Once more, the space where I keep ideas of what to write about is conspicuously empty. I am definitely feeling a little dopey and stunned lately.

Then again, I have been having one of my Sleepy Days, and those tend to fry the old noggin up pretty darn good. Lots of really deep sleep with long stretches of intense dream activity and waking up covered in sweat and feeling like I just ran a marathon through Hell.

So, the usual thing.

In fact, a little harder than usual. These prize fights with Mister Sandman have been taking an even heavier toll than usual. I judge this by the fact that I felt even more beat down than usual upon waking, and especially because I was quite conscious of wanting to wake up and not being able to do so in several of my dreams.

It was sort of like being sedated. In the dreams, I was suddenly aware of feeling very heavy all over, and I awoke feeling like I had only managed to escape the dreaming world with considerable effort, and possibly only because it let me go.

That always bothers me a little bit. It offends my sense of control and freedom to think that sleep can hold on to me even when I feel like coming back to reality. I resent anything that traps me.

Then again, I probably really need the sleep. I mentioned before that I had been having lousy quality sleep lately, fitful and restless and unsatisfying, and that I was almost looking forward to the next big sleep crash.

Well, it came today, and it has been a lulu. And yet, the in between times have not been unpleasant. I have eaten and watched stuff and gone to the bathroom like usual, not feeling bad at all. If anything, I felt sort of pleasantly sleepy. You know, that cozy kind of feeling you get when you are all sleepy and going through your bedtime routine and looking forward to slipping between the sheets and surrendering to sleep for the night?

I am provisionally taking this as more evidence that I am learning to just accept, and maybe even enjoy, these sleepy periods. After all, I had nothing to get done today, no hard scheduled events that would have required me to fight the sleepiness and pull myself together and focus, and that is where the big stress comes in.

Instead, I just relaxed and let it all happen to me, no big deal, just another sleepy day. And so hopefully, by tomorrow, when I will have hard scheduled things like a therapist session and a doctor’s appointment, I will have banked up enough sleep to make my appointments without too much trouble and stress.

Speaking of the doctor’s appointment, I am not looking forward to it. The appointment was not my idea, although I was not surprised when my doctor’s office called up to make it. See, they called Friday morning because they had gotten my test results from last Tuesday, and that can only mean my test results were not very good.

That does not surprise me. I imagine my Type II diabetes is raging out of control. I have been trying to modify my diet so that it has way less carbs ever since the Zombie Finger incident. But I keep forgetting and going back to old bad habits.

I really suck at taking care of myself. Neglecting oneself as one was once neglected. Bad.

So I am not looking forward to this appointment. I rather feel like a kid who just got called to the principal’s office. You might not know exactly what for, but you know it can’t be good.

And I know my condition is bad. The little orange pills I am on do not do a damn thing to help control my condition. I really miss my Avandia. That, plus the other two diabetes meds I take pretty much had the condition licked. But then Avandia got taken off the shelves for some kind of liver problems, at which point I should have immediately gone back to a very strict low carb diet like I had right after my diagnosis…. but I did not.

Instead, I just kept eating the same way. And still living the same extremely sedentary lifestyle wuth almost zero exercise. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The depression makes it so hard to change, though. I have to cling to what small pleasures I can afford because there is precious little pleasure in my life, and pleasure is what we all need in order to avoid the pitfalls of depression.

We need pleasure in order to maintain our sense of well-being. We cannot survive emotionally without our pleasures. And we depressives need them more than anyone else. That is why were are so prone to addictions, be they chemical, sexual, or in my case, just plain digestive.

The key is the reward center of the brain. Whatever activates that is prone to becoming the depressive’s route to self-medication and addiction. In a way, the activation mechanism is secondary. The real problem is the low serotonin levels in the brain, which put the mind into a sort of emergency state not unlike starvation, with a similar brutal simplification.

What matters is what activates that reward center and keeps the serotonin levels from being even more catastrophically low. The long term health of the organism is irrelevant. Like people adrift at sea driven by maddening thirst to drink seawater, even though they know it will likely kill them, the depressive is driven to repeat the long term unhealthy behaviours by the dire ferocity of the short term need. We drink the poison that will kill us tomorrow in order to make it through today.

And the thing about being addicted to food is that everyone can see the product of your addiction hanging from your body in a huge bulbous mound of lard.

And every place that sells food is your pusher.

Being fat sure as fuck ain’t easy. But getting thin is way harder.

And so we just die young. Like I probably will do.