Don’t worry, it’s not about some horrible monster that grabs ahold of you and slowly sucks the life out of you till you’re nothing but a hollowed out husk of your former self.

That’s “Master of Crypto” and he haunts cocktail parties.

No, this is a game I just acquired called Cryptmaster and it’s just so unique and fun that I feel the need to talk about it today.

How I acquired it : first, I saw Yahtzee’s review of it.

Well, that seems like it’s right up my twisted little alley, I thought. I mean, it’s a word game with a morbid sense of humor (a la the Cryptkeeper, complete with macabre puns) and RPG elements.

That’s like, three for three boxes ticked. The only way it could be more perfect for me is if it somehow involved gay furry sex.

But being the cautious type, I downloaded the demo first. Played it and loved it.

Then dicked and dithered around for about a week before finally buying it.

And so far it’s been tons o’ fun. The basic idea is that you are one of four legendary heroes who forced an ancient evil down into the depths of the earth and trapped it there many centuries ago.

Well now said ancient evil is back and he’s resurrected said four heroes as his fleshly thralls as he tries to return to the surface and wreak havoc on the living once more.

He is basically the (g)host of the game and he does most of the talking. And he is delightful. Campy, morbid, theatrical, and silly. And evil, but in a non-serious way, at least so far.

He has promised that as we get closer to the surface world, more and more of our memories and experiences and skills from life will come back to us.

So I can only assume we will eventually defeat our charming but malevolent friend.

The actual gameplay consists of the usual exploration and fighting monsters. except that to fight the monsters you type in words corresponding to your various attacks.

And you unlock these attacks by defeating monsters and choosing one letter from their name which will then be applied to whatever words the four of you are working on, Hangman style, until you get the whole word.

It’s wildly original and lots o’ fun. Unfortunately, you can’t unlock an attack prematurely by guessing its word.

I guess that would make things too easy for brainy word nerds like me.

Anyhow, the game is wild and weird and wonderful and another W word!

Meanwhile, I am, of course. still playing Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey and Pathfinder : Kingmaker, and enjoying both.

Odyssey is exactly the sort of open world RPG with tons to do that I enjoy. Plus I can climb and run and jump like a ninja. which I always love in games.

There’s just such a feeling of freedom and power in being able to move around like a particularly well toned monkey.

Which is what you are, more or less.

And Kingmaker is an excellent isometric RPG, just like its sequel, Wrath of the Righteous, was. I would have to say that, unsurprisingly, I think the sequel is better, but surprisingly, the difference is not all that great.

The second game in the series is just more polished and has a higher budget.

Plus, in Kingmaker, I have to do a lot more kingdom management stuff, and for the most part, I find that kind of thing boring.

I like being the Baron and making choices for the kingdom and speaking to those who come petition me for this and that, but the rest, meh.

I am still too proud/controlling to turn kingdom management to “automatic”, though.

More after the break!

---

Hacksaw through gristle
Clean as a whistle
Straight through the visce-
-ra, well maybe this’ll

Lance that old boil
Let out the oil
And maybe foil
That tempest that roils

Deep in my guts
It sucks to be nuts
No ifs, ands, or butts
And no matter what

But…. I’d rather be sad than numb
I’d rather feel pain than succumb
To the death-beyond-death
Where you can see your breath
And eternally never become

---

Well that happened

Sorry, I had an attack of poetry.

More so than usual, that is. Usually, my attacks of poetry come out as prose in this very space. The images start flowing and I fight the poet’s lonely war to put what we cannot directly express into words and thus capture them on the page.

There is a noble futility to it because deep down the poet and the writer and even the songwriter know that what they create will never truly match what they feel inside.

But it can express some of it, and that helps, so that has to be enough.

I’m in a strange, dark mood. Ignited, I think, by Joe and his father dropping by again. Not that they did anything wrong, not at all, that just happened to be the pebble that started this particular avalanche.

And while I certainly don’t feel good, I do feel like I am getting something important done. This shifting, brooding, slightly seething feeling represents my reaching deep inside and “burning” emotions from a deeper and more mysterious place than usual, and that can only be a good thing.

I need to go deeper and deeper into myself, well beyond and below the realms of nice bright cheerful reason and logic, and that is not going to be an easy trip.

I’m going to have to leave one hell of a lot of what I have mistakenly believed to be myself behind in order to truly get to that massive Wound at my core and stand some kind of chance of actually resolving the primary trauma that has warped my entire life.

And means making peace with not “knowing” things, but rather “feeling” them.

I’ve always had powerful intuition. I just need to let it take the lead.

Who knows, maybe it knows the way out of this mess I have made of my life.

I Will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am worried that I might be skirting the edges of pneumonia.

It started this morning. I was having breakfast and hugging fuzzies like I usually do at 8 am when I realized I needed to get up and refill my water glass.

No big deal. I do this like half a dozen times a day.

And everything seemed to go normally until I sat back down again and realized that my heart was pounding, my breathing was labored, and I felt terrible.

I was also really tired. Like something was draining the energy right out of me. And once I was sitting again, I realized that the whole little trip had felt strangely effortful at the time but I had ignored it.

So after pondering it for a while, I canceled today’s Wound Care.

Seems to happen once every six weeks or so.

I was left pondering what the heck was wrong. It definitely felt very bad. My chest had that full, heavy, rigid feeling that I associate with things like pneumonia and other lung ailments, and that of course had my worried.

Then I decided to lay down for a bit. And that made another problem pop up.

For a few weeks now, I have not been able to lay on my back for very long before it becomes hard to breathe.

Good thing I sleep on my front.

But when I lay down this morning, I found that I was becoming out of breath just from lying there doing nothing at all.

That was pretty scary. I contemplated getting Julian to take me to the ER. If I really was coming down with pneumonia, it would be best to get right on it this time.

I didn’t go. But I still might. I got my breathing under control eventually via my breathing exercises but I still feel pretty much exactly like I did this morning.

So I guess my “plan” is to wait and see if things get worse or otherwise change alarmingly. This could just be a summer chest cold and I will get over it within a couple of days or so.

But of course, if things get worse I will get my butt to the ER ASAP. I don’t want a repeat of that time when the triage nurse took one look at my blood oxygen level and instinctively turned the monitor’s screen away from me.

That shouldn’t seem funny to me, I know, but it does. It was at that point that I realized I was maybe in some serious trouble and that it was very good that I had listened to the voice in my head that said, “No. Go to the ER. This isn’t normal.”

Referring to how I was feeling, obviously. If I had not listened to that voice, I would have gone to Denny’s with Le Gang like I had planned and Lord knows what would have become of me after that.

The phrase “pulmonary arrest” comes to mind.

That’s like a heart attack, but for your lungs. Bad news.

An argument could be made that I am in a similar position now. I don’t feel as bad as I did then but I sure as fuck don’t feel good.

These kids of issues always mess with my head as I try to navigate the narrow channel between rational self-interest and hypochondria.

Man does it suck to be crazy.

Oh, and my tablet is refusing to charge at all again. I managed to get it working for a month or two recently but at the moment it is moribund.

Can’t even use it while it’s plugged in. When I try, it just dies and reboots every minute or so, which is worse than not working at all.

So I might have to order that new battery for it after all.

Ain’t life a peach.

More after the break.

---

Feeling like a slab

Right now, I feel like a slab of sick meat.

Just a uniform, vaguely rectangular slab of extremely low grade meat insufficiently refrigerated in the back of a bad restaurant’s walk in freezer.

I really do paint pictures with words, don’t I?

I feel a little bit better than I did earlier. My chest doesn’t feel nearly as solidly congested and sore, but my nose is running and I had a nosebleed earlier.

Those last two things combined led to something too gross to recount.

So maybe whatever has gone wrong with me today is on it way up before heading out. Its last stop will presumably involve it making my scalp sneeze.

Should be quite the experience.

Of course, the thing really making me feel better is that the sun finally went down so it is finally cooling off.

Heat is bad, mmmkay?

For me, summer afternoons are always a dangerous time. I have fans but all they really do is move the hot air around.

And I have a window wide open in my bathroom but there is no airflow through the bedroom in order to move hot air out and cooler air in.

In order to get that, I would have to leave my bedroom door open, and then my computer audio and Julian’s computer audio interfere with one another.

If only we could let the air through but keep the sound in!

I could get headphones for my computer. But I don’t want to. I don’t like wearing headphones. Even cute little earbuds bother me. They always end up getting all sweaty and gross and then I have to take them off anyhow.

And playing my games with the volume turned down would be even worse.

So I dunno. Maybe I should finally get around to getting air conditioning. I might even be able to get the Province to pay for it.

I could definitely make the case that a portable AC unit for this bedroom would greatly reduce the stress on my weak and vulnerable body.

And that’s bound to improve outcomes AND my quality of life.

Works for me!

Now I just have to follow through on this…. hmmmm….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s been on my mind lately.

The question is, would I be better off if I just gave up, let everything fall apart, did nothing I did not feel like doing, and let entropy reign for a while.

It would be the opposite of my “just keep going” programming and the idea would be to let my system truly fully rest so that it could come back fresh and strong.

Other people seem to do this. Admittedly, they’re not usually planning it ahead of time as a conscious choice, they just fall apart now and then.

Which shows that they are smarter than I am, at least. They “know”, on a deep level, that they need these periods of rest and renewal to do “self care” and look after their sanity and their spiritual health now and then.

And yes. I am primarily talking about women. We men are not that wise.

Take my own example. I just keep limping along and keeping everything exactly the same because deep down, I am convinced that if I lay down,. I will never get up again.

And I can see why I feel that way. To truly lay my burdens down would mean entering into brand new territory for me and I have no idea what lies in wait for me there.

And replacing the unknown with the worst case scenario in our minds is a very human thing to do.

I don’t know what’s there. Ergo what’s there is the most horrible thing I can imagine. Even that is preferable than not knowing at all.

Here be dragons, and all that.

And to let it all go would be to surrender this life-pattern of mine on the hopes of coming up with something way better once I have my rest and renewal.

That is technically asking me to take a lot on faith. But I don’t really see it that way. The idea that I need to reset and renew seems sensible and logical to me.

And honestly, what do I have to lose? My oh so precious worthless life? My pathetic world of video games and naps and a total lack of worth or meaning? This soulless existence clinging to life despite the staggering weight of my own failure to enter the adult world at all despite being 51 fucking years old?

Gee, wouldn’t that be a tragedy.

And who knows, maybe after a fresh reboot I will be a hell of a lot saner and stronger and smarter. Maybe that invisible wall I hide behind will be a lot thinner and more negotiable. Maybe I will be able to pass through the fires of eternity so that I might have all that is impure and unworthy of me cleansed from my soul. Maybe, at long last, I will finally learn not just to survive but to cope.

This all makes perfect sense to me. But logic alone won’t get me anywhere. All it can do is lead me in circles so big that I forget I’ve already seen this tree or that rock a million times before. Real progress will come from turning to face the flames.

Like I said before, it will take voluntarily choosing to do something that I know will be scary and/or painful and/or hard when I could go on without doing so forever.

In doing so, I would be placing value on my own self-actualization beyond the shallow, callow, sallow logic of my depression’s infinite apologists.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the things we do to actualize ourselves rarely if ever make logical and pragmatic sense. It will always be safer and easier to languish in the doldrums while we slowly rot away on the inside. And the things we need to do in order to fight that decay will always seem “crazy” to our lazy, degenerate selves.

But if we are wise, we do them anyway, and thus enable our own spiritual growth.

More after the break.

---

Holy crap, Joe!

So I wander out to the kitchen to make supper and I hear someone out on out little balcony so I shout out a greeting, when who should come out but Joe!

I know why he’s here. We’ve been told they are going to be working on our balconies soon-ishly, and therefore we need to get all our stuff off of ours.

And that’s a lot of stuff. We’ve basically been using it as a supplemental storage area. All that was required was to throw some tarps over the stuff to protect it from the rain.

Not that the balcony gets a lot of rain, The wind has to be blowing from a very specific direction in order for any rain to make it to the balcony. Otherwise, the balcony of the apartment above us is our stuff’s umbrella.

Anyhow, holy shit, there I was, laying eyes on Joe for the first time in six months! Unexpectedly! What a happy surprise.

Then who should walk in from the front door but Joe’s dad, Joe Senior.

And that was…. a problem.

Because, as is my wont during the hot summer months, I was in a style of dress I affectionately think of as “Winnie the Pooh mode”.

See, that’s how you know he’s a stuffed animal, otherwise you could see everything.

So there I was naked between shirt and socks with Joe Senior out there on the balcony and me spending a long time standing with the fridge door open, shielding me.

It was no big deal, really. I slipped back into my room without them even noticing as they were busy with the stuff on the balcony.

Still, I want to know something : Did you know this was going to happen tonight, Julian? Because if so, you really should have told me.

I would have put some pants on for my sortie to the kitchen and saved myself an admittedly fair trivial amount of stress.

But hey, at least I got to see Joe!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s not easy.

I still don’t see a way to overcome that enormous mass of guilt and regret and bad social programming that surround the topic of my life and how it’s turned out.

Again and again, I return to the idea that if I wasn’t so “stable”, I might have fallen apart a long time ago and then actually gotten some proper help way back when I was young and it was not too late for me to get my life moving once I recovered.

But no, I am way too good for my own good at clinging like a barnacle to my dirty little grotto here and making sure absolutely nothing changes.

The games I’m playing change, but the wasting of my time on Earth remains the same.

And of course, I don’t attract nurturing and care because when I am around others, I act as if everything is peachy keen OK.

Even around my GP, for fuck’s sake.

And the truly sick part is that doing that makes me feel like everything is OK too. Kinda.

Dozens of times in my life, someone has asked me how I am or how I am doing and I want to be honest with them and tell them the truth but in that moment, every problem I have suddenly becomes too trivial to mention and I instead tell them I am fine.

That’s what they want to hear, anyhow. Nobody wants me to tell them the truth and dump all my problems and issues and bad bad programming on them.

I have at least finally gotten to the point where when my therapist Doctor Costin asks me how I am at the beginning of a session, I say I am “surviving”.

That’s still technically a positive answer but one that conveys a little taste of my unhappy and difficult life. Makes me at least a little vulnerable.

Mind you, this is my therapist we’re talking about here. In theory, he should be the person I am completely candid and unguarded with.

But the best I can do is not be cheerful with him, and to do my best to tell him about whatever “stuff” is going through my head that day, and try to get some relief that way.

And it does help. Having someone to talk to like that, where I am not worried about the consequences of what I say to them, is very valuable to me.

But I can’t help but wonder if I would do better with a younger, more energetic and ambitious therapist who was determined to get to the heart of my problems and who pushed me and pressed and asked all the right questions to get my emotions flowing.

I mean, clearly, what I am doing now ain’t working. I get relief in the form of emotional release from Doctor Costin but I am not getting any better via him either.

To be honest, I think I have him cowed. I have, unwittingly, convinced him that all he can do is listen to me go on and on because if he tries to get me to actually do stuff, I more or less “bite his head off” with my advanced communication skills.

And I don’t blame him for not being able to handle that kind of thing in me. As patients go, I am beyond hard to deal with, and I doubt many therapists would have the combination of toughness, intellect, and persistence to get through to me and actually make me see things in a new light.

And the man’s in his seventies. He doesn’t stand a chance. Nobody does.

And that, in turn, makes me realize just how alone I am in the world. How alone I have always been. It’s lonely as hell at the top of the intellectual food chain. Knowing that nobody out there can “handle” even a tenth of the real me makes me feel lonely and abandoned and helpless before my problems.

I can’t face my demons alone. But there’s nobody in this world who would be able to survive the radioactive atmosphere inside my mind long enough to help me.

So I will always be fighting alone. I have trouble even imagining what it would be like to have someone in my life who could truly join me in the fight.

I have my friends, and I adore them and treasure them and know that I would be a hell of a lot more crazy without them in my life.

But still, I fight my war all alone.

It’s all I can ever do.

More after the break.

---

Alone in a crowd

Of course, the main reason I fight alone is because I don’t know how to let people into my inner world. That invisible wall of mine keeps everyone out and I have grave doubts about my ability to change that,

When you have had a mental defense up for your entire life, including some of your formative pre-school years, it arguably becomes an integral part of you that you can no more lower than you can open up your skin.

But that’s just plain unacceptable. I know in my soul that the warmth and acceptance and cherishing and love that I have craved for my entire life is out there beyond my wall and I will only get to have it if I learn to let it in.

That would require negotiating with that ancient part of me that was formed while I was being raped and that is quite sure it’s the only thing keeping me “safe” all these years.

Like I have said before, I don’t know how to convince it that everything is fine now and it can finally rest and relax and let my emotions flow clearly and naturally instead of forcing me to try to force myself into one mould or another.

I cannot make myself into someone I am not by sheer force of will.

It can’t happen. People don’t work like that. All I am doing is harming myself by trying to cram myself into absurdly irrational pre-ordained spaces which were conceived of when I was just a child and which therefore are far, far too small and limiting for me.

You have to know who you are before you can become who you want to be.

Until then, I will try letting it all hang out and thereby get some idea of who I really am when I am not trying to make myself into someone else.

The real me is a pretty amazing guy, all things considered.

I should get to know him better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It might be more than I can put into words.

I mean, how do you put the pain of being raped when you were 4 years old into words 47 years later? It’s the defining event of my life but despite the millions of words I have written in this space, I can’t possibly do it justice.

But I have to keep trying. Especially now that I know just how big the cost of keeping it suppressed has been. It feels like at least a third of me and all I could be are locked away with all that silent suffering, and I want that part of me back.

No wonder I have been an emotional cripple for so long. Able to make it through the day without too much pain and suffering, and that’s it. Helpless to help myself, doomed to at best tread water till the day I finally give up and drown in a pool of unshed tears.

How could nobody have noticed the drastic change in who I was and how I acted back then? Because I know I was but a ghost of my former self. I went from being a happy, precocious little charmer to being shy and scared and timid and hesitant.

The experience shattered me and nobody even noticed. Sigh.

I guess they didn’t want to know. They wanted to keep believing I was okay without ever checking to make sure I was because the real goal was to forget I was even there.

And I tried not to be. But try as I might, I just kept on existing.

How thoughtless and inconsiderate of me. I hadn’t even been invited into this world in the first place. I just barged into my family’s lives and then dared to have needs that seriously inconvenienced all around me.

And years later I was still there. Appalling.

No wonder I am plagued by the idea that everyone would be better off without me. That’s the exact message I got all through my childhood. It was the unwritten rule of my entire existence and it continued to crush me to this very day.

I can tell myself how unfair that was, and how I was a great kid who deserved so ,much better than what I got, and so forth and so on, and I can even make myself believe it for a little while.

But my unwelcome nature is bred into every joint and sinew of my existence. It was a message I got from birth and that’s not the kind of thing you can just shrug off.

Especially when I have done so little with myself. I have very little evidence to offer to prove that I actually do deserve to be alive and to take up space.

Just all that “potential” that I’ve never gotten to use.

I could do amazing things if I just had a mentor who could provide the kind of structure and goals I need to keep me motivated.

I’m too weak to create that for myself. On my own, I am limp and diffuse and vacillating and bereft of even the most basic level of motive force.

Abd that’s no accident. I think a major part of my retreat from reality has been to let reality become all foggy and misty and blurry in order to hide my pain from myself so I can keep going.

I would be a hell of a lot healthier if I wasn’t so good at suppressing things.

But I suppose that’s true for everybody.

Conversely to my “blurring”, I think the main thing keeping me from “getting my shit together” is that if I did so, I would have to deal with all that pain inside me, which would suddenly become all too real.

That’s why I have to take things so damned slow. If I go any faster, I will have to deal with all that pain.

The best that I can do is feel it a little at a time, all the time.

And that’s taking forever.

And I haven’t that much longer to live.

Guess I’ll just die, then.

More after the break.

---

Fruvous in love

I’ve tried to imagine what that would be like.

As you know, I’ve never been. Everything I know about romantic love, I learned from TV.

I can imagine what early infatuation is like, at least. That, I have experienced a little, in furry virtual sense.

Most recently with Luke. But like always, I moved far too slow, and now someone else has his love, and I never see him any more.

I need to either become more forward when it comes to romance, or at least fall for someone who is.

Anyhow. Me in love.

It’s both easy to imagine and not. I can fantasize about being really into someone whom I think is wonderful and sexy and smart and all the things I want in a man. I can imagine showering him with affection in my effusive way and making sure he knows how much I love and treasure and desire him. I can imagine talking into the wee hours of the morning with such a man.

But that’s about where it stops. Because sooner or later, the infatuation fades, and reality returns, and…. they’re still there.

And I need my alone time. I need a lot of it, actually. I’m an introvert, after all, albeit one with some extroverted tendencies.

Well, nobody is ever all one thing, am I right?

So in a way, I can imagine myself dating someone a couple of times a week, but I have no idea where it would go from there.

I know I will want to get closer to him. But that doesn’t mean I can.

I know from self-exploration that I have some extremely heavy duty psychological defenses that nobody knows about because they’ve never been activated.

And that’s because I have never gotten all that close with anyone.

But I can easily see getting some poor dude caught up in my emotional volatility and ending up hurting him by, essentially, being a crazy bitch.

And I would hate that. I hate people like that. Have some restraint.

And my God, what if they blamed themselves?

That’s too horrifying to contemplate. I wish I hadn’t thought of it.

I guess I won’t know what a Fruvous in love is really like until it happens.

And God knows how that would ever come about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Haven’t talked about my smooth façade lately. So let’s do it.

What sparked this was a YouTube comment I left recently where, in my usual rambling (but entertaining) manner, I stumbled into talking about how I have all these problems and life has totally passed me by because of them, and yet, I never let my illness show when I am around others.

Around other people, I snap on my smooth façade , and for the most part, I seem calm, relaxed, confident, friendly, and affable.

And that makes sense around strangers. They don’t need to know how fucked up on the inside I am. But I am this way around my close friends too.

And they know better than anyone else in this dimension how weak and confused and hapless I am. So it’s not like I have them fooled.

Now as I always need to say when I discuss this topic, I am not just pretending to be a calmer and more put together version of myself, I actually feel that way.

I guess I got traumatized at too early an age for me to have developed a true “mask” so I learned to actually change who I am instead.

I’m so…. metamorphic.

It’s far from bulletproof. For example, it didn’t keep me from having a low grade panic attack (sometimes amping all the way up to full blown freakout) for the entire time I was in Kwantlen and VFS.

But it’s still there. I am sure I didn’t seem like I was freaking out when I was at those schools, although I imagine the more empathic people figured it out.

The question, as always, is why this façade exists and why I can’t imagine actually letting it drop and being “the real me” around other people at all.

I guess we all have a social mask we use to protect ourselves when dealing with others. It’s a basic part of being human. No reason I would be any different, I suppose.

Even though I often am.

Where the bullet really hit the bone is with my therapist, Doctor Costin. He is the one person in the world I should be able to drop the façade with and yet, I can only manage to partially disable it even with him.

The “real me” is that frightened critter crouching behind my invisible wall and he works very hard to make sure nobody ever sees him and how truly awful he is.

Well, how awful he thinks that he is, anyhow.

But that’s not the full picture of the “real me” at all. Not by a longshot. There is also that tremendous sea of untapped anger in me that just wants to scream bloody murder at the world for all the pain I have inside me.

And that’s another thing I don’t want to show the world, even though it would do me a hell of a lot of good to vent it all.

TO be honest, I’m afraid of what I might do if I let that monster out of its cage. I know that it’s my fault that it’s grown so huge and psychotic and powerful – I am the one who has suppressed nearly all of my anger all these years even though I arguably had a lot to be angry about.

But I feel like if I give in to that anger, I will lose my god damned mind. And I might not ever get it back.

Maybe that’s just an illusion that my depression uses to scare me aware from things that might threaten its control over me, but even so, I still have ot deal with it.

It would be nice if I could tap into that rage and turn it into the motivation to get my big fat butt out of this big fat rut and make some god damned changes in my life.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

---

I freaking love absolutely everything about this.

I love the music, the art style, the voice acting, the script, the fact that it’s cyber-noir, and even more than that, it’s furry!

I want more!

---

I hate time

Sort of. It’s complicated.

I’ve fallen back into the habit of feeling this stab of panic and shame every time I realize how much time has passed without me doing anything productive.

This is clearly one of the ways my depression beats up on me. It would be one thing if that feeling goaded me into frantic action like I was my go-getter of a sister Catherine.

But I ain’t like that. The goading just makes me retreat into myself even further, and I supposed in the end, that’s the point.

My depression’s real agenda is to keep me “safe” by keeping me in this tiny little coffin of a life, far away from the cold hard world that deep down I am sure I can’t handle.

Dunno why I feel that way. Taken at face value, there is nothing about an average “normal” life that I can’t do. I could work a job, pay bills, do dishes and laundry (or hire someone to do them), pay my rent on time, the works.

And yet, when I imagine going out to face that big old world out there, I shrivel up inside with existential terror and I can’t go forward at all.

Leaving me stuck where I am. Which is, again, the point.

At some point in my recovery, I am going to have to make a (metaphorical blood sacrifice. I am going to have to give up a little part of myself and I am going to have to do it willingly and deliberately even though I know it will really, really hurt.

Above all, I am going to have to walk through the fires of my fears and show them that they cannot keep me penned in any more.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Things other than play video games, eat, and blog, that is.

It’s insane (literally) how hard it is for me to expand my world even one teeny tiny bit.

Even just looking for work on FlexJobs feels like it’s beyond me at the moment, and that doesn’t even increase my social exposure at all.

That comes when I actually apply for something. Which I will totally do once I find something I am actually qualified to do.

So far, no comedy writer jobs on there.

Anyhow, it leaves me wondering why it is so hard for me to branch out. Where does this incredible fear that rises within me like a sirocco and leaves me feeling overwhelmed and lost when all I am doing is trying to solve my problems come from?

Several places, I think.

For one, there’s that huge part of me that is walled off and disconnected and that leaves me a lot less spiritual energy to do things than I should have at my disposal.

I think a lot of the feeling of being overwhelmed comes from. Whenever I try to get myself activated and energized to actually do something with myself, I hit that invisible wall I put up between me and the world when I was being raped at the age of 4, and the whole process grinds to a halt with an almost audible groaning sound.

Jesus, does that god damned wall have to go. But I know it’s not as easy as shouting, “Tear down the wall!” like Pink Floyd said.

After all, that wall has been there since I was 4 years old. I have no idea how to live without it. I don’t know what real life is like at all.

As I was telling Doctor Costin during Therapy Thursday today, the really amazing thing is that even just staying within the four filthy walls of this bedroom is not enough isolation for me.

Within that cage is another cage that cuts me off from my environment and my world and that renders me too numb to really feel the love people have for me.

Part of me refuses to believe that love is there. It’s scared to believe in it. As if the moment I believe that it’s really really there, it will disappear, leaving nothing but the sound of my inner demons laughing at me for being a sucker.

Those guys are such jerks.

And within that inner cage are, I imagine, even more cages, all the way down. After all, every retreat from reality creates a new, even smaller cage for you to retreat into, and then that cage becomes the next layer of reality you withdraw from, and so on and so on until you’re just a tiny little shred of humanity inside thousands of layers of cage.

This is what happens when your number one go-to move to deal with life is to pull your head and legs in like a turtle and withdraw still further from reality.

As coping mechanisms go, this is wildly maladaptive. Withdrawing into yourself and turning your back on the real world is downright toxic and if I could, I would simply disable my ability to do so in order to force myself to learn to cope with things.

But maybe all that would do is make me finally go completely catatonic as I give up on reality entirely and just wait to die.

That’s the fate I am constantly dodging. My escapism has no limiting factor except my will keeping it at bay on an active basis.

Part of me wants to flee from life entirely.

And that part of me is always there…. waiting.

More after the break.

---

I wonder how far we are from young hipsters calling each other on land lines just because it makes communication feel more “authentic”.

---

About that money

You remember. The money that mysteriously vanished from my Joker prepaid credit card when a $7.60 transaction made my balance go down $72?

Yeah, it’s still not back.

And I called their toll free number again just to make absolutely sure that there was no way to get to talk to a person or dispute a charge that way.

And yup. It’s impossible. You can select “Dispute a charge” from the main phone menu, but it just dumps you right back to the main menu.

Also, to nitpick a bit, some of the menus have only one option, make them redundant. But that’s probably the sort of thing that only bug the crap out of me.

Anyhow, the phone was a bust so I had no choice but to go to the website and fill out a long and irritating form then email it to them as an attachment.

The email address bounced it back to me.

I might have typed it in wrong, but regardless, this is all seeming super shady.

Not that I can do anything about it right now. They still have my remaining ~$200 in their system and there’s no way to get it back out except by spending it.

And adding to the mysteriousness is that their competition, those PowerPay cards I used to get, just mysteriously vanished one day.

So I don’t really have a choice about using them. When deposit day rolls around in a bit less than two weeks, I will probably buy another one.

I guess I could try that Post Office one again, assuming I can unfuck my account with them. Or hell, maybe finally switch banks to one that offers Visa Debit and be done with the whole god damned issue.

I just want to be able to buy stuff online with the money in my bank account. That doesn’t sound like an unreasonable thing to want, does it?

I wonder if I could connect my bank account with PayPal. Assuming PayPal is still a thing and online retailers still accept it.

Anyhow, money is still gone and shit’s shady as hell. I want my $72 back.

Why is everything after my god damned money lately?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The microphone looks like ass but otherwise, pretty cool.

Pretty sure that one of the reasons I rarely got along with my fellow students, both as a child and as an adult, is that I give off a coldly alien vibe.

I’m weird. That’s what I am saying. And not just in a cute, wacky, nerdy way. Oh no.

I’m weird in a way that can chill people to the bone and leave them very confused by me because I don’t give them the signals they don’t even know they need.

It’s all very…. unarticulated.

It’s especially bizarre with me because on the surface, I am friendly, affable, easygoing, and sweet. My surface vibe is very personable and charming.

But underneath, I am cold as stone, and that dissonance makes most people just shake their head at me and decide I am too weird to deal with.

So they don’t. They pull back from me entirely and that’s where they are going to stay because approaching me is too weird and alienating and it’s not like I get in their face and demand they pay attention to me.

How could I? Until recently I did not even know why they pulled back from me and never dealt with me again.

Now I know. And that means I can try to do something about it.

But I am not sure what. Maybe one of those “social skills for aspies” courses would do me some good. Might teach me the extremely basic social skills everybody else learned in kindergarten but I did not.

Because I never went to kindergarten. It was determined that I didn’t “need” it.

And I didn’t need it intellectually. I was already way way ahead of my age when it came to book smarts.

But I sure could have used those social skills.

I suppose the real solution for my chilly vibe would be to abandon my position behind my invisible wall and actually be fully emotionally present for people.

I’m working on it.

At least I can get on well with my fellow nerds. A lot of them are pretty chilly too and luckily our individual windchill factors tend to cancel each other when we’re together.

Basically, we’re not even looking for the signals we’re not putting out. Most of us have no idea they even exist. Ours is a fundamentally intellectual realm and that’s the level at which we can relate to one another.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have emotions. It just means that our big brains are in the driver’s seat more times that not and we are more likely to follow our fascination than our emotional intuition.

Me, I’m doubly weird. A chilly intellectual with powerful empathy.

Doctor Hannibal Lecter, in other words.

Nerdsville aside, I would like to learn to get along better with “mundane” people and maybe even learn some of the things that they “know” and I do not.

I put quotes around “know” because this is clearly a radically different kind of knowledge from those “book smarts” I mentioned earlier.

This is the type of thing people know deep in their bones, in their guts. Things they know on such a deep level that it’s very hard for them to imagine what it is like to not know them and still have to navigate this crazy world of ours.

This guy gets it.

I like to think that if I had another chance to be around “normal” people, I would be able to control my anxiety enough to kind of soak up the vibe and open my mind to a new kind of understanding of the world.

That might only be possible with Ativan at first. But it’s doable.

And who knows, maybe then I could finally come in from the cold.

Because I am not just cold to others. I’m cold in here too. My retreat into icy intellectualism when I was raped came at a very heavy cost.

And I want my money back.

More after the break

---

The life of a spaz

I am so goddamned sick of spazzing out all the god damned time.

When I was getting my supper (baked potato and hot dogs!), I slipped while getting something out of the fridge, and reached out to grab the fridge door to steady myself.

Unfortunately, my hand landed on the little plastic compartment where we keep all out leftover packets of ketchup, plum sauce, soy sauce, and so on.

There’s got to be like 60-100 packets in there. It’s jam packed.

And, as I learned to my great dismay, it’s not actually attached to the fridge at all. I thought it was part of the fridge like the two crisper drawers, but nope.

So it came out of the fridge door and spilled its contents all over the floor.

And the best part is that I can’t clean that mess up myself. If I try to bend down that far, I will get super dizzy due to lack of oxygen to the brain because of how bad the circulation in the back of my legs is, or my legs will seize up and I will end up falling that way, or possibly both.

So I had no choice but to call Julian and warn him about what he will see when he comes home tonight.

It will be up to him to clean up my mess, and that sucks. I hate it. I want to be able to do things for myself.

Being dependent on others like I am now is quite alien to me. Nobody looked after me like that when I was a kid, at least that I remember.

Even before I was abandoned to do my own laundry and buy my own clothes, I got very little personal attention from anybody.

I got fed because Mom cooked meals for everybody. I had clean clothes because Mom did the laundry for everybody.

So I was looked after in a sort of institutional way.

And eventually even that ended. I had to buy my own clothes and do my own laundry and cook 2/3 of my own meals.

So you can see how I have been doing things for myself for a long time.

And I really miss that. I hate needing to get Julian to do things for me. It makes me feel guilty for imposing on him and being a burden on him.

Maybe I should try getting a wheelchair. Or crutches.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I know that it starts with anger.

I have spent decade upon decade taking out my frustrations on myself. They say that depression is anger turned inwards, and that’s certain true for me. I am my own tormentor and if I am ever to stop bullying and neglecting myself, I am going to have to learn to do something out with those angry emotions of mine.

And that’s a daunting prospect because of all the latent anger boiling just below the surface like molten lava that’s just waiting to burst out of the ground and form a caldera.

There’s so much of it and it wants to lash out at the world so bad and I don’t yet have the internal mechanisms necessary to redirect that into something less harmful.

I’m working on it. I am at least completely open to the idea that these these potent latent id energies can be turned into something positive, like happiness and optimism.

But making that transition is hard. Right now I have two modes : passive and numb, or angry and bitter. And neither of those are super helpful.

Although at least being angry and bitter helps vent those emotions some.

It’s a step in the right direction but not a solution unto itself.

And as attractive as the thought of turning rage into sunshine might be, I am still going to need to deal with it as anger before any of that can happen.

And that feels hopeless. But I know it’s not. I know, deep in my bones, that there is a way for me to find a way to get it all out of my system without violating my very high ethical standards for myself.

Maybe I should sign up for a really violent PVP battle arena game so I can vent my rage on total strangers in a socially acceptable fashion.

After all, it’s PVP. We’re all trying to murder one another. It’s cool.

I’ve never really been into that kind of thing before, largely because I play video games to escape my social anxiety, not to trigger it.

And multiplayer games trigger the hell out of it, sad to say.

Another possibility : picking some poor unsuspecting subReddit and using it as my personal stomping grounds where I give myself permission to be a total a-hole there.

Let’s see how long it takes for my sarcastic ass to get banned, shall we?

I suppose I could live with that as long as I stay within the broad moral framework of public discourse. So no personal attacks, no sadism, no abuse.

Just me expressing my unique thoughts and opinions in an honest way and then dealing with the inevitable fallout.

Knowing my luck, though, people would just ignore me like they ignore everything else that their minds can’t handle.

Being a visionary is hard.

---

Not sure if it’s just the heat or maybe something else, but I have been very tired and sleepy today. Barely made it out of bed to eat n’ write to you lovely folks.

I am a little worried it might be an attack of “something else” because I have noticed that there is little “catch” every time I go from exhaling to inhaling, and even worse, I feel a kind of bubbling feeling in my lungs at the same time.

And that’s pneumonia, folks. Or something a lot like it.

Plus my muscles are sore in weird, random places. And I have that “heavy” feeling and it’s getting hard to concentrate.

So you can bet your bippy that I’ll be keeping an eye on that and getting my overstuffed butt to the ER or the UC if things get worse.

I don’t want to make the triage nurse need to call in another nurse to verify that she really was seeing the blood oxygen reading she was seeing like I did before, many years ago now, when I landed in the hospital with pneumonia.

My blood sugar and blood pressure are normal now. My immune system should be able to handle this kind of thing.

If I end up with pneumonia again, I’m going to have to speak with the manager.

More after the break.

---

Doing a little better

The gunk in my lungs seems to be gone. Which is a relief. And I do not have any weird random muscle aches like I had earlier today.

But I am still quite tired.

And possibly depressed. I have been having a hard time getting out of bed lately, which is a classic sign of depression. A big part of me just wants to lay there and play games on my tablet in between naps.

But I am not going to let things fall apart like that. I’ve done far too much of that in my life. I’m going to keep getting out of bed to sit at Mister Computer till I get over this.

Besides, there’s no way I am going to blog from the tablet. Or chat with my fuzzy friends. Typing on a tablet sucks.

It distresses me that things have fallen this far, though. But I think it’s part and parcel with the ways I have been improving my mental health lately.

I have been waking up inside and trying to reach out into the world and find energy, and that means not living life on automatic mode any more, and that means it now takes a certain amount of energy and motivation to get out of bed.

Sad when what used to be the bare minimum now takes effort. But it is all worth it if it helps me get to a saner, stronger, happier state of mind.

Like I keep saying. odds are that in order to make it to sanity I am going to have to get a lot closer to being crazy. A lot of the bad machinery keeping me trapped and miserable and unable to deal with life was put in specifically to keep things stable.

Pathetic. But stable.

And now my mind has to learn to walk without crutches, and that’s always going to be rather wobbly at first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.