I think I may have had some sort of cardiac…. event… last night.

I was just lying in bed with the lights off, like I do, when I got this really “funny” feeling in my chest. A weird, wet, tingling kind of feeling. And at the same time, I became dizzy and nauseous and a tiny bit faint.

So I sensibly continued to lie there in the dark while this happened, and the dizziness and nausea soon passed but that “funny” feeling hung around for hours.

And I don’t know what to make of this odd occurrence. I can’t very well call it a heart attack as my symptoms were quite mild and there was no pain or major discomfort.

But then again, I have no idea what would have happened if I had tried to stand up or even sit up during the incident. It might have gone very badly for me.

And it weirds me out that this came on when I was doing absolutely nothing. I think my body would have been experiencing more stress and strain if I’d been asleep.

So apparently some part of myself threw a wobbly without being triggered by anything I did. Some important thing in my heart got to the point where it was just fundamentally fed up by what was going on a so it pitched a fit.

This frightens me terribly. If I am not even safe when I am at a point of bare minimum strain, then I have no control over this shit at all.

Well, except for one thing : I can take it to the doctor. Which I think I am going to have to do. I was already thinking about getting Julian to take me to Urgent Care after Wound Care (and then on to Urgent Wound) tomorrow because the stitch in my side has actually gotten worse, and then this thing happened.

At least this shit isn’t hitting me on the weekend, so there’s a chance that Urgent Care won’t be TOO slammed.

The stitch and the cardiac event might be related, might not be. I will present them both to the UC doctor as potentially related.

And that stitch has been there for over a week now. And like I said, it’s gotten worse. I think that whatever happened in my sleep to cause it the first time happened again, so now it’s more painful and seems to involve more muscles.

Which is another good reason to get my big bad beautiful butt in front of a doctor while it’s still a problem I can live with.

Luckily, it mostly only hurts when I sit up or stand up or twist my torso while reaching for something, and stuff like that.

But I guess my period of relative quiet and peace and at least the illusion of stable health is over and it’s time for things to start going wrong again.

It was nice while it lasted. I will miss it now that it’s gone.

Of course, the most probable outcome of my going to UC remains that they will find absolutely nothing wrong with me and I will feel silly and stupid for wasting everybody’s time by acting like some minor thing is a big bad disease.

Either that, or I simply have an atypical ailment that the usual medical screens don’t catch and so I actually am sick but in a way I can neither justify or explain.

And I shouldn’t have to. I’m the patient. I show up, describe my symptoms, comply with the doctor’s instructions, and then my part is over.

It’s up to them to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me.

Yeah… good luck with that.

More after the break.

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It ain’t good

Today has been rough.

My mysterious condition has been kicking my ass today. I just staggered back to this computer desk of mine after making my supper and I was in a LOT of pain.

Something to remember the next time I get to wondering if the whole thing is psychosomatic. I can’t make this shit up.

There was too many areas hurting all at once, and in different ways, for it to be something projected by my imagination.

But it was real bad. Pain all through my knees, my thighs, my forearms, and in all my major joints. Oh, and a sick headache like from heatstroke, too.

Life is like a box of chocolates. I can’t eat it or it will kill me.

So I am not in the best of moods right now. I have honestly been feeling cranky all day, even since that little cardiac incident.

I guess pain and fear can make a fella ornery.

But you know what? I embrace and accept my shitty mood. Excrement occurs. Now that I have stopped suppressing and compressing my emotions in order to create an artificial state of eerie calm, every possible emotion is in play.

And I like it that way. It feels good to feel things again. I want to be alive inside and ready to feel my way through this world as I explore it and to keep on listening to my emotions instead of stuffing them in a closet with a rag in their mouth.

Harsh image, but apt.

And I am just getting started. I’m still standing in the doorway enjoying the breeze and luxuriating in the glorious feeling of fresh air on my skin. I am pausing at the threshold.

There is so much more for me to open up and explore. Right now, the weight of possibilities is keeping me from going forward. That whole, “but then I would have to figure out what to do with myself” thing still lingers on.

But I am working on a solution. One that says it is better to make the wrong decision impulsively and learn from it than to linger forever in indecision.

There are far, far worse things than making the wrong choice.

So fuck it. Flip a fucking coin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, they can be.

Just got finished playing an epic session of Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey.

I’ve almost finished the Elysium part of the post-main-plot expansion (which is turning out to be so…. frigging…. long… ) and that means I have to fight Ros.

I knew Ros for most of this section as a sweet brown doggie who looks kind of like a greyhound (a brownhound?) and seemed to show up wherever I went and whom I would always stop to say hello to.

Sadly, that’s all I could do.

In this game, you cannot pet the dog.

And I knew the game was probably up to something with him, but I didn’t expect that at the end of this part of the game, he’d turn into a giant three headed dog.

Oh. Ros. As in Cerberos. Very cute, game.

So that’s the boss fight I am currently stuck on. Makes sense, I already fought the Medusa, the Minotaur, the Cyclops, and the Sphinx, so what famous Greek monster was left for me to fight?

Makes me wonder who the boss of the NEXT section will be.

I bring this up not just to wank on about the game I am playing but because it brought up an issue I have always had when it comes to things like boss fights in video games.

And that issue is focus.

It’s extremely hard for me to remain completely focused on and engaged with the here and now, in realtime, without daydreaming or other secondary mentation.

And that’s fine for most of modern life. Very little in the modern world requires your completely undivided attention. A guy like me who is never quite all in one place can get along fine most of the time.

But boss fights, like sports, require completely focusing on what you are doing and that’s what trips me up every time because it is extremely difficult for me to remain focused on what I’m doing and what is happening in the game.

In fact. I just realized as I was fighting Ros that when I am doing something like that, I am continuously fighting my own mental wanderlust in order to stay in the zone and beat that dang boss.

And it’s not an easy thing to fight. It’s like trying to stuff an octopus into a box. As you are stuffing one tentacle in, two more slip out, and so to keep the dang thing in there requires a constant struggle.

Plus, it really pisses off the octopus.

And I think this might explain my whole clumsy fumbling dyspraxia life. Doing things like sewing or writing longhand or whatnot requires a continuously engaged consciousness in order to keep your hand steady and get it to do what you want it to do.

My, at best, only periodically engaged mind just ain’t gonna cut it.

And I really want to change that. If I was to join some sort of monastery or ashram or whatever where they teach things like meditation, my main immediately goal would be to acquire the ability to focus my mind whenever I need to.

I find my current inability to do so incredibly frustrating. I like to imagine that I am in control of my mind and I can make it do what I want it to do, and I certainly can do a lot of amazing things with it, but focusing it is not one of them.

And I get the feeling that if I could just get my mind together and flowing as one, I would find it a hell of a lot easier to get my life together, too.

More after the break.

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The format is to not have a format

Every once in a while, I pondering trying to create something more…. commercial.

Ya know, the sort of thing that might appeal to people who are not my dear friends. Strangers, even, who haven’t even met me in RL and found out just how cute I am.

And the thing is, I know I could do it. I have the skills to write all sorts of more generally accessible things. I could write short stories, or start another webcomic (AI art plus text balloons?), or try to do a novel again, or do a humour column or a political one.

And so forth and so on, anon.

I could do all sorts of more commercially works, and make all kinds of things.

But it won’t be THIS thing. This thing you’re reading right now.

And now. Aaaaaand…. now.

Spooky, isn’t it?

THIS thing is my big pile marked “miscellaneous”. Whatever I need to output, it can take as input, because there’s no format to get in the way.

Everything I write comes from deep inside me. Therefore, it is dictated by whatever it is I have going on in there. That precludes any sort of preconceived formula for what can and cannot go into this thing because what comes out might not fit the format and well, fuck that, I’m going to write what I need to write regardless.

I could do the “suite of pseudonyms” thing, where I have different pen names for different sorts of writing.

One for my political screeds, one for my humorous takes on things, one for my science fiction, and so forth.

But even that feels too restrictive. I deeply mistrust categorization because no matter how many categories I make, something is going to fall between categories, or worse, belong equally in more that one category, and so I will chuck it in the “misc” bin, and then more and more things will end up in “misc” as my high powered analytical brain produces more fine distinctions between categories, and before you know it, you have a dozen categories with exactly one thing in them and a “misc” folder with everything else and the kitchen sink.

So fuck that. I will write whatever I need to write at the time I write it and somebody else can figure out where to file it.

Like an agent, for example. Oh, what a lovely fantasy it is to imagine having a wonderful, magical agent to whom I can send anything and they will know exactly who will buy it.

Of course, I’d have to do something to attract their interest first…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or in the words of Pink Floyd, tear down the wall.

Well, I can’t do that. It’s a load-bearing wall! So I am instead letting it slowly fade away, and thereby become extremely permeable.

Its ghost will linger for some time, a pro forma placeholder to keep the part of me that still feels the need to hide away from the big bad world happy, but eventually it will be gone, gone, hone, and I will have to learn to deal with the world on a more case my case basis instead of blocking almost everything.

A long, LONG time ago, I wrote about black-listers and white-listers^[1], and I think that metaphor applies here. White-listers are people who only let a small number of approved things in and black-listers are people who only keep certain things out.

I’ve been a heavy white-lister for a long time, and while I had some idea of that way back when, I don’t think I really grasped what that meant until just recently when I became fully consciously aware of that great wall inside me and realized how it was the root of all my problems.

All my cold and lonely Midnight Tundra suffering has been because that god damned wall was keeping all the warmth and love and sunshine out. My awkward clumsiness, both physical and social, has been because it’s hard to be adroit and graceful when you are doing everything behind a big fricking wall. My inability to connect with and get along with others is entirely because of this wall between me and the world.

And all because some asshole thought he’d get his rocks off by violating me when I wasn’t even old enough to go to school yet.

I’ve suffered for 47 years because of it. He probably forgot about it a week later.

Anyhow, the wall is fading away and I am standing in that newly opened doorway, enjoying the fresh breeze and feeling the sun on my skin.

I still haven’t gone through the door but that’s coming soon. Right now I feel like I am struggling to be born unto adulthood at long last and like all births the process is painful and messy and a hell of a lot of work.

In fact, you might even describe it as hard labour. Bad dum tish.

But I know I’ll make it. There is zero doubt in my mind about that. Certain processes can’t be stopped once they get past a certain point, and this is one of them.

Plus I finally have a sense of what it means to move forward emotionally. Meaning to actually process my emotions and deal with them on their own terms, without trying to analyze them or force them into categories or any other bullcrap.

There’s a lot of mind to me. But there is a lot more than mind to me. I have a heart and a soul and a spirit and a body and I am raring to use them all.

I have been frozen in place for a very long time and it was all because of this fucking wall. So the wall has to go.

I am ready to be exposed before my peers.

Because I’m fucking awesome.

More after the break.

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Best pic of Fru yet

Check it out!

There he is living the life of a glamorous thief and folk hero running around the space station above his home planet stealing from the rich and giving to the poor like some kind of fox version of Robin Hood.

If you can imagine such a thing. 😛

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On the up and downs

Still getting used to having a broader range of emotions now.

I think it’s best to come at this as a kind of exploration. I am exploring the full emotional response space when I used to have my emotions nailed in place at a sort of constant low grade depression that it was easy to ignore as long as I stayed distracted.

So I stayed distracted. And ignored the feeling that I was dying inside.

Well I’m alive and breathing now. And honestly, I’m just enjoying how good that feels. My very next priority is to find new places to be, and maybe look for a flexible job on FlexJobs^[2] so I can earn some cash.

Not that I have a pressing need for more money. Other than a new power supply, my computer is pretty much exactly how I want it and I can afford to keep myself in video games, although I suppose it would be nice to be able to afford the new hotness and not games from like five or more years ago.

Just once, I want to be playing what everyone else is playing, dammit.

But as patient readers know, earning money for me is not about getting better stuff, although that would be nice too.

It’s about actually pulling my own weight for once in my life. An end to feeling like a burden to everyone, especially my loved ones. The ability to, for once in my god damned life, stand on my own two feet and declare myself to be a MAN.

In other words, to finally grow the hell up.

On a good day, I sometimes imagine myself to be a pet. My roomies’ pet fox. Sure, I don’t contribute labour to the household and my upkeep requires some work and some investment and can sometimes be a little gross, but that’s true of all pets.

And like a pet, I contribute my charming presence, my adorable manner and endearing clumsiness, my comforting companionship, and my entertaining chatter.

Hmmm. That’s somewhere between a fox and a parrot.

I’m going to have to think this metaphor over. Meanwhile…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As a kid, like millions of other children all over the world, I loved Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Porky Pig and the rest of the Looney Tunes cast.

And one day I was watching the one where Bugs and Daffy do Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and, being a weirdly intellectual and analytical child, I started to wonder : what makes Daffy Duck tick?

See, some throwaway line from him had given me a valuable insight : he was so egotistical and had such a grandiose sense of himself as a way to compensate for a deep down burning hatred of himself.

His psyche had learned to balance itself and make him functional by generating a counter-force even stronger than the self-loathing, and this became his primary mode for dealing with life.

Sometimes, the way to counter being empty inside is to be full of yourself.

And there is some truth and wisdom in that. After all, Daffy Duck might be a vain, greedy, selfish creature, but at least he’s functional and talented and has a way to live life instead of being paralyzed by self-doubt.

Ahem. I believe this is where I come in.

Because I have been toying with the idea of finally letting myself develop a huge ego and see where it takes me for decades now.

After all, a lot of people with even one of my many gifts have big fat egos and very high opinions of themselves. Why not me?

I’m fucking amazing!

I have resisted the allure of egotism for my whole life because I felt like it would take me someplace I really did not want to go. A place where, like Daffy, I am vain, selfish, and arrogant, as well as being pushy, manipulative, scheming, untrustworthy, and at times downright creepy and Satanic.

Let’s just say I get where the snake of Eden was coming from.

But that’s the classic depressive “all or nothing” lie. It’s not like one step in the direction of positive self esteem will lead directly to narcissism and delusions of grandeur.

“Oh no! It’s better to freeze to death than to turn up the thermostat because that will lead directly to us all boiling to death!!!”

That kind of bullshit.

What I want is enough of an ego to function. Something commensurate with my abilities, which would I admit leave me with a pretty big ego.

Well if it gives me the confidence to go take on that big bad world, I’m all for it. I need something to counterbalance my crippling fear of exposure and the voices in my head that still insists that there is nothing but pain out there in the world for me and that the only safety is in staying locked away in this filthy bunker of mine.

It’s not enough – not NEARLY enough – just to know those voices are wrong. Who cares if they are wrong if they are still around? Knowledge is an intellectual solution that bears very little weight in the world of emotions.

Emotions require belief, not just knowledge. Only positive beliefs can cancel out negative beliefs and in the long run even override those negative beliefs by completely erasing the old tapes they reside on.

Because fuck self-loathing. I’m an amazing dude. The hate for myself is sliding right off me like I’m shedding my skin, and I am all glistening and pink and new underneath.

I don’t have to stay where I am.

I don’t have to be who I was.

And I don’t have to live like this.

I’m movin’ on up. Just watch me.

More after the break.

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Another busy Friday

Between Wound Care, ordering my groceries, and showering at Rosewood, my Fridays have become quite hectic.

And I love it. At last, a day where I have things to do and get done.

I am someone who is happiest when he is busy who tragically lacks the ability to make himself busy. It has to come from outside.

I guess I still have a lot of trouble generating my own impetus. On some deep layer, I suppose I don’t feel like I am worth the effort.

Gee, I wonder where I would have gotten that idea.

Eh, fuck it. My tragic childhood is currently open to review, but pretty soon it too will be a part of me I shed like it’s cat fur in the spring and leave behind.

I am through with hiding from reality like I have something to be ashamed of.

I’m fucking awesome.

Anyhow, Wound Care went smoothly. My nurse was one who had changed my dressings once before, but thankfully, she didn’t expect me to remember her name.

Given that most of the other people in the waiting area with me before a Wound Care appointment are SUPER old, that’s a wise policy.

And I am terrible with names.

I need to learn to take a snapshot of my emotional impression of a person and label it with their name when I first meet them.

That’s more or less how I remember people anyhow. How they look is too unreliable for me, given my poor eyesight.

When I got home from Wound Care, I ordered my groceries, and this time I remembered to set the delivery time FIRST.

More on that later.

Then at 2 pm we left for Rosewood.

I am quite happy that it’s now going to be the same worker showering me each week. His name is Albert, which my brain insists on pronouncing “al-BEAR” because that’s how it would be pronounced where I come from even though it is extremely unlikely that he is French Canadian.

I hope I don’t ever call him that out loud.

That went quite well. Being showered by someone else really doesn’t bother me like I thought it would. It is, in fact, quite pleasant.

I think my general friendliness and agreeability covers any embarrassment I might have felt at first. After all, I wouldn’t want to make him uncomfortable!

Then it was back home to await my groceries.

They arrived slightly before 4 pm (grr, my window was 4 pm to 5 pm) and son of a bitch, I am now saddled with some stupid sugar laden mini-cookies instead of my usual fudge striped sugar free Voortman cookies.

And I even have a substitute set up! Son of a bitch, I thought we were beyond this.

But I guess a lot of people are completely puzzled by the fact that the sugar free cookies are not with the other cookies in the cookie section and just grab the closest thing they can find.

And, well, the mini-cookies ARE fudge striped at least.

But still, it pisses me off. I just want to get what I actually order, god damn it!

Now I am going to have to prevail on Julian to go buy them for me as I know he knows where to find them and isn’t going to bring me chocolate frosted Pop-Tarts or whatever.

Oh, and for sheer randomness, we also someone ended up with a loaf of bread I didn’t order. And it turns out the Door Dash system has no way to tell it you got something you didn’t order. It’s all based on problems with the things you ordered.

So, bonus bread, I guess. But I think it’s white bread, and ick. So boring!

I made the usual complaint about the cookies to Door Dash and got the usual refund, which is good and all, but that’s not what I want.

I want my cookies god damn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time, in this case, being my side.

Woke up this morning with what feels like a stitch in my side and from what I can tell it appears to be here to stay.

That’s unheard of for me, at least so far. Usually I can massage those things away, or stretch them out, which hurts like industrial grade fuck but it works.

But this one is hanging around and that has me worried.

For the record, it’s not quite in my side. It’s about two inches ahead of my right side, in what I will affectionately refer to as “the stretchmark zone”, though I suppose for you non-obese people out there it would be known more as my “love handles”.

And it definitely feels muscular. It’s too close to the surface to be some organ or other having an issue, though I could be wrong.

And like the classic stitch in the side, it really feels like some muscles have been stitched together, so that when I move it tugs on the thread painfully.

Right now, I am medium worried about it. It is persistently painful and the pain is bad enough to make me cry out, so on the purely childlike scale, it’s a problem.

But I am not quite ready to take it to the ER or UC yet. After all, for all I know, it might just resolve itself over time. I might feel that tiny pop you feel when you stretch out a cramp and then the problem is gone.

Things that would escalate this to “make it worth it to go to the ER” status include : the pain getting worse, the pain becoming constant, the pain spreading, secondary symptoms like fever or nausea showing up, or the sky opening up and a great booming voice saying, “Go to the ER already, you knob!”.

I’d have so many questions.

Meanwhile, today was Therapy Thursday, and I yakked Doc Costin’s ear off as seems to be my standard mode these days.

Makes his job easy. All he has to do is listen and understand what I am telling him. Which is not always easy, granted, but he’s known me well enough to have figured out how to speak Fru by now.

Just like my friends. Hi, Felicity and Julian!

I told him about the whole “opening the door and letting fresh air in” thing where I have been feeling better lately – better mood, more energy, more relaxed – and I credit that to having made that leap into believing that the world has all the things in it that I want and need and all I have to do is go out there and find it.

And I will do that soon. Any minute now. Honest.

I told him about how I feel like I can actively engage with my emotions now, without the need for analysis, intellectualization, or the imposition of false order.

Feels pretty good, to be honest. I feel so much more real lately. As I drill through all the calcified gunk that has accumulated in the plumbing of my soul and basically re-bore my entire subconscious circulatory system, more and more of me comes online and I feel more human and real with every passing day.

So psychologically speaking, I’m doing alright.

The old fear is still holding me back, but it’s getting weaker. Right now it’s just part of the gunk clogging up my mind and pretty soon it, too, will be flushed out.

The important thing now is to work up the courage to stop hiding. It’s time to decloak and make myself known to that big bad world out there.

But I’m not afraid. You know why?

Because I’m fucking awesome.

More after the break.

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Sunny, with showers

Right now, I feel a bit depressed.

Which is fine. Now that I am in contact with my real emotions (LTNS!), that means all emotions will have a chance to express themselves, including the sad ones.

Besides, the reason I am feeling a bit low could not be clearer to me : I have not been getting enough sleep lately.

In fact, I think I’ve been rocking a slight hypomanic state. That would explain why I have so much more energy than usual, and why I have been napping way less.

Good riddance to the naps, I hope they don’t come back. I’ve been abusing sleep by making it my escape hatch from reality for far too long, and I am sick of it.

What’s left now is to program myself to ignore the pathetic cries of the old habit that I have to sleep when I can, before the opportunity is taken away by having to actually do something with myself like blog.

This attitude creates an entirely bogus sense of scarcity and urgency, and I don’t need that shit any more. Like I have to hurry up and nap before the door to sleep closes.

Whatever. I’ll just sleep after I do the thing. Worst case scenario is that I end up blogging or going to Wound Care or whatever when I am feeling super sleepy and that is rather stressful.

But it’s entirely possible to go from feeling sleepy to being wide awake without sleeping. And it doesn’t take caffeine or other stimulants either.

It just takes pulling yourself together and digging deep into your energy reserves in order to get you through the next little while.

This is something most people learn to do when circumstances force them to stay up when they would rather be asleep. Things like school, or work, or looking after the kids, or other similar obligations.

But I’ve done almost none of that shit, so I have to learn this the hard way. Even my most recent experiences with school only took up a total of like, maybe ten hours a week, and the rest of the time I could snooze.

Granted, when it was VFS, that sleep was bracketed with a 45 minute Skytrain trip in each direction, and there were definitely times when it would have been really nice to just drift off to sleep cradled by the gentle rocking of light rail.

But I can’t stand the thought of class happening without me. The mere thought of falling behind and missing out was enough to get me to class and back.

Thank God for FOMO, eh?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s take another crack at this one.

I’ve still got tabs for Notd (subscription based writing) and FlexJobs (remote work) open in the left hand end of my Chrome.

They both could be great opportunities to expand my world. I could try to build a subscriber base on Notd by writing tightly paced suspenseful stories designed to make the reader desperate to know what happens next.

Seems like a good way to get people to subscribe, n’est-ce pas?

And I have a number of ideas as to what kind of content might work. It could be fast paced high stakes action adventure. It could be a murder mystery with lots of twists and turns in the plot. It could be grand generational drama with scandalous revelations and a struggle for control of the family fortune. It could be a completely filthy smut story that leaves no orifice unfilled.

Heck, it could even be something akin to a sitcom, which would play to my strength of writing really funny dialogue.

But I would have to keep it short, which would be the interesting part of the task for my writerly side. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I do have a tendency to go on a bit and

So why don’t I do it? Therein lies the rub.

As it stands right now, I’m still too scared. My inner self knows that either FlexJobs or Notd could lead to big change in my life and it doesn’t care that it would be change for the better, all it cares about is that it would be disruptive.

I guess I haven’t gone through that door I just opened to the outside world yet.

Just typing this is producing waves of cold-sweat panic in me right now. It’s that kind of deep down primal fear that reason cannot possibly touch.

All you can do is work your way through it. Eat it up and get it over with.

I’m working on it.

And this is where pressure becomes a factor. My natural reaction is to put a lot of pressure on myself to just DO these things already.

But that virtually guarantees that it will NOT be done because I (just as naturally) avoid pressure and tension and all that stuff.

The pressure just makes me more avoidant, and yet I can’t seem to keep it from happening, and I don’t know how to depressurize the situation.

It’s like my desire to finally go out and play with the other kids is the unstoppable force and my fear and hesitation is the immovable object and the two combined produces one thing only : TENSION.

And thus far, my only solution to that tense conflict is to totally give up on whatever it was that was arousing my urge to expand my life and thus end the standoff.

But I’m not doing that this time. Those tabs stay there until I do something with them. And not just a token something, something that might actually go somewhere.

It doesn’t matter how much my eyes deliberately avoid looking at them, or how bad it makes me feel to think about them, or how conflicted I feel about them.

Some day I am going to use those tools to set myself free. Or if not those tools – if I just can’t overcome the aversion attached to them now – some other tools, or another path, or some other way to overcome myself to become more than I am right now.

I feel the powerful need for transformation and transcendence. But I just don’t know if I am capable of it. Baby steps might be the only steps I can take.

And even then, I still need to use my walker.

More after the break.

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Gimmie a break

Decided to splurge and get myself some KFC tonight. My usual four piece meal. Four pieces of chicken, fries. coleslaw, and a surprise bonus, a little bag of popcorn chicken.

I guess that comes with the meal now. I gotta say, I am beginning to be suspicious of how eager they seem to be to give that stuff away.

My theory is that it’s made from the little bits of chicken meat that used to just be a useless by-product of chicken processing, so it’s dirt cheap for them to make and thus, what the hell, if it makes them even 5 percent more likely to order, we break even.

One last thing on the poulet de mais soufflé : because I had no idea I would be getting some. I was quite puzzled when KFC asked me what kind of dip I wanted. And would not let me order till I chose one.

I chose the honey mustard. It’s the only one they have that I both like and can eat. They got plum sauce, but that shit’s full of sugar.

Anyhow, I told ya that to tell you this : I didn’t get my dip. Order came, no dip.

Seems kind of anticlimactic now, dunnit.

Anyhow, all that plus an individual gravy (which is frigging $3.19 now!!) plus what DoorDash charges me plus tip cost me $30.66.

And part of me still balks at spending that much money on a meal. I could have had a baked potato and a chicken burger for nothing because I already bought them.

And that is no doubt I will have that tomorrow night. But tonight, I decided I needed a treat, and I knew I could spare the money because I didn’t have to pay for Denny’s last Sunday (sadly), so I just spent that money tonight.

And the thing us, you really do need to treat yourself now and then. You can’t let life become a long undifferentiated slog through grey mediocrity. Even if all the things you are doing are things you like, if they’re the same day after day they will fade into the background of your life and your life will seem less real.

And despite my occasion snarky comment about reality being overrated, I know better than most that when life becomes too unreal, you end up feeling lost and alone and scared all the time.

Like you’re, say, wandering the Midnight Tundra.

And we all know how much THAT sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is going to be a big one

Imagine that I am taking a metaphorical running start.

We begin with a question : what if my entire internal narrative is wrong?

What if my entire sad story of a neglected and ignored childhood is completely false and based not on memory but on how I feel now?

What if the people I needed were there for me, but I wasn’t really there?

What if I was only sad and lonely because that wall inside me cut me off from all the love and attention and affection I craved so much?

Have I been guilty all this time?

I have to ask myself these questions because I have to know the truth, and even a mild attenuation of my dark and negative internal narrative could do me a hell of a lot of good, so it’s a quest worth embarking upon.

Let’s start with school. Pouring over those memories in my mind, I can find no flaws. I definitely was a lonely social outcast with no friends for a lot of my school life and when I did have friends they were not great friends.

I was also kind of a bummer to be around too. So whiny and weak.

So there is no chance I am wrong about how emotionally cold that part of my childhood was. School definitely sucked. Boredom in the classroom, terror on the playground, and no friends or social group with whom I could have developed socially.

But I was so overwhelmingly bright academically and in my own way self-confident and assured that people didn’t see how sad I was.

I didn’t let them. Sigh.

But my family and/or home life is definitely up for debate. I have constructed a narrative of cold indifference to if not open hostility towards my very existence and my being timid and therefore neglected and abused and never truly a part of the family.

And there is some truth to that. It can’t be wiped away entirely. In the broad strokes, that characterization is essentially correct.

But the devil, as always, is in the details. Sure, I was not exactly warmly invited to be an equal part of my big family, but it’s not like my parents and my siblings weren’t there, or never talked to me, or treated me like Cinderella’s stepsisters when they’re on the rag.

They were all there, and I talked with them, and while it might not have been as equals, they treated me with respect for my mind, at least.

We were definitely not the warmest of families. In fact for most of my childhood we were pretty detached from one another. Everyone doing their own thing.

But we were definitely the smartest of families. And I could always go to my siblings for a question or to request an explanation of something.

And being a gang of nerds and nerds loving to share information, they were almost always happy to feed my voracious intellect.

And there was love there. I might not have been embraced and included in my family, but I never doubted that they loved me in their own somewhat chilly, intellectual way.

And I loved them too, of course.

So yeah, I was often lonely and alone at home as well as at school, but at home there were people who loved me and wanted me to be happy.

To which my bitter side adds, “Yeah, as long as your happiness did not require literally any kind of investment on their part : emotions, time, support, guidance, understanding, money, attention, protection…. ”

The new narrative is still a work in progress.

But I am open to the idea that my childhood was not as bad as my negative characterization of it makes it sound.

And I know that I will be better off without that negative narrative poisoning me.

More after the break.

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More on internal narratives

One of the corniest things you can say these days is that human beings need to tell themselves stories in order to make sense of their lives.

Good thing I didn’t say that, then. Ha ha.

Obviously, the most important story we tell ourselves is our own life story. It’s the one story that turns what would otherwise be just a string of unconnected memories into something that makes sense to us as a whole.

And, of course, it’s the one story that is all about us. We’re the center POV character for the whole dang thing. We were there for all of it.

In our internal narrative, we ARE the Main Character.

But the thing is, we don’t remember most of the things that happen in our lives. It’s not that we can’t recall it, it’s that the natural compression of memories over time is not lossless and most of it gets deleted before it even gets into long term memory.

And what the mind does not remember, it reconstructs. And what does it use as a basis for that reconstruction?

That selfsame internal narrative.

So over time, that narrative becomes the blueprint of our entire psyche. Which can be a problem because eventually we stop adding our memories to the narrative and start adjusting our memories to fit the narrative instead.

Especially if, like me, you don’t have a lot of other life experiences to base it on. The narrative of my life hasn’t changed that much over time, but the changes that have happened have largely been negative.

That’s because they come from the long process of me realizing just how badly I got fucked over in life and so the story just gets worse over time.

But I think I am ready to turn the corner on that now. I am opening myself up to the world again and that means moving out and moving on.

And that means creating a better internal narrative for my psyche to be based on.

Maybe I haven’t finished processing my past yet. Well too bad, I don’t give a shit. Constantly rehashing the past is just a way of hiding from reality and I am done with that shit. I’m going in the opposite direction.

It’s time for REALITY to hide from ME!

OK, not really, but could you imagine? 🙂

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got up to go to the kitchen to make my daily PB&J and such, but then I paused half way to my bedroom door.

I could feel that I would maybe need to pee real soon. So the question I had to contemplate was, do I stop what I was doing, return to my computer chair, and use the receptacle to pee, or do I press on, make lunch, then pee when I get back?

Well, by default, I finish what I am doing. For me, following through is instinct. So I kept on going to make my lunch.

This was the wrong move.

I knew what would happen yet I did it anyway. And exactly as I expected, I was fine for the first half of getting my lunch together but during the second half, the urge to pee just got stronger and stronger, and when I started to head back to the bedroom, well, the waves crashed over the seawall as the contents of my bladder sloshed up against the urinary sphincter holding them in and a little escaped.

In other words, I peed a tiny bit. Involuntarily. While still in the kitchen,

Yup. That was the wrong decision alright, and I knew it would be, but changing my mind when I paused halfway to the bedroom door would have meant jarringly interrupting myself in order to suddenly switch tracks, and I couldn’t do that.

In that limited and incredibly subjective sense, going ahead to make my lunch seemed like the lesser of two evils. It might have been a very dumb decision that I knew would end badly but at least it wasn’t disruptive.

This is seriously how I think.

Of particular note, to me at least, is how easily I convinced myself that going ahead and making lunch would be fine, that I didn’t need to pee all that bad and that I had plenty of time to make lunch and get back before the flood was due.

This was patently stupid – I mean, why even risk it? – but it seemed like the only option given my horror of sudden change.

Even when that change is vastly superior.

But so what? So I did a dumb thing. Big deal.

Nobody is smart 24/7 and a lot of my fellow geniuses throughout history have not been very good at the practical side of life.

Hence the whole “absentminded professor” schtick. I have always identified with that kind of character. I too am a brilliant person who spends far too much time lost in the wilds of his own mind to pay much attention to the here and now.

But lately, it’s occurred to me that the world inside my head would be a much happier place if I got better at that pesky “objective reality” stuff.

The two are (barely) connected, after all.

Less snarkily, this is where my whole “the world has everything I need” thing really comes into play. Part of my walling myself off from reality in favor of living in the secret garden of my mind rests on the assumption that there is nothing “out there” that is worth the time, effort, risk, pain, and fear involved in going and getting it.

What a ridiculous thought. True, depression can make it hard to even imagine hope, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any.

Being unable to feel or sense the presence or reality of something does not mean it is not there. The sun never stops shining, even at night, when we can’t see it.

And no matter how dark the night or how rough the storm, you can have total faith in the fact that you will see the sun again.

So just hang in there.

More after the break.

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I’ve opened the door…

…but I haven’t gone through it yet.

No rush. Right now, I’m just enjoying the liberating feeling of fresh air on my skin after being sealed in my own god damned juices for so long.

Sorry for that image. But it’s apt.

I know that I will eventually want to go through that newly opened door and check out my surroundings. Right now, I am still all congested inside and that makes it hard to form the coherent will to actually use that exit to check out something new.

But soon I will say to hell with my ice regime and I will reach out beyond myself into the big old world out yonder and say howdy.

After all, I can be seen and be safe. There’s nothing out there I need to hide from. The feelings of exposure and danger are relics of an ancient and irrelevant past, and thus can safely be ignored.

They won’t die easy. But they’ll die nonetheless.

After all, what am I so afraid of? These fears have not been justified by evidence for more than forty years. At these point, the fears perpetuate themselves by creating the apprehension unbidden and unhinged. Comme ca :

A : Of course I’m anxious! The last time I was here, something terrible happened!
B : Really? What happened?
A : I HAD AN ANXIETY ATTACK!!

There’s nothing there. It’s all just old tapes playing in an empty room. The sooner I defy them and do what I want to do anyhow, the sooner my engine will grind up those old bad tapes and spit them out as my motor clears itself and moves on.

And I swear I’m going to do it soon. Maybe even tomorrow.

But again, no rush. It’s not something I have to do, or else.

It’s something I want to do, for me, to make myself healthier and happier and freer.

I have awe inspiring powers of the mind. Intelligence, insight, creativity, analysis, charisma, power of personality, and of course, being pretty darn cute.

I have way more than enough to make a life for myself out there in the world. And I don’t even need to go out into the big bright noisy physical world out there.

I just need to roam to new places on the Internet.

And I can do that!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…that has no Denny’s.

Felicity took a home Covid test and tested positive, so she had to bail on Denny’s. She obviously did not want to expose us to it.

So she stayed home to spend time exposing her elderly parents to it instead.

Sorry, that was uncalled for. It’s just my disappointment talking.

Like I have mentioned here before, I do not handle disappointment well. It always wrecks my mood for a while because it gives me that deflated feeling that comes from when my enthusiasm and anticipation for something good gets punctured.

And that leaves me sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon.

Now, that’s totally a “me” thing. I don’t blame anyone else for it. Especially not in a circumstance like this, where it’s something totally beyond anyone’s control.

Felicity missing wouldn’t be so bad, but quite predictably, Joe seized this opportunity to say he wasn’t feeling well EITHER and so he wouldn’t be going to Denny’s EITHER.

And I can easily imagine the giddy relief in his voice when he told Julian that. I don’t know if he knows that I can hear that kind of thing quite clearly, and how much it hurts me when he sounds so relieved to not “have to” spend time with us.

I mean, I get it. I’m an introvert too, although perhaps less of one, because one thing on the introvert list I don’t identify with is feeling profound relief when plans to go out fall thought and you “get to” just stay home instead.

No, fuck that. That wrinkles my balloon. Sure, there is an element of relief, but it’s overshadowed by the disappointment by a country mile.

Even if it was something I wasn’t really looking forward to doing, like something I expect to be boring or painful or whatever, I am still disappointed when it falls through.

Partly is that like any Taurus, I hate surprises. There I was, with all the mental and emotional resources I would need to go out allocated and ready, and in my mind earmarked for going out exclusively, and then suddenly I have to release those resources and have them go back into general allocation instead.

But the real issue is that whole balloon thing. When something I am really looking forward to is coming, I get all pumped up with joy and when that thing is taken away it all gets released with a loud, wet, flatulent sound.

And I don’t expect anyone who is not like that to understand why that makes me so sad. It would be easy (and hurtful) for someone to say, “Well everybody faces disappointment. Get over it!”

Then again, people like that are assholes who just want to avoid caring about you. That kind of person will go to great lengths to avoid empathic entanglement with others.

After all, why should they be sad just because someone else is sad, right?

The answer, of course, is that it helps. As Spider Robinson said many times in his Callahan books, pain shared is divided, joy shared is multiplied.

And it can help a lot to know that someone else cares about you enough to share your pain and be with you in your time of need.

Sometimes all it takes is a squeeze of your hand and sitting in silence with you while you process your pain.

Everything is better when you don’t have to face it alone.

I will, of course, get over being bummed out about not doing Denny’s this week. And when I do, that will give me more time to spend being worried about Felicity.

Letting my truly gushingly emotional self shine through is getting… complicated.

More after the break.

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Let it flow

I am embracing the slow destruction of my self-consciousness.

The whole idea of being self-conscious is to control how we are perceived so we can stop ourselves from doing embarrassing things.

But this is a painful and unnatural thing to do, which is why it’s such a negative thing to feel “self-conscious”. And why when we are in a flow state, all self-consciousness disappears and we experience what some mystics call “pure consciousness”.

For them, it’s a spiritually desirable state because in it, the false self, the one that is just our idea of who we are, disappears and the real self, the one that is the person we have been since we were babies, can emerge.

On this blog, I have spoken about the real me that has been hiding inside me and doing anything it can to avoid being perceived. And it eventually occurred to me that this inner critter of mine was a lot like a certain little red fox.

Hence my writing those Fruvous stories where he’s someone’s pet. It was a metaphorical way of depicting and then fixing my busted childhood.

We writers have weird ways to cope.

The destruction of my own self-consciousness follows a similar spiritual path. In an Avoidant like me, self-consciousness metastasizes wildly out of control and becomes a massive psychological complex that dominates and distorts your life.

In my case, it has a lot to do with trying to control outcomes, which is a fool’s game if you take it too far – and I most certainly have.

I will learn to accept that shit happens. That no matter how hard I try to control outcomes, factors impossible to predict and beyond my control will always be able to come and fuck up my shit.

So Plan B always has to be learn to cope with things like that.

Because I am extremely tired of leading such a cramped and tiny life just to keep from being surprised and/or overstimulated by things.

If I just hang in there, I will adjust to new things. I am perfectly capable of changing plans on the fly if the situation dictates it. I can open my world to the world at large and suffer through the freak waves and tidal surges of outrageous fortune and be just fine.

I’m open to anything, life. Surprise me.

(But please don’t make things worse!)

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.