Provisional rules for a Dice Man

I am not The Dice Man, I am A Dice Man; someone inspired by Rhinehart but, nevertheless, using them with my own code. As I experiment with their use, I have started to articulate a set of rules for myself that aim to make the dice serve my primary goal – to reduce or avoid my depression. I don’t view them as a panacea, but as an adjunct to other things I’m doing such as: 

• Talking with my wife Sonia and the numerous good friends who populate my physical and silicon world
• Trying to make good use of the advice from my family and friends, even when I think I know better
• Taking my daily citalopram (20mg)
• Looking for work that I can do, which will pay the bills and, ideally, enjoy as much as possible
• Exercising and looking after my body to try to remedy the combined effects of not giving a fuck about it for most of the last year or so (in a self-loathing way) and being fifty five with what seems to me to be some sort of ‘male menopause’, in the sense that my body seems to have shifted into a markedly different phase to the one I occupied between my twenties and turning fifty

It would be naive to think that something like depression can be solved by one thing, and I don’t. But*, in my own case, I do think that being A Dice Man is one thing that could help. Blogging is a public endeavour and it would be disingenuous to pretend that it does not address an imagined audience. So to my imagined audience I would like to say this. 

If you experience depression, I have no idea what that is like for you, why it occurs, what might make it better, or what you should do about it. This blog is a selfish activity that primarily aims to help me. Nevertheless, if it helps anyone else in any way, that would be a bonus that would please me. Because* I’m like that.

Anyway, here are my rules...for the time being.

• Rule 1 – Only nominate choices you genuinely wish for
• Rule 2 – Do not use the dice to make choices where you are already clear about your preference or the right decision, because that would be stupid
• Rule 3 – Use the dice creatively, wherever you notice an opportunity for them to make life more interesting, exciting or fulfilling
• Rule 4 – Where the dice directly involve other people, this should be consensual
• Rule 5 – Don’t become a slave to the dice, or blogging about the dice because you think other people read this stuff. Just use them when it suits you, and write about it when you have something to write that you think you would like to read yourself

*Ordinarily I would never start a sentence with a conjunction. These are examples of me doing edgy grammatical stuff that I don’t do in reports.