In other words, right where I am sitting.

Most of the time, this bedroom of mine is well heated. But when it’s very windy outside, the wind blowing past the big window my computer desk sits in front of (love that natural light!) sucks the heat right out of the room and makes me feel like I am living in a fridge.

So I was really fucking cold this morning.

The only thing to do in that situation is to turn the heat all the way up in my room and start a sort of temperature war between the wind and the furnace, hoping that somewhere in the middle I can feel comfy.

And if that doesn’t work, it’s back to bed to burrow under the covers.

Really makes me wish I had my father’s old caulking gun and thermal tape. I would fix that big window up but good.

Well so much for the light bitching. Now for the scary stuff.

See, I have had two incidents in the last 24 hours that have me kinda freaked out. It’s a good thing that I have an appointment with Doctor Chao tomorrow so I can talk t him about them and he can maybe help me figure out WTF is going on.

The first incident was last night. I got out of bed after a nap and stood up, and felt a series of hard clicks from various parts of the right side of my skeleton.

And not the usual parts, like elbows, fingers, and knees. Deep parts that you normally never even think about because they are just there.

And with these clicks came pain. Serious fucking pain. Hard, electric pain that shot down my right side from just above my right elbow to just above my right knee.

At the same time, my lower back hurt like motherfucker too. A deep ache that gave me that oh so lovely “creaky” feeling in my lumbar region/

The pain was so intense that I had to sit down heavily in my computer chair to recuperate. It took around ten minutes for the pain, which now had turned into a harsh burning sensation, to die down enough for me to get back up and continue my evening.

That’s not good.

Then, this morning, when I got out of bed, I had an attack of…. something.

I was breathing heavily, and I kept yawning really hard. My head throbbed with pain and when I went for my morning pee, that hurt too, right in that area of the bottom of my bladder that has caused me problems before.

The symptoms suggest some kind of oxygen issue. The yawning is especially indicative. Luckily, once I sat down at the computer post-pee, I was able to get my breathing under control with my breathing exercises and I have been okay since.

But that was seriously scary. I was thinking I was going to have to call 911 and I was worried I would not have the breath to tell them what was wrong.

Looking back, I am pretty sure that would not have been a problem. But given how easily I panic when nothing is going wrong, you can well imagine what kind of emotional state I was in, especially after last night’s incident.

After these two attacks, I possibly should have headed to the ER. But they both passed and I am going to see Doc Chao tomorrow anyhow,

The two attacks are probably unrelated, but could be the sign of something seriously degenerative going on.

I hate my stupid fucking life.

More after the break.

---

Meanwhile, in other people’s lives

Joe went in for his second round of chemo today.

I have no idea how bad chemo is these days. I know that it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be. How could it be?

The approach used to be basically, “we’re going to poison you almost to death in the hopes it will kill more of the cancer than it does you.”.

Ditto for radiation therapy.

But I can only imagine that it’s still pretty bad. Luckily, he has Julian there by his side to help him through it. And I am sure someone from his family will visit too.

That’s what normal families do, after all.

Not mine. I’ve recently realized that one of the basic settings of my family was the assumption that we would all do our own thing and have our own lives and not make a lot of demands on one another’s autonomy.

Now it would be facile and glib to just blame that on having self-absorbed Boomer parents who didn’t really give us much choice in whether we wanted to raise ourselves.

And that’s definitely a big part of it, especially for me, the isolated and unwanted “surprise” child who came along when my parents were already getting to be too old to keep up with the three they already had.

Well, mean, my mom was 30 when she had me. So not that old. But still.

They could not divest themselves of all responsibility for raising me fast enough. So like a lot of Gen-X kids, I became “self-reliant”.

But there is more to my toxic and inhospitable family dynamic than mere Boomer neglect. I think that, despite her warmth, there was a deep yet subtle chill that came from my mother that we all felt.

Well, not so subtle for me,. eventually.

And of course, our always-simmering rage pot of a father didn’t exactly help us bond together as a family unit either.

But even at the best times, we were not that “tightly knit” a family. Sure, we did things together sometimes when I was younger, like trips to the beach or to Rainbow Valley or whatnot, but for the most part, we all did our own thing.

And the trips stopped too. Part of the parental divestment movement. Both parents did less and less and less for us as time wore on.

I’m surprised they still let us in the house.

Well, me, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

See above. I am still pretty sleepy and have a tendency to drift off at odd moments

Basically, in order to stay awake and focused, I have to be doing something fairly active pretty much all the time.

Active by my standards, anyhow. You know… playing a video game or blogging or chatting with Julian or whatnot.

Even watching a YouTube video is not enough. I was watching some episodes of the odd but excellent series “Noodle and Bun”, about a throw pillow shaped cat (Noodle) and his lumpy dog friend (Bun) and their wild, weird adventures, and I kept falling asleep at odd moments.

Here’s a random example of their oeuvre :

I found the weird, wobbly style where everyone seems to be made of hardened gelatin off-putting at first, but once I got used to it, I began to really enjoy the full tilt wacky enthusiasm of the series.

I wish the creators all the success in the world. They deserve it.

Anyhow, I keep drifting off when I am not engaged in things, and like I keep saying, this is beginning to worry me.

I wish I could just sleep eight hours at night like a normal person. But I am too disturbed for that. I have that deep hyper-vigilance that never sleeps because you can’t sleep if you don’t feel safe and I never feel safe. Not entirely.

To my deep mind, danger is always lurking, and the moment you let your guard down (say, to sleep), that’s when it will GET you.

That’s one reason I can’t sleep for more than an hour and a half during the day.

The other is, of course, my overactive bladder. In order to be healthy, I have to move a hell of a lot of water through my body more or less all the time, and that means an awful lot of peeing, and that means waking up to pee way too often.

And I don’t know what I can do about that, apart from getting fitted with a catheter so I don’t have to wake up to pee.

Not eager to go there just yet.

I know that I can’t cut back on my intake of fluids. Not at the rate my body goes through them. I apparently need to manufacture a LOT of urine to carry the blood sugar back out of the body via the controlled ketosis of Jardiance.

God, that’s a stupid name for a drug.,

Maybe if I cut back on the carbs, my body won’t need to make so much pee.

But I have to be really careful about that because I don’t want to end up unhealthy because of too few carbs, like I was for years.

Or maybe I just need to master the art of taking a leak without having to wake all the way up and then have to wear myself down again.

I dunno if that’s possible, though. Part of this whole hyper-vigilance kick is that I feel like I need to be fully awake and aware and (sigh) “in control” in order to be “safe”.

This, at least for now, precludes any muzzy-headed barely awake urination missions. I can’t function like that. If I find myself in such a state, I will immediately freak out and that will bootstrap me into full consciousness in a jiffy.

That’s part of why I was never that much of a drinker. Drinking makes you stupid. And some part of me insists that I need to have my wits about me at all times.

Even when I am asleep. God damn it.

More after the break.

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Eat your vegetables

No really. Please do.

It pains me deeply to think that there are millions, probably even billions of grown adults, with jobs and cars and everything, who are still refusing to eat their vegetables.

And mark my words, they are suffering because of it.

They eat nothing but crappy processed high-reward low-nutrition “junk” food and their bodies are breaking down and malfunctioning because of it.

Especially once they reach middle age.

And all because at some point in their early childhood, there was a battle of wills between themselves and a parent who insisted on them eating their vegetables.

A battle they lost. They had to eat them. But thus was born a burning hatred for all vegetables that cost more in terms of their long term nutrition than could have possibly been gained in the parents’ short term victory.

Patient readers know that I was not raised that way. Never in my entire childhood was I forced to eat anything. My mother did not believe in it.

As a result, I have no food aversions of that sort. I love vegetables, especially when they are fresh. Carrots, onions, corn, broccoli, celery, cucumber, chives… the list goes on and on.

And let me be clear : these things taste good. I am not holding my nose and forcing them down. I am eating them both because they taste good and they make me feel good. They make my mouth AND my body happy.

Do they taste as good as mint chocolate chip ice cream? No, they don’t. But they still tastes pretty darn good, with the bonus of making you feel good in the long run, too.

That’s what it’s all about, folks. Feeling good. Eating stuff that tastes good AND makes you feel good instead of stuff that tastes better but leaves you feeling worse.

And trust me, you will feel bad for much longer than the junk food will taste good.

I mean, do the math.

Which is another thing that bugs me : supposed adults refusing to do the basic arithmetic that we all learned in elementary school even when they is money on the line and it could make the difference between, say, driving a nice new car and driving some piece of shit tin can on wheels

And all because they were forced to do math in school and they “hated” it.

Well hating math does not make the kind of truths it represents go away. You will still be ruled by numbers and values for your entire life and you can either take control of that via, I repeat, elementary school math, or be a chump and a sucker who gets ripped off by sharks and bastards who will use your lack of math against you.

It’s really that simple, folks. If you graduated from elementary school, you know enough math to handle your own finances

And eat your god damned vegetables too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And it’s beginning to worry me.

For over a week now, I have spent a majority of my day in the general vicinity of the edge of sleep. I find myself having micro-naps when I didn’t even know I was sleepy.

And it seems to be lasting longer and longer every day.

Like, today I went to Wound Care at 3 pm, and I was falling asleep while the nurse was working on my feet.

At 3 pm, for crying out loud!

Side note : One thing that sucks about having the appointment at 3 pm was that I take my evening dose of Gabapentin at 8 pm or so, so by 3 pm I am almost halfway between doses, and therefore, my pain was a lot worse than it usually is when I do this whole Wound Care thing in the morning.

Also, by the time we got home, it was 3:40 pm or thereabouts, and that meant that at 4 pm, when I usually go make lunch, my muscles were still way too sore for me to even think about a trip to the kitchen and back.

So here I am, surviving on trail mix (good) and No Name All Dressed chips (not good).

In general, I have been buying too much junk food lately. Chips are especially bad because they digest so quickly and therefore hit my bloodstream pretty hard.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, sleep.

It really has me worried because I am way too young and pretty to be one of those old people who drifts off to sleep super easily.

And I especially don’t want it coming up in socially awkward situations. Like if I am talking to someone, or the nurse is doing my Wound Care.

I would be very embarrassed if I fell asleep in those kind of situations.

My God, am I glad I am not a university student at this time. There is no way I could stay awake during most lectures when I am like this.

And not only would falling asleep be an insult to the professor, I would fall behind the other students, and I HATE HATE HATE the idea of falling behind.

That must be somehow related to being the youngest of four kids and spending my formative years shouting, “Wait up! I’m coming! Don’t leave without me!”

Anyhow, yeah, so I keep drifting off to sleep at weird moments. I am tempted to call it narcolepsy but that’s a serious medical condition that has to do with a part of the brain not doing its job at all, and I don’t think the problem is that bad.

At least not yet.

The problem seems to clear up once the sun goes down. So maybe the real issue is that I have finally meta-morphed into a true day-sleeping creature of the night.

I hope I’m not turning into a vampire. Hunting victims seems like so much work. Imagine having to hunt down human prey, wait until they are alone and isolated, then stalk them and sink your fangs into their neck so you can drain their life essence as they futilely struggle against your vampire strength. then suddenly stop as the sweet embrace of death silences their beating heart forever, EVERY TIME you wanted to eat.

And in some versions, you have to do that shit EVERY NIGHT.

More seriously, if this daytime sleepiness continues, I am going to have to bring it up with Doctor Chao before it gets totally out of hand.

I wish I could just wake up, take a leak, then go directly back to sleep like a normal person, but I can’t. I have to get out of bed and do something on the computer while my body and my bed cool down from my fevered sleep

Holy shit, I just fell asleep for a few seconds while writing about my sleepiness

This is nuts.

More after the break.

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Maybe it’s transitory

Of course, this big nap attack business could be just a phase I am going through.

Something I have to endure on the long and rocky road to recovery

I’ve had the idea that my mind has somehow become more permeable to sleep flash through my brain a number of times when pondering this subject.

Also, somewhat less mystically, the notion that as I awaken and arouse the sleeping giant of my full personality, I become more willing to cede some of my precious “self-control” to sleepiness.

For most of my life, I have reflexively fought sleepiness like a cranky toddler. Like becoming sleepy at the right time was some sort of violation of my autonomy because I decide when to go to sleep, dammit.

Even I can see how batpoop insane that is.

And I think maybe a lot of my progress towards sanity is going to involve my giving up the illusion of control in favor of a flexible and intelligent attitude that cedes control where it is a wasted effort and concentrates more on controlling myself to do the big things that actually matter.

It’s a matter of prioritization. A lot of things are best left to essentially run themselves, without the messy meddling of the conscious mind.

And I think as I relax my rigidity, I will regain some of my self and who I truly am as I reclaim the energy that was being wasted on self-opposition.

All these years later, I am still trying to become one with myself. I first read about that concept – of striving to become united in thought and action and emotion so that you can function as a single being without inner conflict – when I was a teenager.

It still sounds like a great idea to me.

But now I know that this is going to involve a lot of internal surrender. “Arguments” that have been happening within me for decades will have to be resolved in whatever manner yields the most peace and harmony, regardless of who is “right”.

As always, the hardest part of recovery is changing yourself.

Luckily, I am prepared to do it.

Open the hood and hand me a wrench. And a blowtorch.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, I finally went and beat Dragon Age : Inquisition yesterday.

Thank goodness “taming” (beating up) my dragon didn’t crash it the second time. It truly was just a problem of having been playing the game for too long.

I will try to remember to be careful about how long I keep my computer humming from now on. Maybe quit the game to give my poor compu-box a break now and then.

I wonder if it’s a head buildup thing?

The ending of the game was unoriginal but satisfying. Fought the “big bad” of the game, a demonic sorcerer called Corypheus, and killed his evil ass, or at least sent him off to some other dimension.

And I got to do the thing I love in the happy endings of video games, namely talk to all my friends in the game one last time and have one last warm exchange of mutual appreciation and celebration of our overwhelming awesomeness before it’s time for the music to swell and the credits to roll.

Bonus : there’s an important character that is only in one pivotal scene near the end of the game, and I heard her voice and said, “Oh, it’s that voice actress who sounds like Kate Mulgrew. I love her work. ”

See, I’ve been fooled a number of times by people who sound like Kate “Captain Janeway” Mulgrew and so I have learned not to get my hopes up.

But then the credits roll, and it really WAS Kate Mulgrew!

I marked like a bitch.

And it was only after the whole credits went by PLUS a post-credits scene with dazzling implications and reveals played that I suddenly remember that there’s a whole post-victory campaign called Trespasser for me to play now.

And I have mixed feelings about that. It’s a great game and I have grown quite attached to my character and his band of heroes and so spending more time with them all is a good thing indeed.

But on the other hand, I had mentally closed the book on the game and was looking forward to moving on to my next game, a game with the odd title Dragon’s Dogma.

That’s the game I started playing today, and it wasn’t till this truly impressive opening animation began to play…

…that I realized I’d played the damned thing before and had not liked it.

And I must have returned it, because I had to re-buy it, and then I completely forgot about the game and it’s stupid name until yesterday.

That said. I am going to try to give it another shot. But it already has strikes against it, like the fact that there’s no Quicksave and Quickload buttons and the button setup is clearly made for controllers not keyboards because it’s nearly impossible for me to hold down ALT or CTRL while also using WSAD to move my character around.

Oh well. I have also reinstalled Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which contains the first three games in the series, and that could keep me busy for a good long while because it’s been so long since I played the whole series straight through that they are practically new games to me now.

Plus, if I really need something REALLY new (to me), I have accumulated around $4.50 in profits from Salad and can use that to buy any number of games for them.

So I am not really worried about the fact that Dragon’s Dogma might turn out to be a dud. The writing seems to be pretty good and that whole scene with the dragon eating your heart is quite awesome, but that might not be enough to get me past the clunky interface and weird combat system.

And that’s today’s bulletin from what I have instead of having a life.

More after the break.

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Then which one are you?

There was a joke going around a while back that goes like this :

Got into a fender bender with what turned out to be a midget. He got out of his car, looking really angry, and said, “I’m not happy… ”

To which I interjected, then which one are you?

Well right now I, like the fellow in the joke, am Grumpy.

And this is a good thing in the long run. I have been talking lately about how the emotion most likely to get me past my anti-action bias and into actually doing things is anger and frustration, and I am certainly feeling that tonight.

i am so fucking sick and tired of living in a pigsty. My room needs so much damned cleaning and I am finally getting pissed off enough to actually do something about it.

Eventually. Some day. Real soon now.

Sadly, I am still on my journey to overcome all that dead weight inertia and frozen paralysis that still resides in my over-encumbered soul.

I’m still waking myself up. Thawing myself out. Resurrecting myself. And that is not something I can speed up. It will happen in its own sweet time.

That said, it does seem to be speeding up lately, possibly due to my both tapping in to that frustration and making peace with the fact that in order to get out of this decades long funk, I am going to have a much less peaceful and orderly inner life for a while.

And that means my outer life will probably be all higgledy-piggledy too.

So I apologize in advance if I become temporarily hard to deal with. I will do what I can to keep my temper tamped down, but what I am overcoming is, in part, a tendency to value inner peace over everything else, including happiness, and overcoming that is bound to cause some, um, turbulence.

Basically I am giving birth to my adult self, and birth is always messy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Of my time playing Dragon Age : Inquisition, that is.

I finally reached the point where I had done all the dicking around doing subquests and side missions I could reasonably do and it was time to advance the main plot.

I hadn’t done everything there was to do in the game. Didn’t get all the shards, didn’t close all the rifts, didn’t figure out a few quests that puzzled me, etc.

But I did all that I truly cared to do. Past a certain point even a dedicated dilly-dallying specialist like myself begins to get the itch to move on and finish the game.

So around noon today, I pulled the trigger and initiated the final section of the game.

And it was war. The final act in these games is always war. I guess that it’s such an easy dramatic conclusion to a medieval fantasy storyline that game devs just can’t resist. After all, the stakes have been rising throughout the game.

And what is higher stakes than war?

That said, I hate war in video games. War is chaotic and messy and there is too much going on for my liking, and I prefer the simplicity of it being just me and my crew versus a bunch of evil things.

That said, the game kept it fairly simple. Just a lot of one on one battles between my side’s forces and the bad guy’s.

I join in and we kill the crap out of them. Easy.

And I mean we REALLY kill the crap out of them, because the battles were all super easy due to the fact that I had done so much adventuring beforehand.

Like, the recommended character level for the end part was between 16 and 19, and me and my peeps are like level 26.

And of course, as is fitting, the end game is long and elaborate. Took me around three hours to get through most of it.

Yeah, I said “most of it”, because the game goddamned crashed when I had just “tamed” the dragon I am to ride into the final fight.

And by “tame”, I of course mean “beat the shit out of”.

Now there’s a lesson for the kids. Remember, boys and girls, you can always use violence to make an animal love you.

Hell, it works in Pokémon. And the best part is you can then make them fight each other for your own glory and amusement!

It’s like every evil kid’s dream. You even get to still be the good guys!

Now I am really, really, hoping that the only reason the game crashed was that I had been playing for three hours and my graphics card got overheated.

If that’s the case, when I go back and try again, it should work fine.

But if it crashes again, I may have to turn the graphics settings down in order to get the frigging thing to work.

Which would be a bit sad. I have everything on maximum right now and I love it. Everything in the game looks fantastic.

And that’s for a game that is ten years old. Which tells me that graphics really got as good as they need to be at least ten years ago.

I literally cannot imagine them looking better.

So that’s where things sit right now. When I resume, so will the “taming” of the dragon, and hopefully, this time it won’t frigging crash.

And that’s what is going on in that thing I have instead of having an actual life.

I know it’s an addiction and it’s ruining my life, but… I need it.

But I guess that’s how addiction works, isn’t it?

More after the break.

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About that addiction

I’ve talked about this subject in this blog before so I will try to avoid repeating myself too much here tonight, but it’s an important subject that I feel the need to address.

I am hopelessly addicted to video games. To the point where they are simply the default thing I do when I am not doing anything else.

Basically, if I am awake, alone, and not blogging, I am playing a video game. The only thing that changes is whether I am playing them on my tablet (aka My Black Mirror) or my PC (aka Mister Computer or “the big computer”).

And I can’t imagine giving them up. Hell, it’s hard for me to even imagine going without them for an hour or two in order to do productive things, like look for freelance work.

That’s how utterly dependent I am on the safety blanket of gaming. With gaming always within easy reach, I never have to face the massive existential void of figuring out what the hell to do with myself.

That is a nontrivial problem when you are disabled. You have all those hours to fill and not nearly enough things to fill them.

And a functionally infinite number of possible things to do. And that’s not good for someone like me with serious decision issues.

Option overload comes far, far too easily for me. That is what happens when you are so alienated from your own emotional core that you don’t have desires to guide you and push you towards this or that possibility.

Then all you are left with is your overgrown intellect, and it fails spectacularly at the task because there are far, far, far too many variables in that equation for anyone to solve.

So you live life on autopilot. You keep doing the things you’ve been doing. Not because that’s a good or a bad idea or the “right” thing to do, but because without emotion or intellect to guide our actions we simply keep repeating our default program.

I don’t know what I want. I don’t know if I want. I know that as a live sentient being I must have drives and desires like every other animal, but I am so out of touch with myself that I have no idea what they are.

So what can I do?

No seriously, I’m asking. Tell me. What can I do?

Actually, don’t bother. No matter what you say, I will simply come up with a nigh infinite number of reasons I can’t do it.

Because deep down, fundamentally, I am still in the grips of the bad part of my brain and it sees motivation as a threat and all change as bad and until I get over that, it doesn’t matter what anyone suggests to me.

I will shoot it down somehow.

I just can’t help myself. Yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow

Especially ones involving my resources.

So yesterday, I ordered groceries. And, as usual, they fucked it up.

Not only did they give me the wrong god damned cookies again (I ordered sugar free, got sugary version instead), I didn’t get my usual 1 KG package of No Name™ Original Trail Mix nor did I get the big box of frozen chicken strips I ordered.

The chicken strips I can do without because I also got a box of Jamaican patties and those will serve as entrees for my suppers for now.

But the trail mix thing really pisses me off because that’s a cornerstone of my diet right there, sad as that may be. Luckily I also ordered a 600 gram bag of a different trail mix (the 1 kg No Name one never quite lasts a week) and that DID arrive, so I am not without my Fruvous kibble just yet.

But there is no way that 600 gram bag will last a whole week.

Now I am not blaming my DoorDash dude for things being out of stock at Real Canadian Superstore, although a paranoid little voice in my head makes me wonder if they REALLY looked or whether, in order to save time, they just skip some things.

Don’t look at me like that. They are paid per delivery. They have ever incentive to cut corners in order to do more deliveries per hour, and I just have to take their word that it was out of stock?

I truly can’t stop myself from thinking like that

But anyhow, paranoia aside, I don’t have my damned trail mix. And in the longer term, I am getting really tired of not getting what I god damned ordered.

It’s injurious to my ability to relax like I am supposed to. I loathe surprises in general and surprise food shortages are more or less guaranteed to really throw me off and I am beginning to seriously wonder if I need to go back to asking Julian to get my groceries for me because I know he will bring me what I asked for, even if he has to try a few different stores to find it.

I’m not gonna get that from DoorDash.

And speaking of unwelcome financial surprises, I just checked the balance remaining on my card and found out that DoorDash charged me the full $70 that the groceries I ordered would have costs if everything had shown up.

But everything did NOT show up. So the charge should have been a lot less.

Like, about $30 less.

God damn it, I don’t need this shit. Why must the universe fuck with me?

Then today, Julian was saying that I need to pay more than the $600 I have been paying in rent since forever to cover the household expenses.

But Joe and I have an agreement. I pay him $600 a month and that covers everything. Rent, food, cable, utilities, and so on.

if Julian wants to change that agreement, he needs to take it up with Joe. Joe is, effectively, my landlord.

And as far as I know, Joe’s paycheck is still being deposited in his bank account regularly, despite him being sick with cancer and hence not working, and I have a feeling he’s been spending remarkably little of it, poor guy, so that is where the money for groceries et al should be coming from.

It is, after all, Joe’s money, not Julian’s. If Joe wants to continue to charge me only $600 a month for everything, that’s his business.

Julian is only part of the process as an administrator. and as such, he is there to do what Joe wants him to do.

And he only wants to charge me $600 a month.

Sorry I had to bitch about this here, Julian, where you will undoubtedly read it, but our conversation this afternoon really upset me and I needed to vent.

Anyhow, here’s two minks in a sink.

More after the break.

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The real me

That’s an incredibly difficult concept for me.

Because something in me refuses to say any of me is “fake” or “unreal”. It’s all me. I refuse to cut off parts of myself just to fit under a label.

Fuck that. Make the label bigger instead. Or just leave me the hell alone.

Besides, everything I do, I do as an expression of myself. Self-expression is my primary mode of existence, after all, and therefore everything I do falls under that banner.

Perhaps that is why I am so feisty about not being labeled or defined. Definitions, by their nature, defy individuality and reduce people to easily digestible categories.

Well fuck THAT. My brand of self-expression does not allow for the expression of anything other than my true authentic self. And that self does not bend, bow, or break for any god damned archetype.

I hate to break this to you, folks, but I’m real.

Hi. My name is Mike. Pleased to meet you.

This is all very Gen X of me, of course. As a generation, we sullen, withdrawn, insular, somewhat unpredictable, and we refuse to be defined.

As individuals, of course, we’re whatever.

But labels aside, like I was telling Doctor Costin last Therapy Thursday, I find it nearly impossible to conceive of a single identity for myself.

What conception of self could possibly encompass all my many modes, moods, and complexities? I can tell you about all my many different facets, some of which seem to contradict one another (I’m passionately empathic yet I am also coldly logical and calculation, for instance), and I can say with total assurance that I know that I am not any of my facets, I am the gem on which they live.

But I have no idea what kind of gem that is.

And lately, I have come to suspect that the “real me” lives inside that gem, and uses the facets as filters through which to glimpse reality while “I” stay safe and warm in my gemstone home locked away from the world.

And it could be that if I want to get well, I will have to leave that bedazzling bunker and some out into the world as my sad little self.

And that feels like it would kill me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I’m such a nice fellow. It just isn’t fair.

Today’s evidence of the malign nature of the cosmos vis-à-vis yours truly happened today when I went to Wound Care.

I felt perfectly fine and was looking to my twice a week pampering (sorta kinda) but when I went to sit down on the exam table (or whatever you call it), I slipped right off it and on to my knees.

I’m lucky the bed thingy was set to be low to the ground or I might have been seriously hurt. As it is, all that happened is that my knees are mildly sore and my ability to relax and trust the universe took yet another hit.

You know, I keep telling myself to relax and not take life so seriously, but things like this come out of nowhere and make that very difficult.

i suppose if I were as happy go lucky as I aspire to me, that kind of thing would just bonce off me impenetrable bubble of self-righting optimism.

I’d just say, “Huh. That was weird. ” and then go on with my life without ever thinking about it again.

And part of me admires and envies people with that kind of resilience. My Moon in Sagittarius thinks that’s the best way to be, hands down.

But I am not a Sagittarius, I’m a Taurus with Sagittarius tendencies, and so this kind of life just spanking me out of nowhere upsets me.

It’s just not fair. There was no way I could have seen that coming.

How could I? I still have no idea what the hell happened.

I know I wasn’t feeling dizzy at the time. So it wasn’t that. That turns the spotlight to something weird happening with the muscles in my butt that made them not work right to grip the surface of the bed, or whatever it is they do to keep this from happening most of the time.

I know I can’t blame the bed because I sat on it just fine after that.

So I dunno. At least this happened when I was in a room full of nurses and so they were right on top of it, checking my blood pressure with the inflate-o-cuff thing to see if there was an answer there.

There was not. Blood oxygen was fine too.

And for me, that’s just bloody typical, innit? I swear to God, one day I am going to be in the ER covered in flames and bleeding out of both eyeballs and the doctor will be saying, “Well, your tests all turned out normal, so we think you’re faking it. ”

That image occurred to me as I sat there with the nurse working on my foot wounds as I wondered what the fuck happened to me.

Even when I’m upset, I’m hilarious. Bitterly hilarious.

Anyhow, I guess things are okay now. I haven’t felt woozy or found myself suddenly and inexplicitly lying on the floor or anything.

That means that theoretically it could all happen again at any moment. After all, if I don’t know what happened or why, I can’t take steps to prevent it, can I?

But I am in deep dish doodoo if suddenly I can’t even sit safely.

Sitting is half of what I do all day! Sit in front of this computer!

The other half is lying in bed, and I would hate for that to be my only option. I know from my hospital stays that staying in bed all the time sucks.

Next time I am in there, I am going to come up with reasons to get up and out of bed and maybe sit in a chair for a while unless I am specifically instructed not to.

You have no idea how good it can feel just to sit.

More after the break.

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Nothing on my mind

But I’ve never let that stop me before.

I think the reason I have nothing in particular on my mind right now is that some very deep mental healing processes are taking up a hell of a lot of my brain’s CPU cycles, leaving very little left over for stray thoughts or random pondering.

Fine by me. I can wait. My mental overflow generally goes to waste anyhow as it produces very little except rambling verbal expectorations, so I am perfectly content to just sit on the sidelines while my deeper self takes care of business.

I have pondered where exactly my genius comes some, and I think it may be exactly that kind of overflow. I spent a lot of my childhood bored out of my proverbial gourd sitting in classrooms where I was not even allowed to read to entertain myself.

I guess to a (bad) teacher, me finishing the work in moments then curling up with a good book looks a tad disrespectful.

Well then challenge me, bitch.

Anyhow, trapped as I was, the only thing I could really do is think about things. And I was already inclined to live in the world between my ears due to that being where I took refuge when I was being raped. The massive boredom only caused that to become deeper and more complex as my mind, bereft of fresh input, instead worked on connecting and correlating everything that was already in there.

Thus, a deep understanding of how things work emerged. From an early age, I had to learn not to say, “Isn’t it obvious?” because odds are, it was not obvious to anyone else.

And thus the question is maddeningly patronizing.

Fast forward to today and my mind is still running that same old program. Said program has endowed me with the kind of rich, deep, and unique insights and ideas that, with a little luck, could have me declared a visionary.

But that ol’ program makes me smart but not happy. Happiness is well outside its wheelhouse. If I am going to seek my own happiness – and I am – I am going to have to learn to think with my emotions as well.

Which just sounds wrong in my head. Stupid Western dualism.

But I’m doing it anyway, god damn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Come to think of it, I never did tell Doctor Costin about being depressed this week.

Oh well, can’t think of everything. It was not that big a deal anyhow, especially not compared to the lows of the previous week.

I guess I could have told him about being really sleepy, too. Technically, that might be therapeutically relevant, as increases (or decreases) in sleep can be a sign of mental illness getting worse.

Meh. Whatever. I’m getting better, not worse. I am positive about that.

Getting better might involve feeling worse from time to time, granted. But that doesn’t bother me any more.

I can feel things waking up and coming online deep inside my mind, where my scare little animal lives. Spring is coming to my little world just like it’s coming to the big world outside my window, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

And I know that’s going to fucking hurt, too. Like I said to Doc Costin today, it’s like waking up your hand after it falls asleep.

You know it’s going to hurt. Pins and needles and maybe even a cramp or two. But you do it anyway because it’s so terrifying to not be able to feel part of your body.

That’s where I am now. My campaign of directing my energies down to the very roots of my psyche is really picking up speed and it’s thawing me out down there at an accelerating pace as every bit of progress adds to the energy available for more.

Ain’t that somethin?

Best of all, I think I am finally starting to tap into the healing power of frustration. Like I have said a million times before, I am really fucking sick of this stupid little life of mine, but this time I am forcing myself to realize that there are things I can do about that.

I can make things better. I can fix things. I am not some helpless hopeless waif without power or agency. I’m an astoundingly intelligent and resourceful and competent grownup and there is nothing I can’t do if I just put my mind, soul, and will behind it

I am through with being scared to try. Try, get hurt, whine about it, then try again.

After all, I am fucking amazing. So why be scared? I am going to kick this mean old world’s ass until it likes it.

As far as I am concerned, I am owed the world, and I intend to collect. I have suffered in the shadows for a very long time and now I am going to come out swinging.

Don’t call it a comeback. I’ve been here for years.

Another rather bracing thing that came up during therapy was just how much of my life has been spent (wasted) staring at screens.

TV screens, computer screens, game console screens, now my tablet’s screen. The vast majority of my life has been experienced through a screen rather than, ya know, actually dealing with reality.

And that’s a horrifying thought. No wonder my world doesn’t seem real to me sometimes. So much of it isn’t, and hasn’t ever been!

At some point, probably about when I pulled myself out of that deep hole I fell into in my early 20’s, I fully adapted to this self-entertaining lifestyle where I do nothing but amuse myself without anything to show for it.

Well that’s not enough any more.

I want things. And nobody is going to come along and give them to me. I am going to have to go out there and get them.

And for once, I feel like that’s worth doing.

More after the break.

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That cold, black cloud is coming down

Love those vocal harmonies. So beautiful!

Anyhow, that’s just my melodramatic way of saying I feel depressed. And unwell. I feel like there is an evil spirit hovering over me and draining my life energy.

More specifically, I feel lethargic and out of sorts. I think maybe the sleep apnea was particularly bad during my last nap and it’s left me feeling oxygen depleted.

I should take another stab at getting a blood oxygen meter. I bought one for like $6 off of some Chinese site once and, big surprised, it did not work.

In fact, I am pretty sure they sent me a display version of the product, which was totally the right product on the outside but there was no electronic guts on the inside

Oh well. These days, if you pay that little for something, you know it’s a gamble. Maybe you will get what you ordered. Maybe you will get the sort of thing I got.

And maybe you’ll just get a card that says, “Stupid foreigner! You really think you get an air fryer for two dollars? We laugh at you! Ha ha ha! ”

Anyhow, I have been doing my little breathing exercises to try to get that blood oxygen level back up. Mostly doing the “maximum exhale”, where I do my best to push ALL the air out of my lungs.

That’s a pretty uncomfortable thing to do, but it usually works. Get the bad, used up air that I think accumulates in the bottom of my lungs out.

Like there is something wrong with my lungs that means I don’t quite clear all that de-oxygenated air out of my lungs when I exhale, and thus, it accumulates over time.

That’s my theory, anyhow. And presumably it gets even worse when I sleep.

Makes me wonder if I could get therapeutic benefit from just hanging upside down for a little while now and then.

Then the bad air would end up at the top of my lungs, where it is more easily exhaled.

Not sure how I would do that safely, though. Hmmm.

I need two big burly men to hold me by the ankles.

For a variety of reasons.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still feeling pretty sleepy. Guess I’m not caught up yet. Dammit.

As a result. having minor thinking issues. Nothing serious enough to be considered a symptom, just minor difficulty concentrating and/or staying focused.

Hey, did you know that cat and dog food would be perfectly fine for human consumption if they didn’t deliberately add a chemical to make it taste horrible and make us sick?

Why do they do that? Is the meat industry behind this? Or is it to maintain the distinction between humans and animals to make it clear to our messed up instincts that we are still definitely higher status than them and therefore what we do to them is OK?

Including grinding them up to make pet food?

Anyhow, where was I… oh right, trouble staying focused.

Of course, the real problem that always comes up when I have one of these sleepy periods is that my sleep is terrible.

I get around three or four hours of sleep at night, which sadly enough is still better than when I had no nightly sleep period at all, just naps.

So progress IS possible.

The rest of my sleep I get in naps of like an hour and a half at most that are scattered throughout the day at somewhat random times.

But like I have said here before, there is more to it than that. I think I retreat into sleep during the day when I can’t cope with even my sad and sordid sequestered reality any more and I need to hide in sleep.

When you’re asleep, you don’t have to deal with anything. You don’t have to cope. You are as close to dead as you can get without actually dying.

Death is too much of a commitment.

I mean, what if it turns out I don’t like being dead? Then what?

Besides, I don’t want to be dead. I want to be alive and having fun. There is so much of life I have yet to explore. I have so much to look forward to if I just let myself have hope.

I’m working on it.

Lately I have been thinking about levity. Effervescence. Lightness of being. Giving your soul a lighter than air quality so that your mood always rises up despite whatever life throws at you.

It’s an exciting notion, but also kinda scary. I guess to the old, sick, obsolete part of my mind, it seems to much like going “out of control”.

But healthy me is like, “So what?”. So I am out of control. So I might do things I don’t expect and lose some of that feeling of deadly predictability.

There are worse fates. Right now, everything is predictably bad. My soul is choked by this oppressive blanket of numbness that makes doing even the simplest of things nearly impossible because in order to do them, I would have to WAKE UP MORE.

And that is apparently not an option. Sheesh.

Well I am going to change all that. I keep pumping energy into the deepest layers of my psyche and doing my best to think gentle, loving, forgiving thoughts about myself in order to convince that scared little animal inside of me that it’s safe to come out now.

It’s okay, little fella. You can come play outside. The sun is warm and the ground is dry and the sky is blue and everything is waiting just for you!

It’s a wonderful world out there full of fun things to do and great experiences to have and maybe even a man or two to make your life even brighter.

So step outside, breathe the clean fresh air, and be free.

More after the break.

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The ultimate prosthesis

Let’s play, “what would Fru need in order to be functional?”.

Hopefully, this is the last time I will need to do this. More on that later.

Well, to start off, my “prosthetic” would have to be a person. My issues are way too complicated and nuanced to be solved by a mechanical device or app.

I think what I need the most is someone who can hold my hand while I do things in such a way that I feel grounded and safe, and thus remain calm.

I could do damned near anything just so long as I have some way to keep from panicking. My tendency to get freaked out over the tiniest thing is my greatest weakness and ultimately the main thing holding me back.

Which reminds me : Doctor Costin wants me to try that Xanax he prescribed me. Now where the heck did I put it?

Of course, any effective assistant of mine would have to not only help me not to panic but to keep me organized in order to prevent these exact situations.

I’d be able to just hand them things and they would tuck them away somewhere safe until I asked for them at a later date.

Seems simple enough, but to me, that would be miraculous.

And it would help with the first part too. I would be a lot less high strung and overwrought and thus prone to panic if I knew what what I needed would always be there when I needed it without my having to remember where I put it.

What else…. well massages sure would be nice but I am not sure that I could consider that to be an acceptable part of their duties.

Maybe if they were a licensed massage therapist, I would ask. But otherwise it would be rather creepy of me to demand it, n’est-ce pas?

And of course, standard assistant duty, they would have to keep my calendar so that I don’t have to worry about appointments, dates, gatherings, and so on.

Right now Julian does this for me, and I love him for it. 🙂

I hope this is the last time I make a list like this because I am trying to stop thinking of myself as so pathetic and helpless and encourage myself to realize that I can do things to help myself and improve my situation without anyone else’s help.

But realistically, there may be a limit to how far I can go with that. It could turn out that no matter how fiercely independent I learn to be, there’s some things I just can’t do.

And for those, I would still need my “prosthetic”.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

By mean ol Mister Sandman himself, no less.

I am having a very sleepy day. Seems like all I want to do is sleep.

Which made it rough to get to Wound Care today. Getting out of bed felt like climbing a frigging mountain. I kept drifting back into sleep for a second then having to yank myself back from the edge and wake up again.

And it just wouldn’t go away. I mean, it’s 4 pm now. It was 8 am when I (sorta) woke up. And I have slept twice since getting back from Wound Care.

And I am still really freaking tired!

As usual, I am trying, and failing, to be mellow and philosophical about it. It would be great to be able to just relax into the experience and savour the calm, peaceful, soothing nature of reality at this moment as a rare bit of freedom from my usual anxious and overwrought mode of being.

But I’ve got shit to do, man.

Not a lot of it, mind you. In fact, this blog is pretty much it in terms of responsibilities.

But being super sleepy makes that pretty stressful too.

Hell, I was so sleepy this morning that I kept almost falling asleep while the nurses were working on me.

And that would have been so embarrassing! How very rude of me. How declassee.

That’s French for “not classy”.

Then I had a few microsleeps when I stopped in the waiting room to rest my poor legs on the way back down to the car.

Falling asleep there would have been less acutely embarrassing but I would have still felt pretty guilty about making Julian wait, or worse, come up to find me.

Jesus, ever burp so hard it feels like it gave you whiplash?

Anyhow, where was I. Oh right. And I was originally going to go do some needed bloodwork after Wound Care but I was way too sleepy to even contemplate it.

I need to be awake and alert to deal with that frigging LifeLabs location, It’s very stiff and sterile and clinical there, and there is always a lineup, meaning you always have to do the whole “take a number and wait” thing, with the added bonus that you have to wait for your number to come up on a video screen like you’re an old lady watching to see if her Keno numbers get selected.

For those who dunno, Keno is basically automated Bingo.

Then, to top it all off, my plan of going directly to sleep when I got home from Wound Care had the kibosh put to it by the fact that the sheer effort it took to get from the car back to the apartment left me too keyed up to relax right away.

So I had to sit at the computer and fuck around for like twenty minutes while the adrenaline slowly left my system till I could finally relax again.

And I hate, hate, HATE that “tired and wired” state of mind where you are too wired to sleep but too sleepy to do much of anything at all.

Because sleepiness has given you a case of the rolling stupids and even simple things like watching a fucking YouTube video are beyond you.

It’s thirty seconds in and I have already lost track of the plot of this cat video.

And I think that’s the most stressful part of these sleepy periods : having to deal with reality when my brain just plain ain’t working for shit.

Very, very frustrating for a super cerebral dude who is used to having lots of brain CPU cycles on hand like me.

More after the break.

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Some unfamiliar tunes

Check out this bit of old OLD school metal :

Consider me to be headbanging slowly but emphatically throughout the song.

Seriously, like I said in the comments, this reminds me of Black Sabbath in the best possible way. And to think, I only clicked on the link because I loved the title “Stoned Back To The Bomb Age”.

In case you’re too young for the joke, that’s a pun on saying the US should “bomb them back to the stone age”, whoever the current “them” is.

The equally racist counter to that is, “So that would take them back to what, last Thursday? ha ha ha. ”

That kind of shit is why I do not miss the past that much.

But speaking of the past, Felicity turned us on to this track :

It is 100 percent a Christian song and it is fucking awesome. It is the best example I have come across yet to support my belief that faith based music does not have to suck. There’s no reason why it can’t be just as good as the mainstream stuff.

Except, perhaps, that the Christian music audience fears mainstream things. Hmm. And I suppose there is a certain amount of that perverse, “if it doesn’t hurt, it can’t be good for you” reversed logic at work too.

In fact, some sects, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, seem to have a morbid fear of people actually enjoying themselves.

This is what happens when a counter-decadence movement outlives the decadence it was reacting to in the first place.

It has to find fault in the world in order to continue to exist so if it is to survive, it must find new things to rail against. New things, previously thought harmless or even beneficial, must be declared to be decadent and worldly and, ya know, icky bad.

This illustrates a fundamental part of fundamentalist thought : preserving dogma and practices far beyond their rational justification.

Like Judaism and Islam forbidding pork. Which made total sense if you’re a desert people living before the advent of refrigeration.

Trichinosis is very nasty and so it was probably not worth the risk back then.

But now? We have, like, freezers and such. And yet, this bizarre belief is preserved not because it makes sense but because of “tradition”.

The important thing is that the beliefs and practices are not analyzed, justified, or subject to any kind of rational evaluation.

After all, once you start asking those questions, the sheer absurdity of a lot of traditional practices and restrictions will become evident and enormous chunks of various religions will crumble into dust immediately.

And if you are emotionally invested in those absurd beliefs, that would make you look and feel very foolish, and obviously we can’t have THAT.

Solution? Just say it’s “tradition”. and therefore does not have to make sense. You are doing it because your ancestors did it and for no other reason.

As someone (not me) once said, “Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.”

Brilliant. Could not have said it better myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.