Did my grocery shopping online today, and was extremely relieved to find that Superstore’s DoorDash site has gone back to normal.

Phew! I was worried that I’d find that they had even less of my usual stuff than last week and I’d really have to re-think my diet.

But no, things are back the way they were. God bless the status quo.

Meanwhile, I have started to worry about my health. I feel ill a lot lately and I keep waking up all sweaty and dehydrated and disoriented from overheating in my sleep.

To the point of wondering if my newish blanket is too cozy and warm.

Maybe I should look for something lighter on Amazon. I still have a fairly large chunk of the $200 in Amazon money my sisters gave me for Xmas.

I should probably spend that on a new power supply for my computer though, so I can play the latest games and render AI graphics without worrying about crashing.

Speaking of which, I decided to pick up a copy of a truly ancient game from almost 30 years ago called Master of Orion 2.

It is what these days is called a “4X” game where you eXplore the setting, eXpand your empire, eXploit the resources you find, and eXterminate your enemies.

So it’s a game like the Civilization series. What I think of as an empire building game. Only as the title suggests this one takes place in space.

So you get to explore the galaxy, discover habitable planets, build colonies, research new technologies, and build yourself an empire.

There’s also war but I don’t care for that side of things. As in Civilization, I usually just peacefully co-exist as much as possible while sinking all my resources into science until my enormous technological edge over the other empires kind of discourages aggression, at least amongst the more sensible races.

Usually there will be one or two opponents who think that because I don’t have a huge military force and never attack anybody I must be easy pickings.

I very much enjoy teaching them how very wrong they are when they are coming at me with spears and catapults and I am responding with cruise missiles and orbital lasers.

Anyhow, I had been pondering getting this game for a little while because I have very fond memories of playing it way way back in the late 90’s and so when the thing went on sale for $1.29 I kind of felt like that was a sign.

I’ve got my empire started now and the basics of how to play the thing are coming back to me and I look forward to conquering all that I behold, or whatever.

It’s not my next big-deal RPG that will keep me busy for a while, but it’s fun.

Oh right, talking about feeling crappy.

As always, it’s very hard for me to tell the difference between physical and mental unwellness. Certainly these rough patches where I feel anxious and depressed for no obvious external reason are most likely just a side-effect of the lowered Paxil dose.

Perhaps I am merely becoming more aware of what has been going on inside me for a long time but I was too numb to feel it.

Now that I can feel it, my mind might actually be able to heal it. I have every confidence in my mind’s ability to re-align along healthier lines now that the long dark winter of Paxil paralysis is finally coming to an end.

But the process is probably not going to be real fun. Things kind of have to go more wrong before they can go all the way right again. First the chemical suppression of my symptoms ends and I thaw out, then my mind slowly assumes a healthier shape.

It’s the part in the middle where I am anxious and depressed that’ll be a bitch.

But I am on the right road at last and I am determined to keep driving.

There has to be a morning after.

More after the break.

---

More about more

Let me take another crack at talking about doing more with my time.

No commitment, just exploring possibilities.

There are, of course, billions of things I could be doing with my time. That’s the problem. It makes how to spend my time impossible to compute. That’s a total dead end.

It’s not the sort of thing even a big brained buffoon like me can figure out.

The only alternative, then, is desire. What do I want to do? And that is where the second problem comes in because I don’t know.

I have my dreams of creative success. Of getting a job as a TV writer, or becoming a big league YouTuber, or heck maybe even a science fiction novelist.

And those are nice to dream about as long as they remain only nice ideas that make me feel a little better.

But the moment I start trying to figure out how I would go about making any of them come true, all my issues show up and overload my emotional circuitry and short circuit my brain until it has no choice but to give up and shut down and go away.

And I know that this is an emotional problem. The shrieking spirits that come screaming out of the void when I try to make practical plans are the ghosts of all the versions of me that I might have been if I had led a healthy normal life and they don’t intend to let me rest and move on until I deal with them somehow.

Maybe I should hold a funeral. Stand over a mass grave and mourn all the people I might have been had things not gone terribly wrong.

Say a few words then say goodbye to it all.

You have to let go of the past before you can grab hold of a new, better future.

All those possibilities are dead and gone. The arrow of time only points in one direction. Whatever might have been (or even SHOULD have been) doesn’t matter because there is no force in the universe that can give me all those years back.

So yes, I want to stop being stuck in the past and move forward with my life. Find my way to a future where I can actually be a real life grownup.

But I get the feeling I have to deal with all those dead soldiers inside me first.

Shit. I still didn’t talk about doing more.

Oh well, I can try again in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And live again.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Managed to completely forget it was happening today until I literally had Doc Costin on the line, but whatever.

I’m really good at just rolling with that these days. I don’t need to “prepare” for Therapy Thursday. Just put the phone in my hand and watch me go.

At least today I had an excuse for forgetting therapy was coming. I had Wound Care in the morning and did my monthly banking after that.

My nurse’s name was Lana. She told me that when we first met. I was glad because I am still too shy to ask them myself.

I am such an odd little critter.

Speaking of which, I talked with Doctor Costin about my recent revelations about how my attention can be like being in a spotlight and sometimes people just do not want to deal with that shit.

The tragic irony is that I pump out so many lumens because I am so desperate for attention and validation. So when I am finally getting some, I turn up the Klieg lights and put on a big show.

And being my audience that way can wear people out. I try way too hard. So I need to learn to dial it back a tad.

Or go the total individualist route and say, “Fuck that! I’m not going to hide my light under a bushel just because some people think it’s too bright! I am going to keep on shining brighter than the sun and if they can’t handle it, fuck’em. The people who CAN handle it will be my friends. So there!”

That sounds good and all, but I feel like I have missed out on a hell of a lot in life because of my absolute unwillingness to accommodate others and insist on being ferociously and completely myself at all time, so I might wanna dial THAT back too.

As hard as that might be for me to do.

I also lamented all the developmental stages I have missed in my weirdly intellectualized life. From having no interest in toys or the jungle gym at the park nor having had an imaginary friend or a stuffed animal I carried everywhere or a security blanket or any of that all the way to not doing pretty much any of the “normal” adolescent things like falling in love super hard, seeking sexual partners, developing an extended friend group, and all the rest.

I missed pretty much all of that. Mostly I was alone. No friends, no attention at home, no mentors or guardians or wise elders.

I more or less raised myself. With the help of my only real friend, television.

And the truth is that I don’t even know how to mentally encompass what it means to have completely missed out on almost all of the important stages of psychosocial development. 99 percent of common wisdom would say that such a thing is flat out impossible. That surely I must be exaggerating for dramatic effect. Surely it is not possible to somehow not grow up like a normal kid by that wide a margin.

But nope. I am living proof that you can miss the bus on a normal childhood entirely.

And I wonder if I ever stood a chance of being normal. I mean, I learned to read when I was 3. That is beyond weird. And like I said, no toys, no imaginative play, no imaginary friend, none of that.

I was a very strange child even before the sexual assault.

Maybe I was simply born to fulfill a very unusual destiny. And that demanded that I have a very unusual life.

My strangely isolated and detached life has certainly given me a unique point of view and a clarity of thought that can be extremely powerful.

Plus, ya know, massive amounts of raw talent and a gargantuan intellect.

Who knows, maybe I will even find a way to make that shit pay some day.

That would be nice.

More after the break.

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Our convenient era

I just wrestled with trying to order something from DoorDash for 45 minutes, and lost.

Admittedly, the mail culprit and instigating irritant which is the fact that I had $22.69 left on this month’s credit card and as it turns out that is an impressively useless amount.

It’s just barely not enough to be able to order a normal fast food meal. Couple more bucks and I probably would have been able to do it. But no.

So my attempt to order me some Subway bombed. Subway is where I usually go when I am low on dough and if things had worked normally that would have worked because my usual 12 inch Cold Cut Combo would have worked out to a bit over $20.

But sometimes the system does this fun thing where it returns an “insufficient funds” error when the funds are, indeed, quite sufficient.

I think it maintains some kind of $5 buffer or something.

So then I thought I would get some stuff from 7-11. Good ol 7-11, always there in the pinch when you need to eat cheap.

But their DoorDash site was all fucked up. Another place where most of what I wanted to order was mysteriously missing.

I shudder to think of what I will be dealing with when I order my groceries tomorrow. Lord knows what’s still on the shelves these days.

What’s worse, the Hungry-man sub I had in my basket disappeared while I was looking for other things.

So then I decided to try those new kids in these parts, Circle K.

Also a weirdly limited selection but not as bad as at 7-11.

So I put a few things together and the total is around $13. OK, no problem, right?

I go to pay and suddenly the total is $28 freaking dollars?!? What the hell?

Apparently Circle K has a $5 delivery free IN ADDITION to what DoorDash charges.

Well fuck THAT noise.

So, no ordering in for me tonight. The money left on my card will meet the ultimate fate of all uselessly small remainders and end up on my Steam account.

And I’m just out 45 minutes of frigging aggravation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s clear to me that my energies are surging beyond what my current extremely low strain lifestyle can contain.

And as my Paxil dose decreases, that’s only going to get worse. So if I want to keep the anxiety at bay, I need to open up my life and my soul to the possibility of doing a lot more with my time than just sitting around playing fucking video games.

And that means I have to break the autohypnotic spell I live under and truly wake the fuck up, and be emotionally present in realtime, and truly commit to really living in the world instead of constantly trying to live entirely in the world between my ears.

And of course, that all scares the fertilizer out of me. Obviously. I survived being raped as a toddler by putting a very large part of me to sleep and waking that part of me up so that I can be whole means facing the reality of that terrible event not simply as a fact but as a memory and that scares me more than nearly anything else.

My whole psyche is built around keeping that atrocity suppressed. It’s like my entire massive maniacal mind is one giant containment unit and everything else in my mind is just a sideline to the massive machinery required to keep me from remembering it.

It’s not just a matter of tagging the memory “do not open” and it’s certainly not something I can simply erase from my mind by force of will.

By suppressing it so hard and for so long, I have in effect preserved the horror of it all in ultra HD, uncompressed and lossless, and when I release that beast, it’s going to be very angry at having been kept in the dark and the cold for so very long.

Memories want to be processed. Our minds never stop trying to digest them. And simply knowing something happened is not nearly enough.

That’s just knowledge. Occasionally useful but it does nothing to handle the emotions involved and those are what are holding me back and clogging me up and keeping me from doing more with my life.

A wild return to the topic appears!

It’s like there is this giant block of ice sitting in the only path out of this nasty little cul de sac of mine and in theory “all I have to do is get it out of the way”, but of course, it is not nearly that simple, at least not yet.

Because that block of ice is the very thing I have been hiding behind all these years. It’s no cartoon villain, it’s a vital part of how my mind is structured and if I yanked it out of there just because it seems bad, the whole damn thing could come crashing down.

And I’d end up being nothing but a drooling goober in a back ward somewhere.

Although I dunno. Maybe that’s just the mental illness creating catastrophic visions of the future in order to keep me from threatening it.

I don’t fucking know.

I know I’m sick of it. Sick of the fear and the anxiety and feeling hunted all the time. Sick of not being a functional human being. Sick of being massively underdeveloped on nearly every single psychological level and that making it nearly impossible for me to cope with any of the realities of adulthood. Sick of being an emotionally stunted loser sitting on a massive hoard of intellectual riches that I can’t spend to get myself places in life because my spirit is just too god damned weak to support it. Tired of drifting from shadow to shadow in life without making any kind of mark on the world.

I could disappear with nary a ripple at any moment. A few people would miss me and be sad that I am gone but the world at large wouldn’t even know I was gone.

Because everything is stupid and nothing matters.

More after the break.

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No sudden moves

I don’t like the fact that I don’t handle sudden changes or other surprises very well.

It makes me feel weak and fragile and vulnerable to the whims of fate. I would rather be a more rugged specimen that can handle whatever life throws at me, like some kind of tough all terrain vehicle.

Then again, I’d be a hell of a lot tougher if I had gotten actual life experience instead of hiding from the world for the last 30+ years.

But I didn’t get that life experience because I was too fragile to leave my comfort zone in order to go get it.

And the wheel goes around and around and around.

As far as things go right now, I don’t see my life changing very much very soon. I’m gonna be stuck on this god damned treadmill until something forces me off it and the only thing that is going to do that is my health getting worse.

Or better, I suppose. Perhaps if I was healthier I would feel more robust and capable and confident and then I would naturally end up taking on that big old world out there.

Or maybe nothing would change except that I’d feel a hell of a lot better. Which would also be good.

There’s definitely still something wrong with me physically. Something subtle that makes it really hard for me to pull myself together and focus, let alone actually engage my drives and let them take me anywhere.

Something that leaves me feeling weak and tired and fragile most of the time. A feeling which makes me feel like I have no choice but to hunker in my bunker and live in emergency mode even though everything seems to be fine.

At the moment at least, it doesn’t feel like it could be something purely psychological, thought I don’t know that I could explain why.

But I worry whether my heart is doing OK. I haven’t seen my cardiologist in years. I don’t even remember her name.

Could my problem really be that this body of mine has a gutless engine and THAT is why I can’t get it up to speed?

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants? I thought it was a lack of moral character when it was a hardware issue all along.

One they can fix, hopefully.

It’s sad when having a heart defect would be the happy outcome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m not the easiest fellow to help.

Just ask my therapist.

I’m too good with words, too mentally maneuverable, too bulletproof in my persona for my own good. In order for someone to truly help this messed up (but magnificent) mind of mine, they would have to be able to show me what I can’t see myself and point out the blind spots and illogical thinking holding me back so that I can fix my own thinking and/or release some of my vast sea of blocked emotion.

And that’s not easy with a guy as complicated and quick as me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between emotions and the world lately. I can only assume that with healthy people, emotions are something that just happen in response to stuff in a natural and organic way, and they just have to deal with them.

Not me though. At some point I cut my emotions off at the root and installed a very humorless and punitive gatekeeper on them and its job is to suppress all but a very narrow band of emotions before they even reach my conscious mind.

Hence my being incredibly repressed. That’s not how emotions are supposed to work. I suppose that it happened as a response to having a lot of really bad emotions to deal with. I wielded the power of my mind to create an artificial and very icy island of false calm in my mind so I could think and didn’t feel so bad.

But that was a cure far worse than the disease, at least in the long run.

This anti-emotion campaign must be part of my being withdrawn, too, and hostile to stimulation. If your emotions are all blocked up with no way out, anything that stimulates them, either physically or emotionally. is going to hurt like hell, and thus this condition conditions you to avoid all but nice safe mental stimulation.

So I have been hiding out in this semi-mobile fortress of the mind for my whole life. My coffin on wheels which keeps the world out as I protect the sleeping part of me by pretending I am dead.

And this god damn crypt has been stifling me in the whole time. The good parts of the world and the good parts of my own emotions get cut off just like the bad.

And there’s an innocence to it all, and a desire to avoid growing up. In a very real sense I have remained extremely immature and hiding it via my shows of intellect.

And “maturity”. I’m not ill-behaved or anything. That takes emotions. And even as a child I was eerily self-possessed.

But my emotional state is fragile and it has grown far too dependent on this nothing of a life of mine to keep my anxiety at bay.

It’s that anxiety that’s really choking the life out of me. Has been for a long time. I kept withdrawing deeper and deeper, and every time I did, the space I withdrew from got filled in with yet more fear, till I was painted into the tiny little corner that is my life.

And so the only way out is through a wall of concentrated and compressed fear.

And I just don’t have the wherewithal to make myself push my way through that most of the time. I can only struggle against this oppressive system of mine on rare and random moments and the rest of the time I just go limp.

I don’t want it to be this way. I want to be strong and confident and capable. I hate being ruled by my god damned fear and trapped in this interment.

But I don’t know how to get what I need to do better.

More after the break.

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The occasional power surge

I’ve been having panic attacks lately but I’m not, like, freaking out over it.

My anxiety is less chemically restrained by Paxil now so it was bound to return. But so far I have been able to handle it.

It tends to happen in little spurts, usually when I am switching activity and/or stimulation levels, like going from playing a game to laying down.

But sometimes it happens in the middle of things too.

And I know what’s going on. It’s what I talked about last week : my energies are awakening from their very long slumber and my mind doesn’t really know what to do with them yet so they end up becoming free floating anxiety.

Whatever. This too shall pass. I’m beyond taking the electrochemical bullshit in my head seriously. Go ahead, do what you need to do to heal, brain. I’ll be okay.

Though the idea of leaning into the anxiety keeps recurring to me. Maybe there are emotions trying to break through the ice of my consciousness from the deep waters underneath and if I just help them I can get some serious healing done.

I’ve given it a try a few times now but I don’t think I have found the handle for the emotions involved yet, so it’s like trying to open a locked door.

Nothing moves and I just end up feeling stupid. And a bit sore.

I will pick that lock eventually. Maybe I should try seeing if I can have a good cry. That has helped me a lot in the past.

I just have a lot of cultural deprogramming to do first. Fucking toxic male bullshit.

Said bullshit is why I only get a good cry out when my inner system bursts like an overloaded pipe and releases the waterworks.

And even then, my emotions have to be unusually close to the surface AND I have to encounter something very sad or depressing or upsetting.

That is definitely way too high a wall to have enough my emotions and I would be better off being able to vent them at a far faster rate.

But it’s just not that simple.

God, I envy women sometimes. They know the value of a good cry.

Can they teach me?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had good ol’ Wound Care today, a Monday.

It’s also a stat holiday, so I had to be buzzed in. The nurses work on stat holidays but the reception staff and all the rest of the admin workers do not.

The benefits of not having a crucial job, I guess.

I know there’s a better word for that. One we used all the time during the pandemic. And yet I cannot remember it.

Getting old sucks.

Anyhow, the new-ish wound on my right foot, the one that had the big blister under it, seems to be doing fine now. There’s no sign of the blister except a section of slightly reddened skin. So phew, at least that’s over and done with.

I still could hear from Doctor Chao about the swab they took, so I might not be entirely out of the woods yet.

In this case, no news is definitely good news. If I don’t hear from him about it I will assume they didn’t find anything too scary on the swab.

Or maybe… they found something so hideous and terrifying that they are afraid to tell me in case that makes it angry!

But probably not.

Other than the very minor annoyance of having to ring the bell and be buzzed in, it was a standard trip to Wound Care at the CCC.

I am getting to know the nurses there fairly well, though not by name I’m afraid.

It never occurs to me to ask their name. On some weird and no doubt insane level, that feels like an impolite question to me. Like I’d be prying.

Yeah it doesn’t make sense to me either.

Afterwards. we stopped at Pricemart and Julian was nice enough to go in there and get me a kilogram of BBQ peanuts.

I needed those because it’s very clear to me that my current supply of trail mix ain’t gonna last till Friday.

In fact, I am most likely going to run out tomorrow, Tuesday.

So I needed to supplement my supplies and when I have to do that I usually get peanuts because they are cheap, tasty, and nutritious.

And Julian was able to find lovely BBQ peanuts in the bulk section for me, and I haven’t had those in ages.

So like, yum.

It makes sense that my trail mix is running out because the recent disruption in my supply chain of groceries made it so that instead of getting my usual 1 kg No Name ™ Original Trail Mix and a 600 g bag of something from Basse, I ended up with a 750 kg bag of No Name Sierra Trail Mix and a 400 g bag of that praline mix from the friendly folk over at President’s Choice.

AKA, products for people who are too proud to buy No Name stuff but still want or need to get things cheap.

As you can tell, that only adds up to 1.1 kg which is 500 g less than my usual amount of trail mix, ergo, a shortfall.

Getting used to getting my stuff from Shoppers isn’t going to be easy. And that assumes that last week wasn’t a fluke caused by them still having some American products in the warehouse and next week they’ll be all out.

I may have to make even more accommodations and adjustments. Le sigh.

I don’t like this level of disruption in my life, but it’s a price I am happy to pay if it contributes in some small way to telling Donald Trump to go fuck himself.

Canadians are pissed off and I am loving it because it leave Polievre with absolutely no moves. He can’t agree with our PM or his MAGA-lite base will devour him like a pack of wild dogs, and yet he clearly can’t disagree either or he will be branded a traitor and get torn apart by literally every Canadian.

So at least Trump found a way to get PP to shut the fuck up.

And who knows, maybe a few of his supporters will start wondering how the hell they ended up in a bind like this.

Honestly, the world needs a “right wing but sane” movement almost as much as it needs a “angry liberal” movement.

More after the break.

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The longest dream

My entire journey of recovery has felt like waking up.

As if part of me has been in deep sleep for a long time and therefore returning to myself is a matter of drawing that part of me out of its slumber so that I may be whole.

Looking back even just a couple of years makes me feel like I was dreaming back then.

And in a way, I was. The mind fog I live in thins out year by year. The sun slowly rises and its light comes streaming in, burning the mist away.

Hopefully the lowering of my Paxil dose will speed that along. It’s done me a lot of good so far. I might be less stable now but that also makes progress possible so I am quite willing to pay that price.

Stability isn’t everything anyway. Predictable awfulness is still awfulness.

There are times I feel anxious for no real reason. Nothing external, anyhow. I figure the real reason is that my awakening mind produces a lot more energy than before and yet it doesn’t really know what to do with it yet.

I’m working on it.

I still have very sleepy instincts. I still compulsively avoid doing anything truly energetic even though I know getting my energies out would make me a lot saner and happier. The somnolent part of me still does not want to wake up and it will do whatever it takes to the rest of me as long as it doesn’t have to wake up and face reality.

I know about reality but I’m not fond.

It’s not hard to envision how that came about. That dormant part of me went to sleep while I was being raped at the age of 4 and all I could do was flee into the depths of my own mind, telling myself, this isn’t happening, this isn’t real.

But it was and it is.

Ever since then, withdrawal has been my primary defense mechanism. Like a turtle, I retreat into my shell when threatened or scared or confused, and it takes a great deal of gentle coaxing to get me to come out of my shell at all.

And even then, the slightest thing will have me withdrawing again, and odds are that I won’t come out again for a good long while.

I’d like to stop doing that. I really would.

But when I try I just end up giving up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve had an insight as to why people don’t want to deal with me sometimes.

First, the problem : People have founds me kind of hard to deal with sometimes for my entire life. So very many times problems have come up where the obvious solution would have been for someone to just talk to me about the thing in question.

And when I bring that up, the other people involve just kind of stare at me blankly because they can’t explain why they didn’t just do that, even to themselves, and especially not to me.

And this puzzles and saddens me because as far as I can tell, I’m a very friendly and reasonable and approachable guy who is never cranky or difficult and who is usually quite happy to do or give whatever it is you want.

And yet people dodge me sometimes, and prefer not to deal with me, and this leaves me sad and lonely sometimes despite my pleasant demeanor.

So what gives?

I think the problem is that while my attention is usually quite pleasant, it is also intense.

It’s like I am shining a big bright spotlight on people. And that can be hard to take. There are times when people would much rather avoid these high beams of mine and it doesn’t matter how warm and pleasant and entertaining I am because the sheer brilliance of my dazzling display can really drain people.

The thing is, all of us occurs in that murky and mysterious zone of interpersonal interplay that is social empathy and that strange land contains much that our culture simply does not and maybe even cannot articulate.

So most people don’t even know how to explain why they find me tiring to be around and sometimes would just rather… not do that.

They are as mystified as I am because they too see me as pleasant and funny and nice and all those other stellar attributes of mine and yet they also have the lived experience of doing the equivalent of crossing the street to avoid me.

“Oh god, not him. Not today. Not right now. ” they think and frantically try to avoid dealing with me like they’re a celebrity trying to elude the paparazzi.

And like said celebrity, if they actually get caught in the spotlight they know they will have to be “on” and smiling and friendly and so forth.

Again, it’s not that my spotlight is unpleasant, just a bit… much.

And then they feel guilty, of course. After all, I’m so sweet and nice and funny and etc. And they can sense I crave attention and connection, and that if I knew I was being circumvented it would hurt me deeply.

And that guilt just makes me even harder to be around.

So I get it now. I want attention so bad that when I get it, the show is on, my megawatt personality turns on full blast, and I blow people away with all that personality.

It’s a tragedy of innocence, really.

Clearly, if I want to be a little easier to deal with, I need to learn to dial it back a little. To relax and just be myself and not try so god damned hard. To not turn every interaction into a song and dance act.

Maybe this is why people like me are more comfortable being the star of the show than we are at the cast party afterwards.

On stage, glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife is wonderful. It makes me into a mesmerizing and charismatic performer, a compelling orator, and a pretty amazing dude to be around if you’re ready for me.

But out of the spotlight I’m this odd critter that doesn’t really fit into the normal everyday world so I’m rather awkward and nerdy and strange, even downright spooky at times.

Maybe what I really need is a healthier way to express myself.

I need to get to work on that.

More after the break.

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The truth about touch

Here’s a bit about the modern view of touch :

I know that I deeply, deeply crave touch.

It’s the main reason I am such a snuggle bug as Fruvous. I don’t get cuddles and pets in the real world so I have to get them in text based VR instead.

It’s entirely possible that if I had a sufficiently snuggly partner, I would not feel nearly as driven to seek out cuddles in fox form.

Or maybe I would. It could very much be that when it comes to cuddles and attention, I am a “thirsty dog” who can never get enough.

In both cases, not getting enough of something at a critical age leaves a being craving that thing forever with no possibility of satiation.

A very sad thought, but one I need to face.

Touch is definitely a need I rarely if ever openly address. Like a lot of males in our society, I don’t believe it to be a need I am capable of addressing at all so my only choice is to sublimate it into my fursona and ignore it the rest of the time.

And of course, virtual cuddles don’t really fill the need. They only help with the cravings. Cuddles in reality are always going to be preferable.

Kind of like sex, really. Which could be seen as an extreme form of touch.

I definitely feel like I did not get touched nearly enough during some critical phase of my pre-verbal years and that this might have been the first of many, many developmental windows that would come and go without my even knowing.

Basically, my life has been a developmental train wreck. In purely scientific terms, I am retarded on many, many levels. So many things that happen to “everyone” never happened to me at all.

I am a strange and alien being.

Julian and I recently watched the movie IF, which stands for “Imaginary Friend”, and movie is quite beautifully made and acted but the plot makes no sense at all.

Anyhow, it got me wondering why I never had an imaginary friend. Or a security object, or a stuffed animals I treated like it was really alive, and so on.

And the only answer I can come up with is that something happened to me, before the rape, that kept me from ever having an “age of magic” where I was capable of imagining the friend I needed and believe them to be true.

As to what that thing was, I can only answer : intelligence? For as long as I can remember I have had this rapacious mind that devoured and digested the world in its attempts to understand everything.

And somehow that meant that I couldn’t have an imaginary friend because I knew that they were not there.

As far as I can recall, I have never believed in magic or had faith in things unseen. Things made sense. It all connected. There was no room in my mind for believing things without evidence or proof, just because I needed them to be true.

And I feel like I have suffered terribly as a result. I truly believe that a certain basic amount of faith – defined as a bit of “wiggle room” in reality in which you can generate what you need emotionally – is necessary for the mental health of even the most vehement of atheists, and without it, we wither on the vine.

It is toxic to need a reason to be happy.

It is far better to need a reason not to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

1108

A fuzzy friend of mine pointed me to this amazingly fun website that has “translators” that use AI to “translate” text input.

But not into real world languages, oh no. That’s boring. Google Translate can do that, as can countless apps today.

No, this site “translates” your text into fun stuff. For example :

Here’s the opening few paragraphs of yesterday’s blog entry :

The world has stopped making sense.

So I go to do my weekly shopping, buying from Superstore via DoorDash. I bring up the Superstore site on DoorDash and immediately know something is wrong because the “things you previously bought” strip only has ten items on it

What the great big galloping FUCK?

I click on “show all” and…. nothing changes. Instead of my usual screen full of like sixty different products, I got just those ten things.

And therefore I am completely lost.

some guy you know

Now here it is “translated” into Windows 95 : 

Error: System Failure! The world has encountered an unexpected glitch.
Initiating shopping protocol via DoorDash at Superstore. Homepage loading…anomaly detected: only ten items in the ‘previous purchases’ array.
What the blazes?!
Clicking ‘show all’… access denied. Instead of my traditional interface brimming with over sixty selections, I am left with a mere ten.
Fatal Error: System cannot proceed. Lost in the digital void!

And here it is “translated” into New York lingo : 

 

Yo, the whole world’s gone wacko. I’m just tryin’ to grab my weekly groceries, hittin’ up Superstore through DoorDash, ya feel me? I pull up the Superstore page and right away I’m like, something ain’t right, fam—only ten items in my ‘previously bought’ section. What the actual hell? I hit ‘show all’ and… nada, same ol’ ten. Usually I got a full spread of like sixty items to choose from, but now I’m just lost in the sauce.

But by far the most amazing “translators” are the ones that do rap : 

Yo, the world’s gone crazy, feels like a mess,
Headin’ to the store, gotta shop with finesse.
Hit up Superstore, DoorDash on the scene,
But only ten things, man, what does it mean?
I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ click ‘show all’ real quick,
Nothin’ changes, just a tiny flick.
Used to see sixty, now it’s just ten,
Lost in this maze, where do I begin again?

It’s not really great rap, but still. Wow. 

See, all the other applications of AI are very impressive and I certainly have had a heck of a lot of fun trying them out, but this is the application that tickles me the most on a purely personal level, with me being a wordsmith and all. 

And yes, pedants, I know that these “translators” might not technically be AI. 

Ask me if I care. 

So like, playing with language is kind of a “thing” with me. Other kids had toys, I had books and comedy and all the funny people on TV. For as long as I can remember, words have played a central role in my life. 

I mean, I learned to read when I was only three years old. That’s how far back my obsession with language goes. 

And my attempts to be funny. That’s one thing I can say for sure I am driven to do because no matter how often I completely failed to be funny, I just kept trying. 

And the end result is the nonstop cavalcade of comedy you know and love today! 

In a way, it’s weird that it took me as long as it did – until 2011 – to figure out what I really needed to do was write. 

I guess I long suspected there was a writer in me somewhere but it took doing my Million Word Year to really get that shit jumpstarted. 

And it’s been 1000 words a day ever since that ended. 

It’s kind of impressive, really. 

More after the break. 

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There’s got to be something wrong with you

For years I have been saying that there’s got to be something wrong with you if you want to be an artist. 

And being one of them tricky artist types, I actually mean two things by this. 

There’s the obvious meaning, along the lines of, “yeah, you have to be crazy to want to make a living in the creative arts, ha ha!” 

But what I really mean is that I truly think there has to be something at least a little bit broken in your head for you to actually get good at it. 

Some process has to have started in your head that, given time, sprouts like a seed and then just grows and grows in some obscure corner of the mind over the years, being fed everything you experience and learn, until it’s gargantuan. 

The malfunction, so to speak, is what create the conditions for it to grow out of control like that. It’s the lack of a counterbalancing process, maybe even one that is normally vital in maintaining mental stability, that allows for this strange symbiote we call our talent to grow so enormous, even at our own expense. 

It certain feels like it feeds on me as much as I feed on it sometimes. 

This is why so many of us creative genius types are diagnosably nuts. It’s not a coincidence so many of us are plagued by our “demons”. 

Without those demons, we’d just be normal, well balanced, ordinary people. We might be happier, maybe by a lot, but we’d be just like everybody else too. 

So it’s rolling dice with the devil every single time. The demons might win, like they have with me for all these years, and keep you all to themselves, and not let you use that big bloated talent for anything productive, just lock you away in your own mind. 

But you also might win and get to harness those demons and have them pull you into greatness, or at least get you out of your damned head for a while. 

So far, I’ve been just hiding from the world while that talent of mine grows out of control and threatens to destroy its host. 

That still might happen. I might roll snake eyes and then my health goes boom and I die or end up in that hospital bed full of tubes, helpless to do anything with all this talent I have been growing over the years. 

But I might finally make it out of this goddamned gulag too. 

And if I do, I am going to burn my name into the sky. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world has stopped making sense.

So I go to do my weekly shopping, buying from Superstore via DoorDash. I bring up the Superstore site on DoorDash and immediately know something is wrong because the “things you previously bought” strip only has ten items on it

What the great big galloping FUCK?

I click on “show all” and…. nothing changes. Instead of my usual screen full of like sixty different products, I got just those ten things.

And therefore I am completely lost.

I am so used to relying almost entirely on that section for all my shopping. After all. like most people, I end up buying the same things over and over. So that “previously bought” makes things so much easier.

Oh well, I thought, mentally rolling up my shirtsleeves and squaring my shoulders, I guess I will just have to actually think of what things I need and search for them one by one the old fashioned way.

They weren’t there.

Seriously. Product after product just plain missing. Things you would not think would just like, disappear all of a sudden.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, they didn’t have my No Name Original Trail Mix!

In fact, when I did a search for “no name”, only three fucking products came up! Three! Superstore is like the world headquarters for No Name brand products and yet somehow they only had three things listed on DoorDash today!

I mean holy jostling jiggling fuck, Batman.

It has completely thrown me off. I feel very discombobulated right now. Once more, life has thrown a curveball at me. Something I could never have predicted would ever happen let alone seen coming. And it’s knocked me for a loop.

And I am left wondering what the hell is going on. What could cause this bizarre outage? Where did my products go?

The mostly likely cause is some kind of error on DoorDash’s part. Something fucked up and they accidentally delisted a ton of products and by tomorrow, god willin’, they will have fixed it and things can go back to normal.

Like I said, that’s the most likely cause. But it’s not the only one.

See, I went looking around other stores’ DoorDash sites and I could not find my products there either. It’s like they never existed in the first place.

So my thoughts immediately went to our turmoil with our mercurial neighbors to the south. Was it possible that all the products that have gone missing came from south of the border and are now under embargo?

Not likely, I admit. But I have to wonder. Presumably if something that enormous and impactful were going down, I would have heard about it somehow.

At least I think I would. It’s hard to say with me because I don’t have regular news reading habits. I tend to get my news from either BlueSky or Colbert.

And I don’t always check either of those. Colbert’s not on during the weekend, including Friday, and I check BlueSky whenever I feel like it.

In fact, in some ways, I am a man of irregular habits. I tend to sort of make things up as I go based on how I feel.

Over time, things do settle into certain patterns. I have my meals at the same times every day, more or less. And I blog with lunch and dinner.

And the odds are pretty good that if I’m not eating or sleeping or blogging, I am playing a video game. Sigh.

i want more out of life. I want a place in society. I want to feel like I am contributing and not just living off of others. I want to join that great big shiny productive connected interpersonal world out there that most people take completely for granted.

I want in, god damn it.

But I’m all broken inside.

More after the break.

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Armageddon ain’t over

I just checked DoorDash and yup, it’s still fucked up.

Well tomorrow is do or die time because I am officially out of trail mix now and I need a resupply stat. So if things aren’t rectified by early tomorrow afternoon, I am going to have to resort to something drastic.

Namely, putting together a shopping list and asking Julian to go shopping for me.

That, at least, will answer the question of whether these products are truly gone or just not listed on DoorDash for some reason.

If Julian goes there and there’s bare shelves everywhere and he can’t find my No Name Original Trail Mix anywhere, we will know that perfidy is afoot.

But if everything is normal and the Trail Mix is there, we’ll know it’s a DoorDash thang.

Which would be a lot better for yours truly. I don’t want to have to come up with a whole new shopping regime with brand new products because apparently mine are all gone.

I haven’t tried it in Microsoft Edge yet. Maybe it’s a Chrome thing, somehow.

If it does turn out to be that, I will give serious thought to migrating to Edge for good. I have no reason to be loyal to any particular browser seeing as I don’t do anything but go to websites and bookmark some of them, and all browsers do that.

So I will go where I have to for things to fucking work right.

I really don’t want to prevail upon Julian. And I really, really don’t want to have to make a shopping list. That’s so much mental effort! I have to remember everything that I need and that means mentally combing through the kitchen over and over.

Oh right, and if I end up needing Julian, that would mean paying for my groceries in cash instead of paying with the card and that would be a hassle too.

All in all, this whole deal has really knocked the blocks out from under me and I greatly resent this disruption to my routine.

I hope I can sort this bullshit out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My state is Minnesota. They seem nice.

Been ill today. Missed Wound Care as a result. Woke up feeling very hot, but that’s fairly normal for me.

I sleep hot.

But when I still felt like bacon would sizzle if it touched my skin an hour after getting up, I knew something was up. Something not good.

That’s when I took stock of myself and realized I also felt light-headed and disoriented and that my mind fog was much denser than usual. And I had a headache.

So I spent most of this morning with one toe out the door to go to the hospital if things took a turn for the worse.

Standard whine : I don’t wanna go. The ER is so boring and depressing. That would be the one time I would wish my tablet was in working order.

Otherwise, I am still quite convinced I am better off without it.

Then again, if I got it fixed, I could just have it around for emergencies. There’s no reason I would have to go back to being such a video game junkie that the moment I’m in bed I’ve got the god damned thing in my hands and I am playing some mindless and manipulative Android game.

Man, I do not miss that.

Well, except for the crosswords. Those were fun. And not designed to psychologically torture money out of you.

I ain’t ever playing that kind of “free” game again.

Not even on the PC. I downloaded a free MMORPG called Guild Wars 2 recently because the description made it sound good and it looked fun, then I played it for like 20 minutes and that was long enough for me to remember that I actually hate that kind of game and wonder WTF I was thinking.

Some lessons I have to periodically relearn, it seems.

For instance, that I really do not like corned beef. It sounds like the sort of thing I would like, which is why I keep forgetting that I don’t like it, but it’s actually quite gross.

Anyhow. Back to me.

I seem to be getting over whatever it is, knock on wood. I still feel pretty gross overall but I’ve been hydrating aggressively and that has kept the feverishness at bay.

I really need to get the medical kind of thermometer. I would really like to know whether or not I actually have a fever when I feel like this.

Knowing my life, the answer will be “no” and I will be left with a mystery as to how I can feel so hot without running a fever.

Wait, come to think of it, that could be from an inflammatory response.

It could also be from dehydration. My system is very unforgiving on that front. Falling behind on refueling my sweat glands can really fuck me up.

Well given how much I pee, I guess that’s not a surprise.

All that fluid has to come from somewhere

What else… did Therapy Thursday. I was not in an introspective mood, so it was slow going at first.

I’ve not been feeling introspective at all lately. That’s why these blog entries have been somewhat breezier and chattier than usual.

I don’t want to dive deep into the mucky waters of my fractured mind. I want to frolic about on the surface like a frisky seal.

I need time on the surface to dry out, groom my fur, and soak up some rays as I enjoy the benefits of having gone deep to dislodge more encrusted emotions.

With every successful dive, I free up more space in my mind for me to be able to think and breathe and grow and overall just be me.

It’s a long and tortuous process, like tunneling your way out of prison, but it will all be worth it when I am finally free.

And it’s not like I have anything better to do.

In the next section, the dumb things I have been doing lately.

More after the break.

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Hard to swallow

In this case, quite literally. 

So I take a nap, get up, get some water, and take a big gulp. 

And damn near choke on it.

Somehow, in my sleep, something caused my throat to swell up and make it very hard for me to swallow anything. 

Nothing goes down easy, not even liquids. 

This was and is, to put it very mildly, rather alarming. 

It’s eased off somewhat since then, thank God, because if it hadn’t I would be in the ER right now. Not being able to swallow is kind of an emergency, especially if I can’t even get liquids into me. 

The only treatment for that would be to get me in a hospital bed and give me all my meals via IV drip. 

Wow that would suck. I love food. Me and food go way back. We’ve had great times together, food and I. 

Anyhow, I am doing better now. I can drink fluids, though I can feel some resistance. And I can eat food, though each bite burns a little going down. 

Before I discovered my swallowing problem, I was thinking I had a nasty case of heartburn. And I was paying close attention to that. 

After all, nobody has looked at my heart lately, and heart diseases runs in the family. 

Hell, it gallops. 

In fact, that initial, ill-fated sip of water was meant to hopefully dilute the acid in my esophagus and relieve said heartburn. 

But then I got sidetracked by swallowing issues. 

All in all, today has been kind of fucked up. Weird health shit appearing and disappearing at a much faster rate than usual. 

I hope things settle down because it’s putting a serious strain on my ability to not freak out about things. A much younger me would have been panicked by these weird and distressing incidents, and that, of course, would make everything much much worse. 

Right now, I am back to “one toe out of the door and on the way to the ER” mode. 

Dear body : please be nice. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

It’s been another medically busy week.

On Monday, I tried to hack the system by just passing a message to Doctor Chao that I needed my prescriptions renewed.

Denied! Well, it was worth a shot. Had to set up a phone appointment instead.

And it turns out it was good that, I did, because…

Yesterday, Tuesday, I had wound care, and the nurse took one look at my left foot and saw that there was a huuge blister under the wound there and immediately went and got Linda, the Wound Care Clinician, who also looked very distressed about it.

And you know she’s seen some shit.

So Linda poked the thing with a sterile needled and drained it, and then she trimmed away the big flap of skin left over.

The blister, or maybe hematoma, was a bit bigger than a toonie and a horrible mottled green/brown color, and you might well be asking yourself, why on Earth did it take a nurse to tell me there was something very wrong with my foot.

The answer to that question is surprisingly complex.

For one, there’s my general cluelessness. I am school smart and reality stupid. That’s what happens when you’re so withdrawn that you deal with reality only the absolute minimum amount it takes to not starve to death, soil yourself, or walk into traffic.

The hilarious but not in a haha way thing is that I had been wondering why my right foot felt “weird” when it was in a shoe – like there was something in the shoe with my toes.

And there was. It was a big fucking blister.

Once more I shake my head at how bad I am at taking care of myself.

Another reason I needed a nurse to tell me about the blister is that one nurse had already seen it, last Friday, and she didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.

I very often take my emotional cues from other people.

I’m just so impressionable!

My two nurses today seemed to think that the Friday nurse really should have caught the blister and done something about it.

But I don’t blame her too much. It’s very easy to get caught up in my aura and be part of my reality bubble and get swept along, and I usually don’t even know I am doing it.

I suppose I should fix that.

At one point, there was talk of sending me to the ER because the nurses were worried about the infection that caused the blister.

Thank goodness that after the whole thing was removed, they decided that I didn’t need to do that. It would have been such a pain in the ass.

They did take a swab and send it to the lab, though.

Later that day was my appointment to get a needle in my other eye, my right eye. That was no fun, still hurt like fuck, but it was over in a second.

I’ll be going back in six weeks.

Today, I had a phone appointment with Doctor Chao in the morning. I had three things to get done and I did all three, which I am proud of.

1. Tell him about the stuff with the blister, Check!
2. Get all my prescriptions renewed at the behest of my pharmacist, SImon. Check!
3. Get a referral to this place for physiotherapy. Check!

Hopefully enough physio can restore at least some functionality to my legs.

But honestly, even if it ends up just being exercise, that’s good too.

I just want someone who knows about these things to tell me what exercises I can do without harming myself.

I know that exercise will do me good on pretty much every level.

But I’m scared.

Stay tuned for the other adventure I had today

More after the break.

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Some fun stuff

If there is more of this comic, I wanna read it!

View post on imgur.com

Suddenly I have a deep desire to travel by train.

And then there’s this tribute to sneks and carbs.

View post on imgur.com

My fuzzy friends know of such neato things!

Now I’m really craving a good dinner roll.

---

The last thing

The last thing today was finally getting that lab work done.

It had been at least two weeks since it had been assigned and I was feeling very guilty about not having done it yet.

As patient readers know, I tried to get it done last Friday but at that point, I hadn’t fasted, so I couldn’t do my good ol fasting A1C.

So I had to come back. This time, I was smart, and booked an appointment online in order to minimize the probability of having to wait in line.

That did mean waiting till today, though. Oh well.

Julian dropped me off at the LifeLabs just half a block away, There’s another one near us over on 3 Road but I don’t like that one.

The lady who took my blood was amazing because she got the needle in my vein on the first try with no hesitation or “searching”.

As patient readers know, I have veins that not only “hide” but that are also sort of rubbery in a way that actually deflects the needle.

So today’s super easy withdrawal from my personal blood bank was a testament both to her skill and my ability to communicate exactly where the good vein is in the crook of my right elbow via body language and telepathy alone.

Then came the pee test. And of course, once I was in the bathroom, I, who has to pee ten times a god damned day, came up dry.

And after I had deliberately drank half a liter of water right before I left, too. I guess it hadn’t made it through my system yet.

But luckily I knew just what to do this time. You see, I knew that when I strain to poop, often a little pee comes out as well.

So I just sat down on the toilet and strained (without pooping) and managed to slowly milk the requisite quantity of urine from my reluctant system.

Thus I foiled one of fate’s attempts to make me feel awkward and embarrassed.

And now you’re all caught up!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh wait, PS. I solved my video game problem.

I won’t go into the details, let’s just say, I was a victim of ambiguous language.

Anyhow. See you tomorrow!