Or at least, that is what it feels like I have right now.

Having one of my sleepy days, and you know what that means. I have spent the day asleep, I feel like utter crap right now, and I had lots of weird dreams.

Nothing worth writing down, though.

My head hurts like hell. The most likely culprit is my sinuses and attendant systems. I will make sure my nose is fully blown and my ears are clear of clogs. That usually does the trick, except in times of big air pressure changes in the weather, when all it does it make it slightly more tolerable.

My reality is such a messed up, unstable, unreliable places. No wonder I tend towards depression and tend to cling hard to the known constants of my life to the exclusion of other possibilities. I am just trying to cope with a reality in which my moods and my health and my mental state are constantly shifting the ground beneath my feet and I never know how I will feel or which door leads to pleasure and which to pain. So I become intensely psychologically conservative, just doing what I always do and blocking all thoughts of anything else, too scared of the world to leave my rusty cage, and run.

Of course, in real world logic, sometimes called “reality”, if I could pry my figners off my clinging post and deal with reality more often and more effectively, a lot of the instability would cease because I would both improve my physical health and give my psyche more input, and thus provide a psycho-sensual baseline for improved perspective on life.

Basically, I would be too busy actually living life and dealing with its challenges and rewards to dwell on inconsequential things and screw my life up with random napping and poor diet and so on.

Right now, I think a lot of my problems stem from the cavernous emptiness of my life, in wish small things cause enormous waves of terrifying echoes and the only peace comes from utter immobility.

And when I try to imagine picking myself up, dusting myself off, and starting, that enormous icy block of paralytic fear gets in the way. The drive shaft is not attached to the engine. The power is generated but it never makes it to the wheels. The linkages are broken, frozen, unable or unwilling to turn.

I am not sure how much of that is psychological scarring, and how much of that is defense mechanism to keep me from having to face the world and deal with what a fucking mess my life is.

And yes, I know the futility of ignoring life because it is too messed up to deal with when it is the very ignoring of reality that has let it get that bad. It is like not cleaning because everything is so messy. Well how did it get that way?

But knowing this does not immediately grant the strength to change it. That has to come from somewhere else, from recovery or fortune or some other extrinsic source of increased potency. Something has to act to shift that burden of ice inside me, to melt it down and let it flow to rejoin the sea, before I can regain enough of myself to make a difference in my life.

Until then, all I can do is make tiny bits of temporary progress in those rare moments when the tides and tornadoes inside me happen to collide in such a way that the eye of the storm passes over me, and I have the strength to pick up my rock and move it a little further along the path.

And I guess I should be content with that. It is not like this massive loathing of my own life is actually leading anywhere productive. Instead, it just fuels the chaos inside. If I could simply accept that I am a very sick person and hence I am not going to get all I want out of life right away, I would be far more content and a lot more likely to actually get better things in my life without the pain and chaos of self-hate and rage.

But again, know that would be the answer, or one answer at least, does not magically make it happen. I really do hate my stupid fucking life and I still cannot find a way to overcome the horror of an entire adult life wasted on depression and and sponging off others and not taking responsibility for my life and this making me an enormous loser.

I just cannot get over or around that fact. I try to forgive myself for it all, tell myself I have been very unfortunate in being a victim of mental illness for so long, and that I should not beat myself up for what I could not control, and that it is all in the past now and there is nothing I can do about it, all I can do is try to control the present to influence the future, and blah blah blah.

But here is the thing about wisdom. Knowing the smart, sensitive, wise, deep, true answer does not make the probklem go away. There is no Grand Teacher who puts a checkmark on your test, and praises you for how good an answer it is, and then you are free to move on to the next thing.

I am very good at knowing that wise and wonderful answer. But it does not fix anything by itself. There are some things no amount of intelligence, sensitivity, wit, intuition, and other mental magic can fix.

And it is these things, things for which no amount or kind of mental action with suffice, things for which even the question “So what do I do to fix it?” is meaningless because that too ask for a mental action, those things confound me.

If i cannot think my way out, then I am trapped.

There is no map for this maze.

… jack shit has happened!

(By the way, if you are experiencing Hot News Flashes and you are a woman over the age of forty who has at least four cats and the entire DVD box set of Sex in the City plus the movies, ask you doctor about Nomanitol, the surprisingly insertable drug for special women just like you)

Not a lot to report about my vague approximation of a life. Feeling sort of crappy right now, not sure why. Achey joints, a big headache, a weird feverish sort of feeling, and a kind of low level irritability that makes me wanna say bitchy cutting things to people.

Luckily, I am all alone in the apartment tonight, so there are no targets for my lazy ire.

So I can go ahead and feel grumpy. Fuckers.

My main worry is that this is the beginning of a flu type infection. In general in my life, that is what the sudden onset of aching joints has meant.

But who knows? Maybe it will all go away, leaving as mysteriously as it came, and I will be left to just shrug and go on with my life wondering if I just dodged a bullet, or whether it was just minor symptoms making me paranoid because my life is so devoid of content that the smallest of things make a huge noise, like dripping water echoing in a vast underground cave.

Until then, though, it is painful and irritating. I feel tightly wound. I hate that feeling. I am a naturally laid back and loose kind of guy.

Or at least, part of me is. The good part. The strong, resilient, awesomely cool part.

The rest of me is a pathetic bundle of neuroses that gets whacked around by life like a ball in a Giants Versus Ogres croquet tournament.

At least I always have a metaphor or simile handy, like some sort of stuff… having… thing.

But oh well. As I go through therapy and do things to try to help myself feel better, the good part of myself, the part that represents the version of myself that I hope to become, gets bigger and stronger, and this island of my soul grows, and who knows, some day it might even be big enough for a fully grown and intact human being to live and love and grow and even lay full down and sleep the good sleep of the whole and healthy person, and awake refreshed.

I have been trying to avoid abusing sleep lately. It seems odd to imagine that sleep is something you can abuse, but you can. Depression makes it easy. Feeling depressed, anxious, confused, angsty? Just go to sleep and fast forward through life to the next good part.

In my sad life, that tends to be a meal.

Of course, a fast forward button is the last thing I need in my life. I have fast forwarded through me entire adult life. I am approaching forty at light speed and I have done pretty much nothing. What I need is a pause button, or even better, rewind.

Just let me go back to that night in the Chinese restaurant when my parents told me and my brother they were taking us out of university so they could take early retirement instead.

I will take it from there. I will come down on them with the full force of my mind and my personality and trust me, I will talk them out of it, and things will turn out a lot differently.

Maybe not better. Part of me says “I can’t imagine it being any worse” when I say that, but of course, things can always be worse. I could have gotten cancer and died a slow painful death before I was even 25 years old. I could have gotten killed in a car accident. I could have ended up in an abusive relationship that left me even more emotionally screwed up than I am now.

Things can always be worse than they are now. Most of us know that. The hard part is being grateful for all the bad things that have not happened to you, and glad that your life is not nearly as bad as some people’s lives, and you have a lot to be thankful for.

It is far, far easier to take all your good fortune for granted, like that is the default state of the universe that nothing could possibly change, or even worse, like you have the worst life possible.

No you don’t. Just living in the modern civilized world means you have a better life than two thirds of humanity living on Earth at this time. Be glad that pure dumb luck made you part of the top third of the population, living in the safety and comfort of modern life.

Even if you are just a loser like me living off the system and wasting your life on the Internet, you and I have a life that would make someone living in misery, squalor, and anarchy in some undercivilized part of the world, where human life is cheap and you have never known a moment without pain, danger, hunger, and thirst.

So, you know…. perspective.

Mayeb if I can keep this sort of thing in mind, I can fight back the urge to say “I hate my life!” so myself so often and try to move myself back to the pint of view where I live in extremely minor luxury and am glad that I live someplace where I am not forced to work despite my serious mental illness, and I can take the time I need to get better.

And boy, is that taking a long damned time. My whole adult life so far.

And so once more, I am left facing the vast void of my life so far, and what a god damn loser I am.

Oh well, at least I am a highly talented and intelligent loser.

Better than having nothing at all.

And feeling half dead.

No new sulfur burps today, so that was likely a false alarm. So hard to know the difference between justified concern and raving neurosis. Possibly I simply had a mild tummy upset from something I ate. Or I did indeed have a case of some over zealous gut bug, but a very mild one.

Or maybe it was just a reaction to the Keflex. Who knows.

Either way, I feel more or less normal, or at least the local variable defined as such, today. At the current moment, I feel a little crappy from some poor quality sleep I just had.

Talk about tough decision to make. Before supper, I felt very tired. Cooking supper and eating it was not making me feel any less tired. So I decided that, contrary to my usual routine, I would take a nap before writing. (What a wild wacky genius I am. )

But because my life is inherently perverse and wicked, the moment I actually lay down, suddenly I was not even remotely sleepy. Went from quite sleepy to not at all sleepy in the space between two heartbeats. Dead tired, not tired. Boom.

This pissed me off. So I lay there, angry with myself and unable to decide whether I should just get up to write, and thus set myself up for the gag where the moment I get back up and set to work, I am super sleepy again, or to just lay there and try to get some sleep in spite of myself.

Well, indecision led to choice B, as eventually I fell asleep while trying to decide,

And then proceeded to have some pretty crummy sleep that left me feeling crappy when I woke up, and I still feel that way right now. I have a headache (damn I need to get that giant bottle of acetominiphen soon), I feel sort of sleepy but not in a healthy way, I am tired and irritable and hostile to this cold and jagged universe and everyone in it who is happy.

Seriously, happy people. Fuck you. Gimmie some or fuck off and die.

This is not a characteristic mood of mine, but I am learning to accept that I will just plain feel this way sometimes, and the best course of action is not to push it down and suppress it and thus add more energy to my depression, but to let it unfold and try to understand and learn from it.

After all, my life languishes in the doldrums of depression largely due to lack of motive force, primal energy, the deep fire that pushes people onwards and powers them over obstacles.

And anger is part of that primal power structure. Anger, bitterness, jealousy, greed, and all the other “bad” emotions all have their place in the operation of a healthy psyche, and trying to suppress them completely only leads to depression, anxiety, and darkness.

It takes a lot of shadow to cover that much emotion and make it seem like it has disappeared. So much shadow, in fact, that you end up living in the dark and the cold and not knowing why.

But no matter how cold you feel and how much you curse the darkness, with the slightest sign of heat and light you bury yourself deeper in the dark and the cold, because heat threatens to bring to life all the dead emotions you have buried in the frozen tundra of your soul, and the light hurts your eyes.

That is why the basic therapeutic process of digging up those old frozen traumas is so important. Dig them up, warm them back into life, and deal with them in realtime. The fewer of them you have, the more light and warmth you can let into the landscape of your soul, and the more of the good healthy hopeful positive emotions that you so desperately need can you let in.

The hard part starts when they start to melt and revive and demand to be dealt with on their own. Then you never know when an emotion that has little or nothing to do with what is happening to you right at that moment will rear its head and force you to deal with it.

That can be quite awkward and you might be tempted to push it back down, or at least try. In fact, if something really important is going on, you might not have a choice. We are able to suppress our emotions specifically so that we can still act in our own best interest in times when our emotions might otherwise lead us to act against them.

It is just that when you are a damaged person, you abuse that otherwise necessary system and end up eventually suppressing nearly everything in order to keep not dealing with your emotional backlog… which of course only causes it to grow.

Myself, I am still trapped in that cycle to some extent, but I fight it when I can. I have learned to really treasure those watershed moments when something triggers a grand melting of the ice inside me and a big iceberg of suppressed self breaks off the glacier inside and drifts off to melt in the sunset.

Those times might not be a hundred percent fun while they happen, in fact, they are often quite awful. But I treasure them anyhow, because after the flood, I feel so more more alive and solid and whole that I have no problem saying it was all worth it, and then some.

Perhaps that is my next step. Feel about within my soul for the next glacial fault line and give it a few well placed taps with my hammer and piton to set it in motion, letting its own weight lead it to snap off and float into warmer waters to melt, and free me from its frigid crushing weight.

Enough of that, and I might actually catch up on my emotional backlog and be free.

And then what?

Well today has been fun.

And by fun, I mean moist.

Today started off like most Tuesdays, with a therapy session. After yesterday’s emotional swamp clearance (sorry you folks had to see all that, but I am feeling much better now, thanks), today’s session was fairly routine and low key.

In a weird way, I wish my emotional emesis (ha, I know a word the Windows dictionary does not!) had come at the therapist’s office. It just seems like it would have been more useful there. But oh well, when it has to come out, it has to come out.

Still, I suppose I wouldl be better off if I had some way of letting the darkness and nastiness out a little bit at a time instead of it building up inside me till it gets so toxic I have to regurgitate it onto the page and leave it there to dry.

Anyhow, so therapy was not anything to write home about, although I did call him to task for getting caught up on semantics, and I am quite proud of myself for that.

I am sick and tired of ending up in pointless and fruitless dissections of word choice with the man. Sure, I recognize that choice of words can be very revealing and there is some merit to the discussion of why a patient says X instead of Y.

But past a certain point, it just gets really fucking irritating to be trying to make a point of great emotional importance and deep personal meaning and have him get bogged down on why I said “destroy” when “destroy” means it can’t come back, and blah blah blag.

NOT MY POINT.

I think he got the message.

So after that, I had a doctor’s appointment. But not until 11:15, leaving me with something like two hours to kill.

Normally, if I have a doctor’s appointment after therapy, Joe takes me to it and waits then takes me home. But this one was unreasonably late. So instead, I had him drop me off at the White Spot near my doctor’s office, and I chilled there for a while.

I ordered brunch, which Joe was nice enough to bankroll (he is a SAINT), which was a kind of breakfast bowl thing. It sounded good on the menu, with layers of bacon, cheese omelet, hash browns, and so on, but when it arrived, it just seemed gross to me. I hate it when my tastes do a flipflop like that. Made me wish I had gotten a more normal breakfast with all those same things cleanly separated like decent breakfast items. And I am the guy who usually loves mixing things.

But this time… meh. I mean, I ate it, and it tasted fine. I just gazed longingly over at the normal breakfast another patron ordered.

Anyhow, I lingered at White Spot, drinking Diet Coke and reading Mysterious Planet, a juvenile by Lester Del Ray from 1951. It is a damned good book, regardless of it being written with 13-17 year old boys in mind. He does a great job of both keeping the pace up and providing enough genuine twists, turns, and cliffhangers to make the whole thing quite the thrilling read.

Sure, the characters are pretty cardboard (but likeable) and it certainly bears the markings of a previous era of what it meant to be a boy and what boys wanted, but that is no barrier to me. In fact, it is rather nice to visit a simpler and more innocent era, where they were sure that in the future there would be no more wars and humanity would be living all over the Solar System and we would all liver longer, safer, happier lives.

As a Gen X guy, I crave that kind of optimism and verve like a man dying of thirst craves water. We are the generation of irony and yet we are irresistibly drawn to un-ironic things. Granted, we might enjoy them ironically, but we also just plain love them for their innocent simplicity.

It is like the bourgeois search of the genuine taken to the metacultural, decadist level.

Result of doctor’s appointment : My finger is cleanly on the mend, despite still resembling a zombie chew toy. I have five more days of antibiotics to take, and then I can finally taking the dressing off my finger and resume typing with all ten fingers already.

And boy, am I looking forward to that. My typing is so much slower and clumsier with my right index finger out of commission. And the rest of the fingers on that hand keep cramping up and being a pain because they do not want to do the extra work.

For a writer like me, it is like trying to talk with a cleft palate.

So after the doc, I took the bus home, got my prescription for more Cephelex filled, then headed home… only to realize that the worst had happened.

I had forgotten my keys!

Forgetting your keys is always bad, but I knew I was extra doomed, because I knew Joe and Julian would both be asleep (Joe works graveyard, and Julian matches his sleep schedule to Joe’s) and so there was nobody awake to let me in.

I tried the buzzer a bunch of times. Nope, no response. I waited around hoping someone else from my building would be coming in. After all, every other time I come home, there is someone else who wants to get in at the same time. But nope, no dice.

So I trudge over to Safeway, and ask to use the phone at the courtesy desk. I call Joe’s cell phone three times. But nope. No answer.

Finally, I have to call poor Felicity, wake her up, and get her to drive over and rescue me.

It was that, or resort to scratching on the door and whining.

So eventually I got in, but it was not a fun time.

But it’s over now, so who cares? It’s an anecdote now.

I am typing tonight’s blog entry into a text file for now, as my web host is being a bitch.

But what the fuck else is new, my whole life sucks shit with a straw right now.

I am not feeling good.

Here I am, at the bottom of the pit again, at that special, special place in my mood cycle where all the pain and frustration and digust and horror boil over into a scaling sea of scalding anger and bitterness inside me, and I feel crazy and complicated and wild and trapped.

But what limb do I gnaw off to get out of a trap made of my own stupid and pointless fears?

Something in my brain, no doubt. In the limbic system. Hmm, there must be some knitting needles around here somewhere…

So as you can tell, I am not a happy fucking camper right now, I am in that terrible mental state that I get into now and then, whenever I cycle back around to it, where I hate hate hate my entire life and hate myself and hate everything I do and just want to leap out of my own skin with an unearthly shriek and dash myself into tiny pieces of filthy worthless flesh on the rocks below.

These are the worst times, when the depression has reached some kind of peak (or nadir?) and merely being low energy and kind of sad all the time just is not cutting it any more,

Cutting it… hmm, lots of people cut themselves. Maybe I will try that.

Nah. I could never go through with it. I am fundementally a sensible person, damn me, so the more dramatic forms of expressing my depression and disgust with life are not really open to me.

I am too boring for them.

I have never even attempted suicide, Well, not in a sense that would make sense to anyone living outside my skull anyhow. There have been times when I seriously considered it, just to get away from the pain for a while, but it never left the preliminary planning stages.

And all this infected finger bullshit has certainly shown me that now matter how bad you think things are, they can always get much much worse, so it is not like self-harm would help anything.

It would just make my life suck even worse.

So much for that way out.

Besides, self-harm is way too much work and too big of a commitment. I am more the self-neglect type.. It’s easy, it’s super cheap, it requires very little commitment, and it definitely will kill you eventually, especially if you are a super fattie like me.

All you have to do is fail to do the things you really should do in order to stay healthy, and then your body slowly falls apart and makes you even more miserable and you don’t have to lift a darn finger to make it happen!

In fact, laziness is not just part of the plan, it’s the principle modality of the entire syndrome.

Think about it. Cutting yourself requires finding a sharp knife, picking a spot, hiding the scars from friends, controlling the bleeding, Alcoholism and other addictions require so much work to maintain, with all that grubbing for cash for your next fix, then coming up, going down, crashing, and all that other bullshit… it’s practically like having a job.

So for the truly lazy and listless, worthless depressive hunk of crap like me, really there is no substitute for simple self-neglect. All you have to do is… nothing!

And the best part is that nobody will have any sympathy for you, because from their point of view, you definitely could do all these things that would make things better. How hard is it to just do this and that, tiny little things that any faintly competent ambulatory cell cluster should find easy to the point of reflex action? They are tiny simple things! You could totally do them!

Well then, we do not care about you, because you are just doing it to yourself.

And that’s just it… you are!

So you just stay out of the way and do not draw attention to yourself and quietly rot away in the dark.

Oh well. If I get angry and fucked up enough, maybe I really will do something crazy and at least become a more interesting form of lunatic.

As is right now, I am boring as hell and I can’t imagine why anyone gives a damn about me.

I sure don’t.

I mean, i try to care about myself. I really do. I try to dig down through all the hardened and calcified layers of depressive sediment to find at least the basic core of pure selfish greed and self-centered desire that all human beings are supposed to possess.

And I get faint readings of it now and then, maybe find a small deposit here and there. But never enough to translate into actual motivation. The fear creates far too strong a gravitational force for any serious movement. Just a slow creeping over the ground as a thin layer of suffering flesh without purpose or intention.

Drifting for the sake of drifting. Motion simply because the flight response cannot ever be completely overwhelmed by the desire to hide. There is always leakage. And that expresses itself as slow random tentative and ultimately quite pointless and futile motion.

The hardest thing about a time like this is that I know that it is temporary. I know that if I write it out and express the dark ugly feelings and vent like I am about to go critical, the dark glowing toxic cloud will pass, and I will feel more or less better for the next cycle.

But knowing this, I still have to go through the process as though I had no idea it was temporary or it simply will not work.

Smart or not, you still have to do the god damned work.

And how fair is that?

No news on the finger front, so you are all spared my tales of digital woe for a day.

It is a pleasantly sunshiney day out there in that big bad Outside place that I have heard so much about. And while I generally remain indoors as much as is feasible, it is still nice to look out my window and see the sun and the clouds and the blue, blue sky.

Right now, Ma Nature is providing a nice show of sky for me, with the top half of my view all cerulean majesty while the bottom half sports a tastefully draped cummerbund of thin, wispy white cloud.

Nature is a bitch, but that bitch knows art.

Today is April Fool’s Day, an occasion about which I have determinedly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I really do not like practical jokes, for the most part. Perhaps it is a part of my decidedly unusual and horseplay-deprived childhood, but practical jokes just seem like socially sanctioned cruelty to me.

Great for people who like to do mean things without the other person being able to get mad.

Like that asshole Ashton Kutcher.

But what I do like about this Day of Fools is the spirit of public silliness that it inspires in normally staid public institutions. I am all for the forms of silliness and jokery in which nobody gets hurt and people just let their hair down and have some fun for a day.

Like take Google’s April Fool’s entry, the Really Advanced Search

Anything which prompts the world’s biggest search engine (and possibly its only one, for all I know or care) to release a search form with entries like “words almost, but not quite entirely unlike”, or “calque or loanword origin” or my favorite, “this exact word or phrase, whose sum of unicode code points is a mersenne prime”, can’t be all bad.

Do not bother trying out some of the more intriguing entries, by the way. No matter what you input, clicking the Submit button just takes you to a Google search page for April Fool’s Day.

That’s too bad, because I was really intrigued by the prospect of being able to look up Cockney rhyming slang. That shit is confusing.

I wasfeeling pretty depressed earlier. Got feeling overwhelmed and inadequate and small and helpless and lame and pathetic and all the rest of the demon choir chiming in. So I summoned up all my courage, looked my problems square in the eye, and went the hell back to sleep.

That will show them.

And what the hell, it worked. I went to sleep feeling freaked out and desperate and trapped and bad bad bad, and I woke up feeling a lot better.

Sometimes, my best option is to just go to sleep and spin the mood wheel again. Sad but true,

I have been feeling more anxious and depressed lately. Obviously, this is primarily because of my health concerns. Being sick for a long time, especially in a gross and horrifying way, would make anyone feel kind of down. And when like me, down is your default position, it is no wonder that I have been feeling worse than usual lately.

But I also wonder if it has to do with my relatively recent lowering of Paxil dosage. Having a major long term stressor and a lowering of antidepressant dosage happen at the same time is probably a bad thing. But that is just the kind of thing life pulls on the likes of me. It never throws challenges or life events at me one at a time. Oh no. It is like rain in the desert… most of the time, there is nothing, but when it does rain, it’s Biblical.

This prevents me from ever getting used to it. It’s like psychological torture.

But what the hell. What does not kills us merely makes us a miserable wreck of the shadow of a human being. I trudge merrily forward through the sewage of my life.

On happier news, I came across this article about some simply breathtaking pictures taken of life in London in the 19th century.

Specifically, the 1870s. Photographer John Thompson set out with writer Adolphe Smith to document London life as it was at that time, and they made record of the images and stories of over 700 people. Each photograph was accompanied by a caption (presumable, that was the writer’s job) that summed up the information about that person.

Check out this one, presented with original caption. Click to enlarge :

Caney the Clown once delighted at the pantomime but 'since his exertions to please at Stepney Fair caused the bursting of a varicose vein in his leg, the mending of chairs brings him constant employment' Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123212/Black-white-pictures-capture-lives-Londoners-1800s.html#ixzz1qpuyfvNt

Well, part of the original caption anyhow.

The clarity is startling. Either John Thompson was a photographer ahead of his time, or there has been some digital help in sharpening the image. Either way, for those who love that feeling of time travel one gets from history, this is mind popping stuff. It is like you are standing right there on the street in London of the day, but without the smell.

Oh, and one last thing I should tell you about before I go : Cooking with Poo.

Go on, I dare ya to click it!

Turns out, it is merely a cookbook written by Tha chef Saiyuud Diwong whose nickname is Poo – which is Thai for “crab”.

Well that settles it. If I ever have a pet crab, I am naming it Winnie. Winnie the… you get the idea.

Did I say Cockney rhyming slang was complicated? Maybe I was thinking of my own sense of humour.

Well, that is all for today. I mostly avoided talking about my gross zombie finger, and I am proud of that. I shared some fun stuff with you nice people, and I am proud of that too.

Because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.

Or something like science, anyhow.

Well, the finger is still a super gross bloated zombie finger. The Keflex is obviously not doing jack shit. I will keep taking it as instructed, of course, because I am not a total moron and for all I know, without the Keflex, this shit would have eaten half my arm by now.

But clearly, it is not getting the job done. So I have to just wait till Tuesday morning till I see my GP again and he will have the results of the swab taken at the hospital by then, and therefore will, hopefully, be able to target the bug with the right antibiotic and I can begin to put this whole thing behind me at last.

Listening to the old guys with their catheter problems was really eye-opening for me. It really put things in perspective for me. I do not want to end up one of those people who are always in the hospital for one thing or another and never know a moment when there is something seriously wrong with them.

I do not want to be a sickly person. I do not want to become an invalid. I do not want to get to know all the people in the Emergency Room by their first names and know how many kids they have and their ages and names. I do not want to be sick all the god damned time.

But that is what I am facing as I go into the future unless I pay far closer attention to my health and specifically my diabetes.

I only got this finger infection because my blood sugar is way too high. I don’t know that for sure, but that is only because I have not tested my levels in like…. years. I have the little card that tells them my testing supplies are all paid for and everything. I could go get more tomorrow. But I have been lazy and negligent about it.

That shit has to end.

It’s already too late to escape the needle. Ever since they canceled the drug that actually worked on my blood sugars (Avandia) because of health warnings, no other drug has been available that could do the job, and I am betting my condition is only getting worse.

That means one thing : insulin injections are in my future. There is an outside chance that if I just clamp down on my diet firmly enough, I will be able to avoid the needle. But the damage is done.

I will likely ending up having to learn to inject myself. Yahoo.

Doctor Wong said I will likely lose the fingernail on the infected finger, and that when it comes back, it may look pretty weird. Regrown fingernails sometimes do. And while I really do not want that to happen, if it does, it will at least remind me constantly of what happens when I neglect my health and failed to take care of myself.

I have had coming up on two weeks of being sick, acutely sick, and I am probably going to have at least another week before this thing is cleared up. And I dearly want to go back to the land of the only chronically ill and stay there.

And that is going to cost me in effort, attention, focus, and dedication.

Historically, I hagve not been good at those. Hopefully this whole finger thing will make a nice deep impression and I will be able to develop new habits that stick, as opposed to before, where I lose dedication and focus once the novelty wears off and then I hit a serious retractive phase in my emotional cycle and I get the powerful urge to reduce complications because I just can;t COPE.

Oh, and here is your latest dose of Japanese robot nightmare fuel.

So when going into a new cycle of trying to actually take care of myself in ways that require more that just taking your pills on time. I am going to have to go in forearmed with the knowledge that it will be easy and even fun at first, but it will be the emotional low points, where I am down and desperate and can’t see the point of anything and just want to curl into a ball and unplug from the world, that are mostly likely to break the discipline needed to keep going on things.

Oh right. Some of my online friends think this drubk guy singing the entire Bohemian Rhapsody in the back of an RCMP car looks like me.

Me, I don’t see it.

And my cute Asian male nurse from the ER on Friday thought I looked like this guy.

Yo, dude, got a burger?

This one I can see, although honestly, I think that guy (Mikey from Orange County Choppers) is a lot better looking than me. I only wish I looked that good.

It is possible that my cute Asian male nurse was attracted to me and was hitting on me and or flirting. If so, cool. Some day, I hope to notice these things while they are actually happening.

Talk about esprit d’escalier.

So anyhow, zombie finger remains zombie finger, whcih means the dressing stays on at least until things scab over properly or something, It worries me, how little size it lost when drained. What the hell is the rest of the mass if not pus?

I shudder to think of it.

Final bit of science-adjacent fun : This elected official in the UK says his real mother is a nine foot green alien woman.

Funny that never came uo during the election campaign.

His story is quite detailed. Might just be an April Fool’s Day prank. Or, after a month in office, he has decided he hates the job and has chosen a highly colorful and unique way to commit political suicide. If so, bravo sir.

Hey, if you gotta go, go big.