If it works...

Lent Somnolence: i'm only doing things to try to forget why i'm depressed and upset in the first place. denial, avoidance, and all that, to get past. meh. but, it works for millions of people everyday. ask anyone on the street. they'll deny it and you'll have confirmation :p

Left the lights on

I blacked out last night. First time in a while that it has happened to me. I didn't take that much stuff, compared to what I used to do on a nightly basis. I have 6 or so unaccounted hours for that are a complete blank. I never did like blacking out, but I always woke up feeling kind of good and kind of dreadful, but chances were I did something amusing and unusual and at some point in the future someone would tell me what crazy things I said or did. I have a feeling I did something crazy. Woke up this morning and, felt like, wow, I lost a few hours of my life! Cool, what better way to spend one of your worst depressive episodes of your life with fuzzy memory and gaping holes in what happened.

On a related note, this is one whole week of being on no Emsam, no antidepressant at all. The lowering of Lamictal didn't seem to effect anything, so I might go lower on it again in a couple months. Two more weeks until I get to start being on an antidepressant and I can hope to feel a little bit better, instead of waking up and wishing I hadn't.

Pollywogs and shellbacks

There's a old ritual, repeated in different forms that dates back to Sumerian rituals. It's mostly known now as a kind of military tradition in the air force and navy, practiced in different ways. Crossing the line means a lot of things. Some of the way it is done now is an acceptance ritual, and for some, it's more of a religious promise. For example, drawing a line of salt between two groups of common people having to go seperate ways, but having each group step over the line and rub out the line of salt with their feet means that they will see each other again, no matter the difficulty that arises. In old seafaring rituals, uninitiated sailors were called pollywogs, or greenbacks sometimes, the experienced who have made a voyage across the equator or some other significant landmark usually call themselves shellbacks. There isn't so much salt used, except the salt in this case is sometimes used as a variation of splashing of salt water on the pollywog during initiation; it's almost a kind of hazing ritual depending on the time and captain and ship.

The merits of dinosaurs and robots

there is this child, a young boy, that from the moment he saw me treated me like a father. i'm not used to that. i'm not used to children, and i'm not used to having such protective feelings for a kid in general. but the way he reached out and made me feel, it was kind of odd. i never felt like i'd be so protective and so caring, much less for someone i had just met a moment ago.

i never felt like discussing the merits of dinosaurs and robots would be the most important thing in the world, but it was, for that moment. i never knew how deep my fascination with fire trucks still was. i never knew how much i suck ass at video games compared to this kid. i never knew i could look into the eyes of someone so much younger and see such promise and also see the hurt that had already taken place. i never knew i could cry for someone so much younger than me and wish i really could make it all better, instead of being a grownup who says it, but doesn't have the slightest idea of how to make it better, or says it by rote, because their own parents said the same thing to them.

things won't be alright, but kid, you'll still have me looking out for you.

is this what it feels like to be a father? i don't know. i do know that dinosaurs are better than robots.

composed in halves

it's a childish way to try to explain myself through the actions of others, but what am i doing with my life. i'm living in the moment. i'm living as that freshman in college, experiencing all that can happen, fully aware of all the hurt i'm putting myself through. fully aware that the more i hit myself with a hammer, the better i'll feel afterwards, because it's so damn good. the more hurt that happens, the more lessons i learn, and the wiser i become, with enough years and time. i'm immature socially, especially when it comes to friendships, relationships, and anything dealing with another person with feelings. i understand my feelings, barely. i don't understand others. that is a huge gap, and it has led to me doing a lot of things that has resulted in pain, all around.

[...]

that's just the only way i can think of trying to possibly explain my actions. half a child. half a man. but i'm not either yet.

comfort in familiarity

maybe you used to be like me. who knows. maybe you can understand from that perspective. maybe you never were, and maybe that is why it's so painful.

i hate pain. i hate causing pain. i hate that i do cause pain, in such vindictive ways. i do. it hurts me more than the other person to read what i write or say. i do it anyway. i'm sick of it, but change comes slow and it might not ever change.

we change for ourselves, if we can, we don't change for others even if that's the biggest reason why people want to change. it's a hard situation to deal with and to be involved with in any kind of way. even as a passive friend, seeing a person do the same mistakes, over and over again. it hurts you. it hurts me to be told what i already know what i'm doing.

there is comfort in familiarity, there is comfort in pain, there is comfort in the cycle of anguish. and there is disgust at the thought of all that i keep doing.

Places to see

There's a few more places left in the world that I'd like to visit. I've gotten most of the far away places done at some point earlier, but I haven't had a grand old time stomping around elsewhere. Here's my list of the *necessary* places I need to visit.

1. Australia & New Zealand. These are put together because I want to observe the speciation of offshore saltwater silversides into more brackish type species, and the do some cast netting in the various river systems all along the northern and western coast of Australia, seeing the subtle differences in the different rainbow fish. Who knows, I might even find a new species or subspecies, it's still happening today by amateur enthusiasts. But being able to bring home some wild stock that I caught myself and knowing what river they came from, location, water conductivity, hardness, all of that dorky stuff; would thrill me to death. Having my own colony at home, a little refuge for such beautiful fish. Whoever decided to give them the broad vernacular name "Rainbow fish" was spot on. If I'm lucky or find a fellow dorkist who can help me find some of the Australian lungfishes, that would also cause a spontaneous orgasm. Just being able to see one in its natural habitat.
In New Zealand, I'd be looking for rainbow fish also, but this time seeing how they differ from lake to lake (rather than river to river). There is a wealth of undiscovered species, it's not uncommon for a new one to be discovered each year. And of course, the varied, very varied geography of New Zealand will give me plenty of eye candy to oogle at and take tourist pictures of.
2. Madagascar. What do I have to say about this wonder of a place? I probably could spend an entire lifetime there, feeling like I was in heaven, with the plethora of fauna and flora around me to observe, helping with conservation efforts and trying to educate local fishermen about better catching practices and local farmers about diversity and how to help preserve their local flora that is sadly, disappearing rapidly.
3. Canada. I want to see people who have undergone a natural breeding process and see the results of this in their personality, physical traits, and mental traits. I chose Canada, because you obviously can't observe natural breeding in the USA; and Canada is a short hop away.

look me in the eye and tell me

letter to an undisclosed person

it snowed tonight. not as much as they said it would, of course. but enough. more than it has the past few times. enough to call it a real snowstorm, with a few inches of snow hanging off the branches. not the shroud of white covering everything when you open your eyes and you don't know where the ground is because the sharp, cold air is making you high, and your lungs are feeling like they should always feel, and your feet aren't quite on the ground, and you can't quite tell where your body ends and the soft crunching, delicate, white powder snow sinking beneath whatever you think is your feet and where that stops and what is the ground.

i cannot sleep again. i'm very sick in some way. i think those nights of repeated insomnia i spent with you took a big toll on my body. my body takes less and less abuse. the signs of age aren't the signs we are looking for. the things we used to do that we could roll over in the morning and not give a second thought, now gives us days, weeks, and yeah, months of pause, while we wonder how did we grow up, and why did we grow up, and why is being an adult so difficult, painful, and most of all, devoid of all the things in life that we grew to love, to enjoy, to wish for, to dream for, to hope for. being an adult is about learning to love pain, except in some people's cases, we already learned how to learn how to love pain before we became an adult. all that growing up did was give us responsibilities, our problems aren't other people's anymore. they are ours. we don't want them to be ours. we want to be that child that dreamed at night and woke up in the morning with a smile, because, faith was a real thing, because dreams were a real thing, because hope was a real thing. all of these things are still real now. we just have to pull our nails out, hair out, do stupid things, things we regret, to get to where we want, to sacrifice what we are, what we think we are, to learn what we really are, and then find out what disgust we hold towards ourselves for surviving. is surviving worth it? it must be for most people. at some level. they are alive. is surviving worth it for me? it's only a question i can answer for myself and anyone who knows me, knows that my answer would be pretty firm. it isn't worth it. it isn't worth the pain. the struggle. the hurt. the loss. the loss. the loss of friends, of family, of love, of what is instrisicticaly you. surviving isn't change, it's being something else. i don't think anyone can be someone else, for themselves, or for someone else,. we can try. we can try really fucking hard. i've tried. so many times. i persevere, i try, i do what i can, as best as i can, but, failure is always what looks back at me in the face. what, allen, am i doing here alive. waiting day by day, crying when i can't sedate myself to sleep. i cry because i have no reason to cry. i cry because i have no reason to want anything. i cry because i want something. i cry because i know i can't have anything. i cry for every reason. i cry for myself and i cry for what i am. i cry that i let myself get like this. this isn't pity, it's angst, it's anger, it's hatred. allen -- if i had the courage to do things earlier in my life, to take those steps before my life became what it is now, then i wouldn't wake up each morning feeling sick to the stomach knowing that my name is allen. knowing that this person, allen, is a coward, a fool, a weakling, a person who avoids everything and who is still that child who is desperately trying to cling onto what a child does. the dream. the want. the hope.

i've lost the dream. i've lost the want. i've lost the hope.

i lost it a long time ago, but i kept on trying to be the child i knew. being a child living in an adult world doesn't work. every single thing someone says to me, if it's a bad day for me, i'll drop deep down into sadness, and blame becomes what i am, first it is blame myself. then it's blame the world. finally if it is bad enough it's blame them and yet again, make someone good in my life leave me.

people like hurt. i think i'm proof of it, in what i do to myself. in what i do to torture and make my life move as slow as molasses, as slow as the molasses incident that killed hundreds of people in an accident -- funny isn't it? death by being too slow? slow as syrup? that is my feelings inside, turn my upside down, bang on the neck with a knife and try to get something to pour out, minutes, minutes, minutes go by, and you might get something from inside me. the rest of me is stuck together, stuck in this whole, stuck. stuck coagulated feelings, sticking all together, in one big mess. my brain is a child who fell asleep with gum in their mouth. except my brain is that everyday. i need to pick apart the fibers of my being, and not tear our even more strands and lose what i am, again, i do this, almost every day, the same kind of action. the same kind of waking up. life didn't use to be like this. sometimes i don't care. sometimes i rip a knot of hair out and say, i can't remember yesterday, i won't remember this, let me cry now, and tomorrow i'll forget why i cried. who cares? in the end, we can ask ourselves that. who cares? who cares? does anyone? i'm losing what i had, the care i had, the care i had came from being something for someone, i won't do that anymore. it isn't true to myself, and how silly is it for me to throw in something moral sounding like that in my diatribe on self-loathing. i'm true to my own ideals, flawed as they might be; perhaps that's why i can't be something i feel is human. i'm certainly not human in my own eyes. i'm cobbled together, taken pieces from those people who have shared with me, taken here and there, and incorporated it into myself. that isn't how a person becomes. it isn't how a person figures out who they are. it's a person who isn't a person, a person so devoid of themselves, that they need so many other people to fill up what is missing, and whatever a person gives me, i treasure it more than gold, and make that idea, that action, that word, idealistic. i'm a mish-mash of ideas, from here and there, from people who would disagree with each other, and even i disagree with myself, but i don't budge, because it's what i made myself. you know the simple things people say when they make a snap judgment about someone? like, for example, you're fucked up. well, that is as accurate as i can say, and as accurate as anyone can say about me. i'm fucked up. the reasons are there, the few of them, the few that i can let out a little out at a time as that drizzled molasses tries to come out of the bottle onto the fried omelet that was my adolescent brain.

i don't have a reason to keep going. this is all what these words mean. i need a reason. a reason for myself. i'm desperately trying to find that reason. i haven't.

i'm scared. i'm doing things i would never think i would go back to doing. the thought of not waking up has turned into a comfort instead of a fear. that is fearsome in how it effects my daily behavior, my daily thoughts, my daily actions, and my future.

i have nothing right now for myself. i have lost the reasons that kept me believing that there was an alternative. i'm still trying, but please don't be upset if i can't find an answer on my own. i want to more than anything.

if only meanings were like apples and one would fall on my head. i could use a kick in the head, but that wouldn't give me a reason. i could use something to the head, to give me this thing i'm searching for. i could use something.

i just wish it was a thing that i could obtain from friendship. friends are there to catch you when you fall. i've fallen, and i've been caught. now what? now what happens?

you tell me. i don't know what happens.

sneeze

I feel sick. I went out once. I got a bug. That tells me I shouldn't ever go outside. lol. Wrapped up in blankets and drinking lots of water and enough vitamin C to feel positively fruity. At least I get a lot of sleep out of this.

*yawn*

The next 3 weeks

Saw the psychiatrist today.

I asked to reduce my Xanax XR dosage, she said no. Surprise! I am being taken off Emsam, like I wanted to. I did, happily, get my Ambien CR doubled again, because of the severe lack of sleep I've been having on the MAOI. One week on the 6mg/24hr Emsam dosage, and then 2 weeks of washing out. No antidepressants. I'll also be doing a one week taper down from Lamictal 300mg to 200mg. I get to drop the lithium next month, and we're going to start Topomax for my non-psychiatric problems mainly, and see if it might help as a lithium replacement since they do that fun sodium stuff. We're going old school and deciding to try Zoloft, and do a slow, very slow, taper up to the max over many months and see how it goes. If needed we'll increase the Adderall (I asked to be taken off it - she said no), and we'll add in a TCA if needed too.

Some quotes, that aren't that memorable

"Maybe we like the pain. Maybe we're wired that way. Because without it, I don't know; maybe we just wouldn't feel real. What's that saying? Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop."
Meridith

"Sorry. Up late. Internet porn."
House

"Wow. It's a big jump from ‘Infidelity is wrong' to ‘Do her.'"
House

Sadly, all three of these are particularly relevant right now, or rather the past couple of months. Okay not so much the internet porn one, but I can't help but like that quote.

is it 6 or is it 6?

[00:57] Lent Somnolence: you know i have 5 blogs, no one asked me i think, if i had others. and i have a paper journal
[00:57] Lent Somnolence: so 6 journals.
[00:59] Lent Somnolence: my life is the simplest people can have, but i have to make secrets in secrets to make this life a different life. so do i have 6 lives inside myself, or 6 lies

Is it 6 lies or is it 6 lives? Or is it both? Lies that keep my own life going, because the real life I have isn't the life I want, and I'd rather be in one of my other more fantastic worlds that no one else knows about. If people don't know about where I go off to in my head when reality hurts too much, then they can't harm me in that place.

Slip up or mix up?

[00:52] ***: well, then you have two options
[00:53] ***: either be honest
[00:53] ***: or don't tell people you have a blog
[00:53] ***: then you can be free to be expressive about all the things you want to be expressive about in your blog
[00:53] ***: or there is a third option
[00:53] Lent Somnolence: no i can't take not lying. people think i do it easily, maybe those white lies that come out might come out easily. but lies like that, they haunt me forever and ever. for years
[00:53] ***: you can't take not lying?
[00:54] ***: what does that mean?
[00:54] Lent Somnolence: the opposite. i wrote it wrong
[00:54] ***: oh
[00:54] ***: the third option would be to assume a pseudonym
[00:54] Lent Somnolence: or it was a real slip of my mind. who knows

Expessing

[00:49] Lent Somnolence: i was so good at being expressive, at saying words that meant depression, loss, love, death, in ways that weren't one word answers that we've heard before

End of the line

I did the begging thing, not once, but twice. I didn't get an answer the first time I asked *her, but the second time I asked they wrote back to me. Surprising, I didn't think I'd hear a single word from her ever again. I asked a silly question both times, just wanting to reminisce about things we used to do together and be able to forget together. I guess I wasn't that much of a fun kind of guy, as she doesn't want to do that; I can't say I don't blame her. It's hard to enjoy your own life when someone else is talking about their own life and horrible it is.

I'm sorry everyone thinks I'm looking for sympathy, I'm not. I want empathy, and no one seems to know how to give it to me. I want those words that people say to other people that mean nothing, but I want those words to mean something. I want the words "It'll be okay Allen.", to really mean it when that person says it, because they believe it. Not because they are trying to keep me going another night or day.

I guess today the days of nostalgia ends. It's funny, the day I crossed the line was this month last year, and the day of thinking about it ends this month this year. Strange coincidences and strange attractions. In this case the strange attraction died far too soon before I could mature enough to give back what another human being deserves. After the years have past and I can understand what someone you care about needs and should be given, it's too late to wish upon a star and wish I was that person I am now, those years ago. Nostalgia hurts. So lets stop thinking.

It's the end of the line, I'm just a year late in realizing the truth.

Results of an experiment

So putting several Emsam patches on your body isn't a good idea. It makes you a little bit crazy. No blood pressure issues or anything else. I did get very, very oddly manic with a great deal of motivation and energy, but I was still in the same mood as I was before -- feeling awful. I also couldn't sleep at all, but I didn't have any feelings of being tired. I went 3 frantic days of no sleep, doing a lot of crazy things and I remember it all. Usually when I get in a state like that I don't remember much of what I did and it's all a bit fuzzy, and all I feel is a bit of dread, because I know I probably did something out of character.

my words go here, my brain goes missing

The View From the Top

I could write a long similar article about reasons I had up and left virtual worlds like that. So I might as well, I'm on Adderall after all.

Lets start from my own beginning of text-based BBS doors that one would play on a Bulletin Board System (BBS) usually running off of an a Amiga, Commodore, or PC clone and a single telephone line. At home, on my lowly Tandy PC that I had conned my parents [which took several months of whining] into getting me for "academic" reasons, I'd wardial with my top of the notch 2400 baud modem to find these phone numbers hooked up to computers, hoping that some of them were public, or semi-private, or even invite only, and register on all of them I could. Unfortunately, war dialing now is illegal for silly reasons in most states unfortunately, but sometimes I still like to pull out a DOS terminal and terminal program and let the computer war dial all night -- there's all kinds of interesting phone numbers you can find.

Registering back then was a big deal, not like it is on the internet now where you fill out a form and get to lie. Most of the owners of the BBS in question would actually *follow up* and call you back and verify your information -- so every Operator on every BBS you register on has all your real information, a scary thing which I found out later. I remember one time I was registering on a new BBS, I believe it was called The Sanitarium, and I was getting line noise (which happens when the phone line is picked up or there is static in the line from rain or snow, etc.,), so you see a bunch of #@~AVCD#@! (nonsense characters from the line noise, like imagine hearing your neighbor on the phone, but seeing it as random indecipherable text on an amber monitor) and finally after your modem has given up the fight whistling and screaming you see the dreaded NO CARRIER on the screen (which means you've been disconnected). Unfortunately the Operator can see exactly what you were typing, and I was typing god fucking dammit fucking fuck stop fucking fuck, or something of the sort (memory is a little fuzzy, but there was a lot of fucking involved), and behold 5 minutes later I receive a scolding phone call from the Operator (we called owners of BBS' Operators), lecturing me on how if I wanted the privilege of being on his board I'd have to follow his policy of no cursing. I obliged and he talked to my parents explaining what I had done, thankfully he still let me have access. moving onto the larger world of the internet and connecting to long distance out of the way BBS in Norway and Sweden and all sorts of places where I could barely decipher what I was reading, all for the thrill of playing in another world with different people. Before long I was lying about my age (some Operators are a little more lax than others and didn't stick with the fax in a copy of your driver's license and I sought those Operators out) and getting onto adult boards and being a mischievous preteen downloading naughty material, of course, when I wasn't involved in playing Legend of the Red Dragon or TradeWars 2002. Or the end all of end all games on BBS MajorMUD on a local BBS called Metropolis Big 12 (check out the Google Searches for Metropolis BBS, the amount of people with fond memories of it is amazing, and the amount of names I recognize is also a bit eerie. Metropolis Big 12 even had not one, but two! local numbers right here in Longmont, plus it had phone numbers in all the other college towns (the big 12 athletic college schools in this part of the USA for those of you not living here are: Baylor, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech) so at times there were almost 50 or so people online at once! It was the first time I had the experience of chatting, by the way, the coolest people to talk to (as a young 14-17 year old during this time [it was a long and torrid affair of modems and the early internet], were by far the ones from Texas, they weren't quite as dull as the others). It was scary as hell. It was was amazing no longer was I limited to single phone line BBS' playing games and using up all my turns and having to wait an entire other day to see what everyone else had done in the game and then agonize over what I was going to do with my 10 or so turns I had that day. Now, I could play MajorMUD for hours on end, for as long as I wanted. I would spend hours and hours figuring out the puzzles in the game, and meticulously making maps out of graph paper, annotating them with loving detail. Here's some online ASCII maps for example, but I made mine on graph paper with much more detail. Frequently I'd bring my entire computer over to my best friend's house and we'd both lie on the floor the entire night long drinking caffeine and terrorizing other players, no one else had the advantage of being able to communicate with each other person to person except us. As long as I had enough money to keep paying for the credits to stay online I'd be on there every second of my spare time, letting my grades, social life, and hygiene suffer. If my memory is right $300 paid with a credit card gave me enough credits to be online for 40 hours. Those 40 hours all went into playing, and I could easily use up those 40 hours in a single week. At the worst of the addiction, I wrote scripts for the DOS based program I used to connect to different BBS, so that I wouldn't even have to be at the computer to play; I'd just keep racking up the experience and money and further distancing myself in the rankings from everyone else. I wasted so much money in such a small amount of time. But, I was the best, on the top, and envied by everyone. It's kind of a nice feeling isn't it? Although, I don't think my parents felt that way after receiving their credit card bills. Thankfully that early in time, it was fairly trivial to generate fake credit card numbers that validated and charge the money to other people. So I was an addict and a bad person then, but wouldn't a crack addict do the same if given the chance and technological know how?

After a while, the thrill of only having the competition of a few hundred people lost interest to me and I stopped playing MajorMUD, and I had also been banned for hacking into an opponents account and deleting their character; coincidentally i was never caught for credit card fraud. I did have a friend caught for check fraud, but I told them from the start that they shouldn't use checks to defraud a company. What can I say, competition is fierce and I cheated in every legal and illegal way possible, if the 2nd best in the game has a password of 'orange' (yes, it was orange) and orange is listed in their public profile as their favorite color, how does one not reasonable expect someone not to try to type it in. I'm a curious person, of course I'm going to stare at a login screen and type words for hours until I manage to get lucky. It's how life works, you keep trying and failing, but eventually you get something happy and unexpected. So, I rationalize it as it not being my fault. It's like you leaving the front door unlocked with a note saying the key is under the flowerpot and not expecting your next door neighbor to be polite and respect that the note is for your friend coming over, and not take a peek inside for themselves out of curiosity. All I did was something a little more fuzzy in the illegal department, I don't think they had laws to really prosecute me at the time, so all that happened was I received a phone call from their legal department threatening some undefined action if I ever was caught calling there again. That really didn't scare me, it's hard to scare someone who isn't 18 yet, and someone who likes to get in trouble, so I called there again. Many times. I was smarter though, falsifying my information with other people's addresses and making sure I was home at the time to answer the follow-up calls, so that I did indeed seem legitimate and not that other evil person. None of this is the behavior of a deviant person or an addicted game and chat addict, of course not, and if you keep saying it to yourself it starts to sound true. Plus, it's really funny to laugh at years later. The charm of the place did slowly wear off, having to stay vigilant and pretend to be someone else wasn't fun at all, I couldn't keep the same friends, those cute and totally impossible to understand college girls I had met in chat that teased me in all kinds of sexual ways that I am still very clueless about, I couldn't talk to the same way. I couldn't play my game as the character I was, starting over was a chore and I realized the only reason I kept on playing was for the status, not for the fun.

I moved onto different, more devious and angry things. A local BBS, right here based in Boulder, called Liquid Sky, had 4 incoming phone lines! That's a big deal for a local BBS, they almost all only have 1, which is operated off their parent's real voice phone line until the kid gets screamed at enough, but no, this place was a luxury and it had 4 lines. I could talk to anyone else dialed in at the time. Coincidentally this is where I met Caylina, the first girl I really ever had a crush on and started to date. Unfortunately, she was a bit depressed and crazy, and decided to have a mental break down in the kitchen of her house in front of her mother and confess she wanted to marry me and have my children, which sent her parents running like headless chickens and before I knew it she had seen a shrink, been put on Paxil, and was forbidden to talk to me. A few months later I received a letter saying that she had been shipped off to New York and couldn't ever see me again. That devastated me for a very, very, long time. Sometimes, I still cry about it. The only real good thing I can say is, the first antidepressant I was put on, was the same one that Caylina was put on, and that makes me smile for some idiotic and charming reason. I guess you can tell how much I miss her, and all the idiotic poetry I wrote after we lost contact -- I was 15 and 3/4 at that time, one of the few times I can recall how old I was when something in my life happened. Another thing that happened on Liquid Sky a while later was I was fiddling around late at night trying to telnet into random .gov IP's, and had managed to get into a few because they never changed the default root password so I snagged all the /etc/passwd files to crack later for fun. The next day I got an email from the Operator that was sent to every registered member asking for a confession or he'd turn over all the BBS records to the FBI, so I was scared and said I did it and it was an accident and made up an elaborate lie basically saying I didn't know I wasn't supposed to type a name and password when it asked me for one. Anyone can make that mistake.

I moved onto the Internet right when it was starting to slowly, ever so slowly get more popular. I could get online through Big 12, read the old Fidonet groups on the older generation BBS even (if the owner shelled out enough money), and on Big 12 I could read real Usenet, and I could even hop into this weird thing called IRC. IRC back then was a great deal more chaotic, EFNet was pretty much the only place in existence, net splits every 10 minutes it seemed, Eggdrop bots in every channel, Bouncer bots all over, it was pretty hectic and was more of a battlefield than a medium for chat. In IRC I learned all about internet slang, especially "A/S/L" (age, sex, location?), and "want to cyber" (cyber being a prefix used to connect the subsequent word loosely to the world of computers or the Internet or sex over a computer, and the oh so common question from other guys (I'm not a girl dammit, I don't care if my nickname looks welsh and girly!) "how big are your boobs?". I also solidified my knowledge of different emoticons like the simple :) to the more complex ones like: <°)))>< (a goldfish), <=======}==O (I used this interchangeable with a sword, penis and a syringe. It was very multipurpose.), @-,-'-,-- (girl's really fell for these roses!). IRC was a good learning and social experience for me, as I was still very shy at the time. Until I found an obsessed 19 year old freshman sex fiend who was into molesting (nicely) online young innocent people like me (I blame her solely for my sexual perversion and corruption), I certainly blame her for my rather abnormal (compared to other people), love for blowjobs, because it was the only thing in the world PoshPuffs (her IRC nickname, who later explained that it as an allusion to tissues, I sure blushed then.) wanted to talk to me about, and I'm the obliging kind of person. After the charm of IRC and Usenet started to wear off, I got a real ISP provider with my very own Unix shell account. I was so excited, I could write bash scripts, I could annoy the hell out of other clueless users logged in who barely knew a single Unix command. I could read my email in Pine, I could compose text in Pico, I could be hardcore and write in Vi [which came in handy in college by amazing professors when my brain did not explode during that part of UNIX classes]. I could telnet and FTP to everywhere in the world trying to guess passwords and user names. I could use Gopher and wonder what the point was in WWW, when you could get exactly what you wanted without waiting for stupid colored text and pictures to load (at this point I had upgraded to a 14.4 baud modem, and even still the WWW was agonizing slow). I could be snobbish and look down on people who used Emacs. I could even use make to compile my own programs written in C. I remember the first time I got the source for tintin++ (the über, at the time, MUD client program) to compile.

That was one of the happiest days of my life. From there I went hopping around the world, telneting to wherever I could to find that perfect MUD. I found it on Sojourn and played for about 6 months I'd say. Then, like drama in real life, the administrators of Sojourn had a fight and they split up; or at least I think this is when I started to play. I was a dwarf cleric happily killing bunnies and then the game I loved was gone. For a while. Toril always keeps on coming back to life, it's that addictive and even death threats (yes several of the founders would regularly get phone and mail death threats for various reasons, like why the hell did you ban me, etc.). I know the rough sequence of the evolution of Toril, I was there for most of the middle and latter parts of it, I missed out on the early part, not having a computer all the way back in 1990. I started playing sometime around 1996, and had the rare opportunity to adventure with the legend Aradune Mithara, who if I remember right, was a stinky half-elf ranger, but an overall friendly guy who helped me powerlevel by killing some tough buffaloes. Aradune is the online persona of Brad McQuaid who left Sojourn sometime in 1999 to help found the MMORPG Everquest. It was a pretty sad day to see such a respected player leave. Toril has been around in various names and forms for a little more than 10 years and it's strange to have witnessed all the influences it's had on the outside world. Such as Forgotten Realms. It's also interesting to take note of all the fantasy authors that have profited from further fleshing out the world, like the well known author R. A. Salvatore, and the creation of several unique iconic characters that really haven't had any equivalence in historical fantasy, but are quite similar to NPCs already present in the MUD itself.

For a while I played Everquest, during one of the times when Sojourn had dissolved and no one really knew if it was coming back, I never did get far in that game, losing interest pretty fast. But, I subsequently became a serious Asheron's Call addict the same year, 1999, and continued to play that game for 2 or 3 years before having to force myself to stop, due to dropping grades and a serious lack of a social life, but I did make a nice profit selling my soul on there (my character, persona, and horde of shiny equipment) by selling it all on eBay, making about 300% more than I had invested in the game. For a while I stayed away from MUDS and MMORPGS, but I started to play Horizons, which lasted for perhaps a year, and I took another break (after yet again making a profit from playing), and picked up World of Warcraft the day it came out. I played that for a short while too, before, yes again, selling myself on eBay for yet more money. I would of never started to play those last 3 MMORPGS if it wasn't for my exgf asking me to, as she needed someone else to play with. Does that make her the worse addict? Requiring a partner so that they don't feel guilty for wasting all that time, and well, their life? I know I wasted a lot of my life on those games, but it was fun, and I can't see myself doing something much more productive during those years of not being medicated and barely being able to step outside my own house.

Now comes the question of, do I start to play World of Warcraft again in November, when I'm expecting her to ask me to pick up the game again with her? In November, the expansion pack for the game is supposed to come out, giving addicts more to do. It's tempting to even think about, I don't even need her to want to play, I'd do it on my own just so I could avoid my own life and have a fantasy life that was better than what I have now. What I have now is, pretty much nothing. I mean I'm playing suicide games lately, anything other than that must be better. Further on in the future, Vanguard will be coming out, which is what Aradune is working on now, having disagreements with how Sony was handling Everquest, so he left to work on his own vision of what Everquest really should of been. I know I'll be there in Vanguard, I just wish someone I knew would be there too. Well, it's a fear years away, so I don't have to worry about that quite yet.


This post has been brought to you by 30mg Adderall and a very, very large Emsam overdose. Mania? No way. It only took me 8 hours to write this through all my sidetracking. I completely missed the whole point of why I was writing this and failed to communicate what I wanted to say, but if I spent this much time on something stupid I might as well click Publish.

:)

test two

test: one 9mg/24hr Emsam patch, 5 6mg/24hr Emsam patch
result: posted later. time of intake 7AM.
cause: have given up on life. am curious to effects. am not suicidal, but close.

test one

test: 100mg xanax xr taken orally. 400mg cimetidine on intake, and 200mg cimetidine every 2 hours later for a total of 1800mg.
result: 12+ hours of sleep. upon waking disorientation regarding location and time, mild confusion, slight lack of balance and noticable clumsiness.
cause: wanted to sleep. wanted to hurt myself.

conversation

[15:29] Lent Somnolence: then why are we having this discussion, did you ask yourself that?
[15:29] ***: because i'm sad
[15:30] Lent Somnolence: some part of you wants help, or else you wouldn't admit to me what is going on
[15:30] ***: i'm just sad
[15:30] ***: i don't want help
[15:30] ***: i just wanted another reason to cry
[15:30] Lent Somnolence: i'm not going to give you reasons to cry. friends don't do that
[15:30] ***: you don't have to even try
[15:31] Lent Somnolence: i'm sorry
[15:31] Lent Somnolence: do you like to torture yourself? like the way i do? doing things to make yourself worse?
[15:31] ***: yes
[15:31] Lent Somnolence: that's what you're doing
[15:31] ***: i know
[15:31] Lent Somnolence: i just wanted to make sure you understood
[15:32] ***: lifes not fair
[15:32] ***: do you know that?
[15:32] Lent Somnolence: and you know that's the reason why we have never really gotten much better in our whole lives? that we go through the motions of wanting to get better, but there is safety in staying the same. familarity. comfort in knowing there won't be change
[15:32] ***: i'm sick of life shitting on me
[15:33] Lent Somnolence: life isn't fair. but life is only what you let it be to you. it's the truth
[15:33] ***: i try to let life be great to me *****
[15:33] ***: where has that gotten me?
[15:33] Lent Somnolence: like you said ******. life isn't fair
---
[15:34] Lent Somnolence: where has it gotten me? 5 years in the same room. 5 years of being alone. 5 years of wanting to get better, but not taking the steps to
[15:34] Lent Somnolence: 5 years of being scared to live
[15:34] ***: well you and i are different
[15:34] ***: i've lived through the last two years of my hell
[15:34] ***: and it's gotten me nowhere
[15:34] ***: i tried to get better
[15:34] ***: i fought
[15:35] ***: and it's not a fair fight
[15:35] Lent Somnolence: no, i don't think so. what has happened to us might be different, but in the end, you say you've given up. i had already given up
[15:35] ***: well how long are you supposed to keep trying
---
[15:35] Lent Somnolence: life was a fight ever since you took your first breath, the first breath that you didn't want to take to be in this world. but every day that you stayed alive you were fighting even if you didn't know it
---
[15:55] Lent Somnolence: depression is like cancer, we don't know it's there until one day out of the blue things are different and we aren't sure how it happened or why. there isn't a why, there isn't a reason, it just happens.
[15:56] ***: a crying mess
[15:56] ***: you being the only person in the world right now i can talk to
[15:56] ***: of all people
[15:56] Lent Somnolence: depression kills us slowly, depression hurts, depression takes away everything we value and love
[15:56] ***: are you copying/pasting off the "depression hurts" website?
[15:56] Lent Somnolence: we try to treat it, the things we take hurt our own bodies, the side effects, all so we can have what we used to have
[15:56] ***: you sound like the commercial
[15:57] Lent Somnolence: i'm talking from years of being depressed
[15:57] Lent Somnolence: it kind of gives me a lot of time to reflect
[15:57] ***: can't you just say yeah it fucking sucks


change the names, the supportive person could of been someone else, and i could of been the other person. that's how i feel. i give advice i can't follow. i give help that i don't listen to myself. i'm the person who has given up, i'm not the person fighting.

death in the family

my papa royal pleco was found dead today at 5:15 PM, judging from skin pallor, overall degeneration of the flesh i'd estimate it died 48 hours ago. both eyes were missing, meaning it was murdered. the aggression level has increased dramatically in the tank, although the former bonded mismatched pair of the texas cichlid and blood parrot is now gone after a successful spawning. the texas cichlid is still exibiting signs of bacterial infection even after multiple treatments with several broad spectrum antibiotics, an external cotton growth has appeared and has been treated with salt and a general antiseptic. i've excised the inflamed external growths twice now, using topical neomycin sulfate, methylene blue, cyanocobalamin; but the growths always reappear after a couple of months. i'll continue treatment with salt in the water to aid healing, and tea tree oil in the water as a weak antiseptic to cover external bacterial or fungal causes. if it continues to worsen i'll have to excise the cysts again and isolate the fish and try a much stronger approach or euthanize the fish, as i believe it's untreatable tuberculosis.

another depressing day.

snowfall

first snowfall yesterday.

freeze advisory today.

i like to lie naked in the snow until i stop feeling. it makes the emotions go away, the thoughts that don't stop, and when i come inside it's one of those rare times when i have a clear head. it makes me feel alive.

talking in circles

[14:33] Lent Somnolence: it's like every morning you wake up and don't know if you're dying or if your pulse is racing because you're missing what you dreamed, or that nightmare you just had really is true, or you can still remember the physical sensation and the timelessness of the moment and realize that it's all gone, just in a blink of an eye

WoW

any WoW addicts want to team up with me this coming November? please say so, i don't want to have to resort to playing with my ex-gf for hours on end. if not, well it's back to nostalgia and just like how times used to be so many years ago -- like when we played AC for months, hours and hours on end, but i'd rather not have that. at least not with her as the constant companion.

aged

i wish i could start over. i don't want to be 27. i don't want to know i've made the same mistakes over and over. i don't want to know that i feel the same now as i did last year, the year before that, and so on. i don't know if there are second chances in life when most days i can say i've already given up. what's the point in crying when i know i'll cry again the next day. what's the point in trying when i know i won't succeed. what's the point in talking to anyone when they all go away.

what's the point?

treading water

birthdays suck all around. especially birthday's of people you thought you had forgotten, or at least buried deep enough in the past. yesterday i got an email from amazon reminding me that an old friend's birthday was coming up. nothing like a computer generated reminder make my mood come crashing down even more, when the birthday in question is jen's. i had one big ugh and that feeling that comes with unwanted memories, and then i deleted the message. i wish deleting things would do the same for my memory sometimes. the harder you try to forget about something, or to move on, or to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself alive, the harder it is to do just that. the harder i try the more reminders i see around me of all the things i never quite manage to resolve fully. i guess now i just cry and weep, go into my own little nest until the feelings of regret, loss, sadness have subsided enough that i can poke my head out a little. i'm still treading water, but at least i've moved past a few things. that has to be something?