Well, so far so good. I feel a lot better than I did yesterday, though I am still very tired.

But it’s a better kind of tired, the kind of sleepy tired that feels like it leads to nice, safe, relaxing, gentle, soft-feathered sleep instead of the deep dark dragging down drowning kind of sleep.

This morning, I had a fairly nasty episode of Irritable Bowl Syndrome. This particular mode of attack is seriously unpleasant, and happens (I think) when I have a blockage so bad that the contents of my intestines back up into my stomach like a clogged storm sewer backing up into the street.

It is very nasty and makes me very nauseous, although due to an odd genetic quirk I inherited from my mother, I have strong nausea resistance, so it doesn’t usual actually make me throw up. And for some reason, it also makes me sweat like crazy, which is generally a good thing, because these attacks usually also involve a low grade fever and a very distinct feeling of overheating, and general heat stroke type symptoms. So the sweating is good, it cools me off and makes the whole thing more bearable.

I think carbonated beverages may be a factor too. It might be that the real problem is a large ball of carbonation trying to rise through a badly clogged system, and that causing something rather horrifically like a bubbling swamp to happen in my poor guts.

Luckily, I was able to stay calm during all this badness and keep a grip on my emotions and remind myself that I had been through the same many times before, and that I knew all I had to do was hold relatively still, breathe evenly, let the bubbles rise and do their damage and dissipate, and if I just hung in there that they would eventually all be gone and I would feel a lot better.

And yup, that’s just what happened. It was very unfun, but I am pleased with my performance in keeping my cool. One thing that suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome my entire life has taught me is that freaking out about it only makes it far, far worse. If I can stay calm, I can just ride it out and make it through with minimal pain.

Even when I was a little kid, I had what they called at the time a “nervous stomach”. if I got too excited about something, or too anxious, I would become physically sick.

No wonder I grew up to be so dependent on maintaining calm. Emotions make me ill. How’s that for a fucked up Skinner box to grow and develop in? To this day, when I imagine what it would be like if I had all the health, both mental and physical, that I want, I imagine myself as fundamentally calm and centred at all time, which would in turn make it safe for me to feel more emotions and not be so god damned numb all the time.

Because despite how I depend on a very low intensity life to control my mood, a big part of me really wants to feel things. I think our bodies and our minds know what should be felt, and register a deep wrongness when the right feelings are not there. Whether it’s your foot or your feelings that fall asleep, you kno somethign is terribly wrong somewhere, and while it can be painful to get feeling back, it also feels really good. The warmth flows back into what was so recently cold and dead and numb, and that feels amazingly wonderful. LIFE!

So often, whatever makes me really feel strongly is beloved to me, even if it makes me really sad, because at least I am feeling something, and for a time I am fully alive, and some of my incredible wasteland fillfed with frozen emotion melts and the glacier I live under becomes a little lighter.

Part of me wishes I could just melt it all at once, total catharsis, and gamble it all on myself surviving the flood to be so much cleaner, stronger, clearer, and more joyful when the waters abate and I am left on dry ground once again.

But if there is a way to trigger total catharsis, I don’t know it, and that is probably just as well. As tempting as the thought is, I imagine that, realistically, it would be at least equally likely that your mind would either be smashed to pieces by the flood waters, or the whole structure of your psych would collapse without all the emotions propping it up anymore.

I don’t know. Might be worth it, though, to get rid of all your crap at once. Like Hercules diverting a river to clean out the stalls of the man-eating horses during one of his Labours.

Have I mentioned how much I loved mythology as a kid? Myths are great stories. To me, there is no better testament (so to speak) to the power of writing and language than religion. From a certain angle, all religion can be seen as a product of some very powerful storytelling, so powerful, in fact, that in an era before the concept of fiction, the stories overrode the usual filters of perception and become real and true to people.

After all, powerful storytelling is so evocative that it really seems real while you are experiencing it. It is not that hard to imagine that in a time before everyone grew up immersed in fiction of various forms and had to learn the difference at quite an early age, the sheer immersiveness of strong storytelling would create the feeling that one had experienced something real and true.

And in a world before the post office, newspapers, or even literacy, and without the full scientific method (and knowledge) for examining the plausibility of a statement… one can hardly blame them for believing it.

And all because someone came up with a really powerful, resonant, affecting story that really moved people.

We writers wield incredible power at times.

Check it out, this section is called Diary and not Blog now. Baby steps.

Anyhow, I feel like three day old shit and I am fucking tired of it and I am beginning to freak.

Today was just like yesterday, except slightly worse. Once more, I spent the entire day asleep and lost in troubled and draining dreams. Once more, I got very little practical accomplished as a result. I was really hoping that I would get my Christmas cards done today, but for the few hours of this day that I was awake, addressing envelopes and writing messages in cards would have been entirely beyond me. I have felt miserable and worn out all day, and have had a hard, grinding headache to boot, and so the mental resources available to me have been meager and scant.

And not being able to think properly always makes me even more miserable. Another price of being such a dysthymic intellectual, I suppose. I need all my mental faculties intact in order to maintain the artificial state of false hyper-calm on which I am so very emotionally dependent.

I wish I could really convey just how bad it is to feel like this. I feel like I am being squeezed to death on all sides, like I have been buried under massive heavy stones which are slowly crushing me to death. My dreams are so deep and intense and vivid that I feel like they are stealing my real life away, and I am terrified that some day they will triumph and I will lose all connection to reality and die in my sleep, or even worse, have some sort of seizure in my sleep and lapse into a coma and never ever awaken again, and be cursed to live forever more in the confines of my own mind.

A fitting, Twilight Zone type poetic end for a person whose main fault is spending too much time inside his own head avoiding reality while awake, I suppose. But not something I want happening to poor little old me, who just wants to be awake and alive and alert enough to have a life, god dammit.

When my health problems get so bad that I cannot support even my sad little nothing of a life, I begin to really worry, and having this crap happen to me two days in a row is really starting to freak me out.

Normally, lately, I have been getting pretty good at handling this all philosophically and not getting too freaked out by it. These things happen, this too shall pass, it is like the weather and the best thing you can do is just wait for it to be over then get on with your life, and so forth and so on.

But lately, the effect has been so deep and so powerful and so severe that my usual calm is shattered. I sleep so much, and feel so bad when I am awake, that I can’t help but feel panicky and anxious about it. I feel like a wounded frightened animal trapped in a situation it cannot control or understand, desperate for escape but unable to even understand the nature of its confinement let alone find a way out, doomed to die in fear and confusion and panic without even knowing why.

My recent spate of nosebleeds worry me as well. My GP brushed them off as just the effect of dry weather and advised me simply to lubricate my nostrils with a tiny touch of Vaseline. But he barely looked, and might have been primarily motivated by a desire to get on to the next patient and try to catch up to his appointments. (My appointment was at 9:30 am and I didn’t see him till 10:20 am. Typical.)

And considering all the bad things happening in my head from a subjective point of view, I can’t help but wonder if something bad is happening in my head in the objective sense as well.

I know it’s not related to caffeine, because I have not had any since Tuesday night. The Diet Coke I had Tuesday night might account for Wednesday’s problems, but not today, Thursday’s.

I don’t think it’s sinus related, as I have been taking my allergy meds, but they could still be a factor. If my sinuses are filling and clogging while I sleep, that could certainly account for sleep related breathing issues. My airway gets smaller while I sleep. Strangled in the dark, indeed.

Psychological factors are difficult to weigh. I suppose I could be in the grips of some long term intense psychological transformation and the hyper intense dream activity is the result of my brain trying to clear some seriously resistant emotional blockage. It would make a lot of sense and if that is the case, I am willing to put up with the insanity if it works out in the end, and I come out of the darkness stronger and more relaxed and happier in my own skin.

I suppose we all hope that out pain serves a purpose, don’t we? We fear meaninglessness more than we fear anything else. We would rather suffer for a good reason than be happy for no reason at all.

But I don’t feel like wandering off on a whole “the meaning of the meaning of life” tangent right now, I have done enough of that in the past and right now I am wallowing in my own misery, not basking on my own brilliance.

Not that those two things are entirely unrelated.

I think I will see how tomorrow goes, and if it’s rotten like today and yesterday, then on Monday I am going to call up a few of my doctors and see what’s up.

I was supposed to have gotten a phone call for an appointment to do the overnight sleep study thing by now, so I have got to call Doctor Yeung. And if I am this ill for much longer, I will call Doctor Chao, my GP, and get an appointment with him and tell him how bad things are getting.

Now if you will excuse me, I am still sleepy, so I guess it’s time to go back into my tomb and sleep.

Here’s to hoping I get to live a while tomorrow.