Got a real feeling of twilight even though it’s only 4 pm.

But it’s a dark, overcast day and it’s snowing, and its the tail end of November, so I guess you could call it the twilight of the year.

It’s certainly dark enough to be the early hours of sunset. That’s probably what started me feeling this way.

It’s not depression, thank Whoever. Just a kind of pensive sadness. I feel deep and dark and poetic. The sort of mood that suits barren landscapes and abandoned towns and parts of the city where everything is run down and overgrown and weathered and the only people who ever go there live there.

Otherwise they wouldn’t go there either.

Melancholy. That’s the word for it. And it’s not that bad a feeling. Sure, you’re sad, but it’s a healthy kind of sad. The kind that expresses something from deep inside you.

Kind of like this song. Warning, it’s as sad as it gets.

That song is brutally sad and I would imagine for a lot of people very depressing.

But not me. It always makes me feel better.

One’s tastes in art are always influenced by one’s needs for catharsis, and it’s the same with me. That song reaches deep into the kind of sadness I find very hard to express.

I am much more familiar with expressing depression, which is not the same thing at all.

It’s a simple effect : catharsis feels good. even when it’s the release of a “negative” emotion. The lightening of our emotional burden feels great, and thus seemingly paradoxical genres like horror and tear-jerkers actually make a lot of sense.

Not to mention carnival rides.

Unfortunately, I generally lack the wisdom to see out art that will provide me the catharsis I need. That short-sighted and shallow hedonism of mine is always there saying, “Don’t do that, it will make us sad, and we don’t want to be sad!”.

Makes sense on the surface of it, like all my stupidest issues. There has to be layers of thought below and beyond whether or not something makes sense.

I missed out on so many healthy and natural childhood activities simply because they did not make sense to my preternaturally calm and logical preteen self.

But some thing don’t make sense until you do them. They can’t be explained and verified beforehand because too much of the experience is bound to context you do not have and won’t get if you insist on knowing where the road ends before setting out.

Take it from one who know this all too well : that’s a great way to end up going nowhere.

For decades at a time, even. Your entire adult life.

But that’s what happens when trauma in your past have left you stuck in emergency mode, prioritizing a feeling of safety above all other concerns, including actual safety.

You mind becomes a paranoid fascist state that obsesses over the slightest hints of a threat and allows for precious little freedom and autonomy all in the name of safety.

Well I ain’t safe. Not at all. I am in constant danger, in fact, from all my inner demons.

They just don’t feel like dangers because I’m completely used to them.

Better a familiar disease than a scary cure, right?

More after the break.

---

Dark days indeed

Turns out I’m not the only one depressed today.

A close friend is feeling the heavy hand of darkness on their soul. Enough so that they stayed home from work.

Life’s kind of ganging up on them. The fan on their car is on the fritz. Today’s an unusually dark and depressing day climate wise.^[1] It’s been snowing, so road conditions are crappy.

So I don’t blame them at all for taking a mental health day.

I’d do the same but I’m unemployed.

I feel privileged that they were so open to me as to come straight out and tell me they were depressed. That’s not easy to do for any of us depressives, but especially them.

They are a very private person.

Whoever knows, I am no good at it myself. I can only talk about being depressed in the past tense. I never say “I am depressed” to anyone,. and that includes my shrink.

I have to leave room for detachment, I suppose. Telling people I am depressed in realtime makes things a little too real and immediate for me.

I need time to intellectualize everything, dammit!

But now I am wondering to what degree I actually experience my depression in realtime. Perhaps part of the reason I have no suicide attempts or hospitalizations is that I maintain that chilly detachment from my own emotions.

That’s an intensely creepy thought. Just how much of an ice lizard am I?

Lord knows I want to be more real and immediate and alive. But I am also too terrified of that change to actually do it.

It seems like it would be so overwhelming. So much more sensory and emotional input to handle. So much stimulation to process. It sounds awful – anxiety city.

At least, that’s what my depression says, and we all know what a sleazy and self-serving liar that motherfucker is.

Presumably my mind and soul would get used to the higher stimulation levels as long as I resisted the urge to panic and flee.

You have to endure to adapt.

Of course, the other reason I have no history of suicide attempts is that they are usually cries for help and I gave up on crying for help when I was still in my crib.

I was the child left to cry.

After a while, you don’t even try.

Besides, cries for help are smothered by my Avoidant Personality Disorder, which insists that the only safety lies in going unnoticed.

Well I have certainly done that all my life. I can disappear before your very eyes and you won’t even notice because I have slipped out of your mind.

Seems crazy that a bison like me can do that, but I have the lived experience to prove it. It takes a lot of effort for me to decloak.

I’m the sort of person who can desperately want attention and want everyone to leave me alone and don’t notice me at the same time.

In other words, I’m fucked in the head.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That phrase popped into my head while I was taking a leak and I immediately knew that this was what I would be talking about next, because…

That’s what I’m trying to do alright.

And if I’d had any doubt as to whether or not this is the right subject for me to discuss right now, the fact that my corrupt inner mind is fighting me tooth and nail to keep me from talking about it would have confirmed that it was.

Now the thought right after “transcend the mental” was “but that’s impossible”. I mean, we are our minds, aren’t we? So how can we overcome our very being?

But that’s not all we are. Our minds are only a part of our total being. For instance, beyond the mental lies the physical and the spiritual, and everything in between.

In fact, the only reason why it seems to me like the mental is everything is that I am so goddamned bright that trying to see anything else is like trying to see the moon and the stars at high noon.

You know they are still out there, but it’s easy to forget all about them.

I think this solipsism of the mind is a big part of the deepest roots of my problems. It limits me in a deep and terrible way by making it seem like if a problem does not have a mental solution, it can’t be solved.

But despite appearances, life is not a puzzle. There are solutions that are hardwired into our minds as a form of self-repair that do not require the active participation of the rational mind at all.

In fact, existing outside the rational mind is a key part of this self-repair function’s entire purpose because it’s in charge of fixing the rational mind when it become corrupted.

And mine sure as shit has.

Problem is that said rational mind is constantly interfering with all things natural and normal and healthy in my mind, so these repair mechanisms get pushed out of the way by my chattering, nattering monkey mind.

I have a lot of monkeys in my head, and they’re ever so strong..

Because my development has been so lopsided in favour of the mental, I lack the tools to even address the rest of my being. Even if I go into the exploration of the remainder of my being with all due humility and the best of intentions, I will still come up empty more often than not because all my instincts are wrong. I will go into it the application of great mental force as my only tool and when that doesn’t work I am stumped.

Hence the need to transcend the mental. I have to dig far deeper than the light of reason can ever penetrate. I have to keep asking myself who I would be if I didn’t have far far more mental might than I have ever known what to do with until I get a satisfactory or at least sufficient answer.

Once more I wish I could just turn that overpowering brightness off for a while so I can get some real sleep and give my emotions a chance to catch the hell up.

Maybe the right strain of pot would help. I don’t know.

I just know I am in desperate need of some real darkness.

More after the break.

---

I feel responsible

You know…in general.

It’s a simple formula : I accept full responsibility for all the reasonably predictable consequences of my actions.

Simple, but the implications run mighty deep. Simple, which makes it impossible to dodge because it has no loopholes. Simple, but unforgiving.

Which might be a problem. For me.

After all, there must be a reason I’ve never heard of anyone else who formulates their ethics this way. Not even hardcore types like my man Nietzche.. Nor the moral grandaddy of all us utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham. ^[1]

And I am not the type to claim that the reason is that everyone but me is morally weak and lacks true commitment to their beliefs.

But the thought does amuse me.

No, I think that the reason most people have an area of exception to this rule or two is that they have an instinct of self-preservation I either lack or ignore.

IIt’s the very unforgiving harshness of this ethic that they are unconsciously but wisely avoiding. It may well be true that my starkly logical ethic is “true”, in that it follows logically from the idea of responsibility., but it’s not, as Felicity would say, true in a way that is useful.

Still trying to learn that lesson, dear.

It may be that this taking of responsibility on such a deep level is not compatible with being happy, or even sane. It’s too harsh for comfort, and while in the past I have taken a certain pride in the purity of my ethos and derived a feeling of moral superiority from it, it now occurs to me that it is a symptom of my being far too hard on myself in the name of logic and the “truth”.

After all, the fact that something is true does not mean it can’t hurt you.

That’s the problem with being, as I have said before, “naked before the truth”.

It’s really fucking cold!

And yet, I am not sure I can fix this fault in myself. I have lived my whole life without protecting myself from the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be, and I am not at all sure I can start doing it now.

It would require a more complex and nuanced definition of “true”, One that includes a level of protection for my tender psyche.

And I am not sure that can be done consciously. That which my powerful analytic mind deduces to be true will always be the truth to me. It’s the foundation of my entire sense of reality, and that’s not easy to alter.

No matter how good an idea it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So let’s take a whack at the piñata full of maggots that is my desire for a “normal life”.

Patient readers know my formula for a “normal life” : a job that lets me support myself for the first time in my life and a boyfriend to cuddle and laugh and have actual sex with and a home I can call my own.

Doesn’t seem like too much to ask, does it?

But I’m crazy. So it is.

So that’s the normal life I want to lead. I want to finally graduate to adulthood by being able to earn a living and have my own place and be in a good relationship.

This nothing of a life of mine is intolerable. I have too much power and talent and charisma to spend the rest of my limited days of life rotting away in a filthy bedroom playing video games all god damned day.

I want more. I need more. I can do so, so much more.

I could make the right people a hell of a lot of money, given the chance. Sign me to your creative team and watch me light up the sky in your good name. Give me the resources and authority I need to make the kind of television I want to make, and people will be saying Shonda who?

But, ya know, I’d still be living that normal life I just mentioned. Ahem.

I suppose that’s one of the many complexities of my personality. There’s the part of me who is absolutely determined to settle down to a quiet suburban life with my Man of Life, and there’s the part of me that wants to set the world on fire with my gifts.

And that doesn’t even include how hard it is to choose WHICH gifts. I have so many!

I suppose those dreams are not really mutually exclusive. I am sure there are plenty of famous creatives who have a nice quiet “normal” lives.

I sure as heck have no desire for a mansion or a yacht or a bleeding Rolls Royce.

Those things might be fun for a little while but it wouldn’t be long before my deep homey-ness would assert itself and I would want quiet domestic bliss instead.

So I would be happiest in a modest middle class home in a modest middle class neighborhood like the one I grew up in.

Some place with lots of green and lots of families and a sense of community. A place of dinner parties and barbeques and a relaxed and friendly attitude.

And no bloody HOAs!

Sure, try to tell me how long my grass can be or what colors I am allowed to paint my house or what lawn ornaments I can have.

See how that works out for ya.

All I know is that this shit can’t go on forever. To quote The Police, I know that something somewhere has to break.

I will either bust out of this squalid cage of mine, or I will implode and my health will fall apart and I will go to an early grave.

Because I want to.

More after the break.

---

Can’t stop the hate

At this point in my life, hating myself is not just a symptom, it’s a habit.

And like all deeply ingrained habits. it no longer requires any justification. Habit is its own reward. It is the path of least resistance. It’s the most cognitively efficient route.

Going with it feels good. Going against it feels bad. And this is all governed by a very ancient and powerful part of our brain.

Habit is like a programmable instinct.

And that’s why despite how I keep pumping myself up by reminding myself how goddamned amazing I am, all that hot air drains right back out me the moment I stop concentrating on it.

My brain returns to normal, and my normal sucks.

But habit is not destiny. It can be overcome. The deeper mind will resist but if you keep the pressure up your mind with inevitably bend in the right direction until it’s in a much healthier shape than before.

So I am going to keep pumping myself up as often and as well as I can until I force the birth of a new normal where I love or at least like myself and where I feel comfortable in my own skin and content to be myself and I am finally able to act in the world from a grounded and stable starting point and thus act effectively.

Wow, I didn’t know even half of that before I started writing about it.

What will keep me pumping is the fact that even after all the air goes out of the balloon it’s still not the same balloon it was before I started pumping. It’s a little bigger, a little stronger, a little more flexible. And that means the next pump-up will encounter less resistance and thus be easier to do and go further than before.

And I am not falling for my depression’s bullshit scare tactic of making me feel like I will develop delusions of grandeur if I let my ego start to rise any more.

Yeah, it can feel that way sometimes as my needle swings too far in the other direction from all my self-hate. Overcompensation is inevitable when you are trying to recover from an imbalance this egregious.

The pendulum has to swing back and forth in pretty extreme arcs at first before losing its momentum and ending up somewhere in the middle.

So I will not let those first big swings scare me any more.

There’s a lot of room between self-loathing and narcissism. I am positive I can land somewhere comfortably between those poles.

But first, I have to let that pendulum swing free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wrote this as a YouTube comment and I am quite proud of it :

A long series of weak-willed and permissive governments are letting the rich get away with murder because they lack the courage and resolve to stand up for law and order and the good of the average, hardworking voter who just wants to feed their family. They routinely sell you. the person reading this, to their elite rich friends by promising that they can fool you into slitting your own throat so that the rich can sell the blood. For decades, rich people have been stealing your money by buying politicians who will take your tax money and hand it to people who already have an ungodly amount of wealth via tax cuts for the rich. That’s money meant to provide government services to you heisted by the paid political hoodlums of the rich. It’s high time we the common, average, decent people of the world rose up to chase these thieves, murderers, and interlopers out of OUR government and take back OUR society before these jackals drag us all down to Hell. Who’s with me?

Michael John bertand, www.michaeljohnbertrand.com

Not bad, eh? It was inspired by this vid :

That video makes my bitter and cynical heart sing because it contains such a high dose of bullshit smashing truth that I want the whole world to see it and be disinfected by it.

But to add to the sentiments I expressed above : The billionaires versus the people of Earth should be a no-brainer, people;. There are thousands of them and billions of us. It would be trivially easy for us to rise up and take back our governments and take away the wealth they so clearly cannot be trusted with.

Then leave them alone to live humdrum, ordinary lives as people of no particular importance or consequence, just like everyone else.

The alternative is to let us all die on a firebomb of a planet because we were too lazy and self-involved to get together and go after these pricks.

Look what’s happening in Iran after the death of just one woman. Now multiply that by the billions of us – including YOU – who will die from the effects of global warming in the next decade or so.

Because that’s what is going to happen when the crops fail, folks. Billions will starve and they will tear down civilization as they go. Nobody will be spared – not even the fucking billionaires who caused the problem in the first place.

No amount of money can save you from millions of angry, hungry people who are watching their children die and who know exactly whose fault it is.

And let me make this clear : there’s something you can do. You just don’t want to believe there is anything you want to do because then you’d have to do it and that would cut into your precious “me” time.

Right now, they think they have us right where they want us : lazy, distracted., fractious, divided, self-absorbed, and incapable of unified action against them.

But we live in an era of global consensus. Look at how fast we all got on the same page about Covid. Or Ukraine. Hell, look how fast we rid the world of plastic straws!

We’ve done it before and we can do it again. Rise up against the plutocrats who own you and take the planet back before it’s too late.

Now I need to go lay down because I’ve apparently made myself sick.

More after the break.

Such a hassle

Every week, I manage to forget what a hassle it can be to order in.

Had my hungry heart (everyone’s got one) set on good ol’ Subway. Brought them up on good ol DoorDash. Was about to get my usual ol Cold Cut Combo when I noticed a notice that said they had no lettuce.

Um, sez what now?

Well I didn’t want my CCC sans lettuce^[1], so I decided to get Taco Del Mar instead. But my Fruvy sense was tingling.

Sure enough, Taco Del Mar didn’t have lettuce OR tomato, and that’s like half of Mexican cuisine right there, so I decided against them too.

I didn’t want my taco salad to be all taco and no salad!

So then I tried Burger King, but only to confirm my findings with a third trend point. Yup, no lettuce there either.

20 years from now, those of us who survived these trying times will be bolting awake out of a dead sleep soaked in a cold sweat and screaming, “Supply chain issues!”.

So I dithered and worried and wrung my hands for a bit before realizing my salvation : thank Heaven for 7-11.

Then I had the always irritating task of trying to make sure my order came to less than the money left on my PayPower card that I was trying to spend, which was around $25.

A few abortive calculations later and I said fuck it and just ordered a Hungry Man sub.

Pain in the ass to the extreme.

So I ended up spending $20 for a sub. $9 for the sub and the rest in taxes, fees, tip, and so forth and so on.

Fuck it. Whatever. Moving on.

Then it was time to register the new card. I was pretty sure I would not be able to do this alone, and I was right.

It’s them goddamned little numbers. There’s a ten digit number you have to input besides the usual credit card info and I can’t read those goddamned little numbers and usually have to get Julian to help.

I just can’t tell the 6’s and 8’s apart. Dammit.

And he ain’t here. He’s off with Joe visiting Joe’s family, as is the norm for Saturday nights. He’ll be back before too long, though.

After it’s registered, I will be able to use it to order my weekly groceries. Because I will be ordering them so late in the day, there’s a pretty good chance that there will be no delivery times available till Monday.

Luckily, I am not actually out of anything major yet. So it can wait.

So that’s been my (by my standards) stressful evening..

I need a source of more meaningful aggravation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] In retrospect, I could have ordered a different sub, like Steak n’ Cheese, which is a lot less dependent on lettuce. But I was rattled and not thinking straight. [1]]

Did the monthly trip to the bank this morning.

I have stalled out on my plan to eliminate the need for said trips by finding a way to spend money online and have it come straight from my bank account.

Seems ridiculous having to keep buying these prepaid VISA cards from PayPower every month in this day and age.

It would be so much easier if I could cut out the middleman. My cheque would b e deposited in my bank account once a month and I would spend it from that same account and everything would be peachy.

But like I said, I have stalled out in the process of making that happen because fate’s dastardly machinations have seen to it that in order to do it, I will need to…

…MAKE A PHONECALL!

And that’s never easy for me.

See, there are two ways to sign up for RBC’s Virtual Visa Debit Card program : their app, and via phonecall.

Well it turns out there is no version of the RBC app that works on my Amazon Kindle Fire 10 tablet.

I’m beginning to wish I had spent the extra $60-$80 on a Samsung.

So that leaves me trying to work up the nerve to make the phone call. Eh.

And it’s not like I expect the phone call to go badly. I am quite good on the phone. Smooth, articulate, with well modulated tones and my own brand of self-effacing goofy charm. There’s no problem there.

It’s the act of opening myself up like that in the first place that daunts me.

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh right, the bank.

It went great. There was no line so I went straight to the teller, and she offered to do my transactions while I was sitting in one of the nearby seats that are normally used for when people have to do something complicated like talk about their mortgage.

So I got to be nice and comfy while I withdrew $1750 out of my account.

You think thay’s impressive, there’s still $750 in there!

I dunno why I withdrew so much. No way am I going to spend the $650 in cash I will have left in cash after buying my monthly $500 card and paying Joe $600 in rent over the span of a month.

Oh well, we’ll see. I might need to buy a second $500 card once I spend a large chunk of the first card on Xmas gifts.

I love buying gifts for people. It lets me express my love for them. And hopefully make them happy in the process.

The other item on today’s agenda was lab work. And there was no line there either. I showed them my CareCard, went to the assigned room, a nice nurse came along and drew some blood with no problems, and I was done.

I didn’t even have to pee in a cup.

So everything went fab. And I am doing my best to hold on to that truth and use it to fight the usual incoming tide of negativity that would wash it all away.

My life isn’t all bad, dammit!

But it hurts so much to remember that sometimes…

More after the break.

---

It hurts to remember

Yeah, about that.

I think part of what drives depression’s black negativity is a desperate fear of hope.

If you never get your hopes up for anything, you can never be disappointed. If you never rise, you can never fall. Hope is for suckers.

Viewed in this light, a black as night view of the world can be, paradoxically, be quite soothing. It constantly reassures me that I’m making the right choice by laying face down in the metaphorical mud and never so much as looking up.

So it hurts to remember that things are not all bad because it violates this internal taboo against hope and makes part of me yearn for something far greater than what the negativity machine will allow.

My bonds don’t hurt as long as I don’t strain against them.

And by such simple mechanisms even I can be tamed. Domesticated. Made to blindly obey an oppressive system just as long as I still have my toys.

But I am so much more than the sad little puppet boy I have been. I am a magnificent golden dragon who shines like the sun as he soars through the sky. I am a proud and mighty beast who prowls through the forests of idea and who can smell what you’re thinking. I am a wise and devious trickster god, with jokes and tricks to make you thinkj as they make you laugh and who defeats evil with his sly and mocking tone and his ability to see straight through to the core of things.

I am also a marvelous and mysterious spirit creature of unknown and unknowable origins who shines against the cloak of the night and haunts hallowed halls.

Hell, I am even a white hot firebrand capable of setting the world on fire with my overstuffed bag of ideological dynamite, ready to choke hypocrisy, delusion, and evil to death with their own foul emissions.

And I’m also just some guy. A nerd with health issues and far more brain power than he knows what to do with. A brilliant man who tragically has been trapped at the bottom of a deep dark well of depression for far too long and is watching his health and life force slowly fade away feeling helpless to change this negative trajectory even though the means to do so are right at hand.

Something is desperately wrong deep inside my soul. It’s that fucked up circuit breaker again I can’t raise my energy to stretch and grow and progress along my spirit path because every time I try, the power cuts out and I am left hanging.

Disappointed again, this time by my own failure.

Total hopelessness is seeming better and better. Why try when it is so much easier and so much less painful to just lay down and wait for death.

Because I want to be alive, cries the id.

But I am not strong enough to give birth to it yet.

But it’s getting closer….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Hey, guess what? I just remembered my plan to combat my negative personal narrative!

You know, those stories we tell ourselves about our own lives? The stories we also tell to others, albeit in an edited form?

They are foundational to our sense of who we are, and mine stinks.

It’s so negatively skewed. I have a profound sense of being a victim of life and its strife and toils, and my entire worldview is like a giant inverted pyramid with me at the very bottom and everything coming down on me.

Gee, Atlas, what’s wrong? You look like you got the weight of the world on your shoulders. Ba dum tish.

But that’s ridiculous. Nobody is a total victim of circumstance and no matter how I feel the universe is not and cannot be against me. I may have had some bad luck but so does everybody. My problems are my own.

My main misfortune is that I am mentally ill. Everything else flows from that.

The specific aspect of my negative self-narrative I want to tackle right now is that idea that I have done nothing with my life.

False. I may not have done anything in terms of a career or relationships (because of mental illness) but I didn’t just stare at the wall, either.

I’ve done things. I’ve gone to conventions and met people there. I regularly hang with my fuzzy friends online and have an effect on them – a positive one, I might add.

As Fruvous, I am. quite honestly, amazing to be around. Arf!

And of course. I’ve spent copious amounts of times with my friends Joe. Julian, and Felicity, and that’s not “nothing” either. We’ve talked, we’ve laughed, we’ve watched many thing together, and we have socialized.

This is what keeps me from letting the Trog take over and make me disappear into my cave forever. These fine friends of mine save my life every day.

So I shouldn’t let my depression use its own long term effects to convince me that for the last 20 years I have done “nothing”.

It may not have been enough. And I certainly wish I had done more. A lot more.

But there’s a vast difference between “not enough” and “nothing”. .and I need to hold on to that truth and clasp it to my breast until it finally enters my heart.

Because I want to get better, damn it. These doldrums are beneath me.

And I can’t get better with an absurdly tragic internal narrative constantly dragging me down into the cold and dark waters of the Arctic again and again.

Heck, this blog alone represents something a lot more than nothing about my life. I’ve written a thousand words a day for 11 years now.

That’s over 4 million words! That is a lot of typing, all to finally release some of the thoughts in my head by capturing them on the page.

And it’s been great. Gives at least a little bit of hope and purpose to my life. Without this outlet I would lose my mind.

But it’s not enough. It hasn’t been enough for a long time. I need more places to put my mojo so I can approach something like a calm internal state.

I posted a video to TikTok today. And I plan to keep doing that every day. Doesn’t matter whether I have something important or interesting to say or not.

Just three minutes of video of me talking a day.

Yeah, I think I can handle that.

More after the break.

---

Of or pertaining to wooz

Another dizziness attack. Yay.

Just getting to the kitchen to make supper and then back again was an adventure. One with pulse pounding action, in that my pulse was pounding in my temples the whole time. It’s ever so much fun.

It’s probably once more due to dehydration. It can happen so fast Two meals without drinking a big glass of water and I am in this absurd and hazardous state.

In a weird and off-kilter way. my Decaf Diet {Pepsi habit is to blame. Often, that little 330 ml can of DDP makes me forget to drink my usual 1.2 L of water because the DDP satisfies my thirst, but not my actual hydration needs.

Bodies are dumb.

To top it off. I am going to have to get to the bathroom and back in order to fill my water cup so I can drink it while I type.

Here I go. Wish me luck.

---

Well that was unpleasant but thankfully uneventful.

Thank Whoever that it’s only six steps there and six back. Even so, I was sagging rather alarmingly while I filled my cup.

And I am having my usual problem staying focused on the screen. It’s kind of hard to stay on target when you are swaying in your seat like a palm tree in a stiff breeze.

But I am being a smart boy and drinking my water now, so hopefully the wooz will go away soon and I can return to my usual level of unobtrusive misery.

Not that anyone is neglecting me in any way. On the contrary, I am being well cared for by Joe and Julian.

It’s not at all their fault that I have such a hard time speaking up for my needs. Like I said recently, at a certain point I just gave up on the whole idea of being helped, and that’s a hard thing to reverse.

And my social anxiety/ avoidant personality/ timidity plays a central role as well. Makes it very hard to believe that asking for help will result in getting it instead of people acting like I just popped out of dark alley and demanded a live chicken.

Everything is sudden when you routinely forget I exist, and hate being reminded.

As a result of all that, I have trouble even conceptualizing my own needs. I just keep bop bop bopping along no matter what. That’s how I survived such a cold and negative childhood without becoming a serial killer just to get some goddamned attention.

People pay a lot more attention to you when you have a body count.

And I know that this inability to speak my needs makes me frustrating as hell to look after because I could be metaphorically heading for the waterfall and it would not even occur to me to cry for help.

But I’m always so afraid to interrupt other people’s lives with my needs.

I guess I need to work on that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hey, guess what? I just remember my plan to combat my negative personal narrative!

You know, those stories we tell ourselves about our own lives? The stories we also tell to others, albeit in an edited form?

They are foundational to our sense of who we are, and mine stinks.

It’s so negatively skewed. I have a profound sense of being a victim of life and its strife and toils, and my entire worldview is like a giant inverted pyramid with me at the very bottom and everything coming down on me.

Gee, Atlas, what’s wrong? You look like you got the weight of the world on your shoulders. Ba dum tish.

But that’s ridiculous. Nobody is a total victim of circumstance and no matter how I feel the universe is not and cannot be against me. I may have had some bad luck but so does everybody. My problems are my own.

My main misfortune is that I am mentally ill. Everything else flows from that.

The specific aspect of my negative self-narrative I want to tackle right now is that idea that I have done nothing with my life.

False. I may not have done anything in terms of a career or relationships (because of mental illness) but I didn’t just stare at the wall, either.

I’ve done things. I’ve gone to conventions and met people there. I regularly hang with my fuzzy friends online and have an effect on them – a positive one, I might add.

As Fruvous, I am. quite honestly, amazing to be around. Arf!

And of course. I’ve spent copious amounts of times with my friends Joe. Julian, and Felicity, and that’s not “nothing” either. We’ve talked, we’ve laughed, we’ve watched many thing together, and we have socialized.

This is what keeps me from letting the Trog take over and make me disappear into my cave forever. These fine friends of mine save my life every day.

So I shouldn’t let my depression use its own long term effects to convince me that for the last 20 years I have done “nothing”.

It may not have been enough. And I certainly wish I had done more. A lot more.

But there’s a vast difference between “not enough” and “nothing”. .and I need to hold on to that truth and clasp it to my breast until it finally enters my heart.

Because I want to get better, damn it. These doldrums are beneath me.

And I can’t get better with an absurdly tragic internal narrative constantly dragging me down into the cold and dark waters of the Arctic again and again.

Heck, this blog alone represents something a lot more than nothing about my life. I’ve written a thousand words a day for 11 years now.

That’s over 4 million words! That is a lot of typing, all to finally release some of the thoughts in my head by capturing them on the page.

And it’s been great. Gives at least a little bit of hope and purpose to my life. Without this outlet I would lose my mind.

But it’s not enough. It hasn’t been enough for a long time. I need more places to put my mojo so I can approach something like a calm internal state.

I posted a video to TikTok today. And I plan to keep doing that every day. Doesn’t matter whether I have something important or interesting to say or not.

Just three minutes of video of me talking a day.

Yeah, I think I can handle that.

More after the break.

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An interesting thing just happened while I was urinating.

I was thinking in general about my poor sleep habits and how common wisdom insists that if I want to sleep better, I need to knock it off with the napping.

And the thought suddenly popped into my head, clear as day : “I can’t close that door. ”

What do I mean by that?

What I meant was that I can’t forswear napping as that would close the door on a vital coping mechanism. When things start to feel like it’s all too much, I can nap.

It’s my primary emergency escape mechanism. And as such, it runs pretty deep.

For instance, one of the main reasons I have had a problem with being away from home either too long or too far or both is that when I am out in the world, I can’t just retreat into sleep whenever I feel the need.

And that makes me feel vulnerable and insecure and makes me wish I was home.

Luckily, this is not the universal phenomenon like it used to be. A lot depend on where I am. If it’s Denny’s or the Community Care Clinic where I get my Wound Care, I will be quite relaxed in these familiar environments and therefore the need to run and hide in the land of Nod will not be strong.

Put me someplace new and it’s a different story.

It’s so easy to forget how mentally ill you are when you never do anything to piss your mental illness off.

It’s not worth it, though.

So to drag myself by the ankles back to the point. I can’t imagine totally denying myself the exit route of sleep. The very idea sounds awful to me, like some kind of “enhanced interrogation” thing they’d use to make me break.

It would work, too. “No, Mister Bertrand! No nap until you confess!”

“You realize duress makes a confession worthless, right? Forcing someone to say what you want them to say then pretending that’s the same as a real confession is like recalibrating your scale and thinking that means you lost weight, right? “

In response, they show me the very comfy and quiet bedroom with freshly laundered linen sheets on the bed and the latest in comfort spring technology.

“Oh god…. OK, the launch codes are…. ”

What can I say. I’m not made of stone. And neither is that bed! Wowsers.

I’m not sure what I would do if I ever had to work anything like a 9-5 job, with meetings and offices and such.

Even if it was my dream job of working in the writer’s room of a TV show. there would still be a part of me that wanted my safety blanket of…. an actual blanket.

I choose not to think about that too hard.

So I can’t see myself giving up naps any time soon. But it need not be that extreme. I could start by just delaying my naps a little bit.

Wait ten minutes before giving in. That kind of thing.

Once I do that and the world fails to cave in around me, maybe I will try for more.

But not right now. I am far too sleepy Damned sunset.

More after the break.

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Out of time

Timne and I have not been getting along too wel lately.

The temporal dislocation moments, where I literally have no idea what time it is, are becoming far too frequent.

They jar my sense of reality and make me worry about my brain.

Take right now. I just woke up to find that it was frigging 11:15 pm anhd so I ony have 45 minutes to pump out 445 words.

I know I can do it but the time pressure is not appreciated.

And tthe thing is, I don’t remember when I lay down for a nap. No idea when that happened. So I don’t even know how long I slept;

I feel like time itself is playing tricks on me;.; How in the hell did I get here? Why am I typing away at this late hour instead of my usual 8 pm or soi? Where did this frigging headache come from? How come I’m so damned full of questions?!?

This frigging sucks. I want what little regularity I have been able to maintain in my life back. Meals at 8 am. 3 pm, and 8 pm. Sleep safely bound in between.

Oh right. The worst part is not the time pressure but the fact that I slept through supper. I am going to have to miss an entire meal because of this bizarre interlude and that’s something that should never, ever happen.

But what choice do I have? I can’t eat a full meal this close to my midnight snack with Joe and Julian. If I did, I would ruin my appetite for the snack and I would end up missing THAT meal instead.

I feel like I am in some bit of existentialist film that violates the rules of narrative structure in order to emphasize the bleak fate of those left behind by life.

Actually, that could be pretty good. Might make me feel better about my sad fate if I could it into something dramatic and dark.

I will add it to all the other great ideas I think up., give a pat on the head and tell them they’re good ideas, then file away forever and forget.

If I had people working for me who could handle the execution of my brilliant thoughts and I only had to supervise and manage, boy could I get shit done.

I am currently munching on some Bacon Dipper crackers and part of an apple in order to get at least a tiny bit of food into me before midnight.

I am pondering adding a sandwich to my usual midnight snacking in order to compensate for the missing meal.

It’s not much of a solution but it’s all I got. I hate having my threadbare routine violated like this and I very much resent being in this pickle.

But at least I won’t run out of time. I’m done and it only took 26 minutes.

Guess I am getting something out of all this typing after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Ring out the chorus and strike up the band, for I am back to PC gaming.

Seems like butt and this cushion finally came to an accord and I can sit down in front of my computer and play games for a while without problem.

I mean, I have to get up and re-seat myself because my butt has grown uncomfortable, but I had to do that before my legs went bad too. So no big deal there.

And it’s not the acute localized pain I was experiencing before. I think my body finally finished filling the wound that was there in and now I have a healthy butt.

Mostly. I can still feel where the wound was but it doesn’t bother me unless I end up sitting on an angle where my buttocks are sort of twisted.

That’s an easy fix and easy to avoid, too.

So life can finally go back to normal-ish again.

Of course, it’s not that easy.

I was out of action for three months plus the 16 days of purgatory in the hospital. and my habits totally changed in that time. There’s a new normal in town. one where I lay in bed all day playing games on my tablet (how sad), and it’s going to take a while for me to change my habits back to what was normal for decades until 4 months ago.

But whatever. No pressure. What will likely end up happening is that I will end up with a sort of hybrid of the two lifestyles in some form of balance with one another.

Admittedly, now that I am back to full on PC gaming, the tablet games are starting to seem pretty lame. Some of the ones I have on the go now are good enough that I don’t feel the need to give them up yet, but some are pretty meh.

We’ll see how things work out.

The first PC game I reinstalled was an odd but excellent one called Monster Train. I figured my first game after my hiatus should be something turn-based that I can play just by clicking the mouse in order to ease my way back into PC gaming.

Baby steps, and all that.

But once I had played that for a while. I got impatient and skipped straight to a full on realtime 3D fave of mine, Fallout 76.

I love this game. I love it so much that the first time I installed it, I ended up playing it for 517 hours, or 21.7 days of gameplay.

That’s because I obsessively did every single thing there was to do in this MMORPG. Did every single quest and side-quest, found all the random collectibles, explored every pixel of the main overworld map. everything.

I just didn’t want my time with the game to end.

But it did. And so I haven’t played it for a couple of years.

Lately I had started thinking about going back to it. After all, MMORPGs change fast so surely there would be new stuff there by now.

And yup, there is. So yay that.

Even that might be only temporary though, because I have $60 sitting in my Steam wallet from when I would use the leftover money on my various Paypower cards to buy Steam bux and thus preserve the value.

And I am all about preserving value.

So I am currently in the market for a brand new (to me) game to be my new obsession. There’s no rush as Fallout 76 will keep me busy for a while, but I am definitely looking for something good that my creaky old PC can handle.

I wish Steam had a “only show me titles this PC can play” option.

More after the break.

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The easily overwhelmed

One of the symptoms of my depression is that it’s easy for life to make me feel like too much is going on and I can’t handle it and I am overloaded and overwhelmed.

It’s like my brain is a circuit with a way too easily tripped circuit breaker.

And it occurred to me that I don’t immediately see why that is a known facet of depression.; What’s the connection between the two? It’s not obvious.

I can only assume that depression is a huge drain on your cognitive resources, and mental bandwidth is one of those resources.

But there has to be an emotional component too,. as I can keep a ton of variables in my head when I am,. for example, playing a video game I like.

I suppose there’s such a thing as emotional bandwidth too. Plus there is the undeniable fact that anxiety or stress triggers an adrenaline response, and adrenaline shifts the brain into “fast but stupid” mode where emphasis is put on the here and now and ytour brain shifts away from the deeper thinking that is great for abstract reasoning skills but not so useful when trying to hunt a gazelle.

Here’s an odd idea : what if we could eliminate stress from an individual? A medication, say, that damps down the adrenaline response.

Is that what anti-anxiety pills do? Hmm.

I mean, most of the time, a modern human doesn’t actually need their adrenaline response. We live lives that are quite safe and the sort of life or death situations for which the adrenaline response is appropriate rarely arise.

Oh. but that would get rid of the positive responses too Imagine not being able to get excited over anything! Greeting even great news with total equanimity. Christmas morning feeling like just another day to you. Never being truly happy.

And obviously sex would not be possible. Or if it was, it would be an oddly cerebral event, without any kind of passion.

What a repulsive thought. No thanks, if the alternative is a passion free life, I will keep my anxiety, and be glad to have it.

There has to be some kind of happy medium, though. Something where I can have a normal amount of adrenaline response without being freaked out by life.

It’s all so overwhelming.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kind of in a mood tailspin right now.

Just spiraling downward like a plane that’s lost a wing. And like the pilot of such an unfortunate vehicle, I am doing my best to at least crash gently.

Not sure why it’s happening. Not that there needs to be an explanation beyond the usual neurochemical chaos of my disordered and diseased mind.

The trigger was realizing that because I stupidly played Fallout 76 right up to my usual 3 pm mealtime, I was too tired to eat let along blog, and so now I had to lay down for who knows how long and throw my timing off completely.

To top it off, instead of just going directly to sleep after Fallout 76, I played a game on my tablet for half an hour first. thus putting me further forward in time.

Annoyed grunt! I am a silly person who does foolish things.

So the real downward spiral started when I woke up at 4:20 pm and realized how behind schedule I was.

Cue the self-excoriation. As usual. Sigh.

At this point in my recovery, these orgies of self-flagellation are not something I can entirely prevent. I can hold them back when everything is going more or less fine and I haven’t fucked up or failed in any unusual way recently.

But when I do mess things up, there is no way I am going to be able to hold back the dark tide of self-loathing by sheer force of will. Cognitive capture is not nearly enough.

So I don’t try. I instead let the Stygian flood rise and fall, unimpeded, knowing that once the waters recede I will be sane again and can put myself back together.

That’s the theory, anyhow. In practice, sometimes that fails too and I end up quite soggy and not entirely sane for a while.

Oh well. Sanity is overrated anyhow. Like Ford Prefect said in Life. the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams. sometimes it’s best to just go crazy now and save your sanity for later.

Sometimes, you have to let your mad dogs howl and get it out of their system. That pressure has to be vented somehow. Better that it does so on your terms.

So even though I feel my mood sliding downwards, I am not worried. Whatever needs to happen will happen and it might be bad for a while but I will still be here at the end.

Issues aside, I am a fundamentally stable dude. If I wasn’t, I would have been in and out of hospitals all the time like some of my fellow sufferers and might even have a number of suicide attempts to my name.

But no. I exercise my own brand of iron self-control for a reason. I can keep myself going on autopilot or by sheer force of will for aqs long as it takes for things to go back to my sad little version of normal.

In fact, I do it all the time, without even thinking about it.

As usual, though, I have to wonder if I would be better off going crazy for a while. Having one of those famous nervous breakdowns and letting myself fall apart.

But that’s for people who have unconscious faith that someone, somewhere, will take care of them while they are crazy and that they are not utterly alone in the world.

I have no such faith.

More after the break.

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Dazed by the aftershock

Man, I just can’t catch up today.

Now I am having my “supper” at 10:10 pm because I slept from 5 pm till 10 pm.

So now I have to eat enough to keep my body and soul together (they’re in relationship counseling and working on communication) but not enough to spoil my appetite for my usual midnight snack, which is in less than two hours.

How did things get so god damned complicated? Oh well, why should my daily routine be any neater and cleaner than the rest of my life.

Welcome to the pig sty. I hate it yet feel powerless to change it.

Eating issues aside, I am also, as has become tradition, screwed up by intense REM sleep. I feel woozy and disoriented and honestly just want to go back to sleep.

Not that I have time for that. God damn it.

So, this is my life. Nothing is reliable, everything is broken, and entropy rules all.

And the most broken thing is,. of course, me.

God, I am so fed up with this feeble god damned life of mine. Here I am, a truly one of a kind talent and intellect, with gifts most people would love to have, and yet my mental health issues keep me cooped up in this monk’s cell of a life. Hiding from the world. Burying my head in the sand by playing video games all the damned time. Dying a little bit more every day in this coffin. Living in filth because I can’t bring myself to wake the demon inside by attempting to clean.

Feeling like I am a seed buried too deep that can never reach the sunlight above. All I can do is dig through the dirt with agonizing slowness.

I deserve so much better than this. I should be a famous writer and creator by now,. with a comfy lifestyle, moderate renown, and a snuggly cute boyfriend.

Is that too much to ask, world?

But of course, the problem isn’t the universe, It’s me. I’m broken inside. And in such a way that it makes it so hard to help myself and nearly impossible for anyone else to help me at all.

I’m too good at keeping people at arm’s length without being obvious about it for that. For someone to help me I would have to be capable of lowering my defenses and letting them in, and that is not currently in the cards.

I am not even candid and open with my therapist. Not really.

And now to lay down and rest for an hour. Sigh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow..