One thing all these Reddit videos I watch/listen to has taught me is that I am not a forgiving person at all.

I realized this only recently, when I realized that in a lot of these threads with social problems like relationship or family issues, I lean heavily towards the “tell them to go fuck themselves with a red hot rolling pin” end of the answer spectrum.

Partly because I am inherently extremely protective of people and so a lot of these tales of people’s atrocious behaviour really piss me off.

I’m also a stickler for manners. The real kind, not that Emily Post bullshit. The kind that are about being considerate of others and a good social citizen.

I bring this aspect of my personality up because it is so in variance with the sort of genial sensitive and sweet image I project.

It’s like I seem like a green, peaceful mountain…. unless you’ve seen me erupt.

Astrologically speaking, it’s a problem people with strong Sagittarius influences have. On the one hand, Sags want to be Mister No Problem, cool and slick and wise and I am here to solve all your problems, babe.

On the other hand, they have a hair-trigger temper that can go from “just sitting here enjoying the ceremony” to “slapping Chris Rock” in a heartbeat.

Call it the Uncle Walt (As in Disney) effect.

Luckily, Sagittarius is only my Moon sign and my Sun sign is good old implacable Taurus which helps stabilize me. So I have not had a lot of incidents of rage like that in my life so far.

Then again, with this isolated lifestyle, I’m not around a lot of things that might piss me off either. That’s why I listen to other people’s problems so much.

Getting mad over their shit is cathartic for me.

Wait, what was I talking about again?

Oh right, forgiveness.

Thanks, Don. Very apropos.

Perhaps “unforgiving” is not quite the right way to characterize it. Because the truth is that in my actual, non-theoretical life. I rarely stay mad for long. Once the heat of the moment is gone, my anger melts away and I go back to my usual sweetness and often apologize for my fit of temper.

I have a lot of trouble holding a grudge, even when I should.

The typical line for us Taurus types is that we’re slow to take offense and slow to forgive, and that’s certainly been true of me. If you’ve pissed me off bad enough that I am genuinely upset with you as opposed to merely being annoyed or frustrated, then odds are I am going to stay that way for a long time unless you show contrition.

That speeds up the process considerably. Because I’m really an ol’ softie at heart.

So I dunno. Maybe I am totally a forgiving person in the long run. I’m just still in the process of actively trying to figure out who I am.

Because I’m pretty sure I am somebody.

I just dunno who yet.

More after the break.

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The other side of nowhere

Well, here I am, eating my “supper” at 10:15 pm.

Once more, I slept when I should have been eating and now I am eating a meal a lot later than I intended and it’s pissing me off.

The fact that I woke up very groggy from sleep apnea is not helping either.

Right now, just typing these words makes me feel like I am walking uphill against the wind. I am having trouble staying focused on what I am doing. My mind wanders and I have to yank it back hard, like it’s a dog on way too long a leash.

Sorry there, puppers. But we got shit to do.

It will be time to Zoom with Le Gang soon, too, and that’s stressful because I am still pretty damned sleepy and all I really wanna do when I am done here is go back to sleep and forget the world for another stretch.

But by the time I am done here, it will probably be too late for that. It’s be like 11 PM or later and if I was to go to sleep then, I would not be awake for midnight and Le Zoom.

Hopefully, the caffeine in this generic Diet Cola^[1] will save me.

I think I know part of why this keeps happening, though. The warped calculus of my rampant neurosis goes something like this :

Hey kids! My name is Stinky Wizzleteats! I’m here to sing….. woops. wrong thing.

It goes like this : OMG, it’s almost time to eat. Eating means “having” to stay awake and blog and stuff. Better dive into bed before the “deadline” before it’s too late!

Sad even by the very low standards. of a very sick man like myself.

Must always remember to treat myself with love and compassion, not brutal judgment.

Anyhow. So there’s that. I have this horror of being unable to sleep when I am sleepy that has grown over all these years of depression to the point where it now interferes with my basic ability to eat at regular times.

The chaos never stops. Decay always wins. Rust never sleeps. Whatever order and predictability I manage to create in my life gets eaten away over time until once more I am left wandering the undifferentiated wasteland of maximum entropy – the void.

Or is that minimum entropy? I am honestly not at all clear on how that works.

Anyhow. Another thing I have trouble differentiating is the difference between the healthy expression of negative thoughts and feelings and a toxic wallowing in self-abuse that is only making things worse.

So I just express whatever is lying around in my head, and let God sort it out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

When no one can handle you, you have to handle yourself.

Fine if you’re an adult. It’s expected. Not so fine when you are a kid.

Especially a kid like me, who could be extremely stubborn and was scary smart so I could think and talk rings around most adults not to mention being self-contained and self-aware enough to know that adult authority was entirely arbitrary and I could defy them without serious consequence whenever I did not like what I was being told.

Honestly, only the fact that by default my attitude was one of cheerful compliance and eagerness to please let me get through childhood without being throttled like Homer Simpson throttles Bart.

Point is, I grew up with no greater power than me in my life. No authority figures to make me feel safe and protected. Nobody with a will strong enough to guide me and show me how to live. Nobody to stop me from hurting myself – or at least warn me of the consequences if I decide to do it anyway. Nobody stronger and wiser and greater than me to turn to when I was scared or anxious or upset or lonely.

In others words, there was nobody. Period.

And the problem with that is there was no discipline for me to internalize. The structure we impose on our kids becomes the structure they then use as the backbone of their own personalities and I was stuck with nothing to build on and thus despite the strength of my will and my mind, I’m a shapeless puddle of goo inside most of the time.

In retrospect, I wish I had paid more heed to others as a kid. Not been so sure of myself and flippant and passively defiant. I would have learned a lot more about life and grown to be a much stronger and better integrated person.

But I don’t think it’s “supposed” to be that way. Nature assumes that there will be authority figures who are smarter and stronger than you around to keep an eye on you and guide you when you are a kid.

It has no backup plan if a kid happens to be born with what amounts to superpowers of the mind and therefore requires someone extremely strong to handle them.

Where are Ma and Pa Kent when you need them? I might not be able to lift a car off your leg but I would take to their down home decency and plain morals quite well.

But I was an impossible child. Nobody could reach me.

Well, except for my babysitter Betty. She was the perfect person to handle me because on the one hand she was very gentle and sweet and I was strongly drawn to that, but on the other hand, she was a tough as nails gal from the other side of the tracks and therefore was not going to put up with any bullshit from yours truly.

So on those rare occasions when I was feeling my oats and being difficult, she could put me in my place with either a cutting quip or a few firm words or, that one time, the ultimate weapon : crying and telling me I really hurt her,

That worked. All the smartass thoughts in my head melted in a downpour of guilt and compassion and I never acted up again.

Funny how that works. Smart lady. She knew that she wasn’t going to out argue me but that I was a sweet and very compassionate kid, so emotions worked great.

I owe her so much. including whatever sanity I managed to scrape together after I was raped. If I failed to become a serial killer, it’s because of her.

More after the break.

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IAN #1 : I am not a calm person.

I am, in fact, a fiery, passionate, inspired person with strong, well thought out opinions I am more than eager to share with whoever will listen.

I have fooled myself into thinking I was calm, clear-headed, rational type person both because that is the kind of person I admire and because it is by no means entirely untrue of me.

I’ve kept my head when everyone around me loses theirs before. I have ignored all the BS my social instincts feed me in orders to figure out what the REAL problem is, and been the sage and even-handed resolver of disputes.

But I have also been excitable, hotheaded, combative, argumentative, and overflowing with mad inspiration at least as often.

And I am never going to become a whole and healthy person unless I learn to stop trying to cut off and deny parts of myself that don’t fit my ill fitting and uninformed artificial sense of who I am and learn to just embrace whatever is actually there whether I like it, approve of it, or want it there at all.

After all, you can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you are.

So I here smash that false mirror that is our illusion of self and start looking inward to see the real me that has been there the whole.

Yes kids, it really is that easy! (NARRATOR : It isn’t. )

I can be the wise old owl, it’s true. And the sober impartial judge. And the resolver of disputes, spreading of oil on turbulent waters, and promoter of peace.

But I can also be a blazing firebrand intent on setting the world of bullshit, pettiness, and prejudice on fire with my verbal hand grenades and truth bombs.

I can also be a nearly undefeatable truth warrior more than equal to taking on the forces of crazyevilstupid wherever they dare to show their imbecilic heads.

I can even be a mad magician conjuring florid phantasm and illuminating illusions from my cloak of wonders to dazzle, amaze, and astound my spellbound admirers.

All this and so much more lies within me and none of it is the province of the calm.

Let’s face, I am a dreamer….. and we dreamers have power beyond mere logic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Eh, fuck life, he said with a smile.

I’m sick of taking things so seriously. So what if my life hasn’t gone anywhere yet. Why should that keep me from enjoying myself?

Life’s a feast, and most poor bastards are starving to death!

None more so than I. I have been starving for so long, in fact, that I’ve damned near forgotten there is such a thing as food. This stupid survival mode thinking has caused me to compulsively deny myself on nearly every level for so long and that shit has got to stop, and pronto.

Why not view life as a game? It’s not like taking it seriously has done me any good. Fuck all this bullshit. I’m through with raking myself over the coals about how life has treated me and how I have “failed” and how frustrated I am about my inability to use all these cosmic powers of the mind I have at my fingertips.

All that does is slow down the healing process and delay the day when I will finally be reborn unto the world, strong and fresh and new.

So to hell with it. That shit ain’t mandatory. I might not be able to keep myself from feeling bad but there’s no need to take those feelings seriously.

They are as meaningless as cold symptoms, and best treated the same way.

Acknowledge their presence, do what you can to treat the symptoms, then ignore them till the fever breaks.

The same winds that brought me down will just as surely bring me up again. Especially if I can remember not to try to cling to any one state of mind.

Let go, fly free, and grab whatever joy you can as you go soaring past.

As I read somewhere a long time ago, “If we try to stop the wheel of time, all we do is delay our own renewal. “

In other words, if we stop trying to stay in one state or another, the natural cycle can progress freely and bring us back to the death and renewal stage again.

If we won’t let there be winter, there will be no spring.

Worse, if we waste time and energy fighting winter after it has begone, we end up stuck in winter for so long that we forget spring is even a thing.

And thus we end up locked in survival mode. Go fig.

At the center of it all is this urge to STOP. Some of us are so wired that our automatic reaction to danger and stress is to slam on the brakes so we have time to think.

The problem comes when you are too scared to start moving again, You get comfortable in your halted state. Worse, you become dependent on it, and start reflexively fighting any hint of motion.

Man, fuck that noise. I want to rev up and peel out, and if I get scared, so what? There are worse things in life that being anxious.

Who knows, if I hang in there, it might even get to be fun.

After all, anxiety and exhilaration are chemically identical. It’s how we interpret them that makes all the difference.

A room full of strangers? WEE HA. this is going to be fun!

More after the break.

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Isn’t life fun?

I swear, sometimes it feels like fate conspires against me.

So we are finishing up at Denny’s when I feel a rumbling down below, accompanied by a sickeningly feeling like my stomach is an office water cooler and someone just poured themselves a very large Dixie cup of water so a big bubble has formed and is floating up to the top.

That means Bad Things are afoot.

So all through the car ride home, as I chat with Joe and Julian, I am closely monitoring my abdominal activity. And sure enough, it goes from a vague gassy feeling to a feeling of hard gas in my lower 40 to the strong convince that I need the bathroom ASAP.

And by need I mean NEED.

So as we are pulling into our parking spot, I tell J&J to forgive me, but I need the bathroom ASAP so they will have to forgive me for darting ahead.

So I rush to the elevator and get up to our floor and then dash to our door….. only to remember that I forgot my fucking keys.

Now I ask you, what are the odds that I would forget my keys on the one night when I would need to get in ASAP? Mother fucker.

Anyhow, J&J showed up shortly after that so I got in and it was no big deal, no accidents or anything.

But things were very stressful there for two or three very long minutes.

Like I’ve said before, it really seems like fate arranges these concatenations of coincidences specifically to force some excitement and danger into my life when I need some shaking up.

And it’s always the same improbable things, none of which are noteworthy by themsevles but click together in a chain that so clearly leads to the exact consequences I am experiencing that it’s hard to see it as purely a matter of chance.

I suppose I should feel flattered that the universe takes time out of its busy schedule to fuck with me on a personal level.

Gee, thanks, Big U. Really. You shouldn’t have.

More seriously, it does feel good that fate – or, more likely, my deepest mind, the part that connects to the collective unconscious – seems to be trying to push me towards growth and evolution and healing.

Now if I could just take my emergency brake off, I would get there a lot faster.

And a lot easier.

Well I am working on it. Gotta loosen up. Learn to ride that wind I have been stubbornly anchoring myself against and let the unseen hand of fate steer now and then.

Maybe destiny is real and I need to stop fighting mine just because I don’t know where it is all going.

I’m sure I will end up somewhere good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap, exactly what I have been talking about!

Needless to say, when I watched this video I was absolutely rapt. Here was indpendent verification of what I have been talking about in terms of being in survival mode, and with plenty of fresh insight to boot!

I am thrilled to the point of giddiness for such an unexpected gift.

Whatever algorithm YouTube uses to generate my YouTube feed, you really hit the nail on the head today. And I am so very grateful to you for that.

OK, enough of my gushing. Let’s talk a wall through the entries.

(0). Survival mode is triggered when you feel overloaded.

OMG yes! I quite often feel overloaded by all the bullshit swirling and flashing inside my tortured mind. There’s just so much going on in there at all times, even in my sleep.

So no wonder I am in survival mode all the damned time.

(1). Lack of focus, or “What?”

Totally. Given my constant mental turbulence, it’s very hard for me to stay focused on the world outside my head. It’s like there is a non stop loud party in my head and I have to concentrate just to hear what people have to say.

Hence my absentmindedness. You’d be absentminded too if you had a riot in your head and an earthquake in your bones.

(2). Forgetting basic needs

Constantly. So much so that I can barely remember remembering them. I manage to eat somewhat regularly and use the bathroom when needed, though often putting it off for far too long because I am so wrapped up in what I am doing.

Other than that, forget about it.

(3). You feel more tired (all the time)

Um yup. It’s rare that I truly feel energetic. And when I do, survival mode shuts that shit down with brutal force. According to it, I am constantly in crises and must live my life like I am preparing for the longest winter ever.

But winter never comes.

The truth is that it’s no wonder I am always tired because my mind is at war with itself and most of my energy goes into that.

(4). You’re more emotional

Um….. I’m gonna skip this one, because I’ve been like this forever so I no longer have any frame of reference for whether I am “more” emotional. My usual feeling of depression is a deep, dark feeling of coldness and numbness – Midnight Tundra.

I would honestly prefer to be more emotional. At least I’d be feeling something.

(5) Memory issues

You betcha. I am always wandering in a daze and my biographical memory is terrible. I forget really basic things while still knowing a crazy amount about lots of things.

Two different kinds of memory, two radically different results.

(6) One task at a time (sweet Jesus)

Yup, although I have never ever been any good at multitasking. I have always had a one track mind. Like I always say, it’ a really BIG track but there’s just the one. I am more of the deep focus kind of guy.

I can fake multitask if it’s the sort of thing you can pick up and put down easily. But that’s really just task swapping – a turn based task.

Well that’s the basic rundown, anyhow. I will be thinking long on this for sure.

More after the break.

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Wake the fuck up!

To the tune of this charming tune.

This is going to be super fun because I am very sleepy at the moment for some reason and now I have to eke out 400 words or so while desperately needing a nap.

My life is so goddamned random.

Still, I am very glad to have discovered the video from Part A. It’s really helping me forgive myself and thus heal. It’s a strong antidote for all the toxic bullshit that the sick part of my mind spews out.

The question I asked in the comments remains, though : how the heck do you exit survival mode? How do I reboot into normal mode? I have been in this artificial state of emergency for so long that I don’t even remember what life was like before it.

But I am eager to find out.

How do I convince my deep, presentient mind that I am safe and it can call off the alert, restore me to factory settings, and reboot?

Because the problem is presentient, there appears to be no rational solution. Or at least, no solution that is detectable by my usual laser beam of a mind that cut right through to the truth.

Or what seems like the truth if you ignore all the burnt flesh around the hole.

Surely that cannot possibly be more important than my need to feel smart!

Back to exiting survival mode. To change something that deeply buried and that radioactively toxic will take “going under” as Nietzsche called it. I am going to have to leave rationality and my brutal truth machine behind and venture out into the darkness of my subconscious mind in order to make the repair.

Not something I am accustomed to doing. I am highly accustomed to staying safe and secure in the bright cold light of my incandescent mind.

With its gigawatt lasers and molecular sharp razors and its ability to see through anythif like Superman with his X-ray vision.

I can always see to the very bottoms of things. Scan them inside and out. Know what they are made of like my mind is a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. Understand how they fit into the big picture of life.

It’s really quite amazing.

What I can’t do is turn all that shit off, relax, and just enjoy things as they are, without any analysis whatsoever.

Via analysis and reduction, my brain can ruin anything. And it does so as a highly perverse way to protect me from the pain genuine goodness causes me.

Cover it in shit until it’s just like us.

Then we won’t be reminded of how much we stink.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I have figured something out.

Instead of constantly trying to figure out what the “right” thing to do is, why not give myself a break and just worry about what the most “me” thing to do is?

I think this might be what all the “be true to yourself” bullshit I have heard in my lifetime was getting at. Before now, it seemed insipid.

Of course I’m being myself. Who else could I be? Whatever I do, I’m doing it as me.

Thus I once more, with brilliant logic and wit, keep good advice from helping me.

Yeah! That’ll show it! How dare it try to CHANGE me?

But that’s a topic for another time.

Anyhow, I think that’s the idea : ground yourself in your own identity and base your decisions on that. That must go how a robust sense of self is nurtured and grown.

Turns out, it only grows if you feed it. Go fig.

I think this is another case where my intellectualism has done me wrong. Acting from one’s fundamental sense of self is a lot like acting by instinct or without thinking.

After all, a sense of self can’t think things through before making the best logical choice!

And my icy intellectual empire doesn’t normally allow for making such off the cuff decisions. Its rules state that the only way to get the right answer is through the rational analysis of all available options done in a calm and deliberate fashion.

Which is staggeringly stupid.

Because how often is that even possible? Life has far too many choices to make for it to be possible to think them all through.

Plus it’s such a waste of mental energy. Energy that could be better used in many other ways. Like for instance, boosting and stabilizing one’s mood.

What a concept.

The only way to totally keep from having to make those split-second realtime decisions that I fear so much is to isolate yourself from nearly all involvement in the real world and limit yourself to hyper predictable and controllable circumstances where nothing unexpected ever happens.

Check, and check.

And it sucks. Dealing with things in realtime is stimulating and exciting. Without it, even the most amazing of video games provides far too little in terms of food for the spirit and zest for living.

It’s all just cold comfort anyhow. One cannot thrive on mental stimulation alone. It has to be offset by time spent in the actual, fully stimulating real world.

Like I wrote in a notebook way back in high school : I can’t live my life like I’m not personally involved. Icy detachment might be good for preserving objectivity and getting certain kinds of answer, but you sure as fuck can’t live your life that way.

Trust me. I’ve tried.

In fact, I am still trying as I type this.

But I am trying to learn to change. To get away from this fucking computer and go experience life for a change, even if all I do is sit on a nearby park bench and watch the world go by while soaking up the fresh air and sunshine.

That sounds really good, doesn’t it?

Maybe I will even do it some day.

More after the break.

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My larval form

What if all this time wasted spent playing video games for the last 25 was not a waste at all. but a completely necessary stage of development that had to happen in order for me to become whatever it is I am meant to become?

Maybe this time of seeming depression and sloth has merely been my period of being suspended in my chrysalis as I slowly develop into something magnificent and soaring that can light the world up with love and hope when it finally emerges.

And maybe it will only live for a day.

But at least it will live.

Surely I will not be stuck being the World’s Oldest Caterpillar till the day I die. I can feel things changing and evolving inside me. My find is slowly and carefully purging itself of all the old toxins and filling in the gaping wound left by my being raped as a toddler, replacing it with pink healthy flesh.

It’s slow going, because that which repairs is also that which is being repaired. And I have no mechanisms to force renewal. No release valves, no system purge buttons, no manual rebooting, no restore from clean backups.

Pretty sure to restore from a clean backup, I would have to revert to the age of 4..

And I am far too sane for that. Too stable. Too “smart”.

Which is why I can only progress at this steady, plodding pace. No nervous breakdowns, identity collapses, psychotic breaks, or any other sudden and violent forms of my hidden issues taking over and doing what needs to be done for me to heal.

Instead I have to take the slow and painstaking route of putting it all into words.

Again, though, perhaps that’s all just a part of my spiritual development. Perhaps my role in life is to walk that long dark trail through the valley of madness while remaining lucid enough to make a map to help others find their way to the light.

Maybe when this stage of my development is over, I will be something entirely new. The next stage of human social evolution. The person who can start a new era just like Jesus did. And Martin Luther. And MLK. And all my other heroes.

This world needs a spiritual, political, and ideological jump start. A kick in the pants to get that process of renewal going and let us heal all our old ills so that we might start over, fresh and new, and with our baskets filled with all the best from the previous era.

Yes, maybe I can start the new revolution.

But first, I need a nap.

Rest well, little rebel.

Maybe you’ll be born tomorrow.

Which is when I will talk to all you nice people again.

God, how I hate you.

From failing to prevent my being raped at The Spa when I was four years old (why did you leave me alone in that shower stall anyhow) to taking me out of school and making me move back home when I was 20 just so you could take early retirement (which was bullshit because you totally could have paid for the rest of Dave and my education with your severance but just…. um, didn’t) and through all those years in between spent walking on eggshells and being scared of you because you were too much of a pussy to control your temper, somehow, you were always there, fucking things up.

Your entire façade of competence and practicality was a lie. You were penny wise and pound foolish. That’s why you bought that snowblower and that’s ESPECIALLY why you started that STUPID home based “business”.

Helping people with their resumes? Extremely amateurish desktop publishing? You really thought there were a lot of people in Summerside who would pay for that shit?

How thuddingly stupid were you? And how stupid was I for falling for your bullshit for as long as I did? You didn’t know jack shit.

I would have made a far more competent head of household than you by the time I was ten years old. At least I knew the difference between actual pragmatism and your particular brand of competence theatre.

Then there’s your dinner table tirades. That was your most frequent and beloved way to fail your family. You’d go off on Anne or David, dumping all your frustrations at how you were too much of a wimp to stand up to your boss Ian and all the ways he abused you onto the people it would hurt the most, the family you supposedly loved.

Not enough to keep you from hurting us, apparently. Then again, didn’t you once tell us that if we loved you, we’d just take it?

Yeah. Shit don’t work that way. You don’t get love for hate. You can’t buy a Maserati with dog turds. And you can’t expect people reward abuse from one of the few people who is supposed to protect you from the exact sort of thing you did to us on the daily.

If you’d been any kind of a man, you would have done absolutely anything in order to keep us from harm.

But apparently learning basic self control was too much to ask.

And in the midst of all that, you had the nerve to play the victim. Oh, we’re all so mean to you for not giving you the love you wanted despite the hurt you visited upon us. You’re just an innocent hard done by hard working man trying to do right by his family despite us having the gall to beg for mercy.

Did it really never occur to you that you didn’t get love from us because we were all scared shitless of you? That’s why getting us to do things with you was like “pulling teeth”. We couldn’t wait to get away from you because every moment in the presence of a ticking time bomb like you was like torture.

All because you couldn’t be bothered to control yourself. How very weak. Snapping and shouting at your kids like some trailer bark reprobate.

You should be so ashamed of yourself you dare not show your face in public.

More after the break. Maybe more of this, maybe not.

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Preservation without purpose is waste

I’ve spoken before about the Miser’s Paradox.

The classic case is, of course, Scrooge, who wrings every last farthing out of life, to the point of making half of London miserable in the process, and yet the money does not make him happy because he is so twisted up inside that he’s incapable of spending any of it on anything not strictly necessary.

And even then he mourns each penny spent like it was a beloved child.

So all his wealth serves absolutely no purpose. His life would be more or less the same if he’d thrown it all out the window or burned it for fuel. All that effort, all that self-denial, all that misery inflicted on himself and others, all a total waste of time.

After all, why hoard something you can’t use? You might as well be a bald man stockpiling brushes and combs

It’s such a tragic waste of precious resources such as time, personal energy, potential, intellectual investment, and emotional attachment.

And so we come to my own case. I’ve never been lucky to have the opportunity to become a serious money hoarder but I definitely see a lot of Scrooge in me and I could totally imagine developing a serious case of financial constipation just like his.

Hence my having a floating surplus of around $500-$800 in savings for a long time due to my inability to think about what I would spend it on.

It’s all gone now. Dammit. I waited too long, expenses increased, and now I don’t even have a buffer any more.

And that really hurts. Why? Because that buffer gave me a sense of security that was very soothing. That’s the real reason I couldn’t make myself spend it.

And it’s not hard at all to see how that could lead to a Scrooge-like situation if I was ever in the position to make money in an open-ended, effort proportional way like Scrooge’s moneylending or some kind of commissioned sales job.

In my life right now, I feel like on a spiritual level, I am saving up for an occasion I know will never come. Even all my toxic flab is a testament to that.

All this energy saved up biologically, and I know it will never get used unless I’m on a plane that crashes in the Andes.

And more than that, there is this cold but compelling instinct deep inside me telling me I have to preserve every bodily resource so I can extend my life as far into the future as I possible can, without limit.

That leaves very little to “spend” on living life now. And what is the point of living to see tomorrow if it’s going to suck just as much as today?

So I need to trim back this overgrown hoarding instinct until it no longer keeps me from relaxing and enjoying myself with the time I have right now.

Winter isn’t coming, instincts. There is no foreseeable time of hard austerity coming. Now is the springtime where we laugh and dance and feast.

Or at least learn how!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I know I’ve talked about this stuff before. But bear with me.

I’ve known myself to have a multifaceted personality ever since my early teens, when I discovered how much I identified with the late great Robin Williams.

I saw this thing about how much fun both he and the animators had when he showed up to voice the Genie in Aladdin and one of the talking hairdos interviewing him referred to his performances as “schizophrenic” and that really stuck with me.

Because while I saw why they said that, I knew they were wrong. I knew that while it might seem that way to an innocent outsider, I knew he was the same person no matter what voice he was using.

Because I’m the same way.

It’s not really about having a head full of voices like an actual psychotic.

It’s about having far too much to express for one static persona to be anywhere near enough to express it all.

Hence my being such a shapeshifter. And mask maker/wearer. There’s far too much going on in my head and my heart at any given moment for me to express without the freedom to shift around and strongly emote whatever pops into my head.

Luckily, I more or less manage to do most of that behind the scenes, so I can maintain a fairly consistent outward persona.

Otherwise I’d seem way nuttier than I already do.

Right now, I can write it all off as being “wacky” or “zany”.

But I want more. A lot more. This time, I am going to try to hold on to the idea that my happiness comes from being busy instead of letting the idea slip away like a wet bar of soap in a too-eager hand because it’s so incompatible with the rest of my mind.

What with all that anti-effort bullshit still hanging around.

What I am trying to do is reinforce the idea that moving to a more effort-rich lifestyle is not about punishing myself or making myself do something for my own good – it’s all about doing something that will feel good while I do it and feel even better once I have done it enough to dissipate all this excess energy superheating my brain.

Maybe then I could learn to look forward to my time instead of viewing it as something I simply must endure.

This “survival mode” bullshit has got to end. I realized today that my mind automatically extends into the future in a completely insane way, as if the only point of life is to last as long as you can and conserve absolutely everything for… a rainy day?

At this point, I have enough stored up to survive the biblical Flood.

It’s a lot like hoarding, or its more organized and focused twin, prepping. You compulsively retain and stockpile not because you know something terrible is coming but because you are incapable of actually having a good time and the cold comfort of having made it through another day.

Except with anti-effort, you’re not stockpiling jack shit. You are, in fact, wasting a lot of valuable personal energy by not using it and letting it go to waste.

And all in the name of not becoming anxious…. by not really living.

I think I’d rather be scared and alive, to be honest.

More after the break.

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I’d be crabby if I was rich

It just occurred to me that I am actually a fairly cranky person. I just keep it under wraps.

Throughout my day, a lot of sarcastic and grumpy comments will pass through my head when something annoys me.

But being a sensitive and civilized human being, I don’t say them.

I mean, even regular folk of average abilities shouldn’t go around grousing at people all the time, like their bad mood gives them the right.

But I have superlative verbal skills and a caustic wit, and I could do a lot of damage with a single cutting remark.

So I keep my rapier wit in its scabbard.

After all, I don’t want it getting any rapier.

But things might change if I were rich. Wealth does tend to bring out the worst in people and I am not so foolish as to think myself immune.

Because if I was rich, the power dynamics of my life would shift radically. I would pursue my dream of gathering a big “second family” around me by having a large house and filling it with people I like.

So far so good. But I am pretty sure that would unlock the “angry middle class father” part of my brain and I can see myself stomping about the place muttering about how this is MY house and things should be how I want them and would it kill people to PICK UP AFTER THEMSELVES and so forth and so on.

In other words, I’d turn into my Dad (RIP), god damn it.

Well, forewarned is forearmed. As far as I can tell, the only way to keep from turning into your parents is to acknowledge that it’s a possibility even with the best of intentions and so you have to ask yourself the very tough question of what made them how they are so you can head that shit off at the pass.

And I sure don’t want to end up a glowering grump like my late father, who ruined any chance of a close relationship with his kids by making us terrified of him.

And yet, I know those forces are within me. The bitterness, the emotional reactivity, the tendency to interpret emotional cues very negatively, the pessimism, even the tendency to react to hurt with anger, it’s all in there waiting to be activated.

So all I can do is watch myself and be ready to squash or (better) redirect that crap when it tries to take control of me.

We don’t have to play our bad tapes. We don’t have to follow our programming.

But to be truly free, we have to be ready to hit Ctrl-Break at the right time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, time to fess up : I don’t give a fuck about old growth forests.

I mean, I guess it’s sort of sad when really old trees die. In theory. But then again nature itself kills more old trees than humanity ever could every single day.

Old trees die. New trees grow. That’s just nature. You can’t tell me that it makes a whit of difference whether humans take a tiny percentage of trees for our own use.

And we replant, too. So what’s the big deal?

I consider myself an environmentalist, but my green ambitions are rooted firmly in my humanism. I don’t give two tablespoons of organic fertilizer for Gaia or Mother Earth or natural beauty or any other doe-eyed hippie bullshit about how there is nothing more evil than a smokestack.

Why? Because factories and cars are icky and flowers and trees are nice. That’s all it boils down to a lot of the time. Hippies are aethetically offended by rubber tires and traffic jams, so they must be pure unadulterated evil. End of story.

Some go so far as to wish the whole world matched their green fantasies. No cities, no cars, no modern medicine, no highways, no fast food, no anything except nice green fields and nice green forests and nice green farms (all organic, of course) and nice green everything everywhere forever.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, except that without modern agriculture, 95 percent of the world’s people would starve to death and the rest of us would be picked off by the lack of modern medical facilities, the diseases running rampant because of the lack of vaccines, nobody having a job since the economy went critical and turned into a supernova, the food wars that would soon break out, oh, and everyone losing their minds from their world radically changing and there being no entertainment left.

I mean, sure, it would doom 999 out of 1000 humans to die horrific deaths that could easily have been prevented, but at least a handful of hippies thought things were really nice shortly before they died.

Makes me want to do a “It’s A Wonderful Life” type Black Mirror episode where some hyper green dogmatic hippie type person gets to see the world without the evils of modern technology and the industrial revolution.

It would seem all bucolic and wonderful – till they asked where the people are.

Cue montage of corpse strewn streets and roads and lawns, all showing clear signs of dying in great misery, chaos, and pain.

And then the wish-granting entity says “But none of this really happened. ”

And the hippie says “Oh thank God!”

And the wish-granter says, “….because without technology, humanity went extinct a long time ago. We never even made it off the Serengeti. ”

And then the hippie begs the wish granter to put it all back the way it was and they do and all seems right again, except that we end with a montage of dire global warming news about the world being on fire.

Because I’m a dick, that’s why.

I should probably start actually, ya know, writing things.

More after the break.

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The bicycle incident

The story in the following vid :

…about a father suddenly cleaning his child’s room and said child getting very upset at the sudden change sounded reaaaaaallly familiar.

Patient readers know this story already, but to quickly recap : when I was a kid, all I wanted for my birthday was for my bike (my sister Catherine’s hand-me-down yellow girl’s bike with the banana style seat, aka “The Banana Bike”), to be fixed so I could ride it around the neighborhood again.

But instead, my family bought me a brand new bike and surprised me with it on the morning of my birthday.

Emphasis on “surprised”.

Should have been a Hallmark moment. Young boy reacts with wonder and joy at getting a brand new excellent bike instead of old broken down Sears special.

But nope. It was way too much of a surprise. Instead of wonder and joy they got me freaking out and crying my little eyes out from the sheer shock of it.

Of particular issue was the fact that the new bike was too tall for my feet to reach then ground while seated on it, and I hadn’t learned to balance the proper way yet.

Yet another time in my life where my emotional reaction was “wrong” in that it was not what people wanted or expected or could possibly have predicted.

One thing about the video that adds to this is that it pointed out the connection between this kind of response and autism.

So add a few more shekels to the “evidence I might be a little autistic” column.

Still not nearly enough to diagnose myself with anything, not even “high functioning autism”^[1], but still interesting to examine.

Some level of autism would go a long way to explain why I was such a serious and cerebral child right from the get-go. No imaginary friends, no imaginative play with my toys, in fact very little playing with toys period.

But I only have these little scraps of evidence. So far at least, they don’t prove anything. They don’t form the kind of single, coherent picture necessary for a solid diagnosis.

Which is, I suppose, a somewhat autistic way of looking at things. And talking.

I know I’m sure as fuck not normal. I have known that since elementary school. I was just not like the other kiddies and that has remained true up unto this very moment.

I was born weird and I will most likely die weird. Amen.

And a solid and coherent diagnosis of just waddy fug is wrong with me would do me a lot of good, I think.

It would help me to not feel like such a misbegotten alien…. thing. I feel the mismatch between what society expects and what I can give it very keenly.

And while I would not want to surrender my unique mind in order to fit in, it would be awfully nice if someone could retrofit the dang thing so I can come in out of the cold.

I will talk to you warm fuzzy people again tomorrow.

One of my peculiarities is that certain high frequencies REALLY bug me.

Basically, if you have ever nerves jangled by someone scraping their nails across a chalkboard or rubbing a balloon, you know the response I am talking about, you know the response I’m talking about.

Feels like someone threw a bucket of ice water on your nervous system.

Mine just covers a wider range of frequencies than most people’s. Pretty much anything up high enough can do it. Squeaky brakes on a car or bus, a loose bearing on a fan or in an AC unit, desk bells, certain musical instruments, certain vocalists, and so on, can all make my poor nerves jump like a startled cat.

That’s why there are certain bits of music where, quite uncharacteristically, I must recuse myself from all judgment because there is no way I can be remotely objective about music that causes me physical pain.

I’m sure that soprano diva’s voice is as beautiful as you say and that piccolo solo was every bit as breathtaking, but I will never know.

And I get the feeling that this phenomenon has informed my taste in music in ways I was not quite conscious of until recently.

There’s definitely been vocalists I have detested for reasons that have nothing to do with their talent or persona.

Their voice just bugs me.

All in all, it’s not like it’s ever been a big problem for me. It’s just one of my many vaguely autistic-like eccentricities.

I’m so weird.

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Joker or Colbert?

It occurred to me recently that I have attributes which don’t quite work together and that at some point I am going to have to choose one over the other.

Basically, there is my anarchic trickster side, that wants to set the world on fire with my blazing arrows of purest truth and shatter the walls of delusion with which people hide from their own rank hypocrisy, and the side that really wants people to like me.

As you can see, these two are not exactly compatible.

Yet I don’t feel like I can abandon either entirely. When one is denied it will inevitably find a way of asserting itself, often at the worst possible time.

Now obviously, so far in my life, I have heavily favoured people liking me. My raving ideologue said has mostly stayed under wraps, coming out only at random moments when I get WAY too into an argument and start giving speeches.

It’s so embarrassing.

Brilliant playwright Tom Stoppard had the same problem. He said something like (I can’t find the actual quote) “I can never decide if I’m a siren or a clown. ”

In other words, does he want to sound the alarm about the dangerous of the world, or just makes people smile and laugh?

I feel that. And yet I know that my journey to connect with my id and the stronger parts of my personality is going to make that budding demagogue in me grow stronger and stronger and therefore harder to control every day.

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.

Now remember to like and subscribe.

More after the break.

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Acting on impulse

“I admit I grabbed her ass, Your Honor, but as you know…

Big revelation : you have to act without thinking at least some of the time.

Because even the biggest and baddest of brains only has a finite amount of energy and CPU cycles so shortcuts are absolutely necessary.

Otherwise you end up like this :

Love that song, even though it (unsurprisingly) tends to cause the very neurotic mindset that it describes in me.

Makes me feel seen.

Anyhow, I am increasingly of the belief that part of the symptoms of depression et al is due to that exact kind of running yourself ragged, cognitively speaking.

Because we intellectual types try to solve everything via thinking and computation, we overstress our excellent intellects and are constantly in a depleted mental state as a result. Running along a jagged edge of broken consciousness, we end up driving ourselves into the ground like a car that stops for fuel but not maintenance,

We can avoid this trap only if we evolve to the point where we are willing to admit to ourselves, others, and God that sometimes our instincts and emotions know something.

That it is entirely possible to make correct choices without deliberate, conscious thought and that it is therefore okay to go through life without necessarily thinking through every decision with the full force of rationality.

That’s Level 1. Level 2, which is much harder, involves learning to forgive ourselves when we make a “mistake” that we would not have made if we had “just taken a couple of seconds to think about it” instead of flagellating ourselves and calling ourselves stupid and vowing to never do anything without thinking about it first again.

It’s not your fault. Life is not turn based. It happens in realtime, which means the time for making decisions is always limited and making said decisions swiftly is the only way to keep up and not end up way behind the others.

That means you have to learn to trust the “fast but sloppy” circuit of the brain at least some of the time. You do not have the option of staying in your ivory bunker and treating life like a game of chess.

Not if you want to be happy.

Because happiness is out there, in the world, as a part of things. All you get down here in the bunker is stale air, flat water, and canned entertainment. No matter how carefully you recycle, it’s still the same shit in a new box day after day.

You need emotional nutrients, prepper, and they’re all out there in the world, among the rest of humanity.

So you’re going to have to go out there and get them.

And yeah, that kinda sucks, but it could be worse.

After all, it’s not the end of the world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God, do I not feel like writing right now.

But now is the time for Writing Part 1, and so the writing shall be done.

Habit is repetition, after all.

And discipline is habit with its big boy pants on.

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That’s not funny

More on why I can’t seem to find myself funny.

In the sense of being able to turn my mental illness into comedy like so many others, I mean. I find myself absurd all the time for the dumb stuff I do out of my general mental fogginess or when I catch myself in a petty vanity of some sort.

And like most funny depressed people (but I repeat myself), I can self-deprecate from here to eternity and back in time for lunch. I will gladly cop to being lazy, absent-minded, wimpy, so out of shape I’m non-Euclidian, and fatter than a CEO’s bonus.

And that’s just for starters.

But I still can’t see myself cracking wise about my depression. It’s not funny to me yet. I guess I can’t ironically detach from it like I do with everything else.

Besides, again like with a lot of funny type people, my comedy is an escape from my depression. I learned to make myself laugh as an antidote for being sad. Making other people laugh is even better. That bypasses my anhedonia.

Sure, I might be incapable of feeling pleasure and joy, but you’re not, and I can feel your jollies through my fully functional empathy, so I can truly say making other people happy makes me happy.

It seems like a cruel irony that I can’t turn my depression into comedy. Not yet, anyhow. There has never been a better time for comedy about mental illness, the more nakedly confessional the better, and I could totally rock that vibe if I could just manage to find something funny about being stuck playing video games for my entire life so far.

But it’s not funny. It’s bone-crushingly sad. Pitiful, really. I am sure I could make people feel bad for me but so what? That wouldn’t make me any happier, and as for them, why would they want to hear that?

I’d just be bumming people out for no good reason.

No, comedy is the only route for me. But I have so little substance to work with. My days are very low on events. My life is more or less a succession of nearly identical days of playing video games and blogging and occasionally jerking off.

I have all this intellect and insight and all these amazing things going on in my head and yet this magnificent engine of wonder between my ears just idles while I mindlessly and monotonously entertain myself.

And yet it’s worse than useless to flail myself over it. That moves me in the opposite direction, making me even less likely to turn outward and create.

So what WOULD help? Feeling comfortable and safe, basically. Then I could relax enough to let my creative juices flow.

But I have no idea how I convince myself to relax. To feel safe. To SLEEP.

Speaking of which, time to give CPAP another try.

More after the break.

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Hello shadow, my old friend

That version is like what all good heavy metal should be like : dark, dramatic, and deep.

Basically, heavy metal should be like Klingon opera.

Feeling dark and shadowy in a lazy kind of way. Not so much shadowy as shady. Like a nice shaded spot by a tree on a gorgeous summer day.

Most of the time, it is deliciously cool and the perfect cozy haven to watch the sunlit world from and enjoy the vast blue sky and the sounds of summer fun around you and the delectable aroma of other people’s barbecuing.

But every now and then, at random moments, the wind blows a little bit harder and suddenly your deliciously cool grotto turns a bit too cold and you shiver as a chill shimmies up and down your spine and reminds you that no matter how bright the day, dark is the night, and night will be coming soon.

Jesus, I should be a poet. I mean, throw some more line breaks into those last two paragraphs and it would fit in at any poetry event.

I enjoy writing it, too. Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t keep doing it spontaneously when I sit down to write whatever.

It’s just that poetry always seemed like a dead end to me. The number of people who can actually make a living as a poet in the entire world wouldn’t fill a high school gym.

The rest of us would be lucky to have a couple friends buy our chapbook or whatever, and are mostly just pests with day jobs and pretensions.

This does not make for an appealing career path.

Then again, money is not necessarily the only reason to do things. If I could find an online community where my work could be read and appreciated – or hell, read and pitilessly torn to shreds, that’s good too.

Negative attention is still attention, after all.

Honestly, I just want people to read me. That’s how it is for us antisocial writer types : writing is our somewhat stunted way of communicating with the world, so we churn out words in our dank dark caves and drafty garrets and then, when we have a big enough pile of them, suddenly realize we have to convince people to read them or the whole thing kind of falls apart.

And that’s unfortunate, because we are…. not good at that kind of thing.

Heck, if we were the kind of person who was good at selling themselves, we probably wouldn’t have become writers in the first place.

That’s why literary agents exist, I guess. And I could try to get one of those.

That also requires a great deal of selling oneself, but if it succeeds, you never have to do it again.

I will ponder it.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.