I’ve been doing it all wrong again.

In that I have gotten back into feeling like I am doing it all wrong again.

Patient readers know the score. That constant feeling like I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing. A feeling I escape by fleeing into video games et al.

Et tu, al?

It’s a habit of thought I can’t seem to break. And it’s one well worth breaking, because it’s extremely self-destructive and maladaptive and, like, bad.

But try as I might to get rid of it, the moment my back is turned, it creeps back in, and stays there until I have this exact same revelation again six months from now.

And it runs deep. I really can’t imagine it not being there. The very idea that there is nothing I am supposed to be doing refuses to compile.

I mean, I can imagine it, and it seems nice. Seems like it would make me feel very free to be completely self-indulgent and lazy and I would finally be able to live to be happy and that is fucking IT.

But I can’t imagine that lasting very long. After all, it hasn’t in the past. Some deep part of me needs that feeling of constant failure. That’s the only way the world makes sense to me and to it.

After all, if there is nothing I am supposed to be doing, why am I here? Perhaps this feeling of mine is where my sense of purpose goes to die, It’s a result of all my intentions and ambitions and desires being locked in perpetual logjam behind the stone wall of my depression and all the makes is through is a vague feeling that I should being doing… something or other.

Dunno what. When I try to figure it out, my mind instantly overloads on options and shuts the fuck down.

Whatever it is that would let me choose an option – something involving the id and being a live person with instincts and passions and everything – I am sorely lacking.

I don’t even know what I want.

In fact, I’m scared of wanting things. In my deep mind, wanting things only leads to intense suffering because I am utterly powerless to get said things. Better off not wanting them in the first place.

It’s like Buddhism only pathetic.

That’s why there’s $2K sitting on my reloadable that I haven’t even touched yet. To spend it would require me to decide what to spend it on and there are just so many goddamned possibilities that I can’t do that, either.

Makes me wonder what would happen if I won the lottery.

I’d probably end up living like Scrooge – as cheaply as possible despite being rich,

And it all links back to indecision and my lack of vitality and all that shit. And I don’t know how to fix that. I don’t know how to fix my deeply broken connection to life and bring myself back from the dead.

Thinking won’t do it. It would have to be something far deeper than the conscious mind could ever hope to reach.

And I don’t know what to do with things like that. I don’t know how to handle them. There’s no point of entry, no handholds to grip them.

And maybe that’s the point.

More after the break,

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Never the same river twice

I am positive that I had a truly excellent idea for what this half of today’s blogging would be about. I even remember repeating it to myself in my head a bunch of times so that I would not forget it.

But I still forgot it. It’s gone forever now. The swift and powerful river of my mind carried it away as quickly as it brought it to me. It passed through my mind like a comet.

And it would have done me no good to write it down because once it was written down it would be dead to me. Worse than dead. Garbage. Pollution. Toxic.

My ideas are only good to me when they are still fresh and wriggling and full of life. Itis that life essence that gets translated into words.

Dead fish tell no tales.

This is the truth for me and I am learning to accept it.

I had the amusing thought recently that it was as through I ended up with someone else’s muse. Mine didn’t really fit me at all.

When I was a kid, and I dreamed of being a writer. I naturally assumed that I would be the sort of writer that starts with an outline and fills in the details one layer at a time until it becomes a book.

That struck me as the “right” way to be a writer. The smart way. Neat, orderly, with a clear progression towards the goal while still allowing room for creativity and discovery.

But um, nope. My muse is one of ephemera and fleeting notions. The only way I write is by capturing the idea and putting it directly to work so that the only way I can actually express myself is through the finished work.

This is not the way I want it to work. But I’m not in charge here. Every artist, regardless of medium or form, worships the same god and that is their muse, and the good ones are the ones willing to do what it takes to make their muse happy.

They do what it takes to make the words (or paintings, or performances, or whatevs) come out, period.

And that’s not easy for me, I don’t like being at the whim of a whimsical muse. I want my actions to be the product of my intentions, not the product of an unpredictable and unreliable inner voice.

But I am, above all, a pragmatist, and I know that there is no use pining for the muse I wish I had. I am far better off just learning to live with the one I’ve got.

And I am learning. I’m learning slowly and with imperfect grace, but I am learning.

Hopefully one day I will catch up with myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

wp:paragraph –>

Gods, am I sick of things not fucking working.

As previously mentioned, I bought a game called Wolfenstein 2 : The New Colossus.

And the motherfucking thing does not work. I get through the displaying of various people’s logos (studio, distributor, publisher, lead programmer’s dog’s chess club) and then the thing freezes and cannot be thawed.

Tried a bunch of things the Internet suggested. None of it worked. So that game lies moribund on my Steam account awaiting something – like divine intervention – to happen to let me play the fucking thing.

And I was really looking forward to it, too. The game got amazing reviews from both critics and players alike, and sounded like something I would enjoy.

But nope. Denied. I would have returned it, but I bought it through Fanatical and they make it a pain to return things, and it was only $15, so for now, they win.

Then I bought Borderlands 3. And I was super stoked for it. I own and have played all the way through all the previous games in the series and am a super big fan of them. They have this crazy play style and snarky sense of humour that I can’t resist.

Not that I’d want to.

But the same thing happened. Le jeu ne jouera pas. The fucking thing won’t play. It also freezes immediately after playing the logos, and that’s just plain not fucking fair.

I’m going to have to return it. It’s only stubborn rage that has kept me from doing it already. As if somehow, I am still going to FORCE it to do what I want.

And after the fucking thing took forever to download because it’s 85 gigs! I haven’t had a download take that long since the days of the BBS, for fuck’s sake.

Oh, and the real kicker? I’d been through all this before. Of course, I only remembered that once I had been through it all again.

I’d bought the game, made it through the epic download, tried to play it, and tried to make it work once before, and ended up returning it.

At least this time, I paid 2/3 less for it.

Update : it took some finagling, but i just verified that it’s not a matter of my computer not meeting the system requirements for the game. So I can cross that out as a cause. My computer can handle it just fine.

Ditto for Wolfenstein 2. Flying colors.

So something seriously fuckywonky (TM) is going on here. I should be able to play both games without any problems, and yet, problems.

Problems galore, to be honest.

The fault has to lie with the programmers. Something they did is fundamentally incompatible with my computer despite it being a very modest and “normal” PC.

So they fucked up, and as a result, I am denied two awesome games.

Now I have to find something else I might like.

And if that one fails, well, someone’s just gonna have to die.

It’s the only solution.

More after the break.

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My limited brutality

I’ve been telling myself for a few months now that within certain narrowly defined limits, I am absolutely without mercy – an intellectual brute.

And that’s true as far as it goes. But now the undefined nature of those narrowly defined limits has started to really bother me.^[!]

So let’s start with the basic definition I have been working from for a while : I never attack people personally but I have no hesitation or mercy when it comes to their publicly stated opinions.

I will destroy opinions I consider evil and wrong with my ninja dragon level mental martial arts and my hydrogen bombs of logic and reason, and if that happens to hurt the person holding that opinion at the time, I am totally fine with that.

They should have thought about that before they became scum.

But I know it’s not that simple. I know that, for example, that a casual observer seeing me bringing that level of force to a mere public debate could easily decide that I am some kind of raging monster with no sense of proportion or restraint, like some kind of intellectual Juggernaut (nope, not saying it)/

And they are not wrong. I have some serious goddamned issues and the fact that I would only let that psycho monster in my head off the chain when I feel it is “justified” can only, at best, partially compensate for that.

And I worry about that monster in my head sometimes. I know he’s just waiting for the moment he is unleashed so he can fuck things up with a two by four.

And that will probably not be good, Sure, it’s quite easy (and fun) to imagine unlikely action movie situations involving packs of ninjas, or other conveniently morally unambiguous situations where it’s clear who is right and who is wrong and who seriously needs a brutal lesson in the benefits of civilization.

(while kicking bad guy butt) “Is this the way you like it, motherfuckers? Survival of the fittest? Well guess what asshole, in that scenario, YOU LOSE! Now don’t you wish you had the protection of a just and fair civilization right about now? Well? DON’T YOU?”

Then, afterwards, to my now horrified friends : “The ultimate duty of a gentleman is to maintain and enforce the standards of civilized behaviour. Ironically, this on occasion requires unleashing the beast within so that one might demonstrate to the primitives that anarchy does not necessarily favour them. “

That would be a damned good set piece. Especially if, until that point, I had been an extremely civilized, gentlemanly fellow with Old World manners and the air of the stuffy, effect intellectual about me.

Hence my joke, “My hobby is beating the shit out of Social Darwinists. I mean, what are they going to do, plead for me to be fair? To follow the rules? To have mercy on them because they are weaker than me? I don’t think so.

I take their stuff too! It’s fun. “

To me, that’s hilarious, but then again, I know I am joking.

More or less. Mostly. More times than not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]]I don’t like that kind of ambiguity. When I am ambiguous, I do so in a rigidly defined way[[1]]

.

Just got back from the doctor. Guess what they found on my ultrasound?

The song above contains a hint!

Spoiler : I got a hernia. A really big one. Right down my midline, above the umbilicus. The hernia itself is 6 cm long, but the hernia sac is 12 cm by 6 cm and 6 cm deep.

For my fellow Canadians with imperfect knowledge of metric, that’s around 5 inches by 2.5 inches and 2.5 inches deep.

Imagine a hockey puck the size of a CD and you get the basic idea.

And I won’t go into it here because I don’t want to make myself sick, but let’s just say the way the doctor described it nearly made me faint.

So for the moment, I am just plain not going to think about it. He reassured me that while bad things might happen, they probably won’t. And he has referred me to a specialist for probable surgery.

So I am just plain not going to think about it until I have to. Eventually, his office will call and tell me when the appointment to see the surgeon will be, and I will make note of this and make sure I don’t forget, but otherwise I will go right back to not thinking about it until I have to.

That’s my plan and I think it’s a good one.

I also talked to him about my back pain, which prompted him to check my lungs (???). He also prodded my spine for sore points.

He didn’t find any. It’s not that kind of pain, It’s much deeper.

So he wrote me a prescription for massage therapy.

Score! Massage sounds pretty great to me even when I don’t have back pain. If I am ever rich, I will have full time masseur on call at all times in my mansion.

A huge Swedish dude with big muscles and big hands who can work my spine like it’s a pipe cleaner in the hands of some impossibly butch Mister Dressup.

Two issues though : are they still doing massage therapy during Covid? And if so, will my disability medical plan cover it?

The answer to the first question seems to be a definite yes. A quick google search revealed a bunch of places here in Richmond talking about how they are open despite Covid and taking appointments NOW.

The second question is far harder to answer. As I recently learned when pursuing new eyewear, what they do and do not cover is a tightly guarded secret (really, they have a moat and a dragon and everything) and so I will have to ask individual clinics what they do and do not cover.

I’m willing to pay some of the cost myself, but not all of it, Not even half.

Oh, and I told the doc about my cataracts.

You know, I could come out of that surgery with much better vision.

That would be freaking awesome.

More after the break.

---

Don’t you know about the bird?

Seriously. I expected him to look like a beatnik Wolfman Jack with the crazy eyes.

Instead, he looks like a blonde Tom Waits. I can dig it.

Feeling somewhat better about life than I did earlier. I think I have reached the point of anxiety and worry and depression trip my “fuck it” circuit breaker and right now I am reveling in the apathy.

Because seriously. Fuck it. Whatever happens, happens. I will keep doing whatever my depression lets me do, and maybe a little bit more, but otherwise I will await my fate with the cheerful fatalism of a medieval French peasant.

Maybe tomorrow there will be war, or famine, or a plague, or locusts. Maybe even an invasion. But we will have today, so let’s make today as good as we can.

It’s a sentiment I cannot argue with but it does not fit well in my cramped and paranoid Northern European brain.

I want to go romp with the faeries of the forest and dance naked round the firepit with a coven of witches and wise women, really I do.

But I can’t do it until I am sure the chores are done, the crop is in, the children are in bed, the fires are covered or put out, and the laundry is done. Oh, and the pigs are fed, and the chicken coop needs mucking out, and that new calf is ill, and….

I can’t conceive of not worrying about things like that. Even if I acknowledged that they were someone else’s problem – not my farm, or my farm but I leave it to my employees, or whatever – that would at best only buy me a little time before my system oriented brain would want to know how it all works, how all the pieces fit together, and that would lead to my needing to optimize the system, and before ya know it I am knee deep in what is going on and emotionally invested in it all and the scenario above unfolds.

This is also how I might end up in leadership roles I never wanted. When you are the guy who sees the big picture, and knows what is going on, leadership comes to you naturally, wanted or no.

Honestly, I might be healthier with a system to fret over and improve.

Or I might lose my marbles completely and become completely obsessed.

Honestly, I could either way.

Where was I? Oh right, cheerful fatalism.

I could never be someone who never worries about tomorrow, either. I am way more ant that grasshopper, for better and for worse.

I am, at best, an ant who moonlights as a grasshopper on weekends.

But I don’t mind admitting that sometimes, I wonder if the grasshoppers of the world might know something I don’t.

Maybe they blithely blunder into problems I would see coming and avoid, but they don’t spend all their time worrying either.

As in all things, there must be a happy medium between the two poles somewhere.

Damned if I know where, though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had another useless fucking therapy session today.

He can’t handle my depression, Nobody can, I am simply too much for this stinking fragile world. I am a supernova in a world of sparks and there is not a human being alive who can handle my incandesence.

Doctor Costin has nothing to offer me, when it comes down to it. When I am letting my depression show to him, he gets panicky and falls back on therapist tricks like “What do you think I should be telling you?”

Bitch, if I knew that. I wouldn’t be talking to you. Quit playing defense. You sound like someone trying to talk down a violent patient, not someone who is trying to help.

And do you have any idea how depressing and discouraging it is to finally get the point where I can reveal a large proportion of my true deep dark feeling with you only to find out you cannot god damned handle it? At all?

It gives me nihilistic thoughts.

I can’t even imagine another way out for me. Everything is hell. I can’t stand living the way I do and yet I can’t imagine changing it either.

The dreams of escape are powerful in me now. Dreams of running away, Of disappearing off the face of the planet, leaving this life behind entirely, and going to some obscure location jut left of the middle of nowhere where nobody knows me and I can start over and maybe make some kind of a life for myself.

Goodbye friends. Goodbye family. Goodbye everyone who knows me. I’m sorry it came to this and I really wish I didn’t have to put you through so much pain. I wish I was a stronger person, the kind who can just pull himself up by his own bootstraps and start over again in some less radical away and be a real person for a change.

But the person you knew was never more than shadows and reflections anyhow. Smoke and mirrors, images and fog, a lifelike simulation of a real human being.

The real truth is that I’m not anybody, Just the pale echo of a joke. One that was never funny in the first place. A bizarre mutant mind with powers beyond the ken of mortal man but who really has no place here on planet Earth.

I wish I could be so deluded as to think I was an alien. Some sort of big brained alien accidentally stranded on Earth and that even now, somewhere in the galaxy, my real parents are frantically searching for their misplaced child.

It’s a nice idea. But I know the truth. I’m just another jumped up monkey like all the rest of us. I just happen to have a brain the size of a (metaphorical) planet with vastly inadequate outlets for my titanic energies, and a head full of bad wiring that turns all that energy into sel-directed rage and depression and paranoia.

A monkey, yes, but a very badly programmed one.

And I am, as usual, all alone in trying to deal with all my issues. Nobody can help, no matter how much they love me or how bad then want to or whatever.

I am a very lonely giant, and it makes me feel quite small.

More after the break.

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The eternal gap

The one between me and other people, that is. I have been thinking about that gap a lot lately and I have come to the conclusion that it is insurmountable.

Or at the very least. I can’t conceive of it disappearing. Or of being happy with someone being closer to me than that. In the heart of all my layers of emotional insulation lies a chamber which is my sanctum santorum , my Holy of Holies, my chamber inviolate, and absolutely nothing and nobody is allowed inside.

In the chamber lies a vast and terrible darkness that stretches out to every horizon in an infinite gulf of menacing void.

And in the exact center of that void lies a castle made of hard, unyielding ice.

And in the middle of that castle is a room. The room is tiny but an expert deployment of television screens and mirrors disguises this fact and makes it seem as if the chamber is spacious and accommodating.

It is not. It is spartan and bare. The furniture is ugly and plain and entirely out of keeping with the sweeping majesty of the rest of the castle.

It is also the only thing in the castle you have seen that is not made of ice.

In this room on a squat and bare stool squats the wizard you all know. A big fat bearded fellow, quite slovenly in appearance, who stares blankly into the monitor of his computer as strings of bizarre symbols and strange glyphs stream over it.

He is nude. The cold does not appear to bother him.

This seems strange but comprehendible to you, But then he suddenly notices you and looks up, and you get a glimpse of the world behind his eyes.

What you see is a dark and terrible void that makes the one outside the castle, infinite though it may be, seem like a mere puff of smoke in the forest fire of his mind.

And in the center of that void is a crying child, a fear-crazed fox, and an assassin with cold dark eyes who seems to be waiting for something.

You wisely avoid looking into the assassin’s eyes.

---

Well that happened.

When I get hold of a metaphor, I really run with it.

Possibly this means I should be writing poetry, but that has always seemed like a losing proposition to me, The number of actually professional poets in the world, as in that’s their only job and they make a living at it, is probably around 50.

I could probably make a splash in the poetry world with the intensity of my imagery and the evocative power of my words.

But meh. The prospect sickens nevertheless.

Guess I will keep turning this blog into poetic prose when the mood strikes me.

Thank you all for putting up with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Right now, I feel like I need to take a week long shit.

I feel so dirty and rotten and sore inside. Surely only the most profound of ablutions could cleanse this mortal sinner of his unholy and profound taint.

Or cleanse his taint, for that matter.

I feel like living breathing oozing filth. I am filth, I live in filth, I exude filth, I contaminate all that I touch, and the world would be a far, far cleaner and more wholesome place if my entire existence, past present and future, could be expunged.

With a really big spunge. Er, sponge.

I wish I could clean up my act. I wish I could get my shit together then flush it. I wish I had the power to attack the enormous amount of cleaning both my place and my person need before they can be considered clean.

But I can barely imagine myself doing it.

Actually doing it is beyond me.

Plus there’s that evil little voice in my head saying “What’s the point? There’s no such thing as a clean turd. The cleaner the outside is, the more obvious it is that the inside is nothing but rusty batteries and dog turds floating in dirty ditch water. At least when you wallow in filth, the inside and outside match, and you can pretend the problem isn’t that bad. Besides, you’ll just get dirty again anyhow, so again : what’s the point?”.

That motherfucker needs to die.

Another sad truth is that when I truly clean up, it also cleanses my senses and everything starts to seem too loud and bright and shiny and real, and try as I might ot adapt to that, I just end up longing for the muting effect of my miasma again.

That’s just so damned pathetic.

But that’s me. A sad pathetic creature nobody could love or even tolerate for long. A dirty, smelly hobo with the crazy eyes that most people don’t want to even make eye contact with and who is beyond accustomed to being chased off by angry citizens from any place he might lay his lice ridden head.

Only not that, because then people would know I exist and I would have a place in the community and an established role.

Instead, I am a bizarre nonentity who makes little to no impact on the world despite having godlike powers of intellect and creativity at my proverbial fingertips.

And my literal fingertips, come tothink of it.

Ad all this as my garbage scow of a life burns down on ocean’s far horizon,. I can’t face all my health problems either, and they’re going to kill me or land me in the hospital for something truly awful any minute now.

And all this happens with a backdrop of life in the time of plague where we cannot evn get together for Christmas for fear of contaminating one another.

I’m a very sick man with a very sick life in a very sick world, and I’m very, very sick of it.

More after the break.

---

This just popped (lol) into my head :

Me (at the move theatre concession stand) : I’ll have the hot buttered cockporn.

Employee gapes at me a moment. I stand there completely impassive. A clock ticks.

Employee : Uh, sir, I think you meant the hot buttered popcorn…

Me : I know what I said.

A few more clock ticks.

Me : Bu in lieu of that, I guess I’ll have the popcorn.

That’s the sort of thing I would do if I wasn’t so shy and sensitive.

Another thought : sufficient empathy more or less forces you to be a good person, at least face to face.

Because if I feel what you feel, then when I hurt you, I hurt too. That conditions a person to not hurt others.

On the other hand, if I make you feel good, I feel good too. Thus nice behaviour is rewarded the same way bad is punished.

I’m been highly empathic my entire life. As a kid I didn’t initially grasp that this was not true for everybody.

To be honest, while I know that to be true, if you really get down into the nuts and bolts of things, I still have trouble imagining what it’s like to be so alone in your own head.

Anyhow, as a natural empath, I naturally became a pretty sweet and caring guy.

Not that I don’t deserve credit for those things or anything, mind you.

But the thing is, empathy is the foundation of morality but it is not morality. You can have great empathy and still be a bastard to people.

For example, you could be a sadist and enjoy the pain you inflict on others.

Less diabolically, I could easily have become a con man. I have the charm, the charisma, the verbal skills, and the devious mind to do it.

And most of all, I have the empathy for the job. I can “read” people and get a sense of what they are thinking and feeling. Furthermore, I understand what makes people tick and it’s usually their watches.

OK, not really.

My point is, all the things that make me such a sweetie could instead make me one hell of an effective predator.

All my empathy would do is make me prefer to screw people over in ways they don’t know about until I am long gone.

That way I never have to experience their pain. By the time it happens, I am out of range, so to speak.

Luckily for my soul and the general welfare of the populace, I also developed a very keen moral imagination that can easily imagine the empathic effects of my actions even if said results were happening on the far side of Venus.

Still, it’s not hard for me to imagine that, if life had pushed me to becoming a more coldly selfish person who took a “me versus the world, take whatever you can grab” attitude towards life, I might have become a very evil person.

Thank goodness my life was not that particular kind of crappy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Back pain is getting worse.

And it’s definitely spastic now. Big spasms that hurt like fuck and squeeze me like over-hugged puppy in the arms of a well meaning toddler.

So I am definitely going to be bringing this up with my doctor this Friday.

I still think gas and indigestion play a role, though, I think somewhere near the core of my torso (corso? No. ) is a bolus of gas and food and um, post-food, and my system is tensing around that bolus which makes my back tense and ow ow ow.

Whatever the cause, what I could use right now is a good gentle muscle relaxant. Preferably topical, but I would take anything right now.

I prefer topical muscle relaxants because they don’t make you sleepy or clumsy or whacked out like the general ones can.

Just checked out Robaxacet on Amazon Canada. It ain’t there. It’s a combination of acetaminophen and a mild muscle relaxant that I used to take.

Of course, that was 25 years ago.

The market may have moved on.

There’s probably some “Doctor’s Home Remedies” type thing I could be doing with like, a pillow and a rock and a microwave that would work, but I dunno it.

Besides, I overheat far too easily for hot rocks and heating pads and such. Not much point in relaxing my back muscles if it gives me a sick headache at the same time.

I could try a hot shower, though. The water on my back could help a lot.

For a while I was able to more or less keep up with the pain via stretching and rubbing and so on, but now that seems like tossing pebbles at a tank. The problem has gone beyond such feeble techniques and now calls for medical grade intervention.

All of this health BS is dragging my mood down, understandably. I try to relax and take the pressure off myself but patient readers know that it’s a much deeper problem than a bad attitude toward my life.

The problem is that I don’t have sufficient outlet for my energies and they tend to back up like a clogged sewer line and that’s where all my anxiety, harsh self-judgment, and intense feelings of frustration get their energy.

It’s weird. I know all this energy is just waiting there for me to use. I know I would be a much happier and healthier person if I took it upon myself to find uses for as much of that energy as I possibly can. I know that drain is better than pain.

And yet, I can’t do anything with this information. It fails to motivate change. Instead, I keep living the same stupid unsatisfying lifestyle that is not-so-slowly killing me, making every day just like the last and driving me into an early grave.

I have all this fear and dread and anxiety that closes like a vice when I try to change anything and crushes my good intentions before they can even be born.

Until I can get that vice-grip off of my heartstrings, nothing is ever going to change.

And this bus is headed right over the cliff.

And all I have to do to save myself is steer.

But I just…. can’t.

More after the break.

---

Between two fires

Well I seem to be between major burns in the emotional incinerator of catharsis I have been experiencing lately, and that’s as close as I am likely to get to “happy” as I am likel to get while this whole thing goes on, so, yay, I guess.

I am sure I will be back to venting my spleen, my rage, and my despair soon.

Been pondering how I grew up feeling like a liability. (See?)

That is a hell of a trip to lay on a sad and broken little boy. I wonder if it would have made any difference if they had known about the rape?

Probably not. They would have just resented the fact that they technically had to care about me now. They would have gotten back to ignoring me and pretending I did not exist and never had eventually.

And I would have wholeheartedly aided and abetted them in that by constant minimizing myself, flinching away from all the attention, and saying it was no big deal.

A sad and broken child indeed.

I wish there had been someone to light a spark in me back then. Someone to ignite all that latent rage and activate the blazingly self-righteous crusader for justice that lay sleeping in that sad little kid.

As am I right now, I am quite capable of someone’s ass all over town if I feel I have been the victim of injustice.

But that’s recent. As in, I only got there in the last three or four years. As recently as 2016, I would probably just suck it up and get depressed about it.

Who knows, though. Maybe someone could have gotten through to me back then, in either a light mentor (“you deserve better!”) or dark mentor (“so what are you going to do about it?”) way.

Honestly, the dark mentor would probably have had a better chance of success. Get me pissed off enough and I am capable of anything.

Even standing up for myself. On a good day, anyhow.

And burning with a passion for justice would have been infinitely preferable to the cold and ignoble oblivion of my childhood. I know now that I could have turned my whole school district upside down with my very pointy criticism of their lack of protecting me from my bullies.

Because that shit is just plain not defensible.

“No, you see, we let the bullies hurt him because we’re too evil and apathetic to even imagine thinking the social pariah kid is worth literally any time or energy to protect. Besides, we think the little smartass piece of shit deserves it.”

Hmmm. That’s pretty damned good. Well done, me..

Now to wander back to Skyrim and a very hot Oblivion.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

wp:paragraph –>

Well it’s official : every time, I get out of bed, my back hurts.

Sometimes quite a bit. To the point where it’s a tad alarming, Like the muscles of my spine are spasming so hard it might break my back.

But that’s probably not going to happen.

Some other health issue will kill me first.

Got the call from the beautiful vampires at Iris Optical. No, the province won’t kick in their $120. They say I am not due for a new pair of glasses till march 2021.

Which is insane, because I am supposed to get a new pair every three years and it has been WAY more than three years since my last pair.

Oh, and apparently I can’t cancel my order now. Presumably because they already have my money (minus the $120) and it’s my fault that I innocently chose what turns out to be the most expensive place to get glasses in the GVRD, according to my Facebook.

Which is bullshit. They could totally cancel my order and refund my money. It’s not like they have even started making my glasses yet. Not when they told me they wouldn’t have my glasses for 7 to 10 days.

Which is also bullshit. If Lenscrafters can do it in about an hour, WTF is with this bullshit outfit taking 7 to t10 days?

Sounds like they mail my order off somewhere. Don’t even make the glasses onsite. And even then, how hard is it to slot lenses into frames?

It’s all bullshit,

My mood is VANTA Black. I want to slay the sun with a bolt of hate. I want to boil the oceans with my rage. I want to rip life’s heart out and eat it.

I want to kick a child in the dick then tell them it’s because God hates them.

Well okay, not really. But that’s how I feel right now.

As you might have picked up from the subtle hints I’ve been cleverly weaving into my prose, my depression is pretty bad right now. It’s been bad for a while now but it’s been even worse since my eye appointment

Oh well. This too shall pass, I suppose.

And speaking of passing, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that my road out of hell passes real close to the cliffs of suicide.

Because liberation will only be found via letting myself actually feel all these long delayed emotions and that’s going to really fucking hurt.

And from that pain will come the urge to escape. That’s what suicide is and always has been to me : the ultimate escape. Escape from the pain, escape from the pressures inside me, escape from the feelings of gross inadequacy, escape from this crumbling edifice of a body before I have to pay the price for all my vice, escape from the existential crisis of choice, escape from everything all at once in my head,.

I want to exit this shitty subroutine, please. I want to fix all the things that art borken inside me then disappear like a puff of smoke in a hurricane.

Jesus. no wonder I like games and stories where the main character starts off with total amnesia so much. I kind of wish it would happen to me.

Alas, no. I am stuck here, in this life, in this body, in this lousy rotten incarnation that should be burned at dawn so it can go out with the tide.

Finally cleanse the world of the stain of my existence.

But that would hurt too many people.

So like Prometheus chained to the rock, I will just stay and suffer.

More after the break,.

---

How to be social

First off, let’s get this out of the way : nobody “learns” social skills^[1] and awareness.

Not in the usual sense of the term, anyhow. There was no teacher, no lessons, no tests, and no final exam. There was no books to read, no exercises to make sure you understood the material, and nobody to provide guidance if you got lost.

So people did not “learn” these skills in the way you learned math and geography.

They “learned” them like you learned to walk and talk.

In other words, by instinct. There are no instruction manuals on walking and talking and if there had been, you wouldn’t have been able to read them anyhow.

Instead, we are born with instincts that drive us to keep trying to walk and talk until we succeed. We are aided in this by quite a lot of specialized hardware in our brains that is already programmed for locomotion and language and is just waiting for the child to fill in the specifics of their bodies and their language in order to come online.

And it’s exactly the same with social skills. ^[1] Regular, non-nerdy people learned them because a deep instinct told them to keep trying until they got it right.

And that’s whereour paths diverge, it seems. Some of us keep trying until we learn, and become normal average citizens.

Others give up in favour of the other form of learning. Book learning. They develop the abstract reasoning skills that schools reward, but at the cost of the other sort of learning and future socialization.

What makes the difference? That’s a damned good question. (Thanks. ) Could be nature – perhaps some of us are simply born wired for abstract reasoning.

Or it could be nurture – those of us destined to be nerdy children missed out on socialization at a very key point, possibly because our even earlier childhood left us with an insecure attachment style that gave us a tendency to retreat in the face of challenge.

I honestly do not know. Probably some of both, as with all things.

But I know this : the first step towards overcoming the limitation of nerdiness is recognizing that mundane people do, in fact, know things you do not, and that they did not learn them from books but from trying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well. I just got charged $260+ for a new pair of glasses.

This was quite a shock as I expected to pay nothing. I have never had to pay out of pocket for my glasses before and I usually only get charged like $20 for the exam.

Oh, and the best part if that I might get charged $120 more, depending on whether the province approves my claim or not.

Yes, according to the lovely folk at Iris Optical, the province will only kick in a maximum of $120 for everything : eye exam, lenses, frames, fitting, everything,.

And I have to pay the rest out of pocket.

This strikes me as unlikely.

My roomie Julian is on disability same as me, and he has never had to go out of pocket for glasses, same as me.

I really can’t imagine the max coverage being only $120. That wouldn’t have paid for my glasses and exam back when I was a kid in the Eighties.

Right now, I am willing to give my local Iris the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are working from outdated and/or incomplete information because they don’t get a lot of dirt poor disabled people in oh so chic Iris.

ButI might change my mind on that depending on what I discover via my own research and how they treat me at Iris.

I am perfectly capable of raising one hell of a stink – think Pepe LePew farting for an hour straight – if I feel I am being ripped off.

As in, how dare this faceless corporation victimize this poor defenseless disabled person by gouging him when he needed glasses so badly his old ones were hanging off his face with one arm missing.

And all during a pandemic, at that.

I was just lucky – sort of – that I actually had the money from my inheritance. Otherwise I would have had a shit fit right there and caused a scene and canceled my order with them right away.

As is, they are going to call me back tomorrow to tell me if my claim was approved, and when they do, there’s good chance I will cancel my order for the glasses and look for someplace a lot cheaper;.

They can keep the money for the exam – after all, they did one, and Doctor Lam was quite pleasant to work with – but I bet I can get a way better deal online.

So I will cancel my glasses order and get a refund on THAT, and then go shopping.

And they better not give me any back-talk when it comes to giving me the full results of my full health eye exam so I can shop around, either.

Because I am super pissed off right now and I am ready to tear someone a new one.

Oh, fun bonus fact : I can’t find the maximum the province will pay for my glasses listen anywhere. Lots of places that say “up to the maximum” but no places will tell me what that maximum actually IS.

Clearly, they don’t want us sneaky poor people deliberately getting the most expensive glasses they will pay for.

That sure sounds like something we poors would do!

So I have sent an email to the province and also consulted the hivemind on Facebook.

Oh, and I bought the game Wolfenstein 2 : Something About A Colossus and it crashes the second it stops playing all the logos.

Oh, and I have cataracts and probably will need surgery for them.

And for all I know, I am going to get a phone call from my doctor’s office tomorrow saying that the results of my ultrasound are in and they want me to put the receiver down and back slowly away from my liver.

But enough about me. How’s your day going?

---

As sick as I can be

Like I’ve been saying, I have really been feeling like the walls are closing in on me health-wise, and death approaches me from an oblique angle.

But I still see it.

It’s blurry AF, but I see it.

And I feel helpless to stop it, Oh, on paper, there are lots of things I could do to help myself, but in practice all my health issues are ganging up with my mental health issues to keep me frozen in place like a wind-whipped snowman.

It always comes around to cold with me, doesn’t it?

Where the limbs of my self-preservation instincts should be you find only wizened, shriveled stumps capable only of generating the same cold dead signal, as from a microphone in a silent room, as it always has.

A silence that makes dead space seem chatty by comparison.

Whatever ability I have to act in my own best interests is nervelessly paralyzed by that terrible cold conversion that turns hot passion into a killing frost.

I guess I invented it as a way to counter my anxiety, but I took it way too far. We are all killed by our primary coping mechanisms, it seems.

Now not a flicker of flame or a poof of smoke can last long enough to melt my frozen flesh and take me out of this long dark winter and put me someplace happy and strong and good where I can overwrite all those bas social tapes in my head and replace them with the positive human interaction I deserve.

But until then, I am so very cold, and alone, and unhealthy, and depressed. Were it not for my traitorous depressed mind bolloxing things up with its death wish, I would be overflowing with energy for making lifestyle changes and doing all the things I should be doing and fighting my way bravely back to good health, taking it one day at a time and proving it takes more than being sick on every level to stop me!

Instead, I just await the inevitable and try not to hink about it.

God save me from my own semi-suicidal self.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m so tired of being tired.

So sick of being sick.

Lately, I’ve been waking up with back pain. The sort that comes when I have a lot of trapped gas in my guts. The blockage causes my whole lower abdomen to tense up and that makes my back tense up too and voila, back pain,

So that’s fun.

I can stretch and rub my muscles but that doesn’t provide long term relief. Only getting the gas out can do that.

I know tricks to help with that, Nothing exotic. Rub here, press there, gently squeeze another place. And so on.

And picking the right moment to poop. Seems absurd, but long experience has taught me that timing is everything in this situation. I have to wait until the chaos within has calmed – call it the eye of the storm – and then go for it.

Otherwise, I will be fighting my own gut to get anything done and that only makes things worse by adding energy to the system and getting Irritable Bowel Syndrome’s deadly pendulum REALLY swinging.

So add back pain to my daily torments. The walls are closing in on me, I can tell. Won’t be long before something really major puts me in the hospital or my grave.

And the Traitor Within still won’t let me do much about it, It compromises my will, saps my strength, and fills me with thick grey fear and confusion when I try.

Because it wants to die, or at least, to have all the decisions taken away from me so that all I have to worry about in life is doing what I am told by medical people.

Who’d be acting in loco parentis in my sick scheme to escape adulthood.

Sad to think that I am incapable of handling the crushing burden of responsibility that comes with being a disabled person.

I want to be so much stronger. But I can’t seem to find it in myself. I search and I search, but I never find it. It’s like I am floating in numbing amniotic fluid without anything solid to push against to propel myself people anywhere.

Instead, all I can do is flail and thrash around and convince myself that motion equals progress and that surely I must be getting somewhere.

It doesn’t do a thing to truly help me but it keeps me entertained while my extremely evitable doom approaches.

Look at the pretty pictures, little boy. The train will be here to crush you under its wonderfully cruel and unfeeling wheels soon.

Doesn’t that sound good? It will be your magic ticket to a place where nobody expects anything of you and everyone is nice to you and you are taken care of by professionals in an almost nurturing like way.

As close as a 47 year old fat man can get, anyhow.

I am so deeply wounded and in so tender and deep an area of my childhood. 4 years old my mind was shattered by a stranger’s cock and the wound went untreated for decades. It’s very much a part of me now, and I can’t imagine life without it.

And yet, it’s killing me.

Fuck you, child raping stranger. Fuck you to DEATH.

More after the break.

---

The hound’s tooth

Sometimes my depression feels like a icicle toothed hound is gnawing at my heart and every heartbeat drives its teeth a little deeper into my tender heart’s flesh.

But I know it will never kill me, That would imply mercy.

Other times, it feels like a dark and dire winter spreading its unnatural cold and chill over a land draped in summer, freezing rabbits mid-hop and killing all that is green and wholesome and good with its deadly frost;

And other times it feels like there’s a terrified animal that thinks it is me trapped in my ribcage and desperately clawing to get out as claustrophobia and the feeling that predators are going to find it ANY SECOND NOW combine into a feeling that I am going to die any second because the predators will FIND ME and GET ME because I CAN’T GET AWAY because I am TRAPPED.

Except the real trap is, of course, my mind.

Sometimes it feels like I am naked at the north pole at midnight, absolutely alone and completely vulnerable and utterly abandoned oh so very, very tiny. And all I can do is curl into a ball and retreat deep into myself to stay warm.

Sure, I am dying from the outside in and eventually the bitter cold will breach my mental defenses and kill me, but at least I will be warm and cozy until then.

And what else am I supposed to do? Move towards warmth? Don’t be absurd.

I’m pretty sure I’d melt.

Besides, I’m too numb to even know what direction to go.

Sometimes my depression feels like icy eels are circulating in my bloodstream and biting me in random places now and then, when I least expect it. Always waiting for the moment when I am most vulnerable to strike, knowing this will only make me more paranoid and hyper-vigilant and scared.

I can almost hear them laughing. Almost.

Sometimes my depression feels like a cold, hard, brutal rage. Brutality personified. The urge to destroy embodied. The Void unveiled. Hate purified to its most essential form – hatred of all that exists. Nullity unleashed. Toxicity perfected.

A rage that could destroy planets. A mindless, impotent thing that just wants to make the world feel my pain as it dreams of stabbing and crushing and crunching and mauling without any regard as to target as long as they are alive and can feel pain.

Sometimes it feels like my skin is too tight and my bones are rattling and any minute my rickety airplane will shake itself to piece.

And sometimes it feels like nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. Everywhere. Forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fucked if I know.

The spontaneous narrative about The Man Who Will Kill Us All will have to pause for now because I have written myself into a corner and have no idea what comes next.

I mean, the world’s on fire and civilization has completely broken down because people know the universe is dying (or so it seems), and that seems pretty final.

Not sure what to do from there. Something involving a ragtag group of survivors, I suppose. I don’t want to go there though.

I mean, how cliché can you get.

That leaves me with The Man, and he’s now a passenger in his own man, with a frightening new entity who knows impossible secrets n the driver’s seat.

Not sure where I am going there, either. I guess this is the risk you take when you write from the gut like I have been doing for the last few days.

The next bits will come to me when I stop rying to figure them out and just let them come to me like all that came before.

I’m new to this business of letting my inspiration run hot and hard. There will be a period of adjustment, Might take a while before my ego-mind gets with the program,

Well, tough titty. Because I am going to do a lot more of this murky dark shit. I’d be doing it right now if getting my ultrasound this morning hadn’t ;left me so depleted.

The scan was uneventful, except that I thought it was for my liver only, but nope. the imaging tech did my entire lower abdomen area.

She took a LOT of scans. Actually has me a bit worried. The paranoid hysteric in my mind insists that this means she found something on my liver and decided that she better survey the rest of the territory in order to paint a complete picture of the disaster area that is my digestive system,

Or maybe not. But I remember once, a long long time ago, my former GP Doctor Robinson told me I had something called “fatty infiltration of the liver”, and made it sound pretty serious, but then told me there was nothing that could be done except to “keep an eye on it”.

Funny how doctors become pessimistic in an airy, cavalier fashion around me.

“Well, sure, your knee ligaments are shredded, and I guess we could do surgery to clean it up some, but it wouldn’t really be help much….”

“Dizzy spells? It’s your diabetes. Take car of that better. NEXT! ”

“Walking across a parking lot made you feel like you ran a marathon backwards? Hmmm. Well here’s some random tests. The results will probably mean something or other if you ever make me read them, “

All of this seems to lead inevitably to a “the only one I can count on is myself” fuck you kindly kind of attitude,

I’ve always resisted that kind of thing because I associate it with really terrible people. It perforce seems to require a abandonment of compassion, and I suppose that makes sense in that if you can’t trust the world, it makes sense to close yourself off.

But that’s too high a price. I treasure my compassion,. I want to keep it.

There has to be another way.

I need another source of strength,

More after the break.

---

When The Man Who Will Kill Us All woke up, it was like he fell out of sleep.

One moment he was deep within the cloud of blissful nullity that is truly deep sleep, then there was a brief sensation of falling, then he was fully awake and his back hurt.

For a long time, he just lay there, trying to go back to sleep. He didn’t remember exactly why he didn’t want to be awake, but he knew he was better off not knowing and that was good enough for him,

But all his sleepiness was gone, and trying to force it was becoming actively irritating, so he reluctantly got to his feet and opened his eyes.

He was on the rocky shore of a vast black still lake, He couldn’t see anything above him.. no sky, no ceiling, nothing….just endless flawless darkness.

And there was something… wrong about the rocks he was standing on. At first they had seemed like a random jumble like any other set of broken boulders on any other shoreline, but the more he looked at them, the more convinced he became that they formed a coherent pattern that only could be seen from high in the air.

Like a message to the gods of this godforsaken place.

The water of the lake seemed off as well. It seemed perfectly still when he looked directly at it, but he kept seeing it move out of the corner of his eye.

That’s when the first spasm hit him. A full body muscular contraction that wrung him out like a wet cloth, then a long dark period of weakness and confusion.

After that, they were a regular occurrence, And they only got stronger over time. The Man Who Will Kill Us All could do nothing but whimper in terror and pain.

But then the spasms changed. They became spasms not of body but of emotions, Each one brought on a flood of a single emotion so intense that The Man Who Will Kill Us All was sure they would destroy his mind completely.

Sometimes it was rage. A white hot towering rage that made him want to scream into the void and shake the heavens with his fury.

Sometimes it would be fear. A soul-tearing unsourced terror that shook him to his core and made him piss himself without an iota of shame,

But worst of all was the lust. Cock harder than cold pressed steel but unable to find release, the raging horniness left him frustrated and furious.

But that was okay. The spasms were coming faster now, and blurring into one another. Soon, the distinctions between melted away and The Man Who Will Kill Us All felt nothing but a rising savage joy as power filled his body and his soul.

Soon he would evolve into his next form.

Soon he would smash the sky and escape this place.

Soon, he would break out and seek revenge on that which had invaded his mind and imprisoned him here.

Soon, he would make it PAY.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.