Both against my depression and, ya know, life.

Still getting the sneaky sleepies. Almost fell asleep during wound care this morning. It’s just a matter of time before it happens unless I become a hell of a lot chattier.

If I was keeping up my side of a conversation, that would keep me awake. I hope.

Unless the conversation was really boring.

But I am not a chatty person. I respond to other people’s small talk but I am not capable of generating my own.

I don’t generate my own big talk very easily either. I swear there was a time when I could start conversations but now my mind just goes blank.

Maybe I used up all my creative energies blogging now. I dunno.

Going back a parenthetical, I did have an amusingly odd experience at Wound Care. I kept hearing what sounded like someone’s impression of what an old man sounds like.

No words, just gibberish in a corny old wheezing old man voice, kind of like some old person puppet in a kid’s show whom everyone seems to understand but us.

And whilst I was sitting there with a nice lady working on my feet, I pondered this surreal phenomenon. But the penny didn’t drop until I heard the nurse talking back to him and realized the conversation was in Chinese.

No wonder I couldn’t understand him! 🙂

Meanwhile, I continue to be somewhat depressed. To be honest, it’s beginning to grate on my nerves. I want to be rid of this pall that seems to be clinging to me and waiting to pounce on my when I stop being too busy to pay attention to it.

I wonder if it’s related to the sleepiness. Perhaps its all a sign of my untreated sleep apnea getting worse. I dunno.

I know the depression is at its worst right after I wake up. And lately I have been waking up in that sweaty, incoherent, don’t even know my name state quite often.

Not hard to see how that might leave me depressed even after I physically recover.

Just to be on the safe side, I will start doing my breathing exercises when I feel myself feeling really bad and see if those help.

If my oxygen level has been low, that sure would explain a lot.

But I can’t forget the psychological aspect too. I have been breaking down long established walls inside me and those walls, while toxic in the long term, were holding back my depression and anxiety in the short term.

Whatever. I will trudge on through. No retreat, no surrender. This tank is going to just keep rolling over everything in its path like a bulldozer from hell and whatever gets in my way will be crushed like peanut butter under the weight of my treads.

Slow. But inexorable. Like glaciation.

And of course, if things get bad enough, I will go to the hospital. Though it occurs to me that I have no idea what happens when you go to the ER with depression.

I feel like they would probably say, “Yeah, nice try, druggie!” and call Security, but that is probably just the depression talking.

I suppose I could call or text chat with a hotline or something instead. Talk to someone who will listen and hopefully understand my problems.

Or at least sound like they do. I know that I am not the easiest guy to relate to for most people. Even my fellow nerds can only meet me part of the way.

Being a unique little snowflake really fucking sucks sometimes, ya know?

It’s like I’m from another planet.

More after the break.

---

How to terrify a killer

This is EXACTLY what made the original Equalizer such an amazing show.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would do if I was a vigilante. Merely bringing them to justice would not be enough. Not for the real scumbags like this guy.

By the time I was done with them they would be BEGGING TO BE ARRESTED.

In my own highly refined way, I am a very brutal man. Not every criminal would warrant that kind of treatment, in fact, most wouldn’t.

I would specialized in those that did.

---

The friendly alien

I was pondering the conflict between being friendly and personable and being weird and alienating earlier today.

Maybe that’s why the idea of being an alien or a robot or the like appeals to me, and to a lot of other alienated nerds just like me.

Because then there would be a reason. An explanation. Instead of awkwardly trying to explain and/or justify myself to people (which never works), I could relax assuming people would just go, “Well no wonder he’s alienating, he’s an alien!”.

I definitely feel like I have been trying to be someone I am not. Not in the conformity sense exactly – I lack the social skills to conform even if I wanted to – but more like I have a software conflict in my personality that causes me to try to be Mister Wonderful when my weirdness always shines through and ruins it.

I would be far better off coming up with a persona that works for all of me. Hence the idea of being a friendly alien or robot or whatever.

Obviously I am not going to try to actually be those things, but they give me something to aim for in this world which has furnished me with very few role models.

Because there’s nobody else like me in the world. I am one of a kind. The most I have gotten from others is little fragments of identity like random pixels of a picture.

I still have nothing even approaching a single, unified, suitable conception of self that I can use to anchor my identity.

All I can do is improvise.

And that’s so very tiring.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

wp:paragraph –>

I want to get off.

Because I still panic when I notice the passage of time.

Like, for instance, today is Thursday. But to me, it feels like Sunday was yesterday. It therefore feels like I “lost” four days somehow, and that makes me panic.

There’s that “oversensitivity to loss” that seems to haunt me.

Because the thing is, you can only ever lose time. The moments pass and are gone forever, and them bam, you’re one step closer to the grave.

And I am well aware that my days are numbered and the number isn’t very high. I highly doubt I will live to see my 60th birthday. Not with the way things are going.

I do what I can to preserve my existence, but it’s not enough. My muscles continue to get weaker and weaker and soon I will be stuck in a wheelchair, and not too long after that, a hospital bed, and after that… after I have gasped out my last in terror and agony all alone and full of tubes as even the muscles that let me breathe abandon me – the next stop is my sad, pathetic grave.

I’ll miss me.

I know all this, but because I am all broken inside, it does not do what it should do, which is to fire me up to make the absolute most of every minute I have left in order to catch up to all the living I have never ever done.

But nope. All it really does is make me want to withdraw into myself harder than ever before and hide from the world until the end comes.

Not going to do that, I don’t think. But part of me wants to.

And now that I am uncorking all my old latent emotions, I have to contend with that part of me openly, and that’s not easy.

But I can’t go back to being numb. I am finally waking up inside and I am thrilled by every new feeling or sensation as I am finally coming to life after all these years.

The sleeper awakens. The dreamer stretches his limbs and looks around, trying to remember what the real world is like.

And the court jester laughs at the folly and the joy of it all.

Today was Therapy Thursday. Talked with Doc Costin about how a big part of me was sealed off when I was raped at the age of 4 and how I have beena cripple ever since.

So, for my entire life, more or less.

That’s what happens when you withdraw from the world like I did. The vast majority of your being becomes locked away in that special place in your mind that you created when what was happening in the real world was so horrible, and you were so helpless, that all you could do was run away inside yourself.

And that big ol’ wound left by the rape has been festering away all this time, poisoning me and all I do and tainting me in a dark and horrible way.

Still, given all that, I have done remarkably well by just not being a serial killer.

It’s a low bar, but I take my W’s where I can.

But it is time to escape my own shadow and face the light. And hold myself in place until my eyes adjust rather than screeching and going scurrying back into my hole.

It might take a long time. But I swear to God, I WILL return.

And when I do, this world will never be the same. I am going to unleash all the magic I have stockpiled over the years and let me tell you, things are going to change.

I can hardly wait.

More after the break.

---

I shouldn’t be doing this…

..but I am not going to eat supper tonight.

I have absolutely no appetite at the moment and the very idea of trying to force myself to eat makes me feel nauseous and dizzy, so nope. no supper tonight.

Not even going to bother going to the kitchen to make myself something.

I have enough stuff left over from lunch that I can improvise a crappy but acceptable meal, and that will be what is waiting for me if my appetite returns.

And it might. I am plying myself with water and nibbling a little on trail mix. It is entirely possible that this will get things started.

I will tell you one thing : I am beginning to worry about how high stakes and demanding my hydration game has become.

I have to drink water almost constantly just to break even. I have been assuming that it has something to do with my Jardiance and its magical ability to smuggle excess blood sugar out of my bloodstream via my urine stream, but I don’t know for sure.

It would make sense though. Before Jardiance I had high blood sugar for some reason^[!]. and now I don’t. Ergo, there must be a fair bit of sugar smuggling going on, and that takes a lot of urine, and that, in turn, takes a lot of hydration.

But it’s becoming downright stressful. Having to go get more water from the tap in my ensuite all the time is a hassle and a pain in the ass. Ditto with having to empty my pee receptacle four times a god damned day.

Moreover, I worry about what risks I am taking with my health. I don’t like feeling like I live on the thin edge of dehydration all the time. I feel like at any time, I could be too lazy to get more water (dehydration robs you of energy) and end up in some kind of negative spiral where I get really seriously medically dehydrated and thus end up in a 911 kind of situation.

I suppose I could ask Julian to get me more water. But I would feel silly doing that when my ensuite’s sink is like three paces away.

I am sure I will figure it all out.

Oh, And yeah. I do have a little bit of appetite now.

Guess I was dehydrated all along.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Must be the lack of exercise because my diet is quite good. [[1]]

Here’s some furry smut a friend linked me to that I really like.

I love getting to share this intimate moment with our mouse lady friend. It’s just so fresh and innocent and genuine. It doesn’t feel performative at all. She is enjoying herself purely for her own pleasure and there is something beautiful about that to me.

It’s such a human moment (irony acknowledged) , you know what I mean?

It even turns me on a little, which is pretty amazing for something with absolutely no penises involved at all.

I mean, it’s not even anal.

It reminds me of the amazing sex in the legendary Omaha, the Cat Dancer series. It’s some of the sexiest sex I have ever seen in fiction because there is something so raw and real about it.

It feels like this is how people really fuck. There’s no sense of a “camera” or anything being faked for your viewing pleasure.

I think the secret is that it has what most smut sadly lacks, which is emotional context. Lust is an emotion, not just an urge or an itch to scratch, and a powerful and amazing emotion at that. One with incredible transformative potential, especially when it is freed of all the bullshit artificial and unnatural restrictions society puts on it.

I mean it from the very depths of my soul when I say that consent is the only rule. Absolutely everything is morally acceptable or even commendable as long as there is consent. And nothing is acceptable without it.

Everything else is just a bunch of bullshit rules invented by people afraid of sexuality’s power over us and terrified of the adulthood that comes with it so they had to try to practically extirpate it holus bolus from human existence.

That’s what the whole “only in marriage and only for the purposes of procreation” nonsense is all about. It comes from the anti-sex sheep painfully and grudgingly admitting that some amount of sex is necessary to perpetuate the species.

Thank goodness this all came into being before we had test tube babies and in vitro fertilization and such things, or they would have ditched sex entirely and all of us would have been conceived in a petri dish.

Hell, those crusty old fossils and scared little children don’t even want you to masturbate. As if God gave his children sexuality just to torment them by telling them never to use it for anything ever.

As if God made a huge mistake when he gave us sex instead of just getting Adam to reproduce by mitosis or some shit.

What an unspeakably obscene thought.

The same goes for other things pertaining to the wet and squishy reality of our physical forms, like bathroom functions and other effluvia.

Some people are still being raised to never, ever, ever speak of those things, period. As if forbidding the mentioning of something negates its existence.

This results in massive amounts of unnecessary human pain and suffering when people raised this way can’t even talk about problems they are having to their doctors.

One of the most shocking things I learned from The Vagina Monologues and its attendant media was that a woman can go her entire life without once so much as having a good look at what she has “down there”.

Men can’t do that. Ours demands attention. Or at the very least aim.

I am very grateful to my often neglectful parents for at least making sure their kids were not exposed to that toxic garbage and therefore grew up with a lot fewer than average hang-ups about sexuality and bodily functions.

Amen to that!

More after the break.

---

A long way home

Another day, another agonizingly long trip out of bed.

Because I didn’t really want to get up. I wanted to stay in bed and ignore the world and stay all wrapped up in my own little world with just me, my comforter, and my tablet.

And even that would have been just a way to pave my way back to sleep.

So yeah, that’s depression all right. As I predicted, my psychological excavations are causing things to get worse before making them better.

Actually, I guess they’re kind of happening at the same time. Which makes sense.

Life rarely accommodates our desires for linear order.

I feel like I am unpacking problems that I had packed away in the deep freeze of my soul a long time ago in order to “function”.

Inasmuch as I ever did.

But I packed them away wrong. I made a huge, hurried mess of the job, and now I have to unpack everything, throw away the useless or toxic garbage, clean off what’s left, and pack it away again, neatly this time.

Come to think of it, I need to do that with a lot of things in my life, both inside and outside this all too commodious skull of mine.

That means I have to actively grapple with my depression and I am not used to doing that. One of the benefits of being so numb for so long was that it kept things (artificially) quiet and calm and predictable inside me.

I was dying on the inside and the clock was ticking as my life passed me by and something deep inside of me was screaming, but it was calm. Kind of.

But now I have to face the storm and fight my way through it. I can’t go back to sleep, and furthermore, I don’t even want to. I want to finally reach the surface of the water and swim my way to shore and lie on the hot sand of the beach when I dry out.

And wait for my skin to stop being all prune-y.

And I know I can do it. I have found the fires of stubborn and spiteful defiance in me and they are ready to fire up to face any challenge by my depression and burn it to a crisp.

The problem is static. My determination is not.

It doesn’t stand a chance.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

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

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

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

I shall explain.

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

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

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

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

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

Here is how my week breaks down :

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

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

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

Yes. that’s dramatic. So am I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And man is that going to suck.

More after the break.

---

The other way

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

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

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

I always have theories.

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

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

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

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

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

Someone needs to give my soul the Heimlich.

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

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

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

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

What a shitbag thing to do, eh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I miss those kitties.

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

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

It sucks to get old and sluggish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

---

Oh shit, I’m down here again

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

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

I need more emotional fiber in my diet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call it spring cleaning for the soul.

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been having chronic back pain lately.

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

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

At least one of those things has got to go.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

You did what now?

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

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

That takes craftmanship!

---

The latest scoop

BROWN ALERT. The following contains explicit poop talk.

So I had another attack of sleep incontinence.

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

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

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

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

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

At least, I assume it was mine.

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

And he’d probably die twice, poor dear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

I’m in a Gen X state of mind.

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

Last thing I need is for it to vent internally.

But it’s on the list.

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

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

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

Turns out not even the computer can beat this encounter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that pleases me in some obscure way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

I don’t want to do anything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That god damned wall has to go.

I won’t bother invoking Pink Floyd.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

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

Guess I have everybody fooled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there I will be, exposed before my peers.

Hi. I’m Mike. I’m new here.

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

More after the break.

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This is freaking savage

Warning, this will chill you to the bone :

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

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

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

---

The liberation of Michael John Bertrand

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

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

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

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

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

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

I always do.

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m working on it.

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

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

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

Repeat until believed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

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It’s all a lie

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

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

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

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

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

And even then, I don’t feel safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things are rarely that cartoonishly simple.

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

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

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

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

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

At least, from my point of view.

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

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

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

But me…. I have to know more.

I have to understand.

And by God, I will, or die tryin’.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So went and got my eyeball lasered this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, deeply into my eye. Technically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the entire fuck, dude?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

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I’m not here

This is something that has been on my mind lately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And some of that reality was people.

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.