Well I guess it’s time to fill my daily quota of shrapnel pulled out of my tortured soul and fed into the insatiable void of screaming madness at the center of my being.
Still working on that. It’s probably some kind of chemical imbalance.
Not really feeling the words right now. My mind is agitated and I am having trouble staying focused on the page. I keep wandering off on long, rambling mental tangents that lead me over hill and dale then suddenly remembering I was like… doing something. Wasn’t I?
I have never needed drugs in order to trip.
I just have to think about stuff.
Haven’t been back to Second Life since last we met.
I know I will go back at least one more time to check out the furry scene there. My gut feeling is that I will find a lot of neat stuff but no people.
According to one furry I know, it’s possible that most of the people from Second Life have migrated to VR Chat now.
That makes sense but sucks. I understand VR Chat is a lot like Second Life but more sophisticated. It’s clearly the next evolution of the idea.
But not having VR gear, I dunno if I can access it. The name says no but I would imagine that if one wants a virtual community to thrive, having it be usable only by the still relatively small number of people with VR sets.
Just looked it up. You do NOT need a VR set to use it. So I am going to check it out once I am done with this section of the day’s bloggening.
I will still go back to Second Life one more time just to check out the furry action. If I don’t, it will hang there as an unfinished task in my mind.
Compulsive completion and all that jazz.
But if VR Chat is where the action is, that’s where I will go.
It’s kind of ironic how I live in this zone between the need for attention (strong) and my social anxiety (also strong).
It supports the notion that I am, in a sense, an artificial introvert. Or, put less poetically but more accurately, I am not naturally as much as an introvert as I have been due to my social anxiety and depression.
I like this idea. Means there is hope for me yet.
And it matches the evidence. I’ve always been a ham. I love performing for people and showing off. Under the right circumstances, I love having an audience and being the center of attention. I am endlessly curious about people and want to hear their stories. I crave affection and attention and affirmation.
A hermit I ain’t. Not deep down. My demons might have chased me into this cave and I might have sealed the door to keep them out, but this is not my natural habitat.
I think my natural cycle would oscillate organically between extrovert excursions and introverted retreats to recharge my social batteries.
But right now, I need to retreat because I have a sinus headache.
More after the break.
I don’t belong here
Mandatory song reference :
Felt good to get that off my chest.
Seriously. Fuck those guys.
Anyhow, that’s not the sense of feeling like you don’t belong I am going to talk about tonight. Tonight, I will talk about where in a way I do feel I belong.
Spoiler : it’s not reality.
I was thinking about the Die Hard movies and that got me thinking about Die Hard 2 and it occurred to me that if just once in my life, I got to say “YIppie ki yi yay, motherfuckers” then take a drag on a cigar while something evil exploded, that would be a peak experience. I could die happy after that.
Hell, I might die OF happiness after that.
But that got me to thinking, well, why? Why would it be this apotheosis level amazing event to do a bit from a movie I like? What, exactly, am I getting out of it?
That’s when it struck me that one of the things I would get out of it would be that for once, my two parallel realities would align : the real world, and the world of media properties that I and most of my other Generation X types have in our heads.
And I had never consciously realized how much of my mental terrain came from media before that moment.
Like I have said many times before, I was raised by television. It’s a well known fact.
But now I realize the real weight of that because it means that so much of my childhood was spent watching TV and reading and such that the vast majority of the childhood experiences that laid the foundation for my personality were virtual.
When other kids were out have real experiences, I was reading, watching TV, and playing video games. All my experiences were from media. I am, in a deep sense, mostly made of media I consumed.
No wonder I have such a weak hold on reality.
I’ve spent so little time in it.
And obviously that continues to this day. I spend all my time in front of this computer. The closest I get to real world experience is talking as a fake fox with other fake animals in a text based environment.
That’s pretty unreal, to be honest.
Plus, there’s hanging out with my real world friends, and thank goodness for that. It is what keeps me sane because it gives me a reason to stay attached to the real world instead of disappearing into the computer like I have joined the Borg.
That reminds me. I was going to try to spend more time outside so I can ground myself in reality and make myself feel much more secure.
Funny how that slipped my mind.
Maybe that’s why I end up spending so much time just laying in bed doing nothing except, I suppose, letting my thoughts process without new input.
That’s my brain forcing me to stop consuming media.
But that’s not enough, I need to get out of my head entirely and spend some time in the real world so I can ground myself and no longer feel like I am constantly dangling over the precipice of madness and catatonia.
Problem is that I am so much more at home in the media saturated world of my mind.
The sad truth is, that’s the place where I feel like I belong.
Kinda pitiful, ain’t it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.