Well, it’s the first half of my day’s blogging, so I must be sick, tired, and depressed.

I just checked. Yup.

One new wrinkle is that have developed morning insomnia. I just can’t sleep in the morning any more.

What happens is that I play video games until 6 am or 7 am, like usual, then eat breakfast, then go to bed.

It’s been my routine for years now, and until recently. it worked.

But now, when I lay down, I get this sudden attack of tension and a surge of energy and together they make sleep impossible.

Patient readers will recognize this as something that has happened to me before, but not very often and totally randomly.

But now it’s every damned morning and it is stressing me out.

The morning sleep period is usually my longest and best one. It’s when I get my high quality dreaming done, as well as body maintenance, and so missing it is really dragging me down.

I still get a nap in the afternoon and another in the evening but that’s maybe five hours total, tops, and that’s not enough.

So I think I am going to have to bite the bullet and take the fucking pill again.

Actually, it’s not so bad. I think I can distinguish between the issues caused by my sleep apnea and the ones caused by the Mirtazapine now, and the conclusion I have arrived at is that the sleeping pill doesn’t cause problems but it does make them a lot worse.

Its hard enough to fight through the effects of the sleep apnea without also having to fight through a heavy, clinging fog of sleep drug.

Basically, my problem is the same as it always has been : sleeping pills don’t help me get to sleep, they just make it harder to wake up.

Well, and they help me stay asleep. That’s the genuine benefit. Wish a decent sleeping pill, I can sleep for four or five hours, which is way better than my usual 2 to 2.5 hours.

Deep REM cycles and all that.

But having so much trouble waking up and staying awake stresses me the fuck out. I wish I could find a sleeping pill that just does its job and then fucks right off.

Ironically, the heavy resistance to waking could be a sign that the drug is doing its job. It could be that with the conscious mind sufficiently subdued by the drug, my subconscious is finally free to dig into a huge backlog of medium term memories and process them into long term memories, and that is such a heavy job that it wants me to get right back to sleep the minute I take a leak or eat or do whatever else it was that made me have to wake up.

But no, I have to be stubborn and try to do stuff. At least for as long as it takes for my bed to air out some.

I tend to wake up very sweaty when I have been having that kind of sleep.

Of course, what I really want is to be able to sleep like a normal person. Eight hours a night, while it’s dark, wake up refreshed in the morning.

But that feels like it happens in a parallel dimension, the one where all the normal people live normal, happy, balanced lives without ever knowing about us sprain-brained losers who dwell in unfathomable darkness all alone and afraid.

I want to live in their dimension. I really do.

But for now, the best I can hope for is to look into their world, and wonder.

What is it like to be sane?

I honestly have no idea.

More after the break.

---

Lost in time

And lost in space. And meaning.

Just had a bad period of temporal dislocation. Finished a session of Assassin’s Creed 2 : No Subtitle and looked at the time and it said 7:28 and for the life of me I had absolutely no idea whether that was AM or PM.

And yes, there are ways to figure that out real fast. That’s not the point. It’s a problem that is easily solved when your brain is working right…. but mine wasn’t.

So I was terribly, terribly confused and frightened. Most people will never experience the kind of temporal dislocation I just did, and if they do, they probably have a much stronger connection to reality than I do and thus could just shrug it off without effort.

Therefore, they have not experienced the intense existential terror that comes from that kind of dislocation.

But I have made progress.

At least I don’t see that kind of thing as normal any more.

I never thought everyone went through this. So that was never the issue.

It was more a matter of having the metacognition to stop and say, “Hey, this sort of thing is probably, like, bad. I should maybe talk to a medical professional about it. “

Most of the time, just plow through whatever bullshit life and reality throw at me and fight it till I get back to reality as I know it, then forget all about it so I can put it behind me as soon as possible.

That works as a minute to minute survival strategy but in the long term it is, of course, terrible. The problem is never addressed.

It’s hard to address and solve a problem when you barely remember it. I mean, I don’t exactly forget these things but they are filed way, way back in my mind and are therefore unlikely to pop into my head when I am thinking about my problems.

Which is kind of the point. I am increasingly convinced that I am far, far sicker than I normally realize and that a lot of my mind’s distraction and compartmentalization and fragmentation is there to keep me from having to face the full horror of it all.

Or maybe that’s just my latent hypochondria trying to make a comeback. I dunno.

All I know is that I have been utterly lost for so long that I cannot imagine what it is like to know where you are and what you are doing any more.

And that’s probably not good either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up demonically hungry. Felt like there was a weasel gnawing on my guts. Hunger pangs as I got my lunch together.

I’m doing it,. god damn it, leave me alone!

Probably means I should inject some insulin. But who knows? It’s been a month since I even tried to test my blood sugar. About that long since I injected.

Yeah, that’s dumb. But the fucking glucometer kept returning errors instead of readings and depression makes me easily discouraged and so guess what, I got discouraged. \

There is only so much I can take. So much frustration, so much failure, so much distress. Past that point, I have to GTFO.

I am great at GTFO. It’s staying in the fight till I triumph that stumps me.

I feel so weak and tired most of the time. It’s like there’s nothing left of me I am desperately hungry on all levels. And a black hole is eating me from the inside.

I will do my best to find my injector pen and inject. Anything if it will get this god damned hunger under control.

I keep trying to get my shit together but there’s just too much of it.

Found the pen. Oh crap, it’s empty. Now I need to gather the strength of will to go get another insulin cartridge from the fridge.

Pretty sure I have one.

Once more, I wish that I wasn’t left in my own care. I am a very sick man and I deserve to be cared for by someone competent.

More on this later.

---

Well I got the cartridge. Now to hunt up my needle tips and swabs.

All right. I have now injected. Hopefully I will feel better soon.

---

Local fan Stewart Smythe passed away recently. Died peacefully in his sleep, or as Kenny Rogers put it in his iconic song The Gambler, he broke even.

I suppose that’s inappropriate.But fuck it. There’s no wrong way to grieve. It is what it is.

And grieving is what it is. We weren’t close friends by any means. But as part of FRED and countless BCSFA meetings, I must have had hundreds of meals with him, and that is more than enough time to feel a strong if casual connection to the guy.

The news was quite shocking. We all knew he was having some pretty serious medical issues and was in and out of the hospital a fair bit, but somehow none of us thought he was in mortal peril.

And coming on the heels of my Uncle Sonny’s passing as it did, I can’t help but feel like I have reached the phase of life when mortality clears its throat to remind you it is there, waiting for you.

And I wish I could say that it galvanized me into realizing how precious life was and how important it was to get the most out of every moment and thus spurred me into a joyous frenzy of carpe diem productivity and bliss….;but that would be a lie.

Truth is, the though of my own mortality comforts me.

Because it reminds me that eventually, all this bullshit will end.

More after the break.

---

The joy of suffering

No, this isn’t going to be a masochist manifesto. as fun a phrase as that is.

Instead, what I am going to talk about is how we inflict a lot of pain on ourselves in our efforts to avoid pain.

The classic case would be the person with a toothache that keeps putting off going to the dentist. They end up suffering 24/7 for days or weeks or even months because they can’t control themselves long enough to endure the hour or so of pain and discomfort involved in seeing their dentist.

In no sense and on no plane of existence does this make sense. Logically speaking. getting it taken care of right away is undeniably the smart thing to do.

But so much of life’s pain comes down to something a lot like this scenario. Especially if, like me, you are someone who forms and reinforces aversions quite easily.

The key here is that what we are talking about is fear versus pain. Our hapless reluctant dental patient knows that the pain will end when they see the dentist, but is unable to overcome their fear of the dentist to accomplish it.

That why fear is so much deadlier than pain. Pain hurts and that’s it. Fear makes you hurt yourself and then keeps you from getting relief by making you scared of the doctor then makes you scared of anything that reminds you of the million and ten things you “should” be doing so you end up burying yourself in the only places you feel safe, namely inside a video game.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Thus, learning how to overcome fear – otherwise known as courage – is super important. If you develop your ability to say “no” to fear and shove it out of your way, you will transcend the limitations of fear and become stronger, healthier, and more free as you actualize the heck out of yourself.

Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

The problem with that formula is that great big “if”. Sure, IF I did that, it would work. Of that I have no doubt.

But will I do it? Probably not. I feel too tired and fragile right now to push against the membrane. It will take me a while to gather the energy to try to free myself.

And to be honest, I might not get there any time soon.

Once more, I feel like a balloon batted back and forth by fear and ambition. I really want to escape my unsatisfactory life and get to a place where I am using my energy and talent in an active and satisfying way and finally making my mark on the world.

But that desire is strangled in the womb by fear and despair every goddamned day.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

i have a very bad relationship with pressure, which is ironic for someone of whom nobody is currently expecting anything but good faith efforts to get better.

Then again, I don’t do that great on them, either. Depression makes everything suck.

The problem is that I have a deeply ingrained aversion to pressure – but only pressure from within. Internal pressure.

External pressure I handle without much effort at all. In fact, I kind of like it. Deadlines have never bothered me. Neither has hard work. Responsibility freaks me out somewhat, but I can handle it once I have it.

But pressure from within tends to make me go kerblooey. And I know that’s a pathological pattern. How could it be anything else, when I only have two modes, pressure free indolence and high pressure freaking out to the point of collapse?

Either way, nothing gets done, I hate myself, and depression wins.

The problem is that I really don’t know how to motivate myself to do stuff. Especially when it is as open ended as doing a video “whenever I feel like it”.

Well clearly that ain’t working. I totally have the capacity to make videos. I even bought the extra fancy bells and whistles version of Corel Video Studio yesterday. And I have tons of ideas for great videos, and the talent to make them happen.

And yet, I remain frustrated and self-loathing because it is so hard for me to actually decide to do it. It’s always so much easier to keep living the same video game addicted lifestyle, I have lived for my entire adult life.

It’s really all I know. Which is both tragic and sad given that I am 47 years old. And doubly so because I have all this amazing talent and potential locked away behind the doors of a massive steel cage made of depression.

And yet, here I go chasing my tail again, because I know that this is the the wrong way of looking at things. That it is, in fact, just another one of my depression’s tricks to keep me all to itself by crushing me with too much pressure.

The real trick, as always, is to forget pressure and instead concentrate on pleasure. Focus on how fun making videos can be and how happy I will be to have made another one. Think about how much I enjoy exploring the world through art, like when I had that writing for animation gig. Anticipate the joy of self-expression.

And forget all about any thoughts of what I “should” be doing. There is no “should”. There is only a completely optional but appealing opportunity for joy.

I could be having even more fun than when I am playing video games.

Imagine that. Another thing I could be doing that would distract me out of feeling depressed and anxious, and this one would yield tangible results.

. Plus I would feel a whole lot better about myself.

And all without having to put myself under pressure.

More after the break.

---

What do I want to do?

Let’s take another swing at this pinata.

Patient readers know that I find the question of what I want to be a very difficult one to answer. And usually I cite lack of funds as the reason.

But that’s bullshit. For one, my resources are not nearly as limited as they once were. My monthly cheque is up to almost $1500 now, and rent (and food and utilities) is only $600, so i have almost $900/month spendable, or $225/week.

So I have the money to go out and do things. Not big fancy things, but still. Things.

But the real issue is that even if I was broker than a burst dam, there are still tons of things I can do for no money.

Hell, the internet is full of them,

So claiming I have no options due to lack of funds is a cheap dodge. Just a way for me to pretend my options are extremely limited in order to get out of having to choose.

Choosing is hard.

So the truth is that I have a lot of options.

This is the part where I say “that’s the problem”. Too many options, option paralysis, yadda yadda yadda, sis bam boom.

But that kind of option paralysis is only a problem if you are trying to compute a solution. Obviously, if you are trying to solve the question of what to do like an equation, the nearly infinite number of variables makes that impossible.

You’d need a computer the size of the universe.

But that scenario does not take emotion into account. It assumes you are looking for the “right” answer, as opposed to simply doing what you want to do.

And when it comes to doing what you want to do, there is no right or wrong answer, ergo there is nothing to calculate. If you want to do it and then you do it, game over, problem solved, next please.

And I think this leads to a broader observation about my own very narrow outlook. They say that when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Well in my case, it’s more like “when all you have is a high speed brain, everything starts to look like a puzzle to be solved”.

Like I have said before, my default way to handle anything is to analyze it and try to find the solution that yields the best results.

And believe me, that’s one powerful ability to have. But it’s just the one ability. There are a lot of other valid ways to deal with life and a lot of life is simply not compatible with that particular tool, no matter how much muscle you can apply.

Basically, you can’t think yourself happy. Trust me, I’ve tried.

So I need new tools. Ones that can start from what I want and only then go on to figure out how I am going to get it.

Sounds simple enough.

I will talk to your nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, I swear this is the last time, but…. sorry about that story about the dog yesterday.

I never intended it to be so long and so sad. But like a lot of men, I am deeply emotionally repressed, and when I started writing about the dog a tiny little crack appeared in the dyke around my heart and a whole lot of sadness, loneliness, and the raw red pain of isolation and neglect came flooding out.

Obviously, the dog is me, with just a thin patina of metaphor. Or rather, the dog is how feel. He’s my emotional reality. He’s the person I am deep inside, underneath all the layers of social artifice and concealed armor and folie a deux,

If I can make you love me, then maybe I can love me too.

Or at least hate myself less.

I know that I do not deserve such hate. By all objective measures, I am a pretty amazing fellow. Bright, talented, unique, honest, sweet, creative, and on a good day maybe just a little bit magical.

But the self hate remains because my anger does not have anywhere else to go yet. So I take it out on myself via internalized abuse.

It’s not fair and it’s not right and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.

i don’t know why I feel such shame when I write something super sad. Like I had done something dirty in public.

I mean, lots of people write super sad stuff, though possibly not quite as sad as mine.

Mine is basically me crying with words.

I suppose I just feel bad for bumming people out. It’s an extension of my fear that if I ever truly opened up about my depression to anyone, it would destroy them,.

That’s not an entirely crazy fear. I collect and purify and distill my darkness instinctively, and I am 47, so I have had a long ol time to brew up some pretty brutal shit.

Even my therapist gets shell shocked and freezer burned when truly exposed to the nightmare within, and he’s treated hundreds of patients over the years.

Once more, I am special and unique in a bad way.

I can feel my id rumbling somewhere below my ribcage. It wants to just scream “fuck everybody” and charge into the world like Juggernaut on a crack bender, destroying anything that gets in my way, grabbing whatever I want, smashing anyone who dares to oppose me, using all my mental strength to bully, manipulate, trick, trap, fool, or annihilate whoever and whatever I need to in order to get what’s due me.

Not sure what that is. Money, for a start.

Of course, I would never actually unleash the beast like that. But after decades of leaving him tied up in the back yard, I am now more willing than ever to consider negotiating a much more mutually beneficial deal with him.

Because the thing is, when you don’t feed the beast…the beast feeds on you.

And I am running out of meat.

More after the break.

---

Which way is Katharsis?

Because I want to go there.

Last night’s profound emotional expectoration reminded me that the best thing for me is expurgate all my old emotions and for me, that means writing about them.

So (very gruesome image warning) I want to keep pressing on that wound until i have gotten all the toxic gunk out that I can.

Then, if possible, go digging for more.

Because this bad stuff is good shit. When I express it, I feel better after. And not just better. I feel healthier. Stronger. Saner.

The problem is that I do not yet have the emotional tools to attack the problem directly. I have the determination to lean in to my pain and thereby get it out, and I have a very vague notion of what “direction” that is in my as yet very blurry and numb emotional world, but I don’t yet have the ability to sight a pool of latent emotion and go after it like it’s my own White Whale.

Which would make the latent emotion…. whale oil? Ick.

Instead, something has to remind me of something that reminds me of something that reminds me etc until I stumble upon something juicy, then I need to have the awareness and wherewithal (awarewithal>) to grab that reservoir of emotion and start drilling.

But I am working on it. This emotional reasoning (aka “feeling your way) is still pretty new to me, but I am a believer now. I no longer worry that my little light will get lost and swallowed up by the deep dark woods of my emotional life.

It might be a tad dark out there, but it’s nice. Comfortable. Warm. Safe. And I know that I will be able to find my way around when my eyes get used to the light, and that all the little animals will come and visit me when they get used to my scent.

And I know that there is nothing out here that I didn’t put there. Even the scariest of ghosts and the hairiest of monster and the wickedest of demons is really just my pet, doing what it was told to do.

I must remember to freshen their kibble.

SO it’s really just me and my friends out here. And that ain’t so bad.

Figures that my plan for developing my emotional awareness is basically to explore it metaphorically. Metaphors really are my go-to tool for expressing that which is hard for me to put into words directly.

Like a lot of other writers, I suppose. After all, Melville had a lot to say about vengeance, obsession, tunnel vision, and rage, and he could have written it all down as philosophy or psychology or whatever, but he knew that to really express it, he needed a metaphor.

Me, I construct elaborate metaphor so easily they are like a native language to me.

Everything else is an act of translation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m not really here.

Oh, I know it seems like I am a real live human being like any other, but trust me on this. it’s all a cunning illusion.

I’m not really here. I am not really typing these words. The words, too, are an illusion.

They make it seem like a genuine human must have existed in order to type these words, but I am telling you, I am not.

Like a doll, I have the appearance of life and vitality, but I’m empty inside, and the fact that when you pull my string, my mouth moves and words come out means nothing.

I am nothing but a thin shell wrapped around a gaping, screaming, gnawing void. Just another shiny balloon abob in the breeze, terrified of losing its sting and ending up floating off into the sky to be lost forever. A pale puppet stuck in the back of a magician’s closet, helpless to affect its fate at all.

All it can do is wait, and hope, and be sad.

He might never come back. Odds are, he will never use me again. Why would he? What use am I? I’m just an ugliness wrapped around nothing.

He’s probably forgotten all about me by now.

I am that sad old dog that is always tied up in the back yard of that one house in your neighborhood with the weird red roof.

Rain or shine, day or night, I am there. There’s no doghouse to take shelter in, no dog toys for you to play with, not a single sign that anyone cares about you.

You don’t even have a proper collar. Someone just tied a rope around your neck. The only objects in your yard are an enormous bowl of food and an enormous bowl of water – enormous so they don’t have to feed you very often, of course.

And sure, the food’s full of ants and roaches and the water is full of dead ants and dead roaches, but nobody cares.

You used to get excited when they came out to feed you. Finally, company! But then you realized that they hate you, though you have no idea why.

You wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to be a good enough dog to get even one more second of attention from them, but they just wanted to be done with you as soon as possible and anything you did to slow them down just made them mad.

You’re pretty sure the oldest boy would kill you if he thought he could get away with it.

And you’d be fine with that. Then your long lonely life would finally end and at least someone would be touching you when it ended.

Mostly, you just lay there. Despair is too kind a word for it. Mostly you stare at nothing, not moving. not reacting to anything, doing your best to live as little as possible because that’s the only way to minimize the pain.

You used to bark at things. Cars, people, birds, cats. Especially cats. It was something to do and it made you feel less lonely because at least you were interacting with people.

Some people got mad and some people got scared and some people got both.

But at least someone knew you were here.

Most people just ignored you. What’s another barking dog in a suburban neighborhood? Sometimes they would laugh at you as you barking and growled and lunged.

You liked those moments. Those people were the only happy people you ever saw.

You’d bark at other dogs, too. They brought up such complicated feelings. Anger that they got to walk with their masters, fear that they would try to take your territory, longing to escape so you play with them, and a desperate desire to communicate something to them. You didn’t know what that something was, but you tried to send the message anyway, hoping someone would hear.

All these emotions would come to a boil in your head and you would end up barking and howling and biting at the dirt like a crazy bad dog who has lost his mind.

And maybe you had. It didn’t matter. Nothing did.

It had been a long time since you barked at anything or anyone. You didn’t have the energy any more. Now you just lay there and waited to die.

Sometimes, despite how hard you tried not to, you remembered your puppy days. Back when you lived inside of the house and got taken for walks and got brushed and petted and loved on and everyone was always happy to see you.

But then you got bigger and people started getting mad at you all the time and you tried very hard not to make them upset but something always happened and that’s when they started putting you in the back yard.

After a while, they stopped taking you back in. And that’s where you’ve been since.

When you were younger, you liked these memories. But that was back when you thought those times were coming back.

Now they hurt so bad it makes you whimper in your sleep.

You don’t know for certain that you’ll die. Death is a difficult concept for dogs. But you have been getting weaker for a long time now, and surely that can’t last forever.

And sometimes you dream that when Death comes for you, he will pat you on the head and take the rope off you next and say “C’mon, boy. It’s time to go.”

And then he’ll take you on a walk to a place full of nice green grass and warm, sunny days, and lots of people who will love you and pet you and tell you that you’re a very good dog. A very good dog indeed.

And maybe you will even get to be a puppy again, and run around barking and chasing things and being silly and excitable and having fun.

And whatever you did to make your people stop loving you will be forgiven and forgotten, and maybe, just maybe, they will finally let you come Inside again.

Yes, surely that is was will happen. You’d been such a good dog for so long. Surely that’s the only thing that can happen.

All you have to do is lie still and wait.

Surely any minute now, you will finally die.

---

Um, real sorry about that, folks. If it makes you feel any better, I was crying my eyes out when I wrote that last part. The “doggy heaven” part.

Just know that there are real dogs just like the one I described in back yards, basements, and garages all over the world. If you see something, say something. Call your local SPCA and report it.Call the cops and animal control too.

If that fails, offer to take the dog off their hands. Pay for it, if you have to.

The important thing is to rescue the dog(s) and find them a new forever home with kind, loving people who will take care of them.

Again, sorry I had to write this.

But sometimes, the bad stuff just has to come out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Such a fun word to type. Ass Ass In.

Last week I beat Assassin’s Creed Unity, and decided to try going through the series chronologically, and bought the very first game, Assassin’s Creed 1.

And migod, what a game. The graphics look very good even by the standards of today and the game is from 2008! And while some aspects can’t help to be a little more primitive than Unity, which came out in late 2014, for the most part it is the same experience, just with a bit less stuff.

Decent writing too. The fact (spoiler) that the guy who gave you all your assassination targets would turn out to be the final villain was telegraphed heavily. The science fiction framing device, where it’s the present and you are some random dude abducted by the Templars (aka the Bad Guys) and forced to relive the life of an ancestor via “genetic memory” and a machine called the Animus, was interesting but superfluous.

I mean, yeah, it allows them to make sequels where you are technically the same dude in each game, and as science fiction plots go it’s pretty creative, but if I am spending 99 percent of the time as one of my ancestors in the past (Arno in Unity, Al-tair (pronounced Al Tie Ear) in 1) and only one percent of the time as Desmond Miles in the present, the most natural thing to do is to think of the sci fi bits as being the occasional hallucinations of my ancestor.

Anyhoo, I beat AC1 early this morning. Pretty decent ending, despite knowing that my final flight would be with Al Mualim (Moo A Limb), and overall I enjoyed the heck out of the game, almost as much as I enjoyed Unity.

Unity was slicker, and by that game (AC5, technically), the controls had gotten somewhat slicker and they had given up entirely on this godawful idea of having the buttons represent you feet, head, left hand, and right hand.

That might be how people work but it’d not how video games work. Presumably, someone thought it would increase immersion.

That person was stupid.

But the controls were easy enough to learn once I learned to ignore that shit.

So to recap, beat AC1 this morning and immediately bought 2. Just tried it out and one thing immediately impressed me : the second game starts exactly where the first one left off. Like in the exact moment.

One nitpick, though : In the first game’s over-plot, they clearly establish that your character (Desmond Miles) is a former Assassin, but at the beginning of the second game he’s never been one and goes on about how he’s not good at fighting.

Not only is that a retcon, in the first game he spent a huge amount of time as a deadly and highly skilled Assassin in the past.

You’d think he would, ya know, remember some of that.

Whatever. The second game looks just as awesome as the others so far.

This time, I get to be an Italian dude named Enzio in Renaissance Florence.

Should be pretty cool.

More after the break.

---

Will of iron, heart of steel

Let’s take another stab at this insistence on total self control of mine,.

It’s irrational. We’ve established that. In my zeal for not taking my emotions out on others like my Dad did (RIP, Larry), I closed down every possible avenue of spontaneous emotional actions and thereby stifled the fuck out of myself.

Nobody is supposed to have total self control at all times. There has to be the option for emotions to lead directly into actions or the id gets fatally wounded and it is the source of all life force, passion, feeling of freedom, feeling alive, and joy.

And you kind of need those things.

It’s not surprising that this regime of mine is a tad lacking in nuance and subtlety. After all, I invented it when I was a child.

It started when I was raped at the age of four and got extensively remodeled when I was the school pariah and bullied all the damned time,

Those led to my withdrawal from reality more than the self control shit, though. That came straight from my father and his dinner table tirades.

It’s hard to envision all the ways his temper fucked me up. I know there I have a lot of anxiety from trying to deal with it. All of his kids have it. That’s what happens when you have to walk on eggshells around one of your primary parents. Life was always a lot more tense when he was around. That made us kids not want to be around him, and he knew that, and I am sure it hurt him a lot.

But he never owned up to it. If he’d been capable of apologizing for his temper once he was calm again, that would have made a huge difference.

I am not saying that would have made it okay. But it would have made it better.

And so we avoided him if possible, and kept him at arm’s length the rest of the time. And it was his own fault.

But I still regret it. Well, regret’s not quite the right word.

I really wish it could have been different. That there had been some way to bridge the gap and bring Dad in from the cold. To make the family whole, instead of polarized.

And to my credit, absurd as it surely seemed at the time, I tried. Back when I was a Seventies kid who thought all we had was a communication problem, I put myself in between my father and whichever sibling he was venting on at the time and tried to get everyone to slow down and chill out so we could work out our differences.

That’s something tragically noble about that.

But eventually I figured out that it wasn’t a matter of communication and understanding. He needed these temper tantrums. They were a pressure release for him. And that meant that nothing could ever keep them from happening.

I mean, I saw the man look for something else to be mad about when one of his angry tirades got blunted by hard reality.

That told me all I needed to know. He was mad and loving it, and he wasn’t going to let something as minor and silly as that anger not being justified ruin his fun.

He’s never have admitted it, of course, because part of that whole rage addict trip is that sweet sweet feeling of righteousness, and you can’t keep that righteous buzz going if you admit you are angry because you like being angry.

Hmmm. That has been very cathartic. I should talk about Larry more often.

Because like it or not, he’s a big part of me, and now that he’s dead, the parts of him in those who knew him are all that is left of him.

I do miss you, Larry Donald Bertrand. We had some great times together. Everything was cool when it was just the two of us, hanging out.

RIP Dad. Maybe we will talk more in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s lay this out nice and simple :

I take my Mirtazapine, I end up where I am right now : trying to eat and blog when I am super dragged out and sleepy and the words, they do not come easy.

Skip the pill, and I get to remain fairly awake, but over time the lack of truly deep sleep means I get more and more stressed and depressed.

Clearly, I need some kind of nuanced solution, because neither “pill good” or “pill bad” are cutting it any more.

I could try an alternating schedule. Take the pill on odd numbered days, skip it on even days, something along those lines.

And on pill days, start my blogging after I have caught up on sleep instead of doing it while I munch my lunch, when I will be all sleepy from the fucking pill.

I will think about it. Something has to change because I am so very sick of this sleepiness bullshit. It stresses me out and puts me in a bad mood.

I really should bring this up with Doctor Costin at some point. He’s the one who put me on the pill in the first place after I told him about not being able to stay asleep for longer than 2 hours at best.

Then again, I dunno what he can do about it. Originally, he wanted me only taking half a pill, but the goddamned pills are the size of a pinhead and there is no way I have the eyesight or dexterity to break one in half.

The real irony is that the pill doesn’t even help me get to sleep, which is what I really want. The sleeping pill of my dreams (so to speak) is one so strong that it can overwhelm my overpowered and overstimulated conscious mind and more or less force me to sleep.

But no sleeping pill I have ever tried has ever done that. It’s always taken just as long as ever to get to sleep and been just as tricky and easy to derail.

All the pill does is let me sleep for longer,and in return I get to deal with this bullshit.

I dunno. Maybe I can learn to be all Zen about it and not create inner conflict by fighting the sleepiness and instead learn to enjoy the sweet sleepiness and mellowness.

Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

---

Man, my morning entries are such a drag.

Well it’s 11 pm and I have 600 words to blog before midnight.

No problem. Let’s roll.

---

Godlike powers etc

Still chewing on this bone!

The thing is, no matter how I try to imagine how I would feel if I took the full power of possession over my advanced abilities, the answer is unacceptable.

Let’s forget about the floating off into space angle : how does a person who is way, way smarter than most people relate to others? How do you look down at people from your Olympian heights without losing all respect for them?

Because when I try to put myself in that scenario, the elitism I have dodged for my whole life comes on strong. My fellow humans begin to seem like children. Or pets. Beings that are no doubt charming in their own way, and as worthy of life and happiness and all good things as I am, but so mentally inferior to me that it hurts my head to try to even imagine trying to interact with them on their level.

And it’s not like I can bring them up to mine.

And I hate these elitist thoughts. I find them despicable. I passionately do not want to feel superior to others. I want everyone to get along in peace, love, and harmony. I don’t want to see my fellow humans as idiots or fools. I want to love everybody.

But I get the feeling that if I am to be a more genuine version of myself and therefore become a lot more comfortable in my own skin, I am going to need to go through these loathsome thoughts instead of merely suppressing them.

I can only hope that I come out the other side of them intact.

OK, so, here I am, way way up in my sky-scraping ice fortress, looking down at all the little people going about their lives below.

Oh, look how small they all seem from here. I could think rings around any one of them without even trying. See them blundering through life trampling on one another and blindly colliding with the same brick walls over and over again. How silly they seem. How childish. How very, very dull.

I mean, sure I can think rings around them. So what? It doesn’t mean anything. It certainly doesn’t make me any happier than they are.

After all, there’s a reason I am up here and they are down there. If I get too close to them, this ice fortress would melt and then where would I be?

Down there? With them? Like, actually among them, with no place to go to get away from them when I get freaked out by all the social stimulation?

Um, no thank you. Be glad that I am at least honest enough to admit that the problem is with me, not them. There’s nothing wrong with them.

I mean, look at them leading happy productive socially integrated lives. They are clearly way healthier and happier than I am.

So who cares how fucking smart I am? Who cares if I’m a wizard with dazzling powers if I am too broken up and damaged inside to use them around others? So twisted up and paralyzed by bad socialization that I have to live way up here in my tower just in order to not be freaked out by everything constantly?

Superior, feh. Only on a technicality. There are times when I feel like I could trade all my spells and powers for the ability to live down there with the others.

But then what would I have? Being a wizard is all I know.

So maybe what I really want is a life like theirs. Connected. Whole. Complete. Healthy. Vibrant. Wholesome. Alive.

Sounds a hell of a lot better than being the ice lich I am now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, it’s Thursday, and that means I’m only starting the day’s blogging now, at 7:49 pm.

I meant to start at 7 pm,.but then I got sucked into playing Plants Versus Zombies and totally lost track of time.

I bought the game last week,. The “Game Of The Year” edition was on sale on Steam for 99 cents and I figured, what the hell, it’s worth that just for the nostalgia value.

Turns out it’s also still an amazingly fun game. It’s one of those rare “Casablanca” level creative projects where you can’t point to one facet of it and says “there! That’s what makes it so great!”.

It’s more of a “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” type thing. The total package. It all comes together in a game that is charming and delightful and adorable and just plain gosh darn fun.

I could point to its virtues. It’s easy to learn but tough to master, which is always a huge plus. The challenge level is more or less perfect. Tough enough so that you feel like you are accomplishing something but still easy enough for even casual gamers to beat.

In fact, the game is so addictive and absorbing that you forget that they have set things up so that it’s actually pretty hard to lose.

And the whole thing is adorable. Sounds weird when you are talking about a game full of zombies, but it’s true. Even though you are pitting killer plants against zombies, all the plants and zombies are charming and cute with a shy, sly sense of humour and a real sense of cartoony fun.

And I am all about the cartoony fun

Beyond that, there is something gentle and human about the whole thing. Again, that’s an odd thing to be saying about a game where plants fight zombies, but it’s true. Somewhere deep within the game’s DNA is a warmth and care that comes through despite the potentially gruesome subject matter.

And as if the game itself wasn’t awesome enough, when you beat it, you get this :

(WARNING : Spoiler for a game from 2009)

I am so very glad that I had completely forgotten about that video when I beat the game half an hour ago, because that meant I got to be sruprised, delighted, and charmed by it all over again.

And there’s definitely nostalgia there for me as well, and not just because I was only 36 years old back then.

Ah, my long gone misspent…. everything.

Dunno what I was doing in 2009. More, I assume. But I do remember what a massive sleeper hit the game was.

I mean, I never saw any ads for it and yet it spread all over the internet in days. And so it was like the whole world discovered this hidden gem at the same time.

Oh, and just to put a bow on the nostalgia, at the very end you get the end credits for the game…. and they only take up one screen.

And 40 percent of that was the people who added the “game of the year” stuff.

I am so used to video games having more credits than most movies these days that it was quite refreshing to see a game made by only a dozen or so people.

I suppose that’s still possible for simple games. App type games. I am sure it didn’t take an army of 3D modelers, riggers, and programmers to make Candy Crush.

But for AAA games, it takes more people than it took to build the Titanic.

And I am still not sure why that is.

Oh wait…. there was a topic I meant to cover….

Oh right. How best to use my vast, godlike mental powers.

Meh. It can wait.

More after the break.

---

I wasn’t kidding

That’s really what I am going to talk about.

As patient readers know, the truth is that I am terrified of my own mental power.

I am not bragging. It truly scares me how far above most other people my intelligence et al can go. When I try to truly confront and integrate just how smart I am into my self-image and self-esteem and such, I get this horrible feeling like I am going to float away into the stratosphere, far far away from the rest of humanity, never to return.

Words cannot properly convey how terrifying that thought is to me. What makes it worse is that in that scenario, I am totally okay with it. Like I had finally decided to hell with humanity and trying to connect with it and left it all behind.

That is, more or less, what I think it would be like if I finally snapped. I would disappear into the sky of my mind and give up on reality entirely.

Of course, back here in the real world, I’d be a drooling vegetable.

Still, it’s an option.

I feel like I have far more power in this brain of mine than my sad and broken soul can handle. Like I am a car with a powerful engine but too weak a chassis and suspension to handle it.

And I don’t want to loom over others. That’s the other part of it. Not only do I not want to disappear into my own head, I don’t want to lose what little connection with the rest of humanity that I have.

I want to go in the opposite direction and connect with others. But I feel like I am drifting upwards every day.

Sometimes I dream of leaving it all behind. No video games, no internet. If I want someone to talk to, I have to go find them. If I want to do something for fun, I need to find someone to do it with.

Throw myself off the deep end. Sink or swim time. I either learn to connect with others or I finally give up and become a crazy ranting homeless person.

That’s so crazy, it just might be really, really crazy.

But that doesn’t matter anyway.

Because I’d never have the courage to do it anyway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a lovely sunny summer day and I am feeling pretty good.

Which is a bit of a relief, to be honest, because when I woke up this morning, I was feeling quite feverish. I was pretty convinced that I was coming down with something.

I felt like I was radiating like a space heater from every surface. And to be honest, I still feel that way.

And yet, other than that, I feel fine. Which is weird.

So it might still be that my immune system is locked in deadly battle with a viral invader, in which case I hope it kicks that goddamned virus’ non-existent butt.

Kind of ironic that at the same time I am fighting off an infection, I am feeling better than I have in weeks.

That’s the sort of illness a fella could learn to live with.

---

Of course, the two might be unrelated and it’s the sunshine outside that has me feeling better. It’s certainly much more “summery” outside than it has been in a long time.

I’ve played around with the idea that I might have a solar powered mood before. All my happiest childhood memories took place on sunny days, and when I try to imagine my “happy place”, it’s definitely a place where the skies are blue and everything has a warm happy sunshine kind of glow.

In short, sunshine and happiness as strongly connected on every level in my mind.

Could be that my depression and my troglodyte existence are more interconnected than I thought, and that getting more sunshine would do more for my recovery than any antidepressant ever could.

The question, of course, is how.

Well the balcony is still there. I could still take naps out there, at least on days when the weather allows it. That would also give me nice fresh air to sleep in, which might help with the sleep apnea as well.

And it would, in general, help desensitize me to the outside world.

All that is keeping me from doing it is working up the gumption to extend my tiny little realm to include said balcony.

And that involves having the courage to do something new, and that’s hard. It seems silly on the face of it, but even a tiny change like that scares me. And it’s that fear that I have to wrestle with if I want to make any progress.

So I am going to start building up the energy to do it right away.

When it will actually happen is another story.

And you know what? I hate being this weak. I hate feeling so damned scared all the time. I hate that I have this disease called depression which hangs around my neck like an albatross and keeps me from having a real, full, satisfying life.

I deserve so much better than this. I am a good guy with plenty of wonderful things to contribute to the world. I am smart and creative and funny and nice. I don’t deserve to be stuck in this dead end existence.

But deserve don’t mean shit, I guess.

More after the break.

---

Not so well

It would be easy to blame my feeling rather ill right now on having eaten too much, too fast. And that is undoubtedly a factor.

But it can’t be the whole story because I eat too much too fast fairly often, and it’s only one time out of a hundred or more that it makes me ill.

More to the point, I ran out of my antihistamines around a week ago and I still haven’t asked Joe for more, so I am prone to allergy attacks, When i have one of those, it sets off a body wide inflammatory response, which is probably both why I feel so hot (subdermal inflammation) and why I don’t feel so hot (inflamed bowls).

In fact, right now, it kind of feels like steel doors slammed shut in my intestinal tract and this sudden crackdown is leaving a lot of what I have eaten recently stranded in between two suddenly very unyielding bulkheads.

Hopefully, my body will cancel its red alert and things will go back to normal sometime in the near future.

Honestly, all I really want to do right now is to lay down and sleep.

But blogging must come first, seeing as it’s 10:30 PM already.

---

On acting smart

Been pondering how to best forewarn people about myself lately.

I’ve talked here before about how my default mode being “enigmatic” doesn’t serve me well. By default, I just plain don’t give people information about myself.

I want people to have to get to know me and understand me before they even think of putting a label on me, so by default, I send out no definitive signals about myself.

And while by the standards of an individualistic society there is a kind of nihilistic nobility about that attitude, in truth, it serves me very poorly and in fact all but ensures that my social reactions will be awkward and strained as people try to figure me out so they know how to deal with me.

Meanwhile, I am sitting there being unconsciously unfathomable while I wonder how to deal with this nice person who only wants to connect with me the same way they connect with most of the people they know.

But I’m not most people.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile to try to relate, though. It’s not like I don’t want to connect with people. I’d like nothing more, in fact.

But that means giving up on the enigma act and learning to signal something about myself to the world so that people are not starting from scratch when dealing with me.

And that means both overcoming the part of me that equates exposure with danger and dealing with the thorny question of how to warn people that they are dealing with a highly intelligent, eccentric, creative person who will have weird responses.

All I can think of is to go around in a propeller beanie and gingham overalls.

But that might be taking it too far.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or in other words, how reasonable is it reasonable to expect oneself to be?

After all, we don’t want to be unreasonable about it.

Patient readers will recognize that I have dealt with this topic before, although probably not in those exact words.

Another way of expressing the sentiment is “moderation in all things, including moderation”. The idea is that human beings, in order to be happy productive citizens, need to relax, let their hair down, and be unreasonable and/or excessive sometimes.

Essentially, we need to retract the superego and let the id and ego out of play andburn off some steam time to time.

And for most people, this is no big deal. Over the years, they figure out what they can do to alleviate the pressure and make that part of their emotional hygiene routine.

Or, less desirably, they just become irritable now and then and this inevitably lead them to getting super pissed off at someone or something and they get catharsis that way.

Personally, I can’t imagine being that emotionally irresponsible. I find the idea of lacking the self-awareness to realize what is happening and the strength of will to take steps to make sure it doesn’t to be, quite frankly, disgusting.

But maybe that’s the problem.

Because for the all too rational types like me, that’s not acceptable. I demand far, far more self control of myself than that.

But that means there is no room left for any kind of outlet. Without the ability to relax my self-control from time to time, those pressures are left to build inside me and my poor abused and underfed id never gets to express itself.

Jesus, I wouldn’t treat a dog this way. Or a child. When it comes to others, I totally get the need to express their id now and then.

But not for myself. Somehow, for me,the rules are different.

And I think at the heart of it is a kind of superstition. Deep down, I feel like if I was to relax and let go, something terrible would happen. I would go completely crazy, or at least I would do something reallly crazy, and I would end up wishing I hadn’t done it.

And there’s the question of having little to no experience asking myself what I want. I have never had much money, and so that question has not come up because I never had a lot of options in the first place.

And given my issues with option paralysis, perhaps that as for the best. I can totally imagine working my myself into a lather of anxiety and confusion when faced with the “problem” of a fat wallet and time on my hands.

Anyhow, what matters is that I honestly have no idea what I want most of the time. I have little experience with acting to satisfy a desire.

Instead, I live a measured, controlled life where I mostly make do with what I have and what I have has been determined by a very careful expenditure of resources which does not allow for any spontaneous indulgence of desire.

And honestly, I don’t know how to live any other way. Deep in my mind lies the conviction that to do anything else would lead to disaster.

Or worse, to the complete unknown.

Personally, I prefer disaster.

It’s a lot more predictable.

More after the break.

---

My world, not yours

I suppose there are worse things than living in your own little world.

Sure, it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s damp and it’s lonely in my pretty little bathosphere at the bottom of the ocean. The air is still and stale and I can’t even remember the last time I was warm and/or dry,.

And sometimes I hear the strangest noises…..

But at least I am safe. Safe from….. um…. bad stuff. Bad stuff of some kind that exists out there beyond the glass somewhere.

I assume. Truth be told, I don’t remember exactly what chased me into this cage. i just know it was bad and that if I tried to escape it will GET me.

And even if there’s nothing out there waiting to GET me, this is the only world I know now. I know that at one point, I lived a nearly normal life on dry land, but that was so long ago that it almost feels like it happened to somebody else.

But what that leaves with is my cramped little world and the big bad world outside it which is virtually unknown to me now.

So it’s me versus a planet sized question mark. There are so many possibilities out there and so much stimulation and no way to control what happens to me and no way of knowing I will be okay and I am getting a panic attack just trying to think about it.

This is what happens when your distrust of everything runs so deep that only that which you can control and predict is considered safe and all else is chaos annihilation madness to the nth degree.

This is clearly not the way to be. It’s very deranged and unhealthy. A healthy organism learns to deal with life on the fly by getting used to it. It copes because it has no choice.

But the degenerate organisms like myself know that there is always a choice : you can always refuse to deal with things and run away instead.

And so you never adapt. And that means you never improve. You never get used to life. You never get stronger. You never get tougher. You never learn to handle things.

So life remains just as scary and hard and dark and confusing as it is to a small child, even if you have a brain the size of a planet.

And I don’t know how to escape that. The easy, glib, and insufficient answer would be to gradually expose myself to reality in slowly increasing doses, but there is no way I have the willpower, emotional stability, or executive function to do that.

And who is going to do it for me? Who would be willing to hold my hand as I take baby steps into the real world? Who would be willing to nudge me in the right direction when I stop, and stop me when I am about to hurt myself?

Who would be willing to do all that?

Nobody, that’s who.

And if I can’t do it myself, and nobody can do it for me, then I guess I am fucked.

Story of my life, really.

Might as well just go to sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.