Things have gotten neither better nor worse re : my health status.

And that’s not good enough, damn it. Not good enough.

I am not surprised there are like a million versions of that clip on YpouTube. It’s one of my favorite Picard moments, and definitely the one I have replayed the most in my head over the years.

Anyhow, I have officially reached the point where I am well and truly sick and tired of being sick and tired. This is always the worst part of being sick for me, the part where I have run out of patience and just want the bug to go the fuck away already.

It’s bad because adding anger to being sick never makes things better. It only makes things worse, and thus this is when things can get really ugly.

At least it gives me the energy to do something about it, namely go to my GP. Clearly, this illness is not going to go anywhere without some kind of external intervention. Antibiotics or whatever. Maybe just a kickass vitamin shot.

But if I am to be rid of this godforsaken pathogen, it’s going to take more than just waiting it out.

So I called to make an appointment when I got home from therapy,. But Doctor Chao is not in on Thursdays, ergo so is his receptionist. So no make-a the appointment today, and that pretty much puts the kibosh on my hopes that I would see him tomorrow.

So I will call tomorrow and make an appointment for ASAP. Although if it’s too far off, I probably will tell the receptionist to forget it because this thing I have will either be over or have put me in the hospital by then.

I’d really rather avoid the hospital if I can Even just outpatients. Hospitals are depressing places, especially for an empath like me who can pick up on all the residual negative emotions left in the air.

See also : laundromats.

But if things start getting worse, I will not hesitate. Right now, my symptoms are not very acute. I have a brief coughing jag now and then and my nose runs. Plus, of course, there’s the malaise that drains my energy away and makes me so damned depressed.

But I have had far worse. So right now, it is totally a “doctor’s visit” level issue, not a “GIT YER ASS TO THE E.R. NOW!” kind of thing.

I am no longer the young man who ignored things until they left him no choice but to pay attention to them because they had gotten so bad.

You wanna bet that I am paying really close attention to my symptoms. The fact that my poor roomie Julian ended up in the hospital with pneumonia was a real wake up call, and I am not gonna let that shit happen to me if I can help it.

Boy I hope I can help it.

Because the very idea of ending up in the hospital with tubs done my throat and into my lungs gives me a case of the screaming heebie jeebies. There is no way UI could handle it without totally flipping out and trying to yank the tubes out. They would have to restrain me to keep me from doing that, and that, of course, would only freak me out ten times worse, and so they would end up having to sedate me.

That’s the only thing that would work. Self control only goes so far, especially when you are facing what is literally one of my worst nightmares.

As in, I have had nighmares where I woke up in that exact situation. Tubes down the throat, restrained, and rapidly losing it completely.

So I am definitely keen to avoid that. I got the hot and cold sweats just thinking about it. So you can bet I am going to do this right.

Talked mostly about being sick in therapy today. Oh, and the whole “need to suffer” thing. As I suspected would be the case, this was not a concept he could absorb. He was against my inflicting pain on myself for therapeutic purposes, and I can see how from his point of view, it is something he can’t endorse.

To his mind, it was like I had told him that I planned to start cutting.

But to me, it makes perfect sense. I will trade brief, intense pain for long term soul rotting depression any day. That’s one heck of a bargain!

The question of how to get the pain without damaging myself remains a vexing one. And my therapist did make one good point : whatever it is, I could end up addicted to it, and that could have negative ramifications.

We had a low key argument about my belief that I could become an addict very easily. Give me an escape from my pain and I will take it and merge with it and get addicted to it with both enthusiasm and joy.

He didn’t agree. But he has only ever seen me as I am in his office. He correctly sees that I am the sort of person who refuses to surrender control to another.

But he was wrong to apply that to substances. I know damned well that if I get something that makes me feel better or even just provides any kind of escape, I will end up losing myself to it.

After all, that’s what Skyrim was.

So I stay away from any kind of euphoric drug. And thatinclude liquor, for the most part, not just heroin and crack. I don’t want anything to do with something that can take my pain away for a while.

I will see what I can do with the newly legal marijuana. It’s not physically addictive and it neither numbs pain nor causes euphoria, exactly. And some sources claim that it can be very effective against depression.

I just want something that can clear some of the bad chemicals out of my head and make room for good chemicals to replace them.

That shouldn’t be toio much to ask, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been feeling pretty crappy lately and it is triggering my depression like its signaling device on jeopardy!.

And it’s not fair,. god damn it. I was doing pretty good there for a while. had three gigs, was feeling fairly positive about life,. had actually earned a little cash.

But then came Vcon and con crud and I feel like I have been sick forever. It’s like I am carrying this enormous weight around. Like I have an aircraft carrier’s anchor tied around my neck.

Or around something even less well suited to the task.

The illness is still occupying my chest for the most part. my nose runs sometimes, and that doesn’t help at all. But for the most part, this is a purely ‘goo in the lung’ thing.

Every five minutes or so, I go into a spasm of coughing. Ususually quite brief, knock on wood. Occasionally ‘productive’.

Well at least something around here is productuve! Ba dum bump.

I want my goid damned vitality back. This sick-bed existence sucks so much. This is the sort of thing that drives invalids crazy.

Like I said yesterday (and possibly before that – if so, sorry!), it wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the chest goo and the snot. It’s the feeling of having the energy crushed out of me by this infection that really gets me.

I mean, I go to the kitchen for a glass of water and by the time I am sitting down again, I am sweaty and short of breath.

That’s bad even for an out of shape fat guy in his mid forties like me.

Even worse, I sweat when I eat. Yes, even doing the one thing a fat guy is supposed to be good at brings me pain. The effort of eating and digesting really takes it out of me.

Combine that with how the illness has suppressed my appetite, and you get a recipe for my having to fight myself over every meal.

Because skipping the meal will always be easier. And there will always be that evil voice of temptation in my head encouraging me to take that first step onto the slippery slide down into oblivion.

I have concluded that there is a part of me that really feels the need to suffer. I don’t think it has anything to do with guilt. Or. if so, it’s guilt over inaction, not actions.

I think it has a lot more to do with having so much unexpressed pain buried in the boneyard outside my back door. That pain wants to express itself and I am so emotionally closed off that the only way it can think of to do that is to make me suffer in the real world, the one outside my head, and get its catharsis that way.

Bow that I have discovered this need for pain, I can take it out, have a good look at it, and decide what to do about it. What happens next?

Well I am not going to bury it again. That’s for sure. This is valuable stuff. Instead, I am going to figure out how to give this need what it wants in a way that does not come with unpleasant long term consequences.

So, no cutting, or anything. I’ve always intuitively understood why some of my fellow victims of depression cut themselves as a coping mechanism. It makes perfect sense to me. Sure, it would hurt, but it also stimulates a powerful adrenal response and I can see that making the depression go away for a bit.

It’s also a gesture of control. I have the self-control to do this insane thing that goes against every instinct, and not only that. I can watch myself bleed calmly and dispassionately and then clean up after.

I am in control, said the bleeding girl.

But even more than that is the pleasure of externalizing pain. It feels really good to take the dark and nebulous feelings of pain and fear and uncertainly and transform it into something as pure and clean and understandable as physical pain.

Trust me, I have been there. Not with cutting. But still.

In fact, I have been developing that side of me lately. One day, around a month ago, I was feeling depressed and tense and anxious. It got worse and worse until, at the very peak. out of nowhere I slapped myself hard on the knee.

And instantly felt WAY better. Just from a harmless little slap. Amazing.

Well I’ve always had a masochistic streak.

So now I slap myself two or three times a day. It really does relieve the tension and calm the chaos within.

And having found this escape route for all the dirty steam inside me, I am damned curious to see how far I can take it. I have experimented with giving myself a whole lot of slaps, and that seemed highly effective. even though I chickened out because I was scared of how into smacking the crap out of myself I was getting.

I even tried giving myself a spanking. My first ever. My progressive parents did not believe in corporal punishment. And I must say, it was an interesting sensation. I can see why some people are into it.

Rather awkward to do it to yourself, though. My arm got sore pretty fast.

Perhaps I should invest in a flogger.

I loved that game as a kid. It was better than Plac-man!

Pain could do me a lot of good if I do it right. Physical pain doesn’t bother me too much when it is in controlled doses.

I guess I know why I used to stick my bare hand into snowbanks as a child. I thought it was just a test of will – and I love me a test of will.

But now I think I might havre been getting more out of that experience than entertainment. Maybe this was my mind’s way of convincing me, the conscious me, to give it the pain it craved.

I wonder how many of the bad decisions of my life were informed by this need to suffer.

I have got a lot to think about. Definitely bringing this up in therapy tomorrow.

Feel free to smack yourselves happy, folks!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s hard for me to know exactly what I am capable of.

You know, given my health issues. Latelty, what with being sick, I have not felt capable of one heck of a lot.

Although I am feeling somewhat better today, which is good. I still feel icky and sticky and I still got goop in my lungs, but the feeling of energy-destroying malaise has slackened off quite a bit.

And that’s always the worst part of illness for me. Things like a cough or a running nose  are irritating to deal with (not to mention gross), but they are really no more than a nuisance and I can deal with them pretty well.

It’s the energy-draining malaise that gets me. It triggers my depression hard then kind of teams up with it to make me miserable.

I have been spending a lot of time sitting on the edge of my bed feeling lost lately. That is never a good sign, other than being a good sign that I am a lot more depressed than usual. It’s like I sit up to get out of bed and end up just stuck there. All my motivation disappears and this strange warmth comes over me.

It would actually be quite peaceful and relaxing if it were more…. optional.

Instead, I end up feeling trapped and lost. I wish I knew exactly what the fuck was going on there. Clearly, my mind/body needs something and grabs the first opportunity to get it that comes along and is not interested in giving my conscious mind the chance to fuck things up by suppressing it.

But what is it? Rest of some sort, I suppose. The kind I don’t get from sleep or my super low impact lifestyle. And it must have something to do with the specific posture that sitting on the edge of the bed involves, seeing as this doesn’t happen when I sit in a chair or on a couch or anywhere else.

Hmmm.. That suggests that it may have something to do with my lower back. When I sit on the edge of the bed, I am sitting without back support and forced to balance on the fulcrum of my lower back.

Maybe that stretches something that really needs stretching and it feels so good that my body is like, “Forget whatever we were planning to do next, we’re doing THIS now!”.

Sounds plausible. The smart response, therefore, is to plan this shit. Make it part of my day. Tell myself that it’s time to go sit on the edge of the bed and let my mind go blank now. Viewed properly, it could be quite the boon.

Of course, now that I am conscious of it, it might stop workin. Score one for the dangers of living consciously. But if that turns out to be the case, I will simply shrug and move on with my life.

It’s not like I have become attached to the phenomenon already.

Or maybe what I need is some sort of cushion or other appliance that pushes my back forward in just the right spot when I sit.

Or hell. Maybe I need to be sitting on a stool or some other form of backless chair. That goes against every comfort seeking instinct in my body, but if it means less lower back pain, I am willing to do it.

After all, it would be a net gain in comfort. Lose the back of the chair, but gain a big reduction in my constant back pain.

The hedonic valence is overwhelmingly positive.

Anyhow. Back to the topic of what I can actually do. It’s nearly impossible to know because there are so many dishonest players in my psyche that it’s hard to tell genuine realism about my capacities from the dirty and underhanded messages from the usual suspects from the Do-Nothing Gang.

So it’s tempting to call upon my arrogance and say “Fuck it, then. I can do whatever the hell I want. ‘ And it feels very good to say that, At the time. \

But hidden within that seemingly positive message is the new expectation that because I can do whatever I want, if I still don’t get things done, it’s all my fault because I suck and I am terrible and the world would be better off without me.

Depression is a fucking minefield.

So I dunno. I have to at least try to do more than the bare minimum. I can’t stand the thought of my life being nothing but video games, blogging, and hanging out with my friends for the rest of my so-called life.

I want to do things. Things that matter. Things that count. Things that make some kind of difference in the world. Things that mean something to me.

Survival is not enough any more. Survival is easy. Actually living life is the hard part. My default mode has long been to remain detached and apart and safe in my little bubble of reality where I can control what I experience and all the stimulation is mental and thus does not trigger my anxiety.

But that mode sucks. It’s easy, and it’s even comforting, but that doesn’t make it good. I can only heal my self esteem by actually doing things.

Especially the things I can get paid to do.

Right now, it feels like every now and then, the stars align and my biorhythmns sync up and I get some precious, precious time when I can be positive and push forward and get things done.

The rest of the time, I am my usual limp shadow of a human being who can do very little except make it through another day of this prison sentence of a life.

And some would say “well that’s all that is expected of you, dear. ”

Yeah, but it’s not all that I want.

What I want is to rise like a shiny, shiny star and radiate to the whole damned world so they can bask in my brilliance.

But all this other bullshit gets in the way.

I really wish I could just start over again. And get it right this time.

But all I can do is muddle through.

Pity. I deserve better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been pretty depressed lately.

But I am trying to keep a positive attitude about it.

The problem is that I am still sick. And it has moved into my lungs. I had a very scary incident earlier today where I woke up from a nap to find that there was a distinct rattle to my breathing. Every breath felt like I was breathing through water and I could feel the goo inside my lungs bubbling as I did so.

That is a very scary sensation in any situation, but it was especially bad in this household because poor Julian had bacterial pneumonia not very long ago.

And a chest rattle like I had is the top symptom of that kind of pneumonia.

So now I am freaking out some. Getting pneumonia is bad in any situation, but it’s especially bad for a person with sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is already displacing my lung capacity and causing a low blood oxygen level in me in the first place.

I don’t have any to spare for fucking pneumonia.

In fact, pneumonia is one of the things that can kill a sleep apnea sufferer like myself. Sleep apnea is one of those diseases that is not, in and of itself, fatal, but it can easily team up with something else to kill you.

Pneumonia would be a perfect example. So would obesity and diabetes,. for that matter.  You know, just to pick two random examples.

So I am feeling pretty scared right now. Not being able to breathe is like my worst phobia. Even my claustrophobia bows down to it. When my claustrophobia triggers, it always does so by making me feel like there is not enough air where I am and that I am going to smother to death.

Physiologically,. this is caused by an adrenaline response that triggers the muscles in my throat to constrict and rigidify, thus causing an actual drop in oxygen intake capacity at the exact same moment when adrenaline is also signaling my bodyh to take deeper, fuller breaths in order to load up on oxygen for fight or flight.

It’s terrifying, of course, and might well be part of the cause of my fear of smothering, along with other breathing and cardiovascular issues of mine.

So I feel like I am on some mighty thin ice, health-wise, right now. I am doing what I can to stay hydrated, eat plent of fruit and veggies, and stay calm about stuff.

That last one is, of course, the trickiest. One of the cruelest ironies of stress is that the smartest thing to do about it is to calm the fuck down, and that is pretty tricky when you are stressing out.

But like anything, you get better at it if you practice it. Part of my dragging myself out of the pit of madness I fell into in my early twenties was learning to not freak out when my IBS started causing problems because that only added fuel to the first and made the whole thing so much worse.

So I had to learn to, in a sense, force myself to calm down. To move in the opposite direction of the one the pain and fear and stress wanted me to go. So instead of grabbing my sword and holding it tight, I let go of absolutely everything and go totally limp and visualize hot metal being dunked into cold water, or similar.

It solves the situation, and that’s fantastic. I will always be grateful that I found this escape hatch through which to escape one particularly bad form of madness.

But I do wonder sometimes if I have gone too far in the other direction. It’s possible that a lot of my problems stem from that big and well-developed emotional override muscle being far too quick on the trigger and suppressing any kind of adrenaline-provoking response, even the good kind, like happiness and enthusiasm and feeling love.

If so, I really need to teach it to calm the fuck down.

Honestly,. the best thing for me would be a democratic revolution against the harsh facist state inside me.

An inner coup, if you will.

But that would require surrendering a lot of my precious and fragile feeling of safety. And I am not ready to do that yet.

But I am getting there.

What really bugs me about still being sick with whatever infection I have is that it is robbing me of productivity. I would prefer to be writing stories for the text app and working the music video gig, but being sick is making it really hard to concentrate and robbing me of my energy and focus, and that makes things so much harder.

Still, there has got to be a way. I am super bored a lot of the time. My usual distractions just plain are not enough any more. I need to reconnect with my slender thread of feeling like I contribute to society, and so I am going to have to force myself to get some god damned work done.

EVen if it’s really hard. Even if it would be soooooo easy to keep letting the days go by (water flowing under). and watch my life go down the drain… this time with a vaguely plausible excuse, even!

Well clearly I can’t do the things that actually move my life forward, give me a much needed self esteem boost, and justify my entire existence.

After all, I’m sick.

Well if I waited till I was healthy to do shit, I would be waiting forever. In the war that is this life, I am one of the walking wounded and no matter what happens, it’s either fight wounded or never fight at all.

And not fighting is no longer an option for me. Resistance is life. I no longer accept life as one of the walking dead, moving but not truly alive.

So bring the pain. Bring the fear. Bring the dread. Bring it all.

Anything is better than feeling dead inside.

And it is through pain that I will live again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I did myself a lot of good when I got a lot of my VFS bitterness out in yesterday’s blog entry. I had been holding on to that shit for a long time and it felt good to let loose on just  how much being betrayed like that hurt me and how unfair it was that after all I had been through, I got crushed like that.

One thing I forgot to mention : it’s true that in general, people do not absolutely need introductions and recommendations in order to get jobs in television. There’s freelancing, and contests, and all that kind of thing.

But I am not most people. With my massive social anxiety issues, I desperately needed someone to open doors for me. Cold calling people was not in the cards for me. Neither was pounding the pavement in order to pound on doors. I am too fragile for that. I was really, really counting on at least one of my teachers being willing to recommend me somewhere so that I would have a foot in the door and a role to fill and thus be able to get over my social anxiety and make a good impression on people.

So when I was told that would not be happening, that was it for me. End of the line.

But it was the sort of thing that hurts me so bad that it doesn’t even register right away. That’s because I pushed it down into the deepest parts of my mind and then stomped on it a few times for good measure.

Where, of course, it rotted into the fetid morass of vileness that is my current mental state. Like any untreated internal injury, it bled out slowly inside me and poisoned me over time without my being conscious of it.

And now that I have forced the pain of it to the surface, I hope I can deal with it and get some serious healing done.

In light of what was done to me, it’s pretty amazing that I had the strength and optimism needed to land the Daily Uno gig, let alone write an episode every weekday for 18 weeks in a row.

But then I fucked up that gig, and then fucked up again by not immediately getting another, and then Skyrim happened, and I fell off the face of the Earth for a while.

To be honest, I have only recently returned to it.

My three jobs are all in limbo of a sort. The text story writing gig is still ongoing. I wish I had the self-discipline to just push out story after story. I know I have the talent and I know I have the capacity.

But instead I end up doing my same dumb shit for hours. Playing video games. eading. Masturbating. Hanging with the fuzzies. Scrolling through Facebook. Renegotiating intergalatic porn rights. Naps.

Lots of naps.

It’s not what I want to be doing with my life but it’s what I can’t seem to stop myself from doing with my life. It sucks but it is familiar and reliable and that means a lot to someone as emotionally unstable and messed up as myself.

That’s how depression makes people into hollowed out addicts. Every one of us.

Anyhow, so the text story gig is ongoing. But the other two aren’t going anywhere at the moment. The $6 article writing gig is stalled out. The lady who is my handler said she was going to toss me another gig soon but that was ages ago.

Honestly, I am pretty sure I fucked that gig up permanently. I completely forgot to tell my handler that I was going away for Vcon, so over the weekend she assigned me a story, then was like “Hello? Are you ever going to do that thing I sent you?” and then had to assign it to someone else.

Yikes. And that very close on the heels of having to bail on an assignment essentially because I just couldn’t brain that day, and her having to find someone else to do it.

In the two hours before it was due.

So yeah, probably fucked that up. Oh well, it was hardly a dream gig.

And the text companion thing seems to have stalled out too. The new ads went out on Thursday, and we companions assumed there would be work waiting for us then, but the woman running it seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth and so we’re all left milling about and wondering WTF is going on.

I am pretty nervous about one thing : it’s an hourly gig, which means that I am expected to keep track of how many hours I work in some fashion and I don’t know how to do that. I haven’t the slightest clue.

All my other UpWork work has been on a flat fee basis. And that’s how I like it. When it’s a flat fee, I can look at a gig and compare payment to labour and make my decision.

Hourly rates are a lot more…. squishy.

But I am sure I can work it out. Others do. So I have hopes for that gig.

And I might go beat the bushes for something else. I got an offer to interview for a gig making a music video for a comedy song, and I could have one hell of a lot of fun putting together something like that.

Plus I haven’t used my video editing powers in aaaaaages.

And I would be making a MUSIC VIDEO. For a former 80’s kid, that’s like the ultimate expression of the visual storytelling medium.

Music videos played a very big part of my life at one point, especially as a teen. Making one could be a strange kind of homecoming for me.

It doesn’t pay much, but whatev. I am not primarily interested in the money at this pointm I just want to show the world how talented and amazing I am.

The big paychecks can come later.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

I figure I am about due to write a third test messaging story.

I wish I knew how to share them here. But they have to be in the form of a spreadsheet in order for the app to understand them and I do not currently know how I would post a spreadsheet to this blog.

Before anyone launches into an orgasmic riff of tech instruction, I am sure it is possible, I just don’t currently know how to do it.

I am not currently hot to learn, either.  I am still not a very healthy person and I lack the mental capacity to absorb that kind of information right now.

Heck, even on my best days I’m not that good at it. There are a lot of reasons why I never went into IT, and that’s one of them.

But lately I have been wondering if I could learn it. I am pretty sure I do not have the abstract logic skills to be a coder but I could probably learn enough of the necessary lore to be a system administrator somewhere, or work in QA.

And at least I would have a normal job skill instead of having gotten trained in a crazy ass field – TV writing – where nobody will even tell you how to get a job doing it and there’s a million other starry-eyed dreamers out there who are competing for the same near-mythical jobs in an industry that does not exactly need more than maybe a thousand writers total.

Funny that it took me this long after getting a $20K+ bullshit certificate for me to think things through that far, isn’t it?

WARNING : Bitterness ahead.

My mistake was in thinking talent and skill mattered. My dumbass self actually thought that if you were amazingly good at writing television, and could prove it, you could get a job writing television.

I mean, that’s how the world is supposed to work, right?

But no, apparently if your teachers don’t like you, none of that shit matters. Worst day of my life was the day that I was told that absolutely none of the teachers who had taught me at VFS would ever recommend me for any TV writing job ever.

A big part of me died that day. I’d spent a year of my life working my ass off for that precious VFS certificate and two days before graduation I found out that it had all been for nothing and I might as well stayed in my pathetic little life.

If I had known that’s how it would end, I never even would have gone to Kwantlen.

But no, big fat sucker than I am, I went to college for a whole year just to prove to VFS that I could handle school and thus qualified for VFS, then worked like hell despite being seriously undermedicated for my severe depression in order to do well in class and show my teachers just what an amazing writer I am, and then none of it mattered because to them, I was just this weird old fat dude who was kind of gross and didn’t fit in and was therefore at the bottom of the peckiing order, ergo not worth investing any effort or time or risk for, and easy to just scrape off their shoes and forget.

So now I have around $26K of student debt I will never pay off and absolutely nothing of value to show for it.

I should at least get a fucking refund.

I still have not recovered from that day in May, 2016. All of my carefully hoarded hope and optimism died that day and I had to start building up my self esteem all over again.

It would have served them right if I had blown my brains out at the graduation ceremony. right as they handed me that worthless certificate.

And the thing is, all those teachers who wouldn’t do a thing to help me knew that I struggled with depression and that school had not been easy for me but that I had come there day after day with near-perfect attendance despite all that. But apparently that did not matter to them.

Not compared to the theoretical risk to their professional reputations if they recommend a super talented guy who happened to be kind of gross for a job.

And the thing is, everyone works over the internet these days so my personal appearance and comportment doesn’t even matter.

I could write amazing things for people without them even having to know what I look like or where I live.

But no – merit didn’t fucking matter. Being the top writer in my class didn’t matter either. Nobody in my class was even closer to being as good a writer as I am. Not even Dan Windsor, and he’s extremely good.

Seriously, Dan. You’re amazing.

None of them were as funny as I am, either. And they all knew it. Everyone there told me what a hilarious writer I am. Others have told me that too.

But again, merit does not matter if you are the social outcast of the group. When your social status level is zero, the idea of any positive qualities being attached to you causes too much conflict in people’s social brains for them to handle so it’s easiest for them to completely ignore all available evidence and go with the version of reality that works best for them personally.

And after all, it’s not like someone with Status Level Zero can fight back or is a threat in any way, so why not shit on them like everyone else?

I mean, what force could possibly oppose that kind of thing? It would have to be like a science, but the opposite. An antiscience. A nonscience. A…. conscience.

Wow, what a weird idea. Reminds me of that other weird thing…. what’s it called? Polarity? Molarity? Oh that’s right…. morality.

Boy, if those two ever got together it would take all the fun out of attacking those least able to defend themselves.

And what kind of world would that be to live in?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s get down to it, boppers.

5 pm : Science Slam YVR.  I went to this mostly to find out what the hell it was. The program book didn’t quite make it clear and it sounded like the sort of thing I would enjoy so I said what the heck and went.

Turns out, as the name suggests, it’s like a poetry slam but for science. The idea is to find the best science communicators. So each contestant delivers a five minute science and then the audience picks a winner.

And I would totally rock that contest. WIth my big personality, my charisma, my public speaking skills, and most importantly my ability to communicate my enthusiasms, I could get the audience so pumped up about science that they want to go out and earn a doctorate that very afternoon.

I’m not saying they could. But they’d want to.

Because I am genuinely super enthusiastic about science. Sometimes uncomfortably so. Science blows my mind and with my performance and communication skills I am positive I could blow other people’s… minds with it too.

The fellow running the event told us that there are similar events all over Canada and that the winners go to some kind of finals round.

Which would be nice and all. But it did not exactly strike me as a well funded and well organized event, so I doubt they would be able to pay my way to wherever the finals are taking place anyhow.

Plus, you know, it would involved doing stuff.

6 pm. Have the Geeks Inherited the Earth? In other words, have we finally reached a point where nerds are accepted into mainstream society? Is it finally the Age of Nerds where we shall rule?

Maybe? I dunno. I was hoping this discussion would be more about the root causes of anti-nerd bias rather than the superficial “hey look, nerd stuff is super popular” stuff.

But it was suppertime and I am sure we all had low blood sugar and so the discussion rambled even more than usual for a nerd based panel discussion.

I did, at one point, rather unexpectedly find myself defending Big Bang Theory. Not as a show, because personally I don’t care for it. But as that super important thing, representation.  It present us nerdy types as people, not stereotypes, with diversity and legitimacy and all kind of good stuff like that.

And it’s not perfect. This stage of acceptance for an outgroup never is. BBT represents the stage immediately after your group is depicted purely as a hurtful stereotype, and so there is still a lot of said stereotypes in its DNA.

In the case of BBT, a lot of their jokes still basically amount to “hah, what a pathetic bunch of loser nerds we are!”.

But it’s still progress. After all, it’s the most popular show on television. And it depicts us nerdy types as real people, albeit in a flawed way.

So while I personally can’t stand the show, I am glad it’s out there.

7 pm. Time for FOOD. Felicity and I end up going to one of our favorite local eateries, the local Denny’s. We enjoyed one another’s company, as usual, but I have to admit, that it was a little sad not having Joe and Julian there. This cold and flu season seems to be especially viscious. Quite frankly, it’s freaking me out a bit.

10 pm. What kinks will we develop in the future? An adults-only panel, obviously. The program book said that these events are closed to those under 18 “except with the express permission and presence of their parents or legal guardians. ”

And I am thinking, “Um, no, not even then. I don’t care if the kid is 17 and you have a very progressive parenting style. GTFO. ”

Just thinking about it gives me the prickly sweats.

Anyhow, it ended up being a wide ranging discussion about the future of sex. The sex-doll brothels threatening to pop up all over the world got mentioned, as did VR, of course. The question of what kinks may develop when physical limitations are removed from the equation was dicussed. I brought up my concerns about human beings going insane from too much change in their physicality.

I felt I was especially qualified to speak on this subject because I’m a furry and we have been exploring sex beyond physical limitation for decades. We just do it with our imaginations and our art, not VR and the CRISPR genetic bag of tricks.

11 pm. You can’t do that at a convention! Oh wait, you CAN? Another panel for grownups. The main thesis is that you can get away with a surprising amount of outright naughtiness at a convention, especially if you know the laws and the loopholes and hence know exactly what you are doing.

For example, in BC, ladies can walk around with their boobs hanging out and the law has nothing to say about it. After all, men walk around bare chested all the time, and you can’t have a law that treats one gender different than the other.

The hotel could, in theory, try to invoke their own rules and toss a bare-breasted maiden out, but they would have to also toss out all bare breasted MEN, and that is a whole new kettle of tits fish.

Still, I wish I had been taking notes, because other than the boob thing, all I remember is being pleasantly surprised at all that one can get away with if one is careful.

And this is the sort of information I can use, man. I can totally see myself as an adults-only event organizer and it would be nice to know what I can and cannot do.

And I have to admit, I am exactly the sort of person who could figure out a way to have a really smutty convention without anyone ending up in jail.

Unless you are into that kind of thing. I don’t judge.

After that panel, I hung out in the hotel room for a bit then spent some time at the Captain’s Party, which was for captains only. So I grabbed a nametag and declared myself to be Captain N. Teneel.

Because what the hell, people my age will get it.

But for those who are younger, here is the answer key :

Yeah, that was totally a thing.

No, I am not going to explain it. It was the 70’s. Things were… different then.

Or so I am told. I was too young to enjoy it then. Dammit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got waaaaaaay sicker overnight.

Right now, I am one sorry critter. My stomach is upset  – it was so hard to get myself to eat. My head aches like someone shot off a blank next to my ear. My nose is running and I have that damned dry tickle in my throat making me cough.

But worst of all is the ague, aka muscle pain. Every muscle in my body screams like a off-key string glissando played on non-Euclidean instruments every time I move. Even standing up is a stiff and painful process.

I don’t think I have ever felt quite this rusty before.

Oilcan…. oilcan,,.,, oilcan….

Well that was more trouble than it was wortth.

The muscle pain is proportional to trhe mass of the muscle moved, so just sitting here typing isn’t too bad. I get little bits of pain but it’s manageable. So thank goodness for that small mercy.

I’d hate to be stuck with nothing to do but lie in bed and sleep.

Right now, I know I will experience a little bit of sleep weirdness purely from the fact that when I went to bed last night, I felt reasonably okay, but when I woke up at 8 am or so I felt horrible and when I managed to get back to sleep and woke up at around 11 am, I felt even worse.

So part of me doesn’t want to go back to sleep in case I wake up feeling even worse.

I am super tired all the time, though, so I kind of doubt that I have a choice in the matter. I will consider myself lucky if I make it to halfway through tonight’s words before having to take a bit of a breather.

I did a stupid today : I skipped lunch. Well, that’s no strictly true.I had two mandarin oranges. which I was delighted to find I could convince my ill body to eat even though I felt quite ill and had a strong anti-appetite.

I guess my body was willing to make an exception for something so obviously packed with Vitamin C.

“Gimmie some of that!” I imagine it saying.

No, YOU’RE crazy.

The weird thing is that underneath all the wretchedness and pain, I feel a tiny little bit of euphoria. I think it must come from my getting punch-drunk from all the pain. Somewhere in my bloodstream, there’s a lot of androphins pumping about, and that gives me a kind of giddy feeling like I am dizzily dancing on the edge of a precipice and high on the adrenaline.

That is something I have been working on lately, by the way. Turning anxiety into excitement. Seeing some large quantity of anxiety coming my way and instead of trying to hide from it. embracing it as a thrill.

It’s potentially quite powerful if I can make it work. Instead of huddling for safety when the anxiety storm comes, I will run out inro the fiercest part of the storm and scream, “Is that all you got? BRING IT MOTHERFUCKER. ”

It’s kind of psycho, but I think it can work. It’s an extension of what I used to call my “kamikaze mode” where something causes me so much anxiety that some kind of surge protector kicks in and suddenly I am all “For the honor of the Emperor!” then throwing myself into the thing wholeheartedly because I just don’t fucking care any more.

It’s a sloppy mode, so it would not work for things where I will need to be precise and on the mark about things. I have found that I can do remarkably well at things despite how giddy and silly I feel, but I would not want to bet my life on it.

It’s a rare mode where I do thing more or less by instinct, I suppose. I am certainly not operating in my usual careful, cautious, clever, and considered mode.

And some exasperated part of me says “For once!”.

My efforts to free myself from the dehumanizing and life-stroying effects of my logic box continue apace. It’s early days yet, but I am definitely learning to be human and a big part of that is accepting my own humanity. Warts and all.

It’s my own form of the ol’ transcendental bullshit. I have spent a long time hiding from reality behind a a layer of cool reflection and an inhuman level of detachment. This let me pretend that I was somehow above all the petty goings on which sadden me so much in the world. Let other people wallow in their jealousies and resentments and social competition. I am Different!

Bull SHIT. The only reason I could convince myself of that was that I am so uninvolved in life that most of the things which would stimulate my reptile brain emotions are completely absent from my life.

And even if I was “different’ that way, who says that’s a good thing? What horrible things did I have to do to myself to get that way? How much of who and what I am had to die in order to maintain the illusion? How much of my humanity did I have to sacrifice?

I cna feel the places where the emotions should be. They feel like the frostbitten and palsied flesh of a fresh stump. I feel a terrible coldness when I try sticking my tonguerin that particular dry socket.

I know that there are things that should be there. Good. living, human, strong emotions unmolested by an ego gone wild weilding a scalpel. These cold empty places fill me with dread as I worry about whether the damage can ever be repaired, or am I doomed to be an emotional amputee all my life.

Maybe those cold areas are my touch of autism and I am no more going to recover from that than a shizophrenic is to make the voice go away forever.

The damage is done. I’m a gimp.

I guess I will just have to learn to live with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I sure hope I still remember the con stuff tomorrow, because I need to blog like normal today and that is more important than producing a con report right now.

We are one sick household.

Julian is still not entirely over his lung infection – he has that lingering phlegm thing that seems so common these days. So he’s not out of the woods yet, poor thing.

Joe got sick last Saturday and ended up spending the Saturday and Sunday of the convention asleep between bouts of cold fucking sweat in our hotel room.

And that’s just plain not fair. You know what I mean? That’s the universe playing dirty pool. And it makes me feel so helpless.

I want to be able to leap into the fray and slay this demon for him, but that’s not how reality works. More’s the pity.

It reminds me of when my brother got strep throat then mononucleosis in college. He spent two months barely able to stay awake for more than one hour out of twelve. All that education got poured down the drain because he caught that goddamned bug.

Joe’s infection hung on without getting better all the way to today, and so, as one is supposed to do with anything that causes a fever for three days or more, he went to the hospital. Julian drove him there, the dear.

And they said they thought it was a viral lung infection and that he should just take some ibuprofen and wait it out.

I have severe doubts about that diagnosis. I am pretty sure that if his immune system could handle this shit on its own, it would have done so by now. To me, it is clear that his immune system needs a boost.

I haven’t told him this, of course. It would be worse than senseless to add to his worries and his doubts.

But I am poised to pounce if he gets worse. I will kick ass by the pound if my dear friend whom I love so much is harmed by a lazy fucking diagnosis.

I’m locked and loaded, Commander. Ready to fire on your command.

And as for me, I am definitely fighting something off. My throat is sore and scratchy and I have a heavy feeling in my chest and I feel tired in that very specific way that comes from my body beng locked in deadly combat with an infection of some sort.

I really hope it wins. Post-convention depression is bad enough without a nasty cold or flu making things worse. I feel like I want to drink a gallon of orange juice then hide from the world with a bottle of hand sanitizer and an IV drip of Chicken Fricot.

It’s an Acadian chicken stew. Kind of like chicken soup on turbo steroids.

Great, now I am craving it so hard I am drooling. It’s SOO GOOOD.

Overall, I enjoyed my time at the convention. I got to be more sociable than usual, even if sometimes I had to more or less force myself to dive in. I chatted with people I don’t know, as well as people I only know from previous conventions.

And I had a very long and fascinating discussion with someone who is part of the Vancouver kink scene and has been for a long time. He ran some of the ‘adults only’ panels I attended, and after one, I humbly and politely asked him to recommend a starting point for someone like me who wants to enter said community.

Sidebar : I feel dumb for not realizing until now that ‘kink’ and ‘BDSM’ are not the same thing and that the kink community is exactly the kind of pro-sex open environment I have been looking for all these years.

I have zero interest in BDSM, but I am kinky as fuck nevertheless.

Anyhow, the first time I asked this person for a starting point, it was just after midnight and he was way too tired to remember the name of the “munch” I was seeking.

No prob. I asked him against at the Dead Dog party, which is the convention-ending party on Sunday Night where everyone gets together for close association, alcoholic libations, and great conversation.

And he gave me the name – Westside Munch – and we ended up having a simply marvelous conversation in which we discovered that we had a lot of the same spiritual beliefs about sex, intimacy, and the magic that happen when people drop their bullshit long enough to be human with one another.

I came away from that feeling great, because I had never really shared my ideas on that with anyone and to share them with someone who “got” them was a joy.

Is that what church feels like to the devout?

Because I can totally see the appeal.

The ball’s in my court now. The next munch is November 6. I have until then to work up the nerve to go to it and face a whole bunch of people I don’t know who already have their own cliques and might not be super welcoming to an odd interloper like myself.

Or they might be super awesome and make me feel like I am home at last.

Either way, walking through that door will not be easy for me. But I am sick of picking the path of least resistance all the time. The path of least resistance sucks. I want to get somewhere in life and that means expanding my world and letting reality in, even if that means surrendering control to fate some of the time.

I can’t control all outcomes.

I can’t command the universe to follow my plan.

I can’t guarantee that I will always be okay.

And there is no such thing as the perfect plan, one so brilliant and thorough that nothing can go wrong and I will have finally conquered a cold and hostile world with the amazing power of my hyperintelligent brain.

All I can do is make the best choices I can and let the chips fall where they may.

I will surrender to reality.

I will live without certainty.

I will accept that it is impossible to eliminate all risk.

And I will tell myself, as many times as it takes, that some things are worth the pain.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.