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.

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