Today, I am going to blog before I do a video.

And when I do a video, it might be something without me in it.

Why? Because I am depressed.

This song expresses how I feel right about now.

That great and terrible sadness is still with me. It seems to have moved in with me for the time being. I am sure it will leave once I hear and understand what it is trying to tell me, or more likely, feel what it needs me to feel.

But I grow tired of its wearisome gravity pulling my mood down. It really does feel like there is something within me pushing down on my mood. I feel so very heavy inside, like I have ten feet of anchor chain wrapped around my shoulders.

Sometimes, it even feels like I’m falling.

I think this all started with my decision to start trying to emotionally detach myself from my current domicile before we move. The idea was that this would make the transition to the new place a little smoother than previous transitions. I thought that would be the smart, practical, forward thinking thing to do.

But in retrospect, that may have been a mistake. I think that is what unmoored my mood and set it floating, and with me, that is rarely a good thing.

Or maybe it is, who knows. Maybe my insistence on uniformity of mood come what may is exactly the thing that keeps me from getting anyplace in life. Maybe I need to look back at thoughts of learning to accept a higher amount of emotional variability in order to break free of the gravity well that has kept me in limbo for more or less my entire adult life.

I think that, at some point, I unconsciously invented a kind of mental mechanism designed to hold my mood to a slightly functional level where I am not particularly happy but I am also not particularly sad, and I can get through each day without danger from my depression as long as I keep my life very, very low stimulus.

And that is the curse of it, of course. Keeping your life to a very low amount of sensory stimulation and relying entirely on the mental stimulation of video games and online chat makes for a very lopsided and unhealthy lifestyle. Your soul starves while your mind grows bloated and distended, like someone who exercises only one arm.

Your world grows increasingly unreal and abstract and you start to feel like you don’t exist. That you are just as virtual as your life.

I think this phenomenon explains why I often feel a lot better after I have been out of the apartment on my own for a while. Exposing myself to the world like that might sometimes be stressful and put a lot of strain on my anxiety resistance, but it also gives me fresh stimulation from real world environments, and that acts against that feeling of unreality that is so corrosive to my mood.

It’s hard to be happy when you don’t even feel real. For me, at least.

Meanwhile, I quietly drown in unshed tears.

Oh, more depressing news from yesterday’s doctor’s appointment : they think I have something called an umbilical hernia. Apparently, that is the sort of thing that happens only to babies and fat people.

So it seems that the pressure of my unbelievable fatness on top of my guts has caused some of them to bulge out a bit. Such happy news. They did not seem to think that this was a huge deal, even though it seems kind of important to me.

In fact, it might explain a lot of my little digestive problems. Maybe if it was fixed, I would be able to digest things more smoothly, I would not get these soft blockages in my intestines, and I would have more room in my bladder.

They also think that my sleep apnea is putting a strain on my heart, which is also lovely news. I guess I should not be surprised, though. Sleep apnea is a serious medical condition and I have let it go completely untreated for like five years now while my CPAP machine gathers dust two feet from my bed.

Clearly, what I should do is go to my GP, confess my enormous burden of medical sin, and get him to get me back on track towards a course of treatment that might actually work for me.

The CPAP machine I have almost made it. I used it for many months, successfully fighting back my feeling that it was smothering me when it was doing the exact opposite. It was helping me breathe way better than usual.

But eventually I lost the fight and got so frustrated with the complications the machine brought to the simple act of sleeping that I gave up on it without telling anyone about it.

And so it sits there. In theory, I could just clean it, put it back together, reread the manual, and start using it again.

But I just… can’t. And I can’t explain why.

So I am not sure what the next step would be with my sleep apnea. Surgery, I guess. Or weight loss, like that is going to happen.

Wellm who knows. If I get into the habit of working out at the gym in the apartment building we are moving to, I might just lose weight, or at the very least, replace the fat with muscle and thus give myself a more demanding metabolism.

But right now, I just feel like I am falling apart and there is nothing I can do about it. I’m heading for the brick wall of an early fat guy death in squalor and agony and I lack the will or capacity to steer away.

So I will lay me down to sleep, and hope that whatever haunts me these days will leave me while I dream.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

In short : not good. Vis :

That’s the basic story. Apparently I have the sort of injury that causes me some pain but is not actually serious enough to, you know, do anything about. The doctors (junior and senior) basically told me to keep using that Voltaren and taking my Tylenol Artritis and to work on my quad muscles (big muscles on top of leg, between hip and knee) to strengthen them and thus strengthen the muscular support system for the knee. Makes sense to me.

But it irritates me to no end that I am once more in a medical gray area. I was really hoping for some kind of definitive answer and solution. It’s X, the treatment is Y, and that will fix it right up.

Instead, I get wishy washy bullshit and a big hunk of my time wasted.

One thing they did mention was putting a brace on the knee. That strikes me as potentially a good idea. If I had something on there that kept the knee from twisting, I could probably ditch the cane and go around more or less like normal.

If not a little better.

The part of the knee that they think is messed up is called the meniscus, which I thought was the name for the curve that forms on the top of a liquid.

Show what my home ec teacher knew. Oh well, I hated her anyhow. Child hating stuck up yuppie bitch.

Anyhoo, the meniscus is one of the smaller players in the upright locomotion game. The Wiki article on it says it helps spread the load where the tibia meets the fibia. Makes sense that we need it… this whole upright bipedal stance thing is a heck of a lot mopre complicated than it looks. We had to develop some fairly complex structures all over our bodies in order to make it work.

And apparently, I broke one of mine.

(WE INTERRUPT THIS DEPRESSING LOOK AT THE FRAGILITY OF THE BODY FOR THIS EVEN MORE DEPRESSING NEWS ABOUT THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE)

Holy fuck, I just heard the news…. Robin Williams is dead, and it looks like it was suicide. He was 63 years old.

Jesus, that is depressing. As if this day didn’t suck enough already. Some days it just rains shit and all you can do is cling to your little umbrella.

I was a very big fan of Robin Williams way back in the Eighties. I thought he was brilliant and funny and wacky and just an amazing person all round. If he was going to be on a show, I was going to watch it.

But it was more than his talent that appealed to me. I really identified with him. Something about his manic wit and kind nature really resonated with me and I used to think that I could be him and that we were, on a deep level, the same kind of person. I felt he and I would get along.

Well, okay, maybe not BE him. Maybe him at 75 percent speed.

So the news of his death really hits me hard. Him dying at 63 would be bad enough. But for him to commit suicide really feels like a stab in the heart. It suggests that he lost a battle with depression, and that’s the same fight that I fight each and every day of my life.

Not that I am making this all about me. Some people might say that the person who is hurt the most by this is Robin Williams, but I would disagree. Robin Williams is beyond all hurt or hope now. He escaped.

The people who are hurt the most by suicide are the people close to the deceased. They are the ones whose lives have been left torn open and bleeding by the violent removal of someone they knew and cared about. They are the ones left wondering if there was something they could have done.

They are the ones for whom the pain is just beginning.

That is why I consider suicide to be an incredibly selfish act of violence against everyone who knows and loves you. The fact that it is done by a person who knows full well that they won’t have to live with the consequences makes even worse.

(Felicity, I know you don’t agree. )

So yeah. If it really was suicide, I am pretty angry at Robin Williams for doing it. No matter what you are going through emotionally, there is no justification for the act of suicide, intractable pain/horrible incurable illness aside.

Whatever it is, it will end, and you will be glad you didn’t do it.

I came pretty close to suicide as a depressed teenager, and somewhat close when I first moved to this area and was living alone in a bachelor apartment and slid into the worst depression of my life.

Luckily, that time, I was usually too depressed to think about suicide. It works that way sometimes. Often what saves us sufferers is the lack of mental coherence necessary to think of doing it, let alone plan and execute it.

From the perspective of someone who came close to suicide himself, I completely understand how you get there. Depression negates everything good inside you and it can seem like the only way out of the trap before it negates you too is to die.

But for me, the knowledge of how badly it would hurt everybody I knew was enough to keep me from doing that. I just could not do that to people, especially my family. Imagine how bad it would be to have a son or brother commit suicide all the way on the other side of the country.

That is what makes me feel I have the right to judge. Fuck you for committing suicide, Robin Williams. Fuck you for that ultimately selfish act. Fuck you fo rdoing irreparable injury to those around you.

And what the hell, fuck you for how your suicide hurts me, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.