It occurred to me earlier today that I never really “got” duty.

Not, obviously, that I don’t understand the concept. It’s more than I have never got why it was considered a thing.

See, I am a man of principle. And that means that to me, you do things because they are the right thing to do. The idea that you do something because it is your duty is a morally neutral idea to me.

Doing it because it’s your job or your responsibility or because you care makes sense to me. As does doing it out of enlightened self-interest, or even just for the hell of it.

But duty? What the heck is that, exactly?

I know that, at least in America, it is often tied closely to loyalty. And I know that due to my socially isolated childhood, I don’t really “get” loyalty either.

To me, loyalty is not really its own thing either. If I am “loyal” to someone it is because I like them and feel close to them and want to protect and cherish them.

Not because I feel loyal to them outside of that.

As for institutions, forget about it. I don’t trust any of them. Not religion, not the government, not charities, and definitely not the forces of capitalism.

It could be argued that, as a whole, Generation X is post-institutional. We have grown up largely without faith in anything beyond what we can see and judge about these conglomerations of interests.

Ironically, that means we have no choice but to put some trust in every one of them. When you don’t believe in any of them, you are left with a world made up of people, not collectives, and you can rely on them to behave in a thoroughly human way,

Not as demons or angels or mindless jackbooted thugs. Just people.

And like the great Will Rogers said, for the most part, people is just folks.

Anyhow, back to duty and loyalty and all sorts of other social emotions that I don’t get and it is entirely possible that I don’t even feel.

Which is a depressing thought, but one I have to face.

I am a very broken man.

I know that other people feel these things, along with other stuff I can’t relate to, like fear and/or respect for authority, a desire for social dominance, and hero worship.

And I don’t fault them for that. I’m the defective one, not them. I am the radical outlier who somehow did not get the full set of social emotions and who has therefore always been the weirdo that lives on the fringe of society.

I’m a sweet guy. But I got weird vibes and I can alienate people who are not on the same kind of mental wavelength as I am.

People don’t know how to handle me. I don’t respond the same way everyone else does. Yet there is nothing obviously bizarre or crazy about me either.

It is like I have my own personal annex of the Uncanny Valley because I seem almost human but there is something… off… about me, despite the charm and charisma.

Hence my sometimes imagining myself as a friendly robot, or maybe an alien.

At least then people would have some clue as to what is wrong with me.

“Oh, well, of course his responses creep me out… he’s FROM MARS!”

That would make my life so much easier.

More after the break.

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Oh, by the way, I’m VERY smart

Said in this voice :

Here’s my problem.

Knowing I have a high IQ is very helpful when it comes to understanding what I say and do. But there is no socially acceptable way to tell people this.

No matter what, you just sound like you are bragging, and that makes people immediately turn on you, or turn you off.

So I end up in quite the pickle. How do I let people know this vital truth?

At least, that is what I have thought until now. But now I have realized that is bullshit.

Knowing about my sky high IQ might help interpret my actions in some circumstances but it is hardly vitally important for social communication.

It’s not like I speak in some kind of incomprehensible intellectual patois or ergot.

The real truth is that it is only vitally important to ME and my fragile ego that people know how gosh darn bright I am.

It’s my one claim to adult legitimacy. My island of confidence in a sea of neurosis and self-doubt. I might doubt whether I am a real person and I definitely have grave doubts about my status as a grownup (yeah right) and I might even, in my darkest moments, doubt my justification for staying alive, but I never doubt that I am hella smart.

And I know that should be, on some level, a bigger deal than it has ever been in my life. Being someone who never had to learn to study, even in college, should count for something somehow, somewhere, shouldn’t it?

Ergo perhaps, on some level, my desire to inform people of the loftiness of my cranium is my childlike way of looking for someone to finally notice me and how special I am.

I mean, that’s the sort of thing that makes one “gifted” :n’est-ce pas?

But I suppose I never got noticed because I was so good at hiding from the world, and so very bad at putting myself forward and demanding to be noticed.

You can’t call it neglect to go unnoticed when you are the one in the Ghillie suit.

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Before you can be noticed, you have to decloak. Make yourself visible and let yourself be seen. Take the big risk that your avoidant tendencies are telling you means death.

But revealing yourself is NOT death. There is no deadly predator waiting to GET you. Nothing terrible is going to happen just because you now exist like everyone else.

The idea of it scares the hell out of me. Makes me feel like I will get trapped by people’s eyes shining on me, like a jailbreaker caught in a spotlight, and surely without the ability to disappear into one of my hidey holes at a moment’s notice, I am DOOMED.

But all that is absolute nonsense. Nothing but the ghost of some very old and outdated emotions, with no substance or justification any more.

So it is time for my big reveal :

Hi. My name is Michael. And I’m real.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Why does the universe hate me?

I’m so nice!

Let me lay out the latest scenario.

As you know, I have been playing Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous for a long time now and for the latest… what seems like forever, I have been playing through the official DLC expansion, Midnight Isles.

Seriously, I am beginning to forget what playing the main game and the other two DLCs was like. It all seems so far away now. I remember there was a plot, and story, and dialogue, and complex tactical combat, and everything! Like a real video game!

It all seems like a dream to me now… could it ever have been real?

Anyhow, for the latest span of eternity I have been stymied by this one uber nasty boss fight. I got so frustrated with it that I restored a save from WAY earlier in the game just so I could make a few new characters of various types and see if THEY could hit the son of a bitch.

That meant that I had to work my way back to this asshole all over again, and that meant I had to do some ALMOST as tricky fights over again, so it has taken some serious blood, sweat, and toil to get back to where I was before.

But finally I made it. Back to the temple where I fought this motherfucker before. I got the spells, gear, skills, and ideas to maybe, just maybe, put this fucker back in the grave (he’s undead) and actually get to progress in the game and maybe even finish this fucking DLC so I can finally move on with my fucking life.

So that’s when the game starts crashing. Hard. A LOT.

It’s just not fair. I have worked so hard. But now, when I load my game, I have at most 5 minutes before the whole thing does that obnoxious kind of crash it has done before where they game is still running but somehow the monitor is not receiving input from the computer any more.

I have tried resetting the monitor when this happens but nope. The only cure is to reboot, and that is really goddamned frustrating.

I dunno what to do going forward. There is no point in going back to a previous save state if the same thing is going to happen again. Then again, it didn’t happen the first time I got stuck, so…. I dunno.

But I can’t give up. I have to finish this. It is how I am built, I have to finish what I start. Especially when I have put this much time and energy into it.

Ergo, I guess I have to find away around the problem. Somehow.

Why is nothing ever easy?

More after the break.

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Got another furry smut comic to recommend!

Naked hot tub party! by the marvelous master, Anti-Dev.

It has a great story, funny dialogue, and lovable characters, along with plenty of hot gay furry sex, so it is basically perfect.

Tragia, the gay weasel, is so damned cute that I want to hug him till he squeaks, and Brooks, the “nothing that happens in a hot tub counts as gay ” rooster starts off seeming like an asshole but by the end of the comic I really like him.

He’d be one of those “that’s just Brooks being Brooks (eyeroll)” kind of friends but if you could get past that, I think he’d be great to have around.

Hope you enjoy the comic as much as I do!

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A little bit better

Tonight. I realized that I hadn’t had Greek food since I was at VFS and went to the donair place next door, so I figured I would order some via our pal Skip.

The only place open was a place called Donair Dude. Fair enough. Donairs^[1] are Greek food in the same way that pizza is Italian food.

And I noticed that Donair Dude has the following quote on their bags and such :

Live life as if everything is rigged in your favour. – rumi

My donair dude bag

And that really got me thinking.

That seems like it might actually work, as long as you didn’t take it too far. Research shows that it seems to be the positive, confident people who assume everything is going to work out for the best who succeed in life.

And it’s the sorry little sad sacks like me who…. don’t.

But I know there is a deep well of positivity and optimism within me. I know that the part of me that refuses to become jaded or callous and that won’t ever give up no matter how slow life is going and that defies my depression in small but meaningful ways.

And that’s my spark. If I can reach deep and connect with that stubborn little light of mine and make it shine, it can be the spark plug that gets my engine revving up and turning over and powering me into the sunshine at long last.

Oh what the hell. This is so cute and dorky, I just have to share it.

I just have to hold on to that feeling – the feeling of stubborn refusal to give up or let go or lay down and die.

Like Mister Idea up there, I am going to keep on trucking no matter what. No matter what my inner storms bring, I am going to keep insisting on thinking about better days ahead and finding my strength and my vitality not from strength of body or even from the power of my Brobdignagian brain but from the power of my spirit and its own power source, my big, big heart.

I have a lot of love to give this world.

It’s just taken me far too long to realize that I don’t have to wait for life to hand me an opportunity to do it in order to make that work for me.

I can keep myself warm all by myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has been stressy.

First, wound care. Everything went smoothly until the end, Dumbass that I am, I completely forgot that now that Joe’s on his summer hours, I need to call Julian when I am done at wound care instead of just going outside to the parking lot where Julian has been waiting for me with the car.

The reasons for that are dull and logistical.

So I end up going down to the parking lot and parking my ponderous posterior in the crude but quite comfy “seat” of my walker and wait for Julian, whom I assumed would be along at any moment.

Only THEN do I remember that I was supposed to summon him by phone.

Now I have to go back up to the clinic and get Megan to call Julian for me. I linger in my comfy seat for a while hoping Julian will just magically appear and then I go back up and hand the little card Julian made me with his cell number on it to Megan.

Then, I get home, and it is time to order my groceries. No problem, let me just register this Pay Power card and…. what do you mean, it’s already registered?

I am momentarily existentially poleaxed. I try a few more times and then give up. Clearly the fuckery is well afoot today.

So I then have to find the phone and call the 1-800 number for Pay Power in order to find out WTF.

I mean, there is $500 of my money tied up in this card!

I talked to a nice customer support dude, give him the numbers off the card, and he tells me the card is already registered but not under my name.

Helpful dude and I investigate.

Upon reading him the numbers from the back of the card for like the fifth time, I squint and realize what I had taken for a 6 might actually be an 8.

Problem solved. I have now been a dumbass twice.

Card activated, I am able to do my grocery shopping via Instacart like usual but these things come in threes so ya just know something else has to go wrong.

My order arrives and here is what I ordered :

And here’s what that peckerwood (or pussywood, don’t want to be sexist) decided was the logical substitution for it :

So now I am with those fricking things and no lovely ice cream treats this week.

Even if I bought some sugar free ice cream (once again from Chapman’s), it wouldn’t help, because the cones themselves have sugar in them.

I complained to Instacart. They gave me a couple bucks’ credit in apology.

But I didn’t want a couple bucks. I wanted my damned ice cream treats!

And the thing is, I had set up Chapman’s ice cream sandwiches as a substitute for their cones ahead of time.

Didn’t have the word “cone” in it, I guess. Or they were out of those ones too.

Oh, and we also ended up with someone else’s bottle of Palmolive.

I definitely did not order that.

More after the break.

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I’m always falling

At least, that’s how it feels sometimes.

I dunno. Maybe I have some kind of inner ear issue. My ears do frequently end up clogged with backed up sinus fluid that travels up from my nasal cavities via my eustachian tubes when it can’t find a way out via my stuffed up nose.

Which works until I end up with stuffed up ears. Sigh.

And like the Metro in Paris, it never stops running. Which I suppose is another of those things I should probably bring to the attention of medical professionals.

But to be honest, I have so many of those that I have no choice but to prioritize.

Either that or farm them all out to like a dozen doctors.

Basically I’m a wreck. Thanks for asking.

On a more psychological and/or metaphorical level, I also feel like I am always falling. Like I am falling forward in time and picking up speed so the days get subjectively shorter and shorter as my mind compresses its contents and it really does feel like I am headed straight for the grave and picking up speed.

And that is a terrifying and depressing feeling.

Maybe if wouldn’t feel so bad if my days had more content in them. My life of abstraction and screens is all too easily compressed into almost nothing because one day is pretty much the same as the next and the next and the next…

And there is so little content to them. It is all just phantom reflections in black mirrors with no substance or weight.

Just games. It is all just a bunch of fucking games.

And I am sick and tired of play. I want to work. I want goals and objectives with real impact that I can see and verify and confirm that I am, indeed, alive. And real.

I spend so much time with illusions that I can’t help feeling like I’m an illusion too, no more substantial than a flickering image on a dimly lit screen.

And at any moment, that screen could flicker out and never come back, and I will be gone like yesterday’s sunset.

I take comfort in that thought. This might not be forever. My sentence might be commuted and my soul be freed without my doing a thing to harm myself.

Not that I want to die. Most people with depression don’t.

We just want everything to stop for a while. For all the nattering monkeys in our heads to shut the fuck up and for the aching tectonic strains in the substrata of our subconscious minds to cease making our world rumble and shake and for us to get some good, clean, wholesome, restful sleep for once in our god damned lives.

If I could get that without dying or knocking myself out cold via substance abuse, I would never be suicidal again.

And wouldn’t that be nice?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

And we got talking about what has been on my mind lately. I told him I had been thinking about the massive psychological wound that lies at the center of my psyche and how it seems like this ocean of suffering inside me and that make it hard to imagine there being an end to it.

But I know that there is. I know that it’s finite. I can feel its weight in my mind and thus I can tell that it has dwindled over the years as I blog away.

It might be draining slowly, but it does so steadily. And I can feel the edges clearly and can actively encourage them to join up so the damned wound can close.

No cigar for guessing where the pain came from : being raped by a stranger when I was but four years old.

Nobody knew it had happened – the bastard got away with it – so obviously nobody did anything about it., I got no therapy. I had no help. I suffered alone.

So what else is new?

Even if it had happened in this current more enlightened era, I am not sure I would have been able to tell anyone. Talking about things makes them real, after all, and my mind had sealed away the memories of the event so well that I completely forgot it had happened to me until much later in life.

And yet, when I remembered, it was like the memory had been sitting there the whole time and I just stopped noticing it.

Which is weird.

I kind of wish I had been able to tell Doctor Klein, the therapist I saw in high school, and seen what he could do with it.

He saved my life,. I was suicidal a lot as a teen.

God, I’ve been so sick for so long. One of the walking wounded, as my therapist said.

Anyhow, give how unable I was to even recall the incident myself, it is not a surprise at all that this means the wound it caused went completely untreated for decades.

And untreated wounds fester. Mine has had 40+ years in which to do it. It hangs there in the center of my mind, visible to none but controlling everything from the shadows.

I still can’t imagine what it looks like. All I can see in my mind’s eye is a spherical control room deep in the center of my mind and nothing but impenetrable darkness within.

But if I had to guess, it is probably a fox. Or some other kind of critter. Something small and delicate and timid and nursing a truly horrifying injury.

A fox with no tail, perhaps.

That’s so depressing. WTF is wrong with me? Why do I think of these things?

Because they express what is really going on inside me, I guess. Like H.R. Giger, I am driven to draw my nightmares, in my case with words.

And I would honestly probably be better off if I drew more of them so I could set them free and not carry them around any more.

More after the break.

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Express the wound

Warning, the following is very gross in a medical way.

Today, I shared a disgusting but apt metaphor with my therapist, Doc Costin.

I compared my attempts at self-therapy to when you are pressing on wound or an abscess or whatever to squeeze the nasty infected fluid out of it so that the wound itself can heal and the body can be free of that toxic foulness.

That is how I feel about my process of digging for pockets of pain and fear and other frozen emotions so that I can expose them to the light of day and have them evaporate and be gone forever.

Thus, I empty out my sea of pain a bucketful at a time.

But I want more. I want to find bigger pockets of badness so I can release more of my pain into the sky and recover faster.

My ambition and my impatience grow (grows?)

I am perfectly willing to face pain and suffering too long deferred. I am not happy about but I am determined to rid myself of this dyspeptic morass of frozen feelings by whateve means is most expedient.

Nero Wolf has been a bad influence on me.

One important thing that came up during today’s session is that in order to let things out, you also have to let things IN.

Once the door is open, it’s open both ways. If I want to drive out my demons, I am going to have to bring in my angels.

I have to let the sun shine in.

Or is it “let the sunshine in”?

Turns out the hippies might have known a thing or two that I don’t.

I am remind of that time last year when I had that incredibly intensely trippy and wonderful dream with rainbow kaleidoscopes and twisting turning pinwheels and an entire song I wrote in my dream. Lyrics, music, everything.

Which I sadly forgot upon waking, along with most of the rest ot the dream.

But my takeaway from that experience was that maybe it is okay to leave mundane reality behind and go on a “trip” in search for your very own rainbow of happiness.

Or even just to use substances and sensations to overwhelm the frantic chattering of your neurosis ridden conscious mind so the rest of you can freaking relax for a bit.

Maybe the New Age type people have a freaking point.

Like, take these lovely young people :

There is something I need in their music. Something that called to me the first time I heard them and that led me to download a bunch of their songs.

It appeals to that powerful and mysterious something that has lurked in my consciousness for my whole life. Something that is larger and stronger than my puny rational mind but that has never done more than pop up at random times and made me feel weird and profound for a while because it didn’t “make sense” and so my overly rationalistic mind had no choice but to treat it as noise.

The idea that I could follow that feeling to something incredible that would expand my mind and liberate my true self never occurred to me. It was more important to me that I keep control and not “go crazy”.

But maybe the mystics know things I do not. Things of incredible value to my soul and my happiness that I have turned away at the door for not fitting into the existing framework of my understanding of reality.

And tell me, how is one to ever transcend with a mindset like that?

How about letting things in and THEN figuring out where they fit into the grand scheme of things? That’s how you expand your mind and give depth to your soul.

And where do you think all your wondrous talk of humanism is leading?

To the place where all things meet, of course.

And that place isn’t rational AT ALL.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For me, wanting things is much healthier than thinking I “should” do them.

Wanting and getting is good for me. I am extremely inexperienced at it. I have, like I said recently, been far more likely to just adapt to existing conditions than I am to change them to better suit me.

There is a very deep fear in me, and a terrible kind of weakness that stems from it, that rots my soul down to its very roots, and makes it very hard for me to resist the urge to abandon my goals and escape when faced with even minor difficulty.

I call it the “collapse and run” response. And it is my default. My most relied upon coping technique and not just by a little but by a lot.

Nothing else comes even close.

And the thing is, getting what you want requires the exact kind of backbone I lack. You have to be able to stand up for yourself and push and push to get whatever it is and maintain a solid, rigid form until you get it.

And as patient readers know, I am goo. I can take almost any form but there is no rigidity or solidity to me, or at least not for very long.

That’s certainly helped me in some ways. For instance, I am pretty sure that my ability to remember facts with so little effort relies on my ability to make my mind completely pliable and receptive, like wax waiting to take the impression of a key.

This impression then becomes a part of me. A part of the tightly integrated model of the world that is always running in my mind and is constantly being refreshed, correlated, cross referenced, and error checked.

Sounds like a hell of a lot of work, doesn’t it? And I suppose it is. But it all takes place at the cognitive level, automatically, so it just seems normal to me.

So I have gotten a lot out of being gooey. It gives me a very flexible and powerful mind that form itself into whatever tool it needs at that moment then revert back into the goo state to await the next challenge.

But it’s no way to go through life. It makes wanting things and getting them nearly impossible because it is always far easier to simply adapt.

Not better. Just easier.

And I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know how one reverses a lifetime of flaccid malleability in order to develop some internal solidity.

The mere thought of trying to do it gives me the prickly sweats. If someone else gives me situations to adapt to, I can do anything.

But I can’t be the mold and fill the mold at the same time. You can’t make a Jell-O bowl out of Jell-O. There has to be a more rigid element involved.

At times I feel like a genie, with vast cosmic powers that are absolutely useless without someone else’s wishes to give me focus and purpose.

Even the most amazing puppet ever is useless without a puppeteer.

It’s all so god damned tragic. 🙁

More after the break.

What is faith?

Yup, it’s another deep dive into religion from a sympathetic outsider’s perspective.

As far as I can tell, religious faith is an escape hatch to reality. It acts as a set of rules to follow that acts as a control mechanism for the dangerous business of hacking one’s own sense of reality.

We need this mechanism in order to deal with the harsh emotional realities of life. With faith underwriting the psyche, a hard limit to just how bad you can feel can be set so that if unassisted reality would take your mood to dangerously low levels, your faith can react to give you whatever emotional inputs you need to stay afloat.

Like I have said before, I believe this mechanism to be the main thing religion gives to people, and it does it so well that the mechanism can remain even after the religion and all its dogma are gone.

The exact form it takes is irrelevant. As long as it enables people to believe in magic (so to speak), it is doing its job, whether the magic is the Ascension of Jesus or the miracle of Chanukah or Buddhist mysticism.

All it has to do is support the idea that objective reality isn’t all there is.

And then fools like me come along and insist that there is no such thing as magic and that things either exist and are bound by the laws of physics or don’t exist at all.

There is no third category for things that are whatever we need them to be whether that makes sense or not.

And the thing is, we’re not wrong. Our statements are factually correct. All these religions and faiths are selling full blown patent pending bullshit.

The mistake is in thinking that this means you have slain the demon known as FAITH and you can pat yourself on the back because everyone knows that when you prove something is wrong, that means you win, and the other party now has to do what you want them to do.

But none of that keeps people from needing faith. All you have done is upset people who mean you no harm and forced them to rearrange their beliefs a bit and made them feel like you hate them.

Why else would you attack the very thing which gives them hope?

So fuck your angry atheism. Yes, it’s all ultimately bullshit. So what? If I can draw moral guidance and comfort from an episode of Star Trek, which is fiction and therefore also bullshit, what is so different about drawing it from the Bible?

Public atheism is a defensive game only. We preserve freedom of religion for all, even the people who consider the worst people on Earth, and we make sure that everyone can believe, and not believe, whatever suits them best.

We do not attack. We are not at war with religion. We are not at the beck and call of hatemongers like Bill Maher and Neil DeGrasse Tyson who whip our hate into a frothing rage at their rallies and their mob events.

We reject hate and prejudice and bigotry in all forms.

Even, and especially, when it is coming from us.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got to see my Luke today. Eeeee!

I was so happy to see him. It can been more than a month. Somehow we were never on Tapestries at the same time.

Well, I say “somehow” but the truth is I am only on there for like an hour and a half a day, when I am eating breakfast.

I used to be there a lot more. But that seems like forever ago now. I would be on there for every meal at a minimum, and sometimes in between as well.

But then being on there and blogging at the same time became too stressful, ergo boom went being on there during lunch and dinner.

I’ve only got so many words to go around. In theory.

Honestly, I am still not sure that was the right decision. But the alternative was to blog in between meals, without the comfort of food to help keep me grounded, and that didn’t seem like a good idea either.

I know that I am feeling the need to be more social lately. I think I have felt that way for a long time but it went against the dogma of my internal regime so I couldn’t actually perceive or acknowledge it.

But I am coming to realize that being mentally occupied with a video game does not actually keep you from being lonely.

It just keeps you from thinking about it.

And the same goes for all the other darker emotions as well. My video game addiction might keep me from thinking about being angry or sad or despairing, but those emotions are there all the same.

One of the things which brought all this to life was that I noticed I was getting this attack of acute emotional pain – fear, anguish, dread all rolled into one – whenever I stopped an activity like blogging or playing video games.

My internal police force cuts the emotion off almost immediately via numbness but for a moment I am in a terrible emotional state.

That must be how I really feel deep down taking advantage of the break in mental preoccupation to be consciously felt for once, if only for a moment.

The video games only treat the symptoms while the disease runs rampant behind the scenes and my deep emotions go berserk in their desperation to be heard.

Sorry about that, deeper self. I will ignore the alarms and try my best to hear you from now on. I have been a neglectful lord numb to the cries of his people and preferring to spend his day in a highly artificial state of peace and calm for far too long.

Not letting you talk because I knew I wouldn’t like what you had to say is not my usual style at all.

So feel free to scream or cry or go on a rampage or whatever else you need to do to make yourself heard and felt at long, long last.

Time for the masks to come off and the dance to end and the guests to show us all who they really are.

We’ve put it off far too long and we’re all so very tired.

Time for this masquerade to end.

More after the break.

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Look ma, no wires!

Been trying to get my new wireless keyboard working.

At first, I thought I was screwed because I bought a Bluetooth keyboard and my computer didn’t even have Bluetooth.

Then I recalled that there was such a thing as a USB to Bluetooth adapter. Found one on Amazon for $10. Groovy.

And I was about to buy it when a niggling little voice in my head asked me if I was sure I didn’t already have one.

Good question. So I checked and lo and behold, this computer DOES have Bluetooth.

Now it was a matter of getting a AAA battery from Joe to power the darn thing. That’s the main thing I don’t like about wireless peripherals : the need for batteries.

Dealing with batteries in this day and age seems so backwards. Like buying games on physical media, or having to find a pay phone.

Anyhow, the battery is in there and ergo the keyboard should be ready to pair with my computer, but my computer ain’t seeing it.

God damn it, why is nothing ever simple?

Dunno what to do now. My knowledge of Bluetooth has been exhausted. If there is a button on the keyboard to make it visible to other devices,, I can’t find it, and it came with absolutely no documentation whatsoever.

It’s this one, by the way.

As you can see, the Verbatim website has no documentation for it either. And there isn’t even a model number on the packaging.

I guess they only sell the one kind of keyboard and mouse combo.

This is what I get for buying the cheapest one on Amazon, I guess.

I guess I have no choice but to google my issue and hope some random Reddit user (Redditor) had the same problem and got a useful answer when they asked about it.

I have had bad luck with that method. For some reason, whatever problem I have with technology always ends up being some kind of bizarre one-off event that mystifies technicians because as far as they know, what I am describing isn’t even possible.

Maybe the universe is trying to force me to develop tech skills. I dunno.

I mean, that’s always been an option for me. I have the right kind of mind for diagnosing and repairing technical problems.

I just don’t have the interest. That does not sound like a fun life to me. Presumably it becomes very easy once you learn the basics and solving the same old issues over and over sounds like a form of hell to me.

I could try learning to code. But I have no inherent interest there either. I lack the motivation to put my mind through that kind of regimentation and segmentation.

So while I have the mental hardware for a life in IT, I would no doubt find it either grindingly dull or migraine inducingly abstract and difficult or both.

Not for me. Sadly.

Maybe I could learn a high level language like Unity so I could make my own weird little video games or visual novels.

Anything is possible.

I will talk to you nicew people again tomorrow.

Damn being an empath can be tough.

Like I like to say, sensitivity ain’t for wimps.

I have no idea what went down, but earlier I was minding my own business, playing my game (Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous), when suddenly I heard Joe yelling angrily so loudly that I could hear it real well even though the door to the bedroom was closed.

Not well enough to make out what he was saying, but that is probably for the best. If I’d known what he was saying, I might have felt compelled to intervene and probably made things a whole lot worse.

Especially for myself.

This event has freaked me out and the aftereffects linger on even though it happened a couple of hours ago and I have had a nap since then.

I can feel it in my chest, too. A bit worried about that.

To say that this is not typical behaviour for Joe is a vast understatement. But I am sure a clue can be found in that today being the Canada Day (observed) stat holiday, Joe’s father and sister Melanie were scheduled to come over and help Joe and Julian with their ongoing de-cluttering project.

Joe being somewhat of a packrat, it’s taking a while.

And seeing as nobody can push your buttons like your parents (after all, they installed them), I can guess what probably happened.

I certainly knew better than to ask my late father for “help” with anything. His constant impatience, crankiness, and volatility guaranteed that it would not be worth it and I would have been far better off doing it myself.

It’s not a coincidence you died alone. Dad. You were impossible.

UPDATE : Just had a chat with Joe. So far I still don’t know what exactly set him off, and I will have to ask eventually because I need closure, but we have touched base on his Dad pissing him off solid.

Plus a surprise : a new (to me) computer chair! They came across an old office chair Joe used to use while de-cluttering and it looked more comfortable than the one I was using so they thought they would let me give it a try.

So I am giving it a test drive as we speak. It’s definitely better padded than my previous chair but only sitting in it for a long time can indicate if it’s an ergonomic fit.

Thus far it feels…. weird. But that is to be expected. My previous chair and I had a long time to adjust to one another.

This one isn’t even shaped like my butt yet!

I will actively resist the childish urge to immediately reject it in favour of going back to the tried and true previous model because it isn’t immediately perfect.

Neither was the previous model. Although in that case, going back wasn’t an option because that computer chair was toast.

This time the previous one is fine. So I at least have a fallback position.

Into a reasonably comfy chair.

More after the break.

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Into the sunset

Feeling really sleepy despite a normal amount of sleep today again,

Of course, my “normal” amount of sleep is most people’s “shitty, fragmented, and shallow” sleep, so there’s that.

I am back to being able to sleep for one and a half hours tops before either my bladder wakes me up or I just find myself kicked out of the Land of Nod for no reason.

But it is probably sleep apnea related.

And yeah, I know that my sleep is terrible. Very unhealthy. I don’t get nearly enough deep REM Stage 4 sleep and therefore my body stays tired and my mind remains burdened with millions of half-processed medium term memories clogging up its pipes and making it hard for me to regulate mood at all.

And part of me says, “Wow, you can regulate those things?”.

Quick, call up the offices of my local member of emotional parliament! I have a long list of new mood regulations I want introduced next time personality legislature is in session! Time to make that lazy bum actually do his job for a change!

I love how weird I am.

Oh well,. just add sleeping to the long list of remarkably basic things I can’t do right, along with other long serving items like “clean anything” and “focus on a goal” and “stay away from video games while awake”.

In the world of depression and anxiety, it will always be your crutches that kill you. Whether it’s liquor or drugs or gambling or risky sex or even video games, whatever you use to stimulate the reward center of the brain enough to not kill yourself yet will be the grave they lay you down in because your relationship with it will be as unhealthy as you are and become your tomb.

That got dark real quick.

Because every depressive is an addict. Anhedonia (that bitch) leaves you so starved for reward that whatever can penetrate the numbness will be fixated upon with fanatic intensity and anything that threatens that dependency will be treated by the deep brain as a threat to survival like it’s cutting off your air.

Even when it is actually doing the opposite : making it more likely you’ll live.

Because merely knowing that something will help you in the long or even medium term is laughably weak compared to the dark power of addiction.

It’s like trying to stop a freight train by stretching a rubber band across the tracks.

I know all the things I “should” do to improve my health and ultimately my mood.

But “should” doesn’t mean a god damned thing if it doesn’t come with the motivation to do the god damned thing.

The first and often overlooked step is to care about yourself.

If you don’t have that, then all the “shoulds” in the world won’t mean a god damned thing and you will find yourself ignoring and/or suppressing them because they can only cause you pain and fear if you think about them.

Knowing you “should”, but can’t, is hell. Take it from me.

When I think about my “should” list, it honestly feels purely theoretical. Like someone’s opinion on what the coach of their favorite sports team “should” do.

Except that sports opinions are more likely to influence the outcome.

And all I can do is shrug and say, “Yeah, probably. ” and then go back to drinking my beer in silence.

I am such a Norm.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is one of my fave bands of all time, but this sentiment pisses me off :

You know, all that “carpe diem” “seize the day” bullshit.

Sorry, Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society, but some of us are just not built that way. If I tried to live for the moment I would be a nervous wreck within seconds.

I need to consider the future ramifications of all my actions and choose what I think will be the best outcomes in order to be able to sleep at night. Without that, life becomes far too random and uncontrolled and I just want to run away and hide until things make some kind of sense to me again.

And what does “seize the day” even mean, anyhow? What day? Seize how? With what? A lifetime spent lunging for whatever seemed like it would make you happier for the moment sounds like a recipe for constant stress and inevitable disaster to me.

I need order and predictability in my life. I need to have at least a solid idea of what is going to happen or I would not have the courage to get out of bed.

I’m the sort of person who, when I was a kid and one of the kid’s shows I watched would say it took place in a world “where anything could happen”, my reaction wasn’t “yay!” but “OH GOD NO!”.

Because that means a lot of previously impossible things are now a possibility. Your mom could explode. Your teeth could all fall out. The world could plunge into the sun.

In fact, I have a lot of trouble imagining the mindset to whom that sounds good. It would require the assumption that only very, very good stuff has now been made possible , which is not what “anything can happen” means at all.

And patient readers know how I feel about Oprah’s “live your best life” horseshit.

That sounds like a formula for neurotic collapse to me. Oh, now I need to constantly worry and wonder if I could be living better? How the hell would I even know whether I am living my best life or not? By whose standards? What kind of empty brained Hollywood bullcrap are you selling, Oprah?

How about letting people just lead lives that seem good enough at the time? How about getting them to focus on eliminating things that make them unhappy instead of constantly trying to beat their own happiness high score? Letting them concentrate on living their life without crippling doubt about whether it’s their “best” one?

Same with “living life to the fullest”. What does THAT even mean? Fullest of what, exactly? According to whom? And how does one calculate this metric?

And what do you do when you realize you have been failing this test your entire life and will continue to fail it because it sets an impossible standard for “good enough”?

Oh sure, I am happy. But could I be happier? Probably. Well then you aren’t living life to the fullest ergo you FAIL FAIL FAIL.

God damn it, people, ignore the vacuous bullshit emitted by all the horse’s asses in the world who would die if they knew your kind of pain for even one second and just try to relax and find things you like to do.

It’s no wonder that I am still depressed when all the advice that is supposed to help me is this fucking STUPID.

And see, this is how I know nobody can help me because if I didn’t control myself, anyone who tried to help me would get this kind of response from me, and that would be a lot more likely to assassinate THEIR happiness than it is to spark mine.

None of you brain dead sheep can help me. So just leave me the hell alone.

More after the break.

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My point is….

… that I am a very angry and bitter person deep down.

And as my therapist keeps rightly pointing out, I am going to have to deal with that shit if I am to make real progress towards being mentally well.

And that’s a hell of a cross to bear for me because I very much do not want to deal with all that bitterness and anger. Those emotions frighten me with their power and their potency and the things they make me want to do.

And they clash violently with the Mister Super Nice Guy image I have of myself. Anger? Bitterness? Sarcasm? Me? No no, you must be mistaken. I’m just a cute little waggy tailed foxy, huggable and lovable and completely nonthreatening and harmless.

And like I always say, that’s absolutely true. I am that person. Everything you see there is a genuine part of me.

But it’s not all of me. Not by a longshot.

It’s my brilliant disguise. My smooth façade. The costume so form fitting and lifelike that I can forget I am wearing a costume at all and pretend that it’s the real me.

And it is. But it also…. isn’t.

And trust me, the “real” me, the scared little animal hiding in the deep darkness within my very core with its paws on the controls, does not like that I am talking about this and drawing attention to its existence.

Well too bad, lil fluff. I am emptying out my all too commodious Jungian shadow, and that includes your little hidey hole.

Trust that I am only doing this because I think it’s my only path to sanity, and that I will love and cherish and protect you through all the scary times coming for both of us.

We need to step out of the shadows and be seen.

Even though, to our core, it feels like that would be worse than death.

It is the fate too horrible to imagine. An annihilation level event. The total destruction of the world that came before it.

Time to tear down the Wall.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Sorry I didn’t warn you about the video containing some of the most brilliantly disturbing animation of all time, but it really would have fucked up the flow of what I was writing. Really shows just how fucked up the British warchild generation was, eh?)

I’m gonna tell this backwards, starting with what just happened.

I came to the computer already very emotionally raw and upset for reasons I will go into shortly, only to find that I had forgotten to log out when I was done fluffing around on Tapestries this morning.

And while I was logged in, my man Luke, whom I have not seen in a month, logged in and was all happy to see me then when I didn’t reply he greeted me again, but with a lot less energy, and then much later he just logged out.

And now I am freaking out with guilt because my negligence caused this man I love to get all excited to see me then be sad because I wasn’t replying and then try again clearly depressed and then just go away sad. :(:( 🙁

And I know it was an accident but I feel like I am losing my mind imagining how hurt he must have been and how depressed I must have made him and I CAN’T FUCKING STAND IT. I feel like it is tearing me apart down the middle and there is nothing I can do or say to make it right because I don’t even have an email address for him let alone a phone number and I want to talk to him and tell him how sorry I am so bad but there is nothing I more I can do.

I left him a note on Tapestries and that’s not nearly enough and I have been crying my eyes out and blowing my nose and trying to calm down without going insane for like half an hour now and I really should be eating my lunch but I am way way too upset and if I tried to eat now I would probably throw up (yay “nervous stomach”) and now I am worried that the not eating plus the emotional exertion will lead to my having a low blood sugar incident and I feel like I am falling apart.

OK. Now I am calm enough to explain the first part.

I have been reading this very long episodic Zootopia fanfic called Striped Up. It’s about a human cop who dies and wakes up as a tigress in the Zootopia universe.

She is the protag for most of it (occasionally it switches to Judy’s POV) and I like her but not everything about her and this is about one of those… differences.

In the chapter in question, she is on patrol when she gets a call about a robbery. But when she gets to the scene, she finds the “thieves” are actually the victims of two anti-fox bigots who savagely beat them and pepper sprayed them right in the eyes.

Just two innocent young people, brother and sister, caught by heinous racists in the nefarious act of trying to steal a small bag of apples, probably because they are starving, and monstrously brutalized by horrible people for it.

Jesus, why did it have to be foxes? Could have been any other species. But no.

But then, our protagonist commits horrible acts of brutality against the bigots, including shattering a beaver’s front teeth, and now I am upset in two directions because what the perps did was atrocious but what our protag did to them was worse.

Because the bigots have stupidity, ignorance, and (sort of) good intentions on their side. Our tigress cop does not. She had no right to do that to those morons and honestly she should lose her badge and go to jail forever for it.

And that’s the point in the story when I realized I was genuinely extremely upset by what I was reading and had better stop.

That’s when I put town my tablet, got my lunch, came to the computer. and discovered what had happened with Luke.

Now I am going to lay down and try to relax and recover from… all of this.

More after the break.

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Got another gay furry porn comic to recommend.

It’s called Boomer’s Big Date and it is a rather unusual love story.

Oh, and while Boomer himself isn’t my type, holy crap is that tiger hot. I am so jealous of Boomer for getting with someone that sexy AND snuggly.

I mean, imagine how soft his fur must be. Oh my. Ahem.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

---

After today’s incident

You know how I feel about today’s big emotional ketchup burst?

Grateful. I am glad the universe conspired to force some big time emotions out of me for once. I know I will be far better off for it.

It seems to do that now and then. Perhaps on some impossibly deep level I am subconsciously making it happen, although I can’t imagine how.

But I am willing to entertain the notion that our subconscious minds understand things on a deeper and more fully integrated level than our conscious minds ever could, and that it can push us towards certain outcomes via “random” choices.

I think that’s how that whole positive visualization thing works, I think. You do your affirmations or make your dream board or whatever and that primes the subconscious mind to make choices that feel right, and that leads to the desired outcome.

Anyhow, back to emotions.

I know that I need to loosen way the hell up so that it doesn’t take some unlikely confluence of events to bring me serious catharsis.

I mean, I also get catharsis by writing in this blog, but it slow and measured amounts.

That’s a speed I can handle, which I guess is what lets it happen in the first place.

But clearly what I need is something that takes me out of control and into the realm of unfiltered emotion like today’s incident so I can feel a lot more and think a lot less and bring on that goddamned flood I have been waiting for.

I mean, that’s what happens in the spring, right? The sun comes, the days get warmer, the ice melts, and the flood comes.

Well where’s my sunshine?

And how do I learn to let the light in?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I pooped the bed again.

Not a metaphor. Literal poop. Actual bed.

Woke up and felt moisture beneath my elephantine butt cheeks and got that inkiong feeling. Put a hand down there and yup, wet. Lovely.

Realized I needed to go to the bathroom pronto to finish the job. Scooted on in there as fast as my gimpy legs could carry me.

Always fun to have to move quickly when unsure of one’s continence.

Thoughts of unspeakable disaster loom large.

Anyhow, I made it and got the job done. Returned to my bed to find that things were much worse than just a bit of moisture. Spent the next half an hour going through half a box of Kleenex cleaning up the mess via the exact same “keep wiping until it comes back clean” method one uses on jobs of a more personal and intimate nature.

Now I know that I said that if it happened again., I would go to the ER. And I am still contemplating making that trip.

But I haven’t yet for the perfectly reasonable and grownup reason that I don’t wanna.

Moreover, the original incident was more than a month ago, so it is hard to claim that a pattern is emerging.

Certainly if it happens again before the end of the long weekend, I will have no choice but to pack my inconstant ass off to the Emergency Room of Richmond Hospital.

Obviously I hope it does not come to that. The ER is a depressing place full of people who are having at least as terrible a day as you are (some far, far worse) so even with my tablet to keep mr entertained, I still don’t wanna be there.

And the wait would no doubt be very very long because in the harsh but necessary pragmatic calculus of triage, “pooped the bed” rates way far behind things like “cut off foot with a lawn trimmer” or “heart went boom”.

And no amount of playing Hearthstone is going to make that any better.

When you are an emotional sponge like I am, always taking in empathic information from your environs, some places are just bad to be. Hospitals are one of them, especially the ER where the walls are caked with pain, tension, and worry.

Courthouses are another. Not of lot of happy going on there either.

Schools are a crapshoot, except around exams of course. Then you are pretty much guaranteed to have “tense verging on hysterical” coming at you from every surface.

And don’t get me started on laundromats.

Anyhow, my point is, the ER sucks. And I don’t relish the thought of having to tell the intake lady I am there because I pooped the bed in my sleep.

Because that’s what they told me last year. They said that if I either couldn’t pee or became incontinent I was to come back and tell them.

Which sounded a lot more reasonable back then.

Maybe I should go to Urgent Care instead. I dunno.

More after the break.

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Oh thanks a lot

I was playing some Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous mere minutes ago, happy and anticipating the McD’s meal I had just ordered.

The meal arrives (thanks for fetching it from the door for me, Julian) and I finish the battle I was doing then shut down the game.

And I am instantly hit with a headache right between the eyes. I think it’s a delayed eye strain headache from the wear n’ tear on the old eyeballs gaming can cause, plus the fact that the background color of the WordPress window I type into is bright white., while the Pathfinder graphics are dark-ish, so things got way brighter all of a sudden.

The result? Ow. Plus a loss of appetite. Dammit.

Oh well, I am well versed in how to deal with these things. Time to clear my ears and my sinuses in order to relieve overall skull pressure and when I am done blogging I will lay down in the dark for a bit.

That should do the trick.

Today’s been OK. Did the wound care thing. Linda the Wound Care specialist was once more there to shave down my foot callouses some more.

This, only two weeks after the previous debridement only a couple of weeks ago. I must have some seriously thick callouses because both the previous time and this morning the session ended with them saying, “Okay, I’m going to stop there. ”

Kind of implies they’re still not done. Holy crap.

And the irony that I, a person who spends as little time on his feet as is humanly possible without having to learn to use a bedpan, have enormous callouses on my feet is not lost on me.

I mean, I didn’t even “earn” them.

I am still holding out hope that these callouses are actually the product of my slowly turning into a hobbit.

Present for the procedure was a UBC nursing student, and I was quite touched by how clumsy and nervous she was, and how deftly the senior nurse she was shadowing intervened when the student was struggling to show her what to do without taking the whole thing away from her.

My bandage changing was apparently her first time doing a procedure by herself instead of just watching.

I approve of that. Sure, nobody really wants to be the test patient like that, but my procedure has extremely low stakes, so it makes sense.

After Wound Care, we went to the bank. My monthly trip to withdraw the money that was direct deposited on “cheque day”.

My credit card provider, Pay Power, apparently has a new digital-only card that can take direct deposits, meaning I might be able to take Vancity out of the equation entirely and just have my monthly money deposited to my virtual card.

Then I would just have to figure out how to pay Joe the rent that way.

I’ll have to get a Gen Z to show me how to do it.

Holy fuck am I old.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.