It’s fair to say that I am not in the best of moods.

Hence my new cheerful little slogan up there. I have entered one of my angry nihilism phases and I will just have to make the best of it by squeezing as much toxic rage out of the open wound as I can while my anger is close to the surface.

For starters, I hate my stupid fucking life.

This is no way to live. Clinging to the underside of life like a barnacle, playing video games all night and all day to keep my mind too full and distracted to hear the constant piercing scream from deep inside me.

A scream that rises from deep within my soul as the percentage of life that doesn’t involve video games or blogging (so at least like, half) howls in pain from its brutal smothering suppression deep in the back back back rooms of my mind.

Something deep within my soul is struggling to be born, and that make it all the more aware that it si buried – trapped in a teeny tiny cage inside my mind.

So it feels a lot like something inside me is dying.

I suppose that’s true too. I wonder which one will win?

I want to be alive and vital and connected and secure. I want to be able to embrace life instead of turning my back on it and plugging my ears. I want to be strong enough to see life as something to enjoy, not something to endure.

I am so god damned sick of being so god damned cold inside. All this Midnight Tundra crap has got to end. Every winter ends in spring, doesn’t it?

This self-sealing sarcophagus of a life is just plain not good enough any more. I am waking up from a very long and fitful slumber and I am waking up cranky.

What the fuck is going on around here, anyway?

And the worst part is that I know all this ranting and raving will ultimately have no effect. Because the whole point of this exercise is to make it more comfortable to keep living the same damned way, not to actual inspire me to change anything.

The fascist government within’s only goal is to pacify. Not liberate.

So maybe I should focus on the pain instead. Let its fires cleanse my soul. Let it goad and prod me into a higher level of consciousness than my usual half-sleeping self-medicating bullshit existence.

Maybe it could even teach me not to be so afraid of my own power.

Pain is a teacher, after all.

So go ahead and roast the toxins out of me, long-smothered fires of pain. Purify and temper me and remind me that I am, in fact, alive and present and real.

Because this half-dreamt existence is a full on nightmare. I am drowning in quicksand and I can barely get myself to care. Certain oblivion awaits me if I don’t get my shit together and yet my shit remains very far apart.

Because I am dead inside. Dead, dead, dead, dead, DEAD. At the very core of my being, right in the spot from which all life springs, I have nothing but a rancid tumour spewing venom and eager to see me suffer.

I am so very, very fucked up.

Now to lay down and try to forget all this.

Wish me luck.

More after the break.,

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Fuck everything forever

Not feeling one heck of a lot better.

Can’t be sure if this is emotional growth or a physical illness.

Maybe it’s both.

But either way, I feel crappy overall. I feel like I’m seething with anger and breathing fire. I want to do a lot of the hurting of things just to vent the radiation.

Good thing I have video games. Very useful for that kind of thing.

I reinstalled Elder Scrolls Online to see if it works with the new hardware, and it does.

And WOW has a lot changed since the last time I played it.

I decided I should probably do the tutorial quest in order to re-familiarize myself with the game. This was done out of an abundance of caution, seeing as the last time I played the game I racked up 1,620 hours of play.

That’s 67.5 days, or 9.5 weeks, of my life sunk into something that has no tangible reward and really just wastes my time.

Such is the trap that I call my life.

No matter how much I rail against it in this space, I know that when I finish blogging and have had my post-blog nap, I will go right back to playing goddamned video games.

Hell, I just bought a ridiculously expensive and enormous monitor just to play video games a little better.

And tomorrow, more RAM for my compu-box will arrive for the same purpose.

Then again, what else would I spend it on? A weekend in Acapulco? A jet ski? A BRAND NEW CAR? I don’t have that kind of money.

More seriously, I have no other hobbies. My video game addiction has hollowed me out completely, as addictions are wont to do.

And it is mostly because it saves me from having to figure out what to do with myself. I used to feel the burden of days quite heavily. When you are disabled, you have a lot of hours and nothing in particular to do with them.

Playing an enjoyable video game seems a lot more fun than staring into the existential void that is your meaningless life and wondering why you ever bother to do anything.

It’s a lot worse in the long term. There are all kinds of things I could be doing to try to develop myself as a professional writer.

Writi8ng contests, open calls for submissions, forums for writers, and so on.

But in the short term, it’s way easier to just keep playing the damned games. And the brutal truth is that you have to survive the short term in order for the long term to matter.

And right now, I don’t feel like I have the wherewithal to reach outside myself and take in new things. I feel like I have no bedrock on which to build a new life. There is nothing solid and reliable enough for me to truth inside me.

It’s like I am floating in outer space, unable to move because there is nothing for me to push off of and no innate means of propulsion so all I can do it float helplessly.

And I intuit that I will not find my inner ground until I somehow deal with that giant psychic wound that’s been inside me since I was raped when I was 4.

And I can feel the pain draining away as my mind’s healing mechanisms slowly filter it out of my bloodstream like emotional dialysis.

Already, the wound seems a lot smaller than it was before. Maybe some day soon the wound will close and I will be at least somewhat whole again.

One can only hope.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I’m pissed off.

For the last couple of days, I kept feeling cold in odd ways.

Like feeling like there was a cold breeze circulating between my comforter and me when I was lying in bed.

Not very comforting!

Or my feel feeling like they were immersed in ice water.

I was getting cold feet!

Or this terrible deep down chill that felt like death’s caress.

From this I concluded I must be terribly sick.

So I have been very worried about my health. That kind of thing is not a minor symptom. It usually means bad shit is about to go down.

Like a blood sugar crash. Or some kind of circulatory event of a sinister nature. Or that I have some terrible infection.

So I wasn’t even sure I would make it to Denny’s tonight.

Possible because I was in the fucking ER again.

But then, on the way to the bathroom this afternoon, I was struck with a sneaky suspicion. One I hoped was baseless.

See, I suddenly remembered that I’d had this exact problem before. Breeze under the sheets, frozen feet, and all.

So then I tried to remember what I had done to fix it.

Oh that’s right. I turned the heat in my room way up.

So I did my business in the bathroom and then came out to check my thermostat.

Sure enough, it was turned down. ALL THE WAY DOWN.

I mean, what the ever loving fuck? If you’re too hot, turn it done a little bit. Don’t god damned deprive me of the benefits of indoor heating entirely.

I am a very sickly man. My immune system is compromised and I am quite weak. I cannot afford to be cold at all.

And that goes double for being as cold as it is outside in February.

Now there are only two people who might have done this deed : Joe, and Julian.

Julian denies it. He actually suggested that it might have happened accidentally.

No, Julian, a big dial does not get turned from all the way up to all the way down accidentally. Like, under what scenario could that possibly happen?

And I sure as hell would not do it on purpose. I turned it up that high for a reason : to make sure I was never, ever cold in my own room.

I have zero motive for changing that.

It would seem that Joe is the only remaining suspect, but I somehow doubt it. He’s too reliable to turn the thermostat down then forget to turn it back up.

But who knows, maybe he will confess and the whole thing will be over.

I’m just pissed off at the whole thing. I feel betrayed, though I know it wasn’t done on purpose to hurt me.

Perhaps the right word is “disappointed”, then.

But at least I am getting mad and staying mad instead of just swallowing the anger and retreating to my dark grotto while it eats away at my heart like acid reflux.

I will see this through to the end, no matter what.

More after the break.

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Ship of fools sailing on

A quote from this here song :

Part of the burden of a high level of intelligence is that you are living in a world run by and for relative idiots.

Emphasis on relative. Average people are not stupid in any absolute sense. They are only stupid compared to me.

I’m the outlier, not them. I’m the weird one.

It’s the part I was born to play, baby!

There is an episode of Reboot that handles this in a hilarious way. The kid, Enzo, breaks into some mystic whatsit that grants him one wish, and he wishes to be the smartest person in Mainframe.

But of course, wishes as always being bastards, the whatsit accomplishes this by making everyone else in Mainframe stupid.

He then has to figure out how to survive in a world where everyone is a moron, including all the main characters.

Trust me kid, it amounts to the same thing.

In fact, I would say the number one challenge for us high IQ types is (relative) stupidity.

Thus the popularity of escaping into some form of elitism. It is a justifiable reaction to discovering that, in a very meaningful way, you are more powerful than most people.

And yet, at least for my generation, you are also persecuted for that power.

The only possible response to that for a lot of people is to identify as a member of a persecuted elite minority in one way or another.

And there was a time I might have gone that way. Lord knows I would have been justified. There I was in elementary school doing my schoolwork with contemptuous ease and (unknowingly) lording it over the other students by scoffing at the same work they found very difficult, while during lunch and recess I had to hide from my classmates or I would get physically abused.

That’s not just how you make an elitist. That’s how you make a supervillain.

But when I contemplated trying out elitism one day, a very strong and powerful voice rose within me and said “NO.”

And I have never looked back. Something deep inside me violently and unequivocally rejects elitism and that’s that.

Yes, I am a lot smarter than most people. But no better. I’m worth one human life just like everybody else.

Perhaps my brains make me more qualified to have opinions on certain things that others. If so, I will put in my 25 cents worth just like everyone else.

No amount of intellect can allow you to bypass the marketplace of ideas. It can only give you a competitive advantage.

And I am too keenly aware of the many ways in which this high IQ has come at the cost of being unable to do normal things to think of it as an unalloyed boon.

I have all my character points sunk into Intelligence.

All my other stats suck.

I will leave you with this little nugget of irony : I consider elitism beneath me.

In that sense. I am too arrogant to be an elitist. I consider them inferior.

Does that make me a spiritual elitist? 🙂

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wow, what a salient subject.

So, time for me to go through another psychology listicle and apply it to myself.

Preamble : Speak for yourself, chickie, it’s totally about having someone to blame for me. I have all this untapped anger bouncing around inside my skull precisely because I was horribly mistreated as a child without even being able to recognize it, let alone find some way to express it.

So I am going to blame my family until all that anger is exposed and expressed.

A. Emotional numbness

Oh hell yeah. It’s one of the biggest symptoms of my depression. There are times when the emotional response I know I should be having is just plain not there. Or rather, it’s there but incredibly faint. Barely more than a faint tingle in the place where the emotion should be, like phantom limb pain.

And it’s because I am constantly swimming in an ice cold ocean of emotional numbness. The signals are there but they can’t get through. So I don’t feel them at all.

It’s especially painful when I know someone is trying to reach out to me. I want so badly to reach back at them and make that connection, but I just can’t.

It’s like two people trying to find each other in a busy airport. They are reaching out in earnest, and I am frantically trying to find them but I can’t even feel them and the neural circuitry I would use to reach them have been rusted shut for decades.

And hell yeah, it’s because of CEN. I was the baby left to cry. My mother just stopped responding to my crying, presumably merely annoyed by it, until I stopped crying at all because it didn’t work any more.

And that was long before I was raped.

I had what they used to call an “icebox mother” and it was particularly hurtful because she had been so warm and wonderful before she went back to work.

After that, it was a downward slide until she would not even react when I gave her a hug. She just looked back at me with dull trepidation, like she was just passively enduring this awful creature’s embrace out of numb apathy.

Oh, so that’s where I get it.

---

B. Low self-esteem

Bingo for this one, too. I was treated like I didn’t matter and wasn’t important and given the clear unspoken message that I shouldn’t even be alive and that my presence in the world only made things worse for everybody.

No wonder I lay down in a snowbank and willed myself to die.

To this day, I have to fight that feeling that the world would be better off without me. That if I died, people wouldn’t sad. They’d say, “Phew, I’m glad that’s over! If I had been forced to pretend to tolerate that guy for one more minute…. ”

I know that’s not true. But it still feels very true to me. I have an incredibly hard time believing that anyone actually wants me around or values my presence or indeed sees me as anything but a massive liability.

And even I can tell how incredibly sad that is. It’s downright brutal.

And I am working hard to change it.

---

C. Picking the wrong people

Nope. I’d have to pick people first.

More after the break.

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D. Impulsivity

Never been a huge problem for me, but I have outbreaks sometimes. Generally speaking, it comes in the form of spending and it stems from some emotional need that has built up to the point of taking over from free will and forcing me to meet it.

Remember, we are only in control for as long as we meet our basic animal needs. If those go unmet, the animal brain can and will take over.

Take tonight. I set out with the intention of spending modestly by ordering Subway. That would have come to around $20 in total.

But then the Subway was closed and I said screw it and got Pokey Okey instead. That came to $30.33. And that means I “borrowed” $15 from next week’s budget.

Sigh. But what the hell, I really needed a treat.

Oh, and nobody was setting boundaries for me, obviously. Nobody gave me any kind of structure or discipline to internalize. Nobody did a goddamned thing for me.

I had to do all that shit on my own.

---

E. Trouble regulating emotions

Also not a thing with me. I regulate the fuck out of mine. To the point of smothering them and pretending they don’t exist.

And that’s healthy, right? After all, it keeps me from misbehaving. Society is satisfied.

Don’t worry, I know my place. I’ll stay out of the way and not bother anyone.

I’ll just quietly regulate myself into an early grave.

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F. Perfectionism

I think it is clearly evident by the sloppy way I do this blog that I am not a perfectionist. 🙂

I recognized the perils of perfectionism at an early age.

If anything. I have the opposite problem. I am not emotionally capable of working on something until I can’t think of any other way to improve it.

The very idea of it makes my blood run cold.

But I have been getting high marks for first drafts all my life. Even at VFS.

So why try harder, says the lazy part of me?

There are oh so many reasons.

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G. Trouble making decisions

Ding ding ding! We have a winner.

I was just talking about this in this space, in fact. I have a terrible time with decisions and it’s probably because I never had any help in making them.

So I dither and hang-wring and stress myself out over even trivial choices and then end up just making the decision impulsively anyhow just to relieve the tension.

I would be so better off if I could skip the indecision and go right to impulsive choice.

But my fundamentally intellectual way of life demands that I try to solve the problem logically even if that is a hopelessly doomed proposition.

Being smart is so dumb sometimes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I just fucking did it.

I bought and downloaded Marvel’s Midnight Suns.

Finally got sick of my own hand-wringing about the whole thing and just fucking got the damned thing already.

Was that the “right” decision? I don’t know and I don’t care.

Fuck it. Life’s too short to waste time looking back. You make the decision the best you can and you keep going,

Seems like my kind of game, good reviews, my fave superheroes, and so on.

Worst case scenario, I end up hating it and returning it. Big fucking deal.

Somewhere in my head, there is a thick-headed Neanderthal of a man who lives in a perpetual state of simmering rage and who has little patience for nuance and abstractions, preferring to strong-arm his way through life.

I could learn a lot from that guy.

Anyhow, I have tried the game now and I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that it seems like a pretty damned good game so far. Excellent voice acting, fun dialogue, very interesting and fun combat system (I got to take out three Hydra goons by having Captain Marvel kick a couch at them!), and so on.

The bad news is that it runs really crappily. In fact it ran so bad the first time I ran it that it took it ten minutes to get halfway through displaying the Firaxis logo.

I gave it the ol three finger CTRL-ALT-DELETE treatment, shut it down in Task Manager, then shut down Chrome and Thunderbird before trying it again.

Then, it just barely managed to load over ten painful minutes of disk thrashing and strangulated audio quality, and I was able to play.

But the audio gets out of sync during the cinematics and this game has a LOT of cinematics, so that’s a serious thing.

And the chunkiness of the performance makes the turn based battle scenes a bit trying.

So overall, it’s about as stressful to play as No Man’s Sky has become since the latest god damned update.

Hope they fix THAT shit soon.

So anyhow, because of the performance issues, I am not entirely sold on Marvel’s Midnight Suns yet.

But I have hope because before I quit, I lowered the graphics quality settings and hopefully that will perk up the performance some.

I’m not looking for smooth as glass performance at high resolutions, just synced up audio and a lot less lurching about.

I’ve been pricing RAM on Amazon.ca and it looks like I could get another 32 gig of RAM for around a hundred bucks.

That should help a ton. And I might be able to afford it this month if I am careful.

Of course, then I would need dear Spuug to come install it for me.

Plus I would want to make sure it’s the RIGHT kind of ram for my motherboard and whatever. I still remember the bad old days when if you bought the wrong kind of RAM, it wouldn’t even plug in let alone work.

Things are probably way saner now but the paranoia lingers on.

---

Why people don’t like utilitarianism

Because to them, ethics is warm and numbers are cold and therefore the two cannot be the same ever.

To them, numbers are the opposite of ethics. They despise quantitative thinking in general and anything that looks like a spreadsheet in particular.

They hate utilitarianism because they hate math and therefore any suggestion that you might need to know and use math to be ethical offends them to their core.

Because utilitarianism suggests that morality is, at least in theory, a solvable problem. They prefer to think of ethics as a mysterious, unknowable thing where there is always room for debate and interpretation and nuance and therefore the idea that it could, in in way and in any situation, be definitely solved with a calculator shocks them.

But the biggest reason people hate utilitarianism, I think, is because it leads to conclusions that don’t feel right. Conclusions that fly in the face of our built in ethical programming that comes from our evolution as a social species. Conclusions that say that the right course of action might leave you feeling horrible.

Looked at like that, I can totally understand some people’s reaction to utilitarianism. If you have spent your whole life doing what feels right, and let that feeling be the very foundation of your sense of right and wrong, the idea that said feeling can be wrong according to some cold blooded calculations is an outright obscenity.

And I am saying this as a lifelong utilitarian.

Because none of this actually proves that utilitarianism IS wrong, just that it FEELS wrong, and while that is understandable, it isn’t rational.

In fact, by definition, utilitarianism can’t be wrong. It is just the seeking of the greater (or greatest) good. Therefore, to oppose it is to argue for the lesser good or greater evil.

This is exactly how ethic works even in people who have never even heard of utilitarianism. The only difference is in how we determine the greater good.

For some, the greater good is determined by what feels like the best choice. They weigh things in their minds, contemplating one option than the other, to see which one feels like the right one.

But for someone like me, numbers are preferable. I don’t trust emotions. I can’t verify their truth. Anyone can tell which number is bigger and that conclusion cannot be argued with in the same way as some nebulous emotion.

That said, most real world ethical situations do not come with numbers attached. So while I am comforted by utilitarianism’s logical rigor, I am far too pragmatic to imagine that numerical utilitarianism is applicable to every situation.

And in the absence of numerical information, I imagine my moral reasoning is not that different than anyone else’s. I try to figure out what is the morally superior option.

My conclusions might seem coldhearted to some in some circumstances and there is no guarantee they will feel right, but I am just trying to find the truth in the best way I know how and that makes sense to me.

You might just have to shoot the hostage.

But only if you are sure there is literally no better option.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This classic popped into my head today :

Warning, this contains swears.

But if that shit bothers you, what the fuck are you doing here?

I love this song because it’s the kind of sad schmaltzy song that was all the rage for a while in the 70’s perfectly punctured by the foul mouthed refrain.

Without that refrain, it would still be an okay song. Maudlin, to be sure, but expressing something real that a lot of people have probably been through.

But WITH the refrain, it’s a 70’s underground comedy classic.

I mean, can you IMAGINE playing that for a room ful of unexpecting stoner friends who are all good and blazed already?

People would laugh themselves sick! It would be like a bomb went off, with people laying everywhere clutching their sides. People living upstairs thinking you opened a door into Hell and they’re hearing all the demons laughing at the tormented.

It would be epic.

Anyhow, thought I would share a memory with y’all.

Did the Therapy Thursday thang. Doctor Costin continues to push me to, ya know, do stuff. Stuff to improve my lot or at the very least give me more social exposure.

And he reminded me to check out the local Pathways Clubhouse, so I am at least going to check out their website.

I am mainly interested in their employment services. I have heard that they help people like me who have no real job experience and are therefore not well suited to the traditional employment route (resumes, interviews, etc.) to get jobs that will give them some job experience to work with.

Being employed would do wonders for my mental health. I would finally be able to support myself and silence the demons of feeling like a burden to everyone once and for all. Hopefully.

But realistically, I know that my physical limitations limit my job opportunities too.

It’s not like I could stand behind a cash register or pack fish or anything like that.

But I could manage office work pretty well, I think. Especially if the place is wheelchair accessible, because if it’s wheelchair accessible, my walker would be no prob.

I’d love to work in filing. I love sorting things and putting them where they belong.

Basically, I could do any job you can do sitting down. I can only stand for maybe ten minutes tops and that is WITH the walker.

Without the walker, I would be lucky to make it two minutes.

The flies are still fucking here. I am going to have to borrow our tennis racket/handheld bug zapper and just zap any I see.

Might not make much of a dent in their population but it would make me feel better.

Thinking more long term, having these flying disease vectors flitting around me constantly cannot be good for a sickly fellow like myself.

I wonder if the government would spring for an exterminator.

More after the break.

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Do a little more

Trying to increase my activity level a little bit.

Baby steps. I am auditioning the idea of resisting my usual tendency to do things in big gushing waves of emotion that don’t last and instead experimenting with doing things slowly and methodically.

And spontaneously, when I can manage it. No planning, no forethought, just doing stuff when it occurs to me and not bothering to keep score.

Because what I am after is not just a change in behaviour, but in attitude.

My whole attitude toward life is wrong, wrong, wrong. I have been cringing and whinging and cowering and glowering for far too long.

I am a powerful and magnificent creature and I have nothing to be ashamed of. I deserve all the good things in life – money, sex, friendship, intellectual conversation, you name it – and I have every right to go out into that big busy world out there and get them for myself with my gifts.

Drop me into any workplace and I will be running the place within three months. Not officially, of course, but de facto. People will naturally start to follow me because I seem to know what I am doing and have great ideas that make things run better not just for the enterprise but for the people who comprise it too, and I am always funny and gentle and reasonable, unlike management.

To whom I will always be polite and deferential, of course. If they object to any of my reforms, I will apologize and say I was just trying to help and make things better in order to increase efficiency and thus profits.

That’s kind of hard to argue with.

I figure eventually they will wise up and move me into management where I belong.

Another change in life strategy is that I am going to go ahead and let my Moon in Sagittarius ego fly as high as it can get away with.

Because I’m fucking amazing, baby. And it’s high time I started to enjoy it. I am a goddamned wizard and my spells are both powerful and lasting. I can do things with words and personality that most people would think impossible.

Lke turn enemies into friends, make the mighty and corrupt doubt everything their reality is based on, bring shame to the shameless and guilt to those lacking conscience, challenge people to be true to their ideals, and in general, stir shit up.

The world of politics and public discourse is far too balkanized and static these days. The world needs someone to come along with fresh new ideas that challenge the status quo and also appeal to the people because they make sense to them.

Kind of like Ross Perot tried to do.

And I am just the shit disturber to do it. I will burst onto the scene throwing ideological hand grenades made of high octane words that rock people to their core and make them wake up and truly look around at what is going on.

Because there’s a lot of bastards getting away with the most heinous fuckery out there purely because we’re so scattered and distracted.

But things like the Covid response and the universal rejection of Putin show that the people can unite to solve problems if they want to.

All it takes is the right kind of inspiration.

And that’d where I come in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling grumpy and irritable right now.

Probably due to masturbation without completion, amongst other things.

Chief amongst the other things would be the state of the world right now.

It’s fucked up.

The UK is ready to explode. Their health care system is falling apart to the tune of 1000 extra deaths a day, old people are freezing to death in their own homes due to high home heating costs, the cost of living is going through the roof, and all the while their current Tory government refuses to do anything about any of it because in order to do something about the nation’s problems they would have to first admit to themselves that they’re doing a horrible job.

This is what I get for coming back to TikTok after being away for a while. Clearly I have lost my resistance to it.

And speaking of resistance, all over the world, there are violent clashes between the people and their governments.

Pay attention, UK, that’ll be you soon.

Meanwhile in the USA, a horrible derailment and chemical disaster scars the land and the company responsible is failing to handle it well on every possible level.

Reminds me of the BP oil spill. I assume I’m not alone in that.

And of course, while all this is happening, the world continues to boil to death and tear itself apart due to global warming, or as I prefer to call it, Killer Weather Syndrome.

“Global warming” sounds kind of nice, actually.

And “global climate change” is too neutral. It doesn’t specify what kind of change.

And of course, absolutely nothing is being done about this change except for a lot of bullshit “seem to be doing something” moves that are far too lenient, too slow, and too little, with too many loopholes for them to be effective at all.

Everything’s fucked and people are reaching a boiling point all over the world. Society everywhere is ready to crack wide open and let its demons run loose. Billionaires and billion dollar companies run the world and not only are they thoroughly evil and corrupt, they’re stupid too, because it’s not like global warming is going to spare THEM.

But the real problem is us, the people. If we rose up against these motherfuckers, there would be nothing they could do to stop us. There’s billions of us and dozens of them. We could shatter their hold over the world without even trying and actually free our governments to do what the people want them to do… or we will tear them down too, and replace them with a government that WILL.

But that won’t happen because people don’t want to leave their cozy-for-now lives and actually stand up to these bastards. Myself included.

So instead we all just fiddle with our screens as the world burns.

Oh. And I am still dying and too crazy to do anything about it.

And my room is full of flies.

So yeah. You could say I’m feeling a tad cranky. Just a little out of sorts. Maybe just a tad miffed at the general state of affairs.

And I would love to strike out in burning rage at my tormentors but they are all inside my head and hence hard for me to get at.

Fuck everything everywhere forever.

More after the break.

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How very Marvelous!

I am seriously considering getting this game.

It’s turn based strategy (I can do that), scores big with the critics (always a plus), and stars some of my favorite Marvel characters (whoohoo!)

I know I talked about getting Elden Ring, and I still might. But quite uncharacteristically, I am surveying all my options before making a decision.

It’s been rough.

As patient readers know, decisions involving just myself are hard for me. I easily get overwhelmed by the number of options and find myself dithering endlessly, unable to actually make a choice.

Hence my tendency to just grab the first thing that looks good and that’s it. The only difference is whether or not I torture myself by trying to decide via logic first.

Turns out I am not well suited for that. Not when it comes to personal decisions. I can be the swiftly decisive INTJ in transpersonal decision making, but not when it’s something that has direct consequences for yours truly.

And I think the root of the problem is my timid and fearful outlook on life. I approach these decisions like if I choose the wrong thing, there will be dire consequences.

As if I am trapped in some demented game show and I am being forced to choose a door out of a dozen doors and all but one of them is rigged to explode.

And that’s no way to go through life. If I can’t calculate the answer then I should skip the painful indecision phase and just go with my gut right from the start.

If it turns out to be the wrong decision, I can internalize that and the next time I go with my gut, said gut will be a little bit smarter.

That’s how it works for people unburdened with my level of intelligence. For them, calculating the right answer like a frigging chess computer is not an option.

It’s go with their gut or not go at all.

I just need to make peace with making decisions irrationally. That means ignoring the voice in my head that insists that emotional decisions always end in disaster because you can’t know that they will work.

The only safe choices, says this voice, are the ones where you can examine all the variables and rationally verify that this is, indeed, the right choice.

But that’s irrational in and of itself because situations where you can actually do that are very rare and the rest of life has to be decided on the fly, without the benefit of being able to work things out beforehand or during.

Hence why normal, healthy people can lead happy, wholesome lives while overbrained weirdos like me waste their lives filling their days will video games and enjoying almost none of the good things in life.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

I just wish things had turned out better for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We have a serious fly infestation in the apartment right now.

And those little fckers are nibbling away at my sanity.

Twice now, someone has spent more than an hour zapping every fly they could find with our handheld bug zapper in my room till they were all dead, and yet three hours later they were back again in just as thick a mass as before.

Seems like my bedroom is the epicenter, which is…. unsurprising, given what a slob I am, but my slobbiness is an insufficient explanation unto itself for this attack.

After all, I’ve been a slob for a very long time and nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Not a full on fly infestation in February.

If my dereliction of duties re : cleaning is to blame, then somewhere there has to be one whopper of a mess and I can’t imagine anything I eat being able to generate the sort of pestilence we are experiencing right now.

Like, did something die in here??

Eating is particularly stressful, what with having to shoo flies away from my food all the time making me paranoid and insecure.

I am worried that we will have to escalate to chemical warfare, in other words, pesticides. Something that promises to kill the bugs AND their eggs.

I hate, hate, HATE the thought of filling my room with nasty chemicals. The very thought of it makes my skin crawl. Even though I know that if it was toxic to PEOPLE it would be illegal to sell, on a deep superstitious level that kind of shit is bad mojo to me and I would rather solve the problem by other means.

Maybe we can find some super eco friendly stuff that’s made with herbs and leaves and therefore less offensive to my senses. I dunno.

There’s a grain of sanity to my aversion this time : harsh chemicals have been known to set off the latent eczema in my hands.

I say “latent” because it’s nowhere near as bad as my mother’s eczema. Hers was so bad I have actually seen the skin on her hands crack and bleed during an attack.

Could have done without that sight, to be honest.

For me, all it has ever done is make my skin feel tight and itchy and turn slightly more red. Maddening at times, given that I know better than to scratch it, but it is more of a nuisance than anything else given how infrequently it is triggered.

It’s always some kind of cleaner that has done it in the past. Like whatever it was on new clothes in the store that would set it off. And sometimes whatever they are using to clean the floors and surfaces in a public place has set if, along with certain kinds of hair products of old.

Thank goodness for the rise of hypoallergenic everything, right?

Nevertheless, I don’t want to risk having my eczema severely triggered by pesticides.

See? I remembered the point I was trying to make!

I’m as surprised as you are.

More after the break.

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The dirty truth of bullying

Julian was watching a news piece about some poor girl who committed suicide when she was only twelve years old due to bullying, and it got me thinking.

That could have been me. I was a very depressed child, and bullying played a huge role in that. Instead of learning to connect with my classmates, I learned to hide from them.

Imagine how things might have been different if my bullies had been identified and punished and made an example of.

I might have learned how to feel safe with people instead of only feeling sort of safe when I am all alone.

And my mind is occupied enough that the bad thoughts are locked out.

But that was never going to happen, and I hope the kids at the school where that poor girl was a student don’t expect the adults to be of much help despite this tragedy because extra training for teachers and school assemblies ain’t gonna do jack shit to address the problem.

Because the real problem with bullying is that teachers become of the exact same social structure as their students and therefore do not truly see bullying as a problem.

Just like the students, they are unwilling to buck the system by sticking up for someone they view as extremely low status and therefore worthless,

Such a move could only lower their own status in the eyes of the students, and teachers and admins quite enjoy their role at the top of the food chain in their schools and are unwilling to risk it for someone as worthless as the bullied student.

That’s how a teacher who will say all the right things about intervening to protect a child if they saw bullying happening will nevertheless be right there, in the room, when a child is being outright tortured and assaulted and not even register it as an event.

Just like all the students who were also in the room and would give all the right answers about bullying and yet also did absolutely nothing to help the bullied child.

We want, at least in theory, teachers to stand outside the social structure of the students and act as a form of honest law enforcement to keep kids safe.

But they don’t. They follow the herd just like the rest, and our herd instincts tell us that low status means low worth and that means said people aren’t even human.

Take it from one who knows.

I guarantee that if one of the high status students had been assaulted, they would have acted instantly because that would violate the real rules of the herd ergo they would react like a royalist would when someone attacks the king.

Attacking non-conforming weirdos, on the other hand, is the system working exactly as it is supposed to and deep down, all those silent witnesses feel like the victim deserves what they get for bugging everybody by being weird and gross.

They should have gotten the message and learned to conform like everyone else. Then the system would have left them alone.

After all, that’s what they all did.

And that very much includes the teachers.

That’s the real dirty secret of bullying, and until people are willing to confront the real; truth of their complicity in these crimes, nothing will change.

And everyone but the victims and their families will be totally okay with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…another day, another failure.

I am trying to come to grips with this lesson I keep not quite learning : that instead of letting my dark thoughts build up over time til they come out in a huge ketchup bottle burst now and then that frightens my friends, I need to learn to let them out a little at a time all the time.

It’s the same thing I had to learn to do with anger in my teens and early 20s. I used to bottle it all up and then every couple months some minor thing would set me off – like a spark a drought racked forest – and I would blow up and cry and rant and yell and accuse people of having no respect for me and so on.

This was not acceptable.

So I at least got to the level of expression of anger and irritation that mostly kept that from happening any more.

And with both the anger and the depression, the problem is that I am basically a positive person who doesn’t want to deal with the darker side of emotions and therefore keeps them suppressed – and that is always a lousy long term strategy.

And yet, “I’ll just keep this suppressed forever!” remains a very popular game plan.

After all, saying “Not now!” when the subject rears its ugly head has worked so far. So it will keep on working forever. Right?

Not exactly. Nice try, though. But you won’t be leaving here empty-handed. Tell them about our fabulous selection of parting goods, Johnny!

So what I need is a path towards integrating the less sunshiney parts of my psyche into my main identity so we can prevent these little stack overflow issues.

Maybe then, I wouldn’t be like an idyllic volcanic island, very pleasant and peaceful and friendly on top but with a raging, boiling reservoir of molten lava down below just waiting to erupt and wipe out all life on the island yet again.

Except it doesn’t ever erupt, does it? IT just eats away at the island’s substructure, causing parts of it to explode or erode or just slide into the sea.

You know, maybe having intermittent explosive rage wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

At least I expressed the fucking emotions. Better than just repressing everything and letting it eat away at me for decades, making me depressed and self loathing because now I only vent internally.

This is not acceptable.

Only a fool would live like that. I tell myself that it’s noble and romantic that I keep all this madness locked up inside myself rather than letting it hurt anyone else, but if that comes at the cost of my chance at happiness, that’s too high a cost to pay.

And surely there are ways to let my beast get some much needed freedom and exercise (and maybe even some validation) without my having a total meltdown and going on a murder spree, right?

That’s just catastrophic thinking, a well known piece of depression’s arsenal of bullshit.

And I am just plain not putting up with that shit any more.

More after the break.

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I miss toast

Of all the things I have lost the ability to do for myself, I miss making toast the most.

Or rather, I miss eating toast the most.Making it was meh.

See, because I can’t remain standing for very long, I can’t hang around waiting for the toaster to do its thing. Even if I put the toast in as the very first thing I do when I enter the kitchen, by the team I leave with my food du jour, it’s barely warm bread.

So I either need a way faster toaster or way better legs.

And yes, I know there’s workarounds. I could put in the toast, hobble over to sit on the couch, and then get back up when I hear the toaster pop.

Or I could ask Julian to put in some toast for me then wait a little while before I drag myself out to the kitchen.

Or I could say “fuck it” and buy myself a toaster for my room.

There. Problem solved. I bring two slices of bread with me when I come back from the kitchen, pop them in my toaster, and wait.

Then again, all the stuff I would want to put on the toast would still be in the kitchen.

So maybe I would have to make the toast in my room then bring it to the kitchen with me for the application of condiments et al.

That would mean keeping bread in my room, though.

This is getting complicated.

Wow, 1968. Just…. wow.

My point in bringing up the toast thing, other than to bitch about my sadly toast free life, was to give myself a space to talk about what I have lost.

I have realized that I am so adaptable that it gives the impression that I can take nearly anything in stride and barely even break my stride.

And the person this fools the most is me, and that’s very damaging because I never stop and take the time to acknowledge the loss and grieve it.

I mean, my legs stopped working right.

That kinda sucks.

A deep and lifelong pattern of denial is emerging from my supposedly veritas uber alles life. Whatever happens, I just keep going, never giving myself time to process the events of my life. And over the years, I have accrued a lot of emotional damage.

And I want to change that. I want to figure out how to slow down and give myself the time and space to feel sad and let go and do all the other emotional self-care things healthy people who are in touch with their inner selves do.

Oh, but not Mister Big Brain here. I have to always be “in control” and able to override my emotions and shove them into my deepest darkness closet whenever they become unpleasant or inconvenient or just plain icky.

And that’s extremely unhealthy. You have to let the emotions make the decisions some of the time because they know what you need to feel better. All you have to do is listen to them instead of locking them out of the conscious mind.

Feel more, think less.

I think I am starting to really get what that means.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Dear friends : Don’t worry about the admittedly very scary words I wrote below. Like I have said before, sometimes I just have to get all the bad stuff out of my head so that I can think, and that’s what I did below. I’m not suicidal, I am not going to hurt myself, and the following is, ironically, a sign that I am really getting in touch with my emotions now, and that’s a very good thing. Thinking got me here… feeling will get me out again. )

And it’s exactly 3 months till I am. So I figure I’d better start working on this issue NOW.

The bitter truth of it is that I don’t want to face a half-century of life without having done a god damned thing with myself.

I have wasted my life playing video games in this shitty little cave of mine and I honestly can’t see that changing any time soon so why do I even fucking bother.

The whole thing makes me want to just lay in bed till I die.

Everything seems so god damned pointless to me. Why continue to dog-paddle through life when all I have to look forward to is a slow painful slide into greater and greater levels of disability and misery as I smile and laugh my way into the grave?

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet…

Oh, but where there’s life there’s hope, cry the voices of sanity. As long as you stay alive and keep trying, there’s a chance you will finally become mentally well!

And I can’t argue against that. Anything is possible.

But you see, I’ve done a very foolish thing over the years.

I told myself that if I hadn’t made anything of myself before I turned fifty, I’d kill myself.

The idea was that this would give me a good reason to get my ass in gear and finally start living life instead of merely surviving it.

Because if fear of death doesn’t motivate you, nothing will! Right?

Yeah. About that.

I guess nothing will, then. Death doesn’t scare me. At least then this whole long farce of a life will be over and I will finally be somewhere safe.

Pain scares me. Debility scares me. Losing my faculties scares me.

But death? I won’t even be here for it.

I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to live a life of joy and happiness where I look forward to every moment I spend on God’s green Earth because I have finally, at long last, gotten the fuck over myself and learned to embrace life.

But that seems like such a distant possibility. I can imagine it but I can’t feel it. It’s not really real to me at all.

I can make it through the day but I can’t make myself happy. I can make progress in a video game but I can’t make myself make something of myself. I can make the words flow through my fingers and onto the page but I can’t make them mean anything.

And it’s so hard to be patient when you have waited for so long. Deep down I know that I can get better but I get so bitter and frustrated sometimes that I feel like I want to scream my fucking lungs out.

I’ve so damned cold for so damned long now that sometimes I wish the cold would just finish the job and kill me already.

Maybe my next life will be better. Maybe not,

But at least this one would finally be over.

More after the break.

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Think less, do more!

That’s easier said than done, but then again, isn’t everything?

Been thinking about my whole approach to life and how I feel about it.

I tackle life “head first”, in the sense that, as I have said before, my basic approach to everything is to apply an overwhelming amount of mental force to it.

That’s just how the cookie crumples when you’ve got brains like mine. Had I been born big and strong and fast instead of big and smart and adorable, and I might have been the sort of person that tried to do everything through brute force.

But the thing about natural talent is that it inherently leads you to focus narrowly on what you are good at. If someone is, say, a naturally gifted pianist, if you take the obvious route you are going to be spending a whole lot of time playing the piano and nobody is going to care whether you’re a well rounded person who is equipped to handle life outside the conservatory.

And I have hyper focused on the world of the mind for my entire life, very much to the detriment of everything else in life.

You know, little things like whether or not I can cope with life, whether I have the slightest idea how to make myself happy, or know anything at all about the world outside this brightly lit surgical theater I call a mind.

And there’s a lot of it out there. To think that for most of my life I went around thinking this marvelous mind of mind encompassed all of life, and there was nothing it couldn’t do because hey, it understood more about how everything works than everyone else.

And it does encompass a lot. And I do understand things nobody else does. It really is an extraordinary instrument of analysis.

But who gives a shit?

Sure, the view is great from way up here, but I am fucking freezing to death and half dead from the lack of oxygen.

Olympian heights suck, is what I am saying.

And yet, what am I doing about it? Talking about it. Thinking about it. Trying to solve my emotional problems with logical analysis.

I guess you have to use whatever you’ve already got to get to where you want to go and I know how to think about things.

But trust me, gentle readers, all this verbalization is but the tip of the iceberg and things of emotional weight and substance are happening under the surface of the sea.

My whole journey to cram as much meaning to every word that I can makes sense to me now. My emotions are trying to escape confinement and get expressed the only way open to them : my words.

All I can say is that I am all for this and hope that by writing my little words every day, I will complete this magical transformation and find my way home at last.

Go, feelings, go!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about unleashing my inner smug, cocky bastard again lately.

Could conceivably be worthwhile.

See, I have also been considering something I first started pondering a very long time ago but has attained special meaning to me lately :

Whether or not it’s better to be cautious and avoid pain or it’s better to act on impulse get hurt, and learn from that.

It’s a more complicated question that it sounds.

To a naturally cautious person like myself, the knee-jerk but naïve answer is that it is obvious far better to not get hurt.

I mean, duh.

But I have also noticed that some perpetually incautious people seem to get along quite well in life. So they are obviously learning something somehow.

The difference is they are learning them emotionally.

Like on an animal level. Over time, this turns into finely tuned instinct and they end up being able to navigate through life on a purely gut level.

This is why some “go with my gut” types are actually quite intelligent on the practical level. Their gut is pretty damned smart because they have been teaching it a lot of life lessons on an unconscious level for their entire lives.

And at the same time, they are strengthening their will every time they do what their emotions tell them to do and it works out.

They end up with a strong and deep well of personal energy that they can bring to bear on life’s challenges and therefore not be daunted by them.

And when life kicks them to the ground, they can get right back up again and tackle the problem again, this time a little bit smarter.

But my point is that there is a hard limit to the utility of caution and a well balanced person (unlike me) can benefit from both approaches.

Which brings us (believe it or not) back to me being smug and cocky.

See, amongst all the reasons why I have never let that side of myself rise to the top, the strongest is probably caution.

That kind of attitude more or less requires acting without much forethought. No matter how much intellect it is based on, its core is purely emotional.

Basically, I would have to, at least some of the time, let my ego make the decisions.

Seems like madness to my legacy fake rationalist side, but I am working hard to obsolete that system as fast as I possibly can.

As an additional benefit, a smug and self-assured me might well attract the kind of challenge I have always wanted in my life but could never find.

There’s something to be said for making people wanting to wipe that smug smile off your face and make you eat dirt.

I mean, I can’t be the smartest guy in the world. It’s too improbable. There has to be people out there who could totally kick my ass in terms of verbal skills and debating prowess and all of that stuff.

And I really want to meet these people. And I want them to kick my ass.

Because then I will have finally found someone who can teach me.

I will have found my sensei.

More after the break.

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Another ordering in adventure

Although this one, thank goodness, is short.

Ordered me a donair with all the fixins (rice, tabbouleh, a little salad, etc.) and got something done while I waited for it to arrive.

Namely, I ordered myself a phone.

Yup, finally getting around to replacing the one that died a week and change ago. Was going to replace it earlier but ran out of available funds, so I had to wait.

In the meantime, Julian has leant me a phone. It’s one that his parents gave him a long time ago, so he has a sentimental attachment to it. So he has been somewhat antsy to get it back.

Probably because he saw the awful state its predecessor was in when it died.

Well Julian, you heard it here second : I ordered a new phone and it will arrive tomorrow. You’re welcome.

It’s nothing fancy, just a simple cordless phone with a base and a handset.

The base is just barely big enough to hold the handset. That’s how basic it is.

Anyhow, I get that done after a false start where on this computer, it wanted my Amazon password, and I don’t know it, but on my Amazon Kindle Fire 10 tablet, it was smooth sailing all the way.

Then I return to Mister Computer only to find a message saying my order was rejected.

Being a highly neurotic product of the middle class. I immediately had to know WHY they had REJECTED me

My order, I mean. Of course. Ahem.

So I hopped onto the support text chat and was told it was not me who got rejected, it was the donair place that got taken offline because they stopped responding to orders.

My theory? They closed early and forgot to tell Skip.

I tried to find another donair place, but all three of them were closed.

So I did a little sideways hop into shawarma. It’s from the same broad family of cuisines and they serve sort of the same thing.

This time it worked. I had some marvelous lamb shawarma with all the fixins instead.

Really, the only major difference was I was down one pita.

And the great thing about shawarma for me is that not only is shawarma delicious, but it’s a cuisine that always leaves me feeling great.

Kind of like Subway, come to think of it. And sushi.

Maybe the secret is to combine low carb-ish foods with lots of meat and vegetables.

I already have the low carb thing going on. So I guess I need to add more meat and vegetables to my diet.

I think that next time I get groceries, I’m gonna get myself a lettuce.

A little salad with every meal could do me a lot of good.

And making salads is fun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.