I just can’t afford to care that it is Xmas today.

Like I was saying yesterday, this is the year I have to cut all ties to Xmas that would bring me down. It’s just not worth it to keep caring when that can only lead to me feeling dangerously terrible this year.

I could lie to myself and fill myself with false cheer by telling myself that next year will be different. Next year I will truly celebrate. Next year I will save up to get myself a room in a nice hotel where I can do Xmas in pleasant surroundings and even pretend like I am a grownup for a while, at least till checkout time.

Or I’ll find some homeless shelter or soup kitchen or food bank and spend the day handing food to the people in society who are even poorer than I am.

Or I’ll volunteer at a suicide hotline, or be Santa for orphans, or wander the world singing songs and solving crimes.

Why, just think of all the wonderful things I could do!

But I know damned well I won’t do any of them. In fact I am betting that exactly 365 days from now, I will be doing the exact same thing – typing my feelings into this blog and whining about how I don’t have the wherewithal to celebrate by myself.

The only way I could prevent that is if I bought all my Xmas stuff for 2025 now, while I am still at least a bit inspired. but set it to not be delivered until Xmas Eve of next year.

But I know I ain’t gonna do that either. The truth is that I just don’t have what it takes to take care of myself. I still haven’t overcome that deep and terrible passivity that lurks at the core of my being that makes it so hard for me to act at all except to just keep going through the motions of my stupid so-called life.

I just keep going along that same old downward path. The gradient is such that it doesn’t feel like I am going down, but when I look around it’s quite clear that I am silently trudging my way down to Hell and a truly pathetic death.

And it’s not like that’s my desired destination. My desired destination involves having a job, a boyfriend, a house, and friends with various levels of benefits.

If I came into a ton of money and met my dream man the same night, he would have to understand that I have a LOT of wild oats to sow before I can consider monogamy.

Luckily, we gay men are more likely to be tolerant of that kind of thing.

But I can’t seem to get off this path no matter how undesirable the destination. It’s like I am locked in by some self-hypnotic magnetic field, like I’m on a rail and this is all just a very depressing Disneyland ride.

And I have tried to figure out what this magnetic force is. What is it that makes it so hard for me to make any kind of change to my life, no matter how desirable?

I feel like my energies are focused in the wrong direction in time. Like at some point, all my potential got sunk into being able to go forward the exact same way indefinitely and that system violently resists any attempt I might make to take those resources and put them into making that future actually better.

Like if I change anything at all, everything will fall apart.

Clearly not true but it’s still how I feel.

So here we are.

More after the break.

---

¿Tienes hambre, amigo?

Decided that my traditional Xmas dinner would be a traditional Xmas burrito bowl from my new best friend, Quesada Tacos and Burritos.

Finally, I can get Mexican food delivered! I’ve never done the “burrito bowl” thing before, but it’s not very complicated.

Take the contents of a burrito and instead of putting it in a tortilla, stick it in a bowl. Ay caramba, you got yourself a burrito bowl.

It’s a very West Coast kind of thing. Has less carbs this way.

So I got layers of lettuce, tomatoes, refried beans, taco beef (!), and brown rice. all in a bowl for your dining pleasure.

And it’s delicious. Om nom nom!

My delivery dude didn’t want to call me on the phone built into the building. I think he actually expected me to come down to his fucking car because he whined that there wasn’t any parking.

Well too bad. I’m disabled and I can’t come down to get it, you have to get it up here.

Besides, what are the odds that someone would ticket a car that you left running with the door open while you took a quick trip up the elevator?

Not my problem, anyhow. Gimmie my food!

My mother called earlier. I always love hearing from her, of course. It’s good to hear her voice and be reminded that, despite all my misgivings about my past and the bad family dynamic I grew up in, she remains a very sweet and wonderful woman.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so. She told me that goes for a Chinese food meal once a week, just her and a book, and quite often when she goes to pay her bill, she finds some kind stranger(s) have paid it for her!

Can you imagine? People see this sweet little old lady with her book and decide to make her their act of kindness.

I told my mother it was because she’s very lovable, which she is.

I didn’t ask if anyone could maybe think she’s homeless, which they might, with her tendency to have a purse and an overstuffed cloth bag with her at all times.

She’s not unhoused, folks. She’s just my dear sweet lovable eccentric mother.

Merry Christmas, my most beautiful and wonderful readers. I hope you had a good one.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The second I stopped playing Divinity : Original Sin, I got super sleepy.

I think the darkening skies probably played a part too. And the fact that I went out to do the Wound Care thing at 2 pm today and was therefore already already tired when I sat down to play m’game anyhow was probably a major factor.

But this happened at a bit before 3:40 pm, meaning that in 25 minutes ^[1] it would be time for me starting the bloggening, and that is not nearly enough time for me to go back to sleep, so here I am, sleepy but determinedly typing away to you lovely people.

I think it being Xmas Eve is making me more sentimental.

I haven’t done a heck of a lot to prepare for the evening. No surprise there. Even when my legs worked the depression suppressed whatever bright and perky urges to do a bunch of stuff to “celebrate” and left me knowing that the minute Xmas was over, I will wish I had done more, and it still not making me motivated to do more.

I am so cold and damp and dark inside. No wonder nothing can live there.

Even so, over the years, like patient readers know, I have been stubbornly determined to keep Xmas in my heart even if it meant being super sad and lonely on Xmas Eve because I just loved Xmas that much.

Well that ends now. Fuck it. I will always love Xmas with all my super sappy heart but this year I am cutting any ties that lead to me feeling isolated and terrible and depressed because I don’t want to have to spend my Xmas day talking to someone at a suicide prevention hotline because I have nowhere to go and no will to get me there.

Those are the stakes, folks. Robin William’s suicide resonated with me far too much for my comfort. Maybe that’s why I got so mad at him at the time.

He made sure all his loved people were away and that they would be OK and then he quietly slipped out death’s door when he was all alone, like some kind of wild animal crawling off to die.

If I ever harmed myself, it would be when I felt utterly alone and isolated with no connection to humanity at all. Or when I felt very happy and replete and didn’t want to go back to the bad place ever again.

Kinda like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Michael Hutchens of INXS. They both committed suicide when they were finally getting better, and starting to heal.

I get it. I understand exactly why that would happen that way.

But I could never do that to the people I love and who love me. Suicide is a brutally violent act to perpetrate on everyone who knows you. It will do considerably more than just break their hearts. That kind of thing could shatter a person.

The guilt alone could kill you.

So no, I could never be that selfish. Even at my lowest moments, and I might be heading into one of those soon, my love for those who care about me would keep me from doing such a terrible thing to them.

Maybe that’s another reason why I got so mad at Robin Williams. How could he do that to everyone who loved him, which includes like half of humanity?

When I learned he was in terrible pain, I forgave him somewhat. I vehemently oppose suicide but I am for euthanasia. If all you have to look forward to is pain and debility and the horror of being in it while your body dies, then GTFO with my blessing.

But as for me, I am fine. Yeah, I have health issues that worry me and I do have daily indignities to deal with, but I am nowhere near despair.

I just feel down now and then.

And then I come pour it all out into this blog, and that helps so much.

Thank you so much for making that possible, dear readers.

Merry Xmas et Joyeux Noel, mon amis.

More after the break.

---

I’ve been trying to read these gay furry smut comics from Korea via Google Translate, and while it can translate the words, clearly it has trouble with the meaning.

I mean, try reading this :

There’s always a ton of repetition and naked dudes screaming “I want to know what I want to know” and “I want to know what I want to say” and “where is the point!?!” at each other and it makes for a bizarre and surreal read.

Presumably, these phrases represent idiomatic Korean that does not translate well, at least not with mechanical translation.

I had been meaning to post one of these for a few days now, but having someone say, “Eskimo…?” completely out of context then having a burly Korean player of American football yell, “I want to go to KKK!” drove me to finally do it.

I mean, what the proverbial fuck, man? LOL.

---

Oh right, Xmas pics!

I forgot I made some of those.

Like this darling picture of feral Fruvous on Xmas morning :

Those stories ended up being quite wholesome for something that started off as a way for me to process family trauma. 

Maybe I should try that again. Hmmm. 

And then there’s this wholesome trio : 

 

I wanna hug them and kiss the top of their heads so bad!

And here’s one from when I had some friends over for Xmas dinner.

In the holiday spirit, we will just pretend that is a tofurkey, as sheep are herbivores.

Well that’s enough wholesomeness for now. We now return you to your usual protective coating of snarkiness and cynicism.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But I’m not.

I feel dizzy. I have since I woke up from a nap around ten minutes ago. It’s a mild dizziness – I was able to get my lunch from the kitchen without too much trouble – but it runs quite deep and is accompanied by an even deeper feeling that something just ain’t right in my body right now.

So color me concerned.

Insert my standard, “wah, I don’t wanna go to the ER or Urgent Care!” whining that usually comes up when I have a health scare of some sort.

The pattern of my life would predict that this will be a scary problem for a while then disappear entirely like it was naught but the frost on the lilies come morn.

But this is not just an outbreak of my periodic flu-ish symptoms. Something deep inside me is telling me something very not good is afoot.

I will see how I feel after I finish lunch and it’s had time to digest, and the water I am drinking has time to percolate through my body.

This could be just another weird way for my dehydration to manifest.

We will wait and see.

My digestion just make an ominous sound. Raise alert level by 10 percent.

Otherwise, I am having a decent day. Divinity : Original Sin continues to be very fun to play and I am glad to have acquired it, especially now that I know that it has a rating of “Universal acclaim” on Metacritic.

Well who am I to disagree with the universe?

I ordered some treats for myself earlier today. Found that Amazon Canadastocks the “big half-kilo bag o’ chocolates” that I got in a previous year, so that will be arriving some time tomorrow.

The website says it will arrive “before 10 pm”, which certainly gives them a nice wide window of time to get it here and have it still officially be “tomorrow”.

Once I get them, I will then have to practice a modicum of self-control in order to keep myself from eating too many at once.

That’s not out of some Puritan streak of compulsive self-denial out of fear of giving in to “decadence”, of course. But the chocolates are sweetened with maltitol^[1] and that stuff is known to have a mild laxative effect,

Why can’t everyone just use Splenda?

Unwelcome thought : it would be far too typical of my life for me to end up in the hospital for Xmas Eve and Day.

Well at least I wouldn’t be alone, assuming I’m out in the ward and not isolated because they don’t know if I’m contagious or whatever.

I’m pretty sure the only thing infectious about me right now is my smile.

We will see how things play out. Right now I have that seasick kind of dizziness that makes my body want to keep going in whatever direction I move it, as though my limbs suddenly weigh twice as much.

No malaise as of yet, knock on wood. And phew for that. If I had a major energy drain and/or sickly feeling going on at the same time as the rest of this bullshit, I doubt I would have been able to get out of bed and focus enough to blog.

But I’d sure as hell try. I am way, way beyond the point where blogging is optional. I need to write my words every day in order to clear the logjam in my brain and let me actually think clearly.

And that’s, like, my favorite way to think.

More after the break.

---

Still not right

I feel a little better than I did earlier, but I still feel that sense of wrongness.

And I am still a bit dizzy. Plus my nose is running and I can feel that the sinuses above and around my eyes are stuffed up.

That congestion is probably what is causing the dizziness and the ill feeling. It’s pressing on that part of my dura that swells up when I get heat stroke and that leads to me feeling dizzy and ill then, too.

I wonder if that’s fixable? My mother once told me that her father, my late Pepe, had a nasty sinus issue once that got way better after an operation. Made a huge difference.

Then again, I have had my head examined relatively recently. One would hope a sinus malformation would be the sort of thing that would stand out enough to get noticed even if they weren’t looking for it.

But maybe not. I dunno.

I think I am more or less ready for Xmas. Which is good because tomorrow is Xmas Eve. I think I will weather it well on an emotional level.

Being able to write out all my fears and anxiety certainly helps a lot, and for that I have you, my readers, to thank.

Like I said up above in part 1, I need to blog. I can’t imagine going without blogging for even a day. I would feel so anxious and restless and, well, blocked up.

Constipated. I would feel mentally constipated. Make of that what you will.

In fact, that need to blog is the best argument for finally replacing the battery on my tablet I could think of.

Sure, typing on a tablet sucks rancid donkey taint, but it’s still better than not being able to share my words at all.

I am still struggling to accept that I can only “push” every once in a while. Most of the time, all I can do is hang on to my scraps of sanity and try to make it through the day.

The sorts of things that might expand my world are still out of reach most of the time. I just don’t have the chutzpah or the wherewithal to fight my inward tide inside most days.

And it’s hard not to get angry and frustrated with myself over that. That feeling that what I want is right there and I therefore should be able to just grab it is maddening.

I guess I need to learn to have more patience with myself.

But I have all this pent up energy and ambition and even good ol greed inside me and it wants to claw its way out.

And I still won’t let it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m not feeling it.

Mostly because I know that I’m not getting much of a Xmas at all this year. No dinner with Joe’s parents and sister, no gifts from my mother n’ brother, and just the usual dinner at Denny’s for me and my tight knit little friend group.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always happy to do Denny’s with Le Gang, and this time, it comes with gifts, and I love giving gifts.

I like getting them too, of course. I’m as greedy for the loot as the next guy. But for me, the greater pleasure has always been in the giving.

What can I say? I love making people happy. Especially those I love.

But yeah, other than tonight, I’m not getting an Xmas this year unless I make one for myself, and so far I have not been able to get my shit together enough to provide one for myself this year.

I’ve never had to do it on my own before. I don’t know where to begin.

The only thing I have planned is ordering a turkey dinner from Denny’s for supper on Xmas day. Woop de frigging do.

In theory, I know things I could do to make things more festive. I could decorate my room. I could watch the Alistair Sims version of A Christmas Carol. I could order myself a box of sugar free chocolates.

Or maybe some not-too-sugary naughty treats, even.

But meh. I just don’t have the motive power for any of that. It all comes back to the main core issue that I don’t find my own welfare to be particularly motivating.

I am still in the grips of internalized neglect and learned helplessness. I can imagine all kinds of solo holiday activities and I can even imagine enjoying them but it all just seems so sad and pathetic to me that I’m not sure that it wouldn’t make things worse in the long run.

Thus my thinking uncharacteristic thoughts like, “it’s just a day and soon it will be over”.

That’s far more Grinch-like than I have ever been before. Patient readers know that I have always kept Xmas in my heart despite the inherent dangers to my fragile psychological state and tender, sweet little heart.

But I’ve always had dinner with the Devoys to anchor me before. It’s hard to even fathom just how much having something to look forward to means to me. I could see my way through a lonely Xmas Eve knowing I would have Xmas Dinner with a lovely family to look forward to.

But now, alas, I have nothing, and no experience with spending Xmas alone and somehow making it feel festive and special.

I’m not good on my own. The last time I lived alone, I lost my frigging mind to depression, and that was when I was a lot younger and healthier.

I could investigate places to go for us lonely souls on Xmas Eve and/or Day. I am sure there must be something in this big ol’ GVRD of ours.

But there would be no point as there would be nobody to drive me there. My friends will all be with their families on Xmas Eve and Day.

I suppose I could finally get around to looking up what would be involved in taking HandyDart to places.

For those who dunno, that’s a kind of specialized bus service/taxi for us gimps. It can take you door to door to things like doctor’s appointments, shopping, social events, and all the rest.

I’ve never taken it before because I’ve always had wonderful Julian to take me the places I needed to go.

And I could look it up, and research places I might go, and do all kinds of wonderful things to make life happier for me.

But first I’d have to convince myself that I am worth the effort and expense.

And that’s a pretty tall order.

More after the break.

---

More gay furry smut recommendations!

Leo the Magician

Well, furries plus whatever the heck Leo is.

I love Leo the Magician because it has everything I love – it’s warm and sweet and funny with seriousness peppered in and it is quite joyously pro-sex to boot.

Its entirely sensibility is very very “me”, plus I love how the art style eschews any pretense of realism for good, solid, appealing, cartoonish character design.

And that’s very “me” as well. If I had a webcomic (again), that’s the style I would want to to be in, albeit maybe slightly more detailed.

But the most important factor is the characters and their expressiveness and appeal.

Lights Out by Funkybun

I love how well written and developed it is. I can feel the emotion in it so clearly! And that makes it super sexy to me.

Even though “all they do is give each other handjobs”. Pshaw. I am way past the age where specific sex acts or combinations of genders and genitals will mean very much to me at all. For me, it’s the emotional intensity and context that turns me on.

And Funkybun’s stuff is so well written! They understand that lust is an emotion and therefore emotion matters in smut just like it matters everywhere else.

And I so totally identify with our, shall we say, more experienced critter. I can totally imagine doing the same thing in the same situation myself.

Maybe it’s my trickster nature. I dunno.

---

Farewell to Xmas 2024

”But wait! ” the version of you in my head cries, “Xmas isn’t until the 25th! How can you be saying goodbye to it on the 22nd?”

Because my Xmas is over. I did Denny’s with Le Gang and we exchanged gifts and I got a few nice things and that was pretty much it.

I loved every second of it, but that was it for me this year unless I can somehow find it within myself to arrange something better.

And it’s not looking too good for that.

I am at least going to do some extra grocery shopping so that I have nice things to eat on Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon.

And I will order something nice for myself for my personal Xmas dinner. Just to be on the safe side, I had my turkey dinner at Denny’s tonight. So in theory that leaves things wide open for Xmas dinner.

Maybe it will be more Denny’s. Maybe I will see what White Spot is serving up. Maybe I will go totally random excess and have some festive Xmas donairs.

We will see what I feel like at the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well for fuck’s sake.

After my computer crashed while I was not even using it (thanks, Salad), I of course rebooted. And my computer came back online.

But it came back wrong!

Apparently, out internet is out, which is why I am typing this into a Libre Office document and not the WordPress interface for my blog as God intended.

My computer connects to the network fine, but the network can’t seem to reach the internet at large at all, and my uninformed guess is that this is a Shaw Cable problem, not an us problem.

I have rebooted several times with no useful result. Once I get enough words out of my system to calm down enough to even think about doing a totally cold reboot where I turn the power off at the power supply (basically unplugging the whole thing) then boot up from THERE, I will have some kind of definitive answer as to where the fault lies.

Not in our stars but in ourselves, as Shakespeare wrote.

It’s just aggravating as a lot of fuck to have to fight this hard just to get back to normal. I should not have to toil and wait and toil again just to get back to where I fucking started.

Not that this is a particularly useful kind of “should” or “shouldn’t”. Whether something should or should not have happened is irrelevant to the problem at hand and can divert important mental resources from the task of actually solving the problem.

But even a paragon of logical analysis like myself (sic) has to give in to the urge to shake his fist at the sky and curse the gods now and then, whether or not it “makes sense”.

It vents emotion, and that’s all the sense I need it to make.

---

Well I did the fully cold boot and it didn’t fix anything. I am still at the “connected to the network but the network isn’t on the internet right now” phase.

Lovely. Because life didn’t suck enough yet, apparently.

Oh well, I can at least still play some of my video games. Offhand, I can’t think of any of my currently installed games which would have reason to need to be online all the time.

That doesn’t mean they won’t require it, of course. Video game companies love requiring an internet connection so that they can continually monitor you to make sure you’re not pirating games.

Which is downright creepy, now that I think of it. We must watch you constantly to make sure you are not breaking the law, Citizen.

But really, it’s for your own protection. From, i dunno, scammers or whatever.

Trust us, we wouldn’t violate your privacy just because we live in a culture of corporate paranoia where everyone is guilty until proven innocent, and even then we assume you’re guilty as hell and are only eluding our greedy grasp because of the mere technicality that you didn’t do it.

A likely story. That’s what they all say!

I just asked Julian to reset our WiFi router. Hopefully that will resolve the problem. If it doesn’t, then we will have to escalate to actually calling Shaw and asking WTF.

I hope that does not prove necessary as it will be a lot of hassle. As with nearly everything, I would rather deal with it all by myself.

It’s so much less complicated that way. Involving other people in things always makes this so much slower and clumsier and stupider.

I did not and never will enjoy group work. Just give me a task and let me get at it.

I can been incredibly productive that way. Don’t make me slow down to the speed of

the slowest sheep in the flock. Let me FLY.
More after the break.

---

The return of the kid

Well rebooting the router restored our internet access, so say for that.

I’m still writing this in LibreOffice because at this point it’s marginally easier. Plus I like how Libre provides me with a constant word count as opposed to WordPress, which makes me press a button to see how much I’ve written.

Oh, how I have suffered.

Other than my computer and internet issues, today’s been okayish. I have my Xmas shopping on the way to being done.

My credit card is glowing red hot from overuse, but whose isn’t this time of year?

Hopefully Joe’s gift from me will arrive before Denny’s tomorrow. We don’t leave for Denny’s until 7:10 pm or so, so the odds are good.

Physically, I feel fairy rotten today. My cold or flu like symptoms are back. Runny nose, sore ear nose and throat, and all the rest.
I’m starting to wonder if it’s not anything viral at all but rather how dehydration presents in me. If so, then all my talk of upping my hydration game gains a brand new urgency.

Because I sure as fuck hate feeling like this.

The muscle soreness and stiffness in particular has been kicking my ass today. That awful back pain I get where it feels like a giant is squeezing my spine is back and it’s not playing around.

I’ve been taking my muscle relaxants to try to fix it. Hard to know if they actually help because the problem happens mostly when I have just gotten out of bed and for obvious reasons, I have not taken a pill in a while when that happens.

The pills do seem to help me get to sleep and stay asleep thought. So there’s that.

Emotionally, right now I feel tired and anxious and low key depressed. I feel very isolated and alone and abandoned, which is a feeling to which I am sadly quite prone.

When depression’s deadly chill comes down it’s like interstellar space inside me. I try my best to remember that no matter what my electrochemical imbalances tell me, the people who love me are still out there and still care about me and want me to be happy.

I guess it’s just easier to feel forsaken and forlorn.

Not better. Just easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lately I have been getting a lot of pain in the muscles in my arms when I use the walker.

i guess it’s finally come to this. My mysterious ailment has been degrading the muscles in my arms for a long time and now it’s getting hard to ignore.

And it happens the moment I start using the outdoor walker. For whatever reason, with my indoor walker, the pain is not as bad.

But when I go out, oh lordy.

It would be ironic if what puts me into a wheelchair at long last is my arms, not my legs. That’s the only solution I can see if my arms won’t hold me up any more.

And it would have to be an electric one, with a motor, because if my arms can’t hold me up for using the walker, they sure as hell can’t propel the wheels of a classic wheelchair.

Like with the pain in my legs, it tends to be at its worst when I first start out. Once the muscles warm up, and the endorphins kick in, the muscles get this cold numb feeling that reduces the pain a fair bit.

Yay for that, I guess.

But I am, obviously, very worried about this development. I don’t want to end up in a wheelchair and I super duper double dog don’t want to lose the use of my arms.

Right now, normal household use doesn’t cause my arms much pain, so phew for that. I get little twinges now and then, and I feel it if I try to move something heavy, but for the most part it’s not a problem. Yet.

As long as I can still use the keyboard and mouse, I can deal with it. That’s what I do with most of my day anyhow, whether it’s video games or blogging.

But it would really suck if I, say, need a lot more help from Julian because I can’t use my arms for much of anything anymore. I would hate it so much if, for example, I couldn’t make my own dead simple meals any more.

I already have a diet that is somewhat circumscribed by the fact that I can’t stay on my feet for very long. There’s all kinds of foods I can’t make for myself because they would require me to stand over a hot stove for too long, or cannot easily be transported via the saddlebags of my indoor walker.

I would love to get back into eating soup again, for example. But how the heck do I carry soup from the kitchen to my room?

Maybe I should buy myself a big ol’ Thermos for Xmas.

Speaking of which, I have 2/3 of my Xmas shopping done. So yay that. And I did my usual Friday grocery shopping online and got myself some extra treats for the holidays, like some of those little pot pies I love and some sugar free vanilla ice cream.

I think I’ll be making an Amazon order soon. If I do, I will see about ordering some sugar free chocolate syrup (yes that’s a thing!) along with the other stuff.

Then I’ll be able to have a chocolate sundae!

I might yet invest in some genuinely naughty treats too. But not too naughty or it will make me feel sick. So I will have to choose carefully.

For instance, I’d really like a doughnut or some Timbits, and my fave in both cases is the old fashioned glazed kind.

But that glaze might do me in.

I will work things out. Tim Horton’s might get some of my money somehow.

More after the break.

---

Stupid frigging Chrome

I am increasingly running into things which do not work in Chrome. And it’s beginning to get on my nerves.

I should not have to use Microsoft Edge to check the balance on my card or add a new card to my Amazon account.

And it’s this kind of bullshit that made me flee Firefox and go Chrome in the first place.

So what the hell. I might just switch to Microsoft Edge. The 90’s internet rebel living inside me balks at the idea of surrendering to Microsoft like that – it was our sworn duty to hate Bill Gates back then – but the lazy, tired old person that I am now can probably override that younger version of me.

There are other alternatives. Opera the web browser is still out there, amazingly. As is Tor, the web browser of choice for people for whom Incognito Mode is not nearly secretive and shady enough. And I am sure there are other browsers out there I could choose from if I chose to.

But meh. Edge is already there.

Got another new game. I was browsing a sale on games by the game studio Larian and realized that while I had played their game Divinity : Original Sin 2 for a whopping 770+ hours, I had never played the original.

And I could get the original for $5. Sold!

Sure, the odds are it won’t be quite as good as the sequel, but if the sequel was good for almost 800 hours of gameplay, and this one only cost me $5, then I will be happy if I get even as little as 200 hours out of it.

And so far it’s fun. I was thrown off at first by the fact that it wanted me to create TWO characters, one male and one female, at the beginning, but that was just so that there would be two characters in my starting party instead of one.

I’ve picked up a third now, a mercenary with a Southern belle accent, which seems incongruous for no logical reason.

I mean, this is a fantasy universe. There’s no reason characters can’t have any accent in the world, whether it’s Southern, Brooklyn, or Jordy.

We’re just used to fantasy being dominated by either neutral American accents or various form of British accents.

I’d love to know exactly when we collectively decided dwarves were Scottish.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just another brush with death.

Needed to get a potato out of the crisper drawer of the fridge. Bent down the wrong way. Bad circulation in my legs means that if I bend down the wrong way, it cuts the blood flow to my brain and I instantly become deathly dizzy.

So I then had to push myself off the bottom section of the fridge, the shelf on top of the crisper drawers, in order to get back up to where the blood could reach my brain again.

Turns out that’s really important.

But that’d my life. Death lurks everywhere, and I can’t look everywhere at once, so one of these days catastrophe will stop playing with me and go in for the kill.

I wish I could say that this truth galvanized me into being more determined than ever to live my life to the fullest and get the most out of every fleeting moment of it.

But it does not. Rather the opposite, actually. It just makes me want to withdraw even deeper into myself and wait for it all to be over.

The whole idea of living life to the fullest seems flawed and doomed to me. How on Earth would I even know if I’m living life to the fullest? How could I possibly know that out of the billions of things I could be doing right now, the one I am doing is the one which will bring me the most joy?

To me, that just sounds like a recipe for constant dissatisfaction as you worry and wonder whether you could be living a fuller life right now.

For some of us, that positive shit just doesn’t work.

Like, take for example Doctor Scott‘s recent video about the third way to fight depression that isn’t therapy or drugs but works just as well as them!

I saw that title, and immediately said to myself, “It’s exercise, isn’t it?”

Yup. He wanted to sell me on the idea of exercising my way out of my despair and I had to laugh a bitter, mirthless laugh at that because if I can barely find the motivation to get out of bed to go to the bathroom some days, how the fuck am I supposed to find the motivation to do something that will actively hurt the entire time (but for “only” 20 minutes!) and then leave me feeling horrible after?

The level of delusion in that kind of thinking is atrocious.

This kind of thing is why I am thinking of not following Doctor Scott on YouTube any more because he seems like a great guy and I believe he is entirely earnest and sincere and really did go through depressive hell too, but despite all that, his videos keep making me really angry because it’s like he has no idea what it’s like to be someone like me and his advice is always this perky bullshit that feels like it’s from another planet.

The Planet of the Ryans, where Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds are from.

I’ve had the same problem with other YouTube therapists as well. They are sincerely trying to help but they clearly have no idea of what it’s truly like to dwell in the darkness feeling so numb from the hard edged chill inside you that sometimes it is hard to remember why you do literally anything.

I mean seriously. Fuck you people. You clearly don’t get it, and if you don’t get it, get OUT. Get out of my fucking head space because you’re worse than useless and I was happier before you came in and dispensed your insipid advice.

If I am ever institutionalized, I will definitely be a “problematic” patient. Kind of like Will in Good Will Hunting. When I am angry, I lash out both intellectually and verbally, and I could easily see myself just destroying therapist after therapist.

“And we’re going to keep going through this until you bring me someone who isn’t a useless god damned idiot!”.

Yeah I can totally see that happening.

I even have to restrain myself so that I stay within the margins of what Doctor Costin can provide me. If I truly unloaded on him, it would kill him.

I mean, dude’s in his 80s.

So instead, I just stay in my tiny little cage.

It’s not like I am in a position to make any demands of people.

More after the break.

---

Borrowing health from the future

I feel like when you have an unhealthy lifestyle when you are young, you are essentially mortgaging your future to pay for your present.

It’s a raw deal but no young person is ever going to be convinced not to do what they want to do based on how they will feel in their forties and fifties.

That’s like forever from now. Who cares?

I sure as hell ate like a total fool a lot when I was younger. Junk food was my favorite side dish. Meals were always accompanied by chips, pretzels, Cheesies, or whatever.

And even after my diabetes diagnosis, I would still eat the sweet stuff sometimes. After all, diabetes didn’t hurt (yet) and I had no other physical symptoms, so how big of a deal could it really be?

Quite big, as it turns out.

And I would love to be able to warn younger fat dudes that they are heading for a brick wall at top speed and it’s up to them whether they crash into it or only nudge it, but I know it would not do any good.

The future isn’t real when you’re young. In general, human beings are not great at reacting to any threat that is too far in the future and/or too abstract.

By the time the operant conditioning of getting a sick, teeth-aching headache within minutes of eating the wrong thing kicked in, it was already too late.

And even today, I have to remain vigilant. I suffer the consequences of my earlier self-neglect, like the nerve damage to my fingertips or whatever the fuck is happening to the muscles in my legs and arms, and yet I still leer longingly at my fave chocolate bars when I see them on DoorDash and I know that if I slipped up, that slope would slide me directly into hell and a premature and very stupid death.

The only way to be safe from that slippery slope is to never set foot on it again. Discipline is repetition and the more often you say no to that self-destructive voice tempting you to doom yourself, the easier it gets.

I still miss all those lovely sweet treats from long ago. But I can’t say I am actually tempted by them. I know they would just make me sick.

And I have sugar free treats I can eat if I feel the need for something sweet.

So why bother sinning against my future health?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Didn’t make it to the orthopedic shoe place today because I’m sick.

Feels like someone’s sitting on my chest. My breathing is a little impaired too. I got the soreness in my ears and throat and of course, I feel like used food.

SoI guess my shoes will have to wait. We’re now going to be going there on January 6 of the new year, which, coincidentally, was my late father’s birthday.

I am moderately worried about my symptoms. It could be just another flareup of that peekaboo plague that seemingly comes and goes at random, but it could actually be something seriously viral instead.

The demon on my chest feeling and impaired breathing are new. That’s what has me concerned. And, of course, the persistent malaise.

Oy, the malaise.

I feel very dragged out and slow right now. Like I am lightly sedated, only less fun.

It’s bad enough that I am having some trouble stringing the words together. My concentration is shot. Staying focused on what I am doing takes constant effort because my mind just wants to drift off back into sleep.

Ah, sleep. Like death without the commitment. You don’t have to be yourself when you’re asleep. You don’t have to be anybody.

And that means a lot to me.

My self-esteem has improved a lot over the years but it’s still not great. The rage and turmoil I once vented on myself via self-loathing are still there, waiting for someplace to go, and my belief in my worth is hardly stable.

If only I could escape this cage of mine. But in order to get out, I would have to let the world in, and I am still deathly afraid of the overwhelm.

The only cure for being overwhelmed by increased stimulation is exposure. I would have to increase the level gradually, giving myself plenty of time to adjust.

Although part of me wants to just toss myself into the deep end so that I have to deal with the issue and overcome the overwhelm or perish.

But I might choose to perish. Because it’s easier.

Not better. Just easier.

Death is, after all, the ultimate escape. An escape from literally everything.

And it has its allure. But I don’t really want to die. That’s just the weariness and depression talking. What I want is to live and thrive and grow and maybe even finally become a marginally competent adult.

It could happen.

But my dreams of basic maturity will have to wait because I am way too tired to think about them right now. It’s all I can do to deal with my own challenge free life right now.

Unrelatedly, a friend (a very cute bat named Windchaser) gave me a code for a game called Spelunky and I have been giving it a try.

It’s a game where you explore randomized levels looking for treasure while trying not to die in myriad ways.

It’s a roguelike, which means that the goal is to see how far you can make it without dying because when you die, that’s it, game over, start at the beginning again.

There doesn’t seem to be a mechanism for permanent progress of any sort and that’s very problematic for me.

The game is beloved by many and makes a lot of top games of all time lists so I am willing to give it a try but so far, I’m not getting it.

Sure, the levels are randomly generated, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t essentially the same. It’s just the same basic building blocks rearranged and that does not make the game any more interesting to me.

And so far I have not seen any of the “brilliant” things that purportedly happen all the time in the game. Unless your idea of brilliance is, “wow, this time the floating platforms are BEFORE the spike pit!”.

Big freaking deal.

More after the break.

---

Another dang gme

Decided, on a whim (yay), to reinstall a game called Warframe.

It’s a multiplayer online game that has a fairly intricate science fiction setting where you control a kind of alien robot body in order to beam down to planets and do simple FPS missions like “protect this structure” or “get this thing” or “kill this dude”.

There’s PVP content too, but I don’t give a crap about that. I’m just not a competitive person. I don’t even like competition when I am fairly certain I’ll win.

I’d rather just avoid the whole ugly business altogether.

Before I got to play it again, I had a bunch of the usual security bullshit to go through. I even had to enable two factor authentication, even thought I didn’t wanna.

Luckily, it wasn’t like the Facebook 2FA where it is impossible to log in without a smartphone. I ain’t got one of those.

A dumbphone is enough for me.

Unsurprisingly, between the fact that I hadn’t played it since 2018^[1] so I didn’t remember much of it and the fact that a lot has changed in the game since way back when, I was utterly confused.

And as I feared, like in all these multiplayer games, there is no way to go back and do the basic tutorial again. So I’ve had to wing it.

Luckily, it’s not as complicated as it seems at first. Once I once more figured out how to start a mission (turns out, it was the Navigation menu). I beamed down to some jungle and started kicking butt.

I still dunno how long I’ll keep playing. I’m as impressed with the game as I was the first time I played it when I was but a 45 year old stripling, and according to Steam, back then I like it enough to play it for almost 120 hours, but I am six years older and slower and less able to keep up with high intensity fast paced combat, so I get the feeling it may not last another 120 hours on my HD.

Still, it felt good to stretch my mental muscles a bit by playing something “new”.

If Warframe doesn’t last, I will give No Man’s Sky another try. I haven’t played it in a bit over a year and there’s been a bunch of free expansions since then.

It’s kind of like making progress. At least I am trying new(ish) things!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to learn to be more impulsive but it’s rough.

My inherent Taurus caution is going to fight me the whole way.

Note that I am seeking to be more impulsive, not impulsive full stop. I will never be an impulsive person. That’s way too big a stretch.

No, I just want to open myself up to my impulses more so that I can sometimes act on them and thus reinforce and strengthen them.

Impulses, it turns out, need to be fed in order for them to stay healthy. And the only way to feed them is to act on them immediately instead of making them wait for the conscious mind to carefully weigh the options.

If you always do that, the impulses die and with them the main spark plug for your whole motivational engine. You lose your esprit, your life force, your vim and vigor.

I recognize the truth of all of this. You don’t have to be Freud to realize that a balance between id and ego must be maintained by the superego and that an imbalance in either direction is a recipe for neurosis.

But knowing something is true and truly believing it are radically different things. Knowing I need to relax and be more flexible and open to impulsive action does not, in itself, make it happen.

And trying to change my deeply ingrained habits of thought can often feel like I am trying to bend steel with my bare hands.

And I’m no Superman.

If I’m to become more impulsive, I’m going to have to alter my relationship with regret.

Take my recent impulsive acquisition of a game called A Plague’s Tale : Requiem.

I got it on impulse purely based on the text description of it and the fact that I knew the game had a lot of passionate fans and was a critical darling.

This was an objectively stupid way to spend nearly of my carefully saved up Salad money. I really should have dug deeper to find out what the game is actually like.

Because I hate the fucking thing.

I’ve played enough of it now to know that what I thought (hoped) was just a tutorial was, in fact, the game, and all I could expect was more of the same slow, plodding, walking simulator gameplay punctuated by brutally unforgiving action sequences based largely around stealth, at which I suck.

It says a lot about me that when my character finally gets her sling back and I could actually kill (or knock out) enemies, I suddenly started progressing WAY faster.

I am good at combat. But stealth eludes me. I’m just not patient enough to do things slowly and silently in the shadows, nor am I observant enough.

So now I am stuck with a game I can’t stand and that cost like six months’ worth of Salad earnings and I can’t help but deeply regret my impulsivity.

Presumably, people who are actually impulsive don’t regret things for very long. They shrug, chalk it up to experience, and just keep going without giving it another thought.

And maybe they are a little wiser in the future, and maybe not. But I envy their ability to maintain their forward momentum regardless.

Me, I know I will be obsessing over this errant purchase for days on end, berating myself and hating myself and wishing I could go back and choose better this time.

Futile, I know. The past is fixed. You can’t change it. Once it happens, it happened.

Maybe if I had more money, I could afford to be more impulsive.

But for now, I just have regret.

More after the break.

---

What’s going on with me

Well let’s see.

Did Wound Care this afternoon. Yes, you read that right, the AFTERNOON. The appointment was at 2:30 pm, which would have been impossible to make if Joe was working but as is, it made for a nice change of pace.

At Wound Care, the nurse and I discovered that the wound on my right foot is actually healing up nicely and (fingers crossed) might actually be on its way out.

That would be nice.

The foot itself is looking pink and healthy too. Presumably the circulation in that foot has improved. Before it was looking kind of clammy and… ashen.

But now, IT LIVES!

This was also a callous paring day. Linda, the Wound Care Clinician, visited me once again to “debride” my wounds and clear things up in general.

So she abraded the callous buildup away with her neat little “sharp ball on a stick” tool. This means that right now I have a slight burning sensation in the soles of my feet where the debridement was done because that’s what it feels like when those areas start to heal and, presumably, starts rebuilding the dang callous.

It’s a cycle.

Tomorrow, Julian and I must make a pilgrimage back to that orthotics place in Vancouver for… a reason.

Honestly, it’s been so long since the previous appointment, where they took casts of my feet, that I have no idea what this second appointment is for.

Hopefully they will just hand me the new shoes. But I am not sure. I think the nice British lady who did the casting said something about a follow up appointment. But she also said she thought I’d have my shoes before Xmas. So I dunno.

So it will be a journey into mystery!

I am not looking forward to it. I had completely forgotten about the appointment until I happened to check my email today and there was a reminder there.

And thank God for that because otherwise we would not have shown up and I would have another “absence due to absence of mind” on my record.

I can be such an airhead! I am living proof that you can be brilliant and clueless at the same time. I wish I was the sort of person who had followers or an assistant so they could keep me on track and organized.

That way I could concentrate on thinking the big thoughts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just had a small urinary oopsie.

I didn’t think I needed to pee that bad, but apparently I was wrong. Because on the way back to my room from the kitchen, the contents of my bladder sloshed against what I guess you’d call the urinary sphincter, and a little leaked out.

That’s not good. That’s not good at ALL.

Add that to the list of things I really should take to Doctor Chao. But that’s unlikely to happen soon because it takes more than a week just to get a phone appointment with him, and I find that quite discouraging.

If I have an issue, what are the odds it will still be there a week from now? Given how frail and variable my health has become, the odds aren’t good.

Even pharmacists are now saying, “You should probably just go to Urgent Care. ”

I still feel weak and I am still worried that the cause might be physical. It’s occurred to me that I have been sick for so long that I no longer have any solid frame of reference for what I should and should not be feeling in my body.

I know I have felt weak and low for a long time and that it really seems like my body starts to gear up to get going then something happens and all the energy flows out of the system again, like a car when the engine won’t turn over.

For all these years I have attributed that to my ruptured psyche, but it’s entirely possible that the problem is, in fact, my wounded heart.

I mean, how would I know?

I am trying to remember the last time my heart got looked at in a medical sense. I am pretty sure it was at least two years ago. Maybe more.

Couldn’t hurt to ring the bell on that sometime soon. What the heck.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to find out that it’s been a physical issue all this time and that an operation or procedure can fix it?

It would do wonders for my deep feelings of guilt and shame about having not lived a grownup life at all despite being 51.

See, it wasn’t a moral failing. I don’t lack character and grit.

I just had a bum ticker.

It’s still a longshot but it’s something worth considering, at least.

And yeah, I know I’m not supposed to feel utterly terrible about how my life has turned out and I am especially not supposed to feel like a complete and utter failure.

What I should be doing is forgiving myself and accepting that I am who I am and I am where I am in life and the best I can do is make the best of the time I have left on this mortal plane and just try to relax and enjoy myself.

Blah blah blah. Knowing what I am supposed to be feeling doesn’t make it happen, it just makes me acutely aware of something else about me that is broken and wrong.

And I’m not supposed to be feeling that either.

But I do. I feel it all. The guilt and shame are crippling. I cringe inwardly at the thought of being in any social situation where I have to admit to completely failing at life.

Nope, no job stories. I have no idea what it’s like to work for a living. Sorry, can’t relate.

No relationship stories either. No idea what it’s like to be in one of those either.

I’ve just lived the same pathetic existence in one place or another (doesn’t really matter where) for the last 30 years or so.

And yet, to the outside world, I don’t seem sick. I never let it show. If it wasn’t for this blessed blog of mine, the world would have no idea anything was wrong with me.

I can’t even come close to truly baring all even with my therapist.

Around other people, my smooth persona is in place and I seem just fine and dandy.

When I grew up, it was definitely not okay to not be okay.

Because when there’s nobody to catch you, you better not fall.

More after the break.

---

The other “shoe”

Well it start with the same letters, anyhow.

Having peed myself earlier, I had to complete the set and shit the bed.

The usual circumstances : I was asleep, was woken up by the need to poop. Or rather, by the horrible realization that I had um…. already started.

Then I was stuck trying to get to the bathroom without squeezing the toothpaste tube too much, so to speak.

A futile endeavour, to be sure, but I had to try.

I got my dirty ass into the bathroom and onto the throne and inspected the damage. Turns out I had done a much better job with the toothpaste tube than I had thought. The amount of substance in my pants was fairly small.

I didn’t think I needed to “go” when I lay down to nap. The lesson to never ignore that need in favour of sleep in order to prevent this very thing has finally sunk in.

But who knows, I might have ignored the warning signs. That would be better than the other possibility, that my condition has gotten even worse and there is now nothing I can do to keep from needing Depends when I sleep.

God, I hope that’s not it.

Oh, and I got my second needle to the eye from the folks at West Coast Retina Consultants this morning. This time it was the right eye.

I brought a book because last time we were there, last Tuesday, we were there for at least an hour and a half.

But today it took less than half an hour. I guess they didn’t feel the need to do all the forms of testing they did the first time.

How much could my eyes have changed in six days?

So the shot hurt the same but the wait? I barely felt it at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.