Oh lordy, this is going to be a big one. I can feel it.

For as long as I can remember, I have been dead set on being completely objective about absolutely everything.

Even when I was a preschooler, I was determined to figure out what was really going on and to make all my decisions based on the understandings that produced.

And that is a perspective I have been loyal to for my entire life. It is the living breathing core of my entire sense of reality and the foundation of my entire worldview. Everything in my mind is tied into it and nothing is accepted as true unless it passes its test.

Big deal, right? I mean, don’t we all try to be objective? Wouldn’t being totally objective about everything be a good thing?

Yes and no. Mostly no.

Because yes, people are supposed to strive to be objective. That’s a fundamental part of creating your own sense of reality.

But there are supposed to be things you are striving against. Other considerations. Social considerations. Emotional considerations.

Human considerations, god damn it.

Most healthy humans’ sense of reality includes and is mitigated and mediated by emotional concerns. For them, social reality IS reality, at least to some extent.

Not for me, though. For me, it has always been intuitively obvious that social reality is a shared fiction and that therefore I was free to ignore it if it got in my way.

Sounds bold and bright and beautiful from a traditional Western rationalism way, but it’s no way for a human being to live.

Because I don’t just ignore social reality occasionally. I ignore it most of the time. And that means I do not perceive it, and that makes the social equivalent of a well-meaning person who nevertheless keeps stepping on your foot.

You’d be socially awkward too if you were socially blind.

Having a perspective grounded in objectivity does give one some power.It is the wellspring of my piercing clarity of thought, for instance, as well as my power of analysis and my ability to get to the heart of things quickly.

But it’s still wrong. It’s still not how a human being is supposed to be, and most importantly, not conducive to being happy.

The human mind needs a lot more than the objective truth to work with. Mere objective reality does not even come close to providing all the emotional nourishment a human psyche needs in order to be happy, healthy, and strong.

There has to be more.

There has to be a way for the mind to get those priceless vitamins and nutrients when reality does not (and quite possibly cannot) supply them by itself.

Somehow, I have to find a way to get those vital emotional inputs for myself.

Somehow, I need to finish growing up.

Somehow, I need to go beyond objective reality.

And not just in an intellectualized “let’s see what lies outside the light of reason” way.

In a deep, fundamental, irrational way.

And that scares the bejesus out of me.

More after the break.

---

Beyond the edge of reality

Sounds like something from the back cover of a pulp science fiction novel.

“An adventure that will take you beyond the edge of reality itself!”

Anyhow, where was I. Oh right, getting de-bejesused.

The thought of going beyond rationality terrifies me. Reason and logic have been both my weapons and my armor against the world for my whole life, and to contemplate going into the work naked (so to speak) maximizes my capacity for apprehension.

All humans fear the unknown. Even rugged intellectuals like myself, who thought no subject is too scary, dark, or disturbing for him to contemplate, balks at leaving my entire basis of reality behind.

And yet I know it must be done. This is an existential crossroads and I know that my only choice is to keep going or stop.

And I ain’t gonna stop. Stopping would hurt worse than anything the road before me could possibly throw at me.

I’ve reached the point of spiritual growth where I have to leave everything I know behind and venture into the vast unknown with absolutely no idea of what will happen.

And I don’t want to do it. It’s very scary. And it will likely hurt.

But the road behind me is gone. There is no turning back. I will never “go home again”. Home is gone too.

All I can do is press forward and look for a new home. A better one. One that fits me better. One that has everything I need in it.

One that actually makes me feel safe.

I could plausibly argue that I don’t know where to start. That would be technically true but actually a bullshit dodge. An act of cowardice meant to delay scary growth.

It’s odd, but the only way I know how to deal with such an existential leap is to open my mind up as fully as I possibly can and do my best to learn everything this new environment can teach me.

This is, of course, the exact opposite of what most people do. Most people would shut their minds defensively when going into the unknown.

But I’m not most people.

One of my greatest gifts is my ability to make my mind completely receptive, like a fresh sheet of blank paper. That’s why I learned so fast and so well in school.

While the teacher was talking and writing stuff on the board, my mind was wide open and absorbing everything.

But that’s a dodge too. I see now that I began intellectualizing.

Well, the first step is always realizing you have a problem.

Truth is, I need to once more ask myself one of the biggest questions of my life :

What is it healthy people have that I do not?

If I could somehow take them and subtract me, what would remain?

What is this mysterious substance I lack?

And how the hell can I get me some?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I may have taken my sleeping pill twice.

Hard to be sure, of course, but it’s a possibility. This morning, when I was taking my post-breakfast pills, I hit a point where I had taken the other morning meds (Rampiril for blood pressure, Lipitor née Atorvastin for cholesterol control, Claritin for allergies) but could not recall if I had taken my Mirtazapine or not.

Normally in this situation I play it safe and don’t take the pill. But this morning I was feeling bold and scrappy and told myself, quite confidently, that I had no recent sense memory of handling the pill bottle or one of the tiny pinhead sized pills and so there was no way I had already taken one.

Now I’m not so sure.

The shocker came when after getting up to pee at around 10:30 am, I went back to sleep and woke up at 2:30 pm.

Making me both a) an hour and a half late for lunch and b) astonished to find out I had slept for four hours in a row.

Did not see that coming.

But this might be much ado about nothing. I might be overreacting to what amounts to a slightly above average sleepy day where I only took the one pill.

Either way, I am very sleepy at the moment and it is taking a hefty effort of will just to stay awake enough to eat and blog.

Guess it’s time for me to pack up my bedroll, fill my canteens, and head off into that rusty red prairie sunset over yonder.

I wonder how long I’ll sleep this time,

---

It isn’t human

And by “it” I mean “me”.

Been pondering my own inhumanity lately.

Not that I think I am not a human being or that I am somehow less than human. I’m as human as the next naked beach ape.

But I know that I am not like the others,. That’s something I have known (on some level) since my first day of school. From day 1, I was calmer,less impulsive, more focused, and above all more autonomous than the rest.

And I wasn’t interested in typical kid things. I didn’t want toys, I wanted books. I didn’t play with toys in any traditional sense of the phrase,i.e., I didn’t makeup stories while manipulating them as play-actors in said stories.

From academia to pop culture, the consensus is that said play-acting is what normal kids do. That it is, in fact, a vital part of their social developments because it allows them to create virtual social experiences for themselves that prime the pathways for later social experience to then energize and guide.

I didn’t see the point. Toys didn’t do anything. What I wanted from the very start was mental stimulation. That’s why I wanted books and video games and why I watched so much television as a child.

All three provide a steady stream of mental stimulation.

So I had no interest in toys, and various other forms of “play” like hopscotch or sports held no interest for me either.

From that point of view, it really seems to me that there was next to no chance that I would ever have a normal, socially integrated, healthy childhood.

Even if I had never, ever been bullied at all, I would still have been one very weird kid and the only way I could see me having friends is if I met other kids who were just as weird and nerdy as I was.

That, sadly, wouldn’t happen till I got to college.

What happened was a profoundly socially isolated childhood and that is extremely unhealthy. The path that most people start in kindergarten didn’t really start for me till college and that got cut off at the knees half way through.

No wonder I am so fucked up.

And all of this makes me somewhat inhuman. I don’t relate to my fellow human beings on the human – in other words, social – level. The social information others absorb like oxygen in their lungs is unavailable to me.

I have the necessary empathy, but that’s it. There is a universe of information and experience missing because I was so isolated.

So I grew into quite an exotic hothouse flower indeed. Things grow strange in the dark, as I like to say, and so on a psychosocial level, I grew into something not quite human.

And yet, it didn’t show. Not on a superficial level, at least, and that’s the only levelon which anyone wanted to deal with me,

And my fear aided them in this. In social situations the panic would rise in me and whatever I had been trying to accomplish when I started the interaction would get replaced by the terrible urge to escape.

So I was an unwitting accomplice to my own neglect.

And it hurts to know that,. Like a lot of victims, I have invested pretty heavily in the narrative of my own innocence, and while of course I don’t consider myself morally culpable for my childhood abuse and neglect, it still cuts way too close to the bone for comfort and gives me the feeling of something unpleasant “touching” me.

But I am leaning into it. This is exactly the kind of painful, wrenching, uncomfortable revelation that brings on the most spiritual growth, and I am all about that kind of growth at this point in my life.

The mind is strong but the spirit is weak.

That needs to change.

And being devoid of any religious software (or even hardware, possible), I am forced, as usual, to make up how to do it as I go.

And you know what? That shit gets tiring after a while. Just once, I would like to be able to use someone else’s prepackaged solution to fix something in my life.

It would be a refreshing change to find something in the world of the soul that fits me.

But whether it’s clothing or spirituality, I am never going to be able to buy off the rack.

I’m just too weird.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Took pill. Sleepy. Etc.

I do feel better overall, though. I can feel the space in my mind where all those medium term memories are stored awaiting REM cycles emptying out, and as it does, my mind gets healthier and stronger.

So the pill works. Sure, sometimes it makes it hard to wake up and that makes me freak out because I feel trapped etc, but that’s honestly not a great reason to skip it.

Not when the alternative is slowly losing my mind.

And yet, because the effects of crap sleep accumulate slowly, it’s a very easy trap to fall into. Especially when I have had a “trapped by sleep” incident.

So I am going to focus on remembering the relief I feel in that place in my mind as it relaxes so in the future, I will be less tempted to slip back into my sleepy ways.

Here’s hoping this cycle of sanity lasts a good long time.

---

Been messing around with Skyrim.

Not actually playing it, of course. Where’s the fun in that? I know every inch of the game, more or less.

Part of the journey back to Skyrim has been realizing how well I remember damn near everything in the game.

Which is cool because my buddy Maelkoth is going through the game for the first time and I always know exactly what he is talking about. Can advise.

But it also means I don’t feel a strong urge to play the thing. Not when there’s piratical adventure to be had in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag.

I’m catching up to my previous save pretty fast. One benefit of having gotten as far as I did in my previous incarnation is that I am totally skilled and confident where before I was a noob and hesitant.

For example, the first time through, the part of the game where you do your first serious naval battle took me a shitload of tries to complete.

Got it the first time through this time. I did a lot of naval battles in the previous incarnation and while I would not exactly call myself good at them yet – I tend to end up almost sinking by the time I win – but I can muscle through.

Ditto for all the murdering. So much better at it now.

In fact, I am now taking all the short assassination missions I avoided the first time because they seemed like too much of a hassle.

Plus I got caught up in some bug in the game that kept moving my target from one island to another.

But now, I love them. I especially love it when I can slip in, takeout the target, and slip out during the ensuing chaos.

I am death, motherfuckers.

As for Skyrim, I’m just having fun getting all the perverted mods I love working again.

Really, this whole thing has mostly been about horny nostalgia.

At least I know that it’s pretty unlikely that I will get addicted again.

I barely even want to play the dang thing!

More after the break,

---

My dearest Felicity

Sorry for being so argumentative tonight,

Right now, I feel like John Mccain in Die Hard 2 : how can the same shit happen to the same guy two nights in a row?

Clearly I am going through some kind of phase. If so, i hope it’s a short one, because I do not want to end up in the same damned position again.

At least I know I have a problem. And I know I am the problem. Clearly, I need to update my software to include the ability to break off an argument instead of just hammering away at my point till the cows (or rather, the bull) comes home.

Anyhow, for the record, I am ashamed of being so pigheaded and not just backing off and agreeing to disagree and all those other things sane grownups are supposed to do.

But please believe me when I say it comes out of love. When you say negative things about yourself that I know to be untrue, it hurts me so bad. Every instinct I have is telling me to defend you against the mean lies someone is telling about you.

Even if that person is you.

You have to believe me when I say that I am, in my own fucked up way, trying to help you. In my mind, I have this fantasy of liberating you from the ideas holding you back and the scales falling from your eyes and you being so happy.

But that never happens, does it? People don’t get argued into changing their minds. Once it’s an argument, people’s minds close and there is honestly no point in continuing because there is zero chance anyone’s mind will be changed.

So my fantasy of liberation is just that – a fantasy. It’s not something that could ever happen and I need to check my ego and be realistic about what I actually accomplish and learn to ignore that feeling that I am just about to break through.

Because I am not. If anything, my gung ho attitude has made the percent dig in deeper. Whatever problem I think I am on the verge of solving, I am actually making worse.

So from now on, I promise I will call things off if I think they are getting too heated. Even if I think I have said nothing which is out of line, I will recognize that simply by persisting and poking and prodding like I do, I am making things worse.

And please, Felicity, if you think I have gone off the rail, feel free to tell me so. I give you carte blanche to say “Argument over!” and voila, it shall end.

Even if you got the last word in. 🙂

So again, sorry for being a dick. I love you very much, dear, even if I sometimes have a weird way of showing it, and you’re a fabulous friend and a fabulous person, and I feel blessed to have you in my life.

Please forgive me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Took the pill this morning.

So you know that I am quite sleepy as I type this.

Had a lot of that really intense sleep that leaves me feeling like a shipwreck survivor who barely managed to swim to shore.

So in addition to being sleepy, I am also dizzy, disoriented, and so on.

Maybe that would have happened even if I hadn’t take my Mirtazipine. Maybe not.

But I knew the risks when I took the damned thing. No, risks is the wrong word.

I knew the most likely outcome when I took it. And this is it.

---

So yeah. Couldn’t make friends when I was a kid because of anxiety.

Still feel pretty bad about that, and not just because of the harm to others.

I am sure they got over it pretty quick,

No, this goes deeper than guilt. I feel a lot of shame about the whole thing. And it’s that terrible deep down shame one might normally associate with a bathroom accident.

So what am I so ashamed of?

I think it’s a loss of innocence situation. I had to confront the truth of my not getting along with others as a child and it turned out to be something a lot darker than my usual airy “I didn’t relate to other kids” explanation.

How god damned glib.

Still, it is from such dark seeds that the new light grows. Now that I have expressed (confessed) it, I can process it, and eventually let it go forever.

Right now, I still feel a lot of shame about the whole deal. And it hurts, But it’s fading away over time and I am sure it will be gone soon.

Until then, all I can think of is that sad little boy who wanted a friend so badly but couldn’t accept friendship when it was offered.

Because people did try. Heck, some teachers even tried. Mrs Rogers tried.

But I was so damned scared.

---

Started a new game of Assassin’s Creed :Blag Flag after my previous save got all corrupted and unusable.

Like I found the previous time this happened in one of the other games, these games are inherently fun enough to make it not that big a deal to do stuff over.

The fact that I know what will happen next does not detract from how fun it is to crawl around murdering people, as it turns out.

So while I am still a little pissed off about losing my previous save, I am mostly over it.

Called my new pirate Cockup Yerbum, because I was too tired to be creative about it.

---

And now, my regular reminding of myself that I am actually an extraordinary person of enormous intelligence, profound wit, deep insight, wizard-like mental power, and a heck of a nice fella oi boot.

By all objective measures, I have every reason to not merely like myself but love myself, and the fact that I can’t is a terrible tragedy and not an indictment of me as a person.

I love you, me.

We should totally date.

More after the break.

Equal means equal!

I am really fucking sick and tired of defending free speech from liberals.

I just spent a lively and enjoyable couple of hours debating hate speech legislation with a dwindling number of people (sorry for driving people awayp) on R.Graeme Cameron’s weekly nerd confab.

I am unequivocally against it.

The government does not have the right to punish speech, PERIOD. There is no such thing as “hate speech”. When Canada passed those laws, we betrayed one of the foundational values of modern society by decided that it is, in fact, perfectly fine to punish some words and ideas if the group is unpopular enough.

To me, this is a no-brainer. The right to speech is a human right, so all humans have it. And people do not cease to be human when we hate them.

This is not negotiable. No matter how much the public hates a group,. they do not lose one quintessence of their rights.

And that includes Nazis and their ilk.

And what really makes me sick about the whole thing is that I am arguing this with supposed liberals. It was so called liberals who passed the hateful hate speech laws.

And you know why they did it?

Because they knew they could get away with it.

Because it felt good to crush their enemies.

Because they decided that people they don’t like aren’t human.

Because they were perfectly fine declaring a group of people were less than human and therefore did not have the same rights as everyone else based purely on their beliefs.

Note how when you take the buzzwords like “Nazi” out of the equation,it immediately becomes appalling this belief is.

Name one other group where you would be fine with their beliefs being punished by law. Where you would be fine with having their beliefs declared “dangerous” to point where you would be fine with their going to jail for them?

Not actions, not crimes : just for their espoused beliefs

Don’t worry, I’ll wait. But I won’t exactly be holding my breath.

Equality means equality – no exceptions. In the eyes of the law, no group – no matter how much most people hate them – has less rights than another.

Why do so few people get this?

Listen A Nazi has the same rights you do.That’s what equality means, god damn it. There are no magic words people can say that make them less than human.

If you are willing to take away a Nazi’s freedom of speech, are you find with someone taking away yours? Why?

They came for the Nazis, and I said nothing, because I was not a Nazi.

Right now, Americans should be thanking their lucky stars and stripes that Donald Trump does not have the power to punish speech he does not like.

In Canada, all he’d have to do is declare anyone speaking against him as “hate speech” and he could lock up anyone he wants.

When those laws were passed Canada declared itself okay with persecuting a tiny powerless minority group.

And I will never be okay with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Have this idea of mine on heavy rotation in my head lately, and so I thought I would write it down here so I can work on it some.

Picture this idea as being up on blocks with my legs sticking out from underneath and faint little ratchet sounds emanating from underneath.

The friendly alien is a way of trying to imagine a version of myself that would get along okay with others without a lot of awkwardness I experience right now.

The idea is that if I somehow presented to the world as someone who is clearly quite friendly but also clearly not of this Earth, it would give people the two most important pieces of information about me :

1. I’m a very nice fellow
2. I’m extremely weird.

I think if people knew those things before dealing with me, things would go a lot more smoothly. They would know I was approachable and sociable and likable, but at the same time they would know not to expect normal behaviour from me,

I mean well. But I’m weird.

Pursuant to that, I find the idea quite comforting. It warms me to imagine that I might be able to interact with people on a warm and casual level without all my tension and fear and issues getting in the way.

It’s how I have always wanted to relate to people. Stuff just keeps getting in the way.

Of course, in the real world, the idea would need to be brought down to Earth a little (so to speak) and translated into something more doable.

I mean, I could walk around with my face painted green and wearing neon yellow deely bobbers, but I think that would raise more questions than it answers.

Still, not a bad idea for a Halloween costume.

But there must be a way to convey that kind of information via my general attitude and demeanor. Some way of telling people I am both nice and weird without having to just blurt it out when I meet people.

That would probably be very awkward.

I suppose I could invest in T-shirts that get the idea across. Something super nerdy but also friendly and funny.

That describes me pretty well.

Of course, odds are that a lot of the problems I think I would be solving with such an approach are figments of my neurosis and the real solution would be to get the hell over myself, pretend I am at least passably normal, and go out and relate to people.

There is nothing that says poor childhood socialization is a permanent trauma. It’s entirely possible that if I was to hang out with more healthy people while keeping my ravening neurosis in check, I would actually pick up the social cues I didn’t get as a child and become a lot more socially healthy.

Or at the very least, I would get better at faking it.

And I would also get important feedback on what sort of thoughts I should share and which will just alienate people.

I am pretty sure I could learn to be less of an alien.

I just need to get over myself and put in an honest effort.

This message has been from Your Dad.

More after the break.

---

The deep dark truth

This is going to hurt like hell.

I know why I had no friends as a child and it wasn’t simply because the world is a cruel inhuman place where I was the constant victim of barbaric cruelty,.

I’m too old for that kind of fair tale.

No, I had no friends when I was a child, when someone tried to befriend me, I would end up freaking out and heading for the hills.

Makes me wonder if befriending me was even possible.

It would start out fine. That’s because at the beginning, my friendliness and need for connection with otherwise would be much stronger than my fears, and that would lead to my accepting the overture of friendship and do my best to get along.

But before long, the glow of friendliness would fade away and the dark chill of my anxiety would take over and before you know it, I am looking for the exit.

And yet, I am still acting friendly. That’s what really get me about all this. I am still;smiling and nodding along as I am edging towards the door, and when I make my big escape, the poor person must have been mystified as to what the hell happened and – big breath, leaning in – must have felt like I rejected them in a particularly deep and permanent way.

So they never tried again. Who could blame them?

Meanwhile, I am just relieved to be out of the tension producing scene. I am not giving any thought to the person I left behind. From my innocently callous point of view, I was very good at getting along without friends and I went into it without friends and came out of it without friends, so no loss, right?

If only I had visibly freaked out or even overtly rejected the person. Then they would have closure, at least. They would have been able to firmly conclude that I was a weirdo or an asshole (or both) and gone on with their lives.

But no. I behaved one way while acting another and never gave people any clear signal as to what the heck was going on.

I remember Shirley Cormier. Very nice girl. Lived around the corner. Invited me to her room. We hung out. I got freaked out. I fled.

I feel bad for that now. That poor girl. She tried to befriend the sad lonely weird kid in the neighborhood but I was too messed up to accept.

I can’t help but blame my lack of kindergarten.

So that’s the deep down dirt on me. I know that I was just a kid and it’s not my fault that I was far too crazy to accept people’s friendship.

But for now, I feel terrible about the whole thing, and I am going to sit with that feeling until it goes away on its own.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Took my sleeping pill, Mirtazipine, at around 8 am this morning,

Unsurprisingly, this led to me sleeping a whole lot. In fact, I have slept more or less the entire time since then and it”s now 2:30 pm, so I have clocked around six hours in the Land of Nod and I don’t feel like I am even halfway through,

So today should be fun.

The words ain’t exactly coming easy either. It’s very hard to stay focused on what is going on in the world of my computer (aka the real world LOL) and so my mind keep wandering off the reservation and making me chase after it with my lasso.

That got rustic fast.

At least it’s been relatively non-tortuous sleep so far. There’s still a feeling of having barely made it to shore after being wrecked at sea, but it’s not too bad.

Why, I barely dread going back to sleep after blogging at all.

If I had more energy, I might try getting on to the patio. Could be very pleasant to take a nap out there in the fresh air, as opposed to the toxic atmosphere here in my room.

But there’s so much crap everywhere in this freaking apartment that even getting to the patio door is like a freaking steeplechase.

So that’s probably not going to happen. God damn do I wish I could be rid of all of Joe’s hoard of stuff. If I had my way, we would given everything to Value Village except for the very small percentage we actually use.

That goes for my own belongings too. Fuck most of this garbage.

Maybe if I somehow got this room of mine all cleaned up, I would be able to sleep peacefully at night.

Sometimes, as patient readers know, I dream of leaving it all behind. Of cutting all ties with my current life and starting over again someplace where nobody knows me and I am free to reinvent myself.

Become reborn, Try a different version of being me. Probably someone a lot more emotional and egotistical and pushy.

Someone who is more of an asshole but also a lot more honest and genuine. Someone who actually does what his emotions tell him to do at least some of the time. Someone who feels comfortable in his own skin because he’s not constantly negating himself.

Someone who knows who he really is.

What an extraordinary thought.

---

Lost on the edge

An old problem has resurfaced lately :sitting lost on the edge of my bed.

It goes like this : when getting out of bed, in between laying down and getting up, there is a phase where I am sitting on the edge of my bed.

Normally, this is a brief transitional phase lasting a few seconds at most.

But sometimes, I just kind of…stop there. All momentum dies, all motivation flees me, and I end up just sitting there in this strange mental state of the doldrums for however long it takes for whatever mental process I am working on to finish so I can come back to myself and rejoin reality.

This can take as long as fifteen minutes or even half an hour.

As problems go, it’s not a big one. It’s not like it’s costing me productive time or anything.And it’s not like I have things to do at specific times very often. So there is very little actual harm done.

But it bothers me, or rather, the mystery of it bothers me. What is happening? And why? Why do I keep finding myself in this suspended state? What deep need is being fulfilled via this odd weightless funk?

Because let me be clear : during this state, I am not thinking thoughts. Internal monologue has ceased. Words are not being formed.In many ways it is a very primal state of mind, like that of a pre-verbal child.

And it certainly feels like I am….processing something. Like there is something so profound going on in the deep layers of my mind that my little conscious mind can do little except watch without comprehension.

What is really going on,I think, is a waking dream state. Odds are very good that if I am getting up, I have recently been asleep.

And am not good at sleep. My sleep is troubled, fretful, and disturbed. So it is entirely possible that I wake up and sit up when I am in the middle of an REM cycle and my mind still has a bunch of dreaming it needs to do.

This thought comforts me somewhat. At least I am getting something done. I still don’t like feeling helpless and disconnected when all this happens, and I suppose if I had my druthers I would still be asleep when this all happens, but if I have to slip into an involuntary bizarre mental state from time to time, this is as least a pretty mild one.

After all, it’s not like I am hallucinating or anything. I’m just….not quite there.

And I know what the cause is :not taking my sleeping pill. No pill means shallow, brief sleep which means not nearly enough deep REM time which means a backlog in the medium term memory where memories wait to be processed via dreaming.

If that backlog gets bad enough, the deep mind simply takes over from my silly little conscious mind and forces me to get that dreaming done no matter what.

And thank goodness for that. My conscious mind is very clever but not very practical. If everything was left entirely up to it, the garbage would never get taken out, the phone bill would never be paid, and the dirty dishes would pile up till they reached the sky.

Which brings us back to the sleeping pill, and how all I have ever wanted from one was for it to be strong enough to thump my chattering monkey brain senseless so that I can get some god damned sleep for once.

Turns out he’s a very strong little monkey, though, and so far, nothing I have tired has managed to help me fight him very much.

All they do is keep him down once he’s down.

Still better than nothing.

But I wish I had something to fight him for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

I think I have figured out what is up with my appetite disappearing, and for once it’s not something with dire implications for my current and future healh.

It’s these sunflower seeds I have been eating. Well, pumpkin seeds, technically.

They are more or less interchangeable because they taste exactly the same. When I got myself a bag of Spitz brand sunflower seeds, I assumed they would be something new and different.

Nope. They look different – for some reason the shells are a kind of bleached bone off-white, for one thing – and the seed inside is bigger, but flavour wise it’s the same deal.

And the thing is, I know for a fact that it doesn’t have to be that way. When I was a kid, part of our Halloween tradition was to roast the seeds from the pumpkin we’d just eviscerated to make our jack o’lantern.

That’s the sort of wholesome, natural homecrafty type stuff we did in the Seventies.

And so I remember what they tastes like, and they did not taste like sunflower seeds. They tasted much nuttier and a bit like pumpkin, unsurprisingly.

So I can only assume that the people at Spitz had a meeting like this :

CEO : Any more new business?
Exec : Well there is this one last thing…. we are thinking about adding pumpkin seeds.
A few moments of silence.
CEO : That’s brilliant! Do it immediately…
Exec : Wow, okay, fantastic, I’ll tell the…
CEO : BUT ONLY IF THEY TASTE EXACTLY LIKE SUNFLOWER SEEDS!
Exec : What? No… the whole point is to offer something different…..
CEO : DIFFERENT? Look, buddy, we’re Spitz. We do one thing and one thing only : we sell sunflower seeds. The last thing we want to do is surprise people. So go ahead and sell your crazy pumpkin seeds….
Exec : But only if they taste exactly like sunflower seeds.
CEO : Exactly. Glad we understand one another.
Exec : Can we at least make them a weird off-white color?
CEO : Uh sure. Knock yourself out
Exec (to the camera) ) That’s all I really wanted, anyway.

Or something like that.

I like the whatever kind of seeds because they are the perfect grazing food. You get a hell of a lot of them for your money and they are impossible to eat quickly because you have to get them out of the shell first.

And I got them specifically so that I would have something to graze on in order to keep the demon hunger at bay.

Guess it did that job a little too well,

So I will have to cut back a touch. Maybe cut myself off an hour before the time I intend to eat. Something like that.

Or just get used to not being ravenously hungry when meal time rolls around.

Whatever. I will work it out somehow. I want to keep eating them because it’s been so nice not being ravenous all the damned time, but skipping meals because my appetite didn’t show up for work is Bad.

I am sure a reasonable compromise can be made.

More after the break.

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Until I stood up, part deux

Once more, I was fine until I stood up.

This time, I was in the car as we held yet another McDonald’s Parking Lot summit and when Felicity asked if we would be doing randomage at 11pm tonight.

Translated : would I be too sick to watch stuff and have to rest until midnight in order to be able to watch stuff then, like last time?: Or would I be okay?

“I’m fine!” I said breezily. After all, I felt fine. What could possibly go wrong?

Standing up, for one. When I got out of the car to get some stuff at 7-11, I immediately got all dizzy and nauseous and tired again.

So right now, I feel like I just spend a hard night on rough seas. Every time I move my head, stuff sloshes around in there and spins me right round, baby, right round.

Like a record player. Round, round, round, round.

And I am getting weird random pains all through my body. Which is no fun. It’s like I am being tortured by a torturer who is small and weak but very capricious.

It all makes me want to turn the lights out and take a nap. Hide from this uncomfortable reality in sleep and hope that by the time I wake up, things will have settled down inside my head and I can go back to totally ignoring my serious health issues.

I mean…priorities.

I know I have a ton of serious issues. The slow destruction of my nervous and circulatory systems by diabetes and sleep apnea for one. Whatever this crap that keeps forming on my scalp is would be another example. I smother in my sleep, I get so little physical activity I am now filed under geology, my mental and emotional states are so unstable it’s a wonder I can find reality in the phone book, and I often feel terrible psychological pain as well.

I am not healthy. I am likely in terrible peril. This should goad me into swift action. Scare me into taking care of myself. Chase me to the hospital or whatever.

But what should be unleashing a roaring lion of determined action onlike produces the sigh of a very small ghost.

Even the thought of Future Me cursing me for a fool for not taking care of myself now and ensuring his life sucks hard does not motivate me much.

Because my biggest health issue is depression, and it blocks all motivation from leading to action no matter how good the reason might be.

I mean,I suppose if there was a runaway train heading toward me I would probably get out of the way.

I might even get scared by it in the process, and feel a genuine adrenaline surge.

But if it;s anything more abstract, I will continue to do sweet fuck all to prevent the disaster clearly heading my way.

Depression doesn’t kill you.

It makes you kill yourself.

And sometimes it takes its sweet time in doing so.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

So over the last few weeks, I have been playing the ever loving fudge out of Assassin’s Creed : Black Flag.

It’s a great game. I have taken to the life of a bloodthirsty pirate with ease.

After all, it’s not so different from the life of a bloodthirsty Assassin.

Except you have a boat. With like, cannons and shit.

And that makes a big difference to me. Letting my have my own ship that I can use to wander as I please is a huge, huge bonus for a game to me. I love having the autonomy to choose what I do next instead of following a linear script.

:Linear scripts can be pretty awesome too. But still, I prefer having a ship.

It was my favorite thing about both the Mass Effect series and Pillars of Eternity 2.

So I have poured dozens and dozens of hours into being a pirate (who I named Browneyed Peter), conquering forts, doing quests, exploring the high seas, and generally having a heck of a good time of it.

It might be my favorite of all the AC games.

Last week,I had a scare. I went to load my game and it wasn’t there. Oh fuck. All that time and effort down the drain!

But I looked up how to get my saved game back,and it worked. Turns out the game keeps a backup copy of your save. All I had to do was rename the file.

Problem solved! Crisis averted! Phew! And now I know how to fix the issue should it arise again. Huzzah!

But no, fate was just setting me up. Because today, when I went to play, it told me my save game was corrupted and that I had to either start over or “load another save”.

But the game only keeps one save at a time, normally.

So I go to the save game directory and guess what, there is no backup to restore this time. There is the fucked save and empty saves but no backup.

So as it turns out, I did end up losing all that time and effort and it looks like I have no choice but to start all over again.

And I probably will, eventually. It’s too good a game to give up on.

But not yet. I am still grieving Browneyed Peter.

I submitted a support ticket to Ubisoft as a gesture of my displeasure. I highly doubt that anything will come of it.

And then, in a move that only makes sense to me, I downloaded and reinstalled Skyrim.

Look, some of us express our anger by doing something flamboyantly self-destructive.Other people might get an offensive tattoo, or go to a bar and pick a fight with someone they know can kick their ass, or go on a bender.

Me, I reinstall a video game that sucked up me entire life and from which I have never fully recovered and was the root cause of my video game addiction.

I doubt it will take over like that this time, though.It’s not the new hotness, it’s not the only way I can express certain oppressed urges any more, and I am older and more jaded and harder to impress.

And I still play video games all day. That never changed. Only the games changed.

So honestly, what harm can it do?

More after the break.

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Dazed and confused

Feeling quite mixed up at the moment.

Like everything is spinning both physically and emotionally. Especially emotionally.

Like something is trying to goad me into action but all it’s really doing is make me anxious and restless and discontent.

I can’t seem to settle one something to do. I keep switching. That’s not good and I need to stop it – for me, that shit always leads to a serious freak out of some sort.

So i am deliberately stopping myself and holding myself still and maybe screaming real loud on the inside until the fever passes and I can be still again.

Or at least comfortable.

---

I skipped supper again tonight. Done that three or four times lately. Suppertime comes around and I have no appetite so I just skip it.

Totally not supposed to do that. Diabetics should not skip meals.That’s just a blood sugar crash waiting to happen.

And yet, here I am. To be honest, I think that in the short term it actually makes me feel better, presumably because it gives my blood sugar more time to drop.

And forcing yourself to eat when you aren’t hungry suuuuuucks. Every instinct rebels against it. Sure, you can force yourself to do it but your body, especially your stomach, will make its anger known.

Kinda like forcing a cranky toddler to do something they don’t want to do. Sure, you might win, but it will cost you.

It’s times like this that I wish there really was such a thing as a meal replacement pill. Just a standard size pill you can take and get everything you would have gotten out of a real meal without having to eat.

Would be real handy in these times where my appetite goes byebye.

---

I’m having second thoughts about my Skyrim project.

Not out of worry about getting re-addicted. That’s old news.

I am beginning to wonder if I even want to play the damned thing. I made a character and went through the intro and fucked around a bit, and I realized that I am basically still sick of the game.

And I haven’t played it for many years.

So I dunno. I might set the whole thing up with all the pervy stuff I adore and then just use it as a sexual playground till I get bored of it and uninstall/

If so, big deal. I had my fun and my horny nostalgia. It was something to do until I was ready to start over in Black Flag.

Or maybe I will buy some entirely new game to keep me busy.

No matter what happens, one thing’s for sure :

It won’t fucking matter,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It was written without fear and without research.

Dorothy parker

Patient readers know that I hate doing research.

I have often joked, in fact, that the lack of research needed is one of my favorite things about writing science fiction.

Nobody can say “Snargulons aren’t purple!” if you just made them up.

I can clearly remember the moment I realized research was not a thing I liked. I was in the stacks of the main library at UPEI, looking for some bit of information for the research paper I had to do for the stupid “English 101” course they made me take and I had not been having a lot of success and suddenly i was seized by this surge of sweeping emotion and I looked around at the rows and rows of identical bookshelves filled with thuddingly dull information and said ‘I HATE THIS!’.

To myself, that is. After all, it was the library.

That’s when I realized consciously that while I was highly intelligent, articulate, and knew a great deal. I was not a scholar.

This came as a mild shock because I was the kid who got an A on every test without studying and therefore thought of myself as the academic type by default.

But being a scholar is far more about finding information and/or placing it where it can be found than it is about knowing things, and that shit bores me to tears.

That’s also why I had such a bad (and dickish) reaction when I had to do the “place your work in the context of other research” part of my psychology courses at Kwantlen.

I actually said something like, “I don’t have to to this, I do original work. Other people can figure out where to file it. ”

I am both embarrassed and amused by that.

I don’t have a lot of moments when I express my latent arrogance out loud, but when it happens, it tends to be memorable./

Truth was, I was finding it super hard to do. My mind just plain doesn’t run in that direction. I have trouble even beginning to answer the question.

My brain, it seemed, was more specialized than I knew.

Now of course, being an intellectual, I would never say research doesn’t matter, or that people who do extensive research are stupid to do so, or that my disdain for doing research somehow makes me better than other creatives, or any of that.

This is my own disposition of which I speak. Other people operate on entirely different sets of principles and that’s fine too.

Whatever floats your goat, man.

The only time I (begrudgingly) do research is when I am afraid of being wrong about something. The idea of being “dinged” by a fellow pedant really bothers me.

Normally, I avoid this via keeping things very precisely vague.

People can’t catch you out on facts you don’t supply.

But there are times when specifics are unavoidable and then I will take the time to actually Google the damned thing.

But I am never happy to do it.

More after the break.

---

There’s no such thing as “people”

Let me explain.

I talked recently about how I thought of misanthropy as the ultimate bigotry and how nobody could possibly know enough about the 7.5 billion humans on this planet to make absolutely any generalization about them deeper than “they’re carbon based lifeforms”.

Further along that line of thought is how there is this nebulously defined category called “people” in the minds of the populace that honestly makes no sense.

Call it the infinitive “people”. It shows up in statements like “People can be so cruel”, or “people are in such a hurry these days” or the ever popular “I hate people. ”

When used as a pronoun to refer to an undefined segment of the population, it’s not too bad. It still leads to erroneous conclusions and specious logic, but it’s not so bad.

It serves a function. Carefully defining exactly who you are talking about is tedious. And most people who use “people” that way will admit, if pressed, that they are not actually referring to literally every human being ever.

But when it is really is used to refer to a generalized conception of all humanity, like in misanthropy, it becomes less a philopshical position and more of a concession of one’s own poor social development.

It reminds me of studies forever burned into my mind where monkeys were raised in isolation since birth then introduced to a general monkey population later on.

Invariably, they freaked the fuck out. Screamed when any monkey approached them, fled to the corner of the cage furthest from the other monkeys, attacked any monkey that got too close, and so on.

i am so very much that poor little monkey.

That monkey, if we would ask it, would no doubt also express a general loathing of the rest of its species. If it is a very bright monkey,. it might even be able to produce rational sounding arguments for why other monkeys are just awful.

But we’d know the real story. We’d know the monkey had been the victim of lack of proper socialization and that it was the one with the problem, not “people”.

This is how I view misanthropy. It amounts to a confession that you are terrified of your fellow humans and have invented a way to stick a halo on it.

Psst. It’s not working.

Like I said, I am that poor little monkey. I therefore entirely understand the “sour grapes” emotions that lead to misanthropy as a defense mechanism.

People freak me out too.

The difference is that I know the problem lies in me. I know that, in reality, people are fine.Not a threat to me at all,. And I know,that my fear is unjustified.

And I know in my heart that no matter how much smarter I might be than someone,. just by dint of being properly socially integrated, they know a lot of things I don’t.

And that means I have a lot to learn from them,

i will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am not going to enjoy doing this.

In fact, just to talk about what I need to talk about today, I have to do a dance of death with my worst phobia : smothering.

But I have to do it, because until I talk it out via blogging, there is a good chance I will do absolutely nothing about my problems until something unthinkable happens,things get far worse very fast, and I end up smothering for realsies.

So here we go : I have been having trouble breathing lately. While awake.

Like everything else, it crept up on me slowly. But I can no longer deny that I am doing my breathing exercises to get my breath back all the frigging time now.

And again. While awake. God only knows what’s happening when I sleep.

I keep needing to push all the air out of my lungs in order to clean out the used air and make room for the fresh air I need so badly.

For a long time now, I have suspected that I have a problem with exhalation. Somehow,I do not get all the CO2 out of my lungs when i exhale, and that CO2 builds up in the bottom of my lungs and reduces my functional lung capacity a little more with each breath, and eventually I have to clear that shit out manually, as it were.

Forcibly emptying my lungs to the fullest extent I can is the most direct and rapid way to do this. Holding my breath also seems to do the trick. And breathing in and out rapidly can also help.

Also helpful : singing. Which is definitely the most fun method.

Anyhow, i have been doing those things a lot lately, and it has me worried. Also worrying is that when I force the air from my lungs, I experience a great deal of resistance. Like something is restricting the outward airflow.

Like there is a bottleneck in there somewhere. Possibly in my actual neck.

My main worry is that, by ignoring my sleep apnea for so long, I have done irreparable damage to my lungs that means I am now in serious shit.

And I can’t defend my self-neglect except to say “depression”.

Depression makes you kill yourself in ways that have nothing to do with suicide.

Obviously, this is the sort of thing I should be bringing before some kind of medical professional who might even, in theory, do something about it.

You know. If they’re not too busy treating worthwhile humans. Or cute animals.

That means either calling my GP, Doctor Chao, or going to the ER.

Neither option is appealing to me.

Dealing with Doctor Chao over the phone when it is something this potentially serious seems like madness to me.

He can’t examine me. He can’t listen to my lungs. He can’t get me to do that breath thing where you make the little balls go up the tube.

What’s he going to do, write me a prescription for air?

That leaves the ER, and its particular brand of bullshit.

On the one hand, they can actually examine me. And seeing as I am coming in complaining of shortness of breath – there, I finally typed it – I would probably get fairly prompt attention from the staff.

But I would have to go in there ready to assert the hell out of myself. None of these life-threatening breezy dismissal this time.

I will these motherfuckers through the wringer if I have to.

AND I HAVE A VERY LARGE WRINGER.

More after the break.

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Without a leg to stand on

Then there is the potentially even worse health concern :

The random pains and other sensations in my feet and legs are extremely frequent now.

It’s gotten to the point where I pretty much always have at least one neuropathological event happening at all times, and sometimes a lot more.

I get random pains of various sorts : stabbing pains, electric shock pains, scraping pains, numbing pains, you name it.

I also get random sensations, like heat or cold or numbness or wetness or a weird feeling like someone is rubbing an ice cube against my skin.

Oh, and there are also plenty of random, painful muscle spasms, as well as twitches, tingles, flutters, and cramps.

In other words, I am in acute neurological distress from the waist down.

Yes, even there. Though not often, thank goodness.

And I know that if I were a rational and sane person, I would be constructively panicking over this acute situation and swinging into action as the threat is quite real and should be quite worrisome to me.

But…. well, depression.

I can’t go there. That mode is currently offline. The best I can hope for is to slowly and painstakingly nudge myself into position to eventually take a cab to the hospital and do my best to get them to take me seriously.

I mean, between my SOB (shortness of breath, obviously) and my legs going nuts, you would think I would have plenty to keep them focused.

Alas, that is not how it works with me. There is some fundamental flaw in how I comport myself that tells people that I am not important and they can safely treatment as the lowest possible priority before moving on to someone who matters.

And I know I am part of the problem. I minimize myself. I treat myself as if I don’t matter, and people pick up on that. I am also terribly eager to please as well as highly empathic, and I have a weak sense of self, so it is very easy for what someone else wants to totally override my own concerns and result in my giving people what they want instead of what is good for me.

Then they go away and I can relax again.

It’s not smart, obviously. But it’s my pattern nonetheless.

Again, I feel like I need some kind of medical advocate.

But all I have is wimpy ol’ me.

Guess that will have to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.