Child audience (shouting) : IT’S THERAPY THURSDAY!

Yes kids, it’s everybody’s favorite day of the week, Therapy Thursday, and that means that I had a therapy session over the phone between 1 pm and 2 pm today.

Well, 1 pm and 12:50 pm. Because therapists need time between patients so they can read our file and remember who the heck we are.

Therapist at desk, reading file : Oh right, THIS guy. Oy.

It was an average session. No great revelations or breakthroughs to report, but at least I was fully awake, which made it better than the previous time.

In fact, I’m kind of proud of that, because I was feeling sleepy and tired again this week but I got mad and said, “No, this is not going to happen! ” to myself and actually got up off my thunderous buttocks and gave myself a wiggle and a shake to wake myself up.

By my standards, that was thrillingly proactive, And it worked!

So, yay me!

Child audience applauds wildly and very encouragingly.

I talked about my whole “source” think. About how I feel like I have to take a journey to the source of my river of life in order to clear the trauma that has been blocking it for most of my life and making me weak, hesitant, and scared all the time.

We know what the problem is : rape trauma. But diagnosis is, alack, not cure, and I still need to make that journey upriver to deal with my problems by doing the emotional work needed to resolve that ancient trauma.

Or at least make it more digestible.

And that’s not going to be easy. That ancient trauma has equally ancient defenses and they are no less deadly for being so old and primitive.

Rather the reverse, I am afraid. They were, after all, designed by a child.

Right now, I am trying to clear my mind of the legacy “logic” system’s notion as to how to “solve” a problem like this.

This is not a riddle, a puzzle, or an equation. There is nothing to “solve”. I can’t gain anything through logical analysis. All the relevant information is already known.

The research phase is over. Implementation must begin.

And I’m ready. Well, as ready as I will ever be. I am fully willing to take on a hell of a lot of fear and pain and anything else those ancient defenses can throw at me if it means that I will clear the blockage and finally get better.

And not just a little. I am tired of this painfully slow incremental recovery. It’s better than nothing but I deserve a hell of a lot better.

Life’s too short (especially mine) to go around with a bone stuck in your throat.

And somewhere out there are the clean green meadows full of fresh air and sunshine and rivers of pure water that I dream of. Someplace where I can be happy and healthy and whole living a life that is wholesome and free.

And when I say out there, I really mean in here (gestures to heart).

Child audience awwwwws.

Thanks again, kids. You rock.

More after the break.

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What is this thing?

Calling it The Wound seems inadequate now.

Now that I have a deeper understanding of what it is and what I have to do to overcome in, I feel like it needs a new name.

I could call it The Clog, I suppose. But that makes it sound like my river of life is dammed up near the source by a giant wooden shoe.

Or a giant ball of grease and hair. Ewwwww,

I could call it The Blockage, but that makes it sound like my cardiac issues. And while my metaphorical heart is, indeed, deeply involved in the issue, my literal is not involved in any but the must general of ways.

I could try to be ominously generic by calling it The Issue or My Problem, but that would not be very satisfying in the long run.

Well I have to call it something. So I will call it Frank.

And quite frankly, Frank has got to go. Frank has got to die. I must kill Frank.

To be fair, he started it. He’s been killing me for decades. Smothering me, choking the life out of me, weighing me down and holding me back.

Making me artificially afraid of the world when I am a man of incredible abilities and vast intellect and monumental power of personality who is more than capable of handling life’s challenges with skill and agility and wit.

Instead I have this bunker mentality which makes me stay all locked up inside myself out of fear of threats from 40+ years ago.

There’s nobody out there, man. No wolves at the door, no bullies patrolling and looking for victims, no uninterested family members making me feel unwelcome in my own home for the crime of being born uninvited.

Maybe that’s what I am truly afraid of : that all those things truly are gone and that means I am truly all alone in the world, without even my imaginary oppressors there to keep me company and pay attention to me.

That has the bitter taste of truth to it. The universe does not care enough about me to be out to get me on any level. Nobody does. I am absolutely alone and adrift on the sea of life with nothing but a buster outboard motor to provide propulsion.

But I am not alone. I have friends, very good friends, who love me and want to see me do well and be happy.

I am just too numb to feel it, and too scared to believe in it. Just another resource I am too weak and gutless to tap into no matter how much I want to.

I have sacrificed far too much in order to maintain this suicidal and self-contradictory sense of “safety” – including my own actual safety.

Frank is killing me. And at this point, one of us has to go.

I vote him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve almost always felt helpless.

But I’ve never been helpless.

Or have I?

Hope you brought your Dramamine because I am bound to go in circles on this one.

It’s true that I felt helpless even as a child. Moreso than other children, that is. All children are pretty helpless.

But not all of them feel that way.

Because I had no warm feeling of being loved and protected to make me feel safe. I had been thrown to the wolves by my family when I reached school age. This was after having been raped when I was four, although of course my family didn’t know.

I barely knew myself. That’s how hard I suppressed it all.

So from the day the bullying started, I knew I was alone. A few times I tried to tell my parents about the bullying but they shut me down before I could get the words out.

Like they had some kind of sixth sense for when I was going to remind them they had a fourth child who had the occasional need.

And when you don’t feel like you can ever ask for anything, and the school won’t do a thing to keep you from being routinely brutalized, you feel helpless alright.

So I withdrew deeper and deeper in order to protect myself from a harsh and cruel world. One where I was all alone and friendless and lonely as hell. Where my fellow students tormented me and the teachers either didn’t care or tacitly approved.

A world where everybody treated me like low grade shit and nobody ever made me feel like I was anything but a burden…. and a disgusting one at that.

Then there were two golden years at UPEI, where I had a group of friends who made me feel included and valued and funny and warm.

Clearly, that had to die. So my parents killed it.

And there I was, back in the same house, in the same bedroom, with the same family as before. Only with even less power because I didn’t even get an allowance any more so I was always broke.

My parents wanted to incentivize me to get a job, ya see.

But the crushing depression that came from having my life destroyed prevented that. Then I became truly helpless when I lost my freaking mind for a while.

Clawed my way back from that to how I am now. Been that way ever since.

And I have all this power at my fingertips. Intelligence, talent, charisma, personality, and the vast powers of the internet are right here waiting for me to use them.

But I am too far withdrawn from the world to do anything with them. In order to make my way in the world I would need to engage and I am too scared to do that.

The voice in my head that tells me that my only safety is in going undetected is still way too strong in me.

Obscurity is safety, exposure means death, it sings.

And I know it’s wrong. My hiding place is killing me. I’m not safe at all.

And I know I deserve better. Much, much better.

I should be living like a god damned king.

But I am too fucked up inside.

Time to find my source.

More after the break.

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My kind of guy

I’ve discovered the YouTube channel of a fella named Joey Engelman, and I am loving all of his stuff.

Because he does these very entertaining and informative listicles about pop culture topics, including some long form ones in the popular “icberg” format, where the deeper you go, the less well known the cases are.

Thus automatically taking you deeper into the topic as you read from top to bottom.

Here’s one about TV shows canceled after one episode :

And it shows why I love this guy, because his stuff combines two things I love : pop culture trivia, and not doing research.

He does the research for me! Perfect.

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I’m an artist! Kinda.

Well, technically, I’m a “director”.

But my point is that art I made (with the help of AI) Is now on public display under the username “Twinklespark” over at e6ai.net.

That’s the AI generated art spinoff of furry porn Mecca e621.net and I have set up an account there so I can post the pics I make and pretend to be an artist.

Because I have the soul of an artist, but the fingers of a T-rex in mittens.

By now you’re probably thinking, “Twinklespark? Not Fruvous? WTF?”.

I had decided I wanted a separate “artist” identity. And when I went to sign up for e6ai.net, for some reason the username auto-filled as Twinklespark.

And that was so unexpected and magical and charming that I had to go with it.

Due to my cautious nature, I am testing the waters slowly. The first three pics I posted were completely chaste and wholesome.

You already know this happy couple :

But please, check out the version on my account. I gave them a backstory!

And then there’s this bit of wholesome affection :

Yes, that’s Robin Hood and Little John from Disney’s Robin Hood having a bit of a cuddle somewhere near Sherwood Forest.

Here’s the proper musical accompaniment :

And finally, there’s this devilishly handsome fellow :

Yup, that’s my first attempt at depicting my lil ol fursona, Fruvous.

Fun fact : I have been roleplaying as him on a daily basis for almost 30 years.

Unfun fact : That means I’m really fucking old.

That said, it’s a pretty good likeness. It doesn’t really capture his zany, goofy, cute n’ cuddly personality, but it gets the basics down perfectly.

Trivia : He’s in a blue terrycloth bathrobe because he’s an escaped mental patient!

It also makes him look way too dashing and suave. Fruvous is way too silly and floofy to be able to look that cool.

But at least now the world can see him.

One last pic, a perverted one, just so you don’t think I’ve gone soft :

He’s such a cutie! And look, he’s blushing.

I didn’t ask for that. It just… showed up.

And it just makes me love him even more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh no, Fru has an excuse to talk dirty again!

As patient and alert readers have no doubt deduced, and as my roommates know beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, I lead a nearly pants free life.

My usual mode is to be wearing a T-shirt and socks and nothing in between.

Yes, just like the dress code for Fuck Club.

This allows for a maximum degree of freedom and comfort. My torso and feet stay warm and protected, and my big beautiful butt and balls and terrifyingly (to some) uncircumcised penis get the plentiful air circulation and freedom to move about to which they have become accustomed because that’s what they prefer.

And I bet your bikini region would enjoy them too, at least now and then.

And if you live alone, well, why the heck not? Who’s to know?

Of course, it’s also nice to have my cock and balls and butt close at hand for purposes of masturbation. ^[1] It allows me to do things like jack off while waiting for a file to load in a game I am playing, or stick a finger or two up my ass in order to give myself a quick finger-banging in order to scratch what I affectionate call my “bitch itch”.

And it’s amazing how calming and soothing a quick dozen and a half thrusts of my fingers into my capacious rectum can be.

Anyhow, In general, then, I only wear pants when I am leaving the apartment. And on an average week, I only leave the apartment twice a week : once on Friday to go to Wound Care, and once on Sunday to go do Denny’s with Le Gang.

That adds up to a total of about five hours a week in pants, and the rest of the time my cock, balls, and butthole are free and breezy.

Normally, what happens when I get home from whatever is that the pants stay on until I need to pee.

Now in order to pee at home, I drop trou. It’s a lot easier than fumbling around with belt, button, and a zipper, and there is no chance of getting my precious tool caught in the unforgiving teeth of a zipper.

It happens to most men at least once. And as bad as you think it is, ladies, it is so much worse. Better to take a tap to the nuts.

Dunno if it’s possible to get a labia caught in a zipper. Not accidentally, anyhow.

And once the pants are on the floor, it’s so easy to just step out of them and revert to my natural unpantsed state that I end up going pantsless from thence onward.

So why, pray tell, would I seek to change that wonderful system? Why keep my pants on for longer than necessary?

Because I am trying to civilize myself again, for one. Right now, if I had to function in normal society, the culture shock would be brutal.

But more importantly, I want to stay awake and focused. Just like when I was a more thorough nudist, I find that being pants free keeps me in a kind of half asleep state where I am never very far from a nap and while that state does round off a lot of the rough edges of life,. ultimately I think it is very bad for me and that I really could use more structure and focus in my life in order to help me gather my energies together and harness them to get stuff done.

I definitely need to be pouring my energies out into the world instead of mindlessly holding them in and letting them damage me.

But I need to find my source first.

More after the break.

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Finding my source

:Like I said yesterday, that’s how I have been thinking of it lately. Like hiking to the source of my river of life in order to find and deal with whatever is blocking it.

I mean, I know what the blockage is : the trauma from when I was raped when I was a preschooler. That’s an easy solve.

And there is a powerfully huge amount of “stuff” built up behind that clog. 46 years worth, in fact. I have been functioning on a mere fraction of my potential life energy for all this time, and I am royally fucking sick of it.

I want to live, god damn it. I am sick and tired of being a shadow person who lives life like he’s hiding from the Mafia and who is so afraid of life that he spends as little time dealing with it as possible in favour of the world inside his computers.

I want to be a real person, with substance and content and a normal life. The kind that comes with a job and/or a relationship. The kind where things happen, and I feel like I am getting somewhere, and there is some god damned point to my being alive.

The kind where I matter.

Right now, I feel like I am a ghost. A fragile creature as ephemeral as a smoke ring. I have so little impact on society except as an (admittedly minor) parasite.

And yet I know in my heart that I could do so much if I could just pull my head out from under my tail and face the damned world.

There has to be a way to overcome all this fear. It’s kept me all boxed up inside myself for far too long.

And it all comes back to that ice jam way, way up river. I wish I could focus all my latent energies into a laser beam that would just melt that motherfucker once and for all.

And I know that would release the flood. Apres ca, la deluge. And I welcome it.

I could use a nice, cleansing mental breakdown. I have been running on bald tires and battery power for way too long.

I need to pull the hell over and fix this fucking thing before it falls apart completely.

And by it, I mean me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because nobody is strong enough. Or so I’ve always felt.

Not completely, obviously, or I wouldn’t have bothered talking to Doc Costin for fifty minutes a week for the last decade plus.

Then again, the fact that I have talked to him that much and I am still crazy after all these years suggests that maybe he can’t help me either.

Talking to him DOES help, though. Some weeks more than others, but there is really no substitute for talking to another human being in realtime. One who knows your history and your problems and your psyche, so you don’t have to waste time explaining yourself and can get down to the nitty gritty.

But as patient readers know, he’s not strong enough either. I can’t truly be open and honest and “myself” with him. When I try, he gets just as overwhelmed and frightened and utterly lost as everyone else.

And I know why. It’s because I’m radioactive.

Not in a toxic sense, necessarily. But something fundamental in me automatically collects, refines, concentrates, and stores things, and I have an enormous stockpile of highly refined but unprocessed emotional toxic waste built up in me like some kind of existential superfund site, and when I let down my guard and try to really connect with someone like a therapist, I can’t help but expose them to all of that.

And nobody can handle that.

Even Radioactive Man would have to put on anti-rad gear. And a lead lined codpiece.

And all that radioactivity is only magnified by my powers of expression. Between my verbal gifts, my charisma, my force of personality, and the sharp contrast between my darker than VANTA black “true self” and my usual persona, I am a creature built for self-expression to my very core.

Load in that high energy fuel that I have been hoarding because I had no way to express my darker side for so long, and you have a recipe for being a man alone on a very big castle on a very lonely island far, far from the mainland.

Like I’m in a one man leper colony.

And because of my radioactivity, I can’t truly get close to people. I can be warm and sympathetic and silly and caring with them, but they are not truly getting close to me in an intimate emotional sense.

Even my friends in Le Gang can only get so close. I love them too much to risk hurting them with my radioactive nature. Hurting someone I love that way would destroy me.

So even though I love and cherish and value them and feel lucky as hell to have them in my life, even Joe, Julian, and Felicity are just an audience to me at the end of the day.

In that they never truly get that close to me. There is always that invisible but inviolable wall between me and them that, like the fire curtain at an old Globe style theater, is there for the audience’s protection more than my own.

Maybe I am wrong about all this. Maybe I could drop my shields right now and everyone would be just fine. Maybe I could just let it all go kaboom and then pick up the pieces and use them to make a new me and it would all work out great.

But IO am too afraid of hurting others and too afraid of my own power to try.

Maybe I need to work on that. Maybe I need to finally grow into these abilities of mine.

Maybe I need to grow my soul.

More after the break.

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The other reason

The other reason nobody can help me is the elephant in the room : my high IQ.

And while it’s probably not true that someone has to be smarter than you in order to be able to help you on a psychological and/or spiritual level – as long as they have understanding you lack, they can help you along your road – my mind burns so white hot that it is effectively radioactive too.

And the same thing has happened with the superfund site, too. All these years when it seemed like I wav doing nothing with my life have led to my becoming more intelligent and more talented day by day via the same processes that made me that way.

A fringe benefit of not growing up, I guess.

At this point, I am genuinely concerned that my mind will get so hot that its molecular bonds break down and it dissolves into plasma.

Some argue that this has already happened. Many times.

The obvious but inadequate solution is to start harnessing all these coruscating energies to do great and amazing things, or to at least make me a living.

Which sounds great on paper but it won’t work. (Story of my life, really. )

Because it all comes back to what I was talking about yesterday : for whatever reason, when I go to activate myself and get going, there is no gas in the tank. Whatever it is that people need in order to get up and get moving just plain ain’t there.

It’s all dammed up inside me somewhere. There is a mighty ice dam keeping my life force from being able to inhabit and inspire me, and I don’t know what it is.

I know this much : it has a lot to do with fear. And not just anxiety. I am talking a deep level of stark animal terror. The kind that makes you want to shrink into a tiny little ball and then disappear forever.

The kind that makes you afraid to be alive.

Well I was never supposed to be here in the first place.

I was never invited in to my family. They never asked for me. And they made sure to never make me feel welcome, either.

No wonder I am polluted right at the source.

And at some point, I am going to have to hike uphill till I find the source of that pollution and get it the fuck out of there.

Only then can the waters of life reach my thirsty soul.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Using AI to make furry porn, that is.

I literally have trouble making myself stop doing it. Earlier today I had to really struggle with myself to get myself to stop long enough to play Baldur’s Gate 3!

My previous addiction has stiff competition.

And it’s not hard to see why because the “gameplay loop” (so to speak) is so simple and satisfying. I type in some (probably perverted) words, wait between 15 and 30 seconds, and ding, out pops gorgeous furry porn.

I mean, look at this!

That’s some illustrator quality art right there! That would not look out of place in the pages of a book by a well known children’s author.

But not J. K. Rowling, because fuck her.

WARNING : The following will contain both pee and/or vaginas.

Right now, I am still mostly using it as a fun form of mental masturbation. Mental, in that I don’t have my dick in my hand while I am generating the art.

It’s way too slow for that. I already have trouble with my endurance on that front. There is no way I could have my Happy Squirting Time before I ran out of gas that way.

Feel free to use “Happy Squirting Time” yourself, by the way. It’s for everyone to enjoy.

And remember, girls squirt too!

And speaking of squirting, check out the world’s first peeing eye dog :

So yeah, my output is pretty porn-y right now. But I am already feeling the stirrings of something more, and I know that eventually I will want to do more than just produce custom wank fuel for myself.

I will want to use it to do what I do best, namely tell stories and/or make people laugh. Making my own comic strip could be trivially easy this way.

Assuming I ever figure out how to get it to put text on the images. When I try it now, it makes random word balloons filled with what looks like Cyrillic but according to Google Translate is nothing at all.

Which raises the intriguing possibility that what is appearing is the AI’s uncomprehending visual approximation of language.

Porn time! Here’s one for those who love vaginas.

It bugs me too much that her arms and legs aren’t fluffy.

Those are some lovely tits, though.

And you should check out her brother.

Oh my. Hey there gorgeous. Mama like. Mama want. Mama NEED.

Of course, I couldn’t leave it at that. I needed more.

So I made this.

Bugs me that he’s not wooly all over too, but somehow, I feel I can overlook it.

Bugs? Oh yeah, that reminds me….

I just wish I had the skills to put a picture of his iconic mailbox on his left butt cheek with an arrow pointing to his butthole next to it.

Because it’s his bunny hole, ya see.

One last pic. Hmmm, so many of these would make people too uncomfy….

Oh, here’s a good one.

I guess that’s enough for now.

I’ve held you kind people hostage to my perversions for long enough.

More after the break.

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My kind of brain

I have never met or heard of anyone with a mind like mine.

I am sure they must be out there – I can’t be THAT unique.

I mean, the odds are 7 billion to 1 against it.

But to my knowledge, I am functionally unique. My bizarre combination of wild creativity and hard nosed pragmatism makes me that most dangerous of creatures, a practical dreamer. The kind of person who can actually build castles in the sky.

The kind of person who actually can change the world. I have very high ideals and grand humanist plans for the future of humanity and a lot of ideas about how to make the world a better place.

But unlike the works of other dreamers, mine would actually work.

And if they don’t work, fuck them. Back to the drawing board. Nothing but concrete results are acceptable. We change the world or die trying.

Now I just need a cadre of young, idealistic, energetic Gen Z types desperate for something to believe in to become my followers and execute my enemies plans.

Barring that, I suppose I would settle for a life of selling my brilliance to the highest bidder and living a life of genteel and discrete debauchery somewhere.

First rule of Fuck Club : no pants. Nothing is to be worn between hips and ankles. Everywhere else, go nuts. But this is a pants free zone.

Second rule of Fuck Club : have extremely good HVAC. Climate control is key if we’re all going to be prancing about with our butts and penises or vulvas proudly exposed.

And yes, girls are allowed too. It’s an all inclusive fuckfest. Everyone who can handle the (un)dress code and the “free use” attitude is welcome in Fuck Club.

Our only limit is the fire code.

Of course, nobody is ever required to do anything with anybody. The inviolable Golden Rule of Fuck Club is consent.

Absolutely anything with consent, absolutely nothing without it. That is, in fact, the only rule for sex.

Everything else is just mindless taboo and is less than worthless.

The idea is to cultivate a true free love atmosphere. One where everyone feels free to be themselves and help themselves to whatever dishes on the fuck buffet look good to them, in whatever quantity they like.

I want to return sexuality to the Edenic world of innocent carnality where it belongs. Free of taboos, shame, and pants, everyone would be free to seek and find (or attract and find, or both) whatever they want to do.

I picture there being a system where everyone has an ID badge that clearly displays their “club name” and there is an app that only works inside the club where people can advertise what they are looking for and look over what others are looking for and if two or more people agree to meet up and maybe do their thing (and have their things done) the app leads them to one another via GPS.

Or leads them to whatever specialty room they choose for their rendezvous.

Because I totally see their being specific rooms for specific fetishes. The more popular ones, at least.

Whatever people need to really scratch that itch, ya know?

Our motto : salvation via satiation. It is only when our needs are met that our minds and souls are truly free.

So, the direct opposite of asceticism.

As you can see, I have given this a lot of thought.

Heck, if I could make the whole thing work, I’d franchise it out!

Would you sign up?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, it’s metaphorical. I haven’t discovered any real lumps there yet.

No, what I am talking about is how I get blocked on a subject – overwhelmed – and my usual brilliance gets bogged down by self-doubt and confusion and the result is a kind of mental logjam that blocks my progress until it clears up.

And it WILL clear up, if I just hang in there and give it time. Slowly, I am learning to be less flighty and more inclined to hang in there and fight for what I want instead of giving up the moment things are less than intuitively easy.

Life can’t be like it was when I was a kid and school was super duper easy for me. So easy I didn’t even have to try.

So I never had to learn to persevere past what I thought my limits were. To exceed myself, and thus truly grow as a person.

And even then, when something wasn’t as easy as that for me, like gym or arts and crafts, I just refused to do it. Or did it in a really half assed way.

And I got away with it because I was so bright on the academics.

And, admittedly, because I could be very stubborn and difficult when pushed.

Like, to a point way, way past the kind of resistance other kids could put up when they were being difficult because I was so ferociously bright that the teachers could not intellectually dominate me or make me do anything I didn’t want to do.

And that’s very bad for a child.

Anyhow, the thing that brought this subject up recently was the fun I have been having making (mostly) perverted art via AI image generation.

And whilst playing around with it has been fun, there were a lot of things about the technical side of it that I just did not understand and felt overwhelmed by.

And that is where I got stuck. For more than a week, I was thinking that maybe the subject was “too technical” for me and that I needed someone, like my friend Windchaser who introduced me to AI image generation, to explain it to me.

But I didn’t. Now that I have started reading up on the subject in the Easy Diffusion documentation, I realize that none of it is all that complicated and that therefore the only thing getting in the way of my learning it was a bad first impression of the subject.

It was like I had a lump of ice in my throat and I had to wait for it to melt before I could swallow the new information.

Luckily, in this one case, I had the inherent perverted joy of the dirty toybox that is ther world of furry porn generation to keep me trying until it did.

And that’s not necessarily a one off thing.

Maybe there are other things I want to do that I could do fairly easily if I could just get past the lump in my throat about them.

Food for thought.

More after the break.

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Maybe it would be easier to maintain a healthy lifestyle if we thought about it less as doing the right thing for ourselves and more as procrastinating about dying.

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The big lump

Of course, for me, the biggest lump in my throat is my Wound.

The one from the primary trauma of being raped when I was 4 years old. I have been trying to digest that trauma for 46 years and I have not had much success.

And it’s the main source of my weakness. A whole lot of me is locked away along with that trauma and that has stunted my personal growth for my entire life.

And that’s a tough thing to try to get over when you’re fifty.

For so much of my life, I’ve just been treading water. Making it through the day. Never giving much thought to where I was going in life or what I wanted to do.

A lot of day just barely hanging on, living the same stupid life of video games and internet and masturbation and naps.

Because all I know how to do is entertain myself.

I’ve never had much of anything else in my life. Just school, and self-amusement. I had jobs when I was younger but never came within a country mile of supporting myself.

Or even trying, really.

I want to be a real grownup some day. Have a job, a relationship, a wider social circle. A career, the respect of my peers, the whole Maslowian pyramid.

But maybe that is not for me. Or if it is, it will come as a byproduct of my finally making something of myself, not as a goal unto itself.

I know I am capable of amazing things in the right milieu. Put me in the right place and watch me shine. I am capable of tremendous creative output, in both quantity and quality, and I have the kind of talents that could lead to both tremendous commercial and critical success because it’s so damned good.

My creative ambition has no limit. I want to make stuff that is so good that it makes the world seem like a better place just for having what I have made in it.

But none of that can happen while I am crippled by this deep and terrible spiritual disability caused by this very old wound of mine.

Until that is overcome, I will continue to limp along, leading a life that gets progressively sadder as I get sicker and sicker because I don’t even have the wherewithal to take care of myself properly.

I get by. That’s about it.

And when I try to seriously think about getting out into the world and making something of myself, as a reality and not just a “thing that is nice to think about”, I feel like I am trying to draw water from a dry well. Whatever it is I need to have within me to be able to do something like that is just not there.

And I’m going nowhere till I find it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Faerun (pretentiously pronounced fay-ROON) being the fictional setting of that game, Baldur’s Gate 3, that I’ve been playing.

Both things happened today, and both were surreal.

First, I was stuck for a while on a particular battle. It involved the denoument of my party member and all around awesome cleric and friend Shadowheart^[1]‘s plotine and that involves a confrontation with the Mother Superior of a large cloister of worshippers of the goddess of darkness, Shar.

Who, as it sadly turned out, is pretty evil. And corny! I mean, she wants to plunge the world into eternal unbroken darkness.

Right, you and every other major vampire villain.^[2]

So what would happen is that I would go confront this Mother Inferior bitch, she would say, “Hand over Shadowheart or else!”, I’d tell her to go fuck herself sideways, and she would sic all her followers on me.

And hoo boy, were there a lot of them. Which is why I kept losing. I would be throwing my big spells around and taking them out in droves but they would just keep coming.

Plus they would cast this goddamn darkness spell (to which they are immune, of course) that really made life difficult.

I had the bright idea to position my party members and their summoned creatures up the staircase leading to the location of the fight in hope of forcing the horse of enemies to be forced to pool at the base of the stairs where they would be easier to blast with my big bad area of effect spells.

Eat hot electric death from the Mistress of Storms, bitch!

The weirdness began when I re-did the conversation with the Bitchiest Witch but instead of replying to “Give me Shadowheart!” with “Go eat a bag of expired dicks, you demented whore!”, I replied, “Um, sure, let me go get her. ”

And she believed me!

I guess it’s no surprise that the queen of darkness isn’t very bright. *zing!*

So I got my people set up on the staircase just so and I was ready for the fight. Al;l I needed to do was send my warrior queen Karlach out to start the fight.

But because I had told the Dame of Dimness I was going to go get Shadowheart so telling her to go French kiss a camel with AIDS was no longer an option.

Easy fix : I’ll just have Karlach attack her. That’s sure to set things off.

But it didn’t. I attacked her, did a lot of damage, and she just stood there still glaring imperiously at me. Her audience didn’t react either. Weird.

So I attacked her again. Still nothing. And again. Nothing.

Well surely she would try to stop me from actually killing her, right?

Nope. Killed her right there in front of a sea of her adherents.

Who did react to her death…. by breaking into small groups for discussion.

“Wow, can you believe the Mother Superior was never worthy?” one said.

Maybe they weren’t so much devoted to her as scared of her?

It was all creepy as concentrated fuck.

I mean, I took it because it got me past that tricky fight. But part of me really wanted to load a previous save and do the fight anyway just to restore a sense of normalcy.

More after the break.

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Well it’s that time of the year again.

Time for me to get this dang song stuck in my head until Halloween.

I know I watched the special when I was a kid.

And I remember thinking it was really terrible. Awful, in fact.

I wonder if I would feel the same today?

After all, it has the voices of Gilda Radner and Catherine O’Hara!

---

The other thing

Oh yeah, the other weird event in Faerun.

This one is much shorter. I had a quest to see what became of an artist friend named Oskar after he moved to the titular Baldur’s Gate.

Turns out he married the rich lady who was his primary patron. Unfortunately, immediately after that, he become sullen and withdrawn, and that worsened to being violent and verbally abusive.

Really, really verbally abusive.

Now if this was the real world, I’d be asking Oskar what marriage meant to him, what his parents’ marriage was like, and in general assuming the problem was that dear Oskar had a lot of metaphorical demons rise up once he was married. Ones he probably had no idea were even there.

But this is a fantasy RPG, so ir was very literal demons. Poltergeists, even.

And that meant that first I had to knock poor Oskar out so he would stop menacing his long suffering and remarkably patient wife and then go through her entire mansion looking for the damned poltergeists and destroying them.

Which was made tricky by the fact that they are invisible. But I am a clever sorcerer, so I just waited for them to attack me then hit that general area with an area of attack spell (Turn Undead worked well) which hurt them and made them visible for long enough for me to finish them off the old-fashioned way.

And when I had destroyed them all, I went blank for a moment, then said this :

And that made me extremely happy.

And now the bad news : the goddamned game has a level cap, and I’ve hit it.

It’s level 12, and apparently they said they had to put that in there or people would get too powerful for the bosses in the game.

Bullshit. You just make the enemies stronger when the heroes get stronger. That’s what every other god damned game does.

Words cannot describe how pissed off I am by this. I have done a whole lot of adventuring after hitting level 12 and none of it fucking counted.

Now I am just going to hurry through to the end because what is the point in doing the side quests when it won’t advance my character?

I feel like this really breaks the relationship between an RPG and its players. Victory equals advancement. That’s how it is supposed to work.

And what’s worse is that it doesn’t even tell you that you hit a level cap.

It even still awards the XP, it just doesn’t count it.

I feel violated.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today is Therapy Thursday, and today’s session pretty much sucked.

My fault, in a sense. I was very tired and therefore not at my most insightful or verbose. I had gotten the usual amount of sleep but for some reason I was still sleepy.

God damn do I miss caffeine.

My therapist. Doctor Costin, would suggest that my subconscious mind was trying to sabotage my session in order to protect my depression and/or avoid talking about sensitive or touchy subjects.

And normally I dismiss such comments. Because they’re irritating.

But I think that was probably part of what was going on with me today. I think the deeper and less mature part of my mind didn’t want to have to come up with things to talk about with Doctor Costin or deal with my issues at all and so it clung to some leftover sleepiness from this morning and hid out in it instead.

Unacceptable. Next time I feel sleepy when therapy time is coming, I am going to do what it takes to wake myself the fuck up.

Get up and walk around. Splash cold water on my face. Punch myself in the dick.

Whatever it takes.

More reasonably, I could keep one of those 591 ml bottles^[1] of diet cola in the fridge for just such an occasion.

Drink one of those like an hour before the session and I will be plenty perky and hopefully full of in depth and probing and therefore therapeutically utile things to bring up and discuss about myself.

The other part of the problem, though, is that I can’t use my usual method of just talking about whatever I have been talking about on my blog lately because I’ve not been writing the navel plumbing introspective stuff lately.

And I am not sure how I feel about that.

On the one hand, I am happy that my mind has started developing its defenses and using them to protect itself.

Believe it or not, a cranky sullen mind that passive aggressively defends itself out of sheer crankiness is actually a sign of progress for me.

It’s a lot healthier than a mind that just lays there on a slab as a subject for me to twitter and tweet about in a detached and clinical sense.

That shit can be therapeutic, true, but it comes from an unhealthy place. If I am to successfully resurrect myself from my frozen slumber, I am going to have to learn to deal with myself as a living, breathing, feeling entity in realtime.

God, its so much more complicated being alive.

Especially when you have spent so much time learning to avoid stimulation that you are no longer capable of making choices that would increase your stimulation levels.

Which leads to an increasingly low stimulus life that doesn’t even feel real any more, and therefore neither do you.

But now you are trapped at the bottom of a hill you can no longer climb.

Clearly something’s gotta give. Something’s gotta break.

Something’s gotta change.

And that means the old tablet of values must be shattered so that a new, better one can take its place.

I don’t know what comes next, but I know it won’t play by the same old rules as before.

My mental illness knows those rules too well.

It’s time to stop trying to solve the maze and start walking on top of its walls.

More after the break.

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To simply live

It’s a lovely dream, isn’t it?

To be able to just live life without all the neurosis, destructive self-doubt, paralyzing anxiety, walls of fear and paranoia, and all the other junk that my mental illness conjures up in its misguided attempts to keep me “safe”.

Fuck being safe. I want to be happy. Even if that means skydiving in the nude.

But the dream is to live free of all that junk. To be able to calm the fuck down and lose all my self-consciousness and finally be able to just live in the moment like a real person and get the most out of life warts and all. Up AND down.

To be able to make a feast of life, instead of being one of the billions of poor bastards starving to death amidst plenty. With the right attitude, I am convinced, life can be a nonstop buffet of pleasures large and small.

But the first thing that has to go is this rigid devotion to a particular notion of “the Truth”. I have gathered more than enough evidence that my faith that “you’re always better off knowing the truth” is wildly misplaced and I can only conclude that in order to make it in this world, you need some way of being able to lie to yourself a little.

Or at least when there are multiple equally valid potential interpretations of events, to choose whatever one makes me the happiest.

The stubborn Truth-ist in me insists that to do so is “cheating” and that I should remain fanatically devoted to whatever interpretation is “the most true”.

But my ability to judge which one that is remains very unreliable, and often leads not to truth but to the interpretation which best suits my negative mental state.

That’s nowhere near the truth, and what’s worse, it’s lying in the wrong direction!

So who’s to say what the truest Truth is? Why not pick whatever version of things makes me the happiest? What’s wrong with giving life a positive spin?

Leave the cult of pain, which insists that the most painful is the most true, behind forever and learn to always have my thumb on the positive side of the scale.

Solve to maximize the happiness variable, damn it. Be happy without needing to justify it. Give yourself every emotion you have ever needed and to hell with whether that lines up with “reality” or not.

Fuck reality. I want to be happy. Even if that means being delusional.

Let’s try being the happy kind of crazy for a while.

It can’t be worse that what I have right now!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] I love those things. They are the perfect one serving size for me.

WARNING : Some of the following art is NOT x-rated.

Sorry if that disappoints you.

Well I have continued to mess around with Easy Diffusion, a fairly easy to use version of the famous Stable Diffusion AI image generation program.

I have loaded the yiffymix model into it so that it has all the gloriously perverted possibilities of massive amounts of furry porn loaded into its little brain, and thus I have been able to entertain myself like never before.

But the real miracle is that I can make art now! At long last, art generation has been liberated from the shackles of natural talent and put into the hot and sweaty hands of enthusiastic perverts like myself, WHERE IT BELONGS.

So let’s start the show!

Let’s kick it off with something wholesome and sweet.

Awwww! Aren’t they adorable? Even if I could never use it to make perverted art, the ability to generate images that are so very “me” like this one – all cute and cuddly and fuzzy and warm – would be miracle enough for me.

I mean look at them! They clearly adore one another. They’re so happy and snuggly and in love that it makes little pink hearts float over my head.

Makes me wonder what the equivalent for horniness would be.

Cute little floaty penises and/or vulvas? Nah, too vague.

I know! Little floaty ERECTING penises and LUBRICATING vulvas!

That would get the idea across.

Especially for art like THIS :

Dunno why one of his eyes is fucked up but I dunno how to fix it either, so…

Remember, you have to be over this | | tall and plausibly over the legal age of consent in your jurisdiction in order to ride the Teddy Fuxpin.

And given the size of that thing, ample lubrication is recommended.

And for those who prefur the other kind of ride, we have :

Oh my my, doesn’t that look delectable. Hey there mister bear. That’s an awfully nice spread you are offering me. Makes me feel hungry all over

. But moreso in some places than others. Naturally.

Gotta touch base with the ladies too. Vagina warning for all you nelly fags who faint at the mere mention of female equipment.

Isn’t she hella cute? So soft and cuddlesome looking. And clearly DTF AF if that is the sort of thing you’re into.

I’d give it a whirl. I’ve never tried sex with a woman before. Maybe I’d love it and it would turn out I am totally bi.

Probably not. But still.

And finally, a nice bucolic scene of a horse in its natural state.

Just think of how many critters all over the world are taking a leak right now.

Kinda bring a lump to your pants throat, doesn’t it?

More after the break,.

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My new anti heartburn med is pantoprazole, which has to be the most bibbity bobbity boo sounding one yet.

A-pantoprazole, a-rigamorole, a bibbity bobbity boo…..

---

Can you feel my heart burn?

About that whole heartburn thing.

IF what I have been experiencing has indeed been chronic heartburn, then that would explain a lot more than my recent spate of cardiac like symptoms.

It might even be what is behind the Demon Hunger which plagues me now and then.

You see, I think what has been going on is that my stomach acid builds up over time for some reason and when it gets bad enough, I start to feel it.

But I have been misinterpreting that gnawing feeling in my gut as being hunger when it fact it’s acidosis.

It makes a kind of sense, because the sensations are similar – in fact,. stomach acid level is one of the ways our bodies tell us to eat – and what do you know, eating relieves the pain because it gives the acid something to eat besides my stomach lining.

And subconsciously I have known this. But the knowledge never quite broke through to the conscious mind until my most recent trip to the (fucking) ER.

I have, I think, become a walking talking case study in acid reflux, and that worries me.

See, way back when acid reflux was in the news as a new thing, I saw a segment on it where they talked about someone who had it so bad that the acid actually ate through his esophagus and into his cardiac chamber itself.

Now that’s some very literal heartburn.

And I am worried that this is what is happening to me. Hence my cardiac symptoms.

I know that I have been suffering spates of this “hunger” for many years. That means the acid reflux has had plenty of time to eat me up inside.

It’s no wonder that the ER couldn’t find any signs of cardiac distress. My heart is doing its job just fine. Everything is aces on the heart qua the heart.

It’s just that the stomach is fucking up and spraying its hydrochloric acid up into the esophagus and that has started to irritate the cardiac chamber.

Hence that “heartburn” feeling – it’s actually heartburn. Go fig.

More worrying is the persistent feeling of tightness in my chest. It really feels like someone is holding my heart in their hand.

If that is, indeed, stomach acid eating into my cardiac chamber, that’s pretty bad. I could have a heart attack that has nothing to do with heart disease or cholesterol.

Ergo this is now what I will talking with Doctor Chao about when I see him on the 18th. I imagine that he will refer me to a gastroenterologist ASAP.

Assuming I am capable of motivating him to actually do things on my behalf. He seems to have trouble with the concept of urgency and how it applies to him.

But I am pretty sure I can light a fire under his ass if I have to.

So it turns out that’s what been eating me lately : me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Things got more interesting once I actually found my way into the domain of Ansur, the ancient bronze dragon, in my attempt to recruit him.

First I had to pass his four challenges. The usual BS about a test of courage (surviving a fight with a buttload of elementals), of strategy (a chess puzzle, oh joy), a test of “justice” (some weird thing I had to look up involving shadows^[1]) and a test of wisdom which I never even found.

Because as it turns out, I only needed to do two of them. I did the test of courage (the secret to survival was to kill the elementals as fast as they showed up) and the test of justice and then I found the door to the dragon’s lair already open.

Which was good because I was not looking forward to that chess thing. I know the basic rules of chess, like the point of the game and how each piece moves, but I tried doing legal moves in my abortive attempt to solve the thing and it would just make an error sound and put the piece back where it had been.

So apparently “checkmate” was not the solution they were looking for.

Anyhow, so I got into the lair of the dragon and oh shit, the dragon is dead. Nothing but a scorched skeleton remains of him.

But before I have the time to process this revelation, the spirit of the dragon wakes up and has a confab with my passenger, an illithid called The Emperor, who lives in a crystal I carry.

As one does.

In this conversation, it is revealed that the being I know as The Emperor is none other than the legendary founder of Baldur’s Gate (the city), a hero named Balduran.

Nice how they sidestepped entanglement with the Baldr of Norse mythology there.

It is also revealed that Balduran (Emperor) and Ansur are old friends.

But it did not end well.

Because you see, Balduran is the one who killed Ansur. Apparently they had a bit of a falling out over the fact that Balduran was turning into a Mind Flayer.

Ansur : Just let me give you a peaceful death rather than become an illithid!
Balduran : Um, no. *kills Ansur in self-defense*

Relationships can be so complicated.

Ansur : Well I am still pretty mad about that so now I am going to return the favour you did me and kill you and your new friends!

And so he resurrects himself as a draco-lich and I now have to kill the dragon I came here to recruit.

And let me tell you, that had better not be it. I was promised a freaking dragon as in ally and if all that ends up happening is my re-killing it I am going to be pissed off.

I am actually rooting for them pulling some cheap trick like, “By re-killing me, you freed me from the spell making me evil! Thank you! Now let’s go fight that giant brain!” because as lame as that would be, it would still be less depressing than it ending there.

More after the break.

---

A quick update

Nope. The dragon stayed dead. Dammit.

---

Feel the world

Still working on opening up this big ol heart of mine.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

It’s odd. I’ve always thought of myself as a very sensitive and empathic person. And that carries with it connotations of openness.

But it turns out that you can be very sensitive and closed off as hell.

In fact, it might be mandatory. Maybe when you are really sensitive, you have to build a Wall (as in Pink Floyd’s The) in order to create a space in your mind (the lea of the Wall) free of all those empathic signals just so you can have a sense of where you end and other people begin.

Take it from a hyper-empath, it can get mighty tricky sometimes.

Especially when you have a somewhat weak sense of self like I do. I don’t know chicken from egg in that scenario.

Do I have a weak sense of self because of my strong empathy? Is the presence of other people’s emotions (mixed interchangeably with my own) the reason my sense of who I am is unstable and poor, or am I strongly empathic because of my weak sense of self?

Whatever. Such flip-flop dichotomies bore me.

The glibly accurate but unhelpful answer is that my sense of self has been suppressed by my depression and anxiety, both of which kept me from doing really any of the things normally associated with finding out who you really are.

I have instead hunkered in my bunker for thirty years of aborted adulthood. I have hidden behind various computer screens, from vt100 terminals to my current behemoth of a monitor, and lived like I was on the run from the law for my entire adult life and only now, at the age of 50, am I finally able to really look at that and ask myself why.

I look back at all those years of wasted adulthood and all I can see is a very scared person hiding beneath a glossy veneer of wit and warmth and charm.

After all, when other people are around, I don’t seem sick. The slick façade is in place and it’s kind of like I am a completely different person.

A better, healthier, more complete person.

It’s only here in this blog that I approach anything like being who I really am. And I have had to write literally millions of words to get here.

And my journey is far from over. As I grow as a writer, my ability to express what is inside me trying to get out expands too, and the process accelerates.

And every day, I feel just a little bit more like myself.

Whoever the heck THAT is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.