Still feeling lonely and isolated, although having gotten out into the sunshine and fresh air to go to Wound Care today has helped me to feel a bit more human.

Gee, imagine how much good it would do me to actually spend an hour or two in the fresh air and sunshine instead of just getting little whiffs of it as I get out of or get into the car. I might actually feel good for a change.

I will think about it. There is a forest of phobias in between me and that seemingly simple idea, and I will have to find my way through said forest before I can summon up the will and the courage to actually try to do it.

And I know that’s insane. So am I. It fits.

And of course, it’s not really about the fear. It’s about the pain that underlies the fear. It’s the pain that the fear is trying to protect me from in its heavy-handed way.

It’s that pain from being raped as a toddler that lies at the center of all of my problems and it’s that pain that I don’t know what to do about.

Or rather, I don’t know how to rationally “solve” it. There’s no series of steps guaranteed to cure it. No medicines that can take that pain away for good. No form of therapy that can speed up the healing process and leave me fresh and clean and strong at last.

All I can do is keep on living the only way I know how, as sad as that is, and keep digging through the scar tissue and dead flesh in the hopes of finally excavating and liberating my sad and lonely soul.

Until that pain is dealt with, nothing else I do is going to do me much good. At best, it eases the pressure and the pain a little. At worst, it is just so much mental masturbation designed by my depression to keep me from making any real progress on helping myself get out of that hole by giving me the feeling of progress without the substance.

If you want to keep people in chains, first convince them that they are free.

So I struggle with my almighty Wound. The really big Wound that no amount of going to Wound Care could ever help. The very Wound that has dominated almost my entire life without me consciously realizing it was there.

I suppose I had to make enough psychological progress to be able to see that Wound as something separate from myself and not just a part of how the Universe works, and thus be able to imagine a world in which it is gone.

But I feel like I have a whole lot of suffering to go through first. I feel like this Wound of mine contains a large amount of very potent pain and that only when this pain is fully felt and dealt with will I be able to heal said Wound for good.

And obviously, I am not eager to do that. Suffering hurts. That’s like its primary characteristic. It is so much easier to just quietly rot away in my tomb.

Not better. Just easier.

Still, I am willing to suffer quite a bit to set myself free. Right now I feel like I am squashed flat under a massive burden of pain and fear and anger and aversion.

And not all of me thinks that’s a bad thing. There is a sad, sick part of me that likes the security and comfort of utter helplessness and which therefore passively resists any kind of personal progress that will disturb its sorry little scene.

In general, the struggle between my sick self and healthy me is one that never stops, even when I am asleep.

My soul is a battleground, and I am its sole refugee.

More after the break,

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Contract and expand

For a very long time, I have felt that I go through an expansion and contraction cycle like a living creature’s lungs.

Unfortunately, so far I have been too linear in temperament to adjust to this truth and learn to accept this cyclical truth and even learn to ride the waves instead of constantly fighting with them to stay afloat.

It’s ridiculous. I can’t stop the waves from happening. So I might as well get used to them by learning to surf them.

There’s no point trying to fight the tide, for fuck’s sake.

Contained within this struggle to adapt to the wavelike properties of my soul is a much more intimate yet inarticulate struggle to stop trying to force myself to be a certain way instead of just letting myself be however I am.

On the deepest level, it really is a struggle for humanity. The fascist AI in my brain thinks it can make me into whatever ghastly horror it thinks I “should” be via sheer force of will.

But no amount of pressure or force can turn a butterfly into a wolf.

This means that a big part of my journey to heal myself has to be figuring out who I really am, and accepting that person, warts and all.

I can’t alter my basic nature, whatever it is. I can only work with it. Anything else is doomed to a very nasty kind of failure.

I think the real, true, deep problem is that I have so many “voices” and forces and emotional current in my mind that figuring out the “real me” will inevitably need me to do something which is normally anathema to me, and that is choose between them.

I hate picking favorites. I loathe being forced to choose between my friends. My love is very expansive and does not submit to such dichotomous judgement easily.

I want to love everybody. Exclusion hurts my soul.

But this is not about friends, it’s about figuring out who I am and that means the various forces within me have to “fight” and reach some kind of resolved equilibrium. I can’t go around being “everybody” forever.

I am legion, for I contain many. Too many.

Some of you motherfuckers have got to go.

And it’s up to me to figure out which ones.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It might be a bad idea for me to indulge myself like this, but what the hell.

I admit it : the noise from the construction goinon directly above me is starting to get to me. My ability to simply tune it out is beginning to break down and I am starting to feel it seeping through my defenses.

And that’s bad.

But perfectly understandable. There is heavy sawing and drilling going on up there and all that is separating me from it is a single thin ceiling and that’s just not enough.

Hopefully I will be able to rally and put my mental blinders (deafers?) back on and clamp them down tight, because it’s not like they are going to finish any time soon.

And I know how sensitive I can be to loud, irregular noises. So I am going to need to proceed with extreme caution lest I end up in some Aspie-like state of sensory hell, rocking back and forth with my hands clamped over my ears in whatever corner of this apartment I determine to be marginally quieter than the rest.

I mean, it’s not like I can just jump in the car and leave. Even if my legs still worked I would still be an agoraphobic shut-in who almost never leaves the apartment.

Basically, I leave this apartment three times a week and two thirds of those times it’s for medical reasons, meaning not exactly optional.

If my feet suddenly regained the ability to heal from injuries meaning I no longer has to trouble the (mostly) gals at Wound Care with my bandage changes, I would only leave this apartment once a week, and that would be for Denny’s on Sunday.

Ain’t that a sobering thought.

But I have to admit, because of the racket above, my idea of going to Gary Point Park and lying on the beach for an hour or two is sounded better and better.

This might be what prompts me to actually go through with it instead of just moping quietly in its generation direction like I do every summer.

I do miss going outside. I miss being outside. Going some place where I can lay on a towel or sit on a park bench to soak up the fresh air and sunshine sounds amazing.

Provided I wear sunscreen (SPF value akin to a coat of white enamel paint) and bring a ton of water and/or other beverages along, of course.

Because the sad truth is that I can’t just be a sunshine boy like I used to be when I was a kid any more. I would have to go out there with only slightly less protection than if I was going on an NASA spacewalk during a solar storm.

But still, the fresh air and sunshine would do me a lot of good.

Most importantly, it would make me feel a lot less trapped. I do not feel free in this cardboard coffin of a life and that’s a bad thing for my mental health.

Ergo anything that makes me feel more like I can go where I want and do what I like would go a long way towards brightening my days.

I mean for fuck’s sake, I only leave this bedroom three times a day. And of those three occasions, only the time I go out to hang with Julian and watch stuff while eating my midnight snack lasts more than a few minutes.

And you know what? Often, when it’s time to go to bed, a big part of me doesn’t want to go. It doesn’t want to go back in the box. It wants to stay out of this tomb of a room and be around people and maybe even live a little.

But habit and timidity drag it back in here over and over again. and each time I swear a tiny bit of me dies a little more.

I wish I could be alive again.

More after the break.

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I’m in heat

But then again, aren’t we all?

Woke up feeling oddly warm all over my face. It’s like I went to sleep with my face on something warm like, say, a surface warm from the day’s sunshine, except that I didn’t and the heat’s not going away and so I am worried that I have a fever.

But I might just be dehydrated. I get that way at the drop of a (presumably moist) hat lately so dehydration is always a good candidate for whatever is currently ailing me.

Even if it isn’t the direct cause, it sure ain’t making things any better.

Datum : turning my head into the airflow from my desk fan does not produce the ecstatic relief I associate with having a bad fever.

In fact, I can barely feel it at all, which is worrying.

Admittedly, there’s not a lot of cool air for it to move around, but I suspect the real problem is that the airflow is no match for my fever’d brow.

When I lay back down, I will aim my bed fan directly at my forehead and turn it all the way up and see if that does the trick.

Hopefully that will quickly turn too cold and I will turn it down again. But what I fear will be the case is that I still will barely feel it.

We shall see. Science will give us the answers!

It would be ironic if I got sick because then I would have to miss Wound Care tomorrow morning and that would make two Tuesdays in a row I missed it due to illness.

People may start to talk about me.

Who am I kidding? Nobody gives a crap, including me.

You teach people how to treat you, after all.

Moodwise, I still have that isolated and alienated feeling like I am a lonely exile adrift in the Midnight Tundra of my mind.

Except no. It’s too directionless for that. It’s more like being stranded in some interdimensional doldrums where even time itself has stopped and I am utterly helpless to do anything at all.

Pleasant thought, n’est-ce pas?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s summer, and with that comes lovely sunshine, horrible heat, and the tendency for my mind to resist settling down to make the words come out.

My mind wants to wander and play in the sunshine, and that is more or less the exact opposite of sitting still and writing stuff. It really feels like having to settle down and get dressed for church when it’s having so much fun romping about outside.

Well, how I assume that feels, anyhow. Never been “to church” in my life. I’ve been IN churches a few times, for funerals and holiday concerts and such, but I have never been TO church in the sense of actually being there to worship.

From what I have seen in the media, it looks pretty boring. No wonder people fall asleep. At least the Catholics are smart enough to keep you awake by making you do the stand, sit, and kneel routine.

Oh, and sing. Can’t fall asleep when you have to sing a very boring hymn now and then.

This is what happens when your religion is run by and for old people. To them, the quiet solemn dry ceremonies are soothing and peaceful.

And good practice for being dead.

But for those further from the grave it’s boring as hell and that is a terrible way to run your religion. Your religious services should not feel like penance for the crime of actually observing your faith.

I figure I would be a very good and effective preacher. I have the charisma, the oratory skills, the passionate beliefs, the deep desire to give people solace and hope, and more than enough showmanship to keep things interesting.

I just lack any actual religious faith, and I am far too honest to fake it.

Still, I suppose I could create a small church around my own version of Christian faith, which is centered not around Christ’s divinity but his message.

I vehemently believe in Jesus’ core message of compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. As far as I can tell, humanism began with the words attributed to Jesus, and I am a humanist through and through.

I even have a name for this theoretical church of mine : the Students of Christ. Catchy, isn’t it? And kind of hard for the other sects to find fault in even if my church does not require faith in God or Jesus or anything else.

This way, Christianity could be cut clean from the Old Testament for good, and unified around a single Gospel and no stupid Epistles.

And this is just my opinion, but I am pretty sure my type of church would be what Jesus actually wanted. True spiritual leaders don’t want to be worshipped, they want to be listened to and heeded.

And they want us all to be nice to one another. But that’s hard, and no fun, so that’s the first thing people get rid of once the leader’s back is turned.

It is far, far easier to worship a Messiah than to actually listen to what they say and, God forbid, actually modify your actions or restrict your behaviours.

I mean, we worship Jesus because he was such a great guy for saying all those nice things about like, the poor or whatever. Wow, what a champ.

And even when people do change their behaviours, they find it way easier to simply follow a particular set of rules rather than actually try to live by the principles those rules are meant to express.

And those rules are always childishly simplistic. Don’t eat that. Don’t touch yourself there. Go to this place and sit still and pretend to listen once a week.

OK, this we can do. But don’t tell us not to be hateful, divisive, and judgmental, because that would require changing who we are, and that’s no fun.

And hate is fun! You get to feel all righteous and vent all of your latent anger at a convenient outgroup and even pretend that it makes you holy to feel that way when it’s pretty much the exact opposite of everything Jesus taught.

Yes, I could start my own Christian reform movement.

And it would be all about bringing Christians back to Jesus.

More after the break.

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We’ll talk about this ingroup

So what is the case for your ingroup to stop hating an outgroup?

Because from the ingroup’s point of view, there’s no downside. They get to shift all the blame for all their troubles onto people who conveniently not in the room with them and therefore can be construed to be whatever makes hating them more satisfying and you never actually see any of them get hurt by it so it’s all good, right?

I mean, sure, this is technically unfair and Jesus probably would not approve, but He is not here either so who cares?

He’s a wimpy liberal faggot with anti-Christian views anyhow. Screw him.

The problem is that the case against hate is inherently transpersonal. It requires an appeal to transpersonal values that say it is wrong to hate another based on whatever group we assign them even if that group is of vastly inferior status to our own and therefore kicking them around seems, at least to part of us, perfectly harmless fun and a sign that all is right in the world.

After all, everything is harmless if you don’t think of its victims as people.

Hence the arc of justice being a long and difficult struggle to remind people over and over again that all humans are people. That’s why they’re called “human rights”.

No matter what group we assign them too, people are still people, as valid and deserving of good treatment as you are, and absolutely nothing can change that.

Including the actions of the individuals of said group. Nothing anyone in said group does can do anything at all to alter the rights of the individuals in that group.

Group punishment for individual actions is always wrong.

Groups can’t commit crimes because groups aren’t even real. They are imaginary categories we sort people into in order to make dealing with the masses of humanity around us easier. They have no other reality.

All in all, at the end of the day, there’s just people. People just like you, with hopes and dreams and personalities and preferences and life stories just as real and valid and important and worthy of moral consideration as your own.

Remember that when approached by people claiming they have found a loophole in human rights that makes it okay to hate any group, no matter how easy it is to get away with hating that group because nobody will defend them.

There are no loophole.

Everybody is people.

And you are just going to have to learn to live with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We don’t get along.

That’s why I still haven’t looked for a job on FlexJobs after that first day. And that’s despite the fact that I signed up for a paid account and everything.

But after the enthusiasm of that first day wore off, and despite my swearing to myself that I was not going to let that happen this time, a thick scab of aversion immediately formed in my mind and it became yet another thing I “should” do and therefore don’t.

Wishing for opportunities is easy. Acting on them is hard. Because acting on them requires actually facing and dealing with reality and I…. can’t.

Well, I have a lot of trouble doing it, anyhow.

And then there’s this place. It’s a platform where I could publish this blog and charge people whatever I saw fit for them to subscribe to it and the platform, Notd (sic), would only take 10 percent of that cash for themselves and I would keep the rest.

Wow, what a great opportunity. I could use a platform like that to develop a fanbase and get them “hooked” on my writing enough for it to be worth a couple bucks a week for them to keep getting the fresh stuff daily.

And if I managed to get even just a few paid subscribers, that would go a long way towards encouraging me to pour myself into making it the best it could be, instead of just my usual random ramblings.

You know, like the ones you’re reading right now.

Thanks, by the way. I love you.

Yup, this Notd (sic) thing could be my golden ticket to a much better life. One where I have money, and nice things, and an audience, and something meaningful to do with my time for once, and so forth and so on.

But it ain’t gonna happen.

Why? Because as exciting as all that sounds, it also scares the crap out of me. I am currently feeling that special terror I get when the prospect of something that would greatly increase my stimulation levels and/or social exposure rears its ugly head, and my deep and terrible anxieties rise up and make it impossible for me to feel the joy of the opportunity because it’s lost behind a wall of stark raving terror.

The terror that I will be plucked out of my safe, warm, filthy nest and cast out into the cold cruel world where I will forever lose access to my escape route.

For the aversive, that’s basically death.

Do all us “failure to launch” types feel that way? Like being cast out into the world would not just kill but destroy us?

It would explain a lot.

Anyhow, what I am saying is that opportunities don’t mean jack shit if I am too chickenshit to take advantage of them, and that is something I am going to have to face and wrestle with if I am going to get out of this fucking cesspit of a life.

Because I deserve better than this. I’m quite frankly amazing. The fact that a truly extraordinary person like me is stuck living like this is quite frankly a travesty.

But I am the only person who can fix that. Who can restore justice. Make things right.

Even if I had a billion dollars in the bank, it would still be up to me to spend it. Even if I had godlike magic powers it would be up to me to use them.

There is only so far the sick sick oral-retentive dream of everything just coming to you without you having to do anything can ever go.

At some point, you will have to take an active part in life. It’s the only way out.

The only alternative is to lapse into a catatonic coma.

And the thought has crossed my mind….

More after the break.

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Gay furry smut recommendation

I really liked this comic.

Not only is the art gorgeous as well as featuring two very sexy anthro feline males, but I find the way their “falling into gay” with each other is written is really, really hot.

Like I always say, lust is an emotion. Make me feel it!

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Sort of furry animation recommendation

I mean, Cleaveland is 100 percent an anthro dragon, and Maulie is technically a manticore (or is that a womanticore?), so it’s furry enough.

I think I actually have kind of a crush on Cleaveland now, in fact.

But like I said in the comments, it’s warm, it’s funny, it’s well made, and it’s just a little bit fucked up in the head. And that makes it perfect for me.

Of course, if I had made it, it would be way more NSFW, but this is why they don’t let me make things like that!

But if AI keeps getting better…. 😛

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Lost in the Terrorzone

Feeling kind of lost and scared at the moment.

It’s a hard emotion to put into words. It’s this feeling of bone-chilling total alienation that hits me from time to time. It always leaves me feel cold and lonely and the image of myself being pushed out into the void, with nothing but darkness all around me and nothing holding me up but whatever it is my back is up against.

There’s no vertigo to it. I don’t feel like I am going to fall. The void around me is completely without substance or directionality. And I feel completely abandoned and alone. And, for some reason, ashamed.

I guess that implies that on some level, I feel like I deserve to be out there. Like I have been exiled from all that is warm and good and wholesome because I am so very toxic and horrifying and disgusting.

And I am. But I’m not, too.

I certainly feel that way, and will continue to do so until I find another, healthier outlet for whatever emotions that feeling expresses.

Self-loathing, for sure. But a lot of other stuff too.

I watched an interesting video about various forms of esotericism, like the Order of the Golden Dawn, Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, and so on.

And it got me thinking about the question of what is it that people get from these esoteric systems of belief that they can’t get from science and “reason”.

A twit like me can easily answer any question about the universe or mysterious happening or whatnot with a perfectly reasonable, logical, probable answer.

And for most people, that answer will be completely insufficient because what the person is looking for is meaning.

And meaning, like belief, is an emotion, and cannot be summoned by reason alone.

The best that science and logic can do is explain things. And explanations are sad and puny compared to the massive questions that plague the human soul.

Science can never tell someone what it all means. And knowledge without meaning is nothing but information.

No matter how “true” it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. More poop talk. You’ve been warned.

After a couple of weeks of fairly normal poops, I am back to nothing solid coming out of me at all.

What makes it worse is that it all kicked off with another bout of sleep incontinence. On Wednesday night, I ordered from Poke Okey for the first time in a while, and ate my custom bowl of good stuff way too fast, and that led to my first spending a bad time in the bathroom and then, when that left me totally pooped (sic), I (possibly unwisely) went to sleep, and woke up with the usual fecal mess exactly where my butt was pointed.

If it had been a crime, it would be a very easy solve.

Clearly, my butt did it.

So I had to go through a whole bunch of Kleenex cleaning it up. At least I am still capable of cleaning it up on my own.

If, like when I was in the hospital, I had to let someone else see the mess I made, I would die on the inside of acute impacted embarrassment.

The emotions tied to our toilet training are always extremely strong. Where to poop and how to go about it is arguably the first thing we ever learn, and the social programming encoded therein is foundational to everything we learn about manners afterwards.

Freud got that right, at least.

And don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before, but I know that these little outbreaks of sleep pooping are supposed to trigger my going to the frigging ER, or Urgent Care.

But the sad and brutal truth is that I know it will go away if I ignore it, and therefore that’s what I do.

That’s all kinds of wrong, and yet, here we are.

I guess there would have to be some kind of terrifying escalation for me to take it to the ER or the UC now. Like it happening while I am awake.

Speaking of which, I had a fun period yesterday where I had to go poop every half hour or so for three or four hours.

That’s how long it took me to remember that I actually know how to stop that kind of thing. It involves carefully resisting the urge to go poop once I am empty enough to make that safe-ish and thus interrupting the self-triggering cycle of it all.

And luckily, that worked. Got things under control. Had a few tense moments but ultimately my system calmed down enough to behave itself.

And today was okay until the pooping time came and then it was diarrhea all over again, and that is never fun.

Like I have mentioned before, those attacks can really take it out of you. Anything involving your bowels spasming drains you of a lot more than feces because your bowels are very large muscles so when they are in an uproar you have some of the biggest muscles in your body doing acrobatics and that is very tiring.

Not to mention it also depletes you nutritionally, both from the rapid loss of fluids fucking up your electrolytes and from the localized burning of a LOT of calories.

It always comes back to science with me, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, that is the latest in the Chronicles of Fru’s Butthole for now. I will, of course, be monitoring the situation in case things get worse.

Hopefully things will calm down for a while so I can forget this whole messy incident.

My life is so weird. And gross.

More after the break.

Oh yeah, the microwave

Microwave is working again. Luckily, last night, I had the clever idea that maybe the problem was a tripped circuit breaker, and sure enough, when Julian flipped the breaker for that circuit on and off, it came back to life.

And that makes me feel gosh darn clever. There I was thinking we would have to buy a whole new microwave and instead the solve was as easy as turning on a light.

It did expose me to the fact that the microwave ovens of today are amazingly cool, and can function as microwaves AND air fryers AND convection ovens AND steamers AND a bunch of other things!

I must admit, my consumer lust for those things is intense.

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The ice falls apart as it melts

Just a random image expressing… something in my mind.

Not going to try to turn it into a poem this time. I’ve learned my lesson. My poetic impulses can stay in prose now.

I mean, it didn’t take long for that last poem thing to turn from self-expression into work. I stopped trying to write it when I realized I was just coming up with cheaper and cheaper rhymes solely because I didn’t know how to end the damned thing.

So no more of that. When I run out of inspiration, it’s over, and I don’t care if that means it stops right in the middle of a.

I suppose that if I continue to try to express my deeper images, they will become more detailed and complete over time.

That’s how it worked with my writing in general. I would start just typing whatever popped into my head and before long I went from disconnected words and images to full sentences to entire concepts to a whole detailed essay that just… flowed out of me.

But I was too locked into my logic cage to be able to handle and harness something like that so I just…. stopped.

We never truly stop being stupid.

We just get better at it,

Well, now that I am far more willing to delve into that deep and mysterious and incredibly powerful part of me of that lurks in the shadows of my subconscious mind, perhaps I will learn to tap into these dark forces and use their power.

All it takes is the courage to pick up my magic wand, and use it.

I’ve been scared of my own power long enough.

Time to get some shit done.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got to talking about that big ol Wound at the center of my mind during Therapy Thursday with Doctor Costin today.

You know, the one from when I was raped as a toddler.

I was telling him about how it’s pretty much my main problem and that everything else that I struggle with is just set dressing compared to it.

He, intelligently, asked me what I can do about it.

At first I said I don’t know. But then the penny dropped, so to speak, and I said, “I think the only thing I can do about it is bring my mind back to it over and over again in order to slowly drain the pain away by feeling a little of it at a time.

Like taking little sips of a nasty tasty medicine.

I wish I had the option to just down the whole thing and get it over with, and maybe I will get there when I reach some kind of tipping point where I have drained enough of the pain that the rest can come free as a single mass.

Or maybe not. I might have to just keep sipping away because the trauma is still too big and too intense and too horrible for my mind to handle all at once.

Either way, I am determined to get it done.

Because it really is my major injury. It’s the part of me that hurts so bad and causes so much primal fear when I try to get moving to get things done.

It’s like a host of clawing, shrieking, lunatic spirits rise up to fill my mind.

And I feel like I have finally excavated enough of the surface debris all that pain has been buried under to finally get a good look at it and feel its weight.

It’s still a massive tumour of trauma at the core of my being but the more I look at it, spend time with it, and do my best to experience it, the smaller it gets.

We also discussed the idea that I need to go way, way back to the person I was before the rape in order to (in a sense) start over.

And seeing as I was only 4 years old at the time, that’s a long strange trip indeed.

But I can remember what a bright, charismatic, precocious little charmer I was back then. And that gives me some kind of starting point for the new me.

I have a pretty clear idea of what a healthy me would be like.

But getting there is going to be so hard.

If I am to make it there, I’ll have to give myself permission to fail – but not to give up.

Failing in this case means to collapse under the sheer weight of the undertaking. It’s to get too tired to continue. It’s to flare out and crash.

But giving up would mean not getting right back on my feet and returning to the fight the moment I have recovered. And further, it would mean not pouring my all into recovering because it’s easier to just lay there all “helpless”.

Yeah, bullshit. You’re not helpless. You’re just not willing to do what it takes.

I know that I can be strong, and brave, and tough. But it’s going to hurt, at least at first, and I accept that.

Being afraid of pain is normal. Letting that fear keep you from growing up is not. Healthy people are lucky enough not to realize they have a choice and so they instinctively self-actualize and what do you know, they turn out fine.

But us “clever” types fight it all the way.

And that’s how we end up 51 year old losers who never grew up at all.

More after the break

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The final wave

Well fuck. I think our microwave just died.

I was nuking myself a baked potato (or well…. a nuked potato, technically) when all of a sudden the whole unit went dark.

And now it will not come on. I fear the worst.

i was not able to unplug it and plug it back in because I honestly don’t know where the dang thing is plugged in. I can only surmise that it’s plugged in the same socket as the fridge, and that’s (obviously) behind the fridge somewhere and there is no chance that I will be able to get at it with my physical limitations.

So for all I know, it might be the socket that blew out, not the microwave, and that would be better provided there’s someplace else to plug it in.

It was so sudden! And I hate surprises. So I am kind of shaken up at the moment.

It could also be something as simple as a fuse being blown or a circuit breaker tripped, in which case it could be quite easy to fix.

It does seem like a power issue.

Part of why I’m all shook up is because that microwave is the only thing I ever use to cook. WIthout it. I can’t cook a thing.

Not even my beloved microwave popcorn!

That’s going to really throw off my routine and my diet. Which means that if the dang thing really IS broken forever, we’ll need to replace it ASAP.

I suppose it’s possible that it is still under warranty. My memory is fairly fuzzy about how long ego we bought this one.

But I think it was like three years ago, in which case, um, nope, it’s our problem.

If the only solution is to buy a new one, then Julian and I will have to come up with the money to do so. According to a quick Amazon.ca search, we should be able to get a basic model for around $80-$120, and we certainly don’t need any fancy features.

Hell, we could probably get a beat up old used one from Value Village, but um, that’s one appliance I have to insists upon getting new.

Seeing as we just had one keel over dead for no good reason. And ya know…. I would hate to get an old one that….. leaks. Yikes.

I can come up with $60 without too much of a problem. Expenses suddenly decloaking really sucks, but that’s life for ya.

I wonder if we could afford one of those convection ones that you can also use like a normal oven to bake things.

That would be awesome. I could bake again!

Oh, and of course, this happened right after my tablet died, too.

Makes me afraid to play with myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, it’s not about some horrible monster that grabs ahold of you and slowly sucks the life out of you till you’re nothing but a hollowed out husk of your former self.

That’s “Master of Crypto” and he haunts cocktail parties.

No, this is a game I just acquired called Cryptmaster and it’s just so unique and fun that I feel the need to talk about it today.

How I acquired it : first, I saw Yahtzee’s review of it.

Well, that seems like it’s right up my twisted little alley, I thought. I mean, it’s a word game with a morbid sense of humor (a la the Cryptkeeper, complete with macabre puns) and RPG elements.

That’s like, three for three boxes ticked. The only way it could be more perfect for me is if it somehow involved gay furry sex.

But being the cautious type, I downloaded the demo first. Played it and loved it.

Then dicked and dithered around for about a week before finally buying it.

And so far it’s been tons o’ fun. The basic idea is that you are one of four legendary heroes who forced an ancient evil down into the depths of the earth and trapped it there many centuries ago.

Well now said ancient evil is back and he’s resurrected said four heroes as his fleshly thralls as he tries to return to the surface and wreak havoc on the living once more.

He is basically the (g)host of the game and he does most of the talking. And he is delightful. Campy, morbid, theatrical, and silly. And evil, but in a non-serious way, at least so far.

He has promised that as we get closer to the surface world, more and more of our memories and experiences and skills from life will come back to us.

So I can only assume we will eventually defeat our charming but malevolent friend.

The actual gameplay consists of the usual exploration and fighting monsters. except that to fight the monsters you type in words corresponding to your various attacks.

And you unlock these attacks by defeating monsters and choosing one letter from their name which will then be applied to whatever words the four of you are working on, Hangman style, until you get the whole word.

It’s wildly original and lots o’ fun. Unfortunately, you can’t unlock an attack prematurely by guessing its word.

I guess that would make things too easy for brainy word nerds like me.

Anyhow, the game is wild and weird and wonderful and another W word!

Meanwhile, I am, of course. still playing Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey and Pathfinder : Kingmaker, and enjoying both.

Odyssey is exactly the sort of open world RPG with tons to do that I enjoy. Plus I can climb and run and jump like a ninja. which I always love in games.

There’s just such a feeling of freedom and power in being able to move around like a particularly well toned monkey.

Which is what you are, more or less.

And Kingmaker is an excellent isometric RPG, just like its sequel, Wrath of the Righteous, was. I would have to say that, unsurprisingly, I think the sequel is better, but surprisingly, the difference is not all that great.

The second game in the series is just more polished and has a higher budget.

Plus, in Kingmaker, I have to do a lot more kingdom management stuff, and for the most part, I find that kind of thing boring.

I like being the Baron and making choices for the kingdom and speaking to those who come petition me for this and that, but the rest, meh.

I am still too proud/controlling to turn kingdom management to “automatic”, though.

More after the break!

---

Hacksaw through gristle
Clean as a whistle
Straight through the visce-
-ra, well maybe this’ll

Lance that old boil
Let out the oil
And maybe foil
That tempest that roils

Deep in my guts
It sucks to be nuts
No ifs, ands, or butts
And no matter what

But…. I’d rather be sad than numb
I’d rather feel pain than succumb
To the death-beyond-death
Where you can see your breath
And eternally never become

---

Well that happened

Sorry, I had an attack of poetry.

More so than usual, that is. Usually, my attacks of poetry come out as prose in this very space. The images start flowing and I fight the poet’s lonely war to put what we cannot directly express into words and thus capture them on the page.

There is a noble futility to it because deep down the poet and the writer and even the songwriter know that what they create will never truly match what they feel inside.

But it can express some of it, and that helps, so that has to be enough.

I’m in a strange, dark mood. Ignited, I think, by Joe and his father dropping by again. Not that they did anything wrong, not at all, that just happened to be the pebble that started this particular avalanche.

And while I certainly don’t feel good, I do feel like I am getting something important done. This shifting, brooding, slightly seething feeling represents my reaching deep inside and “burning” emotions from a deeper and more mysterious place than usual, and that can only be a good thing.

I need to go deeper and deeper into myself, well beyond and below the realms of nice bright cheerful reason and logic, and that is not going to be an easy trip.

I’m going to have to leave one hell of a lot of what I have mistakenly believed to be myself behind in order to truly get to that massive Wound at my core and stand some kind of chance of actually resolving the primary trauma that has warped my entire life.

And means making peace with not “knowing” things, but rather “feeling” them.

I’ve always had powerful intuition. I just need to let it take the lead.

Who knows, maybe it knows the way out of this mess I have made of my life.

I Will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am worried that I might be skirting the edges of pneumonia.

It started this morning. I was having breakfast and hugging fuzzies like I usually do at 8 am when I realized I needed to get up and refill my water glass.

No big deal. I do this like half a dozen times a day.

And everything seemed to go normally until I sat back down again and realized that my heart was pounding, my breathing was labored, and I felt terrible.

I was also really tired. Like something was draining the energy right out of me. And once I was sitting again, I realized that the whole little trip had felt strangely effortful at the time but I had ignored it.

So after pondering it for a while, I canceled today’s Wound Care.

Seems to happen once every six weeks or so.

I was left pondering what the heck was wrong. It definitely felt very bad. My chest had that full, heavy, rigid feeling that I associate with things like pneumonia and other lung ailments, and that of course had my worried.

Then I decided to lay down for a bit. And that made another problem pop up.

For a few weeks now, I have not been able to lay on my back for very long before it becomes hard to breathe.

Good thing I sleep on my front.

But when I lay down this morning, I found that I was becoming out of breath just from lying there doing nothing at all.

That was pretty scary. I contemplated getting Julian to take me to the ER. If I really was coming down with pneumonia, it would be best to get right on it this time.

I didn’t go. But I still might. I got my breathing under control eventually via my breathing exercises but I still feel pretty much exactly like I did this morning.

So I guess my “plan” is to wait and see if things get worse or otherwise change alarmingly. This could just be a summer chest cold and I will get over it within a couple of days or so.

But of course, if things get worse I will get my butt to the ER ASAP. I don’t want a repeat of that time when the triage nurse took one look at my blood oxygen level and instinctively turned the monitor’s screen away from me.

That shouldn’t seem funny to me, I know, but it does. It was at that point that I realized I was maybe in some serious trouble and that it was very good that I had listened to the voice in my head that said, “No. Go to the ER. This isn’t normal.”

Referring to how I was feeling, obviously. If I had not listened to that voice, I would have gone to Denny’s with Le Gang like I had planned and Lord knows what would have become of me after that.

The phrase “pulmonary arrest” comes to mind.

That’s like a heart attack, but for your lungs. Bad news.

An argument could be made that I am in a similar position now. I don’t feel as bad as I did then but I sure as fuck don’t feel good.

These kids of issues always mess with my head as I try to navigate the narrow channel between rational self-interest and hypochondria.

Man does it suck to be crazy.

Oh, and my tablet is refusing to charge at all again. I managed to get it working for a month or two recently but at the moment it is moribund.

Can’t even use it while it’s plugged in. When I try, it just dies and reboots every minute or so, which is worse than not working at all.

So I might have to order that new battery for it after all.

Ain’t life a peach.

More after the break.

---

Feeling like a slab

Right now, I feel like a slab of sick meat.

Just a uniform, vaguely rectangular slab of extremely low grade meat insufficiently refrigerated in the back of a bad restaurant’s walk in freezer.

I really do paint pictures with words, don’t I?

I feel a little bit better than I did earlier. My chest doesn’t feel nearly as solidly congested and sore, but my nose is running and I had a nosebleed earlier.

Those last two things combined led to something too gross to recount.

So maybe whatever has gone wrong with me today is on it way up before heading out. Its last stop will presumably involve it making my scalp sneeze.

Should be quite the experience.

Of course, the thing really making me feel better is that the sun finally went down so it is finally cooling off.

Heat is bad, mmmkay?

For me, summer afternoons are always a dangerous time. I have fans but all they really do is move the hot air around.

And I have a window wide open in my bathroom but there is no airflow through the bedroom in order to move hot air out and cooler air in.

In order to get that, I would have to leave my bedroom door open, and then my computer audio and Julian’s computer audio interfere with one another.

If only we could let the air through but keep the sound in!

I could get headphones for my computer. But I don’t want to. I don’t like wearing headphones. Even cute little earbuds bother me. They always end up getting all sweaty and gross and then I have to take them off anyhow.

And playing my games with the volume turned down would be even worse.

So I dunno. Maybe I should finally get around to getting air conditioning. I might even be able to get the Province to pay for it.

I could definitely make the case that a portable AC unit for this bedroom would greatly reduce the stress on my weak and vulnerable body.

And that’s bound to improve outcomes AND my quality of life.

Works for me!

Now I just have to follow through on this…. hmmmm….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s been on my mind lately.

The question is, would I be better off if I just gave up, let everything fall apart, did nothing I did not feel like doing, and let entropy reign for a while.

It would be the opposite of my “just keep going” programming and the idea would be to let my system truly fully rest so that it could come back fresh and strong.

Other people seem to do this. Admittedly, they’re not usually planning it ahead of time as a conscious choice, they just fall apart now and then.

Which shows that they are smarter than I am, at least. They “know”, on a deep level, that they need these periods of rest and renewal to do “self care” and look after their sanity and their spiritual health now and then.

And yes. I am primarily talking about women. We men are not that wise.

Take my own example. I just keep limping along and keeping everything exactly the same because deep down, I am convinced that if I lay down,. I will never get up again.

And I can see why I feel that way. To truly lay my burdens down would mean entering into brand new territory for me and I have no idea what lies in wait for me there.

And replacing the unknown with the worst case scenario in our minds is a very human thing to do.

I don’t know what’s there. Ergo what’s there is the most horrible thing I can imagine. Even that is preferable than not knowing at all.

Here be dragons, and all that.

And to let it all go would be to surrender this life-pattern of mine on the hopes of coming up with something way better once I have my rest and renewal.

That is technically asking me to take a lot on faith. But I don’t really see it that way. The idea that I need to reset and renew seems sensible and logical to me.

And honestly, what do I have to lose? My oh so precious worthless life? My pathetic world of video games and naps and a total lack of worth or meaning? This soulless existence clinging to life despite the staggering weight of my own failure to enter the adult world at all despite being 51 fucking years old?

Gee, wouldn’t that be a tragedy.

And who knows, maybe after a fresh reboot I will be a hell of a lot saner and stronger and smarter. Maybe that invisible wall I hide behind will be a lot thinner and more negotiable. Maybe I will be able to pass through the fires of eternity so that I might have all that is impure and unworthy of me cleansed from my soul. Maybe, at long last, I will finally learn not just to survive but to cope.

This all makes perfect sense to me. But logic alone won’t get me anywhere. All it can do is lead me in circles so big that I forget I’ve already seen this tree or that rock a million times before. Real progress will come from turning to face the flames.

Like I said before, it will take voluntarily choosing to do something that I know will be scary and/or painful and/or hard when I could go on without doing so forever.

In doing so, I would be placing value on my own self-actualization beyond the shallow, callow, sallow logic of my depression’s infinite apologists.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the things we do to actualize ourselves rarely if ever make logical and pragmatic sense. It will always be safer and easier to languish in the doldrums while we slowly rot away on the inside. And the things we need to do in order to fight that decay will always seem “crazy” to our lazy, degenerate selves.

But if we are wise, we do them anyway, and thus enable our own spiritual growth.

More after the break.

---

Holy crap, Joe!

So I wander out to the kitchen to make supper and I hear someone out on out little balcony so I shout out a greeting, when who should come out but Joe!

I know why he’s here. We’ve been told they are going to be working on our balconies soon-ishly, and therefore we need to get all our stuff off of ours.

And that’s a lot of stuff. We’ve basically been using it as a supplemental storage area. All that was required was to throw some tarps over the stuff to protect it from the rain.

Not that the balcony gets a lot of rain, The wind has to be blowing from a very specific direction in order for any rain to make it to the balcony. Otherwise, the balcony of the apartment above us is our stuff’s umbrella.

Anyhow, holy shit, there I was, laying eyes on Joe for the first time in six months! Unexpectedly! What a happy surprise.

Then who should walk in from the front door but Joe’s dad, Joe Senior.

And that was…. a problem.

Because, as is my wont during the hot summer months, I was in a style of dress I affectionately think of as “Winnie the Pooh mode”.

See, that’s how you know he’s a stuffed animal, otherwise you could see everything.

So there I was naked between shirt and socks with Joe Senior out there on the balcony and me spending a long time standing with the fridge door open, shielding me.

It was no big deal, really. I slipped back into my room without them even noticing as they were busy with the stuff on the balcony.

Still, I want to know something : Did you know this was going to happen tonight, Julian? Because if so, you really should have told me.

I would have put some pants on for my sortie to the kitchen and saved myself an admittedly fair trivial amount of stress.

But hey, at least I got to see Joe!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s not easy.

I still don’t see a way to overcome that enormous mass of guilt and regret and bad social programming that surround the topic of my life and how it’s turned out.

Again and again, I return to the idea that if I wasn’t so “stable”, I might have fallen apart a long time ago and then actually gotten some proper help way back when I was young and it was not too late for me to get my life moving once I recovered.

But no, I am way too good for my own good at clinging like a barnacle to my dirty little grotto here and making sure absolutely nothing changes.

The games I’m playing change, but the wasting of my time on Earth remains the same.

And of course, I don’t attract nurturing and care because when I am around others, I act as if everything is peachy keen OK.

Even around my GP, for fuck’s sake.

And the truly sick part is that doing that makes me feel like everything is OK too. Kinda.

Dozens of times in my life, someone has asked me how I am or how I am doing and I want to be honest with them and tell them the truth but in that moment, every problem I have suddenly becomes too trivial to mention and I instead tell them I am fine.

That’s what they want to hear, anyhow. Nobody wants me to tell them the truth and dump all my problems and issues and bad bad programming on them.

I have at least finally gotten to the point where when my therapist Doctor Costin asks me how I am at the beginning of a session, I say I am “surviving”.

That’s still technically a positive answer but one that conveys a little taste of my unhappy and difficult life. Makes me at least a little vulnerable.

Mind you, this is my therapist we’re talking about here. In theory, he should be the person I am completely candid and unguarded with.

But the best I can do is not be cheerful with him, and to do my best to tell him about whatever “stuff” is going through my head that day, and try to get some relief that way.

And it does help. Having someone to talk to like that, where I am not worried about the consequences of what I say to them, is very valuable to me.

But I can’t help but wonder if I would do better with a younger, more energetic and ambitious therapist who was determined to get to the heart of my problems and who pushed me and pressed and asked all the right questions to get my emotions flowing.

I mean, clearly, what I am doing now ain’t working. I get relief in the form of emotional release from Doctor Costin but I am not getting any better via him either.

To be honest, I think I have him cowed. I have, unwittingly, convinced him that all he can do is listen to me go on and on because if he tries to get me to actually do stuff, I more or less “bite his head off” with my advanced communication skills.

And I don’t blame him for not being able to handle that kind of thing in me. As patients go, I am beyond hard to deal with, and I doubt many therapists would have the combination of toughness, intellect, and persistence to get through to me and actually make me see things in a new light.

And the man’s in his seventies. He doesn’t stand a chance. Nobody does.

And that, in turn, makes me realize just how alone I am in the world. How alone I have always been. It’s lonely as hell at the top of the intellectual food chain. Knowing that nobody out there can “handle” even a tenth of the real me makes me feel lonely and abandoned and helpless before my problems.

I can’t face my demons alone. But there’s nobody in this world who would be able to survive the radioactive atmosphere inside my mind long enough to help me.

So I will always be fighting alone. I have trouble even imagining what it would be like to have someone in my life who could truly join me in the fight.

I have my friends, and I adore them and treasure them and know that I would be a hell of a lot more crazy without them in my life.

But still, I fight my war all alone.

It’s all I can ever do.

More after the break.

---

Alone in a crowd

Of course, the main reason I fight alone is because I don’t know how to let people into my inner world. That invisible wall of mine keeps everyone out and I have grave doubts about my ability to change that,

When you have had a mental defense up for your entire life, including some of your formative pre-school years, it arguably becomes an integral part of you that you can no more lower than you can open up your skin.

But that’s just plain unacceptable. I know in my soul that the warmth and acceptance and cherishing and love that I have craved for my entire life is out there beyond my wall and I will only get to have it if I learn to let it in.

That would require negotiating with that ancient part of me that was formed while I was being raped and that is quite sure it’s the only thing keeping me “safe” all these years.

Like I have said before, I don’t know how to convince it that everything is fine now and it can finally rest and relax and let my emotions flow clearly and naturally instead of forcing me to try to force myself into one mould or another.

I cannot make myself into someone I am not by sheer force of will.

It can’t happen. People don’t work like that. All I am doing is harming myself by trying to cram myself into absurdly irrational pre-ordained spaces which were conceived of when I was just a child and which therefore are far, far too small and limiting for me.

You have to know who you are before you can become who you want to be.

Until then, I will try letting it all hang out and thereby get some idea of who I really am when I am not trying to make myself into someone else.

The real me is a pretty amazing guy, all things considered.

I should get to know him better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.