I’ve been trying to learn to be more impulsive but it’s rough.

My inherent Taurus caution is going to fight me the whole way.

Note that I am seeking to be more impulsive, not impulsive full stop. I will never be an impulsive person. That’s way too big a stretch.

No, I just want to open myself up to my impulses more so that I can sometimes act on them and thus reinforce and strengthen them.

Impulses, it turns out, need to be fed in order for them to stay healthy. And the only way to feed them is to act on them immediately instead of making them wait for the conscious mind to carefully weigh the options.

If you always do that, the impulses die and with them the main spark plug for your whole motivational engine. You lose your esprit, your life force, your vim and vigor.

I recognize the truth of all of this. You don’t have to be Freud to realize that a balance between id and ego must be maintained by the superego and that an imbalance in either direction is a recipe for neurosis.

But knowing something is true and truly believing it are radically different things. Knowing I need to relax and be more flexible and open to impulsive action does not, in itself, make it happen.

And trying to change my deeply ingrained habits of thought can often feel like I am trying to bend steel with my bare hands.

And I’m no Superman.

If I’m to become more impulsive, I’m going to have to alter my relationship with regret.

Take my recent impulsive acquisition of a game called A Plague’s Tale : Requiem.

I got it on impulse purely based on the text description of it and the fact that I knew the game had a lot of passionate fans and was a critical darling.

This was an objectively stupid way to spend nearly of my carefully saved up Salad money. I really should have dug deeper to find out what the game is actually like.

Because I hate the fucking thing.

I’ve played enough of it now to know that what I thought (hoped) was just a tutorial was, in fact, the game, and all I could expect was more of the same slow, plodding, walking simulator gameplay punctuated by brutally unforgiving action sequences based largely around stealth, at which I suck.

It says a lot about me that when my character finally gets her sling back and I could actually kill (or knock out) enemies, I suddenly started progressing WAY faster.

I am good at combat. But stealth eludes me. I’m just not patient enough to do things slowly and silently in the shadows, nor am I observant enough.

So now I am stuck with a game I can’t stand and that cost like six months’ worth of Salad earnings and I can’t help but deeply regret my impulsivity.

Presumably, people who are actually impulsive don’t regret things for very long. They shrug, chalk it up to experience, and just keep going without giving it another thought.

And maybe they are a little wiser in the future, and maybe not. But I envy their ability to maintain their forward momentum regardless.

Me, I know I will be obsessing over this errant purchase for days on end, berating myself and hating myself and wishing I could go back and choose better this time.

Futile, I know. The past is fixed. You can’t change it. Once it happens, it happened.

Maybe if I had more money, I could afford to be more impulsive.

But for now, I just have regret.

More after the break.

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What’s going on with me

Well let’s see.

Did Wound Care this afternoon. Yes, you read that right, the AFTERNOON. The appointment was at 2:30 pm, which would have been impossible to make if Joe was working but as is, it made for a nice change of pace.

At Wound Care, the nurse and I discovered that the wound on my right foot is actually healing up nicely and (fingers crossed) might actually be on its way out.

That would be nice.

The foot itself is looking pink and healthy too. Presumably the circulation in that foot has improved. Before it was looking kind of clammy and… ashen.

But now, IT LIVES!

This was also a callous paring day. Linda, the Wound Care Clinician, visited me once again to “debride” my wounds and clear things up in general.

So she abraded the callous buildup away with her neat little “sharp ball on a stick” tool. This means that right now I have a slight burning sensation in the soles of my feet where the debridement was done because that’s what it feels like when those areas start to heal and, presumably, starts rebuilding the dang callous.

It’s a cycle.

Tomorrow, Julian and I must make a pilgrimage back to that orthotics place in Vancouver for… a reason.

Honestly, it’s been so long since the previous appointment, where they took casts of my feet, that I have no idea what this second appointment is for.

Hopefully they will just hand me the new shoes. But I am not sure. I think the nice British lady who did the casting said something about a follow up appointment. But she also said she thought I’d have my shoes before Xmas. So I dunno.

So it will be a journey into mystery!

I am not looking forward to it. I had completely forgotten about the appointment until I happened to check my email today and there was a reminder there.

And thank God for that because otherwise we would not have shown up and I would have another “absence due to absence of mind” on my record.

I can be such an airhead! I am living proof that you can be brilliant and clueless at the same time. I wish I was the sort of person who had followers or an assistant so they could keep me on track and organized.

That way I could concentrate on thinking the big thoughts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just had a small urinary oopsie.

I didn’t think I needed to pee that bad, but apparently I was wrong. Because on the way back to my room from the kitchen, the contents of my bladder sloshed against what I guess you’d call the urinary sphincter, and a little leaked out.

That’s not good. That’s not good at ALL.

Add that to the list of things I really should take to Doctor Chao. But that’s unlikely to happen soon because it takes more than a week just to get a phone appointment with him, and I find that quite discouraging.

If I have an issue, what are the odds it will still be there a week from now? Given how frail and variable my health has become, the odds aren’t good.

Even pharmacists are now saying, “You should probably just go to Urgent Care. ”

I still feel weak and I am still worried that the cause might be physical. It’s occurred to me that I have been sick for so long that I no longer have any solid frame of reference for what I should and should not be feeling in my body.

I know I have felt weak and low for a long time and that it really seems like my body starts to gear up to get going then something happens and all the energy flows out of the system again, like a car when the engine won’t turn over.

For all these years I have attributed that to my ruptured psyche, but it’s entirely possible that the problem is, in fact, my wounded heart.

I mean, how would I know?

I am trying to remember the last time my heart got looked at in a medical sense. I am pretty sure it was at least two years ago. Maybe more.

Couldn’t hurt to ring the bell on that sometime soon. What the heck.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to find out that it’s been a physical issue all this time and that an operation or procedure can fix it?

It would do wonders for my deep feelings of guilt and shame about having not lived a grownup life at all despite being 51.

See, it wasn’t a moral failing. I don’t lack character and grit.

I just had a bum ticker.

It’s still a longshot but it’s something worth considering, at least.

And yeah, I know I’m not supposed to feel utterly terrible about how my life has turned out and I am especially not supposed to feel like a complete and utter failure.

What I should be doing is forgiving myself and accepting that I am who I am and I am where I am in life and the best I can do is make the best of the time I have left on this mortal plane and just try to relax and enjoy myself.

Blah blah blah. Knowing what I am supposed to be feeling doesn’t make it happen, it just makes me acutely aware of something else about me that is broken and wrong.

And I’m not supposed to be feeling that either.

But I do. I feel it all. The guilt and shame are crippling. I cringe inwardly at the thought of being in any social situation where I have to admit to completely failing at life.

Nope, no job stories. I have no idea what it’s like to work for a living. Sorry, can’t relate.

No relationship stories either. No idea what it’s like to be in one of those either.

I’ve just lived the same pathetic existence in one place or another (doesn’t really matter where) for the last 30 years or so.

And yet, to the outside world, I don’t seem sick. I never let it show. If it wasn’t for this blessed blog of mine, the world would have no idea anything was wrong with me.

I can’t even come close to truly baring all even with my therapist.

Around other people, my smooth persona is in place and I seem just fine and dandy.

When I grew up, it was definitely not okay to not be okay.

Because when there’s nobody to catch you, you better not fall.

More after the break.

---

The other “shoe”

Well it start with the same letters, anyhow.

Having peed myself earlier, I had to complete the set and shit the bed.

The usual circumstances : I was asleep, was woken up by the need to poop. Or rather, by the horrible realization that I had um…. already started.

Then I was stuck trying to get to the bathroom without squeezing the toothpaste tube too much, so to speak.

A futile endeavour, to be sure, but I had to try.

I got my dirty ass into the bathroom and onto the throne and inspected the damage. Turns out I had done a much better job with the toothpaste tube than I had thought. The amount of substance in my pants was fairly small.

I didn’t think I needed to “go” when I lay down to nap. The lesson to never ignore that need in favour of sleep in order to prevent this very thing has finally sunk in.

But who knows, I might have ignored the warning signs. That would be better than the other possibility, that my condition has gotten even worse and there is now nothing I can do to keep from needing Depends when I sleep.

God, I hope that’s not it.

Oh, and I got my second needle to the eye from the folks at West Coast Retina Consultants this morning. This time it was the right eye.

I brought a book because last time we were there, last Tuesday, we were there for at least an hour and a half.

But today it took less than half an hour. I guess they didn’t feel the need to do all the forms of testing they did the first time.

How much could my eyes have changed in six days?

So the shot hurt the same but the wait? I barely felt it at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been having one bitch of a “sleepy day” today.

I’ve slept for around 12 of the last 16 hours. And I am still sleepy. I could easily lay down and go right back to sleep, no problem.

I am just glad that I will be drinking fully caffeinated Diet Coke at Denny’s tonight. That should be enough to keep me going for a while at least.

But being this sleepy for this long is really a drag, man. I don’t want to be sleeping, I want to be awake and doing stuff!

Even if said “stuff” is just me playing video games.

Speaking of which, I have acquired a new one. I was moping about getting burned out on Morrowind this morning and decided to check out what I could get for my nearly $8 of carefully hoarded Salad money.

One of the games on offer was A Plague Tale : Requiem, and I had heard good things about that game and its predecessor, A Plague Tale : Innocence, so I decided to give it a shot for $7.

And I am regretting this decision, which unfortunately cannot be reversed.

I can only assume that I am in the midst of a VERY long tutorial section because all I have experienced so far is tiny bits of gameplay in between a zillion Quick Time Events (QTEs^[1]) and that makes for a simply terrible user experience chez moi.

And I am almost positive the blurb for the game said it was an open world game and so far the world has been very closed, hence my assumption (and hope) that all I have experienced so far is a tutorial.

I suppose I could blame myself for not taking all that long to pick a game from the Salad store, but honestly there’s no guarantee that would have led to a better choice given my issues with being easily overwhelmed.

In fact, if I had mulled it over carefully, as my inherent caution bids me to do, it’s far more likely that I would have collapsed under the weight of all the attractive options and not been able to pick anything at all.

Still, it’s sad to see that Salad money go. It took six months for my account to accumulate that $7, and I can’t get a refund because it wasn’t sold to me by Steam themselves, so if I don’t like the game, I am SSOL^[2].

Oh well, no use dwelling on it. I will play the game at least until I have either finished the tutorial or determined that this is, in fact, all the game has to offer before uninstalling it in a huff and bitching about it to Maelkoth.

Luckily, I still have $20 and a bit in my Steam wallet, left over from previous months, so I can give the whole “a new game for Fruvous” thing a try. I could even buy a game that costs a little more than that as an Xmas gift to myself.

Maybe I should save that for Xmas day, though, so that I have something to “open” (install and play) on that day.

I am wondering if I should order my own little Xmas dinner from a restaurant instead of getting it via my groceries. But then I would have to find a place that is open on Xmas day and serving turkey et al.

Denny’s might work for that.

Presumably a restaurant meal would be better than what I can kludge together, given how limited my kitchen time is.

A TV dinner is looking like the smartest option on that front. Plus something naughty (but not TOO naughty) I can have for dessert.

Details aside, it’s up to me to make my own little Xmas this year, and I am determined to do so rather than what I would normally do, which is just withdraw with a vengeance until the whole thing is over.

I can make things better for myself if I just try. Invest some effort in myself.

After all, ’tis the season!

More after the break.

---

Live another life

Hah. If only. But life ain’t got no reset button.

Unless you believe in reincarnation, in which case it does have one but you lose all your items, progress, and save games, so you’re really no further ahead.

No, the reset everyone wants is to be able to live your life again knowing what you know now, and that’s not an option, as far as we know.

The best we can do is try to pass what we know on to the next generation so that they don’t have to learn the same hard lessons we did.

But that rarely works because our frames of reference are so different. When I was young the advice Boomers wanted to give us Gen X kids seemed like it came from another planet. They clearly had no idea what we were going through.

And I have only a dim half-notion what our Millennial kids went through, and considerably less about what Gen Z went through,

All we can do is stand on the sidelines and give what help we can when it’s relevant but mostly just watch them stumble over excitingly new yet predictable roadblocks.

I hope a little of what we have to tell them sinks in and proves useful. I’m painfully aware of how little comfort us bitter, cynical Gen X folk can offer to Millennials and their injured idealism and their feelings of betrayal and premature ejection into adulthood.

We raised them for a world that stopped existing. Now they are raising kids desperate for something, anything, to believe in.

And I got nothin’.

We of the Generation of X are products of the death of Boomer hippie idealism as it rotted into Seventies moral nihilism and Eighties selfishness, and so we learned to live without ideals or beliefs or trust in anything at all.

And I was happy when I read that the Millennials were earnest and idealistic because the world needed that and we sure as shit couldn’t provide it.

And then that world stabbed them in the back.

I’m so, so sorry kids.

The world today is one fucked up place and we can’t blame it all on the Boomers any more. We’re the generation in charge now.

And how fucked up is that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got nothin’ going on in the real world, so let’s talk about my actual life : video games.

They’re the addiction that is ruining my life, after all. If I could just pry open the jaws of this goddamned beast enough for me to get a few actually productive hours a day in, I might actually get my life moving at long last.

I’m this phenomenally talented and brilliant dude and yet I waste almost every waking hour of the day burning my brain cells with fucking video games.

It really is a tragedy. I could be doing so much good in the world. And making so much god damned money. And having so much hot fucking sex.

I have many layers of motivation.

I know this cage I live in will disappear when I stop needing it. I am entombed by my own desperate fears from long ago. The idea of true exposure to the world, without the cage, makes me feel like I am going to die.

Like it would kill me the same way sunlight kills Dracula.

And it’s very hard for me to truly get a grip on those fears because they are such a fundamental part of who I am. The rape that made me the “man” I am today happened when I was only 4 years old and absolutely everything about me is built on that foundation. That makes it not being there literally unthinkable for me.

I want to heal that brutal untreated trauma from a long time ago. But what can you do when your entire being has been warped and distorted by a single brutal act?

And how can I hope to function as an actual grownup when so much of me is locked away along with the memories of that terrible event? When I was raped, I withdrew deep into my mind to escape what was happening to me, and left only the bare minimum of my being still out in the real world in order to navigate life.

And I have lived primarily in my head ever since.

Maybe that’s how I got so god damned smart. I mean, I was a bright kid before the rape – learned to read when I was 3 – but it might have been the rape that, by driving me so deep into my own mind, made me develop so fast on the mental side of things.

And barely at all on the emotional and social sides of things.

No wonder I always feel so weak. Like something vital, some fundamental fuel, is missing and without it I can’t pull myself together at all, let alone do stuff.

Every now and then the mists part and the sun shines and I can feel okay for a little while. But most of the time I am huddling all hunched up inside, dying from the cold.

And I don’t know. Maybe my problem is physical. Maybe my heart just can’t generate the horsepower I need in order to get things done. Maybe my diabetes ridden circulatory system can’t handle the strain of actual motivation. Maybe I am just too god damned old and decrepit to grow up.

Maybe I just missed the fucking boat entirely.

But maybe it’s psychological too. With so much of my being packed away deep inside of me, I just don’t have enough me to rescue myself.

And nobody else can do it. Nobody is going to stop to pick that sad little fat kid up out of that snowbank and take him someplace warm and show him that he’s loved.

And don’t fucking tell me to do it for myself. That’s not possible. There is no part of me that is strong enough and has its feet planted on solid ground enough to do that.

So I dunno WTF. I am extremely pent up, stopped up, and frustrated, and some day that might just kill me.

But what else can I do?

More after the break.

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Sex Ed with your Digimon

Sex Ed with your Digimon. I know nothing about the show but from the smut I have seen that cute red lizard Guilmon is SUPER popular.

But what I like about this one is the clear warmth and affection mixed in with the lust and the gentle exploration of it all.

It all adds up to a VERY sexy package for yours truly.

And for you too, maybe!

And remember, Guilmon can talk, so it’s not technically bestiality!

---

Anyhow, video games

Another try to talk about what I meant to talk about in Part I. 

I think I’m getting kinda burned out on Morrowind. There’s tons of the game I have yet to see but it’s all starting to feel kinda same-y. 

There’s tons of mods, too, so I am going with those for now. Plus I started a new playthrough after my momentum with my Argonian spearman petered out. 

It seemed like a good idea to install Tamriel Rebuilt, a huge mod that basically doubles the landmass of the game, with more cities and quests and so on. 

But what I found was that the quests were mostly what I call “city quests”, where you just go from point A to point B, do a thing, proceed to point C, and so on. 

There’s no combat, no dungeon crawling, no figuring things out. Just a whole lot of travel and text interactions. 

Yawn. I need more than that to keep my interest. Even the one or two dungeons I found were pretty underwhelming. 

I get the feeling the maker(s) were more interested in quantity than quality. 

So I uninstalled the thing and started a new game as a spell chucking High Elf. Dunno if that will last, though. I am wondering what a stealth playthrough would be like. 

Probably terrible, at least at first, given how much I suck at stealth. 

But it might be worth a try, just to get some more play out of the game. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

 

 

ALL RIGHT. Time to get this done the way I always do, by talking it out in my blog.

The ground rules have changed a little. I will now accept cash donations as long as they are contributions towards a specific thing.

Well I guess I’d always accept cash. But you get the idea.

One thing that someone could get me is my new glasses. I keep putting off ordering them for some reason, even though I know I have the budget for it.

Well someone could give me $25 towards a new pair o’ specs. I have my prescription so all I need to do is order them off of Holy Shit Are These Glasses Cheap.com or whatever, and they’ll be on the way.

By UPS, thankfully. You know, all the postal workers are really accomplishing, besides making us all loathe them for taking Xmas hostage, is teaching people how completely unnecessary they are.

Sure, couriers are more expensive than a stamp, but who the fuck sends letters any more? Everybody just gets stuff off Amazon, and they use UPS.

Anyhow, moving on, someone could also give me a contribution toward my Steam account. I have finally accepted that, against all logic and reason, the actual physical Steam gift cards are a myth and a fantasy and so I will need to act as an intermediary via good old cashola.

Either that, or someone with a credit card could probably send me a virtual gift card. I assume Steam are smart enough to have those available.

Let’s see. I could use a new pair o’ pants. Joe presumably knows my size because he’s bought me pants from them Big n’ Tall guys downtown before.

One of my current pairs is on its last legs (last threads?), Almost all the belt loops are busted and there’s a hole forming in the seat that will hit the illegal parts of my butt any day now, so it’s going to go.

Getting them repaired is also an option.

What else. Well, of course, sugar free treats are always nice. They would make great “stocking stuffer” level gifts. Russel Stover, bless his corporate heart, has an extensive line of sugar free candies and chocolates.

I really like the Starlight Mints and the Fruit Mix in hard candies. Or the sugar free version of Werther’s Originals.

So much better than Werther’s Derivatives.

Now what? Hmmm. It’s a testament to how empty my life is that I can’t think of much that I need outside of food, clothes, and video games.

It’s not like someone could get me a job for Xmas.

I’m trying to think of something that would make my life easier. But to be frank, my life is already pretty easy.

Terrible. But easy.

The problem is that a lot of what I want is too expensive. Like computer parts. I still need to upgrade the power supply in my computer so it can handle all the other fancy schmancy other stuff I have installed in there.

I’ll try to think of something during the break.

More after the break.

---

This could totally be about Fruvous

I’m the blue doggy.

I have a history of approaching very scary looking fursonas and winning them over by the sheer power of my vulpine charm and cuteness.

You know, there can be a lot of power in being nonthreatening and adorable. Often the scary fur is tickled that someone like me is approaching them at all.

It’s good to be cute.

This could be about Fru too, but fair warning, its entirely smut with a cute premise. And he’s the wrong color of fox. But I love how happy he is!

---

More gift ideas

OK, now I really have to cudgel my brain.

The problem is that I always just make do with what I have and I don’t think about what I want but do not have.

I’m adaptable to a fault.

Well let’s see. I could use another “super easy” songbook so I could learn to play stuff on my synthesizer. I think I’d like the Simon and Garfunkel one next. I already have one for the Beatles.

And by “super easy” I mean the letter name of the note (A, B,C, etc.) is printed right on the note so I don’t have to be able to tell if a note is on a line or in a space.

Given that assistance, I can piece together how to play the song if I already know the song well from having listened to it many times.

Hmm. I would also like one for the Tragically Hip, or Jethro Tull, or maybe Cat Stevens. I am trying to pick artists where I know a lot of their songs.

I mean, most of my entertainment comes from YouTube and that’s free. Hmm.

Oh! A clothes hamper would be nice, as would a nice BIG trash pail for my garbage in my room, or one of those sealed containers for the recyclables like the one that we have in the kitchen.

I need help keeping this room clean. Well, cleaner, anyhow.

And lastly, and always, books. What books? I’m not sure. I will see if I can put together an Amazon wishlist to guide people.

Of course, this all assumes anyone actually cares what I want enough to actually shop for a gift for me. Historically this has not been the case.

Not that I’m bitter.

Now that I have some sort of list started, I have to think about what I want to get my friends. Obviously, I’m not going to speculate about that here and ruin the surprise.

I’ve been anxious about the upcoming holiday, even though I have no real reason to be. I will order gifts from Amazon and they will be here in time. I don’t have to stress.

I think at this stage in my recovery, I need to learn to commit more of myself into the things I do, and I need to do more things which benefit from that level of commitment.

I can do this. I can take some of that video game energy and invest it in a new kind of game, a creative game, where I have a lot of fun making things.

This can be a beautiful world if you want it to be.

But first, you have to change.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or is it nothing but fear?

My life has been dominated by a bountiful bumper crop of absolutely nothing. Via my fears and my extraordinary flexibility of mind, I managed to create a hermetically sealed hermitage of a life where I was (and am) as chained up and locked up as any prisoner in a gulag but managed to hide this from my everyday consciousness by staying buried in my video games and my blogging.

At least the blogging is productive. Marginally.

Through this self-imprisonment, I arranged for absolutely nothing to happen to me. My life has remarkably few events in its timeline.

The average person would have graduated, had jobs, found a career, found a mate, made a household, had kids, and made something of themselves by my age.

But not me. I might as well have been in suspended animation.

Well that’s not strictly true. I was alive, experiencing the world a little bit at least, and continuing to gather insight and understanding.

Who knows, maybe all this time in outer space might turn out to have some use after all. That would certainly help with this feeling of nothingness.

Oh right, the subject.

All that nothing happening me has left a seriously big mark. It has, in fact, stunted and warped my entire personality in ways that I don’t dare try to fully comprehend.

The amount I already comprehend is already traumatizing enough.

Because all that nothingness is stored inside me. I guess it’s the Freon in the deep freeze unit that has been keeping most of my personality in cold storage for all these years. I’ve spend decades leading a nothing life in which nothing much ever happens and I don’t grow as a person at all.

And yet, I seem fine. I don’t show outward signs of distress or discomfort or disorder at all. I seem cheerful and confident and smart and funny and sweet and cute and all those other happy fluffy things about me.

And I am those things. But I am also dying on the inside all the fucking time. Within what I’ll call my Fruvous-ness is sad, desperate, lonely, frozen child who lurks deep inside me most of the time in order to hide from the world that hurt him so badly.

He wants someone to love and cherish and comfort and protect him. Someone to finally parent him so he can grow in the sunshine of their love instead of withering and wintering away as he waits, and waits, and waits.

Waiting for something that will never happen. People don’t usually parent adults. And the knee-jerk therapist response would be to tell me I have to parent myself.

But that doesn’t fucking work. A plant can’t generate its own sunlight any more than you can make a boat go forward by blowing on the sails. I don’t have an internalized model of competent parenting to model myself on. I don’t have a source of warmth and love and happiness to draw upon in my soul. I don’t have faith.

I don’t have faith.

Faith in what? I excluded faith as a possibility when I was very young. I took the path of the Truth, of science and reason and logic, thinking quite naively that it would be enough to sustain me.

But paranoia, mistrust, hostility, bitterness, and subterranean rage can never truly be enough to live on. They can keep you going but they can’t sustain any growth.

And so here I sit, caught between the aching desire to finally burst into bloom already and the glacial chill of all that god damned nothing.

I wish I could burn it all away.

More after the break.

---

Two gay furry smut comics I’ve enjoyed recently.

Warning, this one has a bunch of weird fetishes, like (adult) twincest and genital inflation, but if you ignore all that and concentrate on the story, like I did, you’ll find the writing is actually quite good.

Seph and Dom : The Return

This one is just straight up (sic) gay smut, no weird fetishes, but what truly impressed me was the emotional depth and understanding our protagonists express amidst all the buttfucking and cocksucking.

Hold me close and don’t let go

I really feel the depth of their bond and their love. It moved me.

And to me, that’s very sexy.

---

The man in the cell

“Oh, I’m not locked up in here at all. ” said the man in the cell. “I know it may look like I am, but I assure you, I am not.”

“It would take far more than a few bits of tin, ” he said as he gently rattled his steel manacles, “or a few puny pebbles, ” he said as he gestured to the enormous concrete slabs his cell was made of, ” to hold back a man such as I. Why, any time I want, I can simply snap these chains like they’re nothing but wet tissue paper and smash that wall to pieces with a single punch and walk right out of here, and there is nothing that anything or anyone could do to stop me. ” 

“I just choose not to at this time. ” 

That said, he settled back into his manacles with an air of self-satisfaction, clearly quite pleased by the thought of his own awesome abilities. 

And it’s not like I could prove him wrong. For all I, his jailor, knew, maybe he really could do all those things. Anything is possible, after all. 

And I’d only been working in the King’s Dungeon for eight years, and he had been one of my wards that entire time, so I have no idea what he was like before he was here. 

Maybe before he was jailed he was a mighty raging giant who could uproot trees like he was pulling a weed and throw them so far they disappeared over the horizon. Maybe one day he would finally grow tired of our modest accommodations and smash his way out of here with casual ease. Maybe the only reason he had stayed the King’s prisoner for so long was that he appreciated the peace and quiet as it gave him time to truly meditate upon the eternal verities and how they relate to the welfare of mankind. 

Maybe all of these things about him were true. 

But I really doubt it. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

It’s time to spin the wheel!

(spins Wheel of Maladies, it stops on “sleepiness”)

And it’s sleepiness! Yes, today you will be incredibly sleepy for no apparent reason, making getting anything at all done extremely tricky!

That’s what today’s been like so far. I guess my extra exertions yesterday, with the eye doctor appointment and everything, took more out of me than I thought.

And/or I am fighting off an infection of some sort. Maybe the same one that seems to constantly lurking in the background lately.

I say that because I also feel a by now all too familiar soreness in my ears, nose, throat, and lungs, and my nose is running.

But the main thing is Mister Sandman parking a dump truck of sand on my chest then dumping it straight onto my eyes.

If this is malaise, it’s an extra strong dose of it.

Of course, that’s making writing these words for you wonderful people all the more difficult. Just getting my thoughts together enough to write them down is proving to be a challenge, My mind keeps drifting away.

This is when all the mental muscle I have developed over millions of words added to this blog o’ mine comes in handy. I can make the words come out even when my energy is being drained away by something.

Plus I am feeling a little perkier now that I’ve gotten a can o’ carbonated beverage (fizzy lemonade, yum!) on the go.

Jesus, could this all just be dehydration?

If so, my hydration game is getting really out of hand. It’s not like I have gone all day up till this point without drinking any water. I’ve had a couple of glasses.

Then again, the sleep I’ve been getting has been heavy and troubled and therefore pretty sweaty. Maybe I’ve been sweating it out as fast as it’s been going in.

Once more I contemplate just sticking a hose in my mouth and inserting a catheter so that the fluids can pass through me unhindered.

I am but a bend in the river.

On the psychological front. I suddenly realized this morning that I have been feeling quite anxious lately and that my lowered Paxil dose is the probable cause.

Hence my getting super stressed about the bug people coming over , and my continued stressing about not having ordered any gifts for my roomies yet let alone being able to get cards to my family.

These things are genuine issues but my mental illness has blown them way out of proportion and made me panic over fairly trivial things.

And this is, in a strange way, progress.

Because it means my emotions have been sufficiently thawed out for me to start getting old symptoms back, only this time I can meet them head on and try to learn to handle them on my own, without the Paxil, permanently.

I sure am glad I never gave in to the wild temptation to quit Paxil cold turkey, though, because if this is what a 25 percent reduction twice a week feels like, a 100 percent reduction would have sent me to the ER in a very bad mental state.

It does bother me that due to the blister packing of my meds, I no longer have the option to go back to my previous dosage of 40 mg a day instead of 30 mg twice a week.

I am seriously considering telling my pharmacist to dispense my meds normally once this batch of blister packs wears out.

There’s so many little annoyances with them. Like not even knowing what I am taking any more. If the West Coast Retina people had asked me for a list of medications yesterday, I might have been able to name three or four but the rest are a black box to me now, I don’t remember their names at all.

Where in the pill bottle era, I knew them all because I saw them every day.

I will think it over, because the blister packing IS convenient.

But also irritating.

We will see.

More after the break.

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More on anxiety

As opposed to moron anxiety, which I think we all have these days.

I must admit to experiencing a highly perverse form of nostalgia. This anxiety I am experiencing really brings me back to the days when I had first moved to this area and all my enthusiasm for job searching was gone and I had sunk into a nightmare world where I peed out the window because I was too scared of bumping into other residents to use the shared bathroom on my floor of bachelor suites.

Are they also bachelorette suites?

Of course, those were not good times. Even after I got onto the Paxil and gained some distance from the anxiety = enough to handle it some of the time anyhow = my life was very difficult because even when I was alone in my apartment, even little noises from my fellow residents just living their lives could set me off.

But nostalgia is funny like that. You can even miss the bad times. Kinda.

Come to think of it, I dug myself out of that hole too, and I did it by starting and running the local furry community. Through it, I was able to do a heck of a lot of social healing.

I’ll never forget that moment just after me and the local fluffies had just got out of seeing The Faculty at The Hollywood and I was looking out over Broadway and it suddenly hit me just how good it felt to be actually out and sharing and connecting with people.

And in that same moment I also felt an enormous sadness because now I knew what I had been missing for so long. Now I had something to contrast my loneliness against.

It was a very emotional moment.

And now I hope to have more of those. Yes, because anxious again sucks, but I am so much stronger and saner now. And now that I know that it’s just that old beast anxiety rearing its big dumb head again, I am confident that I can overcome it.

I just need more things to DO.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been busy, at least by my standards.

This morning, I went to see Doctor McKay, my eye doctor. I get the feeling Doctor Vaezi, my previous eye guy, is too successful and important for West Coast Retinal Consultants out here in Richmond.

But don’t let the name fool you. They do the rest of the eye too.

It was the usual long process of actually getting to see him. Show up, check in, sit in the waiting room. Get the dilation drops put in. Sit back down in the waiting room. Get back up for the imaging of my eyes in various forms.

There seems to be three forms. I know one of them is to map the blood vessels in my eyes, but I dunno about the other two.

Maybe they just want to capture the sparkling depths of my baby blues.

Then there’s the testing. You know, can you read these letters. I got further than before with that at least with my right eye because when it got tough, I gave myself three or four seconds to just stare at the letters as my eye gathered enough information and the letters slowly resolved themselves.

I hope that did not throw off the measurements. My changing tactics.

Anyhow, then it was more waiting until I got called into the exam room, where I waited a bunch more before my ocular specialist Doctor McKay showed up to consult.

Impressively, he remembered me and what he’d worked on before, which was that blood vessel issue in my left eye. He asked about it, I told him it was fine.

Well, not really. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that the swelling was a lot worse in my left eye, which of the two appears to be the troublemaker.

And that meant it was time for an injection. Yay. He literally stuck a needle in my eye.

But they have new, sharper needles, and he probably remembered that I seem to be somewhat resistant to the numbing agent they use, so he was all slick with putting a drop of the numbant (sic) in my eye and doing the injection all in one motion.

Very impressive technique. Kinda hot, in fact.

Well, I did have a handsome blonde doctor stick SOMEthing in me.

Anyhow, it hurt, but it hurt a lot less than previous shots to the eye. Hooray for sharper needles and skilled doctors.

I will be back there next Monday at 11 am for a shot in the right eye. After that, the shots will be repeated every six weeks until the swelling is gone.

Fair enough. Whatever it takes to retain my eyesight.

After that, we headed over to wound care, and that’s when my troubles began because despite all the time I spent sitting and waiting, my legs were still incredibly tired just from getting to West Coast Retina Consultants and moving around there, so even just getting up the elevator to the clinic was very tiring.

What’s worse is that I really needed to pee.

Luckily, I had the time to do it. Unluckily, I stupidly chose to use a urinal instead of doing the sensible thing and sitting down to pee in one of the stalls.

This, of course, involved standing for a long-ish period and my legs do not like this. There were, thankfully, grab bars on either side of the urinal.

But my pee decided to come out at a very weird angle and that meant I had to use one hand to hold my instrument and achieve any level of accuracy.

Foreskins can be such a pain.

Anyhow, all that conspired to make it so that when I finally sat down in the waiting area I was in agony. I was breathing so hard and in such obvious distress that the old people in the waiting area with me felt bad for me.

Luckily, by the time I was called in to get my bandages changed, my endorphins had caught up with me so my legs were now somewhat numb.

Still very tired, but at least the pain was mostly gone.

Needless to say, after all that righteous suffering, I felt I had earned a vanilla cone from McD’s on the way home.

Thus ended today’s adventure.

Oh, and the bug people were here while I was gone. So, phew on that.

More after the break.

---

Now there’s an image

I just realized how potentially creepy the phrase “the bug people” could be.

Oh, update on last night’s “cold” : it comes and goes. Which is very weird. Sometimes I feel like I’m on the edge of pneumonia and sometimes it’s almost gone. All that’s left behind is a bit of a dry throat.

It seems to be linked to my hydration level, at least partially. I’ve known for a while that because of how Jardiance works, it makes your urinary system work pretty hard and hence also depletes your hydration level pretty fast.

And I am trying to break myself of the habit of procrastinating on getting up and refilling my water glass. That is the number one cause of me ending up dehydrated and it has to stop or shit like this “cold” will keep happening.

I wish my body had a diagnostics panel I could check to see what my levels of various things are so I could top up (or cut back) when needed.

Oh well, maybe someday. We already have things like blood sugar sensors you can implant in your arm and read with an app, so once that kind of thing goes through a few more evolutionary cycles, maybe we’ll all be able to get a “health chip”.

It’s always bugged me that there’s no easy way to tell what vitamins you need. Even a medical lab would have to run a TON of tests to figure out the levels for every nutrient.

Maintaining your body should be as easy as maintaining your car.

“Seems I am low on Vitamin A, calcium, and brake fluid. ”

Imagine how much healthier people would be!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But only a start.

So my apartment building is being treated for cockroaches (eep!) tomorrow, and here I am in my filthy bug-ridden environs feeling incredibly anxious because these people are gonna show up with their bug traps and see my pigsty and judge me harshly.

And I am deeply ashamed of the state of this room of mine. I live in squalor for what seems to the world to be absolutely no good reason and this bug trap visit is bringing that to the forefront and I don’t like it.

So I have started trying to clean up. I guess where filth could not motivate shame just might, but I know there’s no chance I can actually make this place clean in time.

And I know this to be true because, quite disappointingly, I found myself completely out of gas after just a half hour of cleaning, and I’d hope to do at least an hour or two.

But nope. Started at 2 pm and by 2:30 pm I was all tuckered out.

Dunno who this Tucker guy was but he was presumably very tired.

So tomorrow will be a sort of neurotic apocalypse for me. My demons are arriving in force and they come bearing bug traps.

Just like the old gypsy predicted!

Honestly, I really hope they show up when I am out of the apartment. That way they can judge all they want and I won’t care.

And I am going to be out of the apartment for a chunk of time. I have my appointment to see Doctor McKay (about the fluid building up in my eyes) tomorrow and that will probably keep me busy between 10 am and 11:30 am, and then I have good ol wound care at noon, so if I am lucky I will be away for two and a half hours.

Honestly, if they haven’t come and gone by then, I will seriously consider getting Julian to drop me off at my favorite White Spot (on Ackroyd) and then come get me when the coast is clear.

This is really fucking with me.

Oh well, at least it’s keeping me from worrying about my eyes.

I’ve only got so much bandwidth for freaking out, after all.

Meanwhile, I have been spending a lot of time on Bluesky. That’s the hip new alternative to Twitter (sorry, Twix) that all the cool people in the world are flocking to because Twix has become a toxic hellscape of right wing hooliganism.

And of course, with every decent person who flees Twix, the toxicity of the place only gets worse until one bright and shining day in the not too distant future when all us libs will be gone and they will only be trolling each other.

In fact, some of them are already migrating to Bluesky for some reason and then whining about how left wing Bluesky is.

I don’t understand it. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable with all your awesome right wing bros back on Twix? I am sure they make you feel all warm and included!

Or are you willing to admit that you can’t stand to be around people like yourself?

Come on now. You can do it. Just a little push and I am sure you can evolve a sense of irony and shame again.

Trump hasn’t completely made you his bitch yet!

I find the folks on Bluesky to be very groovy. And it doesn’t matter if right wingers invade now because they will be little red drops in a vast blue ocean, and cannot possible have any noticeable effect apart from providing sport for assholes like me.

So bring it on, you troglodytes. Just try to troll me.

Because I troll back. And I can troll way, way harder than you ever could.

Because y’all are dumber than fuck.

More after the break.

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Oh crap no

I am feeling ill. Dammit.

My lungs feel very stiff and scratchy and sore. Hurt a little bit with every breath. Add to that feeling feverish and a little out of it and bone tired, and the picture is bleak.

Well I don’t care. I am going to my eye appointment no matter what. Sorry, John Q. Public, but my eyesight is at stake.

And I use that all the time!

In fact I’m using it right now.

But I really don’t like how I feel right now. This definitely feels like a lot more than just a cold. It feels like someone or something is sitting on my chest. And pain when you breathe is never a good sign.

So right now I am hoping my immune system can fight this shit off before it turns into pneumonia. I don’t want to end up spending a week or more in the hospital on top of the rest of my stressors.

I don’t even have a working tablet to use to keep me occupied. I’d have to either order the battery for it right quick or make do with books and crossword puzzles.

And I have done that before, and it stinks.

Hey Doc, can you do me a favor?

But hey, now I’m not worried about the bug trap people OR my eyes!

Let’s stop there though, please, I’d hate to see what’s next.

The ironic part is that I started feeling bad when I was cleaning my room. At the time I thought I was just tired from the cleaning but nope, I was at the beginning of coming down with whatever it is I have now.

I suppose that when I go out tomorrow, I should wear a mask for the protect of the public. Assume I make it that far.

It’s not impossible that I will get worse and have to go to the ER before then. And then boom goes my eye appointment.

It’s not like the hospital can do that kind of work.

Oh, one ray of hope I need to cling to though : it’s the fluid pressure in my eyes that is making my vision bad right now, so it is possible that if that pressure can be relieved,I will suddenly see a heck of a lot better!

That sure would be nice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s harder than it sounds.

I could rail against my mind fog. Shake my tiny fist at the sky and yell, “Damn you, mind fog, I wish you’d go away forever!”

But I don’t wish that. Not really.

I know that I’m the source of the fog (remember, everything in your head is you) and that going around constantly in a daze serves a vital purpose, namely acting as a sort of soft focus lens to make reality less scary.

And by scary, I mean overstimulating. I think.

Still working out how overwhelm and anxiety fit together in my mind.

Anyhow, the mind fog blurs everything and makes it seem like things are further away and less intense than they are and thus preserve the inner sanctum of my mind in which I have been hiding for most of my life.

I can feel that duck blind of the mind quite clearly now. I can feel how it has acted as both camouflage to hide me from the world and as a kind of shark cage to protect me from it when the camouflage fails.

Above all else, nothing and nobody touches me. Not the real me. Not the crazy critter who lives inside that cage. He can get extremely close to people without them ever truly touching him and he’s so good at it that they never know that hiding inside all that cuddle warmth and snuggly sensitivity hangs a cage of ice colder than space itself.

And I know that this is a big problem for me. I know that I can confuse the hell out of people with the mixed signals I put out. That’s the main reason I tend to keep everyone at arm’s length – from that distance, I can be Mister Sunshine and nobody can sense the little man on the inside who is scared as hell of pretty much everything.

I know that if I am ever to get into a relationship, I will of course have to get one hell of a lot closer with someone. And I know that it is not in my nature to hold back when connecting with someone – we connect deeply or not at all.

And that means that at some point, that little man may well have to abandon his little shark cage and at long last let someone actually touch him and let the layers of ice around his heart just melt away.

I don’t know what will happen then. I hope I can handle it. I’d like to think I would finally simply surrender to it all and become a more whole person and truly, truly love that person with all my heart and soul.

But given that I can’t seem to handle the intimacy of even falling asleep while I am in physical contact with someone else, I definitely cannot guarantee a good reaction.

Oh well, Everybody has to find out what they are like when they are in love at some point of their lives.

Granted, it’s usually in their teens, not when they are 51, but whatever.

Better latent than never!

That’s the thing. I’ve led such a strange life. For as long as I can remember, I can convincingly act like I am okay, and even pass for normal as long as people don’t look too closely, but it’s all just part of the duck blind.

Deep inside I am frozen in time and detached from everything and scared, and all I can really do is lurk in the shadows most of the time.

I’m doing whatever I can to push against this tendency in me and force myself out of my shell and into the world a little bit more.

And sometimes I can, and sometimes I can’t. And that’s okay.

It’s okay to get frustrated with myself over it sometimes too.

It’s okay to wish winter would end and the sun would visit my sky at last.

Even though I know I don’t really want that fog to burn away.

Because then I’d be exposed.

More after the break.

---

The place where it dies

I can feel it when motivation should be happening.

It’s like electricity trying to flow through a broken wire. I can feel a stimulation of my brain but it never makes it to my motivational complex at all.

I’d have more luck trying to pass current through a block of wood.

In fact, that’s more what it feels like : like the wire isn’t broken, it just leads to a large cold block of deadness and apathy and thus gets nowhere near its destination.

And all I can do is just watch and feel it happen from the sidelines. Like I am not even involved. I feel the spark and I feel it get smothered by the deadness and I can’t even feel bad about that.

Because for reasons that are obvious if you think about it, I just don’t care.

Part of it – maybe a big part – is that this is my normal now. Has been for 30 years. Actually being motivated to do things would be weird for me now.

I mean, out of nowhere, feeling like doing something… what’s up with that?

I guess it all leads back to “control”, just like everything else. Almost never acting on my impulses does create a lot of solemn predictability for me.

By treating my own goddamned impulses like alien invaders burst into the room and making irrational demands of me.

I would be far better off being a lot more like a normal, healthy, functional human being who puts the impulses and instincts at the core of their being and everything else gets piled on to that primal id foundation.

I guess this is what happens when the defining trauma of your entire life happens when you are only four year old, your connection to your id gets severed as part of your panicked retreat into the chilly depths of the mind.

I guess I should probably do something about that.

But meh. Whatever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.