I forgot to talk about this last night.

I realized recently that for me, in a sense, being someone who likes to make people happiness came very naturally due to my high degree of empathy.

And my anhedonia, but we will get into that later.

Making other people happy makes me happy is not a matter of a feeling of virtue, nor an expression of my enormous ego (WIP).

No, making other people happy makes me happy because via empathy I feel their happiness, and therefore share in it.

That’s where the empathic reward comes in. That little jolt of other people’s happiness rewards me for making others happy and that encourages me to do it more.

And that’s a central part of my whole motivational complex.

Maybe that’s what I need in order to get motivated : an audience.

I need to make some videos.

Anyhow, it’s empathic reward that motivates me to be funny and fun and interesting and all the other things.

And that’s especially important to people like me because our own happiness mechanism is broken by depression’s anhedonia and therefore other people’s happiness is truly like a drug to me.

For those who don’t know, anhedonia is one of the central symptoms of depression. An anhedonic person is someone who finds very little pleasure (aka reward) in most of the things they do, and are therefore unmotivated to do most things.

Instead, we tend to succumb to some form of addiction because only things that are extremely rewarding for extremely little effort can pierce the anhedonia and give us the stimulation of the reward center of our brains that all organisms need to survive.

Indeed, seeking stimulation of that reward center of the brain is the main reason any of us do anything. When some fool says something is “its own reward”, what they really mean is that to them, it is inherently rewarding.

So you can see how empathy creates a reward system that favours people pleasing and telling people what they want to hear.

For me, telling people what I know they want to hear, and thus getting that quick empathic hit of their being pleased, is always a more attractive option than telling them something that will worry or displease them.

And that’s particularly problematic when it comes to my health.

Dealing with serious health issues almost always involves telling a doctor or other medical professional something more troubling than my usual “fine, thank you. ”

I mean, if your doctor is happy to hear about your back pain, get the fuck out of there, because they’re either a psycho or hate you or both.

And I can tell a doctor about my ailments if they are serious enough to alarm me. But the more vague, could be nothing kind of things are hard to bring up.

As a child, I developed the instinct to just tell authority figures what they want to hear so they will go away and leave you alone.

That doesn’t happen in happy childhoods.

And that makes it very hard for people to help you. After all, they can’t help you with problems you never tell them about, no matter how badly they want to.

Usually the people close to you can tell if you’re hurting via their own empathy. But if you just say everything is fine all the time, what can they do?

You’re putting them in a terrible state of conflict between what you are saying and what they are picking up from your vibe.

And I know this. And yet still, when someone asks me how I am doing. it is nearly impossible for me to say anything but, “I’m fine, thank you. ”

I am a complicated man.

More after the break.

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Weak sense of self

Weak, yet extremely fluid and flexible.

These factors must be related.

Like I wrote a long time ago, I’m a shapeshifter, and that means that my sense of self is so fluid that I can become whatever I need to be in the moment.

But that means I lack internal integrity. Most of the time, I am goo. Just a protean blob lying in the bottom of a test tube in a long forgotten lab fridge somewhere.

No wonder it’s so cold in here.

Part of the problem is the inability to commit. After all, if I pick a shape and commit to it, what do I do if that turns out to be the wrong shape for the situation and there I am, “stuck” in the wrong shape?

This is a very weird way to look at things, granted.

The real answer to that question would be, I assume, “Just deal with it. ” Most people are not shapeshifters like me and so changing metaphorical shape to meet the needs of the moment is not even remotely an option for them.

They are who they are and they just have to learn to work with it.

It’s the weirdos like me who demand that level of flexibility from themselves out of a morbid fear of the commitment it takes to be solid and real.

But how did I end up so… gooey?

I think it’s fundamentally a lack of connection to my id. Without the vibrant life force of an active and healthy id, far too much is decided by the scintillating but unstable world of the ego, of the mind, and minds don’t like restrictions like, say, form.

Undoubtedly my social retardation is a big factor too. One of the ways we discover and reinforce who we are is by interacting with others, starting with kindergarten, and my formative years were spent utterly alone, at least during the school year.

My father was too angry and volatile to be much of a parent. My mother was always too tired from being a teacher AND a housewife.

And my siblings had lives of their own that did not include me at all.

So I was alone, both at home and at school.

I am still working through the many, many layers of frozen loneliness that accumulated on my poor little heart from all those lonely days.

They did not exactly encourage me to come out of my shell.

In fact, that shell was all that was keeping me together.

So I did not go through the usual process of formation of self and therefore my self was left in a half-formed (at beast) protean state.

Maybe some day I will figure out who I truly am.

Maybe some day I’ll grow up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got back from the optometrist and the news ain’t good.

The good news is that my prescription hasn’t changed much. The bad news is that there’s a fluid buildup in both my eyes. That’s why my vision has been getting worse.

And that’s bad.

So my eyeballs are still the same shape, they’re just ready to explode instead.

That’s probably an exaggeration.

Anyhow, it means I am going back to Doctor Vaezi and his clinic, West Coast Retina. Because fluid buildup like mine is definitely above an optometrist’s pay grade.

The solution may very well involve surgery, possibly even emergency surgery if Vaezi et al decide my vision is in serious peril.

At this point, I feel the need to remind myself that I have already had major surgery on both of my eyeballs before, when they took my cataracts out way back when.

And it was fine. I was technically awake for the entire thing but the drugs they had me on were very, very nice, and I was super relaxed all the way through it.

In fact, they had boomer rock playing and more than once they had to tell me to stop singing along to it.

What can I say, I have a song in my heart. And stents!

So now I am worried about my eyesight. If it does, so do I. Put me on immediate suicide watch because I can’t imagine wanting to live without eyesight.

I am too damn old to learn braille.

And the range of video games for blind people is very, very limited.

On the positive type side, if it’s just a matter of fluid retention in my eyes, it could be that once that fluid is drained, my vision will be way, way better.

That would totally rock.

And to think that this all started because I was having trouble reading my paperback books and that’s just unacceptable.

I can’t afford large print editions of everything I own!

OF course, I could get a magnifier. One of those ones that can lie flat on the page.

Or come to think of it, if I got my tablet working again, I could use its camera as a magnifier. Or just switch to eBooks.

I mean, my tablet IS a Kindle, technically. Presumably it can handle letting me read eBooks extremely well.

And sometimes you can get eBooks for very little. I have heard that there are even subscription based services that work kind of like a library in that they let you “check out” books and you pay according to how many you want to have out at the same time.

Of course, I’d have to pay $35 for a new battery for the thing first.

And there is a very good reason I haven’t done that, and that’s because I concluded that I am much better off without the thing.

I do not need the ability to play video games in bed.

Bed is for resting and reading and listening to YouTube videos. It is not a place for mentally stimulating myself with video games to the point where the gap between my mental state and the sleep state is wider than the Grand Canyon.

Now where was I? Oh right, worried about my eyeballs.

Yeah, if they go, I go. I might be able to survive losing my hearing, although the lack of music in my life would be extremely hard on me.

But life without vision would destroy me. I would most likely go insane.

So now I am waiting to hear from Doctor Vaezi’s office as to when they want me to come in, and I am thinking, the faster they get back to me, the more worried they are, and the more worried I should be.

So I won’t exactly be disappointed if I don’t hear from them until Monday.

More after the break.

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Social retardation and Empathic Reward

By any reasonable measure, I am seriously socially retarded.

Developmentally speaking, that is. How could I be anything else? I was all alone and friendless so much as a kid.

And a child cannot develop socially all by himself.

Because I never went to kindergarten, I was already way behind my fellow Grade 1 students on the first day of school.

They all knew each other from kindergarten. They had learned to play with the other kids, make friends, and get along without me.

And I never caught up. I had no friends until Grade 6. When I did have friends, which was basically most of Grade 6 and junior high (Grades 7-9), they were not exactly close knit male bonding “brothers from other mothers” friendships.

Then High School came along, Jason Heisler and I parted ways forever, and I was once again alone, and would stay that way until college.

So how was I supposed to develop my social skills?

Hence my severe social anxiety. I know that I don’t know what I am doing around people, and have an awful lot of days of icy cold loneliness stored in my soul, and so in my mind it’s only a matter of time before people turn on me and bully me.

Crazy, I know. But so am I.

Thank God I did not end up on the autism spectrum. I really feel like it’s a minor miracle that I dodged that particular bullet.

I owe it all to my babysitter Betty, the tough gal from the other side of the tracks whose solid, grounded, rough cut wisdom and deep but no-nonsense compassion for a weird little boy was exactly the thing I needed to overcome my intellectually enriched but socially impoverished home life.

It’s all so very sitcom-esque.

She almost could have been played by Nell Carter.

And there was always summer. My mother was a teacher, so she was home during the summer, and so were all us kids, and my angry father was at work all day, so it was really the perfect time to be a family.

That’s why when I think “happy childhood memories”, I think of summer.

At least then, my siblings were around some of the time. We were still largely inclined to all be doing our own thing most of the time, but on the weekends we would do things as a family, like go to the beach.

i haven’t really talked about social retardation, have I?

That’s because I don’t really know what to say about it. I never learned to pick up the social signals everyone else understood instinctively.

But I know that I can change all that. I know in my heart than I am, in fact, a very charismatic and lovable guy, and have everything I need to not only be social but even popular, in some circles anyway.

All that cuteness and charm I display as Fruvous comes from me. I could totally see myself finding a nice little clique to click into.

All I have to do is escape my own shadow.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Apparently there’s an Apocalypse level wind storm afoot, with winds over 100 freaking miles an hour, and it’s hitting Seattle and really nailing Vancouver Island, and yet somehow all is calm here in the GVRD.

And it’s spooky. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, meteorologically speaking. Ever since yesterday morning, I have been bracing myself for the wind howling around our building and make it sway just a tiny bit.

Or worse. That’s just what normal high winds do ’round here.

I don’t want to think about worse.

---

A small victory

Got my monthly banking done today.

Well, technically, it’s a credit union, but if you going around saying you got your credit unioning (credit uniting?) done today, they’ll lock you up.

It went quite smoothly, as always. I might have trouble with the fact that Van City does not offer Visa Debit, I cannot fault their customer service and overall relaxed vibe.

And vibes are very important to me. They are the water in which I swim.

Anyhow, as always, after the crediting of union, we went to Price Mart and Julian went in to buy me the usual monthly prepaid VISA card.

All went well until I tried to activate and register the dang thing online, and it just would not work. Kept giving me the generic, “we cannot process your transaction at this time” spiel that makes it sound like it’s just a temporary outage when the real problem is that you transposed some digits or whatever.

But I did not. I went over every digit involved very carefully over and over and typed them all in and it still barfed up that message.

So I sighed and resigned myself to having to call the toll free number.

Which got me a frigging automated “Press one for… ” type system.

Don’t those seem anachronistic these days?

Anyhow, I went through the menus and they gave me the runaround but I stuck with it and that’s when my small victory occurred.

Namely that I found the secret option to let me talk to an actual person.

It felt like, in my small way, I beat the system. Hooray!

The nice lady on the line was able to register the card for me.

Or at least I hope she did. The website for my card still does not recognize the card, so I wont know for sure until I order myself some KFC tonight.

It’s going to be a rough month financially. Not only do I have to cough up $65 for my eye appointment tomorrow, I will also have to pay for new glasses (cheap when bought online) and, of course, Xmas gifts.

Which I am going to buy on this month’s disability payment because the next one is not until December 18, exactly one week before Xmas, and I am not going to bet my Xmas giving on Amazon’s ability to get things to me in less than seven days at the heart of the Xmas season rush.

Although they do say they guarantee one or two day shipping…

Nah, better not risk it.

Plus there’s my yearly payment to Postmates, the lovely people who sell me Xmas cards and send them to my family each year, complete with my little message

To be honest, I probably shouldn’t even be ordering KFC tonight. But I’ve already promised my stomach some Kentucky Fried goodness,

So that’s not negotiable.

I guess holiday stress comes for even us weirdo loners who spend every Xmas Eve alone because their family is far, far away

I’m getting an early start on being depressed about that.

I want to beat the rush.

More after the break.

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Everything gets worse

Example : KFC’s four piece dinner doesn’t include a small salad any more.

You mean you expect me to pay and additional fee for my coleslaw?

How dare you, sir. How DARE you.

I knew things were going south when they switched from giving you cans or bottles of pop with your meal to giving you a fountain drink instead.

Way to boost the profit margin at our expense, COLONEL.

Plus I thought I had ordered a “Biggie” fries but I got a regular fries instead.

I’m not sure enough of that to make a complaint, though. I might have checked the wrong little circle on the Door Dash menu.

Oh, and speaking of menus, check this : I heard on the radio today that in the US, for the holiday season, they will be selling their McRib sauce by the half gallon jug,

$20, and you could have the cure for all potentially bland Xmas dishes in your arsenal.

“I’d love more of your squash soufflé, Aunt Margaret. Just give me a second. ”

Today’s been all right. I installed a patch to my Steam version of Morrowind that I hoped would make it stable enough to play without it crashing about 20 mins in.

I wanted this because the official version of the game supports MGE, the Morrowind Graphics Extender, and it makes the game so much prettier.

But alas, no. I think in order to get that working properly, I would have ot somehow make sure it doesn’t try to use my graphics card, and that’s such a depressing thought that I would rather use the less pretty but more stable OpenMW version of the game.

Right now I am playing an archer/summoner. The idea is that I would summon various critters to fight the enemy up close while I hung back and plucked arrows at them.

Pretty sneaky, no?

But I am finding that I don’t need the summoned monsters. I am getting good enough with the bow that I can take enemies down without them.

Which technically means that I wasted a skill slot on the Conjuring ability. And unfortunately, there’s no way to change that when you’ve already started playing, so I would have to start yet another new character to fix it.

And I’m already on, like, my sixth or seventh character!

What can I say, I get restless and want to try a different character build.

I can be quite fickle.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a lulu.

Took a couple of big first steps today.

For one, I started my System Administrator course from SkillUp. It’s a job I am fairly certain I can do.

I did the first chapter. It’s all videos – kinda lame. But whatever. The presenter is comfortingly husky and nerdy, which is a plus.

I wouldn’t trust a good looking person to know what they’re talking about when it comes to the heavily nerdy world of computers.

Oh, one amusing little detail – the captioning keeps spelling sysadmin as CIS admin.

I mean, he probably IS cisgendered^[1], but I can’t see how that’s relevant.

The first chapter is mostly just introductory stuff. What a sysadmin does, what areas of specialization there are, how to brew a cup of coffee so black it eats time, the usual.

It took a certain amount of self-control to keep myself from freaking out over how complicated he made it all seem. A lot of talk about reading tech news sites and keeping your certifications up to date and knowing all the latest hardware and so on.

Oh. And he said you should at least have a two year associate’s degree in computer science. In which case, why am I taking this fucking course?

The whole point of this exercise is to guide me to employment. I am not going to take a two year college degree just to be a sysadmin.

Just teach me how to do the job.

What I really want is diagrams. Ones that say, “this is this part, it does these things, it outputs to these things, here’s what they do…” and so forth.

Then you can teach me the software side of things.

I’m sure I will become more confident as I continue the course. I plan on doing at least one lesson a day. Maybe more.

That’s one of the reasons I am disappointed that it’s all video. I read a lot faster than I watch. If it was text base I could breeze through it at my usual top speed.

But oh well. I will learn anyhow. I will be a good student.

Heck, I might even take notes. No, really!

---

The other big step today was in getting my webcam working.

I learned that Windows comes with a simple video capture program called Camera, and so I can use that to capture the raw video for editing.

Oh, and get this : I downloaded a freeware video editing suite called Da Vinci Resolve because I figured if I could get a video editor other than Corel Video Studio that did NOT slap purple shit over the video I record, and I could stand to use it, I could avoid having to give Corel my $25.

So I download this thing, and it’s very impressive. Very professional looking. I recognize the things like timelines, clips, titles, audio tracks, and so on.

Totally looks like something I could use. So I boot it up and look around then decide it’s time for me to record my first video with it.

So I look for that function, and I look… and look… finally I Googled the problem, and it turns out the answer is quite simple :

Da Vinci Resolve doesn’t do that.

It’s this supposedly fully featured professional video editing program and it simply does not capture video.

And that’s fucking retarded. It’s like you started on step 2. The most basic thing a video editor should do is produce the actual video you recorded. The whole reason I downloaded your freaking program is that Corel wasn’t doing that right. And that turns out to be the one thing you can’t do.

YOU HAD ONE JOB.

Hence my looking up this Microsoft Camera thing. It has no features but it’s still a better program than Corel or Da Vinci.

Oh, and here’s the kicker : when I import the video I take with Camera into Corel or Da Vinci, the audio is out of sync.

It’s fine when I play the video by itself but put it in an editor and suddenly it looks like I have been badly dubbed.

But I am at least making progress.

More after the break.

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A pink one

Felicity and Julian have already seen this, but it’s too good not to immortalize here.

Even thought it’s one of those weird YouTube vids that won’t let me embed it. Hence my having to give it to you in link form.

What is this, a Geocities site?

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The long dark corridor

There’s a depressed feeling that I get sometimes that my mind has learned to express as a long dark corridor stretching infinitely ahead of me.

It’s a large and lonely feeling that contains a streak of helplessness and hopelessness, as if that corridor represents the rest of my life and what it will be like until the day I die.

Even my emotions just echo down the hall into nothingness.

It’s not a good feeling, and historically I have suppressed it, but now I am more inclined to try and slow it down and examine it and try to figure out what it’s trying to say.

It’s certainly an expression of my deep inner loneliness. An interior world in which I have always been and will always remain completely and utterly alone.

In fact, “alone” is too weak a word, but I don’t know what else to call it.

It’s a sense of “alone” which does not even contain the echoes of other people. There should be people in my head, people I have known and who have known me and who can be a warm and comforting, steadying presence, even if only in memory.

But there’s nothing but that long dark corridor to oblivion.

Even the people who should be there are absent. There were people I liked and who were at least somewhat nice to me when I was a kid. I have had online friends who mean a lot to me. I know my family and friends love me and want me to be well.

But it’s like none of that can make it through the thick layers of frost that have accumulated between me and the world from all those lonely days where I was just a sad little robot who went to school.

I don’t blame people for not being able to reach me.

I know it’s damned near impossible to do so.

And you can only leave people out in the cold for so long before they give up and go away once and for all.

And when they do, the absolute worst part of you goes, “Phew!”

Because that’s what it wanted all along.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1][ Really, Microsoft? Your dictionary doesn’t recognize the word “cisgendered”?!? Read the fucking room! [[1]]

Alprazolam! And poof, your anxiety disappears.

Had my big important phone meeting with the nice lady from SkillUp this morning. And it went fine. All my nervousness about the whole thing was entirely unjustified and to be honest seems downright silly in hindsight.

But what can I say? I’m crazy. And crazy people do (and believe) crazy thngs.

It all says a whole lot more about my own rampant neurosis than it says about SkillUp. I was dreading the whole thing because I had convinced myself that I would have to tell this person from SkillUp my whole sordid lack of a life story and confess to them that I was a 51 year old loser who had never had a job.

And I obviously still carry an enormous about of guilt and shame about that.

And I honestly still don’t know how to deal with it. There is a lot of self-forgiveness that needs to happen before I can lay that burden down.

I’m working on it.

So because I was so nervous, I took a Xanax about an hour before the appointment. And it helped a lot.

Plus feeling my anxiety kind of melt away under its effects was fascinating and cool. I could feel my subconscious mind trying and failing to become anxious. The nervousness just faded away.

It all makes me very happy to have Xanax as an option. I would never use it on a regular basis, but for certain events it’s magical.

Now back to all that shame.

I know, intellectually, that I have nothing to be ashamed of. Yes, I have been unable to get employment due to mental and eventually also physical illness and that does make me a fairly extreme outlier – most people have had at least some kind of job.

But I have never supported myself at all. First I freeloaded off my parents, then Dhugal and David and Ross, and then I moved here to the GVRD and finally got to stop freeloadinf off friends and start freeloading off the government of BC.

Yay, independence at last.

All I have done is hide from the world and played video games. I have a massive lack of any kind of meaningful life experience.

Never been in love. Never supported myself with a job. I’ve never really traveled or had little adventures like that.

An awful lot of absolutely nothing of lasting value has happened instead.

And looked at that way, it’s kind of amazing, albeit in a terrible way. Most people would think avoiding life and work and romance for that long would be impossible.

But one of my gift/curses has always been that I can see how much of what people go through in life is actually optional and requires your cooperation and so I know intuitively that you can just,,,, not do it.

And when you can clearly see just how much of the social reality people live in is actually specious bullshit, you can choose not to participate in it when it does not seem like you will benefit from it.

This is bad.

It’s bad because you actually need to do all that stuff in order to become a properly socialized adult who can actually function in the modern world.

Turns out, all that “bullshit” was actually super important for reasons that are not at all evident to a stubbornly skeptical child, and by maintaining my right to disregard it any time I wanted to, I was actually dooming myself.

There are other factors. Lack of kindergarten. Lack of any meaningful form of guidance from adults. Total social isolation. Being a fundamentally broken kid due to the rape.

All of this led to my being deeply incapable of functioning as an adult. I have lived like a kid on a very low rent permanent vacation for my entire adult life.

I guess all that shame and guilt of mine stems from an assumption that I could have functioned like a normal, mentally intact person but failed to do so anyway.

And that’s highly debatable.

More after the break.

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The eternal loop

Patient readers know the score.

COULD I have done better? If I couldn’t have, then I am off the hook for what a colossal waste of potential and living years my life has been so far. I can just square my shoulder, set my jaw, and tell myself that I did the best I could.

But it’s not quite that simple, is it? Because then I would have to face how truly ill I am, and give up on the idea of doing better in the future, because I’m doing my best now.

And its kinda pathetic.

The opposite side of this is the idea that I could have done better and can do better in the future if I just try.

That would involve taking full responsibility for the despicable mess I have made of my life so far, and I am not sure I can handle that.

My self esteem is already dangerously low. Taking responsibility like that seems like handing my self-loathing all the ammo it needs to finally take me over the edge.

But maybe not. I know I don’t really hate myself any more. I have gotten that far, at least. I have embraced the fact that I am, in fact, an extraordinary person, brilliant and amazing and unique, and what’s to hate about that?

I’m a great guy with big problems. That’s all.

The middle ground between taking full responsibility and continuing to skate along like usual is obviously to create a privileged moment where I can say, “OK, I was helpless until now. but from now on, I take responsibility for everything that happens. ”

The question then becomes, well, what changed? Everything. Nothing. Whatever.

Honestly, my true best course of action is probably to just keep fumbling along doing the best I can day to day, knowing that progress will be slow and uneven and hard, but also knowing that there’s no way I’m going to stop now that I know which way is up.

And I guess that’s the best I can do right now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a very strong instinct to tell people what I know they want to hear.

Instead of, you know, the truth.

Especially if it has something to do with me. At some point in my childhood, I learned that there was no point in telling my parents and siblings the real truth about how i was doing because I wouldn’t get hope, I would get an awkward moment of stunned silence because they don’t really want to know and weren’t really asking, and then possibly something like, “But other than that, you’re okay, right?”.

It was absolutely not okay for me to not be okay.

So instead, I smiled and said everything was fine even though it definitely was not. School was the same soul-destroying routine of boredom (in class) punctuated by terror (on the playground) that makes soldiers lose their minds in a time of war.

But I trudged onwards.

I did the same thing with teachers. Tell them what they want to hear so the tension of the moment will end and the adults will go away and leave me alone.

This was bad. Very bad.

Some of those people may have been able to help me. Unlikely, but it’s possible. At the very least, it would have been good practice in the vitally important skill of getting what you want by sucking up to the people above you.

But I was lost in my own world.

On a deep level, what I was doing was the social equivalent of a chameleon changing its colors to blend in with its surroundings.

I “shapeshifted” into whatever it was I could tell they wanted me to be in that moment, and so it was like I was mirroring what I saw in their minds. \

Put that way, it’s kind of creepy. Like the Martian that looks like whoever you want to see the most in those two Bradbury stories.

The main one – the non-Christmas one – has always had a huge effect on me. I identify with that alien way too much. His torment at the end of that story when he’s trying to be what each person in the crowd around him wants at the same time is something I faced all the time.

Partly it’s because I have a weak sense of self. Maybe that’s what happens when other people’s emotions are so present in the mind. Who you really are gets overwhelmed.

But it can be hard to tell my emotions from the emotions of others sometimes. And there is always the temptation to just be someone else for a while.

I guess for people less likely to put themselves in the shoes of another, being yourself is kind of not optional. You are who you are. You can’t suppress your own troubled emotions by voyaging through the emotions of another.

I kind of envy them their lack of escape routes. My escapism has starved my life of meaningful content and left me with a soul so thin and emaciated that you can use its skin as a map of skeletal anatomy.

That sounded better in my head.

But the first brutal lesson upon which my entire personality is built was how to escape the real world by retreating into my mind.

Even now, it’s very hard for me to imagine staying in the game and fighting instead of constantly fleeing and hiding.

And when even this stupendously low stress life of mine gets to be too much for me, I retreat into sleep.

Maybe I would have been far better off if I had no choice but to stay in the moment and learn to cope with reality.

Then I my soul might have some meat on its bones instead of being as weak and diffuse and amorphous as a jellyfish.

Just how does one build spiritual strength, anyway?

Ain’t no such thing as a soul gym.

More after the break.

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The boy who died

I sometimes wonder about what I would have been like if I hadn’t been raped.

Obviously, my memory of my pre-rape life is pretty vague, both because trauma does that to the human mind and because I was 3.

But I remember being a pretty happy kid who loved life. My days were filled with honey sandwiches and my babysitter Betty and Sesame Street and the Polka Dot Door.

Also Romper Room, but I found that show to be patronizing.

I am pretty sure that had I not been fractured by trauma to the point where half of me went to sleep and has still not woken up 47 years later, I would have continued to be a bright, energetic, charismatic, and downright adorable kid.

At least until I had to enter school.

Then things get a lot more dicey. But I think I would have found my footing despite my lack of kindergarten.

Without half of me being functionally dead, I would have had all of my considerable amount of spunk and defiance at my command and could have used it to defend myself against the bullies both verbally and physically.

So I think I would have made a place for myself somewhere in the social hierarchy. Possibly somewhere near the top if I were sufficiently ferocious in my defense of my prerogatives and my boundaries.

But not at the top. I don’t think even an unbroken me would have the ambition to claw my way to the top of the heap. Because like… why?

I don’t want to run things. I don’t need that kind of responsibility.

I might end up in a leadership position despite myself though, because I have a lot of leadership qualities. I’m a big picture guy with high ideals and the pragmatism and respect for the details to put them into action.

That’s pretty much a leadership role right there. You can’t do that by yourself, no matter how hard I might try sometimes.

I can’t do it all by myself.

But I can’t do it with others, either. I never learned to work as part of a team. I am now and always have been a solo artist.

This is not a brag. I know it means I’m broken in a deep and terrible way. I missed so much of my development because of being so alone.

You can’t develop socially all by yourself in your room.

Not even with the internet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know you’re maybe getting a little too into the game you’re playing when stopping feels like waking up from a dream.

That’s how deep I got into Morrowind just now. I fell into this really intense groove where I was very much locked on to the game world and the little aggravations of playing had built up in the background of my mind so that I was in this low level pissed off mood where I was focusing that pissed off feeling into doing things in the game.

And that’s worth noting because if I could just focus that kind of intensity into something that’s actually productive I might actually get somewhere in life.

As it was, I got so into the game that I forgot that I had planned on devoting my energies to trying to get my video production system going again.

What really pisses me off is that it worked perfectly once. Then the purple shit started showing up and wrecking my vibe.

That’s what convinces me that Corel did this deliberately in order to force me to have to pay for the upgrade to the latest version of their Video Studio.

It’s the only explanation that fits the evidence. It’s way too weirdly specific a problem to be attributable to random error.

Random error would result in videos that produce an error when my system tries to play them, or that garbage you seen when a digital video breaks down, or maybe something as old school as afterimages or tint issues.

Not the same big purple wall every time I try to record something.

And I don’t begrudge Corel their $25, but I wish they had been honest and open about it from the start and just told me my license for the software would run out.

I mean, I paid like $80 for it back in 2020. That’s “keep it forever” money to me.

But they have me by the man-bag because I am old and tired and set in my ways and so I really don’t want to have to learn a whole new and no doubt inferior editor.

Still, I might look up freeware video editors just to see if there is one I might be able to learn to love. Just as a backup plan.

I am irritated that my return to the world of making videos has been temporarily thwarted. I was just starting to get my energy going for this transition and pondering what, exactly, I wanted to make videos about.

I keep circling back to the product being me. People would watch the videos because they find me personable and likable and whom they enjoy hearing from, not because I stick to one kind of subject.

Staying in some predetermined “lane” is not going to work for me in video any more than it does for this blog.

I’m never going to be that kind of content producer. I have to be free to express whatever it is I have to express in the moment of creation.

Given recent events, there’s probably going to be a lot of politics. I have a lot of passionate political thoughts and observations and such that I usually do not bring into this blog because I get all pissed off and strident and messianic when I think about those things and that’s a lot to deal with.

But in video, I can just vent. Get it out of my system. Share it with the world

Consider that your warning, world. I am going to channel my verbal gifts and my oratory skills and my megawatt personality into my videos, and I don’t care if it pisses people off because quite frankly, some of them have it coming.

I attack ideas, not people. No ad hominem for me.

But when it comes to the beliefs I consider to be evil, I am just as cold and merciless as a starving shark.

More after the break.

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A little too low

So I figured out why it’s my back that hurts when I go to the kitchen to get food and not, as one would think, my gimpy legs.

The answer was obvious once I started really thinking of it : the problem is the way I have to crouch down in order to use the countertop.

Such is the burden of those of us of above average height. The world is, understandably, not built for us. Ergonomic design has to be based on what will suit the largest number of people, and thus is designed for someone around 5’10”.

Crouching down like that has always been a little bit rough on me, but I guess now that I am 51 my body can’t handle it nearly as well as it used to, ergo, back pain.

Oh well, at least it distracts from the pain in my legs.

Now obviously I can’t get the counter raised or myself lowered. But what might work is if I put some sort of box on top of the counter and did my food prep there.

Not just a cardboard box, of course. That would not be sanitary,

But perhaps a cardboard box with a cutting board atop it, and a dish towel in between.

Such are the little indignities of disability. I have thought about it and even if I was disgustingly rich, there would still be a lot of small humiliations to my condition.

Needing a walker to get around will always be awkward and embarrassing, even if it’s the Rolls Royce of walkers and you arrive at the party in a limo.

And what’s the alternative? Hiring some enormous dude to carry me around?

Sexy, but not any more dignified.

And besides. I’m an enormous dude. I am pretty sure that anyone big enough to carry me would be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Assuming that’s still a thing.

So yeah. When you are disabled, dignity is hard to come by, and therefore what tiny shreds of it you still have become all the more zealously guarded.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow

I’m having my usual busy Friday.

Ya know, wound care at 9:15 am, then ordering my groceries online, then at 2 pm heading out for my weekly shower at Rosewood, then back here just in time to have lunch and start blogging.

And today, while Albert was showering me, I got to think about I tend to be a very agreeable and accommodating person to the point where it becomes problematic.

Because it’s very hard to me to ask for what I want or speak up for myself. The urge to tell people what I know they want to hear is far too strong. It makes it hard for folks to care for me because something might be going terribly wrong with me and they would never know because I would just keep it to myself.

Well, I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone with my symptoms.

I’ve gotten better about it as my health has gotten worse. I still find it very hard to speak up and tell people what’s wrong with me, because when I was a child, that didn’t work.

I would try to tell adults about my issues and just get brushed off.

But there’s nothing quite like illness and pain to get you to rethink your attitudes about a lot of things. Suddenly, shit gets real, dawg. Fuck your neurosis.

That’s how I learned that I was completely alone in the world. And were I made from sturdier stock or more ambitious temperament, that feeling of being alone might have sparked in me the urge to prove to the world that I was just fine by myself and I didn’t need anyone else at all.

But my soul is emaciated and paper-thin, so all it made me do was withdraw even further into my mind and away from the world that I could not survive alone and could not get any help with either.

I’m way too fucked up for anyone’s love to get through to me.

Crap. I need sleep, badly. I am going to have to lay down for now.

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Now where was I?

Forgot I had not finished Part 1 of my writing, so now here I am at 9:23 pm needing to write slightly less than 650 words in one go.

No problem at all.

Was weird to get that sleepy so fast. But I’d had a long day with all the wound care and groceries and shower and whatnot.

But whatever. I usually write all of part 1 in one sitting, and that’s 600+ words.

So really, it’s more like part 1 and part 2 just switched places for today.

Anyhow, back to the self-therapy.

I wish I was a more robust kind of person. But I suspect that a very big part of my problem with that kind of thing is my very weak connection with my id.

I have taken refuge in the crisp but chilly world of the mind far too much and for far too long, and it has left me feeling only weakly embodied and merely technically present.

And I know that has to end. I need to bring myself into balance instead of being so very lopsided in the direction of the ego and I can only do that by spending less time looking at screens and more time actually interacting with the real world.

Or at the very least, increasingly the depth and scope of my screen time. Go out into the wilds of the internet in search of remote work and new social experiences.

The image that keeps crossing my mind is of me throwing a grappling hook out into the ether then pulling myself along by the chain attached to it.

A strange image, to be sure, but it encapsulates how I feel about reaching out beyond myself into the real world in search of a new anchor point or two.

Still feeling nervous about the phone call from the SkillUp people on Monday. And I know why. It’s because I will have to explain the stark raving lunacy of my life so far and admit to having fucked everything up so completely that I am 51 years old and have never even entered the workforce.

And I am so ashamed of what a loser I am that explaining that will hurt a LOT.

All I can do is make myself think about all those lost years now and then and hold them in my mind for as long as I can stand to do so in order to drain some of their power.

Because they are definitely something I need to get over before I truly move on with my life. They are gone and I can never get them back and I don’t know how to handle that.

All I can do is grieve. Let the pain and loss and the horror I feel at what I have done to and with myself wash over me so I can get to the other side of them.

The only cure for emotions is to feel them.

The only way out is through.

I wish it was as simple as telling myself that there’s nothing I can do about it now so I might as well forgot about the past and concentrate on making my future better.

But it’s not that simple. I am not yet capable of that level of hope.

I feel like I have only just arrived at the possibility of positivity, and true hope, full and strong, would be asking far too much of my sad little spirit.

But my deflated soul is slowly filling up with air and systems that got mothballed a long time ago are struggling to come online, and over time, I am sure I will perk up more.

Like I keep saying, I know there is a very upbeat and positive person lurking within me and waiting to emerge.

I can feel him within me, like the shadow of someone I might have been. A happy, optimistic, pragmatic dreamer dedicated to making amazing things happen.

The kind of wonderful things that give people hope.

Maybe in order to find hope, I need to give it to others first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks to my extraordinary level of insight, that is.

I’ve always been able to see right through people, although it didn’t surge to Hannibal Lecter levels until somewhere around grade 4 or 5 .

For me, other people’s emotions are simply present to my mind. They always have been. And that forms the basis of my ability to “read minds”.

Or at least it sometimes seems to others like I can.

And to be perfectly blunt, they have no idea.

Because, as patient readers know, I learned at a fairly young age that people do not like it when you speak casually about their innermost secrets.

Seems to make them feel vulnerable for some reason.

To me, I was talking about obvious truths about people. And I was only trying to help. But of course, part of the very foundation of what lets human beings get along in a world full of strangers is the privacy of our own souls.

So I had to eventually learn to keep my observations to myself and to at least try to act as if I had the same barriers to understanding as everyone else.

And that’s not easy for me. To be honest, I have a very hard time imagining what the world would be like without my X-ray mind.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have other people be these opaque black boxes whom I could only understand through that which they openly express.

I mean, if you think I’m reclusive now….

And maybe that’s a big part of why I did not end up on the autism spectrum despite a childhood that seemed almost tailor made to produce it.

I’ve never found the behaviour of my fellow shaved apes baffling. I have never been limited by the confines of logical reasoning and deduction in how I understand people. To me, it is intuitively obvious that everyone does what they do and says what they say for reasons that make sense to them and in the context of their own lived experiences.

And that’s why I am such a passionate humanist. I can feel in my soul how everyone is vulnerable and weak and foolish and incomplete, and it only makes me love them more.

We truly are just a bunch of wounded souls stumbling around in the dark trying to find that door into happiness.

There ain’t one. Nobody has ever been happily ever after, and the only way to be happy until the day you die is to die in the middle of an orgasm.

There are worse ways to go.

Things can get better, though. But happiness is always going to take work. There is never going to be a point where you can just be happy all the time.

Even billionaires have bad days.

Hence why it is so toxic to view effort as the enemy, as depression forces you to do. The tragic inner conviction that most things are not worth the effort keeps you unhappy.

The big problem is that thanks to anhedonia, for you, it’s true. Only the most extreme positive reward to effort ratios can penetrate depression’s numbness. Everything else is, to you, unrewarding in the extreme.

So whether you get your extremely low effort reward stimulation from alcohol or drugs or gambling or risky sex or even video games, we all self-medicate in our own way.

A neurosurgeon once suggested that we could treat depression with a sort of emotional pacemaker implanted in the brain that provided a low level of stimulation to the reward center of the brain at all time, or perhaps in response to low levels.

I’d be willing to give it a try.

Now where’s the closest trans cranial magnetic stimulation place…

More after the break.

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Video Era 2024

That’s what I hope to launch soon, once I get the technical issues ironed out.

Which probably means paying Corel for the update from Video Studio 2020. Grr.

There are probably freeware video editors out there, but unfortunately I only like the Corel one. None of the others have the hyper efficient “mark and cue” editing style that I have grown to adore.

Compared to it, everything else is weird and clumsy and overcomplicated.

Unrelatedly, I have finally made an optometry appointment. I have needed one for quite a while as it’s getting harder and harder for me to read text.

Especially the text in paperback books. And most of my books are paperback.

So clearly the issue has reached crisis levels.

I booked an appointment for next Tuesday, and then someone from the place (the pathetically named FYIdoctors) called me, and it’s a good thing she did.

Because apparently I have to pay half of the fee for the appointment, which means I will need to show up with $65 in my pocket.

Nice of the province to give me money to live on then claw it back with a copay.

What is this, the USA?

Oh well. At least I will leave with a new prescription and be able to buy some glasses online that do NOT make me farsighted and that therefore I will be able to wear them all the time like a normal nerd.

My phone conversation with the person from SkillUp will be happening Monday morning at 11:15 am and I am extremely nervous about it.

Like I’ve said before, I know that’s irrational. It’s not a job interview, for crying out loud. I am just going to talk with this person about my educational options.

And I can do this. I’m very good at education. I am positive that I can take an online course then ace the certification process and acquire an actual job skill or two.

Right now I am aiming for system administration. I am positive that I can learn how computer networks are run and do a good job of it.

I have a good head for systems.

I could try other things they offer, like online bookkeeping, but meh.

I’m very, very good at accounting. But it’s so incredibly boring.

Even with spreadsheets to do all the math.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The image of me holding myself hostage deep inside my mind popped into my head just now, as I was wondering what to write about, and so here we are.

I’ve envisioned myself as being my own jailor and tormentor a number of times in this space, so on paper^[1] this really isn’t all that different.

And yet, it is. Because it paints a bullseye on the self-victimization of my inner child and how desperate a situation that is.

That poor boy sleeping inside me locked himself in a cage in order to keep the evil real world at bay and retreated into his world of screens and diversions, and at some point along the way he got lost within himself and he’s looked for the way out ever since.

Even though he knows why he’s trapped and knows that he will only find the exit when he stops needing the maze, still, he keeps looking.

I guess it’s better than doing nothing. And he can’t do nothing. He is far too agitated and paranoid and squirrelly for that.

It may not seem like it, but mine is a very restless soul. That’s why I have to fill my mind with distractions that rip my life away.

Video games are perfect for that purpose. They engage me fully because they are an interactive non-stop stream of mental stimulation that keeps me from sitting around actually thinking about my life.

Because my life sucks. So I avoid thinking about it at all costs. Which is why it sucks.

Fixing it would require that commitment to being here and real and taking up space that I was talking about yesterday.

Maybe I need to finally finish being born.

Hold up. my IBS is spazzing out.

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Well that was fun.

Trigger warning, poop talk ahead.

I knew trouble was brewing when a certain deep gurgling, a sound like a chainsaw revving underwater, came up through my guts from below.

Long, hard experience has taught me that this kind of thing and the accompanying sensations can only mean one thing ;

The contents of my lower intestine were liquefying.

And that ain’t good.

Sure enough, before long I had to go poop, and nothing solid came out. That was to be expected, at least if you’re me.

And you might be. I’m a complicated dude.

What I did not expect was for it to burn. That’s not a normal part of this process. And I find myself worrying about what it means.

There’s been no radical shifts in my diet, so that’s off the table. I haven’t suddenly developed a hankering for jalapeno poppers or anything.

That leaves two main avenues of explanation : either something is irritating that general peri-anal region, or something is making that which passes through it irritating.

Amounts to the same thing, I guess.

Something definitely caused everything in my gut to be pulverized like I had a blender in my descending colon.

Presumably, there was a bottleneck somewhere along the line – a place where the intestine narrowed and caused a backlog (sic), and that backlog only cleared when the stomach contents had been reduced to something thin enough to pass through anyhow.

That doesn’t explain the burning, though. My biggest worry, and I have no idea how reasonable this is, is that somehow stomach acid is making it out of the stomach and into my digestive tract where it definitely does not belong.

Makes you wonder how the stomach keeps the acid in but lets food through.

Maybe it doesn’t. I dunno.

More after the break.

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The boy in the bubble

That’s me, I guess.

The difference between me and that famous boy, besides my having a functional immune system, is that his reasons for isolation were very much real.

Mine aren’t. They’re thirty years out of date. And that’s just the issues I have related to bullying and such.

Patient readers know that the real issues started when I was raped as a toddler. That’s when my flight from the unthinkable brutality of it into the depths of my enormous mind and then slammed the door behind me.

And I have been locked in there ever since. And no matter what I try to tell myself, that scared child within me remains convinced that if that door ever opens, the world will come in and destroy him.

And maybe it would, in a way, because if that door opens, he’ll have to wake up.

And grow up, and he – and I – are terrified of that. The healthy side of me wants to grow up and become a real person more than anything else, but the unhealthy side views that prospect with the stark animal terror of a fox beset by dogs.

I tried not to go there with that image but my muse insisted. Damn it.

And that terror harmonizes with the fear from being raped and somehow it all turns into the suffocating casket I live in, the one that is way way too small for me because it was made to fit me when I was much smaller (in all senses of the word) and which has been killing me with how cramped and distorted I have to be to remain inside it.

But it’s my turtle shell. And that makes me cling to it like Linus with his security blanket even though that shell is far too small for me now.

Time to shed that shell and grow another. And that means facing that feeling of unchecked terror and getting on with things despite it.

There will always be a part of me that wants to just keep hiding from the world and being “safe”, and there’s no reason why I have to abandon that completely.

But I need to open up my shell enough to let the air and light in, and let me feel the sunlight on my skin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.