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.

Well, frantic might not be the right word. But busy.

Wound care at 9:15 am. Had a “it sucks to be sensitive” moment when my nurse came to get me in the waiting area just as some other client, a rather confused old lady who did not speak English, and her care worker who barely? spoke English started a hubbub with my nurse about an appointment they thought was at 8:30 am but was in fact at 9:15 am just like mine.

There was much confusion and stress hanging in the air for me to walk into because of this, plus the disorder of it all upset me, and I was left walking into the Community Care Clinic feeling rather off kilter and upset.

It really sucks to be as sensitive as I am sometimes.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My nurse was a lady with an African accent and dark skin, and that was kind of fun. I love the interesting rising caDENCE of her acCENT and the unusual empPHAsis she placed on some sylLABles, see.

It’s not impossible that it was actually a Caribbean accent. After today, I can really hear how the Caribbean accent relates to certain African accents.

Her skin tone and bone structure said Africa, though.

The usual bandage change happened despite the occasional tiny language snafus (“You have wounds on both your…. legs, right?” My feet, actually, but I am pretty sure you know that. ), and then we were on our way to the bank for my monthly bullshit.

The banking bullshit went great. There was absolutely no line at all so the whole thing took very little time and I didn’t need Julian to be my placeholder in line or anything.

I made the usual withdrawal. I still need to deal in cash because Van City still does not have a way for me to spend money via Visa Debit so that it acts just like a Visa card but the money comes out of my account instead of accruing as debt.

If I could only get that service, I would never need to go to the bank again. The money would be deposited in the account and I would spend it from there too.

There’s probably a way for me to do that and I am just not clever enough to think of it.

I can be very, very clever like any good fox, but it’s sporadic. Inspiration either strikes or it doesn’t and I don’t really have any control over that.

One silly thing : after we left the bank, we headed home, and it wasn’t until we had pulled into our parking spot that I realized we had forgotten to get my credit card.

You know, the preloaded credit card I buy every month so that I can buy things online like a civilized human of today.

Without it, I could not order my groceries, and that’s a no go. So off to Sav-On we went.

I registered the card then ordered my groceries when we got home. The groceries were $87 this week, ouch.

Normally I budget around $60/week but I was out of a bunch of things, including canned pop, and I had decided that to jumpstart my canned pop supply I would need to buy two “fridge buddy” 12 packs, and those are like $9 each.

Plus I decided I wanted to get my hard candies, and that was another $10.

So, ouch, but I knew it would be a costly week.

Then later on came shower time. I am enjoying these little excursions more and more as Albert and I get along quite well and always have a pleasant chat as we get the job done, so to speak.

Well, mostly him. But I help.

More after the break.

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Permission to live

It’s what I am trying to give myself, more or less.

I could even go as far as calling it “permission to exist”. I have lived with the burden of subconsciously being ashamed to be alive for my entire life. Whatever recovery I can manage is going to require me to overcome that somehow.

No wonder I spent so much time alone in my room when I was growing up. Or watching TV by myself in the living room, when everyone else was busy.

I was such a nervous and timid little thing. Like an overwrought mouse.

I somehow need to learn to believe that my being around is a good thing. That means forever banishing that evil, evil voice inside me that tells me that I am a blight on all who know me and the world would be better off without me.

I know that voice is wrong, wrong, wrong.

But that doesn’t shut it up. For that, I suppose I would need to expiate whatever emotions that voice is expressing.

I am still working on being able to figure out that kind of thing. I know that all those evil thoughts come from a place of pain and rage – rage turned inward.

Depression makes us our own tormentor. We are the sadist and the victim. We are the torturer and the sinner. We are the plague and the stricken.

We feast on our own flesh.

This is getting pretty metal.

I guess the obvious solution is to find another outlet for all that fucking rage. And I agree with that objective in principle but I still shy away from it emotionally.

I’m afraid of my rage and where it might take me and what it could make me do. The urges it produces are absolutely psychotic sometimes.

I won’t go into details. I don’t want to scare you.

But I get how depression leads some people into depraved acts, I just know better and thus I can’t pretend like such acts are justified in any way.

I know the seduction of rage, and how easy it would be to follow whatever path leads to that rage being expressed.

And um, fuck that noise.

If it’s be miserable or be evil, I will stay sad, thank you very much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Some videos I have been watching and commenting on over on YouTube have got me thinking Gen X thoughts.

Every generation starts where the previous one left off, even though they neither know it or do it on purpose, and Gen X started where the Boomers ended.

And where they ended was bad. Very bad.

Their youthful exuberance started in the psychedelic 60’s but ended in the Age of Disillusionment. aka the 70’s, and that’s when a lot of us X’ers were born.

The 70’s saw the tie-dyed pie=eyed drug-fueled hippie revolution turn into the social apocalypse that followed. Drugs ran rampant and destroyed lives on an industrial scale , because much to the shock of the hippies, it turned out that drugs are bad, mmkay?

All those hippies came down from the high to find their lives destroyed, often along with their bodies, and many of them came out of it with crippling addictions to things like heroin or morphine.

And because of this explosion in the number of junkies, a tidal wave of crime followed as millions of former hippies had habits to feed.

Throw in Vietnam, Nixon, pollution, inflation, OPEC, poverty, and the stress of trying to start a family amidst all this degradation, and the hippies came to a very bad end. They saw all their great big psychedelic dreams turn into absolute dogshit, and their peace love and harmony turn into cheap thrills and street crime.

Oh, and the divorce rate also skyrocketed as the spoiled and cranky Boomers decided they didn’t feel like being married any more.

So they weren’t.

And that’s the milieu into which we were born. It’s like we of the subsequent generation absorbed the Boomer’s newfound cynicism and disillusionment with our mother’s milk and it became foundational to our entire worldview.

So we inherently distrust big dreams and grand schemes and societal machines. We have a natural immunity to hype and drama and idealism. We grew up with absolutely no illusions about drugs or music or anything else.

We had to deal with the harsh realities the Boomers had created by refusing to face reality for half a generation.

Remember, folks, reality always wins.

I will never forget the conversation I had on IRC with a bunch of ex-hippie Libertarian types where they couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that I didn’t trust ANYBODY.

Not government, not religion, not corporations, not education, not charities, not the shining idiots on the TV, and definitely not our selfish Boomer parents.

The same parents that had kids without realizing that kids actually have their own needs and desires that could potentially impinge on the Boomers’ precious freedom and autonomy and prerogatives, and clearly that was unacceptable.

I’m sorry, but I didn’t know having kids would mean less for ME.

So instead of being real parents, they just did whatever the hell they wanted to do and us offspring had to just fit ourselves in whenever and often basically raise ourselves.

Hence being the latchkey generation. The first (and in many ways last) generation to grow up without a full time parent. To come home to absolutely nobody and be left to fend for ourselves at least until suppertime.

To never have anyone to turn to when you needed a parent because they were busy and what they were doing was far more important than you are and really, they’re doing this all for you, so just shut up and leave mommy and daddy alone, OK?

And we did. And then they wondered why we grew up to hate them.

Maybe that’s changed now. Maybe it can no longer be assumed that kids will grow up to hate their parents, at least for a while.

After all, kids aren’t raised by Boomers any more.

I’d like to think we did a better job, at least a little.

More after the break.

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The Therapy Thursday Report

Today’s session was pretty good.

We talked about how I have spent most of my life staying in my bedroom most of the time because that’s the only place I felt “safe”.

When I was a kid, it meant I was “safe” from my family and the pain of being ignored or feeling like I wasn’t even there or the anxiety of dealing with people in general, which I now recognize as stemming from feeling like everyone was always at least a little bit pissed off at me.

Back then, that was normal. I lived with a constant background of people’s annoyance. And that extended from my mother through my siblings and all the way to my teachers.

Nobody really wanted me around because I was such a gross pathetic mess. It is painful to be around someone like that. And disgusting.

The difference is that someone in my home life should have taken it upon themselves to get me to clean up and pull myself together so that I was at least inoffensive.

But I was the Christmas puppy, the cute kid who everyone got tired off and then nobody wanted to take care of me or bear any responsibility for me whatsoever.

Like a big dumb smelly dog who doesn’t know why he never gets pets any more.

Another thing that came up during today’s session was the idea of trying to fixate on my pre-rape self when I was a very happy, charming, adorable kid who was often the center of attention wherever I went without even trying and whom everybody loved.

I can be that person again. Well, an adult version of him, anyhow.

That’s the person I was supposed to be before that evil man raped me. And it’s the person I can be again once I rid myself of all these demons and learn to stand up and shake off my fears and face the grown-up world head-on.

Hopefully without whimpering.

I know that I have to rescue and resurrect that very large part of me that is still back in that shower stall where I was raped.

I need to heal him and the wounds he carries, and that won’t be easy or fun.

But I am working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

After all, it’s what I’m good at.

It’s a shocking thing to realize you’ve spent your whole life curled up into a ball with your back turned to the world as you tried hard to ignore brutal reality in favour of screens.

Like I am just waiting for reality to go away and leave me to my pain.

And because of the trauma that put me into this fixed position, I became extremely passive. I guess you could say that I dealt with being raped by going limp and waiting for it to be over.

I assume I’m not the only one to do that in that situation.

And I have spent the rest of my life doing the same thing. I have felt so powerless for most of my life that it would never have occurred to me that I was supposed to be steering this life of mine all this time.

But it’s clear to me now that much of that powerless is delusional. I have all kinds of power that I have never tapped into. If anything, I have actively (if subconsciously) dodged thinking about the true extent of my abilities in any but the most theoretical of ways for a very long time.

Them : But Mister Bertrand, you’re actually powerful beyond all mortal ken.
Me : I guess. Can I go back to crouching in filth now?

So why do I deny the truth of my own extraordinary abilities?

I think it has a lot to do with not wanting to take responsibility for them. After all, if I truly “owned” my incredible faculties, then I would be obliged to do something with them and that would take me out of my “safe” position of cringing in the dark.

And that would be the worst thing possible, at least according to that tiny child inside me that left the world behind in order to escape the unthinkable thing happening to him.

He’s still hiding deep inside me. That scared little animal at the heart of my psyche fears exposure most of all because he associates concealment with safety and discovery with terrible things happening to him.

Many, many bullying incidents taught him that, as well as an emotionally cold and distant and disdainful home life.

Obviously, accepting one’s true power as well as one’s limitations is a key part of growing up, and I’ve been afraid to do that as well.

Once more we come face to face with my “failure to launch” and that deep conviction that adult life would destroy me.

Or maybe just change me into something unrecognizable, which is worse.

Normal people don’t even think about this shit. They just go on to the next thing their instincts tell them to do without even knowing that is what they are doing.

They’re just doing what feels right and/or makes sense at the time, without the kind of overbearing metaconscious awareness that cripples the likes of me.

They have innocence, at least for a while. And it protects.

But me, I knew far too much far too soon. I couldn’t just innocently do normal kid things for the usual kid reasons because I “knew better”.

Sometimes having perspective can be downright toxic to your wellbeing.

I guess you could call it cosmic self-consciousness. At no point could I let my guard down and believe or do the things kids normally do.

My paranoia ran far too deep. Any sense of control over my existence I felt (and feel) is entirely dependent on tackling things with my over-muscled brain and trying to understand and anticipate everything.

It all seems so futile to me now. But it’s still all I’ve got.

It’s going to take a hell of a lot of growth to get over that.

More after the break.

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Failure to launch indeed

Gave masturbation a try.

As usual, it was a lot of fun, and it felt good to fire up my engines and run them for a bit. But sadly, as is alas also usual, I didn’t get anywhere near takeoff.

And that is always a bummer. I don’t know how it works for females of our species but for us men when we don’t get where we’re trying to go, we die a little inside.

What isn’t usual is that this time, that punctured finale came with a tidal surge of pure black depression. A wave of sadness flooded my mind and for around ten minutes I was feeling pretty bad.

The fact that I also developed a sick headache – the kind that comes with nausea – at almost the same time did not help at all.

But the depression came first. Pun intended, I guess.

That raises the stakes on my little erotic excursions considerably. Frustration is one thing – I have gotten somewhat used to that.

But being punished for my aborted orbital mission with black dog depression is a new wrinkle and one I very much wish to iron out.

Luckily, the flood waters receded after around ten minutes and I was left just feeling a little sick and a little bit, um, sore.

I pretty much have to completely abstain for weeks at a time in order to have any really good chance at reaching blastoff.

And way back when Paxil was pretty much completely nullifying my libido (the first few years after starting it) that was not a problem. Don’t want it, don’t get it, it’s all good.

The problem came when my libido returned but orgasm did not. Dammit.

I figure it must have something to do with the way Paxil dampens one’s emotions in general. That’s how it keeps people with social anxiety/Avoidant like myself from freaking out so much but it also keeps me from having other emotional extremes.

Jesus, what if the numbness I have been blaming on the depression has actually been the fault of my antidepressant?

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants?

Good thing Doctor Costin has me slowly reducing the dose then, I guess.

Sure would be nice to feel things strongly again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this whole idea of elevating your own mood.

The very concept of being able to do things that make you feel better for longer than the thing itself lasts is alien to my excessively introverted mind.

All I know how to do is keep my mind too stimulated and busy for me to be sad. While I am blogging or playing a video game, I’m not depressed and I don’t hate myself.

Maybe because I am actually using a substantial fraction of my energies by doing a task and that leaves precious little room for my dark ruminations.

Either way, I guess you could say I self-medicate with video games. And like all non-prescription ways of treating the chemical imbalance in the head of a depressive, it has become a paralyzing addiction.

Could be worse. I could have taken up drinking.

Anyhow, back to the supposed topic.

Of course, I know that other people do things to make themselves feel better all the time. It’s one of the most basic forms of taking care of your own mental health, Or, put less cerebrally, making life not suck so much.

So the fact that the concept is alien to me personally is just plain weird.

Somehow, my mental malfunctions make it seem beyond impossible for me to take responsibility for my own mood.

I guess I have deeply internalized the idea of my mood being a thing that fluctuates all on itself own, and all I can do is deal with wherever it goes.

Like it’s the weather.

To be honest I do not take responsibility for much in my life. I am stuck in that “helpless and hopeless” mode of just reacting to whatever happens to me (mostly nothing) and doing next to nothing to actually pilot my own vessel.

It scares me to even think of taking full responsibility for my own fate because that would me the horrible mess I have made of my life is all my fault and I don’t think I could survive the spike in self-hatred that would trigger.

I mean, obviously it’s my fault, or at the very least, my responsibility, because who else’s fault could it be?

I don’t even have a boss or a parent to influence and control me.

It’s all me, baby!

But knowing it’s my fault and actually taking on the responsibility for the sad state of my wasted fucking life are two radically different things.

They shouldn’t be, but they are.

I guess I’ve lived my life like I am a helpless leaf in the wind. Which must be a spiritual issues on some level. Some part of me is bone-chillingly scared of taking control and that’s why my strength and energy seem to just fade away when I try to get going.

I feel weak in spirit. Like my soul has a fatal flaw, or maybe just a terrible disease. Something at my core sinks me far faster than I can bail and swamps my boat any time I try to get anywhere.

If I could only plug that metaphorical leak, I might be able to get somewhere in life. But I am clinging to my current life with too much of a death-grip for that, I guess.

If only I didn’t feel so very alone all the time. If only I could make myself believe both that I can be helped and that help is available.

But that will take a lot more thawing out on my part.

And the ice gets denser and colder as I get closer to the heart of things.

But the fire is getting hotter too.

Spring WILL come.

More after the break.

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The paralysis of helplessness

At some point, I guess I just kind of gave up on life.

Must have been when I was crawling out of that deep dark hole I fell into when I was in my early 20’s and my parents took me out of college and made me move back home.

The version of me that emerged from the rubble of that total breakdown was built to survive what was the current conditions at the time but nothing more.

So I can watch TV, play video games, and read, and keep myself from going utterly insane that way.

Those were the resources I had at my disposal back then.

Clearly I need to reconstitute myself again. Only hopefully without having a total nervous breakdown that leaves me malnourished and dehydrated and miserable on the couch for four months this time.

Although I dunno. Might be worth it.

I don’t think I could let myself completely fall apart again. I would be far too scared that I would not be able to put myself back together again.

But it may come to that anyway. I’ve spoken before in this spot about how the path to greater sanity might take me a lot closer to insanity than my current static safety system would normally allow, and that is why.

Sometimes the only way to remake yourself in the needed way is to first shatter yourself into a million pieces and make the new you out of those.

And I hate that idea. It seems like such a waste of existing human potential. And if that’s the only way to get better, the case for going on exactly right now gets much much stronger because at least I won’t get worse.

But I need to grow. I need to change. And that change may have to be radical, not incremental. At the very least, I may need to let go of everything I think I know about myself in order to make way for the new me to be born.

Death to the false self, and all that.

Too bad I am too old, sick, and poor to go backpacking across Europe or to go climb Machu Pichu or whatever.

That seems to be what other, healthier people do in order to “find themselves” and presumably build a solid foundation for their lives as adults.

I’ve built my house on shifting sands and then wondered why I am so unstable.

I have so much I have to unlearn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Starring Run DMC and Rock and Hyde!

Just kidding. It’s about being so damned avoidant.

I’ve been making little attempts to reverse that avoidance by deliberately forcing myself to stay with things that normally make me retreat or run away.

Like those five tabs for various ways that I might find remote work that have been taking up space in my browser forever.

And no wonder, when even looking at the tabs fills me with guilt and self-loathing that makes me immediately flee into some distraction or another to escape my own inner wrath and persecution.

Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem.

And because of the nature of this self-excoriation, I have of course been blaming myself for it and hating myself for being too weak to resist it and do the thing I want to and/or should do anyhow.

And that’s insane. It’s like an entirely internal version of a kind of prisoner’s syndrome, where the prisoner finds it far easier to blame themselves for the abuse they are suffering from their jailors than to blame the jailors themselves.

Because when you are truly beaten down, the idea of rebelling is far too scary to contemplate. Directing the anger towards the right target means confronting the very demons who control your life and have the power to punish you, or worse, even if that confrontation is entirely in your head.

It’s far easier to direct the blame inward.

And yes, this observation has vast political implications.

But I don’t want to go there right now.

So to free myself from this self-flagellating cycle of internalized abuse would require me to essentially confront my inner prosecutors and deny them their power and authority over me and reject their corrupt and sadistic rule.

Sounds good, right? But it’s a lot to ask of oneself.

Because the way down dirty truth of it is that even these demons of mine serve my real agenda, which is to give myself ample reason to continue to not grow up.

Without these tormentors, there would be nothing keeping me from finally growing and rising and becoming a genuine actual certified grownup, and deep down I am convinced that this means utter annihiliation somehow, so it must be avoided at all costs.

And boy are there a lot of costs.

It’s a crying shame to be so at war with one’s own growth. Cue my usual routine about how every time a butterfly is born, a caterpillar dies. With a fixed sense of self, any significant change really does seem like death because it does mean the death of ourselves as we currently conceive of ourselves.

But it is only the false self that dies. The true self can only die when we die. The real me – the person I have been since I was born, the one that has always answered to my name – is as green and eternal as the springtime.

And not just because my birthday is in May.

So I should let myself grow up already. Get the hell out of my own way, beat my inner prosecutor to death with a fucking shovel, and allow myself to soar up into the sky like the majestic fabulous scintillating wonder I am.

Emphasis on should. There’s a hell of a lot of things I should do and I never do them because of that avoidant shit I talked about in the beginning.

Clearly the fascist government within has to fall, and as to what will replace it, I guess we will just see what springs up when its gone.

Maybe then my long dormant seeds of adulthood will finally sprout and grow.

More after the break.

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Coming out of hiding

One of the biggest struggles in my therapeutic journey is to overcome that urge to hide from everything and everyone.

I talked yesterday about how that came about. A childhood full of being resented just for being born, where it seemed like everyone was always at least a little angry with me, taught me that existing out loud meant danger and I was only truly, truly safe when I was alone in my room.

He typed while sitting alone in his room like usual. Sigh.

That brought up a rather large morsel of my loneliness and pain.

Good. The more of that shit I process, the better off I will be. It might not be fun while it’s happening – kind of feels like I swallowed a big lump of ice and it’s stuck right over my torn and tattered heart and melting very slowly – but when it’s gone, I will be all the lighter and happier for having rid myself of it.

Anyhow, where was I? Right, coming out of hiding.

It’s going to be very hard to convince myself that it’s safe to be seen. I have fled the light like a startled cockroach for my entire life.

In my early life, people meant danger. That is the brutal and terrible lesson etched deep into my soul starting from when I was raped and continuing all through school as I got bullied and neglected and socially ostracized.

All that did was drive me even further into myself. And along the way learn to remain retracted from reality into the comfortable confines of my own mind as much as I can.

The fact that school was easier than your average fuck for me did not help either. So much time spent just sitting there, bored out of my gourd because I had finished the school work in a couple of minutes while the rest of the students took twenty or more is absolutely staggering to think about.

Not to mention sitting through the teacher repeating everything so that it hopefully got through to even the slow kids.

Yeah, I know that, teach. I heard you the first time. I was right here.

So even while the teacher was teaching, I was mostly zoned out.

No wonder I grew up seeing my enormous IQ as a burden not a gift.

And I still kind of feel the same way. I mean, at the present moment, my prodigious intellect isn’t doing me much good.

Doesn’t matter how much brains you got if they’re all crazy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There has to be a comfortable middle gear between “ambitionless drifting” and “hating myself for being an ambitionless drifter”.

Once more I attack my crisis mentality. Like I’ve said before, I live my life like I’m in a fucking bomb shelter. As if there are hordes of radioactive mutant zombies hunting me and I can only stay “safe” by coming as close as I can to not existing at all.

Which doesn’t work, by the way. I spent my whole childhood doing that. On a deep level, I knew (without being able to articulate it) that everybody in my family seemed to be kind of mad at me all the time and that this anger could flare up at any second over practically anything that reminded people I was there, so my only “safety” (on the emotional level) was if nobody noticed me.

At the same time, I was desperate for attention. Starving for it, even. Kids need attention paid to them in order to feel validated and appreciated, and that does not change just because I was an unwanted kid.

I didn’t ask to be an odds-defying miracle baby. It’s not my fault that I was somehow conceived despite my mother having her tubes tied.

But you have to admit, that was a pretty neat trick.

Anyhow, my point – yes I have one – was to bring up the subject of this crisis mentality of mine. It’s this persistent notion that I am in terrible danger and that I really should be facing reality and getting on with life but I am not and that means I totally SUCK and am a LOSER etc. that I am hiding from when I play video games all day.

It’s a monster of my own devising, a mere sock puppet for my depression, but it’s kept me in check for 30 fucking years .

And I keep trying to address it. I tell myself that whether I am acting to better myself or just fucking around, it’s OK. I am okay. Whatever happens, it’s fine.

But that doesn’t work for me. And this is where all my frustrated energies and ambitions come into the picture.

Because of all that pent up life force and drive, I am restless and angry deep inside. There is that eternal spark deep inside me that I call my “pilot light” which on the one hand keeps me from surrendering to despair but on the other hand it makes me restless and hungry for stimulation all the time.

And that drive wants to DO THINGS. Important things. Meaningful things. Things that carry some goddamned weight in the real world.

Things that prove I am not completely worthless, a net drain on the world.

Because if I truly am a living liability, then the world would be better off without me.

And we don’t want to go there.

But that’s what my neglected and resented childhood taught me : that I made the world a worse place just by being born and that I was not welcome in this world and that the world would be a better place if I crawled off and died quietly somewhere.

And I know that’s all a lie produced by mental illness, but that’s my higher mind talking. The mind with all that intelligence and creativity and other flashy stuff.

The deeper self, the inner child, still carries the burden of all that neglect and resentment and still feels like I make life worse just by living, let alone taking up resources that should go to someone more worthwhile.

Defined as “literally anybody but me”.

That’s what fuels my endless self-persecution and it is that demon of self-loathing that I am fleeing by remaining buried in my distractions.

If I could only learn the love myself, that demon would die. I need to somehow give that deeper self permission to be alive, and the right to be loved and appreciated.

I still don’t feel welcome anywhere. Part of me is always ready to run and hide.

And that’s no good.

More after the break.

---

The storm is over

The storm is over
The war has ended
The wolves have stopped howling
And can now be befriended

The demons were banished
The ghosts are asleep
The enemy vanished
With nary a peep

The party concluded
The guests all went home
The house is vacated
And I am alone

Everything’s peaceful
Nothing to escape
I have nothing but freedom
So why don’t I feel safe?

---

I feel better now

There, I finally wrote some decent poetry. I feel better now.

And to answer my final question there, I don’t think I know how to feel safe. I have been in this state of cowering and cringing for as long as I can remember.

I know that I was a happy kid before the rape. I was bright and cute and effortlessly charming and therefore had a tendency to be the center of attention wherever I went and led quite a happy life.

But it’s hard for me to remember that. Not just because it all took place before I was 4 years of age, but because it’s kind of painful to remember what I lost.

To imagine the shining innocence that was shredded and scattered to the wind by my rapist, forever shattering my consciousness and turning me from that bright and shining kid into the fragile nervous wreck you know and love hurts like a bitch.

Like I like to say, I lost my innocence so young I don’t remember it.

But that’s not true. I do remember it. I remember what it was like to feel warm and loved and connected to the world.

And as much as it burns to think about it now, I have to make myself do it, because that’ where the uncorrupted copy of my personality lies dormant and if I am to become even a shadow of the person I was supposed to be, I will have to restore from backup.

No matter how old a backup it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I voted in the provincial election today.

And for once, my voting was fully informed.

You see, one of the local papers (I want to say… the Vancouver Sun?) put out a very excellent article containing a one paragraph summary of the three major parties positions on 15 key issues.

That’s 45 paragraphs total. It was quite a detailed read.

And I love, love, love that the fucking BC Liberals were not included in that article because they are just plain not a major party any more.

For decades, they were the center-right party in BC. But over the years they drifted increasingly to the right, no doubt due to the influence of the by the cunts, for the cunts right wing lunatics from down south.

Come on, join the driveling lunacy! It’s fun! You get to be all mad and stuff! And you get to say just the absolute worst things you can think of and get patted on the back and told you’re a patriot and a good Christian for it!

Every day, I wake up and ask myself – who would Jesus hate?

Ahem. Now where was I?

Oh right, the BC Liberals. As they drank gallons of the lunatic right’s Kool-Aid, they basically became the new Conservative party, leaving the actual provincial Conservatives with nothing to campaign on except, “What they said. Only meaner. ”

Remember, modern conservatism is always, at its heart, bullying.

As they became all things to no people, they lost their entire raison d’etre and failed in their important role of letting conservative yuppies pretend they have not sold out.

So they had their Election of Doom, where nobody fucking voted for them. And the already heavily left coast province I live in officially shifted to the left.

Now the three major parties are the mainstream left party, the BC NDP, and the further left people, the Green Party, and the surprisingly scrappy BC Conservatives, who have now cornered the market on frothing lunacy.

If I was them, I’d sell, because that brand of conservatism is dying fast as the actual non-yahoo conservatives remember that they want sane, sensible, responsible government and the frothy types alienate the entire modern movable middle by behaving like people no decent person would want to be associated with.

And the sub-lunatic right absolutely must think of themselves as decent people. Solid. Respectable. Reliable. The “right” kind of person.

And the right kind of people don’t take a shit in Congress.

Well, not in any but the most metaphorical sense, anyhow.

So… I voted. Right… that’s what I was talking about.

And I was able to vote over the phone, which was awesome. I had no faith that wherever our polling place was would have a distance between parking lot and voting booth that I could handle.

And of course, I would have had to wait in line, which is impossible for me.

So I did it over the phone. And there was a bit of a struggle because the first lady I talked to both had a fairly think East Indian accent and I had to strain to hear her over the usual cacophony of a call center.

There has to be a way to design one of those so that the conversations do not overlap so much. But I suppose that would cost more money.

Anyhow, so she got the usual deets – name, birthday, address, oh and the ID number on my “driver’s license”, AKA my BC ID.

She also got me to verbally certify that I did, indeed, have a disability or medical condition that kept me from being able to vote in person

As opposed to just being too fucking lazy, which is not a disability. Yet.

I actually had to do that three times. I guess they want to be absolutely sure. Then a different lady read the names of the candidates to me, I told her my vote (BC NDP), then a third lady came on the line to verify that this was, indeed. my vote before she cast my ballot for me.

And then we were done!

More after the break.

---

Sometimes there’s pain

Sometimes, my rock-strewn path to victory involves a lot of pain.

Growth often does. Rebirth doubly so. And I feel like I am working up/towards a very painful and bloody rebirth indeed.

Real change has to hurt. Not for some “you need to earn it!” punitive ethos, but because the hardest thing to change is yourself because it involves changing the very foundation of what and who you are and how you see the world and experience life.

That foundation is you.

In case I hadn’t made that clear.

So to change that requires something akin to performing surgery on yourself. The thing doing the cutting is itself part of what’s being cut. And odds are the existing structure of your psyche, however dysfunctional, will violently resist this change via the mechanisms that keep our minds intact and stable in the first place.

And that’s where the pain comes in. The existing structure of the mind is saying, “Ouch!” in very clear and unambiguous language.

Pain is nature’s way of saying, “Hey! Don’t do that!”

But I don’t care about the pain. It’s not like it would be keeping me from doing anything important. If it means I have to lie in bed and work my way through the suffering involved in getting rid of the bad and letting in the good, so be it.

Sometimes it does feel like surgery without anesthetic. Other times it feels more like dialysis. Like my mind is slowly clearing out toxins that have been in my bloodstream for so long that my body thinks it’s normal for them to be there.

The simplest definition of “normal”, after all, is “what you’re used to”.

Other times there’s a kind of thrill to it, or even a sense of adventure. Things are changing and growing and getting better, and it’s all so terribly exciting.

Wish it was like that more often, to be honest.

Well, maybe I will be strong enough for that some day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow;

Sadness : I woke up sick today.

And that’s never fun. I knew I was sick before I even opened my eyes. My head hurt, my nose was running, my throat was scratchy and raw, and so were my lungs.

Oh, and my muscles ached.

Of course. That’s what they do.

So no Wound Care or shower for me today, and that always leaves me sad. I didn’t want to stay home. I’ve come to enjoy my busy Fridays, what with Wound Care and showering at Rosewood and ordering my groceries.

Like I always say, I am happiest when I am busy. Which is why I favour video games that can absorb my entire attention.

Like the open world richly detailed RPGs I clearly favour. Ones with lots of quests to do and a deep storyline to become absorbed in.

Imagine what I could accomplish if I could bring that kind of concentration and energy and drive to something that is actually productive.

I need a video game that submits my writing to agencies when I level up. Or something.

Or to somehow convince myself to treat life like a game instead of taking everything so seriously that I am paralyzed by indecision.

Something along those lines, anyhow.

I did get my grocery “shopping” done. That, thank goodness, is something I can still do even when I am sick.

But I hit a frustrating but not entirely unfamiliar roadblock : when I went to pay for my purchases, DoorDash said insufficient funds.

And I was like, bullshit, I have at least 65 bucks on the card and my total is around 62 so I should be in the clear.

But the credit card companies pull this shit on me sometimes. It’s like the last $10 in my account are held in reserve or some shit, so I can’t spend it.

So I went from feeling all smooth and confident because of how well I had piloted my tiny little financial boat through the waters of a five week FUCKING month to being super irritated at having to take things OUT of my virtual shopping cart until it believes I have enough to pay for them.

Very annoying, and a little insulting. The result is that I may run out of a few things before the end of the week and have to hope my rapidly dwindling cash supply can cover Julian going to pick me up a few things.

Poverty never runs out of fresh indignities. Nor does disability.

And I deserve more than this sad little life of mine. I need more money, obviously, in order to make me feel empowered to truly be part of the civilized world instead of limping along near the bottom of the heap.

But I also need some form of employment. I mean, if someone offered to just bankroll me into the middle class I wouldn’t turn it down, but it would be far better for me to get a job using my outrageous talents to make wonderful things.

And maybe even make the world a better place. Who knows.

I still haven’t found my good webcam. I am starting to think it’s gone forever, which means I will have to buy a new one.

That would make the old one show up. But the joke would be on them because my computer can totally handle input from more than one webcam at a time.

Then I could record myself from two angles and be able to cut to the side angle when editing in order to create visual interest in my talking head videos.

The one I can’t find is so damned good, though. Excellent audio, crystal clear video that runs smooth as glass, gets along with my video editing program.

I guess I am going to have to just keep cleaning till I find the fucking thing.

Somehow, I will survive.

More after the break.

---

This made me LOL more than once.

I wish I could embed Instagram clips like I do with YouTube clips.

There’s probably a widget for WordPress that does it but I am too lazy to go look right now, so meh.

Oh, and there’s this, because sometimes Jim Carrey is actually awesome.

That’s the mode he’s in lately, and I must say, I really like it.

I hope being really raw and honest doesn’t go out of style any time soon.

Because I’m good at that.

Oh, and because I must do things in threes :

Our new fave kittycat song!

It’s clearly made with love and care and that means a lot to me.

Being funny is serious business!

---

The other end

Well, here I am at the other end of another day.

I feel better than I did this morning. That awful feeling of malaise is gone and the headache is mostly gone, as is the raw feeling in my throat and lungs.

I kind of feel like I am waiting to be reborn. And that maybe I have been waiting for that for a really long time.

Since I was 4, in fact.

I’d like to be able to believe that the last 30 years of my life were not a waste of time but a long and necessary developmental stage, like it was 30 years in a cocoon.

That’s the most positive spin I can think of for all the time I have spent hidden from the world entertaining myself instead of living life.

And it’s not like I’ve been dead or asleep. I might be stuck in my emotional infancy but I have continued to absorb new info and digest it and add it to my mental model of reality and think and connect and deduce and observe.

So I may not have grown up but I have become deeper and wiser and smarter over the years. I have developed an unprecedented level of insight and a certain kind of secular spirituality that the world desperately needs, and maybe none of that would have been possible for me if I’d had a normal life.

A lot of poets and ideologues and visionaries had weird lives.

Maybe I’m no different from that.

Maybe I’m the good kind of special after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wonder if I could cynically pedal my most cynical and bitter observations as an antidote to corporate indoctrination to the young people of today.

It worked for George Carlin, after all. He spoke the hard and bitter truth to people and now he’s a saint to the young and idealistic.

Especially now that he’s dead, and can’t fuck up his legacy by turning anti-trans.

That would have been a bitter betrayal of his 70’s roots.

And maybe I could take his place as the bitter, angry guy who speaks truths that people don’t want to hear but need to hear. Truths that both set you free and piss you off. Truths that only a Gen X guru like me can discern and then share with those of later generations who are too idealistic and/or indoctrinated to see.

Because it’s occurred to me that the later generations did not have the benefit of Generation X’s thick layers of sales resistance and carefully cultured precision apathy to protect them from all the hypnotic noise the corporate media produces.

I think I could be, as Scott Adams used to say, a “ray of bitter sunshine” to them.

I could speak unto them about our delusions of democracy, the coming environmental apocalypse, the idea that nobody who is employed is truly free, the people who own you and are perfectly willing to sacrifice you for their profit, the futility of modern education, and lots of other dark, harsh things.

All true, and a clarion call to get pissed off and demand change.

Yeah, I could do that.

I wouldn’t want to get trapped in an angry persona. But I suppose I could do it if the money was good.

I’d love to get on that ever so profitable public speaking circuit. Get paid to come and talk to rooms full of people who paid to hear you in person.

I would enjoy that very much.

I will think about it.

---

The strangest feeling just washed over me.

It felt like someone dumped a bucket of ice water over my head and now I feel bizarrely cold and disjointed.

Honestly, I should probably quit typing and go lay down.

But not before I make my words.

The coldness is only on the surface. Only my skin feels cold. The rest of me is as hot as ever. And that is pretty weird too.

Plus I have a nauseous headache. Hopefully that’s just sinus pressure and cleaning out my ears will help with that.

As for the rest of it, though, I dunno. It doesn’t fit the profile of any kind of attack I am aware of, although I suppose it could be some sort of circulatory issue.

One that interferes with the blood reaching my skin alone

That doesn’t sound right, does it?

Could be neurological too. Though it seems too widespread for that. It’s not like there’s one nerve bundle that goes through all your skin.

I wonder where the tactile nexus for the brain is?

Regardless of cause, I feel unwell. And I was feeling pretty good up until that point. Now I am both nauseous and falling asleep, which is a bad combination.

Good thing I never sleep on my back. Nobody wants to die from aspirated vomit.

I will probably be just fine. None of this is new to me except its sudden onset. Well, and the weird chill that came with it.

---

Just had to make a run to the bathroom. Emphasis on had to. Apparently the contents of my lower intestines got liquified somehow.

I don’t fucking know WTF. I rarely do. All I can do is lay down and possibly take a nap and hope whatever this is passes through and out of me soon.

Maybe when I wake up, I will tell you all how therapy went today.

Why is my life like this?

More after the break.

---

Therapy post mortem

Well, post session, anyhow.

I’m pretty sure I’m not dead.

Today’s session went quite well. I was in a pretty good mood and I managed to spool out quite a bit of what my brain has been up to lately.

I told him about realizing that I have been helplessly crouched down with my back to the world silently waiting for the nightmare to end for my whole life.

Ever since that was my escape from the world when I was being raped at the age of 4.

And that’s been my response to stress ever since then. At the slightest hint of something I don’t feel like I can handle, I turtle up and withdraw from reality and keep withdrawing until I’m not scared any more, basically.

Hence my being so deeply withdrawn from reality. Ever time I feel overwhelmed I go deeper in, and I only come back very, very slowly and cautiously.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before, but that’s no way to live.

Talking about this has me quite verklempt. That’s a good sign.

I also told him, in very general terms, about how I went back on VRchat recently and made an attempt to socialize.

It’s so much harder in realtime voice. In text, I don’t have to fight to be heard and I can always get everything out because nobody can interrupt me.

I had actually forgotten the feeling of being small and ignored and powerless that I used to feel at the dinner table when I was a kid.

But I will return to the chat, this time after taking a Xanax to make my social anxiety more manageable so I can get me some sweet, sweet positive human interaction.

While pretending to be some kind of furry critter.

I was a super adorable otter with glasses for a while then, after forgetting how I found Mister Otta, I eventually found a very cute cartoon grey wolf form.

Once I figure out more of how everything works, I will go looking for a fox avatar.

Overall it was a pretty good social exposure exercise. I am glad I did it. I had some fun even if I could not really get into any of the conversations.

I am confident that I will get there. I’m a bright, funny, charming, charismatic dude when I can get out of my own way.

And when in doubt, I just need to remember that I am Fruvous and he is me.

And we are fabulous.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.