I’d rather not be floggin’
My misbegotten noggin
For some words to be bloggin’ 
‘Cause my head is foggin’
My sinues are cloggin’ 
But this task can’t be forgotten! 

My mind does strange things when it is impaired.

But yeah. I would rather not be blogging right now. I am all fucked up from bad sleep, as usual, and I would rather just eat lunch and go back to sleep.

Alas, duty calls. So I am going to at least get 500 words done before I lapse back into my daytime coma like a freaking vampire.

So let’s talk about doing things you do not want to do.

Patient readers know that I consider the ability to choose to do something you do not want to do because you want what doing it will get you to be the key to self-discipline and adulthood, and most importantly, happiness.

You heard it here first, folks. Being able to do things you don’t want to do will actually make you happier.

I will now pause to let our inner toddlers wrestle with that idea.

Because when you are unwilling or unable to do so, life becomes very limited and sad. So much of the world is denied you. All you are left with is that which you happen to feel like doing at any moment.

And that means that whatever that happens to be is all you are allowed to want, too. You can’t afford to want any of the vast number things that you can only get via doing things you do not want to do.

So you might as well make peace with getting very little out of life, and hardly ever getting what you want, and living a sad pathetic life.

But hey, at least you proved that nobody can make you do things!

That makes it all worth it, right?

Oh, and feel free to blog about how outrageously unfair it is for the universe to required you to do things in order to get stuff.

Clearly, if the world was fair, you would always get everything you want without ever having to do anything you don’t feel like doing to earn it.

In fact, you shouldn’t ever have to earn anything. Earning is too much like work. Everything you want should just come to you without having to do anything difficult or scary or even just mildly unpleasant due to you inherent luminescent specialness and anyone or anyhthing that suggests otherwise is just plain mean.

It sounds absurd, but I know a lot of people living that exact life. They have, on some level, decided that they would rather live at the very bottom of the social hierarchy and hate their lives and be miserable rather than do anything they don’t want to do.

When you look at it like that, it seems absurd. Surely the life you want is worth some degree of sacrifice. Otherwise, you are stuck in a very tiny rut.

And when I say you, I really mean me.

Blogging part 2 : The Bloggening.

Deja vu. Just took a nap. Woke up and sat down to blog. Feeling ill after the usual effects of sleep and don’t really feel like writing,  just like before.

It must be destiny.

I recently listened to an episode of the Cracked podcast where they talked about how bad we are at looking after our own mental health.

And they are absoloutely right. The public attitude we all absorbed is that minds do not require maintenance. After all, we are our minds, if we accept that our own personal minds have needs and limitations just like our bodies, then that’s like saying we are weaker than the other monkeys, and who would ever admit to that?

A loser, that’s who.

The podcast also nails the fact that our understanding of our own psychological wellbeing is so crude that we acknowledge only two possible mental health states : normal,. and crazy.

And we can’t even properly define them.

Personally, I blame that curse of all Western thinking, the bogus mind/body dichotomy. Deep within the roots of Western thoughts is the idea that while the body might be dirty and diseased and disgusting, the mind is eternal and pure and clean, and therefore does not need maintainance at all.

Nobody consciously thinks this, of course. But it’s everywhere in our culture if you know what you are looking for.  We inherit this ideological legacies via cultural osmosis.

That’s the real work of philosophy : changing that shared ideological inheritance. It’s a somewhat thankless job as to the world, it seems like all philosophers do is have abstruse arguments of no practical value with one another.

Don’t be fooled. The ideas that open the door to the future are born of such activity. Progress demands a steady expansion of not just our technology but our understanding of ourselves and our world.

And it’s us lonely mental perverts who spend way too much time thinking about stuff that expand that understanding and enable all progress.

But especially social progress. We’re the ones who reject the received valuations of our cultures and force our societies to become more consistent with its highest ideals.

God it’s hard to write in this heat. Kind of wish I had chosen a different path with today’s entry. I know in my head what I am trying to convey, but the heat is making my mind too fuzzy to put it into words to my own satisfaction.

What I think of as my ‘writerly instrument’ – that complex machine that turns what is in my head into words on the screen – is feeling very heavy and unwieldly right now.

From that point of view, I am better off on the days that I can wait until 7 pm to blog. It’s usually somewhat cooler by then.

And those would be Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Those are the days when I don’t have anything going on in the evening.

It was different before Joe got sick. When he was working, Sundays and Thursdays were the only days when I had to blog in the afternoon.

But then his eye malfunctioned.

You know what? I think I am going to just end things here. I stand no chance of being able to write a proper conclusion right now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have had a day of misadventure, which I will now relate.

It started when I woke up at around 10:30 am feeling absolutely terrible. My eyes  were bleary, my stomach felt like something died of a painfuland lingering illness in it, my joints ached, and I couldn’t seem to truly catch my balance.

Not exactly a propitious entree into daily consciousness.

I felt so bad, in fact, that I considered calling my doctor’s office and moving my 2 pm appointment to Thursday if possible.

And yes, I am well aware of the irony inherent in being too sick to go to the doctor. It sounds like one of those things that’s not supposed to happen, like being too hungry to eat{{1]} or too tired to sleep.

But I have been all three of those things at one point or another, and so while a case might be made that they should not happen, they happen anyway.

The universe doesn’t give a shit about “should”.

I felt so bad that I actually called the doctor’s office to cancel, but nobody picked up. If they had, I would probably have gone through with it.

And been spared this afternoon’s Kafka-esque journey.

Luckily for this story’s narrative needs, by the time to get on the bus to get there came around, I had eaten lunch and pulled myself together enough to decide that loser-ing out on a necessary medical appointment by hitting the panic button was NOT the kind of choice I wanted to make, so I got dressed and went down to catch the bus.

But as is sadly typical of me, I waited too long to leave the apartment and missed my bus byh a couple of minutes.

Shadows of VFS and Kwantlen all over again. I was always doing that to myself back then, in the Before Times. Somehow this irrational optimism kicks in and makes me think I need way less time to get to the bus stop than I do.

Then my mind wanders a little, and what seems like a heartbeat later, I have gone from “I have a few more minutes” to “oh fuck, I should have left three minutes ago. ”

So then I end up scrambling for the bus, missing it. and hating myself.

That’s what happened today at around 1:55 pm. So then I had to wait for the next bus.

Fun fact : I had to wait standing up because it was so hot out that the wooden bus bench was too hot to sit on.

Trust me. I tried. I felt like I could feel my nuts roasting and my buns toasting.

So then the wrong bus shows up. Well, wrong-ish. It still took me most of the way there but if I had caught my proper bus, I would have had to walk one fewer block.

That makes a huge difference when it’s eyeball-meltingly hot out.

Eventually, I get to my doctor’s office fifteen minutes late. But of course, that doesn’t mean shit because my doctor is way behind, as usual.

How behind? I had to wait an hour just to get into the examination room and another half hour after that before I saw him.

So I tell him about all the weirdness with my feet getting weird sensations and falling asleep super easily and the weird feeling in my calves and so on and so on, and his reaction was to try one test (tuning fork) then shrug and say ‘Yeah I guess it’s probably diabetic neuropathy.  Nothing we can do about that. ” and that was it.

This did not make me happy. I did the right thing in that I noticed a scary health issue and took it to my doctor and told him all about it, and all I got was a shrug and a perscription for something that might help me sleep.

Because yeah. Sleep was the issue.

And this is not the first time that I have left Doctor Chao’s office feeling like he didn’t really listen and he didn’t really care. He’s a likable enough fellow and comes across as very sweet and compassnionate, and if I told him how I felt, I bet he would feel bad about it and apologize.

But nothing would actually change. Something about me keeps doctors from taking me seriously. Maybe it’s my laid back, friendly manner.

Whatever it is, I am fucking sick of it.

After being told this entire trip was pointless, I went shopping at Price Mart^[2] and picked up some cool stuff. Cucumbers, watermelon, hot dogs, and some brand of freezies I never heard of before but they didn’t have my usual brand.

Grr on that.

So once I had made my purchases, I called a cab and waited outside for it.

And waited. And waited. Took 40 minutes for the fucking thing to arrive.

Oh, but the fun’s not over yet, kiddies, because when I got home, I realized that I had forgotten my keys.

And our buzzer doesn’t work.

And I have no cell phone so I can’t just call one of my roomies and get things sorted.

And there is no such thing as a pay phone any more.

And so I am fucked.

Luckily, a nice old lady who lives on our floor let me into the building, but I knock and I knock on our apartment door (because of course it’s locked in the middle of the day) and get no answer.

So I have no choice but to wait at the door to be let in. Like a cat.

And the thing is, I am not built for open-ended waiting. I can’t hack the uncertainty. It was bad enough when waiting for a bus and the doctor and my cab.

Waiting to actually get to come home when I was so close was not good for me.

Eventually, I just stretched out in front of the door and took a light nap. Again, like a cat. What else could I do?

I had a book with me, but I was too agitated to read.

Luckily, after about an hour, Julian came home, and let me in.

Let me tell you, that was a rough hour. But once I saw Julian I bounced back pretty fast and now I am fine.

But today has been One Of Those Days.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.

[[1]] This one needs a little explanation. I was too hungry to eat once because the hunger was so intense that it made my stomach produce too much acid while also producing too much digestive churning, resulting in my being extremely hungry but unable to keep anything down. Ain’t life fun?’ [[1]]

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Specifically, in maintaining it.

I really need to get my sleep organized. Right now it’s highly fragmented. As a result, I never know when I will get very sleepy and hence have to fight the velvet fog of Dreamland just to get anything done.

And that is both depressing and stressful.

So it’s depressful.

That means I have to start getting dressed for the day. Yeah, I am still lounging around naked when I am alone, even though I know it is bad for me.

It’s so easy and low commitment that it is hard for me to resist. Especially in this heat. Normally, what gets me to put on clothes is that some part of me is cold.

But not in this kind of weather. God dammit.

Anyhow, today is confession day, because I have realized something about my life and how I am living it right now that fills me with shame but that I feel like I absolutely must express to the world in order to keep it from disappearing into the primordial haze of my brain as an unwanted truth and thus not helping me grow.

I trust that will eventually make sense to most people.

My confession is this : progress in video games is my substitute for progress in life.

I figured this out when I was trying to puzzle out why sometimes playing my games felt like a job and why I felt like I was falling behind when I didn’t play them and why a lack of progress in one could make me far more depressed than you would think.

I feel so lame admitting all this. It’s downright pathetic. It’s a humiliating thing to realize about myself because it makes me feel like such a loser. A grown man who uses video games as a substitute for actually gettings things done in life.

But the evidence is clear, as is my introspective sense of what is going on in this voluminous cabeza of mine. Video games are where I get my sense of progress and accomplishment even though playing them doesn’t accomplish jack shit.

And Jack left town.

The “great” thing about progress in video games is that I can do it completely alone. That means that there is nobody watching to judge me if I screw up. Nobody is there getting impatient with me when I don’t get it right the first time. There is nobody to make me feel like I don’t belong there and should just go.

And the best thing is, I don’t have to deal with reality in the slightest!

It’s the perfect drug.

And the fact that playing a video game doesn’t accomplish anything real is not a bug in the process, it’s a feature. Real world progress creates the expectation of more progress to come, and hence creates pressure.

And I cannot handle pressure.

At least, not that kind of pressure. I thrive on other kinds of pressure, like deadlines or a heavy workload or writing a million words in a year.

So what’s the difference? Hmmm. Hard to say. Perhaps the kind of pressure I love is the kind that I am confident I can handle and that I can see coming.

And the kind that freaks me out is open-ended and unpredictable and makes me feel like I am trapped.

Maybe it’s a mood thing. I dunno.

Anyhow, that’s today big confession. I use the false progress in video games as a substitute for real progress in my life.

It’s also a substitute for having a job, which is even sadder. Video games give me a sense of purpose and direction and someplace to focus all that mental energy that I generate with my big bad brain.

I wonder if it’s that energy that gives me my strange aura. The one that makes people say “You’re obviously really intelligent… ”

I think that, at some early age, I must have tuned in to the “brightness” channel and learned to radiate my energies in that direction in order to get adults to be impressed by me and to make my mother happy with me.

But there is more to life than making people see how fucking brilliant I am.

Repeat until believed.

I really do feel a strong urge to prove myself. That’s normal for a teenager but a little odd in a 45 year old who is only now experiencing emotional puberty.

And I have so much to prove. I know that I am a brilliant guy who could make amazing television if given the chance.

It’s getting the chance that confounds me. And that’s always been the case. There’s a zillion jobs I could do splendidly but I will never get those jobs because employers are going to look at the 20 year gap in my employment record and shitcan my resume without even asking me a question.

And if I did, by accident, get a job interview, that same thing will come up.

And the only answer I have to explain all that time is “I’ve been very sick”.

But I feel MUCH better now.

And sure, if the world was fair, that would be enough. But the world isn’t fair and they have a lot of applicants who don’t have all that time in the penalty box hanging over their heads and why the hell did I even bother trying to have hope.

But I do have hope. Because I think it is possible that I could dazzle a potential employer with my charisma and personality to the point where they forget all about odd things about my resume.

I am only now coming to understand my power of personaity. I have always feared and suppressed it before. I suppose I didn’t want the responsibility.

But now I am totally down with turning my bright and shiny personality up to 11 in order to get what I want.

Now if only I could get that interview. And not just in the literal sense. I am sure I could get SOMEone to give me some kind of chance eventually.

But that woukd involved a lot of faith in myself, persistance, and a constant input of energy, and I am not so good at those yet,.

But I am learning more every day.

WIsh me luck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’d really like to know.

Because I’m not one. Not really. I am, at best, a reasonable facsimilie of one.

And yeah, I know that makes no sense. To the world, I am exactly as much of a person as anybody else.

Well, buck up, patient readers, because the nonsense has only just begun.

When I say I am not a person, what I am saying is that I do not feel like one. To me, it feels like other people are solid and real and I am just a shadow traced on smoke. The simplest of simpletons seems, to me, to have more substance and vitality than I have or will ever have.

Perhaps this is a side effect of a corrupted empathy. On the empathic channel. other people stand out like floodlit statues to me.

But my own self is so familiar to me that I don’t see it any more. It’s the background of the background of my life. So I don’t feel its presence.

There’s more to it than that, though. I can feel it. There is something that is supposed to be there within me that pushes back at the overwhelming reality of others and establishes my own identity as distinct, equal, and sufficient.

I call this thing – this missing substance – ‘self”.

It’s not hard to see how I ended up in this fix. My profound sense of vulnerability caused me to cling to my tiny world and tune out all emotions and instincts that would lead me out of it. That included the social growth and self-actualization instincts that lead most people to explore their boundaries, find out who they really are, and grow into emotionally balanced adults who can, like, do stuff.

But not me. Oh no. I was too “smart” for that. Why would I follow some mysterious urge to go out and find others my age and hang out when it “made no sense”? Why would I go looking for sex when I “knew” that would only get me in trouble because of the whole small town closeted gay thing? What was the “point” of thinking about how lonely I was when I could just stay distracted and not think about it?

Now here I am, 45 years old, and wondering if it’s too late to become a real person with a solid sense of identity and an idea of who I really am.

And that takes me back to the idea of moving out and moving on. It would be a huge step towards figuring myself out. I would love to find a nice place off the artsy part of Commercial and meet new people that way.

Or maybe get myself a sugar daddy on Davie. That would work too.

But it’s not something I will be able to accomplish with one big act of will.All I can do is wait for those moments when the fog parts to push myself a little further towards it.

That way I can get there, over time.

Sometimes baby steps are the only ones you can take.

Well, it’s 11:24 PM and that means I have 36 minutes to write 487 words.

(elaborate knuckle crack) Noooo problem.

At least it’s a sane temperature now. The other half of this blog entry was written in the hellish heat of the afternoon, and it’s a wonder it’s even coherent, let alone sensible.

I hearby declare summer to officially suck. And for once, pretty much everyone else agrees. This heat is making everyone miserable. It’s way hotter that the seasonal norm.

Good thing global warming is a myth, or we’d have something to worry about.

And there is no winning. I can’t even siesta my way through the heat because it’s way too hot to sleep in the afternoons.

I don’t know how the Mexicans manage it. Years of experience, I suppose.

Plus, for them, it’s probably a dry heat. And I have experiences both (extremely) dry heat and (very) wet heat, and let me tell you, dry heat is way better.

At least in dry heat, your sweat evaporates quickly and cools you down. In fact, if you are from a wet climate like me ^[1], that rapid evaporation fools you into thinking it’s not all that hot.

It also means you can get dehydrated fast. And that can really fuck you up if you don’t realize what is going on and thus know how to fix it.

But dry heat is still way better because at least it doesn’t make it hard to breathe like humid heat does.

Had therapy today. It was a decent session. Better than last week’s session, where I was only half awake and therefore not exactly my usual sharply perceptive and expressive self who sort of directs the therapy himself.

Because that’s the only way to make absolutely sure it’s done RIGHT. *eye twitch* WHAT CONTROL ISSUES?

Took a cab there. That’s normal. Then took a cab to my bank to cash my monthly cheque. Mildly unusual.

But the real new ground was that I got the cab to wait for me while I was in the bank, then took it home.

In fact, I had never asked a cab to wait for me before. I had been in cabs when it happened a couple of times, but never asked for it myself.

And that wait cost me around ten bucks. So, probably not something I am going to do again. seeing as my bank is like five blocks from my home.

But I am resisting the compulsion to obsess over the money I “wasted”. I tried something new.  I thought it might make me feel more grown-up and in control and all that good stuff.

Turn out, it did not. I just felt silly. But now I know.

And the only failed experiment is one that produces no result, right? This one’s result was that I don’t feel like it was worth the money.

And that’s worth the ten b ucks I spent. I think.

So STFU, compulsions!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Currently stuck in my head :

At first it was the last few lines :

Living lives of quiet desperation is the English way
The race is run
The song is over
Thought I’d something more to say

That expresses the thought so well, it makes me want to cry. Thought I’d something more to say. ” You did, Pink. But then your British-ness kicked in and scrubbed those thoughts from your mind because who are you to think you have something worth saying? What could you – you in particular, you pathetic little git – possibly say that anyone would care about?

Shut up and drink your tea.

You can see how, while as a Canadian I am only slightly British, in the way that a second cousin is slightly related to you, the theme of quiet desperation nevertheless has a certain resonance with me and my own problems.

But my desperation isn’t totally quiet.

After all, I blog about it.

But the lines that got me here blogging are these ones :

Run, rabbit, run! 
Dig that hole
Against the sun
Then, at last, the work is done
Don’t sit down, it’s time to dig another one

Now that, I identify with fully. because that is anxiety/depression.

I’ve talked before about how my anxiety makes me want to dig the deepest darkest hole ever then pull the hole in on top of me.

It’s essentially an urge to hide taken to its logical extreme. Infinite concealment. And once hidden, to stay absolutely quiet and still because that is the only way to be safe from whatever it is that is chasing me.

Reality, I suppose.

Having to grow up and face the facts.

My bullies,  on some level. And at some points in my childhood, that included every other student in my school.

And of course, my rapist.

I never even got the chance to run away from him.

Anyhow, so I have this urge towards infinite concealment, to the point where I almost don’t exist any more.

But the anxiety is still there too, and its message is the opposite of the urge to hide. TO anxiety, the only safety lies in constant movement in activity. In running away. That releases a lot of energy and that energy has to go somewhere.

So you dig that hole. And then you dig another. And another. And another.

You can never stop digging, because the anxiety tells you that the wolf is nipping at your heels and if you stop for even one second, it will get you.

At the same time, the urge to hide is telling you that to move is to be exposed  and that will be when that mean ol wolf gets you.

This creates an enormous tension within the individual as they try to obey two mutually exclusive imperatives at the same time. It’s like an engine turned against itself, like being squeezed between two angry giants, like gunning a seized engine.

This terrible tension, unsurprisingly, produces incredible psychological pain.

And this pain has a name.

We call it depression.

The exact form the depression takes depends on which side of the tug of war is dominant in the individual.

If the anxiety side is dominant, the person is an anxious depressive, prone to spontaneous anxiety attacks as well as ones that are triggered by stressors like pressure or fear. This person is permanently tightly wound. At any second, they may get the urge to run like hell and never stop.

If the concealment side is dominant, you get the dysthymic depressive, like myself. This person seems fine on a superficial level but experiences very low levels of motivation, energy, and willpower, and tends to have a very low activity level centred around a few trusted high-reward activities they use to combat the crushing weight of their depression. They isolate themselves in order to minimize uncontrolled stimulation.

Those seem like distinct types of depression, but they are really one and the same. My dysthymic manifestation of depression is derived directly from my anxieties because all my patterns of behaviour are based around minimizing it.

Hence the low stimulus lifestyle. Any uncontrolled, unpredictable stimulation might set of my anxieties. So I spend all day in the same room in front of the same computer living in a virtual world where I have total control over my stimulus level.

The lack of motivation and drive is similarly a result of anxiety. In order to combat that anxiety, my mind creates an overall drag effect on every thought and impulse in order to keep things from going too fast.

It’s like living on a high gravity planet. Even the simplest of things takes an enormous effort of will and spirit. More ambitious things are completely out of the question.

So in the dysthymic, the anxiety has essentially won. In my life, that anxiety – that fear – rules. I do whatever it takes to keep it happy because if I do not, it will rise and make my life a living hell. Everything I do has to be tested against it to see if said activity will rouse the sleeping giant, and if it will, that shit is vetoed HARD.

Very few actions can meet that test.

That giant is a very light sleeper.

And this is not something I can explain to people. It’s too personal and complicated and it comes from a reality entirely unlike their own. And because I can’t justify myself to others, I feel like I have no excuse for how I am and that fills me with shame.

I go through life in thick, heavy armor that nobody can see and that not only weighs me down but keeps joy, love, and happiness from getting in.

And I dream of the day that I can take that shit off and breathe the fresh air and feel the warm sunlight on my skin and finally be free.

But that won’t happen until I can convince my scared little rabbit that it’s safe

And that might take a long, long time indeed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, my sleep has become terrible again.

That means I am going to have to take a Trazadone some time soon. Dammit. I have been enjoying this period of natural sleep but it is clear to my now that the problem that got me onto sleeping pills in the first place has returned and I have to take the pill until I get some fucking sleep.

Right now, I can’t stay asleep for more than an hour and a half. That is Bad. Human beings need deep REM sleep and that takes a while to get to, so one cannot live on napping alone. Not for long, anyhow.

You brain needs time to process the contents of your medium term memory and transfer them into long term memory.

Without tha, I suppose one might lose all memory of the day’s events every time one slept. That would be a terrible medical condition but a heck of an interesting setup for some Memento-like mystery movie.

Or just a particularly interesting piece of epistelary storytelling via the device of this poor person’s frantic attempts to write everything that happens down so they can read it later and find out what the fuck they have been up to.

Imagine what lengths this poor person would go to in order to avoid sleep.

Could be very dramatic.

Anyhow, back to my own problem. I don’t like taking my Trazadone because it makes it harder to wake up in the morning. Plus, my natural, non-chemical sleep seems to get the job done better.

By that. I mean the sleep I get that way is more refreshing and restorative and filled with that deep down satisfying feeling I only get from decent natural sleep.

Or at least, I did until recently.

Of course, it could be that I am in one of my rare hypo-hypo-manic phases. I repeat the prefix because it is like real hypomania in kind but nowhere near it in intensity.

More’s the pity. The real thing sounds like fun. Loads of energy and confidence and such. Like being on the world’s most natural stimulant.

I call this state mania because, while I am not chock a block with confidence and enthusiasm, I do feel quite alert and perky. I am not sleepy at all and were I less self-aware and cautious, I might just go with it and have fun and let the question of when I am going to actually sleep be tomorrow’s worry.

But I have been here before. I know the madness it can bring. There have been times in my life when I lived my life that way, bouncing between bed and computer, awake for two hours then napping for one.

And as long as you don’t really think about it (which is way easier when you are young) you can fool yourself into thinking everything is fine. After all, you’re getting the same amount of sleep as a normal person, it’s just distributed differently. Right?

Wrong. So very very wrong.

Because that whole time, something very vital ito your sanity is draining away.  You can feel it going. It’s like you’re running on emergency batteries and you can feel them running out, even though everything is running fine right now.

In reality, it’s not something running out,. it’s sometime filling up. Your medium term memory. Eventually, it is full and the brain has to compress the contents more and more in order to make room for new memories, and that can get pretty freaky.

I’ve ended up in some rather fucked up and unpleasant mental states that way. Ones where I feel like I am walking along the razor’s edge of sanity… and I’m drunk.

So no. I will be taking an active interest in getting that sleep ASAP. It might be chemically induced and unnatural, but it beats the hell out of going nuts.

Moreso than usual, that is.

I can’t remember ever being good at sleeping. Even as a small child, I had trouble getting to sleep. Perhaps it’s a side effect of my supercharged mind, I don’t know. But falling asleep has always been a long and tricky process for me.

I get the feeling childhood neglect might have played a role there too. It could be that something went wrong during the period where I was “learning to sleep” – I didn’t get enough of whatever emotional nutrients I needed – and that fucked things up.

But it’s probably the supercharged brain thing. It took me a long long time to learn to handle a mind that is racing at top speed even though I am extremely sleepy.

That’s a horrible state of mind right there. Too sleepy to actually do anything, like read or play a game or whatever, and yet unable to actually get to sleep.

Instead, my mind races to nowhere on a hamster wheel three sizes too small and a voice in my head is silently screaming like an abandoned infant.

Funny hwo that image sprung so easily to mind.

As is, I don’t exactly have a normal sleep schedule. I nap. Once in the afternoon, once in the evening. I know why I do it. It’s an anti-anxiety reflex. By going down for a nap, I dump out my accumulated stress and can start over when I wake.

That keeps the background anxiety level within acceptable levels.

It would be different if I had things to do. Like a job. The kind that takes place somewhere other than my bedroom, where I can go from sitting at this computer to lying in bed without even standing up.

Then I would have to get my poop in a group and develop normal sleeping habits. And it would be a tough transition. Large quantities of diet cola would be involved.

Some people have Starbucks, I have Diet Coke. Don’t judge me just because the way I get my caffiene isn’t “cool”!

Okay, I am clearly beginning to lose my mind. Time for a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Seems like a good deal to me. A year of high quality sunshine Seventies happiness. Well sign me the fuck up.

For some people that would not be enough. I call those people “spoiled”. Sure, love can last forever. But it might not. Love ends. People change. Stuff happens.

It’s like people complaining about their last marriage saying “It was great for the first three or four years…. ”

OK, STOP. Hold the phone. You’re saying you were happy for three or four years? As opposed to forever?

I’d buy that for a dollar. And don’t bother wrapping it up. I will wear it out.

Anyhow. that’s not what I wanted to talk about tonight. Tonight, we talk of sunshine.

I had another “sunshine moment” last night, like the one I described before. This time, I was walking through a parking lot when I suddenly saw the beautiful sunny day with its blue sky and yellow sun and green grass, and I said to myself, “Why can’t I have this?”

Why can’t I live in this wonderful world of sunshine and wholesome goodness? Why am I stuck in my dark, hot save, hiding away from the world playing video games? What is keeping me from walking out of my apartment and enjoying the day?

The quick answer is “depression”. But tonight, I want to go deeper than that.

Because I felt a real longing in that moment. Something deep inside me wanted to reach out and touch that gorgeous day and become a part of it, and it a part of me. I desperately wanted to leave my sad little life behind and go wherever the sunshine led me, and in doing so, get some joy into my life, god dammit.

For the most part, my life has very little joy. Happiness of a sort when I am hanging out with my friends. But the rest of the time, my life is something to be endured. not embraced. It’s something to avoid via constant distraction because if I am not distracted, I will realize how bad my life sucks.

And it sucks because I spend all my time distracted. Etc.

It used to be that, while my life provided little in the way of joy, it at least provided a limited kind of contentment. But that’s not the case any more.

My discontent grows daily. This life of mine just won’t do any more. I am going to have to do a heck of a lot of growing and changing in order to fashion myself a new one.

And going from a state of contentment (ish) to a state of unrest is always going to suck. Parts of me that were dormant are waking up and disturbing my equilibrium. There is going to be a tectonic level of change chez moi, and that is going to involve a lot of pain and distress on my part.

But right now, I am feeling sick so I need to lay down for a bit.

Well that was blleedin’ unpleasant.

Got a tad overwrought, I suppose. Plus other factors. Blah blah. The long and the short of it is that I had a nasty Irritable Bowel Syndrome attack, and truth be told, it’s probably not over yet.

But during this lull in the fighting, I am going to try to get some blogging done.

The attack same fairly suddenly and acutely. Suddenly my head hurt, I felt naseous, my guts felt like a mass of mating snakes, and I knew it was time to deal with some things.

Luckily, I know pretty much exactly what to do in such a situation. The key is to de-escalate (descalate?) the tension as quickly as possible. That means going in the opposite direction to what the pain and so on would naturally take you.

It means laying down and letting go of all pressure and tension in my mind and in my body so that my body can resolve things sans interference from the mind.

That means laying down someplace quiet and dark. Usually, I end up sleeping briefly.  That doesn’t necessarily solve the problem but it gets me through the crisis point.

Beats the hell out of spending an hour or two on the toilet while my guts are twisting up like those aforementioned snakes are now SUPER mad at each other.

I have presumably tripped over all ym usual risk factors. Like my sinuses. I wasn’t sure if I had taken my sinus medications or not,. so I didn’t take them after realizing that because I didn’t want to double dose myself.

Now I am guessing I did not take them. Argh.

But as VERY patient readers know, for me, the sinus stuff is just the most acute manifestation of a whole body wide inflammatory response.

A response which, sadly, includes my poor testicles.

Yup, in times like this, my boys begin to ache in a way awfully reminiscent of that awful, soul-shattering, nightmare inducing way they would ache after being kicked.

Hence the nausea. It’s possible that sinus pain alone can make me nauseous, if it’s bad enough, but throw in testicle ache and my guts doing the mambo and it’s a sure thing.

Luckily, like I said, I avoided all that. And writing it out like that has helped to further calm me. Enough that I am catiously nibbling my interrupted supper now.

The other factor in these attacks is the psychological factor. Often if I am psychologically upset, my IBS makes sure my stomach gets upset too, sometimes at the same time, other times half an hour after I have calmed down again.

Which, if you think about it, is brutally fucking unfair.

Haven’t I suffered enough?

But I don’t think emotions were the trigger this time. It’s not like I was writing about something upsetting or something had stirred up deep passions or anything.

But maybe I was asking myself questions that my depression didn’t want to hear and so it pulled the emergency brake. I don’t know.

Oh well. I seem to be recovering and that’s what matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am not doing so hot in that area.  And I am beginning to get worried.

For a while, I have been getting various kiinds of phantom pain in my poor feet. The most common acute form is a feeling rather like being jabbed between the toes with a red hot needle.

It can happen at any time and has no obvious source. There is no external sign of anything wrong, like discoloration or swelling. And it disappears as fast as it comes on, fading away with a maddening but mercifully hot, itchy, kind of wet sensation.

But there have been lots of other weird sensations. Like my foot feeling cold and clammy like it’s in a wet sock in the winter when it is in a perfectly dry sock in the summer. Or a feeling like I have a big ol scratch down the sole of the foot when there is nothing there.

These are clear signs of neurological distress.

But it might also be a circulatory thing as well because I have noticed that my feet fall asleep SUPER easily lately. The slightest pinch or pressure and down they go, like I have narcolepsy of the feet. And that’s quite worrisome, with or without the other symptoms.

But wait, there’s more. I also get this feeling on my big toes like they are wrapped in very tight bandages. Almost like they have been shrink wrapped.

And overall, the whole area feels numb, including the back of my legs. Sometimes it feels a little like I am wearing tight pants from the knees down.

I am not.

That would be weird.

Oh, and for ages now,  my hands have gotten cold very, very easily.

Even in the middle of a super hot day.

This is bad. Very very bad. Clearly my diabetes is fucking things up somehow and my blood, like the rest of me, isn’t getting around too good any more.

So it’s to the doctor I go. This morning, I was freaked out about it enough that I thought about calling 911. Or getting Joe out of bed to get him to drive me to the hospital.

Meh. If it came to that, I would probably just take a cab.

But things are clearly going from bad to worse. I’ve got to get this shit checked out. I only hope that I have not permanently damaged my body via self-neglect.

I mean, sure I take my meds and avoid sugar, but I still eat too many carbs and I never ever test my blood and I don’t even take my insulin any more because I am afraid of setting off a blood sugar crash and ending up in a very bad place.

Pittsburgh! Ha ha ha. These are the jokes, folks. I don’t juggle.

For the most part, I have crawled out of the deep dark hole I feel into due to goddamned motherfucking Skyrim, but the insulin taking stayed gone.

Turns out it is really easy to NOT stab myself in the flab every night.

Let’s see. Oh, it only takes missing my diabetes meds one time for the hyper hunger to return. As patient readers know, that’s not just a serious case of the munchies.

It’s my cells crying out for nourishment because I don’t have enough insulin response going on and therefore not enough glucose is moving from my bloodstream to the cells to keep them going. So they hit that hunger button HARD.

And it can be very stressful and frustrating because the hunger is SO strong and eating barely puts a dent in it.

I suppose it could be worse. I could be the sort of fat dude that binges. That could easily lead to a very nasty cycle of trying to fill that hole in my gut with frantic eating and ending up making things a whole lot worse.

So I lucked out there. I haven’t done any binge eating since I was a growing teen. Blame and/pr credit my dislike of things without clearly defined limits as well as it offending my sense of order and control.

If anything, I go too far in the other direction and rarely ever eat between meals. Even if I get pretty hungry. That started as a response to extreme poverty but I am in no big hurry to change it, even though I have more $$$ now.

I hate to think of the possible effects of having a lot more money, though. Like, the kind of money where deciding, on impulse, to order some pizza or whatnot would not be madness.

I don’t worry about sweet temptations. I am pretty much over that. I hhave my sugar free treats and the nausea I feel when looking at sweet things has never been stronger.

But there’s all those other kinds of carbs.

Still, meanwhile, back at the point, I got serious health stuff to get looked after. And I will have to be on guard to make sure I don’t just let it dissolve back into the primordial starstuff of my mind like so many other things.

The real problem is that I have both diabetes and depression. It’s the depression that makes it so hard to look after myself properly. Any impulse I have to look after myself better gets blocked by that enormous sadness inside me and I have to turn away and say “No”.

The best I can do is build up new habits over the long term. I successfully got over my hygiene issues. I don’t get the urge to eat sugary foods any more.

But it’s going to take some time for me to recover enough of myself to make that big mound of sadness small enough to truly deal with.

Until then, all I can do is trudge forward like usual, and keep testing my boundaries in search of a weakness I can exploit.

It happens. And then I can break off another piece of this glacier and send it down south to melt.

I wish I could do a lot more than that, But I can’t/

Amd that’s okay. I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.