Your regularly schedule blogging will be resumed after these messages.

First, my deepest apologies for not telling you that there would be no blog entry for Sunday. I was at VCON.

I will pause a moment while you get over the pain.

Secondly,  I have to warn you that I am going to be doing the National Novel Writing Contest this year, and that means that this space will be filled with my daily 2000 words^[1] of whatever the heck I end up writing.

No rules. No plans. No restrictions. I am going full Douglas Adams this time. I’m going to write with such wild abandon that the English language files a restraining order.

Anyhow, that’s my warning. I might also do some of my more usual type of blogging, if I have any energy left.

But the main thing is that this space will go crazy as of tomorrow.

I’m going crazy and taking you all along for the ride!

And now, back to the usual mental meanderings.

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Bear with me, foilks, because I have no idea where this is going.

I’ve had this feeling lately that I am slowly becoming aware of the true core of the evil inside me known as depression. Like some foul and fetid beast one fights at the end of a video game, it is finally lifting up its mighty head and making itself vulnerable to my sniping its fucking brains out.

That won’t be an end to my problems.  I will still have decades of toxins to purge from my psychological bloodstream. Forty years of depression do not disappear overnight.

But it mighjt, at least, stop the production of new toxins. Or at least slow it down.

The secret now is to pull back and let it emerge without a hint of danger for it to suspect. That’s how hunting works : you prey should feel totally safe till the moment it dies.

That’s not just more effective, it’s also more humane. It goes from safe to dead so fast that there is time for neither pain no panic.

It’s almost beautiful, in a very sick way.

In a sense, he said switching metaphors with his usual disregard. it feels like I am about to throw up. And that’s good. Throwing up is a good, healthy, normal, positive reaction to invasive bodily toxins. Throwing up makes a very clear distinction between what belongs in the body and what has to go. Between what is me, and what is merely something that I happened to ingest along the way.

I say this more to myself than you, of course. I inherited my mother’s nausea resistance, and so “letting it happen” is a factor for me, whether the act is metaphorical or literal.

And I think you’d agree that taking the whole self-control thing so far that you are overriding your urge to vomit is taking things a tad too far.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the paradox of self-control and the inhuman level of it I demand of myself lately.

The paradox revolves around the fact that by trying to control oneself past a natural and healthy point, one actually loses control. All the suppressed natural reactions and the patently absurd pressures that build within oneself as a result enbd up play merry havok with one’s psyche, and so long as they remain repressed by a far too brittle and rigid superego. you will never actually be in control of yourself.

I think I may have accidentally cured Britishness somewhere in that big ol sentence.

My point is that self-control is a dynamic rather tha a fixed process. You can’t just set static limits then enforce them, especially if said limits are impossibly strict. The only true route to healthy self-control is to have a fixed result in mind but to do whatever it takes to maintain that result, including letting some things take care of themselves without your micromanagement.

I’ve veered into intellectualism again, haven’t I? Explaining something rather than expressing something. In love with the sound of my own virtual voice. Sigh.

I feel like something is rising within me. That’s what I am getting at. And I am perfectly happy to just watch what happens, knowing I will only intervene if things go really wrong. Otherwise, I will sit back and watch the mental fireworks show.

Not unlike the real one happening as I type this. I swear, I will never get used to the fact that Halloween means fireworks around here.

Where I come from, fireworks are for July 1 and that’s it.

And I am not, in any way, objecting. Fireworks are freaking awesome. We can write on the SKY with FIRE. That’s inherently awe-inspiring and appeals to both the strong effect sky imagery has on me and my latent pyromania.

All I am saying is that I have lived in this region for 18 years, and I still haven’t gotten used to it. So I think it is fair to say that it is not going to happen.

Vcon was fun! As always. It was a stripped-back version that ran only two days instead of the usual three because of a gap in budget and personnel, but it was still hella fun and I felt great coming out of it.

It’s honestly the place where I am the most extroverted all year.

And then, when I had to return to reality, post-convention depression sank in. It’s a lot like post-Xmas depression. But I have been working hard to make sure it doesn’t turn into regular depression.

So I fight the waves until the day I finally learn to surf them.

I get the feeling that I will have to do a lot of relaxing and not taking things so seriously before I get there.

But hey man…if it swells, ride it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.