Today has been a day of somnolence and micturition.

Somnolence in that I’ve been sleeping a lot.

Guess it’s time to pay off that sleep debt again. Oh well. At least it has been fairly healthy, relaxed sleep and not the fever dream REM intense draining kind of sleep I get sometimes when this particular bill comes do.

The kind of sleep that makes me wonder if this is what it would feel like to be some kind of religious mystic who sees visions of God and Heaven while in the throes of divine epilepsy then drops to the ground, nearly lifeless from the power of the experience.

Admittedly, that’s not the sort of thought most people would have.

But hey. I’m a mental mutant. A wild talent. A genius, with all that implies. And we mega-minds are a pretty weird breed of critters, as a whole.

And we are often not that great at life. Those generalized competence circuits are crowded out and cut off by all the abstract reasoning hardware and firmware we developed along the way to becoming the brilliant weirdoes we are.

That’s why those of us who do well enough to become at least somewhat famous usually have a silent partner somewhere who handles reality for us so that we get our dream of only having to worry about being brilliant.

Oh, that would be heaven. To have a person or team to handle all of life’s little details for me so that all I had to do was write and write well, and the money would come rolling in to pay for it all.

And no need to face the Infinite Corridor with Infinite Doors. No need to “sell myself” to any bunch of gatekeepers. No need to overcome my being a maladroit in general in order to deal with things most people find so easy as to not even be a thing to them.

This is why the idea of becoming a cult leader appeals to me so much. It would be lovely to have a cadre of worshippers who are overjoyed to do every little thing for me just for the privilege of basking in my effulgence.

Now there’s a $20 word. And to think, you got it for free!

Luckily for both the world and the state of my soul, several things keep me from going down that perilous route.

The first and most salient is my being a fundamentally honest and responsible person who can’t bullshit people. If I don’t believe it to be true, I won’t say it, and that kind of precludes the sort of grandiose claims of godhood or divine inspiration upon which cult leadership is founded.

There is also the lesser but still relevant factor of my utter lack of any kind of faith. I don’t even have vague Southern California New Age mysticism in my back pocket.

And while the idea of a rationalist materialist cult amuses me, actually pulling that off would be a tall order even for me.

But I might be able to live with the lesser title of “guru”. Someone who is not considered divine and not expected to be anyone’s entire world but who is considered to be very very smart and worth listening to on various topics.

Like a political pundit, or YouTube channel host, or other professional commenter.

I could work with that.

More after the break.

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Oh right, pee

The other thing I have been doing a lot of today is peeing.

Like sleep, that is another thing which goes along at a normal pace then suddenly I am doing a heck of a lot more of it than usual.

And my “usual” is most peoples’ “quite a bit”. I usually pee between 6 and 10 times a day, or around 42 to 70 times a week.

And that did not change today. But the volume per transaction DID.

Hard figures are, alas, unavailable at this time. But to put things in perspective, the receptacle I usually use as my temporary urinal normally holds around four or five transactions before I have to take it to the bathroom and empty it.

This morning I filled it with TWO.

And as always, I find myself asking the same old question : where was I keeping all this fluid before now?

My thinking has progressed on the answer, though.

Maybe what happens is that I become mildly dehydrated, and that causes me to drink more water than usual until I catch back up to demand.

The “watershed” (ha) moment comes, therefore, when I do manage to catch up but I am still drinking water at an accelerated rate so I shoot right past being mildly dehydrated and right into being somewhat OVER-hydrated.

And my body has to get rid of that excess fluid SOMEHOW, and so it does so via the easiest route, namely my penis.

Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.

Thanks especially to TED. None of this would have been possible without the support of him, his team, and his penis.

Mood wise, I have felt rather melancholy since my last nap.

Yes,. I still sleep in naps. I still can’t sleep for more than around three hours and that’s on a good day.

On a bad day, I am lucky if I can sleep for an hour..

And I know that all of medical science says that is bad, but I do not really see myself as having a choice in the matter.

And I would add that given that I am 50 years old obese and sedentary victim of high blood pressure, I am better off doing whatever I can to keep my stress level low and forcing myself to stay awake when I need to reset my background anxiety levels via a nap would stress the hell out of me.

Ergo I am in no real rush to fix the problem. I hope it will work itself out should my circumstances improve to the point where I need to keep a regular workaday schedule, but until then, I will nap like a cat.

To be fair, I was raised by them!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

I just realized that I am superstitiously afraid to call this a GOOD day.

As if that will attract the attention of a cruel and wicked universe, who will then say, “Oh YEAH? Well then try THIS! Not so smug and cocky NOW, are we?” and then do something horrible to me in order to punish my temerity.

When it comes to superstition, fate is never kind, is it? It’s basically Old Testament God. peevish and jealous and spiteful.

Our Angry Father, who are in Heaven, please don’t give my daughter cancer just because you’re in a bad mood and hate to see people be happy.

But remember, God is Love, kids!

Rewinding to the actual topic, yes, even I am prone to superstitious thinking. Everybody is. I bet even Neil DeGrasse Tyson avoids walking under ladder and gets nervous around religious officials.

We need superstition in order to cover the same gaps in our knowledge I was talking about yesterday. Without it, we would have to confront the hardest of truths : that the universe can fuck us over at any time in ways we can neither predict or avoid.

Boom. You have ALS. Bang. A drunk driver jumped the curb and plowed into you and now you don’t have legs. Pow, Your spouse is leaving you and wants a divorce. Wham. Your car is totaled because it hit black ice.

Now if, like me, you are human, you responded to each of those scenarios with thoughts on how you, personally, would avoid them.

Get screened for ALS to catch it early. Go everywhere in your car, or take the bus. Treat your spouse with patience and loving care. Drive slow.

Because we have to believe that there is something we can do to keep terrible things from happening to us, whether it’s eating healthy or prayer or a lucky penny.

And because modern society has done such a superb job of eliminating a lot of the ways the arbitrary hand of fate once fucked people over – things like war and famine and plague and forest fires and car crashes and civil unrest – we have the luxury of thinking our superstitions are working.

This unfortunately can bleed over into blaming other people for their misfortunes. Oh, of course THEY got totaled by black ice because they’re not smart like ME. I bough the more expensive TIRES.

Serves them right for being cheapskates!

The real truth – that they did nothing wrong and there was nothing either you or them could have done to prevent it – is just too hard to bear. We can’t stare unprotected at the brutal reality of the limits of our power over our own fate. We need some kind of way to believe we are in control.

But if we do manage to make peace with this bitter truth, we can overcome our individualistic need to believe the world is fair (at least for us) and realize that the only hope we have against the cruelty of fate is to make damned sure we be there for each other and to hell with what people supposedly “deserve”.

Forget your urge to judge people according to whether or not you think they got what they deserve and instead listen to the voice of compassion in your heart that says a fellow human being is suffering and I want to help them.

Even if all I can do for them is care.

Caring can mean an awful lot to a soul in pain.

Sometimes all you really need to hear is, “I am sorry that happened to you. That must really suck. My heart goes out to you. ”

It may not seem like much but it tells them that they are not alone with their pain.

And that can mean the world to someone.

More after the break.

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The long and winding road

Looking back at what I wrote earlier today, I am struck by what a meandering path these dribbles and scrabbles of mine take.

I never know where I am going to end up, but I know that the odds are heavily in favour of it being nowhere near where I was trying to go at the beginning.

And that’s the way it has to be. If I had to come up with an outline then follow that outline to make a coherent and well argued point, I would not even bother showing up.

Because fuck that noise. When I am blogging, I am exploring. I follow the connections between things wherever they go and while this does occasionally result in my getting completely lost, far more often I discover things I never even knew I wanted to know.

I mean, how else can I exceed the limitations of my current mindset? I have to take the philosopher’s road deep into the jungle of the world of ideas in search of treasure in the form of insight and understanding.

To me, that’s what expanding your mind looks like. To hell with psychedelic drugs, mystic meditations, and all the other spiritual prosthetics needed by lesser minds.

I don’t need any external bullshit to prod my mind into thinking creatively, thank ye very much. That place you hippies need drugs and chanting and a guide to reach for just a fleeting moment is the place where I live.

Welcome to the neighborhood. We’re weirder than your average fuck here. Hope you can handle it.

When you have a mind as free and open and uncluttered by social filters as mine, you can’t just swim along with all the other fish.

Those narrow little channels they call their lives are far too small and restrictive for a giant sea mammal like you.

You need the open sea in order to feel free. And no net can hold you. No harpoon can pierce your blubber. No mortal vessel can so much as slow you down.

And as I swim and explore and feed my giant brain, I grow. I get bigger, and stronger, and more able to swim to wherever the hell I want.

And if the lesser minds don’t like that, they have my full and wholehearted permission to fuck all the way off.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A la Wile E. Coyote after he runs off a cliff.

That’s how the transition between playing Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous to blogging feels today. Like I was running full speed across an open plain when suddenly there was no ground underneath my feet any more.

Better learn to fly, I guess.

I feel OK today. Once more, the sunshine seems to help. I feel fairly “up” and my anxiety level is low-ish, so that is good.

It is hard for me to get both of those to be true at the same time. I have lived a sleeper’s life for so long that when I have energy, I don’t know what to do with it, and when energy has nowhere to go it turns into anxiety, at least for me.

And that ends up, in a deeply strange way,. punishing the raising of my energy level. And somewhere deep in the operating system layer of my mind, note is taken of this occurrence and I go back to sleepwalking through life.

It’s like I think I will die if the speedometer goes over 1. And you can see why.

And I know it’s largely a matter of interpretation. If I could recast the anxiety as exhilaration and the depression as a peaceful calm, I would be a much happier man.

But wishing does not make it so. And knowing where you need to go does not get you there, or even show you the route.

So all I can do is look across the chasm at all the nice places out there that I will never get to see because there is no series of moves that can take me there.

Only a leap of faith can do it.

And I have no faith at all.

And it’s not something you can consciously acquire. It doesn’t work like that. You cannot choose to believe something without the need for evidence.

Or at least I can’t.

Everything has to fit together logically for me, and that is my tragic flaw. We mere humans can’t come up with a working, healthy worldview without the need for something to fill the inevitable gaps so the whole thing can float.

But for me, there is nothing I can do to patch the holes in my boat and so it sinks and takes me down with it.

I really feel like there was a golden age in which one acquires the faith needed in order to be healthy in adult life and if you miss it, or something radically bad enough happens to take it away from you, you are SSOL.

That’s “sweet shit out of luck” for you kiddies.

And as much as I bitch about my past, I don’t know that I could ever have contracted a healthy dose of faith even if I had never been raped.

Because like I’ve said, I was a weirdly logical and sensible child from the very beginning. Things had to make sense and fit together rationally for me even when I wa a fairly happy, bouncy, charming lil toddler discovering the power of his own charm.

So even if religion had been there for me, I don’t know that it would have taken root. I would have had dozens of questions the religious teachers could not answer before I was 5 years old, and probably landed in a LOT of trouble for it.

Especially given how disinclined I am to back down in an argument.

So I dunno. Maybe this is the path I was destined to take ever since I was born with such an unusual mind.

Maybe I will be the one who leads the way to a single, coherent, consistent world view that sustains human thriving without the need for shortcuts at all.

I would go down in history as God’s gift to atheism.

But what the hell, I’ll do it anyway.

More after the break.

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My god, it worked!

Ordered McD’s from Skip. Went off without a hitch. Phew!

This was in danger of becoming a “thing” with me. Ordering paranoia. And that could not help but turn into something ugly.

What can I say. I have trust issues.

But not the usual kind of trust issues where you donb’t know if you can believe what people say or count on them to be honest with you and that kind of thing.

I never worry about that kind of thing. Why would I, when people’s minds and emotions are so clear to me? I have complete faith in my ability to tell how trustworthy someone is and assess their reliability accordingly.

No, my problem is that I don’t trust people to be competent. Or to have my best interests at heart. Deep down, I always expect to be ignored, neglected,. treated a an afterthought, resented, and in general treated like a Christmas puppy on Easter.

Gee, I wonder where I got that idea.

Oh right, my entire childhood.

And I played, and play, my part in that. By being so passive and mild and unable to stand up for myself, I was and still am an active participant in my own social invisibility.

Normally, a vital part of how we humans regulate ourselves socially rests on the assumption that if we are doing something to harm someone, they will alert us to that fact by complaining.

Hey, stop that! Oh, I’m sorry. That kind of thing.

But a soft little critter like myself breaks that part of the social contract with our difficulty in speaking up for ourselves.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me. But it has always been that way. I can remember being frustrated by how my high chair had developed a slight slant and was therefor pinching my poor lil bum, and yet, could I tell my father, who was two feet away and who could have fixed it in a second? Nope.

And when you are like that, the people in your life can become paranoid because they can’t rely on you to tell them if something is wrong and so they either have to watch you like a hawk or tune you out when they tire of trying to monitor you for everything.

It’s definitely connected with not wanting to attract attention to myself, which leads to my not wanting to get into conflict with people.

Well, that and being a peace loving critter who hates discord and conflict.

It is so much easier for me to be this fluffy little ghost who drifts around unseen unless he actively decides to be seen.

But that doesn’t attract nurturing, does it?

I think I have unearthed some hard but important truths here.

Of course people have ignored and neglected me for my entire life.

I made myself invisible!

We train people how to treat us.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Right now, my mind is ticking over way too fast due overstimulation (the fun kind) from playing my video game of the moment.

That is Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, of course. A game, you might have noticed, I have been playing for a LOT of moments lately.

LIke about two months’ worth. And to think, I got it for free from my buddy Maelkoth because he got it in some bundle or other when he already had it.

More on that later.

My point was that gaming had left my brain spinning like a wheel of fortune (no caps) and it was going to be hard to get it to slow down enough for me to actually be able to get a topic and some words out of it.

It was like trying to grab something when there is a whirring fan blade in the way.

Luckily., the logeyness that comes from eating slowed me down enough that I could make the rest of the transition on my own, and well, here we are.

Now about my video game addiction…

The other world

That’s how I have been thinking about the issue lately. Like I live in two worlds, one virtual and one real, and I know the virtual one is bad for me because it distorts my entire life around it and makes it impossible for me to lead a normal, healthy, fulfilling life because no matter what, it will always be easier and more fun to just keep playing video games all day than it will ever be to stay in reality and struggle.

Because real life sucks, man. Everything is so hard and so scary and so complicated and the virtual world of video games and hanging out with my fuzzy friends online are none of those things.

Oh, but if you just stick with it and work hard, you can make your dreams come true!

Yeah, so you say. I have grave doubts. After all, I stuck with it and worked hard to get myself through VFS, and that didn’t do jack shit for me except put me $30K in debt and crush all the hope and joy inside me.

I mean, can anyone make the case that I am better off for having done VFS? I would have been better off staying home and writing by myself.

It’s not like I learned much from the driveling dipshits there.

Meanwhile, back at the point…

I don’t have the self-discipline to make myself work harder than I absolutely have to. And I completely lack faith in the idea that it will all be worth it when I succeed.

That’s an awful lot of investment for a very uncertain level of return. Fuck THAT noise.

I just don’t have that in me any more. I used up the last of my hope and faith and belief in myself getting to and through VFS, and it is not coming back.

Instead every day I get fainter and weaker and one of these days my pilot light is going to go out and that will be the end of my stupid fucking life.

And all I can do until that day is fiddle while Rome burns by playing video games.

But no, really. This is fine.

More after the break.

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Adventures in (not) ordering out

I ordered me some Subway via Skip the Dishes.

Rotisserie chicken with teriyaki sauce. Yum.

Skip said it had arrived. Boffo. I am alone here so I waited the usual five minutes that my social anxiety demands so there is no chance I will end up meeting my delivery person and have to make awkward small talk and feel awful after.

Being me is really complicated sometimes. Life would be easier if I was braver.

Anyhow, I make it to the door and whaddaya know, no food. Fuck.

I was worried this would happen because when the phone rang, I couldn’t hear anything so I pressed 6 to let the courier in more or less on face.

And at one point the website told me I had a message from said courier and I was about to read it but that’s when the phone rang.

And I was going to read it when I got back from the door cbut the moment the delivery is marked as complete, the screen where I could do that vanished to be replaced by the “how did we do?” survey they’ve had forever.

How did you do? NOT VERY WELL.

And now it’s time for me to get very, very angry because I filled out the “request for refund” form and told them my problem and they TURNED DOWN THE REQUEST.

No refund for me. I paid $24 for absolutely nothing.

It was bad enough when they refused to give me a refund for the Diet Coke that was mostly soda water from my BK order on Tuesday night but this really takes the fucking cake and shoves it up a monkey’s ass.

Clearly, the cunts have taken control at Skip and it is time to take my $60-$100 a week in business somewhere else.

There wasn’t even a delay between asking for the refund and it getting rejected, either. I bet nobody even read it. They just automatically reject everything.

They better hope I don’t figure out how to escalate this issue because I am super pissed off and in the mood to do damage.

Ah ha. A chat with us feature. The plot thickens.

His name is Simrat and he seems sympathetic so far.

But nope, he’s a cunt too. He offered me a highly insulting $5 refund. Meaning those cunts at Skip would still have stolen $20 from me.

If they don’t make this right, they are dead to me.

OK, now they are offering the full refund I wanted from tbe beginning. Taking that as a big W for the little guy.

Well, okay, the big guy. But a little big guy.

But one who is willing to go full on nuclear Karen if I feel mistreated.

Looks like I paid for tomorrow’s food in advance!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Chronic indecision teaches creative problem solving.

I mean, there are only so many times you can be forced by indecision to come up with a way to NOT have to choose before you start to get good at it.

But for the most part, it sucks. When you can’t decide, you can’t act. You lack the intestinal fortitude to just pick something and go with it, and so you end up doing very little besides treading water and going through the motions of life.

But you’re not alive. You’re just… around.

Living things grow and progress and change. From the day the doctor slaps us on the ass to the day the hearse shows up for us at the old folks’ home, we are meant to evolve and age and experience life from a different perspective every day.

Not me, though. My life has been more or less exactly the same since the day I first got on to welfare way back in 1999.

The locations have changed and the budget has expanded and the toys have been upgraded and the people burdened with cohabitation with me changed a lot in the early years but my life has remained exactly the same.

I sit in front of my computer all day and hide from reality. That is it. That’s what I do. And it is all I have done for the last 25 years.

More if you count my Silly Con Valley days as well. I did more or less the same thing there too, only the computer was a T1000 terminal.

So, not so much the video games. Mostly just hanging out on FurryMUCK and browsing the text only Web.

Ah, such innocent days.

It’s really all I know how to do. And that forces me to ask… WHY!?!

Why was I not driven to seek more? How can I have been okay with this situation for all these years? How can I have just let the days go by for so long?

What the fuck is wrong with me?!?

There’s the usual anwers.

What is wrong with me? I’m crazy. Insane in the membrane. Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. MY brain does not work right and that keeps me locked in this cage of my own construction, unable to find a way out because I am too scared to leave my cozy comfort zone even a little.

And I don’t listen to my emotions or my instincts. Most of what would motivate me to move on with my life could be classified broadly as instinct, and I don’t listen to mine, or really anything else that might lead out of the comfort of my cage.

Instead, I cling. I cling to my dirty little roost here like if I let go, I will fall to my death. As if right outside the door to my tiny little comfort coffin there is a pack of wild predators who will tear me to pieces if they so much as catch a whiff of my scent,

And I know that isn’t true. But tell that to my emotions. Because it FEELs true.

And maybe, just maybe, I am more scared of having to face the wide open world and its nigh-infinite sea of possibilities than I could ever be of predators, prodigious heights, or any of the other forces my mind uses to scare me away from changing.

Sounds about right.

More after the break.

Crisis? What crisis?

Is my lack of life progress and the deep and bitter discontent it brings a crisis?

And even if it is, is it a good idea to treat it like one?

In the real world, where common sense works, the answers are obvious : Yes it’s a god damned crisis! I’m 50 and in failing health, for fuck’s sake. If I am going to get a life, I had better do it soon while I am still alive enough to have one.

At the current rate, there is no way I will make it to 60.

And of course I should treat it as a crisis! That way, I will take it seriously and stay focused on it and work as hard as I can to solve the problem. Right?

Wrong. Because this is NOT the real world and common sense does NOT work here. That world is a foreign country to me.

I bet it’s nice, though.

This is the world of mental illness ergo none of that positivist crap works for me. Treating it as a crisis just leads to panic which leads to shutting down which leads to my hiding from the world in my avoidant bubble and detaching from my circumstances even more and that’s how we got into this whole stupid mess in the first place.

So if treating it like a crisis doesn’t work, and ignoring it like usual doesn’t work, is there anything that WOULD work?

Maybe. It would involve finding some way to address my issues and advance my life towards something approaching normalcy that does not provoke panic. Something upbeat and positive that turns it into not a crisis but an opportunity to enjoy myself while expanding my horizons and exploring new social vistas and moving my piece ahead in this game called Life.

And if you can do that, please tell me how, and include the proper dosage.

I can clearly envision such a positive frame of mind and to me its superiority to my current mindset is obvious and clear.

Doen’t mean I can get there, though.

All I know is that it is going to take something bigger and more powerful than my powers of reason and to be frank I don’t think anything like that exists.

I have no faith in authority of any kind. I don’t trust anyone whose reasoning I can’t examine. And I definitely don’t think there are people who know better than me.

How could I? I am so much smarter than they are it’s disgusting. I’ve never met, read, or heard about anyone whose level of understanding even approaches mine.

Fat lot of fucking good it does me.

As far as I can tell, there is no way for me to access the “god mode” of my mind. That ultimate level of metacognition cannot be reached via logic or understanding, and that means I can’t go there.

And I am pretty sure that’s the main reason I am crazy. Human beings need to have a way to transcend the world of logic and reason when said world is not meeting even the minimum level of their emotional needs.

They need a cheat code to reality that lets them make themselves happy without any need for external justification.

To be happy for no reason, in other words.

And I can’t do that. I have no faith. I can’t “believe”. I am never going to find that god damned Rainbow Connection.

I made a deal with the devil, mortal knowledge and understanding without limit in exchange for the death of wonder and joy.

And I got ripped off.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sanity. More or less.

That’s the quick answer, at any rate. What am I waiting for when it comes to starting my life and getting things moving?

I am waiting for a break in my insanity. Hopefully a permanent one.

Well then what will that involve?

I have given that a lot of thought lately, and it all comes down to doing it anyway.

As in, be scared and do it anyway. Feel the fear and acknowledge it and validate it but stop letting it keep me all cooped up inside.

That does involve something I have mentioned a couple of times before : becoming a harder man. Less squishy like a marshmallow on the inside. More capable of pushing myself to do what I want to do. Less emotionally flabby.

It is something I have dodged my entire life without really knowing why. There were a lot of times when toughening up would have made life way, way easier. Being such a cream puff has brought me nothing but suffering, as far as I can tell.

So why not become a harder man?

I think it has always felt like it would cost me something I did not want to lose. Something precious and delicate and golden. Something special.

What that is, I am not sure. My innocence, I suppose. Becoming a harder man would mean facing hard truths that, once confronted, would change me in a way that cannot be reversed or altered, and that frightens me.

Do it anyway. I know, I know.

Besides, the fact that the cost is high does not preclude it being worth it. That is often the case with personal growth. You don’t know how much happier you will be as a butterfly than you ever were as a caterpillar until you make the transition.

I guess that one way or another, you need to do the next thing simply because it’s the next thing without knowing what will happen as a result.

That’s why all those people who are way dumber than me have real, successful, NORMALlives when my genius self languishes in the gutter unable to even start to get ,myself going in a happy direction.

Or any direction, really.

Because unlike me, they unquestioningly followed their emotions and instincts and therefore developed into normal, healthy adult members of the species.

Without ever having to know “why” first.

And that included toughening up when it was called for. They did not spend their entire adult lives too scared of life to do anything with themselves.

Then again, they had supportive parents who cared enough about them to both have expectations of them and tell them what they were.

I keep telling myself I “should” have gotten over being taken out of university and forced to move back to Summerside almost 30 years ago.

But some injuries just don’t heal on their own.

Even worse, some injuries actively keep you from seeking treatment for them by leaving you too scared of the world to even ask for help.

And there is only one way out of that cul de sac :

Doing it anyway.

Even if it hurts.

More after the break.

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More on doing it anyway

It really does come down to pain in the end.

Forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do because it scares you hurts, especially when you are not used to doing it because you have lived your life via the Way of the Wimp which has as a bedrock rule that “if something hurts or is scary, then you can’t do it and don’t or shouldn’t have to do it. ”

That means that the second something is painful or scary (or difficult or harsh or whatever), you give up. The idea of sticking it out is foreign to you and you might very well have convinced yourself that said things are “impossible”.

But are they?

What if the reward for doing it was a million bucks and the punishment for not doing it was a slow death by torture? Would you still consider it “impossible” to do the painful scary thing? Would you be willing to die a horrible death just to prove that yes, it was impossible the whole time. DAD?

Or might you find yourself suddenly seeing the thing as a lot more “possible”? Might you, in fact, find it remarkably easy to do now, and find yourself wondering what all the fuss was about as you helicopter to your private island?

Then it was never really “impossible”, was it? It was actually very, very possible. You just thought you didn’t really have to do it because nobody could tell whether it was possible for your or not and so you acted like a brat and said, “Well I can’t. So there!”

I mean, you know, deep down, that when you said it was “impossible”, what you were really saying was that it wasn’t worth it to you. You looked at the potential rewards (unknown and uncertain) versus the cost (definitely doing something you don’t want to do) and decided it simply was not worth it to you.

And that’s a far cry from “impossible” isn’t it?

But that is the Way of the Wimp for you. It’s a way paved with lies and excuses and a determined pattern of refusing to do anything that might lead to growing up.

Fear rules and courage is the enemy. Yours is the path of the infinite retreat. It starts with avoiding one thing but that soon leads to two thing, then three, then before you know it you are locked in place, unable to move in any direction because no matter which way you go, it leads you closer to something you’re avoiding.

And then there you are, trapped, paralyzed, frozen. Buried alive under a mound lof lies, excuses, evasions, half-truths, and self-manipulation.

And you like to tell yourself there is no way out.

But you know damned well there’s a way out.

You do it anyway.

And if you don’t, know that you are choosing your own sorry fate.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a fair question.

What did I do to stop being suicidal? Why do I not have a history of suicide attempts and hospitalizations like so many other depressives? Why despite all the times I have felt truly horrible and wanted to end it all have I never actually tried?

I feel now like I never truly wanted to die. Like with a lot of fellow sufferers, I didn’t want to die, I just wanted relief from a pain so profound that death seemed superior.

It’s the kind of mental state that leads to an animal gnawing off a limb.

But even at my worst moments, something within me kept me from trying or even making any but the vaguest of plans.

I know that at one point, the idea that I would not feel this way forever and that it therefore made no sense to solve a temporary problem like feeling really low with so permanent a solution as death.

That’s way too much of a commitment. I’ll just take a nap instead.

Going deeper in, I think there has always been a solid core of stability underneath all the numbness and chaos and mental noise of my depression. A tiny little island of sanity that I can cling to when the storms roll in.

Besides, I have always been, for lack of a better term, “sensible”. Which in this case means, “highly resistant to being moved into action by emotion. ”

Call it emotional inertia.

So any suicidal impulses would have to overcome THAT, and there’s no way. I can’t even overcome it to do things I actually want to do and SHOULD do.

Questionable activities that I know deep down are wrong like suicide don’t stand a chance of making the grade.

In that sense, my inertia is both a symptom of and protection from my mental illness.

Perhaps that is how I became so resistant to my own impulses in the first place. My mental executives saw the suicidal thoughts in my head and looked at each other then said “how about you run everything past us before you do it, okay?”.

And that’s how “The Committee” was born. Arguably it is far too good at keeping me from doing the wrong things by keeping me from doing anything, but at least it started off as something good.

Just like the rest of depression. If you think about it.

Both depression and anxiety can be seen as healthy coping mechanisms gone berserk and left to grow out of control by mental isolation and a lack of there being any healthier way for the mind to address a lack of reward than to keep pressing the one button that it has found still works.

Anhedonia’s a bitch, man. Word.

With me, that’s video games. I am addicted to video games precisely because they let me get pleasure and joy at a price in effort that I can actually afford.

What’s more, they make me feel safe. Not just safe from the big bad world out there, but from the demons in my head as well.

Video games keep them too busy to torment me.

And now, some Hearthstone.

More after the break.

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Adventures in ordering in : missing ingredient

Welcome to another episode of What Did They Fuck Up This Time ™?

This time, it’s not the courier’s fault. Burger King gave me a large Diet Coke with very little Diet Coke in it.

It’s pretty much just soda water with a teeny bit of Diet Coke syrup in it. My guess would be that the syrup canister was almost empty when they poured my drink, which is a hard thing to detect at this level because it looks relatively normal.

And it’s not like I want them to start tasting every drink before they send it out.

That would be gross.

But I am still disappointed, so I sent in a complaint.

Or rather, a “request”.

The word “complaint” no longer exists on the Skip the Dishes website. To get to where I would normally complain, I clicked on “Need help?” then clicked on item missing etc. and then I was allowed to make a “request” for a refund.

What kind of corporate doublespeak bullshit is this?

I’m not politely requesting a refund, god dammit. I am pissed off and I want to complain. Yes, I expected that to lead them to offer me a refund like they have in the past, but that’s miles away from merely “requesting” one.

“Excuse me, sir or madam, but if it’s not too much of a bother, could you possibly spare a moment to consider compensating me, however lightly, for the fact that you fucked up my god damned DRINK???”

What, was the word “complaint” too harsh and judge-y for the delicate sensibilities of your overpaid marketing department? Did they worry that it was sending the wrong message and predisposing people to be angry and demanding? Did it give the unwashed masses too much power over their corporate overlords?

Well as you can see, in my case, it backfired spectacularly. Instead of calming me down, it pissed me off in a situation I normally don’t stress about at all.

I’ve had to complain about this n’ that regarding my Skip lots of times before (unfortunately) and so to me, it’s no big deal.

I grumble a little, make the complaint, get a refund in Skip credits, and that is it.

But now you have set me off on this whole elaborate rant instead. And while this is largely the product of certain defects in my personality, I choose to blame you.

So screw you, Burger King lackeys. You can’t reprogram MY mind!

The Freemason reptoid perverts from the center of the hollow Earth got there way before you, buddy, and they made sure my brain is write-protected.

Can’t be caught out THERE, buddy boy!

Besides, through the reptoids I’ve nabbed invites to all the best Pervert Parties all over the world, and let me tell you, they are WILD.

I’m sorry, my microchip is telling me not to talk about that.

It says I go nighty nighty now.

Nighty night, nice people!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That was what I screamed in my head this morning when I put a full 1.8 L glass of tap water on my desk, turned my computer chair so I could sit in it, and in doing so caused the back of the chair to smack into said glass of water and spill it all over my desk.

This kind of thing happens to me all the time. And it’s incredibly frustrating and dispiriting. I try to be careful with my movements and to think through the chain of events that I might be about to set off, but inevitably my mind wanders and disaster strikes and I once more feel like an idiot who lives in a boobytrapped world in which he has been designated the head booby.

And I know my own part in this slapstick farce of a life of mine. I know that the fact that I never clean anything and that therefore there’s always dirt and clutter everywhere sets me up for these awkward and potentially very dangerous events.

But that’s not the whole story, because I have been a total slob for decades and only started having mishaps at the current elevated rate recently.

As in, since I got back from the hospital last August.

And it seems to be getting worse over time and that worries me greatly. Clearly something is going wrong with me neurologically that makes these things happen and that is following a degenerative pathology.

Not that the medical world cares. I am clearly going to have to take matters into my own hands and become a very, very squeaky wheel indeed.

Anyhow, the whole thing makes me wanna scream and then move into some kind of facility for the life-threateningly klutz where everything is covered in foam rubber and bubble wrap and made by Nerf.

Or not. That might be more humiliating than having to get a nurse or assistant to do things for me instead.

At least then I could feel like I was still in control.

I’ve always thought I would make a better executive than a worker anyhow.

I am he who writes the specs, not he who follows them.

---

Feeling reasonably good physically. No more surprise poops, knock on wood.

Psychologically, things are superficially calm but down below there is turmoil and upheaval as I hack away at the thick, gnarled roots of my mental illness in an attempt not just to understand what the hell is going on with my mutant mentation but to actively unseat the malignant growth and get it the hell out of me,

Or at least to clear the way to route around the damage.

I feel like as I root around down there, the true face of mu illness is slowly revealing itself and once I can see it fully and clearly, I will be able to bring the full power of my incredible rational mind to bear on it, and it will fade away like frost at dawn.

That’s the plan, anyhow.

More after the break.

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We’re knocking on heaven’s door

But not like this :

..but like this :

It’s funny how age peels back the layers of bullshit we use to protect ourselves.

Way back when Almost Paradise was making its way up the charts and becoming the song of the summer, I sneered at it.

After all, it was just more pop love song garbage meant to manipulate the emotions of the sheeple who listen to all that top 40 crap.right?

I certainly don’t need to actually listen to it to know this. I can tell what kind of song it is, and that’s enough, because after all, they’re all the same.

Mind that phrase because it is the truest and most reliable hallmark of prejudice there is. All forms ot bigotry essentially boil down to treating a subset of the population like a monolithic whole of which individuals are merely identical instances.

In other words, treating them like they are all the same.

Viewed from another angle. prejudice can be seen as false knowledge. The bigot thinks they know a lot about a person simply because that person belongs to one of the groups against which they are bigoted.

A black person is “probably” a criminal. A man “probably” beats or assaults women. A corporate executive “probably” has done terrible things in the name of profit. A Jewish person “probably” had money stashed in one of the banks they own. And so on.

Now to a certain extent, this kind of reduction of people to their subgroups is inevitable because we are simply not built to handle thinking of and treating the thousands of people we see in media and encounter in our lives as individuals.

One popular bit of research showed that we have room in our heads for between 100 and 150 individuals and everyone else is just “them”.

They belong to that amorphous entity called “people” or “humanity” or “kids these days” or whatever else we come up with so that we can pretend we know enough about all those other naked beach apes all around us to feel safe around them.

And in a very real sense, we do. We can be reasonably sure that 99.999 percent of our fellow democratic citizens are very unlikely to suddenly bop us on the head and take our stuff, for instance. Or pull us out of our car and steal it a la Grand Theft Auto.

That sense of safety is vital to the functioning of any modern democratic society, even though it requires us, on an abstract level, to pretend people are “all the same”.

A sentiment inimical to the actual core values of our modern individualistic societies.

God as my witness, I have no idea where the hell I was going with all of this.

Maybe nowhere. I often follow branches of reasoning all the way to the outer limits of human consciousness then suddenly look around and say, “Wait, where the hell am I?”

Someone get me an Uber.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But before we get into that, here’s a little something that I have to share because it made me so happy :

Like I said in the YouTube comments, I had goosebumps before I even consciously remembered what song was about to start.

I just knew, on a deep animal level, that something wonderful was about to happen.

Of course, by the end of the second repeat of the flute loop, I knew. So when the horns kicked in, I was HYPED.

Such an incredibly funky song, and from someone who was a prog rock legend who had never made a pop song before.

Hope it made you happy too, my fellow GenX types.

---

And now on to the less fun stuff.

It all started around midnight.

That is when I realized that despite the nap I had taken from around 8:30 pm to around 11 pm, I was still incredibly sleepy.

So I had to call Joe^[1] and tell him I wouldn’t be able to make it out to the living room to hang out and watch stuff like we normally do on Saturday nights.

Well, technically, on Sunday mornings. Whatever.

That accomplished, I went back to bed and went to sleep.

---

Only to be woken up at around 4 am in one of the worst ways possible that doesn’t involved being buried alive, namely by my crashing blood sugar.

You see, by not going out to hang with Joe and Julian, I also ended up skipping my midnight snack, and as I should know by now, I should NEVER skip a meal.

So I woke up feeling very ill. Nauseous, very cold, tingling all through my body, the whole hypoglycemic nine yards.

Luckily, I had my jumbo bag of trail mix handy, so I sat there eating trail mix for a while before concluding that the trail mix was taking too long to metabolize and that it was time to drink one of the little cartons of Boost that Felicity bought me for my birthday.

So congratulations, Felicity. You may well have saved my life.

Eventually, my blood sugar rose and stabilized enough that I felt comfortable going back to sleep, and drifted off again.

---

Woke up around 7:15 am still very hungry but otherwise OK, or so I thought.

But then I saw that there was something brown spattered all over the side of my leg, and my blood went cold because I knew what it had to be.

A quick check of the general vicinity of my butt confirmed it : I had once more been incontinent in my sleep.

This had not happened to me since I got home from the hospital last year.

I went through a LOT of Kleenex cleaning up.

And all the while I was in turmoil not just because pooping the bed is inherently very upsetting but because when I was leaving the hospital last summer, a doctor told me in no uncertain terms that if either of two things happened, I was to come back to the hospital right away.

The first was if I found myself unable to pee. Got it. That would be real bad.

The other was if I had more night time incontinence.

Uh oh. Can I get back to you on that?

And I tried to convince myself to do the adult thing and get out of bed and call Joe and tell him he needed to take me to the ER and get dressed and all that, but there was just no way it was going to happen. I was way too tired, upset, confused, and strung out on stress to give it any serious thought.

But if it happens again, I will get my poor unreliable ass off to the ER.

More after the break.

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I am not a smart man

Don’t get me wrong. By the usual definition, I am a genius. IQ off the charts, never had to learn to study, high academic achievement, yadda yadda ya.

But stupid is as stupid does, like Forrest Gump’s mama said, and I does stupid. My actions are not all that smart. I do dumb shit all the time and at the heart of it is always my lack of emotional regulation.

I try to make my rational mind sing for its supper, so to speak, by getting it to figure out what the “smart” course of action is and then do that.

But it never fucking works. My rational mind can never handle all the variables and immediately gets bogged down with calculations that multiply in both number and complexity until, like a computer with a memory hole, all of my mental resources get filled up and the whole thing crashes.

And then I just make the decision rashly and emotionally just to get it over with and then lo and behold, I did a stupid.

And the problem is emotional. I don’t have the kind of killer instinct that makes a person decisive and commanding. A stronger person would be able to take the array of options posited by the rational mind, pick the one that seems best, and commit to it enough to see it through to the end, come what may.

I am too afraid of choosing the “wrong” thing. But there are far worse things in life than being wrong, and languishing in the doldrums of indecision is one of them.

And I know this. I know it well. I know it to be true.

But I don’t think I really believe it.

Knowledge is facts. Data. Calculation. It can be learned and it can be deduced and it can be acquired experientially. All without emotion involved.

But belief is an emotion. To believe something is to believe IN something and that requires emotional assets like commitment, conviction, and courage.

Knowing is easy.

Belief is hard.

And believing in yourself is the hardest thing to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

..emerges this heavy duty blast from the past :

That good ol’ song popped into my head this morning despite my not having heard it or thought about it since it was on the radio, so I looked it up on YouTube and gave it a listen and whoa nelly did I get hit with a nostalgia tsunami!

Felt like I had been picked up by a giant hand and then slammed on to the ground like I was a coin someone was trying to flip the hard way ^[1]

And the crazy part is that I still remembered around 75 percent of the lyrics even though I hadn’t heard the thing since like 1980 or thereabouts.

And that even impressed me.

I mean, I know I got a crazy good memory for music, but still… wow.

Anyhow, the song is an all time comedy classic. It’s damned near perfect, in fact. Every verse is hilarious and it follows the “from bad to worse to even worse” escalation pattern to a god damned T.

Like, it’s already going great, then there’s the verse that starts, “So you see, Your Honor” and that takes it to a whole new level.

And talk about relatable. Unless you have been locked in a shed by Mormons your whole life, you have been to at least one grownup style party and you can totally picture the chain of the events depicted in the song.

The song is by a group of fellers from my neck of the woods, the Irish Rovers, who were local rock stars when I was I kid because of their mainstream success with that song, and unfortunately this maudlin hunk o’ crap :

What, did someone think the main thing wrong with Puff the Magic Dragon was that the ending wasn’t depressing enough and didn’t feature the merciless wrath of an angry and withholding God enough?

And as bad as it was for you to hear it, imagine what I went through as a kid. They played that goddamned song at us everywhere back then!

It was like, “You kids like this song, right? Well YOU WON’T ANY MORE!”

Man, what a bunch of uh…. what a bunch of…

Enough of that sad hippie crap. Let’s get back to good ol’ drunk comedy with another all time Canadian comedy classic :

Same brilliant escalation. same sense of humour, also centered on liquor.

Finally, there is this priceless observation :

You nailed it. person I assume is neither a dictionary nor Emmanuel Lewis.

We’re a strange and magical breed, us furries.

And I am proud to wag my fluffy foxy tail among them.

More after the break.

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I’m not really here

And that is, unsurprisingly, the problem.

In my most recent trip though the world of INTJ related videos on YouTube, one of the things that really struck me is the observation that an INTJ’s greatest weakness tends to be our poor connection with the world of the senses.

And you know what? They’re right. I’ve even talked about it in this space. About how I live in this abstract world where everything is mediated by screens, which eliminate all sensory inputs except for sight and sound and even those are abstracted further by being reduced to 2D images on a monitor or tablet or TV.

The purpose of all this abstraction on a physical and emotional level is to insulate me from overstimulation and the anxiety it brings.

But why is my bar for overstimulation so damned low? Why do perfectly normal situations that most people handle just fine overload my sensorium? Why do normal things freak me out, man?

Answer : precisely because I cut myself off from sensory input. Faculties atrophy when they are not used and by living in my little bubble of sensory restriction I have turned myself into the sensory equivalent of the Boy in the Bubble.

And that is so wrong. Without the sensory world to ground and stabilize the mind. you can fall deep into your own crazy inner world without a way out.

That’s one of my biggest fears : that I will lose that last bit of connection to the real world and fall into the black hole at the center of my mind, where my inner demons live, and end up in my own personal hell.

It’s a far more plausible concept than it should be.

The road out is simple but by no means easy : I have to spend less time with screens and more time in the real world, the world I can see and touch and taste and smell and hear, the world that exists completely independent of my deeply flawed consciousness and that therefore cannot be corrupted or perverted by it.

The sun will come up tomorrow no matter how I feel. And there is a great comfort in that. My inner world is a tempest of turmoil precisely because it lacks connection to the world of the senses, and if I am to escape this dead end life of mine, I am going to need to step away from the comfortable world of my screens and spend some time looking around and reminding myself that I am real.

I am real. I am present. I am now. I am a real life flesh and blood naked beach ape with physical desires, emotional needs, spiritual ambitions, and heart that longs for something more than this so called life of mine.

But can I step away from the screens even just a little bit? TO try it out?

We will see.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.