Feeling a bit better today. Perhaps it is the sunny weather that is improving my mood.

I made some eBay purchases recently, and one of them is one of those full spectrum light therapy rigs. It basically looks like a very fancy makeup mirror. I am hoping that I can use it to set my sleep schedule to something more normal and healthy.

Maybe even sleep for eight hours… in a row! Imagine that.

Of course, if it turns out to make me happier as well, outside the better sleep, all the better. Admittedly, it will be a while before the local weather fails to provide sunlight on a regular basis anyhow, but what the heck.

It takes me so long to get around to doing things sometimes that I have learned to strike whether the iron is hot or not. My “doing things” window tends to be small and random, so I get things done whenever I can.

Depression is so inconvenient.

Still, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, I will be going out to eat and hanging out with my friends tonight, and tomorrow I get X-rays to fix this thing with my left knee, so things are looking pretty good from here, for now.

The knee still hurts, obviously. My theory (of course I have a theory) is that some vital bit of cartilage has somehow broken or worn away and that is letting my kneecap click against my femur in a way that Really Really Sucks.

See, there is normal pain. And there is pone pain.

I know bone pain well, because I broke my arm three times as a kid. It is a deep and very disturbing kind of pain, Your body knows something is terribly, terribly wrong. The vital framework that holds everything else together now has a discontinuity, and that totally weirds your body out.

Now luckily, whatever the fuck happened to my knee is no big deal, as these things go. I am not in a cast, nor am I likely to be (I hope). The leg is usable, so I am not stuck in a wheelchair or on crutches.

I have been on crutches before, and holy shit does it suck. Especially in a cramped apartment like ours. I mean, it’s actually quite a big apartment, but we have so many bookshelves lining the hallway that it is quite narrow now, and getting through THAT on crutches when I am not exactly nimble to start with would be a nightmare.

Plus, imagine having to support all my ponderous weight on my armpits. Not fun.

So it is not as bad as it could be. But that bone pain is a monster, y’all. It doesn’t just hurt, it makes me feel panicky and nauseous. And it is all about how many steps I have to take in a row, augmented by whether there are stairs involved.

As long as I can rest up, the first little while moving around will not hurt that much. I’ll still feel the pain, but it will be minor, not at the nausea and panic level at all.

But the more I use the injured leg, the more each step hurts and the more I feel that burning feeling of inflammation heating up my knee (actually, both of them, for some reason) and sending me powerful “STOP DOING THIS” signals.

And if I keep it up, the bone ache spreads into the marrow of my bones, and that is when I start feeling dizzy and anxious and like I wanna barf.

Just getting home from the Shopper’s Drug Mart next door was a long journey into pain. Luckily, I found that small pauses in my gait kept the pain down to a tolerable level. But that trip has never been more dauntingly, subjectively long before.

But I had no choice. I needed more insulin. Can’t exactly put that off until I get well. For all I know, it will take months before this thing is fully healed.

I mean, I hope not, but I try to be realistic about this sort of thing.

My main worry is that this is just the first acute symptom of something more broad-spread. My doctor mentioned osteo-arthritis and that sounded entirely plausible. Hence my sudden worry about the calcium levels in my diet.

They say that after 40, your bones start to decalcify on their own, and so you have to increase the amount of calcium in your diet in order to compensate. The only calcium I currently get is the cheese on burgers when I eat out once a week.

That is clearly nowhere near enough.

So I am not sure what form it will take, but I will definitely increase my calcium intake soon. I guess I will buy some supplements just to be sure. But I would really rather get it from food.

Even if that means wrangling the logistics of supplying myself with milk to drink on a daily basis. The problem is that I would have to get it in the right amount, so that I will drink it all before it goes bad.

My first instinct is always to buy in bulk, both to save money and keep from having to get more all the time. So I would want to buy one of those bigassed gallon jugs of moo juice.

But that would probably go bad before I drank it all.

Oh well, I am sure I will work it out somehow. I can see making milk a daily thing. It’s not that I don’t like the taste. Milk is great. I just got out of the habit of drinking it at some point.

A nice cold glass of milk with lunch every day sounds fine by me. Might even help with my chronic acid stomach issues.

I think I am going to be buying myself some milk tonight.

I guess that is all for me for today, folks! Talk to you tomorrow.

Why do I feel like I have something to prove?

I guess everybody does, in a way. We are born to find our place in society and to seek status within that society. I was told at an early age that I was exceptionally bright and that I was bound to go places.

And I probably would have, if certain things hadn’t happened.

I am still exceptionally bright. I’m also witty and highly creative, as well as a pretty nice guy. And I am not dead yet. I still could go places. I could still become a success.

The problem, then, is not with wanting more. It is with beating yourself up for not having it yet and/or not pursuing like you “should”. The more I examine this inner fascist regime of mine, the better I understand its methods. Like a corrupt dictatorship, it will use any means at its disposal to maintain its power over “me the people”, and its main weapon is fear.

After all, if you can convince the people that the world outside is a horrible, horrible place filled with dangerous enemies that only you, Dictator Depression, can save them from, it is a lot easier to get them to comply with your demands for more and more power and less and less freedom.

Even if the people start to wonder whether what you say about the outside world is the whole picture, or even true, as long as you have the upper hand with fear, as long as they are too scared to go find out for themselves, your regime is safe.

And if they start to get out of line, you have a well developed arsenal of torture techniques, as well as a crack team of brutal enforcers and cold-blooded propagandists, to punish and punish and punish until your will reigns supreme.

( Now exiting metaphor. )

So torturing myself over my failure to embrace any of the millions of different ways I could be attempting to fulfill my ambitions is just another technique which, despite its apparent intentions, is actually just there to keep me in my sad little place of darkness and depression.

Every time I look at my synthesizer, or tablet, or a piece of creativity software like the kind I use for video or music, or a link to a place that accepts submissions from people like me (like motherfucking Cracked.com), or even just try to think about ways to improve my life, the oppressive regime makes me feel really guilty that I am not doing any of those things, and the pain of my guilt makes me develop yet another aversion, and it is that very guilt-aversion reaction that keeps me from being able to follow my ambitions in the first place.

I am always fleeing the feeling of guilt and despair I feel when I think about the tools of my ambitions, and that, of course, makes it impossible to approach said tools and maybe even use them to get somewhere.

And maybe that’s the point of it all. No matter how much “me the people” want to get out into the world and learn and grow and experience things, the inner regime wants to maintain the status quo and uses this guilt-aversion system to keep things the same. We’re not keeping you down, we’re keeping you safe!

Well I don’t feel safe. I feel like I am trapped in a cell with a madman. There has to be a way out.

Perhaps the first step is to stop thinking of all these possibilities I have accumulated (and I know how to acquire so very many more) as burdens of guilt that just make me feel like a giant loser who has wasted his entire life. That is, to put it very mildly, hella counterproductive.

I have spent a long time punishing myself for every little thing. Fuck that. Time to try to learn to be nice to myself.

Instead of burdens, I should see all those possibilities as gifts I have acquired over time, valuable possessions that I should be glad to own, each to be treasured and valued and adored without feeling the need to do something with them.

They are mine, to do with as I please. They are not, I repeat, NOT a gaggle of accusing fingers all pointed at me and singing a song of failure and loserdom. Maybe they are just not the right tool for me at the moment. Maybe they are things that meant something once but I have moved on since then. Maybe they are just fragments of the shell I outgrew and molted off.

Maybe I am way past do for another molting.

If I can complete this exercise of psychological spin control, then I can remove a major blockage within me and maybe, just maybe, rest a little easier in this old skin of mine.

I keep trying to get to a place where I can just accept my life how it is and stop hating myself for what it’s not. A place where I can just live my life for my own enjoyment and not be haunted by all these demons of ambition that tell me that I could totally be kicking the world’s ass right now and because I don’t, I’m a way bigger loser than someone without all my gifts living the exact same life.

But I think I have a long road ahead of me before I can get to that safe calm place. I think I need to wear my demons out before they are tired enough to be put to bed. I think I need to find some way to release all that crazy energy inside me that drives the frenzied inner workings of the neurotic mind.

Only when I can release all this latent energy will I be able to get a good feeling for who I truly am, underneath all that mental activity that shines so much light that it bedazzles and bemuses me onto the sidelines.

You have to empty the pool before you can find out what is underneath it all.

See you tomorrow, folks.