Feeling pretty damned depressed today. Dunno why.

But right now, I feel like this :

I feel like there’s this enormous fire burning deep inside me and filling my soul with thick black smoke that reeks of strange resins and burned flesh.

I’m just glad I am such a loner, because if I had to deal with people right now, I might lash out with my caustic wit.

And nobody wants that, least of allme. I can do real lasting damage with words, and I don’t always know my own strength. What I think is just a mild defensive barb – crankiness level 1 – might well hit with atomic force when it is amplified by my verbal skills and force of personality.

That’s why I keep my rapier wit in its scabbard most of the time,

Which leaves me choking on my own smoke, sadly. Clearly there needs to be a way for me to vent my frustrations and get things off my chest that doesn’t destroy others.

Or at ;least, nobody who doesn’t deserve it.

In theory, the world is full of evil people deserving of my wrath. Corrupt politicians, sociopathic CEOs, racist fuckwits, the list goes on and on.

But first I’d need to pick a venue. And then use said venue with full intent to make my voice heard over the crowd noise of the internet. And then stick with it long enough to make sure that happens.

And that is just too many things.

And that makes me feel guilty for not contributing more to the world. I know I have a lot to add to the public conversation. Things that need to be said. Questions that need to be asked. A point of view and a voice capable of slaying evil thoughts.

But I am all wrapped up in mental illness and until I unwrap myself, all I can do is watch.

And I find that so very very frustrating. I have all this power and potential and ambition locked behind a wall of depression and anxiety and sadness. I want so bad to be able to just bust out of my shell like a bucking bronco coming out of the chute and start kicking ass and taking minds with my outrageous talents but instead all I can do is play Skyrim and watch the days of my life drift by as the sun slowly sets on my health, virtually guaranteeing I ain’t gonna make it to 50.

And I am 47.

And what hurts the most is that I know there are millions of things I “could” do to keep that oncoming train from running me over and I can’t do any of them,

And there’s a lot of reasons for that. but one of the biggest is that part of me doesn’t want to get up and get off the tracks.

That part of me wants to get run over by the train.

It’s looking forward to it.

Because then all this will finally be over.

More after the break.

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Well banked inferno

Feeling somewhat better now.

Slept a lot today, especially in the afternoon. Well fuck it, I don’t owe Skyrim anything.

One of the hard things for me to fully wrap my head around is that a lot of times, sleep is going to make me feel a whole lot worse before it makes me feel better.

i mean, the basic animal response to doing something that makes you feel bad is to not do that thing again. So when I wake up feeling terrible, the last thing I want to do is give sleep another chance to chew me up and spit me out.

My world of dreaming is often so intense it verges on the transcendental. It leaves me feeling like I have been wrung out like a sponge. Like my brain has been so hyper open and aware and alive that it blew through all my resources and left me, the poor mystic who never asked to be a root contact point for the cosmos, washing up on the shores of consciousness with no clue what the hell just happened.

And I can’t help wonder, what’s the fucking point? What do I get out of this deal? I might be happier about this arrangement if it gave me super powers. Or money.

But no. My brain gets to go on this crazy ass ride without my pesky consciousness getting in the way, and in the morning, I get stuck with the bill.

I don’t even get a glimpse of cosmic oneness or a single prophetic dream out of it.

Maybe meditation would help. Expand my mind so that it can accommodate the cosmic bandwidth a little better. Maybe help me build up some kind of mental emergency fuel tank I can tap into when everything else has been burned up on re-entry.

or maybe I just need to learn to relax and go with the flow, man. Let mother nature do her thing without trying to control or resist it.

It’s like, don’t fight the dog, lead the dog, you know what I mean?

And I admit, that’s a lesson I really need to learn,. To stop wasting energy trying to fight the tide and instead concentrate on making the little course corrections that over time steer my boat to exactly where I want to go,

Like I have said before, my basic way to approach anything is ot bring overwhelming mental force to bear on it.

And it works in a lot of situations, in a brute force kind of way.

But it’s not exactly sophisticated and it sure as heck ain’t efficient I would be far better off learning to apply my mental might with grace and precision. It would be much easier on both my mental and my physical hardware, and maybe my dreams would not be so god damned intense any more.

And then I might actually wake up feeling good for a change.

That would definitely be a dream come true.

I willtalk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talk about prudery, shall we? Or as I prefer to call it, erotophobia.

First, let me state at the outset that sex is not and has never been dirty. Or immoral, or shameful, or wrong.

Sex is, in fact, wonderful. The fact that our bodies can produce such intense feelings of joy, pleasure, and intimacy from such simple acts is a gift and a joy and a wonder, and to profane it with unworthy thoughs of shame and guilt is tantamount to sacrilege.

There is but one rule for sex : consent. Nothing without it, anything with it. ANYTHING. Anything you can think of, and many things you can’t. are perfectly fine and in fact good and healthy things to do.

Yet the world is rife with erotophobic strife. Senseless guilt and pointless shame infect the souls of men and women all over the globe and it breaks my heart.

And the worst part is that we inflict this disease on children. That is, in fact, its only transmission vector. Once we are parents, we feel compelled by our shock and horror at seeing sexual behaviour in our “innocent” children that we shame them in ways that will haunt them for the rest of their lives and eventually be transmitted to their children.

Well guess what? Children are not “innocent” in that way. We are born sexual beings, capable of the same sorts of sexual joy and pleasure as adults. There is no pre-sexual phase of life. Puberty does not make us sexual, it merely makes us ready to reproduce.

Babies have been observed masturbating in the womb. Kids do what feels good, and rubbing their genitals feels good. Both their bodies and their minds tell them that it is a good thing to do.

So to shame them for it only confuses them. Parents say one thing, nature says another. This sets the poor child up for a lifetime of conflict and confusion.

If we want to raise healthy, happy children, we have to accept anything they do sexually, up to and including masturbation to completion and even full sexual intercourse with other children their age.

The only things parents need to teach kids about sex is how to be safe and how to be discreet. Safe as in knowing they always have the right to say no to anyone at any time and how to avoid dangerous partners. Discretion as in where it is and is not acceptable to perform sexual acts and the definition of “private”.

Other than that, and of course the parental duty to protect them from evil persons, the parents have no say on what their children so with their genitals. As long as they are safe and doing it in private, it’s all good.

This means that parents will have to deal with a lot of guilt, shame, and alarm. The urge to make a child stop doing something we find offensive is strong.

But that’s all it is – the desire to save OURSELVES from suffering. It has nothing to with what is good for the child and even less to do with ethics and morality.

We could be at the dawn of the true liberation of all from the senseless chains of mindless and destructive taboos/

It will take a great deal of courage and forbearance to achieve as the forces of the dread taboos will attack us relentlessly, but we must prevail.

In one generation, we could put this curse to rest forever.

We owe it to our children to at least try.

More after the break.

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I’m not very smart

I’m just your average everyday household genius.

Confused? Me too. Let’s figure it out together.

What I am talking about is different kinds of intelligence. Academically, creatively, and philosophically, I am a crazy mad genius. I can see more, understand more. calculate more, and just plain do more with this mind of mind than two average people combined. I have a flashing wit, a penetratingly incisive mind, a deep and thoughtful soul, and a level of creativity so high it is visionary.

And that’s one kind of intelligence. That one, I’ve got in spades.

But another kind of intelligence is the kind that leads to good life decisions, and on that scale, I am a fucking idiot.

If smart is as smart does then I does not do smart. That’s today’s big epiphany.

And it’s high time I admit my life dumbness to myself and to the world. I, Michael John Bertrand, Super Genius, am pretty dumb about life.

And we all know why. I am mentally ill. And one of the most consistent symptoms of all mental illness is impaired cognition leading to poor decision making.

Which is a problem in a modern individualistic democratic society, because there is no context in which an adult is officially allowed to let other people make their decisions for them, especially if you’re a man.

And I am. Mostly.

The only exemption is if you are sick enough and deranged enough to be declared non compis mentis and put into institutional care, and for the most part, that is only an option for the rich and the seriously crazy types who are a threat to themselves and others.

Definitely not for well-behaved loonies like me who stay out of everybody’s way and never even draw attention to themselves by attempting suicide.

So I am at the mercy of my own quiet derangement. I sit here at the bottom of the deep dark well of my mental illness keeping myself entertained while my body slowly falls apart and my life force drains away and my adult life not only failed to launch, but exploded on the launch pad during testing.

Nobody can rescue me from me. And were I a stronger saner type of person, that would be enough to make me get up off my ass and take control of my life and go out there to take on that big bad world and probably become an asshole in the process.

But I’m not that kind of person, and where those energizing circuits should be, I have only sadness the bitter cold and the turning away.

And there’s not much I can do about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, time to flog more words from my brain.

Forgive me if I am not in the best of moods, but I still have that pain over my eye. I have a doctor’s phone call between 2 pm and 2:30 pm soon to talk about it.

I had to cancel my long overdue eye appointment for today because at around 10 am this morning, I woke up and the pain was pretty bad.

And then, in a moment of clarity, I suddenly realized that with my skull in this shape, the sorts of tests a full health eye exam involves would be excruciating. 

So I called it off. Dammit. I need new glasses bad, but shit keeps happening.

It’s just as well, though, because it was only this morning that I got the “these are our covid protocols, YOU MUST READ THESE!” email from IRIS, and one of them was that I had to arrive an hour BEFORE my appointment, and that would have meant that I had to get there in like fifteen minutes, and that was never going to happen.

I was already having misgivings about the appointment anyhow because Julian has to dog-walk at 1:30 pm today and my appointment was at noon and there was some doubt as to whether he would be able to drive me home.

And at first. I was my usual agreeable self, saying that was no problem, that I could just take a cab home (a whole two blocks!), do what you got to do.

But this morning I realized that a) I have no cell phone for the calling of cabs and b) at that point, my eyes would be dilated as part of the eye exams, and that was probably a bad state to be in when looking for pay phones that might not even exist.

So next time. I will be more organized. I’ll make the appointment for earlier in the day and that way there can be someone to take me home when I am all dilated.

I am not keen on phone based doctor’s appointments. It puts too much pressure on my ability to describe my problem and that makes me nervous enough during in person office visits. I don’t need this kind of tension.

But this pain over my eyes is quite worrying. It’s in my right frontal sinus cavity (forget that crap I said about occipital sinuses, turns out there’s no such thing) and it’s a hard, solid pain that suggests the sinus is full of something, or severely inflamed.

Whatever. I just want it to go away so that i can return to my usual level of suffering.

I’, also getting a groceries delivery between 3 pm and 5 pm. It’s mostly meat, like hot dogs, bologna, and beef pot pies, but the first thing I added was a crazy amount of Anacid for my headaches.

I was originally going to buy a 200 pack for $20, but then I saw that they had 100 packs for $7 each, so that was an easy six bucks to save.

Now I really want to go back to sleep even though I already slept for seven hours.. Probably due to caffeine withdrawa – no Diet Coke left for me today.

But I can’t go to sleep because I have a doctor’s appointment and a food delivery coming up. So I am going to have to force myself tostay awake.

And I hate doing that/.

More after the break,

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Into the Night

Daylight savings time is kicking my ass harder than usual this year.

Makes sense. This IS 2020, after all.

It gets dark so early now and my circadian rhythms are all out of whack. My body does nt not know whether I should be sleepy or not.

This happens every year, but it usually fixes itself in a day or two. But this year, I am still reeling and it’s been six days.

I am starting to see what those anti-DST people are on about. Because this sucks.

My body is even more stressed out than usual, and I really feel its confusion. Part of me wants to sleep for a year and part of me isn’t sleepy at all.

I think I need to think like a cat and start napping in sunlight somehow.

Make that little nest for myself out on our balcony that I keep talking about. Blankets, pillows, maybe a space heater for when it’s extra cold out.

Oh, and something to hang up to keep out the rain and wind. An old shower curtain, maybe, or a tarp.

Tarp is a silly word.

Could be pretty cozy, and a good place to get fresh air and sunshine and an escape from this here computer of mine.

It is my loved/loathed interdependent mind alter, after all.

Ironically, I am even sleepier now than I was earlier. I got my nap after the groceries came, and yet here I am again.

Either my body chemicals are completely confused, or I have accrued one whopper of a sleep debt and today it came due.

I can’t go to sleep now anyhow. I have this blogging to do, plus I got 7-11 on the way.

So glad I can order from there again, although the menu seems to have changed. The crinkly fries and samosas are missing and for some strange reason I can order Diet Pepsi or Coke Zero but not Diet Coke.

Weird. I should check to see which 7-11 I am ordering from. It might not be the ne just a couple of blocks from here.\

They always have samosas. And Diet Coke.

So today’s been kind of a drag for me. So much time spent resisting sleep, which I hate doing because it stresses me out and puts me in that “tried and wired” state of mind I hate so much, where I am too tired to do anything but also too tired to sleep.

Oh well, Once I have eaten, I can sleep, and know peace once more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Remember, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

So plan accordingly.

The big news on the personal front is that i have this aching pain above my right eye now. It started somewhere around noon and hasn’t let up since. though the intensity of the pain varies from “slight” to “ow fuck!”/.

The way it’s localized suggests that it is probably not purely an eyestrain headache. Those tend to be more diffuse.

Not ruling out eye strain as a contributing factor, though.

It’s made me fairly sensitive to light levels. Looking at the bright white WordPress default screen hurts quite a bit. I should probably change to a darker theme for my WordPress input screen for now, but I don’t remember where to find that setting and I am kind of having trouble concentrating right now so I guess I will just muddle through.

That’s my solution far more often than I would like to admit.

Make due and keep going.

It could be a sinus issue. The pain is roughly the size and shape of one of the lower occipital sinus cavities. There could be a blockage in there. or an infection.

It also might be dental, as the pain radiates down into my jawline. But I don’t think so, because severe sinus issues always make my teeth ache.

Jaw muscles too. Fun.

Regardless of the cause, it’s yet another random thing to go wrong with my health. I swear, it’s like I am 74.not 47.

I have to somehow get my poop in a group or one day soon I will have so many health issues that my body just gives up and implodes.

The problem, as always, is depression. Depression makes everything so much harder. Even such a simple thing as taking insulin daily, say with lunch, feels like it’s a million miles beyond me for absolutely no sane reason.

Because I’m crazy.

And there’s no sense in beating myself up over it. It is what it is, just something I have to deal with. Another fun aspect of being me.

I really wish I could just check myself into a Hospital for the Adulting Impaired and have some nice lady (or dude) speak gently and kindly to me in a supportive fashion and nag me into taking care of myself and maybe tousle my hair now and then.

Baked goods should also play some part.

What I really need is a mother. One that actually pays attention to me, maintains an active and engaged interest in my life. pushes me when I need to be pushed, and just overall gives a damn.

I didn’t get that from my mother. Or rather, I did – my mother was super amazing when I was a wee thing, before she went back to work.

And luckily, when she did go back to work, I had Betty as my babysitter, and she was awesome. Tough, kind, and not afraid to kick my tiny butt when I was out of line.

But then I got raped. That was the first and worst cataclysm. of my childhood. Shattered my mind and drove me deep into a deep dark cave inside myself to escape.

And I’m still there.

The second cataclysm was school. Not only was I thrust into this new and strange environment without having been prepared for it by kindergarten, I went through it entirely alone – nobody even walked me to school on my first day.

And I did okay for a while, but then came the bullying. Cataclysm Number Three. I was completely unprepared for it, and the school did nothing to stop it.

Doesn’t pay to be a pain in the ass gifted kid with a smart mouth, I guess.

All my life, I have been inconveniently intelligent. Way, way smarter than the other kids. And far far too timid and broken from the rape to stand up for myself and demand anything, no matter how bad I needed it.

By fleeing deep into my own mind, I became the far too cerebral person I am today. The id is barely present and the ego is far too strong, and my superego is too busy persecuting me for every little thing to bother holding the ego back at all.

And the thing is, you go crazy without your id. Without it, the mind is helpless against its own mirages and illusions and it is possible to fall down a very deep rabbit hole of crazy as a result.

I’m just glad my pre-school childhood was good (apart from the rape).. Without that good part. I would be a far, far crazier dude.

Like,, psycho crazy. Stalker crazy. “We have to talk about Michael” crazy.

Instead, I was healthy and stable enough to become a sad robot who went to school alone, came home alone, played (read) in his room alone, and went to bed all alone, nobody even caring enough to set a bedtime.

So my childhood was a long steady slog through the ice cold tundra of total social isolation, and it’s that tundra that chills me to the bone when I think about my childhood.

That, and all the social development windows I missed. Kindergarten, a peer group, friends, dates, relationships, competitions, extracurriculars, sex, romance, figuring out who I am, family connections, first jobs,. getting married, having kids, finding success, growing old with someone, and so much more.

The cold from all that tundra is enough to freeze the life right out of you. Stop your heart dead in its tracks like a bullet. Kill you quicker than an unprotected space walk.

And that’s what I am up against. The glacier sitting on my heart. The frozen hellscape that is my soul. The icy wind that never stops blowing.

And that’s why I struggle just to make it through the day. And why I huddle in my little hidey hole and curls up into a ball to conserve heat.

Because it’s cold out there.

And I am slowly freezing to death.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Took the pill this morning. Now i have a bad case of the usual, Bleary eyes, dizzy, disoriented, hard to focus, and so on.

And Ihad planned ot skip blogging with lunch on grounds of incapacity. I am not exactly at my sharpest right now and it would be perfectly understandable if I were to just listen to music or watch YouTube videos instead, knowing it will all get done eventually.

Yet here I am, typing away. Seems like I can’t blog and I can’t not blog either. i guess I just don’t know what to do with myself right now, when it is so hard to concentrate.

The American election is still going on. Having it drag on tortuously like this is very 2020 of it. Last I checked Biden was ahead by just three electoral votes.

That’s way too close. I was really hoping for a slam dunk victory. Now it’s very possible Trump will win and I have no idea how I will handle that but it will not be good.

Please don’t tempt my darkness.

Dunno what is happening with the Senate. Might be funny to see Trump re-elected only to be forced to deal with Democrats holding both the House and the Senate. then he’d have to learn to play nice because he wouldn’t have his pet Senate protecting him any more and they can now hold him accountable.

Done eating. Back to bed.

---

It gets dark so early

Hello darkness my old friend
Now you start at 5 pm

Well I am pretty fucking depressed.

As I write this, Joe Biden is ahead in the polls…. by two lousy electoral college votes. And given all the fuckery with the ballots, the last thing the world needed was a neck and neck race that is easy to dispute.

And who will ultimately decide? Trump’s supreme court. Lovely.

The fate of the world will once again rely on whether a small number of conservatives grow a pair and stand up for that’s right.

It didn’t happen in the Senate when the confirmation of Psycho Amy came up.

What are the odds of it happening when the fate of the world is on the line?

Doesn’t look good for flipping the Senate either. god damn it. Even Mitch the Bitch kept his Senate seat, and I loathe him more than I have ever loathed anyone before.

So it really feels like darkness is about to devour the world, and in response, my own darkness is stirring in its lair at the bottom of that subterranean lake like it’s Godzilla that just heart the hydrogen bomb go off, and it is going to be hungry.

Along with that comes guilt. Absurd but true. I feel guilty because I had all these great ideas on how to shut the GOP down in the realm of public opinion and all these brilliant positioning strategies and oh so many brilliant soundbites, and all I ever did with them was tell them to my friends to show off how smart I am.

And I know the standard response would be to tell me to relax, to remember that I am just one lone Canadian weirdo with no clout or voice and that in all likelihood there was absolutely nothing I could have done to help.

And for most people, that would be absolutely true.

But I’m not most people.

I have power most people couldn’t even dream of. My combination of intelligence, verbal skills, mental clarity, and charisma makes me one hell of a communicator and that means I have great power.

And we all know what comes with great power.

So yeah, it might be crazy to feel guilty about America’s political clusterfuck. Certainly, that’s where the odds lay.

But I know me and I know what I am capable of.

So I will always feel like I could have done something. But I didn’t. I didn’t see the need. I felt no sense of urgency. I let the whole thing slide.

Why? Because deep down, I didn’t really think he could win. I convinced myself that the pollsters were right and I could relax and wait it out.

Well I will tell you one thing :if Trump steals the election, all bets are off. I am going to focus all my powers on his destruction. I will be aiming my lasers straight at his heart and setting them to “kill”.

There will be no mercy. I am willing to whip people into a lynch mod like frenzy of pure inchoate rage that can only be calmed by his brutal death if that is what it takes.

I would be perfectly willing to arrange a Mussolini death for him where he is dragged out of the White House by an angry mob and burned at the fucking stake.

And that goes quintuple for Mitch the Bitch.

So pray to lose, you human filth. Pray your boy goes down and I have no reason to unleash my demons on your putrid little world.

I am the motherfucking Death Star and your planet is in my sights. You steal this election and I will straight up Alderaan your ass.

And I am not the only one. Maybe you don’t think civil war is a possibility because you think the other side is all wimpy liberals who hate confrontation.

But you’re wrong. There is an apocalyptic level of rage at your bullshit government that has only been held in check by the hope that this election will rid the world of you. And not just from your citizens. From all over the world.

Steal the election, and God himself will not be able to save you.

Pray to lose, gentlemen.

It is your only hope.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

I’ve always felt that the world of love, lust, and romance did not include me.

For the first 25 or so years of my life, I thought this was because I was a hideous and monstrous freaks whom nobody could ever love in any sense or on any level.

But then I discovered the Internet, and FuirryMUCK, and being a furry, and eventually being Fruvous, and I discovered it was possible for people to like me and even love me…;as long as I was pretending to be someone else.

But hey, loving the mask is almost the same as loving the mask-maker. Right?

And yet I still don’t feel like that world includes me. Not really. I will concede that it is theoretically possible for me to find love and a relationship and sexytimes, but in practice, I really don’t see it happening.

For one thing, I don’t meet new people. Hard to do when you only leave the house once a week for grocery shopping, apart from the occasional medical appointment.

47 and I am already living a senior citizen lifestyle.

Well I’ve always been well ahead of my age group.

And as I have said many times before. meeting new people is the key to romance. Every new person you meet is a ticket in the romance lottery. Another chance to meet someone with whom you “click”.

No new people, no tickets, no chance of winning.

So real-world type romance is not an option for me. And as patient readers know, I have tried dating apps/sites and they are not for me.

Reading the profiles leave me nauseated and depression. All these dude talking about what they are “into” and telling me absolutely nothing else about themselves or really any sign of a personality at all.

I fall in love with people, not parts. I want a man, not meat.

And when I make a profile for myself, nobody ever responds to it. I suspect because my profiles have way more words than other people’s, so it’s like, tl;dr LOL.

Plus I always infuse my profiles with my sparkling personality and megawatt witand goofy charm and such, and that’s just too intense for a lot of people.

Well fuck’em. Or don’t.

But deeper than the pragmatic issues, I still don’t feel lovable. Not the real me, anyhow. I still feel like if people get to know the real me, they will run away screaming.

I can’t even imagine someone getting emotionally close to someone in the real world. When I try, the picture dissolves in panic and self-loathing almost instantly.

I can entertain a fantasy of romance, but the moment I try to imagine it being real, the walls come tumbling down.

I don’t think this is a permanent condition, though. If I manage to get some employment and success, that would go a long way to boosting my confidence and might make me a lot more willing to go look for love.

Of course, I could also have a massive psychological breakthrough that accomplishes the exact same thing.

But I ain’t exactly holding my breath on that one.

More after the break.

---

The most important bit of news today

Doordash does 7-11 now, so I can finally order from 7-11 again. Yay!

Surely that’s the most exciting news of today, Nov 3, 2020.

---

Deserve don’t mean shit

That’s a movie quote, I think.

I will start out by saying it’s not that I think I don’t deserve love. Of course I deserve love. I’m one heck of a guy.

Cute, funny, smart, sweet, understanding, kind, compassionate, and cuddly AF.

And I don’t hate myself much often. So I doubt it would get into the whole “I can’t love someone dumb enough to love someone like me” territory.

I sincerely think someone would be lucky to have me. Sure, I’m not exactly as low maintenance as I would like to be (working on that), but I could make the right man very very happy indeed.

So that’s not an issue either.

I do worry that if I get close to someone, dark stuff will come floating to the surface of my mind and end up hurting them somehow.

Stuff I have never had to deal with before because I’m such a loner. There is a line in my mind that literally nobody has ever crossed. Nobody has ever gotten closer to me than that. Not my parents, not my siblings, not anybody ever in my life.

And what little human connection I made along the way was scraped off of my soul by decades of isolation, like a snow plow scraping a lawn down to the bare dirt.

All that has left me with a sea of untapped rage and dark thoughts and bad intentions lying under the surface of my personality like a subterranean lake.

And like such lakes, everything is fine until someone goes digging around down there and without warning a sinkhole opens and they fall in.

And there I am with my little bucket, emptying that lake a little at a time every day, knowing that my progress might be excruciatingly slow, but it’s still progress.

I am still too scared to pull the plug out of the bottom and let all that dark water spill out into the world in a tsunami and pollute the waters of the world.

I know the ocean can take it. But I am still too scared to do it. And too ashamed.

I wish I could make peace with all that anger and pain. I wish that, at some point. I had learned a healthy way to express it. I wish I could make it all go away without having to deal with it, like a secret late night toxic waste dump.

But the only way out is through. I can see that now. There are so many situations where “stop” and “go” are the only options. No going back. No changing tracks. No escape hatch. You can either go forward or go nowhere,. That’s the reality of it.

And a lot of people, myself vehemently included, who choose “stop” and just stay there, year after year, rotting away as the energy that should be propelling them forward has nowhere to go and burns them up inside instead.

And all this time they are also building up a vast arsenal of weapons to use against their desire to move forward. Excuses, phobias, dodges, and outright lies even.

Freedom comes when you realize that no matter how bad you think the consequences of pressing “go” will be, they can’t be worse than THIS.

Sometimes uncertain happiness is way way better than certain doom.

Some things are worth the risk.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling angrily apathetic lately.

And we know what that means. Whenever I get the urge to shout “Fuck you!” at the sky until my throat bleeds, it’s never the sky I’m talking to.

Well, unless I got caught in the rain.

No, it’s the voices in my head that have provoked my ire. I feel surrounded and hounded and harassed. The barking dogs and slick-jowled salesmen and evil minded yes men who are NOT MY FRIEND are amped to a paralyzing cacophony and I just want them to shut the fuck up and leave me in peace.

I wonder if this is how some suicide attempts start. The person doesn’t want to die, they just want to silence the satanic choir within for five fucking minutes.

Come to think of it, that’s probably how some substance issues start too, I can see becoming a blackout drunk if it gave me even a tiny slice of blessed relief.

Luckily, being agoraphobic with social anxiety kept me away from such temptations. You have to actually go to the liquor store to get booze, and for other fun chemicals you have to be the sort of person who knows people and gets invited to parties.

Except for pot. But you can’t get addicted to pot. Not physically. I imagine there are fellow sufferer who do their best to stay baked 24/7 but that will never kill them except for maybe a few brain cells.

Which means I could buy some edibles online and see what all the fuss is about. For real, I could use something that soothed me and helped me relax.

Maybe even help me learn to turn down the intensity on this megawatt brain of mine so I can get some proper sleep.

It’s hard to sleep when you’re this bright. Not a joke.

Had one of my thankfully rare bouts of insomnia this morning. Laid down, relaxed, did a few stretches to relax my muscles, and completely failed to sleep.

Had zero sleepiness in me. And I hadn’t even had any Diet Coke yet. This just happens every once in a while. I will be sinking happily into slumber and then suddenly all my sleepiness evaporates and I feel like was floating on a cloud then suddenly fell to the ground and now I am lying there,. dazed and confused.

That sounded better in my head. I swear to God it did.

Oh well, this just means I will have to up my napping game till I catch up. And if that doesn’t seem to be doing the trick, I will take the sleeping pill.

I wish I could get back to taking it every day. I am sure that must have been a much healthier way to live.

But without my input, my brain falsely connected the pill with my having “bad sleep” and waking up all fucked up and confused, and now I find it hard to “trust” the pill.

Makes no sense at all, but it’s what I’ve got to work with.

I need to learn to work with life without it needing to make sense to me.

More after the break,.

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What would; you do?

I just posted this to Facebook :

My fellow depressives :

What would you do if you had lots of energy?

And would it be a good thing?

me, facebook, now

A more complete version would read :

My fellow depressives, people with depression, people with lived experience of one or more illnesses on the depression spectrum ✓ :

What would you do if you had lots of energy? All the energy you could ever want. So much energy that it stops being a consideration.

And would it be a good thing? Shouldn’t it be?

me, this blog, now

What I am trying to do is get people, myself included, to see past the problem. of depression turning one into an energy miser not by challenging the notion that we have no energy (we can deflect that easily) but by simply asking people a theoretical about what IF the problem was gone.

If I get any replies. I expect some will be the perky positive (“Of course it would be good! I’d love that! I’d get so much done!”), the neutral negative (“Um…. I guess it would be okay…kinda..”), the defensive/counteroffensive (How dare you say my illness isn’t real by suggesting that it is possible for me to have energy!”), or the honest defensives (“Fuck you and your stupid question. I don’t want to talk about it” )

But I suspect I will get very few or no replies, because it’s an extremely difficult subject to think about, let alone talk about.

And yet, here I am.

It’s really just a refinement of my question, “If you could take a pill and have your depression disappear forever, with no chance of it coming back, would you?”.

Possibly followed by “Why not?”.

I’m not asking these questions to be a smartass or to make anyone feel bad or inferior or anything like that.

I ask these questions because I think they can help people set themselves free of depression by indirectly challenging depression’s core assumptions.

And while this sort of cognitive approach to depression sometimes seems like trying to climb Mount Everest using only my lips, I nevertheless think it can work.

At least, it’s what has worked for my “cerebral to a fault” self.

Specifically, what helps me the most is questions to which I have no answers. Ones that point out things I can’t explain, things that make no sense, things that are almost laugh out loud ridiculous when you actually put them into words.

So I am, in my own fumbling way, trying to help others the way I have been helped.

At least give me credit for that much.

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Oh, one last thing. Anecdote time.

Last Saturday, I ordered a meal from a sushi place I like. On the website, it said that the meal came with miso soup.

But when it arrived, no miso. And I love me some miso.

So I complained about it through DoorDash.

A few minutes later, I get an offer : would I accept $8.32 compensation?

Um, seeing as a cup of miso is a dollar, HELL YEAH.

If I were a less compulsively honest person, I would totally figure out a way to profit from a system like that.

Instead, I will use it as it is intended.

Because I am honest, and open, and steadfast to a very high ideal.

Joy Danger Bellefontaine · Al and George – I am the Least Machiavellian Person I Know

I’m not even an opportunist!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know what? Fuck safety.

I’m tired of it. Safety is boring. I am soooo over it. In my life, safety has acted like it’s the only thing that matters for far too long and that shit is ending right now.

From now on, I will seek risk. I will gamble freely. I will roll the dice and see what happens. I will press my luck.

Big money, no whammies.

I am sick and tired of the constant cringe. Of being afraid of everything all the time. I don’t want to be ruled by fear any more.

And that means I am going to do the one thing the anxiety fears the most : I am going to embrace it. Let the anxiety come. I’m not afraid of it any more.

After all, it’s just a passing emotion. It’s not something real and it’s not a reaction to something real either. It’s a fluctuation of mentation, and not an interesting one either.

Because anxiety doesn’t matter. It’s not important. It is no more substantial than a dream or a fantasy, and has even less impact on reality.

So to hell with “safety uber alles”. There are far more weighty concerns. like whether I am happy and thriving instead of merely surviving.

Once more, I proclaim that there is nothing in my head more important than my happiness. The whole point of my safety apparatus is to protect me but it’s done far, far more harm than good and it’s got to go.

So fuck safety. I want to have fun.

And that is all that really matters.

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As the water at low tide

You know what? Fuck being deep too.

I am so tired of getting lost in my own depths. Just for once, I want to get the fuck out my uneasy seas and walk on land. I want to dry out enough to feel the sun’s love.

I want to feel and know what I am feeling. I want to know and know what I am knowing. I want to leave my comforting cloak of night behind and walk naked into a bright and shining world where people are healthy and happy and wholesome and full of life and health and good, good vibes.

Basically, I want to live in the world of 60’s music videos like this :

A technical cosmos, vibrant and strong and more than a match for the darkness within.

And if that takes becoming a shallower person, fine. It’s not like being ten fathoms deep ever did me any good.

So I hereby reserve the right to be as shallow as the water at low tide. A mere puddle in a pothole on the road of life. I have dwelt in the darkness for far too long and I need a long trip to sunny climes in order to restore my equilibrium.

I will never stop looking into things deeply and trying to see all sides of things and striving for a greater understanding.

I couldn’t stop that even if I wanted to. It’s baked in.

But that doesn’t mean I have to live in the darkness. It doesn’t mean I have to let the gloom consume me. It doesn’t mean I have to keep feeding my demons pieces of my soul to keep them on my side.

I can be a shiny happy person and still see things as they really are.

But even if I can’t… who cares? I’m happy.

And I would rather be happy than right.

If a head full of lies is the price I have to pay for happiness, I am fine with that.

From now on, “Is it true?” is demoted in favour of “Is it useful?”.

Does it contribute to my wellbeing? Does it do me harm instead? Is it a healthy part of my mental diet, or would I be better off swallowing gravel? Will this thing lighten my load or increase my burden? Is it true but toxic? If so, isn’t a white lie better?

I have lived my life devouring everything I came across like a trawler ship, or a whale. No matter what it was, I ate it all up digested the information, pooped out the bullshit and the lies, and made the rest a part of myself.

Only now does it occur to me that some things are not a good idea to swallow in the first place. I now reserve the right to reject things I think will hurt me without having to swallow the damned thing to find out.

“The final analysis is in, and it turns out that was poison. *dies* “

I don’t owe the truth a god damned thing.

And this means living a more incarnate life. I have hidden in my depths and ignored the grunting straining physicalities of life for far too long and my life below got worse and worse over time as a result.

So even if I was comfortable eschewing reality in favor of my inner realm (I’m not, that’s my worst nightmare in fact), that inner realm is deeply connected to outer reality and if the body gets sick, so does downtown Fruvous.

So for that reason alone, I need to take better care of myself.

And it goes both ways. If I take care of myself better, then reincarnating and becoming physically present wouldn’t hurt so much and I’d be more likely to do it.

Anyhow, back to mental diet. The thing about turning up my nose at things I think will harm me is that it has to operate by instinct. I can’t “know” it is the right decision because that would require me to swallow it, and that would defeat the purpose.

So fuck it. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong, I will never know for sure. Fine.

There’s plenty of things to know and understand in this world. It’s not like skipping the “wrong” one will starve me.

I hereby fully endow myself with the right to prioritize my happiness and wellbeing over whether or not something is totally, totally true or not.

Fuck it. I will take what life gives me and make something for myself from it.

Maybe a pillow fort. Or some decorative collage.

Either way, all I give a fuck about is making myself happy.

And the truth can go hang.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Took the pill this morning at around 8:45 am. Woke up at 1:30 pm, roughly 15 minutes ago, feeling terrible. Very sleepy and groggy and foggy and crappy.

Must remind myself that this doesn’t mean taking the pill was a bad idea, event though right now, it feels like I am being punished for it.

It just means I really needed the better sleep, I tell myself. Once i am done eating I will go back to sleep and probably wake up feeling a lot better.

Atleast I hope that’s what will happen, as feeling like I feel now suuucks.

I am certainly not going to make it to 500 words. 250 if I am lucky. The words are coming pretty hard now and I doubt I have very many in me at the moment.

Which is why I am writing nonsense, I suppose. Stuff patient readers have seen many many times before. Inane and trite.

In fact, I considered not blogging at all right now and punting the task to when I am more awake, but I am too tired to eat without blogging.

The two are deeply connected in my mind.

Well I am done eating. Time to make some Z’s.

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Later that same day

It’s 8:03 pm and I have sushi on the way. Time to get my ass to bloggin’.

Installed a mod called The People Of Skyrim. I was browsing mods and came across this lunatic thing, and while I dithered about it for half a day, in the end I knew I had to try it because it was such a crazy idea.

Basically, it adds more stuff to everything everywhere. The mod author(s) must have had some serious ambition burning because this had to have been a lot of work. The whole map of Skyrim, both inside themajor cities and out, has new locations, buildings paths, spells, artifacts,weapons, armor, and litlle pink critters that go BOOP in it.

I’ve only dipped my pinky toe in it so far because I wanted to finish Dawnguard first, but from what I have seen, it basically doubles the amount of content in the game. In other words, it adds as much content as the original game had.

Should be a lot of fun.

Not without cost, though, as it’s also much tougher. There’s monster encounters everywhere. Journeys that would have been a mere bucolic stroll are now pitched battles against numerous nasty foes.

Works for me. I’ve been wanting to make things harder on myself in a fun way for a while. I can deal with this just fine.

Besides, I have gotten crazy good with the fire magic. So much so that I go around saying this in my head when I win :

I’m such a pyro.

But in my defense, I have tried the other two kinds of offensive magic, lightning and ice, and they are not as fun.

Lightning magic is weirdly hard to aim, and ice magic is just, well….boring.

So fire magic it is for me. We don’t need no water, let the motherfuckers burn!

More after the break

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It’s all I ever do

Another old bone – my video game addiction.

I can’t decide how much of a problem it is because I can’t trust my emotional evaluation of anything anymore.

Patient readers know the tune here. On the one hand, I could view it as a serious crisis and take all available action to fix it and really go for it.

After all, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and with megawatt talents to boot, and I waste my life away playing video games all day.

And I mean all day. If I am awake, fed, and not in the bathroom, I am playing games. It metastasized from a hobby to that deadliest of things, an all-consuming way to self-medicated, round about when I first fell into the Skyrim hole.

And I am still in that hole, more or less. Sure, I stopped playing Skyrim for three or four years, but Skyrim itself was never the real problem.

The addiction was the problem. Skyrim was merely the gateway drug.

So ever since then, I have been a victim of my own coping mechanism, a fate familiar to all depressives in one form or another.

When I am gaming, I feel safe. I’m relaxed. I get to be in my own little world in which I am very comfortable and where pain and confusion and anxiety can’t get me.

And I never want to leave it. It is my refuge from all my problems, and when one of your problems is depression, any kind of refuge from the war within is precious beyond compare and clung to like a shipwreck survivor clings to a floating door.

There was totally room on that door, Rose.

Anyhow, logically, a case could be made for a full bore attempt to rescue myself from my tragic fate and get myself to somewhere where all my powers can be put to good use, preferably in a way that lets me make a living at it.

And it wouldn’t take much. I would be happy with my current $1500/month lifestyle if I was actually earning it.

That would make such a huge difference.

But here’s the thing : if it’s a crisis, that creates pressure, and that pressure easily turns into anxiety, and that anxiety could well drive me inane(r),.

On the other hand, there’s the “stay mellow and grow” approach, where I tell myself that treating it like a crisis can only backfire and my best bet is to relax, do whatever seems right, and concentrate on growing and healing and doing what promotes them.

After all, I am a very sick man, and that’s what you are supposed to do when you are sick : concentrate on getting better.

The fact that I have been sick for almost my entire adult life doesn’t change that.

And yet I have these latent energies desperate to be expressed and the only way they can be expressed is by leaving my cozy cocoon and on some level going out into the world and exploring my options.

Even if I only do it online.

So I don’t know. Somehow, I have to find the middle ground between the mellow and the ambitious. Some way to be both relaxed and bold, comfortable and courageous, at one with the cosmos and desperately trying to find my place in it.

Because I do have a place in it. Despite what the bad tapes in my head tell me.

And some day, I will find it.