just keeps happening.

And it’s causing me a hell of a lot of stress.

I mean, the only reason I was using PayPal to pay for my Uber Eats orders was that Uber Eats wouldn’t take my credit card directly in the first place.

Now even that doesn’t work.

I am beginning to wonder if my reloadable VISA comes from a really shady provider (my bank farms that shit out) and that’s why I keep having issues.

I am tempted to just transfer the balance to my bank account and use online debit.

I am pretty confident that VanCity is trustworthy, After all, they are a Canadian bank, and we have a very boring (and hence reliable) banking system.

God damn it, even calling Paypal on the phone requires you to log in. It says it’s for “greater convenience” but there ain’t another option.

It’s a hell of a catch, that Catch-22.

Update : I was able to log in to my credit card’s website, and put through a ticket there. Hopefully they can resolve it.

Burning down the house

Guess it’s time to try to shock and frighten myself into taking better care of myself.

My legs are now covered in lesions. Each leg has a big one about the size of an Odor-Eater and a host of small ones the size of a large zit,

I probably have some kind of infection. The kind that only dirty diabetics like me get because our sweat is like treacle.

And that segues neatly into the main reason I have not taken this to the doctor yet : shame. I am ashamed of how badly I have taken care of myself and ashamed of the horrible state I am in, and I don’t want to to have to admit to it all to my doctor, who is an authority figure, and that only makes it worse.

And yes I know that is completely crazy. The logical, sensible thing to do is swallow my pride and get this shit looked after ASAP.

But it ain’t that easy. Not when my depression and social anxiety are involved.

So who knows what it will take before I get myself fixed up. Suppurating wounds covering my entire body. Constant deep horrible pain. Not being able to walk any more. Losing my eyesight.

The possibilities are endless, really.

I mean, my medications from my psychiatrist were phone in last Friday and I still haven’t found the motivation to walk one block to go get them.

So I guess one of these days, I’ll just die.

There’s a certain comfort in that thought.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Decided to give another game from my Steam wishlist a try today : this one

It’s called Torment : Tides of Numenera, and it’s an isometric turn based RPG like the Pillars of Eternity and Baldur’s Gate series’ .

I’ve played it for 97 minutes so far, That means I technically have 23 more minutes of play time to make up my mind about whether or not I am going to keep it.

I want to want to keep it. I am growing tired of all this buying and returning of games. And I have the sneaking suspicion that I am just being incredibly fussy and that if I don’t just pick something and stick with it, I will still be flitting about come Xmas.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I am not really enjoying the game, and I think I know why. It’s the same reason I could not get into the game’s spiritual precursor, the much lauded Placescape : Torment.

The games are just too damned weird.

It pain my pride to admit it, but there’s just too much novelty thrown at me at once. The games are so breathtakingly original that it wears me out. And once I reach that point, I lose interest in the game.

It’s just too much work.

The brand new ideas, concepts, game mechanics, and damned near everything else come too thick and too fast for me. In fact, I get the same feeling of being utterly overwhelmed that I got in that linguistics course I took all those years ago.

And the same headache I used to get from programming class.

And that’s not what I want in a game. I suppose that if I had played a ton of that kind of RPG, I might not find it all so novel and stressful.

But I haven’t. So I do.

Also, the game has just screen after screen after screen of dialog and expositional text. I had to wade through like a hundred screens of it just to get to character creation. After that, it was clear that the game was going to mostly be gigantic wads of text broken up by the occasional battle.

Oh, and of course, the battle system and the character stats have to all be new and weird and counterintuitive too.

So here I go, requesting yet another refund.

I want a refund for Darksiders “Not 4” Genesis, too, but it’s way too late for that.

I am pissed off because I am stuck at this brutally difficult boss fight that pits me against a bastard called the Houndmaster whose hellhounds attack me from all angles at once while he attacks me with sword strokes so powerful they can kill me in seconds.

And that wouldn’t be so bad, except that I can’t go back to where I was – that gate closed behind me – and because the game keeps only one save, I can’t go back to a previous save either.

And to top it all off, I am only in this mess because the game glitched in such a way that a certain gate just plain did not open and that meant I couldn’t go forward the normal main plot kind of way, and I was forced to look for an alternate route.

And there’s no way to turn down the difficulty of the game and apparently absolutely no cheats out there for it, so I can’t fix my game that way either.

So I am pretty pissed off at the game right now because my only options are to either somehow win the impossible boss fight, or start all over again.

Or uninstall the game and try to forget about it till I am over being pissed off at it and starting over doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

None of those are good options.

But they are the only ones I have.

More after the break.

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The Bonfire of the Insanities

I am damned proud of that title.

Anyhow, I am still fairly depressed. The theory that this is about sleep seems more insubstantial by the moment.

I mean, maybe I am still behind on sleep. But there is something more going on.

So I figure I’m in one of my burn periods, where my mind is burning all the leftover bullshit in my mind left behind when I have healed a portion of my mental damage.

And while that is happening, my mind is cloudy from the smoke and it’s hard to think clearly plus the heat from the fire gives me a headache and makes me feel cranky and irritable and out of sorts.

And I just bought a big bag of sorts last week. Where’d they all go?

This too shall pass. At some point, the fire will have used up all its fuel and petered out, and I will actually feel pretty good for a while.

You know. Cleansed.

In the meantime, I will maintain my same wearily indulgent attitude toward the depression. I will listen to what it says but I will not do what it wants, or let it rule me when it is a known liar and cheater and therefore nothing it says has any real value.

So I listen because, as inn behaved as it is, it is still part of me that is trying to tell me something and I want to hear that something, both for its own sake, and because hopefully once heard it will calm down and leave me alone.

But it’s not going to get anywhere near the driver’s seat. And I am not going to listen to what it says about what other people think of me because on that subject, it is demonstrably completely insane.

So I am going to hang in there and let the healthy parts of me take over and do what that part of me wants for a change.

It knows best what it needs to do in order to heal.

I just need to start listening to it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Veering between depression and nihilistic rage at the moment.

I feel a strong urge to thump something very hard. My head hurts and it’s very hard to think. My mind is full of tire fire smoke and gritty ash, and it hurts when I blink. My body feels weird, like I am not quite in it and it’s beginning to wander off on its own.

But whatever. This too shall pass. It’s probably just a bad combination of the fact that I just woke up and the fact I hadn’t eaten in eight hours giving me low blood sugar. I am eating as a blog, so the blood sugar thing should fix itself soon enough.

As for the usual waking up bullshit, only time awake can fix that.

Well, that, and precious, life-giving Diet Coke.

So I will feel better-ish soon. I might need more sleep as of yet, though, because I did not get my usual main snooze because I had one of my rare but unpleasant attacks of insomnia. I just could not get to sleep.

So I had to get up for a while.

Eventually, I finally got tired enough to lay down and sleep at around 11:30 am. Woke up around 2 pm. That’s only to and a half hours of sleep.

I’m gonna need a lot more than that.

I just hope this doesn’t end up screwing with my sleep schedule, inasmuch as I have one. I mean, I suppose there are worse things than sleeping in the afternoons, but still.

I’d like to keep at least some tiny shred of predictability in my life.

Because I am still pretty sleepy, the words, they do not come easy. My mind keeps wandering and I have to drag my attention back to the screen and all those cute little black words I put on it.

I think my mind is trying to find a back door into sleep. Like it’s trying to sneak away and go back to sleep, and I have to keep catching it and making it make the words.

And it does not like that.

350 words so far. 150 to go, I can do this.

I am growing more and more dissatisfied with my life. Video games just aren’t enough any more. I get bored in the middle of playing them.

In fact, I think this long quest to find my Next Big Game is pure decadence on my part. Remember, I define decadence as trying to meet a higher need by lower means.

A classic example would be people who crave intimacy, but for whatever reason can’t or won’t acknowledge that, so they try to substitute having lots and lots of sex instead.

In my case, I think I am trying to fulfill my need for more in life via this hunt for the “right” game. That’s why I keep buying, trying, and returning games.

Could be that that game I am looking for doesn’t exist. Or it does exist, but it’s called “actually having a life” and it’s a game that I have felt was too hard for me for forever.

Time to man up and play, I guess.

More after the break.

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Surprise plot twist!

I’m still pretty depressed.

Feeling pretty dark and rage-y. Listening to Nine Inch Nails helped a little. But I still have a dark flame burning in my chest and harsh and heatless light shining in my brain.

Then again, maybe it’s just heartburn.

More likely is that I am still not caught up on sleep and that is weighing down my mood. That will sort itself out eventually, I suppose.

I slept too much.So I stopped taking my sleeping pill. Then I slept too little. So tonight I will be taking the pill again.

I’m a study in contrasts and extremes.

hatever the cause, fuck it. It’s just depression. It comes and goes as it pleases. I don’t really give a shit. I just ignore it when it’;s around.

Like yeah, it’s there, and I validate and acknowledge that.

But that doesn’t mean I have to let it ruin my fun.

And that’s what I want out of life. Fun. I want to enjoy myself. I think that, despite a childhood spent amusing myself alone, I never really learned how to have fun in the broader sense of the term.

There’s a limit to how much fun you can have by yourself. Even with porn.

But then again, that’s my big, big problem : I did everything by myself. I am by nature a highly independent and self-possessed kind of person, but it went way way too far.

Even an INTJ like myself needs the warmth of human contact. A solitary childhood is a terrible thing. There are so many thing I never learned. Priceless inputs I never got. I never had to figure out how to find a place in the human community.

I just did my own thing, by myself, and some very important parts of me died like neglected house plants as a result.

If I could go back in time and talk to my younger self around age 6, I would, of course, tell him to stop being such a whiny little pussy and man up.

But more importantly,. I would tell him to bend a little. Give a little. Adapt a little. Surrender a little of that precious autonomy in order to have friends and get along with people your age.

And above all, learn to fit in. Not in the sense of totally surrendering your independence. But this is not a binary situation. There is a lot of grey area between total autonomy and mindless conformity. If you keep trying, you will find your own balance between the two.

Just like everyone else does.

When I look back on my cold,. cold childhood, I can see how inflexible I was. I guess the lack of kindergarten and kids my own age to play with meant I never learned how to negotiate my space within a group, and that left me way behind other kids who had more involved parents and more playtime with peers.

And i still haven’t caught up. I don’t know if I ever will. I have a terrible fear that my social damage is now permanent and that there is no way for me to learn to open up and be more flexible and accommodating at this stage.

But I know that, somewhere deep inside me, the spark of life is still burning, and the happy friendly warm kid I was before the rape is still within me, waiting to be born.

So I am going to keep on trying to excavate myself, no matter what it takes.

I just hope I can get to myself before I run out of air.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Decided, more or less on a whim, to get this game called Dying Light this morning.

And seeing as the game cost $65, that’s a heck of a whim,.

Quick review : not a keeper. It sounded good on paper and it honestly seems like a great game, but it’s not for me.

Mostly because my old ass is way too slow for it.

The idea : you’re a secret agent parachuted (literally) into Harran, a city in the midst of a zombie plague. You have to recover extra special files or the world will end.

The game is sort of vague about that part. Something about a toxin.

And the game sounded good. The rap was that you could parkour your way around this huge open world fighting zombies, crafting weapons, and scavenging.

It even has a Steam Workshop, which I love in games because it makes downloading and installing mods super easy.

But alas, it was not to be. Turns out my middle aged reflexes cannot keep up with the whole parkour thing. I was utterly lost.

So back it goes, and the search for my Next Big Game continues.

But at least I finally got my (Canadian style) Chinese food craving satisfied. I ordered from a place quite near to here called the Wing Kee, and had me some chicken chow mein and an egg roll both last night for supper and today for lunch.

To do so, I had to forgive the Wing Kee for getting rid of their Dinner for One and thus forcing me to pick one entree instead of the variety of smaller portions I used to be able to get from said Dinner for One.

The sad truth is, they are still my best option for what I consider Chinese food. Patient readers will recall that I have had a really bad (and ironic) time getting Canadian style Chinese food here , in the middle of one of the biggest ethnic and national Chinese populations outside of Beijing.

I mean, it makes sense if you think about it. I somehow doubt I could get Canadian style Chinese food in Beijing, either.

But it means that when I look up Chinese food on these food delivery websites, what I mostly get is a whole entire metric fuckton of places with menus containing words like “intestines” and “spleen” and “sour mushroom” but not a single thing the average Canadian would recognize as “Chinese food”.

So you win, Wing Kee. For now, at least.

Otherwise, things are going okay. I continue to strive to find the positive in life and hold on to it. To open myself up to life and end my long silent slumber. To let Spring come to me chilly little domain and bring the sunlight, warmth, and emotional nourishment I need come to me at last.

That means I am also digging deep into the soil of my soul to find that long buried id of mine. If anything can rescue me from my icily cerebral existence, it’s my good old fashioned primal life force of an id.

Because I am far, far more than a big ol brain.

And I can’t wait to prove that to the world.

More after the break.

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My kind of fun

I feel a little guilty saying this, but I am having way too much fun arguing with a surprisingly right wing Facebook friend.

His name is Sven Manning, and he’s been regurgitating some of that right wing incel misogynistic bullshit about how the game Last of Us 2 is being “ruined” by having more diversity “forced” into it by “SJWs” and how this means the company making it will “get woke and go broke”.

Well, if it rhymes, it must be true!

This stuff is hardly unique. In fact, one the markers of this particular brand of drooling moron is their tendency to regurgitate what others say whole – because as it turns out, even they can’t swallow that garbage for long.

However, to give you an idea of why I found this stuff coming from Sven Manning so surprising , I just got a nasty Facebook message from his husband.

That’s right, he is a man married to a man and yet he’s a right wing loon. I wonder if he knows what the rest of his misbegotten coterie think of people like him and his husband and their kind of marriage?

It’s like the Log Cabin Republicans all over again. But much, much worse.

And the thing is, I am loving this. This lowlife has accidentally made me very very happy because the truth is that I love to argue and fight, and my life rarely actually gives me any socially acceptable venue to do so.

Of course, he has no idea that he just woke the dragon. He will learn soon, though. I am, in this one way, a total bastard willing to nuke the positions I hate into glass with the power of my verbal and logical gifts.

I would have made one hell of a lawyer.

And because I am such a monolithic cunt when roused, there is only one way this conflict can end : by him banning and/or unfriending me.

Because I sure as hell will never give up, and I will continue to deliver the pain, so some time soon he will have to kick me out of his Facebook life just to make the pain stop.

At which point, I will consider him to have said “Uncle”, declare victory, and go back on my merry way without him, whistling a cheery tune.

In fact, I am enjoying this conflict so much that it’s making me want to finally get around to join right wing forums et al with the express purpose of making them ban me because I am upsetting all the fragile little snowflakes too much.

This is the kind of shit that makes me feel alive. I’m like a caged tiger suddenly given the opportunity to hunt. My verbal power towers over most people’s, and I plan to use that power to fight for all that is good and right and strong of heart against these feckless troglodytes whose mass lunacy threatens the entire human race.

So cry havoc and let slips the dogs of war.

I have found my joy, and it’s kicking ass with my awesome language skills.

And I haven’t used even one percent of my power yet.

Just wait till I really get going.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap, was it hard to get out of bed just now!

I kept falling back asleep. Must have happened at least five times. By that final time, I was getting desperate, so I more or less forced myself out of bed by sheer force of will.

It was effective, and I am grateful for that. But I wouldn’t recommend it.

So I don’t think I will be taking my sleeping pill again any time soon. Because that shit was scary and harsh, y’all. Like a freaking nightmare.

Which it may have been, come to think of it. Either way, do not want to repeat it.

Meanwhile, I am kind of stuck in two of the games I currently have on the go. In Darksiders : Genesis, they have hit me with this “escape the collapsing temple” sequence where I have to make all these precise jumps in a row or die.

And there’s no margin of error. You do it exactly right or you have to start all over. And I seriously loathe that kind of thing, as do most gamers, I would think.

I mean, it combines time pressure and precision platform jumping, two things high on gamers’ hit lists, right up there with unskippable cutscenes and escort missions.

And in Dishonored, I am stuck doing this insane part where I have to cross this narrow bridge teeming with guards and huge electric pylon waiting to zap me to cinders.

It’s really quite nuts, and quite the sudden jump in difficulty. I honestly don’t remember it from other times I have played the game.

I assume that has a lot more to do with my imperfect memory than it does with any changes to the game. It’s not impossible that this segment has been added since the last time I played, but the game is from 2012, so it’s not bleedin’ likely.

Meanwhile, I have $30 burning a hole in my Steam Wallet from returning stuff and so I am shopping around for yet another game.

Specifically, I am looking for some sort of open world game full of quests, like Fallout 4 or Skyrim or Witcher 3,

Something where I feel like I am truly getting my money’s worth because I get so many hours of quality gameplay out of it.

I ran some possibilities from my Wishlist past Maelkoth this morning and got some useful feedback from him. Helped me eliminate some possibilities from said rather bloated Wishlist and thus narrow down the range of options.

I might go for a game with the bizarrely named Greedfall. It seems to be the sort of thing I am looking for. But it’s quite recent and thus quite expensive. So I dunno.

Another possibility is Pathfinder : Kingmaker. Unlike Greedfall, it is done in the isometric POV rather than the first person POV of Greedfall et al. I prefer the FPS POV because it’s a lot more immersive, but I have enjoyed the fuck out of many ISO games too.

And it’s like, half the price of Greedfall.

So what I am saying is that I have options.

The problem, as always, is choosing among them.

---

Knocking at my door

Ya know, in a sense, I have been quarantining myself for a very long time.

That’s why this novel phase the world is going through hasn’t changed my life much. I was already “self-isolating” and doing my best to stay six feet away from people due to my crippling social anxiety slash agoraphobia.

At the root, it’s social anxiety. I feel like people are judging me and want to hurt me when I go out in public. My mental disease tells me they hate me and are super angry at me for even daring to show my face in public, let alone share the same air as good, clean, decent folks.

And yes, that’s crazy. That’s the thing about mental illness. It’s insane.

But behaviour wise, it’s agoraphobia. I stay home.

The difference is that I have the power to end my inner quarantine. All I have to do is open the door and let people in. Make more room in my heart and my mind for the simple human things that provide the bread and butter social interactions that human beings need in order to be emotionally healthy.

This idea occurred to me when I was waiting at the door for my Chinese food to arrive and I overheard Joe and Julian on a Zoom call with Joe’s parents and his sister.

It struck me then that this warm and living world that I have wanted to be a part of for so long is not so very far away.

It’s right here in this apartment, in fact. The only thing keeping me on the outside looking in is my own fear. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with me that makes me unfit company for most people most of the time. That’s the insanity talking, and I am under no obligation to listen.

I can hear it now, raving about how to let other people into my life would be to expose myself to CHAOS and the UNKNOWN and the (even worse) UNPREDICTABLE and how the only safety comes from keeping people AWAY and leading my usual kind of soul-destroying cloistered life.

Yeah, whatever, crazy person. Rant all you want. Tear out your hair and ear the sackcloth and self flagellate. Gnaw the furniture, if you need to.

But I am opening that damned door no matter what you think. I will listen to what you are trying to tell me, but I will by no means take your advice.

Because you are crazy. And I’d be crazy to let you run my life according to your demented whims, you grizzled old loonie.

So this is it. I am opening that long-locked door in my mind and in my heart and making a conscious decision to seek out and embrace more human interaction.

And the crazy part of my mind is just going to have to learn to deal with it.

Because I have nothing to be ashamed off, I am lovely company, and there are people out there who want to see more of me.

So why not give them what they want?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Man am I tired of this sleepy bullshit.

I hadn’t taken my sleeping pill for a few days because I was already sleeping a lot and waking up all groggy and fucked up. so I figured my mirtazapine would only make it a whole lot worse.

But this morning, I decided I was being foolish about the whole thing and took the frigging pill already.

And as far as I can tell, it didn’t make any difference. Didn’t make things any worse, which is good. But it didn’t make them better, either.

I guess I slept a little bit better?

On pure whim, I downloaded a free to play game called Paladins. It’s a first person shooter type game. No single player campaign, so I doubt I will keep it for very long.

Multiplayer competition means very little to me. I am a narrative beast, and I need story. Mere competition is boring as hell to me.

Like, why would I even care who wins when nothing is at stake?

I want to be a hero. To do good. Competition is too zero sum for me.

Oh right, emotional coldness. That’s what I was going to talk about.

Basically, I have blamed my emotionally cold life on others, but in light of recent revelations, I have to ask myself if I could have been reached at all.

Yeah, that. When I was raped at the age of 4, I retreated into my mind as a defense and that took me to a very cold dark place from which I have yet to recover.

So I was a hard to reach kid. Very little could make it through the thick layer of scar tissue around my heart. It would have taken someone of extraordinary patience and kindness to truly get through to me.

And it makes me feel so foolish to think of how adroitly I dodged the very emotional connections that might have rescued me from my cold and lonely state.

And once the rot had truly set in, forget about it. Plenty of people tried to help me, but it didn’t take long for them to realize how hard it was to deal with me, and they would give up and go away.

And the really sick part is that part of me would be relived. Phew. Finally, this person who was pressuring me to open up and thus making me anxious is gone. Now I can go back to the bleak and terrible life which I hate.

Better the devil you know, I guess.

So I suppose I can’t blame people for not reaching me emotionally when I was so hard to reach. I was a very damaged kid and that damage cut me off from the world.

And it’s that damage I need to address if I am ever to escape my lonely little planet and go play with the big kids out in the sun.

And now, I have no choice but to lay back down and sleep some more despite wanting to stay up and have fun.

More after the break.

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Mysteries of the Bathroom

Has this ever happened to you? (Please say yes. )

You feel the need to go to the bathroom. But you can’t. And need and discomfort build, and build, and then …. stop.

Suddenly, you don’t need to go nearly as bad. And, after a quick and desperately paranoid check, you are sure nothing actually came out of you.

And yet…. suddenly, relief.

And I mean…. that shouldn’t be possible. Right? The discomfort is caused by pressure and the only way the pressure goes down is if the substance causing it is released, so… what the hell happened?

I have so many questions :

• Was my bladder just faking it in order to get attention?

• Does my bladder have some sort of secret chamber that it only opens up in cases of dire emergency where it needs somewhere to shunt the excess urine in order to relive the pressure temporarily?

• Does the discomfort of the pressure cause me to tap into my latent transdimensional psychic powers and open a portal in my bladder to another dimension where people, I presume, are none too fond of me?

• Is there an alternate timeline where I wet myself and got relief that way, then simply shifted my consciousness back to the timeline where I didn’t?

I’m not going to mention my bowels.

Anyone with a more plausible theory is welcome to submit it, because I would really like to know whether my body performs miracles or not.

---

Is this your card?

Lost track of my all-important credit card again.

Went to get some cash out of an ATM at 7-11 and it was nowhere to be found. Luckily. I remembered that I had taken it out of my wallet as part of signing up for Uber Eats last night. So no panic yet, just the humiliation of having to borrow money from Joe.

A humiliation markedly similar to the kind I used to feel as a kid when I got home from school and realized I had forgotten my keys. The keys that were, as a result, now locked inside the house.

Then I got home and still could not find the card. Now, the panic set in. I was looking at a future where I had to report the card missing and be unable to get at most of my money until a new one arrived.

Luckily, I happened to spot it sitting on some things under my desk. So all is right in the world now. I assume that at some point, I knocked it off the desk, and at another point I accidentally kicked it under said desk,

Or maybe I did it as one smooth action of sublime klutziness. Who knows.

I mean, I have been a klutz for my entire life. I must be getting good at it by now.

That’s enough of my silly ass life for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.