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.