My mood is better today.

Yesterday it was pretty dark. Not for particular reason I can think of, just that part of my long mood cycle I guess.

I suppose that’s another thing I need to get used to about myself : I’m moody. And my moods don’t necessarily proceed logically from anything in my life.

And that’s frustrating.

My overly logical and controlling mind wants everything to proceed logical via a known and controllable cause and effect and has a very hard time accepting that some thing happen “just cause”.

I mean, they have a cause on the fundamental scientific level. Everything does. Presumably a Clarke level alien could track my brain chemicals and activity and show me exactly why my mood shifts like it does.

But I sure as heck don’t know.

It does feel like a cycle, though. A process. Some deep part of me is on a long loop kind of like a conveyor belt in a factory, and the factory is smelting and refining me as I pass through it, and even though the belt is very long, I am still keenly away both that I am going to end up back at the beginning again and that I am not really getting anywhere.

I still feel like a passenger in life. A spectator. A tagalong. Life is something that happens to other people, not me. I’m just this strange and unique creature who is always on the outside looking in and who has no idea what it’s like to actually be apart of things.

But perhaps there is strength to be found in my strange life in suspended animation. I certainly have an extremely unique point of view and some very deep insights into how things work and how they SHOULD and COULD work.

And I am passionately interested in what is going on in the world, and I feel like I could make a valuable contribution to the public discourse if I could only get over myself.

I’m working on it.

At least I think I am. I dunno. Maybe this life of mine really is a conveyor belt and the unhealthy part of my mind has gotten very good at creating the illusion of progress while keeping me “safe” by making sure I don’t get anywhere or change anything.

I’m definitely of two minds about nearly everything.

There’s the healthy, sane, expansive, confident, upbeat side of me that can’t wait to go out into the world and find fun things to do and cool people to meet.

That’s the side of me that really just wants to go play with the other kids.

But the other part of me is still that traumatized little monkey who was raised in isolation and then introduced to the other monkeys and instantly freaked the fuck out.

My isolated life has made me ill suited to go play with the other kids. The sheer volume and density of the fear involved is staggering. I had to learn, at way too young an age, that my only safety lay in nobody noticing me because I stayed hidden away.

And the only place I was truly safe was alone, at home, in my bedroom. That was the only place I could let my guard down and relax the hypervigilance and feel, well, as safe as I am capable of feeling, anyway.

Even in here, the permanently panicking little animal inside me never truly relaxes. That’s the part of me that has been hiding deep in the darkest recesses of my mind and calling the shots from in there with the cold yet crazed calculation of a mighty villain.

He’s just trying to be safe.

But I don’t know what it would take for him to realize he IS safe. Has been for a very long time. The things he fears so much are just ghosts of the distant past.

But he’s afraid to relax and let go.

Because that’s when they GET you.

And that would be the worst thing possible.

More after the break.

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Everything is fine

That’s what I am telling myself and sending it as deep as it can go.

Everything is OK now. I can relax. That scared little animal inside me can finally calm down, lay down, and have a nice long rest.

We’ve made it home safely. In fact, we’ve been home for a very long time.

And we have nothing to fear in the big wide world but our fears themselves. We are perfectly capable of handling whatever life throws at us.

And even if we get overwhelmed and freak out again, so what? Hang in there and wait for a little while and it will go away.

Anxiety is not destiny, for fuck’s sake. It’s just the result of a malformed adrenal response being triggered by innocuous things and if I just hang in there rather than fleeing I will see how meaningless it is.

And there’s always Xanax.

At this point, I feel like what remains of my skinsuit of fear is really just a kind of chemical residue remaining in my system entirely shorn of any cognitive justification.

So much for the cognitive behavioural therapy approach. According to it, if I change my thinking I will change how I feel!

Yeah right. Fuck off, CBT.

Ahem. Anyhow, knowing that all this fear holding me back is basically biochemical bullshit does help me push through it.

Sure, the alarms will go off, but I don’t have to listen to them. I know they are meaningless and represent nothing but a broken warning system.

I feel like I am building up the strength and will to make a big leap into something new. Like making my way onto YouTube again.

I look at my YouTube account and see over 300 videos there and I realize that I am perfectly capable of creating content daily.

Only now it would be much more well produced and way, way funnier.

I could really rock the YouTube world but I have to get started and established first. Make a “workflow” that makes creating videos as seamless and friction free as I can.

Any minute now. I swear to God. It’s coming.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Therapy Thursday thang today.

Talked about a lot of different stuff, as usual. As patient readers have no doubt figured out, I am not one to stick to a particular topic for long.

That’s just not how my mind works. Following the connections between things is so much more interesting to me.

I get bored staying in one place, intellectually speaking.

One of the things that came up was my being a somewhat high strung individual who could really use someone with a strong, steady, patient hand I can hold in order to keep myself grounded when my anxiety starts to spin up.

He’d have to be one heck of a guy. A real solid citizen type, with a powerful manly vibe and the forbearance to deal with me when I’m irrational.

But mostly I deal with myself, or not at all.

That’s another thing that came up : how incredibly emotionally isolated my life has been. I have never had anyone I could truly open up to, which is why I can only do it in the form of this blog. So I have no experiece of being emotionally intimate with anyone.

Not even with my friends, whom I love dearly. I am closer to Joe, Julian, and Felicity than I have ever been with anybody in my life and it’s still not very close.

Not that anyone is doing anything wrong. I am honestly a hard guy to get close to. It’s way easier for other people to open up to me than vice versa.

Like I said to Doc Costin today, that’s what would make me a good therapist but not necessarily a good person to get close to.

I honestly have no idea what will happen if anyone gets closer to me than my usual cheerful and sensitive and inobvious arms-length distance. I certainly want that to happen but I might freak out in a lot of different ways because someone is violating boundaries I didn’t even know were there.

These are the sorts of things normal people figure out in their teens.

I feel like such a freak.

We also discussed my feeling of weakness of character, which like a typical therapist he had to argue with me over.

I wasn’t saying I was permanently weak, Doc, I was saying I feel weak. Currently. I am busily chipping away at the emotional numbness and layer of icy fear that keeps me that way but for now I feel a distinct lack of character in myself.

Hence my general lack of action or determination. I am incapable of making a decision and then following through on it, especially if it takes sustained effort.

The best I can do is occasionally generate a wave of enthusiasm and ride that wave at least until my completion compulsion takes over and forces me to finish.

But the moment that wave crashes, it’s over, and God knows when I will have the wherewithal to generate another one again.

The sort of decisive will that would let me explore the world and expand my life, even only as far as to look for new ways to have fun, is alien to me. I can imagine what it would be like to have it but so far I have been unable to find it in myself.

So I remain hemmed in by fear and going absolutely nowhere. Filled to the brim with talent and genius but with far too weak an id to make use of it.

I live in a vault of riches I can’t bring myself to spend.

And that sucks.

More after the break.

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Tater tots and taco bites

That’s what’s for supper tonight.

The tater tots (or “tasti-taters”, because there’s no way the people at Ore/Ida can copyright the word “tater”) are something I’ve been getting for around a month now. I confess that I am possibly a little too fond of them as I seem to make a little more each time I prepare them,

But ever since I learned that it only takes 3.5 minutes in the microwave to prepare them, I have been hooked.

Hopefully, my Jardiance can handle the extra carbs.

The taco bites are from those neato people at Michelina’s.

Who happen to have one of my favorite ads ever.

The taco bites are meh but I think that’s because I overcooked them. Next time I will nuke them for 2 minutes flat, not 2 and a half.

The result was that the outer shell is a lot darker brown that the ones on the package and the taco meat and cheese filling is all shriveled up on one side of the inside of the shell and hence kind of dry and unsatisfying.

So I will definitely be trying them again in the future.

Maybe not for a while, though, because I have so many other Michelina’s single serving entrees to try.

They really seem to have nailed the formula, because the entrees are around $2.50 each and even I can afford that.

In fact, for around $10/week, I could have my four “home made” dinners a week covered. The other three days supper is either McD’s (Tuesday and Friday) or Denny’s (Sunday). Take out the one night a week I tend to order in, and now it’s $7.50.

Then I would only have to worry about a side dish, and even then not with all of them. A lot of them are meaty pasta dishes, and those do not call for any more carbs.

So yeah. I think I will be eating chez Michelina for a while. I was reluctant to go full Michelina’s at first because change but now I can see that it’s no big deal.

I do have chicken burgers to use up though, so maybe I will only get two Michelina’s a a week for now.

Thus concludes this fascinating analysis of the feeding habits of the urban Fruvous.

That’s the only kind. 😛

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In a dark and brooding mood right now. Dunno why.

Probably just my ever-fluctuating brain chemicals. Or maybe I am coming down with some kind of bug, who knows.

But right now I have a mild headache, my joints are aching, I’m a little dizzy because I just sat down, and overall I am just feeling crummy.

I really should invest in some genetic Tylenol for situations like this. A mild analgesic seems like the perfect thing for my current condition.

And, like I’ve said, I should go back on antihistamines. That would probably help with a whole variety of symptoms given the nature of a histamine response.

Oh well. I’ll taken a Naproxen, that should help, at least with the joint pain.

Today’s not been much so far. Spent a lot of it asleep or just drowsing in bed letting my thoughts do whatever they need to do.

I guess I’ve been feeling bummed out all day, now that I think about it. I must have hit another iceberg of emotion that needs thawing as part of my healing process and that is going to burden my emotional regulation circuits for a while.

And they’re not that robust to begin with.

There are times when the sheer scope of my therapeutic task makes it seem insurmountable. My development has been so damaged and deficient that it’s occurred to me that a normal life might just be out of reach for me.

Certainly the sun has set on any chance I had at traditional employment.

But I’ve known traditional employment was probably not for me for a long time. There’s no way I could survive submitting resumes and doing job interviews, even if it was all online. Not when I know that, objectively, they’d be crazy to hire me.

I mean, I know I would be an amazing employee, but from their point of view, I’m a 51 year old mental patient with no job history to speak of.

Why take a chance on that?

So I would need some kind service like the March of Dimes to open doors for me, I think. They have special relationships with certain kind and understanding employers willing to take a risk on someone like me.

Eh, but fuck it. I’d rather get back into freelancing.

Which would be a pain in the ass because not only do I have to jump through a lot of annoying hoops to return to active status on UpWork, I would also have to have a smartphone which I currently do not.

I know, I know, it’s time I get with the millennium. And it doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition, I could just get a pay as you go phone and it would be a lot cheaper than a monthly plan because I would hardly ever use it.

Don’t know that I want to have the temptation to play games in bed again, though. I would have to put it somewhere where it’s not easy to get to when I want to lay down for a little while.

Being me is complicated sometimes.

I would honestly be better off with a flip phone. Except that would be useless for the main thing I want a cell phone for, which is to be able to do things requiring a smartphone, like using various business’ apps.

Or signing back in to UpWork for fuck’s sake.

There must be other freelancing sites out there, maybe even one that makes allowances for phoneless freaks like myself.

I’ve slept so much better since my tablet died. I don’t want to go back to bouncing between playing games on my PC and playing games on my tablet.

And a lot of those tablet games were just manipulative time sinks anyhow.

Maybe I need a smartphone, but a really shitty one that can support a web browser and some really basic apps and that’s it.

Or maybe I just need to develop more self-discipline.

Nah. Technology is easier.

More after the break.

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To just be

I need to become sufficient unto myself.

This cancerous continuous crisis mode has to go. It causes so much internal stress and avoidance. I would be a much happier and healthier man if I could just… relax.

Which would mean overcoming my old enemy, the anti-action bias.

I’m still in the grips of the depressive delusion that I have an incredibly limited supply of energy and therefore must invest it very, very carefully or tragedy will ensue.

And I am all for the prudent deployment of limited resources, but it too can metastasize into something toxic and compulsive where what started off as cautious investment instead become emotional constipation and reflexive self-denial, or worse.

I’m not preserving my energies, I am letting them rot on the vine. They are going to waste. It’s a use it or lose it situation and I am definitely losing it.

But it’s worse than that because not using it has more consequences that mere wastage. It leads to all kinds of frustration, anxiety, and neurosis from all those energies having nowhere to go but inward.

In order to just be, I must just do.

And deep down I know this. I’ve been saying that I need to do more in order to be happy in this space for decades now. But nothing ever changes.

That characteristic compulsion to hoard my energies (as if that’s even possible) still makes me very lazy.

Perhaps the real issue is reward. The anhedonia of depression makes you think that nothing you do except for the very high reward activities to which you are addicted can possibly be worth doing in terms of how rewarding you will find it.

Needing to expend a certain amount of your energies in order to be happy does not compute in such a stark equation, where everything is about trying to get the most reward from every tiny erg of expended effort.

From that benighted perspective, spending any energy without a HUGE return in reward is like pouring money down the drain.

I’d be better off if I took a page from the book of higher energy types and looked at my energies as a curse that I have to work hard to dispel before I can have any peace.

Or, if that’s too harsh, just see them as opportunities to have more fun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got another needle in the eye today.

My eye doctor, Doctor McKay, is trying a new drug on my eyes. Something called something like “Aleal”. He wants to see if it works better than the previous drug at reducing the swelling in my eyes.

As far as I can tell, the vision in my left eye is still way shittier than the vision in my right eye. But we shall see.

I didn’t even know I had this appointment today until around noon, when Julian told me of his plans to take me there today.

Thus I learned of it not only by surprise but by implication. I had to actually say, “so what you’re saying is I have another appointment today. ” to get the info.

I’d appreciate more warning next time, Julian. You can’t assume that just because you know about it, I know it too.

You know me, I’m clueless. And I know that my appointments are written down on the calendar so I don’t bother remembering them myself.

Please warn me in the future. And that means actually telling me that I have an appointment soon. I shouldn’t have to deduce it.

Anyhow, it of course hurt like fuck. In fact, it hurt more than it ever had before, I think because Doctor McKay didn’t quite nail the “straight in and out” insertion that I know from my insulin days is the best, least painful way to do an injection.

So in addition to the usual pain spike there was a bit of burning after and the needle was actually in my freaking eyeball for like an extra second.

Whatever. The pain is brief, if intense, so I can handle it. I can feel the spot where the needle went in but there’s no pain, just a slight strand of cold, presumably from where the freezing agent got into the injection site.

Oh sure, NOW the stuff fucking works.

Wait, I remember what I wanted to talk about : paranoia.

It started with this YouTube short. ^[1]

It features an intergenerational conversation where a Millennial or Gen Z is quizzing a Gen X type like myself about how our parents just let us go play in the neighborhood with no supervision and had no idea where we were and what we were doing until we came home around sunset.

In the skit, the Gen X’er says, “I don’t know, I guess we were just tougher and more street smart or things weren’t as bad back then whatever. ”

No, my Gen X bro, the only thing that changed is that parents became way, way more paranoid. And that started with us.

We raised our Millennial kids to believe that the world was awash in desperate perverts just looking for a chance to abduct and murder them.

And then we complained about how kids don’t play outside any more.

And it’s all bullshit. Random child abduction is an incredibly rare crime. Your kid is way more likely to get in a car crash or contract a disease than to ever be at risk for being snatched by some dude in a van.

It’s the same kind of ubiquitous paranoia that leads to women feeling unsafe on the streets and imagining the worst when some guy just happens to walk behind them.

It’s all incredibly unhealthy, on both a personal and a societal level, and it leads to so much baseless pain, fear, and suffering, and yet I know there’s nothing I can do about it.

It’s nearly impossible to fight something everyone believes, even if it’s delusional. It’s a truth that is far too hard to face for most people, so it’s just weirdos like me who can see the truth beyond the social illusion and realize it’s all bullshit.

I mean, imagine being a parent faced with the truth that you have been denying your child all kinds of freedom and healthy growth for no good reason.

And the same goes for women. Imagine knowing that you’ve suffered fear and anxiety based on threats that do not exist.

And that knowledge flies in the face of what everybody else believes.

So this pervasive and perverse paranoia probably ain’t going anywhere.

I mean, the real, safe world is so much less exciting.

More after the break.

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More about paranoia

The paranoia of which I speak is much more than a mere sociological anomaly.

Actual, real world policy decisions are based on this communal myth of a far more dangerous and exciting world.

It all revolves around making people feel better about their normal, boring, ordinary lives without them having to do anything.

If the world is filled with criminals after your stuff, it makes every single completely ordinary moment spent safe at home becomes a triumph over the forces of evil who would gladly slit your throat in the night.

Not to mention how this belief implicitly enhances the value of your possessions. This is very important because it forestalls those uncomfortable and confusing feelings where you can’t remember why you spent so much money on these things in the first place.

Turns out getting them was a lot more fun than having them.

It’s like how shitting on unemployed people makes people feel like they are somehow noble and rugged and self-reliant just for having a job exactly like 90 percent plus of the rest of the population.

And all without having to do or change or sacrifice anything at all.

Turns out there’s a lot of money to be made in making people feel special for being just like everybody else.

It’s like we are all part of this cult of paranoia that uses this sense of pervasive threat to conceal the thudding dullness of our ordinary lives.

If people truly opened their eyes and looked outside their lives to the much larger world outside their front doors, they might become discontent with their servitude and start to question the very valuations upon which modern life is based.

Like… if acquiring stuff has no meaning and adds no lasting value to our lives, what then? What do we do with all that money that demands to be spent? Spending money is seen as the primary way of acquiring happiness and so if we can’t make ourselves happy via consumerist means, what else is there?

Spirituality, of course. But modern society does a very poor choice of leading us there.

What we all truly need is a path to meaning and getting in touch with our true values.

But who’s going to sell us that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] I know, normally I would embed the video, but some videos just do not let you do that for some reason. Pisses me off. [[1]

Not where I come from, anyhow.

Back home in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, March is, at best, maybe early spring. The common folk belief is that we will get one last blizzard on or around St. Patrick’s Day and after that, it might be very early spring.

Like, grass poking through the snow. That early.

April is probable spring. Odds are heavily in favour of all the snow being gone before the end of the month, most likely before the middle of the month.

May is definitely spring. Not the first month of summer, spring. My birthday is May 19 and it has almost always been full on spring by then, with the birds singing in the trees and pollen floating on the breeze and everything springing forth into new life.

And clearly, those expectations are a permanent setting in me because I have lived here in the GVRD for 27 years and I still find the idea of March being the start of spring to be annoying, like being woken up too early when the clocks change.

Not that I mind the weather turning nicer this early in the year. I am glad that I am probably going to put my fan heater away till fall soon. That little fan saved my frozen butt this year but I doubt I will need it again any time soon.

Dunno where I will stash it, but it’s got to be someplace where I will see it regularly so I will remember both that I have it and that I know where it is.

These are the things you have to do when you know you are absentminded AF and need all the help you can get when it comes to not mentally misplacing things.

For example, somewhere in this room is a self-thrusting vibrator. Came in a fancy carrying case and everything. Thought it would be the answer to my big bad bottom bitch dreams when I ordered it.

But then I tried it out (uninserted) and the somewhat Cronenbergian horror of what it looked like as it thrust (it has… skin….) and put it away somewhere and then completely forgot about it.

And that thing cost me almost eighty bucks! You’d think that, and the promise of scratching my bitch itch but good, would be reason enough to keep it in mind.

But no. I am a strange and silly creature and nothing I do makes sense.

For another example, there is my light exposure system meant to counteract my possible Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) that I used exactly once, thought, “Yeah, that feels like it might help. ” then put it away and never used it again.

It is so hard for me to develop new habits. It takes a sustained, concentrated effort to keep myself from just going back to my standard existence.

I’ve been in this rut for a very long time and it’s pretty damned deep by now. So deep that it’s hard for me to even remember that there’s a world outside it, and that all I have to do to get out of this rut is to decide, once and for all, to leave it behind.

But its walls keep me safe. Maybe. I dunno.

It’s kind of hard to know if your “safety” measures are working when they keep you so “safe” from the outside world that you don’t even know if the threat(s) still exist.

The odds are heavily in favour of the things I do to be “safe” are worse then redundant and are actually doing me a lot more harm than good.

Which means I’m not safe at all. I’m just not scared because the evils and dangers I am dealing with are hyper familiar and thus fail to stimulate a fear response.

This is fine.

More after the break.

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A touch of urf

Still getting that little stab of dizziness and nausea when I stop moving, and I have come to realize that I’ve also had too much stomach acid this whole time too.

And this worries me. I don’t want to end up with acid reflux, or worse. And I am curious as to why my stomach has been producing too much acid, or possibly not enough of the mucoid coating that normally keeps your stomach from digesting itself.

So if ever you’d wanted to know why stomach acids don’t dissolve you, now ya know.

I could invest in some antacids. I am sure there must be sugar free ones out there. Normally I am quite leery of antacids because when you have Irritable Bowel Syndrome like I do, putting something that fizzes as it neutralizes acid into your guts can lead to all kinds of complications.

Gassy foods can be a bad idea too, and for the same reason.

I think that it’s possible that my sinuses are part of the problem too. Sinus congestion can get backed up all the way to the inner ear and that might be where the dizziness and nausea are coming from, unrelated to the acidosis.

Standard caution here : I should probably takes this to Urgent Care. But I know I probably will not. That would be the practical, sensible, adult thing to do, and we hav established that I am none of those things.

Instead I will hold on and monitor the situation. In all probability, this will be yet another mysteriously transient illness that comes and goes like a thief in the night and leaves me to wonder what the fuck that was all about.

Who knows, maybe this all traces back to my being dehydrated yet again. I will test this theory out by hydrating well and seeing if it makes me feel better.

I dunno, though. My ear canals feel weirdly hot. Perhaps something is annoying them.

The real experiment I should be conducting is my going back on antihistamines and seeing if that cuts off all my inflammation at the source.

I mean, taking Aleve did help a bit. So inflammation might be a root problem.

And that would come from my allergies.

And I have been sneezing a little bit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Took a tumble earlier today.

Not a particularly bad one, but not a gentle bouncing on my king sized bed either.

I was coming out of the bathroom with my full water glass in my hand when I stumbled over my smaller wastepaper basket and fell to my knees.

My knees are fine, thank God. Knock on wood. I think the only lasting effect on them is a tiny bit of mild carpet burn. Big whoop. I can handle that.

But imagine my shock when, around ten minutes after the incident, I discovered I was bleeding, and had bled a fair bit already.

There was a line of red streaming down the outer side of my left leg and at first I could not figure out where the hell it was coming from.

Bleeding is upsetting enough but bleeding from apparently nowhere is appalling.

Luckily, I am fairly good at keeping my head in emergencies such as these. So I set to mopping up the blood with Kleenex, and when it became clear that this was not getting the job done, I went to the bathroom and wetted a towel.

That worked. Once I had cleaned the area up some, I could at least see where the blood was coming from, but not from what.

The where is this spot three inches or so above the outside edge of my left knee, but I still have no idea what the heck happened because I have no idea how falling to my knees could create a wound above them.

I have a little acne in that area. Maybe a zit popped? I have no idea.

It’s stopped bleeding now and there’s a nasty looking gash there. Again, I have no idea how that got there.

But somehow the fall also shattered one side of my larger wastepaper basket, and so that might be a clue.

I could have gotten gashed by a sharp of plastic from the wastepaper basket. That would explain it, I guess.

I am looking forward to getting a shower soon, though I kind of messed that up too.

I ordered this thing called a cast cover that can protect the bandages on my feet from the water when I take a shower.

And for some reason, I assumed they would come in pairs. But I am pretty sure they do not. I am pretty sure when I finally open the package, there’s only going to be one of those things in there and I will have to pick which foot to protect.

The left one. It will be the left one. It’s the one with the much more serious wound that requires much more complicated bandaging because it’s right on the heel.

Terrible place for a wound. I would pretty much have to stay off my feet for like a month for it to have any chance of healing because every step I take rips it open again.

Not worth it.

Still, I feel kinda dumb about the cast cover issue. Of course they’re not sold in pairs. How often do people have two casts to cover?

Oh well. I am still adjusting to the realization that I am not a sensible person. I am always going to have to learn things the hard way, by making mistakes. There is zero chance that I can ever be so prudent and cautious that I stop screwing up.

So I might as well get used to an error prone existence. The best that I can hope for is to learn from my mistakes and not make the same ones again.

And my errors tend to come from either my exuberance or my tendency to be lost in my own thoughts, and both of those have their strong points.

So whatever. I’m a weirdo and a klutz and a spaz.

I guess I can live with that.

More after the break.

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The world inside my head

It’s too big.

But what can I say? It’s where I live, for better and for definitely worse.

That’s another layer of the pervasive, suffocating cloak of fear I live under. When I was being raped I fled into my mind to escape and ever since then I have only emerged into the real world the absolute minimum amount I could get away with.

In fact, if it wasn’t for my massive need for mental stimulation, I might well have slipped all the way into catatonia.

On that level, at least, all my media consumption of TV, video games, and books might have actually saved me by giving me a reason to stay in the real world.

It makes sense, then, that one of my deepest and most terrible fears is that I will lose that last slender connection to reality and fall into my mind forever.

I have no lucid dreamer delusions that the world inside my head would be a happy place where I can do whatever I want and make it into whatever I want it to be.

To me, not only would that means catatonia, it would mean my demons would finally have me all to themselves and they would eat me alive.

So logically, I should be moving in the opposite direction by doing what I can to make myself more grounded in the world outside my head, the world of the senses, the world of objective reality.

But then there’s that fear. I still need to soothe that savage beast within me that has been running and screaming and hiding since that terrible day when I was four and being raped, the part of me that has been permanently freaked out ever since then, the part of me that I walled off from the rest of my mind so I could function but that didn’t exactly make it any saner.

It’s not been asleep. It’s been going crazy trying to be heard.

Maybe I need to learn to listen, even though I don’t want to.

Time to let the crazy relative we keep in the basement out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am quite sleepy as I type these words.

Kept playing my game, Divinity : Original Sin 2 Definitive Edition^[1], up till a bit after 3:30 pm. So far so good. I didn’t feel sleepy then so I didn’t bother with taking a nap before my blogging session and just kept on playing.

But oops, the moment I stopped playing, the tiredness caught up with me and now I wish I was snoozing instead of typing.

Oh well, it’s all part of the job. It has happened before and it will happen again. I should be fine as long as I maintain momentum.

Which is harder than it sounds when I feel like this.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of making peace with my life as it is. It sounds like a great idea. If I just relaxed about my current life and reframed my existence in far less catastrophic terms, I would save myself a lot of stress and frustration and I would be way happier no matter what happens.

Sounds like a deal worth making, doesn’t it?

But I don’t know if I can do it. My anger about my current life is very real and represents a whole galaxy of frustrated human potential that I am too afraid to confront directly because the truth of it all is so very brutal and sad and if I start thinking about all those things I’ve never done and may never do, I might give in to despair.

And not the quietly weeping over things lost kind either. The kind that leads to desperate acts of screaming lunacy.

I don’t want to go to the Bad Place.

Although I dunno. Maybe I could get some serious emotional healing done there. It might be worth the risk that I might just dance too close to the fire.

At least then I might feel something.

That’s one of the main ways that depression leads to not so good behaviour : you become so numb that your nervous system goes into panic mode and makes you desperate to do absolutely anything that might make you feel something.

Me, I am too stable for that shit, for better and for worse. My depression has never included any sort of acting out. I’ve never been a threat to myself or others.

Well, not in action, anyhow. On the inside, well, that’s different. I have been suicidal in the past and it flowed from that exact same sort of desperation.

The kind that makes you want to set yourself on fire just to warm the fuck up.

But no, your stalwart correspondent would never do anything like that. After all, that would either lead to drawing attention to myself, which would be bad, or absolutely nobody noticing or caring about my cries for help, which would be worse.

So I just stay safely locked away inside myself and away from the big mean ol real world and never cry for help in any way at all.

Because when you were the baby left to cry, you learn very early on that there’s no point in crying because nobody’s coming and nobody cares.

Take care of it yourself or do without. Those are your options.

I lean heavily towards doing without. It’s easier.

And all you have to do is withdraw even further from reality in order to get away from your deprivation until you become too numb to care any more.

It’s the perfect system!

Oh, except for not actually leading to my being happy. Only distracted. Absorbed. Absent from reality.

But other than that, it’s flawless.

More after the break.

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On going easy on myself

Let us once more thrust our meaty hands into this tangle of thorns.

So : depression is anger turned inward. I am so hard on myself because I have all this rage that I don’t have an outward outlet for and therefore it can only go inwards.

It’s internalized abuse, and it’s almost beautiful in its brutal efficiency.

And that brings us to the same crossroads that it always does because the only way to get the anger to stop going inwards is to turn it outwards and that means finding a target for my rage that is not myself.

So like… other people. And that complicates things.

I could try to pour it into my politics, I suppose. Belch fire and brimstone over the state of the world. Try to spread my, “billions of us, hundreds of them” message as far and wide as I can in order to get a good healthy revolution going.

They can only wreck the world with their ignorance, decadence, and greed if we remain isolated individuals too wrapped up in our own lives and worried about our own comfort and convenience to ever unite and take them on.

If we band together – even a tiny percentage of us would be millions of people – there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop us and we can rewrite the rules however we like.

You wouldn’t even have to do much. Just show up and demonstrate. If we do that in large enough numbers, the rich and the powerful will get the message.

It’s justice or the guillotine, motherfuckers.

So yeah, I guess I could get it out that way. Who knows, I might just save the world with my extraordinary powers of oratory.

Of course, that would require making videos and being seen.

I watched a video about the French Revolution recently and I was struck by how Marat, a man with some kind of terrible skin disease that meant he had to spend all his time in the bathtub, nevertheless played a crucial part in the Revolution simply through writing.

I take a certain degree of inspiration from that example, though not, of course, from the bloodthirstiness of his politics.

I mean, I’ve got a computer and the internet. I can get my message out there way more easily than Marat penning his revolutionary newsletter.

The people need me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve stumbled upon a YouTube series that is so amazing that I can’t believe it exists.

It’s called Toon’d In and it’s all about legendary voice actors being interviewed by the greatest living voice actor of all time, Jim Fucking Cummings.

Aka Tigger, Minsc from Baldur’s Gate (the mostly lovable psychopathic barbarian ever), Fat Cat from Chip n’ Dale Rescue Rangers, and literally over a thousand other toles.

Just typing that out makes me feel a trifle peak’d. I am marking like a bitch over this. For a cartoon fan like myself, these people are practically gods.

I would definitely put these voice actors on my fairly short list of people whom, if I were to meet them, there is no way I would be able to be cool about it.

I mean, he interviewed Tress MacNeille! Babs Bunny herself!

I mean, just look at all those voices! Mom from Futurama, Dot Warner from Animaniacs, Gadget from Rescue Rangers, the crazy cat lady, Principal Skinner’s mother Agnes, and one of Bart’s bullies from the Simpsons, and many more roles, mostly from things I don’t watch and don’t care about.

And I am almost as excited to be watching Jim talk to the incredibly Keith David, who has done many, many roles with that super sexy voice of his (could melt the panties right off me, no problem) but most of all, to me, he’s the voice of my hard crush, Goliath from Disney’s The Gargoyles.

He’s my kind of hunky (broad shouldered), he’s smart, he’s wise, he’s sensitive, he’s a great leader, he has a deep and silky smooth voice, and he even has a tail.

He’s basically a much more huggable (and humpable) Optimus Prime.

Oh right. So here’s Keith David I guess.

I mean, you should see all the Tiny Toons Rule 34 stuff I got.

Anyhow, the show is amazing. I am gloriously geeking out. And the great thing is that as it is mostly audio, I can listen to it while I am lying down, or while I am doing a crossword in my web browser, or whatever.

Such podcast like things are not really compatible with more serious games like the ISO RPGs I favour because those take up way too much mental bandwidth and I am terrible at multitasking things like that.

For some reason, I can do crosswords just fine. Less taxing, I guess.

Hmmm. Accord to the IMDB, Tiny Toons started in 1990. But I could have sworn I watched it with my friends in junior high. But I was 17 in 1990.

Minor factual Mandela effect, I guess.

Anyhow, the show is burned deep into my brain. There’s just something about it that affects me far more deeply than other animated series.

Even shows I love, like Transformers and the original TNMT or even my beloved Spider Man And His Amazing Friends, don’t have the kind of emotional hooks in me that Tiny Toons does. It’s like the show took place in this magical toon-y world that was so much more colorful and vibrant and fun than real life.

I never felt that way about the Animaniacs or Freakazoid.

The closest show I can think of that had that kind of effect on me is Road Rovers, a sadly obscure one season show about a team of superhero dogs.

I got Rule 34 of them too, of course.

Look, it’s how I express my devotion and/or perversion and/or gonads!

More after the break.

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Chipping away at the ice

That’s what I feel like I am doing lately. Chipping away at the cold fear and mindless avoidance that keeps me down and holds me back.

Part of that is the usual attempts to build up my ego and my confidence. I keep reminding myself that I am a person of extraordinary abilities and therefore I really could be out there wowing the world with my wizardry if I wanted to be.

And I do want to be out there kicking names and taking ass.

But I also don’t. I think the fundamental crux of the crossroads upon which I am crucified is a deep conflict between what the bright and happy, healthy part of me wants and what the deep down crazy and broken part of me wants.

That broken part of me can’t accept that I want to make myself visible. It thinks that the only way I can be safe is to remain undetected, like I’m evading arrest, and so it views any activity which attracts attention to me is the worst kind of madness.

And unfortunately, that broken part of me operates on a much deeper level than the healthy part of me and therefore it retains a death grip on my soul that gives it unlimited veto power over all potential actions.

And it vetoes pretty much everything except my usual routine.

Maybe the smart money is in making peace with my life as it is now. Clearly the feeling of constant crisis and desperation isn’t doing me any good. All it does is reinforce my tendency to withdraw from everything by creating a harsh inner climate from which my usual bullshit life is the only shelter.

There I go again, slagging my life and thus myself.

There has to be a healthier way to channel my discontent. It would be far more sane if I could take that energy and use it to escape this gravity well, but it’s not that simple.

The truth is that it’s hard for any inner or outer motivation to get me to do anything. My inertia is fierce. And it’s an inertia made of that deep primal fear.

I have to make peace with being seen.

I’m an incredible person who needs to get out there and shine.

I have this enormous personality that needs to be expressed because it’s miserable all cooped up inside me. .

I know damn well I’d be a healthier, happy, saner man if I expressed myself more.

But I’m scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s not easy being a wizard.

That’s what you basically are when you are blessed with a very high IQ. The basic, gut-level definition of magic is “the ability to do what seems impossible or otherwise inexplicable” and that is what a very high IQ lets you do.

In fact, it comes naturally to you.

Note that I am not talking about the well known link between high intelligence and social awkwardness and/or the autism spectrum. That’s a topic for another time.

No, I am talking about my own brand of spookiness, which has no definition or diagnosis that I know of.

I’m talking about the kind of smarts that lets you intellectually dominate others with such smooth ease that you don’t even know you’re doing it. The kind that leads to doing astounding things like learning to read at the age of 3. Or being a straight A student without ever having to study, which most people would consider impossible. Or being a small child who talks like a tiny professor.

You can see where I’m going with this.

That sort of thing weirds people out, and makes you seem superhuman and therefore not entirely human. Even if you’re as personable and friendly as I am, you are still going to put out a strangely chilly vibe no matter what you do.

In fact, the contrast between my warm demeanor and my chilly intellect makes me all the weirder, even if you subtract my social anxiety making me want to run away while still putting on a friendly façade.

This is why I keep circling back to the question of whether or not I would be better off being the typical arrogant and superior neckbeard that lurks within me. At least then I would be sending signals that people could recognize and I would fit within a known archetype that let people feel like they know how to deal with me.

And there’s something to be said for taking what I’ll call a challenging attitude toward the world, like you’re just daring the world to knock that chip off your shoulder.

Nothing printable, of course, but still, there’s something to be said.

Instead, my natural instinct seems to be to remain enigmatic. Perhaps I suffer from a strange compulsion to force people to get to know me for me, without the help of labels.

Not that there’s any labels that really stick to me anyhow. I am a very unique dude, for better and for worse, so I defy categorization without even trying.

And that’s creepy.

For the most part, people want to be able to file you away in an already well known folder in their mind. They don’t want to have to keep thinking about who you are and what you might say or do. It’s taxing.

And like I said once long ago in this space, if they can’t label you, they can’t predict you and therefore can’t feel safe around you.

At least, on a basic intuitive sense. The smarter type people will register that you are weird but friendly and harmless and even kind of fun to be around.

But that pesky high IQ threatens people, and it threatens the smarter types most of all, and that can lead to trouble no matter how hard I try to be nonthreatening.

The fact that I’m a 6’1″ behemoth doesn’t help either, of course. Some people will hate you just for making them feel small.

That goes for the intellect too, come to think of it.

Then there’s peoples instinctive hatred of weak leaders. Intelligence is a dominant trait and therefore a non-dominant intelligent person reads as a weak leader to people and arouses their contempt.

This is the instinct that causes younger, stronger leaders to push out weak ones, and for the rest of the tribe to support that.

This is, I think, at the core of all nerd-bashing.

And a depressingly large amount of politics, come to think of it.

More after the break.

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Liberals with alpha energy

The world is in desperate need of more of them.

And that will require more than just putting the call out. It will take a fundamental realignment of how liberalism works and how liberals think and see themselves.

Right now, by default, people with strong alpha energy are not welcome in liberal circles. Liberals think they do not wish to be led and do not need a leader and anyone who might fill that role will be rejected as being too angry, confident, cocky, too unwilling to compromise, too pragmatic, too strident, or just plain not “nice” enough.

That’s why true progress requires a leader with incredible oratory charisma like Barack Obama or JFK, and even then there’s no guarantee they will actually do anything.

They might just be like Obama or Bill Clinton, charismatic but lazy and still too “soft” and corrupt to b willing to fight to change things now that they themselves are at the top.

It’s always easier to do nothing. Nothing is always the easiest option. And why shake the tree when you’ve finally made it to the top branch?

That’s why the world needs more people like Bernie Sanders. He’s as liberal as they come – besides me, of course – but he is also an unrelenting prick who can and will pound away at the exact same issues over and over again and attack any and all who are standing in the way of progress until the easiest thing is to give him what he wants.

That’s the kind of person who can truly change things.

And that’s also the kind of person liberals reject as not being “nice”.

There’s a reason he had to toil alone in the wilderness of politics for all those years before trying to change the system from within.

And even now, there’s plenty of liberals who want to reject him for not “playing ball” or understanding that the real job of a liberal politician is to placate the herd so that they don’t notice when the true powers that be shear them.

Right now, we’re lucky. We’re in the exact kind of age where we kill the dinosaurs of the old guard so that the next generation can take over and actually change things. Dipshits like Chuck Schumer and the rest of the paddle-waving stooges at the top level of Democratic politicians are enraging the left wing masses with their limp wristed and ineffectual opposition to Trump’s insanity and pretty soon that is going to boil over into some kind of radical action that will make Schumer and the rest realized that their only options are to get out of the way… or get run over.

Come to think of it, I’m a liberal with alpha oratory energy.

I should probably do something with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I find it extremely gratifying to see businesses everywhere polishing up their Canadian bona fides and putting them on display for the world to see.

Like, takes everyone’s favorite clown shack McDonald’s. In the drive-thru line at McD’s today, they had a sign that emphasized that they use 100 percent Canadian beef, 100 percent Canadian chicken, 100 percent Canadian eggs, and 100 percent Canadian potatoes. And that was very cool.

And on the radio, I heard advertiser after advertiser emphasize their Canadian-ness, thus assuring us patriotic Canadians that we can shop there with a clear conscience

And the vast majority of Canadians are patriotic. 80 percent of Canadians say they are partially or completely boycotting American products, and you know what?

That is a metric fuckton of people. 33.3 million or thereabouts. California has a population just shy of 40 million.

So the Americans have lost most of a California of market.

The irony is that Trump’s flaccid threats and whiny tariffs are making both the Canadian identity and the Canadian economy much, much stronger.

We are not a loud or boastful people but we have our own quiet, stubborn pride that makes us unflappable in conflict and unstoppable in war.

Not that I expect the USA to declare war on us. Trump doesn’t have even one lousy percent of the balls it would take to do that.

And very few Americans, both in and out of the active military, are going to be willing to wage war on us.

There is enormous soft power in being the nice guy everyone likes. That’s something cretinous barbarians like Trump will never understand. There is absolutely no chance that any nation on Earth would side with Trump against us.

Not even Russia. Or North Korea. Even Kim Jong Un would be like, “dude, stop, that’s just plain crazy. It’s making you look like a dick. ”

It’s like picking on the retarded kid everyone loves.

Not that I am saying we’re a retarded nation, just that we’re universally loved and seen as plucky, scrappy little guys going up against the bullying braggarts down south.

Plus, to be honest, we go hard in war and other conflict.

Because once we decided we’re going to fight, we go’er. Head down, straight ahead, driving straight to the goal, no hesitation and no doubts, we fucking go’er.

And woe betide whoever incurs the wrath of the quiet, patient man. Canadians have no problem pulling together when the chips are down. None of us are trying to be heroes and we are far more capable of forming a consensus that our American cousins.

One thing I want to make clear though : I have no problem with America. I know that Trump does not represent how they really feel.

Even those who voted for him and continue to support him – and there’s fewer of them every day – don’t agree with the shit he says, which is why their Fox News overlords try to explain that shit away rather than trying to convince the flock it’s true.

Face it, Little Donnie, it’s way, way too late to change anyone’s mind about Putin. When he invaded Ukraine global consensus was swift and complete : Putin is an evil aggressor and the attack on Ukraine was unjustified and unjustifiable and anyone who sides with him is evil too.

And that’s something even conservatives agree on. Your people, Little Donnie, have a very black and white way of seeing the world that is extremely resistant to change, and they have completely accepted that Putin is evil for years now, and not even you can change their minds on that.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, Canada.

My own case has a few annoying complexities, because I want to buy Canadian in all things and that’s easy when it comes to restaurants but it gets much trickier when I go to buy my groceries.

I am clearly going to have to research where all my usual stuff comes from.

You see that, Little Donnie? You’re driving me to do research.

And I hate doing research.

But I hate being a traitor more.

More after the break.

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The other foot

Had my ortho shoe appointment today.

Talked things over with Nikki (formerly known as Jackie). Apparently, the shoes are supposed to go all loose when worn because they are meant to fit like slippers, not regular shoes. She gave me those shoes because I said I’d be wearing them at home.

Still working on that. They’re definitely not on my feet right now. Truth is that when I come home from being out and sit down with the shoes still on, after a little while my feet start to hurt, and so I take them off and am not eager to put them back on.

Now I know that when I walk, or even stand for a while, walker or no, my feet swell up. Just another fun side effect of exceeding the weight specifications for the human body.

In other words, being obese.

So if I have been out and on my feet (the two are inextricably linked), my feet are going to be swollen and distorted. That part makes sense.

And as I am sitting down again, they are going to go back to something like normal. That part also makes sense.

But why does that make my feet hurt? You’d think the swelling going down would make my shoes fit better, not worse.

Hmmm. Unless they were swollen when she took the original castings of my feet, which, seeing as I had recently walked from the car to Ortho, they might have been.

Anyhow, I complained about the loose fit and the lack of ankle support, and she made some adjustments to the shoes and they fit better now.

She couldn’t give me really good ankle support without basically giving me ankle bracers, and the Province wouldn’t pay for those anyhow.

So I still have weak ankles that tend to make my feet splay uncomfortably, and that’s something I will have to deal with.

Perhaps there’s exercises I can do to build them up.

That’s the update for today. Stayed tuned for more thrilling adventures.

Oh! And I ordered new glasses, finally.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.