AKA sluggish, which is how I feel right now.

Just woke up, so I am feeling all bleh. The usual kind of post nap bleh : kinda dizzy, although nowhere near as bad as my attacks of “dizziness upon rising”.

Funny how bad experiences can change how you see things.

However I can still say this : it still felt like I didn’t so much sit in this chair as I was thrown into it by centripetal force.

And I feel tired and disoriented and sore, like I just barely made it to shore after a long night on rough seas after a shipwreck.

Yeah, I know I say that every time I talk about this subject. But I can’t think of a better metaphor for this feeling.

So sue me.

As a result of all this nonsense, I am having a certain amount of difficulty staying focused on the screen and making the words come out.

I would rather be sprawled out on my bed waiting for the room to stop spinning.

But I gotta get my words out first. Otherwise there will be no living with myself.

Watched an episode of Cheers with my friends last night. Man, is it good to see that show after all these years. Still one of the best shows ever made.

And it was an early season episode, so Coach was still there. And he is without a doubt one of the most lovable characters ever.

Seeing that show today is like visiting a dear old friend.

More after the break.

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Inside and out

It occurs to me that most people don’t have the kind of rich , chaotic, and unstable inner life that I do.

Probably because they have actual, normal lives that take up far too much of their mental bandwidth than mine does.

I have unintentionally devoted my entire life to stimulating and developing my imagination and vision.

That’s what constantly gorging myself on media has done for and to me.

I have a vast and complex inner world that most people could not even begin to comprehend, and I have honed my inner vision to crystal clarity.

This allows me to imagine whole worlds and deep plotlines and entire conversations in a flash and they are entertaining and touching and good AND internally consistent.

See, makers of sci fi shows? It CAN be done. You just have to put in the work.

But all this inner power comes at a terrible cost. As implied earlier, it comes at the cost of my being an isolated mental freak whose fantastic powers amount to nothing but a bitter joke because I can’t actually do anything real with them.

I can’t even write stuff and try to get it published or at least looked at.

Why? Because mental illness has locked me away in a coffin of fear and buried me alive under all this filth and decay and bodily horror.

Like, my life is fuckin’ Cronenbergian, man.

This inner world of mine is a prison inside a labyrinth inside a dungeon inside a tomb,

Why can’t I have gifts that AREN’T also curses?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, I want to remind my wonderful readers that until I resolve my keyboard issues, and because typing via mouse clicking is so much harder than normal typing with fingers, I will only be writing 500 words a day instead of the customary 1000.

I apologize for this unfortunate necessity.

Right now, the process of resolving my issue with keyboards suddenly having a stroke and getting their keys scrambled is at a standstill.

I am out of ideas for solutions and so for now, it’s clicky typing for me.

But I am getting pretty goddamned sick of it. In fact I am getting to the point where I would almost be willing to pay the $20 for a new Amazon Basics keyboard just to enjoy being able to type normally for the brief time before it too has a seizure and dies.

I am not there yet, thank God, but I can feel myself drifting in that direction.

The other bit of business is about the entries I wrote while the blog was down.

I will be slowly adding them in the near future. The important thing to note for my beloved readers is that I will be backdating the entries in order to maintain the integrity of the archive, and therefore those interim entries will NOT be appearing as new entries but rather just mysteriously appearing in the archive as if by magic.

The earliest one is from August 15, so my suggestion is to go to that date in the archive and read forward from there.

But um, not yet as there’s only two interim entries up right now.

I will inform you in this space when there are enough to bother with.

More after the break .

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My video game addiction

OK, let’s try this again.

Hello, my name is Michael B., and I am hopelessly addicted to video games.

They have colonized and infected my entire life. I play them all day and night. They are the sad and broken answer to the question of what I am doing with my life.

What am I doing? Wasting my life playing video games while my body slowly rots away from neglect because if it doesn’t keep me from playing video games, I don’t pay it any attention at all.

Random infections causing wounds all over my body? Whatever, can still play games.

Nurses bandage them and I just keep on truckin’.

Legs become too weak to support me forcing me to use a walker and greatly limiting my mobility? Who cares? I hardly ever went anywhere or did anything anyway.

And oddly enough, it hasn’t really changed my video game based life at all.

You don’t exactly have to be very functional to lie in bed playing games on your tablet.

The full and certain knowledge that this addiction has hollowed me out completely and stolen my entire adult life and won’t stop draining my blood until I am dead?

Including the knowledge that it will resume feeding on me the second I stop blogging ?

Gee, you’re right. That’s really depressing and totally true. Wo1.

Better bury myself in video games even deeper to escape it.

Avoidant Personality Disorder, AWAY!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve had this song stuck in my head lately :

Particularly this one line that really bugs me :

Rudy thinks / that all good things/ come to those that wait

Um, no. All good things come to those that actually do things to bring them.

Waiting doesn’t do jack shit. And yet I know so many people wasting their precious time on Earth waiting for some magical future to come while doing absolutely nothing to make it happen.

It’s like this dream of theirs is just a comforting placeholder that fills the need for some idea of the future with bothering them by prodding them to do anything.

And that makes me sad. I want to tell these people that dreams mean nothing without action and therefore if their dreams are worth anything to them, they should be worth taking actual actions to achieve.

I mean, that just makes sense.

But I don’t say that because I am still trying to learn the lesson of The Iceman Cometh, a play by Eugene O’Neil.

In it, a bunch of men are hanging out and drinking at the living end of dive bars. A place so lowly it’s not even indoors – it’s just the endcof an alley that’s been crudely curtained off, with sawdust on the floor and crates for chairs

And all these men have a story about how one day, they will get back to their glory days. The ex-prizefighter swears that any day now, he’ll get back into shape and get back into the ring. The broken down old stevedore ssys he is going to go down to the union hall and get his old job back. And so on.

Enter our plot mover and antagonist the Successful Salesman.

More after the break.

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Guess what? Now it’s a drama class lesson!

I’m as surprised as you are. I never know where I am going to end up either.

Anyhow, the Salesman is a guy who is successful now but used to be one of the tragic cases who drank at the bar. And he tells everyone that he came back to help all his old drinking buddies make their dreams come true.

So he pays for the boxer’s gym membership and uses his connections to get the stevedore a meeting with the local union head and does that kind of thing for all of the drunks at the bar.

So they all head out full of new hope and determination to make those dreams of theirs come true, dammit!

But while they are gone, the Salesman reveals that his REAL agenda was to bypass the drunk’s excuses for not acting on their dreams so they could try them out and fail spectacularly , realize how unrealistic those dreams were, and finally be free of the delusions that the Salesman thought were keeping them trapped in this sorry state.

Act break, then the drunks come back, and they all failed big time alright. But far from liberating them, the Salesman has only succeeded in killing the last shred of hope in these men who have absolutely nothing else left.

So they come back utterly destroyed and defeated. Broken men who have humiliated themselves and who now know, without a doubt, that they are worthless.

The Salesman leaves, discouraged and depressed.

The final scene is just like the first. The drunks, thank God, have gone right back to telling the same old stories about how they will get back in the game one day. Turns out the damage the Salesman did was not permanent.

And that’s what passes for a happy ending in a Eugene O’Neill play.

This play meant a lot to me when I first read it many years ago because when I read it, I was on the Salesman’s side. int

Yeah, free them from the delusions that are holding them back!

I was far younger and more naïve back then.

So when they come back all deflated and broken, I was still right there with the Salesman, stunned by what now seem like the obvious and predictable consequences of that plan of action .

How could we have done this? What made us so blind to what we were doing? How could we have been so sure of ourselves that we felt we could basically perform open heart surgery on these men’s souls and have our patients survive?

It taught me a lot about the perils of intellectual arrogance mixed with starry eyed idealism, and really helped me overcome my “veritas uber alles” “anything is better than a lie” attitude.

There are worse things to be than delusional.

Like being completely unable to function, for instance. I could stand to be more deluded if it closed my wounds and let me live again.

Not the sort of thing you can do on purpose, though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(820+ words. Wow.)

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I know I’m genuinely addicted to video games because I can’t imagine what my life would be like without them.

I mean, what would I even do with myself all day?

My ability to actually figure out what I want to do then do it has atrophied to the point of nonexistence since the dawn of this phase of my addiction.

‘Twas Skyrim that birthed it.

So when I try to imagine life outside this addiction of mine, my mind balks. It doesn’t want to go there. All it can see beyond that horizon is an infinite expanse of the existential horror of infinite choice.

Right now, I don’t have to face that choice. Every waking hour that is not spent blogging or getting food from the kitchen or watching things with friends is spent gaming.

The only thing I choose is what game to play next.

Usually it’s this one.

But of course, it’s not a matter of video games all the time or no video games at all.

That’s just the usual all or nothing false dichotomy bullshit the bad parts of our minds use to stay in power.

It’s really a choice between video games to the exclusion of all other things or video games PLUS other things.

Things like taking better care of my health. Or exploring ways I can better express my enormous creative potential. Or looking for freelance work.

Or really anything that actually adds value to my life.

I want to have something to show for my time on Earth.

I can do miracles and wonders. I can turn night into day by writing with words of blood and fire across the arc of the sky. I can conjure worlds with my songs and tame dragons with a kind word and a smile. I can speak with a voice so loud and mighty that it reverberates through history.

But not if I spend all my time playing video games!

More after the break.

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Addiction Part Three

The thing about addictions is that they hollow you out.

And by that, I mean they displace and/or replace everything else in your life . Everything becomes about feeding the addiction as all other concerns – hobbies, lovers, even jobs – vet jealously shoved aside by your new lover.

The reason why is complicated, but the basic principle is deadly in its simplicity : we, like all living beings, are wired both by and for pleasure, and you have found an intense and reliable source of it.

To the primitive wiring of our minds, that makes it better than all other sources and every time you feed your addiction, those circuits are reinforced, making the addiction even MORE pleasurable than before.

Luckily for me, one does not develop a tolerance for video games so there is no risk of an overdose and the physical effects are more subtle and long term.

Games may eventually cost me my life.

Then again, in a sense, they already have by keeping me from having one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow

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And boy do I have a lot of blog entries written in LibreOffice to post!

Dunno why it went offline or why it returned, but it’s good to be back.

Did ya miss me?

And now, back to the blog entry already in progress.

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And then again, I’m not

Yesterday, I spent some time talking about how timid I have always been.

Today I will, without denying any of what I said yesterday, show the ways I’m not.

For example, despite my social shyness, I am intellectually and verbally fearless. I will say anything to anyone at any time. I don’t lose arguments and I am impossible to browbeats, double talk, intimidate, manipulate, cajole, fast talk, or outlast.

It’s funny to imagine my fighting like a lion in some public debate then being terrified into hiding in a corner then sneaking out by the reception afterwards.

I wonder if there have been other famous disputants like that?

And I am utterly ferocious in defense of others. Threaten someone I care about and all traces of shyness and timidity vanish and I will fight like the enraged mama bear I sort of am, if one isn’t too hung up on genitals.

I’m kind of between genders.

And I can be pretty fierce in self defense as well, if a clear threat emerges. It’s in the murky world of social interaction that I am timid.

Give me an obvious oppositional scenario and I become a heavyweight prizefighter.

One with a lot of issues to work out.

More after the break.

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What am I so afraid of?

Old tapes, basically.

That’s the question I always end up circling back to when this subject comes up : what is my social anxiety so afraid of? What calamity does it think it’s preventing?

Embarrassment? Awkwardness? There are far worse things.

Bullying? That hasn’t happened to me since high school. Adult life generally doesn’t have it and when it does it is generally verbal.

And trust me, verbal or physical, I can handle it.

Angry bear with issues in a clear oppositional scenario? Check.

So what’s the big deal?

I’m smart, well spoken, witty, charismatic, and lovable. And I know from experience that if I can just manage to relax and get over myself, I can be incredibly magnetic.

Sure, when people first meet me, things can get a little awkward as I am quite unique and people have never met someone like me before.

So there can be those “failure to connect” moments where I can feel the gap between me and others very keenly.

But it’s only the phobia that turns that into a traumatic experience. If I just blithely ignored it and carried on, the person and I would dial one another in and sorta meet in the middle and everything would be fine.

So really, it’s only memories of my traumatic elementary school days that make me afraid in social situations.

And while those emotions are valid, they no longer apply to my life.

Stand down, faithful guardian. The crisis has passed and the war ended a long time ago. You can come in from the cold now.

And we might even manage to have a good time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.