And by landing, I mean coming home and not going to Emergency.

Thank frigging god.

Made it to the walk-in clinic. The doctor checked me out in a refreshinlgy old-fashioned low tech way. Pulse, check the heart, blood pressure, etc.

I have nothing against high tech – in fct I adore it – but when I am nervous and “awaiting my fate” I find the old fashioned stuff reassuring.

I guess I really am getting old.

I mean, if the place had been super high tech, that would not have upset me, as long as the decor was not too harsh or dehumanizing.

I almost said “too clinical”, but seeing as we are talking about an actual clinic, that did not seem to be la mot juste.

But I definitely prefer my doctor’s offices to be friendly ,and humanistic in the decor/design sense. I am already nervous just from being in a doctor’s office and feeling all the layers of worry, pain, and stress lingering in the air.

Yes, rational materialist that I am, I believe in “vibes”. The evidence from my own life experiences is overwhelming. Some places have a lot of bad vibes.

But I don’t think it has anything to do with magical energy vibrations or ESP or whatever. In fact, I am pretty sure that it is mostly pheremones.

Like I have mentioned before,. pheremones are perceived by a very, very old part of the brain that bypasses our conscious mind entirely and plugs directly into our emotional control center, thus making us prey to powerful unconcious emotional influencers.

In fact, they might be the most unconscious thing ever because while there are a lot of things going on in our brain of which we are not conscious, only the pheremone center is unconscious on a hardware level.

I wonder if there are people born without the ability to react to pheremones, and what their lives are like.

Anyhow, my point is that I think “vibes’, at least the kind that can build up in a fixed area, are really just pheremones.

The kind we get from one another when we are close to one another must involve something else as well because, in my experience, there’s more information in them.

Then again, given what we now know about how people tend to be attracted to people whose antibody profile is the most different than theres (thus insuring that their offspring have the biggest antibody arsenal possible), anything is possible I suppose.

AIn’t science wonderful?

That was a long divergence even for me.

Back to our story. So I saw the doc and he cleared me to come home and not go to Emergency. There was one troubling thing though.

We did this test where I stood with my feet pressed closely together and then closed my eyes, and I immediately become dizzy and started wobbling about.

My theory is that I have somehow been using my eyes to compensate for a certain amount of dizziness.

I will bring that up with Doctor Chao next week.

The doctor at the clinc had a French accent, and I found that surprisingly soothing. I think on a deep level it even made me trust him more.

Probably because it reminded me of my home. Le sigh.

Speaking of French, I have been playing this game called Assassin’s Creed Unity, and it takes place in Paris during the French Revolution.

As in, you are literally in the Bastille when it is stormed.

Cue the Rush song!

But here is the thing. The game is, of course, in English.

And that, in turn, means that all the main characters speak in some variety of UK accent. Because apparently, the world thinks everyone in history was a blood British person, from the kings and queens down to the lowest beggar.

This is a personal peeve of mine, especially when it comes to the French. They are, after all, my ancestors, and it bugs me that they never get to be French any more.

I mean, why not do like they used to do in the movies and have people speak English with the accent of where they come from?

You know,. French people with French accents, etc.

There are plenty of varieties of French accent where are just as clear and understandable as any UK accent, and it would make a lot more sense.

It’s especially galling (or is that Gauling) because Ubisoft is a French company.

Further muddying the issue is the fact that all the background and incidental character in the game speak in French!

Prrfectly flawless French, too, presumably because when you are making games a la belle France, you have no shortage of native French speakers.

I wish there were subtitles for those French speakers, because then I could be improving my French just by walking around listening in.

I guess mere exposure will have to do.

The point is moot, anyway, as I am stuck in the game in a super frustrating way. I make it all the way out of the Bastille before being cornered by the guards on a rooftop, and I am supposed to make some incredible leap to freedom to progress.

But the on-screen instructions as to how to do that do not work. For one, they want me to press W, Up, and E at the same time, and W and Up are the same damn key.

And the Internet is of no help. There is one walkthrough that says I need to do something called an Eagle Dive at that point, but there is literally nowhere on the Internet that explains how to do that in this situation.

I have some more things I want to try in order to get it working. I am going to look into rebinding the keys to make W and Up different keys.

And I am going to look into cheats I can use to skip directly to the next scene.

As God as my witness, I will make the game work.

Or die tying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, a joke.

If you combine lady fingers with Butterfingers, you get Lady Butterfingers, the world’s clumsiest female knight.

As opposed to Butterfinger, a chocolate bar has always sounded to me like a dairy themed Bond villain,.

“You see, Mister Bond, this yellow ray is actually a beam of pure cholesterol…. and it’s aimed straight at your heart. ”

Oh, and he would, of course, have a Wisconsin accent.

Lady Finger, on the other hand, has no obvious specialty, but she does seem to be really popular with the other royal ladies for some reason.

---

OK, enough shenanigans.

First, good news, I am still alive and nothing further along the “twinge then fall then nosebleed” type of thing.

I still feel rather frail and wobbly and a wee bit spooked. Death and disease have tiptoed over my tombstone, and I can feel their shadow still.

But I am pressing on.

I posted about The Incident on Facebook. Why? Well as my friend the Magnificent Em quite rightly pointed out. I posted about it to Facebook because I already knew what I ought to do and I just needed someone to tell me to go do it.

She is such a cool chick.

The answer, of course, is to see a friggin’ doctor, sooner rather than later.

Come to think of it, the whole “I’ll take care of this thing when I see the doctor next week” does sound like it comes straight from one of those “if only they had treated it sooner” stories about men who don’t take their health seriously until it is way too late.

So I am not going to wait until I see Doc Chao next Wednesday. I am going to go to the walk-in clinic nearby tomorrow afternoon.

Hopefully, they will be open on Good Friday. I swear, these things ALWAYS happen right before a holiday where everything closes.

I know I should have gone today, but I just couldn’t. You all know that I don’t do sudden. I needed the time to warm up to the idea.

If it turns out the clinic is closed, I guess I will just have to bite the bullet and go to Emergency at Richmond General Hospital.

It was originally a Lieutenant General Hospital, but it got promoted.

Anyhow, I dread going to Emergency but somebody has got to check me out for this shit ASAP. And I know that if I go there, there is a good chance they will admit me for at least as long as it takes to run a whack of tests.

Or even they don’t admit me,, my problem is not, as far as I know, urgent. so triage will ensure that I am there a really long time.

So I might as well pack a bag and take it with me if I have to go.

God, I hope I don’t have to go.

---

I had a serious revelation when I was writing all that previous stuff down.

Deep down, I feel like nobody could possibly love or respect someone who cannot work for a living.

Especially not if that person is me.

I am pretty shocked to find this floating around ibn my brain. If someone said that shit out loud in my presence I would land on them like a ton of bricks, verbally speaking.

But there it is. My deep deep shame at being a non-productive member of society extends so deeply into the very core of my being that I feel like my being disabled means I am impossible to romantically love.

For who could love one so foul and uiseless a thing as I?

Sounds pretty emo, don’t it.

Obviously, it’s not a statement I consciously agree with, but just as obviously that does not make this emotion disappear in a puff of insight.

It does mean I can start working on it, though. And that’s good. I can try to dig this poisonous vine out at the roots and watch it die.

Harsh image, but then again, I am crazy.

---

OK, so let’s do a deep dive on this shame. Like my man Nietzsche said, let’s overcome by going under.

I had no idea it was there, but it makes sense. I know that I have dreaded the moment when someone asks you what you do for a living.

Possible answers include :

1. “As little as possible! *fake laughter*
2. “I sign checks for the government. The hours are short but you don’t get a lot of them. The hourly rate is amazing, though. “
3. “I’m an unemployable drain on society. You?”
4. “Right now my job is “not killing myself”. Takes up most of my time. “
5. “You call this living? *fake laughter*

And so forth and so on.

See, the worst part is that before someone asks me that question, I can pretend to be a normal, intact, functional human being.

But once that line is crossed, everything changes, and people look at me differently. Especially after I tell them I am disabled due to depression.

No matter how cool they are, some part of them just doesn’t buy it. And with those who do, I now bear the stigma of mental illness.

“Uh oh, better keep him away from the cutlery. ”

It’s very unfair that I feel ashamed of my inability to earn my own keep via productive labor. I certainly wouldn’t think less of anyone else who was disabled.

But part of the tragedy of having a wounded sense of self is that the rules for others and the rules for yourself aren’t even on the same shelf.

They’re barely in the same library.

And of course, I know, on a completely different level, that I am an amazing person with an incredible intellect and loads and loads of talent, and that I have so much to offer the world when I am ready to do so.

But that’s head knowledge. Tell that to my heart, my soul, and my spirit.

You can find them undergoing triage in the Emergency Room.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And it was propably bad. Possibly very bad.

It all started with pants.

I was putting on my pants, which is easily one of the most dangerous things a fat person does on a daily basis, when I felt this twinge of pain in my had then got very dizzy and had to grab the edge of the table to keep from falling and breaking my neck, as my mom would say.

Moms think their children’s necks have the structural integrity of a wet toothpick.

Anyhow, so I stagger over to the bed and collapse, feeling like the room is spinning at a considerable clip, and I notice my nose is running, so I grab a Kleenex to wipe.

Turns out, it’s blood.

So to recap, I felt a twinge of pain in my brain, got very dizzy, then my nose bled.

That seems like a very bad sign to me. It certainly would be in movies and TV. That’s the kind of thing hack writers love to use to foreshadow the person getting seriously sick. Like with cancer or AIDS or tuberculosis.

That last one is mostly for Les Miserables.

So I am kind of worried,. Luckily, I already have another appointment with my GP because his office called me today because he wants to discuss my test results.

Because of how great they are, obviously.

Perhaps he wants to give me a medal.

Sadly, the appointment isn’t until a week from today, so that will leave me a lot of time to fret over things.

And the thing is, I haven’t felt quite right ever since the incident. I am still kind of dizzy and I feel a little weak. A little frail.

So it’s a bit of a struggle to keep my long-buried hypochondria at bay while still paying proper attention to my healh.

Kind of like I am walking against the current in a cold river.

A river of fear.

And trout. And maybe just a tiny bit of bear poop.

But it’s mostly the fear thing.

I use comedy to deal with stress!

I am currently fairly behind on sleep. That might have been a factor. There is nothing a lack of sleep can’t make worse.

I had one of those incidents where I am 3/4 asleep when I suddenly get this supercharge of energy like I just mainlined a triple espresso, and that kept me from getting proper sleep and threw me off quite a bit.

I tried to do the smart thing and finally took my sleeping pill for the first time in ages. I recently realized that I was back to not being able to sleep for more than an hour and a half before my bladder woke me up demanding I empty it.

The pee part is a new wrinkle, but otherwise, I have been here before. It’s the whole reason I asked for sleeping pills in the first place.

So while my literal lack of sleep is recent, my lack of deep REM sleep has been building for a long time and I really should be taking my sleeping pill every single time I go to bed, but I don’t.

Why? Because they make it so hard to wake up in the morning.

Seems like a kind of petty and stupid and childish reason when I type it out like that.

So back on the sleepytime pills I go. Better to have a hard time waking up after a good five solid hours of sleep than to have lots of shitty quality hours of sleep that don’t really do me all that much good

It happens so slowly, though. This degradation of sleep quality. When I first went off the snooze pills, my sleep stayed good for a while.

So like an idiot, I thought I didn’t need them any more.

That also sounds pretty idiotic all typed out like that.

What else. Therapy tomorrow. Going to tell my shrink about my newly discovered mutant public speaking abilities.

He will probably think I am suffering from petit mal delusions of grandeur, or at least that I am “letting my imagination run wild” or somesuch.

So be it. This is not the kind of thing that is easy for people to understand. My tales of extreme effect on crowds sound like science fiction even to me.

But they are all 100 percent true. Apparently I have some kind of gift.

I have always felt a sense of greatness and destiny within me. I assumed this was just a product of having been a super gifted kid and people telling me that I was going to go on to do great things some day.

Fooled you! I’m 45 and I still haven’t even started my life.

And the strict rational materialist in me know that there is no such thing as destiny and whatever I feel calling to me out there is really in here, in my mind.

But tell that to my emotions, because I definitely feel a call. And slowly but surely, it is getting louder, and I am running out of reasons to resist it.

Besides raw, cold, naked fear, of course.

Plus I am still working out how I shall launch myself into the world of public debate.

And more importantly than those little details. I wonder what my persona slash editorial voice will be. Because I am a pretty divided dude.

One part of me wants to lauch myself into the opionionsphere like a meteor with a grudge and lay waste to all the ignorant motherfuckers killing the world with their civilization destroying stupidity. I want to hit the world like a drone strike and shake shit up all over the political landscape. The political debates all over the world could use someone to come in and clean house on these fools.

And once I show them the way, otherwise will join me, and maybe we will get shit done.

So let’s call that side Raging Bull.

But another part of me, let’s call him Secular Jesus, wants everyone to get along. he rejects the narrative of conflict and wants to rescue the conservatives from the evil clutches of bad shepherds.

He wants to find common ground with them, like a good humanist, and show people that under all the arguments, we’re really all the same.

And a third side of me just wants to do whatever makes the money, honey .He doesn’y give a shit about anything except getting his hands on currency so he can build himself a luxurious lifestyle, and will cynically manipulate anyone to make it happen.

So I dunno. At some point, I will have to stop dithering and make my bed.

But for now, it is time to lay down and watch the room spin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Now that I finally have been to the doctor, I am cleared to hang out at Felicity’s parents’ place with her and Joe later tonight.

It’s literally been months since we’ve done it. I got sick, which meant I couldn’t hang at Casa Del Felicity because her parents are old and somewhat frail, and if they get sick with whatever I had, it could really do a lot of damage.

Fair enough. Sound reasoning. I would be able to go back once I had been to the doctor and gotten a clean bill of health.

What I didn’t anticipate was having all that trouble actually getting my doctor’s office on the phone. That problem was enough to rob me of my motivation.

Depression makes motivation very, very fragile. And in my case in particular, the biggest robber by far is the unexpected.

I tried to hang on to it by looking for a new doctor on the website for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia.

Wow, that was a lot to type. At least they finally dropped the “Royal” at the beginning.

Anyhow, that was a process doomed to fail because what I basicallty got was a long list of doctors with names that made me (unfairly) wonder how good their English was and no way of determining which one would be the right fit for me and that killed the remainder of my motivation by strangling it with a rope made of option paralysis.

And thus it languished for months. :Literal months. The whole thing disappeared into the mists of my befogged brain and most of the time, I just plain did not think about it.

That’s how it goes with depression. It creates a mental environment toxic to motivation, desire, happiness, and joy.

And to me, the worst part of that is that it makes me do things of which I am deeply ashamed. Like completely fail to get a new doctor and thus restore my privs regarding Felicity’s parents’ place.

And this has had real world consequence for everybody in my little circle. It meant that at all the times we would normally hang out in private. I was dropped off at the apartment instead and Felicity and Joe went on to hang out together.

This meant a serious drop in my social time, and I didn’t have much to start with.

And God forgive me, but I loved it.

Or at least, the bad part of me. The sick part. Suddenly the amount of social pressure in my life was cut in half and my illness thought that was marvelous. It was quite happy to crawl back into my cave and be twice as socially isolated as before.

Why, that meant way less time when I would have to pull myself together and be socially present and aware. I could remain in my safe little womb way longer, where I could be free of the demons of my social anxiety because I was all alone.

That is literally the only way for me to be free of them. And even then, they are never truly gone. They are still lurking around the periphery of my consciousness like starving wolves who hate me.

There’s an image for ya.

And now, a message for my most important and valued reader :

Felicity, this was never anything to do with you. Not even slightly. At the same time I was further isolating myself, I was missing the heck out of you.

But part of mental illness is not being entirely in control of yourself.

I hate that part.

It did have something to do with your parents’ place though. Still mostly my own insanity at work but it played a part.

Because the truth is, that place makes me anxious. I feel like I don’t belong there. Like I am some kibnd of filthy, disgusting mongrel that has been allowed, just this once, to sit on the couch and is terrified that he is going to screw that up.

And part of him just wants to be back in his doghouse.

And like I said, I know this is 90 percent Crazytown. But that does not make it any less real for me. That place makes me anxious. I don’t fit in. I don’t belong.

And for the ill part of me, not having to go there for months has been delightful. I can be much more calm and relaxed without it in my life.

All of that was to explain this : This is my first chance to hang out with Joe and Felicity in months, and I don’t want to go.

RIght now, my anxiety level is at red alert levels and I am not even there yet.

I am going to have to do that thing us depressives tend to do and cancel at the last minute. I have always taken solace in the fact that at least I didn’t do THAT.

Strike that one off the list, I guess.

This is one of those moments I have quite frequently whether I can’t tell whether what I am doing is good because it means I am taking care of myself by setting boundaries and giving myself permission to not be “okay”, or whether I am letting the mental illness “win” and thus doing great harm to myself.

Well I can only do what I can and make the decision that seems best at the time, and right now that feels like not going.

I will bank mental resources for trying again Friday night. Generally, we hang out Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday nights.

Tuesday and Friday, we’d go to Felicity’s parents’ place, and Sunday we would come back here to the apartment.

And I know I should miss all that. And part of me does, but it’s not the part of me that is in charge right now.

Right now, it’s the sick part of me in charge, and it says don’t go.

So I will not go.

But the fight against my insanity is not over.

Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards.

Sometimes you have to give up what you have to get what you want.

Sometimes you just have to put everything in reverse so you can back out of a dead end street and find a better path.

Some fights you just can’t win.

I will talk to youi nice people again tomorrow. ‘

Feeling virtuous at the moment because not only did I finally get around to making an appointment for a pill refill with Doctor Chao and not only did I go to said appointment today, afterwards I walked the five blocks to my pharmacy, handed them my prescriptions, then went next door to get my lab work done.

Ta da! For a healthy person, that’s just an afternoon of errands.

For me, that is a triumph of self-care.

The walk was kind of rough, and that made me sad. It’s not that long a walk even by my usual fat dude standards, but between being overweight, old, and so sedentary that there are people in iron lungs who get more exercise, my body can’t cut it any more.

Especially my poor feet. They are always the first thing to go. I don’t think I had gone a full block before they were all swollen and sore and bitching up a storm.

If I could somehow bypass that problem, I would be a hell of a lot more likely to walk for exercise. But give that problem, well, you can see why I prefer lifting weights.

Not that I do that either. Because the gym in this building suuuuucks and because I am too in the grips of social anxiety to go use the few machines they have.

Plus I don’t have proper exercise clothing, but that never stopped me before. I’d work out in a tuxedo if the mood struck me.

Oh, and speaking of my being overweight, I am less so than before. Once more, when the doctor weighed me, it turned out I had lost weight.

The last time he weighed me, I weighed 314 pounds. That was last June.

Today, I weighed in at 299.5, meaning I lost 14.5 pounds over ten months.

That is a nice, healthy, steady rate of weight loss. I am still, of course,. far above my ideal weight, but it’s still very nice to know that my fatness is disappearing.

Imagine if I actually, like, did stuff about it.

That’s not fair, really. I do things about out : I take my meds and avoid sugary things. But I don’t actively pursue weight loss. I don’t actively pursue much, to be honest.

I just kind of drift along that long dark silent canal that is my life.

One bit of bad news today : I asked my pharmacist about the OneTouch Freestyle Libre, otherwise known as “the blood sugar monitoring system that doesn’t me to stab myself in the fingertips, which happen to have the densest nerve clusters on the human body”.

With the possible exception of the clitoris.

I told him I was thinking of buying myself one, and in response he showed me how much the little sensor discs that they require cost, and it was $120!

And they only last two weeks. So even if I sprung for the base unit, I sure as fuck couldn’t afford to spend $240/month on the little discs.

And the province doesn’t pay for them yet. Of course.

Clearly, the rat bastard sons of bitches in charge of the company are juicing people for as much as they can get from them and are definitely not eager to change their business model away from the highly lucrative “sell them the thing then sell them the thing needs” business model.

As far as I can tell, there is no reason for the discs to be disposable. Granted, they are supposed to sit on your skin for two weeks, beaming glucose readings to the base unit the whole time, but that just means they need to be rechargeable.

And cleanable, of course. Otherwise eww.

But no matter what is inside the things, there is no way that price is justified by anything other than sheer greed. I can only imagine the porcine capitalists behind the company jizzing and whizzing all over themselves with in an orgy of greed and avarice when they were presented with such a boner blasting opportunity to clip sick people for all they are worth and then some.

I don’t like people like that.

Presumably they are of the same ilk as the scumbags currently murdering Americans by vastly overcharging them for their insulin.

No wonder the kids today are embracing socialism.

Anyhow…. dragging myself back to the freaking point. I will not be spending my money on one of those systems any time soon.

And that means I will not be monitoring my glucose any time soon either. Which means my diabetes will not be treated in the most effective way we know of.

And so I will die inside some more.

So that was pretty frigging depressing.

I thought the discs were more like $50 each. I could manage $100/month for discs. It would be a struggle but I could do it.

But not $240/month. That is sheer madness.

Let’s see. The trip to the lab was routine and unventful. I gave them some of my pee and they took some of my blood.

Well life is all about the give and take.

Oh, that’s right : I have this nasty lump on my right arm and the doctor says it’s some kind of skin infection. I have another similar bump on the left side of my left leg, but that one is not nearly as infected, or as my doc adorably put it, it’s not as “angry”.

So now I am on antibiotics for a week. No big. Modern antibiotics are so much better than the old school ones I grew up with.

Most of the modern ones don’t even have significant side effects. I remember when antibiotics would wipe out all your energy like you had mono.

I always wondered if doctors secretly liked that because it made sure the patient would get the bed rest (or couch rest, or floor rest… ) they had ordered.

I’m looking at you, MEN.

I guess that’s it for my exciting journey into actually doing stuff.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Man I feel like crap today.

Anyhow. Today’s oft-chewed bone to gnaw upon is my intensely lonely childhood.

It was just so wrong. That’s the thought I can’t seem to get past. By all objective and rational scientific measures, my friendless, isolated, terrified, bored, and above all lonely childhood was extremely unhealthy and no child should go through that.

Perhaps I can’t get past that thought because, on some level, I am still mourning it. Now that I can see my childhood from enough distance that I can tolerate interacting with all those painful memories – and worse, all that intense emotional coldness – that I can grieve for myself and all that should have been there and wasn’t.

It definitely feels like grief. A great and terrible sadness and a feeling of something being terribly wrong because something is missing. Something vitall. something needed, something very very important.

The only difference between it and the usual kind of grief, besides it being the mourning of a childhood and not a person, is that I’m not missing something or someone I once had. And that makes things a little more complicated.

And that’s why it took me so long to be able to do it, methinks. I had to wrap my brain around the idea of my childhood as not merely tragic or sad but wrong, and then work from there to the idea of mourning it.

And that’ kind of mourning is not the sort of thing at which I excel. In fact, it’s the exact kind of deep emotional skill I lack due to the exact lack of socialization we’re talking about in today’s blog entry.

Like how I came around full circle on that?

Anyhow, I am too mentally drained to really drive this concept home so I’mma gonna have to change frequencies on y’all.

---

I am so fried because for some reason, I slept very poorly last night.

And not in the usual way, where I wake up sweaty and dizzy from oxygen deprival and stumble around in a thick fog for a while.

No, this was that frustratingly hard to convey kind of sleep where it’s like I never truly fell one hundred percept asleep.

I suppose “shallow sleep” gets the basic idea across. Shallow, broken sleep. Almost like the body slept but the brain didn’t. Not really.

And so when I am trying to concentrate on blogging away for all you lovely lovely people, my mind keeps drifting away from the task and I keep having to forcibly yank myself back to the here and now and try topick up where I left off.

And that is like, super frustrating and irritating. Normally, my mind wanders some while I am blogging but only in ways that are related to the task at hand. Exploring ideas, pondering how to phrase things, processing emotions and memories in order to be able to express them in words, that kind of thing.

This drifting, on the other hand. is injurious to the process and makes me feel foolish.

Luckily, it only happens when I am sleep deprived, and I am gonna go fix that right now.

---

The Pragmatist and the Poet

One of the paired attributes – I won’t say conflicts – in my personality lies upon the axis between my being a tough minded, hard-nosed, even ruthless pragmatists while also, at the same time, being a total moonbeam of a mystic poet philosopher.

Traditionally, these are seen as opposite by our beknightedly zero-sum dualism obsessed culture. But to me, they are one and the same thing.

Because I am a deeply humanistic idealist with a lot of deep, complex feelings about matters emotional and moral,. I am an extremely demanding pragmatist.

My high ideals demand no less. To me, it is unthinkable to profess an ideal but be unwilling or unable to deal with the harsh realities of the world in order to advance dsaid ideal. Because I see the potential for the advancement of human harmony, happiness, and health in a saner, smarter, and safer world, I have to be willing to do whatever it takes in order to see that potential realizes, and to hell with whatever tender feelings in myself or others that violates.

Because it’s not about me. It’s about the common good and if advancing the common good requires that I do things I find distasteful, unpleasant, or painful, that doesn’t matter to me. I seriously don’t fucking care.

Because to fail to do what I can to make things better because of my own personal sensitivities is unthinkable to me. If I was to fail to advance the common good because of such things, to me it would mean that my ideals mean absolutely nothing.

It all comes down to two things : priorities, and sacrifice. If you have the right priorities then you know what you need to do and are willing to accept that you will have to make personal sacrifices in order to get things done.

I think people these days have lowered the bar for personal sacrifice so low that people feel like they are sacrificing for a cause by clicking on a link.

And as long as that’s all you are willing to do, the bastards win. All they have to do is make sure real change can only come from real effort and the sheep will herd themselves while the shepherds laugh like demons at how easy it is to keep their corrupt grip on power.

As long as everyone stays lazy and continues to consider every single heartbeat of their private time as precious beyond all ,measure, the people can occupy, protest. petition, and scream all they want and the bastards don’t care because they know absoluitely nothing will come of it.

If world peace only took half an hour a weekend, people wouldn’t bother. They would say to each other, “Yeah, but then I would have to drive there, and find parking, and then find the place to do it, and by then it’s this whole thing. ”

And then they would go back to bitterly complaining about Trump while also reassuring themselves that there would be no point in trying to change anything because “what can one person do to fix such huge problems?”.

You can do exactly one person’s work towards fixing the problems.

The real question is why that isn’t enough for you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ordered Indian from a new place.

Turns out their prices are pretty good. So good, in fact, that my usual order at a street-level Indian place, a chicken sharwarma platter plus two samosas, was only $11.

Now the whole reason I tried this place is that they have the whole “delivery is free if you order $20 or more of food” deal of which I am so fond.

But I only had $11 worth of stuff. And that, to me, was definitely a meal’s worth of food. So I shrugged and decided I would pay for delivery this once.

So I clicked the “order” button.

And one second later, it occurred to me that I could have ordered more than one meal’s worth of food.

I mean, duh.

But there does not seem to be any way to cancel your order once it’s out there on Skip the Dishes, so I have to live with my mistake.

I have to sit here and eat the meal that was perfectly fine for me before I thought of the mutli meal thing, irrationally feeling like I got ripped off.

Talk about eating your words!

---

Pulling my little wagon

An image occurred to me a little while ago that I think might help in my adjustment to the new reality of my oratory gifts.

The image was of me as being someone who gathers people together in an old fashioned wagon then pulls said wagon. like a tug pulling a cruise ship, to where he thinks people need to go.

I think by putting it in such sweetly corny imagery, my mind is helping me deal with the enormity of my potential future responsibility.

It’s way less scary than imagining myself as a shepherd with a big flock. I know that logically,. one would think there was not a big difference between the two.

Either way I am leading a big group, after all.

But the wagon image is way less scary to me because in it, I am not solely responsible for the well being of my flock. I am not their paternal leader whose job it is to keep their whole society together with me at its head.

I’m just someone taking them to someplace I think they will like.

I’m not a shepherd. I’m a tour bus operator!

That would not, of course, be how things actually worked out. Human beings have a strong need for leadership, and the fact that modern democratic individualist societies make it socially impossible to ever actually admit you want to follow a leader only makes the matter worse by making it something you can’t think about rationally or see yourself as a part of, and the need grows unchecked in people.

So it all goes on subconsciously. Certain people intuitively know how to appeal to this leadership deficit in people and use that fact to manipulate and exploit people, and they get away with it precisely because in order to resist them, their victims would have to pass through the intellectual no man’s land that is the self-admission that they need a leader or some other trusted figure and that they, therefore, are not the ruggedly autonomous individuals society tells them they are.

Very long sentences!

That they are, in fact, a herd animal like any other and exist in a sea of influences and persuaders and other very much non-autonomous things which have a serious impact on their lives and the lives of everyone they know.

Ironically, it is those very herd instincts that make it so hard for us to admit things to themselves and thus become exploitable sheep, because in order to protect ourselves from the predatory leaders, we would have to go against the strong social programming that tells us that only weak, foolish, and stupid people fall for such things.

And we’re not any of those. Right?

Incidentally, this is also how con artists survive. Their greatest ally in their quest to bilk people is the fact that most people will be far too ashamed of their weakness in falling for the grift to ever tell the police, or anyone, really.

So the authorities never a chance to find the offender and the herd never gets alerted to the fact that there is a predator among them.

Now transfer that upward to politics and the trend becomes clear.

Right now, there’s something like a third of the American people who remain hardcore Trump supporters no matter how badly he abuses them and takes them for granted.

Why do they take this abuse? Because in order to fight back against it, they would have to admit to themselves and the world that Trump fooled them.

And he did a humiliatingly half-assed job of it, too.

And in a modern society, the only thing worse than getting fooled is admitting to the world that you could be fooled.

In the deep structure of the zeitgeist of a modern democracy, being that “weak” would make you a terrible citizen and a betrayer of the common good.

It’s like being the person who got fooled into opening the gates for the barbarian hordes. Or the sheep that leads the wolf back back to the herd.

It’s not a crime in the sense that it is an aggression against another individual. In a way it’s far worse. We have a certain degree of respect for criminals.

But the “weak sister” does just as much harm if not more, and does so out of weakness. That makes them both “weak” and therefore unworthy of any respect at all AND someone who has seriously trangressed against their society.

There is no limit to how much someone like that can be hated.

So they will support Trump to the bitter end, when it literally becomes impossible to support him any more because he’s not around to support. He’s out of power and out of public life entirelty and living out the rest of his days in Nixon-like obscurity.

And maybe then, once things have cooled off enough, some of them will admit that they never really supported Trump at all.

Hey it happened with Mulroney.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup, still talking about my public speaking superpower.

At this point, I have to ask myself if I am finally losing my grip on reality. And not just because the claims I am making about myself seem outlandish in the extreme.

But because delusions of grandeur scratching away at my sanity and trying to get out since I was a teenager. It’s something I have to deal with often. There is a part of me that wants to remove all restraint and let my ego soar off into the sky, clutching the last remaining fragments of my sanity in its bony claws.

It’s gotten better as I have gotten better. It’s no longer quite the desperate struggle it used to me. It used to feel like that great eagle of total lunacy was trying to tear me away from reality and I had to cling to the ground as hard as I possibly could or it would fly me and my sanity to Mount Doom and drop us in.

That’s the kind of quality imagery you get here on whatever this is.

Now, the eagle and I have a better relationship. Now and then, when I am pondering my low self esteem and trying to imagine things being different, the eagle will show up, eye me wearily, and say “you remember that thing where I try to tear you away from reality and take you to the opposite extreme of low self worth?”.

And, guardedly, I say, “Yeah. I do. ”

The eagle nods. “I could still do that, you know. ”

“Uh huh. ” I reply. “I believe you. ”

Then it looks at me for a few seconds, then shrugs and says “Cool. ” then leaves.

Honestly, I don’t know where I’d be without my imaginary talking bird to keep me sane.

Anyhow, the point is that my worries that I am finally losing my grip and letting my nascent messiah complex and megalomania and delusions of grandeur run the asylum are not unfounded.

But I keep going over and over it in my mind and all the evidence suggests that I do have some kind of extraordinary rapport with audiences.

The things that have happened to me that prove this just plain don’t happen to most people. People don’t get standing ovations after improvising an RPG session very often. It’s not the kind of thing that happens.

And yet, it happened to me.

So I can’t talk myself out of thinking I have this gift.

And just think, those things happened when I didn’t even know I had the gift. They just flowed naturally from me.

Imagine what I could do if I was using this ability actively, and attempting to control it for maximum effect. Heck, imagine what I could do once I had practiced it for a while.

Suddenly I feel like a new student at Xavier’s School For Gifted Students.

Xavier : We can teach you to control your gifts, and strengthen them, and use them to help people in need.

And now I will use my mutant powers to burn a thick black line through time itself!

---

Ah, and here we are again. So glad you made it through the transition.

Not everyone does, you know. But those that don’t disappear from time forever, so it kind of takes care of its.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, my mutant superpowers.

It seems odd to me that I might have an ability far more powerful than my high IQ. I have thought of myself as a genius looking for an outlet for so long. I have identified with this bigass brain of mine for so long that I often forget that I can contribute to the world. Or worse, that there’s anything else in me at all.

After all, I have evidence for the big IQ. Loads of it, in the form of high grades acheived with very little effort on my part.

The rest is less…. quantifiable/.

But of course, there is so much more of me than this supercomputer in my head. I am, after all, as full and real and valid and important human being as any else. Not even the frigid wastelands of my icy kingdom of intellect can change the fact that I am as human as anyone in the world, no matter how unreal I feel sometimes.

Reality is such a commitment.

I have spent so much time hiding from the world in my icy palace far up the mountain from anything even remotely resembling civilization. I have used the numbing effects of the cold to treat my pain and my fear. I have calmed my seething social wounds by reassuring myself that nothing living could survive here and therefore I am safely alone from all who would judge or hurt or misconstrue me.

Nothing could survive this cold. Except….. me?

The Blood Weasel never ever wants to be touched again. It only can relax – and then only a little – if it is sure it is completely alone. Nobody is allowed to come anywhere near it. That’s why it lives so far away from everything.

You know you have some serious issues when you need to be surrounded by hundreds of miles of taiga in all directions before you can feel safe.

Metaphorically speaking. Obviously.

I use the cold to treat my pain but it’s the cold that is killing me. I am covered in flesh pockmarked by frostbite and made wrinkled and ragged by the snow melting against my still warm flesh.

And it’s a hell of a thing to realize that the thing you want most of all – warm human connection with others – is also the thing you can tolerate the least.

It’s almost like those two things are related. People who can’t keep food down can get very, very hungry, I am told.

I refuse to believe that I cannot be resurrected, however. I am, this day,, far more alive than I was a year ago and the thawing and reviving will continute until one bright day I will realize that I am fully alive again.

On that day, I will walk in the sun once again.

That will be, for me, the first day of spring.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still trying to wrap my head around this potential public speaking superpower of mine.

That’s what it feels like. A superpower. Now that I have opened my eyes and my mind to the thing, I can’t consider it a mere talent or gift.

Those concepts just aren’t big enough to contain the power I can now see I have had all my life. This is not some mere knack .Those are consciously comprehensible aspects of a human mind. Extensions of a rational capacity.

And in general, they don’t pit people in an otherwordly state where they have little to no memory of what they did afterwards.

That’s like…. super freaky. Now that I am thinking about it.

Just yesterday, I watched an episode of Colbert where an actress talked about how she never watches her own work. And I have always understood that. Some of us are very sensitive to identity conflict and it can be very weird to be yourself and see yourself on the screen at the same time for people like that.

People like myself, for instance.

But now I am wondering if I feel that way because performing is such a weird alternate reality dream state for me that seeing it on a screen makes it all too damned real for me and I just can’t handle that.

I suppose that is sort of the same thing.

But I know I have been intensely uncomfortable watching my own videos of myself. IF there are others present the discomfort rises exponentially.

Hell, even just writing about it now, I feel that same discomfort.

I thought it was just shyness, but it might be something more.

Anyhow, the point is, I might have some kind of superpower. And not just any human-level superhuman ability, like being a natural athelete or having an intuitive grasp of mathematics that puts you light years ahead of everyone else.

No, this is the big one. This is the power that shapes nations and changes history. This is the charisma that great figures of history had. The ability to speak to a crowd of people in such a way that makes them connect with you and makes them open to changing their minds about things because of the sheer power of personality of the person doing the speaking.

Churchill. Ghandi. My man Martin Luther. Hitler, even. They all had this ability and they all changed the world with it.

That’s what this ability can do. Change the world.

And quite frankly, that scares the shit out of me.

Chills me to the core. Because with great power comes great responsibility (says the lifelong Spider-man fan) and I have done my best to avoid responsibility my whole life.

Like most creative types, I put a high value on my personal autonomy. Freedom of action is very important to me. I never want to be tied down to a situation that limits my options. I need lots of metaphorical space around me.

And responsibility is like, the opposite of that.

And yet, I am too responsible a person to ever take responsibility lightly. I can’t treat it all like a game. I am too aware of the reality and the stakes for that.

No, if I am reponsible for something. I take that responsibility seriously and do my utmost to fulfill said responsbility as thoroughly and competently as I can.

I can do no else. It’s how I am built.

So the idea of maybe having a potentially world-changing superpower scares several competing varieties of the bejesus out of me.

Because if I have it, then I have to use it. The state of the world today demands it. I have to try to help the best I can. No other option exists.

I’ve talked about that here before. Situations where non-intervention is just plain not an option for me. It doesn’t even feel like I am making a choice. If I am there and I can help, I have to do it.

And that remains true even though I know that I might just make things worse.

Well this whole ability to sway crowds thing is like the ultimate example of that. The world clearly needs someone to butt in to the conversation of politics and annihilate some of the terrible arguments terrible people used to justify their terribleness.

And to be honest, someone needs to lead a lot of people out of the trap that right wing politics has become for them. They have been led astray by shepherds with ill intent, and I am positive that if someone could simply reach them and show them that they can leave these shepherds behind without having to completely change who they are and what they believe, they would follow that person to the promised land and be eternally grateful for their exodus.

And I am pretty sure I could do that. Which means I should.

But I feel dwarfed by the sheer size of the undertaking. It is so large and I am so small.

I have to admit, I feel a little like a reluctant messiah at this point. This would be the point in the story when the saviour rails against their situation and asks the heavens, why me? Why have I been chosen for this journey? What did I do to deserve having this destiny hung around my neck? Why is it my job to save the world that has never been especially kind or loving to me?

And the answer is always the same : because you can.

Help if you can. It’s the most basic rule of human ethics. Do what you can to make things better for your fellow humans.

And I maybe can do a lot more than most people.

In a way, I would be glad to find out I did not, in fact, have this ability. It would take a huge load off my mind.

But I also would be severely and savagely disappointed.

Because who doesn’t want to save the world?

Me, maybe. But this isn’t about me.

It’s about realizing that the world needs someone like you to contribute what you can, and there’s really no other path you can take.

If there is a purpose to my life, this is it.

Now I just have to figure out how the hell to actually do it.

Tune in tomorrow for further details.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I screwed up today.

It goes like this : at around 1:30 pm, I got a call from my therapist asking if I had forgotten that my usual 12:45 pm appointment was Wednesday, aka today, this week and not the usual Thursday/

Obviously. the answer was yes. I had completely spaced on that highly salient fact. I remembered as recently as Sunday, but after that, completely forgot. Was not even on my radar whatsoever.

And as one might expect, I was acutely embarrassed. I apologized to the doctor and, sensing weakness, he got me to agree to come in fifteen minutes early next week.

I would have agreed to come in via a flock of tightly coordinated carrier pigeons at that moment. My face must have been bright red.

Now I bring this up not only to re-humiliate myself in the vain hope that I will learn something from this incident, but because it has direct bearing on something I wanted to talk about in this space anyhow.

Namely, executive function and the consequences of its impairment by depression.

I even posted to Facebook about it last night :

I just realized – pathfinding, aka finding your way from A to B, is an executive function skill.

In fact, it is the definition of an executive function skill. The definition of executive function is “the ability to concieve and execute a series of steps in order to achieve a goal. “

Sounds like pathfinding to me.

So those of us with our executive function impaired by mental illness naturally may have trouble finding our way around.

No wonder I get lost so much!

My facebook feed, last night

Pasting that in because not only is it directly relevant to the topic at hand, it saves me from having to define executive function again.

Depression severely interferes with and degrades executive function. My off the cuff theory as to why is that the mental numbing painkiller that the mind secretes an excess of due to unhealed mental trauma gums up the works all through the brain, it’s just most noticeable when it comes to the higher brain functions like executive function.

My person theories aside, the fact that depression messes with executive function is scientifically well established. And the theoretical definition of it is easy enough to grasp. We all perform executive function tasks every day.

Even something a simple as catching a bus or making a meal requires executing a series of steps to achieve a goal.

And those are the exact kinds of things someone with impaired executive function like myself finds most difficult. It’s not too bad when it is routine tasks because then the subroutine are already written, so to speak, and just need to be executed.

But novel situations are quite another kettle of fish. That is when I get overwhelmed so easily. Simple situations that normal folk wouldn’t even think of as a thing leave me flummoxed and flustered and totally confused.

It’s hard to convey just what that’s like. The best I can come up with is that it feels like something in my mind is overheating and breaking down. Like the wires in my head that control that kind of thing get overloaded and melt into useless goo.

And if, as is likely, I happen to also be having a panic attack at the time, then proper mentation stands no chance. Panic means adrenaline and the adrenalized mind tends to dump its contents frequently in order to leave as much space open for dealing with whatever the threat or danger is as possible.

Of course, in the modern world, it’s often something way less obvious than a flash flood or a hungry sabretoothed tiger.

So between panic and my usual mental haze, I don’t stand much of a chance of being able to sort things out by myself. The best that I can hope for is to find someplace quiet where I can relax and wait until I am calm enough to make sense of things.

Hence, like I said above, my tendency to get lost. I do my best to obtain as solid and foolproof a set of directions as possible to my destination before I set foot out the door. In this modern era, good directions are easily found.

With a bit of work, I could have directions all the way from here to Abu Dhabi and back within an hour.

But there is always some kind of hidden ambiguity that I am unable to resolve with my impaired executive function.

Is this the road I have written down here? Because it seems like it goes in the wrong direction entirely. So should I follow the instructions or my wonky sense of direction? Both seem equally likely to end with me lost and frustrated and panicking and hating myself for being such a goddamned boob that I don’t even know where I am any more, let alone how to get back on track to where I am going.

Oh, and I am now officially late for whatever I was trying to get to. Great, that will definitely help me calm down and think sensibly. Just think of how I will feel when I show up super late and it’s my own damn fault!

That would be about the time I get the urge to go home and forget the whole thing.

Home is good. Home is wonderful. In fact, home seems like heaven to me right now. I never get lost at home!

But of course, to do so would be extraordinarily irresponsible of me, and thus not an option. I would at the very least need to be able to contact the people who are waiting for me and tell them to go on without me.

And if I could do that, I could probably get someone to come pick me up.

And that is just one little slice of how hard it is to be me sometimes, and a glimpse into why I stay at home most of the time.

And I haven’t even touched on how asking for directions escalates the panic.

Sigh. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.