I finally got around to asking Julian if it would be helpful to him if I made a checklist of things to check on in order to keep me happily stocked with stuff.

So do I have…

1. Baby carrots or celery
2. Fruit, apples or oranges
3. Cans of pop in the fridge
4. 2L of pop in the fridge (I have such a soda habit)
5. Microwave popcorn in my cupboard
6. Bread, though that’s more of a communal thing

That should just about cover it. I might think of more items later.

What I would like to be able to avoid is running out of my essentials. I am a little ashamed to admit it, but when go to the fridge and what I want is not there, it has a deleterious effect on my mood.

It bums me out and makes me feel neglected, which I confess is a feeling that is never very far from the surface of my consciousness and is very easily triggered.

And it bugs me that I have to bug Julian to do and get these things for me. I really miss the level of independence I had before my legs went boom in the summer of ’22.

Like the lady sang…

I mean, I know it is impossible to be grateful for every single bad thing that is NOT happening to you. There’s way too many of them.

A functionally infinite number, basically.

So I am going to resist the urge to tell people to appreciate having legs that work just because mine don’t.

I mean, go ahead, appreciate that if you like, but don’t feel like you have to take on a greater burden of gratitude on my behalf.

Just stop and think of what it would be like to need to use a walker to get around now and then and maybe give your legs a nice rub for continuing to do their job.

That’s all I would ask of anyone.

---

I kept putting off suggesting that checklist to Julian because I was afraid he would find it insulting or inappropriate or even presumptuous on my part.

On the other paw, I need to have some sort of power over the care I get. Being passively helpless to even advocate for my own needs, let alone getting them met, is an awful like my “never ask for anything” childhood.

That’s why it was so hard to bring this up with Julian. My deeper programming insists that asking for anything will get me in big trouble, SO much more trouble than it is worth, and so my only choice is to mutely hope someone thinks of me eventually.

And that’s really sad.

And it’s no way to live. It smothers the soul to never be able to get what it wants or really take an activate part in its own standard of living at all.

You can’t live your life like a dog sitting under the dining room table hoping someone will eventually drop something.

Being perpetually broke is a big part of that passivity. Money is power, ergo poverty is helplessness, and that is very bad for your spiritual health.

That’s what middle class types don’t get about poverty. It eats away at your soul and makes you depressed and saps your will to do anything that takes effort, such as, say, looking for a job.

Job hunting is a really harsh process. Most of us are not cut out for that level of constant rejection, especially us sensitive artist types.

It would be far better to have a central government agency that has your resume on file and submits it for various jobs you are qualified for and only contacts you if you at least get through the first round of qualifications.

Kind of like having a Hollywood agent, but for everybody.

Imagine how awesome that would be for both employees AND employers.

A businessperson would be able to find a dozen qualified candidates for whatever job they needed to fill without having to do a single interview.

And we used to have that exact thing when I was a child. It was called Manpower and its job was to get you a job.

We need to bring that back!

More after the break.

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The problem with generation

So why can’t I generate my own tasks? Or set goals for myself, or follow my ambitions, or any other form of directed action towards a goal?

Why do I need some outside entity, like school, to give structure to my life?

It’s like I need something to adapt to. Without it, I am a boneless blob of protoplasm with no ability to act on my own.

And that’s just so wrong. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and yet I am stymied on the most basic of levels by this strange weakness of mine.

The glib, easy, and incomplete answer would be to say it’s because I had so little order imposed on me as a child that there was nothing for me to internalize.

But there’s definitely more to it than that. There’s also the fact that what I did internalize was the idea that I don’t count, I don’t matter, and I am not worth anyone’s time and effort or even inconvenience.

And the heartbreaking truth is that I still feel that way today. I neglect myself in the exact same way I was neglected as a child.

Ergo, anything I want or need is just not important enough for me to bother doing. That’s why I can’t set goals for myself and I live my life compulsively doing the same things.

Plus there’s the fact that there is this massive untreated psychological wound taking a huge amount of my mental resources and as a result, there is a part of me, a big part, that has been silently weeping for 47 years.

And I don’t know what to do about that. Psychological wounds are not the kind of thing one can think their way through.

All I can do is try to be good to myself and try to take away whatever is preventing my mind from healing itself properly so I can get that big part of myself back.

Maybe then I will have the strength to take myself seriously.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Specifically, how a charge of $7.60 made my card balance go from $385.50 to $306.67.

I don’t think you need to do the math yourself to see that this does not add up.

Or subtract up. Whatever.

The point is that around $80 of my money has vanished and I kind of want it back. And there’s the website showing me my transaction history like that last one makes any sense (or cents) at all.

It’s off by $78.87, and that’s um…. not acceptable.

That’s not a fucking rounding error.

The wildcard… wait, it’s a Joker card, they’re all wild…

The randomizing unknown factor is that this last transaction is marked as “pending”. I don’t know why that would be. It’s just a small charge from DoorDash for a Jamaican beef patty I ordered from 7-11.

It was OK.

7-11 food : it’s still better than nothing, right?

Anyhow, when I called the 1-800 number, I quickly figured out that the goddamned voice menu is specifically set up to dangle the idea of getting to talk to a human being in front of your nose but never actually give you that option.

Must save them a lot of money on phone support workers. Because now they don’t need any. There is literally no way to talk to one.

I will try again later, when my seething rage has subsided.

It might be that pressing 0 in the right place will trick it into letting me talk to an actual (and presumably very surprised) human being, in which case, ha-ha, I MADE the system give me what I want. So there!

Fair warning, I’m a fox, and we’re VERY CLEVER.

Don’t fuck with the trickster. We will fuck you up and laugh about it.

Oh, and the kicker : the phone menu told me that you can’t dispute charges marked as “pending”. Well isn’t that convenient.

Now, this could all be perfectly above board and temporary. It could be that when a charge is (maybe) disputed, they withhold a bunch of money in case some of it is needed to resolve the dispute.

The dispute, I remind you, over $7.60.

And therefore it might just be a weekend thing. It might be that when the next business day begins (Tuesday), the transaction will go through and everything will be fine.

But I am still mad, because for fuck’s sake, why does life keep fucking with my money?

Oh, and before I forget…

I found my wallet

The wallet has been recovered. Crisis over.

Well, that one, anyhow.

Turns out that when I took my glasses off and put them on my CPAP machine like I always do, for some reason I put my wallet too, like very NOT usual.

These are the tricks I play on myself constantly. And I have to admire its creativity. I hid my wallet in plain sight but someplace I would never think to look for it because like, why the fuck would it be there?

Next time, I will know to look for it there. Which means it won’t be there, it will be someplace even more fiendishly bizarre.

I only found it when I went to put on my glasses. So there was very little chance of my not discovering it eventually.

Once more, I find myself wishing I had an assistant so that we could work together to minimize the times when I am a total dumbass.

All the more reason to try to get some online work next time I have the wherewithal to go back to FlexJobs.

It would be so lovely to have some genuine accomplishments to use as evidence against my tendency to think I am worthless and useless and terrible.

I mean, at times, I get so god damned sick of myself.

More after the break.

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Wall of nausea

Speaking of which, I think I often feel like I am a horrible disgusting thing because that’s how I feel most of the time.

And that’s probably mostly physical. If I could once more stand up well enough to take showers, I am sure I would feel a lot less grotty.

I mean, my bed bath wipes are better than nothing but nothing beats a nice hot steamy shower to open up and flush out my pores.

And gods, do they need it. The wipes just can’t compare. I swear. I would pay $100 just to use one of those walk-in sit-down showers they have for seniors.

I’m only 51, mind you. But I am crippled far beyond my years.

Going back to how I feel about myself, I have known for a long time about how as human beings, we tend to unconsciously assume that if we FEEL bad, we ARE bad.

As if there was cosmic entity punishing us for our sins.

Like I said, it’s entirely unconscious, but extremely powerful, and I think it haunts the souls of everyone with any kind of long term chronic illness.

If a person is mentally healthy, the result is healthy self-pity. Why is this happening to me? they wonder. I don’t deserve this!

But if, like me, they are cuckoo in the coconut. with a very weak sense of self, they end up feeling like the way they feel is the way they are… and they feel awful.

And because, due to my high empathy levels, I have a mild problem telling where I end and others begin, I tend to also feel like everyone can easily see what a horrible sack of day old crap I am, and are horrified and repulsed by me, and angered beyond belief by the gall it must take to even think for one second I deserved to be around people.

Well okay, most of that is NOT physical. But it’s rooted in the physical feelings of being dirty and gross and awful.

And that leads into a whole other can of filthy worms where on a very sick level, I feel like it’s better to be dirty on the outside because when I am clean on the outside it throws just how dirty I am on the inside into sharp relief.

But that’s a tale for another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hey cool, they have online skills tests on Flexijobs FlexJobs.

This is great news for me as I have no job experience to speak of but I am very smart and capable and the tests can help me prove that.

Plus, ya know, I test well. It’s one of my superpowers. So if I can get a whole bunch of very high scores on relevant tests, I will have something to show to potential online employers that will demonstrate that I can do the job.

Because the thing is, I have never doubted my ability to do jobs. I know that I could thrive in an office environment if given the chance.

I’m bright, I’m hardworking, I’m pleasant, and I have a head for pragmatic problem solving in unique and powerful ways.

And I have basic leadership skills that I would love the chance to hone through experience. Right now, all I have is the aptitude.

And aptitude doesn’t mean shit without skills and experience.

Of course, I am looking for online-only work due to my health and mobility issues.That means working from home and that takes self-discipline.

I don’t think that will be a problem. I am going to be far too overjoyed to have actual productive work to do to even think about slacking off.

If anything, I might be too productive. End up finishing all my work way faster than most people can do it and end up bored again.

I mean, I know that I can get a hell of a lot done when I am in “work mode”, like when I did that crazy ass data entry job, and this could be either a problem or an asset.

The ideal job for me would be one where I can go accept a task, complete it, get paid, then immediately go get another task, and another after that, and so on.

I visualize it as this infinite stack of file folders and when I want something to do I just take one off the top of the stack and another immediately pops up like those cafeteria lunch tray dispensers.

I would love that. Give me tasks, missions, orders, objectives, quests, anything really. I just want things to DO and I am not capable of generating those for myself.

I almost never follow my own orders. Like, who am I to tell me what to do?

You don’t learn self-discipline if you have never been disciplined. The only discipline every demanded of me was the impersonal kind which was required to get through school, and well, school was always super easy for me, so not a hell of a lot of “grit” was ever required of me.

This leads me to wonder if I would actually benefit from a mildly BDSM relationship in which a suitably impressive man required/expected a lot from me and I was eager not to disappoint or frustrate him.

Kind of like being in the military but slightly gayer.

Then HE could be the one giving me tasks to complete. I wouldn’t be getting paid for them per se, though ya know… there’s always non-monetary forms of payment.

And it would definitely test my self-discipline. Especially the self-discipline it would take for me to resist telling him to go fuck himself.

But only if I get to watch.

I mean, the logistics alone would be fascinating.

I wouldn’t be signing up for any “punishment” of the kinky variety though. That’s what I mean by “light BDSM”. I would technically have a “master” and I might even consent to being his “servant” if I like him enough, but nobody is EVER going to tie me up unless they want to DIE.

I’m serious. If someone locks me up, ties me up, or otherwise restricts my freedom, my immediate response is to want to kill them for it.

So um, no. That will not be part of our “play”.

Being whipped, spanked, flogged, or caned, however, might be.

More after the break.

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Hold on to your wallet!

Because apparently I didn’t.

I can’t find my wallet and it is understandably freaking me the fuck out.

Not only is there around $200 in cash in there, there’s all my ID and stuff, and losing THOSE would be a major expense and a hassle.

I’m positive I had it in my pocket when I went to Wound Care this morning and I am almost positive it was still there on the drive home.

But I am not sure it was in my pocket when I sat down in front of the computer. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I dunno.

Julian is currently checking the car for it. I have checked all around my computer desk, both on the desk and on the floor, and it ain’t there.

Usually it’s pretty easy to find on my desk. It’s a large-ish black rectangle a couple of inches thick. So it’s hard to miss.

Right now, I would happily accept one of my typical embarrassing “oh, shit, it was right here all along” outcomes.

I will accept the humiliation if it means I get my wallet back.

God, this is stress I don’t need. Life is always finding brand new ways to fuck with me and all I can do is try to roll with the punches as best as I can.

Hopefully Julian will find my wallet and all will be well.

Oh, before I forget, my credit card is also in there, and anyone who has it can use it because there’s no security on it to speak of.

And that’s where there rest of this month’s money resides.

Sigh. As you can imagine, I’m not feeling so secure myself. I wish I was the sort of person who could just shrug something like this off, but I am not.

Julian did not find it in the car, or anywhere on the path from the car to the apartment.

It’s looking like it is gone for good.

Right now, Julian is driving over to Wound Care to see if it’s in the parking lot there.

And tomorrow I will call Wound Care to see if there is anyone there to pick up the phone and if there is, I will ask after my wallet.

But right now, the prognosis is very poor.

Same to you, life. Same to you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This video describes me perfectly. It’s almost chilling.

I mean, wow. That’s me to a T.

Let’s go through his list :

1. Often an unconscious wish to die. Um, yup. And sometimes not so unconscious. When you are raised to feel like your very existence is unwanted and unwelcome and made everything worse for all your loved ones, there is one very simple solution : stop existing.
2. Pessimistic, skeptical Figures he’d say some bullshit like that! Seriously though, yeah, that’s me. I do my best to resist the pessimism as it is both irrational and self-destructive, but sometimes my feelings demand it. And skeptical, well, I used to publicly identify as a skeptic but then I grew skeptical about THEM.
3. Mistrust of others. Definitely. But I hide it well by being really good at “reading” people and thus being able to understand and predict them, making trusting them a highly informed choice. What I truly lack is faith in others. Or anything else.
4. Suicidal fantasies. For a long time, yes. But not lately. I get an occasional surge of the wish to die but my defenses shut that shit down HARD right away.
5. Great difficulty believing they are loved. Ayup. Big time. I know there are people who love and care about me in this world. But deep down I don’t feel it so deep down I don’t believe it. Knowing is information. Belief is an emotion. And for me, the emotion just isn’t there.
6. Deep shame. Oh HELL yeah. I feel ashamed to be alive every waking hour of every day, and probably in my dreams too. No matter what I logically “know”, down deep where it really counts lies a deep feeling that I shouldn’t be here, that my entire existence is a mistake, and that everyone wishes I would die quietly in a ditch somewhere so they can be spared the embarrassment of dealing with me.
7. Deep insecurities. Uh huh. Punctuated by the occasional island raging egotism, which is another form of insecurity.
8. Deep loneliness. Always and forever, yup. Unless I learn to open up and let people in and actually fully relate to my fellow humans, I will remain an alien on ice far from his home planet. The loneliness cuts so deep into me that I can’t imagine what it’s like to feel anything else. Luckily, I have good friends and when I am hanging out with them, the loneliness retracts somewhat.
9. Never feeling like they belong. Belonging, what’s that? I felt like I belonged with my UPEI friends, more or less. Yay fellow nerds. But that was many winters ago, and the ice has grown mighty thick on my heart since then.
10. A constant fear that they are unwanted. Check. I feel like I am always moments away from those I love figuring out how horrible I am and leaving me forever. And if that ever happened…. well, I guess I’d just die.
11. Deep fear of rejection and abandonment See the previous entry.
12. A constant feeling of being a burden and a pain. Bingo. Deep down, I feel like I make life worse for all who know me. And I know how insane that is. But that’s all it is : knowledge. My belief in my being an unwanted burden remains unchanged.
13. A longing for connection, but a fear that if anybody (etc). Right again. It’s hard to get close to people when you feel like you’re an imploding sack of actual shit and that if anyone gets too close, your illusion of worth will fail and they will run away screaming and cursing your name.
14. Irrational fear that boss will fire them or the relationship will end. Pass. I’ve never had a job or a relationship so I would not know. Maybe?
15. Success won’t last etc.  Also pass. You have to do things to be a success. I don’t do jack shit.
16. Sabotage good things. Probably. I need more data.
17. Reject them before they reject you. I can imagine myself doing this, given my tendency to leap to deranged negative conclusions.
18. Deep anger at self, world, God. Well obviously not God, as I was raised without faith. And the anger at myself is a shadow of what it used to be, mostly being replaced by the much healthier emotion of self-pity. But anger at the world? I have so very very much of that. And part of me really wants to lash out.
19. Deep self-pity. Well yeah. See previous entry. But self-pity is way, way healthier than self-loathing. Take it from me.
20. Drawn to people who will reject them. Hmm. I doubt it. I am far too sensitive for that. If anything, I would be drawn to people who hyper-accept me.
21. Become a people pleaser. Entertainer. Same thing, really. Hey, look at me, I’m all funny and smart and deep! Pay no attention to the suppurating turd behind the curtain, he is unimportant.
22. Becoming a perfectionist. In a few things, maybe. But mostly no.
23. Not able to receive love. You betcha. I know it’s out there waiting for me. But I can’t receive it yet. I am just too cold inside.

Phew! That’s it for now. Analysis to come later.

More after the break.

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Everything will be

Inspired by this video.

Bill realized that he’d lost the ability to remember how he got places.

In his memory, he just was one place, then in another. No transition, no delay, no time spent in between. Just one location after another, without so much as a fade to black or the familiar click of a slide projector to separate them.

He knew that this must be wrong. You simply can’t get from point A to point B without passing through all the space (and time) between. Something must be happening to him in between places, but for the life of him, he could not remember what.

Of particular note was his daily commute. It took nearly an hour (the view of the river from his bungalow made it worth it) and the first and last ten minutes of it involved navigating his way through dense, busy urban areas full of traffic, one way streets, stoplights, and other complexities that made it pretty much impossible to simply zone out like you could with highway driving.

Not without ending up as street pizza.

So surely something must be happening during all that city driving. Something worth remembering. A cop arguing with a pedestrian. A minor fender bender. A particularly flashy digital billboard. An amuse bit of graffiti. Something.

But no. Two hours of every weekday were gone from his memory like they had been snipped out by God’s own video editor.

Bill had no idea what happened to him during those lost hours.

And increasingly, didn’t care.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Talked with Doctor Chao about my back pain over the phone today.

Nothing new was revealed. Well, one thing, apparently some of the bones surrounding my spine show signs of deterioration consistent with arthritis.

Quelle shoc. Arthritis doesn’t just run in my family, it gallops. Doc Chao recommends that I get myself some Tylenol Arthritis to help with the pain.

I might, I might not. The cyclobenzaprine (muscle relaxant) seems to keep the pain under control well enough. Dunno if I need another painkiller.

On the other hand, it couldn’t hurt. Well, except in the wallet.

Predictably, I did not bring up any of the other health weirdness. Like the fact that I keep pooping the bed.

Consider that your brown alert warning.

And it’s not normal poop at all. Instead, it’s a mixture of a thick, translucent fluid and these extremely dense little pebbles of fecal matter.

And I have no idea what the fuck is up with that.

Clearly something is going drastically wrong in my digestion. Something that is causing the constituent elements of normal, healthy feces to come out unmixed.

According to this article, pebble poop is a known thing and is usually just a symptom of constipation. But the article doesn’t mention the fluid portion or the incontinence.

I am pretty sure the fluid portion is the reason for the incontinence. It’s just not something my rectal sphincter is designed to contain.

I should probably see someone about it anyway, though. Could be that there is something very nasty going on that warrants medical intervention.

But I am never eager to go to the ER or Urgent Care and tell them I keep shitting the bed. That’s not something that’s easy to admit to a stranger.

Childish, I know. But it is what it is.

And now, of course, I have the extra strain of telling them that this has been happening sporadically for like a month, yet I am only bringing it to them NOW.

God, being Avoidant is fucking complicated.

It’s way, way easier to just clean up and then forget about it. Go back to living my life like I normally do and hope for the best.

But not really. What I really do is just forget all about it. Yay.

All part of my “just keep going” internal programming, I guess. When there is nobody there to pick you up, you learn to never fall down. For my whole life, since I first went to school, I have just trudged along doing what was expected of me and not taking time to stop and care for myself because I had no faith that I would ever get started again.

And, well, thirty years of wasted adulthood and the grim reaper looking me over like he’s deciding where to stick the scythe later, I am thinking I had a point there.

When my parents took me out of school and made me move back into my childhood home and into my childhood bedroom, that damned near killed me.

I was doing great in school. My professors liked me, I like them. I had nerdy friends I could hang out with and play games. I was even beginning to maybe think about trying to find a way to get laid without getting lynched.

But my parents killed all that just so they could take early retirement.

Typical fucking boomers. It’s all about them.

This is part of why us Gen X types are so sullen and bitter. We grew up with Boomer parents who did whatever the hell was best for THEM and we their unfortunate childred were expected to be perfectly fine with that and whatever consequences there were to US and our wellbeing.

So yeah, I am god damned bitter. I got a concentrated dose of Boomer selfishness and I still have not recovered from it 30 years later.

Because I never had a breakdown. I never tried to kill myself. I never did anything to get in trouble with law enforcement. In short, I never cried for help.

I just kept going.

More after the break.

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If I broke down

OK. So, realistically, what would happen if I went catatonic and/or otherwise could not move and needed to be rescued, call 911 style?

Well, it would take a while for anyone to notice. I spend most of my time alone in my room with just my computers for company.

And they don’t notice shit.

So if it was some kind of medical emergency, I might be in deep trouble. But I can’t see a way around that. I certainly can’t ask Julian to do a verbal check once an hour.

That would irritate me and put a lot of strain on him and that’s a recipe for disaster.

Do not taunt grumpy fun fox.

But what would happen when I was finally noticed? Julian would know something was up for sure if I did not come out to watch stuff with him at midnight. Or if I did not show up at all for one of our Zoom meetings with Joe and Felicity.

He would check on me eventually, I am sure. And when I didn’t respond to the phone or to him calling out my name, he would come into the bedroom to see what’s up.

And when I was completely unresponsive, he would call 911. I am sure of that.

So my internal narrative of having to keep going because nobody will be there to pick me up if I falls is not entirely true.

I think another part of needing to “keep going” is the need any hunted animal to keep moving in order to be a “moving target”.

Can’t stop. Clown will eat me.

I also think that if I did break down, I would find it so embarrassing. I guess one rule of my universe is, “take care of yourself so that you’re not a burden to others ever. ”

We can see how well that worked out. I’ve become a burden to Julian against my will. And the way things are going, I will be a burden on the health care system soon.

That doesn’t bother me much, though. It’s being a burden to those I am close to which makes me feel convulsively guilty.

Even though they’re not complaining.

Being me is so complicated.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Better than I did yesterday, anyhow, which is admittedly a pretty low bar.

I’m starting to think it’s all about staying hydrated. And that means drinking water more or less constantly for every day of summer heat we will get.

And that means getting up to refill my water glass more often. I will admit, I have been getting lazy and sullen about that. I finish one 1.2 L glass of water and I know I should immediately go and get a refill, but I foot-drag and procrastinate and whine to myself and end up forgetting to do it altogether.

And then I wonder why I end up feeling so damned bad.

I should know by now that the summer heat can’t reach me as long as I keep the hydration coming and always have a glass of water on the go.

And yup, that’s a pain in the ass. Between refilling my drinking glass and emptying my pee receptacle (aka the water cycle) I can end up getting up and going to my ensuite bathroom a dozen times a day.

It would be ever worse without the receptacle. I shudder to think of it.

And I can’t think of a sensible and effective solution for that. I could get some sort of large plastic jug with a spigot on it that people take on picnics and whatnot, but who would refill it?

Water is heavy, man. And my muscles are weak. Ergo any container that could hold enough water to be worth using would probably be too heavy for me to carry, or at the very least dangerous.

And as nice as it would be, I don’t think I will be installing a faucet right here at my desk any time soon. The logistics of that would be a nightmare.

Not to mention having a potentially leaky water source right next to all my expensive computer equipment et al.

The only other alternative would be to move my computer into the bathroom, and that of course would be very silly.

Convenient, but silly.

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The ever changing eye

Part of the problem with depression is that you end up seeing the world through a highly unstable emotional filter that distorts and perverts your perceptions as it fluctuates.

Thus, your subjective world is highly unreliable and your sense of reality is eroded nad you withdraw into your inner realm which seems like a safer place to be.

It ain’t. In fact, your inner realm is even more unstable than the external world. At least the world of objective reality has a foundation in what is really going on.

But I guess it feels safe because it’s your home and you are used to it.

The escape hatch for depression suggested by the ever changing eye hypothesis would be to somehow move your sense of reality to something more stable and leave that god damned eye behind.

For me, science is a partial solution to that. I can think my way out of my anxiety sometimes by grounding my emotions in the logic of probability and rational self-examination and sheer muscular deductive capacity.

But that. at best, deals with the anxiety but not the depression. Like I said in a YouTube comment recently, according to the much vaunted CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), I should be completely cured by now because I have mastered shooting down the “bad thoughts” and no consciously recognizably negative idea about myself can make it into my consciousness without my anti-negation guns blasting it out of the sky.

Big fucking deal. Despite what CBT says. bad emotions do not come from bad thoughts. It’s entirely the other way around. And thus, no matter how bulletproof my cognitive defenses become, the underlying emotional pain and damage is still there and still needs to be expressed somehow.

In other words, CBT is bullshit and far less than worthless.

I don’t need to know how to make my illness shut up.

I need to know how to heal it.

And that’s going to take some serious personal magic. The kind that cannot possibly come from rationality or any other form of “playing by the rules”.

Fuck the rules.

I just want to be happy.

More after the break.

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Despite all my rage

Mandatory music video link :

I still don’t know what to do with all this anger.

But I can access it now, and that’s a huge step forward. As long as I keep taking it out and expressing it now and then, I can find a way to let it out without ending up in jail and/or with no friends and/or without developing a Hulk-like alternate persona.

I mean, I’m somewhat of an uptight and suppressed intellectual type, but not to like. Doctor Jekyll levels.

Also, the more I meditate and cogitate about my anger, the closer I get to hearing what it is truly trying to say to me and thus figuring out what I am so damned mad about.

Because I am seriously pissed off at the world. Perhaps that is merely a symptom of coming to emotional adolescence at this late of an age, I don’t know.

I am like. 35 too late to be an Angry Young Man.

And about ten years too young to be a Cranky Old Fart, come to think of it.

Luckily, I am Gen X, and therefore don’t really need an excuse to be surly.

And accessing my rage has its benefits. A lot of other emotions, some of them positive, were and are frozen right alongside the rage and they are getting released too.

And crucially, I think I am learning to take all that raw id energy that I have been suppressing for so long and using it to prop up my mood.

It’s not easy. My physical ailments do get in the way. It’s hard to be happy when you feel crappy, more or less.

But slowly, very slowly, I am learning to be less negative and more positive. I am learning to look up to that warm glowing light above my head and draw strength from it when I need it. I am learning to fight back against the darkness with nothing but that bright light and sheer bloody-minded determination.

I don’t have to live in the shadows.

I don’t have to crouch in the dark.

I don’t have to live like I’m just waiting to die.

I can be proud, and strong, and free.

And I can walk in the sunshine, head held high, and smell the fresh air and feel the warm caress of sunshine outside this god damned cave of mine.

Amen and hallelujah.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was actually doing it.

I had signed up for and signed in to FlexJobs ^[1]. Had agreed to pay them $2.95 for two weeks of their service. I figure that’s plenty of time to see whether the service is worth my hard burned cash or not.

If I stick with it, it’s like $10/month. Perfectly reasonable.

Having signed in, I did a job search for writing jobs, and alas, was discovering something I had forgotten about the job market and me, namely that all jobs require experience I don’t have, certifications I lack, or degrees I’ve never even heard of.

Still, I was trooping along. Worst case scenario, I will need to switch job categories from Writing to something more likely to hire any warm body, like Customer Support.

I’d rather be showing the world what a truly amazing writer I am, but right now, my primary concern is earning some money in order to feel better about myself.

So there I was, plugging along, when out of nowhere I heard some large plastic object hit the ground hard outside and the power in my room went almost entirely out.

Yes, just to add weirdness to the mix, I was still getting a teeny tiny amount of power. Just enough to keep one of the lights on the back of my computer blinking and my desk fan’s blade slowly rotating like it wanted to be backlit in a warehouse in a music video.

But then again, who doesn’t?

Well I could not continue my search now. My computer would not turn back on. So all I could do is lay down and nap and hope reality was prepared to be more reasonable when I woke up.

This worked. After turning the power off at the power supply on my computer then turning it back on, I was able to get it to boot like normal. and here we are.

Meanwhile, the construction in our building has been migrating down over time andnow it’s happening on the floor above ours and it is VERY LOUD.

I shudder to think of how loud it will be when they are working on this floor, right outside my god damned window

Oh well, This, too, shall pass. Nothing lasts forever, not even the bad stuff.

It’s a good thing I can sleep through noise, though. As long as it’s fairly regular noise with not too many sudden sharp surprises, I can tune it out and snooze.

After all, I learned to sleep through the neighborhood rugrats raising a ruckus back home in Summerside.

Heck, sometimes I even listened in from my bedroom as I was curious is to what kids were up to way back in the 90’s.

And sometimes it would be funny and/or cute.

As an additional “treat”, I get to hear what the construction workers are listening to on the radio. Music in Arabic, of course, or possibly Erdu.

Something with a lot of phlegm, anyhow.

It all sounds the same to me, which I assume must be a product of my being an ignorant infidel, uncultured and uncouth.

Thought I am dying to know if it works the other way. Do these gentlemen ever say to one another, “Oh, I can’t stand that Western music, it all sounds the same to me!”

And if so. what does it “all” sound like to them? I’m dying to know.

I will give the FlexJobs thing another try later on. Maybe tonight, maybe not until tomorrow afternoon. We will see.

More after the break.

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Feeling pretty wretched

Not having the best of evenings.

I mut have been doing some pretty intense dreaming as I feel all brain fried right now. Getting the words out is not easy for me at the moment.

Honestly, all I want to do is go back to sleep. I neglected to set an alarm on my tablet earlier, and as a direct consequence, I am here eating supper at 9:30 pm or so.

I can only hope that despite waking up feeling refried twice, I also caught up on some heavy REM cycles and thus will be far better off in the long run.

We always want our suffering to serve a purpose. One of the most incomprehensible and unacceptable thoughts to the human mind is that bad things can happen to you for no reason and with no warning and no chance for you to avoid it.

Hence the tendency for fatuous idiots to solemnly intone, “Everything happens for a reason. ” when bad shit happens.

Well duh. That’s how causality works.

Now that I have gotten in touch with the vast well of untapped rage within me, the urge to lash out at people is stronger than ever.

And I have been letting that out in my Reddit and YouTube comments lately. Only a teeny bit, mind you. I still fear having a total meltdown and ending up in jail.

But the idea of just letting loose with no restraint or consideration for others does have a certain amount of appeal for me. I am extremely angry at the world, as it turns out, and I am still trying to figure out what the hell I am so damned mad at.

The quick, easy, glib, and insufficient answer is “isolation”. I have been all alone in this vapor locked little world of mine for my entire life and I think a big part of all that rage stems directly from all the loneliness I never let myself feel.

And I guess I am mad at the world for not being there for me. For throwing me to the wolves at an early age, causing me to withdraw from reality hard, which of course then just lead to further feelings of isolation

I just want to go somewhere where I feel warm and cared for and loved and valued and cherished. I have been locked out in the cold for so very, very long

I just want to come home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

They might just come in the form of a site called Flexijobs.

It’s a site that aggregates and lists and lets you apply for the kind of remote jobs you can do from home on your computer.

Which sounds perfect for me. Fab, even.

It could easily be my portal back into actually earning money, and that would do a lot of very good things for my mental health.

It would give me some ammunition to use against my deep and terrible sense of shame for being such a burden on everybody and never having done anything with my life.

It would boost my self-esteem immensely. Like Heinlein said, money is the sincerest form of flattery. People can blow smoke up your ass about how great you are when it’s not costing them anything but when they are willing to actual part with their hard earned cash for what you do, that means they must really like it.

And, ya know, I’d have more money. Can’t discount the positive effect of that. I would feel more financially secure and therefore more emotionally secure, and I would have more cash to spend on little treats and other fun things.

My current lifestyle is already pretty decent. I don’t feel deeply deprived of anything. It’s nothing like when I was on regular welfare and feeling like everything bright and shiny and good in the world was out of reach for me, and I would stare at people, say, going in and out of a restaurant and know that they had no idea how good they had it just for being able to eat out now and then.

God, no wonder I was so depressed.

Anyhow, my point was that getting remote work could be very good for me.

Now, because I am me, I actually discovered Flexijobs last Thursday and it has been sitting there in a couple of tabs ever since.

What can I say, discovering something that (potentially) amazing was very intense for me and I had to leave it alone for a while until the intensity wore off enough that I could go there and truly check it out.

And yup, I know that is bad. Were I a healthy fox, discovering that place would have filled me with enthusiasm and excitement and I would have rode that high into signing u and applying for a buttload of jobs.

But I am not healthy and so I have to deal with it my own way.

What I am definitely NOT going to do is let Flexijobs get lost in the tempestuous turmoil of my brain as I became avoidant of yet another amazing thing and end up not doing a thing with it until months later when I finally close the tabs and give up forever.

Fuck that noise. I’m not going to let that happen this time. I am going to stand up and face the hot winds of opportunity and fight my way uphill against them until I get to the top and overcome them enough to actually do what’s good for me for a change.

And I don’t care what it takes for me to get there. I know that those hot winds will be trying to blow me down back into my “place” and I am going to be ready to fight the god damned things the whole way.

Because I not only want more, I deserve more. I am too amazing to live in this state of genteel poverty. I deserve to have my own home, satisfying and lucrative work which makes me feel like I am finally a part of the world and a grownup, and a man in my life who makes me feel good because I love the hell out of him and he loves the hell out of me and that’s really all we need.

And Flexijobs might just be my key to all of that.

I’m so excited!

More after the break.

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On being antisocial

Strictly speaking, I have been antisocial for my entire life.

“But Fruvous!” I hear you say. “You’re so sweet and kind and friendly! You can’t possibly be all antisocial and mean!”

And you’re right, I’m not. I am, scientifically speaking, a sweetie.

But I am nevertheless antisocial in that due to having Avoidant Personality Syndrome, I shy away from social interaction in ways that can occasionally be mistaken for the more stereotypical antisocial behaviour.

For example, if you were passing me in a corridor and you said hi and I was too shy and withdrawn to say hi back, you might feel like I deliberately snubbed you.

But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I would never want to make someone else feel the icy cold caress of a failed attempt at connection like I have felt so much in my life.

And yet I am fairly certain that I must have done so inadvertently many times.

That’s what comes of being very hard to reach. People who try to reach out to you end up going away hurt and confused because of their lack of success. And they then have no choice but to walk away from you, shaking their heads and nursing some hurt feelings, quite likely to never try again.

Meanwhile, I am crouching behind my invisible wall feeling miserable and lonely and wondering why nobody likes me.

They would have if I had know how to let them in.

I’m working on it.

I’m still not sure if I would have been able to connect with people even if I had known what I was doing way back when. I am an irreducibly weird guy who finds it hard to relate to everyday people.

I might have made nerdy friends before college, though. I get along great with my fellow nerds. They are my tribe. They are my people.

And maybe if I had gained nerdy friends earlier, I would have had some vague chance of having normal, healthy teenaged social development.

Would have been a lot better than my hermetically sealed high school years.

Plus there is my insistence on being myself no matter what. By the core values of our individualistic culture, that is noble and heroic.

But it’s also very antisocial. Actually getting along with others requires at least a little bit of compromised individuality so that you can seem like part of the same herd as others.

Being a lone wolf might seem cool, but it’s not.

In the real world, lone wolves die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A disturbing incident just occurred.

I was getting out of bed so I could get some food from the kitchen then get my blog on when my legs gave out and I sank to the floor in the middle of standing up.

And to top it off, I sank down into a very awkward jumble of knees and ankles that was very painful for my less-than-flexible limbs

Patient readers will recognize that this is exactly how this whole shebang with my being disabled started. Way back in the summer of ’22, I woke up from a nap, tried to stand up, found that my legs would not hold my weight at all, and called 911.

Eventually. It’s hard to get to the phone on my desk when I can’t stand up.

Anyhow, an ambulance came, took me to the hospital, I was there for like 17 days, and when I left I had to use a walker to walk.

And I have not been able to walk normally for more than half a dozen steps since.

Now this time. I at least knew enough not to panic. Instead of calling 911, I just sat there for a while, gathering my strength, then managed to get up into my computer chair and took a longer rest there, and then I managed to stand up and go get my food.

But that feeling of heaviness was still there and stronger than ever. So I am now very, very worried that it will just keep growing until I can’t stand up at all any more.

This is probably just me leaping to terrible conclusions as usual. But maybe not.

If my legs stop holding me up entirely, I will obviously have to switch to a wheelchair pronto. And I am sure as hell not looking forward to that.

The transition to using a walker was rough enough. Learning to get around in a wheelchair sounds like a recipe for intense frustration and me damaging a hell of a lot of walls and door frames.

I wonder if anyone is developing a self-driving wheelchair? That has to be a much simpler trick than self-driving cars.

It’s not like the self-driving wheelchair would have deal with traffic.

Anyhow, so I am quite worried. Granted, I managed to get over this incident. but I don’t know for how long and therefore I don’t know if my legs will hold me up the next time I need to get up and go to the kitchen or bathroom.

So I am feeling pretty freaked out right now.

I don’t think it’s just a side effect of the muscle relaxant, cyclo-whatever, that I am on right now. Like I said yesterday. muscle weakness is not listed as one of the known side effects of this drug, plus this has all happened before and back then Ihad never even heard of this drug.

Plus I have been feeling “heavy” when I walk for like a week now..

In retrospect, I guess that was a warning.

So I dunno what comes next. I guess that if I continue to have problems with getting up due to that “heavy” feeling it will have to be back to the ER for me

Or Urgent Care. I guess.

Because this is something I can’t just ignore and hope it will go away on its own. I already did that with my digestive issues a couple weeks ago and that was dumb.

Might also have been a warning sign. Dammit.

Maybe I am just dehydrated. It’s pretty dang hot today. Maybe all I really need is to refill my sweat glands more can a can of Fresca could ever do.

When I sign off of here. I will see if I can make it to the bathroom so that I can take a leak and refill my water glass.

Wish me luck.

More after the break.

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Am I in a loop?

48 hours later, I am back in the same place.

Once more, I am sitting here at dinner time with zero appetite.

I can’t even imagine eating right now. The very idea of food seems disgusting to me at the moment. How could I do all that to myself?

And I’m done it thousands of times, and enjoyed it. Weird.

Right now, there is no food that exists or could exist that would appeal to me I could have access to a replicator from Star Trek : The Next Generation, which can create any food ever, and I still wouldn’t be able to think of anything I wanted to eat.

And I am tired of this bullshit.

I still feel pretty weak/heavy when I am on my feet. I can deal with it for now but if it gets much worse it will be ambulance time.

It will have to be an ambulance because if I can’t walk, I can’t make it down to the car for Julian to drive me to the ER or UC or whatever.

Again, so far it has not come to that and it probably won’t, or at least, not any time soon. But there is something in my nature that compels me to think of the worst case scenario so I can reassure myself that even should that come to pass, I could handle it.

I am also very tired. That’s probably due to the heat. Heat can really take it out of you.

But because I am tired, AND have no appetite, there is very little chance of my making it to the kitchen to get food I don’t even want to eat.

Dumb, I know. But right now I don’t have the wherewithal to fight myself.

Maybe after the sun sets and it cools off, I will feel better, and then I will be able to eat.

I would order in again but I am all alone in the apartment right now and that means I would have to go to the door to get my order myself.

And that’s not an option either.

Man this sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This happened over a week ago but it’s taken me this long to work up the nerve to tell it because it’s downright humiliating and more than a little gross.

So, fair warning, the following would be hilarious to 14 year olds.

OK, so last week I was deeply engrossed in a YouTube video (don’t remember which one) when I realized I really needed to pee.

Last chance to bail, squeamish people

No problem, I thought. I will just use my handy-dandy receptacle.

So without taking my eyes off the video, I picked up said receptacle, used it, ten put it back on my bedside table.

And then the video ended and I once more became aware of my surroundings (kinda), and discovered to my horror that I had peed not in the customary receptacle but another, identical container that I keep next to the proper urinal one.

And this was the one I keep all my hard candy in.

Luckily, they are all individually wrapped and thus were not, in fact, contaminated by this disaster. I was able to empty the liquid contents of my poor “candy jar” into my toilet and then blot the sodden but still unharmed candies dry with a towel.

The only lasting harm seems to be that the heat of my emissions melted the candies slightly in their wrapper, causing them to stick to the wrapper more than usual and that makes them a pain in the ass to unwrap.

Surprisingly, almost no odor was left behind. I was more effective in my blotting off the wee then I would have thought possible.

I can smell the liquid in question if I pick up the container and give it a sniff, but otherwise I have come out the other side with remarkably little harm done.

Maybe there really are angels that look after fools like me.

Well, better late than never, I guess.

Honestly, this was bad even for me. I can’t believe something so very gross out comedy actually happened to me. The Farrelly Brothers should take inspiration from me.

I guess I just don’t get to have dignity.

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About the day

Oh right, the things that actually happen to me.

Did the Wound Care thing this morning. Was kind of embarrassed because one of my bandages came off at some point and I have no idea when.

I really need to pay more attention to my feet. They’re quite troubled.

But my extremely sedentary lifestyle plus whatever the fuck is happening to my legs insures that, quite frankly, my feet don’t get a lot of use.

So unless a problem is bad enough to cause me conscious pain when I get up to go to the bathroom or whatever. I’m not gonna notice it.

I know I should be inspecting my feet every day. I know the whole routine where you sort of methodically knead each foot to look for hard spots, sore spots, or anything that does not feel right.

But there’s a million things I “should” be doing and I don’t do any of them.

What can I say, I was a neglected child who became a self-neglecting adult. Nobody looked after me so I don’t look after myself.

I would like to change all that but deep down I do not fundamentally feel like I am worth the effort and that makes it very hard to do anything with myself.

I can’t get motivated to help myself most days. What do I care about a piece of shit like me? I don’t matter. I don’t count. I’m not worth a bit of anyone’s time and resources.

I’m not even supposed to be here.

And some day, I won’t be.

More after the break.

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I get weak

Mandatory song reference :

I’ve been feeling kind of weak lately.

And not the the usual flu-like way. It’s more like it takes more effort – more oomph – to do things than it normally requires.

Especially things like standing up. Feels like while I am going from sitting down to standing up, my lower legs are suddenly encased in wet cement.

But at least my back doesn’t hurt. And that points to the most probable cause for this feeling of weakness : that muscle relaxant I have been taking, cyclobenzaprine.

Muscle weakness is not listed as a potential side effect of the drug, but it’s a muscle relaxant, so it would make sense for relaxed muscles to need a bit more effort to get to move the way you want them to.

I know I hate moving when I am really mellow and relaxed.

Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that muscle tension is the only thing propping me up all this time.

Maybe I can’t relax or I melt like wax.

I’m a nervous guy.

And maybe that’s why I can’t seem to shake this diarrhea. Every time I think it has gone and my digestion has normalized, it comes back to liquefy my bowels anew

Last night, it got so bad that I couldn’t sleep because when I tried, I would find I once more had to go to the bathroom.

The most fucked up part is that sometimes I get this feeling of some kind of unspeakable mist spraying deep in my large intestines.

That’s when I know something unpleasant is going to happen pretty soon, and that I should probably head to the bathroom right away.

I don’t, but I should.

Instead I tend to resist the warning signs like they are a pesky little brother until things became very dire and I have to sprint – well, hobble rapidly anyhow – to the bathroom lest I have something really nasty to clean up.

I am going to start keeping track of what I eat so that I can see if there are any foods which are triggering this response.

But I fear it might be a symptom of my continuing undiagnosed syndrome that is eating my muscles away.

Ain’t that fun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.