Having trouble getting my head into blogging mode right now.

Like I have said before, it can be hard for me to go from my usual mentally overstimulated yet somehow also sleepy state to the relatively more focused and directed state of mind required to string words together in a form that hopefully makes some kind of sense.

Compared to my usual free floating high flying genius state of mind, writing seems so very very… linear.

Which is a very good thing because it means that at least twice a day, I have to come down to Earth and up to speed enough to get my words done, and I think that in and of itself help me be a tad more sane.

It helps, in fact, almost as much as the cathartic release of my thoughts, emotions, and ideas from my mind prison that was the whole point of starting this thing back in 2011.

My how time flies. Yet never gets anywhere, at least with me.

I sometimes wonder if I am too mentally stable for my own good. And secretive.

I keep coming back to how I don’t let my mental illness show lately. How I keep that smooth façade of mine going any time there are other people around and therefore I am only truly “myself” when I am alone.

But I don’t want to be myself. I want to be that other guy. He seems cool.

And yet I spend the vast majority of my time all alone in my landfill of a bedroom, keeping myself distacted and entertained (but not happy) with video games.

Video games eat up my life as they eat up my time and I know that if I am to get anywhere in life before I die, I am going to have to spend time away from them.

But the very thought of that makes a deathly chill run through my heart and gives me an attack of the sort of clutching panic I associate with suffocation.

For some reason.

That is how I know that I am addicted to video games : the very thought of doing without them for even just a couple hours a day makes me feel like I am going to die.

And I know how crazy that is. But that doesn’t make it go away like in some heavy handed 60’s science fiction story where they aliens disappear when you stop believing they are real.

In my updated version, our existentialist hero would still triumphantly scream, “You’re not even real!” to the aliens, but they would just shrug and say, “Yup. ” and then go right back to zapping his ass.

But boy, I bet you sure feel clever now, huh Earthling? You really nailed us.

Now I must warn you, this next anal probe may hurt a little, but it will probably hurt so bad you find religion and lose it again instead.

More after the break.

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A brief update

That problem I had with my game, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, seems to have resolved itself. It is as if it sensed that I was getting sick of its bullshit and was thinking about saving myself a lot of grief by uninstalling it and said to itself, “Oh shit, I better get my act together!” and started working properly again.

In fact, it’s actually running better now than it was before the problem with it hanging on the opening loading screen even showed up, so either I scared into straightening up and flying right or the recent minor code update to the game did it.

I’d prefer to think the computer fears my wrath, but get real.

The only flaw in the code update theory is that the problem showed up after the code update and fixed itself like two days later, without a further update.

So as improbable as it is (to put it mildly), the wrath based theory is still in play.

If so, I need to figure out how to use my powers for good.

And by good, I mean money.

Maybe companies could pay me to come threaten their computers periodically to scare them into doubling uptimes… OR ELSE.

“I mean it! We’ll replace you motherfuckers with PUNCH CARDS if you don’t improve!

And get away from that coffee…. coffee is for closers!”

Yeah, um… maybe not.

Struggling to activate

That’s what I feel like I am trying to do lately.

Even though I was only tangentially that kind of kid, I have always felt a connection to the weird hyperactive kids who were in and out of various kinds of therapies and always ending up leaving class to go do some kind of testing and so on.

I mean, there was a period, around grade 2 (I think), where that was totally me. The school district were utterly baffled by this kid who showed up already reading at a grade four level and knowing all of numbers and math up to but not including long division. yet who tripped over his own feet and bumped into things and had terrible penmanship.

In their testing based world, these things did not belong all in the same person. If someone could barely tie their shoes and had printing that looked like it had written during an earthquake, they were retarded and went to Special Ed.,

But if a kid could read and write and do basic math at the grade level where most kids were struggling to keep up with Dick and Jane, they were gifted and you put them in a special class for gifted kids.

So it’s Special Ed either way, but on the opposite ends of its spectrum.

Looking back, it feels to me like they had a tragic lack of imagination. The concept “intellectually gifted but physically retard” apparently did not computer to them.

This is what happens when people let the testing tell them what to do. They become blind to the greater context into which the test is supposed to fit.

I suppose my cheerfully cooperative with a dash of incredibly stubborn and difficult personality didn’t help either.

I went through a LOT of tests in that period as the system tried to figure me out. I didn’t mind at all because class was boring and the tests were new and different and fun.

And I enjoyed all the attention too, I think.

Unfortunately, being unable to figure me out, the system just gave up on me. My life in special education ended and I was left to languish in regular education and be bored out of my mind from mid grade 3 on.

It’s not my fault that I was a special little snowflake who needed some very special handling and treatment (that I did not get) in order to thrive.

I was just a kid doing what came naturally to me. Like any other kid.

It’s not my fault you didn’t have a slot for my five dimensional peg in your 2D holes.

I deserved better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m into it.

Had one of my relatively frequent attacks of depression and despair earlier. They tend to hit me when I am switching modes from passive to active or vice versa.

So when I stand up, mostly, but also sometimes when I sit down at the computer after having social time with Le Gang, I get hit by a wave of intensely dark depression that makes me feel lost and lonely and incredibly sad.

And you know what? Good. I need more of that.

Because the more of that and other emotions I feel, the smaller my burden of emotional constipation gets and the closer I get to fine.

So this time when the blackness engulfed me, I resisted the reflex to push it back down to where it came from like it’s an embarrassing relative in a Gothic novel who someone bit through the chains again, and instead tried to open myself up to it so I can try to experience it in its fullest.

So to continue the metaphor, as I feel compelled to do, instead of pushing the embarrassing relative back into the basement, I tried inviting up for tea.

Now I am new at this, so I can’t say I got very far, as once I am on my feet I kind of have to devote all my attention and energy to whatever I stood up to do and deep spiritual experiences kind of have to wait till I sit down again.

And maybe have had a bit of a rest.

But I am going to be looking out for this kind of thing now, and pushing back at a lifetime of suppressive instincts in order to try to open myself up more to life.

And you can’t let more stuff in without letting more stuff out. Right now my bus can’t take on any new passengers because it’s full.

Gonna have to drop off a lot of passengers who have been there way too long in order to let me pull over to the side of the road and clean the damned thing already.

Maybe then I will be able to make this a much happier, groovier trip.

Basically I’m trying ot train myself to “lean in” to the pain, like Sheryl Sandberg says. Instead of pulling back and trying to stop time when the pain comes, thus ensuring that the pain will last, you lean in to it and thus get to the other side of it much much faster.

Like Churchill said, when you’re going through hell, keep going.

And that means staying with the less pleasant emotions even when your instincts are screaming to you to flee at top speed. It means letting go of the idea that you “should” be happy and that therefore any unhappiness is some kind of crisis.

Stop trying to be “happy” and try being human instead.

I’m increasingly sure that happiness is not something that can be pursued directly. All you can do is remove obstacles to it and have faith that it will happen naturally when your levity is stronger than your gravity and that odds are, when it happens you will be too busy having a good time to even notice.

More after the break.

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Find your own damned path!

So my beloved game, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, has invented a new and innovative way to fail me completely.

Before, it was content to just crash at random moments, usually but not always after I had played for an hour or two.

Well, at least it kept me from having to decide for myself when I was done playing.

But now it has decided that was too good for me and now it hangs without even letting me get to the main menu, with Continue and Load and Options on it.

Ergo, now I can’t play at all. And I am stuck trolling the Internet with my weak Google Fu trying to fix the god damned thing.

And I have to admit, I am tempted to just give up on the damned thing already. I have been through so much crap trying to get and keep this game working that I am seriously wondering if it’s all worth it.

The cost benefit ratio is in danger of going into the red.

But I have been enjoying my second playthrough of the main campaign and it is still a pretty damned good game overall, so I will make one serious valiant effort to get it working again before I toss it aside contemptuously.

I mean, I already gave up on my month long Midnight Isles DLC campaign because the fucking thing kept crashing my computer.

Compared to what I am dealing with now, those seem like the good old days. At least I made it to the Main Menu and got to load my game first.

Maybe this is the Universe’s way of forcing me to do something with my life besides play video games all the god damned time.

If so…. thanks, I guess?

But you do know I still have $60 in my Steam wallet, doncha? And there are still thousands of games on Steam.

I’m just sayin’.

If only I could gamify productivity. Turn writing and submitting stuff to various places a fun and engaging video game where I feel safe and confident.

I know there are plenty of ways to do that. Why just give yourself XP for every submission and decide how much XP it takes to LEVEL UP! Woohoo!

Um, yeah, fuck that. If I was that capable of self-motivation I wouldn’t even be sick.

Lately I have really been feeling like a blob without a skeleton. A lot of truly amazing parts are floating in my protoplasm but without a rigid, solid framework to bring much needed structure to my being, it is all just useless goo.

I can’t conceive of being able to provide that for myself. I never had any outside discipline to internalize. All I had was school and that was laughably easy for me.

Without an external framework like school to use as my exoskeleton, I am nothing but a slug oozing around at the bottom of the pecking order.

How can I raise myself to the sky when I can’t even stand on my own two feet?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I want to, anyhow.

That’s what this whole toughening up thing boils down to : developing one’s ability to deliberately do things that are going to hurt or scare you or freak you out because that is the price for getting what you want.

Life is way too short to limit yourself to only the easy and fun things in life while never getting anything that requires effort or focus or seems like work.

That’s something you have to figure out for yourself, though, because you are the only one that can silence or ignore that evil grinning voice in your head that tells you that you can avoid the hard parts of life forever without consequence or cost.

That voice is like the asshole in the suit here :

It might seem like your friend but it will doom you.

Anyhow, like I have said many times before, being able to make yourself do things you don’t “have” to do (i.e. there are no external entities enforcing immediate consequences) and don’t want to do but you want the result is one of the basic building blocks of becoming an adult.

And I have wasted my entire adult life waiting around for that easy road to magically appear and for life to lower its difficulty setting just for little old me so that I wouldn’t have to grow or adapt or change or anything!

I mean, how lazy can you get? Not to mention unambitious.

Gifted child syndrome is definitely a big part of it. People like me who have been gifted their whole life (I learned to read when I was three, for crying out loud) are very used to everything coming to them naturally and easily due to our gifts.

But that only works in school. The rest of life is work.

Us grown up gifted kids often don’t get that, though, or worse. we understand it but we use it as Exhibit A in our case that life is horribly cruel and unfair to us.

But it isn’t. You are being charged the same price as everyone else. Everyone in the world has to work to get what they want and do things they don’t want to do.

Even the idle rich have their challenges when it comes to all the things money just can’t buy. Even they have to sit through elementary school choir concerts.

But we high IQ types are often a lot like the spoiled rich. We seem to think that life owes us an endless amount of bending over backwards to make things just as easy as school has always been for us.

But it doesn’t. Nobody gets that. Everyone has to grow up before they find happiness. Everybody has to make peace with doing things they don’t like and don’t want to do and that hurts or is scary or gross or whatever in order to get what they want.

And no matter how long you wait or how pathetic your life gets, nobody is going to come along to make everything easy for you again.

So it’s a stark but simple choice : grow up, or decide it’s not worth it and suffer.

Either way, you have chosen your destiny. You are not a helpless victim of circumstance. You have made your choice.

But remember, in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.

More after the break.

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Don’t worry if it’s not good enough

Hey fellow old people! Remember this old feel good hit from the Seventies?

How good a feel good up with people vibe does this song have?

I first heard it on Sesame Street. That’s how good it is. In fact, it was years later that I even learned it was by the Carpenters and not Children’s Television Workshop themselves because it fit the vibe of the show so well.

And there were a lot of attempts at that kind of song in the Seventies. It was a very depressed decade. The big technicolor LSD dream of the Sixties had crashed into the drug addicted, crime riddled (related),. dead rock icons Seventies and the feeling that anything is possible turned into “this world has a lot of problems”.

It was a total bummer, man. A bad trip for everyone.

And that’s the time when the feel good inspirational song rises. It happened during the Great Depression and it happened during the Seventies too.

And into that era came Sing by the Carpenters, and for my money. it effortlessly rises above most of the other contenders in a very crowded field.

It’s certainly one of my all time faves. And it succeeds precisely because it isn’t reaching for some massive universal theme, it’s just about singing.

Singing not because you’re performing or trying to be perfect or you have something to prove, but just for the sheer joy of singing. Singing because there’s a song in your heart that is clamoring to get out. Singing because it lets you express emotions you can’t express or are afraid to express in words.

Singing because when you sing, you feel truly and fully alive.

As someone who loves to sing, that really means a lot to me. i had the voice of an angel when I was little but then puberty came along and took that away from me.

Looking back, I took that way too hard. My voice wasn’t freaking gone,. it had just changed, and I could have learned to use the new voice just as well if not better if I wasn’t so damned melodramatic.

My voice cracked when I sang? Well that’s it, my singing voice is RUINED FOREVER and I will NEVER SING AGAIN!

Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with me?

Here’s another all time feel good classic :

Came out in 1973, as did I. And I absolutely love it. It fills me with hope and courage every time I listen to it.

It speaks to me so deeply that I have to wonder if the fact that it came from the year of my birth is somehow related. Like it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of that exact moment in time and thus speaks to me even though I was an infant at the time.

I know there are logic issues with that idea. And I don’t care.

One last song, this one with a somewhat different vibe :

Je me fou de passe indeed!

Alexa, where’s the nearest bastille?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The main takeaway from today’s session was the old familiar “do it anyway”.

That’s what it’s going to take to get myself out of this mile deep rut of mine. I am going to have to let go of the security blanket of video games long enough to look around online for something new for me to do.

Something more job-like. Something to give my life purpose and focus and drive. Something to make me feel like my life is going somewhere at long last.

Something to act as the tugboat to tug me out of these god damned doldrums that have rotted my soul and my mind and my body to the point where I feel like one of the walking dead waiting for death to finally finish the damned job.

That got dark quick.

Something to make me feel like a legit adult and not just an overgrown infant.

Whatever that something might be, it is going to involve me having to feel the waves of anxiety and fear and not let them stop me.

I’ll have to go up, over, or through those waves so I can smash through to the other side and maybe even grow some fuckin’ backbone while I am at it.

I am almost completely lacking in what we used to call “character”. Or “grit”. That ability to grit one’s teeth (hence the name) and fight back against adversity and by doing so overcome it and show it who’s boss.

I have done very little of that in my life.

I haven’t had to. Emphasis on HAD. When I did “have” to because I was going to Kwantlen and then VFS, I got it done.

Of course, I was seven years younger then.

But no… no more god damned excuses. No more always looking for a way out.

Stop trying to escape!

What I am getting at is that I have shown that I can overcome myself and get things that are very difficult for me done when I commit to something.

But the ride has always been on someone else’s bus. Like I said way back even before Kwantlen, the nice thing about school for a wet noodle like me is that once I have enrolled, I don’t have to provide the forward momentum myself.

I just have to show up and be a student. The days of deciding what to do with myself are over until I graduate.

I just have to go and do what I am told. Which is, in both cases, school.,

And I am very good at school.

Everything else is a challenge.

But see, that’s the thing about regular unemployed life. It’s all up to you. You have to provide forward momentum. Not only that, you have to keep trying despite failing over and over and over again until someone finally hires you.

That shit is downright alien to me. I can’t imagine it. I don’t have anywhere even close to the kind of energy and intestinal fortitude that would take.

And yet, to improve my life, I am going to have to find it somewhere.

And that’s going to be incredibly painful and scary and hard. My mental illness is going to fight me like a bear every step of the way and I am going to have to drag it kicking and screaming into the light for this to work.

Come to think of it, it might be kicking and screaming to. Man, this is going to be loud.

More after the break.

There ain’t no easy way out

There ain’t? Shit.

Well then I’m fucked.

What a terrible thing to have to say about yourself, am I right? When you always take the easy way out, you become helpless without one.

Doing things the hard but effective way ain’t even on your radar any more. You will tell yourself the task or challenge is”impossible” when deep down you know damned well it is perfectly possible.

It’s just not easy. Doing it is going to cost you. It’s gonna hurt, be scary, and require an open ended commitment of energy.

As in, “I will do whatever it takes for however long it takes to get X done” kind of thing.

And that has to include the vitally important potential to if it gets harder, you try harder.

As far as I can tell, that’s the difference between losers and winner.

Losers quit. Winners try harder.

I have had it in my head for a long time now that there is always a choice being made when you give up,

You are in effect saying, “This hurts too much or costs me too much. I surrender. ”

Inherent in that is the option to endure instead. It might feel like you had no choice to give up, especially if you have given up so much that you do it without thought, by default, but there is always the possibility of staying in the fight instead of turning tail and running away whimpering.

I have been talking, both here and in therapy, about feeling like I know where I want to go but I can’t find the road that leads me there.

Therefore, I have talking about things like imagination and transcendence and needing to have some kind of crisis or breakdown in order to transcend my current self and finally turn into a god damned butterfly.

But maybe there are all kinds of roads to where I want to go and I just don’t see them because they are all too gosh darn hard for my fragile little self.

So I need to toughen the hell up. And that is going to hurt. And I can waste more years of my life looking for and waiting for an easy way out that does not exist or I can set my sights on finding a painful and scary route that I can live with.

No matter what, it is gonna suck.

But sooner or later, you may have to gnaw off that limb to be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time for me to alienate you by drilling down into this topic yet again.

I have to get to the bottom of why I find it so hard to accept that I am incredibly gifted and thus fully integrate this truth into my self-image well enough that I can hopefully find my way to using those gifts to escape this close fitting crypt of a life of mine and maybe even get myself some nice things.

Like a fancy new computer. Or a boyfriend.

At the very least, I should be able to use my awesome abilities to repair my punctured self worth so I can at least like myself and be happy to be myself most of the time.

Right now, I am kind of half way there. I start off good with, “I have incredible gifts of intellect, creativity, and personality… ” but then my depression butts in with, “WHICH I AM SQUANDERING PLAYING VIDEO GAMES ALL DAY WHILE DYING OH MY GOD I AM 50 AND HAVE DONE NOTHING WITH MY LIFE I AM SUCH A LOSER!!” and so forth and so on in a similar vein.

I guess I can’t really accept myself until I forgive myself.

Stick a pin in that, it seems important. I’ll get back to it later.

Back to the main question : why is it so hard for me to accept my abilities?

In the past, we have dealt with issues like being afraid of the responsibility. For a long time I have had this terrible suspicion that I am supposed to do something with all these gifts – that I owe that to the world.

And I can’t take that kind of pressure!

Never mind having no idea WHAT I am supposed to be doing.

And to be honest, I feel like the world owes me a lot,. not the other way around. If the world was more generous to me, then I might feel like I have something to pay back.

I know that’s a “bad” attitude. And I don’t care.

Besides, the real issue, I think, is that when I think about my magical powers, it makes me want to do things with them, and that desire then gets caught in the sticky trap that is my anti-action bias and brother does that HURT.

And there’s still those infinite doors to deal with.

Another issue I have dealt with in the past is that I feel like accepting my elevated abilities takes me even further from the rest of humanity and my connection to my fellow humans is already incredibly weak and tenuous as is.

I am terrified that if I stretch it any further it will snap and I will float away forever. Never to see the ground again. Lost in the esoteric madness of the untethered mind.

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God it’s beautiful out today. Sunny but with enough of a breeze that it’s not too hot. Light clouds giving the sunlight that nostalgic glow from all my favorite childhood memories from those sun-drenched summers with me and my mother and my siblings all around.

And here I am, a cripple with a keyboard, typing about it instead of living it.

That’s so incredibly wrong. And I want to make it right.

But I am far too weak to get there by myself.

More after the break.

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Why so weak?

There has to be a physical component.

I mean, I am a very sick man. Diabetes, sleep apnea, depression, whatever the fuck is wrong with my legs, and so on and etc.

Oh, and heart troubles. Can’t forget that ticking fucking time bomb.

So I certainly have a lot of reasons to feel physically weak. Like whatever bucket is supposed to hold my strength has a huge hole in it and the strength of my body and my spirit just flows right back out again.

If I could just get at and fix whatever the damned problem is that puts that hole in my bucket and fix it (and fix it), maybe I could get some wholesome strength going and feel a lot more human for a change.

That would probably involve me learning to live with CPAP. Sleep apnea sure as fuck can make a fella feel weak.

And I know I sleep like crap in general. Never sleeping for more than a couple of hours at a time, not nearly enough deep REM sleep, and so on.

Yet I feel like that’s not it. And not just because I don’t want to go another round with CPAP,. I don’t think.

I am worried that it’s my heart. That the narrowing of my cardiac arteries that caused me to need to have stents put in a couple of years ago has gotten worse and the blood flow through my heart is fucked up and that’s why I feel so weak all the time.

That’s not the only possible culprit. It could be that despite having improved my diet, I am still rocking a severe vitamin B12 deficiency because my body lost the enzymes that metabolize B12 when I was an accidental vegan for a while.

Guess I need one of those probiotic drinks.

And of course, I can’t ignore the psychological side of things either. I’d rather it was something physical because those are a hell of a lot easier to fix.

I can’t go to VGH to get stents implanted in my soul, more’s the pity.

But depression and social anxiety and Avoidant Personality Syndrome (my Rolodex of crazy just keeps getting longer) can make you feel weak too, and I sometimes wonder if what I lack is not B12 but character.

One of the ways out of this vacuous valley of mine would be to just give in to my family legacy of cussedness and become a perpetually pissed off dude.

I don’t want to be that guy. I love being sweet fluffy Fru. I’d miss him.

But being him might just be killing me, in body and/or in soul, and the way out of this death trap might just involve getting pissed off and staying that way.

I feel the temptation. That “mode” hangs there in my mind just waiting for me to give in and let it loose on the world.

But the carnage would be… I can’t do that to people. My friends are sensitive souls and that “mode” would hurt them so bad.

Maybe I could be lovably gruff? Like Doctor McCoy or Mel the cook on Alice? Or Lou Grant from Mary Tyler Moore?

I will think about it.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.,

But if you click here, you will.

Fair warning, though, this webcomic from way way back in the early 2000s is EXTREMELY dark and at times very gory and/or explicitly sexual.

It is also one of the most extraordinary artistic achievements I have ever experienced. Don’t let the funny cartoon animals fool you, like with Maus, they are used to tell a story far deeper, darker, and more emotionally penetrating than what can be done without using the power ot cartoon animals to bypass our emotional defenses.

They speak to the child in all of us. There is a reason everything aimed at children, especially preschoolers, is filled with cartoon animals.

It’s because we can relate to animals. In fact, before the age of five, animals make a lot more sense to us than adults ever do.

That’s why little Timmy or Tammy takes that little stuffed animal everywhere with them. It is their touchstone companion, an imaginary friend who can be or do or say whatever the child needs it to in order to help it cope with a very confusing world.

Not that I know this from experience. I never did any of that. No imaginary friends, no play-acting with toys, no little fluffy toy animal I took everywhere with me.

I was fucked up from the very start.

Anyhow, back to Jack.

To summarize the plot of a webcomic that went on for years is impossible. But the plots most often revolve around or involve the titular Jack, a resident of Hell who became the current incarnation of the sin of Wrath after going on a vengeful killing spree then getting killed by the cops.

Boy, the children’s cartoon practically writes itself, doesn’t it?

I was reminded of Jack when I was perusing Rule 34/furry porn and came across a character that looked really familiar.

So I clicked on the image to see who it was and lo and behold, my gut instinct had been right and it was fan art of a character from Jack.

Drip, meet everybody. Everybody, meet Drip.

But uh, don’t touch, kids. Trust me, he is NOT nice.

The memory of Jack having been invoked, I just had to find out if someone out there was hosting the original webcomic.

The last time I had checked, it was nowhere to be found, online or anywhere else. But that was well over a decade ago, and thank every star in a desert sky, since then someone has rectified that situation.

Now I am going to go through the whole series again, and this time, I am going to save every damned one of then to my hard drive.

Nobody is going to get between me and my Jack again. It had a profound effect on me and pretty much every other fur who read it Back In The Day.

And greedy old archivist that I am, that means I have to HAVE it!

More after the break.

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But that’s Impossible!

Just finished watching an episode of the original Mission : Impossible with Le Gang.

The details of the plot etc are not important, but it takes place in an unnamed South American country and starred the incredible BarBara Luna and the combination of these two factors guaranteed it an episode with a very high emotional temperature.

And that got me thinking about my own historically chilly nature and that whole English v. French, Northern European versus Mediterranean, Coolheaded versus Hotblooded, Ant versus Grasshopper thing that has preoccupied me for so long.

Because by default I am on Team Ant. I side with the practical, reasonable, sensible, pragmatic, and well grounded side of things. I prefer to deal with people like myself who are both hard of head and soft of heart and who can therefore focus on achieving high minded goals via practical means.

I want results, god damn it. Positive change. Nothing else will do.

But here’s the thing : I know that this is not the only “successful” approach to life. I might be an Ant but I know damned well that those Grasshoppers know things I do not and have a wisdom and an understanding of life that could do me a lot of good if I could only free myself of my narrow and earth-bound mindset.

I know that my deep understanding of and focus on the pragmatic realities of life can be as much a trap as it is a useful tool. It ties me far too strongly and deeply to the here and now and does not let my soul fly free so it can find a place for itself in the world outside the limitations of dreary quotidian reality.

I mean, what is the use of all this sensible logic and clarity of thought and mind if I am still unhappy? Maybe I could use a little nonsensical delusion in my life.

Where’s the joy? Where’s the fun? Where’s the spirit of celebration? My soul is a bright and beautiful bird in far too small a cage and it is crying to be set free.

But I am scared. Scared of everything this little coffin of mine keeps out. Scared of that big bad burgeoning world out there, all bright and busy and bustling away just waiting to flood into my mind and overwhelm me till I am lost forever.

Or at least that is how it feels. Like if I leave my cage the world will crush me.

And there is no way to let myself out without letting the world in. That’s the deal. And letting the world in will change me so much. It has to. It’s the only way I’ll survive.

And primitive critter that I am, it is hard for me to see that much of a change as anything but death. Or if not death, madness. Chaos. A move totally beyond my current understanding into a world where nothing makes sense any more and I have to start all over again, with the mind of a child, and build a better version of myself.

And that is a hell of a lot of ask of my sad little self. I want to transcend my current state of being. I want to level up my spirit. I want to finally grow.

But there is no paved road from here to there. No continuous path. At some point I am going to have to take a leap of faith into the unknown and I do not have any faith to leap with. I am bound by and bound to that which I know and understand.

And to go beyond that feels like chaos and madness and death to me.

So I drive around in big wide circles instead, searching for the easy offramp that I know damned well does not exist but too scared to go offroad in search of solace.

By my current understanding, you just plain can’t get there from here.

And yet, I have to get there somehow.

I am a thing without wings that must learn to fly.

But I am too scared to try.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

To live on the Altos Five research station was to live by the Gate.

Technically, it was Primary Airlock F10. But nobody called it that.

It opened when the sun rose and closed when the sun set 18 hours later, and that cycle was the iron law of life on Altos Five.

Because when that Gate opened, heat and oxygen from the station flooded into the shallow valley in which the station sat, and the energetically opportunistic local flora and fauna reacted to such sudden wealth by going through what, for it, would normally have been thousands of life cycles in those precious daylight hours.

Thus, it was during these hours that the people who lived there and who had brought this strange surplus with them when Altos was established a hundred years ago could scurry out and gather, hunt, farm, and otherwise do all the things so vitally needed to keep the 75,000 souls who lived there attached to their 75,000 respective bodies.

It was not supposed to be like this. Had everything gone as planned, all but a couple thousand stalwart citizens would never have set foot on the untamed surface of Altos Five because the station’s very advanced hydroponic and aeroponic gardens were more than capable of producing enough food for a million people, let alone 75,000, or so the manufacturer claimed.

In reality, the yields started off underwhelming and only got worse from there. And by the time it was clear that the whole damned system was going to die in less than five years, a massive civil war back on Earth was spreading like wildfire throughout Human Space, the civilization that had put them all there had collapsed, and it was equally clear that nobody was going to show up to fix those “gardens” any time soon.

Altos Five was on its own.

And that meant people were going to die.

What followed was their own pocket sized civil war which saw the population of the station drop to 30,000 over the space of 10 months as people fought over who would get to be among the “precious few” who would get whatever was left of the stored food once the gardens died for good.

Everyone knew what would have to happen once that ran out.

In the end, it was the very research they were there to do that saved them. A group of radical young scientists, engineers, and technicians hid away in a part of the station everyone thought was unlivable and dedicated themselves to one problem and one problem only : how to make the local flora and fauna edible.

In its native state, it was virulently toxic to Terran life. But our young heroes stubbornly refused to accept that, and worked day and night in their secret enclave to come up with an efficient way to neutralize the toxins and make what is left into food.

And that is what stopped the Rationing Wars. Our band of heroes suddenly showed up with brand new food in large amounts and the fighting stopped just as suddenly as it had started ten months earlier.

And it was as if they had all woken up from a terrible nightmare. The madness left them and finally people could take the time to grieve both for the dead and for themselves.

Nobody talked about that time, not even historians. Nor did they talk about all the suicides and killing sprees and outbreaks of random violence that came after.

Everyone knew it had happened, even though it wasn’t even taught in schools. But everyone born since then can, if drunk enough, and around the right people, tell you the story of how their parents took them to the secret graveyard where their ancestors were buried and how they got to be there.

Since then, they had been the people of the Gate. When the Gate opened, you rushed out to get as much done as possible.

And when it closed, you were either back inside, or your died.

There was no third option.

More after the break.

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The gate cont’d

There could be no third option because if the Gate was still open when the sun was fully set, everyone would die, inside or out.

The nights were so cold on Altos Five that they could freeze the oxygen and moisture right out of the air… and out of your body.

And despite everyone having grown up under these conditions, the Gate still claimed about a dozen lives every year.

Not bad for a mobile population of over 60K going in and out every day.

But ask the families of those who died if those are “acceptable” losses.

And then there were the questions in everyone’s eyes. What did they do wrong? Why weren’t they inside on time? What was wrong with them? What HAPPENED?

It all boiled down to one real question : could it happen to me? Or can I safely tell myself I would never do what they did?

The people of Altos Five talked big about how they were tough and rugged survivors and how they (especially the men) would never get caught “outside in the dark”.

But when the Gate actually took someone, not even the biggest talkers of them all would breathe a single word that would suggest the departed was somehow inferior.

No matter how they died, you bowed your head, said it was a tragedy, and kept your damned mouth shut about the how and why.

If the family wanted to share that information, they would.

But you sure as shit didn’t ask.

And time was long past the point where they kicked up a fuss, held ceremonies, and talked a lot of crap about how the dead were “martyrs” and “heroes”.

That maudlin Americanski bullshit was never going to fly with the serious minded and taciturn Altosians of today.

These days, people just did their jobs and kept to themselves and their kin. Public events were rare and attended mostly out of a sense of duty.

A popular columnist summed it up thus : the modern Altosian commemorates much, but celebrates absolutely nothing.

And so, they survived.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Consider this an exercise in wanting things.

What would my life be like if I had everything I need?

Well I’d have a job, obviously. A career. Probably my own small company or business of some sort. Something that can be done from the home via Zoom and email and whatnot, but that also gave me a reason to get the heck out there now and then.

Home is a lot homier when you go out now and then for contrast.

Not sure what I would be doing for a living, exactly, but it would definitely involve my creative talents in a big way. So I would be a writer of some sort, maybe for a big time TV show like The Simpsons, or even my very own sitcom or animated series.

Hey, if you’re gonna dream, dream big, right?

I might be producing and/or directing instead or as well. I’m very talented and extremely controlling, so rising to the executive level of entertainment seems inevitable.

How else am I supposed to make sure people actually do things right? *twitch*

And speaking of home, I would be living in a home pretty much like the one I grew up in. Master bedroom, plenty of guest bedrooms, good sized kitchen and dining area, and a lounging area set up for cozy conversations and/or group media viewing.

And probably some stuff we didn’t have when I was a kid, like a rec room for games of all sorts, a sunroom for lovely green living things, a spa and sauna, and probably a modest sized swimming pool in which I would finally learn to swim.

Oh. And the fuck palace. Obviously.

And speaking of fucking, I would of course be sharing this domain with my husband, and possibly a rotating cast of live-in guests.

Like I have said before, I want to collect people. Not in a giant bell jar sense, of course, but in the sense of finding good people whose company I enjoy and giving them a place to stay where they are safe, comfortable, and supported.

Create a sanctuary for my particular breed of weirdo, more or less.

My husband would be someone I can be comfortable with. Someone I can cuddle and converse with for hours and hours and feel perfectly relaxed and safe the whole time. Someone who understands both what I say and how badly I need to say it. Someone whom I can connect with without either of us getting freaked out and running away.

Them being sexy to me and vice versa would be a plus. I would certainly be fucking a lot more in my perfect life. The exact details of that are unknown, whether it would be my keeping a stable of studly sex workers busy, or having a little black book of paramours, or making one man deliriously happy. Or whatever.

Oh, another feature of our home : pets. Critters. Two or three medium sized doggos, at least a half dozen cats, and a small menagerie of more exotic fare.

Nothing I have to keep in a cage, though. Unless I can afford VERY big cages.

Oh, and the whole place would be designed and decorated to be cozy, comfortable, and casually clean and tidy.

My ideal living space would have nothing in it which makes me sad. Only happy, life-affirming, joyful things allowed!

I am, however, realistic about how possible that is.

So I would settle for “nothing in it that actively pisses me off. ”

That’s everything I can think of at the moment.

More after the break.

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More about my dream life

I had another topic, but then I forgot it, so what the hell, let’s keep this ball rolling.

One thing to be clear about in regards to my dream home : I don’t give a crap what other people think of it, apart from wanting my guests to be comfortable.

But I sure as fuck don’t care about snob appeal or whether people think my living arrangements are “tasteful” or not. Or what other rich people think of me.

I will do things exactly as I please, and those who work for me will need to keep that fact firmly in mind so that they don’t invoke my displeasure by trying to tell me how they think I should be doing things.

You can tell me how I might make something more pleasing to myself. But that is literally the only criterion that matters.

And that goes triple for my money. I will spend it as I please. I will never surrender control to the professional grifters who are eager to tell me how MY money is better off in THEIR hands and that the whole thing is way too complicated and boring for me to be bothered with so I should just trust them.

Bullshit I will. Look, assholes, if I don’t understand it, I don’t sign it. And I do not trust anybody like that.

And I am perfectly happy to let my money sleep in all day in a bank account rather than have one of you pinheaded weasels try to “make it work for me”.

Money doesn’t work. People work. Money is just an incentive.

Call me a socialist but that’s what I believe.

Back to my living arrangement. One thing I am uncertain about is exactly how much space I would be taking up.

My homey tendencies lean heavily towards coziness and intimacy. A sprawling mansion with its own area code would not work for me at all, at least on that level.

But when I look at the various facilities I listed in part 1, I realize that they are not all going to fit in the old family home at 135 Belmont Street.

Throw in things I didn’t mention, like space to hold events and other large gatherings, and it all adds up to something fairly mansion like.

Plus, I mean, I have no idea how much space the fuck palace would take up.

So I am forced to admit that the place would have to be pretty big, and my agoraphobia does not like that at all.

I suspect there to be a hard limit to how much space I can consider “home” and anything outside that limit will be hostile territory as far as my phobia is concerned.

So I would have to either cut down on the facilities or make peace with the idea that no matter how big the place gets, odds are I will spend time in only a portion of it.

Neither option makes me happy.

I guess even in the self-indulgent fantasies of oral retentive fat dudes, compromises must be made and you can’t have everything you want.

Which is kinda sad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Only with self-control. So far.

Here’s the (relatively) skinny of it : I feel like I am turning into my late father, Larry Donald Bertrand, in the worst possible way.

Namely, by becoming as impatient and irritable and downright cranky as him, It’s a process that has been going on for years now, and I am afraid it is inexorably and irretrievably linked with my recovery from depression.

Basically, the saner I get, the less repressed my emotions become (and vice versa, natch) and a large portion of those emotions have to do with repressed anger.

And as that anger comes to light, I am very reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I am, in fact, one grumpy motherfucker.

I base that on all the things I don’t say and how close I come to saying them,

Pretty much all the time I am on my feet and in motion with Joe or Julian, snappish and impatient comments are popping into my head and it really feels like the older I get, the closer those undesirable sentimentv come to escaping confinement.

Pain is the biggest factor, I think. That’s why this shit only happens when I am up and moving. If I am sitting comfortably in the living room or across the table at Denny’s with my friends, I am my usual charming and affable self.

And I have always figured that pain was the main reason old people are cranky. Chronic and/or constant pain can turn anyone into a raging misanthrope.

Dunno what my father’s excuse was, though. Having to put up with himself, I guess.

He was a pain, alright.

And along with the physical pain comes more psychological elements such as frustration at how complicated and irritating my disabled legs make things and the humiliation that comes with that.

Having to get around via walker attracts attention in a way my social anxiety does not like. At all.

Being able to go unnoticed is a big part of how I cope with my anxiety. But now everyone is paying attention to me.

It’s just good that I hardly ever go anywhere alone any more, so I usually have Joe and/or Julian with me to help me stay grounded.

Anyhow, back to my being cranky.

I feel like my road to redemption necessarily leads me closer to the heart of my madness, the very throbbing and incandescent nuclear meltdown at the core of my being that I have spent so much of my life and my time and my energy and my potential and my soul and my spirit keeping buried.

In fact, I feel like my life trajectory right now is best summed up thusly :

And that means risking becoming someone I don’t want to be, at least temporarily. All of my depression’s tricks have to be broken and denied, and that includes the biggest one, “but if you do that you’ll turn into an asshole!”.

So be it, then. I don’t want to go there but I can’t let the risk stop me any more.

Maybe deep down, I really AM an asshole,

Then my job is not to deny that, but to overcome it.

More after the break,

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More about Larry

I do miss my father now that he’s dead.

But it’s a hard thing for me to process because I hadn’t seen him in like 30 years when he died and that was not entirely an accident.

I spent my whole life with him firmly cast in the role of the villain. All us kids were scared of him because of his volatile temper.

This meant none of us ever really got close to him, and in hindsight, that seems tragic. He was very alone in our family, and yes, it was his own fault, but a part of me still wishes I had understood him then the way I understand him now and maybe been able to reach out to him more and find the good in him, and bring it out.

Too late now. I’m 50. He’s dead. Probably would not have worked anyhow because abusers gotta abuse. It’s an integral part of how they cope with life.

That is why they can never admit they were wrong. In order to keep the sweet release of anger from abusing people going, they have to be able to continuously cast themselves in the role of the righteously aggrieved victim no matter how absurd that in a house where everyone has to walk on eggshells around them in fear of their wrath.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. He and I actually got along quite well when it was just me and him. We would watch the news together and he would fall asleep and then I would creep over like a ninja to steal the remote but the moment I changed the channel he would wake up and say, “I was watching that!”. LOL.

That’s when I instituted my “if you snore, you’re asleep” policy. I just found it hilarious how he felt the need to defend his “territory” even when he wasn’t using it.

No, you see, it is vitally important that the thing I wanted to watch be playing while I sleep and totally ignore it!

But yeah it was not all bad between me and Dad. But it was pretty damn bad.

After all, I am the one who chased him from the dinner table with a blistering verbal counterattack to his goddamned tirades.

I suppose that is where I got my urge to teach the value of the protection of the rule of civilization to those who seem to think they are better off without them.

Now that I have proven that, when provoked, I am twenty times the predator that you are by thoroughly kicking your ass, would you like to revisit those social Darwinist statements about survival of the fittest you made earlier?

By such crude but necessary actions are the walls of civilization defended.

The short version : do not assume that a lack of rules means you win. Those rules protect you from me as much as they protect them from you.

Or as Rock and Hyde put it,

Brilliant album, by the way. I highly recommend it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have an idea fluttering around in my head that I can’t quite get to settle down in one spot long enough for me to articulate it, so as an experiment, I am going to start writing regardless and hope it comes to me while I am doing other things.

Let’s see… well I made it through the first chapter of the newly enhanced main campaign of Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous this morning.

This means I have finished kicked the demons out of Kenebres, the city you start in, and I am getting ready to take the show on the road with the armies Queen Galfrey just entrusted me with (gulp!) in order to retake the demon occupied fortress city of Drezen, and once more make it MY god damned city.

Technically, my character doesn’t know that yet. But I do. I miss my war room and my bedroom and ruling my little kingdom, and I am going to get it all back, god dammit!

Second playthroughs are fun like that.

And I am finding that, while I clearly remember the broad strokes of what is going to happen, I have forgotten most of the fine details, and therefore playing through again is not nearly as much of a drag as I feared it would be.

So that’s all for the good.

And the new companion character, Ulbrig, is crazy hot.

He’s a big bear of a dude who can turn into a… griffin.

Bear would have been a bit too obvious. Not that I would have complained.

Bears are crazy hot too. Woof indeed.

Come to think of it, so are griffons… *ahem*.

The attraction is mostly physical. He has a more or less generic burly Viking sort of personality (battle-hungry, boisterous, barbaric) so there is not a lot to him so far.

But apparently Chapter 2 is where the whole “Last Of The Sarkorians” plotline really takes off, so there might be many high quality character moments to come for him.

And until then, I still have my Lann to drool over.

To be honest, if I can figure out how to romance Lann this time, Ulbrig will disappear from my mind like summer haze.

Fickle, aren’t I?

What can I say, Lann’s got everything. He’s smart, courageous, a natural leader, his face is half lizard, he has a very sexy sardonic wit…

Look, it’s a high fantasy setting. You’re bound to get some people with half lizard faces And tails. And horns.

You can’t afford to be too fussy!

Besides, I’m a furry. He could be all lizard and I wouldn’t bat an eye.

Here he is :

Well this experiment is a bust. Not only did I not capture whatever thought was fluttering around in my mind, I don’t have any idea what it even was any more.

I guess it got away.

Oh well. Remember that the only failed experiment is one that does not produce a result. This one produced a definite resul : don’t do that.

More after the break.

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A long walk in the woods

That’s kind what I feel I am doing lately. Walking through the forests of my inner world, trying not to give in to panic because I don’t know where I am and I don’t know which was is up, or out, or anything really. Trying instead to let my mind expand to encompass all of my environment in a natural, easy way instead of trying to impose order on everything before trying to understand it.

That kind of thing has its place, but that place ain’t here. Not now.

And you know, it’s good for me to remember that there are other ways of understanding your world and your place in it besides my narrow minded , lopsided, “analyze everything” point of view of the past.

It’s a great way to think but it’s no way to live.

And even as I struggle to give birth to a greater level of consciousness within myself, I can feel the wrongness of how I am now. I can feel the blackness and the blankness where my heart and soul should be. I can sense the sparking, flailing ends of neural pathways cut off before they could reach the parts of me that are still deeply asleep, and I can feel the rising panic as I become increasingly aware of how dead I’ve been.

That’s a tricky one. I have to raise my awareness of how deep my damage goes in order to fix it. Indeed, I have to pump more energy into those busted neural pathways if I am to bring those parts of me back to life, and that is going to hurt like hell before it does me any good.

Pins and needles, folks.

But I have to balance my awareness against my tendency to panic. The path to redemption always leads through very scary territory and I will have to keep a very firm grip on myself in order to keep moving and not get freaked out by it all.

I know I will keep moving no matter what, though. To be honest, I don’t know how to stop. That stubborn little spark in me that keeps me going no matter what, the same one that saw me through all those lonely years of school with nobody to rely on but myself, will keep on goading me forward no matter what happens.

And I know what I am looking for in this dark forest. Kinda. I want to find my real motivation and my true identity and my heart’s desires and everything else about finding the real me that you can think of.

And when all is said and done, I will have rid myself of all my senseless baggage and what remains will be a happy, shiny, solid, gleaming, irreducible me in all my glory.

And it… I,, will be amazing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.