Why was I such an eerie child?

Patient readers know the drill. Preternaturally intelligent. Learned to read when I was 3 years old. Talked like a tiny adult. Was a strangely calm and self-possessed kid. Had zero fear of or inherent respect for adults.

Yet for all that, I was a terribly lonely child, starved for any kind of positive attention, all alone in my chilly little mind palace.

Honestly, that hasn’t changed nearly as much as it should have. I have very good friends who love me. I socialize with them regularly. And I love them to bits.

But I am still trapped in my palace of ice, nevertheless.

Lowering my Paxil dose gradually over time should help with that. I’m still trying to process the fact that a great deal of the emotional coldness and numbness I have been complaining about (a lot) over the last 20+ years was probably the Paxil, and I just didn’t even have a frame of reference from which I could understand the problem.

How was I to know what was depression and what was Paxil?

Arguably, Doctor Costin should have known. That is, technically, his area of both expertise and responsibility. He theoretically could have figured out it was time to cut back on the Paxil a long time ago.

But I bear no umbrage. I know that I can very intense and overwhelming to deal with. I have both great emotive power and a massive intellect that can make even people with doctorates struggle to keep up with me.

Sorry, Doc, but if I have to slow down to normal person speed for you, there is no way therapy is going to work.

Which is a problem in and of itself, and it’s why this song hits me so hard :

Obviously that’s a metaphorically exaggerated version of my situation. My mind might be accelerated but the rest of me ain’t.

But I get it, Barry. I really do. I’ve spent my whole life slowing way down just so I stand some kind of chance of connection with others. If I took the inhibitor off my engine and tried to go full speed ahead to see just how fast I can go, my last connection to the rest of the human race would snap and I would lose my fucking mind for good.

And that thought terrifies me.

Not to mention that I can’t even imagine what going full tilt would even mean for me. How would that even work? I’m neither a scholar nor a researcher so it’s not like I would be inclined to gorge my bloated mind on all the latest information.

I don’t gorge. I graze.

I suppose I could write at a frenzied speed. See just how productive an author I can be if I just surrender myself to my muse and my craft.

I know I could produce my usual rough first (and last) drafts that way. But then I would have to slow down to do the proofreading, editing, and so forth.

And that’d be a drag, man. I need an editor.

A pretty demanding one.

Often the people who most crave being controlled by others are the ones who can’t/won’t control themselves.

And I know I don’t have the self-discipline to make myself produce the very best writing of which I am capable.

I’ve gotten away with submitting rough drafts for far too long.

Then again, maybe that just means I’m so dazzlingly brilliant that everything I write is perfect the first time and I don’t need to slow down and edit and do multiple drafts.

Yeah right. Even at my most delusional I wouldn’t believe that. No matter how talented I think I am, I know that what I write can always stand a lot of improvement.

Including these blog entries. But that ain’t gonna happen.

The whole point of this blog is to allow me to express myself freely and second-guessing every word I type out of fear of my own eventually judgment is definitely a one way ticket to crazytown.

Oh yeah. And, um. something about being a weird kid.

I’m, pretty sure that’s where I started.

More after the break.

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It’s getting closer

Me buying a space heater, that is.

And none too soon given that it’s actually been below freezing all day today.

That’s no big deal for most of Canada, but here on the Wet Coast, below freezing with snow on the ground is like Arctic Armageddon.

So on the shopping front, I have at least narrowed it down to three or four potential space heaters, from a $45 el cheapo Amazon Basics model to this fancy thing. 

The fancy one is in consideration because it was recommended by two different “consumer reports” type sites and what the heck, it’s just $20 more.

What I want to avoid is the humiliating feeling that you get when you’re sitting there with something with subpar performances thinking, “I paid too little for this. ”

Of course, I don’t want to pay too much either, but at this point I am willing to err in the “too much” direction and rely on Amazon’s return policy to protect me.

Then again, I’ve heard they just keep making returns harder to do… probably because people were abusing the fuck out of the system to just get stuff for free for a week or two then return it.

This is how “restocking fees” happen, people.

Fuckheads. The enemies of all systems. The reason we can’t have nice things.

Anyhow, that is but a glimpse of why it takes me so long to make a decision. I’m trying to take the pressure off myself by telling myself it’s no big deal if I get the “wrong” thing as long as it does the job of keeping my enormous buns warm.

Especially my hands, specifically my right hand. The circulation in it must be terrible because it gets cold so very easily.

My fault, I fear, for using the mouse without a mousepad or wrist support at all for years.

Nothing I can do about it now but get a space heater… and some gloves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I listened to this record dozens of times in elementary school.

I have, I must admit, a very minor kind of dysphoria.

I’ve always felt like I was a thin, supple, gymnastics type person stuck in the body of an extremely overweight ogre.

I’ve always wanted to do things this body is simply not designed to do. Like dance, or climb like a ninja, or vault over objects when I am feeling especially exuberant.

That’s why I love video games where I can do that stuff. Games like the Assassin’s Creed franchise, or the Shadow of Mordor games.

In those games, at least, I can move like I want to be able to move. Like some strange part of me thinks I should be able to move.

As in, I will get vivid flashes of the desire to move that way, all athletic and toned and acrobatic, that I of course can’t do anything with but wait for them to pass.

But I can see what that part of me wants to do so clearly in my mind.

Basically, I wish I could parkour. That shit has fascinated me every since it was still called “free running” and I saw a piece on it on some news show.

I want so badly to be able to move like that. To just flow up walls and over rooftops and along fences and such, almost like a cat.

But I can’t do that kind of thing. And it’s not just because I’m old and crippled and fat. I wouldn’t be able to do it even if I was 25 and my ideal weight and I had kept on working out at the UPEI rec center instead of letting my social anxiety make me stop.

I could have used some Paxil back then,

Anyhow, my point is, even I was the picture of physical health, I still couldn’t parkour. This fleshly frame of mine is capable of many powerful things. It can carry a lot, it can do a lot of work, it can endure much, it can protect the quarterback.

But it’s not built for agility and there is nothing I could do short of a total brain transplant to change that.

Take that as a hint, science. Get on it!

And it strikes me that this very minor kind of dysphoria must be fairly common, at least amongst us deep and thoughtful types.

The average person, thankfully, just becomes whatever they are to become holus-bolus without ever thinking about what body they wish they’d gotten.

It takes some serious brainpower to make yourself miserable like that.

Where was I? Oh right, minor dysphoria being common.

I mean, we know that there can be a mismatch between body and brain. That’s medical fact. It’s almost like the brain and the body come from separate dice rolls and it’s sheer luck when they happen to match.

Well, okay, maybe it’s not that bad. But it’s bad.

That’s why I am so very supportive of not just trans people but anyone who feels like the inside does not match the outside and I want them to do whatever they need to do in order to feel right.

Even if it’s something other people find “cringe”. Like the “fat bearded dude in a Sailor Moon outfit” trope.

I’m not going to judge. If that makes you feel good, go for it, and let the weaklings cringe. You’re living for you, NOT them.

And I am saying this as someone who needs to pretend to be an anthropomorphic fox from outer space on a regular basis in order to feel sane.

Make the outside match the inside.

It doesn’t work the other way around, though many have tried.

More after the break.

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From the inside out

For me, everything always starts from the middle.

By that, I mean that for me, inspiration and motivation and even belief have to come from somewhere deep inside me.

Maybe that’s a testament to just how much of an introverted intellectual I am. I dunno.

And I know that this reliance on the deepest and most mysterious, most intuitive part of my mind might sound a tad odd coming from a science loving rational materialist like me, but to me there’s no conflict because my reason and my intuition have always worked together seamlessly.

They’re like the left and right hands of my mind. Sure, one of them is probably stronger and/or more agile than the other, but I’d still be lost without either of them.

Ever had to deal with a temporary loss of the use of your non-dominant (submissive?) hand? Because that will teach you how much you need it right quick.

So even my most rigorously analytical thought processes use that awe-inspiring supercomputer that is my deep intuitive mind to do all the heavy lifting.

And even my most enigmatic creative thoughts, the ones that seem to have an enormously dense burst of information compressed into a nanosecond, still needs my conscious, rational mind to decompress, unpack, and organize them.

To me it’s all the same in the end. And I could not tell you where one begins and the other ends. Nor do I care.

The question that could really bake your noodle is whether or not I’m smart because of this close relationship between my brain hemispheres, or if my hemispheres get along so well because I am so darn smart.

Both. Neither. A quantum superposition of all possible states. Who cares?

I definitely don’t want to get caught up in yet another senseless dichotomy.

I have never responded well to being told I have to choose a side.

Fuck your goddamned sides. I don’t care whether Team Red or Team Blue wins. I’m not some junior jingoist eager to get picking a side over with as quickly and as thoughtlessly as possible so I can get to fighting (the fun part) all the faster.

Leave me out of your petty dominance games.

Or if I have to participate, let me be the ref.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what it feels like I’m doing when I try to come up with something to write about on this here blog o’ mine – waving a cartoonishly large butterfly net around trying to snag just one of the many thoughts darting about in my head so I can harness it and thereby slow it down enough to put it to work.

Just imagine me putting a tiny harness on a protesting butterfly. Aww.

That’s the thing about my thoughts : they don’t want to be slowed down. My mind, when untethered to a real world task, works incredibly fast. That’s why sometimes it’s so hard to slow my thinking down enough to pick something and go with it.

No time to talk, I’m too busy being BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE! Yeeha!

Tricky as it be to trap one of my lively, slippery thoughts, I continue to do so every day because I can be a lot more sane if I let some of those thoughts and emotions and ideas and all the other mental entities in my brain out.

That was the whole point of this blog to begin with : to express at least some of all the crazy noise in my head so that I can concentrate.

I keep telling myself I should honestly be writing a lot more. As in spending a 9 to 5 type jobs’ worth of hours writing every day so I can see what life is like when I am getting so much more of the craziness in my head out every day.

I remember that way, way back in 2011 when I was writing my first million words and therefore was writing around 2700+ words a day, there were times when I actually felt completely calm and relaxed and okay.

Almost human, in fact.

So if I could stretch myself to that level again, or even go beyond, I might just find that this capacious noggin of mine has become a much quieter neighborhood.

My God, is that how normal people without massive megavolt minds feel all the time? No wonder they have a much easier and less complicated life than mine.

I’ve always had way, way more brain power than I knew what to do with. Perhaps if I had been born with a level of ambition commensurate with my intellect, I would have naturally plowed all that excess mental energy into achievement.

But I ain’t like that. My sister Catherine is, and I’ve seen what it gets her (hint : far) and I have also seen the toll it took on her, especially when she was young, and knew that her path was not the path for me.

Not that I am completely without ambition. I’m a dreamer and I dream high. My highest ambition would be to follow in the footsteps of my (qualified) hero Walt Disney and create a media empire whose name becomes synonymous with quality.

Disney, meet Bertrand.

But doing that via sheer hard work and determination and grit, all while being whipped by a desperate fear of failure, is never going to be for me.

I could stand to go in that direction, though. I guess it’s a matter of letting myself become motivated. I know that there’s a vast ocean of ambition within me somewhere, so it’s just a matter of tapping into it and giving it rein to drive me wherever it needs to go, or even just fuck around, just as long as I get my energies out.

I am still discovering aspects of the true toll being so stopped up inside for so long. I am already starting to feel like the previous versions of me were nothing but ghosts and illusions and that the real, substantial, embodied me is still being born.

And boy, is this birth canal long.

More after the break.

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Afraid of myself

I guess, in my own way, I have allowed myself to be constrained by others.

Namely, I have been the Giant with the Head Hung Low, not just out of humility but out of not wanting to get any further from the rest of humanity than I already am.

When you’re surviving on the tiny bit of warmth that makes it through the door that your fears make you hide behind, the last thing you want to do is retreat.

No, you want to stay all snug up against that door nice and tight so you can soak up all the distant heat you can.

Kinda explains my entire life, really.

Traditional Western individualistic values would say that I should stand up, straighten up, stop worrying about spooking the pygmies at my feet, and stride forward with great purpose and intent so I can finally embrace my destiny.

Or at least get laid.

And I am not saying that would be a bad way to go. But I have a lot of emotional baggage still weighing me down that keeps such noble virility out of reach for now and instead all I can do is keep opening up in my “slow like sunrise” way and hope for that ever looming tipping point to arrive already.

I’ve been thinking a lot about inertia lately. I feel like I need to shake off all this excess inertia I have accumulated over these many years of lethargy and forget all about whatever excuses for inaction that still remain so I can cut loose from the past.

But I’m scared.

I’m always scared.

So, no sudden moves, I guess. As appealing as some big dramatic awakening seems on a cathartic level, the truth is that I have to move slowly or I risk freaking myself out and ending up scurrying back into my hole and slamming the lid shut so hard that I won’t come back out until Spring.

Sometimes dealing with my volatile and fragile state makes me feel like I am juggling nitro glycerin all damned day.

I wish I was stronger. Tougher. Manlier.

But I am what I am, no more and no less.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve always enjoyed grocery shopping.

There’s something cheerful about it. Perhaps my primitive Northern European instincts are saying, “Ah yes, a successful hunt. Now we are sure to survive the winter. ”

Or maybe I’m just greedy and like acquiring food. I dunno.

I tell you one thing : if I could afford it and had any place to put one, I would get a deep freeze so I can stock up on many tasty microwavable things and have those as a resource I can rely on.

I could totally imagine myself becoming a food hoarder that way, though. This pleasure I feel at the acquisition of foodstuffs could be quite addictive if I was free to get whatever I want whenever I want.

I could end up like one of those people that practically has an entire supermarket’s worth of food in their basement.

Today’s been mellow. Did Wound Care in the morning. My nurse was a tad brusque for my tastes, but not everyone can be ray of sunshine and she did a very good job.

She even dealt with these weird black patches on my left foot. They showed up recently. They were almost totally black (maybe a little dark blue as well) and I had one on the outside edge of my big toe and another between my second and third toe.

It looked quite bad, and I was worried that I had suffered from some kind of stroke in my foot and that had caused serious bruising.

But the patches didn’t hurt, which was a good sign. More or less.

Turned out that the black patches most likely came from a time when I stubbed my toe without feeling it, it bled a little, and that caused lint from my black socks to stick to the blood and thence to me.

There only seems to have been one casualty, name one toenail. The toenail for my second toe on that foot is just plain gone, man. No trace of it remains.

It will grow back. But still, it’s very weird to know that I can get injured badly enough to lose a toenail and bleed a bit and not feel it at all because there’s so little feeling left in my feet due to the diabetes and peripheral neuropathy.

I know big words!

I am going to have to do my best to be super careful with my feet, seeing as the body’s natural warning system, namely pain, is not working properly.

Being numb isn’t fun.

Speaking of my feet, my orthotic shoes have already flattened once more. So I have emailed Nikki, the nice British lady who is my orthotics person, with the news, and I am proud of that because my instinct would be to just let it slide.

But the one thing guaranteed to make me assertive is pain.

It also makes me cranky..

I told her about my theory that it’s my weak ankles that are causing the problem. I’m no expert, so that’s just my partially educated guess, though.

She’s the professional…. orthoticist?

Well Windows seems to think that’s a word. Which is a good sign,

For all I know, I just have a weird way of standing and walking that defies containment by mere shoes.

I know that I’ve been pondering getting out my ratty, worn out, beat up shoes and wearing those. I’d miss the arch support but they don’t twist my ankle out of joint.

And that’s a plus.

I imagine Julian and I will be making another pilgrimage to the G. F. Strong building at VGH soon. I hope this is a solvable problem.

More after the break.

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Bits and pieces

Just some random internet stuff.

Like this absolute gem of perfection :

I’m in awe of how well executed the premise is in this strip. And of course, as a gay furry, I could not love that ending more.

Saving the poor innocent dragon from an evil princess! Just imagine the heinous things she was probably making the poor thing do.

I know who I would rather have.

The knight. Duh.

Oh, and I love that I live in a world where something like this exists.

Here’s a pic for those who don’t like following links :

That, my dear friends, is a very frilly, very lacy, very classy plush vagina.

It would make a perfect gift for the sophisticated uptown lesbian on your shop, or it could be used as a talisman to ward off evil gay vampires.

And because this is an Etsy product, it is handmade, one of a kind, and you have your choice of colors for both the base AND the lace.

I’d kinda wanna do white lace over a black base but that would be so obvious.

Oh, and don’t you just love that photograph?

It’s so summery! Makes me imagine a very special ladies only garden party.

But I’m a hopeless romantic like that.

And I thought this was quite cute and informative :

I really need more aspects of music theory illustrated by disheveled cartoon cats.

Maybe then I could learn this shit.

I’ve thought of looking for some kind of free (or cheap) music theory teaching app or site. But I would need to get over my aversion to learning keys first.

They still make no sense to me. Why not put everything in C?

But I hate that when something doesn’t make sense to me, my brain grinds to a halt until I can figure it out.

I know damned well that some things won’t make sense at first and you have to learn more before you will understand said things, but I guess my brain is petulant and spoiled and just expects there to be people around to explain things to it.

It’s not like I think I am incapable of learning keys. I could learn them without too much problem. Sure, they are rote memorization, which I detest, but I really want to actually understand music on a lexical and not just an intuitive level.

I want to know what the fuck I am doing, basically. And what else I can do.

I mean, people like David Bennet (my crush) know how to make things more harmonically rich, or catchier, or how to match melody to bassline, and all these other magical formulae that I can’t believe are things that are known and understood.

My music making would be so much more structured and less haphazard if I only some some clue of WTF I am doing.

I will learn it somehow. Someday. This I swear.

I just have to get the fuck over myself first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had my abdominal ultrasound this morning.

The procedure was no big deal. Ultrasounds are easy. Lie there, hold your breath when the imaging tech tells you, occasionally turn to one side or another.

Fasting for eight hours beforehand was unwelcome but doable. Originally, when I booked the appointment, the lady on the phone said twelve hours, and I said, “Um, no. I am diabetic, I can’t go for twelve hours without eating. ”

So we plea bargained it down to eight. Eight I can do.

But the appointment was for 8 am. so me and Julian couldn’t do our usual hanging out at midnight because that would mean eating after midnight and I’d turn into a Gremlin.

Wait no…I’d just have eaten too late for me to have gone eight hours before 8 am.

Easy solve : we just did our usual hanging out at 11 pm instead.

Getting up that early was a bit of a pain. For one thing, it was really fucking cold. And in general, I don’t like to have to deal with the real world before 10 am.

I’ve never been the “sleep all day” kind of night owl.

In fact, I am pretty sure that a detailed analysis of my sleeping patterns would reveal that I am not so much a night owl as a nap….. toucan.

I couldn’t think of a parallel.

But I have gotten better over the years. Patient readers know that I went many, many years without being able to sleep for more than an hour and a half.

And that sucked so bad. Rotten for my health too, both mental and physical. And yet I acted as though there was nothing I could do about it.

I’ve been pathologically passive for a very long time.

All because of that damned Paxil, too.

Speaking of which (sorta), also did the Therapy Thursday thing. Doctor Costin told me that he doesn’t put people on Paxil any more. It’s actually a very old drug now, and there are better alternatives with fewer side effects.

Now he tells me. I’ve been taking the stuff for more than 20 years. 20 years of going on and on about feeling cold inside and talking about Midnight Tundra and bemoaning the iceberg sitting on my poor little heart.

And blaming it all on my depression when, in fact, it was my antidepressant.

God does irony seek me out.

Ah well, at least I am thawing out now due to the lowered Paxil dose. In around three weeks, when I get my next batch of blister packs, the Paxil dose will go from 40 mg except for 2 days a week at 30 mg to three days a week.

I am looking forward to that. I feel so much more alive now. I was talking about thawing out a fair bit with Doctor Costin and how I feel like it’s going a lot faster now and how I am striving to become more actively engaged with reality and closer to the people in my life and to take charge of my own wellbeing.

To that end, I keep gently reminding myself that I have the ability to steer this beat up little boat of mine and I can actually go out and find my fun and other things that will enrich my life and help me to stay connected with reality.

Living in the world of the mind is hell because without the id to anchor it, the mind is not a stable place. It’s a land of flickering illusions and sinking sands and random drift, and nothing feels real, not even yourself, and you’d sell your soul for a bit of solid ground to call your own.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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One more day

Just one more day until Fruvous’ Very Busy Week is over.

I will kind of miss it. I could handle having one “thing” a weekday, although I would prefer they weren’t all some form of medical appointment.

Those are rarely fun, and never good news.

Oh well. After tomorrow I can try to implement some self-motivation. I’m coming to realize that I can, to a certain extent at least, choose to be motivated.

I can gather my inner strength, take a big breath, and fill myself with energy from my largely untapped id, and let that wave of energy carry me forward.

And that’s where things get meta, because then I have to ask myself if I want to want to do things or not.

I won’t commit to an answer to that right now because I feel like I am in a state of transition between the old, weak, timid. cowardly, cringing way of approaching life where I spend most of my time curled up in a little ball ignoring the world and into a new, strong, courageous, bold way of living where I wander the world with my head held high, looking for fun new things to do that will make me feel alive.

Very important, that feeling alive thing. I have spent far, far too long subconsciously choosing to damp down all feelings of liveliness in order to make doing nothing easier.

Ain’t that a boot to the nuts.

Above all, I’m going to learn to get excited about life. To find and hold on to things I can look forward to and if one of those doesn’t pan out, don’t wallow in my feelings of disappointment, just feel it all then go looking for something new to take its place.

Life is nothing to be afraid of. I can embrace it and learn it and live it and be all the better for it. I don’t have to keep hiding from it like a hunted animal.

Nothing is out to “get” me. I have no predators. People who know me tend to like me, in fact, and want me to be okay.

I should show myself at least the same level of consideration.

And I will learn to truly care about, and for, myself. I am free to stop repeating my neglected childhood and give myself the love I never got back then.

I can grow that missing inner resource that pushing to change things requires.

All it takes is love.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Posted this as a Youtube comment earlier :

OK, long story but bear with me.
1991. I’m a freshman, I have only recently discovered philosophy classes and I have been enjoying the hell out of mine. Holy crap, thinking about stuff is its own entire… thing!
One day, a philosophy professor I adored, Professor Trnka, took me aside and gently but firmly told me that I needed to stop dominating class discussions. That he understood that I was eager and bright but I needed to let the less confident and loud students get their chance to contribute as well, so I needed to tone it down.
This made an impression on me so I was thinking a lot about it as I made my way to my next class, another philosophy class, this one with Professor Koch.
After which he gave me the EXACT SAME TALK.
Almost word for word. These professors had not coordinated in any way or on any level. They just both decided I needed that talk on the same day. So as arrogant as I was back then, I took their lesson to heart. If it had been just one of them, I might have gone the arrogant neckbeard route of thinking, “Well, if they can’t keep up with my genius, too frigging bad. Boo hoo hoo. It’s not my fault I’m awesome. “
But by the time Professor Koch was done, I figured I must be the problem. So I learned to slow down and take my goddamned turn.

I was, in fact, the asshole.

And now I have come all the way back around to contemplating (planning?) being arrogant once more.

I mean, being arrogant doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole, right? It must be possible to have a very high opinion of yourself and your capabilities while still being a genuinely warm and decent person.

You don’t have to be a Trump.

Admittedly, I can feel my cocky and arrogant side trying to tug me away from my usual empathy and consideration and deep humanism so that I can spend more energy just basking in the glow of my scintillating awesomeness.

Well fuck that. That whole idea disgusts me. Even if I gave in to delusions of messianic grandeur (always a possibility with me), the idea of a life lived all cooped up in my own soul instead of exploring the magnificent multiplicity found in the minds and souls of those around me sounds like a slow burning but thorough version of hell.

Besides, there is no reason you can’t hold yourself to an extremely high moral standard because you think too highly of yourself to do anything low, base, petty, or cruel.

That shit’s beneath me, baby. Walk on by.

I think I may be slowly turning into a 60’s Vegas crooner.

Ring a ding ding, baby!

Anyhow, yeah. I think I can imagine myself as, like, a magnified version of who I am right now. Still a sweetie, still sensitive and deep, still caring deeply for people doing the best I can for them, but with the confidence in my own coruscating amazingness that I need to truly shine and fill the world with the wonders I create.

Or at least get laid.

But it has to start with opening up inside. There is much inside me that needs to come out. Just how much, I can’t tell you, but it’s a LOT.

The image I am currently using to facilitate this transformation is of a house with its windows being flung open to let the morning sun and all that wholesome fresh air in, and all my own radiance out.

And if some shadows need to slip out at the same time, so be it. I am slowly learning that my soul is like a packed nightclub in that I can only let the good stuff in if I let some of the bad stuff out to make room.

So I suppose that might seem schizophrenic to some. Sometimes I am upbeat and perky, the next I am bitter and angry and dark, and the next I’m thoughtful and deep, and the next I’m raging about politics, and the next…

I’m a million different people from one day to the next.

But they are all just facets of me.

More after the break.

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The world was our burrito

Strangeness : I ordered a 2 for 1 burrito special from a place called Ricky Ticky Taco. ^[1] Takes a while but it shows up. Yup, there’s my two burritos.

But they’re in a Quesada bag.

As patient readers know, I’ve also ordered my Mexican food from there. And come to think of it, the DoorDash menu for Ricky Ticky Taco was identical to the one from Quesada. Chin stroking hmmmmmm.

I feel like someone is pulling a fast one on me. Are they actually the same place?

Anyhow, when my food arrived, I discovered that moisture had caused the top of my burrito to stick to the wrapper, and thus when I opened the wrapper it ripped the top of my burrito off, thus making it much harder to eat.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to keep the thing together and just dumped the whole thing on top of the little bit of trail mix left in my bowl.

I wonder if that’s how the burrito bowl was invented.

“Oh no, my burrito is falling apart! I know, I’ll stick it in this bowl. Great, now how do I eat it? Well I have this spoon….. hey, this is pretty good!:

Aaaand….. scene. Thank you.

My foot appointment went fine. Nikki (yay, the nice British lady has a name now) made a bunch of adjustments to my giant Frankenstein shoes and hopefully that will keep them from flattening liek they did before.

Seriously, by the time I got to the G. F. Strong building today, they were basically oversized slippers. I could walk out of them.

So far they feel OK. I forgot to tell Nikki about how bad the shoes hurt my feet when she first put them on me. I hope that’s not important.

Today, though, they felt fine.

I suspect the real problem is that I have very weak ankles. So my foot kind of turns sideways when I walk.

Of course, that didn’t occur to me till I was home.

Oh, and one misadventure in the appointment : so I get to the building and Julian and I go through the lobby, down the elevator, and to the prosthetics and orthotics office.

Where the receptionists intercepts me and says, “Michael, come to the back office with me”, so I follow her allll the way through the offices and rooms there only to have Nikki tell her to go to the FRONT office so now we have to go almost all the way back to the reception area and I have still not had a chance to sit the fuck down!

But I am proud of myself for complaining about it. I said to the receptionist, “You really should not be running me around like this!” and “Remember me? The guy who fell last time I was here!?!”.

So yay that.

By the time I actually got to sit my legs were screaming the song of their people at me.

Turns out pain makes me assertive.

Anyhow, that was my day. I’ll be back there March 10.

And I am still annoyed about my burrito.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got another needle in the eye today.

Went to my eye doctor place, West Coast Retina Consultants, and they did the usual tests on me.

My left eye continues to be way, way blurrier than the right. It would be totally fair to say that my right eye is dominant. Dominant as fuck, really.

As in, with just my right eye, I read 8 lines of text of decreasing font sizes and with just the left I barely got through 2.

And the second one only had two letters on it!

So that’s depressing, but oh well. I can still see, knock on wood, and there’s doctors trying to fix that left eye of mine.

Hence the injection. Apparently this injection should firm things up a bit.

It fucking hurt, of course. It seems to be my misfortune to be somewhat resistant to the freezing agent they use on my eyeball, so even though that stuff is supposed to make it so that I barely feel it, I fucking feel it.

But it’s just a moment of (admittedly severe) pain and that is way, way better than going blind when my eye goes kablooey from the pressure.

I’m sure you would agree.

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Wake up, little foxy

To the tune of this, of course :

I seem to have cleared the cobwebs of unconsciousness from my mind for now.

Yesterday’s clinging sleepiness has, at least temporarily, retreated. I didn’t have trouble getting out of bed to go to the eye place and I didn’t feel sleepy while I was there.

In an extraordinary (for me) act of foresee, I even brought a book to read because I know these appointments often involve a lot of waiting.

Dang I’m clever.

Anyhow, this recent bout with Mister Sandman has got me once more contemplating my troubled relationship with sleep.

I feel like my mind plays around with sleep in ways that are not conducive to my long term health and best interests. I have a tendency to take naps out of what I am sure would turn out to be merely boredom if I were to really look at it.

I sleep because I don’t know what else to do with myself, and that’s sad.

And my journey towards greater mental health will be greatly expedited if I do my best to remember to actively engage with life. To be interested in things, and to pursue that interest with happy zeal. To feed my mind, not just keep it busy. To be intrepid and go out in search of fun and adventure, even if it’s only through my computer.

The mission is to find things in life that make me want to stay awake and engaged. That’s the opposite of my depression because it’s my depression that I am ultimately hiding from with all my napping.

And even as I type these words of wakefulness, I can feel the old and busted part of me moaning and whining about how all this energetic engagement sounds like way too much work and it’s better to just slink off and hide from the world in sleep for a while.

No, it isn’t. Sleeping is easier but it’s not better. I am determined to learn to open up and embrace life and connect with the soaring majestic firebird of energy within me so that I can climb high into the sky and shine my warmth out for all the world to see… and feel.

I would love the whole world if I could. So much darkness and pain in the world that could be solved by showing people just a little love and kindness.

Mama loves ya, baby. Never forget it.

More after the break.

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More about sleep

Being super sleepy then having that evaporate on me has really highlighted the difference between needing sleep and just not wanting to deal with life at all.

And it’s that second thing that worries me. That’s definitely depressive. And it points the way to how much work I still need to do to hook up my id and get my whole motivational system online after decades of neglect.

I think I am still afraid to actually be motivated. I am so fearful of the world that deep down I treat motivation like it’s something trying to tear me out of my smelly little socket and that still seems like the worst possible thing to happen to that deep down scared little animal calling the shots from my deeper self.

I guess I am that scared little animal. More or less.

That doesn’t seem quite right but I can’t think of what’s wrong with it. It’s incomplete.

Anyhow, so yeah, I think I resist being motivated because it seems like it’s going to drag me off to God Knows Where and that means not being fully in control of myself and what I do and where I end up and therefore that is chaos and madness and anarchy.

Or something like that.

The degree to which my inner programming demands control and predictability is appalling. I truly have no trust in the universe. Deep down I feel like the only way to be “safe” is to control my life to the point of total predictability and the only way to do that is to basically have no life at all.

That’s certainly the only way to maintain the tragically low stimulation level I now require. It’s like I slid down a long slope because of my apparent inability to ever choose to raise the stimulation level of my life and now I am stuck at the bottom.

At some point I am just going to have to just be scared. Accept that climbing back up will activate my anxiety and do it anyway.

I can always take a Xanax if I get too scared. Or even beforehand.

I know that I am determined to become more robust and engaged and ready so that I am not in such a weak and fragile state all the god damned time.

Somewhere within me lies a raging inferno of energy that lies like a breeder reactor ready to be tapped into so I can do wonderful, amazing, astounding things.

I just need to have the courage to hook that shit up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Showered for the first time in 2.5 years yesterday.

The new setup works great. I am incredibly impressed with the grab bars. They really feel sturdy and stable and that’s, like, their main job.

I’m still not going to be swinging around on them like a kid on a jungle gym, but i trust them not to come off in my hand, anyhow.

The new shower head works fine too. I now have the same hose-type shower head that I used when I was a little kid just learning to bathe himself, and that’s nice.

And being able to aim the flow directly at whatever part of me I want is very nice. Feels very good in some spots, including the ones you’d think.

Oh, and the shower chair also feels nice and sturdy despite being plastic.

All in all, a very rugged setup.

As for the shower itself, eh, I got clean. But my bandages got wet. As in there was a little lake in the bottom of reach bag when I was done. Turns out rubber bands don’t hold the plastic bags on tight enough to keep the water from getting in, so next time I’m gonna use tape like Albert used.

I’m gonna miss that guy.

But nevertheless, it felt amazing to be able to shower under my own power once more. It makes me feel so much more human. Like I always say, disability takes away your dignity, and the new shower setup gives me a big chunk of dignity back.

Plus there’s just something about being able to wash myself that makes me feel more human. It’s something most people completely take for granted but I have had to do without it for a long ass time and it’s good to be back.

Oh, and adding to the wackiness of my little watery misadventure, it turned out that both of the bottles of Head and Shoulders in my bathroom were empty, LOL, so I did not get to wash my hair.

Plus, because of my long shower free period, it turned out that there was but a single towel in my bathroom as well.

Ah well, next shower will be more complete.

The real psychological takeaway from the experience for me is to be proud that I didn’t take the whole thing seriously, so the little bumps on the road didn’t bother me much.

I am learning to just accept that I am not someone skilled at thinking things out beforehand and so my best course of action is to just jump into things feet first, make a bunch of mistakes, and learn from them.

This is not the prudent or “smart” way to do things. But it’s a way to do things, and doing things is infinitely better than the stodgy and stoic stasis I’ve lived in for so long.

Towards this end I will continue to cultivate a cheerful, sunny outlook on life. That seems to be the exact kind of shock absorbers this big ol bus of a mind of mine needs if it’s to actually propel me forward for a change.

I’ve been spinning my wheels for so long, baby, that my tires wore out a long time ago and now I’m running on my rims.

It’s the fear of making a mistake that kills ya. There’s millions of things way worse than being less than perfect, and being (and doing) nothing at all is one of them.

So I need to be less cautious and more adventurous. Accept that living life means making mistakes and getting hurt and that the fun makes it all worth it.

Above all, I want to become a lot more mentally tough and resilient.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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Trouble on the rise

I’ve started to find it very hard to get out of bed, and this worries me.

I don’t feel depressed. Just tired and lazy. I find myself just lying in bed, dozing, for way longer than usual and it’s not just sleepiness – I actively don’t wanna get out of bed.

Even though the only thing waiting for me when I arise is video games.

Maybe that’s the problem, I dunno. Maybe getting up to play video games just ain’t doing it for me any more and I need to shift into a higher gear.

But I fear it’s probably something not as simple as that.

The thing is, being unable (or unwilling) to get out of bed has never been a part of my particular depression. It’s a classic symptom, of course, but one I’ve managed to dodge.

But it’s becoming undeniable in my case right now. I am sleepy and/or tired all the time and all I want to do is burrow under the covers and snooze.

It definitely feels escapist. Like just dealing with my extremely low impact life is too much for me now and so I am retreating to the penultimate fallback position of hiding from the world in sleep.

If that’s the case, I’m in trouble. I’m going to have to tell Doctor Costin about this during Therapy Thursday this week and he might well decide that this whole “lowered Paxil dose” thing ain’t workin’ and I’m going to have to go back up.

Which would be, ironically, quite depressing.

But I don’t feel sad. Or depressed, or anxious, or anything else except sleepy. So maybe this has nothing to do with depression.

And that would be even worse because anything non-psychological that would make me sleepy all the time, like a virus or a brain issue, would be much, much worse.

It could be that I’m still just catching up on sleep debt. But I doubt it. This feels like more than that. I feel positively oppressed.

Hopefully I will get over it and it will be yet another weird health thing that disappears as mysteriously as it appeared.

Because life is at a pretty low ebb if I don’t even have the energy to play games.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I know, I cover this topic a fair bit. But it’s kind of important to me.

This won’t be the last you hear of it either, I am sure. So buckle in.

First, there’s the arrogance I have always displayed.

To me, it’s not really arrogance, but I will admit it’s a fine distinction. I have always been extremely confident about my intelligence and its products.

And why wouldn’t I be? To this day, I’ve not met anyone who is categorically smarter than me. School has always been super easy for me, college included, and this great big brain of mine gives me a feeling of power that makes me feel like I tower over other people like I’m fucking Godzilla.

For the record, I don’t like that feeling. I don’t want to tower over others. That would just take me even further away from the rest of humanity to a place where I would not even feel like a human being any more.

Or so I’ve always thought.

Anyhow, clearly, to some people, confidence is arrogance, and like I said, it’s a fine distinction at best. If you’re an average student watching the like of me saunter into class and ace a test I didn’t even known we were having that day, you’re going to assume that I must be as arrogant as I am superior.

But I never have been, at least from my point of view. Sure, I’ve never pretended to be stupider than I am (and I never will, unless there’s money in it for me, and it would have to be a LOT) but I never acted like I was better than everyone else or otherwise super special and precious, and I think I deserve credit for that.

Even if it was the product of crippling depression and very low self-esteem.

But as patient readers know, for a long time now I have been wondering if being arrogant and full of myself might actually be the smarter path.

At least then I would have the confidence to go out into the world and try to make a place for myself where I can be a real honest to goodness grownup.

And after that, who knows? Armed with the confidence of arrogance (and vice versa), I might conquer the world with my dazzling talents and powerful intellect.

I mean, not literally. I’m not some power mad megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur.

But I feel like becoming rich and famous is not entirely out of my reach.

I do know that there is no healthy middle neutral position possible for me. It honestly seem to be that I can love myself or I can hate myself but I can’t just be healthy and normal about myself.

I fly or I die. Period.

Maybe I could compromise and just develop an inflatable ego. One that I can pump up big when it’s time to go out and take on that big ol world and apply for jobs and/or try to become a YouTube star but that I can deflate back to more sane proportions when it’s time to just be a social human being for a while.

Sounds fairly doable, although I imagine living in two worlds like that can be stressful. I suppose every celebrity must face this conflict, and I do want to be a celebrity.

Admittedly, my talents are more behind the camera stuff like writing, but I can also be a charismatic and compelling orator, and that’s why I am thinking YouTube.

But then the question becomes : what the hell kind of YouTube would I be?

I’ll talk that through when I get back from Denny’s.

More after the break!

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What kind of Youtuber?

Hell if I know.

The problem is that I’m a very complicated dude with a lot of different facets to my personality, many of which I am still trying to figure out, so it’s hard to pick one of these facets as the one to which I give voice.

So here’s the broad categories :

1. Angry. There has definitely been a flourishing of things for me to be pissed off about lately, and part of me has always been kinda hotheaded, and that part of me really wants to scream and shout and foam at the mouth about all the fucked up shit going down on this fireball planet of ours and really attack the forces of evil with every last erg of my massive verbal wave motion gun’s power so I can destroy those opinions I find toxic like I’m the motherfucking Death Star.
2. Saintly. But then again, I really just want everyone to get along. I want to find common ground in the most unlikely and infertile places and help people see that we’re all more alike than we are different and that we’re all in this together against a cold and hostile world so we need to huddle together so we can fight the darkness with the warm glow of humanity, united, and at peace.
3. Funny. Then again, I could stay the hell away from politics, petty bickering, and punditry and just be a harmless humorist making funny eccentric little videos full of my signature charm and gentle good nature to make videos that are warm and friendly and appealing to everyone and maybe just make the world a happier and more welcoming place for the whole darn world.
4. Nerdy. Or I could concentrate on geek culture like science fiction, fantasy, and especially video games (might as well get something out of playing them so much.) I could embrace my zany side and make highly nerd-friendly content that is funny and geeky nerdy as all get out. Or maybe I could tap into my love of science instead and do highly accessible science explainer vids.

Or a million other things, I assume. This gem of mine has a ridiculous number of facets and for now at least, I have no idea how to unite them into a single identity, let alone if that is even possible.

Maybe I will approach the whole thing like I do this blog. No format, no outline, no script, whatever comes out, comes out.

It might work. My personality is the real product after all.

And maybe I’ll assign my different faces their own #hashtage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap, has this been a sleepy day so far.

And not the nice, quiet, healthy, relaxed kind of sleepy either. This is the heavy, sweaty, beleaguered kind of sleep that leaves me feeling beat up and knocked down then propped up for more beatings again.

And God, does it suck.

Now I have two main schools of thought on what is going down with me right now. One says that this is just the result of my usual weird sleep cycle where now and then my sleep debt catches up with me and must be paid up in full all at once.

That’s certainly what I’d prefer it to be. Then I would just have to wait it out.

It would still suck but at least I’d know it would be over once I catch up.

The other school of thought is that I’m coming down with something viral and my body is using up all my internal resources in the war against this fucking pathogen, leaving not a lot left for minor activities like consciousness.

Eh, consciousness is overrated anyhow.

At the present moment, the second school of thought has a sizeable lead. My chest and my throat are raw and scratchy and my nose is running and I have some aches and pains going on.

But that kind of shit comes and goes quite suddenly with me without any solid evidence of whether it’s a virus or just dehydration. So I dunno.

My life is very weird.

Oh well. Guess all I can do is do what I do best : keep trudging along. Make sure to get some solid nutrition into me plus plenty of fluids and, whether I like it or not, bedrest.

As per usual, I don’t wanna sleep all day. I want to stay awake and have fun and do stuff with my time. Sleeping all the time fucking sucks.

Oh, and standard disclaimer, as always, applies : if I get worse, I’ll go to the ER or UC.

I noticed on a poster at Wound Care that UCs are now “Urgent And Primary Care Centers”, or UPCCs, and that struck me as them finally admitting that, due to the fucked up nature of our health care system (thanks, Boomers!), UC is the closest thing they are ever going to get to having their own GP.

Guess I should be glad to have Doctor Chao after all. I’m still mad about him giving up on finding out what the fuck is wrong with my legs, but he’s better than nothing.

Then again, when I went to UC for my legs, they did a bunch of testing that Chao had never thought of right away, so who knows.

Maybe, despite my misgivings about the place, I’d be better off at UC.

Which reminds me. By now, there should be both an order for an ultrasound of my spleen, bowels, and kidneys and one for some bloodwork in the system for me, so I need to get to the Brooke Radiology building some time very soon.

Brooke is a great place. They do your imaging so fast and yet you don’t feel rushed. Their medical imaging techs are really warm and friendly and put you at ease.

The LifeLabs upstairs from them, on the other hand, is not exactly my favorite place to be. I find the place very cold and clinical and it definitely makes me feel like I am just another hunk of meat to be processed to them.

But what the hell. If I can get it all done in one day in one place, it will save me a lo of time and effort in the long run.

Then, I guess, I will just wait to see if Doctor Chao’s office calls.

I’m particularly interested in the ultrasound because I am very curious to know what my umbilical hernia is up to these days and if it has something to do with my weird poops.

If it’s been acting up, I might need surgery. Which would mean cutting my abdomen open, unless it can be done laparoscopically.

So, go laparoscopic surgery, go. I don’t want to have to get split open again!

More after the break.

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That distant shore

I seem to be through the worst of the attack of sleepiness.

I still feel pretty rough, and the chest, throat, and nose symptoms have not changed, but at least I don’t feel like yesterday’s crap any more.

So I dunno. These exact symptoms of runny nose, scratchy throat, and sore chest seem to just pop up periodically with me, and hang around for a bit, then disappear and lurk within me until the next flareup.

Is it a virus? Some metabolic oddity? An allergic reaction? An atypical reaction to dehydration? Or what?

I dunno. And I suppose, as irresponsible as this is, I don’t really care because the symptoms never rise to the point of being severe and/or scary.

I honestly pass through a lot of small periods of minor badness. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe my immune system really swings into action once symptoms appear and beats the ever loving snot out of whatever is monkeying up my works.

Or maybe this is all psychosomatic (attic insane) on some level too deep for me to fathom and this is how my body and mind deal with some deep dark emotional force within me that is otherwise unable to ride to the surface of my conscious mind to be dealt with in a mature adult way there.

Probably not. But maybe.

Eh, whatever. I am beginning to wonder what is the true cost of all my curiosity and analysis and yearning to understand everything. Surely there are better uses of my prodigious mental energies than an uncritical and omnivorous attempt to ingest, digest, and integrate everything I come across like a hyperphagic amoeba.

But even if there are better uses for this miraculous mind of mine, I am not sure I could even switch modes at this stage of my life.

I dunno. Maybe I could learn to adjust my attitude at least.

Because this negative shit ain’t good for me at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.