Being depressed and having to look inside yourself is a painful and often difficult process. It’s a bit like surgery on the soul - something that is painful but beneficial in the long run. In the best case, the pain is very small compared to the healing after the procedure itself.

This process of analyzing oneself is none the less interesting. I feel about my own process that I’m being almost reborn. Rediscovering who you really are, who you really feel like is I guess kind of similar to that. Depression dampens your soul, your spirit and your life. It’s like always wearing a wet blanket. Heavy and damp it’s always there.

So, when you finally start managing to get a grip on that blanket and find ways to remove it, you also discover that maybe you weren’t the same person coming out of it as you were going into it. Pain changes a person, whether to the better or worse is really a matter of perspective. Regardless the re-discovery of that person is a voyage both exciting and painful.

I know that if the person I am now could meet with the person I was ten years ago it’s very doubtful that they would get along. Ten years ago I was naive, maybe a little too shielded, and far too sure of myself. Then again, even though I now have shed most of that naivety I have also become cynical and bitter in the process. Too much of either isn’t good.

Wow, I’m rambling.

What I’m trying to build up to is what the topic is about. Accepting help, and how to do it.

The only thing I’m worse at than accepting help is asking for it. I don’t know the roots of this, maybe it’s a society that encourages self-reliance, and maybe it’s also the depression killing my trust in other humans. Trying to figure out why I do it would keep an army of people occupied for the rest of time.

Ever hear of that saying, “no man is an island”? Well, for many years I considered myself to be an island. Of course my own island traded with other islands, but I always kept to myself, trying to pride myself on my self-containment and self-reliance. What flummoxed me was why this never worked. After a while it dawned on me that I needed other people to be a person myself. I was fencing other people out, becoming incapable om emotional attachment and always preparing for the worst.

In short, I needed to ask for help when I needed it and realize that accepting that help didn’t mean I was weak or incapable of living my life. I needed to stop thinking of my life as islands, and think of it as a unity, a patchwork between people helping each other. Friends or family or complete strangers shouldn’t really matter - helping your fellow man or woman should be a natural thing. This later became the foundation of my humanist viewpoint.

But it’s still difficult for me to accept help, and ask for it. Sure, I’ve gotten better at it, but it’s still a work in progress. Combine this with my lack of expressing my thoughts in verbal communication and I feel that maybe people who help me don’t always realize how grateful I am for that help. I’m an introverted personality, and tend to grunt and mumble a lot. This does not, however, mean that I’m ungrateful. It just means I’m a caveman when it comes to verbal communication.

So, let me give a little clumsy but honest advice to anyone who thinks that he or she is an island: just don’t do it. You’re not an island. Instead maybe give people a chance to come close to you. Sure, it’ll hurt sometimes, but when you find a true friend that you can depend on it’ll be worth it. Know that this person is someone who will help you, and who you in return will want to help. In whatever way may be possible. It might be something as big as helping you move house. It might be something small. Regardless, it will be something valuable to you.

When I slept last night I had a dream. Towards the end of my sleep-cycle I had this disturbing dream that’s been haunting me all day.

It was a dream of ending, of destruction and violence. It was a dream about death.

It wasn’t a nightmare, since I almost never have those. I’m almost always aware of my dreams, and thus they seldom frighten me in the sense that nightmares do.

But this dream, even though it wasn’t a nightmare, was disturbing.

In it, the end of the world had come. Society had collapsed, and I roamed around the wintery darkness of a northern Sweden desolate and isolated. It was as dark as the arctic night could manage, and there were no lamps to scare it away. Houses were ruined, burned-out shells that once sheltered families. Even the winter itself was harsh and dark, not the beautiful expanses of snow that one usually associate the arctic winter with.

I saw my parents house. Like every other house it was a ruin, burned walls and wrecked memories. Long abandoned, the ruin was covered with frost. I knew this place was dangerous, and my companion –who suddenly appeared in my dream, creating that absolute continuity that every dream always has– knew this as well and drew his sidearm. Or her sidearm. I never found out the gender, the face hidden behind a mask of some kind.

Then suddenly, my dream switched to a flashback, and I found myself standing on my parents lawn, handing out automatic weapons to strangers. I realized we were getting ready to defend ourselves against some unknown threat, and I started handing out weapons faster. I didn’t know who or what the enemy was, but I knew there would be very few survivors.

Equally abrupt I realized that everyone I was handing out guns to was a child. No one was older than maybe 8 or 9 years. They cradled their gun with a desperate resolute I wished I’d never seen in the eyes of a child. They aimed their guns at an invisible enemy, reminding me of child-soldiers in Africa. In a way I guessed they were the same thing - the sandy deserts and humid jungles replaced with the arctic cold and silence of the north.

My flashback ended at the same time the children opened fire. I stood looking at the ruins of my parents house, amazed at the trees which had fallen into the ruins, connecting it with the husk of the garage in a bizarre kind of way.

Then something roared. Or actually, the sound was more like a lions roar combined with a sound of some kind of engine. In the upper harmonics a high-pitched squeal could be heard, like a pig screaming in fear. My companion turned and opened fire at something I couldn’t see. I felt a sharp pain in my back and knew that I would be dead soon.

Then everything went dark.

After that, I woke up.

Yeah, the topic pretty much says it all. I think a lot. My brain is rarely quiet. Unless pre-occupied with something needing immediate attention it tends to fall back on common, heavy and almost unanswerable topics.

Most of these topics can roughly be categorized either as “What’s Wrong With The World Today?” or “What’s Wrong With Me?”

—

Let me give you an example of a subject falling under the World-category that I think a lot about these days: Television. Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses. Now, I totally agree with this –”religion” is also one of the many subtopics of the World-category that I think about– but I also think that technology that emerged in the mid-20th century has given us another opiate with which to dull our senses: Television.

When television started receiving wide commercialization and globalization in the 1970’s and 1980’s people (mostly parents) were worried that this thing would corrupt the minds of the young ones. Personally I think that television of that era is incredibly naive and innocent compared to the multiheaded dragon we have today, but none the less it was the seed for the abomination that now blares from millions of boob-tubes around the world.

Over the last two years or so I’ve become almost convinced that television is one of the pillars of what’s keeping humankind from evolving. Television of the early 21st century has become a drug, something to dull our senses so we stay docile and keep consuming. Television is the medium used to subdue people, keep them from asking questions, questioning authority and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

I don’t like using the word “conspiracy” because that word has become associated with nutters and people wearing tinfoil-hats to keep the rays out, but in a way television has become a conspiracy. A de-facto conspiracy, if you will. A conspiracy where we are bombarded with commercials, braindead “reality”-series promoting the lowest common denominators, celebrity gossip, sitcoms, generic humor, generic sadness, generic genericness. Everything fabricated and disguised as entertainment. Homogenated into a weird painting almost resembling reality but not containing one single ounce of it.

This conspiracy extends to some extent to the Internet. The numbing continues here. Look at blogs, for example. Most of the worlds most popular blogs continue the trend of television. Celebrity gossip, fashion, makeup. Admittedly this is medication that netizens themselves fabricate for themselves, but I think that we’re so fond of it simply because we’ve (and by we I mean you and me, the regular joe) been conditioned to think that it’s important. Since we believe it’s important we continue the indoctrination over onto a medium that isn’t controlled by higher-ups, and this in turn slowly corrupts this fabulous new medium after a while.

Everyone is expected to watch television. Unless you follow whatever current nonsense is being broadcast, you’re shunned by the rest of the tribe. If you don’t even own a television you’re considered a freak, an outcast, someone not to be trusted. I have a friend who a few years back tossed out his television due to lack of interest. When the swedish agency that registers ownership of televisions (yes, we have one of those) called him and asked if he’d registered ownership he of course replied that he didn’t own a television. Essentially they then treated him as a liar and a cheat.

Essentially that’s how my thoughts on television go. On and on I think about subjects like that, trying to deduce what they bring or take from our society.

—

Another thing currently rolling through my head is the topic of “therapy”, probably best categorized under the “What’s Wrong With Me?” As any regular reader knows I suffer from anxiety-related depression and am currently taking medication to combat this. A few years ago I regularly attended therapy and it helped me a bit, but after a while I felt that I was only rehashing the same old things without making any progress, and slowly started reducing the amount of therapy I exposed myself to.

Therapy is a funny word. Really, it’s just a fancy word for talking. There are of course various forms of therapy, with therapists focusing on different methods of making the subject themselves realize things. I think that being a therapist is kind of similar to wrestling smoke - if you manage to get a grip you’re really, really good, but getting there is slow and difficult progress.

But in it’s most basic form therapy is simply talking about the things that make you hurt inside. And this makes me wonder; have we lost so much of our ability to communicate with each other that we have to designate certain individuals and certify them simply in order to be able to talk to them about how we feel?

Isn’t it kinda weird when you think about it? We have SPECIAL PEOPLE that we talk to. Any alien species coming to earth would probably be thoroughly confused by the concept. After realizing what purpose it served it would then assume that we’re a very primitive species who lack the skills to communicate with each other, and thus have to educate people to do it for us.

Because, that’s what I think one part of therapy boils down to. Communication. Have we become so distanced from ourselves that we’ve deprecated the most basic of our requirements? Because that’s what I view communication as - a requirement. Requirement not only to feel good about issues that trouble ourselves, but also sharing issues that trouble others.

Usually we talk to close friends, parents, relatives, sometimes even complete strangers. But maybe we’re losing that capability? I know I’m not good at it myself, being a very introverted individual when it comes to confrontational and direct communication.

Therapy is also about finding what works for YOU, the individual in need of help. In my case, my blog has over the years become the best therapy for me.

—

There, I hope that wasn’t too scary.

Has anyone seen a movie called “Interstate 60″ produced in 2002, featuring among other people Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd and James Marsden? If you haven’t, then I strongly recommend finding it and watching it. For some reason it never got a big marketing campaign behind it, but it’s a real gem of a film.

There might be some minor spoilers down below, in case

Either way, there’s this excellent supporting character that shows up at one point in the film, name of Bob Cody. Played brilliantly by Chris Cooper, this character will almost always stay in my mind. He’s excellent, being a man who “says what he does and does what he says”. Essentially he’s a free-roaming cynic, and one of his pastimes is listening to the radio and loudly debunking what’s said on the same.

Example:

Woman on radio: The choice is clear. The Arion 620, the American-made car for the American driver.
Bob Cody: That’s a lie. The Arion engines are made in Japan.
Man on radio: Kill Signal, the movie everyone’s talking about, from Weber Films.
Bob Cody: [laughs] That’s another lie. We’re not talking about it.
Another man on radio: We’re the U.S. post office, and we care.
Bob Cody: Oh! That’s the biggest whopper of all.

Often I hear a Bob Cody inside of me. This is especially true whenever I see a commercial, and it’s unusual that I can contain my sarcasm about commercials and their claims. My friends and family know this well.

And all this yapping brings me to the point of this entry. There’s a company in Sweden called Viasat. The history behind the company is somewhat convoluted, essentially consisting of several different companies in various genres of business merging together over a period of some fifteen years. These days Viasat is one of the largest suppliers of satellite-television, but also maintains holdings in several of the major swedish TV-channels, as well as being the producer of the TV1000-network, one of the major premium movie-networks in Sweden. Essentially TV1000 is a swedish counterpart to HBO, but without the original productions. They broadcast movies and have no commercials, instead you subscribe to the service.

Viasat-channels are also broadcast via cable, in my case through Comhem which is probably the largest cable-TV supplier in Sweden. Me and Ann-Sofie pay for TV1000 since it’s a good way to keep track of movies, as well as being a good source for bored movie-watching in the middle of the night.

Whatever.

Viasat launched a service called Viasat On Demand a few months ago. I really haven’t checked it out until a few hours ago when I went to their homepage. Essentially it’s a video-on-demand service, you can rent movies over the internet and watch them. Nothing new here, it’s all been done before. The reason for my curiosity was that since me and Ann-Sofie already subscribe to TV1000 I was wondering if we could get a free account at this webservice. It had been implied through the commercials, so I got to wondering.

Those thoughts came to an abrupt halt when I saw the technical requirements. Translated from Swedish they are:

* PC with Windows XP or better.
* Internet Explorer 6 or better.
* Flash Player 8 or better.
* Windows Media Player 10 or better.
* A minimum of 1mbit/s broadband connection. 2mbit/s recommended.
* An updated WMP with individualization for DRM-encryption.
* The clock on your computer may not deviate more than 15 minutes from the clock on our servers.
* You must allow cookies.

This means if you’re running anything except 100% Microsoft-products or Microsoft OS’s you’re shit out of luck. It’s absolutely pathetic in my opinion. Why not just put a slogan on the front page saying “Screw you if you’re not a braindead lemming”?

The irony is even more obvious considering that Viasat On Demands slogan translates to “Entertainment On Your Conditions”. When I read this I heard Bob Cody inside of me shouting:

“Liars! That’s not entertainment on my conditions!”

Not too long ago me and Ann-Sofie went up north to experience the Winter Market in Jokkmokk. We stayed at my parents place (who live about 10 km outside of Jokkmokk) and had a fairly good time. Of course, we weren’t the only guests there and I had a brief chat with an old friend of my father. I mentioned that I wrote a blog, and he seemed somewhat confused and essentially asked me why I did that. I answered something flippant to the effect of “I like to push my opinions on strangers” but in the days since I answered that question I’ve come to realize there’s a better answer to the same question.

The answer is simple and somewhat brutal:

I suck at verbal communication.

I never feel that I manage to convey my opinion or emotion correctly when talking. Admittedly, I find it difficult to do even when writing, but writing is a more honest way of communication for me. I have an easier time to line up my thoughts and it’s easier for me to communicate my opinion and thoughts about whatever subject might be at hand.

When talking, I hide this behind a self-assured attitude of forging ahead. Essentially I turn into George W. Bush and accidentally talk myself into situations that I don’t like, simply because I feel a need to hide this insecurity behind lots and lots of words.

Writing is more natural for me, and thus my blog has become my mouthpiece of choice for communicating things that I find difficult to talk about; it can be too emotional, or simply too complicated for me to sum up in spoken words. Written communication is easier for me, especially when it comes to painful subjects. I find it very difficult to talk about my emotions because usually I start crying. I cry when writing as well, but my ability to write isn’t impeded in the same way as my ability to talk.

A typical example of this is pretty much anytime I talk on the telephone. I really don’t like telephone-conversations except for a few exceptions. Occasionally I manage to loosen up enough to have a conversation, but in most cases I become very stiff and nervous. Earlier today I called a certain someone to wish a happy valentines day, to tell her I love her, and of course I clammed up and lost any kind of flow in the conversation. After a while I got so locked that I ended the conversation with the excuse that I needed to eat! How dumb is that? Well, on a scale from 1-10 I’d say it’s a solid 8.

Unfortunately that’s par for the course when it comes to telephone-conversations with me. There are exceptions to this rule, I’ve managed to have hours-long conversations about everything and nothing, but in most cases I clam up and become inwardly panicked about not knowing what to say. When I talk to my parents on the phone I mumble and sound very absent, and only when making an effort can I sound even slightly interested in anything they say - even though I listen carefully to everything they say and wish that I could somehow be more that just some mumbling fool pretending to be their eldest son.

I grew up rather shy. I preferred the company of books (and later computers) rather than people, and even though I over time learned to relax a little and actually talk to strangers I still need periods of isolation. One of my friends a few years back complained that whenever he talked to a pretty girl he would lock up and start saying weird things that scared them off, and how he was somewhat jealous of my ability to talk to pretty much anyone. This ability is basically a fraud to help make it easier for myself - I learned in my teens how to fake it, and this made it easier for me to lighten up and talk to people, rather than becoming really self-conscious like I used to. In fact, for many years I was great at approaching strangers and striking up a conversation.

Now, I’m losing this ability, and I prefer to communicate through writing instead. That’s why I blog. Not because I have some delusions of grandeur about becoming some rich asshole, or pushing my opinions on people, or whatever other things about blogging might exist.

No, I do it because this is the best way for me to communicate who I am with both friends, family and complete strangers.

July, 2006. My life was perfect. I was moving into my dream apartment with my dream-girlfriend and our great animals. Everything was set to work out fine. Even though I as always was depressed I felt as close to perfection as I ever assumed would be possible.

This happiness is now slowly but surely being removed from me, and there’s no way I can change it. I’m certain that I will survive the future, but I’ve become a stunned man who just stands by watching things unfold. I’ve tried changing them, but it was futile. Now, all I can do is accept them and move on.

My fate is my own. I’ve blamed a lot of different things seen and unseen for my misery over the years, but this morning I came to a conclusion that many people already know - I’m in charge of my life, nobody else. I can fairly blame genetics and society for my depression, but I cannot blame them for my apathy when it comes to living my life. It’s been too easy to just shrug things off rather than grabbing the bull by the horns.

I’m wondering about how I’ve lived my life before. Did I live a life where I was subconsciously trying to live some kind of perfect life, rather than living a life that I wanted to live and not give a shit about other peoples actual or implied expectations? Unfortunately I think that I did the former rather than the latter, and this is the cause of my confusion within. Rather than living MY life, I lived a life that was a long list of anecdotes. Instead of finding the real me, I lost him along the way.

The other night I actually found the perfect subject to write a book about. I’m thinking about starting it when I get back to Umeå. It’ll be interesting, trying to write something like that. Maybe I’ll publish it here in my blog, providing interest exists and I myself feel it’s up to my own expectations. Don’t wait too long for it, I’m great at starting stuff but crap at finishing them.

Fairly surprising the Pirate Bay founders/owners were today charged in Swedish courts. I’ve read the articles and the whole thing is just nonsense in my opinion.

First we have Henrik Pontén who does his absolute best at spreading FUD in every direction possible. He claims to have read the mail-traffic from within The Pirate Bay and says that their primary goal is to make money off of copyright-infringement. Sure, I agree that TPB probably generates a lot of money - but I doubt that money goes to anything other than servers and bandwidth. It ain’t cheap running servers, and TPB eats a lot of bandwidth which ironically costs a lot of money. This doesn’t deter mr Pontén though, and he keeps yapping about the scene. He still refuses to realize that -like I mentioned in my previous posting- the scene is a hydra. No matter how many heads you cut off, new ones will replace the old heads.

I’m always fascinated by how politicians and lobbyists never understand the things they try to strangle. So many politicians think the Internet is like the phone-company: one centrally controlled being. The internet couldn’t be farther from the truth. The same goes for the scene - Pontén seems to really believe that it can be squashed. He also acts as if it’s something new. Mr Pontén, let me tell you something: I’m just an amateur here, but even I know that the scene is almost as old as I am. It predates general consumer internet-access, and has been going just fine since the early 80’s at the very least. You’re not the first person to believe that he can silence that, and you won’t be the last to fail either.

This whole process is of dubious ethics in my opinion. I read somewhere that the case-file of “evidence” against TPB consists of more than four-thousand pages of legal gibberish. Normally most legal documents detailing an entire case seldom exceeds five-hundred pages. Many people speculate that this is in order to overwhelm the pirates with nonsense, and instead of doing a fair and balanced investigation simply drowning them in legal jargon.

No, this is a complete railroad-job against TPB. It was ordered by powerful mediamafia-interests, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people high up in Swedish government and the legal-system has been corrupted by greed.

More links: Here, here, here and here.

UPDATE: Swedish IDG has a bunch of articles related to this travesty. Read them, but keep in mind that IDG probably has veiled interest in seeing the mediamafia win this one.

I’ve been kicking this around all day. To write about this idiocy or to just ignore it? On one hand, it’s a subject that touches on my own opinions. On the other hand, pretty much everyone who’s talking about it in the old media, (i.e. newspapers) have completely lost any sense of reality. I’d be very surprised to find enough IQ to fill a tablespoon between the whole lot of them. This in turn means that I have to argue against endless stupidity, and as everyone knows, “never argue with idiots, they bring you down to their level and beat you through experience”.

But, I’m going to argue with idiots now. I feel obliged to tune in and add my voice to fray. I’m not going to be quiet today. I cannot be quiet about this any more.

First off we have Liza Marklund. I’ve hardly ever been bothered by this woman who in so many ways remind me of a swedish version of Ann Coulter, at least as far as physical appearances go. Mrs Marklund is a swedish author of fairly generic detective-novels, and this has brought her fame and fortune. I’ve only browsed through her books, but I would say that she values herself a lot higher than I think is reasonable. I’ve noticed that she’s very good at talking about herself and her “craft” or whatever the hell you want to call it. Ann Coulter however is in my opinion the spawn of some ancient evil, and I wouldn’t be the least surprised if you’d need seven tongues to pronounce her real name.

Up until just recently I’ve been very neutral in my opinion about mrs Marklund. She can write her books and go about her business, that’s basically the opinion I’ve had. At least that was until she opened that vat of stupidity that functions as her mouth, and started sprouting all kind of retarded opinions about filesharing and technology. She’s written an opinion-piece that was published in one of the major rags here in Sweden, and it reeks of stupidity. She builds a whole bunch of straw-man arguments, purposefully or maybe by accident confuses various technologies, and makes strong statements about various things she doesn’t have the slightest clue about.

In my opinion she simply writes herself off as being yet another person who stubbornly refuses to accept the reality of things, since it’s more profitable for her. She argues that filesharers are lazy thieves, and that everyone should pay money for culture. The piece she wrote is absolutely awful, and when reading it feels like something written by an angry and spoiled child.

Pathetic.

UPDATE: I completely forgot to write that mrs Marklund apparently considers libraries to also be thieves by extension of what she argues about. I tried very hard to find some kind of coherent argument in her rantings, and the only thing that she seem to stick by is that tired concept of Intellectual Property. Thus, she considers books, music and movies to be exactly that - non-existent property, owned ideas. Etc etc. Which would by extension mean that library-visitors who borrow a book is also thieves, since they’ve managed to get access to the intellectual property for free. They have gained access to the idea and even though they returned the idea (the book) they still have the memory of the idea and thus have “stolen” it. Mrs Marklund apparently has the same concept of this as the people who wanted to outlaw radio in the 1920’s since they considered radio a threat to those who sold sheet-music…

We also have Antipiratbyråns latest propaganda-piece. Antipiratbyrån is the swedish lobbying-arm for the global mediamafia. In this “article” they expunge a lot of things with very little verification. They claim to have seized some kind of server located at some kind of company. They never mention what company, what server, how they found it or even what purpose it served. For all we know they just pulled the whole “action” out of their asses, and cooked up some story to make themselves seem more successful than they are.

They claim to have dealt a severe blow to the scene, even though they don’t actually seem to know anything about how the scene operates. The article is heavily angled, and the author of it is known to sympathize and write pieces on demand for the lobby-groups.

For example, the article makes heavy use of the raid against Bahnhof a while ago. This was an incident where Antipiratbyrån together with Swedish police raided Bahnhof (a swedish very respected internet supplier) and found a large server containing pirated software, music and films. The article mentions this and claims that Bahnhof lost a lot of respect and customers from this, and generally implies that many firms are actively involved in “the scene” since they have access to hardware and fat internet connections.

What the article conveniently neglects to mention is that the server seized at Bahnhof was funded by Antipiratbyrån in order to provoke a crime! This is called entrapment and is illegal. Antipiratbyrån used an individual who was in dire financial needs and paid him off to start up the server, funded the hardware and knew exactly where it was and how it worked. This makes the whole thing even more absurd. It would be as if cops started selling drugs to people and then immediately afterwards arrested them for possession.

The article also makes some bizarre statement about how pirates generate large amounts of revenue by selling their merchandise to chinese bootleg-companies. These companies pay for pirated DVD-images that they then press on discs and sell. Pardon my french, but why in the blue fuck would this happen? Why would these chinese companies be willing to pay for something that they can just download for free from the net? It makes no sense whatsoever. This just sounds like fabricated justification in an attempt to try to gain support for themselves.

Additionally, I’m always somewhat amused when I read these things about the scene. Antipiratbyrån and RIAA/MPAA have entered themselves into a war that they cannot win. Not only are they fighting against their own potential customers, they’re also essentially fighting against a hydra when they decided to go for fighting the scene as well as their own customers. They can add the war on piracy to other laughably stupid campaigns such as the war on terror and the war on drugs. These three things are essentially like trying to have a swordfight against smoke - there’s no way you can win. They can pat themselves on the back for shutting down one release-group, but I can guarantee them that for every group they manage to “shut down” at least three or more new groups will take their place. For every head they cut off, two new ones grow out instead.

Also in the newspapers is mention of Håkan Roswall who is confident that after 14 months of investigation he now has enough proof to pursue a case against the Pirate Bay. This also makes me shake my head in amazement. What kind of evidence does he have? I don’t know how he managed to finagle some proof, but it’s about as watertight as a screendoor in my opinion. The Pirate Bay is an indexer and tracker - they don’t host any material on their own servers. If Håkan insists on trying to pursue this course of action then the next target should be Google. Google and The Pirate Bay are essentially the same thing - search engines.

UPDATE 080129: Reuters has an english-language article about this travesty here.

Today is a painful day. But I’ve come to two realizations that I need to work on in order to stay sane and maintain my life. Actually I’ve known these before, but I’ve ignored them because I thought I was larger than they were.

I need to be more transparent and more honest. I have a tendency of bottling things up inside of me, and this fills me with even more pain in the long run. In the short run I feel better, I’m keeping up appearances but at the cost of my own harmony. It’s better if I’m more honest and more transparent. It’s a kind of self-therapy I guess.

Me and Ann-Sofie are trying to find solutions. But in the meantime, I need to be more honest and more transparent. I have too much of a tendency to close the gates, and this hurts not only myself but people around me. Shutting people out is not the solution.

This has reflected on my blog. Rather than writing about the real me, I write about shallow stuff that’s easy to digest as well as produce. But I need to start using my blog to open up. Expect more personal opinions and thoughts in the future.

I suffer from depression. Clinical depression. The bad stuff. The really, really bad stuff. For the last seven years I’ve fought a battle against something inside me that’s broken. Because that’s how I feel about being depressed - I feel as if something inside me is broken. Something isn’t right. Some cog or wheel or gear is slipping around the machinery, and I feel broken. I don’t know what’s broken, much less how to fix it.

I’ve learned to live with it. It’s like being in limbo. Many times I feel so shitty that I want to die. In fact, that’s what I feel like right now. I don’t want to continue living. But at the same time I don’t want to die either. I like being alive, most of the time, though it’s just very painful for me, and like most depressed people I think of death as an easy way out.

But suicide is cheating. I’ve always felt that, even when I’ve come close to ending my life. Those times were times of extreme desperation. I didn’t like the options, but the thought of eternal silence and a permanent end to the pain inside me was so tempting that I at least tried it. It were of course cries for help, just like this posting is a kind of cry for help.

Depression is walking hell. It’s a life of being so broken that you can’t explain the pain to anyone, not even you yourself can see how it works or even why you suffer from it. There’s a line in some song I heard once that goes something to the effect of “when I die I’ll know I’ll go to heaven, because my life is hell”. That’s a very accurate description of how I feel most of the time.

I think that the worst part of depression isn’t the immense pain I feel inside my soul. No, the worst part I think is that it’s impossible to describe. No matter how hard I try it’s impossible for words to even come close to describing the confusion, the frustration, the pain and sorrow that burrows inside me. No matter how I try the words will never make justice to this hell. I’m not good at talking about it either, and that’s why I choose to do it like this - words on a website for both friends, relatives and complete strangers to read. Some part of me has hope that maybe this will help someone else who also feels as broken and dysfunctional as I do.

Seven years since I first discovered that I was flawed. Seven years filled with various degrees of medication, therapy and a struggle to maintain some hope for the future. Seven years of wandering the wastelands of my soul while at the same time trying to maintain something resembling a life. Trying to pull my part of society, trying to feel anything except deep hopelessness and futility. Seven years of trying to see the good things in a world that for each day more and more resembles insanity.

Three years ago I found Ann-Sofie. I fell in love with her quickly. At first I didn’t want to fall in love, it opens up vulnerabilities and all the times I fell in love before it inevitably lead to enormous amounts of pain and confusion. But I couldn’t control my emotions, I felt as if she was my soulmate. And in some ways I think she is. Just like me she’s broken, and we were both alone in a world. We both had big hearts and we just wanted to find someone to give it to.

I will always love her, even though it’s now come to the grim conclusion that I’ve feared from the start.

And now I need to move on with my life. This is proving very difficult now, because more than ever I don’t want to move on. Once again my head fills with thoughts of the great sleep. The never-ending sleep. The dirt-nap. But I don’t want to do it. I want to live, even though it’s a crippled life which brings me a lot of pain most of the time. Because that’s another of the really painful bits of suffering from this depression. No matter how much you try, it’s difficult to not hurt. Just by existing you hurt yourself, and others around you. This echoes back on you, and you feel even more pain because you know that other people hurt around you, and even though you only try to live your life you hurt others, and this hurts you back. It hurts me because I don’t want to hurt people, but somehow people do get hurt by me.

I’m at the crossroads. Once again I’m standing at the crossroads, and once again I don’t want to move on. It hurts so much. If there was a devil to sell my soul to I would do that instantly. I would ask him to take away this pain inside of me, and let me do the opposite to that line of whatever song it was. I would live my life in heaven and then spend eternity in hell.

But there is no devil. There is no afterlife. There is only this life, and I’m trying to make something decent and worthwhile of it. I know I have every possibility, but I lack the courage, the confidence and the energy to do just that. I know I have talents, but I have no confidence in who I am. That’s one of the many ways in which I’m broken.

I just don’t want to be me.