That song has been stuck in my head all day, so I decided to share it with you.

That’s but one of his youth-oriented songs that must be pretty interesting to see him do live these days, seeing as he’s really Vincent Damon Furnier born on February 4th of 1948, which makes him 70 years old this year.

But it doesn’t bother me. I never really felt I was part of the demographic to which said songs were addressed, so the fact that a very old dude is singing them doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

The songs are what is important to me, and they stay the same.

Anyhow, back to Mount Blogistan. My rage continues to fade into the background once more. I am going to let it, it served its purpose. It burned through a lot of the accumulated garbage from my hospital stay and just life in general, and now it can go back to where it came from to wait for another trash run.

I still produce way more emotion than I express. Every day I express my feeling a little better, and I have come a long long way from when I was so alienated from myself that I felt like I didn’t even exist, but I still have a long way to go before output matches input.

And then I can truly get to work on my extensive backlog of underexpressed emotions. I am working on those now as well, of course. Any time I talk about my past, that’s pretty much what I am doing, whether it’s in therapy or in this space. Spelunking in the icy caves of frozen emotion, looking for stuff to thaw out.

There’s a lot of stuff in there. My heart has not been open at all for many years. And as we all know, you’re frozen when your heart’s not open.

There’s some real wisdom in there, Veronica Electronica. Thanks.

In a way, I wish I could just hit the emergency release valve and flush all those unexpressed emotions out of my system for good. It’s not like I want to have to wade through the mires of my unearthly emotional life in search of emotions that are ready to be expressed. I don’t want to face the mile high stack of emotional invoices awaiting me in my psychological “in” tray.  It would be awesome if all of that could just dry up and blow away so I can start over.

But when I really think about it, that idea is creepy as fuck. It’s creepy the way a lobotomy is creepy, because like it or not, all those unexpressed emotions are a part of me and to flush them out would be to cut off a part of myself just to make life easier.

To hell with that. Part of my self-awakening (as in, awakening to the existence of my self, my inner being. my identity) has been learning to value my selfhood and act to preserve and protect it instead of more or less completely ignore it and its needs.

I suppose there have been times in my life where, in one of my more self-congratulatory moments, that I was selfless. Unhindered by petty ego demands. Able to transcend the grubby little ignoble concerns of others and focus entirely on the truth.

A notion that is, ironically, quite gratifying to the ego of the self I was denying existed.

On a certain extremely abstruse level, that is hilarious.

Now that I have escaped that particularly peculiar and logically ludicrous form of denial, I can see it as part of the life-destroying chill factor that has kept me down and depressed (but remarkably crisp and fresh) for all of my adult life.

In fact, a big part of my journey of discovery lately has been realizing how much damage I did to myself out of the naive arrogance of thinking I knew better than everyone else and that meant that the things others do as part of their psychological development into adults were strictly optional for me, and I could choose to completely disregard them if I didn’t see the point of them in practical terms.

Like I said before, pity those who are smart enough to be that stupid.

I mean, the arrogance of it all. I assumed that if I couldn’t see the point of something, that meant it had no point and I wasn’t interested in it.

As opposed to there being a very good point to whatever it was but it’s a point that only makes sense once you are doing the thing, and there is nobody around articulate enough to just explain that to me so I have no choice but to learn by trying.

But I didn’t do that. Because I thought I knew better. That’s what really bothers me now. I came to broad conclusions without even gathering any evidence first.

That is so blatantly un-empircal!

Then again, what can you expect when a kid with serious emotional issues and way more intelligence than he knows what to do with is left socially isolated and alone to more or less raise himself?

It’s not exactly a recipe for good long term decision making, no matter how bright I was.

And really, all that pooh-pooing of what the other kids did was really just a tin halo stapled onto my crippling burden of anxiety.

Looking back at my childhood, I was scared almost all the time. Bullying will do that to a kid. I dealt with enormous anxiety all the time.

To me, that was normal. That was life as I knew it. So it has taken a long time and quite frankly waaaay more evidence than should have been necessary for me to even realize that what was happening was anxiety and that having so much anxiety all the time is not normal nor is it inescapable.

And I had it at Kwantlen and I had it at VFS too. So this is not ancient history. It’s been my pattern pretty much my whole life. All the time I was in school, especially between classes, I was walking around in a thick haze of anxiety bordering on terror.

Jesus, no wonder I am socially awkward. All that anxiety takes up a lot of mental real estate. Doesn’t exactly leave a lot of room for sophisticated social interactions.

Believe it or not, this is a major breakthrough for me. Finally consciously recognizing that I was having a more or less constant low grade panic attack the whole time I was in Kwantlen and VFS and pretty much every other form of schooling I have every done.

Getting to know one’s emotions is… complicated.

But I have to admit…. it’s also kind of fun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.