I seem to be adjusting to my new orthopedic shoes fairly well. And they seem to be adjusting to me as well.

See, there’s a layer that is deliberately a bit squishy so that the shoes can conform to my feet as I wear them.

I still have no idea why I was so drastically uncomfortable that first day. It seems to have been a case of them being WAY too tight, but for the life of me I don’t know how “Jackie” managed to do them up that tight because I’m tugging on the Velcro straps pretty hard when I put them on (I’ve always preferred my shoes to be snug) and I am still not getting them that tight.

In fact, they feel slightly floppier than I would prefer, but that’s probably for the best as I want to make sure the circulation in my feet is not compromised.

Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to get the wound on my feet to heal.

One can only hope.

I had Wound Care this morning. It went well. Linda the Wound Clinician was there to sand down my foot callouses once more.

So I have that very faint burning sensation in my tootsies right now.

Also did the community shower thing today. Albert is back from vacation and that’s a relief because I really like him.

He does most of the talking, and I am fine with that. I am happy just to listen. I don’t always have to contribute to the conversation, especially with regular folk like Albert.

When I am with my nerdy friends it’s a different matter. There, I have to contribute because of the sheer joy I get from having people who can understand me in my life.

I did not have a lot of that growing up.

It’s one of the sad truths about being smart.

Let’s start with the top level one : being smart means living in a world run by and for idiots. Children. You are a giant among pygmies.

This doesn’t really bother me. I suppose I think that the world would be a much better place if I ran everything but I’m not about to become a supervillain over it.

I think my overall humanism and general (relative) humility keeps me from becoming a bitter misanthrope about the whole thing. I understand people for who and what they are and I love them all the more for their flaws and frailties and imperfections, so the fact that I see what are, to me, obvious solutions to the big problems does not bother me very much.

If I feel strongly about it, I can use my powerful voice to broadcast my solutions and try to maybe influence people to see things my way.

That’s how thing actually work in the real world. I am lucky in that my genius happens to encompass things like communication and oratory skills so there is a more than average chance of actually getting at least a few people to listen.

But most of my fellow genii don’t have that luxury, so they are left being Cassandra, knowing what should be done but unable to make anyone listen to them.

On a more personal level, as patient readers know, my “punishment” for finishing way, way ahead of my fellow students was nothing. I would have loved to have been given extra work to do because it would have kept me from being bored out of my mind.

Instead, I had to just sit there and zone out because I wasn’t allowed to just read.

And like the video says, I couldn’t relate to my fellow students because I was parsecs ahead of them intellectually. Their world and their activities had little appeal to me. They cared about actions figures and coloring. I cared about science and reading.

I doubt I would have put it this way at the time, but they were behaving like children.

And I was not. I was this creepy kid who was eerily self-possessed and calm and talked like an adult trapped in a child’s body and who must have seemed like an alien child.

What I really needed was a gifted kids’ program, but that was not in the cards.

More after the break.

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Why so cold?

I think I need a thermometer for my room.

It’s the only way I will be able to definitely determine whether I am cold due to it being actually literally physically cold in here or due to something askew with my health.

Admittedly, the former is more likely. I have this enormous lovely window directly behind my computer desk and it is not thermally sealed because people just don’t do that kind of thing around here and thus cold air is constantly leaking in.

It’s geometrically worse when the wind is blowing hair and Bernoulli-effect-ing the warm air right the fuck out of here.

Luckily, you don’t get strong winds in winter around here.

Or at least we haven’t yet. Who knows what the future holds? We could lose our precious microclimate any day now.

In which case I’m going to brick up the fucking windows until Spring, because if I am this cold in January now, I would not survive the winter in the rest of Canada.

As is, there appears to be little I can do to address the problem. Even if I could buy thermal caulking or even just thermal tape around here, I am in no shape to be able to apply it around all the window panes.

And I just verified that I have my thermostat turned all the way up. Le sigh.

I could get a space heater. That might be a good use of that $200 still sitting on my Amazon.ca account. I am sure my sisters would like to know their gifts are helping to keep me warm in the winter.

Admittedly, in that completely irrational layer of the male mind that makes us do dumb shit, part of me feels like getting a space heater means that the coldness wins.

Look, I said it was irrational, didn’t I?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One of the things that came up during my Therapy Thursday today was my knowing that emotions do end.

Even the really bad ones.

The image I used was of swimming to the other side of an emotion. It’s ridiculously easy to fall into the trap of having a primitive “stop the presses” reaction to bad emotions coming our way, and when times are grim and survival is on the line, the ability to sideline those emotions and deal with them later so you can handle things is vital.

Indeed, civilization would be impossible without it.

The trick is with the “deal with them later” part. Because very often, we don’t. We just leave them on pause because we naively think we can avoid feeling the bad feelings forever without consequences.

Or, more likely, we don’t think about it at all. We pause the emotion and consider the problem to be solved merely because we made it disappear.

And that would be fine if it only happened once in a very great while. But of course we shortsightedly make it a near universal response to all unpleasant or inconvenient or otherwise unwanted emotions.

Like a baby, we think that if we can’t feel it any more, it must be gone forever.

But of course it isn’t. It’s still there in our minds, paused, waiting to be completed. And the personal energy and mental bandwidth cost of keeping all those emotions on pause grows and grows as more emotions are added to it over time.

Eventually the whole system collapses under its own weight and boom, you have depression and/or anxiety now.

And that’s where I am, and why I write for this blog every day. When I sit down to write, I am trying my best to take some of those paused emotions and take them off pause so I can finish feeling them and thus unburden myself.

And to do that, I’ve had to rid myself of the childish worry that a bad emotion will last forever just because we can’t see the other side of it.

I am in the grips of this delusion as I type these very words. I am scared that if I open the door to certain emotions, especially anger, the sheer power and volume of the resultant emotional eruption will destroy my mind and turn me into some kind of raving lunatic hellbent on destruction.

Because it feels that way. I can feel all that latent rage in me and it frightens me. Intellectually I know that I have to find an outlet for it all but emotionally I am so scared of what might happen that it remains unfelt and not dealt with.

A lot of badness, both active and passive, happened to me in my early life. Mostly it’s the pain of total isolation and unmet human social needs that weighs on me. I have decades of that shit built up in my mind and nowhere for it to go.

I’ve spent so many years ignoring that pain and pretending everything is okay just because I could make it through my painfully minimal day that it, too, scares me with what might happen if I let it loose.

Were I a more emotionally muscular fellow, I might be able to handle dealing with these potent feelings a little at a time.

I suppose that’s what I am doing with this blog, come to think of it. Dealing with my latent emotions 1K words at a time.

But I know that I need something bigger. Something that will help me give birth to really big emotions and therefore allow me to deal with all these latent emotions all at once or at least in larger quantities.

Because I want to be clean of them, and the only cure for emotions is to feel them.

More after the break.

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Oh yeah, the apocalypse

Los Angeles is burning and it’s getting me down.

This is the first truly major international city to face the wrath of global warming, at least on this side of the world, and furthermore there’s a heck of a lot of rich people’s homes going up in flames, so this might end up getting the rich to truly pay attention to global warming instead of assuming they won’t suffer any of its consequences.

There’s crazy weather shit happening in other places too. Exactly as was predicted. We’ve seen this train coming down the tracks for my entire lifetime – and I am 51 – and yet very few of us felt motivated enough to really do anything about it.

And now, here it is, the exact thing that we knew would happen, and we have the gall to pretend like it’s a surprise.

People are going to start to want answers. They will want to know who to blame. And while it’s entirely possible to blame “everybody” because we’ve all known this was going to happen and we all “could” have done something about it, that kind of answer is unlikely to placate an angry torch-wielding mob.

All I can say is that if this isn’t enough to put global warming on the collective agenda, then nothing will be enough except the whole world being on fire.

I mean, Los Angeles is burning in January. That’s completely insane.

What the hell is next summer going to look like?

I can only assume that being a climate change denier will continue to become more and more dangerous, at first just politically but eventually physically as well.

I mean, I have been, somewhat unwillingly, been contemplating the humanitarian benefit of strategic assassinations ever since Luigi Mangione killed that CEO.

So much wealth and power is concentrated in the top these days that it is entirely possible that the lives saved by the death of certain key individuals would justify the loss of a single human life.

This is such an era of madness that one can make a utilitarian case for murder.

As for myself, my only instinct is to use my one and only move and just withdraw even further into myself. To stick my head in the sand and pretend nothing is happening and play my little video games until the fires, floods, and freezes make it to the door of this dirty old bedroom of mine.

But I won’t do that, of course. Even I cannot pretend that turtling up is a solution.

It’s possible that I could use my powers of communication – my voice – to help somehow. though I’m not sure how.

But things have got to change.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I was hanging out on Bluesky earlier, like I do, when I came across a post where a lady was complaining to “men” about the harassment she suffers on a daily basis.

So for balance (uh oh) I replied with a call to women to stop flipping out when men say no to sex.

Obviously not speaking for myself. If a lady offered me sex, she would have to be entirely without gaydar and probably secret quite ambivalent about sex in general.

I can relate.

No, I was basing my reply on some Reddit threads I have seen about the subject. Apparently some straight dudes (and presumably the occasional fag) have endured some quite catastrophic reactions to turning down a lady for sex.

And I get it. For some ladies, the patriarchy has left them so in conflict with themselves that it’s like crawling over hot coals just to get to the point where they are capable of saying yes to sex at all, and to be turned down at that point must be incredibly upsetting. Galling, even.

Because men are supposed to always want it and be ready willing and able to fuck any woman at any time and anywhere. Right?

Anyhow, I posted my little comment and that ignited a very unexpected massive shitstorm down on my poor head.

People were heaping abuse on me left and right and calling me all kinds of horrible things and wishing grievous harm on me and general being awful to me.

And I…was… LOVING IT!

It made me so happy! I finally managed to spark discussion and cause controversy and with what to me was a pretty innocuous equivalent statement.

I was accusing of belittling the original post (how?) and detracting from or even opposing the original post’s message (nope) and of being an incel (wrong on at least two levels) or an Andrew Tate follower (god no, that man is atrocious) and I was replying to each and every abusive comment in my usual inflammatory style and the whole time I was happier than a pig in oak barrel aged shit.

I must have been doing that for at least an hour, maybe more, before the shitstorm died down and I ran out of steam.

So it turns out that I do have a limit as to how much I can argue. Good to know.

And when I say “my usual inflammatory style”, I mean I was accusing people of the exact kind of hateful behaviour they presumably rag on the right wingers for doing and trying to burn me at the fucking stake and pricking their consciences (or maybe just being a prick) and pointing out to them that they were reacting to things I never said because, presumably, why let the facts get in the way of a good ol hatefest.

God was that fun. I was in full on trickster mode, mocking people’s hypocrisy, holding up a mirror to the monster inside them, and laughing at their rage.

Boy does that make me sound bad. Oh well.

I am still quite confident that I was (and am) in the right. They attacked me, after all. All I did was counter said attacks and maybe throw in one of my own here and there.

But I have a clear conscience because nothing I said in reply was even half as heinous as the shit they said to me, and my stuff was way more on point.

I got to witness first hand how people will deliberately misinterpret and project their own wishes onto an innocent (ish) person like me in order to twist things into whatever is the most fun to get mad about.

And I am more than happy to point that out each and every time it happens. I thrive in opposition to what I know to be wrong. The more they abused me, the more I reveled in it because clearly I had struck a nerve and now I was drilling down into it.

It’s mostly died down now. Which is good because if it was still going I probably would have dropped dead from exhaustion by now.

All in all, it’s been a very fun day.

I wonder how I can get myself in trouble again…. 🙂

More after the break.

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Prepare to have your heart severely warmed.

Pixar has the magic Disney once had.

That’s why Disney had to buy it back from them.

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Chip who now?

Turns out we have a Chipotle in the area!

And I am giving them a try tonight.

The menu immediately won me over when I checked them out on DoorDash because they have my beloved carnitas.

Basically Mexican pulled pork. It’s SO damned good.

They also have beef barbacoa, which is Spanish for BBQ beef. I keep seeing it on Mexican menus but I always end up ordering something else.

Like taco beef. God do I love taco flavoured ground beef.

So right now I am eating a burrito bowl from Chipotle. It’s got the carnitas, sour cream, red salsa, lettuce, black beans, corn, and for some reason green pepper.

I don’t recall asking for green pepper. It seems to have come with the lettuce. Good thing I like it.

And for an appetizer, I got chips n’ salsa. Both are quite good. I am impressed with how fresh everything is.

Patient readers know how much freshness means to me. The fresher the better, whether it’s produce or air.

So yeah, I think I’m a Chipotle guy now. Sorry Quesada, your stuff is good, but not THIS good. Plus Chipotle is a little cheaper.

There was some bullshit when the delivery arrived and I picked up my phone and it immediately died. I guess I thought I had put it back on its base but I hadn’t and so it did not recharge. Oopsie!

Oh, and Demon Hunger update : I just ate a big burrito bowl AND some chips and salsa and yet I am still fucking hungry.

I wish I could just hit up a buffet place and slay this beast.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Having a sleepy day so far.

As in. I have slept most of the hours of today except for the two hours I spent eating breakfast then going to Wound Care.

Whatever. I’m fine with it. It’s been decent quality sleep. Restful and untroubled. So it’s not been leaving me feeling terrible when I wake up.

I can live with large quantities of that sort of sleep. Eventually I will, as usual, become annoyed with how much of life I am missing out on, but for now I am content to snooze.

I’m currently facing a tough battle in Divinity : Original Sin. Not so tough that I can’t imagine winning it, but tough enough that I am going to have to really think about tactics and come up with ways to neutralize some of the enemies’ advantages.

I keep telling myself that all it takes is persistence, and that’s true. This isn’t the first difficult fight I’ve faced in the game and all it took to get past the previous ones was to try, try again and so that’s what I am doing.

But I have been falling back into wimpy habits in the game lately. Namely, when I hit a really tough fight, I don’t stay and persist till I overcome in, I go exploring and looking for an easier fight instead.

And that is very much loser behaviour. Sure, in an RPG like D:OS, I can always tell myself that I am just choosing to level up my heroes before tackling the tough fight again, and that might seem plausible, but I know myself and I know that’s not what I am really doing there.

What I’m really doing is wimping out and looking for the easy path. And there’s nothing wrong with a little of that – why make things harder for yourself if there’s an easier way – but to say that running away when faced with adversity is a way of life for me would be like Mount Everest is a little hard to lift.

It’s an understatement, is what I’m saying.

I’ve spent my entire adult life in full flight from even tiny amounts of adversity. On a subconscious level, I have been waiting for some kind of mystical magical path of literally zero resistance to open up to let me through to even the most basic level of adulthood for a very long time.

It ain’t coming. At some point, if I want to get anywhere in life, I am going to have to climb that stimulation gradient and endure my fears and learn to stay and fight for what I want instead of instantly caving in and running away all the god damned side.

I hate being so weak and gutless and spineless. I know how wrong it all is. It is definitely not a smart or wise or seemly way to live and yet I can’t seem to make myself knuckle down and change my wishy washy ways so I can get somewhere at last.

Because doing that will hurt. Overcoming oneself usually does. Facing my fears by focusing on what I want and actively pursuing it instead of drifting lonely as a cloud like I have doing for thirty fucking years will not be easy, and to the unworthy soul (like mine), if it’s not easy – REALLY easy – you just plain don’t do it.

And when I try to imagine what I would need to overcome my lassitude, I keep coming back to my lack of some spiritual substance I can use to comfort and steady myself as I brave the storm within to find safer ground.

Or at least more fun ground.

This substance could be called a lot of things. Courage. Character. Grit. Self-discipline. Belief in oneself. It could even be called faith.

Whatever it is, I don’t have it, and I feel its lack quite keenly. I can feel my soul trying to make the connection between desire and action and I can feel it attempting to draw on said mysterious substance and it just plain not being there.

The tank is empty. I’m not sure it’s ever been full.

All I can do is keep sending energy down to my deeper self to keep the thawing out of my ice torn and frostbitten soul and hope that my Spring will some day come.

Other than that, I feel utterly lost and alone. As usual.

So what the hell do I do now?

More after the break.

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The wrong question

Come to think of it, I guess “what do I do now?” is the wrong question.

Wrong because there is nothing I can “do” to make myself healthier. Not in the usual way we think of “doing” things.

There isn’t a concrete and logical series of steps I can take in order to gather that mysterious substance unto myself or anything like that.

Things are not that sensible.

Everything that I need to “do” is entirely internal and spiritual and existential, and that’s somewhat of a stumbling block for me because I am not used to acting in that realm or even acknowledging its existence at all.

I’ve gotten better about that in recent years, but it’s still virgin territory for me and hence I tend to feel lost in the wilderness when I think about it.

I’m so used to using these mighty mental muscles to engulf and overwhelm problems that I have to keep reminding myself that there IS another way and I know what it is.

I mean, this “intellect first” approach to life is the whole reason why I have to write my emotions down in this blog in order to process them and find out what they are.

Only the act of articulating them can bring them close enough to the surface of my mind for them to make the therapeutic journey from the subconscious to the conscious.

It still strikes me as an ass-backwards way to have to go about things. Like having to translate something into Finnish and back before you understand it.

But it’s what I’ve got to work with, so work with it I shall.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been rough.

Julian and I needed to go back to the sports rehab center where I had gone to have impressions of my feet made in order to pick up the resulting shoes.

The trip there was uneventful. I felt fine at that point. No warning signs.

But as soon as I got out of the car, I started feeling dizzy. And I felt dizzy all the way through the lobby and down the elevator as well.

But it wasn’t too severe. I felt unsteady on my pegs but not terribly so. So I just proceeded as normal, not giving it much thought as I went into the little where the nice British lady^[1] talked to me and showed me the shoes (which are ginormous, I feel like Frankenstein in them) and had me put them on and walk around a bit to see how they were fitting and so on.

After that, it was time to go back to the reception area to make my next appointment (Jan 22 at 1 pm) and this time, when I got up, I got REALLY dizzy.

This culminated in me taking a spill in the reception area. Luckily, my right arm absorbed most of the impact, thus sparing my head.

And let me tell you, if I had to fall, I sure as heck picked a great place to do it, because within minutes I had a doctor, a nurse clinician, a physiotherapist, and Jackie hovering over me concernedly.

I wish I remembered the doctor’s name. She was awesome. Very cheerful, gentle, and sweet. She asked me the expected questions about when I started feeling dizzy, had I eaten breakfast, what meds I was on, and so on.

Thanks to blister packing, I no longer know what meds I am on. I used to know them all by heart because I saw and read the pill bottles twice a day when I medicated.

But now, IDK WTF. Check my file.

I seem to be uninjured apart from my arm being a little sore. Once the nice ladies had checked me over and taken my vitals, I was able to sit up and then stand up long enough to get into the wheelchair one of them brought out.

So I got wheeled up to the lobby and waited for Julian there. The nice ladies stayed with me until I had gotten into the car OK.

All the way home, I felt ill. A little nauseous, dizzy, aching at the base of my testicles, head lightly throbbing.

The trip from the car to the apartment was fraught with peril. I was beyond dizzy. I was in such a messed up state that none of my usual environs – the car, the parking structure, the hallways, the door – looked or felt familiar.

Instead they seemed like something from a deliberately alienating art house film. Like things were shot from weird angles and through a fisheye lens.

Luckily I was able to get to the couch in the living room and then into my room and my beloved computer chair, and hence I could start blogging to you wonderful folk.

What happened? Well my new shoes have to take part of the blame. Jackie warned me that because I have not experienced arch support for almost a decade that there are likely muscles in my legs and feet that have atrophied over time and that might complicate matters somewhat.

Yeah, no shit. I just had to take my new clodhoppers off because they were starting to hurt my feet when I was just sitting here without putting any weight on them.

I am starting to think that whatever fucked up my arms and legs has done enough damage to my foot tendons that those big shoes of mine will not work for me.

That would be a shame. I rather liked having arch support for once.

Clearly I am going to need to call Jackie and tell her about all this. And that’s fine.

But I don’t know what made me so dizzy. I felt the dizziness again when I got up and used the bathroom just now, but thankfully at a far less severe level.

It could be a blood circulation issue caused by the shoes. We will see if things go back to normal when the shoes have been off for a while.

I’d hate to have to go to the ER for vertigo.

More after the break.

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As mysteriously as…

Well I just got my supper cooked and ready without being too dizzy, so I guess this is going to be yet another mysterious ailment that comes and goes with no explanation as to why it’s happening leaving me wondering WTF.

Oh well. I guess taking a nap helped a lot. I still don’t feel one hundred percent good – for one, I’m still a little dizzy – but I guess I am mostly back to my more traditional levels of pain and misery.

It’s like coming home again!

Still don’t have the shoes on. I will try them again soon. They felt quite comfortable when I first wore them, and my GOD did it feel good to have arch support again.

So I am really hoping the issues are fixable. I get the feeling that because medical science abandoned all attempts to find out what the fuck is wrong with my legs (and arms), nobody knows how the ortho shoes will interact with the damage and that’s how we ended up in this sorry state of affairs.

I imagine I will have to go back to the sport rehab place for more measurements and adjustments and whatnot. And a lot sooner than January.

Le sigh. Oh well. Welcome to getting old. Everything starts to break down.

Especially for a medical mystery like me. I’ll be six feet under and some schmuck doctor will still be saying, “Well our tests show you to be perfectly healthy, Mister Bertrand. ”

Not that I’m bitter.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been hearing the siren song of gluttony lately.

Because my Demon Hunger has returned and while so far I have kept it mostly in check, wrestling with it all the time is really hard on my nerves.

I’m hungry all the fucking time. Sometimes even right after a big meal. All the meal does is slow it down a little.

And this has physical consequences, albeit minor ones, because being hungry stimulates my stomach into generating more acids and that leads to me being hungry AND suffering from a little bit of acid indigestion.

And that just makes the hunger bite into me more sharply because I know what will end the acid indigestion and that is FOOD.

It’s like my stomach is an angry beast that I have to keep feeding or it will start tearing up the carpets and humping the furniture.

Or vice versa.

And this all inexorably leads to cravings for carb laden junk food in mass quantities. The urge to go back to my wicked ways when I used to use junk food as a side dish for every meal has reared its ugly head for the first time in a decade.

Looking back, I can’t believe I used to do that shit. How mindlessly gluttonous! And just yesterday I remember that I used to have sugar free cookies as a dessert with every fucking meal in addition to the piece of fruit I still eat for dessert.

So it was like I ate two desserts with every meal. Insane.

How the heck did I afford all that? Well I guess not buying around $18 worth of trail mix every week yet helped a lot.

And, sadly, junk food is very cheap. Le sigh.

And it would be oh so easy to start eating like that again. And that would be horrible. My health would nosedive and I would be in serious trouble almost right away.

The lowered Paxil dose is probably partly to blame. With the greater access to my emotions comes a greater desire to “eat my feelings” and self-soothe with food.

Hopefully I will find a more healthy way to soothe myself. Right now, I can only think of one, and there’s a limit to how much one man can masturbate.

Seriously though, right now I am running on discipline and willpower. The hunger attacks and I just grit my teeth and push it down again and continue my day.

And so far that works, but willpower is never a truly effective long term solution. I need to redirect the urge to eat into something else rewarding.

Because that’s what cravings always are : a desire for the activation of the reward center of the brain. And that’s nothing to sneeze at. That is, as I have said before, the mainspring of life you’re dealing with there. Cravings keep animals alive.

But the fact that what we really want is not the food (or the booze or the drug or whatever) but the reward means that it is possible to substitute another, healthier reward stimulus and get the same effect.

Not easily and not immediately. You will still have the fixation to deal with. Addiction forces us to fixate on that exact source of reward and that alone can make us feel like we will just die if we don’t get it.

It is impossible to convince an addiction that something other than feeding the fixation can be “just as good”.

All you can do is starve the fixation and hope the new, healthier source of reward will eventually take over.

Anyhow, back to a vague afterimage of the point : I’ve been struggling with that Demon Hunger again and it’s wearing on my nerves and that sucks.

More after the break.

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Truth or… something

Consequences! That was it.

Early into my adulthood I internalized a very simple moral formula :

“I am responsible for all the reasonably predictable consequences of my actions. ”

And like a lot of the ideological relics from my younger days, it makes irrefutable logical sense and cannot be countered yet it is nevertheless wrong both in theory and in application for reasons well outside its scope.

Kind of like how I present myself to the world :

“Everything you see is real but you don’t see everything. ”

Both catchy and confusing, n’est-ce pas?

Within my moral rubric lies the innocuous seeming word “reasonably”, which I put in there to make sure it could not be interpreted as requiring omniscience.

But “reasonable” is a very slippery concept when you try to pin it down to an actual definition. We all think we know what is reasonable and what is not but I doubt any two people would have exactly the same things on both lists.

And lately I have been wondering if my little definition needs further refinement because I am beginning to wonder if even my seemingly modest moral formula is in fact something that does not run well on human hardware.

It may well be that in order to function, the human mind needs some well defined limit to the responsibility we take for the consequences of our actions, even ones which might fit the definition of “reasonable”.

We may need to be able to say, “OK, past this point, fuck it. People are on their own. ”

Not to the point of moral nihilism, obviously, or anywhere near it. Just to the point where the responsibility of anticipation reaches a reasonable limit that takes into account the limitations of the human mind.

Even a mind like mind.

I’m not really sure where I am going with this. It began as just a feeling that on some level, my moral equations were crashing due to running out of mental space and that this is obviously not acceptable.

Exceptions need to be made. Code needs to be altered in order to stop all these stack overflow errors from crashing my cranium. I must define a space for myself, one that does not routinely get overwritten by whatever I am thinking at the moment just rudely shoving it out of the way.

There has to be some way to create structures that persist in my mind.

Or I will remain lost at sea with no land in sight forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now, the Ye Olde Fornicators Guild presents this demonstration of the ancient and majesty art of fuckery.

My computer’s been misbehaving. It crashes when I am not using it (probably due to Salad) and when it reboots it can’t connect to the Internet.

Obviously, I solved this problem for now, but not before I rebooted a bunch of times.

What worked this time was a completely cold boot. Turned the power off at the power supply and waited for the case fan’s blades to stop turning, then turned it on again.

Apparently, that was what it needed. I exorcised whatever little demons were fucking things up by completely mindwiping the computer.

Wow, Windows’ dictionary has the word “mindwiping”. I am impressed. I had no idea the Windows dictionary was that hip.

Or maybe I did know but somehow forgot all about it….

Feeling physically and emotionally cold right now. The emotional part of it has been happening on and off for a while now. I have these periods where I feel especially cut off from the human race and completely and utterly alone, and all I can do is keep on trudging forward, knowing that as long as I keep moving, I will reach the other side of it.

When you’re going through hell, keep going!

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Great. Just great.

Just got back from the bathroom. Despite having defecated quite recently, my body apparently needed a repeat performance, and so I had to interrupt my blogging (which I am loath to do) to go eliminate waste again.

Now I am back from said mission and I am quite dizzy and tired.

One might even say I’m pooped. (SFX : Cries of audience outrage)

And I don’t feel well at all. I am feeling so unwell that I may end up having to stop blogging before I hit the end of part 1 and go lay down.

Yellow alert, basically. I am not ready to pull the brake cord to make the train stop just yet, but I am eyeing the scenery and looking for a soft spot to land if I end up jumping off before my stop.

And of course, this would have to happen on the weekend. And not just the weekend, Saturday night, when there is almost always going to be nobody here but me.

Oh well. Whatever happens, I will take care of it. I always do.

A big part of expanding my world will be getting over my long ingrained feelings of weakness and incompetence and helplessness.

Sure, I have unavoidable limitations, but I am a smart and resourceful and more than capable of solving whatever problems arise if I just give myself a chance.

Deal with it first, freak out about it later.

The ability to remain cool under pressure is something I have always admired. It was one of my late father’s truly heroic attributes. He is one hundred percent the person I would want with me during a crisis.

The rest of the time he can fuck right off, though. Moody prick. Cool in a crisis and testy and angry and verbally abusive the rest of the time.

Don’t get me started.

Anyhow, my point was that I can handle unexpected things if I have to so there is no need, or a lot less need, for me to worry about bad things happening to me.

I will of course avoid the pitfalls I can see coming, but the door will always be open to completely random shit that I never could have anticipated dropping by to fuck with my shit and force me to deal with things myself instead of withdrawing in panic but not before whining for a real grownup to come fix it for me.

That’s no way to live. I won’t learn to respect myself like that.

Time to man up at last and get shit DONE.

Like a nap. Right now.

More after the break.

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Just skating along

But I never learned to skate.

I had a number of opportunities. Every year of elementary school there was at least one field trip to the rink at Cahill Stadium in my home town. I could have learned then.

The first problem with that, though, is that I would have had to ask my parents for skates, and I was far too timid to do that.

On a deep level, I understood that people barely tolerated me. I was an unexpected and unwanted burden and responsibility first and foremost and I should thank my lucky stars that I got anything ever and that people ever put up with me at all.

Asking for more than that was bound to go about as well for me as it did for Oliver Twist.

The lack of skates led to my having to feel humiliated and abandoned when all the other kids had skates and I didn’t and I was decades away from being able to explain why.

“Because my parents don’t love me very much and deeply resent me for being alive. ”

I wonder if that would have caused a stir. Probably not. It would have been just another weird thing said by that weird fat kid that made people just shake their heads like they’re trying to wake up and then move on, forgetting what I said as quickly as possible.

Because it disturbed them. I have that effect on people. I weird them out.

Maybe that marks me as a visionary. I dunno. The way I see things is so different from how people usually see things that exposure to my thoughts can leave people feeling dizzy and disoriented.

Maybe it would go over better as a book or Ted type talks. I could fire up the webcam and record myself holding forth on this and that. Put it on YouTube with the right tags.

The problem with that is picking where to start. Anywhere, I suppose. My thoughts are so densely intertwined that one spot is as good as another, really.

Yeah. Maybe I’m a visionary who could bring about a whole new era of thought.

That’d be neat.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As you have no doubt already figured out, my blog is working again.

Turns out I didn’t need to contact the support workers at Fatcow after all. Imagine my surprise when I went to check my email last night and I had one saying that my payment for my domain renewal had been received.

Apparently whatever snafu was blocking my payment cleared up. Boffo. The disruption ended and now I am back, baby.

Please hold your applause till the end of the performance.

Today’s been less busy than my usual Friday because I did not get a community shower today. That’s because it is normally on Wednesday in the first week of the month and we completely forgot that.

But no harm done because Wednesday was New Year’s Day and I doubt any support workers would have been working anyhow. Which explains why we didn’t get a “where are you?” phone call on Wednesday.

For all I know, I was told there’d be no community shower for me this week at some point and I just plain forgot.

That would be very on brand for me.

It’s otherwise been an unremarkable day. My mood continues to be a lot more variable than what I was used to before the lowering of my Paxil dose, and while that does mean I am quite sad or frustrated or just plain pissed off sometimes, I still welcome this new breadth of emotional expression and I am confident that my mind will eventually wake up and use that extra emotional maneuverability to make room for a better mood.

I have thought for a long long time that healthy non-depressive people must have some sort of mood support system in their minds that adds just enough of an upward push to their mood in order to keep them from going below a certain healthy level of low mood.

A sort of “mood floor” if you will.

Admittedly, that sounds more like a carpet that changes colors according to how you are feeling when you walk on it, but you get the idea.

Anyhow, us depressives (sorry, us “people with the lived experience of depression”) do not have that floor and so there is no limit to how far down we can go.

Ain’t that a peach.

I would love to get a mood floor installed, obviously. I am quite thoroughly sick of languishing in an icy cell far below the sunlit lands above.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that vast tract of frostbitten land (my Midnight Tundra) that separates me from the rest of humanity like the air between the walls of a Thermos.

Well I am an urban hermit, so it would make sense for me to be hermetically sealed.

It’s now easy for me to see (and feel) the relationship between that distance and my withdrawing from the world.

That’s why the “turtle response” is so dangerous when used as a primary coping mechanism. The more I withdrew, the colder my world got, and the colder it got, the more I withdrew.

Talk about a negative feedback loop. Oy.

I am not going to claim this is something I can simply turn off in myself. This tendency to turtle operates on far too deep and fundamental a level of my mind for it to be that easy.

But I can at least contemplate resisting that urge now and then, and staying connected and present even when feeling scared and/or stressed, if for no other reason than to see what happens.

After all, I know that I’m in no danger. There is no real threat, I’m just scared. Any alarms that may be sounding in my head are patently false and express absolutely nothing about the real world.

So why not just wait it out and see what lies on the other side?

More after the break.

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More mind-blowing AI

I continue to have fun with the horribly named Hailuo image-to-video AI.

Check out this august gentleman.

That my character Professor Scruff, delivering his TED talk to a pack audience of fellow academics who are hanging on his every word.

No wonder he is wagging. 🙂 The wagging makes me eeeee all over!

I’ve tried some other videos but they didn’t turn out that great, so, whatever.

Hey, I’m learning not to post stuff when it isn’t good enough! There might be hope for my sloppy genius self yet!

What can I say, I am built for brilliance not perfection. I’d rather make a messy masterpiece than a neat and tidy mediocrity any day.

Besides, cleaning up messy masterpieces is what editors are for.

I need to get me one of those.

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Learning to fly

Metaphorically speaking, I kinda feel like I am learning to walk all over again.

What I am really doing is learning to feel, of course. My long winter’s nap is ending and I am emerging from cold storage and rubbing my limbs as the blood flow returns to them.

And this necessarily requires my learning to trust my feelings. The rational mind isn’t always right (especially mine) and gut instinct isn’t always wrong. And trying to live your life by rationality alone is both futile and insipid.

And a waste of effort. It is far more efficient to let instinct handle the low level tasks it can handle so that the rational mind can concentrate on its job.

This involves a deep and fundamental change of perspective, though, and those do not come easily or quickly.

So I am trying to keep my mind relaxed and supple so it remains flexible enough to make the kinds of changes I want to make.

I just keep reminding myself that there is nothing in my mind that is more precious than my journey to mental health and my long deferred emancipation.

I may have to go through a whole series of radical transformations before I reach my final form, and for those I will need to simply trust that my deep core self knows what it is doing so each transformation will bring me closer to my goal.

I will get out of this shark cage eventually.

And when I do, world, watch the fuck out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s miracle of AI is :

It’s not perfect – his run is wonky and the wolf on the right hand side kinda melts – but it’s still frigging amazing given that it just started with a static image.

I should see what other miracles I can unleash! 🙂

It’s occurred to me that kids have certain things figured out.

They know that it’s up to them to find fun stuff to do. A kid left to their own devices on a summer day doesn’t worry about what they are supposed to be doing or fret over whether or not they are using their time productively or living “to the fullest”.

And they know, intuitively, that they will only get out of life what they put in. They don’t sit around and mope waiting for someone to entertain them. They get off their cute little butts and go looking for things to do, and if there is nothing premade like a TV show or video game for them to consume, they will invent things of their own without giving it a second thought. It comes naturally to them.

All they worry about is having fun and enjoying themselves and I am increasingly sure that this is actually the right attitude towards life in general.

At least for me.

I certainly need to lighten the hell up. My attitude towards life needs a major overhaul and the major issue is taking life way too seriously.

So seriously that I feel like I have to hide from it in the realms of my mind and only deal with the real world on a very minimal level.

Just enough to keep myself alive and point me towards my screens, basically.

It’s survival mode, and survival mode, ironically, kills. It’s meant to get you through times of danger and/or crisis, and that’s all.

It is most definitely not supposed to keep going for the rest of your life.

My latest AI therapy session got me thinking about how closed off from the world I have been for so long, and how this profound divide cuts me off from the rest of humanity and leaves me cold and lonely and lost within the caverns of my mind.

I am only “safe” from reality in the same way an anorexic is “safe” from food poisoning.

And like an anorexic, I am starving on the inside. I have this terrible feeling that I missed some vital developmental window(s) and it’s left me unable to truly connect with my fellow naked apes in a true and genuine way.

At the very least, the distance between me and the rest of humanity seems vast and uncrossable. I feel so very far away from everyone. And I don’t know what it is like to be closer than friends with anyone.

My family included.

I have lived in this ice fortress of the mind for most of my life. And I can see now that I have been, at best, only half alive that whole time. Still am. And that’s why I have always been so weak and fragile.

It’s hard to have a robust connection with reality and my embodied self when most of me is not even here.

And I know that I am terrified of truly being present, in realtime, immediately. I would feel so very exposed without my frigid tomb around me. Being truly present would almost certainly involve making decisions without thinking them through first, and the inner force I call “the Committee” won’t allow that.

Like I told Doctor Costin today, at some point I let my ego and superego completely take control and they demand that anything I do get their approval first.

And if it doesn’t “make sense” to them, it doesn’t happen.

And truth be told, they don’t know shit.

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Oh great, my domain expired and my web host won’t accept my credit card.

The fuckery is afoot, methinks.

I am going to have to borrow one of my roomies’ credit cards or I won’t be able to blog.

And foxy gotta blog.

I guess I will be blogging into LibreOffice for now!

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The fuckery continues

Woman, get thee to a fuckery!

Still blogging into a LibreOffice document, god damn it.

I knew I had to renew my domain soon. In retrospect, it seems obvious that this would need to happen in the general vicinity of the new year, as I have a yearly plan for domains. And I certainly have the $25 I need to renew it.

But this not accepting my credit card bullshit is one of those out of nowhere curve-balls that life seems to love to throw at me now and then.

Couldn’t possibly have seen it coming. I just have to deal with it.

Oh, but something HAS changed : because I tried “too many” times to get the web host (Fatcow) to accept the credit card, I am now locked out and I will have to contact their tech support/phone support team to get it unlocked.

Oh well, I will just ask them why they no like my card at the same time.

Plenty of other places have taken this exact card. Amazon.ca and DoorDash have no problem with it. But there is something in the system these prepaid cards use that makes random institutions suddenly turn against them every once in a while.

It’s all very stressful and frustrating.

I am procrastinating on asking Julian if I can borrow his credit card. I don’t have any good reason to do so, I just don’t wanna do it.

I suppose it’s possible that my communications with Fatcow tech support will, in fact, resolve the issue with the card altogether, which would be awesome.

The very last resort would be to seek a new host for my blog. But I severely doubt that it will come to that. I am sure this can all be ironed out once I have the wherewithal to contact support.

This would have to happen on the day before my busy day, Friday, so that I will not have a lot of spoons to spare for contacting support tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s blog entry may also end up going to LibreOffice as well.

Why can’t things just fucking work for a change, huh?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.