Just got out of bed around 10 minutes ago, and I am nowhere near fully awake, and my head hurts and I haven’t medicated yet, so I am feeling pretty fucking grumpy.

So approach Grumpy Fox with caution. He might just sink his teeth into your ankle.

It’s times like this when I wish I had my own little pocket dimension that was isolated from the main timestream. I would go there and rest up and get all the sleep and downtime I need before rejoining the regular timeflow, refreshed.

Honestly, all I really want to do is go right back to sleep. But I have to stay awake long enough to eat some lunch, take my meds, and get 500 words blogged.

Oh, but my life is nothing but hardship and travail.

Made the FRED reservation (or FREDervation) so that’s done at least. And got my laundry started. So today has been a blaze of productivity for me.

At least by my rock bottom standards.

God damn it, I am fading in and out here. I hate this bullshit. I hate having to constantly drag my dreamer ass back to the here and now and remind myself that I am doing something and kind of need to focus on that until it is done.

Or half done, as it were.

This is the exact sort of thing that made me stop taking my quetiapine in the first place. Patient readers will recall that this whole thing started when I ran out of quetiapine and was forced to go a few days without it.

And discovered the joys of it NOT being so bloody hard to wake up every day,

But I’ve got the other pill now. Its name is mirtazapine and apparently its on-book use is as an antidepressant. So that seems like a good thing.

Sadly, I haven’t taken it yet even though I got it at the pharmacy yesterday because the dosage for sleep is one quarter to one half of a 15 mg pill and the pills are tiny and impossible to simply snap in two like I can with my peroxetene.

So I am going to have to drag out the ol’ plastic pill cutter and that’s a pain. I figure I will go against proper titration sequence and start with half a pill.

Cutting the little things in half will be hard enough. Cutting those halved into quarters seems like a freaking nightmake. LIke trying to do microsurgery on a gnat.

So I will start with a half and see what happens. If the effect is too strong, then I will cut it back to one quarter of a pill.

Life is complicated when you’re crazy.

I am also on a higher dose of Paxil (aka peroxatene) now. I have gone from 40 mg to 50 mg. This seemed like a great idea when I was feeling far worse and discussed it with my doc a couple months back.

But now I am not so sure. It will further cut me off from my emotions and that might not be what I need right now.

On the other hand, if it makes me happier, then it’s worth it.

Nap break time!

---

And I am back. And still fucking sleepy. god damn it.

I calculate that I have already gotten eight to ten hours of sleep and yet I am still sleepy as fuck. The best I can say is that I don’t feel quite as sleepy as I did earlier, so there is at least some sense of progress.

I hadn’t planned on returning to blogging yet. I got up at around 2:30 pm planning on playing my new fave game till around 4 pm and then returning to the blogging.

But I tried to play said game, and found I was nowhere near awake and alert enough for a tricky steal based came that demands a pretty high level of alertness.

That is part of the fun, if you are awake enough for it. But nerp.

So then I tried some Dragon Age : Origins. But nerp, not alert enough for that either, and that’s a game I have played a ton and where you can pause the action and issue commands any time you want.

So here I am, eking out the other half of my words knowing that I am going right back to sleep when I am done.

And I hate that. I don’t want to sleep all the fucking time. I want to live!

The new game, Styx : Shards of Darkness is pretty good. I got it when I bought one of Fanatical.com‘s crazy cheap bundles, and my hopes for it were not high because the first ones from the bundle, Oxenfree and Age of Decadence, did not appeal to me at all.

Oxenfree involved a lot of highly realistic (read : tedious) teen dialogue, and Age of Decadence was so visually ugly – seemingly on purpose – that I could not wait to quit.

But I am enjoying the heck out of Styx. He’s quite funny and likable in a cartoon sleazy kind of way. And that got me to stick with the stealth gameplay long enough to get over my usual dislike of it and start to find the fun in it.

I am still way too bloodthirsty, though. I kill every guard I come across, if I can. Seems like my natural response to a source of tension and fear is to destroy it, and thus end the tension and fear and experience a period of blessed peace.

In theory, I could sneak like a shadow through all these rooms without harming a single soul. But the main problem I have with stealth is that I don’t have the nerves for all that tension. So ending the tension (via murder) is the only way I can get through.

I hope that will change as I get better at the game.

For one thing, killing all these motherfuckers takes a lot of time!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still trying to find some kind of foothold on the wet ice of my slick and slippery mind. I

It’s rough going. Even as I scramble to balance myself on this crazy topsy turvy terrain, another part of me is making that as hard as it possibly can because it is outright terrified of what will happen should I succeed.

But what is it afraid of? I think it’s exposure. I think the chaos in my mind is part of my camoflage and if it went away I would be exposed before my peers.

Warning : the following is disturbing as fuck.

Tear down the wall! Wait…. no, don’t! For god’s sake don’t!

Worse than exposure – which is bad enough for a scared little animal like me who, deep down, feels that only the hidden are safe – is the feeling that what comes after would be even worse – all my bad stuff would come out.

All the nastiness and horror and grotesque secretions I have been holding in for most of my life would rise to the surface and come out, and then I would not only be exposed but exposed while existentially shitting myself.

Now I know this is not rational. I mean, what would that even look like? Me babbling incoherently while soiling myself?

Bad. But survivable.

Would I lose my freaking mind and go on some sort of Mister Hyde crime spree?

Maybe. But probably not. Also survivable, though I would likely come down to find myself in the loony bin and unlikely to get out any time soon.

I probably would deserve it, too. I have a lot of dark impulses that I keep under control at a siginicant cognitive and psychological cost to myself on a daily bases.

If the cork popped out of that genie’s bottle,. I might well be overwhelmed by suppressed emotion to the point of psychosis. I could go on quite the rampage of unspeakable evil before I was done.

But reasonably speaking, probably nothing really bad would happen to me. Certainly nothing so bad that it would justify foregoing the benefits.

Which could be amazing. As patient readers know, I am a huge fan of catharsis, and that would be the mother of all cathartic moments.

It might even let me let go of the primary trauma of being raped at the age of 4. And that would be amazing. All the pain and trauma and horror of that incident have been locked up in my mind since it happened and that was 41 years ago.

I would love to be able to purge it all from my soul and find out who I am – and who I was meant to be – without that massive infected wound dominating my mind.

And that all sounds good on paper, but that does little to conquer my terrible fear and shame and guilt.

Yes, one of the evilest aspects of rape is that it causes the victim to feel shame and guilt for having been violated. The perpretrator, on the other hand, might not feel a thing. The event that shattered your mind and left you an emotional cripple for the rest of your life might have been just a pleasant diversion on a warm summer day to them.

People are very good at that kind of comparmentalization.

So for those 41 years, I have felt, deep down, that I was shit. Worse than shit. I was the most disgusting, horrible,. toxic, shameful, vivid nightmare of a person who ever violated people’s senses by letting himself be seen…. and smelled.

And why? Because that’s what being violated does to people. It’s the epitome of unfairness and injustice but it’s part of human nature and we can’t just turn it off like it’s an annoying error message.

Maybe there is a safer way for me to vent that vomitous bullshit, namely by writing about it like I have been doing here, but someplace with a much larger audience.

And probably in the form of poetry. Poetry might not be where the big bux lie (yet!) but to my mind, it’s the best form of writing for exploring and expressing deep, dark emotions in their rawest and least complicated form.

The very nature of the sort of freeform blank verse poety I write guarantees the maximum freedom of expression in the fewest words.

That’s kind of the point. There is a reason I write that way. For me, writing is all about expressing something inside me. That’s why I do it. The other reasons, for instance the ones involving money. are secondary.

In that sense, catharsis is my whole reason for being a writer. Writing helps me let some of that suppressed emotion out, and that makes me just that little bit more sane, and so over time, the craziness pressure in my head is reduced and I get a little closer to fine.

So the real question is, am I brave enough to take it to the next level and express myself to a deeper degree and to a wider audience?

It’s a super scary proposition. It’s one thing to express myself here, in my tiny little pond where only a few of my (most awesome) friends will see it.

It’s quite another to throw my soul into some larger forum, where I might actually get questions and comments and shit.

I don’t think I could just let it flow like I do here. Not without taking some kind of position, like say “fuck those who can’t take me raw”, or something similarly defiant.

Of course, that assumes that I have the power to attract attention to myself, and in general, I have lacked this power.

But then again, I know what the problem has been. It’s my urge to hide undermining the power and volume of my message.

And because I know what the problem is…. I can probably eliminate it.

And then, my friends…. watch the fuck out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, I don’t have a clue as to what I want to write about.

It’s the classic situation where I have only been awake for 15 minutes and have not had the time to think of anything I wish to address, nor do I have one of my little story ideas, so I guess I am going to be winging it.

What the hell. I never end up talking about what I plan to talk about anyhow.

It’s the price I pay for having a mind that runs perpendicular to the mainstream. A creative kind of mind that follows the connection between things rather than some absolute sense of direction and thus never knows where it will end up.

It’s a powerful mode of thought but it does have its drawbacks, and one of them is having trouble picking a destination and sticking to it.

It’s like trying to cross a fast running stream. You might be aiming for a specific point on the opposite shore but the current pulls you where it will.

I have gone two days without quetiapine now. I will definitely be taking it tonight. I had a nice long talk with my therapist about it and he agreed that the side effects I am experiencing are a cause for worry, especially the akathisia, which is the feeling of intense inner tension and restlessness I get sometimes.

Although this time through, I notice that increased appetite is another side effect, and I have been blaming that on my diabetes. Hmmm.

Well I was definitely having that problem well before I went back on the big Q, so that can’t be the only cause.

But it’s god damned annoying and really wears on the nerves to be hungry – really hungry – all of the god damned time.

Anyhow. My therapist gave me a prescription for a second sleeping pill that I am to use three days a week in order to space out my doses of quetiapine. And who knows, maybe the new pill will be even better than quetiapine.

Don’t ask me what it’s called. I can’t read his goddamned handwriting.

Oh, and he explained to me why doctors use these weird atypical antipsychotics as sleep aids. It’s because they are non-addictive.

All the usual benzos and other typical sleep aids have addictive properties. They also have side effects much nastier than anything big Q has done to me.

But the real attention grabbing headline was that if you have sleep apnea, the benzos can straight up kill you.

Turns out that if you combine sleep apnea with a strong depressant like a benzodiazapine derivative, the respiration rate slowing of the depressant can gang up with the sleep apnea and make it so that one of those times I stop breathing in my sleep, I just plain never start again.

And that’s like one of my worst nightmares so uh, fuck that.

I don’t have the new drug yet because I haven’t been to the pharmacy yet because I am super frigging lazy,. But I took my last Paxil and my second-last Wellbutrin just now, so I am going to have to go tomorrow or risk going off my meds.

And when it comes to the ones propping up what little sanity I have, I am not crazy enough (heh) to fuck around.

What else.There is someone I am interested in online. We have been spending a lot of time together on Tapestries, and I really like being (virtually) around him, and he’s told me he looks forward to seeing me.

And that makes me so happy! Especially because I know it was not easy for him to say that. He’s a rather old school grumpy type and so that was a rare admission of vulnerability in this books.

He’s even talked about me visiting him. He even wants to take me to the House on the Rock, which is a crazy ass place I read about in a Neil Gaiman book once.

Read up on it, it’s insane, and I would love to go there.

But then last night when we are virtually hanging out together, his online “mate” logged in, and I realized, holy shit. here I am again.

Once more, I am someone’s side piece. When his mate showed up, I felt a terrible coldness descend on my heart like a killing frost and I was right back to where I was when I lived with the two Brians in Portland.

I would be there all cuddled up with little Brian, enjoying the exact kind of domestic bliss I have always dreamed about, and then big Brian would get home from work.

And the front door was quite close to the couch on which we were cuddled up, so he would end up both literallty and metaphorically bringing a cold wind with him.

And I don’t know if I can go through this again. I can’t be someone’s part-time lover. Especially not if I am expected to just drop everything when the person’s REAL mate shows up and disappear from the scene.

I can’t do that over and over. It’s too traumatic to me to go from warmth and closeness to the freezing cold of seperation and isolation.

And I can’t let myself be treated as disposable ever again.

So this guy I am into and I Need To Talk. I need to know whether he is actually interested in me or if I am just a nice warm place for him to rest and dream while his real lover isn’t around.

When it comes to love, I don’t share. Learned that the hard way. I need someone for whom I will be as important as they will be to me. I need to be someone’s number one priority, because they will definitely be mine.

I need to be the person who stays and the other person can be the person who feels awkward and frozen out so they leave.

Otherwise, as much as it would hurt, I gotta leave this guy behind.

Man, love can really suck, you know?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I seem to be in the middle of one of those periods where I feel frustrated and angry and nihilistic.

The usual suspects have been rounded up. I feel like screaming incoherently atop a rooftop. Just screaming and screaming and screaming until I have screamed out all my frustrations and I lapse into a coma out of sheer emotional exhaustion.

I also feel like screaming in people’s faces. Tell the whole human race to GO FUCK ITSELF, both individually and as a group.

The ducks can go fuck themselves too. They know why. Fucking ducks.

But worse is the manic edge I feel creeping into the corners of my mind. Like if I am not careful, I will turn into a lunatic that barks at the moon and acts like a cross between Robin Williams and the Joker.

Cocaine-era Robin Williams. Obviously.

The sort of lunatic who, if the button that activated a doomsday device that can destroy the world appeared before them, might just press the button just for the lolz.

The same lunatic side of me that would strip naked and walk right past a kindergarten just so I can laugh at how upset people get over something as harmless as a penis.

It’s also the kamikaze side of my personality, and thatside of me is occasionally very useful. When I need or want to do something that is very scary and/or hard for me to do, being able to just throw myself into it like a madman with a grenade betwene his teeth can be very helpful.

Banzai, motherfuckers! Better start running, because the Fruvous bomb is about to go off and there will be NO SURVIVORS.

But it is, essentially, a manic state, and those are dangerous as fuck. Scary too. It might look like that person in a manic phase is having the time of their life, but in their mind the reasonable, sane part of their pysche is scared shitless like they are strapped to a runaway bucking bronco.

I’ve never had a full on manic episode, but I have gotten close enough to get the flavour of it and it’s freaking terrifying.

Other rogue urges include the urge to grab my keyboard and wield it like a sword to smash everything in front of me, including my computer, my monitor, my speakers, and possibly the window.

You know, as a kind of crescendo.

That one makes a sort of sense. After all, this computer is both my gateway to the world and the anchor that keeps me in place. If I didn’t have the damned thing, I would have no choice but to go out into the world and figure out how to get along with others in some way.

Or I would go fetal and catatonic.

Either way, it would be a refreshing change.

Sometimes, when I am out, I just plain don’t want to come back. I don’t want to go back into this crystalline cage of mine. I want to stay out there in the world and do things.

But I always end up back here, in my box, being kept semi-alive by the clunky old emotional life support system that is this computer.

I’m going to go lie down and think about stuff now.

---

So there’s an update.

Normally, we do Paragon on Thursday nights. Felicity and I go to Garth’s space and hang out with him and develop our silly ass show.

But last week I couldn’t go because both Joe and Julian were sick with a stomach bug and I definitely felt like I was coming down with something and so I thought myself contagious.

This week, I was all excited to go, but then around 4 pm I started feeling really ill. By around 4:45 pm I was feeling feverish. I was dizzy, nauseous, faint, and had a very strange feeling in my veins.

Sort of a bubbly tingling feeling. Very disturbing.

I mean, I have been told I have an effervescent personality, but…

So I had to cancel again. Grr. I hate being the weak link!

The thing is, at the same time I felt dizzy and faint, I also felt fairly agitated. Part of me wanted to lay down and hibernate while another part of me wants to put on my hat and coat and venture into the night and just walk and walk and walk until I don’t feel so crazy any more.

Put a pin in that. That might come in handy at some point.

I suppose that is what happens when this fever of mine meets my earlier feelings of frustration and irritation and such.

Also frustrating : my search for a modern, current, AAA quality game to spend my sister’s $50 Amazon.ca gift certificate on.

I think that made sense.

The problem is that Amazon.ca is a crap place to buy video games these days. Their selection is bizarrely spotty, the good stuff never has Prime uber cool delivery, and the prices are way higher than on Steam.

Then I had the brilliant idea of buying a Steam gift card on Amazon.ca. Problem solved! Amazon.ca money becomes Steam money!

But no… that would be too easy. They were all sold out of the $50 ones and had only 2 of the $20 left, and when I went to order two of those, the damn site crashed. So no dice there.

I will try again, though. Dammit.

The alternative is to buy something else on Amazon.ca, or to see what they DO have instead of searching for specific things.

I hate to be limited like that, but it might be the optimal solution.

Whatever. Come heck or high water, I am going to get a NOW game for once and therefore stand some chance of knowing what the fuck people are talking about when games come up instead of being the poor country cousin being indulged when I want to talk about games from ages ago.

Them : “Oh right…. I think I remember that game. It was okay I guess. Oh, but the sequel was way better… ”

Me : “Wait, there’s more of them?”

Them : “Um yeah…. there’s like, eight games in the series, plus DLC…. ”

Me : “…….I knew that. ”

I am sure I will find something eventually.

Or I could use the money to buy something that would help me escape this pigpen of a life!

If only I knew WTF that would be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Last night was Xmas night, and I ended up getting the bestest gift of all : three hours plus of high quality intellectual conversation.

Every year, my roomate Joe’s family invites me over for Xmas dinner, and I could not be more grateful for that. Xmas can be hard on anyone who has no family nearby to celebrate with, but it is an especially troubling time for those of us with depession.

The suicide statistics for December attest to that.

So I got to eat a very good Xmas dinner, the highly of which for me is always their home-made cranberry sauce (I never liked cranberry stuff until I tried theirs) and afterward we sat around and chatted in the living room.

Or is it the family room? There’s no TV, so I am gonna say family room.

Anyhoo, during said conversation, I ended up bringing up an amazing article I once read about this woman who has started out as a highly skilled agronomist (aka farming science expert) who went all over the world teaching people better farming techniques so that they could get better yields from their fields.

And I have to love how down to earth and pragmatic that is. That will help people a hell of a lot more than a bag of flour or rice from the West.

But as she traveled around the world to places of extreme political instability, violence, poverty, and disease, a pattern began to emerge.

Everywhere she went, the local diet was far too low on protein. Even she could see that, and the only nutritional science she knew came through the filter of what an agronimist thinks about, like how to rate the nutritional content of a crop.

This seemed to her to be leading her to a conclusion she really didn’t like, so she quit her life of jet set philanthropy, went back to her home country, and dedicated herself to learning all there was to know about nutrition.

And everything she read lead her to the conclusion she did not like : that many of the third world places ripped apart by constant war and instability might well be like that, at least in part, because of their low protein diet.

Because here’s the thing : when a human being doesn’t get enough protein, their brain does not work right.

A lot of the higher brain functions shut down, and the person becomes short-tempered, emotional, agitated, and emotionally unstable.

Now imagine that effect multiplied by an entire culture, and you begin to see why this conclusion upset her so badly and why she really did not want to believe it.

If true, it meant that millions of people had died and millions more made into poverty stricken refugee status by a simple lack of protein.

What’s more, there was evidence that denying people sufficient protein was an excellent tool for keeping them from rebelling. That’s why various cult leaders in history have kept people just barely alive by giving them nothing but carbs and vegetables.

No protein, no ability to think rationally and clearly. People who can’t think clearly are much easier to manipulate with strongly emotional rhetoric and threats of violence or excommunication.

And that’s bad enough when it’s David Koresh or the Reverend Jim Jones, but when you are talking entire countries – hell, entire regions – then the human cost rises to apocalyptic levels.

Scientifically, then, the evidence is clear. Politically, though, whoa boy.

Try bringing up the idea that entire nations are stupid due to lack of protein and you will not get to finishes your sentence before people are calling you a eurocentric racists fascist eugenicist. It is simply not a concept we in the developed world can digest. It veers far too close to the third rail that is racial and cultural politics for our comfort.

The optics, in other words, are terrible. It’s not racist, but it sure SOUNDS racist, and that’s plenty bad enough.

So this is a problem that could not be confronted directly. You can’t stand in front of the UN and tell them you want a hundred million dollars in order to make poor brown people less stupid.

Even if that’s not what you say, that’s what people will hear.

So you would have to approach it obliquely. Talk entirely in abstract terms about increased nutrition in poverty stricken areas. That, by it self, sounds like a great idea. Say absolutely nothing about brain function, IQ, higher brain functions, or any of that.

Just make a dull yet appealing case for the program, get the funding, and get down to business.

Then you would face the problem of how to get people their protein. But luckily, the forces of capitalism have already solved that for us.

Protein powders are a billion dollar industry. Millions have already been spent on coming up with ways to deliver large quantities of protein in a shalf-stable and efficient form.

Some of them, I imagine, even taste good.

So all that would be necessary would be to survey the available products, choose the one that best suits the needs of the project, and adapt it into the product that could save the world.

Or at least feed its brain.

Then comes delivery, and that’s where things get tricky. The number one problem of global philathropy is actually getting to the people.

My plan is an elaborate one, but it’s the best I have come up with yet.

What you do is partner up with a popular sports drink company and market the stuff as a sports drink. Let’s call it Go Cola. Work hard to make it the number one sports drink around, if possible. The idea would be to build both cash and hype for the project so that people all around the world will want these product the same way they want Coca-cola, blue jeans, and other projects from the West that they see on Western TV.

Then you “invade” the regions that need the protein the most not with military or overt humanitarian aid but with marketing. Get local dictators and warlords on board by giving them a cut of the profits and pumping up their egos by emphasizing how great it will be to be the person who brought the excitement and pleasure of Go Cola to their country.

By the time they realize that Go Cola is directly responsible for the revolution currently coming for their head, it will be too late.

It could be the biggest thing for global intelligence and consciousness since they put the iodine in salt and took the lead out of the gas.

And all it takes is some goddamned protein.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And what have you done?
Another year over
A new one’s just begun

Um, no, if it’s Christmas, the year isn’t over yet and the new one won’t begin for another week. Idiot.

Aaaaanyhow. Here it is, Xmas morning and here I am, all alone in the world and missing my family like crazy,

And that hurts. But it’s a good kind of hurt. A warm kind of ache that I would not want to go away for any reason other than my being with them,.

I miss my Prince Edward Island homeland, too. This time of year, all would be snowy and white. Soft snow muffles sound and so the world would be more quiet and peaceful than in the summer months.

---

My mother just called, so I am all a-tingle with love and happiness and that precious, precious ache.

I told her about my trip to the hospital for pneumonia. Apparently David never told her about it. I am not surprised – we all do our best to protect her from things we think will upset her.

It’s because we feel what she feels and so when she’s upset, so are we.

After all, she’s our mama.

And truth be told, I probably would not have told her either if it wasn’t ancient history now. I figured that as long as I was coming from being fine now, it would not upset her too much.

And she would want to know, of course. I’m the baby of the family and her bright little dreamer, so she wants to know what is up with me.

And like I told her, I don’t mind her asking about my depression. It doesn’t make me feel bad. In face, it makes me feel good that she cares.

Apparently, she took a spill recently on the thrice-damn’d ice. Ended up hurting her shoulder. X-rays didn’t show anything but it hurt awful bad from her shoulder to her hands and she could barely use that arm at all.

My poor mama!

Then about a month later, she was shrugging her shoulder and heard a lot of little clicky bone sounds and suddenly felt a whole lot better.

She figured she had a dislocation that didn’t show up on the xrays and that shrug made things pop back into place.

The funny thing is, the exact same thing happened to her brother, my Uncle Sonny! The fall, the pain, the not being able to use the arm, the xrays not showing anything, the month or so of misery, then the clicks and relief.

The whole story, happening to two people who happen to be siblings.

What are the odds?

Apparently my aunt Florence has been really having a hard time with her depression. Her husband, my uncle Andre, is beside himself with worry and doesn’t know what to do. All she does is lie on the couch all day and read.

Well all I do is use this computer all day, mostly to play video games, so I can relate. And I know what it is like to be like ghost in your own life, lost in your own shadow and numb to the point of wanting to harm to yourself just to get to feel something.

I’ve never actually done that, mind you. But I have wanted to. and I know why other people with depression do it.

Because it’s better to feel pain that feel nothing.

On a much, much happier note, we talked about my brother’s engagement to his long time girlfriend, Tanya.

Oh, by the way, my brother had gotten engaged to his long time girlfriend Tanya! And I am over the moon with happiness about it.

Like I said to him, I am just glad he finally found a girl smart enough to see what an awesome guy he is.

Of course, I might be biased.

As far as I know, they have not set a date yet. But I want to know when they do, because god damn it, one way or another, I will be there.

Gotta see my bro get married. I missed both of my sisters’ weddings, and I will be damned if I miss his.

The problem, as always, is that there is a whole continent between me and my family and the lands of my birth.

So any excursion home will be costly. The one time I managed it, it cost my sister Anne around a thousand bucks.

I could probably save that up. Especially if I find my gumption again and go back to looking for work on UpWork.

What else… oh, funny story : when Tanya first started coming around, my mother had to establish a certain thing with her :

She did NOT need to be looked after.

See, Tanya does a lot of things for her own mother. So when she first started coming around to my mother and brother’s home, she tried doing the same thing with my mother.

And I find that hilarious because I know my mother and know that was NOT going to fly. She’s quite stubborn and independent and cannot stand having people fussing over her and treating her like the fine china.

So that’s where I get it.

Actually, I don’t mind being fussed over. In fact, I quite like it. But only up to a point, the point where it starts to interfere with my autonomy.

So I would be fine having someone taking care of all of life’s little details for me, but I am going to do what I want, when I want, and that’s final.

Now if only I could be my own caretaker.

I’m working on it.

One last update from home : my mother’s other brother, my Uncle Jim, now lives in an old folk’s home.

Imagine how old that makes my mother feel! Poor dear.

Well I think that’s all the newts that’s fit to sprint. I have just enough time for a bit of a nap before I have to get ready to go to Joe’s parents’ place for what is sure to be a highly pleasant Xmas dinner.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Weird thing to write on Xmas Eve, but what the hell. I’m inspired, )

First of, I promise you that I am not here to yell at you.

Or call you racist, or stupid, or evil, or tell you that you are what is wrong with the world, or any of that hateful bullshit,.

You know and I know that talking like that only gets people mad and makes things worse for everybody. First thing you know, people have their backs against the wall and are fighting like cornered rats and making baby Jesus weep with all the cussing and fighting.

So to hell with that. On this of all nights, let us make peace.

All I want to do is talk with you – real talk, person to person, as equals and friends and people who love their country and its people.

Now, I know you. And I know that you are not a bad person. I know that you believe in courage, honesty, loyalty, patriotism, law and order, and a government for the people and by the people.

I know you believe in freedom and human rights and keeping the little guy – the average, honest, hardworking people of your country – from getting stepped on by the big dogs, whether that’s big government, big unions, big special interests, or big corporations

I know that you a good-hearted person who honestly wants what is best for the land and the people you love.

But I am not so sure that all those people who claim to talk for you feel the same way. To be honest, some of them seem like rattlesnakes to me.

And I look at them, and I look at you, and I wonder : what happened?

How did good, honest, God-fearing people like you end up with such sinners as your spokespeople? And why do so many of you continue to follow these ungodly folk? Why do you stick with people who have turned their back on you and everything the Bible teaches?

Just how did your good will and trust get so violated by media people who don’t give a damn about you and your family and will tell you any damn thing that pops into their heads if they think it will boost the ratings.

These people are treating you like you’re stupid. But you’re not stupid. I know that and so do you. They treat you like you’re a child who needs everything explained to them, and we know that ain’t true either.

You are a free citizen who can make up their own damn mind about what you think and what you say and you don’t need to listen to those crazy people on TV up there acting like damn fools to know what is right.

You are stronger, smarter, braver, and better than that. You know what is right and what is wrong. You can feel it in your gut. You can feel it in your heart. You can feel it when evil tries to touch your soul.

So I ask again : what happened? You know in your heart that these TV people have evil in their hearts and sin in their minds.

Some of them even have blood on their hands.

So why do good people like you keep following them?

I know you value loyalty, but these sinners have not been loyal to you and they certainly don’t keep Jesus in their hearts, so why be loyal to them?

If these people loved and respected you as much as you deserve, they would not talk to you like they do. They would talk to you with respect and dignity instead of acting the fool on TV like you don’t know any better than to follow any clown who says they are red.

Well they ain’t red. They’re yellow. That’s why they only pick on people who can’t fight back. The very people Jesus loved. The weak, the poor, the crazy, the not quite all these in the head… there is no group too weak for these rich TV stars to pick on.

And they think you are too damned stupid to know when you are being picked on, lied to, jerked around, and laughed at behind your back.

And the top dog of that bunch – let’s call him DT – is the worst one of all. A billionaire born with a silver spoon up his ass who steals poor people’s taxes and gives them to all his rich friends like a reverse Robin Hood and who clearly hates everything good people believe has somehow gotten control of the White House and he expects you to go along with whatever he says, no matter how selfish or unholy or downright crazy it is, just because he stole the leadership of your party?

What kind of a – pardon my French – but what kind of a horsehit setup is that? This TV star thinks he can run the United States of America into the ground and nobody will say a damn thing about it because they love him more than their families, their neighbors, and their country?

How stupid does he think you are?

Well I think he underestimated you. Badly. I think he’s taken you for granted and treated you like garbage while wiping his feet on the American flag for far too long. I think it’s high time someone reminded him that he doesn’t own his supporters and that if he does not do right by them, they will go somewhere else and take their votes and support with them.

So I ask you one last time : what happened? And I am not asking just to ask or to make you doubt yourself. I sincerely want to know you side of the story. I want to know what you think of the situation no matter what those thoughts might be.

So go head. Tell me all the ways I am wrong. Call me all the names in the book. If that’s how you feel, let me have it. Get it out of your system.

But if you still feel like talking once you’ve calmed down, I will still be listening and I will still want to hear what you think.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Whether you’re red, blue, purple, or aqua marine, I hope you have a safe and peaceful Christmas and the very best of New Year’s possible.

Peace on Earth, everyone.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, this one is short.

It’s short because there isn’t much of a plot. I’m there, she’s there, we are both SUPER eager and horny and racing to get it on. I even help her out of her jeans and her super cute purple-pink panties.

Once we are both nekkid, she more or less pounces on my erection with her mouth and…. then the goddamed dream ends.

This is frustratingly familiar. Nearly all my erotic dreams end just when I am getting to the good stuff.

Could it be more of that goddamned intensity gating?

Man that shit has got to go.

Frustration aside, this was certainly my most vivid and real-feeling hetero sex dream ever. And I was as raring to go as she was. I was really looking forward to exploring her body as she enjoyed mine.

And not in some intellectual curiosity way, or just a spiritual longing for a new kind of experience.

I was horny as hell and harder than a railroad spike.

As a result, the idea of sex with a real woman in the real world seems like more of a real possibility than ever before.

If I found a willing lady, I would be down to get up, get in, get it on, and get off in a heartbeat.

I wonder if I posted an ad somewhere that said “gay guy looking for first time with lady”, if I would get any offers.

If I was them, I would find the idea intriguing. Certainly if I saw an ad that said “lesbian looking for first time with guy but because of issues it has to be a gay guy”, I would sign right up.

We’d be each other’s first times! How cool would that be?

And neither of us would know what the hell we were doing. It would be hilariously inept. I’d want to tape it.

Anyhow, the point is, I drift closer to being truly bisexual every day. If anything, it seems like the process is picking up speed, and I could not be happier about that.

Now I get to not have the courage to get sex from BOTH sexes!

Seriously though, if I get into chicks, it will really expand my choices in terms of pornography. Don’t get me wrong, there is a ton of gay stuff out there. I mean duh. There is probably more of it, in fact, than is statistically supported by our percentage of the population.

But that”s because we are all men, and men are pigs.

Just kidding. Mostly. I could go on and on about how much of gay culture stems from the fact that it involves men only and therefore does not get slowed down by women as gatekeepers, but that’s for another day,.

The real reason is probably that gay porn is the only safe (ish) way to express your gay sexuality in much of the world.

And that’s sad.

Back to me fucking women, maybe.

As I snarkily implied about myself earlier, my main barrier to sex with man, woman, or understanding livestock is courage.

I have no doubt that I could find a willing partner if I were not so shy and scared of the world in general and people in particular. I mean, there’s apps for that kind of thing. And I know that I can be very charming and charismatic and appealing to people.

But I’s too a-skeered.

I hope I will get over that some day. There is a whole world of humptastic opportunities waiting to be explored just waiting for me to stop lingering in the shadows and jump right in to the deep end.

By the way, none of this vagina sex talk means I am any less into men. I still love da cock and want one in every orifice, please.

Right now, I am incredibly curious about hetero PIV sex, and that makes me rather eager to try it, whereas gay sex to me is old hat,

By the way, have you ever had gay sex with an old hat? It’s amazing.

In order to overcome my sexual shyness, I would need some kind of bridge. Something that would make it easier for me by making it at least a little bit easier to cross that mighty void between me and others. Maybe some sort of talisman I could cling to in order to feel safe, or some trustworthy person to introduced me to a scene so that I would not freak out because I didn’t know anyone there and bolt.

Social anxiety makes life so god damned complicated.

Without a bridge, I would have to activate my kamikaze mode, where I just throw myself into the deep end by convincing myself that I didn’t give a fuck what the consequences were going to be, I was going to go do the thing with great zeal and gusto and fuck everything else.

That would entail doing something I think I have mentioned here before, namely deciding I don’t give a shit if I am being obnoxious, pushy, arrogant, demanding, or just way, way too much.

That’s just who I am, baby. If I am to activate all that latent charisma and magnetism, I can’t worry about shit like whether I am being obnoxious.

After all, that’s how I am as Fruvous. And some people think he is obnoxious and pushy and all the rest.

But a lot of other people think he’s amazing and delightful, and what the hell, I have never been the sort to need everyone to like him.

I only need enough people to keep me from getting bored and lonely.

Admittedly, that’s not a small number of people. Fruvous has a LOT of friends. He is way more extroverted than I am.

But what he is represents what I can be. He is, in many ways, my idealized self, and so if he can do it, so can I.

It’s just a little trickier for me because I’m a 6’1″ 300 lb fat dude and he’s a cute little floofy foxy thing.

But the real power is in the power of personality, and that’s one thing we both have in spades.

So who knows. Maybe I will get out there and sow my VERY ripe wild oats some time in the future.

Until thing, I will just keep on fingering my butthole.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God damn it, Internet. First you fail to have a Muppets themed USB drive for me to buy, and now you have the “After these messages…. ” bumpers but not the matching bookend of the “And nooooow…. on with the show!” ones.

In what world does that makes sense? Grr.

Okay, now I am going to talk about the quetiapine thing. I already talked about it on Facebook but that, as it turns out, did not come close to expressing how I feel about this whole thing, so here I go again.

First, the narrative portion.

While Googling the Wiki page for quetiapine for yesterday’s blog entry, I noticed that one of the Google Answers results was “Is quetiapine a sleeping pill?” I have wondered that myself, so I clicked.

That lead to an Answer that basically said “No”, but that Answer linked to a very disturbing article, and now I dunno what to do.

I already knew that quetiapine was not indicated for insomnia. That means that the medical authorities never approved the big Q for use in treating insomnia, and given that the drug is listed as an atypical antipsychotic for use in treating things like schizophrenia, that’s no big surprise.

That means that my therapist giving me quetiapine for my sleep issues was what is known as an “off book” use of the drug.

So far so good. It seemed like a weird decision on my shrink’s part but what the hell, it helped when other meds (like trazadone and zopiclone) did not, and therefore I just kind of went with it.

But it never occurred to me that the “off book” use would be very bad for me. Until I read the article.

Here’s the juicy bit. There are many side effects…

…including an odd sensation of tension and restlessness (akathisia), Parkinson’s-like tremors and movement abnormalities, weight-gain, high blood sugar, new or worsening diabetes and, in rare cases, heart arrhythmia that can cause sudden cardiac death. A recent Health Canada review linked quetiapine and other so-called “atypical” antipsychotics to an increased risk of sleep apnea —breaks in breathing during sleep.

https://nationalpost.com/health/seroquel-for-insomnia

Emphases mine. I mean, what the FUCK??

I have had nearly all those symptoms. The only one I missed was the one that was fatal. I have had terrible tension and restlessness on occasion. I have had (admittedly minor) tremors. I have high blood sugar and worsen diabetes because those are actually the exact same thing.

And the feculent cherry on this shit sundae is that of course I have sleep apnea and it turns out my sleeping pill might make it worse.

I mean Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

But it gets worse, because according to the article, millions of other people have had the same terrible prescription foisted on them by doctors who were apparently helpless against a very strong marketing campaign for the drug as a sleep aid.

One of whom was my psychiatrist, Doctor Avrum Costin.

And suddenly, questions he has asked me about side effects are thrown into sharp focus. At the time, the questions just struck me as weird. Why was he asking about such crazy side effects? Whatever. Therapy!

And this is not the only time he has fallen for drug company hype. I had to go through this whole rigamarole once because of his insistance that I get brand name Wellbutrin instead of the generic version.

And he justified it with a bunch of bullshit talking points that I saw through instantly as the exact kind of bafflegab that a drug rep with the impossible job of convincing doctors to pay more for no reason would come up with.

You know, bullshit things like dubious stats about some mystical definition of “purity” and how the name brand is “more pure” based on it.

This, despite the fact that if the generic wasn’t in every way identical to the name brand, it would be illegal to sell.

So now I am faced with the higbh probability that I have been taking poison for years because my doctor is a dupe.

God damn it, can’t there be one authority figure in my life who is actually smarter than I am?

Do you have any idea how fucked up it is to grow up being smarter than the adults who are supposedto be your mentors and guides and leaders through life? To have no intellectual authority figures at all?

Or any other kind, really,. When you know you can think concentric rings around someone, it is kind of hard to take them seriously.

When you are in that situation, you know that, essentially, you are on your own. You’re the one who is going to have to figure things out for yourself because nobody in your life can match your speed.

My one cold comfort has always been that there are people who know a lot of things that I don’t.

That’s not the same as them being smarter than me, but it has to do.

Anyhow, existential rant over, back to the topic.

Clearly, what I have to do is have a serious talk with my therapist about his choices and how he makes them and I am going to have to demand he write me a ‘scrip for a different sleep medication.

Preferably one that is actually indicated as a sleep aid, and not some vaginimus treatment that happens to make people drowsy.

And I am not looking forward to this conversation because I know I will be coming in angry and he’ll get defensive and it will become this whole thing.

More importantly, though, is that my trust in my therapist has been shaken. And I do not trust easily. I have layers and layers of defenses like a fort from the height of the age of castles specifically to keep me from having to truly trust people and rely on them.

And my therapist, up until this point, has been the person I have trusted most in this world in terms of letting him see the parts of me that nobody else has ever gotten to see.

And he’s heard stuff that I didn’t know I had in me until I said it.

And he knows me better than any other human being ever.

And I would hate to start over with a new shrink.

So we will have to come to some sort of understanding.

I just have to keep reminding myself that incompetence is not malice and that nobody is perfect and we have to work with what we have.

Hopefully that will be enough to soothe the savage rage inside me made of so many of my ISSUES that it’s like a black tornado of rage.

Luckily, I have venting to you people to help wind me down.

Have I mentioned how much I love you people lately?

‘Cause I do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Having a sleepy day. And you know I hate my sleepy days.

Especially when they last past noon. For some reason, that’s when they seem especially egregious to me. It’s one thing to sleep all the way till noon – mornings are for sleeping, after all.

But when I do that and yet I am still only awake enough to eat lunch (and blog) before going back to bed, that pisses me off.

I don’t want to lose the whole day to sleep. I want to be awake and alert and enjoying life in my own particular way.

But with the sleeping pill comes real sleep, and with real sleep comes an opportunity for my brain to catch up on all the deep REM sleep it’s been hankering for whilst I was in the Bad Place, and it doesn’t intend on giving me a choice in the matter.

Oh well. At least with sleep comes rest and a respite from having to figure out what to do with myself.

I would still rather be awake and playing my video games, but at least I am going to get something out of it.

With REM sleep comes dreams, of course, and I have started remembering some of them, which I take as a good sign.

During the Bad Times, I didn’t remember any of them.

Now, content warning : the dream is sexual.

In this dream, I am floating in a generic white void when a “woman” approaches me and offers to let me try her out, basically.

“Woman” is in quotes because, while I took her to be a real woman in my dream, looking at it now she definitely was not. She was more like a half-inflated sex doll version of a woman.

A very curvy and voluptuous woman, I might add.

I do believe I have a “type”.

This offer was not verbal. It was dream-logic.

Anyhow, I thought, why not, and positioned my very naked self with my arrow pointing homeward, so to speak, and said to her, “So I just slip it right in? ” And she said yes (in dreamspeak) and so I slipped it right in.

And to be honest… it didn’t feel like much. A slight gripping feeling, like a rubber band around my dick, and a vague cold wet feeling that I found to be rather disturbing.

Not to mention counterintuitive. I had always assumed that the inside of a vagina would be warm and wet and slick and overall a very happy place for a penis to be.

After all, they are made for each other!

But no. It was cold. And weird.

And that’s where the dream, or at least my memory of it, ends. Which is rather frustrating. I want to know what happened next.

Maybe she would have warmed up as I got my hump on. Who knows.

As to what it all means, wow, what a Freudian minefield, huh?

The way I see it is that I have been drifting towards bisexuality for a while now and this dream was a stop along that road.

A sort of dry run, if you will. Just to get me used to the idea of sticking my penis in something somewhat like a woman.

The fact that what my poor pecker found was the exact opposite of what a vagina is like is…. weird, I know.

But maybe I wasn’t ready to simulate the real thing yet. After all, I have never actually had my penis inside a woman.

Heck, I haven’t had it inside a lot of men, either. Not for lack of trying. But I practice safe sex and have certain girth issues with standard condoms.

Yes, ladies and gentle men, I am… thick.

In more ways than one.

So even my dreaming mind was just guessing. But that does not explain why the guess was so off the mark.

So clearly, I got Issues.

I don’t think I see women as cold and unpleasant and unwelcoming.

But I am all too aware of how much misogyny lurks within the darkness in gay men’s souls, and so I am not going to dismiss the idea out of hand.

The thing is that, as a gay(ish) man, I have had the freedom to not think about my relationship with women very much. To me, they were simply other human beings with whom I share the planet who are just as valid and human as I am and whom I happen to not want to fuck.

Simple, pure, and clinical.

But even as I typed those words, I felt a hostile chill underneath them. As if those words represented my idea of the “right” answer as opposed to representing the fullness of the feelings involved.

I think I have some deep seated hostility and resentment towards women. I think on some level I actually do see women as untrustworthy and dangerous and irresponsible, and I am happy as a clam that, until recently, for me they were entirely optional.

Here’s where I acknowledge that there is a possibility that this attitude towards women is intimately connected to how I ended up gay in the first place, but there is no way I am going to poke THAT hornet’s nest.

But I definitely feel relief at not having to rely on women for anything – including sex. That implies the aforementioned belief that women are untrustworthy and unreliable.

As to why I came to feel that way, I can’t say for sure. On the surface, it’s the product of a lot of observations about how women rarely display to men the sensitivity they expect FROM men, and how easily and readily women mock and dismiss men’s emotional needs, and how in a lot of heterosexual relationships, the woman has all of the power due to having vastly superior verbal and emotional skills compared to the man, yet take no responsibility for what they do with said power.

I could go on and on. Suffice it to say I could claim my negative feelings were deduced from observations and leave it at that.

But I feel like there must be more. Something deeper. Something way less pleasant to talk about.

Something to do with my mother.

But that’s a topic for another day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.