Had a specious freakout earlier today and last night.

Counted the cash in my wallet. Was surprised (for some reason) that there was only around $925 there. Somehow expected a lot more.

Immediately leapt to the conclusion that a whole bunch of money had gone “missing”. I did the math : the check I cashed on Friday was for $1300, plus I had $200 or so left over from the previous month, so I should have like… $1500!

That means over $500 is MISSING! Oh noes! Calamity! Debacle! FINANCIAL LOSS!

And thus I started a slow burn freakout about the whole thing. I sat there wracking my brains over where the missing money could be. Did it fall out of my wallet somehow? Did the bank not give it to me? WAS IT THE GNOMES AGAIN???

Um, forget I said that. There are no gnomes. There are. No. Gnomes.

Finally the anxiety boiled over and I blurted my troubles out to Julian on the way to Wound Care today, and he was kind enough to brave my waves of hysteria in order to remind me that $600 was indeed missing…. because I’d used it to pay my rent.

D’oh! I instantly felt both stupid and relieved, a combination of emotions I know all too well. I have a well known history of leaping to conclusions both negative and absurd.

But I don’t beat myself up too much over these incidents because I know where they come from : background anxiety accumulates in my mind like (as?) electrical charge and eventually it spontaneously discharges as one of these silly freakouts.

It’s a lot like a moral panic in that sense. Unaddressed fears and tension build up until some news item or rumour provides a “path to ground” and it drives perfectly sound citizens temporarily crazy and they freak out over some bit of nonsense that emerged from the collective unconscious until the fever passes and they all end up feeling rather silly about the whole thing and quickly forget about it.

I don’t have the luxury of burying mine in an unmarked grave at midnight.

But I try not to dwell.

Of course, the real long term solution would be to learn to process and express my emotions, passions, and energies well enough that I don’t have this pattern of escalating undischarged anxiety in the first place.

And I am working on it.

But it’s slow going because I have to laboriously work through all of this bullshit consciously and logically, in writing, because I lack the capacity to make any kind of leap of faith and so everything has to make sense and fit together.

And that takes a long goddamned time. It’s like crossing a chasm by building a bridge across it instead of jumping across.

The only benefit is that if you are lucky, others will be able to follow behind you and not have to go through what you did because of your work.

Hopefully, one day, I will use what I have learned from all this blogging to write a beautiful allegorical tale of overcoming the darkness and finding your way to the light despite a long and miserable captivity.

Knowing me, it will probably be about a sad little robot,

More after the break.

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A really big ego

The problem I have been agonizing over for a while now of how to deal with the reality of my outsized intellect and abilities has one obvious, natural solution :

Develop a really huge ego. Simple, really.

And on paper I have no philosophical or moral objection to that. I have no belief in humility as a virtue unto itself nor do I feel I need to hide my light under a bushel just because other people can’t handle how bright it is.

I’ve always held that you have the right to as big an ego as you can sustain as long as you’re not using it as an excuse to hurt people.

But I have always shied away from developing that kind of ego out of feeling a sort of reverse vertigo that makes me feel like I will go rocketing into the sky if I let my ego rise and lose myself forever in the stratosphere of Ziggy Stardust egotism and delusions of grandeur and other upper atmospheric mental illnesses.

And that thought truly terrifies me. I feel like I could lose myself forever if I went that way. End up some drooling raving cackling maniac in a rubber room somewhere.

Whether this is a real possibility or just yet another phantom my depression cooked up to keep me under its thumb is up for debate.

Maybe I would be fine. Sure, my ego would shoot up and I might be a little crazy for a while, but then it would settle back down to a much higher but still sane level and then I would be much saner and happier Fru.

But then again…. maybe not.

It’s too big a risk to take, and that’s what my depression is counting on. That bastard.

So it’s up to me to figure out how to inflate my ego balloon a little at a time. Sure, the urge to release the pressure all at once is strong (typical male) but the best course of action is to take it slow and safe, at least for now.

I don’t think I can ever have an ego proportionate to my abilities. It’s just too much for any personality structure I can think of to withstand.

I’d need some kind of strong stabilizing force to anchor me and remind me that I am merely human in order to let that big balloon bloom.

Problem is, I have no idea what that could be. In theory, it would have to be someone who can humble me and hopefully even kick my ass now and then when I need it.

Or, whispers my long suffering id, I could just let go completely and deal with the consequences when I return to sanity.

Appealing thought but far too irresponsible for me.

I will keep working on it.

Such delicate compromises I must forge!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Dunno what I have been doing right (and if you know, please tell me) but I actually feel pretty good right now.

Downright chipper, even. Bordering on chirpy.

Who knows, maybe I somehow magically caught up on sleep. Or finally got enough of some obscure micronutrient from the Taco Del Mar taco salad I ate last night.

Or maybe the fates have decided I have suffered enough and released me from my own personal Tartarus so I can finally begin the rise to greatness and glory for which my life so far has been merely the humble beginnings.

It could happen!

Point is, I feel pretty good, and felt it very important to write that down so that I have evidence that I don’t always feel terrible and that I can feel better.

So take that, depression! Fuck you and your lies!

---

I know that earlier, I had a kind of trapped, frustrated feeling. That all too familiar feeling of being too large an animal in too small a cage, forever pacing back and forth, mind simmering with dark thoughts of stalking and chasing and killing that it doesn’t understand and has no way to express.

There I go with my metaphors again! One of these days I am going to write some kind of epic imagistic tone poem like Ginsberg’s Howl just to get them out of my system.

Anyhow, what made this time feeling that caged predator feeling different was that I asked myself, “Well then, what do I want? What would be the ideal release for this feeling? What is it I am looking for?”.

I had no answer. I didn’t expect to, honestly. That’s the exact sort of thing that I have a lot of trouble addressing and so it was enough to have consciously framed and presented the question in my mind then left it to percolate a while.

I have a few answers now.

Sex being the most obvious one. Fruvy wanna fuck, god dammit, or even better, be fucked. As I slowly unpack and unchain my id, my libido is unshackled as well, despite my antidepressants, and it becomes increasingly apparent that my horny gay bear self wants to roam in search of a mate, or at least some mating.

But my massive social issues and/or social anxiety and/or avoidant personality syndrome make that rather tricky. It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where I see to my body’s deep (like, at least six inches deep) needs that could survive the test of my really harsh issues.

Like, I don’t even like talking to strangers and get panicky just thinking about introducing myself to a new person. So how do I go about getting to the humping phase of interaction? Via semaphore?

Anonymous and impersonal sex would be one solution…. if the idea of it didn’t make me wanna puke. Sex without connection or intimacy disgusts me. I am not interested.

I want to have sex with people, not parts.

Now it doesn’t have to be a long term connection. In theory, it could be someone I just met if they appeal to me enough.

But the sort of anonymous hookup the hookup apps promote does not appeal to me.

Patient readers already know this, though. Sorry for repeating myself.

More after the break.

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Voice on school PA system : Your attention please. The following students are no longer, I repeat, NO LONGER allowed to play the Name Game : Chuck… Mitch… and Zuttfucker. That is all.

---

+68

In response to this vid :

Oh, I would do so much.

1. Fill the grounds of my mansion with extremely tasteful, very high quality, and incredibly obscene statuary. And topiary. Then offer tours.

2. Go to very high class posh events in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. Show up in a tux and change in the bathroom if necessary.

3. Two words : themed orgies.

4. Open a hot new nightclub that only lets in people who don’t normally get let in to nightclubs.

5. Put up posters and billboards that say “Today you will get what you deserve!” just to see who they make nervous and who they make happy.

6. Similar to #4, I would start a podcast where I only interview people who aren’t famous.

7. Host a $5000/plate event and serve only things like dollar-store cheese balls, generic sodas, and a Costco sheet cake.

8. Hire a really good gospel choir to repeat what I say in song.

9. Open a zoo where all the animals are hot dudes in body paint. Naked, obviously.

10. Destroy the plutocracy from within. Eventually.

---

Come on home to Black Hat Breweries and try our new “Comfort Food Ruined” menu, where we take the familiar foods you know and love and ruin them by changing things!

Like the classic grilled cheese sandwich? Well then you won’t like ours, because we replaced the cheddar with some weird European cheese you’ve never heard of and the bread is gluten free!

Love Mom’s homemade spaghetti and meatballs? Then stay the hell out of here, because our version might look familiar but the spaghetti is whole wheat pasta and the meat balls are one of those new meat substitutes… Beyond or Impossible or Unlikely or something stupid like that, I dunno.

How about meatloaf? Yup. we managed to fuck that up too. How, you say? By adding weird spices that sound like something a witch would throw into her cauldron and then committed a further atrocity by adding chopped sardines!

Oh, and in case you thought, “well at least there’s beer”, you’re absolutely right! Because we have 117 fucked up microbrews, all with messed up shit like lavender or blueberries or fairy farts for all I know, just as long as it takes perfectly good beer and adds shit no self-respecting man would want in anythng, let alone his goddamned beer!

So yeah, sure, what the fuck, come on down to Black Hat Breweries and let us traumatize your taste buds and poison precious childhood memories with our inability to serve you some normal fucking food for once!

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LOL. Not bad for a rough draft. I should polish it and record it, because that seems like the kind of content that could truly go viral.

It’s the exact kind of thing that addresses a previously untapped vein of discontent and articulates it in a funny and relatable way and is therefore viral gold.

Now I am not nearly as upset as my voiceover guy up there. The phenomenon in question has, at most, caused me to grumble a bit now and then.

But I am absolutely positive that there are a lot of people out there – the “I just want a coffee” set – who feel the same way I do.

I actually think you could make a lot of money with a chain of “normal food” restaurants that just serve absolutely straight down the line North American cuisine.

Wait, I talked about that here before, didn’t i?

Anyhow, enjoy the above. Hope you got a chuckle out of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am slowly getting used to the fact that part of my getting older is having very specific memories suddenly come swimming up out of the morass into my consciousness and just kind of sit there, shining and eerily distinct, until I do something to connect to or otherwise acknowledge them.

The image in my head is of a big shiny koi swimming to the surface of a Japanese ornamental pond and eyeballing me till I pat it on the head.

Then it says something in a jarringly deep voice and swims away.

Sadly, it says it in Japanese, so I have no idea what it means.

God, it’s fun being weird.

Anyhow, my latest koi was the absolutely mindblowingly joyful and righteous Daryl Hammond as Bill Clinton bit he did after Clinton was acquitted in his impeachment trial.

The famous “I. Am. Bulletproof. ” bit.

In it, Clinton looks at the camera and says the above, and the audience (including me) absolutely explodes with exultant joy.

We had just been through many months of bullshit with the GOP trying to impeach Clinton any way they could and failing miserably because back then, there were things some GOP legislators would NOT do and one of them was impeach the President on such bullshit charges.

So Hammond’s Clinton announcing his victory with such swagger was exactly the tension breaker we all needed.

He goes on to say things like, “Next time you step to me, you best bring some kryptonite” and “There’s no good way to beat the comeback kid!”.

Hammond and the SNL writers could not have matched the moment better. The whole piece made me want to throw a big party, and I’m an introvert.

Big parties are not my thing.

Especially if they are also really crowded, because then the claustrophobia kicks in too. And let me tell you, having social anxiety and claustrophobia going full blast at the same time is not fun.

It’s what drove me out of the local furry community that I founded and ran for a long time. The furmeets were increasingly at Rat’s apartment and there were way too many bodies packed into a small space and I ended up spending most of the meet out on the balcony trying to catch my breath and calm the fuck down.

Took me a while to figure out what was freaking me out and a while after that to come to the very sad conclusion that I couldn’t come to the meets any more.

And from there, I just lost contact with my community entirely.

Oh look, past emotional trauma, here to bum me out again.

And the worst part is, I didn’t even fight it. Dunno what I would have done. Probably started a more bite-sized event with just the furries I knew well from Back In The Day when I first founded the thing.

But no, I just dropped out of this community I had been such a vital part of for almost a decade and was so proud of, and disappeared forever.

Kind of like when I dropped out of UPEI and abandoned all my friends, leaving them to drift apart without my unifying influence and presumably wondering why.

Because I was incapable of disagreeing with my parents back then, that’s why. My whole life, I had done what I was told and stayed where I was put. My job was to enthusiastically agree to whatever they asked of me and never object or assert my own needs or anything because I knew that’s what they wanted of me and that little bit of acknowledgement I got when I was a good boy was precious to me.

Be a good boy and have no needs, desires, or even interests so we can do what we love most and forget you exist most of the time, OK? Great.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

More after the break.

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Hmph. I ordered the chips and queso and got chips and gauc instead.

Heads must roll!

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Migosh, does Coke Zero (or Coke Zero Sugar, as it is now known) taste weird when you haven’t had it in a while.

It’s like the first time I tried it, only worse, because this time it caught me off-guard.

It tastes like some kind of weird plum, mint, and tamarind sauce you’d try once at a Chinese buffet, say “Well that was interesting. ” and never touch again.

And the thing is, I can’t be the only person who thinks it tastes weird. They presumably spent a whole stack of millions on consumer research for this stuff and yet somehow they missed the people saying “This tastes weird in a very bad way. I feel dirty. ”

I will just stick with my good ol’ Diet Coke for now.

The Big Bad Bear

Working title for an id personification I am developing in my head.

Look, we writers have weird ways of coping, Just roll with it.

Now, where do I start..

The Big Bad Bear (BBB) is selfish, greedy, arrogant, manipulative, and uses his great size, strength, and intelligence to push others around and casually squeeze what he wants out of people before leaving them broken and depleted as he moves on to his next victim… er. associate.

After all, he reasons somewhat facetiously, he’s not doing anything other people aren’t doing. Hustling for a dollar, trying to get laid. looking for a good time. So why should he hold back more than anyone else?

He knows the answer – because he’s naturally gifted on many levels and therefore the playing field is anything but level.

The fact that he’s also extremely ruthless doesn’t help either.

But he also knows that 99 percent of the population cannot even begin to articulate that answer, and in his world of solipsistic sophistry, that means it’s okay.

After all, if you can’t tell me what I am doing wrong, I must not be doing anything wrong.

The best thing you can say about him is that in his own twisted way, he’s gentle and good-natured. He is, at all times, soft and melodious of speech, kindly and friendly of demeanor, and exquisitely polite to everyone.

In fact, if one only meets him casually, you would think him the very soul of civilization and the gentlest of all possible giants.

And he would happily let you continue to think that until he either had use for you or you got in between him and what he wanted.

This has no effect on his very high opinion of himself as a gentleman and a gentle man.

After all, he declares in tones of pious innocence, it’s not like he wants to hurt people.

He just doesn’t care if he does.

All in all, he is a very bad bear indeed.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am, eating “lunch” at 5 pm.

That means “supper” will be at around 9 pm. That’s the best option given that I will be having my midnight snack three hours later.

I hate it when things get all out of whack like this. But like I have been saying, I keep ending up sleepy when I should be hungry and it throws everything off.

What happens is that I am cruising along along playing my game du jour (Oblivion, currently) and meal time comes around so I stop playing to eat and blog, but find that I am suddenly very sleepy so I end up napping instead.

I normally sleep around 1.5 to 2 hours when I sleep, so just like that, I am off schedule by a couple of hours.

Now imagine that happening for a few meals in a row and you see how quickly things can get completely out of control.

And I suppose that’s the real issue – control. For many years, regular mealtimes were just about the only regularity I could create in my own life, on my own, and in the last year and change that’s all gone to hell too.

Oh well, fuck it. I’m not in charge around here anyhow. I’m just the shmuck who tries to cope with all the bullshit life has thrown on him without completely giving up on everything and lapsing into a coma.

Because that’s the last thing I want to do.

But it’s on the list. Final entry : voluntary catatonia.

Today was Therapy Thursday. It was an okay session. On the one hand, I was fully awake. On the other hand, I did not have a strong sense of what I wanted to talk about so I mostly just rambled.

Rambling can be very useful but my best results come when I go into the session with some sense of how I want to explore a topic or some specific target in mind, even if it’s something I can’t put directly into words.

I wonder if I should start a stream of consciousness podcast on YouTube, Something where I just record myself talking about whatever pops into my head.

It would be like this blog, only even less consumer friendly.

Then again, it would be something people could listen to instead of read without them even having to use Speechify.

And it would be unpredictable as the proverbial fuck because even I would have no idea what the frick I was going to say.

And like this blog, it would be format free, at least at first.

What can I say, I don’t like restrictions. I want to just let things flow.

Like this blog, I might have topics I start with. But knowing me, I wouldn’t be any better at sticking to the point there than here.

What can I say, I don’t do straight lines. Or anything else straight.

So basically, it would be this blog in video format. I guess instead of a word count, I would have a time count.

Ten minutes a day sounds reasonable. Time goes really fast when you are recording video, I have found.

Yeah OK. I will think it over.

Who knows, maybe I will shock the world and actually do it.

It’s not like I’ve got fuck all to lose.

More after the break.

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How smart I am

You know, maybe I SHOULD go around showing off how smart I am all the time.

Maybe I need to stop pretending a giant can blend in with the pygmies and Lilliputians if he crouches hard around and instead stretch up to my full regal height and concentrate instead on being the best mental monarch I can.

Or at least find some use for all this spare IQ I got lying around.

I know that on some level, I need to get harder. Tougher. Less sensitive, on a gut level.

I know a good liberal like me is never supposed to wish to be less sensitive, but I am not talking about how sensitive I am to people’s emotions, situations, and stories.

That kind of sensitivity is golden, as far as I am concerned. I would never in a million years sacrifice one iota of my ability to explore the wonders of other people. Their lives, their experiences, their perspectives, their psyches, their souls.

And I only get that through my fine tune emotional sensitivity and the deep and powerful humanism that flows from it.

I understand people, and that is precious beyond words.

No, the sensitivity of which I speak is more the House of Usher kind. It’s being too sensitive to the world around me to the point of finding very simple things overstimulating and leaves me lacking the toughness need to deal with the world.

There’s a reason those who garden wear gloves.

I have known I was too “soft” since I was a child but I have always shied away from getting harder for some reason.

I mean, besides the fact that it will undoubtedly hurt.

I guess I just don’t want part of me to die. That’s what it is going to take, no doubt. That oversensitive outer skin has to die and then dry into a tough outer shell and I have never had the courage to make that sacrifice.

Most people don’t face this crisis, or at least, not as such. There will come a time in their young adult years where they will face their first real test of character and they either find the strength to get up and go to work or class, or lapse into failure.

But I have been so good at avoiding life that I have never faced such a trial.

I mean, I guess there were plenty of days when I really didn’t feel like going to class at Kwantlen or VFS, but that was nothing new.

There’d been days like that for my entire school life. So those days did not feel like a true test of anything. They didn’t make me reach deep and find resources I didn’t know I had, or take more than I thought I could take.

The courses were too damned easy for that too. Le sigh.

I guess when you’re a regal giant, it’s up to you to find the challenges that are big enough to challenge you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Somewhat ironically, there’s a lot of deep social context to being a nerd.

One bit of it is the fear we have all had at one point of being outed as a nerd. Or people thinking we’re “weird”. No matter how comfortable in your geekitude you might be right now, odds are that you’ve been in situations where you were trying to pass as “normal”.

And often failing at it to a tragicomic extent.

And even when we are not trying to pass as “normal”, exactly, we often try to hide the extent of our geekiness from people we don’t know and hasten to insure that yes, we’re nerds, but we’re not THAT kind of nerd.

You know the ones. The ones more overtly geeky than us and that we therefore don’t want to be identified with to the mundane public we assume can tell the difference.

So sure, I like anime, but I’m not one of THOSE fans who get into their favorite cosplay as soon as they get home from work and who has a person-sized body pillow of their favorite character they can’t sleep without.

And sure, I like Star Trek, and I did, technically, have a full Klingon wedding, but I’m still not one of those fans who has a Gene Roddenberry shrine in their credenza and will fight anyone who says Kirk was better than Picard.

And yes, I am into My Little Pony, but I am not a “brony” and I don’t have an anatomically correct Rainbow Dash plushie nor do I have thousands of pictures of horse vaginas in my iCloud…. ^[1]

You get the idea. Wow, that was a lot of fun to write.

So even while admitting to our nerdity, we want to assure people that, to put it bluntly, we are “one of the good ones”.

That’s what it’s like to be part of a persecuted and not-necessarily-visible minority. The internalized societal judgment never goes away. Nerdphobia is still a very real thing in the world and we nerds have to develop certain instincts in order to “pass”/

That’s one of the biggest reasons conventions are so important for us. For a few days, we get to be somewhere where we are safe. Where we are all nerds and therefore we can let out geek flag fly without worry of judgment or persecution.

And if there ARE some unenlightened mundanes casting aspersions around, fuck’em, we outnumber them ten to one.

Yeah, fuck around and find out, ASSHOLES!

Now this is how it’s been for my generation. Perhaps things have gotten a lot better since then. The Millennials practically declared themselves an entire generation of nerds (mindboggling to me) , and their kids presumably have even fewer issues.

So God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, maybe us Gen X nerds are the only generation of nerds to have suffered like we do.

We would not be in the least bit surprised.

More after the break.

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Someone else like me

All right, time for some mental gymnastics.

What would I think of someone else like me?

Not completely identical. That would be too freak and gets into issues of indivisibility of identity and so on and that’s not what I am here to talk about tonight.

Just someone in the same circumstances, with the same assets and liabilities, and the same general attributes like gender, IQ, background, etc.

We’ll call him Timmy.

So Timmy is 48 (49 in May), lives off of disability because he’s quite sick both mentally and physically, is both gay and a furry, and spends his days playing video games because he doesn’t have enough sanity to pursue his own self-interest.

Or even have a clear idea what the hell that is.

Timmy had a socially isolated childhood with long friendless patches and a lot of time spent alone with his books, TV shows, and video games.

Timmy is a media based creature.

Being sexually assaulted by a stranger when he was four years old and not going to kindergarten because of his high natural IQ led to serious bullying in elementary school that left him terrified of his fellow humans, especially those his age, and severely stunted his social development.

Being mostly ignored and emotionally neglected at home didn’t help either.

As a result, Timmy is a 48 year old bear of a man who has never supported himself with a job, never been in a relationship, never discovered who he really is, and who in many ways never made it past the age of 12 or so.

He has been officially diagnosed with diabetes, depression, heart disease, and high blood pressure, as well as social anxiety.

Additionally, he has self-diagnosed himself with Avoidant Personality Disorder.

He is a very sick man, no matter how you slice it.

The question is : how do I feel about Timmy? What do I think of him?

What is feel is great sadness and enormous sympathy. I feel so bad for Timmy and the way life has treated him. I want to reach out to him so I can hug him and hold him and protect him and give him a safe place to stay and some solid ground to stand on.

I want to hold him up and be his skeleton and his crutches and whatever else he needs in order to grow tall and strong.

I want to be there for him like no-one has ever been before. He deserves all the love and warmth and good vibes that life and mental illness have denied him, and I desperately want to see him grow and heal and shine for the whole world to see.

I certainly don’t judge him for living in the shadows all these years. What choice did he have with all his problems? I am amazed he has done as well as he has.

More than anything, I love him with all my big bear heart.

I only wish I knew someone like that so I could help them.

Oh wait…. I do…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh right. I was going to talk about WHY I had to kill The Committee.

Basically, my id needed to rise up against the tyranny of the corrupt and malignant judge that was my overweaning superego and its cackling demented lackey the brutal prosecutor that is my ego in order to bring these three forces into balance.

There. That should make things perfectly clear to everyone.

And dang, now I’ve started a whole new metaphor.

I think I’m ready to admit I have a problem.

Put more clearly (but less elegantly),The Committee is the part of my mind that suppresses and brutally punishes 99.9 percent of my impulses.

Every impulse has to pass through The Committee before it can lead to action and it rejects almost everything. It rejects anything new and unfamiliar especially hard and so I end up doing the same things over and over and I lead this tiny, drab, half-dead life.

Ergo, those fuckers had to go.

Because I don’t want to be that way any more. That shit is over and done with. I have caught a glimpse of a better me and I want to be that guy so bad I can taste it.

Kinda salty, as it turns out.

I want to be the happy, energetic, enthusiastic version of me that loves life and has lots of fun and does cool new things all the time.

This cowardly shell of mine is not the real me. It’s just the version of me the illness has created by suppressing so much of my true self.

It is a rotten and false identity, and I owe it absolutely nothing but the back of my hand.

My imagery has gotten more violent and oddly more old-fashioned lately.

Maybe I am just so unused to expressing anger and aggression that my brain has to take some very odd paths in order to get it out there.

So ixnay on the backtalk, flatfoot, before I send youse to the Grey Bar Hotel.

Thing is, I don’t need no goddamned Committee. They were a product of pure neurosis, created out of layers of impacted anxiety and the false and dangerous belief that by scrutinizing everything from a million different angles and rejecting anything that didn’t seem completely risk free, I could keep myself “safe”.

And let me tell you, if there is one thing I have learned in the last year, it’s that being obsessed with “safety” is a very unsafe thing.

It puts you at severe risk of making yourself miserable by cutting off nearly all sources of joy, human warmth, and simple animal happiness.

It’s like starving to death to prevent poisoning. The solution is much worse than the problem. Sooner or later, you have to learn to accept risk.

And to see past all the ghosts in your head that scream in your ear and make you scared of everything, no matter how absurd those fears might be.

Laugh them away. They are shrill, but insubstantial.

There has to be a path out of this forest of anxiety.

And if there isn’t, I will burn one into existence.

More after the break.

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Did not think that through

Did a bit of a derp.

Downloaded an Oblivion mod called Reclaiming Sancre Tor (RST)because I finished my previous quest mod, The Heart of the Dead, and needed something new.

And RST sounded pretty impressive.

Reclaiming Sancre Tor is a questbased expansion pack for the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It adds approximately 40+ gameplay hours to the game, fleshing the Blades out into a complete joinable faction. Much more than just a quest mod, see for yourself!

Sounded pretty groovy to me.

So far no derp. But further reading revealed that this quest would not start until I had completed the entire main plot of the game.

Which, as you might imagine, is quite extensive.

The derp came when I said, “No problem!” and downloaded and installed it anyhow.

And then realized that I really did not want to go through the main plot all over again in my current incarnation (mage) because I had done the whole thing in my previous incarnation (archer) and I was quite bored of it.

Just the though of going through all that earnest bullshit all over again makes me urk.

I am such a fussy little flower.

So now I have a number of options.

1. Force myself to plow through the main questline in order to get to an admittedly very large mod I may or may not like. Erf.
2. Uninstall the damned thing and forget all about it except for a mental note to reinstall it if I ever do the main plot again. Possible, even probable.
3. Start a new character and do the main plot with them. That way, doing the main plot is a lot less boring because I would be doing it with a new character that is quite difference from the previous two. Probably a finesse based fighter – I already did Mister Brute Force And Large Weapons like three incarnations ago.
4. Make drop biscuits, brush them with melted butter, and sell them on the street as “Buttery Nipples”. But that probably wouldn’t help much.

Right now, it’s up in the air. I probably won’t do #1 because tedium. And I would be starting the main quest from almost the very beginning, and that would be a drag.

Starting a new character is not out of the question. Got my mage up to level 16, so he’s starting to get long in the tooth. Reincarnation is a real possibility.

But I am having a lot of fun as a wizard with a ton of wacky spells. I love chucking fireballs and summoning critters to fight for me.

Truth is, I’m just not tired of being a mage yet.

So odds are, I will just uninstall the thing for now, and go get something else.

Which is a shame. It sounded quite impressive.

But that starting condition…. oy!

Watch out for that first step. It’s a lulu!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, the on that hangs over me and blocks the sun and leaves me in midnight tundra conditions all the time.

The one that keeps almost all impulses from getting through and leading to (shudder) actually doing things.

Imagine that. Voluntarily exiting my standing wave of blessed and deadly self-hypnosis and opening myself up to that big bad world full of overstimulating chaos and a mind-crushing number of options for something as meaningless and worthless as not dying.

Arnie as T2 pulls up in a car.
Arnie : Come with me if you want to live
Me (not getting in) : Yeah. If.

Because why would I want all this (gestures to his pathetic life) to end?

I have so much more absolutely nothing to do with my life! Why I can’t wait to be an even bigger loser at 58 than I am at 48!

Just kidding. No way I’ll live that long.

I might not even make it to 50.

After all, How can I be sad when I have so much to live through? Years and years of silently smothering like a victim of a slowly spreading paralyzing disease.

Which is what I am, metaphorically speaking.

All those fun years ahead of me of my health just getting worse and worse while I am surrounded by the means to save myself – CPAP machine, glucometer, insulin – that I can’t make myself use because a very big part of me hates me and wants to die.

Because let me be clear. It’s not just a “lack of motivation”, whatever that means. The bad part of my mind and soul is so filled with self-loathing that it wants to see me suffer a slow lingering horrible death from preventable causes while making everyone who loves and cares about me suffer helplessly and horribly as they watch me fall apart.

It would like nothing more. It would be the ultimate act of pure fucking hate.

And as long as this self-annihilating part of me can stop me from doing all the simple and undoubtedly super effective things that would keep me alive and healthy, its victory is inevitable. I keep trying to find the part of me that wants to live and hook it up to the main system but instead all those healthy natural impulses just die, die, die when they meet up with that cold dark numbness inside me.

There’s no amount of motivation that can make a paralyzed limb move. And that’s what I am dealing with here, though the paralysis doesn’t always show.

Because it’s not a paralysis of the body, it’s a paralysis of the will. I have all this mental firepower but it’s worse than useless if the motivations just can’t get through because they are being intercepted by the enemy within.

And it makes me feel so helpless. And I can’t see a way out. The only way I will get better is if I get sick enough to end up in the hospital for a long time and therefore I am under the care and supervision of nurses and doctors and no longer in charge of myself and my care.

Because I am one shitty caretaker.

I barely do a thing.

Either that, or on some deep level I need to truly wake up. Eschew the killing comfort of the sleepwalking lifestyle and shake myself awake, consequences be damned.

My god, that sounds horrible.

Existential growth is so hard to justify to the hedonistic mind. All it sees is a lot of pain and fear and suffering for gains it can’t even say for sure will come, let alone be worth it.

That’s why it’s good that healthy people just do it by instinct.

It’s us intellectual sickos that need everything to “make sense” that fuck it up.

How can you convince a tadpole it’s better to be a frog?

More after the break.

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Kill the committee

A group of fussy, tightassed bureaucrats are seated around a boardroom table. The chairman is standing, and pressing the clicker on a PowerPoint deck. Various documents with words like “permission” and “initiate” and “urgent” appear on each slide, and the committee intones a bored “No. ” at each one even though they are on screen for barely a second.

Suddenly, the door flies open and a very large man with a very large shotgun enters almost before the door is completely open. Without pause or hesitation, he starts slaughtering the bureaucrats. The booms from his mighty stainless steel shotgun are so loud they make loose objects on the boardroom table jump. Within seconds, everyone at the table has been ruthlessly shredded, and now look like so much potted meat.

The big man surveys his work, turns to leave, then pauses thoughtfully before walking to where the remains of the chairman now lie. He picks up the clicker and presses a few buttons on it, and a brief bit of feedback indicates speakers being turned on.

“Meeting adjourned. Forever. ” says the big man into the PA. Then he nods to himself, turns around, and leaves without ever looking back.

big bad mike, 21 Feb 2022

Now don’t flip, people.

That was a purely metaphorical mass shooting. It was me killing off the part of my brain that blocks nearly all of my impulses and keeps me trapped in passivity.

And I am pretty sure it’s still legal to kill your mind.

At first I was just going to talk about this idea of “the committee” as an image I use to represent the punitive, life-denying, hateful part of me that blocks almost everything I want (and SHOULD) do. It’s a useful image I have had for a very long time.

But as I began to gear up to write it, something inside me told me this needed something more than my usual navel-grazing.

And I am quite glad I listened. That was fun to write, and quite cathartic.

I won’t claim the Committee is now gone for good. It would be awesome if hacking my mind was that easy, but it ain’t.

But I’ve made strides in the direction, at least.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What the hell, let’s keep going with this brand of therapeutic flagellation

The hardest thing to convince my deeper self of when it comes to this enormous shadow of shame I live under is that I do not deserve it.

Logically, I know that I don’t. Being weak and dependent on others is hardly a major crime. Feeling so bad about not being able to look after or support myself is not only unjust and unjustified, it’s wickedly self-fulfilling too.

After all, the worse I feel about myself, the less I can do. If I want to exit this death loop, I am going to have to forgive myself for being broken.

Even phrased like that, it sounds absurdly unfair. I’m not the one who broke me. I’m just the person who has made the best of a broken life. Barely holding myself together when my inner world is a warzone inside a hurricane and I have nothing but my tiny lean-to to protect me from the hellstorm outside.

And the only way all of me fits inside is if I stay all curled up into the smallest ball a big ol’ ox like me can be.

OK, consciously exiting that metaphor.

So I know, on some level, that all this shame is undeserved. But it’s been such a deep part of me for so long that it is hard for me to imagine it not being there any more.

Once more, I feel like I would need some kind of symbol, bridge, or talisman to ground me and make me feel calm and safe enough to leave the shame behind.

Something (or someone) I can believe in enough so that I don’t feel so alone and vulnerable and abandoned in the world. A hand to hold, perhaps, one attached to someone strong and positive and supportive who truly believes in me.

You can believe in me too. I’m pretty sure I’m real.

I have all this darkness and pain and feel so toxic inside that it’s very difficult to believe that I am something good. Something worthy.

Something that can can stand in the sunshine without shame.

Proud to be seen. Glad to have people’s attention. Free of the urge to run away and squeeze myself into a crack to hide like a fucking cockroach. Able to look people in the eye without being afraid of what people will see in me as a result.

I am a creature of darkness and night. Illusion and misdirection. Shame and furtiveness.

There’s a lot of light in me too, but only others can feel it. Then I can feel it as it reflects off them. It’s a strange way to get around the part of me that’s broken,.

And all the while, there’s a rotten apple at my core. A leaky reactor powers my ship. A lot of bad blood needs to be bled before I can rise up whole again.

And I’m bleeding as fast as I can.

More after the break.

---

Pierre Trudeau used emergency powers against the FLQ.

His son is using them against the FLQanon.

---

Shame, shame, double whatever

Still drilling down into this shame thing because it’s a big part of my depression and its attendant syndromes and that seems vaguely important.

I want to wipe it all away. Hit rinse on myself and wash all that poisonous self-loathing and internalized hate and jagged pieces of broken emotion off my soul and down the drain where they can never trouble me again.

But you can’t get rid of any part of you without dealing with the emotions in you that said thing is expressing.

Jot that down, it sounds important.

If you try, said thing will just keep coming back. At best, all you will do is force it to come back in a different form. But you will still be no further ahead.

Problem is, it’s very hard to distinguish between the emotions that are the cause of my depression and the ones that are the result of my depression.

I suppose in the end there is no difference. Like space and time and matter and energy, the two are so interchangeable that they are really two aspects of the same thing.

Which is true, but not very helpful, as Felicity would say.

She’s very wise. Knows a lot that I don’t, that’s for sure.

I keep wondering where I can find my solid ground to stand on. My one fixed point where I can place the fulcrum of my very long lever and move my world.

Everything is so variable and soft inside me. We all know why – I am overtly hostile to any kind of stability or order in my inner world because that freaked out little animal in me associates any form of fixity or rigidity with a loss of adaptability and therefore a risk to my safety because I might be “trapped” in the “wrong form” for a given situation.

So I feel compelled to brutally rip apart all stable elements inside me in order to maintain this state of maximum possibility.

Which makes me unsafe in a lot of other ways due to my lack of internal structure and the kind of intestinal fortitude it takes to make it in life.

Life requires permanent commitment to some version of yourself. You have to become someone specific and then invest in that persona. You can’t keep all your options open indefinitely. At some point, you have to choose.

Otherwise you will remain a helpless blob of nothing for the rest of your life. Because of your refusal to become someone in particular, you will remain nobody at all.

Time to make up my mind who I am, I guess.

Easier said that done.

I mean, I get enough option paralysis trying to decide what game to buy on Steam.

Imagine how the infinite possibilities of selfhood strike me.

Well, as always, the only solution to option paralysis is passion. So who do I feel like I am, deep down? Who do I feel compelled to be?

…….honestly, I am drawing a big ol blank here.

But I will keep thinking on it till something emerges.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, this probably won’t be as gross as that sounds.

No promises, though.

I’ve been working on teaching my deeper self that whole “exercise is good because it makes us feel better” lesson.

It’s skeptical but open to the idea.

And I am being patient with it. It’s a rather large change from depression’s usual energy miser madness and it takes a lot of time and persistent effort to make a course correction that game-changing.

And the pieces are slowly coming together. I’ll feel all tense and anxious like I am ready to jump out of my skin and think, “Hey, you know what would solve that? Moving. ”

Or I’ll feel really depressed and say to myself, “Try moving around some. It’s not like it can make you feel worse. ”

Or I will visualize exercise as a way of squeezing the toxins from my tense and tortured body and that makes it seem pretty damned good, to be honest.

I’m still not actually doing it much, but ya know, baby steps.

I will get there soon. I can feel my resistance to motion slowly eroding and the idea and the action getting closer together. Soon they will merge.

It’s only a matter of time.

I’m certainly sick and tired of being sick and tired. I want to feel active and engaged and connected to life. I want to want to DO STUFF, and most importantly. then DO SAID STUFF for a change.

That’s the bit I’ve had the most trouble with. I might actually have the desire to get moving. I might even fantasize about being able to just run run run like a stallion in spring and keep on running till I had burned off all my excess energy and could finally truly relax for a while because all my demons are worn out too.

Take that, you fuckers. I used up your fuel supply.

Yes, I might feel that way but I never act on it. Some deep and toxic habit makes me compulsively throttle those instincts with ruthless efficiency and zero mercy.

I think some part of my mind is permanently stuck in “hiding from a predator” mode. Heck, maybe that’s all Avoidant Personality Syndrome really is in the final analysis.

And in that mode, motion and noise are danger and the only safety is in getting as close to total stasis as you can possibly get.

And that’s no way to live. True progress would consist of somehow getting that scared little animal deep inside me to believe that the trouble has passed, the predators are all long gone, and it’s okay to relax and cuddle up in its burrow and go to sleep.

It’s not at all easy to get through to it. It’s buried pretty much all the way down, and so freaked out and panicky – adrenaline at maximum – that even if you can get to it, getting close enough to it to talk is hard and not entirely safe, and even then it won’t listen.

It can’t hear you over its own screaming.

To be honest, I have no ideas what would calm it down. Not money, or at least not just money, that’s for sure.

Could make things a lot worse, in fact. I can imagine myself being a crazy rich person wearing nothing but a ratty bathrobe crouched behind the console of a million dollar security system all alone in a huge mansion because he fired all his servants and doesn’t answer the door for his friends any more either.

Makes me wish I could take that little critter out, put him in my lap, and pet and stroke and love him till he calms down.

Maybe that’s why Fruvous is so cuddly. I dunno.

More after the break.

---

Bonjour et à Bientôt, Bento!

Decided I felt extra adventurous tonight, so I ordered my meal from a place called Dinesty ^[1]Dumpling House that I have been meaning to try for ages but could never quite work up the nerve.

If you follow the link, you will see that the menu is not at all “normal” by Western standards, but made mostly of recognizable parts, so once I got over the initial shock i was able to make my choice fairly easily.

Garlic Steak Bento Box. I love garlic, steak, and bento, so it was a no-brainer.

Heck, I even like boxes.

Not sure why I love bento so much. There’s just something about a variety of attractively presented foods, each in their own little compartment, that pleases me enormously.

I find it very appetizing as well.

So let’s go through my bento :

Main dish : garlic steak.

Delish all the way. It’s steak how I like it : in bite sized bits. well cooked enough to taste a little char, and spicy.

In this case, the spice is my beloved GARLIC, and I am flabbergasted to say that for once, something I got from a restaurant was garlicky enough for ME.

It’s perfect, in fact. Strong but not overpowering. Plus the steak bits are resting on some vegetables (green onion and another thing I can’t identify” and it’s pure perfection.

I’d buy a bucket of this if I could.

Side 1 : Tofu cubes in… some kind of puree?

I know, tofu cubes, eww. So soft and slimy and unnatural tasting. But this puree of whatever is quite nice so I can forgive that nasty texture.

I think there’s corn in the puree and some relative of the chili pepper, but the truth is, I honestly have no idea.

Tastes good though, so who cares?

Side 2 : Green vegetable mix

We have light green bits and dark green bits. The light green bits are, I think, celery, and I heart celery. But they don’t look like celery, so they might be green bamboo shoots

The dark green bits are some close relative of spinach. Both are quite tasty and contrast nicely with the spicier dishes.

Side 3 : Some kind of…. egg.

It’s half a boiled egg, that’s for sure.

But the “white” of the egg is green. It’s… a green egg.

Holy shit, someone get me some green ham, stat!

Pretty sure it’s a duck egg from the shape. Well, here goes.

Not bad… a bit too salty for me. Clearly a salted egg, which is a common street food in some parts of the world.

Even considered a dessert by people for whom a red bean paste bun is like chocolate cake. I sometimes wonder what Western desserts tastes like to said people.

My guess is “monstrous and delicious”.

Well this was an excellent little adventure in food. Thanks for letting me share it with you, my patient readers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

\

Walking on heavy ground with this one.

During yesterday’s Thursday Therapy, I ended up saying, “maybe I should just make peace with being the sort of person who will always have to rely on others”.

And that opens an industrial sized kettle of wrist-thick worms.

Let’s take the most obvious worm first : men are “supposed” to be independent.

It wounds and enrages my male pride to imagine being such a weak wishy-washy wimp that I am a burden on others for the rest of my life. I have to believe that I will some day be able to at the very least carry my own weight and pay my own way or I will go crazy.

The fact that I have been a burden on others for almost my entire life fills me with a deep and terrible shame that weighs me down like the proverbial millstone around my neck through every moment of my life.

It doesn’t matter that it “shouldn’t”. I could recite all the reasons why it’s “perfectly fine” that I can’t survive on my own like I am reading them all from a hymnal.

Forgive yourself, you’re sick. Nobody expects ill people to be independent. You just concentrate on getting better. You do the best you can. We don’t mind supporting you because you’re wonderful in your own way. Don’t worry about us – none of us are here at gunpoint. We can handle the extra burden because we’re stronger than you, and we do so willingly because we love you.

But I still hate myself for the fact that I will always be a burden on others and end up using other people as barriers to crouch behind between me and Dread Reality because I’m too weak and scared to handle damned near anything.

And the weight of the burden of shame I carry as a result is incalculable. It is the rock that crushes me, the darkness that oppresses me, the black cloak that smothers me.

Going deeper, there is also how limiting it is. Being so weak makes pursuing my own destiny and finding out who I really am and all that teenager and adult stuff.

I am trapped in this crapbox of a life by my illnesses and my failure to thrive, and I feel like I am drowning at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, with all that ocean above me and me down here where sunlight cannot reach me, barely staying alive through all the pain and suffering, wishing I could truly be alive.

And I deserve so much better. But without the power and/or strength to get what I deserve, what god damned difference does it make?

I guess, for now, I can’t really make peace with a dependent life. I’m still too restless and hopeless and frustrated. At the very least, I need to further convince myself that I “pay the bills” in my own, unique way.

Jesus, that sounds so pathetic and lame.

What I am saying is that I am deeply conflicted still.

But some day, I will make it out of this funk so I can exit my shame.

Maybe then, I can even learn to love myself.

More after the break.

---

Gnar gnar gnar

OK, let’s gnaw on this wound some more.

Where does all this guilt come from? Why does being a burden on others mean so much that is so dark to me? Why can’t I relax about the whole issue?

Why can’t I forgive myself for being broken?

I mean, logically, it shouldn’t reflect on my self-worth and self-image at all. Lots of people get sick in lots of ways without thinking it makes them a terrible person or feeling horrible because they are such a burden on others.

So wither my complex?

The first explanation I can think of is that it is a manifestation of the illness itself. Depression thrives on making you feel bad however it can, and guilt for dependence on others is an obvious vulnerability it is all too happy to exploit.

It’s at least first-level plausible, and Newtonian physics, it answers all questions.. up to a point. But then just falls apart.

Because it really just begs the question. WHY do I have that particular weak spot?

For that I think we need to once more visit my childhood.

(SFX : Crowd groan)

Yeah yeah. Get used to it, a lot of bad shit happened then.

Like I have detailed here before, as the youngest of four kids with the nearest sibling being 4.33 years away from me, nobody ever had the time or patience to teach me what I needed to know in order to contribute to the chores like they did or take care of myself.

But that didn’t stop them from making me feel bad about not being able to do things by calling me “useless” and telling me that if I really wanted to help. I should just stay out of the way and let them take care of things.

I don’t even have words to describe the sort of violence that does to a child’s self-worth.

I was taught that I was useless, that I would always BE useless, and that I should feel terrible about it while having absolutely no control over it.

Geez no wonder I have this fucking complex!

And no wonder I feel so incompetent at life. What life skills I do have I was able to teach myself, for the most part. And were necessary for my own personal survival.

So I learned to cook for myself, and do my own laundry. But I never needed to mop a floor or vacuum because the others did that and refused to teach me.

Add in the clumsiness I got from a) having no friends to practice basic motor skills with as a small child and b) having nobody know or care that I was half-blind before my glasses when I was 6, and I have always felt helplessly maladroit, with no hope of learning very basic life skills and therefore being humiliatingly incompetent at things even retards can do for the rest of my god damned life.

The shame runs deep and hard in this one, n’est-ce pas?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.