Right now, my finances are stretched to their limit, and that’s not good.

It’s bad because it means I am always tense about money and that drags down my mood. My emotional wellbeing is so tied to my financial security that they are practically one and the same, and lately, things have been not so secure.

The nail in the coffin has been Joe being in the hospital.

I shall explain.

With Joe either in the hospital or resting at his parents’ place, we have taken to getting together to “teledine” twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays from 8 pm to 9 pm.

This involves us getting together with him via Zoom so we can hang out together and watch some of the video clips Felicity has found for us.

She’s great at that. Brings us the coolest stuff.

The problem is that this teledining event tends to cost me money because Julian goes and gets McD’s for me to eat while we watch stuff with Joe.

And that is $20 a pop, or $40 a week, and that is on top of my other expenses, like groceries and Denny’s.

Here is how my week breaks down :

Start with a weekly budget of $150.
Subtract Denny’s, that’s $40/week. Now we’re down to $110.
Subtract my grocery bill, which is around $70/week. Down to $40.
Then subtract my teledining bill of $40/week and you get zero dinero.

And that’s no good. I need to have some slack in my budget in order to deal with sudden emergencies and, failing those, to be able to have a nice budget surplus that can build up till I can, say, buy a new game for myself or finally get that new power supply that I need or other things like that.

I am a far happier person when I feel like I have enough. Then I can relax and not think about money so much and not feel like I am on the edge of a razor blade all the time.

Yes. that’s dramatic. So am I.

And right now, it’s the McD’s twice a week that is the easiest thing to reduce. As much as I love Ronald’s cooking, I am going to have to make my own dinner for at least one of the two teledining experiences of the week.

And that’s going to be a bummer. Taking away a “treat” is always depressing because your brain was counting on that hit of dopamine and will miss it when it is gone.

The other way to curb my expenses would be to cut back on my groceries, but I am loath to do that because as much as the loss of McD’s twice a week will suck, not having my little pleasures like my cans of pop and the frozen chicken strips currently sitting in our freezer would suck even more.

But I will not give up on that idea entirely. I will continue to brainstorm ways to cut back on the expenses. I want my wiggle room back.

Of course, the other half of the equation would be to increase my revenue by finding some of that sweet, sweet online work.

And I know that would be good for me on so many levels. But when I try to think about the topic, let alone approach actually doing something, that same old unreasoning obliterating brutalizing paralytic fear comes down like the hammer of the gods and freezes the very marrow in my bones until I give up on it.

And I am working on keeping that from happening. But it is going to involve a lot of the kind of deep psychological work that can’t be put into words at all, let alone written about, and the idea of that scares the shit out of me too.

I am hemmed in by fear on all sides. And I can only be happy if I stay in my tiny little box and don’t set off all those punishingly loud alarms.

It’s that, or learn to withstand the fear somehow.

And man is that going to suck.

More after the break.

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The other way

The other way I could escape my fear would be to cut it off at the source somehow.

After all, there is no need to cross a river if it’s stopped flowing.

And while I don’t know for sure where all this fear comes from, I have a few potential theories along those lines.

I always have theories.

The simplest one is that it comes from all my unused energy. I know in my soul that I have tons of energy I could be using but it’s all corked up and has no legitimate way of escaping to express itself.

So it ends up backed up and remains in my mind and soul as potential energy, kind of like an excess electrical charge.

And that’s the energy my anxiety uses. In theory, if I could uncork myself and let out all that latent energy, I could starve my anxiety like it’s a fire with no oxygen.

But that’s the usualkind of Catch-22 because in order to release my energies, I would have to uncork that bottle and if I could do that…. you get the idea.

I guess in my loose metaphor, it’s like the backed up pressure inside me is the very thing keeping the cork lodged so tightly in the aperture.

Someone needs to give my soul the Heimlich.

But I know I am slowly breaking down that cork, that blockage, that wall within me. I am letting my real emotions escape confinement and discovering who I really am, id and all, and doing it a little at a time, but constantly, and at an accelerating pace.

My hope is that I will eventually hit a tipping point where the healthy part of me can simply overpower the diseased part of me and send it packing for good.

Right now, I am still torn. Because no matter what I say or do, here or in the real world, the fact is that I have a massive untreated wound at my core, and until I manage to fix that, I will continue to be a cripple in more than just body.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pretty sure my ex-roomie, Angela, was both overcharging me for rent and conspiring with her friend Gary to mess up my bike so I would then pay Gary to fix it.

What a shitbag thing to do, eh?

And I know why she did it : to feed her hoarding. In many ways, hoarding like hers (and she hoarded everything – pets, food, little trinkets that were supposedly gifts for someone – is like a gambling addiction, or like being a shopaholic.

The addition is always going to demand more, more, more. Because one of the ironclad rules of decadence is that every time you use something to fill the gaping hole inside you, the hole gets bigger.

So yeah. Looking back, it’s all quite clear to me now. Makes me wish that I had taken her up on her martyr routine about how she will show me the rent receipt if I did not believe her about how much rent was.

Would have been tres amusant to see her try to backpedal out of that one.

But this was 20 years ago and I was far more mild mannered and inclined to trust people, so I took her at her word and therefore lived in artificial poverty with her and all her critters for a year and change.

Obviously, there is nothing I can do about it now. I don’t even remember her last name and I know she doesn’t live in the apartment we shared any more.

I imagine she is hoarding away somewhere as I type this.

I mean, when I lived with her, she had four cats, three enormous fish tanks full of fishes, a cage of mice (cute but stupid in a very fucked up way), a cage with male rats, a cage with two male hamsters, and my favorite, an enormous aquarium tank that had been turned into a home for the lady rats.

I adore those little lady rats. They were so cute and so industrious and so social. And for the most part, they all got along great.

Every once in a while, you’d hear a few angry squeaks and have to go make sure that nobody was getting mauled.

But for the most part, they lived in a peace and harmony that was almost Smurf-like.

I try to avoid nostalgia, but there are definitely things I miss about those days. Like all the critters, especially, of course, the cats.

I love cats. I grew up in a home with like eight cats. Throughout my lonely childhood I always knew that I could go pet a cat whenever I needed to feel loved.

I miss those kitties.

I also miss how energetic and resourceful I was back then. I ran the local furry community and went to the events I organized, plus I sometimes just went places to hang out with people, or they came to me.

That kind of thing is not part of my life any more. Sigh.

It sucks to get old and sluggish.

Can’t wonder how much more fun my life would have been had I had access to my full resources instead of unknowingly supporting her habit.

These days, just like back then, if something is going to happen, it will be because I make it happen. I am the spark plug. I am the organizer. I am the motive force.

I am the synthesist – the one who brings together disparate parts and unites them into a brand new whole.

I haven’t done that in a long time. The last vestige of it was FRED, our biweekly fan nosh, and that died with the onset of Covid.

And now…. it just seems like too much work.

And I hate that. I don’t want to be some fucking lotus eater who goes through life in a dreamlike state where I am not even really a part of things.

I want to be involved. I want my life to have meaning. I want there to be more to my life than video games and death.

But I will have to get my tired old motor running first.

More after the break.

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Oh shit, I’m down here again

Woke up feeling super depressed again. Hoping some food n’ hydration will make me feel at least a little better.

I can feel the tears wanting to come out. I keep trying to let them and/or force them out. But I guess I went back to being emotionally constipated again at some point.

I need more emotional fiber in my diet.

Speaking of my diet, the fact that we are out of fruit and there are no cold cans of pop in the fridge does not help. Normally not that big a deal but in my current emotionally vulnerable state it is far too easy to give in to feelings of being neglected and ignored.

Those feelings are never very far from the surface for me to begin with.

It definitely feels like my emotional constipation has something to do with control. Like at some point, in the interests of that semi-mythical state of control, I locked all my tears and dreams and other tender things away in cold storage and now I can’t bring them back any more.

Now, it always takes something external, something really sad that I see or read or whatnot, to get the waterworks flowing.

And I always feel so much better afterwards. Makes me wish I could have a good long cry on a regular basis instead of being bunged up most of the time.

Control is such a fickle beast. Like, if I am so “in control”, why do I feel so bad?

If I was truly in command of myself, I would lay down and bawl my eyes out until I had gotten all the deferred pain and rage and fear out of my system.

Call it spring cleaning for the soul.

Or, if you’ll pardon me for being obscure and disgusting, emotional emesis.

And who knows, maybe I will find a way to free up my feelings again. But until then, I guess all I can do is do this the hard way, via writing.

I guess at least I get my words out of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been having chronic back pain lately.

More so that usual, that is. I’ve been experiencing mild back pain ever since around halfway through my second major growth spurt.

The human body is just not designed to be tall, fat, and sedentary.

At least one of those things has got to go.

And I am sure as fuck not going to get any shorter.

Anyhow, yeah, more back pain than usual. As usual, the worst of it comes when I get up from lying down in bed.

That’s when I get that horrible “creaking” feeling in my back like my back is an old rusty hinge accompanied by a terrible and terrifying pain that makes me groan in agony.

The exact location of the pain varies, but it most often comes from in between my shoulder blades all the way down to my midback.

Then afterwards I am sore and stiff in all the muscles that surround my spine and getting painful “aftershocks” in the form of muscle spasms.

It’s not fun.

But it only happens sporadically. Most of the time I can get out of bed and on to my feet without being waylaid by agony.

But when it happens it’s very bad. Bad enough that I am worried that one of these times the pain will be so bad that it makes me fall.

And I am too old and fat and frail for that. A nasty fall could do me in, or at the very least leave me even less functional than now.

Obviously, I should probably bring this to the attention of a medical professional. And I totally will do so after I have tried a few things to maybe handle it myself.

Like very carefully stretching my back. You know, taking it slow and gentle so as not to end up throwing my back out in the process of trying to fix it.

Massage is also a possibility. Kind of hard for me to reach the area most involved, but I can manage if I just use this big bad brain of mine.

If I had more money, I would get a professional massage. In fact, if I had mucho dinero, I would get a professional massage like twice a day.

From my own personal masseur. A hulking dude with a gentle smile and rippling muscles and big, strong hands.

But I am poorer than most dirt, so I will have to DIY it.

The good news, or at least the less terrible news, is that the pain has not been in the area of my back with the hairline fracture. That fracture is on my L4 vertebra, which is the second one from the bottom of your spine.

In other words, the fracture is much lower on my spine than the pain.

Still, it’s a worrying development. Seems like the universe never runs out of new and inventive ways to fuck me over.

Guess I will just have to get better at handling the unexpected instead of always running to stand still.

In other words, working extremely hard to try to keep things the same.

Fuck that. It’s a losing strategy. I am not saying you have to surrender all control and become one with the chaos or whatever, but you are far better off accepting that you will always be subjected to factors beyond your control that severely limit your ability to control what happens to you, so emotionally investing in controlling outcomes is a fool’s bet and you are better off investing in your ability to cope with whatever.

Shit happens. And it always will. So learn to deal with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

You did what now?

Here’s something to send to a friend who is in an important meeting or at a funeral :

I have to admire their commitment to making something really offensive.

That takes craftmanship!

---

The latest scoop

BROWN ALERT. The following contains explicit poop talk.

So I had another attack of sleep incontinence.

The disgustingly ironic bit is that it happened in two stages. At some point in my night’s sleep, I woke up enough to notice that there was a lot of some kind of liquid on the bed.

Even mostly asleep I had an inkling of where it might have come from. And that’s the same place that guy above glued his balls to.

So I mopped it up with whatever scrappable (and crappable) paper I had lying around and went back to sleep.

And it wasn’t until I woke up in the morning in the clear light of day and my brain fully booted up until it occurred to me that there was probably a solid portion too.

And yup. There it was on my poor beleaguered comforter than has not been washed for like a decade, a whole lot of my poop.

At least, I assume it was mine.

So I cleaned that up with a bunch of Kleenex. Took care of it myself because I would die of shame three times over if I had to make Julian do it.

And he’d probably die twice, poor dear.

As always, I am not going to sound the alarm unless it happens again. Right now, my position is that this seems to be something my body needs to do every once in a while and as it is not accompanied by any other symptoms – no stomach cramping, black tarry feces, feeling faint, or anything else of that nature – I am not going to push the alarm button just yet.

But if it happens again, or I find myself unable to pee, I am going to have to go to the ER or worse, Urgent Care.

Because like I have said before, I was told by an ER doctor that if I experience either incontinence or an inability to pee, I should go straight to the ER.

And yeah. If I found myself unable to pee, I would definitely go straight to the ER because that’s a ticking time bomb and when that bomb goes off my bladder explodes and holy crap would that be BAD.

The whole “only if it happens twice” rule is my own modification to the incontinence half of the equation, based on a) not wanting to go to the ER because the ER sucks donkey taint, but more logically b) the number of times I have had an attack like this and then was totally fine afterwards, thus indicating that a trip to the ER was not necessary.

And if it’s not necessary, I ain’t going. See part a) for why.

The weirdest part of these attacks (warning : intimacy level spike) is that my butthole ends up feeling really, really dilated.

Like something is holding it painfully open. Like retractors or something.

Which makes me wonder, am I pooping myself, or is it just… falling out?

Like, is this a bowel problem, or a sphincter problem?

The anal sphincter is a muscle, after all, and I have muscle issues.

Please, God, don’t make me have to wear adult diapers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am in a not so fun part of my mood cycle right now. I’m cranky and moody and sullen.

I’m in a Gen X state of mind.

It’s always a bad sign when I find myself thinking, “I hate my life!”. It generally means my anger and frustration is building and I am going to need some sort of catharsis soon in order to vent it.

Last thing I need is for it to vent internally.

But it’s on the list.

There’s a few external factors too, though those might be symptomatic of my bad internal state too I suppose.

I am stuck in not one, not two, but three different video games, and it only takes being stuck in one to put a little black cloud over my head.

Stuck on a tough fight in Fell Seal. I even set all my fighters except for one to AI control and I still couldn’t do it.

Turns out not even the computer can beat this encounter.

I know what the problem is, and it’s that the tactical thinking part of my brain refuses to cough and sputter back into life.

Picture me trying to get a very stubborn engine to turn over.

So I am playing rather stupidly. If I want to progress in the story, I am going to have to up my game and start thinking logically and precisely.

Kind of like a chess player. I assume. If only the game had a grid overlay… I do better with grids. Grids give me quantities I can deal with.

Way easier to deal with “this unit can move three spaces” than “this unit can move three meters”, at least for me.

Also stuck in another game, Thronebreaker : The Witcher Tales. I have reached a point where there is a sort of puzzle that I have to solve and I am currently at the, “argh, this is IMPOSSIBLE!” stage even though I have beaten the game in the past so I kind of know for certain that it is, in fact, possible.

Which only makes things more frustrating, because god damn it, I figured it out before, why can’t I figure it out now?

It’s these kinds of things that make me realized I am not nearly as mellow as I think I am. I am, in fact, pretty ornery and testy sometimes.

And that pleases me in some obscure way.

I guess I am just glad to have a self-defense mode. We need anger. Anger is a vital part of our sense of safety. It assures us that we can stick up for ourselves when needed.

Without it, we are helpless to advance our own self-interest.

Take it from one who knows. I have been so out of touch with my id, especially my anger, for so long that I have barely done anything to help myself at all.

I don’t even clean up my room. Or myself.

The third game is Daggerfall, which is the second in the Elder Scrolls series of games and is thus an ancient artifact from the year 1996.

And I am not stuck in it per se. I’ve just been trying different character classes and can’t seem to find the right “fit”.

Today I was trying different magic wielding classes, but they are all limited by the fact that all the useful spells use up like half your starting MP and so you basically have two tries to zap an enemy and then you’re a really shitty warrior.

Presumably it gets better as you level up. But I dunno if I will have that kind of patience!

More after the break.

I don’t want to do anything

Apparently, this depression is worse than I thought. It just took me over half an hour to get out of bed because I was having a very hard time finding the motivation.

I was in one of those very negative mood states where it’s hard for me to remember why I ever do things at all.

The very thought of doing anything so onerous as actually getting out of bed seemed like veritable death march of drudgery.

Obviously, I got there eventually. Managed to get myself up and on my feet and into the kitchen to nuke myself a chicken burger.

Side note : at least I am getting better at having something genuinely tasty and appealing (and full of Vitamin B12, of course) for supper every night.

Stuff that beats the hell out of all that bologna. Ick. I might be off that shit for life.

Anyhow, got my chicken burger together plus a can of carbonated beverage (Diet A&W Root Beer, yum), and that will be my supper for right now.

Because with lack of motivation comes lack of appetite. Sadly. My appetite might bounce back eventually, though. It does that sometimes.

After all. my metabolic needs haven’t slackened, just my desire to fulfill them.

I know what I need : a good cry. Once I am done with my words for the day, I will turn the lights off, get into bed, and attempt it.

I swear I had made myself able to cry when I needed to for a while. I don’t know what the hell happened to make me freeze up inside.

Probably the same thing that caused me to stop remembering dreams.

Anyhow, it’s just depression. It happens to me sometimes. It’s probably a delayed reaction to all the emotional work I have been doing lately in regards to tearing down that wall between me and the world.

That’s the sort of thing that is bound to cause some fallout.

Won’t stop me, though. Won’t even slow me down. I am going to keep grinding away at that fucking thing until it collapses or I do.

Because I have to be free. It’s well beyond any pragmatic concern now. This is something I need all the way down in my soul, and to hell with the consequences.

That god damned wall has to go.

I won’t bother invoking Pink Floyd.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still trying to climb to the very summit of this issue and plant my flag there.

For someone who is never really there, I do okay. I mean, I have had no complaints about my relative absence that I know of.

Guess I have everybody fooled.

Or maybe I just have me fooled. Maybe this whole idea that I am not really here and have been living behind a miles thick invisible wall my whole life is the foolish thing and yet another layer of my tiramisu of tormented delusion.

My ex-roomie Eamon Jones once told me that I wasn’t crazy, I just thought I was.

TO his credit, he immediately saw the logical problem with that statement. Because what is the delusion that you are insane but another form of insanity?

Still, there might have been a milligram of truth in there. Or not, I dunno.

I am just in the mood to doubt everything I think I know about myself and my life. Now that I have realized I have deep and profound reality issues, everything has come into question and I am determined to just keep peeling back the layers until I get to the truth.

After all, I have always sought the truth above all else. This era of my life is no different.

The problem is, you can’t know all of what you failed to perceive. So I don’t know if there were people who tried their best to get through to me and failed.

I know about some who tried. Like pretty much every teacher I ever had in elementary school. Being decent teachers, they did try to connect with me.

But I was on another planet, far far away. Like so many people in my personal history, they tried to get through to me, I gave them the bizarre mixed messages of seeming like I was there and not there at the same time. they realized they had no idea how to tell wiht me, and they ended up just shaking their head as they gave up on me.

Not ideal behaviour for a teacher or other adult caretaker, granted. But perfectly understandable. They had a bunch of other, more comprehensible and “normal” kids to look after. So there was only so much time they could spend trying to crack the shell of that weird little fat kid.

At the time, though, I didn’t know I wasn’t there. That was my normal. Still is, more or less. I am trying as hard as I can to come down off of my cloud but all my instincts rail against it so it is very rough going.

As always, as I push through via sheer determination and weaponized precision hate, I will also be looking for a key flaw I can exploit to make the whole thing crumble away like so much broken shoreline in a rainstorm.

Erosion is real, y’all. Take it from someone who grew up on a glorified sandbar.

Every day, I feel like the machinery I have assigned to the destruction of my wall growing bigger and stronger and more determined.

That’s what makes me certain that I have passed a vital tipping point and from this point on the process can only accelerate.

Every bit of Midnight Tundra reclaimed frees up more of my latent energies for use in freeing up still more.

And one day soon, the whole stinking wall will come down.

And there I will be, exposed before my peers.

Hi. I’m Mike. I’m new here.

And things are never going to be the same now that I’m here.

More after the break.

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This is freaking savage

Warning, this will chill you to the bone :

What gets me is how angry and affronted he is that someone DARED to question him. He’s super pissed off that his evening’s entertainment was interrupted. There is no sense of fear or even worry in him at all.

Great idea to re-enact police transcripts, BTW, and superb acting. I have seen the same thing done with court transcripts too.

There is a lot of meaty drama in those documents if you are willing to dig for it.

---

The liberation of Michael John Bertrand

As I peel back my layers of (potential) delusion, I get closer and closer to something like “the real me”.

I’ve always been a little uncomfortable talking about that kind of thing. The “real you” or “who you really are” or “going to place X to find yourself”.

To me, it always sounded like bullshit. Just an excuse to fuck around.

But now I see the point of it all. I know that there is a “real me” that has been buried under layer upon layer of numbness and delusion that I wear like an underpowered mech suit to “protect” me from the big bad world.

Freedom, therefore, will come from taking that damned thing off. I have to be willing to defiantly bare myself to the world and breathe free, clean air and feel the sun on my skin for the first time in a very long time.

I don’t care what happens to me after that. Whatever it is, I will deal with it.

I always do.

It will be a process of spiritual liberation and I will go into it and through it knowing that I cannot possibly know where it all is going or really control the outcome in any way.

All I can do is have faith in myself and my ability to deal with the unexpected.

Yeah, I hate surprises, but that doesn’t mean they are fatal to me. I can handle myself. I can deal with life in realtime. I can be naked before the world.

I can leave my shell behind for good so that I can finally outgrow it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Starting my blogging an hour late for the usual reason : I was masturbating.

And of course, once I get into the groove of jerkin’ the gherkin, I don’t wanna stop. It feels too good to keep going and it would feel real bad to stop until I have worn down my sexual battery.

So yeah, I still don’t ejaculate very often. Which is still quite frustrating, but I am learning to get used to it and no longer expect it to happen.

On the rare occasional it does, it’s a happy little surprise.

And I at least can discharge my sexual energy if not the fluids. Seminal buildup and the dreaded “blue balls” are a constant problem for me, but what the hell, jacking off still feels wonderful and I do it pretty frequently.

And what the heck, it even counts as cardio. Ya know, anything that gets your heart and respiration rate up for ten minutes or more….

And modern psychology says that nothing beats depression like exercise, so I can even count it as a form of psychotherapy.

I miss cumming, though. Nothing breaks tension like a healthy, hearty squirt.

Oh well. Maybe some day it will return. Maybe I just need the right kind of stimulus. Like, say, the kind that comes from sex with other people.

I’m working on it.

Today was Therapy Thursday. Once more I had managed to completely forget about therapy until the phone rang, and yet, I was able to instantly shift into therapy mode without even slowing down, and I am proud of myself for that.

See? I tell myself. I can handle things. I can react to the unexpected. Not every surprised has to hit me like a hammer to the head.

I can do things. I CAN do things. I can DO things.

Repeat until believed.

I told Doctor Costin about all my thoughts about being isolated from reality and the effects it has had on my interpersonal relationships, including the very real possibility that my childhood was only as lonely and isolated as it was because I had this massive wall between me and reality, and just on the other side of that wall were people trying hard to get through to me but the wall was just too thick.

It’s like I was off on a planet of my own. It still is, really, though I do what I can to come back to Earth for my friends.

Well, I at least get a little closer to Earth. I expect that I won’t actually be able to make it through the atmosphere and touch down for some time yet.

But I am making progress. I am sawing my way through that big thick wall between me and the real, live, sensory world, and swallowing the resulting ice cubes.

I feel hopeful because I don’t feel lost any more. I know where I am trying to go and what am I trying to do. I have faced the sheer enormity of my problem and now I have its measure. It’s no longer an infinite burden with no end in sight.

I can see it from here. More importantly, I can feel it from here. It’s that wonderful warm thing on the other side of my incredible wall, and feeling it there makes it a lot easier for me to keep burrowing in that direction.

I just have to watch out for that wrong turn in Albuquerque.

Soon the Sun Sign will be turning from Aries to Taurus, and I will start getting all that sweet, sweet Solar energy.

All the better for melting the ice around my heart, n’est-ce pas?

More after the break.

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It’s all a lie

Well, maybe not a lie. But a mistake. Lies require intent.

But it could be that my real, lived life does not match the internal narrative of it that I have built up over the years.

I thought I had be left out in the cold or thrown to the wolves, but it could be that both the cold and wolves were me all along.

Me, and that miles thick invisible wall between me and reality.

Invisible because I don’t do anything overt to alert people to the fact that I am not really there. I am, in fact, eerily good at pretending to be right there in front of you when I am actually crouched behind a blast shield in a bunker ten miles away.

And even then, I don’t feel safe.

Well okay. Say it turns out that my internal narrative is way off and that I was not nearly as alone as my mental illness made me think I was.

So now what? What do I do with that information?

For right now, nothing. Nothing but keep writing and talking and thinking about it in order to keep it fro sinking back into my mental morass until I re-discover it in three years.

But the question that sticks out at me right now is, “What do you do when you realize that the entire theme of your childhood and all the conclusions stemming from that were based on a fundamental mistruth?

That would partially invalidate not just a whole lot of my internal narrative but a lot of my memories of my childhood too.

Well I have always suspected that the truth of things was a lot more complex than my oversimplified internal narrative of victimhood.

Things are rarely that cartoonishly simple.

I know that I felt cold and lonely and isolated for many years of my childhood, and that for a lot of those years, I had absolutely no friends.

And I know that I did not feel like I could approach my parents with my problems as they would just brush me off without so much as acknowledging me.

I know that my feeling of being abandoned didn’t come out of nowhere.

So in that sense at least, nothing has changed. Perhaps my subjective experience of life back then was based more on my own emotional state than the evidence. I dunno.

But in the end, it is still what happened to me.

At least, from my point of view.

But I am still going to work hard to correct my internal narrative because I think it has been holding me back for a long long time.

After all, if I imagine myself as the victim, that means I can’t get better without losing a big piece of my identity. Right?

And people will do damned near anything to keep their sense of identity intact.

But me…. I have to know more.

I have to understand.

And by God, I will, or die tryin’.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So went and got my eyeball lasered this morning.

Left at around 8:30 AM for my appointment at 9:30 am.

Dozed through most of the trip there. Sorry I wasn’t very good company on the trip, Julian. 🙂 But I was up way too early.

Got there more or less exactly at 9:30 am, which was a tad stressful as up to that last minute we were worried about being late.

Not that it would have mattered, given how long I had to wait before the laser dude actually showed up.

I didn’t catch his name, which was a shame in retrospect, seeing as I had a very good looking doctor gazing deeply into my eyes for 45 minutes.

Well, deeply into my eye. Technically.

I was slightly miffed that it wasn’t Doctor Mackay doing the procedure. I guess he fobbed it off to a younger doctor, as is the privilege of older doctors.

It was definitely not true that I didn’t feel anything, though. From the very beginning I could feel the laser doing something to my eye. The pressure in my eye kept changing in subtle and not so subtle ways.

Plus there’s the fact that the light is REALLY bright. Which came as a surprise to me because I always assumed they used lasers with a frequency outside the visual range so as not to blind the people they are trying to treat.

But apparently not. So in many ways, that was the worst part of the procedure for me : having to stare at a red light over his shoulder while he shone a bright light in my eye.

That’s not the only bad part though. Sometimes he would keep lasering for too long and I would feel my eyeball warming up and starting to hurt.

Pretty sure that’s not supposed to happen. Ya gotta stop for a second now and then to let the patient’s eyeball cool down.

That was the kind of thing that made me very glad that I had taken a Xanax^[1] before heading off to get the procedure.

At the very end, he left the thing going for so long that I felt actual acute pain and said “Ow!”, and that’s when he decided the procedure was over.

To make things even more confusing, he then mumbled something about how I had “taken 2011 shots (??) and done fine. ”

Wait, was this a fucking endurance test? Were you just seeing how much eyeball burning you could get away with? Surely there was a correct number of “shots” to get the job done so it doesn’t matter how much I was able to “take”.

And the doctor looked all sad and bummed out like he was sad it was over.

What the entire fuck, dude?

Anyhow, like he had warned me, the vision in the eye in question (left) was a bit darker when he was done, but that cleared up in less than five minutes.

I guess there was some burned up eye cells in there or something. Scary.

Then came the burning sensation in my eyes – not from the procedure but from driving home on a lovely sunny day when my eyes were dilated all the way.

That was a long trip home. I kept my eyes closed for most of it. Now and then I would open my eyes and try to keep them open long enough for them to adjust to the light.

Which was stupid, because when your eyes adjust to changes in amount of ambient light, it’s via the very iris muscles those drops dilate.

Anyhow, made it home – thank God for indoor parking – and I still have two functioning eyeballs, so all is well.

I will be going back in two weeks to get my right eye lasered.

More after the break.

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I’m not here

This is something that has been on my mind lately.

I’ve been using this space to talk about how I turned my back on reality when I was raped as a toddler, and how ever since, I have been dealing with reality on a strictly minimum contact basis.

Part of processing that fact, though, is pondering the effect that had on others.

Because I think people can tell when you’re not really there. When despite being superficially pleasant and personable, on the inside you have one foot out the door already and could bolt like a startled doe at any moment.

That’s always been the conflict in me when I interact socially. I totally have everything I need to be a likeable, nay, lovable dude. I am charismatic, friendly, sweet-nature, witty guy who could totally be very successful socially.

But the fear in me ruins it all. I can be having a perfectly lovely conversation with somebody I don’t even know and on the surface of my psyche I am enjoying this rare warm connection to another human being but under the hood, I am starting to freak out and the urge to run run run away as fast as I can is building and it it gets louder and louder in my head until I can barely even make out what people are saying.

And there’s only so much time before, against my will, I have to go.

But because I have put up such a good front, people don’t know why I am running away.

And that’s just socially. I have no idea what impact my remoteness has had on my personal life and my relationships with my friends and my family.

Like I have said before, I bitch a lot about my sad and lonely childhood and with that comes a lot of bitterness about how the adults didn’t do anything about it.

But maybe they tried but just couldn’t get through to me. How could they? I was locked away in my own custom made coffin, staying as far away from reality as I could.

And some of that reality was people.

If I’ve ever frozen you out, I am so, so sorry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t wanna go to St. Paul’s to get my eyeball lasered tomorrow.

Intellectually, I know that eyeball lasering is an extremely safe and well established procedure and that there is no chance whatsoever of me, to pick a random example, ending up with two smoking craters in my eye sockets where my eyes used to be.

It’s not that kind of laser.

In fact, according to the nice fella who will be wielding the laser scalpel, Doctor Mackay, I won’t feel a thing and the whole thing will be over before I know it.

I have my doubts, but I will tentatively believe him for now.

I mean, again, scientifically, I know that’s true. These lasers only zap one molecular layer of cells at a time, which is why these laser treatments can take a while, but that’s way better than them burning the eyes out of you in a hurry.

And all Doctor Mackay will be doing is cauterizing some blood vessels in my left eye that are looking like they might leak at any moment and then I would end up with the big black spots in my vision again… if I’m lucky.

It’s not like he’ll be reshaping my entire eyeball like with laser correction surgery.

Still, I am scared and weirded out by the whole idea of it all.

For some reason, I think I would feel better about it if it was happening here in Richmond. I guess combined eye zapping with being far away from my home territory makes it all the scarier.

And I know I will get over it. Probably before I get there. In fact, my real purpose in writing and therefore dwelling on my irrational fear of the Eye Cutter is to try to burn through all the fear ahead of time so that I can hopefully be calm when the time for the procedure comes around tomorrow.

After all, I don’t want Doctor Mackay to think I’m a wimp!

---

Other than pre-lasering jitters, I am doing alright. I feel fairly good. No new medical horrors have emerged lately, knock on an entire northwestern state’s amount of wood.

Had Wound Care this morning. Something rather odd happened. We showed up at the time they had given us, which was 8:45 am.

And I made it to the waiting area ^[1] and sat down with my usual groan of relief.

The journey from the car to that waiting area (it waits… for you!) is always very hard on me. By normal, healthy people’s standards it’s nothing.

But for me it’s a grueling marathon every single time.

Anyhow, I got there, and waited for the nurse to come get me.

And waited. And waited.

Finally, after about 20 minutes of waiting, I got up and went to look for my nurse to see what was up.

When I got there, one of the nurses said she’d be with me shortly.

A tad galling given that I had already been waiting 20 minutes, but whatever.

Then the nurse came to get me, and I sat down and took my shoes off as usual, and she said that I was a little early.

And I said, “Uh, what? When is my appointment?”

She said, “11:30!”

Fut the wuck? Apparently it somehow got changed and nobody told us. It said 8:45 am on the schedule they printed out for us.

The really galling thing is that if I had known the real time, I could have stayed in bed!

The nurse saw me anyhow, so no real harm done.

More after the break.

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Today’s wonderful/terrifying AI miracle is…

A mindblowing little site/app called Suno. A simple little site that only lets you generate entire songs, vocals and instruments both, in any style, just from a text prompt.

I shitteth thee not.

You can even write your own lyrics, which of course I do.

Here’s something I just threw together in five minutes.

Interestingly, the first thing I immediately wanted to do with it was write rap lyrics. Apparently I have wanted to be a rapper for a long time now, possibly since I first heard Eminem all those years ago, and just never knew it consciously.

But often after I listen to a good rap song, my mind starts spitting out my own verses spontaneously. And judging by the example above, they are not terrible.

I love that the program did what I would have wanted it to do with “slick hip trickster”. And there are effects and tricks added that make it sound awesome and that I never would have thought of myself.

It’s like having my own private record producer. Amazing.

I actually learned about the app Sunday night, but I have been too awed by the power at my fingertips to do much with it until tonight.

But I will NOT let this magic slip through my fingertips just because I am too chickenshit to use it. I will confront the swarm of possibilities and make something – anything – rather than cower in a corner somewhere.

I don’t care if it’s terrible.

I don’t care if I didn’t do it “right”.

I don’t care if I get lost trying to figure out what I “should” do.

I didn’t that stop me from making AI art, and I am not going to let it stop me from making AI music either.

But wow, what an age we live in, eh? Never has so much artistic power been unleashed into the world. This is truly the dawning of a new age and everything is going to change.

I have no idea where this all is going to take us. But I’m not worried. All this business about AI “taking over” is errant nonsense.

What is really going to happen, though, is a democratization of talent. People with no inherent talent for the physical production of music, videos, and animation will nevertheless have the ability to share their visions with the world.

We are all the dreamer now. Anyone and everyone can turn their dreams into reality with something as simple as a text prompt.

I, for one, find that prospect terrible exciting. And terrifying.

It’s always scary to be in the water when the sea changes.

You get existential vertigo when you are looking over the edge of a change far too big and amazing to truly fully encompass in your mind.

We are dancing with infinity.

And I love it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I am beginning to understand just how vast my reality issues are.

And I can’t help but notice how well they line up with my initial response to the trauma of being raped when I was four years old.

Like millions of other rape victims, I responded by withdrawing into myself. HARD. I told myself, “this isn’t real, this isn’t happening” and I fled from reality in order to get as far away from what was happening to me as was possible.

From that point on, I withdrew from the real world as far as I could without falling down an open manhole or walking into traffic.

Most of the time. On a bad day, well, let’s say it was good that my neighborhood did not get a lot of traffic, so as long as I could cross Granville Street without getting run over, I was good to go for the walk home.

School partly forced me out of that shell. I was still quite thickly armored there but the necessity of paying attention to the lessons and doing the class work meant I could not completely withdraw into my shell.

So I became a robot who went to school. Not for the whole time. I did have friends for some of those years.

I honestly wonder what they saw in me.

But for a lot of those years, I was a lonely child who went to and from school completely alone, came home to an empty house, got virtually no attention from parents who were always tired and stressed out from work, and barely knew his siblings.

They had their own lives and they didn’t include me.

They certainly felt no obligation of care. Nobody did. Absolutely no person in the universe felt like my welfare was their problem.

Which is unusual for an elementary school child, n’est-ce pas?

But nobody looked after me at all. They were more than happy to just ignore me and assume everything was fine because if it wasn’t, I would tell them about it.

What heinous bullshit. When I did try to tell them about my troubles, they shut me down right away, presumably to stave off the impending horror of having to think about me for more than a few seconds.

And one of the iron clad rules of my universe growing up was that I got nothing because I deserved nothing. Absolutely nobody was going to give up the tiniest sliver of what they had in order for me to get my share and so I… didn’t.

Anyhow. Reality issues. Sorry, when I start bitching about my crappy childhood, it’s kind of hard to stop.

Sure is cathartic though.

Anyhow, my radical detachment from reality was not readily apparent. I think that was part of the problem. I was very good at convincingly pretending everything was just fine when anyone bothered to ask about me.

Because I knew they didn’t really care at all. They just wanted me to tell them everything was fine so they could go back to not thinking about me at all while reassuring themselves that they did care.

A little. Now and then. Whenever it was convenient.

There I go again.

Scuttlebutt is that my mental health journey will have to involve re-attaching myself to reality so that I can finally balance out all that senseless intellectualism that has been holding me back for so long.

Unsurprisingly, I don’t wanna do that. The very thought of getting cozier with reality makes me feel a little sick.

Reality is so limiting. Why would I want to get enmeshed with that?

it’s a trap, I just know it. Next thing ya know, I am dragged out of my internal bunker and forced to deal with the real world whether I feel like it or not and I am forever severed from the only real safety I know : in the center of my own mind.

I think I will just stay with that feeling a while, see how it plays out.

More after the break.

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No avenue of retreat

I guess the above highlights the important of escape in my psyche.

To my mind, the worst possible thing is to be trapped. I need the maximum amount of fluidity, agility, and adaptability in order to feel safe. I have to be free to flee deeper into myself at a heartbeat’s notice because that is how I survived being raped as a toddler and it’s the only way I know how to survive right now.

All my napping, video game playing, and yes, even blogging, are just ways of hiding from reality by immersing myself in something engrossing and/or all-encompassing that leaves no room for the big bad world in my mind and thus shuts it out.

My mind can’t be filled with anxiety and terror if it’s full of Dragon Age : Inquisition.

Now obviously, if I was simply to stay in reality long enough, I would get used to it and it would no longer seem like such a scary and horrible place.

I would acclimate. I always do. I am, after all, an extremely adaptable person. To a fault, actually. So I would manage somehow.

But the fear the very idea of taking such a step inculcates in me makes it nearly impossible to contemplate actually doing it.

There is no arguing with the deep part of me that is fully convinced that taking such a step would be the very worst kind of suicidal madness.

Actually, scratch that. Suicide is way less scary.

But let’s not go there.

I guess what it really boils down to is that, despite all me writing and analysis and seeming reasonableness, at the end of the day, I’m still fucking crazy.

And that’s what I have to deal with if I am to bargain for my sanity. The sheer screaming muttering gibbering madness that is at my core from the unresolved trauma of being raped 46 years ago.

And until I find some way to calm my terrified little animal down, I am never going to be able to cross the moat of my madness and frolic in the green and gentle land beyond.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I originally was going to say “Pain management edition” after the colon but I decided this was funnier.

And I always go with the funny. Or most poignant. Or scariest.

Whatever will have the greatest emotional impact, I suppose.

Anyhow, this is a story all about how I screwed up big and then I said “Ow!”.

See, I had Wound Care this morning. Wound Care on a Saturday is weird, I know, but this is not the first time it’s happened.

The schedule just works out that way sometimes. And it’s no big deal to come in on the weekend. It just means I have to be buzzed in.

Kind of like when delivery people deliver to us, come to think of it.

Anyhow, this morning’s Wound Care was extra stressful, because I screwed up and totally forgot I had something to do and was treating today like any other Saturday morning until I suddenly woke up from a solid snooze and remembered.

And that was at 9:22 am, and my appointment was at 9:45 am.

Um…GO TIME.

We ended up getting there pretty much exactly on time. Bravo us!

But there was a hidden cost to our victory that soon raised its ugly head : because I’d had to rush out the door without eating breakfast, I also had rushed out the door without taking my morning dose of good ol Gabapentin.

So today’s trip to Wound Care involved a lot of pain for me. Trolleying along with my walker had not hurt that bad since I first got out of the hospital in August of ’22.

And even then, the pain was not as acute.

Basically, everything between my waist and my knees hurt. Especially my hips.

Oy, the pain in my hips. I felt it in the muscles and the tendon, and even in the bone. And that pain radiated inwards towards my core.

Luckily, it did not make it to my no-no area. Small mercies.

So yeah. Today’s Wound Care trip hurt one hell of a lot.

Oh well, won’t make that mistake again. Would have only taken a moment or two to take my Gabapentin on the way out of the door. Next time I will think of that.

Ya know, sometimes I think that the main way we get wiser as we get older is by making a lot of dumb mistakes when we are younger.

Then you have a benighted soul like myself who cleverly refused to participate in adult reality and therefore did not make any of those oh so important mistakes when I was younger, or really at all, and as a consequence I am fifty years old and don’t know shit.

Oh, I am brilliantly intelligent and have vast amounts of extremely deep insight into how things really work and how to make them work better. I’m a wizard on that level.

But that’s brain knowledge. That’s knowledge without true understanding.

Sure, my brain knows a lot of things, but my soul is practically retarded.

We need a good word for this other kind of knowledge, the kind that can only come from experience and the kind of neural pathways experience brings.

Because it’s rather important. And the natural progression of the highly intelligent people (nerds) blinds them to its very existence.

But if you have ever wondered why people far stupider than you do oh so much better in life than you, that’s why.

They might have barely graduated from high school, but their seemingly sheeplike ability to just do what everyone else is doing without thinking about it has actually given them far more practical, unconscious wisdom than your brains ever will.

You’re better at math, they’re better at life.

Kind of feels like school taught you to value all the wrong things, dunnit?

More after the break.

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It doesn’t work like that!

So both my hips are hurting now. Especially the left one.

The left one hurts all the way around the hip joint and into my back pocket, and I can feel something shifting and grinding in the socket.

And that fucking hurts.

And a weird thing did happen at Wound Care : the nurse had me hold my left leg in a certain position that to me seemed perfectly safe but soon the muscles of my left leg started to protest.

Ya know. By hurting. As opposed to via a strongly worded letter to the editor.

But that’s not the weird part. Practically anything that requires me to sit in a position other than one in which my legs are perfectly straight (sic) and therefore puts strain on my tender tendons causes me some amount of pain.

There’s been times when just having my foot up on the stool at Wound Care in slightly the wrong way has caused a lot of pain.

And yet, I am still too timid to tell the nurse, “Hey, this hurts! I need to move!”.

Anyhow, the weird part was that the tendons on my RIGHT leg started to hurt too. The ones directly across from the ones hurting on the left leg.

I guess they ARE all kind of strung together, so it makes sense, but at the time I really had the feeling that the universe was really piling on to me.

And then my hip and associated bits kept hurting even after I took my goddamned Gabapentin! And that suggests that the lack of Gabapentin this morning somehow damaged my muscles.

But that doesn’t make sense. Pain doesn’t cause injuries. Injuries cause pain!

Best I can figure is that my Gabapentin has been hiding a hell of a lot more pain than I thought it was. So much so, in fact, that one standard dose (200 mg) was not enough to put the pain back to sleep.

And now the hip pain is teaming up with the back pain and that whole part of my body shifts and grinds and hurts when I move.

I might have to up my Gabapentin dose again.

Or I might be even more disabled than before now. I did have an attack of flu-like symptoms last weekend. Maybe that was another attack of whatever mysterious ailment has been fucking up my muscles.

I know that since last weekend, my arms are getting tired a lot faster than before. They are almost as bad as my legs for that now.

That wheelchair is coming for me. I just know it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.