Well, we’ve officially entered the part of my sleepy phase where it starts pissing me off.

Can’t be helped. Like I’ve said many times before, I wish I could be all harmonious and philosophical and Zen about the whole thing so I could relax and enjoy this period of extra calmness and renewal.

But I am too damned cranky and ornery for that. I fight it. I resist it. I resent it.

Because I want to do things, god damn it. Not just sleep my life away. I want to be awake and having fun with my games and such.

Sleeping all the time makes me feel like my life is being stolen away. Like precious time is slipping through my fingers.

And yeah, it’s true that the odds were heavily in favour of my not doing anything particularly worthwhile or productive with that time.

So nothing truly of value is lost.

But it’s still my time, for fuck’s sake. I want to use it. I don’t want an overzealous Mister Sandman drowning me in a sea of his sand. I want to bite and kick and scream!

But I guess I have no choice but to ride this shit out. It will set me free when it sees fit and all I do by getting pissed off about it is cause myself undue stress.

Oh well. At least the anger proves I ain’t dead yet. Some part of me resists the coming of the tide and is determined to keep me awake and alive and feisty.

Now the trick is staying awake long enough to finish my meal and this half of the blogging before I have to zonk out again.

Diet Coke, do your thing!

---

So as far as I can tell, this “metaverse” thing is mostly bullshit.

Everything they say about why it will be so awesome is stuff we have been able to do since the 90’s only without needing to strap a brick to my face called a VR helmet in order to do it.

“Isn’t it exciting? You’ll be able to hang out with your friends in VR! Shop in VR! Play sports and games in VR! Be advertised to in VR! Pay bills in VR! Get sexually harassed in VR! Be cyberbullied in VR! Why, it will be just like real life, only way clumsier and stupider and less convincing and rewarding!”

I mean seriously, what the fudge is the point? As my roomie Joe pointed out, we’ve been able to do all that shit in “VR” since the days of Second Life.

The only difference is that we have true VR now so you will be immersed in this shared worldspace like never before.

And that’s far from nothing. It’s pretty amazing, to be honest. I can’t wait to try it.

But if all it has to offer at the end of the day is a way to do ordinary things but in a much clumsier way than the highly efficient ways we have already developed, the whole thing is going to crater once the novelty wears off and it will get tossed into the shitbin of technology with things like pagers and MySpace.

Maybe then the industry will contract to mostly being just about video games and gamers, as is proper.

More after the break.

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Won’t stand up

Because I am too damned dizzy.

No, not him. And him puffing his cheeks like that still freaks me out.

Why? Because I am worried they are about to pop, that’s why. I mean….that’s what Arnie looked like right before the air turned on in Total Recall.

Anyhow. Got up too fast when I got up to get my Taco Del Mar order (mmm, shredded taco beef!) and got very dizzy.

Now that’s perfectly normal. Can happen to anyone. We did not evolve to compensate for the circulation issues caused by sitting on flat surfaces.

You sit, veins in your legs get squished and blood flow is restricted. blood pools in your legs, then you stand up too fast and all that blood starts circulating again all at once and throws your poor brain off and you get that “blood rushing to your head” feeling.

Only with me, it takes a frighteningly long time to go away.

I guess that is because those narrowed parts of my carotid artery are making it harder for my body to rebalance things after such an incident.

And that’s exactly the kind of shit that will lead to my having a stroke if I don’t get my act together and start taking care of myself real soon.

And the sick, sick, SICK part is that the bad part of my mind is like “Oh great, a stroke! Surely after that, nobody will expect anything of us and we will be cared for by nice hospital people and everyone will be sweet to me all the time and I won’t feel like a failure any more because now I have a VISIBLE disability, the kind people actually respect and feel compassion for. ”

Ain’t that a barf bucket full o’ crazy.

But that’s really how that revolting part of my mind thinks. It’s that perverse flight instinct that wants out and doesn’t care how much damage it (you) takes in the process.

Makes sense when you’re running from a lion, not so much when you’re running from yourself and your personal demons.

And I know that there’s nobody in my life who actually sees me as a horrible disgusting shameful failure of a subhuman being.

That’s all on me.

But one of the darkest secrets of abnormal psychology is that knowing something is not real does not always make it go away.

Because the existence of something like my annihilation level self-loathing was never based on evidence or logic in the first place. It’s based on bad brain chemistry.

Ergo, as long as those chemicals stay bad, my self-loathing remains “real” in the most important way possible.

In that it is real to me.

Compared to that, whether anyone else can see these ghosts of mine ain’t worth shit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not in the best of moods.

In fact I seem to be in the cranky phase of my mood cycle. Not too severely – I just feel crabby overall as opposed to seething with hate.

Was feeling overheated and agitated earlier. It’s a bad combination. I’ve been there before. Usually means my pores are so clogged that not nearly enough sweat is making it to the surface so I am both overheating and my skin is freaking out and making me feel like I want to climb the walls.

Usually resolves itself. The pressure pushes the clogs out. But I take it as a pretty severe indicator that I need a shower real bad.

Or in my case, sigh, a sponge bath.

I really fucking hate those now.

I want a shower so bad I can taste it. But I always have this stupid fucking bandage on my foot that I am not supposed to get wet.

Speaking of which, the Creature of my Right Foot is pretty scary looking right now. I miss when it was a nice clean bump. Now it’s all twisted and gnarled like the bark of a very old tree during a heat wave.

As a result, it keeps wearing through the bandage, rendering the thing exposed to the air and the bandage rather useless.

And God knows that it’s not like I do a lot of walking. Just the bare minimum to get around our tiny apartment.

If I walked any less, my legs would become vestigial.

They are certainly trying.

Actually, though, there’s good news on that front. Having mostly conquered my scab picking habit, my legs are now free to heal up from all the wounds they used to have and they are not only almost entirely healed over but the some of the discolored areas are starting to fade as well.

My hope is that by the time summer comes around I will have healed enough to wear shorts outside the home.

So not EVERYthing gets worse over time. That’s nice.

Meanwhile, in world news, Putin’s war on Ukraine continues. He’s blatantly just bombing the shit out of everything out of sheer crankiness at how badly his big bad war is going so far.

What a great reason to murder countless innocent civilians.

Oh sorry, he’s doing it to “break the Ukrainians” spirit”.

How’s that working out for ya, Vlad the Lad? In the words of the late Stephen Biko :

“You can blow out a candle
But you can’t blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher”.

He’s learning this the hard way. Atrocities harden people’s resolve, Vladdie. The worse you are, the harder we hit back.

Things like this and what happened in Hong Kong prove that a free people cannot be suppressed. We fight back instinctively. The old methods of suppression and oppression do not work on us. We resist.

And we will keep on fighting back until your ass is in the cage at the Hague.

More after the break.

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More on Vladdy the Zaddy^[1]

One of the most surprising aspects of Russia’s imperialist aggression against a country eight times smaller than it is how entertaining it has become.

I mean, don’t for a moment think I am making light of Russia’s crimes or disrespected the millions of Ukrainians dead, dying, or displaced due to Putin’s monstrosities.

But you have to admit that how badly things are going for Vladdyshack is pretty goddamned funny in a downright slapstick manner.

I mean, Russia is a giant and by old school measures should have crushed puny little Ukraine in time to get back home before the borscht gets cold.

But Goliath was a giant too, and we all know how his fight with David went.

So instead of the quick mop-up job Putin and his cronies no doubt thought this would be – a mere appetizer before retaking the rest of the former USSR – it is instead an atrocious boondoggle that has been going on for three weeks so far, and in that time Kyivstone Cops haven’t captured a single major city.

Of course, we’re handing our David the very latest in stones for his sling.

But the real reason Russia’s pogram managers can’t due dick is to that non stop giggle factory that is military corruption.

Their equipment, from their MREs to their APCs, is absolute crap. Those big APC/monster truck beasts look very cool but have tires that can’t handle *sunlight* and need to be driven around every couple hours or they lose their shape.

Congrats – you’ve invented the only trucks in the world that need to be walked.

But the real sign that Putin has completely failed at fascism is that his soldiers are underfed, underpaid, homesick, tired, and underequipped, and therefore have extremely little will to fight and mostly just want to go home.

Fascism 101, Day 1 says the soldiers must be treated like gods. Fuck that up, and you are just setting up the next coup.

The ultimate sign of his fascist failure is that his soldiers are surrendering in droves. Why? Because they will be treated better by us as POWS than they are as soldiers in Putin’s tin pan army.

I mean, it’s not even close.

And of course, Putin is losing his shit ten times daily over this debacle. That cool, composed KGB chess player I always kind of respected is gone and now he’s just another hopping, shrieking, frothingly impotent man-baby throwing a massive hissy fit because things aren’t going his way.

Guess he’s more like Trump than we ever thought. Sad.

Right now, we, the tiny splinter faction known as THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD, have not joined the fight in person because nobody wants to start World War 3.

But he is going to keep pushing things until we have no choice. At which point he and whatever is left of his army will be crushed.

Because if his forces can’t beat lil ol Ukraine, how do you think they will do against THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD?

Warm up that cage in the Hague, folks. We’ll be needing it soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been another sleepy day.

No big deal. Like, whatever. It’s not like I had hot plans or anything.

And to be honest, getting caught up on sleep is probably the most productive thing I have done in a very long time.

Sad but true.

The fun twist is that I have started overheating in my sleep again. Waking up all sweaty and with low level heat stroke baking my brain.

Funny thing is, I didn’t realize that had stopped happening till it started again.

Ain’t life a strinker?

Oh well. Hope I will catch up on sleep soon. Maybe even get a glimpse of that ever so rare golden idyll : feeling fully rested.

A guy can dream.

---

Did the Therapy Thursday thing.

Did most of the talking, which is how I like it. Being listened to by someone sympathetic and understanding does wonders for me. It lets me unload whatever I need to unload in whatever order it occurs to me – kind of like this blog, but faster – while also giving me much needed validation and security.

Must be a little boring for him, though. I can tell he wants to say more sometimes.

But this is my time and I want to talk, god damn it. It’s what helps me the most. I have an enormous amount I need to express and words are the only way I can get them out.

It’s a slow an inefficient mode of self-expression but it’s all I have got.

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Occasionally, my therapist. Doctor Costin, suggests I try art therapy. Ya know, drawing my feelings. And I have always rejected the idea because I don’t know how to draw.

My stick figures look like they have cancer.

But the last time he suggested it, it sparked the realization that it didn’t matter. Drawing my feelings would not be about art quality at all. It would be about exploring my feelings in a way that bypasses most of my intellectual interference in a way that could very well tap into those primal feelings that existed before we even learned to talk.

Sounds like fun.

Also dangerous, which is also fun. What can I say, doing a deep dive into the canyons of my mind where my deepest, darkest emotions dwell and where at any second I could stumble across something so powerful and profound it breaks my mind is my idea of a good time, to be honest.

So I might give it a shot. Virtually, of course. It’s not like I have art supplies.

I could get some, I suppose. They say doing it physically really adds to the therapeutic effect by getting that “finger painting” feeling really flowing.

It’s going to be hard enough suspending judgment enough to let things flow, though. I don’t need to add to that by making it all real.

Or something like that.

So who knows, you, kind reader, might get to feast your eyes on some extremely abstract art by yours truly some time soon.

Warning ; the fact that I can’t draw representationally doesn’t mean it won’t be disturbing as all fuck-out.

I’ve got a lot of crazy to unspool.

More after the break.

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Controlling the controlling

One of the things that came up in therapy today was the illusion of control.

I’ve spoken about it in this space a few times. Basically, it is the subtle choosing of the feeling of control over actual control.

Like I said before, it’s like Maggie’s little steering wheel and horn in the opening of the Simpsons. The ones stuck to the dashboard.

They aren’t connected to anything and don’t control anything, but they keep her happy.

The nice thing about the illusion of control is that it soothes our need to feel in control of our lives and what happens to us without burdening us with the actual responsibility.

This creates an ideal state where one is free to take credit for one’s triumphs while shifting the blame for our failures to others on an ad hoc basis.

Anyhow, that’s all old news. On to new business..

What I have been thinking about today is my own personal relationship with the illusion of control. Clearly, my need for the feeling of control is great because I feel so unsafe in the world and it causes me to hyper-control my surroundings to the point of not being able to do much of anything or go much of anywhere because the real world is too random and outside of my control for me to handle.

Only within the four filthy walls of this pigsty bedroom, where change is limited to the pixels of my computer screen, can I calm down enough to feel safe.

Well, as safe as I can ever feel, I guess. Safe enough to function.

But this is obvious bullshit. I can’t possibly be in true control of anything or I would not be here, would I?

If I was in control of myself and my life, I would at least have a job and be a functioning and contributing member of society. I’d be living a normal life instead of being some odd sort of anemone stuck to the seafloor and passively feeding off the wastes of worthier folk to survive.

Specifically, I would be able to make myself do the things that could move me into such a position. But I can’t. The barriers within will not allow it. I freeze up inside instead.

No wonder it’s so goddamned cold in here.

There’s frozen intentions everywhere.

So really, I am as out of control as any other breed of lunatic. I am not in control of my actions…. or inactions, for that matter. My lifeboat is sinking and instead of getting busy patching the hole in the hull or bailing myself out, I sit in the center of it all ignoring the screams and explosions and playing solitaire while waiting to drown.

Good thing it’s taking so long. I am sure I still have plenty of time to get off the ship. No need to hurry just yet.

I’ll get off when things get bad enough, I guess.

Now back to my games.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s see if I have this right :

We nerdy intellectual types get to be that way, in part, because we learn to tune out our emotions and instincts in order to focus on the voice of our intellect and follow it.

This makes us academically smart but emotionally dense because we have built a wall to keep our emotions out so we can continue to be “smart”.

This, in turn, means that ours is a much less emotionally rewarding world than the world of the mundanes. Very little of their world gets through to us. That’s why their world often baffles us with things like organized sports team fandom and small talk.

We just don’t get it. How can they enjoy something so intellectually unrewarding?

Which brings us to the real core of this discussion : it is the intellectually stimulating things which can make it through our wall and touch us emotionally, and that is so rare and wonderful to us that we end up growing extremely attached to it.

Basically. we build a big thick wall with a big thick gate that shut out almost everything, and then worship whatever manages to make it through.

Hence the large amount of emotion present in most fandoms. Our fandoms are a lot like religions to us. The characters are our demigods and our personal version of them and their settings and their lives are our religious dogma.

So when two fans are having a blazing row over what color Harry Potter’s first wand was or whether there’s such a thing as a midichlorian, the stakes are actually much higher than they appear as these things are articles of faith to these people.

And in case you’re inclined to look down on these people for putting so much energy and emotion into something so trivial, ask yourself is who was the greatest basketball player, or who that hourlong drama character should have gone with, or whether or not a hotdog is a sandwich really any more important?

---

Been pretty sleepy so far today.

Which means the “go right back to bed after I get up to pee” method works. I have been trying it out, which means overriding my tendency to avoid my bed for a while after I get up because of that period I mentioned before when I woke up agitated all the time and had to do something to expend the excess energy before I could sleep.

Additionally, I think part of me doesn’t want to return to bed when it’s still warm from my heat and wet from my sweat.

In a perfect world, I would have a series of identical bedrooms so I could go back to a nice totally fresh bed every time I got up to pee.

Back to the experiment. Going directly back to bed seems to have helped me to sleep better and sleep deeper.

Unfortunately, that also taps into my sleep debt. And it is long overdue.

So I have a lot of sleeping to do before I catch up again.

Speaking of which, time for me to lay back down again.

More after the break.

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Burning through time

The greatship the Crippled Giant drifted slowly through space, blue fire flowing freely from the three great gouges some colossal forces had made in its bricklike form.

Even the most basic of scans would have revealed that it has been doing so for a very long time. All around the great plumes of flame lived many complex ecosystems that used the energy of the blue flames as the basis for countless metabolisms.

In one plume, a great sleepy space while turned and lolled lazily in the energy stream like it was nothing but a warm stream. Around it darted millions of much smaller variations on its own form serving it and in turn feeding off it as well.

They all were its children, given birth to and formed according to purpose and need. Some would clean the great bloated body, others would carefully adjust the great feeding gills that drank the energy stream and sifted advanced plasmas from it, still others scouted around the whale and fed the information to its mighty brain, and so on.

And when they had served their purpose, they simply fed themselves back to the might creature who spawned them, their substance to be formed anew in its service.

The second plume housed the machine people who, unbeknownst to them, were the progeny of the greatship’s monstrous AI, Knower, who had designed them and spawned them in hopes of repairing the damage to the ship, no matter how long it took.

But the damage was too great to be fixed in the handful of millennia before the Knower was driven hopelessly insane by instabilities in its core programming and cut off all contact with everything outside itself in fear of “alien influences”.

Without the Knower, the machine people soon lost all sense of purpose or drive, and were left to follow their rudimentary programming and build more of themselves and more of their great machines in which to work and live for its own sake.

Thus was born their intricate ersatz Dyson cylinder that enclosed nearly all of the second plume and turned the pillar of blue flame into the blazing sun of their new kingdom, and filled the interior walls of said cylinder with billions of machine people all striving towards something called the Great Repair – to what, none knew.

And finally, the third plume was host to the Phoenixes, creatures of whimsy and mirth made of nuclear fire, magnetic fields, and gossamer threads of time itself. Theirs was a peaceful existence of games, frolic, and sport, all accompanied by a constant chatter of conversation and the sharing of ideas.

The only flaw in their idyll was their own purposelessness. A terrible restlessness grew like shadows at sundown within their merry spirits, and every day, a few more of them were driven mad by it, and put behind the wall that had been constructed in a vain attempt to keep the madness from spreading.

The rest responded the only way they knew how : by throwing themselves into their games and discussions even more in hopes of using their energies up before they lost their minds and the shadow took over all of them.

Nobody knew what would happen then.

Nobody wanted to know.

So they danced and played and talked and invented and tried not to think about the doom they knew was coming but could not comprehend.

But what of the inside of the broken brick? Who lived there?

The humans, of course.

But that’s another tale entirely.

I will talk to you nice people again entirely.

But hopefully in a productive and healthy way.

So I had my phone appointment with Doctor Teal, the doctor from the Stroke Prevention Clinic at VGH, this morning.

Side note : I had completely forgotten it was a PHONE appointment until his assistant Candace left me a voicemail yesterday which mentioned the fact.

I was all ready to show up at the clinic today. Which would have been embarrassing.

Anyhow, the phone thing went down and the bottom line is that he found some narrowing of several important arteries in my brain, including the upper part of the carotid, and therefore I really need to get my indicators down or I will have a stroke.

I didn’t mention my extensive family history of stroke at the time. Because I was already starting to freak out.

Because strokes scare me. Moreso than other negative health events like heart attacks. Because heart attacks might kill you but you will die more or less intact.

But absolutely anything can happen if you have a strokes, from radical changes in personality to going blind or deaf to ending up in a wheelchair or even ending up retarded, my precious IQ obliterated, and I end up like the narrating character from Flowers for Algernon at the end of the story.

Only with far less practice at being retarded.

It could even lead to my ultimate nightmare, being completely paralyzed and unable to move at all, doomed to live a trapped-in life like this guy.

So ya know…. DO NOT WANT.

Oh, and I doubt this would stand up as a living will in a court of law, but just for the record, if that ever happens to me, PULL THE FUCKING PLUG.

So yeah, I am very scared right now. Freaking out, if you will. And that’s a good thing.

Because fear is the best weapon I have against this paralytic apathy that keeps me from looking after myself properly.

I do care, in theory. I don’t want to get sicker. I don’t want to die. Not officially.

But unofficially, a big part of me totally wants to die. It wants out of this life and it hates my malfunctioning guts and it wants me to die, die, die ASAP.

But I am way too practiced and effective at keeping actual suicidal thoughts at bay for it to “get” me that way so it has to play the long game of keeping me from doing the seemingly simple and easy things I should be doing to prevent my doom.

Wouldn’t that be the shitty icing on the crappy cake? Being extremely sick and knowing that I could have prevented it all so easily?

How frigging humiliating.

That’s why I am glad to be freaked out by all of this, and I hope to stay this way long enough for the fear to burn through as much of the dead tissue and dirty ice and other psychological detritus that is keeping me down.

If I am to be truly free, I must give up a little part of myself.

Hopefully not literally.

More after the break.

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The Virus and Law

Let’s talk about the real role of law in society.

First, to ground it in current events : my province, British Columbia, no longer has a mask mandate. Just like everyone else, we ditched it in the beginning of March.

And I am glad it’s gone. Shows that we are on our way to beating this thing.

However, so far, as of the 15th of March, 2022, absolutely nothing has actually changed. We’re all still wearing our masks.

Because it was never the law enforcing the mask mandate. It was the far more efficient mechanism of social pressure.

To put it crudely but directly, what kept even a fairly reluctant (read : claustrophobic) mask wearer like myself putting that damned thing on every time I went out was that I didn’t want people to glare at me.

It was the disapproval of others that was the whip that drove me forward. The shame of it all. The feeling like I was being a bad citizen and a bad person. Public censure.

That is far scarier to me than jail. And unlike the law, the punishment would come immediately after the crime, which as any animal trainer can tell you is the best way to condition someone not to do something.

Of course, that’s the stick. The carrot is the feeling of being a good person doing the right thing, unlike SOME people.

Because nobody wants to be one of THOSE people. The outgroup. The disapproved. The people we are glad not to be because society looks down on them.

Even a happy little weirdo freak like myself was absolutely mortified when I forgot to put on my mask as I headed out to the cardiologist and that caused one of her staff to mistake me for an anti-masker.

I wanted to die. My internal cringe was so intense I thought I would turn inside out.

This is our primary moral enforcement mechanism. Social pressure. Fear of the disapproval of the community. The feeling of being a bad person.

Law runs a distant second to this. In real terms, on a moment to moment basis. law acts to keep us from doing bad things when nothing else will.

Everyone has had moments when they really wanted to do something – help yourself to someone else’s property, or punch that mouthy asshole in the face, or whatever else – where only the thought of the consequences can hold us back.

Then temptation passes and you calm down and you’re yourself again, principles and self-image as a good person intact, and you are glad you didn’t do it.

For this to work, there has to be a legal system that will catch and punish the guilty. And it is a mechanism we must constantly refine and adjust.

But the real reason most people are not criminals and therefore crime is quite rare is that most of us would feel guilty and ashamed of ourselves if we violated our own moral like that, plus we don’t want to go to jail.

And what would the neighbors think?

So yes. The real thing keeping you safe from crime is the moral character of your fellow citizens, not any laws or jails.

Feel free to freak out a little about that notion. Everybody does.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First with Covid and now with Ukraine, a new and extraordinary truth has been revealed to this brave new world :

Global consensus is possible. And it can form overnight.

Think of how rapidly the entire world – EVERYBODY – was in sync about Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine being completely wrong and how rapidly we all came together to oppose him by so far peaceful – but forceful – means.

Bet he didn’t see THAT coming. Who did?

But this is the new normal, people. This is the way of the future. The world can unite against a common threat like never before, and it doesn’t take treaties, organizations, conferences, summits. or multilateral commissions.

All it takes is the internet.

That is quite clearly what has brought this about. The global village is real. The internet has a culture of its own and it’s not just dick jokes and sick memes.

It’s a primitive but functional living organism in which free individuals are the neurons in the planet’s nascent brain and the internet is the nervous system.

It started with atomization. We all know about how the internet both isolates and unites people. I don’t know any of my neighbors but I have friends all over the world. I don’t know there’s a municipal election going on, but I know about a national election going on halfway around the world. I don’t watch the same TV shows as everyone else, but I have seen the same clips.

That’s been well known since the 90’s. But it turns out that was just the beginning. When we all atomized thanks to having the internet in our pockets all the time, we immediately dissolved into this new medium and became part of a super-saturated liquid primed for crystallization.

Drop in a common threat, and bingo : global consensus and a unified will emerge from seemingly nowhere and we all respond as one.

No force was necessary. Nobody conquered anything. We didn’t need to form a single world government and it sure as hell had nothing to do with politicians.

In the end, all it took was removing the barriers between people then waiting as the waters of all nations mixed together into a single salty sea.

And we are all grains of salt in that sea.

Does my big humanist heart a lot of good, to be honest. This is exactly what dreamers like me have been talking about forever. How when the walls between us come down, we truly are one tribe, one nation, one species. How unity is the truth and it is hatred and division that are lies. How when the chips are down. we all pull together, whether it’s a natural disaster or a global pandemic.

Turns out we’re a pretty great species after all.

And we’ve only just started out on this journey. Once we have taken care of Putin, maybe we will move as one against climate change and shove THAT into the Recycling Bin of history once and for all.

We know we can do it now. We are feeling our power. We know that as a species, there is nothing we can’t do.

And the dinosaur graveyard that is politics will either catch up – or die.

More after the break.

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Quick link : a very excellent gay furry porn comic.

Some NSFW but mostly just a well written story.

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Not that kind of kinky

I just can’t see myself being part of the BDSM community. There is just no place for me there. I am extremely supportive of it. I will defend it from the ignorant and hateful to my dying breath and then I’ll haunt their asses.

But it’s just not for me.

To put it simply : I am too nice to be dominant and too stubborn and willful to be any kind of submissive.

I definitely have no desire to control or hurt people. That just seems like a lot of work and responsibility to take on just to do something I don’t wanna do anyhow.

I want sex to be warm and happy and affectionate and intimate. Two souls finding each other in the dark and sharing the fleeting moments of deep connection that cannot be achieved any other way.

BDSM is like, the exact opposite of that. It’s all mean and angry and reptile brain. It is inimical to any real kind of intimacy (except afterwards, I guess) and to me it goes in the precisely wrong direction, away from anything I want.

And yes, I know it’s all just pretend. But I don’t want to pretend that way.

Being any sort of submissive is right out for me as well. Don’t even go there. I am (mostly) proud of being one stubborn, indomitable, untamable bitch.

If someone thought for one freaking second they could dominate me, I would greatly enjoy disabusing them of that notion. I have been ferociously and freely myself for my entire life and I ain’t looking to change that.

I can’t be forced, coerced, contained, restrained, arm-twisted, enlisted, squeezed out, turned about, compromised, hypnotized, misdirected, disaffected, or trapped.

To be read by Tommy Lee Jones.

And I know I might get along better if I was more flexible, but that just isn’t me.

I might have self esteem issues but I got an awful lot of stubborn pride too, and I will throw myself on your funeral pyre before I will knuckle under in any way.

All that said, I can be quite accommodating. I’m a people pleaser by nature and I love to make people happy. It doesn’t bother me to do what I am told if it is being told by the right person, and I have no problem being the junior partner either.

But don’t push me. And know that no matter what my role is or how sweet I am being, I choose my actions and do as I will at all times.

So if I ever seem submissive, it’s because I like you and want to make you happy.

Ditto on if I seem dominant, come to think of it.

I can play any part. But I choose all my roles.

And if I don’t like how things are turning out, I will disappear like a puff of smoke.

You can have my love, my affection, my admiration, my respect, even my loyalty.

But you can’t have my subservience. Nobody can.

Not even me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Figured it was time for a VERY local newsbreak.

Not a lot going on in my life right now, to be honest.

I probably should do something about that, but meh.

Doing things in active pursuit of my own pleasure interferes with my video game playing time so clearly that’s not going to happen.

That’s how much of an addict I am. Must maximize gaming time at all costs. Petty things like making myself happier via other means, improving my life to make me hate it less, or even doing what I should be doing to stay healthy don’t stand a chance.

Maybe what I need to do is concentrate on the fact that if I am sick in the hospital or otherwise incapacitated, I might not be able to play video games any more.

Then what the hell would I do with myself all day? READ?

Makes me twitchy just thinking about it. This might actually work.

Speaking of which, started a new character recently in Oblivion. This is my fifth character so far.

It went like this :

1. High Elf Mage. Usually I start these medieval RPGs by playing a nice, simple warrior, but I decided I wanted something a bit more colorful this time.
2. Orc Warrior. Specifically a giant skull-cracking Orc who wore heavy armor and specialized in hitting things very hard until they stopped moving. After playing a mage and dealing with all the spells and such, playing that aforementioned simple warrior made for a refreshing change.
3. Wood Elf Sharpshooter/Thief//Assassin. Lots of fun poking holes in baddies with arrows. Even more fun after I installed a mod that added crossbows to the game. I love crossbows. They’re so cool. Did the entire Thieves Guild plotline, which was a lot of fun. Was doing the Assassin’s Guild (aka the Dark Brotherhood) plotline till the point came where in order to continue, I had to kill all my fellow assassins who had been super nice to me up to that point. And all because some half-crazed upper management type told me to? Um, no.
4. Human Mage. Yup, mage again. Missed magic. This time, installed a mod that added over 350 spells. Had fun with those. But eventually it all got to be a bhit much for me. Did a bunch of quest mods.
5. Human Warrior. Swords and speed. That’s my current guy. Right now I am doing the main quest in order to activate a mod that happens after it.

I found the second mage surprisingly hard to let go of. I hadn’t gotten all that attached to my previous characters but this one had a grip on me.

I think it was the quest mods that did it. I’d been through so much with him. Plus I had gotten him to level 25, which was a new high, and I had maxed out all his magic skills so there were no more spells he couldn’t cast.

And there was technically nothing forcing me to make a new character. But playing the game had started to seem like work with him, and that’s a no-go.

So I forced myself to make a new character. I still miss the previous one but it’s fading.

Video games are super emotional sometimes, y’all.

More after the break.

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More on video game addiction

Let’s start from familiar territory for patient readers : I spend all my time playing video games because that’s the closest I can get to being happy.

While I am engaged in my games, my mind is too full of that particularly rich stream of mental and physical stimulation for there to be any space left for neurosis.

Video games therefore push the bad stuff out of my (conscious) mind and suspend me in a world where I feel relaxed and comfortable and safe. There is no danger of overstimulation by a world with far too many unbound and therefore unpredictable variables I am expected to somehow be able to process all at once, in realtime, without any time to think about it.

Maybe I have an input filtration problem. I dunno.

Instead, my world is reduced to just sound and light, and even those are able to be instantly turned off (or turned down) if they get to be too much for me.

Alt-F4 and they stop instantly.

If only real life had that option.

In short, the world of video games is much. much easier for me to handle, as well as being far more rational and fair than the real world.

This result in what I have enumerated before : while I am lost in a video game, I am not anxious. I’m not scared. I’m not depressed. I’m not despairing. I don’t feel overwhelmed. I don’t feel trapped. I don’t feel like harming myself. And I don’t feel like screaming.

Instead, I feel relaxed, and peaceful, and engaged, and calm. The world doesn’t seem like such a scary and hostile place and I feel competent and capable and decent instead of feeling like a nightmare and a disgrace and a very broken robot.

I’m not supposed to be like this. But it’s okay.

(WARNING : SUPER sad song. I mean it. It will break your heart.)

I don’t want to be so broken. I want to be whole and happy and normal. I want to be able to function in the world and have a normal life. The sort of life most people take for granted as the minimum for everyone.

What’s it like to just… go outside? I’ve never been.
And I never will

At least it sure feels that way. Like I am trapped in this hollow shell of a prison cell in downtown Hell til the day I die a miserable and pathetic death.

And nobody will really mourn because I had all those chances to save myself and I did nothing instead so it’s really all my fault.

I chose to die like that.

It must have been what I really wanted all along.

And they’re not exactly wrong.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

WARNING : Like my man Shogo says. the following may forever alter how you see the people of Japan.

It did for me.

Where’s that comforter? I feel cold.

He and I. understandably, have very different definitions of “collectivist”.

Mine is the warm, sunshiny Western version, I suppose. To me, collectivism means everyone looks out for everyone. We are all crazy hopped up monkeys clinging to a rock that is hurtling through space. None of us know what we’re doing. We are all imperfect, mortal, and fragile, and our only hope for making it through this whacked out drug trip of a life is if we love and support one another as much as we possibly can.

Knowing deep in our souls that we are stronger together than we could ever be alone.

Well okay. That’s just humanism. Feels good to write it out like that, but not one hundred percent relevant to my point.

How unlike me.

My point is that to me, collectivism is about unity and wholeness and humanity, and is therefore incompatible with the coldness described by Shogo.

I guess that’s how a left leaning individualist from the West would see it, though. After all, I am far more familiar with the excesses of individualism and its form of coldheartedness. which looks a lot more like Ebenezer Scrooge than a monolithic oppressive All that you must serve.

This is depressing me. I need some humanist music, stat!

That will do.

This fresh vision of the Japanese people as coldhearted people who would let someone die on the street rather than get involved is, ironically, very individualist to me.

I imagine that our friend Shogo and I see the world through very different lenses, though. Hence our opposite (but not opposing) points of view.

It knocks some of the fairy dust out of my somewhat rose colored picture of the Japanese as a people of elegant order and civilized ways.

I think high population density plays a role. The more tightly packed we are, the harder we have to fight just to maintain our individual integrity amidst all that bio-pressure.

Past a certain point, that becomes pathological. It’s no coincidence that most civilization’s period of human sacrifice comes right after the population explosion that comes with the invention of walled cities.

Perhaps there is balancing act between seeing your neighbor as a friend and a part of your community, and seeing them as a rival and a threat to your own ambitions.

Us products of well established individualist societies inherently understand that keeping things on the friendly side of that equation requires giving each other space in every sense of that word.

So we have a whole dictionary of ways in which we do this, from living in “apartments” to knowing not to take groceries from someone else’s cart to being able to sit in a subway car full of people, facing all different directions, and somehow still not make eye contact with anyone.

More after the break.

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Not too happy

Not happy with how the above turned out. It feels muddy and vague. For whatever reason, I was having trouble concentrating when I was writing it, and it shows.

Perhaps I should have given my thoughts on Shogo’s video more time to percolate so I could develop clearer points to make.

I only watched the video yesterday, after all.

But oh well. Part of art as a process is making art you don’t love but can learn from as you ponder what went wrong.

That’s a hard thing for budding artists to take. They subconsciously expect their own work to please them as much as their favorite artist’s work does, and when it doesn’t even come vaguely close, they get discouraged.

But as everyone knows, you shouldn’t compare your beginning first draft work with the final product of the top professionals in the world.

I mean, duh.

Moving on. Today’s been rather hazy, as appears to be the new normal. Seems like along with this chronic sleepiness comes a dreamlike blurring of consciousness and hence a similar blurring of memory.

Did the wound care thing in the morning. It was uneventful.

I liked my nurse. She had a pleasant Eastern European accent and was both friendly and briskly efficient, which is a heck of a combo as far as I am concerned.

If I had to choose, I would choose a briskly efficient nurse over a friendly but kind of sloppy nurse every time.

In medicine, competence is more important than user friendliness.

Plus I managed to spit out the question I had been formulating for a couple of weeks : last November, one of the nurses said I was almost ready to stop coming, but now I have a huge freaking nightmare wound – like a bunion with a crater in it – so what the heck happened to me?

The answer is obvious in retrospect : I failed to take care of myself so it got worse.

Plus, the thing honestly needs the attention of a podiatrist., and patient readers know they leave us poor people to pay out of pocket for those, so…. yeah, no.

But this thing is getting pretty gnarly. So I might have to save up for one..

I’m sorry, I though this was Canada. For-profit private health care is best left to uncivilized and barbaric lands like the USA.

So whatever. It gets better, it gets worse, my foot rots right off my leg, who knows.

What else…. well, as usual, my life doesn’t have many events per se. Mostly it just rolls along on automatic, the days and weeks and months and years blurring together into a uniform undifferentiated haze of meaningless and mangled ticks of the clock.

All this sound and fury and power and insight and intelligence and creativity and straight up magic powers, signifying nothing.

But hey, at least I was super cute for friendly strangers.

That must count for something, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Historically, one of the nightmares that I’ve had the most frequently is some variation on being way up high on a mountain on a cliff that is barely big enough to fit me and if I move at all, I will fall.

That’s a fairly good representation of what my depression and anxiety feels like.

Like I am always just barely hanging on. Like I am always dangling by my fingertips over a thousand foot drop into the screaming void that waits to devour me. Like I am a character with a horrible abdominal injury who’d had to jam his fist into it just to keep his intestines from falling out.

Sorry for that harsh image, Probably should have warned you or something.

Now there is no point in debating whether this feeling is “real” or not. Obviously iy’s delusional. In reality, my guts are fine where they are and I am not on the edge of any kind of steep drop.

It’s just a way to characterize how I feel. And I am going to feel that way for the near future whether or not it is based on anything real, so I have got to deal with it.

Kind of explains my extreme aversion to risk.

People dangling over cliff edges are notoriously conservative.

Obviously, I don’t like feeling like this, though I am sure it serves a purpose in my depression’s dark plans for my humiliating and futile death.

Keeps me in line, dunnit?

I want to be able to climb down from this cliff edge and sew up my gut wound and be able to walk around like a normal person without all this terror.

But I still have all that damage inside me. All the good intentions and wise self-talk in the universe can’t make that go away.

I need genuine healing and that is not something I know how to give myself. I deeply intuit that somehow my bright and shiny intellectualism, with all its laser blades and complex analysis engines, interferes with the natural recovery processes that, without the rational mind’s meddling, would have healed me a long time ago.

By trying to stop the wheel from spinning, we only delay our own renewal.

I read that somewhere once. New age language aside, it seemed wise.

Fits with that Churchill quote I love so much, “If you’re going through Hell, keep going!”

Words of wisdom for those of us whose instinct, when facing peril, is to freeze up.

That’s great if the problem is you’re being stalked by a predator, not so much if the problem is that the house is on fire.

In that case, you best get your ass to movin’.

But some of us are so stuck in “freeze” mode that even something like worsening health problems doesn’t stir us into action.

Instead, we freeze even further.

Keep that up, and you might just end up freezing to death.

It’s like that old chestnut about horses running back into a burning barn because the barn is where they feel safe.

Fun fact : horses ain’t that dumb.

So to my deepest self : hey, stop doing that!

Do the other thing! The thing where being scared makes you do stuff!

The train is coming! Get the fuck off the tracks! NOW!

More after the break.

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So damned tired

This sleepiness thing is getting to be a real drag, man.

Right now, what I really want to do is take a nap. But I kind of need to eat and blog first. If I was to nap now, I might not have my “supper” until like, 11 pm.

And that’s just plain dumb.

So instead, I have put in my order for an eclectic assortment of edibles from 7-11 then immediately started doing the blog thang.

Normally, I would have gone back to playing video games while waiting for my food to arrive. But tonight, I want to be done with this whole shebang ASAP.

Holy crap, Windows Dictionary recognizes “shebang” as a word. And here I thought “the whole shebang” was an Atlantic Canada colloquialism.

Meanwhile, back at the point.

It’s the unpredictability that is the real bummer part of the sleepiness. Sleeping a lot is only mildly annoying. It’s something I could easily plan my day around.

But not knowing when I will be sandbagged by Mister Sandman is real stressful.

Maybe I should consider a policy of going right back to bed after I am woken up by the need to pee instead of taking that as a cue to go do things.

I developed that habit after a period where I always, always woke up very agitated and sometimes very anxious as well, and so going right back to sleep was impossible.

I had to stay up long enough to calm back down.

I suspect sleep apnea played a big part in that phenomenon.

But I wake up semi-normally now (apart from when I have crazy nightmares of my ogre-brother chasing me), and I could probably go right back to sleep and maybe actually improve my sleep quality to the point where I don’t get mugged by ersatz narcolepsy.

Wow, my vocabulary is downright frisky and ambitious tonight.

Because of the sleepiness, today’s been a bit of a haze. Just another action packed day in the life of a unemployable reject who fell through the cracks so fast it bent time.

It really is tragic how someone with my kind of ability and potential got sidelined by mental illness and ended up wasting his life playing video games.

I could do so much for and in this world if I could just get out of this cage of mine.

I dream of productivity. I long for purpose. I want to get things done and get paid for it.

I want a normal life, god damn it, and I am not ashamed to admit it!

A job, a man, a plan, a canal – Panama.

A job, a man, and a place of my own. Is that too much to ask?

But I have to deal with my damage before I can set myself free.

And there’s just so much of it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Seems like my sleep debt is due for payment, and it’s not exactly optional.

I’m heaving one of my sleep days and this one came with a twist : one whopper of a nightmare to kick off the festivities.

As is often the case, I only remember the end of it. It involved a horrible, ogre like monster running towards me through a maze while sort of barking at me, but not like a dog would bark.

Like a very, very crazy person would bark out of sheer incoherent rage.

I was legit the most scared I have ever been in my life. Nothing else has come close. Not even other nightmares.

Thank goodness that woke me up. Left me in a pool of sweat, dehydrated and starving, with my heart beating like I had a particularly athletic rabbit running really fast in there.

Took a while for the pounding to slow down to a normal level, too. Eek.

But the worst part is…. and this is hard for me to say, but… I am pretty sure that the ogre was my brother Dave.

And that troubles me greatly.

Because why? It feels like a very obscure kind of betrayal. That’s why it’s hard to admit.

Quite honestly, I am ashamed of it. But um, don’t try to make sense of that. This is the world of dreams and dreams don’t need to be logical.

One theory is inane but worth recording, anyhow. For quite a long time now, my brother’s online persona has been an ogre.

Not in this sense :

But in this sense :

So in a superficial sense, the two things connect, but emotionally, that is a laughably simplistic interpretation of the phenomenon.

More likely, the answer is that there were a few choice times in my childhood when I was that scared of my brother.

Not exactly sure why, but it was probably something I said.

It still feels wrong, though. I love my brother and miss him terribly. We were very close for many years. Years in which we were each other’s only friends.

But like I said, dreams don’t have to make sense.

Oddly enough, I am sort of glad I had the dream. It blasted through a bunch of latent emotions all at once.

And such is the deep perversity of my nature that it feels good simply to have experienced any amount of raw, uncut, unmuted emotion.

Makes me feel somewhat alive, at least for a little while. Cuts through all that dead ice weighing down my heart and provides some much needed ignition to my blood.

Makes me want more. I like being alive. It feels good, even when the cause feels bad.

There is more to life than a simple hedonic calculus of pleasure and pain can contain. Painful things can make you feel better. Pleasurable things can leave you worse off. You can miss things that you hated at the time, and vice versa.

It still boils down to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, but we humans can get pleasure and pain in some very counterintuitive ways.

I’ll think about that as I zonk out yet again.

More after the break.

False scarcity and the war on effort

Call it emotional austerity.

Like its governmental spending namesake, emotional austerity seems to make sense. In times of scarcity, you spend more carefully. Cut back on nonessential spending. Tighten the old belt buckle. Adopt a lean and hungry attitude.

So far so good. But there are some hidden assumptions.

For one, it assumes you know exactly what spending is nonessential. That requires knowing exactly how the machine works and are therefore competent to start tinkering with it to the point of removing bits you deem no longer needed.

That requires far more than an idea of what “seems” unnecessary.

Preferably, you have at least a casual knowledge of what the fuck you’re doing.

Once more I have digressed. Sigh.

Where I was trying to go was to address how depression forces you into this state of emotional austerity where you behave as though you have incredibly little energy and every single investment of effort, no matter how small, has to justify itself as “profitable” to an impossible degree.

Like real world austerity, it’s superficially plausible. Have less, do less. But doing less can lead directly to having even less and your ending up achieving exactly the opposite of what you were trying to do.

For example, moving less might make you gain weight, the extra weight leads to having even less available energy, you move even less, and so forth.

It’s great to save money on food but not if it causes the patient to starve.

So it goes with depression’s austerity. A lot of the things it drives you to do, like moving as little as possible, avoiding all things requiring sustained energy, and so on, end up causing your supplies of energy and inspiration to dwindle even further.

On the other hand, counterintuitively, if you do the opposite of what it says and start moving and doing more, you will find yourself with more vitality in the long run.

Turns out your body and mind have an energy budget and it is based on how much energy you have needed lately.

Need more, get more.

It sounds like topsy turvy lunacy, but it’s absolutely true.

Like I always say : depression lies. It lies all the time. Lies are its basic mode of operation because, like Fox News, it has to lie that much to maintain its tenuous contra-factual version of reality.

And like Fox News, one of its most powerful forms of propaganda is its ability to convince you that you already know what the truth is, so there is no point in checking to verify what it says.

That is what it is doing when it tells you there is no point in trying. It knows that if you DO start trying and doing and moving and getting things done, you will find that it has been lying to you for a really long time and that there never WAS a nuclear war and it’s been safe to go outside all this time.

The door is open. You can leave this dank and dusty bunker any time you like.

So the question is : do you really want to leave? Are you ready to go?

Either way, the only thing stopping you is you.

So make your choice,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.