Sometimes I have it.

Most of the time I don’t.

In this context, when I say “push” I mean “push the boundaries of my cozy crypt of a comfort zone by going outside them”, more or less.

Most of the time all I can do is make it through another day in my usual fashion. Same old life of playing video games all the fucking time punctuated by the occasional bit of blogging, sleeping, or taking a crap.

Really living the dream, aren’t I?

A very, very sad dream. From someone with a truly terrible job.

Today was Therapy Thursday.

I think I am slowly getting better at being emotionally present and open during therapy. It’s a long road because of how alienated from my own emotional being I am, but I am making progress over time.

Extremely. Slow. Progress.

I’m feeling a lot more these days, which is some very important progress. For far too long I have wasted my life dodging my emotions by burying myself in my distractions and remaining almost fatally numb to the world.

But I am not afraid to feel any more. I have stopped cowering before the intensity of my own feelings. I want to feel it all now.

In fact, I crave it. Because I have finally successfully associated the joy of the catharsis with the sometimes quite painful emotions I need to work through.

And I want that joy. I crave it. It’s like an act of cleansing or elimination. I feel so much better when I am done.

And I have been emotionally constipated for such a very, very long time. Backed up all the way to my back teeth, even.

Which leads to the other reason I crave feeling the feelings and that is that every little bit of emotion I manage to squeeze out reduces the emotional pressure built up inside me and makes it that little bit easier for me to relax and think and function.

It just sucks that the only way I can do it is through words.

I have to write or talk about my emotions to get them expressed. This slows things down one heck of a lot.

I would be a much healthier guy if I could express my feelings more directly. And I am working on it – every day my writing gets a little more expressive and emotionally dense, and I get a little bit closer to the problem at the core of my being.

In layman’s terms, I’m fucked in the head.

At least I don’t hate myself any more. I’ve at least gotten over that. I can shut that shit down with such brutal efficiency it’s like it never happened.

There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m a great guy. Millions of employers would be happy to have me on the payroll. I can do amazing things.

I’ve just been the victim of mental illness for a long time.

And I do what I can to get better, On a good day, I can get out and push.

But most days aren’t that good.

More after the break.

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Not so nice

Another thing that came up in therapy today was my having to face the prospect of a future in which someone might see me as a threat, and how painful it was to even type those words into yesterday’s blog entry.

Felt pretty bad this time, too. Clearly I have a lot invested in my own harmlessness. The very notion of someone seeing me as a threat makes me feel positively ill.

That’s not me! I’m sweet and fluffy and harmless and lovable.

I’m cotton candy, for crying out loud!

I’m your cute n’ cuddly pal who’s happy to make YOU happy. And vice versa. I’m the nonthreatening guy who people feel safe around and open up to. People trust me.

And I love that about myself. I’m not some frustrated Brit who secretly hates “having” to be nice all the time. It’s a genuine source of pride and joy to me.

And it’s a defense, too. If people don’t see you as a threat, they don’t feel the need to engage in conflict to sort out who’s on top and all that reptile brain shit.

And if someone DOES find me threatening and starts some shit with me, it is guaranteed that they will look and feel like an asshole whereas I will be the harmless guy everyone instantly sympathizes with.

But all of that only takes you so far.

And I am so much more than that.

As always with me, what you see is real but you don’t see everything. Not by a long shot. You only see the tip of the iceberg, the puppet on my hand, the facet of my multifaceted personality that happens to be catching the light at the moment.

Or. more accurately, that circumstances instruct me to use in that situation.

And like I have said many times before, I know that I am not the facets, I am the gem. I have various subsets of my personality that I use when whatever I have that passes for a social sense makes me switch.

Luckily, this all happens subconsciously. If I had to think about it, I would be even more socially anxious than I am now.

Perish the thought.

But to drag myself back to the point, if I am going to enter the world and thus be subject to things I hate like social competition and hierarchy, I am going to have to face the fact that this means possibly being less than totally nice.

At the very least, I have to come up with a much more complex matrix of social rules than “just be nice to everyone all the time”.

And that means I will have to wrestle with some not so nice facets of my personality, like my capacity to be ruthlessly calculating, manipulative, and selfish.

I have it in me to be a particularly loathsome kind of asshole. And that would not be a problem if I didn’t find the idea dangerously tempting.

Part of me would love to say “Fuck everybody but me!” and break free of the shackles of empathy and compassion. Just go out into the world and get the things I want by any means necessary, and consequences to others be damned.

I probably couldn’t sustain that. My deep empathy and humanism would catch up to me eventually. I’d start feeling bad about the things I had done.

But by then I’ll have the money, so who the fuck cares?

Just kidding. I think.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And therefore, I already am.

Time to wrestle with my fear of my own power and attendant issues.

Yes, again. The previous rounds were inconclusive.

It’s easy to see my fear of my own quite significant gifts as being a function of my depression, and perhaps that’s all it is.

Make me too scared to even focus my powers on a particular goal, let alone actually wield them to that end and face resistance from the world, and that will most definitely keep me all bottled up in this measly little life of mine.

Put a pin in that bit about resistance, though. That seems important.

I’m definitely scared of the world. To the extreme. My only safety lay in concealment and/or not being noticed for a formative chunk of my childhood. That was the only way I could be safe from my bullies.

And that bad programming runs awfully deep. Try as I might, here I am 44 years later and I still can’t convince myself that I’m safe.

So part of my fear of using my own powers is definitely fear of attracting attention to myself. That greatest of terrors for the avoidant and socially anxious : exposure.

Because for shy folk like myself, exposure equals death. We live in constant fear of a predator that lives in our head and these anxious and avoidant tendencies we develop are, we are convinced against all reason, what keeps us “safe” from this overblown shadow puppet we use to scare ourselves.

So yeah. Fear of exposure is definitely a big part of it.

And as I haver said here before, fear of the responsibility implied by my outsized brain and all its powers is another factor.

I have a strange relationship with responsibility. On one level, I dodge it like Scooby Doo dodges ghosts. I can’t help but feel it as a noose closing around my body trying to trap me and that is Very Much Not Good so I flee.

But on another level, I am perfectly fine with it. Doesn’t bother me at all.

I suppose it all depends on how competent I feel to uphold said responsibilities. If I am one hundred percent sure I can do it, it’s no big deal.

Like when I was organizing FRED. Minimal work, easy and fun. No problem.

But when I am not sure, it becomes a source of anxiety and therefore something I very much seek to avoid.

And thirdly, there’s the question of what I would even do with these powers of mine if I could access them.

That leads directly back to that giant crushing question of WHAT DO I WANT?

And I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I haven’t fully recovered from being afraid to want anything, sad to say. At some point I adopted an attitude of never wanting things because whatever it is, I can’t have it, so wanting it can only cause me pain.

It’s like the world’s worst version of Buddhism.

And even I can see that is a horrible attitude and a terrible way to go through life. No wonder I have such a cold interior, I have cut myself off from the very base of all existence which is desire.

And with the stuff I know I want, like a job and a boyfriend, it doesn’t really feel real. If I suddenly had the ability to grant myself these things whenever I wanted to, I am not sure that I would.

Right now they are safely locked away in my dreams of “some day”.

The thought of them being REALLY real, like right now, makes my tummy hurt.

More after the break.

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My dark side

Another aspect of my fear of my own strength is that when I start thinking the evil thoughts and that scares me.

It’s easy to be virtuous and sweet and nice when you have no power. No power means no temptation. If you have no reason to be bad, why not be good?

After all, then people will like you. And there is a certain advantages to being harmless. To being no kind of threat to anybody. Makes people feel safe around you and in the crazy world we live in now, people need that feeling of safety.

Neil Innes gets it.

But like poor ol Ringo Starr found out, being the cute one can be rather limiting and even quite humiliating when it comes time to stop being a fluffy little cloud and start being an actual person, with dignity, drives, and desires.

And when I start seriously thinking about making my way in the world and going after the things that I want, that’s when ol’ Machiavelli rears his ugly head.

He’s always lurking around in my mind somewhere, the prick.

See, with my combination of empathy, insight, and intelligence, I could be quite the schemer behind the scenes. I can think concentric rings around most people and it would be a trivial matter for me to use that fact to make people do whatever I want them to do just by manipulating them on a level too sophisticated for them to see.

It would be like doing magic tricks for a kindergarten class. Easy.

And I have known this to be true for a very long time. The feeling of being a giant among pygmies, or rather an adult among pygmies, is overwhelming sometimes and that’s why this is a subject I have zealously avoided thinking about.

Because it creeps me out. Makes me feel all wiggly and weird inside.

The takeaway from this discussion is, I think, that this new sense of self I am laboring to create has to rely a lot less on my self-image as cute, fluffy, and harmless, and has to include my being potentially threatening to people.

God, I hate the very sound of that.

But I think it’s where I need to go.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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It’s a lovely spring day outside. The sun is shining, the birds are singing show-tunes, the grass is wondering how green it is, it’s delightful.

It’s the sort of day made for taking a walk someplace where nature is busting out all over. Or sitting under a tree reading a book about feelings. Or breaking out that fun project you’ve been neglected because winter made you boring.

It’s definitely NOT the sort of day where you want to sit behind a keyboard and write.

But here we are.

Summer Vacation Mode strikes again. I am feeling lazy and self-indulgent and that makes me increasingly resistant to doing anything that I am supposed to be doing.

Gack. How very very dull.

I just want to indulge my desires and have myself some fun.

And it’s only April. I got six more months of this shit!

Normally, my reaction to being in this mode is to simply roll my eyes and drag, cajole, and prod myself forward anyhow.

And that’s still the plan. I mean, it’s not like I have a lot to get done in a day and I have no real desire to stop writing to you magnificent people every day.

But I also want to take a look at this mode in a more positive light because it’s a mode in which I am sufficiently energized to actually want and crave things.

And that is so much healthier than my usual state of flaccid ennui that I think it is worth examining what it’s all about.

Starting with : what would happen if I indulged these urges?

My scope for indulging these desires is rather limited, of course. I don’t have much money and I am not very mobile.

But I am trying to unlearn that kind of self-defeatist thinking. Sure, I have problems, but I also have a highly creative and resourceful mind that is more than up to the challenge of figuring out how to have a good time despite my limitations.

I just have to get the fuck out of my own way and learn to open my mind to the possibilities instead of letting that grumpy old Trog of mine convince me that I can only be “safe” if I make myself as small as possible and hide in the dark.

Fuck that. I’m here, world. Get used to it.

And fuck being safe. Safety, like all good things, becomes a bad thing when taken too far. When the real operating definition of “safety” is not “free from danger” but “free from things which provoke my anxiety” and that eliminates damn near everything, it as most definitely turned into a cancer.

And that’s not who I really am. That’s just something that happened to me. The real me is optimistic, upbeat, and sees the world as a wonderful place full of wonderful things.

And all I have to do to return to my real self and shake all this negative bullshit is to consistently correct some bad habits of thought and action and I will be set.

I don’t have to live this circumscribed life.

I can be happy and free.

And Summer Mode can help lead the way.

Bet you thought I’d forgotten! 🙂

More after the break.

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My other life – Drezen edition

I’ve not played Kingdoms of Amalur in around 24 hours.

True, that is largely due to the fact that the action in the other game I have been playing, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, has been heating up. I am fighting my way through the demon occupied city of Drezen, liberating it as I go, and the game is doing an excellent job of ratcheting up the tension and excitement as I go.

Fighting through a burning, war-torn city as the good guys (crusaders, mostly) fight with demons et al all over the place was pretty exciting.

And once more I managed to explore absolutely everything on the map EXCEPT the place I needed to find to continue the plot before finding said thing.

It’s like I am compulsively thorough without even trying. Impressive.

After that it became a quest to find the Magic Nyah-Nyah of Power that will let the side of good win over the side of bad because it has holy power and yadda yadda etc.

And I almost have it! And I am so excited.

What a kickass game P:WOTR must be to keep a jaded GenX type like me actually engaged in it on an emotional level!

But the real truth about Amalur is that I am getting tired of it. I started a new playthrough as a big beefy warrior and it’s sort of different from when I was a mage but not different enough to sustain my interest all the way through a second playthrough.

I’m even doing entirely new quest-lines that take me to places I never even visited the first time through, and yet I still feel pretty meh about the whole thing.

Playing it has started to seem like a chore, and that’s usually when I bug out of a game.

The irony is that I still more or less enjoy myself when I am playing it. But the thrill is gone. It doesn’t feel new any more.

Time to move on. Which means I need a new game to replace it.

Luckily, I have around $70 sitting on my Steam account waiting to be spent on something that I do NOT end up returning.

I can do this. I can be strong. I can commit.

A couple of weeks back there was this amazing Steam Spring Sale where a whole lot of AAA quality games were on sale for like 50 percent off.

But I already had two games on the go and I did not have faith that if I bought one of those games and set it aside for when I was done with one of the ones I had going that I would even remember it was there, let alone feel like playing it.

It’s complicated to be me.

So I didn’t buy any of the games I have been looking for. No Cyberpunk 2077, no Elden Ring, no nothin’.

Oh well. Guess I will either pay full price for them or dither around about it long enough to buy them in the SUMMER sale.

Sometimes my chronic indecision actually pays off.

Mostly, though, it’s just really freaking irritating.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

All right, this is getting downright silly.

Today, I am not getting around to eating “lunch” until 5 pm.

That’s not nearly as bad as the 7 pm plus of recent vintage, but it is still annoyingly late to be eating my middle and arguably most important meal.

Most important because it’s the one which features my Cavalcade of Medications. That’s the process by which I take like ten different medications with the meal. All the ones I take only once a day.

And I do wonder if taking them all in one sitting puts undue stress on my systems. I suppose I could spread them out over all four meals of the day,

But then I might forget which ones I have taken, and get confused. It would increase the mental overhead costs completely.

And being the easily overwhelmed space cadet that I am, I can’t afford that. I never know how much mental wherewithal I will have at any given moment, but in general I am not well supplied with it, so I must be cautious.

It’s all reality’s fault. Why does it have to be so annoying? I’m so smart when I stay within the realm of the mind.

Oh, how I dream of being a pampered intellectual superstar. With people to deal with reality for me so I am left free to be my brilliant and amazing self with way fewer incidences of also being a complete fucktard.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, late for lunch.

Now I know that in the grand scheme of things, eating lunch two hours later than I had intended does not really matter. I get fed either way. It’s no big deal.

But it irritates me. And not just because of some abstract sense of what the “right” time to eat lunch is.

It’s not like I arrived at 3 pm via some long and detailed scientific process to determine the exact ideal time for my midday meal.

In fact, at one point in the distant past I ate at a way more normal time of 1 pm.

But then, like now, I went through a period where I kept missing that time by an increasingly broad margin and so eventually I just gave up and gave in and said, “Well, okay, it’s 3 pm now. Ya happy? ”

I refuse to let it drift to 5 pm, though.

And I know what the problem is. 3 pm rolls around and instead of stopping what I am doing to blog n’ eat like a grownup, I grump about it like a cranky toddler and end up putting it off just to show it that it’s not the boss of me now!

I suppose one solution would be to move my lunchtime back to 1 pm so that by the time my little snit fit is over it’s 3 pm and I am actually on time, sort of.

Nah. That kind of thing never works.

Or I could just get the fuck over it.

Hmmm. 1 pm you say….. intriguing….

More after the break.

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Life isn’t fair

Of course it isn’t. There is nothing there to MAKE it fair… except us.

What justice there is in the world – and there’s quite a lot of it – is there because human beings, with their systems and their laws and their morals, have manufactured it.

The world outside our sphere of influence is a cruel and horrible place. The only justice that exists in the oh-so-innocent world of nature and animals is the brutally Darwinian kind, and that’s no justice at all.

It’s survival of the fittest, and you know they’re the fittest because they survived.

Society exists specifically to fight this law of the jungle. By banding together and looking out for one another, we create not just a stronger tribe but stronger individuals as well.

The tribe that supports an injured member of the tribe through a time when they cannot contribute to the tribe prospers because in time they get that individual’s labour back and thus get years more of productivity from someone the law of the jungle would have doomed to starvation or worse.

The tribe that supports the aged and infirm continues to benefits from those people’s knowledge and wisdom and the things they can produce socially.

The tribe that protects the weak from the strong creates a society in which everyone feels safe and can relax their guard and think communally, fostering things like culture, knowledge, and social progress.

Feel free to bring these examples up next time you encounter a social Darwinist.

This human justice is the only reason I can sit here and write and you can sit there and read it instead of constantly patrolling in case a rival wants to kill us and take our stuff.

Thus those, like the aforementioned social Darwinists, who espouse some notion that we are better off if we discard those they consider to be a “drain on the system” or quite simply “not worth saving” are flying in the face of humanity’s proven track record of being strongest and most prosperous as individuals precisely when we support and protect one another the most.

That’s why history is a story of tribes – the Etruscans, the Hittites, the Spanish – far more than it is a story of individuals.

Even the great Napoleon would have been just some Sicilian pipsqueak without a whole nation of Frenchmen at his back.

Our overly individualistic modern society can blind us to just how interdependent we are and how much we owe to our fellow human beings just for being able to stay alive.

And that’s fine when the system takes care of us. We are then free to imagine we are somehow a self-generating miracle of individualistic virtue who have earned absolutely we have ever gotten through our own individual merit.

But when in our hubris we start dismantling the very systems that allow us to feel this way, we become dangerous both to the society we have so tragically failed to understand and to our own spoiled and overprivileged selves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am absolutely thrilled by what is currently being done in the realm of pornography.

And I am completely serious when I say that.

People are using the form of porn to tell really deep and sensitive stories that happen to revolve around sex.

To me, this is the best of both worlds. Not only is it so refreshing to read porn that recognizes that people have brains as well as gonads, the fact that these comics provide greater emotional context and emotional resonance to the fucking makes it way, way more hot.

And oddly… comforting. I think for my sad little icebox of a mind, sex is a great way to connect me with the warmth and intimacy of the id. It’s a nice gentle yet passionate way to heat myself up without having to deal with troubling things like anger but instead to access a very tender and affectionate and liberated side of myself.

Because for me, sex is always intimate. Two souls reach out and touch one another. If that’s not a part of the experience, then I am not interested.

Miss me with that shit.

I could never do truly impersonal sex. Even if it was with someone I just met, there would have to be some kind of serious vibe going on between us before I would feel like getting freaky with them.

Gotta connect emotionally before I want to connect physically.

Anyhow, back to porn.

I mean, check out this thoroughly charming tale.

It’s about a het couple that swaps bodies, and I think it handles the subject in a refreshingly playful and “realistic” manner.

It’s by an artist who calls themselves Funkybun, and I am totally into their work. It’s always so innocent and playful and free – everything I think sex should be.

It’s sin and a crime and a shame that something as wonderful, magical, and deep as human sexuality gets tied up in shame and guilt and pointless inhibition.

The world would be a far happier, safer, and saner place if we dropped all the bullshit and opened ourselves up to the wonders of human sexual expression whenever, wherever, and however we please.

I mean, just think of all the pleasure and joy and release that is literally at our fingertips at all times. We could bring ourselves such innocent happiness if we simply let go of our baggage and let it all hang out.

Honestly, I think that’s one of the reasons people keep slapping all these rules and restrictions on sex – they can’t handle how powerful it is and how it upends our usual table of values by offering so much pleasure for such a low cost.

Such things could be highly damaging to a consumer economy if they caught on. Imagine how much less useless crap we’d buy if we did a lot more fucking.

Our entire sense of having to “earn” pleasure with labour could be upended if a REAL sexual revolution were to ever occur.

And what then? World peace? A just and fair system of law? Free avocado?

In a fully expressed world, anything is possible!

More after the break.

Happiness is work

Note : I am not saying work is happiness.

What I am saying is that being happy takes effort. Sustained effort. Your happiness is something you need to manufacture constantly if you want to have it.

That’s why the depressive’s internal energy austerity measures are so very destructive and counterproductive. Being stingy with your personal energy is supposed to preserve your happiness by not letting you invest it in anything without a massive rate of return.

Something has to produce maximum reward for minimum effort or it’s not worth it.

Hence the depressive’s anti-effort bias and loathing of anything that requires an open ended investment of effort.

After all, how can you judge whether or not something is worth the effort if you don’t know how much effort it will take?

And I know why this happens : anhedonia. Depression’s blanket of numbness blocks most pleasure from getting through and so only the things with massive reward stimulus can get through to us and at least give us enough reward to survive.

But you have to try to escape that mindset because happiness takes effort. You have to make yourself be happy, even if that means going out into the real world and looking for things that will increase your happiness with no guarantee of finding anything.

This is a hard thing for us introverts to accept. We generate our own energy, we don’t get it from our environment like extroverts do.

But what do you do when your own energies just plain aren’t enough?

You go look for stimuli in the environment. It’s the only solution.

And if you can get your energies up and keep them up, you can keep your mood up too.

Just as long as you remember to use this new energy to elevate your mood instead of letting it turn into anxiety, panic, or self-loathing.

You need to let some extroversion into your life to balance out the problems with too much introversion, like depression.

If you can learn to do this, lifting your mood will come as naturally to you as breathing or digestion. It won’t feel like effort at all.

But it requires you to banish a lot of depression’s self-destructive negative attitudes. The ones that tell you almost everything is not worth the effort. That make you act like you have a finite and very small amount of energy that you can only dole out in tiny amounts that do not get the job done at all. That tell you to hold everything inside.

The truth is that our personal energy isn’t a pool. It’s a fountain. It refills itself constantly and the more we take from it, the more we get from it.

Austerity fails every single time. It crushes the economies its trying to save by encouraging a negative, miserly, and parsimonious mindset.

That’s true for personal austerity too. Don’t fall into its miserly trap.

Do stuff instead. Spend that energy recklessly. Use up all your spoons every day.

You will have more spoons than you had today when tomorrow comes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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Sometimes it’s a good thing.

Last night(read part 2), as patient readers know, I was not feeling good at all. My mood was incredibly low and the Bad Thoughts had made an appearance on the distant horizon and I talked about how if it got much worse, I would go to the ER.

Well shortly after posting all that, something happened, and suddenly I felt like a million plus one times better.

I don’t know what the thing was, although given that I don’t remember it happening, I am guessing it was a micro-sleep. I took a brief involuntary nap.

All I know is that I had been sinking lower and lower then there was a moment of missing time, just long enough to make me feel like I was waking up all of a sudden, and bingo, I felt fresh and new.

How very nice! And I am NOT being sarcastic.

I think I know the probable cause. While I was still blogging, it occurred to me that I had not done my breathing exercises in a really long time.

These are little practices I have come up with in order to clear the “used air” out of my lungs so that I regain my full lung capacity and can breathe properly again.

My theory is that there is a small defect in my respiratory pattern than causes my lungs to not quite get rid of all the deoxygenated air in my lungs when I exhale.

Over time, that stuff builds up in my lungs, taking up lung capacity and leaving less room for fresh, oxygen rich air to come in.

When I was a kid, this led to my suddenly heaving a big, sad sounding sigh without even noticing it, causing my poor mother much alarm.

She’d ask me what was wrong. Why the big sigh?

No reason. Just happens sometimes.

Actually, Mom, tons of things are wrong, but whatever.

As an adult, however, it seems like my respiratory system needs some manual help now and then when it comes to catching up on my oxygen needs.

But I had forgotten to do that for a very long time, and that is probably why I was feeling so god damned bad.

The exercises don’t bring instant relief. I guess my system needs time to build up the oxygen levels in my blood to what they should be. So there was a bit of time between doing the exercises and feeling the effects.

The exercises are simple. There are three :

1. Forcing all the air out of my lungs in one long exhalation. This is neither comfortable or fun, but it gets the job done. Out with the bad air and in with the fresh air. That’s the stuff. This is why so many mystic schools of thought start with teaching you how to breathe properly.
2. Holding my breath. Not sure why this works. When it’s happening, it feels like it’s causing the bad air to be sucked out of the bottom of my lungs and up to where it can be exhaled when I finally breathe again. This is easier than the long exhalation but not as thorough or effective.
3. Rapidly breathing in an out. Like, as fast as I can, so that I am panting like a dog. This is the one that’s hardest to get away with in public. I don’t use it as much as the other two but it’s good to have when for whatever reason I can’t seem to calm down enough to do the first two.

And they work.

I am not entirely out of the woods. I still feel tired and sleepy. I probably have more work to do before I truly catch up.

Still, the lesson remains : feel terrible? Try breathing.

The results may surprise you.

More after the break.

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Everything sucks and nothing matters

That’s my brand new nihilistic motto. Like it?

I’m thinking of bringing up my old Cafepress account and sticking it on some T-shirts and other merch. In nice big sans serif letters, black on a white background, very bold and plain to maximize the impact.

God I wish I had a graphics partner for shit like that. I can see what I want in my mind but making it ain’t as easy as you’d think.

Anyhow, I think it captures the spirit of our times rather well. Could be a big hit with the “edgy youth” demographic.

Goes well with my “fuck everything forever”.

Then again, I suppose that technically, I don’t want my words to be the motto of those who tear down what’s left of society in an apocalyptic rage when they realize just how doomed we all are.

I mean, as a writer I’d be flattered, and if they came to make me their king I would of course accept, but still.

Not exactly the legacy I anticipated but it beats being devoured by cannibals.

Seriously though, it’s good for me to be able to express those nihilistic emotions that are my psyche’s rather crude but effective answer to my rational mind’s ever bubbling witch’s brew of neuroses and anxiety.

Sometimes the best thing for my mental health is for my id to slam my stupid complicating ego and my overweaning superego on the head with a brick made of solid rage while screaming SHUT THE FUCK UP.

You assholes have been in control by yourselves for way too long and just look at the fucking mess you’ve made of my god damned life.

I’m almost 50, my health is in the shitter, I have no life, I’ve never even supported myself or lived on my own or been in a relationship, and I am addicted to video games.

How much worse could going with my gut instead make things?

So yeah. Shut the fuck up, you corrupt and incompetent components.

The id’s here and I am ready to school you fools the hard way.

So sharpen the fuck up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Chalk this one up to the unintended effects of opening myself up emotionally.

But between my reaction to the mysterious vanishing email yesterday^[1] and the spinwarp I got into just now over deciding what and when to eat, it is becoming clear to me that I am a rather excitable person when the depression isn’t dragging me down.

In a way, it’s almost cute. Me getting into a tizzy while trying to make up my mind about relatively simple things like I am some tiny Mediterranean dude.

And while the increase in stress is not exactly welcome, I can live with this revelation.

I don’t have to always be the calm and reasonable one. I’ve been that person in the past but I have to wonder if that was a virtue or a symptom.

If it’s a symptom, I can live without it.

Besides, I imagine that things will balance out a tad more over time. Right now, this excitability is new so it’s acting by itself. But give it a few weeks and I am sure it will integrate into the rest of my personality and be a tad less volatile.

But either way, I would rather be excitable and enthusiastic and optimistic than calm and depresses and apathetic any day.

Who knows, this could be the first signs of a whole new version of me dawning. Me with access to my full creative power, full of inspiration and goodwill and overflowing hope.

Because I am perky, god damn it. When I allow myself to be.

And why wouldn’t I?

---

The Late Late Late LATE Show

So here I am, eating “lunch” at 7 pm.

It’s the same old story. I decided I am going to stop playing the game I am playing when I get to a certain point in the game and then the universe conspires to make that point recede into the distance like the end of the corridor in a nightmare.

In this case, I was searching all over for the exit to a place only to find, two hours later, that there was no exit per se and that to end that part of the game I had to talk to some people about the mission instead.

As a result, I didn’t exit the game until it was 4:45 pm. And that would have been bad enough, but then the tizzy du jour happened and I ended up not being able to figure out what the fuck to do with myself until almost 6 pm.

Then I was able to at least order my groceries. And after that I figured out :

1. That I was going to order in
2. What I was going to order
3. That I wanted it ASAP

That only took another half hour of dither, tither, hither, and thither.

Hence my eating “lunch” at 7pm. Which would technically mean “supper” would be at 1- pm, but to be honest, I will probably skip it.

Or maybe just have a light snack then. I will be eating my snack 2.5 hours later at around 12:30 am, so I could honestly go either way.

Regardless, it’s honestly no big deal and nothing to get all stressed out about.

But if that’s the price I have to pay for freedom, I will pay it a million times over.

More after the break.

---

And the beat goes on

The beaten down feeling, that is.

I had intended to make an appointment to see Doctor Chao, my GP, today. Totally forgot. Sure hope this is all psychological because if it ain’t, I might be neglecting myself into some serious trouble.

So what else is new?

Even if it is “all in my head”, it could still be cause for concern, I suppose. Faint little shadows of the Bad Thoughts have been tiptoeing through my mind lately.

But in a somewhat different form. There’s no toxic self-loathing involved any more. No desire to cleanse the world of my loathsome self.

Just the basic desire to not feel like this any more.

But don’t worry folks. I am light years from danger. This would barely qualify as “suicidal ideation”. I’m just extremely vigilant about such things for obvious reasons.

And if things get substantially worse, I will hie me hence to the hospital posthaste. Whether it’s physiological or psychological.

I am not going to take risks with something like this.

Honestly, what I really feel like doing right now is hibernating. Or slipping into a coma.

There’s a subtle difference.

I just want to keep sleeping until I am actually fucking DONE. I am getting very tired of waking up tired and sleeping but staying sleepy.

Sleep just takes the edge off.

And this could still all be the long term effects of blowing the lid off my emotions. I am embracing my emotions without reservation or pause these days and that is bound to bring a lot of very bad shit that I have been suppressing for decades to the surface.

It’s certainly a different kind of world I am living in now. I am abandoning my numbness and its cold cold comforts in favour of feeling every single thing that is in me to feel, warts and all.

And I know I shall not waver in this mission no matter how bad I feel. I have the bit in my teeth now and there is no turning back until I have bitten it clean through.

I have access the deep rage at my core and turned it towards the real enemy, my depression, and I will drive it back until I have swept these lands clean.

The real me is waking up and he is seriously pissed off about all the bullshit that has been going on while he was asleep.

And he’s cleaning house.

So as wearisome as this deep sadness has gotten, I will keep going.

And if there is one thing I know I am good at, it’s keeping going no matter what.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.