And the day hand on the Great Clock goes CLACK once more.

I really need to work on my relationship with time.

I recently brought up how I am always checking the time and mentally mapping out blocks of time and honestly somewhat obsessed with time in therapy, and my therapist immediately latched onto it.

Not hard to see why. So far, he had only ever seen my soggily sad side and some of my anger. His picture of me, presumably, was entirely that of your usual dead-inside apathetic depressive slob.

And that was a perfectly adequate picture. Up to a point. But it was not the full picture by any means.

And I don’t blame him for that, because until recently, I had no idea how chock full of compulsions and obsessions I was either.

I had the same view as my shrink. I thought I was the opposite of the obsessive “type”, being the total slob that I am, and therefore never suspected myself of harboring OCD type issues.

But now that I have turned myself on to them (yay, the Seventies speak!), I am getting a pretty good picture of them, and there are many.

The time thing is the latest one to attract my attention. (See, I got back to the topic! And all by myself!).

To recap : For as long as I can remember – at least since I got my first watch – I have obsessed over time. I am always looking at the clock and mentally scheduling my time, deciding when I will do (or stop doing) X based on when I will be doing Y, with Y being some fixed-time event like an appointment or hanging with my friends.

It is not optional. If I tried to stop I would immediately panic because suddenly I have no idea when to do anything or what to do with mself and it would be like being suddenly struck blind.

Why do I do it? It’s a way for me to exert control over my life and feel like I could anticipate problems and dodge or deal with them. As long as I know what time it is, I can reduce the chaos of a million open doors all clamoring at me down to a nice, simple progression of time.

This, then this, then this, then this. That I can handle.

But all depressives are victims of their own coping mechanisms because we rely far too heavily on them and turn them into something awful.

In this case, the effects are relatively minor. I fret and obsess and I would probably benefit from taking a more relaxed, Mediterranean attitude towards time and the clock.

Things will happen when they need to happen, type thing.

But it keeps part of my mind busy fussing with something and that might be good for me in the long wrong, as when that particular part of my mind is busy it tends to pick itself apart.

The real compulsion part of the OCD tag team is the feeling of compulsion that attaches to the plans I make.

And that is pure madness. There is no dodging that fact. There is no rational reason why it would feel like doing something other than what I have planned will make something really horrible happen.

No horrible thing in particular, mind you. It is pure dread. It makes me feel like the world is being occluded by a dark miasma, like there is thick black smoke over everything, and the only way to get back to normal is to give in and go back to doing the planned thing.

So far, I am calling it compulsion dread, but that name sucks sweaty donkey taint (but in a BAD way) , so I am open to suggestions.

Then there is another kind of temporal dread : fear of the future, and the feeling like I am always running out of time.

My recent triumph in realizing that I felt like I was never doing whatever it was that I am supposed to be doing was a big breakthrough, but now I worry about making it stick because I have nothing to replace it with.

So I can feel my mind slowly oozing back into that kind of thinking rather than facing the task of actually figuring out what to do with my life.

That whole setup – hating myself for not doing whatever it is I am supposed to be doing and burying myself in my distractions to escape that burden – kind of kept me busy like…. all of the time.

Without it, I have to face that hallways of infinite doors once more. It’s one of my greatest fears. So many possibilities, how do I choose? How do I figure out which door is the “right” one?

“There’s no ‘right’ one. But you know what’s always wrong? Doing nothing. ”

I know, I know. But that doesn’t solve the problem. I still feel like I am paralyzed in the middle of a crosswalk, knowing I have to get out of there before I get run over but unable to decide which way to go.

The only solution I can think of is quite indirect : it is to continue to try to beef up my connection to my id and the life force it can bring, and hope that by doing so, I will develop my “evil Kirk” side and become more decisive.

Said id hookup is still quite weak. It’s just a teeny little fire smaller than a burning match-head right now, and I have to protect it and feed it so that it can grow and intensify.

And it’s honestly going to stay that way unless I can get over the feeling that doing something for purely emotional reasons is chaos and madness and keep on insisting that everything be analyzed, labeled, dissected, broken down into its most basic components, and then, now safely and very dead, finally stored somewhere and forgotten.

That’s not living. The soul needs light and love and joy and sadness and all kind of uncontrolled, unpredictable emotions that make life worth living and give life its color and flavour.

My overpowered high beams brainiac brain cannot provide that. All it can offer is cold comfort and colorful distractions.

And that’s just plain not enough.

My soul is starving.

And I need to learn how to feed it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not long ago, it occurred to me that my particular romantic and/or sexual preference – open sex closed monogamous relationshup – could be summarzied in the word “polysexual”. 

You can fuck whoever youi like, hubby – just play safe and tell me all the deets later. I will do the same. 

But I am your man and you are mind, and that means that if you fall in love with someone else, the sky will rain fire. 

Sexuality fidelity is absurd. Emotional fidelity is mandatory. 

The most important thing is that I am your number one priority in all things and at all times. And you will be mine. 

Fair’s fair, after all. 

Anyhow, before I get lost in the forests of my own emotional intensity, after thinking of the word, I decided to Google it to see if it is already a thing. 

And of course it is, but it is does not mean what I wanted it to mean. 

It has the rather confusing definition of meaning “someone who is attracted to some but not all genders.” 

And this is where my being a good liberal intellectual runs smack dab into my being a bastard about language and logic. 

Because on a strictly intellectual level, I have a logical issue with adding a lot of new entries to the gender scale. 

Don’t get me wrong : if one of the new labels fits you and makes you happy, then God bless, I could not be happier for you, and consider my lip zipped. 

But as someone who is way too invested in the minutiae of language and who wants things to have precise and specific definitions, it bugs me. 

This is how I imagine it going down : 

Pretty Young Idealistic Person (PYIP) : I identify as polysexual! 
Grumpy Old Me (GOM) : So what, you’re into parrots? 
PYIP : I don’t get it. 
GOM : Never mind. So what does polysexual mean, exactly? 
PYIP : It means I am attracted to some, but not all, genders! 
GOM : Out of how many genders? 
PYIP : Oh, I dunno. I think there is like…. eight or nine now? 
GOM : OK, then, which ones are you not into? 
PYIP : I don’t know….. I mean, I’m into men…. oh, and women… 
GOM : The usual suspects. Go on. 
PYIP : And um…. and I am not attracted to fat guys… no offense…
GOM : Some taken. Fat is not a gender. Go on. 
PYIP : Um…… well…. I dunno…. 
GOM : Well how about trans women…. are you attracted to them?
PYIP : Well are they…. 
GOM : Pre-op. 
PYIP : Well them… um…. no, I don’t think so. 
GOM : Fair enough. I won’t ask why. The dick wants what the dick wants, right? People can’t choose that kind of thing. 
PYIP : Exactly. Thank you, for understanding. 
GOM : No prob. What about trans men? Pre op. 
PYIP : Um….. no. I don’t think so. 
GOM : What’s left…. how about the genderfluid? 
PYIP : No, I don’t think so. That’s such a gross word! 
GOM : I know. It sounds like something you wouldn’t want to get on you. Anyhow, what else is there? Come on, you’re a young person, you must be more up on these things than me. 
PYIP (exasperated) : Well I dunno! Others! 
GOM : But you are sure you are into at least one of them and therefore describing yourself as bisexual would be inadequate. 
PYIP(super exasperated)  : Yes! No! I don’t know… god! 
GOM : I will just put you down as “bisexual plus”, then. 
PYIP : Fine. Whatever. 

Note : I am never that big of a dick in real life. In real life, I am fully aware that people do not exist solely to satisfy my intellectual interests and would never badger some poor young person to the point I do in the above example in the real world. 

Part of me would want to, though. 

Anyhoo. So polysexual has an existing meaning and it applies to gender, not relationship rules, so that’s out. Poopies. 

However, speaking of gender, I find myself drifting towards bisexuality lately, as opposed to my more usual homosexuality. 

Well, homosexuality with options. Homosexuality plus, basically. 

For years I have been calling myself polyromantic (which also has an existing meaning which is also stupid) in that I can see absolutely no reason why I couldn’t fall in love with a woman. 

After all, to me at least, romantic love is about souls, not parts. If I admired and adored someone, the bits would not matter. 

Until we got into the bedroom. Then, they would matter. Or so I thought. 

But I have always wanted to be truly bisexual. It seems like the spiritually superior position and my spiritual ambition has no limits so I have been striving towards bisexuality for a while without having the slightest idea of how to get there. 

Well it turns out exposure helps. 

I peruse a lot of furry porn, and despite my search terms, some of it always ends up involving a female or two. 

No biggie. I am not the stereotypical vaginophobic fag who screams and faints at the mere thought of lady naughty bits. I have always appreciated vaginas, both for the valuable work they do (where would we be without them?) and aesthetically. 

Some of them are downright adorable. 

Until recently, however, that’s as far as it went. They’re nice and wonderful but not something in which I see myself personally involved. 

But I have been going through the archives of a rather fun furry webcomic call Cats n’ Cameras and I am beginning to find the lovely vag in there more than cute, but downright appealing. 

Here is an example.  ^[1]

That charming vagina in the last panel looks mighty nice to me, and more importantly, to my penis. 

So progress is being made, is what I am saying. I am still a long way from true bisexuality, but I am happy that at least part of me is getting there. 

For example, I don’t think I could handle the real thing, especially if there is still pubic. For reasons that are obvious if you think about it, furry ladies tend not to have public hair. 

But at least I am feeling the tug from some kind of vagina now. 

And who knows? Maybe I will make it to true bisexuality some day. 

I can hardly wait. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

It’s a more complicated question than it seems. 

If I were some kind of aggressive, domineering, imposing, or even very intense person, the question would be easy to answer. 

The answer would be HELL YES. 

In the same vein, if I was a shy, softspoken, unsure of himself mouse of a person, the question would be equally easy to answer. 

The answer would be AWWW, THAT’S SO CUTE! NO. 

But no, I am somewhere in between. I am terribly shy but also extremely confident. I have problems speaking up for myself at the doctor’s office and yet I would argue with God Himself if I thought I was wrong. I have social anxiety so bad that even doing things with my friends, whom I love and trust, takes battling my inner demons, and yet I have no problem performing in front of a crowd, a camera, or royalty. 

And that’s just the introvert/extrovert stuff. 

My feeling is that I send out a lot of mixed messages. My intellectual self-confidence says one thing, my gentle genial joking nature says another, my enormous size and maleness a third. 

And the fact that I have so much emotion going on below the surface of which I am not fully aware and therefore do not know what message I am actually putting out makes me more confusing still. 

Add in my fluid sense of identity and a tendency to shapeshift like I am the genie from Alladdin, and I am am enigma wrapped in a paradox and seasoned with fresh conundrums and Tibetan salt before being rolled in mysteries and breadcrumbs and deep fat fried. 

Because I am, after all, a deep fat friar. 

And this is not the sort of question people who know and love me can answer, because of course they have me figured out by now.  They know me as the brilliant shiny tragically fragile bizarre little hothouse flower I am, and therefore they can’t see me as others see me any more. 

And in a sense, it’s not a question I could ask strangers who just met me either, and not just that would be super creepy and weird, but because I am fairly certain they wouldn’t know either. 

My signals are just too complicated. You have to know me for a bit to get any kind of a clear idea of just what I am about. 

When you figure me out, please let me know. Because I don’t get me either. 

Now I have pondered whether there is something I could do to clean up my signal, so to speak. Not in order to lie about who I am – I can’t and won’t do that – or make any sort of compromise of self, but to simply make myself more easily understood by others. 

Because being a complex enigma shrouded in mystery might seem like it would make you all alluring and captivating, but in realy it just makes you weird, hard to deal with, and best avoided. 

But too nice to mistreat openly. I am the sort of person who is easy to like but hard to take. Most people just don’t want to work that hard in order to make literal and emotional sense of someone. 

Forget actually trying to relate to me. 

Back to the main question : do I intimidate people? 

Yes and no. Sorry, the quantum physics answer is all I got. 

Again, it’s a matter of mixed messages. I am very intellectually assertive and confident and I clearly think fast and articulate myself powerfully and effectively, and that might well intimidate people slower than me. 

And that’s most people. 

And while I have come a long way since I was an unwitting verbal and intellectual bully in my early adulthood, I am not foolish enough to think myself permanently reformed. I know that there is always the possibility of a relapse and I do my best to monitor myself. 

Power tempts, after all. 

So in the right situation, I might intimidate the hell out of people.  Especially people who lack my kind of confidence and verbal virtuosity. 

And that’s most people. 

On the other hand, in another mode, I am a sweet, funny, kind of weird dude.  As long as there’s no serious kind of argument,  my gentle giant vibes are present and I can come across as the exact opposite of intimidating. 

And then in a third mode (I have so many modes), I might come across as, well, kind of pathetic. In both a good and bad way. 

So  I guess what I am saying is that I’m a complicated man. 

And no one understands me…. at all. 

This is why it is so hard for me to answer the question of whether I intimidate people or not, or indeed, any question about how I come across to people. I really have no idea. 

And that means I have no real control over it. And that should concern me. It’s part of how one deal with the world after all. 

But I am the sort of person who works from the inside out. So fretting about the details of how I am coming across does not come naturally to me, and to be honest, I find the whole subject distasteful. 

My approach is to concentrate on being sincere, honest, good-natured, gentle, and kind, and trusting that these qualities will shine through to others and tell them what they really need to know about me. 

Perhaps that is naive of me. A lot of people are far too superficial to see through my weight and my size and my generally not exactly coming across as a grade-A alpha stud dog macho man. 

I could if I wanted to. But I don’t. 

But as far as I am concerned, for now at least, filtering out all the superficial and shallow people sounds like a great plan to me. 

I will just concentrate on maximizing personal awesomeness and let the chips fall where they may. 

After all, isn’t that what us dreamers are meant to do? 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

These thoughts are relatively new, so they are still wet ’round the ears from being birthed and not quite fully formed yet. 

Hey, you didn’t come out of your mama in your final shape either. 

And now, the origin story : 

Earlier, I was pondering the day ahead of me and going through my traditional paroxysism of anxiety and dread. 

During this inevitable struggle, the thought occurred to me that I was not feeling up to facing the day and that I would probably therefore end up spending a lot of time in bed. 

This is not an unusual thought for me. 

But this time, it came with one of those freeze-frame moments of clarity that mark the most productive of personal insights because they mark points where I catch myself in the middle of doing something that I had no previous knowledge of doing. 

Does that make sense? I will assume yes. 

This time, I realized I felt a great deal of shame for not being able to handle life. That specific shame was connected with a ginormous complex bolus of related shame, like a terrifying complex tumour, and so that kind of marked it as something I need to talk about. 

Sunshine is the best disinfectant and all that. Drag the bad stuff out into the light of the conscious mind where it can be dealt with. Get both your conscious and unconscious mind working on the job. 

And so on. 

So, shame. I have a great deal of it. Like I have said before, I went many years thinking I was not the sort of person to be riddled with shame because, after all, I was raised without religion, and my image of a person wracked by shame was some poor victim of a religion’s inability to deal with the physical truths of human life and therefore saddles people with a lot of guilt for being a live human being with natural needs and desires. 

God damn transcendentalist acesticism. Is there nothing it can’t ruin? 

But that’s just the most obvious kind of shame.  Mine is more personal. It had a lot to do with being ashamed of what I see as my massive inadequacies and inability to function in society. 

But I am a very ill man. As we’ve discussed, all society expects of me is that I do my best to get better. Self-care is a very big part of that. 

So why should I feel bad because my illness sometimes makes it very hard to cope with reality and so, in self-defense, I have to withdraw? 

I think the answer is ultimately it is unmanly. I feel like a pathetic wimpy creature because I cannot deal with things head on, like a man “should”. I “should” be strong and powerful enough to tackles my sea of sorrows and by opposing end them instead of just running and hiding like a cowardly child fleeing the sound of thunder. 

That’s clearly some self-defeating macho bullshit. Toxic masculinity indeed. But the issue runs very deep into the very taproots of my identity, so it is not easy to dismiss. 

Gonna have to dig that fucker out and blast it. 

As it turns out, I have the same deep and irrational self-reliance ethos that more traditionally male men do. The idea that I “should” be able to take care of everything myself and I “should” be able to cope with life and I 
“should”  be capable and competent and reliable and not only that, I 
“should”  be able to do it all myself witout anyone else’s help. 

There I go,  “should”ing all over myself again. 

In this schema, my failure to meet this standard means I am a total failure as an adult human being and should drown in shame till I die of it. 

Again, this is clearly irrational and insane, not to mention deeply unfair. 

But this is the bad stuff, and I have to draw it to the surface in order to defeat it, and I do that by writing about it. 

Your mileage, as always, may vary. 

Getting over this androgenic insanity means giving up a big part of myself. Knowing something in you is toxic and being ready to let it go are not quite the same thing. So right at this moment, I feel like grieving. 

So please indulge me in this bit of visualization : 

I place my misbegotten ideals of savage self-reliance on a Viking longboat. For a few moments, I sit looking at them, and weep. Weep for myself, weep for the part of me that has to go, weep for all the damage it did to me before I was able to cut it free and let it go. 

Then, with a firm shove of my foot, I set the boat floating out into the dark waters of the bay, and watch as it drifts unerringly into the center of the waters and awaits my next move. 

So I take up my bow, nock a gasoline-stinking arrow, light it off a nearby torch, and point the bow at a parabolic angle. 

Tears still in my eyes but body rigid with determination, I stare at the dark shadowed mass of the boat and its cargo, waiting for the moment. 

When the moment comes, I let my arrow fly, and it describes an elegant flaming arc across the sky before sinking deep into the foul flesh of my dead and defeated demon. 

Instantly, ship, cargo, and all are ferociously ablaze, the light from the fire so intense that it hurts the eyes. 

Yet I do not look away as I watch it all burn. The pain is good. The pain is clean. It purifies as it burns. It kills what is not clean. 

And as it burns, the boat floats away towards the horizon, taking the last stinking remnants of my misbegotten flesh with it. 

Gone, gone, far away, gone away forever, gone across the final horizon, gone for good, gone, gone gone. 

Then I turn away, and weep like a child until dawn. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

The affirmations are going to be a tad more basic tonight. 

I have the right to exist. 

I deserve to be here. 

I have nothing to be ashamed of. 

I have the same right to exist, survive, thrive, and be happy as anyone else. 

I have as much of a right of a place at the table and a share of meal and all the other good things in life as anyone else. 

I might have been a mistake but I am not a crime and I don’t have to apologize for being alive and being myself and being around. 

I don’t have to justify my existence. I don’t have to earn people’s love by being funny or sweet or even smart. I am not some horrible thing that has to tapdance as hard as he can in order to stay in the light of people’s attention because if I fail to kepe them dazzled for even one second, they will realize how awful I am and reject me with infinite force and duration. 

I don’t have to do that. There is nothing to distract from, nothing to cover up. I am a good clean wholesome person who deserves love, respect, acceptance, understanding, and the glowing vitality that can only come from positive human connection. 

Nobody has the right to question my presence. Nobody has the right to make me feel bad just for being around. Nobody has the right to exploit my shyness and people pleasing nature to make me marginalize myself and save them the trouble of having to do it themselves. 

And nobody has the right to dare to deny me my share of the common resources just because they don’t feel like dealing me in and thus losing a tiny percentage of their own share. 

I don’t care if you have gotten comfortable with forgetting all about my existence most of the time. I don’t care if you wrote me off as a solved problem a long time ago and hate the idea of having to re-open my cases. I don’t care if my wants and needs make your life more difficult. 

You never should have written me off in the first place. 

And now you’re paying the price. 

I am here. I have always been here. And I am done hiding. I am going to insist on being recognized as valid and real no matter what. 

I am a fully real flesh and blood living, breathing, feeling human being. I am not a computer. I am not a friendly robot. Neither am I a saint or and angel. Nor am I demon or a monster. 

I am here now. I exist in this moment and the moments beyond. My existence is not partial, optional, fractional, subliminal, or situational. 

Even when I have surrounded myself in a thick cloak of shadows and illusions and my true self cannot be seen, even when I am lost even unto myself, nothing has really changed. 

I keep on being valid and real even when I have used up my bag of tricks and put the bag over my head so I can hide from reality. 

I am me. 

And that is exactly who I am supposed to be. 

I had more to say but meh. I am too tired at the moment to think it all up let alone think it through. 

It’s been rough lately. I keep getting super sleepy all of a sudden. So I lay down, and more than half the time, suddenly I am not sleepy any more. 

It’s all super frustrating. 

I know what it is : it’s the phenomenon I call “the melt”, where radiant warmth makes me sleeeeeeeepy. 

Usually, I associate this phenomenon with having come inside after being out on a cold day. That’s why I didn’t figure out why I was getting these weird and inconstant nap attacks right away. 

But the key is the radiant heat. I get sleepy when the heaters in my room kick in. They are right under this computer desk, and so when they turn on, I am getting lovely toasty warmness aimed right me and down I go. 

That’s the logical explanation. The emotional truth is that I am left feeling mega sleepy without being able to go to sleep until I finish my words. 

And I hate that shit. I hate the stress of having to force myself to stay awake. It puts me in a bad mood because it makes it so damned hard to think and squeezes the window of my consciousness down to the point where my existential paranoia kicks in and I start freaking out like I had been struck deaf, dumb, and blind. 

And without even getting really good at pinball. 

Some of the worst moments of everyday life for me have been those times when my body is screaming for sleep but I am in a situation where sleep is either not possible or not at all acceptable. 

Like being in class at school, for instant. I always sit in the front row because a) I am a bit of a keener but mostly b) I have poor eyesight and so I need to be up front to even be able to see what is going on. 

The front row is, however, a uniquely poor one for the potential class nap taker. The professor is bound to notice a sleeping student when they are only a few feet away and drooling. 

Plus, I have an intense fear of missing out or falling behind. So while I have come damned close to sleeping in class, as far as I can tell, I never have. 

Another one is the Skytrain. I have a long history of finding being in motion to be very sleep inducing, especially at night. 

And the Skytrain is great because it’s a smooth ride and there are parts where the time between stations is more than long enough for a snooze. 

In that case, what keeps me awake is my social anxiety and general lack of trust in the world not to stab me in the back the first chance it gets. 

Well those are my words for today. Now I lay me down to sleep. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

And this time, it’s personal. 

My Demon Hunger is back, and this time I don’t know how to make it go away, and it is driving my crazy. 

Previously, it was always simply a matter of getting caught up on my meds. But as far as I can tell, I am on point with my meds and yet I am still crazy fucking hungry nearly all the time. 

I have even expanded my meals somewhat, and that’s something I almost never do. Ditto on eating between meals. I don’t do either of those and yet I have been doing both in a vain attempt to keep this fucking hunger at bay. 

The best I can do is keep it relatively calm for short periods. 

Now patient readers know that this is quite possibly a lot more than just a bad case of the munchies. It could mean that something is terribly out of whack with my diabetes and that means my cells are frantically sending out hunger signals because they are not getting enough energy from the blood stream due to lack of insulin response. 

So I am starving to death on a cellular level. Lovely! 

If this keeps up, I will have to check myself into the ER. As usual, this kind of thing waits till the weekend to kick into high gear, and therefore there is no chance I could just go see my GP about it. Not until Monday, and I may not have the luxury of waiting that long. 

I am trying not to totally freak out about this, but it’s not easy. 

Obviously, I don’t want to go back to the fucking hospital. I doubt it would be the sort of thing where I would need to be admitted and end up in a room like when I had the pneumonia, but still. 

My memories of being adrift in that environment are still too fresh for me to be ready to go there again. 

But I also don’t want to die. 

So there’s that. 

It’s so hard to think clearly when you are starving. Here I am actively stuffing my face with food and it is barely making a dent in the hunger. I shudder to think of what it would take to make me actually feel full. 

I did have fun imagining a doctor writing me a prescription for a buffet. 

I honestly don’t know how they would treat my problem.  The immediate response is obvious : a heavy glucose drip. More time with an IV in me, yay. But you can’t always wait for digestion to get the job done. 

Sometimes you have to go right into the vein. 

But I don’t know how they would treat the lack of insulin response if my current meds are not doing the job.  It is possible that they have access to meds stronger than what I normally take. 

But it is also possible that they do not. And then I would have to face a seriously bad possibility : 

That I have finally fucked myself over with my self-neglect badly enough that I am now a brittle diabetic who could die at any moment from cellular starvation and all that brings. 

My hands are cold. Weird. 

The thing is, I know a guy who died just like I might. And his name was Mike, just like me. He was a fat dude like me too, and he had type 2 diabetes, and he didn’t really take care of it properly either. 

And so he slipped from type 2 diabetes – insulin tolerance buildup into type 1 – not enough insulin and from there into brittle type 1 – no normal insulin response at all. 

And from there, he got even worse, to the point where his roomies had to call the ambulance three or four times a week to get them to come essentially jump start him. 

Shock paddles, glucose mainlined into his veins, the whole deal. 

And well, one time it just didn’t work, or possibly they didn’t get to him in time. Either way, he fucking died. 

And I would really rather avoid that. I haven’t even had a chance to live yet. I am sure as shit not ready to die. 

Of course, it is possible that I am goign way over the top with this and goading myself into a paranoid frenzy over nothing at all. 

Maybe I just need to let my meds do their thing and any moment now I will catch up and my blood sugar level will go to normal and all my cells will get their care packages of lovely delicious glucose, just like Mom and glucogenesis used to make, and all will be right in God’s kingdom again. 

 This might all be an extended and elaborate panic attack, and no more. 

But I can’t take that kind of risk. I have got to at least consider the fact that I might be in a serious bind right now. 

Ironically, if I was taking better care of myself, I would have a glucometer set up and ready to take a reading that would tell me whether or not I had any reason to panic. 

But I don’t. I have no idea where my old glucometer is, let alone its test strips and lancets and the rest. 

I don’t even know where my insulin injection pen is. And I bet some good old insulin would go over real good right now. 

All I can do is monitor my own condition as best as I can and be ready to hit the official panic button if things get bad enough. 

One tiny bit of good news : my hands were cold because I forgot to close the window after taking my last shower. 

So that’s one symptom down, at least. What I thought might be the cold hand of death stealing over me turned out to be the far more familiar hand of my own fractured state of mind. 

I wonder if I would still be absentminded if I was sane.

Felicity is lying down. I guess my next step is to call Joe. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

At least, I hope so. 

Time for some healthy self-boosterism. 

I’m kind of awesome.  I’m an amazing guy. I have never met anyone else quite like me, and for once, that’s a good thing. 

I have never met anyone as charming, cute, funny, and ghosh darn smart as I am. I make people happy wherever I go. I put out a strong positive vibe even when I am not feeling at all positive myself, and that makes the world a better place wherever I go, both online and off. 

There is nobody else like me out there. I am one of a kind. I am an electric neon go-go dancing ball of fun and everyone who knows me benefits from my glow, my warmth, and my sweet, sweet sunshine. 

The fact that all that sunshine comes from a place of terrible cold and darkness only makes it all the more amazing. 

Sometimes, we put out the vibes we want back but can’t give to ourselves, so we have to bounce them off others first. 

Seems complicated, I know, but it kind of works. 

I am also uniquely intelligent. I have never met someone who sees things the way I do. I have an original and potent way of seeing the world that makes patterns clear to me that elude others for their whole lives. I have a fuller, richer, and more complete understanding of the world than anyone I have ever met. 

Even the greatest thinkers seem small-minded and limited to me. 

I’m also extremely creative and highly talented. Things I write have a life of their own because I write from a place of inspiration and emotional truth. I don’t force a predetermined form on my writing. I let it grow and flow organically, and to my mind, that gets better results. 

I could never be the sort of writer who starts with an outline then builds that up and builds that up into larger and larger pieces until it’s the full thing, complete and perfect. 

The very idea makes me shudder. How dreadfully dull that would be! I am sure it works wonderfully for others. I can certainly see the beauty and power of it as a technique. 

But that’s not for me. For better and for worse. I write by the seat of my pants because that’s what keeps me excited and motivated.  It is the act of creation that I enjoy. 

Refining and perfecting are a necessary evil to me. 

In addition, I am a really sweet guy. I genuinely feel for people and truly want people to be happy and to do well. It saddens me when people suffer and in many ways I feel their pain. 

If I could. I would give the whole world a great big hug and tell it everything will be okay and sit and listens to its problems and do my best to understand it all. 

A lot of people just need someone to listen to them. I would love to be that person. Someone who listens, and understands, and validates. 

So, life happened. Oh well. Let the self-hagiography continue! 

Let’s see, what other stellar qualities do I possess? Well I am a very tolerant and understanding person. I have a deep understanding of what it means to be human and how difficult a thing it can be to be the monkey with just enough brains to make life hard on itself. And this understanding guides me in seeing what truly matters about a person and disregarding the sort of superficial and arbitrary nonsense other people get hung up on. 

So I understand and embrace all kinds of human strangeness. And I am gentle in my judgment of others. I often find myself in the position of trying to reassure people that I don’t judge them nearly as harshly as they judge themselves and I do my best to extend understanding and compassion to those who need it. 

Hmmm. That comes off a little too clinical and cosmic. Oh well. 

My point is that I am a sweetly non-judgmental dude and I consider that to be one of my better qualities. 

And I genuinely love making other people happy. Call it selfish empathy : I love feeling other people’s happiness, especially when I know I am the source. That way, I both feel good from the reflected happiness and feel good because I feel like I am doing good. 

I can’t think of anything I would enjoy more. If I had my way, I would do nothing but make people happy all day.  That would be my paradise.

 What else. Well, I am playful and I don’t take myself too seriously. I love being downright silly and goofing around with friends. I especially like using my verbal skills to have fun with words and ideas. 

Oh right. I also have amazingly powerful verbal skills. I wield words like a wizard wields spells. I word make very good plus. 

At the same time, I am completely comfortable with numbers. Thats never been an either/or thing for me at all. I always did just as well in algebra as I did in English and as well in Physics as I did in Social Studies. 

Perhaps you have to have a certain kind of overflowing and powerful mind in order to not feel the need to simplify things by picking a side. 

Or maybe I am just to socially isolated that I never had the slightest notion that it was possible (or desirable) to pick a side and stick with it. 

Which means I am also very fair minded. My point of view is highly objective and I can exercise clear and balanced judgment in situations where most people would lose their heads. 

In summation, I am one heck of a guy. Almost magical, really. 

And that’s all I have to say about myself today. 

Remember, this was not an ego trip, it was me trying to remind myself that I have a lot of great qualities. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

Pea soup, that is. The mental fog is very thick right now. 

Q : What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?
A : Well anyone can roast beef… 

You either get it or you don’t. 

I experience so many strange mind states. Right now, my mental fog is thick and glutinous. I feel like confusion and disorientation are a mere window’s thickness away from overwhelming me. It is only be dint of the expenditure of a very large and continuous of mental energy that I am able to cling to the here and now and real at all. 

Or at least, that’s how it feels. 

It feels, in fact, like I am adrift on an uncertain sea, slowly spinning due to the influence of a strange and unknowable current, and lost in fog so thick I can’t even see the prow of my boat. 

And my boat is tiny. 

Part of that, I suppose, is hunger. By which I mean low blood sugar. Hunger might suck but it alone rarely makes it hard for me to think clearly or give me the feeling of fluttering faintness that makes me feel like the flourescent light bulb of my soul is flickering and could go out at any moment. 

Don’t worry. I will be OK. I have snax. 

But another part of it is the clinging clammy clutches of my mental illness, no doubt. Bolstered by my sleep apnea. 

About that : so I bought this blood oximeter so that I could measure my blood oxygen levels and do what I can (breathing exercises, fresh air, oxygen vampirism) correct low levels when I found them. 

Problem is, all my readings are coming back normal. 99 percent. If anything, that might be TOO healthy. 

This puts me in a bit of a bind. 

See, one of the ways I clawed my way up out of the depths of my total mental collapse into paranoia and hypochondria in my early 20’s was to make the firm and final decision that I would believe what I was told about myself, no matter what. 

So if the doctor said I was fine, I would believe him. If the tests came back negative for whatever I thought I had, I would believe that too. 

So on that level, I am heavily inclined to believe my new toy when it says that my oxygen levels are normal even two or three minutes after waking up and getting out of bed. 

Admittedly, I have not yet taken a reading the moment I wake up. 

But either way, the results make no sense. I know damned well that I smother in my sleep dozens of times a night. That’s what the tests showed. And given how I often feel when I wake up, lack of oxygen while sleeping is actually the least scary possible explanation. 

In order for the readings to be consistent with that, I would have to posit that my body gets all the oxygen it needs to restore healthy levels in those first few precious breaths upon waking. And that seems unlikely. 

Either that, or my naturally unnatural sleep cycle is such that the really bad smothering happens way before I wake up and so I don’t have low oxygen levels at that point. 

It’s possible. That would not explain how lousy and out of breath and bruised I often feel upon waking, but it is at least plausible. 

The third option is, of course, that my eximeter, despite its sleek design and attractive color LED display, is a cheap and inaccurate piece of Chinese knockoff crap and I would get better results by slaughtering a yak abd poking the entrails about with a stick. 

But I can’t afford to think that way. I have got to believe the readings, at least until I have some solid reason to doubt them. 

Something better than “they don’t match how I feel”, I mean. 

But if the readings are true, that would seem to indicate that I somehow do not have sleep apnea any more. 

Aww crap. I just realized I am trembling. Not good. 

That is not entirely impossible. I do seem to be losing weight lately, juding my how loose my pants have become.  Losing weight could in theory correct the obstruction that causes my sleep apnea. 

It doesn’t seem very likely, though. 

God damn it. My twitching just cost me the sauce that came with the spring rolls I ordered as an appetizer with my Indian food. 

I was holding the little cup of sauce when a twitch hit me and I involuntarily squeezed the cup like it was a ketchup packet in the claws of a lobster, and sploot, that lovely sauce all over the damned place. 

What a waste! I almost wish I had not had a chance to try the sauce with the spring rolls before spilling it, because then I wouldn’t know how good they taste together and how nice the sauce is. 

Oh well. At least I am eating now, and therefore my blood sugar will go back to normal and I will stop the goddamned twitching. 

I don’t get why my blood sugar was so low, though. I had a totally normal lunch at a totally normal time. And I didn’t do anything that would have accelerated my metabolic rate. 

I give up. Life is arbitrary and terrifying. One day soon I am going to keel over and die and the autopsy will reveal that I was suffering from dozens of major issues and people will be left wondering how I could even have lived as long as I did, let alone make it through the day. 

How’s that for a hypochondriac thought? All that is missing is the wounded-angel martyrdom of “I told them I was sick!”. 

Then again, I did try telling doctors about a lot of things that got dismissed for insufficient reason….

Well whatever. At this point, find out it is all in my head would be a blessed relief. Then it would just be a matter of increasing my meds. 

I swear I can be sane if I am on enough drugs! 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

First came the Drive. 

Officially, it was the Albucierre-White-Singh drive, or the AWS. Alcubierre had done the initial math. White had figured out how to simplify the equations and take the drive from completely impossible by any means to just barely possible in this Universe. 

But it was Singh – Ravinder Singh – who invented the math that showed that it could all be done with existing technology – but only barely. 

Then came the Pax Aster, a golden era of peace and cooperation between all the bickering factions that humanity had split into once we had finally conquered of our solar system 

Once Singh had made his famous presentation to the Pan Planetary Union, seen by billions all over the Sol System, there was no turning back. Even the most fractious and difficult of leaders did not dare risk being seen as i any sense impeding humanity’s destiny in the stars. Humanity was, for the next twenty years, as one. 

People debated the methods, but no one debated the goal. 

Then came Ascension Day. Humanity has never seen such a spectacle. The space around the Test Plant glittered with spaceships covered in sparkling decorations. Low density plasmoid fireworks invented just for the occasion formed spectacular shapes in empty space before shimmering into nothing. The “stands” were enormous loggia floating in space and in each one, the party of the century was in full swing. 

This day had been twenty hard but productive years in the making, and humanity was going to celebrate the hell out of every way they could. 

Then came the Test. 

With enormous fanfare, the chairperson of the Top Council for Humanity in Space pressed the button that fired up the AWS drive on the great ship the Star of Humanity for the first time. 

And as the great drive flared into prismatic glory, a great and mighty cheer arose from those assembled. They had done it! 

The cheer died in their throats, however, when the great ship simply blinker out of existence. 

No warning. No flash. One moment it was there, and the next it was not. The loss was total. All the astronauts, all the equipment, all the scientests and nobles and celebrity guests, gone in an instant. 

And in that moment, humanity’s united spirit was crushed. 

Recriminations filled the Tanglenet. Everybody blamed everyone else. A billion conspiracy theories sprang into life overnight, and the spirit that had united humanity was now spoken of exclusively in bitter, recriminating tones. People needed someone to blame. 

So they turned to the most obvious suspect : Revinder Singh himself. Surely he must have known that this was possible. Surely the genius behind this whole thing must have had some idea that HIS drive was not entirely safe. Surely this was all, ultimately, his fault. 

So the Great Genius was dragged into the spotlight and made to ask questions by a PPU panel of prosecutors, scientists, spiritual leaders, and prominent citizens charged with the holy mission of Getting To The Bottom Of What Really Happened. 

And after putting up a token, nay symbolic defense claiming innocence, the Great Genius admitted that he had, indeed, seen the possibility of such an event, but had considered it so improbable that it was not worth mentioning at all. 

This answer satisfied nobody, and what was left of the cooperative spirit in humanity died a messy and terrible death. The PPU disintegrated as a functioning political force almost instantly, and to be someone associated directly with the Great Project quickly meant to be in fear for your life. 

The people wanted blood, and they didn’t care how they got it. 

Adding to the chaos was the fact that a large percentage of humanity’s top leadership had been aboard the Star of Humanity when it disappeared, and the power vaccuums that created destroyed all they touched as groups of angry and violent people clashed as they tried to fill the void. 

This was the Interregnum, and it was to last fifteen long and tortuous years. Of the 380 billion humans alive on Ascension Day, almost a billion would die in the Faction Wars, and billions more would see their worlds shattered by wars that turned them into refugees and tore their familes apart. 

But then came the Pilots. 

Experiments conducted in hush-hush secret revealed that roughly one person in 150 million had the potential to learn to guide an AWS vessel in those crucial moments of startup and takeoff (and shutdown and arrival) so that there was no chance of them “blinking out”. 

So then came the Hunt. It was as thorough as it was brutal. People were tested on masse and nobody gave two thoughts to concepts like “permission”. Thousands were turned into vegetables or lunatics by the process, but eventually humanity had its 2500 Pilots. 

And suddenly, our trek to the stars resumed. The Pilots were treated like pampered pets, given anything they wanted except control over their own lives. They went where they were told and did as they were instructed. 

And humanity began to coalesce once more. The factions didn’t disappear but they became both larger and less contentious. A rough kind of system wide government known ironically as the Pilot’s Union formed to regulate how this fantastic new power was to be used. 

So then came the Seeding. Human colonies spread to nearby stars, slowly at first but rapidly growing into great fertile waves of expansion began. Within 25 years, there were as many humans living outside the Sol System as within it, and good ol’ Sol took on the air of The Old Country. 

But this came at a cost of a vast reduction in human freedom.  People labored for the new bosses by the billions without any thought of being paid because to ask for pay was seen as unpatriotic. Democracy was also swept aside in the rise of fascism. The very notion that the average person should have a say in anything was cruelly mocked as “naive”. 

But then there were the Pilots. And the Pilots had a Plan. 

The Plan was simple in concept. They would play the part of dutiful, spoiled, arrogant pets for as long as it took for the entire civilization of humanity to become completely dependent on their labor and completely forget the very notion of pilots as people with free will, and then they would go on strike as one and force reform on the empire of humanity. 

And that’s how we came to have the society we have today, children. 

And the man behind that Plan? 

It was none other than Ravinder Singh himself. 

But that’s a story for anothet time.