Waiting for spuug to show up. He’s have transport issues.

I am glad I called on him to do the memory job because, as he reminded me, my computer’s case is quite tiny and so putting the memory IN will mean taking a lot of stuff OUT, and that is not something I would feel remotely comfortable doing.

So much for the whole “it’s super easy! Just plug a thing into a thing!” idea.

I am thinking that I might completely the trifecta and get a new case when I get the motherboard and CPU combo.

That combination of things used to be called a “barebones PC”, but of course, like all good and useful terminology, its meaning has drifted over time.

I am pondering whether I might be best off buying my barebones from a small computer shop. The thought is that they can offer me a better price than the big boys as well as personal service I sure as fuck can’t get from Amazon.

I will mull it over. No rush on that. I won’t be in a position to maybe get what I want until the New Year. For now, all I need do is put my Xmas money together.

I am in a good position. Today is Deposit Day and I have roughly $160 in my wallet from last month. That’s a good nest egg right there, and the only person’s Xmas money in there is my mother’s.

I am hoping to get around $300-$400 together. That should be enough to future-proof my PC for a while, which is my ultimate goal.

And, ya know, to be able to play current games better too. I can’t wait to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with 24 gigs of physical memory instead of a mere 8.

At least, I think it will be 24 gigs. I am pretty sure the 8 gigs I have right now is built into the motherboard and therefore not taking up one of the two memory slots on it.

I mean, going from 8 to 16 would still be great. But I want MORE dammit!

Video games are my main hobby, after all. Makes sense to invest my meager moolah there. Properly done, upgrading my computer could bring me gaming pleasure for years and years to come.

Well, I have had a looksee at good ol Amazon.ca and it turns out there is still such a thing as a barebones PC. Go figure.

Of course, I still don’t understand most of the techno gobbledygook that comes with any of these barebones PCs. I can’t even tell exactly what any of them have inside because the information comes at me like this :

“Mini PC OS Desktop PC 12th Gen Intel N100 4C/4T 16G DDR4 500G M.2 PCIE1 SSD TRIGKEY G4 Mini Computer, Support W10 Working Micro PC, 4K@60Hz UHD Graphics Dua; Display”

Plus a lot of these rigs are described as “mini PCs”, and I know I don’t want one of those. They are cutesie little hobbyist computers for tech types who want a baby PC to play with and nurture and go “Wow, look at all the stuff it can do despite being so cute!”.

Nuh-uh. I want a monster. A mad beast that hungers to smash through millions of floating point operations a second to give me gaming joy.

To hell with your toys, I want a real man’s computer!

More after the break.

---

The harm we do to ourselves

Once more, Psych2Go has my number.

Let’s go through the list.

Social withdrawal. AKA my entire adult life. Low self esteem? Check. It wasn’t all that long ago that I hated myself. Now I just get on my nerves sometimes.

Viewing self as damaged and unworthy? Check. Still working on that one. It is very hard to remember that other people don’t see me that way and that this deep feeling of being disgusting and toxic is the product of my mental and physical illness and nothing more.

Viewing other people as evil and untrustworthy? Yes and no. I see people as unreliable and when the insanity has me in its grip, I feel like everyone hates me and is judging me and wants me to just crawl off and die because how dare I think I had the right to force people to see me by going out in public.

Damn. Never typed it out quite like that before. That’s so messed up.

Lashing out? Thankfully no, but then again. nobody has gotten all that close to me either. And I am very afraid that if they ever do, out will come the rage and I will lash out with all the fury of the wounded child who doesn’t want to let anyone touch them again.

At least I am aware of the potential problem, and that’s a very good start.

Freezing up.  Yup. To a pathological degree. And she is right, it began as a response to a situation where I felt utterly helpless, to wit, when I was being raped.

I fled to the only place I could go : into my mind.

Dissociating? Ayup, a lot. Zoning out/brain fog? Hell yeah. Emotionally numb? I am a afraid so. Difficulty in making decisions or taking action? SO MUCH YES. And a paralyzing fear of trying new things? Ditto.

It’s like in one minute she summarized me completely. And…

Fawning. That’s the big one for me right now and I have only scratched the surface of it. It’s clear to me now that my response to trauma was to flee and/or freeze, and when that didn’t work, to turn on the cuteness and charm… and helplessness.

After all, if you’re helpless, you’re nonthreatening. And innocent. In a twisted way it’s like I am trying to turn the threat into a friend or even a caregiver.

I’m not proud of that. What man could be? But I do not doubt that it is true.

And judging by how much it still hurts to talk about it, I clearly need to talk about it more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wheels are in motion.

The warm and wonderful William “spuug” Graham is going to stop by soon, maybe tomorrow, to install my newly acquired 16 gigs of DDR3 memory.

This was sort of a silly purchase, because I am going to be buying a new CPU and motherboard in the new year with my Xmas money and savings, and that motherboard will probably take DDR4 memory, and I already have some of that due to an overenthusiastic errant purchase last year.

Why? Because I’m silly.

I am a silly, absentminded, imprudent, impulsive fool, and I am increasingly convinced that I should stop fighting it as a character flaw and start embracing it as a life strategy.

I’ve realized that I have been trying to force myself to fit on the Etruscan bed of my idea of “smart” for my entire life when I just might not be cut out to live that way.

Ergo, I would be better off embracing my wild surges of inspiration and enthusiasm and letting them sweep me along, even if they cause me to run straight into a brick wall.

Yeah that sucks, and one can only hope that one’s impulses will get smarter over time and learn to send you along less wall-prone paths, but by golly. I am ready to entertain the radical thought that it might just be more important to preserve and harness those powerful impulses rather than strangle them in their cribs in the name of being “smart”.

It’s a new theory but it’s gaining ground rapidly.

Every time I quash an impulse – and this happens almost constantly, I do almost everything more out of habit than desire – I am contributing to my lack of motivation by starving my poor belabored id of much needed reinforcement.

Turn them down for long enough and they will give in to despair. Who wouldn’t?

These are the kind of mistakes you have to be extremely intelligent to make. Only us smarty pants types have the beefy emotional override centers of the brain to completely ignore all our emotions and impulses in pursuit of greater facility with abstractions.

Great for school. Sucks for life.

In other news, they put me back on going to Wound Care twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, and so I had to go this morning.

And that was not easy, what with all my muscle soreness lately.

God damn, I hope that’s not permanent, because I am getting tired of all the moaning and whimpering I’ve been doing just from trying to get around.

So yeah. Doing Wound Care really sucked. And yet, when the nurse asked how I was doing, I told her my muscle were “a little sore”.

Why do I lie? Am I really that allergic to drawing attention to myself? Somebody should know that things are going poorly for me.

But I am too damned Avoidant to tell them about it.

No wonder I’m so fucked up. It’s like I’m drowning because I’m too meek to call for help.

Well, those people on the shore look busy. I don’t want to bother them.

More after the break.

---

One kind of guilt I have

I feel bad for making my friends, who love me, watch my physical health fall apart.

I mean, it’s one thing to have our mental health issues destroying you. It’s quite another to having them hurt the ones you love.

And the root problem is definitely mental health. Avoidant Personality and all that. Makes me too wrapped up in my own little world of video games and watching stuff on the TVC with friends and napping to do what I need to do for my health.

At least Jardiance^[1] has my blood sugar under control now. My last a1C test, which tests long term blood sugar, was 7.3, and 7 is normal, so… good enough for me.

Guess I don’t need to worry about that for the time being, although I have been worried about it and felt personal guilt about it for so long that I am not sure I can even stop.

. If I can, it will take a while. That guilt train has a lot of momentum to kill.

But back to my loved ones. I know it must be seriously crazymaking to have a sweet, funny friend get sicker and sicker in front of your eyes, with you helpless to stop it.

The worst part is that the thing keeping THEM from doing everything they can about it is entirely invisible. It is a phantom of the mind, albeit a powerful one, and therefore it seems like I am neglecting myself to death out of sheer apathy.

And I am, kinda. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

What I really need is for a competent adult to take over top-level executive control of my life. Have them make the decisions and the adjustments and the plans. Have them learn about my blood glucose monitor and how it works then step me through it. Have them figure out how to get government assistance for my disabilities, so all I have to do is fill out and sign the forms. Have them make all my doctor’s appointment for me, so that I can’t just let them slide.

Ya know, typing it out like that, I realize that what I need most is someone to hold my hand and keep me calm so that I don’t freak out and give up on things.

Someone confident and competent and tough.

Like the one he is looking for in this song :

But a man. Obviously.

One who can be hard headed and practical and authoritative so that I can be soft and silly and just do what I am told.

That would be a heck of a job for some fella to take on. But I would repay them a million times over with all my love and understanding and compassion.

For the right man, I could be a happy little wifey.

But he’d have to be one heck of a guy.

First, to get this out of my head :

Soy, oats, and sugar cubes
Appaloosa, baby…. so that’s what you feed me…

“Loosa” by buck

In case that doesn’t ring a bell, it’s a parody of “Loser” by Beck.

Well the last 24 hours or so have sucked. I did NOT make it to Denny’s last night. When the time to go came around, I was quite miserable.

The worst was the dizziness. If I tried to stand up, the new and perverse version of gravity slapped me back down on to the bed. Even getting to and from my computer chair took a cat burglar’s level of planning and caution as I climbed off the bed and into the chair on my hands and knees.

Almost as bad was the muscle weakness and pain. Even if I hadn’t been dizzy, standing up would have been impossible because my muscles were limp noodles wrapped in ancient rubber bands. Everything felt swollen and painful and inflamed.

And the usual tertiary symptoms : a little bit of chest congestion, a soupcon of sore throat, a smidgen of headache.

Oh, and I was also mentally incoherent. My marbles were all over the damned place. Could not string two thoughts together to save my life.

My life is so much fun.

That’s how most of my evening went. I could do very little, Even playing games on my tablet was too much for my addlepated state of mind. So for the most part I just laid there in bed and drifted through the fog.

Luckily, when I’m incoherent, doing very little doesn’t bother me. Occasionally, I will get the impulse to do something, but then realize that I can’t even imagine the series of steps it would take to do that thing, and then the idea fades into the fog.

I also slept, albeit poorly. One of those impulses that never made it to action was the impulse to get out of bed and get my Gabapentin, which would have done wonders against the muscle pain, but I couldn’t do it.

Next time I am having an attack of the fugue state flus, I need to remember to bring the portable phone with me when I lay down.

That way, I might actually be able to call Julian and get him to come do needful things like getting me my meds or refilling my water.

Assuming I can string enough thoughts together to do that.

By the time morning came around, I had recovered enough to get out of bed and have some breakfast and take some of that sweet, precious Gabapentin.

That let me sleep a whole lot better and I think that sped my recovery along nicely.

Nothing fucks with recovery like being too incoherent and weak to eat, get water, or sleep properly. Funny how that works.

Right now, at 5:20 pm, I feel a lot better. My muscles are still sore and I feel tired and a little bit groggy, but I can function more or less normally.

I was able to go to the kitchen and get food while only moaning with pain and saying things like, “Oh god!” every now and then.

Now, it’s back to bed, hopefully for more sleep.

More after the break.

---

---

What lovely timing!

Just as my McD’s order arrives, my tummy does a flipflop and now I feel ill.

It feels sinus related (sinusoid?) so hopefully clearing my nose and ears will solve it.

But that’s just life in this bloated carcass I call a body. At any time, things can go sideways and screw me over.

And I can’t help but feel like I earned this. Both karmically, by completely ignoring my body most of the time except for the bits needed to play video games, and on the very practical level of all those years I spend not taking my diabetes seriously at all.

I mean, the way I used to eat back in our Nerdvana (1 Road and Francis) days boggles my mind. Junk food as a side dish with every meal, eating sugary shit I knew I should not have been eating often, carbs galore.

But the thing about type 2 diabetes is that having a sky high blood sugar level doesn’t hurt.^[1] So it is far, far too easy to ignore your diabetes and pretend to be healthy and eat whatever the fuck you want.

At that point, it’s a purely theoretical disease. Sure, your doctor SAYS there is this mythical thing called “high blood sugar” happening inside you, but you don’t feel it. You don’t see it. You don’t suffer because of it.

The doctor might as well be warning you of bad mojo or evil pixies.

It was only after a number of health scares – like being in the hospital for ten days with pneumonia – that I truly buckled down and at least heavily modified my diet.

I still don’t monitor my blood or take insulin. But I can only handle so much.

After all, I am mentally ill. And with a Cluster C mental illness, Avoidant Personality Syndrome, and all the Cluster C conditions are very hard to treat.

In my case, as patient readers know, my mental illness makes me give up on things far, far, FAR too easily and when that happens, I don’t tell anybody or do anything about it.

\I have no philosophical or practical objection to managing my blood sugar. Injecting insulin doesn’t bother me at all.

But getting the blood testing up and running involves too long and complicated a process for my depression to handle and telling someone about it so they can help me goes against being Avoidant, so it’s not gonna happen.

Plus I just don’t value myself much. So in the fucked up calculus of my diseased mind, I am just not worth the effort.

Sad, isn’t it?

I hope to start feeling better some day. Stronger, more self-assured, less scared, more grounded and confident.

The road there looks pretty rough, though.

Maybe I just won’t bother.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pretty sure that was a 5th Doctor, Doctor Tristan, episode.

I am feeling unwell. I have been getting the chills all afternoon. At the same time,. I feel like I god a low grade fever burning.

Is this the hot and cold fever? I always assumed that would be more dramatic.

Hopefully, getting dressed and getting some food into me will help. Of course, my appetite is also shot, but I am not going to let that stop me./

Luckily, I am pissed off enough about being sick on a Sunday, with Denny’s coming up, that I have the determination it takes to force myself to eat.

Fuck how my precious little tummy feels. I NEED NUTRITION.

Besides, I am tired of being such a goddamned pussy. It’s so irrational. Time and time again I increase my total pain and suffering with my unwillingness and/or inability to just grit my teeth, accept that this is gonna suck, and endure the relatively minor amount of pain or fear or whatever it takes to get important things done.

It’s a cowardly and pathetic way to live, and I am god damned sick of it.

Time to bite the bullet and become a harder man, because continuing to be a big wimpy marshmallow will only lead to greater pain and suffering.

I don’t want to be a harder man because I get the feeling it might make me a lot harder to get along with. I can’t seem to dream up a harder version of myself that isn’t also angrier, more impatient, and way too sarcastic.

Maybe that’s just an illusion spun by my depression. A paper demon guarding the exit and scaring me off with visions of me turning into my father.

Well I am not my father. And I can tap into that energy currently wrapped up in latent anger without exploding all over the damned place.

Or at least, I won’t explode for long.

I guess this is part of the development I should have had as a teen. Learning to tame the raving lunatic, the creature of stark raving id, in the male brain.

It’s not enough to merely suppress it. That’s an idiot solution akin to junking your entire car because the engine is making a funny noise.

And suppression is not without cost. Quite the opposite, in fact. Emotional suppression is only meant to delay troubling emotions until the time in the very near future when we can unpack those emotions and deal with them.

But we don’t do that. We keep making the minimum deposit on that debt as compound interest kicks in and the debt just keeps piling up.

And that means keeping those emotions suppressed costs more and more of our mental resources over time. And of course, we keep piling up more and more.

It’s a rotten way to live, and I am going to find some way to exit it.

Even if that means I get even crazier for a while.

And kind of hard to live with. I guess.

There are worse things to be than a bit crabby.

More after the break.

---

I’m not there

Unsurprisingly, I did not make it to Denny’s tonight.

I am just too ill. The very thought of going out on a cold December evening makes me blanche like I was driving past a horrible car crash and unable to keep my ghoulisj self from gazing into the wreck and trying to figure out what happened.

My mind has been permanently warped by an overexposure to forensics.

I just have to try to figure things out, even when I know that’s a very bad idea and will only lead to more heartbreak and trauma.

But I just have to know, Mother. I know the smart thing would be to roll up the windows, ignore absolutely everything, and go on with my life.

But then I wouldn’t know what had happened. What, am I supposed to take some journalist’s interpretation of what went down?

Oh no no NO. I make my own goddamned decisions on absolutely everything because mine is the only opinion I can verify logically.

I know there is probably something very wrong with that catastrophoc a lack of trust i the very fabric of the universe, but it’s what I am stuck with.

I have a lot of positions and beliefs that, if I was doing it all over again,. I wo0uld not adopt at all.

I would be far more cautious. and prudent. I can’t guarantee that this will make things a whole lot better, but I’d like to give it a try.

At least it would make things different, And a change is as good as a rest, sometimes.

I dunno, though., Maybe I am not meant to be careful and cautious and prudent. Maybe, as unlikely as it seems, I would be better off dashing heedlessly into danger and dealing with whatever madness that brings,

That sounds every kind of wrong from the point of view of my usual careful and cautious self, but then again, what do I know?

Being a slave to caution and prudence has not helped me so far. All it’s done is hold me hostage to weakness and cowardice and trapped me in this deathly doldrums and kept me for every goddamned heartbeat that should not be.

Because I should not be. I am a mistake that I can’t correct without ending my mistaken existence, and well…

Not yet, Jesus. Not yet. I have too much stuff to do.B

But I won’t take away the option to finally end this pathetic existence Because if I thought there was no way out, I would truly want to kill myself.

Knowing I can end it whenever I please keeps me from doing it.

And hopefully I will simply accept the conclusions my late night mind arriva at.

No point in constantly fighting yourself. It’s a waste of protein.

I want to be in harmony with myself. But I have too many tempests in my teapots for me to gave the easy live I crave.

I need to calm the fuck down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My installation of Easy Diffusion (the thing I use to AI generate art) has gone wacky.

Not only has it become crazy slow and unreliable – there’s even a delay in frigging typing in the prompts, and I often have to close and reopen the browser tab between renders just to keep the damned thing from freezing or crashing its tab – but the number of what I call “monstrosities” or “mutations” keep going up.

They are the bizarre, Cronenberg does Akira type distortions that crop up when generating images via AI because the AI does not actually understand what it is generating, it just reproduces and combines patterns.

So you get extra limbs, headless torsos, body parts emerging from random places, or my least favorite, two character’s bodies kind of melted together so that there is no boundary between them.

I told you it was Cronenberg’s Akira. Body horror indeed.

That’s been happening ever since I started making AI art, but lately it’s been happening a whole hell of a lot more, and it’s grinding my gears.

I keep having to add more things to the “negative prompt” – like it sounds, it’s where you list what you do NOT want to see – just to get something that isn’t a nightmare.

Anyhow, here’s some smut I managed to make despite it all.

I can’t help wondering if the two problems – poor performance and rising mutation rates – are somehow related. Like there is something interfering with both.

If so, I dunno what it is. I haven’t changed anything in the browser or in Easy Diffusion itself, It is possible something updated itself, though…. I am incapable of turning updates off because of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

I can’t stand the idea that other people are using a newer, better version of the software than I am. I guess I am afraid of being left behind.

If only staying current on other things was that easy!

Imagine a future where everyone’s brains are fully integrated into the Internet at all times and both their cognitive subroutines and their basic and extended knowledge were being updated all the time, nearly instantaneously.

Of course, not every person would get the exact same updates. People would still be pick and choose their “news” sources. So, sadly, people would still argue over the facts to a certain degree.

But there could be something like Wikipedia to act as a body of knowledge that people more or less agree is more or less impartial and accurate most of the time.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right. Smut.

Damn I make good stuff.

I still make images like ALL the time. I have games installed but I rarely play them. Watching YouTube and making art is way more fun.

And I am even, technically, learning a skill.

AI is the future, man. And I am catching that wave.

More after the break.

---

The dark of the dark

I don’t know when I became a shadow.

But I know I wasn’t always one. I’m certain of that.

Yet when I try to remember a time “before”, all I get is the smell of case hardened steel, the image of a door welded shut, and the feeling of gently but firmly bouncing off of something very, very solid.

Like I’m a balloon bumping against a window.

From the inside…. I think. Maybe not.

I’m not all that interested in what’s beyond that wall anyhow. I don’t need answers. I’m content to flit from darkness to darkness, mingling with my kind, watching and observing the world of the living and the light, knowing my place is beyond them and around them and at times almost with them, but never of them. Never again.

And I am fine with that.

---

I think I was human once. If so, that makes me sad. Sad to think that some poor wretched soul had to die for me to be born. He must not have been a very happy person if he gave up his humanity to join us in the shadows.

Oh yes, there are more of my kind. It’s hard to say how many because we tend to stay as far away from each other as possible.

I think that’s because we don’t like being looked at like we look at others.

But personally, I have encountered hundreds of us. You see, we wander, all of us, and wanderers can’t help crossing one another’s paths now and then.

We don’t like it. But we can’t help it. It’s not like we plan our routes.

We just wander.

---

As far as I can tell, we’re not alive, and we can’t die.

It’s hard to be sure, of course. It’s not like I can tell you how old I am. Numbers stopped meaning anything to me a long time ago.

But some of my memories of my time as a shadow seem very old indeed. And I have glimpsed other shadows who seem far older than I.

So as far as I know, we can’t die.

But we can become shriekers, and that’s worse.

---

Shriekers are beings of madness, rage, and malevolence. They scream and cry and babble incoherently and claw and tear and sink their fangs into anything living they encounter, trying to drain them of all their life energy.

Luckily, they almost always fail. In our world, life is far too strong and bright for us to have much effect on at all, and what little effect we do have takes calmness and concentration to exert, and shriekers have neither.

They only can succeed in doing harm to creatures whose life force has ebbed very low and who have great darkness in their souls.

Whether the darkness is their own or not.

---

Any of us could become a shrieker at any time, because a shrieker is what happens when a shadow goes insane.

And when you only exist as a flickering shadow, madness is never far away.

That is why I write these words, or think I do. The one thing we shadows know prevents the madness is expressing ourselves, and so we write these notes and leave them for one another to find, and thus keep our minds clear and ourselves sane.

This, I have now done. I hereby testify that I am clean. I feel no anger or hate. I still love people, and watch them for all the right reasons. I take joy in their joy, feel pain from their pain, and delight in watching them grow, prosper, and pass.

I am of the dark. But I still love the light.

And long may that be.

---

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fruvous howled in terror as he scampered across the midnight tundra, claws slipping on the dull white ice as he ran for his life.

Behind him loomed his house, windows radiating a darkness that seemed to devour all the light around it greedily. It advanced on him in great, slow, thudding steps of its giant winter boots which compacted the tundra below it with a loud, sickening crunch.

And as it crunched after him, it howled too, but it was a howl not of fear but of rage. A howl comprised of a thousand knife-edged winter winds moaning in a dark and foul harmony the following words : How dare Fruvous escape its clutches? Didn’t he know that nobody wanted or loved him, so he was supposed to die in that back yard? That’s what happens to worthless, useless, unwanted foxes when people finally got sick of putting up with them and threw them away.

Now the house was here to finish the job, and Fruvous’ poor little heart was beating faster than ever as he ran for his life as fast as his paws would take him, almost blind with terror of the horrible haunted house behind him.

But his scampering steps were no match for the house’s giant strides, and soon, to the fox’s horror, the house’s back door was gaping open as it descended upon him and draw him into a darkness from which he would never escape…

---

Fruvous scrabbled hard at the blankets he slept on in an old laundry basket in the basement of his new home. For a few moments, he had no idea where he was, and the panic from his nightmare made him want to flee once more.

But then he woke up, and calmed down a little, laying on his side panting and looking around at his surroundings like he’d never seen them before.

Then, bit by bit, it all came back to him. The room where he lived in the family basement. His little nest up next to the furnace where it was nice and warm. The lovely humans asleep in the house above. And the fact that they loved him, and he loved them harder than he had ever loved before.

These memories comforted him. But he was still very scared. And when he was very scared, there was only one solution : Stacy.

So with all his innate predator’s stealth, Fruvous crept up the basement stairs, padded silently through the kitchen and up the main staircase, then pushed the door to Stacy’s room open with his nose.

Stacy always left her door a tiny bit open specifically so he could do that.

With a nimble little hop, he was on Stacy’s bed, tail swishing as he saw his favorite human, his angel, sleeping peacefully with her arms wrapped snugly around her shaggy brown teddy bear, Rupee.

At first, Fruvous was jealous of this fluffy rival for his angel’s affections, but after a very thorough sniffing, he concluded that Rupee was just a thing, and if a thing like that made his angel happy, he wanted her to have it.

Still, he couldn’t help glare and snarl softly at the thing-bear as if warning it to stay in its place as he curled up against the small of Stacy’s back.

He rested his chin on her side, sighed a sigh of blissful contentment, and fell asleep.

---

More after the break.

---

So I did it

I wrote part 4 of the Fruvous saga.

And I am planning out a part 5. Stay tuned.

Who knows, if I keep this going long enough, I could have a book on my paws hands.

I mean, I know the chapters are pretty short right now, but they are also pretty dense, so I don’t necessarily need to write 50K words for it to feel like a novel.

O M G, I could even try to illustrate it! It would be tricky, because I would have to make his look and his old and new homes consistent, and that’s not easy.

I really wish Easy Diffusion had a setting between “totally random” and “exactly the same”. Random can be way too random.

Anyhow, point is, Fruvous has a bit of a future. I honestly think he could be a beloved character, given all the years I have spend learning how to be/write a cute fluffy little foxy, and of course my fabulous writing skills and big, warm, sentimental heart.

Might have to change the name though. I am not in any way affiliated with the band that is his namesake, after all. And even though the band disbanded ages ago, I would still want to avoid any confusion and/or legal repercussions.

Oh well, Fruvous has a backup name, Fru, so I would just use that.

They can’t copyright a syllable!

Of course, for me, the ultimate expression of our little redheaded floof would be in animation, something I can’t do…. yet.

But the AI tools are getting better and better, so who knows, any day now they might make animation so easy that even I can do it.

I certainly have the animation knowledge. I grok it. And I am pretty sure I could handle the visual aspects if I keep things simple.

Holy crap, we’re almost there already.

I have volunteered to join the beta. Imagine my being able to create animations just by typing in the script, like I did with Invideo and this lovely thing :

Like that, but with animation. It’s well within the reach of the technology. After all, animation is just a series of pictures and we can already generate pictures.

Admittedly, animation is a much trickier beast that just cobbling together stock video clips and generated voiceover.

But the ability is tantalizingly close to reality. In fact, it might even be a reality if I am accepted into the beta for SayMotion.

God, do we live in an exciting era!

Especially for those of us who have a lot more talent than skill.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have to link this here for reference purposes, but for God’s sake, do not watch it.

In fact, I considered talking about it without linking it at all, but that felt wrong too.

I won’t recap the plot. That would defeat the point of warning you off it. All I can say is that it involves a hunter and a wolf and her dead cub and it is incredibly, heartbreakingly, almost sadistically sad.

And I truly wish I had never seen it.

Because I can’t handle things where bad things happen to animals. I am way too sensitive and far too much of an animal lover for that. Things involving animals go straight to my big soft heart, and so, like I said in my comment, I really could have used a trigger warning to warn me off that fucking thing.

And to top it all off, it happened in animation, which also has direct access to my feels.

And to make this crystal clear : I hate the people who made that goddamned thing right now. Part of me is still rational enough to note that those people did nothing wrong, they just helped express the animator’s vision like with any other piece of art.

Hell, I will even admit that I have written things almost as sad as that. And my intention wasn’t to make anyone suffer.

It was to get the sadness out of me and on to the page. Hence the recent Fruvous stuff.

But right now, I don’t care. I hate Toniko Pantoja and everyone else who made that fucking animation. I am sitting here all busted up inside writing with tears in my eyes because those people made that thing and I was unlucky enough to click on it.

I am even kind of mad at YouTube for putting that shit in my feed.

And I know that I won’t always feel this way. There’s even a fairly good chance that once my sadness fades, I will declare it a masterpiece, like I did with Grave of the Fireflies (don’t watch that either, things only get worse and worse for the children).

But right now, I loathe it. Why did you put all that in my head, Toniko? I didn’t need this. I didn’t want to be blindsided by all this heartbreak. I didn’t need to be filled with rage and grief over a mother wolf who doesn’t even exist.

Like I have said many times before, being sensitive isn’t for wimps. More callous people have no idea how someone like me suffers.

A drop of poison is harmless by itself, but add it to a body of water…. a glass of wine, or someone’s bloodstream, or my deep well of a soul… and it can poison the whole thing.

Still, I would never want to be less sensitive. The depth to which I feel things and the insight that it brings are very dear to me, and a vital part of who I am.

And I have seen what a harder, more callous, less merciful me would look like.

And it’s not a pretty picture.

More after the break.

Drowning in the dark

Going through a wave of depression right now. I guess that goddamned wolf video knocked some stuff loose and now I have to deal with it.

And that’s a very good thing in the long run. There are worse things in the world than being sad and depressed.

Like being numb, for instance.

At least when I feel bad, I feel alive.

But whatever. Like I always say, I don’t let being depressed get me down any more. This too shall pass. It’s just the weather.

In fact, when I was lying in bed after blogging this afternoon, I deliberately sought out the pain I was feeling and leaned on it, exhorting myself to FEEL IT! FEEEEEL IT!

I couldn’t keep that up for very long. But it’s a good, healthy start towards breaking he habit of pulling back from negative emotions and burying them in favor of leaning in and feeling all I can of it in order to get it over with as quickly as possible.

I am finally hooking my genuine desire to feel things so I can feel alive with the actual circumstances under which I usually hide in numbness and illusion.

Bring the pain. I want to feel it. I hunger for real emotion like a starving man, and like a starving man I am not picky about what it is I eat.

So pain, sadness, depression, rage, darkness, and whatever else I got lying around is all equally good fodder for countering the forces of numbness and nullity inside me.

I don’t want to live like a specimen on ice any more. I want to be really here, and to feel like my world is really here too.

I just need the courage to walk through doors I know may slam shut forever behind me.

The courage to commit, basically. To make a choice and live with it, no backsies. To go forward when you know there is no possibility of retreat.

That’s a very hard thing for an Avoidant Personality Syndrome to do. We’re a timid, fitful bunch deeply entrenched in a “run and hide” (or flee and freeze) strategy that makes its opposite, “stay and fight”, seem utterly unthinkable.

Impossible, even. That can’t be done. That’s not even an option!

Of course it is. Unthinkable and impossible are radically different things.

And lord knows, I have a very combative side to my personality. A part of me that wants to struggle and fight and get hit and hit back and use my strength without restraint.

So if I can just learn to think of my depression as the worthy opponent I have always ought, maybe I can focus more of my energies on destroying it.

After all, I would never let someone I love be treated the way I treat myself.

I just need to learn to love myself.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just had a rather delicious thought.

You know, technically, I am now a pornographer.

Oooh, I felt a delightful frisson run up and down my spine just typing that.

After all, I’ve always wanted to be one. I consider the production and distribution of truly filthy pornography to be one of the highest forms of arm, and a vitally important service to all communities around the world.

People need to get off, dammit. And I am deliriously happy to help them.

And I do, indeed, create porn and distribute it via e6ai.net. It is, admittedly, a rather niche website in the very niche world of furry smut, but I am still putting my stuff out there for the world to see.

Well, the small percentage of it that is suitable for public viewing, anyhow. Ehehehe.

And I sincerely hope at least one person has brought themselves to orgasm while viewing an image I generated. That would make me so happy.

I wonder if I should try putting some of my stuff on PornHub? I know they accept furry porn, I have seen some there.

Who knows, maybe I could even attract a dedicated following if I put my stuff up on someplace with high enough visibility.

Oooh! Another delightful thought : I could even write and illustrate my own pornographic novels. That would be within my current capacities, given a little help from something along the lines of a book type template for OfficeLibre.

I definitely would be hard pressed to format and typeset the thing myself.

My greatest hope for my image generation capabilities is to be able to make my own comic books, or maybe another webcomic like Hank Watches Television.

You know, some of those were pretty darn good.

Once more, I must gently remind myself that I am an outrageously talented and deeply hilarious dude who has a lot to offer the world.

And maybe that is part of the problem, in a way. I still have to overcome the part of me that is terrified of going out there into the big bad world and getting “trapped” out there without the ability to disappear into my hidey hole when I feel overwhelmed.

I suppose it doesn’t have to be like that, though. As long as I am working from the apartment here and I don’t overcommit myself and leave myself with too little alone time, there is no reason why I can’t explore the big bad world while still having my bed right behind me for whenever I need to reset and relax.

I don’t have to go from this limp and lifeless limbo of mine to being up and ready and functional 24/7, or even eight “working” hours a day.

I just have to do a little more than what I am used to. Send out a feeler to a potential fun way to become more visible to the world now and then. Open my mind to the real, not just theoretical, possibility of opening up my world a bit. Face that ice cold tidal wave of fear inside me and try to bleed away some of its energy when I can.

Sometimes baby steps are all you need in order to get started.

And the whole time, my nice warm bed will be there waiting for me.

I don’t even have to stand up to go there.

More after the break.

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Turning down the fear

I guess it’s a two pronged approach :

1. steel myself to endure the fear to get what I want
2. reduce the amplitude of said fear to make that more doable

Prong 1 (I love a good prong) is tricky. I kind of have to wait until the energy is right, like I’m Luke Skywalker.

Most of the time, I feel weak and timid and fragile and like I am barely hanging in there. This is not a feeling that inspires courage or risk-taking.

Trying to charge ahead into the teeth of the tempest when I feel like that feels like lunacy. Like trying to tap-dance on two broken legs.

Hopefully, the B12 shots I am getting from Doctor Chao will help with that. In theory, once my B12 levels are normalized, I should feel a hell of a lot better as finally my nerves and muscles will be getting enough of what they need.

Sure would be nice not to feel so cold and brittle all the goddamned time.

Prong 2 (one prong is never enough) is both simpler and more complicated.

Simpler, in that what needs to be done is fairly straightforward : I need to find more outlets for my energies so I can reduce the massive overcharge of nervous energy that is the main root cause of my equally massive burden of free-floating anxiety.

If I could redirect enough of my energies into energetic activities, productive or not, I could maybe calm down enough to finally exit freeze mode and be able to think and breathe and regulate my emotions properly.

That sure sounds nice.

But like almost everything, that’s easier said than done. The very fear I am trying to disarm and defeat stands in the way, and the only way to get past that would be to do the very sort of blockade running charge I talked about in Prong 1.

Still, I refuse to give up. If nothing else, I am trying to let my frustrations build to a point where they will be strong enough to overcome my wimpy, diffident resistance.

And there’s the long term project of trying to learn to see the world in warmer, more merciful and humane ways than my usual stark and brutal scientism.

It all seems so cold and sad now. But for now, it’s still all I have.

I want to leave this Midnight Tundra behind. I want to be warm and human and alive. I want to feel things like human beings are meant to feel them. I want to be part of the human race at long, long last.

I don’t know how to get there.

But I am going anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A comment I wrote on this Youtube video.

You lost me at “an unbroken line that goes all the way back to Krishna himself. ” That’s not something I am capable of believing. Everything after that troubled me. I accept no spiritual authority above my own. I dislike hierarchy intensely as a result. What you say to me is either right or wrong and I will be the judge of that. I don’t claim that this is the “right” way to be. I recognize that my attitude is very limiting in many ways. But it’s who I am. I don’t believe in the supernatural at all. Magic isn’t real, there is nothing beyond the material realm, things either exist, and are therefore bound by all the laws of nature and science, or they do not exist and are mere phantoms of the mind, or lies we choose to believe because they make us feel better. There is no third category of things which exist but ignore some of the laws of science in a hazy, undefined way so that we can believe in things that do not make sense and cannot exist. Maybe I would be happier if I could delude myself into believing things not in evidence. But I will never know. This is my path. And I walk it alone.

I was with the monk guy up until that point. I could see the benefit of a simple lifestyle made of basic human ingredients like service, camaraderie, good meals, and so on.

I bumped on him being a Hare Krishna because I knew their reputation as being an annoying cult back in the 1970’s. They always seemed a tad suspect to me. But then I learned more about how religion works in places like India, and I figured, well they seem weird here but in other places it’s all perfectly normal, so whatever.

And I bumped on the whole “reciting their mantra for two hours a day” thing. Like, what the everlasting fuck is up with that? That seems unnecessarily extreme to me. In fact, it reminds me of the deliberately mind-numbing practices of other cults.

Whatever dogma they use to justify it, the real reason they enforce such behaviour is to keep their people from thinking critically.

But it wasn’t until the mystic hierarchical bullshit started flowing that he lost me completely. Bull SHIT these motherfuckers trace their lineage all the way back to God (Krishna). Anyone who expects you to believe such a load of unprocessed cow poo is not to be trusted in the slightest.

But clearly that triggered something in me, because what came out of me was an entire declaration of my rationalist materialist POV.

And I tried at first to be even-handed and respectful about it all, but my passions burn too hot for that. At least I did not accuse their leaders of anything directly.

Patient readers know that I have serious doubts about whether the severe rationalism I expressed in my comment is actually good for me.

It could very well be that my dedication to the absolute provable, logical, evidence based Truth of the world, no matter how “right” it might be, is actually a major component of my depression because it cuts off my ability to create solutions to my emotional needs with my imagination.

You know. All that “power of imagination” crap they fed us in the 70’s.

Makes me nauseous just thinking about it, to be honest.

But there may have been some truth in all that nonsense. Maybe it really does make sense to believe in magic in one form or another because it gives you the ability to see beyond what the world gives you and dream up whatever you need when the real world is not meeting your needs at all.

Not sure what to do with that info, though. It is far, far too late for me to start believing in magic now. I know it isn’t there.

So I will have to find some sort of compromise between the rational and the mystical. Something that allows the mind to balance its emotions and maintain a lower limit to how low mood can go without having to rip a hole in one’s reason to do so.

Sounds impossible, I know.

But if I can pull it off, I will birth an entire new era of consciousness.

And there’s got to be some money in that.

More after the break.

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The rainbow connection

Maybe some day I’ll find it, Kermit. But I doubt it.

The furthest I have gotten so far is to give myself open permission to ignore “the rules” if they aren’t working for me.

After all, I am a hardcore pragmatist and that means if it doesn’t work, it’s got to go. And so far my harsh materialism has not worked for me.

If anything, it’s made me even less functional.

And this “fuck the rules” attitude was a great start and helped unbind a great deal of compacted emotional from my ever constipated emotional core.

But that’s just step one, and I do not know what step two could be, let alone the rest.

And I know that’s the wrong question, in a way. I know that I am still trying to find answers by waving my giant klieg light of a brain around when the answers I seek can only be found in the dark and dank undergrowth of my unconscious mind.

That said, it’s no small task, either intellectually or spiritually, to develop an entirely different way of looking at the world. I have (over) developed my fiercely analytical mind to such an advanced degree that quite frankly I am terrified of it.

And I now know why. It’s not good for me.

It’s not good TO me either.

In many ways, it’s my internalized bully. The dark, diseased, depressed part of my mind uses its subroutines to torment me and tear me down. This engine of mine is the primary thing my mental illness has corrupted into becoming my overactive and thoroughly corrupted superego.

It’s like my ego is the evil prosecutor and the superego is the corrupt judge and the two collude to persecute me and my sad little id.

But I’ve got my id on supplements now and it’s getting stronger. And it has carte blanche to smack the crap out of the ego and superego if they get out of line.

Because nothing is more important than my happiness, and that goes double for my evil “justice” system and all its god damned rules.

Fuck your lawful evil bullshit. I’m gonna bust you up chaotic good style.

Because you know what? I’m fucking amazing. I am an astoundingly talented, intelligent, creative, and above all humble individual and I am through with letting you fools tell me otherwise.

I know that if I get myself out there where people can see me, I can wow people with my brilliance and seduce them with my eloquence and at the very least get some fans.

And who knows, maybe even money.

So fuck you, you bastard of a barrister, and fuck you twice as hard, your “Honor”. I am going to find a way to be happy despite you.

Heck TO spite you, you evil fucks.

And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

557/1114

I have at least another chapter of Fruvous’ new life mapped out in my head, but after a lot of pretty rough sleep, I am in no fit state for writing fiction, so it will have to wait.

Right now, even writing my usual loose prose is taking a fair bit of effort.

The usual good/bad sleep dichotomy is of course present. Am I mentally fried because I slept very poorly due to my sleep apnea, or am I mentally fried because I slept very well and that led to me catching up on missed REM activity and that, in turn, left me in a drained and fragile state resembling that of a Biblical seer right after a vision.

Honestly, I could go either way. But if I had to guess, based on the vaguely haunted feeling in my head and the slight echo in my thoughts, I’d vote for the latter.

I hope my readers (hello, you wonderful people!) are enjoying the recent Fruvous storyline. I know it started off dark and got even darker but he has found a new forever home with much, much better people now and I swear any future tales will be a heck of a lot more pleasant.

It started off Jack London but from now on it will be James Herriot, with maybe a little bit of Beatrice Potter thrown in for good measure.

And of course, the whole thing has been a very important form of therapy for me. His story is my story transmuted into fiction via the magic of cute fluffy animals.

How furry is that?

I will, in passing, give myself the usual reminder that I really should write more fiction. It’s both good for me emotionally and makes more sense commercially as it would be a lot easier to sell a book about the adventures of a cute fluffy fox than to get people interested in my somewhat sluggish and event free biography.

But that’s the nice thing about being a writer. You don’t have to be interesting yourself. Your writing can be interesting for you!

Not that I consider myself utterly boring. I am, in fact, quite fascinating to listen to if you are of an intellectual bent.

I suppose that means I really should try podcasting. Perhaps my skills of conversation and oratory would make me a positively spellbinding voice to listen to in the car or while you’re getting your 10,000 steps in or whatnot.

Actually, maybe not in the car. I have been known to be so engrossing to listen to that it causes the driver of the vehicle to miss our desired exit.

Listening to me in the car might not be safe!

Of course, then I would once more have to face the cold hard wall that is the challenge of trying to promote my content.

I know damned well I could make a fun and entertaining podcast. It’s convincing people to listen to the damned thing that daunts me.

I really do need an agent. Or manager. Or babysitter. I dunno, someone who can provide the competence and confidence I lack so that I can just concentrate on laying those golden eggs.

The irony is that I know I could promote somebody else. Just like I know I can be a great proofreader and editor for someone else’s work.

It’s that deadly feedback loop that happens when I am dealing with my own work, which is like a part of me or a child to me, that things go bugfucky.

There’s a reason you’re not allowed to perform surgery on your own kid.

More after the break.

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And the gates slammed shut

Went to refill my water in the bathroom. Figured I might as well enjoy a nice luxurious pee into an actual toilet (as opposed my receptacle) while I was in there. Realized mid-pee that I also really needed to poop. Got that done, then stood up to resume my usual kind of daily activities.

And that’s when something slammed shut somewhere in my large intestine and my balls started to ache dangerously and my head throbbed and I knew I was in for a very rough time of it.

Not entirely sure why those things – gut ache, balls ache, and head ache – tend to happen all at once with me when my IBS is acting up. Hard to say what the root cause is and what is a reaction to said cause.

All I know it that it’s not a great time to b me right now. Feels like someone tied a knot in my guts then wrapped them into a bow. My poor testicles hurt like I’d been lightly kicked in them and my head is broadcasting that “sick headache” feeling of combined pain, pressure, and nausea from somewhere in the vicinity of my “third eye”.

Can’t eat supped in this state. Luckily I have a couple of tangerines here and I should have no problem getting those into me at least.

They are a pleasantly flavorful and low intensity, low commitment fruit.

Plus I have some of the latest mix here too. That is peanuts, sunflower seeds, and our old friend, sesame sticks.

Still don’t know why said sticks help me sleep. I have poked around a bit and couldn’t see any obvious candidate for what micronutrient they contain that might do the trick.

Doesn’t really matter. Until further notice, I’m going to keep eating them, and enjoying the deeper and more peaceful sleep they bring.

My sleep is still pretty bad, but it’s much better than it was. I hardly ever get that painfully bright blank feeling in my mind any more.

That shit was scary. Made me feel over-awake and twitchy, and it felt like at any moment it could grow to engulf my entire mind and I would end up a vegetable in some back ward just smiling like an idiot all day, vacant as an empty apartment.

And the worst part was to a very dark part of me, that sounded good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.