Today’s batch, that is.

I thought that, for today at least, I would try to blend the shared content with the shared consciousness and offer you some cool links along with the belly button lint.

I guess that would be one advantage of being an “outie”…. no place for lint to hide.

Whereas if you are a big fat innie like me, you could lose a fingertip in there. I have probably gathered enough lint in there during my life to knit an entire sheep.

Oh, and speaking of which, I love this piece from Seth MacFarlane :

The poster’s description says “it’s either from Family Guy or American Dad”. Yeah, they could totally get away with a kinky gay ram swearing like a sailor and demanding something be shoved up his asshole on network TV.

Then again, they do get away with a lot…. OK, admittedly, it’s a fine distinction.

But still, it’s clearly from Seth Macfarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, his web series where he can do more or less whatever the fuck he wants, including having a submissive gay ram who sounds a lot like Brian the dog from Family Guy begging to be shorn.

Needless to say, I love it. It combines sexual perversion, cartoon animals, and comedy, and that is a pretty good way to win my heart.

What can I say, I know what I like.

Another thing I like (what a deft segue!) is people who take the time out of their busy day to have fun with public signs and the English language as well.

Like whoever did this :

Done. Now what?

I love you, anonymous person who took the time to print out a bunch of pieces of paper with the word “No.” on them in huge capital letters and put them all up around the original sign, purely out of the urge to express their own surreal sense of humor and maybe, just maybe, make some other people laugh too.

I love this kind of thing because it harms nothing, hurts nobody, and makes everybody’s day a little brighter and a little less like every other day.

Boredom is a real problem in the modern pampered age, and anything someone can do to liven things up without hurting anyone is thumbs up from me.

Besides, I have never understood what people have against it in the first place.

Well, then he has nothing to fear, does he?

Poor Bill Posters. He will never get a fair trial.

Oh well, at least we know he will never have to roll over for these guys.

I absolutely love this song, even though, strictly speaking, it isn’t actually good.

I mean, it’s amateurish, the video obviously had no budget (although apparently they somehow managed to get Daniel Frishman, Dan’s boss from a few episodes of Night Court, to appear in their video), they obviously have no idea what they are doing, and most of the song is musically terrible.

But then there’s that chorus… that completely unexpectedly and one might even say inappropriately awesome chorus.

Plus, honestly, it has so much joyously uninhabited goofiness that I cannot help but feel a strong affection for it. These guys are not holding back, and I love them for it.

And the chorus is prophetic, because they truly are the Dog Police (it’s the same dudes in the dog masks and the band, if you hadn’t figured that out) and truly, nobody knows who they are. I can find no information on them on the Internet. This video is the only evidence of their existence. And yet, they have given us so very much.

I’m telling ya, there ain’t no justice.

As for me, I am having another stupid sleepy day. I don’t feel like talking about it, not because it bothers me, but because I hate repeating myself.

Sleeping a lot, many dreams, barely enough time to eat and poop, etc.

Room for one more sign. This one goes in both the They Had To Be Told and There Is A Story Here files, I think.

Great, now what do I do with this guy?

One can imagine that sign writer’s inner monologue.

“Should I put the ‘or anybody’ in? I mean, technically, I guess it’s implied. But what if, by omitting it, I am implicitly condoning throwing people in? Could I live with myself if I am called into court to face the person who got thrown into the pond because of my rank negligence and brutishly cavalier attitude towards human life? No, I better put it in… boy, I hope this doesn’t end up on the Internet. ”

Woops. Sorry pal!

Saludo, muchachos. Peace y’all!

You know…. kinda like Three Times A Lady by Kenny Rogers…. a little bit, anyhow….

Anyhoo. Time feels weird today.

It is hard to describe, but everything feels like it happening at two speeds at the same time, like some bizarre cosmic reverse zoom effect on my reality filter.

(Gets a hell of a lot of work, that reality filter of mine. Honestly, in some sense of the words, it is more of a fantasy filter that lets just enough reality in so that I don’t try to hump the furniture. )

In the first speed, I am zooming down the highway, strapped to the hood of a Mack truck, flat on my back, only able to see the road through my feet, and controlling the vehicle with a Playstation controller stapled to my lip.

(That image brought to you by the Chubb Group, my playing way too much Rayman Raving Rabbids for the Wii, and Viewers Like You.)

In the other speed, time is gracefully slow, like glaciation. It gets kijnd of frustrating at times, because things happen so damn slowly, but on the other hand, it has a kind of calmness to it which is quite soothing.

Obviously, I like the second speed better. I am definitely going into the time of life when a person begins to feel like they are hurtling pell-mell into the future at a high rate of acceleration, days whooshing past like telephone poles next to the highway, with nothing but old age and Death at the end of the road.

I have to keep reminding myself that despite the tricks that the mind plays on us older people as our time perception increases and the days seems shorter and shorter, it is all an illusion and the day has the same number of minutes it always has.

Probably, my random sleep habits do not help the matter at all. Every two hour nap is a touch of the fast forward button of my life, which is the last thing I need.

And yet, the very idea of staying awake for sixteen hours fills me with a terrible and enervating dread. All those hours to fill with activity, all those hours of somehow keeping my mind busy and distracted so that I do not have to deal with the incredible panic and tension growing daily under the skin of my psyche because of how old I am, how much I hate myself, and how I cannot handle even the modest pressure of trying to pick something to do with my life and just god damned do it for a while.

And so forth and so on. For me, depression is often like being wrapped tightly in a million icy tentacles all tugging in every direction possible and the only way out is to push a button that is impossible to reach because of all these fucking tentacles.

And so you try to do the best you can with the very limited mobility you have, and it is all too easy to fool yourself into thinking life is not so bad, you can maybe cope, you are not that sick, and you can pretend your life is normal for a while.

But then, despite your careful adjustment of your blinders to prevent this exact thing, a situation comes along that show you just exactly how weak, ill, incapable, and pathetic you are, and how unsympathetically sad your life is, and you are crushed again.

And so you become depressed, and do the only thing you know how to do, which is to retreat even further into the tiny dungeon of your mind, where you at least feel safe.

I know that if anything truly horribly traumatic happens to me, I will just plain give up and stop paying any attention to reality and lapse into catatonia.

I have no choice. Even though being trapped inside my own mind with no outlets is my absolute worst nightmare, with no more solid ground, to drown forever… it is all I know how to do.

My dream, I suppose, is to get to shore and stay on shore, but deep down I know that diving deep into my own filthy waters is an addiction I will not easily shed, not without my life becoming far more pleasant and fun.

If the sun shone more warmly on me, I might be tempted to stay out of the water for longer.

Then again, maybe I am just too numb from the cold to feel the sun.

No, I haven’t suddenly decided to write Punisher fan fiction.

I just figured that if my last thing where I went on and on and on (and on) about my personal problems pertaining to my being cuckoo in the coconut was called , then I have basically declared war on my mental illness and seeing as I seem to be compelled to keep going on and on (and on) about it, I might as well call it some kind of journal, and pretend like I am tracking my progress out of a sense of organization and science, as opposed to just plain not being able to help myself.

I feel kinda guilty that I haven’t done any capital W Writing lately, just these bloggy type things. I would rather be writing brilliant essays or short stories, but I just don’t have it in me lately. Or rather, the elements are all there, and I probably have as many essays and short stories simmering on the surface of my witch’s kettle of a mind as ever.

But the self-examining (and self-expressing) stuff just pushes it out of the way.

I guess it’s all about what elements of my psyche want it more, I suppose.

And it is not like writing all this down is completely useless. On the contrary, I think it is doing me a lot of good. In pop psych circles, what I am doing is known as “writing it out”, dealing with things by journaling them out and hence bringing them up and letting them out. The perfect therapy for a writer, presumably. Just keep writing out your emotions and so forth, and release some of that intense pressure inside that makes life difficult.

Sounds good on paper, at least.

Another therapy session today. Already? Yup. My therapist and I are still ironing out the kinks in our scheduling, so the spacing between sessions is a tad ragged and uneven, but that should settle down soon so that I have appointments mostly on every Tuesday, with the occasional Monday substitution in order to accommodate another patient.

Whether the appointments are six, seven, or eight days apart does not matter much to me. I like predictability and regularity to a certain extent, and having an appointment on the same day of the week and at the same time each time would be ideal.

But having it on the same time and mostly on the same day will suffice.

I gave him an update on my symptoms of withdrawal from the lowering of my Paxil dosage from 80 mg to 60 mg. The dizziness seems to be getting worse. So far, it’s nt like, a lifestyle issue, but still, I am a little worried. If it gets to the point where it’s hard to even stay upright or walk in a straight line, then I will consider it a Problem and will see recourse. Maybe take 70 mg once or twice to ease the transition to the lower dose. With ym doctor’s permission, of course.

My therapist, that is. Not that schmuck GP.

The other symptom is that when I get hungry lately, I get really really hungry. It is kind of crazy, to be honest. I will wake up from a nap and be so ridiculously hungry that it’s like a kind of insanity. Like I have a black hole in the pit of my stomach.

On the one hand, it is good to have some degree of appetite back. Due to all my issues, I have been forced to get used to eating simply because I feel it is the time to eat, not because I am actually hungry. My appetite is usually very low. Even when I do feel like eating, I don’t really feel hungry. I just feel a certain emptiness in my stomach and lack of blood sugar level as a sort of abstract concept, and react accordingly.

So, getting hungry is good. But getting crazy hungry is way too much of a good thing. I seriously get so hungry that the two and a half minutes it takes to nuke some microwave popcorn seems like an eternity. I get so hungry I could snatch food from the hands of passersby. “What’s that? I don’t care, it’s food. Hand it over and nobody gets hurt.”

I just want nice normal “Gee, food would be nice right now” hunger, dammit. Why does everything have to be so extreme?

And me, the hardcore radical moderate that I am.

It’s just not fair.

You know the ones. The ones where I spend the whole day asleep and have tons of highly vivid dreams and barely stay awake long enough to eat and drink and eliminate before it is back into the velvet tomb of sleep.

Progress continues on my ability to cope with these days in the appropriately enlightened and philosophical manner. This time through, I am feeling extra mellow about the whole thing. This might be due to my eating a whack of leftovers from last night’s Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of the day.

This, of course, included some quite lovely and large pieces of marvelous turkey, and so at least some of my current mellow goodwill might be attributable to being fully in the warm embrace of the goddess triptophan and her all-natural barbiturate like caress.

Nevertheless, I am counting this as a win against my previous problems with finding these days incredibly depressing and making things worse by railing against them and the time they waste and how I wanted to be doing other things and blah blah blah.

It’s the railing and complaining that is the waste of time and life. The only productive thing I do in any day is write one of these blog entries, and so any day where I do that is equally productive. Whether I spend the rest of the day sleeping or playing video games hardly makes a bit of difference, and it’s folly to think otherwise.

Thanksgiving dinner was quite lovely. Our friends Ryan and Jenn (married couple) have made a tradition of doing a very nice dinner for us and a few of our friends at the stately home of the inimitable Garth Spencer, a heck of a fellow and the editor of BCSFAzine previous to my best friend Felicity.

The food was plentiful and excellent. The company was highly convivial, consisting of me, roomies Joe and Julian, the founders of our feast Ryan and Jenn, our host and lender of kitchen Garth, and Amos, a friend of mine and Felicity’s.

It was a full table, wacky conversation ensued, it was a lovely evening.

Or it would have bee, but I was feeling ill.

This is the sort of thing where being someone who is just plain not a healthy person starts to really take its toll. I was not feeling that well when we left, but after I ate, I felt a lot worse. My head was swimming with dizziness (probably from the Paxil reduction I have been telling you about) and I became incredibly and apparently unquenchably thirsty.

That is happening a lot lately. My blood sugar must be beyond fucked up. I will be thirsty, have a drink of water, and be dry mouthed and parched again ten minutes later. I pretty much always have to have a big glass of water on the go, or life becomes very difficult and unpleasant very quickly.

Add to that my increasingly craving for salt, and getting ridiculously hungry sometimes, the signs are there for my blood sugar being stratospheric.

You see, when your blood sugar is too high, your body produces more urea (in other words, urine) in a frantic effort to try to get rid of the more or less toxic levels of sugar, and that means you go through your supplies of both water and sodium quite rapidly.

What your body wants is for you to drink lots of water and flush the excess sugars out and hence restore normal levels. But if you are diabetic, that is just not going to cut it. Too bad your body doesn’t know that, and tries to make you run a river through your body anyhow.

And your sodium does not stand a chance. Normally, your body uses sodium in order to regulate its hydration level. varying the salinity in your blood being a great way to regulate how much water your cells retain.

But if you increase your water intake, all that useful sodium gets washed away in the flood. When you are as out of whack as me, well… shit gets crazay.

And all because, for some reason, I can’t seem to get around to making an appointment with my GP and getting my medication sorted out.

As far as he knows, I have been happily taking a new med for months now. Whereas the reality is, there was some snafu and I should have called him right away to get it fixed and yet, guess what, nope.

I seriously don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me sometimes.

The trenches, in this case, being the metaphorical ones in which the two sides huddle and trade cigarettes for porn in the World War II inside my mind.

That would make happy, healthy me the Allies, and my depression Hitler.

Though honestly, it get really hard to tell one side from another and all you really care about is getting some peace and quiet for a while.

Right, wrong, who is winning, who loses, where the whole thing is going… fuck it.

Sooner or later, battle fatigue makes cowards of us all, and a mockery of ethics.

War never changes.

I know everyone is sick of the way this blog is going lately, and so I decided that today I would try something different and talk about my psychological issues in depth and with special attention to tiny details.

I know, I know…. and you are welcome.

At least today, I have an excuse : I saw my therapist this morning. Originally, I was planning to make my own way back via the miracle that is the public transit system because Joe was going to need all his time to sleep, but he ended up taking a day off work, so that ended up not being necessary.

Secretly, I am glad. Making my own way home on the bus would have been an adventure, and probably pretty good experience in boundary stretching, but I am nowhere near strong of character enough to do that when it can be avoided.

“No, Joe, I said I was going to make my own way home, and by golly, I will!”

Yeah. That does not sound like me.

Anyhow, it was a decent session with my therapist. I reported in to him on how the reduction in my Paxil from 80 mg a day to 60 mg a day was going. So far, no major fireworks, either good or bad. I have been experiencing mild dizziness, nothing too bad, just the occasional wobbly feeling when I move my head too fast or stand up too quickly. Give how often other factors like blood sugar irregularities or sinus issues make me dizzy, it barely register on my radar at all.

The impact is felt more strongly in my emotional tone. I definitely have felt kind of like a little black cloud has been following me around lately. I have had attacks of depression and attacks of frustration, as well as a few periods where I felt pretty good, actually.

Overall, I simply feel emotional. The intensity of my emotions is heightened, and so the highs are higher and the lows are lower.

For us science types, the amplitude of my mood has increased but not its frequency.

If that makes any sense.

It’s not too bad, really. One grows very tired of being numb after a while, and so at least at first, you are just happy to be feeling things again.

It’s like that warm, kinda good, kinda ticklish feeling you get when your foot is just starting to wake up from being asleep. It is not entirely a good feeling by itself, but it beats that terrible coldness hands down.

That is how I feel inside now. 80 mg is a simply ridiculous dosage, 20 mg over the maximum dosage listed in all the pharmaceutical references. It was crazy of my GP to put me on that high a dose in the first place. Hence, my instant agreement when my therapist suggesting stepping down the dose.

If this dosage works out, my therapist will take me down to fifty. Fine by me. There was a time when I needed a heavy dose of emotional anesthetic. I was in very bad shape and no therapy would have been possible with me in that state.

But now, I feel like the medication is slowing down my recovery. Getting out of my hole is going to require feeling a lot of things that I have been suppressing for many years, and something that keeps that from happening or makes it happen far too slowly is worse than useless, it’s a negative.

I would never drop the medication completely, all at once. I know enough pharmacology to know what a horrible disaster that would be, and even if I didn’t, my buddy Joe tried that and crashed into deep depression about a month later.

So I know it’s dumb from that.

But turning it down slowly over time is a good thing.

I feel the good stuff so much more. That makes feeling the bad stuff more worth it, to me.

Maybe now, I can feel love.

Yup. It’s more soul-searching navel-hazing rectum-examining blog entry where I spill my entrails onto the virtual page and pick through them in order to try, by sheer extispicy, to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me and why my stomach hurts all the time.

Perhaps it is a peculiarity of the intellectual class to require such elaborate and intricate self-examination in order to achieve what a less left-brained type might achieve simply through living, or prayer, or taking the hits that us smarty types are far too clever to let happen to us, thank you very much sir.

And so, we learn nothing, and nothing changes us.

But no, we intellectuals have to process everything through that big messy jury-rigged madman’s supercomputer that makes up our conscious brains, and while these mighty engines have great power in the world due to their excellent facility for abstract reasoning and all the article of civilization that flow from it, the interface does not make for a smooth and peaceful inner life.

Smart people just have smarter problems. Complicated people have complicated problems. Whatever you have, your demons have too.

And lately, I have felt like my own demons’ strongest skill is simply to keep me in check. It is like I am trying to win at chess against an opponent who only seeks to keep me from making any progress, victory be damned.

Like a fatally seized engine, my spirit cannot truly power me forward in life. Some part of my mind always comes up with the equal and opposite force to stop me and keep me safely static. Everything varies but nothing changes. Ice is stronger than fire. Climb up the sides of the well as much as you want, you will never reach the light at the top, and the higher you climb, the more it will hurt when you fall.

And yet, that is still your only way out.

Well, all my perpetual personal ponderings do bear fruit now and then, especially now that the process is vastly accelerated by therapy. Now progress is measured on a historic scale, much better than the previous geological one.

I know that avoidance is my problem. Pondering that, I came up with this motto :

Endure what you could avoid.

A simple enough mantra, but powerful. Take the hit. Go out there and get hurt. Growth through pain, or more precisely, growth through experiencing things, not merely thinking about them.

Finally, I understand the source of the apparently nihilistic thoughts I have been having lately, like “Fuck it, I don’t care what happens to me” and “I guess I am just plain not in charge around here. ”

It’s not so much that I literally do not care what happens to me. I obviously don’t want to break a leg or get hit by a bus any time soon (or ever). It is just that I am so damned sick of my stupid fucking life right now that the actually productive part of my meta-conscious mind is saying, in effect, “Seriously, what could be worse than this? ”

It is kind of like the tiniest slice of suicide, this feeling like I don’t care if bad things happen out of my desire for change because at least they would be new bad things, and hey, a change is as good as a rest sometimes, right?

At least if I change some things, I will have the novelty and challenge of adjusting to new circumstances for a while. Things will be fresh and new and alive, as opposed to stale and old and undead. New experiences will stimulate me and change me and helps me to grow, even if some of the just plain suck.

My current fantasy for a new life involves me attending the Writing for Movies and Television program at the Vancouver Film School and living in either the Davie Street area or near the cool and funky section of Commercial Drive.

I am tired to the meat of my marrow of living a life of quiet nothingness, spending all day playing video games and fucking around online while my life slips away from me with nothing to show for it.

I love my roomies very, very much, and I never want to do anything to hurt them. But it is becoming increasingly clear to me that it is way past time for me to move on with my life, to “do the next thing” instead of just drifting through life like a cloud that passes unnoticed from birth in the East to death in the West.

That’s just not good enough. Time for me to move on.

But it’s going to hurt.