So I have this article open in a tab right now.

It’s a list of the top literary agencies in Canada. A great starting point for a tyro like me who is looking for someone to do the part he can’t do – promoting his work – right?

It scares the hell out of me.

Because the sick part of me can only view it as a threat. Something that requires leaving my fetid little nest to even contemplate and that, were I to succeed in getting an agent, would take me out of this stifled but “safe” existence forever.

At least part of the time.

And that’s my conflict, really. As much as the healthy part of me wants to finally spread my wings and fly, the sick part of me wants to stay hidden and forgotten in this sad little life of mine and will resist my getting anywhere as hard as it can.

And so far, it has ruled me. Very occasionally, I can overcome it long enough to put myself out there a little bit.

But for the most part, I continue to hide in video games as a way of self-medicating and my thoughts of escape stay safely abstract – a nice thing to think about, but only if there is absolutely no risk of it actually happening.

That way I can strain against the bars of my cage all I want and make myself feel better by imagining how awesome it will be when I am free without having to face the true existential terror of facing all those goddamned possibilities.

And I can keep all my escape routes.

But this time. I am going to keep going. I will return to the tab with the agencies on it, taking it in a little at a time, till I finally contact one about maybe taking me on.

It might take along time, but I will get there. I will at least try to get an agent. Someone to promote my work for me so all I have to do is write it.

That’s the part I am good at, dammit.

---

When i was a kid, I saw a movie called Iceman. It was about an unfrozen caveman and dealt with how they tried to make an environment for him where he would feel safe and tried to communicate with him.

There’s probably a lot more to it than that but I don’t remember it.

What I do remember is that at the end of the movie, the Iceman escapes, and you see our scary and confusing modern world through his uncomprehending eyes.

And that really fucked me up. I had to go upstairs to my bedroom and lay down until my heart stopped racing and my head stopped pounding.

Because it was so much like my own feelings of alienation and anxiety. I totally identified with how that poor caveman felt.

In fact, I am having an anxiety attack right now just thinking about it.

Of course, I am no caveman. This world freaks me out for entirely different reasons.

But the emotion is the same.

I need to go lay down now.

---

Bad times at Casa Del Me

My computer’s sick. So I am sick.

Funny how that works.

My computer has developed some sort of illness that makes everything load very very slowly if it loads at all.

Skyrim, for example, won’t run at all. Hence my being here blogging at 5:53 pm on a Sunday when normally I would wait until we got back from hanging with Felicity.

I can’t even get Task Manager to run so I can see what processes are taking up what resources and see if there’s anything I can monkey with there.

Luckily, Spyhunter 5 still works, so I have it doing its scan.

Unfortunately, said scan takes a very long time to complete because it scans every single damn file on my computer and I have a LOT of files.

In theory, it could scan just the executables. After all, only executables contain instructions that can be corrupted via malware.

I’m pretty sure you can’t hide a virus in an image file or a text file.

But better to be thorough than to tell the user they are malware free when they are not, I suppose. I’d rather they were over-cautious than sloppy.

If the Spyhunter scan doesn’t fix things, I will have to consider the possibility that it’s a hardware issue and I am going to have to buy something new to fix it.

That would suck.

And all this has me very stressed out, and part of the fun of being me is that stress makes me physically ill too, because really, I was born to suffer. Evidently.

Dunno if I will be going out with my friends tonight. I certainly don’t feel up to it. All Ireally want to do right now is crawl under the covers and sleep and hope he whole thing is over when I wake up.

Scan is 21 percent done. So far, it hasn’t found any serious problems.

I could skip tonight. Order my groceries online. Take that nice long nap. Maybe even long enough so that the scan is done when I wake up.

And who knows, like last time, it might reveal exactly what the problem is, and all I have to do is tell it to fix it and everything will be tickety boo all over again.

If it doesn’t find any problems, I will have to escalate to hardware diagnostic programs and other higher level stuff, and if that doesn’t work, I will have to escalate all the way to getting help.

And if that doesn’t work, I guess I will need a whole new computer.

And that would really, really, really suck.

It’s definitely a file access issue. Things that doesn’t involve file access run just fine. Like, I can type here without a problem.

But saving takes two minutes minimum. It’s insane.

One thing I have yet to try is to just turn the damned thing off for a while. Let it completely cool off.

I’ve rebooted once, and that didn’t fix it. But I haven’t done a totally cold boot.

The die is cast. I’m not going out tonight. Already ordered my groceries. . Chose a 5 pm to 7 pm delivery time just like last time.

But last time, that was the earliest time I could get. This time, I could totally have gotten my order way earlier and saved myself some time.

Oh well. At least I ordered my soft drinks in larger quantities than usual to take advantage of not having to carry them myself.

Now to order myself some supper.

It’s a fun age we live in, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My mood seems to be drifting towards the negative end of things lately.

I feel increasingly pent up, frustrated, irritable, nihilistic, and angry. I had my first “I hate my life” moment in months yesterday. I want to do something – fight something. lift a massive burden, fuck a mighty beast, punch a mountain in the face, anything really, so long as it takes a lot of energy and vents my aggression.

And it’s unpleasant (to put it mildly) but it doesn’t worry because I know what it is all about. Another big iceberg of frozen pain has broken off the glacier that sits on my heart, and it’s making me angry as it melts.

That, and my dissatisfaction with my current life is building up. Maybe this time it will come to a crisis point and then transcend into a period of determination and resolve that powers an attempt to grab some long term progress once more.

Like getting an agent. Or a gig off of UpWork. Or joining a political subReddit and trying to make a name for myself there. Or looking for writing contests i can enter. Or any of the other avenues I know damned well lie open for me to pursue any time I want.

My kingdom awaits.

It waits for me to be healthy enough to go claim it. I know deep in my soul that I can make a very big splash in the world if I put the world in. I no longer have the luxury of self doubt : I know I’m amazing, a truly gifted communicator (and so much more), and that all kind of success are possible for someone like me.

But I have to get healthy first. Until I do, I will continue to cling to my little hidey hole and be unable to risk success.

Yeah, I said risk. Because that’s how the sick scared part of me sees it. It sees success like it sees everything else : like it’s a big hand reaching down to pull me out of my hiding spot and take me away to a place where I will be naked and exposed before the world, with no way to escape when it all becomes too much for me.

So it prefers to stay hidden and “safe” and let the days pass me by without my making any kind of mark on the world till the day I die in utter obscurity and ignominy.

And what a tragedy that would be! All this power and talent and potential wasted because my mental illness smothered it in its crib.

Well fuck that.I’m going to use my frustration and rage to bash away at walls of my depression like an angry Juggernaut (bitch) and keep on bashing till I make an exit for myself, and then I am out of here.

And so what if I have to abandon all my usual escape routes? That just means that the only way out is through and I will have no choice but to succeed if I want to be able to return to the peace of the hidden.

That works for me.

More after the break.

---

No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

Pink Floyd, “time”

Because there is no starting gun.

I consider myself a textbook case of “failure to launch”. I had everything I needed to succeed in life – I was in college, getting my usual stellar marks,. impressing the heck of of my profs, on my way to a double major in psych and philosophy, when my parents dropped the boom on me that they were withdrawing funding and ruining my life.

That second part was, to be fair, only implied.

As patient readers know, that was about the worst thing that could have happened to me. I was just starting to truly emerge from my shell when I was kicked out of the nest I had built for myself and forced to return to the town where all the bad shit had happened to me and to the very bedroom I had used to hide from the world when I was not at school.

And that’s when I stopped growing. I managed to pull myself back from the brink of insanity by sheer force of will, but my growth has never resumed.

Until now. Maybe.

But I know another person, a different kind of person, would have reacted differently. They would have rebelled. They would have stormed off to get their own apartment. They would have used the year and a half I had to wait before restarting school to get a job, applying for scholarships, and do whatever else it took to overcome.

But not me. So the question is, what do they have that I don’t?

My answer as of this moment : instinct.

They had instinct pushing them forward, demanding action. driving their decisions. Instincts that told them this could not be allowed to happen and gave them all the anger and spite and other motivations they needed to succeed despite this.

But not I. My early childhood trauma (raped at the age of 4) drove me deep into my own mind and put a thick wall between me and the whole world of the instincts that drive healthy organisms to eat, drink, fuck, and do all the other things required to live.

Instead, I live in an airless vacuum so cold it could flash freeze a live yak in seconds. Whatever instincts I still have can’t operate in that kind of cold.

The circuits are frozen shut. Blood does not pump. Machines break down. Molecular motion itself has died.

That “starting gun”, as it turns out, was instinct.The instinct to live and grow and thrive. The instinct to fight for what you need even if you can’t logically justify it. The urge that makes life go

The instinct without which your life is cold and isolated and lonely because the cure for all those things is following your instincts, and you’re too “smart” for that. .

You god damned fool, you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It occurs to me that I have told people about this idea in person but never really put it into words on this here blog o’ mine.

So here goes :

It’s a very simple idea. I would take the average American news feed and replace every single word that denotes a subgroup of the human race with the word “American”.

It’s simple, but devastating, because it forces the reader to deal with the reality of a news story without any of the social filters that obscure the truth and give people a chance to apply different sets of rules to different groups.

And I am deliberately choosing to use the word “American” as my universal replacer because it’s a magic word for Americans that invokes all their patriotic fervor and makes it impossible for them to discount someone’s humanity.

Here’s an example. Compare these two headlines :

White cop shoots unarmed black teenager

American cop shoots unarmed American teenager

They mean the exact same thing, and yet it’s like they are from different universes. The All American version is far more neutral and makes it impossible to know if the teen “probably deserved it” or not.

It works with political labels too, it’s just a little trickier :

Democratic congressman Joe X proposes new regulations

gets turned into

American legislator Joe X proposes new regulations

Now people don’t know whether they are supposed to agree or not!

Guess they will have to actually read the story and decide for themselves.

On the implementation side of things, in theory it could be done via an automated find and replace. All I would need then is as comprehensive a list of various names for subgroups as I could formulate.

But honestly, I wouldn’t trust it. Automated find and replace schemes have a way of producing funny results and there would always be the chance that I forgot to add some group name to the filter and that defeat the whole point of the exercise.

So I would have to do it manually. Which would be a bit of a pain, but worth it.

The same rule would also apply to any comment sections or forums attached to the site. {{1} No names of races, religions, genders, political affiliations, or sexualities.

But what if that information is vitally important to the story?

If it is that important, it will be obvious from context. And if it’s not obvious from context, then odds are it wasn’t as important as you thought.

But I won’t lie : information is being lost. That’s kind of the point : to get rid of extraneous information and force people to deal with the facts of the matter, without prejudice.

I mean, think about it….in my first example, does it really matter what race the cop is and what race his victim is?

Are you saying there’s a combination of answers to those two questions that would make the cop’s actions more justified? Or less?

That’s the beauty of this idea : it forces people to confront their own bigotry.

It might even reveal some of my own. Shit I didn’t even know was in there.

And that’s fine by my. I make no claims of perfection. Eliminating bigotry has to start with the bigotry within ourselves.

All American News is a powerful tool for helping us do just that.

And I think that can only make the world a better place.

More after the break.

---

People are human

I have been thinking a lot about cynicism lately.

From some people’s point of view, I am an extremely cynical person.

I disagree, of course. I see myself as a realist.

But then, cynics always do.

Nevertheless, I don’t consider myself a cynic because I don’t have a negative opinion of humanity and I don’t claim everything is phony or that everybody is out for themselves only or any of the other beliefs normally associated with cynicism.

In other words, I don’t consider myself cynical because I am neither a pessimist nor a misanthrope. I am, in fact, a humanist.

And it is my ability to see people as they really are, both the good and the bad, that has led me to my humanism.

Because it’s only when you realize what frail, silly, weak, and absurd creatures we are… when you grasps that we’re all children in grown up clothes stumbling through the dark and trying to find the door into happiness – that you understand that nobody is better or worse than anyone else and that it is in the darkness of our confused and needful minds that we are truly united.

So yes, if all you knew of me is that I explain a certain thing as being a product of much simpler and more basic motivations than is overtly obvious, I might seem like a very cynical and even unsympathetic person.

But stick around and you’ll eventually hear me explain some other thing as being the product of much more innocent and blameless motivations than people think.

That’s the thing about being objective in a biased world : viewed from only one side,I seem like a very one-sided person.

And I always strive for objectivity. As Robert Anton Wilson put it, I am one of those people who wants to know what is really going on.

And to people who are used to a more forgiving and negotiable version of reality that is open to being adjusted for your comfort here and there. my view can seem extremely harsh and cold and calculating and heartless.

But I want to know what is really going on because I want to be able to make things better for people and that means knowing how things are right now.

I have a very deep desire to help people, and for me, that means facing the facts, dealing with harsh realities head on. and taking the pragmatic view at all times.

Other people operate on an entirely different kind of reality, and I respect that. I can’t tell you what will work for you. I can only tell you what has worked for me.

And for me, seeing with clarity is exactly what makes me the big soft humanist I am

And that’s the opposite of cynical. Isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] That, I might have to automate if the volume of discourse was high. [[1]]

….this must be a therapy day.

Today’s session went okay. Not a lot of anxiety beforehand, which was nice.

I’ve been getting anxiety attacks before sessions lately. Not severe ones, but bad. I never got them before Covid ^[1] but I get them now.

I think it’s because it involves the phone. I do not get on well with the phone. For someone with severe social anxiety like me, the phone allows people to, in a sense, sound an alarm then “barge in on me” when I least expect it and demand I pull myself together and function socially, thus shattering my little socially isolated haven.

And making a phone call is even worse. Because then it’s me “barging in:” and demanding people’s attention and I always feel like I am imposing on them and wasting their time and that they wish I’d just die.

I am not saying that’s how it is. Of course that’s not the reality of the situation. FRom an objective point of view, it’s clearly insane.

But it is nevertheless how I feel. That’s the stark truth of a mood disorder like depression : it makes you emotionally delusional.

You feel things that aren’t there. Your interpretations of reality are utterly deranged. You think people who love you hate you. You think people are laughing at you when they don’t even know you exist. You think you’re the most horrible misbegotten hunk of steaming human refuse ever shat upon an unsuspecting world when to the rest of the world, you’re just some person like anyone else.

You even view the world as an actively hostile hellscape with a malign intelligence focused on hurting you as much as possible at every opportunity.

I know I sure do.

Not intellectually, of course. On some remote and distant level, I know it’s all madness and that the reality is that the world is just a place and can no more being against me than the peak of Everest can be against me.

But the disease is not so easily disarmed. The distorted emotions are too strong to be subdued by reason’s meager powers.

It’s like there’s a giant with a megaphone screaming “YOU SUCK!” in one ear and a mild mannered Bob Newhart type saying “Um, that…. that’s not actually true. You…you’re fine. You know. Considering. “

Except less adorable.

That’s what lead me to the conclusion that depression is not a disorder one can out-think. It was sheer hubris to ever think it could be.

Like, did I really think that I and I alone was smart and strong enough to find the hidden door out of depression? That I would “figure out” how to escape it when millions others, some no doubt as smart or smarter than me, have failed to do so?

I am ashamed to admit that yes, I did believe that long ego. But no more.

The answers is emotions. And it will always be emotions. Due to how I am constructed I may have to go through a lot of complicated steps (like blogging) to access and process my emotions, but emotions are always king.

And reason is nothing but its helpful but hapless vizier who does its best to rein in the mad king that is depression, but ultimately has no power to stop him.

Didn’t expect this post to get political, but….

More after the break.

---

Dig where it hurts

Was talking to my therapist today about how I go looking for the things I don’t want to talk about because those are the things I want to be talking about.

That’s where the therapeutic pay-dirt is found and where the best deposits of the hurting that heals are layered, and so when I sit down to blog, most days I am prospecting for a topic which will provide the most progress towards wellness I can find.

I really do get caught up in my metaphors, don’t I?

So every day, I am implementing my own version of “leaning in”.

My friends have heard the following explanation, but just in case someone whodoesn’t know me ever reads this :

What I took from all that “lean in” talk a couple years back (in the Before Time) was the notion that when we are hurt, our instinct is to hit the bakes and slow everything down.

But that’s the worst thing you can do because it only prolongs the pain. Like my old buddy Winston Churchill said, “When you’re going through Hell…. keep going!”.

And he was a manic-depressive, so he knew Hell quite well.

The key is to learn to do the opposite – to move in the direction of the pain and thus keep it as short a time in agony as possible.

In other words, just rip the damned bandage off. Stop picking at it.

It’s an approach that is working for me, and it might work for you, but don’t feel bad if it doesn’t. I’m a slightly masochistic gonzo kind of guy who knows, on a deep level, that sometimes suffering is the price we have to pay for healing and growth, and I have more than made peace with that truth.

Now I actively seek the pain that heals.

But I understand that for some people, mild pain over time is truly better than one and a half seconds of total agony. They “hug the baseline” in life by avoiding the extremes, and thus they are never very happy OR very sad.

Extremes are therefore to be avoided at all costs. I understand, I used to be that way myself. It makes perfect sense at the time.

And all I can say to that is that you don’t know the deep pleasure when these long term pains are suddenly ended until you try it for yourself.

Once you give it a try once or twice, you will be as addicted as I am to this liberation.

And for once, it’s an addiction that actually makes you healthier!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Savvy readers will remember that my sister Catherine told me I was “useless” when I was very small because I was slow and clumsy learning physical tasks.

And I don’t hate my sister for this. We were all kids at the time. And Lord knows, our unhappy home gave us all a lot of reasons to lash out.

The real mystery is that we got along as well as we did.

So no, I don’t hate her for telling me I was useless.

But the truth is, I believed her.

Those incidents and others like them, incidents where I got yelled at for trying to help or trying to do things for myself and doing them “wrong” and ones where I was told that “the best way for me to help was for me to stay out of the way^[1]” left me in a position where I couldn’t do anything for myself and felt horribly guilty about it.

It occurs to be just now that there was another path : I could have become spoiled and entitled. I would have become a much worse person and I am glad I didn’t go there, but you have to admit, it would have protected my self-worth and probably led to a more functional (if hard to live with) version of me.

But what really happened is that I became an emotional cripple who was convinced that any attempts he made to look after himself would end in disaster and so all he could do was hope someone else came and did it for him.

Thus, it is yet another part of the childhood baggage I am still dealing with today. It’s the main reason I am such a total slob. It’s why I am sitting here in a filthy bedroom that I never, ever clean because when I even contemplate cleaning up, this crippling fear grabs me and chokes the confidence out of me and makes me wish I hadn’t tried.

Logic be damned, that sad and lonely boy inside me is still convinced that trying to do things himself can only lead to him making things worse and getting in huge trouble for it to boot.

I can feel the waves of condemnation and guilt and helplessness crashing down on me just from thinking and writing about it.

And it seriously impedes one’s ability to grow up, man. Ya know? If you can’t even look after your environment to a minimum level, if you don’t feel competent enough to do even the most basic things, how can you become an adult?

The worst part is that I am that I had and have a learning disability. Something like dyslexia, in that I get the same “hall of mirrors” effect in my head that dyslexics talk about – but not dyslexia because it literally means “bad reading” and I read well,

I read damn well.

So I literally could not have done things faster or better. I got punished for having a learning disability. I spent my life hating myself for having a learning disability.

Even now, I struggle with this because it’s an invisible disability and very hard to explain even for me.

I don’t even know how I would asks for a diagnosis.

But I am through with feeling bad for being broken.

After all,I didn’t ask to be born this way.

I’m just the poor schmuck who has to cope with it.

More after the break.

---

Taking your foot off the accelerator

All right, time to tackle this one.

I’ve sort of mentioned in passing how I have realized that part of how depression manipulates me is to take a mood or emotion that is heading in the direction it wants me to go and ramps up the intensity until it breaks through whatever resistance I have and have no choice but to do what it wants me to do.

The image in my mind is of KITT suddenly accelerating and smashing through a wall.

Only evil. So not KITT, KARR.

And I want that to stop. I want to learn to take my foot off the accelerator and deal with the world in an emotionally real way. It’s a cheap and dirty trick my depression plays on me and I am sick to death of it and I need to stop falling for it pronto.

But it won’t be easy to stop the acceleration. It operates on that deep down level that can’t be directly acted upon by the rational mind.

All you can do is sort of poke around in there like a mechanic working on an unfamiliar engine and try to figure out what connects to what.

Unfortunately, despite knowing that this is not the sort of thing rationality can fix, I only have rational tools at my disposal. So all I can think of is self-monitoring and interrupting the process midway for a sanity check.

I imagine saying to myself,. “STOP. Now what is REALLY going on? Forget the panic and the bad brain chemicals, if you were calm and rational right now, how would you describe the situation?”.

Could work. At the very least,it would give me an opportunity to step back from all the panic coursing through my veins and treat it like a passing affliction, like a coughing fit or high fever, that I can simply ignore while it runs it course, patiently and indulgently letting it do what it needs to do without letting it overwhelm me.

Remember, one of depressions biggest, fattest, favorite lies is that you “have no choice”. You have to do what it says. And it will enforce its will via panic, shame. or whatever else works best on you.

But it’s a lie. You have a choice. You can choose to stay in the game and endure whatever emotional bullshit your depression throws at you. You can do it while staring your depression right in the eyes, daring it to fuck with you.

Keep it up long enough and your demons will fade away, defeated.

And you will have emerged victorious.

And that feels pretty damned good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As a result of my high IQ, I’ve been a giant among pygmies for my entire life.

And like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, I’ve learned to move slow and be very careful in where I choose to step in order to avoid accidentally squishing anyone.

I’ve lived in mortal terror of accidentally harming someone with the vastness of my intellect and my other powers for a very long time, and quite frankly, I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of hunching down so as to not scare people with my giant’s height. I am sick of shielding people from the intensity of my mental electrical field. I am sick of trying to fit in when not only is it not working, it’s absurd to think it ever could.

Even with the best intentions and total dedication to the task, an elephant can’t blend in with the grasshoppers.

And I am sick of feeling bad when my extraordinary intelligence proves inconvenient for people who have never dealt with someone like me – and that’s almost everybody.

You ain’t never had a friend like me.

Most people have no idea how to deal with someone like me, and I have taken the blame for that for far too long.

It started when I was a little kid and the teachers didn’t know what to do with me, Being the little empath that I was, I could tell I frustrated them and stressed them out, and that made me feel bad for being such a problem for them,

But you know what? To hell with that. It is not and was not my fault that I am a strange and powerful creature unlike anyone else you’ve met. I didn’t ask for all this free-range intelligence and mental power. It’s not like I can just turn it off, even if I wanted to.

And at the end of the day, all I really want is the freedom to be myself, on my own terms, just like everybody else.

It’s time for me to stop crouching to hide how much I tower over others and start standing up straight and proud to be the wonderful and unique critter I am.

And if people can’t handle that, tough. It’s not my responsibility to make myself easy to understand and deal with. Neither is it my responsibility to keep from making people feel stupid merely because they are not as bright as me.

And when I say things and people look at me like I am an alien because my point of view and approach is so unlike anyone else’s, that’s not my fault either, and no amount of translation into “their language” is ever going to prevent it.

Because I have a ten dimensional mind in a three dimensional world, and that means I will always see patterns invisible to others and see more of the chessboard than others and thus be a powerful visionary destined to be misunderstood.

That’s what happens when you are way ahead of your time. All you can do is keep expressing your truth and hope the world catches up to you.

I’ve been waiting for the world to catch up with me ever since I was an elementary school student with a university level brain.

Guess I will just keep waiting.

More after the break.

---

On being large

I have spent my entire life being afraid to take up space.

Afraid to exist. Ashamed of using up resources in order to live. Humiliated by the thought that anyone ever had to put up with a monstrosity like me.

Thinking I didn’t deserve to live. That my very existence was an affront to all that is good and pure and right in the world. That in the balance sheet of life I was a massive and completely unjustifiable liability to both myself and the world, one that should be corrected swiftly and permanently.

Hence the suicidal thoughts. At times, only the thought of what a massive blow my death would be to all who love me holds them back.

I have a lot of people who love me, both as Fruvous and as myself, and if I committed suicide, it would tear them up inside. ‘

I could never do that to them.

Besides, I am through with all that pointless and ungrounded shame. It’s just a relic of the past, the unintended result of being born unwanted and resented by all and being far too weak and clueless to realize it and act to correct the situation.

I’m sure my mother and my siblings would swear that they never thought of me as hated burden, a massive inconvenience, or a resented imposition.

And I am sure they never thought those things….. consciously.

But it’s how I was treated, so its what I have to deal with right now. These feelings of unworthiness and rejection and abandonment didn’t come out of nowhere.

As a child, I was, at best, an afterthought. At worst, I was a deeply resented expense and a barely tolerated presence. I never asked to be born, never decided to have needs like any other kid, never wanted more than my fair share of things.

And I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I HAVE NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF.

Repeat until believed.

I am a fully worthy, lovable, wonderful person who many consider to be a definite asset to the world, and I deserve love, respect, compassion, and support as much as anyone else deserves them.

The way I have been treated does not reflect who I am. I never deserved to be treated like an unwelcome guest in my own home. I was a victim of emotional neglect and that is entirely the fault of the people who didn’t want me around.

I am a good boy, god damn it.

And I refuse to be ashamed of my existence any longer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lost my left arm this morning.

The left arm of my glasses, that is.

Probably should have led with that.

Anyhow, the thing just plain fell off, which was quite upsetting. To compound the tragedy, I had the glasses off and saw what, to my bleary eyes, looked like a bit of schmutz on the spot where the arm should connect to the rest of the frame, so I brush it off…only to feel the teeny tiny screw that will be impossible to find on my messy floor and that holds the whole thing together fall off.

Lovely. Well that thing’s gone forever.

In retrospect, the signs were there. The fit on my glasses had been getting worse.

One incident in particular comes to mind. About two weeks ago, I woke up from a nap and put my glasses on like usual, but they felt wrong. Off kilter. I took them off and looked them over as best I could ^[a] and found no obvious issue, so I put them back on and put up with the weird feel of them.

So honestly, I could have seen this coming.

Ironically, this happened on the very day I had planned to finally get around to calling up my eye doctors (with the atrocious name FYIdoctors) and making a long overdue appointment for a full eye exam

You know, glaucoma test, peripheral vision test, pupil dilation, the whole nine yards.

So I googled FYIdoctors (urk) in Richmond, and the only one the official website for the chain says they have in Richmond is way the hell out on Five Road.

But the one I went to last road was at Three Road and Westminster Highway, which is like four blocks from here.

So that set me back on my heels for a while;.

It’s entirely solvable, though. The number for the closer clinic is out there somewhere, I just have to up my Google game.

Been having a super sleepy day too. And it is about to reclaim me.

Son of a bitch.

More after the break.

---

Meeting myself halfway

I have got to start keeping it together better because I only made it to 366 words before the sleep monster dragged me back to bed earlier today and I’m “supposed” to do at least 500 words in the first half of my blog entry.

Hence the name.

Clearly something has destabilized my sleep schedule and the underlying assumption that by time I have lunch (usually between 1 pm and 2 pm) I will be awake enough to do Part One of my day’s blogging is no longer valid.

I’ll give you a second to catch up with that sentence.

I really need to learn to be less prolix.

And to stop using obscure words. Like prolix.

Now I can solve the problem of my sleep schedule not lining up properly in many ways :

1. I could go to bed earlier. Not impossible but I am reluctant. I treasure the hours between finishing watching stuff with Joe and Julian (between 1:30 am and 2 am) and when I go to bed for reals (between 7 am and 8 am). They are the happiest times of my day because all the world around me is asleep and I feel free and relaxed as a result. It’s when I am the least anxious. So that’s out.
2. I could delay lunch/blogging until I am awake enough to finish. No dice, that’s too unstable a schedule. My health is best when I eat at the same times every day.
3. I could divorce lunch from Blogging Part One. Have lunch at the proper time, but let blogging wait till I catch up on sleep. That’s fairly reasonable on paper but the transition would be rough. Still, it would give me more time to hang with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries and be more social in general. So there’s that.
4. I could go back to doing all 1000 words in one go, with supper. I mean, I did that for many years, I could do it again. But I like the two part system. It gives me something to look forward to and two chances for self expression. The things I express in part 1 are unlikely to be what’s on my mind when I do part 2. And I would hate to go back to my whole day being a wasteland of entropic ennui up until 7 pm or so every day. The two part system stays.
5. I could just learn to accept that part one isn’t necessarily going to be 500 words or more any more. Make peace with the new reality and stop treating it like a disaster and a failure and see it instead as a natural adjustment to my routine that serves the high purpose of making my life match what is going on inside me instead of trying to work it the other way around.

Those are the options I can think at this moment. No doubt there are many more.

You know, I am a much more competent and resourceful person than I normally give myself credit for. Sure, I have spacial and visual issues, but I can handle them no problem if I stay calm and use all this mental muscle to either circumvent obstacles or, if that’s not possible, move them out of my way.

It all has to do overcoming your negative bias enough to believe that you can and will overcome your problems and succeed despite what all your excuses tell you.

That’s why you have to murder those fucking excuses. They are poison pills that kill you by giving you permission to give up when you haven’t even tried yet.

I’m not saying it will be easy. In fact, it will probably be one of the hardest things you ever do because those excuses have shielded you from the world for a long time.

Whenever the world tried to wake you up and drag you out into the light, like a squid squirting ink you deployed an excuse and swam away free.

But now you know this to be true, and that means that you now have two choices :

1. Cut the excuses loose and learn to grow again, or
2. Decide you’re happier being depressed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So very sleepy. But what else is new?

At least my long dessert-free period will be over soon. Patient readers will recall that I didn’t get to do my usual Sunday shopping last week because Joe’s car had a flat tire and so we didn’t go anywhere.

Then I ordered groceries online from Sav-on, only to have a bunch of stuff not show up.

:Like most of my sugar free cookie order.

So I haven’t had my usual sugar free cookies since Wednesday afternoon, and let me tell you, it’s been rough.

I even considered doing a whole new Sav-On order just to get my desserts, but the minimum order is $40, and that’s a lot of cookies.

I really miss my little indulgences at the end of each meal. Pleasure is important and I have really missed my treats.

Luckily, as far as I know, Joe’s car is fine as we will be shopping like usual tonight, and I will finally get my frigging cookies et al.

And life will be sweet again.

---

Otherwise, life has been video games. As usual.

Finished with my incarnation as a Bosmer (wood elf) archer. That was fun. Got to be all badass with crossbows, which is always a plus, because I love crossbows.

They are so damn cool! Like everything that is cool about bows combined with everything that is cook about guns.

They even go ka-chick like a shotgun!

And I forced myself to keep playing till I got to level 30 and had 300 exhibits in my Legacy of the Dragonborn museum.

Usually I start getting the urge to start over as a different character build around level 25 and don’t make it to level 30.

What can I say, I get bored fighting and exploring the same way for so long.

But I am trying to be a tad less twitchy. After all, you don’t know what happens next unless you stick around to find out.

To wit, I am going to stick with my current incarnation, a human necromancer, at least until I get to level 40.

Seeing as the mod I am centering this playthrough around only starts at level 30 and is notoriously labor intensive, I will probably go way further than that.

I look forward do it. I’ve done the mod, Undeath, once before and it is a crazy amount of work and quite hard. In that sense,it’s crazy that I am doing it again.

But what the hell.I need more challenge in my life. Obstacles to overcome, pitfalls to avoid, crazy situations to somehow survive.

Ideally, this would come from actually doing something productive, but baby steps.

Some day, these cage bars will dissolve, and I will be free,

Until then, I have my games.

More after the break.

---

Depression is a luxury

I know that sounds awful. Let me explain.

Depression is a luxury only in the sense that it is only possible because in themodern world we are so divorced from the struggle for survival that we can “afford” to be depressed and do nothing and live in quiet despair.

If the situation was such that it was get up and do things or die, depressives like myself would find their motivation eventually. The human brain only gives us the luxury of depression when all out basic needs are met.

When they are not, a much older and more powerful part of our brains takes over we feel as hungry or thirsty or tired or whatever enough to fix the situation.

Despair is also a luxury. You can see that in the super happy and hopeful songs from the Great Depression (ha).

Back then, the whole world was so dark and terrible place that despair was no longer an options. You had to grab on to whatever hope and joy and inspiration you could find because the alternative was to lay down and die.

And we’re seeing something similar now. We live in dark and desperate times when it seems like the shadows have grown darker and hopes dimmer than any other point in the lifetimes of people alive today.

And people are responding by making videos where increasing numbers of people. each in their own little Zoom window, sing songs of hope and inspiration because god damn it, that’s what we all need right now.

Now is not the time for depressing music about depression. And I say that as someone who tends to gravitate to it.

Here’s my fave recent example :

And from way way closer to home (literally), my cousin Dale and friends!

This is what the world needs : hope, togetherness, the sense that we are in this together, that the fundamentals of humanity are still here for us, and the message, unspoken, that we will get through all this together.

And it gets me thinking about my own depression. It makes me wonder if I might be a happier and healthier person if my life had been harder. Hard enough so that I, too, had needed to find my hope and strength in order to beat back the darkness before it consumed me for reals.

Instead, I have languished in the doldrums of a sad but easy life. My survival has never been threatened. I have lived off others for my entire adult life. I have never had to worry about where my next meal was coming from. I have never had to choose between bills or rent. I have never had to fight to survive.

So I am “free” to play video games all day getting absolutely nowhere in life. I had my pilot light snuffed when my parents took me out of university. All that boundless optimism that gets people moving when they are young died, and it’s still dead.

There is nothing to galvanize me into motion but my own weak self.

And I am working on it. Some day. I will finally bang the rocks together hard enoughto create a spark and get me moving again.

Because I don’t have to be that sad and forsaken little boy any more.

I can grow up. I can be a man. I can be a real person.

I can find the strength to grow again.

it just takes a little time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I miss my Dad.

I guess he’s been dead long enough now that I can stop pretending that his death does not effect me. It does. He was my father, and he’s dead, and I miss him.

I can even start forgiving him for what a crappy dad he was and how his anger issues clouded my childhood and left me without any real father figure growing up.

Because that’s the thing about angry parents. Their children do not trust them and can’t relax around them so they can’t really connect with them and that means that, bottom line, they are not there for their kids and do not fill their role psychologically speaking.

Like my three siblings, I was afraid of him for most of my childhood. Later on, when I was older and he had mellowed out some, we got along okay. I liked watching The Nation and The Journal on CBC with him. We had a lot of good conversations about politics and the world and such.

And we went on that trip across the USA and then back up north into Ontario to see his family way back in 88, and had lots of good conversations along the way, too.

Like a lot of angry parents, he was a pretty good guy when he wasn’t mad. He was always helping the neighbors with this n’ that. He was charismatic in a very down to earth way. As a kid, I would watch him talk to people he’d run into when we were out shopping or whatever and marvel at how easy and friendly he was and how easily he seemed to connect with absolutely anybody, from welfare bums to the Mayor himself,and treated them all the same.

As a socially isolated and anxious kid, this was beyond being a superpower and was more like some kind of holy magic.

Looking back, I wish I had tried harder to connect with him and understand him. So much of my childhood was spent in a kind of defensive crouch when he was around that connecting with him was the last thing on my mind.

I mostly wanted to avoid him.

But looking back, I can see how much that hurt him. And I regret that the way the family dynamic worked out made him the enemy.

I mean sure, it was his own fault, but still. I wish it had been better.

And perhaps this is my secular messiah complex talking, but I can’t help but wonder if I could have saved him. If I could have penetrated his armor and show him kindness and understanding and helped him get through some of his issues so that he could have calmed down and been a happier, healthier father to all of us.

Probably not. But it’s a nice thought.

Obviously, it’s far too late now. He’s gone and I will never see him or talk with him or watch the news with him ever again.

And that hurts. It hurts like hell.

Yes, I remember Larry.

And I miss him.

More after the break.

---

The Other Larry

Yeah, I remember him too.

Time for me to pay for the sins of my father in hopes of laying them to rest or at least do a better job of burying them this time.

We’ll go chronologically, with him leaving poor little four year old me me naked and alone in a rather large shower stall at a place called the Spa.

In terms of consequences, that’s easily the worst. Being raped by a stranger at the age of 4 is the event that shattered me. It turned a happy, bright, gregarious, slightly spoiled little kid into the shivering, defenseless wreck I still am today. If there was one event in my lfie that I could erase, that would be it.

But the degree of his culpability is impossible to determine. It could be that he literally only left me alone for a few minutes to get something and my rapist saw this and made his move in that brief time.

Or it could be that it was the 70’s, sexual license was at an all time high. and my Dad sacrificed me to this man’s cock in hopes of socially advancing.

Or anything in between.

Moving on. there is a childhood spent walking on eggshells due to his impatience and rage. The biggest manifestations of this were his dinner table tirades where he would rip into Anne or David and verbally savage them while my sister Catherine and I sat there feeling helpless and my mother cried.

Well, I eventually stopped being helpless and learned to fight back with words and eventually chase him away from the dinner table entirely.

And I resent that he made me do that. As with the bullying I endured, I feel like it took something from me and left me a more savage and brutal person as a result.

That’s how you truly lose your innocence : when you have to become more of an animal just to survive.

And finally, his masterstroke of selfishness, taking me and my brother out of university so that he could take early retirement instead of sticking it out for a few more years so my bro and I could graduate.

And the worst part is, I was so desperate for my parents’ approval and so accustomed to sacrificing everything for their convenience that I agreed to it.

With a smile on my face.

Thus abandoning both my own future (and my brothers) and the only real friends I had ever had up unto that point.

And then proceeded to have a nervous breakdown that I still haven’t recovered from and it has been 25 years.

That’s what happens when something hurts you so bad it breaks your ability to care for yourself or look out for your own interests.

So yeah. The case of me versus the late Larry Donald Bertrand is pretty damning.

But he’s dead now. This world no longer has him in it. He is gone forever and he can’t ever hurt me again.

And warts and all, he was still my dad.

And I miss him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once more, I claw my way to the surface of consciousness so that i can do my best to blog my little heart out despite being sleepy.

Whatever. Here goes :

Been thinking a lot about my voice lately, in both the literal and figurative sense.

I have a very powerful voice. With my verbal skills, my intellect, my power of presence, my keen analytical mind, and my deep insight into how things really work, i can express myself in ways that have a powerful effect on people.

So add that to the list of riches I have had in my vault for years, just waiting for me to finally have the courage to spend them.

And there is so much I want to say to the world. So much I want to contribute. So much heinous bullshit going around that I could totally destroy in a minute if only I was given a opportunity to deliver my message.

But opportunities aren’t given. They’re taken. Or created. At the very least, I would have to be in line for opportunity with my hand out instead of crouching behind my duck blind like I am an alien anthropologist studying humans in secret.

There has to be a way out of this prison cell of mine. And I will find it when I am strong enough to let the world in so I can let myself out.

Right now,I am pondering where my best point of entry to launch my commentary campaign. Should I be making videos? That would certainly maximize the power of my message because everything I say would be amplified by my charisma etc.

But videos are also a lot more work, and I might need things to be as easy as possible, at least at first. So I am also looking for venues for my just typing in my comments on things like everyone else does.

But I, of course, will do it better.

I just want people to listen to me. And I have a deep paranoid fear that no matter how perfectly and powerfully I express myself, people will just block me out of their minds and ignore me rather than have to deal with me.

So I will just have to make myself impossible to ignore.

I have a good loud voice that carries well and I am perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to get people to pay attention.

This includes nudity.

More after the break.

Addicted to relief

Been pondering the connection between being a loser and being addicted to that rush of relief you get when you give up or give in and all the tension of the situation vanishes leaving behind those sweet, sweet endorphins to reward us for failing ourselves.

That’s what it all boils down to, really. It’s classic short term thinking on a neurochemical level – going for relief now at the expense of anything that might have come if you had stayed in the game.

And the thing is, if you do this often enough, and consistently enough, you never learn what would happen if you hadn’t given up, and so you never get any evidence that contradicts the loser narrative of having “no choice” but to give up, and you are free to make up whatever sour grapes type reason why it never would have worked without any fear of it ever being proven wrong.

It’s a pretty sweet deal, really. Oh, except it ruins your life, condemns you to being a total loser, and makes you abjectly miserable most of the time.

But otherwise, ya know….. score.

The road out, therefore, requires us to not only endure the stress, fear, anxiety, or whatever other emotions our loser programming is deliberately amplifying in order to bring us to the breaking point as soon as possible, we also have to resist pushing the panic button and having it all be over right away leaving us to bask in the glow of relief.

Giving up feels good. That’s why it’s so popular.

The first step in overcoming anything is becoming aware of it, which you and I now are.

The next step is recognizing and accepting that you play an active role in your own defeat. You are choosing to lose when you press that panic button, whether you are conscious of it or not.

This contradicts the loser programming message that you had “no choice” but to give in. So I understand if you are upset right now and want to contradict me.

But I ask you this : if not giving in meant you saved your mother’s life, could you do it? What if it won you a million bucks? What then?

You’d be able to do it then, right? So clearly, you have a choice. That loser narrative of not having a choice is obviously self-serving bullshit. Propaganda put out by the loser programming in your brain in order to justify itself.

So own it. Admit to yourself that you have a choice and that those choices have resulted in the life you live now, and that you are responsible for those choices.

After all, if someone who has hurt you claimed they didn’t have a choice but to give in to their urge to do it, you’d call bullshit, right?

And yes, accepting this truth will fucking hurt. I’m processing it right now and it is not pleasant. It feels like part of me is dying and my world is falling apart.

And it’s all true. But the part of me that is dying is the sick weak loser part of me, and good riddance. And my world might be falling apart, but that’s good too, because it clears the way for a newer, better world to replace it.

Growth is often painful. So is healing. The voice of despair can be very persuasive when it tell you that said pain means it’s to worth it.

But it is. It totally is. And if you just stick with it long enough, you will agree.

That’s enough for today, I think.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.