Not feeling like doing the Big Think tonight (hey, even visionaries take the day off now and then) and so tonight will be simple personal reportage with the usual amount of rambling and whatnot.

Gotta watch out for that whatnot.

First, here’s today’s video.

Sorry for the poor audio quality. Guess I still don’t know where the damned microphone is on my tablet.

More on Joe’s car problems : On Tuesday night, Joe’s “check engine” light came on. Being a sensible guy, he immediately took his car to the dealership. That meant he needed to rely on Felicity and his father for rides while the car was out of commission.

Luckily, it was just some little part that needed replacing. But of course, they had to order the part in (my theory is that auto repair parts never actually stock any parts) and that meant the whole thing took another day.

Which meant the car was not ready until yesterday, Thursday, and that just happened to be the day his car insurance ran out. Isn’t life fun?

And then today he has a weird (for him) shift. Poor Joe! What a series of curveballs.

Compared to that, the mild disruption that was my having to be dropped off early was nothing. I had a pleasant meal at IHOP. Took me a while to make up my mind what to have because I was super hungry, but I enjoyed my choice. It was a pot roast melt…. just pot roast and cheese, pan toasted melt style. Very simply and quite tasty. Plus fries, of course,

After all, this IS Canada.

I was a bad boy and had dessert. Hot fudge sundae. It tasted good, but it was too small to be six bucks, so… would not recommend. But who goes to IHOP for dessert?

What with all the pancakes, waffles, french toast, and crepes, most of their entrees are desserts anyhow.

Afterward, it was a very short walk to therapy. Like, not even a full block. I do believe I have found my new breakfast spot for when this sort of thing happens. No offense to Denny’s, but the food is slightly cheaper at IHOP and having such a short trip after was really, really pleasant.

Therapy went fine, although I continue to worry that we don’t seem to be getting at the real deep dirt lately. I suppose it is up to me to steer things into darker and more therapeutic directions instead of just skimming the surface with whatever I have been talking about on my blog lately.

One thing we did talk about is my sense that other people have this feeling, somewhere deep down, that they are not alone. It’s not all up to them. And I am not talking about religion, although that is the face this phenomenon usually wears.

This is a deeper and more powerful sense of not being alone, and I think you get it from your parents. Either they were there to pick you up when you fell down and comfort you when you were upset, or they weren’t, and if they weren’t, you had nothing to internalize as your base level feeling of safety in the world and you are left adrift, emotionally abandoned.

Studies have shown that in many mammals, the quality of early care has a dramatic and possibly permanent impact on an animal’s life. Rats that did not get enough licking in their first week of life grow up to be more easily frightened, panicky, and even die earlier than rats who got the right amount of licking.

Monkeys raised apart from other monkeys when they are infants end up as hostile, anti-social adult monkeys who can only view other monkeys as threats and who will never, ever learn to properly socialize with other monkeys, and likely will never even have sex with another monkey.

No word on whether bullied monkeys can also end up the same way.

So I am intensely aware that something went drastically wrong with me. I can see in others that which is missing in me, and it is profound. They have a basic sense of safety that I will never have, not even if I lived in a mansion filled with the latest security systems surrounded by an army of security personnel. I will always have this sense of constant vulnerability and exposure, or at least I will bear the scars of having it.

It seems odd, but the only thing that fixed that feeling of constant danger was Paxil. We live in an age where we can chemically cure psychological trauma, or at least treat the symptoms. No doubt if I were foolhardy enough to stop taking my Paxil, a lot of that would come back to me real, real hard.

When I think about the true scope of wrongness and just all that I am missing, it is hard not to just gape at the horror of it all. It is the sort of thing that stuns the mind. I feel like a lot of my immobility has been caused by this sort of thing. I am too keenly aware of how broken I am and how much I am missing that should have been there right from the start.

But sooner or later, you have to pick your jaw up off the floor, dust yourself off, and take a good hard inventory of the assets you DO have. And I have a lot of them. Gifts unavailable to the more traditionally socialized among us. Things do grow strange in the dark, but some of those mutations are beneficial. I’m a wizard with words, I have a rich imagination, I am hella smart. Ans so forth and so on.

Now if I could only fix this busted transmission that keeps all that from driving me forward, I would have all I need to go out there and conquer the world.

All I have to do is get the hell over myself already.

Any minute now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.