A mile and a half of unreclaimable swampland

That’s how my stomach feels right about now.

Funk soul brother.

It’s the usual. Freshly awoken, feel like cfrap, life goes on. I will feel better soon, although I reserve the right to say  “not soon enough'”.

“Not soon enough. ”

As a result, I do not have a lot on my mind right now. At least, not much in the way of thoughts coherent enough to put into words. So I really have no idea what to blog about right now. hopefully something will come to me.

I really love cucumber.

To me, cucumber is the watermelon of vegetables, and I absolutely ADORE watermelon. Have since I was a wee sprog.

My mother likes to tell the story of my introduction to watermelon. I was very young – barely up off the floor – and I had to be coaxed into trying it because, you have to admit, watermelon looks kind of weird.

but eventually, she and my babysitter Betty talked me into it, and it was love at first bite. I sat there under the table with my slice of watermelon and alternated between taking bites and going “mmmm!” very loudly.

That must have been cute. At first.

Gah, it’s so hard to concentrate. It’s like trying to juggle and hold on to your helium filled balloon at the same time. The slightest break in my attention and my mind floats off into the sky and I have to yank it back down to reality by its string all over again.

It just happened again.

Oh well, I shouldn’t worry so much about such things. As long as I rotate back to reality now and then, the writing gets done. I might not be at my most coherent at the moment but I can still string the words together for you nice people.

But I will definitiely be doing today'[s entry in two parts. There is no way I have enoughb rocket fuel to get me all the way to 1000 words in one sitting right now. I need like, three or four more hours of asleep and I plan to get them as soon as I am done with part 1.

Heck, maybe after a good nap, I willl actually have something to write about.

I have a vague feeling that my dreams have become darker and more disturbed lately. A vague feeling is all I have, though. I have not remembered my dreams mcuh for a very long time now, and I used to remember them fairly frequently.

I wonder what’s up with THAT.

While I ponder that, please enjoy this musical interlude.

And now it’s progressed to my starting to nod off when my mind wanders. Definitely a sign of sleep deprivation. They are called “microsleeps’ and it’s how your brain cope with getting far too little sleep.

It basically forces the issue. You sleep for a few moments whether you want to or not.

And if it happebns fast enough, you don’t even know it happened.

Which can be bad if you happen to be driving at the time.

Well that’s my 500. See you on the flipflop.


It’s three hours later and I feel a lot more human.

And I am doing something I almost never do. Something bold, something exciting, something that will tqake your breath away with its groundbreaking audacity.

I’m having a between meal snack. 

Okay, now calm down. Calm down. Remember to breathe. here, breathe into this paper bag. That’s it. Thaaaaaats iiiiit.

OKnow.Are weready to go on? Good.

SEriouslyh though, patient readers know that I almost never eat between meals. It’s a habit from back when I barely had enough money to feed myself and over time it has turned into a compulsion that I mindlessly follow for no reason.

We have plenty of food.I’m not going to starve if I increase the amount I eat by around twenty five percent. I can afford to buy that much more of my snacky type foods.

And yet, I had to struggle with myself just to get to the point where I would eat absolutely anything between meals. Even things paid for by our collective Costco purchases are a no go area according to my ferocious compulsions.

The result is that if I get hungry between meals, there is nothuing I can do but try to put it out of my mind as I suffer in silence.

This is not consistent with my freshly adopted “maximize my happiness” philosophy, and so it has to go.

On a broader scale, I think this compulsive self-denial leads to a lot more than mere hunger in me. I think my whole personality is focused around blocking out the 99 percent of reality that I feel I cannot have in order to hyper-concentrate on the things that I trust to be available to me no matter what.

This is the same pattern that drives all forms of addiction. even relatively mild ones like mine. The focus of the addiction – be it video games or crack cocaine – looms ever larger in the addict’s mind and drives out all other sources of pleasure and reward.

Luckily for me, it’s impossible to develop a high level of tolerance for video games so they will not lead me to the ultimate deadly cul-de-sac of needing to take a fatally high dose of them in order to not feel like I am dying.

But it should be noted that my other addiction, food, causes Type 2 diabetes precisely by raising my body’s tolerance for its own insulin.

So I am not exactly out of the woods there.

Anyhow. I think I have spent a lot of time very, very closed off to all that life has to offer. I did it because I thought that the only thing that can come from thinking about things that you want but cannot have is making myself miserable.

And that’s true to an extent. But only if your sense of what you can and cannot have is based on reality.

Mine is not. Depression has had its finger on tghe scale for a really long time and so I cannot trust my sense of what I can and cannot have.

To me, that means that the next thing is for me to explore my boundaries and see whether or not they represent reality or the dark delusions of the depressed mind.

How will I do that? Dunno. Try stuff, I guess. New stuff. Cool stuff. Whatever seems to be within my ability to stretch.

And maybe I will get burned more often than not, but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is figuring out what makes me happy, and then doing that a lot.

I just want to be happy. Everything else is negotiable. Everything else is method.

And I don’t give a shit about method. All I care about is results.

And the result I am looking for is a happier me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

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