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.

Repeat after me : Nothing is so good that it can’t be made better.

Call it the Optimizer’s Prayer. It’s something I truly believe, and making things better (or making better things) is what I want to do with my life.

But it is not a matter of faith. It’s based on a lifetime of seeing how things are and imagining how they could be better. That’s all the evidence I need. And the older I get, the better I am at seeing these superior solutions with clarity and certainty.

And the better I am at being to articulate it as well.

And as long as this drive to optimize the world remains withing the soft and cozy walls of sanity, it’s a wonderful thing. I could do the world a lot of good. I could be a pretty amazing guy.

But of course,. I am a crazy person, so my drive to optimize is as corrupt and untrustworthy as any other part of my mindscape.

What happens is that “this could be better” turns into “this should be better” which rapidly devolves into “you should have done better” and finally “you suck because you didn’t do that the best possible way, you useless fucking loser. ”

My mind is stuck in a loop of constantly trying to do my best while constantly failing my own test because I cna always see what I could have done better.

Sometimes it’s hard to see anything else.

The missing ingredient, as usual, is forgiveness. Humanity. An understanding that all I can do is make the best decisions I can based on what I know at the time and the odds are very low that it will be the ideal or even the superior solution because I am not a perfect person.

I hate those perfect people.

SO why do I hold myself to such impossible and inhuman standards? I think it has something to do with being so alone in my formative years that I had to kind of make things up as I went long, and that’s lovely if you’re a jazz pianist but not so good when you are building the mental machinery that you will have for the rest of your life.

In fact, I think a lot of my problems make a lot more sense if you think of me as a grown ass man with a mind designed by a child.

There was nobody else in my head to help me! I was all alone in there. Nobidy was trying to guide me or support me or make sure I got what I needed to develop properly. Nobody gave a significant enough fraction of a shit to actually try to influence me.

Instead. experience taught me to go away and not bother anybody, and I am still doing that to this very day. I sometimes wonder if my agoraphobia is, at its root, a desire to stay out of the way and not be noticed.

After all, there was a time when not being noticed was key to my survival. It was the only way to make it through recess and lunch without getting bullied. And at home, it was the same basic thing. The only safety lay in blending in with the furniture.

So I was a stealth kid. A ghost. I learned to disappear and not draw any attention to myself.

And that’s why, for all my talk abvout walking in the sun and wanting to be a part of life and all that razzamatazz, there is a great and terrible force working against that goal and that is the great fear within me that says that exposure equals danger and my only hope is to remain hidden and hope nobody notices me.

That’s the monster that rears its ugly head every time I think seriously about stepping outside my little box and pushes me firmly back to square one.

It’s the only square I know.

I have been thinking about this great fear a lot lately. It’s also a great sadness. I have spoken before about how when I am gearing up to do something, this great sadness will turns its head away from the world, tears in its eyes, faces the wall, and say “No. ”

And that’s where it stops. Because to proceed would be to enter the territory of the biggest monster of them well, the time I was raped as a child.

I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to see that’s where I first turned my head to the wall and said no. Shut out absolutely everything and took my mind away.

And it’s never come back. It’s too scared.

So I can’t just push past that barrier. Not yet. Maybe in the not too distant future, but I am just plain not there yet.

Of course, ideally, I would be able to do it right now. But I am just too lame.

And just like that he comes full circle and gets back to talking about his brutal and corrupy optimization instincts. Ta da!

Bet ya didn’t see THAT coming!

What is needed is some kind of humanizing factor. Call it the mercy to my judging mind’s justice. The voice that says “But I am, after all, only human. ”

Then adds, “and that’s fine!”.

It says something about one’s unbalanced state of mind when being merely human means you are not good enough.

So I need to learn to show mercy to myself. Forgive myself for being a frail, finite, limited, vulnerable, imperfect naked beach ape and not the superhuman demigod that my overweaning intellect sometimes makes me feel like I am.

It’s hard to see yourself as merely human when you feel the difference between yourself and mainstream humanity so keenly and feel like it has to make you somehow both less and more than the average joe.

Their minds and worlds seem so small and limited to me.

But then again, they’re happy and I’m not.

So what the hell do I know?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.