And nothing really rocks
And nothing really rolls
And nothin’s ever worth the cost

Meatloaf, “bat out of hell”

So I am back at the violently apathetic stage of my mood cycle again.

Emphasis on the “pathetic”.

Right now I hate everything and everybody everywhere forever. Everything seems stupid and pointless and worthless and banal, especially myself.

Oh wah wah wah, I’m so special and so sad, woe is me, someone come treat me like the big bearded baby I am before I wet myself again!

Listen, fatso, you need to stop being such a pussy, grow a pair, and get to work. Moping never solved anything, so get off your big marshmallow of a butt and get shit done!

Thanks, me. I… needed that.

And I have a point there. I would probably be a lot better off if I invested time and energy and focus in finding meaningful things to do.

Stuff that is not just an entertaining distraction to keep my mind busy and engaged while I rot away on the inside on this slow trip to a hellish and pointless death I call my life.

Oh yeah. I’m in a real swell mood.

Give me credit, though. I keep trying to reanimate myself. But that huge Wound of mine just won’t let it happen. Any time I try to get motivated and develop some enthusiasm for life, or even just get my shit together enough to take care of myself properly. this terrible cold ache radiates from the wound to shut me down and leave me feeling more isolated and alienated than if I hadn’t even tried.

And then it’s a while before I can even think about trying again.

Because that’s what happens when you try to put weight on a broken limb. It’s more than just painful, it’s the kind of pain that makes you never want to do that again.

Except that “that” covers damned near everything besides just barely making it through the day while my ship burns down to the waterline.

It is a lot like being crippled. And I suppose I really am crippled. Psychologically, and increasingly, physically as well.

But I need more. I want more. I crave more like a junkie craves junk.

I know that somewhere in me there is a strong, bold, confident, and utterly fantabulous person ready to bust out of this shell and land squarely on center stage with a flourish and a bow and a musical TA DA! and fix the audience with a killer smile and say “You can relax, everybody…. I’m finally here. ”

And then the crowd goes absolutely wild.

More after the break.

---

A conversation I can imagine myself having :

A : Wow, I can’t believe you got the answer right. I could have sworn you were pulling that answer out of your ass.

Me : Oh I was. It just also happened to be the right answer.

(A gapes at me. )

Me : What can I say, I’ve got a really smart ass.

---

Making a choice

I hereby declare the happier, stronger, more confident version of myself that I have glimpsed recently to be the real me.

Fuck this limpid loser I’ve been pretending to me. That’s just a phase I’ve been going through. A stage in my evolution, nothing more, and it is no more the “real” me than a butterfly is “really” just a caterpillar.

And that’s true no matter how long it was a caterpillar.

Hey, perfection takes time.

So fuck this cramped and claustrophobic chrysalis. I am busting out in style. I outgrew this coffin a long long time ago and it’s high time I rose from my grave and took a walk in the sunlit lands above.

Sure, I might burst into flame.

But that will pass, and nothing of value will be lost.

I am gonna grow and grow like I am turning into Godzilla, and fuck anything that even thinks of trying to restrict me.

How can you stand to be so limited?

Walter bishop, “fringe”

I never identified with Walter harder than when he said that.

And that’s saying something.

And you’re right. Walter. I can’t stand being so limited any more. I am tired of cloaking my true stature in order to hide from the world like a coward.

But I am not a coward. I’m a giant. A titan of talent and intellect. My assets are gargantuan and my liabilities are miniscule.

People like me aren’t expected to be good at everyday life. Does anyone care if Einstein kept a tidy desk? Whether Ray Bradbury kept track of important correspondence? Whether Martin Luther was a slob?

Of course not. What mattered was what they were capable of doing on a large scale, the scale of history and literature and pop culture.

And believe me, I can do a lot. I got gigawatts of power under every fingertip and a little golden key to the place where all things come together and a red hot hotline to the angels of our better natures and the strange but telling insight of a holy visionary but without all the transcendentalist bullshit that usually comes with it.

I am more than passing strange, with an otherworldly nature that gathers gossamer threads of truth and knits them into the swords and armor of the gentlest of jihads.

Hmmm. There’s a lot more but I am out of manic energy.

My point is that I am far too grand a creature to allow myself to languish in this petty little prison of mine. One way or another. I am going to transcend my cell and use it as the basis for my next evolution.

And everything that has come before will become a part of me, integrated and fierce and ready to fight the whole damned world if that’s what it takes to make a place for myself that I can be proud of.

Or at least that doesn’t make me cringe with shame.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was a pretty productive Therapy Thursday.

And one of the gems today’s session produced was the fact that I have been internalizing my rage like all depressives, taking it out on myself, despite the fact that like the title says. I don’t deserve it either

Lemme back up and explain.

I have all this latent rage that needs some way to express itself. Leaving it locked up is not an option. Rage demands expression and will get expressed one way or another whether you let it out voluntarily or not.

Same with other primal emotions, like fear and lust.

Nothing stays suppressed forever.

So there are two wages rage can be expressed : externally and internally.

We’re all familiar with externalized rage because we’ve all known angry people. And we’ve all had experience where we lost our temper because we were in a bad mood.

But depression has its roots in internalized anger, where the individual takes it out on themselves inside their own mind, often without realizing they are doing it.

This is the Eternal Prosecution I was talking about yesterday. Abuser and abused are one and self-destruction is at its most…. efficient.

But it has to go one place or another. Either I take it out on others or I take it out on myself. And of those two, I have consistently chosen to take it out on myself as taking it out on others is absolutely morally unacceptable to me. My anger does not make other people suddenly deserve to suffer.

So that leaves taking it out on myself the default choice.

But as Doc Costin pointed out, I don’t deserve to suffer either. Nobody in this scenario does. I’ve done nothing to earn the wrath of my Eternal Prosecutor. I did nothing to earn all the abuse and neglect I’ve suffered in my life.

I’m a sweet guy. I deserve better than this.

But if it can’t go out into the world and it can’t stay inside and wreak havoc, where there heck is it supposed to go?

There has to be a third option. I know it doesn’t seem like there is, but that is what makes it a fascinating problem to me.

It is through such dire conflicts of the mind that the spirit grows and consciousness expands. Hence the whole “one hand clapping” bit.

Which reminds me of something amazing that happened last week.

Fair warning, not sure I can express this in a way that will make sense to others.

But I have to try.

It happened when I was talking about the whole idea of feeling trapped inside my own skull. That, unsurprisingly, set off an attack of what I will call “existential claustrophobia” and I started to hardcore panic.

But then a voice in my head said something like “no, we will USE this” and turned the energy of the panic into energy to crush the walls in my mind that hold me back.

That’s the best way I can think of to describe it. It was glorious. I felt this spreading relief and a deep sense of dark victory as my mind crushed its restraining walls via expansion like an angry amoeba busting out of its petri dish.

Obviously, turning panic into growth is one hell of a trick, and I look forward to exploring this extraordinary form of alchemy further in the future.

Sharpened by reason. Powered by pain. The engine that will set me free.

What a thrill!

More after the break.

---

Where’s the fire, mark II

Let’s try this one again as I did not end up saying what I meant to say last week.

Typical, I know.

Anyhow, what I wanted to talk about was this constant sense of panic that is always there in the back of my mind.

Like I (kinda) said before, everything else in my mind operates within the envelope of that panic. I honestly can’t imagine what it would be like if it wasn’t there.

I’d sleep a whole lot better. That’s for sure.

And the thing is, objectively, I know I have no reason to panic. I am, health issues aside, completely safe. The sense of being hunted and having to hide or something will GET ME is entirely delusional.

In fact, on a very fucked up level, my various serious health issues have been a relief because at least now, my paranoia is justified.

Ba dum tish.

The deepest and most destructive form of this panic is the constant feeling of failure that I have talked about before. It is definitely the biggest and baddest of my demons and the one I flee the most.

It’s from that feeling that I am hiding when I spend all day playing video games an blogging and hiding from life in general.

Deep down, I have no faith in my ability to succeed in life. So when I talk about feeling like there is something I should be doing but I don’t know what, hidden within that sentiment is the feeling of my own general weakness and incompetence that informs almost all that I do.

Deep down, I do not believe myself to be capable of making it out in the real world at all.

This despite the fact that if I break down what it takes to live alone into its constituent tasks, I can do them all.

Pay bills? No problem. Do my own laundry? I have since I was ten. Cook for myself? Ditto. Shop for myself? I actually enjoy it. Keep my space neat and clean?

Um…. I can pay someone else to do it for me!

But deep down I am still the abandoned child waiting for someone to remember me and come rescue me and protect me from this cruel world until I am strong enough to make it on my own.

I was kicked out of the nest far too early.

I still need someone to take care of me.

But I am a big huge tall man now, and nobody takes care of people like that.

Not for free, anyhow.

Guess I need the money to pay someone to do it.

Better get on that right away.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Recently caught myself in the act of garroting myself.

Not literally, obviously. That’s just the only image I could think of that came even close to matching the violence of the act.

It was my usual self-torture where I take my frustrations out on myself in a form of internalized abuse. It’s a fundamental building block of my depression and as that, I am quite familiar with it.

But it’s one thing to know it’s happening and quite another to catch yourself in the act. I now have a clear memory of that moment and it is pretty bracing stuff.

The sheer viciousness and malice I felt at the time is frightening. And on such a coldblooded, primitive level too.

It’s not an act of rage. Or frustration. Nothing as wholesome as that.

It’s an act of pure uncut hate. Loathing in its most concentrated form.

And I had never witnessed those emotions in myself before. I knew I hated myself sometimes but not like that.

I suppose I just saw my self-loathing as being the result of frustrations with my life and a general low self esteems ganging up on me but this is something far deeper and much worse than mere lack of self-approval.

It shows that my inward directed rage is vast and powerful and that’s a disturbing thing to see in oneself.

I feel like I just peeked over the rim of a vast dark ocean of inky black voidstuff. Stuff so cold that you would die in an instant if you feel in.

Stuff that hates all that lives.

And I know this is my hate. I can’t pretend it come from somewhere else.

I am not THAT kind of crazy.

I know that it’s the product of all my unexpressed anger and frustration and ambition and desire and pretty much every other hot and vital emotion that might suggest for even a moment that I am truly alive.

I’m a zombie by choice. Kind of.

But not really.

I know now that all my vital emotions have been bottled up for so long that they turned into something twisted and dark and incredibly toxic.

I suppose that’s not exactly a surprise, though. The surprise was seeing how much of it was directed at myself. I had no idea I hated myself that much.

Clearly, this is something I need to work on. Pronto. Luckily, I know where to start :

I know I don’t deserve it. Any of it.

I mean, I’m not perfect, but I don’t deserve anywhere near that level of hate. I’m actually a pretty sweet guy who has a lot to contribute to society via his talents and who has been treated badly by life on many levels and who therefore deserves to be treated really well, not subjected to further torment.

But all that anger has to go somewhere, and the only way to stop it from being directed inward is to direct it outward, and that’s what always stops me.

Because I really don’t want to spew rage into the world. I have such a buildup of undischarged emotion that it’s hard to imagine it coming out in anything but a sanity shattering nuclear explosion if I open the floodgates.

That’s probably bullshit though. More lies told by my depression to preserve its existence. There has to be ways to harness all that raw power and use it to improve my life and the lives of others.

Every bomb is a rocket, after all.

It’s just a matter of finding the right nozzle for the job.

More after the break.

---

I don’t trust me

And now, because I am apparently all about the sunshine today, let’s talk about what it is like to be suicidal.

(Felicity, you have my permission to skip this part entirely. )

First, a very necessary prefacing statement : I AM NOT CURRENTLY SUICIDAL. This is all about the past. I am in no danger from myself.

I have a healthy fear of death now. I don’t wanna go. So don’t worry.

That said, I have been there and I know what it is like.

I know what it’s like to be afraid of what you will do to yourself. To not want to be anywhere where all it would take is a few moments where the bad impulses tke control for you to kill yourself.

Like walking down the sidewalk next to dense city traffic. One little jump and splut.

Or on the edge of a steep drop, on a building or a cliff. Again. Jump. Splut.

These are the thinks you have to think about when you have the urge to kill yourself lurking in the shadows of your mind.

Even worse are the suicidal fantasies. The ones where that most evil of voices starts talking to you about how nice it would be if it was all over. How then we’d be free, and no longer trapped in this stupid body in this stupid life. Wouldn’t it be nice to finally escape this wretched existence?

This voice believes in really emphasizing the key concepts.

Of course, that’s not true. It won’t be a liberating relief because you won’t be around to feel any of that.

In fact, one might say the biggest problem with suicide is that you won’t be around to enjoy its benefits.

Well, that and the whole being dead thing. I guess.

I’m glad I am not suicidal any longer. Even when my depression is at its worst. I just want to cry, not die.

And when the occasional self-destructive impulse makes it through my defenses. I don’t panic and I don’t give it any oxygen.

I just watch it wither and die, like I know it will. It is an impulse, nothing more, and impulses rarely live long when it’s clear they won’t be acted on.

Take it from someone who lets almost all of them die.

But that’s a problem for another day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Jesus Effing Christ, it’s 4:07 pm and I am only just now having lunch.

It’s just been that kind of day. Sleepy and slow. Seems like I can’t stay out of bed for more than an hour and when I sleep, it’s for maybe an hour and a half tops.

It’s getting on my nerves. I wish I could just stay asleep till I am done like a normal person instead of being woken up by my overactive bladder all the damned time.

I have seriously considered going sans liquid intake for like 12 hours in order to try to achieve that blessed state.

Or at least cut way down.

It’s no mystery why I pee so much. I drink a lot of water and Diet Coke. I’ve always got my Double Gulp cup on the go with one fluid or the other. I am extremely accustomed to taking a few gulps of my drink now and then.

I would even classify it as a rather mild addiction, because the idea of going without it gives me that classic feeling of anxiety and deprivation familiar to all addicts.

So clearly, liquid intake has become deeply integrated into my psyche. It’s a small repeatable pleasure with additional health benefits (being well hydrated) but I might be taking it a little too far.

Then again, when I can bring myself to take one of my (many) sleeping pills, and set off the atom bomb in my head that is my brain catching up on its sleep debt, I can at least stay asleep for like four hours before I have to get up and pee, and that sounds like a normal rate to me.

But it’s such an unpleasant process! I know that if I just stuck with it and took a pill a day no matter what, eventually I would be all caught up and might even be able to sleep in a healthy and balanced way, but getting there is such a bitch.

It’s hard to put into words what it is like when I am in that state. Lack of oxygen is definitely a big part of it. It makes me feel like I have had all the life squeezed out of me. Like I have been pulled through a long series of quarter sized knotholes.

Like I am barely alive. My head hurts, I feel a harsh buzz throughout my body. like tiny buzzsaws are grinding away at every nerve, my head throbs and I am nauseous, an worst of all, I can’t think at all.

I can handle damned near anything as long as I still have my wits. But take those away and I am beyond lost and completely miserable.

So um…yeah. That’s why I don’t do the sensible thing and take my sleeping pills. I have plenty of them and in many varieties but the immediate effect of taking them is so harsh that it leaves me with an animal terror of the things that I can’t override.

As irrational as it can be, when something causes a reaction that powerfully negative, your deep mind says WE SHALL NEVER DO THAT THING AGAIN.

It’s such a deeply emotionally powerful experience, in fact, that I feel compelled to describe it over and over again in this very blog, like a recurring nightmare.

I wonder if this is like those people who have a powerful out of context experience, like a UFO abduction or a holy vision, and end up retelling the story of it for the rest of their lives because it’s the only way to cope with the memory.

I can relate, is what I am saying.

More after the break.

---

I’ll pokey YOUR okey!

Decided to give in to temptation and order from Pokey Okey tonight.

I deliberately refrained from ordering from them the last two times because I felt like getting my Pokey on was getting to be a habit and I did not want to get stuck in a rut.

I could never be one of those people who gets the exact same thing every time. Not only would that be too repetitive for me, but I have a lifelong compulsion to not be boring that informs a lot of what I do.

Now you know why I am such a fascinating and unique individual.

Well, that and a terrible childhood.

I keep getting my Pokey on because it’s just such a perfect cuisine for me. It has lots of lively flavours, a modular style where you can put stuff in or leave it out (love that), loads of variety, absolutely heaps of nutrition, and a fun silly name.

I assume it sounds more dignified in the original Hawaiian.

Because of its nutritional bounty and lack of heavy carbs or fat, not only is it delicious but it leaves me feeling good afterwards too.

So I keep coming back to it.

Still, when I order in on Friday, I will get something else.

---

Meanwhile, in my other realm, I continue to have fun playing Inscryption and The Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion.

Was a little miffed at Oblivion because after having slogged through seven very boring, ugly, and repetitive Oblivion Gate dungeons in order to complete this one quest, I find out the quest was totally optional, doesn’t matter, and the whole thing was pointless.

Well fuck YOU. I really thought it was a key part of the main plot.

There wasn’t even anyone to congratulate and/or thank me at the end! I actually had to go looking for the guy who gave me the quest and ask him about it directly, and only then did he say “Oh, right, that. Thanks, I guess. ”

I may be paraphrasing there.

But oh well. Still enjoying the game. It’s basically Skyrim, only not as extensive or sophisticated. The world is much smaller and the graphics a touch cruder, but the basic bones are there and it’s still tons of fun to play.

Inscryption is still a ma zing too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The image of my mental illness being like a bone stuck in my throat has popped into my head again lately.

Unpleasant, I know, but apt. Not my fault a lot of the shit I have to express is disturbing.

Fair warning, it’s only gonna get worse.

And the thing is, for many years now I have been just living with that damn thing in there like it was a part of me.

Like there was nothing I could do to get rid of it so I just had to put up with all the different ways it makes living a normal happy life impossible.

Can’t breathe properly at all, so I am always weak. Can’t eat properly either. Always on the verge of triggering my gag reflex. Can’t communicate my feelings properly so I have to type them out instead.

All in all, it’s a rotten way to live, and it’s only occurred to me quite recently that I would be much better off if I could retch that goddamned thing up already.

And yup, that will suck. It will hurt like hell and be gross and upsetting and I might even throw up a little in the process.

Told you it would get worse.

But it would be extremely worth it if I could clear the blockage and breathe free. Rid myself of this fucking bottleneck and finally let the energies flow in and out of me without artificial inhibition.

I’ve spent so long all cramped up inside. It’s like spiritual constipation. I retain everything by default and that’s as bad emotionally as it would be physically.

There’s a hell of a lot in me that needs to go, is what I am saying.

Unfortunately, unlike with the condition’s physical counterpart, there is no way for a doctor to get a grip on it with the forceps and yank that sucker out.

Pretty much have to do that myself.

I’m working up the nerve to try.

---

Oops, I did it again

So, I fucked up my installation of Oblivion.

Was trying to get a very naughty adult mod working and decided to attempt a manual install of the mod. This involved copying thousands of files into a bunch of different subdirectories of the game’s main directory.

Did not work. Got the same result as when I used a mod manager to install them.

Only… there is no hitting “undo” on a file copy that huge. So now I have to figure out how to go delete all those files, or at least the ones causing the problem.

Whichever ones those are.

Either that, or I have to fix the original error. That would rock because not only would I be able to play Oblivion again, the perverted mod would be working too.

But I dunno how to do that. So I am asking around on the forums in hopes that someone can save me from myself once again.

I try so hard to be cautious and clever but time and time again I end up doing something foolishly impulsive and tripping over my own feet.

And then I have to beg someone to rescue me.

It’s a hard knock life, for me.

More after the break.

---

And now for this important update

Fixed the problem outlined above. Turned out the problem was that I had somehow turned on support for a mod I don’t have and that confused it.

So, yay me! I can have all the perverted fun I want now.

And that’s a lot.

---

Potential product idea

This could be big.

Imagine a cup with a chamber up top with a drain in the middle into the bulk of the cup, which lies below.

The idea would be that you fill the top chamber with ice cubes (or even better, shaved ice) and then pour your beverage through the ice into the chamber below, which has a built in straw you can then drink your now icy cold beverage through.

Hmmm. First problem : what is keeping your beverage cold once it’s in the chamber below? Two things : first, it’s a thermally insulated chamber, and second thing, cold air from the chamber above, which is NOT thermally insulated.

Could work, might not.

Second : does that actually result in a colder beverage than if you just drank your liquid refreshment with ice cube in it like a normal person?

I honestly don’t know. Only some good, earnest R&D with thermal engineers could find out for sure.

If so, great. People would love that. Everyone would want one.

If not, then the market is a lot smaller because it would mostly only be useful for when you want to make a warm beverage cold.

And that generally doesn’t come up a lot.

Of course, with the right marketing combined with the right level of moral bankruptcy, people might be convinced it’s colder and tastier…. via suggestion… but all we actually say in the ads is that what you get is a cold refreshing beverage at the end…

It bothers me how devious my mind is sometimes.

Finally, could this be made cheaply enough to compete with today’s disposable cups? Either as a direct replacement or a premium option? Pay fifty cents more for your drink and get it in the “cooler cup”?

Get it? It’s cooler in two ways!

I slay me.

Could be a pretty big thing, especially if one of the big fast food franchises got behind it and made it the spearhead of their summer ad blitz.

Feels good to actually write down one of my many brilliant ideas for once.

Hmmm, there was something else. I’m sure of it.

Oh right! This :

Let me clear my throat

White people in the house! *some people cheer*
Black people in the house! *exact same people cheer!*
All the people in the house! *again, the same people cheer*

Meant to link that earlier, when it would have been appropriate.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, video games.

They must be my real life because I spend more time in those virtual worlds than I do with my mind in good ol’ objective reality.

So if I am not there when I am feeding my video game addiction, where am I?

First, have I talked about Inscryption yet?

A quick site search say no. So here goes. Warning, I am about to gush.

It’s an incredible fucking game. Not just a good game or even a very good game, it’s something else entirely, something that takes video games themselves to an entirely new level as an art form.

This game levels up video games, is what I am saying.

In it, you play a hapless nameless person who has been abducted by a mysterious and twisted figure whom you only see as a pair of eyes in the dark and who forces you to play a CCG^[1]-style game against him with you life as the prize.

You can also get up from the table and explore the cramped cabin he is holding you in, and find various puzzles you can solve for bonus cards or abilities.

Some of which are quite potent. I always have a lot of respect for games designed well enough that they can give you truly powerful abilities without it screwing up the game balance by making things too easy.

And the thing is, everything I have said so far is just the first third of the game! Once you beat your captor three times, you escape his clutches and the game turns into something quite a bit different.

The whole thing is done with such imagination and originality and the creepy spooky atmosphere is so intense that it totally sucked me in.

The fact that it’s one of my favorite types of video games didn’t hurt either.

It’s definitely one of the best games I have play this year. When I am done with it, I am going to check out the developer’s other two games to see if they are just as mindblowingly original and imaginative.

There’s even a mod scene for the game. I haven’t gotten mods working for it yet, though I did try. But who needs mods when the original game is so amazing?

I will make a more dedicated attempt to mod it once I have beaten it.

---

Been kinda sleepy lately. Not, thank goodness, to the extent I was after the stents went in. I never want to experience that level of being crushed by sleep again.

Made that one of the worst days of my entire life.

But I think have cracked the code to getting better (in the long run) sleep : going right back to sleep after I get up to pee.

It’s not what I want to do. For many years I have tended to stay up for a couple hours. Thus my day has been broken up into alternating periods of sleep and activity.

Not a healthy way to live. Brains need longer sleep periods in order to get all those juicy REM cycles they need to transfer medium-term memories to long term storage.

I wonder if this is why my biographical memory is so poor? Facts and trivia and knowledge I can remember for decades.

What I did yesterday? Total mystery.

More after the break.

---

Alone and adrift

So what else is new? For me, that’s Dog Bites Man.

The Man Bites Dog would be if I felt connected and rooted.

And I try to remember that this vast gulf between me and others isn’t real. It’s just the product of my mental illness numbing me to my own empathy and humanity.

So it’s not how it feels : that nobody cares about me, and everyone has abandoned me, and I am forever lost and abandoned to that midnight tundra that is my personal hell.

Forget being tormented by one’s personal demons. By this point I would appreciate the company. My hell is endless total loneliness and abandonment.

But on my good days. like I said, I remember that the pain is real but the abandonment is not. There is all the love and acceptance and comfort and love I want out there in the world from people who truly care about me.

I just can’t feel it.

And that’s…. pretty fucking depressing, to be honest. No wonder I prefer to forget the truth and go back to thinking it isn’t there at all.

That might be objectively worse – after all, it means that the love can’t be mine ever because it just plain does not exist, whereas if it does, it’s just a thin wall of madness away. I could break through any minute now.

But the truth is, despair is a lot easier to take.

Despair is final. It’s done. You give up and lay down and are free from the cycle of hope and disappointment that is far more crushing than despair ever could be.

Hope can come back when health comes back, and I am therefore strong enough to take it should it falter again.

I wish I could feel the love people have for me. It makes me feel very guilty that I can’t. Not that I blame myself for my emotional disabilities. It just seems so sad that people sending love my way get so little feedback from it.

It does make it to my sad little planet, people. And I love you all back.

But I labour under a terrible curse, and it makes it so hard for me to feel anything at all, let alone love from afar.

So I apologize if sometimes it seems like I barely know you are there.

Sometimes my inner vision grows to take up my entire mind.

And sometimes….I am just too damned cold to receive you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, why the heck not? I’ve been irrationally sad for long enough.

Like I have asked for, why do we need a reason to be happy? Why can’t it be our default setting? Our lowest energy state? Why can’t it be unhappiness that bears the burden of proof?

We’re pretty hard on happiness. If a person is overtly happy all the time, at the very least we consider them to be irritating.

At worst, we assume they are retarded. Or insane. Or both.

There is a lot of scientific evidence that it’s those people for whom happiness comes easily and sadness rarely lasts who truly have it made. Not only are they happier, they live longer, they achieve more success, they recover from tragedy faster, and in general pretty much have life’s ass half kicked before they even get out of bed.

It is a highly desirable state. But is it possible to become that way? Or is it more of a “you either got it or you don’t” type situation?

Some say spirituality can lead to this state. And it certainly seems plausible. Surely a belief in an all powerful, all seeing, all knowing being who loves you unconditionally, warts and all, would contribute to one’s sense of wholeness and wellbeing,.

It’s like having the Ultimate Parent backing your every play.

There is the slight problem that no such entity actually exists…. or does it?

I’ve often said that the main problem with deistic religion is that it insists on claiming its god or gods literally exist in external, verifiable reality.

This is understandable. We want to think there really are angels up there, somehow.

But it is ultimately doomed. It sets faith on a fatal collision course with reason both on the higher level, as in logic and science, but also on the lower level where people’s everyday sense of how things work lives.

You don’t need to be Bertrand Russel to realize that if you ask a question and the person replies, “Stop asking that!”, they are full of shit.

It would be far better in the long run to avoid all attempts to ground one’s faith in the material world at all.

A God that only exists in the hearts and minds of human being could still be a force for good and a source of strength, comfort, and joy for billions.

Note I am not saying that this is a fictional god (any more). As a concept, that’s a nonstarter. It cannot work.

What I am saying is that this is a God that only exists, or needs to exist, as a force within the human mind, heart, and soul.

God is as real as love. It too has no existence outside the human soul.

Fuck, that’s not what I was talking about, was it? It was…. um….

Happiness! Right! Why can’t we be happy by default? What is wrong with being happy without justification? What if we just give ourselves full permission to be happy whenever we think we can get away with it? Why…

…ya know what, I think I’ll just continue this in part 2.

More after the break.

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The quality of my decisions.…

…tends to be poor.

If stupid is as stupid does. then I does stupid.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet. and yet I languish in ignonimity (sp?) because no matter how insightful and “wise” I am, I keep doing the same dumb shit.

Like tonight. Ordered from White Sport. Got their excellent chicken strips. Could have gotten a salad with it. It was right there on the menu. Either Caesar or Garden. But somehow ended up getting the fries n’ coleslaw instead.

And I sure as fuck don’t need those carbs. Hell, to be honest, I don’t even want them. Fries are increasingly boring to me.

Yet some weird compulsion made me get them. Like at some point. the rule “if there are fries you must get them” formed in my head and locked itself in there tight.

So now I have these ridiculous box of way too many fries. I can’t believe there was a time when that seemed like a normal amount of food to me.

I guess carb addiction is a bitch. It keeps going even when you aren’t even hungry for the god damned things any more.

Gotta get that fix. Sigh.

The thing is. in a tricksy and self-defeating sense, I don’t make a lot of bad decisions, because I don’t do much of anything so it doesn’t feel like I am deciding anything at all.

If you’re just wasting away playing video games all day. it doesn’t seem like you are deciding to do it. You don’t face each day saying, “Of the billions of things I could do today, what am I deciding to do?”

I could never do that. Option paralysis would crush me. So instead, I drift slowly to my piteous doom, just going through the motions day by day, coping the only way I know how and watching as my humble craft drifts inexorably toward the edge of the waterfall.

But if I started rowing, I would have to pick a direction to row.

Besides, part of me wants to go over the edge and finally be done with this farce of a life anyhow. And it knows is that all it has to do is keep interfering with my ability to get my shit together and keep me confused and unsure of myself and it can get that Ultimate Escape it craves without ever presenting an actual suicidal thought.

I never stepped in front of that bus, I just…. couldn’t decide which way to go to get out of the way as it pulled into the station.

Um. Which way do I…. um… splut.

And just like that, it all was over.

Finally, truly and forever over.

I left horrible emotional (and literal) carnage behind, but for me at least, it was all over.

It’s scary how much that appeals to me.

But I will never do it. I could never do that to those who love me.

Besides, I ain’t fuckin’ done yet.

I got too much shit to do to die.

Hell, I haven’t even started yet.

Aaaaaany day now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve recently realized that I have gotten quite gassy lately.

As is my usual mode lately, now that I’ve noticed it, I can see that it has, in fact, be building up slowly for a long, long time.

Starting at least as far back as when I had those weird attacks where ended up (grossness alert) horking up an enormous ball of lung butter in like a belch from hell.

Got over that, thank god. I think I just subconsciously learned to burp more often, and to be more “open” in general.

Better out than in, like I always say. Especially when you have IBS like me and holding it in can lead to hours of painful cramping.

It’s not easy being me.

Anyhow, yeah, I realize I have been burping a lot more lately, and it’s been getting worse over time, and it has me worried.

Because as comical as gas can be, when it gets like this, it generally means something is wrong with your digestive system and that is leading to under-digested food making it into the lower intestine, where it ferments and produces gas.

This is, incidentally, why old people get gassy too.

So I am worried that my digestive system is not doing its job properly, and I need to get that looked after.

Sure, why the hell not, everything else is failing, why not my gut?

Once more, I wish I could just check myself into the medical equivalent of an auto shop and tell them to check everything. Don’t ask me questions, just pretend I came to you unconscious and you have to figure me out with instruments.

Because my responses aren’t normal, Doc. In general, I always feel like I am not giving people whatever it is they expect of me, but it’s especially bad with doctors and other medical professionals. I describe my symptoms as best as I can and I can see that they just don’t add up in their heads.

And it’s particularly stressful because the stakes are so high.

Life of death, even.

So some time soon, I need to see (or, I guess, call) Doctor Chao, my GP, and get him to check me out on some more levels.

I’m a tad worried bout my lungs too. Some of the shortness of breath I was having went away when I got my stents but not all of it.

Plus my untreated sleep apnea and my under-treated diabetes and… sigh.

It’s all so complicated and stressful, with way too much stuff I am supposed to know an act on, and it all makes me want to run away and hide until a grownup comes to tell me what to do.

That’s all. Just tell me what to do right now. And keep telling me. I can’t figure it out myself. I need someone to cut through the complications and red tape and just give me a clear set of instructions to follow.

I am so very lost.

Someone please come to get me.

And take me home.

More after the break.

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The eternally arriving curry

So, half an hour ago, my Indian food was twenty minutes away.

Fifteen minutes later and it’s 15 minutes away.

Now it’s been twenty minutes since I ordered and it’s 5 minutes away.

I’m getting a real Xeno’s Paradox feeling here.

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On being crazy

First, quick update : the curry arrived. Huzzah!

Anyhoo, being crazy is a hard thing to wrap your (warped) head around.

Because no matter how much you tell yourself that your perceptions are distorted and untrustworthy, they are still all you’ve got. Still your only window on the world.

So most of the time, you have to believe them. As much as one might want to aggressively challenge one’s every perception with one’s mighty powers of reason like some kind of 60’s science fiction hero, in reality you just can’t keep that up all the time.

And when your particular flavour of crazy is depression, the distortions are subtle and therefore require a much higher level of metacognition than actual hallucinations.

If you look out the window and see a thirty foot tall flaming moose playing banjo, you can be reasonably sure there is no such thing and therefore know you are hallucinating and can choose to either ignore the creature or join in on mandolin.

But if you look out the window and see your neighbor Greg and instantly know that Greg hates you and wishes you’d just die already,” that’s much harder to discount.

Still, I try. I use my own powers of rational analysis to challenge the distortions of my mental illness when I can.

I reassure myself that thoughts like “all my friends secretly hate me and resent having to put up with me and only do so out of pity” are not supported by the evidence at all, and do not connect to any rational worldview, and that helps pull me out of the mire.

It’s not the right solution for everyone, but it works for me.

Some of the time, at least. But it’s a poor substitute for proper brain chemistry. And there are plenty of times when the bad chemicals are simply too much and I have no choice but to think and feel things I know are not true.

And that’s when I truly feel crazy. And it’s fucking terrifying.

Because only insanity can fuck over your entire universe. If you mind goes there is no way of escaping it. It makes you acutely aware of being trapped in your own skull and that is not a feeling I would wish on anyone.

We are our minds. Our brains. And they are our universes. We only ever get this one body, this one brain, this one life. One identity, one set of arbitrary indicators (gender, race, country of birth, etc), one plotline in a story of billions.

And I find that very sad.

I suppose that’s kind of crazy, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not that it’s a big deal or anything….

…but I’ve started looking for freelance work again.

Via good old UpWork.com. During therapy today, Doctor Costin brought the subject up. He said there was a time when I was happier because I had paid work.

And he was right. Getting paid for my work was extremely good for my mood. I have not had the opportunity to do much “earning” in my life. Mostly I have just passively lived off others. My parents, or Brian and Brian, or David n’ Dhugal n’ Ross (twice).

And even when I massively upgraded my life by getting on welfare (yeah you read that right), and therefore stopped being a financial burden on anyone I knew personally, I was still a burden in terms of making various roomies deal with reality for me.

But that’s another topic for another time.

Yes, I actually realized it in time to get back on topic!

This is a red letter day for me.

Anyhow, my point is that I was a much happier person when I was earning income with my writing. It was the perfect tonic for my feelings of worthlessness and toxicity because I was finally contributing to society and had a sense of purpose.

Then Skyrim happened. But it only took advantage of my already crumbling mood.

If depression was a virus, I was already immunosuppressed..

What’s kept me from getting back to working via UpWork has been a sense of shame due to having kind of flamed out last time.

I had a bunch of prospects, but they were all very vague and there was a lot of uncertainty and basically my anxiety got the better of me and I ghosted them.

And that sucks. It really does. I have “incomplete without explanation” jobs on my UpWork record and I am just going to have to deal with it.

But I am not going to let that limit me any more. I need a serious life upgrade and UpWork is my most accessible, least scary, and most probable avenue to getting one.

It’s all online, and it’s all writing, which is something I rock like a motherfucker, and it can be a great way for me to build up my self worth.

And maybe even save enough for a new computer. At TODAY’s prices, oh my.

More importantly, it would be something productive to do with my time. I am very tired of playing video games all the goddamned time. I need more – much more – out of life.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet, talent coming out the wazoo, with charisma and charm and a winning personality, and yet I languish in filth and obscurity.

Tell me, is that fair?

Crowd : NO!

Don’t I deserve a better life?

Crowd : Yes!

Great! Now can anyone give me a ride home? I lost my bus pass.

Crowd : (tries not to make eye contact)

So from now on, I will keep an UpWork tab open, and when I feel up to it, I will apply for a job or two.

And now, for the unhealthy part of my mind to flip out over the whole thing.

“Oh no, something is coming to yank us out of our nice safe socket! We’ll be exposed! We’ll be vulnerable! We won’t be able to retreat at a moment’s notice! We’ll have to stay focused! We’ll have to stay awake! WE WILL HAVE TO ACTUALLY DO STUFF. This is the WORST THING THAT COULD EVER BE!!!!!”

Ya know. Stuff like that.

Man it sucks to be crazy.

More after the break.

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Where’s the fire?

I’m always in a state of crisis.

I’ve talked about it many times before. The feeling that there’s something I am supposed to be doing but I don’t know what it is and it’s super important and yet I have forgotten what it is and the tact that I am not doing it means I am failing.

Horribly, completely, and utterly failing.

And with no way out of the situation either. I can’t even begin to imagine an actual answer to the question of what I should be doing.

Too many variables. Too much complexity. Does not compile. Stack overflow error. Too many unknowns. Too many unknowables. SYSTEM OVERLOAD. SAFE OPERATING TEMPERATURES EXCEEDED. EMERGENCY STACK DUMP! RESET! RESET!

Um……… what was I talking about again?

So with my being constantly in the jaws of this unresolvable crisis, I have no choice but to retreat from reality and essentially hide from my own sense of failure.

Hide from my own brutal judgment.

It ain’t the cops, it’s the Judge I fear.

And I know that if I could exit this crisis mode, I would be far healthier and happier. That kind of long term stress is a killer. Those stress chemicals keep the body from healing and renewing itself properly and over time, shit starts falling apart.

No wonder I am so damned unhealthy.

At least Doctor Ebtia cleared me for exercise. That’s not enough by itself to get me to do it, of course. I am still too scared for that.

But at least I know it won’t kill me.

Well, not with a heart attack, anyhow.

Exercise would make me a lot healthier and happier too. There’s a reason it’s the number one recommendation for depression now and that’s because it fucking works.

Both the statistical and the clinical consensus is that exercise is the most effective treatment for depression.

But I’m too scared to do it. It’s not the pain and the effort I fear, though.
It’s my own adrenalized anxiety. When I imagine myself exercising, all I can envision is my gasping for air, my head throbbing. my lungs aching, and my mind filling with the sort of animal terror that makes chased rabbits drop dead from heart attacks.

That’s what I am afraid of : ending up having a hardcore panic attack of a severity not possible for someone in a calm resting state.

That’s where the deep animal fear comes from. Nature in its wisdom responds to situations that make us that scared by saying, whatever brought that on, DO NOT DO IT AGAIN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Even if it’s something that poses no actual danger at all.

Like, say, going for a nice walk.

I’m still terrified to do it in case I end up in the Bad Place I described.

So if I am to get into exercising at all, I will have to come up with some very, very gentle way to get into it that doesn’t potentially trigger panic at all.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ya know, it might not always seem like it, but I live life on Hard Mode.

And not just because of the obvious factors of my mental and physical ailments. Not that those aren’t bad enough.

Being crazy and physically ill at the same time makes both much worse, after all.

But there are a lot of less diagnosable things that make life harder for me than for the other billions of precocious primates in the world. Stuff I almost never talk about.

Like my issues with coordination. I have always been quite clumsy. And not just on a “bad at gym and sports” level.

On a “might actually be a disability” level.

Anything involving fine motor control is likely impossible for me.

I was the kid who spent the entire sewing class trying the thread his needle, after all.

This has always made a lot of everything life extremely difficult for me. Between poor eyesight (even before my surgeries) and poor coordination I have had a lot of trouble doing simple thing like washing dishes or mopping a floor or sweeping.

The only things I can do competently are the things that are automatic, like laundry.

In order to get things like that done, I have to fight a pitched battle against my own distorted senses and scrambled inputs.

I more or less have to make my body to do what I want it to do by sheer force of will. And that is extremely tiring and pretty inaccurate as well.

It’s like crossing the Alps on tippy toes. Sure, it CAN be done, but…

And it’s always been this way for me. Even when I was a preschooler. They even did a fuckton of tests on me when I was in grades 1 and 2 to try to figure me out.

But then they basically gave up on me.

I was too much for them, I guess.

But the problems were never addressed again. After all, I was incredibly gifted in all the academic parts of school and those were what mattered, so who cared if I sucked at gym and couldn’t walk down a corridor without tripping over my own feet?

I’m glad puberty straightened me out to the my current level of incompetence at least.

This handicap of mine has hurt me a lot over the years. Especially because I lacked the capacity to articulate what my problems were so I could not express or explain the reasons why I could not do these simple things.

I suspect there may be an organic component – something a tad off in some key areas of the brain, possibly from childhood head trauma.

But I also think there was nobody to play with me in the right ways to encourage my motor development and coordination when I was a wee thing.

Regardless, this physical incompetence is just one of the many things that makes life difficult for me.

And it’s one of the reasons I stay in my own little world, where I am competent and capable, far more then I should.

The real world is loaded with potential humiliations and alienations that will reveal my obscene lack of physical development to the world.

No wonder I hide away here.

I wonder what good some sort of diagnosis might do me?

More after the break.

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A little more aggravation

Now THAT is what I call a remix. It takes what is awesome about the original and boils it down to its kickass essence then amplifies it.

Anyhow, ever since last night’s marathon of morons, I have been pondering aggravation and its role in regulating one’s emotions.

Because here’s the thing : I have to admit that after it was all over, I felt better. Getting that mad and writing out my tale of woe with my signature snark was very cathartic for ,me and my troubles expressing anger, and that has really got me thinking.

Is this what rage junkies like Marc Maron and my later father are addicted to? It has to be, right? On some level, their brains recognize how good it can feel to get super mad and therefore reinforce those neural pathway like they do with all sources of reward.

Before long, that becomes the default way to deal with accumulated stress. Just flush it out in an orgy of rage. And because this functions like an addiction, it hollows out all resistance to getting its fix and small things like the fact that you are ruining every relationship in your life by turning into an evil raging ogre on the regular doesn’t matter because addictions have no concept of the future.

Neither does anxiety, come to think of it. Hmmm.

Adrenaline don’t care.

So I feel like I have sampled a very dangerous drug in the last 24 hours, and learned a pretty valuable lesson about the exact nature of its deadly appeal.

The idea of people deliberately seeking out things to make them angry disgusts me. Presumably, the nature of the game prevents people from doing it consciously.

Because the most important thing for all rage addicts is the feeling of justification. No matter how clearly irrational and unfair the anger is to any outside observer, to the rage-a-holic, it must all be completely justified in their minds for the whole kick to work.

Of course, being addicts, their standards for justification are pretty low because that’s not what it’s about. They are about as fussy about their rage triggers as a junkie is about his smack.

All that matters is the fix, and getting to it as quickly and easily as possible.

So as absurd and pathetic as it is, my father really thought it was the fact that my shoes were slightly in his way when he came down for supper that was the reason he was screaming at us at the top of his lungs and spewing spittle all over the dinner table when I was a kid.

What a sad and humiliating delusion.

You hear that, Larry Donald Bertrand, or at least the version of you that is still taking up space in my head? You were pathetic.

But then again, I told you that when you were alive, didn’t it?

Good on me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.