I am sick and tired of surrendering all the time. ^[1]

Because that’s not the real me. I’m a fighter. I’m a scrapper. I don’t take crap from anyone. When I activate, watch the fuck out, because now all my intellect and verbal skills have been crystallized into their most deadly form and it’s all being aimed at whatever asshole has pissed me off.

So why should I let this asshole that calls itself “my depression” get away with fucking me over? Why should I surrender to it when I should be drawing on all my latent rage and my naturally combative nature to fight tooth and nail for my own happiness?

So I am giving up on giving up. No retreat, no surrender. From now on, the only way out of the situation is over the dead bodies of my enemies.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. Mostly.

The urge to flee and hide is some major league mojo and too powerful a force to merely discard and suppress.

So the idea is to harness that by taking retreat and surrender off the table, so that the only way to get the escape and relief I crave like heroin is to deal with the problem and by opposing end it.

Looked at that way, becoming stronger and healthier and such seems way more doable. It’s not a matter of becoming an entirely different kind of person.

It’s just a matter of redirecting my existing emotional energies into something more conducive to my enjoying life.

But it does mean doing something I have been avoiding doing for my entire adult life : becoming a harder man.

Harder. Tougher. More calloused. Less sensitive. More aggressive. Less passive. Better equipped for survival and fighting to get what I want. No longer a sad little boy hiding from the terrifying real world in video games.

Instead becoming a big strong man who is ready, willing, and able to use the extraordinary gifts with which he is blessed to squeeze some goddamned happiness out of this rotten old world and actually enjoy living for a change.

It’s like I have had a million dollars in the bank all this time, but I was living like a pauper because the power of the money and the associated responsibility scared me.

Well fuck that noise. It’s time for me to use my superpowers to enrich my life.

I am not the helpless abandoned child I imagine myself to be.

I’m a balls out full on fucking wizard, and I am sick of waiting for the world to come find me in my social duck blind and verify my specialness.

I am ready to go out there and prove it, in giant flaming capital letters. I am goddamned amazing and I deserve a much better life than that sad little boy can provide.

Don’t worry, kid. You’re coming with me. And we’re going to find a place that is safe and warm where we can be happy.

Even if we have to build it ourselves.

More after the break.

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Today was Therapy Thursday, and I did my best, in my sideways stumbling way, to put across my recent thoughts about myself, my powers, my ego, my worries about going insane or turning into an asshole to my shrink.

And it’s that last bit I am going to talk about : turning into an asshole That’s the other bugaboo my depression uses to keep me under its big fat thumb.

So when I try to think about freeing myself from its stranglehold so I can finally be free to grow, my depression, in addition to the mega-messiah demigod delusions of grandeur type thoughts, also feeds me id fueled arrogant rage thoughts about how much better I am than other people.

And that’s a more realistic worry, to be honest. A lot of people (especially men) in my position react to a world that doesn’t understand them and sometimes actively hurts them for being smart by defensively flipping the script and saying “I’m not inferior to YOU…YOU are inferior to ME!”.

And I can feel those stirrings within me. Heck, the stuff I wrote above the break today smells strongly of that kind of thinking.

But just like I said I might have to go a little crazy in order to become sane, I might have to become at least somewhat of an asshole to be able to learn to love myself.

I don’t want that to be true. One of the only virtues I can claim is that I am one heck of a nice fellow. A real sweetie. Sensitive, caring, understanding, lovable ol’ Fru.

But is that the real me? Yes and no. None of it is faked, those are real motions and I really do care about people, and care very deeply.

But that’s not the entire me. It’s a curated version of me. I am beginning to realize that I am super good at showing a selected facet of myself while keeping the gem its hidden in the dark.

Put another way, I wear a lot of masks. And they are all me in the sense that he who makes and wears the masks never changes. Only the masks change.

I think the most frightening thing, however, is that while I have that mask on, that mask is me. I am one with the mask.

That’s why I occasionally talk about having “modes”. To me this is second nature, but I suppose to a more fixed person it might seem like I am a different person in each mode.

But no. I’m just reflecting the light using the facet of myself that the situation prompts.

Somewhere inside me is a little director who decides which facet to use at which moment. The one that reflects the situation best, I suppose.

Anyhow. Dragging myself back to the point, none of those facets is the entire me, and in order to become whole, wholesome, and sane, I am going to have to gather together all these little compartmentalized parts of myself and knit them into a whole and entire me.

And he/me will still be a heck of a nice guy.

But he/me will be a lot of other things too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God damn am I sick of having to swim upstream and uphill against a raging river of sleep just to blog every day.

I am spacing out for long periods of time as I try to blog this. It is so hard to concentrate. I feel like I am underwater and being tugged back and forth by the waves.

All I want to do is go back to sleep and hope to wake up more refreshed. Seems unlikely to me at the moment but I know that’s irrational.

Doesn’t seem like I have much choice, to be honest.

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And make it double

(in a sad loser voice) Turns out I’m double depressed.

I stumbled across the term, double depression, yesterday and onviously I just had to look it up because WTF could that possibly mean?

Turns out it’s a complication of dysthymic depression. I’ve known I was a dysthymic depressive for decades now. I think of it as “long term depression” because instead of feeling really horrible for short periods of time followed by a recovery period, a dysthymic depressive feels pretty crappy all the time.

That’s a vast oversimplification, but it gets the idea across.

Double depression happens when the depression of a dysthymic depressive like myself worsens into a major depressive episode, The major depressive episode is superimposed over the dysthymic depression, thus “double depression”.

I dunno. Seems fishy to me. Why call the worsening of a disorder “double” that disorder? Seems both arbitrary and unnecessary to me.

It also smacks of oneupmanship. Like it’s something someone came up with in an argument over who was sicker.

“I’m way more depressed than you are!”
“Oh yeah? Well I am DOUBLE depressed!”

I don’t think I have ever had a major depressive episode. I’ve been extremely depressed, of course, and I have been suicidal for long periods of time.

But somehow I just kept muddling through. Never attempted suicide, never ended up in the hospital or the asylum.

And I would like to think that this is because despite all my problems, I have a deep well of inner strength that keeps me going no matter what, albeit at a very low level.

And that’s true. But that’s not all.

The stark and brutal truth is that I don’t fall into major depression because I know there is nobody there to catch me. I don’t attempt suicide because I know there’s nobody there to stop me. Never tried to get myself checked into the hospital or the asylum because I knew they would just ignore me and dismiss me like everybody else.

This is what happens when you grow up completely alone.

I more or less raised myself. I got myself to and from school alone. I did all my school work alone. I suffered and was depressed as hell alone.

I did it all alone. At this point, it’s hard for me to imagine anything else.

They say suicide attempts are a cry for help.

Well there’s no point to a cry for help if you don’t think anyone will hear it.

If I attempted suicide, I’d just die.

More after the break.

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Burnishing my godhood

Welp, time to go on a big ego trip, I guess.

The truth is that I am vastly more powerful than most people. I have enough electrical potential in my talents, my intellect, and my charisma to power New York City. By all the standard measurements (read : reptile brain thinking), I am superior to most of the human race, at least on those levels.

And I have known this since I was five years old, and yet I have never been able to handle the idea because of the awe-inspiring level of responsibility implied.

And so it has never really been integrated into my concept of myself. It’s a lot less like a part of me and a lot more like something I own in that sense.

And the thing is, as this attached but separate part of myself, it scares the hell out of me. In some ways, I am afraid to even touch it. I have a deep and terrible fear of accidentally hurting people with it and that means I don’t use it nearly as much as someone with ambition and drive would use it.

This has to change. I accept that now. I have to move to a place where I enjoy and use my powers instead of fearing and ignoring them, both because that will be far healthier for myself for dozens of reasons and because the world might just need me.

That’s the ego trip part of all this. I have let my fear of falling to the delusions of grandeur seemingly implied by my abilities for far too long.

It’s clear that this fear, while not entirely ungrounded, is mostly used by my depression to keep me in its icy cold grip. It is a manifestation of a generalized fear of the world, people, having to be a grownup, and the like.

And it might just be that I have to go a little crazy in order to finally be sane. That I have to let my ego balloon go as high as it can so it can eventually come back down to a normal, natural, sustainably sane level.

And there are worse things to be than a raving egomaniac.

Like being a sad depressed loser with the powers of a god, for instance.

This transition won’t be easy, though. There will be a lot of scary thoughts about being superior to others and them being lucky to know me and all that kind of rot that I will have to wade through. Thoughts I normally suppress as hard as I can but that I can now see are blocking the path to my self-actualization.

So what the hell. Look at me, the smartest man in the world. Gasp as I demolish the delusions of evil people and speak powerful truths that rock global consciousness to its very roots and usher in a whole new era of enlightened policies and progress.

Also, I want money. Buy my stuff!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Online grocery shopping edition.

So, due to recent complications^[1], I ended up ordering my weekly groceries online instead of getting them in person (so to speak) Sunday night like usual.

Ordered them Monday morning. Could have ordered them as soon as I got the news that Joe’s tire was flat so we wouldn’t be going anywhere Sunday night, but it took some time to adjust to the disruption to my routine.

I was quite pleased to find that there was a delivery slot open the same day. I had feared that I would not be able to get delivery until Tuesday or even Wednesday.

And once I warmed up to the idea,I had fun shopping for my stuff online. It’s all the fun of grocery shopping in person, but without all that walking.

The sad truth is that shopping on Sunday nights is the most exercise I get all week.

On the other hand, I am unable to walk without pain.

But that’s a story for another time.

So I ordered my groceries from my usual Sav-On Foods (Ironwood) then eagerly awaited their delivery between 5 pm and 7 pm. They arrived via some fella named John and I happily started putting everything away.

Only to realize that a ton of stuff wasn’t there.

I had thought it was weird that there was only three bags.

And it was some of the best stuff too. Two thirds of My sugar free cookies were missing, as were my two little bags of Russell Stover sugar free chocolates (mini peanut butter cup and mini mint patties) that I had bought as a treat.

My first thought was that John had missed a bag. But then I saw that my order had come with a receipt of sorts (two printed out pages stampled together) and saw that a half dozen of things I ordered were marked “the following items were out-of-stock and were not substituted”.

Which kind of begged the question of when I would be getting either them or at least a refund of what I paid for them.

Oh, and they had also substituted regular vanilla wafer cookies for my sugar free vanilla wafer cookies, and that was clearly unacceptable as I am diabetic.

:Looks like I will have to disable substitutions in the future.

So I sent Sav-on HQ a rather snippy little email about all this as by this point I was a rather miffed consumer.

Got a reply a few hours later saying that a) they were sorry about the bad substitution and would be refunding me for that but that b) I had not been charged for the things that had not shown up.

And it was only then that I remembered being told when I ordered that I would only be charged for my order when it actually went through the checkout.

Obviously, then, if my guy John didn’t find a thing, it never got scanned and I was never charged for it.

So, d’oh! Once more I jump to conclusions and end up with egg on my face.

C’est la vie.

More after the break.

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What we are missing

As far as I can tell, what is missing in people with depression and present in people without it is a system – a mechanism – that supplies whatever emotional energies are needed in order to maintain a minimum of positive mental health when the individual is not getting them from outside sources such as reality.

This is not to say, of course, that normal people are happy all the time. That’s why it is important to stress that the purpose of this mechanism is to maintain a minimum level of happiness, wellbeing, and so on.

It’s meant to keep you out of the shadows, not to bathe you in constant sunshine.

This mechanism – let’s call it “the sunshine machine”, or TSS – operates almost entirely subconsciously. It has to do so because otherwise the powerful truth-seeking instincts of the conscious mind would be asking it a lot of awkward questions and forcingit to justify itself when the whole point of the TSS is to operate without the need for any reasoning, justification, or external input.

Thus the depression found in recovering truth idolaters like myself. By prioritizing truth above all – veritas uber alles – I was unknowingly sabotaging my own mental wellbeing by keeping my own TSS from doing its job.

The human mind truly does need the ability to fool itself in order to be healthy. Reality may or may not provide all the emotional vitamins and nutrients a healthy mind needs.

And when it doesn’t, we absolutely need to be able to manufacture them ourselves, and the truth be damned if it gets in the way.

Explains a lot of thing, dunnit?

Like religion and faith. Installed early enough in life, religion can act as this TSS precisely because faith requires no proof – it is chosen, not proven.

Thus, the conscious mind is bypassed. And it’s my belief (ha) that this vital connection can remain active even after the faith itself is abandoned.

What matters is whether you have a TSS in your brain, not which kind it is.

But this also explains why it’s so impossible to talk about religion. The very nature of a TSS means it cannot be rationally examined. None of them can survive that.

And yet, and I cannot stress this enough, these religious beliefs are still a deep and fundamental part of people’s psyches.

And this is what you are attacking if you attack someone’s faith. Even if all you are doing is asking innocently logical questions, you are attacking the very core of what keeps their psyches afloat despite a sea of troubles.

Remember that before you judge and mock.

Now the next obvious quest is : is it possible to build a working TSS in the mind of a depressed human being and thus potentially cure them?

I’d like to think it is. But if it’s possible, it would be via means not accessible via our usual conscious minds.

For obvious reasons.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, an update : ordered my groceries for this week this morning. Was pleasantly surprised to see there were delivery slots open for today.

So some time between 5 pm and 7 pm, my goodies shall arrive.

Now I just have to make sure I am awake at the time despite a lack of caffeine in my bloodstream. No groceries means no Diet Coke to keep me going.

And judging by how tired I am right now, I am probably going to spend the rest of the afternoon asleep at the very least.

Guess I had better set an alarm just in case.

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It occurred to me last night that deep down, I am not at all worried about whether or not I can succeed in the world.

After all, I am one ridiculously talented and intelligent person. I am confident that if I could just get my work and myself in front of the right people, they would realize how amazing I am and want me to make them a whole lot of money.

I would, of course, be all too happy to oblige.

So really, it’s a matter of when, not if. When I am mentally healthy enough, I will find my way to the world outside my mind, and enjoy success there.

And that makes it easier to make it through the day for yours truly by giving me a destination pulling me forward through the miasma of my fears.

Life is always better when you have something to look forward to. And having the faith in my abilities to believe that I will succeed makes the whole prospect of trying seem a whole lot less scary.

Something to keep in mind as I make it through the days, one day at a time.

All I have to do is make it out that big ol door.

Wish me luck.

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Half an ass

It’s better to do things badly than to not do them at all.

No really…. it is.

As far as I am concerned, perfectionism is an enemy of art. People get to feeling like if it isn’t perfect, it’s not worth doing, and that’s insane.

Because how will you ever achieve perfection if you don’t do it badly and learn from it?

I feel the need to tell this to myself again and again because I am in the process of murdering all my excuses and this is one of the big ones.

The desire to make videos that were better than my previous work rapidly mutated into the feeling that there was no point in trying because my work wouldn’t be good enough.

You just can’t give depression an inroad like that.

So I hereby give myself permission once more to half-ass it. To do a quick and sloppy job. To slap things together however, throw it onto the internet in one form or another, and call it a day.

Because at the end of the day. I would rather produce a ton of half-assed bullshit than absolute no videos at all.

Some of us, I think, are simply not meant to work on things until we can’t think of any more ways to make it better. I envy the people who can function that way because I can’t. I have to operate on waves of inspiration and get the most out of the energy while I have it and when the wave crashes, so do I.

And then, I truly never want to see the goddamned thing again. It is worse than dead to me. It’s grosser than yesterday’s toilet paper to me. It has to go.

And I think I know why. Part of being the overflowing fountain of creativity that I am is that anything that gets in the way of new ideas must die, die, die.

And nothing gets in the way of new ideas like old ideas.

That’s what kills and disposes of the thing once I am done with it. It is dead to me forever, and nothing can bring it back.

And I say this knowing how crazy it sounds. From an innocently logical point of view, there would seems to be nothing keeping me from rewriting a story I wrote before so that I can do a better job this time.

And I am slowly getting there. The idea doesn’t seem as monstrous as it once did. And I have found myself wanting another crack at things I wrote before.

\So I am very carefully nursing this little flame of transcendence in hopes that one day, it will turn me into a real writer who can just keep hammering away at the thing till it’s finally as good as I can make it.

But the going is mighty slow. I don’t feel like I will be there any time soon.

Till then, Plan B is to explore and try to figure out what makes me this way and how to be a good writer despite this handicap.

The only answer I have for that is “find an editor”. If there was someone who read the thing, pointed out all the flaws, and give it back to me, I could then fix the flaws and pass the thing back and forth with the person until we both agree it’s good.

And this has been known to happen. All it would take is an editor or other gatekeeper who thought I was talented enough to be worth the effort to teach.

Quality ore, from which an amazing author could be smelted and forged.

Dunno where I could find someone like that. But they are out there, I am sure.

I suppose the logical route would be to submit my stuff to lots of different places in hopes that one of the gatekeepers of said places takes an interest in me.

Either that, or I need a bitter, brutal rival who will seize any imperfection of my work and use it against me, so I have to make it airtight.

That seems much more stressful, but I am desperate.

However I get there, I want to become a real writer one day.

And after that, maybe I will even become a real person.

Dare to dream, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I mean, sure, physically I was a child once. Can’t deny that.

But I never had a childhood, so how could I have truly been a child?

So many of the things that were supposed to happen in one’s childhood just plain never happened to me. My intensely lonely childhood was so much worse than lonely.

No friends. No peer group. No hanging out together. No social exploration. And when the time came, no sexual exploration either. No learning to get along with others. No learning to resolve disputes. No learning to make and keep friends. No learning to fend for myself. No learning to rely on others, either,

Just this vast aching void where my childhood was supposed to go.

And yet, I was too shy and skittish to let anyone know how sad I was. If an adult had cared enough to ask, I would have brightly told them I was fine.

Not true in the slightest, obviously. But it was what they wanted to hear. And it got me out of the scary situation.

Not that they would have done anything about it if I had told them. People just plain did not want to deal with me. They made that crystal clear.

And yet, they were only responding to the signals I put out. Because like I have discussed previously, I would start out fine but then the urge to flee would set in and I would start putting out “go away” signals while being superficially engaged.

And sure, it’s easy to say someone “should” have helped me anyway. But I was elusive, evasive, super intelligent, very strange, very stubborn, and damned near impossible to reach on my best days.

So realistically speaking, that “someone” would have had to be one amazing person. Almost superhumanly so.

Truth is, they ignored me because I wanted to be ignored. As much as I wanted people to notice me and accept and love me, I also wanted them to leave me the fuck alone.

This is what happens to sad little monkeys like me that ended up raised in isolation. We fear and loathe our fellow monkeys at the same time we desperately want them to accept us and lets us into their tribe.

What can I say, we’re some seriously fucked up monkeys. Now, because of my own fucked up monkey issues, I have to go take a nap.

More after the break.

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Hello monkey wrench

And speaking of monkeys…. got a largish monkey wrench thrown into my life today.

Turns out one of Joe’s tires went flat. A slow leak is suspected. This being Sunday, his Honda dealership is closed, so he can’t get it fixed today, which means the usual Sunday night activities are not gonna happen.

That means no going to the McD’s at Ironwood and hanging with Felicity at an appropriately socially distant….. distance, and that is sad.

But it also means that I don’t get to do my usual Sunday shopping, and that is a huge deal because I am completely out of all of my usual supplies.

So no diet pop, no big things of various kinds of trail mix, no sugar free cookies.

That’s a pretty major disruption in my placid yet vapid little life, and I am not happy about it at all.

But I’m not that upset about it either.

Partly, that’s because I have been dealing with the issue in little bursts, as if I have locked the potential panic away in a closet and every now and then I open the door a crack to let some of the anxiety out then slam the door again.

It also helps, though, that it’s nobody’s fault. Excrement occurs. Sudden flat tires are one of the hazards of modern life and railing at the forces of fate rarely makes things any better anyhow.

I mean, it’s fun sometimes, and quite cathartic if done properly.

But it doesn’t help.

So I am going to do my best to take this in stride. Sure, it sucks, but this too shall pass, and in a way it’s good for me to have something to deal with that shakes things up a little and forced me to actually deal with things instead of sleepwalking through life.

Unsurprisingly, I am feeling shaky and insecure right now. That’s natural for a lover of stability and predictability like me.

I mean, I want novelty and change in my media, not my life.

But that will pass too. No need to make more of these feelings than is warranted. This incident has no broader meaning and there is no lesson to be learned.

Sometimes, the best thing to do with emotions is just sit with them and hold their hands and LISTEN while they express themselves.

We monkeys have a tendency to think the intensity of the emotion always matches the severity of the situation, but that’s not true.

Trust me. I have done a lot of freaking out over things that don’t matter. And worse, I have ignored a lot of things that I should have taken more seriously.

And so it goes.

Now, our emotions can convey a lot of important information, especially about our own mental wellbeing and what we need to do to preserve it.

That’s a lesson I am ever so slowly and gracefully learning every day right now.

But people have a tendency to substitute emotion for reasoning.

And I can see why, Whatever the situation, emotion is always first on the scene. We feel about things way sooner than we can think about them.

And thinking is hard. We don’t want to do it. When the adrenaline hits, the last thing we want to do is slow down to think things through.

And that’s fine.

What isn’t fine is when people apply that to the rest of life. When their world view is based around whatever generates a strong enough emotional response to knock out their reasoning capacities so they can feel certain.

Generally, this revolves around two of our most primal emotions, ones we share with every single form of life on the planet : rage, and fear.

Such a person is soothed by things which make them angry or scared and enraged by things which ask them to think.

And that’s conservatism today in a nutshell, really.

And now you know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, a quick update : got my website working, Purging my cache worked.

So yay me on that, at least.

Now i am here trying to blog through a haze of sleepiness. As usual.

And I am so very sick of this bullshit. Every goddamned day, I have to fight the fog just to blog. Knowing I would rather be asleep, but having to make the words instead.

I have pondered some solutions. Going to bed earlier might work. That way, I would stand a chance of being done with sleep by the time to lunch and blog came around.

And that’s easy to say when I am super sleepy and it’s daytime, quite another when it’s the wee hours of the morning, I am fully awake and aware and having fun playing whatever video game I have on the go at the time.

No guarantee that I won’t still be sleepy come blog and lunch (blunch?) time either.

Another idea is to separate lunch and blogging. Eat at the usual time (around 1 pm) then go back to bed and blog whenever I wake up again, hopefully more awake.

And that’s not entirely out of the question, but I have eaten while I blogged for so long that ti would definitely feel very weird to just eat.

Not impossible, of course. After all, that’s what I do for breakfast. I never blog during breakfast and I seem to handle that just fine.

So I will think about it.

Of course, my sleeping pill, Mirtazapine, plays a role. Never thought of myself as the sort of crazy person who goes off his meds, but as patient readers know, I often stop taking my sleeping pill precisely because I am sick and tired of being sleepy at this time.

And as patient readers also know that this is a subtle trap because I can do it and feel fine for a long time but under the surface of my consciousness I am losing it.

So that’s no long term solution either.

Lately I have been dealing with the issue by just ending part 1 whenever I am done eating instead of plugging away till I reach 500 words.

It is not a good solution and makes me feel like I am failure, but at least it’s easy.

And we always have to do whatever is easiest, don’t we?

Not what is best. Just what’s easiest.

Anything else is too damned hard.

More after the break,.

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It’s the principle of the thing

Ordered me some KFC for dindins tonight.

Arrived and everything was there… except for the 594 ml Diet Pepsi that was supposed to be part of my Big Box meal.

And this put me in a mild quandary, because I don’t need it. I got my Diet Coke, I am fine. I could have just let it slide.

But ! paid $1 to upsize it from a 321 ml to a 594 ml, god damn it. And really, the system needs to know if shit is getting left out.

So after a tiny struggle to figure how to report this via Doordash, I did report it. Even though I knew it would get someone – either the person who picked my order or the person who delivered it – in trouble.

That’s never easy for a polite Canadian like me. But I had to do it.

I felt aggrieved.

And that reminds me of my own contemplations of a life lived, like mine, by principals, regardless of other considerations.

A cogent moral argument could be made that the lack of said drink cost me nothing in real terms. I could easily have ignored it and gone on with my life.

But a principle had been violated and I felt that had to be addressed.

But what does that even mean, anyway? What do I, or anyone else, mean when we say it’s a matter of principle?

First off, we can disregard the people for whom it means “I am being petty because you hurt my feelings but I am too much of a pussy to admit it so I hide behind the language of morality instead.

Seriously, fuck those people.

No, we’ll assume some actual principle is involved. What is a principle?

Working definition : A moral concept meant to restrain human behaviour to that which is moral.. This is not the same as a moral rule – rules are meant to reflect principles.

And that’s a key factor in arguments made based on principle. Because they are based on solid moral principles instead of arbitrary rules or authority, they are much harder to argue with when they come into question.

Hence their popularity with the unworthy, sadly.

The basic argument for principle, in its most abstract form. is “action X is wrong (or right) because it violates (or conforms to) principle Y”.

This makes sense to most people but it is subject to attack by consequentialist arguments like that found in utilitarian ethics.

“No harm no foul” sums up that angle rather well.

Going back to my little situation, we can characterize the sides as “people should do their jobs properly” versus “what harm did it do?”.

But that would ignore the emotion involved. Like I said, I felt aggrieved. I had not gotten what I paid for. I felt hurt.

So I acted out of principle but also out of emotion. And if I am being absolutely honest, the emotion came first.

The principle was, at best, the form my emotion expressed itself, and at worst just a convenient weapon for a rather abstract form of revenge.

So does any of that justify my perpetration of an act that will undoubtedly harm someone I don’t even know?

They violated both my principles and my interests, even if the actual harm was mild. They also violated the rules of their job.

Either of those could be used to justify their being punished. They deserve said punishment as any other rule violator, at least.

And this punishment could have been avoided if my drink hadn’t gotten lost.

And yet…. perhaps it’s just the softness of my secret heart talking, but somehow I am not fully convinced by these arguments.

Deep down, I just don’t want to hurt people. Even if they deserve it.

I guess that makes me a deep down liberal from my very core.

What’s worse is that I am pretty damned proud of it.

Guess that means I am incurable.

And that’s fine by me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Blogging to a text document because my webhost is stupid.

Stupid because for some reason, instead of just charging my monthly fee to my credit card automatically like it has done for years, now it suspends my service and sends me an email telling me that it hasn’t received my payment, and then I have to log in, click the thing that says make the payment, and then wait for my account to be reactivated.

The thing is, they have my credit card info. They could totally keep charging me automatically. But for some reason, for the last two months they have made me log in and click “OK”.

It’s like they lost confidence in themselves and need validation now.

If so, I can relate.

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Had an odd thought about myself and my predicament recently :

“It never should have been allowed to get this bad. “

That’s an unusual sort of thought for me because there is not a lot of logic to it. Allowed by who? Who was supposed to intervene before my life got the way it is?

The easy and insufficient answer would be “me”, obviously. But that’s not congruent with the emotions attached to the thought. There is definitely a sense that “someone” should have intervened.

Someone who is not me.

And I suppose that is true, if you go back far enough. I could certainly make a case that someone should have intervened when I was a very depressed and lonely child – a robot who went to school.

But I know myself too well to be able to accept such a pat narrative. Truth is, I am very good at putting out a “leave me the hell alone” vibe while not overtly doing anything to push people away.

Started out as a defence against bullying, I suppose. A doubly destructive defence, because I learned both to hide away from everything and to push people away passively.

No wonder I was such a lonely kid.

So it’s hard for me to imagine how someone could have intervened. It would have taken someone of extraordinary strength and perseverance to overcome my shyness and my swiftness of mind and my facile ability to hide everything behind superficial friendliness long enough to reassure the authority figure that everything was fine so they would leave me alone.

Feels strangely good to confess that last bit. Weird.

I can’t help but feel like this is all a consequence of having all this mind power from such an early age. Of being “smarter” than most adults when I was a tiny child and thus having all the strength and resources to really fuck myself over in the long term.

And at a time when education had fully embraced a non-authoritarian model which precluded the sort of confrontation and struggle that might have benefited me.

No wonder my favourite teacher was Mrs. Rogers, who still had a lot of then unreconstructed schoolmarm in her.

She was the only one who bothered to really try to reach me.

I wish I had appreciated it more at the time.

So sure, someone should have done something at the time.

But could they have?

More after the break.

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Fuck, my blog is STILL down. I am still blogging into a LibreOffice document.

I do NOT have the energy to hop into my webhost’s live chat to deal with this right now. So I guess it’s going to have to wait till tomorrow.

I’m going to try clearing my browser history et. al. Maybe that’s the problem.

Because the website itself is up, just not my usual input screen.

Turns out, clearing your web history of everything that was ever in it takes some time.

Curse my need for thoroughness!

Jesus, I think it would have been faster to have them removed rectally.

More fun, too.

Bored now. Moving on.

Now it can be told!

Okay. Now let’s talk about what happened last night.

I lay down for a nap around 8 pm. At around 8:30 pm, I felt a twinge in my digestive tract.

This was soon followed by a pain, then a sharp pain, then the kind of gut-wide pain that tells methat Something Is Very Wrong Down Below.

What followed was the worst irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) attack I have had in years. Lots of cramping, a fair bit of nausea, a soupcon of gas. And pain. Lots and lots of pain.

Felt like a weasel was trying to gnaw its way out of my gut.

Oh, and it’s on fire.

This pain pretty much made me its bitch. Took me an hour just to get from lying down to sitting on the edge of my bed. Probably at least as long to get from the edge of the bed to the toilet.

Part of that was the pain and part of it was waiting till it felt “safe”.

So that was a pretty rotten time to be me. But I am proud of myself because despite being in a lot of pain, I stayed calm and even a bit cheerful throughout.

I just kept telling myself that this was just something I was going to have to let run its course and that it would all be over soon.

And of course, the great thing about a prediction like that is that sooner or later, it’s right.Eventually it was all over and I was happy that I had stayed calm even when I felt the flames of panic start burning away at the foundation of my calmness.

Panic only makes an attack like this far, far worse. Staying calm, detached, and philosophical about the whole thing let me come through the whole thing safely.

And that got me to thinking about (what else) the difference between normal people and someone like myself.

Maybe part of what they have that I don’t is that their highest priority is getting on with life, and not the ultimate truth of things.

Maybe what they have that keeps them sane is a series of neural pathways that fill in whatever their mind needs in order to remain balanced.

Maybe the real secret to happiness is not to worry too much about what’s true.

And maybe that is something I can learn to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a scare with my Skyrim today.

After a male body replacer mod (so that my dudes are nude and look good), one of the signature fuckups of Skyrim started happening, the one known as “CTD on load”.

CTD stands for “crash to desktop”, which is when a program crashes but not the computer, so instead of having to reboot you just end up suddenly staring at your Windows desktop wondering WTF happened.

That’s what would happen when I tried to load my saved games. And the frustrating part was that it would happen at the exact moment when the game would finish loading and let me play.

Dunno what causes that, but it’s a grade A piss off every time.

I tried a bunch of my saves. They all did the same thing.

I tried starting a new character. That looked like it was going to work but nope.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the game. That takes around an hour and a half because to reinstall it has to download the files again.

That did not fix the problem.

Then I remember the “purge mods” button in Vortex, the program from the Nexus websites that I use to install and remove mods. It removes all the links between the mod files and the game then up them back in, properly this time (one hopes).

I gave that a shot. And it work! My save loaded.

Well then I figured it MUST be safe to try that male body replacer again!

D\on’t ask me to explain my reasoning there because there wasn’t any. Wishful thinking mixed with being horny is a dangerous combo.

And it broke the game again, and this time. a mod purge didn’t fix it.

So I had to do what I had been hoping to avoid, which was to de-install ALL my precious mods and then reinstall only the crucial ones, then try to load a game.

And at first that didn’t work either. Not with my current character. But then I loaded the new game I had made and managed to get THAT to work, so, problem solved.

If I was in the mood to start all over again. Which I was not.

Luckily, I remembered that for some Skyrim CTD on load stuff, all the mattered was that you got one good non-crashing savegame made, so I tried to load my current warhammer wielding orc again, and this time it worked.

I was even clever enough to load a save from before all this mess so that I did not lose my progress in my Legacy of the Dragonborn museum.

So all’s well that ends well, I suppose. Could have done without all the stress and worry, but things are back to normal now and that’s what counts.

My adventures continue, and I have now added to my lived experience of having things go wrong and NOT panicking but staying in the game and solving the problem instead.

And that is how, in more than one sense, I saved my game today.

See what I did there?

More after the break.

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Sorry, folks. That’s it for today. Got real sick.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

….I honestly have no idea what I would do with myself.

That’s the great thing about being addicted to video games. I never have to think about what to do. If I am up and awake with nothing else to do, it’s video games every time.

I don’t have to face the burden of hours any more. I never feel like time is a wasteland of meaningless sensations any more. I don’t need to figure out what to do, or even to figure out what I want to do.

Free time is video game time. Period.

And the thing is, because the games fill my mind so completely, I can easily ignore the rest of the world, including my own rotting on the vine, while I play them.

Like all drugs, they are the source of and solution to all my problems.

The real killer aspect of addictions is that they bypass all the emotions that normally warn us of danger and keep us together and help us function.

You could deal with the guilt you feel over neglecting your kids in favour of indulging your addiction by going to spend time with your kids…or you could indulge your addiction and make the guilt go away.

You could deal with not having eaten in days because you spent all your money on your addiction by going out and trying to borrow some money for food or by going to a food bank or whatever else….or you could indulge the addiction and not have to think about it for a while yet.

You could deal with your dissatisfaction with your idle and worthless life by forcing yourself to be productive and find meaningful work to do….or you could just play video games all day and avoid dealing with anything ever.

But hey, you blog! That’s something, isn’t it?

Yes it is.

But it’s not enough.

And yet, it’s all I have right now.

I can think of dozens of things I “could” be doing, of course. Looking for work on UpWork. Making a video. Writing fiction. Looking for an agent. Joining some major forum so I can express my views in a more visible way.

Hell, getting into contact with my siblings via Facebook so I don’t feel so alone. I’d be happy just to be a small part of their lives.

Beats being so disconnected all the time. I presume.

But of course, it’s never a matter of not knowing the solution to my problems. I am a very clever and resourceful person. Solutions are easy for me.

So easy that I can think of so many possible solutions that it becomes impossible to choose one, so I do absolutely nothing!

Except play video games, of course.

And I know it’s all a trick, An illusion. A hall of mirrors making my problems seem legion so my depression and my addiction can have me all to themselves.

And I know that if I really, really tried, I could make all those mirror images disappear and see things as they are.

But then I might have to do something.

And I’d rather just play video games.

More after the break.

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Destroying my world

So that a new one may be born.

That’s more or less how I feel about my life right now. Like I am slowly but mercilessly destroying absolutely everything that gets in the way of my rebirth.

Because that’s what it is going to take. A rebirth. The time for incremental change is over. The rot has set in too deeply for that. The whole thing needs to be burned to the ground so that the whole damn thing might start over with what we know now.

Am I still talking about my mental health? You decide.

This grim view of my prospects for slow reform does not come easily or naturally to me. I am the sort of person who always checks the bathwater for babies. I am by nature (but not by politics) a conservative person who does not like big risks and inherently mistrusts big changes and especially mistrusts people who say things like “the system cannot be saved, we have to burn it to the ground and start over!”.

During what I will heartrendingly call “normal times”, I view that type of person as a dangerous lunatic who wants to watch the world burn and has found a flimsy justification to hide that behind.

Either that, or just a hyperbolic nitwit in love with the sound of their own voice.

So you can understand my reluctance to throw in with that crowd.

But there comes a time when ever a reformer like me has to admit that the degree of “reform” needed is so massive and extensive that calling it reform is like calling death a “blood pressure issue”.

At the same time, though, on the other front, I feel like I have to make war with the actual dangerous thoughtless lunatics on the left.

Aw fuck, veered into intellectualizing again.

Back to talking about me.

The point stands that even when talking about myself, I think the system is too corrupted for incremental change to do much good.

What I need is a transformation. Transformation is the little death that lets a person surrender all form in order to be born anew. It means abandoning all you were in order to become who you truly are. It means reforging your identity into something fresh and new, without all the impurities that tainted it before, and turning it into something far closer to who and how you really are at the core.

But that means leaving all your old disguises behind. :Let them burn like the impure and improper shadows of your former self they are.

They are mere shades of you, and hold no more power over you than your reflection in a mirror or a picture taken of you from long ago.

It is time for the shedding of skins. It is time for the forest to be cleansed by fire. It is time to put the old self out of its misery so that a newer, stronger self can be born

Guess I’ll just die then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For whatever reason, I don’t normally talk about politics and the news here.

But today I am going to make an exception because the world’s gone crazy and that is definitely having an effect on my mental health.

Last night, on Colbert, they said there might be as many as 50 million Americans infected with Covid.

That’s around 1/7 of the population. Think about that. One out of seven Americans having the disease that’s shaken the world to its core.

And all because the American right wing has been trained to attack and destroy any fact they don’t like without giving it any due consideration.

I feel like all of America is facing the test of the Gob Jabbar from Dune right now.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, in said test the person puts their hand in a box while a poisoned needle – the Gom Jabbar – is pressed to the back of their neck.

They are told that if they take their hand out of the box, the needle will be pressed into the back of their neck and they will be dead within seconds.

The box then makes the person being tested feel the exact sensations they would feel if it was burning their hand all the way to the bone.

The person doesn’t know it’s only faking it, of course.

The idea is to test whether the person is “human” or not by testing whether the knowledge that to withdraw their hand is to die is enough to keep the person from doing what every animal instinct is saying to do and yank your hand out of the fire.

This is harsh and cruel and problematic, but I like the underlying concept of testing whether the individual has the rational self-control to keep their hand in that box based purely on knowledge alone.

And that’s the test millions of Americans are failing right now. For most of the world, the knowledge that there is a deadly disease out there killing people is more than enough to make us accept the limitations of these times and change our behaviour.

But not for the Fox News set. They don’t want Covid to be real because if it was, they would have to control themselves and do what they are told, and as a group they are a bunch of spoiled brats for whom being asked to restrain themselves is the worst thing ever and never ever justified.

So they’re going to die. And there’s not a damned thing we can do about it.

Millions of Americans are going to die from their own ignorance and stupidity and stubborn pride,and all the rest of the world and the rest of America can do is watch.

I mean, we will keep trying to make them see reason, but without much hope of success. Maybe they will change their minds when they start dying in large numbers.

But I doubt it.

So millions will perish and I am frightened by how callous I am becoming about that.

Let them die of their own stupidity, then, and make the world a smarter place.

Those dark thoughts are not welcome but I can’t seem to shake them,

We live in mighty interesting times.

More after the break.

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My drug is video games

Every depressive self-medicates and we are all addicted to our chosen method of self-medication. Every single one of us.

We all have the thing we do obsessively because depression suppresses our ability to feel pleasure, so precious little gives us pleasure.

This creates a deadly emotional wasteland, Human beings need pleasure. Without pleasure we truly lose our minds, our hearts, and our souls.

Pleasure is how nature tells animals they are doing the right thing. Pain sends the opposite signal. Without them, we are adrift.

Therefore, every depressive clings desperately to absolutely anything that will bring them pleasure and hyper fixates on it to the point of addiction.

For me, my destructive self-medication is video games.

Like I have said before, while I am playing a good video game, I am not depressed. I am not anxious. I am not worried. My ever-lurking dread is nowhere to be seen.

Playing a good video game fills my mind so much that it pushes all the bad stuff out and keeps me entertained and engaged.

It even provides a (false) sense of accomplishment and even worth.

All without any of the messy scary details that make real life so hard.

No wonder most of my free time is spent playing video games. They are my refuge from a world where I don’t fit in and I am always scared and everything is too loud, too sudden, too bright, too stimulating, or just plain too much.

So why not spend most of my time in the one place where I am happy, or at the very least, too busy and having too much fun to notice how unhappy I am.

Because it’s keeping me from having a life. That’s why not. Because it sucks my time and my life and my days on Earth away from me. Because I could be doing so much more with myself and my time if I was not so damned addicted to them,.

Because they are what I have instead of having a life, and deep down inside. I am miserable.I am dying on the inside from lack of growth. Because I am wasting away from lack of vital emotional nutrients.

Because video games are not enough. Human beings need far more than distraction and entertainment. I am no longer a child whiling away the hours till it’s time to go to school again. I am not just keeping myself busy till someone tells me what to do.

I have an entire adult life to do with as I please and nobody is going to come tell me what to do or where to go or tell me I am a good boy.

I’m on my own. Like always.

Might as well get used to it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.