Doug Henning, that is.

Fuck you, Doug, and all your empty headed talk about “the power of IMAGINATION!” and how we could “be anything we wanted to be” because if we only wanted it badly enough, our biggest dreams would come true.

Yeah, Jiminy Cricket can go fuck himself with a can of DDT too.

And it’s not just you, Doug. I loathe your entire generation of vacuous pinheads regurgitating your formulaic “pro-social” pablum about how great cooperation and friendship are and how we shouldn’t exclude people just because they’re different.

Fat lot of good that shit did me when I was a friendless weirdo child who never even got the chance to cooperate with anyone because I was different.

I mean, my fellow students must have had that shit repeated to them over and over again every Saturday morning too, yet somehow they still didn’t get the fucking memo.

Like a lot of inclusive and empathic ethics, it’s not something you actually do, it’s something that makes you feel good when you hear it.

Actually being nice to people sucks.

They got the memo about cooperation, though. They all cooperated beautifully when the entire student body of Parkside Elementary was chasing me around the playground with harmful intent.

All that crap about the power of friendship really hurt me back then. It was like the normal people were mocking me and grinding my face into the dirt about how wonderful being normal like them (and not “gross” like me) was and how I would never know the simple social pleasure of having a peer group because I was broken and disgusting and wrong and didn’t even deserve to go anywhere where others could see me.

But that would never have occurred to you, would it, Doug? Your evacuated cranium would never have conceived of there being a downside to jerking people off by telling them how great something most of them already had was.

But it wasn’t just the children’s entertainment of my formative years that I hate. I hate that whole generation of hippie dippie Boomer teachers who didn’t want to be seen as an “authority figure” and therefore let my fellow students run wild like Lord of the Flies.

God, do I hate that book.

My whole childhood was marred by the unintended consequences of all those Boomer teachers preferring to try to be our “friend” instead of having to actually live up to their responsibilities and take charge of the classroom.

As a result, I, like many other Gen X kids, grew up in a world without authority figures. And that made us, or me at least, very nervous and uncertain because we lived in a kind of anarchy where you had nobody to turn to when you were scared or weirded out or just plain don’t know what the hell is going on.

Human beings experience enormous stress without leadership. Whether the limp wimps of the world like it or not, we need hierarchy.

That doesn’t mean anything fascist. It just means there needs to be someone who understands the big picture that people can turn to when they don’t know what to do.

Without that, everyone gets stressed out by all the uncertainty. Nobody even knows if they are doing what they are supposed to be doing and if so, if they are doing it right. Discipline falls apart (if it ever existed) and people do mindless, aimless things like cattle in a feedlot. Everyone is miserable, including the teachers.

But hey, better that than forcing a Boomer to actually take responsibility for the things they actually have responsibility for, right?

No wonder they made such lousy parents.

More after the break.

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Not that I’m bitter

Oh wait, yes I am. I’m bitter as hell about the way my life turned out.

But I am trying to get over it because it’s not helpful. I know that my harsh, bitter, angry, scornful internal narrative is hurting me in the long run because it gets in the way of my moving on with my life by causing me to dwell on my past.

Or more correctly, dwell IN my past.

And that’s no good. If I want to move on into the future I have got to make peace with my past somehow, and that won’t be easy.

And it can’t be done by fiat. It has to be earned by working through all of the emotions involved until some degree of resolution is achieved.

Not “closure” because nothing is ever truly completely closed. But it can be sufficiently resolved so that the wound is closed and you can use that part of you again.

Right now, all that bitterness and rage over where I am today and how I got there as well as the massive amount of grief and torment I feel about all those years of my life in which all I did was playing fucking video games plus all the self-loathing that comes with being a 51 year old loser who’s never even had a job adds up to a massive amount of stuff for me to process and there is no quick and easy way to do it.

I can’t possible swallow that mass of indigestible dreck all at once. So all I can do is eat it one mouthful at a time and hope that some day, somehow, I will have eaten enough to make a difference in my life.

And that means giving myself permission to be mad about stuff that might even, in the final analysis, be my fault.

One of the biggest and most soul-wrenching questions that I face over and over again because I can’t seem to resolve it is : how much am I to blame for being who I am today? Could I have done differently? Or was I destined to tread water for 30 years before I could even begin to get my shit together?

The thing is, both answers to that question are bad. It’s bad to imagine I was helpless to do any better and it’s bad to imagine that I totally could have ergo this is all my fault.

Maybe it IS my fault. But if it is, I can’t handle that at all. Accepting that would crush me. I might never recover.

But the question then becomes, if I stay like this, is it STILL my fault? Or can I make it better for myself?

I’ve been proceeding on the assumption that I can. And in tiny ways, I have.

But part of me yearns to reach out for more. So far, my negative demons have been keeping me from doing so.

But some day I will finally reach outside myself and meet the world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What the hell, let’s talk about what is going on in what passes for my actual life.

It ain’t much but it’s all I’ve got.

I finished Cryptmaster, Not felt the need to play more just to fill out more words yet. I guess I sort of miss the game. I wish it had some kind of “new game plus” mode where I could keep all the words my heroes know but start back at the beginning of the plot. Then I would have something more interesting to do than just mindlessly fight monsters.

But I can’t even find the option to start a new game at all, which is tres tres bizarre.

Over in Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey, I am continuing to enjoy ancient Greece despite the fact that I finished the main plot last week or so.

The end of the main plot was really lame.^[1] Sure, I killed the main baddie from the early game, but he didn’t even put up a fight. I guess that was supposed to seem like I had finally caught up with this skeevy coward who committed so many evil deeds from the shadows and finally gave him the brutal justice he deserves, but it was just way too easy to feel like victory.

He didn’t even have tough bodyguards or anything.

Oh well. At least I have also fought the Minotaur, the Cyclops, and will eventually fight the Medusa. And one other classic Greek monster I can’t think of at the moment.

Not the Hydra, sadly. The 12 Labors of Herakles are canonical fact in this universe so good ol Herc already took of that one.

I was pretty disappointed when I got to the exterior of Medusa’s lair and it turned out that I was not high enough level to do the quest to get inside.

I was all pumped up and ready for another tough boss fight! But no, alas, I have to go do other stuff in order to level up.

Luckily there is this whole secondary main plotline to keep me busy. It’s more or less an echo of the first main plot, with two new groups of conspirators (the Hunters and the Order) for me to hunt down and kill. And I haven’t even finished killing the first one (the Cult of Kosmos) yet!

I’ve been busy. I will get around to it eventually.

Over in Pathfinder : Kingmaker, I have once more ignored my kingdom to the point where the people rose up and destroyed it. Ooops.

The thing is, I don’t actually know what I am supposed to do to prevent that. And reading documentation for the game doesn’t seem to provide the answer, so I have decided that I am just going to turn on automatic kingdom management and let the computer worry about keeping my peasants from slitting my throat in the night.

Kind of a bummer, really. I mean, I have built all kinds of cool shit for the citizens of my barony. And as far as I knew, I was treating them quite well.

But apparently that’s not enough. Yeesh.

What do you people want from me??

It was a lot easier in the sequel, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous. Way less hands on management of your kingdom because you are kind of busy prosecuting a war against the demons streaming out of the World Wound.

Dramatic, is it not?

There’s even a few mentions of the World Wound and the goings on around it in Kingmaker, which is exactly the kind of continuity porn we nerds love.

Hey look, this thing references that other thing! And that rewards me for paying attention and knowing the lore! And I really, really like that.

We’re not that hard to please, really.

I guess that’s enough for now. Hopefully I will think of a better topic for part 2.

More after the break.

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You know, in a way, I’m still a child genius. Because I’m still a genius. And emotionally speaking, I’m still a child.

My aching back, redux

You know what pisses me off? I still have no idea what’s wrong with my back.

None whatsoever. And neither does my GP, Doctor Kelvin Chao. And furthermore, he doesn’t care. That’s very clear to me now.

Around twice a day, when I get out of bed and stand up, the small amount of jostling that walking subjects my spine to will set off excruciating paroxysms of spasmodic back pain that feels like a giant with iron hands is grabbing my spine and squeezing it like it’s a recalcitrant tube of toothpaste while also twisting it like it’s trying to turn my spine into a spiral staircase.

I paint pictures with words.

I am trying to get better at making sure I leave myself some water in the glass before I lay down because I can get from the bed to the computer chair without much pain and once I am in the computer chair, I can take my muscle relaxant, cyclobenzaprine, and within ten minutes my back is relaxed enough for me to move without whimpering

But only if I have the water I need to take the pill.

Back to Doctor Chao, it’s clear to me that he considers a patient who has stopped complaining to be cured. What the actual problem is, he does not give a shit. He wrote you a prescription, you stopped bitching at him, he’s done.

This is wildly inadequate. I mean sure, the cyclobenzaprine controls my symptoms, but my back is still terribly fucked up and without knowing why or how he has no idea if it is going to get worse or what I should do to make sure it doesn’t.

But who cares? He got the fee for my visit, so everything is fine from his end.

So he doesn’t know what’s wrong with my back or my legs or my arms, and he’s perfectly fine with that because the longer things go undiagnosed, the more often I have to come in and see him, and the more fees he gets to make.

I rest my case.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh hey, it’s another video from this dude, with a list for me to reply to and everything!

And it’s abut being a burden to others, which I um…. know a lot about.

So let’s dive in!

First, the list. You have this problem if you are:

a) Afraid to ask for help. Ayup. Even from people whose whole job is to help people like me, like receptionists and nurses. This does have the beneficial side effect of my learning, out of sheer nervousness, to be very warm and personable to these people. I guess I am trying to charm them into helping me?

b) Afraid to inconvenience anyone else. Same thing, really, so ayup. I automatically assume that I am not important and unworthy of anyone’s time or effort.

c) Afraid to burden anyone with your problems. That’s me alright. And that even includes my therapist, although over the years I’ve at least gotten over that with him. And of course, I can write them down here whenever I need to.

d) Afraid to put too much on anyone. Kinda the same thing, so yeah. I do, in a sense, try to avoid putting too much of my bullshit on any single person, knowing full well that there isn’t a person a live who could handle all of it. Even me, really.

e) Think everyone is either too busy for you or has their own problems to deal with. Roger that. I am nobody’s priority. I assume myself to be an afterthought at best. Nobody really wants to hear from me and people are better off if I don’t bother them by reminding them of my existence.

f) Don’t think you’re a priority or are worthy of people’s time and energy, Um yeah. See the previous response. My whole childhood drummed this lesson into me : I deserve absolutely nothing. I don’t even deserve to take up space.

g) Don’t want to be “too much” for people because they may abandon you. That’s the fear, yeah. I feel like people barely tolerate me to begin with so the last thing I want to do is overload them.

h) Afraid to look weak, dependent, or needy. That ship sailed a long time ago. Whether or not I am afraid of it, it’s happening. So no to this one.

i) Proud of being a strong, independent person. Pride yourself on being self-sufficient. Permit me a dry, ironic laugh. Ahahahahaha, no. I am 51 years old and I have been dependent on others for all but about a year of that. And even then, I needed help from Ravenwood to get my bachelor apartment and to apply for welfare.

j) Conclude that the goal in life, and the sign of being healthy, is to be self-sufficient – to not need anybody. Another big NO from me on this one. I mean yeah, that’s my long term goal – to finally be able to do everything myself, or at least get it done by paying someone to do it. And that would be a sign of being healthy to me. But that’s not going to happen any time real soon.

k) Are validated for taking on lots of responsibility and helping others. I wish! Maybe I will be strong enough for this eventually. But not now.

l) Think people will judge you if you ask for help or are incompetent to do things on yur own. I have always assumed that this is happening. I would be very surprised if nobody but me was doing it.

m) Convince yourself that you don’t have needs or shut down so you can cope. A tentative yes on this one. In the moment, I can totally convince myself that I don’t really need anything per se, because the alternative would be to ask someone for something and that’s clearly not on. See a).

n) Take any sign of others’ tiredness, or “having a hard day”, as a reason to not ask for anything. Oh god, yes. Nothing would make my resolve to ask for something shrivel up and die faster than sensing that the other person is already tired or feeling put upon by life.

I think that’s enough for now. I will do the other 4 after I get home from Denny’s.

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o) Often feel abandoned – nobody cares for you. Another resounding YES. Feeling abandoned and forgotten is always on a hair trigger with me – it’s a feeling that can pop up in an instant at any time, even when it’s patently untrue. I mean, Julian literally cares for me, and yet, that feeling of bereft isolation is always there just below the surface, waiting to rise up and take over. It’s a bad tape I need to erase.

p) More alert to the needs of other than your own. Eh, I’m iffy on this one. Truth be told, I am often too lost in my own pain to put someone else’s ahead of my own. That said, when I do sense that someone is suffering, I feel great waves of sympathy and concern and I desperately want to help them. I want – maybe even need – to be the person I needed when I was in acute distress.

q) When you have a need you need help with, instead of admitting it, you conclude that it must only be because you are weak, too tired, or having a bad day. I’ve gotten a lot better about this kind of thing but I still have a long way to go. MY default mode is still, “I am suffering because I suck”, basically. This problem of mine, whatever it is, is entirely because of my inherent awfulness which I am helpless to correct and yet still hate myself for, and the last thing I want to do is confess this awfulness to someone else in order to beg for help. That could not possibly lead to a good outcome. It could only make people push me away in revulsion and contempt and thus leave me TRULY abandoned and alone.

r) Conclude that the reason you have needs is that you are too lazy. More or less yes. Too lazy, too broken, too pathetic, too disgusting, too weak, too unworthy, too worthless, too clumsy, and too much of a liability. To name a few.

That took up more words than I thought it would.

As you can see, my self esteem is still not so great. On a good day, I can not only remember how awesome I am, I can even feel it a little.

But for the most part I remain weary and limp and unable to generate the impulse to do anything but the usual with myself.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s get this out of the way first :

It occurred to me that one of the barriers between me and activating all the parts of me that I mothballed in order to become the stable but pathetic version of me you know and love is that doing so will make my life a hell of a lot more complicated.

That’s what dealing with the full range of human emotions is going to mean for me. And this complication, in turn will result in something still worse, at least according to the old bad unhealthy part of me :

It means I will lose “control”.

My inner world will no longer be tightly circumscribed and therefore hyper predictable and so I would have to deal with not knowing what will be happening in my mind and my soul from minute to minute.

You know. Like normal people.

Normal people don’t question their emotions like I do. They don’t squash nearly all of them in order to achieve an entirely fabricated and unhealthy inner “calm”. They don’t demand justification for their every little action.

They feel things, act on those feelings, and take it from there. Eventually they learn to control their emotions and think things through and so on, but not before establishing a solid emotional base from which later growth can spring.

But me, I fucked all of that up.

Not on purpose, obviously. It happened as a result of my withdrawing into the world of the mind when I got raped. That caused my development to skew wildly towards the mental and left my emotional development mostly stunted.

And all because things had to “make sense” to me. I didn’t play with the other kids in the sandbox because it seemed pointless and stupid to me. I didn’t have a stuffed animal I lugged around everywhere with me because I knew it was just a toy. Same with having an imaginary friend. I knew they were not there. So what was the point?

Mind you, that’s a question most adults couldn’t answer either because they have never thought about it. It’s play, and play doesn’t need to have any kind of point because play is supposed to be inherently rewarding.

And if it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong.

Looked at through that lens, the fact that I was asking for some kind of justification for doing what all the other kids did was wrong from the very beginning. It was rotten at the root and spoke of something being desperately wrong with me.

I mean, who even says these things? I was such a weird kid.

I keep looking back and wishing I had just relaxed and let myself be myself back then. Forget trying to control and predict. Go ahead and have that huge ego everyone is so afraid you will develop. Go through life with a cocky, smartass attitude that might not always be pleasant to be around, but would have at least let me be a whole person with a basis for further developing myself instead of being this emotionally emaciated cripple who is afraid of everything.

And I know it’s not too late to become that person. Indeed, I can feel that version of me struggling to free itself from its chains so it can be born and replace this tired, worn out, decaying version of myself before it’s too late.

But so much has to happen first.

Or maybe it doesn’t. I dunno. Maybe that’s just another layer of bullshit.

Either way, my big transformation isn’t going to happen right now.

But maybe not too long from now. Maybe.

More after the break.

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Break the seal

No, the seal I am talking about is the hermetic seal around all the vacu-locked parts of me that have been sequestered away for so long.

That will not be an easy seal to break because, in a sense, it does not want to be broken. That seal has been protecting my internal state from all the anxiety and severe depression that used to plague me for 20 years or so, and so my deep programming still thinks that it needs to keep that thing intact or all Heck will break loose.

And I suppose it will, in a sense. In order to truly reclaim my human potential, I am going to have to open that big steel door inside me and let all my monsters and animals loose in order to get at and fix the stuff that got locked in there with them.

And I think that’s one of the things holding me back, which is why I am talking about it tonight. Hopefully by talking (typing?) it out, I can defuse some of the emotion surrounding this attempt at unleashing Bedlam, thereby making it something that is easier to deal with.

I wish I was the kind of person who could just throw open those big steel doors and let pandemonium reign as things work themselves out, but I am not.

One of my many deep and binding fears is a fear of losing my mind completely and thus losing myself as well.

I don’t want to end up in a straightjacket in a rubber room somewhere. I don’t want to get lost in thought and never come back. I am terrified of losing the last tenuous wisps of my grip on reality and end up locked up inside my mind forever more.

Maybe that could never happen and it’s just more toxic bullshit that my depression uses to keep me under its thumb. I dunno.

But it sure feels like it could happen. I have had doubts about my grip on reality for a very long time. And that makes sense given how little I interact with reality except through one screen or another.

I probably should try to make good on that whole “spend some time outdoors alone” thing. But I know damned well that I won’t.

This harbour of mine is still icebound.

And there hasn’t been an icebreaker in this region in a long, long time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had to miss Wound Care again, this time because I have a head cold or somesuch.

Might be a sinus infection, I dunno. My head feels weirdly solid, like someone filled all my sinus cavities with rubber cement.

And I feel very feverish. Like the whole front side of my head is facing a recently opened oven door. Or like the heat coming off the pavement at night, when the sun has gone down but the pavement is still radiating the heat it absorbed.

Those were always some of my favorite times as a kid because the sun wasn’t making it hot any more but the heat from the pavement kept it from being cold.

The result? Toasty warm happiness.

Anyhow, back to what I was talking about.

I am pretty upset about missing two Wound Care appointments in a row. That’s not healthy. I almost wish I had gone this morning no matter how I felt.

But that would have been stupid and irresponsible of me. I was not about to bring whatever virus or bug I have to a place with a ton of old people.

That said, I will show up to my Tuesday appointment no matter how I feel. The only excuse I will accept is if I am in a coma at the time.

And even then, I’ll try.

Luckily, before I woke up sick this morning, I replaced the dressing on my right foot. It fell off, so I had no choice. Luckily I have some of those type of bandages lying around.

The left foot, though…. I am not looking forward to changing that. The wound there is like a wedge was cut right out of the fleshiest part of the heel and that makes bandaging it tricky even for the nurses.

For a maladroit like me, it’s like trying to sink all the pool balls with your break.

I will keep it covered with something, somehow. I have a supply of these extra absorbent big blue bandages that look like a very boring mouse pad, but those don’t come with their own adhesive so I would have to use the clear medical tape to secure it in place and I can’t even wrap a present without it looking like a tumour so this is going to be real, real fun.

I’m kinda fucked when I can’t just defer to someone who is actually competent.

It’s insane (sic) how overspecialized I am. I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and yet I get lost easily, have spent far too much of my lifetime confused by things most people don’t even think of as a thing, and need someone else to help me so much as leave the apartment.

And that was mostly true even when my legs worked.

I am a classic absentminded genius. I am capable of amazing feats of mental strength, insight, and agility, and yet I languish in the doldrums and rot in place because my brain is frozen in a very bad mode and I don’t know how to free myself.

Or maybe I do know, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Whatever.

Once more, I circle back to that bit about how in order to be truly free, you have to give up a little part of yourself.

I believe that to be true. After all, the main thing keeping us from being truly free is always ourselves. In order to level up your being, you have to sacrifice whatever part of yourself is holding you back. Kill it, mourn it, and move on.

And I don’t know what part of me that is, exactly. But I can feel it there in my mind quite clearly, and eventually the urge to gnaw that part of me off will be stronger than my fear of the pain and the damage, and I will free myself from myself.

Until then : same dumb life.

More after the break.

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Something’s gotta give

And the sooner, the better.

For a long time now, I have been trying to force myself into some sort of crisis state that will break down my defenses with the sheer power of its inherent conflict so that my mind can reshape and reform itself into something far more healthy.

But my whole deal, in a way, has been that I created this form of myself to maximize stability, and so destabilizing it is not easy.

Plus, I mean, we are talking about changing who I am as a person, and that is always going to be the scariest kind of change.

But I think I can do it. Because really, the idea is not to change who I am, but to unlock it. I want to become more like myself, not less.

I want to unlock and unfreeze all these parts of my being that have been hidden away from me since my breakdown in my early 20’s.

What are they? Nothing much, just most of human development.

I mean, arguably, a lot of my development was locked in permafrost when I was raped at the tender age of 4 years old.

That has to be why I completely missed out on all the normal developmental milestones and was such an eerie child.

I guess the school system did try to correct my deficits. There was a period, around grades 2 and 3, when I was the subject of a LOT of scrutiny by the school board and I got tested a zillion ways for a zillion things.

But I obviously aced all the cognitive tests. The sensory tests showed mostly normal. I buried the needle on creativity and verbal skills too, naturally.

So I think they had no idea what to do with me. My kind of problem, social retardation, did not show up on their tests. So they threw their hands in the air and gave up on me.

And because they gave up on me, so did I.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As my standard joke goes, if it wasn’t for jumping to conclusions, I would get no exercise at all.

I just went through this and I thought it was time I wrote down one of my experiences with being so “jumpy” so I can examine it in this space.

I was in the kitchen about to make my usual PBJ for lunch when I realized I could not find the big 2 kg jar of Kraft peanut butter that I bough last Friday.

This is where the madness starts, because I immediately leapt to the conclusion that Julian had hidden it from me in order to get me to use the peanut butter left over in one of the like ten mostly empty peanut butter jars sitting on the counter.

At almost the same time, I realized that I really needed to pee.

So I walkered back to my bedroom and into my ensuite and started taking an angry piss. All the while, I was fuming, and thinking angry thoughts about how dare Julian try to make me do things his way and how this was NOT HIS CALL TO MAKE. If I wanted to “waste” the little bit of peanut butter left in a jar because it was not worth the effort it would take to scrape it out of there ^[1], that was my business, especially now that I am paying for my own peanut butter.

This went on for the length of one of my always lengthy pees (hello, aging prostate) and then I went back into the kitchen to take another look.

And thank God I did, because the goddamned peanut butter was 90 degrees and three feet from its usual spot, sitting on the stove between the elements.

And I felt very, very dumb. Extra dumb, in fact, because this is far from the first time I have gotten angry or upset or freaked out over something being “missing” when it’s just in a slightly different place than usual.

Going over my memory of the incidents, it seems like the problem is that I have a strong emotional reaction instantly and once that emotional reaction kicks in, I can’t think logically or critically about whatever I am reacting to or about.

Why does this happen? Well I think I have a lot of latent emotion just waiting for the tiniest spark to set it off most of the time.

As I was telling my therapist Doctor Costin on the phone today, I think that when I clawed my way out of the nervous breakdown I had in my early 20’s, I froze a lot of things inside my psyche in order to get back to sanity and what was left unfrozen seemed functional in that I could make it through the day without a lot of pain or fear, but under the hood things were a frozen mess of arrested development.

Amongst the things frozen was a bewilderingly wide section of my emotional response spectrum. I truly was not the same young man that had headed off to college in 1991.

I was a crippled remnant of that bright young man. I could eat and drink and enjoy TV and video games again but that was it.

And that’s the person I have been for the last 30 years.

And all of this has me wondering what my life would be like if I didn’t repress so much. What if I just went with my emotional reactions come what may? What if I stopped trying to create hyper-predictability by keeping myself under “control” (ha)? What if, like most of humanity, I just did what my emotions told me to do, without question?

I’d be a very different dude, that’s for sure. I would probably be a lot harder to be around. especially at first. But maybe it would settle down after a while and I would be the same person I am now, but with a far more emotionally real and enriched life.

It’s a tantalizing prospect. I don’t think I could ever completely let go of emotional “control” but I could ease back on the brake a little, at least.

Maybe then I would know what it’s like to truly be alive.

More after the break.

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I love this guy

Here’s his latest video :

And since he brought it up, let’s talk about procrastination.

Here’s the secret of procrastination : you don’t really want to do it.

Whatever it is, deep down, you do not want to do it. You may think you should want to do it. You might tell yourself over and over how it’s no big deal to do it. You may even convince the grown up part of you that you really want to do it.

But deep down, you don’t wanna. So you don’t.

Imagine that there are two teams, Team Do It and Team Don’t. Imagine they are in a tug of war. But here’s the trick : team Don’t wins as long as you don’t do the thing, and that means that Team Don’t does not have to overpower Team Do It, it just has to keep your will divided enough so that you can’t decide to Do It or decide to give up and it still wins.

Hence procrastination. Procrastination thrives by keeping you in that middle, undecided zone where you still consciously think you will do the thing or at least might do the thing eventually, but subconsciously know you never will without ever having to actually own the fact that you won’t ever do it.

Because you never decided not to do it. But you never will.

The solution. then, is to make up your mind. Either decided to do it and do it, or decide not to do it and do something else.

You may find that the decision to definitely do or not do it will be exactly what you need in order to find out how you really feel about it.

If deciding to do it makes you say, “OH GOD NO!”, then guess what, you don’t wanna do it. And now you know it.

And if deciding to give up on it fills you with a sense of sadness and loss. guess what, you really do want to do it and now you know THAT.

Bottom line, though, is that nothing external to you is going to force you to decide. And your psyche is clearly fine with leaving you wandering lost in indecision forever because again, that way not doing it still wins.

You have to decide to decide. One way or another.

Only then can you exit the procrastination loop.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a phone appointment with Doctor Chao this morning.

And the good news is, he wasn’t late for it.

The bad news is, he was early, WAY early. The appointment was for “between 11 am and 1 pm”, because apparently only a doctor’s time is actually valuable.

Well he called at frigging 9:30 am! An hour and a half early.

But luckily, I was not doing much of anything besides hanging with my fuzzy friends, so I was able to take the call.

But that’s the second time in a row he’s pulled this calling early shit. In retrospect. I kind of wish I hadn’t rewarded this behaviour by taking the call.

Maybe next time, if I am feeling ornery, I will say, “No! Call back at the right time!”.

And then hang up.

OK, no, I probably won’t do that. But it’s an amusing thought.

Oh, and one more slightly galling thing : he asked me what he could do for me when it’s his office that made the appointment.

I kind of assumed you had something you wanted to talk to me about, Doc.

Anyhow, I knew what I wanted to discuss. First we talked about this disturbing thing where I get attacks of shortness of breath when I lay down.

Like I’ve said before, it’s like my heart is having trouble switching gears. The attacks are fairly mild as long as I don’t lie on my back, but seeing as I am 51, already have two stents in my heart, am quite obese, and have a long family history of men dying from heart disease, it makes me more than a little worried.

He said that what can happen is if you have sluggish circulation (check), blood pools in your legs when you’re sitting down. If you then lie down, that fluid now rushes back from where it was into the heart and the heart gets overwhelmed by it, and thus, I end up having trouble getting enough air for a little while.

And that seems plausible enough although that last bit confuses me. Why would too much blood in my heart makes me feel like I’m not getting enough air?

I have so may more questions.

What I really need is a doctor I can email.

We also discussed what’s wrong with my fucking legs. I am proud of myself for mentioning that as of last week it has been two years since I landed in the hospital and I still don’t have a diagnosis.

So he reached into his back pocket and pulled one out of his ass.

He said that when you lose sensation in your feet, your body is not getting all the feedback from your lower legs it needs to keep you balanced properly and that can lead to issues with the legs over time.

I don’t buy it. It’s plausible but unsatisfying. There is definitely something wrong with the muscles in my legs, especially the tendons, and that same thing has been making my arms weaker as well.

But I guess that’s all I will get out of him for now. But this is definitely not over. I need treatment, not just explanations. I don’t want to lose my ability to walk without a fight.

I figure what I need, assuming his theory holds, is physiotherapy. The right kind of physio could boost the circulation in my legs and feet and build the muscle tone back up in my limbs to combat the apparent atrophy.

And who knows, my physiotherapist might be a sassy Jamaican lady with whom I will argue a lot but ultimately form an unlikely bond.

What? It could happen.

More after the break.

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What we choose to believe

We the “smart” types tend to act and feel as if all our beliefs are the only logical conclusion possible given the facts and that therefore choice doesn’t enter into it.

Which is pretty damned hubristic, when you think of it. And it’s also a dodge. Oh, of course I don’t have to defend my beliefs on a personal level. I can just stand back and pretend all my conclusions to be foregone and that therefore to argue against them would be to argue against logic itself.

What a load of crap!

And the truth is that there a lot of different equally valid ways to look at things and we are fully enabled and empowered to choose the POV that works the best for us.

“But that’s cheating! And/or delusional! And/or lying!” you shout.

But no, it isn’t. You are not choosing to see black as white or day as night. You are just adjusting your view within the confines of observed reality.

Take that old saw about the cup being half full or half empty. Cocktail party conversation aside, the truth is that it’s both. Both statement are equally true and apply to the exact same object so we are free to choose to see it as half full.

After all, you’re not wrong.

And the half full POV is a much happier one, so why not choose happiness?

Of course. there’s a lot more going on. For one thing, pessimists tend to fall victim to a negative bias every bit as delusional as Pollyanna optimism, where they have subconsciously decided that only bad things are real.

This is an understandable overreaction to a loss of innocence but the trick is not to get stuck there, but to let the pendulum keep swinging back and forth till it reaches equilibrium in the middle somewhere.

Or even deliberately let it swing towards the positive, just more informedly so.

I am convinced that we can change our negative outlooks to something more conducive to living a happy life.

But it’s going to be hard, especially at first. We have a lot of negative momentum to kill. Getting that flywheel to stop dragging us under will not be easy.

But I am determined to do it.

Fuck all that negativity telling me I have to be sad.

I choose to be defiantly positive!

Take that, world!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Didn’t make it to Wound Care this morning.

I started feeling rather off late last night. My limb were weaker than usual and I felt hot even though it was after midnight. And I was dizzy, too.

Making my midnight snack was an adventure in my weakened condition. I was lurching around our tiny kitchen and desperately clinging to the cabinetry the whole time.

So I warned Julian that there was a chance I would not make it to Wound Care.

And when I woke up this morning, I knew I would not be going, because in addition to my previously listed symptoms, I now had the all too familiar heaviness and scratchiness in my chest and a swollen, scratchy feeling in my throat.

Plus weird aches and pains in random parts of my body. Like the lower tendon connecting my right kneecap with my leg, and the first joint of my right pointer finger.

Hmmm, that sounds inflammatory. I will take an Aleve and see if it helps.

So yeah, yet another Wound Care missed. Which also means I did not get a chance to cash all these little checks.

You see, yesterday, I got a stack of envelopes in the mail, all from some place I had never heard of before.

I opened them up and found a bunch of checks for amounts as low as $0.03 and as much as $9.98. 7 checks totaling a little under $30.

How unusual. But it didn’t take long for me to solve the mystery when I spotted the word “Paypower” on the accompanying documents.

What I was receiving was the little bits of money I had left over at the end of the month when I switched from one month’s card to the next.

Mighty decent of the Pay Power folks to be so honest. I always assumed those bits o’ cash were gone forever.

In theory, there should be a metric buttload more of these little checks coming because I was a PayPower customed for WAY more than seven months.

I admit, it will be mildly embarrassing/amusing to go to my VanCity branch and cash all these little checks. But it’s a five week month and I really need the money.

And what the heck, I’m certainly not going to be the first person they see in such a fix.

I’ve also been pretty sleepy today. Another day where it takes a long time for me to get out of bed because I keep falling back asleep.

Makes me feel like I am trying to escape sleep’s gravity well.

On the video game front, I’ve beaten Cryptmaster. Not much of an ending, but whatever, it was a fun and wonderfully weird game to play.

There’s a limited about of continued play value as I have not unlocked all the character’s attacks and memories, so I can continue to fight monsters in order to get the letters to do that.

But meh. I’m iffy on that. For one thing, the game makes it oddly weird to find monsters to fight. I swear, there were a lot more monsters when I was still participating in the plot.

Guess I already killed most of them. Damn.

I also completed the main plotline in Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey. Honestly, the ending did not really feel very climactic. I mean, yeah, I killed the bad guy introduced in the early part of the game, but he was no match for me as an opponent and it wasn’t that hard to get to him and overall I was left expecting more.

And then the coda was basically :

“Isn’t it great that we’re together as a family again?”
“Yes, it sure is. ”
ROLL THE CREDITS

Um… okay then.

But of course, I am nowhere near done with the game. There’s still members of the Cult of Kosmos to hunt down, leveling up to do, and several DLC storylines to complete, not to mention the ridiculous amount of other types of sidequests and such these kinds of games are loaded with.

So I will probably keep playing for a while at least.

And I still have Pathfinder : Kingmaker going. And, ya know, hundreds of games in my Steam library and the rest of Steam at my fingertips when I have the $4.

So I am pretty much set.

More after the break.

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The deep down dark

Feeling depressed at the moment.

But not in a bad way. Well, not all THAT bad anyhow.

It’s more like a darkly brooding melancholy. I don’t hate myself or have any inclination towards self-harm or anything.

I kind of hate life at the moment but not for any particular reason. Though I am sure I could come up with quite the laundry list of reasons if I tried.

So I won’t try.

As always, I feel like I am rocking back and forth between darkness and light.

The darkness comes when I have yet another batch of long suppressed black emotion to burn and the light comes when that batch had ended and in its wake I have a precious little space in which I can strive with all my might to learn to be happy.

Because I am more convinced than ever before that it’s a skill. You have to make yourself happy, it doesn’t come naturally. It takes effort, and that’s why depression’s anti-effort bias is so god damned toxic.

Like so many other things. it’s like a muscle of the mind. One you use to elevate yourself without waiting for a priori permission from the real world.

Right now, that’s a struggle I am still fighting. A good working name for this ability to elevate oneself would be “faith” and I still don’t have much of that.

I grasp the principle, and I have for a long time. I even encapsulated it as : “We hope not because there is reason to hope, but because it is better to hope.”

But articulating it and putting it into practice are radically different things, at least for me. To make it come true, I have to dream it first, and then hold on tight to that dream long enough for it to create something lasting in my mind.

Or at least, something that doesn’t instantly disappear when the lights go out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had the visit from the lady from Assisted Living this morning.

About an hour before the 10 am visit, I was getting so (irrationally) nervous about the whole thing that I decided to take an Alprazolam to steady myself.

What then followed was a fascinating feeling of my anxiety and the drug duking it out in my blood stream. I could clearly feel my mind trying to assert its adrenalized state against the calm, cool feel of the Alprazolam.

Every time I say the name of that drug, I expect a genie to appear.

I did manage to get some cleaning done before our morning guest arrives. My funky little grotto is nowhere near clean but it’s a lot cleanER than it was before.

I will continue to peck away at the job, a lil here and a lil there, until I have cleaned up my room for the first time since we moved in here a decade ago.

It’s important that I have gotten the job started. I am going to try my best to solidify the lesson that cleaning is really no big deal, despite what the forces of evil in my mind say, and I am free to make my environment more pleasant and decent whenever I like.

OK, enough preliminaries, on to the visit.

She was nice. Had an accent I couldn’t place. Kind of like Russian but not quite. So maybe her language of origin is a related Slovak tongue of some sort.

Basically, she asked me two tons of questions about myself and my needs. I was glad that Julian was also there, as that helped me stay calm almost as much as the Alprazolam did. Thanks Julian!

On the less fun level, tussling with my anxiety this morning did remind me that I am, in fact, a crazy person.

And yet, in a weird way, that made me feel better. It felt good to feel anxious because it still beats feeling numb. I’d rather get freaked out and take a pill than just feel nothing.

At least being scared makes me feel alive.

Anyhow, we went over a ton of stuff. For example, there’s a sort of drop in program for people with disabilities she wants me to try. They meet once a week and stay from around 9 am to 2 pm, having lunch together as well as occasional snacks.

And I know it’s something I should at least try. I need some way of breaking out of my limited world of Denny’s and Wound Care. I need to meet new people and learn to socialize and essentially finally get the kindergarten education I missed way back when I was of preschool age.

But obviously, the idea of doing that REALLY sets off my socially anxious/Avoidant side. So if I am to give this thing a try, I will have to climb that mountain first.

Undoubtedly I would take another Alprazolam before heading there.

We also talked about a program where once a week, I could go to an old folks’ home and the staff there would use their walk-in tubs and such to give me a shower.

I… really would rather not be washed by another person. Like most people, I have not been washed by someone else since I was a toddler. I would much rather go into the walk in tub by myself and wash myself, with a staff member standing by in case something goes wrong.

She is also referring me to an occupational therapist who will assess my physical needs. I didn’t bother telling her that I had seen one twice, both times when I was leaving the hospital after a long-ish stay, and yet, somehow, nothing came of it.

Probably because there was something I was supposed to do to get the ball rolling but I missed it in the deluge of information they keep subjecting me to.

And the social worker this morning was no exception. So much information given to me all at once, without a break, and I am expected to somehow remember it all?

I can’t do that. By this time next week, I will have forgotten most or all of it.

If these people want me to do a whole bunch of things, they are going to have to make me an itinerary.

Otherwise my foggy mind won’t be able to retain any of it.

More after the break.

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Two kinds of memory

I can hear you asking, “But Fruvous, you are so academically gifted. Why can’t you apply that to all the medical information they throw at you?”

At least I think that’s you I hear asking. Might be Floyd.

Good question, you and/or Floyd. Why can’t I treat these medical infodumps like lectures at school and just passively absorb the info?

Well, for one, it’s not a lecture in that it is aimed directly at me, not an audience of students that happens to include me, and therefore it is a lot more stressful, and stress inhibits memory formation.

Also, it involves a mix of things I’m supposed to remember and things I am supposed to do, and that’s a lot more complex than a regular lecture.

Additionally, there’s the fact that I am out of practice when it comes to academic learning. Haven’t been in school since 2018 or so.

And finally, academic learning tends to fit into an overall pattern of knowledge that I have been subconsciously learning through the whole course, whereas these medical tsunamis are quite out of context in my life.

What I really need to do is take my tablet to these meetings and record them. Along with taking pictures of whatever documents they hand me.

Eh, who am I kidding? I would probably still end up utterly lost.

And yet, it’s not like I am being treated any differently than anyone else. So these infodumps must not be a problem for most people.

At least I have Julian to help me make sense of it all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.