I feel better today, for those who are interested. Yesterday was bad, but even in my darkest moment, I could still believe that things would get better soon, and that is some serious progress.

I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that I should stop thinking about the future and beating myself up over what could or should be, and just live day by day. So I’m a hothouse flower, someone with a massive deficit in the “life skills” category across the board who is entirely unsuited for normal life, everyday living, or coping with that “reality” shit that is so popular with the kids these days. So what? I can either be a terrible hothouse flower who constantly mourns and suffers over all the other, cooler kinds of plants that he will never be, or I can just concentrate on being the best little hothouse flower I can be.

Go with my strengths and forget my weaknesses, in other words. Nobody gets to be good at everything. We all get a thin slice of the capability pie and have to make do with that. The amount we cannot do and are not suited for always vastly outweighs our tiny clutch of capability, and the challenge is to figure out how to make that work for us, and not waste time and energy pining for what we are not and will never be.

There is wisdom in simply doign what comes naturally to you. There is strength in knowing what you can do, and more in knowing what you cannot. The arrogant mind can’t see why it can’t just do anything it can think of doing, but the reality is that we are all limited beings and no matter how powerful our intellect, reality remains unmoved without concrete action.

Thoughts and dreams and ideas are pure and simple and clean and easy for us intellectuals to handle. Reality is indiscrete, complicated, muddy, and difficult. And there is no point in crossing your arms and pouting and waiting for someone to come along to make your reality more compatible with your big bad brain. You have to find your own connection, make your own tunnel between the inner and outer worlds, develop your own personal relationship with reality that lets you be you and it be it and everybody gets along.

I think right now, my relationship with reality is highly dysfunctional. It’s like the death throes of a marriage, where the two parties are in cold war mode, ignoring each other with cold hostility most of the them, and fighting any time they do talk. With no communication between the sides, there can be no resolution, and things can go on like this for a long long time before things get so bad they force a break up.

Then, of course, things really get ugly.

I suppose, in this analogy, breaking up would mean removing myself even further from reality, and I have no idea how that would be even possible short of collapsing into catastrophic catatonia. Give up the Internet? Stop watching television entirely? Seal myself up in a vat? I don’t think so.

I might be a timid and frightened creature, but I could never disconnect from the outer world by that much. The whole “I wish the world would leave me alone so I can be alone with my books forever” type intellectual fantasy does not appeal to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love books dearly. I don’t just like to read, I need to read. It’s as necessary for my mental metabolism as nutrition is to my physical metabolism. I have often joked that to me, books are a vitamin. It’s only true metaphorically and subjectively, but that’s true enough for me.

But just books? Um, no. Not nearly enough stimulation for my ever hungry mind. My mind is like a shark, always moving, always hunting, always hungry, never stopping, never sleeping…. you get the idea. The nice thing about the Internet is that I can always get roughly all the stimulation I need, at any time, and in whatever flavour suits my fancy at that moment. Without that….

… well I might actually have to leave the apartment and do stuff. Oh no!

Or just continue to go insane in the dark, out of the way, not bothering anybody with my problems like a good little boy until they drag me to the rubber room and throw away the key.

. You never know with me.