Hi there Livejournal friends! Yes, it’s been ages and ages since you heard from me. And for that, I apologize. Here is why :

First, the WordPress plugin I used for ages just plain stopped working. I figured, well, surely any day now, they will release a patch and it will start working again.

That has happened once or twice with other plugins, so I was not worried.

Then, one day, I realized I had been waiting for a month and a half. So, probably not going to happen any time soon.

So then I went to look for a new one via the WordPress archives, only to find out, to my enormous shock, that there was no suitable replacement.

This makes the lack of a patch to the one that works even more galling. I mean, I realize that Livejournal is somewhat of a landmark neighborhood now, and not at all the hotness that it once was, but come on.

So that is why you have not heard from me in a while. I know that I could repost my blog entries manually, but I am too damned lazy amd/or absentminded.

When I finish a blog entry, I press Publish and then forget it. On to the next thing. So it would be tricky for me to develop a new habit of publishing to my blog then reposting manually.

The Tumblr reposting plugin also stopped working. So I have been only visible on my actual blog at http://michaeljohnbertrand.com for the last few months.

One annoying thing : having to do this as an OpenOffice document because I have become so incredibly dependent on WordPress’ ever so handy (nearly) continuous onscreen word count and none of the other blogging platforms that I know of do that.

Sad that I can’t write without knowing how many words I am writing. But I have done this 1000 words a day thing for so long that I can’t function in an unstructured writing environment.

Anyhow, enough administrivia. How have I been doing, I hear at least one of you ask, hopefully?

Well, like always, my life consists of blogging, video games, television, and the very slow slog up the shallow grade of the very long road that we in the mental health consumer community call “recovery”.

So yeah. Depression is still sort of my main gig. I get very frustrated at the slow progress of my life sometimes, but that is highly counterproductive in the long run so I try to keep it down to a bare minimum.

In fact, I think learning to just accept that some things cannot be made to happen but can only be allowed to happen is quite a good spiritual lesson for me. One of the things that I have learned about myself recently is that have been wasting enormous amounts of energy trying to control the small things in my life and leaving very little of myself left for actually getting where I want to go.

So, as is the karmic lesson of all us Taurus types, I have been learning the fine art of just plain letting go of control. Or rather, to put it in Buddhist terms, the illusion of control.

Once you free yourself from the shackles of the illusion of control, you can save your will and your energies for the big things that truly matter to you and let the smaller things sort themselves out.

In fact, that is something I have been saying to myself a lot lately : “These things will sort themselves out eventually”.

It is difficult for me to accept that sometimes, like the libertarians say, things really do go a lot better without intervention.

I am an interventionist by nature. I would be a classic control freak if I had more energy and was a less mellow guy. Deep down, a part of me thinks “Nothing works unless I make it work!”

But that is just not true, and you can do yourself a world of hurt by trying to micromanage yourself like that. Human beings have a lot of perfectly good automatic systems that work great if the conscious mind just leaves them the hell alone to do their jobs instead of constantly second-guessing every last little thing and demanding constant progress reports.

Talk about inefficient! You end up being more about the process than the product, and that is a bad thing when the product is YOU.

So I am slowly learning to loosen up inside, stop poking around in my own guts trying to read the future from my own entrails so much, and not take things quite so seriously.

I know, it sounds odd to hear Mister Comedy Guy himself talk about taking life too seriously, but like a lot of funny people, I am also a bag of exploding neuroses, and a lot of us develop our ability to generate comedy because we are people who REALLY need to laugh.

It’s a defense mechanism, a self-soothing mechanism, a way to gain social acceptance if you are socially awkward, it’s a way to deal with conflict, it’s a floor wax, it’s a dessert topping.

As you can see, I still ramble on as much as ever. Aren’t you glad I haven’t gotten over that yet?

Well, what can I say? My words do not, in general, come to me as fully coherent and complete thoughts with a built in outline for the essay about a particular subject very often.

And honestly, a lot of the reason I blog is to give all the words in my head a place to go and frolic and be free.

Before I became a daily blogger, there was so much going on in my head at any given moment that it was like I went around in a haze of buzzing thoughts and ideas that wanted out.

Now, with this daily release, I can get at least some of them back, and that means I sleep a whole lot better at night.

Well, with this, and the drugs.

Mostly the drugs, really.

But blogging is in there somewhere, I swear!