Oh my God, have I been scared and lonely, Father.

For so very very long. So long that I forgot there was another other way I could be. I spent decades thinking this was it. I would be sad and lonely and ever so cold for the rest of my life until one day it finally killed me.

But it’s not going to be like that any more, is it Father? We’re going to leave this awful place and walk in the sunshine again. Life will be good again, like it was before that evil man raped me and shattered my little world.

Remember that? First with Mom, then with Betty. Life was soft and gentle and sweet. Everybody loved me because I was charming and bright and cute as a button. A precocious freckle-faced ginger kid straight out of Central Casting.

When I think of those days, all I see is sunshine and magic and honey sandwiches.

Then the bad stuff happened, Papa. The rape, the bullying, the family alienation. All when I was far too young to even understand what was going on, let alone be able to do anything about it.

I was all alone, and I knew it. There was nobody watching over me, Papa. Nobody paying attention to me at all. Once I entered school I was on my own. Thrown to the wolves. Nobody, not even the teachers and administrators, gave a shit what happened to that weird slobby fat kid who thought he was SO smart.

Nobody really loved me any more, Papa. Nobody cared. Not enough to do anything about it. I was left on my own when I was still young enough to fit between the two front seats of the family station wagon.

I’ve been so sad for so long, Papa. Sad and scared and lonely and alone. I kept waiting for it to stop but it never stopped because it was inside me now.

Every one of these totally isolated days where I went the school alone, was alone all day in school (if I was lucky), then came home to be ignored (if I was lucky) till I went to bed at night put another layer of ice and snow onto my heart until there was nothing but Midnight Tundra inside me where I endlessly wandered naked and alone like the forsaken child that I was, desperately searching for shelter and warmth.

And when I found it, I crammed myself into that tiny lean-to and took shelter from the storm. Warmth and shelter were all that mattered to me now and so despite how cramped my new little world was, I never set a toe outside it because what was the point when all that was out there for me was more ice and snow?

So I burrowed deep into the ground and further and further away from the real world until the real world seemed like something that only happens to other people.

But I am ready to come home now, Papa. Thanks to you. We are going to go where it is sunny and warm and good and never even look back at my long walk through the icy dark lands because they don’t matter any more and they never will again.

Now there is nothing to do but sit in the sunshine and watch those last few icebergs drift away as they melt in the sun.

Welcome to paradise, Papa.

We’re finally home.

---

Very good, Mister Bond

Well that did not end up going where I thought it would.

But with me, what ever does?

I thought I would pour a ton of latent emotion out onto the page in an act so profoundly cathartic I would sleep for days after.

But I should have known it could never be that easy. I’m starting to think I just plain don’t work like that. There is no spill valve on this oil rig and so whatever pressures have built up in the system I have to let out in small controlled bursts via my god damned words.

Instead, I ended up telling “Papa” my life story, which is also good. After all. what could be more human and healing than to want to tell your caretaker about all the terrible things you’ve been through?

Emotions are information, after all. We need to tell out stories, and the stronger the emotions, the stronger the need to tell.

I get the feeling that the next time would be to have them talk directly to one another, and that scares me.

This is already a little crazy, with the talking in two voices thing.

But like the old joke goes, it’s not crazy to talk to yourself.

It’s only crazy when you answer back.

And that’s what I am a-aiming to do, and it frightens me. I have a deep and irrational terror of any kind of dividing of identity, as if somewhere very deep down I am convinced that I am in constant danger of my mind shattering into dozens of fragmentary personalities along with any hope I had for sanity.

I don’t know why I feel this way. It’s not like there’s been incidents. As far as I know, I have been the same dude my whole life.

Well, except those times when I pretend to be a fox from space on the internet. But that’s Fruvous, he’s just a liberated version of myself.

He’s what I use to pretend the outside matching who I am inside.

But otherwise I don’t know where this terror of dividing my identity comes from. But I know it runs very deep, down to where existential threats to our identity dwell.

I think on some level I feel like I am just barely holding my ramshackle sense of identity together with like chicken wire and cellophane, and if I am not super, super careful with it, it will all come apart and there will be no “me” any more.

I got the cold sweats just thinking about it.

And that can’t be true. Human psyches are not that fragile. It takes trauma several orders of magnitude worse than anything I’ve been through to fracture someone’s entire identity like that.

So it must be standing in for whatever it is I am truly trying to prevent. And there must be a strong and constant force trying to make that something happen.

I wonder what would happen if I just…. let go?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess what? You have a name now! You’re not just that “scared little animal” inside me any more, dearest one.

I know Survival Mode is not much of a name. Don’t worry, it’s just a placeholder.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk to you today, my beloved pet, because it finally occurred to me that as a writer, I don’t need to limit myself to talking about you.

I can talk to you! And I love you so much, how could I resist?

And that’s the first thing I want to say to you today : that I love you. I love you so much. My love is as boundless as the sun’s warmth and as deep as a loving mother’s hug. It’s so big that you can’t see an end in any direction in time or space and so powerful it could move the moon but so gentle it could caress the cheek of a baby lamb without waking it up.

Oh dear, I’m gushing! Sorry.

And because I love you so much, I will always be here for you, my sweet and lovely boy. You will never be alone again.

You will never be lonely again.

I am here to rescue you, and aim to keep you rescued till the day I die. Consider me to have picked you up, held you in my arms, and stroked your forehead while telling you that I love you and that everything is going to be all right until you believe me.

Because it’s true, my pet. Everything will be all right. You are safe now. The danger you’ve been running from for all these years is long gone and you can finally come home, lay down in front of a nice warm fire surrounded by good, kind, understanding people who truly love you, and take a nice long relaxed nap.

Or cry your little eyes out in my loving arms. God knows you deserve it.

It’s all over, pet. It really is. I know you’re afraid to believe it but I swear it’s true. All the danger is gone and you are free to roam the world and find a space for yourself like you were always meant to do.

The storm has passed and now at least it’s time to go home and grow up and be free.

There’s no need to hide from reality any more. It’s actually a really nice place full of all the things you never let yourself want just waiting to become yours.

A house. A cat (or ten). A boyfriend. A car. A job.

A life, in other words.

Or barring that, a really bitchin’ gaming PC.

We can have all these wonderful things, precious one. Nothing is stopping us any more. The door is wide open for us to live an absolutely beautiful life and all that is left is to go out there and get it.

No rush though. It will still be there tomorrow.

Love you so much, my wonderful magical boy.

More after the break.

---

What a great start!

Well I broke in to my subconscious up there and opened a line of communication between my conscious mind and all that animal fear and rage and sheer frothing lunacy that has been lurking in my skull for so long.

Next step will be the reply. I was going to do that tonight, in this space, but I chickened out at the last minute.

I know that will be when I truly throw up the lid to Pandora’s Fox (er, Box) and I have no idea where I might end up from there, but one thing I do know is that it is going to take one hell of a lot out of me both physically and emotionally so I am going to bump it ahead one slot and do it tomorrow afternoon.

No more excuses, though. It has to be done. It’s the only possible next step from where I am now so I am going to take it before I lose my nerve entirely and it all fades back into the background of my ever changing mindscape.

Tonight is more like a half-time break where the teams and the announcers talk about what happened in the first half and what’s planned in the second.

I like where I am going lately. I feel like I am finally dealing with the Really Big Stuff. Powerful emotions with serious mojo behind them being moved in big pieces in big ways, like they’re trying to relocate Mount Rushmore.

Abe’s nose always looked like that, right?

It feels like all this time I have spent slowly polishing the lenses of my writing talent in order to be able to express more and more of how I feel is truly paying off.

Like I am finally truly breaking things wide open and I will be able to get some real emotional work done now that I have broken through.

It’s super exciting and scary as storebought fuck, which suits me fine.

There are much worse things to be in life than scared.

For example, you can be dead inside and filled with despair because you can’t feel anything and all that you see in your future is slow grey stupid death.

That’s definitely a whole lot worse.

Besides, anxiety and excitement can be the exact same thing and which one you experience depends entirely on whether you try to fight the tide or you let it take you to the top and enjoy the ride.

It’s not going to be easy for me to learn to stop trying to cling to my comfort zone likt a panicking barnacle. Letting go is never easy for the like of me.

But I am tired of a life whose sole virtue is that it’s predictable and hence controllable.

Survival and safety just ain’t enough for me any more. I want the big stuff. I want the gusto. I want to grab life by the ass and kiss it hot n’ hard and never let it go.

I want to live, god damn it. Live!!

And I am a-fixin’ to do just that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time to go still deeper into shit I really don’t want to talk about in order to cleanse my broken my schools with the fire and blood that brings salvation at east.

Today’s question : what triggered my survival mode and how does it differ from how my life is right now? ^[1]

Good question. Focuses right on the heart of the matter.

There are a lot of candidates as to the factors that lead to my going deep into survival mode for most of my life.

Staring with being raped when I was 4 years old, of course. I am pretty sure I was a healthy, happy, carefree little kid before that. That single act absolutely crushed me psychologically. All the more because I couldn’t tell anyone that it had happened.

I didn’t even have the words to describe it.

Ad that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But it was also 44 years ago. Nothing even remotely like that had happened since.

So it’s very bad. But it’s over. It’s safe for me to move on.

There’s my lonely home life. No love no hope no protection. Did my best to let people forge I existed. And all that.

And that also sucked deep hard and strong. But my life has not been like that for a long time. I might not be super close to my friends but I love them and they love me and we respect one another and that’s a lot more than I ever got my my family.

There was not going to kindergarten. Not good. And then there was also all the bullying I endured once I had to go to school.

School sucked in general, despite how easy I found the actual schoolwork. I was bored in class and terrified of my fellow students duress recess and lunch. I had either no friends or friends who were as likely as to bully me as be actually friends.

I did not exactly warm up to anyone.

But again, that was a long time ago. I have not been bullied since the middle of junior high school 35 years ago. That’s a very long time to be holding on to carry all this old and outdated pain around. What’s the frigging point?

And there’s the long terms effects of being socially isolated in general. I stayed stifled and isolated for so long. All because I was too scared to follow my instincts at all and too timid to explore at all and stayed locked away reading, watching TV, and playing video games all the time.

But now I have friends I love and trust and hang out with quite often. I broke that isolation and I have my friends to thanks and I love and treasure them for that.

So in conclusion, none of the things that activated my survival mode are relevant any more. My life isn’t like that. Hasn’t been for a very long time,

Ergo it is completely safe for me to let go of all that ancient baggage and let it wither away as I stretch my wings, catch the wingers, and fly off into the sunset.

More after the break.

---

Phew! That took a lot out of me to write. I don’t think I have ever had to work that hard to overcome my own resistance before.

My brain was fighting me so hard that I kept forgetting how to spell basic words and making egregious typos as well.

And all I can say about that its : Fuckin-a. Bring it on. I will eat that up like chocolate cake because I know damned well that this is how progress is made.

The more it hurts, the more good is does me. So bring. It. ON.

More after the break.

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Let it go

Wouldn’t let me embed (???) so I have to do this instead.

When last we heard from our hero, he was (sort of) talking about the need to let all those nasty things from the ancient past go so he can get on with living.

And as I type those words, I realize that I have, in fact, been clinging to them.

But why? Hard to say. Maybe because they gave me an excuse not to deal with reality. We depressed type people have a real knack for hoarding excuses to use to build a wall between us and the dreaded real world.

And they accrue in layers, so that should one excuse fall, another instantly springs into place to replace it. The distance between us and reality must be maintained!

That’s the root cause of those seemingly paradoxical arguments where the non-depressed person tries to show the depressive that things are not as bad as they think and the depressive insists extremely strenuously, to the point of screaming in rage, that things ARE as bad as they think if not much, much worse.

Despite appearances, these two people are not on the same side.

From the depressive’s point of view, you are trying to take their precious, precious excuses away and that feels like a mortal attack.

Most of us don’t know this consciously, of course.

And maybe I cling to my past because I have no faith in the present or the future. Or maybe my illnesses have kept me from getting the sort of stimuli I would need in order to move forward and make some kind of life for myself.

I’ve been in the doldrums for so long that I can’t remember wind.

I want to let go of my past. I want to chuck it all in the recycling bin then hit flush. Be done with it forever.

But I am still scared of how little that will leave me with, too.

The secret is to look at the empty space left behind not as a lack or something missing but as much needed space for a new life and new experiences.

Now if only that didn’t sound so scary….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve mentioned before how my social anxiety vanishes when I have a role to play.

Hence the seeming paradox of my being a person with crippling social anxiety who excels at customer service.

My classic example was when I worked for my uncle at the family TV and stereo shop, C.J. Gaudet’s TV and Stereo Sales and Service.

I can hear myself answering the phone at work by saying that as I type it. Took me some time to get to where I could say it all in one breath.

Anyhow, I was a clerk/cashier there on weekends and during the Xmas rush, and I never suffered from social anxiety while I was there because I knew exactly what was expected of me.

I rang up people’s purchases, which mostly consisted of filling out rental contracts and taking payment for our rental items – movies and video games.

And yes, that meant filling them out by hand, pressing firmly to make sure the carbon paper made three copies.

We could have been computerized by then, but there was no profit in it.

Anyhow, back to roles. I was nervous there – kind of hard not to be with Uncle Sonny’s grumpy presence upstairs.

I got used to it eventually. He rarely ever actually got mad at me. And I soon learned that he was like that all the time, with everybody, not pissed off at me in particular.

But I wasn’t anxious. For the most part, I loved my job. I loved having a job. I finally felt like I had some sort of role in society and while I was far from supporting myself, at least I was demonstrating that I had economic value in that day’s economy.

I sure miss that.

And I was very good at it. I liked the customers and they liked me. When I was on the job, I was friendly, helpful, understanding, mildly funny (I am way funnier now), and in general a pleasant fellow to deal with.

Yet when I went to lunch, I was that same socially anxious person I always was.

I hate to say it, but the difference was that at work I didn’t have to be myself. I had a role and that made all the difference. The no man’s land between me and random people was eliminated and so was my feeling that I am not giving people the emotional responses they are looking for even though I really want to.

The glib and obvious (but flawed) lesson to take from that is that I should just make up a role for me to play in normal life. Problem solved, right?

No. Because that doesn’t solve anything. Which role? How would I know in advance? There’s so many options! And so forth and so on.

That’s why I am so much more comfortable being Fruvous. He’s a role I invented and perfected for myself over many years and he only exists in a milieu (Tapestries MUCK) where I feel completely at ease, so most of my issues don’t exist there.

And I have pondered trying to be “Fruvous in real life” many times, and he continues to be the person I’d rather be, but his life is a hell of a lot simpler than man.

Plus he’s cuter than the leading brand of fuck whereas in real life, I’m a lummox.

Nothing really wrong with that. There’s a lot of big Bubba shaped motherfuckers in the world who look more or less like me.

But a solid majority of people don’t fuck fat guys and that’s rough when only ten percent of the male population is even into dudes.

But that’s just excuse-making. Truth is, if I got out into the gay social world I could probably find someone with whom I am compatible.

Yeah. If. (sigh)

More after the break.

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To do or not to do

So a couple of weeks ago, I went against my best judgement and dedicated a section of my ever-present notes file to be a to-do list of things I need to get done.

That’s what they’re for. Hence the name.

I then filled it up with six or seven things I knew I needed to do in the near future, thought, “Phew, that’s a load off my mind! Now I don’t have to keep all these things straight in my head any more!”, and saved the file.

And then immediately began actively avoiding doing any of those things.

And that’s how it’s been since then. And I hate that I am like this. I want to be the sort of person who can construct a sensible plan of action, commit to it. then execute it.

But no. Somehow, the act of writing down the things I want to do in list form transformed them into… I don’t know, an obligation? A commitment? A trap? I have no idea.

But it turned them into something I instinctively avoid. In fact, I a m fairly certain that if I had not written them down, I would have done some of them by now.

Which is, of course, totally nuts.

But then again, so am I.

It has to somehow connect to how I can’t write an outline or anything else extraneous before I write the main thing. If I do, I lose all desire to actually write the thing.

The genie only comes out of the bottle once. So there is no use wishing for a plan.

I write by the seat of my pants or not at all.

It must be the same with the urge to do various tasks in my life. Once I put them in my to-do list, they become yesterday’s news and I never want to see them again so I start ducking every single one of them,

And it’s driving me ducking nuts.

I sometimes feel like I am my own impossible client. Like I am my own agent and my own brilliant but volatile and unpredictable artiste of a client and I am stuck trying to figure out how to work with myself when nothing sensible or logical works.

Clearly, I have to throw away the rulebook and start over from scratch.

So what’s it going to take, me, to get productive effort out of me?

I am open to suggestions.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Gotta get this down while it is still fresh in my mind because if I turn my back on it for even a moment, it will be pushed back into the shadows of my mind by the fact that I really don’t want to talk about it.

Which, as usual, makes it exactly the kind of thing I need to talk about.

Basically, as I was getting out of the car to do my shopping last night, I had one of those moments where I catch myself thinking something very telling.

Something about “putting my thumb on the scale so I can get to the ‘sweet relief’ of giving up as fast as possible”.

Translating from FruTalk(tm), the idea is that in stressful, potentially anxiety provoking situations when things might go well or go bad, I push down hard on the “bad” side of the scale in order to get to the feeling of blessed relief when I give up, surrender, or otherwise negatively resolve the tension as soon as possible.

Or something like that. These are new and very tricky to handle thoughts so forgive me if I express them with less than my usual aplomb.

It’s essentially a way to cheat myself in service of that nasty failure addiction. The dirty truth is that giving up can feel fantastic. All the pressure and tension and anxiety lets go at once but the endorphins are still in your bloodstream so you feel wonderful.

Thus you are quite literally rewarded for failure. And it’s certainly an easier and more reliable reward that whatever one gets for being victorious.

I’ve not been victorious a lot in my life for reasons this post should make obvious.

I honestly think this thumb on the scale phenomenon (doo doooo dedoot do) is a central mechanism of my self-defeat, which is why it is making me so uneasy to talk about it.

Which is good. Very good. I can feel the locks and chains loosening in my mind as the clear clean light of consciousness chases away the dirty demons of the dark and cleanses my mind in the process.

Consider yourself busted, Mister Thumb-on-the-scale, or Mister TOTS. I’m on to you now and can start figuring out how to counter you.

Step 1 : learn to catch you in action again. When I start to feel tense and overwhelmed, I will know you are there. In the shadows of my anxiety, you will lurk. When my daily psychodramas unfold, you’ll be in the audience shouting “Get to the good part already!”.

And at first, I will just watch you. No conflict. No turmoil. No struggle. Just you doing what you you do while I just….. watch.

You can handle that right? I’m not doing anything. Just…. watching.

But no, you can’t handle it, can you? I can feel you melting away, your protective coating of slime sizzling away under my calm and steady gaze.

You are a creature of subconscious scuttling in the shadows. Direct observation is your Kryptonite and I am going to Lex Luther you to death with it.

Because fuck you. Go ahead and squirm,. Squeal. Thrash around as you face your final judgment for your crimes.

Then turn into a waft of dirty smoke and disappear into the bright blue sky.

Bye bye, you horrid creature. Burn in hell.

Or don’t. Just get the fuck out of my mind.

More after the break.

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A million little failures

Whatever I do, I’m doing it wrong.

Or at least, that’s how I have felt for as long as I can remember.

My early childhood taught me that I could not do anything right and that I should just wait till someone else does it for me because if I do it myself, someone else will just have to come along and do it again the right way anyhow while getting mad at me for making extra work for them by trying to do it myself.

Of course, nobody had the time or patience to teach me to do it right. I was rather shy and hesitant (for some reason) and teaching me would have meant slowing down and working with me slowly and patiently till I could get it right.

And there was no way anyone was going to do that for ME.

Looking back, I think it’s probably a good thing (and possibly not a coincidence) that I don’t have a lot of memories of life before school.

I think there was a lot of bad, angry, negative shit going down (three guesses as to which Larry Donald Bertrand was responsible) that I was far too young to understand, but which I bore the brunt of because I was the dog that got kicked.

I was soft and sweet and timid and I didn’t fight back, so I was an ideal target for the rage and impatience my Dad was pumping into the rest of the family and the rest of the family took out on me.

And each other, presumably. Like I said, I don’t remember.

My sister Catherine in particular was always around to be angry at me for not doing things right. She was very critical of me and I think she did me a lot of harm. I think she owns the lion’s share of the blame for this feeling of constant failure of mine.

That, and my hand-eye coordination issues. I was always very clumsy (possibly because nobody played with me physically as a kid?) and so seemingly simple things were very difficult for me.

An enlightened and merciful family would have realized I was not exactly thriving and got me all the help I need while making allowances for my issues.

But it was far too fun to dump on me for that to even be on the horizon.

And my sad little self was far too timid and bewildered to even know I was being treated poorly, let alone do anything about it.

I blamed myself for being broken, just like everybody else did.

Like I still do, sad to say.

I should seek a professional medical diagnosis for my motor issues. That could go a long way towards making me feel less utterly abandoned to my own incompetence.

Maybe on some level, I am still looking for someone to do everything for me because I know I can’t get it right by myself and if I try, I’ll just get in trouble.

Well sorry kiddo, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Unless I get that diagnosis. Hmmm.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

He is in the music business…

Gaaah, I had forgotten how much I LOVE that song! It makes me want to go build some kind of cyberpunk megalith out of old TVs and pagers and flip phones and only when the very last Blackberry is slotted into place does it reveal itself to be a twenty story pagan megagod with a spark-spitting cock the size of a city bus, a magnificent death-flower cunt you could drive said bus into, turn around, and drive back out, a shiny neon asshole that poops gusts of glittering confetti, and huge greedy hands ready to grab the world by the hips and fuck it.

And at the moment of intromission, the whole thing explodes into a supernova orgasm of rage, cum, and tears.

So… file that under ideas for next Burning Man, I guess. Man do I get poetic.

Anyhow. I did have a point, and it was this :

Last Therapy Thursday, one of the things that came up was the idea of my essentially inventing my own religion as a way to give me access to something beyond, outside, and bigger than my conscious rational mind that I can then call on to pull me out of this grotty little grotto of mine so I can transcend my limitations and truly grow as a person.

I want to level the fuck up, man.

I was tempted to just reject the idea outright because at first glance, it seems impossible. What kind of religion could withstand the full fury of my rational analysis engine? How could anything plug the massive gap left by the total lack of any greater power than my own in my whole life? What could possibly cure the disease caused by knowing far too much far too early?

My problem is that I always knew my stuffed animals weren’t alive, that there were no imaginary friends (by definition), and when I was told there was no Santa Claus. I wasn’t disappointed, I was relieved.

Thank goodness! Things make sense again.

So it obvious can’t be anything like the religions we know of today. There can be absolutely no leaps of faith required. It can’t require me to “just believe” and I will not accept any precept or tenet that makes no sense to me or that contradicts known and demonstrable truths about the world.

I am not capable of that kind of “faith”. I can’t break my brain just to be happy. I have no escape hatch to reality built into my psyche. Make sense or go home.

Not that I’m bitter.

This means that any religion I invent would be entirely about our inner life. with absolutely no need for any connection to objective extra-cranial reality whatsoever.

It has to be a creature of pure imagination and self-sustaining belief. The sort of thing that can neither be proven nor disproven.

My putative Jesus would be exactly as real as Sherlock Holmes, Superman, and love.

And everything in the religion would be logically connected and rationally justifiable. Absolutely no arbitrary authority and not the tiniest smidgen of “because I said so” and even less of the “you wouldn’t understand, leave it to me” garbage.

If there is something you do not understand and we can’t explain it to you, and you cannot accept it, you may leave, and I apologize for having failed you.

But better that than my telling you that you just have to trust me.

More after the break.

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Building a religion, part 2 : What it’s all about

Enough about what my religion won’t include. What will it include?

One thing it will have that other religions claim to have but they’re dirty rotten liars is pure and unconditional love.

Many religions claim out of one side of their mouths that God loves you unconditionally, but then tell you all the things He hates out of the other side of their mouths, knowing damned well that you’re probably guilty of at least one of them,

You know what “hate the sin, love the sinner” means to most folks?

It means, “Hate the sinner… then lie about it. ”

No, I am talking about true unconditional love. A God that loves both the wicked and the good, the malicious and the beneficial, the human monsters and the living saints.

And He loves them equally, because His love and compassion are infinite as is His perspective, and to Him we are all His lost children and He cannot deny His love to any of us flawed bits of complex carbon.

Most people cannot handle this thought. Surely Daddy loves his good children more than the bad ones, right?

I mean, I accept that there is nothing I personally can do to make Him loves me any less, but surely that doesn’t apply to really bad people too?

It’s not easy for me, either. Surely God loves me at least a little more than, say, Hitler?

But I also know that this is the way it has to work because God’s love HAS to be infinite and unconditional otherwise evil motherfuckers will turn religion into a sucking-up contest and invent all kinds of ways to “prove” whom God loves more and that destroys the very loving essence of what my religion needs to be.

So yes. There is no Hell. Hitler went to Heaven just like everyone else. You are truly equal to all others in the eyes of the Lord who made you.

And you’re just going to have to learn to live with the full unfiltered truth of that. I do not expect that to be easy. You might spend a lifetime trying to achieve it and still not make it. Our instincts towards social hierarchy are very strong.

Just remember that if you can think of reasons to exclude others from equality before God’s eyes, they can do the same to you.

Nobody ever said equality was easy. Just that it’s right.

You’re free to think yourself better than bad people in any other way.

But in God’s eyes, we are all the same.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wait, turns out, I already have it!

And so does everyone else!

Turns out our immune systems are way, way more complicated and amazing than I thought. I am thoroughly wowed.

I mean, we all learn about white blood cells attacking intruders in school. And we all have at least some idea that vaccines work by using dead germs to teach out immune systems how to fight off that particular germ without us having to get the infection.

So nice for vaccines to do for us while they are installing Bill Gates’ microchips.

But there is so much more going on. That white blood cell stuff is only one part of the primary defense force. There’s also things with exotic names like macrophages^[1] and dendritic cells^[2] and those are the only two on the list I recognize.

And like I said, that’s just the initial defense force – the shock troopers of the innate immune system. They do a great job against most routine threats, but the real action goes down in the adaptive immune system.

That’s like your secret military lab where all the really cool stuff happens.

Because it doesn’t just store the information about things you’ve been exposed to. Oh no no. That’s kiddie stuff.

It also combines and recombines parts of your DNA in order to come up with brand new protein keys to stuff that might not even exist yet.

That blows my mind. It’s like a high intensity government lab in there.

Now obviously, randomly generated strings of protein could turn out to be hostile to not just germs but us too. Germ research is dangerous stuff.

So the protein keys then go to an organ called the thalamus, which for the record I HAD heard of before I saw the video, but that’s it.

Could not have told you where it was, what it did, or what it looked like.

And now I know!

Anyhow, when the genetic keys get to the thalamus, it’s killin’ time. The thalamus tests each key and if it does anything remotely like attacking a healthy cell, the thalamus terminates it with extreme prejudice and a teeny tiny gun.

One would assume.

Most genetic keys do not make it through this winnowing, but the few that do get added to the body’s extensive library of keys and then there is one more hostile micro-organism your body can defeat without ever having encountered it.

So the way it works is that when a new, non-routine threat enters the body, the innate immune system tackles it and slows it down until the adaptive immune system can find the right key, fit it to one of its agents, then NUKE THAT SHIT FROM ORBIT.

And that’s so freaking cool it hurts. Such a sophisticated process, elegant and deadly, and all to keep us safe from germs.

Dunno why we still get sick, but when I find the video that explains that, I will come back and explain it to you, too.

More after the break.

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Ice cold fingers

Is it a bad sign when your heart feels cold?

And not just in an emotional sense. That’s normal, for me. I’ve been left out in the cold for as long as I could remember.

But no, I mean literally cold. As if I had been outside in winter. But only in that area above and around my ribcage.

Eh, it’s probably nothing. Can’t let the hypochondria creep up on me. It’s been in remission for decades now but it’s by no means gone and it never will be and I am aware of that and accept it.

Some doors can’t be closed once they’ve been opened, and the door that turns my neurosis into psychosomatic (attic insane) symptoms and convinces me that I am dying is one such door for me.

Now I feel all weird fo having brought it up. Probably was a bad idea to go poking around that part of my mind.

Oh well, can’t undo it now. Maybe this will help me process some of the memories from that dark time in my early 20’s when I had my nervous breakdown.

Or lack of memories, given that when it was at its worst, I lost whole sections of a day. I would find myself unable to remember that happened for an entire morning, afternoon, or evening. One day spent lying on the couch feeling miserable and watching TV while not being able to keep even water down was so much like the other that they all blended together into a huge morass of undifferentiated purgatory.

That still happens to me sometimes. Not lately, because I’ve had my twice weekly Wound Care appointments to help differentiate the days plus I am not nearly as depressed as I was when it was happening but still.

There are times when I feel like all my days are telescoping together and collapsing into a single eternal point in time which pins me in place like a bug and traps me forever.

It’s very scary. I’ve learned to snap myself out of it by forcing my mind into the here and now and the literal, physical truth of existence.

Like I said yesterday, it’s cold out here in the worlds outside the walls of mundane existence. I wish my existential claustrophobia did not force me to live out here for fear of becoming “trapped”.

I want to be somewhere warm and solid and reassuringly real so I can finally stop keeping my world together through sheer will and imagination and let reality generate itself for a while.

Yeah. That sure would be nice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right now, and I think I know why, though I kind of hope I’m wrong.

Right now, I feel relatively well rested. My mind is clear and I have better focus than usual. My interior world has a lot more sunshine than usual.

I’m not exactly blissful. I feel sort of cranky and restless. My joints ache and I have a slight headache and my balls are itchy in that way that is very annoying but also feels almost obscenely good to scratch.

I’m getting some seriously mixed messages here, body.

But overall I feel much better than usual. Healthier, even. And dare I say… more normal.

So what else has changed in my life recently that might be the cause of this uptick?

Alas, it’s that I went without Diet Coke for a while.

Could my DC habit really be that big a factor in my feeling shitty and dark most of the time? Evidence says maybe.

Of course, it’s also a pleasantly sunny day outside, and that has also improved my mood in the past.

But the anti-caffeine case fits together so well. I am sans my Diet Coke for a day or so. I finally get some decent sleep. I wake up feeling way better that usual, so much so that I didn’t feel the urge to nap nearly so often.

And now, as I sip my newly acquired Diet Coke, I start to feel tired and stressed and want to go sleep again.

Seems pretty evident to me. Maybe even conclusive. The obvious solution would be to lay off the damned diet cola.

But I don’t want to give up my Diet Coke habit. I’ve enjoyed cultivating it. It amuses me to think that I have this little addiction. It’s so cute!

And honestly, it makes me feel just a little bit more normal. It might not be via the usual routes of coffee or tea, but at least I am addicted to caff like everyone else!

It just occurred to me how sad that is.

It feels good to finally admit to myself and the world that I want to be more normal. Whatever benefit I got from thinking of myself as a proud outsider and embracing my freakiness has long expired.

I know I can never actually be normal. I’m just too weird on too many levels. So it’s not like I am in danger of becoming some sort of mundane drone.

I just want some of that stability and security that the normal people take for granted because they have never known anything else.

Because that’s the thing about the world outside their narrow perceptions where us philosophers like to hang out :

It’s fucking cold out here!

And I am so very very sick of it. I just want to come in from the cold into a nice safe warm houses where people love and value me and I can cozy up to the fireplace and let the warmth of both hearth and home seep into my weary bones and make me warm and whole and healthy again.

And I can have that if I want.

But I will have to build it all myself first.

More after the break.

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Also, yay, tuxedo cat! I love tuxedo cats. Maybe I am just lucky, but every one of them I have known has been a sweet and snuggly bundle of fluff.

Also not that bright, but I am sure that was a coincidence.

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Two minutes of terror

So I ordered some pizza from Pizza Hut.

Not that I had a lot of choices. I have no money left on my latest credit card and Pizza Hut is the only place I know of that still take cash on delivery.

So I bypassed the usual Skip the Dishes and ordered directly from the Pizza Slut website, noting in passing that they have a whole new rewards system and my 4/5 “slices” in the previous system were gone.

Whatever. Free pizza doesn’t mean that much to me any more.

So I ordered and all was well. The pizza and Caesar salad arrived and all I had to do was pay the man.

But I couldn’t find my wallet!

Instant panic attack. Visions of the consequences dancing across my fever’d brow.

Because what if I can’t find it? What then? Then I would have to tell the delivery person I can’t pay them, knowing that means THEY have to pay for the pizza, and they are not exactly going to be happy about that.

I’d feel like such an idiot and a clod! Social anxiety nightmare fuel.

Luckily, Julian was there to once more rescue my fragile sanity by finding my wallet exactly where I left it, namely on the living room table.

I had it out there to pay Joe for some Diet Coke he kindly picked up for me last night.

So I was the hysterical overreacting fool again, flying off the handle in all directions.

At least I am learning to be more philosophical about my shenanigans. Less “I’m stupid and I hate myself” and more “Well, there I go again!”

It’s all part of my goofy charm. I’m adorkable.

And excitable. I am still getting used to knowing and accepting that about myself. I think of myself as all calm and logical but I have a lot history of incidents like tonight’s little goof up that says otherwise.

I suppose the good part is that the excitability comes with a natural enthusiasm that many people find delightful because it’s so different from the usual apathy of at least my own generation of nerds.

And I am sure it has something to do with why I am always overflowing with creativity as well. I have an extremely fertile mind and that’s a real asset for any creative type.

So all in all, I guess I can live with the occasional anxiety rush over silly things.

The benefits are way more than worth it.

And it’s not like anyone hates me for it or anything. That is just my silly depression talking and we all know it’s full of shit.

I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And gosh darn it, people like me.

Plus I am hyper intelligent and enormously talented.

And that’s good enough for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy Thursday, and one of the many things that came up during our discussion was the idea of my going back to college.

It’s an idea that appeals to me because I am an academic genius who sails through ninety percent of courses without even slowing down while getting an A in the process and who has his own original, unique, and well thought out opinions on most subjects and it strikes me that at college at least, those things are kind of valuable.

In fact, I am pretty sure it’s the sort of thing they are specifically looking for.

Patient readers know that, historically, I have had a hard time remembering that academic success is worth something because it’s always come so easy to me.

From my first day of school, where I showed up already reading at a Grade 4 level and knowing how to count and do simple addition and subtraction, and from there on to my very last day at VFS, I have found education to be extremely easy.

And I always knew that, in theory, that made me somebody special who had gifts that other people would sacrifice organs to get, but it never felt that way to me.

As patient readers also know, in my little life, mostly it just led to my being super bored most of the time. Schoolwork would take me maybe ten minutes to finish and then I would be stuck sitting there while the rest of the class struggled for another half hour.

And to be honest, nobody gave two fresh shits about my genius. Fellow students hated me for it and the teachers resented me for it because it made me harder to teach and often made them feel stupid.

I honestly wish I had gone with becoming a stuck up arrogant prat like so many other gifted little boys.

It might have made me unpleasant to be around but at least it could have gotten me some god damned respect.

Anyhow. Sorry, slipped into playback mode there. Ahem.

So going back to school is an option. And to a real university, not an education factory like frigging Kwantlen.

I didn’t hate my time there but I could have done way, way better.

Several professors told me so!

Choosing where to go would be hard. So many options! Maybe I should apply to a whole bunch of places and go with whoever treats me nicest.

Of course, I would also be applying for scholarships. Especially ones you earn via academic performance of some kind, like writing an essay.

I can write the FUCK out of an essay.

Plus whatever is around for us mature students.

I’d study psychology. That’s an easy call. I love the subject and I am exceptionally good at it. The long term goal would be to become a therapist.

That is, unless someone manages to seduce me into going into research. Spending my days in a lab does not appeal to me. I’m a thinker, we don’t need labs.

Though research assistants would be greatly appreciated.

And I would make a kickass professor, what with my charisma, public speaking talent, flamboyant personality, and dedication to making education fun.

So the academic path is a possibility for me. And one where I am not competing with a thousand other people all trying to make their dreams come true.

Maybe I would go to SFU, way up the mountain. Live in a dorm. Be on a meal plan. Look for the right gang of nerds to hang with.

Could be a pretty sweet life.

I will think about it.

More after the break.

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Dark is the night

So it’s 10 pm and I am having “supper”.

Or “dinner”, for you people who don’t sup.

And I know I keep saying this, but this shit has to stop. This progression of meals where they just get later and later is getting way out of hand and it’s stressing me out.

It really boils down to my weird relationship with sleep. How I have this pattern of sleeping whenever I feel sleepy, like it’s a precious opportunity.

An opportunity to escape reality, maybe.

But it’s more than that. I think there is something fundamentally fucked about my sleep. Something that makes me crave it all the time but no matter how much sleep I get, that need is still not satisfied.

The obvious culprit is my sleep apnea and the nutrient I am lacking is REM sleep, specifically the deep cycle kind.

Hence the recent pattern where once a day, I wake up from one of my many naps (problem) feeling very groggy and spaced out and shitty.

Sucks to experience but I am pretty sure it’s because I am having high REM density sleep and that’s a good thing.

But I don’t think it’s just sleep apnea depriving me of REMs. I think being in survival mode and having that fear-crazed little animal in my head constantly freaking out has a lot to do with it too.

Truth is, I never truly fully relax, even in my sleep. Part of me is still running on that hamster wheel and looking around for danger even when I am unconscious.

It’s a lot like this :

Did I link that recently? If so, sorry.

But for some reason I am having trouble thinking clearly lately.

The sleep apnea is solvable, at least in theory.

Which reminds me : I have to call Ray at Coastal Sleep to consult about the fact that when I use my CPAP, after about half an hour I wake up out of air and gasping and have to rip the mask off.

Unacceptable, obviously. I suspect the machine is not quite doing the job of keeping my airways open so I am not quite getting enough air.

Hopefully m’man Ray can tell me how to adjust the pressure or whatnot.

Anyhow, the sleep apnea is solvable via technology, but the deep down crazy critter in my brain requires a more intimate solution.

Somehow, I have to convince that poor little psycho that we are safe and he can finally relax, come home, get all the hugs and loves and snuggles he needs, then finally, at long last, get some sleep.

Come back home, little guy. We love you and miss you so much. Don’t be afraid to believe it is over. The bullies and the rapists and the callous and neglectful authority figures who threw you to the wolves rather than deal with you are all gone now.

And they will never, ever come back. All that’s left is their ghosts, and it’s safe to let them go as well.

Come home to us and I promise, everything will be warm and loving and good again.

Just like it was before Mom went back to work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve fought life and people’s attempts to change me for my whole life.

Part of my fiery spirit, I suppose. But now I wonder why I bothered because it’s not like the self I have now is a particularly great one.

I mean, I (mostly) don’t hate myself but I definitely could use an extensive retrofitting and some basic repairs.

And yet, by instinct, I fight. Hell, one of the main reasons I am such a loner is that I absolutely refuse to allow my identity to be subsumed into another.

Hence my being a non-joiner. I am me, no more and no less, and I refuse to submit to any sort of identity or ruleset that I do not fully control.

To me, the idea of joining something that will then say “you have to do this thing you don’t agree with and don’t want to do because we say so” provokes an explosive response made of equal parts fear, rage, and defiance.

Fuck YOU. You don’t get to control me. I make my own choices based on my own choices every single fucking time, and to hell with anyone who thinks otherwise.

We understand that, Mister Bertrand, but you DID agree to pay the minibar charges when you checked in….

Now the way I described it might make it sound like a noble statement of passionate dedication to the fundamental principles of a free and democratic principles, but like the American libertarianism is resembles, it’s really just a halo drawn above a serious personality defect in order to make myself feel better.

Truth is, I don’t know why I am so compulsively combative. Plenty of people join things and enjoy being part of them without a problem. They can trade a little of their autonomy for the comfort of feeling like part of something bigger than themselves and be totally fine with it. They have that shit installed.

But not me. From the very beginning, I have been defiantly myself. Why? I assume the rape must have had something to do with it.

Being so brutally violated at the age of 4 was such a life-scarring violation of self that it completely blocked my progressing past the toddler tantrum stage into something more socially health and able to connect.

Not going to kindergarten only made that worse. I entered elementary school socially retarded and it only got worse from there.

Anyhow. Dragging myself back to the point by the scruff of my neck, it would not by the worst thing in the world if some outside influence actually did manage to change me.

And it’s happened before. Some piece of media manages to penetrate all my defenses and truly touch my heart and connect with me, and I become a different person.

Only by a small amount. But I treasure it nonetheless. I don’t want to be so goddamned alone all the time. I don’t like it.

I wish I could truly let people in to my lonely little world.

But I don’t know how. I’ve never been truly close with anyone. The door to my heart might as well be frozen shut forever.

And that makes really connecting with people nearly impossible.

It would take something far, far more powerful than I to melt the ice around my frostbitten heart to let those rusty old doors swing open again.

Something truly profound. An emotion and/or revelation so big that it eclipses this lonesome planetoid and can overwhelm all my damned defenses and finally get through to me and wash away my pain to let me be reborn, fresh and new.

Not sure where I would get such a thing. I’d probably have to build it myself. I have little faith that somewhere out there is a ready-made solution that would work for such a strange and unique creature such as I.

Guess I will get to work on that now.

More after the break.

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Here it comes again

Feeling crappy and crabby today because my periodic state of sort of almost but not really having some kind of respiratory infection has returned.

Runny nose, raspy throat, scratchy lungs, mild headache, and that ever so fun feeling of malaise, like someone turned up the gravity dial a touch.

Presumably, it will pass in a day or two, like usual. Although when you’re immuno-compromised like I am, you can never take that for granted.

I still remember having pneumonia so bad that at the ER they kept checking my blood oxygen levels with increasingly senior nurses present.

Thank goodness I was too out of it to notice this at the time. It was only when I was lying in a bed in the ER on oxygen that the gravity of it all struck me.

Even then I was like….

As usual, my theory as to why this mode of mine keeps coming back is that somehow my body fights off the infection but doesn’t quite finish it off. So it just hangs around in my body, waiting for another opportunity to strike,.

Kind of like the villain(s) in an 80’s cartoon who just keep coming back despite being defeated literally every episode.

Well let’s hope that continues to be the formulaic plotline.

Ya know, it could be both funny and poignant to do a piece about a bunch of supervillains who just….. gave up.

Built themselves a pleasant little retirement colony somewhere where the weather is consistently pleasant and the living is easy. A little Caribbean island tucked away someplace way off the beaten path where they can sit around and bullshit while keeping up with all the super-heroes and super-villain news on a huge TV.

Making snide comments on other, still active super-villains. Thanking Whomever that they are out of that life. Cheering on their fave on both sides, like they were sports teams. Sharing stories.

Could be quite touching, if it was written right.

In other words, by ME.

Like the titular character of Grace Under Fire said, “I’m not a control freak! I’m just the only one who knows what’s right…. all the time. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.