After days of having to fight to stay awake, I am now bouncing off the walls.

Try for the one in the middle next time, life. Sheesh.

Still, this doesn’t have to turn into anxiety. After all, the physiological symptoms of anxiety and exhilaration are exactly the same. The only difference is in interpretation.

So you know what? I’m not anxious. And I’m not hyper. Nor am I climbing the walls.

I am motherfucking SUPERCHARGED. (heavy metal guitar RIFF!)

Now let’s get some shit done.

---

So last week’s groceries came entirely via Instacart, and to be honest, I doubt the Ironwood Sav-On is going to get another dime of my money.

Real Canadian Superstore via Instacart is so much easier to deal with. Better selection, lots of things Sav-On stopped carrying ages ago, and no frigging $40 minimum order.

Look, if I was there in person, you wouldn’t be demanding that I buy at least $40 worth of stuff before you sell me anything.

And don’t talk to me about delivery, because you charged me separately for that too!

Fucking Jim Pattison.

Anyhow, I am through with them and their aggravations.

Instagram did screw up, though. I ended up with the full sugar version of one bottle of Canada Dry Ginger Ale and two packages of Voortman cookies.

I am diabetic. That is not an acceptable result.

But I logged in to Instacart today and told them about the snafu, and they immediately refunded the money for the products to my account.

Well. That worked out well. Faith in Instacart restored!

---

Still not feeling great.

I mean, it’s great to not be super sleepy all the time. But I still have a feeling like the moment right before your ears pop in an airplane all the time. And it’s wearying.

And my brain is still lagging behind too. It’s taking me forever to get these 500 words out because while the words are in my head as usual, herding them together and moving through the gulley to my mouth is running slow.

Congestion in the gulley, I suppose.

I feel like I need a flushing out of some sort. A nice deep cleansing to clear out accumulated toxins and gunk so I can reboot the system.

I suppose this is when some people resort to enemas.

Contraindicated with a vengeance for us Irritable Bowel Syndrome sufferers. Take the indication against using laxatives or firmatives and triple it for enemas.

Which is too bad. They seem kind of fun.

I’ll just keep running water through my system the old fashioned way : by drinking it.

---

I feel kinda blank deep inside at the moment.

Sorta painfully numb. Like when the Novacaine is just beginning to wear off after a root canal. It’s a numbness with an edge. A foreboding numbness.

Whatever. It’s only pain. Yeah it sucks but compared to things like fear and dread and that terrible sadness that feels like someone is very slowly ripping your soul in two, it is definitely not the worst thing out there.

And neither am I.

More after the break.

---

Feeling the twilight

Been down and up and emptied my very fully bladder again.

But I feel like I am getting somewhere. I think my mood pendulum’s arc is getting shorter and shorter, suggesting that some time soon I might stop swinging entirely and hang loose in the middle somewhere.

Still don’t exactly feel fantastic. Sometimes I wish I was a car so I could take myself in for a quick lube job and a change of fluids.

Been thinking about imprinting today. Tastes. They play a profound effect in our lives and we all acknowledge we have them – I like raspberry, you like mint – but we don’t question where they come from.

Only mental mutants like me think about weird shit like that.

At some point, we imprint on things. We try something and like it and somewhere a card with that thing’s name on it is added to your “things we like” file.

But the thing that I can’t seem to stop harping on is that at no point do you decide what you like. You decide whether you like something or not, but you don’t decide whether you like it or not.

And once it is there, that’s it. It’s a part of you for the rest of your life no matter what. There is no way in the world to turn the guy who likes raspberry into one who likes mint.

And yet, we judge each other as if it was a choice. We say someone has “good taste” or “bad taste” as if it was some kind of achievement.

It was, at best, sheer luck.

Because what does having “good taste” mean, anyway? That your tastes are most like the most people’s tastes, so that if you like it, so wlil they?

That would make sense but that’s not how it works, is it? The people that the public put forth as having “good taste” often have tastes that are quite unlike the public’s taste.

And they take pride in that.

The public is meant to disregard their own tastes and try to force their tastes to be the same as the critic’s tastes so they can impress a lot of other phonies and wear the false feathers of a preening cuckoo.

To me, good taste can be summed up in a single word : YUM! If it tastes good to me, then it is in good taste, and the devil hang the rest.

To me, the job of the public critic is to guide people towards other things they might like, not to tell them what they SHOULD like. What a ludicrous idea!

In that sense, the critic is a scout. One who has gone there first and gotten a quick impression of the territory so that you, the reader, aren’t going in blind.

Online marketplaces have almost gotten there. The admirable simplicity of Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought this” formula has largely usurped the critic’s role as a brave pioneed.

Yet the critic remains because for some odd reason – perhaps to keep things from getting too spooky – we do not identify individuals whose tastes most align with our own.

That seems like the next logical step to me. Forget analytical abstractions. In my life, the most reliable sources of new things I’ll like has always been people with similar tastes. So why not give us that?

The math is pretty damned simple.

Maybe they’re afraid this system would identify people as tastemakers and then the big corps would descender upon these “influencers” like hungry piranha?

Makes as much sense as anything, I suppose.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. More water imagery!

Today is going to be an adventure. I am setting out into the still and dark waters of my sleeping mind with no idea how far I will go or where I will end up.

Should be interesting,

Yesterday, Joe and Julian and I watched the Albert Finney version of Scrooge.

It’s a musical version that I remember quite fondly from my childhood. I adored it back then. It was so colorful and musical and expressive and full of Xmas spirit. It always left me feeling positively aglow with the spirit of the holidays and I looked forward to watching it will my family every year.

And now….. eh.

Now it is an overblown, overdone, overly ornamented overwrought bit of corny, cheesy excess that I now find quite frankly embarrassing.

Albert Finney is still a damn good Scrooge, radiating bitterness and malice and rapacious greed, and that’s still my favorite Ghost of Christmas Present, all giant and jolly and Jovian and, best of all, absolutely mercilessly sarcastic to Scrooge.

It’s like he shows up in the movie to be the voice of us, the audience.

And it’s that great green pagan figure I want to talk aboujt today because it is he whose lesson I so deeply want to learn.

See, even though we’re pretty unalike on the surface, I have always identified very deeply with ol Ebby Scrooge. It’s a story I never tire of because I consider his journey to be mine as well, and I can very easily imagine my falling into the miser’s trap.

And I have figured out why, I think : it all stems from a derangement of values that causes one to put far too much emphasis on what one sees as “real” and “solid” and “reliable”… like money.

At its root, this disorder is about security. The miser has had some traumatic experience(s) that involved losing something precious (a person, a home, a love) and caused them to cast about for something more “real” etc.

And I can dig it. I grasp the falsity of golden idols so that’s not a route I would have been likely take, but I am scarcely better off as someone who gave up on absolutely everything and withdrew from reality into the realm of the mind.

A counting-house or a bedroom with toys, either way we’ve cut ourselves from all sources of the warmth and connection and light that could cure our dreadful loneliness in a very wrongheaded attempt to be “safe”.

It’s like locking oneself in with a lion to escape a mouse.

That’s why I want to learn the Ghost of Xmas Present’s lesson so badly. I know that I would be far better off being more open, expansive, welcoming to life, and overall just plain happy because I am so much more capable of celebrating life.

That’s far preferable to my usual turtled up and suspicious attitude towards life where the real world is always seen as a cold, hostile, brutal place whose tortures can only be escaped via total physical, intellectual, and emotional isolation.

A state in which all that is trust is the world of the mind and all that can get in must get in via that electric pathway known as “the media”.

So video games, YouTube, TikTok, and so on.

All things which entertains the brain but chill the heart and starve the soul.

Junk food, essentially. And like with real junk food, the main problem is not the bad that comes in, it’s a good that it displace.

So let me hereby embark a quest to look for soul food and heart’s true joy and all those other marvelous things that my being needs so badly.

I need emotional nutrition, dammit.

And that means gently and carefully letting go of my grey growling glare that refuses to let my mind create any of that which it needs because that would not be “real”.

Well fuck real. I’m a pragmatist. Give me whatever works.

And if that happens to be candy coated illusions and delusions of grandeur, so be it.

More after the break.

---

Some recent acquisitions

Recently bought and tried out Persona 4 Golden. Then returned it without ever having made it to the actual game.

That’s because the fricking thing is 50 percent visual novel. And I can’t stand visual novels. I like actual video games.

Like I always say, I love to read and I love to play games but I don’t play games to read.

But I was on the cusp of crossing the two hour limit for returns and thereby committing to the damned thing because the reviews are orgasmic and everybody and their little blue budgie praises the games in that series for being AMAZING and I decided to restrain my usual flightiness when it comes to games and dig in for as long as it actually took to get to actual game content… then it started crashing all the time.

Well don’t that just figure.

So I returned it and now I am back at square one. Still looking for my New Thing.

I did get some new games from one of those Humble Bundle deals. Six games, $12 or so, what the hell.

The star of the pack was the third Wastelands game, a turn based post apocalyptic sci fi RPG with a good reputation.

And a hell of a learning curve. They throw you right into a pitched battle at the very beginning of the game, with hordes of redneck cultists trying to kill you and shit exploding all over the place and a huge robot scorpion.

All before I even know Thing 1 about playing the damned game.

I get the feeling they assumed new players had played the previous games because the tutorial is minimal and way too stressful for my old ass.

It’s suppose to hearken back to the strategic RPGs of the past.

I never played those.

There’s a reason for that.

So right now, the only thing keeping me dragging myself forward in the game is the promise of more of its “all the awards” winning writing.

So I probably will give it at least one more time.

But jeezly fuck, give a guy a break!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The last little while has been almost entirely devoted to sleep and peeing.

I’m serious. For the most part I have been sleeping punctuated by my waking up with a VERY full bladder in urgent need of being emptied.

So I guess my body has decided I need to catch up on two fronts today.

And it’s annoying. I prefer to have a choice about going to sleep or to the bathroom and for the last 16 hours said choice has been largely taken away from me.

I suppose I should be glad I at least got to make it to the toilet before I peed.

Speaking of which, I have emptied said over-filled bladder at least six times in the last 12 hours. That is an impressive amount of urine to discharge.

I won’t bother wondering where I store it all, like I usually do when I hit one of these patches. Logically, there must be somewhere it lurks until it’s time to let loose.

Somewhere possibly extradimensional. Dimension P.

Seriously, though, the obvious though somehow unsatisfying answer is that it is somehow retained in my cells.

What causes this retention remains a mystery. I suspect it has something to do with sodium being retained in my cells as well.

And I do have a fair bit of salt in my diet. But that’s something I ironically do in order to fight my tendency toward dehydration.

I suppose it’s better to pee a lot than be dehydrated.

But it just seems wrong somehow. Unbalanced. Not to mention being just plain annoying having to go pee all the dang time.

The sleepiness is old hat to me, of course. I’ve had these sleepy periods now and then for a long ol time.

They too can be annoying. As patient readers know, I can be groovy and mellow with the whole somnolent vibe for a while but eventually I am going to want to DO something besides sleep and then it becomes a problem.

Drat my restless ramblin’ ways!

More worrisome is that my back has been bothering me lately. Seems like it’s always tight and aching. Feels like there is something gastrointestinal going on that is causing a big, complex knot of tension to form in that fussy area atop my spine and leading from between my shoulder blades down to a foot above my injured L4 vertebra.

At first I thought it was the vertebra itself that was hurting, and that would have raised the alert level a bit.

But no, that area is involved but there’s no acute pain anywhere near there. Thankfully.

So it’s just a matter of trying to relax and let my body and mind do whatever they need to do without my overwrought mind screwing things up.

My conscious mind is such a micromanager.

I’ve been feeling the angry apathy stirring lately. That “fuck everything everywhere forever” kind of feeling. The frustrating feeling than nothing matters. nothing means anything, and everything is worthless and lifeless and boring.

I think it comes from being really fucking tired.

More after the break.

---

As the stars gently rain down to earth

Feeling kind of sadly sweet and sweetly sad at the moment.

A sense of gentle apocalypse sings softly in my soul. The rain drops in waves, like a vertical ocean caused by a sprinkler the size of the entire sky. Windshields become aquarium glass and the puddles sheet up to slap the car like a duel is being declared.

Yet the rain isn’t cold. Nor is it warm. It’s the sort of tepid luke-warm temperature you get when the sun-showers are in the middle of turning into rain.

And sky-dark and night-dark blend together to erase all boundaries between night and day and hang us up like soggy towers in the nether realm betwixt.

And the streets all smell like wet dust and baked asphalt, and people are shielding their eyes with military salutes as they look up to confirm that it is, indeed, raining.

Such reckless speculation demands hard data to confirm.

And the puddles slurp and slop and gurgle deep in their disturbed digestive tracts as the drains overflow with unspeakable solids and the heavily drew=drenched and pollen-rich odor of rainwater percolated through flowers and leaves is gradually replaced by the nose-grating smell of plant matter in accelerated decay.

I guess this is how a poet cries.

Never could manage to do things the easy way.

Been sleeping and peeing more. Not at the same time.

But at least this time, I feel like I am getting somewhere. There some kind of deep cell-level flushing process going on and with every rinse cycle, I feel a tad cleaner.

Got to keep my waters flowing, though. No point of washing the garbage annd grime out of my soul if there’s no underground river to wash it all away

The worst part is that I am still so tired that the words are coming mighty slow.

Not as bad as last night when I got home from Xmas dinner, though. Wow was that a drag. I could barely type, let along string together coherent sentences.

So if I was even less coherent than usual last night, I apologize. I was so tired that I would type the same word three or four times before it came out right.

Then there was sentence structure to wrangle with. Oy gevalt.

Tonight I am dropping in and out of conscious connection far less often. It’s still much harder to farm words than usually, and that’s a drag. But this too shall pass.

These rainstorms of mine pass through my skies sooner or later. Maybe not as fast as I would like them to but eventually they have to clear out and go home and leave me in peace so I can finally get some of my tears cried.

So far I can only squeezes them out a few minutes at a time.

Surely I can do better than that.

Isn’t that right, Shirley?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh god, I hope not.

But it would figure.

See, I’m not feeling very good right now. It’s my usual suite of symptoms. Sore throat, headache, raw feeling in my lungs, mild dizziness and disorientation. Brain fog is a bit thicker and clingier than usual. My teeth hurt,

And I will be heading to Xmas dinner in an hour and a half or so. So, yay.

I am hoping that food, hydration, and my usual sinus unclogging measures can bring me back to life enough to go with Joe to Xmas Dinner at his parents’ place.

Missing that due to ill health would be almost infinitely depressing.

I mean, if I am truly sick, I shouldn’t go. Joe’s parents are quite old and I would hate for them to catch something from me, the sad waif they take in once a year.

But if it’s just the odd syndrome I get now and then, with no clear and definite sign of infection that doesn’t clear up once I am fed and watered, I can go.

And I want to go. It’s a highlight of the year for me. It’s always me, Joe, Joe’s sister Melanie, and his parents, and then me as their sole guest.

And not only are they lovely hosts for little old me, they are all highly intelligent and engaging conversationalists as well, and that makes me feel positively spoiled.

And I really like that feeling. Makes me feel all warm inside.

So I am going to do my best to patch myself up and get better so I can enjoy myself for the evening in a way that actually involves other people.

Ones I don’t even live with! Oh my. How very.

The water is already making me feel somewhat better. That’s a good sign, n’est-ce pas?

On the plus side of things, my mother called, and it always does me good to hear her voice. Reminds me that I am not entirely cut off from my origins.

There has to be some way to get back in touch and stay in touch with my siblings and my mother. I miss them all so much.

Got some family news. Apparently my Uncle Jim lives all alone and has become even more bitter and cynical.

The latest is that he doesn’t believe in Covid. Thinks it’s no worse than the flu and people are blowing things out of proportion and all that crap.

Add that to the fact that he sometimes calls up my mother, his (much) older sister, just to rag on and mock something he knows she loves, and a picture forms.

He’s got Ingrown Personality Syndrome, and as far as I know, there is no cure.

The name I gave it comes from the way it makes an isolated person turn inward and become ever more bitter and resentful while cloaking themselves in a deepening sense of dark superiority while becoming increasingly incapable of behaving like a human being at all.

It’s like an addiction to the sour sense of smugness that comes from cynicism, and it’s irreversible because it feeds upon itself.

The patient is fouling their own nest with this toxic insularity, and this causes them pain. But their ego won’t let them see that they are the source of their own pain, so instead they blame the world, and project their pain onto chosen scapegoats, and turn even further away from the world and their own humanity.

Which causes even more pain, and so on and so forth.

I’ve lost two friends to it. It’s devastating.

On the other hand, my sister Catherine just returned from Tanzania where she was part of the Canadian delegation to the World Economic Forum.

Next step President of Earth, obviously.

Well I think I am alive enough to make it to dinner. Knock on wood.

More after the break.

---

An inch of white snow

Dinner was fine. More or less.

Food, wine, and conservation where are in abundance and I feel quite good all through the festivities. That is a drastic improvement about previous Xmass where I had to wade through deep puddles of social anxiety before I could get myself calmed down enough enough to relax and enjoy myself.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while I was there, first my thumb went numb and tingly and then my next finger and the middle finger started to join it.

I was able to bend and rub and twist the feeling back into my digits and beinf things back to mostly normal.

But then my right jaw went numb and I had to force that area back into life to behave all oved again again .

Then it seemed like I was doing OK-ish. Until I sat down and tried to write only to find that it is very difficult to words make the making on the pages.

So writing has been much harder than usual. Hopefully, this is entirely because i am very tired because of my being way busier than usual, and not because I have head another TIA or ten and I am teetering on the edge of a big time full blown stroke.

I guess only time will tell. I know that what I probably should have done is go straight to the ER once I started getting number. That would be the smart thing to do.

But I did not want to interrupt my lovely evening and so I didn’t say anything to anyone about any of it and just hopes it wasn’t a suicidally stupid thing to do.

Once I am done here, I am going to go take my clothes off, crawl into bed, go the hell to sleep, and hopefully wake up feeling a lot better.

If not… if I am in fact worse off… I will have to go to the god damned ER.

Oh well. At least I will have my tablet this time. That should make things way easier,. especially if I end being admitted.

Hope I see you tomorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The calendar always gets it wrong by a bit.

Tonight’s going to be the longest night.

At least for those of us who will be spending it alone.

Yes, while everybody and their best friend’s other dog are getting together with their friends and families and that weird guy from work, we the lonely will be sitting at home all by ourselves and trying hard to keep our hearts from breaking.

Or at least, hold the pieces together.

Yes, it’s Xmas Eve, and as usual, my friends are all off spending it with their families while my family is an entire continent away. The closest relative that I know of is my Uncle Jim, and he’s both Muslim and in Toronto.

Plus I barely know him.

As for members of my immediate family, it used to be that I could claim my sister Catherine as the geographically closest sibling.

But that’s when she lived near the western border of Quebec. But now she is living her best life as a high flying government official in Washington, DC, and that’s at least a bit further east than Manalapan, New Jersey, where my sister Anne lives, so Anne is now the closest to me in terms of physical distance.

In term of emotional distance, they’re all dead last.

That’s not entirely their fault, however. I am as capable of reaching out to say hello as they are, at least from their point of view.

From my point of view, well. social anxiety is a bear and mine makes it very hard to reach out to anyone for any reason ever.

I try but then this withering frost hits me and I shrivel up inside like a dead tree in winter and the feeling that nobody wants to hear from me and will resent my even reminding them that I’m alive overwhelms me and I crumble.

After all, as far as I know, they are getting along fine without me. They certainly don’t seem to me pining for my presence otherwise they would contact ME.

But an alarm just went off in my head warning me that now is not a good time to be entertaining such bitterly self-pitying and maudlin thoughts.

To stay safe, I need to stop those chains of thought before they can tighten their grip on me and choke all sense of reason and reality out of me.

As long as I tread carefully around emotional landmines – and there’s a lot of them right now – and keep reminding myself that everything will go back to normal on Monday so I just have to make it through the night, so to speak, I will be fine.

Besides, it would be absurd to die just because I feel sad. Especially when there is a very non fatal way to deal with it : cry.

Yes, cry. We men suffer greatly from our cultural programming against crying.

Well I am not going to keep doing it. I am going to finish this half of my blogging then lie down, turn the lights out, and do my best to have a damned good cry.

Wish me luck.

More after the break.

---

No more tears

Well, I didn’t end up crying.

In fact, my depression did me dirty by making me forget all about my intention to cry by making me very sleepy instead.

And being the invalid that I am, I rarely have a reason not to go to sleep when I feel sleepy, and having no caffeine in my system to help ward off a big nap attack, I have lost most of my ability and motivation to resist sleep.

But now that sleep, like everything else, is an agent in my depression’s deviltries, I have to be suspicious of my sleepiness too.

But what I really want to talk about tonight is my long history of passivity.

I mean, I’m never intentionally passive. It just kind of happens.

I swear that will be a joke when it grows up.

Anyhow, extreme passivity. Previously, I have described it as being caused by my equally extreme reluctance to leave the cozy and disgusting nest deep in here where I first withdrew from life while being raped.

That’s also the Trog’s cave. The place he never wants to leave and squeals like an anally violated pig if anything, no matter how good, tries to take us out of there.

As far as it is concerned, the outside world is worse than utter annihilation. It’s that unnamable menace, the Worst Possible Thing, that which is so horrible that nothing specific you can conceive of can possibly encompass it.

And that all comes from that extreme withdrawal from the world. That is what causes the Inward Tide in me that crushes everything like heavy gravity and is always pulling me down, down, down.

It’s a very powerful force that underlies my entire psyche. In fact, I get the feeling that force is the engine behind the entire demonic shitshow that is my depression.

So to change that, I would have to reach down to that fundamental sense of safety that got shattered when I was raped, and somehow convince it that extracranial reality is not necessarily a bad thing and that time voluntarily spend outside of my head might actually be pleasant and pleasing instead of like being naked at midnight in the tundra.

Hmm. That sounds familiar.

That would involve changing a very very deep setting in my emotional BIOS. Not the sort of thing one can reason oneself into.

Not without their being a hell of a lot of emotional work going on too.

But I can start here : I’m not afraid any more.

The real world is not a scary, harsh, and hostile place I need to avoid as much as possible to minimize exposure.

I am perfectly capable of leaving this fetid nest of mine, walking straight out of this cave, and handling myself in the fresh air and sunshine.

I am not a trembling hothouse flower doomed to cling to whatever gardener I can find who will protect me from the real world.

I can do this. I can go out into the world and cope. I can fuck up, learn, and move on. I can finally develop as a person.

I can be a true blue bonafide grownup.

It won’t even be that hard.

Look out world, I’m comin’ for ya!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No, really. It is.

In that it’s still Real Winter out there. Damn it. And I suspect it might keep being Seasonal Saturnalia for a good long time. Possibly till spring.

It would be such a colossal bummer if my beloved Left Coast had the same climate as the rest of Canada in the future.

Like I have said before, there is not one tiny trace of nostalgia for winter left in me.

When I first moved to the GVRD in 1998, it felt very strange for winter times to come and go with no winter.

To my senses, it was like a late fall that lasted all the way till spring.

And every year when the days got short and the skies turned grey and then it more or less just stayed that way, I would feel this vague aching tension as if my body was waiting for the other shoe to fall.

And I genuinely missed winter… or thought I did.

But over the years, we had some spates of l’hiver vrai at this time of year, and at the same time I was acclimating to my new home, and then the final blow came :

I turned 40.

And the cold started hurting my lungs. Then the end of my nose. Then inside my nose. And finally, it started to hurt my bones.

And that did it. Fuck winter. I hope to never see it again. At this point, even living in LA, where the sun can indeed shine every day, sounds good.

At least it’s a dry heat.

Hey, it’s a cliché for a reason. It’s vastly preferable to moist heat. Take it from someone who has lived in both.

Meanwhile, I cleverly thought I would stay one step ahead of the fuckery by ordering my groceries a day early to be delivered tomorrow, Xmas Eve, because I had a funny old feeling that getting them delivered on Xmas Day might be tricky.

Alas, I was not nearly clever enough. Every slot for tomorrow was taken by the time I got around to ordering my stuff.

This makes sense because that’s when everyone would be ordering those last minute Xmas Eve/Xmas Day items you forgot until now.

“Oh my god! SUGAR PLUMS! We don’t have any SUGAR PLUMS!”
“What the hell are sugar plums?”
“I have no idea, but we HAVE to HAVE them or Christmas is RUINED!”
“,,, have you been drinking last year’s eggnog again?”

Ah well, live and learn. I added some Xmas treats for myself to the list this time and I won’t be getting them till Boxing Day. C’est la vie.

My room is still too damned cold. I have been poking around the Canadian Tire website to see if I can find what I knew as “thermal tape” in my childhood.

It’s tape you use to seal up the gaps around windows and other small heat-leaking areas. Every year, my Dad would fill the gaps with thermal caulk then cover them with a layer of said thermal tape.

And it worked. No cold air was getting through THAT.

But of course, we live in an era where there’s too many damn many varieties of everything and none of them are the thermal tape of my youth so now I have to plow my way through a forest of potential solutions to figure out which one seems like something I and my roomies are competent to do.

Why does everything have to be so fricking complicated??

More after the break.

---

With blazing heat!

Well here I am again, needing to do 400 words in 45 minutes, which works out to roughly a word a minute.

I ain’t worried. I type way more than a word a minute, obviously, and I’ve beat the clock like this before.

I have been training myself to be prolific by writing in this blog for the last 11 years and that means this is not even a challenge, really.

I mean, I went through all of the VFS Writing for Movies and Television one year “intensive” program without even feeling the strain until the end. I could have done the program three times over in that year.

Because I’m fucking awesome.

Not having a life helps too, naturally. It’s not like I had to fit my course work into my busy social calendar or anything.

To be honest, the hardest thing about my time at VFS was the same as the hardest thing about my time at Kwantlen and all other levels of education :

Getting there and back.

Whether it’s taking one bus or traveling from one end of the Millennium Line from one end to the other, it’s always been hardest and most laborious part of school for me to go from home to school and back again.

It would be amazing to go to school with a nice warm drive, door to door, for the entire journey. In cabs, or in a friendly friend’s car.

Once I am actually at school, it’s smooth sailing. The courses are easy and fun, and I almost always do quite well in them.

And I am long past the point of worrying about bullying.

So yeah. I’d like school fine if it wasn’t for the travel portion.

Makes a good case for taking courses online, I suppose. Still an option. I could probably get a distance education for pretty cheap or even free, and then I might even get a degree in something with more of a future than writing for TV.

Remember, kids, don’t go for a degree in something with very few job openings unless you know you are a highly competitive winner type person.

Us soft and sensitive creative types don’t stand a chance.

Unless we can get an agent.

In this scenario, agents shine like angels above us all. They are the magical people who can take on all that competition stuff and create that most magical of conditions :

A world where all you have to do is the thing you do. Act, sing, write, and so on.

They take care of the rest and you just watch the money roll in.

Such a beautiful dream. Makes me want to cry.

And now to do today’s TikTok.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For some dang reason that song has been stuck in my head today.

Oh wait, I know, it’s because I am always fucking cold.

At least when I am not in bed under the covers. There, I can actually feel warm. Patient readers know that’s actually an improvement from before, when even under the covers I was cold as hell.

Then I turned the heat up in my room, and things got better… under the covers.

But I have the heat cranked all the way up right now and I am still frickin’ cold as I sit here in front of Mister Computer.

In fact, the second I get up and out from under the covers, I am losing heat, and I will get colder and colder until I go back to bed.

I can think of two reasons for this.

First, there’s the fact that my computer desk is directly in front of a great big window. And windows are drafty.

Normally, this is a minor problem because it doesn’t get that cold around here. Historically, temperatures below freezing are a rarity around here and if we get any “real winter” it’s only for a couple of days, and quite mild.

But this is the year that all changes, I think. Thanks to the global climate disaster, everything is changing, and right now that means Old Man Winter has settled in for a good long stay on the formerly Wet Coast.

And that means my big old window radiates cold right now.

So I am going to order me some thermal insulation tape and get Joe and Julian to help me tape up all the cracks and seams in that big old window and hopefully make this dirty old box I live in just a little more livable.

The other cause is my poor circulation.

It really feels like my body just isn’t heating up my blood and circulating it well enough to keep me warm.

I keep waiting for my body’s “polar bear mode” to kick in and warm me up. Usually, feeling subzero temperatures on my skin is enough to knock the dust off my inner furnace and start it up, but that does not seem to be in the cards now.

Back home in the Maritimes, every year I would be cold in late fall until I was outside feeling the cold (usually because I wasn’t wearing a jacket yet) and then I swear I could feel my metabolism shift gears and start making a lot more heat.

Well I am still waiting this year. Might be that due to my poor health that mode is just not available any more.

As a result of all this, plus the darkness of this time of year, my mood is taking a beating. The cold makes me feel feeble and weak and insecure and vulnerable.

And those feelings do not need that kind of help.

Even worse, I feel a storm of irritability rising underneath the pall of despair. I have had a number of “fuck my life” or “I hate my life” moments lately and that is never good.

At least I see this problem coming and can be ready to apply extra restraint and self-control if I feel a case of the crankies coming on.

More after the break.

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Got no sun up in the sky

Song #2 that’s stuck in my head today :

Gaaaah her voice is so incredible it’s almost painful. I listen to her sing and it flips my lid. It’s like my senses can’t believe anything can be that good.

And she’s singing one of the greatest sad songs of all time.

*yoink* said the music loving fox.

It’s a song I can relate to, except there’s no missing man in my life.

Well, not a specific one, anyhow.

For me, love is something that happens to other people, like most of life. I am not consciously lonely in a romantic sense because I have no idea what I am missing.

I’ve never been in a romantic relationship. I have been hidden away from life by my mental illness for my entire adult life.

And clever trickster that I am, I not only hide from life, I hide the fact that I am hiding from life. Many who have met me are shocked when I tell them I suffer from depression because I don’t “act” depressed.

My personal demeanor is always warm and upbeat. I smile, I make silly little jokes, I radiate my own brand of gentle charisma. I always seem like the opposite of depressed.

And that’s not fake. I am not some completely different person stifled by a mask they feel compelled to wear.

But there is a lot of talk “unmasking” on TikTok lately. In that case, they are talking about autistic people learning to just be themselves instead of wearing the social mask they have had to learn to wear to “fit in”, but it got me thinking.

I am well aware of my social mask. My problem is that I prefer the mask to myself. I would rather be that guy than be me.

Ergo unmasking is almost unthinkable to me. When I try to imagine it, I get right up to the point of truly visualizing it and just stop. My mind refuses to go any further.

That doesn’t mean there is nothing behind the mask. That’s absurd.

There’s just nothing that wants to be seen or known beneath the mask. So it cloaks itself in darkness and fear, and thus hides itself from itself.

Nothing to see here, move along, no metaconsciousness allowed.

As a result, I have absolutely no concept of who I am sans mask. My sense of self and the mask are as one. As far as my basic consciousness knows, I really am that friendly, cheerful, waggy fox type person.

That’s certainly who I WANT to be. Who I would RATHER be.

But I know that’s not true. There is the realest me, the maker and wearer of masks, the unseen figure lurking in the shadows and pulling the strings.

And I strongly intuit that getting to know THAT fellow is key to my recovery because that’s the only way I can create a whole and fully integrated sense of self.

Until then, all I am really doing is costume changes.

And those don’t really change a thing, do they?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pretty sure I’ve used that title before. Oh well.

New (ish) today : a delivery via Instacart is on its way. It’s a grocery delivery services in the same way that Uber Eats is a food delivery services and I have used them a couple times before, but not recently

But I needed a few things and my usual grocery destination, the Sav-on Foods at Ironwood, still has their ridiculous “$40 minimum order for delivery” policy, so I figured I might as well give them another shot.

And it’s a lot of fun because you can type in what you want and get results from every grocery and convenience store in your area.

Which is great for bargain hunters.

I am not one, in general. I would describe myself more as “very open to bargains but not inclined to actively hunt for them”.

Because honestly, for me, bargain hunting can almost never survive cost/benefit analysis. At least at the grocery store level.

Like, how much effort am I going to put into saving 15 cents on a can of yams?

Mainly, the point of my giving Instacart another try is that I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the Ironwood Sav-on and I want to try other options for my weekly groceries and I figured Instacart was a great place to start.

In theory, I could order ten different things from ten different stores via Instacart, though I am pretty sure that would rack up a LOT of fees and tips.

So all my stuff is coming from Real Canadian Superstore. This is the perfect way to shop from RCS, because I still get their wide selection and low prices without having to bag my own stuff.

I hate bagging my own stuff. Not that it’s complicated or difficult.

But you can take the boy out of the middle class but you can’t take the middle class out of the boy. And to my mind, that’s somebody else’s job, not mine.

Hmm. My delivery window is between 3 pm and 5 pm, and it’s 4:45 pm. Nervous.

Oh well, it’s hardly mission critical.

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The other event of the day is that I will be going in for a CT scan at 7 pm tonight.

Once more, I am having my head examined.

And none too soon after my recent terrifying but thankfully temporary speech issue. That might well have been a TIA, or “mini-stroke”. and I need answers.

I really don’t want to end up even more crippled than I am.

Especially not my powers of speech.

The CT scan is no big deal to me. I’ve had plenty of them. I know where Medical Imaging is in Richmond Hospital, I know I don’t have an adverse reaction to the tracer dye they use, I am quite used to the freaky cool science fiction noises it makes, like I am in a death trap arranged by supervillain obsessed with hard drives, so I am good.

Suck a bit having to deal with the Actual Winter out there to get there and back. It was nuts getting to and from Wound Care yesterday. A foot of snow on the roads, unplowed,. and traffic full of people who are not used to this at all.

If I had any nostalgic longing for Real Winter left in me, that killed it.

Bring back the wetness!

More after the break.

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On stopping not doing things

Let’s talk about my aversions.

Patient readers know that I have a serious issue with aversions. I develop them with ease and get rid of them only with enormous effort.

Or, to put it simply but confusingly, once I start not doing something, it is extremely hard for me to start doing it again,

I don’t know why this is. It could be seen as a manifestation of depression’s anti-action bias, I suppose. My mind is so geared against doing things that the second I internally express not wanting to do something, my subconscious mind pounces and starts filling in the tunnel like in an Indiana Jones movies so that I can NEVER do that thing.

Or at least, that’s how it feels. Like we’ve tilted the cartoonish metaphor on its side now and the thing I decided not to do is in a hole in the ground with a lid, and my subconscious mind immediately starts piling heavy stones on the lid to make it harder and harder to lift.

Well this shit has to stop. And it starts with lifting the goddamned lid anyway.

Ignore the bullshit messages my depressed mind uses to convince me that everything is impossible, summon up my mighty mental muscle, and flip that fucker.

Basically, I want to stop believing my depressed mind’s negative inputs. I will view with great hostility and suspicion any suggestion that something is impossible for me, or can never happen, or that I am powerless to steer my own fate.

You know why? Because I’m fucking awesome. I’m amazing. I have nigh-miraculous abilities that let me do astounding thing and that means I have power

Yes, power, motherfuckers. I am through with denying my own power because I didn’t want the responsibility. I am sick and tired of being afraid of myself. I am going to seize the reins of my mighty steed and ride that big dicked fucker all the way to the top.

I’m gonna get me some of the good stuff before I am too old to enjoy it. I’m gonna get a great place to live, a really nice British luxury vehicle, a very generous travel budget, and oodles of the very best nerd toys.

And it all will be MINE.

And all I got to do is released my black beast and ride it to the top.

Yeah. I can do this. It’s time to enter my yuppie phase.

I got the power. I just need to have the guts to use it.

And you know what? I might not use it in a responsible fashion. I might use it entirely for my own enrichment and entertainment. I might, in fact, make it all about me.

I’ve hidden my light under a bushel for way too long.

Now I’m gonna burn that bushel down.

I finally got some ambition, baby!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not in a self-harm sense. So relax.

No, what I mean is to just stop holding myself together. I feel like I have been doing that for most of my life and I am starting to wonder why.

It made some sense when I was going to school. I had to keep pulling myself together in order to even get out of bed and go to school, let alone make it through the day.

But I haven’t been in any kind of school for five years. And the small events in my life, like Denny’s, Wound Care, and hanging with Joe and Julian don’t exactly require much in the way of girding my loins, so I really have no practical reason to do it.

Just force of habit. And fear. Always fear.

Fear that if I just let myself fully fall apart, I will never be able to put myself back together and I will be more disconnected and underpowered and disjointed than I was before I foolishly threw it all away.

That seems unlikely to me now. In fact, it smells strongly of my depression’s particular brand of bullshit. A boogeyman whose tasks it is to scare me aware from doing things that might actually help me.

And one thing is for sure : letting myself fall to pieces would sure as hell make me feel better because I have finally fully laid my burden down.

Lord knows how much energy holding myself together drains out of me. Even the drain I can feel on the surface seems like a lot, and it goes down into many, many layers of frozen emotions and hasty patch jobs all the way through.

In fact, I honestly don’t know how much of me is real and how much is depressive bullshit with no more substance than candy glass.

The only way to find out is to let everything go and let the sunlight in and a soft warm rain then let everything false melt in the sun and get washed away, leaving nothing but the real me behind.

My gut feeling is that a heck of a lot of me would go down the drain and that it would not be too hard to put myself back together because there will be so much less bullshit to maneuver around and take into account and placate.

Like I keep saying, there’s nothing in me that is more important than my getting better.

So anything that blocks or impedes my recovery has got to fucking go.

I will metaphorically gnaw my own arm off if it is holding me back.

There’s is a great big magnificent world just waiting for me to come and turn on its lights with all my personality intellectual electricity so I can dazzle them with just how fucking amazing I am and all the wonders I can create for them.

And land myself a solidly middle class lifestyle in the process.

Hey, even I am not ALL altruistic. I want a pleasant life too.

And I’mma gonna git me one.

More after the break.

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Take that, hornet’s nest!

I did it, I did it, I finally god damned did it.

I posted something to deliberately stir up trouble and it actually did it!

I posted a deliberately inflammatory anti-conservative video on TikTok and some of these dumb motherfuckers took the bait.

It’s always helpful when your opponents have a tendency towards unthinking knee-jerk reactions where they just reflexively spew half-digested words like a regurgitating toddlers without a shred of substance to anything they say.

It’s pure wargabl and I love it, because it is hilarious. And pathetic.

None of them even made content with what I said, tacitly admitting that yup, conservatives are a bunch of cowardly little babies.

I told you I was inflammatory.

And in a language even they could understand : schoolyard taunting.

One just spewed crap about my appearance and what they assumed was my lifestyle, living off of something called CERB.

I assume it’s some form of social assistance.

I told him that proved he had nothing substantial to say.

Another one did the whole, “Like Justin Trudeau is any better!”

I told that one that it’s pretty sad when your best argument for your side is that they are no better than people they consider enemies of the state.

Another said she bets I had never been to a protest. a council meeting, or negotiated anything in my life, so my words made no sense.

I asked her what the fuck that had to do with anything.

Oh hey, I think I just figured out how to post Tiktok videos outside TikTok!

Click here to see me in action.

As you can see in the comments, I am having the time of my life.

Welcome to the parlor, said the spider to the flies. By attacking me (very badly), you have stepped into my arena and challenged me, and that means I am not going to hold back. You’re getting the full force of my incredible mind focused into a tight coherent beam by all the bullshit I see American conservatives get away with because apparently Democrats are too goddamned wimpy to go for th jugular on these fools.

Me, I go straight for the jugular every single time. And in normal polite society, that’s a problem. I’ve had to learn to restrain my killer instinct in debate because playing as hard and as rough as I do is completely wrong in a friendly conversational setting.

But it’s perfectly accepted – even encouraged – online, so that is where I am going to make my mark by finally unleashing my awe inspiring powers of communications on a lot of crazy/stupid/evil motherfuckers in dire need of my brand of education.

My long term goal is to make conservatives on both sides of the border fear me.,

Quake with fear, you tiny FOOLS!

I will walk the world like a titan, and all evildoers will despair when they heard my tread.

More concretely. I want to be the chlorine in the pool that is public debate. I want to advance the debate by sweeping away terrible thought and lack of though and force a lot of people to either evolve or get the fuck out.

There’s way too much crazy/stupid/evil in this world right now.

And I plan to fix that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Could you climb a thousand steps? Probably not.

But could you climb one step a thousand times?

Sounds a lot more doable, doesn’t it?

It’s all in how you assess the task in your mind. If you imagine climbing a thousand steps, it’s as if you are picking up all thousand steps at the same time and saying “Nope, no way I can do this task, it’s way too heavy, ”

But if you imagine doing one step a thousand times, you are only picking up a single step, and saying, “This is so light! Yeah, I might be able to do this 1K times. ”

Yet the task has not changed in the slightest. Only your conception of it has. Yet now the task seems much, much easier.

And the new “one at a time” perception is actually the more accurate one, because you will only ever have to climb one step at a time.

At no point is it physically or logically possible to climb a thousand steps at the same time. So assessing the task that way makes absolutely no sense.

So why do we do it? Why do some of us do it all the time? What gives?

We do it because we don’t want to do the task.

But for whatever reason – usually pride – we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we just plain don’t want to do it and that on some deep layer of our minds it feels like we are avoiding work or travail and that can be a very addictive feeling.

So it is a very efficient form of self-defeat. If it was possible, you’d have to try. And you don’t want to try. So it’s not possible. QED.

Why so cunningly defeat yourself? Because you’re afraid. Afraid of the world. Afraid of growing up. Afraid that you will not be able to handle real actual; grown-up life. That it’s far too big a task for little old you to handle and you’d be crushed.

After all, who could possibly lift all of adult life at once?

That sounds vaguely familiar from somewhere.

And even worse, once you start succeeding at things, people will expect you to do it again and again and again on and on into infinity, and nobody can lift infinity, so it must be completely impossible to have an adult life.

Despite the fact that literally billions of human beings are doing it as we speak. You could not possibly need more proof that all this “impossible” stuff is pure bullshit and it is, in fact, perfectly possible to do, and in fact, even probable

But you don’t want to. You’re scared, and you don’t want to go. You want to stay. You would rather stay the eternal infant, no matter the cost, than have to face and overcome your enormous fear of growing up.

You are even willing to endure the enormous pain caused by blocked growth rather than have to grow up. You are a plant in far too small a pot and so you are rootbound and wretched and suffering all the time.

Still, it’s better than having to grow up, right?

After all, if you grow up, something bad might happen to you.

You might even get hurt.

More after the break.

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About adult relationships

What does it mean when a child gets along better with adults than with kids his age?

Because that’s what it was like for me when I was a preteen. Kids my age were mostly just a source of bullying. Even with the nicer ones, I just didn’t click. I wanted to be friends with them but I just didn’t know how to connect.

Thanks, lack of kindergarten!

But that wasn’t the only problem. No point in trying to ignore the elephant in the room : I was just way, way smarter than them,

I arrived at Grade 1 already able to read (well) and write (badly). I knew math up to but not including long division. I could speak with adults on their level. I could sing (okay).

But more than any of that, I was just on a totally different plane than most people.

I still am, to be honest, but I am much better at coming down to be with people.

This made me alien to my classmates. They might not have been on my level but they could sense my otherworldly strangeness and how far above them I was intellectually and that made me “weird”.

Basically, in that clip, little Simba is a normal kid and Scar is me.

Ya know, without the evil.

But you can see how some excitable people read something LGBTIA into it.

Where was I? I thread-jacked myself with the Lion King.

Oh right. I was being a weird kid.

The bitingly cruel irony is that my elevated IQ let me see my fellow children as what they were : children.

Children who thought and behaved childishly. Whereas I was “mature” and “sensible” and eerily self-possessed.

That was part of what adults found fascinating about me. Compared to most kids my age I might as well have been a talking dog. Hearing perfectly adult speech coming out of a little boy must have been quite bizarre.

Plus precocious kids have an appeal of their own. That’s why they show up as characters in sitcoms so much. In our deep social programming, a smart child is a “good” child in that we want our kids’ minds to grow and therefore a smart kid is a kid who is thriving, and that pleases us.

And I was a precocious little freckle faced redhead back then.

It’s like I walked straight out of Central Casting.

“We need a generic Youngest Child, Have you got one?”

“Yup. Got one right here. He’s even a lovable little smartass after you get him calmed down and relaxed. ”

“Yeah yeah. I bet he’s even a freckle faced redhead, right?”

“You know it. I’ll send him right over. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.