Placeholder post title

I swear I am going to remember the really excellent idea for a post I had earlier.

But in the meantime, I guess the usual drivel will have to do.


Not much going on yesterday and today, thank Dog. No medical appointments, no testing or imaging, no trips to the bank, no nuthin’.

And that’s quite a relief after that crazy busy day I had on Friday.

Now it’s a nice quiet Sunday and I have been indulging my video game addiction and catching naps and occasionally snacking between meals.

I am starting to wonder if I would be best off with a lifestyle of constant, low grade snacking. Just always having something healthy on the go.

With the occasional “sometimes” food as a treat.

He inspires us all

It seems like a radical idea, and maybe it is. I admit, the vision of my turning into the constantly eating fat dude who is the butt of many jokes crosses my mind.

You inspire me too, Clawsy. (sotto voce : IN MY PANTS. )

That reminds me. I haven’t posted anything shockingly obscene here lately.

That feels wrong. One sec.

Here we go!

And we have three “yea” votes for wild jungle butt sex, and no “nay” votes. Motion passed!

The world needs more hot gay jungle butt sex.

Preferably with AC, though. Don’t want people to pass out from heat exhaustion before they have a chance to pass out from SEXUAL exhaustion

Like I said before, I haven’t been doing any AI art lately. Which is odd, really, because I was making that stuff as a hobby more or less all day long for like months.

But my “new” computer crashes when I try to do a render, so, grr. A very fun hobby nipped in the bud by a mysterious hardware ailment

I am pretty sure it’s an issue with my power supply. Next Wednesday, when my deposit drops, I am going to order a new one.

Something ballsy and powerful. But not TOO expensive. I need to go through a period of normal spending levels in order to regain my equilibrium.

I mean, I might even end up punting the new power supply purchase to April’s deposit purely to give myself a break for a month.

Better to let a surplus build up than to go into debt anyhow.

I can’t wait to be able to get back to my usual level of groceries. I could only afford one fridge buddy of cans of pop this week.

So I got a week of nothing but Fresca ahead of me.

And don’t get me wrong, I love Fresca. But I need variety, too.

What else…. I have been having a lot of fun farting around with side quests and whatnot in Dragon Age : Inquisition, but that itch to continue the actual plot of the game is building up and eventually I am going to have to give in.

Like I’ve said before, they were clearly trying to make their own Skyrim, and the game has the buckets and buckets of content to prove it.

One interesting choice that differentiates it from Skyrim, though, is that there is no physical “world”. There is a main map and you go between different lands through it. I can’t go to the Hissing Wastes and start walking and end up at the Forbidden Oasis.

And I am fine with that. The novelty of having a whole “open world” to explore wore off a very long time ago.

I mean, the last thing I need is for games to trigger my agoraphobia. I’d be fine with a came that took place almost entirely indoors.

You know. Cozy. But with monster slaying.

More after the break.


What’s with my life?

Earlier I was feeling pretty ill. My head hurt, my stomach hurt, my testicles hurt, I felt feverish and nauseous, and my appetite could only be expressed in negative numbers.

Big ones, too.

And while I was feeling crummy, it suddenly came to me in a flash : this has been happening to me for my entire fucking life.

As in, I have memories of going through periods like that when I was still too young to go to school.

And my whole life, I have treated it the exact same way : suffer a while, then it goes away, and I forget all about it and go on with my life without ever telling anyone about it, least of all a doctor.

Now what the fuck is up with that??

Gods, it’s like there’s no end to the ways in which I am messed up.

Yeah, I know, that’s way too negative a way to look at things. But it’s all I have until I learn to be more positive.

And that’s going to take a change that goes far deeper than mere education.

Anyhow, it’s like I am a little kid who gets hurt playing but goes right back to playing the minute it stops hurting.

Which, come to think of it, I also did. I would come home for supper after playing outside all day and my poor Mom would exclaim, “Michael, you’re bleeding!”.

And I would look down at whatever cut, scrape, snag, or whatever like I was seeing it for the first time ever and say, “Wow. I am. Huh. ”

I’m not the easiest person to care about, am I? I wish I could be more in touch with my surroundings and my body so I wouldn’t put my loved ones through all this.

But I am an introspective introvert to a nearly pathological degree, and I don’t know how to fix that. I can tell myself I “should” do this and I “should” do that, but none of that shit is going to happen until something far deeper and more fundamental in me changes.

After all, my primary trauma of being raped when I was four years old happened so early in my life that I have very little memory of life before it.

And having to go that far back to find renewal is hard, especially when you are an over-brained weirdo like me who has gone way too far in the direction of the ego and superego and therefore had a weak and puny id.

And the id is the primal life-force. It’s the drive we share with all animals. It is the spark that drives the engine that we call ourselves.

No wonder I feel like one of the living dead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fru’s Very Busy Day : Aftermath

Today’s mostly been about recovering from yesterday.

As you recall, I had a very busy schedule yesterday.

First, I had the usual Wound Care at 9:30 AM. That went mine. My nurse was a little timid and shy, which was adorable. My bandages were in terrible shape from having been on there a whole week.

Remember, I didn’t make it to last Tuesday’s Wound Care session because I was so totally wiped out from last Monday night’s MRI.

As a consequence, the one on my right foot was in tatters and the one on my left (grossness warning) was so full of discharge that I think I was technically floating.

Ew. Anyhow, after that, it was back home for around an hour. It’s an awkward amount of time to fil especially because it means going from car to apartment and back for my poor fragile leg and arm muscles.

One of these times, I will bring my tablet and stay in the car. I am sure I can fill an hour by doing one of my jigsaw puzzles.

They’re very relaxing.

God damn, am I old. Next I will begin to crochet.

And I barely even know what that means!

The visit to Doctor Chao went fine. I am kicking myself a little for forgetting to mention my back pain to him. I only got as far as telling him about having more pain and fatigue lately when we both go swept up in my urinalysis results that everything else got forgot.

Oh wait, that’s wrong. That should have been “forgotted:>

Honestly, my back pain issues are a lot more important then some minor pee ailment. I get these intense stabbing pains in my lower back sometimes that scare the poop our of me, and I should probably get that shit looked at.

The kind of pains that make my back spasm and my spine to instantly straighten like the cane of a too-hastily opened umbrella.

Anyhow, after a prescription for an antibiotic for my pee fungus, we came on home for the big wait until 10:30 pm or so when we would head to Vancouver for my second MRI series of this week.

During that wait time, I would both go to the door to retrieve my groceries, and then, three hours later, go to the door to get my shawarma.

Getting my shawarma went fine, but the grocery trap was a nightmare. In no way should I be carrying anything that heavy at al, let alone all the way to the other end of the apartment to my room.

What happened to my perfectly sensible plan to only move the groceries inside the apartment, leaving them right there by the door?

That would have been way easier. But as patient readers know, I am a crazy person who does crazy things for no good reason, so instead I picked up two big bags of groceries and headed for my bedroom.

I felt like I was dying before I had even made it half way.

But I survived, and eventually it came time for the MRI. And I felt very agitated due to my busy day beforehand and the stress and pain I had already been through.

I was seriously considering hitting the panic button so I could GTFO.

While waiting, I took 2 Ativan 1 mg pills, melted under the tongue .As usual, that took like ten minutes when it’s only supposed to take 20 seconds.

Everything about me is weird.

But onc things got going, I was fine. I just mellowed out and went into my “internalized but awake” mode and dozed my way through the whole thing.

And it was a LOT, because there were three scans : one for each arm (30 mins each), and then a pelvis to ankle scan (45 minutes), so I was in there for 105 minutes, or an hour and 45 minutes.

Still, whatever. Thanks to Ativan keeping my panic suppressed, it was no biggie.

More after the break.


Another fucking adventure

Wanted to order in tonight, but my card is tapped out. so he had to be Pizza Hut.

Fine. I order, it arrives, and I make my painful way to the door to pay for and retrieve it. To do so, I brought a fifty.

Fucker at the door says, “Oh sorry, I didn’t bring any change. ”

He knew I’d be paying in cash and he brought no change?”

“All I have if a 20. ”

My bill came to $30.16. So in order to avoid stiffing him by sixteen centers, I have to go all the way back to my bedroom to retrieve a five then come all the way back to the front door to pay him.

THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING FOR ME TO HAVE TO DO.

By the time I get back to the door, I am dying from the pain and the exhaustion. I manage to pay him and he leaves, I turn around to start plotting how I am going to get it all back to my room, trip, and fall down onto my knees.

My muscles had gone on strike and were refusing to hold me up.

So now I was on the ground cry-laughing from the pain and absurdity of it all.

I honestly think the dude’s scam was to make it so inconvenient to pay him properly that I would just hand him the fifty and say “keep it!”, thus getting him a nearly $20 tip.

Well fuck you, asshole. Clearly you didn’t count on me being willing to risk my life to go get that $5 to pay you properly.

And the fact that you would try to pull this scam on a very clearly disabled person speaks very poorly as to your character.

You unmarked sack of discount shit.

So that was my Saturday Night adventure I am hoping Julian (hi Julian!) starts working earlier Joe-attending shifts so this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

And I guess it’s a bit of an ego bruise to the part of me that thinks I can do all these things for myself if I really have to.

I don’t like the idea of what I do being limited in what I can do based on whoever happens to be around at the time.

And poor Julia is looking after two sick people, me and Joe, so I don’t want to make his life any more stressful than it already is.

Maybe I need to start getting my pizza via Amazon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling the droop

I am worried that my mystery muscular disorder is getting worse.

Lately I have been getting so tired from such small amounts of activity. And that feeling that my muscles are just hanging off my bones like so much meat is getting stronger.

But I have thought that before, and it turned out to be something transient. So I am resisting my usual urge to jump to (negative) conclusions.

I mean, I already know I am fighting off an infection.

A UTI, specifically. My second urine sample tested positive for nitrates (the kind produced by germs) and an even higher staph count than before, so yup, I definitely got something nasty lurking in my waterworks.

Luckily, the particular variant of staph is vulnerable to pretty much all antibiotics, and so Doctor Chao was able to pick the one that kills this particular bug the best with minimum damage to the good gut bacteria so vital for digestion.

Meaning there’s a chance that, for once, I will be able to take antibiotics without ending up with diarrhea.

I learned all this when I went to see Doctor Chao for my weekly B12 shot, of course.

Hmmm, come to think of it, he should be ordering new bloodwork to see if my B12 levels are healthy now.

Boy, I sure hope so. That shit could have many beneficial long term effects.

Today’s going to be a rather busy day for me and my poor tired muscles, because not only did I have Wound Care and Doctor Chao’s office (for my B12 shot) this morning, and not only will i be doing MRI #2 tonight, but in between I will be bringing in my own grocery order and whatever I order for dinner because Julian is currently “on shift” with Joe at the hospital today.

So for me, today will be a freaking marathon. No probs, I can handle it.

About Julian being “on shift” : It is very, very wonderful how Joe’s family has organized themselves into a rota in order to make sure Joe has someone with him all the time.

That is exactly the sort of warm. understanding, supportive act of kindly sacrifice and consideration that my awkward and distant family would never do.

Not even for the kids they like, aka, not me.

However, if I were Joe, I would secretly find it really irritating. When I am sick, I want to be alone with my misery.

I love getting visitors, mind you. They puncture the terrible feeling of isolation that being in the hospital can cause, and remind you that you have a life and people who care about you and you will be back to both some time soon.

But the nice thing about visitors is they leave. I enjoy their company for an hour or two and then they leave and I go back to the important task of suffering.

See, I can’t help but be “on” when other people are around. It’s kind of sickness. IF there are people around, I am performing for them.

I have no other way to relate to people, really. Sad but true.

I know that my loved ones don’t expect me to entertain them all the time. It’s just that when I try to imagine myself having people I know and love in the hospital room with me and either ignoring them or being cranky with them, my brain melts.

That could really screw me over some day, given my unstable health. I guess I will have to deal with it when I finally end up a permanent resident of medical care facilities.

Not looking forward to that, but it seems inevitable.

And I can barely be bothered to care.

More after the break.


Just the tip

The good news is that despite overestimating the amount of money that would be left on my card after today’s groceries by about ten bucks, i did manage to order in.

The bad news is that in order to do it, I had to cut the tip my Dasher (seriously, that’s what DoorDash calls their drivers) from $3 to $1.

Well I never said it was bad news for me.

Seriously though, I do feel bad about, in a loose way, stealing some of my Dasher’s tip. If money was not so tight, he would have gotten $2 more, so…. sorry dude.

But facing the possibility of not being able to order in at all because of insufficient funds when I had been looking forward to my “treat” was just too damned depressing.

So think of this as a mental health donair.

And this was after a long journey where I was taking thing off the order and trying the charge again only to get the insufficient funds error.

The breakthrough came when I realized the wraps were WAY cheaper than the plates I was trying to order from the shawarma place.

Like, $5 cheaper.

And yet I still had to, um, shave my Dasher’s tip.

Oh well. For karma’s sake,. when my finances go back to normal next Wednesday and I am ordering in, I will pad the next guy’s tip.

Doesn’t help my most recent Dasher but it will help assuage my conscience.

I am so damned bourgeoisie.

For the record, the beef “donair” wrap is quite delicious. Which is good, because I chose the restaurant totally on a whim.

Saw the listing on DoorDash, said, “That looks good!” and ordered.

And I am proud of that. I did something spontaneously and without a heavy amount of attempted forethought and it worked out just fine.

Had it turned out badly, I might feel different. Then the struggle would be to resist excoriating myself over how STUPID I had been and how if I had just given it TWO SECOND OF THOUGHT and so forth and so on.

Breaking myself of that habit is going to be tough. It’s like it hijacks my usual bad response to disappointment and turns it into raw hot self-loathing.

And I don’t deserve that. It’s not my job to do absolutely everything in the smartest way possible at all times. That’s not a standard anyone can meet.

Even the brightest of us are stupid most of the time.

But we all do our best.

And that means giving ourselves lots of room to be human.

Not an angel, or a robot, or a holy man, or a pedagogue, or any of the other ideal selves that dwell within me but can never be real.

I might have the power to seen larger than life, but I am still just some dude.

And it would behoove me to remember that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The war within

I feel like there is a conflict raging inside me.

And that’s good. Conflict is good. Conflict gets things done.

The war is basically between the old guard and the new hotness. Between the old sick part of my mind and soul and the new, strong, healthy part that wants me to rise and grow and get some kind of a god damned grown-up life for myself.

I feel like the door to my emancipation is wide open. I’m just having trouble deciding t go through it. The part of me that doesn’t want to have to change holds me back.

Hence the war. The part of me that is alive and healthy is fighting to overcome all that freezing fog and glacial ice inside me in order to take over and finally heal me, fully and completely, without the old guard’s fucking interference ruining things.

And the new growth will eventually win. It’s inevitable. The old guard is fixed and moribund and unliving. The new growth is vital and resilient and strong. The new growth will grow and spread and bring new life to the frozen plains of my Midnight Tundra, and soon the land will live and grown again.

Spring at last. Sweet lord almighty, spring at last.

And I can ease this process along by remembering to deliberately send energy down into those lively, vital parts of me in order to energize their growth and make sure they can overcome all that dead scar tissue and the husks of old emotions to reclaim my soul and my self from the fell clutches of mental illness.

Lord knows I have lots of energy to spare. My body might be tired and sick and depleted but my mind is still an electromagnetic powerhouse that generates gigawatts of raw electricity merely as a byproduct of the massive amount of mentation going on at all times and at all levels.

This mind of mine is pretty fucking amazing. It can do so much. I’m a freaking wizard, Harry, and yet I languish in the Failure to Launch zone because I’m also crazy.

And part of that insanity is being afraid to grow up. The central pathology of Failure to Launch seems to revolve around this feeling that to grow up is to die, because growing up means going out into that mean old world out there, and we are convinced we cannot possibly “make it” out there.

And that’s definitely crazy, because like… why not? Getting a job is horrible but doable. Finding an apartment is also bad but doable. Paying bills is easy in this day and age. Housework is not that bad, especially if you keep on top of it.

So what’s the big deal? It must be that whole “fixed sense of self” thing I have alluded to in the past. To grow up is to change on a deep and fundamental level, and to the fixed self that seems like death.

Try to convince a caterpillar that turning into a butterfly won’t kill it. That it will still live on as a butterfly.

Similarly, becoming an adult won’t kill me,. Or rip me out of my cozy tomb and throw me to the wolves. Or cost me some important part of myself.

But it will mean change. The kind you can’t back out of. It means changing as a person and that’s always super hard and scary to do.

There will be pain. And fear. Maybe even some (metaphorical) blood.

But I will emerge from my chrysalis as the radiant glory that I truly am.

And all the world shall be warmed by my glow.

Plus I’m going to get MAD laid.

More after the break.


Journey to the Center of the Earth

I wonder what a chronology of the public perception of “the world” would look like.

And I mean, the modern perception of “the world” as a spinning ball of dirt with a bunch of different nations and cultures on it.

Obviously, if you define “the world” as “all there is”, we have had an idea of “the world” ever since our “world” was just one tiny slice of Olduvai Gorge.

This question first came to me as a child in the 1970’s, when it was very common for people to bemoan “the state of the world” or to say “this world’s got problems!” or to ask one another “what do you think of the world situation?[1]“.

And I am pretty sure that was new. I don’t think people in the 50’s and 60’s thought that way, or though about “the world” much at all.

Despite the rise of mass communication (like TV and radio), things that happened in far off countries could just as well be happening on another planet.

But the Seventies brought a rise in mass communication power and intensity. Color TV came along, as did international phone exchanges and touch tone dialing. Satellite communications allowed for live coverage of anywhere on earth to be beaming directly into your living room. The baby steps of the internet happened in the Seventies.

Mostly nerds at universities and military bases text chatting with one another.

“The world” was getting smaller. Small enough to fit inside people’s heads, I suppose, at least as a conceptual space.

I suppose before there was “the world” to complain about, people complained about “life” or “this life” being harsh and cruel and full of misfortune, misery, and woe.

The difference is that back then, it really freaking was. War, famine, plague, and death stalked the lives of pretty much everyone.

Anyhow, that pessimism about “the world” and the universal belief that “this world has a lot of problems” is something that a lot of us Gen X types grew up with.

And people wonder why we are so sullen and cynical.

WE LEARNED IT FROM YOU!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.



Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. According to the title character of the comic strip B.C., “i couldn’t think of a better place for it. “

Get off my back

When’s the last time you heard someone say that, eh?

Anyhow. Being me has comes with a certain amount of back pain ever since my second growth spurt. when I was fifteen or thereabouts.

Nothing terrible or crippling. Just occasional aches in my lower back that make me really, really appreciate chairs with good back support.

But lately, the pain has gotten worse, to the point of occasionally being “acute” (defined by me as “bad enough to make me cry out in pain”) and I am starting to worry.

The old man noises I have been making as I move around have taken on a sharply plaintive tone, and there have been a number of worrisome incidents.

Like this one time I was getting out of bed (always the biggest challenge for my back) when my back muscles spasmed quite painfully and pulled my spine ramrod straight, causing me to fall back onto my bed in a dazed state.

That was pretty bad.

And in general, the creaking of my spine has been more painful and the muscles there have become far more likely to be an impediment to my moving around than the long term issues with the muscles in my legs and arms.

It took a while for this to penetrate the paranoid parapets of my consciousness because it sort of blended in with the pain from my limbs.

It took a while for it to get acute enough to stand out and make itself known.

But as recently as last Monday night, when I was doing the MRI thing, I noticed that it was my back aching that limited how much time I could spend walking far more than my leg and arm muscles.

I’ve been trying to sort of bully the muscles in my lower back into relaxing via pushing my spine straight with my fist, and of course via rubbing, and both of those things feel good and seem to help but the root problem remains.

Meaning it’s probably a digestive issue at heart. (Or at spleen. ) Somewhere in that troubled territory known as my lower intestine(s) is some kind of soft blockage and my peristaltic attempts to pass it down the line are making the entire area tense, including the lower back muscles that are, after all, right behind it.

Sounds weird, but trust me, I have been through this before.

Not a lot I can do about it except to hydrate aggressively in order to try to flush the blockage downstream, and to keep it moist and thus less likely to get stuck and clog things up as well as making it more likely to break into easier to pass chunks.

Oh well. To coin a phrase, this too shall pass.

But just in case, I will bring it up with Doctor Chao when I see him on Friday morning for my weekly B12 shot.

That’s going to be a busy day. Wound Care and Doctor Chao in the morning and then my second of two MRIs late at night.

I will be a lot less nervous about the second MRI because now it’s a known thing. I am always a lot more calm when I am no longer dealing with an unfamiliar place and all the overstimulation that comes from that.

I really am a fragile, timid creature, aren’t i?

But I am working on that. By hook or by crook, somehow, I will pull myself up out of this deep dark well and find a way to be real and feel good in the real world.

I don’t have to be an urban hermit any more.

More after the break.


So damned tired

It feels like the simplest of things takes so much effort lately.

I don’t know if I am at the bottom of a cycle or what. But it sure feels that way. Just getting to the kitchen to get food and back feels like a marathon. I am breathing hard and sweating and a little bit dizzy when I get back.

And I really, really don’t want to lose the ability to go get my own food. It’s like my last line of defense against the erosion of my personal capacities.

Well, that and being able to go to the bathroom on my own. But that does not bear thinking on at all.

It would be ironic if, having regained the ability to order my own groceries online and thus saved Julian from having to go grocery shopping for me for him to then have to start making my meals and bringing them to me.

Actually, at that point, I would just request help from the province. I know they office meal assistance via some kind of meals on wheels deals deal sometimes.

Back home, when I was a kid, Meals on Wheels was simple : they came straight from the hospital kitchen, just like you were an inpatient there.

I do sometimes wonder if I would be better off in an assisted living facility. It would unburden poor Julian and take a lot of guilt and worry off my conscience, plus they could monitor my vitals and head off issues before they become problems.

And to be honest, relying on me to self-report is a terrible system. Between a lot of problems not showing up unless I am up and moving (which would happen even less in a managed care home) and my just having no idea how I am supposed to be feeling, my ability to know when I am sick is more or less entirely based on whether or not I can still use my computer to play video games.

Sad, ain’t it? I am a piteous creature, n’est-ce pas?

Sometimes I wish I could just give up and start over. Just magically leave this life and this body behind and start over in some small town up the coast where nobody knows me or my history and I can start over with a clean slate and decide who I am from there.

Like V did in V for Vendetta.

But with less murder.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got the ice in me

And its name is Ativan.

Did the whole MRI thing last night. The good news was that the scan took only 15 minutes, not 45. Apparently they have better machines now.

Makes me wonder if they keep telling people the older, longer times because it’s so nice to tell them it will only be a third as long in person.

The first nurse I encountered was not pleasant. He was one of those high strung Asian dudes who basically radiates tension and who treats me like a particularly dimwitted pack animal that needs constant goading to get to do even the simplest things.

Really, really not a good fit for me. I mean yeah, I move slowly and cautiously, but it’s because your nattering at me overloads my verbal processing center with commands.

STFU for a second and give me time to process what you’ve already said. Geez.

I suppose I could just tune you out and do whatever seems to make sense, but occasionally there’s actual, important info in what you say, so I have to listen.

Luckily he handed me off to a way, way nicer nurse who was kind, gentle, and funny, and that’s what I respond to best.

She even laughed when, after some painful maneuvering and accompanying old man noises. I said, “Being sick is hard work, ya know. ”

Which I thought was a cute, funny thing to say. Turns out I was right!

Anyhow, she shepherded me through getting ready for the scan. Thankfully, it was a thorough modern and sleek looking machine (smoothly contoured white plastic and ceramic, very sci fi) and not the bizarre monstrosity that looked like an industrial dishwasher fucked an iron lung that I went through before.

IT didn’t help that the chamber with Monstro in it had all the grace and charm of a gym basement, or maybe a storage room under your municipal pool.

Anyhow, this place was much nicer. Soon, I was settled in to the head vice (or whatever you call the thing to keep your head steady) and then she put a sort of mask over my face that looked like the mask they made Hannibal Lecter wear as re-imagined by Fisher-Price. Or maybe Lego.

I’d already taken my Ativan when I was in the waiting room. IT produced a kind of icy calm in me which was vastly preferable to freaking out but which I don’t enjoy.

I am already far too cold and dead inside. More of that is hardly welcome.

Anyhow, I was relaxed through most of the scan, but by the end of it. I was beginning to become agitated again and I came dangerously close to entering the “I feel trapped!” realm which can only lead to panic and anxiety and misery.

So I think that before the scan on Friday, I will take two Ativan. Not looking forward to a double dose of ice and snow, but it’s better than freaking out and going through phobic hell during a scan which promises to be twice as long.

i can easily imagine me losing my shit completely and trying to escape the machine by any means necessary.

Well, they give you a sort of kill switch, so presumably I would just squeeze that and everything would shut down.

Not as dramatic as going full on Beast Mode, but probably a lot safer and a lot less likely to get a big red flag added to my medical file.

WARNING : Patient appears calm, intelligent, and well-behaved, but the second something goes wrong he Hulks out.

Nobody wants that.

More after the break.


At a van

So far, the main side effect of my Ativan use has been sleepiness.

I’ve had a pretty sleepy day.

And sadly, it’s not been the nice warm cozy kind of sleepiness.

No, it’s been more the “dragged unwillingly back into the void by the tentacles of a malevolent interdimensional whirlpool over and over again” variety.

Well, I was warned that Ativan might interfere with sleep apnea.

Actually, scratch that. Nobody warned me about that at all. I had to do my own research and find out about the potentially dangerous interactions between both Ativan and sleep apnea AND Ativan and Gabapentin on my own.

Now I am pretty sure there would be no reason why my pharmacy would know about my sleep apnea. It’s not like I take drugs for it.

They definitely know about the Gabapentin though.

Oh well. In this life, you’re on your own.

A fascinating take on mood management

Cant trust anyone to look out for you. Because they might not. Especially if, like me, there’s something about you that makes people not want to think about you or deal with you in any way.

I am not saying people are callous or evil or neglectful. although it feels that way sometimes. It’s more like I am just too much, ya know? I have such a powerful effect on people with how I express myself that when people are not around me, it subconsciously makes them want to avoid me just to preserve their own identity.

Or something like that.

And I am sure it confuses people because I am a sweet and nice and kind fellow who is funny and fun to be around, so why do they cross the street to avoid me?

Which sadly is just another reason to avoid me. I am just so confusing!

To average folks, that all just comes across consciously as my being “weird”. And, ya know, guilty as charged. I’m weirder than most fuck.

But it’s more than that. There is an aura I generate that gently warps reality to be more like what I am trying to project.

If I ever decided to use that in a focused, drive way for my own personal gain, I could easily become a charismatic demagogue with a special cadre of “true believers” ready to have their lives and their reality defined by me.

But like Paul Atriedes, I don’t want hordes of fanatics screaming by name as they cut a bloody swatch across the world in a brutal jihad.

I just want to fix the system and bring a small number of billionaires down.

And if that takes brutal bloody violence, well then…. maybe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Scanners, part 1

Tonight’s the night I go for my first of two MRI scans at VGH’s Blackmore Pavilion.[1]

Not looking forward to it. Glad I had the forethought and chutzpah to get me some Ativan to take to ease my nerves.

Hopefully, the drug will keep my claustrophobia at bay long enough for them to do their 45 minute scan. of, I think, my head and shoulders region.

Scanning for dandruff, no doubt. Ha ha ha.

If the drug can keep my adrenaline response tamped down enough, I think my built in self control and/or self-discipline will take care of the rest.

Ideally, I will just lay there in the machine lost in my own thoughts for a while. Tonight, the procedure will be around 45 minutes, maybe slightly less.

And I really hope it goes well because the one on Friday night is double that., 90 minutes, and that seems like death to me right now.

So, three cheers for Ativan. Without it, I would simply have to refuse to do it.

And I would hate to have to do it. I don’t want to be a “difficult” patient. My shy and accommodating nature cringes at the thought of it.

But phobias don’t negotiate. My claustrophobia is immune to reason and logic and rational restraint. I know full well that I am not in any danger, the walls are not closing in on me, and I am not about to be smothered.

My adrenaline response, however, doesn’t listen to any of that rationalist bullshit. This is the part of us that keeps us alive in the wild, and it knows that it is better to run from something that isn’t dangerous than to fail to run from something that is. so it defaults to sounding all the alarms when the right (or wrong) stimulus occurs.

Essentially, our bodies are built to assume that our rational mind is too stupid to know when to run from danger (or fight, or fuck, or whatever) so our instincts are hardwired in to our motivation center so that when the shit goes down, it can take over and run the show, leaving the rational being we think of as ourselves helplessly relegated to the sidelines, where it can only gape.

Oh fuck. I am intellectualizing again. I need some sort of alarm that goes over whenever I start lecturing instead of venting.

Anyhow, back to the MRI machine.

I don’t have much experience with these modern fast-acting anti-anxiety meds. I understand that they can be extremely effective in keeping the panic at bay, and I have wanted to have some around for quite some time now.

Mostly to act as a kind of security blanket for when I decide it is time to exit my teeny tiny comfort zone and try to expand my world a little.

I am never going to get anywhere in life if my fears keep calling the shots. Ativan might just be the key to having the actually positive social interactions that can overwrite those old old bad tapes of mine with critical new information.

Like that I am perfectly safe. That’s an important update.

So it would be real nice if it turned out that Ativan really does work for me and I could maybe use it in the future for other, less medically imposing situations.

I know that Doctor Costin will give me more if I ask. He knows I can be trusted. I have been his very slow to change patient for more than a decade. He knows the score.

Well, it’s time for me to rest up.

More after the break.


Reluctantly crouched at the starting line

Yeah, i know I already linked this recently.

But I can’t think of another song that captures nervous agitation this well.

It’ a little under an hour till we depart for my VGH MRI, and I am not happy.

For one thing, I should totally be eating, but I’m not. I can’t. I am too agitated to eat. My appetite is gone and my every instinct is telling me that if I eat, my “nervous stomach” will make me very ill.

And that would really suck right about now.

I am compromising by eating just a little bit at a time very slowly. Just enough to justify taking my night medications.

Last thing I wanna do before doing something about which I am nervous is skip my Gabapentin, aka my painkiller.

Apparently, there is a chance that taking Ativan while on Gabapentin will make the Ativan side effects of dizziness, lack of coordination, and sleepiness worse.

Yay. All the more reason not to take the Ativan until like 20 minutes before the procedure. Presumably then I will be around a team of medical professionals who can help me get in and out of the machine when needed.

Would be all too ironic if I make it there despite my misgivings only to be waylaid by a god damned drug interaction that should have been caught by the pharmacy.

Jesus, maybe I should take an Ativan NOW. I am freaking myself out here.

Relax. Breathe. Hydrate. Remember that it’s only 45 minutes of my life and after that it will be all over until next Friday.

When I will have to do it for twice as long. Yeesh. This life of mine.

Oh well, I can simply choose to see tonight as a trial run for next Friday. If I can make it through 45 minutes tonight, I can probably make it through 90 minutes later.

Hmmm. According to the internet, a dose of Ativan lasts between 6 and 8 hours. Which means I could take a dose right now and be sure that it would still be in effect around 140 minutes (2 hours 20 minutes) from now when the procedure starts.

I might just do that. I would very much like to stop panicking right now.

Well fuck. I just had to go poking around. Turns out that you are not supposed to take Ativan (or any of the Benzodiazepines, including Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, and Ativan. ) if you suffer from sleep apnea.

I have serious and completely untreated sleep apnea.

Now what the fuck do I do?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.



Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. Huh. I really thought pavilion had two L’s. Not according to Windows.

Well that was dumb

I am deeply into Dragon Age : Inquisition.

There’s just so much content in it! Dozens of regions, each full of quests and plot points and monuments to find and resources to claim and enemies to fight.

Plus there’s this character who is your chief scout and she greets you every time you go to a new region and gives you a quick run-down of the salient details.

You know, what the region’s like, what its plotline is, who to kill, and so on.

Touristy details like that.

And I find I am beginning to really like that head scout. She’s so friendly and informative. I look forward to seeing her when I go somewhere new.

If only the real world had nice, friendly, well-informed people to greet me when I enter new and unfamiliar places full of strangers.

Might help with the social anxiety. A lot.

Anyhoo, I got so into playing DA:I this afternoon that I completely lost track of time when when I finally emerged from my state of suspended animation long enough to look at a clock, it was almost 4 pm and time to get my lunching and blogging done.

Which was a bit of an issue because the moment I stopped playing the game, I sagged into feeling very tired and sleepy.

But I was not willing to delay the blogging et al. Discipline is repetition. The more you do something, the easier it is to do. If you start letting things slip, you are only betraying yourself by breaking the pattern you’ve established.

And ultimately undermining your sense of your own reliability.

So I went and got my food and came back to Mister Computer (mark 2) and sat down to gather my second wind and get to work.

And I am proud of that. A previous version of me would have said, “Oh, well, under the circumstances, delaying my meal and blogging for an hour so I can take a nap is not that big of a deal, right?”

But it is, Former Me. It’s a huge deal. You are injuring yourself in a deep and terrible way. You just can’t see it yet.

And Lord knows I need things that are regular and reliable in my life. Like I have said many times before, I have done a terrible job of being my own keeper, and if I want to feel better about myself, I have to be better to myself.

And that’s so hard to do. I have all this red hot angry energy which I cannot externalize and therefore which can only vent internally and end up scorching me.

In other words, I can only attack myself. And I do that a LOT.

They say depression is anger turned inwards.

Well it sure as heck is for me.

And that means that in order to stop the constant self-abuse, I have to find something else to do with all that anger, and that’s a huge problem because I absolutely refuse to take it out on anyone else.

And I have no idea where else to put it. Obviously, the best solution would be to not have the anger in the first place, but that is not an option and never was.

I have been hurt so much in life and I have never had an acceptable way to vent the anger that pain brought me that I have a massive backlog of rage to deal with.

And I don’t know how to deal with it. I can’t shake the feeling that if I was to start trying to express it, the sheer energy density of it all would cause a massive explosion that would explode my brain.

Or at least my sanity.

There’s just so much of it. I don’t know what to do.

Anyone need some inchoate rage? It’s free!

More after the break.


It was kind of a hobby

The ease with which I completely give up on things is beginning to disturb me.

I mean, it’s not right, and it’s not normal, and it might not even be sane/

Take all those AI generated pictures I made with Easy Diffusion. I was really enjoying doing that. Even the pics that were NOT porn.

Like this harmless little number. Doesn’t it make you feel all snuggly inside?

Made that one with the Microsoft Designer generator. All it took was a prompt that was something like “two bears cuddled up in bed together”, and presto.

What an amazing tool. What a magical technology. What unlimited possibilities.

I haven’t so much as glanced in its direction for more than a month.

Now part of that is because my “new” computer crashes when I try to run Easy Diffusion (the software I used to make all that porn) processes. Not every time, but often enough to make it feel like it’s not worth it.

Working on that problem, by the way. According to the Tom’s Hardware forum guy, my power supply is “not good”, so that’s the next thing I will upgrade.

That will have to wait until the next Deposit Day, which is a week from Wednesday.

I can’t frigging wait. This five week month stuff sucks shit.

Anyhow, it started with that problem, but I could have gone on making practically anything (G-rated) I could think off with the Microsoft website.

But that’s too wide open for me. I guess I need structure. Constantly trying to convince Easy Diffusion to make the porn I wanted gave me focus.

But “make whatever you want” does not.

I did make this, though.

He’s saying, “So I said, ‘Hey, don’t mess with me. I’m a small arms dealer!’ Get it?”

I saw this pic and immediately loved the guy. I mean, I bet his jokes are terrible – pea sized brain and all – but you still gotta love him.

Oh, and I made this.

I swear to Dog that this is AI generated and not just a photo

That’s where shit starts to get spooky, dunnit? It doesn’t quite look perfectly real, but it could plausibly be an inexpert Photoshop.

Oh, and one last thing.

“Where’s…. my…. GENITALS??”

Pic posted to reassure you that being unable to make porn does not mean that I am not still a deeply disturbed individual.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Slow out of the gate

Got distracted by masturbation (damn you, penis) and ended up not ordering my groceries until like 4:15 pm.

You know, when I would normally be eating.

Actually, I decided yesterday that it was time to move lunch to 3 pm, which makes the meals a lot closer to being evenly spaced out and thus is healthier.

But today, I forgot that I had decided that.

Changing one’s habits can be complicated.

Eventually, I will move lunch to its new permanent home at 2 pm. That way, it’s six hours between breakfast at 8 am and lunch at 2 pm, then six hours until super at 8 PM.

And then only four hours till my midnight snack. But that’s not movable because I get together with other people to watch stuff off the PVR then.

And then it’s eight hours till breakfast at 8 am.

To fix that, I would have to start getting up early to eat at 6 am every day. And who knows, maybe that would be a lot healthier in the long run.

I have often pondered the potential health benefits of keeping your circadian rhythms in sync with external time. That old, “early to bed, early to rise” schtick might have some actual wisdom to it.

Maybe getting up with the dawn and sleeping with the sunset makes sense and if we did it, our bodies would feel a lot less stressed that way,

Don’t know if I could pull it off, though. I’ve been a night owl for decades now. I recognize that it’s not the healthiest lifestyle but it seems to suit me.

When everyone else is asleep, I feel free. It’s like a great weight has been lifted and I can truly take deep breaths and feel alive for a change.

Which is pretty mysterious once you really look at it from a scientific point of view. Just what are these signals that change when people go to sleep? What exactly is it that I am picking up on?

It can’t be pheromones. I can’t possibly be smelling all the people in the apartments above, below, and around me. How would all those smells even reach me as I sit here in my apartment with the windows closed?

I honestly feel that human beings have some kind of electrical perception that lets us “sense” what the humans around us are doing even through the walls.

I’m sure pheromones play a role too, especially in things like crowd behaviour and mood synchronization events like concerts, plays, sports games, and church services.

And heck, even going to the movies. While that movie is playing, if it is any good, that crowd of strangers is temporarily united by a shared experience that they are all experiencing at the exact same time.

Anyhow, so I feel best when I have the night more or less to myself. Somehow, I know.

Which reminds me of the times when I have been on the streets walking home late at night and felt absolutely fantastic. Like I was walking on air with a song in my heart.

I am started to wonder if the biopressure from other humans has always been a problem for me. One that was very difficult to conceive of, let alone articulate.

Makes me wonder how I would feel if I truly “got away from it all” by going to some remote location where there’s no other humans around for hundreds of miles.

Maybe this is why people have to fuck off to some mountainside in Tibet or some remote cabin in Alaska in order to “find themselves”.

If so, than this ability to sense the presence of others around us is something so endemic to the human condition that we all accept the truth of it without questioning it or wondering how it exists.

I mean, what was with all that crap Thoreau talked about the virtues of solitude?

How would our bodies even know whether we’re in a crowded high density apartment complex or a remote retreat in northern Nepal?

Pretty spooky stuff!

And just think : if we could figure out how this all works, we could come up with a way to block the signals and create artificial solitude.

And wouldn’t that be nice?

More after the break.



Basically, charcuterie is crudité for carnivores.


The wrong thing

Holy fucksauce, am I tired of getting the wrong things when I order groceries.

Tonight, I ordered 9 items, and 4 of them were wrong. Two fatally so.

I ordered All Dressed flavoured No Name chips, got BBQ instead. I do not particularly like BBQ chips. I will probably still eat them, but still.

I ordered a bag of “Everything” trail mix. Got “Mixed Berries” instead. Shit is half dried fruit at least. Dried fruit is not great for diabetes.

But much worse was that instead of the Voortman’s No Sugar Added Fudge Striped Cookies, I got fucking NO NAME full sugar Fudge Striped Cookies.

They don’t even look faintly alike. I mean what the fuck.

AND I ordered my usual Russell Stover’s No Sugar Added Fruit Flavoured Candies and I got freaking full sugar LIFE SAVERS instead.

The final piece of the puzzle is that my order arrived an HOUR late.

To me, this paints a picture of someone who was running way behind and just throwing whatever looked vaguely right into the cart in their haste.

I put in a complaint to DoorDash and they refunded me for all the wrong items. I then used that money to get myself some McD’s.

Which was dumb in retrospect because it would have made more sense to use that money to try to get the things they fucked up.

Now I will have no cookies and no hard candy until next Friday unless I come up with some clever financial shenanigans to pay for them.

I guess I could ask Julian to go get them for me. That way I could pay cash. And I can spare the cash because apparently we are not doing Denny’s this week.

Apparently Joe, who tested negative for Covid when he first went into the hospital last month, has now tested positive for it. And that means Julian might have it as well as he has been spending so much time with Joe.

I could still do Denny’s with Felicity, she would just have to pick me up on the way.

But whatever. I will manage. I always do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Writing on the wall

Writing this into an LibreOffice document because when we headed out to Doctor Chao’s office, Julian decided our router needed a rest and unplugged it, then forgot to plug it back in when we got back.

So I am slightly annoyed with him. I am pretty sure the router doesn’t actually need the little rest periods he gives it sometimes, but I don’t say anything about it because usually, it’s a harmless thing and if it makes him feel better. who am I to say no?

But the time previous to this, I had to remind him to plug it back in, and let me tell you, when you are relying on ME to remember something for you, you are in dire straits indeed.

I mean, who do you think you are, Mark Knopfler?

And now this time, he forgot, I forgot to remind him (see?), and then he took off to go see Joe in the hospital, leaving me sans internet.

And I didn’t notice at first because I was playing Etherlords 2 and that does not require an internet connection to function.

I mean, the game’s from 2003. There barely was an internet back then. I was organizing the local furry community via email when that game came out, for crying out loud.

Come to think of it, I have no idea how I even heard of the game, let alone where I found it. I can only assume I stumbled across it on some “warez” site and pirated it.

I did a LOT of software piracy back then, as did all of us cool internet residents. I could not afford to buy games, and even if I had the money, I wouldn’t have had access to a credit card to pay for it.

But at some point, I got onto full disability, my income improved, I got a reloadable VISA from my bank. VanCity, and suddenly paying for games became an option.

And I haven’t pirated anything since. Guess I grew up a little.

I’m as surprised as you are.

Now where was I? Oh right, the router.

Julian came home and plugged it in somewhere around when I started on the whole “piracy and me” tangent, so I gotta da interwebs back.

But I am going to keep writing this in LibreOffice because it’s a remarkably comfortable environment in which to string together words.

Partly because it defaults to putting things in Liberation Serif, and I quite like how my words look in that font. Makes what I type seem more important and fancy somehow.

I was annoyed when I tried to play Dragon Age : Inquisition sans internet and it would not load. Because, of course, it can’t run without EA’s stupid online marketplace there to hold its little hand and reassure it that Daddy still loves it.

I have a lot of issues, don’t I?

Did the Wound Care thing. The nurse wants me to moisturize my right foot and it’s not hard to see why. The skin on the sole of my foot looks like dried out pink parchment, or maybe the remains of a particularly gay paper wasp nest.

It’s bad, is what I am saying.

Also did the Friday B12 shot thing. Brought up a weird issue while I was there.

Warning, the following will be gross.

See, lately, this yellowish white greasy substance has been precipitating out of my urine and ending up on the bottom and sides of my pee receptacle.

So I asked him what it was, and he didn’t know, so it’s time for another pee test.

I’m not worried. My urine has always tested well.

More after the break.


All about journaling

Check out this guy’s system.

Plus, is he likeable or what? Instant subscribe.

I enjoyed the heck out of that video. Everything he says makes so much sense and seems like it would really work.

For someone other than me.

Like I said in the comments, I could never be that organized and structured about doing this a-here blog of mine. This thing only works for me because it has no format and therefore I can always write whatever is on my mind when I sit down to blog.

If I tried to go into it with a plan and goals and a specific direction, those would be the things my neurosis latches onto and uses as the nuclei for a whole chain reaction of option paralysis, self-loathing, and ultimately, giving up in frustration.

I am sure his system works for the kind of people who are soothed by rules, structure, limitations, and so forth.

And part of me really wishes I was that kind of person. They seem like they would be so much more effective in life than me.

But that’s not who I am. My muse is willful and defiant and would make me absolutely miserable if I tried to be that structured.

So I will just keep staggering along, trying to figure out how to deal with my volatile and highly reactive muse.

I think learning to take life less seriously will help a lot. Seriousness (or gravity) short circuits me because seriousness raises the takes and what do high stakes lead to?

That’s right, Billy. Prussia! I mean… pressure!

But you know what? Life’s not that big of a deal. Sure, from a certain narrow POV. it’s the most important thing there is, but any given decision within that POV is honestly not important enough to tie yourself into knots over.

Again, it’s all a product of that post-game analysis. After the decision is made, the slow circuit of the conscious mind has plenty of time to analyze the problem and find what depression really wants : a way it could have been solved better.

And then you kick the shit out of yourself for being an idiot, and the downward spiral of self-excoriation begins, and just like that, you are your own abuser.

But just like with real world abusers, you cannot let yourself be fooled by their justifications into thinking they are right.

Abusers NEED to abuse, and they will find absolutely any excuse to do so, whether it’s legitimate or not. That means they will lie, cheat, manufacture evidence, and do whatever else it takes to make you feel bad and hate yourself.

Don’t believe a word they say. They are thoroughly corrupt and dishonest.

And especially don’t believe their post-game analysis.

They fucking LOVE that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.