Well, I really fucked up this time.

Except I didn’t.

It’s complicated. Lemme explain.

Imagine my shock when I got up this morning to find about an inch of water on the floor.

The toilet in my en suite had overflowed. Silently. Spontaneously. Disastrously.

Well I know when I am beat, so I phone Joe. Hated to wake him up, especially for a nasty task like this, but there was no way my crippled ass could handle this shit.

As a result, Joe and Julian have been cleaning up this mess all day. They lay towels and blankets down to soak up as much fluid as possible then run them through washer and dryer then it’s back on absorption duty again.

And that’s pretty bad. But it gets so much worse.

Because you see, the water seeped through the floor to the apartment below ours. And through that apartment to the apartment below THEM.

So those people called our Strata Council. And they called our realtor, the guy who owns this apartment and rents it to us. And he came over, seriously pissed off.

So we are in hot water (snrk) with our landlord now and we are probably going to have to pay God knows how much in damages and now our landlord has seen how messy and cluttered everything is in this place and so we will be lucky if he doesn’t decide to throw us out on our collective butts.

And every depressive instinct in me wants to blame myself for the whole thing and launch into a very destructive shame spiral that makes me think the world would be a better place without me but I am fighting it tooth and nail.

Because for one, I can’t for the life of me see how I did anything wrong.

The damned thing overflower spontaneously. As in, not attached to a flush at all. It’s done this a few times before but I was lucky enough to be alerted by an ominous trickling sound and was able to stop it before it got very far.

Not this time. This time it was silent. Or at least, not very loud.

So as far as I can tell, I did nothing wrong. I still feel bad about all the work Joe and Julian are having to do, and the money Joe will likely have to pay is going to damned near kill me, but I am not truly blaming myself.

It’s a lot for me to process, though, and I sure as hell don’t feel real good today.

This exact thing happened once before, when we lived at Francis and 1 Road. That time it included our downstairs neighbour banging on the door in an acute state of distress because my poo water had dripped down into his baby’s crib.

That time it really did crush me. Don’t know how I survived it.

Ya know, sometimes all that keeps you alive is the fact that your executive function is too fucked up for you to be able to come up with a suicide plan.

This time, I know I am going to go through some shit (so to speak) and the next 24 hours won’t be a lot of fun, but I am not worried.

These things come and go. All I have to do is hang on.

More after the break.

---

You’re all wet

Still struggling not to blame myself for today’s flooding.

Honestly, it’s the toilet’s fault. So to speak. Toilets should not even be capable of just spontaneously overflowing without anyone even flushing.

That toilet is just plain weird. Sometimes it even flushes itself.

No, seriously! I will be here at the computer and hear it flush.

I guess a ghost pooped?

I know that it’s not my fault, yet the guilt seeps back in when I am not actively suppressing it, so I have to remain alert.

Makes me wonder if I would be better off just letting the guilt happen so I can get it over with. But I have chosen my path and my path is resistance.

So fuck you, depression. You can fuck off and die. I am going to hold on to reality and you are going to be nothing but a cloud passing through the sky of my mind.

By tomorrow, you’ll be gone. And I will still be here. Survivng.

Sometimes just making it through the day is a triumph.

---

Got my graphics card problem solved. Spuug (aka William Graham) is going to come over tomorrow afternoon and install it for me.

I am, however, going to keenly watch the whole process, which after all is not particularly complex, with an eye to convincing myself that I can do this kind of thing myself in the future.

This whole phobia about touching the insides of my computer is just plain silly.

All it requires is plugging the card into a PCI slot then connecting it to the power supply.

I’ve assembled component stereos that were more complicated than that.

So Spuug will be dropping by tomorrow at 3 pm.

It’s still distinctly possible that it won’t work unless I get a beefier power supply, so I am adjusting my expectations accordingly. A beast like my ” Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080″ has got to require a lot of juice.

The next step will be either getting an equally beefy CPU or a better monitor.

I will probably do the monitor first as that will have the more dramatic and pleasing effect. Plus that’s something even I feel confident in replacing.

Could be quite the leap. Modern monitors must be able to do so, so much better than the 1920×640 I have been running for all these years.

Heck, maybe it will even be good enough for me to use with my glasses on!

Should honestly just buy a new pair of glasses, without the extra “fine tuning” my eye surgeon added at the last minute.

Glasses are crazy cheap now. Could probably get a new pair for like, $20 from my friends at Smart Buy Glasses.

It would be so nice to be able to go back to wearing glasses all the time, as God intended for me.

Wow. That’s practically, like, proactive of me!

Will wonders never cease.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Stand back, folks, ’cause this is a big one. And it buried pretty deep.

Back when I was a preschooler, I, like most kids that age, wanted to help out with the family chores. But nobody had the time and patience to teach me.

The fact that I was timid, shy, and clumsy didn’t help either.

In fact, I can see now that a vicious circle formed : the more hesitant and slow I got, the more angry and impatient my siblings got with me, and the more angry and impatient they got, the more hesitant and slow I got.

Because I was scared of them. Wonder why.

This culminated with my sister Catherine losing her shit at me and screaming at me that I was “useless, completely useless” and that if I really wanted to help I should just “stay out of the way”.

This fucked me up pretty good.

It destroyed what little faith I had in my own competence and forced me into a position of just sitting on the sidelines while other people took care of things.

Which is more or less how I have lived my life.

It also forced me into a position of helpless guilt because I had no choice to rely on others but having no choice in the matter in no way keeps you from feeling guilty – or being made to feel guilty – about being a burden on others.

It’s not fair to punish someone for something that they cannot help and did not choose, but that’s never stopped people from doing it before.

They made me feel guilty just for being alive, for fuck’s sake.

So I have gone through my whole life feeling generally incompetent. Like I can’t do even the most basic things to look after myself and have to rely on others.

And yet, because I was so badly neglected as a child, I was forced to be more self reliant than most kids. I could make my own food – Campbell’s soup and peanut butter and jam on toast was my standard meal.

And I could do my own laundry – because at one point my siblings rather rudely told me that “they” (my mom) wouldn’t be doing it for me any more.

These are, after all, the same people who forced me to do my own clothes shopping when I wasn’t even 10 yet.

So I think it’s cleaning tasks where I feel the most incompetent. Basically if it requires fine motor skills and an attention to detail, I’m out.

Plus I honestly think that when I was raped, I lost whatever progress into the anal stage of development I had made and regressed to the oral stage, and I am still there now.

I still feel useless. I still feel hopeless against the big bad world and that leads to feeling like there is no way I could survive on my own – even though I have.

I fell apart psychologically, but I managed to feed, clothe, and house myself okay.

So I don’t know why I am so scared of the Big Bad World out there. When you really look at it, I am perfectly capable of doing all the tasks to make it as a disabled person.

Jobs are another story.

I guess I am still dominated by some very old and out of date tapes that are always ready to play SUPER LOUD.

I have GOT to learn to erase that shit.

More after the break.

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I’m… NOT postmodern?

That up there is the third documentary I have watched (listened to) about postmodernism that describes something utterly alien to my understanding of what being po-mo is all about.

I am thinking these younger people are seeing it through a very different filter than I am. The fellow in the documentary above, for example, was clearly doing some motivated reasoning when he put together his argument against the excesses of the modern wokist crowd and somehow construed it to connect with postmodernism.

Personally, I grew up with what I understood to be a postmodernist point of view. Namely, one that saw media in the Gen X way – we see the picture AND the frame, we grasp that media exists in a context and that the context is part of the message.

That’s why my generation loves meta so much – we love taking one thing and putting it in the context of another because that creates the sort of frisson that directs attention to the contexts of both things.

Hence the Seth Macfarlane reference humour that has, sadly, been absolutely beaten to death by overuse now.

So much so that young people are posting anti-meta rants about how cheap meta-tytpe humour is and how lame it is and so forth and so on.

Nothing is so good that idiots doing it badly (or worse, in a cynically formulaic way) can’t ruin it so that the merest hint of it makes people wanna puke.

And while I try to be realistic about how even my generation ages and becomes the old people just like the rest, to hear these young people – for good reason – trash my beloved Gen X meta jokes still really hurts.

Oh well. I know I’m still hilarious. Jokes get old but funny never dies.

It just changes its disguise from time to time.

Back to postmodernism. It’s particularly weird to here it brought up now because I was sure we MUST be on to whatever is next by now.

I liked that the Millennials brought along a return to earnestness. Whatever happened to that? I was all for it.

Lord knows Gen X couldn’t do that. We’re allergic to earnestness. The only way we can enjoy it is by making fun of it in venues like MST3K.

In our weird twisted way, that’s how we show love to it. The epically bad media we so love to mock actually has a warm place in our cold embittered hearts.

It’s like the right kind of bad media is the equivalent of a puppy trying to growl and look fierce. It’s trying so hard but doing it so badly we can’t help but love it.

So the generation that ironically mocked, say, Plan Nine From Outer Space is the same generation that came to unironically love the movie.

We are a strange and twisted lot.

So what the hell does/did come after postmodernism anyway?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There was a delay in actually getting to the blogging today – and we all know how much I love it when THAT happens.

I hate it when something interrupts the process in between my deciding to write and actually getting to write.

It’s like I have summoned up the creative energies and I am ready to begin casting my spell when suddenly I have to shut it all down and wait.

It’s like the creative equivalent of blue balls.

It’s my own fault, though. Turns out that “500 Internal Server Error” I was getting was Fatcow, my web host’s, unhelpful way of saying it was time for me to pay for my account for another year.

When the nice fellow on the text chat told me the problem was that I had not purchased any hosting for my account, I had one of my “bad moments”.

But… but I’ve been a loyal customer for over a decade!

Yes, my first reaction was to somehow construe it as a personal rejection.

But then I got hold of myself and realized what happened and put in my current credit card info and now I am all paid up.

Cost me $115 CDN, yowch, but that’s for another whole year.

And then, after paying, I was still getting the same error. But the text tech went away and did something, and obviously it is now working.

The only lingering problem is that I have already used up half an hour of my “up” time as well as been through some stress and aggravation so my internal resources were partially depleted before I even started writing.

As a result, I get the feeling I won’t make it to 500 words this session. I will give it my best try but there is only so long I can be “up” before my back starts to hurt, especially if I am exerting my mind like I do when I write, so who knows where I will end up.

Whatever man. It’s all good.

---

Still have that “heavy gates” feeling in my soul, although today it feels more downbeat and contemplative. I’ve been watching/listening to some fairly heavy YouTube videos and that’s put me in a ponderously pondering kind of mood.

I’ve been sampling the works of a channel called Then and Now, where this Irish dude does these remarkably well researched and in depth takes on impressively ambitious topics like “The Invention of Personal Responsibility” and “The Age of Anger”.

That first one was pretty good but it had a very clear bias towards countering the bullshit conservatives spew about “personal responsibility” (of which they bear none) and I was hoping for a more in depth look at the history of the concept.

Because I consider it one of the foundational ideas of all our liberal democracies. It opened the door to personal, individual rights and responsibilities and without those, the individual vote of an individual citizen could not even be conceived.

But oh well. The fact that he didn’t do it the way I wanted doesn’t mean he did it wrong.

You hear that, fellow nerds??

More after the break.

---

Another late part 2

Slept when I should have neem eating again. Hence, another “supper” at 10:30 pm.

Fuck it. Whatever. I’ll blog and I’ll eat and by tomorrow it won’t make any damned difference whether I ate at the “right” time or not.

So fuck you, self-judgement. Who cares what you rhink, you’re crooked and crazy and treat me like an enemy anyhow.

I did what I could.

---

I spent a lot of time “floating” today.

That’s what I call it when I hang out at the edge of sleep. I am almost asleep – I’m laying down, my eyes are closed, I am deeply relaxed, I’m not taking in sensory input from my environment any more – but I never make that final move into sleep.

I think I enter that state so my mind can finish a buttload of thoughts and hence get caught up on my consciousness’s back orders (so to speak) when I have a lot on my mind and have been overstimulating my poor ol noggin and it just needs a period where it doesn’t have to process any inputs and yet I remain awake enough to process thoughts and emotions.

That’s why I usually feel better afterwards even though I did not actually sleep.

It’s damned near sleep anyhow. Like I said, it’s the edge of sleep. I get the same feeling of skipping ahead in time and it would be a stretch to say I was fully conscious during it.

I know the difference between that and real sleep might seem academic to some. But trust me when I say that it’s not sleep. It’s its own thing entirely.

Kinda like a trance, I suppose.

Anyhow, did that for around three hours total today. And while it does lighten the load on my mind, it also leaves me feeling alienated and out of sync with the world.

Like I just came down from a drug trip and reality doesn’t seem real yet.

And for some deeply strange reason, I always feel guilty, too. Like I did something shameful and wrong on a “peed your pants in public” level.

On that level but not involving that kind of same, I must add.

I end up feeling like I wasted time in some deep way. Compared to what, I have no idea.

The sad truth is that “floating” was probably the most productive thing I did all day.

So I don’t know what the hell I’m ashamed of. That’s got to be some pretty deep brain level shit going on there, because me, the conscious mind, doesn’t understand it at all.

Perhaps the deep “inner toddler” level of my mind the expression of all those thoughts so fast is akin to an act of elimination.

It’s the same sort of shame I feel when I write something really dark and/or sad.

Yeah. I can see the parallels, Unburdening oneself.

Man, that is severely fucked up. Feeling shame for catharsis.

I have so much to untangle in this twisted mind of mine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how my thoughts and emotions feel right now. Enormous and heavy and movable, like massive stone doors guarding some vast mystic keep and looming over potential intruders very impressively.

It’s not an unpleasant feeling. A tiny bit spooky, maybe. There is trace of that all too familiar “haunted” feeling I get from time to time.

But for the most part it feels good. Like my emotions are far more strong and together than they have ever been. I feel solid, and strong, and that feels good.

Did the therapy thing today. Covered a lot of ground, and good stuff too, but no particularly heavy revelations or discussions of note came of it.

Like I keep telling Doctor Costin, sometimes it’s just good to be listened to by someone capable of understanding me.

As a creature with a very strong need to express himself, that means a lot to me.

Getting really into No Man’s Sky. It’s already passed my first test of whether I am truly enjoying a game : I find it hard to stop playing.

You play a space explorer with a basic one-person starship, a very high tech space suit, and a handy gizmo called a “multi-tool”.

With those at my disposal, I explore a galaxy with literally quintillions of planets and a most fascinating overall plotline involving tracking down a mysterious signal and meeting some very cool aliens with a space station that teleports.

As is always the case with this sort of game, I alternate between blazing through the main plot and just plain dicking around.

Like sometimes I just pick a random planet, land, and explore. The planets have lots to do on them, like scan indigenous life forms for science and cash.

You get the most galactic currency (known simply as “units”) for animal life and least for minerals, with plant life somewhere in between.

I have encountered some really amazing alien life forms. Like something from the planet Pandora by way of Doctor Seuss.

You can also use your scanner to find “points of interest”, like broken machinery you can raid for nanites (another currency), technology modules that are always good for some highly valuable mysterious data and occasionally good for more, and even alien ruins and forgotten settlements.

Unsurprisingly, there is an “explorer” play mode where that’s all you do. No plotlines, no quests, no pirates, no anything at all except the joy of exploration.

Not for me. I need plot. I need narrative. I need quests. Otherwise things start to seem pretty pointless and I end up just quitting.

I need to be working towards something.

There’s hostile conditions to deal with on most planets, which is a pain. IT mostly consists of constantly scrounging for the sodium your space suit’s environmental shielding needs to keep working.

Doesn’t add much to the game, if you ask me. I wonder if I can turn it off?

I managed to stay all peaceful and Starfleet for a while in the beginning, but then the pirates started to notice me and so, after finally learning how the lock-on system worked, I have been forced to blast some pirates out of the sky.

Not that I mind terribly. Pirates are scum. But I still felt a loss of innocence.

So far I have not had to fight planetside, though. I leave all the critters alone besides scanning them. And they do the same for me.

I know this will end. If it’s not a hostile creature I have no choice but to kill, it will be hostile fellow sentients of some sort.

I already had a close call with a fugitive from justice. He took a few potshots at me and I was close to turning my mining beam on him, but he got back into his ship and fucked off, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Eventually I will need to buy weapon attachments for my multi-tool and become a badass space marine. I just know it.

So I will enjoy my time frolicking in innocence in the meantime.

More after the break.

---

I don’t wanna sleep

I just wanna bang on the keyboard all day!

Okay, here’s the situation.
My parents went away on a week’s vacation, and
They left the keys to my Mom’s new…

…uh… sorry. Kinda got lost there for a second.

The real situation is that my eyes are very tired from gaming and it’s making me quite sleepy and I don’t have much of an appetite and that makes this an ideal situation for me to end up sleeping when I should be eating and having “supper” at 10:30 pm and being very annoyed with myself.

But I’m not gonna do it! I’ve been fighting back against the urge to nap and building up my ability to go on despite sleepiness and this is a great test of that.

I can sleep when I am DONE eating and blogging.

That needs a portmanteau. Bleating?

I am tired of my tendency to escape into sleep whenever possible.

Talk about a weakness of character, I can’t even commit to consciousness.

Well no more. From now on I am going to resist the urge to nap both to remember how to stay awake and more importantly to improve the quality of my sleep when I do get around to laying down for a nap.

I can’t quit napping cold turkey. I use it as a way to handle anxiety too much. I escape into sleep and my background anxiety level goes back to zero.

But I can nap less, and resist more, and maybe find a way to exit this eternal soft dreaming state in which I have been trapped for a very long time.

When it’s just me alone in my room, even when I am seemingly fully awake and engaged, part of me has one foot in bed, ready to nap.

And that’s no way to live your life, such as it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Didn’t have therapy today.

My therapist, Doctor Avrum Costin, called me yesterday and told me he had a personal emergency so could he reschedule our weekly therapy session to Friday?

Sure, Doc. No problem.

And could we make it noon instead of 1 pm?

Also no big deal.

So it’s on for noon tomorrow instead.

And it occurred to me that I am way way more flexible and adaptable than I usually give myself credit for.

Because it really was no big deal for me to make the adjustment. I wasn’t just fawning and placating when I said that. I made the change in my mind and that was it.

Put that in the “evidence against Asperger’s column. I have none of the mental rigidity and inability to cope with change that that the syndrome is usually associated with, and that seems like a pretty fundamental if not foundational part of the disorder.

So I honestly don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. Again.

Maybe there is a disorder that is to Asperger’s what Asperger’s is to autism : a milder and higher functioning version of the same sort of thing.

But it’s more than just “being a nerd”, which is what I used to say. There is something very deep and terrible wrong with me on a fundamental level. Something that cuts me off from the rest of humanity and locks me away in the ice fortress of my mind.

Three guesses as to which early childhood rape led to THAT. When I was raped at the age of four, I escaped the only away available to me and fled deep, deep into my mind and built this icy fortress there to keep the rest of the world out.

But at some point along the the line, I lost (or threw away) the key. I forgot how to get out of this damn place, or rather, I lost the ability to survive outside it.

Like Mister Freeze being unable to survive outside his deep-freeze suit.

Now I might be wrong about that. Maybe after a thawing out period (which might be quite painful) I would survive outside this icy womb-tomb of mine just fine, and I would finally be able to feel warm and alive and real.

Like shaking your hand or foot awake after it falls asleep.

But for now, the part of my mind that equates thawing out with death like I am Frosty the Fucking Snowman is too powerful for me to defy.

But I am working on it. Slowly I am driving the illness from my mind and prising the fingers of its clammy hands off my throat, and some day I will be able to leave this musty sarcophagus behind me for good.

I am in the process of resurrecting myself. It’s slow going – the depression releases its grasp slowly and reluctantly and it is only by sheer bloody-minded application of constant force that it give up any ground at all.

But a fixed foe cannot triumph over a truly implacable hero.

And I am that hero.

So give up now, depression. You cannot win.

More after the break.

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One of me

There’s times when good ol’ Doc Costin suggests something like I need to learn to parent my inner child, or be my own inspiration, or somesuch.

And I have to tell him that I can’t be two people. Not yet, anyhow.

For me, it’s like he’s telling me to scratch my left elbow with my left hand. I can’t be the thing being fixed and the thing doing the fixing at the same time.

Not consciously, anyhow.

Maybe I am thinking about it all wrong, though. Maybe it’s more like scratching your left elbow with your RIGHT hand. And maybe this balking at the idea of being “two people at the same time” is just more of my depression’s bullshit.

I’m getting really tired of your crap, depression.

If it is depressive manure, I know what aspect of me it’s using : my lifelong horror at the thought of dividing my identity.

This is some deep mind stuff so bear with me.

But I have always had this fear of dividing my identity. As if were I to do so, my mind would break into pieces and I’d never be coherent again.

And yes, I see the irony in saying that when I spend a couple houjrs of every day pretending to be a fox from another planet.

To me, that’s not dividing my identity. That’s putting on a mask, which to me is entirely different. I am not being two people when I am Fruvous, even though it’s not like I forget I am really Michael John Bertrand back here in mundane reality.

I’m still Michael. I’m just Michael with a mask on.

I suppose in that sense, Fruvous is more like a fictional character in something I am writing. When I write from the point of view of a character, I do so by, in essence, pretending to be them so I can see the world from their perspective.

To me, that’s a very enjoyable part of the process. I love looking at the world from different points of view. It enriches my own view of reality the same way that seeing photos of an object from different angles enriches your knowledge of said object.

I am too paranoid to ever trust that my own POV is sufficient.

But I can see how to someone without my fluid sense of identity, that would seem like schizophrenic madness. A lot of people can only see the world from their POV because they have such a deeply rooted and fixed sense of who they are.

I can’t imagine being cooped up in my own head like that. How stifling!

Back to being Fruvous. There is yet another layer of elaboration, because I don’t have any “alts”. I have the one character I play on Taps and that’s it.

Most furries on there at least experiment with trying being other characters, either to further explore their own identities or just for fun.

Not me. Not an option. THAT, to me, would be dividing my identity, and is therefore never ever gonna happen.

I am one complicated dude.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

With Dr. Gabor Maté and some chick with a bad perm.

Ignore the title because they don’t cover any of that. At least not directly.

But patient readers know that I am very familiar with suppressed anger. I am full of it. As of this writing, it still awaits me gathering the nerve to vent it.

In my case, it goes deeper than having to suppress my anger because expressing it would have made my situation worse.

That’s for targets of direct abuse.

No, to me the really galling thing is that I went the first 25 years of my life without even being able to recognize that I was being mistreated.

I was miserable, and depressed, and heart rendingly lonely, and yet I did not come within a country mile of blaming anyone in my life for that.

I just blamed myself and my being so fundamentally fucked up and broken.

And even that, I kept clamped down inside of me. As now, back then I never let the misery show when I was around others. They got only my smiling, friendly self, mask strapped on so tightly that it even fooled me.

The few times I tried to express my pain and problems to a parent or a teacher, I got shot down brutally and efficiently by people who were disgusted by the idea of a horrible thing like me trying to get closer to them in any way.

Both groups wanted to pretend I wasn’t there. Instead of helping me with my problems, teachers acted like I was holding them hostage and my parents acted like I was an alien from another dimension.

So I stopped trying to reach out and gave up on the world outside my head and retreated to the world of media consumption.

And I am, of course, still there. I never got to develop any further than being a robot who goes to school and recharges with TV, books, comics, and video games.

Mostly just video games now.

To this day, I can’t let my depression show to others. And by that, I don’t mean “I dare not do it” or “I work hard not to do it”.

I mean I literally can’t. It’s not an option. That mechanism seized up in the closed position a long time ago and decades of icy cold conditions have only frozen it even more firmly closed.

Maybe I will be able to someday. But personally, I cannot imagine trusting anyone enough to do that. Try as I might, I can’t see it as anything but a recipe for doom.

Because no matter how much they want to help me and how much they love me and how good and pure and righteous their motives are, exposure to even a small portion of my darkness and pain will destroy them.

My experience with Doctor Costin proved that. He’s been a therapist for almost fifty years and yet when I try to TRULY let loose with my emotions like you are supposed to do he was overwhelmed and terrified and left speechless.

So yeah. Fuck that. The world has never been able to handle the real me.

Instead, I am a creature who must spread his personal truths very, very thinly amongst the manifold layers of masks and illusions I use to protect my wounded self.

And then of course, there is here. Here, on these pages, I can do my best to express whatever I can and at least get some of it out of my system.

It’s by no means a complete solution. But it’s all I’ve got.

More after the break.

---

A TUF challenge

So the full AKC registered name of my new graphics card is the
“Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 ti”.

But don’t let the cute name fool you. It’s a monster.

Did a little research into cases, motherboards, and power supplies. Should be able to get all three for between $300 and $400.

A lot more than it used to be, but that’s true for everything. And I can afford it, if I must.

But must I? Doubts have crept in. Where, exactly, did I get the idea that Mister TUF would not fit in my current case? Other than the fact it’s big?

Surely the makers of these things would not make one that doesn’t fit into the average computer case, right?

That’s at least a possibility.

So I have decided it is time for me to face my unfounded fear of messing with the inside of computers and open this PC up so I can look around and see if, in fact, this mishugana beast will fit in there.

As far as I know, I don’t have a lot of other stuff plugged in. A lot of the usual culprits like network card and sound card and such are built in to the motherboard.

There might be literally no cards plugged into this thing’s PCI rail.

In which case there should be plenty of room.

While I am in there, I might as well clean the dust out. I will attempt to do so gently so as not to stir the dust up too much and give myself an allergy attack.

Dust and I are not compatible.

But it must be pretty dusty in there, seeing as the case has not been opened in the eight years I have owned this PC.

Man I wish I had a Dustbuster. They’re made for this kind of thing.

It’s right in the name!

The traditional way to clean the dust out of your PC is with a can of compressed air, but that would damn near kill me.

All that dust flying everywhere. I’d be risking anaphylaxis.

If I decide there'[s room, I will take the plunge and plug the damned thing in all by my little old self.

I will still want to upgrade everything piecemeal over time, but there will be less of a rush because using my new toy isn’t depending on it.

One complication : TUF boy only output in HDMI, and my computer does not have an HDMI input, as far as I know.

I think my monitor does, though. Perhaps this output need not pass through the computer directly at all.

I will check it out, anyhow.

Things are afoot!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling a kind of punch drunk optimism right now.

Like I am a prizefighter who has taken a lot of punishment because he’s not been doing so good in this match but who is still determined to hang in there until he figures his opponent out and kicks their ass.

It’s a nice feeling, really. I like how it is positive but not delusional. It doesn’t pretty things are great, because they ain’t. And it doesn’t pretend things are going to be all right, because that is not how reality works.

It just says, “I am going to keep fighting no matter what. ”

And I can live with that.

It’s about time I harnessed my scrappy nature and made it a force for good as opposed to just being a force for getting me into arguments with strangers.

You think you can make me just lay down and die, depression? Well FUCK YOU. I am going to keep on fighting with everything I have, no matter how little that is.

And if I am destined to die like a mouse, I will die with a tuft of lion fur between my teeth and a defiant sneer on my face.

I might seem diffuse and timid and weak but I am actually more powerful than you can possibly understand and I am itching to rain my thunderbolts down on any enemy or obstacle that gets in my way.

After all, clouds are diffuse and insubstantial too, but mighty oaks are felled by lightning each and every day.

My darkness is not infinite. I will make it out of it one day. Probably the moment I no longer need it to hide in.

Until then, I will do what I can when I can in order to improve my life.

And the rest of the time I’ll just hang in there.

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Got the graphics card from my friend Jaekob. So that little saga is over.

Now, to get it installed.

Which might be easier than I thought because the thing is enormous, way bigger than the usual PCI-style card for a PC, and that has me wondering if it might actually be in an external mount.

In which case I just have to plug it into power and plug it into a USB port on my PC and bingo bango bongo, I am in business.

In support of this concept is the fact that the cables in the little bundle of cables Jaekob send with the card are WAY too big and thick for something that is supposed to fit inside a PC case.

So it might be so simple that even I can “install” it.

It even comes with three case fans for cooling, which is impressive. If it needs that kind of cooling, it must be powerful indeed.

I find it kind of hard to imagine that high speed high def graphics can fit in the limited bandwidth of a USB connection, though, so it might be that it requires HDMI or the like and that will mean buying an adapter or somesuch.

Still, things are movin’ on.

More after the break.

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Another late date

Yet another case of sleeping when I should be eating and blogging!

I am just sitting down to eat “supper” at 10:40 pm!

Admittedly, I would have eaten 40 minutes earlier if I hadn’t ordered in. Decided I needed me some Subway. I woke up at 9:10 pm and I could have jettisoned my plans to eat in and just had my regular kind of supper.

You know, nutritious enough, but also kind of sad.

But nope. I was determined to order in.

Then at around 10:20 pm Subway called and told me they were out of Diet Pepsi

Nope. I’ll have Pepsi Zero.

Nope, out of Pepsi Zero.

OK, then I’ll have apple juice.

Nope, out of apple juice.

And that’s why I am eating my turkey sub with the wholesome and energizing liquid sunshine that is orange juice.

Weird. But whatever.

They were also out of my beloved Miss Vicky’s Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar chips. But that was an easy fix, just give me my almost as beloved Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips.

I also got pressured into ordering two very naughty cookies by Skip the Dishes yelling at me that I was only $3 away from free delivery.

Now I am stuck with these cookies. I might eat the white chocolate and macadamia one but the chocolate chunk one is going to Joe.

I know my limits. If I ate that one, I’d feel terrible.

The other, I can more or less get away with in the short term. Probably.

One weird thing : I have no idea how long I slept tonight because I can’t remember when I went to sleep.

That’s a vital piece of information if I want to judge just how dumb it was for me to go to sleep when I did.

I think I fell asleep between 6 pm and 7 pm, which definitely justifies my being totally surprised when I woke up at 9:50 pm.

Learned today from Jaekob that my mega-powerful new graphics card that Jaekob sent me is not, as I had hoped, external.

I had hoped that because the thing is frigging HUGE. There is no way it will fit in my puny little computer case.

So at the very least I am going to have to get a new case, motherboard, and power supply. My HD is still fine, but my CPU may be built into the old motherboard and hence I will need a new one of THOSE, too.

So basically, if I want to use my powerful new GPU, I basically have to build a brand new computer around it.

This does not come as a surprise to me.

And I had been thinking it was time for a new computer anyhow. The one I am currently using to type this is vintage 2015, and eight years is mighty old in computer years.

So the next step is to shop for a good deal on a case, motherboard, and power supply. And it had better be a pretty robust power supply, because I get the feeling that my enormous new GPU is going to need a LOT of power.

Like, the kind that makes the lights flicker every time I reboot.

This is actually kind of exciting!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

There is this great and terrible sadness within me that fills so much of my heart and mind and soul with its lake of ice cold tears that it leaves very little room for anything else at all.

It is this sadness which that sad little boy with his faced turned to the wall in my mind is expressing when he refuses to face reality and says, without anger or hope, “No. ”

This sadness is, I suspect, in turn an expression of that great wound deep inside me left by being raped at the tender age of 4.

In a sense my mind has been trying to express that pain for the last 45 years of my life. But the memories have been sealed away far too tightly for it to express itself in anything but the most vague terms.

We are ultimately doomed by the things we do to cope and keep going on. No matter what horrors befall me, somehow I pull myself back together and keep functioning at my low but sustainable level.

Because that’s what I have always done. After all, what’s the point of letting myself fall apart when there’d be nobody there to put me back together? I had no choice but to just keep going no matter what.

That’s what happens when you grow up with absolutely no sense of authority. Never in my life have I felt like there were older, wiser, stronger people looking out for me who had my best interests at heart and who would guide and protect me so that it was safe for me to explore.

Fuck, I was way smarter than most adults anyhow.

I was thrown to the wolves on the first day of school. How happy they must have been to finally be rid of me, or rather, the expense of paying for a babysitter for me.

One less reminder that I existed. Wonderful. Bliss, even.

No wonder its so very cold inside my soul. I grew up without getting any of the emotional nutrients a child needs to develop properly.

No love, or comfort, or support, or encouragement, or guidance, or even attention.

I was a robot that went to school. When not in school I entertained myself.

And that’s still all I know how to do. I certainly don’t know how to be alive. How could I when I was so emotionally starved?

They can rightfully claim they didn’t know. But I can also claim that they didn’t care to know. They liked just imagining that I must be okay because I never seemed sad.

Of course. I wasn’t allowed to be anything but OK., Saying anything else would have led to them stumbling over their words in shock as they were suddenly reminded they have a real live fourth kid with needs and desires and everything, and that could only lead to them realizing just how little attention they paid to me most of the time.

So they would sputter and stammer and exit the conversation as quickly as possible.

There was absolutely no chance that they would interrupt their busy and important lives to actually help me, or show some concern.

After all, I didn’t exist. They treated anything but the expected answers like I had just burst into the room and held them at gunpoint.

They would only do what it took to go back to pretending I wasn’t there as smoothly and rapidly as possible.

It was not okay to not be okay. At all.

More after the break.

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Wall of rage

I think my vast reservoir of unexpressed rage is really getting in the way of my recovery and it’s high time I did something about that.

Which means I have to find a way to stop being so scared of it.

That’s what holds me back. It feels so much like if I try to tap into my anger, it will explode like a hydrogen bomb, taking my sanity and possibly some innocent bystanders with it as I go on some kind of Mister Hyde rampage.

But that’s probably just more bullshit from my depression. Yet another guardian demon tasked with scaring me away from things that threaten my depression’s regime.

Because expressing all that anger would undoubtedly lead to a saner and stronger me. When the dust cleared, I would be a whole heck of a lot calmer and more clear-headed.

My untapped rage is a major source of the deep tension that underwrites all my mental illness problems. It takes up a huge portion of my mental and spiritual resources to keep it all suppressed and those are resources that should be going to lifting my mood.

I still haven’t done that “beating up pillows while yelling about my shitty childhood” exercise Doc Costin wants me to do. Had the perfect opportunity last Saturday night when Joe and Julian were out of the apartment and I had the place to myself.

But I was too damned scared. Still am.

It’s coming, though. I can feel it. The rage is rising to the surface of my consciousness and pretty soon I am going to have to release it before it chokes me to death.

Yeah, a nausea metaphor is highly appropriate here. After all, I have been swallowing something toxic for a really long time.

Quite possibly my next blog entry will be me venting all my rage about my shitty childhood and how I grew up feeling unwelcome in my own home.

So, consider yourself warned. If the next entry stars “Dear Mom and Dad” or “Dear Family”, you might want to put on some protective gear before reading it.

I am going to have to face just how bad things were for me and for how long. Year after year of near total isolation. No friends, no connection with family, my teachers didn’t like me either. I was all alone in my life.

And the whole time, I was too timid and weak to even understand that I was being mistreated, let alone assert my rights.

They fucked me up good, and with remarkable efficiency. They barely had to do a thing.

Leaving me out in the cold like an old dog tied up in a yard came naturally to them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Title says it all. really.

I knew I was in trouble when I tried to eat breakfaster and even crackers, otherwise known as the world’s most innocuous food, made me sick.

I felt dizzy and nauseous, which suggests it’s a sinus issue. Then again, my balls are achy and sore too.

These symptoms have coincided many times in my life. I suppose it could be that I have a body wide inflammatory response going on.

If so the Aleve (naproxen) I just took should help.

I also feel hot, and achy, and very very drained. There’s parts of my body that feel bruised though there’s no discoloration on the surface of the skin.

Takes a continuous effort to keep my mood from taking a nosedive, too. Would be really easy to make this far, far worse by panicking and freaking out and put my body into a very dangerous stress mode that would only make me feel worse.

Been there. Done that. Learned better, thank goodness.

Now I just wait this kind of shit out. Whatever it is, it will pass. It will disappear as mysteriously as it arrived and I will go back to that sad state I call “normal”.

AKA “relatively not miserable”. On a good day. As a whole.

I ack the energy to go get some stuff from the kitchen for lunch, and Joe and Julian are off helping his sister Melanie moved a couch, so I have to just make do with the stuff I have here in my room with me.

At least I am actually eating some of it, albeit slowly. That’s a lot better than I could manage at breakfast. So perhaps I am already on the mend.

For obvious reasons, it always worries me when I can’t eat. My diabetes makes skipping meals a most dangerous act. I could end up crashing down so hard I don’t get back up again.

I would have to hope my Emergency Mode would kick in like it did that one time at VFS. Class ended and I got up to go home and immediately knew I was in deep trouble.

I had pushed things too far and my blood sugar was crashing. I could feel the tingling all through my body backed by a deadly chill and it felt like I was dying.

Because I kind was.

But then my eccentric Emergency Mode kicked in where I become rather giddy and giggly and I’m like…

It’s a form of insanity in which the fact that I am on the edge of death amuses me. Uh oh, guess I’m in big trouble! Tee hee hee.

But it works. It keeps me together and moving so that I can save myself. I went to that sandwich place I liked and got a sandwich and one of their giant ginger cookies.

Under those circumstances, sugar is not only allowed but recommended.

Shit. Where was I?

Oh right, not being able to eat. Well I have eaten a lot of crackers and some Smartfood popcorn and I am about to eat some sugar free oatmeal cookies, and I am feeling one heck of a lot better.

Which is good. Because I wanna go to Denny’s with Le Gang tonight.

Now I will go lay down and eat cookies.

More after the break.

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After a good meal

Made it to Denny’s. Everything went fine. And now I have had a decent meal and taken on valuable nutrition, so I should feel better now.

It’s funny how when I am sick, what we normally think of appetite disappears b ut is sometimes replaced by a sort of primal craving for nutrition.

I first noticed that three or four hospital visits ago. My appetite was gone, but when a meal arrived I ate every last bit of it – even the oatmeal, ewww – because I wanted NUTRIENTS god damn it.

I sorta wish it was always like that. I wouldn’t crave empty calories at all. They would be pointless wastes of my limited appetite. I would want nutritionally dense foods only.

Sort of like my idea of a genetic modification that could give people perfect nutritional sense so that everything would be exactly as delicious as it is nutritious.

That would solve a lot of problems, wouldn’t it?

Of course, then there would be the problem of being surrounded by people eating food that is actively disgusting to you now. Everywhere you go, there’s shelf after shelf of crap food for people to shovel into their bodies and poison themselves.

I picture breakouts of nutritional terrorism where groups of people with this modification commit acts of violence against junk food and those who make it.

The opinion-sphere would be abuzz with talk about whether that means this modification should be banned. But is it fair to punish everyone for the act of a few deranged lunatics with poor impulse control?

Man am I good at extrapolation.

Now I am picturing armed enclaves of die hard junk food enthusiasts gathered together in mutual defense of their stockpiles of Twinkies, Doritos, and Slurpees.

I must admit, that image amuses me.

No doubt the existence of these groups would put pressure on the market to come up with more nutritious versions of snack foods.

Try our new flavour of Doritos, Won’t Get You Attacked By Loonies!

I must admit there have been times when a sort of nutritional fascism has crossed my mind. A state wherein unhealthy foods are outlawed, or perhaps just heavily taxed.

I wouldn’t actually want that. People have the right to eat crap if they want to.

But I would be lying if I said the idea had no appeal for me.

File it under “nice to think about but a horrible idea”.

Besides, banning things for which there is high demand is futile. One of the rock solid rules of capitalism is that demand creates supply. Where there is sufficient demand, there will be people looking to make money fulfilling that demand.

Just look at the war on drugs.

Actually, don’t. It’s very depressing.

But you see what I mean.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More therapy via YouTube :

I’ve ignored CPTSD until now because. besides my worries that it’s not really a thing and that other mental illness is getting mislabeled as a result. I also didn’t think of myself as a candidate because I have just the one majorly traumatic even, being raped when I was 4, and CPTSD, as far as I knew, required many severe traumas over a long period of time.

But then the video linked above showed up in my YouTube feed, and it occurred to me that maybe spending day after day incredibly lonely and isolated as well as many incidences of bullying might have the same effect.

So I gave the vid a watch. What the hell, I don’t yet have a single diagnosis that covers all of my issues. Maybe CPTSD would be it.

Let’s go one by one

I. Nothing is safe

Patient readers know that I got this in spades. There is no such thing as safety in my world. There is only anxiety in varying degrees.

What really worries me is that I can’t even imagine feeling safe. It’s an entirely alien thought to me, accessible only conceptually.

If I try to imagine feeling safe, I can only imagine that re-igniting my paranoia the moment I realized it was happening.

I got some serious fucking issues.

Because safety is the truth. I AM safe. It’s the paranoia that is the illusion. Nobody is after me. Nobody is waiting in the shadows for me to let my guard down so it can GET me. No wolf at the door, no barbarians at the gate.

Apart from my health issues, everything is perfectly serene.

Now if only I could convince my scared little animal….

2, We can never relax

Yup on this too. You’d think I lived in a war zone.

I don’t like being touched by strangers. But it doesn’t freak me out, I just consider it to be rude and presumptuous.

To me, touch is intimate, and therefore only for people I love and trust.

3, We can never truly sleep

Like the man says, I can never truly sleep. Even in deep sleep my mind is tormented and troubled and I can never truly one hundred percent rest, ever.

I don’t wake up anxious exactly. I am too mentally fried by sleep apnea for that.

4. Horrible self-image as the worst thing ever

Ayup, pretty much. I am getting better at remembering that I am, in fact, quite astonishingly awesome, and even when I fall back into self-loathing it is nowhere near as bad as it once was, but that horrible self-image is still there.

5. Drawn to extremely unavailable people

Um, nope. I like open and expressive people, actually. And cuddly.

6. Sickened by people who want to be cozy with us

Hell no. I’m starting to think some of these apply only to Brits.

7. Prone to losing our temper big time

Another big nope. I’m Mister Nice and Sweet pretty much all the time. I do have a breakdown everyone once in every ten blue moons but that’s it.

8. Being highly paranoid

Kinda. Certainly I expect people I don’t know to be unreliable and untrustworthy. To my great shame, I can even suspect people I know of turning on me based on some tiny thing, and the worst part is, I am not even mad about it.

Just sadly resigned. Eeyore. It figures.

More after the break

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Winter’s bitter end

I was listening to a documentary where a man was talking quite candidly about his struggles with his Asperger’s, and the subject of a “cure” came up.

The question is, if there was a cure for Asperger’s, would you take it?

It’s a very touchy subject. People have formed a defiantly proud identity after a lot of painful struggle under the Asperger’s label. Often that diagnosis was and is a source of great illumination and relief to them. Finally they knew what was wrong.

And so the Asperger’s community formed their identity and made their own claim to the right to be acknowledged, treated with respect and dignity, and accomodated.

And now you are saying you want to take all that away? What’s next, a cure for being black? A tonic for Judaism??

And yet, my all rational measurement, Asperger’s is a disability, and therefore an illness. And illnesses get cured.

I imagine all disability communities wrestle with something similar.

Myself, seeing as all I have is a weak self-diagnosis of which I am not entirely convinced yet, I have nothing invested in the idea of being an Aspie.

I also have misgivings about the direction Aspie pride has taken. It borders on Aspie supremacism at times, and of that I do not approve.

I guess people always have to go to far in order to find out how far they can go.

I should stick that on a T-shirt.

So would I take this theoretical cure?

Yes. In a heartbeat.

Why? Because I am sick and tired of being so damn cold.

If this cure could bring me out of the cold and dark of my eternal Midnight Tundra by fixing my broken antenna and finally letting me connect with my fellow human beings in a warm and wholesome way, I am all fucking for it.

That would be. in a word, my salvation. I have been so cold and lonely locked away in my icy inner fortress for all these years. This bright light of reason and logic that I have spent so much time perfecting illuminates brilliantly but does not warm.

I know there’s something terribly wrong with me. There always has been. I’m not just “different”, I’m broken. That is crystal clear to me.

And if this theoretical cure could fix me so that I wasn’t so cold and lonely any more, you cannot possibly give it to me fast enough.

Same with my depression. Get that shit out of here.

Ironically, those might be the very illnesses keeping me from feeling any solidarity with my fellow sufferers.

Solidarity is for joiners.

Maybe after the cure, I could become one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.