My stomach can be so impatient!

I made lunch. I am sitting down to eat it. Food is moments away. But my stomach is giving me rapid fire hunger pangs like it’s trying to transmit my life story via telegraph.

I’m frickin’ doing it already! Relax!

---

Still feeling agitated.

Makes it hard to focus on things. Even playing video games, which is normally what I use to keep my mind busy and thus keep the anxiety away.

It’s a treatment, not a cute. DEFINITELY not a cure.

Forgot I was going to take a Mirtazipine this morning. By the timeI remembered, it was too late in the day. Would have really fucked up my already aberrant sleep cycle.

Human beings are not suppose to get their sleep in 1.5 hour naps. We need sustained sleep in order to get to those very deep REM cycles that complete the difficult task of integrating the day’s events into long term memory.

But you probably knew that already.

So I have to go back on the pill, but like I said yesterday, I don’t wanna. Having to fight to stay awake scares me. I feel like my body is trying to kill me.

And considering my sleep apnea, it kind of is.

---

I get the feeling that if I was rich, there would be a whole wing of my mansion that was identical bedrooms with identical beds so that when I woke up and didn’t want to go back to my sweaty messed up bed, I could go sleep somewhere else.

Then again, maybe they should all be different so that they feel like different places.

I would have to experiment.

---

The agitation keeps trying to make me freaked out and anxious and occasionally succeeds for a moment or two.

I keep getting that feeling like there is something terribly important that I should be doing. Or that I am in terrible danger, like something is hunting me.

Eh, whatever. I know it’s just my life energies trying to find a pathway via which to express themselves. A deep part of me desperately wants to burst into the world like a beloved sitcom character who gets a round of applause from the studio audience when they show up for the first time in an episode.

Right now, there is still too great a burden of depression in the way. But I am busy digging away at it and lately it’s been feeling lighter than ever, so we will see.

Whatever happens, I will just keep making it through the day and doing my best to convalesce and trying my damnedest to head for the light.

Even though that means repeatedly heading back into the darkness.

Well, like my buddy Nietzsche said, to overcome yourself, you must go under.

Speaking of whom, I am having trouble finishing my project of reading my entire Portable Nietzsche cover to cover, largely because by now I am pretty god damned sick of the guy,

And yet, every time I think I have finally had enough of his petty bullshit and bathetic egoisms and such, suddenly he is deeply wise and insightful again.

He’s such a high maintenance friend!

More after the break.

---

Like, right now I am reading a section of The Antichrist where Nietzsche talks about “the psychology of the redeemer”, by which he means Jesus as a person as He is depicted in the Gospels.

And despite his fiery atheism he is surprisingly sympathetic to Jesus In fact, at times he seems to have a great affection and admiration for “the redeemer”.

He (in my opinion) sees Jesus as a truly gentle, innocent person who disliked putting walls between people so much that he would rather “turn the other cheek” than raise a hand against evil men.

But what really got me was when he talked about how what Jesus wanted was to show the world another way of living – his way. But instead of following Him, they worshipped him instead, all while doing all the divisive and petty things he clearly hated.

And I had been thinking along those same lines before even reading this section.I have this scene in my head where as it starts Jesus is just finishing a parable, and the people listening are like, “Wow, you’re so awesome!”.

And Jesus is like, “Thank you! So, you’re going to do the thing I just said right?”

The worshipers, eyes aglow with adoration, nods slowly. “Uh huh. Because you are so very very cool. ”

And Jesus is like, “Good. Because that’s what I am trying to teach you. How to live life a different way. The way of peace. ”

Glassy eyed nods.

Jesus leaves, and the worshipers look at each other, beatific, and talk about what an awesome person Jesus is, and someone asks what it was Jesus said.

And of course, none of them know. They were not listening. Listening is hard. You have to pay attention and remember stuff.

Adoring Jesus is way easier.

Put that one in my “paranoid messiah” file.

Because I have given a lot of thought to how a potential messiah figure (me, for example) could actually make things better via their teachings in a way that could not be corrupted by repeated reinterpreted to suit whatever people want to do anyhow.

And it’s pretty much impossible. The fact that Christianity lost all connection to the actual words of Jesus almost immediately is proof of that.

No matter what you say, people will just do what they wanted to in the first place. You can’t make your teachings into some kind of unbreakable contract that makes it literally impossible for people to be shitty to one another.

They will continue to eye the exit and only pretend to pay attention until you either finally give up and let them go or they do it the minute your back is turned.

Either way, moral restraint has failed.

Your best hope would be to create a culture that embodies your teachings. Work your beliefs into the very foundation of said culture. Hope your culture lasts.

And even then, they will probably start killing and raping one another before long.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the sitch :

I’ve not had a lot of sleep. Been too agitated. Got maybe an hour and a half between 8 am and 10 am and that’s it. Not been able to sleep since.

Plus there is this rolling anxiety attack dogging my heels. {{1} It keeps trying to rus h the gates of my mind when it feels like I am not paying attention, and maybe getting past the outer gate but my inner defenses against that shit are very strong and act very fast, so the anxiety doesn’t get very far.

I mean, on a certain level, I do kind of feel like I am going crazy and/or manic, but that’s just life casa del me.

I am loco in the cabeza, after all.

In fact, my current mental state could easily be interpreted as some kind of waking nightmare where I am strapped to the front of a speeding locomotive and headed straight for a very thick brick wall.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I can instead do my level best to harness this energy both for getting things done and for elevating my mood.

I mean, come on, mania can be hella fun!

I am in the process of trying to teach myself to summon and harness much larger amounts of personal energy than I am used to.

And this is both a result of and a good time to practice doing that.

I mean,what’s the worst that could happen? I end up in too good a mood?

I can live with that. Might make a nice change.

I’ve certainly gone the other way often enough.

So when I feel my energy surge, I try to redirect it into filling myself with sunshine. more or less. It’s a crude process so far but it’s early days yet, and I am confident that this new instrument of mine will grow in power and sophistication over time.

And for that matter, there are far worse things than crashing and burning.

Like being dead inside. For example.

No doubt, some time soonish, I will feel terrible again.That’s just how these things go. Ups and downs, valleys and troughs, amplitude varying over time.

And I am well and truly sick of hugging the baseline. Of preferring to have no highs in order to keep from having lows.

Fuck that noise. I want to live. And that means losing my fear of amplitude. It means prising my stiff and frozen fingers from the icy cliff face to which I have clung for so very long and if I fall, I fall.

Sure, it might hurt. I might lie on a ground a while, getting my breath back.

But then I can finally get up on my own two feet, dust myself off, and take a good look around at life.

And all these moving pictures I control instead of living life can recede to their proper place as something one does between life events, not instead of.

Dunno what I will do when I am done part 1 of blogging.

Maybe I will gather all my energies and merge them with the Great Cosmic Frequency and become eternally one with the harmonics of the universe.

Maybe I will let my mind expand to encompass all the living creatures on Earth and truly understand that we are all just the universe experiencing itself and that all our petty divisions and conflicts are nothing but illusions, man.

Or maybe I’ll just finger my butthole and giggle.

ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE TO THE TRULY FREE!

More after the break.

---

The fucking heat

It stresses me out.

Physically, I mean. When it is super hot out, I struggle to remain hydrated. If I fuck that up – and all it takes is forgetting to refill my water glass for like ten minutes – then I get my gods be damned heat stroke.

Which means I get a throbbing headache that makes me feel nauseous and dizzy and is oriented and maybe just the tiniest bit homicidal

It’s a really bad head trip. Is what I am saying.

And I got my propensity for heat stroke from my late father. He liked to tell the story of the time when he was on the roof doing some shingling on a hot August day when the heat stroke hit him and he realized that a rooftop is a very bad place to be when you are dizzy and nauseous and disoriented.

It was a very bad situation. Could have ended badly. But luckily he was eventually able to make to the ladder and then go down it very, very slowly and carefully, and then he went inside and drank some ice water and cursed himself, good-naturedly, for being a god damned idiot.

I can relate, totally. It never happened to me on a rooftop, but it happened to me while riding my bike in traffic, and that’s pretty freaking bad too.

I’ve never had the nerves for being a true urban biker anyhow. I can’t share the road with cars when I am on a bike,.

I think I lack the requisite faith in either humanity or my reflexes.

Today’s been reasonably okay. Still working on putting my energies to work pumping up my mood instead of just making me a jittery nervous wreck.

Still, I am beginning to worry that my mental state is wearing thin from lack of quality sleep, so tomorrow morning I will – sigh – take my sleeping pill.

I don’t want to. But I gotta.

I realized today that being all super sleepy doesn’t just make me mad because I would rather be having fun – it scares the shit out of me.

When I keep getting dragged back into sleep when I feel like I only barely made it out alive the first time, part of me is convinced that this time it’s going to finish me off.

Annihilation. A fait accompli.

Explains why I used to sleep on the couch sometimes when I lived with Eamon. Sleeping someplace different and fresh made a huge difference.

Something to think about in the future.

Now, I’m going to lay down with my head in a fan.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] And also heeling my dogs. Which is presumptuous and rude [[1]]

That’s how I’m feeling right now. I feel very blocked and tender and reluctant.

It’s actually almost interesting how strong the feeling is. I mean, I usually have times when I really don’t feel like blogging and the words, they do not come easy.

But right now, it feels like every single word is being ripped out of my flesh, and that is a new and fascinating sensation.

Also, very painful.

---

My friend Windchaser wants to play a game called Dungeons and Dragons Online with me, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

Can’t say I like it. The controls are strange… somehow I feel like my movements are always too slow and too fast at the same time.

And the graphics are….; antique. Which is pretty weird looking at high res. I can’t decide whether they deliberately went for an old-school look similar to all those SSI D&D games from the 90’s (which I never cared for), or whether they just suck.

These and other factors combined make me not really want to play the damned thing any more. Which puts me in an awkward position re : Windchaser.

I mean, I could just tell her I didn’t like it, and she would accept that. But I would feel terribly guilty about it because I know she has been trying to get closer to me (in her own way) for a while and that this, therefore, is a high stakes gambit for her.

And the thought of crushing her hopes like that makes me sick to my stomach.

So I guess I will end up playing it with her and keeping my big mouth shut about it.

And I think that will be good for me. Part of recovery for me is learning to make room for other people in my life instead of treating everything (and everyone) like they are entertainment that I can turn off when it no longer amuses me.

That’s the problem with living a solitary life where all you do is entertain yourself. You lose the ability to compromise and make accommodations for others because it’s been a long time since you had to share.

That’s a tough thing to face in oneself,. especially for a big ol squishy liberal like me, but no growth can come from denial, and what I need most right now is growth.

Remember, the opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s vitality.

It started with Maelkoth. Every time we part, I’m the one who instigates it, and he (in a cute and funny way) begs me to stay, and I sort of laugh it off and leave anyway.

And that is really starting to bother me. Not just that I do it, but that until recently I did it in such a thoughtless and cavalier way.

So I have been doing a lot of soul searching about it. Like, what’s up with that?

I know part of it is my inability to truly believe that people want me around. And a younger, less thoughtful version of me would have accepted that glib and facile answer and blithely continued hurting people.

But now I know there is so much more to it than that.

People really enjoy having me around. No wonder – I am a pretty special guy. I have never met anyone quite like me. I have a lot of light and love and laughs to give.

And when I go, “Well, it’s time for me to go. Bye bye!”, it must really hurt.

I want to learn the art of leaving slowly.

Because I really don’t want to hurt those who care for me.

That shit’s got to stop.

And I’m the only one who can stop it.

More after the break.

---

Are we still here?

We are? Yay!

Had an internet (Internet?) outage.Rebooting didn’t fix it. So I went to reboot the router.

But I could not find it/. Sometimes I forget what a clutter hurricane hoarder’s paradise this place is because I know where to find the stuff I normally use.

I’m as clutter blind as anyone on that score.

But this place is jam packed with stuff for which we have no use and yet retain instead of just donating it to Value Village or whatever.

If it was my stuff, most of it would have been long gone by now. I don’t like clutter and I especially do not like having so little space to start with and having said space jam packed with stuff absolutely everywhere.

And is add to my stress, man.

Anyhow, back to the topic at hand.

---

Can’t handle it

Like I have said before, I am not sure I can handle the responsibility that comes with my various powers and abilities.

I have a lot of power in this brain of mind, and not just intellectually. I have a strong effect on people. I have charm and charisma galore, for instance, that I have never even began to use precisely because I was too scared of the responsibility.

And with me, power is always exactly proportional to responsibility. To a fault, perhaps.

I have definitely wondered if I would be better off behaving irresponsibly. If I just concentrated on expressing myself and “being me” without worrying about the consequences to others.

I mean, I could never completely abandon responsibility. I am too empathic for that.Soif I am hurting someone in realtime, I will know, and suffer with them.

But I can easily see myself living a heedless existence where I don’t sick around to experience the consequences of my actions.

I just skate on blithely, spreading sunshine and ignoring the crashes and bangs of things falling apart in my wake.

That sounds distressingly good to me. File it under FEBM for Fuck Everybody But Me.

It’s tempting. But for now, at least, I am going to keep trying to be a good person.

Save the giving up on all forms of moral restraint for when I am rich.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Metaphorically speaking, that is. Relax.

I must be getting the suffering I asked for because I feel like crap, emotionally speaking.

I feel angry and resentful and bitter and nihilistic and I am not even trying to hold back the tidal waves of self loathing with the tiny dyke of my emotional self-control.

I just let the waves wash through me. They don’t mean anything, anyway. It’s just the same old dog chewing on the same old bone again. I am full of frustration and bitterness, and the only way I know how to deal with that is to take it out on myself.

So blah blah loser, wasting my life, every day closer to death and I haven’t even started living yet, etc etc sis boom bah.

None of it means anything because the truth is that I am a very sick man, and I am doing the best that I can with what I have.

And who could ask for anything more?

So part of me want to scream myself bloody. I have a lot of raw emotional energy looking for a way out. A lot of blocked id struggling to find a way to finally bring me to life after all these years as the walking dead.

I’ve been using a good visualization to get my energies going to the right place for once. When I feel one of these energy surges, I imagine the energy going into my body and warming all those cold empty places within me with the wholesome sunshine of real,healthy wholesome life force.

Makes me feel a lot better when I remember to do it. I think that, in a primitive way, I am learning the basics of how to support and inflate one’s mood.

Pretty sure that’s how healthy people stay healthy. By various means, they compensate for whatever emotional inputs they are lacking with this sort of energy, and that keeps them going long enough to get the real emotional inputs they need.

It’s just us mental mutants obsessed with things being “real” who stupidly try to get by on just what life hands them.

The result? Depression, and when you are depressed, life ain’t handing you dick. And even if it is, you’re too damned numb to feel it.

So you know what? Fine. I hereby declare that I am totally fine with “faking” the emotional warmth, affection, acceptance, support, and love that I so desperately need.

And I don’t give a shit if that means the people who abused and neglected me are “getting away with it”. News flash, they already did get away with it and a lot of them are dead and the rest are out of my reach so fuck it.

And no matter how long I sit on the side of the road looking pathetic and sad, nobody is going to take pity on me and rescue me and give me the childhood I deserved.

It’s never going to happen. So I might as well get up onto my own two feet, give the middle finger to a callous and uncaring world, and go looking for happiness myself.

Forget that happy childhood and look for a happy adulthood.

Let those damnable dreams die.

More after the break.

---

And then I stood up

Everything was fine. I was ready to get a shower then get dressed and go to have our usual Friday night confab with Felicity in the parking lot of the Ironwood McD’s.

And then I stood up, and everything changed. When I stood up, I immediately got very dizzy and nauseous and ill.

So here I sit, heavily but unsteadily, knowing there is little I can do to make this sick ride I am on go any faster so I get off sooner.

Right now. my main concern is trying to get myself calmed down enough to order or make something for supper, then the real challenge begins: making myself eat it.

I am seriously considering just skipping the meal entirely. Not something a diabetic like myself should do, but an attractive proposition nonetheless.

Now if only the room would stop spinning.

Stupid fucking room.

---

Pooped. Feel a fair bit better now. I am still crazy dizzy and unsteady but the nausea has abated somewhat.

So there’s that.

Beginning to feel like eating is a possibility, at least in theory. Dunno what I want just yet, it’s too early for that.

Kind of craving potato salad. Weird.

---

Depression as decadence

Been reading parts of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, which has a horse sized dose of his complaint about Christianity being anti-life and anti-health and anti-spirit and basically against everything that makes us feel healthy and strong and joyful.

And it’s got me thinking about my own degenerate self. Despite being one hundred percent religion free, I can see that same pattern in myself.

I have always shied away from the red beating heart of life, preferring to live in the icy cold shadows of my mind, knowing nothing of the world except how to entertain myself.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet, etc.

So I end up fleeing from the hot dense complex world full of physical, social, and overwhelming mental stimulation. And for many years, I did not question that.

But then one day last year I looked out at a beautiful summer day and I asked myself why can’t that be my life. Why do I have to hide away from the world that contains all the good things I could ever want from life? Why can’t I be one of the good,healthy, strong, lively people of the world?

Why couldn’t I be alive.

And I have trying to resurrect myself ever since.

I know it’s a matter of desensitization. That the world would not seem so hot dense and loud to me if I simply put myself out there long enough to adjust to it. That the smart thing would be to increase my exposure gradually until I am ready.

But I am not nearly organized, self-disciplined, or stable for that.

So I will continue to live this frozen lifestyle until someone or something arrives to shove me out of my comfort zone and into the big bad world out there.

’cause I sure as fuck won’t do it myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Getting tired of people talking smack about toxins.

And you know the kind of yahoo who does it. It’s these asshole atheist types who love to bully people who they deem ideologically incorrect”for the lolz”.

I hate those fucking people. They are the reason I refer to myself as a “nontheist”. It’s a much less confrontational and hostile word, and keeps me from being associated with those god damned bigots.

Among that slavering bunch of hooting apes, it has become fashionable to attack people who believe in cleanses and the like for their belief in mysterious “toxins” that they believe the cleanse rids them of.

The yammering yahoos treat this belief like it is tantamount to believing in evil spirit, making cleanses akin to exorcisms.

But I say that toxins have a perfectly logical scientific basis. Here it is.

Human beings today live among hundreds if not thousands of materials that did not exist during most of our evolution Because they are so new, evolution has not provided the human body with a robust means of trapping and eliminating them, and so small amounts of them enter the bloodstream and end up accumulating in our tissues.

These, then, are “toxins”.

A cleanse, therefore, by flushing out your insides (sometimes with extreme prejudice), dislodges these toxins and washes them away, thus relieving your body of the stress of having this foreign and possibly toxic substance lodged within it.

That, then, is the theory. Nothing about it is mystical,irrational. or unscientific. It makes perfect sense, and therefore those attacking it need to admit to the world that they are attacking the people, not the belief.

Because that’s what bullying bigots do.

Have I mentioned how much I hate those people?

---

Did the therapy thing today.

It went fine. I told him about my recent embracing of suffering and how I was willing to suffer however much I need to suffer in order to lessen my burden of pain.

I also told him about how I discovered my stabs of anxiety were really a need to cry trying to fight its way to the surface and how I am learning to just let myself cry.

And how in the past it took something external to set off my tears,.I then told him about my super sad stories about the old dog in the back yard.

He correctly deduced that it was really about me. Well duh.

I’ve been sleeping a lot lately. Like, even more so than usual. And as usual, I feel frustrated by it. I want to have fun, dammit. not sleep all the damned time.

But I am getting better about it. Turns out, the secret is to tap into my deep reserves of apathy and despair.

Makes it surprisingly easy to say “Eh, fuck it. Whatever. ” and go back to sleep/

I mean, I have known for a long time that these sleepy periods happen because I have been getting too little sleep and what I do get is low quality, so periodically I need to catch up on all those lost REM cycles.

The smart adult type thing, therefore, is to just let them happen so they are over with as quickly as possible

I’m working on it.

More after the break,

---

Still pretty sleepy. Still struggling to adapt.

The problem is that it eventually starts of feel like a trap. One I am struggling to escape but keep falling back into anyhow.

And historically. we foxes do not react well to feeling trapped.

Plus there’s the nature of the sleep itself. It tends to be pretty rough. The kind of sleep where I wake up sweaty and disoriented. feeling like I just got an all day beating at the bottom of the ocean.

When you feel inexorably drawn back to that punishing experience, it freaks you out.

Right now I am somewhat awake, but feel pretty thick-witted and poorly attached. Like my mind keeps drifting and I keep having to drag my attention back to the task at hand.

That is not fun. Right now, despite the Diet Coke in my system, the words are not coming easy and I honestly just want to go back to sleep.

Well that’s not true. I want to stay awake and play Black Flag.

But barring that, I guess I would rather be sleeping.

At the very least, it’s easier.

---

This is very cute and sweet :

Kind makes me re-think my policy on caged pets.

My mother raised me to think that a pet that you have to keep in a cage most of the time is not a happy critter and thus keeping said pet is cruel.

And that made sense to me. I sure as heck wouldn’t want to live in a cage.

But then I met Angela’s lady rats, and they seemed happy enough. Granted, they had a whole three level terrarium setup to themselves, which was a lot of room for six lady rats and all their bedding and such.

Then I see a video like the one above and I realize that I never really imagined being able to pet one’s caged rodent, and otherwise share closeness with them,.

I still couldn’t handle the cage thing though. I would do my best to hamster proof my living space instead, so the little cutie could roam as they please.

That, I could live with.

---

Feeling pretty crappy today.

From the heat, I assume. It always stresses my body out. I am doing my best to stay hydrated but it doesn’t seem to be enough.

Maybe I should get one of these new cube shape AC units that you fill with water once a day or so. Might make a big difference in quality of life.

They seem to be going for around a hundred bucks. I can afford that. I have around $300 surplus on my reloadable VISA.

I will definitely be thinking about it. I’ve wanted AC for as long as I remember.

And now, at long last, it’s somewhat affordable.

I would be a fool to miss out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been reading my Portable Nietzsche lately and that is never an easy thing because even a Nietzsche fan like me finds him alternately blazingly brilliant and frustratingly petty and shortsighted.

One area in which he pisses me off is in his misanthropy. And that’s brought a lot of my thoughts about misanthropy to the surface, and it is those thoughts I will express today.

Because it has occurred to me that misanthropy is the worst form of bigotry possible.

Why? Because at least all the other forms of bigotry only deny the individuality and humanity of some subset of the human race, and therefore feels capable of making a value judgment on all members of that subset.

Misanthropy does that to all of humanity. Every single human being in existence at any point of history, past or future or present, from the dawn of time to the heat death of the universe, with no chance of redemption.

It is the ultimate example of “they’re all the same”.

In this, we recognize that, like all forms of bigotry, misanthropy is not only morally reprehensible but intellectually dishonest. It claims knowledge that patently cannot exist because it ignores the enormous variability and individuality of its subject.

You can’t possibly know enough about 7 human beings – let alone the seven and a half billion currently alive on Planet Earth – to make any kind of value judgment on them, good or bad.

This is easily demonstrated by counterexample.

“Human beings are horrible!”
“Really? Even Mister Rogers?”

“Humanity is wonderful!”
“Really? Even Hitler?”

Note : it is the overly broad nature of these statements that make them so easily disproven. But then again, bigotry has always been intolerant of nuance.

What the misanthrope is really saying is something like “My social issues are so severe that I will accept or generate ridiculously unjustifiable value judgments on the entire human race in order to slap a halo on my fear and loathing of them. “

Right. You’re not the one with the problem. The entire species has the problem!

And I am saying these things as someone with serious social/psychological issues which cause him not merely to fear and hate most of humanity but to actively withdraw from most of society to the point of being able to lead an adult lifestyle.

When it comes to human gregariousness,I am an extreme outlier.

The difference is that I don’t pretend that it’s morally justified. I know that the problem is me, not them. An early childhood trauma coupled with a socially isolated childhood caused me to fail to develop properly and that left me with serious issues when it came to dealing with others.

So how does one become a misanthrope? Why is it not merely enough to avoid one’s fellow humans? Why is this absurd value judgment even needed?

Because even the crankiest of curmudgeons is human enough to feel drawn to their fellow human beings, and when people feel drawn towards something they hate and fear, they need something counteract that draw.

Hence misanthropy. The misanthrope feels the draw to their fellow humans, mistakes it to be humanity being drawn to them,and “fights them off” by declaring these imaginary hordes to be universally awful.

Incidentally, Nietzsche himself presents an excellent model of why his misanthropy is wrongheaded when he says it is impossible to judge life because you are either in itm and hence biased, or not in it, and hence unavailable for comment.

The same is true for the human race, Freddy baby.

More after the break.

---

Getting it done

Finally got around to calling my doctor and getting my non-psychiatric medications refilled. So yay for me on that front.

First, I called my pharmacy to see if I had prescriptions on file. Nope. Then my pharmacist says “You haven’t had these prescriptions filled since last September”!

Um, wat? That makes absolutely no sense.

Turns out, I just hadn’t gotten them filled there since last September,. That’s when I remembered that the last few times I went to see Doctor Chao, I had gotten my prescriptions filled at the pharmacy attached to his office.

So that was slightly embarrassing. Like I got caught cheating on my pharmacist.

So then I called my GP’s office. Turns out he’s not doing in-person appointments yet.

Which is no big deal this time because all I wanted was a pill refill. That is an easy thing to do over the phone.

But it still rankles me. Why can’t he just wear PPE like all the other doctors?

Anyhow, job done, anyhow. I still have wounds all over my legs and I have been getting a lot of weird and sometimes painful feelings in them lately, but at least I got pills.

Or at least, I will once I get Julian to pick them up for me tomorrow. Or maybe I will go get them myself so I can get some blood work done at the Lifelabs next door too.

Depends on how I am feeling. Lately I have not been feeling so hot, probably because it’s so hot.

Still, I managed to slow myself down enough to take a long look out my bathroom window and take in the fresh air and sunshine while watching someone mow the lawn.

I really want to do things like that more often. I think that one of the things that contributes to my general malaise is that I am so cut off from nature in my filthy little ferret hole here.

Even commuters get more exposure to nature than I do. At least they have to get to and from their cars.

And the thing is. my little nature time today made me quite happy. It reminded me of happy summer days of my youth, and I got some clean air for once.

And yet, I had to force myself to do it. My default position is to cling to my life exactly as it is right now, no matter how much another part of me craves change.

Deep down, I still have that feeling like I am just barely holding my guts in, and I have to remain absolutely still or I will die.

It isn’t true, obviously.

But I still feel it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I may have leveled up this morning.

Basically, I have been getting these stabs of anxiety lately. They pop up when my mind is between things on the computer to concentrate on, and my usual response has been to dive head first into whatever the next thing is in order to escape.

Not smart but it “works”.

But this morning, for whatever reason, I decided to just let the damned thing hit me. Just opened my mind to the experience and let whatever wanted to happen, happen.

Well it turns out that what came on like anxiety was actually sadness. What happened was that I felt a wave of sadness and pain and so I cried.

And then felt a lot better.

I’ve said it before and now I am saying it again : men, cry. Do whatever you have to do to silence the imaginary male peer group waiting to make fun of you in your head – drive out to the middle of nowhere, or close all the windows and blinds, or put a hardcore action movie on and turn the volume up super loud, or whatever – only you know what will work – but get it done.

The relief you will feel will amaze you.

So yeah, I cried. And I am glad I did. Happened a couple more times too.

I am hoping that I can teach myself to let loose more often, at least when I am alone. After all, it’s not like I am heavily invested in projecting a macho image.

I’m a fancy fluffy faggot who is effusive and silly and sentiment who loves animals and cuddles and is in many way pretty darn female, and proud of it.

But I think it goes beyond that. I think we men end up alienated from our own emotions, even fluffy fags like me.

And the depression fucks with it too. There have been many times in my life when I wanted to cry but couldn’t. The emotions were frozen inside me and stuck in my throat and I could not make them thaw out.

So I ended up just swallowing them again.

That’s why whenever I have one of my infrequent breakdowns when something sad in media hits me just the right way, or when I end up writing something super sad about an old dog (for instance) and end up cryingmy eyes out the whole time, I always end up feeling so very grateful that it happened because it made me feel so much better.

Like I have said before, it’s kind of like throwing up, in that it is very unpleasant while it happens but you feel better after because you got rid of what was making you sick.;

Well, lesson learned. When I feel that shit coming on now, I am going to lean in and go with it. Heck, I might even try to bring it on.

Anything that speeds up the melting of that iceberg around my heart is a good thing.

Even if it kind of sucks at the time.

More after the break.

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I deserve to suffer

Because suffering brings relief.

Been doing a lot more thinking about suffering and how the avoidance of one form of suffering can lead to way more suffering than the suffering being dodged.

There’s probably a much better, less sing-song repetitive was of phrasing that, but I am too tired to think of it, so you poor people are just going to have to suffer.

See what I did there?

Anyhow, I am through with such myopic thinking. Between desperately needing the release that suffering through my emotion pain brings and the joy I feel when I actual feel real feelings instead of hollow numbness, plus a tiny splash of my slight masochism, I am totally ready to bring on the suffering and pain and sadness and rage and all the other nasty bullshit I have been unconsciously collecting and concentrating in the dark laboratory of my mind and finally get this shit over and done with.

So bring it, motherfuckers. Come at me, demons. Take me down into my own personal hell. Stretch and chop me on your Ecrustean bed. Pierce, tear, and mangle every inch of my tormented flesh. Grind me up and spit me out.

I don’t care any more. Gimmie everything you got. I will eat it up with a spoon and then bang on the table demanding more.

Release the hounds. Apres maintenant, le deluge. Summon every demon in Hell for a Satanic Jamboree in my brain.

I want to burn it all.

---

I continue to play Assassin’s Creed : Black Flag,but the going is pretty rough because now I not only have to pilot the ship, I have to do it while also controlling all the weapons on my ship, and paying attention to what the enemy is doing, and also paying attention to the sea so I don’t run into an island, and so forth and so on.

And this kind of thing just ain’t my bag, baby.

And then I ended up getting a game called Rebel Galaxy where I have the exact same problem, only in space.

But damn do I love the music in the trailer.

In it, I have my own spaceship. And I have to pilot it. In battle. Battle that is a lot like naval battle, including being based around broadsides.

How did I end up in the same fix TWICE?

Oh well, the other games I got in that bundle will be nothing like that.

Speaking of which : one of the games is King’s Bounty, a game I thought seemed vaguely familiar but didn’t think I had played – I even checked my GOG.com, Steam, and uPlay accounts to see if I had it there and nerp.

But then I saw the logo and the logo looked SUPER familiar. So then I found some gameplay footage on YouTube and then I *finally* remembered the game.

So the combination of how many games I have played plus how my brain is slowing down with age has finally reached the point where I almost forget entire games, even ones I have played for many hours.

Oh well. Just means there are more new games for me to play than ever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just woke up and Jesus Christ do I need a do-over.

I am dizzy and disoriented and my head hurts and it’s very hard to concentrate enough to think of the words for the typing and the blogging and such.

I really just want to go back to sleep, while at the same time being afraid to go back to sleep considering what sleep just did to me.

What I really want is to go to sleep someplace nice. Like a really nice hotel room. Someplace quiet and cool and clean, far away from this god damned toxic life of mine where I wallow in my own filth.

Not because I want to. But because I am too depressed to clean anything myself, and it’s not like anyone else is going to do it for me.

I wonder how much a maid service would cost.

Because everything in my life is filthy. There’s no sheet on my bed for reasons and so I sweat directly onto the mattress cover, and that hasn’t been changed since it first went on there ages ago, back when we lived at Nerdvana at One Road and Francis.

I miss that place. It was much larger and next door to a strip mall.

I never vacuum either. The air in here is dirt. It’s a wonder I can breathe at all. My desk is covered in used Kleenex and pill bottles and other garbage.

And I know the sight of all of this grossness should motivate me to clean so that I can have a nice clean wonderful place to sleep and to live.

I can even feel that motivation trying to break through the thick layers of ice around my heart in order to actually push me into action.

But it doesn’t make it. Instead, I react to all this mess the way I react to everything : I block it out of my mind and retreat deep into my mental prison and ignore it.

Escapism of that sort is truly a terrible affliction. It robs you of nearly all life force by giving you the ability to escape any situation, rather like a drug.

I assume healthy, active people capable of living a decent life do not have that ability, and have to actually deal with things.

Lucky, lucky them.

It all makes me feel so powerless. Like I completely lack agency. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, with all this power at my command, and yet all I do is hide from the world by playing video games all the god damned time.

And I want to push against this evil force, but it hurts so bad when I do. Like trying to walk on a broken leg.

I really wish I could believe in some higher power that could give me the strength buck the trend long enough to reverse it.

But all I have is myself,and that it not nearly enough.

More after the break.

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Just another comatose Monday

Unlike previous Mondays,I have not forgotten about the weekly Zoom meeting hosted by R. Graeme Cameron going on right now.

I’ve just been sleeping all god damned day, and there’s no end in sight.

Oh well, at least it’s a more healthy kind of sleepy now. The kind that feels warm and cozy and languid and relaxed, as opposed to the kind that feels like I am fighting to stay alive while a curse is trying to turn me into a zombie.

I had a dream like that once. It was kinda badass.

So at least there is a chance that when I inevitably go back to sleep (grr), it will be that rarest of things for me : good, healthy, restorative sleep.

Usually the best my sleep can do is “not actively hellish”.

But it’s the Zoom meeting thing that is really pissing me off because I really want to do. The attendees are all smart, nerdy, intellectually lively people and the conversations I have had when I managed to attend have been superb.

And as patient readers know, highly quality conversation is my favorite thing ever.

But I keep sleeping all day on Mondays and it’s pissing me off, god dammit. I want to be having nerdy conversation, not dancing with death in my sleep all damned day.

And here I thought it was bad when all it did was keep me from playing video games.

This frigging sucks.

---

Finished Assassin’s Creed : Revelations and have moved on to Assassin’s Creed : Black Flag, aka The One Where You’re A Pirate.

Technically, the next game in the series is Assassin’s Creed 3, aka the American Revolution one. But it was weirdly expensive when I checked, and I have been wanting to be a pirate Assassin for a while now so I decided to skip ahead.

Black Flag is…. different. They rearranged the controls. I rearranged some of them back to what I am used to from the four other games in the series I have played.

Had one issue : it wouldn’t let me remap something to the Caps Lock key.Usually,that’s how I get around the fact that my left shift key doesn’t work.

But it’s also easier for my big fat fingers to reach.

But whatever. Found a substitute which I will adjust to over time.

The changes to the combat system are harder to take. There no more Counter-Kills, which combined countering attacks with killing, and that was the core of my fighting style up until now.

It works out well for me because letting the other guy make the first moveis highly compatible with slow old guy reflexes.

Now I have to actually, like, think about stuff. Geez.

But I am sure I will adjust. And so far, the plot is interesting. My character is a somewhat hotheaded young man who signed up to be a “privateer” (god damn them all) but at the very start of the game, you (sigh) get shipwrecked.

Because if it’s an even vaguely nautical game, it’s going to start with a shipwreck,

Game designers just can’t help themselves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Continuing from last night :

So I have discovered this rich and throbbing vein of elitist rage and disgust in myself.

Because the truth is, I don’t want average people to be close to me. At all.

Seriously, fuck those people. They don’t get to be close to me. They don’t get to touch me in any way shape or form.

They should be glad that I am such a nice dude that I always treat them with courtesy and respect and patience.

Hell, they don’t even get to see the real me. Why would they? They wouldn’t understand it. They wouldn’t “get” me. They would just end up blinking at me like cows watching a passing train and making me feel like an alien.

Trust me, I have copious life experience to back that up. So many times where I tried my best to express myself and got nothing but blank stares and severe alienation.

So to hell with them. Get the fuck out of my mind space, you fucking peasants.

An unparalleled genius walks among you, and the fact that you can’t see that or understand it is your problem, not mine.

I’m the smartest son of a bitch you’ve ever seen. I am, in fact, smarter than less then one percent of the human race. My mind operates on levels so far above anything you can conceive that you might as well be ants trying to understand algebra.

And I am so very tired of stooping down to your level. I am so very tired of trying to be nonthreatening and I am especially tired of pretending to be one of you.

I’m not one of you. From your point of view, I am, at best, a friendly freak. And I don’t want to be one of you.

I have higher ambitions than that.

So you know what? Yes, I do look down on you average people from Olympian heights. How could I not? I’ve been smarter than everyone except my friends and family for my whole life, very much including my childhood, and I am done with trying to hide or not draw attention to this fact in order to stick out less.

It’s not working. It was never going to work. No matter where I go or what I do, I am going to stick out like I was covered in neon signs, so I might as well just do as I please and let the Lilliputians get in my way at their own peril.

And like I have said before, I don’t give a fuck if my brilliance makes someone feel stupid. You know why?

Because compared to me, they are.

I don’t hold it against others when they are better in the many skills I lack,. I don’t blame competent people for making me feel incompetent, I don’t blame strong people for making me feel weak, and I don’t blame Idris Elba for making me feel ugly.

So don’t blame me if I made you feel stupid just by being who I am,. Your ego is not my responsibility, and as long as I am not deliberately trying to make you feel bad (and I am not, trust me) your feelings of inadequacy are yours to deal with.

More of this, sadly, after the break.

---

Actually, fuck that. my mood has changed, the river has flowed onward, the Lords of Flux have rolled their dice dozens of times since then, and I no longer feel like pursuing that particular topic.

Might come back to it, might not.

I hope folks realize that the stuff above the line in today’s post is me venting some very unpleasant emotions I found lying around in my mind and felt I needed to express in order to be rid of them.

Not that I am letting myself entirely off the hook, because everything I said up there is something I actually feel.

But it’s not necessarily who I am, if that makes sense.

I clearly have a lot of long simmering hostility towards others that I have been hiding from everyone, including myself, and no good can come of that.

Venting them removes the tension and energy drain of suppressing them from my mind and gets them out in the open where I can deal with them.

It’s funny.I knew I had a lot of suppressed rage, yet finding out it took the form of such naked hostility and rage still shocked and surprised me.

I guess it’sa lot easier to deal with suppressed anger as an abstract concept than it is to deal with it as a real and current emotion.

And of course I have a lot of hostility towards people and the world. People and the world hurt me a lot when I was a kid. And I felt powerless to do anything about it.

In fact, the real question is why I wasn’t enraged by it at the time. Just too damned timid and weak, I suppose.

Too prone to retreating into myself instead of dealing with things.

Well the long suppressed anger is coming to the fore now and I feel like screaming myself bloody and crushing buildings with mny fists and tearing this shitty old world a new asshole then throttling it.

Pretty sure these are the emotions I was supposed to have in my teens. Well, better late than never,I guess.

I am full of pain and rage and frustration. And I want to take it all out on the world. Punish the world for causing me so much pain by causing it pain in return.

The fact that there is no deserving target handy changes nothing. The fire rages within me nevertheless and it won’t go away until it finds an outlet.

I’m working on it. What I need is to invent some kind of bridge between my angry emotions and the world that lets me vent it all in a safe and responsible way.

Maybe I will start writing really gory horror stories.

But not right now. Right now, I need to lay down in the dark.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yay, more talking about my eternal pain and torment.

Right now, I feel both ill and depressed.

Which one causes the other? I have no idea. Do I feel physically bad because of my emotional issues, or am I depressed as a result of being sick?

Dunno. Not important. Probably one of those both/neither situations that indicate the dichotomy is false and the question is, therefore, unanswerable.

What is important is the connection. The two influence one another, and I think I have found a key flaw in the way that feeling bad can make me feel like I am somehow bad.

The thing about feeling sick and/or depressed is that nobody can tell. I might feel downright toxic,.hideous, and vile, but to the world I am no different, broadly speaking, than if I felt fantastic.

I am not how I feel. This is important.

I think that somewhere in the back of my head, I felt like everyone could tell what a wretched hunk of purulent shit I was, and therefore hated and was repulsed by me.

In other words, they felt about me how I felt about me.

But there’s a rather key boundaries issue here, to put it mildly. In a broadly metaphorical sense, I have them all fooled. The version of me that others see bears very little resemblance to the quivering pile of rotten organs I see in my mind’s eye.

I mean, there’s some connection. I am kind of a slob. But still.

My mind really does end at the skull. This is important to emphasize because my high level of empathy makes it seem like it doesn’t.

Other people’s thoughts and emotions have always been present in my mind and I suppose I subconsciously thought it went the other way too.

But it doesn’t. No matter how I feel, emotionally or physically, the world sees the same old average big fat dude it always sees.

And that changes everything. For one, it makes the world far more safe for me. A whole lot of my social anxiety is/was based on feeling like everyone around me felt about me like I do, and therefore hated me and resented my presence and wished I would just go home and die.

Obviously that is untrue. I’ve known that for a long time.

For one, it vastly overestimates my importance to casual strangers. Most of them, I assume, barely notice me, or if they do, they don’t think about me much.

Maybe that is why I have always been comfortable in crowds. Being just another face in the crowd is very close to being invisible.

And what victim of social anxiety hasn’t dreamed of being invisible?

Even if it’s my dreaded scenario of passing people on the sidewalk, where you definitely have the opportunity to get a good look at the people you pass, people still aren’t perceiving me the way I do.

I’m still just another fat dude.

The ultimate is actual social contact with strangers on a casual basis. The dreaded “mingling”, a word that makes a social phobic like me shudder every time I hear it.

But even in that nightmare, people are not seeing me the way I do. And so I can rid myself of the idea that everyone automatically hates me and that I have to cringe with shame on the inside just for daring to draw people’s attention.

I’m fine, or at the least, no worse than most. Yes, there is still the very real issue of finding it hard to relate to people because of the high IQ and all, but that is a far cry from people instantly loathing me.

From now on, I will go forth with the safe and certain knowledge that my mind ends at my dura and nobody sees me how I see myself.

After the break, I will return to the subject of my being able to relate to people.

Got some dark shit to confess.

More after the break.

---

My hidden elitism

So earlier today, I got an email from a fat-friendly gay dating site I signed up for called “chasabl” (as in, chubby chaser).

They had been emailing me saying “Hey, we miss you” and “gee, you haven’t logged in since forever” and “Dear god, please tell us what to do to make you love us again!” (one of those is made up) and clearly they were tired of my shit because this latest email said “just log in, or we’ll DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT!”

So I logged in. And like all the cool dating-type sites now, it has a Facebook type interface as well as more traditional dating stuff, so I scrawled down my “feed” to see what was up, and I felt this surge of utter contempt.

Why? Because all these men were so BORING. None of them was saying anything even vaguely interesting. It was all mundane bullshit from their lives stated in the dullest way on Earth.

I had the same sort of reaction to my feed on a site called My Depression Team. A place where depressives like me can be supportive of one another, more or less.

But this time it really hit home and I was forced to confront the very real elitism I was feeling. I had very real contempt for these people and their posts.

Why? Because I found them boring. Because the details of their lives didn’t interest me. Because they failed to entertain me with their lives.

Because they weren’t as smart, clever, and funny as me, basically.

That was shocking enough to realize about myself with Chasabl. There’s nothing wrong with these people. Some of them might even be into me.

But if I find them so contemptibly dull, would I even want that?

It was far worse than that when I realized that’s how I felt about the My Depression Team people. These were people trying to help one another through the very illness that has kept me down for my whole life and are being nothing but kind and considerate and quite frankly downright wonderful to one another, and yet, I turned up my nose at them.

I think these things set off a strong reaction in particular because they both required a lowering of my defenses and making myself vulnerable.

Suddenly, these perfectly fine ordinary people weren’t outside the walls of my mind where I could deal with them at a distance using my social toolkit of politeness, pleasantness, and egalitarianism.

They were INSIDE THE HOUSE. And I really didn’t want them there. In fact, I wanted them out of there as fast as humanly possible.

And it made me realize that on some levels, my social isolation has given me a privileged position in that I have a life free of average people.

My friends are all quite bright. The place I hang out online, Merriam’s on Tapestries MUCK, is my fave hangout specifically because the crown there is quite smart. The media I consume is also pretty dang smart.

So life has not forced me to be able to deal with average people. i live in my own low-rent ivory tower, and my social skills have atrophied as a result.

That’s why this wave of contempt caught me by surprise. It’s easy to think you are free of bigotry when the object of your bigotry is far away.

But when they move into the neighborhood and eyeing your daughter, that’s when the demons in your head wake up and take notice.

So now I know. I have some serious fucking issues regarding dealing with people I, to my shame, feel are beneath me.

At least now that I know, I can start to change that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.