No, I mean it. Please do.

I caught myself at it again last week : really hurting myself internally out of self-directed rage. Thrusting a dagger of pure rage into the flesh of my soul with a mind clouded by such utter loathing that it’s barely even human any more.

And like last time, I’d like to think that this does not represent how I truly feel about myself . That I don’t hate myself THAT much. That yes, I sometimes get sick and tired of dealing with my own bullshit and frustrated with this truncated and compressed life of mine, but I have at least recovered enough not to hate myself any more.

And maybe that is true of my conscious mind. But there is still a lot of internalized rage going on down below, in the machine works of my mind, and that is something I feel I need to root out and examine.

Clearly, I have a lot more self forgiving to do. I want to give myself all the love and support and compassion and understanding that I never got as a child and that I still desperately need as an adult. I want to hug my sad little robot boy inner child and pour all my love and kindness and warmth into him until it melts his shell away and lets him be human once again.

And I am working on it. I am trying to get strong enough and “real” enough to be able to be the parent I never had to myself. I know I have all that love in me somewhere, so it’s just a matter of having what it takes to bring it where it is needed.

Change is not death.

Love will not destroy me.

I can be a better me without anything of value being lost.

And there are worse things to surrender to than chaos.

---

This is one of the most adorkably pretentious things I have ever seen.

The sheer un-self-conscious earnestness is delightful to me. Cynical Gen-X pricks like me comb through hundreds of hours of old media looking for shit like this.

What can I say, it’s what makes us happy.

But never in a million years would I want these five young men – especially the bass, whom I totally have the hots for – to hear my laughs.

I have vowed to never pee on the parade(s) of the generations after hours. Their capacity for earnestness is something I treasure and have vowed to protect. I want them to do things with great sincerity and true innocence.

We X’ers sure as fuck can’t.

So go for it, Millennials and Z’s. Dance like nobody’s watching. Write like nobody could possibly have had thoughts this deep before. Start wildly idealistic and impractical businesses you are sure will make you rich and bring you massive clout. Invent dumb dances and fashion trends on TikTok. Be young and bold and foolish. Be proud to be learning things the hard way.

And if you happen to hear some of us Gen X types sniggering in the corner, ignore us.

We only do it because we’re dead inside.

More after the break.

---

More key battles

So Amazon delivered the new cheap keyboard I will use to replace the really old cheap keyboard today I was using as a replacement for my newer but still old cheap keyboard today, like they said they would.

I was intrigued by it because it says it’s one of these newfangled “mechanical” keyboards and I was keen to find out what in the galloping fuck that meant.

I mean, aren’t they all mechanical? Are there chemical keyboards out there? Energy based keyboards? Metaphorical keyboards

As it turns out, in this context, “mechanical” means “real real springy”, with a pretty stiff action and a heavy duty “click”.

Seems kind of exaggerated and absurd to me. Like they went too far in the other direction. Sure, I like a solid response in my keyboards but not to the point where it feels like the damned thing is fighting me the whole time.

Maybe it will get better once it’s broken in. I dunno.

Anyhoo, so I installed the new keyboard and set the old old keyboard aside, and booted up the ol compubox and typed in my Windows password and… it did not work.

Told me the password was wrong. The same password I’ve typed hundreds of times.

Must have been a typo. So I went back and typed it in more carefully.

Nerp. So I typed it again SUPER carefully.

Nuh-uh. So I typed it in again going slow and saying each letter and number out loud in a tone like a bored kindergarten teacher.

Nope. Tried a few more times, then gave up and swapped back to the old old keyboard from my ancient Lenovo.

Miracle diablu. the exact same password now worked.

So something about my new cheap keyboard was fucking things up. At first I was very WTF but now that I have had time to calm down and think, I have theories.

Of course I have theories.

It could be that the new keyboard’s super stiff action is causing me to double type some of the letters. Or that there’s a fault in the connector causing random alphanumeric garbage to leak into my precious words.

Or it could be aliens.

I mean, I’m not saying that it’s aliens.

But it’s aliens.

All in all, a weird experience. Luckily, I don’t actually need a new keyboard per se. I just bought a new one because I figured this one from the old Lenovo is ancient and who knows how much longer it will last, so I better plan for the future.

But I do want to know WTF the problem is with the new one, so when I have a minute I will swap it back in and see what happens when I try to type with it.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So lately, the A key on my keyboard has been sticking.

Very annoying, especially when I am playing a 3D video game with traditional WSAD style controls and find myself compulsively sliding to the left.

And of course, I knew what I should do : prise the key up and clean underneath it. Odds are, it was sticking because of some gunk that had accumulated under it over the years, and a quick cleaning of the area in question would fix it up in a jiffy.

But as my entire life loudly and clearly proclaims, no matter how sensible, mature, and congruent with your long term best interests an action is, it’s still easier to not do it than to do it, and so I never got around to it.

In my defenses, up until today, it was a problem I could temporarily fix. When the key got stuck, I could unstick it by lifting one side of the key up a little with my fingernail.

It would pop back up, and I would be on my merry way until it did it again.

Well today that stopped working. So it was either I had to prise the key up and clean under it, or learn to live without the letter A

nd tht ws not relly vible lterntive.

So I pried it up and of course it was absolutely filthy under there. Why?

Because I’ve had this keyboard for almost a decade and have never ever cleaned it all that time. And because I eat at my computer.

So the underkey area was stuffed with compacted crumbs and dead skin cells. Compacted to the point where I more or less had to chisel it out.

Such is the price of skipping basic maintenance, folks. Popping the keys off your keyboard and cleaning underneath is not a difficult or unpleasant task, and can easily be done while you binge-watch your favorite hourlong drama.

Or you can use one of those cans of compressed air. Then it’s even fun! FWOOSH!

So I spent some time chiseling out my keyboard’s undercrust and managed to excavate the key in question and those around it for good measure and then… found I could not make the damned keys fit back in.

I think the problem is the diabetic nerve damage in my fingertips. Most likely.

So I panicked a little. The need to blog was surging inside me but being blocked by a keyboard now missing A, Capslock, S, and W.

Capslock and W I might live without, but the others….

So after a standard period of fretting and dithering, I decided I had no choice but to jettison my meager supply of dignity and go, hat in hand, to beg Joe and Julian to once more rescue me from the tragedy of my own incompetence.

They weren’t home. Uh oh.

But I am actually glad that’s how it worked out because it meant I had no choice but to rescue myself. Luckily, on the way back to my room, I passed my ancient Lenovo computer that was the computer I used before this one, and that was the computer Julian used before he got a Macbook.

And lo and behold, there was a perfectly good keyboard attached to it. YOINK!

So that’s the keyboard I am using right now, and my brand new one that I just ordered should arrive tomorrow.

Because I still ain’t gonna clean this damned thing.

Fuck it. One decade of service is enough!

More after the break.

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These dark corridors

In my dreams, I walked… and yet, I didn’t really walk. I floated down the cold grey corridors with my feet not quite touching the ground and no sensation of weight, and yet my brain told me I was walking, and I believed it.

Anyhow, in these dreams I “walked” down endless soft gray corridors lit by the walls’ cold inner glow. The air was perfectly still and I could feel it flowing over my naked limbs like the voluptuous caress of an indifferent ghost.

But wait…. I’m not naked. I’m in a robe of some sort. Or is it that old winter jacket I wore when I was 8? Why do I keep thinking I am nude?

I am sure that the corridors and indeed this whole experience are repeating endlessly, yet I detect no pattern and nothing ever seems familiar.

Everything I emit – sounds, heat, odors, that ineffable feeling of presence that tells you someone is watching you – bounces back at me at strange angles quite painfully, so that I find myself trying to emit as little as possible just to maintain the peace.

And always there was the heavy, directionless dread. I felt haunted and possessed but by something with no center and no location, just a feeling that saturated the very space around me and preserved me in arctic permafrost, only letting me move enough to keep me from freezing completely.

Inevitably, the silence began to speak. But refused to make sense.

At first it was merely a background murmur, easily dismissed. But then it slowly got louder in the manner of an approaching crowd of talkative people, till eventually it was all around me filling the air with a rich ragout of conversation which I could hear every syllable of but could make absolutely no sense of.

And yet, I knew they were speaking my native Polish. All the phonemes and syllables were familiar but the words were random combinations of them.

And yet, spoken with correct timing, cadence, and melody, exactly as if this was proper spoken Polish. And with these sounds came the profound feeling that I was missing out on an absolutely fascinating conversation that would illuminate and inform and delight me more than any conversation I’d ever have but I was just too stupid to understand it.

Then just as I was realizing this, they stopped. All at once, as if by secret cue. One second the air was as full of talk as a spring meadow is of birdsong, and the next the silence had returned with all the finality of the closing of a tomb door.

But I’d stopped “walking” at some point and now I stood in front of a great mirror that filled the same 90 percent of my field of view no matter which way I looked.

And I knew that if I took a look into the crystal-dark depths of the mirror, I would see something glorious and wonderful that would cleanse me of my pain like a warm shower and heal me so deeply and completely that I would never be the same again.

And it scared the hell out of me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One trend that science fiction writers have been reluctant to project into the future is the rise of sexual permissiveness.

The reason is obvious : go much past current norms and you are inevitably writing pornography. A talented writer can imply an orgiastic future without being explicit about it, but it is still going to be the sort of story one can’t exactly sell to Disney.

Meaning alas. my dream of wildly explicit animated pornography with Disney level production values and animation will have to continue to wait till I am a billionaire.

At that point, watch the fuck out.

But to me, there is much amusement and titillation to be had in imagining a future where the liberation of the libido has advanced to the point where they as are far ahead of us as we are ahead of the bad old days of the repressive 50’s.

Just imagine it. Explicit sex everywhere. TV, movies, billboards, bus benches, you name it. If it has ads on it now, it has what we would consider hardcore porn on it in this future.

Not all the time, of course. There would still be non-sexual entertainment galore. Sitcoms and rom-coms and action movies and medical dramas and all the rest.

It’s just that wherever “sex sells”, the sex would be completely explicit.

In fact, pornography as we know it might have disappeared entirely because in a world where a five way anal fuckfest is used to sell corn flakes, who needs porn?

Oh, and of course, all clothing and other public lewdness restrictions are long gone. You could show up to church stark naked and with vibrators in every orifice and boink yourself for the entire sermon and nobody would bat an eye as long as you were quiet about it and didn’t leave a stain.

You could even bring a friend or ten. Public sex would be totally legal. It would be looked upon like all other public displays of affection : perfectly legal but depending on the situation and how loud and/or obvious one is about it, possibly considered socially unacceptable, especially if people are trying to eat.

In the interests of not getting canceled, I will leave the kiddies and our four legged friends out of the picture for now.

To my filthy mind, the most interesting part of this future is what effect on society would this revolution have? It is my belief that a truly sexually free world, where everyone can get as much of whatever sex they need without shame of fear, would be a much more relaxed and reasonable place to live.

A satiated world is a safer world. Go pax orgasmus!

The obvious setup for this kind of story would be to have a hip, progressive person from our time get transported to this highly fuckable future and have their minds blown to the point of turning them into radical social conservatives by all that lovely humping.

Could be pretty funny, to be honest. And fun.

Of course, it would also be incredibly obscene. For me, it would not be enough to merely imply things. I’d want the audience to feel some of the shock too.

And hopefully turn that shock into laughter. The good, deep down belly laugh kind of laughter that releases loads of tension and is good for the soul.

What can I say, I want to heal the world with laughter. So sue me.

Obviously, my version of things would be considered pornography. And I am a million percent fine with that. I would love to be a famous pornographer.

I consider it a higher calling.

I’d love to heal the world with porn, too.

More after the break.

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A pound of betrayal

Here’s the news from Tamriel, in other words, from the game Oblivion.

So I went through the whole Thieves Guild plotline with my current stealth archer character, whom I named Heartseeker.

Not my best work, in retrospect, but what the hell. I dare not linger on what to calla character or I will end up agonizing over it for hours as I try to pick the “perfect” name that truly expresses the essence of my creation.

So I tend to go with the first name I think of that doesn’t make me wanna puke.

The Thieves’ Guild plotline was okay. A little alarmed at how easily I took to burgling once I got over my initial qualms.

Normally I would feel too guilty. But the thing about burgling is that you never actually see the sad look on your victims’ faces when they find their stuff is gone. I will be long gone and counting the money I got for fencing it by then,

So it’s remarkably easy to rationalize and compartmentalize.

Then I moved on to the Dark Brotherhood (aka the Assassins’ Guild) plotline. So now i am killing people instead of merely robbing them.

Perhaps because I had already rationalized being a thief, it didn’t take me a whole lot longer to get used to assassinating folk.

This was greatly helped along by the fact that the assassination missions are incredibly well designed. Every one of them has been unique, exciting, challenging, and just plain a whole lot of fun.

For one, I had to break into a prison and kill a prisoner without any of the guards eeing me. Another time, I had to arrange an “accident” for someone by loosening the screws holding a decorative mounted troll head while they were sitting underneath it.

I am a little ashamed at how much fun I had murdering people.

And the whole time, I was supported by the other assassins in my Sanctuary. They were all nothing but totally awesome to me (except for one grumpy khajjit) and I loved each and every one of them. They were my Brothers and Sisters. The guild mistress was like a mother to me.

Then the head of the organizing orders me to kill them all.

Um. Nope. Not gonna happen. I am not. deep down, an evil person, and I am not going to kill all my new friends just because the higher ups think ONE of them MIGHT be a traitor. I don’t care what Lucien Lachance says!

He seems twitchy and sketchy AF anyhow. I bet he’s lying about this being something the Black Hand (ruling council of the Dark Brotherhood) ordered and he is actually just trying to silence someone who knows about something HE did to betray us!

But I looked it up and there is no way around it. If I want to go any further in the Dark Brotherhood plotline, I have to kill them all.

Well fuck that.

Then again, I am going to start a new character soon. An evil necromancer. And he’s going to be more…. ethically flexible.

So I will get there eventually.

I’m learning a lot about myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, yup, it’s Therapy Thursday.

It was a good session with Doc Costin because I got to unspool a lot of the things that have been on my mind lately about what a what a strange child I was and WTF was up with that and so on.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of my best session are ones where I do most of the talking, usually in a Tarantino-like state of agitation.

With maybe some Goldblum mixed in.

I just have so much I need to express.

Costin had this idea that action preceded emotion and that if I wanted to change the emotions I had to pick some action that ran contrary to my negative emotions and do that regularly and consistently in order to change the direction of my mood.

Or something like that. I was highly agitated at the time and not listening well.

Because what I heard was basically, “The solution to being out of gas is to drive to a gas station to get more!”.

As in, he was asking me to find the motivation to do this repeated action in order to solve my lack of motivation.

Or something like that. Again, agitated.

I was probably being difficult and unfair. I get that way when I am agitated and trying to genuinely seek answers to my questions but get nothing but sad smoke and weak wind from the world that just can’t handle my hurricane force self-expression.

On the other hand. still rocking the metaphors.

But I will always remember how meek and defeated he sounded. And that will haunt me. Both because I can’t help but feel bad for doing that to him (though I know I shouldn’t^[1]) but also because it emphasizes just how alone I am in the world.

Because nobody can handle me. Not even a therapist with 50 years of experience like Doc Costin can stand exposure to my real. unregulated emotions.

Which means I can never truly open up to and connect with anyone. I always have to be holding back so much of myself just to keep from stomping the Lilliputians.

Anyhow. I am still looking for some sort of diagnosis for what the heck was wrong with me as a kid. Why I was born so god damned different.

And can I ever hope to repair my ability to connect with others?

Or will I be a sad little robot for the rest of my life? Able to get people to like me, even love me, but unable to truly get close to anyone?

Maybe I should just go with it. Follow my bizarre inner pathways and to hell with whether the world understands me. Become twisted and avant-garde and alien like Jim Carrey mixed with Yoko Ono.

Sure, I still won’t be connecting with people, but at least I will be expressing myself.

One way or another, I need to make peace with who I really am.

But I am so unlike others that there’s nothing out there to model myself on. I am a weird combination of giant, god, alien, robot, and teddy bear.

There is no way for me to be small enough for this world.

Maybe I just have to create my own. As usual.

More after the break.

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The power imbalance

I don’t want to be more powerful than everyone else.

I don’t want to be Gulliver in Lilliput, carefully placing each foot with exaggerated slowness and care so that all the little Lilliputians can get out of the way in time.

I don’t want to be a giant among pygmies any more.

And yet, I want to be who I really am. Therein lies the conflict.

Thus it feels like the only morally acceptable way I could truly stretch my limbs and be myself is that if I wandered off into the metaphorical wilderness where there are no ordinary people for me to worry about harming.

The morally unacceptable way, of course, would be to say to hell with the little people and do exactly as I please and let them worry about not getting trod underfoot.

That would be wrong both for the obvious reasons (potential harm to others, lack of taking responsibility for my actions) but for the slightly less obvious reasons of letting loose a very ugly side of myself of which I am ashamed.

A part of me that is part Juggernaut (bitch), part Mister Hyde, and part Hannibal Lecter, who lives entirely for his own amusement and gratification and who ruthlessly uses the enormous power advantage he has over others to take what he wants and do what he wants and to hell with the consequences to anyone else.

Someone who leaves a trail of human wreckage behind him about which he either doesn’t care or is actively amused by because to him, it represents just how god damned clever and amazing he is for getting away with the loot without having to pay the price for it.

This is not a real person, though. Like with Jekyll and Hyde, this is my shadow self, made of all the pieces of id I have severed and smothered over the years and who would not exist in a healthier, more well rounded and integrated person.

So I am trying to negotiate my way to a more happy and whole me. But it’s very slow going because I still can’t accept the loss of (illusory) control involved in “letting myself go” to let emotion call the shots some of the time.

To me, that sort of thing still seems like madness and anarchy and the death of the person I think of as myself, and that’s not entirely wrong.

I would become a very different person if I loosened the hell up. I would finally let go of being a caterpillar and let myself become a butterfly.

The question, then, is if I would be happier that way.

If so, then maybe it’s fine if this version of myself dies.

It wasn’t working so good anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, this is some pretty interesting shit about dopamine.

The whole thing is worth watching, but the gist is that dopamine is the chemical of motivation and reward, and modern life is great at giving us easy, fun ways to stimulate the release of dopamine by triggering the reward center of the brain.

Which has the potential to turn us into dopamine junkies. We become addicted to the easy dopamine and become dependent on it, and develop a tolerance to our own dopamine so that other, potentially better for us activities that are not as immediately rewarding – like exercise, eating healthy, doing creative work, and so on – can’t possibly compete and so we find ourselves unable to find the motivation – aka the dopamine – to do them even though we know we “should”.

The solution, accord to the video, is to fight dopamine tolerance with the occasional “dopamine detox” where for 24 hours, you skip all of your usual high reward activities, like playing video games, scrolling social media, masturbation, and so on, and do other thing like taking walks or exercising or doing any of the other “ought to” things that normally don’t appeal to you but might just be better than nothing now.

The idea is to let your dopamine receptor dry out and drop some of that nasty resistance so that life becomes more rewarding again.

This is a potential cure for the modern malaise where everything is blah, nothing seems worth doing, and you haven’t the motivation to do anything productive.

Of course, actually doing it will suuuuuuck, especially at first. You will be very bored and your dopamine receptors will be screaming their little heads off for their usual high calorie diet and you will want to cave in so badly.

But your reward at the end will be a much happier life. So, worth it. Maybe.

I am very interested in this entire line of thinking. It seems like a very clear-minded and practical approach to getting us back to our happy place.

It seems especially good for us depressives. I’ve talked before about how we the depressed all end up addicted to once source of reward or another as we desperately try to maintain a healthy dopamine level by hitting that lever as fast as we can like thoe poor little rats.

Man we humans do some fucked up things to animal.

Anyhow, the idea of taking a break from our high-reward addictions for 24 hours seems like it would work to me.

But you don’t need to start there. Start with just an hour. One hour where you are consciously choosing to take your power back by saying “no” to the incessant demand of your spoiled brat dopamine receptors.

You can increase the duration over time. When one hour becomes too easy to be fun, go for two, then three, and so on.

Right now, I have a lot of emotional calculations going on in my head. I know the healthy part of me want to try this because it senses this could really help me but of course, the sick part is whining and looking sad and clutching at my video games.

I will talk myself into it somehow.

More after the break,

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The quest for nachos

It was a long and perilous journey, but at last, we have arrived.

It started around a month ago. I was craving nachos. It was time to order some food. So thought, White Spot has nachos and as I recall they are quite good.

Look up White Spot on DoorDash. No nachos. Maybe they had them once but they keep drifting upmarket and nachos are peasant food, Don Juno.

He really gets around, Don Juno.

Then a couple weeks later, I remember my nacho craving. So this time I look up the DoorDash page for Little Mexico Cantina, one of the only Mexican places around.

It’s in Steveston.

They, alas, were closed. Nerp! So once again, I got something else.

Week after that, I thought I had it licked. Taco Del Mar! Surely a place with taco in th name has nachos.

Nope! They had a very nice rice-bowl kind of thing – kind of a Mexican donburi (Don Buri?), but no nachos.

Finally, tonight I thought, “I know… Boston Pizza! They have potato nachos at least!”

So I pull up the DoorDash page for Boston Pizza and they don’t have nachos either… or anything else besides bottled iced tea.

I shitteth thou not. The only thing on the DoorDash menu was four entries for various brands of bottled iced tea.

Clearly things be fucked up at the Dash. If I was Boston Pizza I would be mighty steamed up about it. It makes them look bad.

Then again, maybe there’s been a catastrophic financial meltdown at BP and they have decided to focus on their most profitable product line, and that’s bottled iced tea.

But probably not.

So no dice with Boston Pizza. And my lust for nachos was raging out of control. How could this crisis be resolved without social chaos or loss of life??

Oh right. Denny’s.

I knew damned well THEY had nachos because I got them there on occasion. They are typical family restaurant nachos which means they are good but not great, but at this point, I wasn’t in any position to be fussy.

So that’s what I ordered, along with some onion rings, which I had also been craving.

Now all the onion rings and half the nachos have been eaten, and I am sated. Whatever dark god that demands the occasional Mexican meal has been placated and finally the village can sleep in peace.

My Denny’ nachos came “some assembly required”, which is pretty common in delivery these days. Makes things way easier to deliver and lets people put things like nachos together to their own tastes.

NBD. Plus, I am pretty sure I got more “nacho meat” (how many wild nachos died….) this way and that’s my fave part of nachos, so it Saul Goodman.

He’s friends with Don Juno.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

WTFIWWM = What The Fuck Is Wrong With Me. Meh, too long, too ugly. You will not be seeing that sad looking thing again.

WTFWM? Letting the Is and the With be implied, as is allowed in acronyms?

Shorter, but still ugly and not exactly catchy or memorable. Let alone pronounceable.

Anyhow, time for more brooding on what a strange alien robot child I was.

And yet, at the same time, very sweet and charismatic and the rest.

It makes me wonder if showbiz is my destiny, or should be, or could have been. Because as a larger than life showbiz personality, it doesn’t matter if you have trouble forming connections with people on a personal level.

All that matters is that you can get up on that stage or in front of that camera and shine like a supernova. Radiate that star power that makes people smile and feel good,. be charming and funny and lovable. and leave the personal issues in the dressing room.

It is even possible that it’s the people with interpersonal issues like me who end up redirecting all that energy into their broader appeal and BECOME those performers who jump off the screen and into your lap, metaphorically speaking.

I have a lot of theories about artistic talent being a side effect of not being able to express yourself a “normal” way.

Hence odd folk like me who prefer audiences to people. On stage, I know who I am, what is expected of me, what I need to do, and I am confident in my ability to connect with the audience and get a happy groove going with them,

To that end, I have no end result or fixed destination in mind. I am going for a feeling and all my jokes and whatnot are just aids in getting me to that feeling.

A feeling of mutual happiness. My happiness makes them happy. I feed off that happiness and shine it back to them. They feel my glow and get even happier, which makes me happier, and if all goes right, soon we’re quite high on each other.

That was my dream during my all too brief foray into standup comedy. I just wanted to get up there and connect with people. Vibe with people. Make them laugh and feel good and maybe make their world a little bit happier in the process.

We all have to do our part to push back the darkness and make this world a shinier, brighter, warmer, and more wonderful place.

This world can be a beautiful place if we want it to be.

If we dare to dream it so.

If we are radical enough to have hope.

Maybe I should try to get back into standup. It’s not like it stop existing when Covid hit and our fave pub shut down.

I could even do it online, and avoid mobility and motivation issue..

No live audience, though. I would have to imagine one.

Still, it could work. I could create some sort of show for myself. Just me and my webcam and my winning personality.

Maybe have my own little satirical news show. Wouldn’t be too hard to pluck news clips from this here intarweb and add my own snarky comments.

Could even work in some of my skits if I reworked them as news bits.

I will think it over.

More after the break.

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The what pad?

Been checking out Wattpad.

It sure has changed a lot. Back in the day, it was a scratch pad type websitewhich people used to share large chunks of cut and paste text.

Hence, it became the transmission vector for all the “copypasta” memes that got passed around – various chucks of vital text that got passed around. Today. the term is mostly associated with a certain style of horror story – the creepypasta.

I love how internet slang builds upon itself.

But apparently, since then, it has grown into a high successful – and commercialized, ick – way for writers to share their work with a broad audience and maybe get noticed.

Seems to also include a way to monetize your work directly. Again, ick, but it’s not like I would turn it down.

All this talent has to be worth money somehow, right? RIGHT?

At the very least, I could throw some of my existing stories and whatnot up there, sans editing, and see if it gets any nibbles.

Why sans editing, you ask? Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep writing and rewriting every single word until I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s as good as it can be?

I guess so. But I can’t do that. It is simply not in the cards for me. Not only does anything I write become as gross as used Kleenex to me the moment I finish it, but even if I can get over that, editing myself makes me incredibly depressed and odds are I will lose all faith in it and throw it away instead of perfecting it.

It’s not how I want to be, but it’s still who I am.

Besides, I’ve been turning in first drafts for my entire life without suffering any consequences. And not to brag or nothing, but my first drafts are better than most people’s final cuts, so it’s not the end of the world if I am a little sloppy.

I hope to one day be able to tolerate deep editing my own stuff, but for now I will have to settle for sloppy genius over precise mediocrity.

It’s my cross to bear.

At the very least, once I toss some of my stories onto the Watt, I might be able to use that as a basis to network with other writers and maybe make progress that way.

But knowing me, nothing will actually come of it. I will drive up to the entrance of the real world, look in from the outside for a while, think about how nice it must be in there, and then drive off with an enormous sense of relief.

Because I am still fucking terrified of really being out there, in reality, exposed, where danger can come from any direction at any time and in any form and there is no way I can control anything enough in order to keep myself safe.

I need a bridge.

I need a talisman.

I need someone to hold my hand.

And right now, I have none of those things.

But one of these days, I will heal. I will prosper. I will thrive.

And maybe then, I can grow the hell up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still no answers as to what the fuck is wrong with me.

I will talk to my therapist about it on Thursday. He might have some ideas.

Because, again, the question is : if it’s not autism, what is it?

What made me such an odd little robot child? Why did I have such trouble connecting with the other kids? Why did I not give a crap about toys, or playing for that matter?

Why wasn’t I like the other kids in a way both subtle and profound?

What caused me to grow so very differently?

Was I simply too smart for my own good?

It could easily be that simple. I was (and remain) so weird because I was parsecs ahead of the other kids in term of IQ and that made me bizarrely different right from beginning.

Like I keep saying – and now I know why – I never stood a chance.

It’s a plausible, logical enough explanation which is sufficient enough to work with at least, and yet I resist it.

Because part of me doesn’t want it to be that simple. The thought of it sends a strand of half-frozen molasses sliding through the veins of my heart like an alligator slipping silently into the river on a moonless night.

My god am I good with the imagery.

I’m not sure why the idea that my native IQ’s to blame chills me so. Perhaps it because in a way it confirms that I really am an unusual being. Something that is Not Of This Earth. Someone who is alienated precisely because he is alien.

Yeah. I think that’s it. It bothers me so much because it precisely illustrates and magnifies that interstellar void that screams in itrage and hunger between me and most other human beings.

I’d rather it was something kinder. Something that didn’t make me feel like such a bug.

Something that didn’t make me feel alienated from myself.

Because I find that little robot boy to be pretty weird too. I have no more tools to use to relate to him than anyone else. I want to hug him and hold him and squeeze him so tight that all the light and love and warmth he needs can finally get through to him.

But then again, if I could do that, maybe he would melt away and disappear forever, and then I would be stuck being myself.

What a horrifying thought. So boring and limiting and dull.

Besides, no single identity could possibly encapsulate and express the brilliant shifting shaping glittering multifaceted multidimensional dazzling jewel of creation that I am.

That’s why I need to be free to shift shape with it. The only way I know of to have any sort of stability inside is to constantly run to keep up with it and thus get the sort of stability one gets from being a passenger in a speeding vehicle.

Sure, you’re going very fast. But it feels like you’re sitting still. Sort of.

It might not be much like the real thing but it’s all I know.

No wonder I’m tired all the time.

More after the break,.

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Expect this to continue

I am probably going to keep harping on about what a weird kid I was for a while because I strongly intuit that there is a lot of therapeutic value in the subject. The search for answers feels very important and I feel like I can unlock a lot of long suppressed emotion by pursuing it, and maybe help myself thaw out a lot in the process.

Ergo, your continued patience is greatly appreciated.

You guys are awesome and I love you!

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Today’s medical update

Now let’s see. Got my third Covid shot on Sunday.

Such a relief. Was feeling increasingly paranoid about it.

The pharmacy tech who gave me the shot was adorably Gaysian. Had the “gay accent” down perfect. It was a struggle not to start talking the same way.

People never take that in the code-matching spirit in which it is intended. They tend to assume you are making fun of them.

I’m just trying to speak your language!

It ended up being quite the ordeal, though, because they wanted me to hang around for fifteen minutes after the shot (to make sure I didn’t have a weird reaction to the shot) and there was nowhere to sit.

So I had to stand for fifteen minutes and that is Not Good. I am too fat, sick, and old for that. My feet swell up painfully and I get lightheaded and it is overall Quite Bad.

But I made it. And then we had to walk to the car. Which it turned out was roughly as far away from us as it was possible for us to be and still be on the premises.

Not blaming Joe and Julian for this. This was a supermarket parking lot on a Sunday afternoon in this population-dense neighborhood.

It’s not like they had a lot of spots to choose from.

In retrospect, I should have stayed at the supermarket entrance and had them bring the car to me.

But you know what they say about hindsight : it sucks.

So I ended up having to walk a ways on already swollen feet. And not only was that quite painful and stressful, it reminded me of what a fragile little butterfly I am now.

There’s got to be some way to fix that.

Anyhow, today I went to see Doctor Chao, my GP, about a certain event where my left hand and the left side of my face went totally numb.

I got better.

But I still don’t know what the fudge happened. So Doc Chao (master of kung-fu!) is referring me to the Stroke Prevention Clinic at VGH.

Sounds good to me, given my extensive family history of stroke and heart disease.

So that’s where I am, medically speaking. Inoculated and waiting for a call from the stroke prevention people. Lord knows how long that will take.

But at least I am getting some things done.

There may well be hope for me yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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