Oh right, yesterday was my 48th birthday.

Didn’t do anything to celebrate it besides buying a crazy huge bundle of fairly high rated games via Humble Bundle.

20 decent games for $30 and the proceeds go to help Covid research.

That’s $1.50 a game. Not bad.

First one was Into the Breach, which is a turn based military strategy game. Likelihood of continued play is low. I like turned based strategy but I’m not in the mood for it.

Next was Baba Is You, an incredibly original and fun puzzle game where manipulating the rules of the game is part of the game. Replay potential 100 percent. I got stuck after the first few puzzles and had to look for hints because the puzzles involve the sort of nonlinear thinking I have always struggled with, but the game is so dang fun that there is no chance I am going to give up on it.

Bioshock Remastered came next. An updated version of a classic story-rich FPS from long ago. I tried the original long ago but didn’t care for it. But this time I am determined to learn to enjoy the thing because so many people rave about it.

So far, the game is unusual and very chaotic. I can see why it turned me off before. Lots of noise and strange lighting and alarms going off.

But also a lot of brilliant atmospheric touches and one heck of a setting. So, I will push myself through the game some more and see if things get a little less crazy eventually.

And then came, believe it or not, Euro Truck Simulator 2. Not a game I would have chosen like EVER but it was included in the bundle so I thought what the hell, I will give it a shot.

Unsurprisingly, it was not for me. Couldn’t even get out of the parking lot.

Next was Hyper Light Drifter, a somewhat 80’s inspired adventure game with 16-bit graphics and a “crashed on an alien planet” storyline.

So far I am iffy on it. It has a lot of potential and excellent music (very space-y and synth-y) , but on the whole it does not really engage me.

Left me cold, to be honest.

I will probably give it another chance to grab me.

Then came The Witness. First person perspective, 3D world, puzzles to solve strewn about various places. Not really my cuppa. Baba Is You has more of my kind of puzzle.

There’s even a verbal component.

Finally in the series of the ones I have actually installed and tried comes This War Of Mine, a war game about surviving as a group of civilians.

An interesting approach. But it has zero tutorial and expects me to control three characters all at once and combined with the understandably bleak setting I am pretty sure I won’t play it much.

Those are my impressions so far. Right now I have Titan Quest Anniversary Edition, an update of a game from 2001, downloading.

It looks promising. I am hoping it’s like Baldur’s Gate or similar. I have enjoyed the heck out of games of that genre when the writing is good and the system is OK.

Woops, forgot to talk about my birthday.

Oh well, like anyone gives a shit.

More after the break.

---

I’m 48 and I don’t care

Sung to the tune of Monty Python’s “The Lumberjack Song”.

Part of me – the part that has not yet yielded to bitterness and cynicism – wants me to have been all “yay me!” about my birthday, but meh.

I guess it’s true what they say : the older you get, the less they mean to you,

I mean, it’s hard to get excited about your birthday when you don’t even get cake.

Well, I suppose I could have baked one myself, with Splenda. Been meaning to get back into baking for myself. It would give me something more active to do than play video games and it would save me money on sugar free desserts while allowing me to have a much greater variety of dessert choices.

Plus, cakes are easy.

The main stumbling block is that damned oven. It has this fun quirk where it lets me preheat it and put something in to bake…. but this time the heat doesn’t come back on.

And the only way to get it to come back on is to thump the stovetop real hard until you hear it click.

And that’s pretty stressful. I get pretty emotional when I cook and that doesn’t help.

It presumably could be fixed. I assume there’s just something wrong with the little switch that turns the heat off when the oven door is open.

How hard could that be to replace?

Oh, and speaking of video games, I’ve tried Titan Quest now and I love it. It’s a Diablo-type ARPG and it’s set in an ancient Greece where all of the Greek mythology is true.

Yes, that means that the Titan in the title refers to the actual Titans, the ones that Zeus and his children slew.

I’m as surprised as you are.

In this version of events, Zeus merely “banished” the Titans, because otherwise they would not be around to be villains.

And that bugged me a little but whatever.

But now they made a villain out of Nessus the centaur, a being so heroic he got made into a goddamned constellation!

Oh, and apparently satyrs are evil now. Satyrs! Happy horny humpy satyrs who do nothing but hump nymphs and fauns and each other all day!

Sigh. Oh well, still a kickass game.

Plus I tried an absolutely nutzoid game called Superhot where the gimmick is that it’s an FPS where time only moves when you move.

The result is kind of like being inside a slow-motion replay of an action scene. In many ways, it’s more like a puzzle than a shootout.

That said, it’s kinda fun. I’ve always wondered if it would be fun to have all the time I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do, then do it, and the answer is yes!

And I still have ten more games to go!

I bought myself one heck of a fun present.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

I am in a fairly good mood right now.

Been going through some serious emotional turbulence lately. Depression, sadness, anger, frustration, and so on.

Fine. Let’s do this shit. Set the controls for the heart of the sun, bitch.

One incident stands out : last night, I woke up from a nap around 11:10 am and got out of bed, and the strangest sensation filled me.

It was like deep within my soul, an ancient tomb cracked open and unleashed the foulest of miasmas, the breath of a thousand corpses, into my spirit. I felt this heavy, oppressive, and altogether unhealthy kind of depression flood into me and try to drag me down to Hell.

It was freaky deaky baby.

This happened once before, and under the same circumstances : I had just gotten out of bed between 11 and midnight, and at midnight I would be Zooming with Le Gang.

I think that has something to do with it. The Zooming. I think in preparation for it certain doors are getting opened inside me and there’s some nasty, nasty stuff locked in there.

I fought this awful new presence on like an instinctual, primal level, like I was fighting to live, and ended up holding my ground until it retreated.

I can’t say I am entirely unhappy that it happened. It was kind of exciting. My depression has never been nearly that dramatic before.

I could handle that happening now and then.

Plus, I feel that this was a new level of processing old emotions for me. Far more potent and visceral and above all efficient way of burning through the old junk that takes up so much space and energy in my mind than all this laborious stringing together of words.

Like I have said before, so far I lack the capacity for transformation that others seem to possess. No sudden transcendent (r)evolutions for me.

I am too damned stable for my own good.

But I may get there eventually. These odd hauntings are a good indication of that. Every day, my grip on my old school pseudo-rational ego dominant ways gets a little looser and I open my mind up to a greater existence just a tiny bit more.

So who knows? Maybe some day soon, I will finally free my mind enough to allow it to do make the huge and completely irrational changes it needs in order to heal.

There’s nothing wrong with not knowing what your mind will do next. I can open my consciousness up to more direct influence from the subconscious. I can teach that oversized intellect of mine to get the fuck out of the way and stop trying to control everything and make it predictable all the time.

I can learn to like surprises.

Well, or at least not to hate them so much.

Recovery is, after all, a process. I’m still trying to figure out this whole id thing.

I might have to go crazy for a little while in order to get the hang of it.

But don’t worry. I’ll be back. Some day.

More after the break.

---

How fares the spirit?

I’m going to talk some more about the video game Spiritfarer tonight.

I’ve been playing it for a couple of weeks now, and it is an extraordinarily original and wonderful game. I guaranteed you’ve played nothing like it before, and it is wonderfully gentle, funny, charming, and fun.

Also emotionally grueling. But we will get to that.

In it, you play a girl named Stella who takes the job of ferrying spirits to the Afterlife through something called the Everdoor after Charon gets fed up and quits and tells you you are his replacement.

So you don’t exactly volunteer. The role is thrust upon you. But whatever, it’s fun.

The game consists of piloting your boat around the world of the game and picking up various spirits, who all take the form of anthropomorphic animals (whom you can HUG!), and taking them through their individual final tasks before they are ready to go through the Everdoor and on to Whatever’s Next.

That’s my term, not the game’s.

And at first, I went about this task cheerfully. I have always had an affinity for death and end of life scenarios, so this was not morbid to me, it was sacred, and I felt lucky to be entrusted with so tender and important a task,

I would make an amazingly good funeral director.

So I completed tasks for my new spirit friends, and when the time game, I took them to the Everdoor and saw them through it, tears in my eyes but happy they were moving on to the next life.

But that took a toll on me. One I didn’t realize at the time. And at some point, the worm turned, and I started really dreading doing my duty.

Because it sucks to send your friends away all the time. And the game doesn’t help because as you go, the deaths get subtly sadder.

There is always a period at the end where you are paddling them the last little distance to the Everdoor and they talk about their life and how they feeling leaving it.

Those get more tragic as one goes.

And if you’re a sensitive soul like me, eventually it starts feeling like you are killing them yourself. You aren’t – they died before you even met them.

But you’re the one making them go away forever, and that feels sort of the same.

So this sweet and gentle game is taking a heavy emotional toll on me. Not that I mind – it is quite rare that a game engages me on an emotional level like this.

But in a sense, when I said before that I felt like this game was made for me, I had no idea how true that was.

Turns out, that including my connection to death and how emotional I get about things like saying farewell to life.

Oh well. Maybe it will help me learn to cry again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s just not fair.

Why can’t I unleash my mighty talents upon the world and use them to make a name for myself as well as a living? I have all this well honed talent chomping at the bit to get out there and show the world just what a shiny sparking wonder I am.

I can feel the powerful forces inside me. I know I have the potential for greatness. I know I could be so much larger than life, especially my current sad life.

I could be the sort of person that really makes a difference. And I would do it through the power of my words. I would be a public intellectual extraordinaire, and would shape how people think for generations to come like the true visionary I am.

The world needs my truths.

And why can’t I find love? I deserve a boyfriend/husband as much as anyone else. And I could be so very very good for the right man.

I could be loving and affectionate and sympathetic and understanding. I could listen to his day with genuine interest and wait on him hand and foot not out of submission but out of devotion. I would want to make him happy as he can be. I could be his soft landing after a hard day and his safe space in a hostile world.

I could make the right man very, very happy. And in turn, he would just need to be strong enough to make me feel safe and secure, and smart enough to value me for the wonder that I am.

And why can’t I move in a larger social world? I have nothing to be ashamed of. And I’m a hilarious and adorable type dude whom people love when they get to know me. Add to that the fact that I am a fascinating conversationalist with many unique and well developed opinions and I could be an asset to any kind of social gathering.

Plus, I am a genuinely nice person!

In other words, I have everything I need in order to make my dreams come true by stepping out onto the world’s stage and showing them what I got.

I have so much magic in me just waiting to be brought to life.

All that stands between me and my dreams is that goddamned Wound of mine. Just one lousy psychological injury from my ancient history is holding me back and keeping me from evolving to my next, far healthier form.

Well this too can be overcome. I will grow too large and strong for these brittle chains to bind me. I will shatter my shackles and crush my confines and destroy this cell of mine so thoroughly that retreat is no longer even a concept.

I can feel it coming. My transcendent transformation. My holy evolution. Soon, and at long last, I will move on to the next phase of my life and leave this cozy shell of mine behind for good.

Watch out world, because I’m coming out.

More after the break.

---

I fucked up

So it turns out I fucked up in a way that seems easy to avoid in retrospect.

Had my appointment with Doctor Vaezi, my ophthalmologist, today. The purpose of the visit was to prepare for the operation on my right eye scheduled for the 31st.

While I was there with the Doctor, I asked a question I knew was quite fateful : was I supposed to be using my eye drops this whole time?

Because I quite stupidly stopped after about a week.

Turns out, yup, I was supposed to be using them for six weeks. If someone told me that at some point (and they probably did), I totally forgot it.

This explains why the eye that was operated on is still pretty blurry. It’s because it’s still swollen from the operation. The drops were supposed to fix that.

Well I can only resume taking them now and hope I haven’t fucked up the Doctor’s good work. He did not seem to think I had, and said that if the drops don’t fix the swelling, he can fix it with an injection like the one he did in my last visit.

So I probably didn’t fuck myself up too bad. Which is a relief.

Of course, I still hate myself.

Can’t be helped. Finding out my suspicions of my own stupidity were well founded unleashed the expected maelstrom of self-loathing and internalized rage.

How could I be so stupid, it’s obviously the wrong thing to do in retrospect, I am such an idiot, I am not competent to care for myself, no wonder I am dying, and so forth and so on ad nauseum.

I have buckets of that shit sloshing around in head right now and there is nothing I can do about that except try not to fight it because fighting emotions is largely futile and the best way to get rid of them is to let them run their course.

But I am not listening to all that nonsense. Nothing really has changed. Yes, I am chagrined to know that I bobbled another play but I am not surprised and refuse to let the self hate penetrate my ego fortress.

Because the truth is that I am a very sick man. I do my best to look after myself as best as I can, but my illnesses make that very difficult and that means I don’t do that good a job of being my own caretaker.

Maybe things would be different if I was not so numb to my id and the motivational machinery it is attached to.

On paper, you would think the desire to save my own life and not end up intubated would be motivating enough.

But it ain’t. I’m busted up inside and part of me wants to die. I am a supernatural scientist who is more than passing strange and not even of this Earth, and I do not function by the rules of nature.

So will I save myself? I have no idea.

I hope I do. Mostly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I have an appointment with Doctor Vaezi, my ophthalmologist, in preparation for my second cataract operation later this month.

That would be the one on my right eye. It does not have anywhere near as much cataract as the left one did, but it still needs fixing.

And honestly, I am looking forward to it because then my eyes will match. Having one crystal clear eye and one still kind of wonky eye hasn’t been a huge problem but it does making reading from a book a little harder.

I never know how far away to hold the book, I spent most of my life practically literally burying my nose in books in order to be able to see well enough to read and now that does not really work any more.

Plus I look forward to being calm and relaxed like the people for whom it was their second operation I met in the waiting room when I went in for my first.

Those people were telling us first timers that we would be fine and that it wasn’t that bad, which I now appreciate.

But at the time I kind of resented them. Smug bastards.

Sorry about that, folks. I look forward to joining your ranks.

Because now it’s no big deal to me. I know exactly what to expect. I know that I will bolstered by wonderful Ativan in order to keep my nerves calm. I know the experience will be pretty trippy but not particularly painful.

And I know I will be making with the eye drops for a while after. No big deal.

I like eye drops a lot more when I am the one putting them in. Way more predictable.

Then this Friday, my turn for the jab finally comes – I get my first Covid shot at 1 pm at good ol Kwantlen.

So not only will I be joining the Partially Vaccinated club, I will get to revisit the place I spent two semesters taking courses to give myself a recent education history so I could get into VFS.

I can’t say my time at VFS was blissful but it was okay. Looking back, I spent most of my time there having a low level panic attack, just like with VFS, so that kind of prevented me from forming a lot of warm fuzzy memories of academic enrichment and student camaraderie and so on.

I was just a robot who went to school there too, more’s the pity.

But I enjoyed my courses, one linguistics course of doom aside, and I liked my professors. There were some good peeps there.

And I am very eager to get my immunization started. It’s clear that now that the FDA said the fully vaccinated don’t have to wear masks or socially distance that we will rapidly have a two tiered society where the vaccinated have a lot more fun.

I just wish I was getting the Johnson and Johnson jab so it would be all done with the one vaccination instead of getting one shot, waiting 20 days, and getting the other.

I want to be immune NOW, god dammit.

Both because I hate the damn masks and because I want to be able to actually go to restaurants with my friends again instead of eating McD’s in a parking lot and only getting together over Zoom otherwise.

Breaking bread around the same table is a very important form of human bonding and I miss doing it with my friends.

And who knows, a month from now we may be doing it again!

Oh, and it’s my birthday Wednesday but I don’t give a shit.

More after the break.

---

Grinding it out

Really in the mood to grind out some catharsis tonight.

I’m at just the right levels of both numbness and rage to be willing to make myself suffer in order to make myself better.

Willing, hell, I am eager for it. Pain looks pretty good to me right now. Sometimes pain can be liberating. It can release the metaphysical pain inside you and thus be a total net gain – permanent relief from temporary suffering.

That’s a pretty good deal, if you ask me.

Right now, I wish I could just plop my Wound out on a table and push down on it like it’s a zit I’m trying to pop.

Just squeeze the toxic nastiness out of it in search of holy relief.

If only it were that simple. Instead, all I can do is keep grinding out the words instead, always seeking to put as much of my pain into every syllable as I can in search of the day when I am definitively releasing far more of the pain than I am accumulating.

Then I can get to work on this goddamned backlog.

Luckily I have been at this long enough that grinding out words twice a day does not seem like a super big deal.

I mean, this stop feeling like a choice a long time ago. I need to make with the words every day. I need it like I need food and oxygen.

And that’s what keeps me doing this even on days when I really really do not feel like it. Deep down, I know that if I tried to skip it, the need for it would drive me nuts, so I might as well just do the fucking thing.

Besides, this blog is my one slender claim on productivity. Without it I would not be contributing to the world at all.

Instead, I am writing a blog that almost three people read! Woohoo!

Oh well, perhaps one day I will migrate this thing onto Tumblr so that there is at least a theoretical possibility of it being discovered by others.

Have to wrestle that Wound of mine to the ground first, though. Right now, it is still in charge, more or less.

I can’t do anything that aggravates it or I just fold like a deck chair. It’s a reflex I developed a long time ago in order to be able to function.

But soon, I won’t need it any more. The Wound is shrinking every day and soon it will be small enough for me to ignore, or at least endure.

And then nothing is going to hold me back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

My inability to cry is really bumming me out lately.

Because I can feel the tears welling up inside me. There is a large buildup of sadness in my chest and in my mind, and it would feel so good to let it all out. My inability to do so is like emotional blue balls at this point.

And yet, when I try to let loose, I cry for maybe five seconds max and then it all dries up. And those five seconds are not very satisfying or productive.

The floodgates refuse to open, and I hate it.

I wonder if my antidepressants are to blame? Specifically Paxil, Wellbutrin’s action is wrong for this problem.

It pumps you up. If anything, that’s the opposite effect.

Paxil, however, is different. As far as I can tell from having been on it for 20 years, it mutes your emotions and thus makes them way easier to deal with.

I remember when I first started taking it, I felt lightheaded and numb all the time. This was not entirely pleasant but still beat the hell out of wanting to walk into traffic.

That lasted a couple months or so, and then one day I realized I was thinking clearly for the first time in a very long time.

It was like waking up from a very long nightmare. I became a Paxil fan in that moment.

And I have been waking up ever since. Every little bit of progress towards recovery has felt like waking up just a little bit more.

Presumably, because the suffocating protective numbness of my depression has retreated just a little bit.

I have been self-sedating for a long time. Wrapping myself tightly in my cloak of paralysis, hating my immobility but too dependent on how well it keeps the real world out and cancels out my pain to ever let it go.

Well, not all at once, anyhow.

But I swear I used to be able to get the tears out. Every three months or so, I would lay down in bed and have a good cry, and it did me a world of good.

I always ended up wishing I did it more often. But I never did.

Stupid North American male emotional constipation and internalized fear of seeming weak or vulnerable even to yourself.

And now I seem to have lost the ability. Presumably my depression sensed that it was helping me and found a way to shut that shit down because it wants me all to itself, all the time, forever.

Well fuck you, depression. I am never going to stop fighting you. I will never give in and surrender. I will resist you as hard as I can every single moment and that means my victory is inevitable.

For you are finite. Limited. Fixed. There is only so much of you, and there’s less of you every day because you are melting away under the heat of my raging id.

And soon, I will storm your final citadel and defeat the dragon known as Wound, and final victory will be mine.

Your days are numbered, depression.

And I will dance on your corpse.

More after the break.

---

Pushing it out

Welp, guess it’s time for me to figure out yet another angle to push from in the hopes of ridding myself of more of my toxic buildup of suppressed emotion.

Once more, I dance around the obvious and disgusting physical metaphor.

Right now I am feeling somewhat alienated. Not too bad, I have certainly had it worse.

But there is a chill running through the warm center of my good mood and it is making me feel like I am not really here.

Or there, for that matter.

More like I am in quantum superposition between and above both states. In one sense, I am between here and there, but in another, I am nowhere at all.

I spend a lot of time in between. It stems directly from my pervasive aversion to making decisions. To picking option A or option B.

To making any sort of commitment.

As a result of this fear, I have become an expert at not deciding. If there is a way to either choose both A and B or avoid choosing whatsoever, I will find it.

I think that’s a big part of how I became so devious and tricky.

Of course, this low decision lifestyle is not a happy one. The number of things one can do without making hard life decisions and accepting the possibility of being wrong is vanishingly small. As weaknesses go, it’s extremely limiting.

I would be far better off if I had enough id to feel the drive to always go forward and thus I had something goading me into making a decision so I could get on with things.

But I don’t have that kind of id. Not yet. For now, my id is still largely untapped and inaccessible to my conscious will.

Hence my freezing to death in the ice palace at the center of my soul. The place where I put this lonely cell of mine.

The door’s not locked. But I can’t leave. Not yet.

After all, beyond these frozen walls lies the dreaded Real World, with all its stimulation and demands and complexity and urgency and immediacy.

Out there, I have to deal with things in realtime, with no time to think. So there is no way for me to figure out what the “right” move is.

Out there, it’s football, not chess.

I only know chess. Football terrifies me.

But that, too, is a crippling restriction. The Real World is a rough and tumble place where you have to go with your gut and trust your instincts to survive.

This, too, terrifies me.

But if I dig down, I know that I am brilliant even in realtime, that there are worse things than fucking up (everyone does, it’s how they learn), and that the biggest catastrophes make for the best stories.

This is why I am trying to draw on my deep reserve of smug cockiness.

Something has to get me out of this place!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Next Wednesday is my 48th birthday.

But I am pointedly not making a list of things I want for my birthday.

Why not? Because nobody ever gets me anything off the list, so what’s the point? They just get me whatever they feel like getting me. My desires have nothing to do with it.

Apparently, nobody gives a crap what I want. Presumably, actually reading the list, then picking out what they are going to get me, then going through the process of actually getting me that thing is way more effort than they think I am worth.

I mean, who do I think I am, someone who matters?

So fuck it. I am not going to go through all the effort of making a list and investing my hope that someone loves me enough to read it and get me something from it any more.

I am tired of getting my heart broken.

Besides, whatever it is, I could probably just buy it for myself anyhow. I have almost $2K in savings at this moment, roughly $1.5k of which is spendable cash. I can buy a lot with that kind of money.

I don’t know why people don’t read or use my lists. Maybe it is just too much like dealing with me personally, and we all know what a torturous nightmare that is.

Then again, maybe it is just because they know that no matter what they get me, I will smile and thank them and be grateful no matter what it is.

So why go through all that hassle when the reward is the same regardless?

It’s just not in me to complain about a gift. If all someone saw fit to give me was some pocket lint, I would still thank them meekly.

I’d be emotionally devastated, but I would thank them.

And what makes it worse is that it is so hard for me to think of things I want in the first place. For the most part, most of the time, I have no idea what I want.

It’s how I adapted to being powerless for so long. If you have no power to attain what you desire, the only way to make the pain of unfulfilled desires go away is to learn not to want things in the first place.

That’s why I have so much cash saved up. I honestly have no idea what to do with it. There are so many possibilities, and I lack the healthy connection with my emotions needed to cut them down to just things I actually want.

I feel like this represents a tragic lack of imagination on my part, and that bums me out.

But it’s really hard for me to imagine something that would make me happy, or happier at least. I am so accustomed to just making do with whatever life begrudgingly gives me and being grateful I get anything because whatever I get, no matter how small, is still infinitely more than I deserve.

Because I deserve absolutely nothing.

I don’t even deserve to be alive and take up space and use up precious oxygen that could be breathed by worthier lungs.

How dare I.

So yeah. No more birthday and Xmas lists. Nobody fucking cares what I want.

But that’s okay.

I’m used to being powerless.

More after the break.

---

How to avoid avoidance

Not technically the name of the video, but I like it.

I thought this video touched on some thing worth talking about concerning my AVPD, so I thought I would using it as my jumping off point tonight.

And here’s the comment I left :

“My life is a cage, but on stage, I’m free” – Will Smith in Boom Boom Shake The Room. I am way, way more comfortable on stage, too You know why? Because on stage, you’re not interacting, you’re performing, You know exactly what it is you are supposed to do and what your role is. Suddenly everything is simple. There’s no tricky social situations full of unknowable variables. You do your thing and that’s it. It’s almost like magic if you are AVPD like we are.

me,the comment section of the video featured above

I figured I would share some of what I have figured out about us AVPD types and why we feel how we feel.

One funny difference between me and him : if I was at a crowded party and the room suddenly went quiet, I wouldn’t get nervous.

I’d get LOUDER. Because now I have an audience and I want EVERYONE to be able to hear the brilliant things I say!

Then again, I am, as we all know, a big ham,

Oh, and of course, I am one hundred percent on board with him about going with you gut. As patient readers know, relatively recently I figured out that the problem that leads to my paralytic indecision is that I am trying to solve complex problem entirely by intellectual means and that’s just plain impossible.

Too many variables in too complex a configuration. The human brain has limits.

And so the only way out of that is to go with your gut. Call it instinct, intuition, the fast circuit of the brain, or whatever.

But that is clearly the only way out of the forest of indecision.

So you don’t know which way is out. So what? Go whichever way seems right. But go. Don’t stand there like Buridan’s Ass, transfixed by indecision.

And don’t be so damned afraid of being wrong. People are wrong all the time, including those people who seem so confident and vital, and they survive it.

I swear, fear of pain and fear of being wrong are the worst, most crippling fears around.

But it’s early days yet. In order to truly progress, I will have to go against every single malformed instinct I have and put myself in some kind of situation where I need to engage without having time to think about my answers.

Just thinking about it opens a black hole in the pit of my stomach.

But it is the way forward, and I will get there eventually.

Nothing can stop me now that I know where I am going.

I may not move fast, but I never stop, either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because I have no idea what to write about right now.

My usually fertile imagination seems to be at a low point and I feel pleasantly empty headed and cheery.

Clearly, my brain has switched into Summer Mode. Happens every year when it gets sunny enough. All the higher functions go on vacation and I become lazier and more self-indulgent than usual.

Yes, that’s possible. Shut up.

On the bright side, this generally improve my mood a fair bit. Summer Fru has a higher baseline of happiness than Winter Fru. I start actively looking for ways to have fun and start to get the urge to leave the apartment.

Maybe this is the year I will actually do it. No promises, though.

But Summer Fru doesn’t want to think real hard, or really do anything that isn’t totally fun. So getting myself to do unfun things becomes harder than ever.

Yes, that too is possible. Now hush. We’ve been through this.

Oh hey, I just thought of something to write about!

You lucky, lucky people.

---

I got ambition

I realized recently that, far from the ambitionless fool I have always considered myself to be – quite happily, I might add – I am actually incredibly ambitious.

Specifically, if I want to do something, I want to do it in a way that is both original and superior to the way everyone else does it.

If the most that I can hope for is to do it as well as everyone else, I lose interest. I will still do it, of course, if it needs doing, but the passion is gone.

In other words, I am a showoff at a very deep level. This is not exactly a surprise to me.

I think this comes in part from the fact that I have so much natural ability that I have been able to be very impressive in my particular slice of society with very little effort.

I could absolutely crush a test without even studying. I always knew the answer to the teacher’s question. Everyone who met me knew how goddamned bright I was without my even having to do anything.

And I can see now that I took (and take) a lot of pride in that, despite also totally taking it for granted. Pretending to be mediocre was never in the cards for me.

I have to shine, shine, shine baby, and if that hurts your eyes, get some shades.

Clearly, there is a side of me that has no self esteem issues at all. Lately I have been thinking of it as my “Baby. I’m awesome” side. A side of me that is cocky and arrogant and entirely sure of his awe inspiring powers.

I have always suppressed this side of me because he’s a total dick. A lovable one, perhaps, but still pretty obnoxious.

And I am not about to let that side of me have full rein in my life. But that doesn’t mean I can’t integrate some of its better attributes into my personality.

And that’s exactly the kind of thing I can do better in Summer Mode.

See how I brought it all together at the end?

Told ya I was awesome.

More after the break.

---

Oh crap, now what?

Oh right. I have to think of something to write about again.

Um, um…. crap. This is hard!

I know, let’s continue with exploring my “dark side” : the arrogant, smug, sarcastic, dismissive, irresponsible, entirely devoted to his own amusement version of me.

I could probably learn a thing or two from that asshole.

Not to the point of becoming him, obviously. But he is very much an expression of my sorely neglected id, and I desperately need ways to reclaim my id so I can use it to both motivate me and thaw myself out, and so it is worth giving him a look.

First off, let’s set this “dark side” business aside and refer to him instead as a “less favoured version of me”.

In some ways, people would like him a lot less. After all, he would be a way less nice and sweet version of me, with way more of a chip on his shoulder and a way quicker temper to go with it.

Think a more sarcastic Sinatra.

On the other hand, they might also like him more because he wouldn’t have my dreary drippy wimpiness to contend with. He would be a lot harder to like but a lot easier to respect. He wouldn’t lean on others so hard, and would drain people a lot less.

I could certainly learn a thing or two about confidence from him. Basically, he could teach me that it’s perfectly okay to go on an ego trip.

I have had the thought, “you should have as much self-confidence as you think you can get away with” recently, and this fits that perfectly.

Certainly my current low-commitment enigmatic half-fake humility approach is not working. I mean, yeah, in its own way it minimizes risk to my itty bitty ego, but it does so by making me, at best, barely tolerate myself, and that’s not going to cut it.

I can’t keep ducking down for fear of the world. I have to stand tall and face the flames, and if I get burned, I get burned.

There are much worse things that can happen. And next time, I will know enough to avoid the fireball.

The important thing is to stop being too afraid of becoming a raving egomaniac to pump myself up at all. There has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

Self-confident, but stable. And not too much of a dick about it.

I think I can count on myself not to be mean. Even at my most arrogant, I would never allow myself to be the sort of person who hurts others for fun.

I’d rather die.

But I might be less careful how I wield my rapier wit, and that could definitely make me the asshole in some situations.

Really, it boils down to deciding if I would rather be a wimpy nice guy or a strong guy who can be kind of a dick.

The real answer may surprise you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What the hell, let’s poke this thing with a stick and see what falls out.

As patient readers know, I have recently realized, on a visceral level, that there is a huge psychological wound at the center of my mind and that it is this primary injury that has left me psychologically crippled for my entire life.

When I was raped by a stranger at the age of four, I retreated into my mind to escape the situation and have yet to emerge.

Hence the wound. It was far too large a trauma for me to be able heal, especially in my weakened condition. This was compounded by the fact that I did not even have the words to tell anyone what had happened, let alone the courage to actually approach someone and tell them.

So the whole event has remained virtually unprocessed in my mind for almost 44 years. For decades, I never thought of it at all.

It was as though I simply trained myself not to see it. I never forgot it, exactly. It was more like one day, I suddenly realized it had been there all the time.

And the would it caused exerts a terrible gravity over my entire psyche. I have very few memories of what life was like without it.

I lost my innocence so young that I barely remember it.

And that really messes a fella up. I knew far too much, far too young. Innocence is like a protective layer that makes sure young minds don’t learn about things before they can handle them, and mine was ripped away from me at a brutally young age.

No wonder I was always such a “knowing” child. An “old soul”, as the hippies and mystics call it. But not because I’ve been through a million reincarnations.

It’s because I’ve seen shit, man.

Right now, in my life, I feel like I am still kind of gnawing at the edges of this wound of mine. And that feels pretty good. Just reducing the jagged edges of it is a great relief.

But on a higher level, I feel like my mind is working on something big. I feel like the forces of my mind are slowly surrounding the wound in order to engulf it like an amoeba, and slowly crush and dissolve it from all sides.

So that’s pretty cool, I guess.

Means I might actually see some big time recovery soon. If I can heal that fucking wound, I will become so much healthier and stronger. I will finally be able to face the world with enthusiasm and pride because I don’t have this crippling injury any more.

And I know I can do it. In fact, at this point, it’s inevitable. The pressure on the wound is as inexorable and powerful as glaciation, and it cannot hold.

Things will likely get worse before they get better, though. Because the obvious denouement to this is my remembering the incident itself, and the closer I get to that point, the more it’s going to hurt and the more I’ll want to stop.

But I won’t stop. In my own highly specialized way, I am incredibly tough, and I can bulldoze through the pain if the goal is worthy.

Pain is nothing It passes. Growth is permanent. It lasts.

And I am going to grow no matter what.

More after the break.

---

Big Wound, part 2

Would it be weird if I started capitalizing wound?

My big Wound. Hmmm.

Kinda weird, but I am going to go with it for now to try it out.

This frigging Wound of mine has (metaphorical) weight. I can feel it in my mind, just hanging there in cargo netting in the center of it all, like lost contraband.

I have borne this burden for almost my entire life. It has left me bent and stooped like a hunchback and warped my entire development as a person for 44 years.

Ergo, it’s hard to imagine life without it. It’s such a fundamental structural element of my entire psyche. It’s like trying to imagine a house with no foundation.

But the fucker’s got to go. If I fall apart without it, fine. That just means I will have to put myself back together, and I can do a way better job this time.

I mean, the previous me was built by a child. A very scared, hurt, miserable child.

I love that boy. He went through so much all alone. He was socially isolated and profoundly lonely and longed for the friends and warm family connection he instinctively knew others had and he did not. There was days in elementary school when he was so depressed that the whole world felt unreal and hollow, and he would just wander the streets, unable to concentrate well enough to find his way home.

And yet, he just kept going. Trudging through life, going to school like a good little robot, leading a largely joyless and at times downright awful life full of fear of things most people don’t even notice, and bearing all those burdens silently and alone.

Looking at it that way, it’s no wonder that I am not a functional adult. I got so very little of the emotional nutrients I needed in order to grow up healthy and strong. No love, acceptance, guidance, affection. sense of having a place where you belong, socialization with my peers, nothing.

Just books and TV and video games.

Well you were one heck of a kid, little guy, and don’t let anyone tell you different – including yourself. You did absolutely nothing to justify the shitty way life treated you and it is not your fault you were too weak and scared to fight back.

You deserved all the love and hugs and listening and understanding in the world. You deserved a good mentor, a family that made you feel included, and a close-knit group of friends who did everything together.

So please accept this big warm hug from a stranger from the future, kid.

Maybe together we can find a way out of this cage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went to the cardiologist today.

It is not looking good.

Largely because my blood pressure was crazy high. 180 over something, when normal is 130. So um… not good.

So I got a brand new med, Atenolol. Plus I am going to be scheduled for a heart ultrasound at St. Paul’s hospital in Vancouver. She is sending me there because the wait time here in Richmond is months whereas with St. Paul’s, its weeks.

I’d just like to go on the record as being in favour of paying higher taxes if it means we finally have enough goddamned ultrasound machines.

Anyhow, the ultrasound is no big deal. But she is also booking me for an angiogram, which according to my cardiologist is a wire inserted into a vein and then threaded through my arteries to look for blockages and possible eliminate them.

But I must have the name wrong, because the Internet says it’s a dye test that does basically the same thing.

I like the second one a lot more. Having a wire in my veins sounds creepy as fuck. And Doctor Ebti, my cardiologist, said there is a one in a thousand chance of complications, one of which is death.

Oh yay. Gimmie more of that. Sounds fun.

Anyhow, I will, of course, comply. Despite appearances, there are some forms of authority I respect, and medical is definitely one of them. Being a doctor means knowing so much more than I do about medicine that even I would not gainsay their advice.

Except that, well, I am not sure I truly have high blood pressure.

I mean, it’s not that I don’t believe Doctor Ebti. My blood pressure was def crazy fucking high today. Blood pressure cuffs don’t lie.

But I have literally never had a reading like that before. I was flabbergasted when she told me. During my recent hospital stay. they took my blood pressure a dozen times and it always came back with my typical result : slightly elevated but still within the normal range of someone my size/shape.

So today’s reading is…. anomalous.

Oh well. I am going to buy a home blood pressure monitor, at her recommendation, and then I suppose we will find out who’s right.

In the meantime, I will comply.

Doctor Ebti seemed really rushed and stressed during our appointment. I had to resist the urge to say, “Hey Doc, slow down, you’re gonna give yourself a heart attack!”

Hah hah hah. I slay me.

The new med, atenolol, has the possible side effects of dizziness and being out of breath from exertion. I already have both of those symptoms.

So this should be interesting. Means that for the next few days, I will have to remind myself to move slowly and carefully, like a ship in a narrow harbor.

This will not come easy to me. For all my life, I have had the tendency to do things abruptly and swiftly. Going slow and easy will really test my patience.

Beats the fuck out of falling and breaking my neck, though.

I will keep you nice people up to date on my condition.

More after the break.

---

The story so far

Well I am feeling pleased with myself. Instead of doing my usual dickering and dithering, I Googled home blood pressure monitors, found a highly rated low cost model, and ordered it off Amazon.ca.

I also took advantage of the opportunity to get a good price on a bunch of sugar free hard candy, as well as a little chocolate.

Amazon.ca has all these great deals on sugar free stuff, but the good price only kicks in when you are spending at least $25.

Well the monitor was $50, so I was in like Flynn already.

And I like having a good supply of hard candy around.

What can I say, it soothes me to have something sweet to suck on.

Now imagine that I said the previous sentence in the voice of Mister Humphries from Are You Being Served?.

And I just took my first atenolol. Man, what Madison Avenue genius comes up with these drug names? I liked it way better when I thought the name was just “atenol”.

“Finally!” I thought. “A drug with a simple, straightforward, dignified name.”

Alas, no. Upon second glance I learned they slapped an entirely superfluous extra “ol” on the end to make sure it sounds very silly when said out loud.

Like you got lost on the way to the end of the world and ended up just repeating the last syllable like a dolt.

Well, so far I don’t feel especially dizzy. But the real test will be when I stand up. That’s when the room will either start spinning or not.

Bad sign : my head is starting to loll back and forth very slightly.

Anywho, I am trying my best to cling to the dire warnings of my cardiologist and the righteous fear they generated in order to keep myself motivated to clean up my fucking act and save my own damn life.

Which means getting my toxic high blood sugar down to normal. Which means taking my insulin. Which means, ideally, testing my blood.

And I still don’t have nearly enough willpower to go back to lancing my precious fingertips for blood. I just can’t do it. My last experience with the meter was lancing myself over and over and getting an error message instead of a result, and the sad truth is that I lack the intestinal fortitude to get over a thing like that.

I wish I was tougher. But I ain’t.

That leaves the option of taking insulin blind. I’ve done it before, so I don’t know why I am scared to do it now. Just one needle-full of insulin a day could make a huge difference to both my health and how I feel.

Do it to feel good, I tell myself. Forget other, long term motivations. They are not nearly strong enough or pure enough to overcome the depressed side of my mind.

Do it to FEEL BETTER NOW.

Yeah. That might do the trick,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

heknewherasachild

Came across an interesting moral case on Reddit (via YouTube)

Everybody loved middle aged Bob and his twenty-something wife Sue…. until it was revealed that he had known Sue since she was six (6) years old, and then absolutely everybody turned on him.

Including me. I was as disgusted and outraged as his friends and relatives when I first read that, and as patient readers know, I am fairly broadminded about such things.

But it got me to thinking : why? Why would that be so offensive? Bob and Sue were both consenting adults. Why should him having known her as a child matter?

So I pondered that a while, gave it a right good think, and this is what I came up with :

As near as I can tell, when Bob knew Sue as a child, this put him in outermost circle the parent or caretaker role in people’s minds, and that permanently locked their relationship in that state : one adult, one child, him the “uncle”, her the “niece”.

Ergo, the same child/sex taboo that punishes pedophiles applies, at least according to the social rules we have all internalized.

Of course, people in the Reddit thread were accusing Bob of being a pedophile and “grooming” Sue. but there was absolutely no evidence of that in the original post.

I think people just leapt to that conclusion in order to explain how they felt about Bob.

I call that “reasoning via emotion” and it is not logically valid. You can’t say “I feel X therefore Y must be true!”. You can’t assume all emotions are justified.

Otherwise, a white woman being frightened by a black family having a picnic would be evidence enough that the black family was up to no good.

Anyhow, I thought it was an interesting case because it pointed out an aspect of our social programming that I had no idea existed : that when you know someone as a child, the taboo against connecting with them sexually is permanent.

There is no statute of limitations on pedophilia, it seems. That is how powerful the child/sex taboo is. Anything that even resembles a violation, however falsely, receives its full wrath.

But what if there had been a long period without contact in the 25 years they had known each other? What if he’d known her when she was six but then her family moved away and he didn’t see her again until she came back after college? What then?

And even if they had known one another all that time, that doesn’t necessarily mean he had any influence over her. “Knowing” someone is a very broad statement and most of the people we know we do not try to have sex with.

And I hate to point this out, but even if he had some influence over her growing up, the fact is that “grooming” is not, as yet, illegal in and of itself, and so legally speaking, Bob is in the clear unless there is clear evidence they did more than talk.

So really, the taboo makes no sense in this case, at least without further information.

And yet I still kind of hate Bob.

I guess some taboos are just like that.

More after the break.

---

A very special funeral

(We open on me, standing at an altar, dressed in a purple (with gold trim) priest-style robe but with no religious iconogaphy. To the right and behind me is a curiously large stained-wood coffin)

Me : Good evening, and thank you all for coming to this very special, very personal ceremony. We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of all the potential lives I might have led if things had gone differently.

(There is a soft murmur in the crowd. People saying “oh!” in pleased surprise can be heard. Things soon quiet down. )

Me : Hence the size of the coffin. It has to be big to hold all the versions of me that I need to bury. As you can imagine, there’s an awful lot of them, and it’s time that I stop clinging to them as though at any moment I could jump into that possibility and become and fully accept that they are dead and gone forever.

In fact, most of them have been dead for a very long time.

Sorry about the smell. I did my best.

So tonight, we are gathered to bid farewell to all those versions of me that never were. It would obviously be impossible for me to name them all – trust me, this speech is already long enough as is –

(Audience chuckles amusedly. )

-but naming a few of the most prominent ones is well within the limits of my time and your patience for long speeches.

(Another amused chuckle)

Let’s start with Accountant Fru. Some of you may not know this, but I took an Accounting class in high school, and got a 98 percent in it. Understandably, this made the teacher really, really want me to go into accounting as I clearly had the knack.

But not the desire. I gave up on that dream the moment I realized I could not imagine ever even introducing myself as an accountant.

“Hello, I’m very boring, please ignore me. ”

Um, Nope. So farewell, Accountant Fru, You never really stood a chance.

(The coffin clacks against its stand, as if something heavy had just been added to it)

Luckily, there was another thing I am very good at, and that leads us to our next departed soul : Psychotherapist Fru.

This is a big one because it’s the one I spent the most time thinking was going to come true. Had things gone the way I planned, I would have graduated from UPEI with a double major in Psychology and Philosophy, and gone on to get a Masters in Clinical Psychology before setting up a private practice as a therapist.

I’m sad to see you go, old friend. But you are never going to happen now.

(The coffin clacks again)

Finally, we bid a sad farewell to Scientist Fru. There was a time in my life when I thought I would grow up to be a brilliant, groundbreaking scientist of some sort.

But then, Calculus happened.

(More amused laughter.)

And I realized that the path to science was littered with math much harder than that, and that’s when I realized I was not as cut out for the scientist’s life after all.

So farewell, Doctor Fru. Let math do us part.

Me : Thank you. Okay, let’s do this.

(Flash cut to the coffin slowly rolling down the conveyor belt of a crematorium. Mourners are arrayed on either side of the belt and I stand at the end. My eyes never leave the coffin as it moves down the belt. Eventually, it passes through the door into the crematorium oven. When it is fully inside, the oven door closes behind it and the oven briefly glows red and a loud crackling is heard, then all is silent again.)

Me : That’s it, then. They are gone, gone forever past that final horizon. And now, a few moments of silence for all the versions of me that left us today.

(I bow my head, pain and grief write large on my big face, and tears run down my face. A few sobs are heard from the mourners, and they bow their heads too. Eventually, I straighten back up and smile brightly at the mourners. I clap my hands to signal that the ceremony is over.)

Me : All right! Who’s up for some Chinese?

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.