So I went in for a procedure pursuant to my upcoming cataract surgery this morning.

A simple enough concept, at least in theory : they inject me with a tracer dye and then taken a (surprisingly long) series of pictures of my retinas in order to get a really detailed view of what is going on back there.

I went into it in a cheerful frame of mind. Cheerful – and sleepy. The procedure was at 9:30 am, which is a rare time of day when I am almost always asleep, so in a sense it was the middle of the night according to my vampire’s sleep schedule.

And I had trouble sleeping the previous night. Nervousness, I suppose. Anticipation. Sometimes just the knowledge that I have to get up at a certain times is enough to rouse my latent insomnia.

But whatever. No amount of sleepiness is that big a deal when you know you can go right to sleep when you get home.

They had to violate dilate my pupils, which I hate, because I hate getting eye drops. My lovely long lashes get in the way and it’s irritating suppressing the urge to blink.

Might not be as bad if I was putting them in myself. Dunno.

Then the waiting. Really should have brought a book. Oh well. They had an “alternative” radio station on, which set off this exchange in my head.

Me : Pffff, that’s not alternative music.
Also me : Oh really? Why not? Because it doesn’t sound like the stuff you played in the 90’s? Alternative isn’t a genre, you know. It’s whatever’s not played by mainstream media. You of all people should know that.
Me : All right, geez, you win. Holy crap am I irritating.

my brain, this morning

I mean, I had a point, but I didn’t have to be a dick about it.

The one snafu was that when it came time to put in the dye, the girl woman could not find a vein and so I had to go sit in the hallway with a warmed up Magic Bag (or en francais, la sac magique) on my arm while my new secret friend Barbara had the procedure ahead of me,

I’d noticed her when she came in while I was waiting in the waiting room. She was a squat, broad, nervous looking woman who seemed like she hadn’t gotten many breaks in life and I am always attracted to people like that,

Then she spoke to the receptionist in the most ridiculous high pitched voice – somewhere between Rusty the Rooster from The Friendly Giant and The Chicken Lady from KITH – and I was in love.

I swear I am not a stalked. Just a lifelong eavesdropper. Stalking is too much work.

So listening to her go through the procedure helped soothe my growing impatience. I was very annoyed that they couldn’t find a being because I haven’t faced that issue in a long long time.

I used to have “veins that like to hide” according to the phlebotomists at LifeLabs, but at some point the medical establishment seemed to get over that and nobody at LifeLabs or the hospital had a problem again.

So to have this bullshit pop back up was a highly unwelcome blast from the past.

Eventually they got things working and I got dyed and flashed. Taking like 8 pictures of each retina was very taxing to my poor eyes that have never liked flash photography in the first place, but it was soon over.

Now the only after-effect is my pee is bright sunshiny yellow.

More after the break.

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Empathy can lie

Just said this in a Facebook comment I am too lazy to link here, and it struck me as a good jumping off point.

I am highly empathic. So much so that I consider myself “an empathy” because it’s not a learned skill, it goes all the way to the very core of my being and is an important portion of the foundation of my entire worldview.

This means that i have a tendency to implicitly trust my empathy, and believe that what it tells me about the world and other people’s emotions represents how they really feel.

But my empathy lies just like the rest of my mind lies. It’s as susceptible to Depression’s false impressions and sock puppet manipulations as any other part of my being.

Depression (through its Empathy puppet) : I’m you’re empathy, and everybody here haaaaates you and wishes you’d go away and DIIIIIIIIIE!

in the voice of hooty from owl house for some reason

It definitely hurts to admit this to myself. It is no fun to face the truth that one of your most trusted faculties could be passing off echoes of your own pain as truth. That your entire umwelt is even more shot through with lies than you thought before.

Makes me want to burn the whole thing to the ground and start over.

Fuck it, why not? In the words of one of my favorite recent MP3 acquisitions, I hereby declare that I don’t know shit about shit.

Fuck it. I don’t know a god damned thing. All my insights and trivia and all the other products of my ever so powerful mind are nothing but a flaming pile of dog shit because they are all products of my depressed mind and hence suspect, ergo worthless.

Let the whole diseased edifice burn to the ground so I can start over clean. Like all true philosophical seekers. I will doubt everything I think I know and burn anything that does not pass my test.

That test being reality. My false empathy and chemical chaos have conspired to sell me a patently absurd negative portrait of reality where I pretend I am seeing things as they are but really I am seeing them as they feel to me and that’s bullshit to the extreme.

That’s not the kind of trusting your emotions I am aiming for.

Never let reason tell you how you feel.

Never let emotions tell you what’s real.

They both have their jobs. Leave them to them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Coming this fall! Macaulay Culkin is the founder of a gay bank in… Homo Loan!

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Yeah it’s a dumb joke but I like it.

I’m in an odd emotional state at the moment. Sort of relaxed and happy, but also a little tense and tired.

And vaguely horny.

Which is about as horny as I ever get without additional stimulation. Long gone are the days when I had random power surges.

Can’t say I miss those random boners. Always a social handicap. But I do kind of miss the horniness I had when I was younger and not on antidepressants.

There is a primal heat to sexual excitement that my poor cold soul surely lacks.

As patient readers know, my sexuality is, to put it rather mildly, sluggish. My overall desire level is low and my sleeping dragon (how Tao) is hard to rouse. Even when I do get horny, the general flattening of emotional affect that comes with my Paxil makes it difficult to masturbate to completion.

And sadly, as a man, not “finishing” is extremely frustrating. I’d love to be Zen about it like a woman and accept whatever pleasure comes along, but as a man, when I can’t complete the journey it makes me wanna smash through a wall with my dick like some kind of priapic Kool-Aid man.

Take a few moments to let the power of my imagery settle over you. I can wait.

I remember the first time I got seriously boned up after starting on Paxil had made my libido vanish for three or four months.

I was ridiculously grateful. To whom, I cannot say. But it really felt like I had been given back something precious and wonderful.

Before that, I had told myself repeatedly that losing my libido was no big deal. After all, if you stop wanting something, then it’s no loss to stop getting it, right? So I no longer had any desire for sex. Big deal. One less thing to want and not get. Right?

Wrong, of course. That was total bullshit. Sour grapes completely. And I knew that the moment it returned.

---

Found a new game I like. It’s called Iris and the Giant.

It originally caught my eye because I was paging through the Humble Monthly games available to me and saw it supposedly had a 100 percent user rater on Steam.

Uh, sez what now? Is that even a thing?

Then I watched the trailer, and saw it was an arty game about a sad little girl, and I was like, “ehhhh….I dunno. ”

But then I saw the thing that changed everything : cards.

Sure enough, the description mentioned it being part CCG, and I was sold.

And I love it. The sad little girl stuff is okay. I certainly identify with her, although she at least has a father who is worried about her.

I was just as sad. But nobody was trying to penetrate my defenses.

Anyhow, it’s that golden miracle of the gaming world, the game that is very easy to learn and understand but complex enough to be interesting.

Easy to learn, hard to master. Perfect.

Gameplay is a little hard to describe. Basically you fight these grids of demons with cards that do things attack like all the demons in a row or column, or let you attack one whether it’s in the front row or not, and so on.

Running out of either life (Will) or cards spells doom, and once you play a card it’s gone, so a big part of the game is making sure you get more cards.

It’s loads of fun, and I love it.

More after the break.

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On seeking challenge

I’ve been sort of halfways tiptoeing up to this subject for a week now which means it is high time to just face the goddamned thing.

The stuff I least want to talk about is always the stuff most worth talking about.

On with the show. Fact is, as much as I whine about a lack of challenge in my life, the truth is that this has always been something under my own control.

The more correct and accurate version of events is that I had very little challenge handed to me by the schools and my sad timid life.

There’s always been an infinite universe of challenge out there in the world waiting for me to go get it. With all the possibilities out there, surely there’s a level of challenge that would suit my needs.

But I would have to go find it. There’s no chance it will coming looking for me, and if it did, odds are I would hide till it went away.

And this is where my lack of character comes in. Because I have been too timid and weak and limp to go out and look for challenge. I might talk the talk about wanting to pick a fight with the world but I would never walk the walk by actually doing it.

Hence my recent remark about lacking the character to deliberately make things harder for myself. To pick the path of greater resistance. To do more than the absolute minimum I can get away with.

To swim uphill for once in my goddamned life.

To do those sort of things takes backbone. Grit. Toughness. Intestinal fortitude. Call it what you will. It’s like having some kind of core of resistance to use as the base of all your efforts to fight back against the world and forge your own destiny and do all those ruggedly individualistic things I have always dreamt of but never had.

I think at the core, such a baseplate consists of pure irrational inflexible raging id. A primal “fuck you” to the world that is fulcrum that decides when you pivot from flight to fight and throw yourself upon that which opposes your will like a thing possessed.

I’ve chosen to stay soft and squishy and gooey. I lack this solid backplate to use as an anchor point for pushing back at the world. I have instead chosen to hide out of both fear and a misguided association between flexibility and safety.

It doesn’t really matter if I can assume any form I need in response to a challenge if all of those forms are going to lack structural integrity and fall apart the moment the emotion driving them fades.

Or worse, squish like Jello under the fist of God when actually put to the test.

So it comes to this : I am going to have to develop some solid, immutable, permanent ground within myself if I am ever to become strong.

And that means making a permanent commitment of resources. Resources that can’t be turned into whatever I feel I need at the moment. Resources that stay the same.

And that scares the ever lovin’ bejeesus out of me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tried Endless Space 2. But not for long.

It’s supposed to be the kind of big space empire sim that I have been craving for a while, and it has some impressive production values, but the tutorial just suddenly… stopped and I said fuck it and gave up.

What is with these games that have such insufficient tutorials? This is becoming a “thing” with me. It just keeps happening.

Am I the problem? Do I give up too easily? Freak out too readily? Get stopped by bumps in the road that healthier people would take in stride?

No. It is the games who are wrong.

I’m definitely going to give Endless Space 2 another try, and this time, I am going to ignore the tutorial and try figuring stuff out by just fucking around.

That will be a bold new step for me. And a healthy one, too. A small step away from expecting to have everything explained to me and towards facing things on my own by handling life’s unexpected challenges instead of instantly collapsing and fleeing.

When I put it that way, it’s freaking terrifying.

But growing up often is. And the older you are when you do it, the harder it is going to be. But it still beats going to your early grave still a child.

Fetus in a casket.

I mean, to be honest, I don’t know how many years I have left. I’m not a healthy man. I have physical health issues that my mental health issues keep me from dealing with properly and they might just do me in before I see my 50th birthday.

And I am 47. 48 in May.

I also took a game called Valfaris out for a spin. It’s a side-scrolling shooter along the lines of Contra (ask your dad, kids) and I heart its art design very very much because it’s all heavy metal and science fiction and dark and I love all of those things.

And it seems like a pretty good game. But for some reason, the controls and I do not get along well. There’s something wrong about them and I am not sure what except that they seem to violate expectations I didn’t know I had.

So when I try it again, I am going to rearrange the controls and see if I can fix the problem. If not, I will try to get used to them in whatever configuration because the game seems quite badass otherwise and I am curious to see more.

Moodwise, I am feeling somewhat restless and discontent. I feel like something has been stirred up inside me and it makes me want to go pick a fight with someone just so I have an outlet for my need for aggression and conflict and struggle.

Somehow, I need to find the middle ground between things which are absurdly easy for me and things too hard for me to even think of trying.

Somewhere in this strutting farce we call life there must be the right level of challenge for me. The level where I feel stimulated to strive and overcome without getting overwhelmed and giving up.

Time to tap into this need for challenge and apply it to life.

More after the break.

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Saving throw failed

There’s an R. Graeme Cameron weekly fandom Zoom meetup happening right now.

Joe is there. Felicity is there. But I’m not there, even though I sort of passively implied that I would attend this week.

I just couldn’t do it. I failed my saving through versus my social anxiety. I tried to make myself go a bunch of times but my inner resistance was just too strong.

Might as well have been trying to shift the Rock of Gibraltar by tying it to a kitten.

So I am somewhat depressed right now. I wish I was there. I wish I was healthy enough to do things like that without even giving it a second thought.

I wish I could just rush out into the world in search of joy and fun and adventure instead of being bound and gagged and chained in my lonely little cell by fear.

And some day, I will escape. I work on it diligently every day via this blog and my own silent contemplations as I keep my conscious mind busy with games and YouTube.

Could probably step that up a bit. Recent revelations require some pretty deep processing. Mental note : play less mentally challenging games.

After all, there’s always Solitaire.

I suppose I probably could force myself to attend by sheer force of will. And maybe I should. Maybe that’s the exact sort of thing I need to do in order to get that positive social input that I need if I am to outgrow my issues.

Can’t heal a frostbitten soul without warmth, after all.

At least I am slowly opening up to the idea of going out into the world in search of what i want. Seems like a very basic function of being a live animal, but depression seeps deep into the soul and freezes things on even the most basic of levels.

And it can do this because it convinces you that numbness is better than pain. It says “Hey, I can take your pain away and locked it away forever in my deep freeze. “

And when you are hurting, that sounds like an amazingly good deal. The pain disappears and you can go on with your life.

But that goddamned demon Depression never mentions the price you will pay. The coldness. The chill. The killing frost that seeps deep into your soul and makes you too numb to feel any of the light and love of the world and leaves you feeling isolated and utterly, utterly alone.

Then it offers to take that pain away, too.

It’s a bad, bad deal that costs far more than it benefits you, and it all depends on your unwillingness to endure pain.

After all, you haven’t had to feel the pain in a long long time. Not with Depression to whisk it away from you in return for making your world even colder.

Escaping the cycle, therefore, requires putting up with pain. There are worse things than pain, sadness, anger, frustration, and all the rest.

The more you endure, the warmer things get. You’ve got a lot of ice to birth and waiting won’t make it any easier. So get in there and dig. Reclaim all the emotions Depression stole from you. Your motto should be, “I want to FEEL EVERYTHING. “

Do enough of that and you can finally kick that fucking demon out.

Because you won’t need it any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In terms of video games, anyhow. Baby steps.

Tried a game called Kingdom Two Crowns. ^[1] Hated it.

I need a name for this particular reason to hate a game. Underguided? Too sandbox-y? Anyhow, you start off as a king on a horse and you are guided through the very basics of building and buying things and then totally abandoned.

No indication of what to do next or what the point of the game is. Just, here’s ho to do stuff. Got it? Whatever. Bye!

And I need more than that. It’s like that game I played last month where you’re on an alien planet and are expected to build up civilization Minecraft style.

I’m too lazy to look up the name.

I am not cut out for that low a level of structure. I need a plan, goals, plot, and so on.

At least I have figured out what these games are going for now. I think they are for people who really love to explore and discover new things and figure out how things work. For someone like that, needing to figure the entire game out from the very basics is a slice of heaven.

I ain’t that kind of person, though. Perhaps I am too timid. Too little urge to explore the unknown. I break down when there’s no series of structured tasks to complete, and learn that way.

Hence my love for quest rich environments in large, open worlds. That’s the right level of structure for me. Plenty of tasks and goals, and in the process of completing those, I end up exploring the environment anyhow.

Still, I am learning to wander around in search of adventure. Just ramble around seeing what there is to see. So there is hope for me yet.

That’s the way I want to grow spiritually too. At some point, my urge to explore got near-fatally suppressed by anxiety and that’s just not normal for a child.

Children are supposed to explore and discover and try stuff and get hurt sometimes and learn from that and develop their feeling that whatever life throws at the them, they can handle it and will get through it.

Instead, I hid from the world and explored the world inside my mind instead. And while that definitely has benefits, it’s unbalanced and hence unhealthy.

Especially when you get trapped in there by your anxiety.

I’ve kind of hit a wall in Autonauts, that cute game where you build robots and use them to make automated systems that I wrote about before.

Like before, I built up to a certain level of complexity then got overwhelmed by my own system and lost the thread.

So I will have to start over again. And it’s frustrating because things like this give all the indication that I will be able to build things up in a series of logical linear steps forever, but my brain will not cooperate.

Part of the problem is that my systems in that game still require active maintenance, so I can’t just build them and forget them as I work on the next thing.

And I am not good at multitasking. It’s a trouble issue. When I switch focus to task B, I stand a pretty good chance of forgetting task A entirely. Or at least losing in my place in the sequence of steps of task A.

Oh well. The game is fun enough that starting over is that not huge a deal.

More after the break.

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Beyond this illusion

Obligatory song reference :

That dude looks nothing like I thought he would.

Anyhow, been thinking more about the whole illusion of self thing and the personal issues connected to it lately.

Specifically, looking at the large disconnect between my self-esteem and my actual assets and worth through that lens.

It is my idea of myself – my illusory self – that is infected and compromised by depression. That mirror I am looking at is hopelessly warped and distorted by depression and worse than useless when it comes to giving me any idea of who I really am and what I am really worth.

If I could, I would throw the whole thing out and start over. Rebuild from scratch, like I am doing in Autonauts.

But right now I can’t think of a way to cleanse the doors of consciousness. I don’t have access to the sorts of therapy, religion, or drugs it would take for a clean reboot.

Maybe I could do it with meditation. Stick a pin in that, it might come in handy.

The other way of doing away with the mirror is to simply turn away from it and looks at the world with my own eyes so I can see things as they really are, unfiltered and complete, without the false self getting in the way.

It is an appealing though but also terrifying. After all, if you have believed that the image in the mirror is reality for your entire life until now, looking away from the only reality you know can seem foolish beyond all comprehension.

Giving up known reality for an unknown “higher” one? Madness.

But possibly worth the risk. I know that somehow my issues with looking outside the bright white light of reason are deeply connected to this issue of false self. My Klieg light of a mind is intimately connected with that false mirror of illusory self in some way, and to overcome my flawed false self I must also overcome my faith in what the bright light shows as being the only reality.

I need to wean myself off that dazzling bright light and learn to stop being fascinated by the crystal clear (but completely cold) pictures that mirror captures, and turn around to see the world as it really is, in living color.

It’s going to be one hell of a journey.

But I got nothing better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I guess I understand that now.

People used to put that sentiment on T-shirts and bumpers stickers and such back in the 70’s. Never understood it back then, of course. Being an entirely too logical and analytical child, it seemed like, well, nonsense.

The only thing that kept me from declaring the whole thing stupid was that the slogan was embraced by hippie type people who didn’t seem stupid to me.

Now I kind of get it. It’s kind of a Dadaist statement against conforming to conventional “sensible” thought patterns that make one predictable and stifle creativity.

Stop making sense and start having fun, more or less.

For me, it has a much deeper meaning now, obviously. I am still pushing against the walls of my pseudo-rational cage and learning to see in the darkness outside the harsh white light of reason.

You know, the brighter the light, the darker the shadows outside it seem. If the light is bright enough, you can’t see anything outside it at all.

Makes it very tempting to convince yourself that there is nothing out there. That the light of your mighty mind touches all that is real and you are a master of reality, fully capable of understanding the universe in all its splendor.

It’s especially tempting when the real truth is that the darkness scares the shit out of you and it would be ever so nice to just subtract it from your personal reality entirely.

But I am not so foolish. Not when there is so much that said sad little perspective cannot explain, let alone actually help with. The bright white light is focused outward and can never show what lies inside your heart and your mind.

So I’ve been learning to see by a different light, with different eyes. Emotional eyes. Might not be as bright a light, or illuminate things with such ice-cold clarity but it’s a hell of a lot warmer, and like the rays of the sun can actually sustain life.

Clarity is great but it ain’t everything. Especially when you have to maintain an intergalactic level of cold to achieve it.

What good is a clear undistorted view if you’re dead inside? You’re just a zombie with a really good view then. Big fucking deal.

And the world is so much bigger than what my poor reason can contain. No matter how bright I think my mind shines, it can only see the world in black and white, and life is a technicolor tapestry of such richness and vibrancy and life-sustaining sunshine that to think it is limited to what the bright white light can reveal is suicidally foolhardy.

Reality might be rational, but life definitely is not, and that’s an incredibly important distinction to draw. The darkness might be scary but that’s where all the light and love and happiness and fun and food for the spirit can be found, so I had better go out there and hang out long enough for my eyes to get used to the lack of light.

My soul has be starving for a very long time.

Time to find the feast and tuck in.

More after the break.

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The Illusion of Self

Been reading I’m Not Really Here by Tim “The Toolman” Allen for the third or fourth time, and let me tell you, if you think he’s just some grunting idiot, this book will change your mind, as it’s an amazing and fascinating journey through mysticism, quantum theory, spirituality, philosophy, epistemology, and car repair.

Seriously. Read the book. Every time I read it I grow a little as a person.

Anyhow, in he, he mentions Tao and its theory of the illusion of the self, and this is an idea that absolutely does not compute from the point of view of Western culture with its emphasis on individualism, so I decided to take a shot at explaining it.

First off, nobody is saying that you, the person reading it, does not exist, or should not exist. That’s a common misinterpretation and it misses the point.

Where the error lies is in our idea of ourselves as individuals separate from the cosmos. We are individuals, yes – but also part of the cosmic whole.

At the same time.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds.

Imagine a tree. Now, look at a single leaf. You can easily identify it as one particular leaf. It is that leaf and no other. You could even name it if you like.

We’ll name it Erik.

And it would be easy for Erik to imagine itself as an individual, with all the glorious assertions of personhood that come with it.

I am Erik! Hear me roar!

But Erik is also connected to the tree by his stem. It is through this stem that he gets all he needs to live. As we all see every fall, without that connection he turns brown and dies. Yes, he contributes to the tree via photosynthesis, but the tree could do without him way easier than he could do without it.

View in this light, all of Erik’s assertions of autonomy and self-determination are ludicrous. He’s about as autonomous as a fetus. And no matter how much he rails against this fact, it remains true.

In other works, Erik is a libertarian.

Enlightenment comes when we acknowledge this truth and then look down and notice our own stems. And realize that we, too, are both individual and part of a greater whole, and because of this, we are never truly alone or apart, and that the things we think divide us are illusions created by the illusion of self.

This illusory self is not who we really are. It is no more real than our reflection in a mirror. We look at that reflection and recognize it as ourselves and indeed spend our entire lives saying “That’s me!”, but it isn’t.

It is the reflector, not that which is reflected.

Enlightenment, therefore, can also be see as what happens when we stop looking at reality through the false and distorted mirror of our illusory self and actually step away from the mirror and look at reality directly.

And when we can do this, far from losing ourselves, we become more ourselves than ever before because now the illusory self is gone and only the true self remains.

And we are filled with joy because all the tensions between our true selves and our false mirror image are gone and we can simply be who we are, just like we did when we were little children.

Then we are ready to receive the truth that we are all connected, that every other human is as much a part of you as your arm or your leg (or your stem), and that harmony is our natural condition and it is only illusions that drive us to view ourselves as separate entities at war with one another.

This is the spiritual and philosophical basis for universal humanism.

Glad ol’ Tim Allen Dick gave me an excuse to explain it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got a new game called Elex.

But first, I got excited to get a game called Control. It was going to be included in March’s Humble Monthly monthly, and I had been tempted to join that before for reasons, and my friend Maelkoth loved the game, and the game was normally $30-$60(depending on edition) but a Humble Monthly sub was only $17, so I figured I would go for it.

So I signed up for Humble Monthly. In February, so the game wasn’t there yet. But there was only a few days left in February, so I waited.

March 2, that month’s bundle dropped. I tried to acquire Control. It told me I had to sign up for Humble Monthly to get it. Waddy fug?

Turns out, I would have to wait till the end of March for it because all I got for my $17 in February was a month’s worth of access to February’s bundle.

If I wanted access to March’s bundle now, I had to pay AGAIN.

Which I did, despite it now being financially stupid, and got the game, all excited to play it, and woops my computer is too old to play it, god damn it.

Can’t even return it because I didn’t exactly “buy” it.

That shit has got to stop happening. Luckily, with Maelkoth’s help, I think I have learned to read the tea leaves of modern sys reqs, so it should not happen again,

Anyhow. Another game called Elex was in the bundle, and it seemed pretty interesting, so I got it.

And so far it’s very impressive. Its world feels so incredibly real. The rock formations, the sunlight, the dynamic shadows, the grass, the buildings… there is something deeply and ineffably right about them that is downright intoxicating.

It reminds me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There are scenes in that movie that seem as real as memory to me, which is apropos.

I haven’t gotten that deep into it because it’s an incredibly deep and rich world and I am still figuring out how to get around, fight, etc.

It’s all so much to take in! But that’s always the case with new games, and new places in general. You just gotta hang in there till you get used to it.

Words to live by.

The game is not merciful. Tried wandering the wilderness with just my beginning weapon and no armor and got eaten by critters a lot.

So much so that when I got killed by an outlaw with a vibro-blade, it made for a refreshing change of pace.

Oh well. I will figure shit out in time. The game’s environment is more than enough to keep me playing long enough to make the learning curve.

It even has a small but substantial mod scene. I may have finally found my new Big Game to keep me busy for a while.

It’s not as good as having an actual life but it will have to do until I build one.

More after the break,

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Justice is served!

Via my astounding powers of analysis and deduction, I have caught the rapscallion who stole all that money from my reloadable VISA recently.

It was me. Thankfully, when confronted with the facts, I surrendered peacefully.

It was all the “extrabudgetary spending” I have been doing. I mean, sure, my calculations of my budget earlier this week were spot on.

But i realized today that I fell into the habit of simply assuming I “probably” had enough room left in my weekly budget for whatever little thing I wanted now and then.

Like my B12 seeking orders from Sav-on. Or a video game here and there. Or a thing or two (or ten) from Amazon.ca. You know, little things like that.

And as anyone familiar with the concept of money can tell you, those little things can add up real fast. To the tune of roughly $600 I didn’t know I was spending.

This is what happens when you spend without access to your wallet. Reality drains in favour of what you want to be true, and you end up doing some depressive spending which when you discover it only makes you way more depressed.

Which is where I am right now. The firewall is down and now the self-loathing and frustration and yes, even grief are hitting me, and I deserve them.

There are few things a Taurus like me hates more than waste. And I feel like I had a great thing, a $2000 windfall, and I wasted 30 percent of it on random crap.

And that hits me like a bullet to the heart. I am literally grieving the lost money like it was a beloved relative. I know that might seem silly to less Earth-bound people but for me, losing money really fucking hurts.

Especially because I was really enjoying having that $2000 in the bank. It greatly increased my sense of security. I am the sort of person who has deep emotional ties to his resources and who profits greatly from financial security on an emotional level.

It has never been a mystery to me how Scrooge got the way he did. I am perfectly capable of using money as my security blanket against the world.

Not hard to see how that could turn pathological.

Hence, I now feel a great deal more vulnerable.

And I know what the rational position is. It’s not like I desperately needed that money. I had no big plans for it. The loss will have little impact on my daily life.

Heck, in this space, I even said it was fine if I just frittered it away on this and that once.

That statement was based on the assumption that I did so knowingly, though.

Ah well. This too shall pass. I will get over it and move on.

Maybe I should spend the rest of my windfall before I waste it, too.

Nah. That would only lead to more regret.

And I got plenty.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not my strong suit.

First, let me make it clear at the outset : goals are good. In fact, they are amazingly good. I know I would be better off if I set small, achievable goals for myself.

I should know because they droned on about that constantly at the Core Program at psych outpatients at Richmond Hospital.

They wanted to talk about the goals we set and how we achieved them, how that made us feel, and so on. If we failed our goals we talked about that and how maybe we should set smaller goals next time. Etc etc blah blah blah.

I have no doubt that this methodology works extremely well in both clinical trials and field tests and I find no fault in it at all on that level.

But it sure as fuck didn’t work on me. Not only was I not inclined to do it emotionally (not defending that) but I was not capable of it intellectually.

I was far more severely depressed at the time and my executive dysfunction made the whole notion of choosing a goal then formulating a plan of action and executing in order to achieve that goal laughably out of reach.

So I just lied. It was easier. And I didn’t even care that I was lying.

It’s amazing how callous you can be when you’re dead on the inside.

Anyhow, forcibly jerking this discourse back to the topic, I have never been any good at setting goals, much to my detriment.

I can’t even get past Step 1 because of my problem with indecision. How does one even choose a goal when there are so many possibilities?

It’s my old nemesis, the infinite hallway of infinite doors, all over again.

I had a goal once : write for TV. Went to college for a year just to qualify. Did the program. Wracked up $25K debt to do it.

But my teachers didn’t like me so that went nowhere.

Other than that, I have never set goals for myself then driven myself to achieve said goals. I have nothing against the idea, it’s just not my style.

It all seems like too much pressure and stress for my laissez faire personality.

But that is not written in stone. The real missing ingredient is inspiration. When I get inspired, I can do amazing things.

I mean, I wrote a million words in 11 months based on one wacky inspiration, FFS. Other times I made a whack of videos. And I had a lot of fun doing it.

It was also frustrating, draining, confusing, and occasionally downright painful.

But hey, that’s art. Excellence is never cheap.

So at least in theory, if I could find another crazy goal, I could inspire myself into something like productivity again.

This time, I might even put the products of my inspiration somewhere where people can actually find them and see them.

Maybe even people who might know people who know people who are in the industry.

What a wild idea!

More after the break.

---

I think I am ready

Ready to at least start thinking about escaping my (s)hell and venturing out into the world to find my fortune, or at least a normal life.

Today was Therapy Thursday and I was talking about this with Doc Costin. I told him that I felt more capable of taking action than ever before and that some of that deep black ice that torments me was melting and that I was feeling more vigorous and alive than I had in a very long time.

I feel like my region and I are experiencing spring at the same time.

Ain’t that somethin’?

Of course, I am realistic enough to recognize that my debut will be virtual. That would be true even if there wasn’t a pandemic on.

The secret to progress is baby steps and for me, that means staying in my comfort zone of my computer and the internet while expanding my virtual world to include new people and new situations and avenues of self-expression.

My first try at this was a bust. I was all ready to dazzle the Cracked editors on the Cracked forums but the Cracked forums are gone. Kaput.

I think the people behind Cracked – people I used to like and admire and want to emulate – have completely checked out. The forums are gone, the last episode of the podcast is “How wacky will the 2020 election be?”, the articles are getting increasingly shallow and contrived.

My guess is they have a stable of freelancers that do all the work and all my heroes just see the site as a machine that shits money now.

That was depressing.

My next point of entry is Reddit, but it’s so vast and there are so many subReddits that it seems impossible to choose one.

It’s not, of course. People do it all the time. It’s only my own strange mind that tries to process everything in parallel that can’t handle too many options.

The sane thing to do would be to browse ones that seem interesting until I find some I like and try sticking my oar in there.

I think the problem is that I want to know what I am getting into. And that works great for some situations but for others it’s simply impossible.

Exploration is the only option.

Yeah, about that.

I was also talking to Doc Costin today about being too scared to explore for most of my life. And how this led to my trying to anticipate and make rational adjustments and thus control my world.

I called it “conquering the world with my mind”.

And it is powerful. But far too limited. The amount you can actually anticipate, predict, and so on in life is actually very small and if you try to live by that parody of rationality, your life will be pretty small too.

And small cages make growth impossible. I am really feeling that lately.

So I am going to learn to embrace unpredictability and risk. You can’t ever totally control outcomes without stifling your soul and leading a very stunted kind of life.

Fuck that shit.

I want out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Big fucking deal.

Earlier today I experienced a pretty bad wave of depression. My mind was flooded with sadness and hopelessness and a terrible feeling of dread.

Like I knew something truly awful was about to happen. Something so awful I couldn’t bear to think about it or even glance in its direction.

And to be honest, even though I feel somewhat better now, the dread lingers on. I have to keep fighting it off by reminding myself that nothing bad is known to be happening to me or anyone else in the near future and that this dread has no basis in reality.

But then again, neither does the depression and despair. It’s all just neurochemical bullshit with no more meaning or truth to it than the shapes of passing clouds.

So this time, I just said fuck it. So I’m depressed now. OK, fine. I’ll just be depressed, then. I’m not going to panic and I am not going to fight it or panic or anything like that. I am just going to treat it like the nonevent it is and let it run its course.

And that made me feel a bit better. I am tired of being bossed around by this bullshit we call “mood”. I have an incredibly strong mind and vast reserves of will, and I am going to use them to beat back the tide and reclaim my mind as my own.

And god help whatever random chemical bullshit stands in my way.

---

Got a few new games recently.

One was via Humble Monthly. It’s a service offered by the Humble Bundle website where every month, there’s a slate of games you can download from for the low low price of around $17 a month.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. We shall see.

Anyhow, the first and only game I have acquired so far via this dubious transaction is Valkyria Chronicles 4, and nope. Nope nope nope.

The trailer for it made it seem like a 3D action RPG like Skyrim, but it is actually a very deep turn based-ish 3D strategy game and my brain says noooo, too much input, we are not going there.

I have played such strategy games in 2D and enjoyed them. But the combination of a third dimension plus having to control my soldiers in realtime FPS adds way too much complexity for my brain to handle comfortably.

I’m good at creative strategy. Innovative problem solving. Complex verbal gameplans. That kind of thing.

The more formal kind of strategy one finds in things like chess is beyond me. My mind really doesn’t want to go there and I usually let it do what it wants when all that is on the line is my own entertainment.

Also tried a demo of a very weird game called Luck Be A Landlord. It’s basically the world’s most complicated slot machine, where between spins you get to choose symbols to add to the big 5X5 stripe machine, and the idea is to earn enough money by spinning to pay your ever-increasing rent so you can keep playing.

Was fun for a little while but meh. Not a keeper.

More after the break.

---

Still in the dark

Still pretty depressed, much to my surprise. Even though I thought it was going away, it ended up hitting a plateau instead and then just kinda hanging around.

My well of soul is full of black octopus ink swirling and spoiled and corrupting into the void shredding toxic cloud that makes the demons laugh until they wet themselves when I refer to it as my soul.

I dunno. I probably just need a good cry.

I’m serious. My current working theory is that the glacial processes of my recovery have pushed a deposit of sadness and grief to the surface and now I have to make the time to feel it all if I want to continue.

Might not be fun but it’s got to be done.

This future grief is probably the cause of my dread as well. Something terrible is definitely going to happen : I’m going to be real sad for a while.

Oh well, there are worse things to be. Crying might not be fun while it is happening (unless you have one mother of a weird fetish) but you feel so much better after.

That’s why my number one piece of advice to other men is to cry, god damn it. Crying is a vital part of regulating our emotions. It’s the all important release valve that regulates the pressure level in our emotions and if you never cry, you will explode.

Or choke on your own fumes and die.

Either way, pretty stupid outcome when you think that ten minutes of tears could have prevented it AND left you a much happier person.

And I’m no expert. It’s still something I have to make myself do, or rather, make myself let happen. And even then, it’s pretty rare.

I’d probably be better off if I did it more often. But I am as much of a product of testosterone poisoning as the next North American male and I got a healthy dose of a fear of being vulnerable in front of the implacable bully inside too.

Horrible to contemplate all the destruction wrought by teaching boys not to cry. All the suffering, both to ourselves and to those unfortunates who become our outlets for the only “acceptable” way to release tension, rage.

What a writhing mass of craziness that bullshit is.

Women have no idea how much suffering in silence we do. Well, that’s not true. They are beginning to learn, and to sympathize.

Makes me glad to be an out fag. The expectations are different. We have a partial pass on “womanly” things like chattiness, overt displays of emotion, and showing vulnerability in front of other men.

Doesn’t totally solve the problem of severe impacted emotions, but it puts us a lot closer to the finish line.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Working on it.

Specifically, working on reminding myself that I am a pretty great person and people are happy to see me when I am around.

What brought this to mind was a recent (as in five min ago) incident where I was headed to my room as Joe was headed out the door to go to work and he told me to have a good day and I smiled and said “You too!”.

A simple, warm, everyday exchange. And it made me feel good.

For a couple of heartbeats. Then it was like a bucket of icewater was dumped over my soul and I felt a wave of depression and shame.

And what the fuck is THAT about?

Like, seriously. Where did that bucket of icewater come from? Certainly nothing external had happened to justify it. All that had occurred was that I’d had a pleasant experience where the warmth in Joe’s voice made it clear he was fond of me.

But apparently that triggered my depression’s defense mechanisms and it had to squash that warm happy feeling ASAP.

This is a new wrinkle for me. i have never caught the sheer core madness of my depression in action like that.

It is a stark thing indeed to watch one’s madness in the act of making you miserable.

The sadness component could at least be waved off as being sad that the pleasant experience was over. There’s a lot more to it than that, in all likelihood, but still.

But why the guilt and shame? About what? Over what?

As near as I can tell, I was basically feeling guilt and shame over inflicting my toxic self on such a nice person as Joe.

Or at least that was the paper-thin excuse my depression needed to douse my soul with a liquid nitrogen fire extinguisher.

Clearly that shit has to stop. I should at least be able to enjoy the nice things that happen to me. I am getting quite the glimpse of how the artificial chill of my inner environment is maintained and it is freaky.

But why does this happen? It’s easy to say that it’s my depression protecting itself, but that is a glib and not very insightful answer.

It’s kind of like my mind is protecting the integrity of its contents in the worst possible way. Happy inputs are inconsistent with all the darkness and negativity inside me and so my mind follows its basic cognitive programming and rejects the much smaller conflicting input in favor of the larger harmonious body of information in my brain.

But I want out, god damn it. And that’s going to mean hanging on to these brief moments of happiness and warmth and defending them from the overactive fire suppression system in my head.

So fuck this depressive bullshit. I want to suck every bit of good, wholesome, positive emotion I can get out of this life. I want happy positive vibes to suffuse me so they can melt my frozen heart and finally get to come home again.

For the first time.

Let me feel their love. Amen.

More after the break.

---

My shame has appeal

Get it? A peel? Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

Stooge-isms aside, above the line I dealt with the shame and how lame it is, but not where it comes from or how to solve it.

So let’s take a crack at it.

First off, we have already fully established in these pages that my sense of shame started the day I was born because I was an unplanned and unwanted child and so I was “another mouth to feed” to a set of parents who were already struggling to keep up with and feed the three they had.

Not my fault, obviously. I didn’t ask to be an accident. I didn’t decide to come whether I was wanted or not. I would not have chosen to barge into their lives.

But there I was, unwanted and resented.

Luckily, I was hella cute. And charming. In those glorious early days, I effortlessly charmed the adults I encountered by being adorably redheaded and freckled (which wore off eventually) and amusingly precocious in pretty much the same way the cute kid on a sitcom is precocious.

Probably not a coincidence.

So I got plenty of attention as a little one. I effortlessly became the center of attention when it suited me and lapsed into thoughtful silence when it didn’t. As now, I could be quiet and introverted or the life of the party depending on mood.

And of course, I was crazy smart. Like, bury the needle. I was reading one or two months before my 3rd birthday. I watched science shows for adults before first grade, and understood it all. I talked like a tiny adult.

Amazing and weird as fuck at the same time. Story of my life.

Hello, I’m a friendly alien.

So thank goodness, the shame did not get me immediately. I had the usual youngest kid angst about birth order injustice and people not taking me seriously and all the usual frustrations of that age, but all in all, it wasn’t that bad.

Until 1977 came around, and everything went to hell.

That’s when I was raped. Shattered my little psyche and forced me to retreat deep into my own mind so hard that I am still trying to coax myself out again 43 years later.

Some of the shame comes from there, I imagine. As unjust as this is, the utter violation of child rape leaves its victims feeling permanently soiled.

Then my friends Janet from across the street and Trish from next door went to school without me. They were a year older and so went into grade 1 a year earlier than.

By the time I got there, they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me, of course.

And then it was grind of school and neglect at home. The attention at home stopped when I stopped being cute and then everyone pointedly ignored me as they had busy, important lives to lead and I had overstayed my welcome.

Reminding people I exist was discouraged on all levels.

No wonder I often feel like I don’t.

School treated me no better. Bullies beat and harassed me right in front of teachers and playground monitors and nobody so much as blinked because from their point of view, nothing worth noting was going on, and they certainly weren’t going to so much as twitch one single muscle in order to save a fat smartass weirdo like me.

Like all herd animals, they viewed status as value and therefore a low status kid is a low value kid and not worth protecting.

The fact that I was clearly smarter than them and felt no need to suck up to them didn’t help, I am sure.

So home or school, everyone treated me like I didn’t count and didn’t matter and shouldn’t even be there, and I internalized the fuck out of that shit.

I think that’s the true wellspring of my deep sense of shame, and the social anxiety that comes with it. Day after day, week after week, year after year, a steady drip of the message that I was not important to anyone anywhere and that my supposed “gifts” for me nothing but boredom in class and resentment from teachers and were therefore worse than nothing and that I was a hideous nightmarish disgusting concatenation of contaminants who was less than worthless and who should just go away and die.

Yup. That’s my shame, all right.

As to what to do about it, I don’t know.

But I know that it’s all untrue and that I have nothing to be ashamed of and I am finally started to really push back against the madness.

Sounds like a good start to me,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Might not make it to 500 this time. We will see.

Took the pill I have been using as my sleep aid, alprazolam, this morning after breakfast. And now I am all fucked up from bad sleep.

No honeymoon period where the sleep is cozy and nourishing and relaxing and nice this time. Nope. straight to the brain scrambling fever dream stage that makes me wish I had never touched the stupid fucking pill.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I had noticed my sleep periods getting shorter, and decided I would try nipping the problem in butt.

Yes, I know it’s “nip it in the bud”, but I’m horny.

Perhaps I should have waited longer. I really do not like feeling like this. I wish I should wash it all away with a brisk shower or a hot meal or by rinsing my brain under cold water in a sink for ten minutes.

Or maybe hard liquor. Nah, that would only make things worse.

It’s kind of fucked up to get punished by the universe for doing the smart thing. Sure, I will probably be better off in the long run from having breached the dam holding my sleep tide back, but right now it does not seem worth it.

I need to learn to sleep like a normal person. Eight hours a day. In a row.

It just seems like so much of a commitment. Like, what if I decide I would rather do something else in the middle of all that sleep? Now I’m stuck.

Kidding aside, time to let sleep kick my ass some more.

I will be back.

---

Who are you and what are you doing in my bedroom?

Oh right. You’re my blogging audience. Sorry about that, I just woke up.

Slept a bunch more. Feel a lot better now. Lots more sleepy time in my immediate future, but at least I no longer feel like I am downing in it.

Knock on wood.

As predicted, I did not make it to 500 words earlier. I was too damned sleepy. Made it to 280, which ain’t bad, but that means i have 220 more words to write than usual tonight.

Whatever. Once I get started, I can write for a long time. Writing these millions of words over the last decade (started this blog in 2011) has built up my writing muscles to the point where writing is not that hard for me.

Especially this kind of writing. It’s mostly just jotting down my thoughts as they come to me, with a minimum of forethought or planning.

As you can plainly tell.

Writing fiction or a subject driven think piece is harder. Much harder. Then I have to keep a bunch of stuff in my head instead of just stringing thoughts together.

Wow, just thinking about putting that much effort into this makes me feel tired and overwhelmed. No wonder I do it so infrequently.

And now the usual cat’s chorus of shrieking viragos raises it rusty voice to scream at me about all the things I “should” do and therefore suck for not doing.

I “should” write more fiction. I “should” work harder to make my writing as good as I can instead of my usual “fire and forget” method. I “should” be beating the bushes looking for work as a writing. I “should” at least be posting to Vocal.

Yeah yeah. Learn a new song, you howling bitches. You’re not helping. You’re just giving me all the more reason to hide away from the loud clattering world.

Consider yourself put on mute. There is no “should”. All that matters is my own pleasure. If when all is said and done, I am having fun, then everything is A-OK.

I hereby declare amnesty from all compulsion. Whatever mental malfunction turns my desires into destructive pressures is hereby disable, uninstalled, and destroyed.

From now on, life is a game I play for my own amusement and to hell with whatever gets in the way of that.

I need to be supremely selfish for a while. Probably not to the point of becoming a total asshole, but I won’t rule it out.

To be honest, I would rather be a happy asshole than a miserable nice guy any day,

I have to reach deep and find my id and let it roam free for a while if I want to restore balance to my personality. Unleash that cocky, sarcastic, pushy asshole I have been suppressing deep inside me for so long.

I guess I always knew it would come to this. The only difference is that I am now willing to admit that this asshole I have been suppressing is just as much a part of me as the sweet guy I normally think of as myself, and that if he is such an extreme dickbag, it is because he contains all the pent up id I have never expressed and therefore is a symptom of my imbalance, just as much as my weak and wimpy side is.

All told, I have on hand the makings of one hell of a guy. Someone who is sweet and nice without being weak and impotent and pathetic. Someone who is strong and competent and dynamic without being callous and selfish and losing track of the deep compassion I treasure so much about myself.

The path to becoming that version of myself will be long and complicated and no doubt downright ugly at times. I admit that right here,

But I am finally ready to fight. To struggle to be born. To keep pounding away at the walls of my reality until they finally give way and let my tiny little world get bigger.

I will sacrifice peace in the name of happiness when it comes to that. I will stop running from my anxiety and face the music instead. I will leave all I think I know about myself behind in order to figure out who I really am.

I will wipe the slate clean, and draw myself anew.

And this time, I’ll use my true colors.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.