Clearly this is becoming a series.

Mostly because if I do something twice, I feel compelled to do it a third time.

But I already know what I will be talking about in the next one, so there’s that.

Anyhow, you know this isn’t aimed at you, so here goes :

I have finally started tapping into my deep wells of both sarcasm and cutting observation in order to put my work and my words out there in the world and I must say it feels pretty good.

And I have already gotten both praise and backlash and I love both so I am quite happy with how things are progressing.

But my ambition remains to go huuuuuge with my words. I want to be a globally recognized thought leader whom people turn to for my vision, my insight, my unique point of view, and my ability to be more right about a lot of things than everyone else.

I want people to say, “Boy, I can’t wait to hear what HE has to say about this!”, both on the left and on the right, and it would make me so very, very happy to know that I am sparking discussion and debate all over the world with my thought provoking takes on the world we live in.

That would make me one very happy trickster. I would know that I was doing my duty to get people to think and grow and expand their minds, even if initially they are only doing so in order to better disagree with me.

When people think, we win. It’s the sleeping brutes we have to watch out for.

Now what else should I be typing about? Oh yeah, my day.

---

Time for a life update

Did not make it to Kinsmen. Last night and this morning I was having one of my attacks of flu-like symptoms. Raspy throat, scratchy lungs, stiff sore muscles, energy drain, all the old familiar faces.

It’s clear up a little bit since. My lungs and throat are still out of whack but some rest and fluids seem to have cleared up the drained feeling and moving around some today and getting some sunshine and fresh air seems to have helped my poor muscles.

It’s amazing how often that in order to get better, I have to do the exact opposite of what my stupid body wants me to do.

No, don’t pick that itchy as hell scab. Move those sore stiff muscles. Don’t eat the stuff that looks so tasty but it’s fulla sugar so you know it will make you sick.

Anyhow, I did make it to my doctor’s appointment today.

Being too sick to go to the doctor is something I reserve for when I need to be way more irrational for whatever reason.

We talked about my high blood pressure. He tried to measure my BP the old fashioned way, with the pressure cuff and stethoscope, and it didn’t work.

Could have told him it wouldn’t work, but would he have believed me?

Once we moved on to the automatic digital method, he discovered that my blood pressure is, indeed, too high, but that the difference between my sitting and standing BP was so great that upping my BP meds to lower my sitting BP would lead to my BP dipping so low when I stand up that I’d pass out.

But he referred me back to Doctor Shari and I will talk it over with her eventually.

Unfortunately it took a long time to get back home. When I was done with Doctor Chao, I got his receptionist to call Julian.

I had to do that because my dumb self forgot his phone at home. Which meant a lot of being bored while waiting. D’oh.

But Julian did not pick up. So the receptionist left a message. Then we did the same thing half an hour later. Same result.

Another half hour later and it finally occurs to me to get her to call Joe’s cell instead. That works, and gets the ball rolling for my pickup.

Then I have another brainwave and realize that I can wait for pickup outside in the fresh air and sunshine if I just used my walker’s seat.

So I got my fresh air and sunshine despite missing Kinsmen.

Turns out the problem was that Julian’s cell ran out of power.

Oh well, excrement occurs.

More after the break.

---

plussingthetrigger

Another home run from Kee

Wow, does this guy get me.

Yup, this is pretty much it.

Like I have said before, what sanity I retain I think I got from my babysitter Betty.

So things didn’t really go all to hell for me until I got to school and there was nobody looking out for me or who even cared about me any more.

And so I became more and more withdrawn. At first I tried to make friends and get along with others but there’s only so much rejection a sensitive child can take before they conclude that there is nothing out there for them in the world of other people.

Like I have also said before, my shyness is somewhat paradoxical. I can seem outgoing and friendly and even charming but that disappears at the slightest sign of rejection or even just non-inclusion as I am crushed like the hothouse orchid I am.

In a sense it would be less confusing if I was just plain antisocial all the time. Might even be healthier for me, really.

But that’s uh, not how things turned out.

I mean, I need a Xanax to do my stuff at Kinsmen and yet I record a video of just me talking every day and think nothing of putting it on YouTube and TikTok.

I never had any trouble speaking up when I knew the answer in class. Yet I hid from my fellow students during lunch and recess.

I was a complicated child, and now I am an even more complicated man.

I hope that at least makes me interesting.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am quite proud of the video I made today.

Don’t take it personally. If you’re reading this, odds are heavily in favour of it not being addressed to you.

See the title if you get a tad confused. If that doesn’t apply to you, then it’s not for you!

Anyhow, here it is :

The choice to address it to the viewer in the second person (“you”) was quite deliberate. This vid is me aiming flaming truth arrows right at the heart of the modern right wing in order to break through their thin patina of justifications and reveal unto them just what worthless fucking cowards they are for being such pathetic stooges.

And all because the alternative is to think for themselves. Unacceptable!

I pondered trying to work that angle of insult into the speech in today’s vid but it already has a small amount of topic drift so I left it out.

But perhaps that will be the angle for my next verbal tactical assault.

I posted that vid to BlueSky, of course. I know it will appeal to my fellow lefties. My hope is that it spreads far and wide enough that some actual right wing fucknut types will see it and feel the sting of my extraordinarily sharp observations that cut them to the quick.

One does what one can.

The dream, of course, would be for this to bring down a torrent of incoherent and badly misspelled abuse from MAGAts on my head. Think of all the fun I would have responding to these pinheads and crushing their tiny minds with my mental might.

Bring it, motherfuckers. I will strike you down with God’s own thunder.

Actually, fuck that. I will strike you down with MINE.

My butt problem continues. The inflatable donut is back – Joe used his magic powers of knowing where he left stuff or saw stuff to retrieve it – and it helps but my weight squooshes the air out of it pretty fast.

Guess I need something with a stronger valve.

Obviously I don’t want to start buying cushions again. I remember how none of them worked for me before, possibly because I am quite fussy when it comes to my comfort, especially the comfort of my big beautiful bum.

So right now I am rather uncomfortable and will be getting off the computer the moment I am done with my words in order to let said profound buttocks rest.

I wonder if there’s butt exercise I could do to build up its core strength.

I wish I knew what the hell I did to make the pain go away last time. Did I just subconsciously learn to sit a different way? A way that did not create pressure points to torture and torment me?

I have no idea. Like I said before, this problem seems to have been coming on slowly over a space of months, so it’s not going to be a simple matter of making an adjustment.

Something changed within the butt itself, and I wanna know what.

My ass wants answers, dammit!

I suppose I could talk about it when I see Doc Chao tomorrow about my high blood pressure. Clearly the hypertension is my top level concern but if he has some suggestions as to what to do with my butt, I’m all ears.

I just like saying butt a lot. Hee hee hee.

I’ve also had a few attacks of very mild shortness of breath lately. Nothing I would call 911 over, just feeling a little out of breath at odd moments, and earlier today I had a dizziness attack when I was getting my clothes for today off the shelves.

Once more, I was saved from a nasty fall by my giant bed.

Without it, I would have to go around wrapped in bubble wrap.

More after the break.

---

Feel so tired

I just came back from getting my supper out of the fridge and I am way more out of breath and tired than usual.

And that’s after a shorter trip than usual because all I had to do was grab my leftover Subway from last Saturday night plus a can of pop and a piece o’ fruit.

No waiting around for the microwave at all.

Maybe that’s the problem though – no pause in the middle. Hmm.

Anyhow, more worrisome than the being out of breath and my heart and head pounding and so forth is this scratchy, sore feeling in my lungs.

Uh oh. That feels distinctly viral. I will do my best to hydrate thoroughly and see if that fixes me up but if not, I might not make it to Kinsmen tomorrow.

Which would kinda suck.

I will still make it to my doctor’s appointment regardless, of course. Apparently I need it more than I even knew when I made it.

Like I said, it could all go away with sufficient fluid intake. We’ve been down this road together before, dear audience, and what seems dire turns out to be nothing or nothing much at any rate.

But I do not like the feel of it at all. This plus that dizzy spell I had earlier point toward there being something draining my system and I do not wish to end up with god damned pneumonia again so I am gonna be real careful about this.

I swear that my body chooses when it knows I will be going to the doctor in order to get ill. LIke on some deep level I have been suppressing my own symptoms and only the prospect of actual care can cause them to surface for real.

That’s a depressing thought.

I will keep you updated, dear readers. And I will be monitoring my own condition very carefully because if this gets worse, it’s off to UC or the ER for me.

Because I am NOT getting pneumonia again dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Starting with my own, of course.

Considering the amount of time I spend making outrageously and delightfully filthy AI art, my libido is in working order, more or less.

It’s a fun hobby because it motivates me to learn to make the AI art generators do what I want them to do and that, in turn, encourages me to stretch my visual imagination and try to learn to be as specific as possible.

The AI art generators punish non-specificity by creating Cronenbergian horrors that look like someone crossed this website with the last 20 minute of Akira.

Let’s see if I can find a creation of mine I am willing to share with y’all.

Pretty sure that one won’t get me in trouble. Probably.

Still pretty harmless. OK, one more :

I think that’s probably enough for now. Right? Right.

And then there’s this rockin’ gem :

Holy shit, right? That sounds so good. That channel, Fake Music, has a whole bunch of similarly funkified versions of 80’s and it blows my mind, man.

I am also jealous of the name Fake Music, because that’s what I make and now I can’t call it that and it’s like the perfect name.

I might call mine “synthetic tunes” if I ever organize my stuff into channels. I like the sound of that. It sounds like exactly what you would expect people to be listening to in “the future”, at least if you were around for New Wave the first time.

I’m getting the itch to write another song. Something more personal. So watch this space for my next mopey folk song built around an elaborate metaphor for my inner life.

I’ll call it, “Emo, the Tragic Dragon. ”

I’ve been struggling with my “shoulds” today. As in, my idea of what I “should” be doing but I am not doing because I am just letting my usual routine carry me along instead.

And I know that’s the wrong way to be looking at it, and I am trying to get over it. There is nothing I “should” be doing except staying alive and trying to stay healthy. That is all society asks of a disabled person like myself. I don’t “owe” anyone anything else.

What I continue to desire is to do things I want to do, because I want to do them. Need and “should” don’t come into it. I will be much better off if I learn to simply follow my desires without putting any pressure or stress on myself.

Because it’s the pressure and stress that triggers the avoidance and it’s the avoidance that keeps me from getting anywhere in life.

But so far I still lack the courage to simply step off of my well trod path and go looking for whatever else out there seems fun.

For me that might as well be a spacewalk. That’s how big of a step it feels. Like I would be venturing into the hard vacuum of space.

Which is ridiculous, of course, and obviously a delusion spun by my mental illness in order to “keep me in my place. “

But my place kinda sucks.

Somehow, I am going to find a way to stop withdrawing so hard so I can emerge from my shells and take a look around me at long last.

And that means giving up on giving up on reality.

And that means going back to where it all started.

And that’s not gonna be fun.

More after the break.

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Your pet Fruvous

As I have mentioned before in this space, as sad as it sounds, it has does me a lot of good to start thinking of myself as a pet rather than a burden.

Not that any of it makes sense at all when it comes down to it. Via the province, I pay my own way in this household, so I’m not a financial burden except in small incidental ways like the gas money to drive me to my medical appointments.

It says something about my mindset that I think about things like that.

And yes, my roomies help me with my walker when I am getting in and out of the car. And that’s very nice of them and I appreciate it a lot, but the still-sick part of my mind insists that this makes me a burden on them even though they are not, in any way, complaining about it.

So the pet thing helps me to recontextualize it all. After all, pets always involve a certain amount of effort to care for and look after. And unless you are very small of soul and puny of heart person, you don’t resent the pet for it, because you know you get a great deal from having your cat or dog or budgie around as a companion and looking after them is, if you are strong enough to see it, actually part of the pleasure of it all.

We humans have instincts to care for beings who are dependent on us, after all.

So imagine myself as serving that function in the lives of my friends, both offline and on, helps me to quell the evil voices in my head telling me that I am nothing but a liability to all who come in contact with me and…. well, everything that can lead to.

I’d still much rather be earning a living as a normal, tax-paying, decent citizen as opposed to being a burden on the British Columbia taxpayer (albeit a microscopic one), but at least thinking of myself as a pleasant pet who provides a companionable presence and amusement and occasional bits of adorkable incompetence (as well as. of course, my top notch analysis) makes me feel like there is, in fact, some point to me being alive and that I do, in fact, contribute to the world in some way.

Digging myself out of the deep hole which swallowed my self-worth for so long is taking a long time, but I am getting there, little by little, every day.

I even like myself some of the time now.

It’s a start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel a great deal of strain right now despite not having done much and I am assuming that means I am once more dehydrated.

But maybe it’s something worse. Who knows.

I do know that I am very much looking forward with talking to my GP, Doctor Chao, on Tuesday^[1] because I am quite worried about what has been going on in my health lately and I am eager to talk about it with him.

Who knows, he might even have something useful to say or even do.

Keep your dreams alive, kids.

The infection on my thumb worried me a great deal because I associate that kind of grotesquery with the bad old days when I didn’t take my diabetes seriously at all and had a1c readings in the 20s (normal is 7) and acted like there was nothing I could do about it, that was just life I guess.

What a fucking idiot I was. And I am paying the price for that idiocy now.

If my a1c has for some reason gone nuts again then I am going to have to go back on insulin and that means solving the whole blood sugar testing question.

Luckily, the province pays for the modern blood-free testing systems now where I just have to put a sensor in my arm once a month and it takes the readings.

I think we’re up to the Freestyle Libre 2 now, maybe 3?

And I am sure Doctor Shari (Caswell) can hook me up with something like that. So that should be less of a hassle.

And the thing is, it’s entirely possible that I could have the high blood sugar again despite there having been no change in my diet because diabetes is a progressive disease and so it could very well have just gotten worse on me.

And that could explain the other thing that has me worried, the sky high blood pressure readings they took when I was at Urgent Care for the thumb.

That’s very very not good. High blood sugar can lead to high blood pressure because high blood sugar makes your blood thicker and it therefore takes more total pressure to move it around your body.

There’s a few bits of naughtiness I could cut out of my diet. The muffins I get with my McD’s twice a week, the vanilla soft serve cones that I get now and then, also from McD’s come to think of it.

That place is no good for me, I tells ya.

And I could cut back some on the carbs, although I am leery of that given how badly I botched that before with my no carb diet.

Turns out that’s a bad idea. Felt ever so much better once I put carbs back into my diet. Then immediately felt stupid for my dip into nutritional extremism.

Because I know better, god damn it. But I guess “carbs bad” was easier to remember than “maybe less carbs?”.

Fucked if I know.

Oh right, and I did make a vid.

Speaking of nudity, I think my body misses me being naked a lot. Now that I have things arranged so that I can change into a clean set of clothes every morning, I spend most of the time clothed, only being naked when I shower and when I sleep at night.

Almost like a normal person.

And I have noticed that when I am getting dressed in the morning it’s like my body is going, “Oh god, no, not this shit again!”, like I was putting on ski clothes in the summer.

Maybe I need to start showering more than once a week in order to clean out my pores so that my skin can breathe and regulate my temperature better.

What I really want is a long hot soak in the bathtub.

But that’s not an option for my gimpy self any more. Le sigh.

More after the break.

---

Another tale of ordering in

And I am writing about it, so you know something went wrong.

Nothing major, thankfully. I just ordered Pepsi Free with my meal and got Brisk Iced Tea instead. Luckily, after finding where they had moved the Help button on DoorDash, I was able to put in my complaint and got an instant refund of the whole cost of my Cold Cut Combo meal, which was $10.30!

Now that’s Brisk, baby!

I also ordered this Bean Fiesta Side Salad for $3.50 which turns out to basically be salsa with beans in it and is quite tasty!

And much healthier than the red velvet cookie I almost bought. Phew. Those are very very delicious but very very bad for me.

I also got Miss Vickie’s Sweet Chili and Sour Cream chips with my order, which I had not had since I was at VFS. They’re still quite good, though not as good as my beloved Miss Vickie Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar chips.

But I wasn’t in the mood for those.

I love them dearly but they do insist upon themselves.

One niggling detail the refund couldn’t cover : my body is essentially pouting at me because it was promised caffeine in cola form and didn’t get it.

Well too bad, body. There’s no way you’re getting it now.

I don’t even like iced tea.

What else. Not a lot going on in my sad little life. I keep talking about doing new things in order to liven up my life and wake me up inside and such, but the easiest thing to do is always nothing and so far I have not been able to make myself actually do it.

I still come up against that feeling like if I do that I will somehow injure myself, like I would have to cut off a finger to do it.

Well, they say that to be free, one must give up a little part of oneself.

But it’s so much easier to just keep running on my cozy little treadmill, and like a hamster in its wheel, feel like I must be getting somewhere when I know I am going absolutely nowhere and that is, in fact, the idea.

Not better. Just easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went pretty darn deep on this one, and I am glad I did because I think this little therapeutic exercise did me a heck of a lot of good.

And now I am busy trying to hang on to its lessons so they penetrate my defenses.

Here it is :

It started as thoughts about how I have been doing really well with the catharsis lately. How I have been feeling larger amounts of emotional release when I trigger various feelings through my writing or talking and how great that is and that got me thinking about how to best take advantage of that and that’s where the idea for the little “letter to myself” you see above came from.

I think it makes for a rather intense and dramatic video, but then again, i might be biased, seeing as it’s all about ME ME ME.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I am holding on to the good feelings from making (and watching) the vid because I can already feel the usual chemical holocaust of depression and anxiety that rages in my head trying to put things back to “normal” and I’m not having it.

Fuck my “normal”. It sucks used monkey tampons. I deserve a far superior “normal” and I am going to change my default fucking settings or die trying.

Returning to “normal” is at the heart of so much of our pain and suffering and self-destructive behaviour. Perhaps one of the best things drugs like ketamine can do for us is release us from our “normal”.

Fuck normal. I want awesome!

And that’s a good thing to keep in mind as I fight to keep my mind from going back to its (my) self-loathing toxic swamp monster beliefs about myself.

I am not some kind of horrible nightmare being of maximum repulsiveness whom random people loathe on sight for having the sheer gall to think I deserve to be seen in public when I clearly should be locked away in a dark sepulchre somewhere.

Holy crap, I spelled “sepulchre” right the first time. Score.

I saw a short furry animation about social anxiety recently that really struck a cord with me, though I dunno if people without the disorder will get it :

So I wrote this comment under it : 

Oh, so very THIS. This is exactly the kind of insanity my social anxiety imagines happening to me only without the British thing to hang it all on. Just this pervasive feeling that everybody hates me for having the sheer gall to bring my clearly incredibly repulsive self out in public to nauseate the public and pollute time and space themselves with my toxicity. And that any second now I will do something that pushes then over the tipping point into mob violence and I will be chased out of civilization by a rage fueled torch wielding mob.

That was extremely cathartic to type. Phew!

And it really was. Like I have said before, sometimes I have to vent the negative thoughts and emotions in my mind in order to feel better, and those evil social anxiety delusions had not been taken out and aired in a long time, so it was time to do so.

And just like that, another fat drop of condensation drips off the iceberg on my heart.

I’ve made a ton of progress since the time of those unstable thoughts. I now know (most of the time) that feeling like that was just some biochemical noise in my brain and that none of that deranged bullcrap is true and most of it doesn’t even make sense.

Now I believe in myself and my abilities more often than not, and the more emotional detritus I jettison, the better off I’ll be.

More after the break.

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Industrial scale catharsis

Like I have said, I am very happy with the acceleration in my rate of emotional release lately. I feel like that lower Paxil dose is really paying off now.

But I am also itching for more. I guess it’s a sort of spiritual ambition. I want to start shipping out those latent emotions like I’m a heavily laden cargo ship being unloaded by stevedores getting paid a flat rate.

Not the most accessible of metaphors, but I yam what I yam.

One of the things I am just starting to wrap my head around about myself is that I think I am a lot less patient than I used to think I was.

In my natural state, I am a lot more dynamic and active. I want to go go go and keep going. And while that comes with a deep reservoir of energy and motivation and inspiration, it also comes with a certain amount of impatience as the energies inside of me clamor to be expressed.

Not an easy thing for a Taurus like me to admit. Patience is supposed to be one of our primary virtues. And I am still more patient than average, I would say.

But as I unpack and activate myself, I am going to have to do what a lot of young people end up doing as well and that is to learn how to harness those wild energies so I can express them in a productive and healthy ways.

I may need to let them run wild for a while first, though, because this wild horses of mine have been cooped up for way too long and they need to run.

Whatever the hell that’s going to mean.

Obviously I’m not going to be limbering up for the triathlon any time soon. That ship sailed many years ago. And I don’t immediately have any conception of how to let those energies out within the framework of my current life.

Maybe I will have to find a whole new mode of existence, and I have no idea where something like that may lead.

But I am learning to trust my instincts and not worry about knowing what is next as long as I am doing what my heart tells me is the right move.

The acorn has no idea it’s going to be an oak tree.

But it becomes one just the same.

I should be so wise.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first I will bitch about my therapist.

Today was Therapy Thursday and my last session before my fucking therapist buggers off for a three week vacation with his wife, meaning my next session with him isn’t until September 25, which is almost a month from now.

Because of course he doesn’t arrange a locum (substitute doctor) or anything. After all, only my mental health is on the line. and even professional psychiatrists like him agree that mental health isn’t important, doesn’t matter, and won’t suffer if you just decide not to provide treatment for a month.

This kind of shit is why the other medical specialties look down on psychiatry.

Imagine if an oncologist took that attitude. “Sorry, no chemo for a month, I am taking a vacay with some chick I met at the gym. Try not to metastasize while I’m gone!”.

Not that I’m bitter.

Actually, I have not even started being bitter yet because you will never ever guess where my elderly therapist is going on this vacation.

Go ahead and guess.

Give up? Well here it is :

HE IS GOING TO FUCKING PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND.

My home province! Which is where I want to be this time of year!

Oh but wait, there’s more.

HE WILL BE SPENDING THREE DAYS IN SUMMERSIDE.

MotherFUCKER. He is going to be EXACTLY where I want to be so I can see my family and hug my Mom and meet a bunch of Acadian relatives!

And all in the gorgeous summer in my home province, the time year all my happy childhood memories take place.

ARGH. I am unbelievable pissed off and bitter about this. Of all the goddamned places he could go in this great nation of ours, he chooses not just my tiny home province of only 180,000 souls but my exact home town of around 17,000 people.

That son of a bitch. When we were on the phone, I had to strangle the urge to scream “Take me with you, god damn it!”.

The province really is a magnet for old people. They like our slower pace of life and the fact that we’re always behind the times.

The very things that drove me nuts as a kid.

So while my mental health wastes away, my therapist will be having my dream vacation, and there’s not a god damned thing I can do about it.

Old people have too much money.

Anyhow, back to the topic. During today’s therapy call, the subject of my pugilistic side came up because I have been struggling to integrate it into the rest of my psyche lately.

Part of me always wants to fight. Not out of some need to prove I am dominant or some inherent desire to hurt people or express my rough and rugged nature.

I just want to very energetically engage with the world. To be able to exorcise my deep seated latent aggression outside the usual rules of civilized restraint.

But I learned at a (thankfully) young age that my desire for a good scrap does not mean that those around me have volunteered to be my sparring partner.

So I locked that part of me away. It never fit with my mild mannered and pleasant persona anyhow. I didn’t want to fight, I wanted to be loved on and adored!

And now, thirty years or so later, I am wondering if I went too far. Surely I could have found some way to use those powerful instincts instead of pulling a Doctor Jekyll and isolating my angry beast and ignoring it and leaving it to wreak havoc in my subconscious mind and make me all kinds of mentally ill as it desperately tries to find some way to express itself.

Well I hereby declare my intention to start listening. I know it may not have a lot of coherent words to say at first, the poor thing, but I will listen nevertheless.

This is now the top priority in my attempts to reclaim my id.

Oh, right, and I did a vid.

More after the break,

---

I feel known

Apparently this Kee fella has pretty much got me and my childhood pegged.

He gets that I was both an ignored child :

But I was also a hated child :

It was a very simple system. When they noticed me, they hated me.

When they didn’t, I was, by default, ignored.

I was very passively punished for being noticed. Like Kee says, it was in the way people looked at me like I was interrupting when I entered a room, or how I got blank looks like I had just beamed in from Mars when I tried to enter conversations.

Because apparently I hadn’t existed until I opened my mouth.

I never really felt like a member of my own family. It was always my parents, my siblings, and me, the odd one out. The one who didn’t belong. The one nobody really wanted around any more.

The one who was just kind of… there.

The one where the costs of raising me were an extra burden on already overburdened parents, as opposed to being the same as the costs for my three older siblings.

The one who was just callously handed his baby bonus money and told to go do his own clothes shopping. When I was barely old enough to cross the street alone.

“Here. This is all you get. We do not think you are worth any of our own time, effort, or money, so you get what the government gives us for you being alive and that’s it. ”

That’s so god damned cold. How could they stand to be so cold to me? What did I ever do to deserve that?

I didn’t decide to be born.

And I was such a sweet, bright kid. All I ever wanted was for people to be happy around me. It didn’t even have to be caused by me.

I just wanted to be loved and valued.

I just wanted to be treated like I was wanted.

I just wanted someone to tell me I was okay. Good enough. Valuable. Not forever locked in being a burden on people who resented my existence.

I just wanted some god damned emotional warmth.

And I still do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because I don’t. And maybe I should. But I can’t. Or can I?

First off, today’s vid :

Now back on topic. Do I believe in magic?

No, and that’s despite of (or because of) all the pro magical thinking propaganda I was bombarded with as a child in the 1970s.

We got so much bullshit about the “power of imagination” and how things can be true “if you just believe in them” back then that it’s no wonder we grew up cynical little Gen X’s.

Yes, Boomers, I am saying you made us this way. You meant well and were trying to give us the sort of support for imagination and creativity and vibrancy that your Greatest Generation parents couldn’t give you, but it was all a load of crap, you stupid hippies!

Anyhow, where was I?

Oh right, my lack of believe in magic. As far as I can remember, I was always a relentlessly logical child and belief in magic never really stood a chance with me.

I mean, I wasn’t even in elementary school when my relentless questioning forced my siblings to admit that Santa Claus wasn’t real.

And when I heard that, I was relieved because now things made sense again.

But the fact that being a rational materialist like I have always been is logical and makes sense does not actually make it a good idea, and that’s the sort of conflict I struggle with as I keep bumping against the limitations of logic and the internally and externally consistent mindset like a bee bumping against a window as it tries to get past a barrier it is simply not equipped to understand.

I can relate.

Because reality isn’t enough, people. That’s the conclusion I have come to. Whether we consciously believe in magic (or God, or ghosts, or whatever) or not, the human mind needs to be able to exceed the limits of the real world in order to generate the emotional inputs needed to keep one’s mood from going below a certain red line.

Essentially, the mind needs the capacity to be self-rewarding when reality is not providing enough reward center stimulation at that moment to keep us feeling like we are good little monkeys and a credit to our family and tribe.

It really does come down to that on an evolutionary psychology level.

That’s why I keep circling back to this subject and my pondering about learning to fly. None of the roads I am on lead to happiness. Happiness is out of the reach of logic and reason and the need for one’s knowledge to be one contiguous picture. At some point I need to leave the road and fly there instead.

And that doesn’t make any sense. Obviously. So the really big step – the leap of (or into) faith – would be to learn to be okay with that.

For the first time in my life, I would have to learn to accept that something can be true even if it does not make sense and is not justified or logical or reasonable.

Like, for instance, believing in angels. Just to pick a random example.

It’s a matter of believing things because you choose to (and need to) believe them instead of believing them because you have figured out that they’re true.

And that’s a pretty heavy concept, man. I don’t know if I can handle it. I have had this relentlessly logical mindset for my entire life and it completely defines my worldview and my mindset and my umwalt and departing from that feels like I would be embracing insanity and the unknown.

But other people manage it and they are much, much stronger and healthier and happiest and more well adjusted than I have ever been.

So no. I don’t believe in magic.

But I am going to get there somehow, by God.

More after the break.

My previous solution

The previous time I tackled this whole “learning to fly” thing, I ended by reminding myself what an awesome rebel who has never felt bound or compelled by other people’s rules I am so why should the rules of logic be any different?

Which felt quite good to type at the time but now seems… insufficient.

The truth is that there’s not going to be a logical solution to the problem of illogicality. The only solution is to step off the edge of my reality and plunge into a world that follows a different set of laws, ones that are primarily emotional as opposed to be rooted in something like an internally consistent model of reality.

My model might be just as full of shit as anyone else’s but it at least makes sense.

So I would have to decide, consciously and deliberately, that the new rule of my world is that I will be happy, period. And absolutely everything within my demenses, including reality itself if necessary, will bend to this new dictum.

I feel like this necessarily involve telling the world where, how, and with what common household objects it can go fuck itself.

And I am not against that. It does seem to suggest that there’s been some sort of anger at the world seething within me that I somehow forestalled via being so logical, as if I locked away a great deal of emotions via facile justifications.

Hmm. This warrants further investigation. I might be onto something there.

Perhap I have done that a fuck of a lot in my life : used my icy precise logic not just as a way to pursue truth but as a way to nullify nearly all of my passionate emotions.

By becoming detached from them. By escaping the emotional mode in which I felt exposed and vulnerable by retreating into finding things “fascinating” and studying them like some kind of ersatz scientist.

Have you noticed that the expensive words come out when I’m uncomfortable?

What would life be outside all this “fascination”? I honestly don’t know. I would have to take off this SCUBA suit and wade into the water with the rest of you, I guess.

I know how bad that makes me sound and you’re not wrong.

I guess I know the nature of this cage I’m in now. It’s made of logic and science and detachment and analysis and “fascination”.

Given that, there is clearly only way for me to get the hell out of here :

I’m going to have to learn to fly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This should be fun. Typing with my right thumb numb.

Not to mention eating.

So I went to do my usual deal at the Kinsmen today. I thought about not going due to the nasty infection on my thumb causing me acute social anxiety, but luckily our dear friend Xanax took care of that.

What a guy.

The special guest for today was a Chow Chow/Tibetan Mastiff mix dog called Mushu after the character Eddie Murphy voiced in the Disney flick Mulan.

Today was National Dog Day, so we had Mushu doing photo ops and we did a dog oriented round of trivia.

Sadly, I did not get to pet Mushu. He never came close enough to me. Dammit.

Oh, and the people at the Kinsmen center are fully aware of my diabetes now, so while everyone else got birthday cake for dessert, I got a chopped up apple.

It was a very good apple, granted. A Honeycrisp, I am pretty sure. Had a pear-like sweetness to it that was just divine.

But fat men have strong feelings about cake and I hate feeling left out so eating apple while everyone else had cake was a struggle.

It is a lot more work to type like this.

After Kinsmen, it was off to Wound Care. We were early but that worked out great because I needed to use the bathroom anyhow.

I showed the Beast That Ate My Thumb to the nurse at Wound Care and she said there was nothing they could do about it and that I needed to take it to a doctor.

No big shock. So it was off to so called Urgent Care.

The waiting involved wasn’t too brutal. I snoozed through a lot of it. I got to the triage stage right away and then it was a matter of waiting for the doctor.

Well, the nurse-practitioner. Not that I care. I knew it was not a complex task at all so an NP made sense.

She injected my thumb with lidocaine – twice, one on each side of the thumb – which put it to sleep, pretty much.

The injections were pretty painful, though. Made me wonder if her making the necessary incision without anesthetic would have hurt less.

It worked, though. Did not feeling anything during the procedure other than a vague tap from the scalpel now and then.

Anyhow, at one point, the NP said, “As a rule of thumb, when the…” and I grinned and said, “rule of thumb, eh?” and we both laughed.

So that was good.

Then it was off back home with a prescription for Keflex (four pills a day, yay) and some care instructions for the remaining scraps of skin and the wound left by the infection.

This ate up most of my most productive time of day (the afternoon), so things are a bit out of whack in my life right now.

I will try to record a quick video for today at some point as well as doing my usual blogging part 2 later on tonight.

No big deal. I am quite adaptable. I will get it all done no problem.

Yikes, it is almost 7 pm already. Maybe I spoke too soon.

I hope Keflex isn’t he antibiotic that made me sleepy all the time. That was a serious drag. Made it hard to get things done,

And that was before I did a video every day too.

Oh, and I will be ordering my meal online instead of getting Julian to get it from McD’s because I am out of cash.

All these confounded complications!

More after the break.

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And here we go

And now to finish my blogging and then rest for a bit. If my rest is short, as they sometimes are. I will make it to our usual midnight Zoom.

But if not, well, dammit, I will have missed two of those in a row and I hate that, but I have been on the go all day and I am rapidly running out of steam and the finish line is only around 306 words away so I am not sure I will be able to make it for another hour and a half of watching Cops and other vids.

Life just keeps getting in the way, doesn’t it?

All I can do is trudge onwards and see how I feel when I am done blogging.

I feel like I am forgetting something. Oh yeah, I did end up doing a video.

I suppose I should post it now!

Completely redundant if you’ve read the first half of this blog entry, come to think of it, only this time the tale is magnified by my winning personality.

What it wins, I dunno. I should look into that. Maybe I’m owed some stuff.

Hmmm, anything else. Well we played dog trivia while Mushu was visiting. After lunch, we get out mental exercise, at least in theory, but I think most of my fellow oldies (my Kinsmen kinsmen, if you will) would agree with me that the questions were too damn easy this time.

I felt insulted, but that’s often the case with me. Others did too, though, and the odds of there being another sky-high genius in the bunch are prohibitive.

Oh well, it was kind of fun answer the questions anyhow, even if I did so with an air of exasperation. I mean, who doesn’t know that a bunch of dogs born at the same time is called a litter? Or that ones who form a single social unit are a pack?

It’s school all over again, dammit. I would have preferred to play that categories game again, that’s a challenge for everyone.

Well I guess that’s it for this long day. I am going to take a nap and see how I feel when I wake up around midnight.

Play me out, ABBA!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I figure I must be, by sheer size alone

There a lot of me.

But that aside, I know that despite my shyness and timidity, I have a pretty strong presence, and then there’s the sheer wattage of this gigavolt brain of mine.

I do think I intimidate some people with that. They have no way of knowing that I am a gentle giant intellectually as well as physically, and don’t throw my metaphorical (or literal) weight around unless it’s absolutely necessary to preserve the peace.

In the Canadian sense of the phrase. Like what Mounties do.

If they are the Mounties, who are the Mounters?

Oh right, I also did a vid today.

But back to my impressiveness.

My depression and anxiety (they’re a team) often make me feel like I don’t matter, I”m not even here, nobody notices me, nobody cares about me, and nobody would even notice or care if I disappeared forever.

But I suspect the opposite is true. I think that not only do a make a strong impression on people with my vibrancy and charisma and intellect, I think that if I am not careful I tend to “use up all the oxygen in the room”, so to speak, and it’s only my hesitance and civility that keep me from obnoxiously dominating every conversation I am in.

And not by being pushy or loud, either. Just by sheer magnetism.

Luckily I learned that lesson when I was at UPEI and learned to be a good boy who made sure everyone got a turn.

I sometimes wonder if I over-learned that lesson though. Maybe I would be a happier dude if I just let my enormous personality off the leash and let it get some exercise.

In some appropriate setting, obviously, otherwise I would be being a pain.

I never want to be the sort of person who makes people say, “Oh God, no, it’s him!” and avert their eyes when I walk in a room.

I suppose the Kinsmen event is apropos enough. Maybe when I go there tomorrow and when I have the Xanax in me I will try taking my light out from under my bushel and see what the heck happens.

I could be thronged by admirers.

But I hope not because that would freak me the fuck out. I mean, maybe not, if the Xanax is doing its job, but thinking about it in my currently alprazolam free state gives me the sweaty clutching panic.

Seriously though, I am not sure what I would be looking to get out of that experiment. Further connection with others, I suppose. Maybe even a decent shot of actually feeling like I belong somewhere and fit in.

There’s a heady thought. I don’t think I have ever felt truly like people wanted me around, even when they patently did.

Those old bad tapes in my head still play pretty loud.

I am low key panicking just from typing about this subject. I know that I have social damage that goes pretty damned deep and that makes me, for lack of a better term, alien to a lot of normal human things.

Because I grew up so alone. The animal studies of what happens then are quite conclusive and it’s not good.

You end up with individuals who may never be able to socially integrate at all. A vital developmental window was missed (namely all of them) and as a result I simply do not have the sort of social instincts all the other happy little monkeys have.

But I am quite friendly and lovable and charming for an alien. I may not be like the other kids on the playground but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

After all, weird is just another word for unique and interesting. I am a fascinating one of a kind and exotic critter, and that should get me a prized spot in this human zoo.

After all, I’m just so damn impressive.

More after the break.

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On and off

Sometimes I’m very ill. Sometimes I am perfectly fine. And sometimes I am in between.

Today’s been stressful because I have been sick on and off all day. This after the bullshit I went through last night.

I suspect the culprit is our old friend hydration. Somehow I have stumbled into that delicate state where failure to hydrate constantly and rapidly leads to dehydration symptoms across the board, from headache to nausea to faintness to weakness and back again, and at that point, as far as I know, I’m sick.

That’s why I didn’t make it to physio this afternoon. All morning I was toggling between feeling quite ill and feeling mostly okay.

The appointment was at 1 pm so I decided that I had to make up my mind at noon. When noon rolled around I felt awful, so I had to say no.

Damn thing’s a waste of time anyhow. Oh look, the government got you a physiotherapist, technically! It’s a woman you’ll see for half an hour a month and she will teach you one new exercise and then that’s it for the month.

Oh, and I have this new gross thing going on :

Hopefully, you got a look at it in there somewhere. If not, trust me, you ain’t missing much, it’s a disgusting blobby sac of… fluid,

And it keeps getting bigger, meaning it will probably pop on its own eventually. If not, I may get sufficiently sick of it to lance it myself with the tip of a pen.

I suppose it could be related to my other symptoms. They could be coming from my body trying to fight off the infection. It’s definitely possibility.

If the thing lasts long enough, I will show it to my Wound Care nurse tomorrow at 3 pm and see what they think. It seems too minor to take to the ER or UC.

I might take it to a pharmacist instead.

So, you know, my life is a Cronenbergian horror show that kind of makes me want to just check into the hospital now and when they ask me why I am there, i will say, “Nothing yet, but give it a minute. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wrote a song which may surprise you, and not just because it’s a country song.

But stay tuned because it’s not entirely what it seems.

Here it is :

I was tempted to skip the whole lyrics on screen (LOS) thing and save myself a buttload of hassle, but I felt like that would be cheating somehow.

Anyhow, the sneaky and subversive secret of the song, which I will only admit to here because nobody who doesn’t know me reads this thing, is that I wrote that song with the intention of turning people against Trump by reminding them of their actual values.

That’s why it’s a country song. I figured that’s how to reach the diehard Trump demographic who still believes he’s going to save them after he is done grinding their faces into the dirt.

Yeah buddy. Any second now.

So in order to complete my act of subversive media, I tried to think of everything I could that his demographic thinks they still believe and that he contravenes flagrantly.

Only now does it occur to me all the ways he goes against American values. You know, freedom, democracy, truth, justice, and the American way.

They think they still believe in all of that too. Hence complaining about “woke Superman” from assorted pinheads.

Fool. Superman would kick your white Christian nationalist bigoted butt.

Oh well, I guess I can tackle the Americana stuff in another song. Something in an over the top American patriotism style, with a military marching band and a male choir humming the melody in the background as Lady Liberty herself belts it out.

A project from some other day when I am feeling bored and in need of a challenge.

That said, insert my now standard whining about wishing I had spent more time on the lyrics here. I tried this time, I really did.

I had the idea for the song last night, as I was falling asleep, and when I got up this morning I wrote some notes for the lyrics.

But the bulk of the actual songwriting AND making the song AND making the video had to fit into the two hours between 2 pm and when I start blogging at 4 pm.

And the problem is self-discipline. I had like twelve hours or more between the idea and its execution and those are hours I could have spent writing the lyrics and polishing them and refining them until I couldn’t make them any better.

But that would have cost me precious fucking around wasting my life playing videos and watching TikTok on my phone time. How tragic.

So I need to get my priorities straight and accept that if I am to become the amazingly productive and dazzlingly talented and lavishly compensated creative megastar I know I can be, I am doing to have to radically realign my lifestyle and that means less time spent mesmerized by video games and the internet and more time spent doing fun stuff that might actually get me somewhere.

In other words, I need to grow the fuck up.

But not in a way that makes me stiff and boring and serious and tedious and all that. That is how a child views being an adult, and I ain’t having it.

No, I will still live to have fun and enjoy myself, I will just move on from the petty amusements of time-wasting games and move on to the way more fun and potentially profitable world of doing actual work.

I could really make a splash if I truly get behind myself and push.

And even if it all ends in failure, I will have had a good time doing it, so who cares?

More after the break.

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Life is trying to kill me

I have had a stressful night.

So I wake up from a post Blogging Part I nap around 20 minutes before 6 pm, and 6 pm is when I have my Sunday shower.

My one shower a week. But at least it’s one I can do by myself.

And as I sit in front of my computer pre-shower, I realize I feel a mite woozy. Oh well, it’s probably just because I just woke up.

So 6 pm rolls around and I get naked and put on the plastic cast cover I use to protect the bandage on my left foot and stand up to go get my shower.

Further wooziness. Hmmm. Not good. I briefly consider not taking my shower out of an abundance of caution.

But in my compromised mental state, if I didn’t take my shower, I would not be able to go to Denny’s with my friends, and that was a total nonstarter.

Like I have said many times before, Denny’s on Sunday with Le Gang is the highlight of my week and the only thing that would keep me from going is being in the hospital.

So I dry off and get dress and as I go to put on my belt I notice something is very off because I can’t get the belt on. The waistband of my pants is cutting too deep into my guy and I can’t get at the belt loops.

Using more sterling logic, I decided that if they were that tight, they would stay up without the belt, and I soldiered on.

About this time I should have noticed that I was feeling pretty crappy. But that really came to the fore when I did up the too-tight pants and the crappiness accelerated rapidly. I felt too hot and nauseous and dizzy and that only got worse when I made the mistake of standing up.

Luckily, on the way from my computer to the door of my bedroom, enough blood got to the right parts of my brain for me to realize that this was not viable in any way shape or form, so I grabbed a pair of pants on my way past and got Julian to fetch a belt for me and sat down on the couch to do a pants transplant.

A transpant, if you will.

And that helped a fair bit but I still felt terrible and I seriously considered very reluctantly bowing out of Denny’s this week.

But I knew I would be emotionally miserable knowing my friends were doing Denny’s without me, so I chose to be physically miserable instead and went down to the car.

Luckily, as I had hoped, the air conditioner in the car soon had me feeling better. On some intuitive level, I had surmised that I had heatstroke even though my conscious mind was too dumb to recognize it.

Then we made it to Denny’s and between hydrating and their aggressive AC I soon felt better, and we had our usual pleasant meal.

Then I go to pay with my credit card, and it’s declined. WTF? I knew there was enough money left on it!

So I have to borrow the cash to pay my bill because I have like $10 in cash left because deposit day is Wednesday and this was a five week month.

Then I realize I need to pay real bad, so I head to the bathroom, but oh fuck, the handicapped washroom is occupied so I have to use the regular one.

Or piss on the floor, which might have been safer.

Problem is, there’s four steps without anything to use to support myself between the bathroom door and the closest urinal.

I make it to the urinal and I get through the very long time it takes me to pee without only one hand to use to support myself (other one was, um, needed for something else) by resting my chin atop the urinal.

Disability destroys dignity.

Then I have to make it back to the bathroom door and through it to my walked, and my legs start to give out on me halfway there but I manage to rally and make it.

But my heart is beating REALLY hard and I am worried. So we hang around a bit longer so I can calm down.

Then, for one final jab, as I am on the way out of Denny’s, I have to pass through the area connecting the front of the restaurant and the back, which is normally no problem, but the busboy and his cart are there too.

I barely scooch past time.

So as you can see, I have had a stressful night.

And now I am gonna sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.