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.

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.

Had my last shower with/from Albert today, and it was bittersweet.

He’s the person who has been giving me my weekly community showers at Rosewood Manor for the last three months or so, and I like him.

And not just because he’s the first man to touch my naked body in years.

No, it’s because I found him to be quite pleasant company. He told me about his life and his family in Montreal and his life in the Philippines and so on.

At first, he did most of the talking, and I am fine with that. I am happy to listen to someone else talk if they are interesting, and I find most people interesting because I am endlessly curious about other people’s lives. Lives unlike my own.

I’m crazy for hearing people’s perspectives so I can add them to my own internal model of reality. There is nobody alive who doesn’t have something to contribute to my understanding of life and the world.

Anyhow, I am glad to have my new grab bars, shower chair, and detachable shower head (the kind with a hose), and I am looking forward to being able to take a shower for the first time in two and a half years, but I will definitely miss Albert.

Life’s like that, isn’t it? Everything comes at a cost. Nothing is one hundred percent good. We are always weighing cost versus gain.

All we can really hope for is to trade up.

I have not tested my new shower equipment yet, even though it was installed on Wednesday and today is Friday.

To be honest, I was so preoccupied with my anxiety over having the installer dude here that I totally forgot to mentally prepare at all.

And right now I am going through my neophobia phase. When something new comes along, I sometimes need to let it just kinda sit there for a while in order to get used to it before I actually start using it.

It’s very Taurus of me, I know. We are notoriously conservative (in the emotional sense), even wacky freaky free spirits like me, and it can take a long time for us to warm up to anything new, even if it’s something we definitely want.

It’s pretty weird.

That’s why I have pieces of technology lying around that I tried once, did not instantly understand and/or like, and never touched them again.

I have a very cool waterproof bluetooth shower speaker sitting right in front of me that I tried for like five minutes to get to work, couldn’t figure it out, so I gave up and forgot all about it for literal years.

I have a very good, powerful massager with various heads, variable intensity and interval of vibrations, and even little programs of various vibrations that make up a whole session of massage.

Used it for a while. Lost track of the charging cord. Shrugged, forgot about it.

Heck, somewhere in this junk pile of a bedroom of mine is a self thrusting sex toy that I tried once, found the thrusting action kind of creepy, and never touched again.

And the same thing has happened with oh so many video games. I try them out, they don’t instantly grab me, so I return them.

I’m actually quite fickle.

But I am at least learning to cope with things like that. I know that when I get something new, I may have to force myself to use it the first few times in order to get used to it.

And that’s just sad.

More after the break.

Why would you do that to yourself?

Atheists puzzle the faithful.

To them, it seems like atheists voluntarily live in a world that is far colder and harsher and more hopeless than it needs to be.

And all in the name of some abstract sense of what is really “true”.

To the faithful, that does not seem to be a trade worth making at all.

To them, objective truth is not nearly as important as emotional truth. And religion is, ultimately, about people’s unmet emotional needs.

Feeling unloved? God loves you.

Feeling unsafe? God will protect you.

Feeling lonely? Jesus is always there by your side.

Feeling scared by that great big complicated world? God makes it simple again.

This is why faith – the belief in things without proof – is vitally important. It might seem to a chilly intellectual like myself that unfounded belief is lunacy, but to the faithful, belief without the need for evidence or proof is belief that cannot be taken away by the shifting sands of our thoughts and ideas.

And we must always remember that confidence that you can figure out what is real and what is illusion and thus create one’s own understanding of reality is not universal.

The very thought of heading out into those murky waters of doubt and uncertainty terrifies a lot of humanity because they have no faith in their ability to find their way out again and so, to them, that’s a recipe for drowning.

Or worse, getting lost and confused forever, without even knowing which way is up.

So to them, we intellectual liberal types standing out there in the swamps of intellectualism calling for them to come join us are sirens trying to lure them to their doom in a place where we can survive but they cannot.

And all for the chance of being marginally more “right”? Uh, no thanks.

Because to the majority of humanity, the ultimate capital-T Truth is not of paramount importance. What they value is whatever makes it easiest to get through life, whether it’s “really really real” or not.

They intuitively grasp that there are some things that it is better to believe because the benefits of belief are enormous and the costs are, to them, negligible

Now myself, I don’t see religious belief ever being an option for me.

But that does not preclude me from extending my compassion and understanding to the faithful and the pious.

We’re all in this together, folks.

And I would never deny someone whatever helps them make it through the day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

Told my psychiatrist, Doctor Costin, about the “bad moments” I’ve been having lately, and how I regain my equilibrium pretty fast when they have them but that I am beginning to wonder if I should just let myself fall apart instead.

He said that was a bad idea. That having a breakdown leaves an injury that you never totally heal from so you are better off avoiding them entirely.

OK, fair enough. I will stay the course for now.

But I don’t know for how long, because the “bad moments” are becoming more frequent and lasting just a little bit longer each time.

So clearly something’s got to give.

Knowing me, all I really need is a good long cry. And that does, in fact, seem like a better idea than a total nervous breakdown.

So the next time that cold hard wind starts blowing inside me, perhaps I will see if I can release that energy via tears.

A fit of deep down ugly crying might do me a hell of a lot of good.

Might just be the emotional enema I have needed for a long ol time.

Speaking of being verklempt, I once more did not exactly bare my soul to Doctor Costin. I almost never do. I doubt I ever will. Letting down my guard and letting my emotions pour out in front of others is just not in my programming and it might be too late for me to add it in now.

Like so many other men, at some point I built these fortifications around my tender heart in order to protect it from the cold hard world, and keep it (and myself) from being or seeming to be vulnerable.

Because deep down, it feels like the second we’re vulnerable, the imaginary bully in our minds will pounce and use our weakness against us.

This is, of course, insanity, but nobody said being male and being sane were the same.

Due to my extraordinary intellect, the madness goes even deeper for me, because I can simulate vulnerability to the point where I even fool myself.

Like…. a lot.

But it’s time to confess what’s really going on : I am using the incredible speed and agility of my mind to bring currently inactive emotions to the forefront, in a purely conversational mode, and communicating them in that cauterized form.

And this is with my therapist. With everybody else, I am even more guarded.

And yet I seem very open and honest and forthright. And I am. As far as you know.

But on the inside I know, deep down, the sort of game I am playing. I almost never, even with my therapist, talk about what I am feeling right now. It’s always what I have felt in the past, or some abstraction of emotion devoid of currency or power, or maybe, on rare moments, the thoughts and ideas of the moment.

But none of that involves any true vulnerability. I am one thousand percent confident in my ability to move to protect myself verbally and intellectually from any threat, so I can seemingly bare all without ever really feeling exposed.

It’s all a rather complicated and elaborate game, but all it really boils down to is that, even as I type these very words to you, my sweet and gentle audience, I am not truly making myself vulnerable to you.

In the end, it’s all just analysis after all.

Jesus, no wonder it takes me so long to make any progress. I’ve been faking it.

More after the break.

One little step

But I need to keep in mind that progress happens a little at a time and, and this is the key point, the fact that I can see how things might have been better does not mean that they should have been better and that therefore I have failed.

That is honestly the rubric I have been living under and as you can clearly see, it’s pure uncut looney tunes crazy town.

I can always think of ways things could be better. It’s part of my whole INTJ thing. I have an intuitive grasp of how things work and how things fit together and that means I am a natural optimizer, especially when human thriving is part of the equation.

But a harsh, sere inner environment where there is only one hundred percent total success or abject and total failure is some seriously psycho Asian parent stereotype crazy making bullshit.

It’s my evil superego rigging the game against me while maintaining the very thing impression that success is, technically, possible.

No it ain’t. Fuck off.

I think it comes down to frustration at its root. I have all this life energy and ambitious and passion that has been completely stymied by my mental illness for a very long time and that id energy is very frustrated and angry inside me and that, in, turn, leads me to take that frustration out on myself through corrupted inner judgment.

After all, if I could ever be good enough, I’d have to stop hating myself, and then what would I do with all that aggression?

I’m working on it.

I’m doing what I can to build channels for that raw human energy to be expressed in the world. At the very least, I want to learn to use it to bolster my mood instead of corroding it and making it crumble.

Deep inside of me is a voice driven mad by captivity that is constantly screaming and screaming and banging itself bloody on the walls of its cage.

And I need to liberate the poor thing while it still remembers that freedom is a possibility for it some day and therefore hasn’t gone completely insane.

I’m working on it, my lovely lunatic. I will find a way to let you go without putting others in danger – including me. I will find ways to harness your energies so that you can do something with them other than bang mindlessly on the bars.

God willing, I might even find a way to get you laid so you can get rid of THAT energy.

I have been trying to hide from reality in the world of the mind for far too long. There’s a real world out there which is way more stable and sane.

And I’m gonna make it there.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s tough to admit to myself that all or most of my feeling of being cold and isolated for the last 20 years was actually the Paxil.

It makes sense in retrospect. Paxil works on my social anxiety because it acts as something like an emotional anesthetic and numbs the amygdala so that it’s less likely to activate the FFF (fight, flight, or freeze) system prematurely and it’s that system that creates the symptoms of an anxiety disorder.

And that’s fine at the right dosage. But, as I have now learned, if the dosage is too high, that numbness cuts straight to the bone and creates a broken frozen inner hellscape that denies the patient access to really any motive power from the id at all.

No wonder I’ve been like Good Kirk, unable to make decisions, for so long.

And all because I was unable to recognize that my Paxil was the problem. Indeed, I have clung to my Paxil as my lifeline to sanity since I was first prescribed it more than twenty years ago because back then, Paxil was what enabled me to exit the maelstrom of insanity that was my extreme depression and social anxiety.

Paxil created a vitally necessary space between me and my insanity, and that space let me catch my breath and actually think.

So that made me label Paxil as not just good but my saviour. And seeing as it had been a long time since I had tasted sanity – there’s a really good chance that I have been crazy for my whole life – I had no way of knowing when the Paxil went too far.

I blamed all the coldness in my soul on the depression, when it turns out the real problem was my antidepressant.

Doesn’t that just figure.

Imagine that, all my talk of Midnight Tundra and feeling numb and cold and isolated all the time was really coming from the Paxil.

I might actually have healed from my illness a long time ago without even knowing.

Thank God I am thawing out now. The barriers keeping me in an emotional deep freeze are falling due to the decreased Paxil dose and I can feel myself coming out of the cold sleep I have been unknowingly trapped in and now I can be decanted from my strangely womblike hibernation chamber only to discover that the rest the crew is dead after a corpse falls out of a locker in a highly improbable way.

Like, what, they died leaning on the door at the exact right angle?

I am deliberately letting this revelation about Paxil and me circulate in my mind because I know that it’s something I am going to have to work through before I can truly grok it and accept the truth of it.

Part of me is super angry, of course. All these nonfunctional years – most of my adult life – robbed from me by my inability to realize what was actually wrong.

And there’s nobody to blame or even get mad at. Not even myself. I had no idea what was wrong, how could I?

It seems obvious in retrospect, but that’s hindsight.

And Doctor Costin had no way of knowing what my true problem was either. I never described the issue as a symptom of anything. I didn’t know what all that coldness was about so neither did he.

It’s just another way – maybe the biggest one yet – life fucks me over in ways I can’t see coming and that require major mental upgrade to understand.

Or even recognize.

All I can do now is continue with the plan to lower the dose over time and hopefully that will thaw me out enough for me to feel truly alive.

More after the break.

The bad moments

I’ve always had them but now I want to dig a little deeper on them.

These are the moments when the sadness and depression and despair overwhelm my defenses and I feel ice cold hand clutch my heart and what I can only describe as a soul chill goes through me and I have to fight to regain my equilibrium.

Or do I? Like I’ve said before, maybe I would be better if I leaned into that feeling instead of squashing all those emotions back into the box and probably doing myself some harm in the process.

That might be better in the long run. Just let myself freak out and lose my mind and fall apart for a little while so that I can reap the benefits of a whole lot of the bad emotions getting expressed all at once.

But I don’t know if I have the courage to gamble with my marbles like that. And the instinct to instantly get back up and keep going is very strong in me.

Like I’ve said many times before, when there’s nobody there to catch you, you don’t dare risk falling. And if you do fall, you get right the fuck back up before the predators sense your vulnerability and swarm you.

Or something like that. We’re talking primal reasoning here.

Which brings up hypervigilance. On the surface, I might seem like a strange candidate for hypervigilance seeing as I am a lifelong space cadet who barely seems to know what planet he’s on most of the time.

That’s because my hypervigilance is mental, not sensory. I’m always trying to concentrate, anticipate, circumnavigate, and compensate for whatever life decides to throw at me.

But past a certain point, that’s impossible…. unless you live such a limit and proscribed life that you life finally becomes sufficiently predictable because you never DO anything.

Welcome to my world.

I have definitely spent most of my life in FFF mode, and that’s very bad. I can’t recall many times when I felt completely relaxed and safe. Part of me is always on the lookout for threats and dangers in all directions.

And that means constant biological stress.

And the thing is, I know that I am safe.

But deep down, I’m too scared to believe it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve always been very sensitive to vibes.

I mean, the kind of vibes are talking about these days when they talk about giving someone or someplace a “vibe check”. It’s the overall lingering emotional impression of them, kind of like the empathic equivalent of an odor, and for those of us sensitive to those kind of things, the feelings associated with the vibe can be quite powerful.

Trust me on that.

And for almost all of my life, I have considered those feelings to be entirely my business. It took a long time before it occurred to me that anyone else felt the same thing, even though intellectually I knew that I had heard people talking about them.

But to me, especially as a kid, they were just these weird feelings that came out of nowhere and forced me to have to deal with them all by myself because I didn’t want to ask anyone about them and have them think I was crazy.

They certainly made me feel like I was crazy sometimes, or on the way there at least. I’d be trying to deal with reality while these vibes were trying to make themselves heard, metaphorically speaking, in my head, and it made life stressful.

I honestly would have benefitted greatly from someone simply explaining that yes, this was a real thing, and I was not crazy, and that there were ways to integrate these psychic messages with the rest of my senses instead of fighting them all the time.

I could use that last part now, to be honest. I’m beginning to think that this vibe sensitivity might be a key part of my social anxiety as part of the stuff going on in my head when I am trying to interact with people that acts like a noisy radio station in my head that I have to work hard to ignore.

I honestly wish I could turn that shit down sometimes. Or off, even. Though I suppose if I did turn it off I would end up feeling incredibly lonely without these emotional impressions reminding me subconsciously that there ARE other people in the world living their lives and feeling their emotions.

So what the heck IS a vibe anyhow? I mean physically. Literally. Scientifically.

It has to be pheromones. That’s the only medium for these messages that makes any sense. I think that pheromones play a much larger part in our subjective lives than we understand or even recognize and it’s weirdos like me who notice them.

In fact, I think they play a key role in how there can be such a thing as a zeitgeist, which is basically a massive vibe. There is otherwise no avenue of rational explanation for how we can have a collective anything.

They are also an important component in empathy. Not the only component, of course. We get lots of info from things like vocal tone, posture, facial expression, and of course those minute shifts of tiny muscles in our eyes.

But there’s definitely a component beyond those things. Something you can pick up in the air without seeing anybody. A feeling of danger, for instance, or relaxed happiness, or jubilant celebration, or even those extremely volatile emotions that can turn a random group of people into a riot.

I know that for me, my subjective experience of vibes often feels more like electromagnetism than any sort of odor. Like my nervous system is acting as an antenna picking up signals from other people’s nervous systems.

I am sure science would not back me up on that, although I would love to see what happens if I go into a Faraday cage and am therefore isolated from absolutely everything in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Probably nothing. But maybe I would suddenly feel more relaxed than ever before.

It’s worth a shot.

More after the break.

More on vibe science

I like to joke (even though literally nobody else will ever find it funny) that I am the world’s only rational materialist mystic poet.

I guess you had to be there.

It’s my way of expressing the awkward tension between my fairly hardcore science and logic based mind and my deeply sensitive and empathic nature.

I don’t consider them to be in full on conflict but they don’t always get along.

When they do get along, for instances when I am writing (like right now), it’s like a mainline connection between my deeper self and the world outside my skull. The words flow out of me in a stream of consciousness and I get my emotions out of cold storage so I can express them and thus be rid of some of my heavy burden.

And I think I am getting better at that over time. The lowered Paxil dose helps a lot.

Much easier to have a stream of consciousness when you’ve thawed out.

I think I am also helped that despite my scientific mindset, I have stalwartly refused to participate in any kind of inane false dichotomy between STEM subjects and the arts.

In general, never tell me I have to pick a side. Fuck YOU.

I’m good at creative writing AND scientific reasoning. I can joke around AND I can discuss cosmology. I love philosophy AND brain science.

And I refuse to cut myself in half and abandon one half of myself just so that I fit into someone’s neat little box.

Fuck your boxes. I’m a custom job. Can’t figure out where to file me? Too bad. Guess you will have to get to know me instead.

And to me, the connection between the intuitive and the rational is crystal clear, though I doubt I could define it. To me, it all comes from the same deep and mysterious place in my mind. A mind which uses whichever faculty works best in any given situation and is made far more powerful than the two halves combined as a result.

Now if only I could use all that power to make some freaking money.

That’d sure be nice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lately, in quiet moments, I have been catching glimpses of a far off mystical land.

A land in which I am okay. Where I can simply relax and enjoy my life for what it is and maybe look for more and maybe not, but no matter what, I take it easy and I am forgiving and kind to myself.

In this magical kingdom, I finally learn to take life less seriously.

It’s only life, after all.

Life is too important to take seriously. Too much seriousness renders one rigid and fearful because the mind lacks the suppleness and strength to roll with the punches and handle life’s curveballs.

You are driving a car without shock absorbers. Instead, you end up like me, all curled up in a ball on the inside because you’re so scared of the bumps in the road that you stay off the road of life entirely and end up watching the world go by without you instead.

Holy crap, am I good with the metaphors.

Let me drag this back to the first person to avoid further intellectualizing.

I am just getting to the point where taking a far more relaxed and engaged attitude toward the world seems doable. It’s no longer a distant hazy and unreachable shore, like my very own mist-shrouded Avalon.

It’s a very real place and I am getting closer to it every day.

Slowly I am uncurling and stretching my mental limbs and trying to get the stiffness and soreness out of muscles long locked in place by fear and anxiety and the desperate need to blot out reality that result from them.

Maybe reality ain’t such a bad place after all. Maybe this big crazy world has a place for little ol’ me and there’s nothing out there waiting to eat me alive and I can finally relax, get comfortable, and dare I say it, even feel safe.

Feeling safe. What an astounding thought.

I mean, I know that I am safe. There are no predators after me. I have a modest but stable income that meets my modest but stable needs. I am free to live my life purely for the fun of it all and feel safe in feeling safe.

I can let my guard down now. I mean, what the fuck am I even guarding against? Life is not “just waiting for me to let my guard down so it can GET me.”

And hell, even if it was, there are worse things than getting got.

What I should be worried about is being worried about everything. That kind of inner stress is toxic and unsustainable. The engine of life, the id, has been fooled into working against itself like I’ve got both the accelerator and the brake pushed down all the way and it’s tearing my vehicle apart.

I won’t pretend that I can wave the proverbial magic wand and be straightened out and relaxed and well adjusted just like that.

The unbending process will take a while. It’s not easy to be your own chiropractor. Allowing myself to resume my natural shape will not be a linear process and there’s bound to be some dead ends and wrong turns on this trip of mine.

But I have a goal now. I know where I want to focus my limited energies. I am in pursuit of a feeling of health and I finally know what’s been blocking that for all these years.

It’s been Paxil. Ain’t that a bitch.

But now that my dose is lower, the great thaw is finally coming and I will finally have my long deferred springtime, maybe even in time for the real one.

But there’s no rush. Things will unfold as they should. Healing is natural and, like a houseplant, just needs sunshine and love to thrive.

Waiting is fullness.

More after the break.

This ain’t good

Well (literal) crap.

I have been forced to come to the conclusion that I am unwell.

Moreso than usual, that is.

The evidence is as such :

1. My appetite has greatly diminished. It’s not to the point where it’s impossible for me to eat yet. I can even enjoy the taste to a limited degree. But making myself eat requires an act of will, especially at the beginning, and I have absolutely no enthusiasm for my food. I should have known the retreat of that damn Demon Hunger of mine was too good to be true.
2. I’ve got the chills. I’m starting to wonder if it’s been as cold in my room as I thought it was because my feeling of refrigeration has definitely risen to the point of feeling actual chills now. Mild ones, all told, but once you’ve had the chills you will recognize them every time as they are awful. These spasms of coldness that wrack your body and make you feel like you can almost hear the arctic wind blowing through your soul. Ghastly.
3. Nausea and a burning sensation after defecation. I felt quite ill after my most recent trip to the toilet. I felt this very strange and unpleasant hollow feeling in the middle of my lower abdomen along with the usual nausea, headache, and dizziness that I seem to get whenever anything goes wrong in me. And a very warm feeling all over my butt, like I was sitting on a heating pad. Wish I had looked into the bowl as that might have netted me some medically important information but I was too nauseous to even think about it.

So I don’t think I will be going to Wound Care tomorrow. Even in a mask. My dressings are both doing okay and I don’t wanna expose the other sick folk to whatever is going on with me right now.

And I sure as fuck don’t want to experience actual cold either.

Oh, and finally, because my life loves irony, all of this illness has come to me on the very day that I talked with my GP, Doctor Chao, and told him that besides the coloration issue with my feces I felt perfectly fine.

And when I said it, I did!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, like Hoth.

But yeah, it’s a cold world here at Fru Central. Cold air keeps leaking in from the gaps around the window panes of this big beautiful window right in front of me, and while I love the natural light it lets in, I’m not as fond of the natural coldness.

So I am probably gonna buy a space heater off of Amazon soon.

Yes, I know, it’s obscene the way Bezos is cozying up to Trump, but that prick knows he has us all completely dependent on Amazon now so he can do whatever the fuck he wants and we’re still gonna buy from him.

Like Colbert said recently, what else are we going to do? Go to the store?

Do they even still have those?

Back to heating. A space heater is an inefficient solution to the problem of this computer station of mine being too fucking cold. I’ve dealt with space heaters before and yes they are very good at heating space but the trick is getting that heat to where it needs to go.

So I will be looking for a unit with a fan. Like a giant hair dryer. But for rooms.

Even with a fan you have to be super careful with those things. Put them in the wrong place or point them in the wrong direction and you can end up melting the paint off a wall, utterly wrecking a poster, or even end up setting the place ablaze.

Plus there’s the fact that we will be paying for the electricity to run the damned thing when this room should be properly thermally sealed instead.

Insert my standard grumble about how nobody on the Wet Coast knowns how to deal with the cold.

Anyhow, as inefficient a solution as a space heater is, I don’t see another alternative. I can’t tape up the gaps around the window panes myself, and I am not going to rearrange my room so that my computer desk faces the opposite wall.

As nice a thought as that is right now.

And this is how cold I am with the heat in this room turned all the way up. I shudder to think of how cold I would be if I turned the heat down.

Luckily, this is BC, we have hydro, it’s cheap, so the power bill is not that steep.

Still, having to have the heat up that high just to survive galls me.

I keep having to crawl into bed just to get under the covers and away from that window so I can warm the fuck up.

And of course, I end up sleeping because that’s what I normally do when I lie down and get under the covers. It’s a patterned reflex.

So I have slept for most of the daylight hours of today so far, and a good chunk of last night too. And I know I will go right back into bed when I am finished with my words.

I’ll probably end up napping until it’s time to go to Denny’s.

Another cold place, come to think of it. They always have the AC turned up to “arctic spring” levels for some reason.

So we all just keep our jackets on when we’re there. Which is kind of weird but what the hell, we love Denny’s and they love us.

We’re there every Sunday night and we’re pleasant, easy to get along with, understanding customers who tip well, so we’re favored customers.

And they give us good food at a good price and great service so it’s our little “third location” home away from home.

Well, second location for us unemployed folk.

Some day, I will climb out of this pit and join the world.

But for now I just need a nap.

More after the break.

So damned tired

And all I did was go to Denny’s.

But that involved getting dressed (damn coat zipper) , walkering down to the car, then making it from the car to our seat in the back of Denny’s, then doing all that in reverse to get back home, plus a trip to the Denny’s handicapped washroom to pee. and all this done under the adverse condition of it being frigging cold.

All of that combined is enough to make me feel very tired and my lungs are hurting and my heart is pounding and I feel like I have taken a light but thorough beating.

All from what was, for most people, a negligible amount of activity.

I mean, pampered celebrities living in the lap of luxury do as much as I did.

So it’s been one of those times when the painful truth of being disabled really hits home for me. When I am not pushing myself, it’s easy to forget how sick I am most of the time.

But at times like this, and to a lesser extent every time I come back from the kitchen, the fact that I’m a cripple is painfully emphasized.

Which is why I dream of having a personal assistant some day. One I am paying out of my own money. That would greatly increase my feelings of empowerment and independence and competence and decrease my feeling of being a dependent burden on those around me.

It kind of helps to think of myself as my roommates’ pet. Cute and lovable and a valuable part of the household even though I cost them time and labour.

At least I mostly pay for myself. Well, the province does, anyhow.

The important part is that I’m not a financial burden on my friends.

Anyhow, the fact that my disability subjectively disappears while I am doing my main two activities, namely using my computer and lying in bed, makes it very easy to forget that I am any different from everybody else.

Physically, that is.

But experiences like tonight scare and depress me because it brings it all home to me. My body does not work right and that’s only going to get worse, not better, with time.

It makes me feel like I am on an island slowly becoming submerged as the water levels rise and I can fool myself into forgetting about it because hey, my house isn’t flooded yet, but the truth is I am going to drown sooner or later no matter what.

Anyone know where I can get a houseboat?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at the very least a briskly edited one,.

I know that my extremely negative internal negative is toxic and that if I want to get well (do I ever!) I will have to dream up a whole new story of my life and myself. One that supports hope and growth and especially health and healthy choices.

I mean, my current internal narrative is that I’m a 51 year old complete and total loser o is rightfully deeply ashamed of having done absolutely nothing with life except hide from the world and play video games for the last 30 fucking years and who is desperate to escape the rancid tomb that is his current life and actually get around to becoming a grownup before my health gets so bad that I become truly incapable of work.

Which puts a lot of pressure on me. And I don’t handle that kind of pressure very well. In fact, I tend to hide from it in my turtle shell and, what else, play video games.

So clearly that view of things is not functional. I need to dig deep and find some hope and through that find something to look forward to. Something that can make me feel like there is actually something to live for.

Mostly, I live by default. I live by not dying and not thinking about the future much.

But I know I can do better. I know that I have so, so much to contribute. I could be not only functional but phenomenal. I have a quite frankly astounding IQ and loads of creative energy and talent and a sweet and lovable personality plus I am capable of an enormous amount of work.

I could be a major asset to any office type situation. I could be amazing in any writer’s room or other creative hub.

And I am totally capable of making my own thing and making it work.

YouTube is my current destination. I have this pretty decent quality webcam that I have barely used. I have loads of creative talent and I am funny and fascinating and I have a lot to say. I have a unique point of view and a lot of insight into life and the world.

And I’m cute, too.

Enough pumping myself. The new narrative starts now :

I am not a loser. I am just disabled. I have been very sick for a long time and that has kept me away from the world and I have done the best I could with what capacities I had remaining to me.

And I have not spent the last thirty years only playing video games. That whole time I have been interacting with my fuzzy friends, informing myself and feeding my head, writing on this blog, and continuing to think and observe and formulate and analyze and make my unique and powerful insights even deeper every day.

So I have not wasted my life. My life might not look like other people’s lives and I wish it had been different but that doesn’t mean my life has no meaning or purpose.

Maybe this whole long journey was simply an extended larval stage whose entire purpose was to give me the time I needed to become the absolutely stunning and incredible butterfly I know I can be.

That I know I will be. I just have to let things unfold as they should and do my best to support my own growth while the fabulous being I am on the inside finally unfolds its wings so they can dry in the sun.

And when the time is right, I will fly.

More after the break.

The ocean of sadness

Now we move on to the real issue : the ocean of sadness inside me.

Because that’s what I am left with once I take the unhealthy ways I express that sadness away. Just a vast sea of tears I need to shed and a stereotypical North American male difficulty in shedding them.

Maybe my lowered Paxil dose will help. Maybe it’s been the Paxil that has kept those tears frozen for over 20 years and lowering the dose will continue to let my emotions flow out of me and thaw out the ice-jam that has been clogging up the system for such a long time now.

It’s not like I want to be emotionally constipated. It’s something I neither believe in or desire. I want to be the sort of person who can express whatever they are feeling freely, preferably in realtime, and thus avoid accumulating deferred tears as well is impotent rage, stymied lust, isolated compassion, and all the rest.

Basically, I want to be more French.

And that means being way, way, WAY less concerned about being “in control of myself”. There’s a choice bit of Anglo-Canadian repression. Oh, there’s nothing worse than “losing control” don’t you know. If you “lost control” then you might express something less than perfectly pleasant to the world and make other people uncomfortable and that would be so dreadfully embarrassing.

Even worse, if I “lose control” I might not be able to predict what I am going to say and do well enough to stop myself from doing things purely on emotion, and then what would become of me?

They’d lock me up.

That’s what this whole control thing boils down to : predictability. Knowing what I will do. Put that way, it really seems like an insufficient justification for cauterizing my emotions.

But I suppose I have internalized the wrong lessons from mistakes I have made in the past. I blamed listening to my emotions, essentially, and acting upon them,

That’s the rational mind bullying the id about in an unbalanced way. Highly intelligent people have an overdeveloped emotional suppression circuit in the brain and I think we end up neurotic messes because we lean on that thing way too much.

It’s supposed to let you defer emotions so that you can think clearly and listen to that all important inner voice that does all those fancy calculation, inference, and recall operations that constitute being “smart”.

It’s not supposed to be used to suppress emotions forever. Somewhere in my mind, all the emotions of the last 45 years of being alive are stored and waiting for me to have “time” to deal with them.

And I wish I could just declare bankruptcy and have that emotional debt expunged.

But it’s not that easy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is an expansion on something I put in a YouTube comment recently.

Us liberal intellectual types are quite fond of wailing and gnashing our teeth about Trump humpers and their tendency to believe all kinds of things which are clearly objectively wrong and honestly a very tall supply of hooey.

My response to that is, “so what?”.

Why should people care whether their beliefs about the world and how it works are objectively true or not? Whether or not they really faked the moon landing has no direct bearing on people’s daily lives, and that means they are free to believe whatever suits them best regardless of facts.

This is why evidence to the contrary has no effect on these people. Their beliefs were not arrived at via reason and therefore reason cannot dislodge them. Their worldview emerges from a steamy haze of emotional needs and their own life experiences plus their cultural programming and as long as their beliefs continue to serve those functions, especially the emotional needs one, they are not going to let go of them and will interpret any attacks on those beliefs, no matter how well reasoned or based upon the evidence they are, as attacks on themselves personally by evil people trying to take away their emotional safety blanket(s).

The virtue of getting closer to the Truth ™ means nothing to them. They are not on a lifelong search for true knowledge. They don’t pursue impractical goals like that.

They know what they need to know to work their job and take care of their kids and make it to Church on Sundays, and everything outside those critical beliefs is unimportant and therefore can be whatever you need it to be.

Obviously these people are not entirely divorced from reality. These kinds of things are rarely that cut and dried. Like all humans, they live in a world which is a blend of the objective and the subjective into what I call “human reality”.

We are neither robots nor lotus eaters.

But the ultimate truth of things is not of paramount importance to them. That’s why if you do happen to take away a beloved belief of theirs via logic and evidence, they will not thank you, they will hate you with the white hot passion of a thousand suns.

Just the fact that you have introduced the possibility of doubt into their mind is a good enough reason of them to hate you and everybody like you till the end of time.

Doubt is not good for these people. They have absolutely no faith in their ability to derive belief from their own intellectual faculties. The best that they can hope for is to use their people skills to figure out who seems trustworthy and then follow that person or people with undying, unswerving loyalty no matter what.

Thus we have Fox News. Their bread and butter consists of seeming trustworthy enough to their demographic to feed them the kinds of reassurances they need to quell their doubts and let them go back to their preferred state of artificial certainty.

If us left leaning intellectuals want to stand a chance of keeping hope and freedom alive in a Trumped up world, we will need to understand and accept these hard truths.

We will have to address the underlying emotional needs that their belief in Trump addresses and learn to address them better.

This requires not just paying lip service to these people and their concerns or talking above their heads in terms of lofty abstractions or distant ideals but actually going to these people where they live and truly listening to them and give them every indication that you are on their side.

They go to Trump because he makes them feel welcome. He does, quite frankly, a terrible job of it but it still makes him seem like the vastly superior choice over some college educated liberal who looks down their noses at people they see as their social inferiors and therefore can’t imagine possibly being important.

We have to become conscientious objectors in the culture wars. We have to open our arms and our hearts to Trump supporters and give them the love, reassurance, respect, and support they will never get from him and thus steal his supporters in a way that will not only be effective but highly ethical too.

More after the break.

The spaces in between

I definitely feel like I am somewhere between two places lately.

I know that I am going in the right direction, the direction of greater emotional health and mental functioning and maybe even (gasp!) personal productivity.

Which is the only truly meaningful form of productivity. To feel like you have made something worthwhile is an incredible feeling and I want lots of it.

So some time soon I will start making YouTube videos again. It won’t be easy to get back into it – for one thing, I will need a competent video editing program that can handle both video capture and basic editing without screwing up the timing – but if I make a concentrated effort I can get going again and hopefully keep it going long enough for the fun and appeal of making stuff to kick in.

I’ve realized that I was making a classic mistake : delaying getting back into the biz by waiting for the “right” idea to come along.

Fuck that. It makes self-sabotage far too easy. Just never actually decide any idea you can think of is good enough and you can bullshit yourself right into the grave, the whole time thinking you are going to do your thing “someday”.

I’m for just plunging into things and figuring things out as you go. I know that according to practically everything that is the “wrong” way to do things, but it’s what works for me.

Fuck it, I don’t do anything the “right” way. I do things my way, which works for me and possibly nobody else ever.

I’m special like that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Therapy Thursday thang.

I told Doctor Costin that I think the greater emotional bandwidth I am now experiencing due to the lowered Paxil dose is allowing me to be more confident and self-assured.

Turns out it’s hard to really believe in yourself when you’re numb.

And presumably this effect will grow as my mind learns to make use of the greater bandwidth in order to support my mood.

Not that I am happy all the time. That would be insipid. I want to feel everything. Sadness, anger, frustration, even grief. I want to feel it all.

Because what I really want to feel is alive.

Turns out it’s also hard to feel like you’re amongst the living when you’re numb.

I feel like things are starting to really flow in me. The emotions are moving around like water in your plumbing, and that is making it far easier for my mind to flush out the waste products of my overbearing mentation so that the inside of my mind feels nice and clean and fresh and I can think more clearly.

I have longed for this greater sense of flow for a long time without really being able to articulate it. All I can do is relate it to water : I was frozen by the Paxil and now I am starting to thaw out and that means my rivers are running high.

And that makes me feel so much healthier.

Right now, I’m a bit sleepy. I am going to need a nap when I am done blogging. That’s not unusual for me. Blogging uses up a lot of brain energy.

If you’re doing it right.

I’m start to feel more socially bold, too. Last night I actually logged in to Discord and even did a little voice chat with some European dudes who were playing Fortnite.

I didn’t know I would be logging into voice chat when I logged in to that server. It just started up. And I was tempted to immediately log right the fuck back out due to social panic but I stopped myself and hung around for a while before actually introducing myself to the Eurodudes.

They even invited me to play Fortnite with them but I’ve tried that game and it is way too chaotic and overwhelming for me.

There’s a reason I like turn based RPGs so much. I was never any good at multiplayer FPS games in the first place.

It’s hard to shoot straight when you’re battling social anxiety.

And Fortnite is an FPS where you can build like towers and castles and shit on the fly, so that is WAY beyond me.

And speaking of overwhelm, Discord still kinda freaks me out. Individually the different aspects of it are easy to comprehend but as a whole you have servers and channels and DMs and voice chat channels and messages coming in on all levels and it’s so hard to keep up.

So overall I think I might have lasted 45 minutes before the overwhelm got me and I had to log off and play video games while my anxiety levels returned to baseline.

I know I have no reason to get freaked out. I’m a lovable fellow with great social skills when I can get out of my own shadow enough to actually use them.

Maybe next time I will take a Xanax before trying to be more social. It might be just what I need to get some positive social interaction that can overwrite those ancient anxious tapes from my bullied and isolated childhood.

Repeat until believed : I am just as good as everybody else and I have nothing to be ashamed of so there’s no reason to freak out in social situations.

Yeah. That seems about right.

More after the break.

Yup, that tracks

I’ve been playing around with a tracker called Psycle and having a lot of fun.

A tracker is a very old school way to make music. When it’s on the screen, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was some weird programming language, and it kind of is.

But how it works is not important to our tale. Which is good because I have no idea how I would explain it.

The important thing is the nostalgia factor for yours truly because using a (far more primitive) tracker is how I first got into making sample-based music WAY WAY back in the early to mid 90’s. ^[1]

So messing around with one of these programs REALLY takes me back.

And the thing is, I had just been waxing nostalgic about the things that were so much easier to do in a tracker when I came across a mention of Psycle Tracker in a YouTube video (where else?) about freeware programs everyone should know about and I thought what the hell, this is obviously fate, so I grabbed the thing.

Dunno how much I will end up using it. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. It’s easy to imagine myself launching into this whole lengthy magnificent exploration of the whole world of sample based composing but we both know that ain’t likely.

And it’s not necessary either. It’s perfectly fine, I am telling myself, to just play around with something then stop when I get tired of it. Not everything has to be some grand epic achievement or else it means I suck.

That’s a classic example of rigging the system against yourself, because of course you will inevitably stop doing the thing at some point and if that means you instantly lose then the only way to win would be to keep doing it till the moment of your death.

And that seems like a bit much.

So who knows. Maybe I will dig deep, hook the program up to my ancient collection samples, get back into making music for fun, and have a whale of a time.

Or maybe by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten all about it.

And both of those outcomes are fine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.