Don’t have anything in particular in mind for today’s words, so I guess it’s personal update time.

Let’s see. Oh, my “earaches” are under control. Quotes because they are probably more than just earaches. Whatever they are, as long as I keep my nose blown and my sinuses empty, they are not a problem. I have not had a serious attack for a while.

That doesn’t mean the problem is solved, of course. Whatever the hell that is wrong with me that caused them in the first place has not been fixed. I only have the symptoms under control. I still need repairs.

Speaking of which, I haven’t heard from a surgeon or my doctor’s office about seeing a surgeon to fix up the big holes in my abdominal wall yet. I am going to call my GP’s office tomorrow to ask about it, and to make *sure* they have my phone number right. I have all these problems (fucked up knee, hernias, earaches) and I want to get them all fixed if I can.

I am falling apart, and nothing seems to be happening about it.

I am perfectly willing to endure whatever I have to endure to get myself patched up. I am not exactly eager about it, but I am willing. I know there will be unpleasantness ahead. Things that are scary, things that are weird, things that are uncomfortable, and things that just plain hurt.

But irresponsible as I can be, especially towards myself, if I know I have a problem, I am going to want to get it fixed.

In a weird way, it is nice to have some problems that can actually be repaired. Things like diabetes and depression can’t be surgically corrected. There is no way to have your insulin resistance patched up, or have your depression removed. They are long term problems which may or may not be entirely solvable.

The abdominal hernias, at least, can be repaired. Who knows what good that might do me? I have no idea how long I have had those hernias. They might be quite old. Maybe they are the whole reason I have digestive issues in the first place.

It’s not hard to imagine that these “soft blockages” I have talked about before, where things get backed up down there and end up compacted and causing all kinds of trouble, might just be the spots where the food is going through the part of my small intestine outside my abdominal wall.

Seems like the natural place for a bottleneck, is what I am saying.

So it could be that, once I am all patched up and healed up, I am a much happier dude, with way less intestinal instability. I have kind of felt like my guts were hanging out for a long time, but I just assumed that was metaphorical.

Turns out, it is literally true, in a way.

Boy, I hope my feeling like there’s a cold wind blowing through me never becomes literal. That would be fucked up.

Anything else to report? Well, the reason I am doing all my bizness around seven hours earlier than usual is that today I will be going to the monthly BCSFA meeting, despite the omens.

Omens like the fact that the hallway in Ray’s building have recently been repainted, so there might be a fumes issue. I am all over the place with paint fumes and my reaction to them. Sometimes they don’t bother me at all, sometimes they annoy me a little, and sometimes they make me feel like I am going to pass out and/or throw up and/or die.

So we will see if I can even attend the damned thing. I would hate to be a cause for complications. For example, I would not want my inability to handle the fumes keep my roomies from doing so. So I have a backup plan.

If that ends up being the case, I will just get someone to drop me off at the Skytrain station in New West and I will Skytrain my way home. We live two blocks from Brighouse station, so it is not that big a deal for me to Skytrain it. The only complicated bit will be switching Skytrain lines. But I can figure it out.

The other ill omen is that Kathleen fell and cracked her shoulder. Poor dear! I hope she is okay.

Besides her personal suffering, there is also the issue that she is usually the person who brings most of the snacks. So I am guessing that there will be no snacks. And there is usually quite the spread.

The snacks are not necessary, of course. All you need for us nerds to have a good time is a big room with enough chairs for everybody. We will entertain ourselves with our vibrant and scintillating conversation.

But still. Kathleen’s mishap makes the whole thing feel ill fated. Silly, I know, and completely irrational. Probability does not work that way. Bad things happening does not, without a causal link, make other bad things happen.

Spilling milk on your shoes at breakfast did not make that pigeon poop on you during lunch, and it doesn’t mean that something bad will happen to you at supper either.

Despite that, we humans are a superstitious lot. No matter how hardnosed a skeptic or rugged a philosopher you might think you are, you have superstitions nevertheless.

Anything else to report? Not that I can think of at the moment. Life has been going fairly smoothly lately, especially since I got that GST cheque. Before it, I was very tense about money and worried about making it to check day this month.

But now, I am serene and calm on the subject. I will be just fine.

Oh, get this : I still haven’t ordered that Airbake cookie sheet I want because I fucked up when I gave the lady at Money Mart my postal code. So I have to go in again.

God as my witness, I will have unburnable cookies!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My creativity is extremely impatient.

Maybe that is because everything was cooped up inside me for so long. That created the conditions for me to become addicted, instantly addicted, to the release I get from writing my thousand words and posting them immediately to the net every day.

This blog is truly a lifeline to me. It lets me get at least some of my words out. I still have a billion words locked inside the vaults and storerooms of my soul, but with this blog, I can at least slow down their rate of accumulation.

Obviously, the vlog entries help with that too.

I am pretty happy with how my vlog is going lately. Granted, the blog entries used to have higher production values back when all I had was a crappy webcam and too much time on my hands. Being able to record it and edit it immediately made a big difference. I could cut and paste and trim and title when it was all still molten, not yet fully cooled.

That is what I mean about impatient creativity, though. Just the act of having to plug my tablet into my computer (and transfer the file over to my HD to edit it) is too long and too complicated a step for me. If I do that, the red-hot creativity of it cools and solidifies and my inspiration to go on is dead, dead, dead.

I will try not to be too gross about it, but creation to me is a lot like a process of organic elimination. Once the words (or whatever) are out of me, I don’t want to see them again. I want to move on to the next thing.

I wish I could say that there was a period after which they no longer feel like a part of me and so operating on them (known to sane people as “editing”) won’t feel painful and disgusting and just plain wrong…. but I don’t seem to operate like that. All that happens is that over time, they leave my immediate memory, but all it takes is reading them again to take me right back to when I wrote them in the first place, and boom, they are a part of me again.

And I just can’t go back like that. I just…. can’t. I don’t know why and I wish it were different, but one of the hard life lessons I am learning lately is that there will always be things about yourself that you can’t justify or explain but are nevertheless a very important part of you that is not up for debate.

Sometimes, all you can say is “that’s just how I am”, or “that’s just how it works for me”, and if people truly care about you, they will take that as true without argument or denial.

This is, presumably, intuitively obvious to people who are not all bound up in the hyper-rationality trap. People less restricted by the need to stay in the light of reason, logic, and rationality are completely fine with telling the world, either by word or deed, that they are who they are and work like they work and that is the beginning, middle, and end of it.

But somewhere on the way, I donned the straightjacket of excess reasonableness. My verbal/logic abilities fooled me into thinking I could explain everything and justify anything and that I could face the world as a self-contained rational stalwart without any of those messy inexplicable noncommunicable truths to worry about.

It is amazing what an elaborate and transparent set of delusions one can create when one makes them out of logic and reason. This is especially true when you have the mind of a psychologist like I do, because there isn’t the enormous dark area of human behaviour sitting there on your map of the universe, reminding you that there is a lot you just plain don’t get, like there is with a lot of other hyper-rationals.

I have never had a big trouble understanding why people did what they did. I was only ten years old when I realized that everything people do makes sense to them, and that was the key to unlocking most of human behaviour. You can deduce a lot about people’s motivations once you start from that premise. People are not random.

You can see, then, how someone like me might fool themselves into thinking they see all and know all, or at least, can figure most of it out, given time.

But that is so, so very wrong. Being able to see and explain things is only part of the puzzle of living. It’s great for reassuring you that being reclusive isn’t as exclusive as it seems to be. It’s great for looking at the world through a telescope from way on high and fooling yourself into thinking you are somehow a part of what is going on down there. It is great at making you feel you can handle anything, especially when you haven’t had to handle anything lately.

But there are vast realms impenetrable by logic and light within the human soul. None of us gets to be intellect only, no matter how proud Reason likes to pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. Every one of us is a vast cosmos of self, filled with memories, emotions, opinions, and all the other stuff for which we have no names.

It is true that we must always know the difference between what goes on inside our minds and what goes on outside of them, and the mystically true should never be mistaken for the literally true.

But that does not mean we get to ignore all that we cannot explain about ourselves. You do not need to be able to justify yourself to the world. We are so much more than our reason and language can ever convey.

I don’t know, that’s just the way I am.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.