(Editorial note : I goofed! Thought I had finished yesterday’s entry but I had 30 words left. So um… welcome to Bonus Entry Sunday)

Let me start off by saying : I don’t give a crap if he’s convicted.

Doesn’t matter. It’s completely beside the point. He’s out of office. He’s probably never going to run for President again. He hated the job the first time and only ran for re-election because of pride and the narcissist’s need to cling to what they have regardless of whether or not they want it.

Ref. : Terrible parents who hate their kids but fight like hell for custody.

No, I don’t give the tiniest of craps whether he is convicted. All that matters is that he be investigated. Investigated to the nth degree.

I want the trial to dig up all his dirty secrets. All his criminal activities. All his most egregious betrayals of everyone he has ever known. All his fucked up family secrets. I want him to have to watch on TV as he is stripped naked in public and there is not a god damned thing he can do about it.

And not just him. I want all his cronies dragged naked and screaming onto the public stage as well. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, every one who voted against accepting the election results, all his press secretaries, every ex-staffer, everyone he threw under the bus, you name it…they all need to be put on the witness stand and made to sweat in the spotlight as they are forced to testify to all the ways they betrayed America in Trump’s name.

And trust me, they will sing. Because Trump shows no loyalty, he inspired no loyalty, and so there will be plenty of underlings willing to stick their dagger into Trump in public, knowing there is no way he can stop them or punish them for it.

I mean, what’s he going to do… fire them?

And once the lower level people really get the flames of Hell burning below decks for Trump. even his loyalists will start to jump ship as they decide they would rather drown than burn. They will really get that bonfire raging.

And then, the absolute masterpiece of this schadenfreude smorgasbord : making Trump testify. Because you know he’s going to fall to pieces when subjected to questions he can’t dodge, doesn’t like, and can’t tantrum his way out of.

Every narcissist’s mortal enemy is reality, and he will be getting a massive dose of it in front of the whole world without any way to prevent it.

Plus, as we all know, he will be completely unable to avoid perjuring himself. He has no concept of reality any more and his own reality is so riddled with delusional bullcrap that he honestly has no idea when he’s lying.

So I am really looking forward to watching him lose his mind completely when questioned by prosecutors with nobody there to protect him,

My anticipation level for that approaches a cultist’s fervor for the Apocalypse.

Also remember that everything in his Senate trial can then be used as a basis for or evidence to support criminal charges. So that even when the whole thing is done, he will have dozens more trials ahead of him. Trial after trial like the one he just went through for the rest of his life.

Who knows, maybe he’ll kill himself. That would be sad because it would mean he never really paid for his crimes.

Or maybe he’ll just die from the stress. He’s 78 after all.

Or maybe he will try to flee, and we can all watch his inept, bumbling attempts to evade capture end will him fleeing to his buddy Vlad Putin…. who turns his back on him.

Given all that, does the actual Senate verdict matter? Not at all.

And all we have to do is pop the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the show.

More after the break.

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On getting Vocal

Crossposted the above Trump stuff to Vocal. the blogging site where in theory I can get paid for blogging if my posts get enough hits.

I feel good about what I wrote. It might not quite be the streamlined all-action tight punchy prose of my dreams. but it’s relatively focused, all on the same topic, and written in a witty and engaging fashion.

Plus it amuses me to imagine it actually gaining traction and my getting an absolute shitstorm of angry comments… from liberals!

“Stop trying to make us have hope!” they cry.

Geez, sorry. I’ll never do THAT again.

Like hell I won’t. What can I say, I’m a scrappy optimist who fights for hope every chance I get.

In politics, at least. In my personal life. well… I am learning.

Despair is such an easy out that it becomes extremely addictive. Whatever the stressor is, just give up and screw the consequences.

After all, nobody can expect you to keep trying when you’re sad!

Or mad, or scared, ;or bored, or….ever, really.

Like I have said many times before, the main appeal of giving up is that it brings instant relief from the stress. Sure, it might have fucked you over in the long or even medium term, but like any junkie, you will sacrifice all self-worth and your own best interests in order to get that sweet, sweet blast of relief.

Despair, then, is just addictive failure extended into the future. No longer content with merely giving up on a case by case basis, the addiction now moves against its greatest enemy, hope, and attacks the very idea of it.

Victory in this stage of depressions assault on your sanity occurs when it convinces you that even thinking about hope is pointlessly painful and you settle into survival mode.

And now you are depression’s bitch.

The secret, then, is learning to give up on giving up. Start with delaying giving up by just five seconds. That’s all. Five seconds.

That’s enough for you to learn that not giving up is possible. That you are not as weak as you thought you were.

And you can build yourself up from there, one second at a time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Babe, I’ve seen the guys before
And know I’ve got the lowest score
I know I’m unemployed and broke
But babe I’ve got a million jokes

And if none of them will make you laugh
Give me a minute and a half
And I I’ll write a million more
And give you giggles by the score

I might not be the greatest man
But I’ll do all that I can

I’d walk a hundred million miles
And move the world to see you smile
Lasso the moon, seduce the stars
To bring them down to where you are

And then I’ll teach them all to sing
How you’re my queen of everything
And as they sweetly harmonize
You’ll see my love shine in my eyes
And it will make you feel cozy and warm
And shelter you from the storm

And when I trip, stumble and fall
You’ll always be the one I call
Say “Babe, I’m in the hospital
Come pick me up, I feel so small”

---

Meh. That’s enough of that crap.

I mean, it’s cute and all and there’s some decent verses there. but there’s a lot of dreck too and it is not turning out how I wanted it to turn out.

Next time, go in with more of a plan. I know that’s hard for me, but it’s the only way to keep things moving in the right direction.

The idea was to make it a silly, goofy kind of love song. A serenade where the male singer makes the case to his crush that despite not being much of a man, he is still the one who will love her most and best.

And it’s still clear in my head and if I could just write the damn thing, it could be a very cute and charming love song celebrating love that is wrong on paper but beautiful and wondrous in practice.

But then I started to ramble, basically. Lost focus. Started just making verses for their own sake, and that’s no good.

So for now, I stop.

Some day I will give it another shot.

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Had my phone appointment with my GP.

He called at 10 am, not 10:30 am which is when the appointment was scheduled. Meaning he was actually early for once, and that’s a goddamned miracle.

When I visit him in the office, he is a minimum of thirty minutes late.

I might be less rankled by phone appointments after this.

Anyhow, the takeaway from that conversation, besides a few pill refills, was that there are some podiatrists that work within the medical system and that therefore do not require a separate payment from the patient.

Boffo. I am going to call the guy Doctor Wishlow referred me to and make an appointment. Doc Chao looked him up for me and seems like this guy is a podiatric surgeon who specializes in, among other extremely impressive sounding things, “diabetic limb recovery”.

Holy shit. Then I guess he should be able to handle a diabetic foot ulcer no problem.

You know a surgeon’s good if his specializations sound like superpowers.

More after the break.

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Save it for momma

Anyone who has been around kids enough has seen this :

The child gets hurt while playing, The pain is clear on their face and their eyes have filled with tears but they’re not crying.. not yet.

Instead, they run right to their primary caregiver and only once they are in earshot do they start crying.

Almost everybody knows this and accepts it and most people think it is cute, and it is.

But why do they wait? It hurts right away, so why not cry right away? They are crying because they are hurt, right?

The usual answer is that they wait because what they want is comforting from their primary caregiver. The crying is, in effect, an alarm and there is no point in sounding the alarm if there is nobody to hear it.

And that is true.

But it’s also huge.

Because it illustrates how emotions are information. Every feeling we have, in addition to performing its individual function, is also information to be broadcast to our fellow naked beach monkeys about what is going on.

Take a monkey troupe. One monkey sees a jaguar in a tree. It cries out in fear, and attracts the attention of several other monkeys, who investigate. They also see the jaguar, and they cry out in fear. The number of monkeys who are aware of the threat keeps growing. Eventually, the monkeys huddled together in fear undergo a change. Once there is enough of them, fear turns to anger, and they start throwing things at the jaguar to drive it off.

And unless this is an especially dumb jaguar, it works. The jaguar splits. The monkey troupe is protected. Victory for monkeykind.

And all any of them had to do was what came naturally : voice their emotion.

Now take us. Modern life is a hell of a lot more complicated. We definitely can’t go around voicing every emotion instantly. The complex network of relationships on which we all rely (commonly know as “society”) wouldn’t survive.

But emotions are still information. Everything we feel contains within it the impulse to transmit that emotion to our fellow primates.

So we all end up accumulating these unsent emotional messages because modern society still doesn’t take emotions seriously enough and we go on as if a repressed emotion just…. goes away.

But it doesn’t. And that’s why catharsis is so important. Emotions do not go away until they are successfully transmitted, no matter how long that takes.

That’s why so many of us have entire airlines’ worth of emotional baggage dragging us down. All those latent emotions waiting to be expressed and transmitted can really weigh a person down.

Therapy is one way to get that shit transmitted. Journaling is another. A heart to heart with someone you know and trust is a third.

But on the species scale, what we really need to do is teach our kids that their emotions are important and that part of being healthy is having a person to tell about our day so we can get those emotions out.

And the best way to teach that is to be that person for our kids.

We could pave the way to a radically less neurotic future if only we would listen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or don’t. I’m not your mother.

Did therapy. Not a great session largely because I was pretty sleepy throughout.

Talked about how I am digging around inside myself looking for the primal spark that can get my id engine truly running.

Because I’m alive, god damn it, and I’m truly sick and tired of feeling like one of the walking dead. I want to FEEL alive for a change, and maybe even find some kind of hope, even if it’s only in the form of sheer stubborn defiance.

Fuck you, ya crummy old world. I’m going to live despite your best efforts.

Eh, who am I kidding. Life’s never cared about me enough to oppress me,

We also discussed how hard it is for me to believe that people can help me. My experience is that even those few who like me enough to put actual time and effort into trying to help me can’t handle the strain of my pain and thus my burdens go unshared.

I am and always have been completely alone in my struggles.

And I am and always have been woefully inadequate to the task. I never had a chance to get strong,. Far too much of a burden was placed on me and me alone from the very beginning, and it crushed me and I stayed crushed.

When that happens, all you can do is retreat into your own mind, far away from that big bad world that I can’t handle and that therefore baffles and terrifies me. Instead, I live in a world of intellect and imagination where my only contact with reality is through the safely sterilized path of media consumption.

Mostly video games. But also other internet stuff.

And, of course, this beloved blog of mine (pat pat).

Crushed under a rock like I have been, it’s amazing that I learned to just keep trudging onward no matter what.

Then again, I suppose I had no choice. If I had truly been totally crushed by my excessive burdens, I would have stop functioning at school, and that would have attracted attention to me, and I wasn’t allowed to do that.

After all, I didn’t want to get into trouble for reminding people I exist.

So really, silently marching onwards regardless of how much pain I was in was just a way to maximize my non-existence.

Wish I had thought of just refusing to do any school work as a way to force the system to pay attention to me, like faithful reader and natural source of fabulousness Felicity did. That might have helped.

But I probably would not have had the courage to do it anyhow.

After all, that would have attracted attention to me,

Telling your kid not to draw attention to themselves and essentially raising them to be ashamed to be alive – to hate their own existence as much as you do – is such a brutally fucked up thing to do to a poor innocent kid,

You deserved so much better, Little Me.

What happened to you was a crime,

More after the break,

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Strange sense of time

Just had another of my temporal dislocations.

God, I am not sure I can even explain it. Perhaps it’s too soon. Suffice it to say that I got my AM and PM crossed, thought it was tomorrow when it was today, and now I feel rather brutally disoriented and have suffered a sprain of the brain as a result.

My lord am I sick of this bullshit.

Is it not enough that I hate myself sometimes and that I feel like I am floating helplessly in a pool of anesthetic with no way to generate momentum basically all the time?

Isn’t this endless diffraction and paralysis and watching my doom approach me like an oncoming train and I am tied to the tracks enough?

Ain’t it enough that here I am, brain the size of a planet, the wizard-king of Mount Oblivion, with all this power at my command but without the will, fortitude, wherewithal, and courage to use it?

Isn’t it enough that I am terrified of myself?

Apparently not, because the universe has dictated that I also need to have my entire sense of reality trashed now and then to keep me from developing any trust in the universe and my place in it at all.

Right now, I am angry and scared. Angry at the cosmic injustice of it all, and scared because I don’t even know what is real any more.

Now that I have had some time to cool off a bit, I think I know what happened. Somehow, at some point, my mind blew a fuse and I skipped forward in subjective time to tomorrow morning.

Thus my AM/PM flip.

I remember looking at the clock and thinking, “oh shit, I have my 10:30 am phone appointment with Doctor Chao in an hour and a half, I better get some sleep.”

So it must have happened before 9 pm.

And I am pretty sure when I had supper, I thought it was breakfast. Which would explain why there’s water and not diet cola in my glass.

So this dislocation probably happened before 8 pm, which is when I tend to have supper. This raises the ugly possibility that it happened while I was awake.

Yes, I can recall it reaching 8 and feeling sleepy but telling myself that I wasn’t going to sleep instead of eating again. I did that this AM and it had the predictable result of my waking up with low blood sugar and crazed with hunger.

I bet that’s when my sense of time started falling apart. I ate “breakfast” at around 10:30 am, and that threw my whole day off.

You know, I always knew I would be using all my detective skills just to figure out what the fuck happened some day.

It’s just so… me. So perfectly on brand.

Oh well. At least I am on sync now.

Or at least I hope I am.

Honestly, I just want to crawl back into bed and sleep till things make sense again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow(?).

Well that was a waste of my fucking time.

Finally took my bad foot to the ER. It’s the same bad foot as before but over the last week or so it’s gotten a lot worse. To the point where it hurts like a bitch to walk on it.

As in, hurts so bad that I found myself getting a tiny panic attack when I knew I would have to stand up and walk soon. So bad that just getting a meal from the kitchen feels like a Station of the Cross.

And worse is this sort of sick crunchy feeling and the wobble in my step it causes, because that is twisting my ankle and putting strain on the sides of my foot.

Plus, what was once a tiny area of dry, stiff skin is now a big nasty diabetic ulcer. Still dry, thank God, but quite a trainwreck nonetheless.

The pain makes me functionally crippled, so I figured, ER time.

I shouldn’t have freaking bothered.

Because after being there for three hours and having them get my hopes up by taking blood and x-rays (also the name of my webcomic), all I got was “see a podiatrist and try to stay off it”.

Well double fucking duh, asshole. I already tried a podiatrist and they’re mysteriously not covered by my disability coverage and you don’t need to tell me to stay off it because it FUCKING HURTS.

Oh, and what do they recommend for the pain? Tylenol! Thanks a lot, doc. Kindly consider first going and then fucking yourself.

I say “mysteriously not covered” because it makes absolutely no sense that going to the podiatrist isn’t covered when going to any other medical specialist is.

Like my ER doc. Doctor Wishlow, said, it makes no sense that a sore on my arm is covered but one on my foot is not.

And like I said to him, “Does the province consider feet to be a luxury?”.

Because that’s the only way this shit would make any sense.

So I spent three hours in the ER and got nothing. Hell, they didn’t even refer me back to the wound care clinic.

Luckily, in the process of getting my butt to the ER, I discovered that the foot hurts a lot less when I have a shoe and sock on it, so I will be keeping my feet shod and socked for the time being just for getting around the house.

And tomorrow, I will call the podiatrist who Doctor Wishlow said was “willing to consider a reduced rate”. Oh yippy fucking skippy.

Looks like I am going to have to bite the bullet and pay for medical care. In CANADA.

Let that sink in. Insanity.

“Honorable MP, why does British Columbia favor American style health care for feet?”

Then hit them with the “are feet a luxury?” line.

I might also see about renting a cane. A proper medical one. I am sure I could get the regular kind off of Amazon for pretty cheap, but given my weight and clumsiness, I would prefer something guaranteed to be sturdy.

All in all, today has been lame and sucked.

Now I am going to go lay down in the dark and sulk.

More after the break.

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You never can tell

Got this stuck in my head :

Still pissed off about my wasted afternoon. I think I assumed that because it was a much worse problem this time, there was bound to be some kind of action.

Nope. Still nothing. When I was waiting for my cab, I darkly amused myself by imagining myself asking Doctor Wishlow ^[1] if I should just go home and set my feet on fire, and see if that rated medical intervention.

I give it a 50/50 chance.

---

Got myself McD’s tonight, as a treat. My usual 10 McNuggets meal with large fries, large Diet Coke, and a carrot muffin for dessert.

But it doesn’t feel like a treat. I guess I have had it too often for it to feel special. Chalk that up to experience, then : the usual from McD’s does not a treat make.

I originally had my heart set on some tasty KFC. Got my usual order from there together too : 4 piece big box with coleslaw and fries plus an individual gravy,

So much nicer than the communal gravy.

Anyhow, it was all ready to go, but then I remembered that the local KFC closes at 7:30 pm for some insane reason, and it was 7:43 pm, so no dice.

No wonder I don’t get KFC very often. I’m usually not even hungry till 8 pm.

Presumably the local KFC franchisee (hee hee hee) thinks there is no point in staying open once the dinner rush is over.

I can’t say for sure that they are wrong to think this, but all the other places I order from seem to disagree with them on that.

Stupid fucking KFC.

---

So as you can see, I am still in a lovely mood.

Part of the problem with being unused to venting feelings of anger is that I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to get out of this pissed off state of mind.

I guess I just have to let the fever run its course.

That’s hard. I don’t like being angry. It burns. I want to exit this mood and go back to my usual default level of shittiness.

Home sweet home.

But I suppose being unwilling to endure unpleasant emotions is a big part of my problem. I keep hitting the escape button on the bad stuff but all that does is shunt it to the side and adds it to the enormous backlog of other unprocessed bad stuff.

And that backlog takes a lot of energy to keep repressed, leaving tragically little for such petty tasks as, for example, keeping my mood above suicidal.

Happiness takes energy. Austerity kills happiness. In doing so, it kills whatever the hell austerity was supposed to achieve.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been feeling angry and nihilistic lately.

The usual angsty crap. Everything is stupid and pointless and meaningless and lame and my life is a pathetic meaningless grind of day after day of doing nothing of substance while I wait to die.

Good thing I’m patient.

It’s all so frustrating. I feel so trapped and helpless, and yet salvation always seems so tantalizingly close because the positive steps I could make to improve my life all seem so simple and easy and totally within my capabilities, and yet that nameless and pervasive fear still holds me back like I am vapor-locked to a slab.

It’s getting so bad that I think I am going to have to fall back on the last resort of a wretch like me : faith.

Or maybe trust. I am just going to have to trust that if I keep tunneling through all the dead scar tissue and atrophied adipose deposits in my blasted bloated brain, I will eventually clear out enough of my metaphorical arteries to restore healthy blood flow to my bruised and broken heart for this old carcass of mine to finally come alive.

It feels like I am making progress. Like my main systems are slowly and gradually coming online and I can get the faintest glimmer of feeling what it is like to be alive.

But it’s so goddamned slow. And not just slow – recently I have come to realize that it can’t happen while I am watching, so to speak. My trying to focus my mind and will myself to do things in a logical and linear way always backfires because my overweaning superego takes over and brings the pressure and the judgment and the fear and everything goes all to hell.

I simply cannot accomplish things by arranging a frontal assault of the main gate.

All I can do is leave the back door open and let growth sneak in at midnight and get things done before anyone knows it’s there.

In other words, give myself room to grow. I feel like I have been truly growing lately and I think it’s because I have consciously committed to pumping personal energy into my great and glorious id and that means things are finally waking up inside me.

It also helps that I have consciously recognized how full of crap my oh so logical and rational side is.

Sure it’s a powerful wizard, but if it can’t summon me some happiness or conjure up some peace of mind, fuck it, it’s useless to me.

The id is the life spring of all happiness. Depression fools you into hoarding your energy and spending it very reluctantly, and that is what kills you.

It’s like, “the patient is sick, so we cut off most of their blood flow”.

You have to ease up, thaw out, and let things flow. Stop killing yourself with emotional austerity and embrace the economic growth and wholesome wellbeing of a free flowing cash economy of the soul.

Even for me, that’s an excessive metaphor.

So I am paddling down the river of de nihil lately.

But I am headed to the promised land.

More after the break.

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And now, the thing I do

Ya know, it occurs to me that this little blog of mine is my paper thin defense against being completely fucking useless.

This is it. These thousand words a day that only two people read. These words muttered into the darkness of the void, tiny and precious and the only justification my existence can claim.

It’s so little. And so much. It might be just one lonely beach ball on the distant shores of life, but to a gnat like me, it’s an entire planet.

I am not naturally so small. If my world was set a-right I would live a much larger life.

But I’m stuck being small because depression has stunted my growth. All this power and potential and sheer fucking amazingness crammed inside the soul of a toddler.

No wonder I have claustrophobia. I’m all stopped up in here!

But it’s not my fault I went crazy. I was doing fine till my parents yanked college out from under me. Then I went crazy and here I am, 25 years later. still bugfuck insane.

That’s what happens when you are too sick to help yourself. Especially if you are a big burly bearded man who society says “should be able to take care of himself”.

Guess I am just a loser, then. For all those years, my entire adult life, it’s been all I can do to just keep making it through the day by keeping myself distracted.

Every now and then, I would have the wherewithal to swim in the vague direction of progress. Getting individual therapy. Going to Kwantlen then VFS. Starting and maintaining this wackass blog of mine.

But mostly, I just drifted through time. I never thought about the future because when I tried, all I could see was a big greyed out mirror ahead of me, and if I tried harder, all I got was clutching panic as I realized what a flaming diaper pail my life was.

Yet somehow, I kept believing that things would get better “someday”. Like the horizon, “someday” never got any closer. and yet I kept on believing.

Amazing how it’s possible to believe something will happen while doing absolutely nothing to make it happen, isn’t it?

Luckily, these days, I am growing stronger, and for once I can actually feel the future as a real and solid thing, and that lets me truly believe that somewhere out there is a place where I can belong, be strong, and finally be a real human being.

Even if I have to build it myself.

Well what the hell. I’ve always had to do things my way anyhow.

And as my id finally rises like sap in spring, it will banish the shadows of indecision with the pure red light of desire.

Fuck what I “should” do.

What do I want to do?

I look forward to figuring that out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Right now, trying to think of something to write about is making me feel like a junkie tapping himself in various places trying to find a usable vein.

Dammit, there has to one tiny bit of vein that hasn’t collapsed!

Maybe if I inject it into my eye….

Here’s something I don’t get about heroin addiction.

Not the addiction itself – addiction has always made perfect sense to me. For some of us, life really fucking hurts, and we will therefore lunge for anything that can make that hurt go away for a while like a starving dog lunging for a steak.

I’m an addict like every other depressive. The only difference between me and a junkie is that my addiction is video games and it is killing me far, far slower than junk would.

I don’t consider myself superior. Just lucky.

I could easily have become a substance abuser. All it would have taken was the wrong group of friends.

My luck was and is the fact that I don’t know those sorts of people. The kind that party with substances on a regular basis.

I don’t even know anybody who drinks.

Basically, I am not cool enough to become a substance abuser.

No, what I don’t get is why the market hasn’t produced a more convenient form of heroin than a powder you have to cook on a spoon then inject.

At the very least, they could sell it already cooked. Saves a big step of the process and you would think junkies eager for a fix would go for that.

You could even sell it in pre-filled needles for the ultimate in convenience. Just take off the air tight wrapper and inject.

Another idea of mine – substance abuse clinics. Not clinics to get you off your addictions of choice, rather ones that support it in a medically supervised and controlled environment. Monitored dosages of guaranteed purity, immediate medical intervention in case of complications, safe comfortable clean rooms in which to trip, the whole nine yards. It would be the ultimate safe injection site.

But it would have to operate deep underground because society is too addicted to morally shitting on addicts to allow such a thing to operate in public, even if it was a totally private business with no government funding whatsoever.

Society is so two faced about addiction. Out of one side of its mouth it nod solemnly when it say alcoholism is a disease, not a moral failing, but out of the other side it condemns all the other, less respectable addictions.

And why? Because addicts are low status, and thus, safe targets. Nobody is going to publicly stick up for their rights so everyone is free to use them like a toddler on a sugar bender treats a pinata that looks like its bogeyman.

Kind of like pedophiles, really.

The kicker is that all the abuse of addicts by society and the legal system is supposed to be for their benefit.

Because, you know, addictions ruin lives and so we must punish it because something something death penalty for crackheads.

What a load of crap. Nobody even pretends that the war on drugs saves lives any more. It’s just another way to kick people when they are down.

It’s the same old story. Keep people down and justify it by how down there are. Typical.

I’d legalize everything, myself. Prohibition doesn’t work. Demand creates supply. Against that basic force of capitalism, government is helpless.

Legalize, regulate, and tax it all, just like with liquor.

But first, we will have to give up our hate.

More after the break.

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How now. hausfrau?

You know, on a deep level, I’d really like to be a housewife.

Not a house-husband, although that would also be awesome. A housewife.

Frumpy dress, apron, soap operas, the whole nine yards. Maintaining a household for the man I love. Cooking and cleaning and doing every last little thing to make it a warm and pleasant place for him. Greeting him with his robe, pipe, and slippers when he comes home after a long day at work. Listening attentively and intelligently and above all sympathetically as he tells me about his day. Tucking him in at night and sleeping next to him, adoring him. Being the best darn homemaker I could be because I love him and want him to be happy.

That all sounds simply marvelous to me. But why?

For one thing, it would resolve the conflict between my sex (male) and my gender (fluid). I have always had strong “female” feelings of compassion, nurturing, and effusiveness that simply do not fit with my internalized gender expression rules.

Hence my referring to myself as a “maternal male”. It’s not a very precise term but it’s the best I have come up with so far.

Note that I don’t in any sense feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body. The conflict is not physical at all. I am perfectly happy to be biologically male.

No, it’s a gender role issue.

Makes me wonder if being socially transgendered is a thing.

And I know that there is technically no reason why I can’t be nurturing and emotionally effusive and all that while presenting as male.

All I can say to that is that I have absolutely no solid role models for that. Just tiny scraps of pop culture like Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdhouse (“He’s so maternal he’s practically a nipple!”) and the way Felix’s poker buddies try to keep him from committing suicide at the beginning of The Odd Couple.

So I don’t know how to be a man like that. Role models are important.

But deep down, I know the real appeal of being a housewife – it would be a great way to retreat from reality and having to be an adult.

No big issues to think about. No massive decisions to make. My world is as small as my household and everything else I leave up to my husband.

Sounds like a lovely place to visit but I doubt I could live there. Sooner or later, my greater mind would awaken and demand to know what’s really going on.

Might be nice for a while, though.

And who knows, for the right man, I might be able to make a real go of it.

I can always be a grownup online while he’s at work,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t want to do this. Because I know it is going to hurt. And I really don’t feel like I have the wherewithal to do it right now.

But it needs to be done. Recovery demands it. I have to get my internal narrative more in line with the totality of my history if I am to become a saner, more whole, and above all a truly balanced human being.

And what the hell, I can’t think of anything else to write and it’s not like the task will be any more appealing later.

So let’s do this thing.

Yes, I had a tragically and brutally isolated childhood. I spent way too much time alone.

But it wasn’t all bad. The isolation was less than total. I spent time with the family. I sometimes had friends.

Like when I got home from school, sometimes I would watch soap operas (mainly General Hospital) with my mother. It was a good time to be with her as she was not busy and we could talk during the commercials.

Watching GH was how she decompressed after a long day at work and before she had to get up and make dinner.

I’ve spoken of that injustice before, though.

And sometimes I would watch The National and The Journal^[1] with my Dad, and spend time with him that way. We also talked during the commercials, though he did most of the talking.

I didn’t mind. Chatty as I am, I am also content to listen if someone either is interesting (and my Dad was) or just needs someone to listen to them.

And I wasn’t always alone at school either. I had friends sometimes. I had Kevin and Trevor in Grade Six. We bonded over heavy metal, especially KISS. I wouldn’t say we were super close and I was always nervous around them, but I wasn’t alone.

Then in junior high I had Troy Little and Philip Oatway. We weren’t friends outside of class but we were pretty close in Percy Motherfucking Mcgougan’s homeroom class, and talked about comics and goofed around.

Then I met Jason Heisler and Michael Copeland. We did stuff in and out of school, including going to the arcade to play Double Dragon during lunchtime, hang out at Jason’s place to watch stuff on VHS, and shoot the shit.

They would turn on me sometimes, though. I understand (but won’t go into) why now, but at the time, well, it didn’t exactly help my social anxiety.

So the truly lonely times were grades 1 through 5, and 10, 11, and 12. Most of elementary school and all of high school.

Ergo, I was not a lonely iceberg floating in a frigid sea for my entire childhood.

It just feels that way now because I have so much unprocessed loneliness and isolation from back then. And it’s true that even when I had friends, I didn’t get that close with them and often felt like they were barely tolerating me.

But my childhood was not the uninterrupted scrape across dirty jagged ice I have described in this space in the past.

There was some good parts too.

And I am through sacrificing the truth in the name of narrative efficiency.

More after the break.

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What else didn’t suck

There are various other aspects of my childhood that were not terrible.

Like summer. Because my mother was a teacher , she was off during the summer. So in the summertime (when the living’s easy), I had my Mom back.

That made things just like they were in those golden days before my mother went back to work and I had a full time parent.

Gen X was the first generation to grow up without a full time parent.

I feel like not enough attention has been paid to that.

So anyhow, summer was a lot nicer. Mom was home, I was out of school and thus safe from my bullies in my home neighborhood, and we even did stuff as a family again.

That sucked a lot less than the rest of the year. I still had no friends, but that hurt a lot less with my parents and siblings around.

And the weird thing is that even though life was objectively crappier than a music festival port-o-potty, I was a lot less depressed back then. I was a much cheerier and energetic person as a kid. And I left the house on my own a lot more often.

Heck, sometimes I went all the way to the other end of town just to play games at the arcade in the mall there.

I only became seriously depressed after puberty. Hmm.

Speaking of arcades, I have happy memories of the times I spent there, too. A lot of the time, I would run out of quarters and just hang around.

Watch people play games. Offer advice. Get on people’s nerves.

It was a happy place for me to be because I felt safe there.

Same for the local mall, Waterfront Center. I enjoyed hanging out there too. It was only five blocks from home and I knew it well and felt safe there too.

What else. Well, speaking of safe spaces for scared foxes, there was the school library. For a book loving kid, this was a slice of heaven, because not only was it full of books, there was always an adult there (the librarian, who was nice), I was safe from being bullied there too.

To this day, the sight of a lot of books on shelves in one place has a strong soothing and calming effect on me.

So yeah. Not everything in my childhood sucked. There were relatively warm patches between the ice ages. II sometimes had friends, and family, and happy places to be where I felt safe.

I guess nothing is ever all one thing. Everything is a mix. Life is not a cartoon.

No wonder cartoons make me feel safe too.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

What the hell, time to vent some negatives.

Warning, the following is going to have a lot of stuff I have said before.

---

In retrospect, I guess I could have foreseen that watching this vid would stir shit up :

The first way they fucked me over is by never wanting me in the first place. Patient readers know I was an accident. In fact, I defied the odds to be born because after my brother Dave was born, my mother had her tubes tied.

So that was one tricky sperm.

Having never wanted me, they resented me. I was an unwanted intruder who suddenly showed up and demanded a share of the resources – physical and emotional – when they already were only just scraping by.

So instead of making room for me, they ignored me. Pretended like I had never happened. Never gave me an equal share of anything.

And because they didn’t. neither did my siblings.

This became especially true when I grew out of my “cute” phase. Like an Xmas puppy, they lost interest in me when I made the mistake of becoming a dog. I went from being a happy kid who was often the center of attention because he was precocious and charming cute to being, like I have said many times before. an unwanted guest who has overstayed their welcome but cannot leave.

And maybe I would have rebelled, demanded my fair show, and elbowed my way to a seat at the metaphorical table if I hadn’t been raped by a stranger when I was four.

This forced me to seal away most of my id and turned me from a confident, sociable, slightly smug boy to a timid, cowering, doormat who was afraid to even have needs let alone voice them, because any time he even looked like he was asking for something, it was treated like a bandit raid. Like I had just shown up out of nowhere and demanded their treasure and blood.

This is what happens when you spend most of the time pretending one of your children never happened and doesn’t exist. When you actively edit them out of your consciousness and on all levels make them collaborate with them on this.

“Michael, don’t draw attention to yourself. ” said my father many times.

Why the hell not, Dad? Everyone else does.

Oh right, because you resent my very existence.

So I grew up extremely passive. Unable to ask for what I wanted or pursue my own needs in any way, I learned to just wait in the darkness and hope that my masters would see my need and bestow a boon upon me in a moment of absentminded benevolence.

This almost never happened. So I starved in silence and stayed in the shadows, filled with terrible guilt for the crime of being born and having needs of my own.

Well, it’s taken me more than 40 years, but I have finally figured out that I deserve to live. That I have the same right to be here as anyone else, and that I am not a burden, a liability, or a crime.

I will just have to build myself back up from there.

More after the break.

Because I’m sure there’s more I want to get out today.

I just don’t know what.

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I don’t know what love is

I’m like a reverse Forrest Gump – I’m a smart man, but I don’t know what love is.

I can’t think of a time when I felt loved and included and accepted. Maybe before the rape, but at no time after.

It’s been one long trudge through an airless emotional wasteland since then. The rape is what made me seal so much of myself off, but there was not my encouragement from life to unseal anything either.

Rather the opposite. It was cold as hell in my little life. Outside my little bunker there was nothing but loneliness, boredom, and fear.

Social isolation made it lonely. My advanced intellect made it boring. And bullying kept me scared to open the door even a crack.

So I became a robot who went to school. It’s shocking to look back and see how terribly alone I was back then. It’s all so very wrong. No child should grow up that alone.

I went to school. I came home. I watched TV. I read. I played video games. Then I went to bed and got up the next day and did the same thing again.

The whole time, I was alone. Not physically, obviously. But emotionally. There were no other presences in my life. No friends, no parents, no siblings, nothing.

They were there, but they weren’t there for me.

Or maybe it’s me that wasn’t really there. I dunno.

Because I know I was very hard to reach. That’s what happens when you withdraw so deeply into yourself that you might as well be on a distant planet. Nobody can get to you, which is both the tragedy and the point.

People tried, now and then. But I didn’t know how to let them in. They would try to make contact with my tiny outpost and succeed in making contact with me but completely fail to actually connect with me emotionally.

Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe it was impossible. Maybe my antenna was broken forever when I got raped.

Or maybe I am just on a very different frequency. I have an FM mind in an AM world.

But I do not know what love is. I can’t even imagine it because I have not had it. The closest I get to it is a warm sense of camaraderie I feel when I am with my friends.

That warmth, lovely as it is, doesn’t penetrate very deep. I am still cold and frozen at the core, and more than a little dead inside.

Romantic love? Not likely. Kind of hard to find love when you have social anxiety.

And it’s not like I am going to start a family.

So I guess this is it. Life in the deep freeze, forever.

Oh well. The cold never bothered me anyway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

454 words. That’s how many words I have to add in this section of my blogging.

Forgive the variance in format, but I wanted to link to the Trump thing on its own because I thought it was pretty good and worth sharing on Facebook and I didn’t want there to be a bunch of non-related stuff at the bottom.\

I felt so good about my column, in fact, that I crossposted it to Vocal, which is a blogging site where if your article gets enough hits, you get money.

I signed up for it ages ago, and put a couple things up there, but neither of them survived the review process.

Turns out they have a 600 word minimum. Noted. Kind of sucks for those who want to write short, pithy, funny stuff, but whatever.

Limitations are opportunities for growth, after all.

It will make a good testing ground in my campaign to put literally any of my creative output out where people can see it.

Even if I have to do really sloppy and half-assed job of it. Whatever.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. A lazy submission beats no submission at all. And who know, maybe the people who do the approving of articles for Vocal will end up being the editor I need in order to shape up as a writer.

I mean, if they say, “Not good enough! Change these three things!”, good. I will change those things and try not to make the same mistakes again.

I am not the type to reject criticism out of hand. My desire to improve is too strong for that. I have to listen because I might just learn something.

Or I might dismiss it as thickheaded nonsense. But I give it a chance.

I haven’t put much on Vocal since I signed up because I let myself get intimidated by the challenge of writing for popular appeal.

But that’s heckin’ dumb. I am a very funny and insightful and appealing writer. True, I am not the sort of person to write “7 Killer Gardening Hacks” or “12 Ways To Force Him To Love You”, but I can write engagingly and interestingly and even adorably, so it’s silly to get hung up on definitions.

So I think I will direct my energies towards Vocal, assuming the storm inside lets me. I don’t know exactly what to write so I will just label it a “column” for now.

That should be vague enough to last until I find my voice.

Speaking of which, I will likely be trying various potential types of article. I am sure I can come up with something with mass appeal.

Maybe a super adorable children’s story series. Will Phil the Ferret and Tanda the Panda get home in time for Jacksie’s wedding? Tune in tomorrow, kids!

That could really work if I could resist the urge to be sarcastic or perverted.

Or both, obviously.

Political commentary would be a natural fit, or really any kind of commentary.

I’m a commentary kind of guy. A commentarian, if you will.

Heck, I might even try being the bitchy fag who dishes celeb gossip a try.

What the hell, if it pays, I’ll do anything. The only kind of writing I won’t do is bad.

Other than that, door’s open, boys.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let me explain.

We the people have just exited a war zone. With Trump gone, we can now begin the recovery process, and for a little while it is going to be rough transitioning back to a peaceful civilian life after four long years of constant bombardment.

Like I keep saying, Trump’s one true genius was his ability to repeatedly top himself in horribleness every single day of his administration.

And that kind of thing takes a toll on you, the sort of toll that you don’t even consciously feel while the attack is still going because you have long ago forgotten what normal felt like and have retreated into a kind of defensive crouch where the only goal is survival.

Now that there’s peace, though, we are starting to remember what life was like before him, and we can finally feel the difference and therefore really feel just how incredibly fucked up life under Trump was and that is going to be quite traumatic at first.

So I think the next month or so will be pretty rough. Sure, democracy survived the illness. The fever broke, the disease is dead, and better days are on the horizon.

But it will take a while for the aftereffects to fade. The disease is dead but our cells are still soaked in the toxins it created and there’s still a lot of dead bacteria to flush out of our collective bloodstreams.

Not only that, but our nervous systems have been attuned to constant bullshit bombardment for so long that it will take some time before our nerves actually believe the threat has passed.

I’ve already seen this in my liberal American friends. When I say something positive about the current situation, they reflexively reply, “Oh, but the forces he unleashed are still with us and we might never be able to recover from that. “

This is nonsense. Trump is gone, his supporters are thoroughly disgraced, his legislative cronies like Mitch the Bitch are powerless before the wrath of the court of public opinion, Democrats control EVERYTHING, and Trump is going to go on trial and every dirty secret will come out and justice will be served at long last.

So why the negativity? Because people are afraid to hope. Things have been so hopeless for so long that we are not quite ready to believe its truly over yet, and so we convince ourselves that, despite all evidence, things are still awful.

This will pass, of course, as the pattern fades from lack of reinforcement and the wolf persists in not being at the door.

But I bet there are millions of people currently plagued by nightmares where Donald Trump is still the President somehow.

In fact, I think in a very perverse way, we will miss him, like old Londoners getting misty eyed over the Blitz. You can miss anything you got used to, no matter how awful that thing was at the time.

Heck, Trump has dominated the conversation for so long that it will take some time for us to even remember what we used to talk about.

I think it was…. taxes, or something?