Had kind of a rotten afternoon, and it has put me to thinking.

No, nothing bad happened. I didn’t get bad news or get in an accident or anything. Just the usual randomly produced feeling like absolute shit for no apparent reason. I woke up in the afternoon after a brief and unpleasant nap feeling like death. I could barely breathe, all my joints hurt, I had a massive hadache, I was covered in sticky sick-sweat, and I had a ringing in my ears that I could feel in my bones.

Napping is so much more exciting when it’s so much like playing Russian Roulette.

Mao mao diddi mao. BANG.

I did a bunch of the breathing exercise I have invented on my own to try to get my breathing back to normal after some very bad sleep apnea sleep. Generally, these involve deliberately and slowly emptying my lungs as much as possible to get rid of as much “bad air” as possible and make as much room for new, fresh, oxygen bearing air as I can. I am not sure if it is scientifically accurate, but my theory is that somehow, I have a problem with incomplete exhalation. I don’t breathe out quite as much as I breathe in, and so over time, carbon dioxide builds up in my lungs and displaces the lung volume I need to get a decent amount of oxygen into his big body of mine.

I am not sure why I would have a problem with incomplete exhalation, but I suspect it has to do with the massive weight of my huge gut pulling down on my whole chest, making it take more energy and muscle to empty the lungs than to fill them.

Maybe I have a weak diaphragm? I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

Anyhow, after emptying my lung, holding my breath (dunno why that helps, but it does), and doing short runs of deliberately rapid breathing, I was able to drag myself at least part way out of the miasmal funk, and thus able to stagger to the bathroom and fill my big ol water glass (it’s a Double Gulp, which I think you will admit is the classiest of the Gulps) and stagger back and hydrate myself, which took me most of the rest of the way out.

It’s days like this that remind me that I am not at all a well individual. I’m a sick person, in the true sense of the word (amongst others), and I don’t think I give myself credit for that a lot.

I often feel very bad about how little my life has amounted to, but consider how ill I am, I suppose I should be glad I can do anything at all. It’s not impossible that my health will continue to deteriorate as I enter middle age and in seven years, when I am 45, I will look back at this time and well up with nostalgia at the freedom and autonomy I enjoyed.

That’s a comforting thought. Enjoy the moment, folks, because it will only get worse from here!

Better than wallowing in your misery, I guess.

I feel like part of my problem in dealing with my life is my inability to truly accept the cyclical. I am by nature very cognitive-forward, very left-brained, very linear, very goal-oriented. That is great for some things, especially things which can be thought through or otherwise solved via planning, but it is not at all good for dealing with instability, unpredictability, and the changing nature of my subjective reality.

I think I am fundamentally unstable. I don’t mean insane (thought I am that too) but instead that I am not the sort of person who can ever expect his inner life to be a calm and steady train ride through gently rolling verdant countryside, no matter how badly I want that.

Instead, I think that due to my intensely overdeveloped inner life, my incredibly deep and passionate search for the truth regardless of what said truth or its pursuit does to me, and my extremely sensitive nature, my inner life will always be somewhat of a pell-mell minecart ride over rickety bridges and steep inclines and constantly zooming in and out of darkness and light.

And it’s useless to try to prevent it, or to resist it, or to bemoan it and constantly try to find something to cling to when the winds and the tide are just going to tear me away again.

Better to learn to surf, and steer with the current.