Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

Not a great session. I had managed to completely forget the appointment was today while playing more Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey, so when the phone rang at 1:03 pm, I was actually annoyed.

Who’s bugging me now, dammit?

But of course, it all came flooding back to me when I heard Doctor Costin’s voice.

Still, not a great session, since I was basically improvising. I did, at least, manage to bring up that whole hot n’ cold thing I talked about here recently.

You know, how I have a raging wildfire and an endless Midnight Tundra within me, and how nice it would be if they could just get together to make me warm.

I have been looking for emotional warmth my entire life. Not very well, to be sure, but I have been looking for it.

At least now I know that all that coldness inside me is not merely a product of having been isolated and alone for so long. It is also the cause of said loneliness.

It is a mindless drive for “clarity” and “objectivity” and it cuts me off from others on an emotional level because of course, truly connecting with others would require me to drop this intellectual pose to let my guard down and be real with people.

Possibly to the point of being intimate with them. Imagine that.

But I am extremely dependent on this state of artificial detachment. It is foundational to my entire sense of reality.

I don’t just love science, I am science. From a very early age, I have held this “objective” posture so that I might see the “truth” of things, and despite knowing just how badly that’s hurt me (and others), I still can’t imagine seeing things any other way.

But I am working on it. I have taken a few baby steps into the realm of feeling the world instead of merely observing it. I have dug up some memories of a very young and innocent me who looked upon the world with far more wonder and delight and who experienced things through his mind AND his emotions.

You know. Before the rape.

And I am trying to get back to that state of innocence. I want to learn to view the world with an (ironically) more neutral and objective emotional outlook instead of the hostile, suspicious, paranoid, and mistrustful bias I have now.

There’s just as much good as bad in the world. Everything is relative and everything is open to interpretation. You’re just as free to think about kittens as you are to think about death. You’re just as free to think about your good points as you are your flaws.

You’re just as free to look for reasons to love yourself as you are to self-negate.

It’s not that simple, I know. Our self-degradation from depression expresses genuine emotions and in order to free ourselves from our own torture chamber, we have to address those emotions and give them a better way to express themselves.

But on another level, it really is that simple. The demons are ours and so is the fight. And as long as we are internalizing our anger and taking it out on ourselves, the demons win and we stay in Hell.

Those hell-fires run on our own rage, venting inwards.

Hence my telling Doc Costin today about how I feel like I can at least access all that rage inside me now, and in so doing, let it express itself little by little.

Like bleeding pressure from a system in small amounts in order to reduce the internal pressure to something a little more safe.

Next up, let’s talk about all that rage.

More after the break.

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Oh god, not this again

Once more it’s around 8 pm and I have absolutely no appetite.

I mean, I’ve even given myself permission to order in, and still my stomach says “Meh.”

I’m not going to let this stand this time, though. I am going to force myself to order something in about ten minutes. I cannot afford to miss another meal.

I ended up not eating supper last night due to sleep weirdness. and I’ll be damned if I end up missing two suppers in a row.

God, I am so sick of this shit.

I wonder what it is about this time of day that kills my appetite? It can’t be the heat. By 8 pm it’s starting to cool down even on the solstice.

Oh, speaking of which :

My god, I actually managed to name-check the solstice ON the solstice!

That might seem minor to you, but trust me, for me and my tendency to have my head stuck so far up my ass I can see my tonsils from behind,. being aware enough of where I am in time and space to pull that off is nothing short of miraculous.

Anyhow. So it can’t be the heat even today. But it could be some kind of “sundown” effect of a different sort.

It definitely feels like some sort of “nothing’s coming out so nothing’s going in” constipation kind of lack of appetite.

But I don’t know what would bring that on right now I swear I was hungry like an hour ago, but now, nothing.

Well fuck it. I have now ordered from Subway. Nice, fresh, low-challenge Subway. I am pretty sure I will be able to eat that.

And ordering it used up the last of the money from last month’s Joker credit card, so that neatly takes care of THAT too.

By my calculations, that should leave about $5 on the card, which I can easily transfer over to my Steam account.

And it didn’t even come out of this month’s budget!

It’s sad how happy that makes me.

But oh well. There’s a reason I was so good at accounting that I got a 98 percent in the class and the teacher confessed to me that it should have been 100 percent but he didn’t want the other teachers to make fun of him.

Because I’m not just good…. I’m literally unbelievably good.

I should probably figure out a way to use that to get money.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. : The Subway, as always, is very good.

Well, kinda. It’s a muscle relaxant called cyclobenzaprine.

Took my first one early this afternoon. So far no major side effects. I don’t feel especially drowsy. I do feel a tiny bit woozy. That’s it.

And there is a pleasant warm feeling suffusing my muscles and that feels very nice. I don’t think it’s relaxing my muscles per se but then again, this was only my first dose.

I’ll take another with supper.

The instructions on the bottle say I am to take it “3 times a day as needed”. and I am like, well, which one is it?

Are they predicting that I will need it three times a day? Or are they TELLING me how often I will need it? Or are they basically saying, “We have no idea. Pick one yourself.”

I mean, yeah, I know, they probably mean “take as needed but no more than three times a day”, but the phrasing is ambiguous and that annoys me.

I will also be trying my new osteoporosis medication, alendronate, soon.

That one kind of scares me. The instructions are so strict sounding and relatively complicated compared to the rest of my meds.

I have to take it when I have just gotten out of bed in the AM and at least half an hours before I eat anything.

Apparently having food in your stomach messes up the absorption rate of the drug. Which strikes me as a significant design flaw.

I mean, people gotta eat.

But whatever. I have to take it immediately after getting out of bed and then DO NOT lie down again for the next half hour.

Or my bone density will come back wrong, I guess.

Hmph. Well it’s having one another side effect : it’s making it very hard to get the words out. I am struggling here and I am not even half way done.

And I am feeling pretty sleepy. Not unusual for me for this time of day but this feels different. I feel very slowed down and laggy.

Noted. We will see how I feel after taking a second dose with supper. Might end up being a once a day thing, if that.

Because this kind of sucks. It’s kind of like being drunk except without that lovely feeling of boozy bonhomie.

Oh well. Hopefully I will feel better after a nice long post-writing nap

The most annoying thing is that this osteoporosis drug is only taken once a week. And I have historically not been very good at remembering to do things once a week.

My current drug regime is all daily, and that suits me. I’m good at that. I take my 8 (!) different daily meds every day without a problem.

But weekly? Meh. If I was good at that, I would not have let my Ozempic sit there on my desk gathering dust for more than a year.

People seem to think it’s a hot new weight loss drug. I never noticed myself losing weight when I was on it.

But it’s not like I check my weight ever.

So I will need to set up a weekly reminder on my tablet to take the damned thing. While I am at it, I should set up reminders for the two days a week I am supposed to be take the lower 30 mg dose of Paxil.

I’ve always been absentminded. I keep forgetting to do something about that.

Ha ha ha.

Right now, I am really looking forward to finishing my blogging and then taking a quick pee before going right back to bed.

I am beginning to sag in my seat here.

More after the break.

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Another temporal displacement

Here I am. having “supper” at 10:30 PM. Oops.

What happened : I played video games (AC : Odyssey) until 7;55 pm. So far so good, I usually have supper at 8;02 pm.

But the moment I stopped playing, I realized I was SUPER sleepy. So I set an alarm on my tablet for 8:17 pm so I can take a 20 minute power nap.

OK, maybe not an actual nap. More of a 20 minute power snooze.

So I do that. Drowse away for 20 minutes. Alarm goes off. I turn it off, and think to myself, “Nah. I need another twenty minutes. ”

Then fall back to sleep without ever setting a second alarm. D’oh!

Oh well. We trundle onwards regardless. There’s nothing I can do about it now, so there is no point to dwelling on it any further.

And what the heck does it really matter, anyhow?

I think I am getting a little better at severing myself from the past once it has passed. I still have many parsecs to go before I can stop living in the past and commit myself to living in, and for, the here and now, but I am heading in the right direction.

It’s just that I am so used to living slightly out of phase with what is going on around me and what is happening in the here and now that the very thought of being fully and completely present gives me a full on prickly cold sweat on the back of my neck panic.

It would be so intense! So unfiltered. So REAL, and demanding, and consequential, and so very very LOUD on all possible levels.

Surely there is no way I could handle all that. I would be completely overwhelmed. It would destroy me utterly.

Or at least that’s how it feels.

That’s why all this “mindfulness” bullshit does not appeal to me. Yes, I get that a great way to fight anxiety is to “ground” yourself in the here and now by, say, looking around to find something red, then something green, and so on in your immediate environs .

That’s not going to work for me. For me, that causes anxiety.

What a piece of work am I.

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And that’s where I stupidly tried to render an image in Stable Diffusion, knowing that it could crash my computer, and crashed my computer.

And that sucked, but I have to admire the flawless ironic timing of it. It literally crashed at the exact moment I was thinking, “But what if it crashes?”.

I am truly my own worst enemy.

Not that there’s a lot of competition for that job….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got the X-rays of my thoracic and lumbar spine after Wound Care today.

Wound Care went fine, but was a tad more involved than usual as it was once again time for one of the Wound Care Clinicians (Linda this time) to debride the callouses on my poor ol feet.

They’re always a little sore afterwards, with a faint burning feeling. Well, my feet were just abraded rather thoroughly.

I guess not everything that gets removed is dead, calloused skin.

There was one moment of somewhat not-nice amusement when my nurse looked around and said to herself, “Now where are my Caesars?”.

She was looking for her scissors. Which in her accent came out….. LOL.

Don’t worry, I am not so uncouth as to laugh at the poor woman who presumably speaks at least one more language than I do.

But I am laughing now because teehee.

Then it was off to Brooke Radiology for the X-Rays. Superman was busy so they had to use the machine.

And the folks at Brooke were their usual smoothly efficient selves. But I did end up having to wait in line a bit before registering at the front desk and that did a number on my poor busted legs.

In retrospect, I should have used the chair function of my rollator (outdoor walker) and rested except when it was time to move ahead.

Oh well. Live and learn.

But that plus the usual amount of walking involved with doing Wound Care plus the extra lifting of my legs I had to do for the debridement have all left my legs not very happy with me at all.

They keep threatening to spasm or cramp up and I get little jabs of pain in the back my my upper legs when I get up to get food or water or whatever.

Right in my big ol’ drumsticks.

If it keeps up, I might take an extra dose of Gabapentin and see if that stops my legs from bitching at me for a while

Had to put on the usual ridiculous hospital “gown”. I am positive the tech told me to take my pants off but leave the shirt on, which sounded ass backwards (so to speak) considering it was my lower and mid spine that was being X-rayed.

Then I get de-pantsed just to find out she gave me a gown, not the…. I want to call them “hospital pants”, basically terrycloth sweatpants – I had been expecting, and now I am completely and utterly confused.

So what else is new?

So I take off everything and get into the stupid gown. This surprises the tech, who insists on putting an extra gown over me like a blanket while I am on the X-ray table.

Whatever. Like I have said before, I seem to be less modest about my own nudity than most people, and this was one of those rare moments when that causes slight trouble.

Of course, the fact that I don’t wear underwear did not help either.

Anyhow, pictures taken, Doctor Chao’s office has them by now, and I should hear from them about it in a couple of days.

We will see. I might have to chase after them about it.

It’s so hard to learn to be positive when I am naturally cynical and suspicious.

Maybe I should try to split the difference somehow. Like, be all, “What a wonderful day to be alive in this cold and hostile universe! I can’t wait to embrace the new day and all the ways fate will fuck me over for no good reason! Yay. ”

No. That just sounds sarcastic. And/or schizophrenic.

More after the break.

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Window dressing for a sweatshop

That’s how these words I type feel to me right now. There is a hell of a lot of heavy shit going down in this busted up headspace of mine and then there’s my conscious mind just sitting on the sidelines saying, “Wow, that looks like hard work. ”

Like I got repeatedly told, rather traumatizingly, as a child, you can help most by just staying out of the way.

I guess that’s how I learned that I don’t matter and nobody wants me around. I wanted to help so badly. I wanted to do what everyone was doing. I wanted to do my part.

But nobody had the patience to teach me how to do things and it was easiest for them to just tell me to GTFO.

I guess that’s how I learned that my needs don’t matter at all. My whole life, I did what was best for others. I was the malleable, adaptable kid who is always okay with whatever you are changing about his life and who never asserts a single need of his own, to the point of self-neglect.

Because I was too timid to ask for anything. I got the message very early on that I was just barely being tolerated and the last thing I wanted to do was make myself any more of a burden than I already was so I never asked for a thing.

I was always the only third class citizen. There was my parents, my siblings, and then me, the accident. The unwanted houseguest. The Christmas puppy. The afterthought.

And the whole time, I had no idea I was being neglected and abused. I was well into adulthood before I began to even question how I was raised and it was decades after that when I started wondering why I wasn’t treated like my siblings by my parents.

I was never equal. I was always living like a house mouse, scurrying around trying not to be seen and surviving on whatever crumbs the others left behind

And that’s so very….wrong. That’s not how you are supposed to raise a kid. You’re not supposed to make him feel like a stranger in his own family. You’re not supposed to make him feel like you wish he’d just disappear.

I tried to. Really I did. But I just kept existing anyway.

How bratty of me.

No wonder I always felt so small. And why I wanted to escape detection and feared “exposure” because none of the attention I ever got was very positive.

And why even when I was with my family, I was mentally checked out and only half listening to what was going on. Enough to monitor the conversation for things that involved me (rare) but not really engaged or present.

The same thing I would later do in the classroom. And get in trouble for it because teachers would thing I wasn’t paying attention.

But I heard and learned from every word they said. It just did not take up a significant portion of my massive intellect to do so.

Looking back, I wish I had grown enough backbone to make demands to be treated fairly by my family and my schools. To throw my weight as an incredibly gifted student around and get a fuss made about me, even if I have to make it myself.

I was, and am. an academic genius. But the only teacher who seemed to recognize this was my favorite teacher ever. Mister Blair Arsenault.

Nobody else wanted to invest in me. Too much work, I guess.

Now it’s up to me to invest in myself.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right now. Like my brain can’t find the right frequency and is just listlessly wandering the dial in search of it.

Oh well. Inspiration is a wonderful thing but it’s not necessary. There is always my failsafe measure : just start typing.

It’s how I started out writing things like this blog. No plan, no outline, no complicated intentions. Just start typing and you will figure out what you’re doing as you go.

This method is not for everyone. In fact, to some, it would seem like jumping out of an airplane with a ball of yarn and knitting needs with which to knit your parachute.

But it’s what has worked for me. Don’t daydream of what you WILL write some day – that is a fine way to make sure you never write it. Don’t write detailed notes either, and for heaven’s sake. do NOT write a deep and elaborate backstory for the world in which you are totally going to set, I dunno, some sort of story eventually, probably.

Nuh uh. That’s the deadest of ends. If you want to write, write. If the idea of writing right now frightens or upsets you, ask yourself why. Is it that you like the idea of writing and want to have written things but don’t want to actually do the writing? You know, the part that is actual work, and takes time and effort and thought and strain?

Well then it’s time to get real. If you want to be a writer, write. Do it RIGHT NOW. Don’t do anything else. Prove to yourself that you CAN and WILL be a writer BY WRITING.

That’s the only way to truly learn to be a writer. Thinking you can learn to write without writing is like thinking you can learn to ride a bike without riding. It just does not work.

Leave all that “preparation” bullshit to the equally bovine feces based creative writing courses and tutors and way too weighty books on writing where they belong.

And remember, nobody needs to see what you write except you. And if you hate it, you can just delete it and start over with what you’ve learned.

The most important thing is to start building up your writing muscles. The ones that translate thoughts into your head into words on a page. Over time, articulating your thoughts and emotions will become easier and easier, and more importantly, the deep part of your mind where inspiration is born will learn that there is an exit for feelings and thus a way to let them go and be rid of them.

Trust me, it will love it. Your deeper self has a lot to say, you just need to open a way for it to be heard.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe, when faced with the prospect of actual work, you have decided you never really wanted to be writer in the first place. You just liked putting a halo on your daydreaming, but if it requires you to exert yourself doing something which is not nearly as much fun as mere mental masturbation, forget about it.

That’s the thing about true creative work : it’s work. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun but it DOES mean it can’t be easy. It will always require far more of an investment than watching YouTube or scrolling on your phone, and there is no guarantee that it will pay out any time soon either.

So make up your mind : are you a writer? Because writers write. It’s right there in the name. Or are you just a daydreamer with pretensions?

I didn’t plan on this being some weird kind of pep talk for other writers, but what the hell, here we are.

More after the break.

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The life update

Oh yeah, stuff has happened.

Well, one thing : I saw Doctor Chao about my back today.

I will give Doctor C one thing : he has totally solved his lateness problem. It used to be that I would be lucky if I saw him within 45 minutes of my appointment time, and often it would be an hour and a half of waiting in the waiting room before I saw him.

And that’s bad enough for me, but what about people with lives?

Anyhow, that’s all in the past now. Now, the wait is twenty minutes tops. Still not exactly machinelike efficiency, but ever so much better.

Plus I brought my tablet, which is more or less working like normal now. It still sometimes refuses to charge but if I leave it that way for a bit then unplug the charger then plug it back in, that wakes it up.

So I am still wary of it, but so far, it’s behaving.

Now where was I? Oh right, the appointment with Doc Chao.

I told him about the terrible grinding pain in my back when I stand up after lying down, He looked ovr my chart, including my recent MRIs, and realized that my actual spine had not been imaged in a while so I will be going in for X-rays of my thoracic and lumbar spine region tomorrow, after Wound Care.

Apparently, you don’t need an appointment to get medical imaging done at Brooke Radiology any more. That was more of a Covid thing.

That’s going to take some getting used to, seeing as the LifeLabs upstairs from Brooke still treats walk-ins like third class citizens.

I guess they get off on it.

Doctor Chao also thinks that the problem might be osteoporosis. The spine doctors as VGH thought that might be it but were leery of saying so because I’m a dude.

A dude with virtually no dairy in his diet for decades, mind you. Sigh.

So Doc Chao is putting me on an osteoporosis medication (kind of curious how that works) plus a muscle relaxant for the back pain.

The muscle relaxant might make me sleepy. Fine. It’s not like I have a life it would take me away from.

Hell, it might even help me sleep better. And I am all for that.

Well I guess that’s the update for now. We’ll see what shows up on the X-ray.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s now clear to me that the fire that burns inside of me and the emotional warmth that I have craved for my entire life come from the same place and it’s all a matter of one’s attitude, which dictates whether the fire burns or warms.

I get the feeling that I have been thermally polarized for a long time. I have my icy cold analytical intellect in the same person as my ragingly powerful creative fiery soul, and in order to keep the two from canceling each other out, I keep them far apart

But that’s terribly wrongheaded. Why should I be shivering in the cold dark night of my freezer compartment of a life when I have all this lovely heat inside me?

Heat that I can totally turn to warmth…. for other people, not myself. Somehow I became immune to my own healing rays of light and therefore I have to use them to warm someone else and bask in their reflected glow.

God, that’s a depressing (but true) way to look at my warm personality.

I can only love myself by loving others. One would think that for efficiency’s sake alone I would be able to cut out the middleman and love myself and be warmed by that love, but on some deep and mighty level I built thickly insulated walls around that icy cold mind of mine specifically to preserve “clarity” and “objectivity”.

I wanted to see the Truth. I am one of those people who, as Robert Anton Wilson put it, wants to know what’s really going on. I want to see through the layers of delusion to the very heart of things.

Or so I thought. I am still in the process of wrapping my head around how inhumane and self-destructive such a brutally alien point of view can be.

I mean, inherent in this whole, “I want to know the Truth” mindset is the phrase, “no matter the cost”, and I am here to tell you that it costs too damned much.

It’s a point of view without sympathy or mercy for oneself. It denies me even the most basic protection against the cold hard realities of the world, leaving me wandering naked on that Midnight Tundra wondering why I am so COLD.

Put on a freakin’ parka already!

But it’s not that simple. It’s very hard to surrender this “clarity” when the truth of what it reveals is central to one’s entire sense of reality. My world is made of crystal clear insight and to change that in order to gain personal warmth feels like insanity.

So perhaps what is needed is a paradigm shift towards a mindset that does not feel like warming myself up inside makes my world “less true”, but rather, one that opens it up to all kinds of truths it could not see because I was so damned cold.

I am sure the world is full of warmly wonderful things that I have had no emotional access to because I was too busy preserving this “clarity”.

Nobody had to detach me from humanity. I did it all myself, and all in the name of a search for the truth.

But even the truth is subject to the hedonic equation. To utility.

So at what point does this insatiable drive for insight because a liability and not an asset? What use is all this “truth” if it leaves me dying of emotional malnutrition and spiritual hypothermia? God damn it, how much am I willing to pay just to feel smugly superior to others and their “delusions”?

Too fucking much, apparently.

And there has to be some way to make this all work together. To move my lonely satellite closer to the Sun and let those protective layers of ice melt away to let the sun shine into my heart.

There’s sunshine in my heart. It’s always there.

And it makes me a sweet, sweet honey… fox.

More after the break.

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Why I read gay furry manga

For scenes like this :

I know it doesn’t mean a lot out of context, but trust me, this was the glorious climax to a long romantic buildup of the “He feels the same way about ME!” variety.

And that sort of thing is very good for my soul. I think there is some bad social wiring in this rat’s nest of a mind of mine that needs examples of positive gay romance to soothe it because of that part of me from long ago that still sees gay sexuality as a threat.

Being me is really fucking complicated.

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A virgin to love

I am one. In two different ways.

I have no direct experience of romantic love at all. The closest I have come to romance has been through furry roleplay, and that never got very far.

Largely because I kept making the same mistake over and over again – moving too slow and not “laying claim’ to the man I wanted, and then seeing him go off with someone else leaving me all alone again

I guess it’s a side effect of my “free spirit” approach to life. Making someone “mine” does not come naturally to me. To me, we’re together because we like being together and no exclusivity is required.

But that leaves my partners wondering if I am even all that into them. Do I actually want them, or are we just buddies who hang out sometimes? Would I fight to keep them? Would I sacrifice some of my precious autonomy to be with them? Or would I just shrug and flit off to the next bit of pleasant company?

I don’t know the answer to any of those questions. For what it’s worth, I often don’t know how people really feel about me, either.

I guess that comes from being so easygoing and free. I don’t give pledges of undying love to anyone but I don’t demand them either.

I guess a partner who takes the initiative and pursues me would be ideal. Especially if they are patient and persistent enough to put up with my sometimes vacillating nature.

It’s not easy to bring a big personality like mine in for a landing. And without landing, there’s no way to settle down, is there?

And I want to settle down. I want it SO MUCH. I dream of domestic bliss and making a home with my Man of Life.

But it won’t be easy.

Nothing worthwhile ever is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I am finally getting around to watching The Last Unicorn

Somehow, the subject of the movie came up in discussion when I was hanging with the fuzzies this morning, and I mentioned that I had a weird history with it despite never having seen it.

A friend gaped at me when I said I hadn’t seen it, then promptly dug up the link above so I could rectify that situation.

About the weird history : way way way WAY back when I was brand spanking new to this whole “furry” thing and playing my first character, a minotaur named Farmboy^[1], on good ol’ FurryMUCK ^[2], I people kept making references to “the Red Bull” (not the one that gives you wings) and I hadn’t the foggiest idea what they were on about.

After all, I wasn’t red. I was chestnut brown!

And these people seemed to want something very kinky from me, and that was not something I can provide. Whether I have pointy horns or a fluffy waggy tail, I am the same gentle affectionate harmless critter and they were definitely never going to get tied up and abused (or worse) by yours truly.

But they would cozy up to me being all subby and cute and sexy, and I would cuddle and pet and fuck them, but inevitably they would get all frustrated and leave.

I disappointed a LOT of submissive males back then.

Luckily, a few of them, like Furlup and Luagha, got over it and became friends anyway.

Anyhow, back to our odd looking friend the Unicorn. [[3]]

I had multiple opportunities to see the move in my mid to late teens but I always balked because what little I knew about the movie suggested that I would find it to be upsetting and sad and possibly even traumatizing.

And I can’t take those kinds of risks. Anything involving animals cuts straight into my heart and the wrong thing can leave me depressed and upset for days.

This is why I have never, and will never, see or read Watership Down or any of the other works by that author.

As brilliant an idea it is to write fantasy from the point of view of animals for whom the human world is magic, I am not going to go there.

My sad and sensitive little heart couldn’t take it.

But I am willing to risk The Last Unicorn now. What the heck, it’s worth it just for the sheer potency of how Seventies it is alone.

I mean, the songs are by America!

And Seventies nostalgia is quite potent for me. I think it’s because, having been born in ’73, things from the Seventies connect me to my early childhood, before I had the sort of jadedness and filters we develop as we get older.

Sure, lots of stuff from the Eighties is also highly nostalgic for me. But it doesn’t hit me with the megaton force that Seventies stuff does.

After all, that’s when I lost everything.

More after the break.

[[3]] What? She’s weird looking, with those enormous eyes and that weirdly streamlined head of hers. I get that she’s not just a “horse with a horn”, but still. [[3]]

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A very uninteresting fact

I won’t be ordering from KFC on Saturday nights any time soon.

It took a few times for me to “get it” but this time I remembered that since our KFC switched from bottled to fountain drinks, it’s become extremely trick for my walker bound butt to pick up my order from the door.

Because a fountain drink in a cup has to be kept level at all time or it spills. Just imagine trying to keep the damned thing level when you need both hands to use your walker.

So I was moments from ordering up some KFC when I remembered this salient factoid, and as a result, Donair Dude got my money instead.

Ergo, I am now happily shoveling what amounts to donair poutine (fries with donair meat n’ sauce on them) into my mouth and pondering the vagaries of fate and the law of unintended consequences.

Like, whoever made the decision to switch to fountain drinks at KFC certainly did not intend to exclude disabled persons like myself. That was probably the further thing from their minds at the time.

The truth is, the markup on fountain drinks is WAY higher than on bottled drinks, so presumably it was just a cost cutting measure.

Yet it still means that I couldn’t get the KFC I was craving, or at the very least, that getting it had a hidden cost for me that I was not prepared to pay.

It should comes as no surprise to anyone that the world is a different place when you are disabled. What is a small, negligible distance for you is a hike for me. What is a simple form factor for delivering Diet Pepsi to you is a major roadblock for me. What is a basic staircase for you is an impossibility to me.

And so forth and so on.

I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that I may never walk normally again. And I am increasingly pondering whether I should make the transition from walker to wheelchair at long last.

Moving around while sitting does have a lot of appeal. But having to pilot the thing around obstacles and around the apartment seems like it would really suck.

So honestly, I dunno. Maybe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomrrow.

I generally don’t like “shop” as a verb – I associate it with the kind of mindless consumerism that leads to phrases like “retail therapy” (I get mine wholesale) and “fast fashion” and their being more women’s clothing stores in any more than any other category of store by a ratio of three to one.

Think about it, ladies. For the market to support than many stores, the markup per item must be ENORMOUS.

Those cute, kicky summer heels you just bought for $15? Cost them $1. And that includes the labour of the judgy looking ladies who rang it up for you.

The labour of the elderly Indonesian lady in some godforsaken jungle sweatshop who actually made the damned things barely enters into the price at alll.

Anyhow. Back to what I am fairly sure was the point.

I don’t like “shop” as a verb, but today I shopped well, and I want to crow a little about it.

See, I went to do my usual Friday shopping online at Real Canadian Superstore via DoorDash and noticed that all the grocery stores on DoorDash had this awesome sale on where you got 30 percent off of any order over $60.

Cha ching, thought I.

So I did what shopping I needed to do and my total came to a little under $45.

Now’s when things get fun, thought I, rubbing my paws together with glee.

First I supersized my peanut butter order. A 2 KG jar instead of my usual 1 KG. Then I added a second 1KG bag of my usual No Name Original Trail Mix.

That got me to the magic $60 mark, then I applied the offer code and just like that, even with tax and tip, my total game to just under $50.

And I will not have to buy trail mix or peanut butter for a WHILE.

Looking back, I kind of wish I had thrown in some small thing that would feel like a “treat” to me just to make the whole thing more rewarding.

Oh well. For a Taurus like me, saving money is always a treat.

Hmmm. I know there was another thing. Now what was it? Oh yeah…

FOXES ON SPEED!

Well, amphetamines anyhow.

Ritalin still counts! Ask any pharmacology student.

Anyhow, I took my first Ritalin (or methylphenidate, as it’s known at home) today, and as seems obvious in hindsight, I did not feel any different.

I mean, I felt somewhat more energetic and enthusiastic than normal, but I felt that way before I took the pill too, likely due to getting a dose of sunshine and fresh air when I went to Wound Care this morning, so that doesn’t count.

I’ve slept as I normally do (too often, in naps) and felt more or less the same as always.

But that’s just the first pill. Could be that I will start to feel the effects when I get more of the drug into my system.

Or maybe I am just so massive in being massive that a mere alteration of my fundamental brain chemistry stands no chance of making me more decisive.

Or maybe not. Honestly, I could go either way.

I admit, I do feel a little “wired” after going and making my lunch. So maybe what was needed was something to stimulate an adrenaline response in order to get the Ritalin really pumping in my bloodstream.

But I can tell you this : so far, I don’t feel any more capable of making decisions. But then again, I just started on the drug, so it may come to my rescue yet.

Or give me a heart attack via tachycardia.

Either way, it’s a change.

More after the break.

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Trying again tomorrow

I have decided that I will take Ritalin #2 tomorrow morning.

My heart was really racing earlier and that freaked me out. Both for the obvious reason that it’s scary for that to happen for anyone but especially for someone with stents in their heart like me, plus hypertension et al, and for a slightly less obvious reason.

You see, having my heart be racing like that reminds me way too much of when I am having a panic attack.

So it was giving me a panic attack. Funny how it can work backwards like that. I guess I was flashing back to panic attacks I’ve had in the past.

It was a flashback panic attack, Jack.

So I am going to give my body time to cool off before I go doing that again.

I am probably overreacting. (Boy, do I say that a lot lately )

And speaking of things happening a lot lately. been having digestive issues again. Seems to be a pattern now. Loose stools with a certain amount of burning associated with them, and possible leakage, and taking the form of a main event and an encore.

Once more, I tell myself I should be going to Urgent Care or the ER. Coupled with my attacks of severe back pain, this all could indicate something spinal going on, or potentially even worse, something going awry with my untreated umbilical hernia.

Remember that one? Feels like it’s from forever ago, dunnit?

Back then, the surgeon looked at this huge bulge in my abdomen and told me that he didn’t think it was in danger of rupturing and that therefore he did not think that it was worth the risk of operating on it.

Normally, he’d implant a sort of mesh cage to hold it in place, but he couldn’t do that until – you guessed it – I’d lost a lot of weight.

Might be time to get it looked at again. I dunno.

But that’s the kind of thing that if it goes back it can make a heart attack looking like a frigging hangnail, so I will talk to Doctor Chao about it during our phone appointment coming up on Monday.

The one I made at the beginning of the month. For my back pain. Sigh.

Hang in there, body parts! Hang on tight!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Whoo boy, am I having one whopper of a “sleepy day”.

I have slept all day except for being awake for Therapy Thursday and breakfast, and I can tell I am not even half done yet. As I type these very words, my head and eyelids are heavy, I keep drifting off into reverie when I am not typing, and I keep tipping the wrong weirds without even crowing it.

That felt strange.

So I’m not looking forward to this particular blogging session. To say the words are not coming easy to me would be a vast understatement. As usual during these periods, I keep drifting off in thought and having to yank myself back to reality and the task at hand in order to get any typing done.

So this ought to be fun. Whee, look at me, I’m dancing on the edge of the wing of a plane in flight and flashing my bare butthole at William Shatner and John Lithgow.

Gaze upon my asshole, ye mighties, and despair!

Yeah, this ought to be a hoot and a half.

If only I had something to talk about besides my pathetically horny thoughts. Something important and impactful. Something less silly.

Oh right! I will soon be experimenting on myself with drugs.

Paging Doctor Fruvous…

Talked with Doc Costin today about the whole “trying out an ADD drug” thang. And he agreed to prescribing me a low dose of Ritalin so we can see what happens.

I am rather nervous about the whole thing because, as he reminded me, all the drugs used to treat ADD are some form of amphetamine, and I have stents in my heart, and so I am a little worried about that.

But I am still going through with it. The potential benefits justify the risk in my mind. If something can fix my chronic indecision, I have got to give it a try.

My mind has been frozen by being pulled in all directions at once for a very long time. It’s like any time I try to make a decision, all the other possibilities that I would thus be denying grab me and pull me back to the center of them all again and I am once more stranded at the infinite crossroads without a map.

And I know there is something that is supposed to be happening to resolve that impasse. Healthy people do not have this problem. They make decisions and act on them out of their own genuine desires all the time, and never look back.

How the fuck is that even possible?

I can only assume that they don’t have powerfully creative minds that are always aware of all the possibilities like I do. They only ever see whatever options are right in front of them and choose from those every single time.

But it’s more than that. Some basic primal urge rising straight from the id must prompt them to keep moving again and maintain the momentum they are only dimly aware they even have, and I am the poor puts with an id so weak it barely takes up space.

Sorry about that, little guy. I swear I am trying to bring you to life and make you healthy and strong again. But the lack of you has left me so limp and deflated that I can only try to pump you up now and then.

I suppose at some point, I am going to have to find the sheer chutzpah to make mnyself take the plunge into right activity whether I feel like it or not.

Don’t hold your fucking breath for that. Most days, I am barely hanging on.

More after the fucking break.

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I can’t pretend to be grateful

Because I’m not grateful.

I’m filled with BITTER FUCKING RAGE.

And the very notion of trying to be grateful for this shit stain of a life of mine makes me want to puke from both ends.

I mean, it’s so god damned humiliating.

“Oh wise and benevolent overlord, I am ever so grateful for all the time you spent NOT beating me to death today. And there are so many ways to hurt me that you haven’t gotten around to using on me yet! I am just soiling myself out of gratitude for your less than theoretical maximum abuse of me. Please, may I suck shit from your toes to show just how much I appreciate how good you are to me? PLEASE? ”

Yeah that’s not fucking happening. I refuse to be grateful simply because my life could be worse. That’s so seriously toxic bullshit there. That kind of thinking renders gratitude and indeed just plain good things meaningless because things always COULD be worse and COULD be better, so what does it even frigging matter?

So spare me your empty headed vacuous positivism and your Doug Henning rainbows and unicorns brain rotting bullshit.

I hate you and everyone else disgorging pre-digested platitudes and acting like you have something useful or meaningful to say to me.

You don’t. You can’t. You are so far beneath me and I am so far beyond you that you mewling morons are less than microbes to me and the very idea that you think you know enough to offer me any kind of help would be hilarious if it wasn’t so revolting.

I am alone. I’ve always been alone. I will always be alone. Because nobody can understand me, let alone handle me. I have to walk on the very rims of eggshells around everybody just to be able to get along at all.

If I ever let down my guard and let the “real me” shine through, I would end up in jail. I need this feeble “Mr. Fluffy” persona of mine in order to function at all. Without it I would be a glowering tower of rage and sarcasm and the will to destroy. I would spend every day looking for someone to hurt so that I could actually get rid of same of this rage by putting it into another.

That’s how sadism works, folks. You make other people experience your pain.

So no, I am not fucking grateful. Grateful for what? Pardon me if my standards are a little bit higher than being grateful for all the bad things that have NOT happened to me.

And fuck you, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It occurs to me that writing in this here blog is actually the closest I get to dealing with the real world on a daily basis.

Which is not very close, obviously. All I am doing is stringing words together for maybe five people max to see and read. And I am doing it from the cowardly comfort of my “garbage dump without the charm” style bedroom.

But still, those five friends of mine are all part of reality (a really lovely and greatly appreciated part!), and these words of mine do technically go out to the Internet at large, and that’s reality too.

I am, technically, exposing myself to the world when I do this.

Hi. I’m Michael. And before you ask, it’s because I’m uncircumcised.

Most of the penises in the world, man or beast, look like mine.

But yeah. Technically I am already “out there” in the real world, albeit in a very minor “tiny toe in the water” way.

And ya know – so far so good.

Doctor Costin keeps bugging me to make my blog into something bigger. Something more people would see so I could maybe attract an audience and maybe even make a tiny bit of money off it.

And it’s not the worst idea in the world. I am sure that these words, with all the raw emotion, poetry, and my strange sense of vision, could attract a following if they were exposed to enough potential readers.

Who knows, if I played my cards right and got very lucky, I might even be able to live out my dream of becoming a highly influential pundit.

I mean, I definitely have my own identity and a unique point of view. And my writing can be extremely provocative or even subversive.

I could be the best kind of agent of chaos if I had sufficient platform. Say things that really shake up how people see things by shaking the scales from their eyes so they can see what is truly going on in the world and how they have the power to stop it.

I should write a really stirring speech called, “You can save the world!”.

And you can. Just not alone.

But to make this blog more of a “thing” would require a very painful transition into worrying about quality and worrying about whether each entry is “good enough”. Is it smart? Is it entertaining? Am I saying something worth saying? And so on.

And I really don’t want to do it. This blog is my safe space where I can just write whatever is in me to write without worrying about my audience. It’s very important to me that it remains an unfocused and unformatted venue for all the thoughts in my head that are waiting to be expressed. I can’t go taming it. It would die.

But I can see myself starting another blog, or more. One where I did actually try to make it as appealing to a mass audience as I can and see if I can catch people’s attention.

Or at least piss them off enough to comment. I’d be… good at that.

It might end up being several blogs under various noms de plume to represent me writing in different modes. One for my high octave political screeds, another for my more philosophical meanderings, yet another for my more gentle comedic side, and so forth and so on.

Honestly, I could end up with a LOT of them. The voices in my head are legion and they are all eager to grab the mic and deliver their message.

Well whatever. Sometimes we have to do crazy things in order to express ourselves.

Why should I be any different?

More after the break.

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Weary down to the bone

That was a very unpleasant trip to the kitchen.

The minute I got up from the computer, I knew I was in trouble. I was instantly as tired and sore as I usually am when I come back from the kitchen.

This did not bode well.

From then on, it was a real battle just to get to the kitchen and do stuff. I was lurching around like I was on a ship in rough seas, and for once it was not due to being dizzy, it was due to being so very weary.

And there was no warning. I felt fine till I got up. Even that burning in my upper leg was gone. As far as I know, I was 5 by 5.

But the second the muscles were carrying my weight, I was in pain.

Ain’t that a fucking peach.

Obviously this worries me. I have already been worried that I have hit the end of my “good times” and from now on things are going to get a lot worse really fast.

I’m probably just overreacting. But maybe not.

Maybe it’s just that the heat is wearing me down and I have not being hydrating aggressively enough so I am dehydrated and depleted too.

I bet my electrolytes are so out of whack that they have entered the long theorized state of negative whack.

Spooky, isn’t it?

Knowing me, by this time Friday I will have put this current crisis behind me completely and have moved on to the next thing that I think means I am about to frigging die.

But of course I’m not about to die.

I haven’t had a long, lingering, horrifying, debilitating, and humiliating descent into being too weak to even breathe on my own any more yet.

So as long as I am not immobile and full of tubes, there’s time. I guess.

I sense that there’s something deeply wrong with that entire line of thinking but it’s making me feel better so fuck it.

I am so, as they say in AA, sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I keep blaming myself for not taking care of myself properly, but for the most part I am.

Blood sugar and blood pressure are normal. Only the sleep apnea remains.

Maybe I will try to focus on addressing that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I say, “might be” because I know I tend to overreact to things and leap to negative conclusions based on wildly inadequate information, so I am covering my ass.

So to speak.

But the pain in the tendons connecting my kneecap to my upper legs has spread into an overall inflamed feeling all through said upper leg, with accompanying stiffness.

I am worried that my mystery condition is attacking my muscles in earnest now and that I am at the beginning of the end of my ability to walk at all.

Again, might be an overreaction. But it might not be.

So once more, I need to tell myself I SHOULD be heading to urgent care. What with last week’s lower intestinal issues and this week’s muscle and tendon pain, there are plenty of reasons for me to put myself in front of a qualified medical professional.

Heck, that’s not even counting the severe back pain that I get from time to time.

And yet, I don’t feel sufficiently motivated to go. I guess that’s because none of my symptoms are all that alarming and it takes some real fear for me to overcome my general lassitude and passivity enough to take action.

There’s a lesson in there about motivating myself, I’m sure. Something about using my tendency to panic in order to get things done.

Hard to imagine panicking over my lack of employment. I mean, where’s the fire? I will always know deep down that nothing bad will happen to me if I continue my shiftless and worthless lifestyle.

Well, nothing that hasn’t been happening to me for 30 years or so, anyhow.

Which brings me back to that key question for all us Failure to Launch types : what makes us so sure that we can’t make it in the “real world”?

It must have something to do with that fixed sense of self. It’s not that we don’t think we can do the actual individual actions involved in adulting.

It’s that transitioning to an actual adult life means changing who we are as a person. It means growing up, and like I have said before, for every butterfly that is born, a caterpillar has to die, or so it seems.

And it’s very hard to convince that intelligent caterpillar that transforming into a butterfly is not, in fact, death. That they will still be the same person only changed.

The same person in the exact same person that you were when you were born. Your body changed radically during your childhood and yet you are still that same person who wore your nametag back in kindergarten.

It’s still a super scary thought, though. I guess the leap to adulthood seems like cliff diving into rocky water. No matter how many reassurances you get that it’s perfectly safe, you’re sure that you are about to die.

And so you will do whatever it takes in order to not have to grow up. You’ll mooch off friends and parents, you’ll write long Reddit posts about how unfair it is for the world to expect you to actually do stuff for money, you’ll infuriate everyone who tries to care about you with your passive but intense stubbornness, and all while telling yourself that you are the victim in all of this.

And you are.

But you’re also the victimizer. You are hurting yourself the most, and that will only stop when you stop fighting your own growth and let it all happen.

Blocked growth hurts. Flowers die if their pots are too small. The pain you can’t explain is actually the pain of your fixed sense of self rigidly keeping you from growing as a person. You need to bust open your cage and let yourself expand.

And by you, I of course mean me.

More after the break.

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Made a decision about my indecision

I am definitely going to take Doc Costin up on his offer to put me on an ADD drug to see if that helps me with my indecision issues.

It’s just too wonderful a prospect to let pass me by. I have fairly serious doubts about whether I have ADD – I honestly don’t think I meet enough of the criteria.

I mean, indecision alone isn’t enough for a diagnosis, is it?

And I don’t have issues with lack of focus, restlessness. inability to finish things, and that sort of thing.

But who knows, I could be wrong. And I figure that the worst case scenario is that I take the drug for a while and it doesn’t help and then I stop.

Might be a weird side effect or two, but whatever. If it can unfreeze my motivational structure and allow me to make decisions and act on them and move forward with my life, it’s worth the damned risk.

Right now, even when I am feeling like finding some work online, I am poleaxed by the question of where to go and what to try.

And I know that what the well-meaning types who don’t get it will say, “It doesn’t matter! Try anything! If it’s not the right thing, try something else!”.

Uh huh And which “anything” do I try again? No matter what the setup might be a decision still has to be made, and I am not constitutionally capable of deciding that kind of thing arbitrarily.

I need a reason to do things. I need things to make sense. I need to have some kind of sense of where the road is going before I set foot on it.

And I know that can be crippling. And in my case, it is. But knowing that and overcoming it are two very different things.

And I know that my indecision is how my depression “keeps me in my place”. It’s not the only way it does it, but it is the strongest among them.

It makes me wish I had another thing like school where I just needed to sign up and then the rest of the decisions are made for me and I just have to show up and do what is expected of me.

Doc Costin has suggested distance education. Since Covid, it’s become extremely doable to take university classes online. I could do that.

Might just be able to show the world how smart I am after all.

I will think about it. And…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.