Did some work on all that stuff in my tabs.

For one, I posted one of my ancient shorts stories to Archive Of Our Own (AO3).

Here it is in all its glory

I chose it more or less at random because the point of the exercise was to break the seal and get something put up there and hopefully get a comment or two.

It’s not a terrible story but it’s not great. I can do better now.

I’ve had the idea for a sort of an angelic alien being from far away for a long time now. Since I was in UPEI way back in 1991, in fact, so 32 years or so.

It sprang into existence when I was first reading Thus Spoke Zarathrustra by Nietzsche and pondering what I would write if I decided to try to write a piece of philosophical fiction like that.

And I thought it would be interesting to posit a nearly perfect being coming to Earth and experiencing it with an open mind and a compassionate heart but without prior knowledge of humanity and our ways.

Don’t assume it would be horrified by us. Maybe it would decide we’re wonderful despite our imperfections, and sure to only get better as we evolve.

I’ve never believed in any judgment of ourselves as “good” or “bad”. We’re just people. We’re far too varied and complex for such simplistic valuations.

I will probably post something else tomorrow. Something funny, like one of my sarcastic takes on fairy tails or science fiction tropes.

AO3 is primarily a fanfiction host and I am not particularly inclined to write fan fiction, so there is an irony there.

And said fanfiction is mostly erotic in nature, at least partly, and so far I have not written any sort of erotic fiction.

I’m not against the idea. In fact, I am quite confident that I could write stuff so steamy you could cook rice in it.

I’m just not currently interested in writing it. I write to express myself and I guess I don’t have any sexy emotions to express at the moment.

I also took another looks at that freelancer site Fiverr. I still have not posted an ad for my services to it. It still strikes me as an absurd way to do business.

But I feel like I looked around enough to desensitize myself to the daunting challenge of trying to convince people to hire me some.

Looking over the ads there, I can’t help but notice how deadly dull most of them are. So I have an in there. I am sure I can write something colorful and amusing and fun that would make me stand out from the crowd.

Anyone put off by that is probably the wrong fit for my style anyhow.

And I suppose I could work up some samples from different styles and moods and genres of writing to show off how versatile I am.

That could be kinda fun. I like to dabble in things.

Oh, and I left a message about my GPU crashing issues on the forums of a site called Tom’s Hardware (the computer kind), which is THE hub for computer hardware aficionados as it has all kinds of data about everything with a microchip in it and lots of programming stuff too.

I figure it’s a good place to ask for advice.

So to sum up, I did some potentially productive things today, and felt I needed to memorialize that fact in words.

Good job, me. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

More after the break.

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I am NOT a CONTRARIAN!

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Old school gaming

It sucks that it’s come to this, but I have two games on the go on my PC right now, and the most recent one is 10 years old.

The other is old enough to drink in all 50 US states.

And I am playing such ancient artifacts partly because I know that they won’t crash my goddamned computer and force me to reboot.

The younger game’s Dragon Age : Inquisition, AKA the third in the Dragon Age series.

I bought it directly after finally finishing the previous game, Dragon Age 2, which was a sequel to the first game, Dragon Age : Origins.

Well, nobody said the titling had to make sense.

It’s graphics are a lot more detailed than the previous game, and the world is much, much bigger, and overall the production values have skyrocketed.

In fact, it’s all a tad overwhelming. In retrospect, I might have been better off playing something else in between. Oh well.

I am finding the combat to be a lot more difficult. It’s much more chaotic and busy and that is not good for my particular model of brain.

Oh well. I can always turn the difficulty down.

The other is Etherlords II, which is from the ancient year of 2003, and is still the best CCG (think Magic : The Gathering) style game I have played.

So much so that this is my fifth or sixth time playing through the whole thing, and I amd still having a hell of a good time.

I’ve played some pretty good CCG style games since Etherlords II came out.

Hearthstone, Slay the Spire, and Inscryption all come to mind. CCGs are one of my favorite kinds of game, after all.

In fact, for me, it’s pretty much CCG or RPG. Etherlords II is both.

There is another game that I really liked, the original Magic : The Gathering game made by Microprose way back in the 90’s.

But it’s so ancient now that modern computer just can’t play it. It would probably be possible to get it working with a DOS emulator, but meh.

It too combined CCG and RPG. One could look at it as an RPG with a robustly developed CCG as its battle system. Same with Etherlords 2.

That makes me feel like I am truly earning my victories, and I love that.

So that’s my game life, AKA the closest thing I have to a “real” life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…I did not, in fact, burn to death in a raging inferno.

I know, I know… I’m as surprised as you are.

The alarm stopped shortly before I stopped blogging, leaving the second half of last night’s blogging as mute (but eloquent) testimony to my personal ordeal.

In a way, it was good that I was blogging when it all went down, because it allowed me to work through my feelings and my panic in realtime and ultimately led me to realize that I could probably handle the situation by myself if I needed to.

And that’s good to know. One less thing to be paranoid about.

One down, eleventy billion to go.

I think that I am a lot more capable than I give myself credit for and that I have an awful lot of learned helplessness to work through if I am going to make it to emotional adulthood before I make it to my no doubt premature grave.

I’ve been thinking a lot about coldness and ice and such as pertaining to my internal landscape. No surprise there. I have had a very cold and lonely life, especially in my childhood, and that has left me frozen solid inside.

But every day, I thaw out a little bit more.

It’s all the fault of that goddamned overactive parasympathetic nervous system of mine. All that coldness is really my body hyper-over-responding to the “threat” of my own anxiety and fear by spraying everything with liquid fucking hydrogen in order to “keep me calm” instead.

That where the “wall of fear” comes from. My entire fear of reality^[1], in fact. When my deeper instincts are trying to revive me by getting me to try to expand my world even just a little bit, it’s this overreaction that punishes me for daring to think outside my tiny little box by hosing me down with bone-chilling ice-water on the inside, thus killing any and all motion and freezing me in place.

Perhaps what I need most is to react to that by pulling my frostbitten and flash frozen self to my feet and carrying on anyhow.

Sometimes the most radical act you can do is just staying alive.

No, I’m not going to link to the song.

On a deeper level, I feel like there must be some way to keep the deep freeze from turning on in the first place. Presumably, this involves increasing my feeling of safety, which is a very complicated thing to do when your own psyche threatens and torments you on a daily basis.

I can’t stop hurting myself until I stop hurting myself. Typical stupid Catch-22. Doesn’t mean that stopping it is impossible, just that doing so will require an upgrade in consciousness that lets me see it in a bigger, higher, more complete way.

And by definition, you can’t understand a higher level of consciousness until you have it. If you already understand it, you already have it. That means that striving for a higher level of awareness is always an act of faith : faith that you will be better off as a result.

And it may well not seem that way at the beginning. Expanding one’s consciousness is not the clean and simple and rainbow candy colored experience New Age hippies make it out to be when they’re trying to sell you on their spa.

It’s a brutal, messy, difficult, and visceral experience. At least if you’re doing it right.

More after the break.

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35 not 28

I’ll keep this short because I’ve said it so many times before : it’s a five week month for me, and that, as usual, sucks.

Makes no sense to make me live for five weeks on what normally only has to last four, should be a 25 percent bump in the non-shelter part of my monthly deposit for times like this, they only get away with it because we disabled people are weak and poor, etc.

There, I got that off my chest. That should hold me till the next one.

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I’ll never tell

Been pondering why I just don’t tell people about stuff I am dealing with.

It really highlights how important this blog is to my mental health because the things I can’t seem to bring up in life can be let out here.

Bur why do I keep everything to myself otherwise?

Well there was nobody to tell anything to when I was a little kid. Nobody wanted to hear from me, not my parents, my siblings, or my teachers, and I had no friends.

And even when I did have friends, they were not exactly the kind you open up to.

So I guess I learned to keep everything in by default. What else could I do with it? There was no place for it to go.

And that just kept going when I grew up. High school had been friendless and lonely, and people wanted to hear from me even less.

Plus by then, my sisters were in college. Not that I was ever all that close to them.

In fact, I was never all that close to anybody. And it’s hard to say who’s to blame for that. My parents and siblings, I guess, for brushing me off or just plain ignoring me whenever I dared to try to reach out to them.

And even now, when I am fifty years old, I find it very hard to overcome those deep tapes that say nobody wants to know about my problems because nobody cares and trying to bring it up will just lead to a rejection that hurts far worse than loneliness and my mental health issues never will.

Opening up just lets in the cold. It certainly can’t lead to the warmth of human connection, no matter how badly I want and need that.

Nowadays, I wonder if I can open up at all. Maybe those doors have rusted shut for good. Maybe I am sealed inside for good.

But I reserve hope that for the right person, I could open wide.

But there’s a reason I process my emotions by writing about them.

Namely that writing is something I can do all alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Shared mostly for the little British girl at the beginning.

And also because it’s an awesome album and every track on it is genius.

But to answer your question, Alice, sure, I can tell you the way to the real world. Just go in the exact opposite direction that I am facing and you should be there in no time.

This discovery of my blanket phobia of the real world has really opened my eyes, and I think I have started the long journey towards overcoming it.

Right now it’s just a straight up wrestling match. I feel like I am slowly forcing my way into that rapidly raging stream of constant fear and as I plunge deeper, I interrupt it and rob it of its power, bit by bit.

Good thing for me that I am incredibly stubborn. If I can get myself started on something, I will feel compelled to finish it, and nothing short of my dropping dead will keep me from reaching my goal.

So I am not worried that I will give up right away like I have done with so many things in the past. Once I get going, I keep going until I reach my goal.

And in this case I am kind of highly motivated. The stakes are high and the potential rewards are rich beyond measure. That’s more than enough to keep me going.

Plus the secret to self-sustaining stubbornness is that obstacles and challenges just make you angrier and more determined than ever to see it through.

It’s like the universe is actively trying to make you give up and you’re like, “Well you can go fuck yourself, I’m gonna try harder!”.

That’s the secret to life, kids. Losers give up. Winners try harder.

This is why I have always longed for opposition in my life. I know that if I had someone, or a group of people, to fight against, I would have no more trouble finding motivation.

The sheer pleasure of defiance and righteous opposition would be more than enough.

Of course, that assumes they can put up a decent fight, and that’s where things get tricky because I am enormously powerful in my realm.

My combination of verbal wizardry, enormous intellect, powerful personality and presence, and sharp wit make me a very hard person to oppose.

In fact I find it kind of hard to even imagine someone having what it takes to be a proper opponent for me.

I mean, I know that I can’t possibly be the smartest person in the world. The odds are nearly eight billion to one on that one. Nor can I be the only smart person who is also charismatic and incredibly stubborn and sharp as hell.

So statistically, logically, I know that my match must exist out there. Maybe there is even, dare I hope, someone who can thoroughly and definitively kick my ass and send me home to mama in the world.

I would love that so much. Finally, someone I can lean from!

Maybe I should just go be incredibly rude and offensive on Reddit and see if that causes the gunslinger effect^[1] to produce a worthy opponent eventually.

I could never bring myself to actual be mean, rude, and evil, but I sure as heck could be provocative, controversial, and obnoxiously confident.

That might be enough to do the trick.

Surely somewhere out there is the sensei of my dreams!

More after the break.

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Great, now I’m sick

I am getting really tired of waking up to some kind of nasty surprise.

Like my eye being fucked up. Or not being able to stand up properly. Or like right now, where I woke up feeling very feverish and too sick to eat.

I will at least force myself to eat an orange. And I am drinking water in order to see if dehydration is part of the problem.

Oh, my nose is running too.

Oh, wonderful. Now the fire alarm is going off, and I am here in the apartment all alone cause Julian is at the hospital, and I am physically unable to just get up and go out without taking a big risk of falling down.

I hope someone just burned the toast or something, otherwise I could be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Well if I see or smell smoke, or feel feat coming up from the floor or down from the ceiling, or any of that, I am going to have to unfold the rollator and rollate myself the hell out of here despite the risks.

I just had an awful thought : what if I don’t have a fever, it’s just that hot in here because the whole building is on fire?

I hear sirens in the distance. And they’re coming closer. I guess if they stop outside, I will have my answer and will have to call 911.

I know I can make it as far is the second floor parking structure. So I could probably make it to the lobby. I guess if pressed, I could get across the lobby and then I would be outside the front entrance.

Sirens are even closer now. But they keep going off then coming on again. Are they having trouble finding the address?

Oh, and just to make this all the more perfect, I am not sure I have any clean plants. So I might have to make a pantsless escape.

Wouldn’t that just be ducky. Me, outside, in the winter, naked between the waist and ankles, bits flopping about.

Well I guess I’d put on a dirty pair in that case.

Yay, the alarm stopped. Phew, the secrets of my genitals are safe!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As one might imagine, it’s quite crippling.

So much so that it has crippled me for my entire adult life. And I’m 50. It’s become crystal clear to me that this fear of the real world is the central problem from which all my other mental health problems flow like tributaries of a mighty river.

I just can’t handle the real world. So I hide from it. The image in my mind, which is not new, is of me sitting facing a wall with reality behind me as I do my best to drown it out with all my games and distractions.

I was telling Doctor Costin about this today I told him about this all encompassing fear of the real and how I thought it was the ultimate manifestation of my inability to handle any kind of increase in physical or emotional or social stimulation levels without having a phobic response that, more often than not, causes me to form yet another aversion.

I am a very scared man. I just hide it from myself by doing everything the fear tells me to do and thus staying in my teeny tiny comfort zone, where I an pretend to be a somewhat normal person as long as I never, ever try to escape.

After all, you’re only imprisoned if you want to leave, right?

So ya know… stop wanting that. Problem solved.

As Doctor Costin pointed out, my way out of this mess is necessarily going to involve me fighting the fear head on, and that means going ahead and being scared out of my mind, but keep trying to expand my world anyhow.

I told him how, to me, that felt like walking against the wind. When I try to move forward, the fear comes like a howling hurricane to push me back into my “place” and punish me for daring to defy my depression.

And for a long time, it’s worked. I’ve stayed cooped up in this tomb of a bedroom (bedtomb?), or someplace like it, for my entire adult life.

If you can call me an adult. And call this a “life”.

I certainly don’t feel like a grownup. I feel like a 50 year old man who is at best twelve years old on the inside, without even emotional puberty under my belt.

That might seem harsh, but remember, I did none of the things associated with being a teen. I didn’t develop a group of friends, didn’t “hang out” at some teen social hub, didn’t pursue love or sex or both, didn’t become political, didn’t “network” with other teens, and didn’t try to become part of a larger community.

Any why not? Universal fear, yes. But also, I knew too much. I knew exactly what was going on in my body and exactly what other teens did and why and so I couldn’t do what I was supposed to do, which was to follow my instincts like everyone else.

I was so fucking stupid, thinking I knew better.

I knew nothing. The dumbest person in my graduating class knew more than me. They had the privilege of being too dumb to know what was going on and therefore not being able to interfere with or resist it and fuck everything up.

There are mistakes you have to be an extraordinary genius to make.

And I made all of the them. I should have listened to my hormones and my instincts instead of smugly assuming I was better than everyone else because I didn’t.

Kinda too late to fix that now, ain’t it?

More after the break.

I like to eat Vegetable Thins. I also like to eat Vegetable Fats, but that’s just canola oil.

The less said about Animal Thins, the better.

And Mineral Thins taste awful.

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Gone with the wind

I ran out of my antihistamines a couple of days ago.

Normally, you see, Joe buys them for me. Because he’s super awesome like that. But Joe’s still in the hospital and isn’t going to be coming out any time soon, or so it seems, and so a lot of little things he does have gone by the wayside, leaving Julian and I (mostly him) scrambling to pick up the slack and really appreciating how much of the day to day operations of this household rely on good ol Joe.

So right now, I got snot running down my face in the wake of a sneezing fit, and it’s making me think about how much I really miss Joe and wish he was healthy and home and it has nothing to do with the little things he does and everything to do with missing the hell out of my dear friend and being worried sick about his health.

No, the verbal irony of being worried sick about someone being sick is not lost on me.

And I know this worry has been acting on my mood a fair bit. In some ways, it has made me a lot more melancholic and sad than usual.

But on another level, I think that sadness has pushed me into greater insight into myself. Often it is our own pain that pushes us towards empathy and understanding, especially when that pain involves concern for another, and I feel like that is what has been happening with me.

It’s like my worry for Joe has opened up my heart and energized my emotions and melted some of the ice that clings to my soul, and that got everything flowing and got me feeling everything I can at last.

More. I want to feel more. I want to feel everything there is to feel. I have been cold and sleepy and inert for far too long. I want to be alive and if that means pain and sadness and feeling lost, so be it.

I’d rather feel pain than feel nothing.

At least pain means something.

And if it’s emotional pain, at least you feel better after.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For the most part, I… don’t.

Get things done, that is. For the most part, I live this friction free floating existence where I passively absorb input and output very little of meaning.

This blog aside. It’s my one desperate link to productivity. Thanks for reading it.

But for the most part, I do very little of substance with my time on Earth. Mostly, I play video games, which have the magical quality of giving you the feeling of productivity via progress through the game being earned through your own efforts, but which actually produce absolutely nothing and mean even less.

Video games are my hamster wheel. I can run and run and run without a care because I know that I won’t actually get anywhere.

Hey. That rhymes.

And after taking a good hard look at myself, I have to admit that the root cause I don’t get anything meaningful done is that I am afraid to.

More specifically, getting anything real done requires dealing with actual reality and its higher stimulation level from things like their being actual risks and stakes and complex interactions and maybe even other people and stuff like that.

God, no wonder I’m such a psychological cripple. Me, the hardcore pragmatist, can’t actually handle the real world at all.

How fucking ironic.

This is why, despite all my self-administered pep talks, I never get anywhere in life. I have a deep and fundamental reality issue and until that is addressed and healed, nothing else matters because I will simply continue to run on my wheel until my untimely and no doubt messy and humiliating death.

Could be any day now, given how much things keep fucking up in my body.

Clearly, I need to toughen up. I can’t continue to be a fragile soap bubble floating trough life that the slightest contact with anything solid could pop and thus destroy. I can’t keep being so timid and sallow and weak. I can’t sleepwalk through life any more.

Not if I want to escape this elaborate little trap of mine.

And I do. I don’t want to die like I am now, completely irrelevant to life. I want to activate and realize and grow. I want to strive and achieve and prove to myself and the world that I am far more than roadkill on the highway of life.

And under it all is this terrible feeling of weakness. And pain. It feels like I have the psychological equivalent of a broken bone and that means I can’t put any weight on my soul without it causing incredible pain.

I used to think the cause of this was the deep and largely unhealed trauma of being raped when I was four years old. And I am not ruling that out as a cause.

But I am also open to the idea that it’s my vitamin B12 deficit that is to blame. It’s a very important vitamin and my body has been running on extremely little of it for at least a decade now, and that’s not good.

Next time I see Doctor Chao for a B12 shot, I am going to have to insist on setting up all the appointments for future shots in advance.

This shit ain’t gonna work if I am only getting a shot once a month.

And maybe if I get my B12 levels up, I will feel more like a human being, instead of a zombie stumbling through the fog.

That sure would be nice.

More after the break.

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On keeping tabs

Let me tell you about some of the potentially life-altering tabs I have open in my browser right now. All of these have been lurking there fore a minimum of two weeks without my doing a thing with them.

Why? Because reality scares me. I can’t deal with it. See above.

I’ve got this tab, which leads to my homepage on the website Archive Of Our Own, sometimes charmingly referred to as AO3, presumably because that looks a lo t less silly than calling it AOOO.

Look like a hookup app for wolves.

It’s an anything-goes fanfiction site. It hosts original works too. The idea was that I would post some of my own work there and maybe attract a fanbase.

That was more than a month ago. No action yet.

Then there’s a link to Fiverr, where us freelancers are spected to write ads for ourselves in order to convince potential clients to hire us.

Um yeah, that’s not going to happen. I haven’ the foggiest idea what to write in order to convince people to hire me and not someone with more qualifications, and it doesn’t seem like the place is geared towards creative writing anyhow.

But if you ever need an essay written, no questions asked, boy do I know a place.

Then there’s this fairly amazing sounding video :

Pretty amazing, right? Seems like the exact kind of thing I am looking for. Surely amongst the ten offerings there’s something right for me, and that means I could finally go back to earning money and feel so much better about myself!

It’s been there three weeks. I have only watched the first three minutes of it. Got freaked out, his pause, never looked back. no action.

And finally, we have this link to job postings for writers on Indeed.ca.

Same as the above. Checked it out for a few minutes, saw something that maybe I could do, got freaked out, goodbye forever.

And yet I am also too spineless to close these tabs because then I’d have to admit to myself that I am never going to do any of the things instead of coasting along on the belief that I will get around to them “someday”.

Watch out for that word, “someday”. That shit will fuck you up. It convinces you that you are getting somewhere by doing nothing.

That’s not how it works.

So, yeah. That’s how my life works. I would probably be better off if I grew a pair and closed all those tabs, or finally did something with them.

But no, as usual, I will hover in between, unable to commit or confront.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been craving sweet things lately.

And that’s not good. It’s a classic symptom of diabetes. In fact, waaaaay back when I first got my diabetes diagnosis, that was the first symptom I noticed.

I’d gone from a normal amount of the enjoyment of sweets to devouring entire boxes of cookies in one sitting. And still wanting more.

Thank God (and Doctor Robinson) for that diagnosis, because that’s how I avoided becoming the fat guy who is eating constantly.

As adorable and lovable and humpable as Clawhauser is, in the real world, people like him eat sweet things constantly and feel like they would “die” or “starve” without them because they have Type 2 diabetes and their blood sugar is so insanely high that when they stop eating it plunges fast enough to make them make a mad dash for the Oreos just to put it back to “normal”.

Needless to say, the prognosis for someone like that is pretty grim. If they don’t find it in themselves to snap out of that mode in time, they can go through the whole pathology of diabetes, from Type 2 to Type 1 to brittle Type 1 to no longer with us in a shockingly short time. It’s quite sad.

And that’s not even counting the psychologically addictive nature of our modern supranormally rewarding foods. In many ways, we fat people are simply addicts with a very visible pathology.

Good thing he’s a cartoon character and doesn’t have to worry about that.

Anyhow, back to me. I would say I am mildly worried about my cravings. But I think I know where they came from.

I’ve been missing meals lately.

Mostly midnight snacks, but there’s been a few other meals too. I keep missing midnight snacks because with Joe in the hospital, our usual routine of watching stuff at midnight has been disrupted and being a creature of habit with very low levels of initiative, I have not yet summoned the wherewithal to replace it.

And I feel very silly about that. Missing meals is a very serious thing with me. I really should not do it. One missed meal can throw off my whole system for a week.

And I have missed a bunch of them lately.

In theory, I could just eat more for a few meals to make up for the deficit. But like I said, I am a creature of habit and it’s very difficult for me to alter my routine like that.

It’s taken me years to get to the point where I will eat between meals at all. When I was desperately poor, it was out of the question. I could barely afford three meals a day.

And my brain is still programmed that way.

So if I truly miss a meal, like I make it to the next meal without anything in between, there is no way for me to catch up and I have to just… endure it.

And part of that, it would seem, is putting up with having a sweet tooth all of a sudden.

It’s really a pain in the ass.

More after the break.

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Feeling kinda lost

Having trouble waking up from my latest nap.

I think it’s because it was day when I went to sleep and night when I woke up. That always throws me off.

But I was also pretty deeply asleep when the alarm I had set on my tablet went off. Then, quite irritatingly, I accidentally made the screen with the “stop” button disappear by pressing the “home page” button by mistake, and so I was unable to turn the damned alarm off ’cause I have no idea to get the “stop” page back when that happens.

Which is a serious pain in the ass when you’ve just woken up. I had to use the emergency shutdown sequence (hold down the power button and the left volume button for ten seconds) in order to shut the god damned thing up.

So one might reasonably say that my reentry into consciousness was a tad rough.

In retrospect, I kinda wish I hadn’t needed to wake up. I really was very deep in sleep when the alarm went off. Who knows how long I would have slept if I had not set that alarm? I honestly probably really need some deep REMs.

As patient readers know, my sleep habits are atrocious. I get most of my sleep in 1.5 hour naps in between meals. That means I almost never get the really deep sleep that the mind needs so badly in order to transfer memories from medium to long term memory while we sleep.

No wonder I have so much brain fog. I am convinced that my mind bears a constant burden of a whole bunch of medium term memories forever stuck in limbo, unable to either be forgotten or be remembered.

Sad little lost souls.

Then again, brain fog is a good place to hide from reality, or rather, have reality hidden. All that fog softens the edges of reality like a soft focus lens and makes things all dreamy and hazy and vague.

Bad for clear thinking and remembering to do things, but it’s a great escape.

And I hate to admit it, but I abuse that state a lot. Part of the “benefit” of how I sleep only in little spurts is that I never need to truly fully wake up, at least when I am at home, and that lets me linger in that soft grey lazy state of mind.

At least I get dressed every day now, and that keeps me from goes completely into half-asleep mode all day long.

Like most forms of escapist abuse, being half-asleep all the time solves an immediate problem – having trouble dealing with reality – but ultimately does more harm than good.

I wish I could just stay fully awake and learn to frigging deal with things. And maybe I could if I was healthier physically.

Until then, I am going to keep drifting through life like a little grey cloud.

Maybe I should just make peace with that instead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the appointment with Doctor McCay, the eye doctor, this morning.

I was a little surprised that I had to do all the usual eye tests again. I kind of assumed that not a lot will have changed in a week, so why bother?

But looking back, it makes sense. A lot COULD change in a week. I want the doctor to base his decisions on the most up to date data available.

And the tests are no big deal. Honestly, the eyedrops are more of a pain, and that’s because of my eyelashes, which are unusually long for a man.

I imagine that would prove to be an asset were I ever to do drag.

And what the hell, I just might some day. I am sure I would enjoy it. It would be a superlative outlet for both my rapier wit and my smoldering flamboyance.

Other than being Fruvous, of course.

Anyhow, the pupil dilating eyedrops sting a little, and the way they test your inner eye pressure at that office involves more eye drops and sticking the meter directly on to your eyeball, which doesn’t hurt , but is pretty weird, but for the most part, it’s no biggie.

Honestly, the large periods of waiting are the worst part. Next time I go there, I am definitely bringing my tablet. I was so bored!

The wait once I actually got into the wait room was the worst. Felt like forever. As you might expect, I was kind of eager to hear the news about my poor left eye, and that made the waiting much worse.

When Doctor Mackay (sp?) showed up, we talked about the problem with my eye. He took a look as I told him that there did not seem to be any improvement.

But I think I was wrong about that. The filmy portion of my vision that looks like you cracked an egg onto a camera lens is actually a lot less opaque than before.

The big black dot plus assorted other tendrils of darkness are still there, although it’s possible that they, too, are less opaque than before.

Which is good, because the surgical procedure for cleaning up my eye sounds horrifying. I think Doctor Mackay could use a quick refresher on bedside manner because the way he casually talked about peeling back my eye and draining the goo out of it damn near gave me a heart attack.

I know he’s a surgeon, not a regular doctor, but geez dude. That is a very tender and intimate part of my body we’re talking about, not a malfunctioning sump pump.

He decided to give the injection I got last week another week to do its work. OK.

I left with an appointment to see him next week. At first, there was a problem because he wasn’t due to be back in Richmond for three weeks, and that is a bit too long to leave my fucked up eye.

But then he asked if I could see him at the eye clinic at St. Paul’s hospital, and I thought about it and said yes.

If we made it to the Eye Care Center in Vancouver, we can make it to St. Paul’s.

So that’s where my eye stands. Another week and change for the injection to maybe fix the problem, and if it doesn’t, a horrifying surgery.

So, go injection, go! With how much that fucker hurt, I feel I am owed some results.

More after the break.

---

Get your damned hands off me, you dirty depression!

While I was waiting for Doctor Mackay today, and thus bored and restless, I actually remembered to take that excess energy and use it to push back my depression.

I can do that because I have a very clear idea of depression in my mind. I know what it is and what if feels like and thus I can direct mental effort towards its destruction.

I sometimes imagine this as prising depression’s icy fingers off my heart, hence the title of this section listed above.

But for the most part, I visualize it more as being pushing a big steel wall back by sheer force of will and grim determination.

I am a big fan of grim determination. Grim determination gets things done.

And the thing is, it works. I can feel that wall moving back as I push on it like I have Juggernaut strength and force it to retreat and give me some more fucking room in the all too coffin like confines of my mind.

Gotta watch it with that line of thinking. Don’t need to set off my mental claustrophobia.

This pushing back thing is something I have done a number of times It is a great use of all that excess nervous energy my massively magnetic mind naturally produces as a byproduct of all the high voltage mentation that’s always going on in my head.

I think part of that magic is my ability to keep thinking about something without it needing to take space in my conscious mind. My mind can keep beavering away at a thought without me doing anything at all.

Then, at some future point, my mind goes DING and outputs the result into my conscious mind, and I am like, “Cool. ”

Which is fine in theory, but in practice, it means a massive amount of my mental CPU time is eaten up by dozens of these subterranean thought processes that I started and forgot about, kind of like when your computer is slow because you have way too many background processes running.

Makes me wish my brain had a Task Manage so I could halt most of them.

But I suppose my deep and profound understanding of things has to come from somewhere. Somewhere in my mind is a white hot forge that melts all these raw thoughts and refines them, taking out everything extraneous, and then outputs it as another piece of the giant INTJ machine that is my mind.

Does that sound creepy? I feel like it sounds creepy. I am such a strange admixture of types. A highly systemized and powerful computer for a brain but with the personality of a harmless performer who just wants cuddles and laughs and who deeply cares about people and does his best to truly empathize with them, but who truly believes that he can best help people by keeping a cool head and remaining objective so he can see things how they truly are, and thus solve problems efficiently.

Some day, I will be able to conceive of a single conception of self that can include all my strange ingredients into a cohesive persona.

But if not, well, there are worse things to be than a chimera.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Somewhere deep and dark and dank. far away from the light of the world, a creature stirs in its sleep.

Sometimes it smiles, and sometimes it moans, and sometimes it scrabbles again an unseen surface with its flat dull claws, but what never changes is the look of panic and fear etched, seemingly permanently, on its muzzle.

And it is always struggling. This is no peaceful slumber, no knot of peace. This is the tormented slumber of a coma patient. the fractured sleep of the end-stage alcoholic, the restless nightmares of the truly insane.

And yet, it struggles. It struggles to return to the surface of the water despite not even knowing which way is up any more. It searches huntedly for the exit to the maze it can’t stop creating around itself. It fights to exit this twisted twilight existence.

And above all, it struggles to wake up. And return to the land of the living.

And it’s halfway there. As usual.

---

That a rough depiction of how I feel lately. Like there is something deep inside me that is tossing and turning in its sleep as it tries to awaken.

It’s the real me, I suppose. The “me” that lies at the core of my being and has been buried and suppressed and starved into a stupor for so very long. The “me” I might have been had mental illness not enveloped me after my parents took me and my brother Dave out of university and made us come home to the family house.

No wonder I fell apart.

I can feel it moving in me. And I wish I could help it be reborn but the best tht I can do is stay out of the way while it tried to dig itself out of depression’s interment.

The problem, of course, is that the bigger part of me still wants to stay buried. It’s no accident that I ended up down here so deep. This is the product of decades spent burrowing deeper and deeper into myself while fleeing the light of day and hiding in the comforting low stimulation environment of this stale tomb.

So until the part of me that wants to emerge is stronger than the part of me that wants to stay hidden, hidden I will stay, as this wall of fear around me suffocates me.

I want to open up my mind and embrace the fear. Encompass it. Envelop it. I want to eat my fear and thus triumph over it as I tear down the wall between us and let my deeper mind process and digest it and make it part of me instead of continuing to xt like it’s a torment inflicted by some external force.

Like I said yesterday, it’s just a pile of unprocessed emotions. It no longer means anything in and of itself. I can point to where it comes from and bitch about my horrible childhood all I want, and that does help me feel better, and I think it even does me a fair bit of good in the long run.

But that run is too damned long, man. Maybe longer than I have. I’m tried of being broken and frustrated and lonely and alone. I want to be a real person, an actual genuine accept no substitutes grownup, with a life and a job and a place in society with more dignity than the “failure to launch:” ward can afford me.

I want to launch. god damn it. I want fly.

But most of all, I want to live.

Is that too much to ask?

More after the break.

---

Worried about Joe

My roomie, buddy,, and reality intercessionary ^[1], Joseph P. Devoy, is still in the hospital and I am very worried about him.

He went to the ER Saturday afternoon after having been sick for almost this entire year so far. It started off as a nasty cough plus other flu-like symptoms and he went to the doctor and got antibiotics for that, but once that cleared up some it then mutated into extreme nausea, to wit not being able to keep any food or even water down.

Been there. It’s hell.

That went on for about four days before, at my gentle nudging, he went to the ER and they ran some tests and then admitted him.

Lucky for him that he has his boyfriend and my roommate Julian by his side. Julian is a very sweet, kind, loyal, and conscientious fellow, and Joe could not ask for a better mate to have by his side right now.

\Julian’s been spending most of the day with Joe at the hospital. So it’s been a lot quieter, and lonelier than usual around Fanhattan lately.

The worst part of having a loved one in the hospital is, of course, the feeling of helplessness. I wish I could do something to help, but it’s in the hospital’s hands now.

I don’t even known what’s wrong with him, and that’s what really hurts. I can handle anything if I have the facts. Facts soothe me. But this uncertainty wounds me.

I just hope to God that he will be okay. Every day he is in there, I worry a little more. Last I heard, they were talking about doing a biopsy of his lymph nodes (well, presumably only one of them) and that sounds pretty bad.

Of course, it’s no doubt worse for him. Don’t want to seem totally self-centered.

But from where I sit, it’s the worry, and the helplessness, and the not knowing what the heck is going on that really hurts.,

Be well, dear Joe. I miss you so much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

P. S. : Oh right, I’m sick too

Almost forgot. Got a phone call from Doctor Madhani today. There’s going to be a serious of MRIs of my arms and legs in order to figure out what caused the anomalous readings in the previous tests, plus she is prescribing another test (one I forgot to do before, d’oh!) and a plint and brace for the carpal tunnel in my left (?) hand.

I am right handed. I definitely get pain in my right hand. I hope she knows what she is doing because that seems like the wrong hand to me.

I think that’s it. I hope I’m not forgetting anything.

Some day, I will know what the fuck is wrong with my legs!

---

I’ve been feeling restless and impatient lately. \

And that’s a good thing. That’s the sort of thing that can potentially lead to change. If I get pent up and frustrated enough, it might give me the energy and incentive I need to overcome the wall of fear that keeps me from moving forward with my life.

it would also help if I could learn to take life less seriously. I know it might sound funny for a hilarious guy like me to be talking about taking life too seriously, but I truly believer that to be the case.

My deep down Taurus programming is very serious. Deadly serious, even. It insists that what is real and solid in the world – we’ll call it “reality” for short – is the most important thing possible and should always have the highest priority, come what may.

And that sounds sensible enough. What could be more important than reality? The here and now? The things that actually exist and are really happening?

The answer is, of course, “nothing”, but that doesn’t mean that the best approach to life is to take those things incredibly seriously.

In fact. in my case, it raises the stakes for life so high that I can’t handle it and I can’t deal with anything and I have to spend my time hiding from reality because everything is so fraught with danger and importance.

That’s clearly no way to live.

For one thing, it lacks flexibility and resilience. It makes for a very rigid yet fragile approach to life where any old bump in the road can send you to the metaphorical emergency room and the world is therefore a very scary place that is best avoided.

Like that’s an option. No matter where you go, there you are.

I would be a hell of a lot better off if I could ease the frick off and learn to take things a lot more lightly. Treat life like a game or a dream or a lark. Live to have fun and enjoy myself rather than trying to be some kind of superhuman paragon in order to :”live up to my potential” and be as great as I feel like I could be.

And maybe I can be a one of a kind world-changing thinker and a once in a century genius and the most talented dude ever, but I won’t get there by thinking that way.

I need to silence the voice that insists that taking things less seriously can only lead to disaster because honestly, it’s not like things are going great now.

And to be honest, I am warming up to the idea that tragedy and failure are not the worst things in the world – doing and being nothing is.

I would rather be alive and doing something with my life than drowsing through this fucking sleepwalk of an existence with no destination in mind but the grave.

Unfortunately. that realization alone is not enough for me to pierce that wall of fear. Like I said yesterday, that wall is not amenable to reason or even my own best interests. And my own weak motivations and feeble drives are no match for it.

It is a malignant mass of carcinogenic emotion that lies deep within my soul and pollutes every fiber of my being.

It will take the equal and opposite emotions, like hope and inspiration, to destroy this spiritual infection so that I can finally have some peace and some balance in my life.

And I don’t know where to get that. Out of nothing at all, apparently.

And I have tried giving myself permission to just give myself the emotion, without it needing to make sense or be justified at all.

And I have not given up on that. It might work eventually. But it might not, and from where I am sitting right now, it doesn’t seem possible.

I feel like I just don’t have it in me to make that kind of change.

But maybe some day, I will.

More after the break.

---

The reservoir is dry

More about just not having it in me to change.

I keep circling back to this feeling of not having whatever spiritual substance is needed in order to fight my fear and grow as a person.

I can’t shake the feeling of soul starvation. Intellectually, I know that a feeling of emptiness is a primary symptom of depression, probably because depression’s numbness is so pervasive that you can’t even feel your own life force any more, but intellectual understanding of a problem provides, at best, cold comfort, and at worst it is way less than useless because it doesn’t fucking help.

I know so much and I see so much and I understand so much and I “get” so much and yet it’s all just so much paper waste in the eye of the storm of my emotions.

I might as well be trying to stop a charging bull by playing solitaire.

And I am keenly aware of just how ignorant and foolhardy I really am, because for all I have developed my truly amazing mind, my soul and my spirit are so underdeveloped that it’s a wonder I still draw breath.

People grow based on their life experiences, and I have far too few of those, and the ones I have don’t exactly expand the mind and spirit much.

Plus the vast majority of them are from my twenties. Back then I did things like organize furmeets, and I knew people through those.

I don’t know what I could organize now. Maybe a Gen X club so we can all get together and pretend we are still what is “normal”.

I’m too old and crippled and poor for any sort of spiritual pilgrimage or journey to find myself. I guess if I am ever going to find myself, it will have to be online.

Figures I’d be there.

And I know there is so much I might do to expand my world online. But change is so hard and complacency is so easy as to be effortless, and I can’t imagine where I would find the internal resources for that, either.

Maybe if I get my vitamin B-12 levels up high enough. I will feel strong enough to do the things I need to do to heal my broken soul.

Or maybe I’ll just die. I don’t know.

But I do know one thing.

i will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have always been extremely sensitive to the vibe of my location.

But lacking the sort of mind that eagerly embraces other New Age concepts, I have never really had a place in my mind for these perceptions.

Vibes are real. Of that, I have no doubt whatsoever. To me, the vibe of a location is as real as its temperature,. humidity, and lighting.

The fact that nobody knows what exactly it is that I am perceiving doesn’t matter one bit to me. I could no more deny the existence of vibes than I could the existence of air.

I wonder if that is what religious faith is like for whose who have it. To them, it is equally absurd to deny the existence of God because they feel Him everywhere they go.

Must be nice.

Anyhow, vibes are very concrete and real to me, presumably due to my high level of empathy. To me, it makes perfect sense that the emotions I pick up from people might well linger in a location in some form.

I can’t tell you what a vibe is. or how empathy works for that matter. My best guess is pheromones’, because they objectively exist and yet very little is known about how our mind perceives and processes them, let alone the profound effect they have on our minds, our moods, and maybe even our opinions.

But that theory, while probably true up to a point, feels insufficient to me. My subjective experience of picking up on vibes feels so much like I am receiving some kind of energy like my spine is an antenna (and so is everyone else’s) that I can’t help but wonder if some kind of electromagnetic force is involved.

Probably not. We’re very good at detecting electromagnetic forces and so far nobody has stumbled across this elusive empathic energy.

It is, of course, possible that it’s a very faint and subtle form of energy that encode the information in a novel way that just seems like background EM radiation to us.

But the skeptical scientist in me doubts it. Perhaps the real appeal of viewing it as an energetic phenomenon is that “I feel your emotions” sounds so much better than “I can smell your feelings” to us.

Regardless of mechanism, vibes are here to stay. And there have been many times I have considered., in the abstract, leaving normal life behind and wandering the world in search of those good, good, good…. good vibrations.

And I wouldn’t care where I found them. Whether they can be found at a Baptist picnic or a Saturnalia orgy doesn’t matter one whit to me.

Wherever it is, I just hope they let me stay long enough to soak it all up.

And there are so many things that science cannot readily explain that nevertheless demonstrably exist. How does a riot turn perfectly ordinary law-abiding citizens into raving lunatics? How can we tell if the vibe of an audience we are in shifts? How can we tell our life partner is upset when we haven’t even laid eyes on them yet? How can a parent suddenly know that their child is in danger?

Hell, how the fuck can there even be such a thing as a collective unconscious? How the hell does that work? And what effect does it have on us?

These and other topics are covered in our new Time Life book series, WTF?

Maybe those are the questions people like me, with one toe in the world of the mystical and the intuitive and the other nine toes in scientific realism, to try to bridge that gap and let us consciously understand these unconscious influencers.

Whether I can do that or not, it’s still a damned interesting subject.

More after the break.

---

I might be indecisive

Just had a negative experience that I feel is worth sharing.

All day long, in a corner of my mind, I’ve been pondering whether or not I was going to bother ordering in tonight, like I often do on a Saturday night.

But this is no ordinary Saturday night. Joe’s been quite ill lately, nauseous and dizzy and miserable, and today, after four or five days of that, he finally went to the ER.

I am, of course, very worried about him. Doubly so because he’s been at the hospital for ten hours or so now, and last I heard he was going to be there overnight, so clearly this is not just some bug

i hope he’s okay.

Anyhow, back to the plot. I was wondering all day if I would bother ordering in. See, I used up all the money on my credit card, and all I have left is cash.

That means the only place I can order from is Pizza Hut because they are the only place I know of that still takes cash.

I’ve mentioned that before, haven’t I?

Now me being indecisive is not news. I have decision issues. I think they stem from a very poor connection to my id, so I am like Good Kirk in the Two Kirks episode of Star Trek : nice, but completely indecisive because he lacked the killer instinct derived from his id that let him make those tough decisions.

But tonight was different, because I wasn’t just vacillating, I fell into this deep funk of indecision. It was like everything in my mind slowed down to a crawl and I was left there in a very strange and unwelcome mental state. It made me extremely depressed. It felt like I was trapped in some dark dimension.

It only lasted about ten minutes, then I unstuck myself, but it was a disturbing incident. My mind has never done that before. And I really hope it never does it again.

For now, I will chalk it up to an effect of how worried I am for Joe. A freaky, one off thing that will never happen again.

But if it does, I know about it now and I know I can power my way out of it when I need to, so whatever.

My life is so weird.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.