I have had this YouTube post from my man Patrick Teahan up in a tab for almost a week now because it’s given me a lot to think about and digest.

He says things like this :

” Many of us don’t have a reference point for what⁠ it looks like to be free of our trauma narrative that runs us.⁠ – Patrick Teahan “

And how. I have no solid recollection of mental health in me. I think that’s because, in the strictest sense, I have only truly been sane for the two years of my life when I was going to UPEI and the fours years of my life before I was raped.

And I suppose being a sane infant or toddler doesn’t count for much.

And that phrase, “trauma narrative”, is really resonating with me. I know that my personal narrative of neglect and isolation is not a healthy one. It is, in fact, quite toxic, and yet I don’t really know how to overcome it so I can replace it with something far more conducive to a healthy happy life.

I’ve been chipping away at it by reminding myself that I am, actually, magically delicious and one heck of a guy, and that while my life is unfulfilling it could be a lot worse.

I have a safe and stable home in which to try to become sane, with wonderful supportive friends without whom my life would be so much harder.

And I am grateful for all of that. I truly am.

Perhaps I can overcome the surfeit of bitterness that made me unable to be grateful for what I have before, and that could do me a heck of a lot of good.

I need an antidote for all those psychological toxins in my bloodstream.

I need a way out of needing a way out.

Patrick also says this about being the opposite of your trauma :

1. That it’s okay to be seen.⠀⁠

I have a lot of trouble with this. My maladaptation has been isolation for so long that I have lost my tolerance for real social exposure and as much as part of me craves attention another part of me wants to disappear underground forever.

Part of me hates feeling like I am invisible and another wishes I truly was.

2. That it’s safe to be you.⠀⁠

I don’t even know who that is. My total lack of emotional adolescence means that I went on almost no part of the journey of self-discovery we are meant to experience on our way to becoming our own authentic selves, in our teens and twenties, so all I can do when faced with the question of who I am is throw up my hands and say, “I dunno. ”

I have a version of me going that people seem to like and that might actually blossom into something healthy and useful in time.

It’s not the only person I could be – I contain multitudes – but it will do for now

3. That people want realness⁠ and not our false protective selves.⁠

I’m not so sure about that. It sounds good in theory and it’s what anyone wants from someone they care about, but in practice they might like the real me a lot less.

From where I stand now, it feels like the “real me” would be a lot angrier, pushier, more demanding, more domineering, and a lot more selfish and self-satisfied.

Maybe not a monster but way harder to deal with. That might not be the worst thing in the world if it leads to greater happiness for myself.

But at what cost?

More after the break.

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So many winters

The image of my heart being buried under the snows of many winters popped into my head a little while ago.

It seems apt. It would explain why it’s taking so long to excavate myself. I didn’t get buried this deep in the permafrost overnight and I am not going to unbury myself overnight either, so I must be patient with myself.

But being patient sucks. I want freedom now, god damn it!

Fast forward into summer, let the flood come. Whoosh. Wash everything clean and let my poor frozen heart melt free of the icepack and dry in the sun.

But I guess that’s not in the cards either. Inasmuch as I have designed myself at all, I have made myself, the person you know and love, with stability in mind. The brief, such as it was, was, as always, to be able to just keep trudging forward no matter what.

Not that I ever get anywhere, of course. So in a way it’s an eternal treadmill, or maybe my very own hamster wheel. It satisfies my need for the feeling of progress without all that “things actually changing” nonsense.

Stability in motion, folks! Rolling monotony.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the image of myself as being strapped in and tied down to my current life, a la Clockwork Orange, and I think I can use it as a way to motivate myself to change in order to “escape”.

It really does feel like there’s a force like gravity that keeps me in this same magnetically locked and bonded position. When I try to resist, the forcefield surges with a menacing hum and I slam back down and get plastered to my seat like I am riding the Gravitron.

Only a lot less fun. I love the Gravitron. It’s my favorite ride.

I am tempted to call this mystical force something like my fear of change, and that’s correct as far as it goes but it does not go far. It’s a valid but incomplete answer.

I guess we’re basically back to the caterpillar and the fixed sense of self. To my mind, changing who I am is way too much like dying and I don’t have the kind of courage it takes to surrender all form to be remade anew yet.

So I am going to have to continues to creep up on change incrementally, passively awaiting the passing of some deep tipping point to change everything without me ever having to choose to change.

Death by natural causes, in effect.

I am a thing that changes.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks to the lowered dose of Paxil, my sexual response is waking up a bit more and I feel more capable of orgasm than before.

Yes, it’s going to be one of THOSE blog entries. The ones where I get uncomfortably intimate with my so-called sex life like I have no boundaries.

Which is not far from the truth, come to think of it. Generally speaking, if I don’t speak of certain topics openly, it’s because I don’t want to offend people or gross them out, not out of personal shyness.

I’m not saying I’m incapable of modesty or shyness, but my goalposts for revealing myself are way further apart than most people’s.

I’m just happy people are paying attention to me and listening to what I say.

To that end I’d answer almost any question.

Anyhow, lately, assuming I’ve not been overdoing it and draining my very limited batteries, I can at least have what I am calling a “mini-orgasm”.

It’s almost cute.

What happens is I get a modest surge of pleasure and I ejaculate some mostly clear liquid which I am assuming is prostate fluid.

It’s not much but at least it provides me some release without my necessarily having to wait like two or three weeks of not touching myself in order to build up enough – let’s say “pressure” – to have any eruption at all.

I usually continue to masturbate afterwards just to make sure that this was, indeed, all I am gonna get and to make sure I get as much balls emptying benefit as I can.

But not too long after I am all out of mojo and beginning to chafe, so I stop.

I know I will never get back the wild stallion of sexual impetus I had in my 20’s. Like a lot of old people, I look back at those days and sigh and wish I had been more self-confident and in control of myself and understood myself well enough to know what exactly I have going, sexually speaking, so I could use it to sow all the wild oats I could.

Youth is wasted on the young, and all that.

I know that a completely “normal” sexual response with others is probably not in the cards, at least not any time soon.

There’s a very strong chance that for me, sex will always be a performance. A sort of sexy show I put on to please a partner, which in turn pleases me, but maybe not to the point of cumming myself.

To my romantic side, this is heartbreakingly tragic. But despite my vulpine vampishness and extreme and joyous openness, there is a terrible conflict in me when it comes to sex with other men where I both want and fear it.

It even comes up when I am masturbating or otherwise browsing porn. I’ll be lusting away and suddenly I will have this strong fear/threat reaction like “this is wrong/bad!”.

Weird, I know. But I know from whence it comes. It’s a strange and terrible cocktail of societal programming and the fact that my first experience with male/male sex was being raped as a toddler.

So there’s a lot of dark and complicated shit going on way down deep in my sexuality.

Maybe if I was to meet the right fella and fall in love and get close enough to him that my barriers come down to the point where I actually felt completely safe with him, sex could be more than a performance for me.

It could be the mutuality I have always dreamed of. Two people sharing pleasure in a cosmic circuit where their pleasure gives you pleasure and vice versa until it all builds to a truly incredible moment of explosive connection.

Just my modest little fantasy.

More after the break.

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I make things better

You know what? I make life more fun when I’m around.

After all, I’m funny, silly, warm, charismatic, and I put out a pretty happy vibe. It cheers people up to be around me, and that means more to me than I could possibly express.

All I want in life is to make people happy. A life spent spreading happiness would be like Heaven to me. I would feel like there was truly a reason for me to be alive then.

And it’s occurred to me, just now, that I do that. Maybe not on a global scale – yet – but in my own life, I liven up and ennoble the mood wherever I go, uplifting people with my large output of sun-shiny vibes.

And my lowered dose of Paxil is only making that effect stronger. Turns out that I am much more effective a vibrational influencer when I have access to more emotions.

Huh. Go figure.

And this trend is set to continue because my therapist and I are pondering when to do my next dosage lowering, from 30 mg (instead of the usual 40 mg) twice a week to 30 mg three times a week.

I’m excited for this experience to continue but I don’t think I am ready for it to be in my next month’s supply of blister packs, so it will probably be the month after.

So somewhere in March, the dosage will likely be stepped down.

Right now, I feel like I am still slowly attenuating to the lowered dosage. My mind still have to find places for the new emotions I am feeling, and that’s a painstaking process, so I am not in a huge rush.

Despite that insane kamikaze voice in my head saying, “GO COLD TURKEY! Rip off that fucking Band-aid and FLY!”

Followed by an insane cackle and an explosion.

Anyhow, back to my latest attempt to pump enough air into my ego for it to float.

The thing is, I’ve known objectively that people like having me around for a very long time but, like happens so often with me, somehow that knowledge never penetrated the layer of ice around my heart.

I knew it, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t believe.

It’s like how I have known for my entire life that I am academically gifted (to say the least) and yet somehow that never made me feel any better about myself.

It all came too easy, I guess.

But now I am finally ready to celebrate my general awesomeness. I’m an amazing dude and it’s time I learned to embrace and enjoy that without worried that it will somehow lead to delusions of grandeur or me turning into a raging arsehole.

I’m incredible. And a big part of that is being the sweet, nice, caring dude I am.

I won’t be giving that up for anything!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Watched a video about how to identify and address the toxic beliefs that are holding you back and fueling your mental health issues, and while the video itself was forgettable (seemed mostly to be an excuse for some lady to talk about herself, which is.. special), the idea itself seems good so I thought I would give it to go.

And I know that this is a good idea because my mind really doesn’t want to go there, and it’s making feel anxious and disoriented and a little dizzy, almost like vertigo, so I know I must be on the right track.

Let’s start with the more obvious toxic beliefs, like that I am something hideous, pathetic, repulsive, and unlovable.

I have no evidence to support such a radically incorrect belief. It stems entirely from a need to express the bitterness and anger I feel by turning them inward, and that, in turn, only makes me angrier and more bitter.

Ultimately it devolves down to the fact that I feel horrible and disgusting and unlovable. And that feeling is so deeply embedded in my self-image that changing it requires the psychological equivalent of open heart surgery to fix it.

And that’s a hard thing to have to do to yourself.

Another limiting belief of mine is that I am weak and incapable and incompetent.

My dyspraxia plays a big part in that. Also known as developmental co-ordination disorder, it’s just like dyslexia except instead of making it harder to learn to read, it mkes it harder to learn motor skills.

I’ve had that problem for my entire life. It’s why I am such a spaz when it comes to doing physical things. Combined with my poor eyesight (even in glasses), it definitely functions as a disability all on its own and leaves me in need of someone who is physically competent more often than I would care to admit.

This was made into a psychological issue by my siblings being impatient with me not being able to do certain simple things and making me feel bad about even trying to do things myself, let alone giving me the time and space and help I needed in order to laboriously learn to do things.

I sometimes wonder if there’s something wrong with my mirror neurons. Maybe too many of them are devoted to empathy instead of motor skill acquisition.

So unlike the belief in my horribleness, my feeling of helpless physical incompetence does have some basis in reality. I do have a lot of trouble with some things, especially things requiring fine motor control.

To be honest, I’ve never controlled a fine motor in my life. Like a Bentley or a Jag.

But acknowledging my limitations does not require me to hate myself over it. That’s entirely optional and hopefully avoidable in time.

I might want to pursue an official diagnosis, though. It might help me to qualify for additional assistance, such as occupational therapy.

Who know, maybe it’s partly fixable.

Another very toxic belief is that I am worthless. That I am nothing but a liability to the world and to those who love me and, well, you can guess where that leads.

The very bad place.

I know that people like me and value me and want me around. And I know that I am actually a phenomenally talented and capable individual who has an amazing amount to offer the world if I could just get out of my own way.

I know these things and yet I don’t feel them. All my despair and self-loathing has no basis in reality and yet the delusional beliefs remain because they are my only way of expressing certain difficult emotions in myself.

So ridding myself of these toxic beliefs requires finding a different, healthier, less self-destructive outlet for those feelings.

And I don’t know where to go for that.

More after the break.

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Missing the point

My intuition is saying that there’s toxic beliefs that the above text comes nowhere near addressing. That there’s much deeper and more fundamental delusional beliefs that need to be addressed in order for me to finally clear the bone from my throat and heal.

Obviously, I don’t know what those are yet. But it’s a solid lead.

Come out with your hands up

It just occurred to me that for a lot of my life I have felt surrounded.

Like, as in, cop on a bullhorn shouting, “You’re completely surrounded! There’s no chance you will escape! So come out with your hands up!”

And here I am hunkered down in the one room of the house with no windows, assault rifle in my hands, nowhere near ready to surrender to the god damn cops.

Of course, there’s nobody out there. I’m not surrounded by anything but my own fears and the need to escape them.

And the only way to escape from your fears when they have you surrounded is to withdraw even further into yourself and essentially pretend they are not there.

And I have done this many times over and so I am many, many layers deep into myself. By “choosing” to remain cut off from the world and living in the world of screens, I am fleeing my own inner prosecution and things just keep getting worse and that only makes me withdraw even more.

It’s a terrible cycle. It “works” in that it makes it seem like the bad things have gone away when I am really just filling my mind with video games to displace them.

That’s like the definition of maladaptive.

Practically the entire world of media, as one, yells that I should face my fears and conquer them and I will feel so great and free afterwards.

No doubt this is true. But it doesn’t make it easier to actually do that.

It doesn’t pry the icy fingers of fear from my throat so that it no longer fears like if I face those fears I will die… or worse.

Right now it feels like defying that circuit of fears and aversions that surrounds me would be like tearing off one of my limbs.

And I know that it would probably be worth it.

But I’m scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I seem to be adjusting to my new orthopedic shoes fairly well. And they seem to be adjusting to me as well.

See, there’s a layer that is deliberately a bit squishy so that the shoes can conform to my feet as I wear them.

I still have no idea why I was so drastically uncomfortable that first day. It seems to have been a case of them being WAY too tight, but for the life of me I don’t know how “Jackie” managed to do them up that tight because I’m tugging on the Velcro straps pretty hard when I put them on (I’ve always preferred my shoes to be snug) and I am still not getting them that tight.

In fact, they feel slightly floppier than I would prefer, but that’s probably for the best as I want to make sure the circulation in my feet is not compromised.

Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to get the wound on my feet to heal.

One can only hope.

I had Wound Care this morning. It went well. Linda the Wound Clinician was there to sand down my foot callouses once more.

So I have that very faint burning sensation in my tootsies right now.

Also did the community shower thing today. Albert is back from vacation and that’s a relief because I really like him.

He does most of the talking, and I am fine with that. I am happy just to listen. I don’t always have to contribute to the conversation, especially with regular folk like Albert.

When I am with my nerdy friends it’s a different matter. There, I have to contribute because of the sheer joy I get from having people who can understand me in my life.

I did not have a lot of that growing up.

It’s one of the sad truths about being smart.

Let’s start with the top level one : being smart means living in a world run by and for idiots. Children. You are a giant among pygmies.

This doesn’t really bother me. I suppose I think that the world would be a much better place if I ran everything but I’m not about to become a supervillain over it.

I think my overall humanism and general (relative) humility keeps me from becoming a bitter misanthrope about the whole thing. I understand people for who and what they are and I love them all the more for their flaws and frailties and imperfections, so the fact that I see what are, to me, obvious solutions to the big problems does not bother me very much.

If I feel strongly about it, I can use my powerful voice to broadcast my solutions and try to maybe influence people to see things my way.

That’s how thing actually work in the real world. I am lucky in that my genius happens to encompass things like communication and oratory skills so there is a more than average chance of actually getting at least a few people to listen.

But most of my fellow genii don’t have that luxury, so they are left being Cassandra, knowing what should be done but unable to make anyone listen to them.

On a more personal level, as patient readers know, my “punishment” for finishing way, way ahead of my fellow students was nothing. I would have loved to have been given extra work to do because it would have kept me from being bored out of my mind.

Instead, I had to just sit there and zone out because I wasn’t allowed to just read.

And like the video says, I couldn’t relate to my fellow students because I was parsecs ahead of them intellectually. Their world and their activities had little appeal to me. They cared about actions figures and coloring. I cared about science and reading.

I doubt I would have put it this way at the time, but they were behaving like children.

And I was not. I was this creepy kid who was eerily self-possessed and calm and talked like an adult trapped in a child’s body and who must have seemed like an alien child.

What I really needed was a gifted kids’ program, but that was not in the cards.

More after the break.

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Why so cold?

I think I need a thermometer for my room.

It’s the only way I will be able to definitely determine whether I am cold due to it being actually literally physically cold in here or due to something askew with my health.

Admittedly, the former is more likely. I have this enormous lovely window directly behind my computer desk and it is not thermally sealed because people just don’t do that kind of thing around here and thus cold air is constantly leaking in.

It’s geometrically worse when the wind is blowing hair and Bernoulli-effect-ing the warm air right the fuck out of here.

Luckily, you don’t get strong winds in winter around here.

Or at least we haven’t yet. Who knows what the future holds? We could lose our precious microclimate any day now.

In which case I’m going to brick up the fucking windows until Spring, because if I am this cold in January now, I would not survive the winter in the rest of Canada.

As is, there appears to be little I can do to address the problem. Even if I could buy thermal caulking or even just thermal tape around here, I am in no shape to be able to apply it around all the window panes.

And I just verified that I have my thermostat turned all the way up. Le sigh.

I could get a space heater. That might be a good use of that $200 still sitting on my Amazon.ca account. I am sure my sisters would like to know their gifts are helping to keep me warm in the winter.

Admittedly, in that completely irrational layer of the male mind that makes us do dumb shit, part of me feels like getting a space heater means that the coldness wins.

Look, I said it was irrational, didn’t I?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One of the things that came up during my Therapy Thursday today was my knowing that emotions do end.

Even the really bad ones.

The image I used was of swimming to the other side of an emotion. It’s ridiculously easy to fall into the trap of having a primitive “stop the presses” reaction to bad emotions coming our way, and when times are grim and survival is on the line, the ability to sideline those emotions and deal with them later so you can handle things is vital.

Indeed, civilization would be impossible without it.

The trick is with the “deal with them later” part. Because very often, we don’t. We just leave them on pause because we naively think we can avoid feeling the bad feelings forever without consequences.

Or, more likely, we don’t think about it at all. We pause the emotion and consider the problem to be solved merely because we made it disappear.

And that would be fine if it only happened once in a very great while. But of course we shortsightedly make it a near universal response to all unpleasant or inconvenient or otherwise unwanted emotions.

Like a baby, we think that if we can’t feel it any more, it must be gone forever.

But of course it isn’t. It’s still there in our minds, paused, waiting to be completed. And the personal energy and mental bandwidth cost of keeping all those emotions on pause grows and grows as more emotions are added to it over time.

Eventually the whole system collapses under its own weight and boom, you have depression and/or anxiety now.

And that’s where I am, and why I write for this blog every day. When I sit down to write, I am trying my best to take some of those paused emotions and take them off pause so I can finish feeling them and thus unburden myself.

And to do that, I’ve had to rid myself of the childish worry that a bad emotion will last forever just because we can’t see the other side of it.

I am in the grips of this delusion as I type these very words. I am scared that if I open the door to certain emotions, especially anger, the sheer power and volume of the resultant emotional eruption will destroy my mind and turn me into some kind of raving lunatic hellbent on destruction.

Because it feels that way. I can feel all that latent rage in me and it frightens me. Intellectually I know that I have to find an outlet for it all but emotionally I am so scared of what might happen that it remains unfelt and not dealt with.

A lot of badness, both active and passive, happened to me in my early life. Mostly it’s the pain of total isolation and unmet human social needs that weighs on me. I have decades of that shit built up in my mind and nowhere for it to go.

I’ve spent so many years ignoring that pain and pretending everything is okay just because I could make it through my painfully minimal day that it, too, scares me with what might happen if I let it loose.

Were I a more emotionally muscular fellow, I might be able to handle dealing with these potent feelings a little at a time.

I suppose that’s what I am doing with this blog, come to think of it. Dealing with my latent emotions 1K words at a time.

But I know that I need something bigger. Something that will help me give birth to really big emotions and therefore allow me to deal with all these latent emotions all at once or at least in larger quantities.

Because I want to be clean of them, and the only cure for emotions is to feel them.

More after the break.

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Oh yeah, the apocalypse

Los Angeles is burning and it’s getting me down.

This is the first truly major international city to face the wrath of global warming, at least on this side of the world, and furthermore there’s a heck of a lot of rich people’s homes going up in flames, so this might end up getting the rich to truly pay attention to global warming instead of assuming they won’t suffer any of its consequences.

There’s crazy weather shit happening in other places too. Exactly as was predicted. We’ve seen this train coming down the tracks for my entire lifetime – and I am 51 – and yet very few of us felt motivated enough to really do anything about it.

And now, here it is, the exact thing that we knew would happen, and we have the gall to pretend like it’s a surprise.

People are going to start to want answers. They will want to know who to blame. And while it’s entirely possible to blame “everybody” because we’ve all known this was going to happen and we all “could” have done something about it, that kind of answer is unlikely to placate an angry torch-wielding mob.

All I can say is that if this isn’t enough to put global warming on the collective agenda, then nothing will be enough except the whole world being on fire.

I mean, Los Angeles is burning in January. That’s completely insane.

What the hell is next summer going to look like?

I can only assume that being a climate change denier will continue to become more and more dangerous, at first just politically but eventually physically as well.

I mean, I have been, somewhat unwillingly, been contemplating the humanitarian benefit of strategic assassinations ever since Luigi Mangione killed that CEO.

So much wealth and power is concentrated in the top these days that it is entirely possible that the lives saved by the death of certain key individuals would justify the loss of a single human life.

This is such an era of madness that one can make a utilitarian case for murder.

As for myself, my only instinct is to use my one and only move and just withdraw even further into myself. To stick my head in the sand and pretend nothing is happening and play my little video games until the fires, floods, and freezes make it to the door of this dirty old bedroom of mine.

But I won’t do that, of course. Even I cannot pretend that turtling up is a solution.

It’s possible that I could use my powers of communication – my voice – to help somehow. though I’m not sure how.

But things have got to change.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I was hanging out on Bluesky earlier, like I do, when I came across a post where a lady was complaining to “men” about the harassment she suffers on a daily basis.

So for balance (uh oh) I replied with a call to women to stop flipping out when men say no to sex.

Obviously not speaking for myself. If a lady offered me sex, she would have to be entirely without gaydar and probably secret quite ambivalent about sex in general.

I can relate.

No, I was basing my reply on some Reddit threads I have seen about the subject. Apparently some straight dudes (and presumably the occasional fag) have endured some quite catastrophic reactions to turning down a lady for sex.

And I get it. For some ladies, the patriarchy has left them so in conflict with themselves that it’s like crawling over hot coals just to get to the point where they are capable of saying yes to sex at all, and to be turned down at that point must be incredibly upsetting. Galling, even.

Because men are supposed to always want it and be ready willing and able to fuck any woman at any time and anywhere. Right?

Anyhow, I posted my little comment and that ignited a very unexpected massive shitstorm down on my poor head.

People were heaping abuse on me left and right and calling me all kinds of horrible things and wishing grievous harm on me and general being awful to me.

And I…was… LOVING IT!

It made me so happy! I finally managed to spark discussion and cause controversy and with what to me was a pretty innocuous equivalent statement.

I was accusing of belittling the original post (how?) and detracting from or even opposing the original post’s message (nope) and of being an incel (wrong on at least two levels) or an Andrew Tate follower (god no, that man is atrocious) and I was replying to each and every abusive comment in my usual inflammatory style and the whole time I was happier than a pig in oak barrel aged shit.

I must have been doing that for at least an hour, maybe more, before the shitstorm died down and I ran out of steam.

So it turns out that I do have a limit as to how much I can argue. Good to know.

And when I say “my usual inflammatory style”, I mean I was accusing people of the exact kind of hateful behaviour they presumably rag on the right wingers for doing and trying to burn me at the fucking stake and pricking their consciences (or maybe just being a prick) and pointing out to them that they were reacting to things I never said because, presumably, why let the facts get in the way of a good ol hatefest.

God was that fun. I was in full on trickster mode, mocking people’s hypocrisy, holding up a mirror to the monster inside them, and laughing at their rage.

Boy does that make me sound bad. Oh well.

I am still quite confident that I was (and am) in the right. They attacked me, after all. All I did was counter said attacks and maybe throw in one of my own here and there.

But I have a clear conscience because nothing I said in reply was even half as heinous as the shit they said to me, and my stuff was way more on point.

I got to witness first hand how people will deliberately misinterpret and project their own wishes onto an innocent (ish) person like me in order to twist things into whatever is the most fun to get mad about.

And I am more than happy to point that out each and every time it happens. I thrive in opposition to what I know to be wrong. The more they abused me, the more I reveled in it because clearly I had struck a nerve and now I was drilling down into it.

It’s mostly died down now. Which is good because if it was still going I probably would have dropped dead from exhaustion by now.

All in all, it’s been a very fun day.

I wonder how I can get myself in trouble again…. 🙂

More after the break.

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Prepare to have your heart severely warmed.

Pixar has the magic Disney once had.

That’s why Disney had to buy it back from them.

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Chip who now?

Turns out we have a Chipotle in the area!

And I am giving them a try tonight.

The menu immediately won me over when I checked them out on DoorDash because they have my beloved carnitas.

Basically Mexican pulled pork. It’s SO damned good.

They also have beef barbacoa, which is Spanish for BBQ beef. I keep seeing it on Mexican menus but I always end up ordering something else.

Like taco beef. God do I love taco flavoured ground beef.

So right now I am eating a burrito bowl from Chipotle. It’s got the carnitas, sour cream, red salsa, lettuce, black beans, corn, and for some reason green pepper.

I don’t recall asking for green pepper. It seems to have come with the lettuce. Good thing I like it.

And for an appetizer, I got chips n’ salsa. Both are quite good. I am impressed with how fresh everything is.

Patient readers know how much freshness means to me. The fresher the better, whether it’s produce or air.

So yeah, I think I’m a Chipotle guy now. Sorry Quesada, your stuff is good, but not THIS good. Plus Chipotle is a little cheaper.

There was some bullshit when the delivery arrived and I picked up my phone and it immediately died. I guess I thought I had put it back on its base but I hadn’t and so it did not recharge. Oopsie!

Oh, and Demon Hunger update : I just ate a big burrito bowl AND some chips and salsa and yet I am still fucking hungry.

I wish I could just hit up a buffet place and slay this beast.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Having a sleepy day so far.

As in. I have slept most of the hours of today except for the two hours I spent eating breakfast then going to Wound Care.

Whatever. I’m fine with it. It’s been decent quality sleep. Restful and untroubled. So it’s not been leaving me feeling terrible when I wake up.

I can live with large quantities of that sort of sleep. Eventually I will, as usual, become annoyed with how much of life I am missing out on, but for now I am content to snooze.

I’m currently facing a tough battle in Divinity : Original Sin. Not so tough that I can’t imagine winning it, but tough enough that I am going to have to really think about tactics and come up with ways to neutralize some of the enemies’ advantages.

I keep telling myself that all it takes is persistence, and that’s true. This isn’t the first difficult fight I’ve faced in the game and all it took to get past the previous ones was to try, try again and so that’s what I am doing.

But I have been falling back into wimpy habits in the game lately. Namely, when I hit a really tough fight, I don’t stay and persist till I overcome in, I go exploring and looking for an easier fight instead.

And that is very much loser behaviour. Sure, in an RPG like D:OS, I can always tell myself that I am just choosing to level up my heroes before tackling the tough fight again, and that might seem plausible, but I know myself and I know that’s not what I am really doing there.

What I’m really doing is wimping out and looking for the easy path. And there’s nothing wrong with a little of that – why make things harder for yourself if there’s an easier way – but to say that running away when faced with adversity is a way of life for me would be like Mount Everest is a little hard to lift.

It’s an understatement, is what I’m saying.

I’ve spent my entire adult life in full flight from even tiny amounts of adversity. On a subconscious level, I have been waiting for some kind of mystical magical path of literally zero resistance to open up to let me through to even the most basic level of adulthood for a very long time.

It ain’t coming. At some point, if I want to get anywhere in life, I am going to have to climb that stimulation gradient and endure my fears and learn to stay and fight for what I want instead of instantly caving in and running away all the god damned side.

I hate being so weak and gutless and spineless. I know how wrong it all is. It is definitely not a smart or wise or seemly way to live and yet I can’t seem to make myself knuckle down and change my wishy washy ways so I can get somewhere at last.

Because doing that will hurt. Overcoming oneself usually does. Facing my fears by focusing on what I want and actively pursuing it instead of drifting lonely as a cloud like I have doing for thirty fucking years will not be easy, and to the unworthy soul (like mine), if it’s not easy – REALLY easy – you just plain don’t do it.

And when I try to imagine what I would need to overcome my lassitude, I keep coming back to my lack of some spiritual substance I can use to comfort and steady myself as I brave the storm within to find safer ground.

Or at least more fun ground.

This substance could be called a lot of things. Courage. Character. Grit. Self-discipline. Belief in oneself. It could even be called faith.

Whatever it is, I don’t have it, and I feel its lack quite keenly. I can feel my soul trying to make the connection between desire and action and I can feel it attempting to draw on said mysterious substance and it just plain not being there.

The tank is empty. I’m not sure it’s ever been full.

All I can do is keep sending energy down to my deeper self to keep the thawing out of my ice torn and frostbitten soul and hope that my Spring will some day come.

Other than that, I feel utterly lost and alone. As usual.

So what the hell do I do now?

More after the break.

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The wrong question

Come to think of it, I guess “what do I do now?” is the wrong question.

Wrong because there is nothing I can “do” to make myself healthier. Not in the usual way we think of “doing” things.

There isn’t a concrete and logical series of steps I can take in order to gather that mysterious substance unto myself or anything like that.

Things are not that sensible.

Everything that I need to “do” is entirely internal and spiritual and existential, and that’s somewhat of a stumbling block for me because I am not used to acting in that realm or even acknowledging its existence at all.

I’ve gotten better about that in recent years, but it’s still virgin territory for me and hence I tend to feel lost in the wilderness when I think about it.

I’m so used to using these mighty mental muscles to engulf and overwhelm problems that I have to keep reminding myself that there IS another way and I know what it is.

I mean, this “intellect first” approach to life is the whole reason why I have to write my emotions down in this blog in order to process them and find out what they are.

Only the act of articulating them can bring them close enough to the surface of my mind for them to make the therapeutic journey from the subconscious to the conscious.

It still strikes me as an ass-backwards way to have to go about things. Like having to translate something into Finnish and back before you understand it.

But it’s what I’ve got to work with, so work with it I shall.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been rough.

Julian and I needed to go back to the sports rehab center where I had gone to have impressions of my feet made in order to pick up the resulting shoes.

The trip there was uneventful. I felt fine at that point. No warning signs.

But as soon as I got out of the car, I started feeling dizzy. And I felt dizzy all the way through the lobby and down the elevator as well.

But it wasn’t too severe. I felt unsteady on my pegs but not terribly so. So I just proceeded as normal, not giving it much thought as I went into the little where the nice British lady^[1] talked to me and showed me the shoes (which are ginormous, I feel like Frankenstein in them) and had me put them on and walk around a bit to see how they were fitting and so on.

After that, it was time to go back to the reception area to make my next appointment (Jan 22 at 1 pm) and this time, when I got up, I got REALLY dizzy.

This culminated in me taking a spill in the reception area. Luckily, my right arm absorbed most of the impact, thus sparing my head.

And let me tell you, if I had to fall, I sure as heck picked a great place to do it, because within minutes I had a doctor, a nurse clinician, a physiotherapist, and Jackie hovering over me concernedly.

I wish I remembered the doctor’s name. She was awesome. Very cheerful, gentle, and sweet. She asked me the expected questions about when I started feeling dizzy, had I eaten breakfast, what meds I was on, and so on.

Thanks to blister packing, I no longer know what meds I am on. I used to know them all by heart because I saw and read the pill bottles twice a day when I medicated.

But now, IDK WTF. Check my file.

I seem to be uninjured apart from my arm being a little sore. Once the nice ladies had checked me over and taken my vitals, I was able to sit up and then stand up long enough to get into the wheelchair one of them brought out.

So I got wheeled up to the lobby and waited for Julian there. The nice ladies stayed with me until I had gotten into the car OK.

All the way home, I felt ill. A little nauseous, dizzy, aching at the base of my testicles, head lightly throbbing.

The trip from the car to the apartment was fraught with peril. I was beyond dizzy. I was in such a messed up state that none of my usual environs – the car, the parking structure, the hallways, the door – looked or felt familiar.

Instead they seemed like something from a deliberately alienating art house film. Like things were shot from weird angles and through a fisheye lens.

Luckily I was able to get to the couch in the living room and then into my room and my beloved computer chair, and hence I could start blogging to you wonderful folk.

What happened? Well my new shoes have to take part of the blame. Jackie warned me that because I have not experienced arch support for almost a decade that there are likely muscles in my legs and feet that have atrophied over time and that might complicate matters somewhat.

Yeah, no shit. I just had to take my new clodhoppers off because they were starting to hurt my feet when I was just sitting here without putting any weight on them.

I am starting to think that whatever fucked up my arms and legs has done enough damage to my foot tendons that those big shoes of mine will not work for me.

That would be a shame. I rather liked having arch support for once.

Clearly I am going to need to call Jackie and tell her about all this. And that’s fine.

But I don’t know what made me so dizzy. I felt the dizziness again when I got up and used the bathroom just now, but thankfully at a far less severe level.

It could be a blood circulation issue caused by the shoes. We will see if things go back to normal when the shoes have been off for a while.

I’d hate to have to go to the ER for vertigo.

More after the break.

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As mysteriously as…

Well I just got my supper cooked and ready without being too dizzy, so I guess this is going to be yet another mysterious ailment that comes and goes with no explanation as to why it’s happening leaving me wondering WTF.

Oh well. I guess taking a nap helped a lot. I still don’t feel one hundred percent good – for one, I’m still a little dizzy – but I guess I am mostly back to my more traditional levels of pain and misery.

It’s like coming home again!

Still don’t have the shoes on. I will try them again soon. They felt quite comfortable when I first wore them, and my GOD did it feel good to have arch support again.

So I am really hoping the issues are fixable. I get the feeling that because medical science abandoned all attempts to find out what the fuck is wrong with my legs (and arms), nobody knows how the ortho shoes will interact with the damage and that’s how we ended up in this sorry state of affairs.

I imagine I will have to go back to the sport rehab place for more measurements and adjustments and whatnot. And a lot sooner than January.

Le sigh. Oh well. Welcome to getting old. Everything starts to break down.

Especially for a medical mystery like me. I’ll be six feet under and some schmuck doctor will still be saying, “Well our tests show you to be perfectly healthy, Mister Bertrand. ”

Not that I’m bitter.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been hearing the siren song of gluttony lately.

Because my Demon Hunger has returned and while so far I have kept it mostly in check, wrestling with it all the time is really hard on my nerves.

I’m hungry all the fucking time. Sometimes even right after a big meal. All the meal does is slow it down a little.

And this has physical consequences, albeit minor ones, because being hungry stimulates my stomach into generating more acids and that leads to me being hungry AND suffering from a little bit of acid indigestion.

And that just makes the hunger bite into me more sharply because I know what will end the acid indigestion and that is FOOD.

It’s like my stomach is an angry beast that I have to keep feeding or it will start tearing up the carpets and humping the furniture.

Or vice versa.

And this all inexorably leads to cravings for carb laden junk food in mass quantities. The urge to go back to my wicked ways when I used to use junk food as a side dish for every meal has reared its ugly head for the first time in a decade.

Looking back, I can’t believe I used to do that shit. How mindlessly gluttonous! And just yesterday I remember that I used to have sugar free cookies as a dessert with every fucking meal in addition to the piece of fruit I still eat for dessert.

So it was like I ate two desserts with every meal. Insane.

How the heck did I afford all that? Well I guess not buying around $18 worth of trail mix every week yet helped a lot.

And, sadly, junk food is very cheap. Le sigh.

And it would be oh so easy to start eating like that again. And that would be horrible. My health would nosedive and I would be in serious trouble almost right away.

The lowered Paxil dose is probably partly to blame. With the greater access to my emotions comes a greater desire to “eat my feelings” and self-soothe with food.

Hopefully I will find a more healthy way to soothe myself. Right now, I can only think of one, and there’s a limit to how much one man can masturbate.

Seriously though, right now I am running on discipline and willpower. The hunger attacks and I just grit my teeth and push it down again and continue my day.

And so far that works, but willpower is never a truly effective long term solution. I need to redirect the urge to eat into something else rewarding.

Because that’s what cravings always are : a desire for the activation of the reward center of the brain. And that’s nothing to sneeze at. That is, as I have said before, the mainspring of life you’re dealing with there. Cravings keep animals alive.

But the fact that what we really want is not the food (or the booze or the drug or whatever) but the reward means that it is possible to substitute another, healthier reward stimulus and get the same effect.

Not easily and not immediately. You will still have the fixation to deal with. Addiction forces us to fixate on that exact source of reward and that alone can make us feel like we will just die if we don’t get it.

It is impossible to convince an addiction that something other than feeding the fixation can be “just as good”.

All you can do is starve the fixation and hope the new, healthier source of reward will eventually take over.

Anyhow, back to a vague afterimage of the point : I’ve been struggling with that Demon Hunger again and it’s wearing on my nerves and that sucks.

More after the break.

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Truth or… something

Consequences! That was it.

Early into my adulthood I internalized a very simple moral formula :

“I am responsible for all the reasonably predictable consequences of my actions. ”

And like a lot of the ideological relics from my younger days, it makes irrefutable logical sense and cannot be countered yet it is nevertheless wrong both in theory and in application for reasons well outside its scope.

Kind of like how I present myself to the world :

“Everything you see is real but you don’t see everything. ”

Both catchy and confusing, n’est-ce pas?

Within my moral rubric lies the innocuous seeming word “reasonably”, which I put in there to make sure it could not be interpreted as requiring omniscience.

But “reasonable” is a very slippery concept when you try to pin it down to an actual definition. We all think we know what is reasonable and what is not but I doubt any two people would have exactly the same things on both lists.

And lately I have been wondering if my little definition needs further refinement because I am beginning to wonder if even my seemingly modest moral formula is in fact something that does not run well on human hardware.

It may well be that in order to function, the human mind needs some well defined limit to the responsibility we take for the consequences of our actions, even ones which might fit the definition of “reasonable”.

We may need to be able to say, “OK, past this point, fuck it. People are on their own. ”

Not to the point of moral nihilism, obviously, or anywhere near it. Just to the point where the responsibility of anticipation reaches a reasonable limit that takes into account the limitations of the human mind.

Even a mind like mind.

I’m not really sure where I am going with this. It began as just a feeling that on some level, my moral equations were crashing due to running out of mental space and that this is obviously not acceptable.

Exceptions need to be made. Code needs to be altered in order to stop all these stack overflow errors from crashing my cranium. I must define a space for myself, one that does not routinely get overwritten by whatever I am thinking at the moment just rudely shoving it out of the way.

There has to be some way to create structures that persist in my mind.

Or I will remain lost at sea with no land in sight forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now, the Ye Olde Fornicators Guild presents this demonstration of the ancient and majesty art of fuckery.

My computer’s been misbehaving. It crashes when I am not using it (probably due to Salad) and when it reboots it can’t connect to the Internet.

Obviously, I solved this problem for now, but not before I rebooted a bunch of times.

What worked this time was a completely cold boot. Turned the power off at the power supply and waited for the case fan’s blades to stop turning, then turned it on again.

Apparently, that was what it needed. I exorcised whatever little demons were fucking things up by completely mindwiping the computer.

Wow, Windows’ dictionary has the word “mindwiping”. I am impressed. I had no idea the Windows dictionary was that hip.

Or maybe I did know but somehow forgot all about it….

Feeling physically and emotionally cold right now. The emotional part of it has been happening on and off for a while now. I have these periods where I feel especially cut off from the human race and completely and utterly alone, and all I can do is keep on trudging forward, knowing that as long as I keep moving, I will reach the other side of it.

When you’re going through hell, keep going!

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Great. Just great.

Just got back from the bathroom. Despite having defecated quite recently, my body apparently needed a repeat performance, and so I had to interrupt my blogging (which I am loath to do) to go eliminate waste again.

Now I am back from said mission and I am quite dizzy and tired.

One might even say I’m pooped. (SFX : Cries of audience outrage)

And I don’t feel well at all. I am feeling so unwell that I may end up having to stop blogging before I hit the end of part 1 and go lay down.

Yellow alert, basically. I am not ready to pull the brake cord to make the train stop just yet, but I am eyeing the scenery and looking for a soft spot to land if I end up jumping off before my stop.

And of course, this would have to happen on the weekend. And not just the weekend, Saturday night, when there is almost always going to be nobody here but me.

Oh well. Whatever happens, I will take care of it. I always do.

A big part of expanding my world will be getting over my long ingrained feelings of weakness and incompetence and helplessness.

Sure, I have unavoidable limitations, but I am a smart and resourceful and more than capable of solving whatever problems arise if I just give myself a chance.

Deal with it first, freak out about it later.

The ability to remain cool under pressure is something I have always admired. It was one of my late father’s truly heroic attributes. He is one hundred percent the person I would want with me during a crisis.

The rest of the time he can fuck right off, though. Moody prick. Cool in a crisis and testy and angry and verbally abusive the rest of the time.

Don’t get me started.

Anyhow, my point was that I can handle unexpected things if I have to so there is no need, or a lot less need, for me to worry about bad things happening to me.

I will of course avoid the pitfalls I can see coming, but the door will always be open to completely random shit that I never could have anticipated dropping by to fuck with my shit and force me to deal with things myself instead of withdrawing in panic but not before whining for a real grownup to come fix it for me.

That’s no way to live. I won’t learn to respect myself like that.

Time to man up at last and get shit DONE.

Like a nap. Right now.

More after the break.

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Just skating along

But I never learned to skate.

I had a number of opportunities. Every year of elementary school there was at least one field trip to the rink at Cahill Stadium in my home town. I could have learned then.

The first problem with that, though, is that I would have had to ask my parents for skates, and I was far too timid to do that.

On a deep level, I understood that people barely tolerated me. I was an unexpected and unwanted burden and responsibility first and foremost and I should thank my lucky stars that I got anything ever and that people ever put up with me at all.

Asking for more than that was bound to go about as well for me as it did for Oliver Twist.

The lack of skates led to my having to feel humiliated and abandoned when all the other kids had skates and I didn’t and I was decades away from being able to explain why.

“Because my parents don’t love me very much and deeply resent me for being alive. ”

I wonder if that would have caused a stir. Probably not. It would have been just another weird thing said by that weird fat kid that made people just shake their heads like they’re trying to wake up and then move on, forgetting what I said as quickly as possible.

Because it disturbed them. I have that effect on people. I weird them out.

Maybe that marks me as a visionary. I dunno. The way I see things is so different from how people usually see things that exposure to my thoughts can leave people feeling dizzy and disoriented.

Maybe it would go over better as a book or Ted type talks. I could fire up the webcam and record myself holding forth on this and that. Put it on YouTube with the right tags.

The problem with that is picking where to start. Anywhere, I suppose. My thoughts are so densely intertwined that one spot is as good as another, really.

Yeah. Maybe I’m a visionary who could bring about a whole new era of thought.

That’d be neat.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.