I am very worried about my health lately, and for once, it’s my physical health rather than the disputed future of my so-called “sanity” that is at stake.

First, though, a few caveats.

For one, I am going to be discussing a personal health problem of a very intimate and somewhat disgusting nature. So if you are squeamish or simply don’t want to get to know me that well, spin on. I am sure I will write something a little easier on the digestion tomorrow.

In the meantime, I have hundreds of thousands of words written and stored in the archive of this blog. Feel free to peruse my greatest hits.

Heck, read the crappy stuff too. It’s fun!

Another warning : I feel I must confess that I am a former (recovering?) hypochondriac, and so whatever worries I have about my health might just be the ghosts of phobias past coming back to add their doleful dirge to the haunted chorus in my head.

When I was in my early twenties, I was ridden quite hard by the hag of hypochondria, and spent a lot of time terrified that minor symptoms meant my imminent doom by a thousand plagues and defects.

The fact that in this period, I had my first encounter with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which can only be diagnosed by a long series of tests which rule out everything else and which therefore left me with a good two years in which there might well have been something really wrong with me, as far as I knew, did not help one bit.

Oh, and one last warning : I am also experiencing the effects of a recent reduction of my Paxil dosage form 50 mg a day to 40 mg a day, so that might factor into my emotional state somehow.

Nevertheless, I am worried about my physical health, and I want to talk about it here.

Basically, I think something is wrong with my waterworks, so to speak. I keep getting this deep ache in this very specific spot about the size of my fist on the left hand (my right) side of my body. It is a very localized ache, sometimes rising to the level of being serious pain, and it seems to get a lot worse while I am urinating. It feels, in fact, like I am squeezing the urine out past some sort of blockage in there, and the blockage is none too happy about it.

In addition, I am often left with the feeling of not being quite done when I finish urinating. which is a classic sign that something is wrong in there. And it persists even if I spend considerable time trying to “make sure” I have gotten it all out. It feels like somewhere along the line, some part of the system does not fully relax and reset as it should.

And the thing about not feeling like I am done is that, well…. sometimes I am not. This is highly embarrassing to admit, but sometimes I think I am done, and I zip up and everything, but, surprise, a little more comes out.

Problems that make one wet oneself have a way of grabbing your attention where mere everyday aches and pains might not.

And it’s even worse than that, because sometimes I find my penis to be very moist (told you this was gross) after I have slept, like I have been leaking a little the whole time, and my testicles and the rest of that area are soggy too.

I am just lucky that, because of my tendency to drink lots of water to stay hydrated and flushed out, my urine is highly dilute, and tends to have little or no odour. So a few minutes with a Kleenex or some toilet paper for cleanup is usually sufficient.

It really seems to me that I have something wrong with my bladder, and that has me quite worried. We diabetics are highly prone to kidney and bladder issues, and so the idea that I have a massive bladder stone in there, or some deep valve malfunction that will require some very invasive surgery and a very long, painful, and humiliating recovery time to fix is sadly quite plausible.

Luckily, I will be seeing my doctor a week from today. I wanted to see him today, but according to his “English as a second language” receptionist (he has two, the other is a native English speaker), my doctor is on vacation, and I did not feel like asking her why he did not have a locum in his place.

(I get very nervous and flustered when dealing with people with poor English. It’s a weakness. )

So next Tuesday, I will be going to see my GP to get my pill refill and to talk to him about all of this. I imagine he will send me for some blood and urine work and mostly likely an ultrasound of the problem area. And possibly more. A urinary catheter might enter my future (and my urethra) some time in the near future. Fun, fun, fun.

Oh well, I had one once before. It’s very weird feeling and not something I would volunteer for ever again, but it is not nearly the phallic horror that you imagine it to be before you have had one.

I certainly do not like the idea that hospital stays and surgery might well be in my future. My last hospital stay, when I had my gall bladder out, was extremely unpleasant, with a great deal of bungling and neglect and people just plain not doing their job.

Maybe I will write about that some time. It would be highly cathartic.

And I am the sort of person who has a really hard time trusting himself to the competence and goodwill of others in the first place. So my stay at the Royal Columbian in New West made a bad problem a hell of a lot worse.

Oh well, who knows. Maybe the whole thing can be solved by drinking a ton of cranberry juice.

I sure hope so.

Thanks for letting me fret in text, folks.

I have been thinking a lot about regret lately, and I thought I would write about it here to help sort through and clarify said thoughts and hence help me process things.

As I have mentioned before, I have been working hard to rid myself of most of my regret lately. Not all of it, of course. Only a sociopath has no regret or anticipation of regret, often to their undoing.

But I want to be rid of most of it, because it’s not a productive emotion in excess and I have come to realize that I have it in far, far too great a quantity, and it is one of the major things holding me back and keeping me in the same unproductive “holding pattern” that I have been in for most of my adult life. Both regret, and the anticipation of regret.

Let’s make that distinction. Regret is simple… it is that feeling you get that you wish you had done something differently in the past. You wish you had made a different choice, went a different direction, seized an opportunity you let slip through your hands, or had kept your stupid mouth shut.

On the surface of it, this is a useless emotion, because the past is fixed. It’s done. Wanting to have done something differently and feeling bad because of it serve no purpose but to make you miserable for no reason at all.

But regret serves a vital purpose because it is the active agent towards our learning from experience. In the ideal case, we make a choice, regret it for as long as it takes to learn what went wrong and to fix in the mind the emotional potentials to prevent similar mistakes in the future, and then the regret would fade and leave us with a fresh and open mind.

But sadly, the human mind does not work so cleanly. The fear of particularly painful or emotionally disturbing events recurring causes us to cling to regrets, afraid that if we let them fade from our minds, we will forget all about them and the bad thing will happen again. The emotional potential is far too strong and becomes a liability instead of a

And then there’s the anticipation of regret. Simply put, it is the feeling you get when contemplating potential actions that you better not choose a certain option because you can imagine yourself regretting it. This is the primary way regret educates us, by setting up those emotional potentials I mentioned earlier to remind the individual not to make the same mistake again, and it does this via the simple emotional language of aversion/fear.

And this is fine… when it works correctly. Another way regret malfunctions is that it overgeneralizes. This is how many phobias operate. A single one-off freak occurrence, because it creates a very strong negative emotional response, ends up causing a broad and categorical fear that encompasses all kinds of situations that pose absolutely no threat of the bad experience recurring, thus cutting the individual off from many positive experiences to absolutely no sufficient end.

And now we come to me. I almost forgot that was my destination, what with all the philosophizing and stuff. Sometimes, my mind wanders off without me and it takes me forever to find it again.

Silly old mind.

Anyhow, I realized recently that, far from being the regret free person I thought I was when I was younger (of course I had no regrets, I hadn’t made any big choices yet!), I am paralyzed by an enormous burden of regret.

And what is worse, the regret has become a living thing that rules my life, because I am so afraid of making mistakes that I do nothing, thus increasing my crushing burden of regret about never doing anything with my life. I add to my own burdens constantly, and yet, a sick and terrible voice rules me inside and the song it sings reads “Doing nothing is always better than trying anything because when you aren’t doing anything, at least you aren’t doing anything wrong!”

Clearly, I have to free myself from this poisonous line of thinking. I am very tired of going nowhere and doing nothing with my life. The view of life as an infinite series of rooms with an infinite number of doors and only one of them leading to something good is clearly nonfunctional to the point of virulent toxicity. It has to go.

So I have been putting a great deal of effort into monitoring my mind for this sort of toxic thought, and squashing those thoughts before they go too far, and replacing them with healthier thoughts, ones without self-recrimination or regret.

It is not easy to change on this level, and it will no doubt be w long and winding road that leads to my goal of a clearer, fresher, more relaxed and content mind. I will need a lot of help from my therapist as I clear out roadblocks and try to give myself the kind of deep down healing, way down in the deepest and most vital organs of my mind, that will lead to me becoming the stronger, happier, more even keeled and capable version of myself that I know for an absolute fact is in there inside me somewhere.

I was not always like this, and therefore, I can be different again. At one point, I had strength, and energy, and hope, and resilience. I want that back. Not the same thing exactly, but just as good, or even better. I want to banish the darkness that I have wrapped myself in, and feel the cool breeze and warm sun on my skin again, and breath free once more, ready to face the world, instead of just hiding from it by losing myself in my lost and lonely labyrinth.

I will find my way out of the maze just as soon as I no longer need to be lost and hiding any more.

I just hope I don’t end up regretting it after.

It is funny how memory and thought work sometimes. I had no real plans as to what I was going to write about today, but then this song came up on the old mp3 player, and suddenly, I knew, although I was not entirely happy about it.

In fact, I tried to talk myself out of it, because this is a large and very scary subject for me to deal with and the part of me, the very big part of me, that operates to keep me calm and comfortable and safe is screaming “No! Don’t do it! Why bother? It will make things worse!”

Maybe in the short term. But in the long term… it could help a lot.

So where to start? Well, at the risk of being trite, at the beginning. Of me. My life.

I am pretty sure I was a happy kid up until a certain point. My siblings were around (largely good, thought occasionally a pain), my mother was around more, I was friends with the girl next door and the girl across the street, and things were pretty decent.

And I was, I think, a popular and charming kid. I had no fear of adults, and I would strike up a conversation with anyone, usually bemusing and amusing the heck out of them with my verbality and volubility. A little freckle faced redheaded kid with more smarts than is good for him and a sunny and quirky personality. I was kind of a phenomenon, I imagine.

But then my father took me to The Spa, I nearly drowned in a pool accident, and after that, he molested me in the shower.

That broke me, I think. It’s hard to say, because these are memories of early childhood, well before school age, and a lot of other things changed for the worse in this general time period. My sweet, gentle mother went back to work, to be replaced by a babysitter for the day, and a busy, emotionally absent, depressed mother in the evenings and on weekends. My siblings went off to school, as did my friends, who were both a year older than me so they went off to kindergarten (unlike me) and then to school, leaving me alone with the babysitter.

All of this, molestation including, all happened when I was 2 or 3 years old.

After that, well, Daddy wasn’t there. He was never a big figure in my life after that. I feel sort of weird and sort of bad about that now. Part of me, despite how much I hate him now, kind of wishes I had tried harder to get to know him and to understand him and make him more of a part of the family, instead of this “abusive him versus the rest of us” isolating dynamic that evolved.

I don’t know. Maybe given his deep issues, that never would have worked. Perhaps this is part of the egotism my therapist mentioned, the one that makes me think I can fix things I can’t. I really am a heck of a negotiator. But who knows. Probably, there was nothing I could have done.

But that’s what it was like for the rest of my childhood. For the most part, I just kind of avoided my father because dealing with him was unpleasant because he was impatient and volatile and I was shy and sensitive and well, rather wimpy, and we just didn’t really get along.

We never argued or anything, though. We did not interact all that much at all, and when we did, I was always very wary and a little scared of him, and so without a basis for trust, and with the effects of his molestation of me (if not the memory) always there in my mind… there was really no relationship.

And his dinner time tirades didn’t help matters either, even though they were literally never directed at me. It was always Anne, the oldest, or David, the oldest boy, who bore the brunt of his verbal abuse over the dinner table.

And sad little me, I would try to mediate. As though it was all a big misunderstanding. I was a young teen before I figured it that he was an abuser and this was something he needed to do, it was how he dealt with all the stress of life outside the house, mostly his job. He took it out on us, usually at the dinner table. He could no more stop doing it than he could stop breathing.

Like most rage based abusers, he considered his tirades one hundred percent justified, and was completely incapable of ever admitting he was wrong about anything, ever. Imagine having to defend everything you have ever said, no matter how mad or upset you were, till the day you die. No wonder he was such an asshole.

Still, not a major factor in my life personally for a lot of my life. I occurs to me now that this was a bad thing… I had no real paternal influence in my life. I had a father, but not a father figure. That has to have had a lasting effect. For most of my life, having nothing to do with my father seemed like a good thing. Avoiding him was a full time occupation.

But, at the risk of sounding hopelessly poetic, who was there to teach me to be a man?

Nobody. And then, just to cap it all off, my father talks my mother into his cockamamie early retirement scheme, which just happens to mean yanking me and my brother out of university and essentially wrecking both of our lives.

I am a disabled recluse, and my brother works at Wal-Mart. (Sorry, bro… but we both could have been so much more, you know?)

That is the rough and sketchy outline of my relationship with my father. And the thing is, I didn’t really start to hate him until I had been away from him long enough to really get a grip on just how much he had destroyed me at the beginning and end of his influence.

Some day, I will write him that letter. I feel writing this diary entry has gotten me partway there.

Some day, Dad. Some day.

You know what? To heck with beating myself up about how this blog is very unstructured and random and whatnot. I am just not the sort of person to have a neatly organized blog, with everything in categories and neatly tagged and all properly formatted and so on.

You know what kind of people are good at that sort of thing? Very boring people.

The best I can reasonably hope for is the occasional furtive sortie into the general area of neatness and order and competence between long periods of lapsing back into my natural protean chaos.

And beating myself up over what I will never be is hardly productive. So screw it.

These are just my thoughts for today. Make of them what you will.

Met Joe Black

My most recent Netflix watch has been on my mental “movies I plan on watching” for a long time, namely the rather epic movie Meet Joe Black.

And by “epic”, what I really mean is “long”. The damn thing clocks in at three hours long, which means it starts out asking a fair bit from its audience right out of the gate. Sure, it has both Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, but still. Three hours? It’s not so big a deal to me as a home viewer because I can just however much of it I feel like, when I feel like it, but three hours in a movie theater in this era where intermissions are a thing of the past? Oy.

And the movie is very, very slow. I wouldn’t say that the movie is padded, mind you. Everything that happens does serve the plot. So you are not sitting there going “Get on with it!”, exactly.

But everything that does happen, happens at a slow, stately speed to allow the actors and actresses all the room they want for long, significant pauses and subtly turned readings of a line, as well as lots of
this kind of thing :

“I am going to say….. ”
“Yes? What are you going to say?”
“… this sentence. I am going to say this sentence. ”
“So you said that sentence?”
“Yes…. I….. said it. ”

You get the idea.

So it’s long, and it’s slow, and those are two big fat strikes.

As for the premise…. that Brat Pitt plays Death, come to collect Anthony Hopkins, but decides to hang around to check out life for a while…. barely has anything to do with the movie. The movie, indeed, seems to work hard to make sure that we don’t think it has any speculative fiction content at all. No special effects to speak of, no probing of interesting questions about Death, just a quick bit of dialogue to establish that Death is not, in fact, taking a holiday (everyone is dying just the same as always, because otherwise, it might have become interesting) and then for the middle two hours of the movie it barely even comes up.

So, so much for the main reason I was interested in the movie. I love things that have to do with Heaven and Hell, Life and Death, Right and Wrong, and so forth and so on.

Add in the fact that we are expected to really feel for Anthony Hopkins, a fabulously rich, powerful, and successful man, and it’s no wonder that the box office for the movie was poor and even the critics seemed somewhat bewildered by the movie.

Still, I did get some enjoyment from it. It is visually rich, and the acting, while perhaps slightly overindulgent, is otherwise superb. Anthony Hopkins is, in fact, quite likable, and Brad Pitt is interesting as a socially awkward and clueless Death. Sort of a stealth “special education” role for Brat Pitt. He’s like a handsome and very confident Aspie, and that is fascinating to watch.

So overall, I don’t think the movie was a waste of my time or anything. It asked a hell of a lot, but it delivered enough so that I didn’t feel like I had been ripped off.

If I had seen it in the theater, I might not be so forgiving.

A Recurring Problem

It occurred to me today that a lot of ideas have to occur to me many times before I actually do something about them.

It is like the idea is formed, but it’s not really ready to be born yet, and so I send it back down into my subconscious mind to be mulled over, considered, maybe modified a little, examined from all angles, and then it pops back up via recurrence for another audition.

That would explain why it seems like I am in a fast car with no reverse gear sometimes. I can’t just keep going with an idea once it has occurred to me. I have to think of it, then let it go while I think about other things, then come back to it again, like I am going around and around on a merry-go-round and can only make a grab for the brass ring once per rotation.

And the real problem is, the world outside my head doesn’t see the merry-go-round at all, and they can’t understand why I can’t just walk over and grab the damn thing, and hold on to it.

And I can’t really explain it. It’s just how I work. I am a strange breed of machine.

And seeing as my latest project in the never ending renovation of my soul is to try to eliminate nearly all regret from myself (without becoming a sociopath) and to learn to view life as an adventure, where there are no wrong moves, just different chapters….I am going to stop thinking of myself as a broken machine, and start thinking of myself as just a nonstandard model.

One with its own strengths and weakness. Not broken, just different.

There is a serious Robot Pathos animation script in there somewhere.

Well, those are my thoughts for today. There was a lot more, but my webhost screwed up and I lost like 500 words that ain’t coming back.

And just when they want me to renew. Hmmm.

Today was a therapy day, so you know what today’s blog entry will be about.

Or do you? While today’s therapy session was fruitful and fun, the tale I will tell now will largely be the tell of how I got there and back, and what happened on the journey.

First, some background. The reason there is a tale to tell in the first place is that my roomie Joe, who usually drives me to and from my weekly appointments (praise be to the Joe, for he is an awesome guy), work for the local schools as a janitor, and therefore is working a different shift than his usual graveyard shift this week while the little ones are off having Spring Break.

(Yes, that means it is officially Spring now, no matter what the calendar says. I know it’s Spring, because I got my first Slurpee craving of the year today. )

Anyhoo, Joe was (and is) working a 7:30 am to 4 pm shift instead of his usual 10:30 to 6:30, so he could not possibly drive me to the usual 8:15 am appointment. But, being the heckuva guy he is, he did give me $20 towards taxi fare.

As it turns out, the cab ride was $24.30. Almost $25 just to get to the other side of Richmond! Can you believe it? No matter how long I live, I will never get used to how ridiculously expensive taxi rides are here in the Big City. In Summerside, where I grew up, you can still get anywhere in town for a flat $3.25, and it’s bigger than Richmond (though it has way fewer people).

Heck, I remember how mad people were when they raised the price from $2.75 to $3.50! People were lining up in City Hall (then Town Hall) to complain. There was nearly a riot. And the beauty of a flat rate system is that it rewards the cabbies for serving as many people as possible, which means they have a strong incentive to get you there as fast as possible, as opposed to this meter bullshit, where their incentive is just to keep you in the car as long as possible.

But enough of my parochial bellyaching. So I ordered up the cab, and was slightly surprised when a minivan showed up. Or maybe it was an SUV or whatever. I don’t know the difference.

Anyhow, I wasn’t complaining. Yay, leg room! My driver was an affable East Indian fellow, very relaxed guy, who was enjoying a breakfast of fresh fruit and what smelled like figs rolled in rice with some kind of curry. It smelled pretty good, honestly.

That adventure ended, I was at therapy. I was early (hard to time the cab thing) and it was a very unpleasant cold morning, but luckily, the building and the office were open so I did not, as I had been fearing, have to wait outside. Phew! That would have sucked.

As it turns out, my therapist was late. I didn’t care, because I had a book to read. Persistence of Vision, a short story collection by John Varley. Good stuff…. reminds me of Heinlein.

After therapy, though I sort of tried to stop myself (not really), I wandered over to the nearby Denny’s to reward my intrepidity with a nice lunch. I ended up having a club sandwich with fries and gravy, which is a Classic Meal in my personal gustatorium.

Afterward, I just had to find the bus. This turned out to be a little harder than I thought it was going to be based on my earlier research. I ended up having to hike the whole kilometer back to the intersection at Shellbridge Gate and Cambie. Stupid highway overpasses and their being a place where you would have to be a lunatic to put a bus stop there.

But get there I did, working off a tiny portion of lunch I suppose, and manage to catch the bus I was looking for, the 410 Railway. (I include the details specifically for you transit buffs.) I asked the guy if he could announce me stop. D’oh number one…. all the buses announce their stops automatically in a slightly creepy neutral female computer voice now, and have done so for like five years. I had completely forgotten. Shows how little I use Transit these days. All these years of getting driven places by Joe have dulled my public transit instincts!

So anyhow, after getting on the bus, I added D’oh 2 to the drivers’ opinion of my mental fitness by freaking out and pulling the stop request cable when I saw Francis Road go by. Wait, that’s my street! I must have missed my stop! Nuuuuu!

But no, my stop was on 1 Road, the cross street to my intersection, and I had to do the Walk of Shame and tell the driver that I had requested the stop in error.

Technically, I could have just played stupid (a part to which I have a natural inclination) and looked around when we stopped for whatever idiot pulled the cord when they are not getting out, but I am compulsively honest and responsible and I never could have lived with the guilt.

Anyhow, I get out at 1 and Williams, and then, duh, I get on the 401 in the direction I am usually going when I get on the 401, but that’s the wrong choice this time and I am in Steveston before I realize it. D’oh number 3! Really, it’s a wonder I have lived this long.

But it’s no big deal, I just took the next 401 headed in the right direction. We live not far from Steveston, so it was just matter of going the wrong way for like six stops then back the right way for like twelve. I still felt dumb whe I got back to 1 and Williams though.

And so I made it home, eventually, colder but wiser, and thus ended my epic trek.

You know, given how goofy and clueless I am, it is a darn good thing I am cute.

Otherwise, there is no way anyone would be able to put up with me. Truly, I am the wacky sidekick in the grand sitcom of life.

I am Kramer.

Well, here I am, able to post a blog entry today after all. This rocks, because I wrote one yesterday too (I just have to move it from the laptop to my main computer and post it… expect some posting out of order time travel magic soon) which means that once I have all my cute little ducks in a row, I will actually have a post for every day of the convention.

And you know what that means? No posting gaps! My post-a-day record will remain! w00t! 🙂

Had a pretty fun time at the convention, overall, despite the incident that I wrote about for yesterday’s entry (warning, it’s a dark and depressed entry… try to accept that I was feeling really horrible at the time and venting that into text, and that afterward I felt a lot better). Had fun at furry panels, talking about various stuff.

Went to one about Character Building. I joked with the people there that I needed a panel like that, because my Dad always told me that I needed to build some character. They laughed, and I am pretty sure they were laughing with me, so that was positive.

Talked about a lot of cool writerly stuff there about how to make a deep and well fleshed out characters. The dude running the panel had a fairly good understanding of the basics… all the stuff the writing books tell you about how to make your character seem more like a real person. Ask yourself questions about what they are, who they are, when they were born, where they come from, why they do what they do, that kind of thing. What are their motivations? What is their involvement in the world you have built around them?

Stuff I already knew, to be honest, but there is a lot of benefit in just doing something with a bunch of fellow writers. We are such a solitary and isolated lot that anything that lets us all be together and relax and enjoy is worth its weight in publisher’s ink.

I brought up one of my own favorite subjects, which is character appeal. What makes certain character just leap out and make you fall in love with them? What makes a Superman, a Mickey Mouse, a Sherlock Holmes? Characters that have such enormous appeal that they become, essentially, immortal, unlike their all too mortal creators?

Because that is seriously the sort of thing I would like to get into. I want to make characters that people will love so much, they cannot wait to see the next thing they get up to. It’s something I learned from all my sitcom watching, but it applies to everything. Characters people love and want to spend time with will carry your work forward better than absolutely anything else. Audiences will forgive bad writing, poor special effects, plot inconsistencies, and practically all other sins and errors if they love the character enough.

Yes, I’m talking about Doctor Who at the moment. Now THAT is a character that has stood the test of time and proved irresistible to audiences.

Sadly, nobody at the panel had anything particularly insightful to add about character appeal, but that is fine. I have trouble learning writing from others anyhow. I seem to be destined to me the sort of person who has no choice but to learn by doing, as much as I wish that was not the case.

The hotel we stayed at was great. I absolutely loved our room, because it had a whole little kitchen in it. Full sized fridge (none of that minibar crap, although they couldn’t quite keep themselves from at least putting some $2 bottled water in the fridge door. Microwave oven. Sink. Kitchen cabinet with a full set of silverware in it. It felt quite homey, and it meant I saved a ton of money because I just ate food we brought from home most of the time. Beats the hell out of having to pay for a restaurant meal every time I need to eat.

Speaking of that, I saved so much via eating food from home that I was able to splurge by going to the super fancy awesome buffet the restaurant does for Sunday Brunch. And the food was quite good. I deliberately loaded up big time on the protein because I knew I would not be able to avoid the marvelously decadent looking dessert table, and protein does wonders to slow down the digestion of pretty much everything that is not protein, so it blunts the effects of eating bad things.

Still, I probably should not have had the fudge. Not all sugary things are alike, and some are far worse for me than others, and I am pretty sure fudge is about as bad as it gets outside of maybe sugared Kool-Aid or some other form of liquid sugar.

But in my defense, the fudge was really really good. It was just like my grand-aunt’s amazingly good brown sugar fudge that she made every Christmas to give as gifts, but super creamy and soft and rich. So while it was very stupid of me to eat the damn stuff in the first place, at least I got a lot of pleasure from my sin.

If I wasn’t so greedy by nature, I would have been a good boy and just eaten the lovely tasty fresh cut fruit for dessert. Watermelon, pineapple, strawberries… all my all time favorites.

But no, I had to also nab the little slice of chocolate cake, some kind of weird cookie I didn’t end up liking, and the wonderful, magical, deadly fuuuuudge.

The moment I finished eating it, I knew it was a bad idea. And I ended up having to crash out in the car and miss the closing ceremonies due to my overindulgence. Gluttony, thy bite is cruel!

Man, it sucks to be broken.

But I had a great time overall, and I look forward to the next one!