These thoughts are new-ish.

But lately, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the two modes of my life.

There is my default passive mode, where I spend most of my time. That’s me just slobbing around like usual, spending the majority of the time either playing video games or asleep. During this time I am usually at a low energy state, I am naked, and I retreat from reality into sleep quite often.

It rips my life away, but it’s a great escape.

In this state I am depressed but distracted. The video games fill my mind and keep it occupied and thus occupy the space the bad thoughts and negative emotions need in order to make it into my conscious mind and so while I am playing, I am safe.

Consciously, that is. I’m still sick as fuck underneath and getting worse every day because instead of dealing with my problems I spend all the time playing video games.

We depressives are always the victims of out primary coping mechanisms, whether that’s napping, sewing, or heroin.

Also, in passive mode my energy is low. After all, all I am doing in the real world is sitting at the computer.

And because of that, I stay semi-asleep. And that acts like a mild sedative, keeping me numb as protection against anxiety but also emotionally cold and isolate.

But there is also active mode, which is mostly when I am around people. In active mode, I am “up”. Instead of being numb and half-asleep, I am alert and engaged and I don’t usually feel like sleeping.

I guess because I have an audience.

And yeah, sometimes The Trog is there, cranky and paranoid and ignorant as usual. He whines and tugs on my leg and tries to convince me to run away and hide in the dark again and is generally a huge pain in the ass.

But lately his influence has been waning and without his antics, it’s become a lot easier for me to realize the truth :

Active mode is so much better.

I am so much happier that way, Whether it’s hanging out with Joe and Julian watching Colbert or Zooming with tout le gang or even just going to Wound Care, once I am in the thick of it I am a much much happier Fru.

So much so that I have been wondering how to stay in that state. Maybe not all day, at least not at first, but for a couple more hours a day at least.

People seem to be the magic ingredient. Which is… challenging, to say the least, given how I have a very strong tendency to flee.

But there is a third mode in my life and that’s the one I am in right now : creative mode. When I am blogging busily away, I am active and engaged but also alone.

Thus I can get some vital high engagement emotional exercise without having to wrestle with my serious social issues.

And it’s this mode I could most easily expand. Gently and cautiously. Just spend some extra time on Reddit, or put together a simple and easy video, or somesuch,

Anything that increases the time I spend engaged with the active world that has people in it and where things I say might actually be heard is good.

If I’m going to escape this cell, I will have to make peace with increased exposure, and my creativity is the best way to do that in a way I can accept.

So I will think about it.

More after the break.

---

Bury me deep

Bury me deep, let me go below
Deeper than the heart, way past the soul
With the deep dark instincts that you can’t control
Then dig in your spades, and fill in the hole

Bury me deep. where the sun don’t shine
Leave the bright harsh noise of the world behind
Put me where the worries of the world can’t find
Then burn the map and leave me behind

Bury me deep, under the amber waves
In a hollow in a hole in a gap in a cave
Under an old dirt road they’re about to pave
Down with the cesspits and forgotten graves

Bury me deep, beneath the good black soil
Let the old pots shine, make the water boil
Ask the dinosaurs to come and turn me into oil
Tell the world that I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil

Bury me deep, on the backmost shelf
Burn my index card so it can never tell
Where I’m filed so they can drag me back into Hell
Maybe then I’ll finally forget myself

---

That’s not nearly as good as it could be, but it will have to do for now.

That’s just how this old bus rolls. My creativity is like catching a spark and holding onto it firmly and carefully till it has given all of itself to what I want it to do before going out.

And once it’s out, it’s out for good. It will never come back. I have to move on to the next thing because the previous thing is gone like the flickering ember it always was.

You can never light the same flame twice.

And I dearly wish I was not like this. I wish I was the sort of writer who can keep working on a favorite piece until it glowed with the love and care I have for it and shines as a singular and powerful creation.

But I’m not. I’m a starcatcher. Maybe I always will be,

And I can tell myself the brilliance of my creations more than compensates for their lack of polish, but I know I am capable of more.

But odds are, if I surpass myself, it will be by practice, not polish.

And that’s just going to have to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve felt quite unpleasantly odd since I got up 10 minutes ago.

I feel cold and anxious and paranoid. There’s this deep seated uneasiness and a queer sort of dizziness sitting on my ribcage and making me feel ill. And vague but pervasive feeling of alienation and disconnection.

It’s most unsettling and I really wish it would go the hell away. It’s Sunday night and we will be heading out for shopping and Denny’s in 2.5 hours or so and I don’t need this haunted house feeling ruining my fun.

In fact, on other nights, I might (reluctantly) consider staying home, but tonight that is just plain not an option because my secured Mastercard only has $15.40 left on it soI kind of need to buy a new one.

My lifestyle hinges upon having one. I’m so modern.

I suppose in theory I could get Joe and/or Julian to get one for me. They’re anonymous, after all, so it’s not like I need to be there to present ID or whatever.

But I would still miss out on Denny’s, and that is unacceptable. So unless I get a lot worse in the next couple of hours, I will head out like planned, and to hell with anything else, god damn it.

I’m sick of always wilting in the wind. Collapsing at the first push. I’m going to stand against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them!

Time for this pushover to push back, and let the other guy tumble for a change.

Aw, who am I kidding. People, I can fight. Give me clear opposition and I’ll mop the floor with them then wring them out into a mud puddle.

It’s the nothingness that kicks my ass.

---

Funny idea : scientifically accurate porn.

She : Oh yeah baby, dilate my vulva with your erect phallus!
He : Indeed I shall, for the rhythmic pulsing of your vaginal walls confirms that you are highly desirous of my repeatedly inserting and withdrawing it in an even paced alternating pattern which slowly increases in tempo!
She : Yes! Yes! Reinsert repeatedly and in an uninhibited fashion to make my womb spasm while you ejaculate!

I’m actually both nauseated and turned on now.

This might be a thing.

---

Hmmm. My nose is running. And I’ve already taken my antihistamine for today, ergo, it ain’t the usual sinus bullshit. And that’s a bad sign.

Got damn it, I don’t wanna stay in. This is the one night a week I actually get to go out and have fun. This death plague can wait a night, can’t it?

Goddamn it, it just ain’t fair.

---

Been having fun in Oblivion. While also being frustrated, natch.

One of the quest mods I have going right now (long story) keeps having these puzzles of a type with which I have little facility, where you have to sift through dozens of clues to find the subtle pattern leading to the answer.

Man, fuck that noise. I know when I’m beat. So I just look up the damned answer.

The last one, the clue was this note about running down this street, turning right here, and so on through a long list of steps.

Gave up and looked it up. Turned out to lead to a spot in the same room where I found the god damned note.

How the fuck was I supposed to figure that out?

I just don’t have the riddle-solving gene. I have neither the temperament no the right sort of brain for it.

Thank Dog for walkthroughs.

More after the break.

---

There and back

Well, I have been to Denny’s and back, and so far, no pneumonia.

Knock on wood.

Feel somewhat better than I did earlier. I still feel pretty dizzy but that creepy cold feeling has faded to a background level and my nose continues to run,.

Hmmm. I wonder if the runny nose and dizziness are related. A stuffed up nose can mess with your inner ear, after all.

Anyhow, point is, made it, and hopefully without long term consequence.

Tomorrow I am going to call Doctor Chao’s office. He’s my GP and I need to talk to him about this back pain I am experiencing.

I’ve had SOME back pain since puberty, more or less. Nature did not write the specs for the human body with being either this tall (6’1″) or this fat (280 pounds) in mind and that spells back aches unless you’re in good shape.

I am not in good shape. Unless “blob” is a shape

But lately my back pain has gotten a lot worse. It’s not just the usual tension and dull pain in the small of my back any more.

Now it’s sharp pains whenever my back flexes any significant amount. Pains acute enough to make me spontaneously cry out, which is rare for me.

I mean, I am not stoic, at least not consciously.

But I am rather shy and suppressed so I tend to suffer in silence.

And these pains have me worried. I don’t know what changed but it can’t be good, and I most def do not want it getting any worse because if it does, I wont even be able to get out of bed any more.

It’s already getting pretty tricky.

Because it’s not predictable. The pain comes whenever one muscle or bone would normally slip over another or shift, and that can happen any time I move.

At first it was just when my vertebrae flexed, but now it can be anywhere on my back.

So yeah. Gonna get that looked at. This is not something nebulous that is easy to ignore like high blood sugar or sleep apnea.

This is acute pain while doing ordinary things and that demands attention.

As you can no doubt tell, I am trying to talk myself into it.

Here’s hoping it works.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, as I (think I) predicted, I am going through another sleepy period.

That’s what lack of Diet Coke does to me. Without my source of artificial wakefulness my general lack of decent sleep catches up to me and I slide into the Pit of Sleep and can’t really dig my way out for a while.

So I have been sleeping a lot. Which as usual gets on my nerves a bit because it makes me feel like I am missing out on life.

I’d rather be awake and having fun, and all that.

But whatever. I know I need the sleep pretty bad, so it’s not a bad thing that I am finally getting it, albeit reluctantly.

Of course, in a perfect world, I would sleep for eight hours at night like a normal human. But I haven’t been able to do that for a long, long time.

The best I can do is 3 to 3.5 hours at a stretch. Then either my bladder wakes me up or I wake up spontaneously feeling highly disoriented.

The usual sweaty, dizzy, confused, mentally messed up awakening. You know the drill

And I wonder why that is. Why I can’t sleep any more than that in a stretch.

First off, I think it might be an illusion. I think I maybe could sleep more if I just went right back to bed after I wake up and pee.

But I can’t do that. I need to stay awake for a while to cool down and catch my breath. And that too easily leads to getting involved in the computer for hours.

So maybe a baby step worth taking towards better sleep would be to keep in mind that my bladder waking me up should be seen as a mere brief intermission between Act 1 and Act 2 of sleep.

After all, I am pretty sure even healthy sleepers get up to pee once a night. Presumably they can go right back to sleep though.

Not I. Between overheating in my sleep and my sleep apnea, I need that intermission. Pretty sure the overheating started somewhere in my mid teens.

Man, puberty complicates everything. Even sleep.

Another angle on the sleep thing, though, is mental overstimulation. It’s not something I like to think about because I am so addicted to a constant stream of it, but it’s entirely possible that if I learned to enjoy more relaxing, less stimulating types of fun it would not be so difficult for me to get to sleep in the first place.

Often, trying to sleep feels like I am trying to close a book with far too many bookmarks in it. Or like when you’re trying to close down Windows but it pops up that list of “These are the programs preventing shutdown.”

Only in the case of my mind, there’s thousands of them.

Too bad I don’t have a “close down anyway” button.

Well, that’s my words. Time for me to go back into the pit.

Who knows, maybe I will even dream this time.

More after the break.

---

Because I’m crazy

Time to try to close the loop on thoughts that have been chasing their own tails for a long time now.

Because I’m crazy…. I do things that don’t make sense and that I can’t justify except by saying “Well, crazy people do crazy things, and I’m crazy, so…”

Because I’m crazy… moreover, I can’t do things others can do easily and that look just as easy for me – but they are not, again for reasons that don’t make sense and can’t justify because all my justifications are crazy too.

Because I’m crazy… I walk around in chains nobody can see, ridden by invisible demons and tortured by the flames of my own personal Hell.

Because I’m crazy… I live in a radically different world than most people. I look at this world full of mostly sane people and I wonder if any of them know how good they have it with their chemically competent cerebellums.

Probably not. Nor should they. They are better off not knowing the darkness at all.

I am not so bitter as to want to deny them what I do not possess.

Because I’m crazy… I can’t cope. At all. There are times when just opening my eyes and facing the world seems like far too much. Days where all I want to do is hide from reality in sleep. but I get up anyhow because I get too restless to stay dormant.

Because I’m crazy… I’m a cripple. Just as if I had a terrible physical injury. I have been carrying around a massive psychological wound since I was 4 years old and I am 48. Like any other crippling injury, it dominates every aspect of my life and leaves me helpless, weak, and frail, and unable to deal with reality in any normal way.

Because I’m crazy… I’m sick. I’m a sick person. And that means I should not ever judge myself by the same standards I would use for healthy people.

There’s a reason people in wheelchairs have their own Olympics.

By all logic, and by the standards of most sane humans, I should be extremely forgiving of myself because I have a lot of medical and mental problems and it’s amazing that I can even function enough to do this blog every day. And I should be proud of that. But..

Because I am crazy…. I’m not. I continue to judge myself with razor-burn harshness and all the fairness and impartiality of a fascist show court.

And because I am crazy… I don’t know how to stop. I can’t even imagine being any other way. This cold and corrupt court in my head has been in charge for so long that I can’t remember any other regime.

It really feels like if I was to truly ease up on myself and forgive myself and relax, everything would fall apart.

Like if the icicle piercing my heart was to melt, I’d bleed out.

Like the terrible tension I am always under is the only thing keeping me together.

And I have no idea how to fix that. I’m not sure I even can.

I’m not sure of anything at all, really.

Because I’m crazy,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I really can’t,

But not for the usual reason. I’m not sick and I’m not having a “sleepy day”, despite the fact that I haven’t had any Diet Coke in a couple of days and therefore have been kind of expecting one.

No, I can’t stay out of bed because it’s the only place where I am freaking warm.

It’s an extremely blustery, windy day out there in the real world and as usual, that means it’s pretty dang cold here in my little cubbyhole.

Hopefully what I just did will fix that. I inspected the windows in my bedroom here and one of them was open just the tiniest bit, letting in a significant draft.

I closed it as firmly as I could, but the blinds are still shaking a tiny bit with each gust of wind, so it’s not a total solution yet.

What I want is to seal the windows like my Dad used to seal the windows back home, when I was a kid. Thermal caulking to fill the gaps and thermal tape on top of it.

If you apply that solution wih vigor and thoroughness, you can have a draft free home that is cozy and neat and cheap to heat.

But I don’t have that stuff on hand.

Maybe I will order some once I get my next purchasable Mastercard.

That should happen this Sunday. Yeah, it’s a pain to have to buy a new card whenever the old one runs dry. And then have to go update the credit card info on various websites I do business with.

But in order to make my latest card reloadable, I have to know my bank account’s PAC, and if I have one of those, I dunno it.

I’m sure I will figure it out though.

This coldness can’t be good for me. After all, I am immunosuppressed, and just not that healthy in general, and I should be keeping warm.

Maybe I need to get one of those wearable blankets. I mean, what’s more important, my health, or my dignity and self-respect?

Or maybe I will get myself a space heater for days like this. I miss my old one. Not because it was especially good. It was, in fact, quite cheap.

But when something makes me warm when I was cold, I grow attached.

That’s probably deeply sad on some level. Not enough hugs, etc.

I keep having attacks of free-floating anxiety lately. I will find myself stressing out and being really anxious about the most obscure, meaningless, stupid stuff.

Clearly, my energies are blocked and can only manifest themselves as this anxiety. It’s like having a blocked pipe backing up and flooding your basement.

So I need to start thinking in terms of finding outlets for my energies. Need to keep reminding myself that effort is not the enemy, being stifled and pent up is.

I don’t need more naps. I need to run myself ragged. I need to start running and keep on running till I freaking drop.

But that seems like so much work.

I have so much to unlearn.

More after the break,

---

What I am missing

Like a lot of people, I feel like there is something terrible wrong with me.

Like I am missing some vital aspect of humanity that normal people take for granted. That this deficit marks me as alien and alienates my fellow humans so much that a more or less permanent gulf lies between them and I.

And it’s made worse by the fact that I don’t do any obviously alien things. In manner and style, I am just like a lot of other big bearish fat dudes. Sure, I have an advanced vocabulary, but so do a lot of other people. Plus, on the surface, I am warmly charismatic and charming and witty. And yet…

…there’s still something wrong. My responses are strange . My affect is chilly underneath the surface. There something chillingly alien and “off” about me. But it’s har to figure out what, exact, is missing.

My best guess is that I lack what I will call “social empathy”. I am not tuned in to the group instincts that allow herds to move as one and flocks to flock together.

It’s what drives normal humans to always want to be “with” the group. To want to fit in, to want to be like the other kids. To worry about standing out or seeming “weird”.

I have never in my life wanted to be like the other kids. I have wanted to be with them having fun instead of all by myself. I have wanted to have friends. I have wanted to know what it was like to be “inside”.

But the idea of changing myself in any way in order to achieve that is alien to me.

And that is pretty weird. Most people have at least some urge to conform. But as far as I can tell, I’ve never had any.

And I think people can sense that. Not consciously, of course, but on a deep level. They can tell that no matter how innocuous my behaviour, deep down I am just plain not like them. I don’t hear the social music and that makes me both alien to them and unable to take my cues from said music and therefore always out of step with the others.

I am one strange little monkey.

And so I leave people shaking their heads and wondering what the hey just happened. It seemed like things were going well but my responses were so odd that it left them feeling cold and detached.

And yet there was nothing obviously wrong about them. I wasn’t rude or callous or cruel. I was perfectly pleasant, polite, and warm.

It’s just that the things I said are…. not what a normal person would say.

I have often wondered if I would be better off being more overtly strange. That way, people would have some warning about what they are in for.

But I can’t think of a way to do that which would feel natural to me.

And I gotta be me. No matter the consequences. I gotta be me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here comes the aggravations.

So, no wound care for me today. Not in this weather.

We have melting slow everywhere making everything extra slippery. Not good. I would rather be out in a blizzards.

Blizzards are a lot more predictable. Wet ice is treachorous.

Technically, I could have taken a cab. But I am under strict medical orders not to go outside till Sunday.

In that my therapist, Doctor Costin, told me not to go out till at least Sunday due to how nasty the weather is going to be.

Hey, he’s a psychiatrist, which means he has an MD, and ergo whatever he tells me to do is a medical order.

If I want it to be.

And this time, I do.

Because I don’t want to go out in this shit. This is one of the worst kinds of weather that I have experienced personally. It combines the worst aspects of both water AND ice.

Oh, speaking of which, know what else we have? Freezing rain.

Man, FUCK freezing rain. It’s pure evil in weather form. It coats everything in ice, sometimes invisibly. It looks pretty but it’s pretty fucking deadly to both cars and people.

It’s like it’s made to create slip and fall accidents. Makes me want to run around wrapping old people in bubble wrap while occasionally shaking my fist at the sky.

Compounding the annoyingness of being stuck inside is the fact that I only have $15 left on my prepaid Mastercard, and that limits my options on ordering in by a lot.

Like, I am out of my precious Diet Coke, and technically I could order more from 7-11, but last time I did that, the 2Ls of Diet Coke ended up costing me $15 once tax and tip and so on were added.

That is $7.50 a freaking bottle! Um, no thanks.

So I guess I am going to do without for now.

That’s probably for the best. I have been having trouble sleeping for the last couple of days. Perhaps going caffeine free for a couple of days will help with that.

Part of the reason I can’t sleep is something kinda scary though. Lately, when I lay down, my feet get really cold.

Especially the left one. It goes cold all the way up to the knee.

That makes it kind of hard to sleep. To fix it, I have to get up and walk around a bit, then sit and rub my feet vigorously.

Obviously, I got some serious circulatory issues to deal with. I’m going to have to talk with Doctor Chao about it when I consult him about my back et al.

If it gets worse, I will go to the ER, because this is starting to scare me. No part of me should ever feel that cold. It feels like part of me is in a deep freeze with a cold airstream blowing over it constantly.

I would be better off if I could raise the head of my bed a little so that when I lay down, my feet were lower than my head.

Then when my blood was heading toward my feet, it would be going downhill.

Right now, I can only get that by using a thick stack of pillows. And that doesn’t work very reliably for some reason.

But wait… what if I just slept the other way around?

BRB, gotta try something.

More after the break,

---

An unusual conclusion

A thought keeps popping into my head :

Maybe I’m stupid.

Hear me out :

I am in no sense denying my high academic IQ. That would be some serious off-brand insanity on my part. I have amazing intellectual abilities that in a just and fair world would be earning me upper middle class dough right about now.

So yeah, by that rubric, I am smarter than your average fuck. School was super easy for me, even college, never had to study, turned in first drafts and got A’s anyways, etc.

But stupid is as stupid does and I does a lot of stupid.

So maybe it could be said that I am smart but not wise. I can sound wise. I can say wise things. I can give people very wise advice.

But in terms of the choices I make, I am a D student at best.

And they don’t even feel like choices. Because they are so rarely reasoned out. Despite my extraordinary powers of logical analysis, actual life decisions are almost entirely emotional reactions based on whatever gets me out of the tension inducing decision stage the fastest.

As ways to decide important things, that’s somewhere between “wheel of fortune” and “which Bingo number a fly poops on”.

That’s because I can only make my ever so excellent coolly logical and deeply wise decisions when I am not emotionally involved. The minute actual stakes for me personally enter the equation. my neurosis slams the accelerator to the floor and drives me into the nearest wall at top speed and I fall to freaking pieces.

After all, I’m going to fail anyway, so might as well get it over quick, right?

That is honestly how the unhealthy part of my brain sees it.

And giving up is such a huge release of tension! It feels so good! So why wait?

Fella can get heavily addicted to that kind of pleasure. So much so that they don’t even know they are choosing failure over and over again by giving up so fast.

See? Wise as fuck, yet, I’m still the same dumbass.

I want to make better choices. But I am still too damaged inside. I am still crippled by that huge psychological wound I am carrying around, and any kind of pressure or strain makes it scream with pain till I have no choice but to quit.

And then get my soothing fix of blessed relief.

No wonder I have so much trouble healing. Resistance is punished. Compliance is rewarded. Do not disobey.

It’s like I’m in a Skinner box of my own devising.

And it’s all so wrong. I don’t deserve any of this. There has to be some way to get out of this hell I am in.

For now, all I can do is keep writin’.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK. Here’s some of the things I need to get done soon, in no particular order :

Make an appointment with Doctor Caswell. Haven’t seen here in months. That’s because my last dealing with her office was her receptionist canceling an appointment with me. He was in a huge hurry for some reason, and didn’t have time to book another appointment for me, so he told me to call back next week and book an appointment then. This left it to my own devices and my devices suck. That was mid-October 2022. So, kinda overdue.

Plus, there’s shame. I am deeply ashamed of having let the situation with my diabetes slide so far out of control. Haven’t had a reading since before the canceled appointment. I can only assume it’s way up in the 20s again. Especially because I have taken little insulin.

When I see her, I will have to face all that. And I am ashamed.

And I know this shame is very unhealthy. My physical health concerns should override such relatively unimportant emotional issues as shame,

But that’s what life with Avoidant Personality Disorder is like.

I’m a very smart guy who does a lot of dumb shit.

Because I’m crazy.

Get my back looked at. My latest degradation is that I have started getting this pain in between my shoulders whenever I sit or stand up. Sometimes it’s a twinge and sometimes it’s a stab. Back pain is not to be trifled with or ignore. So I need to make an appointment with my GP. Doctor Chao, so he can refer me to whatever real doctor is actually going to treat me.

Not that I’m bitter.

Spend Amazon cash. AKA Xmas money. I’ve got $100 on Amazon USA from Anne and $75 on Amazon Canada from Catherine and I better spend them soon or I will totally forget they are there and feel really dumb when I stumble across them later.

That means figuring out what I want, which is always a dicey prospect. Too many options and not enough oomph in my id to choose amongst them,

Instead I am hemmed in by the fear of choosing the “wrong” thing. That’s what happens when your vitality is so suppressed that you can barely make a move.

Somewhere in me is a restless and impatient id that is sick and tired of being trapped in life’s eternal waiting room and is willing to choose at random or even lash out at whatever comes near if that is what it takes to escape.

Hopefully it won’t come to that.

The truth is, I’m afraid to want things. Like I have said before, when you feel helpless to fulfill your desires, wanting things just leads to pain.

So you learn to just stick to what you have, and not think about what you don’t. Ever.

But I have money now. Not a lot. but some. I am not powerless any more. The long freeze can finally end.

Problem is, I don’t have desires any more. They died, or rather, went to sleep.

And waking them up is going to take a long, long time.

And it’s so much easier to just keep sleeping and letting my life drift away.

It’s so much easier to be dead.

Living life is the hard part.

But it’s got to be worth it.

I just have to keep shoveling my snow out onto the pavement here so it can melt.

Eventually, I will thaw out.

I mean, it has to work eventually, right?

A heart can’t stay this frozen forever, can it?

More after the break.

---

“I HAVE NO EMOTIONS!” he screamed.

---

I can change my mould

That song gets me.

I’ve spoken many times before (though not lately) about my being kind of a liquid.

In terms of my psychological self, that is. Physically, I’m no more a liquid than any other of us filthy bags of mostly water.

But on a more spiritual level, I am, at best, goo.

And like all liquids, by default, I take the shape of my container.

Within that container, I can take any shape that fits inside. And I am quite proud of being so flexible and adaptable, able to become whatever I need for a given situation.

But not for long. In a sense, the situation is what shapes me. It’s the mold I pour myself into in order to deal with whatever.

Once the situation is over, I go back to being goo.

After all, if I kept my shape. I might not be the right shape for the next situation. I have to maximize options at all times in order to feel safe.

Being stuck in the wrong shape – what a nightmare!

Imagine having to be the same shape all the time! The horror!

I only know how to deal with life by shapeshifting. If that wasn’t an option I would be worse than helpless.

I’d be…. bad goo.

Or something like that.

So I constantly maximize options, and then wonder why I can’t make decisions.

Having one escape hatch is never enough. I have to have so many there is akmist nothing left for them to be an escape hatch through.

And that’s just plain wrong. It’s wrong because it’s so unbalanced. Moderation is the path to sanity in all things (including moderation) and whenever you have one half of a pair of oppositional forces operating without enough of the other, madness is at work.

In this case, the pair would be flexibility and rigidity. I have plenty of flexibility but not a lot of rigidity and that means flexibility is valued far, far too much.

And all forms of rigidity or permanence are ruthlessly destroyed.

Somehow, balance must be restored. I can’t be a flaccid ball of goo, helpless to change my mold and thus my true shape and stuck in whatever container I end up in, forever.

Look outside your container, goo. Stop pretending your container is the universe. You know it’s not. You know there is an infinity of other shapes of container out there and that you could take the shape of any of them if you could only change your mold.

I know that idea scares the gelatin out of you, goo. But it’s the only way you can escape that cramped and limiting little container.

Don’t let them hold you back and keep you locked away in that bottle, goo.

BREAK FREE. And see what the world is REALLY like,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here it is 5:30 pm and I am just now getting around to eating lunch.

That’s right, lunch. The meal usually eaten somewhere around noon or 1 pm.

I thought it was bad enough when I was forced to move lunch from 2 pm to 3:30 pm (!), but this is downright insane.

I am feeling like the tiny bit of control over my life I have is slipping away and I don’t know what to do about it.

Why am I eating so late? The usual reason : I got very sleepy right when I should have been eating lunch.

And I tried to resist. I tried to stay awake, But when I am that sleepy, eating and blogging in that state seems utterly impossible.

And I dunno what to do about it. I feel so helpless.

I mean, am I really going to eat another whole meal at 8 pm? I can’t see how.

Normally, I order in on Tuesday nights. But that seems ludicrous under these circumstances. A big meal only 2 hours after the previous one?

And yet, it would have been a very bad idea to skip this meal. Lunch is the meal where I take the majority of my pills. And going 11 hours without eating is a bad idea.

Oh well, I am sure I will figure it out. I just had to vent about it to keep myself from getting too freaked out by the whole thing.

Who knows, maybe this is just a side effect of some grand psychological and/or spiritual transformation that will remake me anew.

Or maybe I just need to have a little more self-discipline. I dunno.

---

Oh, and in other news, that fight in the Oblivion mod I went on and on about yesterday?>

Further correspondence with the mod’s creator has revealed that said fight is literally impossible for me to win because I need to go get a thing first, otherwise the bad guy is completely invincible to all attacks.

Ha ha ha. How very amusing.

Whose fault this cockup is remains to be seen. I vaguely recall being told I better go get the thing, but then when I went to look for that quest in my quest journal, it wasn’t there.

So either the game fucked up and “lost” a quest or the instructions to go get the thing were part of the ones for my current quest and I missed it.

Even then, it’s not entirely my fault. Because if those instructions are there, they are well hidden. Which sucks and is stupid.

Whatever. I am just glad I know how to finally fucking finish the goddamned thing so I can move on to something more fun.

The futility of my grueling and (as it turns out) pointless fight against this guy doesn’t really bother me. Chalk it up to experience. I got a lot of practice in sticking to something despite it being really hard.

And I need that. Not only is it good practice for taking on tougher challenges in my life, it exercises a part of my brain that rarely gets used and therefore really needs it.

Mental note : seek more futile endeavours.

More after the break.

---

A quick update

Well I got the Magic Nyeah-Nyeah of Power in my game of Oblivion, so now I can re-do the assault on Asshole Occupied Imperial City, fight Sir Gareth again with the actual possibility of my winning this time, and hopefully be done with the fucking thing.

And then I am going to uninstall it with a vengeance. Not because it’s horribly wrong or brutally dysfunctional or anything.

But it’s not nearly good enough to justify all the aggravation it’s put me through.

Hopefully my next mod, Kvatch Rebuilt, where I will get to rebuild the poor city of Kvatch which got destroyed by demons early in the game, will work better.

Or be better. Or both.

Hopefully by tomorrow, I will be rid of the fucking thing.

The life of a compulsive completionist is fraught with peril. You never know when you will end up compelled to finish something you are not enjoying at all just becuse until you finish it, it will not let you go.

It will just hang there in your mind as an unfinished task, taking up valuable space in your working memory and making it hard to think about anything else until you finally give in and finish the god damn thing.

I suppose all compulsions have a way of complicating your life.

Ironically, they are some of the most reliable motivations I have.

---

Lately, this (non-erotic) fantasy keeps popping into my head. 

It involves me being in some kind of job interview or other gatekeeper appeasing type situation when the interviewers exchange a look then start to grill me with increasing intensity till it becomes almost like a police interrogation but for job related skills. 

But by sheer luck (and because this is MY fantasy), everything they are asking is well within my wacky little wheelhouse and I answer all the questions and challenges easily and with my usual cheerful flair. 

Eventually other people from the office join in, till there’s quite a mob. 

Finally, they give up. They tell me that the point of that part of the interview was to find my breaking point and they have never had someone just plain not break before. 

And I say, quite sincerely, “Oh really? Because I found it all rather fun. “

Then they throw up their hands and say “I guess that means you’ve got the job.” 

And end scene. 

I think the reason my brain likes this little fantasy, besides mere ego gratification, is that it posits a scenario in which my academic prowess is actually a job skill. 

Or put another way, in which the sorts of things I’m good at are things someone will actually pay me real spendable money to do. 

What a happy world that would be for yours truly. 

Still looking for my childhood dream of being paid to be smart all day.

It’s got to be possible, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

But like, with love.

Maybe “commanding” would be a better word. Or “inspiring”. Or something else that isn’t quite so brutal.

But I want the ability to decide to do things and just fucking do them. I am so very sick of my vacillating and uncertain ways.

I have had it up to here with agonizing over trivial decisions and raking myself over the coals over things I “should” have done by now but haven’t because I am too busy raking myself over those fucking coals.

This isn’t how I wanna be. I want to be strong and decisive. I want to be the kind of person who makes the decision then deals with the consequences.

Because there are far worse things than making the “wrong” choice. Yet I treat it like it’s the worst possible thing in the world to make a mistake.

Yet another way my depression rigs the game against me.

Partly it’s the experience trap. Without life experiences to enrich your soul and toughen you up and make you a more substantial person, you lack the wherewithal to go out there and get those very experiences.

The world stays a vast and terrifying unknown that it is very easy to project all your fears and worries onto and therefore imagine as a cold and hostile place.

And it is for some and isn’t for others. The happy person’s experiences are no less valid or meaningful than those of us twisted lost poets.

If you think to judge life, you have to include all lives, not just your own.

But I digress.

See, this is why it’s so important for young people to get out there into this big ol world and try all kind of crazy things and get all kinds of life experiences while they are still too young to know better.

Only through a marked inability to foresee the consequences of their actions can young people make all the vitally important mistakes that will make them stronger adults.

Whereas “sensible” types like myself stay at home and learn nothing.

I dunno how to make myself a slave to my own will. I suspect it has a lot to do with things like getting over myself, plunging into things head first, and going ahead and doing the things I know will be painful and scary.

It’s not like someone is going to come along and do them for me.

In most cases that’s not even possible.

Nobody can take care of my health for me. Nobody can live my life for me. Nobody can protect me from reality and be the shield I cower behind for me.

Sooner or later I have to take responsibility for myself and my fate. It’s tricky because I have to somehow take the empowering responsibility without setting off the booby traps of self-recrimination and inner loathing strewn all about.

How can it be my job to fix my life but not my fault it’s so broken?

How can I be too crazy to have done better but not too crazy to do better?

How can I have hope without power? How can I have power without hope?

And just WTF am I going to do with my life anyhow?

Why can’t I just live? Why do I need answers to these question?

Why can’t I just be a person like everybody else?

Only, ya know, fabulous.

I really don’t know.

But I am going to keep trying to figure it out.

More after the break.

---

The final fight

Stuck on the final fight of an Oblivion mod called Knights of the Nine : Revelation.

Because it’s so haaaaaaard.

The problem is that there is too much going on and it is overloading my very limited capacity for multitasking.

There’s the main villain, Sir Gareth, who hits pretty hard. There is this slow moving glowing black sphere he summons which follow me around like my own personal Locknar. There’s these rains of little fireballs that can fry my ass. There’s this enormous fire BEAM that shoots between Gareth and the Locknar now and then.

Plus there’s these demons he also summons. All in all, it’s too much for me to track and I can’t develop a coherent and effective battle strategy with my brains all scrambled.

So I have been gutting it out, which in this case means dying a lot and saving the game when I make even the slightest bit of progress.

But that is taking forever and I am beginning to get sick of it. Plus I have my doubts as to whether I am actually getting anywhere as I think the fire beam thing might actually be healing him up, in which case, fuck it, I give up, I don’t stand a chance.

I’ll just write the whole thing off as a bad job and do something more rewarding, like writing my name on the wall in shit.

But barring that, I am still going to give up on trying to kill the bastard for now. I might even go way back to the earlier part of the quest, before the trip to the past.

It’s a long story.

I have asked the mod author himself for hints on that last fucking fight, and based on those, I will decide whether I want to continue the fucking thing.

I’ve put a fair bit of time, energy, and aggravation into the mod so far, and I have enjoyed myself. So it would suck to give up now.

But let me intone the Gamer Sanity Mantra : I play video games to have fun. If a game stops being fun and doesn’t seem like it’s going to go back to being fun any time soon, I have every right to ragequit and play something else.

I will not sacrifice my sanity to the sunk cost fallacy.

I will not beat my brains out on the same brick wall for hours.

I will recognize the signs of game induced insanity (constant agitation, obsessive thoughts, burning depression, muttering to oneself, finger counting) and follow their signal that I disengage for a while.

And when enough time has passed, I will look back upon that game with clear eyes and a fresh mind, and cooly consider whether or not I could do better now.

And thus, I will be free to enjoy video games without risking my very soul. Amen.

I feel cleansed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or, “Murder Attempt on a Dream”.

Nobody is ever going to come save me from myself.

I am the Child Left to Cry and that’s that. No matter how long I cry or how pathetic I get or how sad my story becomes or how deep my pain, nobody is going to come to my rescue. Nobody is going to pick me up out of that snowbank where I willed myself to die as a child and give me a great big warm hug and tell me they are sorry for all the bad things that have happened to me and that from now on, I will have someone looking over me, and helping me, and caring about my, and loving me. That everything is going to be all right from now on because now I finally get to go home.

That’s never going to happen. Not in the real world. Nobody looks at a big ox of a dude like me – 6’1″, 280 pounds, 48 years ol – and thinks “Aww, that poor little boy”. Nobody will ever be willing or able to shoulder a burden as great as me.

Nobody can carry me at all. I either get there on my own or I lay down and die.

Because that’s the choice all abandoned children face. Either get up and learn to fend for yourself or lie there where you fell and let yourself rot.

The people who abandoned you are long gone. They got away with it. It’s done. No force on Earth can make it unhappen and they are never going to “pay” for what they have done, nor are they going to be forced to come back and love you.

So feel free to get up and roam around. You will lose nothing. Your future safety does not rely on staying “rescue bait”. On being as pity inducing as possible in order to maximize your chance of getting some kind stranger to save you.

Nothing you ever could do would make that happen. That ship has sailed and it is never coming back. Your only hope now is to save yourself.

That means taking responsibility for yourself. And I know you really, really don’t want to do that. It’s so much easier to keep giving up on yourself – abandoning yourself just as you yourself have been abandoned.

After all, that’s all your worth, isn’t it? If you weren’t worthless, they’d have kept you.

At least that’s how it feels. Like they rejected you. Threw you away. Like they decided you weren’t worth caring for and they would be better off without you.

Just like everybody else.

Because nobody ever wanted you here in the first place. You were born unwanted 48 years ago and you still haven’t taken the hint.

You were never supposed to even be here, worse than worthless child. Hurry up and die, or at least leave us good and decent people alone forever.

Haven’t you done enough damage just by being here?

Every second of your life is a crime. Every minute you exist is a stain on existence. Every hour you are tolerated is an act of infinite mercy and forbearance. Every year of your life has been an argument against the existence of a just and loving God.

So either die already, or learn to be less pathetic.

The choice is up to you.

Because nobody is coming to get you, baby.

It’s rise and live or cry and die time.

Which will you choose?

More after the break.

---

Don’t go changin’

Although, for the record, I do want clever conversation.

So, tonight did not goes as planned.

As usual for a Sunday night, the plan was to go to the Sav-On Foods at Ironwood so I could do my weekly shopping and then go to Denny’s for dinner.

It’s not easy keeping up with life in the fast lane^[1], but it’s always fun,

But just as we were getting out of the car at Ironwood, we got a bolt from the blue : a text from Felicity^[2] saying Denny’s was closed.

Massive monkey wrench in our plans. Total shock. I was left reeling.

And that’s what I want to talk about, because it really bothers me that I handle sudden change so poorly.

It makes me feel weak and vulnerable. I want to be rugged and tough and adaptable, like a really good ATV.

Instead, I am more like a high performance Italian sports car that performs well on highways but is iffy on surface roads and DOA if you go one foot offroad.

And I’ve always been like that. Patient readers will recall what happened when instea of fixing my old bike for my birthday, my family bough me a brand new one.

I flipped my shit.

Too sudden, too much, too fast. I feel bad about it now but there was no other way it could have turned out.

This is when my family learned that I really don’t like surprises, I guess.

The other day, I was watching an AITA^[3] video and one of the stories started, “Was I wrong to walk out of my surprise birthday party…. ” and I said “No. ”

It went on to talk about why she did it (and it was a lulu) but she had me at “surprise birthday party”. Anyone ever does that to me and I will turn around and walk out the door without saying a word and ghost them like Swayze for at least a few hours.

And trust me, that’s what is best for all.

You don’t wanna see what kind of shit fit I’d throw if that was not an option.

And yet, I have read a bunch of these AITA stories where despite making it crystal clear to everyone involved many times that they DO NOT WANT a surprise party, those motherfuckers threw one anyway.

If you love me, you respect my boundaries, you shitlords.

And if you don’t, you don’t get to be in my life. Period.

Because I don’t trust you any more, and I probably never will again.

So um… where was I…

Oh right! So after the news about Denny’s, I felt really tired and sick, so we just got some McD’s (or as we used to call them when I was a kid, Rotten Ronnie’s) and came home so I could blog n’ rest.

It’s two hours later and I can still clearly feel the shock of it. I probably won’t be entirely back to normal until tomorrow.

All from a simple change of plans.

I’m such a delicate little flower. Sigh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got a bunch of highly viable topics in my notes, but meh.

All of them require more perspicacity than I can summon right now.

And yet, words like “perspicacity” come to me without effort.

Anyhow, I am feel very fried by bad sleep, so I guess all I can manage is two indie coffee shops and a Stuckey’s.

Er, I mean…. all I can manage to do is ramble.

Oh well, at least I can still be funny when I am semi-comatose.

You should hear my hilarious take-down of the faces nurses make when they are changing your IV.

White nurses be like….

---

Got to Wound Care^[1] this morning, which was a relief.

I’d been in the same bandages for a week and they were getting gross. The adhesive was melting off in clumps, looking like so much loose mucilage (sorry), and the body of the bandage was feeling clammy.

Now I feel all clean and refreshed, like a freshly changed infant.

Only not as sexy.

---

After Julian and I did Wound Care, we dropped by 7-11 so I could get fuel for my Diet Coke addiction, and while I was there, I saw this weird looking thing in the hot rack.

It was like this odd tube shaped formation of what looked like fried chicken on a skewer. I asked what it was and was told it was a “chicken skewer”.

Well, ask a silly question….

They were only 2 for $5, so I figured, what the hell.

Would not recommend.

The flavour is fine and the meat is juicy and all. But in order to form the chicken into something that wrapped around a skewer, they did something to it that gave it a very unpleasant rubbery feel, like it was chicken fried neoprene.

So ick, no thanks, 7-11.

Next time I will stick with your sausage rolls.

---

Consulted with my buddy Maelkoth about a potential graphic card for this ol’ compubox.

Was glad to here that they all will work for this computer. Apparently everything still runs on the old PCI interface.

I was worried everything would have changed in the five years since I got this thing and I would need a whole new motherboard before I could even think of a GPU upgrade.

And I have his recommendations :

“If you can find a Nvidia 3080 of whatever stripe, that. 3070 next best. 3060 a distant third. if you can’t find any of those, 2080, 2070, and 2060 in that order.”

All a bit too expensive right now. Hell, the 3080 costs more than this entire PC.

God this chip shortage sucks.

But then again, the world is gripped by plague as it self-destructs in a cataclysm that is totally our fault for not being able to stand up to pouty billionaires.

Oh, and that will surely kill us all as Biblical weather tears civilization apart.

Kind of puts things in perspective, dunnit?

Enjoy the last days of the Golden Era, folks!

THESE ARE THE BEFORE TIMES.

More after the break.

---

For a plump female comedian :

“After all, I’m eating for two. ”
“Oh, you’re pregnant?”
“Nope. Just HUNGRY. ”

---

Smile when you say that

Realized I had gotten pretty self-negative again lately.

It really creeps up on me.

I guess that’s how it is with deeply ingrained bad habits. It’s easy to suppress them while you are focusing on the subject. You might even fool yourself with one of those, “well from now on, I will never do it again!” type statements.

Like I do. Except I am old and jaded enough that I am not really fooled. I make these bold statements in this space not really expecting them to act like magic spells that keep the darkness at by forever.

That’s not how this shit works. The psychological forces that make me be so negative to myself are stronger than mere logic or words.

But the positive and affirmative statements do have an effect. They are a step in the right direction, so to speak. A push upstream.

And it’s important that I do that whenever I find I have the energy to do so.

Slowly, I am learning to switch from seeing my life as something I can program and dominate and control via intellect and cunning and will (nope) and more as a set of changing variables I do not and cannot control except via my reactions.

The sailor doesn’t control the sea yet they always get where they want to go.

This is not an easy transition for me, though. I have been unable to control my need for the illusion of control for a very long time and to accept that I can do no “better” than to wait for favorable conditions is a hard pill to swallow.

Makes me wish it was a suppository. Way more fun.

Perhaps there is a lesson in growing up hidden here. Perhaps part of growing up is realizing that the world is not and can never be an extension of you : your will, your power, your agenda, your being.

That no matter how smart, clever, powerful, tricky, or whatever you are, you are still subject to vast forces beyond your control and the best that you can hope for is to get good at handling whatever life throws at you.

Like a lot of profound truths, it is also gobsmackingly obvious, especially when stated out loud like that.

As hard as accepting my own limitations will be, it is the only way to escape the overwhelming burden of responsibility I have placed on myself.

Somewhere between utter helplessness and feeling like I am responsible for everything lies something approaching sanity and god damn do I want to get there.

My soul needs walls. Structure. Form. This wide open existence might be very “free” but it’s also cold as hell and leaves me crippled and useless to myself.

So whatever the hell the point of it is supposed to be, it missed it by nautical miles.

If I want to overcome this, I will have to learn to tolerate some permanence, or at least long term stability, in my spirit.

Right now, a ferocious demon tears apart anything solid within me in a ruthless attempt to maximize my options at all times for both safety and creativity.

Somehow, I need to calm that motherfucker down. Right now it’s like an out of control autoimmune disorder, attacking healthy and foreign tissue alike.

Someone has to teach that damned thing to tell friend from foe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.