I went out this morning. It's a beautiful day and I felt like I didn't belong in it. When you spend 99% of your leisure time alone, how does life not become all about you? I say this in the "me" sense and I don't care for this reality at all. Maybe that's why I spend so much time watching movies and tv series where I can become involved in virtual lives. Even after escaping decades of denial and living as "me" I'd rather continue escaping into "not me". I'm never truly alone however, there's always the cat, Bushi and Jedi-Mouse, the personification of my depression. The cat and I connect in a behavioral pattern that only permits two modes of interaction - when she's hungry I feed her and in bed I must extend an arm so she may rub her head in my hand then plop her 19 pounds on top of my arm until it loses all feeling. Love can be strange but it's still love and it leaves the major part of my alone time to deal with my depression. I say "my depression" because it is indeed a particular type that requires much care and feeding or it begins to leak out into my 1% of social leisure time and invariably ruin the experience. Most weeks it demands a full day or a little more of my complete attention which is doable and I consider it a sort of "truce or cease-fire, call it detente" and it allows me to pose as a functional human and even run a business. I've been writing the Jedi-Mouse blog for years yet it only recently occurred to me that the Mouse was indeed my depression and a separate entity. On occasion I'll read the old blogs and as dark as they are they still seems like old friends. So often people who learn even a little about me say, "OMG! You should write a book!" They should read this blog from the beginning then they might reconsider. I do have an idea though, since the Mouse loves to stay up late, get really drunk, sit half naked at the keyboard and thrash out at the virtual consciousness of social media as if it were a cosmic therapist, I think I should begin the "Chronicles of Jedi-Mouse", sometimes taking excepts from old blog posts and sometimes just letting the drunken rodent have at it. How this would be different from the original blog I'm not sure but it my be more frequent.