In all the old familiar place
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through

It’s a song.

What I mean by that is that I have ordered myself a new webcam .

Yay for that! I can make an attempt to become a YouTube star who makes money off of clicks every time he posts a video.

That would improve my work ethic substantially.

In fact, honestly, if the business world was really and sincerely concerned with getting the most labour per local currency unit, everything would work like that. You’d get paid for every bit of work you did.

Mop the floor at McD’s? Ka-ching.
Submit that projected earnings report? Ka-ching.
Sit through another tedious lecture from a senior civil servant? Ka ching.

And just think of how much more efficiently your workplace would make use of your time and effort if they were paying you per task.

Employee would work harder and make more money both for themselves and their employer, and everybody would win.

Well, except for peckerhead managers far too used to treating workers like sheep who now have to face the fact that labour is, in fact, valuable, and that wasting employee’s time means wasting the company’s money, so now their power is slipping away.

The more bad things that can happen to those kind of people, the better. Such undemocratic attitudes have no place in enlightened society.

Anyhow, where was I before I diverged into solving the relationship problems that arise between labour and management?

Oh right, getting a webcam.

I have a feeling that my output as a YouTuber will be a lot like my output here : without format or subject matter, just whatever I happen to be thinking about when it came time to make my video for the day.

The best I could do is use tags to separate my different streams of consciousness, or maybe have separate channels for my different subjects or foci.

Tags would probably be easier for me. The channels solution would probably end up where all such categorizing ends up for me : with me ending up just throwing everything into the “miscellaneous” bin because I can’t decide which of two or more categories to put things in.

Which defeats the entire purpose of the categories (channels) in the first place;

And I can see myself getting into the habit of finishing the video creation process by thinking of all applicable tags.

I’d hate doing it at first, just like I hated doing it on TikTok, but if I want my video blog (?) to spread and grow, I have to play by the common rulebook at least somewhat.

Then there’s the somewhat sticky issue of people not liking pure talking head videos. That’s changed somewhat in the era of TikTok and the rise in listenable YouTube content, but it’s still better to give people something to look at.

I mean, I consider myself to be a compelling speaker, but not at like, the Martin Luther King level, where what I am saying is so powerful that people are enraptured by me.

But, ya know, dare to dream.

I suppose I will be experimenting with different kinds of content in order to see what gets me some traction.

I can make long thoughtful in-depth talking head pieces. I can make lighthearted and silly “audio captioning” style comedy pieces. I can do strident political screeds.

Boy, could I do some strident political screeds. It could be epic.

And who knows, maybe I could a the big bad bullshit destroying iconoclast who changes the way people think and see the world for generations to come.

Or maybe I could just make a few bucks being yet another loudmouthed fat dude with a YouTube channel and too much to say.

Honestly, at this point, I would make whatever kind of videos people want, and by want, I mean the kind that generate clicks and therefore money.

I’m just that desperate for financial validation.

More after the break.

---

The American election

I suppose I have to talk about it.

Right now, it’s doom and gloom. Trump is way ahead. Things look grim.

But that’s only because the vote moves from east to west, so right now the results are skewed by all those red states in the middle of the country.

The exact same thing happened before Biden’s win in 2020. Hence Trump whining about them “suddenly” finding a whole lot of Biden votes.

Um yeah. Because the Left Coast was never going to vote for YOU, ya cocksucker.

Plus, early and mail-in voting is often not counted right away, and polls show Harris is way ahead with those voters, so do not abandon hope.

I know that four more years of that fucker is a horrifying prospect, but remember that horror and probability are not related.

In other words, the scariness of a potentiality has no bearing on how likely it actually is, just on how large it looms in our mind, which can be mistakenly thought to be the same thing, but it ain’t.

Hence people being disproportionately worried about extremely rare and improbable things like crime and terrorism when what’s a lot more likely to hurt them are things like heart disease and car accidents.

The world would be a much safer place if we could concentrate on the real threats instead of the bugbears of our minds.

I mean, terrorism is so rare as to be almost fictional and yet we waste trillions of dollars trying to prevent it.

Might as well go bankrupt buying werewolf insurance.

And as should be obvious from the name, terrorism succeeds only inasmuch as it makes people scared and causes them to do injury unto themselves out of fear.

I mean really, do you think the architects of 9/11 were sad that they made the whole world crack down on everything everywhere despite their small numbers?

How about we take all that anti-terrorism money and use it to stop climate change?

If only we could convince the world that global warming is caused by ISIS….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m all sleepy today.

It feels subjectively like a bunch of latent sleepiness was lying around in my brain chemistry like a glacier and a big chunk of it calved off and floated to the surface.

If so, it’s probably ultimately a good thing because I presumably really need the sleep and now I will be catching up on it.

Whether I want to or not, apparently.

i know what triggered this iceberg of somnolence : this morning I was having back pain issues so I took one of my muscle relaxant pills.

Hadn’t felt the need to take one in at least a month, probably more. So there’s at least one thing in my life that has actually gotten better.

Dunno what triggered the back pain. Knowing me, the root cause is probably digestive, although I haven’t eaten anything unusual or troubling to my guts lately.

But my bowels don’t need a reason to get cranky. Maybe they’re just bored.

Had wound care this morning. Yes, on a Monday instead of the usual Tuesday. I am on the Mondays and Thursdays schedule for this week for some reason.

Something to do with the upcoming Remembrance Day, no doubt.

Good thing Joe mentioned this change in routine last night at Denny’s because it was the first I’d heard of it.

Eh, nobody tells me nuttin’. For some reason people sometimes find me difficult to approach even though I am super nice and very reasonable and friendly.

It probably has something to do with my big personality and charisma and the way being my audience can be quite draining for people.

Not because they’re bored or anything. Perish the thought.

But because it’s an intense experience of something kind of like heightened reality. And that can wear a person out.

It’s what makes me a compelling orator and performer but it can be wearying on a one to one personal level, I imagine.

Meanwhile, it’s very windy out, which means that my room is cold. For some reason, whenever it’s seriously windy, it sucks the heat right out of my room.

My windows probably need to be insulated. But that would be a huge hassle. I’d have to move my desk back in order to get at the big big window it sits in front of, and that would require getting a whole lot of cords coordinated and stuff moved, and then I would need to be able to stand up long enough to seal things up with thermal tape.

It would not be easy, is what I am saying.

So I guess I’m just going to be cold. I felt it most in my hands. They do not like being cold and they make that fact known in no uncertain terms.

And it’s not like I can type with mittens on.

Oh well, it makes for good hibernation whether. Maybe that’s the real reason I am so damned sleepy today.

My body wants me to go to sleep for the winter.

Luckily, I am not quite that ursine.

That’s not an option for me given how often I need to pee. And while deep, restful, relaxed sleep is very important for mental and physical health, I am still not willing to wear a catheter to achieve it.

Those things weird me out. They’re not painful, it just feels very weird to have something going up into your bladder through your penis and into your guts.

As one might imagine.

Oh well. At least a cold bedroom makes wriggling in under the covers feel nice and cozy. And I am all about that cozy vibe.

It’s one of my favorite vibes!

More after the break.

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On being real

Reality is such a commitment.

I mean, once you’re real, that’s it. You’re stuck with it. You can’t go back to pretending that you don’t exist.

You’re real, you’re there, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.

Of course, what I am really talking about is not being real but being seen. I’ve spent the vast majority of my lifespan locked away in my bedroom where nobody can see me and therefore I am not around anyone who wishes I did not exist.

In other words, my family. That’s where the pattern was set. It’s clear to me now that my belief that everybody hates me and wishes I would just go away and die and never come back started with a family that saw me as an interloper in my own home.

But it was never really my home anyhow. Just the place I was least unwelcome.

Even now, at the tender age of 51, this feeling of constant unwantedness plagues me even though I know in my mind that it’s entirely baseless.

My friends love me and love having me around. They’ve never given me reason to think otherwise. Yet even sitting here all by myself in my bedroom, typing away to you lovely people, I feel like I am not supposed to be here and that people wish I would go away forever so they did not have to deal with my contemptible pitifulness ever again.

Yes, even now, I never feel like people actually want me around or are happy to see me.

My mind knows that’s not true but my heart still feels that way anyhow.

And there’s no direct way to make myself stop feeling that way. All I can do is keep chipping away at that glacier that sits upon my heart and keeps me from feeling loved and sending love down to my sleeping inner child in hopes of convincing him that it’s safe to wake up now.

And that everyone wants him to be here and is glad to have him around and happy that he came into their lives.

I think he’s maybe afraid to feel that way. Afraid to believe it. Because if he started believing that and then it turned out not to be true, it would kill him.

It would crush his little heart.

Plus, if he started believing he was wanted, then he’d be stuck being real.

And reality is such a commitment.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, let’s go through this vid looking for gold.

Deep, cleansing breaths. Here goes.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am not going to suddenly be yanked out of my comfortable yet stultifying life just because I am watching a vid.

1. Meter reader analysis : I don’t really have the temperament for that kind of work. I could probably handle the number analysis – I am pretty good at spotting patterns – but the work would give me a headache. So, maybe, but probably not.
2. Remote hotel reservation specialist : The job is remote, which is keen, and I love customer service, but I imagine I would have to learn a heck of a lot about whatever hotel I worked for, and that seems like it would be hard to do remotely. So I rate this as a solid maybe.
3. Content moderator : I think I could be content as a content moderator. ^[1] I would have to give myself a crash course on the popular social media platforms – no biggie – and I’m a weirdo who enjoys making lots of judgement calls, plus I’m fairly thick skinned when it comes to content, so this one is a solid lead. Yes!
4. Social media manager : Hmmm. I could probably craft witty tweets, although it might take me a bit of time to get into that particular groove. But managing a company’s entire social media presence sounds overwhelming to me. So I rate this a maybe, but probably not. Plus I don’t have much social media presence.
5. Online tutor : I don’t know if I would make a good tutor. I think I might. Like all nerds, I love sharing knowledge, and I am a kind and sympathetic person who is good at seeing things from other people’s POV. I have no qualifications though and I have no specialized areas of knowledge. So I rate this one a maybe.
6. Customer service representative : I could probably handle this. I’d have to learn everything I could about whatever I am representing, because my biggest fear would be someone asking me a question I don’t know the answer to. But like I said, I actually enjoy customer service. I’m so weird. Put this on the plus side of maybe for me.
7. Transcriptionist : I don’t think I type 65 WPM, though it’s hard to say, because for obvious reasons I type straight from my head as opposed to an audio source, so I have no idea how fast I would type for that. More importantly, though, I can’t see this as being a job with a future because AI is getting extremely good at recognizing voice accurately. So call this a negative maybe.
8. Online survey taker : That’s a job? Of course not. And I have done this gig a tiny bit and they ask a ZILLION questions for very little money. Um, no.

That’s enough of that for now. I will do the other seven in part 2 of today’s entry.

And you know what? It’s been no big deal. Once I got into the actual work of it, that absorbed me enough that I wasn’t anxious and I wasn’t thinking about pressure or change or all the other things my neuroses feast upon.

I can totally do this. And it would be so good for my mental health for me to have something truly productive to do with my time for at least a couple of hours a day.

The extra money would be nice too, and the ultimate would be if I could actually make a living at one of these things, but mostly I just need stuff to do and I am incapable of providing my own structure so I need someone else to provide that.

Online university is still an option too, of course.

---

Part two : the Jobening

Now where were we?

1. Virtual bookkeeping : Today I learned that being a bookkeeper is still a thing. I could probably get accredited as a bookkeeper. I’m the only person to ever get a 100 percent in my high school accounting class, after all. I know I have the aptitude. I would just need to take a few online classes to update my skills. And I suppose I could do the work. I know how to make a spreadsheet. I will put this one down as a positive maybe.
2. Medical coder : Yikes. I am sure I could do it but I’m also pretty sure I would hate it. Learning all those weird (and unnecessary) codes would be such a snooze. I might balance the books and I might even read your meter, but I draw the line at this kind of work. No.
3. Proofreader : I don’t think so. I have an extremely keen grip on the English language in all its minutiae, but what I lack is a fine attention to detail. I could be wrong, because language errors in stuff I read online do tend to leap out at me, but I would honestly make a better editor. I can improve your writing better than I can make sure everything is perfect. So…. maybe?
4. Virtual recruiting : Not sure how exactly this works. I guess it must be like outsourcing your HR work and paying someone to plow through all the applications for jobs till you find someone actually hireable. I don’t think I would enjoy that. Too much guesswork, because it’s not like there won’t be multiple equally qualified people for every job. And being responsible for whether someone’s kids get to eat would be way too much for me. Nnnno.
5. Online ESL teacher : The whole world wants to learn English because it’s now the lingua franca of the world. The internet gave us that. But I get very stressed out around people who don’t speak English well, making this about the worst kind of job for me. Um, nope.
6. Search engine evaluator : Hmmm. Another “judgement” job. I can see myself doing this. I am sure it can be quite tedious but like I said, I like exercising my judgement on large numbers of things. That’s why I used to enjoy sorting through my random acquisitions from Usenet so much. So, positive maybe.
7. Virtual event planner : Another hmmm. I’m not exactly one of the party people but I do have excellent organizational skills. I am not sure about organizing virtual events, though. That sounds like no fun. I suppose real world party planning would be really hard to do remotely though. Yeah, FedEx me those cake samples. I could probably do it but I would probably hate it. So no.

There! Now I can close one of my lurking tabs! Hooray!

Next I will sign up for SkillUp!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Being the half-born prince kinda sucks.

I can feel my half a life so clearly now. Perhaps that’s a good sign. I look back on my life and realize how much of me just wasn’t there at all.

But I didn’t know that. I though that was all of me. In fact I have only realized the bifurcated nature of my existence in the last few days.

And when you are half alive and think that you’re whole, of course you think there must be something terribly wrong with you because you don’t know why you can’t do what all the other kids do and grow the hell up.

It’s because half of me (at most) has been left behind for all these years.

That’s probably a big part of why I don’t feel like a real, legitimate person, too. I’m only partially present. I have lived most of my life half-asleep.

There’s a very sad, scared, and traumatized little boy asleep deep inside me, and I am still working up the nerve to wake him up.

He doesn’t want to wake up because then he’ll have to finish dealing with the horrible nightmare visited upon him by the cock of a stranger one horrible day in 1977.

He fled into sleep and the cerebral to escape that horror. Escaped into the depths of his mind and hasn’t come out since because he’s asleep in there.

Like Sleeping Beauty, complete with waiting for my prince to come give me the kiss that will bring me back to life.

Though given my reclusive ways, I’m not sure how the hell he’ll find me.

At some point during my grand awakening, I will have to stick my head out of this deep dark dank and deadly cave of mine and let myself be seen and known.

And that will not be easy. I have been stuck in “freeze” mode (as in fight, flight, or freeze) for a very long time and the overwhelming dictum of “freeze” mode is that discovery equals death and only going unnoticed can bring safety.

When forced into exposure. “flight” mode kicks in and no matter what is happening to me or how much I might be enjoying my time, the anxiety clock is ticking and urging me to go back into hiding and “freeze” mode ASAP.

Like a lot of scared little animals, I do have “fight” mode when cornered. And like the proverbial cornered rat, I can turn surprisingly viscous when defending my person and my territory, metaphorically speaking.

Of course, one thing I need to accept about myself is that I do have somewhat of a temper. It flares up at odd times and for what are quite frankly abstruse reasons, but I have one and it can very well get me into trouble if I let it.

And I should probably let it, if that’s what it takes to uncork my personality and let me live an intact life with the full range of human emotions.

And that means growing up, and that means waking that poor little boy up, and that is going to be heartbreaking.

At least I have found a way to have sympathy for myself. That’s a good thing.

I mean, I guess I do really care for that scared little animal inside me, as well as that sleepy little boy.

But I have been brutally unforgiving to the person they form, and I suppose that by extension I have been unfair to them, too.

This metaphor is getting complicated.

Perhaps if I can keep the boy and the fox in mind, I can learn to remain sympathetic to myself and gain a little bit of blessed mercy from the brutal machine regime within.

I do love myself, after a fashion.

Perhaps I need to let them know it.

More after the break.

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The Busy Friday Chronicles for Nov 1, 2024

Did the wound care thing today. Our appointment was at noon, which I think is the latest in the day it’s ever been.

There was a bit of drama beforehand because first I woke up to discover I was juuuust about to poop (turned out I had already started^[1]) and had to skip to the loo.

So that was not fun. I really wish I knew why sometimes the contents of my bowels liquefy while I sleep as it causes all manner of mischief.

Then when I staggered out of the bathroom (some bowel movements really wear you out), I checked the time… and it was 20 to noon!!!

That’s when we would usually leave!

So I had to get dressed real quick, and the ride to wound care at the CCC was a little more tense than usual.

But no panic, we were on time, no big whoop.

The nurse was one who has tended my wounds a number of times but of course, I could not remember her name.

I hate how bad I am with names. I’m always afraid people will think I don’t care about them or don’t think they are important.

Then it was home for an hour and a quarter before it was time for my weekly shower at Rosewood Manor with Albert.

And it was a clusterfuck from the get-go. First, when Julian went in to get me a wheelchair, they told him they don’t do that any more.

They’d done it two or three weeks in a row, but not any more I guess.

So I had to walk all the way to the shower room, and that was not easy because I had already done the walking for wound care.

So my legs were hurting by the time I got there. Luckily, we arranged for Julian to pick me up at the back entrance after, which is right next to the shower room.

The last time I did the trip back to the lobby, I almost took a fall because my legs gave out just as I reached the lobby and it was sheer luck that I was right in front of a chair when that happened.

Hence my asking for a wheelchair.

Then, once me and Albert were in the shower room, another group of people (patient and attendant) showed up and said THEY were booked for 2:30 pm.

To which I instantly said, “No you’re not!” but luckily nobody heard me.

You see what I meant about defending my territory? I can switch into Grump and Defensive mode in a heartbeat when provoked.

Most people never see this side of me because my life is so flat and mellow that nothing ever provokes me.

So then Albert had to go have a talk with the interlopers plus a lady I think is an administrator at the Manor while our appointment time is ticking away.

Luckily he got it all straightened out and things went on as normal.

But this double booking bullshit really burned my biscuits because it’s such a stupid SNAFU that shows that someone doesn’t know WTF they are doing and parts of the organization aren’t communicating properly.

In retrospect, I wish we had asked the other attendant who told her she and her client could use that facility at that time.

That’s our most likely culprit right there.

Everything else went fine. That was my adventure for the day.

And there’s always something perversely therapeutic about having something to get really irritated about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And it has nothing to do with ghouls, ghosts, and goblins.

For the last week or so, I have been dreading this day. To the point where any time I would think of it, my mind would immediately shy away from it like a horse that’s trying to tell his rider that the big spooky mansion is haunted, and as the day grew closer my sense of apprehension only grew stronger.

And now here we are on the day itself, and I hate it.

And while I was doing the Therapy Thursday thing today, I figured out why.

It’s because I know I will be all alone doing absolutely nothing to celebrate tonight and that will leave me feeling lonely and isolated and forlorn.

It will feel like everyone in the world is getting together and having fun tonight except for little ol’ me and that is going to depress the hell out of me and there’s nothing I can do about it now.

Oh, there was a period of time where I could have done something about it. If I were amongst the living, I could have ordered myself some sugar free treats off of Amazon and eaten them while watching something spooky on YouTube (glitch in the Matrix stories, perhaps) and maybe hung out with some of my fuzzy friends online and not felt nearly as lonesome and left out as I do now.

And it’s not even dark yet. It’ll be worse later on.

But no, I am a warm fuzzy critter who’s dead on the inside, and mustering the wherewithal and gumption to do those kinds of things is far beyond my mortal powers, so I am just going to sit here like a lump and be miserable until sunrise tomorrow.

I can’t even order myself some pizza because Joe and Julian aren’t here (they have actual things to do because they have lives) and the buzzer system in our building is broken (again!!) so I couldn’t let the delivery dude in the building and would have to go down and get the stuff at the front entrance instead.

And with my gimpy legs, that would be a very tricky prospect, and probably unsafe as well given that there would be nobody around to help me if the journey proved to be much too much for me and my legs gave out and I fell.

Still, there IS a love seat to sit on in the lobby. So in theory, I could order the food, then head down to the lobby with a book and wait for it to arrive. Then, after it comes, sit down on the love seat for a rest before heading back upstairs.

Broken into segments like that, it might be doable.

We’ll see if I can find the ambition.

It would definitely help me to not feel so bad, but it would still be a risk. If anything went wrong I might lay there for hours.

That would suck.

Barring that, though, I am going to feel crappy. Kind of like a victim of circumstance, but not really. Unless we take “circumstance” to include “being mentally ill”.

Being crazy sucks. It’s no fun at all.

Well at least I can try hanging out with my fuzzy friends. That should at least take the edge of the loneliness. I can spend some time hugging fuzzies.

And who knows, I might order in just for the adventure of it all. Sure, there’s a risk, but it’s manageable, and if I can pull it off, I will be so very pleased with myself.

I am trying to train myself to think in terms of solutions and things to look forward to instead of being so fucking negative all the time.

I can make things better for myself. I truly can.

I just need to rise up and take charge of my life.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

---

The fox stayed home

`I didn’t order in.

Chickened out, I guess you could say. Couldn’t quite get myself to do it.

It was a good plan and it probably would have worked fine but when push came to shove, I fell over.

You know. From the shoving.

I told myself that I would rather just save the money up anyhow. But that was sour grapes. The truth is that I didn’t have the guts to do it.

Oh well. There’s always next time.

And there’s always a next time.

The important thing is not to take this night’s result as an excuse not to try in the future. That’s loser thinking and I am sick and tired of that shit.

Losers are always looking for the closest exit. They want that quick hit of relief their feel when they give up on something and suddenly all the pressure is off and they will choose that over the remote possibility of success every single time.

Well, there go the Halloween fireworks. Another thing I don’t get to enjoy.

Yeah, I know. That’s loser thinking too. Always wallowing in the negative instead of looking for a way to be happy no matter what.

I’m working on it.

I don’t know where to find the strength to be positive. All I can do is try to remove as much of what is weighing me down as possible in hopes that eventually my natural buoyancy will take over and let me float free.

I still feel like there’s something vitally important missing from me. Some fundamental component of living that I lack and that without that emotional nutrient, all I can do is languish in the doldrums of life and do nothing that means anything till I die.

Scary, isn’t it kids?

But I can learn to feed my soul. I can feel the lack but I can also feel what could fill it and soon, that sad little boy will wake up and rejoin the rest of me, and I will be whole.

Hmm. Maybe I have an idea of how to start my NaNoWriMo novel after all.

Remember my motto : I only have to know what happens NEXT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m feeling sluggish and tired and hence a bit cranky. I feel a weak but constant burning in all my muscles and my head hurts in that spot directly in that “third eye” spot in the middle of my forehead and I feel foggy and confused.

So I’m not doing too great right now. But this too shall pass.

Until then, I will use this negative mood in order to vent some more of the toxic garbage that has accumulated in my soul and maybe ease my burden a bit.

Basically, the crux of it all is that I hate my life and how it’s slowly falling apart along with my aging and sedentary body and yet I feel utterly helpless to change my destination.

I know it doesn’t seem that way. On paper there are loads of ways I could improve my life. But they all require something I just don’t seem to have.

They all require me to stop crouching in the corner with my face turned to the wall. I need to finally stand up, turn around to face the world, and enter that big bad world out there in order to finally deal with things properly.

And I just… can’t.

Even thinking about it hurts me. It gives me this feeling like my frostbitten and snow scarred body is being dragged painfully over rough and dirty ice. Like something raw and broken in me is trying to come to life but I am just too damaged to complete the circuit so I fall apart instead.

I am very good at falling apart. It’s getting my shit together that I fail at.

And it makes it so hard to avoid my self-loathing. That anger turned inward is a hell of a demon to try to exorcize. I have so much bitter contempt for myself and the pathetic worthless trash heap I’ve made of my life that it makes it hard to remember that I have any worth to anyone at all, let alone that people love and support me.

There’s still a terrible gap between me and others. An almost total lack of connection with the rest of humanity. I live in my own little walled off realm where I don’t connect with anybody on any deep level and thus I feel very, very alone.

And I know there are people who want to get closer to me. But I can’t let them in. I may have opened up a doorway inside myself, but I am still standing in that doorway and not letting anyone in, like an overzealous bouncer.

The truth is that I don’t know how to let people in. Or rather, I have no idea what being close to people is even like, and that scares me.

That part of me is frozen shut and has been for a long, long time. Whatever capacity I ever had to open up and connect with people died of a thousand winters deep inside me a long time ago, when I just plain gave up on people.

I went through my period of trying to reach out. Trying to make friends, connect with others, be a part of things. Even trying to be normal in my extremely clumsy fashion.

But due to lack of kindergarten (among other factor) I completely missed the bus when it came to socialization and normalization. I have been locked in this frozen realm of mine for a very long time and in here, I can’t touch anyone and no one touches me.

And that’s not enough. My soul has been starving for what feels like forever. All my gaming and blogging can do for me is keep me busy and/or amused. They can’t feed my spirit or help me grow.

So I feel trapped. But I’m not trapped. Except that I am.

I am just trapped by very inobvious and deeply personal issues that make no sense to the world outside myself as I see it.

I am broken in a way for which people don’t even have a word.

And I don’t know how to fix that.

But venting like this certainly helps. Thank you for listening.

More after the break.

---

The long dream

Been sleeping a lot today.

Must be time for the balloon payment on my sleep debt. It’s been a little frustrating because I’ve been only getting to play my video games in little 20 minute intervals and that’s an unsatisfying amount of play.

Feels like I am just getting started when it’s time to stop. Dammit.

But the real sleep problem that is on my mind right now is how a big part of me has been asleep and dreaming ever since I was raped at the age of 4 and how it has just occurred to me that in order to get better, I am going to have to wake that poor boy up.

And that’s not going to be easy. He’s been asleep for so long that there is no way that he is still healthy and whole as he slumbers away. He’s going to be a very sick child when he wakes up and that makes it seem like waking him is downright cruel.

And yet, awaken he must. In time, he will recover from his long, long nap and be able to truly wake up and take deep, cleansing breaths and then get up and face the day.

And on that day my psyche will be more whole than it has been ever since that terrible man raped me, and I will have all my faculties at my disposal instead of having to drag the dead weight of my sleeping self around behind me.

He doesn’t want to wake up. As far as he is concerned, there is still a horror beyond all comprehension waiting for him in the real world, and therefore waking up is the worst possible thing that could happen because then the monster will GET him.

And I don’t want to wake him up. It will not feel like I am doing him a kindness, at least not at first. Not only is he going to wake up sick, he will have to face a lot of very harsh truths when he does wake, including the horrible fact that he has been asleep for 47 years and most of his life has passed him by.

But somehow we will both get through it.

Because on the other side of all of that lies freedom.

And that make it all worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Those five tabs continue to haunt me.

They are : Notd, a truly excellent forum for writers which would make a great springboard for, at the very least, network with other writers and all I would have to do is summon the self-confidence to upload my stuff to it…

FlexJobs, a site specializing in remote work jobs which might be perfect for me if I could only pull myself together enough to page through the listings until I find one I am actually qualified for…

The March of Dimes Employment Services page, which has all kinds of resources to help gimps like myself find the employment we need to become more independent…

The March of Dimes Skill Up page, which would enable me to acquire the skills needed to actually qualify for stuff…

And this video, which promises 15 juicy remote work opportunities.

All five of these things are wonderful opportunities that could very well be the golden ticket I need in order to finally enter the magical world of employment.

And then I would be a real honest to goodness grownup! Golly!

And they all just sit there like wallpaper with me almost never even thinking about them and when I do notice them there, I immediately avert my attention from those terrible things that make me feel tense and scared and guilty.

Which is why these golden tickets go unredeemed. I am far too prone to fleeing things that scare me by diving deep into my distractions (video games) until I forget all about whatever it was that set me off.

And what sets me off in this case is, I suppose, fear of growing up. Fear of changing. Fear of entering an environment, however virtual, with which I am unfamiliar and therefore one that would be far more stimulating that my usual life and it’s that jump in stimulation levels that scares me.

I associate all such jumps with anxiety attacks, and that’s why I am still on this long smooth flat road to absolutely nowhere because when you can’t choose anything that increases your stimulation you end up at the bottom of a steep ravine.

If you can’t go up, your only choices are to go down or go nowhere.

And while my road seems flat, I’m actually going down a very gradual but fatal decline and at the bottom of this hill lies my early, stupid, pointless grave.

And ain’t that a kick in the nuts.

And I know it’s my own cowardice that is keeping me trapped on this long and lonely road. I am a hostage to my own extremely overactive fear responses and it does not seem like they will let me go any time soon.

So I find myself increasingly contemplating my own kind of “lean in” strategy where instead of trying to quiet my fears or somehow overcome them in a macho manly way (yeah right), I simply endure the terror.

Just walk right into it and let it wash over me. Let it discharge like so much static electricity. Wait for it to wear itself out, then go ahead and do the thing anyway.

And if that fails, pop a Xanax. What the hell.

Something has to end the chokehold my fears have on my every moment. There has to be some way to get past that massive wall of fear and it’s seeming increasingly likely that the only way out is through.

Maybe that’s how I teach my soul to fly. I keep talking about not being limited by the logical and the sensible, but I am still driving around looking for an exit.

When I know that the only way to get there is to fly. Leave logic and common sense behind and just go there even if it doesn’t make sense at all. Even if there’s no logical connection between what came before and what I want to happen.

Even if there is no road to that holy place at all, and the only way to get there is to fly.

It is truly a handicap to need things to always make sense. It can lead to a remarkably well integrated and robust understanding of things, but it’s no good for the soul.

Sometimes reality simply does not furnish what we need.

And then, we have to be able to make it ourselves.

More after the break.

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Leave this world behind

Perhaps it’s because my subjective world is so unreal, but I cling to what connection to reality I still retain with a fanatical deathgrip for fear of the vast and hungry canyon of total mental oblivion over which I am dangling.

Madness lurks below. Or so I’ve always thought.

But maybe that is all bullshit. Maybe I could let go and not only would I be fine, I would actually be way better off because now my mind can find its natural equilibrium and I could learn to relax and not be so freaking anxious all the time.

Ah, but can I afford to risk it? What if I’m wrong and I do end up utterly mad?

That is how paranoia always works. It sets things up so that the consequences of disobeying it just might be far, far worse than any benefit – might, in fact, be fatal, either literally or metaphorically, and thus makes it seem “not worth the risk”.

It’s the perfect scam, because it keeps you from ever testing whether or not it’s valid.

I mean, if there’s a real possibility that turning on your light will cause an explosion that will kill you and your entire family, you’re probably going to just get used to the dark.

But is that a real possibility? Or rather, is it in any sense at all likely?

And if it isn’t, why do you keep scaring yourself with the possibility? What does that cycle of fear keep from happening? What are you REALLY scared of?

Anyhow. This tight grip on my connection to reality might be partially to blame for why faith seems so impossible to me.

Because to have faith, I would have to let go. For the first time in my life, I would have to leave the tightly integrated structure of my rational model of the universe and enter a world of pure emotion and intuition, and that scares the shit out of me.

I can’t verify emotion. I can’t test intuition’s reasoning. I can’t examine their justification and see if it checks out. I can’t be sure of anything at all.

Or maybe I could be sure of all of it if I could just believe.

But I can’t, or at least, not yet. I can’t believe something (or in something) without having a reason to do so. It has to make sense to me.

But belief without the need for justification is the definition of faith.

And I don’t know if I can do that.

I just know that I need to.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Julian drove me to an orthotics center today so they could push my feet into foam.

In order to make a cast of my feet, of course. This is one of the many wonderful things my case worker Galina has put into motion for me, and should eventually result in my getting new shoes with offloading orthotics inside them.

The idea is to take the pressure off the wounds on my feet so that they can heal.

One surprising bit of info : going around in my socks all the time might be the very reason the wounds on my feet haven’t healed.

It makes sense when you think about it : when you go around barefoot or in just socks, the flexing of the muscles tears the wound open with every step.

Harsh, I know. But accurate.

That’s especially true with wounds like the one on my left foot, The wound is smack dab in the middle of the muscle right above the heel, and wounds like that do not heal well even in the best of circumstances because pretty much anything you do with that foot will flex that muscle.

I am pretty dang curious as to how orthotics will get around that.

Well, I will know in 2 to 6 weeks. I fully expected that. The wheels of government turn mighty slow and I most definitely did not think I would be leaving the orthotics place with new shoes today.

As always, I do what’s asked of me then forget about it till I need to do something else.

The orthotics place is in Vancouver, so it was a bit of a road trip to get there. Plus it’s located in this big rehabilitation center which is itself located in a cozy, tree lined Vancouver residential neighborhood, so it’s a tad off the beaten path.

Something occurred to me while we were in that neighborhood : everyone knows that people love those tree lined neighborhoods.

What struck me is that this basically means we like living in the forest. We want to be surrounded by trees. And then every lawn is like a little meadow of our own.

We’re still forest animals at heart. And I say this as a person who grew up on a tree lined street, and so that kind of thing is especially powerful for me.

I find it comforting to think that we complicated humans are basically forest animals who seek our natural climate.

Makes me think of those adorable British children’s books about anthro animals living in forest neighborhoods, like The Wind In The Willows.

The orthotics specialist was a very nice British lady who did the pressing my feet into the foam thing. The foam was firm but yielded when the lady pressed down on my feet with her hands, and voila, two remarkably high resolution impressions of my tootsies.

It was a very interesting sensation. Like stepping into crusty snow, only much warmer and drier. To be honest, it made me want to have a bunch of that foam to play around with and make impressions of various things.

Now the whole thing has to make a stop at my GP Doctor Chao’s office so that he can add the shoes to my prescription, then it’s off to the government to await their holy benison so the orthotics people can make my frigging shoes.

One thing that concerned me was that she was clearly implying that I should have the new shoes on all the time, and that would be a major adjustment for me.

But then I realized that there would be no reason for me to wear them when I was sitting at the computer or lying in bed, and that’s 80 percent of my waking hours, so I guess I would only have to slip them on when I stood up.

And I can live with that, I guess.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

More after the break.

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The long haul

I feel so damned tired sometimes.

Especially after a day like today, with an unusual amount of moving around. Right now my legs are aching. More worryingly, so are my arms.

I am terrified that my undiagnosed and hence untreated muscular degeneration is going to take my arms next. Having legs that don’t work right is one thing. It sucks but most of the time I am sitting or lying down anyhow, so it’s not that bad.

But if my arms become as stiff and weak as my legs, that could fuck things up big time.

If that happens, I am going to demand answers and a treatment, because that could make my life intolerable.

Just leave me the ability to type and use the mouse.

Anyhow, so I feel sore all over and that is not ideal because I still have wound care tomorrow where I will need to make another subjectively long trip via my walker.

I feel my destiny in a wheelchair looming larger and closer than ever before.

I get the feeling I might not make it to wound care tomorrow. Depends on how I feel when I get up.

I really don’t want to miss tomorrow’s appointment, though, because the orthotics lady had to remove the bandages on my feet in order to do that neato foam thing and then stick them back on again.

They’re not a wound clinic. They don’t do that kind of work. I have the feeling that she’s more of a medical technician, like a physio, then an actual part of the medical system.

And I was not super happy with that, but as long as I make it to wound care, they can change the bandages to ones that are put on there properly and all will be good.

But will I make it? I dunno. Right now it doesn’t seem likely but maybe if I lay in bed willing my legs to recover from their ordeal faster, I can make it.

I frigging hate my life sometimes.

It’s just so god damned stupid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We introverts tend to generate our own energy.

As opposed to extroverts, who take their energy from their environment.

Now obviously I am not speaking of literal energy. Whatever energy you’re using to walk, talk, and masturbate as you read this comes from inside you no matter how you are wired because it’s a product of your metabolism.

So what we’re really talking about is the emotional side of motive power. This includes that magical, mystical substance called “motivation”, but also things like the elevation of one’s mood, inspiration, the urge to socialize, and so on.

Both introversion and extroversion have their pluses and minuses, and the world most definitely needs both kinds of people.

But both sides can also go too far, to the point of becoming pathological.

Extreme extroversion can lead to someone who is monophobic – in other words, they hate to ever be alone – as well as hyperactive and reactive and who simply cannot function without people to perceive them and react to.

Extreme introverts, like myself, can end up very depressed and unmotivated and anhedonic because when their internal generation of “power” isn’t enough, everything grinds to a gruesome halt.

And the thing about depression as a mental illness is that it creates a kind of friction that enormously increases the amount of “power” needed to do even the simplest of things, and that’s bad, bad news when you are limited to only what you generate internally.

The result is persistent depressive disorder as we know it, with the lassitude, lack of motivation, and dependence on whatever in our lives we have gravitated to as the activity that provides enough reward for the effort it requires.

All depressives are addicted to something, in my opinion.

All this leads to my own case and my thoughts about this whole energy deal. Clearly, I need a lot more of the stuff if I am to escape my own rather nasty gravity well.

Luckily, I know that it is at least possible for me to get some energy from external stimulation. For example, I often feel quite awake and alive when I have been hanging out with my friends at Denny’s of a Sunday night, as I will be doing in 2 hours and a bit.

But for the most part, I have been far too closed off and insular to get much from my environment except through screens, and screens are not enough.

I mean, obviously, in a literal sense, video games are stimulation from outside of my skull, but to me they are more like extensions of my mind.

But a good game can motivate me to play it for hours on end. So there’s that.

My catastrophic passivity is part of this equation as well, because it rarely occurs to me to actually seek the sort of social stimulation I clearly need in order to stop feeling so cold and lonely all the god damned time.

So what I clearly need to do is gather my meager motivational forces together and go hunting for greater social stimulation of a positive variety.

But more fundamentally, I need to open myself up to the world and all its potential stimulation instead of huddling in a corner with my screens and shutting the real world out as much as possible.

I need to become a real human being and not just a broken simulation of one. I want to find all my long neglected instincts, emotions, and drives, and enable myself to let them take me where they will no matter how unpredictable the journey might be.

Because the thing about healthy people is that it doesn’t matter how surprising life might be because they are confident that they will be able to handle it.

That is their form of predictability – confidence in themselves. And the more they successfully endure, the greater that confidence becomes because they now have the experience needed to make even better decisions in the future.

Seems like an impossible and distant galaxy from where I am right now. And yet I know the potential for that sort of self-affirming life lies within me.

I was a very open and optimistic and enthusiastic kid before the rape.

I can be that kind of person again.

I will find a way to get back to that.

One word at a time.

More after the break.

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Dig, dig, dig

And I will get back to that happy, positive place by swinging my psychological pickaxe and digging deep into into the substrate of my psyche in order to excavate all those old fossilized emotions and release the energy bound up in that deep black rock so that it can return to powering my actual generators again.

Can I work a metaphor, or what?

And I have seen little hints of light breaking through the clouds lately. Moments when I can feel a certain lightness and buoyancy threatening to lift me up and actually make me feel good about life and the road ahead of me.

A warm, sunshiny feeling is a-stirring, and so I am desperately tunneling through the rock still holding me down in order to become light enough to start floating again.

I don’t care if I float off into the stratosphere and disappear into the sky. Nice place, the sky. Could be a nice place to live.

And it sure as fuck can’t be any more cold and airless than how I feel down here.

So I am throwing every sandbag I got over the side of this hot air balloon of mine and I will keep doing that until I finally lift the fuck off.

To hell with having my feet on the ground. Staying firmly grounded in the here and now has always been a purely theoretical idea for me anyhow. I’ve talked big about it but the truth is that I can’t handle the here and now in the slightest.

I will always retain my fundamental pragmatism. That’s immutable. But I no longer give a shit if I am being “logical” or “realistic”.

I just want to be happy.

And absolutely nothing else matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a surprisingly slippery question.

I will always recall the moment I realized that there was such a thing as nerds and nerd culture. I remember I was sitting around playing D&D with some fellow students in junior high (in my school district, grades 7 through 9) and it suddenly occurred to me that I had more in common with the people there than just D&D.

Somehow, I knew that if they were into D&D, odds are they were also heavily into science fiction, heavy metal, and Star Wars.

The odds were also very good that they did well in school. That wasn’t a lock, because not every nerd is academically gifted – just most of us – but if you’ve the wit to play D&D at all competently, you’re no dummy.

Most importantly, I realized there were other people like me.

Of course, now, with the rise of the Internet and internet culture. we are all aware that there are millions of us nerds out there and that there is a vast and varied geek subculture that supports us in our nerdity.

But my revelation would have come in 1987 or so, so all of that hadn’t happened yet.

I imagine a lot of my fellow geeks went through a similar journey.

Eh, nerdy kids these days don’t know how good they got it.

Anyhow, enough biography. Let’s address the question : what is a nerd?

I don’t know, but I know one when I see one. Ha ha ha.

First off, we are a subset of the naturally occurring intellectual class. This is the percentage of the population that naturally develops a higher than average IQ and hence does well in school.

Nobody has to create this class of person. The human race seems to simply produce them without the need for any kind of intervention.

Now, whether any given society encourages and/or exploits this higher level of intelligence sadly varies wildly depending on culture, both societal and family.

But that’s outside the scope of this think piece.

Depending on how broadly one defines nerdity, it could be said that all the members of this naturally occurring intellectual class (NOIC?) are nerds of some sort.

But someone bound for law school is not just a “law nerd” by any stretch of the imagination. The line has to be drawn somewhere.

One of the defining characteristics of nerdity is a love for learning and the accumulation of knowledge. Nerds love to know things, and when it’s something they like, like Lord of the Rings, they will want to learn everything there is to know about their fave thing.

I’m not that kind of nerd myself. I’m a lot more omnivorous than that. I take in all kinds of information and it all gets sorted and formatted and reduced to its pure essence and that essence become part of my working model of the world.

There are lots of things I love. Like science and video games, both geeky. But I can’t imagine that making me want to learn everything there is to know about either subject.

I will definitely enjoy learning about them. An article or YouTube video about those subjects has a higher likely of attracting my attention than one about trains.

It’s the obsessive drive to collect that I lack, whether it’s merchandise or trivia. I love to learn and I enjoy having knowledge to draw on, but I get bored far too easily and I am far too restless to stick with even one of my favorite topics for a long time.

So I am more of a generalist. That’s my specialty.

More after the break.

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Topic what topic

You have to admit, I kept trying to return to the topic of what a nerd is.

But it’s so hard for me to make the words go where I want them to go. I can’t be restricted to a topic. My mind refuses to be constrained by even its own ideas.

There’s a lesson for me in there somewhere, I think.

Now, there are worse sins than not being able to stick to a point. All that really matters is whether a writer keeps you entertained (or amused or engaged or whatever) with whatever it is they wrote. Whether they prove their thesis or not is secondary.

This was true of some of the columnist of old. Like my hero Dave Barry (sp?). He managed to get to a point where all he had to do was come up with 750 funny and engaging words a day, and everything would be all right.

I want that kind of life. Sure, having to come up with those 750 high quality words every day would be way, way harder than producing 1000 words of my usual drivel, but I know I would be up to the task.

And sure, the fame would be nice, and the money would be very very nice. But what would be the most appealing thing about it to me would be the simplicity of it all.

No more infinite corridor of infinite doors. No more option paralysis. No more constant, gnawing feeling that there’s something I am supposed to be doing and I am not doing it.

Just 750 little words and you’re done for the day. And you know what you’ll be doing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on.

That would be amazing.

Piers Anthony, another hero of mine, also talked something similar. He said he got to the point where he felt he owed the word 1000 proofread and edited and polished words a day toward whatever he was working on (and it could be any one of several projects) and as long as he got those words done, all was right in the world.

I wonder if that’s where I got the !K words a day idea?

And most importantly, absolutely nothing could change that obligation. Even if he missed that target 100 days in a row, on day 101 he still owed the world those words. Failure was absolutely no excuse to quit.

And that might seem harsh to some. But to me, it’s genius. Because it changes the equation so that failure is no longer an escape from the problem. In that case, the path of least resistance becomes to just do the damned thing and get it over with so you can do whatever the fuck you want with the rest of your day.

It’s a way around the laziness and procrastination endemic to us creative type people.

Shit. That reminds me. NaNoWriMo is coming up in 5 days and I don’t have an idea for what to write about yet.

I could just improvise my way through it like I did with my previous November novels. There, too, what I ended up writing bore little resemblance to what I had meant to write.

But I still need a good, solid, inspiring point of departure.

Time to start brainstorming!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.