I ran out of sleeping pills.

Which means I have not slept.

That’s the main symptom of running out of one’s sleep meds these days. There aren’t any psychosis level hallucinations or other crazy ass withdrawal symptoms like there was in the bad old days of Valium and other barbiturates.

Ya just don’t sleep. At all. You can’t.

And at first that is no big deal. After all. I don’t feel tired. If anything, I feel pretty good. Almost chipper, really.

But I have been through periods of low sleep and/or low quality sleep and I know that this is merely the honeymoon period and if this goes on for more than a day I will start getting that feeling of shiny, shiny blankness in my mind that will grow over time and which scares the hell out of me for reasons I do not fully comprehend.

It’s like the bigger it gets, the more of me it displaces in my mind. And if it gets big enough, I start feeling like I don’t know I really am any more.

Am I the person who normally lives in this outsized skin of mine?

Or am I the shiny, shiny, shiny nothingness in my mind?

That’s some spooky shit. I should use that in something.

Anyhow, I am hoping I will last through FRED and hanging out with my friends afterwards before my brain gets too wonky and it gets hard to concentrate on what is in front of me and my mind wanders off somewhere without leaving a forwarding address.

Hey, maybe this would be a good time for me to write some weird poetry!

I’ll give it a shot :

shapes slide over each other
like a kaleidoscopic whirlwind
trying to teach you the alphabet
Of a language you do not speak

On the hilltop shines a beacon
Its light is so very bright, but oh so cold
It is abstraction in its purest form
Without reference or content

Its light exerts a certain pressure on the mind
Like a high pressure hose blasting barnacles off the hull
Of that messy stack of lies and excuses
You call your mind

And as the cleaning continues
The reason for it disappears
And now it’s just a sensation
That pleases as it kills

Hmmm. Not bad, I guess, but it feels messy and ungainly. Like I was was fumbling toward something – some figment in my mind – but got lost.

I suppose if I kept writing that crap long enough, I might figure it out.

But the mood has passed. I am no longer interested in freeform poeticism. It seemed like a fun thing to try but now I am bored of it.

I guess I don’t have what it takes for abstract experimentation. I am too much of an impatient pragmatist for that. I want to be getting something done, not just masturbating with my muse.

If and when I try something like that again, I will go in with at least some sort of notion of a destination or a subject or at least some really arresting starting image.

Otherwise. I just get bored and sick of myself.

More after the break.

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Finally finished a tough fight in Divinity : Original Sin 2 (aka DOS2).

It’s pretty much all tough fights now that I have finally arrived at the city of Arx. The game no longer seems interested in giving me mid-level encounters that are not too difficult so I can build up my characters.

Or maybe the problem is that I am just not that good at the game and it’s finally caught up with me. The game has been getting steadily more difficult and I didn’t make it all the way up the escalator.

But I swear there was a period in between the game seeming way too hard when I started playing it and the game seeming too hard when I play it now where I was in my Goldilocks zone and doing quite well in the game.

How I miss those halcyon days of about a week ago.

Got FRED tonight, in a bit less than an hour. That leaves me with a bit less than 45 minutes to finish the day’s blogging.

No problem. I work fast and I do good work. My rough drafts are better than most people’s finished work and for the most part, I do it by instinct.

Which is pretty amazing, if you think about it. I have a lot of objectively impressive abilities that somehow never add up to a better life for me.

And I find myself looking back to that day when I decided, quite firmly, that intellectual elitism was not for me and that I was an egalitarian at heart.

And I wonder if I made the right choice.

I mean sure, the intellectual elitism might have turned me into a smug prick who loved always being the smartest guy in the room and liked to rub people’s face in it as he effortlessly dominated lesser beings and sold his talents to the highest bidder….

…but I might have been happy. Or at least functional.

That nightmare version of myself looks pretty good to me right now. At least I would have money. And self-esteem. At least I would have made something of myself instead of isolating myself from the world for my entire adult life. At least I would have something to show for my 46 years of life on Earth.

Instead, I am the world’s oldest tadpole. My life never got started and still I wait.

Wait for what? Death, I guess. At the very least, that’s all I see in my future.

Just one long slow escalator ride down into the grave. And my tombstone will read “Here lies Michael John Bertrand. He was around for a while, I guess. ”

And I feel so very frustrated by this. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, with powers hitherto unknown by science, and all I can do is play video games all day because no matter how hard I turn the key, the engine just will not start.

It makes me wabnt to scream bloody murder into the night.

And who knows. Maybe I will.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.