Why, it’s Therapy Thursday, of course! Everybody knows that!

Everyone but me, that is. Somehow I managed to completely forget what it being Thursday meant and didn’t get reminded till the phone rang and it was Doctor Costin.

Annoyed grunt! Oh well, no harm done. I was in a good enough mood that it was easy to just let the whole thing roll off my back, laugh it off, and move on.

As to what exactly we talked about, the bad news is that I don’t know, exactly.

But the good news is that I don’t recall because I processed some large icebergs of emotion during the session and that’s not exactly easy to describe.

Plus, ya know. I was too busy processing emotion to take notes, mental or otherwise.

I think I may actually be starting to dig into my actual emotional substrate instead of just tunneling around randomly like an indecisive earthworm.

If so, I am going to keep digging. Hell, I will rent a backhoe if I have to. I am eager to unearth my unholy host and release them into the world to seek their fortune.

Or whatever. All that matters is that I am not hauling their shrieking and howling spectral butts around any more and can finally get some real sleep.

Funny how I can’t really remember what we talked about. I just remember this feeling of emotions being evoked in a larger way than ever before.

Those were some mighty big icebergs.

Which is great. I am long overdue for some emotional global warming and can’t wait for all this goddamned permafrost to melt and reveal the ancient relics hidden along ago.

And then smash them into dust with a sledgehammer.

Maybe I just need more time to process what all went down before I can write about it.

I know there was some of his usual “you should DO SOMETHING” bullshit.

Not that he’s wrong, exactly. I probably would be recovering much, much faster if I was more active. Even if it is just more active on the internet.

I’ve been talking little steps. Like I am pretty sure I “get” Discord now.

It’s not nearly as complex as it seemed at first. There’s servers and servers have channels. It’s not that different from later-stage IRC in that sense.

I even managed to find servers in which people occasionally actually talk. Imagine that.

Those of us who were there know THAT is just like later-stage IRC too. Endlessly looking for channels where people are actually talking.

Meanwhile there are thousands of channels with millions of users all waiting around for someone else to say something.

God, did/does that drive me crazy. Talk, god damn you! Talk! why are you here on a CHAT server if not to TALK!?!?!

Have we really become so passive that we treat even internet chat like it’s passive entertainment like radio or TV?

I know, I know. I am just a skooch overwrought about the whole thing.

But I need conversation, damn it!

More after the break.

---

Why is this?

The statement “My baby is cute” could be an entirely nonsexual statement about the adorability of one’s infant or an entirely sexual statement about how sexually appealing one’s significant others is.^[1]

How is it those two things can overlap like that?

And that’s not the only example. The language of love and lust is the same as the language we use to talk about children and childrearing.

And this strikes me as particularly odd given how incredibly strong the taboo against putting children and sex together even conceptually has become.

Yet language like I’ve mentioned above flies almost completely under the radar and it’s just socially isolated weirdos like myself who even notice this bizarre discrepancy.

It’s normal. Therefore it’s fine.

I mean, lovers even talk baby talk to one another, for Christ’s sake!

I figure the uniting factor is tender emotions, and the lowering of defenses they require. With both a child and a lover, some very delicate and vulnerable feelings are involved, and it would make sense if our minds used the same circuit for both except for one small but vital difference.

The one that connects those emotions with sex, in case that’s not clear.

This is illustrated by the various ways we use the word “love”. We can love our children, love our lovers, and love nacho cheese.

Those are three different sense of the word “love” yet it makes intuitive sense to us that we use the same word for all three because we are talking about something for which we have powerful positive associations.

Given that the love for our kids and the love for our lovers run on the same circuit with one vital difference, it makes sense that for some people, that difference disappears.

This is especially true for individuals for whom a traumatic out of context sexual interaction with a sexually immature adult has left them with a permanent lifelong rejection of adult sexuality.

All that leaves them is their childish sexuality that has been activated way before that of other children and caused their sexuality to imprint on that scenario.

Thus the pedophile meme reproduces. An encounter with a pedophile turns the child into a future pedophile.

It’s crushingly tragic.

Wow have I wandered far afield.

My point, and I do have one, is that it’s weird how one of our strongest taboos, the child/sex barrier, is routinely violated by the very words we use to describe sexual and nonsexual attraction, and nobody even notices.

I think this conflict reveals something deep about the hazy nature of our deepest emotional triggers and how things that seem so far apart can be found to have a much closer connection than one might ever have suspected.

The zeitgeist can be a scary and surprising place to explore.

But there’s so many interesting things to find there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What, exactly, is this coffin sized jail cell of mine made of? And what routes of escape does that suggest?

The first answer to the first question that occurs to me is : fear. It’s made of fear.

But like all swift, easy answers, it’s true. plausible, appealing, and woefully inadequate.

Because why fear? What kind of fear? Where does all that fear come from?

I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all some elaborate con job I have been pulling on myself in order to protect myself from some deeply dreaded realization. A circus sideshow full of bright lights and dazzling colors purposely designed to keep me too distracted to ask dangerous questions about the man behind the curtain.

Jesus, I do go on a bit.

And it has to be a very complex and delicate con job because I am not easy to fool. I have a very powerful analytic engine running at the core of my psyche and it is always hungry for things to pull apart, examine, deduce from, analyze, and finally synthesize new information from, and it can tear apart lies and delusions as effortlessly as I digest my latest meal.

So this part of mind that hides things from me has to be pretty damned clever.

Digging deeper, my hell is made of emotion. Fear is one of those emotions but it’s hardly the only one. It’s just the one I find easiest to grapple with.

I am not, despite that gigawatt generator in my mind, very good at dealing with my emotions. That’s why I have to write about them in order to process them.

In a healthier specimen, these issues would be resolved via some healthy non-rational process running deep in my emotional core free of interference from my overweaning intellect and all its machinations.

But alas, I am still of the breed that insists everything must make sense. With no shortcuts, no intuitive leaps, and definitely no “just because.

So I have to just keep writing on this blog like I do and talking to Doc Costin once a week like I do and hope that I eventually gnaw my way through my thick layers of dead scar tissue around my heart till I break through to something worthwhile.

It all seems so hopeless and slow, though. Like I am trying to get through a brick wall by digging at it with a teaspoon when there is a perfectly good door right next to me if only I could free my mind enough to see it.

I guess those walls will come tumblin’ down when I don’t need them any more, an observation I first made within the first year of this blog.

And it started in 2011.

This suggests that at some level, this terrible tomb of mine is keeping something else out even more than it is keeping me in.

But what am I so afraid of that it could make this captivity seem preferable?

The quick and easy answer would be “reality”.

But we all know that the quick and easy answer is always wrong.

More after the break.

---

What the key to heaven is made of

Catharsis. That’s what it’s made of. I have such a massive glacier of unresolved emotions in me that only occasionally snap off into icebergs that I can then melt into something like actually dealing with things.

And it’s taking forever. At this point, I can’t even be sure I am losing glacial mass faster than I am accumulating it

For all my brave talk, I still suppress most of my emotions.

And to me, the next step is as obvious as it is almost unthinkable :

I have to start actually acting on my emotions.

I feel faint just from typing that sentence. It’s all well and good to explore my emotional issues withing the safety of my own mind but actually acting on them??

But I have so many!

Seriously! My mind is such a whirlwind of emotions at all times that trying to pluck one from the maelstrom and act on it feels as futile as trying to hold a lottery drawing in the middle of a tornado.

Of course, I know that the whole reason I have this inner whirlwind is that so many of my emotions go unexpressed that they are so cramped together that they have merged into something like Night On Bald Mountain from Fantasia.

And thus was born HEAVY METAL! *devil horns*

I can’t shake the feeling that if I opened the door even a tiny crack on my feelings vault, the door would fly open as hosts of my personal demons, the skeletons in my closet, and all those goddamned ghosts of things that might have been come shrieking out to freedom, leaving poor lil old me shattered and insane.

But maybe that’s just another of depression’s guardian illusions and I would actually just fine – better, in fact – once the flood subsided.

I would just have to hold on tight to my grip on reality until the flood is over.

I can do that, Probably.

And again, that’s all well and good if it is all happening in my mind.

But once acting on these latent and potent emotions enters the equation, shit gets ral, dawg. I might do absolutely anything while in the grips of emotions flooding through me like water from a fireman’s hose.

Once more, I wish I could just press a button and flush the whole damned system. There is nothing in that massive ball of chaos and madness that I want to keep. I would be fine with hitting the reset button and starting over, without saving first.

Fuck it. That emotional backlog of mine can go straight to hell and up Satan’s asshole and back again. I don’t give a shit.

I just want to be free of all this baggage so I can go out into the world with a light heart and clear mind and an eternal spring in my heart.

And I am going to make it there some day. I promise you I will.

I just have some heavy housework to take care of first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kinda feels like it’s raining inside me today.

Nothing harsh or torrential. No lightning, no volcanoes, no hurricanes.

Just a soft and steady downpour that slowly soaks everything in cool, clean, clear rain that washes all the toxins and torments away.

Then again it’s always raining.

What I probably need is a good cry. But like most North American males, crying is not easy for me no matter how many times I tell myself that it’s a good idea to do so.

Use it or lose it, I guess. Suppress the urge to cry hard enough and those faucets rust shut and can’t easily be opened again.

I can’t even seek out something that might make me cry and get relief that way.

Because idiot hedonism won’t stop insisting that crying feels bad and therefore it makes no sense to make yourself cry on purpose.

And yeah, crying feels bad. But it makes me feel better. It’s totally worth it.

Yet I remain locked deeply in the bowels of my emotional constipation, hoping some unbidden event comes along to set my poor tears free.

It’s happened before. I think there is some deep part of me that still has the ability to act against the tyranny of my cult of reason and self-control and get some of these vitally important emotional tasks done via subconscious shenanigans.

So the wall that holds back my tears gets thinner and thinner without ever actually letting them out until something comes along – usually something I watch – and gives the wall a little poke, and the floodgates are thrown open for a time.

And I end up feeling so much better afterwards. Almost human, even.

And yet the moment the storm has passed the walls go up again. Sigh.

Part of the problem is that when emotional suppression is built so deep into after many years of it you are packed to the gills with unexpressed feelings, they necessarily have become a large part of what it is your head. Therefore to let them out means a huge shift in the contents of your skull and your mind not incorrectly interprets that as a threat to its stability and shuts things right down again

To release them all in a near-Biblical level Flood, like I long to do, would be to throw the mind into utter chaos and destruction and my mind is structured around remaining stable no matter what.

More’s the pity. There are far worse things than chaos. In fact, some things are worth going a little bit cuckoo for cocoa puffs over.

But that prospect scares the chocolatey goodness out of me. I have absolutely no faith that if I went crazy, I would ever make it back to sanity again.

Or if I did, I would wake up in a secure psychiatric facility in a prison in multiple forms of restraint, and some nervous junior nurse would have to come in and tell the big scary hairy man what he has been up to while he was “out”.

Might be worth it, though, if I was sane and stable afterwards.

More after the break.

Blood and fire

I have a wild and passionate heart that is completely out of place in a cautious and sensible type like myself.

For example, ever since I was a little kid, I have gotten these urges to just wander off into the great wide world and find whatever there is to find out there.

I’ve never done it, of course. That would be crazy. Why abandon comfort and security for some wild and unpredictable future? It doesn’t make any sense!

Well I am increasingly aware that doing things that don’t make any conventional kind of sense because something deep inside you is urging you to do it is actually an important part of growing up and my refusal to follow those nonsensible urges called “instincts” is a very big part of why I haven’t.

Grown up, that is.

It’s that soul-destroying and pitiless self-control again – an idol for which I have sacrificed nearly everything good and pure and healthy in me just so that I could have a very false and destructive sense of control over myself.

Well it’s not fucking worth it.

Oh, but it makes life more predictable so I don’t have to deal with the unknown!

Yeah, that’s the thing about barren wastelands devoid of all life : they are very predictable. No messy and unpredictable living things doing Hell knows what to your nice clean lunar landscape.

The sad thing is, that really does appeal to the diseased part of me. I have had a number of dreams in the distant past where I was on the surface of a completely lifeless planet with nothing but huge boulders and caves and depressions in the ground all around me, and a fine ash falling continuously from the sky.

And for some insane reason, this made me deliriously happy

Come to think of it, it was the same kind of ecstasy I felt one night when I was walking the streets of my hometown at 3 am.

It’s this exultant feeling of freedom. Like all this time, it’s the biopressure of my fellow human beings (and my fear of them) that has been keeping me all balled up and cramped within myself, and when that was gone, by soul could breathe free.

That has got to be what the outdoorsy types get high on : that feeling of having no other humans in your mental presence.

Now I can’t very well become that kind of person this late in life. Ship sailed on that when my legs went boom.

But it’s definitely something I have to think about. There must be some way of creating that blessed mental silence for myself.

Maybe meditation could do it?

I’ll figure something out. I always do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I

More joy from my Youtube comments on this video

No no no… you’re still trapped in their boxes. The big lie is not that there’s not that there’s’ no alternative to capitalism, is that the system exactly as it is now is the only form capitalism can take and therefore to want to change it in even the slightest is to be AGAINST capitalism and THEREFORE unthinkable. But capitalism is a game and the rules of a game can be changed at any time and it’s still the same damned game. We could radically rewrite the rules of capitalism and it would STILL be capitalism. It hurts me to see so many of my fellow liberals fall for this con when they talk smack about capitalism when all they really want is a rule change. The right instantly wins when you align yourself with anti-capitalism and they know it. Resist the urge. Because what they REALLY fear is a change to the rules of capitalism that would threaten THEIR position. The system could be a brutal dictatorship and they would still be against all change because they’re high in the hierarchy and would have the most to lose if we the people started shaking the tree from down here where we are. Remember, it’s they who rise the highest who fall the furthest… and they know it.

I agree with myself on this.

Actual capitalism – as opposed to the bullshit status quo that calls itself capitalism right now – is an inherently flexible and robust system which can keep going under all kinds of rulesets and therefore there is no reason we cannot adjust the rules in order to make things more fair.

After all, even children know that some kids keep winning the game because they have both found and made easily exploited loopholes to the rules, you change the rules to get rid of the loopholes so that everyone can enjoy the game again.

And kids also know that whatever kids were unfairly advantaged by the previous rules will squeal like little piggies about how “unfair” this is all is.

But it’s the opposite of unfair. It WAS unfair and we fixed it. You’re just mad because now you have to actually compete with everyone else.

That’s the Bertrand Privilege Test in action : one of the surest signs that someone is privileged is that they react to equality like it is a personal attack.

It’s practically a confession.

A confession because only those with an unfair advantage can lose out when equality is restored. For all of us playing fair, whether willingly or not, we can only benefit.

And if you need proof that capitalism can not just survive but thrive under a more fair and equitable set of rules, you need only look at Europe.

Countries like France and Germany maintain extremely high levels of economic performance while also being far, far more fair and humane than anything we have ever seen on this side of the Atlantic.

That’s the big, open secret the parasitic plutocratic fatcats of North American society don’t want people to learn about let alone think about.

Because guess what? Germans still can get rich via capitalism. So can the French. And the Spanish. And the citizens of every other even vaguely civilized nation on Earth.

All over the world, people are getting rich and buying mansions and yachts and gold plated toilet seats while ALSO being subject to a much fairer set of rules that insure that the people benefit from their success as well.

So remember : it’s our economy. We can make any changes to its rules that we see fit. It belongs to us.

We do NOT belong to it.

More after the break.

---

Underground forest fire

I am unwell.

Not only do I feel distinctly feverish – that all too familiar feeling like there’s a space heater in my core and it’s turned way up.

I should get a good digital thermometer. I’d feel better if I had data.

More worrying than the fever is that I woke up with a gut so full of acid that I couldn’t move a meter without being stopped by a stomach spasm that made me audibly and involuntarily cry out in pain.

Luckily, some water then some food tamed the acid overdose and I am no longer in that kind of pain.

But it worries me because that’s a very unusual symptom for me. I’ve not had acid indigestion or heartburn very often in my life.

Plus I feel like the acid is still there so I may have merely delayed the symptom.

In addition, I feel lightheaded and woozy and I have a headache centered right smack dab in the middle of my forehead, where my bindi would be were I Hindu.

And I understandably feel kinda squirrely and paranoid because I went from lazing in my bed comfortably after a nap to in pain from the sudden onset of a mysterious and painful ailment in the time it takes to sit up.

Could it be from being insufficiently hydrated? It’s possible, I suppose. Hydration seemed to be the solution to the problem. It diluted the acid and gave me enough breathing room to go get food.

Or it could be another manifestation of what I have been calling the Demon Hunger that I suffer from time to time. Hunger signals our stomachs to produce acid, after all.

But something’s up, I am sure of that. Last night I had this weird pain all through my forehead and jaw and had to take one gabapentin and some acetaminophen in order to get it to go away.

That’s not usual either. I am quite worried that I am coming down with an infection of some sort and I am going to have to go see Doctor Chao or even go to the ER before all is said and done.

Or maybe the problem will disappear just as mysteriously as it appeared, like those bouts of flu-like symptoms I get from time to time.

I guess my immune system, compromised as it is, always wins in the end. At least when it comes to systemic problems like this.

If it’s some localized infection eating a hole in my flesh, it couldn’t care less.

The saddest part of this is that there’s a little voice in my head saying, “well, at least something exciting is happening for once!”.

Am I really that bored of mu rut? I’d have every right to be. I have been living the exact same pathetic lifestyle for 25 of my 49 years and it’s getting a tad stale.

There has to be a path to a better way of living. Something where I feel free and useful and clean and good, instead of stewing in my own juices all the goddamned time.

I’d rather be able to jettison the juices and rinse myself off inside so I can start again with a clean slate and maybe do as better job of things this time out.

I have all this intelligence and talent to give the world.

Isn’t that worth meeting me halfway somehow, world?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

1117

580.5

It’s not just a rule of comedy.

Lately I have been pondering my own fight for positivity. I know that the negative pall depression puts me under is wrong on ever level and that sometimes I can fight it and sometimes I can’t, but I am in search of a more permanent solution.

One that does not require the depressive’s worst enemy, a continuous input of energy. Even for mentally healthy people, a constant input of energy is for emergencies only and never ever a good long term solution.

Because sooner or later you’re going to get too tired to keep it up.

But for us whose insanity is called depression the stakes are incredibly high. Our depression masks our energies, making us feel like we have almost none, because that’s a big part of how the damn thing controls us.

It keeps us in a constant austerity mindset.

But austerity doesn’t work.

It makes you act as if you are starving when you have a full belly, a full larder, and full wallet. Yet as hungry as it makes you, it won’t let you eat one crumb more than is absolutely necessary. It truly is a pernicious evil.

And you just know that when trying to fight uphill eventually fails because you run out of energy (or at least, depression makes you think you do), depression will be there to grease the downward path to make sure you fall ALL the way back down again if not even a fair bit further so it can punish you for trying to escape its grasp then hover over you like a choir of harpies shrieking about how stupid you were for trying and how you should just give up and never try anything ever again, etc.

God, do I hate my depression. It’s so goddamned evil!

So the solution to banishing those dark clouds from my personal sky cannot be to just keep fighting forever. Depression knows you can’t do that and is perfectly willing to let you fill your heart with hope and try to make it up that mountain by sheer force of will because it knows that you will fail and the pain of disappointment will be enough to keep you docile and obedient to it for a good long while.

And the solution can’t be to merely keep thinking and talking about it, either, because if that worked I would have cured myself decades ago.

It has to be that something far deeper than words or thoughts can reach has to change. I have to find that inner pilot light that relights my furnace when it goes out and thus keeps my metaphorical house warm even when the weather outside is bitterly cold.

At least, that’s how I assume it works for sane people. They have some kind of eternally renewing energy source that keeps their inner world from experiencing the sort of long term deathly chill that we depressives live with every day.

My best guess is that this pilot light of mine is fundamentally a manifestation of my primal id and it’s my deep and troubling alienation from my id, instincts, emotional core, and so on that keeps it from doing its job.

The word that comes to mind is “renewal”. I lack it. There is supposed to be some p[oint in the cycle where all dies, lies fallow, then bursts back into life, like the Phoenix burning up in its own flame them rising from the ashes.

But my neurotic and myopic interference with all natural processes stupidly slams on the brakes when things go bad, thus insuring that the badness goes on and on and on.

As I read in an astrology book : when we seek to stop the wheel in its spin, we only delay our own renewal.

Wise words. That is where my fear of trodding on unknown paths gets me. I don’t know for a fact that the future would bring my revival because I can’t see that far ahead, so I decide that going forward at all means total disaster.

Which is quite the jump, to assume that all unknown things are horrible. It’s really just the basic fear of the unknown transformed into something that smells a bit like common sense and caution.

It’s rooted in that deep down mistrust of everything that comes from early childhood trauma. My feeling that the world is hostile to me and out to GET me and will hurt me any chance it can get stems directly from being raped when I was only four years old, before I had even completed primary brain growth.

Of course, the later bullying didn’t exactly help either.

So while intellectually, I have stayed balanced and objective and have rejected both optimism and pessimism as unsupportable assumptions about all of reality, the truth is that deep down I am blackheartedly pessimistic and fully expect life to torture, torment, and traumatize me at every turn.

Even though, for the most part, it hasn’t. And doesn’t.

This is what happens when the tail wags the dog and you believe something because it reflects an emotion inside you and not because you have any reason to believe it.

I still have trouble escaping the gravitational pull of the feeling that everybody hates me and wishes I would just go away and die so they wouldn’t have to put up with my pathetic presence any more, which they only ever did out of pity in the first place.

The odd thing is, it felt good to write that down. Well, I have to let the negativity out sometimes. Penning it up is not any kind of long term solution.

The only long term solution I can think of is that there has to be some way of processing the negatives like a sewage treatment plant and then outputting the now clean waters of the soul back out into my waterways.

Or at the very least, some healthy way to release the nastiness into the world where it can not hurt me any more.

But how the heck do I do that?

Dunno. So that’s a discussion for another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More goodies from my YouTube comments :

The question was, “Do you think your high IQ as more of a gift, or a curse?

Ain’t that the million dollar question. I hate to say it, but mine has hurt me way more than it has helped me. It made it hard to relate to anyone my age all through primary education. It insured that I was bored as hell in class. It definitely made me act in ways that came across as arrogant and haughty. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am, It meant that school never challenged me at all. Even in university. the course work was childishly easy for me. It meant that I was smarter than every teacher I have ever had, which means I never had the comfort of knowing that people older and smarter were looking out for me. It made me a pain in the ass to teach as a result. Not because I was snide and disrespectful, but because I was so unpredictable. At any moment, I might ask a question that makes the teacher or professor feel and/or look stupid. And worst of all, it means that in strictly cognitive sense, I live in a world of relative idiots. Ordinary people are like children to me. This violently clashes with my deep egalitarianism and desire to connect with people and find out their story and understand who they are and where they are coming from. And I have no idea how to resolve that conflict.

me, on youtube, this am

I posted that chunk of text here for two reasons : it seemed like a very psychologically important bit of writing in which I disclosed the details of one of the central conflicts of me entire life (and thus belongs on this self-therapy session of a blog) could poke, and I wanted to see if I could poke holes in it via looking for the positive side of being so god damned smart all the time.

And I probably can. So for extra credit. I am going to do so without drenching my words in the usual coating of self-defeating negativity and snark.

Hoo boy. Let’s begin.

Let’s start with the obvious : school was never hard for me. At all. And while that does have the disadvantages I listed above, I can’t deny that compared to most people’s experience of school as a place of risk and danger and stress, I had it SUPER easy.

Even all those keener kids who I went to school with had to work really hard to get the sorts of grades I got just by showing up.

And I appreciate that and value it and do my best to remember how extraordinary that is and hold on to the implications for my life going forward.

There’s surely a place out there somewhere for someone with my gifts.

Going deeper, we get into the much murkier and harder to define area of what intellectual joys and deep insights have been available to me only because I have the high powered hardware to support the search.

It’s a slippery subject because while it is simple in concept. in application it’s very hard to imagine what life would be like with a very different kind of brain.

I suspect I would have developed my personality and charm a lot more.

Closely related is the fact that I just plain see more than most people. More of the chess board, more of the big picture, and more of both the breadth and the detail of life.

And while that sometimes reveals very dark things to me, I would not trade it away for anything. It’s the beating hart of who I am on a cognitive/emotional basis.

And finally, there is no doubt to me that some of my non-cognitive gifts would be less than they are or even nonexistent without that high powered hardware.

My wit, for example. I would not be nearly as funny without the extremely detailed and interconnected and indexed comedy database I have been compiling since I was a kid.

So those are all the positives of my high IQ that I have come up with so far.

There’s probably not all of them, though.

---

---

Make sure you’re not hiding

Or, more fully, “Before you complain about not being noticed, make sure you are not hiding or being invisible. ”

In other words, take down your cloaking field first. I have spent most of my life bitterly resenting being overlooked, but the truth is, my social anxiety is so intense that I learned to fade into the background and not be noticed at an early age.

And it’s silly to expect people to notice you when you’re trying so hard not to be noticed.

The thing is, this cloaking field is not necessarily conscious. I went a lot of years without realizing I was doing it. So of course I resented not being noticed.

From my point of view, it happened for “no good reason”.

And that perpetual victim mindset is very seductive. Oh woe is me, I am the universe’s chew toy, a completely innocent victim of a chaotic and capricious world that is so evil and malign that I couldn’t possibly be expected to take responsibility for myself and do things to make my life better because I am the only one who can.

It would be futile. Who am I to take on the entire universe?

Phew! I almost had to grow up. That would have been the worst.

The phrase “powerless by choice” springs to mind.

It’s something I used to talk about a lot in this space : you can’t have the power to help yourself without taking the responsibility to do so, and free spirit types like myself are notoriously averse to responsibility, so we prefer to think we are helpless victims.

But if you’re choosing it, you’re not really helpless, are you?

So I have to ask myself : is this sad life of mine a price I am willing to pay in order to never have to take responsibility for myself?

So far the answer has been “yes, actually”. But that can change.

I admit that the idea of taking full responsibility for myself scares me more than any of my many anxieties or neuroses.

It makes me instinctively shrink back from reality and wants to retreat even further from the real world into the depths of my own mind.

That’s my go-to response for everything, really. Hence my being Avoidant.

But it is futile to fight such an obvious and inevitable truth : existential responsibility cannot be avoided. No matter how you slice it, if things are ever to get better for me, it will have to start with something I do.

Nobody is going to spontaneously come into my life and rescue me without my having to do a thing to get it started.

Especially when I work so hard not to be noticed by life at all.

Ball’s in my court and always has been, and always will be.

it’s not about what is “expected” of me by some nebulous entity. That’s just another way of dodging the truth of one’s responsibility for oneself.

What it’s truly about is what I want. And that’s way scarier.

I mean, what idiot left ME in charge?

Oh right. Me.

That figures, to be honest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

1128

I’m a pretty low point in my mood cycle.

It’s a place I return to over and again where my anger, frustration, bitterness, and existential angst have built up to toxic levels and the Bad Thoughts start creeping in to my mind once again.

There’s good old “fuck my life”, always a bad sign. Then there’s the next step, “fuck everything everywhere forever”, which you must admit is the most impressively thorough expression of hostility you’ve ever read.

And then there’s what happens around half an hour ago, when I was getting dressed ^[1] and noticed that all the items of clothing I had selected were black.

And a voice in my head thought, “Hey man, what’s the deal with all the black?”?

To which a different voice said, in a kind of low affect Tommy Chong voice, “Well, whatever increases my chances of getting run over. ”

And that is…not good.

Not just because I thought it, but for the fact that for a couple seconds after I thought it I not only found it funny but thought getting run over sounded pretty good, actually.

After all, thinks the sickest and saddest part of my mind, if I got run over it would either kill me and end my suffering or it would land me in the hospital with a perfect excuse for why I am not going anywhere or doing anything with my life.

Yes, apparently to that part of my mind, there still aren’t enough barriers protecting me from reality and societal expectations and only a hospital environment, surrounded by people whose profession is to care for me and where I am never expected by anyone to do anything except cooperate with whatever testing is needed and be general a pleasant and easy to manage patient.

It’s tragic how good that sounds to me.

Even sadder is the fact that my lifestyle wouldn’t even change that much. I already lie in bed for most of the day, playing games on my tablet.

The main difference would be parting with my PC and eating balanced, normal, healthy meals three times a day in a setting that is actually clean for once.

It’s just too bad that I would have to get much sicker for it to happen.

Back to the point. I would not classify myself as currently suicidal or liable to harm myself, but I am nevertheless closer to that state than I ever wanna be.

Brace yourself, I’m gonna start talking about my dick again.

Because I know that part of my deep frustration has nothing to do with mental health and everything to do with physical tension.

Namely the kind caused when a human male gets sexually aroused without any chances of orgasm or ejaculation over and over again.

Blue balls is the colloquial name for this condition, or as I prefer to call it, Smurf nuts.

And it’s gotten so much worse lately because while my inability to reach the happy squirting time is the same as ever, my libido has really ramped up for some reason.

And this makes things harder (ha) because the only way I know of where I can still cum is to not masturbate at all for more than a week and then give it a whirl.

Before the recently horniness spike, this was not that much of a challenge. I could do without and not really miss it much.

But now I am attempting like twice a day, minimum, and that’s never gonna work. I am running down the battery without ever letting it get a full charge.

Not only that, but it means I am increasing the pressure level in the ol’ fuel tanks way faster than I used to.

No wonder I feel angry and frustrated and depressed.

Those are some agreed-upon symptoms of Smurf nuts.

More after the break.

---

Easy to catch, hard to lose

I seem to have caught a chill.

At keast, that’s what I call it when I get like this. I have felt cold for days now and nothing I do seems to warm me up.

It’s gotten so bad that I don’t even feel warm under my comforter. In fact, for some bizarre reason, when I am under it, it feels like there is a cold air current betwen me and the comforter and it is chilling me like I’m looking for something in the freezer.

That’s not good.

Getting dressed for once (remember, I blog naked) helped some, but I was still cold below the surface of my skin.

I turned up the thermostat in my room but I can’t feel a difference.

So I am forced to assume that the problem is not situational.

It’s circulatory. My sluggish circulatory system is not moving my blood around right and that leaves me feeling cold.

Which is creepy as hell when you think about it. So I don’t.

Luckily I know what will help. Unluckily, what will help is stand up for a while. Something my mysterious leg problem makes particularly difficult.

Not to mention painful.

I could try giving myself a brisk and vigorous rubdown, like I am a thoroughbred fresh from a race or a prizefighter fresh from a fight.

That would stimulate circulation and bring blood closer to the surface. But it’s also a lot of work. So standing seems like, if not the better option, then the laziest one.

Honestly, I will probably do both. I will stand a while so that my whole body’s blood supply can circulate without any pinch-points getting in the way and with gravity helping things get around in at least one direction

And then I will lay down, put a YouTube video on the tablet to listen to while I give myself a good rubbing.

That should fix the problem. I will have myself warmed up in no time.

I wish I had a fireplace to curl up in front of. Or a wood stove. Love that radiant heat.

Space heaters just aren’t the same.

Anyone know where I can find a sauna?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

TRIGGER WARNING : Watch out for Roy Rogers’ horse.

Oh, but also :

TRIGGER WARNING : Serious poop talk ahead.

So first, a small confession : ever since my legs went boom, I have kept a receptacle on my bedside table for me to pee in.

This saves me from having to get out of bed to empty my bladder and that saves me a fair bit of pain.

Obviously, when I do eventually get up, I just empty it into the toilet and flush.

And now, a distressing mystery : lately, whenever I pee, I get the urge to poop. It feels quite urgent, and yet, the moment I finish peeing, it goes away.

This worries me because I can’t come up with a healthy explanation for this phenomenon. My best guess is that somehow, while I am urinating, the pipe between my bladder and my urethra swells as the urine passes through it and that presses on or against something involved in defecation, hence the urge to do so.

And that’s not normal. It’s quite new, in fact. Something in there must be swollen, or inflamed, or both. Uh oh.

Anyhow, thus the stage is set for what happened last night.

I was woken up by a full bladder at around 4:30 am. I of course grabbed my receptacle and began peeing into it.

Not longer after that, I became aware of a very ominous bubbling sensation coming from my rectum.

I probably should have stopped peeing then. But we male humans really don’t like forcing a stop to our peeing.

It’s uncomfortable at best and downright painful at worst.

Nonetheless, the moment I was done, I felt the bed under where my butt had been, and sure enough, it was wet.

Oh shit, I thought, not without irony.

So I grabbed a bunch of kleenex and mopped and wiped up the (mostly) fluid. This included having to thoroughly wipe my ass for reasons that should be obvious.

Very upsetting. But I kept it together and got up and flushed all the kleenex and headed back to bed.

Only to discover a big pile of what I am forced to refer to as poop. ^[1]

My reluctance comes from the fact that it did not look like poop at all. It was a light tan color and made of small discrete lumps.

That and the smell of bile as I wiped it up made the whole mess seem a lot more like semi-digested food than actual feces.

And I know what you’re thinking. But as heavy a sleeper as I am, I am pretty sure that vomiting in my sleep without waking up is beyond me.

Besides, it was on the wrong part of the bed for that.

On the other hand, I am at a loss to explain how such a substance could make it all the way through both sections of the GI tract while remaining in that state.

It would certainly take something going drastically wrong.

And that has me seriously worried. I was told at the hospital that if I have bouts of incontinence or difficulty peeing, I am to go back to the ER at once.

I am not ready to do that just yet. But one more incident and I am gone.

At least I will have my tablet with me and thus the waiting will be less painful.

Lord. don’t let this mean that things are getting worse.

More after the break.

---

A : Well, time to strap on the old feedbag…
B : OK, but let’s eat first.
A whinnies in agreement.

---

Birthing dirty ice

Today was Therapy Thursday.

Had a pretty good session. I got a lot of my negativity out. Managed to get quite emotional. Even cried a bit near the end.

That is big progress for me. Being emotional in realtime is hard for me, especially in the presence of others.

I’m beginning to realize my social mask is pretty damned tight.

So much so that the “real” me is a stranger to me for the most part. I invest so much of myself into my default persona because he’s the person I wish I was. The person I would rather be, without all the damage.

If I could transform into that guy – Fruvous, both the RL and VR – I would. He’s so much happier and saner than I am.

But like I have said before, it’s not that I am faking being Fruvous. He is me and I am him. But he is not the whole me.

I even feel better when I am being him. I feel warmer and stronger and, dare I say, sexier. My expansive personality and charisma shine through and I can almost feel like a whole person. A real human being.

But then I go right back into my little box and I am sad old me again and I bury myself in video games to mask how much it hurts to be me.

Oh well. At least pouring ,my guts out to Doc Costin made me feel better.

And the whole time, I had that cold feeling inside that I have come to associate with catharsis. The feeling is centered around my heart (how symbolic) but radiates out weakly to the rest of me.

It’s like I am experiencing the thawing out of my emotions on a bodily level. I can almost feel them melting away.

Sadly, I need my words to do it. Hence this blog.

Once more. thank you so very much for reading these words.

You make this all possible.

---

Further adventures in ordering in

So my credit card is just plain not working on DoorDash.

So I decided to revisit my Uber Eats account from long ago. The account I abandoned because Uber Eats stopped accepting my credit card/

The circle is complete.

So I sign in to my account. It wants the code it texted me. But I didn’t have a cell phone back when I signed up so, with his permission, I used Joe’s number.

A fact I did not recall until he was asking me if I ordered an Uber.

Ooops. I apologized to him, then put the whole thing out of my mind.

Until derp, it’s Joe who gets the phone call saying the food has arrived.

No problem, I will just change the number associated with the account.

It is impossible to change the phone number associated with the account. I can change literally every other thing, including my name (??), but there is no option anywhere on the website to change your phone number.

So I can’t use that service either. Joe will get the call and there is nothing I can do about that so bam goes Uber Eats.

Oh well, at least I got one meal out of it.

But yeah, Really starting to resent this Kafka-esque bullshit.

Shut up and take my money!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is a big subject so I am going to uncharacteristically tackle it in parts.

One reason I am so damned cerebral was that it was via that route that I conquered my fear of the dark and otherwise overcame some of my irrational fears.

That was the first time I felt that sense of pride and triumph that comes from overcoming the darkness with the power of my mind and my will, and it was quite formative.

It’s the sort of thing that turns one into a future skeptic,. I suppose. Though I feel the same way about that label as I do about labeling myself an atheist.

And labels in general, really.

And this thing about overcoming my fear of the dark by telling myself that there was nothing there in the dark that wasn’t there in the light over and over points to a larger aspect of my overly intellectual nature and that is that for me, logic and reason and science and so on were refuges from a cruel and chaotic world.

The world outside my head might not make a lot of sense to me, especially the social aspects of it, but I could have order and reason and beliefs based on the facts inside my head and I could fit it all together in a strong but flexible framework in my mind, and that could form the structural support for me to build a shelter there.

But that came at one hell of a cost. A cost that I didn’t even know I was paying until four or five years ago but one I now regret bitterly.

Because you see, the thing about this Mister Reason con is that it passes its own tests. It’s logically consistent and resists change and does a very good impression of being actual logic and reason.

But it completely leaves out the spiritual and the world of the deeper soul. It’s entirely ignorant of the needs of the spirit and the joys of being an embodied being and the world of sensual pleasure.

And it sure as fuck doesn’t know how to have fun, or to make itself happy at all.

It’s an incredibly narrow view of the world that feels like being broad and deep of mind because it covers such enormous areas of knowledge and understanding.

But that’s all it covers. Knowledge and understanding. Cold facts and deductions. Rules and applications. Systems and mechanisms.

All very power and all completely useless when it comes to being and feeling alive.

Because I am not, as it turns out, a robot. Neither am I an angel, a saint, or a holy man. I am a humble human being and that means it is beyond futile for me to pretend that I can completely hide from the loud and scary world in my lofty ideals and Olympian detachment forever and ever, amen.

I’m here. I’m real. This is now. This is the real world, warts and all. And being violently averse to it in favour of my cerebrations does me no favours because despite what my deceitful powers of reason tries to tell me, the real world is where I will be living the rest of my time on earth so I might as well get used to it already.

If you don’t endure, you won’t adapt.

Must resist the urge to flee.

More after the break.

---

The story so far…

1. A&W. Because I got-za to have the Mozza. Nope, payment rejected. I checked and the card shows no errors. And I have ordered A&W with a PayPower card before. So I have no idea WTF. OK, then I’ll try…
2. Burger King. That grilled taste. Nope, closed. Before 8:30 pm. What, do the employees and managers all have an early bedtime? Where I come from, BK is the go-to fast food for when you are drunk/stoned and hungry at 3 am. (In our defense, we didn’t have a Denny’s. )
3. Denny’s. Also closed. WTF? My first thought when it said they were closed was “like hell they are!” but then I realized I always go to Denny’s on Sunday so maybe they close earlier on week days. Apparently, our Denny’s is not one of the 24 hour ones. Or some serious bugfuckery is going on.
4. McD’s. Payment also rejected. This is beginning to feel personal. This lil card of mine already paid for my groceries for this week dammit!
5. Last try : 711? Nope, Hungryman sub has vanished from this reality. Ordered one just last week. Now there is no mention of it or any other of 7-11’s fine selection of subs on DoorDash. That would be very mysterious to me if I cared. Maybe the lettuce shortage fucked things up in production?

Fuck it. I give up. White flag. I will just eat my bologna and cheese melted onto some Ritz crackers in the microwave in peace and trouble you no more.

For now. Because I am still pretty pissed off. My tummy and I were disappointed five freaking times and patient readers know I do not handle disappointment well.

I mean, it is hard enough for me to make up my mind once, for Dog’s sake.

Addendum : when I typed “sub” into the search bar for 7-11 on DoorDash, 23 different products came up, NONE OF WHICH WERE SUBS.

I mean, that’s downright Kafka-esque.

Oh well, at least I didn’t end up spending the $20-$30 ordering in usually costs me.

I have this theory that restaurants have figured out that people are less fussy about price when they are ordering in, and have jacked up the prices on their delivery menus well above what you would pay in person.

Next time I’m at Denny’s I will have to pull up their DoorDash site and see if the prices on DoorDash are the same as the ones on the menu.

This is the kind of pulse-pounding two-fisted investigative journalism you’ve come to expect in this extremely au courant blog.

And hey…. you’re welcome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.