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?