…is pretty weird.

This mostly has to do with socks.

See, after wearing a pair of socks for approximately eight hours, the right sock starts falling off of my foot. It just slides right off. I am always having to either pull it up, or worse, go looking for the damned thing.

Sometimes, I get so frustrated from the search that I just put on any random sock I happen to come across.

This is slightly offensive to my sense of order, but fuck it.

And I honestly don’t know what my foot is doing to cause this to happen. I can only surmise that it somehow changes shape due to swelling of some sort.

But you’d think that would make the sock tighter, not looser.

So maybe it’s something that my foot is doing to the sock while I am wearing it. Stretching it out in some way that it can’t instantly snap back from.

But how? Like, what de fuck, man. What is one foot doing to the sock that the other one does not and why is there a difference?

What the fuck is wrong with my right foot?

I have no idea. It’s possible that my foot changes shape somewhat during the day due to diabetes complications. Lord knows my feet are not anyone’s idea of healthy.

Hence my having to go get the bandages on them changed twice a week.

One last datum : whatever my foot does to the sock, it recovers from it when it is washed. And that’s also strange because you’d think that something that changes the relationship between my foot and its sock to such an extent that the sock literally just slides off at the slightest provocation would leave a lasting mark.

But nope. Either the foot changes back or the sock changes back or both.

My feet are so weird.

Feeling kinda tired and worn out today. Makes it hard to even imagine doing anything but the usual burning through my remaining time on Earth playing video games and blogging to you fine people.

I have come to one conclusion, though : my entire approach to getting out of this hole is wrong. I put way too much pressure on myself and then crumble and flee.

Like, take those two sites, FlexJobs (remote work) and Notd (people can subscribe to your writing) , that I have mentioned before. The main reason I haven’t done anything with those two sites is that I have laden them down with portent in my mind as the big thing that could change my life forever.

For the better, mind you. But that’s still scarier than most fuck.

Once more, I return to the idea of treating life like a game and sites like FlexJobs and Notd as merely toys with which to amuse myself.

After all, life is stupid and nothing means anything. So I’m just gonna fuck around and enjoy myself any way I can get away with.

Taking things seriously is positively toxic to actually doing those things. All this neurotic baggage immediately attaches to it and I instinctively flee this high pressure situation and hide in my distractions, waiting for it to go away.

It never goes away.

So fuck all that bullshit. I’m too cool to be dragged down like that. I don’t have to make a big deal about things in order to get things done.

In fact, the opposite is true : making a big deal about them kills them.

I know it’s not going to be easy to implement this new attitude. But the basic components are already there in my personality. It’s just a matter of bringing them to the forefront and letting them take charge.

So what if I’m laughing cynically at the world as I try to conquer it?

Everything is stupid and nothing matters.

So do whatever works.

More after the break.

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Well that sucked

I knew I was in trouble the second I stood up.

That’s when it hit me : pain and weakness throughout my body and my heart beating hard and fast (and loud, at least to me) and I had a trip to the door and back to do.

The whole reason I stood up was to go get my Donair Dude order from the apartment’s front door. Normally this is not a problem for me.

I can’t really afford the food at all, but what the hell, I will manage somehow. And this is a mighty tasty mega-donair.

Anyhow, I managed to stagger back from the door to the kitchen and set down the food, and then I faced a quandry.

I was feeling rather woozy and my muscle pain was clawing at my sanity and I kind of felt like I was going to pass out.

Which would be bad as I am all alone here in the apartment.

I should get one of those medic alert button thingies.

Normally, what I would do when I get my neato Donair Dude 2-for-1 is stop in the kitchen to put one of the orders in the fridge before taking the other one to my bedroom for the usual eat n’ blog.

And I had originally planned to do that this time too. But after hesitating at the edge of the kitchen for some very long seconds, I realized that there was no way I could make it through the steps of separating the two orders and sticking one in the fridge and still have a decent chance of making it back to my room.

And that’s when I did something clever. I noticed that my order came in two bags (one for the donairs, one for the drinks) that had been stapled together at the top. So for the return trip to my bedroom, I draped the stapled section over the side of the walker, creating a saddlebags kind of effect, and voila, I did not have to carry my order.

It’s little things like that which remind me that I really am clever, as befits a fox.

The trip back was still touch and go, though.

Oh, and I figure the problem was, you guessed it, dehydration. The moment I started drinking my 591 ml Diet Pepsi, I felt a whole lot better.

That makes me wish that I had status bars like in a video game where I could just glance at them and know I was dangerously low on hydration.

Presumably, I would also hear and see some kind of flashing alert message.

On a more practical level, I am going to try to keep some water in a glass on my night stand so that the minute I wake up, I can start replacing whatever water I sweated out while I was asleep.

Because this shizz be cray-cray, y’all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s back, baby.

For those of you who are new here, or have just forgotten, what I call my “demon hunger” is a period where I am incredibly hungry and nothing seems to satiate me for very long. When it’s really bad, even a large meal barely slows it down

So far it’s not too bad. My usual meals appease it for a while, at least. And hopefully, whatever drives this phenomenon will get whatever it wants soon.

I assume it’s some sort of nutritional deficit, in which case, I wish it would be a little more specific about what it wants me to eat.

MORE FOOD NOW does not give me a lot to go on.

Could be my diabetes, of course. Somehow, despite my best efforts, sometimes my blood sugars get seriously out of whack^[1] and it takes something big to restore balance to the force, so to speak.

That one theory, anyhow. And seeing as in the past I have been able to cure this condition with a shot of insulin. I’d say it’s a pretty good theory.

That’s about the only time I take insulin these days. Jardiance, the miracle drug with the terrible name, keeps my blood sugars down to a healthy level via controlled ketosis.

Believe it or not, that’s what is behind the “keto” diet. Some people think that if you avoid certain foods and eat other specific foods, you can get the same effect as with Jardiance but without those icky actually medically tested and scientifically accurate prescription drugs from Big Pharma.

This is patently untrue, but if tagging a magic word on to what is merely a sane and sensible diet gets people to eat better, I am all for it.

Just remember, kids, there IS such a thing as too few carbs. Your body needs carbohydrates to function. They are the fuel life runs on.

Remember, moderation is the key. Aim for the middle.

Like I always end up saying, being hungry all the time is really hard on the nerves. It’s like this irritating voice droning in your ears that only gets louder over time until you finally can give it what it wants.

Normally, it’s enough for me to keep some kind of snack cracker on hand, like Cheez-its or Vegetable Thins, to munch on when my tummy gets too rumbly.

But when this goddamned demonic hunger strikes, that’s not enough. And while I have obviously made headway against my “no eating between meals” policy, I still can’t imagine having even a small meal between the usual big meals.

So it’s definitely partly my fault for being so damned stubborn.

We Taurus types can be our own worst enemies that way. On the plus side, it can make us incredibly tenacious and firmly committed to our beliefs.

On the minus side, it can lead to making life worse for ourselves by sticking to a point or a position that we don’t even remember the justification for.

Let’s see. Hunger aside, it’s been a decent day. Did the Wound Care thing this morning. Found that while my muscles were weak and hurt a fair bit on the way in to where I get my Wound Care, on the way out my muscles had warmed up and felt pretty good.

Not fully healthy, of course. But a lot less weak and ouchy.

Makes me wonder if I should try getting some exercise on my own. ^[2] I have been pondering doing laps of the hallways leading from the elevators to the apartments on my floor. They are conveniently laid out in a square, making doing laps feasible.

And I would do them while using my outdoor walker, which can also be used as a seat, so if I am way on the other side of the floor from our apartment when I run out of gas. I would be able to sit for a bit to rest up.

It will probably never happen. But it’s nice to pretend it might.

More after the break.

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The fundamental motivation issue

This is going to require some serious rethinking on my part.

I have never fully believed in this “motivation” stuff. It’s always seemed like BS to me. Something made up to cover up the gap between the things we want to do and the things we are actually prepared to do, for real, right now.

“Woops! I mean, I totally want to do it, but I just don’t have the MOTIVATION!”

Yeah, and you never will. At no point in the future will doing the thing seem any more appealing than it does right now, so just be honest with yourself and admit that you don’t really want to do it. You just like the idea of doing it.

Crap, I have threadjacked myself again.

What I was going to say is that I have been beating myself up for the lack of this motivation stuff when the truth is that I have a profound psychological injury that has been weighing me down and holding me back for my entire life.

It’s not a lack of “motivation” that keeps from from trying things any more than it’s a lack of “motivation” that keeps a paraplegic from dancing.

I am broken deep down inside and until that changes, I’m not going to get very far. Time and again, the pain from my Wound and the fear that tries to prevent that pain will gang together and stop me before I get anywhere because I am too damned injured to do it.

So from now on, digging into, cleaning out, and healing that wound is my number one preoccupation. Maybe I will poke around and check out some spiritual wisdom to seeif any of it makes sense to me. Maybe I will dig into the better therapists on YouTube’s archives and see what I can find there.

Or maybe I will do jack shit except lie in the dark thinking about stuff.

But one way or another, I’m going to heal that wound.

And then maybe I can be a real person once more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy Thursday.

And one of the things I ended up telling Doc Costin about ^[1] was my feeling that I am getting better at dealing with things on a purely emotional level.

I can “feel my way through” the darkened forest of my emotions a lot more easily than ever before. I can leave my useless and highly suspect powers of logical analysis behind and just explore my emotions by feeling them.

It’s actually quite thrilling. I have this whole new world inside me just waiting for me to let go of the delusion of control long enough to see what has been there all along.

If this is what being out of control feels like, then I am totally down with it. Fuck logic and intention, let’s roll.

Besides, there’s a reason I called it the delusion of control. It’s not really being in control of myself – if it was. I would get shit done as that’s what I want.

But I’m not in control and nothing gets done.

Seen from that angle, it’s obvious that what I used to think was self-control was only the feeling of being in control of myself, not the real thing.

And I get the feeling learning to tell the difference between the two is rather important.

It amuses me to think of how scared of leaving the bright white light of “reason” behind and entering the deep dark forest of my emotions I used to be.

It doesn’t seem like a big deal to me any more. It’s true that it’s dark in there, at least from my ego’s perspective, but there are other ways to find your way around besides logic and you can find them once you have the courage to be there.

And now, that is also adding to my feeling that whatever happens, I can handle it. And that is a vitally important thing to know about yourself.

For far too long, I have been scared of life with my head turned toward the wall, pointedly and panicked-ly ignoring reality in favour of my screens.

In a setup like that. where you feel like you’re made of spun sugar and the slightest unexpected event can shatter you into a million pieces, of course you’re going to be an urban hermit who hides from the world you don’t think you can handle.

Most people get over that phase of life because they have to in order to get through school and their traumatic first months of employment

But not me. I’m too “smart” for that.

As a result, I’ve barely grown up at all. I’m 51 years old and yet a big part of me is still that terrified toddler whose whole life was ripped apart by a stranger’s dick, and until I heal the grievous wound left by that heinous attack, I won’t be able to grow up at all.

And I want to be a grown up, not a timid baby. I want to be able to lead a normal life instead of remaining in this cloistered closet for the rest of my life. I want to feel strong and confident and ready to take on the world.

But I have to get myself healthy at first.

And that will take some time.

---

I want to make videos just like this one!

The humour, the information, the density with all the little text gags, and the rather lovable presenter are all fantastic and things I totally will steal one day.

Hey, bad are copies, good art steals.

---

This is also quite good :

It’s about the narrator’s journey to an ADHD diagnosis and it got me thinking about my own experience with trying out Adderall.

It didn’t do anything for me. I felt exactly the same. Le sigh.

---

Forward and deeper

I feel like one of the ways in which I have made progress lately is that I have developed the crucial sense of what it means to go forward with my emotions.

I now have a clear feeling of development. I know now, on an instinctual level, that there is a sequence and a motion to my learning to deal with my emotions, like I’m a steam locomotive on a one way track. and that whenever I feel like it, I can move forward on my track and hence go deeper into myself in search of my Wound so I can finally soothe and comfort and heal it.

There’s a highly allegorical children’s book in all of this, I’m sure of it. Call it the Phantom Locomotive or somesuch.

Perhaps have some mentor figure repeatedly saying, “You have to get there eventually as long as you keep going forward!”.

Or the other way around. Whatever.

And of course, from a storytelling point of view, trains are great because you can just your plot points in whatever order you like along the tracks and the hero will naturally encounter them in that order without it seeming obviously forced.

Hmmm. Perhaps I shall cogitate on this further.

But probably not. Like all my other brilliant ideas I think of all the time, it will arise, I will say, “wow, neato!”, and then it will subside back into the fertile topsoil of my mind.

Oh well. The further I travel down this lonely train track, the closer I get to being a happy, functional, capable version of myself and that future person will be capable of getting good ideas and seeing them through for the sheer delight of bringing something beautiful and meaningful and new into the world.

But I need an audience. Performing for myself accomplishes nothing. I have a desperate need to express myself and that perforce requires someone to express myself to otherwise what’s the point?

Knowing that somewhere on my hard drive lurks some very brilliant writing is not enough. I need people to see how amazing I am, and bask in my glow!

I truly just want to make people happy, as others have made me happy, through art.

I’d rather make a million people happy at a dollar each then one person happy for a million bucks. I am a man of the masses. I want to make the whole world sing.

But first, I need to 86 this Wound.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling super sleepy just like I did yesterday. In fact, it’s a bit worse.

This is not unusual. These “catching up” periods always last for at least a couple of days and can drag on for three days or more. I am in it for the long haul.

Doesn’t make it any less irritating, though. Insert standard bitching and whining about not wanting to sleep but wanting to DO THINGS instead.

I don’t want to sleep all the time, I want to have fun! I want to do fun stuff! Like eating meals and playing video games!

Man, I really am a toddler. But with more masturbation.

Otherwise, things are going alright. I don’t seem to be getting those weird little periods of slight chest pain and shortness of breath when I lay down today.

Still, I uh, should probably see someone about that. Those seem like pretty ominous symptoms. I should probably get Doc Chao to take a look at my ticker.

And while he’s at it, my heart. Ta bum tish.

It really does feel like it’s something cardiovascular, and that’s not the kind of thing a fat dude in his fifties can afford to ignore.

I have a phone appointment with Doctor Chao on the 31st. So I can talk to him about it then. Unless it gets a lot worse, then to the ER I go.

It’s especially bad if I lay on my back, which I like to do from time to time because it takes all the pressure off my back and thus lets the poor thing rest for a bit.

I can’t sleep that way, sadly, but it makes for good relief now and then anyhow.

But lately, the longer I lay on my back, the harder it gets to breathe. It’s like there is something small and heavy sitting right on my heart and it just gets heavier over time.

So yeah. That’s kind of worrisome as well.

I always sleep either laying on my front or my side. And there’s this definite feeling when this problem is acting up of it being something like a sticky gear shift. Like instead of being a smooth transition from sitting and alert to lying down and resting, my internal gearbox gets stuck between gears now and then.

Or something like that.

It’s not good, is what I am saying.

The 31st is one week from today. I guess I can wait that long. But of course, as always, if it gets worse I am heading straight for the ER.

Got to be gentle with this heart of mine. It’s quite tender.

Let’s see, what else. Well this site is amusing in a very crude way.

It’s a parody of all those tasteful ads for custom candles that are supposed to offer a slow symphony of scents as the candle burns down through the layers.

Here’s something I have always wanted to know : what, exactly, is burning when you light a candle? Is it just the wick? Is the wax just there to make the wick burn slowly?

Because wax does not seem like it would burn. And if all that is happening is the wax melting, doesn’t that mean that you could gather up all the melted wax and form it back into a candle shape around a new wick while it’s still warm and pliable?

It seems obvious to me that it would work. And yet, in the days before electricity, people were always fretting over using candles when they could not afford more, or somesuch.

Surely it has to have occurred to them to just re-use the wax.

Or am I the only one who sees this? I often am.

More after the break.

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I’m better than you

But then again, I’m not. It’s…. complicated.

Once more we return to the dreaded topic of superiority. Faithful readers will already be familiar with how my vast intellectual superiority over most people has been a complicating factor for me for my entire life.

And sure, it alienated me from my fellow students in the school system – I simply could not relate to them nor they to me. And it meant I was mostly bored out of my mind in class. School work was never challenging to me.

But what I want to talk about tonight is specifically that thorny knot that is my being “superior” to others.

I am anti-elitism. I am a dyed in the wool humanist who thinks we’re all fragile beings trying to make it through this carnival of obstacles and chaos called life and I don’t want artificial barriers like gender, race, religion, or ability to come between us when, for me at least, it is intuitively obvious that we are so small and the Universe so big that we’d be fools not to stick together.

And that’s all well and good, but that pesky intellectual superiority of mine makes it hard to feel like I am on the same level as others. Like it or not, I tower over them, and no amount of scrunching down will make me blend in with the pygmies.

And I don’t know how to deal with that. When I try to imagine how I could deal with the indigestible yet undeniable truth, all I can think of is me as a shepherd walking among his sheep and making sure they are okay.

And while I do find that a somewhat comforting thought – at least then I’d have a role, and a job – I doubt the “sheep” would feel the same way about it

And that’s why I have to take this issue out and beat it all about now and then. I am trying to work through all the complications inherent to the issue so that I can eventually reach some sort of peaceful resolution to the conflict.

The other image I have of the everyday folks is that they are children, and I am pretty sure they would hate that even more than being sheep.

So once more, I ask : how does a big brained egalitarian like me learn to find his place in this world of childlike sheep (lambs?) and do good ibn the world without having to suppress his abilities in order to keep from spooking the herd?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oy. Just took me almost an hour to get my ass out of bed.

I kept drifting in and out of sleep, never fully entering either state. It was a strange twilit world where what remained of my conscious mind felt like it was trapped in a whirlpool that was pulling it down into the depths of consciousness itself.

Which kinda sucked.

Even sitting up didn’t fully release me from the whirlpool’s grip. I was still floating in and out of consciousness, although I was at least not going as deep into sleep as before.

Eventually I actual pulled a quorum of my marbles together and was able to get up and go put my lunch together then come back here to type to you lovely people.

In local news, the sheet and the blanket are now on my bed.

So yay, I did a thing.

And I have taken one nap in their embrace and as you can see by what I have written above, it went well (?).

One of the many paradoxes of my bizarre existence is that really good sleep usually leaves me feeling really messed up because of all the REM activity is suddenly trying to catch up on now that I am actually sleeping deeply enough for it to happen.

So like I always say, it leaves me feeling like some kind of seer or mystic that has just had their mind hyper-activated by having a vision.

That kind of thing can take a lot out of a fella. You end up burning through a hell of a lot of brain calories all at once.

But what the hell, I’m down for this. Go ahead, brain, burn through all those latent dreams. Throw them onto the inner pyre and let them blaze.

I am perfectly willing to suffer like this, or worse, if in the end I actually reach a well rested and rejuvenated state.

I barely know what that’s even like. For most of my life, it has only happened by accident. The random forces of tension, anxiety, paranoia, and sheer neurosis achieve some state of equilibrium in my mind, like different sine waves just happening to converge into harmony now and then, and I wake up feeling great.

But who knows. Maybe with my wonderful new bedding, I can make it happen more often, and actually live a much calmer and more restful life.

That could be huge. Or at least, very nice.

Now that I am digging into my history with sleep, I realize that even as a kid I had a hard time getting to sleep and my sleep was anxious and troubled. It was nothing for me to wake up to sweat soaked sheets wrapped around me in knots, or to be awoken by falling the foot or so from my bed to the floor.

Like I said before, I’ve never been very good at sleep.

Gee, you’d almost thing something massively terrible happened to me at a crucial stage of my childhood and that trauma completely derailed my growth and kept me from completing many important stages of development.

No wonder I can be such a toddler. No wonder I completely failed to develop normally. No wonder I never had an imaginary friend nor did I play with toys.

I retreated from reality into the world of my burgeoning mind and so I became a highly intelligent and articulate man-baby who despite his prodigious abilities can’t pull himself together enough to actually do anything with them.

And it’s all because of that crippling psychic injury I refer to as the Wound.

It’s hard to deal with life when you are crippled in a way nobody can see. I bet it wold not even show up on an fMRI scan of my brain.

All I can do is feel as much of the pain as I can take at any moment, and work my way through it that way.

God knows how long that will take.

But it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

More after the break.

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It’s not my fault

This is something I need to remind myself on a regular basis because I tend to forget.

It’s not my fault that my life has turned out the way it has. I have done remarkably well given how very psychologically damaged I am and have almost always been.

Too well, perhaps. Never letting the world see my pain. Always pretending everything is fine when other people are around. Always presenting the same cheerful, lovable, engaging, funny face to the world.

But let’s try to stay positive.

I have done nothing wrong and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Yeah, my life has not gone the way I would have wanted it to, and it hurts to think of all my peers that have gone on to have actual lives, some quite successful, without me.

But I ain’t dead yet. Not quite. And I am determined to overcome this massive mental injury deep inside of me no matter what it takes.

Maybe I should be looking into deep spiritual practices. Shamanistic stuff, even. But it would be very hard to get past my knowing that it’s all bullshit.

I fear what would happen would be that it brought out that dark rage in me and I would just end up screaming at some poor well-intentioned practitioner about how they can’t help me because they’re not even remotely strong enough.

The darkness inside me would eat you alive, kid. Best leave it alone.

I guess that, as usual, I am just going to have to figure out how to do it my own way. If neither secular nor spiritual aid can reach me, what else is there to try?

So I guess I have to do everything by myself, as usual. I don’t even know what it is like not to feel like I am completely alone in my fight against my problems.

Doctor Costin tries, but he’s not strong enough either. And he is in his seventies. If I was to truly let loose with the “real me” it could literally kill him.

Maybe if I was in some kind of institution, I could let it all out. Some quality time spent screaming in a rubber room might do me some good.

Or make me worse. I don’t know.

I could try to learn to channel it into my writing. That could lead to some amazing and disturbing stuff that could rock the world.

If anyone read it. Which they would not. Because first I would have to share it with the world and I am too chickenshit to do that.

But, um. It’s not my fault.

I guess positive was just not in the cards for me tonight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have got the part of my bed I sleep on mostly cleared off now. Pretty soon, it will be time to open up the packaging on my new blanket and sheets and dress that part of the bed and then slip into my chosen sleepwear (nudity) and take a nap on a nice clean bed for a change and without even having to rent a motel room first.

I’m looking forward to that. I may even summon up the gumption to give myself a very deep and thorough bed bath first so that I will be putting a clean me on those clean sheets and under that clean new blanket.

So I am looking forward to it, yes. It will be very nice to sleep clean for once.

But I am also anxious about it, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Because I think I am getting close to figuring this shit out, at least cognitively. Wherever I feel fear like I am feeling now, the deep dark pain of my Wound is the real cause.

All my anxiety stems from an attempt by my basic autonomic systems to keep me from doing things which make that big ol’ Wound hurt.

That’s what I am really afraid of, deep down. All my more superficial anxiety has roots in this terrible pain and it is this pain which cripples me emotionally.

Because when there’s a nightmarish injury at the very core of your being, there is not a hell of a lot you can do that won’t make it hurt.

It’s like some grotesque spinal trauma. No matter how good I am at hiding my pain from everybody, I still can’t function, and can’t explain why even the simplest things are beyond me because everything hurts so bad.

But it’s not all doom on the horizon. I feel like when it comes to dealing with this Wound of mine, I have leveled up.

I have a much greater understanding of just how bad the damage is and how deep it goes now, and that makes me feel more like it is something that, while massive, is still finite, and therefore it is something that can be handled.

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

Hello, Wound. You’re my project now. You should fear this.

I know that the real solution will not be a matter of logic and/or analysis. One way or another I need to penetrate the defenses around my Wound so I can finally finish experiencing all the pain and trauma and fear contained within and thus finally be free of this crippling injury once and for all.

The only way to get rid of emotions is by feeling them. Only then can your deeper self let them go, because now their job is done. The message has been received. The transaction is now complete. The books can be cleared.

And that’s going to bring about some pretty big changes in me. I mean, it has to. That Wound has been festering there for almost my entire life. My entire personality structure has been built around it. I have no idea what life is like without it.

And that scares me. But it excites me too. I see a bright and glorious future ahead of me where I can finally emerge from the shadows and shine for the whole world to see.

I am an amazing guy with incredible abilities and a heck of a sweet personality too. I could make very big waves in this world if I could just stop being crippled by an injury so old that it remembers disco.

Now to take what should be a very pleasant nap.

More after the break.

I want more from LIFE.

And now I am willing to admit it.

I know that I have talked about finding my life to be unsatisfactory (a lot) in this space before, but this is different.

This feels a lot less cerebral and a lot more primal. This is like a mighty monster from the Jurassic era rising from the muck and mire of my freshly thawed Midnight Tundra and letting out a giant roar to proclaim its existence as a warning to all.

And I think that’s pretty neat.

Basically, I walk the dinosaur.

It happened when I was grabbing some food from the kitchen. I felt this surge of energy and frustration but instead of it just tormenting me, the whole dinosaur sequence from the above prose happened in my mind in a heartbeat, along with that sentiment from the title : I WANT MORE FROM LIFE.

And I find that quite encouraging. Clearly my id is waking up and making itself known and that makes me so happy. I have known for a long time that the icy cold of my tiny tomb comes mostly from a lack of id power to balance my overpowered ego and over-enthusiastic superego. I would be a hell of a lot warmer if I could just let the sunshine in.

Oh what the hell.

But something is going to have to “die” first. That little piece of myself that you have to give up in order to be free just has to go, and I think with me it has a hell of a lot to do with giving up my ice-bound perch in the chilly world of the mind and letting myself melt and become a real, live, whole person instead.

I am not the frozen version of me. Therefore that version of me can melt and become something more than itself and nothing has “died” or become lost.

I think that at some point in my development, the flight from reality and the icy detachment required for logical analysis overlapped in my brain and I have been hiding out in this frigid cave of mine ever since.

Well I am not afraid any more.

Let the spring come.
Let the thaw commence.
Let the flood waters cascade down and flush out all the toxins and garbag that have accumulated in my soul
Let me surrender all form and be reborn unto a brand new world
Let me live again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The “it” being just how disabled I am at any given moment.

As in, yesterday, I felt reasonably good. Moving around didn’t hurt too much and I felt reasonably strong and alert. I was doing alright.

And yet, today, I have that terrible heavy feeling again. Even just getting up to get water from the bathroom makes me feel like I am wearing a cement suit. Just going to the kitchen to grab a can of pop and come back has worn me out like a brisk hike.

I suspect that the problem is that I’m dehydrated. That happens so easily now. Not only is the summer heat draining my fluid reserves to produce sweat, but the miracle of Jardiance controlling my blood sugar comes at the price of my body having to manufacture a lot of urine because that’s how Jardiance smuggles the sugar out of your blood and out of your body.

And just as I am typing that, Julian knocked on the door to say goodbye for now and I was able to ask him to get me some nice cold clean water from the Brita pitcher in the fridge, and thus provide me with some high quality hydration.

I still wonder if Brita water only tastes better because it’s cold.

I guess I would have to do a blind taste test, Brita water versus refrigerated unfiltered tap water, to figure it out.

You know, for science.

Anyhow, we will see if I feel perkier once I have more water in me. Luckily, the water from the Brita should at least give me enough energy to get more water from the sink in my ensuite should I feel the need.

And I will try to keep dark thoughts about whether I am going to fall apart and end up in the hospital full of tubes before dying a stupid and tragic death out of my mind.

Because hey, it’s a beautiful sunny summer Sunday, I am going to have dinner with my friends at Denny’s not too long from now, and there is no need to dwell in the darkness when there’s lots of light to be had.

On the bedding front, both my new sheets and new blanket have arrived and have been removed from their Amazon boxes. Now I just need to clear about half of the space on my bed so I can lay them out and cuddle into them for a good night’s sleep.

And therein lies the problem. I should never put another task to be done before deployment of my new bedding. That creates a classic gumption trap where I need to find the motivation to do thing A before I can do thing B and that is already too complicated for my very weak id to handle.

And I wish I was not like this. I wish I could just decide to do things and do them instead of ending up stranded in a no man’s land of dithering and indecision all the time. I wish I had the force of will and the drive to make my will manifest in the world instead of constantly crouching behind my invisible wall hoping nobody notices me.

While at the same time being desperate for attention.

I’m a complicated man. And no one understands me but…. umm… no, that’s is. Nobody understands me, period.

. Not even my therapist gets me. He couldn’t handle the “real me”. No one can.

That’s why all anyone gets from me is a version of me. It isn’t fake or an illusion because everything in it is 100 percent me.

But it’s nowhere near being all of me. Let alone the “real” me.

I’m not a teenager. I can’t just let loose with all my emotions and then sort through them to figure out who I really am.

My shit has consequences. The volcano at my core is mighty angry.

And it makes me feel like if I relaxed my self-control, I would go crazy and end up hurting a lot of people before I found my new equilibrium.

It’s not worth it. Yet.

More after the break.

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So Biden dropped out

I learned about this hours ago and my jaw is still on the floor.

I mean, it makes sense in retrospect. All those fucking traitorous and hysterical liberals calling for him to step down as if that was going to improve their odds of beating Trump.

Um, no. This is actually the worst thing that could have happened on the Democrat side, because there is no Barack Obama waiting in the wings to swoop in and take up the nomination and inspire people to vote in record numbers on a wave of hope and inspiration and determination to make things right.

Biden getting Covid was presumably the last straw for the poor guy. He’d already been stabbed a million times by members of his own party and was bleeding out, but the Covid probably made him feel like this time, he was not going to be able to get up off the mat and keep fighting.

And all because his poor debate performance made liberals panic and turn on him because now he had loser dust on him and they lacked the emotional maturity to see that he was still their best bet for beating Trump.

You’ll note that the right wingers would never do what the lefties did to Biden. That’s because unlike my fellow liberals, they understand loyalty.

Now we’re fucking doomed. There is nobody who can replace Biden and have even half the chance of winning he did.

Camela Harris sure as hell can’t do it. She’s the only vice president to make even fewer public appearances than Dick Fucking Cheney. She clearly knows that she is NOT a politician and has negative public appeal and for her, engaging with people can only lead to disaster.

There’s one way she might win, though. She needs not just to run against Trump, but to prosecute him. That’s her greatest strength. She is one hell of a tough prosecutor and she’s potentially going up against a very wimpy and vulnerable criminal.

She is well equipped to lock on to Trump and just keep hammering away at him until she has reduced him to a blubbering incoherent mass of malfunctioning grey matter who can barely even cry for momma any more.

She might not be able to win the election, but she can make Trump lose it.

But she has to give up on the false liberal ideal of niceness. Fuck being nice. Trump is the biggest threat the USA has faced in my lifetime. The time for playing nice is over and it’s time to go to war and go for the jugular.

I’d rather be a bastard that wins than a nice guy who would rather lose than do anything that the liberal masses might see as “mean”.

After all, being in power might mean making tough decisions.

Better to just let the world burn as you keep your hands clean.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just checked and god damn it, this is gonna be another five week month.

And there’s only been one “normal” month since the last one!

I sm so fucking sick of this shit. Now I am kicking myself for spending that last $100 on Amazon orders when it could have (at least partially) covered the extra week.

But no, now I have to re-budget and figure out exactly what I will have to do without in order to make it through the month.

And just when I was finally starting to relax and enjoy life after the previous financial rape via calendar.

Wouldn’t that just frost ya.

I am sure I will figure something out. I am a highly intelligent, resourceful, and adaptable, so I am sure I will make do just fine.

But I should not have to put up with this bullshit. The only sensible thing would be if the province increased the non-shelter portion of our payments by 25 percent when the time between payments increases by 25 percent.

I mean, this ain’t rocket science, folks. More time should mean more money.

But I guess nobody gives a crap about us disabled people if there’s no media around. They can screw us over however they like and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it because we’re just a bunch of cripples.

So of course they don’t care that the people under their purview randomly have to live for five weeks on what usually only covers four.

It makes the accounting easier for them, and they’re the only ones who count. We should be grateful that we get anything at all.

But you have heard all this from me before. And honestly, you will probably hear it all again the next time this shit happens.

It stresses me out and all that stress has to go somewhere.

Me, I use my words.

Otherwise, today’s been OK. Started off bad when both Julian and I completely spaced on the fact that we had Wound Care this morning at 8:45 am and overslept.

I woke up at like 9:20 am, he woke up not long after.

I got him to call to apologize on our behalf, and surprise, they had an opening at 4 pm.

Bitchin’. It’s a plan, man.

We had to arrive a bit early because apparently at that Vancouver Coastal Health facility they lock the doors at 4 pm on weekends.

I’m sure that makes sense to someone.

Anyhoo, we showed up, my nurse (Nicole) let us in, and the usual stuff happened, But in addition to that, we talked about my applying for Assisted Living, which Julian had been kind enough to initiate.

And this was a conversation he wanted to be part of, so he ended up joining us.

So now Julian knows the secrets… of WOUND CARE! Mua ha etc.

Anyhow, my takeaway from that conversation was that I actually do pretty good on my own. I don’t need help with anything but showering, and that is something I was totally going to take care of back when I still thought I had spare money.

I can get a shower chair for like $60-$100. Not this month, though. Sigh.

The only other major life area I can’t do myself is laundry. I need Julian for that. In an emergency, I might be able to find a way to somehow haul my laundry to and from the machines despite needing to use a walker.

I picture a laundry basked perched on the classic Little Red Wagon.

But I do my own cooking (sorta) and I get dressed and undressed on my own just fine and I manage to make it through the month without setting myself on fire more often than not, so I guess I do OK as long as Julian is around.

Which brings up a very awkward point : a lot of what Assisted Living would do for me is currently being done by Julian, so their role would mostly be to replace him.

And that feels all kinds of wrong.

For one thing, I don’t think he hates doing what he does for me. For another thing, it would absolutely kill me if he thought he’d been replaced because he was not good enough or didn’t do the job well enough.

You do a fantastic job helping me out, dear. I could not ask for better help, because not only do you do a wonderful job, you do so in a patient, attentive, conscientious way that never fails to make me feel comfortable and secure.

So yeah. I don’t think we really need Assisted Living for much.

We will see how it all pans out.

More after the break.

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Am I a romantic?

Yes and no.

I’m very sentimental. And if I am in love with someone, they are going to know it because I am quite effusive. I will shower them with affection and romantic words and cuddles and hugs and so on.

God, could I use a good so on.

And I would be almost as affectionate in public, if they don’t mind. I really do want the world to know how much I love this wonderful, amazing, incredible person.

But no matter how affectionate I get, I will never be able to forget the practical details. I am, for better and for worse, fundamentally pragmatic, and I will not be able to relax and be a lovey dovey hug machine until I am sure all the practical details have been taken care of and everything is going to be OK.

The best I could do in terms of…. let’s call it romantic abandon is to fake it by making pragmatic adjustments to my plans on the fly without telling my lover.

Like, “Oh OK, now we’re in a pedicab going God knows where, that means I will have to dip into my supply of local currency to pay the guy, and probably when we get to wherever we’re going as well, and this means the trip to the museum is on hold for now, and that means…. ”

And this could be going on in my head while I am being all passionate and “wild”.

If I could not do that, I might have to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt because if I don’t have things nailed down in my head, however flexibly, I am going to be overwhelmed by cosmic anxiety as my worry-wort nature screams at me that if I don’ know what will happen DOOM MUST ENSUE.

So am I romantic? Sure.

But only once we’ve nailed down our itinerary.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s occurred to me today that I’ve always had this tendency to sort of “fade away” when I am doing anything involving difficulty or effort.

It’s like I can’t even commit to doing things and so before I even actually try to do it, I am halfway out the door already.

This negatively impacts performance.

In other words, it’s why I often do terribly at even the simplest of things. If it’s something even slightly outside my areas of confidence (intellectual, creative, wacky, etc) then when I try to do it, the anxiety immediately kicks in and makes me want to give up and flee and that means I am too scared to really try doing the thing and so I fail.

And when I fail, the sick part of me says, “Phew, thank God that’s over! I feel so much better now! What a relief!”.

So on a primitive level, this goes down in the books not as a failure but as narrowly escaping mortal danger, and I actually feel kind of good about it.

But then reality sets in and I realize that my inability to do even basic things has once more left me embarrassed and humiliated and now I hate myself.

I hate myself SO DAMNED MUCH.

This is why it is far better to stay in the game and get hurt. Life will treat you far more kindly if you are genuinely trying your hardest, even if you fail.

Besides, pain is transitory. It happens then it’s over. It’s not fun but it’s nothing worth fucking up your whole life to avoid.

Adulthood begins when you can choose to do something you know is going to suck because you think the rewards are worth it.

That is more or less how having a job works. Or so I have heard.

So how do I stop this fading away effect? Through getting hurt, I imagine. The more hits you take, the more your deeper mind gets the message that pain is not the worst thing in the world and you will get to know the triumph of knowing what it will cost you and doing the damned thing anyway.

This will be extremely liberating. The tougher and stronger you get, the less scary and dangerous your world becomes. Things that were unthinkable nightmares before will become laughably trivial because you finally have the (real and metaphorical) callouses to endure them with almost no pain at all.

But that means resisting the urge to flee reality when you think something painful is coming. And that is not going to be easy, especially at first.

I know that my instincts are all wrong. Escape is my greatest addiction, the one that underwrites all the others, and fighting that urge is going to be tough.

Kind of makes me want to run and hide, ha ha.

But somewhere in the vast expanse of my wimpiness and cowardice there must be a flaw. A subtle fault in the fabric of it all that I can exploit to create a teeny tiny breach for my latent strength and courage to surge through.

I think the secret is to get mad and stay mad, which is not something I am used to either. But I think that if I can conceive of my struggle for manliness as a way to defy and/or spite something or someone, that would help me stay determined.

I need to tap into all that latent anger more often period. I suppose that means I will have to be willing to become an angrier person, at least for a while, as I do my best ot learn the integrate this new power into my personality.

World domination through bitterness!

More after the break.

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Don’t Google Mommy

This is quite witty and fun.

I can relate, although compared to Millennials and beyond, my little trove of perverted things stupidly attached to my real name is quite small.

That’s the benefit of being an Internet pioneer, not a native.

Like, who gives a fuck what anyone posted to UseNet?

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A busy day

By my standards, anyhow.

It started at 11 am. That was the time Julian was originally going to drive me to the bank to do my monthly banking.

It still pisses me off that I can’t find a way to spend my money online and have it come directly out of my bank account.

I think in order to get that, I would have to switch banks. VanCity is way behind the times when it comes to this kind of thing.

So, consider my gumption trapped because changing banks is a HUGE hassle.

Anyhow, 11 am comes around, and Julian and I realize that we forgot to wash any clothes for me, so we had to wait on the washing machien et al. and I had therapy between 1 pm and 2 pm, so the trip to the bank had to wait until after that.

Oh well, whatever. I don’t mind change, it’s uncertainty I can’t stand. A switch from 11 am to 2 pm means going from certainty to certainty.

But going from 11 am to “whenever” would be completely unacceptable.

Anyhows, we did the bank run a little after 2. It went quite well. VanCity might he behind the times but I must say they are always super nice and accommodating to me.

People really are extra nice to you if you have a disability. At some point that will stop surprising me, but until then, it’s really quite nice.

I don’t know why I always expect the world to be cruel and callous to me. I guess it’s because that’s what my childhood was like.

Not even my teacher could stand me for very long.

Anyhoo, after the bank we came home and I ordered my groceries. It came to the usual ~$65, and I re-upped on all my little pleasures.

By the time I did that. it was time to eat n’ blog, and after THAT I had to wait for my groceries to arrive between 6 pm and 7 pm, and then it was time to teledine with Joe. Julian, and Felicity at 8 pm, and then it was time to finish blogging.

So really, it’s been a madcap merry-go-round of activity today.

And I feel fine.

I am happiest when I am busy.

So I need to learn to keep myself busy.

And I have a whole lot of anti-action bias to overcome before that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not only is this a great song from an amazing musical (Little Shop Of Horrors, the Ric Moranis version), but it opened my mind in a truly enlightening way.

It taught me that the boring standard middle class life I had always taken for granted growing up was somebody’s dream life.

And I did not have to look far for those somebodies. We were surrounded on all sides by working class families where if they were lucky, one member of the household actually had a job.

Being part of a primary resource economy really sucks, folks. It’s like being a writer : the people primarily responsible for bringing the thing into existence get treated the worst.

Anyhow, my family was not even slightly interested in the usual middle class “keeping up with the Joneses” social snobbery and competition bullshit. We’re all natural egalitarians. It’s how we were raised.

But we still had nicer stuff than our neighbors. And intentions and attitudes aside, I Am sure there were ways my siblings and I unconsciously expressed our economic status simply in the things we took for granted.

There have to have been times when we were looked upon with envy, if nor jealousy. Maybe even a little resentment,

And I was totally oblivious to this whole scene until that song, Somewhere That’s Green showed me that I was, in fact, rich, and always had been.

And yet. compared to the rich people in the one rich neighborhood in town, I was poor. And you could tell I was poor because all the other kids from the advanced classes I took in High School dressed way better than I ever could and showed up to school in nicer cars than my family could ever afford.

Added to the first observation, you can see how I came to realize that we are all rich and we are all poor. No matter how bad you think your life here in the golden paradise that is life in a WEIRD^[1] nation, there are around two billion people in the world to whom your life seems like living in Heaven.

And no matter how good you think you’re doing, the One Percent sees you as being absolutely no different than the dirtiest drunk on Skid Row.

We’re all lowly scum in their eyes.

And to me, this leads naturally to a egalitarian humanist view of the world. I can’t deny compassion to someone simply because they are richer than me because I certainly wouldn’t want to be denied compassion by those who are poorer than me.

And I can’t look down on people poorer me unless I am perfectly fine with those richer than me looking down on me.

Pain is pain. Suffering is suffering. We all bleed the same color. All the things that truly matter – family, friends, relationships, community – are the same no matter what your circumstances are, and once you learn and accept this, your heart can open up to everybody because now you truly understand that we are all in this together and none of the silly ways in which we divide ourselves from one another really matter when compared to the challenges we face just trying to get through life together.

Like I always say, we’re all just drunken monkeys stumbling through the dark trying to find the door into happiness. Nobody really knows what they are doing or what the hell is going on, and the people who seem like they have it all figured out are people who have only thing figured out and that’s how to fake it really convincingly.

One of the ironies of the modern age is that the people who seem to be living the best possible lives on Instagram are actually the ones with no life at all because everything they do is calculated to impress people on Instagram.

The people who put on the best show are always the one with the most to hide.

More after the break.

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Everything is stupid and nothing matters

Gonna stick that on a T-shirt one of these days. Who knows, it might catch on with today’s angsty, neurotic, freaking out all the time Gen Z kids.

I found out why they are like that. One fact made it all make sense to me : they came of age AFTER 9/11. So of course they don’t see the world as a safe or happy place.

Plus, you know, the planet’s on fire, we’re losing democracies, and all over the world, the lunatics are taking over.

But it’s probably just the 9/11 thing.

One bit of sort of good news : some of them seem to be at least dimly aware that they were raised by us, Gen X, and not the Boomers or the Millennials.

I’ve given up on the Millennials. As far as they’re concerned, they were somehow raised by the Boomers just like we were.

Not sure how that is possible. Pretty sure you can’t have two generations in a row raised by the same generation. That’s demographically impossible.

Still, it’s probably at least partly our fault, or rather, the fault of our collective “fuck off and leave me alone” attitude.

I mean, we never had our Boomer parents’ full attention anyhow, and when they did suddenly remember they’d had kids at some point they often only made things worse by trying to then speed-run parenting with “quality time” so we learned to just tell them whatever they wanted to hear so we could go back to being sullen.

It took up a lot of our time. That, and Nintendo.

So no wonder history forgets us so easily. We’re reclusive and passively hostile. We actively encouraged the world to forget about us when we were younger.

And it’s not like our parents were going to remember us.

Damn it, I meant to talk about Gen Z and got sidetracked bitching about the Boomers.

Even when they’re not in the room, they somehow make it all about them!

Well what I really wanted to say is that I feel like we, as a generation, fail the Gen Z’s in some deep and terrible way.

One theory is that we unconsciously assumed that they would be as stoic about their cynicism as we are and thus we passed that cynicism on down to them.

But they’re not like us. Their cynicism is far more panicky and desperate and eager for any fucking shred of hope and meaning they can find, which is why they tend to fall prey to ingroup identities in a way we never would.

Just imagine you’re a Gen Z kid who desperately needs someone to give them a pep talk and reassure them that everything is going to be all right and they go to their Gen X parent for it and instead of that get, “Yup. Everything and everyone sucks. Might as well get used to it.”

Oh well. At least they know we’ll always be there for them.

I just wish we had a little more sunshine to share with them,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.