So my buddy Maelkoth gifted me a couple of games via Steam lately because he’d gotten the Steam codes as part of a bundle of games and two of them were for games he already owned, and he thought they’d be games I would like, so he gave the codes to me. Which was quite nice of him.

One of them is Kingdoms of Amalur : Re-Reckoning.

It’s a fairly decent open world first person type RPG in the same spirit as Skyrim and countless other, lesser games.

Like Elder Scrolls Online. But we’ll get back to that in a bit.

So far, the game is pretty good. The story is interesting, the graphics are lavish and pretty, and holy batshit, Fatman, is it loaded with content.

There are quests everywhere. And for the most part, I am happy with that. I love it when a game has lots for me to do.

Especially in an RPG, because that means that every one of those quests will involve me doing something good that helps somebody.

And I love me some happy karma quests. Doing good and helping people all the time would be the ideal life for me.

Too bad it only exists in video games.

And wowsers, did they not skimp out on the special effects. Spells crackle, magical weapons glow, combat animations are superb.

But it does have one big flaw and that’s difficulty level.

It lacks it.

Seriously, things are way too easy. There’s loot everywhere, the enemies aren’t very tough, and you level up fast.

And that’s on Normal difficulty. I’d hate to see how it plays on Casual or Story.

It’s bad enough that I am considering starting over at a higher difficulty level.

The other game he gave me is Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous.

It’s an ISO/overhead RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate, Pillars of Eternity, etc.

And so far, it’s pretty damned good. Tried it out this morning and I am loving it so far.

First thing I had to do was make a character, or choose one of the premade ones.

I am congenitally incapable of using someone ELSE’s creation when there is the option of creating my own, so I chose to generate my own.

What can I say, I always choose the option that allows for the most self-expression.

So I choose to make my own character and almost immediately regret it because wholly moley are there a lot of things to choose and a lot of options to choose from!

But there was a gem to be found in all that hubbub : I could be a kitsune!!

Anthropomorphic, naturally. So my character is an anthro fox! Just like Fruvous!

And that sexy, sexy Robin Hood from Disney.

Getting to be a fox makes any game like three times better in my books.

You start at a merry festival, brought in on a stretcher by someone who found you injured by demons outside the city walls.

And it was all so peacefully medieval that I dropped my guard while trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, exactly.

So when the demons attacked and started killing everyone, I was shocked.

Should have seen it coming. This is why we can’t have nice things, people.

So now my character, a fox who’s handy with the crossbow, has joined up with some other characters he met on the way and we’re off to quest to kill the fuck out of the horribly demonic Lord of the Locusts who’s behind all this crap.

Just another day on the job when you’re a hero. Sigh.

Problem is, I now have two pretty good games to play and I have to decide between them when I wanna play something.

Pretty sure Pathfinder has the edge. Amalur is OK but flawed. Pathfinder is better.

And ESO? They’re out of contention entirely. I was already getting burned out on it, this just put the final nails in its coffin.

Turns out you can burn out on a game, even while playing brand new content, pretty fast when you spent 1600 hours playing it a long time ago.

Huh. Go figure.

More after the break.

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It’s Friday, I had therapy!

Yeah, I know it doesn’t scan.

So I shared the gist of my recent ego tripping with Doctor Costin today.

In doing so, I ended up developing the ideas further, so I thought I would share here.

Basically I am abandoning all humility. Fuck that noise. I am goddamned amazing and to hell with anyone who expects me to pretend I’m normal.

I’m not normal. I’m a freak, and proud of it. I am a wild mutation of the standard cultural genome and said mutation has produced a one of a kind person with an incredible set of skills and the big big personality to really make them work.

Plus I have this astounding level of humility.

My new approach to life is to have the biggest ego I can get away with.

Because why not? I have some reason to think highly of myself, and Lord knows being self-loathingly humble hasn’t done me any good.

I figure, stay humble enough to stave off potential delusions of grandeur.

Other than that, go hog wild. Push it as far as I can. Walk around thinking I am God’s gift to the creative arts and dare the world to prove me wrong.

And I am going to take my brand new brashly optimistic POV with me when I go looking for freelance work again.

I already found that when I am applying for jobs on UpWork, I am suddenly Mister Confidence. I am just going to do that on purpose now.

Ya know, the evidence that I am a lot more extroverted than I ever thought before is really starting to pile up.

I will always be, fundamentally, an introvert. Someone who favours low stimulation levels and who finds social engagement draining instead of energizing.

But my constant craving for attention is not an introverted trait. Neither is my love of performing in front of an audience, or how I want to rise high and shine bright.

Turns out that whole thing is more complicated than I thought, Go fig.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been once again pondering trying to make it in academia.

It should be a slam dunk, at least on paper. I’m crazy good at school. Academically gifted out the wazoo. School has always been depressingly easy for me.

Yes, even in college.

And I have to admit, I am curious to see just how far up that goes. Surely at some point on my way to a doctorate in psychology I would begin to feel the strain. It can’t be that I am too smart for school in general, can it?

God, I hope not. I want challenge, god time it. Give my mind something to really struggle with. A heavy burden to strive and strain against.

Because I’ve been bored in school for way too goddamned long. There has to be a place where the work is at least difficult enough to demand my full attention.

Instead of what I’m used to, which is being so bored that teachers who don’t know me yet think I am not paying attention and try to catch me daydreaming by asking me what they just said.

Only to have me explain everything they just said in the last half hour back to them only better phrased and more to the point so it takes me only five minutes.

Yeah, I know that’s a dick move.

It sure was funny, though.

Anyhow, it occurs to me that my ability to do that would make me one hell of a good teacher. The kids would just plain learn more from me because I could get them through the officially mandated curriculum in the first half of the class and use the other half to do things that are actually interesting.

And of course, my lectures would also be incredibly fun and entertaining because I’m an amazing dude and not only would I be dedicated to making education come live for my students, more to the point I wouldn’t want my lectures to bore me.

Meanwhile, back at the point.

My plan would be to find a well respected institution of higher learning that nevertheless wanted me as an extra (im)mature student, take as many courses at once as they would let me, ace them with my usual airy disregard, and hopefully attract the attention of my professors and get some sort of buzz going about myself as a student.

That would hopefully lead to things like scholarships, invitations to guest lecture, being sent to academic conferences, and other goodies.

And we would see how far I could push that, like I said. But the idea would be to get a doctorate and become a lecturer and get published in fancy journals and such.

Sounds like a decent way to make a living, all told.

But would I get bored with stuffy old academia too easily?

Even if I deliberately make myself into an academic bad boy whose lectures spark riots and whose published works set off great fusillades of angry commentary?

That does sound like an awful lot of fun.

Hmmm. I will think about it. Seems a lot easier than trying to make it in show biz.

Then again, I haven’t even given show biz a chance to appreciate my talents.

I should at least give them a shot, shouldn’t I?

More after the break.

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Can they learn?

I think we have to go on the assumption that they can not.

What I am talking about is the tendency of us liberal intellectual types to act as though those on the other side of the political spectrum are merely ignorant and naïve and therefore if we just raise their awareness and enlighten them, they will suddenly turn into intellectuals just like us.

Do you get why they might find this approach rather galling and patronizing?

And the thing is, they might just lack the hardware to think like us. I am not saying they are stupid in terms of gray matter, but it may just be that people of average IQ do not have the kind of extra mental CPU cycles to devote to seeing things in an open and complicated way that leaves plenty of room for nuance.

That’s just not an option for them because they are not like us. And nothing we can do or say will change that fact.

Therefore, if liberalism is to succeed, we have to stop thinking of our Republican/Conservative friends as temporarily stupid geniuses and start treating them the way they want to be treated : with respect, dignity, and compassion.

And that starts by listening to them. REALLY listening to them. Without interruption or rebuttal and with plenty of patience and attention.

Listening to someone attentively and respectfully is in no sense the same as agreeing with them. You might vehemently disagree with everything they say. That’s fine.

But for now, you keep it to yourself. Let them say whatever they feel the need to say. Only ask polite and respectful questions intended to help them get out what they feel they need to get out.

I think you’d be surprised how much more calm and reasonable people can be when someone genuinely wants to know what they think about things and why.

Above all, there are to be no signs of hostility or opposition. So no slogan soaked clothing or other political artifacts in view.

Nothing is accomplished by making people feel like they are under siege by hostile forces and they have to fight like a cornered rat just to survive.

That just makes people deep themselves deeper into their entrenched positions.

I fully believe that if we could get both sides together and get them talking in this spirit, a whole lot of the animosity and tension would evaporate as people discovered that they actually felt the exact same way about a hell of a lot of things and realized that the other side are not demons or hellions but just ordinary folk trying to make sense of a very scary and chaotic world in whatever way makes sense to them.

We’re all human beings here.

Let’s start from there.

I really don’t feel like blogging right now.

Probably because it’s beginning to work.

I feel genuine change is afoot and so my broken down old depression is kicking up one hell of a fuss, dragging its heels as I drag it off into a well deserved oblivion.

Good. Its tortured screams please me. Music to my ears.

It knows I’ve made a breakthrough or two lately and it can feel the ground shifting underneath its feet and knows that means the end is coming for it.

And there’s nothing as dangerous as a dying dinosaur. Especially when it knows it is the last of its kind and after this, it will be extinct.

Well good fucking riddance. Welcome to the La Brea tar pit. Here’s your anchor.

So go ahead and fight it, you morbid malignancy of the mind. Knock yourself out. Make your grand dramatic last stand like a good supervillain. Give it all you got.

Because no matter what you do, you’re still gonna die in the last act of the movie, and I’m still gonna ride off into that sunset and have a hell of a lot more fun without you.

And go ahead and try to get me to back off by inflicting pain. It won’t work any more because I have got this shit rigged now.

The more you make me suffer, the angrier I will get at you, and the harder I will wring your filthy little neck.

You’ll only be hurting yourself.

And that’s fine by me.

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That other life of mine

Meanwhile, in the life I actually live (for now), I have been playing a lot of Elder Scrolls Online, aka that game I’ve played for over 1600 hours.

It is the only MMORPG I have ever found to be worth my time, so it kind of makes sense that it ended up being worth so much of it.

I recently used some of the Crowns I accumulated back when I had an ESO Plus membership to buy the Clockwork City DLC, and it’s been a lot of fun.

I really loved the Skyrim mod this ESO expansion is based on, so it was a no brainer that it would be one of the first DLCs I got.

I’m running through the main plotline right now. It’s got high level intrigue, very nasty Daedric monsters, evil cultists, a missing Living God (not Vivec), and a whole bunch of hilarious talking crows.

Not that there’s anything wrong with them in my books. I used to listen to this song off our Disney storybook albums when I was a kid and I thought the crows were awesome!

I didn’t know anything about racism back then. The idea that they were supposedly caricatures of black people would never have occurred to me.

Ah, such innocence.

And they still don’t seem like bad people to me. They still seem like a fun if somewhat rowdy group of people who truly care about poor ol Dumbo.

So in my heart of hearts, they will never be racist or negative.

But um, I don’t expect anyone else to see them that way.

Because objectively speaking, they are racist AF.

More after the break.

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Hey there America!

Hey America! What’s it like to live in Canada’s basement? 🙂

Just kidding. I’m just yanking your chain. Forgive me.

But you drive us Canadians so crazy that we have to poke fun at you now and then just to keep what remains of our sanity intact.

Having you as our “older brother” can be nerve wracking because you lurch from sane and heartbreakingly noble to crazy and alarmingly evil so wildly that we who are, for the most part, helpless to do anything but watch are in for one hell of a roller coaster ride.

And trust me, we’re watching. America watching is the true number one Canadian pastime. You’d be watching too if you were the mouse in bed with an elephant, as one of our greatest prime ministers put it.

In a situation like that, you bet your bippy that the mouse is going to watch the elephant’s every move just to make sure we don’t get stepped on.

But more to the point, to be honest, America, y’all are damned entertaining.

It’s a non stop reality show mixed with the wildest damned soap opera ever down there from the point of view of us Canadians.

In the neighborhood that we call the free world, you’re the crazy neighbours everyone talks about. Nobody knows what you’ll do next, but it’s bound to generate a lot of hot gossip as we all try to figure out what the flying fudge is wrong with y’all.

Not that we’re blind to your suffering. Our heart goes out to you all the time. You’re our close kin, after all. We’re not the same but we’re a hell of a lot alike. Same variety of English, same food, same culture, same traditions, and broadly speaking, the same basic way of looking at the world.

Side by side, it’s abundantly clear how different we are.

But compared to the rest of the world, we’re almost twins.

We’re the New Zealand to your Australia. The Austria to your Germany. The Belgium to your France, Switzerland, and Germany.

And while as a Canadian I will always find it galling to be mistaken for an American (sorry), even I must admit that from afar, the family resemblance is uncanny.

When you look at it that way, we’re all each other has. No other culture is anywhere near as alike as our two.

And like all close family relationships, it has problems. Issues. Drama. More for us than for you because most of the time, y’all forget we’re even here.

And even when you do think of us, you know so little about us that you end up stumbling around and giving us second hand cringe when you try to relate.

Don’t sweat it. I think, on the whole, Canadians are quite happy to be ignored by you.

We’ve seen what happens to countries you take an interest in.

Just kidding, America. See? We’re friend again.

But um, we’ll just hold on to your car keys for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still feeling pretty fucking cranky.

And you know what? Good. I’m not going to get anywhere if I just wallow in fatuous contentment all the goddamned time.

I will only change if I get mad and stay mad long enough for the rage to power and focus my energies on attacking my depression till it’s dead, dead, dead.

After all, it fucking deserves it.

And it’s not like I am happy. I don’t even qualify as content any more. The best I can say is that I am not miserable most of the time and even that is beginning to wear thin.

I am so fucking sick of the same old dead end routine. This can’t be how the rest of my life plays out. I can’t spend whatever days I have left just playing video games and blogging whilst I rot away from the inside just because I am too broken to move.

Damn right it’s not good enough.

My rage contains far more than enough heat energy to propel me to a new and superior state of equanimity. One where I am actually happy and fulfilled instead of being merely distracted and numb.

THERE SHALL BE MORE. This, I declare. Somehow, I will find a way to expand my life to include some kind of forward momentum. Somewhere, there’s a place where the light I shine will be seen by those who can lift it higher. Sometime soon, I will start climbing the ladder of worldly success and not stop until I’m up there in the heavens where I belong. Where I have always belonged.

I deserve so much better than this sad little existence of mine. I have a truly amazing mind, oodles of charisma and charm, a genuinely sweet, kind, and helpful personality, and so much to offer the world I should qualify as a natural resource.

And all I have to do is go out there and claim my place in the sun. And for that I have to stay angry and proud and ambitious and keep dreaming those big, big dreams.

I’m not saying it will be easy. I’m just saying I can do it. I can get all those lovely things I have been craving for oh so long : money, acclaim, a place in society, the recognition of my peers, a home, a husband, a wacky little found family of my own, and a whole lot of very geeky toys.

And, you know, fulfillment and all that crap.

But that all means that I have to be willing to sacrifice my short term contentment in order to achieve a long lasting happiness. Things will need to get a whole lot worse before they get a whole lot better.

I have built enormous stability and strength into my negative downward spiral, and it will take seriously potent mojo to overcome all that and make room for growth.

Not looking forward to that. But it has to be done.

So make it so. Let it be done. I hereby declare that I am lighting the bonfire that will burn away all my tired old bullshit and send the rocket of my ambitions into outer space.

Look out world, here I come.

Look for a new light in the sky!

More after the break.

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No big change

Nu surprise, my manic trip from earlier did not instantly transform my life.

But that’s stinkin’ thinkin. That’s the evil of depression’s “all or nothing” bullshit. Like thinking things have to be perfect or they’re not good enough, or love has to be absolutely without conditions or it’s not real, or that your achievements have to be so spectacular they are at the theoretic limit or they don’t count.

Seems crazy, I know. And it is.

These ARE symptoms of mental illness after all.

And while my results from my earlier emotional exertions are regretfully sub-miraculous, I still feel different.

Better, though in a rather rugged away. I feel like I have clawed my way one rung up the very long ladder that leads to where I want to be, and that feels good.

And I am going to remember the lessons of today.

1. I am capable of overcoming my deep well of inner bullshit enough to force myself into a positive and hopeful mindset via the all encompassing power of being royally sick of my stupid fucking life.

2. I can look my own amazingness in the face without blinking. I have cringed away from my own light and the real truth of how extraordinary I am for far too long. Now I am taking responsibility for these incredible gifts of mine and in doing so, I know that I am taking on the responsibility of actually doing something with them. Even if (when) that means exiting my cramped but cozy comfort zone. Fuck my comfort zone. This coffin of a life just ain’t big enough for me any more.

3. I am strong and powerful and fierce when I tap in to my decades of suppressed rage. That shit’s potent when used as fuel. I don’t have to float through life like I have no power to influence my own fate. There’s still plenty I can do.

4. I can face reality. It won’t be easy at first and I will no doubt have to redirect myself outward many, many times. I have spent my whole life with my face turned to the wall and steadfastly ignoring all that goes on behind me in favour of the soothing false reality of media consumption and that’s not something you can change on a whim. But I have all I need to negotiate reality successfully except the will to do so. And that can change.

5. Nobody is coming to save me. So I was abandoned. Well everyone who did it is has “gotten away with it” because it’s in the past. No matter how piteously I flounder or how winsome and adorable I make myself, I am and still will be all alone. It’s far too late for anyone to say “You poor thing!” and scoop me up in their arms and hold me close and tell me everything is going to be all right – except for myself. So the choice is clear : rescue myself, or wither away and die.

And I ain’t dying.

Yeah I don’t want to “have” to rescue myself from myself. And yeah, on some fuile level I feel like I am “owed” more nurturing and protection and well…. parenting.

But it’s not going to happen. Ever. Unless I provide it for myself.

And I am strong enough to do that.

It just might take a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Was watching YouTube and this happened.

(Warning, song WILL get stuck in your head. So, shields up, folks. )

It was so strange and psychotic that I just had to share it will you nice people.

Kind of like being in an accident and being compelled by the trauma to tell the take of it who so much as glances in the direction of your cast.

I’d call it brilliant marketing of the “make something so weird it will go viral” variety except that I have no idea what the hell was being advertised.

I think I saw a backpack for like half a second at the end?

I certainly didn’t feel like clicking a link after. I was in too much of a “WTF did I just watch?” daze to even think about it.

But it got me to watch the entire thing without so much as glancing at the Skip Ad button, and given the downright twitchy nature of my attention span, that’s impressive.

And I have to admit that, brilliant as I am, I could not have come up with something like this. It is quite beyond my substantial imagination.

But most of all, I had to share it will you nice people because I had to prove to myself that it was real and not some Pocky induced fever dream.

…. you see it too, right?

---

Speaking of fevers, it is freaking hot in here today.

A week ago I was bitterly complaining about someone turning the heat off in my room, and now I am seriously considering doing it myself.

I guess spring has officially sprung. And how

I have at least popped open the window in my en suite bathroom for the first time this year, apart from brief periods to air things out.

If this truly is the beginning of spring, then I likely will not close that window again until some time in October.

What can I say, I like my fresh air.

Now I have lived in this region for 25 years and I still can’t really wrap my head around spring starting in March.

Where I come from, St. Patrick’s Day is considered to be the last day where a really BIG blizzard is likely to occur.

People will listen to the weather and say, “Well here comes our St. Patrick’s Day blizzard. That’ll be the last big one this year. ”

That’s true far more often than not. And to be honest, by that point people on Prince Edward Island have been through so much winter that they really need any reason at all to have hope.

Actual spring doesn’t start till mid-April. That’s when the snow melts, the flowers bloom, the birds start singing in the trees, and a winter’s worth of dog shit appears everywhere.

See, in the winter, nobody picks up after their dogs because snow.

But Islanders don’t really commit to the idea that it’s spring until May. Then we are willing to let down our guard and believe that it is probably more or less springtime.

But ya never know. It once snowed briefly on the morning of my birthday, and that’s on May 19. Turned to rain pretty quickly, but still.

So the idea that it could be considered spring here on March 6 is still absurd to me.

Honestly kind of makes me feel like a sucker.

More after the break.

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What I’m supposed to be doing

Oh god, here we are again.

How many times have I been back to the exact same place? The place where I end up talking about this constant feeling that there is something I am supposed to be doing?

And how that feeling is one of the main things I am dodging by isolating so hard? Like it’s some kind of monster I am hiding from?

Jesus. I have been writing about this for over a decade. You would think I would have gotten over it by now.

Maybe that’s what I was supposed to be doing.

Well I don’t know what to do with this information now. I am certainly in no mood to go declaring that from now on I will be free of this feeling and live my life for my own fun and enjoyment exclusively.

Because that would be utter bullshit.

Besides, this feeling must come from somewhere. So where?

Perhaps it’s just a summation of all my frustrated dreams, ambitions, and desires. It’s what happens when your motive force is almost completely stymied and so all desire to do a particular thing is suppressed and all you’re left with is a base level “something”.

Because in one sense, there is something I “should” be doing : living life! Not out of a sense of obligation or expectation but just to get some god damned happiness for once in my sad little life.

That’s something my deeper self wants to be doing, but my damage prevents it. I am far too scared of the world and the dangers my old tapes insist is still there to really step outside my comfort zone at all.

So I just repeat the same pattern over and over again until I die.

Which again would not be a problem if there was nothing in particular I wanted or needed to be doing, but there is.

There is SO MUCH I want to be doing.

But all I can do is look out the tiny window of my metaphorical prison cell and think about how nice it would be to be out there in the sunshine playing with the other kids and having fun.

And believing my own target painted on the horizon – that I am sure to get out there and get my real life started “eventually” so all I have to do is hang on till then.

And yet, what am I doing to bring that about? Blogging and therapy. The same things that have failed to solve the problems since 2011.

Who even was I back then?

I should take my own advice and do things NOW NOW NOW.

But sometimes we tell others to do what we wish we were doing but can’t.

Take it from a guy who’s on fire : don’t play with matches.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have to believe that I can be wholesome and pure and clean.

I have felt dirty and soiled and gross for as long as I can remember. Even since I was raped and that was almost 46 years ago.

It forms the foundational layer of my Avoidant feeling of being something disgusting and horrible and loathsome. It devours my self esteem the minute it tries to establish itself and gnaws at the roots of my psyche with its urge to purify the world by cleansing it of my filthy fucking presence.

And on my tombstone, it will say “Sorry for the mess”.

It’s the reason that no matter how many of my virtues I add up – intelligence, charm, sweet nature, et al – the balance sheet remains vehemently in the red.

It’s the reason why I hate myself so much. Enough to want to kill the man in the mirror.

It’s the reason why I use words like poisonous, toxic, and radioactive so much. I am trying to express what it’s like to feel like a living fucking turd.

And not a healthy one, either.

It’s also the deep basis for my lifelong issues with hygiene. Here’s why :

Because if you can’t be clean, the next best thing is to just stay dirty.

That way, you never have to feel that horrible contrast between being clean on the outside and living filth on the inside.

That’s when I truly feel like a blot on the landscape. A toxic accident. A Thing That Should Not Be.

Besides, it’s easier to be filthy and stinky and gross. Takes less work and matches how I feel inside anyhow.

This is a common feeling in rape survivors. We were violated in such an intimate way that it’s hard to shake the feeling of having been permanently ruined.

That goes double when you’re male and triple when it happens when you’re only four.

So like…. six times total.

Stuff that happened later did not help. My being ignored by my family and abused by my classmates only confirmed what a repulsive sack of shit I was.

Maybe they could sense something broken inside me. I dunno.

There’s a truth in the idea that we project how we feel about ourselves to the world and that it is this message that other people unconsciously align their own opinion with.

Maybe I was telling people how to treat me without knowing it.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. I can overcome this. There is nothing wrong with me. I am not some kind of nightmare parasite helplessly feeding on those who love him.

I can cleanse myself. I can purge myself of all which makes me feel impure. I can find my way to a wholesome and healthy point of view that makes me feel strong and upright and holy and proud.

I can leave all my toxic effluvia behind and start fresh again. I can go to where the water is clean and the air is fresh and the sun shines golden and warm all day long, and I will be received there and welcomed into their kingdom as the wretched refugee I am.

I will have to sacrifice much to get there. But it will only be things I am better off without.

And at this point, there is little I would not give of myself in order to finally, after all these years of suffering, be clean.

More after the break.

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Unwanted advice for young people

I will be 50 in 74 days – not looking forward to that – and so it’s about time I entered the didactic phase of my life and starting giving young people unsolicited advice.

With that in mind, here’s some life lessons from someone with no life :

A. The point of life is to be happy. Everything we do is or should be dedicated to that goal. Even our jobs and careers should be seen as beholden to the obligation to be a net increase in our happiness quotient. And if something is taking more out of you than you are getting out of it, cut it loose and look for a better option.

B. Do it now. Whatever it is you really want to do, do it now. Don’t wait for the right conditions – that’s just a bullshit way of not doing it while pretending you someday will. Next stop : Loserville. Whatever it is, get on with it. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. Take risks, get hurt, and learn from it.

C. Beware of illusions painted on the horizon. WTF does that mean? It means that the world is full of people who are sure something is going to happen some day even though they are doing absolutely nothing to make that thing happen. Ergo, this idea of the effortless eventuality is an illusion of a future that is always the same distance ahead of you – like the horizon. Via the simple act of actually pursuing your desired future, you put yourself way ahead of all those people. Even if it goes poorly.

D. Treasure your momentum. Whatever you do, do not let your life grind to a halt. Even if you badly need a rest, take that rest with clear intentions of getting that rest then going back to your life. Don’t let yourself dawdle in the doldrums. Inaction for too long lets the rust creep into your joints and before long starting up again will seem impossible and you will be stuck there for a very long time.

E. You will get old too. The younger you learn to accept that you will go through all the well known phases of like just like everybody else, the more of an advantage you will have over the people who will one day waste enormous amounts of time, money, and effort trying to stay young. Your youth is valuable, it’s true. You have more vitality and sex appeal now than at any other time in your life. But aging gives as well as takes away. Imagine yourself at every age that lies ahead of you. What will you be doing then? What will life be like? Start thinking about these things now so that when age does catch up to you, it won’t be a nasty shock. It will be exactly what you knew would happen because it happens to everybody.

That’s all I can think of right now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty pissy right now.

You know, grumpy and out of sorts. Glad there’s nobody I have to deal with right now because I might not be my usual sweet and friendly self to them.

Aw, who am I kidding? Of course I would be. I can’t just turn that shit off. It’s been my social armor for my entire life.

By now, it’s pretty compulsive.

I’ve told the story here before of when I was in the hospital back home in Summerside and feeling absolutely wretched due to my IBS and related issues and then two orderlies showed up to change the sheets et al and suddenly I was bright and charming and funny and joking around with them then the moment they left, I went right back to being absolutely miserable again.

And the thing is, I genuinely felt as perky and lovable as I was being while those guys were there. It was not an act. My mood changed in an instant.

And it occurs to me that a healthier person would conclude from that incident that they must be an extrovert and should be around people who can be their audience as much as they can.

But I am not, alas, that person. I have far too much social damage for that. I spent too many formative years in the situation where quite literally I was only safe when I was alone, and that really fucks a fellow up.

That, and skipping kindergarten.

This subject has been on my mind lately what with all the talk online in the autism spectrum community about “unmasking”.

AKA stopping pretending to be normal.

It’s made me realize that I have instinctively used my charisma, affability, and so on to protect myself from the world for so long that it’s very hard for me to imagine relating to to people any other way.

Therefore, the thought of “unmasking” from that gives me the feeling of being very close to the edge of a very tall cliff.

It would be such a leap into the unknown that I don’t think I could do it.

And that’s not really a problem, because for one thing, it works fine for me and so I have no pressing need to change it.

It could be argued I would be happier if I were more “genuine” but I don’t see how.

And for another thing, it’s never really worked anyhow.

I mean, it’s not like it ever convinced anyone that I am a normal person. It didn’t help me fit in. It didn’t help me get along.

It mostly just confused the hell out of people because I seemed so open and nice and yet there was something very wrong about me too.

Mostly because I lacked the social skills to follow through on the charm. But also because once the initial charm wears off it turns into fear and I start pushing people away without even knowing I am doing it.

I suppose it could be said that “unmasking” would bridge the gap between my friendly sunny persona and the far grumpier and choosier person I am underneath.

But I dunno. That still doesn’t seem like an improvement to me. Seems like I would just end up getting into conflict with people a lot more and nobody wants that.

After all, I don’t want everything thinking that I am always pissy.

More after the break.

---

You live, you learn

Yeah, thanks, Alanis.

So I had another “adventure” tonight.

I decided I was going to order in, and ended up ordering a large taco pizza from 7-11.

The second I saw that on the menu, I knew I was ordering it. I heart tacos. I heart pizza. So a combination of the two is an easy sell on me.

Especially because I love taco flavoured beef so much. It’s really the star of the show in the taco realm for me. Everything else merely assists it.

No, YOU’RE weird.

Unfortunately, it came with a 2L of either Pepsi or Coke, so I am stuck with a 2L of Coke Zero now when I ordered Diet Coke.

Maybe they were out. I dunno.

Either way, I am reluctant to drink it because I am not used to caffeine any more. Normally I only have it once a week, at Denny’s.

I also did something silly. I needed $3 more to qualify for free delivery, so what did I add to my bill?

A large bag of Miss Vickie’s Sea Salt And Malt Vinegar Chips. Which costs $6.

Because Miss Vickie don’t come cheap. But I pay because I love those chips.

Anyhow, I order, my delivery dude delivers, I tell him to leave it by the door, and all is good as far as I know.

But when I open the door I see that he, quite logically, put the pizza (still in box) on the floor of the hallway.

Where I am going to have to bend way down to get it.

That was not easy and probably not good for me either. Lesson learned. Be damned careful ordering pizza on a Saturday, when there is nobody to retrieve my order for me.

I then staggered into the kitchen feeling pretty bad, and then I had to carry the entire pizza, box and all, into my room because I have no other way to transport it.

After, I found myself feeling bad because yet again, life had thrown something at me that I could not have anticipated and I’d had to deal with it on the fly.

But why is that a bad thing?

Do I really expect myself to anticipate all possibilities in all things forever? Sure, seeing the problem coming and avoiding it ahead of the time is preferable, but having to deal with things in realtime doesn’t mean I have somehow failed.

Because that’s how it felt. Like I had failed and the pain I suffered was the penalty.

And that’s totally nuts. And then some.

Everybody has to deal with things on the fly all the time. There is nobody who can anticipate all possible problems and neutralize them beforehand.

And part of my journey towards sanity has to be learning to accept that.

The real truth is that we are subject to forces beyond our control and arbitrary shit just happens without there being anyone at fault, not even me.

Excrement occurs, man. You got to deal with it and move on.

I did nothing wrong tonight. And next time, I’ll know better.

So why beat myself up?

Other than force of habit?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

..back. My aching, decrepit back.

I was struggling to get my food together in the kitchen when it suddenly occurred to me that my struggles had a lot more to do with back pain than leg pain.

Sure, my legs hurt like they always do when I am standing, especially when I have stand unsupported in order to do something that takes both hands, but the pain in my back every time I turned my trunk was far worse.

This is not exactly news. This realization has been building for some time. It just hadn’t dawned on me yet because I have had back pain for so long that I just tune it out.

Well I tuned it back in today, and whoa nelly. It ain’t good.

There’s a lot of pain in my back these days. My best guess is that it has to do with my playing video games without changing how I am sitting for hours on end.

But it could be vertebra gnomes for all I fuckin know.

Unlike my leg pain, though, I can partially treat this back pain myself via my advanced Eastern medicine practice of pushing down hard on my spine until it’s the right shape again, more or less.

And yet, I don’t do that very often. And even when I think to do it, I feel a great resistance to the idea from the unhealthy portion of my mind.

So what the downtown fuck is that all about?

At this moment, it seems like it’s the same thing that keeps me from cleaning my room : an unwillingness to take responsibility for myself.

And deep within the foul and sticky heart of that unwillingness lie my profound issues around abandonment and a resulting lack of nurturing in my childhood.

Some very stubborn part of me keeps me from properly taking care of myself because some irrational fragment of my developmental programming insists that these tasks are somebody else’s job and I am not supposed to have to do them yet.

And that therefore if I do them myself, someone somewhere is “getting away with it”

This is almost comically irrational. Whoever’s job it was supposed to be they are thousands of miles away and pretty unlikely to show up to give me a cuddle.

By all rights, I should surgically remove that hope from my soul. It’s very counterproductive and I would be far better off without it.

But that ignores the fact that the basic emotional need it represents is still unmet and I can’t just wish it away.

I could force the issue but that would involve me becoming a colder, harder person than I am right now. I would have to embrace a more “you can’t count on anyone but yourself” point of view, and I do not like where that leads.

As always, YMMV.

Because believe me, there is a brutal, cold, selfish version of me waiting in the wings. The kind of person that has given up on all things soft and sensitive in both the world and himself and dedicated himself instead to grabbing as much as he can for himself without a single thought for the consequences to others because all he cares about is basking in the glow of how god damned clever he is.

I don’t want to be that guy. But he’s in there ready to come out if life fucks me over badly enough that I decide the only way I am going to get anything is to take it.

But for now, I will continue to use my powers for good.

More after the break.

---

Here come the maybes

Time to represent the other side.

Maybe I wasn’t as neglected as my standard narrative says.

Maybe all the love and acceptance and warmth I crave was right there in front of me but it couldn’t get through the thick invisible wall being raped at the age of four left me with.

Maybe all that coldness I experienced was, in part at least, due to my goddamned damage. Maybe I have spent most of my life locked away in an arctic cold deep freeze of my own devising while all the time complaining bitterly about how cold I am.

It’s at least a possibility.

But it’s a lot less satisfying that having people to blame. There is a righteous purity in being the universal victim and a kind of coward’s victory in being really bitter.

And I am. Lord knows I am. I don’t express it except in this space, it doesn’t exactly jive with my cute and cuddly persona – but I am a very bitter and resentful man.

But maybe that is unjust. Maybe people tried to connect with me but the wall was too high for them to climb. Maybe I shut people out and shut people down without even being conscious of doing so.

That’s way less satisfying than my standard narrative. Why, there isn’t even a villain.

I mean yeah, there’s my rapist, but he left the stage right away. He wasn’t there for my lonely sad childhood. He wasn’t directly responsible for any of it.

And blaming a metaphorical invisible wall isn’t very satisfying. It’s hard to get really mad about being fundamentally broken. Possibly from birth.

I was a weird kid even before I was raped.

But after I was raped, it was much worse, and all because of that wall I put up to keep the suddenly very evil world at bay.

In theory, that wall could totally come down now. The danger is long gone. My life is quite safe, medical issues aside.

But I still don’t feel safe. I still feel like the moment I let my guard down, life is gonna GET me somehow. All that social damage from bullying is still there.

So it’s up to my deeper self to heal the damage and set me free.

Because living in a deep freeze sucks. There’s nobody to talk to and I am pretty sure these tater tots are freezer burned by now.

But I can’t escape until all of me wants to escape.

And I am still hauling a lot of old damage around.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It really isn’t.

But first, medical update : I have arteriosclerosis in my head.

That’s what Doctor Teal had tell me. And obviously, they can’t go poking around my gray matter to put in stent or scrub that shit out.

So it’s all up to me now. I have got to get my risk factors under control.

Which is why I was shocked and dismayed when the possible Doctor Ebtia^[1] told me that my blood pressure and cholesterol levels are way too high.

But I am on two different blood pressure meds plus Lipitor!

Turns out that when that doctor at Richmond Hospital cut my blood pressure meds’ dosages in half to cure my dizziness problem, he may have gone too far.

As for the cholesterol, well, our bodies start producing their own cholesterol as we get older and so I guess I need a dosage increase.

From 20 mg to 80 mg. Seems a tad extreme to me. I have her permission to drop it down to 40 mg if I start getting muscle pain.

I am thinking I will just start with 40 mg. Call me crazy but that seems more sane.

As for the blood pressure issue, I really don’t want to end up super dizzy again so I am hoping some kind of happy medium can be found.

I mean, I guess dizziness beats having a stroke, hands down, but still.

Anyhow, on to the actual topic.

What was that again?

---

It’s still not darkness

Oh right. Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

And I was explaining my whole “leaving the light of reason and entering the dark of irrationality” thing I was writing about yesterday and Doctor Costin pointed out that this was a false dichotomy that made thing far too oppositional and that only served the purposes of my depression.

And he was right, gol’ dang it.

And that sparked another thought about how this side of me I want to develop – the side of emotion and intuition and trans-rational thought – is not wholly alien to me.

How could it be? It’s a vital part of me and always has been. Like I said yesterday, it was there before I could even talk.

And once I opened up this avenue of thought, I remembered a lot of times when I was in that mode and it turned out OK.

It is over my overweaning superego and its chief crony the ego that thinks of that sort of thing as alien and irrational and malign.

The real me – because your emotions are ALWAYS the real you – the real me knows that I have a heart and a soul just like everyone else and that there is nothing wrong with letting them do the thinking if my feelings are the topic of discussion.

I have resources within me that can aid my efforts to heal myself immensely but my depression has hidden them from me until now using this pseudo-rationalist bullshit about light and darkness as cover.

Well fuck that. I am not my mind! I am a fully functional and intact human being and I can totally handle my deep emotional self just like the billions of other human beings on the planet who do not have my towering intellect.

We CAN think.

We MUST feel.

There is so much more to me than my clever mind and it is high time I got to know the rest of me.

More after the break.

---

Making my life move

I won’t be able to get my life moving until I stop clinging tenaciously to my little world.

Hence, the Trog has got to go. Or at least learn to be more reasonable. His (my) tendency to react to any kind of hand like it’s an invader looking to drag him off to hell has cost me a hell of a lot in life and if I am going to go anywhere, he has to let go.

There are far worse things than to be carried away by something. It is, in fact, a good thing to let your passions and desires drive you to leave your crummy little comfort zone in order to pursue what you really want in life, even if all you want is a good time.

I have spent far too long suppressing, ignoring, and even resenting my passions because they made sitting around doing nothing with my life more painful.

Well good for them. They were clearly trying to tell me something. Something like, “Hey you out there! Do something with us! Put us to work! DO SOMETING DAMMIT. It’s getting really crowded in here and the line stretches for miles!”

Or something like that.

I’ve talked before in this space how when you almost never act on your impulses. you die inside. Eventually the impulses more or less stop trying to move you and then you sit there and wonder why you have no motivation.

Because you didn’t feed the little motivation you had and now it’s dead. Happy?

Myself, I have smothered my spirit by living under a policy of suppressing all impulses because whatever they will make me want, I can’t have. So these impulses can only bring me pain and disappointment and frustration.

That’s a heck of a big generalization. Sure, if what I want is a private jet, I can’t have it. Same with a lot of things that cost money to do.

But if what I want is someone to talk to, that’s entirely doable via the internet. If I want to explore a new space, there’s plenty of those available online. If I am looking to maybe advance my career as a writer, I can do that too.

My point is that there are a lot of things I CAN have but this brutal suppression of almost all impulses keeps me from doing them.

Instead, I just play fucking video games all the damned time.

No motivation needed. It’s more than habit. It’s a reflex. Something I do as automatically as I breathe or digest food.

I try to imagine doing other things with my time. But my addiction is not that reasonable. It says that any time where I could be playing games but don’t is the worst thing ever.

And once more, we’re back at “it beats having to figure out what to do with myself. ”

And it does. But only in a very limited and self destructive way.

But that’s the way of all addictions, isn’t it? Sooner or later they displace or destroy everything but themselves and make you do things you know are bad for you but feel compelled to do anyhow.

They have hijacked the very core of your motivational structure – the drive which makes the thirsty animal look for water and the hungry animal search for food.

And I do not, so far, know how to hijack it back.

Bet it’s really gonna hurt, though.

Addictions don’t die easy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Earlier today I got this sneaking suspicion that this was a five week month.

Checked online and yup, not getting another disability payment till March 22, which is exactly three weeks from today.

Sigh. I hate it when this happens. Oh, I will be fine financially – I have just enough saved up to cover the extra week.

But it’s just so depressing. To be expected to survive one extra week without any extra money seems so arbitrary and cruel.

Imagine if at your job, sometimes you went three weeks between paychecks instead of two. You’d raise hell, right?

But it’s always safe to pick on those who are too weak to fight back, like us disabled folk and folks on welfare.

Oh, I am sure they have some kind of justification. Probably one that amounts to “it makes the bookkeeping nice and tidy. ”

I’m not kidding. That’s how these people think. I mean, what is the welfare (there’s that word again) of thousands of BC residents versus the sheer joy of a clean spreadsheet?

Nothing, am I right?

Oh well. At least it gives me something to bitch about.

And that’s a good thing…. kinda.

---

Free to go

Postulated : I accept that I can leave this hellhole of an existence any time I want.

Corollary : The real issue, therefore, is to want it.

And I do. But I also don’t, and that’s the problem.

As much as a big part of me years to be out there in there world living a normal life with a job and a boyfriend and my own place to live, another equally big (if not a little bigger) part of me views that as an annihilation level event of incalculable undesirability.

To be clear, this is not an adult part of my mind. There is absolutely no reasoning involved. It is pure raw emotion, that emotion being terror.

Actually, terror isn’t a strong enough word. It’s too civilized. If it’s terror, it is vehemently not the terror one feels when watching a horror movie.

It’s the terror of a prey animal staring into the slavering jaws of a predator that has almost caught up with it.

And there is no reasoning with that because it is not the product of reason. It comes from the deep animal emotional center that was there in us long before we even gained the ability to talk.

There being no rational solution to this wall of fear of the world outside my nanite sized comfort zone, all we are left with irrational solutions.

Solutions based just as much in that primal pre-rational world as the problem. One with some seriously powerful mojo behind them.

And I am sure that shit is possible, I just don’t know how to do it on purpose.

I am lost on how to interface with this deeper pre-rational mind of mine.

And what’s frustrating is that I know that even asking that question is going about things completely the wrong way. It’s asking a rational question about an irrational thing.

But for now at least, that’s all I got.

More after the break.

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Outside the light

Once more, I am confronted by the vast and murky realm outside the powerful and revealing light of my incredible powers of reason.

That light touches so much that I can see how people like me might fall into the trap of thinking that it illuminates absolutely everything. That it touches all that is real and anything it doesn’t touch is mere illusion.

That’s a particularly dangerous load of crap.

Take it from one who knows. I thought like that for decades. Unconsciously, which is ironic as it denies the existence of the subconscious mind.

But as I touched on in part one, the really important stuff comes from layers below the conscious level. That’s where all the powerful emotions that rule our lives come from and that’s the layer we have to go to if we need to repair emotional damage.

And brother, do I need that.

That said, I still feel like I can travel to the very edge of what the light shows but I can’t actually leave the light entirely.

It’s like I’m a dog that has reached the end of where his leash used to be. It’s gone now but he still fears going beyond its reach into the Great Unknown.

For me, the biggest problem is, I think, the leap of faith. In order to learn to survive in that void, I have to let go of the structure of connecting facts that makes the world make some kind of sense to me.

Within this structure, everything fits together logically and new facts are always coming in and making it even more accurate and robust and everything is bright and shiny.

Colder than hell, but bright and shiny.

And that’s the thing : the life-giving warmth and love and acceptance I crave so deeply lies in the lands outside the light.

I will never be able to feel those things until I go into the darkness and fix my damage.

And to do that, I am going to have to learn to view the land outside the light in a radically different way.

Right now, it seems like oblivion. The void. The great nullity. On that deep down level it feels like if I let go of my structure and leave the light, I will be destroyed.

But that’s making the error of the fixed self. No doubt learning to navigate my own psyche in a brand new way will change me a lot. And so, from a very narrowly construed point of view, “I”, i.e. the person I am at this exact time, will “die”.

But who cares? The person I am right now is deeply broken. That means that by definition, healing my wounds would be a very large change.

And that’s what I want, isn’t it? To heal?

What I really want is to not feel sad and trapped and stifled any more. I want to be a normal, functional adult human being who can stand on his own two feet and face the world and not only handle it but thrive.

I am so sick of being weak and scared and tired. I want to be strong and happy and full of light and love and overflowing joy.

And to get to that point I have to let go and enter the darkness.

Can I at least bright a flashlight?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.