I swear, I am so goddamned sick and tired of this runny nose that I have half a mind to buy some tampons and shove one up each nostril.

And hey, if I drip a little vodka on them first, I can probably convince the news media that this is the dangerous new way to get high that literally all children between 10 and 18 are doing.

“They call it Smelling the Dragon, and it could be coming to a high school near you. And now, an interview with a teenager willing to say or do whatever it takes to get on television and who will be tweeting about what a lame bunch of morons we are to believe her during the interview. But why should we care if it’s true or not? It fills air time and gets you to click. ”

Hmmm. That ended up being a meatier bit of snark than I had intended. I really should get back into comedy writing. I obviously have a severely impact snark gland that needs to be expressed.

Aaaaanyhow, snot faucet aside, I feel better today than yesterday, and yesterday was better than Wednesday, so the trend is clearly that I am on the mend.

The feeling of being drained of my energy is mostly gone, and boy is that a relief. As I have discovered during my occasional “sleepy periods”, sleeping all the damned time gets pretty depressing pretty quick.

Sure, I can tell myself that my body and mind need the sleep and that the more I sleep, the more I will heal, and all that jazz.

But the fact of the matter is that when it is hard to stay awake, sleep becomes a trap, and you feel like you are locked away in a dark cell while everybody else gets to go on with life.

Sounds ironic coming from someone who has used sleep to fast-forward through time as much as I have, but that just proves that I know whereof I speak from both sides of the cell door.

I still use sleep in order to avoid having to deal with life in too large a chunk. The idea of having to stay awake all day (you know, like a normal person) still freaks me out. I am heavily reliant on the refuge of sleep as a way to zero out my anxiety levels and escape from reality for a time.

It’s the closest thing to not existing for a while outside suicide.

It is hard to describe what I am so afraid of, though. It is tempting to say boredom, but that would be wildly misleading. It’s not being bored that scares me. If it was just that, it would lead directly into the motivation to find other things to do.

What I am really afraid of are the things that come crawling out of my mind when I am bored. With insufficient mental occupation, all kinds of demons and skeletons emerge from my mind and start pushing me towards freaking out.

So I hit the snooze button on that alarm, so to speak, and sleep.

I keep telling myself that I have nothing to truly fear and that I should try staying awake all day just to see what happens.

For all I know, I would go through some sort of eye of the needle crisis point and emerge on the other side a far saner and more emotionally stable person who is more awake than I have been in decades.

That is one possibility, sure. But it’s also possible that I would just lose whatever bare strands of sanity I have left and end up in a rubber room somewhere banging my head against the wall and drooling.

Granted, that is not the most likely option. In fact, that is the exact sort of thing that scares a lot of people but almost never actually happens.

But it is hard to get over the feeling that you are barely keeping your marbles together and that any additional amount of jostling will send said marbles everything like you just scored big time at Ker-Plunk.

It is a matter of faith, in a sense. You have to be willing to just let go and trust that your internal defenses will save you. You have to ignroe everything your emotions tell you about terror stricken emotional conservatism (and the resulting lifetime of eternal inner fleeing from even the slightest fear stimulus) is the only way to stay “safe”, whatever the hell that means.

In many ways, suffering from anxiety-driven depression is like being one of those soldiers from a long resolved war who ends up hiding from “the enemy” for no reason for decades because they become so good at avoiding all human contact that they have no chance to ever learn that the war is over.

Their anxiety about getting caught makes them hyper aware of the slightest out of place stimulus that might indicate that “the enemy” is in the area, and they become expert at moving completely without detection.

That is how I have lived my life as well. When the depression truly ruled me, the simplest and most normal of household sounds (I lived in a bachelor suite in a large house) could make me whimper with fear.

So I just strapped on my blinders and ignored the world outside my computer screen, and only did what was absolutely necessary for survival outside that, and even that not without considerable difficulty.

I look back at that time now and I am amazed that I survived it. I guess I was too scared to do anything rash. It’s absolutely true that we depressives are at the highest risk of suicide when we are on an upward mood swing.

Because we really, really, really don’t want to go back there,

Anyhow, I must be getting better, because I am back to being wrist deep in my own navel and talking about my depression again.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

Love you all!

Today was better than yesterday, but still not that great.

I am definitely on the mend. My chest is mostly cleared, and coughing doesn’t hurt any more. That is a huge improvement right there. Yesterday, I was ferociously suppressing the urge to cough because coughing was intensely painful.But now, if I get the urge, I cough freely.

Don’t get me wrong, coughing is still not exactly fun. But compared to yesterday, it is a goddamned breeze.

My throat is not as sore either. There’s still some swelling in there and swallowing is a little bit of a challenge, but at least fluids go down easy.

What else. Oh yeah…. not constipated any more. Funny how I usually only notice how long it has been since I pooped when the dry spell finally ends. If I was more cognizant of such things, I could solve the problem with a slow but aggressive course of fluid intake on my own.

Overall, I am getting better, and it’s only now that I can look at what has been happening to me this week and think about what exactly was going on.

I think the problem is that being sick with an infection and being depressed are a lot like one another. Having to stay in bed, being all tired because my body was fighting the infection, being all mentally incoherent…. that’s an awful lot like being depressed, and as a result, I think being sick made me depressed.

And vice versa.

I guess that should come as no surprise. My depression is always there like a gravity well, and recovery is largely a matter of developing the thrust to stay out of there despite the pull.

Anything that drains your engines is bound to cause a bit of a regression.

I also think hay fever has been adding itself to the mix as well. It’s hard to tell, of course. The cold could very well be nasal as well. All I know is that my nose has been running constantly and that always gums up the works.

So I have been rather very a lot unwell, actually. Nothing to take to the doctor or anything, but still, life is still ganging up on me.

That’s okay. I can take it. I will survive. I am through letting life squash me flat. I will bounce back sooner or later and then the battle will continue.

Not much else to report. That’s the thing about spending most of your time asleep in bed. It does not exactly generate a lot of topics for conversation.

As always when I am ill, I make a specific effort to remember what it is like so that I can be properly grateful when it is over. My life might not be a bowl of cherries when I am well, but at least it’s a hell of a lot better than this.

Well, as well as I ever get, anyhow.

I did manage to get myself together enough to go over to Safeway to buy a few things,which is good. I didn’t super need what I bought, but I thought I needed a reason to move around a little and get things circulating.

Plus I felt I needed some happiness food. So I got myself some of those sugar free iced novelties I like so much. They are expensive but worth it.

And Safeway’s selection for sugar free cookies is crap.

In terms of how I felt, the trip was a mixed back. On the way to the store, I felt fine, and was glad I had decided to do it.

But by the time I was on my way back, well.. let’s say the trip back from Safeway seemed very long indeed, especially the stairs to the apartment.

For me, the worst part of being sick, other than it triggering my goddamned depression, is the icky feeling you get from sick sweat cooling on your body. It leaves me feeling all gunky and gross, and yet it’s hard to shower when you can barely stay awake for more than half an hour, and that is sitting down time.

So first thing I am gonna do when I feel better is take the mother of all long hot showers and try to degunk myself but good.

I would say I was going to take a long hot bath, but despite meaning to take one, I never seem to get around to it, so fuck that.

Showers are just way more convenient and way less of a commitment. Taking a bath is this entire process. Showering is just a matter of an aggressive form of rinsing.

Like I have said before, I wish there was a human washing machine… that is, like a washing machine for clothes, but for people. You would just sit down in it and it would give you a very thorough cleaning.

Without the tumbling around, though. That would hurt.

In fact, I guess it would be less a washing machine for people as a highly specialized form of hot tub. One with like, wash and rinse modes, and presumably a very good filter considering the whole idea is to wash all the gunk off you.

But just think of how awesome it would be to get super clean every morning, and all without lifting a finger. I bet people would be a lot happier if they had very healthy clean skin all the time.

Or maybe that’s just my own weird little obsession. I don’t know.

Now I have to decide if I am awake enough to catch up on the week’s Daily Shows with Joe or whether I need more downtime. I think I will at least try to stay up. I have some diet cola in the fridge if I need awakeness assistance.

Or maybe I will just go back to sleep and trying to sleep this sickness away.

Man, being sick is depressing.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow! 🙂