No electronics, no photography, lasers, wine, swords… generally nothing relating to hobbies, interests, or fun.

It does not feel like it’s going to get any better in the near future either, so if anyone’s hanging around waiting… well don’t hold your breath.

Sorry.

This was supposed to be fun and eclectic and some depression is ok among the silliness, bad photography, and electronics pr0n, but now it just feels like the all-depressing all-the-time channel.

Thank you to everyone who’s come and read things here over the years, commented or not. I appreciate it.

I’ll either be back, or I won’t. There might more posts, or maybe not. Maybe just time for a prolonged break.

I mean, the Melatonin does help me fall asleep quicker, I’m pretty sure of that, but it doesn’t keep me asleep. I still wake up several times in the night, and depending on the night, sometimes I can’t relax enough to get back to sleep again.

Like last night / this morning, woke up around 4am with a mild panic attack, so I had to read for an hour to get my mind off it.

Now I’m just feeling empty.

Work is going downhill fast, I know I have to do something else, find something else, but I don’t know what and don’t know how. I’ve been lucky up till now – stuff has just happened, opportunities have just turned up when I needed them.

When I do get an idea, it is quickly shot down by all the doubts, uncertainties, and dissenting inner dialog.

Logically, intellectually, I know what I should do, know what I should try, but my heart’s not there. I feel hollow. My inner demons, my little sabateurs, are winning, or have won. I just want it all to go away, to end.

So I remain stuck, motionless, paralyzed with fear and self-doubt, then whine about it on my little blog here, and complain to my friends about how much I suck at life.

And another day slips by, it’s now the middle of April and not a single step forward has been made. It’s part of the cycle, the lack of progress feels like failure, which reinforces the sense of worthlessness and self-doubt. Today will be another day of fail, because yesterday was fail, and all the yesterdays before that were fail.

Ok I know it’s not entirely true. A few people care. A couple things matter.

Nonetheless, Foamy does make a compelling argument.

This is Pixie and she has not a single fuck to give about anyone’s problems.

Apparently, according to her, all that and more can be attributed to lack of sleep.

Lack of sleep, or poor sleep, are of course ongoing themes in my existance. I take hours to fall asleep, wake up frequently, and I’ve got sleep apnea so even when I think I’m sleeping, I’m probably not.

She suggested that some supplements might help me get some decent sleep, and that in turn could help me with the depression, stress, et cetera.

So I took the suggestion and ran with it!

Pilz-E said he’d guard the pills for me. He’s good that way.

I got Melatonin to help with the sleeping because my sleeping seriously needs help and the bottle said it would help with that and I got 5-HTP because it’ll “Promote Healthy Mood Balance” and I don’t wanna have my mood balance be all unhealthy which I bet it is right now because I haven’t been taking 5-HTP before and then there’s a great big economy-size bottle of back-pain pills because my back hurts a lot because when I was eighteen I broke it skydiving but I got better but now it hurts and who’d have ever thought that breaking your back would have any kind of long term effects that’d haunt me 20 years later.

So hopefully in a week or so, I’ll be sleeping quietly, mentally stable, free of backpain, and will no longer have the insides of my eyeballs spelling out messages in Elder Futhark while I’m trying to drive.

That’s when I noticed all my eye-floaters had congregated into the middle of my vision. They had taken on a bunch of sort-of sharp, angular forms. In fact they looked a lot like runic symbols. And they were all lined up like they were forming words. A sentence.

I’ve had eye-floaters for as long as I can remember. And I’ve known what they are for so long, I don’t remember learning it. They’ve never come as a surprise to me, although at times they are a bit of an aggravation.

And I seem to have a heck of a lot of them. A few dozen? Now and then I’ve tried figuring out if they’re in one eye or the other, but I’ve never been able to isolate them, so I suspect they’re in both.

Anyhow, so I’m driving, it’s already grey and dreary out, light rain is starting to blur up the windscreen (where it’s not quite  wet enough to make the wipers effective, but not dry enough to ignore), and now my eye-floaters seem to be trying to spell out acrane messages to me.

At the same time I notice my tinnitus is going. When it acts up, and there’s background ‘white noise’, my brain often seems to try and sort the random stimulus into something intelligible, so wind can start to sound like there’s music or voices in it.

So now not only am I seeing messages inside my eyeballs but between the tinnitus and the sounds of wind and rain against the car, I’m hearing whispers inside my ears. To be honest, it made me laugh a little at first.

Then I got thinking – most of the time, the floaters are barely there. Always just noticable but equally ignorable. What if they’re always spelling out words and messages, but this was just the first time I’ve noticed it?

Wouldn’t that be a great way to send subliminal messages? Right inside the eyeballs? So everywhere you look, whatever you’re doing, even if you blink, there’s always those subliminal messages happening.

Same thing for the tinnitus. Turn up the high pitched whistle inside my ear, and now indistinct background noise suddenly starts resolving into half-heard music or whispers, to be dismissed or tuned out, but unable to be turned off. Another ideal portal for subliminal messaging.

The tinnitus has only been around for 20-years or so, while the eye-floaters have been with me more or less ‘forever’.

All this flashed through my head in a matter of seconds. Still driving along, now I’m thinking – if we are the sum of our experiences, and our experiences are a result of our perceptions filtered through previous experiences… and all this has been going on for ever… then what?

Could my ongoing depression and inability to do anything to fix it just a side-affect of some negative or destructive messages, subliminally delivered through my eyeballs and eardrums?

All those little self-destructive impulses, the dissenting inner-voices / internal dialog, the ones I call my little sabateurs, what if they’re being controled and manipulated through subliminal messages in my eye-floaters and tinnitus? What if they aren’t mine at all, what if my little sabateurs are the subliminal messages themselves?

Then who’s sending them?

So then that makes me think about demons and posession, and that in turn makes me think that maybe I’m really just crazy, because really that’s just the simplest answer.

In the end, I don’t know. I had a huge sense of dread about the whole excursion. It was hard leaving the house, I spent too long saying bye to the kitties as if I was worried about not making it back home.

But I did – there weren’t even any close calls, unless you count the whole tired / headache / vision-obscured-by-runic-messages-while-driving thing.

Well it’s bullshit.

The lack of money can lead to a significant happiness deficit. And if your happiness level is in arrears because you’re stressed-out about being broke, or unable to pay the bills or the mortgage… and if having a [better] job and more money would allieviate that stress and therefore allow you to get out of a negative-happiness balance, then that just mathematically proves that yes you can in fact buy happiness.

I’m not saying that money and happiness are equivalent. There’s probably an exchange rate, and it probably varies from day to day and person to person. Maybe there’s limits too. Like if you’re already pretty happy, then money won’t buy you any more of it?

But damnit, I’m stressed about work, money, bills, work bills, work money, mortgages, and money, and it’s making me really fucking unhappy. It doesn’t help that I haven’t been in a particularily good place to begin with.

Today has been particularily bad – I have a supplier trying to break a 10+ year old agreement and raise a price retroactively by 400%, a customer who rightly-so refuses to accept a retro-active increase, and meanwhile I’m stuck in the middle wondering how I’m going to pay my mortgage on Monday.

Sure I can simply refuse to pay the supplier the increased rate but that’s not a solution; meanwhile we have other business with them, and other customers, that become jeapordized if the whole relationship goes bad.

These are the days that make me wonder about a dead-end job slinging coffee or cleaning dishes. Might not pay well and the hours probably suck, but at least you don’t have to deal with this sort of thing. And I wouldn’t mind dealing with this sort of thing if there was actually any money in it but the margins are so damn skinny I’ve already lost money by spending 4 hours on it trying to negotiate and communicate with either side.

These are the days that make me think about finding salvation in a bottle, or at the end of a barrel.

No, I don’t handle stress very well.

Which is wierd, because you’d think I would be used to it by now.

But it Never. Fucking. Ends.

You think maybe it’s going to stop, maybe things are starting to look up, it’s turning around and you can relax and take a  breath. But it’s all just a ruse. The universe just letting the chain slacken a bit before it yanks you back down.

The heck with it.

With any luck I’m going to get some wine, go home, and get drunk before anything else goes wrong.