This is going to involve a lot of things that are difficult to articulate even for me, so please bear with me.

I’ve been feeling very… floaty lately. Like I am not really here. Instead, it feels like I am floating through the world like a neutrally buoyant balloon, not really truly touching anything, helpless in the breeze.

Now that I have become conscious of this floaty feeling, I realize it’s been building up slowly for a long time.

Yet another deadly health hazard that stalked me like a very patient predator, making sure not to have any clear, undeniable symptoms until it was far too late.

Even now, it’s a subtle and vague thing. It could still be entirely imaginary. I might just be reading too much into minor symptoms like any other recovering hypochondriac.

I don’t think so, though. It’s too consistent and persistent.

It really became apparent when I got out of the car to do my shopping last night. I felt very dizzy and it felt like the world was flooding away from me. My skin tingled all over and I felt a lurch in my stomach like I was in a high speed elevator that had just jerked into motion. That made me feel nauseous, unsurprisingly.

And that got me thinking about how this feeling of surreality has been building for a long time. My life is so unreal by default that it took me a long time to notice.

I mean, I spend all my time in front of this computer, mentally inhabiting its world via video games, Reddit, and blogging.

I have next to nothing to do with reality at all.

This is not an accident. I only feel safe in my virtual world, where I am in control of the stimulation level and feel competent and effective instead of incompetent and worthless.

I know that paints a less than heroic picture of me. I am scared of the world so I hide from it. The enormous burden of pain I carry leaves me precious little wherewithal witch which to struggle and strive and achieve.

No matter how badly I need to do so.

Crap. OK, back to the floaty feeling.

I’m getting better! I remembered the topic! Eventually!

It has me quite worried because I fear that it might be a sign that my peripheral neuropathy has shifted into high gear and my nervous system is dying from the surface of the skin inwards.

IT would make sense. I am still not controlling my diabetes properly. I am still without working glucometer to do so with. I need to call the pharmacy to see if I am due for another pack of sensors yet.

And I often get random intense pains of various sorts in various places. Burning, stabbing, wrenching. freezing, you name it, it’s hit me out of the blue.

Usually lasts less than five minutes. But it’s still a pretty bad sign.

And I know this should galvanize me into action. It should give me a pressing need to do everything I can to make sure I don’t die a horrible neurological death.

But it doesn’t. I’m still too sick in my head to deal with how I am sick in my bed.

That enormous indigestible lump of pain within me still paralyzes me when I try to act on my own behalf, and until I find a way to rid myself of that, I am going to keep drifting towards that big ol waterfall up there.

I am going to end up in my worst nightmare : buried alive in my own body, unable to move, tubes down my throat to make me breathe, going absolutely insane but not even able to make a sound, let alone scream.

Man that’s gonna suck.

More after the break.

---

Otaku’s hearts go “lub sub, lub sub”.

---

You are here. 

Well, I am, anyhow.

My mother and my brother live here.

I miss them a lot.

I’m sure they occasionally recall my absence too.

---

Burn bitch burn!

I’m in the mood to fricassee in my own grease tonight.

Time to burn like the bitch I am. I am sick of fighting the pain. It’s not worth it. Fighting it hurts more than the pain itself in the long run.

Better to just let the goddamned forest fire happen so it can clear out all the old brush and dried leaves and make way for new, healthy growth.

So fuck it, spark it up, clear out the deadwood, and get things going.

The big pain that I call my Wound hurts like hell. Let’s just sit with that pain a while. Resist the urge to suppress or dodge it and let it rage away unabated.

See, that’s not so bad. Sure, it hurts, both in and of itself and via that strange cold feeling I get in my chest when I am dealing with my shit.

But we want that cold feeling. Because it indicates progress. That’s the sensation of some of the ice around my heart melting and slipping away, like icebergs calving off the edge of a glacier.

It doesn’t feel good. It’s painful and icky and weird. Before I recognized this pain for what it was, I was pretty freaked out by it.

But now I know it’s progress. So bring it on.

The more I melt, the more I heal. So turn up the heat.

I’ll take it all. Embarrassment. Shame. Anxiety. Fear. Dread. And that nameless terror that drives compulsion and makes you feel like something terrible is going to happen.

Sign me the fuck up. I’m both frustrated and numb enough to volunteer. It’ll be worth the pain just to feel alive for a fucking change.

The only thing worse than feeling bad is feeling nothing.

Feeling pain means you’re alive.

Feeling nothing means you’re dead.

And on the whole, I’d rather be alive.

Most of the time, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That oddly worded question popped into my head last night and I decided it meant it was time to tackle the small question of the meaning of life again.

Mine in particular.

It came up because I have been struggling with feelings of meaninglessness and futility lately. The feeling that everything is pointless and that I don’t know why I do anything has been coming up all too frequently.

And that is concerning. Move to low yellow alert, Ensign. I am not too worried about it yet because there’s no urge to self-harm or “escape” attached to it, so it qualifies more as self-pity than anything else, and that’s a good thing.

In order to pity oneself, like I have said many times before, one must love oneself enough to feel you don’t deserve what you’re getting.

So it’s a good sign.

But it’s still worrisome, so let’s poke it with a stick.

Patient readers will remember that I have struggled with this issue many times before. The last time I did so, it was to document my startling and original conclusion that knowing why we humans seek the meaning of life does not, in fact, mean that I am someone immune from that same need.

There’s no logical reason why it would, when you think about it.

I feel like there’s a signature mental error of us clever intellectual types in there somewhere. Something about mistaking the detachment of analysis for detachment from the thing analyzed.

But that’s a topic for another day.

in other words, I need to find the meaning of life too, or at least, the meaning of mine. There has to be some kind of point to all of this bullshit I’ve lived through clinging to the margins of the book of life, otherwise, what’s the point?

But I have enough levels in Existentialism to know that there is no point in searching for some kind of inherent meaning to life. We are not the product of any being’s intentions. None of us have a cosmic task to accomplish. The universe did not create us for a reason, either individually or as a species.

No, we must create our own meaning in this impassive universe.

I keep trying to reduce it to essentials : what do I need in order to be happy? What are my unmet needs and how do I meet them? How do I develop a better functional relationship with life?

And that sounds perfectly logical. Suspiciously so. Makes me wonder what I’m missing.

A lot, probably.

Regardless, there’s a certain charm to trying to imagine I am my own zookeeper.

What does this lovely and unique creature need in order to thrive?

Well a very thorough cleaning of my cage would sure help. And fresh bedding.

Seriously, though, I think the problem is the cage. I think we’ve explored the possibilities of caged life quite thoroughly. It really needs to roam free.

Problem is, it won’t leave. Door’s been open for years. And the creature often stares through the door, and occasionally approaches it, but mostly it just lays there in its cage, listless and disengaged, and plays with its toys.

It’s like it’s completely given up on life.

And how do you fix that?

More after the break.

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That gutter troll

I guess I have always assumed that there is no place for me in the world where all the good and whole and healthy people live.

You know, the “normal” world. Where there’s sunshine and fresh air and natural beauty and all else that is wholesome and decent and pure lives.

Instead, I have remained, in my shame, tucked away in my tiny cave far away from the warmth of human connection. Living vicariously through my projections and pretending that everything is okay and in hearty denial of the fact that it is not.

At least here in the shadows, I am not reminded of what a revolting monstrosity I am. At least here I can feel inconspicuous. At least here, I am able to pretend that I am, at least somewhat, just like everyone else.

But I’m not. I’m just plain not. I am one very strange creature and there is no point in being in denial about it.

Instead, I should concentrate on making that work for me.

After all, Superman isn’t like everyone else either.

And I know most of my shame is irrational. It is based on how I feel and not any kind of objective truth about myself. It’s the toxic byproduct of being raped when I was 4.

A lot of us rape victims feel soiled and awful. It’s the most unfair thing of all. But it’s true.

And I am working hard on figuring out how to get rid of it. But it’s slow going so far.

I think this is one of those things I can’t reason myself out of. It’s going to take something of a spiritual nature to wipe away this taint I bear. Some kind of cleansing ritual powerful enough to convince me I am now clean.

But I have no such bag of tricks. For the millionth time, I wish I had some kind of religious tradition to draw upon when I need some way to reach outside of my petty everyday self and connect with a higher existence.

But it’s too late for that. I know I’m all alone in this head of mine. I can’t imagine a path to belief in divinity and holy helpers and an all powerful being who loves me.

I sure can see the appeal, though.

Like with everything else, I guess that if I want something that will work for me, I will have to build it for myself.

Being unique really sucks sometimes.

Knowing me, I will probably write it into existence. Make it part of a story I am writing. Use that story to flesh it out and breathe life into it.

Or maybe I will say to heck with it and just plain write new holy texts.

We’re past due for some anyhow. Might as well be me.

At least this time, someone will do it right.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because sometimes, I just… can’t.

One of the hardest things to cope with about depression is the numbness at its root. It is my belief that depression and all its horrors stem directly from a deep and terrible numbness of the mind that cuts off the patient from all the positive inputs we need to be sane and healthy individuals.

Thus, depression isn’t always about feeling terrible.

It can also be about feeling nothing. Which is terrible.

The numbness robs us of our capacity for pleasure and joy, and we end up addicted to whatever activity has the sky high effort to reward ratio to be able to pierce that thick layer of ice that clings to our hearts and give us the tiny trickle of life-sustaining energy on which we survive.

I am all about the poetic rambling sentences today.

To some, talking about depression’s numbness is counterintuitive because we tend to think of depression in terms of negative emotions, like sadness and anger, and numbness seems like the opposite of emotion.

But what I am saying is that it’s this numbness that leads directly to the negative emotions by starving us of the kind of spiritual sunlight people need to survive.

We are not in control of this numbness. It comes and goes as it pleases according to the chaotic whims of our brain chemicals.

So we never know how we will feel. And that’s depressing in and of itself. We can live in totally different emotional universes from minute to minute and there is no way to cope with that except to shut down and hide from the world some place with very low stimulation levels where we can feel safe.

This is why we self-isolate. We seek hyper-stable low-stimulus environments in order to compensate for the chaos within.

The worst, to me, is when it freezes out those we love. It’s easy (and convenient) to imagine that we are all alone in our bleak snowscapes but we are not.

Almost all of us have people who love and care for us who have been left out in the cold by our illness and who wish they knew how to reach us.

I know I do. I am eternally grateful for my dear friends and their persistence in loving me. I know I can seem like I am a million light years away sometimes but I do truly love you all with all my heart and appreciate all you do for me.

I wish there was a way I could keep my illness from hurting anyone else. But the only way to do that would be to go back to living completely alone and there is no way I could survive like that any more.

I barely survived it back then. I was pretty crazy a lot of the time.

So I guess I just have to trust that my friends know what they are doing and can take care of themselves and figure knowing me is worth the cost.

Well I am pretty damned amazing, come to think of it.

So I guess it all works out.

More after the break.

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Starting from scratch

Also known as the blog entry about nothing.

No ideas rattling around in my capacious cranium at the moment, so I guess it’s time for a State of the Fruvous address.

I am doing okay. It’s an intense time to be me. That stent operation has put a lot more energy into my system and I am still sorting out what to do with it.

I have a whole new motivational system to build. after all. One that can actually lead to action for a change.

What a strange new world.

Right now, like I said before, the most straightforward and noticeable effect is that it has turned up the volume on my emotions.

Fine by me. The more I feel, the faster I heal. I’d pop the cork and let them all out at once if I could.

Here comes the flood.

The immediate effect of this is that emotions are un-suppressing themselves. Stuff just keeps bubbling up and I am doing my best to keep my mind open. flexible, and receptive so that I can receive what my deeper mind is trying to tell me.

And I can feel something stirring within me, struggling to wake up, trying to be born. It knows the dreaming has to end and it wants to leave its crib and see the world at last.

But as for right now, it is still primitive and weak. Barely even a conscious thing, more like a person in a coma who has just remembered reality.

But it grows stronger by the minute. This rich new diet of life force lets it put on bone and muscle mass rapidly, and soon it will be ready to escape this hibernation chamber I have been locked in for so long and actually go find out where the crew went.

It’s alien monsters, isn’t it? It’s always alien monsters. Why can’t it ever be something fun, like they’re all hiding in the cargo bay to throws me a surprise party, or they got invited to some kind of interstellar barbeque joint and my invite is waiting for me along with a rented space tux and a shuttlecraft, or they found an orgy planet, or something.

Actually, forget the surprise party. I hate those.

My point (I think) is that I feel hopeful that I am getting better. The route will be anything but linear and there is no telling how long it will take, but I am moving along my path to recovery at an accelerated rate and that has to be a good thing.

I still have a lot of sadness and doubt and isolation and all the rest of depression’s usual bag of tricks. I still have a whole lot of healing to do.

I am still carrying around a very big wound and it’s still weighing me down.

But I am melting that block of ice on my heart as fast as I can.

Die, my depression. DIE.

Wow that got intense quick.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There are drawbacks to being good at holding yourself together.

Sometimes, falling apart so you can come back together stronger is the best thing you can do for yourself.

But I suppose that’s not the kind of thing most people can do on purpose.

I spend a lot of mental and emotional energy just keeping my shit together. And I have to wonder if it’s worth it. What am I getting out of it?

Stability, I suppose, or the illusion thereof. The semblance of predictability. Freedom from the dark demons of chaos always threatening to tear my tender sanity apart.

But are those real? Maybe they are merely paper ghosts my insanity uses to control me. Yet more boogeymen my depression created.

Maybe I could let it all fall apart and still be fine. Better, even, at least after the dust settles and a new and superior island of stability forms.

I have a strong feeling that much vitally important transformation has been delayed and denied by my conscious mind’s constant interference in the mind’s natural processes.

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering if I would be far better off if I was far less self-aware and in command of my mind.

I mean, we have subconscious minds for a reason and they are probably best left alone to do their jobs.

But no, I “know better” and demand control over everything because I don’t trust anything to work fine on its own (issue) and so I essentially micromanage my own mind instead of letting it just do its job in peace.

Like the title above suggests. I should just let myself change. Surrender all form so that I may be reborn anew and all that mystical type stuff.

The shape I have assumed is incorrect. It does not do what it is supposed to do, which is facilitate my pursuit of my own happiness.

It is supposed to be my shapeshifting super-suit that can turn into whatever I need it to be in any given situation.

Instead, due to my fanatical need to keep everything the same, it is an ill-fitting and cumbersome costume that keeps me from meeting most of my needs.

It’s got to go.

But change is scary. On a deep level, where identity lies, it’s the scariest thing there is.

For every butterfly born, a caterpillar dies, and so forth. But only if the caterpillar thinks of itself as a caterpillar only, fixed and stable.

Because it’s true, the caterpillar dies. But that which once was the caterpillar lives.

If it can understand and accept that, then there is no death, just transformation.

My word, I am all about the mysticism today.

Similarly, if I can accept that stopping being this current version of me does not mean stopping being me but only the transformation into a happier version of me, I can stop fighting the changes I need to make and let myself become what I need to become.

We are not a singular being. We are a process. We stop being who we were the same way we stopped being infants, children, and teenagers.

Gradually, and with no gaps.

Fighting that is futile. It’s time I learned to stop.

I hereby declare that I am ready and willing to change however I need to change in order to be happy. In other to be free.

Let’s hope I’m still able.

More after the break.

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If I was sane

This is my attempt to “think past the problem”.

What would it be like if my mental illness disappeared?

Wonderful, obviously. It’s the main thing keeping me from pursuing a happier, more rewarding, more fulfilling life.

One a lot more like a normal person’s, with jobs and relationships and such.

I would be a heck of a lot more confident. Perhaps obnoxiously so. Without my crippling self-doubt and convulsive fear response, I would be one cocky son of a bitch.

I know this about myself. Hidden under all the layers of neurosis is a smug prick determined to push his luck as far as it will go and who refuses to limit himself any more than absolutely necessary because God gave him a fortune in talent and intelligence and he’s going to use it to get rich and have fun doing it.

Or something like that, anyhow.

But I would still be a sweetie too, I think. Just maybe not quite as worried about other people’s feelings. Not to the point of being callous, mind you.

Just to the point of being able to pursue my own self-interest and assume other people are capable of taking care of themselves and aren’t made of fragile glass.

Similarly, I would be a lot more ambitious. In my own laissez-faire way. I’d take a lot more risks, and use my unique perspective to find unusual angles and approaches to things that work because they exploit loopholes nobody’s ever thought of before.

I’d be more romantically and sexually adventurous too. I’d go after anyone I was attracted to who was, shall we say, available to me.

I’m not about to mess with some straight dude’s head by pursuing him. I could really mess someone up with my charisma and charm and ability to push people’s buttons.

And that would be very, very wrong.

So I would never do that. Um, again.

Sorry James. I didn’t know what I was doing.

What else… I would have the courage of my own cleverness. By this, I mean I would do things that seem incredibly bold but are actually way more sane than they look because I have figured out the difference between how scary things seem and how dangerous they actually are.

Life belongs to those who know the odds, kids. And can play them with skill.

I know there was a lot more I meant to talk about, but right now all I can think about is the sheer joy of being free of all this goddamned fear.

Somehow, I gotta pull this off.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy Thursday.

And my shrink, Doctor Costin, had an intriguing suggestion. In the course of the session, I was talking about the massive psychological wound around which my psyche is formed and I said that I wished there was the psychological equivalent of a wheelchair or other prosthetic that could help me deal with it.

It was meant more or less as a joke, albeit one with a nugget of truth.

But Doc Costin said he thought I could build something like that myself. In my mind.

And he’s right. I totally could. That sounds like a very “me” thing to do.

And what the hell, it might even work!

---

But what would such a thing even look like?

It would have to reinforce me somehow. Prop me up. Give me the structure that I can’t seem to give myself. The structure I never got as a kid and never had to develop as a student due to my outrageous natural abilities.

In many ways, these brains of mind have spoiled me.

By default, I am goo. Shapeshifting goo. I can take any form I choose and tend to shift to whatever shape best suits the situation I am in. This gives me a great deal of flexibility and there is enormous power in that. I can be whatever I need to be.

But in between those moments I am a limp pool of wet noodles. It’s great when I have some clear purpose or goal to focus me, but when there isn’t, I am lost and adrift.

I’m a genie without wishes. An android without a master. A self-driving car with no destination. And I can’t seem to generate these inputs myself.

So in addition to holding me upright and giving me structure, my psychological superstructure would also need to somehow support my finding and expressing my own desires via actions.

Honestly, I am picturing a robot hand holding mine and a robot voice saying “There, there. Everything will be all right. You are a good *tik* human. “

That’s almost painfully adorable.

A lot of it does come down to reassurance. It doesn’t always seem like it, but I am a very anxious and worried and nervous person and having someone strong and competent and confident to reassure me would go a long way.

A father figure, basically. Someone to calm my fears and encourage me to try new things, take risks, and expand my horizons.

Of course, this is putting a lot of strain on out whole wheelchair and/or prosthetics metaphor. We’re talking an actual person now.

So not so much a prosthetic as a mentor. Or a boyfriend.

Or a “Daddy”, I suppose. In the BDSM sense. I won’t deny that the idea of taking a subservient role to a dominant male has some appeal to me. Mostly because it would relieve me of the burden of having to figure out what the fuck to do with myself.

Can’t imagine who could actually dominate me, though, and that’s the problem. I am not looking to play let’s pretend. It would have to be someone who genuinely has a stronger personality than me otherwise I might as well stay home.

And I have a mighty strong personality. Backed by a smartass attitude and a very sharp and powerful mind. They would have to be able to anticipate and out-think me, and that is a much taller order than mere power of personality.

But who knows. Maybe somewhere out there is some megalithic motherfucker who could put me in my place.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like. I bet it’s nice.

More after the break.

---

On feeling more

More of what?

More of everything, really.

Unsurprisingly, the emotional effects of the mending of my heart are mixed. Having this newly strengthened river of life flowing through me has basically turned up the volume on all my emotions and that’s taking some getting used to.

It’s nice to have the good things amped up. I feel more capable of joy than ever before. I can feel more of the warmth of the company of my friends than ever before. I feel closer to the warmth and the light of the world than I have in a long time.

But the depression has gotten stronger too, and that worries me.

I find myself feeling open, active, conscious despair more often. Depressive thoughts like “I don’t want to deal with anything” and “I don’t want to get out of bed” and “there’s no point in anything any more” have become far more common.

And my sessions of sitting on the edge of my bed, lost, are getting longer and longer.

In the long term this could be quite good because it’s the product of my mind forcing buried emotions to the surface so I can process them and deal with them.

But you have to make it through the short term before the long term matters.

I don’t think I am in danger. As unpleasant as these moments of peak depression can be, they are not giving me the urge to do anything. Not yet, anyhow.

Luckily, I am very good at just soldiering on no matter what, so even if my depression deepens I know I will keep trudging along.

Besides, I can feel something being formed deep in the subterranean caverns of my soul. Something dark and grand and huge and powerful. Like an ancient god from a time before reason coming back to life and returning to its people after thousands of years of a deep and troubled sleep.

It is mighty, and noble, and invulnerable, and driven by a desire to give its human children the gift it has been protecting in its deep cavern all these years.

A gift that will bring them a great and terrible Awakening that will banish the shadows from their minds and let them see their world with clarity and depth for the first time.

It will do this because it loves it.

It knows some of us will die.

But the soul of humanity will be reborn at last.

---

Well that happened.

I amaze myself sometimes. Had no idea that was all in me. I just had the vague notion of something big and dark inside me and when I started writing about it, that came out.

I totally see how someone of a more mystical mindset would interpret an experience like that as being some kind of communion with a higher plane or cosmic entity.

After all, subjectively, it feels like that all “came out of nowhere”.

But I know it’s just me and my weird old brain.

Still feels pretty good to get it out there though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Now, the one thing you absolutely have to know about my butthole..

Seriously though, relax, we’re not talking about physical hardware today.

But don’t worry, we’ll get there someday!

Instead I want to talk about how something clearly went wrong during my anal stage of development as a small child and that’s why I am a total slob.

It’s crystal clear to me that I did not get the full dose of grooming and nesting instincts that other people got. A lot of important switches were never switched on and that has made life very difficult (and smelly) for me in many ways in my life.

I’ve always been a slob. Now I want to know why.

It’s not hard to guess what caused the issue : I got raped.

In, presumably, the anus, even.

And so I reverted to the oral stage in classic Freudian fashion. I became passive and weak like an infant, and I gave up on ordering my world the way I wanted it.

“It’s fine how it is” became my motto.

And in early childhood fashion, I think it was a protest of sorts as well. On some level, I was trying via self-neglect to attract the nurturing and attention that I needed.

I think I am still doing that in a way, to be honest. Sigh.

I think that’s my biggest barrier to cleaning up my act, so to speak. Deep within my soul there is still that angry child who wants someone to see the mess and feel bad for him and be thus prompted to take care of him.

They ain’t comin’, kid. But I know that’s hard to take.

I think part of me is afraid to take on the responsibility, too. I mean, if you lack the drive for it, keeping oneself and one’s environment clean seems like a lot of work.

Especially when you know you can just, ya know, not do that.

But it’s not that the mess doesn’t bother me. It bothers me a lot, actually. It’s just that instead of dealing with that via cleaning, I deal with it by withdrawing from my environment like a turtle retreating into its shell.

After all, that’s how I deal with everything else.

Well that’s going to end. I am going to get strong enough to face things and handle things and cope with things so that I don’t have to hide from anything any more.

I will take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, god damn it.

The stents in my heart have given me the raw material I will use to build a much, much better motivational engine for myself. One that actually drives me forward into a future with purpose and meaning and the ability to support myself.

I deserve so much more than this sad little life in suspended animation. I’m an amazing person, and should be out there proving that to the world.

But in order to get there, I will have to slowly wean myself off this turtle shell of mine. Convince myself to spend more time outside it. Learn that I don’t need to stay close to it so I can dive in at a moment’s notice.

Learn I can frigging deal with things, basically.

It’s going to cost me a lot of pain, anxiety, and fear, and there will be times when I will want to give up, but I will prevail.

Because fuck this weak pathetic life.

I want more.

More after the break.

---

Stop being smart!

And for Dog’s sake, slow down on the need to be right all the damned time.

Been pondering that never ending quest for the truth of mine, or rather the seamy underbelly of it, the need to constantly show off my intelligence and just how goddamned clever I am.

It’s not negotiable. It can’t ever be eliminated. This massive mind of mine needs exercise and my fragile ego needs validation and a childhood spent bored out of my mind in school left me in dire need of constant stimulation and all those factors combined plus a very strong need to prove myself means that I am probably going to be strutting my intellectual stuff till the day I die.

But I could dial it back a touch. Learn to moderate it and channel it into something more healthy and productive.

Luckily, I already learned to channel it into trying to be funny and interesting and fun to be around. That’s not without its problems but it’s a whole lot better than what a lot of my fellow neckbeards get up to.

It’s not the social aspects of this phenomenon that concerns me tonight, though. It’s that deep down burning need that rages like an out of control wildfire deep in my belly. It’s the fact that underneath all my sweet nature. wit, charm, and sensitivity is a part of me that is very. very crazy and dangerous.

Not hallucination type crazy, obviously. More maniacal. It’s cackling mad scientist crazy.

And this has to have a huge effect on the rest of my personality. That kind of thing doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

So I feel like I won’t get a real grip on who I am until I confront and try to understand this need to always do the “smart” thing.

As if life was school and I was still trying to get top marks.

As if at some point I would be officially recognized as the smartest.

As if I was still trying to make my mother happy by answering her questions correctly.

Whoa…. that one has to be big. Before I ever set foot in school, I was my mother’s student, and I would have done anything to make her happy.

Jesus, no wonder all four of us Bertrand kids ended up being so intellectual. We all started off as Mom’s students!

Well this has been productive AF. I have unearthed a lot of things for me to think about.

I can’t wait to tell my therapist about it all.

He’ll be so happy with me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Free to a good home

Warm, loving, affectionate pet. Sensitive to your moods and eager to please. Happy to do what you do as long as he’s with you. Snuggly and cute despite being a large breed. Always up for a cuddle or a wrestle. Funny and silly. Loves to make you laugh. Loyal and dedicated, though not a working breed. Great with kids. The perfect companion for someone who needs a kind and faithful companion to light their lonely path.

Free to a good home

Pet with some issues. Affectionate, but clingy. Flexible, but dependent. Silly, but also quite clumsy. Not safe around delicate things. Has a number of medical issues, so watch out for those vet’s bills. Prone to fits of melancholy. Cute but in a way that can really get on your nerves after a while. Awkward around people he doesn’t know. Not exactly low maintenance. May come to seem like a burden. Can be a real white elephant to the wrong owner. Can be downright depressing at times.

Free to a good home

A scared little animal
Who’s been running for a very long time
And is ever so cold, and tired, and lonely
And just wants to finally come home

---

Live to sleep?

I found myself thinking the following thought :

“I stay awake only for as long as I have to. ”

And that thought shocked me because I do not normally think of myself as that kind of person at all.

But I also realized it was true, more or less. The moment I get out of bed, a part of me starts longing to be back in it and counting the minutes until I go back to sleep.

And it is that part of me – that pressure in my mind – that pulls me back into bed the minute it can get away with it and keeps me in this cycle of sleeping in two hour naps instead of staying awake all day and sleeping at night like a normal person.

This craving for the escape of sleep is the source of that inward tide that act like gravity on my soul, pulling me down along with my mood and my energy levels and making it so that I have to constantly input energy even to just stay awake.

I’d be a lot better off if I could escape this gravity well.

But to discover that terrible tendency within me is a real eye-opener. It gives me an idea of what I am up against as I try to embrace life and living and the world outside my head. A substantial part of me wants the opposite : to sleep forever.

To not have to cope with anything ever again.

To finally escape from everything forever.

To basically be dead.

I got head work to do, that’s for sure.

---

---

I thought this was pretty damned good,

Could do something similar with us gays calling each other “fags”.

I’m a big believer in taking back the words. If you’re not ashamed to be it, they can’t hurt you by calling you it – even if they use a very offensive version of it.

It’s easy to turn it back on the haters, too.

“Why yes, I am fat. You have correctly deduced that I am grossly overweight. What subtle signs did you use to derive that startling and original conclusion? Was it something in the way I walk? Or perhaps the thickness of my fingers? Or was it the huge ball of fat currently stretching my shirt out, you fucking idiot?”

Don’t fuck with the funny fat guy.

---

A Mandela moment

Came across this factoid today : Crayola discontinued the “Flesh” colored crayon way back in 1962.

One small problem : I am positive I saw “Flesh” colored crayons in the Crayola crayon boxes of my youth and I was born in 1973.

So that’s impossible. Yet the memory remains. And that’s some freaky shit.

There’s potential outs. It could be that “Flesh” was discontinued in the USA but not Canada. But that seems pretty unlikely.

It could be that the crayons were not actually from Crayola and I am misremembering the brand. But you’d think the crappy brands would have changed too.

It could be that the ones we were buying were from before 1962. Crayola crayons are extremely shelf stable and vendors don’t like to order new stock unless they have
absolutely none of something left.

So it is at least marginally plausible that at some point, a massive bunch of unreconstructed Crayolas entered the Prince Edward Island system.

But we all know what it really is : it’s the Mandela Effect.

Somehow. a false memory gets encoded into our minds as if it was real. Something about the nature of the information and the nature of our minds leads to us somehow deriving a false memory as our memories get compressed and stored.

I wonder if it’s a modern phenomenon brought on by the amount of information in our heads passing a certain limit of our mind’s indexing capabilities and causing errors?

That’s also marginally plausible.

The big one for people my age is the Berenstain Bears.

Now that has always been their name. BerenstAIN Bears. With an A. No book has ever been officially published with any other name. Therefore any other name you remember them under has to be false.

I totally remember seeing BerenstEIN Bears books.

And I loved them! Granted, they were a tad schmaltzy and lame for a pint sized cynic like me, but there was such love and warmth and such top notch moral lessons in them that they won me over.

It was just like my sitcoms! But with furries!

But no. It’s a Mandela memory. And literally millions of other people have the exact same false memory. How is this possible?

My only clue is that Berenstein is a much more “normal” name. We see dozens of -steins in our lives. Who the fuck ever heard of a -stain?

Plus it just sounds gross, giving us another reason to change it on the way in.

So instead of recording it like it is, our minds made a “close enough” copy out of parts is already had around.

But that doesn’t explain other examples, like the original, people thinking Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the late eighties.

On what level did that “make more sense”?

The answer, I think, would take a godlike understanding of everything that was going on at the time plus everything there is to know about human memory to derive.

Meanwhile, we can all just enjoy being freaked out by it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It really feels like the apocalypse has begun, doesn’t it?

Everywhere there is some kind of nasty shit going down. Flood, fire, rough, hurricane. the list goes on and on.

Here in the GVRD, we are cut off from the rest of the province by severe flooding.

So we have had to start rationing. There’s signs up in the supermarkets telling you that you can only buy so much meat and dairy and such. Gas stations are telling people only to buy as much as they absolutely need.

Of course, the people on the other side are actually flooded and have things much worse. My heart goes out to them.

And it’s only going to get worse, folks. Much, much worse.

Because right now, we’re still burning through the slack inherent in the system. The surplus that it carries as a matter of course. We’ve been overproducing for a long time and right now, we are coasting on that fact.

But it’s going to run out. Sooner rather than later.

And then everything is going to start falling apart.

This time next year we will be nostalgic for Covid. We will look back at those days when all we had to do was wear masks and wash our hands to be safe and sigh. To imagine being so naïve and clueless to think that life would go on even remotely like it did before the food died and the Bad Times began.

Take a deep breath and soak it all in, folks.

Because these are the Before Times.

I tried to phone my GP’s office to make the followup appointment after my stent operation. I got a rather peremptory “all circuits busy”. Twice,

It’s coming for us all. Up until now. it’s been possible for the majority of people, especially in densely populated urban centers, to treat the mayhem like it’s just the regular sort of natural disaster.

You know, very bad, but not the sign of something worse to come.

But people are going to start figuring it out soon. The percentage of the population shaken out of their ordinary lives by environmental madness will grow and grow, and those people are going to be pretty goddamned pissed off and want answers.

Climate widows (and widowers) will start showing up on TV and YouTube making passionate, heartfelt cases for their lost loved ones. Climate change will stop being this subject of public procrastination and idle fucking platitudes and become the crisis we are dealing with RIGHT NOW.

But what the fuck are we going to do about it? Even if we ceased all greenhouse emissions right this instant we’d still have far too much CO2 in the atmosphere.

If we’re going to fight this and win, it will take a massive coordinated global effort, and I don’t see that happening without something radical changing politically.

The future looks grim. People living underground. A lot less freedom. A lot less choice.

A lot less people.

Enjoy this Golden Age while it lasts, folks.

Things might not be this good again for a very long time.

More after the break.

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What we can do about it

I have a few ideas.

1. Start moving underground or otherwise weatherproofing cities. We need to accept that what used to be natural disasters will become everyday weather and work hard to make our towns and cities weatherproof. That will involve things like much heavier construction in order to make things wind and rain resistant,. In some places shielding whole areas with massive windbreaks might be cost effective. We are also going to need to drastically expand our street drainage and storm sewer system. Snow removal will likely need an update too. Firefighting will also face new challenges – especially in the fighting of forest fires. In general, we should anticipate spending far more of our public money on safety for the next couple of decades.
2. Pooling our knowledge. Because no matter how wild a weather system is, there is somewhere in the world where it’s a regular thing and they know how to deal with it.. There needs to be a “best practices” approach where innovation is encouraged and the stuff that works gets passed on.
3. Put a price on carbon. Obviously, we need to take the excess CO2 out. Right now, there is no solution for this because captured carbon has no market value. The governments of the world can solve this by buying it. Establish a global market for captured carbon with a fixed rate and then let capitalism do the rest. The market can serve the people if we nudge it in the right direction.
4. Greater government regulation. I hate to say it but things will have to get less free. The margins of survival will get a lot thinner and that means that the creative chaos of a totally free market will be a luxury we can’t afford any more. There may well need to be a “necessities” economy run by world governments with fixed prices and no profit taken and a “luxuries” economy which is more like what we have in the world now.
5. One world government. Not as a fascist junta that overrides all national identity and sovereignty, but as a new top level of government. Kind of like the EU. We’ve gone from huts to villages to towns to cities to city-states to nations and now to the final layer before we go multiplanetary, global. It will be this layer that coordinates the global response to the climate crisis. And to do so, it will need a fair bit of power because it has to be able to tell nations to knock off all that polluting and make that stick. With war, if absolutely necessary.

Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head.

Maybe I should turn all this into science fiction. Could make for a pretty good setting.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Always so much maybe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And another thing about climate change….. nah just kidding.

The naturalness I mentioned in the title is of the much more personal and spiritual kind.

Namely, it’s the naturalness that is the exact opposite of self-consciousness. To feel it is to feel free of the constant monitoring, regulation, and judgment of our social superconscious minds, and it is a mood universally considered very pleasant.

There is a reason why when we feel very aware of our own social shortcomings and awkwardness, we call that feeling “self-consciousness”. We intuitively grasp that if our mind is in this split state where it is scrutinizing itself, things are not going well.

The good times come when we forget ourselves – like when we “lose ourselves” in an experience, or when “time flies” because you’re having fun and thus not monitoring it.

And that is my desired mode of existence. I have been an intensely self-conscious and brutally self-judgmental person for as long as I can remember and it has given me precious little chance to develop any kind of self-worth or even sense of self.

So how does one go about becoming less self-conscious? It’s a question that can get very Zen very fast, because the very act of trying to do it makes you more self-conscious as you try to solve the problem the forebrain way.

Instead, it is a matter of relaxing the mind. That’s why people find drinking helps. The liquor helps the mind lose its self-consciousness and returns us to a more child-like state where the self is whole and we simply are who we are.

What I am saying is liquor makes us stupid enough to be happy again.

Obviously, self-forgiveness helps a lot. So does what I will call “personal fatalism”, where I simply declare that I am whatever I end up being and there is only so much control I have over that and the rest is just, well, me.

That came out way more confusing than I intended.

I am not at my most coherent today. Probably should have chosen an easier subject.

You know what? I’m tapping out.

I was boring myself anyhow.

---

Mood today is… strange. I have that “haunted” feeling again. Spooky. Like ghosts are in my eavestroughs and the chimney’s full of imps.

The belfry is, as is traditional, full of bats.

I definitely feel like the operation has changed me in a deep and fundamental way. I feel more alive and real and vital than I have in a long time.

But it’s going to take a while for that new vitality to percolate up from the deep layers of my being. Entire new pathways have to be forged by the river’s freshly renewed flow and that takes some time.

I can feel things moving and growing and healing and changing in me. I can tell that certain potentials will continue to accumulate energy until they force me to act.

That won’t been fun. It will presumably express itself as intense frustration first as i grow bored and discontent with the limited options available in my current mode and start looking for the exit.

Even if I have to knock down a wall to make it myself.

More after the break.

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He weebles and he wobbles…

…but so far, I have not fallen down.

Feeling fairly dizzy right now. I have checked and I can’t stand or sit without swaying a little bit, like I am being moved by a slight breeze.

I’ve felt odd all day. Hard to describe. Like when I turn or move, I can really feel the air against my skin and get a soft “whoosh” kind of feeling.

That’s in addition to the aforementioned “haunted” feeling. And a general feeling of alienation and otherness and being ever so slightly out of phase.

And I don’t know what to make of it. It could be a sign that something has gone wrong in me of the sort I should bring to the attention to a medical professional.

Or maybe I’m just in a weird mood. And my sinuses are blocked.

I guess all I can do is keep an eye on the situation to see if things take a turn for the alarming. That’s all I seem to do lately.

Even my medical symptoms are shy and hesitant and afraid to commit.

They really didn’t mean to bother you and will just go now.

---

Energy is not happiness

I def have more vitality and energy now. But of course, that doesn’t translate into bliss.

It just means I have so much more to work with now. A bigger life budget, if you will. And that in and of itself is a pleasure because I have been so cold and numb and dry for so long that feeling anything at all on that deep level, even fear or pain, is a huge relief.

But it comes with its costs, like everything else. My emotions are growing more intense and that can be pretty scary.

Yet I will not falter. I won’t pull back from growth because I am frightened by the loudness of my own natural real feelings.

I will put on some earmuffs and get used to it instead.

I want to be more real, god damn it. And that means being emotionally present instead of being walled off with ice and glass and only seeing the world through the reflection of the mirror above my periscope.

And remember, self, that the discomfort is temporary. Hang in there and you will adjust. Your eyes will get used to the light and everything will be clear again.

And all you have to do is restrain your urge to flee for a little while.

Not forever. Just for the time it takes to get over it. Amazing things happen when you just stick with something.

You might even find out you’re a lot tougher, stronger, and more resilient than you think!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, I think I have finally calmed down enough to talk about this in a sane way.

I am worried that the world is going to end.

There. I’ve typed it out. It’s out there.

The world is burning, flooding, heating, cooling, drying, acidifying. alkalining, and basically terraforming itself away from us, and what do we do?

We joke about it. Ha ha, too bad the world’s going to end, I was really looking to the next season of the Crown, ha ha ha.

That’ll look great projected on a giant screen in our future show trials.

Prosecutor : “You mean you knew the end was coming? ”
Defendant : “Well…. yeah. I mean, I’d heard it on TV and read it in magazines and on social media and been told every possible way many many times.”
Prosecutor : “And yet you did nothing to stop it. “
Defendant : “Well there was nothing we could do. ”
Prosecutor : ” WHAT DO YOU MEAN, THERE WAS NOTHING YOU COULD DO? THERE WERE SEVEN AND A HALF BILLION OF YOU BACK THEN! “
Defendant : “Yeah but we had like…. lives, and stuff…
Prosecutor : And now there’s only three million of us left. Hope you enjoyed that beer.

See, what I see happening is that climate change will keep getting worse and people will continue treating it like it’s just natural disasters until we reach a tipping point where very important things like shifts in the Gulf Stream and ocean acidification and things like that make millions of acres unfarmable and that will start a chain of events where things like food riots and a total breakdown of law and order will crush modern society as one way or another, the problem of too many people to feed will be resolved.

The current population requires all of modern agriculture to maintain, and that agriculture requires a high energy high tech society to function, and that high energy high tech society can’t survive a world wracked by constant extreme weather.

Because here’s the thing nobody is saying : it is only going to get worse.

We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Eventually there will be nowhere left to hide. Nowhere you can feel safe. No place that is “normal” at all any more.

And then the food will die.

And then what the fuck are we going to do?

I don’t think people are seeing the full picture yet. The whole damn ecosystem is going to collapse. We won’t be able to grow nearly enough food to feed 7.5 billion smartass monkeys any more.

Food prices will skyrocket as the same demand chases a much smaller supply. It’s already starting to happen. The world is going to look like one big third world country where the only hope of survival is the soup line…. or war.

Like I said. One way or another, the problem of too many people and not enough food will resolve itself.

War, pestilence, plague, or famine,,, those are what I see coming for us.

Maybe Biden’s trillion-dollar plan will work. But I doubt it.

The world is going to end because we didn’t want to annoy one hundred billionaires.

Well, after all, there was nothing we could do.

More after the break.

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Oh shit, we’re still talking about climate change?

Um, yeah. Sorry.

See, this is the kind of shit that brings my hidden messiah complex to the forefront.

Because what if I am the only one that can save the world?

Not via superheroics, obviously, but through the power of my words?

What if the whole reason I’ve got all this charisma, intelligence, and eloquence is so that I could be the one to galvanize the world into action on climate change before it’s too late? First Greta, now me?

I spent a good part of my morning wrestling with this question.

What if the world needs me?

It took me a couple of hours to talk myself down again. I had to do it.

Because who wants to be the Messiah? Not me. I just wanna have fun.

Like a lot of people who have felt The Call, I don’t wanna go. I just want to be a person with a job and a boyfriend and a home gym, god damn it. I just want to use my vast store of abilities to make money and get stuff. I just want to be a lazy intellectual who spends his days doing interviews and hosting panels at conventions.

But some fuckers had to go set fire to the goddamned planet and now I gotta fix it.

Well someone has to.

And yes, I know that thinking it’s your job to save the world is a classic delusional structure. I might as well be declaring myself to be Napoleon. Or Jesus.

So let me reframe it in somewhat less crazy terms : what if I am one of the people who might help save the world?

Why that’s not crazy at all!

The problem is that I am not looking to contribute to a fucking debate. I am not here to discuss options, open a dialogue, or get a motherfucking “conversation” going.

I am here to shriek like a train whistle with its nuts caught in a vise in order to wake people up and get them good and pissed off about the fact that climate change is going to kill them and everyone they love as well as modern civilization itself all because corrupt politicians won’t piss off their plutocratic owners by making them stop.

I want people to pour into the streets like cops murdered another black dude and demand change NOW or we will do it ourselves, mob justice style.

Humanity will save itself by ANY MEANS NECESSARY. Anthrogenic greenhouse emissions could be gone tomorrow if we had the will to forget the rules and do what needs to be done to make things right.

And maybe, just maybe, I need to be the one who sounds Gabriel’s horn,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.