I sort of have one.

Intellectually, I am supremely self-confident. I state my opinion with conviction and communicate with speed, vigor, and accuracy.

To some, that makes me seem arrogant. And I can’t say that I am not. I don’t think of myself in those terms, but I can see how, compared to more hesitant and timid people, I might seem like I think I know it all.

Hardly. And I have no problem admitting when I am wrong.

My pride insist on it. I would never stoop so low as to be intellectually dishonest, and that applies to my own actions as well.

And I am at least somewhat aware that I have a sky high IQ and loads of talent. Gifts others would kill to have and all that.

I tend to dismiss my gifts by saying “fat lot of good they’ve done me”, but that’s not fair. I am a very ill man, especially psychologically. That’s why the gifts have not done me a lot of good in terms of money.

But they have enriched my personal life in countless ways.

And there’s the sad fact that I just don’t want ot take responsibility for all that power. If I was truly to take ownership of my gifts, the question of what obligation I have to use said power to help fix the world comes up, and that scares me badly.

I could do the world a lot of good if it wasn’t for this darn depression.

Guess I’ll just die then.

And now, I have to go back to sleep.

---

Everything sucks at first

That’s my advice to young people. Everything sucks at first.

The beginning of trying something is always the time when it is hardest, the least fun, the scariest, the most stressful, and takes the most effort.

So stop judging things by how they are at first. EVERYTHING sucks at first, and then gets easier. The period at the beginning is in no way representative of how the thing will be most of the time, and if you resist the urge to reject the thing in order to escape the stress, you will make it through the worst/first part and get to the good stuff.

But only if you hang in there.

Too many people give up right away, or as soon as things get scary or hard. They treat even those things which are vitally important to their dreams like they are leisure activities they can drop the second they seem like work.

Well I got news for you, kids : life is work. Everything worthwhile requires effort. Most of life is not entertainment and you will only get out of it what you put into it.

And life will never, ever make the first move. So stop waiting for some kind of signal that tells you it’s okay to start trying now.

You are always going to have to invest the effort before you know if it’s worth it or not.

And sometimes it won’t be.

But sometimes it will!

And times it does pay off will more than compensate for the times it does not. but only if you stay in the game and keep trying.

And even if you put effort into something and it doesn’t work out,.so what? Effort is renewable. Our batteries recharge. The feeling of disappointment does not last forever.

And now you know more about what works for you and what doesn’t. Which means the next thing you try has a much better chance of working for you.

But you have to keep trying.

This problem of giving up based on how things are at first is particularly pernicious for us big brain types.

That’s because we all had the same experience as children of a time when we got praise and approval for things that were easy and fun for us.

You know. School type things.

And we imprinted heavily on that time, and kept on seeking it even as adults.

But that time can never ever come back. What made you a child prodigy was being smart for your age, and once you are an adult, that phrase has no meaning.

Nobody is going to pat you on the back and say “Good work, you are so far ahead of all the other 37 year olds. ”

So stop looking for that door back into the golden realm where everything is easy and fun and you get everything you want without it even seeming like work.

That place does not exist. It never has. So stop holding back until you find it. Stop choking your own growth in order to keep from moving away from that place. Stop rejecting options based on their initial costs because deep down, you are holding out for the happy easy non-scary effort-free option that will never, ever happen.

You will never be a child again.

And you will never be a prodigy again.

So you sure as hell won’t ever be a child prodigy again.

You will be a happier, healthier, more successful person once you have gotten rid of that entire idea forever.

Now what I have said has undoubtedly been extremely painful for you. And you are no doubt currently looking for a way to reject the whole thing based on that pain.

You can tell yourself I am just a harsh, cruel person who loves crushing people’s hopes and dreams with my cold hard words.

I am not. I am trying to help you. These words are meant to set you free.

But liberation always comes from sacrifice. In order to be truly free, a little part of you that is holding you back has to die, and that really fucking hurts.

Look at it as a painful but necessary medical procedure. Like getting a rotten tooth pulled. Sure, the actual dental procedure hurts,. but afterward you feel so much better.

You also might reject my words because “I don’t really understand”.

But I do. Everything I have said here is based on my own experiences and the bullshit I have found in my own skull. I exempt myself from absolutely none of it.

I’m just as bad as you.

And if I don’t really understand you and your situation, why does it hurt so much?

Is the real problem that I understand your situation all too well and have hit far too close to the bone for comfort?

Remember, my only goal is to free you of the bad ideas holding you back. I wish it didn’t have to hurt as much as it does,. But it does.

Nothing in us dies without a fight.

The sick part of you is currently fighting my words with all its might because it knows that its very existence is in peril.

The question is, whose side are you on?

The side of your disease, or the side of my cure?

Only you can decide that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So here’s my drama.

Some quick backstory : I’ve been heavily into Skyrim lately. In order to use additional animations in the game (read : sexytimes fun stuff), in addition to installing the mod, you have to run a program called FNIS to make the animations work. ^[1]

Not a problem. Doesn’t take long unless you have a (heh) fuckton of animations.

But lately it had been halting partway through, claiming it couldn’t work on some of the files because they were in use by other processes.

And when that happens, some of the creatures in the game lose their animations and become completely immobile. Stiff as boards, and not in the fun way.

It’s actually pretty creepy. And no fun, obviously, because they can’t fight back.

So clearly I needed to fix this. Problem was, no program I was running was using the files in question. So I had use Task Manager to dig through all the processes running in the background of my Windows 10.

While doing so, I noticed there was a lot of shady looking shit there. So I started ending those processes then trying FNIS again.

While doing so I noticed that if you right clicked a process, you could go to the directory from which the process originated.

There was a particularly annoying one called IAService.exe which was a part of this apparent anti-virus program that I never asked for or installed but somehow ended up on my computer.

Turns out it was malware disguising itself as an anti-virus program.

That’s why I couldn’t kill the process and couldn’t delete the directory it came from.

That’s never a good sign.

Then I noticed that right under the “show directory” option it said “search online”. So I did, and that’s how I learned about the nefarious nature of the program. The site that told me about it said to download and use an anti-malware program called Spyhunter 5 to get rid of it.

So I did. Downloaded it, ran it. It immediately found a bunch of evil shit already running. Then it started running a full file scan, and it too started finding lots of nastiness.

And the file scan took a really, really long time. Almost 12 hours, in fact.

But once it finally completed, I had a list of almost 30,000 infected files and other issues that needed fixing. And the free version of Spyhunter would totally fix all of them for me for no extra charge.

48 hours later.

Got to hand it to them, that’s brilliant in an evil way. Who is going to want to wait 48 hours to fix all those issues?

So I caved in more or less instantly and paid $60 (ouch) for the full version. It scrubbed my machine and now it is officially “clean”.

So that’s the drama of the last 16 hours of my life.

Oh, and FNIS runs just fine now.

More after the break.

---

Oh right, before I forget : the point of all that stuff about self-care yesterday was that I can make myself feel loved and cared for by looking after myself better.

That changes everything.

Just wanted to be sure I wrote that down.

---

Just try again

This is a hard lesson for us intellectual types to learn because it’s mindless.

That is, in fact, why it works.

The idea is this : when faced with a troublesome difficult task, one that will most likely take many tries to get right, the most important thing is to start trying again the moment failure registers, before you have a chance to think about it.

If you do this, you will maintain momentum because it’s much easier to keep doing something than it is to start doing something.

It also keeps the conscious mind from registering each attempt as a separate event. Instead, the whole event is one continuous event, and that makes a huge difference in our minds because one of the ways we mark how much effort something is taking is by counting each event.

I have been applying this idea in my own life (in other words, in video games) and preliminary reports are very encouraging. Because the event is continuous. it is far easier to feel a sense of triumph when the task is finally conquered.

And it will be conquered. Very few challenges can hold up against this kind of assault. And every time you win this way, it will reinforce the lesson that persistence pays.

Yes, there will still be times when giving up is the smart move. But it should never, ever be the default. The default should be to keep on trying until your succeed, and giving up should only ever be done with great reluctance and after careful consideration.

It should also noted that this is not an endorsement of beating your head against the wall. Inherent in this technique is that you are trying different ways to solve the problem. Some problem will fall if you just keep trying the same thing till you “get it”, but most will not.

These are the thing jocks know but are far too inarticulate to convey.

Getting mad at the problem can help if accompanied by trying over and over. Anger can help fuel your persistence.

Plus, it turns the problem into a fight. Now it’s not just a matter of giving up to go do something easier and more rewarding.

Now, giving up means the task wins. The task wants you to give up. The task knows you don’t have what it takes to complete it and is just waiting for you to give up so it can rub it in your face, and laugh.

And if you do give up, that will just prove the task was right about you.

And you don’t want that, do you?

It might seem a tad psycho, but it works.

And your journey to being a winner starts when you stop worrying about whether thoughts are truly truly true, and start thinking in terms of what gets you closer to your goals versus what is only holding you back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

9

May I have your attention please?

I’d just like to announce that there continues to be no emergency.

Everything is fine. The sun is warm, the grass is green, and life is good.

I continue to be an awesome dude with great friends and a truly epic brain. I have fun games to play and tasty food to eat and delicious beverages to drink.

I have a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in and my days are spent having fun.

Things could be one heck of a lot worse, and I am grateful for all I have.

Life is pretty damned good and I am one amazing person.

Who could ask for more?

---

Well, me, for instance. But it’s always good to count your blessings. Reminds you to count the good things in life, too.

It’s hard for me to be positive. I am so accustomed to cringing in the dark that it is hard for me to remember there is any other way to be.

Like, I get, intellectually, that not everyone has my issues, but it’s hard for me to imagine my own happiness in anything but the vaguest, dreamiest, flimsiest way.

You know, all that “walking in the sun” business.

But if I put my mind to it, I can imagine a version of my life that is not radically different from my current one but which is far more satisfying and fulfilling.

I just have to take a couple of those video game playing hours and replace them with writing stuff that might actually sell.

But that’s the easy part. It’s the actually selling whatever it is that is the hard part. That is the big step I have never been able to take.

That’s why UpWork worked for me. Easier for me to write for someone else, according to their desires, than to take my own little darlings to market.

And I might get back onto UpWork some day. It feels more possible now than ever. Sure, I messed up before, but I am still the highly competent and intelligent guy with mad skills that I have always been, and it would do me so much good to be able to earn money that way.

So I will move that to the front burner.

Of course, even better would be to get an agent. Or at least a mentor. Someone who could help me through both the hurdles of being a writer and all my mental issues.

Its so hard to do everything alone all the time. I have never felt up to the task, and yet, I have never felt like I had any choice either.

So I have felt, very deeply, like an abandoned child for my entire life. One who, instead of reacting by becoming a scrappy and rugged individualist type (and probably a huge asshole), reacted by withdrawing from the world into the safety of his own mind.

It always comes down to this : there’s so many things I know I can do.

But I lack the wherewithal to get to where I can do them.

More after the break.

---

The illusion of luxury

How bourgeoisie^[1] a subject, am I right?

But seriously, what I am talking about isn’t pretending you are richer than you are. I don’t give a flying feathery fuck about status, success, or any other form of living your life to impress others and make them think highly of you.

Fuck that middle class “keeping up with the Joneses” bullshit.

No, what I am talking about is a lot more personal than that. What I am talking about can be described as doing favors for yourself, or maybe being your own spa.

That makes no sense. Let’s try an example.

My shower takes a little while to warm up. While it does so, I go get the clothes I want to put on when I get out of the shower^[2] and lay them out on the corner of my bed closest to the bathroom so that they are waiting for me when my shower is done.

This started as just something do to while the water warmed up. but then I discovered that I actually liked it. It made me feel good.

In fact, it made me feel like someone cared about and/or was caring FOR me, despite the fact that said person was unquestionably myself.

Suddenly, self-care makes a lot more sense to me.

Not that I ever wondered why people cared for themselves, of course, but now I know more about what people get out of it.

If we can “fool” ourselves like this, then self-care becomes its own reward. You don’t need to get your care and nurturing from another purely theoretical person (nobody looks after you when you’re a fully grown man) in order to feel loved.

Like with erotic love, it’s perfectly possible to do it yourself.

And this is huge for me because I know damned well that a big part of my inability to look after myself properly is that my inner child stubbornly refuses to do the things someone who loves me is “supposed” to be doing.

As a powerless child, I weaponized my neglect. Unable to ask for what I needed, I instead bore mute testimony to my neglect by not taking care of myself and let the world see how badly parented I was.

That’s why, when I start to think about taking better care of myself, that stubborn inner child refuses to let me because then, they will have “gotten away with it”.

News flash, kid : they got away with it. They neglected the crap out of you and never suffered any consequences for it. One parent is already dead and the statue of limitations ran out long ago for the other one.

No matter what I say or do (or fail to do) from now on, they will still have gotten away with it and that’s the bottom line, sucker.

Neglecting yourself as a child might work. It might show the world you are in trouble and need help even when you can’t ask for that help yourself.

Neglecting yourself as an adult just makes you a slob who’ll die young.

And who the hell wants that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sleepy as hell. Trying to blog. Bleary and incoherent. Makes writing feel like trying to swim upstream during a flood.

Every fucking day. Same old shit. Getting pretty fucking sick of it.

And it can be avoided by just not taking my sleeping pill. Works like a charm. All that sleepiness goes away and all it costs is me slowly losing my mind.

What a set of fucking choices.

---

I was such a strange child.

Self-possessed and independent of mind, and yet, desperately lonely as well. Masterful of mind but pathetically eager to please. Friendly yet detached. Polite and pleasant yet capable of incalculable levels of insolence and disrespect. Absolutely no fear of adults and no belief in their inherent authority, but terrified of my fellow kids, and for good reason. Always more comfortable with adults than my own cohort.

Otherworldly wise and eerily intelligent. Spooky to hear a small child talk like an adult. A previous era might have declared me to be possessed by a demon, or perhaps some kind of changeling child left to be raised by humans as one of their own.

There are worse families to be left with. Much, much worse.

Still, I wish they had been a tad fussier on my behalf.

There must have been times when I must have seemed like a robot, or a puppet, or a ventriloquist’s dummy. Surely those words could not actually be coming from a little boy. It had to be some kind of trick.

But it was. The kid was me. I was there. I remember it all.

But I didn’t understand. Why were people so mean to me? Why did my family treat me like I didn’t exist? Why was I a ghost in my own life?

I didn’t deserve it. Heck, I still don’t.

And I feel so damned old already.

Guess I’ll just die, then.

---

My word, am I cranky in the mornings. Anyhow.

There is no crisis

This is another big one, I can tell.

I have lived the entirety of my depressed adult life as if there was constantly a crisis underway and therefore my withdrawal from everything to avoid said crisis was justified.

But there is no crisis. There never was. There was a feeling of crisis due to my anxiety disorder, but no real crisis ever emerged to justify that emotion.

Sure, my life as I am living it right now is unsatisfactory (to say the least), but that is not a crisis, an emergency, or a disaster.

It’s like I have been living in a fallout shelter for decades even though the sirens stopped and the all clear had been given out a long time ago.

The sad and bitter truth is that if the crisis truly and totally stopped, I would miss it. It’s all I know at this point. It’s the closest thing my life had to any purpose or meaning.

Some day, I told myself. Some day, when this crisis is over, I will emerge from my stale cocoon into warm sunny wonderful world where everything is wonderful and I finally get my chance to truly shine as the bright resplendent butterfly I am.

And it was safe to dream this because I knew deep down that it would never happen.

The best and most toxic dreams are the ones that reality cannot destroy.

I knew it would never happen because I knew the crisis would never be over. Those sirens would keep on wailing for me and providing a nice warm safe feeling of security by giving me a blanket excuse for not dealing with life at all.

Murder your excuses.

But now I can see that this sense of crisis was merely another puppet of my depression’s devising. A tool my depression uses to keep me in line in its misguiding attempt to keep me “safe”.

Miserable, lonely. cut off from the world, dissatisfied, unfulfilled, and only tenuously connected to reality…but “safe”.

But is it better to be safe in hell than to risk heaven?

Those who never fly never fall.

However, those who never fly never soar, either.

Is it better to try, fail, and learn than to never try?

Yes, it is. It has to be. There are worse things than failure. Failing means you tried and trying means you learned.

And learning means you will do better next time.

But that doesn’t make trying much easier. Knowing I should try – that trying is the smart thing to do – does not impart upon me the emotional resources to do it.

As far as I can tell, healthy people have a stubborn, persistent little spark inside them that compels them to keep moving forward in life and that goads them into action even when they are not sure of themselves.

Depression kills that spark. And without that primal spark – that spark plug, the id – the whole engine of the psyche grinds to a bloody halt.

This spark doesn’t wait for justification or any other form of justification or approval from the ego’s centers of rationality- it just sparks away no matter what, and that prods healthy people into healthy action according to their instincts.

But dumb ol me, I trained myself to ignore my instincts and that little spark inside in order to better focus on the cold rational products of the mind, and gained vast and extraordinary powers by doing so.

But it doesn’t matter how powerful and amazing this computer mind of mine might be if the power supply doesn’t work.

If all these thoughts have no chance of becoming actions and instead just go to give me the feeling of having done something without having to actually do anything, then they are worse than useless because they keep me from moving towards self-actualization of even the most basic sort.

So that has to go too. No more living in or on dreams. No more accepting that the comfort of the though of something is as good or better than actually doing it.

Sooner or later, all this mentation has to lead somewhere, otherwise what’s the point?

Sooner or later, I will run out of “some days”.

And that’s the real crisis.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Forcing myself to blog right after therapy even though I really, really don’t feel like it.

Which is normal for me when I have just finished therapy. I feel very emotionally tender and vulnerable and even somewhat bruised right after therapy, and the last thing i want to do is keep on poking and prodding myself via blogging.

That’s why I have been just plain skipping it lately. On Thursdays, I don’t start blogging until 7 pm or so. That’s been the pattern for a couple of months now.

But not today. Today, I felt the need to dig in and keep going instead. I didn’t want to slump back into the depths of solipsistic ennui and mindless distraction. I wanted to keep the catharsis and the sense of my emotions being real and present going.

The idea of watching YouTube vids as I eat lunch then going right back to sleeping and video games seem appalling to me at this moment.

Because the truth is, as vulnerable and weak and battered as I feel right now, I also feel way more alive than usual.

And I want to feel alive.

I want to be alive.

I want more life, fuckers. This somnambulist lifestyle just isn’t cutting it for me any more. I want to be awake and alive and present instead of half-asleep and half-dead and three quarters not even here right now.

I want the wind to come and chase this fog away so that I can finally feel the warmth of the sun and be healthy and whole again.

And if that wind has to come in the form of a hurricane, so be it.

Whatever it takes to bring myself back to life, I’ll do it.

Whatever needs to happen inside me in order for me to be free., I will make it happen.

Whatever the healing process needs to do in order to make me whole. let it happen.

Because I am fed up with all this bullshit and would like to finally come home.

More after the break.

---

Under the Dome, part 2

Ordered from The Dome again.

Good news! The fries continue to be crazy delicious. Yay! It was not a fluke.

Also got chicken fingers (chickens don’t have fingers) and a cheese quesadilla (which is redundant because the ‘quesa’ in quesadilla means cheese, so “cheese quesadilla” basically translates to “cheese cheese sandwich”).

Chicken fingers are pretty good. Breading tastes fresh and spice level is good.

I am slightly paranoid about spice level ever since a traumatic experience with fried chicken with absolutely zero spice.

My god, that was awful. Without spices, the bread just makes things grittier. Left the aftertaste of expired dry dog food.

Anyhow. my meal from The Dome is quite good. And if I hadn’t splurged on the quesadilla (I hope that was the last time I have to type the word “quesadilla”) it would have cost about the same as a meal at McD’s.

And tasted way, way better. No drink though.

I have to admit, I kind of want to see this place some day. The weirdly limited menu composed entirely of combinations of the same eight things intrigues me.

Plus the menu contains weird things like “cheese corn snacks” (clearly a basket of Cheezies) and jumbo Mr. Freezie’s.

So Cheezies and Freezies, basically. They should have a special.

Anyhow, the place is both magically delicious and substantially weird, and that makes me want to go there to see it in person.

My hope is that it’s like the mom and pop snack bars of my youth where the only cooking equipment is a deep fryer and so everything you can get from there is either deep fried or not cooked at all.

I have particularly fond memories of a little place called the Brown Derby which was just down the block from my babysitter Betty’s house.

It was a combination snack bar and corner grocery. There was an order window where you ordered hot food and a door into grocery store part.

Both were positioned so that the lady who ran the place could take food orders or ring up your groceries without moving.

And you got your fries in a greasy brown paper bag.

That sound sloppy as fuck, but it’s not that bad. The paper soaks up a lot of grease and very little makes it to the exterior of the bag.

Smart people still grip it only by the top fold, though.

---

Happy for no reason

Why do we need a reason to be happy?

Why can’t happy be the default state? Why can’t people be happy except for when they have a reason not to be,, and once that reason is gone, they’re happy again?

And most importantly. why would be assume that if someone is happy all the time, they must be either stupid or crazy or both?

What is the relationship between intelligence and unhappiness?

Maybe all we are really doing is making “sour grapes” assumptions that protect our sanity because if someone was super happy and smart it would drive us nuts.

So if someone is very happy, there MUST be something deeply wrong with them, just to maintain the balance.

Otherwise we would go crazy from the envy alone.

I also think that there is a lingering belief amongst us brainy types that dumb people are happier than us. We are only too aware of how being a smartypants can wreck our fun and we like to imagine that people without our problems must be happy.

But they aren’t. They might not have our problems but they have just as many problems. Problems that would be laughably easy for us to solve.

In other words, they have just as many problems as we do.

They’re just stupider problems.

The thing is, there actually are people out there who are happy by default. They have a deep wellspring of cheerfulness in their souls and not only are those people way happier than most, they live longer and stay healthy longer too.

Those lucky goddamned bastards.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let me tell you the difference between winners and losers.

It’s all about how one responds to a challenge.

Winners respond to a challenge by trying harder.

Losers respond to a challenge by giving up.

To facilitate giving up, losers respond by attacking the challenge itself.

It’s too hard. It’s not fair. I wasn’t ready. I’m not good at this kind of thing. I’m too tired.

And so forth and so on. Sound familiar?

All of these ways of attacking the challenge instead of trying harder are excuses. Like a magical spell, they are words that get the loser out of a tense situation and let them wallow in the sweet, sweet relief of the sudden release of tension.

And all it cost them was their soul. And self-esteem.

Because sure, you get the immediate hit of relief. But once that is gone, you are left with the knowledge that you gave up on yourself and ran away.

It’s short term thinking at its most disgusting, and marks you as a total loser.

And it’s all enabled and facilitated by your list of ready made excuses not just to give up, but to not even try in the first place.

So murder your excuses. Slaughter them all. Leave no survivors.

And get mad. As mad as it takes. Get pissed off at the challenge and you will find you have the energy to overcome it.

Resist the urge to flee. Stay in the fight and keep punching.

It is really that simple.

---

Screwing my Skyrim

Sadly, not in the fun sense. Not this time.

Had a real Magician’s Apprentice this morning. Was messing around with mods, de-installing and re-installing them, and ended up fucking things up so bad that I had to uninstall the whole game then download it again.

Or so it seemed at the time. More on that later.

The worst part is that I don’t even remember why I started messing around in the first place. Certainly nothing that would justify the long hours I spent just getting back to 0.

That seems to be something I need to go through periodically. Something where I have to fight like hell just to get back to where I started.

Makes me glad for what I have, I suppose.

But the Taurus in me insists that such things can be avoided in the future with sufficient caution. Which is technically true.

The question, however, is how much said caution costs me. What I went through this morning, while unpleasant, was a finite penalty.

Ergo, basic cost-benefit analysis (how I love it) dictates that only an equally finite cost can be justified by it.

Caution has costs of its own. Costs in terms of motivation. And cowardice Opportunities lost. life-potential curtailed, ambition suppressed, soul strangled, life-force killed.

Like all virtues, it is only a virtue when exercised in balance with other considerations. There is no virtue that cannot become a vice when taken too far.

Not even caution.

People say you can’t be too careful.

But you totally can. My life is proof of this.

Life involves some risk. No matter how careful or cautious or forward-thinking you are, you cannot eliminate all risk. At some point, you have to gamble.

Even my current sad little life where I play video games all the time and mostly hide from the world has risks.

All my health issues (besides depression) are a testament to that. I am a very sick man and that didn’t happen by accident. I have lived a very unhealthy lifestyle of way too much carbs and way too little movement for a very long time, and to be brutally honest, that’s what will most likely send me to an early grave.

Now does that sound “safe” to you? Sure, for me, it’s normal. But there is a big difference between that which doesn’t upset us and that which is good for us.

That leads me to one of the biggest questions a Taurus can ask themselves :

Is a negative sure thing better than an uncertain positive?

To most people. that question is absurdly easy. Obviously the positive thing is always better than the negative thing. Right?

But for someone like me, that is a real puzzler. I like certainty. I hate open risks. It is entirely possible for me to think that a reliable and predictable bad thing is better than the risk and uncertainty attached to a positive thing.

That’s how over-cautious I am. So over-cautious that I would rather definitely lose than to possibly win.

And obviously, that makes me a big time loser in the game of life. Decades of acting as though caution was an incorruptible virtue that you can never have too much of has led me to the sad path I currently tread.

Because deep down, I feel like risk equals failure. It’s like the ultimate expression of Murphy’s Law. On an emotional level, deep down where my inner child lives, I feel like life is actively malign towards me and will take every opportunity to fuck me over and that therefore the only way to be safe is to eliminate said opportunities.

Which is absurd, obviously. The world is neither benign nor malignant. There is no malevolent force trying to destroy me. No fundamental law of nature that moves the cosmos towards a position of maximum suffering for lil ol me.

Frankly, I am nowhere near that important.

But this isn’t about reason. This is about that sad scared kid inside me who has never stopped freaking out about all the evil shit that happened to him/me and how he managed to get me to a point where I could function (minimally… a robot that goes to school and watches TV) but that did nothing to stop the screaming.

That little boy has ever reason to view the world as a place that is callous and uncaring at best and downright hostile and malign at worse.

That’s the world as he has experienced it.

That is his personal truth.

And no amount oif thinking or talking is going to change that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well it happened again.

Woke up at 10:30 am or so with a full bladder. Peed, looked at the time, sat down at the computer for a bit, contemplated playing some more Black Flag. Drank some lukewarm leftover Diet Coke.

Decided I was too sleepy for anything and went back to bed. It was 11:30 am or so.

Woke up and it was fricking 3:30 pm!

This is going go throw off my routine. Bigly.

Right now, I am, of course, eating my very late lunch.

I’ll be eating supper at around 8ish, Which is four hours from now. Usually, I aim for six at the minimum.

So, oops. And of course, I am still very sleepy, though at least I am getting some ability to resist it from still more Diet Coke, cold this time.

Dunno how long that will last, though. Was pretty pissed off that said effect ran out before I hit my 500 words and thus finished the first half of my blogging yesterday. Had no choice but to go back to fricking bed.

Et tu, Diet Coke?

---

Do I intimidate people?

Well, yes and no.

From what people have told me, I know that basically radiate IQ. And I am fine with that. I have absolutely no interest in pretending to be dumber (or more normal) than I am, and the world is just going to have to deal with that.

I am one rare and powerful creature. Quake with fear, you tiny fools!

And were I as megalomaniacal as that statement makes me sound, filled arrogance and smug superiority, that might make me pretty intimidating, especially when amplified by my large statue and powerful personality.

But I’m actually a pretty sweet guy, soft and sensitive and self-effacing and silly. I am genuinely eager to please and want to get along with everyone.

And then my slovenly appearance sends yet another set of signals.

So the question of how, exactly, I come across is… complicated. My unshielded high IQ electrical field says one thing, my gentle giant persona another, the fact that I am actually kind of clueless and helpless another.

Honestly, I think that most of the time,. people just plain don’t know what to make of me. I am a rare bird indeed, and a mystery to even the most dedicated ornithologist.

And I know that is a social barrier. If people can’t figure you out, they might ignore you or disregard you or whatever.

But I think I know the solution, and that is to project myself more. That horrible awkward chasm that opens between me and normal people when I try to deal with them on a personal level can be filled with my charming personality and good vibrations.

At least in theory.

It’s worth a try, anyhow. Worst thing that can happen is that I end up making people uncomfortable or confused, and while I would rather that did not happen,it would be nice to have the other person be the confused one for a change.

Going back to the main question. I think it’s like I am a bear.

And no matter how friendly, silly, and cuddly a bear is, you can’t quite forget that he is a dangerous, powerful animal who could kill you in a heartbeat.

I won’t. But I could.

And that makes things awkward.

More after the break.

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I know nothing about myself

Not literally, of course. That would be scary.

But philosophically and psychologically, I hereby declare that I know absolutely nothing about myself. I could, in fact, be damned near anybody.

I hereby relinquish and repudiate all previous notions of who I am and what I am capable of and who I am meant to be.

By doing so, I free myself to be whoever it is I need to be at the time, with the long term goal of figuring out who I “really am”, on the inside.

In scientifically pretentious terms, I hereby wipe the slate of every single extrinsic motivation I have ever had, including the ones that were entirely my idea, and free up room for me to let my intrinsic self emerge and shine for all the world to see.

I further stipulate that even the notions I conceive about myself from this point on are as impermanent as words written in sand, and under no circumstances be allowed to interfere with the all important process of discovering my true self.

It could well be that I have to be a million different people before I find the one form that sticks. It might be that the real me is radically different than the person I am right now.

Hell, it’s possible that my final form would be unrecognizable to me as I am right now.

And I don’t care. Throw it all to the wind. I have nothing in me right now that is so precious that I would let it restrict my personal growth.

I am finally letting the instincts that lead others to explore themselves when they are young wake up and have their say, and to be honest, it feels pretty good.

I wonder what other instincts lay dormant within me, just waiting to be dug out of the icy grip of depression and turned on.

Not my libido. It’s sluggish but alive. I get horny. I want sex. I crave sex.

My personal barriers prevent that from happening right now. but all is in flux and therefore that may change in the future.

The ties that bind me are of my own devising, and therefore are mine to discard when they no longer suit my purposes.

They will disappear when I no longer need them, like all the rest. They never truly bound me, they only gave me an excuse to stymie my own growth.

Well fuck that. I’m gonna grow like kudzu that fucked some bamboo and a baby whale, and I will no longer be bound by any smaller notion of who I am.

Every day, I will dream myself anew.
Every day is a door I will go through
Every day, I will free what I’ve deprived
Every day, I will keep myself alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling especially fucked up by sleep right now.

I keep almost drifting off then yanking myself back to consciousness.

Not good. Very stressful.

But worse is the dizziness. I have been lurching all over the place like I am on a ship in a storm. Even just sitting here peacefully, barely moving at all except for my fingers, I feel like the room is spinning.

And speaking of dizziness, yesterday I was between thoughts when my eyes happened to alight on my bottle of Rampriril and I finally noticed that there, in big letters, it said MAY CAUSE DIZZINESS.

Well that would explain a lot.

But not really. I don’t think my dizziness is the kind brought on by a blood pressure medication. I don’t feel faint, like the blood is rushing to or from my head. I don’t feel any sort of flutter and I don’t feel cold or flushed in the face.

Pretty sure it’s sinus related. My sinus cavities are full of fluid that sloshes around every time I move my head, and that’s throwing off my sense of balance.

But I could be wrong.

Whatever the cause, it sucks.

So does struggling to stay awake, although the Diet Coke I am drinking is helping with that, thank goodness.

I mean, I still wish I was asleep in my bed, and I am definitely not at my sharpest, but at least I am not drifting off any more.

I still want to, though.

---

Those little women

Been reading Little Women by Louisa May Allcott for the first time since I was a kid.

I read it two or three times when I was young. I really liked it back then. Reading it felt like a trip to a happier, better place where everyone was…

Actually, fuck that, The truth is that it was a trip to a happier, better family. A close-knit one where everybody cares deeply about each other and looks out for one another and there is an abundance of warmth and love and affection.

So unlike my own chilly and neglected life, where nobody gave a damn about me, there was nobody looking after me or even taking an interest in me, and I was completely abandoned by those who were supposed to care for me.

Sadly, the book does not hold up well when read at my ripe old age of 47. Oh, it still has all its charm and appeal, but I am now painfully aware of how artificial and formulaic it is, to the point where it almost feels patronizing.

Fuck.I’m drifting off again. More after the break.

---

Too many mods

I always know when I have installed too many mods in my Skyrim installation because that’s when things start to crash, behave strangely, or just plain disappear.

So despite having done one yesterday, I am thinking I am going to have to do a purge/reset of all the mods and then add back only the ones I can’t live without.

And that is very much a darling-murdering type of choice to have to make.

I mean, I can do it. Brutal prioritization is a skill I possess. I can assess my resources and cull that which is least valuable to me when called upon.

Doesn’t mean I enjoy it, though.

One weird thing was that when I got to this point in the main plot :

…but instead of the badass main villain Alduin landing and starting his Villain Speech, he just landed, then flew away, then landed again, and so on.

Which would have been comical had it not been a potentially game-ending error

Like imagine an actor is about to deliver a serious heavy duty Shakespeare speech but instead just keeps making their entrance, leaving, then making it again.

Luckily, there was a kludge. ^[1] A few console commands and I at least had the Dragonrend Shout (which forces dragons to land them) and could go on with the game.

But that turned out not to be a good thing because you immediately fight Alduin in the present and I just plain don’t have the raw power to do it.

Even with my follower Faallokaar and whatever I can summon, I could barely damage the big lizard. I might as well have been throwing pebbles.

So I loaded a game from before the whole scene, and now I am on a quest to acquire some serious fucking firepower.

Which means I need to find a place to buy me some high level spells. The standard set sold everywhere just won’t cut it in this fight.

I wonder if the nice folks at the College of Winterhold can hook me up.

---

Another sign that I have too many mods is that some are installed but just don’t work.

Including one I love called Blackthorn, which adds a little village that you can build and restore and rule over as your own little fief.

It takes time and gold, but I don’t care. I love that kind of thing. It gives me enormous satisfaction to make my little village grow until it is a thriving community.

The fact that it’s also insanely profitable in the long run doesn’t hurt either.

Sadly, my little village does not currently exist. The mod is installed but I went to the place where my village should be and there is nothing but forest and wolves there.

God damn it.

So that’s another reason to do another purge and reset.

Heck, maybe I can even get Inigo, my fluffy funny fuckbuddy follower, to work.

He’s a Khajjit follower who has over 7000 lines of dialogue, often quite on point for what is going on, and with a very charming and adorable personality.

Plus, he has the sexy Khajjit accent which makes him sound like his namesake, Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride.

When he starts out, he is technically heterosexual. The first time I seduce him, he says something like “I didn’t know I was into this kind of thing”.

Trust me, darling…. you are.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This having to crawl up out of a deep dark cavern of sleep every day sucks.

But so does slowly losing my mind to a lack of REM sleep.

:Like always, I have no good options and must choose that which sucks less.

And that… varies.

---

Under the Dome

Ordered from some place called The Dome last night.

It’s a place with a curiously limited menu. One that leads me to believe that the place is one of these little hole in the wall restaurants where they have a deep fryer and that is it.

I mean, check this shit out.

Anyhow, they had a $5 off introductory thing so I decided to give it a try. I ordered the sub, fries, and onion rings.

And the sub was decent. Tasty when it was hot, but a tad too spicy for me now that I am eating the second half cold,.

Turns out, it has jalapeno poppers in it. Makes me wonder why that did not bother me last night when the thing was hot.

Physically hot as well as chemically hot.

The onion rings were delicious but too greasy for my stomach. Keep forgetting to avoid super greasy foods. Ever since I had my gall bladder out, my system can’t quite handle them and they end up making me a little queasy.

But the fries…. my god, the fries….

The fries were crazy delicious. My mind was blown. They might well be the best fries I have ever had, and that’s truly saying something.

Whatever oil they fry them in gives them this sort of buttered toast flavour that is truly outstanding. Plus they were fried to crisp perfection.

Which means that I will likely be ordering from them again, even though the sub was only okay-ish and the onion rings were too greasy for me.

Next time I will just get the nuggets instead.

---

The lurking panic

I’ve talked before about how there is this anxiety attack always kind of lurking around my consciousness waiting to strike me the second I let my guard down before.

Well I have been thinking about just what is going on there, and I have scarily concluded that it has something to do with my poor respiration.

This is a crazy dangerous topic for me, for it comes with a serious danger of triggering a panic attack from my phobia of smothering (which, of course, makes me feel like I am smothering), but I have to do it anyhow.

Might keep me from, ya know, dying in a hospital with tubes everywhere.

The idea is that my waking respiration is so bad that I run low on oxygen all the time, and the lurking panic is actually my body trying to tell me this and triggering the appropriate response, which is panic.

But my anti-panic psychological defenses won’t let it through.

If that is correct, then I am actually in pretty bad shape and should really take a trip to the ER because I am short of breath nearly all the time these days.

And that’s, like, bad.

But to do that, I have to get past the anti-panic defenses I have so carefully constructed in an attempt to make myself sane.

Now, I shall lay down and try to stop thinking about it so I can calm down.

More after the break.

---

Now where was I?

Oh right, the fact that I might probably be dying.

I realized that I have unconsciously learned to take slow, steady breaths in and out. A lot like how one breathes in their sleep, in fact.

Presumably, this is how my autonomic nervous system copes with the slow disintegration of my working lung capacity.

As over time the carbon dioxide that doesn’t make it out accumulates in the bottom of my lungs, it leaves me with less working lung capacity as the air I breathe in never makes it to the alveoli down there.

Isn’t it cute how I am going scientific to keep from panicking?

Anyhow, it now occurs to me that said alveoli might die if they do not get enough oxygen on a regular basis and so I might be losing lung capacity permanently.

That would also be BAD. Very, very BAD .

Better get my ass to a doctor pretty quick, right?

Right. But also, wrong.

No matter the stakes, it will take some time to accumulate the energy necessary to overcome my inertia and anxiety and let me decide to act.

So my trip won’t be for a few days yet, maybe not even till Thursday or Friday.

That’s not the way I want it to be, but that’s the way it is.

If I had my druthers, I would be perfectly capable of swift and decisive action when the situation demands it, even when it involves me.

But I am not so lucky. It will have to wait till I can make myself do it or until things get bad enough to warrant a 911 call.

And I am sure that, in the future, I will be cursing the me of right now for not acting sooner when the warning signs were perfectly clear and all that noise.

But I hope I will have the humility and the self-awareness to remember how hard things are for me right now, and how from my point of view at this exact moment in my personal history, it seems equally possible that I would go to the ER and they would check me out and then tell me there is nothing wrong with me, or at least, nothing wrong enough for them to bother doing anything when there are actual worthwhile human beings who need their help.

And I find that rather discouraging.

Depression makes me easily discouraged. Everything in my psyche is geared towards doing nothing (that matters) as a way to keep myself “safe”.

It’s very hard for me to work up the motivation to do anything because my internal resistance is so very strong.

Depression is like friction in that way.

So before I go risk another humiliating rejection by the medical system, I am going ot need to work up a lot of energy, and that takes time.

And if I get sick or die before I am ready, oh well.

I did the best that I could.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sleepy, Hard to concentrate. Wish I was still in bed but gotta eat;. Etc.

---

Discovered something pretty amazing this morning : there is a program called Cathedral Assets Optimizer which totally automates the process of converting mods from the original Skyrim to ones that work with Skyrim Special Edition.

Which is not only super convenient because now I can use all the “Oldrim” mods I know and love from Way Back When, but also means that Way Back, when I said on the forums that in theory it should be possible to automate the process and people didn’t believe me, I was right, god damn it.

The first one I converted was a mod for a dragon follower named Faallokaar, There’s two majors versions of this mod : a boring sex-free one and a fun, exciting one where you can have all kind of crazy gay sex with him.

I chose door number 2. Of course.

At first I couldn’t figure out how to work the program because I could not figure out where it was outputting the mod’s files.

Spoiler, turns out it wasn’t, it was converting them where they sat. I am so used to converting file types to have input and output that it took me a while to realize what was going on. I thought it wasn’t doing anything at all.

Nope! It was working fine. I just needed a paradigm shift.

There is also a female version of this dragon, and that’s the one I used to use back when because she had a cute, sweet voice, whereas the male version has a deep, intimidating, rough voice.

Seems silly to me now, but what the hell, I was a different person then.

Weaker. More timid. Less complete. More depressed. More confused. Etc.

Thanks goodness I hae gotten better since there. Still a long way from sanity, but I am approaching it and gained speed.

More after the break.

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My fantasy life

Alias “the closest thing I have to a real life”.

First, piracy : had to rescue my second play-through from oblivion. Loaded up the game and my subtly named pirate Cockup Yerbum was gone.

But this, I know how to handle. I just went straight to the save game directory and renamed one of the backup saves and Cockup was back.

I also backed up that whole directory and put the backup somewhere completely divorced from the main game so the main game can’t corrupt it.

It’s like I buried my treasure. Arrh, and all that.

The game itself is going swimmingly (and sailingly). I’ve gotten a lot better at searching the seas for boat carrying the metal I need to upgrade my ship (the Jackdaw), and so I am sleeker, stronger, and more powerful on the water than ever.

The proof of that came this afternoon, when for the first time (this time) I decided to attack a Level 1 fort on my own.

In my previous incarnation, attacking even a level 1 fort was a complicated and protracted affair as I tried to dodge the fort’s cannons and mortars while aiming my broadsides at the fort’s defensive towers.

This time the fight was brief and definitive. Blew the towers to smithereens with only a few shorts. Between my mortars, my broadsides, and my high precision swivel guns, I took them out with contemptuous ease.

Now I am thinking I might take on a Level 2 fort. See if I can handle one. What the heck. Worst thing that can happen is I get my ass handed to me.

In this game, that rarely costs you much in terms of time, effort, or treasure.The game autosaves quite frequently, and that encourages even risk-averse types like me to take risks and be bold.

There’s a life lesson in there somewhere, I am sure.

Over in the more fantastical waters of Skyrim. I have been making my way through the main plot semi-reluctantly.

I mean, I know I have to do it in order to get it out of my system and then I can start exploring other options, but I kind of know the plotline really, really well.

But what can I say, I get caught up in the plot and develop a need to do the next thing and the next thing and the thing after that, even though I know what’s coming next.

So clearly, it’s more about my being almost fanatically goal oriented and loving having a series of tasks to do than it is about anything to do with the story.

I am addicted to questing. As long as I have a “next thing” to do, I am happy.

Even if my motivation to do the “next thing” is not curiosity but nostalgia. For me, rocketing through the main quest is a trip down memory lane. I am constantly going “Oh right, I remember this!” in a way that feels like revelation.

The way I figure it, nostalgia is our brain’s way of rewarding us for unpacking and refrehing out memories.

That is why there is such pleasure in simply remembering. And why even bad things can provoke nostalgia, because it’s not the memory which is pleasing, but the remembering of it.

I mean, I have loads of nostalgia for my elementary school, Parkside Elementary, andI was fucking miserable there.

Yet all I have to do is think about the place and it all comes flooding back – the layout, the sounds, the memories, the emotions, and of course, the smell.

Dusty concrete, floor polisher, and pencil shavings.

Still happy I have my boinkable dragon companion Faallokaar with me. He has three modes : humanoid lizard (Argonian, of course), cow-sized mini-dragon,and full sized fire breathing ass kicking self sucking dragon.

That last one is hot AF.

He doesn’t do it in battle, though. That would be rude. And heavily imply a seriouslys askew set of priorities.

First you defeat evil, THEN you suck your own dick till you spurt hot cum down your throat, completely with gulping sounds.

Now if you’re excuse me, I need to go towel off my extremities.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.