Eating my lunch after sunset once again.

My ability to eat my lunch on time (3 pm-ish) has really taken a beating lately. The problem is that I keep playing Fallout 76 right before lunch and that is a fully 3D, open world game with a very detailed world and hence it takes a lot out of me.

So I play it before lunch, then the moment I stop I realize I am very tired and need a nap before I take on my blogging.

Once more, I find myself sleeping when I should be eating.

And I know it’s no big deal in the grand scheme of things. So I end up eating a couple of hours later. It’s suboptimal but hardly catastrophic.

The reason it bugs me, though, is that it’s so hard for me to keep to any kind of a routine. My natural inclination is to improvise my way through life, making my decisions based on how I feel at the moment rather than according to any plan.

Which sounds okay in theory but in actuality it’s like being one of those people who volunteered to live deep in a cave for a long time to see what effect severe isolation like that has on a person.

Spoiler alert : it’s not good.

What I am getting at is that human beings are not meant to live lives completely free of structure and schedule. We need some basic rhythms and pulses to our lives in order to be able to control and steer them, and even more importantly, to feel like we are in control of them.

And I rarely feel like I am in control of things. I often feel quite powerless to do anything to improve my life. I am that which is acted upon, not that which acts.

But I know that’s not actually true. It’s just a lie I tell myself because despite seeming like a total bummer belief, it actually makes me feel better overall so that the desire to do productive things that might disrupt my depression’s hold on me.

I serve in ways I don’t even understand. God damn it.

Imagining myself to be powerless is so much easier than believing I am fully capable of making shit better for myself and all I have to do is pick which way to do it.

Out of the billons of possibilities.

Not something I know how to do. I know that the problem is that nobody can actually process all the variables I perceive and that therefore I need some other way of making the decisions, but so far, that’s as far as I have gotten.

I am nowhere near the point where I can simply do what I feel like doing. I suspect that to be the “correct” choice, but it requires a form of faith which I do not yet possess.

I have so little experience acting on emotion, after all. And up until this point at least, I have considered the very idea to be insane.

Act based on a temporary, vacillating, flickering thing like emotions, that don’t actually know anything about anything? Nonsense.

The delusional belief at the base of that,. I suppose, is the idea that it is possible to live a happy and productive life based solely on what one can know.

Yeah…. I don’t think so. There are so many needs that all that knowledge and logic and such can never fulfill because they are emotional needs.

Nothing I learn or deduce can make me feel any warner or more connected to others or less scared of the overstimulating world.

The world of the mind can be fascinating, illuminating, even thrilling.

But it can’t be comforting, soothing, or even truly satisfying.

So my salvation lies in correcting the massive imbalance between reason and emotion in this big old brain of mine. Making emotion stronger.

But I still don’t trust it. How could I?

More after the break.

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Reining in the black beast

This just in : for now I will be referring to that powerful and terrifying uber-brain (in German, Überhirn) of mine as “the black beast”.

This is a marked improvement over thinking of it as some sort of insectoid alien thing straight from Cronenberg and Giger.

That image, while compelling, was injurious to the process of trying to integrate that part of me into my actual personality, so it had to go.

So it’s not a robot bug supercomputer alien – think microchips crawling around like beetles on their pins – it’s a dark and dangerous beast over which I am the nominative master but which keeps a hell of a lot of secrets from me.

Think a mighty and powerful panther with read glowing eyes and an aura of dark menace and brooding intensity about it, and a look like it is growling even when it isn’t.

Hmmmm. But it can act like a frisky and adorable kitten when it wants to.

This integrating thing is harder than I thought it would be.

Well, these things take time. Knowing me, it’s the sort of thing where I will have to dream it again periodically, each time getting a little bit closer to capturing the truth,.

Oh well, a dreamer’s work is never done.

At least now, it’s something that might be alive and warm blooded. That’s better. Who knows, if I keep going, it might even be human some day.

Or at least sentient.

In the beast I have combined my overweaning superego with my underfed id as a first step towards a more balanced psyche.

It seems like a crude and dangerous first move. What if the result is my becoming more villainous? Dare I hand my rapacious id the controls to my supercomputer?

But no. That’s Doctor Jekyll thinking. My id is not my enemy, nor is it a mindless demon. Like the Other Kirk in the Two Kirks episode of Star Trek : The Original Series, my id isn’t evil. It’s cold and scared and hungry and need my love most of all.

So come into my arms, thou black beast. Let me stroke your head and hold you close to warm you up. There’s a home inside with food and water and a fireplace, and shelter to keep the cold and the wind away from you as long as you like.

You know, now that I get you into the light, I can see that you look like a certain scared little animal I know.

Well he can come in too.

Now relax, my dear pets. You made it. You’re home.

And everything will be okay from now on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

f–

Or, if that’s too folky for you :

I couldn’t figure out which one to post so I posted both. You’re welcome.

I chose that theme for this entry not just because the sun had almost completely set (pretty colors!), but because I have been pondering my personal lack of sunshine.

Where exactly did/does all this coldness inside me come from? And how the heck can I thaw myself out?

I’ve already had some clues.

The fact that my imposing intellect and I have, at best, a working relationship is a big one. That’s a big chunk of my inner glacier right there. Having such a strange and strained relationship with most of my cognitive hardware must have a chilling effect on my interior world.

Perhaps I’m so danged smart because it’s cold inside to the point of superconductivity.

Or maybe I’m so cold inside because I am so dang smart. Chicken and egg.

Another source of refrigeration is the sheer mass of unprocessed emotions that lies at the heart of my vast region of Midnight Tundra.

In order to avoid dealing with my emotions as they happen, I freeze them in place. And with every tick of the clock. more frozen feelings accumulate

And Spring never comes. Well, not yet, anyhow.

Another factor is my long cold childhood. There was a long time at the beginning of my schooling – grades 1 through 5 – and a period at the end – grades 10 through 12 – where I had no friends whatsoever, and those were some mighty cold days indeed.

And when I cast my mind back to those days, the cold winds rise from deep within me and leave me feeling a chill that pierces my very heart.

So I try not to do that.

The logical, clear, and useless answer to what to do about all this god damned ice is for me to move closer to the sun and let it all melt.

Far easier typed than done. I first have to truly and deeply convince myself that my ice is not, in fact, a part of me and that melting will therefore not equal death.

Or at least, not the death of anything I give two soggy shits about.

But it’s much harder to convince my deeper self. My true self. The one that lurks beneath all the stone and snow, using them as his protection against exposure to the harsh light of day.

No wonder I’m so cold. I flee the light.

One of my fundamental conflicts is that I both want warmth and love very badly and I fear it will destroy me.

Well if so, then let me be destroyed. Smash the ice within me and set me free. Liberate me from this empty shell of a life.

I will remake myself from whatever is left after the thaw.

More after the break.

---

On stockpiling talent

It occurs to me that I have not been doing “nothing” or “nothing but play video games” all these long lonely locked-in years.

I’ve also been getting smarter. Sharper. Deeper. And funnier.

Just from living my life as I do, and letting certain subconscious processes progress naturally, I have been honing my various gifts. It’s like I have been training them for some future challenge without knowing it.

What that challenge might be is, of course, entirely up to me. I feel like there is a spring inside me that is slowly winding up, and when it’s stored enough energy, it is going to shoot me into the stratosphere.

Failure to launch? Not this time!

Not sure of the trajectory yet. But I know I need to launch myself right smack dab into the middles of what’s going on, thus maximizing my chances of finding some kind of niche before I run out of momentum.

I will take any writing job I can find. I know I can’t afford to be picky at this stage. And whatever I take, I will of course crush it like a beer can under an elephant’s foot.

And that’s an aluminum can, for the record.

That means getting over my aversion to going back to UpWork. Why am I averse? Because my exit from there came in the form of ghosting on like three different jobs, and that fills me with shame and guilt.

So to get back to business on UpWork will require crawling through the minefield morass of my own personal guilt.

Luckily, I know it’s all in my head and there is literally nobody standing in the way of my getting back into the swing of things except myself.

And I can be SUCH a pain to work with! So flighty and emotional and sensitive.

But I mean well, I swear! And I’m worth investing in because I can spin magical tales that reach, and soothe, and even heal people’s hearts.

You want that magical sense of wonder? You want stories that make people laugh, cry, and feel like they have truly experienced something? Storytelling so good it makes people feel better about the world in general?

I can make that happen.

And that goes for anything else you want. Tragedy that brings out the tears you keep locked up inside. Adventure so bold and noble and heroic and exciting that it burns calories. Family dramas that feel like they are about your family… to everyone.

And of course, my specialty, comedies so funny they should include a part of adult diapers with the ticket.

All this and so much more could be yours if you are the lucky, lucky person to see me for the wonder I am and give me the honor and the privilege of making you a LOT of money, plus prestige, credibility, and the love of millions.

I could make the right person into the next Walt Disney, my friend.

And all it takes is the vision to see what I can do, the courage to take a chance on me, and the resources to cover my modest salary.

I gotta say, that’s one hell of a good deal.

Are you the lucky person who will take me up on it?

Man, I can really sell myself when I want to.

Hell, at this point, I’m chomping at the bit to hire me!

Food for thought.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A breakthrough : I now believe I really am a person.

It’s a faint and flickering belief and I can’t guarantee I will never backslide, but I am confident that I have made real progress and that nothing that will distract me from the goal of solidifying my sense of self as much as I possibly can for very long.

Now what the hell do I mean by being a person?

For a very long time, I have had a very weak sense of who I am. For the most part, if the subject came up, I eluded it with facile deflections and distracting performances.

“Who am I, really? Well I think that, deep down, I *SMOKEBOMB*”

Not sure why I was so afraid of the subject. My best bet is that I don’t want to get locked in to any particular identity and thus lose the protean edge I get from being a such a fluid and flexible shapeshifter.

Of course, patient readers have read my previous ponderings about taking that desire to remain maximally malleable too far, to the point where there’s no solidity to me at al, especially when there is nothing for my to adapt to.

Ergo, it would be much better for me if I could dial back that shit some. Maybe allow for some medium-term structure. It doesn’t have to be “no structure” or “permanent structure”. That’s a well no self defeating trick called “all or nothing”.

Or put another way, “only perfection is adequate”.

I think I can live with, “holds its structure until I need those resources for something else”. That way I get SOME kind of a skeleton for my soul.

Then again, that might be what I am already doing.

Dragged myself by the heels back to the point, I now feel like there is something good and strong and pure and alive underneath all my layers of shadow and ice.

I mean, logically, there has to be. I can’t be ALL illusions and fantasies. Somewhere in there has to be the illusionist and the fantasist.

But that’s merely logical. What matter is not what you think but what you feel. And I now feel like there’s something real going on deep in my layers.

And that’s a good feeling. It feels like warmth and light and an uplifting wind rising from that deep dark place where my life force begins.

My wellspring, I suppose. Guess I have one of those too.

Which brings me an important lesson : things are there even when you can’t feel them.

Remember, the sun never stops shining. Sometimes the planet gets in the way, that’s all. And if we wait the sun will come up again, right on schedule.

So don’t let depression fool you, All the love and warmth and connection with others you have ever wanted is out there waiting for you.

You just can’t feel it due to depression’s deathly numbness.

And knowing it is out there, with just a thin layer of ice and stone between you and it, you can confidently push towards it because you know it can’t last forever and that if you keep pushing against it, it will snap like a rubber band and you will emerge into the warmth and light at last.

And by you, I mean me.

And by me, I mean us.

And by us, I mean everyone.

More after the break.

---

Sign on an old fashioned steakhouse : “All our meat is plant-based because plants are what the meat eats”.

Hmm. Still needs work.

---

Whoever I want to be

When I was much younger, that’s how I would answer the question of who I was : whoever I wanted to be.

In doing so I thought I was being all tricky and mysterious and enigmatic and fascinating and cool. And I sort of was.

But mostly I was being a dick by fucking with people for no good reason.

People ask questions because they want answers, not riddles. If I thought it would impress people I was dead wrong. It just alienated them.

No wonder I had trouble making friends.

And would it kill me to just make plain ordinary sense when I am around “normal” people? Is small talk really all that bad? Does every conversation have to be loaded with intellectual stimulation, even if I have to drag it there kicking and screaming?

I feel like I have been a short-sighted spoiled intellectual for my whole life. Surely there were things I could have done to meet people partway instead of using my weirdness as a weapon to push people away.

But that’s the bizarre dance of social anxiety and/or shyness. You are lonely so you get closer to people but then you flip over into panic mode and can’t put distance between you and them fast enough and it’s only when you get that distance that you can calm down enough for panic mode to disengage and then you realize you just rejected the thing you want the most, and you are lonelier than ever, and depressed as hell.

No wonder we shy folk often choose to isolate ourselves instead. Sure, loneliness cuts into our hearts like it’s trying to split them in two, but at least when we are alone, we’re not hurting anybody and they’re not hurting us.

My word, is that sad. Sorry.

All my life, I have longed to be a part of things. To be included. To be connected with people. To stop being so god damned alone.

But I can see now that it wasn’t just a failure of my caretakers to help me socialize that has kept me all alone for all my life.

I’m a big part of it too. People tried to befriend me and I pushed them away. I didn’t even try to stick it out and try to find a way to relate and connect.

No, I either pushed them away or ran away and of course they never tried again because I had made it pretty clear that I neither wanted nor needed them.

And without even the common courtesy to do it via a loud argument, or even a quiet but firm rejection. Oh no, that would have been rude, and cruel.

Instead I just kind of faded away. Like ghosting them, but in person. And by doing so, I probably really, really hurt some people who only wanted to be my friend.

But I was listening to the panic and the fear, and it said get the fuck out, so out the fuck I got. I wish I could go back to everyone I rejected in this way and apologize to them for freezing them out in such a thoughtlessly cruel way.

I attracted them with my sunny affect and then froze them in my interstellar void.

And I am so, so sorry.

I don’t blame myself in a moral sense. After all, I was just a kid doing what made sense to me at the time. I didn’t have anywhere near the ability to understand what I was doing and why that I have now.

But on an emotional level, I feel terrible about it all, and wish with all my heart that it could have been different. My life would be radically different if only I had been able to overcome my social issues and made a real friend in elementary school.

Instead I have dwelt in the silence of my Midnight Tundra all my life.

And nobody can rescue me because nobody can even tell I am in distress. I hide my suffering extremely well. I don’t know why I do it, I just do.

But that’s a topic for another time.

Love you, my readers. You’re my lifeline.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Trigger warning : body horror.

I just had a piece of tooth break off. Just snapped right off onto my tongue.

This happens to me now and then. It’s all part of my transformation into a cackling old hillbilly pervert that mutters things like “squeal like a pig” and “purty mouth” as he rocks away on a porch somewhere.

Seriously though, it’s because I never brush my teeth. (Visit yesterday’s blog entry for my various theories as to why that is,. )

The reason why it came loose is no mystery, give (grossness warning) that it was black over about 50 percent of its surface.

Ick, I know. It’s actually quite horrifying, both to see and to have happen., If it wasn’t for my excessively tight emotional self-control I would be freaking out over it.

As is, the panic hits the thick layer of numbness and death around my heart and dies.

That is, I suppose, its function. To prevent panic from spreading.

Doesn’t seem worth it, to be honest. Overall.

Anyhow, the weird thing about these occasional tooth losses is that there is never any pain. One would thing that losing a third to half a tooth would involve some pain somewhere along the line, but nope.

Which explains why I can be so blasé about it, I guess. If there was a large amount of blood and agony involved, I would be far more motivated to prevent it.

But apart from a vague ache where it used to be, there has been nothing. No blood, no pain, just one day there’s a piece of tooth on my tongue.

I didn’t even feel a click. And the gabapentin I just took will likely take care of that vague ache. So to be honest, in my flattened affect world, it’s barely even an event.

Which is tragic and bizarre, I know.

---

It’s that tme again

Therapy Thursday, that is.

Once more, I don’t recall the details of what we talked about too well. I think it’s because I am getting better at expressing my emotions in these sessions, and for some reason, that comes at the expense of biographical memory.

Which has never been a strong point of mine in the first place. I learn facts fast and remember jokes and anecdotes for decades, but ask me what I had for breakfast and I have to take a guess based on context clues.

It must have somethin in common with those other times of strange amnesia, the times I have been performing.

It’s like anything above a certain amount of emotional activation and my brain just stops writing anything down.

But it’s not like missing time. I feel no discontinuity. So in that sense it is not true amnesia at all.

It’s just that the memories are one long undifferentiated blur. I can no longer retrieve specific memories from it any more than you can take the eggs out of a cake.

And something deep inside me tells me that this is a good thing. That somehow this is a healthier way to be. That losing these specific memories is a small cost to pay for something in my mind putting those resources to far better use.

Like supporting my mood, for example.

Makes me wonder just how far that road could take me.

Only one way to find out.

More after the break.

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The alien within

One thing I do remember mentioning to Doc Costin is that discovery I recently made that not only did I feel like this mighty mind of mind was something I had, not something I was, I was also pretty goddamned scared of it.

It feels like a part of me, but in the same sense that a prosthetic leg or cyborg arm would feel like a part of me. It’s something that I use all the time and for nearly everything, as if it was part of me, yet not truly part of me.

And that’s pretty damned weird.

And it’s got to end. I can’t permit this split in my mind to continue. There has to be a way for me to integrate my various parts into a coherent whole.

So how did this split come about?

I think the main force of it came from there simply bring nobody else like me. I had no role models to wrap my big IQ in, no examples of how someone deals with all this horsepower and firepower without losing one’s mind to depression, narcissism, or delusions of grandeur.

Sure, there are lots of smart people in media. And m family are no dummies either. But I have never come across someone I could truly identify with.

Instead, I’ve had to identify with bits and pieces of characters. Sherlock Holmes’ sharp mind. The EMH from ST : Voyager’s dry sarcasm. Doctor Rodney McKay (David Hewlett)’s intellectual arrogance. Data’s naïve insistence on logic.

The character who came closest is Walter (John Noble) on Fringe. Like me, he is an intellectual dreamer with a brilliant mind, questionable attachment to reality, poor social skills, and a seemingly paradoxical combination of mental might and a general bewildered and fragile state of mind. Walter and I know what it’s like to tread on the brink of madness from being so high above and detached from reality.

Difference is, he fell in. And there but from the grace of God go I.

Unlike me, his early childhood genius was recognized and valued and he was given everything he needed for his intellect to thrive.

I just got bored.

I’m more than a tad bitter about that.

If only someone had recognized my gifts and invested in me and told me this mental muscle of mine was a good and valuable thing and showed me to a place with other kids like me where I was no longer held back by the other students.

A gifted kids program, in other words.

I might even have been properly socialized there.

But nobody cared enough to find a place for me.

Story of my life. I am too much hassle to help.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve never been able to make myself try harder or work harder than is absolutely necessary at anything.

Because I’ve never had to.

Plenty of times I should have, but few times when it has taken a maximum effort to succeed. Most forms of success have come to me quite easily.

Hell, even VFS’ “intensive” one year Writing for Movies and Television barely taxed me, and even then, only in the last semester.

And there were many times, especially in early elementary and late high school, when teachers told me how much better I could be doing if I only “applied” myself.

But my point of view is if I could great marks with zero effort, why go for super duper deluxe marks when the difference is small and the increase in effort is great?

I mean, that’s technically an increase of infinity percent! ^[1]

Of course, I now know why I should have tried harder : scholarships! And the awards and accolades and hopefully impressing people who could help me get ahead that could have lead to said scholarships would have been nice too.

But I was too young and naïve to even think about scholarships, let alone try harder because I wanted them.

After all, my parents had told me that they would pay for college, and so I considered that matter settled.

Never in my life had I been expected to do all I can to make things easier for my parents. My older siblings apparently got that memo but I did not.

My job was to stay out of the way, remember? So I did.

If someone had told me that it would be a big help to my parents if I tried to get the best grades I could so I could get scholarships one day, I would have done it.

But nobody ever expected anything of me.

Because I didn’t officially even exist, remember?

And it’s not like my graduating from school and needing my university paid for should have come as a surprise to them. They had my whole life to save up for my uni and they knew exactly when they would need it, and yet they did nothing.

Why? Because they were so very fond of forgetting that I exist. And silly lil me, I did my best to stop existing.

That’s why I am so damned Avoidant.

On my own and without this information, I did attempt to try harder a few times. Tried to be more like my overachieving sister Catherine.

But I am just plain not built that way. When I tried to focus and strive I became so riddled with anxiety and fear and tension that I couldn’t function.

The transformation was too much for me. It would have taken changing my entire approach to life. And for what, to go from being a A student to an A+ student?

Fuck that noise.

Ironically, I would have done better if I could have thought of it more selfishly. If I had thought of it in terms of proving to the world how amazing I am and gathering praise, applause, and the occasional cash reward for it, that might have motivated me and given me what I needed to overcome the anxiety and kick scholastic ass.

But back then I didn’t think that way. At all.

I’m still open to the idea of trying it now, though.

I could be an academic superstar with colleges wooing me all over the world.

But that sounds a lot like, ya know, hard work.

And as you know, I have never been able to force myself to work harder than I absolutely had to.

And I never had to.

More after the break.

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Lazy and self-indulgent

That’s how I am feeling right now. It’s 10:30 PM and I am just getting around to eating supper and I am feeling too lazy to even go to the kitchen and back so I am just eating the stuff I have here in the bedroom with me.

Which now includes a new treat. I made an Amazon order yesterday, getting Felicity’s gift plus some “body wipes” for myself.

They gave me body wipes when I was in the hospital last August in lieu of a shower, which I was not capable of, or a sponge bath, which I was eager to avoid as they seemed rather awkward.

So the wipes were a great solution. They’re kind of amazing, really, because you can clean your whole body with them, including hair, and you don’t even have to rinse off after. The stuff just evaporates.

I am hoping the “new toy” factor will encourage me to “bathe” a lot more often. They work better than a sponge bath too.

Don’t worry, that’s not the treat. I am not erotically attached to them (yet).

As I often do, I finished my Amazon shopping spree by checking what they have in terms of sugar free goodies so I can treat myself.

After scrolling through pages of stuff I don’t care about (powdered peanut butter?? )I came across a big bag of sugar free fruit flavoured gummies by a Dutch company called Frisia and I had to give them a shot.

Well they arrived today and they are nummy. Exactly the kind of thing I wanted to find, So I am happy bout that.

$20 bought me a throw pillow sized bag of 1000 of the delicious little darlings (two cents each, not bad) and the only bad part is that I now have to restrain myself from eating myself sick with them.

I can do this. I am strong.

I looked up this Frisia company and it seems like they sell a ton of products, and at the very least all the gummi ones are all sugar free.

They might just get a lot of my money if I can find online dealers in their goods who charge a reasonable price.

I will feel better once the gummies I bought today are safely stored in one of our old peanut butter jars that have been cleaned out so we can use them for storage.

Right now they are just too damned tempting for my own good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

good day sunshine

This is always a juicy topic. Let’s take another crack at it.

I will start off by saying : I don’t know why I can’t clean. Why the very idea of it gives me the deep down ice cold willies.

But like I said when I tackled this subject before, I think it has something to do with not wanting to take responsibility for my life.

Cleaning up after myself would put me firmly in the “caretaker” role, like I was an adult or something, and I am just not ready to make that transition yet.

I most likely never will be. I mean, I am pushing 50, for fuck’s sake. If it hasn’t happened yet, it might never happen at all, and I will die without ever really being born.

I’m the one who needs the caretaking. I didn’t get nearly enough in my early childhood and it really feels like I can’t go forward until I do.

It’s a bill long overdue.

Or maybe I could go forward without it, but at a terrible cost. One I am thus far been unwilling to pay. A loss of innocence on a deep and terrible level, perhaps.

And there is always the feeling that if I take over such responsibilities myself, those who were “supposed” to finish looking after me will have “gotten away with it”.

Buddy, if it’s in the past, they already got away with it.

Ah yes, it’s all coming back to me now. I had previously figured out that at some point in my early childhood, presumably when I was raped, my development was interrupted and as often happens in that case, I reverted in age.

Mix in the other factor that I was silently protesting my lack of love at home by letting everyone see how messy and neglected I was, and you begin to see that this issue of my lack of cleanliness is a thorny and complicated one indeed.

Another layer : patient readers know that at some point I withdrew from reality rather aggressively and thoroughly. That involved a retreat from the real world of a severity rarely seen in people outside the catatonia ward.

And well, dirty surroundings are of the world outside the mind. Dealing with them requires a fair bit of time spent OUTSIDE my head, and that goes against the entire gravitational pull of my poor brain.

The whole structure of my living psyche is dedicated to a strenuous and thorough campaign of minimizing the time I spend outside of the world of the mind.

Hence my sedentary ways. As long as I have the electric nipple of computers and the internet in my mouth, I can ignore the real world entirely as I lay in this filthy bassinet and slowly rot away from the inside.

It’s very hard for me to see outside those tiny little boundaries of life. I feel that icy hand of fear squeeze my heart when I even try. The idea of being fully free to pursue a grownup life doesn’t feel like freedom to me.

More like freefall. There I am, the baby bird who failed to fly when kicked out of the nest again. I have no confidence in these heavily atrophied wings of mine.

I hate feeling this weak. I hate BEING this weak. I want to be strong and proud and comfortable in my own skin. I want to be glad to be staying out of my head for a change because for once, it feels good to be alive.

But there’s some serious frigging issues I have to deal with first. The kind that hurt. The kind that bleed. The kind that scare me like a little kid experiencing their first black when it’s the middle of the night and they have no idea what has happened.

That doesn’t mean I have to stop digging, though.

More after the break.

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Try to relax

Actually, no don’t. LET yourself relax. Trying is the opposite of relaxing.

Same goes for sleep too. Sleeping is not something you do, it’s something you let happen. So getting to sleep is mostly about getting out of your own way.

These are lessons I am still learning.

It seems paradoxical that an unemployed and sedentary person with depression like myself could be riddled with stress.

But like I have said before, having depression is like driving around with the parking brake on. Even doing the simplest of tasks requires overcoming tremendous mental resistance and on bad days it’s exhausting just to be awake.

And in a way, that’s why I am pondering getting myself a spa day for Xmas. I want to go where people have many ingenious ways to be nice to my body, including intriguing forms of massage and many ways to cleanse the skin.

My that sounds good.

The theory is that I would feel a million times better if I could get my poor pores cleansed and all my muscular tension released.

And that could do wonders for my mood and general mental health.

I can tell that I have SO much tension packed into every muscle fiber of my being that it might be the only thing holding me up right now.

As for my pores, alas, they are clogged. I don’t sponge bathe nearly often enough. So at this point getting my pores thoroughly cleared would probably count as a form of weight loss. Especially if I also exfoliate.

And brother, do I want to exfoliate.

Barring the spa trip, I might give getting another massage gizmo a try. My Renpho massager that I got myself last year still works and does a pretty dang good job, but it doesn’t get to the really deep back pain from the muscles around my spine.

That would take something more powerful. Like a chiropractor. With really big hands.

Actually, that might be a tad too arousing to me. Might cause an indecorous display.

I’d be shopping for relaxation with a keen eye, though. I’m not going to get a new thing just to get a new thing. It has to be better than the Renpho somehow.

Speaking of which, think I will dig that thing out from the mess on my bed and use it.

Gonna get me some good, good, good, good vibrations.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not sure what I am confessing, exactly. It just sounded cool.

I feel like I am edging closer to pulling together some form of positive self-image and maybe even a better internal narrative.

The “that’s so Fruvous” twist is that this involves reconciling the dark and negative feelings that emanate from my wounded being and the objective truth that I am a pretty amazing person, actually.

You guessed it, it’s time for the litany of self-praise. Just remember, it’s therapeutic.

I’m extraordinarily intelligent. Might as well get that out of the way. Straight A student without ever having to study, smarter than all my teachers, yadda yadda, ^[1]

I’m a very sweet dude. Kind and sensitive and compassionate. I truly care about people and want them to do well. And I have a deep understanding of the human condition and a keen appreciation for all the little imperfections that make us human.

I’m funny. All my profs at VFS said so. My friends certainly think so. One of them who worked in Canadian broadcasting for over a decade even told me I was by far the funniest person he had ever met.

Plus, ya know. I’ve made a lot of people laugh. Sometimes really hard.

I’m warmly charismatic. That’s something I have only been contemplating fully consciously recently. There is a warm glow to me that is like sunlight on your soul and I think it makes people happy, or at least happier.

If true, that makes ME extremely happy. Because making people happy is what I love to do the most. And as someone who has dwelt in darkness for his entire life, the idea that I could shine a little sunshine into someone else’s darkness fills me with such exquisite and sublime spiritual joy that it must be akin to religious bliss.

I’d heal the world if I could.

I have great vision and imagination. One benefit of spending most of your time in the world inside your head is that you become very good at imagining the furniture. I have a powerful imagination that can make my dreams almost tangible and that, when harnessed to my potent intellect, makes me one of the most powerful kind of people : the pragmatic dreamer, who can see how things should be then come up with a plan to make things that way that will actually.

And last but not least, I am one hell of a writer. I do words good.

To sum up, I’m an intelligent, sweet, hilarious, charismatic, creatively brilliant writer, and that is enough.

More than enough, in fact. And not just enough on some abstract scale of merit. It’s more than enough to be able to put together some kind of life.

My depression would have me end that equation with, “…and yet despite all that you’re still a weak, helpless, disgusting sack of shit who doesn’t deserve to live. ”

But that’s just not true. I am a good and worthy soul who deserves a place in society as a productive taxpaying citizen who is just as good as anyone and who therefore finally gets to be a fully certified and genuine adult type person.

I’ve cowered for so long in the long dark shadow of my deep and dire shame at being so weak and helpless and “useless” that to me, that’s practically the Holy Land.

Yes folks, I dream of some day finally making it to bare adequacy.

Dare to dream, folks.

More after the break.

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Being smart isn’t worth it

Not for me, anyhow.

Or maybe it is. I dunno.

But talking about my astounding IQ in part 1 has aggravated the sore tooth that is my troubled relationship with my mighty intellect, and as with any sore tooth, I just have to keep poking at it with my tongue.

One thing I should note : it just occurred to me that my big brain has always been something that I have, not something that I am.

Like the real me has this massively powerful animal it leads around on a leash, and while I am in charge of it, that doesn’t mean it always does what I want it to do.

It’s like the servile but treacherous servant in a Restoration comedy. Perfectly loyal and obedient to my face, but following their own dark agenda when I’m not looking.

It seems odd that there should be such a dichotomy. One’s IQ operates as a very deep and central level to one’s psyche. How did it come to me that I don’t think of it as me?

I think it maybe happened because a mind as massive as mind is extremely difficult to truly conceive. So I have no choice but to have a sort of “black box” relationship with my analytical mind where it does what it does then outputs the results to me without my being consciously involved at all.

But more than that, there’s the bare fact that my massive mind terrifies me.

Like it truly is a massive and powerful entity, cold and ruthless and unforgiving, like a dragon, and I am this tiny meek and helpless creature cowering in a corner of the dragon’s lair clutching the gem that lets me control the dragon.

Actually, let’s park that image here before it becomes a novella.

Another revelation : when I try to imagine integrating this side of me into the main part of my identity, I feel a profound sense of fear, shock, and deep down horrified disgust.

Like it’s the touch of some kind of horrifying insect.

So it’s like my brutal truth machine of a mind is actually alien to the warm, kind, alive remainder of who I am. I am deep down horrified of it and that’s the root of why I have this strange relationship with my own intellect.

But the truth is that there is no separation. I am it, it is me, we are the same entity.

And I think that overcoming this false dichotomy would do me a lot of good.

Time to bring the hot and the cold together to make warm…. and alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It happens every year. Sometimes more than once.

A holiday or other special occasion is coming up, and I know there are related things I want to do, but my mind freezes with option paralysis and timidity and I can’t think of or do any of those things and so the event will come and pass, and then the spell will finally be broken and I’ll be able to think again, and only THEN will I suddenly think of all the things I “should” have done and start beating myself up over it.

Well I am goddamned sick of it so I am going to take a hammer and chisel to that god damned ice in my mind and in my soul and smash it into nothing but snow, which quickly melts in the sun.

So I am doing my best to imagine that it’s Boxing Day and Christmas is completely over for another year and I have the Boxing Day blues and I am kicking myself for missing the opportunity to…. do what?

Nope. Still drawing a blank.

Almost everything I can think of isn’t an activity, it’s a sentiment. All I really want for Christmas is my family. My Mom is in her Seventies, so we can never be sure how many Xmases she has left in here. And every time I think about that, I get so homesick it makes me heartsick. I want to see her again so bad it aches my soul.

Please don’t leave without me, Mom. Wait for me to catch up.

And of course I want to see my siblings too. I miss the hell out of them. I’ve come to feel like a lonely satellite way over here on the Wet Coast, far away from even the side of the continent I hail from, and I miss Anne, Catherine, and David so bad.

Here I am, staying out of the way again. Isolating myself from all the love and warmth and togetherness that I want so badly but can’t get close enough to feel for fear that the heat would melt my snowflake heart.

Like that would be so bad. I’d rather be a puddle than an icicle. I’d rather melt than die of emotional malnutrition. I would rather evaporate like a puddle in July than spend another winter frozen in place like a snowman.

Besides, none of that ice and frost and snow is really me anyhow. It’s just the byproduct of an overzealous fire suppressing system, and reflects nothing about myself and who I truly am as a person.

I could fly my little spaceship right up to the sun and let its rays melt the frost from my crest like it melted the wings off of Icarus and absolutely nothing of value would be lost.

I might not recognize the scared little animal that washes up on the shore once the floos waters have receded, but I will know for god damn certain he’s mine.

‘Cause he’s me.

More after the break.

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My new wheels

Check out my totally cherry new wheels, bro!

It’s one of these and it’s my Xmas gift from Joe. And I was looking forward to a walker that wasn’t missing a wheel and that I therefore have to push pretty hard in order to get it to painfully scrape forward.

But it turns out there is quite the learning curve.

Because the second I tried the new one, the front end started veering all over the place and I nearly fell over.

As it turns out, going from a walker which requires extra oomph to get it to go anywhere to one with silky smooth action is a pretty big leap and I was pushing too hard.

I soon adapted. Pushed gently, let the walker tell me how much force I needed.

But sadly, there is a more profound issue : it’s not tall enough.

Even at maximum extension, I have to hunch over to use it. And not just a tiny bit. When I got back from Denny’s just now, for a moment or two after I let go of the handles and even then it took real effort to straighten up at all.

That is simply unacceptable. My old crappy one-wheeled walker was better than that. I can’t go around hunched over like that. It would wreck my back.

So now I have to summon all my assertiveness and go tell Joe that his gift to me is not working out and he has to return it.

This will be very hard for me. I hate having to disappoint people or give them bad news, even if I am not to blame for any of it.

Part and parcel of my being such a sensitive soul, I suppose.

But as is, I can’t use that thing. So I am going to ask Joe if he is sure he can’t get anyh more height out of the thing,. And if he can’t, it has to go.

Luckily, I warmed up my assertiveness muscles earlier at Denny’s. I ordered the pot roast dinner and when it arrived I took a bite and noticed a distinct and very out of context alcohol taste to the pot roast.

I tried another bite. Same thing.

So I told the manager about it. That was the assertiveness bit. Luckily, I had told my friends about it first, so I knew I had their backing, and that helped a lot.

He apologized. I asked for another order of the same thing. They were out of it., So I ordered my old reliable order : chicken strips dinner with corn and mashed potatoes.

What can I say, I’m a meat and potatoes kind of guy.

They were fine.

But there was something just as wrong with Felicity’s turkey dinner, too.

I am thinking there was some fault in the freezer. Someone left the door open, perhaps, or there had been a power interruption, or the like.

Now for the time being, I consider the matter closed. We love that Denny’s and they love us, and we have never had a problem like this before.

But if I get sick from this, I am going to have to escalate.

I’m not saying lawsuit, but I am saying financial compensation will be sought. And I am guessing granted, because the last thing the chain wants is the word “Denny’s” in the same headline as, “vomit” or “made him sick”.

The real problem though is that I have a very strong aversion to food that might be rotten after getting extreme food poisoning from some food from a 7-11 back in ’88.

And that aversion has been activated and these kinds of things are very strong because they are meant to keep you from eating poison.

The normal course of action for this kind of incident would be to form a powerful and unstoppable disgust for Denny’s,

But I don’t want to lose Denny’s. Like I said, we love them and they love us. I don’t want this one incident to ruin that,

So now I am actively grappling with the aversion part of my brain to keep it from forming that iron clad disgust so we can keep going there.

My life is a bizarre adventure sometimes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

At least, I am pretty sure I am. Could just be me flying off the handle in hysterics like I am prone to do, but I don’t think so.

I think my as yet undiagnosed leg condition that is supposedly unconnected to my spinal injury has been getting worse.

The pain in my legs when I stand is worse, as is the pain I experience when I putter around the apartment with my walker. My endurance during those excursions is falling too.

Seems like as soon as I am on my feet, I am already sagging like water balloons hung a clothes line.

Yes, that’s oddly specific. Thanks for noticing.

In addition, I have been having more bits of body weirdness of the neurological kind lately. Sudden stabbing pains in random locations. Muscle twitching that goes on for minutes. Aching.

But by far the worst, and the hardest to write about. was an incident last Wednesday or Thursday when I was sitting and chatting and watching Colbert with Joe and Julian when out of nowhere and with no other symptoms, I started finding it extremely hard to speak.

Lord, you can take everything else but please leave me my life, my loins, and my words.

Pretty sure it was a brain level issue and not a mouth issue because it wasn’t just that I couldn’t make my mouth make the words, it was more like I would start to form a sentence in my mind and then the record would skip and I’d have to start over.

Meanwhile I would get a couple of phonemes into a sentence and then I would be making the sorts of sounds normally associated with toddlers fresh to the concept of words.

And all with the grin of a maniacal moron plastered across my face like a real goober.

I got over it, mostly, but I can still feel my mind trying to veer off in that direction and it takes a serious exertion of will to stay on track and not end up in verbal hell.

So I am not out of the woods yet, but I am utterly terrified. This is my worse nightmare of turning into a slaw jacked spastic hunk of twisted meat and tangled nerves warehoused in a back ward somewhere and running my hands through a bowl of rice over and over and over all day/.

Why yes, that is also strangely specific.

What can I say, the part of my brain that turns my emotions into imagery works with fever-dream intensity sometimes and my dreams are so powerful they leave me shellshocked.

So yeah. Pretty freaked out. Definitely need to call Doctor Chao for an appointment on Monday. I am really, really scared.

Oh. And apparently I had some sort of scan scheduled for the 26th of November and completely spaced on it. Didn’t even know I had missed anything until later that week.

Almost as if there was something wrong with my brain….

More after the break.

It finally happened

It FINally happened.

I’m slightly mad.

Actually, that would be a new high tide mark for me as I have been more than slightly mad for most of my life.

I’d say that I mostly stay at definitely mad with highs up to quite mad and lows due to hypomanic episodes down to a bit mad.

Mostly I don’t let it show on the outside, though. After all, it wouldn’t be very Avoidant of me to attract attention to myself.

I’ll just die quietly off in a corner. Wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone. I am sure you all have better, worthier, more important things to do.

Sorry about the mess.

Don’t worry, folks, I am not actually saying anyone is neglecting me. Joe and Julian are fabulous beyond compare, and I am eternally grateful to them for all they do to deal with their trying but also entertaining roomie.

I just need to get the self-pity out of my system sometimes.

And THAT is a real high water mark for me becaus e in order to pity yourself, you have to think you don’t deserve what it happening, and for a long time that wasn’t the case.

In fact, I have a hard time thinking about what I deserve. It’s pragmatic in a very bleak sense – who cares what I “deserve”: when it won’t change anything except to increase my feeling of impotent rage?

But really, I can only think of what I deserve in dreamlike hyperbole.

One side of me thinks, “Why darling, I deserve absolutely everything. Wealth, fame, accolades, a life nestled deep into the lap of luxury, a prominent place in the world pundit-sphere as a thought leader and notorious figure of controversy, and a cozy little ranch in a VERY VERY secluded area where me and a select few very special friends can live as we please.

No, I am not going to explain that.

Of course, I would have to expose myself to people who can help me first, which means disarming a heck of a lot of my Avoidant Personality Disorder first.

Then I would have to figure out where to find that kind of person.

Find them online, of course. I was unlikely to be invited to any swanky show biz party where I can rub elbows with entertainment moguls BEFORE my legs went boom, and if invited, I might have um.. failed to attend.

Now that I am pushing along with a walker, oy. I cou

I could probably handle a zoom call. I would be terrified and be looking at looking for those fast-acting anti-anxiety meds Doc Costin have me to try once, but I could do it.

I think one of them was an Atavan?

I am such a mess!

I really could use a caretaker/assistant/reality interface specialist.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, a confession : I’ve been doing one three minute video a day on TikTok.

Missed a couple days – new habits don’t always “take” right away – but other than that, I’ve been doing one a day for a couple of weeks at most.

Before you ask, I have no plans to repost them here. For now, the two arenas have to stay separate. Once I have built up my confidence and competence in TikTok some more. I will revisit the issue of crossing the streams.

In yesterday’s TikTok, I asked what I thought were pretty mild questions about thevery tricky area of pedophilia.

All I asked was if we have gone too far in our our zeal to protect the kids from Uncle Pervert. When people are afraid to show affection to their children in public out of fear of suspicion and when if someone stumbles on a perfectly innocent “bearskin rug” photo from days gone past they would immediately burn it while casting fearful glance over their shoulders, and when children are being raised by parents who see a predatory pedophile around every corner (and don’t think the kids don’t pick up on this), surely something has gone seriously bugfuck crazy here.

Again, naively, I thought that surely people can’t get too upset about this very mild question that doesn’t even address pedophilia directly and that takes absolutely no stance regarding anything but the public fight against pedophilic rape and even then only ASKS QUESTIONS, can they?

But that assumed people would only react to what I actually said, I forgot the monumental heights to which people will build their straw men in order to reach the conclusion that is the most easy and fun to argue against.

So all day, I have been fielding comments filled with frothing mouth-breathers tripping over their own eagerness to express the hate of the day againss that evil person who dared to question it.

And when a belief cannot tolerate being questioned in the slightest, you know that deep down people know they are wrong.

And that scares them because nobody wants to wake up on the wrong side of history and if it turns out they are wrong about this, it means they have been very bad people.

The same kind of bad people whose blind and fanatical hate has always landed them on the wrong side of history.

Because in all of human history, the people screaming “KILL THEM ALL! ” have never, ever, EVER turned out to be right.

No group has never come within a million parsecs of deserving that sentiment. And most ordinary citizens would be surprised to find they felt that way about anyone.

“Did I saw Jews? I meant pedophiles. ”
“Oh well that’s different, then. ”

The very arc of modern human history bends away from such unholy hatred of your fellow human beings for any reason whatsoever.

But people don’t want to be told they have joined the exact same kind of hate movement that has been directed at Jews, Mormons, the Chinese, the Irish, homosexuals, transsexuals, and commies, just to name a few.

And they joined for the same reason : it’s fun to dump hate on people society has given you permission to hate. Being part of a lynch mob is always a heck of a good time and you can dump all your rage and frustration from your ordinary life onto the latest scapegoat and feel just EVER so much better after.

It’s the same thing child beaters get out of being their children, only on a societal scale.

Now I could claim that I am fighting the good fight in my comments purely to stand up for what is right and fair and true, but you nice people know me too well for that.

You know that I am fucking LOVING THIS.

I have finally managed to get myself in the right kind of trouble, and now I can let my pugilistic side out of its cage so it can fight like a warrior at long last.

So don’t feel bad for me. I’m practically dancing in the streets.

Now to go piss people off even more. Mua ha ha.

More after the break,.

Why oh why

..why the fuck is it so hard for me to order in???

Tonight it was SUPPOSED to be a bacon cheese dog (!!) plus fries and drink from Five Guys. And I was stoked to find I found someplace where I can order a loaded dog.

I ordered via Skip the Dishes, a place whose name I had completely forgotten. Which is insane considering I had this song playing every time I ordered through them :

Everything was find and/or dandy until 9 pm, when my order was supposed to arrive. Instead I got a phonecall from a very nervous sounding Asian lady who said the courier said the buzzer didn’t work and could we come down and get our order.

OK, annoying, but something I have dealt with before. Between our frequent buzzer malfunctions and the occasional driver unable to pierce the complex and highly technical mysteries of picking up the receiver outside the building’s front door,. dialing 0601,and telling the nice person who answers that their food is here so you can let them into the building, I have had to do that a lot,

Thank God for Julian. Thank you, Julian!

So I tell the Asian lady someone will be right down and, after hanging up, I call Julian that I need his help.

Around here, the phone is our unofficial intercom due to my mobility issues.

Julian immediately goes down to pick up my order at the front door of our building.

Nobody is there. Motherfucker.

He checks all around, comes back up, then comes back up to report. Then he is nice enough to go down AGAIN.

Still no luck. I can only assume that either A, he was never at the right address in the first place, or B, he had an anxiety attack after getting off the phone with Asian Lady.

Either way, no food for me. And there wasn’t time to order anything else so instead of a hot dog and French fries my meal consisted of a handful of trail mix and some bologna.

What a let down.

I reported the items missing – one by one because there was no place to say “this entire meal never showed up” and apparently I will get my refund when the matter has been “reviewed” by a “board” of some sort.

But I don’t want a refund. I want my fucking food!

Now I am going to go lay down and sulk.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.