S I beat Kingdoms of Amalur : The Re-Reckoning – Fatesworn.

Big fucking deal. It’s just a goddamned game. But whatever.

This is what I have instead of a life, folks. Enjoy.

The final fight was very impressive and seemed impossible when I first tried it and got my ass kicked ten ways from Sunday.

But then I figured out the trick of it and after that it was simple. And not that difficult. Had to fight pretty hard but that’s all for the good.

It’s the climactic fight of the whole game where you face off an evil “not quite a goddess but almost as powerful as one” entity with the fate of all of Amalur hanging in the balance, and so on.

Villains always have such grandiose schemes. Just once I would love to see a villain whose big plan is to steal enough money so they can open up a really top rate café.

Or finally have the best dish at their church’s weekly potluck dinner.

Or even just to get stinking rich. Lots of ways to do that which don’t involve dressing up in silly costumes and going toe to toe with people with laser beam eyes.

If villains could restrict themselves to these modest and achievable goals they would never get into conflict with the forces of good at all.

But no, it has to be ruling and/or destroying the world. Like they are trying to force the world to discipline them like a child lashing out.

But I digress.

I’m now in the post-victory part of the game. There’s a fair number of quests that only pop up once you have beaten the main plot, and I am sort of dawdling along through those for now, but I don’t know how much longer I will do that.

Because I am honestly pretty sick of being a mage. My character is crazy powerful now and cause a meteor to fall from the sky (fire) or send an ice storm to follow an enemy around (ice) or send out a shockwave of electricity to fry any enemies who dare to come near me (lightning) and I am ready to try something new.

And it’s true that I could reset my current character by having all his skill and ability points refunded and turn her (yes, her) into a totally different character, but meh.

When I start over it’s because I want a fresh start. So even if I reset and turned myself into a big beefy barbarian babe, it would still be the same ol mage to me.

So I will probably start a new character next time I play. These post-victory quests are cool and all but not enough to keep me playing a character I have grown tired of.

And on my second playthrough I will do my best to slow down and smell the roses. By which I mean, do less rushing through the main quests and a lot more exploring the side quests in search of content I have not yet experienced.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

More after the break.

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I’m losing my mind

Reality error. Please reboot and restore from backups.

Because reality is really not making sense to me right now.

I went to check when my appointment for wound care is tomorrow. Apparently, I have been switched back to twice a week for no reason I can comprehend.

Anyhow, I went into Thunderbird to check the schedule they emailed to me, only to find out the email had completely vanished.

I searched for it in all my subfolders and it is just plain gone. Like it never exist. It’s not in the spam folder, the trash folder, the replies folder, and everywhere else.

Not there. What the actual fuck.

Oh, but that’s not nearly insanity provoking enough because my reply to that email is still there. So I have proof of the damned thing existing.

But the reply doesn’t contain the attachment so I still have no schedule.

And that’s pretty fucked up. But there is so much more fuck to up. (Up to fuck?).

Because when I replied to the email address that sent me the schedule, it bounced.

No such email address. What the downtown Judy Brown is up with that??

So now I am in what a wonderfully odd fellow named James^[1] calls a “spinwarp”. I have so far been entirely unable to come up with a theory to explain how the frick all of this could have happened.

And as patient readers know, I am very good at theories. They usually emanate from me like infrared radiation. I can come up with theories as easily as fish get wet.

But not this time. Maybe when I calm down and am no longer in an agitated state about the whole thing, all will become clear.

Right now. though, I am freaking out.

And now I am going to have to get up at 8:30 AM to call Community Care and ask them, hat in hand, when my appointment today is.

Reminds me way too much of those nightmares I had as a teenager and into my early twenties where I was in my high school and classes had starting fifteen minutes ago but I didn’t know what class I was supposed to be in because my schedule was in my locker and I had forgotten my locker combination yet again and I was dreading having to go to the front office and ask the secretaries there because they were getting extremely bitchy about it because of people who just never bothered to learn their locker combination because why bother when they can just ask the secretaries?

And so in the dreams I was wandering the halls of my high school trying desperately to remember either what class I should be in or my locked combination.

I am experiencing that same kind of stress right now, only my situation is way less plausible than my old nightmares.

Remember, stories have to make sense. Reality doesn’t.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, damn do I love this song.

Because damn it, that song slaps! Love that upbeat energy.

Reminds me of this earthquake of a booty shaker :

I really hope “butt shaking furry music video” becomes a thing.

OK, everyone all charged up and full of sunshine? Good, because I got to take it way way down now.

That’s the namesake of today’s blog entry, and I chose it because that “winding down” feeling is still with me and it’s starting to worry me.

It feels like every day, everything gets a little harder. Moving hurts more, I have less energy and less motivation, I’m increasingly apathetic about life and what happens to me, and it gets harder to concentrate.

But it could all be in my mind. Maybe this is just a side effect of opening myself up more emotionally and soon I will adjust to this newer, more emotionally rich world and lose the urge to hide away from it all.

On the other hand, maybe something terrible is happening with my health and I really should be talking to someone about all this but, with my particular brand of bitter irony, the condition prevents its own treatment by leaving me too unmotivated to get in contact with my GP.

Or my therapist, for that matter.

I will do what I can to gather my energies for the big move of actually reaching out into the world outside this bedroom to do stuff.

Maybe this is just a Long Sadness. Me going through a long period of sadness due to my needing to feel some bad shit in order to heal while not yet ready to have that total nervous breakdown I have been putting off for a couple of decades.

But I can’t break down. Not really. You know why?

Because there’s nobody out there to rescue me if I do. When that is a fundamental truth of your existence, you know in your soul that to break down is to die so in order to survive you have to keep going no matter what.

I’ve always had to do it all myself. There was never anyone there to help or support me. I’ve been emotionally isolated since my first day of school.

Maybe there were people who were trying to help me. But they were out there, beyond the wall, and so to me, they weren’t even there.

And if I hurt people that way, I am so very, very sorry.

I knew not what I did.

I was just a broken little kid with way more brains than was good for him and a head full of bad wiring and issues nobody could possibly understand without being me.

And what are the odds of that? Million to one.

I’ve spent so long in the cold dark vault of the supercooled superconducting circuits of my impossibly inhuman mind. Thinking I was safe there away everyone and everything that could hurt me, never knowing until it was far too late that the call was coming from inside the house : what was hurting me most was me.

And I don’t know how to stop because I don’t know how else to exist.

One thing’s for sure : my predators are long gone and for my entire adult life, the only one hurting me has been me.

What’s going on out there beyond my personal wall doesn’t matter.

It’s the Abu Graib in my head that hurts the most.

More after the break.

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Your own worst enemy

Finding out you are your own worst enemy is hard to process for a mind raised on traditional heroic storytelling.

You can’t have the good guy and the bad guy be the same person in the model I was raised on. You especially can’t have them both be you.

I mean sure, we pay a lot of lip service to the idea that “the first enemy you must defeat is yourself” and all that jazz, and that sounds cool when the hero’s mentor says it, but we never really explore that in any kind of mainstream storytelling because it’s such a bad fit for individualistic heroics.

For one thing, if the enemy is me, then I can’t attack the enemy without attacking myself, can I?

Right now, I have declared a civil war between the healthy and functional parts of my mind and the remaining diseased and toxic carcinomas of my depression.

But it’s kind of like chemotherapy. Some healthy tissue is bound to get damaged when the chemo attacks the cancer, and you just have to hope it will regenerate when all the fighting is done and the cancer is gone.

I feel so weak and helpless lately. Like I am wilting away. And I have this terrible feeling like the walls are closing in around me. ^[1] Like the tiny island I live on is getting smaller and smaller and the only reason I can’t see it directly is that I am so cut off from the real world that I have no frame of reference to compare it to.

But maybe this is all part of the healing. I’ve said many times that I might have to go a bit crazy in order to become sane. Maybe this is part of that.

If so, it’s probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I have so much suppressed bad stuff to feel in order to free me of my deadly burden. I might have to be in a bad place for a long long time.

But I will not give up. I am going to keep pushing my emotions to the surface in larger and larger chunks and continue to drive that dark impostor that is my depression out of my mind forever so that I can finally be free.

And I am willing to go batshit fucknuts insane to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For some reason, watching this video makes me stressed and anxious.

Before I started watching it, I was worried that I wouldn’t like it because it was so obviously pandering to us Generation X types.

And we are not super comfortable with being pandered to. We’re a lot more used to being treated like we don’t exist. Like we never even happened.

Like we were never here in the first place.

But once I started watching and/or listening to it, I found that I was getting increasingly upset and agitated by it even though it was not triggering me on any conscious level.

It’s not like it reminded me of better times and it hurt because things are so different now. I am a dedicated believer in progress and the future and I think we are a lot better off now than we were back then, overall.

So while I might “miss” some of the things from way back when, I have no desire to go back to those days unless I have the sports almanac from Back to the Future 2.

And maybe that’s the problem., Patient readers know that I have always had a problematic relationship with nostalgia. For most of my life, I thought of it as that weird aberration in people’s minds that makes them remember things as being way better than they were and caused them to think their childhoods were the best.

Well my childhood fucking sucked, and I’d be damned if I was going to let myself forget just how bad it was.

But then one day I came across this picture someone had taken of their mother and their father standing in front of their 1970’s car and looking every inch the 70’s hippies they were and it was a glowingly sunny day and it all looked like my own version of a Ray Bradbury nostalgia piece and that’s what opened the floodgates in my mind and unleashed a great walloping tsunami of nostalgia.

After that, I had to admit to myself that I had tons of nostalgia. Denial and defiance were no longer options. Not after that.

But I am still not comfortable with nostalgia. My mind is future oriented to a fault. So having my memories stimulated like they were by that video makes my self-appointed task of maintaining the truth of how much my childhood sucked a lot harder.

A more sane person would just give up and let nostalgia make it seem like my childhood was a magical wonderland full of pure and innocent joy.

But it wasn’t, god damn it. It had child rapists and bullies and negligent adults who treated me like garbage and airheaded teachers who French fried their brains on drugs before I ever met them and incredible loneliness and isolation and all kinds of other things that should never happen to a child.

And most importantly, I was not happy. I was a very sad and lonely little boy who spent most days incredibly depressed without even knowing it because for him it was normal.

A kid who gave up on himself just like everyone else did. A child without hope or friends.

A child who lay down in a snowbank one day and willed himself to die.

And I cannot forgot all that, or pretend it was different. I just can’t. That would cost me far more than I could ever bear.

For bitter and for worse, I just can’t lie to myself. I am a creature of truth and knowledge and that means I am naked before the truth at all times.

And it’s a damned cold place to be.

More after the break.

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And down we go

Well I fucked up big time.

Turns out there was a deadline for getting all that stuff done for that sketchy job and it was 24 hours after I got a certain email and that was March 22, six days ago.

So I completely flamed out on this one. Rocket crashed on launchpad. I somehow completely missed (or completely forgot) that part of the long and complicated and located in many places set of instructions.

I am not good at taking in a lot of instructions in a short period of time at all any more.

Causes me no end of trouble at doctor’s offices.

Oh well, back to UpWork and finding more stuff to apply for. One stupid screwup is no excuse for giving up entirely.

After all, success comes from experience, and experience comes from failure.

I am sure I will find a niche somewhere some day. Or at least get some more scutwork type jobs. There’s a job up now to type in someone’s grandma’s handwritten recipes, and I was totally gonna apply for it but then I read further and the person had this whole list of categories each recipe had to contain, with detailed explanations of the specifications for each, and yikes.

I still might go for it. It appeals very strongly to my love of homestyle old fashioned family things and who knows, I might pick up a good recipe or two.

But that’s going to be a hell of a lot of work. The notice says it will be hundreds of pages with 1-4 recipes per page. The budget for the project is $350.

That’s bound to be a lot less than minimum wage.

I think I might just point these people to the wiki page for OCR and be done with it.

The important thing is that I am not going to beat myself up over my little error. It is, sadly, the sort of thing to which I am prone.

I have a lot of intelligence but not a lot of wisdom. My inward facing perspective often leaves me stumbling around like a fool in the world outside my head and at this point I don’t think I will ever change so if I am to get anywhere in life, I have to learn to take these things in stride and just keep going.

So I am bummed that I screwed up, but I am not going to let it slow me down.

Just gotta keep knocking on those doors until someone opens one for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I did the thing. I wrote the two little blurbs about myself for the place with the job.

And it was not easy. I can see why I kept putting it off. On some level I knew that writing short blurbs meant to represent me to the public would stress me the fuck out.

So I wrote them. But I am not happy with them. I will likely go back and punch them up so they are funnier and more engaging and more in my signature style.

Which I am currently working on developing.

I know I have one. Writing literally millions of words on this blog has to have at least that effect. I am dimly conscious that there is a consistent (ish) mode which I use to express myself in the written (typed) word.

I just need to shepherd myself through painstaking process of becoming consciously aware of my style without wrecking my writing in the process.

I dunno. Maybe it’s not worth the risk and I will end up just barging my way through things without forethought like I usually do.

It’s worked for me so far. Somehow.

Some day I am going to throw myself into some wild (but potentially productive) intense social situation and just improvise (bullshit) my way through it.

Crash some kind of entertainment industry party and schmooze like crazy. Without worring about doing everything right.

Because I won’t. I will, in fact, have no freaking idea what I am doing, Therefore I will have to rely on my instincts and they are highly untrained so I would likely be crashing into the furniture and causing a stir with my attempts at learning to socialize.

But one learns by failing. And there is a comfort in going into something knowing that you will be extremely bad at it at first and thus have to concentrate on staying in the game long enough to learn it.

Tonight’s situation is unusual. I spent the afternoon writing periods doing the job stuff instead of blogging so I will have to do my full 1K works this evening and it is already 8:40 in the evening.

Ya know, we call it the evening, but never say what it evens.

Does that mean the day is “the odding”?

That would make it even.

Anyhow, it’s no big deal. Long and ever ago I used to do my 1K words in one sitting every day, starting around 7 PM ish.

Then I got sick and was far too tired and weak to do that, so I broke it up into two 500 word chunks to make it more manageable.

Then when I got better, I discovered I really liked doing it like that. So I kept doing it.

The plan right now is to do this chunk now and the second chunk around 11 PM.

It’s a bit of a tight schedule but I will get it done. No problem.

Because above all, I must always remember : I’m fucking awesome.

And that’s really all that mattes.

More after the break.

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Part 2 : The Partening

Still haven’t had that cry. Still need it.

I’ve tried. But it feels like my waterworks have rusted shut. I try to bring up the emotions and let them be felt and it makes me feel like I am going to cry, but I never do.

Which is frustrating, as you might imagine. Like when you know you have another sneeze coming but it won’t come.

Or like masturbating without being able to climax, I suppose.

Some vital part of my emotional expression network is down and won’t let the tears come. Perhaps some part of me is scared that if they start they’ll never stop.

Silly, of course. I mean yeah, I have a lot of unexpressed pain and fear and so on. My life is pretty awful sometimes, especially medically, and yet I just keep going in my accustomed mode without ever slowing down or stopping or even letting the pain and fear of it all show.

Truth is, I am a massively repressed person. So repressed that the only way I can express my feelings at all, even to myself, is to sit down and write about them.

Which is, obviously, what you’re reading right now.

A classic example of how repressed I am would be the issue of my lust. By all rights, I should be horny as the proverbial fuck (sic) all the god damned time. Were I more alive inside, and therefore able to access and feel the full range of normal human emotion, instinct would be driving me to seek out sex wherever I could find it.

But it doesn’t. My balls are a perpetual state of Smurf blue but most of the time I don’t notice. When I do, it’s purely physical. The actual emotion of lust is almost never felt.

Because what’s the point of tormenting myself, says the sick part of my mind. I’m going to get the same amount of sex and of the same kind whether I let the lust be felt or not, so what is the point of letting myself feel all that frustration?

And that makes sense in a narrowly hedonistic sense. But scratch the surface and it reveals itself to be a deeply broken and life-denying way to see things.

Emotions are not optional and repressing them always comes with a cost. This is especially true with the reptile brain emotions of anger, fear, and lust.

I have lived in a state of artificial calm created by extensively suppressing nearly everything for far too long. It’s warped my entire life around this need to remain “in control” (ha) all the time.

It’s a massive overreaction to anxiety. No wonder I am so fucking numb. A healthy person would feel their emotions and deal with them, not lock all their feelings away in the deep freeze of a severely impaired psyche.

In short, I am all broken inside.

And I want to heal. I want to learn to feel. I want to know what’s real.

But I am so damned scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, I still haven’t done that last bit of administrivia for that job I’m after.

Why not? Because I’m scared.

As is usual for this era of my life, I’m not scared of any specific outcome. It’s not like I am terrified of being rejected, or accepted for that matter.

I’m just scared in general. Scared to face the world, I suppose. Scared of transitioning into a life where I am involved and interconnected and there are expectations of me and people are relying on me and stuff like that.

Scared to be alive. More or less.

Let’s explore that : scared to be alive because it means, at its heart, an increase in stimulation levels, and I have spent decades fleeing from that by experiencing reality almost exclusively through this computer of mine.

That’s the stimulation level I can handle. The nice, safe computer, where everything is under my control and through which I play my games.

And unlike real life, if they get too loud, I can turn them down. Or off, if needed.

But it’s more than merely sensory. After all, this UpWork job I am pursuing would take place entirely through my computer and yet it still scares me.

In that case it’s a matter of exposure. Getting that last bit of work done and sending it off would mean officially exiting my dank little grotto and heading out into the big bright bustling world on a more metaphorical level, and that’s terrifying to me.

Goes to show that no matter how bold and wonderful your intentions, if you haven’t cleared it with your inner child and/or deeper self, it’s doomed.

Irrational it may be, but it still has a powerful veto over everything you do, and if you want to move forward, you have to address its concerns.

Hence my writing about this subject today. I’m trying to work through my feelings on the subject in hopes of finally moving forward on this.

And it’s working. I can feel myself thawing out from that horrible flash frozen feeling I get when the fear hits hard and freezes me up solid.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I’ll get over it as long as I keep the pressure up and refuse to give up. That’s what the evil invader in my mind that is my depression wants me to do. It wants me to give up and run away and hide under the bed until it all goes away.

But I know where that shit leads. Not just to immediate failure, but to self-loathing, depression, and me being too scared to even try again for months.

Well fuck that noise. The only way out is through. If my deeper self wants to stop so bad, it will only get there by actually doing the fucking work.

Failure is not an option. Success is the only goal. I will surmount and overcome this obstacle and every other one life present me.

If I do not get this gig, it will NOT be because I gave up.

Fuck that. I will overcome, and I will succeed.

More after the break.

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The triumph of entropy

I am officially becoming concerned about my recent level of tiredness.

I feel like I’m winding down. Like I am slowly running out of energy. Like I am not getting back through sleep all the energy I expend while awake.

And it’s not like I put out that much, for fuck’s sake.

And yet, this is not the sick kind of tiredness, the kind that comes from being ill. The kind that makes me feel oppressed and suppressed and depressed.

In other words, pressed.

Pressed down by gravity, and entropy, and life in general.

No, this is the healthy kind of tiredness that expresses itself mostly as good wholesome sleepiness, complete with yawning and heaviness of the eyelids.

Sorry if I just made you yawn. If it’s any consolation, I made myself yawn too.

Anyhow, for now I am choosing to interpret this sleepy period as my body and mind trying to get to a healthy place where I get enough sleep, including enough of those juicy REM cycles, for me to actually function as a human being as opposed to being in a half-sleep state all the fucking time.

Gee, I wonder where all this brain fog comes from.

It couldn’t be the fact that I walk around in a half-dream state as a way to reduce the stimulation levels of my already understimulating world, could it?

Nah. Must be like, retrogrades and toxins or something.

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Mother and the Machine : Remastered

Been thinking a lot about two sides of my multifaceted personality lately.

It’s been sparked by all these INTJ videos I have been watching on YouTube. On the one hands, it’s always soothing to watch stuff about INTJs like me because it reduces the feeling of utter alienation that our solitary and independent natures leads to.

I definitely feel that I am my own worst enemy sometimes due to that.

But on the other side of the coin is the fact that I am, at the same time, a warmly empathic and caring person with a bright and engaging personality and a lot of charisma and charm

And on the surface at least, that seems completely incompatible with being an INTJ.

It’s like I am two different people, one of whom is a cold, calculating, analytical cyborg chess player and the other is a big gooey ball of warmth and friendliness and deep down fluffy soft lovability.

And it’s very hard to put those two sides together into a single conception of self.

All I can think of is some kind of robot teddy bear. Like Teddy Ruxpin.

SO all this leaves me wondering, as always, just who and what I am. What kind of bizarre creature can contain such radically different and powerful forces?

Choosing which one is the “real” me is a fool’s game. Such questions swallow their own tails almost immediately.

Everything in my head is me. Even the bad parts.

But it’s not hard for me to pick the one I like more. Warm fluffy me is way way more likable than robot insect me.

Yet I continue to need to be both.

So somehow I have to fit them together if I want to be whole.

And I do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Even more depressed. But I still don’t care.

Because fuck it. This too shall pass. I am clearly dealing with some heavy emotional shit right now and the best thing I can do is just let things unfold naturally.

Maybe try to help a little by doing what I can to open myself up emotionally and try my best to just let it all out.

I probably need a good long cry. If I was a woman, and thus a lot smarter about emotions, that’s what I would do.

I would get a sad movie, a box of Kleenex, and a pint of some especially naughty kind of frozen dessert, and I would cry till I was all out of tears.

Possibly with the help of some of my friends via Zoom.

But no, I’m a man, and despite being a liberal homo intellectual who rejects the patriarchy and doesn’t feel constrained by traditional gender roles and considers themselves gender-fluid and all that good stuff, I am still a product of a fucked up society that teaches men to suppress everything and that therefore has a serious case of emotional constipation even on the best of days.

No wonder men’s suicide rates are so much higher than women’s.

So while I have been able to bring out the tears now and then, it’s still not easy and I have to fight through a lot of bad social programming to do it.

Ergo, I don’t do it nearly often enough to keep up with demand. And this despite the fact that I always feel so much better when I am done.

If profound feelings of joy and relief aren’t enough reward to keep you doing something that you know is good for you, I don’t know what is.

And clearly, I don’t.

But what the hell, I will lay down in bed and give it a shot later. My emotions are pretty close to the surface right now (yay!) and so now it a good time to try to break my tears out of eye jail.

I hope that the geological forces of my personality keep pushing things to the surface and forcing me to deal with them.

I have these moments where I can focus my anger against the depression and draw on my deep well of pure balls to the wall defiance to inspire me to overcome my limitations.

Because fuck you, depression. You don’t own me. You don’t control me. You’re not even a legitimate part of me.

You’re just something that happened to me for a while, and is going to stop happening me real soon now.

Before too long, this whole last 30 years of my life will seem like one long troubling nightmare from which I am thankfully waking up.

And all these bad years will be chased from my mind by the light of dawn just like any other bad dreams, and everything will look better in the morning.

No matter how dark the night is, dawn comes anyway.

More after the break.

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The things I do to myself

Why o why am I so smart and yet so stupid?

Ordered in again tonight. Pizza Hut. Pasta. Alfredo. Yum.

But the journey I had to undertake to get it from the door to the apartment to in front of this a-here compubox was painful and stressful and probably downright dumb.

Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose. And I do stupid.

I really need some sort of handler. Like I’m some kind of exotic animal that is not from this climate and therefore needs constant care in order to remain healthy and to keep it from trying to eat any wiring it can get to.

Behold the Fruvous! A marvelous and exotic creature with an almost human-like intelligence and an inexplicable tendency to be able to comprehend and discuss the deepest mysteries of the universe while at the same time looking like he was dressed by a squad of cranky hobos, and getting lost in elevators.

No wonder, then, that he’s the only one of his species known to science.

In fact, the most baffling thing about him is how he survived this long in the wild.

Debate on the subject is lively, mostly revolving around two main theories : sex. and pity, with “cuteness” a steady dark horse candidate.

Free to a good home. Relatively low maintenance. Great with kids. Gets along well with other pets. A very vocal breed, but will hush if asked nicely.

Excellent companion animal. Needs little exercise, very loyal and affectionate. Always up for a cuddle on the couch or flopping out at the foot of your bed.

Makes an excellent guard animal, though his method of subduing intruders may shock some potential owners.

Not recommended as a service animal. Means well and is very eager to be of assistance but a tad too clumsy and clueless for the role.

And so forth and so on.

Man, am I prone to extending metaphors!

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Haven’t had that cry yet.

Part of the problem with the path of least resistance is that it far too easily becomes the path of least effort, and that’s far less healthy.

Easier is not always better, damn it.

The real theory behind the path of least resistance includes not resisting the urge to act either. The natural flow of being a healthy embodied individual naturally leads to action based on emotion.

Depression introduces a highly unnatural resistance to action which stifles the motive force of the individual and makes even the simplest of tasks difficult because it is as though you are from a planet with much weaker gravity and from your point of view, you are walking around plated in thick lead armor.

Armor nobody else can see and that you can’t explain even to yourself.

You just have to accept that you are sick and must act accordingly.

Take care of yourself. Be gentle with yourself. Forgive yourself. Don’t be afraid to make yourself feel pampered and well cared for.

After all, you’re worth it.

I Will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am beginning to worry about this potential employer of mine.

For one thing, they are making me jump through a LOT of hoops. I have to do so many steps just to maybe qualify for future jobs. It’s beginning to feel artificial. Like the real point is to see how much abuse I will take.

Their desired answer : lots.

Plus they keep emphasizing what good exposure the gig will be, and how useful for getting future jobs it will be, and talking about what a great way to start a career as a writer it is, and so forth and so on.

I associate that kind of talk with people looking to exploit wannabe writers, myself.

Finally, after all this hoop jumping, they are weirdly vague about what exactly it is they want me to write.

On the personal misgivings side, they want me to list what games or other geeky things I am “expert” at.

Not super comfortable with declaring myself an expert in anything. I’m not a specialist, I’m a generalist. I know little bits about a lot of things. Experts know a whole lot about a single thing. It’s totally different.

They also want me to use words like “professional” and “experienced” in my bio.

I am neither. I’m just some highly articulate weirdo on the internet. dammit.

None of this adds up to an actual objection to the job. So I am going to go ahead and do the rest of their hoop jumping BS.

I am probably just getting nervous because it’s all so real now. I have to keep fighting off the urge to just ghost them in favour of a very manly “run away and hide till it goes away” kind of strategy.

But I will NOT start my re-entry into the world of freelancing with an entirely avoidable failure. I will see this shit through no matter what, and they will either like my writing enough to keep me on or not.

Having a regular gig, even as a barely paid stringer for a shady website, would help me pull my life together by giving me something meaningful to structure it around.

Right now, this blog is my main structural element. And it helps a lot, and I love each and every one of you for that.

But I need more. And UpWork is my ticket out of this dump of a life of mine. It offers me the best chance to jump the gap between me and the socially functional world of working for a living because it’s remote work I know I can do.

So I don’t have to interview for it in person and I can take writing a proposal on UpWork and when the job comes, I can kick its ass with my awe inspiring skills.

Well, they inspire awe in ME, anyhow.

I’ve spent far too long cowering in the shadows. Time for me to burst onto the scene in all my iridescent effervescent incandescent glory and wow this world right out of its collective fuzzy socks.

Because I’m fucking amazing.

More after the break.

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Yet more misadventures in ordering in

Good god, y’all.

This time, the freaking delivery person not only left my order outside our apartment building, they did not even ring up to tell us it was there.

Lord knows how long I might have waited for the phone to ring if I wasn’t an inherently paranoid and suspicious person who sense that his order was overdue and exiting his game to check up on it.

See, this is why I have trust issues. This kind of thing justifies being such a paranoid and suspicious person because people are constantly fucking up the simplest of things around me and I have to watch out for myself all the fucking time.

I can never just trust people to do their jobs competently. I always have to be on the lookout for someone having their fuckhead moment of the day and screwing up.

This is how micromanaging happens, people. People like me experience enough idiocy that they conclude that all their employees are drooling morons who can only do things right when they are being treated like dogs in obedience school.

I know better than that, of course. People are not inherently stupid. Society would not function if everyone was an idiot but me.

BUT bad management can bring out the stupid in everyone because if the employees are afraid of you, you will provoke an anxious adrenaline response in them, and adrenaline makes people stupid.

Ya know, that revelation alone could revolutionize management as we know it.

It would teach a lot of the angry type managers what they are doing wrong.

Take it from someone who grew up around an angry type dad and who therefore spent a lot of time thinking about the whole cycle.

Of course, I know exactly why my food got left outside the god damned building. In fact,. I can see it in my mind like I had security cam footage. It’s that clear.

Yet another courier was defeated by the mind breaking challenge of figuring out how to pick up the phone attached to the building and dial 0601.

Those types of buzzer systems have been around for more than 25 years and yet person after person is utterly baffled by them.

How someone can be old enough to drive and yet never having dealt with this kind of setup is beyond me.

Victims of suburban life, I suppose.

I wonder how they would handle the old fashioned system where there is a whole panel of individual buttons for individual apartments, with people’s names next to them.

Presumably they would take one look at that and run shrieking into night.

Gotta love the apes using the same techniques white police used to use on black people way back then.

I see what you did there. movie! Clever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well that was weird.

Sat down to use my PC and woops, no internet. Checked my tablet – none there either.

Well fuck. Now what?

To give myself time to think it over, I went to the kitchen to make my belated lunch.

Been sleeping when I should be eating again.

Making lunch gave me time to ponder my options. It’s always amusing to get a taste of just how dependent on the internet we’ve become during an outage.

“Well, I could…. no, that’s online. I know, I could…. nope, online too. Of course, I’ll just… fuck! Also online. Dammit, what did I do with myself before the internet??”.

It’s just like a power outage in that way. Although most of us don’t remember a time before electricity, at least.

But I swear to God, I was perfectly capable of entertaining myself and dealing with reality for my entire life between my birth in 1973 and the advent of the internet for most people in 1995.

I vaguely recall videotape being involved somehow. Remember those?

Anyhow, I eventually remember that I copied my entire previous hard drive onto this hard drive when I got this PC, and that included my now quite ancient video file collection, so I could watch some of those.

Plus, it occurs to me now, I also have a bunch of podcast episodes saved to my MP3 collection and I could have put one of those on.

Moot point now. Internet is back, obviously. Turns out the router accidentally got unplugged when Joe and Julian were doing some heavy duty spring cleaning.

I figured it would be something like that when it was down for BOTH devices.

The weird thing was how hard it was to get back into the blogging mindset once I had given up on it and made peace with the situation.

I relaxed too far. I mean, I knew that the situation would likely be resolved after Joe and Julian came back from running errands but I relaxed like I was in London during the Blitz and had no idea when the next Allied food drop was coming.

So when I realized it was time to get to work, so to speak, my inner child was all whiny and dragged its feet. I basically had to wrestle with it in order to get it moving in the right direction despite its protests and bargaining attempts.

I’m the sort of person who cannot afford to give himself any wiggle room because I am extremely good at wiggling.

Like, so good I make Jell-O jealous.

So that’s my afternoon adventure. Well, plus it’s Therapy Thursday so I had my session. Nothing big came of that although I think I am getting better at letting my guard down so the emotions can come out when I am with Doc Costin.

So that’s something. I feel like my emotions have been closer to the surface in general lately, and I am quite happy about that.

Visibly so, even.

My mission right now is to squeeze all the emotions I can out of my cramped and wretched soul. This vast vault of frozen feelings locked deep within me has got to go.

It takes up way too much space and the electric bills are killing me.

More after the break.

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I’m sort of employed?

Can’t say much about it, but I seem to at least have been accepted intop their trial program and I will hopefully get my assignment soon.

Just have a bit more administrivia to go through first.

Looking forward to having something meaningful to do with my time. Something that actually pays a little bit of money. Money that I can earn.

And earning money is something very precious to me. I’ve done so little of it.

Certainly never enough to support myself. I’ve always depended on others to support me, and that is a deep and potent source of shame for me.

And that. as patient readers know, goes all the way back to my emotionally impoverished childhood where I wad made to feel helplessly guilty just for being alive and having needs and taking up space and such.

So it’s about a lot more than merely whether I am a burden on the taxpayers of the province of British Columbia.

I cost them so little compared to their revenue that I am barely even here.

No, it goes way deeper than that. I want to break this pattern of dependence and find my way into the work of work and compensation that most people take for granted so I can finally support myself both financially and emotionally.

It’s absurd that I am going to turn 50 without ever supporting myself. I have so much talent and intelligence to offer the world. There simply has to be a place for me somewhere in this big bright busy world and as hard as it is for me to stand up and go against the flow, nobody is going to find that place for me so I have to do it myself.

Getting freelance work off of UpWork is a great place to start. I’m one heck of a good writer and it’s high time I made some freaking money off it.

Money I can truly call my own, guilt free.

And I know a lot of people would tell me not to feel guilty for being sick and therefore unable to work.

Well add that to the long long list of things I should do but don’t, then, because as I have explained, that guilt looms large in my life. Too large to simply wish away, or get over.

It makes me feel subhuman and subnormal. It makes me wonder why I am even alive. It humiliates me and taunts me with my utter lack of growing up.

I’m going to turn 50 in less than two months. I will be a 50 year old lifelong loser.

I don’t know if I can live with that.

Here’s hoping the new job opportunity works out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I sit, on the cusp, indeed the very brink, of employment.

The writing for video games is going to give me a crack at their writing test. That involves writing 7 articles based on headlines they will give me for $35.

And I am eager to go. Champing at the bit. I am reluctantly crouched at the starting line.

But alas, there is one more hurdle. In order for me to get that precious first assignment, I need to access a Google Workspace, and to do THAT, I need the guy behind the assignment to grant me permission to do so.

So yeah, it’s “hurry up and wait” time. I am so eager to show my potential new boss what a kick ass writer I am that having to wait is painful.

But wait I shall. Of course.

Haven’t heard back from any of the other jobs I have applied for via UpWork. I am going to give them till Friday before I start applying for more gigs.

After all, I don’t want to end up getting new work when I am in the middle of existing work. I mean, I should be so lucky, but it would be stressful.

And I just don’t like having too many plates spinning at once. I am not a natural multitasker and I reach my limit where if I add a task, I lose a task pretty quick.

Heck, it’s rare that I even have two video games on the go at the same time, like I do now, because of this dislike of splitting my attention.

Yet there is a REALLY good sale happening on Steam right now. A rectum-load of expensive AAA games are on sale for like half off, including two of particular interest to me, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2.

Coincidentally, both are games I bought and then found out they wouldn’t run on my hardware so I had to return them.

But that was before I got my Graphics Card of Ultimate Doom. So I am eager to give them another shot.

I will admit, there is a strange sort of redemption/revenge angle to that.

But if I buy one of the games, what then? Having THREE games on the go?

Madness. Anarchy. Blood in the streets.

I’d better make my mind up soon, though, because the sale ends tomorrow.

I hate having to make decisions under time pressure.

I have the money. In that I still have that $70 I have been trying to spend since last Halloween or so.

I buy games. But then I return them when the two hour return window is about to close.

It’s a good thing Steam is not a person or they would be getting pretty sick of this high strung indecisive bullshit of mine by now.

I guess you could say I have a serious problem with commitment, at least when it comes to committing my money.

If only there was a decent Netflix-like subscription based service where I could play games for as long as I like for one easy monthly fee.

They exist, but they all have a terrible selection and crappy network connectivity.

Um, no thanks.

More after the break.

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Flat like the horizon

That’s how my mood graph would look right now. Not happy, not sad, just… meh.

Frequency low. Amplitude hovering around zero. Like a recording of an empty room in with no windows in the middle of the night.

And that’s not a good thing.

Because it means I am numb, and dangerously apathetic. If I did not have iron self control at all times, this would be the sort of thing that led to self-harm, or worse.

Because underneath the superficial calm and dead affect is a brain screaming to feel something, anything, anything at all.

There’s definitely been times in my life when pain made me almost giddy with joy because I was finally feeling something.

Something actually penetrated the numbness and stirred something inside me that reminded me I was alive. A real live human being here on this planet with eight billion other souls living and breathing and feeling and being part of life.

Just because I can’t feel them doesn’t mean they are not there. It just means my maladjusted mind is activating my parasympathetic nervous system waaaaay too hard so instead of merely calming me back down after an adrenaline response, which is what it is supposed to do.

Mine goes too far in that direction. Waaaaay too far.

And despite what you might thing, feeling nothing is far worse than feeling something bad. At least feeling bad makes you feel alive by stimulating an adrenal response strong enough to penetrate that god damned layer of parasympathetic paralysis.

Feeling bad may suck, but at least it doesn’t leave me feeling absolutely and totally alone in the universe. Like it’s just me floating in an endless silent white void of absolute nothingness. Less than nothing, in fact, because not even space/time is present.

It’s a null set. A something with noting inside.

Look, some people self-soothe with liquor. Others do it with a hot bath.

Me, I self-soothe with science.

It really does make me feel better.

Of course, ideally, I’d neither be numb OR in pain but somewhere nice in between. A nice neighborhood where the people are kind and understanding and the real estate is reasonably priced and even a busted up freak like me can cope.

But I’m always denied any sort of happy medium. Maybe my brain just doesn’t know what the merry middle even is any more, and looks on it with grave suspicion as being far too simple to be trusted.

Maybe I just need to learn to express my emotions better. Express them in life, in realtime, instead of only letting them out onto this very page.

It’s hard for me to even imagine what that would be like. I have been locking everything away for so long that the very thought of free-range emotions seems hostile and bizarre to me now.

But then I wouldn’t be able to control what I express. My emotions would just go out into the world unregulated and unguarded, left to fend for themselves.

Then people might actually know how I really feel about things.

They might catch a glimpse of the true, unedited, uncut me and I would be exposed to the whole world.

Surely only annihilation can come after that.

But it’s not like my current self is worth keeping around anyhow.

I could really use a hard reboot and restore from backups.

Anyone know how to give me ECT?

I will talk to your nice people again tomorrow.

Lately I feel like I have been on a downward trajectory.

Every day I feel a bit more tired, and depressed, and reluctant to do anything that is not strictly speaking “fun”. I feel lazy, and self-indulgent, and hedonistic.

In other words, it’s spring.

Happens to me every year. The weather turns nice and I get lax. Something about all that sunshine makes me want to kick back and have fun and nothing else.

But within that, I have also felt a sort of decline. Like in a deep part of my mind, I am very slowly falling asleep.

It’s not an unpleasant feeling, other than some mild annoyance at being tired and a little cranky when it comes time to get off my ass and do something, like fetch food.

Or go to wound care, like I did this morning. Or whatever.

Now normally, I would instinctively fight this sort of steadily sinking into somnolence. I’d be all “I don’t want to sleep all the time, I want to stay awake and have fun!”.

And it might yet come to that. Being sleepy all the time gets on my nerves.

But maybe I just really need the rest. My restless mind is like a shark on the hunt at all times, always looking for more intellectual stimulation to feast upon and always searching for answers in its hyper-vigilant quest to see dangers coming and deal with them before they happen.

And that’s a terrible way to live.

Because I never truly and fully relax. Even when I am asleep, that shark-like part of my mind patrols relentlessly and keeps me from getting enough of that really good deep REM sleep that is so important to mental health.

I can only assume (and hope) that if I succeed in convincing my deep deep mind that I am, in fact, safe, and nothing bad will happen should I let my guard down and show enough trust in the world to turn my back on it for a while, I will finally be able to get enough of that filet mignon sleep to wake up with a healthy mind.

I can’t really imagine that could happen. Obviously logic alone is woefully inadequate. No amount of logical argument is going to vanquish an irrational fear birthed from a horrific trauma from my early childhood.

And the sad truth is that if it’s not accessible via logical analysis, I am stumped. I have no frigging idea how to go forward.

But that doesn’t mean that the task is impossible.

It just means that I will have to develop the tools to do so as I go.

Because I am not entirely blind to the murky world of pre-rational emotion. I remember what it was like to be a child. I know how the world felt to me back then. I know what the world was like when feelings led to other feelings without there needing to be a logic to it other than the deep calculus of emotion.

For most of my life, I avoided such deep waters because they made me uncomfortable. I vastly preferred to stay within the sanitary and air conditioned comfort of my cerebral world where even the strong emotions were mere grist for the mill of my intellect.

Which is absolutely useless for healing. Instead of expressing, cleansing, and closing the wound, it preserves it perfectly in the freeze dried depths of my deep freeze mind.

Well that is officially fucking over. Spring is here. Bring on the flood. Let all those suppressed emotions wash over me like a tsunami.

I will survive. And the world will be a warmer place when I revive.

More after the break.

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Slice and fold

So once more, Pizza Hut got my money because they still take cash.

It’s the very end of my month – check day is tomorrow – and I wanted a treat but all I had left was cash. Both my main card and my second card have been sucked dry.

So Pizza Hut are once more my heroes. None of the delivery services take cash any more. Most of the chains that deliver don’t do it any more because they have, sensibly enough, stopped doing the delivery themselves because Skip the Dishes and Uber Eats will do it for them for free.

That’s one of the main reasons I abandoned my old fart ways and surrendered to the digital money revolution and got myself a card to use online.

And that’s how I pay for groceries and dining in. But not Denny’s.

For Denny’s, I pay cash. For me, putting the money down to pay the bill is an important part of the dining out ritual. I’ve eaten in restaurants, both by myself and with others, since I was quite young, ergo my habits are quite deeply ingrained.

And paying with a card just feels wrong. Especially the tipping. Tipping via the card doesn’t feel like tipping at all because it’s just numbers on a screen and I have to just trust that the global megacorp will pass that on to the server.

Not nearly as emotionally satisfying as handing the server the cash directly.

Decided to try one of Pizza Hut’s new Melts. They’re basically a panini. Take a big slice of your chosen pizza, fold it in half, toast it panini press style, boom, you got a Melt.

Kind of a boring name, but whatever.

And it’s quite good. I knew the odds were pretty good that I would like it because I love paninis and I love Pizza Hut’s Meat Lover’s pizza, so it was their game to lose.

And the best part is, they don’t have whatever weird chemical was in their P’zones that made me turn against them quite hard after a while.

My guess is that the P’zones arrived to the restaurant frozen and I was reacting to whatever weird organic antifreeze they put into pizza sauce to make it taste okay to most people after being frozen.

Because I can’t hack Pizza Pockets or any other frozen pizza type product.

Having weird food sensitivities seems so very on brand for me.

For I am not of this Earth.

I’m from the one next door.

Everything is exactly the same there except their Urkel is white.

You can see why I had to escape a nightmare hellscape like that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.