I kind of miss being apathetic.

I mean, not really. I would rather be alive and in pain than numbly content. That contentment might seem like a good deal, but it comes at a terrible price.

Because if you can’t feel the bad things, you can’t feel the good things either. And people need nourishment in their lives, not just a lack of toxins.

Man (and woman) cannot live on safety alone.

That is what taught me that there are things far worse than pain, like being dead inside, and that the cold circuit of the brain cannot sustain a healthy mood by itself.

So I don’t truly miss my apathy. It’s just a thought that passes through my mind from time to time when I am feeling overwhelmed by all that jangling chaos inside my head.

Nowadays, nihilism has replaced apathy. I’ve gone from not caring whether I lived or died to defensively declating that I don’t give a shit about anything as a way to overpower all those crazy voices in my head.

Because seriously. Fuck that shit,. All those voices of multifaceted aversions and emotional perversions and the million and ten neuroses all shrieking for my attention at the slightest provocation can go die in nuclear fire, because I am sick and tired of their crap and no longer willing to put up with it.

I’ve tried to be smart and civilized about the whole thing by listening to what the voices are trying to tell me, and I am not giving up on that, but before any of that can happen, I need some fucking peace and quiet in my head so I can think.

And, more importantly, feel.

As you might have guessed, I am still mad at the world. And my life. And life in general. And everyone who ever hurt me. And the list goes on and on,.

And that’s fine. I am not looking to calm down. This rolling rage of mine is just fine by me. It’s burning through prodigous amounts of the random bullshit and stinkingly septic psychological scar tissue clogging up my pipes, and I could not be happier about that.

So fine, I will stay mad. I’ll stay mad till Xmas if that’s what it takes. I’m enjoying the feeling of being truly alive that comes with the rage.

It might not be easy or fun, but at least it keeps me warm for once.

I recently realized this about the upcoming American midterms : I feel about them like I would feel about upcoming major surgery.

A surgery that could very well cure the terrible illness that has been devastating me for the last two years, but could also do nothing or even make things worse.

So I view it with a kind of sick anticipation. It’s a potent cocktail of hope, fear, dread, and an overwhelming sense of immensity of events verging on awe.

We live in interesting times. These are the days that will feature prominently in the history books of the future. So much is in flux and the pernicious influence of the old crazy mean and stupid of the world being manipulated by pedagogues into their preferred state of outright terror into voting in people just as horrible as themselves all over the world continues to erode the values upon which civilization is based.

The real ones, not the bullshit panoply of prejudices and public neuroses the social conservatives call the foundational values of civilization.

It’s ironic. They are quite right when they sense that civilization is under attack byt eht forces of chaos and barbarism.

What they miss is that it’s people like them who are doing it. People who are freaked out by the changes they can no longer absorb and have fallen into the trap of thinking it is possible to turn back the clock to a time when they understood what was going on.

And sure, they weren’t filled with bliss back then either. But try telling THEM that. The long lense of nostalgia can make even the worst of times seem like a simpler and more innocent time when life was better.

Myself included. Although my most intense nostalgia is for my preschool (and pre rape) days, when my mother was still home taking care of me and I felt loved and cared for and safe. When I was a little redheaded kid with oodles of natural charm and cute as a heck and a knack for beguiling and bemusing everyone I met.

Things from that era can unleash tsunami level waves of nostalgia in me. I think the nostalgia is all the more potent for my having suppressed it for so long.

Why did I suppress it? Because when I was a child, I saw people claiming that the days of their childhood were the happiest days of their lives, even when they clearly weren’t.

And my childhood was absolutely horrible. So I decided that I would never fall pray to this madness called nostalgia that made people think things were far better than they had ever been.

Basically, I said to myself that if I ever make the mistake of thinking these were the best days of my life, shoot me in the fucking head, because either I have lost my freaking mind or my life has gone so very poorly that death would be a mercy.

I can see the ignorance in that view now. I still feel the same way about my childhood and that is unlikely to ever change.

But I can see how making such a decision is an example of the exact kind of dehumanizing emotional brutality based on, perhaps, an excess of confidence in my own judgment that has left me such a fucked up adult to this very day.

Kids shouldn’t be left to raise themselves. Even if they are crazy smart, talk like an adult, and seem like they know everything already.

Because despite all that, I was still just a kid.

And I was all alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am a conundrum wrapped in a mystery, stuffed into an oxymoron, then slow roasted in a imponderable sauce before being lightly dusted with powdered paradox and finished with a bold illusionberry sauce.

Anyone else getting hungry?

Let’s try this again. I am a cipher that translates into an irrelevant message in a forgotten language written on a random cliff wall in a misbegotten canyon down a faint and dusty road from bloodstained rock where, a long time ago, a worthless explorer died a cruel and pointless death.

That got dark at the end.

One more try. I am a digital file folder of worthless documents written in an obscure format only readable by an obsolete operating system using a file system so clunky and obscure that modern data retrieval wouldn’t even recognize it as information.

The computer itself is a barebones, jury-rigged, unrecognizable circuit board lying two inches from the ceiling on the top shelf of the back row of a forgotten storage room in the lowest sub-basement of an abandoned facility located in an ugly and ill kept indutrial park in some shabby subdivision far away from the highway, near the airport, in a neighborhood so run down and depressed that even the stray dogs avoid it,.

If any satellite could be bothered to take a picture of the area, it would look like a crime scene, with large buildings sprawled like corpses whose arms and legs were made of cheap, ugly, depressing prefab housing filled with people who stopped trying so long ago that they would not even recognize the meaning of the term.

People who go through the motions of life doing whatever it seems like they are supposed to do like ghosts putting on a play. People whose main skill in life is avoiding thinking about anything bigger than the next party or event because they all, to a one of them, know that outside their carefully constructed and maintained lives lies nothing but absolutely annihilation of the soul.

People who go through life like sleepwalkers who know that the worst possible thing to happen to them would be for them to wake up.

I really do paint a picture with words, don’t I?

My point, before I went off on that fascinating artistic tangent, is that I have been an enigmatic person all my life. And I am damned good at it. So good, in fact, that most people have no idea that I am mysterious and obscure because I put on such a good show of being open and honest and willing to tell anyone anything.

I do such a good job of that, in fact, that I often fool myself as well.

That is, as it were, the point. When you get right down to it.

But if some omniscient observer were to read all the transcripts of my life, they might just pick up the pattern. They could figure out that a lot of the time, I give evasive and noncommittal answers to questions about myself.

I get away with it because people are swept up in the show. Plus I use my highly advanced powers of self-expression to deflect, evade, obscure, or dodge questions I don’t like, and I do it so deftly and with such great skill that people feel like I have answered their questions even when I haven’t.

After all, there is no point to being evasive if people know you’re being evasive. That would attract the very attention I seem to be trying to avoid. The only truly secure secret is one that nobody knows exists in the first place.

But why? Why must I evade? And I truly have no choice. It’s the product of instincts that run deep into the very core of my psyche. Hard wires that lead all the way down into my mammalian brain, where the scared little animal at my core resides.

On that deep dark level, my instincts tell me that the only safety comes from hiding all my problems and projecting the image of a happy, healthy, independent person who is always just fine and doesn’t need anything so you can go away and go back to your life now and leave me the hell alone.

It’s a rather complex form of camoflage, and requires my rather extraordinary kind of brain to maintain, I would imagine.

But it works for me.

Well, not really. What it really does is keep me from getting the sort of help I need. That image I project keeps people away. That’s the whole point. And that means I do not get close to others and they do not get close to me.

Nobody touches me. Ever. Not really. Deep down I am safe in my hermetically sealed vault where nobody can ever get to me again.

But of course, I am starving and smothering in there. Human beings cannot survive without the closeness of others and that means that on some level, you have to let people in. It’s not enough to simply be near them and soak up the residual warmth of their nearness without ever actually letting them in.

The healing I so desperately need can only come from convincing that scared little animal that it is safe to finally open that door and lets itself be touched – truly touched – by another for the first time in a very, very long time.

EVerything else – the games, the distractions, the colorful illusions, the simulated proximities, the artificial love songs, the poetry of the obscurist soul, all of it – is nothing more than morbid masturbation of the soul if it doesn’t lead to true openness and the final liberation of that terrified infant inside.

Nobody knows the real me. Not my shrink. Not my friends. Not my family. Not even the people I play pretend with every day online, where in theory I can be exactly who I want to be and have no reason to hide.

Nope,. Nobody knows real me. Nobody can.

That’s because there is no real me. The masks conceal nothing, the walking armor is empty, the son et lumiere is all there is.

In fact, I am not even really here.

Show’s over. Dim the house lights. Everyone go home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And deeper in derp.

Wow. Jeff Beck and ZZ Top do Sixteen Tons. Bitchin’.

So yeah. Whatever. Not feeling any better about my life than yesterday. Still feel like everything is stupid and pointless and worthless.

So, ya know, just another average day here in Sad Hell.

Finished my course of antibiotics last night. So I suppose that means that I am technically “over” my pneumonia now. At least on paper.

Me, I am not so sure. I can still feel gunk in my lungs, and said lungs are kind of sore most of the time,. I haven’t been coughing much and I can’t say I feel the malaise coming back, so that’s good,

But as far as I am concerned, I am not out of the woods yet, and I will be paying very close attention to my health for the next couple of days to make sure the antibiotics did a thorough job and didn’t just cull the herd.

-Who knows. Maybe the real reason I am so pissed off and depressed lately is that I am still fighting this fucking thing and it’s ruining my mood somehow.

But nah. This shit has been coming for a very long time. It just took escaping my current life for five days then coming back to it and realizing how much it suuuuuucks to kick it off. But this storm has been brewing for years.

I am just so god damned tired of this life and this lifestyle. I long to make some kind of radical change that will truly shake thiings up by breaking all my old patterns and forcing me to create new ones.

Fresh ones. Strong ones. Ones better suited to who I really am. Ones that start from me and work outward in order to better cope with the reality of being who I really am.

Patterns that include dealing with complex emotions experienced in real time Otherwise known as “coping with reality”, Patterns that include far more of the real world than the dank and squalid little gadren known as my current comfort zone.

That sucker is way overdue for expansion and I have the land deed and zoning variances to make it happen.

All that is left is to actually do things.

Yeah… about that….

I am very much feeling the eternal stalement lately. Like for every move I make, there is a part of me – call it the Deadly Adversary – that makes the countermove that will return things to their “normal” state of total doldrums,.

I suppose, in a way, it’s a question of resolve. Part of me wants to move forward and part of me is terrified of the entire idea and willing to do whatever it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen, no matter how self-destructive.

And right now, it’s the negative side that has the power of the id behind it most of the time. That’s why the countermeasure is both instantaneous and vehement. It definitely has the force of fear and pain and all the other hard emotions behind it,

Against that, my sad little rational ego strains in vain. Most of the time. Real progress will not be made unless I can steal the energy from that bastard and grow strong enough to push back when he tries to put me in my place and hold me down.

And that means dealing with my emotions. And I mean really dealing with them, not just analyzing them to death with permanent Spock eyebrow going “How fascinating!” and mistaking intellectual gear grinding for actual progress.

So yeah. I am pissed off about my life and how it’s turned out and where I find myself at the absurd age of 45 and I am going to stay pissed off about it until something changes or I go completely insane.

Honestly, I could go either way.

It might not be fun or comfortable to stay mad like this, but I don’t give a shit. This is the only way anything is ever going to change. The deep layers of my tainted soul have to be made to believe that the only way out of this uncomfortable situation is to forge new pathways that lead to a superior solution.

Only then will the gates of my prison swing open so I can go out on leave at least. So much of the energy of my soul is set to work against itself that it can be hard to figure out how to get ahead.

Or what to do with the energy once it is released from enternal self opposition. That’s the thing – I honestly don’t know what to do with myself when I have energy.

If I am not careful, it will turn into anxiety and depression. Perhaps that’s a big part of what has been happening with me lately. My energy is coming back to me after all that time spent sick and it’s not finding anything like a decent enough outlet so it’s backing up and becoming depression etc instead.

It’s a theory, at least.

I always have a theory.  I’m a theory kind of guy.

It’s putting that shit into practice that’s the hard part.

I dunno. LArgely, I just don’t give a shit. Fuck it. Fuck it all. Fuck everyone and fuck everything. My new life motto is “I don’t know and I don’t care. Fuck off. ”

I can even sing it, if I feel like it. It’s my new nihilist anthem. It’s the perfect solution for when there are so many voices in my head asking for answers or trying to contain things I am anxious about and avoiding that I can;t hear myself think and the only way to shut them up is to brain them with a brick of rock solid id.

De doo doo doo, motherfucker.

The meaning isn’t all that’s true. That still blows my mind.

So I dunno. I guess you nice people will have to put up with my angry venting and other forms of delay-adolescence crankiness until I get a grip on myself.

Long live the new flesh, I guess,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am feeling somewhat better than I did yesterday.

But I still ain’t happy.

Part of the problem, and it shames me to admit my life is this shallow, is that I have gotten pretty burned out on that game I have been playing a ton, Elder Scrolls Online, and I have yet to find a replacement.

So now there is this big empty void in my life where the fun used to be. It’s tragic that this is what my life has become, but it’s the truth.

My mood is highly dependent on whether or not I have a good game going or not.

Seeing as I currently do not, this is a good time to start talking about why I need one so bad and what I could do to maybe try to transfer my emotional dependence from video games to something a little more productive.

If only I could re-imagine writing as a video game, and feel as safe, comfortable, and confident doing it as I do video games, as well as finding it just as rewarding.

Rewarding is the big thing. Everything we do, we do to stimulate our reward center.

But of course, life is not like a video game. Like Jane Mcgonigal said, reality is broken. In the world of video games, effort and reward are nearly always equal, persistance always pays off, everything is geared to keep you motivated with continuous small rewards leading to occqasional larger ones, you can take on roles of great status and importance and even wealth that are totally out of reach in the real world, and indeed the whole reality of the game is custom made to make you happy.

Life ain’t like that, in case you haven’t noticed.

When I am playing a good (by my standards) game, I am transported. Mundane reality ceases to exist (for the most part) and I escape my highly unsatisfactory mundane existance and go to someplace where I am important, powerful, valuable, and above all, where I can be a hero, righting wrongs and kicking the crap out of evil.

With a setup like that, why wouldn’t I prefer that world to the real one? It’s not like the real one has been especially kind to me. My real existence is a depressing drag through time where the minutes and days are to be endured, not enjoyed, and where a good day is one where the game I was playing was so good that I barely noticed the passage of time at all.

Yay, I made it through six whole hours without thinking about stuff! It’s almost like I skipped those hours entirely!

Truly, my greatest goal seems to be to make it through the day as seamlessly and effortlessly as a champion swimmer cutting through the water with their body.

That can’t possibly be right, can it? That can’t be healthy. There has to be more to life than trying to get through it with a minimum of pain.

And as patient readers knows, I do want more out of my life. I am sick to death of this sad existence of mine. I want to earn and learn and love and LIVE.  I am tired of living my life as if I am in cold storage somewhere, waiting for an ineffable something to happen in order to activate me and bring me back to life.

Whatever the fuck it is I have been waiting for, I think it is safe to say it ain’t gonna happen and whatever happens in my life, it is up to me to make it happen.

And that…. makes me sad. Which is sad.

Presumably, I had my emotional development interrupted at some crucial stage and a big part of me is simply waiting for the emotional inputs I never got in order to be able to move on to the next developmental stage, and then the next, and the next, and so on until I actually grow the fuck up.

I don’t have a solid read on what those inputs might be, but I definitely know that it has a lot to do with nurturing. I did not get the care, comfort, support, and above all the sense of safety I needed when I was a kid abandoned to the wilds of elementary school, and that fucked me up in a very big way.

And there is no way to get those inputs as an adult male. None. Adult men are viewed with unmasked contempt for even hinting that they might want that. And it’s worse if you are big and tall because you look like you “should” be able to take care of yourself.

Well I can’t. I think my life amply demonstrates that. And that’s just too fucking bad, because there is nobody out there to look after me either.

My therapist keeps telling me that I need to learn to provide these inputs for myself. But I don’t see how that can work. You can’t pick yourself up and carry yourself. It’s physically impossible. There is no part of me that is strong enough to be the inner parent that I so desperately need.

If there was, I wouldn’t even need one.

So I am fucked, more or less. Can’t help myself and nobody can help me and I can’t do jack shit without help, so fuck ME, I guess.

It’s a hell of a catch, that Catch-22.

I guess all that is left for me is what I started with : A life that is meaningless and irrelevent and inane where the best that I can hope for is a video game good enough to make me forget how much I hate myself and my life for a while.

And maybe, every now and then, when the stars align and the portents are fruitful and all the hens in the coop lay sideways eggs, I can do a little something to push against the walls of my cage and maybe get myself a tiny bit more room.

It ain’t much, but it’s all I have got.

And it’s fucking pathetic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I fucking hate everything right now.

Which means I have entered the angry nihilism phase of my long term mood cycle, I suppose. Because I seriously give absolutely no fucks at the moment.

Everything I do seems pointless and worthless and stupid. I feel like taking all my clothes off and running screaming into the night. I feel like picking a fight with a stranger just so I would have a way to vent all this aggression. I feel like I want to grab the world by the throat and shake it till it starts making fucking sense.

maybe smack it around a little too. It knows why. Fuckin’ bitch.

This is a bad time for me. I want to level buildings and crush traffic underfoot. I want to scream in the face of everyone who has ever hurt me. I want to crush the life out of every single inner fucking demon I’ve got.

I want to leave a long trail of destruction and mow down any bullshit that confronts me.

I want to bleed hard in public.

I suppose it’s all a part of my extremely late blooming into my emotional adolesence. Being a teenagar is rough enough when you are young and strong and resilient.

When you are old and weak and sick, it’s a frigging nightmare.

I am just so tired of this bullshit life of mine. I want to hit the reset button and start over. I want to not have to live as this person in this life any more. I am tired of being me. I want to be someone else for a change.

I keep getting the urge to just cash this month’s check and disappear. just plain vanish off the facre of the Earth. Take a random Greyhound to wherever and start a new life someplace where nobody knows me and I can reinvent myself.

Because clearly, this version of me isn’t fucking working. And I am losinf faith in my ability to get to the version of me I want to be via incremental patches.

What i want most of all is to start over from scratch.

I suppose that’s the escapist in me. Because why deal with the mess I have made of my life when I can just run away and leave it for someone else to deal with?

Part of me is really that irresponsible.

But not most of me. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is debatable. But as it stands, I could not do that to the people who love me. If I followed my dream and disappeared. I would leave a lot of people I care about with a terrible mystery about where I am and what I am doing and whether or not I am okay.

Something like that can be just as destructive as suicide. Worse, in some ways, because suicide at least provides a horrible kind of closure.

Vanishing like part of me wants to do would leave everything in doubt.

I could never do that to people. I have too strong a sense of responsibility for my actions. I can’t knowingly hurt people like that.

Admittedly, this greatly limits the scope of my self-actualization. Less aware and responsible people do crazy things because that is what their inner voice tells them they have to do in order to evolve all the time.

Granted, they are usually a lot younger than me, but the point stands.

But no, I am too ‘smart’ for that. Oh no, not me. I am all smart and logical and sensible and totally in control of myself to do anything so foolishly healthy.

I… had a suicidal thought earlier. It passed quickly, but it still scared me some. That okl demonic voice started whispering in my ear about how awesome it would be to escape all this bullshit and pain.

Now I kind of wish I had gone to my therapist yestetday instead of skipping it out of fear of spreading my pneumonic plague all over the place.

Clearly, I am not in a good psychological state right now and I could use someone to talk to who isn’t a part of my life. That way, I can tell them anything and everything without worrying about hurting them or my words having consequences.

Oh well. Too late now. I will have to wait until Thursday, six days from now, to talk to someone in the way I need to talk to someone.

Maybe I will call a crisis line to tide me over. I dunno.

I am so sick of life hurting so much. I feel like an animal trapped in too small a cage. The tranquilizer has warn off and I realize what a pickle I am in and I begin to panic and pace back and forth. But that only makes things worse.

The world is a vampire.

And despite all my rage, I am still just a fox in a cage.

I have this urge to burn. I want to take all my bullshit and my issues and my baggage and my toxins and my dirty, dirty soul and build a giant bonfire with flames so high they lick the clouds out of them.

I want to burn and burn with a purifying fever that drives all the nastiness and filth from my misbegotten self until I am empty and pure and ready to move on to the next spiritual level without any regrets and no emotional baggage.

I hate being this grubby gross fat dude with the huge brain and no life. I am so fucking sick of knowing how powerful I could be if only I were strong enough to truly wield what I have instead of being a tiny monkey at the controls of an enormous machine that it can barely handle even at the best of times and which, quite frankly, scares the poop out of him mor often than not.

I want to be as big as my talents.

I want to be as strong as my mind.

I want to be as vibrant and vital as my wonderful personality.

But instead, I am the wretched thing you see before you.

And I ask you…. how can that be fair?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Brief (ish) note regarding the previous blog entry : please remember that sometimes I just need to vent all my negativity into the blog in order to calm myself down when I get all stressed out and frustrated. When I do so, don’t take anything I say about hating my life or wanting to jump out the window as meaning I have the slightest intention, or even a true inclination, towards any form of self-harm.

I am not suicidal and have not been for a long time. I want to live. Life is fun. It has video games in it. I want to stay.

I just get really fed up and pent up and crazy sometimes because I lack sufficient outlet for my emotions and they pile up pn me real quick.

Alright, that taken care of, let’s talk mood.

Mine has improved since writing that previous blog entry in the wee hours of the morning. That means writing it did its job, so… yay that.

I still don’t care for this life of mine very much, but I don’t feel like a trapped animal about it any more.

Catching up on sleep has helped a lot. I did not sleep well in the hospital. It’s too weird an environment, with things beeping and people moving around andthe  flourescent lighting does weird shit to my circadian rhythms. .^[1]

Plus I had fun neighbors. There was this one guy who screamed, I am assuming involutarily. But it wasn’t normal, horror movie screams. It was more like one long monotone scream, without emphasis.

It’s like, if a normal scream is “Aaaaaaaaaaaah!”, this was “Aaaaaaaaaaaah.,”

And I know what it going on there. It’s a brain function thing. It is not a scream, exactly, because it is not necessarily expressing any fear in the person. Rather,  it’s more like while they sleep, their brain wakes up that part of the brain responsible for our primal emotional vocalizations but then fails to give it any meaningful input, and therefore what comes out is the aequivalent of the background hum from an amplifier.

This poor person presumably (as they are in the hospital) has some kind of organic brain issue, of which the “screaming” was but one symptom. It’s certainly not the sort of noise that comes from anything voluntary a person would do.

But not all shared my enlightenment. Myself, I could tune the poor guy out, more or less. But for someone, that was not an option, and that someone would scream obscenities at the first person at the top of his lungs at random moments.

This was, of course, far far worse than the screaming. I wanted to scream back, “Dude, you are not helping!”, but ya know, didn’t want to get into a whole thing with the guy.

But that was really hard on the nerves.

So I am getting caught up on sleep now and that, of course, makes everything better. Plus I am back to my normal diet, which also helps a lot.

And my appetite is back. Thank goodness for that. As I have mentioned many times before in this space, eating when you have no appetite (or worse, negative appetite) is a bitch and a half and so I am at least glad I am not wrestling with that any more.

Come to think of it, though, I ate heartily in the hospital. I ate most of what I was served, even though the food was bland as fuck and they wouldn’t give me salt.

I think the artificial scarcity helped there. By which I mean that I couldn’t eat what I wanted whenever I wanted. I was going to get the food they gave me and that was it.

But more than that, I think my body really wanted the nutrition. So in a sense, my appetite wasn’t even involved. At least, not the conscious kind we normally associate with the term.

It was something more basic that bypassed conscious reasoning entirely.

The proof of that is that I actually ate the oatmeal that came with breakfast.

And it was horrible. Tasted like glue. Adding my precious packet of sugar substitute made it just barely edible. But it was still nightmare fuel.

But I ate it anyway, because I wanted that nutrition, dammit. I needed those complex carbs and fiber. So I scarfed that slop down anyhow.

Now if only I could be that smart with my own diet.

Oh well. I am home now, and have some of the usual kind of appetite. Which is awesome. Beats having to fight my body in order to feed it.

That shit gets real stressful. And I don’t always win. Sometimes I really have no choice but to skip a meal because there is no way I am going to be able to eat. Food seems almost infinitely gross to me at those times.

So even though I know skipping meals is one of the stupidest things I could do, I end up doing it anyway.

My life is… complicated that way.

I even have enojugh appetite to mostly finish my meals now. For a while, even when I had some appetite for meals at home, it would vanish about a third of the way into the meal and then I was back to “food is gross” mode.

It honestly felt like my stomach had gotten smaller. Or rather that, like my lungs, my stomach had something in it displacing what’s supposed to be there.

And while my body didn’t miss the carbs, it did miss the nutrition I got from the fruits and veggies I eat.

So I am glad to be back to normal on that scale too.

But there is still a fair bit of work to do before I am out of the proverbial woods yet. I still need to take a super hot shower so I can rinse five days of nothing but bed baths out of my easily clogged pores. I am doing a slowed-down, low-intensity version of my breathing exercises in order to slowly expand my lung capacity.

And of course, I will finish my course of antibiotics.

Slowly, I climb back up the ladder to where I was before.

Hopefully, I will soon put this whole damn thing behind me.

Then I can work on actually improving things!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t think I can do this any more.

This life of mine, I mean. I can’t stand it. Maybe it took being away from it for five days when I was in the hospital for me to be able to truly see it clearly, but it is clear as day to me now that I hate my frigging life.

It’s so stupid. So inane. All these days just marking time till the day I die. All the video games and Facebook and questionable dietary decisions. None of it appeals to me any more. And the prospect of going on this way for the rest of my life sickens me.

I live in filth because I never clean anything. This whole room is a garbage pit. Everywhere I look, there’s garbage, dust, and disarray. It’s a shit pile, and it makes me depressed just to look at it.

So what is my brilliant solution? Just don’t look at it! Just stay laser focused in on the computer screen and push the fact that I live in dirt out of my mind.

I am very, very good at pushing things out of my mind.

My bed is completely disgusting. No sheet on it, just the mattress cover that has been soaking up my sleep sweat for over a decade. The only bedding is my equally filthy and disgusting comforter. It hasn’t been washed in years.

So I sleep stewing in my own juices. Isn’t that lovely. You would think that this would inspire me to clean shit up.

But we all know it’s not that easy, don’t we? Because depression.

I never vaccuum, so the air is filthy with dust. It’s a wonder I don’t cough up dust bunnies on a regular basis. That has to be just brutal on my health.

And yet, here I sit, doing absolutely nothing about it. Because depression. Because depression blocks the pathways between motivation and action. So it doesn’t matter how much reason I have to do something.

The terror deep inside me keeps that from happening. It’s a terror that freezes everything inside me until its nothing but dead tissue.

Cause of death : frostbite and freezer burn.

My life has no direction. I try to row towards my goals when I can, but most of the time I just helplessly drift along towards a lonely and pointless grave where the epitaph will read : “Here lies Michael Bertrand. He had potential. ”

And I do. I have tons of it.

But depression keeps getting in the way.

If it wasn’t for my depression, there would be nothing keeping me from resigning myself to a few afternoons’ hard work cleaning up my room and putting it into a state that does not, in fact, require me to completely ignore my horrid surroundings in order to keep from wanting to jump out of the window, screaming.

What a radical notion. And quite brilliant. Gosh, I really do have potential!

Too bad it doesn’t mean jack shit. Because depression.

I feel so trapped. Like there is no way out of my terrible situation. I hate my stupid fucking life and yet I don’t feel like I have the power to change it.

The only solution, in such a situation, is to keep my mind unfocused and consciousness wrapped up in my distractions so that I don’t tbhink about how much I can’t stand my life. I just keep myself distracted, entertained, and utterly passive.

When escape is impossible, functional despair is the only solution. Give up. Don’t think about it. Keep your mind busy. Stay out of life’s way. Cling.

Don’t look around. Don’t think about my life. Don’t examine anything. Remain intellectual and detached about everything, and congratulate myself on how gosh darn smart I am and how I am totally going to do something amazing some day.

You know. When the Department of Genius finally gets around to knocking down my door and dragging me off to a fabulous career with an amazing lifestyle just for being my ever so special and unique snowflake self.

And all without me having to do anything! No effort invested, no risks taken, not even the tiniest step away from my teeny tiny comfort zone needed.

Golly, it’s a miracle!

Well that’s not going to fucking happen. If I am to have a life I can at least stand the sight of, it will have to be by the dint of my own efforts.

Which means I am fucked. Most of the time, anyhow. I just plain don’t feel strong enough to do it all myself. I lack the internal integrity.

The slightest application of thrust, and I fall apart.

So now what? What the fuck do I do with this information? Yup, I hate my life. This is not new. Recent events have simply added clarity to the whole thing.

And the truth is, I have no plan, as such. I can talk about trying to get work on Upwork but that’s iffy with my health being so fucked up.  I never know how much wherewithal I will have in order to get shit done.

It really makes me long for a regular gig instead of this freelance bullshit. If I had a regular gig, I could gather and dole out my energies rationally and I would not be so subject to the whims of my fucking chemicals.

But how woyuld I even find such a gig? Let alone land it?

I feel so helpless and isolated in the world. Abandoned. Developmentally arrested at far too young an age to be able to cope with adult reality without a hell of a lot of help.

More help than one can reasonably expect from the world, to be honest.

So I dunno. Maybe this is one of those cases when I just have to let the frustration build until it forces new pathways to open in my mind.

Or maybe I will finally go just plain nuts and forget about all this reality crap.

I have no idea.

But I do know this : something, somewhere, has to give.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have to talk about Max because he became a big part of my life while I was in the hospital, even though we have never met and wouldn’t know one another from Adam, God, or the Jackson Five.

See, Max was my next-bed neighbor in Room 604 of Six North in Richmond hospital. That meant I got to hear everything that went on over there.

After all, the only thing between us was curtains, and they are not exactly soundproof.

I fell a little in love with Max the first time I heard him. He arrived at the hospital not long after I did, and so I was there when he was moved into room 604.

He’s chatting with the nurse when he accidentally bumps into her or something and says “Aw, gee, sorry Chief. ”

For those who are not old and/or cool to get the reference :

It’s a catch phrase (one of many) from Get Smart

And that blew my mind. To hear that reference out of the blue like that immediately made me like the guy. And so I began to listen to whatever was going on over there as a matter of course.

I can’t help it. I’m a lifelong eavesdropper. I am too insatiably curious about people’s lives not to be. I always want to know what really happens in people everyday actual completely real lives.

It’s the writer in me, I guess.

So I start listening in. And Max is fun to listen to. He’s very funny and charming to the nurses in a LArry David kind of way. He has the gift of gab. He seems like he would be a fun guy to be around and terribly embarassing to his kids.

My kind of fellow.

I particularly liked it when his daughter brought her husband and some of the grandkids to Room 604 so they could celebrate her birthday together.

Now Max was in his element because now… he had an audience.

And it was clear that his relatives really loved and cherished him. There was a lot of love in that room. He even made the grandkids laugh, and I don’t think they wanted to be there (what kids wants to visit an old man in a hospital bed?) so they were definitely a tough crowd.

He was such a charmer that day that I wondered why he was in the hospital. He seemed to be doing fine to me.

I didn’t have to wonder long. It soon became apparent that Max, well, he was not all there any more.

In fact, there were times when he wasn’t all here, either.

He would get confused. At first, just a little confused. He’d ask when supper was when he had just eaten it. ^[1] He’s call a nurse by the wrong name. He would ask to see the big game on his rented TV, and then ask out loud who put this crap on?

But he got a lot worse. He would slip back in time, thinking he was at some patio party from long ago, complaining that all the kids expected him to feed them when “he’s not a fucking cook, okay?”. He would talk to people who were not there.

And when it got really bad, he would just call out his daughter’s name like a lost child looking for its mother.

In fact, it reminded me of something from when I lived with Angela. One of her cats, a big tough longhaired grey tabby named Harley, was quite elderly. And Harley, too, would get lost sometimes. He would start meowing like kitten, sounding so very sad and lonely, and Angela would have to go find him and pick him up and pet him and tell him that everything was going to be okay.

Max did not have someone like that. The nurses looked after him, of course, but they are always super busy and so they can’t spend a lot of time with individual patients.

So most of the time, Max was all alone with his dementia. I felt really bad for him because I know what that knd of fog of confusion can be like. And it’s terrifying. He was clearly very lonely and frightened and lost, and there was nobody to comfort him and tell him everything was going to be okay.

I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to reach out to him and tell him, in my best calm, centred, clear voice, that he was in the hospital now and being looked after by good people who wanted him to be healthy and so he should just relax because he’s safe.

Or something to that effect.

But I didn’t, of course. I am far too shy to do that kind of thing. Imagine trying to explain that to his family.

“And who are you again?”
“A random guy with pneumonia. ”
“And you know my father because….?”
“Because I’m a busybody…. listen… ”

But even that is too optimistic. That is how it would work in a sitcom. It would be funny and awkward and while initially mistursting me, the family would get to see that I care about Max and want the best for him, and by the end of the episode, we would all be together sharing a laugh and maybe some cake.

But life is not a sitcom.

It’s sad how often I need to remind myself of that.

Eventually. Max’s problems became discipline problems because his confusion made him agitated and that made him want to stand up, and standing up was not good for him and definitely not what the nurses wanted him doing.

And the thing is, no matter what we know to be true, human beings tend to react to other human being’s behaviour by the standards of “normal” people. So the nurses were getting mad at Max for “not listening” and “not doing what he was told”. They would get him calmed down and agreeable then the moment their backs were turned, he would forget it all and be lost and trying to get out of bed again.

Eventually, this one nurse got so frustrated with him (quite unprofessionally, in my opinion) that they moved him to some other unit in the hospital where someone could keep an eye on him all the time.

The worst part was that I could tell he was ashamed of this.

I, too, know what it is like to be ashamed of the mental mistakes you make and the trouble it causes others when you also feel there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Now that I am home, I won’t get any more updates on how Max is doing. I hope he is doing okay. I hope he finds his way back to the light, at least for a while, and I hope he gets to spend lots more time with his loving family.

I will miss you, Max Who I Don’t Really Know At All And Will Likely Never See Again. It may sound strange, but it’s true. I won’t be there as you flirt with the nurses and I can’t be there for you when you get lost in the darkness of your mind.

But who knows. Maybe we will bump into each other out there some day.

Then we can help each other find home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

From outer space!

I am back from Richmond Hospital, where I spent the last five days recoverting from pneumonia. Yup, the same pnemonia my roomie Julian had.

Small world. Small, contagious world.

I am far from out of the woods yet. I am still pretty sick. I am home not because they cured me but because I am well enough to go home. PEruiod.

And I am kicking myself for letting myself believe that leaving the hospital meant I would better by then. I was severely disappointed t find out that wasn’;t true when we left the hospital and I instantly becamke winded.

In face, to be honest, I feel more or less the same as when I checked myself into the hospital. SO an irrational and rather cranky part of me wonders why I just spent five fucking days in the hospital.

It’s crazy, I know. If I really think about it, I feel a gazillion times better than when I entered the hospital. Sure, I am still frustratingly lacking in lung capacity, but when I went in Friday night I felt terrible on many, many levels.

Now, it’s down to just a few.

I am okay if I I sit still. Almost no shortness of breath (SOB) then. It’s when I get up and move around that I get in trouble.

So yes. Irony of ironies, my treatment for my serious illness is to continue my extremely sedentary lifestyle – only more so.

Oh, and here was my first clear thought when I left the hospital “Oh crap. Now I have to be a person again. ”

Because that’s the best thing about being overtly sick in the hospital for someone with my profound weakness of character : nobody expects a damn thing of you. You have official permission to do nothing with your life and not be a grownup and not reall deal with anything at all.

That’s how people like me fall into being Munchausen’s Syndrome patients. To a person with severe emotional difficulties (ahem), being a hospital patient is ideal. They get care and nurturing and people’s sympathies while also being free ot any responsibility to deal with the scary loud grownup world out there, of which they are terrified.

So part of me – a very unhealthy part – is going to miss being in the hospital. It was like a vacation from reality in a way. I lived in a world where all I truly had to do all day was keep myself entertained, and people took care of my meals and my meds and such.

It was a lot like being a kid.

And the whole time, I maintained a sort of “don’t think about it” mental state. I dedicated myself to staying absorbed in my distractions because I knerw that would make the time pass easily and that was my top priority.

Patient readers will note that this is how I live my life outside the hospital too. The hospital only magnified it a lot. And it took away a lot of my autonomy, and that sucked pretty hard. I like to do things myself.

If I do it myself, I don’t have to sit there waiting for someone else to do it, not knowing when it will happen, uncertainty grating my nerves.

Much better to just do the damn thing myself.

Picture me saying that in a Hank Hill voice. He and I are alike in a lot of very Taurus ways, including occasionally feeling like the only person who has any SENSE around here some times.

Still, in other ways, being a hospital patient is an oral retentive wet dream. You get to just lie there while the world revolves around you.

When I was first admitted to the ER, an amazing scene took place. In the space of fifteen minutes, a dozen health professionals took various readings and measurements from me while I say there feeling like I was in the middle of one of those “fabulous makeover” scenes where the person is getting their hair done, while getting a manicure and a pedicure at the same time.

I have to admit, it was all kind of thrilling, and made me feel comptently cared for, and that’s not a feeling I get much out of life.

Now let’s talk about me versus the system.

I woke up Saturday morning with terrible back pain. It was excrutiating. Like someone had stuck a dagger between my shoulder blades. Huge knot of tension around it.

So I did the logical thing and I pressed the nurse call button. A nurse showed up. I told her all about the agony I was in. She nodded, then left without saying a single word about what would be done about my fucking pain.

And this would happen two more times. Press button, Get nurse. Patiently explain that I am in a lot of pain. They leave. Nothing happens.

Eventually, I at least get a nurse with sufficient rudimentary sentience to say “Do you want more Tylenol-3’s? Well you can’t have them until 12:30. ”

This did not appease me.

It was nearly 10:30 as she said that, and somehow waiting two hours for pills I knew would barely take the edge off did not appeal to me.

By this time I am super mad and probably super scary. The pain has cost me all sense of diplomacy and the fact that I am quite clearly telling a hospital full of health professionals that I am in a lot of pain and it barely seems to be registering yet alone producing a result is making it that much worse.

Eventually the doctor assigned my case. Doctor Wong, shows up. I think the nurses went and got him because they couldn’t handle me.

And at first, he is giving me the bullshit about Tylenol too. So I really let him have it, telling him that the Tylenol did not work and I needed something like a muscle relaxant. I made it clear that I was not going to be happy until someone actually addressed the fucking problem instead of regurgitating a formulaic response.

It was like some kind of Kafka-esque nightmare where everyone was a moron incapable of actually taking in any new information unless it fit within their microscopic umwelt. I was telling them exactly what the problem was and it might as well have been random clicks and pops and high pitched whining noises.

So I ended up essentially dominating Doctor Wong. Suddenly he had suggestions as to ways to actually treat my pain. Almost like it was a real thing that was actually happening and he was some kind of healer.

And all I had to do was scream into the hurricane for hours first.

Eventually I more or less sorted things out myself. I realized that it was the same kind of pain I got when I was severely constipated So I schemed my way toi the bathroom and tried to solve the problem that way,.

It more or less worked. The knot of tension remained but the horrible pain was gone. I ended up[ stretching out the knot of tension over the days.

But seriously. Why did I have to go through all that shit? It made me feel seriously misanthropic. You would think a patient reporting pain and getting treatment in the hospital would be the simplest thing ever..

And yet, I had to get super pissed and basically intellectually browbeat an actual fully trained medical doctor just to get him to wake up and look at the problem.

If there had not been so much pain, I probably would not have gotten that upset.

Probably wouldn’t have gotten results, either.

This is the sort of thing that turns guys like me into raging arseholes. I got a taste of the power of my mind, personality, and size from this incident, and it has given me a hell of a lot to think about.

Maybe the problem is me. Maybe there is something about how I normally comport myself that makes people dismiss what I say from their minds as fast as they can and refuse to treat it as real.

Perhaps my strong power of personality is to blame. Without meaning to (necessarily), project what I say so strongly that it feels like it is invading people’s minds and trying to take over their will, and they have to protect their mental sovereignty by just blotting it out at the most basic level.

Plus, my usually mild and pleasant mantter makes it seem like that would be a safe thing to do. I am highly nonthreatening most of the time.

It has its pluses and minuses.

Whatever the reason, I tell things to people and it completely fails to stir them into any action whatsoever. Something  about me stupefies people.

Maybe it’s my charisma. I don’t know.

But I do know I am damned sick of it and from now on I am going to step on however many toes it takes to make people wake the fuck up and LISTEN.

Damn being sick is making me cranky AF.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

Also, probably later tonight as well.

Because I still have to tell you about Max.

Well the good news is that I feel somewhat better today.

I am not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination, but I can at least see the light from the clearing in the distant trees. Some of the life-crushing energy drain has lifted adn so I am not nearly as depressed as I was yesterday.

Dunno why. Maybe my immune system is finally starting to beat this goddamned bug. I sincerely hope that is the case. I really want to be rid of this meddlesome virus, and for reasons carved entirely out of male insanity, I would rather I did it on my own.

Because then I didn’t have to show vulnerability to an authority figure (Doctor Chao) and let him put his drugs inside me.

I told you it was crazy.

Speaking of Doc Chao, I still don’t have an appointment with that motherfucker. I called five times today – no answer. The voice mail that starts “This service does not take messages..” didn’t even kick in. Just ring ring ring ring ring….

Exactly. Thanks. Pedo McBeardface!

So now I have to start thinking about alternatives to Doc Chao because while my mood is better, I think my lungs are slowly getting worse. It seems like I am short of breath all the time now, even when I am just sitting here typing, and I have to breathe slowly and deliberately in order to keep up with minimum oxygen demand.

So I don’t think this is something I can afford to leave till Monday.

Why do these medical things always happen to me right before the weekend? FML.

So that leaves two main options : a walk in clinic, and the emergency room.

I am quite leery of walk in clinics. Every one of them that I have been to is understaffed by extremely bored people who clearly hate being there and give your case the absolute minimum of thought it takes to make you go away.

Why do they suck so bad? Because you have high status people (doctors, nurses) seeing to the needs of very low status people, like the homeless and drug addicts.

And to someone who went to medical school,, having to see to the medical needs of people who don’t matter and don’t count and are often ugly on multiple levels and possibly not all that bright is absolute torture.

They didn’t go to medical school/ nursing school in order to spend all day around poor people! That can’t possibly be right. That’s not how the universe is supposed to work!

So like everyone else who hates their job, they are only going to put in the absolutely minimum amount of effort they think they can get away with, and that minimum does not include the effort it takes to mask their contempt for their clients.

And the clients don’t complain because in their world, doctors are highly intimidating authority figures from another dimension and they are just glad that one of these galactic superbeings paid attention to one as lowly as them.

That’s why it takes a middle class guy with middle class expectations like myself to see how badly the whole thing is run.

I swear, in another lifetime, I was a medical administrator, and I fixed that shit.

With extreme prejudice.

Whatever that means.

So to sum up, I really don’t want to go to a walk-in clinic. I do not like them.

But the alternative isn’t any more attractive. Taking something like this to the emergency room would activate another powerful symptom of a middle class upbringing : guilt. I would find myself wondering if it was really an emergency, per se, and if it wasn’t why should I be here taking up valuable resourcees that could be going to someone far sicker than I am.

So, guilt. And neurosis.

So I dunno. As insane as it sounds to me, I think I am going to have to just play it by ear, or rather, by lung. If I get worse, which is a real possibility, then it will be time for a trip to the OR. If not, I might limp my way to the walk in clinic a block away.

This thing has gotten as far as it has becauise it has snuck up on me slowly. I don’t have the kind of symptoms that I associate with a chest infection. Like everyone else, I have had chest colds. and they usually give me a heavy feeling on my chest, hacking up a lot of gross stuff, and a deep soreness in my lung tissue.

None of those are present right now. At least, not in forms I can recognize. What has been happening instead is that the goo in my lungs has been very slowly building up and displacing my lung capacity, which due to sleep apnea ain’t great oto start with.

What I need is an expectorant. This lung goo has got to go and I don’t think my body’s natural reflexes are up to the job. Most of my coughing is not productive, dammit, and so clearly I need something that will loosen things up in there

And maybe that is all I need. I hope that’s all I need. But it occurred to me just now that “lungs slowly filling up goo” is pretty much the definition of pneumonia, and that possibly I should be putting this whole thing on an even faster timetable.

So how’s this : not better by morning, it’s ER time.

And if it gets worse, ER time, no matter how inconvenient the timing or how I would rather keep hanging out with my friends at Denny’s.

You know. To take a random example.

So that’s my life right now. The serious contemplation of whether I should go to the ER now or later.

Life is such a basket of kittens, isn’t it?

Oh well. This is what life’s like when you are old and fat and so out of shape that you basically no longer have one.

I should probably do something about that at some point.

You know. When I have the energy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.