…except that which we make.

There is nothing about being a good person that makes bad things any less likely to happen to a person. And there is nothing about being a bad person that makes good things any less likely to happen to a person.

This is unquestionably true. There is no rational connection between the purity of your actions and the random hand of fate. Good and bad behaviour have an effect on your fellow human beings and what they are likely to do, but when it comes to the kind of things that can make or break you life out of nowhere, nothing can protect you.

I mean, Michael J. Fox got MS, for fuck’s sake. Robin Williams got a brain disease so painful that it drove him to suicide.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is still rich.

And the thing is, we all know there is no inherent justice to the universe. And yet, this truth is so intolerable to the human spirit that entire major religions have been invented, in part, just to give people a reason to deny it.

Hence the whole idea of a just afterlife, for example Heaven and Hell. That way even though we can all see the lack of justice in this world, we can at least take comfort in the idea that all scores will be settled and all debts will be paid when we die.

Not particularly plausible, but you can’t prove it ISN’T true, and that is good enough for religion, or conspiracy theories, or alien abductions, or anything else human beings use to make a terrifyingly complex world seem more manageable.

The real problem with the true, justice free nature of the universe is that it means that there is nothing we, personally, can do to keep these bad fates from befalling us.

The only thing protecting us, if it can be considered protection, is luck.

It’s a truth that forces us to confront the limits of our personal power. And that is a very rough thing to confront if you are the product of an individualist society who has been raised to believe that we are all authors of our own fate, able to shape our destinies however we please if we only want it bad enough.

This is also patently absurd. I can be a lot of things but no amount of wishing will make me a concern ballterina.

Plus, that “believe in yourself” bullshit I was force fed throughout my childhood is merely a way to sneak that old “just world fallacy” in through the back door.

After all, if everyone can be whatever they want to be, then whatever they are, they chose to be that way, and you don’t have to feel bad for them, right?

They should have just chosen to be rich, like me!

The truth is that some people get lucky when it comes to the circumstances of their birth and some do not.

And before you start thinking I am only talking about the Donald Trumps of the world, remember that you did nothing to deserve being born in a globally rich, peaceful, enlightened, well educated, and prosperous nation, either.

We are all rich and we are all poor to someone.

And how fair is that?

More after the break.

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All too sweet

Got a nasty surprise when I went to order my groceries today.

Like a lot of sites, Instacart gets you to rate the previous use of the site when you log in. So for example, when I log in to Skip the Dishes, they ask me to rate both the last restaurant I ordered from through them and how good a job their “courier” did in delivering that food to me.

So I am rating my previous week’s grocery delivery when it asks me to rate the substitution my driver made.

What substitution? I wondered as I clicked.

Turn out my driver make a little switch : instead of my usual sugar free Werther’s Originals, she gave me the full fucking sugar kind.

Gee, no wonder these “new” candies tasted so much better than the “old” ones. They were full of fucking sugar!!!!

I’ve been eating those all week, although not that many because the flavour, while super delicious, was quite a lot richer than I was used to, so I took it slow.

At least, that’s why I thought the “new” ones made me feel ill.

Needless to say, I am super fucking pissed off about this. I have been poisoning myself for weeks with these fucking things.

Then there’s the idiot(s) who delivered today’s order. First, they only found 7 of the 12 items I ordered, but that’s not their fault, there’s a strike at the port and the shelves are pretty empty all over the place.

Like the whole shipping industry is saying, “Hey, remember boats?”

What DO blame the fucking idiot driver for, though, is not only leaving my grocery order outside the front door of my apartment building instead of actually getting it to the apartment door like they are supposed to, even though they knew that it had one of these in it and it’s fricking July :

…but they also didn’t bother to call us on the apartment phone to tell us they had made the delivery in the first place!

Mother FUCKER. What is wrong with these people? Either they think apartment buildings are really big houses or they know they are supposed to deliver it to my apartment door but can’t be bothered to do it because actually doing their fucking job takes too long and is too much of a hassle.

Same thing happens with Skip too.

So now I am in an angry, cranky, hostile, and suspicious mood because I apparently can’t trust people to do even the bare minimum of their jobs correctly and now I have yet another thing to watch out for and to be honest, this is exactly how people like me end up bitter misanthropes who yell a lot.

And I don’t wanna go there.

I don’t want to end up like my father.

But people keep pulling this shit…..

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow

Did the Therapy Thursday thing one day early today (so… Wistfulness Wednesday?) due to my therapist having to travel tomorrow.

One of the things that came up was how I am trying to wake up that hot, bright, living core buried under all my layers of icy intellectualism and emotional evasion.

And I feel like I am doing that, in a sense, by pumping energy into that tender area at the core of my being where the Great Wound lies, and in doing so, in a sense, sending that energy back in time.

After all, that Great Wound Incident that birthed that poor scared little fox inside me happened when I was only four years old and so whatever I do to heal myself has to reach all the way back then in my personal subjective history.

That is also where what is left of the little boy I was before the rape can be found, and I am going to need to draw on his energy and his innocence pretty heavily in order to have some kind of place to start my renewal.

One can only cleanse with clean waters, after all.

The metaphor I used in today’s session was one I have used here many times before – what it is like when your hand falls asleep.

Once you notice it, you immediately start trying to wake it back up again because, even though it being asleep is not very painful, you know that the lack of sensation from that part of your body means something is VERY WRONG and you panic a little from the need to fix that issue PRONTO even though doing so will hurt.

Well a hell of a lot of my mind has been asleep for a long time. Not dead, like I have said before, but asleep – like it’s in suspended animation or coldsleep.

Very, very coldsleep.

And waking it up is going to hurt like hell. Pins and needles of the SOUL, mes amis, And none of the sleeping flesh I am trying to defibrulate back to life is going to wake up in a good mood. And at first, the temptation to go back to the peace of deathlike sleep will be very strong, but I know I won’t give in.

Because I truly don’t give a shit if I hurt any more. Bring it. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Temporary pain is a small price to pay for the permanent release of toxic demons from my very backed up personal Hell.

Catharsis is almost always worth whatever you pay to get it.

Besides, it’s high time I made all this numbness work for me. It can absorb the pain for me as I try to reanimate all my dormant human potential.

Whatever pain I feel as a result of my resurrection is nothing compared to how much I lust for the release of all this half-frozen poisonous BULLSHIT I have been carrying around like a backpack for 45 plus years,

Jesus, no wonder I have back pain issues.

More after the break.

---

Scared little fox

Let’s dig a little deeper into that wound while it’s still open.

I don’t want to. Which is why I am going to.

I sorta kinda tried to explain the whole fox thing to Doctor Costin today. Obviously I can’t really get the full idea across to him without explaining all of furry fandom to him, and I tried that once, and it did not go well.

Too many missing common reference points. Not his fault, we are of very different generations. At the time, he didn’t even use the internet much.

No way I can relate to that.

It made me realize just what a massive edifice of the mind furry fandom has become. It’s such a deep and integral part of me that I don’t think about it much, but to even contemplate trying to explain it to somebody makes me realize just how much shared context and mutual understanding is involved.

But I think I got the bare gist of the idea across to him.

The important thing at this stage is to concentrate on just how much I love the little guy. I love my sad, scared little freaked out foxy so much that I want to put him in my lap and pet him and groom him and make him feel all warm and comfy and safe forever.

In a weird way, I feel like I am on a mission to rescue him. Like this is one of those heartbreaking scenarios where someone is trapped somewhere and the rescuers can see them but can’t actually get to them yet.

Hang in there, little buddy. Help is here at last. It might take me a while to clear away all the rubble and rocks that lie between us but I swear that I am not going to stop digging for you until I can finally pull you into the present with me and keep you forever more.

In the meantime, take my love. Take my passion and my warmth too. Borrow my strength and my courage and my conviction if you need them. Know that I will not stop fighting for you no matter what because I am you, and you are me, and we are we, and we deserve a better life.

And I’m on the right path now, little foxy. The one that leads to us being reunited after having lost one another for so long. Once we are together again, we can help make one another whole at long last, and be together as one.

Sorry I lost you for so long. I took a lot of very wrong turns, and got lost myself.

Sorry you were out there all alone in the cold and the dark and the rain for all those years. It has taken me this long just to remember you exist.

But once we are together again, we are together forever. That’s a promise.

Nobody will ever abandon you again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tired of a lot of things. But mostly myself.

I’m so very tired of being such a spaz. I’m always knocking things off other things, or dropping them, or bumping into things, or other klassic klutz moves.

I’m tired of the pain and I am tired of the damage and I am tired of the mess but I am mostly just tired of the humiliation.

To keep fucking up like that despite how hard I try to get things right is depressing, disappointing, and dispiriting.

Clearly this is something beyond my control, seeing as I have had this problem for my entire life and I am fucking 50. Those motor deficiencies I was diagnosed with when I was young were never successfully corrected, and I 40+ years later, I am still stuck with them making life harder for me every day.

No wonder I am so reluctant to engage with reality. It doesn’t go well for me.

Leave me in my world of the mind, where I am nimble and agile and strong. Where I can act with great power and precision and hold to a very high standard of performance. far beyond what the average person can do.

But leave me out of the everyday actions of the here and now.

That’s one of the things I actually liked about being in the hospital around a year ago. Everything just came to me. Meals, help getting around when I needed it, medications, people I could talk to for a bit as they took my blood or whatever.

It’s an oral retentive dream come true, really. All the comforts of infancy.

Anyhow,. besides being tired of dealing with my own bullshit, I am just plain tired. When I woke up from a nap at around midnight last night, I could feel this blanket of malaise hanging on to me, and it hasn’t let up since.

So I figure I must be fighting off some kind of infection. That’s usually what this kind of feeling means. My nose has also been running a bit and I feel a touch feverish.

But then again, it IS mid-July, so that could just be the heat.

Regardless, I am going to do my best to keep up with my hydration needs and I am going to try to grab whatever genuine nutrition I can get my hands on to give my immune system everything it needs to win the war on whatever bug I got.

Speaking of hydration, I am pondering buying a water cooler.

And by that, I mean the kind that actually cools the water, not those fake “water coolers” that are just fancy stands for those big bottles of water.

Fuck that. I have all the room temperature water I want, thanks. If this thing is to justify its existence, it has to get me COLD water.

Or maybe I could get an ice maker instead. Or try and fix the mini fridge that has been gathering dust in my bedroom for many years now.

Or say fuck it all, and get an air conditioner for this room.

That would be, in a certain brutal sense, the most elegant solution.

Demand for cold water to drink would go way down if it wasn’t so fucking HOT.

More after the break.

---

Return of the fox

When last we met in these hallowed pages, I had finally broken down and admitted the scared little animal in my head was a fox.

I avoided that for a long time, I think because adding a fox to anything raises the emotional stakes enormoulsly and I was already dealing with the very pith and marrow of my being so why turn the volume up any further?

But now I am ready for that level of emotional intensity. In fact, I think in this case, the strong emotional impact foxed have on me can be a very useful tool in getting past my usual defenses and maybe get closer to the heart of the matter.

It might even help me with my tendency to pretentiously intellectualize.

So I admit it. That scared little animal that has been living like a fugitive in my head ever since I was raped as a child is most definitely a fox.

He’s not Fruvous. Fruvous is another version of me, one free of all accidents of birth and circumstance so he can be free to express his (my) flamboyantly fluffy nature.

But I will note, in passing, that the backstory for Fruvous that has been in my head ever since I invented him waaaaaaaaaay back in the early 90’s involves him being on the run from galactic law enforcement most of the time.

Makes ya wonder, dunnit?

But no, this inner fox is not Fruvous. Not yet anyhow. I am leaving the door open for integrating more of my life story into Fruvous but for now I prefer to leave him as his happy waggy fluffy foxy self, without my heavy burdens.

That way I can still use him to escape.

No, this little fox in me is another fox entirely. He… well he’s this fox.

That was not easy for me to reveal. For obvious reasons, that part of the song also has a strong emotional effect on me.

But you know what? That’s a good thing. If there is a way out of this maze of mine, it will only be found by feeling things.

So anything I can use to penetrate the wreath of ice around my heart is a good thing. It connects me with my real emotional core and wakes it up from its cold slumber to remind me that I am alive, dammit, and that there is a real person with feelings and instincts and needs under all that intellectual bullshit, someone who is as vulnerable and needy and in need of love as anyone else.

Looks like I am human after all.

And it took a fox to show me that.

Figures, doesn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a breakthrough of sorts on my age old issue of wondering how much of me is “real” and how much is “performance”.

Recent developments have made it clear to me that there is a “real me” hiding in the deep dark shadows in the center of my being.

I can’t see it yet, but I know it is very scared and cold and lonely and freaking out from anxiety and paranoia most of the time and it is not at all a healthy critter.

It’s been running for so long that it’s forgotten how to stop.

And that poor little creature is the closest thing I have to a “real me” because it exists far below all the other layers of my being, right at the very heart of this whole operation, and I can tell it has been there for a very long time.

46 years, in fact. Sinced the day I was raped.

And yet, I hesitate to call that poor thing the “real” me because there is so much more to me than that. I have done a lot of growing since it was born

Not nearly as much as I should have, thanks to that terrible day, but still.

So I am willing to accept that our runaway fox character is in a sense the original me and the point of origin for all I am now, but that’s not the same as being the “real” me any more than the acorn was the “real” oak tree.

Still, you have to feel real bad for the little fella, don’t you?

I have been trying to talk him down for a long time now, and little by little, it works. He becomes more relaxed, more trusting, more comfortable, and less liable to be scared by his own shadow.

It’s slow going, though. Just like everything else. Sigh.

I wish I could just pick him up and cuddle him and stroke those cute lil ears and give him everything he needs and tell him everything is going to be okay now, he’s finally safe at home, and he never has to face it all alone again.

He’s been so very alone for such a long, long time. Nobody to rely on. Nobody he trusts to be there for him even when he is at his craziest and being near him unshielded put even veteran professional therapists into a blind panic.

Nobody he could turn to for guidance, or advice, or even a sympathetic ear. Hiding from the cold cruel world in the only place he feels safe, video games.

And yet nobody knows how much he suffers because he never lets his suffering show. Around others he is warm and friendly and cute and all the rest.

But when he is all alone, he cries frozen tears.

He is so closed off from the world that he had to invent a way to basically talk to himself for three or four hours a day via blogging just to get the words and feelings out.

He knows he needs to open up and connect with people. But he is so, so scared.

More after the break

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On letting it show

And why I, um…. don’t.

It doesn’t make sense, at least on the surface, that I hide my pain like it’s a state secret. It’s not like I have even been particularly stoic or macho. I am not trying to project an image of infallible strength and I have never thought of myself as being afraid to show weakness or be vulnerable.

And yet, it cannot be denied that I have hidden inside my smooth façade for as long as I can remember. I am never totally vulnerable with anyone, not even my shrink, and it would be fair to say that I hide inside a shifting persona where not even I know what is real and what is mere illusion.

And this is not an accident. Deep internalized fear makes me need to be that kind of moving target, where my predators can’t tell where I am in all that mist and fog.

But they know that wherever they think I am, they’re wrong. And if they try to grab me. all they will grab is air.

That’s the idea, anyhow. And that might all make sense if I was some kind of super spy.

But I’m just some mentally ill dude whose pursuers are entirely imaginary and who therefore hardly needs to go to such lengths just to be “safe”.

Besides, it is impossible to be “safe” when you are locked in a cage with a lunatic and that lunatic is you.

Real safety would come from letting that fucker out. Then maybe I could get some peace and quiet, maybe even some restful sleep.

That would be so nice.

But I shudder to think of what “he” would do if set loose.

I mean, I get where Mister Hyde and the Hulk come from. They come from Jekyll and Banner’s deep well of repressed id and they would cease to exist if their respective “better halves” could loosen up and not be so goddamned neurotic.

And I am in that same rather leaky boat. I have an enormous reservoir of raw id energy that seethes and roils in a cavern deep inside me, and I am scared of what I might turn into if that ticking time bomb ever explodes.

And I know that is probably bullshit. This imaginary Mister Hyde version of myself, callous and manipulative and cruel, is most likely just an illusion my depression uses to keep me from messing with its power source and keep me repressing away.

Odds are that if I opened up the outflow valves on that reservoir of raging id, there would be a bad period at first but I would soon adjust rebalance my mind.

Only this time. with a lot less emotional toxic waste to deal with.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? And I swear I am gonna do it!

The second it stops being so scary.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Came across this on my YouTube feed and fell in love :

Enjoy the fall.

That is definitely my brand of emo adjacent metal. Speaks to my pain in a voice just enough like my own to be comforting.

Any more than that and it would get creepy.

Feeling relatively okay today. Experiencing serial sleepiness, which can be frustrating because it means that I nap, get up for an hour or so, then I am sleepy again.

I’m trying to remain Zen about it and not get all pissed off and start whining about how I don’t want to sleep I want to DO STUFF.

Oh yeah? Since when? Admit it, what I mean is that I want to play video games.

And seeing as sleeping is actually marginally more productive (at least I get rest out of it), “missing out” on the “opportunity” to play my games seems less than tragic.

Then again, it could be said that progress in video games is the only kind of progress my life makes. Everything else suffers the slow but constant death of stasis.,

Life isn’t supposed to stay the same. It’s grow, or die.,

Guess which one I’ve chosen,

It’s so hard for me to truly imagine life outside the shelter of my video game addiction. There are all kinds of more enriching things I “could” be doing – but I can’t.

Not really. Not without one hell of a lot of pain and fear and change. Not without a leap of faith that seems far beyond my capacities right now.

I don’t even have any faith, let alone enough to power so much as a tiny hop.

I am not capable of belief without evidence. I get the idea – some things are believed not because they are “true” but because it is better to believe them.

That’s what faith boils down to, in the end.

And that make perfect sense to me until I try to imagine myself being part of that.

I can’t. I just plain can’t.

From the point of view of the faithless, faith is insanity. As far as I can tell consciously, everything I believe to be true is backed up by a reason to believe it, and all those reasons intertwine to make my understanding ot the world.

There are gaps. After all, not even I know everything. The difference is that I don’t fill those gaps with faith. I leave them open, no matter what.

Which is all noble and rugged and shit, but the truth is that a cold wind blows through those gaps and causes a deep existential pain like a toothache of the soul and that kind of thing can really take a toll on your spirit.

This is why so many atheists are angry, bitter people. It has nothing to do with the people of faith in the world and everything to do with the fact that science cannot possibly provide the kind of solace, strength, comfort, and all the rest that faith can.

Blaming that pain on the religious isn’t an act of principle.

It’s an act of envy, and you know it.

More after the break.

Faith and belief

Yup, I’m still going on about that.

I feel like it is a very important issue in my growth and recovery. Like I have reached not a crossroads but an offramp, one that seemingly leads off the edge of a cliff, and I have to somehow find a way to hit that ramp with enough speed to get me to the other side of the cliff even though I can’t even see the other side from here.

Or maybe I am supposed to be able to hit the ramp and just…. fly away. Leave the whole practical issue behind and soar above it all. Fly off into the sunset.

I really have no idea. This is very unfamiliar territory to me.

And the thing is, it feels like everyone else can fly like that without even thinking about it. They can cross bridges I can’t see and that won’t be there if I try to cross and they do it so naturally and so easily that they have no idea why I am stuck on the wrong side of the gap, staring over the edge of the cliff, trying hard to figure out how the hell they do it.

But I know that’s wrong. I can feel my spirit banging on the bars of the cage of supposed “logic” and “reason” it has been trapped in for so very long and trying to tell me that it is dying in there and I have to find a way to let it out.

Because my “rational” point of view might have the virtue of being internally and externally consistent with all verifiable evidence and is therefore “true” in that limited sense, but that doesn’t mean it is what is best for my soul.

And that is, in the end, where my illness lies. Not in my bad brain chemistry or my traumatic past or the endless convolutions of my tortured mind but at the very root of my being down in what I call my soul.

There is a terrible rot in that core of mine, one that stems from that primary trauma of being raped when I was but four years old, That horrific act left a wound too big to heal and so I have had to live with it and deal with it my entire life.

That wound has festered in me and infected and toxified so much of my being that it is hard to know where I end and the trauma begins.

But it is not me. I am not my trauma. I am not my pain. I am not my wound.

They are just bad things I have to deal with, nothing more.

They do not define who I am, even if they sometimes seem to stretch from horizon to horizon to horizon all around.

There is far more to life than they can encompass, and I will reach out to that bigger and better world and let it tow me out of this cesspit.

I am not alone. There are people here with me, even when I can’t feel them. They love me and want me to be well and wish they knew what they could do to help me.

Don’t despair, my dearest ones. It may seem like I am on my only lonely little planet somewhere far off in space, and that I don’t even know you love me.

But I do know. I can’t always feel it due to the sickness in my soul, but I do know you are out there and I want desperately to be there with you but for now it is too cold, far too cold, for me to join you.

But some day I will.

And in the meantime, you give me a warm and welcoming home to strive for.

There is something wonderful waiting for me when I finally thaw out.

And that wonderful thing, dear friends, is you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Remember how I have joked that it has been so long since I started paying Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous that at this point I could start the main game over again and it would almost seem fresh and new?

Well, about that….

Last night, I finally gave up on getting the Midnight Isles DLC to fucking work and not crash when I try to fight the final boss and decided to instead move on by buying the final or at least latest DLC expansion called The Last Sarkorians.

Time to move on, I thought. I’ve done everything I could to solve this issue short of hiring a time of crack MIT computer engineers to investigate, and they stopped picking up the phone when I call ages ago.

Can’t remember why. Some obscure budgeting issue concerning my not having one.

I will only revisit the issue in question if Owlcat, the company who makes the game,. puts out an update to the main code of the main game.

People other than me have had the same issue and apparently it cropped up a couple of updates ago, so one can only hope the next update will fix whatever they broke.

Anyhow, so I purchase and download The Last Sarkorians then load up the game and click “New Game”, eager to get started.

But it ain’t there. “The Last Sarkorians” is not one of the options. The main game and my other DLCs are there. but not TLS.

Son of a BITCH. Even in the future nothin’ works.

So I Google around and eventually figure that unlike the other DLC. The Last Sarkorians is not a standalone campaign but an extensive plotline added to the main campaign, and therefore I will have to play through the whole frigging main game all over again to experience it!!!

Son of SEVERAL DIFFERENT BITCHES.

And to be honest, when I learned this, I was very tempted to just return the damned DLC and go play something that doesn’t ask so much of me.

Like 3D Risk. Or long distance yodeling. Maybe throw in some javelin catching.

But I persevered and I have started a new game of the main campaign and I am going to go through that entire mountain of mishigas all over again just to get the new stuff.

I swear this game makes me feel like I sold my soul to the Devil. Like I am experiencing some kind of twisted bardo scenario where my soul is doomed to keep playing this same damned game until I break the cycle of video game addiction entirely.

Well good fucking luck, karma. My compulsions don’t break that easily.

Anyhow, I have started a new game of the main campaign and chosen the new class, shifter (as in shape), for my main character, and so onward I will trudge.

So far, the worst part has been having to go through the world-rending horror of the inciting incident all over again, this time KNOWING it is coming and that there is not a god damned thing I can do about it.

It’s nice seeing the introduction of characters I came to know very well during my first playthrough, though. Especially my buddy Lann, who is hotter than most fuck.

I mean, brave, funny, noble, strong, and fiercely loyal. Oh, and a total stud.

What’s not to like?

More after the break.

---

An unnecessary update

I hereby swear that, God as my witness, I WILL NOT KILL WENDAUG

See, Wendaug is a character from early in the game who joins your party along with Lann and who then disappears when the shit is seriously going down.

Having been through this part of the game three times before, I know that she is off betraying the party and her people, and that I will eventually be given the choice of either killing her or letting her rejoin the party.

I have chosen to kill her each and every time.

Now I am not normally a vindictive or punitive person. But the options are to kill her, let her traitorous ass back into the party, or let her go, which she says will only lead to her lurking in the shadows waiting for an opportunity to kill me.

And she did not just betray us to the forces of actual evil just a little be. She did the full Quisling “eat everyone but me and let me watch them die” kind of thing.

Oh, and she reveals herself to be seriously creepy and unstable in her confession scene, so there’s an “ick” factor too.

But I have read about a bunch of shit you never get to see or do if you don’t have her with you later in the game. .

So this time through, I will ignore my strong urge to rid the world of her as well as my equally strong misgivings about having TWO unstable psycho bitches in my party (SPOILER :Camellia is a basket case too) and let her rejoin my party

In other news, being a “shifter” is kind of lame so far. I can only use my ability to shift into a minor aspect of my dragon form^[1] once in a great while and when I do, it is hard to tell if it did anything besides make me hit a little harder.

But I am only level 2, so presumably there’s lots more fun to come.

Still, part of me wishes I had gone with my first instinct, which was to be a fireball chucking battle mage. It seems to be the class that suits me the best as it combines being powerful in a really flashy way with the versatility of spellcasting.

I mean sure, it’s cool to be a mighty paladin and splatter enemies all over the place with one swing of your mace, but how much cooler is it to do the same thing with a fireball you shot from your fingers?

Answer : Much, much cooler. Like… WAY cooler.

I doubt I will restart as, say, a Magus or Sorceror.

But I might retrain as one when that becomes an option.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been pretty depressed today, but not in a bad way.

At least, that’s the modulation of interpretation I am aiming for. Sure, I have felt low all day and I don’t have much enthusiasm for life at the moment and I feel sad and down for no particular reason, but that doesn’t have to be a crisis or even a bad thing.

I’ve just switched into a particular mode, that’s all. Might not be one of my favorite modes, but it’s not all that bad, really. Nothing wrong with being a little melancholy now and then, especially if you are wise enough not to try to fight the tides of sadness and instead you open your mind and your heart as wide as you can in order to experience the emotions as fully and completely as possible.

And I am actively working on acquiring said wisdom. There is a time and a place for being able to set negative emotions aside, but it is a system meant to get us through crises and we end up using it for every god damned thing.

The result? Billions of us walking wounded dragging a massive dead weight of frozen emotions behind us until the burden grows so heavy we can no longer move at all.

And that is called “depression” and it really sucks.

So I am doing my best not to fight the blues that have come to haunt me today. Instead I will muddle through as best as I can while remaining open to feeling whatever feelings are here that need to be felt.

I don’t have to be happy all the time. I can accept that life will always have highs and lows and whether or not I “deserve” them is an odiously wrongheaded question, along the lines of asking whether you “deserve” to be hungry.

It’s going to happen whether you deserve it or not. Might as well learn to handle it instead of fooling yourself into thinking you can just keep putting it off forever.

And trust me, the more you put it off, the worse it gets. Like an unpaid debt that just keeps accruing penalties and interest the longer you let it slide.

Like the old song and the Bible says, there is a time for every purpose under Heaven.

And if we are patient and wise, instead of trying to stop time during one of the good times (thus turning them bad), we simply wait and watch the wheel spin unhindered, knowing it will bring us back to that place eventually.

Right now, I am on a space marked “low point in the mood cycle”. Before long, as long as I let the wheel spin, I will be back on the way up again, a little bit better off for having learned not to try to fight the natural cycle of my being.

And if I keep on feeling everything, that weight holding me back will get smaller and smaller like a melting iceberg, until one day it will be gone like yesterday’s dew.

More after the break.

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A thing about women

I wrote this in a YouTube comment last night before realizing it was a total tangent and not related to the subject of the video at all, so I snipped it out :

Women wield extraordinary power over men. They are the gatekeepers to a man’s entire value because in our society, men are nothing if they can’t get sex and if they CAN get sex, they are judged by the hotness of the chick they can bone. The only men immune to this are us homosexuals – we have our own issues. The approval or disapproval of a woman can make or break a guy, and I know women did not ask for this power but they have it anyway and they should take that into account when judging men and what we do

me, last night

This has always been the problem with the whole “men only want one thing” line of thinking they used to feed women.

Those older ladies meant well. And they weren’t wrong : men in that era, and to a lesser extent today, really do want that one thing.sex.

But that one thing is everything. It is a validation of their entire being and proof positive that they have some worth as a man.

If you then translate this into the incel community, you can see why a nerdy man, whom society deems the very definition of unfuckable and therefore less than worthless as a man AND as a human being, might be driven a wee bit nuts by this double message.

Given that intolerable position, it is not a big leap to conclude that the system is rigged against you, and to blame that on the apparent source of your pain, women.

And for many man, that overheated conspiracy theory about a castrating feminist cabal is far easier to take than the truth, which is most likely that they don’t get women because they don’t try very often and they don’t try very well.

Because once you strip away all the intellectual trimmings, what the incel movement is really about is an excuse for not trying.

Trying is hard. Trying is risky. Trying is scary as hell.

But if you can convince yourself (with the help of others) that getting a woman is literally impossible for you, then you are off the hook. And you can protect yourself from all the bad messages society is sending your way by retreating into bitterness, misogyny, conspiratorial thinking and all the cold comfort those things can bring.

It’s a very sad solution to the problem. I would much rather see my straight nerd friends ditch the entire system of hateful gendered bullshit and have the courage to treat women like people and find one you can be human with, without all the games and rules and the rest of that nonsense.

But until then, we are going to have at least a couple of generations of young men who are caught in the gears of gender politics and therefore will be prey to the numerous traps and dead ends that the incel movement represents.

I have great sympathy for my straight nerd brothers. They are in a terrible position in society. My heart goes out to them even when my mind cannot agree with or endorse the hateful madness in which they find their solace.

I can only hope that Gen Z finds another way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As opposed to just thinking about stuff.

That perennial subject came up during Therapy Thursday today. And it remains a valid point that nothing is really going to get better in my life unless I take positive action.

And that means stepping away from the video game addiction to at least look around online for work, contests, a host for my blog where it might get notices, or something along those bloody lines.

I’d say I have given the “moping around playing video games and writing about how much your life sucks while doing nothing to make it better” strategy a pretty thorough trial, and the results have not been encouraging.

I know that in order to become a more active participant in life, I am going to have to climb hill after hill of fear and anxiety and doubt and all the other things my depression’s sick little mind will come up with in order to convince me to give up and lie down and go back to “normal”.

Even though my “normal” SUCKS. Living in a dung heap of a room surrounded by garbage and filth and mindless clutter because apparently cleaning anything ever is just too much responsibility for me. Languishing away in my self imposed prison while my body rots away from neglect and age despite a truly mind boggling abundance of intellect, charisma, and talent. Just letting the days go by.

The problem is that while my daily life is terrible, it is also comfortable.

I wallow in the depths of a pit of inertia. A gravity well that keeps me stuck on this crappy little planetoid of mine because staying here is easy and boosting myself into orbit is real hard, yo.

And the thing about the climb into orbit is that you either make it or you come crashing down to die in a fiery meteor crash and I don’t want to risk that.

But I have to.

But I can’t.

Or at the very least, it’s really gonna hurt.

Another thing that came up today was my whole “infinite doors” problem. The right course for my life is impossible to computer. There’s too many possibilities. The greatest minds working with the greatest of supercomputers could not crack it.

Hence my answer to the imperative “Do something!” has alway been, “OK. What?”

And I am not capable of doing as my therapist suggested and just picking the first vaguely plausible idea that comes to mind and going with it without thinking about any other of the myriad possibilities.

Not gonna happen. Nothing could keep me from pondering the other possibilities and wondering whether I made the right choice. I don’t have anywhere near that level of mental discipline and I never will.

I am just not built like that.

So the question becomes, how could I ever choose one of those millions of possibilities and believe it in strongly enough to go through all the hardship and pain and convulsive self doubt I would go through to see it through when it could still turn out to be a massive waste of time that makes me wish I hadn’t bothered, like VFS?

And I know the whole “infinite doors” dilemma is just a trick my unfaithful mind plays to keep me in this craphole life, but unlike most of my mental tricks, I can’t see through it.

I really don’t know how the hell I would pick a path and stick to it. I have no burning ambitions or big dreamy dreams to guide me. There is a pivotal emotional fulcrum needed to shift a bulk like mine and I just plain don’t have it.

All I have is fear and insanity.

And that means I am never going to get out of this place.

I’m going to die in here, and sooner than you think.

And I am not even sad about that.

More after the break.

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No solution yet

My crashing issue with Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous remains unsolved. Dammit.

Tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game. No dice, still crashes like a mofo. And it really sucks because I am almost positive that I can beat that really tough boss now.

I am wondering if there are cheats out there that would let me simply skip past fightin him. I’d hate to do it because I still want to beat that motherfucker, but if it lets me finish the DLC it might be worth it.

Beats the hell out of giving up entirely, that’s for sure. I am holding on to that as an absolute last resort, because quite frankly I need to move on with my life, but I will have to be sure I have tried everything I reasonably cat to fis the issue before I go there.

I’m trying to stifle the voice in my head that says. “How pathetic, being all bummed out and distressed because a video game stopped working. What a sad life you live!”.

Man, that voice is a dick.

Well for better or worse, that’s my life right now. I have an awful lot of sweat equity and emotional capital invested in this game, which has been fantastic up to this point.

Love, love, love the game. One of the best I have played in a long time. And I have been playing it for something like two months now.

At this point, I could probably start a new game of the main campaign and it would almost seem fresh and new to me by now.

OK, maybe not, but…. almost.

At least there is the 4th DLC to try. Plus the second Season Pass DLC, although the copy for that one does not do a good job of making me want to play it.

No matter what, this will all work out in the end somehow. A month from now I will on to new and brighter things and this will all just be a wry anecdote.

This too shall pass. Everything does.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It flows rapidly.

It always has. And while the benefits of having such a swiftly flowing stream of consciousness are many, including having constant access to a lot of mental power at a moment’s notice, there are some drawbacks as well.

Like it being hard to hold on to a thought or an idea or even an emotion. Everything moves so fast in my head that even at the age of 50, catching an idea and holding it still long enough to use it is nearly impossible.

Especially given how I tend to lose all interest in the idea once it is written down. Which is pretty goddamned inconvenient, but we don’t get to choose our muse.

We creatives are just stuck with whatever shows up, even if it doesn’t fit with the rest of our personality and behaves in ways we find hard to understand and accept.

But accept it we must because we’re stuck with it. You only get one. I can’t take my mysterious “quicksilver in moonlight” muse back to the muse store (or “museum”) and say, “I’m sorry, this was clearly meant for someone else. May I have another?”.

And of course, you can choose to ignore your muse…. if you don’t mind having the wells of your creativity dry up like the frigging Sahara.

Not an option if, like me, your calling is self-expression.

I’ve at least figured out that much.

If there is a reason for me to be alive (debatable), it’s to use my gifts to express what is deep inside me and use that to make beautiful things.

But there is a fundamental disconnect between me and my muse and that is that I am not. by nature, spontaneous AT ALL.

Not for me is the sudden inspiration that has me dashing to the computer to feverishly type it all down while the iron of my creativity is still hot.

That would be far too sudden and disruptive for me, not to mention out of context, for my staid and stable little life.

I couldn’t live like that. And I deeply regret that. I would be so more productive av a writer if I could let wild inspiration take me and power me through making something truly spectacular now and then.

But I am not that kind of guy. Pity.

I mean, I hate to be interrupted and that is essentially what classic inspiration does.

I guess I just have to do things my own way, even in this. I have ideas, they get filed away somewhere in my mind, and if I am lucky, they will pop back up at the right moment and I will use them then.

It’s a lousy way to run a railroad, but at least it means that I always have tons to say at almost all time. And when the stars align, it can even make me look quick witted and pithy when all I am really doing is remembering something I thought of before.

More after the break.

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Is this still real?

Are we still here?

Is this still the place it once was?

I ask because Windows just went through the mother of all updates – one that involved no less than four or maybe even five reboots – and so it feels like absolutely anything could have changed at this point.

I didn’t want to reboot. But Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous crashed again.Turns out restoring a previous save from before I got to the Island of Doom did not solve the god damned problem and I am back to… well, you know….

So now I am at an impasse. I can’t go forward in my game – it will crash. And yet I really don’t want to give up on completing the Midnight Isles DLC because I have spent so much time and effort getting to where I am.

I’m like, emotionally invested now, ya know?

So I guess I am going to have to fling myself into the jaws of trying to solve the technical issue despite my lack of tech skills.

I need a very patient friend who is a master at solving PC issues. Every time I try to deal with something like this I feel so in over my head that I might as well be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Yeah, I thought that ended in an S too. Apparently not, according to Wiki.

I know that the system seems to load something right before the crash. So m best guess is that a temporary file that got corrupted.

And an article I read had a great solution for that : just delete these two directories!

But I have no idea if that worked because in doing so I also DELETED ALL MY SAVES.

Mother FUCKER. Talk about a cure that is worse than the disease. No way am I starting my whole Midnight Isles journey over again unless that was literally the only way to get past this issue.

And even then, maybe not.

I must admit, I am tempted to just give up on the whole thing and download the final DLC for the game, The Last Sarkorians, so I can play through that and finally be done with the game for good.

Unless there’s some good mods for it. Ones that add content like new dungeons or quests or plotlines, not just the usual graphics tweaks and UI fixes and extra weapons, armor, hairstyles, or whatever.

But once I finish all of those,. I swear to God I will start playing something ELSE. A completely DIFFERENT video game. Imagine that.

I have been so obsessively fixated on this one DLC for this one game that I have almost forgotten what that was like.

Whatever I play next will NOT be another isometric RPG. Of that I am sure.

It will be something 3D. Like Fallout 4 or Elder Scrolls Online.

BUT NOT THEM. Something bright and shiny and new, where things are not nearly as much of a slog, and happy little rabbits sing you their happy little songs…

I think I need to lay down for a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Warning, my metaphors are gonna get grossly medical/biological again.

I have often visualized my many aversions as being like some kind of elastic membrane inside my body that has to be stretched till it breaks in order for me to overcome it.

Yes, kind of like the hymen.

And the thing is, as unhealthy as this membrane is, it’s still a living part of me and is therefore going to be incredibly painful to treat like that.

And that pain is not just a disagreeable sensation. It’s nature’s way of screaming, “STOP DOING THAT!!!” at the top of its lungs, so there is a great deal of white hot anxiety being transmitted too.

Basically, every fiber of your being is telling you not to do that. That anything that hurts that much must be damned near killing us, and not only do our instincts shriek at us to stop, they follow up compliance with a strong compulsion to never, EVER do anything even remotely like that again.

And what do you know, that attempt to overcome it just made the aversion stronger, and insured you won’t try again for a very long time.

The depression and anxiety and avoidance won again. You took them on and not only did you not defeat them, they came out ahead. You’re worse off than before.

Now, can you understand why telling us people with depression to “just keep trying” is a far worse than useless piece of advice?

Tell ya what, Little Miss Sunshine, how about you step into my enormous shoes for a day and try fighting all of evolution and biology day in and day out just to get through a very low challenge day, then ask yourself how much you feel like doing things which make the pain and fear even worse.

It’s not gonna happen. You might as well be telling someone with a broken leg to “just keep jogging”. The sheer scale of what you are asking is staggering.

People like me don’t end up fearful and broken due to a lack of character. We end up that way because we are being conditioned to be that way by our broken brain chemistry that punishes effort and rewards capitulation.

And trust me, nobody is so strong of mind or will or “character” that they can withstand the unrelenting torture of depression for very long.

The truth you’re trying to avoid, Pollyanna, is that if you got depression, you would be fucked too. You could not do a tiny bit better than anyone else with our disease, and that means it could happen to you just as easily as it did to us.

The universe is a cold and callous place and bad shit happens to good people who have done nothing to “deserve” it all the time. If you have managed to stay healthy and happy and strong, it is as much due to pure dumb luck than any virtue of yours.

We are where you would be if you had a neurobiology that acted as the cruelest of torturers 24 hours a day.

Oh, I’m sorry. Is this harsh truth making you depressed? Well I am sure someone as strong and smart and good will overcome that in no time.

Just keep trying!

More after the break.

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That was weird

I got into a weird head space in Part 1, and I like it.

One of my favorite things about writing this blog is that I learn things about myself from it. Things I never knew I knew, understanding that feels like it coalesces out of nowhere, deep wells of emotion I had no idea were in there, and so on.

That’s one of the benefits of having a free-flowing format, with no set plan for what the blog is about or what kind of thing I am supposed to write or some distant goal in mind.

The only goal for this blog is for me to keep digging up my fossilized emotions until I reach some sort of tipping point where the dial turns from “crazy” to “sane-ish”.

I have no idea when or if that will happen, but no matter what, I am going to keep on digging because it’s the best thing I can do for myself right now.

Emphasis on can. There’s millions of things the Pollyanna types in Part 1 think I “could” do but I just can’t, and they will never understand why.

Gotta remember that bit about constant torture, though. That’s gold. Really gets the nature of our torment across.

I do manage to think outside the box sometimes. Try to imagine a way out of my depression via things I can actually do. Do my best to dream up an escape route that might actually work. That might actually happen.

But I am not going to be able to dream that particular dream until I face the fact that as much as I desire escape, the idea also scares the organic fertilizer out of me.

This hole I am in is a shelter of sorts as much as it is a prison. It protects me from having to face the infinite corridor of infinite doors out there. It limits me in ways that are brutal to my soul but on some level, my psyche prefers that to having to figure out what the fuck to do with myself.

I don’t know how to generate my own agenda. I don’t have big dreamy dreams to follow. VFS was my one big shot at following my dreams, and that went all to shit.

And yes, I “could” have kept going despite the lack of support from my teachers at VFS.

But no, I couldn’t, because their betrayal of me fatally wounded my spirit. I had done so well at all my assignments at VFS and it seemed like all my teachers knew how talented I was and what an amazing TV writer I would be.

I had hope. They killed it. So much for hopes and dreams.

So I went back to what I knew : video game addiction and a slow descent into medical hell as I fail to do all the things I am “supposed” to do to get healthy.

But I can’t do them. I just…. can’t.

So all I can do is keep on digging. 1000 words a day of self-therapy.

It’s not much but it’s all I’ve got.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.