And just like that, the stars started going out, one by one.

And all humanity could do was go outside and gape at the darkening sky and wonder what it could possibly mean.

Astrophysicists were dragged away from their labs and telescopes and dusty little office and pushed in front of cameras and brusquely asked to account for it all.

“we’re just as surprised as you are!” they answered. This true but unsatisfactory answer only enraged the crowd.

“A cosmic dust storm is raging between Earth and the stars!” they tried next. This satisfied most of the Earth’s population and life warily returned to normal. Sky gaping become a hobby, not a breathless obsession.

But it didn’t last long – a week, ten days at most – because this explanation could not account for stars blinking out of existence like faulty Xmas tree lights, one at a time, and in no particular order.

Luckily, the astrophysicists had a new explanation ready to go. One they were pretty darn proud of. It involved some very convincing charts and diagrams showing how or solar system had been invaded by thousands of spherical objects of an “unknown substance” (dark matter?) and it was these mysterious objects that had been “misidentified” as a dust cloud at first but were now know to be mystery spheres.

Surprisingly, this worked. It was enough for most people that the scientists knew what it was and reassured them it was harmless (?).

It wasn’t much, but it kept civilization going for a while.

What really unleashed hell was when a very beloved and prominent and popular astrophysicist, a woman named Lucinda Parjeet (“Science’s Aunty”),, suddenkly broke down in the middle of a live interview and, with the mad clarity of a soothsayer, announced that everything she was supposed to say tonight was a lie and the that truth was that, “The universe is dying! THE UNIVERSE IS DYING! The Universe is dyyyyyyyyyyyyyyying!” then collapsed into wracking, heaving sobs.

That clip became the most viral thing in the history of the internet, and wherever it spread, seeds of desperate chaos were sown, and soon took root and flourished.

By now the sky was mostly dark at night, making the moon seem like an enormous pale intruder by comparison. Under its light, the world went mad. Nightfall brought riots, acts of terrifyingly nihilist terrorism, the birth, death, and rebirth of death cultures, mystery societies, and fanatic religions, and worst of all, public “blood sacrifices” of anyone the mobs could get their hands on and thought might appease the gods and bring the stars back to the sky.

Then things got much worse when someone, somewhere (historians disagree to the point of fisticuffs on who and where) started up the cry of “The Sun is next!”, and now the madness was no longer confined to the night and consumed enough of humanity that civilization flailed itself to pieces practically overnight.

Cities burned. Suburbs were sacked. Violent clashes akin to small civil wars raged constantly. Mass suicides became routine. People asked each other if they planned to “be around when it happened” with the casualness of asking someone if they had plans for the weekend.

The few “deniers” who insisted that there was no evidence that anything bad was going to happen to our solar system were hounded into hiding by the howling mobs.

Humanity was in the worst trouble of its short existence. Doom was everywhere. Hope was absent,. Chaos, death, and madness ruled the day.

And the whole world burned.

---

Meanwhile, The Man Who Will Kill Us All was surprised by how unsurprised he was by all these events.

It was as through he’d seen it all before. Or rather, as if he had read the script and knew his part by heart and was just waiting in the wings for his cue.

Except there was no script, He had no idea it was going to happen till it happened. Until the first star blinked, he was as safe and secure in the knowledge that, no matter what, life would go on as the rest of humanity.

But the moment the news footage of that first star going out reached his hermetically sealed hermitage, a strange and terrible force awoke in The Man Who Will Kill Us All, and said, in a voice both terrifying and terrifyingly compelling, “IT HAS BEGUN. “

The days following had been a pitched battle between The Man Who Will Kill Us All and this strange new voice in his head. And at first, he was full of bravado and determination , ready to do whatever it took to eject this invader.

But the more he fought it, the stronger it got, like it thrived on the conflict. He felt himself slipping away as this entity came to utterly dominate his mind.

Eventually he gave in, not because he decided he couldn’t win, but because he was too tired to fight any more.

And besides, fighting it hurt so bad, Like razor blades slicing his brain.

And giving it felt so good, Like amazing sex, a great meal, the finest of massages, and a good nap all rolled into one.

No amount of self-disciplined and self-deterministic rage could hold out against that for long. Within a week, The Man Who Will Kill The World was reduced to being nothing but a silent passenger living in fatuous bliss and hating himself for it in a dark and dusty corner of his own mind.

One who watched in shock and horror as this new force used his body to access parts of his sealed world he never knew existed, made contact with the outside world using equipment he’d never seen, and spoke with other human beings, which he had never been able to do.

Eventually The Man Who Will Kill Us All gave up trying to make sense of it all and went to sleep with no intent to wake, effectively committing suicide.

Well, almost effectively. Because he was very much still alive.

And soon, he would awaken to a far, far different world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know. The one with people in it.

Real people. Happy people. Strong people. Healthy, whole, and hardy people. People with lives. People with jobs. People with families and careers and social circles and hobbies and involvements and commitments and lovers and partners and sex.

People whose brains work the right way.
People who don’t feel the burden of days.
People who never think about ways to die
People who never have to ask themselves why
People who never need a reason to try

People who have no idea how good they have it because they don’t live every waking minute in the shadow of death. They never worry that one day their self-control will slip for just a second and they will kill themselves, or do something else crazy. People who think nothing of doing things they feel like doing because their feelings can be trusted.

People who walk in the sunshine of human contact, social connection, community acceptance and inclusion, and the real living world, and never know it because it is all they have ever known.

The real people. The good people. People who are good : good people, good partners, good parents, good children, good employees, good friends, good bosses, good citizens, with good lives.

They are good in general and never feels absolutely worthless. Less than worthless. A liability to reality. A net loss for the entire human race. A vile and tragic mistake only death can correct.

I think about that other world a lot. To me, it seems ;like the promised land. A garden full of life and light and vitality and love the darkness can never touch. A sunshine soaked sanctuary filled with impossibly happy people who are completely unlike myself.

I would get glimpses of this world via media as a child and felt such a terrible longing it felt like I would die. And I still want to be a part of that world instead of my lone and lofty ice capped hell where the air is crystal clear and cold as space and hurts me.

A guru on a mountaintop, but not by choice.

If I could, I would climb down and join that hot and busy world down there. The one I understand so well from watching it for so long.

But I can’t. I am stuck on this god damned mountain, chained to that big goddamned rock by fear and confusion and the feeling that if I melt, I will die.

Like I’m a fucking cartoon snowman.

So I’ve only ever seen that other world from orbit. I have never been a part of it. I’ve always been on the sidelines of life, seeing all and doing nothing. A ten dimensional disembodies eye with plenty of vision but no will.

And it’s so very, very cold here. Cold enough to kill, which is why I am not really alive.

And I know all this is objectively crazy.

But I don’t care, because it’s subjectively true, and that’s allit needs to be.

More after the break,

---

Everything is worthless

Everything is worthless
Existence has no meaning
Everything is pointless
And I can’t find the sky

Nature isn’t lovely
The world is cold and hostile
The truth of life is brutal
And I can’t find the sky

Everything is haunted
And everything is broken
So many words unspoken
That might have led somewhere

When I look up
All i see is madness
A million drops of sadness
Suspended in mid air

The hell I’m in
Makes my blood begin to freeze
The world’s one big disease
And we’re all microbes too

My skeleton
Is getting restless in its closet
But there’s no soul there to stop it
Some day it might break through

When look down
The ground below is bleeding
The world goes on, unheeding
Pretty soon it won’t be there

There is no sense of order
We’ve become a race of hoarders
And there is this constant order
Of garbage left to rot

And when they come to collect me
I hope they don’t reject me
Because they don’t expect me
To have so much that I’m not

When I look around
I see souls with gaping mouths
Trying hard to shout
But their pain can’t get out

The world around me’s screaming
But I just can’t stop dreaming
My mind is always teeming
With thoughts that all want out

And as they jam the exits
My mind is a dog’s breakfast
All because I can’t select shit
When they all scream and shout

---

Narrator : Meanwhile, deep inside an underground factory, The Man Who Will Kill Us All is trying to decide what to eat.

He stares at the menu screen as if he can make one of the same eight things the dispenser’s been stuck on for the last three months suddenly appeal to him with the power of his mind alone.

Well, you never know till you try,

But it’s no use. Just the pictures of the all too familiar items make him sick,. Even the shepherd’s pie, and that used to be his favorite.

He poked the “next page” and “previous page” buttons more out of habit than hope. They continued to make the distressed soft buzzer sound that normally meant he had reached the beginning or end of the menu and could go no further.

So I guess this is it now, he told himself for the millionth time.

Abruptly, The Man Who Will Kill Us All got up, grabbed a random book, and ran back to his bedroom to hide under the covers and read.

He did that because he was beginning to get angry, and he didn’t like it when he got angry. Alarms sounded, red lights flashed, loud angry voices came over the PA to sternly scold him in a language he did not speak.

Russian, maybe. But there was nothing about it in the files.

Worse than that, sometimes when he got mad (or one time, really scared), he felt this cold but intense energy building inside him and he was terrified of what would happen if he didn’t shut that down immediately.

It felt like it would kill him. This was true.

It felt like it would bring his sealed off little world to an end. This was also true.

But this was not how he would kill everyone. That would be something entirely different that had little bearing on why he had lived his entire life in a sealed off chamber in a forgotten bunker deep below a secret factory that had once been the headquarters of a project to dig the Deepest Hole in the World.

No, it would not be his intensly toxic and radioactive body that led to him becomin the Man Who Will Kill Everyone.

But he didn’t know that yet.

---

I ill talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But, like Data, Pinocchio, and Dexter, I’m working on it.

There are entire sweeping categories of emotion missing in me, Places where vital human emotions and drives should be that are just plain empty, or at best, faintly sketched in, and marked “this space intentionally left blank”.

And I know these emotions must be in me someone, waiting to be born. But their seeds are buried too deep for the warm sunlight of love to ever reach them, and so they sleep through the long dark winter of my depression, dreaming without meaning until spring finally comes to their soil.

For example, everything to do with love and romance is drearily dormant. To me, love is only a pleasant theoretical. Never been in love, never been in a relationship, never even been in lust with someone. Barely ever even dated.

I’m not even sure I am capable of it. I’ve been so dead for so long.

So for me, that entire huge part of human existence might as well be Paris to me, in that I have heard great things about it and it seems very nice and I hope to go there someday, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.

But what bothers me more is the lack of a drive towards it, or even a longing. Presumably, there are powerful instincts that cause most human beings to be driven to seek out a mate, or at least someone to mate with, but like all my other instincts, my partner seeking drive lies buried beneath a thousand years of compacted snow.

Ditto with all the urges and drives related to finding a place in one’s community, both in terms of social structure and in terms of being a contributing member of society.

Never had a full time job. I’ve never supported myself. Never known the dignity of work. I’ve always felt like a burden on others.

And I have dreams of employment, but not enough drives to take me there. They too lie buried in an icy tomb.

Dreams aren’t drives. In fact, they can be the exact opposite : instead of driving you to achieve them, they become substitutes for the real thing.

I don’t even have the proper grooming and cleaning urges. That’s why my room looks like an overturned dumpster. I never clean anything ever. I just ignore the mess as I focus all my attention on the world inside my computer instead.

I wash my comforter maybe once a year. My bed has no other bedding. My bed is absolutely filthy and yet I lack the motivation to do anything about it.

Ther are supposed to be emotions and drives that make us clean out environments, but mune are in that same snowbank as all my other drives.

SO there’s a lot that is “not quite there” about me. I am one weird dude, made all the weirder by the fact that I am also warm and friendly.

The Friendly Alien, that’s me.

More after the break.

---

Not so sweet

As I grow older, my tolerance for sweetness slowly decreases.

Like the last time I got Diet A&W Rootbeer, I frankly did not care for it much. It seemed way too sweet and quite cloying as well.

These guys got it right,

Except I seem to be going in the opposite direction. The more I drink of it, the less I like it, and that’s happening pretty much across the board vis a vis sweetness.

Not at all a bad thing for a diabetic like me, obviously. And I never had a major sweet tooth anyway. I enjoyed sweet things as much as the next primate, but it was never a big deal to me.

In fact, it was the sudden development of a major sugar craving that was my first clue that I was becoming diabetic.

Suddenly I was eating entire boxes of cookies in one sitting and craving more. I didn’t do shit like that even when I was a teenager with a bottomless appetite.

I’m just glad that I didn’t end up on the fatal path some diabetic fatsos end up on where they just eat more and more sweet stuff in order to stop the cravings until their endocrine system explodes like an overheated gearbox,.

Luckily, I have iron nerves and steel-belted self-discipline and I couldn’t afford it.

And I suppose I am becoming less sweet as a person over time too. One of the ugliest truths I know (brace yourself) is that the nicest people are often the ones whose fears drive them to constantly try to placate the big bad scary world.

I suppose it happens mostly in those of us with some natural charm, Instead of running away from our daily demons or fighting them as hard as we can or even hiding away from them under the blankets, we try our best to charm and befriend them and make them love us.

Because if they love us, they won’t hurt us…. right?

As a result, as confidence and self-esteem and assertiveness rise, the compulsion to be “sweet” relaxes some and we can behave in a more balanced and healthy way.

Better for us by far, of course. But to the world, it might well seem like this nice, sweet,. lovable person is “suddenly” way more rude and hard to deal with.

And there is no use trying to explain to them that you are only learning to assert yourself. They do not want to hear it. And if you try to explain in detail, at some point they will realize that if they accept your view of things it means that they, on some level, have been unwittingly victimizing you for a long time, and then the steel shutters close with monster truck force.

That’s not how I see things. I most definitely do not expect people to somehow know they are taking advantage of me and restrain themselves when I am trying so hard to send the exact opposite message.

It does mean people like me have another ugly truth to deal with, though :

That in order to be well, we will have to do things that risk upsetting and hurting people. And that as a result, in order to escape out own private hell, we will have to firmly and decisively choose ourselves over others.

And that really fucking hurts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Brace yourself, it’s time for my self-esteem calisthenics routine. Call this an inventory of personal assets if it makes you feel better.

First off, I am really, really intelligent. IQ through the roof. Never had to study in school and got straight A’s anyway. Never sweated a test. Never worried about my grades. Took high grades and high academic achievement for granted because they were just so easy for me,

Funny how it’s only been in the last few years that it’s occurred to me that this IQ of mine might actually be good for something. Might even make me special.

You know, in a good way. For once.

But it’s more than IQ. I see into things. Over the decades. I have honed my mind’s eye into a finely machined engine for separating truth from fiction and reality from illusion and getting directly to the heart of things that baffle most people.

This gives me a perspective that is broad, deep, and wide, while also being almost breathtakingly clear and high resolution,.

I see things. I know things. I’ve been to the place where all things come together.

Hell, I live there. Heck of a view.

I am also a genuinely nice person. I care about people and want them to be happy. Even when I at my most coldly pragmatic or brutally pragmatic, the end goal is always human happiness and the greatest good.

And I am very sensitive. I feel what others feel. I understand where they are coming from. I know what makes them tick. I understand them better than they understand themselves, more often than not.

I get people.

And that makes me very sympathetic towards them, I have seen what fragile, flawed, and vulnerable creatures we all are. Even the most confident and high performing people are just blind monkeys stumbling through life groping for meaning or at least something we can hold on to for support.

And I’m funny. Really, really funny. I have been obsessed with comedy for as long as I can remember and all that comedy I soaked up from sitcoms, cartoons, standup specials, and everywhere else I could find it all went into my understanding of what made things funny.

Add my people-pleasing nature and my loving the spotlight and over the years I unconsciously trained myself to be one funny, funny guy.

Both in person and in print.

Still working on being hilarious telepathically.

And I am, quite frankly, adorable. I have a silly, goofy kind of charm and an instinct for what I can get away with in my pursuit of positive reactions that more or less makes me a living teddy bear, with the soft and cuddly nature to prove it.

Because I’m also very sweet, with a gentle affectionate nature and a soft, loving touch. In my perfect world, I would spend all day doing nice things for people.

And I am not just saying that. That’s my dream.

Time to pause for breath. Will continue to inflate my flaccid ego later.

More after the break.

---

Blueprint for a new religion : Part one – Deletions

The world desperately needs not just a new religion but a new kind of religion. One that takes as its first task the discarding and deletion of the loads and loads of antiquated bullshit world religions have accumulated over the generations but have been unable to cast off due to this useless crap being preserved as “tradition”.

This means a return to principles. Principles outrank rules every single time. The whole point of rules is to express principles, but all too often people cling to rules as that is much easier than applying principles.

But the principles are what is important and if the rules conflict with the principles, it is the rules that must go.

At the risk of sounding Jewish, one might call it keeping the spirit of the law from getting smothered by the letter of the law.

All religions have the same basic principle : be nice to one another. And yet, what a bewildering mishmash of high test bullshit we have spun in order to distance ourselves from having to do that one simple thing.

Ergo, the first step in creating a new religion is to purge all the bullshit rules from the premises with all due haste.

Ask yourself : does this rule have anything to do with being nice to one another?

If the answer is “no”, then bin it.

All the messed up rules about sex, for instance. Absolute garbage and a senseless impediment to human happiness.

There is exactly one rule fox sex :consent. Everything with, nothing without. So bid a very unfond farewell to rules about orifices, gender combinations, specific acts, times of the month, and what you use to prevent conception while still having fun.

Ditto with dietary restrictions. These are invariably relics of the time before refrigeration and make absolutely no sense now. Begone, then,

Boom go most of the rituals, too. Too often, performing rituals is used as a substitute for performing moral acts.

In our new religion, then, there is to be only one way to be a good person, and that is to do good things. Period.

The rituals that remain after the purge will be the ones that still have deep and sacred meaning to people. I suspect that will be the ones that connect people to the sacred inside us all, but I will let the polls decide, as it were.

There will also be absolutely no intercessionaries. Nor shall there be special buildings or other places that are necessary to connect with that sacred place in our hearts.

There shall be no sacred bottlenecks with the priest class exacting a heavy price for permission to walk through the sacred turnstiles.

Nor shall there be a clearly human holy figurehead who acts like a petty, jealous, peevish earthly ruler by deciding by decree who does or does not warrant entry into the good part of the afterlife

There shall also be no afterlife.

But I have run out of space. More on this tomorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I ain’t talking golf.

Well, time to flog some blog from my tired old brain.

The sandpit in question is the kind Mister Sandman might use to store his excess sleep sand. I am currently very sleepy and wiped out, and it’s such a drag.

Still playing the same character in Skyrim. Just kind of wandering around doing little missions, building up my character and my museum exhibit count.

My eventual goal, if I continue to resist the urge to start over, is to completely fill my museum. I think there’s space for a total of around 1100 exhibits, so at a current total of just shy of 850, I am well on my way.

No idea WTF I would do after that, though. I’d probably have to start a new character then, just to clear out the museum so I can start over.

Because if I am not collecting exhibits for my museum, then what’s the point? Legacy of the Dragonborn really does completely change how you play Skyrim. It gives you this really great long term overall quest that puts everything else you do in a greater context without getting in the way or taking over.

It even provides fun side quests periodically. It really is the best mod ever.

But I will probably end up starting over. It’ll suck to lose all my levels and gear and such, but I’ve done it lots of times before, so I know I will get over it pretty fast.

The rush to get the initial quests done and level on my character so it stands some chance of surviving usually keeps me busy enough to forget the loss of the old character long enough to become emotionally invested in the new one.

Feeling somewhat depressed today. But that’s probably just the sleepiness Took the pill the morning and this time it’s really lingering and making life difficult for me.

Must remind myself that while this is, technically, the sleeping pill’s “fault”, that doesn’t necessarily mean taking it was a bad idea.

I probably need this sleep. So as annoying to me as it can be to sleep all day and not get to have any fun, it’s worth it if it means I get caught up on sleep.

Or so I keep telling myself/. One day I might even start believing it. At moments like this, it can be hard to see a point in it all and I wish I could just wash the sleepout of my system so I can do what I want.

Mot quite at 500 words yet. Fuck it. I’m falling asleep at the keyboard here.

Time for me to go back to bed.

More after the break,

---

I miss carbs

Sung to the tune of the refrain of this song :

Of course, it’s not really the carbs I miss. It’s the flavours. Carbs can go suck a mile of dick as far as I’m concerned. Don’t miss them, never will.

But I do miss the flavours of all those tasty, tasty carbs. Both the really sweet carbs and the savory ones.

I miss Doritos as much as I miss ice cream sandwiches.

And I think I am far enough into my war on carbs in my diet to admit that I miss them. I am not worried about my resolve crumbling any more because as much as longing fills me sometimes when I see chocolate bars on sale or see those maple shaped cookies with the maple frosting that I love so much, I don’t actually have the urge to eat them.

So it’s not so much “I wish I could have that” so much as it’s “I wish that wasn’t poison to me. ” I know that if I ate the bad stuff, I would immediately feel ill. Headachem nausea, a flushed feeling, and a general feeling of my body saying WTF is this???

And that’s all the reinforcement my aversion to carbs needs. Nausea is your body’s main way of reminding you what NOT to eat (again) ergo once the thing you want to cut down on is programmed into your nausea circuit, the rest takes care of itself.

Diets have tried to force that by using pictures of naughty foods with cigarette butts put out on them or other gross things happening to it, but you can’t force the connection.

If you try, the person develops an aversion to your diet, not the cupcake.

So yeah, I miss the taste of all those carbs I used to it, but not enough to actually eat them. No worries there.

I do wonder how the fuck I survived eating all those goddamned carbs, though. Every goddamned meal came with a side of chips, or pretzels, or Cheetos, or whatever.

And I ate that way for more than a decade. No wonder my diabetes is fucking me up all over now – I am paying for the sins of my youth.

I guess we all do, sooner or later. One way or another.

And I would never go back to that. I do not miss the heavy bloated feeling that came with that kind of excess. I do not miss having that shit weigh me down all the time. I do not miss having a body full of empty carbs where nutrition should have been.

All that shit is worthless food to me now. A waste of my finite appetite. You’re only going to eat so much in a day, so you might as well get the most out of each bite as you can.

In both flavour AND nutrition. And it’s not a zero sum game. You CAN come out ahead. There are plenty of foods that are delicious AND nutritious.

Maybe not as delicious as the worthless junk food, but pretty damned close. And when it comes to 100 percent delicious with zero nutrition and negative effects on top of that versus 90 percent delicious plus nutrition plus no harmful effects, the choice is clear.

Not always easy, but clear.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wow, here I am just beginning to blog and it’s 8:24 PM!

What a slacker I am.

I usually start blogging will lunch, which lately has been around 2 pm.

it used to be 1 pm but there’s been some slippage.

The problem with lunch at 2 pm is that is generally around when I am l officially waking up for the day^[1], and as patient readers know I usually feel terrible at the time, and the last thing I want to do is blog.

Me make words now? No. Me eat foods. And watch Youtube.

Normally, I just work through that reluctance, and by the time I have some food and some Diet Coke in me and I have gotten the words flowing, I am up and running and I can at least make some kind of sense.

But if you’ve ever wondered why the first half of my day’s blogging tends to be a lot darker and more negative than the second half, now ya know.

Finished a simply massive mod called, for no particular reason, Maids II : Deception. 

Too massive, to be honest. I know a mod is too big when plot exhaustion sets in and I switch from being eager to see what happens next to just wanting the fucking thing to be over already.

And when I reached that point, there was still at least ten hours of gameplay left. Oy.

So I am glad it’s over. The ending was maddeningly vague and grandiose. Oh, it was all very impressive sounding, but there was really no substance to it and so it all came across as the words of a fortune teller madly improvising a future for you and hoping the spooky words cover the fact that she has no idea WTF she is doing.

But one good thing about plot exhaustion is by then I just don’t care. Is it finally over now? Good. Now I can go back to how the game normally works!

And besides, I am almost never happy with endings anyhow. My extremely finely tuned sense of plot structure and theme demands a far weightier and more conclusive ending than most writers are capable of generating, myself included.

Anyhow, the fucking thing is over. Now I can execute my plan to start over without actually starting over.

I can do this because one of my mods lets me return to the character creation menu and change whatever I like, including name and species, and that in general is what I get out of starting a new character, so it’s worth giving it a go.

There’s still the nagging issue of it not actually being a fresh start, though, so I don’t know if changing name and species will be enough.

I mean, I would hate to lose the 800+ exhibits in my Legacy of the Dragonborn museum as well as my maxed out Magic schools (4 out of 7 of them) and all my spells and gear and such, but on the other hand, the need for renewal is strong.

I need to shake things up and start over now and then, or I get bored and dissolute.

So we will see. I might end up starting over even though I don’t “need” to.

I move in mysterious ways.

My depressing appears to be clearing up. I feel a lot better today than I have lately. More awake, more alive, more cheerful.

I think I just need to vomit up all my darkness from time to time. ^[2] And the further I go into recovery, the bigger and longer those periods of emotional emesis will be.

And I am not out of the woods yet. I still feel that deep dark nausea and there may will be more voiding of toxins in the near future.

But I feel I am over the worst of it. The stone is more than halfway passed. I feel emotionally warmer and more alive than all of last week, and so I hopefully have a better week ahead of me than behind.

After all, I have Trump’s marvelous meltdown to savour and enjoy. I was a little worried when he replaced all the top military officials with his own people – how very Fascist 101 of him – but then I realized that was the civilian brass he replaced, and the real Armed Forces hate Trump’s guts and will never support his regime.

So let him have his little fetish parade of fake fascism, I look forward to the day when he orders the troops to occupy America and they tell him “Fuck no, SIR. ”

Other than that, hsi extended tantrum is quite amusing,. Less so is the fact that his Republican cronies are still supporting him because they are still scared of antagonizing his supporter base and incurring his wrath.

Why? Because he could still buttrape THEIR careers. sad to say.

Still, that may not last. Some of the brighter ones may well realize that Trump is increasingly impotent and that it might just be time to jump that sinking ship like a smart rat and start positioning themselves for a post-Trump world.

The secret is time. Right now, still being on Team Trump doesn’t seem like it will cost them much. But as Trump continues to cry like the baby he’s always been and loses every single one of the lawsuits he will file because of lack of evidence, he will lose both hard and soft power and be reduced to just another flailing infant of right wing rage.

And honestly, not a very good one at that.

Myself, I hope Fox gives him his own reality show where he has 24/7 360′ surveillance like on Big Brother and he can rant and cry and pout whenever he feels the urge and thus can humiliate himself to the maximum possible degree.

Hell, give him his own streaming service.

I’d pay $11.99 a month for that, wouldn’t you?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I like posting video.

Still feeling stressed and depressed and repressed and compressed.

Went to the doctor this morning. Routine stuff, no worries there.

Got my B12 shot, which was nice.’ Always makes me feel a bit better. Also happy I remembered to bring the bottle.

Still kind of resent having that responsibility. But whatever.

Also got a flu shot. Always a good idea, both for practical reasons (immunosuppressed people like us diabetics need help staying healthy) and emotional reasons (as plague stalks the land, it made me feel better).

Both are important.

In fact, doing things to make myself feel better should really be a much higher priority for me. I am, after all, an emotionally ill person and need all the help I can get to feel good for a change.

But that’s where this gets weird. Because genius that I am, I know almost nothing about pursuing my own happiness.

For decades, my life mode has been “cling and endure”. Like a frigging barnacle. I just hang in there, hiding from the world in video games, changing nothing, ignoring reality as the days (and life) pass me by and my health slowly burns to the ground.

All with a presumption of my own utter powerlessness that runs so deep that it cuts at my entire emotional connection to life.

And outside of the madness, I know this isn’t true. I am not utterly powerless. There’s millions of things I could be doing to better myself!

I just have to…. choose one.

But that’s another issue, for another time.

The real issues is this profound paralysis deep inside my psyche. A deep chilling numbness that kills all attempts to seriously get moving and makes it so that where I should be feeling a surge of energy that drives me towards a goal, I feel a glacial wind blowing directly on my heart instead.

All of this keeps me locked in this long lazy looping death spiral and I want to save myself but the machine links between what I want and what I do are frozen shut, rusted over, and broken,

And, as I have already discussed, part of me doesn’t want me to get better at all. It wants me to get worse and worse until I die, or at the very least, till I get so sick that I end up in the hospital and all that horrible choice is taken away from me and all I have to do to be healthy is do what the doctors and nurses tell me to do.

It’s utterly obscene how good that sounds to me,

Makes me wish I could skip the getting sicker part and check myself into a nice cozy psych ward where I can get loads and loads of therapy and maybe actually get better.

Otherwise, I will have to somehow learn how to make myself happy. Which means I will first have to break the grip of this terrifying inner cold snap.

And where do I get the energy to do that?

More after the break,

---

Fear the Future

It’s actually more like “Dread the Future”, but that didn’t alliterate.

I realized today that I still can’t picture the future. When I try, a white-hot sheet of glowing static fills the screen and blocks the image entirely.

And then there’s the dread. This is the big dread, the kind that needs no logical justification, not even a feared consequence.

It just fills your mind with the terrible sense that something really bad is going to happen and that stops you in your tracks. ^[1]

That’s gotten a lot worse lately because it become crystal clear that things are only going to get worse for me, healthwise, for the foreseeable future, and that I don’t have much future left in me.

The picture is so ugly that it’s no wonder my mind blocks it.

And the fact that there’s a voice in my head screaming at me to save myself by doing any of the millions of things I could be doing to improve my health isn’t helping.

I’d never turn it off, though. It might well be my only hope.

There has to be some way to shake off this paralysis. Something that will melt the glacier sitting on my heart, crushing the life out of me and keeping me down.

It’s a lot smaller than it was before, but it’s still enough to crush me flat and leave me too numb and broken to save myself.

And nobody can save me from myself.

So I am pretty much fucked.

But who knows. Maybe one of these days, the fear of ending up in the hospital full of tubes will connect with my mangled motivation machinery and I will actually start looking after myself properly.

I wouldn’t count on it, though, Not until the demon of suicidal tendencies can be exorcised from my fractured psyche.

All I wanted was a Pepsi.

I keep telling myself that I don’t want to die, and it helps for a while. For a little while, I can feel a few wan rays of sunshine and see, far off in the distance, what I think might be the sunshine and green meadows of my own promised land.

But then the shadows return and I wonder why I bothered.

I want to live, I want to be alive. I want to live long enough to get a life.

But right now I just don’t ses how to get there. I just can’t get there from here. If I am to truly heal, it will take something much bigger and more powerful than my ever so vaunted intellect can possibly encompass or even imagine.

And I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how it works.

I need the intervention of something bigger than me.

But that’s something I’ve never had and never will.

So I guess I’ll just die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

That’s the plan, at least.

Still feeling really depressed. Everything seems grey and stupid and lifeless and pointless and flavorless and boring and banal.

And underneath all that my id continues to roar with rage and rattle its cage and threaten to rampage till it founds a new age.

But that will never happen,.

It would be far too interesting.

I feel so pent up and trapped right now. Like just want to mindlessly thump my head against the wall as hard as I can just to be able to feel something.

But I’m not in a psych ward and this ain’t no rubber room and there ain’t no men in nice white coats to rush in and hold me down so the doctor can sedate me,.

In short, there is nobody around to save me from myself.

And there never has been. People have to both pay attention to you and give a shit whether you live or die for that to happen, and I haven’t had both of those at the same time since I started school in 1979,

Since that first day of school, I have felt absolutely utterly alone. Abandoned. I’d say thrown to the wolves, but throwing would have been too much effort.

Left for the wolves, I guess, in the same sense that recycling is left for the garbage truck or food scraps are left for the homeless.

And while being forsaken at such an early age might have made another child tough and resilient and ambitious, it instead made me timid and cautious and inclined to hide from the world and its coldness and hostility rather than go out there and fight it.

The rape and my deep withdrawal from reality ensured that. That’s when I became pathologically cerebral and cut off from my id to the point where it was practically a disability unto itself.

And I am only just now started to find my way out of that icy prison of the mind. I am doing my best to excavate and activate myself and maybe some day actually be truly and wonderfully alive.

But as long as I stay in my lonely garret, the going will be mighty slow. The real sunshine is out there in the world, but I am far too frozen and weak to go find it.

Like I said, I feel frozen, trapped in place. I can see my destination but I can’t move closer to it. All I can do is put as much energy as I can into the reheating process in hopes of thawing myself out and finding out what it means to be truly alive.

And when I am feeling stopped up as I am right now, that basically amounts to pouring hot water into frozen pipes and hoping they thaw before they burst.

Or whatever. Bursting might be good for me too.

Either way, I am hoping to channel my energies into transcending my darkness and ascending to the next level of existence, whatever that may be,

If I make it, I’ll send you a postcard.

More after the break.

---

Gonna kick at the darkness

I just realized why that line means so much to me, despite me being at best meh+plus on the song itself.

It means so much to me because it suggests that even the darkest darkness has daylight hiding just below the surface, waiting to emerge and turn night to day if you just kick it hard enough.

And that’s a comforting thought for a dweller in the dark like myself. It suggests that all that midnight tundra I think lies between me and the light is actually an illusion and that there is sunshine in my heart. It’s always there.

That song always fills me with a sweet kind of longing. I so badly want to be part of its normal, healthy, chocl full of goodness world. The world that most kids grow up in, where they had people looking out for them and looking after them and the world was cozy and safe and they learned life’s lessons slowly and at the right ages and got to be raised in the shelter of normalcy.

As opposed to me, who got raped at four and hasn’t felt safe since. It was such a senseless and brutal act that came out of nowhere that it severed my connection to reality and especially to the warm strong wholesome world of the id almost entirely.

I’ve been a floating brain alien ever since. Incredibly intelligent and gifted, like any good floating brain alien,. But physically incompetent and spiritually feeble as well.

The physical side doesn’t matter too much, If I had maintained my middle class trajectory, there would have been all kinds of fields I could have gone into where physical ability didn’t matter one bit.

Like being a therapist, which is what I was planning to be. Nobody cares if their shrink is a klutz who can’t even change the sheets on a bed.

But the weakness of spirit is a much more serious issue. It’s why I didn’t take much action to fix my terrible situation as a kid, or even tell my family about it.

My parents might not have paid me much attention, but I am pretty sure they would have come to my defense if they knew what was happening to me.

When push came to shove, they always had my back when school was being evil.

But I was so weak and scared and passive and withdrawn. And I could always put up on smile and a “Nope, everything is A-OK with me!” attitude when their gaze did happen to stray my way,

Then I would go back to being lonely and miserable in peace.

They didn’t really want to know anyhow. I know because I tried to tell them, Their eyes glazed over and they got this look of panic like I had suddenly trapped them and they had no idea what to do when I went off script and actually said something other than I was fine, just fine.

So I gave them what they wanted. It was the easiest thing to do for a facile shapeshifter like my sad little self.

When I need to, I can lie with almost every fiber of my being.

I’m glad that has not come up a lot, or I would be even more confused. I already have enough trouble knowing who I really am.

I am the one who chooses.

I am he who walks through walls.

I am the Maker of Rules.

And I am just some fat guy with a computer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still pretty depressed, but currently too tired to get all angsty poetry about it.

Happy about Biden winning, of course. Duh. Enjoying Trump’s whining and flailing about like the brat he is as he refuses to accept that he lost.

Saw something truly wonderful on the Daily Show last night. Trump was, surprise surprise, playing golf. That’s not the good part.

The good part was that he then had ride through streets thronged with people joyously celebrating his defeat on the way home!

It’s like if the Wicked Witch of the East had lived long enough under Dorothy’s house to hear the entire Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead song in the Wizard of Oz.

Now we get to enjoy watching him vent his impotent rage as the lamest of lame duck presidents. Right now, all his toadies on Fox News and in Washington are still parroting whatever he says, but that won’t last.

After all, when it becomes clear that no matter what he does, he will not remain president, the pressure to distance yourself from his toxic death plume.

And he truly can do nothing. None of his lawsuits will do any good because it turns out those evil liberal courts insist on some obscure thing called “evidence” in order to even accept a lawsuit in the first place.

So there’s no chance of him changing the result legally. He has no evidence, no argument, and no grounds. All the billable hours in the world won’t change that.

Ergo, the fact that he packed the Supreme Court will avail him not. They can only rule on cases referred to them by lower courts, and the lower courts ain’t having it.

That still leaves civil unrest as a mans of retaining power, but that won’t happen either. His supporters might be (shockingly) numerous, but they are utterly disorganized, undisciplined, uncommitted, and quite frankly, a bunch of whiny sissies who would shit themselves explosively at the first sign of real force.

They’re cowards like all bullies are cowards. If they weren’t cowards, they would pick on people who could fight back. Instead, they only pick on the weakest people who pose the least threat.to them.

So no, I am not worried about a new civil war. I am not concerned about Trump voters making the streets run red with blood. I have no fear of any competent coup attempts.

I predict that his support will melt away into virtual nothingness long before Jan 20, as will the belief that the libs somehow “stole” the election.

The whole of Trumpism is going to wind down as it becomes increasingly clear that Mad King Trump is just Daffy Donald again.

Because you can’t be the Lizard King of those who worship power without power. Without power, you can’t generate the kind of fear/awe/respect that these people need, and sooner or later, they will seek it elsewhere.

By Inauguration Day, a lot of those who voted for him will barely remember his name,

I’m still holding out hope for Trump to show up for a hastily assembled press conference in a dirty old housecoat, old man balls hanging out, drooling out of one side of his mouth, with a half empty bottle of Yukon Jack in one hand and wearing Burger King wrappers for shoes, only to deliver an utterly incoherent word salad of a speech full of obscenities and accidental confessions, at the end of which he soils himself explosively why crying for his mommy, then passes out.

It’s such a beautiful dream.

More after the break.

---

Good news, everyone!

KFC has biscuits now!

And they’re pretty good. Better than the standard ones I bake because I use the easy peasy recipe and truly good biscuits are FAR more work to make.

About the same as the ones you get from Pillsbury in a can, which is probably not a coincidence. That’s probably where they got them too.

And I loves me some biscuits. I totally shouldn’t be eating them in a meal that already has fries and the breading on the chicken, but that’s a lesson from the future.

Right now, I am enjoying dipping the biscuits in the gravy like the classic Southern breakfast to particularly care,.

You know, for some reason, for my entire life I have eaten my pieces of fried chicken in ascending order of size.

And I won’t bother making up some kind of logical reason for doing so. I am sure I could, but it would be retroactive justification at best.

The truth is that sometimes, we make up rules for ourselves purely to give us some way of making a decision and getting on with things rather than turning into Buridan’s Ass and getting lost in indecision.

Hmmm. It’s Buridan, with only one R. Looks wrong somehow.

Anyhow, we make up rules, and that’s fine. We would be lost without the ability to make arbitrary decisions based on little or no information.

The problem is that these rules then get loaded into the part of our mind responsible for habits, cravings, compulsions, phobias, and deep beliefs.

Once installed there, the rule now has the force of one of the deepest and most powerful parts of our minds, the part that compels a hungry animal to eat, a thirsty animal to drink, and a horny animal to jump on another animal’s back and hump.

Whatever justification, if any, the rule had to begin with is rapidly left behind because the rule no longer needs justification now that it has the incredible emotional power of that part of our mind to enforce it.

So then this rule that we just made up to get us through a situation, becomes the only way we can do the thing. Now every other way “feels wrong”.

And if you are unfortunate OCD sufferer, that dumb rule joins the hosts of others that make life almost impossible to live.

That’s why it is always good to test all rules on a regular basis. Ask, why is this a rule? Why was this rule implemented in the first place? Is that still true? And the most important question of all : does this rule do more harm than good?

To me, rules are tools, nothing more. Good rules like good rules serve a purpose and do it well. Bad rules merely needlessly increase friction in the system with no or insufficient return on investment.

The worst rules are ones that are worse than the problem they address.

And this operates on the personal level too. Try to figure out the rules you live by and then put them to the test.

You might find that liberation and joy are only one old rule deletion away!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still pretty depressed.

I’m superficially calm, but deep inside me, a mad beast is howling itself hoarse and beating itself bloody against the walls of its cage. It knows nothing of the world but pain, and the only thing that lessens the pain is to howl and howl and howl.

That’s how I feel right now. I have this pain deep inside me that makes me want to scream, It’s like this ache that squeezes my bones and grinds my teeth and makes me feel like I could shatter and explode from the strain any second now.

Probably some kind of inflammatory response.

Or maybe I’m just tired. My sleep was interrupted by a phone call from my doctor’s office to tell me about the dermatologist’s appointment they told me about last week.

I guess the receptionist forgot to write down that she’d done it already.

This does not inspire confidence.

I’ll be seeing Doctor Chao for my B12 shot this Friday, so I can talk to him about it then, I will also give him the progress report on that pain in my right frontal peri-nasal sinus.

God, I love scientific jargon.

The basic report is that the problem persists but its severity has decreased since I got my sinuses to drain and cleared my ears and nostrils.

As long as I keep my sinus pressure down, the pain is minor. Easily ignored. So in the immediate, the problem is solved.

But there’s still something seriously wrong in there.

I think I should get my head examined.

By which I mean get my head x-rayed. IT really feels like there is something solid in there, and I would like to know whether or not that’s true.

Seems pretty unlikely. More likely is that the sinus cavity in question is somehow swollen shut while full.

Not sure what could cause that, but it’s my best theory so far.

Sleep’s been ample but poor. The residue of intense dreaming lingers in my mind and makes it hard to concentrate and/or stay focused on a task.

Hopefully, like yesterday, I will eventually get enough sleep to feel more or less awake.

Sleep should not seem like work.

And yet, it often does for me. Instead of being some kind of respite wherein I find comfort and renewal, it often feels like a chore I am obliged to do, an ordeal I have n choice but to endure.

And that’s not right. That’s not what sleep is supposed to be at all.

I wish I could just sleep the pleasant, peaceful, calm sleep of an infant and wake refreshed and re-energized and ready to take on the world.

Instead, I have deeply troubled and fitful sleep which leaves me feeling drained and bruised and depleted, like I should be in the ICU.

At least then, I would be moving towards healing. Instead, I am drifting slowly but inexorably towards my doom and I cannot find the energy to try to keep it from happening. All I can do is watch it come.

My own person black hole sun.

---

There is no other pill to take

Sleep now in the fire, indeed.

Still feeling angry and depressed. That black smoke spewing fire continues to grow inside me, making my eyes blurry from the heat and making my poor ears ring with its deep crackling roar.

And you know what? I think I’m starting to like it.

Burn, bitch, burn!

Go ahead, my little inferno. Rage. Devour everything weak or impure in my body and my mind and especially my soul. Drink it down in huge thirsty gulps, chow down on it in massive cheek-stretching bites. Gorge yourself on my weakness and pain and grow big and fat for daddy.

I am leaning into my nihilism and it feels fantastic.

I’m in the mood to stick a metaphorical finger down my throat and vomit all my broken thoughts and half digested pain all over the audience while screaming “Take it! Take it you bastards! Take it ALL!”.

I am sick of living with all this bullshit clogging me up and crowding me out of my own mental space, like I’m some kind of garbage hoarder who comes home daily with more “treasures” and can’t bear to part with a single soiled napkin or dirty diaper.

Well fuck that. Back the flatbed dumpster up to my window and I will throw out every single bit of garbage I have ever hoarded and then setthe whole thing on fire so I can dance naked around the fire, cackling like a demented demon and howling at the moon.

And with every howl, the laughter gets bigger, and deeper, and louder, until it resounds off of every flat surface and vibrates in every chambered space and fills every listening ear, from the tiniest mouse to the biggest whale, with my madness and my pain.

And yet I will scream and roar and laugh on and on into the heartless cold of the night until the world cries out for mercy and begs me to stop.

Only then will I relent.

Only then will my strange song end.

Only then will I know I have been heard.

And maybe then, I will finally be able to relax and get some sleep.

---

Man, this dark shit I’ve been writing is quite a trip.

Is there a market out there for this shit? There must be.

No idea what to call it, though.

I suppose I could add a shit-ton of line breaks and call it poetry. That would be acceptable to me. I consider it poetry in its current form too but then again, I know the state of mind I was in as I wrote it and where all the imagery comes from and trust me, itis not the place where rose comes from.

The images come straight from the soul of my dark heart. Down deep, where all the killing clowns and perverted penetrators and triple headed garbage monsters live.

See? Imagery like that.

So expect more or this stuff in the future, folks.

I’ve got a lot of trash to burn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.