In a word, ugh.

Suffering from some temporal dislocation at the moment. I took a nap and for some reason, when I woke up I was convinced it was around 1:30 pm, and so when I finally managed to get up and get my butt in front of the computer only to find it was in fact a hair past 3:30 pm, I felt like I’d just had two hours of time and life snatched away.

And that feels bad. Real bad.

I will adjust, of course. The regular flow of events will help me get back in sync with the rhythms of the day and by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten all about it.

These are the strange little hazards and issues that my fractured psyche throws my way when fate is getting bored with me and wants to stir shit up.

So those are the depths I’m arising from : the depths of a temporal fugue and its accompanying sense of loss and confusion.

Meanwhile, my heater arrived early this morning. Ah, the miracles of the modern age, where I can order something Saturday afternoon and have it show up right on my doorstep Sunday morning.

I haven’t plugged it in and tried it out yet though because the place I had planned to put it on my bedside table turns out to be absolutely filthy and I am kind of afraid that if I put the heater there right now, the random gunk caked on there will burst into flames.

But I will probably end up plugging it in tonight anyhow, because tonight I will be sitting here in front of Mister Computer after the sun goes down and that is, of course, when it gets seriously fucking cold in my lonely little spot.

Not that it’s a tropical paradise right now, either. Le sigh.

Maybe I will check the thing out soon.

It’s basically a fan with a heating element in it. Which means that someone finally invented the “hair dryer” style heater that I’ve always wondered about.

Hopefully it will work and solve my lil freezing my butt off problem. I must admit that I am having second thoughts. Certainly, as with all space heaters, I am sure I’m going to have to fiddle with its exact placement near me to make sure I neither freeze nor fry.

Still stuck in my video game. I am going to have to revisit every single site listed as having a Blood/Star Stone and make absolutely sure there’s nothing there.

I did make a little progress though. As I have been rechecking old sites I came across an Inert Stone I had not picked up for some reason, and so I now have 11 of the 12 stones that I need to proceed with the god damned game.

At least I hope I only need 12. The internet is unclear on that. I might need as many as 15, and that would be a biiiiiitch.

My last resort will be to go to every single character in the frigging game and initiate trade with them in case I sold an Inert Stone to them.

If that doesn’t work then my playthrough is officially completely borked because it’s pretty unlikely that I will find another one just lying around somewhere.

Oh, one cute little joke : there’s a skeleton buccaneer you fight early in the game

And his name is “Pontius Pirate”. LOL.

I can only assume that after I defeated him, he washed his hands of me.

More after the break.

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Nostalgia is a lie

Or at least, that’s how I used to think.

And like most of the ideas with which I have poisoned myself over the years, it is irrefutably true. Nostalgia makes people remember things as being better (and simpler) than they actually were. It introduces an error into our recollections. Factually speaking, nostalgia is a lie.

But there is so much more to life than mere factual accuracy.

For one thing, there is what is emotionally healthy for us to believe. I have wasted a lot of my life and my own mental health pretending that my mental diet didn’t matter. That I could drive towards the truth at any cost no matter what and if that hurt, tough. It was worth it to know the Truth(tm).

After all, even if it hurts, even if in fact it’s outright soul poison, you’re still always better off with the hard truth than with a comforting lie, right?

Um, but why? How could I even know that? Maybe there are some truths you are genuinely better off not knowing or at least not believing. Maybe some lies and illusions are way, way better for you than the harsh and toxic truth.

Maybe we all need to maintain a certain amount of leeway for self-delusion to act as a kind of shock absorbers of the soul instead of insisting that we have to endure every god damned bump and rock and axle-wrecking patch of black ice on the road unfiltered in pursuit of some abstract notion of intellectual ruggedness.

I hope I can change my ways. I’m so used to lunging for the truth no matter what like an over-aggressive attack dog that there is some doubt. And of course it is logically impossible for any mind to willingly and consciously embrace untruth.

But there’s wiggle room, if you’re willing to dig for it. There is Truth ™ and then there is the assigning of meaning to that Truth ™, and that’s where that leeway can fit in.

And a whole lot of depression happens on that interpretive level. The actual truth might be, “I just broke something”, but the conclusion, “therefore I suck and am terrible and shouldn’t even be alive” is one hundred percent optional.

That has absolutely nothing to do with fact and all the people who know me would vehemently disagree with that self-assessment and I know for a fact that I am crazy and that therefore my interpretations are suspect at best, so why not bow to the opinion of everybody who is not me, remember that absolutely everyone makes mistakes, and let myself off the fucking hook?

So, so what if nostalgia is a lie? Maybe I could use some soft warm lies in my life.

It’s not like the Truth ™ has made me fucking happy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

l