I shouldn’t have let myself get distracted by my penis.

It was bad enough that when I woke up after my afternoon nap, it was 4:45 pm. That’s around an hour and a half ish late.

I try to eat lunch between 3 pm and 3:30 pm every day,. although my track record on that has gone into the shitter lately.

As meal times go, it’s becoming increasingly theoretical.

But even if I had gotten my poop in a group and eaten at 5 pm or so, it still would have been better than eating my “lunch” at 6 pm.

Which is what I am doing right now. Sigh.

See, I let myself get distracted by the urge to masturbate. This has been happening to me a lot lately, despite how rarely I actually get to ejaculate.

I tend to think of it as “wearing out the battery” instead. I might not get to cum but the urge to play with myself is discharged and goes away for a while, and I suppose that’s the next best thing.

And while I was masturbating, I was telling myself that I didn’t care how late it was getting, I was going to finish. Even if it took till 6 pm!

But then my erotic adventure ground to a halt when my penis started feeling sore and too sensitive, and as the glow of lust faded, I knew regret.

Because it was 5:50 pm and I felt very dumb.

Like I said earlier, the urge to jerk my gherkin has been hitting me a lot lately, I don’t know why that would be.

Something to do with the season? Might I been “in rut”, or somesuch?

Who knows. All I know is that it has become somewhat of a nuisance as well as a health hazard as certain parts vital to the operation get quite sore, and protest.

And that hasn’t happened to me since I was a teenager. Weird.

Of course, part of the problem is that, as an idle and shiftless invalid, I spend far too much time pantsless, and that means temptation is alway close at hand.

So to speak.

I have tried to mend my semi-naked ways. Hanging around nude or sans pantalon is comfortable (and convenient), but I think it is ultimately bad for my mental health because it encourages me to stay in a soft, dreamy, bedtime state of mind instead of waking up fully and engaging with the day.

And I am definitely happier when I am activated and engaged.

It’s just easier to stay in dreamland, and so that’s what I do.

Forcing myself into action on my own initiative never seems to work for very long. There’s only so long I can ignore my every instinct, I guess.

As wrong and self-destructive as those instincts are.

The Holy Grail would be to find my own inherent motivation to want to engage with the world on a more robust basis,

Nobody needs to force themselves to do something they want to do, after all.

But as with its mythological namesake, I have been fruitlessly pursuing said inherent motivation for a very long time, catching glimpses of it now and then, but never able to catch up with it.

The Trog, who only wants to hide from the world in his cave, is still too strong in me. I shy away from the world too much and too often to engage.

And I will never fix that via sheer force of will. That never lasts.

I will only fix the Trog’s little red wagon when I heal that big ol Wound.

More after the break.

---

Ruining it for myself

Learning how to relax and be more natural and spontaneous is proving to be tricky.

Case in point : ordered some KFC tonight. Skip said it would take around 33 minutes to get here. Okay, I thought, what should I do while I wait?

Oh, I know, was my brain’s brilliant retort, I’ll masturbate!

Yes, you read that right. Despite everything I wrote in Part 1, I decided it would be a great time filler to play with myself.

And of course, it always starts off feeling good. But I should not let that fool me because once the pain sets in, it is nasty.

Sure enough, once the honeymoon period (snrk) was over, I felt not just sore but sick. As in nauseous. Because when I over-indulge in onanism, the problems are about a whole lot more than mere friction abrasions.

No, some bit of machinery located close to my cajones but between them gets very sore too, and when it gets sore, so do los cojones.

This produces a feeling a lot like having been kicked in the nuts, hence the nausea.

Ain’t my life fun?

So anyhow, I did the stupid thing, and as a result, my KFC order is slowly getting cold as I wait for my balls to calm down enough to let me eat.

It’s looking good. I had a few nibbles on the contents of my Boneless Box^[1] and I seem to be handling it OK.

My fries are cold, though. Ick.

Now I know that the important part of this event is how I interpret it. Traditionally, I would be beating myself up over it quite brutally, telling myself how stupid I am for doing it and raking myself over the coals.

Like I have been doing thus far.

But that comes from an expectation of being able to control outcomes, and a resulting unforgiving or even merciless attitude to my own failures.

This is a disastrously bad attitude towards life.

I’ve alway been a cautious person. And that can be a good thing. But there is nothing o good that too much of it can’t turn it bad.

And for me, “caution” has grown out of control until it is nothing more than a blanket excuse not to engage with life at all.

Because of course, nothing can ever be completely safe. Ergo, the only way to be safe is to not do anything.

It’s more complicated than that, of course, but that captures the gist.

This is what happens when a regime of “safety fascism” takes over in one’s mind. “Safety Above All” is its motto and its rallying cry, and petty little concerns like whether you’re happy or content or want to be alive any more don’t concern it.

But you’re not safe. That’s the irony of it all. This regime completely fails to keep you safe because the regime itself is a bigger danger than anything from the outside.

Nobody in the real world has done anything to hurt me in the real world for a really long time. My life is completely safe from outside threats.

It’s the people in my head who abuse me.

Think I will start taking risks just to spite them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess I need to chew on this bone some more.

This version of myself that I present to the world – my social self, which I have taken to calling my “smooth façade” – is not phony and it’s not an act, but… it’s not the “real me”.

The “real me” would be whoever I am without the smooth façade concealing me. . I have absolutely no idea who that is because the façade has been in place almost seamlessly for as long as I can remember.

I suppose the person I am in those rare moments when I am not consuming or producing media would be a good place to start.

But I work hard to make sure I never have to be that person for very long.

Which, as we discussed yesterday, is a big problem. I should not be afraid to be who I really am but one of the major symptoms of Avoidant Personality Syndrome is the feeling that deep down you are something nightmarishly horrible and ugly and toxic and disgusting, and I am still in the process of getting over that.

Still, it might be useful to contemplate a little social nudity now and then. To at least try to imagine what it would be like to stop “masking” and “be real”.

Whatever the hell THAT means.

That’s the thing. I am such a cipher unto myself that it’s hard to even contemplate being the “real me” because I have no idea who the fuck that is.

I have done a remarkably good job of hiding from myself all these years.

I suppose when you hate yourself as much as I used to, you don’t really have a choice. You hide from yourself or you destroy yourself.

I so totally internalized my bullying and neglect. Sigh.

But it’s not like I don’t have clues to who the “real me” might be. One of the things that makes my smooth facade so smooth is that none of its components are false at all.

Like I have said many times before, it’s all the “real me”. Everything you see in that picture is 100 percent myself.

It’s just not the full picture. You don’t get to see the full picture. Nobody does.

Especially not me.

To be honest, I have so many facets and modes that I can’t possibly fit them into one picture. It’s like trying to capture all of the Grand Canyon in one snapshot.

I can’t even imagine being forced to be just one person. How confining!

The most important thing for me to remember is that there IS a real me. Someone is wearing that mask, and it’s the same person who made it, fitted it, adjusted it, and adds to it every single day.

I am the ringmaster of this whole sideshow of sadness, and every thing that happens needed my signature on it to make it legit.

I may not know who I really am… but I know that I really am somebody.

Let’s try to figure out who.

More after the break.

---

A little bit worse

My health’s crappiness level has been trending upwards lately, and it has me worried.

I am dizzy when I get up more often, and usually that comes with a sinus headache (or what feels like one) centered smack dab in the middle of my forehead, right where my mystical “third eye” wpuld be if I were Hindu.

Not that I could ever be a Hindu. Cows are too damned tasty.

This headache is accompanied by dizziness and nausea and an all too familiar feeling like I am, despite all appearances, actually in the back of a flatbed truck going 80 miles an hour on a well paved highway.

I get the feeling I am still not keeping up with the hydration demands of my body. I need to get back into the habit of always having a glass of water on the go and taking a few hearty gulps from it periodically.

But it’s more than that. I think the sickness in my skin is getting worse too.

I’ve been through this hundreds of times in my life. The clogging of my pores gets worse and worse and I get sicker and sicker till the fever finally breaks, my sweat dislodges the clogs, I start sweating normally, and suddenly I feel a WHOLE lot better.

The feeling of relief can be quite intense, leaving me downright giddy.

Which is fine when I am home and can jut lay down until things stabilize, but can be kinda scary in a manic kind of way if you’re, say, at an outdoor event like Pride.

That was a nasty incident. Pride already tests my psychological defenses by being so crowded and loud and chaotic.

Crowds don’t bother me at all because nobody notices you in a crowd. You’re just one of the hundreds of faces they will see and intantly forget.

But crowdING triggers my claustrophobia pretty bad.

Now where was I?

My skin is sick. Right.

I really need to solve the shower/bath issue. There has to be a safe way for me to get truly clean. I just have to call upon my clever foxy mind to find it.

There’s no way around it. I have to somehow reconnect with the government agency responsible for getting us cripples the equipment we need.

Which would require buckets and buckets of the exact kind of gumption and initiative I lack. Of course.

So I am not going to rule that out yet. I might get inspired to at least get the process started one lazy afternoon.

But alternative solutions that did not challenge my mental health issues quite so much.

What I really need is some sort of advocate or agent or social worker who can hold my metaphorical hand and help me navigate the system.

But do such angelic persons even exist? Maybe.

A long, long time ago, I dealt with a disability advocacy group in downtown Vancouver near the MEC and they helped me get on disability.

Don’t remember what they were called but perhaps they or something like them are still around for those of us whose disabilities include being terminally timid and shy.

Once more, the prospect of developing a really huge ego occurs to me.

But that seems like an awful lot of work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There is a site I spend a lot of time on with the unusual name (and URL) of Yiffer.xyz. 

I spend a lot of time there because they have an absolutely massive collection of furry comics available for free.

And yes, I feel a little guilty about that. None of the creators of these comics are getting paid by Yiffer, I am sure, and I am enabling this piracy by hanging out there.

But I need it.

I need it because reading the gay furry smut I find there makes me feel better. And not just better about being gay and a furry, but better about life in general.

Because these comics exist in a place where gay sexuality is not merely accepted but normal. Where mean can express both love and lust for one another in an open and accepting way. Where I can witness men who love one another on all levels, and see the dynamics of male/male relationships, and imagine a world where I might just fit in a lot better than I ever have in the real world.

In that sense they act as my ersatz gay neighborhood. That, and Tapestries. Between the two, I can express so much more of who I really am than in RL.

Which is sad, in a way. I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if I had not had furry text based environments to use to explore my larger than life personality and all the ways in which I needed to express and expand who I am.

Who would I be without Fruvous? I can’t even imagine it. My imagination is so much bigger than mere reality can contain that I had to create a fictional extension of myself just to be myself.

Some of us can only be who we really by wearing a mask.

And by doing so, I found out that I can be a very vibrant, lovable. sexy, adorable, and hilarious person when I am not limited by accidents of birth.

In the Furry world, you can make the person you are on the outside match the person you are on the inside, and that’s a truly magical thing.

Especially for us weirdoes.

And for the record, I do want to be more like Fruvous. I feel like the person I am as Fruvous is in many ways an idealized version of myself and the sort of person I want to be in the real world.

He is so much more open and expressive and confident than I am. Unlike me, he is not afraid to turn his personality power up to 11 and that is a huge part of his appeal. He has no conflict between a desperate need for attention and a terrible fear of being noticed and exposed.

He can turn on the charm and the wit and the warmth and if it works, great, and if it doesn’t, whatever. He can be silly and broad and clown around and have fun in a way I’ve never been able to in life. And he can express all the nurturing and “maternal” instincts I have alway been too bound up in gender stupidity to express.

So being him has been a great help to me…. but it’s also been a great crutch.

Maybe without him, I would be forced to learn to express myself in the real world, and therefore be way more engaged in life and not so damned cloistered.

Maybe without him, I would burn out and fall apart and be even more miserable than before because I felt like there was no hope for me at all.

I doubt I would survive that. There is a reason that I don’t have a history of suicide attempts and maybe being Fruvous is a big part of that.

Because no matter how low I sink, he stays afloat.

And that means a lot to me.

More after the break.

---

A vacation from being myself

It occurs to me that this is what being Fruvous affords me – a break from being myself.

Which is both good and bad.

Bad, because I need that break because I don’t want to be my real self. I don’t like being me. I don’t want to have to do it.

I’d rather be the person I pretend to be. If I had a choice, I would keep mask and throw away the person wearing it and I would just be Fruvous forever.

Thank God that’s not an option.

And I know how very wrong this disavowal of my true self is. That is a very unhealthy and in many ways unfair way to look at things. I “should” learn to love myself for who I really am, warts and all.

Just add it to the long, long list of things I “should” do but don’t.

And I am working on it in my own way. I have come a long way from hating myself so much that I couldn’t stand to look in the mirror for fear that the wave of hate and rage and utter contempt against the person I saw would consume me.

Yes, it was really that bad. And not that long ago, relatively speaking.

Now, though, I have become quite good at beating back the flames of self-loathing with an internalized litany of all my good points and the genuinely amazing truth of what an extraordinary and unique person I am.

I don’t think I have terminated the painful emotions at the root of the self-hate yet, but I at least have it boxed in into a tiny little corner of my mind.

The good side of being Fruvous is that it has allowed me to explore, expand, express, and elaborate on many aspects of myself that my social anxiety/avoidant personality disorder keep me from exploring in the real world.

I can’t imagine trying to find my way in the RL gay community with my issues, my age, and my weight. I can’t do night clubs – oh boy, loudness AND crowding, two massive triggers for me – and more intimate events would scare the crap out of me.

I would need a native guide. Then maybe I could do it. Someone to whom I could turn when I don’t know what to do because I am socially lost. Someone I can count on to be friendly and nice to me when my demons are telling me everyone hates me and wishes I would go away.

Someone to be my rock of sanity to cling to when I am going crazy.

It would be a tough job. But if I could find someone who could do it, I might just end up wanting to marry that person.

If you’ll be my rock, I’ll be your clown, your songbird, your safe haven, and your dear sweet doting mother, all wrapped up in one package.

And so many more things besides! I can be a lot of things.

But only to the man who can be one solid reliable thing all the time that I can rely on to be there when I need him.

Not sure who would want that job, but I swear I can make the right man so happy.

Resumes are now being accepted.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

How does one go about healing a 46 year old Wound caused by rape?

That is the question I am grappling with now. Now that I have locked on to this deep and terrible Wound at the center of my mind as the source of all my mental health issues and debilities… what now?

Heck, how do you heal any kind of trauma, whether it’s a 46 year old child rape or how sad you are that today’s blueberry bagel had fewer blueberries that usual?

The only thing I know how to do is to keep digging up the fossils of past hurts and bringing them back to life by writing about them here.

And that helps. That “works”. It may not always seem like it, but everything I write here helps me enormously by letting me reduce the pressure of unexpressed thoughts and emotions locked inside this skull of mine.

The deep psychological navel gazing helps most of all, of course. It is basically me trying to be my own therapist and dig up the bad stuff so I can expose it to the healing light of day and watch it melt away.

I’d melt the whole damned glacier all at once if I could. Apportez le deluge, and to hell with the consequences.

Maybe I would lose my mind for a while. I would certainly lose control. End up flailing around spewing raw emotions everywhere like an out of control fire hose until I catch up with the backlog.

I must admit, that idea has a certain chaotic appeal to me. I rather like the idea of being able to press a metaphorical button and surrender control till I am healthy again.

And who knows what would be left of me when the waters recede? I still don’t know what parts of the person I think of as myself are the real me and what parts are just more of that dirty black ice my depression has fooled me into thinking of as me.

Because rhat way, you see, I will confuse loss of depression as loss of self, and as we all know, loss of self is the one true definition of death, so my mind will fight tooth and nail to defend the very depression that plagues it.

Depression is such an ugly thing.

Well I have had enough of it. I am not my depression and as far as I am concerned, the angels of mercy are free to borrow Michael’s sword and excise the entire tumour right now and I will just have to learn to live with whatever is left.

Maybe, like with chemo, some healthy tissue will also be destroyed in the process. That would be sad, but as long as the damage was minimal and I kept important things like bowel control and the lyrics to Tragically Hip songs, it would be worth it.

Of course, it ain’t that simple. As always, my recovery will be a lot more like trying to disarm an impossibly intricate bomb and having to patiently follow each tiny wire back to its source before carefully disconnecting it.

I’d rather go in there with a chainsaw, but you do what you can do,

More after the break.

---

Escaping through the senses

In my recent journey through the vast network of YouTube videos about being an INTJ^[1], one of the things that came up that really stuck with me was the idea that we INTJs with poor mental health can often site a poor relationship with our senses as a major contributing factor.

That sentence was way simpler before I had to get all INTJ precise about it.

But it’s true. My relationship with the sensory world is terrible. I have lived most of my life via screens. TV screens, computer screens, tablet screens, and so on.

As a result, I have paid precious little attention to the real world all around me, and this has not been an accident. For the most part, I have treated the real world as an irritating distraction from my screen life.

This is bad.

There should be balance. The real world anchors the mind and limits how far into madness our neurotic brains can wander. Without this tether, I end up feeling like I am not even real, or maybe that I am real but the world isn’t.

Neither position leads to happy outcomes.

And I know this, and yet, I still feel an icy hand grip my heart with fear when I think about leaving my screens for a while.

The things I do on screens are how I regulate my mood. Quite irrationally, I feel like without the screens, I will descend into madness. It feels like there would be nothing I could use to escape my inner demons and therefore they would GET me.

This, needless to say, is a remarkably poor survival strategy.

Because it means the demons pretty much have the place to themselves. They can (and do) run riot with self-destructive urges, desperately acting out like neglected children in a vain attempt to get my attention.

But I tune them out, like a bad parent.

Nevertheless, the path is clear : if I want to escape this cage of mine, I am going to have to do it via my long neglected senses and spend more time in the “real world”.

Just typing that send a chill through my heart. Am I really that afraid of reality?

Ayup. I guess I am. Damn.

Ironic given how much I have always prided myself on being a “realist” who is not afraid to deal with the harsh truths of the real world. Pragmatic, and so on.

Sure, if we are still within the world of the mind, where I feel safe.

Take me out into the REAL real world, and I fall apart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is going to be big.

I’ve had a major revelation : I have been carrying the weight of and very slowly processing the trauma of being raped by a stranger when I was 4 years old for 46 years now, and counting.

That entire time, I have had this obscene presence squatting at the very center of my psyche and dominating everything I think, say, and do. It is the root cause of all my dysfunction and the main reason I find life to be so goddamned hard.

Because this massive injury takes up an enormous percentage of my mental resources just to contain and handle. It’s like a toxic waste dump in the middle of a town. Almost my entire psyche has been warped and twisted by the need to somehow continue functioning despite this heinous injury, and until I find some way to deal with it, my progress against my inanity will be incremental at best.

None of those elements are new. I have talked about “the Wound” before, for examplr.

It’s the perspective on the phenomenon as a whole which is new. Never before have I truly understood the enormity of the problem and just how huge an influence it has exerted over my entire life.

It is why I have alway been so weak and timid and shy. Its the part of me that ruthlessly vetoes any attempt to pull myself together and make something of myself. Its enormous drain on every aspect of my being is what makes it so hard for me to find the motivation to do pretty much anything.

Because whatever energy I might generate is immediately sucked away by the insatiable hunger of the Containment Project.

In theory, this energy is being stored for a “rainy day”, but in practice there are no conditions “rainy” enough for it to be accessed so it is essentially being hoarded.

And like all hoarding, no matter what trappings of practical purpose it may have adorned itself with in an attempt to camouflage itself, it is raving, ravenous madness at its core that like all addictions hollows out its victims by eliminating all other sources of reward.

I may have wandered off topic there but my point remains : this nightmare at the core of my very soul is the root cause of all my madness and the main thing keeping me from escaping this foul and fetid little ossuary of a life of mine and I am not going to get anywhere in the time between now and my bleeding demise unless I find some way to deal with it.

Like most things, that’s easier said than done. Like it or not (and for the record : not), this tumour of the mind sits right at the very root of my being and one does not change such an integral part of the foundation of one’s mind lightly.

But I’m on to it now. I have its scent. I know where it lives. I can begin the long hunt for this malevolent beast from prehistoric times in earnest.

And mark my words : the beast will die.

I want my life back, god damn it.

And I finally know who took it from me.

More after the break.

---

Quick recommend : an excellent gay porn furry comic.

The sex isn’t important, it’s the warmth between the two men that I love.

Check it out!

---

Approaching oblivion and gaining speed

Like a galaxy, I have a massive black hole at my center. And everything within me orbits that dark star whether it knows it or not.

Well, I guess everyone knows it now.

And I know that in order to free myself from the dark star’s oppression, I am going to have to steer my little spaceship directly into the heart of that dark star so I can finally confront and resolve the unhealed trauma from long ago that is the dark star’s heart.

Without the need to contain and control this massive wound in my psyche, a huge portion of my human potential would be returned to me and my mind would be able to function in a much healthier and saner way.

It might even be able to have something akin to faith, but without the need to believe nonsense. All that is needed for the job is a way to access and generate the emotional inputs needed to stabilize mood and keep it from going below a certain level.

Healthy people have this capacity. Usually, it comes from religion, and the astounding thing is that the capacity persists long after the religion is gone.

It’s like religion is merely the delivery system,.

And I can’t help but notice that all four Bertrand kids were raised without religion and all four of us have truggled with our mental health.

Maybe religion isn’t all bad after all.

Maybe the real truth that public atheism can’t handle is that reality is not enough. 

You can’t stick to only what you know to be true (scientifically, logically, rationally, etc) and survive. The real world simply does not and cannot supply all you need.

And this is what the lovers, the dreamers, and to a lesser extent me have been trying to tell people for a long, long time.

All that “the power of imagination” jive they fed us kids in the 70’s was trying to get us to extend our reality into the world of the imagination so that we would not have to rely on only what our reality gives us.

So maybe it’s the smart move to believe in magic, or aliens, or God, or whatever else lets you believe that there is something powerful that is beyond evident reality that you can draw upon when your reality just isn’t cutting it.

Otherwise, there’s nothing stopping your mood from falling through the floor and heading straight to Hell, and boom, you have depression.

So I am clearly going to have to build my own faith. None of the options I know of wll suit me because they all rely on mystical BS that I simply cannot accept.

It is far too late to install traditional faith in my operating system, That door closed forever a long time ago.

But there are still things to believe in, and as many a seeker has said, what you believe in is not important, what’s important is that you believe in SOMETHING.

I am beginning to see the wisdom in that.

And what inspires me is my deep humanism. I don’t believe in Jesus but I believe in His message of love and understanding for one another based on all the things we have in common simply by being human together.

Be human, everyone. It’s okay!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Finally remembered to do my weekly Ozempic ^[1] injection, which I was supposed to do Tuesday but forgot until today, Thursday.

Oh well. Better late than never, in this case at least.

And it felt oddly good to do the injection. It felt… clean. Like I had done a very successful act of self grooming and now I feel all better.

Well it’s not self grooming but it is self CARE, so I suppose it falls under the same broad category of activity,

And it feels good to be able to do SOMETHING for myself. I have been so helpless and weak since the incident that led to my hospitalization last August.

To refresh your memory (and mine), this whole shebang started when I awoke from a late afternoon nap to find that my legs simply would not hold any weight.

They still had feeling, but the muscles just hung there like old, worn out rubber bands.

This struck me as bad.

So I called 911, and told them about it, and the ambulance came, and took me to the ER, and that’s what led to sixteen unpleasant days in the hospital with nothing to do but read, do crossword puzzles, and listen to my next bed neighbour Helmut be a total pain in the ass to all and sundry.

Including his long-suffering sister, who wondered why she bothered to come visit him when he was so difficult and demanding.

Dude was an asshole but I must admit, his antics entertained me. And I needed that desperately because I did not have my tablet yet.

Anyhow, they kept me there for sixteen days not because they knew what they were doing but because that’s how long it would take to complete the course of antibiotics I was on, which had to be administered four times a day.

That made doing the outpatient antibiotics thing impractical.

At no point did they have any idea what made my legs go boom like that. As usual, they checked all the usual things and when it was none of those, they shrugged and sent me home and moved on to more rewarding patients with easier to solve problems.

And that’s been the pattern ever since. Nobody gives a damn what it actually wrong with me. Not even my GP, who seems like a really nice guy but who does not appear to have the attention span or working memory space to stay focused on the problem for longer than one brief office visit.

I’m telling you, if I end up in the hospital again, I am going to be a nightmare to those fucking people becaue I am going to hold their nuts (or ovaries) to the fire until they actually do their job and figure out what the fuck is wrong with me.

I mean, I hate to have to be “that guy”, but I hate the idea of losing my ability to walk or breathe on my own out of politeness a hell of a lot more.

I will make them fear my wrath, if that’s what it takes to save what is left of my legs.

More after the break.

---

Stop trying to escape

“Well baby…. ” said Jonny to the smoky blonde bombshell in the bed beside him, “I’ve loved every minute of our time together, but you know I’ve got to keep moving on. A guy in my position can’t afford to stay in one place for too long. ”

“I know, Jonny. And believe me, I understand.”, she said. ” Just promise me you’ll try your best to be safe out there, okay?”

Jonny shined his killer smile on her. “Don’t worry, baby. Safety’s what I am all about.”

“I know. “, she said. “Oh, and can you do me a favour?”

“Yeah? What is it, baby?”

In a voice not quite her own, she said, “Stop trying to escape. ”

Jonny reacted instantly. He threw the remains of the orange juice he was drinking in her face, rolled off the bed into an alert crouch, kicked the glass out of her bedroom window, and dove through it onto her fire escape.

Once there, he descended the fire escape rapidly by eschewing the slow and clumsy stairs in favour of using the railings of each floor like a ladder he could shimmy down.

And as he did so, he barely even noticed that the giant billboard on the building opposite now showed a picture of the smoky blonde, orange juice dripping from her face, saying “Stop trying to escape” in a bold but sincere font.

Once in the alley below, he hid for exactly 88.3 seconds in a (thankfully clean) dumpster until he heard the all too familiar sound of a patrol car driving slowly through the neighborhood, PA system playing the usual loop of various people Jonny once knew and loved all imploring him to stop trying to escape.

When it got to his mother, tears in her voice, plaintively pleading for him to come on home, all is forgiven, I just want my baby to be safe, and so on, Jonny knew there’d be enough space between the patrols for him to cross the street, ascend three other fire escapes, cross half a dozen rooftops in a random zigzag pattern, and then suddenly duck into a tiny alcove created by a very subtle overhang on an ancient office building that Jonny had noticed on the way in.

Now he had some time to think.

As usual, his conscious thoughts came in a jumble of voices.

“Like my real mother would ever do something that maudlin. ” said one.

“:She almost had me fooled, ” said another wistfully. “They are getting really good at programming conversation into these things. ”

“But they all turn into robots eventually. ” said another, harsher voice. “No exceptions. ”

None of it was anything Jonny hadn’t heard a thousand times before. By now, their litany was soothingly familiar to Jonny, and so, like an old familiar record, Jonny listened to it to help him get to sleep.

And as he drifted off, he heard a childlike voice say, “But my name’s not Jonny. And they know that. ”

“So what?” he thought sleepily before the darkness overwhelmed him.

---

Woo! Fiction. That was hella fun to write.

I won’t promise to bring you more of that plot because we both know I probably will not. Suffice it to say that “Jonny” is not in reality as we know it.

And no. That’s not his real name.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s what it sounds like.

Namely, it’s the tendency to reflexively withdraw into oneself, like a turtle retreating into its shell, in response to danger, threat, stress, and so on.

The problems with this stratagem are obvious. The number of situations where turtling up would actually help the situation is vanishingly small, and for the rest it can only make things worse, or at best, leave the problem unaddressed.

But the response persists because in an immediate and very short term sense, it “works”. If you frame the problem as being scared by seeing something upsetting, withdrawing from the situation makes that problem go away by subjectively moving the problem further away, outside the shell, where it’s a lot less scary.

It’s a lot like running away from the problem, but with the added bonus of not actually having to do anything or go anywhere.

And once you have turtled up, the problem doesn’t even seem like a problem any more. So you are certainly in no hurry to lower your defenses so you can go deal with the problem you just “escaped”.

You’ll just wait for the problem to go away, like you really are a turtle and are ecaping a predator you hope is too hungry to be patient.

And maybe you check to see if the problem is still there now and then, at least at first. But eventually you just stop checking because checking only upsets you. Much easier to just accept that the problem is there permanently and there is nothing you can do about it so you might as well get comfy in your shell.

And it’s true, there really is nothing you can do about it…. not without coming out of your shell first, and by now, all nuance has disappeared and to you, opening your shell now means death, or something even worse.

And that’s bad – you are now permanently trapped in your shell because you either can’t or won’t actually face reality and deal wiith your problem.

Oh, but it gets so much worse.

Because that’s just one response to one threat. What happens when the next threat comes around, and the next, and the one after that?

Each time a threat comes along, you retreat deeper and deeper into yourself and go further and further away from reality and any ability to actually deal with the issue.

And with each layer of retreat, you get smaller and smaller, because each iteration has to fit inside the previous one like a Russian nesting doll.

And as you get smaller and further away from reality, you get weaker, because with each layer of retreat you get further away from the sun’s life-sustaining rays.

All the love and joy and happiness you want lies waiting for you… OUTSIDE THE SHELL. And as long as you keep thinking that to leave the shell behind means death (or worse), you will continue to be trapped in there.

Time to open those pod bay doors and step out into outer space, Commander.

You can even bring your shell with you if you wanna.

And you will be so glad you did it.

You know, I think I have the makings of a pretty good children’s book here.

More after the break.

---

Repeaat after me : I won’t die if I open up.

I Wont’ Die If I Open Up

I WON’T DIE IF i OPEN UP

And the real me won’t die if I melt, either.

I am not Icarus. My wings won’t melt if I get too close to the sun.

And I have been freezing out here in the outer reaches of the solar system for far too long. I need more sunshine. I need more warmth. I need more LIGHT.

It’s time to assume a lower orbit.

Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

---

And now, a poem :

I was craving onion rings
So I said, “I’ll order Burger King!”
But couldn’t find a Whopper on the page
So I ordered me some chicken thing
To accompany my onion rings
And wrote these silly rhymes to quell my rage

I am serious. There was no way to order a normal Whopper on the Skip the Dishes menu for BK.

There were Double Whoppers and Triple Whoppers galore, but abolutely no way to get a regular single Whopper.

I felt like I was going crazy. Like I was about to have a Falling Down moment.

This is one more instance from becoming a “thing” with me. It started with the Denny’s ,menu, with every burger being a double burger by default.

But I don’t want a double burger, god damn it. That’s too much meat. It totally throws off the balance of burger and toppings too.

So give me my fucking single patty burger god dammit.

This is America’s fault, isn’t it? Them and their ever growing gluttony. Some probably crunched the numbers and figured out that most people were ordering double burgers anyhow, presumably because they now think single burgers are gay or whatever.

If they ever stop serving regular Big Macs in favour of doubles, I really will storm the local McD’s and totally go Walter from The Big Lebowski on their asses.

I have literally delivered that “we live in a SOCIETY” speech, word for word, in my head.

That, and certain parts of a bit of Pathfinder DLC I recently played, has revealed to me that when push comes to shove, I am fundamentally a lawful dude.

I want a peaceful society where everything is handled smoothly and efficiently and everyone can get along with the help of the rules.

Good rules can do that. They let us cranky beach apes live together harmoniously despite our aggressive tendencies.

Bad rules just get in the way, or make things worse.

So I am definitely a lawful guy, but I pick and choose which laws I obey.

Neutral Good, all the way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And there’s a reason for that.

Disgust short circuits compassion. Turns it right off like a light switch. And that seems so horribly cruel and callous.

I mean, being gross has nothing to do with whether you deserve compassion, right? Only whether you will get it.

But as much as it pains me to admit it, it kind of has to be that way.

Because the whole point of us having a sense of disgust in the first place is to make us stay away from things that will make us sick.

And some of those things are people.

Evolution has to thread a very tricky needle when it comes to our reaction to sick people. On the one hand, the tribe that cares for the sick continues to benefit from the labour the sick person will contribute once they are well, and thus prospers.

But getting close enough to a very gross person might well lead to whatever disease they have spreading to the rest of the tribe, and thus disgust tells us to stay away from that person in case they are contagious the same way it keeps us away from food that’s gone bad, dirty water, and the dead.

Luckily for us modern homo sapiens, we get the benefit of one of the most important unsung heroes without which modern life would be impossible : antisepsis.

Without our knowledge of germs and how to kill them, the world would still be ravaged by horrible plagues all the time. We would lose millions of babies to crib death and a;; the rest every year, and it would be once more rare for a kid to make it to their second birthday, let alone adulthood.

Both of my grandparents were products of large French Catholic families, and they both had a lot of brothers, sisters, and cousins that did not make it.

And that was just two generations ago. Think about it.

Anyhow, because we know how to kill germs, we don’t need to be conflicted in how we feel about the sick. Sick people go to the doctor or the hospital, where there are plenty of people who are extremely good at preventing contagion, and those people can therefore safely make you well.

At least in theory.

Don’t get me started.

Nevertheless, the ability of disgust to suppress compassion remains. That is why war propaganda always refers to the enemy as “dirty”, or the equivalent. even when the enemy is the Japanese, who are some of the cleanest people on Earth.

And it’s why when we think someone is morally deplorable, we say they are a “dirty, rotten, stinking (epithet)”. Our morality and our disgust dovetail that well.

Which brings us to disgust’s moral equivalent, contempt. To have contempt for someone is to see them as having very low value as a human being.

It crosses the Venn diagram with both disgust and our sense of moral value that tells us which of our fellow community members are good for the community and should be valued, esteemed, and encouraged, and which should be considered liabilities, looked down upon, and punished for their transgressions.

That’s what backs our drive for conformity, including the unofficial enforcement mechanism of conformity, bullying.

Bullies who pick on the weird kids are unknowingly policing conformity. On a deep and distant level, they are trying to get the weird kids to stop interfering with the warm blanket of conformity and its ability to make you forget that you are surrounded by all sides by potentially hostile strangers who could be after your stuff and/or mate.

Living as close to each other as we urban humans do is extremely abnormal in the animal kingdom. One might even call it unnatural.

Civilization, therefore, can be seen as a set of behaviours and attitudes that allow this bizarre commingling to not just happen but to lead to our prosper as a species.

More after the break.

---

My skin is sick

Because I can’t shower. Here’s why :

For one thing, the nurses at Wound Care stopped saying I could shower if I had the clear plastic film over the bandages on my feet.

They still put that stuff over the bandages, mind you. But they have clearly forgotten why, and just do it because it’s what the previous nurse did.

But they stopped letting me shower and I am not going to go against their wishes.

Not that it matters, because I can’t stand for long enough to take a shower any more anyway. The moment I am on my feet, I am in pain, and if I am standing without leaning on anything, unsupported, that pain gets worse REALLY fast.

When I was about to leave the hospital last August, a very nice lady talked to me about all these modifications to my bathroom that the government was going to pay for so that I would be able to get in and out of the bathtub and on and off the toilet safely.

But then I left my hospital room for a few minutes and when I came back, the big long form she had left with me was gone and with it, her contact info.

So I got nuthin’.Typical, really.

That’s just how my life works. Mysterious forces manifesting out of nowhere specifically to fuck me over then vanishing into the night.

Anyhow, point is, I can’t shower and sponge baths are a joke. They don’t do a thing to clean the gunk out of my pores and it’s clogged pores that are making me sick.

What I need is hot water to open up my pores and flush them out so my poor skin can finally breathe and perform its role in homeostasis properly.

Until I figure out a way to get that which doesn’t involve taking a shower OR a bath (can’t get out of the tub with weak legs), I am going to continue to suffer and feel like used shit all summer long.

Anyone know where I can find a good sauna?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup, this is my life now : slumping into my computer chair, breathing hard and aching all over. just from being to the kitchen to make myself a PB&J and grab stuff from the fridge so I can have lunch.

Once more, I was tempted to skip the trip and just graze on the trail mix I keep here in the bedroom with me, and once more I did the healthy thing and got myself up and on my feet and moving instead, and once more I am being punished for it.

Such is the nature of my worsening existence on this burning lifeboat of a life.

I guess I am just too crazy to live. That will be my epitaph. And the obituary will read,
“He was a great guy, but his mental illness kept him from taking care of himself physically and ultimately that’s what killed him. ”

God, it’s 20 minutes later and my breathing and heart rate still haven’t gone back to normal yet. That’s not good.

That’s not good at ALL.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to end up helpless and full of tubes in a hospital bed somewhere. I don’t want to become so weak and feeble that I can’t even get out of bed any more and all I do is sleep all day because that’s all I CAN do.

I feel like I am drowning in quicksand while my friends watch helplessly on dry land. I know that I am sinking and I know there are dozens of things I know I “should” be doing to help myself get out of this deadly predicament and I can’t do any of them because I have this terribly painful wound deep within my mind and until I finish dealing with that massive trauma, everything else will have to wait.

Even if it can’t.

Even if I can’t.

Even if I am sure to die way before I get over myself.

And that will be the ultimate victory for my demons of mental illness. They couldn’t get me to kill myself outright – I’ve gotten too good at shutting those thoughts down before they start for that.

And anyhow, fuck suicide, I ain’t done yet.

Arguably I haven’t even started.

So if outright suicide isn’t a possibility then neglecting myself to death will have to do.

But that’s not really it. That’s just a smokescreen for the real problem : I am deeply broken on the inside and I have no idea how to fix it.

When I try to gather my energies to accomplish anything of substance, the energy just flows right back out again. My system rejects.it, saying it has no room to take on new tasks what with all it has to deal with already.

Too many chainsaws to juggle, sorry.

Ergo, all I can manage is to limp ineffectually along as my doom bears down on me like a runaway steam train and I am not even tied to the tracks.

I am just too crazy to get out of the way.

More after the break.

---

I don’t want to be up

And yet here I am.

I feel so very fragile and shaky and weak. All I really want to do is lie down in the dark and whimper. But I got my words to do.

Got to do the words.

After all, this 1K words a day thing is my only link to the world of productivity, and a thin and tenuous link at that.

As long as I do my words, my life means….. something. I have done something with my time. My life is not entirely just a series of wasted moments poured out of a broken bucket into the vast latrine of time.

I paint pictures with words.

I can’t imagine what life was like way back in 2010, before I launched the Million Word Year project to kickstart my life as a writer.

Wrote my millionth word 11 months later, in early December 2011. How could I get it done in only 11 months, you ask?

By being awesome. Duh.

Seriously though, by writing more like 2K words a day when to get those Million Words in a year, I only needed to write 1,667 a day.

Turned out that once I got started writing, I had a lot to day.

And here it is 12 years later and I still haven’t run out.

Not even close.

Before that wacky project. my days truly were wasted. One bled into the next till they all ran together and life meant nothing at all.

Was a lot more suicidal back then too. Not a coincidence.

So I am glad I managed to dig myself out of that hole. But I have felt like I needed to take things to the next level for a long time now.

I need to level up my writing but I have not come up with the right idea to inspire me yet.

Lots of possibilities, of course. As always. A creative mind like mine can always generate a ton of possible answers.

But they are always “other people” kind of answers. The sort of things that sound sensible and plausible as things other people could totally do…. but not me.

Because I’m broken, remember? Crazy. And the heart of my craziness is a massive cold steel wall that keeps motivation from getting into even the same area code as action.

Until that is resolved, nothing will happen, and all the best ideas in the world are like trying to get your car’s engine to start by replacing the spark plugs when the problem is that the fuel line has been cut.

I use weird metaphors.

I have tried to get that across to my therapist. He, understandably, keeps trying to goad me into action and I keep trying to explain to him why that does nothing but hurt me.

He has been my therapist for well over a decade now, and I have made extremely little verifiable progress in that time, so his desire for concrete results makes sense.

But if he doesn’t even understand the basic nature of the problem, we will keep talking past one another and getting nowhere.

And speaking of going nowhere, time to rest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

From the following :

Woke up with that playing in my head, so I thought I’d share.

I’m glad that wonderful gang or weirdos got to have one genuinely kickass global hit before they broke up.

What hit, you say? Why, this one, of course.

And speaking of things I feel like sharing, may I present : Kit and Kay Kaboodle

WARNING : Pretty much ever panel of that sadly long defunct webcomic is NSFW AF.

And that’ because it was so very very me. It was joyously and marvelously pro-sex in a very positive and healthy and wholesome way, and I go through the archives now and then when I need a pick me up.

It always leaves me feeling good. It does my heart good to know that there are people like Richard Katellis and their friends out there who see the world of human (and furry) sex and sexuality the same way I do.

Namely as a big bright and beautiful world full of so many wondrous ways for people to give one another great pleasure and joy that it should be left as free as possible at all times and in all places and ways so that people can express their desires to the fullest and find their greatest and most satisfying release.

I mean, wouldn’t the world be a better place by far if everyone got as much of whatever kind of fucking they need whenever they wanted?

A satiated world is a peaceful and happy world. That’s what I believe. Call it pax orgasmus, if you will. People are so happy and calm when they have had their happy squirts for the day.

With enough fucking. the world could become a very mellow and groovy place indeed.

And while I have my own ideas as to how we might achieve this blessed state, odds that virtual reality will take us there before I ever could.

Not that we are anywhere near having VR sex good enough to replace the real deal. It’ still pretty much a bad joke even today.

But who knows. Maybe the new generation of scary good AI can do that, too. Lord knows it seems to be able to do everything else.

The latest terrifying news I saw showed how they can now take a THREE SECOND clip of your voice and use it to create a virtual voice that sounds exactly like you

.That shit gives me chills, man. Because of my poor eyesight, I identify people far more by their voices than their faces, so that really hits me where I live.

I always knew I would reach the point where the new technology scares the hell out of me, but I had no idea it would happen when I was only 50 or that it would happen in a way that feels so… invasive. And personal.

Not that I am against the new AI. You won’t find me talking about how we need to put a stop to the research so we can think abouit the consequences like so many other supposedly rational type people today.

For one thing, stopping it now is impossible. The way to make a thing like ChatGPT is well known to all who want to know now, and so that genie ain’t going back in the bottle.

But even if we could omehow unsummon this Djinn, I would be against it. I am fiercely pro-progress, and I am not going to change that just because progress has finally gotten around to scaring me personally.

Time can only ever go forward, folks. And it’s the same with progress.

Eventually, I will be left behind entirely. And I accept this.I already live in a world where I cling to my landline phone like a safety blanket and use an email client to get my email and where I still crave actual, physical, real books to read.

Eventually my little enclave will be complete and I will give up on the future entirely.

Have fun without me, folks. And try not to wreck anything we can’t fix,

More after the break.

---

An old idea

I’ve tried to write this story several times but could not make it work.

The idea is that the story would take place in what seems like a perfectly ordinary home of the present, with someone going through a perfectly ordinary day.

But little by little, weird little details creep in. The windows aren’t real… they’re screens. The sounds of suburbia… lawn mowers, barking dogs, car doors opening and closing, the soft sussurations of someone’s sprinkler system… are fake too, and on a loop. The home is completely free of dust and dirt.

Finally, the big reveal : the window screens deactivate and we see bizarre creatures barely recognizable as human peering in, and pointing and gesticulating as they jabber to one another in a language that sounds like bursts of high speed static to us.

Our protagonist waves wearily but cheerfully to these beings, and comes out of their house to pose for pictures with them.

It is then revealed that this “house” is actually part of a living museum where people whi consider our present to be a bygone innocent era where everything was “right” (or at least “normal”) gather to live as their ancestors did.

In other words, they are a lot like the Amish, only they stopped the clock at now.

I thought the story would be entertaining in its mystery aspect (people wondering WTF i going on) and its Twilight Zone reveal, but for me, the real point would be the challenge to our usual perspective it represents.

As patient readers know, I am all about perspective.

You can see how my earlier thoughts about my own little technological enclave of what i “normal” to me reminded me of this idea.

I know I keep saying this, but I should really write more fiction. It definitely scratches an itch mere blogging cannot reach.

Maybe I will steal a trick from Douglas Coupland and create a flexible fictional framework for whatever I happen to feel like writing.

Oh, this completely random bit of science fiction dropped into my urban realist literary novel? It’s um…. a story idea one of the characters talks about.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.