It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Things were starting to look pretty bleak.

I discovered something strange about myself. I've had hints about it over the years, but it came very clearly into focus the other day. The world holds me to a higher moral and ethical standard than it holds other people.

Ouch.

So yes, that is in part because of the fact that I hold myself to a higher standard. Yes, Tim, I realize because I am a philosophy-minded sort who ascribes to a virtue ethics-based creed that there may be some element of confirmation bias. I'm factoring that in. Beyond that, though...

I'll give a specific example. Due to unfair vicissitudes of divorce that I won't get into here, I am only allowed to see my kids at a supervised visitation facility. During intake at this facility, my ex was asked to fill out a form rating my capacity for violence. This form has been discredited by pretty much every government agency, including the judge in our case, who happens to be on the board of the visitation facility. The form had questions like these:

Has the other party threatened you with a weapon?
Were they implicated in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand?
Have they or have they not stopped clubbing cute little baby seals?

My intake form, on the other hand, only had a space for my name, with "Adolf Manson Satan" already filled in.

NOTE TO OFFICIALS GOOGLING ME: THE PREVIOUS STATEMENTS HAVE BEEN HYPERBOLIZED FOR HUMOROUS EFFECT

Regardless, the point is that the form was taken full advantage of, I was falsely portrayed as dangerous, and the supervisors should have expected me to be a complete raving lunatic. Now, instead I have been my usual self. Polite, cautious, honorable, articulate, and helpful even when being intolerably crapped on. I'm surrounded by methheads and worse who actually belong in this place, and who seem to be given every break imaginable when it comes to bending rules and such, but I am afraid to fart in this facility for fear of getting tasered. Still, I am treated more restrictively than the rules seem to imply, and not seemingly out of punishment. Maybe because I'm not struggling, the shackles just have a way of slipping tighter... figuratively speaking.

It's not just in that arena. It's at work, at play, with family in friends. People expect me not to act like a dick, even when it's okay to be one. Or to perform when there's no reason for me to. I realize there's no reason for me to get worked up about this, or feel singled out, and I'm not, but I have to be intellectually honest. It's something I'm noticing. Sometime's it's seemingly arbitrary, and while I have a definite knowledge that the phenomenon is there, I don't know the full scope of it.

These were the things I was thinking about recently, and honestly, the biggest feeling I was getting was that of being lonely. I felt really cut off from everyone, even the people who are most supportive of me all the time, until yesterday, when I realized...

So fucking what? Maybe I am unfairly held apart. Big deal. Life continues. So will I, just doing my thing, walking my Middle Way and trying to not be huge asshole and yet remain somewhat entertaining. So for this I would like to thank not only my homeboys Tim and Tim for direct and indirect consultation, but also my Mommy, my good friends online, and of course the evah-wonderful and savage Kayla, love of my life. Also:

"Do good. Don't do bad. Keep trying to figure out which is which." -Daolin

Damn. Do we really need a thousand millennia of fucking Buddhas to help us out with this?