Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

I talked about how I now knew that all that chilly fear that grips me when I try to do anything outside my very narrow corridor of existence is my brain’s way of keeping that enormous fraction of me that’s been frozen and locked away all these years from thawing out and upsetting the whole system.

That is, in essence, what I am so scared of. That enormous icy dread that freezes me in place is simply my maladapted mind’s way of maintaining stability and keeping me strapped down, head immobilized, eyes pointed at the screen as if I was in A Clockwork Orange except that what I see on the screen I’ve taken to be reality for a long long time.

And it is. But just a narrow little slice of it.

It gave the illusion of reality partly because I can see very far and very deeply from my Barcalounger of doom. I know so much and understand so much that it never felt like my point of view was limited at all.

And it wasn’t…. on the intellectual level.

But emotionally and spiritually, quadriplegics have a greater range of motion than I.

Luckily, the illusion has (obviously) started breaking down. In those rare moments when I Am not playing a video game, I find myself wondering, is this really all I am going to do today? Is this all there is for me? What other things, new things, could I be experiencing? And most importantly of all….

…could I be having a heck of a lot more fun than I am right now?

The answer, of course, is yes. It’s not like video games, as great as they are, are the most fun things in the universe. There’s all kinds of fun things I could be doing. Things that do more than just keep me occupied and entertained. Things that enrich me and bring me joy and love and fulfillment.

Or things that just get me laid, god dammit.

These cold fears of mine have kept me from thinking about things like that. Anything that felt like it might awaken my soul was a source of nameless terror that paralyzed me and kept me from moving forward in the slightest.

And that’s bad.

It’s trapped me in this tragically limited existence for almost 30 years now. But now my soul is slowly thawing out and waking up and it wants so much more.

So these fucking fears and aversions have got to go.

G’wan, get outta here! Vamoose! Shoo! GIT! *chases inner demons with a broom*

Right now, I don’t have the mental resources to launch a full out assault on the system. I am still too scattered and weak and diffuse for that.

But a storm is gathering within me, and soon (I hope), I will throw my all at all that god damned ice and break it up so it can melt in the sun and be gone for good.

This will not be easy. The old bad maladaptive part of me will insists that I am going to die (no, it is), that the walls of reality itself will come crashing down and I will be broken beyond all hope of despair when that ice gives way.

But I am not my ice.

I am the sad motherfucker trapped in that ice. I am a living, breathing, id-bearing animal who has been cut off from the wellspring of life force by all this ice for far too long and I am just about ready to hook that fucker up and throw the switch.

I’ll take the pain, the fear, the nausea, the dread, the heart palpitations, the illusions of illness, and anything else the system can throw at me.

But LET ME LIVE.

More after the break.

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Digging the terminology

I am really digging calling my mental illness “the system”.

Taps into my latent anarchist side. I am good at subversion. I have a real knack for taking down bad order. I can jam “the system” real good.

If the system is just, I’m for the system.

If the system is corrupt, I’mma throw a brick through a window.

My love of good order and my hatred of bad order are two sides of the exact same coin as far as I am concerned.

Hence my being “neutral good” in RPGs.

The Odyssey continues

Playing Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey continues to pay out nicely.

After completing the main plot then more or less fucking around for a while, I did the bucolic quest of paternal bliss that I knew would result in a loved one dying in order to kick off a long bloody question for vengeance.

And yup. One minute I am enjoying the domestic life in the lovely little village of Dyme (dee-may) with my father-in-law and fellow assassin Darius and my wife Neema and my infant son, Elpidios. ^[1]

Aaaand the next minute a bunch of assholes from the Order of the Ancients show up, slaughter everyone in the village and burn it to the ground just to get me to show up so they can try and kill me.

And yet, their leader, Amorges, still thinks he’s on the side of justice! Bah. He’s a bloodthirsty monster who chooses the most vile and violent solutions to any problem and tells himself it’s all justified in the pursuit of “peace”.

Burning villages for vastly insufficient reasons does not promote “peace”.

Anyhow, that was the introduction to Chapter 3 of the game, which was a pleasant surprise to me because I had forgotten I was on Chapter 2.

I just finished chapter 3, where I killed Amorges, tearfully reunited with my infant son, and just as tearfully said goodbye at him as his grand-pater took him away to parts unknown because he’d never be safe around someone with as violent a life as I.

And I think that’s what I have enjoyed most about this game : being set in ancient Greece, they do not hold back on the emotion one iota. My hero, Alexios, cried like an infant when his wife Neema died.

And you know what? That’s exactly what his culture would expect of him. That’s so much more enlightened then our compulsive emotional constipation that keeps us all bottled up inside.

Let it out, Alexios!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

From what I can gather, I radiate intelligence like it’s my personal magnetic field.

At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with as to how people can tell me, “you’re obviously really intelligent…” when they have barely even spoken to me yet.

And I have always felt like I had a personal energy field that sometimes crackled with all my latent energies that I did not know how to express.

It’s not like I was going to take a quick jog around the block any time soon. Even though that honestly probably would have done me a lot of good.

Kinda too late for that now. I am still looking for some form of medically monitored exercise, like physio or the like, so I can work out without worrying that I am going to make my still undiagnosed condition worse.

I miss the workouts I could do way back in 1991 at UPEI.

But yeah, all my mental stimulation creates this static electric charge, like my brain is a giant Van de Graaf generator and it discharges in the form of inspiration.

So in a sense, that’s where all my brilliant ideas come from. Also my deep intuition, which can be eerily accurate sometimes.

What’ll really crisp your tapas is that afterwards, I can examine the event and see the incredibly long series of connections and associations that happened in the blink of an eye in order to make that intuitive flash happen.

It’s like I was subconsciously building this circuit made of logic and something beyond logic (meta-logic?) in my mind and the intuitive flash happened when the last piece was added to the circuit causing it to blaze into life and output into the conscious mind.

And the thing is, there is always far more energy than I know how to discharge. So I always have this crackling cumulonimbus cloud of creativity churning and sizzling away in my head to call upon when needed.

Problem is that when I am not tapping into my creative maelstrom, having a constant major weather event happening in your head kind of means you’re crazy.

There’s been times in my life when I have been tempted to say, “sorry, I couldn’t hear you over all the noise in my head. ” to someone, but I um, knew better.

No way they’d take it in the lighthearted, no I am not schizophrenic way I intended.

And that’s the thing. It’s not a sensory thing. I don’t literally hear voices or noises or whatever in my head, thank God.

It’s more their mental equivalent. A metaphor, I suppose.

And yet, despite that, I feel like I have been struggling to hear and understand people over the noise in my head for my entire life.

Sometimes there’s just a hell of a lot going on in the mega-computer that is this capacious cerebellum of mine, and the brain bandwidth left over for actually processing sensory input from the world gets mighty thin.

Which is pretty dang weird, now that I am typing it out loud. I don’t suppose it’s something most people experience except maybe when they are cramming for exams or have a major life decision to make or something.

But my mind always has a hell of a lot going on under the hood. That’s my magic gift, perhaps, is that I can generate a task in my mind, assign some subconscious resources to it, and then forget about it, thus freeing my conscious mind to do other things.

Like fantasize about Zootopia characters. (Me, Judy^[1], Nick, a bottle of carrot flavoured lube, two strategically placed throw pillows…)

But because these processes are subconscious, my conscious mind easily loses track of them and most of the time I actually have no idea what is actually going on in my head until when and if it outputs.

What I wouldn’t give to have the Task Manage from Windows for my brain.

Or honestly, just a reset button.

More after the break.

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Let’s play Pop-o-matic Trouble!

Because that’s what kids want from a board game….. REVENGE!

So I am in the second week of having all my meds bubble-packed. Yes, all my many, many medications are now sealed up in plastic bubbles the size and shape as the packet I get my hot mustard dipping sauce in when I get MacNuggets. #relatable

And honestly, it’s mostly a pain in the ass.

I mean, I guess it’s nice not to have to handle all those pill bottles every day, but I was and am extremely used to that by now. I’ve been on a lot of meds for like 20 years now, and so my day has included a lot of pill taking for a very long time.

You get used to it.

And popping the pills out of their pack is a pain. You have to do it very carefully or the pills will scatter all over the place and I have had to learn to sort of make a bowl of the hand they are being popped into in order to make sure the pills don’t slip through my damaged by diabetes numb fingertips and go astray that way.

So right now, I miss my pill bottles. I asked for the blister packing because my case supervisor, Galina, suggested it, and I still have two and a half weeks of blister packed fun to go though, and I know I am a grumpy old cuss who doesn’t like change and so I hate everything new at first, so I am going to see how I feel when I am done.

Who knows, when I finish my packed pills, I might love them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am at the tail end of another blood sugar burn-down where I feel really feverish but more importantly I can feel my blood sugar crashing and it’s making me, to borrow a scientific term, hyperphagic.

In other words, it makes me REALLY FUCKING HUNGRY.

Thank God I survived another one. It felt like I was in serious peril there for a little while. So I did what any hyperphagic bear would do and ate like crazy.

Ended up decimating the little bit of trail mix (mostly “Omega” from Basse this time) plus a few healthy handfuls of those White Cheddar Cheez-its I mentioned before.

No doubt as to the cause : I did not have my midnight snack last night. That’s because I, to my shame, slept through the usual “getting together with Julian to watch Colbert on the PVR at midnight” period.

I must have forgotten to set my alarm. Because I lay down for a nap after finishing blogging, like I usually do (writing to you wonderful people burns a lot of brain calories), expect that this time, instead of sleeping for like an hour and a half like I usually do, I slept from 9:30 pm to 1:30 am.

That’s four hours of sleep. That’s generally how long I sleep when I get my official “sleep at night” after I do whatever around midnight.

Colbert with Julian, watching Cops et al over zoom with Julian and Felicity, etc.

And I feel really bad about that. I treasure my time watching stuff with Julian. He’s great company and it’s the most social thing I do most days.

Well, that and hanging with the fuzzies.

Anyhow, what matters to this scattered narrative is that I did not eat my midnight snack last night and hence I had another period of extreme hunger, high fever (or something that feels like it), and a horrible draining away feeling that makes me feel like I am going to die if I don’t eat enough.

And I just might.

Clearly, I have to stop being so cavalier about missing meals. What I should have done last night is go to the kitchen and made my usual snack anyhow, and taken it back to my room to eat it while watching a Dr. Gabor Maté video.

Or whatever. But I really do love that guy. He’s a hero to me.

Anyhow, my point is that missing meals is very dangerous to me and I will have to take my meals way more seriously if I want to avoid meltdowns in the future.

And I do. Because they suck. And might kill me.

To avoid skipping the midnight snack on nights when we hang with Felicity, I either need to start doing the hanging with Julian thing after we hang with Felicity, which is unlikely because we’re both pretty tired by then, or I have to get used to going out to make my snack at like 11:30 pm or 11:40 pm so I can eat it while we watch Cops.

Man that show is compelling. I can see why it was such a huge hit.

And in general, I need to take my health more seriously. But that’s a tricky thing for me to do because I don’t want to trigger my latent hypochondria or otherwise give myself things to be neurotic about.

I might just be too fucked up in the head to take care of myself properly.

And that would suck, because it’s not like there’s anyone else to take care of me. Unless I find myself a nice cozy hospital bed to live in for the rest of my life, I am going to be the one in charge of me no matter what.

And yet, fundamentally, I just don’t give a shit about myself.

My childhood was so bad that even i don’t think I am worth any effort, time, attention, money, or affection.

And I don’t know how to fix that.

More after the break.

How to fix that

I will now uncharacteristically pick up where I left off.

I don’t know how to learn to value myself more. I have my list of genuinely awesome things about myself and I know, intellectually, that it all adds up to a pretty amazing dude, and yet deep down, I still feel worthless and pathetic.

Clearly I need to do some deeper work on myself. That message about how less than useless I am got installed more or less from birth but was countered at first by me being the cute little redheaded freckle faced precocious kid that charmed everyone.

But that wore off. Even the cutest puppies still become dogs. And then nobody even wanted me around any more.

That was quite the fall from grace. I wonder if on some level, I am trying to get back to that place where everyone loved me and I was the center of attention wherever I went without even trying.

I did go from being a cute little redheaded boy to being a cute little red-furred fox, after all. One who is funny and charming and sweet and lovable.

`And in some ways, I am more myself when pretending to be him than I am when I am forced to be who I actually ended up being.

Not sure how I feel about that, but it is what it is.

Geez, I just realized I value who I am when I am Fruvous more too. That’s the person I really want to be. Friendly, outgoing, vibrant, with a lot of friends and loads of charisma and appeal. Someone everyone loves.

And, fur aside, it’s not impossible that I could be that person in the real world. It would be a lot more work, especially at first, and I would have to accept that, just like on Tapestries, my charms would not work on everyone.

But if I had a place I could go in the real world where I knew a bunch of people and they were all pretty cool and quite smart, like at Merriam’s, I would be there all the time.

And maybe I could finally actually develop socially, after all these years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I recently decided to invest some of my hardly-earned Salad money in a 2014 remake of a very old game called Fallout 2.

It’s a game from way, way back before the Fallout series was even 3D, so it’s a 2D turn based isometric RPG like Baldur’s Gate, Pillars of Eternity, or Pathfinder : Kingmaker.

And when I installed it and started playing, I discovered something wonderful.

I have never played it before!

Everything I thought I remembered from playing Fallout 2 must actually have happened in Fallout 1. So now I have a completely new (to me) Fallout game to play!

And that is Christmas in August to an RPG nut like me.

Plus there seems to be a robust modding community, which makes things a lot more fun. I’ve already installed a few.

One of them adds a ton of content just by digging into the game files and implementing a bunch of stuff the original game devs meant to have in there but had to take out because they didn’t finish it in time or somesuch.

Presumably the patch completes or fixes what needs it then re-includes it in the game, which is pretty kewl.

So far, the main issue I have with the game is that everything is kinda tiny. I guess that’s what happens when you have an old game running at modern resolutions.

But playing it is giving me eye strain headaches, so I am going to need to find a fix. I will see if running at a lower resolution makes things more visible to my weak eyeballs.

I’ve had this problem with very old games before. It’s mildly amusing and/or ironic that the problem with playing an old game is that my computer is too new.

Luckily, I still have Kingmaker and Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey to play when I need to remind my eyes what things are supposed to look like.

Or I could just, you know, look away from the monitor at the real world, but where’s the fun in that?

Reality is highly overrated.

Meanwhile, had another adverse health event this morning. I was hanging with the fuzzies and eating breakfast like I usually do around 8 am when I started feeling quite unwell. I felt incredibly hot. Like, not just a little feverish, and not just like it was hot out. I was feeling so hot that it became hard to think and my head felt thick and the inside of my skull was tingling and it felt like something bad was coming on.

And I just sort of lingered in that state for a while because I wasn’t thinking very well and so the thought, “Hey, this could be pretty bad. ” took a while to happen.

The really ironic part is that I was still chatting with my fuzzy friends like normal. Somehow, that part of my brain was working fine.

Once I had gathered enough of my wits to form a quorum and therefore make decisions, I said goodbye to the fuzzies and then…. I was stumped.

On some level, I knew that I maybe should call Julian’s cell and get him to take me to the hospital, or maybe even call 911, but that kind of decision was so far beyond me that light from me wouldn’t reach them for thousands of years.

So I went back to bed instead. By default, essentially.

Luckily, I did not die or have an aneurism, so… that’s good. Looking back, I think the problem was that my pores had gotten clogged and so the “fever” lasted until enough sweat built up to flush the pores out again.

Or whatever. My body doesn’t need a reason to do weird scary shit any more.

More after the break.

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Telling people what to do

I have a lot of natural leadership qualities.

Intelligence, sensitivity, understanding, judgment, charisma, and a genuine desire to help people, to name a few.

Plus I am just enough of a socially detached weirdo to be impartial and fair.

I will do what I feel to be right every single time.

But I have never sought leadership roles besides low level community organization and the occasional directing gig in amateur theater.

And I duck or dodge leadership because I don’t want to be tied down with responsibility. I am an artsy fartsy free spirit type and I prefer to maximize my autonomy.

But I am starting to reconsider that position. I could do a lot of good if I found the right kind of leadership position – knowing me, one I would create myself.

What’s more, I am beginning to realize that I am, deep down, a very pushy person. Not in a domineering way, exactly. More like being the yappy little dog that nips at the sheep’s heels to keep the herd moving.

And I am very opinionated. And often I feel very frustrated when things are not going the way I think they should.

To me, this all leads in one very specific direction : telling people what to do.

Not in a mean way. If you have to make people fear you in order to get them to do what you want them to do, you suck as a leader.

True leadership means being the person people turn to when they don’t know what to do and to be that person you must seem smart, confident, and like you understand the big picture and have everything under control.

That way people will take your direction and not even feel like it’s someone telling them what to do. After all, it’s something they are seeking from you, not something you are imposing upon them.

What they want from you is whatever bit of action or information they need in order to go do their individual task.

Do that right, and people can relax about the big picture and concentrate on doing their part to the best of their ability.

And I think I could do that if I could just get over this childish aversion to responsibility.

The world needs me.

That should count for something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I can’t get enough of this guy.

Now I could write a million words based on that video alone but for now I am going to stick with his first topic, which is stress.

The world seems to have forgotten the basic theory of stress. Basically, stress kills because it keeps the body from repairing itself.

You see, when we are stressed, our adrenal response kicks in. When that happens, our body shifts priorities entirely to RIGHT NOW because it is assumed that you’re being chased by a saber toothed tiger or whatever and so what matters most is that you survive the next five minutes of your life and to hell with anything long term.

You have to survive the short term for there to even BE a long term.

And that means long term things like healing, cellular regeneration, clearing blood toxins, and so on are put on hold until the crisis ends.

BUT THE CRISIS NEVER ENDS. Modern humans face dozens of complex stressors all the time and that means we stay in this state of compromised renewal all the god damned time, and that is why stress is killing us.

That’s why previously fairly rare diseases like cancer have become so prevalent, along with things like hypertension, depression, stroke, anxiety, and birth defects.

And speaking of depression, it is poisonously ironic, Doctor, to tell people like me that our depression makes our medical outcomes worse across the board makes us very depressed and thus makes our medical outcomes worse across the board.

I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong, Doctor. The world needs to know these things. I am just commenting on the inescapable irony of it all.

It’s like, the times I’ve been the hospital, I have noticed (and greatly appreciated) how the nurses do their best to tell me things without freaking me out.

I would love to sit in on whatever course they take that teaches that.

As for disconnecting from ourselves and our bodies, I sure as federally insured fuck know all about that. When I was being raped at the age of 4, I completely divorced myself from the reality of the situation as a way to cope with the unthinkable, incomprehensible horror of it all.

I told myself, “this is not real, this isn’t really happening, I’m not really here” over and over again until, presumably, it was all over.

I don’t consciously remember the event except for bits and pieces. But I am positive it’s all recorded in me somewhere and that the effort it takes for my mind to basically fight itself in order to keep those memories suppressed has cost me far more than I would ever want to know.

I wasn’t always a wimp. I wasn’t born that way.

And of course, I never truly returned to reality. I reconnected with the world of the senses and the “real world” only as much as I absolutely needed to and the rest of me stayed suspended in the world of the mind and what was purely internal.

Like thoughts, ideas, emotions, words, puzzles, games, TV, video games, reading, and of course, eventually, the Internet.

That’s why my whole personal life has been lived through screens. If it hadn’t been too early for remote learning, I no doubt would have lived my scholastic life through screens as well. Screens screen out reality, with which I have somewhat of an issue.

And even as I am typing these very words, I know that I am mostly not really here. My physical self is unavoidably present, but my inner self is crouched down behind a screen scared out of his mind (literally) of the big bad world out there and sending these little strips of words out into the world to represent me instead.

It’s pretty sad.

More after the break.

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Two sleepy buddies

Guess what? I’m making images again, and I don’t even have to use my own computer.

Instead I am using this amazing website to make images like this :

The same site lets me make smut too, but I haven’t made any that I consider both good enough and safe enough to share…. yet.

But it’s comin’.

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Memory Lane, Sneak Peek edition

I’ve been going through some of my ancient YouTube playlists and have found some real gems from long ago that I just have to share.

But I’m pretty close to the end of today’s words, so I will only share a few.

Like this peppy and colorful little number :

(warning, not safe for people who hate it when things are in rhyme)
(I’m looking at you, Felicity!)

I admit, it’s a little twee even for me but there’s enough wit and invention to it (plus, ya know, murder and stuff) that I can put up with it.

Here’s another ancient morsel. It’s short but packed with… well you’ll see.

(warning, not safe for people who don’t like REALLY brutal satire)

Like I said, brutally satirical of a certain kind of middle class white lady, most likely in Southern California or Texas.

The super racist kind, to be specific.

And I think something particularly nasty comes crawling out of people’s minds when they have someone of definitely lower status who lives with them, like a live-in maid.

Especially when those people depend on them for their green card.

But remember, the white ladies lose in the end!

And finally, this little masterpiece :

(not safe for those sensitive to people hilariously desecrating classic 80’s music videos)

Oh, and watch the original video first, it’s good, and it makes this version much funnier.

That’s enough for now, I think.

I will probably share more of the best of the 2000s in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just had a very unpleasant experience.

I was plugging away, playing Pathfinder : Kingmaker, deep in concentration as usual, when I suddenly realized my stomach was positively boiling with acid.

What’s worse is that I could also feel my blood sugar start to sleep. I got this feeling I have had before, like something vital is rapidly draining away from me. It comes complete with a splitting headache and a case of the greasy sweats.

Sorry for that image.

So I did the only thing I could do : I ate. Good thing I always have food nearby. I started noshing on trail mix and Cheez-its and just kept on eating until the acid beast in my stomach was placated.

Luckily (and probably relatedly), it was almost time for lunch anyhow. So now I am doing the whole blog and eat thing.

And fretting, as I so often am, about resources.

This was a bad week to end up needing to eat essentially two and a half meal’s worth of trail mix because I already have a deficit.

See, every week, I buy a 1 kg bag of No Name Original Trail Mix and a 600 g bag of some other trail mix from the friendly folk over at a company called Basse.

I originally got just the 1 kg bag of the No Name stuff but I found I was running out by Wednesday (I shop on Fridays) so I added the Basse stuff to my routine.

Plus it gives me some variety in my feed.

But this week, instead of the 1 kg bag of the No Name stuff, I got another 600 g bag from Basse. Meaning I have a trail mix deficit of 400 g.

Oh well, at least they didn’t saddle me with one of the Basse mixes that’s like half candy this time. I can’t eat that shit.

Plus it offends the 70’s health food nut in me to see nice wholesome trail mix turned into junk food to make it more palatable.

Don’t get me started on granola.

Anyhow, I just know I am going to run out of trail mix before the week is over and that is the kind of thing that stresses me out.

I hate running out of things. The idea is to buy more before you run out. That way you never have to deal with the heartbreak of having none left.

So now I feel like I have failed somehow, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. My instincts make me feel like I have let the village down and as a result this winter is going to be a hard one.

I’m a complicated dude, is what I am saying.

So yeah. I guess it was my stomach’s turn to freak out on me.

Actually, it was probably primarily a blood sugar thing that expressed itself, in part, as a highly acid stomach.

Dunno what precipitated a blood sugar meltdown. It’s not like my activity level went up in some radical way.

Then again, I did start playing Kingmaker right after a long and intense session of Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey, and I suppose that in my gimpy world, that would count as an unusual increase in activity.

Normally, I would lay down after a long session of a fairly intense game like Odyssey, but today I decided to push myself a little and see what happens.

Won’t be doing THAT again any time soon.

Plus it’s high time I started eating lunch at 3 pm and not 4 pm.

Or I started eating breakfast at 9 am instead of 8 am.

My point is that eight hours is too long to go without eating even for people who are not diabetic, let alone my No Sugar Added ass.

I am so bad at living.

More after the break.

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This joke needs work, but :

I’m thinking of changing my chicken’s feed, she’s getting way too many Trump stories.

Stupid goddamned algorithm!

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A fire in the darkness

Remember, if you can’t take the heat…. you’re pretty much fucked.

That’s how I am feeling right now. It’s around 8:30 pm and the sun is setting and it is finally, FINALLY starting to cool off.

But I have felt many varieties of shitty today and the heat’s to blame.

Well, that and airborne pollen. Basically, summer is out to get me.

If money wasn’t so tight, I’d get myself some antihistamines. But the god damned hellspawn shitlicking 5 week month made that impossible.

I can’t even get Felicity a birthday gift and her birthday was 11 days ago.

And besides my lovely brush with hypoglycemic death earlier, I know my IBS is mssing me up to. Right now, I should be eating supper, but my appetite is DOA.

I’ve managed to eat a Mandarin orange (Cantonese oranges are too expensive) and I will try to nibble on some of my White Cheddar Cheez-its in order to keep body and mind together for now.

But mostly I am hoping my midnight snack will compensate for my missed meal.

The White Cheddar Cheez-its are pretty good, by the way. But be warned, this “white cheddar” tastes a lot like Parmesan cheese to me.

This adds fuel to my theory that “white cheddar” is really just white-bread Parmesan.

Think about it.

And yes, I see the irony in skipping a meal on the same day that I had a blood sugar crash. I know that I might be dancing with death on this one.

But he’s light on his feet and really knows how to Charleston.

I won’t get into the whole “it sucks to try to eat when you have no appetite” thing. Whatever. I have more or less given up on that fight.

I know that I could make myself eat if I really, really had to. I’ve done it in the past, and it has saved my ass a few times.

But I already essentially ate two meals for lunch today, so I am sure I will be fine. I only have to make it to midnight anyhow.

I’m sure my body has enough latent calories for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think my condition is getting worse. But it’s hard to tell.

Today’s trip to Wound Care was really rough. I barely made it from the car to the waiting area of the CCC (Community Care Clinic).

The second I was on my feet, I was exhausted and weak. It reminded me of the bad old days before my hospital stay of July 2022 when my legs were getting weaker and weaker and less flexible and harder to coordinate.

Back then, I didn’t have a walker, so the trip from the Joemobile to the CCC was excruciating. Many times, i thought I would not make it. By the time I made it to the waiting area, I was red-faced and sweaty and short of breath.

And yet, it took waking up to find my legs just plain would not support my weight at all before it occurred to me to do anything about it.

Sometimes I look back at past me and I am agog with confusion and horror. What the hell was wrong with me that instead of seeing someone about my leg degradation, I just treated it like it was normal and kept motoring along?

Maybe that’s the problem : I just keep going. There is a fundamental restlessness at the core of my being that insists that I keep moving and grooving no matter what, hungry like a shark for mental stimulation and never truly coming to a rest.

That’s kinda fucked up.

Also, before we leave the topic, I need to once more apologize to all my friends for putting them through the nightmare horror show that was watching me develop enormous infections (cellulitis), slowly lose my ability to walk, and acting like it was all perfectly normal and no big deal.

I’m over that now, I think. But I still feel bad about what I put you through. Sorry.

Anyhow, on to my current degradation.

The trip from the CCC back to the car was pretty bad too. Not as bad as the first trip as my muscles had warmed up somewhat but I still felt quite wobbly and weak, and experienced great relief when I finally sat down in the car.

Pretty bad, huh? Probably a good reason to go see Doctor Chao again. Well, that and my recent attack of sleep incontinence.

I could also take it to Urgent Care or the ER. Insert standard whining about not wanting to go here. They both suck enough to make making an appointment with Doctor Chao seem like an appealing alternative.

But I know that there will probably be at least a week’s delay before Chao can see me. Possibly more. Like all GP’s, he’s becoming super busy as the Boomer bulge hits their most medically demanding years – the last ones.

Plus my faith in Doctor Chao has taken some big hits. It’s clear to me that he is not capable of sticking with a problem like my muscular deterioration until he actually comes up with a diagnosis.

With him, it’s out of sight, out of mind. I only exist to him when I am talking to him, in person or on the phone, and so if I am not there demanding answers, I might as well have dropped off the face of the Earth.

Silly me, I thought the doctor’s job was to do whatever it takes to heal people. I never knew there was a “unless I run out of inspiration and can’t think of a possible diagnosis in which case fuck it” clause.

Not that I’m bitter.

I swear, if I end up in a wheelchair, I’m going to sue that man.

More after the break.

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Intermission : Funny bunny comics!

Some of these are absolutely brilliant!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9zIENibhXY

I love seeing things like this. They remind me that bright young minds can keep advancing the art of comedy long after I am dead.

When you get old, it’s easy to get jaded. But stuff like these comics cut through that. And that gives a grizzled old coot like me hope. Hope that I can avoid ending up hating everything because nothing makes me laugh any more.

Keep up the good work, kids.

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It gets worse

Not only was today’s trip to Wound Care especially rough on me, but now I feel like I received a light but thorough beating as I am stiff and sore all over and even just getting up to refill my water glass can make me groan.

Luckily, an Aleve seems to have done some good.

But I am officially quite worried now. This is not normal for me. I have definitely become more disabled. I am going to have to seriously consider the ER.

Or Urgent Care. *sigh* I really should relax about that place. Yeah, it somewhat sucked before they opened the second one, but I understand it’s a lot better now.

But anyhow, I am going to see how I feel over the next 24 hours or so. If I continue to feel all beaten up, I will have to go to UC or the ER.

God, I wish my tablet worked.

But it’s almost totally dead now. Even on the rare occasions when I can get it to charge at all, the moment I start actually doing anything the charge falls back to 1 percent and then the whole thing shuts down.

That means I am going to have to prioritize getting a new battery for it. And that will cost me something like $35. I was also going to try to get a shower chair with next month’s money, but who knows, the Occupational Therapist who is going to visit on the 21st might have the power to get the government to buy me one.

And that would be nice.

Since hooking up with my case supervisor Galina (the lady who visited a while back), things are, amazingly, actually happening for me.

And so far, all I have to do is show up for stuff.

This is ideal.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well that fucking sucked.

I just had the worst dizzy spell I’ve ever had.

And that’s saying something!

I had just exited the drowsing state that accompanies my waking up from a nap in the afternoon these days and walkered my way to the kitchen when it hit me like a ton of lead to the forebrain. Hit me so hard that the only reason I didn’t take a nasty fall was that our kitchen is tiny so I was able to shoot out my hands and grab hold of the cupboards on either side of me.

And even then I was in mortal peril because the room was still tilting from my point of view. A fact I learned when merely shifting my weight caused the world to do another violent shift that would have laid me out without the support of the cupboards.

Thanks, cupboards. You went above and beyond today.

Julian rushed over to see what was the matter, So he went above and beyond too. I managed to tell him I was dizzy. He asked what he could do as he helped me get the walker back upright. I honestly couldn’t think of a way he could help.

Some things you just gotta go through alone. Maybe if two burly interns with excellent reflexes has been there to hold me up, that would have helped.

But maybe not. I dunno.

Anyhow, I did the only thing I could do, namely hang on tight and wait for the dizzy spell to pass, which thankfully it did quite rapidly.

But that was very, very bad. I could have injured myself dozens of ways as my mighty mass came down on some poor part of me all at once. At my age, and with my osteoporosis, I could have broken a lot of my bones, too.

Makes me feel like I should go around in one of those safety harnesses that mountain climbers use. Plus a six inch layer of bubble wrap.

Now obviously, I got up too fast. That’s clearly the trigger in this situation. I was drowsing siesta style and then suddenly woke up and remembered that it was time o make my lunch and do part 1 of my blogging for the day, and that caused me to leap to my feet and walker to the kitchen far too quickly.

But that’s merely the inciting incident, not the root cause.

The root cause was probably dehydration. I get dehydrated so easily these days. So easily that I have to drink more or less constantly just to keep ahead of it.

So that combined with my circulatory issues is probably why I had such a severe onset of dizziness. And now I am left, as I so often am, wondering how seriously I should be taking this incident.

My normal, childlike reaction is to say, “well I am okay (ish) now, so I’ll forget about it. ”

Look, I’ve been telling you people I am not a competent caretaker for myself.

The other possibility would be to go to Urgent Care. And I don’t wanna. Ditto the ER. I am not in the mood to pack up some stuff and go to the UC or the ER and end up just sitting there bored out of my gourd (due to my fucking tablet not working any more) only for them to eventually tell me they can’t find a problem and so yay, you get to go home now. Aren’t you excited?

Go fuck yourself with a rusty bedpan, you knob. I wanted answers, not a pat on the back. Your lack of scientific curiosity offends me.

More after the break.

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People who hate utilitarianism

My theory is that the people with a strong hate for utilitarianism are people who fundamentally hate math.

And all other forms of quantitative thinking. The idea that a moral problem – any moral problem – could be solved by simply looking to see which of two numbers is bigger is extremely offensive to them.

To these people, morality is warm and human, and numbers are cold and inhuman, therefore morality can never, ever be reduced to anything numerical.

These forces are fundamentally at odds with one another. They are opposites, more or less. to these people and that is a hill they are totally willing to die on.

Despite the fact that said opinion is an aesthetic one, not a logical one. They don’t have an articulate argument for their rejection of utilitarianism, just an emotional reaction to it.

And here’s the thing : the logic of utilitarianism is ironclad and irrefutable. All
utilitarianism boils down to is choosing the greater (or greatest) good.

Ergo in order to argue against it, you’d have to argue for the lesser good. And that would be downright silly.

I think a lot of people get a bad impression of utilitarianism because of the extremely contrived questions in ethics 101 books where utility would demand that you do the thing that IS right over the thing that FEELS right.

Like, say, pressing a button that dooms one man to die so that five others might live.

Now me, I would press that button. My morality would demand it. Five people surviving is better than only one person surviving. That’s so basic it’s elemental.

But I won’t claim that I would walk away from it feeling good. In fact, seeing that one person die and knowing they died by my hand would probably haunt me for the rest of my life. I’d have nightmares.

But, and this is a real sticking point for some, morality is about doing what is right, not what feels good. And that’s what really sticks in some people’s craw : the idea that those two things can diverge from one another, at times quite radically.

Oh, and one last thing : I know and accept that utilitarianism is not for everybody. There are many people in the world for whom my personal brand of precision pragmatism is quite simply incompatible software. They can’t think like that and it would be highly injurious to them emotionally to even try.

And to that I say, do whatever works for you, people.

After all, that is always the pragmatic choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So today started out pretty shitty.

And by now you know I mean that literally.

Brown alert, poop talk ahead!

So the day started out fine. I had trouble unwinding so I ended up staying awake until like 6:20 am this morning.

But after that, I was finally tired enough to sleep.

Slept until a bit before 10 am. Got up, ate breakfast, hugged fuzzy folk. My usual morning routine, two hours later.

Whatever. Not important.

I still needed a lot more sleep, though, so I had to bid farewell to my fluffy paramours and go back to sleep far earlier than I would have liked.

So I went back to sleep and slept quite heavily…. too heavily, as it turned out.

Because yup, sleep incontinence struck again, Man I’m getting tired of this shit (ha ha).

Woke up quite groggy, felt the by now sadly far too familiar wrongness in the general vicinity of my butthole. put my hand there, got the very bad news.

So then I had to go through a ton of Kleenex cleaning both bed and butt to the best of my ability given the steel spikes shooting up through my mattress trying their best to impale me so I bleed out, because that’s just the way my life works.

Not that I’m bitter.

Oh, but life was not done being shitty (hee) to me. Not by far.

See, once I finished cleanup, I realized I needed to pee. And luckily my receptacle was close at hand and there was room for even a sizable micturition in it. So I figured I would make use of it.

But in my hazy and pissed off state (terrible combo), I forgot that for some reason, sometimes when I pee, I get the urge to poop during the act.

Sometimes the urge vanishes the moment I stop peeing, suggesting that the problem is that something is making my bladder press against or otherwise stimulate my bowels.

And not in a fun way.

So the moment I started peeing, I felt a great mass of stuff slithering out of me uncontrollably. Understandably, my heart sank as my bowels emptied.

And this was WAY more stuff than had come out of me the first time. So not only did I have to start the cleanup all over again, it was a much bigger and grosser task this time.

Ain’t life a peach.

Oh, and this time, it wasn’t the somewhat harmless half-digested bits of food like the first time. This was some serious (literal) shit.

I can’t promise I won’t make more shit jokes.

So I cleaned up THAT mess with an even more enormous quantity of Kleenex, and when I was sort of done, I realized I had a huge wad of extremely soiled tissues that I needed to dispose of.

So I reluctantly wadded them up, carried them into the bathroom, dumped them into the toilet, and flushed.

Which was dumb, dumb, dumb, because of course, the toilet instantly clogged and began to overflow.

This was getting farcical in a completely unfunny way.

Luckily, I knew what to do. Gently got the plunger in there and with a few swift form plunges, I unclogged the mofo.

It was a very low level clog, easy to defeat.

So that was my wonderful morning. Just another sunshine-y day in the life of a lost genius trying to finally get a life at the age of 51.

And I haven’t even talked about the shower thing yet. A total stranger hosed me off like I was an elephant at the zoo today.

It felt pretty good.

More after the break.

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The Rosewood Incident

So after Poopgate Number Whatever, I was able to relax by (what else) playing video games for a little while until 1 pm rolled around and it was time for me to head off to a local old folks’ home, Rosewood Manor, for a shower.

My first in well over two years, mind you.

And I was nervous, but as Felicity had suggested, I had popped a Xanax around noon so I was not panicking or freaking out.

Amazing stuff, that Alprazolam (Xanax). My anxiety was completely gone. And yet, I wasn’t stoned or sleepy or silly or dizzy or anything.

I was just chemically unable to panic. Bitchin’.

We arrived a little early. The appointment was for 1:30 pm and we got there at more like 1:20 pm so neither my case worker Tina nor my caretaker Harjit were there yet.

Plus, we were having trouble getting the car registered for parking. Parking was free for the first two hours, and we were only there for an hour, so that was all good.

Eventually we were led down a long corridor to a “spa room” that had some weird high tech kind of bath tub and a sort of stall with a detachable shower head and a device resembling a wheelchair as imagined by Fischer Price in it.

I got undressed and got in the chair and Harjit washed my hair and showered me all over. Thanks to Xanax, it was no big deal. I have always said that I somehow got a lower dose ot the nudity taboo than others and so it honestly was no big deal for me to just sit there and enjoy the luxury of FINALLY showering after all this time.

Well, being showered. You know what I mean.

I might ask to do it all myself next time. I’m not sure. It’s a strange thing to trust a stranger to do for you. It’s so personal.

But I must admit, my oral-retentive side loved being taken care of like that. And that is kind of distressing. I don’t like that side of myself and don’t want to cater to it because I don’t want to end up as even more of an overgrown and overbrained infant than I already am. I much prefer to be independent.

So in sense, it’s the classic struggle between decadence and autonomy. It’s a territory I am going to have to explore more and more as my debility advances and I am going to have to get used to preserving my dignity and freedom however I can.

Overall, it was a pleasant experience, although when I got home my legs were not happy with me due to having to go down that long corridor and back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Doug Henning, that is.

Fuck you, Doug, and all your empty headed talk about “the power of IMAGINATION!” and how we could “be anything we wanted to be” because if we only wanted it badly enough, our biggest dreams would come true.

Yeah, Jiminy Cricket can go fuck himself with a can of DDT too.

And it’s not just you, Doug. I loathe your entire generation of vacuous pinheads regurgitating your formulaic “pro-social” pablum about how great cooperation and friendship are and how we shouldn’t exclude people just because they’re different.

Fat lot of good that shit did me when I was a friendless weirdo child who never even got the chance to cooperate with anyone because I was different.

I mean, my fellow students must have had that shit repeated to them over and over again every Saturday morning too, yet somehow they still didn’t get the fucking memo.

Like a lot of inclusive and empathic ethics, it’s not something you actually do, it’s something that makes you feel good when you hear it.

Actually being nice to people sucks.

They got the memo about cooperation, though. They all cooperated beautifully when the entire student body of Parkside Elementary was chasing me around the playground with harmful intent.

All that crap about the power of friendship really hurt me back then. It was like the normal people were mocking me and grinding my face into the dirt about how wonderful being normal like them (and not “gross” like me) was and how I would never know the simple social pleasure of having a peer group because I was broken and disgusting and wrong and didn’t even deserve to go anywhere where others could see me.

But that would never have occurred to you, would it, Doug? Your evacuated cranium would never have conceived of there being a downside to jerking people off by telling them how great something most of them already had was.

But it wasn’t just the children’s entertainment of my formative years that I hate. I hate that whole generation of hippie dippie Boomer teachers who didn’t want to be seen as an “authority figure” and therefore let my fellow students run wild like Lord of the Flies.

God, do I hate that book.

My whole childhood was marred by the unintended consequences of all those Boomer teachers preferring to try to be our “friend” instead of having to actually live up to their responsibilities and take charge of the classroom.

As a result, I, like many other Gen X kids, grew up in a world without authority figures. And that made us, or me at least, very nervous and uncertain because we lived in a kind of anarchy where you had nobody to turn to when you were scared or weirded out or just plain don’t know what the hell is going on.

Human beings experience enormous stress without leadership. Whether the limp wimps of the world like it or not, we need hierarchy.

That doesn’t mean anything fascist. It just means there needs to be someone who understands the big picture that people can turn to when they don’t know what to do.

Without that, everyone gets stressed out by all the uncertainty. Nobody even knows if they are doing what they are supposed to be doing and if so, if they are doing it right. Discipline falls apart (if it ever existed) and people do mindless, aimless things like cattle in a feedlot. Everyone is miserable, including the teachers.

But hey, better that than forcing a Boomer to actually take responsibility for the things they actually have responsibility for, right?

No wonder they made such lousy parents.

More after the break.

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Not that I’m bitter

Oh wait, yes I am. I’m bitter as hell about the way my life turned out.

But I am trying to get over it because it’s not helpful. I know that my harsh, bitter, angry, scornful internal narrative is hurting me in the long run because it gets in the way of my moving on with my life by causing me to dwell on my past.

Or more correctly, dwell IN my past.

And that’s no good. If I want to move on into the future I have got to make peace with my past somehow, and that won’t be easy.

And it can’t be done by fiat. It has to be earned by working through all of the emotions involved until some degree of resolution is achieved.

Not “closure” because nothing is ever truly completely closed. But it can be sufficiently resolved so that the wound is closed and you can use that part of you again.

Right now, all that bitterness and rage over where I am today and how I got there as well as the massive amount of grief and torment I feel about all those years of my life in which all I did was playing fucking video games plus all the self-loathing that comes with being a 51 year old loser who’s never even had a job adds up to a massive amount of stuff for me to process and there is no quick and easy way to do it.

I can’t possible swallow that mass of indigestible dreck all at once. So all I can do is eat it one mouthful at a time and hope that some day, somehow, I will have eaten enough to make a difference in my life.

And that means giving myself permission to be mad about stuff that might even, in the final analysis, be my fault.

One of the biggest and most soul-wrenching questions that I face over and over again because I can’t seem to resolve it is : how much am I to blame for being who I am today? Could I have done differently? Or was I destined to tread water for 30 years before I could even begin to get my shit together?

The thing is, both answers to that question are bad. It’s bad to imagine I was helpless to do any better and it’s bad to imagine that I totally could have ergo this is all my fault.

Maybe it IS my fault. But if it is, I can’t handle that at all. Accepting that would crush me. I might never recover.

But the question then becomes, if I stay like this, is it STILL my fault? Or can I make it better for myself?

I’ve been proceeding on the assumption that I can. And in tiny ways, I have.

But part of me yearns to reach out for more. So far, my negative demons have been keeping me from doing so.

But some day I will finally reach outside myself and meet the world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.