John was amused but not surprised to see that the other members of the Facility’s Executive Committee looked just as haunted and restless as he did.

They had all known one another for years, sometimes even decades. And so as they took their seats around the conference table, complex, meaningful looks passed among them like carrier pigeons, and accomplished much of the committee’s work before anyone had even said anything.

“Now I know what you’re all thinking. ” began Kevin, the current Project Lead, “and I know that you all already know this, but just for the record, let me make this clear : Yes, the Dreamer is waking up. ”

A restrained murmur susurrated through those assembled.

“All the signs our statistical models predicted are present. The entity’s energy fields are increasing in power while decreasing in flux and shrinking in size. The gravitic and temporal anomalies have all but vanished and the entity’s ‘body’ has started to stir in its magnetic bottle. The ‘message’ traffic in its ‘mind’ is already more directed and coherent than we have ever recorded before and they have been following John’s predictions as to their rise in complexity perfectly. There can be no doubt about it. The moment we have, um…. anticipated… all these years is finally coming. The Dreamer will dream no more. May God have mercy on our souls.”

“More to the point, ” said Steven drily, “May the Dreamer have mercy on our souls. And the rest of us as well. “

Aileen laughed indulgently. “Why so worried, Steven? Do you have some reason to think the entity might not be entirely pleased with us?”

Hanford chimed in, “I know that if I woke up after a long nap to find myself with tubes and wires in every orifice and a small apartment built into my ‘brain’, I would not be in a particularly forgiving mood. ”

“Not to mention high definition recordings of all my dreams going back to the 1950s. ” added Sheila with a sigh.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, people. ” warned Kevin. “This entity is a complete unknown. We do not know if it even has anything we would recognize as motivations or desires, let along something as petty as a thirst for revenge. ”

“The thing about aliens… ” said Trevor. “…is that they’re alien.

“Exactly, Trevor. Well put. ” said Kevin with a nod. ”

---

And with that my brain suddenly ran out of gas. Man, this fiction shit is hard.

Don’t worry, I know what else needs to be covered about the Dreamer and I know the basic outline of how the meeting is going to go from here.

What happens after that, not so much. This is a rather big idea I have on my proverbial hook and it is not going to be easy to land.

But I am having fun so far, brain shutdown aside.

I am tempted to just tell you all about what is going to happen next in the story, but if I do that, I will never actually write the damned thing.

All my impetus to create must go into the actual creation of the thing or I lose all motivation. That’s why I can’t make notes or an outline beforehand.

If I wrote notes or an outline, then the idea would be out of my head and I would never want to see it again, much less stick with it long enough to get it written down properly.

I can’t justify or explain why that is. It’s just the way my particular muse works. And if you want to excel at your art, you do whatever it takes to get your muse to cooperate.

Happy muse, happy life.

Now to let the little grey cells rest.

More after the break.

---

Writing versus blogging

I mean, obviously, blogging IS writing. But you get the idea.

Writing fiction is so much harder. There is so much that you have to imagine. When I am blogging like I am doing now, all I have to do is express my thoughts in words.

That’s way easier for someone whose head is always teeming with words like me.

Too bad I can’t just blog for a living. That would be the sweet life. Just doing like I do but making a comfortably middle class income doing it.

That’s not impossible, of course, but it’s not bloody likely.

For one thing, people don’t read blogs as much as they used to. Back in The Day, when the Earth was still cooling from the impact that formed the Moon and the people of the world lived like children and the Internet was largely just text and imagines – yes, even before YouTube, children – everyone was trying to be a blogger and blogs were very well read and influential.

But now, I would probably be better off trying to be a TikTok star.

I wonder if Canada will become like a TikTok haven once the USA has banned it.

Who am I kidding, a) the parent company will probably figure out a way to make TikTok owned by a US company on paper, and if not, b) getting around a “ban” like that would be a trivial task for the billions of nerds of the world.

Hell, just use a fucking VPN.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, fantasizing about a life where I earn a living.

I know I could do it. It would not even be that big of a deal. The world is full of earn from home type possibilities and some of them aren’t even scams.

Or so I have heard.

Plus there’s my massive talent and enormous intellect and winning personality.

So I know that building up the idea of earning a living to the near mythically ascended state of being is not rational and not helping me. I would be far better off thinking about all the really stupid and lowly people who nevertheless have jobs and telling myself, “Well if they can do it… “.

But I would have to leave my little bathetic bunker to do that!

And that’s always been the real issue. I keep choosing to cling to the known rather than take any amount of risk by going outside my tiny, tiny world.

I can’t even learn to use VRChat because I panic when I try. Ditto Discord.

Is there any help for me at all?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been feeling better lately. More present, more alert, less depressed, more willing to engage with reality.

But this does not mean suddenly breaking my video game addiction. In fact, it’s led primarily to my playing my games even more, and playing them harder and for longer periods of time.

That’s because it would be foolish in the extreme t hinge my psychological recovery on whether or not I overcome a habit that’s had me in its clutches for more than a decade.

Not sure when, exactly, it metastasized into a crippling addiction. Not even sure if I was living here in Fanhattan or back in Nerdvana.

But I do know what triggered it : Skyrim.

Mother fucking Skyrim.

So I don’t plan to set myself in opposition to that addiction just yet. Eventually I Will make space in my life for other, newer things, gradually, a little at a time.

But for now I will just enjoy being able to enjoy things more.

:right now I am mostly working on trying to make life outside video games seem more enticing. That’s a rough job, though, considering that addiction is very good at convincing you that life without the addicted “substance” is cold and horrible and miserable and basically impossible.

That’s the power of our tendency to fixate on the strongest source of reward relative to the effort needed to get it. Especially once the addiction has truly set in and the reward becomes even easier to get because we have built a royal road of neural pathways leading directly from the “substance” to the reward.

Like I always say when this subject comes up, for me, the big barrier is having to figure out what to do with myself and my time.

This used to be a huge issue for me. A big part of my depression in those pre-Skyrim days involved agonizing over what I “should” do with myself as I once again tried to navigate the infinite corridor of infinite doors.

Too many possibilities. Can’t be done. It’s like the Three Body Problem. It does not take long for the math involved to become so complex as to be unsolvable.

“But you can do whatever you want to do!” says a glittery-eyed children’s TV show host from the fucking Seventies.

Well fuck you, Doug Henning. It is not that easy. I have no idea what I want. Or rather, I can think of millions of things I want. So how do I sort through them all and pick one?

That’s how malnourished and underdeveloped my pathetic id is. I have no idea what I want because I have so little experience wanting things.

Like I have said before, at some point I made the life-wrecking decision that I had to little power in the world that wanting things could only lead to pain and so I learned to just make do with whatever I happened to have and not think of anything else.

This murdered my soul.

I don’t know if pining away for all the things I want but can’t possibly get would be any better but at this point I would be willing to entertain the possibility, at least.

At least then I would be alive, and have some clue as to who and/or what I am. At least then I would have tried to follow my desires inasmuch as I could and they would have led me out into the world to get some god damned life experience. At least I would have had some way to organize my time and possibly find meaning in my days.

Instead, all I have is the nihilistic negativity of this purposeless shambles of a life.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother.

More after the break.

---

Long awaited dawn

John looked at the clock as he picked up the phone. 3:40 AM. Who the hell would be calling at this hour?

His wife Sandra stirred in her sleep, thinking the same thing. She assumed whoever it was, her husband would brush them off so they could get back to sleep.

And that’s why it was so shocking to see her normally sedate and orderly husband suddenly sat bolt upright, eyes wide and hyper-alert, when he heard what the person on the phone said.

“Yes, I heard you. ” he replied in a voice quavering with suppressed tension. “Are you sure? Sorry… of course you’re sure. You wouldn’t be calling otherwise. Yes. Yes of course, I understand. I can be there in ten minutes. OK, I’m on my way. See you soon.”

“What’s wrong, John? ” she asked. She had never seen him like this and it scared her.

“Nothing. ” John replied distantly as he got dressed. ” Work. I’ve got to go in. ”

“To work?” Sandra asked. “But it’s almost 4 in the morning. ”

“Uh huh. ” said John as he threw a bunch of papers into his briefcase. “Don’t wait up for me. I don’t know when I’ll be back. ”

Now Sandra was really rattled. Where had her sleepy, gentle academic of a husband gone, and who was this rigid stranger with eyes like he’s a soldier about to go to war standing in his place?

“Well… goodbye. ” she barely managed to say to him as he headed out the door. With shocking suddenness, she heard his car start up and drive away, tires squealing at the sudden unexpected acceleration.

Sandra turned the light out and tried to get back to sleep. But a cold dark feeling of loneliness and dread now occupied her heart, and she could not shake the irrational feeling that she would never see her husband again.

She must have slept, because suddenly it was dawn, but she didn’t remember going to sleep. She got up and went through her morning routine woodenly, feeling like she was watching a robot version of herself from afar.

It wasn’t until she found herself staring at her two beloved Malamutes, Kitten and Rainbow, like she didn’t even know who or what they were that she finally had the good sense to break down and cry.

And she was still crying and stroking the immaculately groomed fur on Kitten’s head when the sun set again.

This is worse than if someone had died, she thought. At least then she would know what had happened. At least then her world would still make sense.

Eventually, she got up, fed the dogs again, then went back to bed.

But for reasons she did not care to examine, she slept in the guest bedroom that night.

---

AUTHOR’S NOTE : Um, sorry about the lack of closure. In retrospect, I should not have started the story this late in the day. But stay with me, folks, I promise this is all going somewhere and you WILL find out what was said to John and where he went very soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something amazing happened yesterday and I feel the need to capture it in the typed word to keep it from getting lost in the tidal wash of my mind.

I had just finished re-reading one of my favorite furry smut comics of all time, Comic Relief by the god-dragon-master of gay furry smut. Braeburned, ^[1]

And as I was basking in the glowing good feeling^[2] I get from the really good gay furry smut, something in me activated and a whole new wonderful feeling washed over me and sent my soul stretching towards the horizon.

Warning, this is going to get really metaphorical and/or spiritual.

I felt strong and alive and pure for the first time maybe ever. I felt like this stretching out in a new dimension was letting me transcend my usual deadly doldrums pig sty self-loathing mindset and tap in to something far healthier and cleaner than usual.

And that’s when I had the thought that I used for the title of this entry : it can be good. Life can be good. Existence can be good. My life does not have to be a matter of me being claustrophobically cloistered behind that ten foot thick wall of compacted scar tissue I have been hiding behind for my entire life.

It can be so much more.

And this wonderful feeling lasted for a while. At least twenty minutes. And all the time I was enjoying it, a little corner of my mind was saying : REMEMBER THIS. Remember this feeling, both its nature and its shape. Remember that things do not have to be the way they have always been. Remember this amazing feeling so that you can call it up later after it has faded away and use it to guide you toward a better place to be.

It’s a very hard feeling to describe, even for me. It was like cool, clean air flowing against your skin on a hot, sweaty day. It was like the purest, cleanest, most life-affirming water washing my being clean of all the usual filthy and gunk. It was like joy and exhilaration and the anticipation of something fantastic coming all rolled into one.

And now I know that escape is possible. I can leave this grubby little coffin of mine behind and exist on a completely different and vastly superior vibration, and all the guilt and shame and disgust with myself and that pervasive feeling of being something nightmarishly horrible beyond description can be washed away by a pure clean light and I can sample what it might be like to be normal.

In the sense of being healthy. I will be weirder than most fuck till the day I die.

And through it all wove a thread of semi-sexual fantasy of me being able to just get together with another dude for sexual fun and maybe a little bit more.

All without the obscuring mists of fantasy. It wasn’t a furry dude I was imagining, or some kind of wild scenario, or well *ahem* any of the sexual schema that I don’t ever talk about here either.

Just me and some guy. Not impersonal sex – foxy don’t play that.

But not too far from it. We meet online, through text chat, get to know each other, get a serious sexual vibe going, then get together and see if said vibe has real world power.

It would still be a little iffy if I would be able to handle that emotionally. For me sex is inherently intimate and that’s not really negotiable.

But I would be willing to give it a try. Maybe.

More after the break.

---

Living with gusto

Sadly, not with this guy :

But no. What I am speaking of is the idea of living life with enthusiasm and zest, as opposed to what I have been doing for most of my life, namely living hesitantly and with great fear, ready to abandon everything I have going on and retract into my shell at the slightest sign of trouble.

That fucking sucks. It’s no way to live. You end up doing far more harm to yourself by withdrawing from life and thus not getting the life-affirming experiences people need in order to thrive than you could possibility be avoiding through your timidity.

And by you, I of course mean me.

I use this blog to talk to myself a lot.

Plus I have been thinking about the idea of a “pilot light” for the soul lately. I think healthy people have one – a source of energy and life that never goes out and that can re-ignite their soul when needed in order to keep them from sliding down too far.

Us depressives, in our energy miser wisdom, don’t allow that kind of thing. Why, that would involve unplanned, uncontrolled energy expenditures and we can’t afford THAT!

Picture me sarcastically clutching the pearls.

Upon deep scrutiny, so much of my depression comes down to me thinking I know better than everyone else, or even know better than my instincts.

It all seems so arrogant and foolhardy.

Well I hereby grant myself permission to respond to a declining mood by revving up my engine to compensate.

If I want to be more engaged with and in life – and I very much do – then I am going to have to radically remold my entire attitude towards living, and that is going to mean reprogramming even the most basic and primitive of my emotional responses.

And that’s not going to be easy. All my instincts will be shouting at me that reaching for happiness is too much work and I should just know my place and stay sleepy and let whatever is left of my life rot away beneath me

Well fuck that. I’m going to live before I die even if it kills me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] A feeling which includes but is in no way limited to the sexual. The good stuff doesn’t just turn me on, it makes me feel better about life. [[1]]

Both against my depression and, ya know, life.

Still getting the sneaky sleepies. Almost fell asleep during wound care this morning. It’s just a matter of time before it happens unless I become a hell of a lot chattier.

If I was keeping up my side of a conversation, that would keep me awake. I hope.

Unless the conversation was really boring.

But I am not a chatty person. I respond to other people’s small talk but I am not capable of generating my own.

I don’t generate my own big talk very easily either. I swear there was a time when I could start conversations but now my mind just goes blank.

Maybe I used up all my creative energies blogging now. I dunno.

Going back a parenthetical, I did have an amusingly odd experience at Wound Care. I kept hearing what sounded like someone’s impression of what an old man sounds like.

No words, just gibberish in a corny old wheezing old man voice, kind of like some old person puppet in a kid’s show whom everyone seems to understand but us.

And whilst I was sitting there with a nice lady working on my feet, I pondered this surreal phenomenon. But the penny didn’t drop until I heard the nurse talking back to him and realized the conversation was in Chinese.

No wonder I couldn’t understand him! 🙂

Meanwhile, I continue to be somewhat depressed. To be honest, it’s beginning to grate on my nerves. I want to be rid of this pall that seems to be clinging to me and waiting to pounce on my when I stop being too busy to pay attention to it.

I wonder if it’s related to the sleepiness. Perhaps its all a sign of my untreated sleep apnea getting worse. I dunno.

I know the depression is at its worst right after I wake up. And lately I have been waking up in that sweaty, incoherent, don’t even know my name state quite often.

Not hard to see how that might leave me depressed even after I physically recover.

Just to be on the safe side, I will start doing my breathing exercises when I feel myself feeling really bad and see if those help.

If my oxygen level has been low, that sure would explain a lot.

But I can’t forget the psychological aspect too. I have been breaking down long established walls inside me and those walls, while toxic in the long term, were holding back my depression and anxiety in the short term.

Whatever. I will trudge on through. No retreat, no surrender. This tank is going to just keep rolling over everything in its path like a bulldozer from hell and whatever gets in my way will be crushed like peanut butter under the weight of my treads.

Slow. But inexorable. Like glaciation.

And of course, if things get bad enough, I will go to the hospital. Though it occurs to me that I have no idea what happens when you go to the ER with depression.

I feel like they would probably say, “Yeah, nice try, druggie!” and call Security, but that is probably just the depression talking.

I suppose I could call or text chat with a hotline or something instead. Talk to someone who will listen and hopefully understand my problems.

Or at least sound like they do. I know that I am not the easiest guy to relate to for most people. Even my fellow nerds can only meet me part of the way.

Being a unique little snowflake really fucking sucks sometimes, ya know?

It’s like I’m from another planet.

More after the break.

---

How to terrify a killer

This is EXACTLY what made the original Equalizer such an amazing show.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would do if I was a vigilante. Merely bringing them to justice would not be enough. Not for the real scumbags like this guy.

By the time I was done with them they would be BEGGING TO BE ARRESTED.

In my own highly refined way, I am a very brutal man. Not every criminal would warrant that kind of treatment, in fact, most wouldn’t.

I would specialized in those that did.

---

The friendly alien

I was pondering the conflict between being friendly and personable and being weird and alienating earlier today.

Maybe that’s why the idea of being an alien or a robot or the like appeals to me, and to a lot of other alienated nerds just like me.

Because then there would be a reason. An explanation. Instead of awkwardly trying to explain and/or justify myself to people (which never works), I could relax assuming people would just go, “Well no wonder he’s alienating, he’s an alien!”.

I definitely feel like I have been trying to be someone I am not. Not in the conformity sense exactly – I lack the social skills to conform even if I wanted to – but more like I have a software conflict in my personality that causes me to try to be Mister Wonderful when my weirdness always shines through and ruins it.

I would be far better off coming up with a persona that works for all of me. Hence the idea of being a friendly alien or robot or whatever.

Obviously I am not going to try to actually be those things, but they give me something to aim for in this world which has furnished me with very few role models.

Because there’s nobody else like me in the world. I am one of a kind. The most I have gotten from others is little fragments of identity like random pixels of a picture.

I still have nothing even approaching a single, unified, suitable conception of self that I can use to anchor my identity.

All I can do is improvise.

And that’s so very tiring.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

wp:paragraph –>

I want to get off.

Because I still panic when I notice the passage of time.

Like, for instance, today is Thursday. But to me, it feels like Sunday was yesterday. It therefore feels like I “lost” four days somehow, and that makes me panic.

There’s that “oversensitivity to loss” that seems to haunt me.

Because the thing is, you can only ever lose time. The moments pass and are gone forever, and them bam, you’re one step closer to the grave.

And I am well aware that my days are numbered and the number isn’t very high. I highly doubt I will live to see my 60th birthday. Not with the way things are going.

I do what I can to preserve my existence, but it’s not enough. My muscles continue to get weaker and weaker and soon I will be stuck in a wheelchair, and not too long after that, a hospital bed, and after that… after I have gasped out my last in terror and agony all alone and full of tubes as even the muscles that let me breathe abandon me – the next stop is my sad, pathetic grave.

I’ll miss me.

I know all this, but because I am all broken inside, it does not do what it should do, which is to fire me up to make the absolute most of every minute I have left in order to catch up to all the living I have never ever done.

But nope. All it really does is make me want to withdraw into myself harder than ever before and hide from the world until the end comes.

Not going to do that, I don’t think. But part of me wants to.

And now that I am uncorking all my old latent emotions, I have to contend with that part of me openly, and that’s not easy.

But I can’t go back to being numb. I am finally waking up inside and I am thrilled by every new feeling or sensation as I am finally coming to life after all these years.

The sleeper awakens. The dreamer stretches his limbs and looks around, trying to remember what the real world is like.

And the court jester laughs at the folly and the joy of it all.

Today was Therapy Thursday. Talked with Doc Costin about how a big part of me was sealed off when I was raped at the age of 4 and how I have beena cripple ever since.

So, for my entire life, more or less.

That’s what happens when you withdraw from the world like I did. The vast majority of your being becomes locked away in that special place in your mind that you created when what was happening in the real world was so horrible, and you were so helpless, that all you could do was run away inside yourself.

And that big ol’ wound left by the rape has been festering away all this time, poisoning me and all I do and tainting me in a dark and horrible way.

Still, given all that, I have done remarkably well by just not being a serial killer.

It’s a low bar, but I take my W’s where I can.

But it is time to escape my own shadow and face the light. And hold myself in place until my eyes adjust rather than screeching and going scurrying back into my hole.

It might take a long time. But I swear to God, I WILL return.

And when I do, this world will never be the same. I am going to unleash all the magic I have stockpiled over the years and let me tell you, things are going to change.

I can hardly wait.

More after the break.

---

I shouldn’t be doing this…

..but I am not going to eat supper tonight.

I have absolutely no appetite at the moment and the very idea of trying to force myself to eat makes me feel nauseous and dizzy, so nope. no supper tonight.

Not even going to bother going to the kitchen to make myself something.

I have enough stuff left over from lunch that I can improvise a crappy but acceptable meal, and that will be what is waiting for me if my appetite returns.

And it might. I am plying myself with water and nibbling a little on trail mix. It is entirely possible that this will get things started.

I will tell you one thing : I am beginning to worry about how high stakes and demanding my hydration game has become.

I have to drink water almost constantly just to break even. I have been assuming that it has something to do with my Jardiance and its magical ability to smuggle excess blood sugar out of my bloodstream via my urine stream, but I don’t know for sure.

It would make sense though. Before Jardiance I had high blood sugar for some reason^[!]. and now I don’t. Ergo, there must be a fair bit of sugar smuggling going on, and that takes a lot of urine, and that, in turn, takes a lot of hydration.

But it’s becoming downright stressful. Having to go get more water from the tap in my ensuite all the time is a hassle and a pain in the ass. Ditto with having to empty my pee receptacle four times a god damned day.

Moreover, I worry about what risks I am taking with my health. I don’t like feeling like I live on the thin edge of dehydration all the time. I feel like at any time, I could be too lazy to get more water (dehydration robs you of energy) and end up in some kind of negative spiral where I get really seriously medically dehydrated and thus end up in a 911 kind of situation.

I suppose I could ask Julian to get me more water. But I would feel silly doing that when my ensuite’s sink is like three paces away.

I am sure I will figure it all out.

Oh, And yeah. I do have a little bit of appetite now.

Guess I was dehydrated all along.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Must be the lack of exercise because my diet is quite good. [[1]]

Here’s some furry smut a friend linked me to that I really like.

I love getting to share this intimate moment with our mouse lady friend. It’s just so fresh and innocent and genuine. It doesn’t feel performative at all. She is enjoying herself purely for her own pleasure and there is something beautiful about that to me.

It’s such a human moment (irony acknowledged) , you know what I mean?

It even turns me on a little, which is pretty amazing for something with absolutely no penises involved at all.

I mean, it’s not even anal.

It reminds me of the amazing sex in the legendary Omaha, the Cat Dancer series. It’s some of the sexiest sex I have ever seen in fiction because there is something so raw and real about it.

It feels like this is how people really fuck. There’s no sense of a “camera” or anything being faked for your viewing pleasure.

I think the secret is that it has what most smut sadly lacks, which is emotional context. Lust is an emotion, not just an urge or an itch to scratch, and a powerful and amazing emotion at that. One with incredible transformative potential, especially when it is freed of all the bullshit artificial and unnatural restrictions society puts on it.

I mean it from the very depths of my soul when I say that consent is the only rule. Absolutely everything is morally acceptable or even commendable as long as there is consent. And nothing is acceptable without it.

Everything else is just a bunch of bullshit rules invented by people afraid of sexuality’s power over us and terrified of the adulthood that comes with it so they had to try to practically extirpate it holus bolus from human existence.

That’s what the whole “only in marriage and only for the purposes of procreation” nonsense is all about. It comes from the anti-sex sheep painfully and grudgingly admitting that some amount of sex is necessary to perpetuate the species.

Thank goodness this all came into being before we had test tube babies and in vitro fertilization and such things, or they would have ditched sex entirely and all of us would have been conceived in a petri dish.

Hell, those crusty old fossils and scared little children don’t even want you to masturbate. As if God gave his children sexuality just to torment them by telling them never to use it for anything ever.

As if God made a huge mistake when he gave us sex instead of just getting Adam to reproduce by mitosis or some shit.

What an unspeakably obscene thought.

The same goes for other things pertaining to the wet and squishy reality of our physical forms, like bathroom functions and other effluvia.

Some people are still being raised to never, ever, ever speak of those things, period. As if forbidding the mentioning of something negates its existence.

This results in massive amounts of unnecessary human pain and suffering when people raised this way can’t even talk about problems they are having to their doctors.

One of the most shocking things I learned from The Vagina Monologues and its attendant media was that a woman can go her entire life without once so much as having a good look at what she has “down there”.

Men can’t do that. Ours demands attention. Or at the very least aim.

I am very grateful to my often neglectful parents for at least making sure their kids were not exposed to that toxic garbage and therefore grew up with a lot fewer than average hang-ups about sexuality and bodily functions.

Amen to that!

More after the break.

---

A long way home

Another day, another agonizingly long trip out of bed.

Because I didn’t really want to get up. I wanted to stay in bed and ignore the world and stay all wrapped up in my own little world with just me, my comforter, and my tablet.

And even that would have been just a way to pave my way back to sleep.

So yeah, that’s depression all right. As I predicted, my psychological excavations are causing things to get worse before making them better.

Actually, I guess they’re kind of happening at the same time. Which makes sense.

Life rarely accommodates our desires for linear order.

I feel like I am unpacking problems that I had packed away in the deep freeze of my soul a long time ago in order to “function”.

Inasmuch as I ever did.

But I packed them away wrong. I made a huge, hurried mess of the job, and now I have to unpack everything, throw away the useless or toxic garbage, clean off what’s left, and pack it away again, neatly this time.

Come to think of it, I need to do that with a lot of things in my life, both inside and outside this all too commodious skull of mine.

That means I have to actively grapple with my depression and I am not used to doing that. One of the benefits of being so numb for so long was that it kept things (artificially) quiet and calm and predictable inside me.

I was dying on the inside and the clock was ticking as my life passed me by and something deep inside of me was screaming, but it was calm. Kind of.

But now I have to face the storm and fight my way through it. I can’t go back to sleep, and furthermore, I don’t even want to. I want to finally reach the surface of the water and swim my way to shore and lie on the hot sand of the beach when I dry out.

And wait for my skin to stop being all prune-y.

And I know I can do it. I have found the fires of stubborn and spiteful defiance in me and they are ready to fire up to face any challenge by my depression and burn it to a crisp.

The problem is static. My determination is not.

It doesn’t stand a chance.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Right now, my finances are stretched to their limit, and that’s not good.

It’s bad because it means I am always tense about money and that drags down my mood. My emotional wellbeing is so tied to my financial security that they are practically one and the same, and lately, things have been not so secure.

The nail in the coffin has been Joe being in the hospital.

I shall explain.

With Joe either in the hospital or resting at his parents’ place, we have taken to getting together to “teledine” twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays from 8 pm to 9 pm.

This involves us getting together with him via Zoom so we can hang out together and watch some of the video clips Felicity has found for us.

She’s great at that. Brings us the coolest stuff.

The problem is that this teledining event tends to cost me money because Julian goes and gets McD’s for me to eat while we watch stuff with Joe.

And that is $20 a pop, or $40 a week, and that is on top of my other expenses, like groceries and Denny’s.

Here is how my week breaks down :

Start with a weekly budget of $150.
Subtract Denny’s, that’s $40/week. Now we’re down to $110.
Subtract my grocery bill, which is around $70/week. Down to $40.
Then subtract my teledining bill of $40/week and you get zero dinero.

And that’s no good. I need to have some slack in my budget in order to deal with sudden emergencies and, failing those, to be able to have a nice budget surplus that can build up till I can, say, buy a new game for myself or finally get that new power supply that I need or other things like that.

I am a far happier person when I feel like I have enough. Then I can relax and not think about money so much and not feel like I am on the edge of a razor blade all the time.

Yes. that’s dramatic. So am I.

And right now, it’s the McD’s twice a week that is the easiest thing to reduce. As much as I love Ronald’s cooking, I am going to have to make my own dinner for at least one of the two teledining experiences of the week.

And that’s going to be a bummer. Taking away a “treat” is always depressing because your brain was counting on that hit of dopamine and will miss it when it is gone.

The other way to curb my expenses would be to cut back on my groceries, but I am loath to do that because as much as the loss of McD’s twice a week will suck, not having my little pleasures like my cans of pop and the frozen chicken strips currently sitting in our freezer would suck even more.

But I will not give up on that idea entirely. I will continue to brainstorm ways to cut back on the expenses. I want my wiggle room back.

Of course, the other half of the equation would be to increase my revenue by finding some of that sweet, sweet online work.

And I know that would be good for me on so many levels. But when I try to think about the topic, let alone approach actually doing something, that same old unreasoning obliterating brutalizing paralytic fear comes down like the hammer of the gods and freezes the very marrow in my bones until I give up on it.

And I am working on keeping that from happening. But it is going to involve a lot of the kind of deep psychological work that can’t be put into words at all, let alone written about, and the idea of that scares the shit out of me too.

I am hemmed in by fear on all sides. And I can only be happy if I stay in my tiny little box and don’t set off all those punishingly loud alarms.

It’s that, or learn to withstand the fear somehow.

And man is that going to suck.

More after the break.

---

The other way

The other way I could escape my fear would be to cut it off at the source somehow.

After all, there is no need to cross a river if it’s stopped flowing.

And while I don’t know for sure where all this fear comes from, I have a few potential theories along those lines.

I always have theories.

The simplest one is that it comes from all my unused energy. I know in my soul that I have tons of energy I could be using but it’s all corked up and has no legitimate way of escaping to express itself.

So it ends up backed up and remains in my mind and soul as potential energy, kind of like an excess electrical charge.

And that’s the energy my anxiety uses. In theory, if I could uncork myself and let out all that latent energy, I could starve my anxiety like it’s a fire with no oxygen.

But that’s the usualkind of Catch-22 because in order to release my energies, I would have to uncork that bottle and if I could do that…. you get the idea.

I guess in my loose metaphor, it’s like the backed up pressure inside me is the very thing keeping the cork lodged so tightly in the aperture.

Someone needs to give my soul the Heimlich.

But I know I am slowly breaking down that cork, that blockage, that wall within me. I am letting my real emotions escape confinement and discovering who I really am, id and all, and doing it a little at a time, but constantly, and at an accelerating pace.

My hope is that I will eventually hit a tipping point where the healthy part of me can simply overpower the diseased part of me and send it packing for good.

Right now, I am still torn. Because no matter what I say or do, here or in the real world, the fact is that I have a massive untreated wound at my core, and until I manage to fix that, I will continue to be a cripple in more than just body.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pretty sure my ex-roomie, Angela, was both overcharging me for rent and conspiring with her friend Gary to mess up my bike so I would then pay Gary to fix it.

What a shitbag thing to do, eh?

And I know why she did it : to feed her hoarding. In many ways, hoarding like hers (and she hoarded everything – pets, food, little trinkets that were supposedly gifts for someone – is like a gambling addiction, or like being a shopaholic.

The addition is always going to demand more, more, more. Because one of the ironclad rules of decadence is that every time you use something to fill the gaping hole inside you, the hole gets bigger.

So yeah. Looking back, it’s all quite clear to me now. Makes me wish that I had taken her up on her martyr routine about how she will show me the rent receipt if I did not believe her about how much rent was.

Would have been tres amusant to see her try to backpedal out of that one.

But this was 20 years ago and I was far more mild mannered and inclined to trust people, so I took her at her word and therefore lived in artificial poverty with her and all her critters for a year and change.

Obviously, there is nothing I can do about it now. I don’t even remember her last name and I know she doesn’t live in the apartment we shared any more.

I imagine she is hoarding away somewhere as I type this.

I mean, when I lived with her, she had four cats, three enormous fish tanks full of fishes, a cage of mice (cute but stupid in a very fucked up way), a cage with male rats, a cage with two male hamsters, and my favorite, an enormous aquarium tank that had been turned into a home for the lady rats.

I adore those little lady rats. They were so cute and so industrious and so social. And for the most part, they all got along great.

Every once in a while, you’d hear a few angry squeaks and have to go make sure that nobody was getting mauled.

But for the most part, they lived in a peace and harmony that was almost Smurf-like.

I try to avoid nostalgia, but there are definitely things I miss about those days. Like all the critters, especially, of course, the cats.

I love cats. I grew up in a home with like eight cats. Throughout my lonely childhood I always knew that I could go pet a cat whenever I needed to feel loved.

I miss those kitties.

I also miss how energetic and resourceful I was back then. I ran the local furry community and went to the events I organized, plus I sometimes just went places to hang out with people, or they came to me.

That kind of thing is not part of my life any more. Sigh.

It sucks to get old and sluggish.

Can’t wonder how much more fun my life would have been had I had access to my full resources instead of unknowingly supporting her habit.

These days, just like back then, if something is going to happen, it will be because I make it happen. I am the spark plug. I am the organizer. I am the motive force.

I am the synthesist – the one who brings together disparate parts and unites them into a brand new whole.

I haven’t done that in a long time. The last vestige of it was FRED, our biweekly fan nosh, and that died with the onset of Covid.

And now…. it just seems like too much work.

And I hate that. I don’t want to be some fucking lotus eater who goes through life in a dreamlike state where I am not even really a part of things.

I want to be involved. I want my life to have meaning. I want there to be more to my life than video games and death.

But I will have to get my tired old motor running first.

More after the break.

---

Oh shit, I’m down here again

Woke up feeling super depressed again. Hoping some food n’ hydration will make me feel at least a little better.

I can feel the tears wanting to come out. I keep trying to let them and/or force them out. But I guess I went back to being emotionally constipated again at some point.

I need more emotional fiber in my diet.

Speaking of my diet, the fact that we are out of fruit and there are no cold cans of pop in the fridge does not help. Normally not that big a deal but in my current emotionally vulnerable state it is far too easy to give in to feelings of being neglected and ignored.

Those feelings are never very far from the surface for me to begin with.

It definitely feels like my emotional constipation has something to do with control. Like at some point, in the interests of that semi-mythical state of control, I locked all my tears and dreams and other tender things away in cold storage and now I can’t bring them back any more.

Now, it always takes something external, something really sad that I see or read or whatnot, to get the waterworks flowing.

And I always feel so much better afterwards. Makes me wish I could have a good long cry on a regular basis instead of being bunged up most of the time.

Control is such a fickle beast. Like, if I am so “in control”, why do I feel so bad?

If I was truly in command of myself, I would lay down and bawl my eyes out until I had gotten all the deferred pain and rage and fear out of my system.

Call it spring cleaning for the soul.

Or, if you’ll pardon me for being obscure and disgusting, emotional emesis.

And who knows, maybe I will find a way to free up my feelings again. But until then, I guess all I can do is do this the hard way, via writing.

I guess at least I get my words out of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been having chronic back pain lately.

More so that usual, that is. I’ve been experiencing mild back pain ever since around halfway through my second major growth spurt.

The human body is just not designed to be tall, fat, and sedentary.

At least one of those things has got to go.

And I am sure as fuck not going to get any shorter.

Anyhow, yeah, more back pain than usual. As usual, the worst of it comes when I get up from lying down in bed.

That’s when I get that horrible “creaking” feeling in my back like my back is an old rusty hinge accompanied by a terrible and terrifying pain that makes me groan in agony.

The exact location of the pain varies, but it most often comes from in between my shoulder blades all the way down to my midback.

Then afterwards I am sore and stiff in all the muscles that surround my spine and getting painful “aftershocks” in the form of muscle spasms.

It’s not fun.

But it only happens sporadically. Most of the time I can get out of bed and on to my feet without being waylaid by agony.

But when it happens it’s very bad. Bad enough that I am worried that one of these times the pain will be so bad that it makes me fall.

And I am too old and fat and frail for that. A nasty fall could do me in, or at the very least leave me even less functional than now.

Obviously, I should probably bring this to the attention of a medical professional. And I totally will do so after I have tried a few things to maybe handle it myself.

Like very carefully stretching my back. You know, taking it slow and gentle so as not to end up throwing my back out in the process of trying to fix it.

Massage is also a possibility. Kind of hard for me to reach the area most involved, but I can manage if I just use this big bad brain of mine.

If I had more money, I would get a professional massage. In fact, if I had mucho dinero, I would get a professional massage like twice a day.

From my own personal masseur. A hulking dude with a gentle smile and rippling muscles and big, strong hands.

But I am poorer than most dirt, so I will have to DIY it.

The good news, or at least the less terrible news, is that the pain has not been in the area of my back with the hairline fracture. That fracture is on my L4 vertebra, which is the second one from the bottom of your spine.

In other words, the fracture is much lower on my spine than the pain.

Still, it’s a worrying development. Seems like the universe never runs out of new and inventive ways to fuck me over.

Guess I will just have to get better at handling the unexpected instead of always running to stand still.

In other words, working extremely hard to try to keep things the same.

Fuck that. It’s a losing strategy. I am not saying you have to surrender all control and become one with the chaos or whatever, but you are far better off accepting that you will always be subjected to factors beyond your control that severely limit your ability to control what happens to you, so emotionally investing in controlling outcomes is a fool’s bet and you are better off investing in your ability to cope with whatever.

Shit happens. And it always will. So learn to deal with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

You did what now?

Here’s something to send to a friend who is in an important meeting or at a funeral :

I have to admire their commitment to making something really offensive.

That takes craftmanship!

---

The latest scoop

BROWN ALERT. The following contains explicit poop talk.

So I had another attack of sleep incontinence.

The disgustingly ironic bit is that it happened in two stages. At some point in my night’s sleep, I woke up enough to notice that there was a lot of some kind of liquid on the bed.

Even mostly asleep I had an inkling of where it might have come from. And that’s the same place that guy above glued his balls to.

So I mopped it up with whatever scrappable (and crappable) paper I had lying around and went back to sleep.

And it wasn’t until I woke up in the morning in the clear light of day and my brain fully booted up until it occurred to me that there was probably a solid portion too.

And yup. There it was on my poor beleaguered comforter than has not been washed for like a decade, a whole lot of my poop.

At least, I assume it was mine.

So I cleaned that up with a bunch of Kleenex. Took care of it myself because I would die of shame three times over if I had to make Julian do it.

And he’d probably die twice, poor dear.

As always, I am not going to sound the alarm unless it happens again. Right now, my position is that this seems to be something my body needs to do every once in a while and as it is not accompanied by any other symptoms – no stomach cramping, black tarry feces, feeling faint, or anything else of that nature – I am not going to push the alarm button just yet.

But if it happens again, or I find myself unable to pee, I am going to have to go to the ER or worse, Urgent Care.

Because like I have said before, I was told by an ER doctor that if I experience either incontinence or an inability to pee, I should go straight to the ER.

And yeah. If I found myself unable to pee, I would definitely go straight to the ER because that’s a ticking time bomb and when that bomb goes off my bladder explodes and holy crap would that be BAD.

The whole “only if it happens twice” rule is my own modification to the incontinence half of the equation, based on a) not wanting to go to the ER because the ER sucks donkey taint, but more logically b) the number of times I have had an attack like this and then was totally fine afterwards, thus indicating that a trip to the ER was not necessary.

And if it’s not necessary, I ain’t going. See part a) for why.

The weirdest part of these attacks (warning : intimacy level spike) is that my butthole ends up feeling really, really dilated.

Like something is holding it painfully open. Like retractors or something.

Which makes me wonder, am I pooping myself, or is it just… falling out?

Like, is this a bowel problem, or a sphincter problem?

The anal sphincter is a muscle, after all, and I have muscle issues.

Please, God, don’t make me have to wear adult diapers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am in a not so fun part of my mood cycle right now. I’m cranky and moody and sullen.

I’m in a Gen X state of mind.

It’s always a bad sign when I find myself thinking, “I hate my life!”. It generally means my anger and frustration is building and I am going to need some sort of catharsis soon in order to vent it.

Last thing I need is for it to vent internally.

But it’s on the list.

There’s a few external factors too, though those might be symptomatic of my bad internal state too I suppose.

I am stuck in not one, not two, but three different video games, and it only takes being stuck in one to put a little black cloud over my head.

Stuck on a tough fight in Fell Seal. I even set all my fighters except for one to AI control and I still couldn’t do it.

Turns out not even the computer can beat this encounter.

I know what the problem is, and it’s that the tactical thinking part of my brain refuses to cough and sputter back into life.

Picture me trying to get a very stubborn engine to turn over.

So I am playing rather stupidly. If I want to progress in the story, I am going to have to up my game and start thinking logically and precisely.

Kind of like a chess player. I assume. If only the game had a grid overlay… I do better with grids. Grids give me quantities I can deal with.

Way easier to deal with “this unit can move three spaces” than “this unit can move three meters”, at least for me.

Also stuck in another game, Thronebreaker : The Witcher Tales. I have reached a point where there is a sort of puzzle that I have to solve and I am currently at the, “argh, this is IMPOSSIBLE!” stage even though I have beaten the game in the past so I kind of know for certain that it is, in fact, possible.

Which only makes things more frustrating, because god damn it, I figured it out before, why can’t I figure it out now?

It’s these kinds of things that make me realized I am not nearly as mellow as I think I am. I am, in fact, pretty ornery and testy sometimes.

And that pleases me in some obscure way.

I guess I am just glad to have a self-defense mode. We need anger. Anger is a vital part of our sense of safety. It assures us that we can stick up for ourselves when needed.

Without it, we are helpless to advance our own self-interest.

Take it from one who knows. I have been so out of touch with my id, especially my anger, for so long that I have barely done anything to help myself at all.

I don’t even clean up my room. Or myself.

The third game is Daggerfall, which is the second in the Elder Scrolls series of games and is thus an ancient artifact from the year 1996.

And I am not stuck in it per se. I’ve just been trying different character classes and can’t seem to find the right “fit”.

Today I was trying different magic wielding classes, but they are all limited by the fact that all the useful spells use up like half your starting MP and so you basically have two tries to zap an enemy and then you’re a really shitty warrior.

Presumably it gets better as you level up. But I dunno if I will have that kind of patience!

More after the break.

I don’t want to do anything

Apparently, this depression is worse than I thought. It just took me over half an hour to get out of bed because I was having a very hard time finding the motivation.

I was in one of those very negative mood states where it’s hard for me to remember why I ever do things at all.

The very thought of doing anything so onerous as actually getting out of bed seemed like veritable death march of drudgery.

Obviously, I got there eventually. Managed to get myself up and on my feet and into the kitchen to nuke myself a chicken burger.

Side note : at least I am getting better at having something genuinely tasty and appealing (and full of Vitamin B12, of course) for supper every night.

Stuff that beats the hell out of all that bologna. Ick. I might be off that shit for life.

Anyhow, got my chicken burger together plus a can of carbonated beverage (Diet A&W Root Beer, yum), and that will be my supper for right now.

Because with lack of motivation comes lack of appetite. Sadly. My appetite might bounce back eventually, though. It does that sometimes.

After all. my metabolic needs haven’t slackened, just my desire to fulfill them.

I know what I need : a good cry. Once I am done with my words for the day, I will turn the lights off, get into bed, and attempt it.

I swear I had made myself able to cry when I needed to for a while. I don’t know what the hell happened to make me freeze up inside.

Probably the same thing that caused me to stop remembering dreams.

Anyhow, it’s just depression. It happens to me sometimes. It’s probably a delayed reaction to all the emotional work I have been doing lately in regards to tearing down that wall between me and the world.

That’s the sort of thing that is bound to cause some fallout.

Won’t stop me, though. Won’t even slow me down. I am going to keep grinding away at that fucking thing until it collapses or I do.

Because I have to be free. It’s well beyond any pragmatic concern now. This is something I need all the way down in my soul, and to hell with the consequences.

That god damned wall has to go.

I won’t bother invoking Pink Floyd.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.