Because they’re basically the same thing.

The core dynamic is the deeply cowardly act of redirecting anger created by abuse by those above you (and therefore scary) onto those who are not only below you but actually the least powerful and therefore least scary targets around.

Shit flows downhill, as my late father used to say.

And it would be one thing if these people did it with the full knowledge that they are doing something rotten purely because they can get away with it and it feels good.

But of course, they don’t do that, because they are far too weak and timid to take that level of accountability for their actions.

Instead, they go through amazing mental contortions to actually convince themselves that the least powerful (and scary) people are actually to blame for their pain.

Thus the ability of billions of people all over the globe to blame the poorest people in society for things like national debt.

Because make no mistake : modern conservatism is abuse. Its entire underlying structure is about delivering the pleasure of hurting the weak to the masses and everything else is just window dressing.

That’s why it’s all so mean spirited. That’s the entire point. That’s the product. That is the addictive substance.

The right wind pundits and podcasters’ job is to use whatever means are necessary, no matter how blatantly intellectually dishonest, to remove all impediments to that sweet, sweet joy of taking your pain out on the only people you’re sure can’t fight back.

This is also why compassion enrages them so much. Compassion stirs actual tender emotions in people’s hearts and if you’re addicted to the joy of hate, that only reminds you that you’re actually being evil and that ruins all the fun.

The point is to have a great time hurting the very people Christ commands you to care for while also believing that you’re not just a good person but the best kind of person and definitely getting into Heaven ahead of all these heathens

I mean, why let that faggot Jesus spoil all the fun of being Christian, right?

And if you listen carefully, you can detect a solid note of panic in their voices when they are railing against compassionate measures. That’s the panic of a hate junkie who feels like their supply is being threatened.

Imagine the revolution that could be unleashed if all these people could swear off the hatred and became enough of a vertebrate to look above them for the source of their pain and suffering and direct that rage at the people actually hurting them.

But that would take courage and, like I said, these people are cowards. And that’s just as true for conservatives blaming the poor for the deficit as it is for your average schoolyard bully beating up a nerd for daring to be smart when they are dumb.

The entirety of modern conservatism makes a lot more sense when you realize that it’s all just an abuse delivery machine.

I have suffered from this effect myself because my own father would get shit upon and put upon at work by bosses who felt free to make messes they knew he’d clean up and who would dump nearly their entire workloads on him because they knew he would do it for them without a complaint.

And then he’d come home and take it all out on his wife and kids.

My childhood would have been a hell of a lot easier if he’d just had the balls to protest how he was being treated by lodging a complaint with his union, UPSE.

But no. Like a true conservative, he could only vent his rage on people who could not fight back – people he claimed to love – and where he felt the most safe – at home.

Makes you sick to your stomach, doesn’t it?

More after the break.

---

The problem of stupidity

Ordered me some Pizza Hut tonight.

A Melts (Bacon Chicken Alfredo, yum) and their new Golden Crispy Waffle Fries (meh, not crispy, boring) cost me only $20.66, which is only a few bucks more than what getting McD’s via Julian costs me. Not bad.

When the delivery arrived, I had to explain the concept of me buzzing her up to my Dasher (seasonally apropos) twice before it sank in.

She did get in eventually, though. Which is good, because I’m home alone and, gimp that I am, I would have been able to get my order if it’d been delivered to the lobby.

Anyhow, the whole thing got me thinking about stupidity and why it’s so infuriating.

Part of it is violation of expectation. You expect a certain degree of mental agility from people and when it’s not there it not only throws you off, it makes whatever you’re doing way harder because now you have to explain things.

And odds are, if this person is truly a dip, it will not be easy.

But in the broader sense, the herd is only as fast as its slowest member and that is certainly truly for society as a whole.

Especially if you’re intellectually gifted like myself. My whole school career was spent bored and frustrated at having to move at the speed of the slowest student in the class when all I wanted to do was rush forward like a heavy locomotive.

But anyone who has been saddled with a particularly dimwitted co-worker gets it.

When you’re as brilliant as I am, in a sense most of the world is that co-worker. On a purely intellectual level, the average person with an average IQ is like a child to you.

And the fact that you are stuck in the world where these children run everything can make even mild mannered liberal intellectuals pull their hair out.

Let alone passionate types like myself.

That’s why so many of us succumb to misanthropy. It’s a natural response to the problem of stupidity because it’s either dedicate yourself to leading the sheep (a job for which we are often ill suited) or resign yourself to being stuck on the same bus as everyone else when you can clearly see that the driver is drunk.

Myself, I reject misanthropy as a matter of deeply held belief. After all, you can’t exactly be a misanthrope and a humanist at the same time.

And I will choose my humanism over mere crankiness every single time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. More poop talk.

Had another “incident” this morning, though I didn’t realize it at first. I had already muzzily made it to the computer and the fact that there was a fecal odor in the air had made some sort of impression on my sleep-addled brain but it wasn’t until I moved a little and felt a certain kind of moisture under my buttocks that I realized something was seriously amiss in my southern regions.

Got up off the chair and yup, there was a big smear of poop there. I wiped that up with a Kleenex, then sat back down, and only then did it occur to me : um, but what about where that poop came from?

Got up again, and yup, there was a new, smaller smear of poop there. Duh. This time I wiped it up then wiped my ass too.

There was one more surprise waiting, but this one was almost pleasant. I discovered that, like a well trained puppy, I had managed to poop mostly on another very unfortunate McDonald’s bag and not the bed, so cleanup was easy.

So I may still be having “accidents” but at least I’ve learned to go on the paper.

This unpleasant discovery was the deciding factor in my choice to not go to wound care this morning. I had already been feeling poorly – the usual scratchy lungs, throat, and ears – but now I realized that the contents of my intestines were still feeling rather fluid and as bad as literally shitting the bed is, it’s got nothing on it happening in public.

Imagine if it happened in the car.

Insert melodramatic shudder here.

It would actually be better, if it had to happen, if it happened at the Community Care Clinic, because nurses are trained to handle that kind of thing and they certainly always have excellent cleaning supplies on hand.

Perhaps I am overthinking this.

And now we come to the portion of the incident report where I ponder what it all means. This is the second incident in what, three days? four? and that seems to suggest something is afoot down below.

The big worry is that it has something to do with my spine. I do have a hairline fracture on my L4 vertebra, after all, and that’s not good.

I don’t think it’s that, though. I have no other neurological symptoms (well, no new ones anyhow) and the way the contents of my digestive tract keep going gooey suggests that it’s a containment issue, not a spasmodic one.

Oh, one worrying detail : the insufficiently contained substance was not its normal color at all. It was light tan, not the usual dark brown, and that worried me because I seem to recall that possibly indicating a problem with the spleen.

Spleen is a funny word.

I just looked it up. Apparently it can indicate a problem in the gallbladder, pancreas, or liver, which are all part of your “biliary” system which acts as a drain for those organs.

Well obviously it can’t be a gallbladder problem because I ain’t got one. Mine was taken out a very long time ago.

But the other two are up for grabs.

It could be that my untreated umbilical hernia is acting up somehow. That thing’s been on my mind lately as a possible factor in a number of issues that I have had with my digestive and urinary tracts over the years.

I suppose I should at least get someone to look at it to see if it’s time for a surgical intervention or not.

Then again, I have had my lower abdomen imaged a few times in the last five years, so perhaps another look at the hernia would be redundant.

You know I think I’ve had that thing since high school?

More after the break.

---

You know, it just occurred to me that two of my favorite chocolate bars when I was a kid were the Skor bar and Crispy Crunch, both of which can shred your palate.

Was I just a masochist? Did I just enjoy my chocolate with a hint of dangerous?

I think I just really liked butter toffee.

I still do!

---

It’s okay to be okay

Let’s gnaw on this topic for a while.

Call it, “Is there a crisis?”, because it has to do with my feeling that there is always something I should be doing, but I don’t know what it is and so I am not doing it.

I’ve had very bad nightmares like that. Some of my worst, in fact.

That feeling has evolved into this sense that my time for making something of myself is running out and I need to get on it NOW NOW NOW before it’s too late.

And that’s just not helpful.

That just creates the very kind of pressure that I hide from and thus it just sends me even deeper into myself and away from any ability to cope with the real world at all.

Ditto for all my talk of being trapped in his shithole life of mine. And my talk about how shitty my life is, come to think of it.

I mean, that all represents genuine anger and frustration in me, granted. I am deeply grief-stricken AND pissed off at how mental illness took thirty fucking years of my life – my entire adulthood so far – and I am just barely waking up from that funk now.

And all those emotions have to go somewhere. Maybe crisis mode is not a good final destination for them but it’s at least a move in the right direction.

I know in my heart that I would be far better off if I could approach life with open-hearted joy and a sense of wonder and enchantment where I greeted every new day with breathless anticipation of all the fun stuff I was going to do.

Um yeah. That’s not going to happen. I am the wrong generation for that shit.

The point, though, is that I need a deep and fundamental shift of attitude to something more accepting and forgiving and thus compatible with my happiness.

Survival isn’t enough. Survival is easy.

It’s thriving that’s hard.

But I’m going to get there, god damn it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

He said to his body.

Feeling somewhat nauseous due to a sinus headache at the moment, but I unclogged an ear to allow the fluids to drain out again and the headache is on the way out

And taking the nausea with it.

Which is good because a “sick headache” is a terrible thing. And I should know, because I have had a lot of them,

It was a happy day when I finally put the whole picture together and realized that my sick headaches were from sinus pressure and that this meant that I could find relief just by unclogging my ear.

Not to be too gross or anything, what is happening is that my nose runs a little bit more of less all the time. First that clogs my sinuses, but then when they fill up, the liquid backs up and starts oozing out my ears via the eustachian tubes.

But when my ears get clogged up too, then the liquid has nowhere to go and that’s when the pressure starts building and the sick headache comes a-calling.

Luckily unclogging an ear is quite easy. All it takes is a finger wiggle. And then the problem magically disappears. Poof!

Otherwise today’s been OK. Had a potentially game-breaking issue come up in my game of Morrowind – a key character’s dialogue was missing. I would talk to her and she would say nothing, just a blank speech window, in return.

How very rude!

And this quest is part of the main storyline, so I can’t just shrug and go do something else like I would if it was a side quest

I Googled the problem. No solutions. I asked Microsoft Co-Pilot about it. It had a number of suggestions, none of which worked. I was beginning to despair. Visions of having to start a whole new character/playthrough to only maybe get around the problem were swimming in my head.

It’s surprisingly damp in there.

But then I restored a game from before I entered the area with the character in question, and this time while invisible I actually bothered to steal the key to said character’s jail cell and used it, and that fixed everything.

I hadn’t done that before because, being part wizard, I could just spring the cell door lock with a spell.

But apparently the game didn’t like that. Go fig.

So yay, problem surmounted. I reign supreme. Feel my technical might. Etc.

I still haven’t done that third lesson. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen today.. Maybe tomorrow after wound care.

I have to officially admit that I am definitely avoiding it now. It has joined the long and ever-growing list of avoidant aversions that wreck my life and leave me trapped doing the same things over and over again ad infinitum.

So what I need is to summon the mental fortitude to firmly resolve to do it, and other gainful things, at a certain time, and that means no video games during that time.

It also, hopefully, will let me prove to myself that I can overcome these mindless aversions in order to get what I want.

It’s not like there’s a genuine threat here. The worst thing that can happen is I spend an hour or so doing something I don’t enjoy and do not immediately understand.

And the feeling like something terrible is going to happen to me if I leave the fetid embrace of video games is just the addiction talking.

It signifies absolutely nothing. It’s just meaningless electrochemical noise clogging up my synapses and keeping me trapped in the same old negative but predictable cycle.

I swear to God that I will ctrl-break out of this loop.

Or die tryin’.

More after the break.

---

The easy part is over

Last night, both before and during my writing about being all alone this Xmas, I had myself a good cry.

And I am proud of myself for that. I felt all that sadness and pain inside me and I let it out in a healthy way instead of just swallowing it back down and letting it make me depressed and angry.

So far so good. But once I’d gotten all my tears out, I realized that I still had a lot of pain in me and it was not going to yield so easily.

So now I feel like I successfully opened an infected wound and cleaned it and got all that nasty gunk out, which is great, but the wound’s still there and it still hurts and relieving that is going to be a lot more tricky.

The nurse has done her job and now it’s time for surgery.

So I am continuing to poke and prod at the wound. Digging around in it, looking for those pockets of infection that remain, and doing my best to feel it all.

Not an easy task. I have suppressed almost everything for a really long time in order to maintain the delusion of things not being so bad, so all my instincts are wrong and it’s hard to catch myself in the act of repressing myself because it happens so fast.

But I am learning. I have these occasional (but vitally important) moments when the emotions are close enough to the surface that I can give them a little push and have them actually come up and be felt and expressed instead of lurking forever in my all too densely populated subconscious mind.

Seriously, my unexpressed emotions are packed nose to nuts in there.

It’s not as fun as it sounds.

The truth is, I don’t even know how much feeling I have left to do. A lot, presumably.

But I am confident that I will get it all out eventually because I am honing my ability to “lean in” to my emotions and get them over with and take a sense of accomplishment from that as it’s way healthier than the alternative.

For now, my emotions are a vast and waveless underwater sea, dark and mysterious, and I am in the process of learning to swim in it.

At least I’ve stopped drowning.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The first one is the videos by this guy :

I’ve only watched a few of his videos and I already adore him. As far as I am concerned, his videos are perfect internet contents because :

1. He’s very likable – he seems like the everynerd to me
2. He’s very funny, in a sharp but also self-deprecating way
3. He’s very cute (might be a less big deal for others, idk)
4. The videos are about gaming, and, hello!
5. The videos are informative, interesting, and entertaining
6. I don’t have a sixth point
7. I really love watermelon

Well I’ve never been good at staying on topic.

I like his videos so much that in my mind I am paying them the ultimate compliment of being jealous of them.

I wish I made stuff that good! He’s doing the exact sort of thing I want to do.

Well, one of the things I want to do. I got a million different ideas for what I want to do on YouTube if I ever manage to become functional enough to make videos again.

I can record videos with Microsoft’s Camera app. I’ve gotten that far. But the audio goes out of sync when I try to edit it, so that’s my current gumption trap.

It doesn’t have to be one, though. I could just record the videos all in one go and pop them directly onto YouTube, and then use YouTube’s editor.

Either that or try to figure out why Corel Video Studio is fucking up my vids. In many ways that is preferable because I’d be able to edit video the way I like to do it.

Now where was I? Oh yeah. Scott the Woz and his videos.

You can bet I am taking copious mental notes. His videos make me feel like I am taking a master class in how to make YouTube content and I want in, god damn it.

But would I cover video games? I dunno. It’s such a crowded topic. And I don’t like crowded rooms. I get claustrophobic.

Then again, I’ve already decided that the real product in anything I do will be me. My personality, my charisma, my wit, my unique point of view.

So who knows, maybe I could make gaming videos as good as Scott’s.

Not the same, though. Not only would I never try to directly compete with stuff that good, videos like his take a lot of research, and a researcher I am not.

So I’d be more likely to do game reviews, or stuff about video game design or my hot take on the latest gaming news or whatnot.

I feel like I might find a natural home in soft journalism.

The other discovery is actually a re-discovery of how much I love reading gay furry porn comics. And how good it is for me.

Perhaps it scratches some itch that would normally be satisfied by actually going out into the world and finding romance. And I am considering it.

In the form of trying to become active on some dating site.

But not the hookup apps. I am more interested in people I can talk to than sex. I am just plain not built for casual hookups.

Unless some kind person invites me to an orgy some day.

Anyhow, reading these comics is good for the soul for both a light and a dark reason.

The light reason is that they present a positive, wholesome, fucktastic view of a world where being gay is no big deal and gay romance is just as likely as the straight variety and things are saner and nicer and better overall.

The dark reason is that sometimes they cause this deeply buried powerful aversion reaction I have towards homosexuality, no doubt left there by my childhood rapist,to surface, and I want to bring that shit up as much as I can because only by feeling it and dealing with it will I ever be rid of it and I want that shit gone.

It’s gotten in the way of my having sex far too much.

I deserve to get proper laid, dammit. Like the bottoms in the comics.

And I don’t need old tapes in my head getting in the damned way.

More after the break.

---

Iceberg on the horizon

Julian, please do not discuss any of the following with Joe. Like, at all, I don’t want him to feel bad and I don’t blame him and I’m not mad.

But I have a very large problem coming up and at the moment I cannot think of a solution and that has me worried.

See, Joe hath revealed unto me that his parents are not going to have a big Xmas dinner this year because they are both in their 80s and just aren’t up to it any more.

Fair enough. I am not entirely surprised. At the last Devoy family Xmas dinner I went to, I could tell that his parents were struggling to keep up.

So I completely understand. But it leaves me in dire straits because that Xmas dinner was the one thing keeping me relatively glued together through Xmas eve and Xmas day, and without it I will be spending the entirety of Xmas all alone and I am really not sure how the fuck I will survive that.

I will have to talk to Doctor Costin about it when we do Therapy Thursday this week. And once I am over the shock I can try looking for places online where I might find some kindred spirits that day.

As patient readers know, Xmas is a very psychologically dangerous time for me. Sentimental holidays cut right to the core of my feeling alone and isolated and alienated and worthless and abandoned and bereft and alone.

Yes, I know I said alone twice. It fits.

Were I healthier, I might try volunteering at a soup kitchen or some equally Xmas-y appropriate venue. Were I wealthier, I might rent a hotel room someplace swank and at least be alone in luxury. Were I more socially connected, there might be any number of places willing to let a poor little droop-tailed fox come in from the cold on that wintry day

But I’m none of those things. I’m me. And my usual safety net will, of course, be busy with their own families that day, because unlike me, they still live where they’re from.

But I am all alone and a solo Xmas could leave me feeling awfully depressed and I don’t want to end up in that very bad place.

And unfortunately, I am not able to take the scrooge option. I will always love Xmas, no matter what Xmas does to be in return, because I would rather be miserable than to cut off or shut down the part of me that loves Xmas.

I’m a sentimental fool, and that’s both my nature and my choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, time to blog despite being quite sleepy.

At least getting up and making lunch shook some of the cobwebs out of my head. I would not have bet money on that when I was sitting on the bed trying to pull myself together enough to get up and get my day going.

Pretty sure I had a number of microsleeps during this period.

This “sleepy at sundown” thing is getting to be a drag, man. Thank God it won’t be like this all winter or I would have to radically alter my routine.

And I don’t like doing that. It’s so hard for me to do. I have come to realize that I rely heavily on whatever routine I am able to maintain in order to give my life some semblance of order and predictability.

That’s one of the main reasons I still have not done Lesson 3 of my sysadmin course.

More powerful than that, though, is the video game addiction. In order to do the lesson, I have to leave the warm and musty bosom of my video games for an hour or two, and my mind interprets that prospect as my basically going out into the cold naked, and so it’s difficult to get myself to do it.

It doesn’t help that I have not enjoyed the course so far. I was really looking forward to being taught how to do the job of network administrator and thus far all I have gotten from this joker is him loving the sound of his own voice.

That’s probably unfair but my point is that it’s not been fun yet.

I know I can do the job. I’ve got a good head for systems and how they fit together, and I am quite computer literate, so I am sure I can learn how networks work, how to keep them running, what problems I might face, and so forth.

I just need someone to explain it to me, starting with the basic principles and working up to understanding everything as a whole.

Put that way, I’m actually quite looking forward to it. I love that kind of thing.

And honestly, that’s the attitude I need to maintain if I am to make it through the course. I need to forget all about jobs and work and earning and all that scary and depressing stuff and just have fun with it. Treat it all as a game.

That’s probably a good attitude to have about life in general, come to think of it.

I know that I take things way too seriously, and I know that can be a serious impediment to living a happy life.

Especially for me. I’m a free spirit type and too much seriousness just leads to me hiding from life instead of dealing with things.

And that’s some seriously maladaptive shit, man.

If I could just loosen up and go easier on myself instead of being stuck in this cycle of inner abuse and avoidance, I could have the happy cheerful life I desire so much.

But that requires a pretty serious fundamental readjustment of attitude and those do no come easily. In fact, they often don’t come voluntarily.

Being change when they have to, not when they want to.

By default we stay the same.

To be honest, I am not sure how one learns to take life less seriously. When I try to enter that mode I just end up feeling nihilist.

Everything is stupid and nothing matters.

And that’s not a helpful attitude.

I can grasp the concept of treating life as a game easily enough but the actuality of implementing it daunts me. It would involve a major hack of what Nietzsche called my fundamental table of values, and those don’t come easy.

Well I know one thing for sure.

Thinking alone will not get me there.

I need to feel my way around more.

More after the break.

---

It’s nice to forget

Until you remember.

As I nuked myself some nuggets I was pondering something I have pondered before : how the nature of my debility makes it easy for me to forget just how disabled I am for long stretches of time.

After all, whether I am sitting at the computer or lying in bed, the fact my legs don’t work right does not come up, and that’s how I spend most of my day.

Even my occasional trips to the bathroom to empty my receptacle and/or bowels only put the issue into my mind for short bursts most days.

So it’s really only my twice daily trips to the kitchen that remind me that I am not a healthy man. When I get back to this here computer after a relatively short time on my feet and practically collapse into my computer chair because my legs are threatening to just plain give out on me, it’s hard to pretend everything is normal.

But then I am back to my sessile lifestyle where I live like a freaking barnacle, and I can forget my woes for another stretch of time.

And I suppose there’s no way around that. I mean, what’s the alternative? Sit here moping about how fucked up my legs are all the time?

Semi-forgetting at least lets me lead some sort of life. A sad sort, to be sure, but a life.

Then again, perhaps sitting around feeling sad about it all would do me some good in the long run. It might actually inspire me to focus on my life and find the energy to act to make this life of mine a better place to live.

I just feel so… limp most of the time. Like I just don’t have the motive force within my spirit that I would need to get moving and actually change things in my life.

Just thinking about it makes me quail sometimes, like an old maid encountering a burglar in her basement.

And maybe that’s a physical thing, I don’t know. Maybe there is something wrong with my heart that makes it impossible for me to build the force of spirit to do anything except to hold on for dear life to the tiny little life-boat that is my tragic existence and wait for some kind of hope to come along and save me.

Even though I know that’s never going to happen.

But it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went further than I absolutely had to for my health today, and I am proud of that.

It’s been the usual busy Friday. Did the wound care thing at around 11:30 am, and that went smoothly, as usual.

Had a guy I’ve had a few times before. Dunno his name because I suck, and I don’t know where he’s from originally, but he speaks in this rising-inflection staccato chirp where the syllables just flow like strings of pearls and combined with his tendency to use “bro” talk with me and his strange cadence makes him hard to understand.

But it’s also somewhat charming. And I have had him as my nurse often enough that my ear knows how to parse what he says now.

Every time I am sitting there as a nurse tends my wounds, I wonder if they think I am aloof or superior just because I don’t spontaneously speak.

I respond when spoken to, of course, and I am always my usual pleasant, polite, and affable self, but I don’t start conversational threads.

I feel like at some point, I just lost the ability to do that. Even with my friends. It’s like I used to have a folder in my head marked, “things to talk about” and I either stopped adding to it or deleted it completely.

It bothers me.

The bonus feature came next : getting myself vaccinated.

No biggie. I have no fear of needles. Whatever.

However, to get said vaccination (for the flu and Covid), I had to walker my way from the parking lot all the way through the Shopper’s to the pharmacy in the back and then make that same trip in reverse when I was done.

And this was not good.

I had already presumed upon my sick leg muscles to propel me through wound care and now I had to do this whole other thing?

My body was not happy with me.

In fact, by the time I made it back to the car, I was ready to drop I was panting and sweating and feeling like I was going to fall down.

But hey, at least I am inoculated now and can rest assured that I am protected against the flu and Covid now.

In the long term it will be worth it, but as of right now, I am not sure.

The problem with a prophylactic like a vaccine is that if it’s working, nothing happens. So it’s hard to know if it is even doing anything at all.

That needle could have been full of distilled water and I would never know unless I actually contracted Covid or the flu.

Guess I’ll take their word for it.

The result of all my exertions today is that right now I am so VERY tired. The extra motion plus night falling with a sickening thud has made me want to sleep for like a million and a half years.

This part of the year is always rough on me because of how early it gets dark. The minute the sun goes down, I want to sleep. It triggers the latent sleepiness in me.

And I’ve always got a lot of that lying around.

Other times of the year, sundown does not make me want to sleep. There’s just something special about the run up to the winter solstice, aka Longest Night.

Or “Shortest Day” but nobody calls it that!

I imagine that’s a big holiday with vampires.

It would be like their Christmas!

Oh well, whatever. Now I am going to lay down and zonk out for a couple of hours.

More after the break.

---

Perchance to dream

I am a little worried about how sleepy I have been in the last 36 hours or so.

It feels like no matter how much I sleep, I never actually catch up to my need, and so I stay sleepy. It reminds me of those times when my appetite goes nuts.

Those times when the Demon Hunger is upon me.

I hate that shit. It’s so stressful! Plus I end up eating way more than usual and that throws off my grocery schedule and that disturbs my sense of order.

Such as it is.

I get the feeling that if I was more healthy and focused and energetic, I would be a lot more organized. Because I do like it when everything is neat and tidy.

I just lack the will to make or keep it that way myself.

Hence my heady dreams of having an assistant. It would be their job to keep everything organized and neatly tucked away, ready for me to call on it, whether it’s my favorite pen and paper or the name of someone I met at an industry event.

What the hell, this is my fantasy, so in it I am a big time head writer on a TV show, making fat stacks o’ cash and enjoying the respect of my peers and the knowledge that I am finally doing what I was born to do : make good television.

That’s my ultimate dream. To become a producer like my hero Norman Lear and run my own studio that is known for making the highest quality TV.

Like another of my heroes, Walt Disney, I would want to build a brand synonymous with excellence in every field. Movies, TV, books, lunchboxes, and so on.

My company would naturally not be quite so squeaky clean. In fact, I might even build my brand around entertainment that is just a little more “spicy” that you expect.

I dunno. I know that the real money is in G-rated content but I would not be able to work under such restrictions for long.

My artistic soul yearns to be creative and free!

And really, really smutty sometimes.

In fact, if I had Disney level clout, nothing could keep me from producing my magnum opus of a SUPER smutty X-rated feature length cartoon with an extremely upbeat and cheerful pro-sex message and, of course, lots of cartoon animal sex.

Because I would not just be looking to titillate, although there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’d be looking to liberate people’s minds, souls, and libidos from oppressive ideas and beliefs that keep them frustrated and angry and help them find a way they can embrace their inner pervert and maybe feel it up a little.

It would make Rocky Horror Picture Show look like Mary Poppins.

It would make Fritz the Cat look like Steamboat Willie.

It would make Deep Throat look like a history lecture.

In short, it would be the horniest, filthiest, most overwhelmingly fucktastic film ever made and I would be extremely proud of that.

And who knows, it might even help some people feel seen, and accepted.

I am not, in the traditional sense, an ambitious man.

But creatively speaking, I want to shake the heavens with my art.

It could be so amazing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I noticed that I was one microwave popcorn short of making it to tomorrow’s grocery order, so I decided to order some more from 7-11 last night, along with a few snacky type things to have for supper.

A chicken Caesar wrap and a Jamaican patty, if you’re curious.

When I looked up “popcorn” on 7-11’s DoorDash, though, along with the microwave popcorn, up popped (sic) the option for me to get some Smartfood popcorn instead, or something called 7-11 Movie Night Popcorn.

Memories of the sadly now long gone Orville Redenbacher’s Movie Theater Butter Popcorn (best popcorn EVER) swimming in my head, I ordered the 7-11 stuff.

What the hell, I haven’t had the pre-popped stuff since I stopped eating so much junk food a long time ago, so I figured I’d get myself a treat.

In retrospect, the very plain white packaging should have tipped me off that something was not quite right.

Turns out the stuff isn’t buttered at all! And I’m like, what the fuck kind of lame ass movie night have these people been having?

Instead all it has is salt and “seasoning”, which seems ominously vague to me.

Oh well, once more I get burned because I didn’t check the fine print before making an online purchase. I think I need to accept that without the crushing burden of depression, I’m a somewhat impulsive person due to my tendency to follow waves of enthusiasm.

Well, there’s two ways to go through life : carefully checking to make sure there’s no pitfalls waiting for you before you make even the smallest step, or revving around at top speed and learning where the walls are by bouncing off them.

I’ve always taken the first route and been an inherently cautious person – to a fault. I’ve been so “cautious” that I don’t do jack shit, and that’s taking it way too far.

As with all things, there needs to be a balance. Sure, caution is good, but you can’t live life in fear of bouncing off the occasional wall and so you have to get out there and try new things and explore, too.

After all, you never know how far you can go until you go too far.

That’s the sort of statement I used to scoff at, but now I see the wisdom in that approach to life.

It promotes a very robust engagement with life where you are fostering your impulses by acting on them and thus promoting a healthy and strong connection to your id.

My id’s a puny little thing. Kinda pathetic, really.

I’m working on it.

Of course, it’s kind of hard to get any serious amount of esprit going when you are half dead inside due to an early childhood trauma.

Correction, half asleep inside. Dead is dead, there’s no coming back from that, and now that I know that part of me has been missing in action for 47 years, I have started the very long process of waking myself up.

I have this image in my head of myself being on a slab like the one Frankenstein’s monster is on right before he gets struck by lightning, except my slab just keeps going up and up as it lifts me towards the bright light of consciousness.

I still plan on shouting, “It’s alive! ALIVE!”, though.

I know it’s not going to be easy. Birth rarely is, for mother OR child, and in this case I am both. And waking up has never been easy for me either.

But I keep coming back to consciousness again and again.

I have no choice.

It’s where all the snacks are.

More after the break.

---

Subtle and sad

That’s how I am feeling at the moment.

I have a definitely feeling of melancholy. A heavy but not crushing blanket of sadness envelops me and I have a feeling of rainfall and darkness and silence and cold.

That sense of silence seems to stick to me lately. Silence and emptiness and the feeling that something is missing.

In general, in our mind, something missing means something hidden. A feeling of emptiness can indicate that something vital to us is being masked or suppressed by our psychological defenses, and we think that we are broken when we are merely numb.

Hence my continued efforts to shake myself up to wake myself up. I am doing the psychological equivalent of flapping your hand and knocking it against something to wake it up after it has fallen asleep.

Right now, the effort it will take to wake my other half from its torpor seems immense and it’s hard to see, or rather feel, the end of that process.

But end it must because I know that no matter what, I will never stop pushing myself to wake up and get myself moving, in life if not in body necessarily.

I feel like I am still standing in the doorway of that door inside myself that I opened what seems like several forevers ago.

I honestly thought I would have gone through it by now. But I should have (could have) known better than that.

Sure, opening that door was an enormous step and it has made a huge difference to my inner environment. My soul can breathe and there’s a sense of direction, like I finally know which way is up and which way is forward and what it means to progress through one’s emotions instead of acting like I have no control over them.

So that’s one hell of a lot better than the airless interior I had before.

But actually going out into that big bad crazy world is a much, much, MUCH bigger step and right now I am still standing in that doorway trying to acclimate to a much more stimulating environment than my sterile tomb.

I need a new equilibrium, and those take time to find.

I’m working on it.

Sometimes I get the crazy urge to just throw myself to the wolves. To kick myself out of the nest and out into the world where I will either fly or die and hope that my instincts will kick in before I hit the fucking ground.

But I can’t do that because I might just decide to die instead.

Because it’s easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a serious question.

One that emerged from a recent bout of brooding. ^[1] Do I have the capacity to reach a state of contented equilibrium with life, or will that hungry and restless shark swimming around in circles in the depths of my subconscious make it impossible for me to ever truly be OK?

I guess there are worse things than having a restless soul. If I ever get out of this junk drawer of a life of mine, that restlessness could make me very busy and productive.

Certainly, I long for engagement. I crave opportunity. I want to be in a place in life where I can show the world just how fantabulously amazing I am and reap the rewards due someone of my extraordinary abilities.

The ability to earn seems like this prize that’s always just barely out of reach for me. I know that there’s a lot I could contribute to society and the world, but I have to get out of my own way first.

I dunno. Maybe that’s the point. They say that what we truly fear is not that we are helpless, but that we are powerful beyond measure, and maybe that’s true with me.

Maybe I am afraid of my own power and the responsibility it implies. If so, I think I am getting over it, and doing so via good old fashioned greed.

I want money, motherfuckers. Money I can use to vastly improve my lifestyle by hiring an assistant who can take care of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and so on in a way that does not make me feel like I am taking advantage of a friend.

I’ve done a lot of that in my life, and I’d really like to stop. For once in my life I want to pull my own weight and actually contribute instead of being a drains on everyone

Admittedly, the people of British Columbia are not exactly groaning under the strain of my $1375 a month, but still.

And I want nice things. A comfy bed with quality bedding, a highly ergonomic office chair, a bevy of supple, muscular young men to stuff me at both ends until I pass out from sheer bottom bitch bliss, you know, the standard stuff.

Oh, and a car and driver. Something nice. Like a Bentley.

I would normally have said a Jag, but they have apparently lost their minds recently.

And of course, I want a husband, or at least a boyfriend. Someone I can dote on and care for and share everyday domestic life with. Someone to cuddle up with as we laze about in bed, reading or watching TV or talking. Someone to hold my hand to steady me when my anxiety threatens to overcome me. Someone who needs a sympathetic ear to listen to the events of their day and offer them understanding and support and a safe warm place away from the big bad busy world.

When you look at it that way, I’m really quite a catch.

Predictably, I have wandered far stray from whether I can be OK.

Oh well. Topics are just jumping off points for me. Someplace to start because it has to start someplace. Whatever I end up writing, it will come from deep inside me and be something that needs to be expressed.

And that’s the kind of thing that just can’t be confined to a topic.

More after the break.

---

Dream hard, dream well

It’s good for me to ream about what I want my life to be like.

The more I dream about it and the more vividly I dream, the more real and possible it will seem, and hopefully one day, will seem real and possible enough that I can reach out and grab it.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

It’s like I am trying to open a door of possibility in that all oppressing wall in my head and then somehow wiggle on through it.

I am feeling guilty because I haven’t done the third lesson in my sys admin course yet and it’s been almost a week since I did the second one.

I can’t afford to let this opportunity slip away like I normally would do. Normally, I would freeze up and, essentially, wait for it to go away because my messed up mental CPU now sees the opportunity as a threat and wants me to hide from it.

How is an opportunity a threat, you might ask? One word : change.

The primitive mind fights change blindly. The idea that a large change can be good does not compute when you are in a primitive mode. Like a wounded animal trying to bite the hand of the vet who’s trying to treat it, all the primitive mind knows is that a big hand is reaching in to get it and it has to fight back.

Or in my case, squeeze into the back of the cage to hide.

And that’s the thing about operating in a non-stop emergency mode : it can put you at the mercy of your primitive mind. Even if you’re a major league brainiac like me, anxiety and phobia can have you acting like an animal.

In a bad way.

But that’s the old me and the new me is going to bear down and do the damned lessons and accept that this dude is not going to teach in a way I enjoy and that I am going to just have to let the information wash over me without trying to put it in any kind of order in my mind and just hope that it will all fit together eventually.

I can’t let this slip away from me.

Tomorrow I shall do the damned work. Also…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with my health or wound care or anything important.

I am just annoyed that my computer crashed twice when I was playing Morrowind despite the fact that I was playing via the far more stable OpenMW (for Open Morrowind, obviously) executable instead of the error ridden original one.

I have been using OpenMW almost exclusively since it doesn’t crash like the original executable does, or so I thought.

But turns out that switching to OpenMW did not so much solve the problem outright as give me way more leeway before the thing crashes.

Because I know what caused the crashes : I had way too much going on in the game.

I had enemies fleeing^[1], snow falling, other enemies attacking me, and I was shooting arrows at all these things (except the snow), and I guess that was just too much for my imperfect computer to handle so it shit the bed and crashed.

Speaking of shitting the bed (what a segue), I had another “incident” last night, and I was even awake for this one.

Graphic poop talk ahead, for those of you who had not figured that out yet.

I was lying in bed, reading^[2], at about 3 am or so when I felt the need to pee.

No problem. My receptacle was handy. So I peed into it, and noticed in passing that peeing was making me feel like I had to poop.

This happens sometimes. I fear that it means something is going wrong in my lower abdomen that is making my bladder push down on my bowels, or somesuch.

I do have that completely untreated umbilical hernia floating around in there. There is always the possibility that it’s starting to act up.

Anyhow, I didn’t pay it much attention, but then when I finished peeing, the feeling didn’t go away. In fact, it got worse. Much worse.

Time for a trip, trip, trip to the loo, I thought. But the moment I began to roll over as a prelude to getting out of bed, I felt the contents of my insides squeeze like a toothpaste tube and threaten to come out, so I stopped.

Which was futile. It all came out anyhow, and I was stuck cleaning it up with the world’s most unlucky McDonald’s bag because it was what I could reach.

Normally I would use Kleenex like a normal person, but I could not find my box of Kleenex under all the other stuff on my bed, so the McDonald’s Bag was it.

And I think I did a rather heroic job of cleaning up as it came out so that not a lot of it actually made it to the sheet.

Some of it still did, alas, but it could have been so much worse.

Now I have no idea why things went the way I did. My best theory is that I’d had some sort of bottleneck in my colon that caused a substantial logjam to form and last next was when the dam burst.

Two things disturbed me about it (plus the event itself) : for one, everything coming out of me felt hot as it exited.

Not really hot. More uncomfortably warm. And it was strictly felt in my anal and perianal region, suggesting it was something about the substance, not the aperture.

The other thing (warning, it gets worse) is that what came out of me was not normal feces. It was that pablum-like substance that smelled, well, like a diaper pail.

A full one.

So all that has me worried about my guts. But I know that the usual pattern is that there will be no more events for at least a month, or however long it takes me to completely forget the previous incident.

So I guess I won’t do anything about it. Again.

More after the break.

---

How much should I worry?

Because I never really know.

I get the distinct feeling that I worry about a lot of things that don’t matter at all while completely failing to worry about things that are, in fact, super important.

But I dunno WTF I am doing most of the time anyway. I just kind of stagger through life bumping into walls and falling down wells and getting blown around by the breeze.

I’m trying hard to wake my sleeping inner child up. At the moment, it feels like I am trying to jump-start a very cold engine. I put the energy in and get sort of a response but it’s so faint that it’s hard to be sure it’s real.

Was that the engine almost turning over, or just the spark plugs clicking?

I know a weird amount about cars.

All I can do is keep shunting as much of my enormous excess of nervous energy into warming up and activating my sad and somber spirit as I can, and hoping that eventually, I will rise from the slab and begin a new life.

One where I am actually alive for a change.

It’s a thrilling prospect.

At the same time, part of me wants to get into bed, burrow deep under the covers, and retreat so deep into myself that the outside world is barely a glimmer in the sky.

I won’t do that, of course. That would be like dying and I am not ready to die. I may not be all the way healthy yet, but I have found that stubborn spark in me that refuses to give up no matter what, and it simply WILL. NOT. DIE.

So I’d better get used to being alive.

I’m working on it.

And I don’t think it’s entirely psychological.

I think there must be something physically wrong with me that makes it so hard for me to stay focused and pursue my best interests, and so much easier for me to just keep going the way I always have.

Just making it through the day.

It’s this feeling of fading away. LIke the vessel within me that is supposed to hold the energies that would drive me to explore my options and expand my life is so weak and fragile that it ruptures almost instantly if I try to fill it.

And what worries me is the possibility that it truly is rooted in the physiological and I just haven’t noticed because I’ve been like this for so long that I no longer have any sense of how I should be feeling.

Maybe there’s something wrong with my heart. It certainly feels that way sometimes. That would certainly explain why I feel so weak and fragile and timid all the time.

Or maybe it’s my nerves that can’t handle even the slightest strain. I dunno.

But it’s entirely possible that I am so scared of the world for reasons that go beyond lacking character and backbone.

I know that I’m sick of it. I don’t want to be weak any more. I don’t want to have to hide away from the world and keep my mind occupied by video games so that I don’t sit an think about my disastrous life.

I want to be robust and healthy and strong. I want to be able to tackle my issues head on and be able to just keep hacking away at them till they collapse under their own weight and disappear forever.

Instead, I am a weakling who has to stay in this shapeless, formless mode most of the time where I just float down that long dark corridor like a leaf on a river and all that awaits me in my future is debility and death.

And I feel so helpless, and oppressed by all the things I “could” be doing except that I don’t have the wherewithal to do much of anything.

I don’t like where I’m headed but for some reason I just can’t steer.

I mean, I don’t even know where I want to go.

Out, I guess. Away from this squalid squatting in my pigsty of a room and into a life where I can feel competent and strong and capable and worthwhile.

I want a life I can be proud of, instead of always cringing in shame on the inside. I want a life where I can provide for myself instead of being entirely reliant on the government and the kindness of my friends. I want to feel strong and happy and proud

And maybe my barriers are entirely psychological. That doesn’t mean I will somehow magically learn to pull myself up by my bootstraps and learn to be a man some day.

I will just have to keep on digging to free myself from this deep dark hole I fell into decades ago when my parents pulled me out of university.

And that got so much worse when I discovered Skyrim,

I wish I could just reboot myself and start over. Or land a rich boyfriend who pampers me as I dote upon him, like Leona Helmsley did.

Anything to escape this timid treadmill of mine where I can’t even paddle my own canoe except for those rare moments when the biochemical storm in my head randomly abates long enough for me to feel normal for a little while.

There’s got to be a way out of this mess.

And I will keep on looking till I find it.

After all, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

More after the break.

---

I dwell in darkness

And not just because we’re approaching the Winter Solstice.

As you can possibly tell from the previous section, my mood today has not been great. I’ve slept a lot – looks like it’s time to pay the sleep debt again.

And that can drag my mood down sometimes.

But it feels more like I just have emotional trash to burn. The negative emotions have accumulated once again and it’s time to vent them so they can go away.

The only cure for emotions is to feel them, after all.

So right now I feel pretty low. There’s a grumpy feeling smoldering under the surface of my mind and it’s making me feel like glaring at somebody.

As out of character as that would be.

I mean, I’ve been talking about it for over a decade now, yet anger is still one of my biggest issues. I know that I have an enormous lake of molten rage buried deep in the subterranean layers of my consciousness and I know that it’s one of the major source of my psychological pain, but I still can’t bring myself to vent it as often or as thoroughly as would be best for me because I fear the consequences.

I’m so afraid of the monster that lurks within me. He’s a brute and a lunatic and a liar and I really don’t want to turn him loose because there is no guarantee that I would be able to rein him in again afterward.

I might just be having too much fun being evil to stop.

All I know how to do is vent it all here now and then. And I apologize for subjecting my friends to that. Just know that it helps me enormously to be able to get my negative feelings out and that I usually feel a lot better afterwards.

It’s kind of like throwing up in that sense. I have something toxic in me that has to come out and there’s no neat and clean way to accomplish that, so emotional emesis it is.

Come to think of it, that’s a good word for how I feel today : toxic. Like there’s something nasty brewing inside of me and soon it will all come out.

So um, things might get a lot darker before the dawn, folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.