I know it would be a fairly easy assumption that the title of this journal entry means I'm going to be depressing and more of how I've been in the past despite saying I wouldn't be last time. But that isn't what I'm aiming for. I'm in more of a contemplative mood.

I've been thinking about happiness. What is it? Or rather, what is true happiness, and contentment with life. I've been happy before, but only for brief amounts of time. It's far more transitional and fleeting than the kind of overall glow I've seen in other people. I never seem to be able to hold onto it for more than, at most, a few short hours at a time. Things I do to try and attain some measure of it always seem to go wrong and have the opposite effect in the long term. This doesn't seem very fair. I am a cynical and somewhat bitter individual, prone to near-constant stress and anxiety, but I've somehow managed to keep a certain amount of hope going in a quiet corner of my brain, contrary to how I normally act and feel and despite events in my life. I can't explain it, but it's always there. A small part of my mind holds a vigil for eventual happiness and satisfaction.

One way I know I'm not happy, is that I am lonely. This is not the same as being alone. I can quite comfortably not be around people for extended periods of time, and often prefer to be, more so than I prefer the company of others. But I still desire and require a counterpart; an equal. On an intellectual and emotional level, who I can be comfortable with and share things with. Contrary to the movies, and what your parents, society and your inbuilt genetic imperative might tell you as you're growing up, love is not happiness. Or at least, it isn't necessarily. In fact, it seems to be more about pain from my limited experience. Every relationship where I have developed some degree of love, be it familial, romantic, friendship, or even for an idea or inanimate object. It seems to consist of more pain than happiness. I loved my father, despite his abuses, and despite my anger over them. I love my mother and sister, though they are usually a source of considerable shame, frustration, and again anger. I fell in love with a beautiful but similarly unhappy young woman, but she was unable to reciprocate the emotion and in my desperate frustration, and to my infinite regret, I managed to drive her away from me. As I have similarly driven away, or been driven away by or even just drifted away from most of the friends I've had.

A particularly worrying thought is that the majority of those seem to become happy once away from me, or find happiness and that's when they suddenly leave. The young woman, who I still constantly think about and care about regardless of what happened and didn't happen between us, has recently found a degree of happiness, or at least contentment. Her life has become infinitely improved, academically, professionally, and personally since she stopped spending time or talking with me. And I'm glad for her, because she deserves for things to go right for her for once. I mean that sincerely. But I'm also jealous, and sad that I couldn't be a part of it. Which in turn bothers me with how selfish that seems. And even though she was unhappy before I met her, that she couldn't be happy until I wasn't around worries me. Similarly, my best friend, at least I consider him my best friend, got married this year and it's obvious to anyone even in passing that he's high as a kite. But I've barely seen him since his wedding, and I barely saw him during it either. I was there, but I wasn't really a part of it, but on the periphery observing from a distance. I wanted to be more involved, but couldn't find a way to be. Now, I realise that any newly wed is going to be more concerned with the excitement of a new chapter of their life having started than with spending time with their friends. But I can't help feeling as though gradually he's not going to be around for more than very occasional and brief moments from now on, each time with our friendship having cooled and lost coherency a little more. I don't want it to, but I don't see what I can do. Or know that I should do anything. Wouldn't it be very selfish to impose my problems and anxieties on his happiness? All I know is that I seem to be a common link in what sucks in the lives of those closest to me, or periods of time when things don't seem to be going that well for them. And I don't know why, and it isn't a problem that I'm equipped to analyse and correct. I'm better with machines than people. But machines aren't a replacement for even the limited human interaction I need.

Happiness also isn't money or material possessions, but I've known that for a long time. It hasn't stopped me filling the limited space available to me with all manner of supposed entertainment devices, games, or DVDs. They amuse me for a time, and they can distract me from things, but they don't make me happy.

Music and comedy are two things that can make me forget that I'm not happy for a time, and are both very important to me. I might go so far as to say that I am passionately attached to them. But they don't last, and when they finish I'm almost immediately maudlin and depressed again, no matter how much I convinced myself whilst they were ongoing that I felt better.

I used to feel the way I do about music and humour with prose. I used to love reading and spent most of my childhood with my head in a book, lost to my surroundings. And I loved writing. I was also told by people that I was very good at it, and I dreamt of having a career telling stories that could entertain, amuse, intrigue, and move people. But I don't seem to be able to do that. I lost confidence in what I was writing, and in my own talents. Constantly questioning whether I was any good or not until I became convinced I was shit, and now rarely write at all because of the frustration and disillusionment I get from it. It's also ruined reading for me, because now all I can think about when I read a book is how I failed to write one.

Perhaps happiness is not absolute. Different for everyone, based on their personalities, and experiences. But despite having had a difficult life, I know other people who have been through worse and still managed to be happy, so that can't be the problem. Maybe it's just me? Perhaps I'm incapable of being happy? That can't be it either, because I wasn't always like this. I used to be the exact opposite of what I've become, until I was about 8 years old. I used to be trusting, gregarious, loving, innocent, imaginative. I had a lot of friends. What went wrong? Surely that child couldn't have been so utterly transformed simply because of my father? He was always violent, from the earliest part of my life. It can't be the sole blame of my poor health, or my mental problems or autism either, because those have always been there to some extent too. So have the endless vivid nightmares at night and resulting insomnia, and the fears of being alone, of death, of rejection, of arachnids. Yes, as minor and ridiculous as it sounds, a fear of spiders is helping to ruin my life. I'm constantly on edge and worried about them and looking around at corners and the floor and walls for them, even though they can't actually hurt me. I haven't eaten today because last night I saw a massive one on my kitchen floor and now can't go in there, and I've only drank anything by taking a bottle and a glass into my bedroom. I'm not going to be able to use that kitchen again either until it comes out again when someone else is there and removes it. Because it has crawled off out of sight too, I'm nervous about being downstairs at all, and have only left my room, the one place I know it isn't, to go to the bathroom. I've been staring at the crack under the door for signs of it coming in. In fact, the only reason I'm able to think about all of this objectively and with some sang-froid is that the stress and anxiety of the last day has completely burnt out my emotions. I'm too stressed to be depressed. What the fuck is wrong with me? And how do I change it?

With everything that's happened, and everything that bothers me, there is still the small child I used to be lost somewhere in my head, holding out a tiny beacon of hope. I'm not sure though that I can find him before that torch goes out entirely and leaves him utterly consumed by the dark. I'm not sure that I even want him there at all, as hope just provides more opportunities for pain and disappointment. But he won't let me give up on him yet, though nothing it seems can help him. Hope, so I'm told, rides alone.

Obviously I've been very depressed lately, and allowing it to get the better of me. Things are slowly starting to turn around a bit, mostly as I've tried to stop dwelling on things. So bear with me, and who knows what might happen in time. Either way, I apologise for being so depressive.

I'm giving up. I'm just not a very good writer. I'm never going to finish my book, and I've hit the wall with Citadel too. I've been deluding myself for too long that I'd ever get anywhere, on the basis of occasional boosts of confidence from the kind words of well-intentioned friends. I may once have possessed real potential as a writer... I'd like to think that my old English Literature professor's reaction to a short story I wrote for an assignment when I was 16 was genuine (he fell out of his chair laughing, in a good way, and declared me the closest in style to the late Douglas Adams he had ever read). And I have fond memories of my time writing on Section 47, a Star Trek fan site, where I was held in moderately high esteem as a writer before I managed to get myself banned by alienating the egotist in charge there about his draconian methods. But those were a long time ago now. Sometimes when I think about how long ago it actually was, it continues to surprise me that it was 7 and 4, nearly 5 years ago respectively.

Everything I try to write now seems to be derivative. I cannot write when I am depressed, and so the few times I've actually written anything in the last few years have been as a result of inspiration, where another writer or a film or a piece of music has altered the state of my mood momentarily. I cannot sustain it, and ultimately it means I don't write anything original or unique any more. It's regurgitating and trying to emulate how an already existing work made me feel, and failing to do anything new or to even approach the quality of the original.

My imagination and wit have atrophied. I've grown more and more despondent and bitter overall. I have no confidence in myself or anything I do any more. I feel so old, and so alone. Whatever once made me eccentric, creative, passionate, and darkly funny has either gone or is almost gone. Instead I'm just constantly veering between depressed apathy bordering on nihilism, and frustrated rage.

I have no idea who I am or what I am supposed to do any more. My childhood dreams and expectations have all failed to materialise or be realised. The things I used to be good at and enjoy doing I no longer am any good at and find tedious, and nothing has filled the vacuum left behind. I can't write, I've grown obsolete as a computer engineer after three years inactive and out of work through illness as the last operating system I trained with is soon to have been succeeded and replaced not just once but twice when Windows 7 is released in a few months. Any thoughts of becoming a minor stand-up comedian went out with the realisation that I'm not funny. I've lost my pilot's license because I haven't logged the required flying hours thanks to my health, and I'll never get it back again because it's just too damned expensive and this time I don't have a friend helping me out by letting me fly with him in his plane. As with most of my already few social contacts, we lost touch a long time ago, and I have no idea how to try and get back into touch with him, or explain the length of the absence, or how to deal with the resulting awkwardness.

I accomplished just enough to ensure that I have a CV and titles and enough residual pride that I cannot try and make do with an average, humdrum life. If I were told tomorrow by my doctors that I am well enough to work again, I'd be too over-qualified to get a basic boring job. If I met a woman who could see past my flaws enough to wish to be with me I could not be satisfied, because of who she wouldn't be. I will never have a proper family because I've been forced to realise that my health issues could be passed on and I could never morally justify doing that to a child, taking that chance. And even if that weren't a consideration, I could never inflict life on this Earth on anyone anyway. For too many people the bad outweighs what joy or beauty remains in the world.

I'm above what most people accept as a decent, simple existence, but I'm a failure at accomplishing something close to what I previously planned to do with my life. I'm left somewhere inbetween in limbo, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I don't know what to do.

I am generally intolerant of heat. I am of Northern heritage, and consider the perfect day a dry pale grey with strong gusts of wind, or gently covered with a layer of pure white snow. I don't feel the cold in a conventional sense, but rather feel more alive with the sensations it brings. Heat on the other hand simply makes me feel unwell, restless, constantly exhausted, and sweaty. I despise the current trend in the UK of hotter summers each year, to the point where I'm thinking I might have to migrate North for the summer, because laying flat on my back in the nude all day, surrounded by fans blasting warm air at me and only moving to get drinks that instantly re-emerge in the form of perspiration doesn't allow for very much of a more practical or even merely entertaining nature. I had gradually been getting myself out of the habit of staying up all night and sleeping, if ever, in the day. This heat has turned me nocturnal once more, as I am simply unable to cope and function fully in the day when the temperatures are at their zenith. Even in the ever shorter nights the warmth is distracting.

An especially unfortunate effect of the heat is that it makes me even more introspective than usual. I sleep even less than usual, and since I can't do much else either, I invariably wind up spending the time in thought. I've had constant moments of deja vu recently, and a strangely deep-set sensation bordering on almost prescient knowledge of death. It's more ambiguous than simply dying from sunstroke or kidney failure (I'm drinking 2 pints nearly every hour, and I'm still not going to the bathroom - the only pissing I've done lately is from my pores) or any other kind of physical demise. It's a strong feeling of ennui. Perhaps my life is become so dull, unfulfilled, repetitive and meaningless that I genuinely have done the exact same thing at the same time, and thought the same thoughts and felt the same things. My perception of time has always been... unique. But a part of me feels that something is going to change irrevocably. Maybe it is a premonition of actual physical end. I suspect however that it refers to a more subtle state of death; change of how I live on a grand scale. What, given my inactivity, I cannot discern right now. Maybe the heat is just playing tricks on my mind...

For all of the things that go wrong in my life, this has been an especially strange year so far. My sister got pregnant, and subsequently had a miscarriage. My best friend got married, and in the process forced me to realise that some things I took for granted were never really so, as well as meaning that I don't see him very much now, soon to be at all when he moves away to pursue his new married life and start a home not only away from our home town, but away from our home county. Indeed, the opposite end of the country. And finally, I have been rejected once again by a certain lady. I had a feeling that would happen, but as last time, I allowed myself to be optimistic, foolishly so, and opened myself up to be vulnerable. I should be angry about what happened, but I cannot bring myself to be so. Instead I am merely very sad. Perhaps this is where the sensation of death comes from; I have always known that I will die alone. And I have never been so lonely as I am now. I am entirely lacking any kind of social contact, virtual or otherwise. My dissatisfaction with my home situation, and the natural differences in intelligence, taste, and personality leave me even more disconnected and excommunicated from my family than ever. And I have to deal with a love that requires me to not know the close companionship of a single equal with whom I can entrust everything of me. It could be suggested that the latter is self-inflicted, torturing myself needlessly. The object of my affections would almost certainly believe it to be the case that I am being unrealistic, but for the first time in my life I am certain about what I am feeling. I am in love, and far from being unrealistic, I realise it may mean that I can never fall in love again with any other partner. It's just that there is nothing I can do about it. That is not self-pity, or depression, but simply a plain statement of frustrated conviction. If I could change things, I think I probably would. I have rarely felt so pained as I did yesterday when I took a package for her into her college reception for her to receive indirectly, without having to come into contact with me in person. When I tried to describe the circumstances that required me to leave it with them, I felt as though the two women there were judging me as somehow a coward, inadequate, lacking honour or nobility or grace. Perhaps they believed that I had dumped her and was taking the easy way out depositing the package with a third party. I do not think of myself as a particularly good man. I have done many things I am deeply ashamed of, and made many mistakes, and missed many chances through neurosis or being stubborn. But knowing that I was being looked upon in that light by a stranger made me feel extremely low, at a time when I was already upset with the circumstances that required me to be there.

Whatever this change is that I believe I can perceive, it cannot come soon enough, though I expect that I will come to regret this desire for haste in time and with hindsight... unless it should truly be a journey to the undiscovered country, for which I can find no reason not to welcome a final, much delayed adventure. There is nothing to recommend over it in my life. Part of me wishes I was just being melodramatic in believing that to be so.

Looks like I can motivate myself from time to time. Prepare to be suitably congratulatory that my apathy is not absolute. I've started researching, plotting, and character outline development for that series of Star Trek stories I plan on publishing here on dA. It's very early days, and you're not going to see any story here for a while yet... I'm treating it as a serialised novella, rather than how I write my short stories that I put up here, which are just opening Word and seeing what happens in 30 minutes when I happen to have an inspiration. This means research, drafting, continuity checks... The plan is to release each chapter as I complete it. I've already made a folder for them in my gallery (nothing there now, obviously), which is where they'll be put when they're done, to keep them separate from my other stories.

I can't say much yet, but there are a few absolute details. Firstly, chronology. These stories will be set just after Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The idea is to play around initially during the 3 years between that film and the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when Kirk's crew on the Enterprise are on their final voyages and Sulu and the Excelsior are in the Beta Quadrant looking for strange gaseous anomalies. I wanted to do it in the later original film series era, but I also wanted to use a newly commissioned Constitution class starship, and with the Enterprise-A being decommissioned at the end of Undiscovered Country and the Excelsior class beginning to enter active service also, it wouldn't make much sense for Starfleet to commission a new Constitution after this time. Whether or not this project of mine extends beyond those three years I have no idea... I do have ideas for two story arcs, but after that, we'll see.

Secondly, I'm not going to have any of the show or film characters or ships show up in my stories. I definitely will not be retconning canon stories or events to shoehorn my original characters in, though one of my characters has a history where he was a nameless redshirt on the Enterprise during the Wrath of Khan. I think I can justify that because his being there has absolutely no effect on events and changes nothing except his own character. I loathe with a deep and abiding passion when fan writers and Star Trek RP players make their characters best friends with Kirk and company, to the point of saving them, and altering events from the shows and the films. It's bullshit, and people need to quit doing it. I will be including references to events from the films, but they'll be apart from what my characters are doing, remote and distant, purely for the sake of showing where I am in relation to the films in timeline, and to include my characters in the same overall setting and universe. It's worth remembering that Kirk and Spock, and the other TOS crew to a lesser extent, were very highly visible, influential figures in the Federation and Starfleet, so to ignore them entirely would be anachronistic. However, I won't have Scotty or Chekov or someone suddenly and very conveniently show up and get involved in what I'm doing with my characters. Hell, even published official Star Trek novelists have a tendency to do it, and it drives me nuts.

Thirdly, I'm going to ignore The Next Generation and anything that was made in the franchise after 1991 and The Undiscovered Country. So all the continuity mistakes and retconning that occurs in Voyager and especially Enterprise and the J.J. Abrams film that fucked Star Trek up and turned it into the barely recognisable crap it is today means absolutely nothing. Doesn't exist as far as this goes. Even the lesser changes that sometimes crept into TNG and Deep Space Nine are going to be utterly ignored, despite my actually liking those two spin-offs. The original series, the animated series, and the original film series are all that I shall be drawing inspiration from. So no Ferengi, no Borg, no Jem'Hadar will magically appear. Klingons will have been first encountered during Kirk's first 5 year mission on Enterprise. Romulans will not have been seen in the century between the Romulan/Federation first contact wars and when Kirk intercepted Mark Lenard's Romulan commander in Balance of Terror, and at the time of these stories they will be making tentative peace negotiations with the Federation prior to their involvement in the Khitomer peace talks in Undiscovered Country. Jonathan Archer and his merry band of muppets never existed. The machine planet that found Voyager VI and enhanced it to create V'Ger was not the fucking Borg homeworld. Essentially, every dumbassed change that was made to modernise Star Trek's past and justify the incompetence and lack of imagination on the part of the writers and producers of the later Trek series and movies will be wiped out in this purer interpretation of the original Star Trek. That's probably very elitist and arrogant of me, but I happen to think that Star Trek has been in a long, slow decline until now it's almost utterly ruined. It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't also interfered with the older canon, tainting it to try and make the new stuff work. If anyone has an issue with that, don't read my stories. If anyone at any time comments that in episode such and such of Enterprise they established contact with such and such before Kirk's time, I will track them down and pull their intestines out through their nose.

In other news, I've just discovered Google Docs. And wow... I was impressed a couple of months ago with Microsoft Live Office, but Google Docs is really something new and incredible. The Microsoft system still requires you to use a Windows operating system and have Office installed. Which isn't terribly helpful because besides my XP Pro desktop system I have a Linux netbook. Google Docs does everything that the Microsoft solution does, and more intuitively and easily I might add, but most impressive of all is the fully featured word processor in-built to edit and create documents in Firefox online, on the fly. I have never liked OpenOffice. It's clunky, it's awkward to get around, it's a bastard to update, and it's not even compatible with newer Microsoft Office file formats. So to be able to write in Firefox on any system that has an internet connection, and use any and all file formats, is what I have wanted from the start. This is progress, this is how it should be. And it's still in Beta! It's not even a finished piece of software... truly impressive. From now on, all my writing will be done on there. After 15 years I can finally retire Word and do away with all the inconvenience and rigmarole that it comes with, as well as having to copy important documents to fallible external media and constantly synchronise across separate computers and systems. I'm a little late to the party, and I'm not Google's biggest fan in some respects, but this is how I want to write, how I always wanted to write.