No really. I do.

And not for some long term reason like lowering my blood sugar, elevating my mood, helping me lose weight, or any of the other usual reasons.

I need exercise because I am feeling very tense and nervous and irritable and I am pretty sure exercise is the cure.

It’s always better to focus on immediate benefits when trying to talk yourself into doing something you don’t normally do, or even want to do.

Now obviously, I have known about the long term ways to “need” exercise for a very long time. But they never meant much to me. Just another set of things I “should” be doing but did not remotely feel even the slightest motivation to do so.

I’ve got a lot of those. The list is very long. They honestly don’t even feel like they belong to me. That sort of thing is for other people.

To me, all the things I “should” be doing are a passing curiosity at best. Like, I agree with them all… how could I not? They are all perfectly sane, logical, sensible things that I would have to be a blithe idiot to disagree with.

On the other hand, I don’t even feel like I am personally involved.

In that cheerfully fatalistic (emphasis on the “fatal”) vein, I need some exercise. Something to burn off the excess energy making me all twitchy.

And that there is a paradigm switch devoutly to be wished. The default mode of depression is to view effort as the enemy and to treat one’s personal energy as a precious resource to be hoarded like a miser.

Which is bullshit. Sometimes you are one hell of a lot better off without it. I dream of being able to view each day as an opportunity to exhaust myself. To not stop doing enjoyable, meaningful things until I am sure I am done.

Instead, I have lived each day like I’m an invalid until, what do you know, it became true. Now I am riddled with issues and circling the drain and wishing, however futilely, that I had taken all this shit more seriously many, many years ago.

But the truth is, I couldn’t. Depression killed my motivation and there was nobody in my life to tell me to start taking care of myself more so I was free to self-neglect myself into this sorry state as much as I wanted to, or at least, could not keep myself from.

Had a call from my doctor. He’s gonna hook me up with a new endocrinologist. Which is fine, I suppose, but all they are going to do is tell me to do the things I already know that I should be doing.

Testing my blood. Taking my insulin. Getting my blood sugar way, way down.

Seems like a lot of pain and hassle and work just to keep from dying. That honestly is not enough of a motivation for me.

If only there was some kind of cash prize. Give me a cut of the money I will be saving the taxpayers by not getting way, way sicker.

You laugh, but it would work.

Then again, the real savings come when I die young.

So there’s that to look forward to.

More after the break.

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The great mass at my center

Like the trans Pacific garbage patch, there is a conglomerated mass of toxic nastiness circulating endlessly within me, and it really needs to go.

It is the living core of my depression. It is the massive unhealed wound that cripples my soul, destroys my will, drains my life force, and leaves me unable to deal with life. It is the fundamental flaw that denies my destiny.

It also really sucks.

If I could but dislodge this mother of all clogs, I could return to life for the first time since I was raped 43 years ago and start to truly breathe free and live the healthy, strong, powerful, and fully engaged life that was denied me so long ago.

I can feel it so clearly now, this sticky glacier bearing down on my heart, filthy and poisonous and oppressive and so very, very heavy.

And it’s never seemed smaller to me. Far from being the all smothering blanket of mental fog it used to be, now it seems quite limited and finite and… mortal.

Not that I am ready to stick a metaphorical finger down my metaphysical throat and hork the whole fetid, squirming parasite onto the floor for the stomping just yet.

But I have never been closer. Some time soon, I will get enough leverage on that god damned demon to hurl it from me with hurricane force and then it will be gone from me forever and I will finally be clean.

I don’t remember what that feels like. Even fresh from the shower I feel like I am nothing but syphilitic diarrhea on the inside. The times in my life where I have had severe hygiene issues were powered in part by the feeling that cleaning myself on the outside just made me feel dirtier on the inside and it was all pointless because there was no such thing as a clean turd anyhow.

Migosh that’s awful. And so totally unfair.

And yet that’s still how I feel inside. Knowing it is wrong on all levels does not, sadly, make it go away. This feeling of being fundamentally tainted and the cringing shame that drives me into the shadows that comes with have been with me for so long that it’s hard to imagine them not being there.

But it’s what I deserve, god damn it. I have spent four decades in hell for something someone else did to me, and that shit has got to stop.

I deserve liberation. I deserve freedom. I deserve the warmth of human connection. I deserve love, tolerance, and acceptance. I deserve to come in from the cold.

I deserve a normal life.

And somehow, some day, I am going to get it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Catching up on sleep debt today.

Fine. I’ve had some of the really rough sleep that results in my waking up all dizzy disoriented and feeling like I have been squished flat, but it has not been too bad so far.

Knock on wood.

Making the words happen is a bit trickier than usual because I am having trouble staying on task. My mind keeps wandering off on tangents.

Mmmm. Tan Gents.

See? Like that.

So I might not make it all the way to 500 words this session. I might end up needing to take a nap before I get there.

Suboptimal but acceptable. It happens from time to time.

Besides, the caffeine in my Diet Coke may rescue me yet.

Go stimulant, go!

---

On the local front, 7-11 has 2Ls of Diet Coke again, which means they have started getting my money again. It was weird that for a couple of months, not only did they not have my precious 2Ls of Diet Coke on their DoorDash menu, they didn’t even have 2Ls of Diet Pepsi either. Coke Zero was the only option in the 2L size.

And Coke Zero is…..ehhh. It’s not undrinkable but it’s not very good. Has such a heavy and strange taste. Like there are way, way too many flavour notes and it ends up producing an oppressively busy flavour profile.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

In other good news from the world of us urban hermits, I discovered that a local Chinese place, Bamboo Express, has the sort of Dinner for One type ordering that is my preferred way to order Chinese food.

Here, do you like one of these four lists of three dishes? Yes, yes I do. Parfait.

Without this option, if I want those same three things, I have to order three full orders of those things, and that’s both way more expensive and way too much of a commitment.

So now Bamboo Express will be getting my money just like 7-11.

It’s not complicated. Just have what I want!

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Something on my mind lately : the difference between lying and being wrong in relationships of all kinds.

Let’s take your typical love song setup. You said you would love me forever and now you are leaving me. So when you said that, you were lying!

Um, no. They were wrong. When you say something like “I will love you forever”, you’re not just making a commitment, you’re also making a prediction.

This prediction is based on how you feel at that moment. To break it down into legalistic language, what you are really saying is, “Right now, I love you so much that I cannot imagine that ever changing”.

But things change. People change. Circumstances change. The truth is that commitments based on the emotion of the moment are generally not the soundest, no matter how powerful the emotion and no matter how hard it is for people to imagine being in an emotional state other than the one they are currently in.

I don’t blame people for viewing it as lying, though. The difference is quite subtle and probably only suited to mental mutants like me who think too much about stuff.

It feels like they lied, and that’s good enough.

But the truth is, people just suck at predicting their future emotions, and I suppose in a theoretical sense, we would all be better off if we could learn and accept that.

Even the person who seems like our soulmate might turn out to be someone who just happened to be going the same way as us for a while.

A lot of love is really just collisions in the dark.

More after the break.

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More than human

When I first thought of this subject while in the shower. I immediately felt a lurching feeling in the pit of my stomach like someone had just slammed on the breaks, immediately followed by a surge of fear and reluctance.

So obviously, it’s what I have to talk about tonight. This should be good.

Let’s talk about being superhuman.

As patient readers know, I was born with a crazy high IQ. Learned to read before I was 3, got great marks without studying in school, and so on.

This put me well above my peers (and most adults), and let me tell you, it’s lonely at the top. The fundamental problem I had in terms of socialization was my inability to relate to the other children.

Oh, I could understand them well enough. Too well, as a matter of fact. Sometimes I knew them better than they knew themselves.

People hate that.

But understanding people like I do, analytically, is not remotely the same as relating to them. Relating inherently puts people on the same level and forges a two-way connection between individuals.

There is nothing two-way about my astounding powers of analysis. My ability to understand them does nothing for their ability to understand me.

Rather the opposite, in fact. It makes me even more of an alien to them.

And this gulf between us really hurts. The pain I feel from my inability to truly connect with others gnaws at my soul and all these decades of isolation in my ivory fucking tower have left me with so much built up loneliness and mindless fear of the world that it feels like it could kill me if I let it.

Don’t worry. I won’t let it.

I could intellectually understand what my fellow kids got out of playing in the sandbox… but it didn’t make the sandbox any more appealing to me. I had a pretty good idea why teens in my town hung out in front of the liquor store in hopes of getting some grownups to buy liquor for them, but it didn’t make it seem any less pointless to me.

And I can dive deep into pop culture and produce endless hours of cogent, brilliant analysis of what made the Flintstones so appealing or tell you all about how Columbo episodes are structured, but that doesn’t make me any more like the people these shows are written for.

I’m a very weird dude, and it’s a lonely frigging life. I want so badly to reach out and connect with others, but between my social damage and my Olympian mind, it is too huge a gap to bridge.

I have to believe that there was somewhere in the world where I’d fit in.

I thought it would be VFS but it wasn’t.

Maybe I will try academia next.

Surely there’s lots of brainy weirdos there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling vaguely grumpy and cranky right now.

Not for any particular life-event type reason I can think of. Just a general feeling of tension and pain from being alive in this misbegotten meat sack of mine, I guess.

Normally, this is the sort of thing I push out of my mind reflexively, along with damned near every other kind of emotion not actively involved in playing video games.

But today I am going to just sit with my feelings of crankiness for a bit, maybe get to know them a little better, and find out how I can accommodate them.

Because as ugly as crankiness can be, it serves a purpose. One that, perhaps, is only evident to a freaky little robot like me that operated without it for so long.

It externalizes anger, and thus, vents it. A cranky person is positioned to react with clear anger to irritating stimuli, and thus release the inner tension fueling the cranky state.

Thus, emotions are released instead of being suppressed.

As patient readers know, for the vast majority of my life, I have vilified crankiness and irritability because I associated it with the angry, impatient father who tyrannized my childhood and used his family as his verbal/emotional punching bags when the stresses of his job got to him.

Usually at the dinner table. Sigh.

As a result, I resolved at far too young an age that I would never, ever, ever take my bad mood out on others no matter what.

I’d rather die. Or so I thought.

But I went far too far. I locked away all my anger and left myself with precious little ability to ever release it in an acceptable way.

Hence my explosive rage when I was younger. I would let everything build up inside me until one tiny thing set it off then it would all come out in some tear filled tirade where I accused people of not caring about me and a lot of other stuff too.

I learned to express my anger a little more often and that problem went away. Although honestly, I wonder if I was better off before.

At least then, I blew off the needed steam. Wasn’t real pleasant for my friends and family though, which is why I changed.

I didn’t like that shit. I hated the loss of control.

There are worse things than losing control, though, I suppose.

Like, for instance, being too depressed to take care of your plethora of medical issues properly before they straight up fucking kill you.

Ya know. Just to pick a totally random example.

So hooray for being cranky, I guess. I am far from being in a place where I can find and use healthy outlets for my rage. but I can at least acknowledge and value being in a snarly frame of mind without rejecting it entirely.

Of such little steps a mighty journey is made.

And I need to fix my mental health as soon as possible as it might just kill me.

And that would suck.

More after the break.

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No room for despair

Watched (listened to) this video today :

And on paper, that might seem like a bad move for someone who suffers from serious depression like I do.

It’s a depressing video about a depressing subject, and someone who did not know better might wonder why I would subject myself to such media.

Well, fictional person, I am glad that I did, because it actually made me feel better about myself by helping me realize something fundamental about my nature :

I am incapable of despair.

True despair, that is, the kind that leads to giving up. I might not be the Monarch of Motivation due to my illness but I am not one to lay down and give up either.

When I try to imagine doing that, this fierce flame of total defiance ignites in my heart and I scream “Nooooooooooo!”.

Not a fucking chance. I don’t give up and I don’t surrender. Fuck going gently into that good night. I’m a scrapper, a fighter, a warrior. While I live, I defy, and I don’t care if the odds are against me and things look hopeless because I would much rather die fighting, knowing that I caused as much pain, suffering, distress, and damage to the forces of evil as I possibly could rather than go meekly to the slaughter like a goddamned lamb.

For me, defiance isn’t a choice, it’s who I am. That hot, bright, angry spark of rage in my heart is a fundamental part of me and without it I would be dead. It is the coruscating nuclear firestorm that powers all my systems, and I can no more shut it down than I can shut down the sun.

That’s why, no matter what, I keep going. I might not be going anywhere in particular or even anywhere worth going, but I never stop. Ever.

That’s why I have not had much experience with the sort of passive despair where one can’t even be bothered to get out bed that many of my fellow depressives experience.

Nope. Not gonna happen. I’d get bored and restless too fast. I might lie in bed staring at the ceiling for long periods but it is not because I have lost hope.

It’s because there is so much going on in my mind that I have to do nothing but wait until the mental traffic thins out enough for me to get moving.

One might ask at this point where this nuclear spark of defiance is in my struggle against my depression.

After all, it seems like just the thing for it.

But so far, I have been unable to conceive of my depression as an outside entity trying to control me. I don’t have a single figure whose picture I can stick on my dartboard to motivate myself to succeed.

To be honest, nobody has ever cared enough to repress me.

I might be better off if they had.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh right, choosing to believe.

What I was trying to get at in Act 2 of yesterday’s blog entry was that the particularly potent bullshit of my previous “rational” stance fooled me into thinking there was only ever one way to interpret things – its way.

Its corrupt, unreliable, and hopelessly incompatible with joy and life way. Made all the more dangerous by being stamped as “objective reality” by a dim mockery of reason.

Miss me with that bullshit, okay?

Instead, I am developing a more flexible view of reality where everything is more open to interpretation. There are many ways to apprehend the same objective event, after all, and I will learn to pick the one that best suits my emotional needs.

That’s what healthy people do, after all, and while rationalist goons like my former self might snigger up their sleeves at healthy people’s “delusions” and “denial” and mock their ever so obvious to handle “reality”, they’re happy and strong and we are a sad and sickly lot, so who really has it better?

It’s clear to me that healthy humans have the capacity to shield themselves from reality’s harsher edges by looking at things from the best possible angle.

It’s only broken monkeys like myself who deny themselves this resource, and end up emotional cripples unsuited for life on Earth despite their knowing what is “real”.

Fuck reality. I want to be happy. And I am willing to take whatever steps away from the real world are necessary to get there, up to and including total catatonia, to get there.

So I am slowly learning to stop and ask myself, is there another way to feel about that? Another, more comfortable, healthier and happier way to look at it? Can I take that block out of the Jenga tower of my mind and move it into a more stable position?

I think before now, the overriding priority in my mind was to squish the contents of my memory into the most compact and interconnected form possibly by a kind of gravity constantly putting pressure on my rugged internal model of the world.

And that’s quite powerful. It has led to my being as deeply insightful and visionary as I am, and given me access to secrets both profound and profane.

At the same time.

But it leaves no room for mercy. Like all other aspects of my Brutal Truth Machine, it prioritizes a search for the truth as violent and uncompromising as the machine that yanks the skeletons out of factory chickens.

It’s a mechanically separated truth. And it’s no good for living.

So I am going to loosen the fuck up. There has been an uptight, intense, humorless, merciless monster lurking under all my wit and warmth and kindness all these years, and he seriously needs to chill the fuck out.

Sit down. Pop a brewski. Vibe to the music. And try to relax dude. Whatever you have rattling around in your skull, let it out, man. Give it room to run around and play and maybe air out your cranium a bit.

Because it’s getting pretty funky in there, to be honest. A good rinse would be good too.

Then, once everything is all fresh and clean and that cracked out squirrel that lives in your head has had its exercise and is ready for a nap, let it back in, and go about your day in a much healthier way.

There. Isn’t that better?

More after the break.

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Blood and Fire

Currently stuck in my head :

And that seems as good a springboard for tonight’s discussions as anything else.

What strikes me about a song like that, and female-orient folk-type music in general, as it seems like it comes from a much wiser and deeper place than my home planet.

These ladies do not have these ridiculous walls of dogmatism, stubbornness, phony machismo, emotional constipation, and all the rest of the male bullshit package making life more difficult for them. Often past the point of absurdity.

No, they deal with emotional, complicated, and irrational nature of life directly, with a mind focused on solving the true problems of people’s needs not getting met without being distracted by a lot of abstraction and pretention and other karmic noise.

And they express themselves. They put their emotions out into the world. That is a far, far healthier way to live than the spiritually suppressed male world where we swallow everything until we have no idea what parts of us are real and what are just calcified deposits of fossilized emotion.

I figured out at an early age that this meant women were, in this sense, “smarter” than men. Sure, there might have been a time when men had an advantage at certain forms of applied technical skills (cars, sports, computers) but women have always had the advantage when it comes to dealing with life and being happy and I know which skill set seems more valuable to me.

Because women deal with things. They get shit done. A friend is upset? They coordinate and comfort her with the rest of her friends. Another friend is having a baby? The baby shower seems like it almost organizes itself. Someone is going through a bad breakup? She goes to her friends and cries about it and vents about it and talks the emotions through and then she’s better and goes on with her life.

Meanwhile, six months later, the guy she broke up with is still an emotional wreck who can barely cope with life and spends way too much time at the gym trying to burn off the pain and the bar trying to drink it away.

And he keeps saying the same things about the relationship over and over to whoever will listen because he has no better way to express his feelings and thus cannot exit the loop he is in.

Yeah, I know which group I would rather be in.

Unfortunately, I have a penis.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Blogging because I don’t know what else to do with myself right now. I am too anxious and depressed to just eat my lunch and watch something on YouTube like I normally do on Therapy Thursdays, and there’s really only two things I do, and I refuse to eat and play video games at the same times because god damn it, there has to be SOME time in the day when I am not playing a fucking game, and eating is it for me.

That was technically a sentence.

Had a follow-up appointment with my ophthalmologist, Doctor Faezi, this morning. Only 11 days till they slice my eyeball open, scoop out the inside, and replace it with an artificial lens to get rid of my cataract(s).

The day started off poorly when I had a mental malfunction and thought the appointment was at 8:45 am not 9:45 am so when I woke up at 8:30 am I freaked out and got dressed and ready in a panic and rushed out to have Julian remind me that I was an hour off.

D’oh. I went back to my room, sat down in front of the computer, launched a game.

But my heart was still racing and I felt dizzy and tired like I had just walked a block. I feel sick to my stomach and kind of like the room is spinning very very slowly. And it does not seem to be going away.

Then the proper departure time comes around, Julian drives me to the office, I go up the elevator to the office, greet the receptionist, sit down in the waiting room, and realize I feel absolutely horrible.

As in, take how bad I felt in front of my computer and cube it. It was painful and confusing and so on, but mostly, it was scary as fuck.

I felt like I might die. And…. I might. It’s plausible. I might not last another year. My 48th birthday next month might be my last. My health issues are profound and pervasive. It may already be too late for medical science to save me.

And it’s freaking me out. I am so damned scared. I feel like I am minutes away from ending up in the dreaded “in the hospital bed full of tubes” position, or worse.

And you would think that such gut-wrenching terror would be enough to motivate me to take better care of myself better, but…. not so far.

Because there is a suicidal traitor in my mind who doesn’t want to live. It wants to escape the mess it’s made forever. It wants out. It wants to escape.

It wants things to finally be over.

And it is willing to block all attempts at progress in order to achieve that goal.

But you know what? I’m done with asking my demons for permission to love. I am not going to take that cold surge of fear in my stomach as an answer. There has to be more to life than the limits set by my ancient outdated fears.

Somehow, I am going to find or make the energy I need in order to live.

Or die trying.

More after the break.

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Choose to believe

One of the things that’s on my mind lately is wiggle room.

Specifically, the wiggle room between different ways to interpret the same thing.

As patient readers know. I’m a recovering rationalist. I am keenly aware of the tragic limitations of my previous “logic and reason” bullshit mindset and how unsuited it is to be the sole operating system of a human psyche.

One of its limitations has recently become evident to me : it tricks you into thinking there is always only one “right” way to see things. The supposedly “objective” way things are in “reality” according to those selfsame faculties of “reason”.

What a load of crap. My reason is just as corrupt and diseased and unreliable as the rest of me. It lies to me all the fucking time. And it does it very well because it wears a reasonable and rational face while doing so when it is just as crazy as I am.

So to speak.

So my spiritual challenge right now is to transcend that limited point of view and expand my mind to encompass my full being, emotions and instincts and inspirations included.

That involves learning to, as my therapist said today, “turn my brain off” now and then.

He’s right. I would be better off if I could get this massive mind of mine to shut the fuck up now and then and just leave me alone.

Which means I can’t rely on it to generate my sense of reality any more. I will learn to look at the world with new eyes instead.

All that reason ever showed me was the illusion of reality anyhow. A mirror, nothing more. The real world still awaits me, over my shoulder.

But it’s not an easy transition to make. I’ve accepted my corrupted reason’s version of reality as the truth for a very long time and it’s going to be tough to, in a sense, start all over again, almost like being reborn.

I don’t mind being reborn. Who knows, maybe I will get it right this time.

---

I guess I’ve calmed down some now.

Maybe I am going to die soon. Maybe not. Maybe my true fate is to be just another obesity statistic. Another promising life cut down far too early by an epidemic of food addiction and bad genetics combining to make people into time bombs.

I really hope not. I want to live. I’m not ready to go yet.

But all I can do is whatever I can do to get healthy. Both physically and psychologically. I will float along the edges of my major disasters hoping to find a path between them that will lead me to something a lot like actual health.

Or at the very least, a non-painful, non-gross, non-scary form of debility.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got pretty damned scared that I am going to die last night.

I’m just so sick. I feel dizzy almost all the time. My diabetes is way out of control and my sleep apnea is totally untreated. I have a huge untreated hernia and I get sudden sharp pains and other weird sensations on my legs all the time. My feet have been part numb and tingly for years. And I am so very, very weak.

In short, every inch of my body is fucked up and I am terrified that all these health problems are going to do me in before I can get them fixed.

I don’t want to die. I’m not done yet. I don’t want to go. I want to stay here with my friends and hang out and have fun together. I want to play video games and listen to YouTube videos about cool topic. I want to keep trying to get sane.

This life of mine ain’t much but it’s all I got and I wanna keep it.

I don’t want to go into that long dark room.

Saving my own life is going to be a hell of a lot of work, and that’s problematic to say the least because part of my depression is balking at anything that requires sustained effort and giving up on anything that seems scary or difficult or too much like work right away.

What I really want to do is surrender myself to a higher authority. Humbly confess my total incompetence in the face of reality and beg them to run my life for me because I am clearly not capable of doing it myself.

I wish I could just check myself into the hospital and tell them “Test absolutely everything, because I cannot be relied upon to self-report accurately. My state of mind makes my perceptions far too unreliable and I have no frame of reference for being healthy any more. Please fix me anyway. ”

Not an option, unfortunately, at least until I become super rich and can check myself into an American luxury hospital.

That sounds so nice. The ultimate in oral retentive retreat from reality. Surrender myself to a bunch of people dedicated to making me healthy.

For money, true, but the public health system can’t afford to invest that much in my care and tends to treat one problem at a time too.

That might not be enough. I mean, I am sure that as a system they will do everything they can do to keep me above the ground and give me all the opportunities to get my various ailments treated, but I might not have what it takes psychologically to get all that stuff done and I don’t know what to do about that.

I wish I could just run away from it all. I keep fantasizing about that. As if by taking off running I could somehow escape my problems and start off.

That doesn’t work when the problem is bad health. After all, no matter where you go, there you are, all full of disease and on the verge of total collapse.

And it’s all so unfair. I have done the best I can within the limits of my mental health and yet, here I am, damn near dyin’.

At least I have the fear now. Hopefully that will propel me to right action.

More after the break.

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Scary from the Smart

I think I am starting to figure out one of my more vexing personal mysteries, why from my point of view I am this easygoing, sweet, accessible, approachable guy but from other people point of view, I can be extremely intimidating and hard to deal with.

Unsurprisingly, I think my sky high IQ is the key component. I think that when I pay attention to someone, it can be like being in the spotlight.

And not just any spotlight. The kind they used to spot planes during the Blitz.

And so even though I am being pleasant and friendly and (in my mind) harmless, people can’t quite relax around me, and that makes them either consciously or unconsciously want to avoid me.

And this is true even if I have legit charmed, entertained, and engaged them. Even if they walk away thinking I am one heck of a guy (and they’re not wrong), it still might have been exhausting and bewildering to them because they have never dealt with someone like me before and they are not used to interpersonal interactions of such intensity and vibrancy.

Obviously, my charisma and presence is a factor too. All three things come together to form the high beams of my attention.

I can only imagine that I have accidentally caused some confusion in people because of the cognitive dissonance between “wow, what a cool guy” and “I really don’t want that to happen again any time soon”.

And the thing is, I am always “on”. If I am around others, show’s on, and I am working hard to impress, amuse, and so on without trying or even knowing I am doing it.

It’s how I deal with the world, I guess. Perhaps if I had not had such a socially isolated childhood, I would have developed a more sturdy and nuances social strategy than “charm everybody always”, which definitely has the flavour of an extroverted toddler to me. One who has just realized that smiling and waving at people can get them some very pleasing positive interaction.

That’s probably what I was like when I got raped. That would explain a lot.

I don’t really see a direct solution to my intensity issue. It is simply not in my nature to turn down my flame. I got to shine, shine, shin.

But I could, I suppose, tune it a little. Make its light a little warmer, a little friendlier, a lot less alienating and a hell of a lot more inviting.

First I think I would need to get past a lot of very old, very deep, very nasty issues that make me want people to STAY THE FUCK AWAY.

That’s probably another thing that makes it stressful to be around me. Mixed messages.

How I wish I could take a pill and flush out all the bad mojo inside me.

Instead, all I can do is write it out of me.

Thanks for helping with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, a new video game.

I have been on the hunt for a new game lately. Always a bit of a challenge due to my highly refined tastes, but made especially hard by the fact that I appear to be in one of my extra fussy moods which makes me try games then return them a bunch.

At least I have one good game on the go. It’s a rather eccentric beast called Monster Train and I could try to explain how you’re defending the last flame of Hell from the invading forces of Heaven and how this somehow involves you being on a train, but suffice it to say that it’s an excellent collectible card game derivative of the type thatI enjoy immensely and so I have been having fun with it.

Although I do have one design nitpick : throughout the early game, you earn experience points and level up the various clans of demons you have access to, and in doing so unlock cards and abilities and other neat stuff.

Until you hit level 10 in each clan. In which case, that shit just… stops.

Now obviously the game can’t have an infinite number of cards etc. to reveal as I level up, but given the limits of the rest of the game it really knocked like half of the momentum out of my gameplay.

There is still the actual dueling of enemies trying to get to the boss, and that is still fun, but I miss the element of discovery.

I am going to check out the small but meaningful mod scene for the game.

Gave a game called RimWorld a shot. It’s an intriguing idea because it’s not exactly a game. It’s a space colony simulator. So you can build your colony but there is no plot or overall quest or goal.

It sounded interesting, especially because there is a mod for it called (I shits thou not) RimJobWorld which allows your cute little aliens to have all kinds of perverted sex with one another, and you know I am all about the perverted mods when they are an option.

But I started the game and there was a ton of things to learn and I just didn’t feel like it.

I am so god damned flitty lately.

I also tried the first entry in the Dark Souls series of games. but did not care for it. The controls were clunky and slow and the whole thing seemed claustrophobic and off-putting somehow. But the worst thing was the game camera not keeping up with the action during the first big boss fight.

Fuck that noise.

So now I am once more “between games”. It takes 24-48 hours for the money to be returned to your Steam account once you return a game, so I will have to wait before getting something else.

It used to return the money right away but presumably people were using that to game the system somehow, so now we have to wait.

Oh well, At least Steam enables my fickleness by letting people return any game as long as they have not played them for more than two hours.

Makes me way more likely to invest money in a game, so it’s a win/win all round.

Oh well, I am sure I will find a game I love enough to keep eventually.

More after the break.

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My further adventures

Reinstalled Borderlands 2 to play while I wait for my money to refund. Great game. Handsome Jack is one of the greatest villains in anything ever. As funny as he is evil.

And he’s plenty evil.

Meanwhile, in the real world, I had my phone appointment with the urologist today.

I’d love to tell you his name, but it’s like six syllables long and there is no way I am going to remember one of these long East Indian names unless I see it written down.

He asked me a bunch of questions, of course. Seemed like a very nice fellow. Like the people in the hospital, way less concerned about my peeing blood than I was/am.

Funny me, but that seemed like a rather alarming sign to me.

Upshot is that he extended the prescription for my antibiotic for four more weeks, making for six weeks total. Plus he put me on the rather adorably directly named FloMax (known as tamsulosin at home) to improve my urine flow by helping my prostate relax and take a more philosophical approach to life.

Because that’s what he thinks the problem is : an infection in my prostate. Okey dokey. Guess that puts the final bullet in my “bladder stone” theory.

But there might be something in there, anyhow. Sometimes part of the prostate becomes inflamed from infection and forms a little (shudder) sac filled with (gack) fluid, and that ends up pressing on the urinary tract in much the same way a stone would.

That’s what my ultrasound on the 23rd will be looking for, among other things.

Plus I am going to get a camera shoved up my urethra at some point, and a different one (I assume) stuck up my butt.

Doctor H wants a really good look at that region. Not super happy about the peehole camera but I have had a catheter before and it’s not that bad.

Weird. But not painful.

Plus, of course, they are going to cut open my eyeball to fix my cataracts on the 26th. Starting to get nervous about that.

Which is fine. It’s just a stage along the way to my getting used to the idea. Joe, who has had the procedure, assures me that while I will be awake at the time, I won’t feel a thing and they use a bright light on the ceiling to make sure you don’t see the very sharp scalpel coming for your very tender eyeball.

Thank frickin’ god.

And that’s just two of my many health issues.

I still have no frigging idea why I am so weak, for instance.

One crisis at a time, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I realized I can’t make myself cry any more.

I used to have the knack of it. When my internal unprocessed stress level got high enough, I could will myself to cry and thus get the wonderful catharsis of crying.

But I can’t seem to do that any more. I try and I just end up concentrating on my breathing and doing my breathing exercises instead.

Maybe you need properly oxygenated lungs with no CO2 buildup to cry, I dunno.

But I miss it. Crying is awesome. It changes everything, Things that seemed insurmountable before are suddenly no big deal. Pressures you thought were going to kill you are gone. Problems that were driving you crazy suddenly have simple solutions.

It makes everything better, and all for the paltry price of bawling you eyes out for a little while. Seems like a bargain to me.

So I would like to get it back. But without the ability to trigger it at will, that means the only way to get it back is to do something quite alien to my nature : deliberately seek out sad things that will unlock my tears.

Women, being smart, do this all the time. They seek out sad movies or books or whatever because they know they will feel a lot better after a good cry.

Men are not so sophisticated, not even fags like me. Our reasoning is “Being sad is bad, Me no want be sad. So me no cry. Plus, if me cry, other men will make fun of me and destroy my value as a human,. ”

Or something like that.

There are things I know will make me super sad.

This, for one :

Pretty much all of The Fox And The Hound. The last ten minutes of All Dogs Go To Heaven, when they are talking to the little girl before going back to Heaven.

I must have non-animated-feature ones but right now my mind’s a blank.

As it stands now, I tend to only cry when the right thing comes along when I am in a very emotionally vulnerable state. A perfect storm of circumstances.

And that doesn’t happen too often. Obviously.

Perhaps if I search the corridors of my mind enough, I will find the new location for my waterworks and be able to let things out again.

Or maybe I will learn to stop being such a pussy and go watch something super sad.

Sure, crying isn’t fun, but the catharsis is. It’s like a painful and uncomfortable medical procedure that relieves a very painful and serious condition.

Or hell, like getting a rotten tooth pulled.

It seems like it must be a solvable problem. Might involve doing something that seems weird and wrong to me, but there are worse fates.

Or, I suppose, I could just keep pouring it out here in the form of spontaneous prosetry where the images flow like floodwater and I enter a trancelike state where I am even less connected to the world than usual as I transcribe my pain.

Kind of a clumsily indirect way of doing it, but it works for me.

Yeah. I’ll do more of that in the future.

More after the break.

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Let’s start here

It’s as good a place as any.

Lately, my recovery has felt like I am painstaking pulling icicle daggers out of my heart.

It’s a slow and delicate operation and each dagger removed has only the smallest of effects, but over time I start to feel better.

Still not the dramatic transformational spiritual event I long for, but without religion or at least some sort of mystic tradition, there’s little chance of that anyhow.

My mind follows the rules of reality and is thus quite limited in what tricks it can pull in order to try to heal itself.

Maybe I need to get really, really stoned. I dunno. It’s worked for others.

I could certainly use something to loosen up the strictures of my mind and allow for some kind of transcendent healing.

Some pot, maybe a microdose of acid, a truly good deep massage, maybe a light dose of a painkiller. All to get myself into a really loose, relaxed, receptive frame of mind that can make the necessary transformations of healing.

Right now, my rigid brain structure stands in the way, demanding things follow logically and make sense and all that useless bullcrap.

Look, Brutal Truth Machine, that’s all well and good for a certain quite potent kind of thought. My spectacular powers of analysis stem directly from that structure.

But you are not omnipotent. And your path does not and cannot lead to the answers I seek. So forgive me if I leave you behind and seek another way.

And I am not scared of your power any more, Brutal Truth Machine.

Because you work for ME.

Admittedly, it can seem strange to be afraid of the power of your own mind, but I think I have figured out the root.

It’s that my mind is inhumanly powerful. It operates beyond normal limitations and therefore my soul simply does not know how to handle it.

It’s not like I had any freaking role models.

I’m keenly aware of what a merciless robot that part of me can be. And I know it’s the reason I see things nobody else does, which is not as fun as it sounds.

Can be quite alienating, actually.

And having powers far beyond most mortals is inherently scary, at least to me. I feel like I live in Lilliput and have to always be very very careful where I put my feel lest I crush some poor peasant without even knowing it.

No wonder I mostly stay put.

I am sure that my sense of how much a danger I am to others must be grossly exaggerated. I mean, yeah I am super smart on many levels, but not to such an extent than puny Earthlings need to be protected from my terrible power.

And yet, when I try to interact with normal people, the vast gulf between where I am mentally and where they are makes it very very difficult and extremely confusing.

I am also hampered by my insistence on being genuine 24/7. I can’t just make up a phony persona I use to deal with mundanes. It’s just not in me.

So I guess I will just keep on being scary and weird.

You’d think I would be pretty good at it by now.

I will talk to you nice people again.

Been catching up on sleep. Ergo, I feel terrible right now.

The usual bullshit. Dizzy, disoriented, sore, and so on. And feeling very very lost.

So what else is new? I’m always lost. It’s a persistent state. I haven’t truly known what I am doing or where it’s at in a long long time.

Anyhow, the important thing to remember right now is that no matter how bad I feel, I am still the same shining amazing wonderful person I am when I feel well.

Feeling wretched is a transient state that in no way reflects anything about myself. I am awesome. I feel sick.

I’m an awesome person who happens to feel sick right now. It happens.

So take that, stupid mirror inside my soul that always reflects my surroundings. I know you are there to help me blend in and not be noticed like a chameleon, but you need to learn to quit doing that when it’s counterproductive.

I need to just be in the world. Exposed. No camouflage. It’s entirely safe now. The bullies are long gone. Nobody is out to “get” me. I can stop hiding and come out to play with the other kids now.

Repeat until believed.

And while I am reinforcing old affirmations, there is still nothing I am supposed to be doing. Nada. All I have to do is do my best to get better. That’s it.

There are things I would rather be doing. There are things I long to do. There are things my soul cries out to do.

And not being able to do these things due to my depression is painful and frustrating and makes me want to scream sometimes.

But that doesn’t mean I am a bad person for not doing them. Or that they represent some unknowable but vitally important incomplete task.

I am safe.

I am fine.

I am free to do as I please.

And right now, that means going back to bed.

---

Wretched Part 2

Feeling somewhat better after another bunch of sleep. Still pretty tired but no longer feeling quite as afflicted. Hopefully if I sleep a bit more, I will catch up in time to go out for my usual Sunday shopping and McD’s with Le Gang.

Right now, I would say the odds of my making it are around 5 to 3 against. I feel pretty tired and weak and sick and don’t have the wherewithal to pull myself together and get a shower and get dressed then go out.

But I steadily improve. Hopefully a bit more sleep will do the trick.

I have discovered a new and highly effective sleeping pill : Tylenol. Two Tylenol before laying down and I am way more likely to get some real sleep.

My theory is that it’s the relief from all my little aches and pains and general soreness that is the key.

Whatever the cause, it’s nice to have a sleep aid that is this cheap and safe.

The only downside is that I am ripping through my Tylenol supplies rather quickly. Oh well, like I said, it’s cheap.

Down I go again.

More after the break.

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After the disaster

I think I am either done with or almost done with this killer sleep cycle.

As I have said before, I have developed a sense of these things. There is a certain tension of the mind that slowly slackens as I get caught up on sleep, and it is almost totally slack now.

Still, there’s no guarantees. There have been times I thought I was done, but then it was like my brain discovered a brand new deposit of sleepiness and started digging.

Whatever. I have nothing on till Tuesday morning. I can sleep all I like. Nothing will be lost if I play less video games than I could have.

Repeat until believed. And then some.

I have been fanatically and compulsively maximizing my time playing video game with enormous zeal ever since I fell down the Skyrim hole.

And it’s not hard to see why. When I am playing a video game and listening to a video, I am not merely occupied. I am in the Zone. My mind is fully occupied and that creates a subtle but profound kind of joy in me.

It’s not something that has happened a lot in my life. I’ve always had way more consciousness than I knew what to do with.

I was the smartass kid that looked like he was not paying attention in class but then repeated everything the teacher said back to them when quizzed, after all.

How freaking obnoxious. No wonder nobody liked me.

I swear, I was not trying to be a dick. Apparently it just comes naturally to me.

Anyhow, I think in the past pre-internet days, good TV shows came close to keeping my mind fully occupied. Ditto for reading and video games, natch.

But nothing compares to the fullness of video games plus YouTube. It is no wonder that I am so hardcore addicted to it because when I am in that Zone, I am almost happy.

Imagine, me happy. What a concept.

So no wonder I want to maximize my time in that state. Wouldn’t you?

But it’s an addiction and it is taking my life from me. It has already robbed me of all my potential to get ahead in life by keeping me serving the addiction rather than pursuing my own long time self interest.

Depression makes thinking about the long term at all by keeping you in a state of constant dopamine starvation.

Starving animals do not think about tomorrow. They stay focused on whatever sources of dopamine they can find and fixate hard on those, leaving precious little mental potential left over for even thinking about tomorrow, let alone five years from now.

I have my dreams. I know where I want to go in life. I know there are many arenas where all my natural talents could shine like a newborn star. I know there are jobs out there which I could rock like a bitch.

But without that dopamine, I can’t get there.

So I just bury my head in the sand to shut out the horizon instead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am very scared by all my health issues.

Which is probably a good thing.

I feel like I am trapped in a burning building and desperately searching for a way out as flames roar and timbers crack and the heat makes me sick.

But the building is my body and there’s only one way out of that and that’s death.

And I’m not done yet, god damn it. I can’t die before I get to live. I have so many things I want to do once I overcome my depression.

My depression, of course, is eagerly awaiting my death. Like a cartoon wolf with a napkin around its neck and a knife and fork in its hands waiting for the prey species protagonist to come out of a cave, it can’t wait to finally finish killing me so that all this ridiculous bullshit can finally be over.

Oh, how it loves that word. OVER.

Because it’s the part of me that drives me to escape things rather than deal with them. It is the anxiety portion of my depression that ramps the fear up to a million in order to overwhelm me and makes me forget everything except getting out of the situation by the shortest possible route, long term consequences and my self-interest be damn’d.

It’s the fear of that goddamned wolf that keeps me cooped up in this life that is far, far too small for my expansive awesomeness. It’s what keeps me glued to this fucking computer in order to drive out thoughts of it.

Like I am trapped in a tiny cabin in the middle of the woods and there’s a psycho killer hunting me outside and all I can do is watch TV and tell myself “Don’t think about it, don’t look out the window, don’t stare at the door, just watch the TV and forget the danger you are in. ”

I know the danger isn’t real. But that doesn’t help, because I know it will continue to FEEL real and that makes it real enough to ME.

When the conflict is between what you feel to be true and what you know to be true, emotion will win most of the time. Even in a hardcore rationalist like myself.

Because it will always be easier for reason to create an illusion to justify the emotion than it will be for reason to overcome emotion.

It doesn’t matter if there’s a wolf out here in objective reality.

The one in my head is more than enough.

More after the break.

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A Fresh Summer Breeze

Story time! Into my childhood neighborhood moved Doctor and Mrs Beer. They were from South Africa and moved to my small town so he could practice medicine. Dunno much about the Doctor, but SHE was a pill. Very snooty and tended to looked down on others. That is SUPER incompatible with the culture of Prince Edward Island. Reverse snobbery is strong with us. So she was NOT WELL LIKED in my neighborhood. Ergo, when she decided mint would be the perfect plant for the borders of the little walkway in her front yard, nobody told her it was a bad idea. Well, of course, the mint kicked the shit out of her grass and took over. Her lawn was nothing but mint from curb to porch. Every time my brother would mow their lawn, it made the whole neighborhood smell minty fresh. Given that in the summer it usually smelled of rotting kelp (think salty farts), it was quite the improvement. She, of course, was mortified. We, of course, loved that.

another facebook anecdote

Not much to add to that.

If this keeps up, I’m going to end up writing a memoir.

I’ll call it “Memoir of a Very Boring Man”, just to pique people’s interest.

---

Back to fear

Winding all the way back, let’s talk about my being scared about my health.

I really don’t want to end up in the hospital full of tubes and tied to the bed to keep me from pulling out said tubes.

Because that would be what it took. Given that I am so leery of having anything covering my face and restricting my breathing that they have to use the minimalist oxygen mask on me, the one that only plugs into the nose, tubes down my throat are seriously not going to happen if I have anything to say about it.

It’s not something I can control. This is a deep down terror brought on (I think) my decades of untreated sleep apnea.

Smothering repeatedly in my sleep many times a night for thousands of nights has had a psychological effect on me.

It’s like some kind of horrible tortuous experiment.

So if I woke up and I had a tube of any kind down my throat, that fucker is coming out even if it kills me. The fear response would be too strong. I wouldn’t even be a conscious sentient being at that point.

Who knows, though. The right drugs might keep me mellow. Yay, drugs.

Still, Tubed Fru is my nightmare scenario and I am terrified of the prospect. I am freaking out a little just thinking about it.

And that’s good, because maybe I can use that fear to prod myself into taking better care of my health.

One can only hope. It’s a special kind of deeply personal despair to know exactly what you should be doing for your own immediate self-interest and still not being able to make yourself do it.

The emotion is there, somewhere. In theory. But it cannot penetrate depression’s thick oppressive blanket of numbness in order to produce action.

Might as well be shouting into a dialtone. It works just as well.

But maybe anxiety can actually help me for once. I’m going to treasure and protect and guide this flame off fear. I’m going to nurture it and help it grow big and strong and potent so it can save me from myself.

I am my own supervillian, it seems. I put myself into this melodramatic death trap and I am the only one who can get myself out of it.

But I am tied to the railroad tracks. I know the train will kill me if I don’t free myself and get out of the way, but my hands are literally tied.

Right now, all I can do is hope that medical science will be able to fix whatever happens to me before it kills me or leaves me in a state worse than death.

Either that, or the province hires someone to watch over me and make me behave.

Some foxes don’t do too well in the wild.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.