I’ve used this image here before : my life as me in a boat on grey water floating silently through a long dark corridor at the speed of a funeral procession. Not going anywhere in particular, one moment exactly like the last, and the next, and so on, forever.

The silence is eerie. Unnatural. Deathly. All I can hear is the sounds of my little rowboat paddling itself slowly and serenely forward. The water lapping at the hull of my boat. The occasional soft wooden clunk as my boat brushes the side of this strange canal which is barely wide enough for it.

I could make noise, of course. Shout, yell, bang my fists. Raise a ruckus. Smash the silence in an act of defiance. Assert my existence.

But the very thought freezes my heart with ice cold fear. Oh god no, I can’t do that. In fact, I dare not make even the smallest of sounds.

Because if I do, something terrible with happen. If I make as much as a peep, IT will know I am here, and then it will come and GET me.

And that’s the worst thing possible. Apparently.

Well I have been feeling like that a lot lately. Like I am just floating forward in time helplessly, scared to death of waking the giant within.

The giant is, I think, my anxiety. I’ve talked before how I thought I developed my aversion to physical stimulation as a very crude and maladaptive overcompensation for my anxious tendencies.

It’s like cutting off your arm to cure a hangnail. I mean sure, it works, but…

There is no “and then” after the giant GETS me. There doesn’t need to be. This is the vast unnamable dread, the Very Worst Thing, the result so terrible that it is impossible to imagine what comes next.

“And then I died.”
“And then what?”

It’s an expression of what life is like when you are stuck in Hide mode. As patient readers know, in addition to Fight or Flight threat responses, we also have Hide.

And I have been hiding from damned near everything for a very long time. It’s what Avoidant Personality Disorder is all about. That scared little animal inside me can never calm down and understand that the danger is over and things are okay now.

And so I hide and hide and hide. I use this computer of mine as a big filter that gives me the illusion of being in the world but with none of that pesky social and physical stimulation that makes it so very hard for me to cope.

I’m here but I’m not here. I’m Schrodinger’s Fox. I’m a realistic hologram.

And if I am to break my mould and live free at last, without pain or shame or taking the blame, I will have to stand up to the Giant Within and spit in his god damned face.

Hey you! Fuckhead! I’m right here, dumbass. Come and get me.

Do your fucking worst.

Let’s get this over with.

More after the break.

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I can’t sing straight

(vampy voice) Or anything else straight, for that matter. Darn.

Anyhow. I have come across an odd problem in my exploration of the world of home karaoke. A problem so odd it took me a while to diagnose.

It seems having the music playing really throws off my singing.

Seriously. It’s weird as five dimensional fuck. For a while, I thought I was just learning the harsh reality that I didn’t sing nearly as well as I thought I did when I was singing to myself sans accompaniment, and while that was sad, practice would improve that.

Or not. Like I said before, I am singing for pleasure and exercise, not performance. I have no desire to actually be a singer. At most, if I start writing songs (a distinct possibility), I might do my own vocals, at least for the demo.

But a future American Idol candidate I am not.

Eventually, though, the “I suck” theory began to wear thin. It just didn’t make sense. I couldn’t have been that deluded about how well I sang on my own. Could I?

So today, I experimented. I started singing a song with SingSnap, and sang badly, then paused SingSnap and sang the lyrics a capella, and lo and behold, it was a lot better.

Still not exactly golden, but not total shite either.

So I think the musical accompaniment throws me off somehow. I have never sung “with a band” before, and I am not at all used to having all that noise in my head when I am just trying to sing.

Hopefully, I can adapt. Because what fun is karaoke without the music?

Might as well just be a text file of the lyrics then.

It could also be that I have been singing in the “key of me”. Like, the notes are all wrong but they sound right relative to one another so I can’t tell.

And they say it’s not the frequencies that make music, it’s the intervals, so I suppose there are worse faults.

Regardless, it is a surprising and intriguing problem. Further experimentation is warranted. I already tried doing a song with the volume turned way down, and that seemed to help some.

I suppose the obvious solution is to learn to just ignore the music. That way my lack of multitasking ability doesn’t come into play.

It really is a problem for me. To the point where I have wondered if a total inability to divide your attention counts as some kind of obscure mental disability.

The sort of thing Oliver Sacks would write about. The book would be called “TheMan Who Literally Could Not Hold Two Things In His Mind At The Same Time”.

Maybe I just need to learn to juggle.

Luckily, I have staggeringly vast mental powers that more than compensate for my total lack of multitasking.

I really am a study in contrasts.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

wp:paragraph –>

Came across this vid in my YouTube wanderings, and thought there was a lot of good stuff in there, so I wanted to share and comment :

Let’s get started.

“Comparison is the thief of joy. “

I don’t normally think of myself as someone who compares themselves to others.^[!]

I don’t give a fuck about keeping up with the Joneses. I don’t get jealous when people I know get ahead in life. I tend to ignore petty status symbols and similar vanities.

But there’s one very large, very important, and extremely potent group of people I compare myself to and it damned near crushes me every fucking time.

And that’s People My Age. I am acutely aware that the vast majority of people have made something of themselves and have a career and a family and a modicum of success by the time they are 48, and I have never even had a job.

And yes, I know I have been very sick for a long long time and I suppose that should be enough of an explanation for me to forgive myself for all that. \

But it ain’t.

And even if I stop blaming myself for it all, it still fucking hurts. I want what they have so bad. And the more I think about it, the more bitter I feel about being denied it.

So let’s move on.

“If you’re going to eat crap, don’t nibble it. ”

In less disgusting terms, if you are going to do something, do it wholeheartedly. Don’t do it with one foot out the door. Don’t go into every situation already looking for the exits.

Throw yourself into what you do and you will get far more out of it. Things you do will have a much higher chance of seeming “worth it” and so will life.

I need to learn this so bad.

For a long time, I have pondered whether part of the problem with clever, broken people like me is that we are far too keenly aware of the possibility of escape.

From what I have seen, normal healthy strong people just do whatever is in front of them. The idea that they could just stop and escape never occurs to them, Whatever instinct causes herds to move in the same direction urges them to just keep going in life and while to us smarty pants types it might seem like mindless conformity (and it is), they at least keep going and end up experiencing more of life.

Why? Because they do not think they have a choice. They always do whatever those around them are doing. For them, the social illusion is very real, as real as the laws of physics and just as hard to deny.

And I think they draw great strength from that. Their umwelt is a far more stable, reliable, predictable, and safe place as a result.

I mean, sure, the sheep at the center of the herd never discover new territory, but they don’t get picked off by coyote either.

In some ways I wish I could forget that escape is always possible. I might be a lot better off if I thought I had no choice but to go through whatever it is I am doing.

Too late for that, though. I’m clever as fuck. I see beyond the social illusion with startling clarity and can step out of it any time I choose. I am He Who Walks Between Walls, a five dimensional creature in a three dimensional world, and that gives me powers.

It also leaves me quite alone in a world that doesn’t feel real to me at all.

So, yay me, I guess.

More after the break.

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More Words of Wisdom

What the hell, I’m not even a third of the way through the video yet.

“Do you want it done right, or done right now?”

The sentiment is trite but damn do I love the phrasing. Sounds like something I would come up with.

Only when I said it, people would just get confused.

“But… same word singsong make brain hurt!”.

Yeah yeah. This is why people like me write. Better chance of being understood.

“…just put glue on your ass and do it….”

Exactly. Fuck this “I just can’t seem to do it” bullshit.

Gee, what could the solution to not doing something?

Yes, you in the back with your hand up.

“Could it be…. doing the thing?”

Ding ding ding! Very good. You make take one candy from the jar.

Everything else is self-defeating bullcrap. What the person wants is for you to say magic words that make then able to have done the thing without doing it.

Like there is anything anyone can say that will suddenly make you motivated enough to do it. You have already decided whether you want to do it or not.

If you want to do it, do it. Pay the price, grit your teeth, exit the world of aimless hedonism that has become our default state, and do the fucking thing.

And if you don’t want to do it, fuck it then. Give up on it and move on.

But whatever you do, do not hover in the twilight of indecision. It will only cause you more pain, suffering, doubt, and self-questioning than actually doing the thing could ever do to you.

The only way to do it is to do it.

Repeat until believed.

“…nobody is paying as much attention to you as you think.”

The way I formulated it for myself as a child : “On averare,other people think about you about as often as you think about them, “

Put another way : we are all wrapped up in our own little lives in our own little world. To us, that world is our entire universe and we tend to subconsciously think other people see us the same way.

But those closet universes in our heads only have room for one. They see as much of what you do as you see of what they do,

So relax. People aren’t judging you.

In fact, they barely notice you at all!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] After all, if I was, I would look bad in front of my Gen X peers! [[1]]

There’s the fear, and then there’s giving in to the fear.

And i am goddamned sick of doing the latter.

Because it’s optional. When anxiety really has made you its bitch, it doesn’t feel that way. You’ve become so accustomed to caving in at the slightest pressure that it feels like one automatically causes the other, like a reflex.

But ask yourself this : could you do it for a million bucks? Could you do it if the alternative is a slow horrible painful death?

What if it’s both? Do it and you get the million, fag out and you die? What then? Think you could hold it together then?

Yes? Well then it’s a choice then, innit?

It’s Therapy Thursday and when talking with Doctor Costin, I got to think about the big cold clammy hand of fear that keeps me living this stupid fucking life of mine.

You know, the fear that rises like a killing fog whenever I think of going outside this tiny little box in which I live. The fear that cuts off all life, motion, and energy, and makes me feel like I am going to die. The fear that has ruled my life for decades and kept me from getting anywhere in life or even growing up.

Ya know. That old thing.

Well I am truly fucking sick of it. That is not me. That is not the real me. The real me is strong and defiant and brave and doesn’t let anything slow him down or get in his way.

Not for long, anyhow.

So fucj this fear shit. I am going to tap into the vast energies I command and grow and grow until I am the size of Godzilla and stomp those puny little fears of mine to the ground in order to prove to the world that nobody can cage me.

Not even me.

The path forward requires not eliminating the fear but enduring it. Staring it right in the eye and saying “Yes I see you. Yes I feel you. Yes I know you are there and trying to stop me. But you’re not going to stop me. I’m doing what I want to do despite you. Go back to where you came from, demon. You have no power here. ”

And only then can you banish the fear and overcome it. Giving it what it wants only feeds it. So does hiding from the world to avoid it. The only way to kill a fear is to feel it fully but refuse to back down.

And that should be easy for me. I’m a naturally defiant person. I strongly resist any attempts to confine or control me.

Not that it’s come up much in my life. People have to care about you in order to put in the time and effort to repress you.

But still. If I continue to visualize my fear as an external force trying to trap me, I should be able to access all the raw id energy I need to overcome it.

I swear, I will free myself with the sheer power of my “fuck you” attitude.

More after the break.

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Islands of despair

Lately, I’ve been going through periods of profound sadness verging on despair.

Don’t worry, though, I am not in any danger because even when they are very intense, I retain the knowledge that this wave of existential agony will soon end on its own. It’s just something I have to endure for the time being then it will be over.

A bit like being someone who has fits, I suppose. Emotion fits.

They seem to happen most often when I am getting out of bed, either right before I hit the “sitting on the edge of the bed” phase or during it.

And while they don’t panic me or make me want to do anything drastic, I still wish I handled them a bit better.

Because I am always struggling to get through them and I think I would be better off just sitting with them and doing my best to experience them fully.

Emotions are information, after all, and part of me is clearly trying to tell me something. If I truly want this particular ghost to cease haunting me, I will need to listen.

Not easy. Ghosts are scary. Escape can be very habit-forming. And self-sustaining, too, because if you flee at the first sign of danger, you never find out if the danger was real.

And that’s no way to live – obviously. When even the most specious of illusions can chase you up a tree, your life is going to be very tiring indeed.

So step one, I suppose, is to hold out against the fear just a tiny bit longer. One extra second. That’s a very small and digestible goal that doesn’t ask too much and yet it is enough to demonstrate that I have some control over my responses.

I am way past being sick of being hounded by all this fucking fear. High time I turn around and kick those yapping hounds in the dick.

Or pussy. Must be inclusive.

But I think the real battle will happen on a layer way below my conscious mind. Something big is moving in me. The very ground I stand on is shifting. And I have no idea what my new configuration will look like.

I don’t really care. I am willing to try damned near anything that might help me escape this monk’s cell, this cloistered hell.

Right now, I am in a purge cycle. My mind is periodically heating up like a blast furnace in an attempt to cleanse my soul with fire and burn away all the toxic crap that has built upon my soul like layer of barnacles.

Burn, you little bastards. BURN.

The point of all that heavy metal fireworks is to break up the thick crust that encases me like a suit of armor. If I can do that, I can free myself from it and walk in the sun again.

For it is not me. Nor is it a part of me. It’s just something that happened to me.

And I can un-happen it too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just had a highly illuminating and depressing conversation with my diabetic dietician (yay, I finally have one) and she ended up (accidentally) revealing to me just how many carbs I am still eating.

No wonder I rock a blood sugar between 20 and 30. Between the carbs and my total lack of physical activity, I’m in a diabetic deathtrap.

I can’t say I was entirely surprised. For the last couple of weeks, I have been feeling iffy about my diet and the many ways carbs still make it in. The dried fruit in my trail mix, the fries I still eat with my McD’s, the fruit I eat, the sugar-free desserts I have been having with every meal….

My defenses are porous as fuck.

Time to buckle down and truly take this shit seriously, then. I really don’t want to have to do it but I have to do it.

Moira, my dietician, is going to email me a carb chart and I will use that to plan my meals. I might have to change my diet a fair bit.

Cut down on the sugar free desserts for sure. They may not have sugar but they still have carbs. So instead of having them with every meal, I might switch to just having them with supper and my midnight snack.

And (big sigh) start getting salads with my McD’s instead of fries.

Honestly, it’s not really that big a deal. I seem to naturally be shifting towards a more ectomorphic view that things like fries are just empty carbs and not real food anyhow. I find I get a lot more excited over veggies and protein lately.

Oh, and I will have to stop pretending that carbs I get from ordering in somehow don’t count. Nope. Gonna have to treat those like any other meal.

Moira (damn I love that name) says that I should be getting 45-60 grams of carbs per meal. That seems doable.

Funny story : At first, she was just saying 45 grams, and I was like… “Per day???”.

Phew, no. She doesn’t believe in low carb diets like that. Says they are unscientific.

On that, we agree.

Now that I am thinking it over, the changes need not be super radical. I think I can make my diet fit into that many carbs with the reforms listed above.

And what the hell, it will give me something to do. Something to focus on and accomplish instead of just rotting away in the sweet toxic park that is the world of my fucking video games.

I’m getting sick of them, to be honest. There has to be more fulfilling and interesting things to do with my time.

The karaoke is a good start. I mean, my voice varies from barely passable to actively nauseating, but that doesn’t matter because I am singing for fun and exercise.

I love singing, it makes me happy, and it helps with my sleep apnea.

It’s all win, really.

Eventually, I will find my webcam and launch my career as a YouTuber.

I know I ca do it at least as well as the people I have been watching. And there is a decent chance I can do it a hell of a lot better.

In fact, it’s possible that I could be absolutely goddamned amazing at it. Better than all the rest. A rock star from the word go.

But first, I have to stop being such a pussy, find the cam, and get started.

Aaaaaany minute now.

Gee, thank goodness I am young and healthy and have my whole life ahead of me.

O wait…. nvm.

More after the break.

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Hey, no problem!

Both as Cliff Huxtable and himself, Bill Cosby had a son of whom he said “He has a two word philosophy of life : no problem.”

That’s because Theo Huxtable is a Sagittarius and they have a very laid back attitude toward life. I know this intimately because I have my Moon in Sagittarius and so that is kind of my life philosophy too.

Only kind of, though. My Sun sign is still Taurus. We tend to assume there’s a problem until we are satisfied there isn’t.

We’re not a trusting lot.

The thing is, I am not sure why I have this “no problem” attitude, or what it means. So I figured that tonight, I will poke around in this capacious cranium of mind and take a stab at figuring it out.

It’s partly about taking pride in one’s adaptability. Of that I am sure. We centaurs have agile, acrobatic minds that can apply themselves to a lot of situations and we love showing them off by being the person who solves the problem that people are upset about and making everything a-OK again.

We love that shit.

But it also encompasses a particular reaction to stress. The initial Sag response to tress is to relax, which might seem crazy if not the exact opposite of what you should do.

But actually, by relaxing, the Sag keeps their mind in the exact state of relaxed alertness that performance psychiatrists agree leads to top performance.

So by having the opposite reaction, the Sag instinctively gets peak performance while not even seeming like they are trying.

This is extremely irritating to others. Luckily, we don’t care.

Of course, that only gets you so far. Many things in life require you to slow down and focus so you can drive single mindedly towards a goal with a long term sustained effort.

Sometimes life is a marathon, not a sprint.

You can’t get far on just inspiration and cleverness. Eventually you have to do the unfun things you’ve been using your mental agility to dodge.

Where was I? Oh right. Another aspect of being Sag is living in a world full of people who worry too much and about the wrong things.

Or so it seems to you. From a Sag point of view, people are always getting caught up in problems to which you see a clear and obvious solution and causing them a lot of unnecessary stress and worry.

If you’re a sage Sag, you learn that most people don’t see the world like you do and so you do not judge them for their quagmires.

They still make you sad, though, and so you try to help. You kindly offer said people the brilliant solution that was so obvious to you and bask in their praise of your heroic smartness and general aura of sagacity.

Just kidding. The solution is so obvious and brilliant that when you offer it, the person feels stupid for not having thought of it themselves and gets mad at you for it.

Trust me on that one.

Well I guess that’s at least part of the structure of the Sagittarius “no problem” attitude.

It can make school easy…. and growing up very hard.

Some shit you just should not dodge.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s occurred to me that in order to learn from painful experiences, you kind of have to stick around and endure them.

At least, to learn properly from them. Learn with your full human capacities of both logic and intuition (and emotion and all the rest).

If, instead, you compulsively flee the situation mentally, you only learn on the deep emotional and irrational level an animal learns.

A way based on aversions and fetishizations over which the rational mind has, at best, highly limited control, and at worst no control at all.

In fact, if the system has degraded far enough, the best the rational mind can hope for is to make up bullshit rationalizations for why these irrational fears and attractions are, in fact, totally logical and reasonable.

The results of this can be quite pathetic.

Oh no, my lifelong hatred of all vegetables, including starches like potatoes and wheat, is completely rational and based on my… um… deep skepticism about the standards of nutritional science and suspicious about the power of Big Vegetable propaganda!

Yeah, talk that talk. You’re obviously full of crap.

Possibly literally, given how little fiber you must get.

I, at least, know all my neuroses and anxiety are completely irrational and not based on reality at all.

I have always been as honest with myself as I can be.

I am too honest with myself to claim to always be honest with myself.

Besides, I know I’m delusional. They are emotional delusions based on distorted interpretations of reality as opposed to grander delusions based on rampant psychosis, but they are no less irrational for it.

I might not think I’m George Washington, but I feel like everyone hates me, and that is just as untrue.

Many find me downright lovable, in fact.

It helps to be cute.

So at least I don’t fool myself over such things. That gives me a be advantage over some people. I don’t pretend that I am totally rational.

I’m too rational to do that.

But that does put me in the unenviable place of knowing I am crazy and not being able to do anything about it.

Or at least, the knowledge of being crazy not meaning you then stop being crazy.

In a more rational schema, you realize you are wrong about something and change your mind about that thing in order to now be right about it.

But there is a reason that’s an unpopular option. It totally ignores issues of emotional and cognitive stability. Every piece of information in our minds is just one part of an incredibly complicated house of cards and we are false rationalist fools if we imagine that it is easy to just snatch one card out of the pyramid and replace it.

Think of that next time you are tempted to think someone should just change their minds because they are so clearly, obviously, and demonstrably wrong.

Trust me…it ain’t that easy.

So um…. yeah. I guess what I am trying to say is that I feel like I have not truly learned from my painful experiences because I fled them mentally instead.

Pain can be the best teacher if you let it.

But you kind of have to experience it first.

Maybe I will manage to talk more about this in the second half.

More after the break,

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Gotta burn to learn, part deux

Thing is, there’s more than one kind of knowledge.

Nerds like me absolutely nail it when it comes to the sort of knowledge they test for and reward in the school system. I’ll call it formal knowledge for ease of communication rather than get bogged down in terms like symbolic knowledge, academic learning, an that kind of thing.

And in our little nerd universes, we like to pretend that is the only kind of knowledge that exists, or if pressed, the only kind that matters or counts.

But that is a shiny but superficial kind of knowing compared to the kind of knowledge one gets via experience.

Otherwise known as “actually doing stuff”.

And the thing about this experiential knowledge is that it is non-transferrable. The sorts of deep emotional connections that comprise it cannot be written down or explained because it is not your brain that learned it, it was your soul.

Or your psyche, or your deep self, or whatever else you want to call it.

Point is, you learn it with the totality of your being and not just that fancy interface with all the tricks we call the rational mind.

Compared to the deep mind, the conscious, rational mind might as well be a cheap calculator with a three color display.

And two of those colors are black! *canned laughter*

So far from being the totality of your personal universe, even in a genius like myself the rational mind is merely the emcee of the show that is the full, deep human mind.

The big IQ just makes my rational mind a lot more likely to put on airs and front like it is the big powerful poobah around here.

Guess what : it ain’t. It’s corrupt, self-destructive, unreliable, and a compulsive liar. Part of my road to recovery has been the realization that I absolutely cannot trust this big bad brain of mind and that my only hope to escape its delusions and judgements is to tap in to the raw, irrational power of my long suppressed id.

I really should get to know it better. I’m still calling it Mister Id.

Aaaa horse is a horse is a horse, of course…

I’m still on that road. It’s a long and bumpy one. Learning to trust my gut is going to take a long long time because I still have not killed the voice in my head that insists that going with your gut is nonsense because what the fuck does your gut know?

Going with your gut is for people without brains. Like Dubya.

And I know that is wrong. But I haven’t found my way to what is right yet. I am still fumbling around in the dark looking for a light switch that I know isn’t there.

I need to develop new senses.

I need to learn to see with something other than my eyes.

I need to learn to feel my way around.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

I think my eyesight is getting worse.

First, the good news : got an appointment with Doctor Vaezi on the 15th. It’s even at 8:10 AM, so I can get a ride there from Julian before Joe has to go to work.

The bad news : I actually had an appointment with him scheduled for June 30th. One I completely spaced on, apparently. As in, did not even write down anywhere, nor tell Julian about. Swish, strike three, I’m out.

I hate it when I fuck up like that. But I am a very sick man, and shit happens.

Anyhow, back to the point : I am very worried that my eyes are getting worse. Seems like it gets a little harder to read text, both on the screen and in real life.

And I am scared that this will just keep getting worse until everything is just one big soft blur and I am functionally blind.

I need to say this to get it out of my system, but I also mean it : if I ever go blind, I willkill myself. I could get used to almost anything – being deaf, or paralyzed (as long as I keep my hands), or bedridden, or whatever.

But blindness would be a dealbreaker. Or lifebreaker, I suppose.

I cannot imagine wanting to live if I couldn’t see.

Got that off my chest. That is not a probable outcome at this point. I suspect the worst that will happen is I will need another operation. Or, more likely, that I will need to go back to wearing glasses.

Possibly pretty strong ones.

Hopefully this can all be foxed with a shot to the eye or two, like I said before. I am probably blowing this whole thing out of proportion and everything will be fine in the end and I will look back at this and laugh.

And the good kind of laugh, not the kind of laugh that escalates in volume and maniacal glee to indicate that I have finally lost my freaking mind.

It finally happened.

But diabetes can take your sight. And mine has been running rampant for a long time and continues to do so because my FUCKING sensor spontaneously stopped working and I am back to injecting insulin based solely on intuition.

AKA, not very much. Dammit.

That new paid for by the government prickless (LOL) glucometer can’t get here fast enough. I freaking hate this shit.

My only alternative is to pay $100 for a new sensor. Or beg another from Doctor Caswell, which can probably do.

But not yet. I am going to need time to build up the nerve to make the call to tell Ken I need another sensor again.

I didn’t do anything wrong this time, I swear! It just conked out.

Maybe it couldn’t handle the sweatiness level of a fat guy in a heat wave. I dunno.

Anyhow, so I am worried about my eyes. If things get bad enough I am going to have to see if Doctor Vaezi can see me sooner.

If not, I will have to go (sigh) to the ER.

I’m becoming a bit of a frequent flyer there.

More after the break.

---

Oh right, I’m supposed to write things now

Trying not to let my visual issues get me down or freak me out.

Whatever happens, I will get through it, and I will be fine.

Also trying not to beat myself up too much over missing that June 30 appointment with Doctor Vaezi. That involves studiously ignoring the annoyingly shrill, mocking voice (like my own personally Woody Woodpecker) in my head that says “If you hadn’t fucked that up, this problem would already have been solved, LOSER. ”

Man I hate that little asshole.

I was really hoping to find one of him getting brutally raped. Oh well.

Some day I will hopefully exorcise enough of my demons and externalize enough of my rage that I won’t attack myself any more.

I am my own tormentor. At some point, I internalized the abuse I got from the world, despite said abuse mostly coming in the form of neglect.

Active or passive, the world made it clear what it thought of me, and many have been the times I wished someone actually would actively abuse me because then, at least, someone would be showing an interest in me and validating my existence.

If someone puts time and energy into torturing you, you must mean something to them.

But if nobody pays any attention to you whatsoever, not even to hurt you, you conclude that you don’t matter at all. To anyone. Ever.

In fact, you don’t even fucking exist. Or at least you shouldn’t.

And the fact that you just keeping hanging around breathing the air and taking up space is a fucking crime. Can’t you take a hint? We don’t want you around!

Signed, The Entire Human Race, Plus The Cosmos Itself.

Well fuck all y’all. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to claw my way up to the sunlight on a ladder made of the corpses of my enemies and take what is rightfully mine and FUCK anyone or anything that gets in my way.

For far too long, I have been left to starve in the midnight tundra of my depressed soul. No sunlight, no love, no compassion, only the cold arctic moonlight and life lived on emergency power, with no backups.

Well that shit ends right now. One way or another, I am going to make it to the dawn and I am going to build me a shelter and some warm fucking clothes and I am going to warm myself with the heat of my burning delusions and when I finally recover enough to feel human again, I am going to open my front door and walk out into the sun of that new dawn and take a deep breath and shout my joy at being alive to the sky.

And not even heart disease or blindness can to stop me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a lovely sunny 4th of July. ^[1] It’s 24 degrees out, the sky is blue with a light patina of fluffy white cloud, and I am feeling fairly good.

I’m not sick, but I’m not well.

I thought I had this brilliant, explosive, deeply insightful topic to write about today, then I sat down and started writing about it and realized it made no frigging sense.

So that was a bummer,

I had been thinking about my idea that you can be addicted to relief. And the idea was, well there’s no relief without pain, so does that mean you’re also addicted to pain? Does that mean you subconsciously seek out pain in order to feel relief from it?

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But sigh. Nope.

Because a) no pain is pretty much always better than relief from pain unless you’re a way more energetic and intense person than I, and b) if you suffer from depression and anxiety and various physical ailments like I do, you don’t exactly have to go looking for pain, and c) it’s not like I have a long history of getting myself into painful and/or scary situations I then require relief from.

I would probably be better off if I did, to be honest. At least I would get some frigging life experience instead of being a hermetically sealed urban hermit.

And maybe then I wouldn’t be so god damned afraid of everything. I have known for a very long time that what I “need” to do is go out into the big loud busy world and stay there until I acclimate to the higher stimulation levels and thus learn, on a deep level, that the outside world is not so scary after all.

Yup. Known that for ages. At least a decade. Probably a lot more.

Convincing myself to actually do it, on the other hand…..

Now would be a great time to do it. The weather’s fantastic. The outside world is a very pleasant place right now, all warm and happy and cheerful. It’s pretty much my personal dictionary’s definition of “nice” out there right now. As long as I take it easy, I could take the elevator down and sit outside for a while, just soaking up rays and letting the fresh air clean some of the crap from living in filth from my lungs.

That reminds me. Time to look up cleaners. I could totally see myself sinking a couple hundred bucks in hiring some professional cleaners to come in and sanitize this god damned cesspit I call a bedroom.

It would be money well spent.

I might have to leave the apartment while they work, though, in order to avoid the feelings of intense shame at people seeing my… mess.

Let’s just say there’s more than just dust in places.

But it’s their job. I am sure this would not be the worst they will have seen.

Might be up there, though.

More after the break.

---

Hello Monkey! Hey, is that a wrench?

Well, life has thrown a rather depressing complication at me.

See, because it’s summer, Joe’s work as a janitor for the school board has switched to summer cleaning hours.

That means he is now working from 10:30 AM to 6:30 PM, which means the car is busy during those hours, which means it is not available to take me places for most of the day for the next two months.

That’s going to make getting to my medical appointments very tricky.

For the stuff here in Richmond, there’s always taxis or the bus. So that is doable at least. I don’t want to pay for cabs but I can do it if I have to.

But for the stuff at St. Paul’s and other faraway locations that’s not an option. Cabs would cost far too much and I am not entirely sure I could handle the bus for the stuff i Richmond, let alone a long complicated journey to some place in Vancouver.

I sure as fuck would be using the elevator in the Skytrain stations.

There is also HandyDART, which is a point to point bus service Transit offers for disabled people so they can get to their medical appointments.

Pretty sure it’s free. And on paper, it would be the perfect solution.

But I am terribly afraid of the mentally disabled. Not proud of that but it is what it is. And the prospect of spending a long ride in a short bus with them chills me to the bone.

So that’s definitely a last resort kind of thing.

I could ask Felicity, I suppose, although she has a pretty busy teaching schedule so it’s pretty iffy as to whether she would be free,

I would, of course, pay for gas.

But then there’s the issue of fucking COVID. Neither of us are fully vaccinated yet and she is worried about taking the virus back to her elderly parents so I am not sure she would be comfortable with me in her car, even if we both wore masks.

Which is a shame, because road trips with her are always awesome. I can’t think of another person I would rather have drive me places.

Luckily, as far as I know, I have nothing major till the end of the month. So other than the need to cash my monthly cheque (finally), I have no need for a ride any time soon.

I will check my notes to make sure that is true, though.

I really need to start putting that shit into a calendar app of some sort.

Or at least writing it down on my actual calendar.

Somewhere in me is a highly competent person who always stays on top of things and is super organized, efficient, and in control.

To the point of it being a little scary, in fact.

But he’s buried under depression with the rest of my good traits.

Someday I will dig that poor fella up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

By any objective standard, I’m a pretty awesome guy.

Patient readers know the drill. ^[1]

1. I have a sky high IQ. Hyperintelligent. Never had to study in school. Never met anyone clearly smarter than I am. Can think rings around most people. Etc.
2. Massive writing talent. Well I mean. You’re reading it right now. My time at VFS proved to me that I write better than most people without even trying. Some day I should get around to trying.
3. Charismatic and lovable. What can I say, I’m a sweetie. I have a charming personality and a megawatt power of personality. Cute, too.
4. Hilarious. I am one funny motherfucker. Many people, some of them who don’t even know me, have said so. Right before Covid hit, I did a comedy open mic and got a huge ovation. I got the power.
5. Genuinely caring and compassionate and understanding. I really care about people and want them to do well. I see their pain and want to help them. I would heal the world if I could.

And so forth and so on. I’m going to stop there because I am making myself sick.

My point is, I have got a lot to be proud of, and yet I am not proud. I have nothing to be ashamed of, yet I am wracked with shame. I have many assets so potent that most people would give three limbs to have, and I have to make lists like the one above to remind myself I even have them,

In short, I have a great deal going for me and yet I don’t feel it, I should get at least some happiness out of all my gifts and yet I rarely do.

What’s up with that?

First off, it’s mostly latent. I’m not doing anything with it, or not much at least, and while that hardly invalidates my powers, it does mean that they are bottled up and frustrated and thus a source of pain more than a source of joy.

Sad but true.

Plus, I take them for granted. I know I shouldn’t but I do. They are a part of me and always have been. Trying to appreciate them is like trying to appreciate having fingers.

I mean yeah, you’d miss them if they were gone, but most of the time you don’t even think about them.

Plus, and I realize this is a bit of a wack thing to say, but they have never done me much good anyhow.

The reasons for this are extremely complicated and I can’t claim I bear zero responsibility for that, but the fact remains that for the most part, my high level abilities have just alienated me from others and left me bored and lonely.

Well, that’s mostly the IQ part that does that. But still.

And I know that can be changed. There has got to be a place or situation where I can use my talents for personal gain out there somewhere. And it’s only my own inner paralysis that keeps me from seeing and finding and exploiting that kind of thing.

One day, the scales will fall from my eyes and I will see my opportunity and seize it and finally get to make something of myself.

Assuming, of course, I live that long.

More after the break.

---

My eyes are dim, I cannot see

I was going to link a version of the Boy Scout song those lines come from, but the only version on YouTube was sung-shouted by distinctly NON-professional children and that shit is hard on the soul, so, you’re welcome.

Anyhow. My point is, it’s been five weeks since my second cataract operation, and I still can’t see too good.

In fact, my vision right now is worse than it was without my glasses before I had the first cataract removal operation.

And it has me worried. I was really anticipating some form of improvement. Kind of thought that was the whole eye of slicing my eyeballs open. Twice.

But I suspect something has gone terribly wrong. And it might be my fault.

After all, I was the one who fucked up the instructions on the eye drops for the first operation and stopped them way too soon.

Now I am trying to stay level headed about the whole thing and not disappear down a shame spiral and end up oscillating between denial and self-loathing for freaking ever and never actually dealing with the issue.

I mean, that’s what I have been doing so far, and look where it’s got me.

So when I go cash my check on Monday, I will also make a stop upstairs to Doctor Vaezi’s office and make an appointment.

He told me to come back to him if things didn’t get better, and they didn’t, so back I shall go to get them to run their diagnostics and see if they can fix me up.

Hopefully, it will be as simple as him giving me another of those anti-inflammatory shots he gave me once before. It was very effective, and it didn’t even hurt.

And my eyeball felt nice and cool inside for a while.

My biggest worry is that he will tell me my eyes are super fucked and there is either nothing he can do to fix them or it will take a round of far more complicated, painful, and dangerous operations to keep me from going blind.

Admittedly, the odds of that are (hopefully) low. But that’s how my hyper-neurotic mind works, and I feel better for having exorcised that thought from my head by writing it down for you nice people to read.

That’s how us writers work, I guess. We work out our issues by writing.

Like that thing about the Great Column? Started off as a way for me to workout some ideas about restructuring my mind to handle a more energetic life.

And I think it turned out pretty dang good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Man, not only do I not have my ducks in a row, I don’t think I have two ducks in the same province right now.

I feel very, very scattered right now. I am having a hard time concentrating on the screen. My mind keeps wandering off on tangents like a bored child at some boring adult type event.

So, me as a preschooler, basically. I did that a lot.

Kind of inconsiderate of me, looking back, but when you are a young child, your parents are gods, and the idea that something you do could hurt them in some abstract way doesn’t necessarily occur to you.

By abstract, I mean in a non-obvious way. Obviously, you know that if you hit them or said something mean to them it would hurt them,

But worrying them by doing something that isn’t scary to you seems like it is, quite frankly, more their problem than yours.

I mean, I got why they were upset with me when they finally found me (usually talking to the scariest looking adult around) after I wandered off.

But everything seemed okay now, so really, what’s the big deal?

Little kids are pricks, is what I am saying. Even pretty nice little kids like I was who loved animals and felt bad for people in soap operas.

Anyhow, back to the subject…. shit. I don’t have one.

Oh wait, yes I do, it’s how scatterbrained and incoherent I feel.

Weird that I somehow forgot all about that,

---

Oh right, all those games

Oh right, I bought one of those crazy packs of like 20 games for 4 bucks recently.

Might as well record some quick impressions of some of the games while I still remember the damned things.

Dungeons 2. The premise is that you’re an evil demonic villain type building dungeons and stocking them with traps and monsters in order to protect you from the hordes of annoying heroic types who seem to think you exist solely to provide them with fodder for their quests for fame, glory, and experience points.

Oh, and loot. Boy do they love loot.

And while the game has a very amusing evil-type narrator with a posh British voice and a snarky attitude, I did not get very far into the game before realizing it was not, in fact, my cup of tea. At least, not at the moment.

Perhaps I will be more in the mood for that kind of RTS-ish gameplay some other time.

King’s Bounty : Dark Side. And speaking of evil (ish), in this game you are a servant of the Dark working to free your people from the forces of Light who have run amok and slaughtered your innocent (ish) demons, devils, and ghouls in their mad quest to destroy the Dark and shatter the balance forever.

And that’s terrible idea. For what is Light without Darkness to illuminate?

I’ve played two other games in the King’s Bounty franchise before. They are well made RPGs with turn-based combat. They are a lot like the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise but with much better story and world-building elements.

This one seems fun. Odd that I ended up with two “you are evil” games, although in this one, you’re only evil-ish. The forces of Light are total bastards and cruel zealots and you and your allies are more goth than actually evil.

Which I enjoy immensely.

Who says Dark has to mean evil?

More after the break,

---

Somewhere in deep space

Somewhere in deep space, the Great Column awoke.

All along its height, points of articulation flexed slightly, cracking the crust of micrometeorite dust that had formed on joints over the millennia.

Inside the Great Column, everything and everyone the Capacithons had ever know shook too. Things fell off high perches and shattered on the floor. Dust left undisturbed for hundreds of generations filled the air.

The insectoid Capcithons felt the walls, floors, and ceilings of their universe move for the very first time, and this was so bizarre and upsetting and incomprehensible to them that, as one, the millions of them who called the Column their home wrung and worried their delicate hands, and their antennae vibrated in sheer terror.

Blind chaos reigned for several long heavy seconds, and then every Eldest remembered their training, and drew themselves up onto only their hindmost legs, and skreed the scree none of them ever thought they would ever hear, let alone make.

Instantly, the twitterings, chirps, and squeals of consternation stopped as if their power had been cut, and every Eldest^[1] turned to their Brood, and told them thus :

“Lo, my Children, it is Time and we are Chosen! Rejoice, for we are blessed by fate to be the ones who will prepare the way for the Energy which soon will arrive! Go to your Station! Fulfill your Purpose! Rejoice, because the Blessed Day is here!”.

And after a few moments of stunned yet solemn silence, the halls, tunnels, corridors, chambers, galleries, and alcoves of the Column burst into furious activity. The humming of flapping wings was so intense it it made some citizens bob and weave in midair.

But their sense of purpose was undimmed. Every one of them had trained their entire lives for this moment without ever believing it would come, but now that their training was activated, they were as single-minded and focused as their hive-dwelling ancestors had been when they smelled a foe.

Channel Guardians polished their Channels until they gleamed with efficiency. Conduit Masters tested and adjusted their Conduits till they clicked between positions as smoothly and precisely as if they were part of the same animal. Most sacred of all, the Chiplords verified that every single microchip in the vast brain of the Column was behaving exactly as specifications said they should, and replaced any that did not.

These and the dozens of other specialized groups set to work with an intensely focused fury, determined to make their Eldest proud and terrified of failing their Brood.

And throughout the Column, the Bulwarks lined the corridors to make sure that overexcited and confused citizens made it directly to their Stations.

Thus, within a handful of minutes, the Great Column went from Dormant to Primed then to Ready for the first time in recorded history.

And then the Energy arrived, and with it the Song that was so ineffably beautiful that many of the Capacithons passed directly into a state of stunned bliss from which they would not recover for many days.

And they rejoiced, because via the Song they knew that they had done well.

And such was the power of the experience that not a single one out of the millions of bug-people thought to ask themselves. “What now?”.

They would soon find out.

---

Good. Because I have no idea either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] And perhaps, in their deepest thoraxes, some of the Eldest thought, “Oh no! Why now? Why us? Why of all the generations does it have to be us?”. But if so, they never told anybody about it. “

Warning, it IS in rhyme.

I am too blown away by the scope, depth, and beauty of that epic poem to have anything cognizant to say about it yet.

But it did inspire me to try this :

---

The Trial of Man

At last, I had him where I wanted him.

“O wretched creature Man! ” I began, “How do you justify all the wretched horrors you have visited upon yourself and the world?”

“I don’t.” he calmly replied.

“Because you can’t!” I accused.

“Yes, but not for the reason you think. “

“Because they are unjustifiable! ” I hotly retorted.

“Because I do not exist. ” he coolly replied. “I’m not real. There is no person called Man, or Humanity, or Homo Sapiens. I am merely a… well… “

He picked a bit of dried grass that had fallen out of his overalls off the ground.

“…. straw man. A rhetorical device, and a misleading one at that. ”

I was taken aback by this, but tried not to show it. “Are you seriously saying that there is no such thing as the human race? Because I can think of seven and a half billion reasons why that’s an absurd idea. “

“Oh come now, you know better than that.” he replied in an infuriatingly patient and indulgent tone. “I never said there was no such thing as humanity, I said there was no such person as Humanity. The human race is not, as yet, a conscious being. It therefore makes no sense to be angry with it. Or to praise it, for that matter.”

“But…. but…. ” I sputtered. Then got a grip on myself.

“But then who is to blame for all your crimes?” I demanded.

“No one. ” Man replied.

“NOBODY? ” I screamed.

“No, not nobody. No one. As in, no one person, or group of people. If there is no such person as Humanity, how can they commit crimes? As a species, we are barely beginning to develop the dimmest level of global consciousness via the internet. Global sentience is centuries away. “

“Oh, and as an aside, ” he added, “if there was such a person as Man, would they not be just as responsible for all the good things done in the world as all the bad? “

Well he had me there.

“Then why do we keep thinking you exist?” I asked.

“Because as human beings, we are so hardwired to be social that we can’t relate to anything if we don’t relate to it as a person. That’s why we anthropomorphize everything. That’s why we can get angry at our car for not starting, or at the weather for turning foul, or at made-up conceptualizations of our entire race. None of these things are conscious being that make decisions we can then judge. If you suggested that they were out loud, people would think we’re crazy. And yet, we react as though they are.”

He leaned forward in the witness box, and said, “The real scandal, kid, is that there is nobody in charge. NO BODY. Our social instincts force us to search for and believe in a hierarchy that does not exist. Never has. But these instincts are so strong that we invent entire religions based on a clearly imaginary leader figure who is in charge of everything just to make ourselves feel better. ”

He sat back down in his seat. “And we elect leaders and pretend they are responsible for everything when they clearly are not. And the craziest part is they think they are in charge too. But they’re not. The brutal truth is that civilization is an emergent property of humanity and we are all responsible for it. But we don’t know how to overcome our social instincts enough to see that yet, so we elect and worship figureheads. “

He then paused, and said, “I’m sorry, what was the question again?”

I sighed, and checked my notes.

---

Well, turns out that did not help me stay on point like I hoped it would.

Oh well, still some stuff worth articulating.

More after the break.

---

What does the fox sing?

None of this shit, that’s for sure.

Oddly enough, I make sense when I talk.

No, what this fox sings lately is stuff off SingSnap.

It’s a karaoke website and/or app and it’s the best one I have tried yet.

And I have tried a bunch.

What makes it great is not that it does any one thing better than the other apps, it’s that it does everything right. The interface is simple and attractive and easy to use. They have tons of content. Everything loads smoothly and quickly.

Quite frankly, it’s a pleasure to use.

Except for one little occasionally major thing : like most websites or apps with tons of content, the content is all user submitted, and some of it is absolute crap.

I’m talking riddled with typos, extra spaces everywhere, extraneous non-alphanumeric characters, and partial or complete failure to actually sync up with the damned song.

It’s a testament to how much I otherwise like the thing that I react to that shit by grumbling and looking for a better version rather than quitting in disgust.

It offends my delicate artistic sensitivities.

Speaking of which, i do not recommend pressing the “Hear how others sing it” button. Trust me, in most cases, the answer is “not very well at all”.

I clicked on it once and the girl sounded like Droopy after he got “fixed”.

But I’ve been having a ball with it, singing my heart out to my favorite songs. I’ve done some Eminem, some Tom Waits, a LOT of Tragically Hip (RIP Gordie :(), and one of my fave all time songs to sing, Total Eclipse of the Heart.

And the thing is, not only is singing fun, it’s also very good for me. Turns out that singing helps people with sleep apnea firm up the muscles in their neck and soft palate that go flaccid and block your airway when you sleep.

It is also my personal opinion that it helps clear the carbon dioxide that pools in the bottom of my lungs. The stuff my breathing exercises help me get rid of, especially the one where I empty my lungs as completely as I can.

Singing seems way more fun than that.

So now I have a new hobby : singing. Maybe I will record one of my performances one of these days, but I am in no big hurry.

For now I’m just going to….

Sing with it
Sing for the year
Sing for the laughter
Sing for the year
Sing with it
Sing for today
’cause maybe tomorrow
the Good Lord’ll take me away…

It’s true. I could go at any moment.

Damn right I’m gonna sing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.