But um, not the one in China.

No, I am talking about the wall that went up between me and the world when I was raped at the age of 4. The one I have suffered behind ever since.

The thing is, it’s an invisible wall. I went decades without even knowing it was there. It was only after considerable introspection that I realized there was a handy metaphor for that which keeps me from connecting with others.

And even now, most of the time, I am not aware of it. I get the feeling that part of how this wall has “kept me safe” has been to hide its own existence so that the evil forces of my malign ego and corrupt superego can’t attack it.

IF so, good job. Bravo. I need all the help I can get against those pricks.

And because I have been unaware of it for so long, I was left in an innocent fog as to why I had so much trouble connecting with people.

Why things would start off promisingly but before long that horrible moment of failed connection would occur and a cold crushing hand would smack me back into reality where I felt even more alone and more alien than before.

The problem is not an obvious one for either party. All surface indications are that I am a bright and friendly fellow that’s easy to get along with.

But there’s just something wrong about me. I don’t give people the responses they need. They don’t get the feedback from me they need in order to feel heard. I desperately want to give them what they are looking for but I do not know what it is.

This is what happens when social development stops in first grade. Presumably, had I gone to kindergarten, I would have learned the social skills to fit in with the other kids at least well enough not to creep them the fuck out with my icy intellect.

But that was not to be. They decided I didn’t “need” kindergarten and boom went my last chance of being normal.

So the wall stayed up. And as I hid from my peers and was ignored at home amd barely tolerated by my teachers, it got thicker and thicker because it turns out that wall of mine is made of ice and the longer I was in the cold, the more layers of ice accumulated.

At least, that’s my usual narrative. But the truth is, I don’t know.

I know I didn’t feel loved or valued or cared for, but that does not mean there were no people trying to do just that, only to be frozen out by that god damned wall.

I was a very hard child to reach behind that wall. It would have taken an extraordinary kind of person to penetrate my defenses.

There were none of those around. None that were interested in a weird, thorny, slippery little ice-cube like me, anyhow.

Or maybe there were throngs of them and I just couldn’t feel them there.

More after the break.

---

---

Would I lie?

No really. Would I?

More importantly, would I lie to myself?

See I am worried about my narrative. I have had this self-pitying angry bitter everybody’s martyr narrative where I am the innocent victim of other people’s unforgivable malfeasance forever, but now I am wondering how true it is.

At the moment, at least, it seems like it is full of generalizations taken as facts and narrative shortcuts that make it an easier to digest story at the cost of locking myself into this role of the passive victim forever.

Surely it was not as cartoonishly simple as I have made it out to be. Yes I was a lonely isolated boy to an unhealthy degree for a lot of my childhood. But I also had friends for a lot of it too.

First Kevin and Trevor, then Jason Heisler and Michael Copeland. And when I was in home room in middle school, I had Troy Little and Philip Oatway.

Except for Troy and Philip, they were not always the best friends to me. But to be fair, I was whiny and wimpy and irritating.

Doesn’t justify abusing me but I at least see where it came from.

Those three pairs cover the four years of grades six through nine. When I made the transition to high school, I was once more friendless.

But I at least had four years of friendship.

And it’s not like every day was abject misery. Life sure as fuck wasn’t easy and I was extremely lonely very often. But I kept myself too buried in TV and books and comics and such and managed to survive it all and even enjoy myself a lot of the time.

And it wasn’t radio silence on the home front either. Granted, for a while there, my siblings didn’t have a lot of time for me, but that doesn’t mean they ignored me completely. We talked, watched TV together, ate dinner together.

I feel like I have to kill my previous narrative if I am to be healthy and free. The old narrative trades absolute truth for bitterness and self-justifying victimhood, and that is no way to go through life.

And I especially don’t want to keep living in the past. Everything I go on and on about happened more than 30 freaking years ago. And yet I can’t seem to get over them.

Clearly I am not processing this shit right. Writing about it here definitely makes me feel better by releasing pent up emotions, but that’s not the same as actual healing.

I need something bigger. Something that moves me in a deep and profound way far beyond the confines of the intellectual playpen that is my conscious mind.

I don’t know what that could possibly be. But it’s out there.

TIme to start seriously thinking about what truly moves me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I…. think I may have had a minor cardiac event this morning.

Let me set the stage.

I had been playing Pathfinder (how rare) and as I have been doing more and more lately, I was sitting in a seemingly awkward position, namely sitting with my left elbow on my left knee and supporting some of my weight.

Sounds bizarre, but it takes the strain off my lower back so it’s good for giving my oft abused and chronically sore lumbar region a break.

Good thing I use the mouse with my right hand, I guess. Although most games require enough keyboard input to make them very awkward to play with one hand.

Anyhow, so I was sitting like that and then I straightened up and that when this completely awful feeling welled up from what felt like the middle of my brain.

It was mostly dizziness, but not the normal kind of dizziness that you might get from spinning yourself around on a lazy Saturday afternoon when you are bored out of your mind and Inspector Gadget isn’t on the TV for half an hour and three cats are watching everything you do because to them, YOU are TV.

We’ve all been there.

So not that kind of dizziness. Something far more sickening and unsettling. Like that spot in the middle of my brain had a black hole in it and it was distorting the very space inside my skull and making it go all wobbly.

To the point where it made me feel like I was on a rocket going straight up.

No surprise that it also made me feel nauseous, then. A lot like the kind of motion sickness I got when as a kid I would overdo it on the carnival rides and my inner ear would throw a tantrum.

We’ve all been there.

Worse than that,. though, was this feeling of terrible wrongness. Like something had gone terribly wrong in my personal universe and nothing was certain any more.

I was afraid to move.

And this sensation just got worse and worse, till I had to say goodbye to my fuzzy friends (by this time I was eating breakfast) to go lay down for a nap.

And as I lay down, I told myself that if I felt the same way when I woke up again, I would have to do something about it.

Well I was still dizzy when I got up again.

But, I didn’t do anything.

I didn’t get that far. I was still busy panicking and dithering and silently whimpering when suddenly the feeling just…. melted away.

Within about a minute, I went from feeling awful to feeling fine except for still being pretty freaked out by the whole thing.

And before you start in on me, yes I know I should have called 911, either during or after the incident. I know that would have been the smart thing to do. I know that by just going back to my life I am take a crazy risk.

But what can I say? I do dumb shit.

Hell, I didn’t even mention the chest pain yet.

More after the break.

---

Wow, that felt good.

Got a phone call. Some asshole with an East Indian accent saying, “My name is Richard and I am calling from the technical department…”.

And I said, “No you’re not, you’re a scammer, so FUUUCK OOOOOFF.”

And hung up.

We get a lot of those calls and they piss me off so bad. Felt good to finally direct that anger at its source.

As it turns out, righteous anger is an excellent antidepressant.

---

What I fear most

In no particular number or order.

The idea of getting truly close to anybody scares me to death.

Not sure why. Nothing rational, that’s for sure. It has to be something that operates in the deep dark layers that handle things like identity and connection.

One simple explanation would be that it’s because I’ve never actually been close with anyone at all. Not within my memory, anyhow.

Pretty sure I was very close to my mother before she went back to work. But that was when I was three years old, so I have only vague, sunshine soaked memories of it.

In my mind, the memories sound exactly like this :

And I know I loved my babysitter Betty, and life under her tough but loving care was quite lovely too. I missed my mother during the day but Betty knew how to take care of me with the sort of loving kindness with just a dash of discipline to keep me in line that I needed so badly as a kid WAY too smart for his own good.

But after school began, that was it. I got to and from school by myself right from the beginning. It was up to me to get myself out of bed, make and eat breakfast, and get my lil butt out the door in the morning.

And before long, there wasn’t even anyone around when I got home either.

Hmmm. I didn’t intend this to be yet another inventory of my sad and lonely childhood, but well, here we are.

Back to the point. Yes, my fear of being close to another is tied to my terrible childhood,. especially the rape and the bullying.

I arguably have no idea what it is like to truly open up to another. I have never gotten closer than friendship with anyone in my life, and even that is at a distance.

It really feels like if I get too close to someone, I’ll die, like a moth in a flame. Or melt like a snowflake in the desert sun.

Crazy, it’s true. But I am a very socially deranged person. Almost none of the stages of social development actually happened to me.

No play-acting with my toys to entertain myself. No making friends and forming bonds. No acquisition of a peer group in my teens. No nothing.

This means that I am socially retarded, developmentally speaking. The rape and then the bullying broke something fundamental in me and I doubt it can be fixed.

I have lived in an ice bound prison ever since.

There are people out there who love me and care for me but I can’t feel it. The best I can do is acknowledge it and be grateful for it.

But under the warmth and fluff lies a heart sheathed in ice that pumps its love out into the world because that’s the only kind of love I can feel :

The kind that is only my light reflected off others.

I want so bad to come in from the cold.

But it feels like I’d die if I did.

I am not my ice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

THERE. I have ordered my usual order (minus a few of the spicier elements) from Pokey Okey and when it gets here I’m a-gonna eat it all up.

This is very significant because I have not had an actual full meal since Sunday night and it is freaking Thursday.

So I need this freaking food. All I have had is the occasional piece of fruit or handful of popcorn or a few leftover Lay’s potato chips.

Better than nothing. But not enough.

In fact, I think the only reason I have not gone into catastrophic hypoglycemia is that I have been way too tired and incoherent to do much of anything, nd therefore I have not been depleting my blood sugars much.

As coping mechanisms go, that one really sucks.

But it got me through a period where I was so incoherent I literally could not put together the sequence of steps it takes to eat food.

Had plenty of food here in the room with me. I could look at it. I could recognize that it was, indeed. food. And I felt some sort of vague pull toward it, like my brain had the dim notion that I should move closer to this object for some reason.

But that’s as far as it got.

The fact that the illness also killed my appetite as well as my judgment and the rest of my higher reasoning faculties did not help at all either.

I chose Pokey Okey specifically because it’s tasty and fresh and jam packed with nutrition and therefore a perfect way to jump start my way back into eating stuff.

Gotta remember to take things slow at first though, or I will crash the system.

Today I had a real fun thing happen : there I was lying in bed and suffering when suddenly I felt a ripple pass through my body and then, like a magic trick, suddenly my entire gut felt like it was fully of wet cement.

This has happened to me before. About a dozen times so far. It’s like my colon falls asleep then suddenly jerks awake and freaks out because like wow, where did all this poop come from all of a sudden?

Holy shit, dude.

So I have been dealing with that all day. Luckily it is the sort of problem that works itself out eventually, even though the trip might kinda suck.

Oh, but that’s not the topper. The topper is that for whatever reason, my inner thighs feel very bruised even though there is absolutely no external sign of bruising.

I give up. Apparently absolutely everything is in play now. I could wake up tomorrow with a third nipple or a second penis or a unicorn horn.

This shit doesn’t even have to make sense any more.

Oh, and today I had possibly the least productive Therapy Thursday ever because I was still too incoherent to put together any therapeutic thoughts.

Normally I am teeming with them, but for Monday, Tuesday, and most of Wednesday, I was barely having thoughts at all.

Mostly I just kind of lay there and suffered.

Hmmm, maybe being completely incoherent was a good thing. Kept me from getting freaked out by how sick I was.

Better Living Through Mental Incoherence. Could be a big hit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I am learning to do. I am learning to open myself up to feeling my emotions and experiencing life through them instead of through the icy cold embrace of reason and logic alone.

It shed light, but no heat.

But I know I have a long way to go. I know that the aperture I have opened up in my emotional retaining wall is tiny and fragile as of yet, and that for the most part I am still living under the old regime.

Namely I still mostly suppress any emotion that threatens to cause so much as a ripple in the pond of artificial calm I live in.

It’s a terrible overreaction to anxiety, and presumably the source of my body’s hostility to its own adrenaline. The icy cold and lightless world I live in is exactly what you would expect from a parasympathetic nervous system gone berserk and scrubbing so much adrenaline, cortisol, and all the other products of the sympathetic system out of the bloodstream that you are getting far less than what is needed for healthy mood.

And bingo bango bongo, there’s your depression. QED.

But there are much worse things to be than anxious. Like suicidal.

And as I have discussed here recently, I don’t think I am a naturally calm person. At thje very least, I am more excitable than I used to think I was.

It could be that if I keep widening that aperture and get access to my full range of humanoid emotions, I will find some kind of natural balancing point where I will be able to maintain some kind of actual, real, earned calm.

But whatever. Part of my journey right now is to slowly get used to the idea of a life without that lake of artificial calm. A life where I have melted the ice around my heart and thawed myself out and therefore have to deal with the waves of the ocean where once there was only all that fucking Midnight Tundra.

I so want that to be a shade of makeup. Or the scent of a manly deodorant.

That means upping my tolerance for chaos – or rather, what I used to think of as chaos. I will have to dream up a new way of looking at things if I am to get over that and make room for living, breathing, thriving life on my newly made fertile plains.

And that is going to mean finding something else to do with my rage. A very tightassed character named Regill in the game I have been obsessively playing, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, has pointed out to me just how being coldly logical and pragmatic can actually be an expression of a deep but tightly controlled rage.

It’s like the deal is that the rage agrees to be restrained by supposed logic and reason on the understanding that said logic and reason will feed it regularly with opportunities to stick the dagger in by being ruthless and cold.

All while hiding from accountability behind a shield of being “logical” and “right”.

That’s the main reason why there are all those nasty people who hide their general malice and hostility behind things like “policy” and “the rules” and “just being realistic”. Those are people whose real agenda – venting their rage on whoever is around without them being able to fight back – has corrupted whatever actual practical functions and concerns are within their power and they are power-tripping balls.

I have been that guy. Not to the point of abusing power but I know the icy satisfaction of feeling like you know the right answer where others would be fooled by emotion.

Yeah. That’s gonna have to change too.

More after the break.

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When I’m 50

Only 24 or so days until I turn 50 whether I like it or not.

And I don’t like it. If I could, I would skip it altogether and stay 49 forever.

But life’s odometer does not work like that. The arrow of time only goes in one direction and can neither be stop nor reversed.

And I have been so sick for so long.

And I know that means I should not judge myself to be a “loser” just because my illnesses have kept me out of normal life and I have never supported myself.

But I can’t help it. At least, not yet. Not until I finish mourning the person I never got to be. The “wasting” of my life and all those years that slipped through my fingers because I was too sick to do anything but play video games and mess around online.

My entire adult life so far has done down the drain, never to return.

And the future ain’t so bright either. I am just going to get sicker and sicker until I end up in a wheelchair, and after that, I will be bed-bound for the rest of my days.

However many days that is. Not a whole lot, I’d wager.

And the worst part is that my bad health is, on paper, preventable. To all the world it looks like I could easily monitor and control my blood sugar and start getting exercise and try to socialize outside my group of friends and all that la la la crap.

Well all I can say is that… well, I’ll let the late Tom Petty say it for me.

Life inside this haunted head of mine is no where near that cut and dried. I have this massive wound at the core of my spirit and just getting through the day and having some level of fun despite the anhedonia takes everything I have.

I don’t have the spoons for much else.

So all I can do is dig my escape tunnel a thousand words at a time and hope to one day escape the prison of my mental illness.

Maybe then, I will be able to finally become a real person. An actual adult.

That’s the dream. anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More or less.

I’m in a good mood because I just scored a big victory in Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, that game I have been playing obsessively for weeks.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I beat a major baddie who was a smug and abusive asshole who REALLY had it coming.

And it was in gladiatorial combat. So there was even a wildly cheering crowd in order to further stoke my ego.

And this was no easy victory. This guy totally kicked my ass of me and my party a half dozen times before I thought of a better approach.

Namely making sure we were all fully rested before even starting the fight. I had forgotten that was an option in that scenario.

When I came back with everyone at full health and with their spells and abilities fu;lly recharged, motherfucker never stood a chance.

For one thing, I had remember that I have two different characters who can summon angels to help in the fight. That helped a lot.

As did the fact that my pet – a saber toothed tiger I named Snagglepuss – can really fuck a person up with his claw and bite attacks when he gets up close.

And he really earned his Meow Mix that fight. Did half the damage all by himself.

So anyhow, that rocked, and so I feel good.

Bought another game recently, a very furry interactive story called Beacon Pines.

I bought it because it is consistently the highest rated game on my Steam wishlist and I asked my friend Maelkoth about it and he gave it a solid recommendation, so I figured those were factors combined were enough to justify giving it a shot.

Well, that and the fact that it’s furry and adorable.

At first you might this is a harmless children’s story in a somewhat British mode, where all the people in a town are anthropomorphic animals in clothes and things and more or less act like people.

But Wind in the Willows this ain’t.

The game works by giving you “charms”, which are words you can use to select an option during one of the game’s branching storyline choice points.

And your first indication that this is not quite kid lit is that one of the first words you get in the game is “shit”.

Well I suppose in a world where the poop emolji is everywhere, that’s not so scandalous a thing any more.

You know, I remember a time when I could go weeks without seeing feces at ALL.

Anyhow, the game is quite good. It has a weird and creepy and HIGHLY original plot in which I am fully invested. I haven’t the slightest idea what happens next.

But the main characters are all child animals, and it is basically a Chose Your Own Adventure, so along a lot of the timelines, the kids die.

Fully of screen, of course, but still.

And the art and animaltion are top notch, as is the voice acting. And going back and trying a different word at a branching point is a lot of fun, but usually there are only two choices no matter how many words you’ve collected.

And I was disappointed in that but I understand. It would be hell on wheels to make a game where a dozen keywords plus a dozen branching points means 144 plotlines.

That would just be gross.

Anyhow, the game is quite good, but I am not sure I am going to keep it.

Because it’s just so slow and dull compared to the games I usually play.

There’s a reason I don’t explore all the “interactive fiction” out there, even though on paper (or electrons) they are exactly my sort of thing.

And it’s because video games have turned me into a stimulation junkie and just following some story with the occasional choice to make is too low stim for me.

Makes me feel like an utter cretin to admit it, but it is what it is.

I have played for roughly 90 minutes, meaning I have roughly 30 minutes of game time before I hit the two hour mark where past that point, I can’t return the game.

And I am tempted to return it. But I am sick and tired of my own flakiness when it comes to buying then returning games.

Especially because I know that it’s a lot more about my fear of getting “stuck” than it is about the games themselves.

And is it really that big a deal to get “stuck” with a game I don’t totally enjoy?

Given my highly limited resources…. yeah, actually.

So I really dunno.

Soon we will see if the game survives my rampant neuroses.

More after the break.

---

Fox (on) fire

Holy crap, I wrote 800 words in part 1!

And they went by so fast and so easily that it didn’t seem like I had written more than usual. It seemed perfectly normal.

In fact I was quite pleasantly surprised when I slowed down enough to check my wordcount and found I was alright at almost 700 words.

I guess I had a lot more to say about Beacon Pines and my tendency to return games out of sheer nervousness than I thought I did.

The problem is that it makes it impossible to judge whether I actually like the game or not. When I look back at all the games I have returned, some of which are universally beloved by critics and players alike, my purported reasons for returning them seem superficial, slight, or downright nonsensical.

That’s how I know that those aren’t the real reasons I returned the games.

The real reason is that the two hour deadline was coming up and I became filled with apprehension to the point of it edging into panic and the quickest and easiest way out of that situation is just to return the fucking thing.

This does not bode well for future relationships.

Because the thing is, I am a nervous and excitable dude. Without depression artifically flattening and deadening things, I am the sort of person who gets very excited about things and that state of excitation can turn into either joy or panic (or rage) at any moment, depending on my mood.

And my mood is not naturally stable.

In my natural state, I am all over the place.

And I am learning to simply accept that. I am not the cold, calm, rational, and mature person I once thought I was.

I am, instead, warm, excitable, irrational, and childlike in many, many ways.

And you know what? I like me that way.

So goodbye, false versions of me.

From now on, I will just be who I am, and stop trying to curate myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(WARNING : Medical horror ahead. )

Don’t wanna talk about this. But I gotta. So here goes :

I think I might be getting weaker.

Seems like moving around takes more and more effort lately, and causes me more and more pain than ever before.

And that is with the walker.

In fact, the last time I did Wound Care, it took way more out of me than usual, and I was in a fair bit more pain as well.

Ditto with the previous trip to see Doctor Caswell.

What’s worse is that it’s not just the intensity but the nature of the pain that has changed. Lately it feels like I am not so much moving my body around like a normal human being as piloting a set of stilts made of bone and padded with flesh.

When I am on my feet, it feels like my muscle and flesh are just hanging off my bones by the tendons and that all the work is being done by an increasingly small group of muscles that still can generate barely enough force to move me around.

Time to go back to Doctor Chao and remind him that my legs still don’t work and that there is a good chance they are getting worse.

It also means I must once more face the prospect of a time not long from now when the walker won’t cut it any more and I will be looking at either a wheelchair or crutches.

And I hate crutches.

Unless they were the cool kind they call forearm crutches. You know, the kind Jimmy from South Park uses.

You know, this guy!

Those I might be able to live with. They seem far more light and agile and a lot less cumbersome than traditional under the arm crutches.

There’s also leg supporting crutches, known when I was a kid as leg braces. Those might help do what my leg muscles increasingly cannot, and that’s hold me up.

I don’t want any of this to happen, obviously. Ideally I would get normal leg function back and being able to walk around like everyone else again.

But I am the sort of person who can’t relax about something that is bothering him until he makes plans to deal with it or otherwise handle the situation.

And this stuff has been on my mind for weeks now. Ever since my last attack of flu-like symptoms that made me sleep all weekend, practically.

It was after recovering from that when this feeling of my flesh just hanging off the bones became clear to me, and since then I have known I needed to talk it out in this space but have been putting it off because it’s such a scary and depressing subject.

But no one has ever successfully dealt with a problem by not thinking about it. So now I have written in out, and made it real.

Now it is up to me, and nobody else, to get this dealt with instead of doing what I usually do, which is ignore and/or avoid problems until they force me to deal with them by becoming a crisis and taking the issue out of my hands.

Well that’s not good enough, god damn it. Not good enough.

I am not a coward and I am not a child. I can face my problems head on and deal with them an a sensible, adult fashion.

It’s just a matter of pulling myself together and getting it done.

So Monday morning, I will call Doctor Chao’s office and get this ball rolling again.

More after the break.

---

The big sad

Surviving a wave of depression right now.

They come and go. I try not to pay much attention to them. They don’t mean anything and they aren’t even necessarily trying to tell me something.

I should be so lucky.

No, it’s just a fluctuation in the neurochemical balances in my brain. I am free to stay safe on the shore and watch the waves go by.

As long as I don’t wade into the water to try to fight the tide, I won’t get wet. I won’t get caught in the undertow. And the shadowy sharks of my subconscious mind can’t get to me here on dry land.

I could slap an attribution on it if I felt it was needed. Maybe this is a delayed reaction to the stuff I talked about in part 1. Maybe this is just a side effect of my subconscious mind processing a block of deep sadness left over from all the hurt I have experienced in my life and then just ignored instead of dealing with the pain.

Why cope when you can escape? Oh, there are so many reasons.

Or maybe I just need a good long cry. It’s still hard for me to arrange that.

Stupid male emotional constipation.

I think the real problem is not the worry that some imaginary male rival or bully will pop out of the woodwork to mock us.

The problem is being afraid to deal with the emotions involved. Crying brings all that pain and fear and distress to the surface so it can be expressed, and when you have the option of just not doing that. it’s easy to just keep putting it off until you have accrued such an enormous backlog of unexpressed emotion that it looms over you like a tidal wave that threaten to destroy you if you don’t keep running away.

Man, I am all about the water metaphors right now.

So basically it’s emotional procrastination. You keep putting off dealing with things until they pile up and then that becomes your excuse to KEEP putting them off and the problem just gets worse and worse.

The only solution is to stop running away and turn around to face that tidal wave and deal with your issues the best you can.

And I swear I’m going to do that soon.

Just… not right now. I have…. stuff.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Eating lunch at 6:17 pm. That’s a new record even for me.

My fault. I got so deeply into my game of Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous that by the time I pulled my head out, it was already 4:45 pm.

Then I ordered my groceries, and decided I would wait till they arrived at around 6 pm so that I could eat the potato and egg salad therein.

Foolish of me, I know. But I am not a smart guy.

I’m just very, very intelligent.

I got in so deep because my adventures have now led me into the very depths of Hell itself, or as it’s known in the game, The Abyss.

Potato, tomato. It’s an infernal plane of torment, misery, and evil and it’s where devils and demons come from and it corrupts people. It’s Hell.

But with a distressingly racist subtext.

See, the place I am in right now is a big city in Hell. And how did the people who made the game decide to depict a city in Hell?

In a word : Arabian.

Arabian architecture. Arabian clothes on the demonic citizens. Even an Arabian sound to the god damned background music!

So when the art department was tasked with depicting an evil, lawless city full of backstabbing, violence, murder, and death, they thought, “Oh, so basically Tehran.”

They might as well have named the place Agrabah, the city from Disney’s Aladdin.

That number was questionable when the movie came out.

Now it is so cringingly racist it feels like a crime against humanity.

And the kicker? Before the Gulf War happened, the movie was actually going to be set in Baghdad! A real city full of millions of people, with cars and electricity and everything, where they haven’t cut people’s hands off in over a century.

Imagine that racist and culturally intolerant POS opening number introducing Baghdad!

Clearly Disney was not “woke” yet.

Do you thing a single one of the people railing against “woke” this and “woke” that thinks, “Well if I’m not woke, what does that make me?”

Asleep? Stunned? In a coma? Brain dead? Give me something to work with here, people. What do you want to be called?

Personally, I like “stunned”. It’s not an actual antonym of “woke”, admittedly, but it seems to sum up the kind of mentality they are going for.

Imagine reporters, absolutely deadpan, reporting that a Stunned protest took place in front of a courthouse today.

Or them talking about some domestic terrorist as being “believed to be linked to the so-called ‘Stunned’ movement. ”

Or how about describing Tucker Fucking Carlson as “a leading Stunned voice” on Fox.

It would explain his default facial expression.

That is a face of almost infinite smackability.

The hilarious thing is that by going with “woke”, the American right wing ceded the victory to the left before a single shot was fired.

Because who, on a gut level, wants to be less “woke” than the next guy?

Remember, in the land of the Stunned, the Woke One is king.

More after the break.

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Emotionally unavailable mother

I have/had one.

First, let’s see what Kati has to say.

Mine gave up on me.

Not at first, but once she went back to work when I was around three. She was a full time teacher and a full time housewife then, and that left precious little time for her precocious little redheaded tyke.

You know, the one she never wanted in the first place. The one who defied her tubal ligation to be born. The one she had no room for because she was already an overburdened mother with three kids to raise when I came along.

And I was left wondering what I had done wrong to make my mother stop loving me.

No wonder I am so desperate for attention.

I’ve told you nice people before how for a while I could come home from school and tell her about my day and she’d listen.

But eventually it was like talking to a brick wall, only without the echo. This devolved to the point where even when I gave her a hug while she did the dishes, she not only did not respond at all, she looked back at me like I was just some horrible alien thing attached to her that she merely passively, but resentfully, endured.

That look hurt me almost as much as the rape did. It killed any sense I had that I was not alone in the world and left me to retreat into the inner realm I still occupy today.

Because when the world hurts that bad, the only thing you can do to protect yourself is withdraw from it, and minimize your exposure to its toxic effect.

And my life became a great deal colder. And stayed that way.

Kati mentions “good mother messages” – things you wish your mother had said to you.

So let’s give that a try.

“I haven’t forgotten you, Michael. I am sorry I wasn’t there for you emotionally. I never meant to hurt you or make you feel abandoned and alone. I know you are hurting inside from how you were treated in school and I am here to give you all the comfort, soothing, and understanding you need to recover from that. From now on, you can always come to me when you need someone to talk to who can help you make sense of your world and makes you feel safe and loved and warm again. Even when I am tired or busy or depressed, or even all three, I will be there for you when you need me. You are precious and important and I love you enough to make you top priority in my life along with your siblings. And I am going to make damned sure your siblings always make room for you in everything we do, and we will always plan everything with you being equal to your brother and sisters in mind. You being too young and weak to compete for what you want will no longer mean you get nothing. I’m so happy I had you, my dreamy little guy, and think you’re the best surprise a mother could ever get. I love you, Michael. Now come give me a big warm hug. ”

There’s probably more but it’s a good start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s a prediction, BTW. Not a plan.

But I just went to the kitchen, got my lunch together, and came back with no belt on my pants because I didn’t feel like stopping to put on my belt on.

Thus, I had to make my PB&J while holding my pants up by awkwardly tilting my hips this way and that, causing me all kind of hassle, all because I didn’t want the hassle of putting on a belt.

That was a net negative no matter how you slice it. The smart and sensible thing would have been to either stop and put on the belt or just taken off the damned pants.

It’s cool, we’re very much clothing optional around here. Part of the benefits of us all being gay men.

In fact, honestly, it’s unusual to find me IN pants when I am at home. But I am planning on changing that by getting dressed in a fresh set of clothes every day.

It will make me feel a whole lot better and do wonders for my level of alertness and calm. There’s nothing inherently wrong with hanging around pantsless but for me, it’s associated with the kind of unbounded mental state that leads to depression.

Hell, I have been a nudist. I have lived in a household where the first thing you do after coming home is take off all your clothes. Where you have to remember to keep some clothes near the front door in case someone shows up unexpectedly.

Where I dreamed of a place with a nice eight foot tall privacy fence so I didn’t have to put clothes on if I wanted to lie in the sun for a while.

And where NOBODY wears trunks in the hot tub. ^[1]

Because this is California, baby. Be cool.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, me being an idiot.

This is all part of my learning to encompass and accept the fact that I am not a wise man. I am not even a smart man.

What I am is an incredibly intelligent man. If I was a D&D character, INT would be my primary stat. I can think rings round most people, my thoughts operate on a level that most people could not even conceive of, and I’m really good at school.

But I am also a clueless bumblefuck because I am so withdrawn into my own mind that there is not a lot of room left for actually paying attention to the here and now, and so my relationship with reality and my environment is distant at best.

All part of being an INTJ. We’re brilliant but we suck at anything sensory.

But I am going to fix that by doing little exercise to get my body moving and my senses engaged in order to ground me in reality and the real, physical world.

There’s a lot that sucks about living in the world inside your head. It gives your personal demons very close access to your most tender feelings, it blurs the line between what is going on inside our head and outside it, and it alienates us from reality in a truly deep and terrible way that has long lasting and highly deleterious effects.

So I want to come home to the real world while I still can. Finally escape the prison in my head and walk in those peaceful green meadows I can see through the windows.

Because I’m here and I’m alive and I’m ready to be born.

I just need to warm up enough inside first.

More after the break.

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Oh yeah, the point

The point of my bringing up my tendency to do dumbass things was not self-abnegation but rather the opposite : self-forgiveness.

I have been far, far too harsh on myself on nearly every level for far too long. Especially when it comes to being “smart”. On some deep level, I have felt like I had to make the smartest possible choices every single time or I have utterly failed.

And that’s just plain stupid.

Nobody could live up to a standard like that. It’s inhuman. Everybody, from the lowest idiot to the most stratospheric of geniuses, does dumb shit sometimes.

And besides, life is not an exam. Nobody is keeping score and there will be no report card at the end. Nothing is going on your permanent record.

So go ahead and fuck around. There are far, far worse things in life than failure and you are under no obligation to make fewer bad decisions and unwise choices than anyone else just because you’re intelligent.

And by you, I of course also mean me.

Above all, I forgive myself for not being perfect. For being suboptimal. For not always being able to grow and strive and reach for the top.

For most of the time, in fact, being barely able to just hang in there and wait as patiently as I can for the next time my mental fog parts long enough for me to get things done.

And I never know when that will be. I can encourage it to happen, in a way, but I can’t make it happen. That’s life with mental illness.

Your mind is not yours to command.

Right now, I am trying to cook up a new kind of project for myself. Something I can create and call my own. Something presentable and professional. Something I can be proud of. Something that, god willin’ and the crick don’t rise, will get me the audience I so desperately desire.

Could be a blog. Could be a YouTube channel. Could be TikTok.

Could be a lot of different things. But it’s going to be something by golly. I am a powerfully creative and fascinating person and it’s time I prove that to the world.

And I can have everything that I want. Money, audience, influence, fame.

But first I have to do what I do best : dream.

Dream up a brand new thing that I can do to show off my mad skills.

Sounds doable to me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or is there? I dunno.

Patient readers know that I keep coming up against the brick wall of my feeling of constant crisis. A powerful feeling that operates way in the background of my mind and makes me feel like I have to hide out against some terrible calamity happening just outside my tiny little bunker.

But there’s nothing there. Nothing is “after” me. There is no nuclear holocaust to justify my bunker mentality. It’s all green grass and butterflies out there.

The only ghosts chasing me are the ones inside my haunted head.

But no matter how often or how firmly I tell myself this, the feeling persists. And as long as the feeling persists, my logic is helpless against it.

It’s really just my shattered sense of safety all over again.

Being raped when I was 4 left me permanently traumatized and that’s what locked me into the “freeze” (of fight, flight, or freeze) mode that has warped my entire life.

So while I “know” I am perfectly safe, I don’t believe it. Not really. Not deep down, where it counts, on the primal animal level.

If only I could truly believe that I am safe – that the crisis is over and I survived it and everything is going to be okay now – then I think I could be much happier and healthier in this tired old skin of mine.

And not just psychologically. Physically as well. I am convinced that this bunker mentality of mine interferes with my body’s ability to heal and regulate itself by locking me into a constant low level adrenal stress state and as we all know, stress kills.

It kills by keeping us in fight or flight mode, which focuses all out energies on the here and now under the assumption that what matters is surviving that saber toothed tiger or felling that wildebeest so the tribe can eat, and not how you’re going to feel after.

So I am sure that plays a big role in my shitty health.

So ya know, no pressure. Just get sane or die. Ha ha ha.

Well I’m working on it. The words you are reading right now are a big part of that. I write these words to express my emotions and work through them.

And I feel like I am on an accelerated path lately. Every demon I release and every ghost I exorcise is just a little bigger than the last one, and as I liberate them through the oddly narrow opening that is my writing talents, my hope is that by the time they are all gone, the opening will be big enough for me to go through, too.

Not sure if that means it’ll be bigger or I’ll be smaller, but I am okay either way.

So writing on this blog really is my job because what society expects of a sick person is that you do what you can to get better, and this is how I get better.

And I thank you all for making it all possible.

More after the break.

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Dying in the dark

Lately, I’ve had this feeling that I am dying.

And this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Because a big part of me IS dying, and I’m all for it, because it’s the bad part.

The diseased part. The toxic part. The part that has been holding me back for far too long and therefore has to go. NOW.

So I think I need to be careful about what parts of me I am identifying with. The depression wants me to think it and I are one and if it goes, so do I.

Bullshit. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that the more it dies, the more I live, and that’s what it can’t stand.

It is, after all, just a mindless computer program I created a long time ago in a moment of horrible crisis with the only goal being to keep myself safe.

. And seeing as it’s a program “written” by a four year old in response to being raped, I can forgive it for not exactly being sophisticated.

But its reign is over. I’ve seen it for the idiot mechanism it is, and with every beat of my heart the real me goes stronger and the old me, the sick and crippled stunted child-man version of me, ebbs further away.

And that’s sad, in a way. When it is gone, I will mourn it, for it was me for a very long time and it’s not a bad person, just no longer an expression of who I truly am.

It’s like a suit of clothes that no longer fits me because I have outgrown them. And my new wardrobe will no doubt take the best elements of it into its design, but it will no longer be limited to those old clothes with all the holes in them.

I need room to grow. Because I have one heck of a lot of growing and healing to do and I can’t do any of it if I am cooped up in my little tin box of a life.

I need the freedom to be alive. To live and breathe and think and feel and be a part of the world instead of a refugee hiding from it.

And I don’t even need to leave this bedroom to do it. The internet is a vast and thriving place and brimming with opportunities for a brilliant fellow like myself and it’s only a lack of courage and vision that has kept me from seeing that until now.

By golly, I’m going to either make something of myself or die trying.

And given that I turn 50 exactly a month from today, that’s not just an idle saying. I might very well drop dead before I make any of my dreams come true.

But I’d rather die trying than die in the dark.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because that’s what this is, this blog of mine. It’s the closest thing I have ever had to a real job. And that’s pretty sad.

But I have always been too good at hiding from reality. I was always hidden away in a bedroom in front of a computer somewhere, just like I am right now, as I type this.

Well at least I’m consistent.

So there’s never been anything compelling me to go out and deal with that big mean world out there. I’ve never needed to work in order to survive. I’ve never had kids or a wife to support.

And as for the natural instincts that lead most young mammals to go off in search of their own territories, we all know I am very good at ignoring my biological drives.

If my instincts were telling me to go out there and kick ass, I wasn’t listening.

Even now, as I am quite belatedly waking up my slumbering id and putting it to work, I am still not exactly chomping at the bit to get on out there.

Because I am scared. Scared of that big loud terrifying world out there. Deep down, I am still an abandoned child who is convinced that he cannot possibly be strong enough to survive on his own and so it’s hide from the world or be eaten alive.

And I know that’s nuts. So am I.

I know that I have all the skills I need to live on my own and work a job. My health issues are a complication and then some, but I could find something I can do.

And there’s always freelance work, of course. That’s well within my wheelhouse.

And yet, loon that I am, the idea of having to face the real world on my own fills me with horror. It’s become the hidden villain of my life, all the scarier for remaining unseen.

If my life had taken any sort of normal route, I probably would have gotten my degree then gone out to prove myself in my twenties and made something of myself.

Instead I’m almost 50, a cripple, and scared of my own shadow.

But that is not destiny. What comes does not have to resemble what’s been. I can pull myself out of the dark again just like I did all those decades ago when my parents pulled my brother and I out of UPEI.

Nobody is going to rescue me. No matter how pathetic my life gets, nobody is going to show up and tell me it was all a tragic mistake and take me away to some place where I don’t have to deal with being a grownup any more and from now on, all I have to do is be brilliant and that will get me whatever I want.

It’s a little nauseating how much that appeals to me.

No, if I want more, I am going to have to get it for myself. And that means I have to crawl up my giant heap of ossified bullshit till I am finally up high enough to get the fuck over myself and get on with life.

Maybe when I get up there, I’ll plant a flag.

More after the break.

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The second shift

Time for the rest of the day’s work.

I wonder what it would take for me to become a successful blogger

And by “successful”, I mean “able to make a living writing words”.

I suppose in a perfect world, I would have a space for my writings with a lively and enthusiastic and highly engaged audience of readers who would read what I write and leave intelligent comments about it and even debate it in the forums.

That sounds pretty doable. The trick is somehow getting said audience.

Thus we come to the Achilles heel of so many of us sensitive artistic types, ESPECIALLY us writers, and that’s self-promotion.

We’re not exactly inclined toward it.

Our whole deal is sitting alone in our nice safe homes and typing words and assembling worlds and expressing our thoughts all alone, where nobody can bug us or try to interfere and things can therefore be exactly how we want them to be.

To then take this darling child we’re brought into the world and try to sell it is such a bizarre and horrifying thing for us to try to do.

This is why agents exist. They know how to do that shit.

And, presumably, how to deal with cranky, anti-social, reclusive writers.

But we’re talking Internet writing here. The agent is not as needed because you don’t have to face the same kind of gatekeeping as traditional publishing.

But I do not know how one garners an audience. That first step, where you get people’s attention long enough to engage them, is a doozie.

Still, it has to be possible. Someone out there is making a living stringing words together on the internet. Somewhere there’s a place where I could get the exposure I need in order to develop an audience and my skills at pleasing said audience.

I know what my brand is or would be as a commentator : my fresh hot takes on familiar subjects. Or, on a deeper level, my ability to surprise the reader with my unique POV and to stimulate fresh thought and debate.

So in essence, my ability to stir shit up.

That would not be the product, mind you. I would never say things I don’t mean just to offend or provoke people.

Not only is that below me, but it would be entirely unnecessary because the things I genuine thoughts and beliefs piss people off enough already.

Trust me on that.

But they would have to read or watch or listen to me first, and that brings us back to square one with how you get their attention in the first place.

Preferably in ways that do not involve hilarious public nudity.

That’s more for me that for you, reader.

And I know the fact that I can’t think of how to get people’s attention is a psychological thing, not a cognitive thing, and if I could just pull my head out of the, we’ll say, clouds, it would become obvious.

But my shyness and fear are getting in the way.

God damn it Trog. Get the fuck out of the way!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!