I know, let’s grapple with the meaninglessness of my existence.

I just finished a satisfying session of the game I am currently playing, Divinity : Original Sin 2, a title which, like in the previous title, has absolutely nothing to do with the game.

Someone just thought it sounded cool, I guess.

Anyhow, I enjoyed playing the game, like I always do, but the voice in my head that incredulously asks, “So this is it? This is all we’re going to do with our day?” is getting louder and harder to ignore.

And that’s probably a good thing. If it gets loud enough, I will have no choice but to give it what it wants and what it wants is for me to do something productive with my time.

Something with a result. A result that I can look at and say, “I did that. I made that. I accomplished that. My life has some sort of point. I’m not just a passive victim lying on the side of the road in life any more. I’m part of things. I amount. I count. ”

As you can see, I’m a desperate man. And kind of pathetic.

So what’s keeping me from putting down the games and picking up, say, a video editor?

I think the best place to start with that is that video games are my security blanket. And my shelter. I am deep down terrified of facing the real world outside of them.

That big bad world where I have to make decisions and figure out what I want to do and choose amongst the billions of options I have at my disposal at any moment and be a person and deal with a much higher stimulation level without freaking out and maybe even deal with other human beings.

As long as I keep compulsively filling ever spare moment with video games – keep living like my entire life is a video game playtime optimization exercise – I don’t have to face any of that crap, or anything else in reality for that matter.

It’s one mother of a maladaptive coping mechanism. And it’s had me locked in place with no chance of escape to a meaningful life for a very long time.

And I am so tired of it. Yet the truth is that I am terrified of life on the outside. It’s fear that keeps me locked away in this icy dungeon of meaningless stasis.

But is it really a prison if I know I can walk out of it at any time and it’s only fear of the outside world that is keeping me here?

Yes and no.

Whether it’s fear, a lock, or a ball and chain, if you are trapped, you’re trapped. If you don’t feel like you can leave, you’re right.

And so far I haven’t been able to summon up even one percent of the sheer grit required to force my way through that impermeable curtain of fear so that I can make a new home for myself on the other side.

Or at least get used to the fear.

I think that, deep down, I know that when I cross that Rubicon, some deep and very tender part of me will have to die and that’s going to really fucking hurt.

And I guess that at least part of that is my remaining innocence. It’s a battered and dented old shield but I am still hiding behind it.

But it requires me to remain uninvolved and detached from everything and everyone.

And I am starting to think it just ain’t worth it.

More after the break.

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One toe over the line

Faintly amused by the fact that Part 1 ended up being exactly 601 words, one word over the goal I set for Part 1 each day.

Feeling fine physically but emotionally I feel sort of out of sync. I suppose I am in one of my rumination phases where I struggle with some aspect of myself on such a deep level that all my conscious mind knows is that there’s something vaguely wrong.

About being detached et al : I know that one of the things that keeps me hiding away is the fear of too many things coming at me all at once.

Fear of overwhelm, in other words.

And I mean, sure, that’s a possibility, especially when I have just emerged from my cave. But there’s no need to take on the whole world right away.

I can linger in the doorway while I adjust to the outside world.

Then again, I opened that door months ago and I still haven’t gone through. And I mean, the fresh air and sunshine are nice but the idea originally was that this would only be a prelude to, ya know, actually going out there.

I’m working on it.

It all comes down to energies, really. My lowered Paxil dose is loosening me up and giving me access to more of my own life force as the ice sheets of numbness retreat.

The trick now is to learn to use those energies to support my mood. There is nothing wrong with lifting yourself up a priori to any particular justification for happiness and indeed, I think being emotionally healthy requires it.

Normal people do it subconsciously. Depressed folk like myself don’t. Either we never had this self-correcting mechanism or ours got broken by trauma somewhere along the way. Either way, we are broken.

It’s almost like we’re daring the world to make us happy. Like on some deep and completely irrational level we’re forcing the world to make the first move so that we don’t have to take the risk of opening ourselves up to it.

Look, I said it was irrational.

At some point you have to give up, open yourself up, and trust the universe to, at minimum, not be actively hostile towards you.

To not be out to get you, in other words.

And that’s a lot of ask of the wounded ones like myself. As far as we know, being closed off like a clam in its shell is what has been keeping us “safe” all these years.

But of course, you’d have to open up to find out if that’s true, wouldn’t you?

And that’s the fix I’m in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or rather, on winning the argument. Not the same thing.

Part of being the giant genius that I am is that I can outmaneuver, outmuscle, outthink, and basically outdo anyone at all in any argument or discussion whenever I like.

In fact, it’s hard for me not to. I often don’t know my own strength and my shield of innocence tends to blind me to the effect I am having on others when I effortlessly and unknowingly utterly dominate them in what should be a friendly conversation.

Instead, I seem like I am going for the jugular, and in a way I am because my mind lunges for the heart of whatever I am thinking about and cuts right to the very core of an issue and that can have more or less the same effect.

I know that I should be a gentler giant. But I honestly don’t know how.

I just do what comes naturally to me. It’s what I have done for my whole life. As far s I can tell, from my point of view, I really am just doing what everyone else is doing.

But the rules are different for giants.

Which brings me back to the issue of role models. I don’t have anyone I can look to as an example of how to be a nice and responsible giant. I don’t know how to deal with people with normal IQs without thoughtlessly shoving them aside, pinning them to the wall, or pinning them down with my logic beams.

So to speak.

When I try to imagine what operating with the correct level of gentleness would be like, all I can see is me talking down to people like they are children.

And even assuming I could somehow do that without people noticing – which is highly doubtful given my social cluelessness – I would find it deeply appalling to do.

I don’t want to see everyday people as children. I loathe the very idea of looking down on people from Olympian heights. I don’t want to be way up on the mountaintop, I want to be down to Earth with the people.

For fuck’s sake, my connection to the rest of humanity is already slender. I can’t afford to sever whatever life giving umbilicus that remains.

But what other options do I have? It’s either continue to accidentally harm people or accept that I am not like them and end up flying intro the stratosphere where I will most likely freeze to death, or starve, or die of lack of oxygen.

I want to be more connected to others, not less. And that very much includes “normal” people. They might not be as bright as me but I still could learn a lot from them.

Like how to be happy, for instance. Or at least how to be human.

I feel like this overweaning intellect of mine has been a wedge between me and others for my entire life and I don’t know who I would be without it.

But I still don’t know what to do with all these brains I got.

The only conclusion I can come to about all this is to fall back on the default instruction of our entire culture and say that I should just be the best version of myself that I can be and if the world can’t handle that, tough.

I don’t like that conclusion at all, but it’s all that I’ve got.

More after the break.

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Okay, prepare yourself for some God-tier level nerdity.

And that INCLUDES THE ENGINE! Holy SHIT!

It has a top speed of 17 mph, though it’s going a mere 13 mph in the video because the makers were afraid a higher speed would make it vibrate apart.

And obviously the wheels are not LEGO.

But still, pretty cool, huh?

My latest malady

And tonight’s featured player is… the inner ear!

I have been experiencing motion related dizziness lately.

It mostly happens when I stop moving. That’s when things slosh around inside my head and make me feel very dizzy and nauseous.

Every little fucking thing makes me nauseous.

I’m sure that this too shall pass, just like all my other ailments. It’s probably just one of the many ways my body manifests dehydration and once I get enough fluids in me things will go back to “normal”.

But the stakes of my hydration game are harsh, man. If I stop drinking water for more than an hour I start getting sick in one way or another.

So I am in the process of programming my brain to respond to any form of my feeling unwell, however seemingly unrelated to hydration, by immediately filling my water glass and taking a mighty swig.

If I am truly dehydrated, that swig will turn into a long series of gulps as I drink like half a liter of water all in one go because suddenly my body is like, “Water! This is what I need! Better fill up on it now, before this idiot forgets again. ”

My body doesn’t trust the brain to look after it properly, and for good reason.

But this hydration thing is starting to really worry me. This game should not be so stark. I shouldn’t constantly be only one sweaty nap away from feeling seriously ill.

That can’t possibly be normal.

I looked it up and my pharmacist and GP are in the clear because there are no official listed interactions between Metformin and Jardiance.

But still, some literature says that one of Jardiance’s listed side effects is dehydration, and that some people find that being on Metformin makes that side effect worse.

So to be honest, I would rather just stop taking Metformin. But I am, more often than not, wise enough to know I should not just take myself off a medication because I think it sounds like a good idea.

Especially not without telling my GP.

I should probably at least talk to my pharmacist, Simon, about it. He seemed to think that when one goes on Jardiance one is usually taken off Metformin at one point.

Maybe I should Google it some more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I have been pondering the question of what it’s like to be around someone with a massive mind like mine.

Because I know that, despite my delusions of humility. I radiate intelligence like it’s my own personal electromagnetic field. It’s a strong part of why I have such a strong presence and why my attention can be such an intense experience.

I have thus far lived my life in a kind of holy ignorance of this effect on others. I go through life as if I was just another person and try, in my own highly eccentric fashion, to get along with and relate to average, everyday people.

But I’m not one of them. I’m a giant. And I am beginning to think that the smart thing for me to do is to concentrate on being a friendly giant instead of squishing myself down to try to pass as human.

And fail miserably, of course. It’s pathetic, really.

It’s true that I don’t know what I really am. I was talking about this with Doc Costin recently, I know that I am not autistic and yet autism is the closest thing I have to a label or a diagnosis for why I am so damned weird, and always have been.

So calling myself a giant makes as much sense as anything else, really.

Anyhow. About what it’s like to be around me. I can only guess that it can be kind of freaky, especially because I send such mixed messages.

That magnetic field of mine sends a very clear message of power. But like a lot of large people, I have invested a certain amount of my potential into appearing friendly and harmless so I don’t scare people.

That and my strange combination of charisma and shyness must make it potentially quite confusing to be around me.

Not to mention my tendency to talk about things other people don’t understand as I try to convey opinions and observations that are simply beyond their ken.

I do wonder sometimes what would happen if I simply forgot about whether people will understand me or not and just concentrated on speaking my truth, uncut and unfiltered.

But no. I am strongly driven to express myself and that requires someone to actually be able to pick up what I am putting out.

Some day, though. Maybe.

I guess I have never really learned to relate to normal everyday people because I didn’t want to end up talking down to them, which is kind of inevitable when you’re a giant.

The idea of them trying to talk up to me is a nonstarter. I mean, the logical inversion is right there in the language but that’s just not how these things work.

Part of the problem with the complex signals I emit is that people can’t tell if I am a threat or not. In some ways I am and in others I’m not.

I try really hard not to be. I’m not looking to hurt anybody. I don’t throw my intellectual weight around. My cloak of innocence keeps me from really noticing it when someone is challenging me for dominance or whatever. I can’t say I have ever set out to deliberately outcompete someone socially.

But that’s more a testament to what a recluse I am, not to my personal humility.

If I had my way, all my interactions with others would be gentle and pleasant and friendly and understanding and kindly and good.

But that gets kinda complicated when you’re a freaking giant.

Maybe I just need to accept that I am a special little hothouse flower and that means I have to find my own way to make it in this mundane world.

The world ain’t built for people like me, whatever I am.

More after the break.

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More on gigantism

I have never wanted to be “better” than others.

On any level. Don’t get me wrong, I dream of extremely high levels of achievement – the sky is the limit, really, I wanna fix the world – but I do not think of that in terms of putting anybody else down.

Maybe I would feel differently, though, if I had not always been so effortlessly dominant.

Intellectually, I mean. I have never met another person who is definitively smarter than me – not even as a child. I have spent my whole life feeling awkward and embarrassed about how I tower over others in the realm of the mind and it requires no more effort on my part to be that way than it takes for me to be tall.

It’s just how I am.

I know for a fact that I have dominated others with my verbal muscle and mental might without even knowing I was doing it. From my point of view, I was just participating in the conversation like everybody else, and if I wanted to I could plausibly maintain that posture and declare that I have no idea what people are talking about when they tell me I need to dial it back and I’m “just doing what everyone else is doing”!

But that would be like Superman saying, “What? I just tried out for the football team like any other high school guy!”.

Yeah but you know better, Clark.

My claim of innocence would be similarly disingenuous. And yet, to be honest, I still don’t know where that leaves me.

How should a mental giant like me behave? What should my attitude towards the world and myself be? What is my role in society?

The problem is that I have no role models. There’s nobody else like me in the world, as far as I can tell. I am a one of creation, the product of a very specific and extreme set of parameters unlikely to be repeated in any other individual.

I get along good with my fellow nerds, especially, of course, Joe, Julian, and Felicity, who mean more to me than I could possibly convey.

And I am humbled by their willingness to put up with a great lumbering beast like myself. I know that they are not exactly immune to my electromagnetic field but, thank God, they stuck with me long enough to get used to it.

But even among my fellow nerds, I stick out. I am the oddest of ducks, and it’s hard for me to imagine that a tribe exists where I would feel at home.

I just want one where I can feel useful, at least.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Most of us who have been to college are at least passingly familiar with the philosophical idea that to become wise, you must admit that you know nothing.

Not literally, of course. In the sense that one opens one’s mind to the idea that anything you know might be false. An illusion. A lie. A phantom of the mind.

This prepares the student to learn new things, and unlearn old ones. A better way to phrase it might be that you must admit that you know nothing for certain.

But telling young, intelligent people that they know nothing really grabs their attention.

Anyhow, for intelligent and capable people, the idea of questioning everything you think you know in search of errors to correct is a bracing but tolerable idea.

But how much deeper does it cut to admit that you know nothing about yourself?

The person you think you are – the one you think you know – is nothing but a theory based on what you have observed about yourself.

When you look in the mirror, you don’t see yourself – you see an image of yourself, and your idea of who and what you are is just as superficial.

The real you is the person looking at the mirror. And you can’t get to know who you really are until you turn away from the mirror of the false self and look at the world as it truly is, with your own eyes, from your own unique perspective.

That’s the whole deal behind people going on a long journey to “find themselves”. Through ordeal, exploration, and adventure, the false self is stripped away, letting the true self underneath come to the surface so you can get to know yourself.

Luckily, most young people do this instinctively, on one level or another. Whether it’s backpacking through Peru or just moving out of the suburbs and into the city or anything in between, the real life hero’s journey requires leaving behind all you think you know about yourself from your childhood and finding out who the heck you really are.

Not me, of course, but I’m special.

As are, I suspect, a lot of us other failure to launch types. We never made it to that stage of life. That’s why we didn’t launch.

That’s just another in the vast array of life stages I completely failed to complete. Heck, most of them I never even started. It’s like my intellect was so advanced that it soaked up all the human potential meant for literally everything else.

That’s why I sometimes feel like this big brain of mind is more of a parasite than a symbiote. Like I am some kind of deformed freak stuck lugging this massive mind around without any notion of what the hell to do with it.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a “mental freak show”. Nobody is going to pay to see the Amazing Fruvous and his Magical Brain.

I’ll figure something out eventually. All this power must be worth money to somebody.

Anyhow, issues of selfhood have been on my mind lately because I have a very strong feeling that I don’t know myself at all and that the way forward for me is going to require me to surrender a great deal of what I think I know about myself in order to make room for a newer, better, truer idea of who I am to bloom.

I don’t know who I am. For all I know, I might be anybody. I have some things I think I know about who I am, but I could be completely wrong. Anything anyone, including me, thinks they know about who I am might turn out to be completely wrong.

Even the things I rather like about myself.

But the purification of self is beginning, and I don’t who I’ll be when it’s done.

But I think he’ll be a pretty cool guy.

More after the break.

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A post scarcity world

I should probably finish watching the video before talking about it, but meh.

And there’s something our host and narrator says that set me off, he said that in our world, everything is about money.

And that is simply not true. But the capitalist delusion that creates that impression is the main factor in why people fail so often when they try to imagine post-scarcity.

Actually, almost none of what most of us do every day is about money. Yes, we need to get paid for our labour in order to live, but for most people in most jobs there is no direct relationship between how much they work and how much they make.

So every day except payday, and most of payday too, what makes people do their job is not money, it’s the fact that it’s their job. Their responsibility. If they don’t do it, people will get mad at them and they will get in trouble. And the pseudo-tribe that forms in every single workplace will disapprove of them and they will lose status.

And that would be exactly the same in a post-scarcity future.

Think about it. If technology made food, shelter, electricity, et al one percent of the price that it is now, you would not have to work to live.

But people WOULD still work. We are born to work. Our social instincts demand that we contribute to the collective. Work gives us far more than mere income. It gives us purpose, direction, organization, focus, an outlet for our energies and our abilities, and a place in society as a worthy citizen.

Sure, the 90 plus percent of the world with jobs often thinks that if they didn’t need money to live, it would be like a permanent vacation.

But vacations are rest and rest is only meaningful when contrasted with effort. You have to be resting from something. Resting after something.

I am sure every Federation citizen could spend all day on the Holodeck and never do a single bit of work. And I am sure some do.

But I am even more sure that most people don’t.

Because take it from me, long term unemployment rots the soul.

Human beings are not born to remain idle. We need jobs not just to live but to give our days on other some kind of meaning.

And money doesn’t even really enter into it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m beginning to worry about how easily I become dehydrated.

I followed a hunch and asked Microsoft Co-Pilot (which is my Jesus) whether there’s a link between Jardiance and dehydration, and yup.

I figured there might be because Jardiance’s whole deal is that it removes excess blood sugar from your bloodstream by passing it into your urine via controlled ketosis, ergo it might lead to increased urine production and thence increased hydration demand.

Apparently the dehydrating effect is particularly strong if Jardiance is taken at the same time as good ol Metformin, and hello, yeah, I take that too.

Seems like that shit might be contraindicated. Ain’t that a hoot.

That would explain why my pharmacist, Simon, seemed surprised that I was on both Jardiance and Metformin, and mumbled something about how usually when they start you on Jardiance… then trailed off.

You’d think either he or Doctor Chao would have put a stop to this. It’s their job to know about shit like drug interactions. I shouldn’t have to consult AI to learn about this.

Oh, and here’s some of the symptoms of severe dehydration :

Rapid Heartbeat  : Yup, experienced that during my recent bad patch.
Rapid Breathing : Yeah, that too.
Dizziness : So bad I couldn’t even turn my head without the room spinning.
Confusion or Irritability  : Lots of confusion. Probably would have had irritability too if anyone had bugged me.
Skin Inelasticity : Aka skin that doesn’t bounce back when deformed or pressed against something. Yup. Was kinda weirded out when the impression of a McD’s bag I accidentally sat on stayed on my ass for like, an hour.

So it would seem that my theory that recent spate of ill health was drive by dehydration was right on the money.

Now I just need to program my brain to remember that when I see or experience things like that. it is an emergency and I need to hydrate NOW.

Oh well. Like I was telling Doc Costin today, part of the problem with my recent run in with illness is that my judgment, never great in the first place, is one of the first things to go when I am sick or scared.

Hence my never making it to the ER. Yes, going to the ER or UC would have been the smart thing to do, but when I was feeling really bad, the last thing I wanted to do was get dressed and get my butt to the car and then out of the car to deal with the ER (or UC) and then wait God knows how long in a waiting room before they can get around to seeing a low triage priority case like mine.

And even when they finally saw me, there’s a fifty percent chance that after all that waiting and them running tests on me and so on, they would have just told me that they couldn’t find anything wrong with me then sent me home.

So yeah. Going to the ER or UC would have been the objectively sensible thing to do.

But I didn’t do it and now you know why.

I told Doc Costin about my conclusion that I am not a sensible man.

He seemed bemused and nonplussed.

The next step after that would seem to be to ask how one copes with life as a dumbass. And I don’t have a good answer for that now.

All I can think of is that it means I have to rely on my support network (Joe, Julian, and Felicity) to keep me from walking into the open manholes of life and otherwise all I can do a kind of muddle through the best that I can.

It’s true that I have no self-discipline.

But how the fuck was I supposed to develop it? And when?

More after the break.

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I am the Breadman! 

Coo coo cashew! 

WARNING : The following is German comedy. 

So glad that this time, when I came across something about this unusual German show about a clinically depressed loaf of bread, I actually looked it up.

Bernd is a perfect sad sack/grouch character. His entire existence is ridiculous and absurd, his very low affect sad reactions to the insane things he’s being put through are very funny and relatable, and he seems to live in the world of screens, and really, don’t we all these days?

Just had to share him with y’all.

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On growing up

I feel like it might just be too late for me to do it.

I was talking about that with Doc Costin today. I might have missed the bus to adulthood entirely. I might never grow up. I might be stuck being whoever and what I am now for the rest of my life.

I’m certainly not going to find my destiny in traditional employment. Who would hire a 51 year old crippled loser without a degree for anything?

For that matter, what the hell can I even do? It’s not like flipping burgers is an option, seeing as I can’t remain standing for long.

No, I think I am going to have to invent my own job, and that means one thing : YouTube. It’s time to finally stop dicking around and become a YouTuber.

Prince Edward Island boy becomes a Tuber. How apropos.

And that means I have to stop waiting to figure out what I “should” do as a YouTuber or what category I want to work under or any of that bloviating bullshit.

Like I’ve said before, I need to just start doing it and figure out what the fuck I am doing as I go, just like I did (and do) with this blog.

Just get the webcam rolling and whatever comes out, comes out. Maybe all I will ever produce is talking head videos. That’s fine, a lot of people listen to YouTube rather than watch it anyhow.

Or maybe I will get ambitious and do fun and silly things like I did a long long time ago.

Point is, it will put me out there and give me a place where I can express myself more fully than mere words makes possible, and that could do me a lot of good.

And who knows, I might even develop a following and get my idea out there into the world where they might do the world some good.

And net me a modest income. Just being able to support myself would be great.

But first I have to learn to exit my current mode, at least for short periods.

And it’s always so, so much easier to change nothing and just keep letting the days go by without me.

So this is going to take a very specific investment of will.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I seem to be back to normal. Knock on wood.

I mean, I dunno, I’ve thought I was OK many time before in this recent period and instead things just picked a new way to fuck up, but I have eaten many times without ill effect today and I don’t feel dizzy or ill, so I am taking the W.

Still dunno WTF made me so miserable for four plus days. Which means I still should go see a doctor or two about it all. That would be the smart, grownup thing to do.

But I know I won’t. Like a little kid, once it stops hurting I forget all about it and any resolve I had to subject myself to the lengthy and boring Purgatory that is going to the ER or Urgent Care is long long gone.

I could book an appointment with my questionable GP, Doctor Chao, but it’d be a week before I could even get him on the phone, so meh.

My best guess as to a diagnosis is that it started with the same bug Joe got (he’s fine now by the way) and that emptied me out (and how) and that, in turn, set me up for a serious level of dehydration.

Which is plausible as far as it goes but it doesn’t go all the way. I did manage to get water into me throughout the ordeal, though maybe not enough. There has to have been another factor at play.

Which brings me back to the idea of an inflammatory response of some sort. The fact that Naproxen (generic Aleve) helped me feel better during the crisis is telling but far from conclusive in and of itself.

It could easily have been the placebo effect.

Assuming it wasn’t, then it could have been histamine related. It’s possible that aging has cause my allergies to get worse, just like it made my mother’s eczema worse.

I did have a number of sneezing fits recently. Not super severe ones but more than just a sniffle or two.

So that could be what triggered all this nonsense. I am planning on acquiring some antihistamines in order to test this theory.

It could be that by treating the inflammation and not the allergy, I was addressing the symptom and not the root cause.

Whatever. It’s absurd that I am trying to diagnose myself in the first place. Logic and sense would dictate that I stop being such a child and go to the ER or UC already.

That’s what Joe did, and they fixed him right up.

But he’s sensible, and I am not. And I need to learn to accept that. I’m terribly smart and incredibly bright and I can even be extremely wise when giving advice to others but I am not a practical, sensible, grown up type person like he is.

I’m a strange alien child-thing who is ill suited for life on Earth and who is definitely going to continue to do foolish things for emotional reasons out of a lack of self-discipline and an inability to focus.

And the sooner and better I accept this about myself, the sooner and better I can stop trying to force myself to be someone I am not and start adapting to who I really am and seeing what I can do with what I’ve actually got.

And that means shedding a lot of my bitterness and cynicism, I think. I think that one of my assets is a capacity for enthusiasm and belief and if I am to unlock that potential that means I have to jettison a lot of the negative thinking that I habitually employ and prepare myself for the possibility of disappointment and disillusionment.

Maybe it’s not always better to never have hope in the first place.

More after the break.

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The evening after

So far so good.

I still feel kind of off, but that’s to be expected. Heck, I rarely feel 100 percent well even on my good days, so if I did feel that way now I’d suspect delirium.

In other words, I have returned to my standard level of pain and misery.

My appetite is still strong, which is good. I have some catching up to do. After all, I ate very little for four days.

I think I was victim of impaired thinking for a lot of that unpleasant time. The pain, the stress, the fear, and the uncertainty combined kept me in an adrenalized fog and prevented me from thinking clearly about my situation.

But maybe that’s just my current, calm, rational-ish mind judging my fogged up mental state by its own standards quite unfairly.

Maybe I did the best that I could. Imagine that.

Somehow, I gotta let myself off the leash. I know that there’s a part of me that wants to run free and wild and let life just wash over me as I run around experiencing everything that I can without feeling the constipated left brain need to know what will happen before I even make a fucking move.

How the hell am I supposed to learn and grow like that?

I need to follow my heart. But I don’t trust it. I can’t verify its intentions. I can’t make sure what it wants is safe before I take its direction. I have no idea where it will take me.

And I know that’s okay. That’s life. That’s how just this whole wacky game works.

But I am so scared.

Scared deep inside, where it’s hard to reach. That poor little boy that got brutally violated by that horrible man is still in there denying the reality he is in in an attempt to negate the horror he’s experienced.

That’s far too high a price to pay, but he doesn’t know that. What’s happened to him is bigger than his entire world and worse than he can even comprehend, so what can he do except wish it all away?

He learned that monsters are real when he was still afraid of the dark.

And that’s too young.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Eating seemed like a good idea.

Around noonish today, I was feeling fairly good, so I decided that would be the right time to go to the kitchen and get myself some food.

I figured that if eating made me feel worse, tough. At least I would get some nutrition into me. I didn’t feel like eating, but I made myself do it anyway.

Plus my esophagus and stomach were feeling very acidic so I figured it would be a good idea to put something in me for that acid to work on.

The good news is, it stayed down.

But other than that, it made me feel worse. I got this weird sickly-warm feeling that started in my guy but slowly spread through my body. I became quite prone to dizziness, to the point where so much as turning my head makes the room wobble a tiny bit. And with that wobble, big or small, comes a surge of nausea.

Even more disturbing, though, is this heaviness of limb and sluggishness of circulation I am feeling. I feel very “off” in a way that makes me very nervous and it is clear to me that the time for equivocation is over and it is time for me to go to the ER.

But how do I get there when I can barely make it to the bathroom and back?

The obvious answer would be 911. I call them, some healthy young people show up and put me on a stretcher and take me to the ER.

But what do I even tell the 911 person at this point? I’ve been through so many phases with this mysterious ailment that I would have no idea what symptoms to even talk about. I’ve gone from incontinence and diarrhea on Friday and Saturday to agitation and splitting headaches on Sunday and Monday to this bizarre new permutation that I am not even sure how to convey.

The other possibility would be getting Julian to drive me to the hospital. Who knows, maybe they can put me and Joe in the same room, ha ha.

Honestly, for all I know, he’s already home. Wouldn’t that figure.

I will figure this out. I definitely feel a strong need to have medical people take a look at me. Shit has been going down that is NOT NORMAL.

And who knows, maybe this is all just a severe case of dehydration and a few hours on IV fluids will fix me right up.

I’ve been trying to keep up with hydration but it’s tricky when you have no idea whether it’s even safe to stand up or not.

Right now I seem to be in a “better” period. I am even a tiny bit hungry, which is nice. Hydrating and taking a Naproxen (generic Aleve) seems to have gotten me to some sort of point of stability. So now would be a good time to make a break for it, whether it’s via Julian or 911.

But now, of course, because I am a man without character, my resolve is wavering. Because I don’t waaaaana go to the hooooospital. It’s boooooooring there. I want to stay here with my compuuuuuter!

I am such a child. But there’s some good reasons for that.

There’s also another weird angle : last time I put pants on, I had to take them off almost immediately because my legs immediately started to overheat like crazy.

Serious. It felt like they would stifle.

So I guess my only hope for a pantsless trip to the ER would be 911. I mean, I’m sure they wouldn’t exactly turn me away at the door for not meeting the dress code, I would like to retain what tiny shreds of dignity I retain.

So I dunno. Knowing my own spinelessness, I will now completely forget about going to the ER or UC and go back to my usual lifestyle until I either get better or drop dead.

I guess I’d rather live.

After all, I still have almost $50 saved up on my Steam account and $120 on my Amazon.a account to spend.

So ya know. I got commitments. Things to see. People to do. And so on.

More after the break.

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Well I ate

Ergo, I now feel terrible.

But this too shall pass. The food will make it past the hernia and then things will go back to being sort of okay for a while.

I really do need to get to the ER or UC. Sure, I don’t wanna go, but sometimes you have to do the grownup thing and make yourself do something.

I’ve had to do that remarkably little in my weak and herniated little life.

I sometimes wonder if my problem is that I’ve had it far too easy in life. Things like school came to me so easily that I never had to learn to overcome myself.

I find myself thinking about the idea of traveling through Europe as a college aged kid a lot lately. Or something equally adventurous.

I think I grasp how such a thing can help you “find yourself”. Having to deal with a whole new continent all by yourself and survive by your wits must make people have to reach down deep and draw on their true selves.

Sitting on your ass playing video games all day, on the other hand, requires jack shit. So I have been able to stay so deeply and fundamentally underdeveloped.

I always seem to have people to deal with reality for me around, too. Good people who are willing to deal with a troublesome but charming critter like myself and who seem to think that all the hassle is ultimately worth it.

This is what I mean when I say, “it’s a good thing I’m cute”.

I guess I keep hoping I will just… get better. Than my body will catch up with whatever the fuck is going on and I’ll be able to go back to normal.

Oh well. At least I won’t take “normal” for granted again for a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been toggling back and forth between sick and okayish since Friday night and it is really starting to get on my nerves.

The fact that I’ve barely eaten can’t be helping. But can you blame me? My latest bout of feeling really ill was triggered by my eating a handful of trail mix.

Bad mistake. Only easy to digest foods for the time being. Got it.

Honestly, I probably should have gone to the Emergency Room or Urgent Care by now. But my symptoms never quite seem serious enough to get me to push the button.

Basically it takes fear and/or pain to get me to call 911 or get Julian to take me to the ER or UC, and so far, neither of those has quite been bad enough yet.

Speaking of UC, Joe is at one right now. He has had it far worse than I have this weekend. Projectile vomiting like crazy, poor guy.

Can’t help but wonder if maybe he and I have the same bug. My symptoms have been mostly digestive in nature, though with fun stuff like splitting headaches, chills, and for some reason general agitation thrown in.

It could be that the main difference between me and him is that I have my mother’s bizarre resistance to vomiting. So instead of throwing up, I just feel really terrible, and I am denied the relief that throwing up might have provided.

Can’t say I really miss it, though. Barfing isn’t fun.

Another possibility with me is that my long dormant umbilical hernia has finally gone awry. Right now the locus of my issues seems to be a troublesome area about six inches to my right of my navel and that’s the right general neighborhood.

Hmmm. Interesting. I was able to eat my sugar free fudge striped Voortman cookies without a hitch, and the orange I just ate only caused a minor ripple.

So ease of digestion definitely seems to be the key in getting food into me.

I wonder what else I have lying around that goes down easy?

Besides me, of course. Nyuck nyuck.

I wonder if getting some Meaty Marinara rotini from Pizza Hut would do the trick. Pasta is quite easy to digest and I would get carbs, veggies, and meat out of the deal.

That’s not really in the budget for this week but I think I can make an exception if it’s for the noble cause of me not starving or dying in a blood sugar crash.

Ya know. Priorities.

What really sucks is the yoyoing between thinking I’m getting better and then getting yanked back into the sick tent.

Julian is home. Good to know that if I do decide I need the immediate attention of trained medical professionals, I have transport.

Decide being the operative term here. I’m not so good at deciding things.

Especially when one of the options is as inconvenient and disruptive and boring as taking the ER/UC route. I mean, both of those places involve long waits in rooms soaked in stress and boredom pheromones and that is just not a wholesome environment for a sensitive soul like myself.

I suppose in a way, getting my tablet working again could be seen as a health investment seeing as I would be a lot less resistant to the ER/UC if I had some way to take the Internet with me.

But I still don’t really miss the damned thing. It was a plague upon me.

I suppose I will go make yet another attempt at sleep. Like I said, I’ve been weirdly agitated lately. Dunno if it’s related to other ways I am sick or not.

Wish me luck.

More after the break.

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My latest sin…

..was getting up to empty my pee receptacle, apparently.

That’s what seems to have pressed the “next” button on the “shuffle” mode that is my health lately because I felt fine and was even pondering a pasta purchase (see above) until I got up and emptied my receptacle (something I normally do three or four times a day) with a bit too much enthusiasm because the moment I sat back down I got the exact kind of sick headache I dread and boom I was quite nauseous and my head was throbbing with pain and I felt like I was trying to pass a stone through my “third eye”.

Eventually I staggered to the bathroom once more and was able to empty my bowels (mostly voluntarily, yay) while wondering if the universe heard me talk about having my mother’s nausea resistance and said, “Oh yeah? We’ll see about that!”

I see to be past the worst of it now. It helped a lot when I was able to unclog my ear and thus allow for sinus drainage again. That’s a frequent problem of mine.

It’s like the ears are the overflow storm drains of the sinuses. If they get clogged, hey pressure just builds and builds until it’s squeezing my brain in its vicelike grip.

And that really smarts.

Things are relatively quiescent right now but I have some rumblings in my tummy that have me worried.

So much for my idea of actually eating a meal tonight. Food is the furthest thing from my mind right now.

Wait no, that’s my feet. But food’s pretty far too.

Overall, I wonder if I am in the grips of a system wide inflammatory response, and if so, what am I responding to and can I please please be rid of it?

Something occurred to me recently that seems blindingly obvious in retrospect : what if all these times when I was sure I had a fever but the ER thermometer said no, I was actually seriously inflamed?

That would make me feel really hot too, wouldn’t it?

Maybe instead of pasta, I need a large quantity of Aleve. And maybe a referral to an inflammatory disease specialist.

I am so damn sick and tired of being sick.

The tired part I can live with for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I…think I’m getting better?

Today’s still been pretty damned nasty. Incidents of “leakage”, having to clean up as best as I can in the times where I feel somewhat better. going through a hell of a lot of TP and Kleenex, not being able to eat much at all.

Makes me really wonder what the heck is going on with me. I can only assume that I’ve had a stomach bug of some sort, although food poisoning is also possible.

You know, that’s a pretty fucked up thing to call that particular ailment when you think about it. Food poisoning.

That’s not a disease, that’s a crime!

Anyhow, despite various levels of unpleasantness, I don’t feel nearly as sick as I did 24 hours ago. In fact I feel fairly okay. So I am hoping that means that the primary cause of this being a very shitty weekend (literally) has left the building.

Which is a better prognosis than I was giving myself earlier today. Yesterday, it also kind of seemed like I was getting better but then my recovery seemed to stall so I was worried that I might have to go to the ER or UC after all.

I mean, this is not a healthy state to be in. Even if I hadn’t gotten any worse, living without being able to eat and never knowing when “leakage” might occur and feeling vaguely toxic is simply not sustainable.

In fact, I’m kind of amazed that I haven’t had a big blood sugar crash. But I suppose the fact that I’ve not been able to do much beside listen to YouTube videos throughout this ordeal helped with that.

I definitely need to get some solid nutrition into me ASAP. I think that right now, my system’s mainly unhappy with me because it’s empty. Digestive systems don’t like being empty, especially mine, plus it means I don’t have a lot of nutrients on hand in order to help with rebuilding things.

So I am pondering getting myself cleaned up and going to Denny’s with Le Gang. Might seem like an odd choice given what I have been through in the last couple of days but it would give me access to a broad spectrum of nutrition for relatively little effort and it would do me some good to hang out with my friends after two days of isolation.

But I’m not committing to Denny’s just yet. I’m going to get up and move around some first and see how that feels.

Because I would die of shame if I was in our little home away from home at Denny’s when I suffer a “containment breach”.

That simply does not bear thinking upon.

If I don’t end up going to Denny’s, I will likely end up ordering in. Heck, I could even order in from Denny’s if I wanted to.

I have a real hankering for a turkey dinner right about now.

The important thing is nutritional intake. There’s only so long I can keep going on plain potato chips and the occasional cookie.

And not that many of those, either.

I also have trail mix, but my body is totally not ready to be digesting nuts right now. I tried eating some trail mix earlier only to get that “hot gravel” feeling again.

Honestly I just want this whole thing to be over. It’s been a miserable (and deeply disgusting) couple of days and I just want to get back to my life.

Maybe that’s the silver lining to this ordeal : I appreciate my usual humdrum low affect event free life more now.

Because things can always be worse.

More after the break.

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Well this is different

I kind of miss this afternoon.

Because back in those halcyon days I felt like I was almost well again and that soon I would be healthy enough even to go to Denny’s.

But the wheels started coming off that bus around 5:45 when I began to feel these chills. Uh oh, I thought.

Yet I managed to hold on to hope all the way to eating some McD’s while on Zoom with Julian and Felicity. I thought, surely I will feel a lot better once I get some food into my and my system can start rebooting.

Not so much.

Turns out I just feel terrible in a new and exciting way now.

For starters, I did not making it very far into my McD’s. I managed to eat around 2/3 of my Big Mac and a handful of fries before my stomach gremlins caught up to me and I had no choice but to stop.

The problem seems to specifically be a stomach thing. Things would be fine up top and more or less fine down below but the period where the food was actually in my stomach was not so good.

And the chills keep coming. And I hate having the chills. There is something so profoundly soul-destroying about feeling like there is a cold wind blowing directly through your bone marrow

While, of course, also feeling like you’re under a heat lamp on the surface.

Bit of a cock-up on the bodily thermostat front.

So I dunno what the fuck is going on with me but you can be damned sure I am keeping an eye on things in case they should take a turn for the worse.

Metaphorically speaking, I’m holding the phone with “9-1” already dialed.

The most frustrating thing is that I am still operating on insufficient nutrition. I mean, I am glad I got some Big Mac into me but I’m still running on close to empty.

But I cannot imagine being able to force myself to eat at this point. Not only do I feel nauseous and overheated I also have a serious headache and, of course, chills.

I need to get myself one of those massive bottles of 500 ibuprofen and maybe some antihistamines or anti-inflammatories.

Man am I sick of being sick.

But hey, at least I’ve learned that these are a thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been quite sick for the last 16 hours or so

I’ve felt nauseous and sweaty and dehydrated and very. very ill. I’ve not been able to eat or sleep and the contents of my lower intestines have been pulverized and liquefied thus have not been staying in.

I have pooped the bed at least half a dozens times. And it is definitely not normal feces. It’s that pale and sickly poop the color of sand that is almost completely soft and it has turned all my farts into sharts.

It got all over my poor blanket. Damn thing seriously needs to be laundered now, I am pretty sure that what is on there will wash out fairly easily, but it’s still pretty bad.

My current state of dishabile is really the culmination of days of feeling increasingly unwell. Looking back, I wish I had been more on the ball so that I could have gotten out ahead of this problem instead of more or less stumbling sideways into the deep end.

All my symptoms fall under the general umbrella of IBS. I think I have some sort of timeline established in my head because I know I was fine when I ate my McD’s last night, and I know I was in South Central Hell by midnight. so presumably things went awry somewhere in between.

Of course, this shit feeds on itself. Feeling very ill makes it nearly impossible for me to eat which means I get sicker and sicker as my blood sugar drops, and so on.

Coming up with the words is not easy right now. My brain does not want to work to express itself right now. It would rather I somehow withdrew entirely from reality so that I could wait until the issues clear up on their own.

But there is no guarantee that they will.

I’ve tried eating a little bit of trail mix but my stomach did not like that. Made me feel like I’d swallowed a handful of hot gravel. Not good.

I need some softer, easier, friendlier foods that go down and stay down easy. That way I can get some solid nutrition into me and maybe get things moving in the right direction.

That would sure be nice.

I’ve got to remember to refill my water before I run out completely. That’s the only way I will be able to stay out of the pits of dehydration, and let me tell you, those pits suck.

The idea of going to the ER or UC has flitted through my mind a few times, when I felt particularly bad. Right now, there’s nobody home but me, so I would pretty much have call 911 to get there.

And I don’t think my problem is serious enough for that.

Although honestly, being put on IV fluids would probably do me a world of good. It would get me some direct hydration, without having to involve my shaky digestive tract at all, and that would probably do me a lot of good.

What really appeals to me is being able to go to the ER and just let them take care of everything. Here I am, ready for you to repair me and hopefully take me out of this very unfortunate state of being,

Of course, that assumes I can trust the nurses to be competent, on the ball, and focused, and that sort of trust is quite tricky for me.

I shouldn’t need to feel like I am my own case manager when I am under the care of the medical establishment. I should be able to relax and trust

But I can’t

I will talk to you nice people after this.

More after the break.

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Grits and gravy

That’s basically been what has been coming out of me/

The gravy portion is a mostly translucent liquid that I assume is normally just one constituent element of fecal matter but that because of how very disordered my digestion is right now it’s appearing on its own in some godawful form.

This substance is both slick and gritty. The total output is a combination of the thin slick fluid mentioned above and a gritty almost gravel-like substance which seems to me to be made of the hulls from all the popcorn I eat.

So it’s a matter of extremes. A very thin, loose fluid and its opposite.

And that’s what just keeps coming out of me. As a result, this substance is all over my bed despite my vigorous attempts to contain it.

It is a terrible thing to feel a feces adjacent substance sliding right out of you with no chance of stopping it.

It makes me feel so helpless.

Luckily, our mystery substance doesn’t have much of an odor. So it is not, in fact. feces, at least not in any meaningful sense. It’s not entirely odorless. mind you : it has a vaguely burned odor. making me wonder if somehow I have swallowed a fair bit of hair and it’s passing through me in my “grit”.

I am doing what I can to make myself at least drink water. Trying to work my way up to eating some actual food but it’s quite rough.

My stupid body doesn’t like even the concept of food right now.

Like, putting stuff in my face where I chew and swallow it and eventually it gets torn apart and turned into part of me…

Like, what’s with that?

I think that my digestion is slowly returning to normal. Dunno what made it go completely berserk and drag me through Hell but it seems to be over. I gues

I guess I probably won’t end up in the ER or UC. It looked pretty bad there for a while but hopefully things will go back to normal now.

Making the words come out is very hard right now. It’s very difficult to express my thoughts on a cogent and coherent form.

I keep having to type words over and over until they come out right.

It’s very irritating.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.