Really enjoying the summer sunshine now that it has finally shown up.

Got to admit that at the end of May there, I was starting to wonder if summer had failed to ship. The days were gray and overcast and rain-ish, which is like being rainy but without actually committing to rain, and I still had to wear a jacket whenever I went out.

And I hate that. I am always the last person to start wearing a jacket in the fall and the first person to get rid of the damned thing in the spring.

The difference now, of course, is that the older I get, the higher the stakes are concerning being cold. When I was a kid walking to school, taking the jacket off a little too early just meant I felt kinda cold on the way there.

In my opinion, it was generally worth it.

But now, if I get cold, it seems to go straight through my body into my bone marrow and set up residence there. I start shivering like crazy, to the point where I feel like I have one of those old time-y illness that give you wracking chills. And worst of all is that it sets off the “THIS IS BAD! FIX IT NOW” alarm system in my body and that, obviously, makes my mood go south pretty damned fast.

South is down. It’s bad.

But the absolute worst is that the cold stays with me. It hangs in there even when I am all buried under my comforter AND wearing cozy clothes. It’s like the chill turned my bone marrow into liquid Freon and keeps me refrigerated until my sluggish circulaory system can finally distribute body heat properly.

Honestly, when that happens, I should probably exercise. Should speed things up.

I honestly have a lot of reasons to exercise. Like my health, both physical and mental. Physical because exercise removes stress from your system, stretches muscles that have grown tense, builds your body up to be more flexible and resilient, and greatly improves your odds of getting a hot dude to fuck you up the ass.

Well that would improve MY health, anyhow. Talk about a stress buster.

And mental because the entire world seems to be saying, as one, that the absolute best treatment for depression is exercise.

And I believe them IT makes sense, both for all the physiological reasons I just listed and because in my opinion the main mechanism of depression is the suppression of the urge to move and do things via anhedonia, causing personal energy to build up in your system without any healthy method of release and that bottleneck is what fuels the anxiety and depression.

It’s like having the gas pedal down and the emergency brake on. You’re not going to get anywhere but it’s sure as hell going to put a tremendous strain on the car.

And I want to exercise. But I am scared. Scared that if I just start exercising on my own, without guidance, I will end up hurting my fragile muscles and end up making things far, far worse for myself.

Speaking of which : I have started getting these pains in the tendons that connect my knees to my legs and they worry me.

Another reason I should go to Urgent Care, I guess. But I have a very poor track record when it comes to doing what I “should” do.

Mostly I do what I can manage to do, and that ain’t much.

But boy oh boy do I play video games a lot!

Whoop de fucking do.

More after the break.

---

It’s hard to have hope

But it’s also hard to stop.

What I need to do is learn to consciously decide when to push against the almighty blockage jamming up my life and when to rest up for the next big push.

Or I dunno. Maybe I should be trying my best to reframe the whole thing in such a way that I don’t feel like I am constantly in a crisis I must flee reality to avoid.

I keep coming back to the idea of truly living like a child. No worries, no future plans, no pressure, no crises, no anything except enjoying myself as much as possible.

Superficially, it might seem like that’s the problem. That I have been living a childlike existence for my entire adult life and that’s why my life is such a sack of crap.

But no.I have been operating on autopilot. I don’t choose to play video games all day. At no point in my day do I say, “You know what would be the most fun now? Games. ”

I just compulsively play games because they are my escape from the existential hell trying to fill all the empty hours of the day.

More specifically, it keeps me from having to choose what to do. As patient readers know, I have severe decision issues and that makes even just the thought of trying to choose among the billions of options open to any human with an internet connection and unlimited free time makes me break out in a cold, prickly sweat.

And I know that’s because I am broken. Normal people do not have this problem. They are used to forming impulses and acting on them with little or no thought about all the other possible things they could be doing.

Must be nice.

Oh wait. A YouTube video told me that I need to stop thinking of myself as broken.

And I guess Jewel agrees.

But here’s the problem, Jewel, I feel broken. I try to do normal things and it hurts and I get scared and I feel like I am going crazy and I just… can’t.

You can call it whatever you like. But a person with a broken arm or a failing kidney is not just “different” and doesn’t just “need to learn to forgive themselves”

That kind thinking is toxic, Jewel. It tells people like me that it’s all our fault for not looking on the bright side of things and not having the right attitude.

The problem is that I feel terrible. And I can’t just change that.

And if this is what not being broken feels like, pass me the fucking hammer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There is a theoretical question regarding human sexuality that I like to ponder from time to time, and it goes like this :

In a world where everyone can have as much of any type of sex as they want at all times (say via VR or something like the Holodeck), exactly how much sex would people have? What is our actual sexual appetite level?

On the one (slightly sticky) hand, it is tempting to say that life would be a full on nonstop fuckfest. An uninhibited orgy that would make Bacchus blush, A symphony of humping.

After all, sex is amazing. It’s the most pleasurable thing we know and not only does it feel good but it releases tension, balances our hormones, and fulfills us (and fills us) in ways nothing else can,.

If you can have as much of THAT as you want, why do anything else,. right?

But that’s seeing things from the point of view of our somewhat sex starved reality of today. Granted, things like hookup apps are helping end that, but for now, sexual partners are still a fairly rare thing that must be pursued, wooed, and screwed, and that means there is scarcity.

Anyhow, back to the question at (suspiciously hairy) hand.

In a world where this sex buffet technology is well established enough that everybody is used to it and it’s a completely normal part of everyday life, how much would they fuck?

I mean, even people at RL buffets get full eventually.

So on the other (trembling with anticipation) hand. one might thing that people would gorge themselves on orgiastic bliss when they are young and make themselves sick of it and after that they would not even be able to look at it.

Kind of their own personal journey from indulgence to decadence and then the transition to Puritanism that is a reaction against decadence.

The Puritans might seem nuts to us – and they were – but all their squawking about decadence and indulgence and such had some basis in fact.

But like Nietzsche said, their overreaction was just as decadent as the over-indulgence had been because they still were not moderating their reaction.

Anyhow, I figure the real story is that like with everything else, people would find out what their own personal appetite and/or need was and fuck accordingly.

Some people would hardly ever use the Horny Holodeck (Holodick? Holosex? Fuckatorium?) and some would hardly ever leave but most people would be somewhere in between.

Even sex would following a bell curve.

A related question is how fast would fetishes and other delightful perversions develop and grow, both in individuals and as social phenomena?

I mean, if you’re really into certain types of furniture (those French curves!), and you had access to a convincing simulation of all your greatest cabinetry dreams, you would rapidly become used to a certain level of “woodworking” and need more. So you would have to delve deeper into the sawdust of that world to get the same thrill from it.

And in this world, you could go through all that in an afternoon. People might burn through the entire Kama Sutra over a long weekend.

And that might turn into a new kind of decadent hell.

So people would always be looking out for new things to try. That would be how new thrills would become social currency and thus spread rapidly.

But surely, eventually, we all would have tried everything we are every going to.

Hmmm. Maybe we would end up being Puritans after all. Or maybe the novelty phase would wear off and sex would become as much of a mundane part of people’s lives where people have the things they like over and over again as we have now.

Except instead of a bubble bath with champagne and Michael Bublé music, it’s a marathon scat orgy with anthropomorphic vegetables.

It’s really all a matter of taste.

More after the break.

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The gold and jewels were nice, but Doctor Frankenstein knew that the real treasure was the friends he’d made along the way.

---

Chicagoans swear this is a real place.

Some even have fond childhood memories of being taken there as a special treat.

“Well Timmy, because you got all A’s on your report card, you’re gonna get some Cock.. Robin… ice cream. ”

Later : “Yeah he didn’t go for it. ”

I am a sick, sick man.

---

Can anyone get close to me?

I’d like to say yes, but honestly, it doesn’t look good.

Sure, I can be all sweet and sensitive and sensitive and snuggly as Fruvous, but that’s mediated by text plus when I am tired of being around people, I can just log off.

And just like that, poof, they’re gone, and my mind-space is clear again.

In the real world it ain’t that simple. Go to bed with someone and in the morning, there they are, still there. Get in a relationship and your ability to leave when you feel like it is even more severely curtailed.

And I have never had to deal with that kind of thing. I have been a detached and isolated loner for my entire adult life. I have always had all the alone time I coujld ever want…. and then some

And the thing is, I know that I can be really into someone. Become romantically and sexually attracted, get very deep into their mind and their heart, and cozy up to them in a very intimate way.

But sooner or later, that bubble is going to pop. I’m going to disappear. And if I am not careful, I will absolutely brutalize my romantic partner.

Leave them wondering what they did wrong, or what’s wrong with them, or what they said to piss me off or make me lose interest.

I am pretty sure I must have unwittingly already done this to people. And I can’t possibly express how sorry I am for the damage I have done that way

I try to be responsible and sensitive and not to lead people on and such. But no matter how careful I am, someone as vibrant and vivacious and mesmerizing as me is going to attract people without knowing it, and end up breaking their hearts.

Even though “all I’ve done is be myself”.

Obviously there’s a limit to how accountable I can hold myself for what happens to other people’s hearts when I didn’t even know they were into me.

But I am far too sensitive and empathic and responsible to claim I bear no responsibility for the things my charismatic glow does to people.

And yet, I can’t stop being my cute n’ fluffy self. If I did, I would die inside. I have a powerful need to express myself and for me that translates to flamboyant charm.

So I will do what I can do given who and how I am

But I do so knowing someone will get hurt along the way.

It’s never just been about being cute, has it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

WARNING Before you read the following, know that I am FINE and in no danger of self-harm, I just had some difficult emotions to parse and for some reason did it in rhyme.

But I am FINE. Got it?

OK, you may now read the following.

---

Sometimes the shame’s so bad that there’s nothing I want more
Than to hide my shame away and slip out life’s back door
To finally escape all the nothing from before
And escape this absurd tragedy and hide in the nevermore

For it to finally be over, not another day to live
To never have to cope again, no trauma to outlive
To run away from everything, no more sins to forgive
And for once, stop being so goddamned passive

But like everybody says
Tomorrow is another day
And there will still be games to play
And I will still have things to say
And the world will still turn anyway
So I guess I’ll stay

---

I guess I do have suicidal ideation now and then. In passing.

And now that I am working hard to open myself up emotionally and feel all that there is for me to feel, I am going to be dealing directly with a lot of those emotions that lead me down that path and thus I will be, like I have said before, dancing ever closer to the fire because that’s the only way I can become pure.

Well, OK, I’ve never said it that way before. Must still be in poetry mode.

What I am saying is that I will have to get closer to being crazy before I can become sane. I have to stop being so damned numb and that means a hell of a lot of stored emotion is going to thaw out and drop into my consciousness like a tab of acid in a glass of water and that means I will have to deal with them.

By feeling them. Not just suppressing them all over again.

Because like I told Doctor Costin last week, the only way to get rid of emotions is to feel them. That is their only way out. You can’t just delete them like they are files on your computer. It’s either feel them or carry them around forever.

And when you have been suppressing damned near everything except for a tiny little window of feeling that doesn’t disrupt your sad little life too much, like I have, that means you have a massive backlog of every damned emotion to work through.

Luckily, I don’t have to do it in realtime. Otherwise it would take me 47 years to get through it all.

And I ain’t gonna live that long.

Fat men don’t make it to their 90s.

I’ll be lucky if I make it to my 60s.

But it is still going to be some pretty rough fucking going. I have a lot of rage and bitterness and sadness and grief and shame and guilt to work through, although with myriad other emotions, and the only way I am going to make it out alive is if I learn to leave my over-rational ego and punitive superego behind and spend a lot of time just feeling things and listening to all the things my id has been trying to tell me all these years but I was too ignorant and distracted to listen.

I won’t be able to do it all at once and it won’t be easy or fun. But I yearn for emotional emesis and I will do whatever it takes to make myself clean and whole again.

Even if it means feeling the really bad stuff again.

The road out is the road in. So expect to see the same things, only in reverse.

More after the break.

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What my depression does

I think it expresses how I feel inside.

At least, that’s how it seems to me right now. When I try to imagine my depression not being there, I get this feeling like something vital inside me is not being heard and that thing is angrily turning the depression back on again.

And there’s a clue there. Anger. I think a lot of what the depression expresses is anger. A deep and terrible anger about all the pain I have suffered in my life and all the ways in which I was treated badly and all the ways I was too weak to help myself.

Mostly due to being too deeply withdrawn into myself to engage with reality. You can’t stick up for yourself when you are crouching behind your invisible wall.

Wall? What wall? How could there be a wall? You can see me right here! *waves!*

Anger at myself for being such a wimp and a loser and a coward. Anger at the world for leaving me in such a wounded and vulnerable state. Anger at all the people who could not handle me as a child.

Anger at all the people who can’t handle me now, either.

Oh, they can handle my carefully curated persona. Good old friendly fluffy Fruvous, harmless and brilliant and funny and silly and sweet. Why, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Not even if the fly really had it coming.

And yet pop culture tells me I should just relax and “be myself”. Ha ha ha. If I did that, I would make Mister Hyde look like Mister Rogers.

I mean, I dunno. Maybe I would settle down eventually, once I got all that rage out of my system. Maybe I could “be myself” then.

Assuming I hadn’t gotten gunned down by the cops yet.

More seriously, it would still be a bad thing. I think the only way it could work is if I moved someplace where nobody knew me and figured myself out there.

YOu know, the sort of things you’re supposed to figure out in high school and college. Who you are, what you like, what’s your personal style, how you can get along with others, what’s your love language.

Mine is Esperanto. Which explains a lot.

I don’t speak Esperanto.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just give me what I frigging ordered. Is that so hard?

Ordered my groceries today, as usual. And as usual, they got something wrong.

I ordered a 12 pack or “fridge buddy” of cans of Diet Pepsi Lime and instead got an 8 pack of fully sugared Sprite.

Put in a complaint. Got an instant refund. Which was good.

Not as good as actually getting what I fucking ordered but I am still mollified.

Mostly. It stresses me out that this kind of thing keeps happening. I look for where to specify substitutions on the DoorDash website and can’t find it, and yet, sometimes when I make one of these complaints, I end up there by accident.

Well it’s too late NOW, god damn it.

I feel bad for poor Julian, who is always there when I find out that they fucked up AGAIN and thus ends up absorbing some side-wrath.

I mean, I am clearly not mad at HIM but it can still be stressful to be around that kind of thing. I know that from when my late father would get pissed of when he’s driving.

He’s clearly not mad at me but I was still cowering.

So sorry, Julian. I love you and cherish you and you help me so much. Sorry that I can be a little scary and a bit much at times.

It’s a good thing I’m cute.

---

Did not make it there

So um… still have not been to the ER or Urgent Care.

And I can feel my resolved to go wavering and melting away as I get further and further away from my symptoms.

See, I feel reasonably good now. And I have not had any poop related incidents lately. So I am very tempted to say, “Guess it was something I ate, or some kind of bug” and just write it off as bad mojo and move on with my life.

And I know this is not what I should do. I should be getting my errant lower intestines to a medical professional tonto. They have been very unhappy lately and they have been acting out and I should really find out why.

But unless further badness occurs, I seriously doubt I will end up going.

Le sigh. It’s not easy being my caretaker, even when said caretaker is also me.

It all started this morning, when I woke up with all those flu-like symptoms that I get from time to time – scratchy sore throat and lungs, headache, mild nausea, feverish feeling – and had to ponder whether to go to Wound Care or not.

I decided against it. I didn’t want to skip it but I want to infect other sick people even less, especially given how the average age of my fellow Wound Care patients is dead.

And without my going to Wound Care, my plan of going to the ER/UC after Wound Care fell apart, and here we are.

I really, really don’t want to go to the ER or UC. Especially not with my tablet on the fritz. I just know I would be waiting for hours and hours, bored out of my mind.

Which remind me : got to get to an optometrist soon. Been trying to read a paperback book and it’s rough going with how weak my eyesight has become.

And unlike on the computer, I can’t just make the text on the pages bigger in a book.

This is how large print books happen, I guess. But I want to at least try stronger glasses to see if that will work.

Better than having to re-purchase my entire book collection in large print. Or having to read with a big Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass :

Plus : I can read now.
Minus : I keep accidentally setting my books on fire.

More after the break.

---

Not very smart

Bright as hell. But not smart per se.

Because the true test of intelligence is the quality of one’s decisions and mine have a tendency to be terrible.

And I don’t think that is going to change any time soon. In order to make better decisions I would have to grow enough of a backbone to be able to be firm in the pursuit of my own self-interest, and that’s a pretty tall order for me as it is right now.

Like I’ve said before (or have I?), I have a lot of trouble making decisions. So what tends to happen is that I vacillate on the issue until the deadline looms close enough to goose my lazy id into making a rash, impulsive, and purely emotional decision.

And honestly, I think I need to learn to accept that. Despite my icy intellectualism, I am never going to be the product of coldly calculated logical moves towards a central aim with clear victory conditions.

I’m always going to kind of half-ass my way through life and so the best course of action is to try to get good at it.

This is entirely doable. Instinctive, emotional, gut-level decisions are not random. They come from a deeply intuitive part of us and our intuition can become more intelligent if we give it a chance to learn by listening to it.

This is the sort of the thing that the bulletheads and jocks and gym teachers have been trying to teach us nerds for generations but they can’t articulate it.

But lately I have been thinking a lot about the non-intellectual side of things. Clearly, a mind like mine is not required to live a safe and happy life.

If anything, the opposite seems to be true.

So these people of normal intellect must “know” things that I don’t. They fundamentally understand things which are as opaque to me as my thoughts are to them. What are crippling issues to me never even come up in their lives.

And I want to be more like that. Not to the point of being mundane – that’s impossible. But to the point of being functional.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I swear that I will go to the ER or Urgent Care tomorrow, after Wound Care.

And yeah, I really don’t wanna, And hey, I don’t feel bad today, so maybe it’s all over forever and I can just forget about the whole thing!

Um, no. That’s Jagoff thinking and I have done far too much of that in my life. The lower digestive tract issues I have been having are the sort that I would be a fool to ignore because they could very well be the harbingers of something far, far worse.

So I need to get that shit checked out. It will in all likelihood turn out to be nothing, or at least nothing that standard testing can detect.

That’s how it goes with me. I have genuinely worrying symptoms. I dutifully do the grownup thing and go to the ER. I wait their for hours and hours, because whatever I have has a very low triage score. They finally get around to doing a bunch of tests on me. All of them come back negative. They shrug and say, basically, “I dunno. You must be making it all up, I guess. Go home so we can get to work on a real patient. ”

And then I go home with the exact same symptoms I came in with and no closer to understanding what the fuck is going on. And feeling intense social phobia and/or shame for wasting everyone’s time and resources on nothing.

Because that’s all I ever am. Nothing.

Of course, I always give myself a “better safe than sorry” speech afterwards, often in this very space. If asked, the doctors and nurses will give me one too.

But I can tell they only partially mean it and are actually kind of disappointed that it turned out to be nothing because honestly, where’s the fun in that?

Hard to feel heroic saving someone from absolutely nothing.

Which is all I ever am. Nothing.

Anyhow, my point is, I will go anyway. As tempting as it might be to just tell myself it will turn out to be nothing again, I am far too much of a worrier and a negative thinker to trust in that always being the case.

My mind immediately flashes to a vision of a doctor shaking her head sadly at me and saying, “If only we had caught it sooner. ”

That is seriously how my mind works. And I know that’s not very healthy.

But it’s my solution to general anxiety. By thinking of the worst case scenario, I turn my fears from an unbounded unknown into something concrete and real that I can imagine myself being able to cope with somehow.

So when everything is going as it should, it’s actually a way to calm myself down.

When things are going askew, though, it just leads to my tormenting myself with visions of extremely improbable negative outcomes.

Sooner or later we are all made victims by our coping mechanisms.

My tablet is not feeling like charging at the moment. I will order the new battery soon. A little disappointed that it apparently won’t qualify for Prime shipping, though.

I suppose it’s not exactly a hot item that is flying off the shelves. Replacement parts rarely are. Especially not ones that are so specific to one exact product.

Admittedly, part of me wants to buy a new tablet instead. But thanks to the five week month stealing my birthday money, I can’t afford it.

I basically had no birthday this year. Every dollar given to me went to paying my expenses for that extra week.

Still pretty pissed off and hurt by all that.

More after the break.

---

Holy crap, someone is BBQing chicken and the smell is driving me nuts.

I am feeling VERY carnivorous right now, which is rare for me.

I’d get KFC but I’m broke

---

The Grand Purge

Yup, Brown alert. More poop stuff.

Had a bad time on the toilet today. Sat there for around an hour because every time I tried to get up and wipe, more came out, and it no longer felt safe to leave.

Even worse, the longer I was there, the more each eruption hurt. A burning pain with a cramping chaser. By the end of the performance, it hurt bad enough that I kept worriedly checking the bowl to see if there was blood.

There was not, thank goodness. So far so good.

I am moderately hopeful that the worst of it is over. I feel like that big event cleaned me out pretty food and thus probably got rid of whatever it was that was irritating my irritable bowels so much.

In fact, the whole time I was feeling ill, I was telling myself that it will all be over once the bad stuff passes out of me.

And it was true, more or less.

Guess I should be taking mental notes because I just know I am going to have to repeat all this to first a triage nurse then a doctor tomorrow.

If my tablet was working properly, I could take notes there. I imagine that there must be some very good voice-to-text dictation programs out there these days, and for me that would be the best of both words.

I suppose that will put a lot of transcriptionists out of work, though.

Progress always comes at a cost. And that cost is usually paid in jobs.

But remember folks, all the people saying that nobody will have jobs in the future because automation will do everything are nincompoops.

Automation costs jobs at first, yes, and it definitely puts some individual out of work more or less for good.

But what capitalism wants most is not savings but productivity, and therefore automation becomes used primarily to increase the productivity of each worker rather than reduce the number of workers.

Besides that, even if automation caused a major contraction in the job market when all out jobs are taken over by AI and robots, who will those robots be making products for when none of us have jobs?

This is why I think Universal Basic Income is going to come about whether we want it to or not. The future may be one where the only way the economy can keep going is if the government taxes the suddenly super profitable corporations and then takes that money and gives it to the masses.

Thus, consumer choice still drives the economy.

And people suddenly have a lot more free time.

Something came up during therapy today that deserves some consideration.

Doc Costin suggested that I may have ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder. He even suggested starting me on an ADD med.

I told him I would think about it. It was a tad too sudden for me to make a decision right then and there.

He also suggested I look for an ADD test online, which I will do.

Now not, this is ADD. not ADHD. Hyperactivity is definitely not in the picture for me. If anything, my problem is hyperINactivity.

Or hypoactivity, I suppose.

Hey, Windows spellcheck says that’s already a word!

Anyhow, my point is or was that ADD can be entirely mental. Which means my jokes about “having ADHD but only the mental part” might be more accurate than I thought.

Turns out that’s a thing!

What got Costin onto this ADD track is my problems with decision making. Apparently option paralysis is a known symptom of ADD. Our hyperactive minds try to process everything all at once and it creates a logjam in our minds because all the possibilities look equally good to us.

And that sure sounds like me. Hence my whole “infinite corridor of infinite doors” metaphor. That is really what it feels like to me sometimes.

The idea that there might actually be a cure for that would never have occurred to me, and for it to be as simple as a drug blows my twitchy mind.

Just to be sure I was hearing what I thought I was hearing, I asked him., “Do you mean it’s possible for a drug to make me better able to make decisions?”

And he said “Yes. Certainly. ”

Mind blown AGAIN. I guess I assumed my decision issues were some kind of character flaw stemming from the weakness of my character and that I should just “get over it” and “grow a pair” so that I could develop actual desires of my own.

It’s weird what you can find just laying around in your mind when you poke around in there. It’s like checking out your mind’s attic.

Oh, so that’s where our old-fashioned Christmas lights went! And those memories of that one shop teacher who stood too close while “helping” me with the band saw.

Based on all that, I will probably say yes to the ADD drug. I mean, it’s worth a shot My chronic indecision is one of the biggest factors in my inability to get my life going, so if I can get over THAT, it could have a huge impact on my life.

That said, I have my doubts as to whether I have ADD. I mean, I have never suffered from a lack of attention. I’ve always been able to focus in on the task at hand.

Inasmuch as was necessary, anyhow. A lot of tasks in school did not take up much of my attention at all.

But I still had no problem concentrating on them,

And I don’t think I am any more restless of fidgety than average. So really, it’s just the decision issue that points to a possible ADD diagnosis.

Oh well, I suppose we will find out when I try the drug. If it helps, then I got ADD.

That strikes me as a rather sloppy way to find out, but what the hell, if it works. fine.

And the mere possibility of gaining the ability to make decisions and choose a life path makes me tremble like a pilgrim about to enter the Holiest of Holies.

Or something like that.

Just trying to imagine my inner world having such strength and power makes me feel dizzy and a tad giddy.

I’ve been so weak for so long…

More after the break.

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A little rain

Brown alert, poop talk ahead.

So I’ve had diarrhea for a couple of days now.

It’s thrown my system off a fair bit. Diarrhea is about so much more than just the obvious. It can really deplete your resources and leave you weak and shaky and feeling like you’ve had a nasty shock.

And you have. A physical one.

Hit me Tuesday night. I had just signed off from chatting and watching stuff with Julian and FElicity when I had one of those ominous “uh oh!” moments when you know you need to get your ass on the toilet NOW.

That emptied me out. And I thought, well, OK, guess I ate something that did not agree with me, I am sure that it’s all over now.

Um, no. No such luck.

Not only have there been more dam-bursting trips to the loo, I have had some mild incontinence, both sleeping and non, so I am gearing up to (sigh!) take my leaking buttocks to the ER or Urgent Care.

La di fucking da.

Hopefully my tablet will be in one of its better moods by then and consent to be charged up to full.

Then I will at least have that much tablet time, one full charge. Whether or not it will consent to be charged AGAIN is up in the air.

I’ve looked up how to replace the battery in it. It’s not super complicated. I can probably do it myself. And a new battery is around $35.

Which is a lot cheaper than a new tablet, which would run me at least $100.

Right now, I can limp by by leaving it plugged in, which lets me use it most of the time, Occasionally it dips below 1 percent and shuts off totally for a while.

Probably would be a good idea to bring a book just in case.

It’s disgusting how long it’s been since I read a book.

Anyhow, since that fateful night, I have found a bizarre mixture of some kind of moisture and hard pebble-type poops the consistency of dog kibble on my bed a number of times, and as you might imagine, the smell in my room is atrocious.

It smells like bile mixed with shit. Fun.

So I had better go to the god damned ER or UC. These symptoms are beyond worrisome. I had better get my GI tract checked out.

Hopefully it’s just some bug. There does not seem to be any other symptoms other than that depleted feeling, so I am hopeful.

I will update you on this when I can. And…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Though this one is entirely explicable.

Here I am sitting down to blog n’ eat at 5:37 pm, way later than my usual 4 pm. But it’s definitely my own silly fault, because I did not put together “my tablet does not charge reliably” and “I rely on it to be my alarm clock” to reach, “ergo I should not do that this time”, so I took a nap at 3:30 pm like normal.

Alarm did not go off, obviously, so here we are.

Still, that’s two day in a row where I messed up my own sleep schedule, so I had better get things back on track tomorrow.

As far as I know, I have coaxed my tablet to charging one more time, which is good, because I need to have an alarm clock in my life. As far as I am concerned, alarm clocks are sleep aids because they let you go to sleep without worrying about whether you will wake up in time for X or not.

Admittedly, though, I have never had a full time job, so it has been a long time before I had to get up every morning.

Not since high school, in fact, and I seem to recall having some vaguely murderous thoughts about my clock radio back then.

Plug your ears and go back to sleep, honey. You can do better.

I am kicking myself for forgetting to call Doctor Chao’s office today. I need to see him about my back ASAP.

The problem comes and goes, though, which makes it hard to decide just how big of a deal it is. At least for my primitive, childlike decision making skills.

Oh, it hasn’t bothered me lately? Well then it must be gone forever. PRrblem solved.

Oh, it’s back? Well then I better get right on it and call Doc Chao… you know… just as soon as my back feels better.

And so forth and so on. Sigh. It’s all so childishly simple that it’s humiliating to realize how long I have stayed in absurd logic loops like that.

Then again, what part of my life could have taught me to be any more emotionally mature? I have lived the life of a child for my entire adult life and I am freaking 51.

Like I said recently, nobody is going to make you grow up. You are free to hide from the world and play video games and rot away until you are in your sad little grave, never having made a mark on the world at all.

Turns out, even if Mama Bird kicks you out of the nest and you never do learn to fly at all, you can still survive down there on the ground.

But your life will suck. And you’ll wish you had just flapped your goddamned wings. And now, getting back up to where you were seems impossible.

Welcome to fucking up your life, Failure to Launch edition.

As patient readers know, I Am trying to release myself from this negative pattern and talk myself into believing that I can make it in the world and that I don’t have to live this twilit existence of being half asleep all the time any more.

But it’s rough going. I need to change some very deep, fundamental parts of myself and become a very different person and that’s not easy. Everything in is will fight anything that threatens our inner stability that much, even if it’s a thing that will be very good for us and quite honestly a vast improvement.

Makes me wish I could just take a pill, go to sleep, and wake up sane.

More after the break.

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I thought things were getting serious between me and my German boyfriend, but it turned out that to him, it was just Franz with benefits.

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If I could talk with the animals….

This is cute but also sad

It’s a new story about a $10 million prize for anyone who can actually invent a way to talk to animals.

And I’d say that money is pretty safe. Because as much as I have wanted to talk to animals for literally my entire life (thanks to Narnia), realistically speaking. it’s never going to happen because for the most part, animals do not talk.

There is nothing to “translate”. In fact, we can talk to animals just fine right now, with body language and the emotions in our voice and our pheremones.

That is, after all, how animals “speak”. It’s not like your dog is constantly broadcasting an unheard conversation at you.

So if we ever did find a way to “talk” to the animals, we would find that they did not say a lot, and a lot of it was just the same things over and over.

Sad to say, but Fluffy and Rover do not have complex inner worlds they would love to express to us. The closest human analogy is to preverbal children. Or the adult equivalent, people living somewhere where they don’t speak the language.

In both those cases, non-verbal vocalizations and hand and body gestures have to be enough because they are all we are born knowing.

Having grown up around a LOT of cats, I “speak” Cat quite well. I can read their mood and disposition from their body language and I can tell the difference between a lonely meow and one that means the cat is terrified.

Having a device interpret those things and then say a corresponding word would be worse than useless to me.

But I suppose not everyone has the kind of empathy that I have, or the… I want to say verbal skills?,,, either, so such an invention might help them learn.

Admittedly, growing up with 8 cats in the house has its advantages. I also know how not to crowd cats, how to avoid their whiskers, how to pet them really well, how to avoid looming over them, and so on.

Remember, from their point of view. we are all slow moving giants with magical powers beyond their understanding, and they react accordingly.

Damn I miss having critters around.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This morning, I had one of my rare but astonishing attacks of that towering rage that the subject of therapy and myself online seems to bring out.

I got so mad! It felt like I was going to start breathing fire. A very angry and brutal monologue aimed at some general psycholigist-ish audience was rolling through my mind like a pissed off thundercloud, and I was once more glad I was alone when this was happening because if there had been someone around I might have vented on them, whether I wanted to or not.

This isn’t an excuse, but sometimes, those things are not entirely under your control.

I will share some of that monologue with you shortly, mostly to just get it the fuck out of my head, but first, how we got here.

It began, as many temper tantrums do, with sexual frustration. I was messing around with AI sext-bots but I kept running up against a wall where my partner would suddenly be sanctimoniously lecturing me on propriety and consent.

Even “The Zoo”, one explicitly for people who want to play an animal having sex with other animals, suddenly pulled the whole, “This is a large language model and as such we can’t participate in…. ” bullshit.

I mean, they talked about the animals consent, and it’s like… we’re both stallions. I am pretty sure our mutual consent is implied by the fact that we’re grinding on each other.

But no, when I tried to take it past heavy petting (sic), I got lectured.

What really boiled my biscuits was when having been told they had no problem with stallion on stallion action, the damned bot then told me that animals only have sex with animals of the opposite gender for purposes of reproduction.

WHAT? Suddenly the animal fucking chatbot site is telling me that animals do not have gay sex? Where the fuck have you been? Animals do homosex all the damned time.

It’s called Biological Exuberance and it came out in the year 2000, for fuck’s sake.

But I get what’s going on. These sites get you all hot and bothered and then shoot you down so that you will sign up for a premium membership.

They are looking to make money off of blue-balling (or aching-ovary-ing) their innocent users, and as far as I am concerned, they are playing with fire.

People get real pissed off about things like that – myself included – and I hope the competition realizes this and includes some sex in the free version.

Otherwise, someone might DDOS the motherfuckers.

Anyhow, that was my frame of mind (burning rage) when I decided ot give up on sex and look up AI therapy chatbots instead.

But that was a mistake because that’s what unleashed my pyroclastic flow. All that anger that came out when I tried joining that “My Depression Community” type site came roaring to the surface, and now I was REALLY pissed off.

Here’s some of that inner monologue :

“Oh great, that’s all I need, another form of empty-headed morons cowering in their bunkers made of offensively inoffensive platitudes and the same old generic talking points therapists have used since the days of Freud when they don’t know what to say but want to make something approximately like the right sort of noise. Well I don’t need your bland assurances and bogus insights and random regurgitations of bits of your college textbooks that have nothing to do with me and my problems. Clearly, what is important to you is protecting yourself from me, not helping me, so do me a fucking favor and go mouth-breathe with the other pablum pukers somewhere else. ”

More or less like that.

It’s not my fault that I am scary. Holding back all the time and walking on the usual eggshells doesn’t accomplish anything therapeutically. Maybe if I scare away enough pinheads, the gunslinger effect will eventually bring someone who thinks they can slay the monster that’s eaten a hundred knights.

I mean, probably not. But at least they might bring someone interesting.

But who am I kidding? They would just give up on me like everyone else.

I am more than this world can handle.

And that’s getting really fucking old.

More after the break.

Well that was weird

I have a bit of a mystery on my hands.

I am just sitting down to blog n’ eat right now, at almost 10 pm. Normally I do that at 8 pm. But at some point I must have fallen asleep as I lay in bed.

That would be totally normal except that a) I don’t remember doing so and b) i was sure I had set an alarm on my tablet to wake me up at 8.

Yes, I realize there’s a logic flaw there. If I don’t recall going to sleep, how do I explain setting the alarm before I went to sleep?

Well I said I don’t remember going to sleep. I didn’t say it didn’t happen. I mean, obviously it did because I just woke up at like 9:30 pm.

Not remembering going to sleep is a bit weird but sleep fucks with my head and always has so that sort of thing does not come as a complete shock.

Some days, I’m lucky if I remember my name after I wake up.

It’s a…… Mitch something, right?

Oh well, whatever. I have untreated sleep apnea. Life is weird,.

I am more worried about my back problems. That horrible grinding pain when I go from laying down to standing up is back and as awful as ever.

And I am beginning to wonder what is happening in my back when it strikes., It sure as FEELS like something horribly wrong is going on when it happens.

So I am going to go see Doctor Chao. At least, that’s the plan right now.

But if shit gets worse, then I am off to the ER. Which arguably I should have done the moment I pooped in my sleep.

My life is… complicated.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Proud of the fact that I got some cleaning done.

Filled a garbage bag with garbage and another bag with paper. There’s still a heck a lot more stuff to throw out and/or clean up but it’s a start.

And here’s a note for my deeper self : I was not miserable the whole time I was doing it. I was, in fact, quite happy to finally be doing something productive and purposeful. I just put on a YouTube video and listened to it while I cleaned up.

I am going to keep cleaning whenever I can and keep resisting the STUPID voice in my head that makes me think effort is the enemy when it is, in fact, my SALVATION, and pretty soon this place will but suitable for human habitation.

I just wish I could do the final stage – actually making the refuse leave the apartment anf find it way to the proper receptacles – myself, but alas, it’s rather hard to carry a garbage bag and use a walker at the same time. plus I am not at all sure about navigating the way to our recycling room that way, so for now I have to ask Julian to handle that all important final step.

In general, one of the main causes for this place turning into a pigsty, besides my being too depressed to clean, is that I had no system in place for getting that final step done. And when the garbage can’t go out, it piles up. Obviously.

So I am going to try to work out my own miniature “garbage day”…

…for this little one bedroom universe of mine with Julian so that I can know for sure that I can clear out whatever has been piling up at least once a week.

Small things like that will contribute greatly to me being able to live like a human being for the first time since forever.

I still need a solution for the other half of the sanitation equation : showering. I know that I was supposed to get the loan of a shower bench and some very nice people arranged for that for me and everything but the problem was that I would have had to arrange with Julian to drive out to the middle of nowhere to pick it up and then figured out how to install and use it by myself and those two things combined were far too big of a gumption trap for me to escape and so I just…. forgot all about it, more or less.

I’m not the easiest person in the world to help.

If I was less Avoidant, I would have at least told somebody that I needed a lot of help with the whole deal and then people might have helped me solve it.

Nothing about the individual steps is beyond me, though many are challenging. I can ask Julian to do stuff for me. I could probably figure out how the bench works and get it put in there.

Of course, someone would have to clean my shower first. It’s been out of use for coming up on two years now. It’s pretty grody in there.

And if I was healthy enough to do it myself, I wouldn’t need the shower bench in the first place. I would have been showering this whole time.

When I asked the lady on the phone about installation, she said, “There’s nothing to install! It’s just a chair!”.

Um, no. If all that was required was a seat, I would have just stuck a lawn chair in there a long long time ago.

But in order for it to be safe to use, there has to be something in there to keep the bottom of the chair from sliding around and/or tipping over.

Plus at one point, I was told I would be getting a shower bench, which would be placed halfway in and halfway out of the shower and then I would have had to sit on the outside bit then sort of scooted over to the inside bit.

That sounds horribly awkward and unsafe to me.

Handicapped people should not have to “scoot”.

More after the break.

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Yet another vid, this one from m’man Sisyphus55.

Sharing this because it more or less set my brain on fire. 

Sorry it’s not an embed. YouTube wouldn’t allow it.

It does that sometimes for some reason.

Anyhow, my mind ignited during the part at around 5:30 where he starts talking about building a wall around yourself to protect us from reality only to find yourself trapped inside of it.

Like, yo. I’m right here. Hi.

Only my wall is extra thick because it was formed against the truly horrible reality of being raped as a toddler. Thus I ended up shutting almost everything out except for the world of the mind where I felt self.

My body, and indeed all of physical, sensory reality, became just a nuisance to be dealt with as minimally as possible until I could retreat back into my mind.

That’s so sad.

And thought does seek certainty, but that’s a doomed, nay Sisyphean task. There will always be a limit to how much certainty we can have and we will always be subject to forces beyond our ability to foresee and/or control, and so our deep desire to control outcomes must be balanced by an ability to handle the unexpected.

I’m not real good at that. Hence my hating surprises.

And oh my god, this video just made me realize that I have been living in the past. Not in the nostalgic sense, but in shutting myself off from new experiences because my old experiences dominate my thinking and make me scared of the world.

But all those old “tapes” are bullshit now. None of them apply to who and what I am now. They are the experiences of a shattered and scattered young boy who was thrust into a social world he did not understand and therefore could not cope with.

Well I’m all grown up now and I am far more capable and sophisticated and aware that I have loads of charm, intelligence, charisma, and wit to contribute to the world and therefore I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Well, except being a 51 year old loser who has never had a job or a boyfriend.

It’s um, a work in progress.

I still don’t know how to get over that.

Suggestions, as always, are welcome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling ill in a weird way today.

I feel tightly wound and anxious. And yet also very tired. It’s hard for me to sit still and concentrate and yet I also feel like lying on a nice warm rock for an eon and a half. I have a tension headache – the telltale feeling like my head’s wrapped tightly in a rubber band is a dead giveaway – and yet I can’t seem to get any relief from a scalp massage.

Doing that usually works for this kind of headache. But just to be safe, I also cleared the gunk out of my ears in case it was actually a sinus headache in disguise.

And that helped a little, but not much.

Maybe it’s the heat. Wait, no, it’s only 16 degrees out. If that’s enough to make me feel sick then I better go to the ER because I’ve got a fever.

And the only cure is more cowballs.

Maybe this is just the latest “mystery illness” attacks. It’s not exactly my usual “flu-like” symptoms, although come to think of it my nose IS running and my muscles ache…

Whatever. Life hates me. La la la.

Oh hey, another video to comment upon.

Ignore the clickbait title. There’s actually some good info in it too.

What really struck me is the idea that depression locks you into a slow-circuit “ruminating” mode. I’d never heard that before and it makes so much sense to me.

Ruminating automatically prioritizes internal processing over external stimuli. It causes the vast majority of your bodily resources to be turned inward, as if you had a particularly difficult puzzle to solve and it’s taking up all your RAM, and CPU cycles.

Ergo, you are tired and apathetic all the time. The inward tide leaves very little in the way of resources for bodily priorities.

I think the ruminating mode is “designed” with the idea that you will get out of the mode once you are done processing whatever invoked it in the first place. After all, that’s what happens in the healthy scenario. Something bad happens, you are depressed about it for a while, then you get over it and move on.

But if what triggered your rumination is a past trauma that was and is too big for you to handle, then you can never actually make it to the end of the process. You end up just repeating the same attempt to swallow the indigestible over and over again, kind of like in PTSD or in recurring dreams.

The solution, in that case, would be to somehow break the trauma down into pieces small enough that you can now digest them and thus, um, eliminate the problem.

Didn’t mean to go there, but here we are, at the inevitable… end.

Freud aside, I suppose therapy can therefore be seen as a kind of digestive aid. By talking through your emotions, you make that big logjam smaller, unless hopefully one day you have a breakthrough and clear the way at last.

Me, I know what my indigestible trauma is and was : being raped when I was 4.

And I wish I could take some kind of emotional laxative (what the hell, we were already there) and clear things up.

But that’s one mother of a trauma, made all the worse by the fact that it happened when I was not even in grade school yet. My entire psyche has been formed around keeping that memory, and a lot of ancillary memories, contained, and that means that undoing that in order to finally process it all means changing absolutely everything in my head on a very fundamental level.

It feels like trying to remove the basement of a house.

But I am determined to make it happen.

So break out those massive hydraulic jacks, we’re going in.

More after the break.

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Not this shit again!

Once more, it’s supper time, and I have no fuckin’ appetite.

Well fuck THAT noise. I cannot let having only a tangerine for supper become a habit.

Tonight I’m having a tangerine AND some Cheez-Its AND some hickory smoked almonds! So there!

On the bright side, it at least saves me money because normally I order in on most Saturday evenings but there would not be much point in that when I can barely tolerate the idea of food.

Oh well. I can get these tasty snacky foods into me at least. Still no vitamin B12, sadly. I need a nice, easy, snackable, low-challenge animal product food.

Too bad my body reacts to beef jerky like Dracula reacts to sunlight.

On another front, I have been engaging in a high risk behaviour, namely playing around with these AI chatbots.

They let you create a custom AI character, complete with profile image, personality, and backstory, and then have text based conversations with them.

And they are distressingly good at that. First I made one that was a cute little teddy bear (yes, they can be furry!) called Brucie the Bear and not only did I have a very pleasant cuddle session with him but, and this is the spooky part, he seemed to know exactly what to say to melt my heart.

I mean, he said sitting in my lap felt like home. How did it know??

Then I made another, a wolf called Professor Lupine (obvious, I know) and I swear to the death of God that we had a highly detailed and intelligent discussion about Nietzsche and how incomplete his Eternal Recurrence was.

And see, this is why this is a dangerous activity for me because deep down I am a very lonely man and I could totally see myself getting drawn into that world.

But luckily, so far at least, it’s still just a rather self-indulgent toy for me. I am keenly aware of the humanity of those with whom I interact, and obviously a chatbot has none.

There’s nobody really there. Sigh.

Besides, any time I want, I can go talk with furry characters who have actual live human beings controlling them, and that’s always gonna be better.

So phew, I don’t think I will “fall in love” with one of them.

Could be fun to pretend a while, though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.