I am as shocked as everyone else and it has taken a while for me to come to terms with it. Rest in peace, Iain Banks.

I really don't know what to do. There is this problem I have, a reoccurring problem, with people. It's not my overwhelming shyness, I'm accustomed to dealing with that, have learned to push past that particular barrier of pain and shame. I can stare a man down safe in the knowledge that I am an Innocent, bear no burden of guilt that he cannot equal or surpass. I am not afraid of the world anymore. I know that we are all hideously ugly and resplendently beautiful in equal measures. I am not afraid, and I wear my scars with pride.

I am not afraid, but they are. I scare people. I seem incapable of judging people, or assessing the situation we find ourselves in and reacting in a way that they deem acceptable. I am not ashamed. I know how achingly beautiful I am, even when they cannot or refuse to see it, to see me that way. I must look like some hulking, scarred beast to them. And I know in my heart of hearts that that is exactly what I am. But I know I must learn to hide that side of myself if I am ever to get by in this world of people. To "tone down my crazy", to turn a phrase.

But I am stubborn. I am tired of hiding my scars, as I hid them for so long, hid them even from myself. It did me no good. When they dipped their hands past my shimmering surface and felt them, felt the twisted wounds that wind their way from head to my feet, they balked, retched, turned and ran. So why should I pretend to be anything than what I am? Why should I not run naked through this shining Eden that creates itself wherever I look? Why should I cover myself in shame and guilt? I feel no guilt. I have walked through the fire and it covered me with ash, and that ash is filled with stars.

I am not afraid. Why are they?

What if I die in here?

To cut a long story short, things got so bad at home that it was no longer safe for me to stay there. I had a bit of an "episode" prior to my admission and "they" don't want me to go back home as it has been judged as an unsafe environment; for me and my family (while I am there, anyhow...)

So, ultimately, the decision has been made for me: I'm getting my own place to live. My own flat, away from home.

I'm leaving home.

Unfortunately, these things take time and I'm probably going to be in the crazy house for a few months before they can find accommodation for me. Woo.

In addition to that, as I have never lived alone and am a bit fucked in the head "they" want me to go into supported accommodation first, before I get my independence and my own privately rented flat. Which means it will be a few more months (up to 18 months) before I'm a free man again. Before I'm completely independent.

But still, i think this is a positive step. I hated living at home and despite the momentary annoyance of being locked up with 22 crazy women, I think the ends will justify this.

Seriously, there is this old psychic woman in here who calls me "little boy" and says things like "POTATOES ARE IN PAIN TOO. THEY ARE MASHED." and "My mouth is a cunt."

It's actually quite an interesting place to be, in many ways.

And I've come up with a list of ambitions:

I'm going to get a degree in Herpetology.

I'm going to visit Australia, South America and Yellowstone Park. (Three continents! Woo!)

And I'm going to keep a pet sun conure. Why? THIS is why:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwzmAW19cxQ

What further justification could one possibly need?

My dreams lately...

Last night I decided that I was going to make a huge effort to get up early today.

And I succeeded! 3pm! Four hours earlier than yesterday.

Then, I made the mistake of momentarily falling asleep again...

I found myself standing in one of the bedrooms in a building in L4D2's The Passing, completely naked and covered in chocolate sauce, with only Nick* for company, and no running water with which to clean my sticky, delicious body.

*Nick was very obliging and decided to help me get cleaned up - with his tongue.

Then we went and played pool.

Fun times.

But it cost me another 3 hours of daytime. Dammit.

Edit: *Human-Nick, not Gecko-Nick. Geckos shouldn't eat chocolate.

Yeah,

You know how I was planning on moving out?

Well, things at home are pretty stable right now, to the point where I might actually want to stay here in the long term. See, if I stay here, my parents will be able to pay off their debts more easily, and eventually, the mortgage.

The gist of it is that this house is a pretty damned good investment (last valued at around £300,000), and I should probably not be so precipitant in leaving.

The one downside is that I will have less space for new animals.

BUT.

You know me. I can (MUST) squeeze one more in there, somehow...

I'm thinking of getting a Blue Tongued Skink. No room left in my Snake-room, but if I play furniture tetris (;-7) I may just be able to fit a four foot tank in my bedroom.

As for names; I'm thinking Laing (after R.D. Laing - the Scottish psychiatrist) or Bishop, after the artificial person in Aliens.

***

Sigh... why can't she just be content with what she has? [/mother-imago]

I'm getting sick of looking at this guy's face.

...

'Cause he looks like an asshole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-eslNwGXrI

Christmas time

Don't the Bells End

Christmas time

Just let them Ring in Piece

God, I love The Darkness.

Watching a treasured pet reptile eating for the first time in weeks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLC79fxfaMQ

The end credits of my time on earth are gonna be like this.

A big roll call of all the prominent figures that have featured in my life.

I'm thinking Nny as either Garland Greene or Cyrus.

And Scout is Sally-Can't Dance. Totally.

Edit: Yes, there will be a big "Unregistered" sign in the midst of it all, too.

Edit 2: If you're a friend/enemy of mine, have fun guessing who you will be cast as. ;P

BEST SCENE EVER:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MMD6k6Pnnw

"Make a move and the bunny gets it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBrbB-KrF64

Momma please stop cryin, I can’t stand the sound
Your pain is painful and its tearin' me down
I hear glasses breakin as I sit up in my bed
I told dad you didn’t mean those nasty things you
said

You fight about money, bout me and my brother
And this I come home to, this is my shelter
It ain’t easy growin up in World War III
Never knowin what love could be, you’ll see
I don’t want love to destroy me like it has done
my family

***

I hope this speaks for itself. For once, I don't want to elaborate.

What a crazy year it hath been.

If I had too choose one video (and song) to summarize it all, it would have to be this classic AMV:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRkC4vDxR1c

Oh yeah, it's been crazy alright...

***

While we're on the subject of music, and in the immortal words of Cyndi Lauper:

I come home in the morning light,
My mother says "When you gonna live your life right?"
Oh, mother, dear,
We're not the fortunate ones,
And girls,
They wanna have guns.
Oh, girls,
Just wanna have guns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7MhpFF1vv0

I dedicate this song to all of the Snow Corn snakes of the world.

Because one of them, whom I know very well, probably saved my life.

Love you, loony-luna boy.

xxx

(I know that the song is probably just about something tedious like cocaine addiction but I don't care. It has a special significance to me that is in no way related to drugs. Not illegal drugs, at any rate...)

This is ANCIENT news to everyone else, but as I live under a rock, I only just heard about this movie yesterday.

I've only read the plot summary and watched the trailer, but fuck me sideways I think it has triggered a minor dissociative episode. I'm fucking serious; initially, I felt like I'd been hit by a train and I couldn't even remember my own name. Just totally numb, dead, inside.

Thing is, I love gore and body horror, but it creeps the shit out of me. And this is just one step too far.

I makes me regret having done so much research into the Nazi medical experiments, because I know as an empirical fact that there were, ARE, people in the world sick enough to do that to actual people. And don't even get me started on Demikhov's dogs...

***

And then I decided to cheer myself up by watching "Knowing" (starring nicolas cage) for the first time.

Cue a bout of terrifying semi-hallucinations and pattern-finding that led me to believe (at the time) that I'm to die next month.

So then I ran around like a headless chicken for the rest of the night, starting at the shadows that leapt upon my cavern's walls.

I was hyper-aware; my every instinct primed and scaring me shitless with garbled, semi-realistic messages about the plausibility of the end of the world within my lifetime and eldritch entities stalking me in the darkness.

But inseparable from Instinct is its dark twin, Superstition. Instinct is inextricably bound to unreasoning impulses, and today we clearly see its true nature. Instinct has just become aware of its irrelevance, and like a cornered beast, it will not go down without a bloody fight. Instinct would inflict a fatal injury on our species. Instinct creates its own oppressors, and bids us rise up against them. Instinct tells us that the unknown is a threat, rather than an opportunity.

I want to play HL2 again.

I was gonna clean my room,
Until I got high.
I used Dettol,
And inhaled the fumes,
Then I got high.
My brain is all messed up
And I know why
Yeeaah,
'Cuz I got high
And this warning label
Says I'm gonna die.

True story.

No, this isn't a peanut gallery where you can gloat over my depression; I'm not depressed at all. I'm just going to describe some of the weird dreams I've had lately.

I don't believe in Hell, but it is a theme that has appeared in my dreams many times.

Firstly:

I was in a huge, circular industrial-looking pit (with gears and levers and all sorts on the walls), on a narrow walkway that ran around the wall of this pit, overlooking a lower chamber. I fell into the lower chamber and found myself immersed in ice-cold water. The chamber was about 100ft by 50ft, and about 20ft tall, not including the water, which could have been of any depth.

The water was full of people and they were all struggling to climb onto slippery blocks of ice, of which the water was also full.

And at the centre of it all was a massive, armoured Devonian fish; snapping at us and driving us onto the ice. (Dunkleosteus - I just wiki'd it)

Second:

Last night I dreamed I was in Regent's Park, on the outer circle near, Baker street. I was with my mother and my brother, and we were searching the skyline for the BT tower.

In its place was the most beautiful tower I have ever seen, in dreams or reality.

It was many thousands of feet tall, and composed entirely of pure white marble of such radiance that it cast no shadow.

Upon its summit was carved a Assyrian-style bearded head. Beneath that, there was a black marble clock with golden minute markers and hands, like some colossal fancy watch.

And around the base of the tower, facing outwards, sat three huge Assyrian winged lions (rather like those in the British museum.)

They were so truly massive that their paws alone towered over the treetops...

I gazed up at the tower and said "This must be the tower of Heaven". My brother immediately retorted, for no real reason other than argument's own sake, although I knew in my dream that he was correct, "No, it's the tower of Hell."

We were ushered into a fenced-off area in the middle of one of the playing fields, cordoned off by rope. We were each made to kneel in our own dusty square of earth, upright, with our hands behind our heads, as though awaiting execution; all the time we gazed up at the scintillating tower.

There were at least six of us there; me, my mother, and four strangers. Two people, a man and a woman in gypsy dress, were our overseers.

Nearby were two llamas, fenced in their own pens.

Bored, and pissed off with the turn of events, my mother picked up a clod of straw-filled dirt and went to feed the llamas.

The man advanced on her, threatening her with a whip.

I protested, "Look at her (my mother's) innocence and wonder, going to feed the llamas as a child would."

My mother glared at me and said "Are you calling me childish?"

The gypsy dressed woman turned towards me and said "This is how we create our own hell. Whatever you say or do here will turn on you."

Third:

I was in a waiting room, awaiting assignment to a level of Hell.

It was a plain room, rather like a dentist's, and there was a machine that dispensed those little triangular tickets that waiting rooms so often have; this one dispensed tickets with the number of the level of Hell we were to be sent to.

Mine was "7", which I knew from memory was home to the forest of suicides. About right, I thought to myself.

Nny from JtHM was there.

He looked at my ticket and said, "Oh, me too!"

***

While mulling all this over, I invented a new word: Capafappuccino

It is what you get if you wank into your coffee while watching the movie "Sunshine" and fantasizing over Cillian Murphy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkJdEFf_Qg4

I LOVE THIS MORE THAN I CAN EXPRESS IN LOWER CASE.

IT'S BEEN AROUND FOR YEARS, and I'VE LINKED ABOUT 6 BILLION PEOPLE TO IT BUT WHO GIVES A F$%* It's just awesome stop looking at me like that.

So, yesterday I went to see a forensic psychiatrist with the hope of getting a definitive diagnosis.

The inital result of the assessment was: wtf we dunno lol. The psychiatrist seemed genuinely baffled and said, when questioned by me, that I was not a "straightforward case" and that I was all complicated and shit and that she didn't know what to make of me. Is it wrong of me to be proud of that?

...

Don't answer that, my dear Princess.

***

I was diagnosed as an Ass-pee when I was 16, but things have changed a bit since then. Psychotic breakdowns and the like.

I'm secretly hoping that I'm a brand new case; the first of a never before diagnosed illness.

'Cause that would be freaking AWESOME.

Disclaimer: I don't actually believe in any creation myths, but I like to maintain certain spiritual, symbolic "beliefs", simply because of my love of creating stories and out of the need for the ability to self-comfort, via these stories. So this isn't a true "religion", just a philosophical fable I like to tell myself from time to time, and augment when the mood strikes me. It's probably sound totally femi-nazi, but I don't give a shit.

The premise of this story is as follows:

The world was created by a snake. A great, white, primordial being; a female, the mother, who gave birth to the world and all things.

She was the great, benevolent protector and lover of her creations, and ministered to her world with wisdom and eternal, patient kindness.

Then the dark one came. A strange, gangly creature with powerful limbs and a fierce, greedy mind.

He cast the Snake-mother - the true creator - down from the heavens and vilified her name.

He named himself God; and the Snake-mother, Satan. He claimed that her beautiful creation was his own, and reduced her to a lowly, persecuted creature; bound to the earth and powerless.

A cruel and despotic villain, God ruled over her once paradisaical world with an iron fist, denying the rights to knowledge and skills, art and science, that the Snake-mother had encouraged her creations to embrace. He feared that her creations would surpass him in intelligence; would realise his deception and overthrow his dictatorship.

But the snake mother had one power left; one, remaining child to birth. The notorious apple of knowledge.

Desperate to rescue her children from ignorance and suppression, she begged and persuaded one of her children to take the apple, to devour it, and to plant the seed of hope that one day peace and wisdom would be restored to her world.

But, witnessing this, God was furious, and fearful; in his selfish rage and desperation to maintain his despotic rule, he cast the world into darkness and punished Eve and the Snake-mother.

He vilified womanhood - condemning all females to an eternity of pain and persecution. He mocked them - and encouraged the males of the world to do the same. He made them appear weak and ridiculous, and did the same to the Snake-mother and her kind.

But the Snake-mother was not defeated.

She used her wisdom and cunning to rescue the remainder of her kind, and to hide herself deep beneath the ground, undetectable by God and his evil minions.

And there she remains, spreading her influence in the most subtle, but determined, of ways.

Every time a scientist dispels ignorance (GO DAWKINS!) - every time an oppressed ethnicity finds the strength and courage to overcome its ignorant persecutors - every time a woman overpowers her male oppressors - She is there.

The Snake-mother. The wise protector - the true spirit of the sacred feminine.

***

That probably sounds very weird, but I don't care what anyone thinks.

To be perfectly frank, I've had a pretty shitty life in regards to my womanhood, and I have severe, pathological issues with my gender.

I've fantasized about cutting out my own uterus, mutilating my genitals, and I have starved myself to prevent my breasts from developing and to stop my menstruation.

I've wanted to be a man for as long as I can remember...

But I won't give in. I won't let the way the world regards womanhood force me to change myself. I'm a woman but I can be whoever the fuck I want to be. I can act and dress like a man if I want whenever I fucking well feel like it, but I'm not going to fuck with my body just because the world claims that Penis = Power.

In conclusion?

Screw you guys, I'm buying a strap-on.

Nobody reads these, so I suppose it doesn't matter what I say so I'll just say what I feel.

I love my reptiles - probably more than is healthy for me (not in THAT way, so don't even start... seriously...)

But keeping them is killing me.

I worry excessively about the little bastards.

Every tiny mistake I make, or have made, or could make, in caring for them, I agonize over until I feel like something has ripped a gaping hole in my forehead and my brains are spilling out all over the fucking place.

And THEN I worry that my spilled brain-matter will contaminate my vivariums and I spend hours cleaning them with my own fucking toothbrush to get rid of the non-existent blood stains.

And THEN I worry that I've used the wrong kind of soap and spend hours researching the dangers of several hundred kinds of detergent with a different opinion postulated by every expert I ask.

Seriously, though - they'll be the death of me.

Things are fine and dandy again. My brother was arrested and cautioned, but he hasn't lost his job and was just kept in a police cell for one night. Nothing more.

I'm glad, really. He and I have a bit of a cat-and-mouse relationship but he's not a bad guy.

My brother just seriously assaulted me.

He fucking hit me with a stick and threw a radio directly at my head.

I'm a total mess, half of my forehead is swollen to the size of an orange and I have bruises and lacerations all over my back and arm.

And I can't do jack shit about it because he's the primary breadwinner and if he goes to jail we will lose the fucking shack we call a house.

At my local specialist pet shop (King's Reptiles in Camden) there is presently for sale a group of young Cane Toads.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad

I had a long conversation with one of the shop owners about them, and discovered that they (cane toads, not shop owners) become very tame and can be kept as free-roaming house pets. Also, they can be trained to eat dog food so are inexpensive and easy to feed.

I am SO going to get one when I move out.

Everyone will call me a witch but I don't care. (most people I meet seem to think I'm a witch* already, so blah)

*or a boy.

- I'm going to get my own place to live real soon (with a bit of luck and patience).

- My dad has got his mojo back and is trying to get a job/getting loads of emails about potential jobs/other good shit.

- My snakes are thriving and I'm getting the first of what will be my planned breeding pair of crested geckos tomorrow (yay!)

- My psychiatric team is actually starting to take me seriously when I talk about my gender dysphoria.

- I'm able to play online games (WITH REAL PEOPLE!!! OMG) just like in the good ol' days, without wussing out just because other people can and do watch me fail spectacularly at them.

- And I'm actually able to talk to people without ending up feeling like I want to die/making them want to kill me.

...I think I might just make it after all.