If only there was a word….

Anyhow, I definitely just played way too much Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey.

I played for almost four hours in a row and during that time I did not feel tired or sleepy until right before I stopped.

I’d like to think that even if it hadn’t been time to lunch and blog, I would have stopped at that point anyway, but who knows?

Clearly my common sense was on vacation or something.

Anyhow, I knew I had fucked up the minute I actually stopped and quit the game.

Instantly, this heavy blanket of deferred tiredness landed on me and I began to feel a little lightheaded and confused.

But I still needed to make my lunch. So I had a command decision to make. Do I head to the kitchen like normal despite my feeling like my blood sugar was slipping, or do I call Julian and enlist his help?

I decided that, given that I didn’t even know if he was home or not, and I am, after all, smart of thought but dumb of action, I went for it.

And I was fine, more or less. I didn’t feel great and I was very glad to get back to my seat here in front of Mister Computer with my food, but I did not set of a cascade failure of my entire metabolism, and that’s a good thing.

I am so god damned sick of getting dizzy at the drop of a very small hat.

Now I have eaten all my food, and I sure hope that’s enough to keep me running right because I don’t have any more food here in my room and I don’t want to risk getting up to go get more.

But I do have an unopened bag of No Name pretzels out in the living room. Hmm.

What I could really use is some mixed carbs. Some complex carbs for the long haul energy plus a small amount of simple carbs to ignite the complex carbs like some kind of metabolic spark plug.

I don’t know what would fulfil that brief. A frosted bran muffin?

Julian was nice enough to bring me my pretzels. They’ll have to do.

I honestly don’t know how much trouble I’m in. On the one hand, I’m not super hungry any more, on the other hand the dizziness seems to be getting worse and is now accompanied by a weird heavy bloated feeling in my arms.

I am definitely laying down when I finish my words.

Things are feeling a lot more random for me lately. I guess that’s what comes of relaxing the system that kept me on guide rails going slowly forward like I was on some kind of dark ride that I until recently took to be my reality.

But the real world is the carnival outside the ride. Loud, colorful, busy, and a heck of a lot of fun if you’re doing it right.

For the record, I’ve not been doing it right.

It is admittedly tough to see the fun in life when you feel as bad as I do right now.

As if the other weirdness wasn’t enough, I’m also in the midst of an allergy attack.

Damn do I need to get back on them antihistamines.

My IBS has been acting up a bit too. Honestly, all I really want to do right now is go to sleep in the hopes of feeling better when I wake up.

That might be a bad idea. It would suck to have a blood sugar crash in my sleep.

But honestly, I’m not even sure it’s optional at this poitn.

More after the break.

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Stop resisting yourself

I am a man of intense inner conflict.

For decades, I have been quashing every drive I have except the ones involved with playing video games and writing on this here blog o’ mine.

You may have seen it.

And the thing is, these drives don’t just go away. They are still running away inside me just like with everybody else.

But mine are jammed. Blocked. Stopped up. It’s like the engine is revving away but the car is up against a brick wall.

Not only does this not get me anywhere, but it’s not good for the car either.

Thus I am a being subject to massive internal stresses. My mind and body are constantly at war with themselves as the drives say “go!” and the depression says “no!”, and I think it takes a toll on me that I have never truly acknowledged because if I did, I might want to do something about it, and “doing things” is strictly forbidden by the fascist state that is my inner life.

After all, if I start “doing things”, who knows what I will do? Answer, nobody! Not even me. And surely no good can come of such rampant anarchy!

Of course, I know that such feelings are wrong. I know that I would be a hell of a lot better if I just took my foot off the brake and let myself go. I know that all this self-resistance is very bad for me and boht my health and my happiness, and that surely there has to be a better way.

But I’m scared.

I’ve lived this way for almost thirty years now. I don’t know any other way to live. I have no idea what it’s like to act on my impulses. And I have no faith that it will lead to positive outcomes because of that lack of experience.

What I really need is a firm, strong, competent hand to hold me and calm me and guide me and help me get out of my own shadow so I can live.

I can’t do that for myself, any more than you can lift yourself by the scruff of your neck. I don’t have any memories of a better me to draw on.

For me, there’s been school and failure and that’s it.

And I went through absolutely none of the developmental stages that would have prepared me to be my own person and make it on my own.

No wonder I have always been sure that I will die out there, despite the fact that I have all the skills i need to survive.

But I never launched.

And it’s getting rather late in the game to do it now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up feeling burning hot and VERY hungry.

So once more, I had to do heavy damage to my trail mix supply. There is no way it’s going to last me till I do my grocery shopping Friday, so I am going to have to order in some more supplies from 7-11 when I have supper tonight.

Right now, I have at least partly sated the ravenous beast in my stomach by feeding it my leftover Subway from last Saturday night . And the feverish feeling has faded away somewhat. Still, I could really go for a burger right now.

This is the second attack of these symptoms this week and I am getting pretty worried. This is not at all normal for me. I really wonder what de fug is going on.

Both the hot feeling and the hunger suggest that something metabolic might be going on. Something that makes my metabolism kick into crazy overdrive and burn through a hell of a lot of calories way too fast.

Maybe this is an atypical reaction to low blood sugar? Like my body says, “Oh crap, we’re starving, dump the energy reserves into the bloodstream so we can go out and get some frigging FOOD!”

Eh. Plausible but inconclusive.

Clearly, I am going to need to get my butt to a doctor of some sort sometime soon. Lots of weird stuff has been happening to me lately.

None of it a smoking gun clearly indicating a defined medical problem, of course. I don’t get that kind of clarity. Things are always weird and vague.

But blood sugar crashes are no joke. I think I need to start having a snack around noon. Something with complex carbs and healthy proteins.

A bran muffin, maybe?

The words are not coming easily. My head feels foggy and lost. It’s hard to stay focused on the screen. My mind wants to go back to bed, I think.

But I have words to write first.

Just got up to get more water. Because I am probably dehydrated too. I know I was super thirsty earlier today.

Which is also worrisome, of course, as that is a classic sign of diabetes. But I find it rather hard to imagine my blood sugar being too high when it just crashed.

So it’s probably just plain old dehydration from sweaty, feverish sleep.

I realize I’ve been roof-mending lately. That’s when you use a problem as an excuse not to deal with said problem and then when the problem ends , you’re like, what problem?

Clearly I need to gather my wits and gird my loins and be a grownup about this whole thing and get Julian to take me to Urgent Care the next time this happens.

Doctor Chao is useless on that front (and many others) because it takes at least a week to get to see him and that’s for a phone appointment.

I also need to pull the trigger on going back on antihistamines. I get the feeling a lot of the badness and weirdness lately has an inflammatory component and so keeping my allergies under wraps would help with that a lot.

I think part of me just doesn’t want to admit that I am not doing so well lately. It wants to go on thinking everything is OK and nothing requiring adulting is needed so I can go back to gazing into my own navel and digging out the lint.

And, you know, playing video games way too much.

That’s most of what I do with my waking hours. I just fritter and waste them in a offhand way playing video games.

That’s what I’ve done with my life so far. Played a lot of video games for way too many hours and spent the rest of the time napping.

It’s all such a waste!

More after the break.

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Another way out

I am still searching for that middle path in between giving up and putting pressure on myself to escape.

Actually, I suppose I know what the path is. It’s to find and free my inner motivations so that I can approach self-liberation with a spirit of joy and enthusiasm instead of it being something I am trying to make myself do.

Life could be a heck of a lot more fun if I could just learn to relax and go with the flow and embrace my naturally ebullient nature.

Oh, but then I might be “out of control”.

Well then fuck control. So what if I don’t know what I am going to do next? I would say self-control has had a good long run and has been proven to be a dire enemy of my prospering and growing, and it’s time to give going with my gut a try.

Lately I have found myself fantasizing about what a life with a lot less thinking would be like. What kind of person would I be if I let my emotions take the driver’s seat?

Hearty. Gregarious. Impulsive. Probably somewhat shady. Not in an immoral sense – it would still not be in me to hurt people for my own gain – but more in the sense of always looking for the angles on things nobody else sees.

I dunno how many times in my life I’ve seen a simple but novel solution to a problem, proposed it, and had people just kind of stare at me blankly because even though, on paper, the idea is super simple and easy to understand, in practice it’s so far out of their expectations and understanding that it does not fit in their brains.

But back to the actual topic.

On the less great side, I imagine a less thinky me would be obnoxious, pushy, somewhat greedy, and rather self-aggrandizing.

Or arrogant. Or something. Whatever word covers, “clearly thinks he’s hot shit without him actually saying anything”.

Could be worse, really. I think I’d be someone who might well be the life of the party right before getting kicked out of it.

Or maybe I am wrong and I would turn into some professorial type instead.

There’s a lot of possibilities.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Mouse as in the input device, not the adorable rodent.

Earlier, my mouse was being very naughty. It was connecting and disconnecting randomly, and it was shredding my poor nerves.

I don’t handle that kind of thing well. I’m too high strung.

The problem appears to be the cord connecting the mouse to Mister Computer. ^[1] I had to play a game similar to the contortions you used to have to do to get a TV signal back in the days of broadcast television just to get it working again.

Yes, my children, there was a time BEFORE the cable TV that you now presumably find quaint and strange and hard to understand.

There was even a time where if you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to actually be in front of a TV set at the time it was broadcast or you were SSOL.

Ask your dad what that means.

I’m still wrapping my brain around the fact that the generation I still think of as “the next generation”, Millennials, are actually the first place winners of the old people contest now. They are yesterday’s news, just like the hippies were in the 1970s.

Now we have Gen Z in the coveted “young people today” position and Generation Alpha is waiting in the wings.

The oldest Gen Alpha kids are 14 right now, meaning these kids were born in 2010 at the earliest, and that is so weird to me.

I’m only now learning to accept 90’s nostalgia. And I know we will be switching to early 2000s nostalgia soon and I will be completely lost.

I mean, I am already completely lost because I have never watched any of the one hour dramas that rule the culture for a spell.

So no Game of Thrones, no Downton Abbey, no The Sopranos, no Breaking Bad, no The Wire, no Orange is the New Black, nothing. None of these shows appealed to me.

Admittedly, that is largely because by the time I hear of these shows, they are already massive cultural juggernauts and I instinctively hide from shit like that.

I’m Gen-X and that means I inherenly avoid massively popular mainstream things. To me, those things always read as “crowded”, emotionally speaking, and I don’t endure tightly packed crowds for anything short of immortality.

Social anxiety. Claustrophobia. Bad childhood experiences. An extremely strong need for autonomy. By their powers combined, these things make tight crowds a no-go.

Oh, and tragically poor childhood socialization too.

I try to keep an open mind about things. I don’t reject things solely because they are mainstream. I am open to absolutely anything being good.

But I confess that when something gets acclaimed as the new thing “everyone” is watching, that makes me want to avoid it like the proverbial plague.

Call it anti-social. Call me a typical “edgy” Gen X-er. Call me closeminded. I won’t argue with any of those.

But I have been a contrarian all my life. Whichever way the herd went, I went the other way, and benefitted from whatever they left behind.

There can be a potent advantage in being an outlier.

Which is good, because the reasons I have to stay at the edge of the herd are not good.

Deep down in the guts of my nervous system, I am still the monkey raised in isolation who now sees the other monkeys as a threat.

I consider myself lucky that all this resulted in was my being a loner. It could have been so much worse. I could have ended up with a rage disorder, or Asperger’s, or even severe withdrawn nonverbal autism.

And the one thing I am not is a misanthrope.

Even though God knows I have every reason to be.

More after the break.

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More about misanthropy

The thing about misanthropy is that it’s not logically supportable.

None of our opinions on “people” are valid. There is no person named “people” about whom we can generalize. There’s almost eight billion human beings alive on planet Earth right now, and you think you know something about ALL of them?

Any opinion we have about “people” (or “humanity” or “the average citizen” or whatever) is clearly hopelessly biased by our own singular personal experiences which cannot, in any sense, be taken to be typical for the entire species.

Same with opinions about “life”. Whose life? When? Where? If you think life sucks, then that must mean that you think literally nobody is happy. Not even the people whose success in life you envy and resent.

Now I am not saying these abstractions are not necessary. Indeed, I am not even saying they are optional. Our anthropomorphic bias is so incredibly pervasive and strong that we even have to relate to the entire species AND life itself like it’s a person.

It’s hardwired into us. Myself included. I have had dark thoughts about “people” and “life” before. Knowing that these abstractions are irrational hardly makes me immune.

But it does give me a way to rescue myself from such dark ruminations. I can remind myself that whatever I am feeling about “people” is not based on anything rational and therefore I am free to discard it and return to neutral whenever I want to.

Because the truth is, we don’t know anything about “everybody”. But that truth is so massively unacceptable to us that we have no choice but to pretend we do.

The real truth of unique individuality multiplied by eight billion people is absolute madness and chaos without some degree of generalization.

And as irrational as they may be, these generalizations are functional. They “work”. They allow us to navigate the extreme complexity of the modern human social web without completely losing our minds and ending up hiding under the bed.

So consider these accurate but unwelcome observations of mine to be something you simply keep in your back pocket for emergencies in which an exit from social reality and its distortions is needed.

Otherwise, carry on illogically.

After all, we’re only human!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But I have a potential excuse.

First, the error : Woke up from a nap at around 3:35 pm. Blearily sat down right here in front of Mister Computer with the intention of fucking around on the Web for a while, just until my usual 4:05 pm lunch time.

But somehow, I ended up lying down and going back to sleep instead.

I don’t remember doing that. I don’t remember deciding to do it either. I just remember waking up ar around 5:45 pm and now here I am.

And that is…. troubling.

And now I feel quite feverish. I feel hot all over and I’m dizzy and incredibly thirsty.

So thirsty that I filled my usual drinking glass with water from the bathroom sink sat down, and drank the whole 1.2 L of water in a matter of minutes.

Got Julian to bring me a can of pop and to refill my drinking glass from the Brita pitcher. That’s something like 1.5 L of fluids total.

Bam. It’s all gone too. Only took slightly longer.

And now I’ve realized that I am incredibly hungry as well. I have already eaten what would be my usual portion of trail mix and now I am eating another equal portion, plus some Vegetable Thins, plus an orange.

And, thank God, that seems to have at least slowed down the Hunger Express.

Oh, and to top it all off, I am having trouble reading what I am writing off the monitor for some reason, and I am committing a fair bit more typos then usual.

I am not well.

I suspect my blood sugar was crashing too. That would explain the mega-hunger and the visual distortion and perhaps the extreme thirst too, although I associate that more with high blood sugar than with low.

But not the feverish symptoms. Those must be something else. Something viral, maybe.

I honestly possibly should have called 911 or gotten Julian to drive me to the ER, but I was far too mentally disjointed and out of phase to even contemplate doing that.

Even getting dressed feels out of reach at the moment.

I seem to have weathered the worst of it, although I suspect I am going to need still more trail mix and crackers before the hunger demon is truly sated.

So I am not feeling at all well. That’s what I am driving at, I guess.

Thus the temporary suspension of my hardcore self-exploration here in the pages of my blog. The blog that is the only thing I’ve actually produced for many years.

It’s OK, I guess.

And people do seem to be impressed when I tell them I write 1K words a day. I have written literally millions of works over the years (do the math) and I sure as hell can’t even imagine stopping .

I mean, what the hell would I even do with myself then? This blog is the only thing holding me together. It gives me something to do every day that is well within my capabilities and that serves my overwhelming need to express myself in words.

Arguably, something more ambitious would serve it even better. But I do what I can.

I have no idea what I just survived an attack of. Low blood sugar, for sure, and dehydration, but what caused those remains a mystery.

As is what led to me taking that weird extra nap. Like, WTF was up with that? I don’t like blank spaces in my memories. They disturb me.

Of course, I am going to be monitoring myself for more weirdness and if things get bad, I am going to call 911.

Now I am going to lay down and sleep.

This time, on purpose.

My life is so weird.

More after the break.

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Another late meal

Seeing as I had “lunch” at 5:45 pm, it should come as no surprise to you that I am here eating my “supper” at 9:45 pm.

Well, at least the 45s line up.

The good news is that I feel one hell of a lot better now. Whatever weird fit overtook me earlier seems to have vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.

It’s not 100 percent gone. I still feel a little overheated, and I’m a tiny bit dizzy. But at least the rapacious hunger and throat-parching thirst are gone.

So I am back to the sad state that is my “normal”.

And this time, I did lay down to sleep on purpose, which is good, but when I woke up I realized I hadn’t set an alarm or even looked at what time it was first.

Which is unlike me. And that’s troubling.

But it’s all over now so I can just forget the whole thing ever happened and go on with my life exactly like I always do!

Not the smart way to live, granted, but if I ran to my doctor or the ER or Urgent Care every time my health did something weird, I would basically never leave.

Not to mention what that would do to my latent hypochondria.

Ergo, I have to be judicious about what constitutes an emergency.

Or if not judicious, at least flippant.

Hopefully I well be good to go (g2g) for tomorrow’s Wound Care appointment. I’ve been getting pain in the wound on my left foot again, so I look forward to a dressing change.

Seems to happen more when I am wearing my beloved “hospital socks”, otherwise adorably known as “Padded Paws”, the cozy non-slip socks that they get you to wear in Richmond Hospital so that you don’t end up slipping and sliding on the floor.

I love these socks. But I get the feeling that I should never wear them for more than a day, otherwise the hurting starts.

Normally, I only change my socks when I am changing my clothes to go out of the apartment, and that only happens three times a week.

I probably should fix that. I am sure Julian would not mind washing more socks. It would make so little difference to his workload.

And my feet would thank me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK. Time for an actual plan. Let’s do it.

Oh, I don’t frigging know. There’s too many possibilities and so I end up in that Infinite Corridor of Infinite Doors again.

Even though I know it’s all bullshit. If I really wanted to make a go of this Notd thing, I would just enter kamikaze mode, jump in with both feet, and figure it out.

And I am sure they have tons of resources for us writers on the site too. Suggestions for topics, tips for getting started, guides to general writing styles, and so on.

So really, the problem is that I am conflicted. I want to go out into the world and try to make something of myself, even if it’s only on the Internet, but a much deeper and stronger part of me is scared shitless to go out there and until I convince that part of me that exposure is not a fate worse than death, I’m not going anywhere.

Until then, I will not be able to plan jack shit. Damn it. When I try to imagine actually doing the thing everything in my mind just falls apart and shatters.

So once again, we end up where we always end up : with me trying to convince my inner child that it’s okay to go out and play.

The mean kids are long gone. I am not going to get bullied or attacked or mocked if people can see me. I don’t have to live like I’m hiding from the fucking feds.

Yes, going out there will trigger a massive rise in stimulation levels. Even when it’s safely mediated by my beloved screens. Being seen and interacting with others, possibly even in realtime, is definitely gonna freak me out.

At first. But everything sucks at first. That’s common knowledge. And if you want to get anywhere and/or do anything in life, you have to learn to hang in there and keep going until you make it through the beginning part that sucks.

Which involves getting over a too easily triggered flight response, I guess.

I am reminded of how my beloved babysitter Betty helped me get over my fear of loud noises when I was a preschooler.

There was a train going by just after we had crossed the tracks, and normally this would have sent me running because it was so loud. but Betty held me there, with the train passing five feet away, and stroked my hair and said things like, “See? Nothing’s happening. You’re okay. ” until the train had passed.

And you know what? It worked. I stopped being scared of loud noises right there and then. She helped me persist long enough to learn that the noises were no big deal. They couldn’t hurt me. I was fine.

I am going to try to remember that day. In that simple way she helped me to become less of a pussy, and I am eternally grateful for that.

Unfortunately, she was not there for the rest of my childhood.

Anyhow, enough reverie, back to the topic.

Which, as it turns out, is my fear. The fear that keeps me from being able to plan what I am going to do on Notd.

I feel like I can face my fear head on now. I can deliberately trigger it hard in myself and then just wade all through the fear till I pop out of the other side of it.

It’s not quite “leaning in” but it’s close.

And I am pretty sure that by doing so, I reduce the fear. Make it smaller. Deprive it of some of its power. Take control away from it.

And in doing so, be Betty to myself.

You see? Nothing bad is happening. You’re okay!

More after the break.

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This can never be enough

It just… can’t.

If I honestly thought that this stupid pointless worthless fucking life of mine was all I was going to get until the day I die, I would just plain give up.

I would just go to bed and wait to die. Might as well get it over with. It’s not like I am going to be missing anything, and the world can sure as hell go on without me.

So I have to believe that I will one day rise from my grave and join the world and be an actual human adult some day.

I’m not asking for a lot. A job, a boyfriend, a place of my own. The sorts of things that normal, healthy, decent people take for granted.

It’s that or rot to death in this sepulcher of a “life” and that is just plain not acceptable. I deserve so much more than that and it’s not like people are lining up to rescue me so it’s up to me to git that shit done.

An argument could be made that my dreams of escape are what are hurting me the most as I continually reach out for something I cannot grasp and feel the heartache and frustration all that dreaming causes me.

My brother would tell me to just try to make some kind of life for myself.

Well that’s what I am trying to do. I’m not pining for superstardom, though I would not turn it down. I just want a simple, decent life where I have some dignity and some resources and someone to share a bed and a life with.

Like I wrote in Part 1, the problem is that my fear is still holding me back. But that is going to end some time soon. I am going to keep raising my demons so I can banish them permanently until there is nothing left to hold me back from reaching on out to that big ol world out there and finding some kind of way to be a grownup.

Because this bullshit eternal child genius existence sucks. I am so damned sick of only knowing how to entertain myself and thus letting all my fabulous gifts rot on the vine.

I should be able to rise like a god and shine like a star for all the world to see.

But barring that, a decent job would be nice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I find it mildly humorous that, despite my having been doing the blister packed medications thing for over six weeks now, and as a result taking my meds with breakfast and supper instead of taking them all with lunch. I still get this surge of energy at lunchtime as my body and mind get ready to take all them meds.

Well, you do something (like taking your meds with lunch) literally thousands of times in a row and I guess it becomes pretty deeply ingrained.

So ingrained, in fact, that its remnants remain active even a month and a half later.

Like old-school nuns, I am a creature of habit.

Reaching the end of my rope in Pathfinder : Kingmaker. There is very little left to do. There will eventually be the final confrontation with Nyrissa, the eeeeevil fae queen and/or sorceress and/or goddess who is the main antagonist of the game but until then, I have kind of run out of steam (but not Steam, ha ha. ) in the game.

The only quests I have left are ones I have no idea how to pursue, and presiding over my “shittier than underneath the outhouse” kingdom where problems keep coming up that I can’t solve because my kingdom is falling apart and therefore all the problems have a 0 percent chance of my people solving them is really gtting me down.

To the point where I am seriously pondering using a save game editor to force my kingdom into being fully of shiny happy people holding hands and then praying to one of the game’s many gods (Pharasma?) that I can keep it that way.

It’s either that or start a new playthrough. And I am not quite ready for that yet, although my current level of passive frustration makes it a tempting idea.

But I might just live long enough to finish the whole goddamned thing, so I am not going to start a new anything until then.

It’s a good game. But it’s a marathon. So far I have played it for almost 220 hours, according to Steam, and it ain’t done yet.

Same with Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey. I’ve played it for 182.3 hours now and the end is nowhere in sight.

I am very impressed with all the time and effort into the Elysium DLC expansion. It’s pretty much an entirely new game to play after you finish the main campaign, and that, I am sure, was fantastic for people who had beaten the game when it first came out and are looking for a reason to start playing again after all these years, but for “late in the game’s life cycle” gamers like me, it’s a pain.

That probably should have been more sentence. Oh well.

Come to think of it, I’m also pretty stuck in Fallout 2. I have done all the quests I know how to do around Klamath, the Umbra Tribe village, and The Den, and yet I am still nowhere near strong enough to make the trip to Vault City to the east.

The encounters in that direction are way too tough. Huge gangs of bandits, even huger mobs of monsters, bleh.

I am going to need nearly godlike strength to deal with that shit.

And more teammates. So far it’s just me and Sulik, my fellow tribal, and he’s awesome and all but not nearly enough to deal with the kind of numbers I am facing.

So all I can do is explore. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world, I suppose, but I much prefer to be driven forward by the plot.

But what do you expect from a game from 1998? That’s over 25 years ago! A quarter century! That’s millennia in gamer years.

I should be grateful that it doesn’t have a command line interface! 😛

More after the break.

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Not quite right

Got myself some Subway tonight and things about it are…. off.

First off, the sub. I decided to try something new on my Cold Cut Combo : the Smoky Honey Mustard sauce. I like smoky flavoured things. I like honey mustard. Sounded like a winning combo to me.

And it tastes good…. but then it doesn’t. It has an odd chemical type aftertaste for me, a sort of sickly sweet rubbery tang that I do not like at all.

And the best part is, I have another six inches of sub to eat after this one! Yay!

So now I feel stupid for having gambled my entire sub on an unknown sauce. I wish I had stuck to my usual mayo + garlic aioli instead.

Which is basically mayo + mayo + garlic.

I’ve realized why I almost always get the Cold Cut Combo, though : it’s the sub that tastes the most like subs tasted when I was a kid.

When I was a young’un, there was only one kind of sub, and that was it. Even during the submarine sandwich craze of the 80’s, the basic Captain Submarine^[1] sub was still salami, pepperoni, lettuce ,onions, and green pepper.

There were other options, like bell peppers and mushrooms, but the basic formula was exactly the same.

Then Subway came along and all heck broke loose! 😛

Then there’s the drink. Amongst the options offered to me was Pepsi Zero Sugar, so I clicked on that when I was ordering.

I would have preferred regular Diet Pepsi, but whatever.

So imagine my horror when what showed up was CHERRY Diet Pepsi Zero Sugar.

I haaaaate cherry cola. That stuff is godawful in my books. So I was now struck without an acceptable beverage option.

I’ve been trying to take drinks of the stuff now and then to see if I can acclimate to the taste of it and it seems to be working a little. At the very least, the horrible cherry flavour isn’t as much of a shock now.

But still…. ick.

I like cherries but I don’t like cherry flavoured things. And especially not maraschino flavoured things, gah.

Give me my darker sweet drinks every time. Caramel, not white sugar.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Have I done this premise before? Eh, whatever.

Watched a video about Jungian psychology that talked about how it is by exploring your shadow – that place where you hide everything you can’t or won’t accept about yourself – that you can find not only true mental health but maybe even your purpose in life.

Now I dunno about that second part. I don’t disagree with Jung per so, just like I don’t disagree with Freud, but both men fell into the pathfinder’s trap of thinking that that marvelous new thing you’ve discovered explains EVERYTHING.

Hold your horses, gentlemen. Let’s not get carried away.

But the idea that you can increase your mental healthy by making the subconscious conscious seems sound to me if not overapplied, so what the hell, let’s try to figure out what all I have shoved out of the light about myself.

There’s a lot.

In fact, from a certain POV. it feels like there is a whole universe of it. For lo these many years, I confined my consciousness to a very narrow corridor of possibilities and everything else got chucked into the fuck-it bucket of my subconscious.

Well I’ve told the bucket where it can stucket (sic) and now it’s like I’ve just landed in Oz and I am seeing life in color for the first time.

Anyhow, enough wittering away. What’s in there?

We’ll tick of the simple, easy ones first : all my basic lizard brain level emotions have been redirected there. Rage, lust, ambition, resentment, bitterness, and so on.

There’s oceans of all that stuff hidden in my shadow because I have never had the guts or the wherewithal to deal with that stuff at all.

It takes a certain amount of boldness and grit to follow your urges in order to slake them, and I have not had that in me.

Instead, I just stick my head in the sand until they go away.

But of course, there’s far, far more than that in there.

Take the entire realm of romantic love. I’ve barely ever been there, and when I did have it, it was online and via text based furry environments and thus rendered “safe”.

Actual normal adult romance has never happened to me, and I honestly don’t know if it ever will. As things stand right now, I can’t see how that could ever happen to a furry urban hermit like myself.

I mean, how would I even meet somebody, let alone become romantically connected to them? My life is so sealed off.

I presumably have all these needs myself but I cut myself off from ever following my instincts and/or doing things purely for my own emotional satisfaction a long time ago, and forced myself into a cage made of logic and cowardice, then managed to forget all about what life outside that cage might mean in regards to myself.

There’s no family or intimacy or sense of connection for me right now. I feel very remotely removed from the human race, and I long for greater connection, and yet I also doubt my ability to maintain such a connection.

I can only imagine myself fleeing from connection because it’s all just too intense and “real” for me and I need to escape into my flickering shadows once more.

And for the stuff in the green zone, I have two kinds of confidence, total, and absent. There are intellectual arenas in which I am completely confident, to the point of seeming arrogant, and I am not sure I could say that I am not.

Maybe being so sure of yourself really IS a form of arrogance. I don’t know.

But outside those areas I am the sad little critter you know and love. Clumsy, shy, and easily confused, I stumble through the scrubby underbrush of the world afraid of everything and doing nothing.

Well, nothing of note, anyhow.

Video games don’t count.

And I long for some confident, competent, noble soul to come scoop me into his arms and give me the comfort and reassurance I need in order to go out and play with the big kids and finally learn how to get along.

More after the break.

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More pyramid stuff

I honestly believe that as simple and obvious as it seems, Maslow’s hierarchy as illustrated above actually contains great wisdom.

Taking another look at the green zone, I guess I started off as a very unique individual and I have never been anything else.

I never felt pressure to conform. Whatever frequency that shit is broadcast on, I don’t receive it. The most I ever had was very vague, diffuse thoughts about what it would take to get along with the other kids.

But it never felt like something I could actually do.

They were as alien to me as I was to them.

Ironically, I actually do better with the stuff at the top of the pyramid, in the purple zone. Creativity I have in spades. Morality has been a deep part of me ever since my early teens, when I first understood that people have a moral stance and it’s something they need to fight and stand up for.

And I have been stockpiling inner potential for so long that it’s like I am stockpiling canned food for the Apocalypse.

So I suppose I am kind of built upside down. I have the top zone and the bottom zone covered, more or less, but everything in the middle is missing.

I have a long way to go before I am truly human. My higher self cannot sustain me without my lower self’s energy and love and warmth. I have been trying to live up where the air is rare for far too long.

Time to climb down and see what’s going on in the real world.

I have insights to share! Anyone want some?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Totally forgot that I did not, in fact, have therapy today.

My therapist is out of town today, and unlike other times, he can’t still do our phone therapy because his family is dragging him off to some resort way up a mountain where the cell reception is terrible.

Knowing how people feel about their dependence on technology these days, I am betting that for this resort, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.

“Oh dear, not a place where there’s no cell reception and no WiFi so my family will be forced to get off their goddamned phones and actually look me in the eye when we talk And how will my boss, who doesn’t understand how being on vacation means I can’t solve his problems at work, get ahold of me at all hours, day or night? Darn. ”

It must be so much harder to get away from it all these days, mainly because we carry “it all” around in our goddamned pockets.

And just think, it used to be that all you had to do was go for a rest in the country.

Anyhow, I forgot I had no therapy today. ^[1] So there I was waiting for that weekly phone call and getting increasingly nervous and tense as the minutes ticked on by.

Then, at 1:17 pm, just when I was gearing myself up to phone Doctor Costin myself (not easy with my Avoidant nature), I suddenly remembered that I would not, in fact, be hearing from him until Friday, the 13th of September.

It’s an easy day to remember, that Friday the 13th of September.

So then I felt dumb, of course. But it’s a familiar kind of dumb, a dumb grounded in my tendency to be very absentminded.

Then, just now, I sat down to eat my lunch, and started looking around for that can of pop I was sure I had just put down on the desk in front of me.

And I looked and I looked but it was nowhere to be found, and I was staring into the face of a flat out Fortean mystery when I suddenly remembered that there was only one can of pop chilled in the fridge so I decided to leave that one to have with supper and therefore the can of pop I was sure I had gotten out of the fridge to have with my lunch was, in fact, a hallucinatory belief.

So I am not having a great brain day.

Meanwhile, on the “Fru makes actual life progress” front, seeing as FlexJobs slammed the door in my face yesterday, I must now turn my attention to Notd.

And not in some flighty, airy, “ooh, I could do THIS or I could do THAT….” kind of way like I have done befoe.

I mean… making actual, executable plans. The kind that require…. decisions.

And decisions are very much my cross to bear. There is something about my highly creative mind that makes it hard for me to pick an option and go with it.

It’s like my mind can’t help but try to go in all directions at once and that, of course, instantly jams the system and I don’t pick anything.

And I know this is somehow linked with creativity. Like that going in all directions at the same time is how my creative mind approaches a novel problem, or something.

But the real bogeyman behind the scenes is, as always, fear. Fear of choosing the “wrong” thing and getting hurt.

But like… who the fuck cares? Make mistakes, get hurt, learn, grow. That’s life.

And I am going to have to make peace with that if I want to more forward.

More after the break.

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A bad moment

Brown alert, poop talk ahead.

So, I pooped.

And it was kinda rough. There was definitely some pain on exit. Kind of felt like my poop was covered in broken eggshells. Not good.

But I checked the bowl – no blood – so I added it to the ever growing list of “weird shit (sic) my body does that’s not enough reason to go to the ER” and put it out of my mind.

Until about ten minutes or so later, when I was sitting in front of the computer and a terrible sharp pain shot through me from right in the middle of my guts.

Kind of felt like I was shitting the proverbial brick.

Luckily, it passed through me in about three seconds and I have felt relatively fine every since. But that freaked me out some.

I am worried that something is happening with that umbilical hernia I’ve had forever and that the surgeon didn’t think warranted surgery.

It was a risk versus reward thing. It would have been a pretty deep surgery that would have taken a long and difficult time to recover from in order to repair a hernia that did not seem to be causing any trouble.

I’m worried that the last part of it might have changed.

A lot of my gastrointestinal issues seem to center around a spot directly behind my navel, and that’s exactly where my umbilical hernia is, logically enough, located.

And that’s where the pain I had earlier was located too.

So I dunno. It would make sense if the hernia has gotten worse and has started to push up against everything else in my gut, making the spaces for those things smaller, that this would create both a fecal and a urinary bottleneck that causes issues.

If so, someone might need to finally get around to fixing it. And I really don’t want to have to go through all that. There would be so much pain and so much scariness and so much time stuck in a hospital bed in a hospital ward and there are so very many things that can go wrong and the whole thing scares the bejesus out of me.

So I won’t be sounding a brown alert just yet.

But another incident like the one I had tonight and I will have no choice.

I still kind of feel like I ate peanuts with the shell still on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My life has become more painful lately.

And it really highlights one of the problems with have my meds blister-packed.

First, the pain. The wound on my left foot has been hurting all day. It’s a stinging pain followed by a tingle, ergo I am naming this sensation a “stingle” or “stingling”.

Don’t use that without my permission. It’s mine, dammit! 😛

And it’s beginning to worry me. I’ve had this sensation before but not this frequently. It makes me wonder if the nurse got the dressing wrong yesterday and now it’s letting in more sweat and the salt in the sweat is stinging me.

It’s literally rubbing salt in my wound.

And I have skin ulcers in my perianal region ^[1], which makes my usual sessile nature somewhat more painful than it needs to be.

I shift in my seat a lot. I hope that counts as exercise.

And my poor deteriorating muscles are hurting more as well. I am feeling distinctly rusty today. I might take my second-last Aleve to help deal with it.

Speaking of pills, there’s that disadvantage of blister packing I mentioned.

See, back in the days of pill bottles (it seems so long ago), if I was having an especially bad day with the muscle pain, I could just take more Gabapentin.

But not now. I don’t have access to my medications, they are locked away in plastic bubbles and I therefore do not have any control over my dosages.

At this point, I am tempted to tell Simon, my pharmacist, that I want to go back to the bottle(s), but he puts so much work into blister packing my meds away that I feel like it would be a dick move to give up on it now.

But I still miss my bottles. I had a system. It worked.

Oh well. I get the feeling that this next phase of my life will involve me discovering a lot of feelings that I didn’t know were there because they were locked behind my wall and not allowed to get anywhere near being felt, let alone expressed.

I’m visualizing it as me sitting with a friend in the front room of a pleasant but sparsely furnished suburban home having declared an open house so we could meet the neighbors and having no idea who the heck will show up.

But I’m not afraid. For I am armed with GINGERBREAD COOKIES.

Oh, and speaking of moving on with my life, I gathered all my courage this morning and decided it was time to log in to FlexJobs and find myself some work.

Only to find the motherfucking website wouldn’t take my credit card.

Son of a bitch. After all the avoiding and delaying and telling myself I am just not ready yet, I finally get my shit together to embark upon my long delayed journey into adulthood and the boat fucking sinks on launch.

I tries to keep the energy going and switch over to Notd instead, but getting that up and going is gonna take a hell of a lot more gumption than I had on hand at that moment.

So many decisions…. I know, I know, just play around with it.

I’m working on it.

So that was a kick in the taint. And I have started to be in a really bad mood in the morning before I eat, just like my late father and my brother, and that’s not at all a welcome development in my life.

I guess that’s just one of the emotions I didn’t know I had.

Welcome to my home. Have a cookie.

More after the break.

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“Now you’ll really be a POTTED plant!” I said as I got my begonias drunk.

---

Well I’m here

As are you. Thanks.

I feel rather scattered at the moment. It’s been difficult just getting my thoughts lined up enough to start making the words happen. My mind wants to run around and play like a big dog let outdoors for the first time since last fall.

So I keep having to direct my attention back to what I am doing, and that’s a pain.

That aside, though, I am feeling better than I did early. I feel more solid and more healthy and overall more robust and alive, and that’s a very good thing.

Not sure what made the difference. If I had to guess (and I do), I would say I either got caught up on sleep or hydration or both.

I will try to remember how I feel right now the next time I am being lazy about getting up and refilling my water glass in order to stay hydrated.

I just get so tired of the whole “a river runs through me” routine. Getting the water, drinking the water, peeing, lather, rinse, repeat.

My bladder gets especially tired of it all. I’m not sure if it’s healthy and normal or a sign of something wrong in my waterworks, but sometimes I get this ache in the lower right quadrant of my torso when I have been peeing a lot and it makes me wonder what the heck is going on in there.

I’ve probably said this before, but I really wish we had the medical beds from Star Trek so I could get absolutely everything scanned at the same time and doctors could see my entire body to any degree of magnification so they could fix everything that’s wrong and I could experience actual health for once.

Oh, and it would kick my hypochondria out on its ass too.

I need DATA, god damn it!

Plus I am positive that wild holodeck orgies would really reduce my stress.

Ah well. Maybe some day I will have the money to go to some fancy spa and have good looking men with big, strong hands do nice things to me for a while.

Will that include wild orgies?

Only if my doctor okays it and/or participates.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been weird.

Did the Wound Care thing. That was normal. Got a nurse called Emily, who had seen me as recently as last week.

I really wish I could have the same nurse each time. That way I could get to know my nurse and establish a relationship with them.

Like what is happening with me and Albert, the fellow who gives me my shower on Fridays. Over the weeks, I am sure we will get to know each other a bit.

After all, he’s already seen me naked and touched my junk.

With a facecloth. But still.

After Wound Care, we came home and I got some more sleep. Woke up around 1:30 pm or so and decided it was time to tackle this really hard fight in Pathfinder : Kingmaker. and finally kick its ass.

Thus began my very deep involvement in the game. I have to hand it to the devs at Owlcat, who made the game. It took all I had to beat that fight.

Plus I lost twice before I managed to cobble together a winning strategy. And the winning fight took over an hour to complete.

By the end of it, I was sweaty and punchy and totally exhausted. That’s why I was just sitting there, stunned, when it slowly dawned on me that I was hungry.

And from there, with dawning horror, I realized I was really REALLY hungry. And tingly. And feeling a bit faint. And in the background, I felt this dizzy, falling sensation that I know all too well.

I was having a blood sugar crash.

And it’s not hard to see why, in retrospect. First I went to Wound Care and back, and that burned a lot of blood sugar. Then I spent a long time locked into strategic combat with a video game and that took an intense mental effort that must have burned a hell of a lot more brain calories.

Our brains are very greedy beasties, after all. One fifth of all our metabolic output goes to keep those hungry engines in our heads fed.

Just thought I’d share that little factoid. You’re welcome!

So I think it was all that skullduggery that triggered my blood sugar collapse. My body is not used to that level of metabolic demand. I probably blew through my entire metabolic reserve when I was playing that game.

Obviously, my blood sugar crashing is an emergency, so I stopped everything and started stuffing my face with Cheez-its and trail mix.

And that seemed to do the trick. I could feel that the collapse had been halted and then it was just a matter of eating enough trail mix to get my blood sugar level up.

My trail mix supply has obviously taken quite the hit, but whatever.

Looking back, this was not that bad a crash. I caught it early and luckily Cheez-its and trail mix were enough to halt the decline, unlike other crashes I’ve had where I try eating trail mix and my body is like TOO SLOW! NEED SUGAR NOW!

Bodies can be so bossy.

After I recovered, I checked the time and it was almost time for lunch. And blogging.

So I called Julian, hoping to get him to bring me some things so I could slap together a crude but effective lunch.

But he was not at home. Damn it.

So I had to get up and go to the kitchen to make my lunch. And when I got there I realized that I was quite dizzy.

So that made making lunch an adventure.

Another exciting day practicing the delicate art of not dying.

So far so good.

More after the break.

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On unleashing the tiger

Although in my mind, it’s a sexy slinky cartoon tiger, like Shere Khan.

Seriously, though, I know that by opening the door to my id and all the Jungian shadow creatures locked up behind it, I am inviting chaos into my life.

I accept this truth. I know that there will be a certain air of lion taming to my life for a while. I will have to deal with my fuzzy demons on a case by case basis instead of simply suppressing damn near everything equally, across the board.

I can’t get the image of myself strapped in place and forced to look directly forward a la Clockwork Orange out of my head. It’s like when, long ago, in my early 20’s, I had to pull myself back together after a total nervous breakdown, I did so by getting to a somewhat stable place and then nailing myself there.

And then, the real trick bit came : hiding the fact that I had done this from myself. And thereby setting up a kind of virtual environment in my mind where it seemed like I could look around and see amazing things about how things work and understand so much that other people find utterly opaque and mysterious and so I could not possibly be locked in a jail cell if I can do all that!

But it was all just images projected on the walls of my tiny room. I could maintain the illusion as long as I didn’t actually try to go anywhere or do anything, but that is one hell of a hefty price to pay for a little mental respite.

Now, though, I am determined to get the fuck out of here. I have opened the door and now, I suppose I am waiting till I feel “ready” to go through it.

But what am I doing to get ready? Arguably very little.

I might just have to activate kamikaze mode and just fling myself into the void and trust that I can learn to fly before I hit the ground.

I mean, here I am at the end of the high dive board, looking down at the water and knowing that I need to jump.

In order to jump, though, I will need to kill another little part of myself to set myself free. I will have to damage myself in a deep and terrible way. And it’s gonna hurt.

But I don’t think I will ever feel “ready”. And I sure can’t wait around for it any more.

Time to shout, “Aieeeee!” and leap into the void.

Aaaaany minute now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.