I am freshy awoken and have no frigging clue as to what to write about.

No idea. I am just plain not awake enough for this shit. I’m drawing a complete blank.

Better hope the caffeine in my beloved Diet Coke perks me up real soon.

Well, there is my eye surgery tomorrow. To take the cataract out of my RIGHT eye. That one is nowhere near as big as the one from my left eye, but Doctor Vaezi thinks it would be best to get it out too.

Plus then he can put the artificial lens in the right eye as well to make them match.

And this time I will take the drops for the whole six weeks IN A ROW, dammit. My left eye is still a little blurry. I might have fucked up my new eyeball permanently despite my having gone back on the eyedrops for it for the last two weeks.

At the end of this process, I could have had perfect vision. But no, my dumb ass had to miss the whole “six weeks” thing somehow, and here we are.

I am so goddamned tired of dealing with my own bullshit, ya know? I try so hard to get things right but there is always something I miss or misunderstand or just plain forget.

No wonder I keep wanting someone else to run my life. Clearly, I suck at it. I am just plain not mentally competent to manage my own care.

I wish I could just check myself into an institute for those who have completely failed to become grownups. You know, all us bruised and battered little baby birds who did not learn to fly on the way down after being kicked out of the next and just hit the ground at full acceleration instead.

9.8 meters per second per second is a harsh mistress.

And they wonder why we can’t get or hold jobs.

Anyhow, eye surgery.

Like I said before, totally not worried about this one. Been there, done that, got the eyedrops, and so on. It will be weird but not painful.

Probably won’t take as long due to smaller cataract, either.

But the fucking thing is scheduled for 7 am tomorrow morning, and that’s goddamned annoying. Means I have to get up at 6 am in order to leave at 6:30 am. Fuck.

That means that I will not be hanging out with Le Gang after we get back from shopping and McD’s. I will come home, finish my blogging, and go straight to sleep.

Bit of a bummer, that. I will try not to be too cranky about being up so early, let alone having to actually think and do stuff.

It’s funny how it lands on one of the few times of the day when I am almost always asleep. If it was at 9 and not 7, no problem, I usually get up and eat breakfast at 8 anyhow, so no big deal.

But no, it’s at 7 am. Son of a bitch.

Oh well. This time tomorrow it will be well and truly over. Come what may.

More after the break.

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My cup runneth over

Welp, I just wet myself.

I almost made it back to the apartment OK. I could feel the need to pee building as we chatted in the Ironwood parking lot. I knew I would need to go straight to the bathroom when we got home. I was monitoring the situation closely.

But I thought I had time. I thought it might be close but I would make it. The idea of not making it had not crossed my mind.

But I had forgotten that, while the blood and pain have not returned since Friday, one of my lesser urinary symptoms has stuck around and that is the tendency for my need to urinate to suddenly surge to dam-busting levels without any warning.

It hadn’t stuck in my mind that much because I spend the vast majority of my time within three or four steps of my toilet, so when the need struck, relief was close at hand.

But not this time. There I was, waiting for the elevator to take me to our floor from the parking level, when the tsunami hit and I was helplessly pissing my brand new pants.

What a christening.

Luckily, only Joe and Julian were there to witness this debacle, so my embarrassment was minimized. They know me, they love me, they know I have medical issues involving my waterworks, and so I don’t feel so bad about them seeing and knowing about it.

God knows, they know better than anyone what a mess I can be.

Still, I am angry at the world for its continuing war on my dignity. I just don’t get to have any, apparently. Between things like weeing myself and all the ways my usual state of absentminded confusion has of making me look like a total idiot and my spastic clumsiness always tripping me up (sometimes literally), it is no wonder that my preferred mode of existence is to sit still in front of my computer doing nothing productive at all.

Hard to humiliate yourself when you are completely alone and sitting down.

And fear of humiliation, rejection, and awkwardness is a huge factor in Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD). It looms so large for folks like me that we will warp our entire lives around our desire to avoid those negative social outcomes.

It’s absurd on the face of it. Yes, humiliation and rejection and awkward situations suck, and they hurt, but they are hardly the worst things in the universe. Certainly you shouldn’t shape your whole life around avoiding them.

But we do. I do. And I would love to stop, but I can’t. Not yet.

I’m not strong enough yet. I’ve got a lot more healing to do. I have a massive Wound to deal with before I can be free of these terrible fears.

Until the Wound is cleansed, there will be a weakness at my center that cripples me.

But once that Wound is cleansed, nothing is going to stop me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Watched this very interesting video recently :

Aside : I have such a crush on this dude now. He’s cute, he’s smart, he’s hot, he’s upbeat, and he teaches me science. FRUVOUS WANT.

Anyhow. This notion of cognitive ease leading to false feelings of truth really connected the dots for me, bringing a lot of things I already knew into alignment.

I love it when that happens!

For one thing, it provides a solid scientific basis for “the big lie”, the idea that Nazi motherfucker Goebbels popularized that any lie, if repeated loudly and often enough, will eventually be taken as true.

Why? Cognitive ease. It becomes the easier thought to think, and we have a very strong tendency to believe the easier thought to be true.

After all, in a very broad sense. the easier to think thought is often the true one because it’s the one that does not conflict with what we already know (which I have mentioned before) and it’s the thought which “feels good” to think both because of the cognitive ease and because it offers a way out of a potential state of confusion.

This solution is especially attractive to people who aren’t that mentally strong in the first place. That’s why it’s only the overly smart mutants like myself who can resist the effect.

We, the intellectuals, can develop the high level of metacognition needed to actually analyze and judge new information and either accept or reject it.

And I am sure we are not completely immune either. It’s just harder to fool us.

It’s not surprising that animals do it to, at least not to me, because I have seen a lot of nature documentaries where the documentarians got their closeup footage of actual wildlife by moving into the area and just… hanging around, being unobtrusive and nonthreatening, until the animals got used to them being there.

Being a somewhat timid and skittish animal myself, I can relate.

I can also relate to the notion of the grumpy, suspicious genius. I can totally believe that having the sort of temperament that views all new information as a potential bullshit grenade would lead to both a higher level of truth and a lower level of happiness.

In fact, that idea makes so much sense to me that I am immediately suspicious of it.

Cognitive ease, therefore, can also be used to explain why stupid normal people seem happier than us brainy types (and vice versa). Their life contains a far higher percentage of cognitive ease because they accept things at face value and only do the heavy thinking when they can’t avoid it.

This explains the correlation between intelligence and depression, I think.

However, one cannot simply choose to be stupider. I know this because I have tried. I can only feel safe when I have let my internal security team sweep the area for threats.

I can’t just send them home. I don’t have the faith in my own safety and the benign nature of reality and life in general I would need to let down my guard like that.

Perhaps in time, I can overcome my paranoia and learn to relax about life.

But as things are right now, I have no choice but to keep on being hostile and suspicious in response to a cold and malicious universe.

Which is pretty stupid, to be honest.

More after the break.

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I declare myself

Okay, sports fans, time for some serious big league declaration style affirmations!

I hereby declare myself pure.

I am not a tainted thing. Nor am I toxic, or repulsive, or diseased, or any other thesaurus entry for the idea of being inherently something very bad.

I am not filth. I am not bad. I am not rotten. I am not spoiled.

And I am absolutely, positive, and in all senses NOT DEAD.

Any notions I have ever had along these false lines have merely been bad attempts to explain how I feel by imagining these feelings to be some inherent part of me. A reflection of something about my true self.

But they are not. They are lies created by a simple chemical imbalance in my brain. They might be how I feel, but how I feel and how I am are very different things.

So I am pure. I am clean. I am innocent.

I am new.

Therefore I am as fresh and clean as the dew that greets the dawn. I am as pure as a river fresh from its source, and as innocent as a newborn calf. I don’t need to own any of the terrible things which have happened to me in my life and even if I did, I do not need to let these things cling to me for life and weigh me down and make me weak.

So I hereby declared myself flushed. All those toxic illusions are hereby banished from my body and my spirit and given freely to the river of life which will take them far, far away and then give them, in turn, to the might ocean, where they will disperse harmlessly into the ocean’s vast and voluminous reaches.

Begone, thou false foulness! I cast ye out. You were never real. You were just smudges on the false mirror of my illusory self. The real me has be alive and strong all this time.

And I am not a bad thing. I am a good boy, wonderful and lovable and clean, deserving of all the love and compassion and understanding and acceptance and encouragement and guidance and all the other good things of the world in the universe.

I am a good, sweet, kind, bright, adorable creature and did nothing to deserve the hateful things that have befallen me.

But most of all, those things have never changed who I really am.

The real me is pure and strong and clever and good and wholesome and clean.

The rest is just bullshit I will be better without.

Fuck you, false foulness.

You go back to the hell which spawned you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The whole deal. Blood in the urine. Intense fucking pain during urination. And then it just plain disappeared again.

This time, it started around 4:30 am. Got up after a nap, went to do the post nap pee thing, ow ow ow, also, blood.

If anything, this time the pain was worse. But like the previous time, it didn’t hurt for the entire time I was urinating. Just during approximately the middle of the event.

But holy fuck does it hurt. And unlike yesterday, I was awake and alert enough to think, “Here comes the pain!” every time I had to pee, which made it a little worse.

Knowing what is coming is not always a good thing. Especially when it is something you can’t do anything to avoid.

So clearly, something is up. Something that will probably flare up again tomorrow, if not sooner. And if/when it does, I am heading straight to the ER.

As in, ow ow ow, hey look blood, calling taxi NOW. Might as well catch this bullshit in the act, as it were. Beats the hell out of explaining what WAS happening to the nurse at triage and all the rest.

And it seems likely to recur at some point. If it happened twice, it will happen again.

The question, then, is WTF? As in, what the fuck is happening? When I was (briefly) talking to my therapist Doctor Costin this morning, he suggested that I am passing a stone, and that seems plausible.

I am a little hesitant to reach that conclusion, however, because that was what I thought it was the previous time I was pissing blood and the people at the hospital were all “Nope, not that, that almost never happens, forget about it. ”

Could they have been wrong? Perhaps if I had not gotten sick the day I was supposed to get that cystoscopy (aka camera up the peehole), I would know.

I was supposed to call to reschedule that. You know, on my own initiative. Of which I have just scads and scads.

Oh well. If/when I land in the ER again, maybe I can suggest they do it then. You know, while I am there and all.

Or at least I could do the rescheduling then.

Not looking forward to going back to the ER. It’s a very boring and stressful place. Boring because there is not much to do besides just lay there, and stressful because of all the bleeps and bloops and other noises.

Plus, for the vibe sensitive like me, the aura of tension and worry and stress from all the seriously messed up stuff an ER deals with all the time is both palpable and oppressive.

But if I gotta go, I gotta go.

At least this time, I am in less of a panic and therefore have time to think about what I want to bring with me to make the time more bearable.

A book, for sure. Maybe some snacks, although I would have to make sure I am cleared for those before eating them.

Hell, I suppose I could even bring myself my massager.

I mean, what the heck, might as well work on my back pain while I am there.

More after the break.

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Life’s little pitfalls

I ordered my usual beloved Garlic Aioli dip with my 7-11 potato wedges and got the Cheddar Habanero instead.

Dammit. I can’t even eat the Habanero one. Habanero goes right through me and isn’t exactly gentle on the way through.

And I am the only one in this household who eats even mildly spicy food, so it’s not like I can give the stuff to Joe or Julian.

And the thing is, I don’t even like the potato wedges that much. I find their spiciness unnecessary and irritating. The only thing that ameliorates that is, you guessed it, that Garlic Aioli dip.

The coolness of the mayo base of the aioli silences the spiciness and of course, replaces it with a pleasant garlic flavour.

Ketchup does not cut it. I am finding that out right now.

Kind of regretting ordering a cheddar smokie with nacho sauce now. My mouth is a riot of various kinds of spiciness right now. Most unpleasant.

Thing is, until tonight, the DoorDash menu for my local 7-11 (Cooney and Granville) didn’t have the Garlic Aioli on it. Hadn’t for about a month. So when it popped back up again, I was like, all right, it’s back.

Apparently not. I assume my delivery person can tell the difference between the two and that the only reason I got that Habanero crap was that they were out of Garlic Aioli.

Frankly, I am beginning to worry about my local 7-11. Things like this keep happening. And the other day, when I went in there in search of samosas, they weren’t simply out, they were vehement about having absolutely no samosas at all.

I suppose they might have had some thickhead being all “Get some out of the back, I can wait!”. But apparently samosas are just not a thing at that one any more.

And the staff seemed pretty tense too. Definitely a worried and stressed vibe.

Oh well, it’s not like I am worried they will go out of business. Franchisees may fail but franchises do not. If the current owner/operator of that 7-11 truly blows the goat on running it, another will take their place.

Meanwhile, I will be careful what I trust them with.

Not my dip order, that’s for sure.

Oh, and the icing on the crap-cake was that I forgot to order a Double Gulp of Diet Coke in order to get myself a new Double Gulp glass after the last one began to crack.

That was the whole reason I was ordering from 7-11 in the first place!

Oh well. I will be ordering in tomorrow night. I can try again then.

I find the Double Gulp plastic glasses (or are they glass plastics) last around a month of fairly heavy duty as my glass for both my water and my beloved Diet Coke.

Not bad for like $2.50!

I suppose I could get something more permanent and classy. But in the past, I have had trouble finding anything big enough for my needs that was both attractive and reasonably priced and not a huge freaking stein.

I’m a big guy with a big thirst and smaller vessels would involve far too much getting up for refills. That would be annoying as fuck,

Wow. I managed to write almost 600 words on my dumb little issue.

I am oddly proud of that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

When I got up this morning and took my usual morning pee, I immediately knew I was in trouble. Serious trouble.

Because peeing hurt. Wow did it hurt. Like someone was trying to rip a piece of my bladder out with red hot tongs, it hurt.

And there was blood. Not as much as when I went to the ER last time, around 7 weeks ago, but a highly noticeable amount.

Well crap. This was bad.

The next two or three hours were spent in the all too familiar cycle of having to pee every 15 minutes or so and said peeing being bloody and painful.

Slowly I gathered the will to go ask Julian to drive me to the ER. But I got up and left my bedroom at the exact moment he was leaving to go dog-walking.

As in, all I saw was the apartment door closing. Comedic perfection, really.

So then I decided I would ask Joe to drive me. But I didn’t want to bug him too early, so I kept dithering and hesitating.

Then, right before I was going to go knock on his door, I did a quick bathroom break and ….no pain, no blood.

Um. Well OK. I waited another 15 minutes and then went and took another pee. Still almost no blood and almost no pain.

So for now, I am assuming that whatever it was cleared up on its own. Since then, I have not had the frequent urination or the bladder pain, although I do still feel rather feverish and a tad off.

Eating lunch and hydrating seems to be helping on that score.

I was tempted to just go to the ER anyhow, but my social anxiety would not allow me to go if there was a serious possibility that they would not find anything amiss.

Rationality be damned, if I go and they find nothing I will feel massively guilty and foolish and face a tsunami of deep and terrible shame,

It’s easy to say “you should go, just in case” but for the likes of me, it’s not easy to do.

I will keep a close eye on the situation, of course. And if things take a turn for the worse once more, I will take a cab to the ER without hesitation.

And to think, I canceled today’s therapy session over this. If only I had know it was going to disappear like a fading frost.

In fact, normally, I would be highly suspect of any illness that cleared up so quickly, given my history of psychosomatic illness.

But while my mind is perfectly capable of turning anxiety into nearly any kind of pain, I am fairly certain that putting blood in my urine is beyond its reach.

At least I hope so, otherwise I do not stand a chance.

The good news is that my therapist is calling around 1 pm tomorrow to get a status update so hopefully I will get to talk to him then.

I have a lot of stuff about my recent thoughts of rage and evolution I want to discuss.

All in all, it’s been a weird and irritating day.

But at least it hasn’t been boring.

More after the break.

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Still doing OK

Everything seems to have gone back to normal.

Which is weird. The sorts of symptoms I had this morning, with the severe pain on urination and the blood in the urine stream, do not strike me as the sort of things that simply come and go.

If nothing else, it’s bad narrative structure. What kind of ending is that??

And yet, here I am, peeing at normal intervals and without blood or pain.

The deeply paranoid part of me doesn’t trust it. It’s too easy. Surely this is but the harbinger of something far more dire and drastic.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

Seriously, though, it’s not the first time something very weird has happened with my health and then just disappeared. It’s happened enough to make me wonder just what kind of strange mojo I possess.

I won’t go into details because quite honestly I don’t want to bring up the specific memories as they would likely freak me the fuck out.

But seemingly serious shit that ends up being strangely transient is not an unknown phenomenon in my life.

This is why I don’t immediately go to the ER. For all I know, whatever it is, no matter how seemingly dire, might vanish like it never happened.

Weird mojo indeed. I have a strange relationship with fate. I have had a lot of things happen to me that were unlike anything anyone else had experienced.

But not in a flat out implausible way. That would be a giveaway. That would end the tension. It’s always something normal in content but strange in the specifics.

Or maybe I just don’t know how to describe things that happen to me in a way that other Earthlings people can relate to.

I’m a bizarre creature but I mean well.

I can see the appeal of believing oneself to be an alien. Or a vampire, or a reincarnated dragon, or a secret fairy princess, or whatever.

Such a leap provides someone with an identity structure that works for them when the society they live in does not. It gives context and justification for their alienation and gives them, at long last, a tribe and a place where they belong, however unreal.

To me, these people are victims of a society that has failed them spectacularly. One of the best things one can provide for the loner nerds of the future is perfectly human role models that they can relate to.

Why do you think Star Trek is so popular?

Because it represents a future in which smart people are accepted and valued instead of alienated and ostracized and even bullied.

Where they are seen as having a valuable role in society instead of being viewed as pathetic misfits who will never get lai.

A future where things are calmer, more rational, more enlightened, more sophisticated, more socially advanced, more secure, and above all, a lot more fair.

No wonder so many of us want to move there.

I wouldn’t mind going there myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am not planning when I am going to start YouTubing.

I’m not planning on NOT doing it either.

Why? Because plans come with pressure and anxiety, at least for me. And they create a bottleneck in time where my evil side knows if it can just keep me too freaked out to do it at the appointed time, I will give up entirely and not try again for a long time if ever.

The only solution, then, is to refuse to plan. It will happen when it feels like happening. Probably some time soon, but not necessarily.

Waiting is fullness, as the Martians say in Stranger in a Strange Land. Things will happen when the energy is right for them and that’s fine.

No need to rush, or linger. Waiting will fulfill.

I know I am still feeling restless and bored and sometimes mad at the world. Thoughts like “I hate everything and everyone” and “life is stupid” and “I don’t fucking CARE” are fairly frequent in his haunted head of mine lately.

Fine. Bring it.It’s all part of my powering up to break on through to the other side.

I am on a collision course with my own evolution and gaining speed. And I don’t give a fuck if it hurts or if I go a little crazy from the crash.

Spiritual growth never comes easy. It comes from overcoming the very structure of your psyche in order to become fluid enough to assume a new, superior form.

That shit has got to come at a cost.

Remember, for every butterfly born, a caterpillar dies.

And I am very very done with being the world’s oldest caterpillar. I am quite willing to take the plunge and become whatever is next. I am incredibly sick of my life as it is right now and so really anything new seems pretty god damned good to me.

Time to give birth to my next form, then.

Or at least a whole new version of me. Fruvous 2,0, now with content instead of just a lot of aimless potential.

Or maybe it will be just another goofy ass thing I do that only my friends see and that I eventually get bored with and stop doing.

Even then, it would be worth it just for making my life better for a while. Giving me a feeling like I am doing something instead of just marking time till I die.

I will at least try a few things to promote my new content. I am well aware that my lack of self promotion is a major Achilles’ heel as a creator and that the way forward means going against every avoidant personality disorder instinct I have and actually doing things to deliberately attract attention to myself.

Just typing that gave me the cold sweats. As much as I want love and fame and money, the unhealthy part of me wants solitude, obscurity, and unlimited autonomy.

Victory, then, consists of letting the healthy side of me win.

Even if that means filling myself up with starry eyed dreams and not letting pesky old reality bring me down any more.

Turns out you can be way too realistic for your own good.

I’m as surprised as you are.

More after the break.

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Too little too late

This is gonna hurt.

As I think I mentioned before, I talked with my mother last Thursday. And for the most part I loved it. It always makes me so happy to hear her voice. For the half an hour or so we talked, I was a happy little boy who basked and preened in the glow of her warm, loving personality once again.

But then the very last thing she said before hanging up snapped me out of that mode and brought me to an entirely different place. A much darker place.

What she said was, “I’m glad I had you!”.

To which a dark and bitter voice in my head said. “Sure…NOW. ”

Yeah, NOW you’re glad you had me, when it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s easy to be happy you had me when it makes you feel good to say so. There is no problem expressing gratitude now that it is far too late.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I was not treated like you were glad you had me when I was a kid, Mom.

Because you weren’t. That’s the bald truth of it. Nobody was happy I was around. Not you, not Dad, not my siblings. Nobody.

To everybody that mattered, I was an intruder who forced himself on them and was therefore barely tolerated and then, only if I did my best to help everyone forget that I even existed at all.

And it pains me to no end to have to say it, Mom, but that includes you. Once you went back to work, you treated me like an embarrassing inconvenience like everyone else.

Not in words, of course. Heaven forbid. If you had actually expressed your impatience and contempt out loud, you would have had to admit it to yourself and hence take responsibility for it, and there was no way I was worth that kind of effort.

But it’s how you treated me, Mom. You and everyone else. The underlying assumption was that I understood that I wasn’t wanted or welcome so obviously I would do everything in my power to minimize my impact on your life.

And boy did I get the message. To this day I feel like I have no right to even exist. Like my very existence is a horrible crime and I should be ashamed to live and breathe and take up space because I deserve absolutely nothing.

Ergo, absolutely anything I get is by definition undeserved.

So yeah, I am glad you’ve stopped regretting having me. It beats the hell out of the alternative. And I will always love you as hard as I can, Mom. You are and will always be the number one person in my universe.

But i am still carrying the pain of all those years of being the unwanted child.

And nothing you can say now will make that pain go away.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Small, but meaningful.

Feeling a bit better today. Call it an upgrade from “overcast” to “partly cloudy”. I am still in a fairly shitty mood but there’s some sunshine and positivity in there too.

Summer is breaking across the land like a new dawn. It’s pleasantly sunny out, and I can hear lawn mowers at work. I can also hear some kids playing in the distance, which is a particularly welcome sound after such an insular year.

So that’s a cheerful thing. I cherish this time of the year because it’s sunny but not super hot yet, so it’s the only time I can truly enjoy summer without reservation.

Who knows, maybe I will even go outside on my own one of these days.

No promises, though, They are ultimately counterproductive,

Been giving a lot of thought to becoming a YouTube star^[1]. My highly enriched YouTube diet is increasingly dominated by single creator content and I can’t help but notice how what they do is entirely within my skill set and how to be honest, I could probably be a lot more funny and interesting than most of them.

And more controversial, given some of my opinions. Hey, love me or hate me, I don’t care, just as long as you watch me.

For a while I was dicking around about the subject because I couldn’t decide on a format or topic for a vlog of mine.

But you know what? I don’t need one. I’m the format. It’s all about me. My views, my style, my persona. my outrageous personality, my smartass attitude, and of course, my unbelievable and myriad talents.

Fuck formats, fuck topics. If I wait around trying to choose one of the sea of options out there, I will never get anywhere.

The only way this is going to work is if I jump in without looking and figure out what the fuck I am doing by doing it a bunch.

Kinda like this blog, really.

I have also been dicking around because I can’t find my webcam right now. But today I realized I don’t need it. My high quality (for the price) microphone is right here and works just fine, so I can record voiceover no problem, and use things like on screen text, pics, video clips, and so on to cover the video portion of the vlog.

Yeah that’s a lot of annoying work, but that too is a plus because it will encourage me to be succinct and get straight to the point,

After all, the shorter the voiceover, the fewer images I have to find or generate, right?

And I think I have what it takes to “make it”. I have personality, charisma, intellect, and a lot of interesting things to say.

Plus I am quite fearless and not afraid to speak my mind directly, which admittedly does not seem to be the average YouTuber’s approach but I am not in the game to be popular, I am in the game to be amazing, and if I have a brand one day my speaking unvarnished truth will be a big part of it.

There’s a lot of foggy thinking and unaddressed bullshit in the world that desperately needs my loving sarcasm and incisive wit to counterbalance it.

So who knows. Maybe some time soon, I will start making YouTube content again.

I could have a lot of fun getting into the good kind of trouble.

The bad kind could be a lot of fun too, but I will try to stay nice.

Then again, I have always wanted to be a figure of controversy….

Let me put it like this. I won’t even say something I do not mean. The sincerity of my convictions will never be in doubt.

My sanity, on the other hand…

More after the break.

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Sloth over gluttony

Forgive me if I already talked about this.

But lately, about a half hour before when I am planning to eat, I end up getting really, really sleepy instead,

So sleepy that I more or less don’t have a choice about whether or not to take a nap. So I end up sleeping for an hour to an hour and a half, making me late for my meal.

This throws off the timing of my day, meaning that either the next meal will be either be “early” in that it will be at its usual time but with less time elapsed since the previous meal than usual or “late” in that the time elapsed will be the same but the actual meal time will be late.

I honestly don’t know which is worse. “Late” just pushes the problem into the future. “Early” at least solves the problem, albeit via brute force.

What I really hate about this new wrinkle is that it robs me of my sense of control over these things, and seeing as I don’t have much control to start with, losing any of it is a loss I really feel.

Actually, it’s not so much control but the will to control I lack, but that is a topic to be discussed when I am less filled with disgust at my stupid life.

Yeah, still not in the best of moods. Still feeling tense and restless. I am hoping that I can let this feeling build until it gives me the energy and will to evolve to the next level of this sad little existence of mine.

I know the next step : become a YouTuber. Make stuff that is more compelling than this wall of text I produce every day and that I will put somewhere the general public might actually see it.

What I need is to find the courage to actually take that step and exit my cloistered realm and step out into the big bad world, even if it’s only via making videos.

Careful of that first step. It’s a lulu.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1] Or “YouTuber”, as they are called, which sounds to me like an insult hurled at a potato. “You tuber, you!” [[1]]

Today, on our “things I need to periodically remind myself” playlist, we have that old standard, “people do actually care about me”.

And they do. They really do. I know they do. All evidence points to this conclusion.

But I forget it all the time because I don’t feel it.

I am just too goddamned numb. Depression is a lot of things but I am convinced that at the deep down core, it is numbness.

That seems counterintuitive because depression makes you feel a lot of very bad things. But I would argue that those bad things all stem from being too numb to feel the good things in life like people caring about you.

So you feel utterly alone in the world even when surrounded by friends and family who love you. I know I do.

Maybe that’s because it is easier to handle being utterly alone than it is to face the fact that all the love you want is right there but you can’t feel it.

I mean, would you rather believe that nobody is calling, or that many people are shouting themselves hoarse trying to get through to you?

Being in many ways far more honest and realistic than is good for me, I know that people out there are trying to care about me and that while I don’t literally believe they aren’t there or don’t count, I don’t necessarily reflect all I receive either.

So to anyone who care about me and loves me and wonders if I even notice or whether it makes the slightest difference, know that I do notice and it makes a huge difference.

It’s just that my depression is like living on Pluto. The light from the sun barely reaches me at all and any signal you send is very weak by the time it gets to me.

I wish it wasn’t so. I want to be able to receive all the love in the world in high fidelity surround sound both so that I will be much happier and so that the people I care about know I value and cherish the love they give me.

But it’s just so damned cold and lonely out where I am. And I want to move closer to the sun and all my friends, but I am too damned scared of melting.

Being frozen is all I know. So no matter how much I yearn for the light and warmth of human closeness, another far sicker part of me equates melting with death and will fight that move like it’s a fight for survival.

And for my depression, it is. Closeness would kill it. It can only live if it can keep me identifying with it so that I think of damage to it as damage to me.

But I am not my depression. I want it to die, die, die so I can finally be myself again. If damage to it hurts me, then I am fine with that,

Bring it on. I will march through Hell to rid myself of these demons. Let the fires of Hell make me pure. Let them burn the pain away, Let them cleanse me of my filth.

A clean like that is worth any amount of pain.

Wait, what was I talking about again?

More after the break.

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A low boil

I’m in a pretty shitty mood right now.

I feel irritable and tense and restless and liable to snap. Everything hurts and I hate the world. I’m just glad I don’t have to deal with people for another 3.5 hours or so because I feel pretty grumpy.

And I feel crappy physically as well. That might well be the cause of my bad mood. I have aches and pains all through my body and I feel like my skin is on too tight. My head hurts and I am overheating from a vague but pervasive burning sensation.

In other words, I am rocking a body wide inflammatory response probably set off by a hay fever attack I had a couple of hours ago.

Despite my having a 24 hour Reactine in my bloodstream. One I took 12 hours ago.

You’ve failed me again, Reactine. God damn it. This is all a plot by the makers of Reactine to get me to shell out for the stronger but shorter lasting regular Reactine tablets that I would have to take like four to six times a day to get constant coverage.

You can have 80 percent coverage for 24 hours for a reasonable price or you can have 100 percent coverage for 4 to 6 hours for two limbs of their choice.

Plus an option on your spleen.

So right now, I feel like barking at strangers. I want to tell the world to go fuck itself then provide it a long and extensive list of both justifications and methods. I want to bash skulls with a red hot hammer until I feel better.

I want to leave a long trail of destruction and mow down any bullshit that confronts me.

Hopefully a couple of my trusty Tylenol pills will take the edge off. Man I am blasting through those fast. I bought 200 (two bottles of 100) not that long ago and I am going to need to buy more soon.

Oh well. They help a lot and they are cheap. Well worth the price, even if they go quick.

I don’t like being in this sort of mood. My determination to never take my bad mood out on others keeps me from externalizing it the “normal” way, despite my knowing intellectually that there are worse things than being cranky now and then and that said crankiness is probably a lot healthier than my internal total prohibition.

That’s great in theory but in practice I can’t imagine being able to live with having snapped at people just like my late father used to snap at us kids.

So I choke on my own venom instead.

There has to be some superior solution that lets my bad mood out without transferring my pain to those I love.

Maybe I should give up and become an atrocious internet troll. Use someplace like Reddit as a dumping ground for my most brutally honest opinions and see what kind of ruckus I can cause.

Bet I could cause a lot. I have a natural talent for pissing people off.

Could be a fun hobby.

But I think I will stick with Tylenol for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty crappy at the moment.

Physically, I have what the used to call an “ague”. In other words, my muscles ache. I have this dull hard ache throughout all the major muscles in my body as well as my wrists and other joints.

Feels like they have petrified just a little.

And emotionally, I’m at a low ebb. I feel disgusted with life and tired of myself and sick of this sad pathetic existence of mine.

So as you can see, correcting my internal narrative to be more positive is still a WIP.

I suppose no amount of good intentions and/or willpower can entirely overcome a whole lot of negative emotion.

And the thing is, I really am disgusted with my life and how it’s turned out and I am deeply frustrated with my inability to advance my own cause and move into a state of greater happiness and fulfillment because mental illness is holding me back

It rankles me on a fundamental level that I have all this power and ability just waiting to be used to make a better life for myself but it’s worse than useless because there is something deeply broken about my mind that makes said power impossible for me to access. My systems just can’t bear the strain even for a second.

And yet, it’s so easy to convince myself otherwise. To fall back into thinking that any minute now, I will give my head a shake, snap out of it, and get on with life.

Yup. Aaaaany second now.

And of course, failure to do so proves how much I suck. That’s standard depressive bullshit thinking . But it masks a deeper, darker, denied truth, because it hides the brutal truth that there is literally nothing I can do against this illness.

No act of will or summoning of courage and resolve will let a blind man see or the lame walk. Nothing I can do with this mighty and massive mind of mine will overcome the terrible Wound I carry inside me. I can’t just crush it with overwhelming mental force like I do everything else.

I am truly and deeply limited by my illness. And that’s the dark truth I work so hard to deny. I am utterly trapped in this tiny life of mine and it’s high time I faced that fact.

And learned to work within my limitations instead of simply ignoring them like I do with so much of life. If I am going to get closer to the life I want to lead, it will be with the mind I have now, crippled though it may be.

And that means no longer waiting for a healthier mind that might never show up. Or if it does show up, it will be far too late to do me any good.

No more waiting for my crippled legs to magically start working again.

Time to grab a goddamned cane and learn to hobble.

I may not get there fast but at least I will get there.

More after the break.

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The kidneys of the soul

Clearly, I have a need to vent my pent up negativity occasionally.

Luckily, I can do so here. I have the platform and the audience (thank you so much for reading) and the verbal skill to pour my negative thoughts out in words on this blog of mine instead of having to work them out some other, unhealthier way.

Like I think I have said before, I am positive that have I been given a more working class childhood, I would have become one of those guys who goes to bars and picks fights on the weekends.

I might not know why I do it, but I would do it.

Anyhow, the fact that I accumulate this toxic gumbo of self-loathing, rage, bitterness, and raw aggression that I need to void like a bodily function onto to page now and then strikes me as both inefficient and unhealthy.

Sane persons must have healthier ways of dealing with this stuff. Some way of working this stuff out via physical activities and/or talking with friends and/or some other healthy thing a degenerate like me can scarcely imagine.

Religion, maybe? I am pretty sure some people are helped by it.

But me, I don’t have those healthy organs of the soul. The only way I know of process my emotions is by writing about them.

Like I always say, in order to be an artist, there has to be something wrong with you. Something that keeps you from expressing your emotions another way.

At least this moment has provided me some perspective on the nature of my mood cycle. Clearly, any attempt to “stay positive” is doomed to failure because eventually the unfiltered toxins of my unwholesome spirit will overwhelm any positive resolve and drag me down into depression no matter what I do.

The key, then, is to stop trying to fight the cycle by trying to stop it in the happy phase, and instead learn to accept that my life will always cycle between the light and the dark, but this doesn’t necessarily mean being happy then sad.

It can instead simply be a cycle between energized and dormant. Falling energy levels do not have to be interpreted as a slide into depression. They can instead be viewed like getting sleepy after being active – a normal natural thing that can actually be quite pleasant as long as you accept it and structure your life to accommodate it.

After all, we all get sleepy every night but most of us don’t interpret that to mean we are dying on the inside.

We know it is going to happen and that it is perfectly normal and that we will get sleepy, sleep for a while, then wake up and go on with life.

That seems like the wise path to me. Ergo…. ahem….

I hereby declare that I will no longer fight my mood cycle and will instead relax into it and learn to love every little step along the way.

And now, I will accept that I need a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s still sort of Spring, right? Late, late Spring? Summer doesn’t officially start till the Summer Solstice in June, right?

Regardless of the fact, I have been doing some Spring cleaning. This morning, I grabbed a garbage bag from the drawer in the kitchen and started clearing off this desk of mine so I will have some goddamned room for a change.

I have the garbage bag for garbage (natch), the paper bag from last night’s McD’s for paper, and whatever bowl is currently sitting empty after my latest meal for all the tiny little bits and pieces of organic matter left over from hundreds of meals.

There’s more of those than I thought there would be but it makes sense in retrospect.

It feels good to clean. Makes me feel like I am getting something done, true, but even more importantly, it makes me feel like I am making things better.

I have felt like I had no agency for so long. Like there was nothing I could do to make my environment more pleasing to me so I had no choice but to push it out of my mind and ignore the madness and chaos of my environment and live in literal filth while focusing on the world inside my computer extra hard.

With this computer, I can escape the reality of my surroundings. Or so it seems. But no matter how deep I go into this compu-box of mine, I am still here in the real world living in a human pigsty in a body that is falling apart.

Those two things might be related.

I mean, no wonder I pay so little attention to my surroundings. They’re awful!

And yes, folks, I see the relationship between my ignoring my surroundings and them being totally awful.

That is, in fact, the fundamental ironic cycle of my self-defeat. I ignore things because they are unpleasant and it would take work to fix them, so they get worse, so I ignore them all the harder, so I end up in the fix I am in today.

Well fuck that. I can change things. I can make things be more to my liking. I can control my environment and my life.

I can make myself happier.

Repeat until believed.

So yeah. I will clean this desk off. Not all at once, but in bits in pieces here in there. That way, I can dart out of safety of my addictive distractions, get some cleaning done, then slip the tit back in my life and return to the safety of oral retentive bliss.

All depressives are addicts. Only the drug varies. Whether it’s booze, gambling, or video games, every single one of us has something we have fixated upon as our source of reward center stimulation

Of course we self-medicate. We live in an untenable mental state caused by a lack of dopamine in our brains. This mental state is one of intense craving akin to that of a starving animal or one dying of thirst.

So if we find something that stimulates our reward center and hence triggers a release of that sweet, sweet dopamine, we are going to fixate on it hard, especially if it takes relatively little effort to do.

Hence, we are all addicts just struggling to get to something like normal. We will fixate hard on whatever lets us feel at least somewhat better, whether that is heroin, gambling, or hardcore crochet.

Or, in my case, video games.

And all these addictions can kill you.

Some are just a lot faster than others.

More after the break.

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More about junkie depressives

The thing about addictions is that they hollow you out.

Not all at once, of course. That would be obvious and you would fight it and win.

No, it hollows you out via a long, protracted series of tiny compromises.

“It won’t hurt anyone if I stay here for another couple o’ drinks. The kids are in bed by now anyhow and my wife has her crosswords. It’ll be fine. “

“So my mother won’t lend me any more money. Well FUCK HER, I never loved her anyway, and she never loved me. Besides, I have plenty of friends who STILL LOVE ME and care whether I am ALMOST DYING or not. ”

“Mom and dad will never miss that old wooden cigar box, and i bet I can get 50 for it easy. Then it’s off to the Golden Lasso Casino to have some fun! And then I can pay them back from my winnings. I’m sure they’ll forgive me. They always have before!”

“I should probably do things to look after my environment and my health. But that would mean less time playing video games. So obviously not. Guess I will just die, then.”

I am one hollowed out dude.

I wasn’t always this way. Before I fell down the Skyrim hole, I did lots of things other than play video games. I would hang with the fuzzies on Tapestries while surfing the web, I would play around with music and video, at times I was even productive.

By my standards, anyhow. I made things. I put them online.

Some people saw them. My friends. So, technically….

But then I feel down a deep dark hole called Skyrim and lost my mind. I went three days without eating or sleeping. I spent all my time playing Skyrim. It ate enormous chunks of my life that I will never get back.

And the fact that mods let me indulge my dark fetishes was a big part of that. When you have no other way to express certain desires, anything that lets you do that is going to be almost an object of worship.

Eventually, I manages to crawl out of the depths of that hole. I eat and sleep now. I have social habits. I go get my groceries most Sundays.

But I still feel the overwhelming urge to maximize my time playing video games, no matter what the cost.

And given how sick i am getting, the cost is getting pretty fucking high.

So I am going to exercise my resistance muscles. Spend some time in between blogging and video games just chilling on my computer.

Maybe doing some cleaning. Maybe just watching YouTube vids and chatting with the fuzzies. Maybe working on music or video.

Or maybe trying to get really, really good at masturbating.

Hey, it’s the only cardio I get!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Like, at all. Not anymore.

Did the Covid vaccine thang today. Was nice to see Kwantlen again. Except…

Entered via the North Entrance, and that meant going up two flights of concrete steps.

And patient readers know I do not get on well with those.

It was a nightmare, quite frankly. I had to haul myself up each step by using both hands on the guardrail. My knees are so stiff now that it was like I was on stilts.

And even then, I teetered dangerously on the top step.

And my knees throbbed dangerously, nay threateningly when I finally made it to the top.

So that’s my new reality. Stairs are a no go for me. Period. Just plain not an option. I am, in fact, a cripple, and that’s something I will just have to get used to I guess.

Won’t be long before I need crutches or a wheelchair, I suppose. Hard to know which one of those is worse.

Wheelchairs are cumbersome, they draw attention, they are tricky to pilot for a klutz like me, and they are a lot of work for your arm muscles.

On the other hand, crutches hurt. My underarms are not meant to bear my weight, god damn it. And they are not exactly klutz friendly either.

I mean, I’m clumsy enough with my actual limbs, and they’re on my body all the time.

Oh well, More reason I should be taking better care of myself I suppose.

Emphasis on should.

He’s hoping my depression lets me some time soon.

At least I got my jab today. Hooray for that. So far, the only side-effect I am feeling is that I think I am running a bit of a fever.

I have that “glowing hot in the infrared” feeling. No big deal.

I have a fan. I have beverages. I’m ready.

Unfortunately, I don’t get my second jab until four months from today. Four freaking months until I am fully vaccinated!

In the US, it’s like 20 days.

But apparently this is going on all across Canada, because according to my mother (who called yesterday – eeee! ), it’s the same on good ol PEI, too.

Her theory was that it was because they are prioritizing making sure everyone gets their first shot ASAP.

Makes sense to me. We are (shame of shames) lagging behind the Americans in that sense, and that is the sort of thing that really motivates Canadians.

(whispering) We can’t let them get ahead of us on health care god dammit!

But it sucks to have to wait so long. I want to be fully vaccinated now, god damn it. The world is very clearly dividing into the vaccination haves and the have-nots, and every middle class bone in my body demands that I be a have.

I want to go to restaurants. I want to throw my mask away. I want to feel smugly superior to anti-vaxxers for more than intellectual reasons.

Feeling smugly superior to the unenlightened is a major motivating factor for us liberal creative intellectual types.

Oh well, maybe when enough people have their first shot they will revise their timetable.

At least I am 74 percent immune now!

Big freaking woop.

More after the break.

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More game impressions

First there’s Portal Knights, a rather fun blend of Minecraft-style sandbox play and a classic RPG where you kill stuff.

On paper, that doesn’t sound like my kind of thing, but somehow this game really pulls it off in a way that I enjoy.

For one thing, I am not being just plopped down in the aforementioned sandbox and left to play on my own. There are quests, dungeons, activities, missions, and a plot.

Patient readers know that I never played in actual sandboxes as a kid. I never saw the point of it. Then again, I totally missed the point of a lot of a normal childhood.

But this amount of sandbox I can handle. Sure, you can dig up various resources and make stuff out of them, but I am not required to deal with block stacking in 3D in order to make buildings, and that’s a huge plus for me.

Next we have Wargroove. Meh. Pretty standard military strategy game. Maybe a bit more pizazz than usual. Moving on.

Then there is Brutal Legend, which is FREAKING AWESOME.

It’s a heavy metal saturated action game and it’s got me hooked.

In fact, it made me its bitch when during the first fight in the game, this started playing :

And I was like, “NO FUCKING WAY!”.

But yes, way. So very fucking way. All the fucking way.

The game has a live-action intro with Jack Black, and the art style makes it feel like you are inside a heavy metal album cover. Everything about it is very, very metal.

It’s not without fault, though. It involves a shitload of driving, which I did not sign up for.

I came for the axe wielding mayhem and that’s it, dammit.

Then came Death Squared. Puzzle game involved sliding cubes around. Yawn.

It really should have been called Death Cubed. Guess that’ll be the sequel.

Then came Crusader Kings Complete. A STULTIFYINGLY typical medieval strategy game in the tradition of Nobunaga’s Ambition.

That shit is basically Fruvous repellent.

After that there was Pinstripe, an arty, spooky game where an ex-priest has to travel through Hell to save his daughter.

Didn’t get that far. Got stuck on a puzzle during the intro and realized I was just not invested enough to Google a solution or work on it any longer.

It seems quite beautiful, but I am simply not in the mood for an art game.

Then came Teleglitch : Die More Edition. An interesting take on very low res gaming but that shit just gave me eye strain, and that’s kind of a dealbreaker.

Then, after that, there was Dwarfs!? You control a dwarf colony and try to lead it to glory, in other words gold.

I might come back to that one. Seems potentially fun. But not sure I have the room in my brain right now to learn a system heavy game.

And then there was Dead In Burmuda, a somewhat crude survival game where you control the eight survivors of a plane crash on some island.

Presumably not actually Bermuda. That has like….civilization and shit.

Not my cuppa anyhow. It’s so crudely made that it makes me sad.

And finally there is Bury Me My Love, a visual novel (ick) about some Middle East stuff and a family and it all takes place over text chat and I could not care less.

And that’s the roundup. A few keepers and the rest were fun to try.

There’s a few bits of non-game software left in the bundle. I’ll cover them another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.