Well, Joe just tried to throttle me.

But I had it coming.

I was pushing his buttons. I did not mean to do it, but I was.

It’s made me realize that I needle people without consciously meaning to do so. You would think that my arguments with my sister from long ago would have taught me that lesson, but apparently I forgot.

In my stupid ignorant head, all I am doing is defending my position. I tend to forget that other people are (a) way more emotionally involved in that kind of thing than I am, because (b) they don’t have my kind of skill with argument, ergo (c) from their point of view, I am torturing and tormenting them for no good reason.

We were arguing about my plan to save the world, and that is my only explanation (not an excuse) as to why I took it as far as I did and pushed back as hard as I did, and I said a lot of insulting things that I wish I could take back because they were not fair and not the sort of thing one says to someone they love.

Some of those insulting things were true. But that doesn’t matter.

I will, of course, be apologizing profusely to Joe. I let thing gets way out of hand. Part of me knew how angry he was getting with me and again, from my battles with my sister, I should have known that absolutely no argument matters enough to keep going when one person is clearly in a lot of pain, but I was defending my thesis and so I kept on going to the point where Joe tried to strangle me.

I mean, not seriously. It was an outpouring of extreme rage, not a murder attempt.

I am especially ashamed of interrupting him a ton of times. That’s not cool even when everyone is calm. It’s even worse when they are not.

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Maybe i shouldn’t be writing this down, but this is how I process things.

Well, he just came in and apologized to me and I started to apologize to him and he,…. broke down crying. Huge wracking sobs that shook his whole body. Maximum tears.

And he told me how he has been doing so much for so long and how he knows I can’t help it but doing all the housework and taking on all the responsibility has been stressing him out for a really long time and that the rent went up and is now freaking $490/month each so my $500/month means I have only been contributing like $10/month towards food and bills he’s been paying the rest and how all of this is why he’s been unable to work for a long time because he’s been too damned depressed.

And yeah, he could have told me about the rent thing and a lot of other stuff before it got this bad, but like I have said, I know that I am not, in fact, easy to talk to, and so I understand why he kept it all bottled up instead.

And the pain of the guilt from having caused him all this pain without knowing it is god damned killing me. It’s like a long cold blade through my heart and all I can do is keep pushing the blade through a little at a time until it pops out the other side.

It kills me to see this man I love and owe so much to in so much pain. I feel like such an asshole for being such a dick to him earlier. I wish I had never brought up my goddamned plan, or at least that I had recognized how mad he was getting and did the right thing by hitting CTRL-C on the whole conversation before things went critical.

I held him as he cried and I apologized to him and told him it was okay and that I would be paying $600/month from now on and I would learn to do more of the housework as long as he was willing to teach me and that I was so, so, so sorry that he had suffered so much for so long.

I’m going to have to handle this guilt with care because while I believe it to be deserved, I can’t afford to let my depression take hold of it and run with it because if I did, I would become suicidal pretty fast.

In fact, I feel like I am keeping those suicidal thoughts away by force of will alone.

This will pass, so don’t worry. I am not in danger. I can hold myself together until I have calmed down enough to remember that I won’t always feel like this.

I am having my own good cry now, and that’s always a good thing.

And in the unlikely event that I start feeling even worse and start pondering self-harm, all I have to do is imagine how bad my hurting myself would make Joe feel and that alone would keep me from doing anything.

Sometimes, the thought of how much my suicide would hurt others has been the only thing that kept me from doing it.

Whatever works, man. I am glad I am still here. Even now, I am glad I am still here.

Eventually, I will sleep. Might have to take my sleeping pill (just one…). Might just collapse out of sheer emotional exhaustion once the adrenaline wears off.

But one thing is for certain : I will dance with my demons, and kiss them too. I will reach out a hand to the ghost that haunts me. I will swallow the pill that makes me ill. I will drive that icy dagger straight through my heart and give it a twist.

But none of it will defeat me.

And when dawn finally comes, I will greet it with open arms and a smile.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have that haunted feeling today.

It’s hard to explain.I feel both spooky and spooked. Kind of like I am not really here, but also kind of like I am here twice, like I am a ghost haunting my own body.

It’s like my soul is not quite as firmly attached to my body as usual. Like it wants to go roaming around the astral plane without all this sick and tortured flesh to drag around.

Or maybe I just need to go for a walk. I dunno.

Oh, and here’s my plan to save the world :

You can’t get Covid-19 twice.

Once you have it and get over it, you’re immune.

There is no reason for people who are immune to suffer the same restrictions as everyone else as the immune can’t spread the disease.

Ergo, what we need is a way to publicly identify those who are immune and use them as the front line essential workers who deal with the public.

I propose a system where the government sets up rigorous standards for testing people and certifying that they both do not have the virus and that they have the antibodies to fight the virus.

These people would then be declared “cleared” and that would qualify them for various up front jobs (assuming they are otherwise qualified).

It would also free them from some of the restrictions of this era. There is no need for a cleared person to wear a mask in public, or stay at home. They could also congregate in public freely.

They’re immune. It’s like they already have the vaccine.

Unfortunately, the certification as clear would not be free. The sad truth is that if you want a lot of something done fast, it has to be profitable.

Once the program has a proven track record, governments might start paying for the testing as a way to get the economy going.

Businesses might also pay for it for their employees so they can re-open with all cleared staff.

If this program really caught on, the world could go back to normal almost as fast as it shut down. Testing businesses would make a lot of money, people would go back to work, and we can all go back to living our lives.

Plus, when the vaccine finally does arrive, we can make sure it only goes to people who need it because we have this vast database of people who don’t.

So there you have it. Test people, clear them as immune, let them go back to work, and we can have this problem licked within a month.

Doesn’t that sound good?

me, just now

Wrote that and posted it to the blogging site Vocal, which claims that it pays bloggers based on how many views their blog entries get,

Who knows, if that article makes even a tiny bit of money, I might migrate this blog to it.

Either that, or I will start a totally new thing there.

I dunno though. Then I would feel pressure to write to please an audience as opposed to just venting my thoughts,.

Or I could be a radical outside the box indie writer who writes from the heart and the balls and who would never compromise his integrity or his commitment to speaking truth to power by catering to the lowest common denominator.

People love that kind of thing.

More after the break,.

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Because I feel like it

I thought of this topic, judged it to be a good one, formed the intent to write about it, did a bunch of of stuff, forgot the topic entirely, decided to write about something else, then when thinking about the other thing stumbled upon the topic again.

Just felt like sharing that bit of my process.

The real topic is doing things for emotional reasons.

I need to do more of that.

But that’s not as easy as it is simple. All my life, I have attacked life with the power of my big bad boss of a brain. Whatever it was, I would apply my mighty mental muscles to it and conquer it via logical analysis, complex reasoning, and brute brain force.

And that shit is powerful. So powerful, in fact, that it’s very easy to fall into the pattern of using that big ol hammer for every nail you see.

And when your hammer is that big, all you see is nails.

But there is so much more to life than that. And so many problems that simply cannot be solved that way.

Especially the personal, emotional kinds of problems. Like depression.

There is no magic formula for me to figure. No equation to solve. No clever solution that shows out how gawrsh darn smart I am.

It’s not that kind of problem.

The only way to “solve” depression is to go into the deep dark forest of emotion and feel my way through it.

I have known this for a while, but I feel like it’s only recently that I have truly started doing it. And it is, of course, very slow going at first because I am walking blind.

I am extremely unused to emotional reasoning of any form. I have been dazzled by my own brilliance for so long that it’s going to take a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Right now, I have no idea what I am doing.

And that’s fine. It’s perfectly okay to not consciously understand what is going on, where I am going next, or what is going to happen to me.

It doesn’t need to be a panic inducing thing. I can just sit here in the dark, not moving, staying calming, knowing that I am safe here too.

And who knows what I will see once more inner eye dilates? Fantastic beasts and wizard’s towers? Demons and darkness and the living dead? Vintage ads for Doritos starring Jay Leno from back when I didn’t hate him for what he did to Conan?

I hated him because he was just really fucking irritating?

Time alone can tell. That inner realm of my emotional core has been cloaked in darkness and denied a voice for a very long time. It’s still quite young.

I look forward to helping it grow up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.