Total insomnia. Can’t even get within a nautical mile of sleep. Feel very wound up and tense and irritable.

Not a great start to my day. Not only am I frustrated by lack of sleep, I know that when this particular fit ends, I will be super sleepy and need to sleep a lot. 

And that’s a bitch because I have IV antibiotics in the afternoon and FRED tonight and then hanging out here after FRED with Le Gang and honestly, I am exhausted just thinking about all the spoons that will take.

There is no convenient long stretch of time for me to catch up on sleep, either.

I fear something’s gotta give.

And the only thing that could give is FRED and I really, really don’t want that to happen. I really want some social time,and I have been looking forward to this FRED for exactly that reason. I feel so cooped up!

Like some kind of….. chicken.

Also, logistically speaking, if I don’t go to FRED, I won’t get to do my usual Sunday shopping, and that will unleash a whole shitstorm of problems.

And yet, I don’t really feel up to doing FRED, either. I wish we could just do Denny’s like we did last Sunday. Just me and Le Gang and a relaxed and informal dining experience. That sounds real good right now.

FRED, on the other hand, involves a much higher level of both noise and social stimulation. It usually takes me a certain application of will to get me over the jitters before I go to FRED even when I am healthy.

I am not sure I have that torque to apply as I am right now, sick and tired.

Well there is no need to decide just yet. I will concentrate on making it through the whole IV antibiotics thing first and then see how I feel after.

Who knows, maybe I will get my second wind.

I hate all this bullshit. The daily trips to the hospital I can handle. It’s all quite routine to me now. Get my ‘big pink sheet (looks more liked purple to me) at Registration, put it in the designated tray at Treatment, wait for the nurse to come round and hook up my IV, then relax for a while.

Takes about half an hour for the drug to go in, then maybe ten minutes for the flush afterwards, then if there is nothing else I can go.

Speaking of the ol’ war wound, I took a look at it when I changed the dressing this morning (was Caesar, is now Ranch) and was quite pleased to see that a whole bunch more of it has gone white and translucent.

White and translucent means it is now dead tissue and will come off when the wound care nurse looks after it tomorrow.

And I am pretty sure that means the thing is healing up quite nicely. After all, if my leg is to go back to normal, that enormous whatever on my leg (abcess? tumour? flesh demon?) on my leg has to go, and how else would that happen except that the tissue of it would die and presumably slough off eventually?

So the good news is, I think I am on the mend. In my opinion, the infection is gone and the wound is drying up and blowing away.

And on that happy note – I will be back later, after the quite possibly no longer actually needed IV antibiotic treatment.

---

Back from the IV antibiotics. FRED is still seeming iffy. Right now I do not feel very good but that is probably due to the heat, so I am going to sit here, hydrate, and blog.

Ah, the eternal summer conflict : I want the fan on high to keep me cool, but I also want to listen to my music. And I don’t want to have to crank the volume of the music in order to hear it over the fan.

And really, it’s exceptionally cruel of the universe to make me choose between my music and heatstroke.

Which will he choose? The answer may surprise you.

I am starting to feel better. Maybe I will make FRED after all.

Either way, I am covered. I had the wisdom and forethought to ask Joe and Julian to take me to Price-mart on the way home so I could do my Sunday shopping before FRED. So that’s no longer a factor.

Oh, right. I better confess this now before it can lie in my head and fester any longer : last night I pulled a dumdum.

I forgot that I had paid for my Subway online, with the credit card, and paid the delivery guy for it as well.

Presumably he thought I was just a super generous tipper.

Which is slightly less than honest of him. I have made that mistake a couple times before and the driver was honest enough to tell me that I had already paid, and thus saved me from making a costly mistake.

Not this guy. Not that it is his responsibility to protect me from being a dumbass. It’s still my fault. And he came across as a total bro, so it’s possible that the sort of complex thought required to make that call is not his forte.

I can relate. It’s not really mine either.

As far as I cna tell, there is no way to get my money back. No way to even prove I gave it to him, for that matter. He could deny everything and I would be up shit crick.

So I will just chalk that up as a $17 lesson in paying attention and leave it at that.

I wish I could focus on the world as tightly and deeply as I focus on a video game or whatever I am writing. But I guess there’s internal deep focus, and there’;s environmental awareness, and the better you are at one, the worse you are at the other, like it’s some kind of spectrum.

That’s why what I really need is an assistant. One who’s everything I am not – highly focused, super competent, very organized, and above all, alert.

With someone like that, I could minimize the amount of stupid mistakes I make and concetrate entirely on pour my super concentrated mega awesomeness into the world.

Let it flow where it may!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wow. Ordered a nice fat footlong sub from Subway for tonight’s dinner and it says it will be here in 17 mins.

I am used to waiting around 45 minutes for my food, so that’s pretty frigging impressive.

We will see if they make it.

---

Fiiiiiinally got that frigging ultrasound today.

So that’s a load off my mind.

Got the call at 8:30 am. Thank goodness I happened to be awake. Normally I would be asleep at that time,

So,,, yay insomnia, I guess. I had a very hard time falling asleep, even after the phone call. I was feeling very agitated and tense for no readily discernable reason.

Could be that what I really needed was to ejaculate. Empty those big ol’ balls of mine. I have spent most of my adult life kind of ignoring whatever they had to say and as a result, I think I have blamed a lot of feeling ill on other things when it was just a case of the good ol’ blue balls.

I ignore my sexuality in general, to be honest. It is as childlike and underdeveloped as the rest of my instincts and drives. I know that on some level, I would love to have lots and lots of high quality gay buttsex , please, but like everything else that should make me want to do things, it goes nowhere.

And when I try to imagine it actually happening, that freaking-out feeling starts and I know damned well that even if the sexual opportunity of a lifetime fell into my lap, I would have to fight an incoming tide of deep, deep anxiety to take advantage of it.

It makes me wonder if sex is ever going to be a part of my life. Between my very deep seated issues with it and the level of performance suppression from my antidepressants, and my profound social damage, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where I would actually get it on and get off too.

Makes me kind of wish I could just skip the whole thing, to be honest.

Of course, it might be a different story if something appealing to either of my two illegal sexualities came along. That might be stimulating enough to blow that clog on my energies away and let me have a good time.

The illegality of them, though, presents some spectacularly difficult logistical issues not to mention a strong element of risk.

So (irony intended) I guess I am just plain screwed. At least until a more enlightene world that can tell the different between moral consent and legal consent comes along.

Like i have said many times before, it is a hell of a thing to be told by society that you should never, ever, ever get the kind of sex you really want, that if you ever did it would be a terrible crime, and that people like you should be locked up (or even killed in awful ways) for even wanting what you want.

Well I can’t stop wanting it. That’s hardwired. Human sexual imprinting is not, as far as science can tell, alterable in any way.

You get what you’ve got and that’s it. That’s your primary sexuality and absolutely everything else will always be an inferior substitute.

I have two. One is illegal. And the other is really, really, really illegal.

So illegal that it would be far too huge a risk for me to do anything to seek that kind of sex. So in that sense, the system works. I will not act on my impulses.

But I refuse to believe that getting that type of sex is inherently wrong. That’s just mindless taboo talking. I am positive that it is possible for all parties involved to thoroughly enjoy themselves and even grow emotionally closer through it.

But due to the extremely hostile social and legal climate, it would take meeting the exact right kind of people for me to ever get what I really want, and I haven’t the slightest idea how to find such persons.

Guess I will just have to never, ever, ever have what I want.

God, that’s depressing.

---

The ultrasound was painless, of course. Partly that’s because it’s so noninvasive, and partly it’s because my leg demon is not very sensitive to touch any more.

Not long ago, just having my pant leg rub against the dressing hurt like a son of a bitch. But that’s not true at all any more. In fact, I can poke the thing or squish it around a little and it doesn’t hurt. And it’s not red and inflamed at all any more.

This leads me to believe that the infection itself is dead and that further treatment is mostly a matter of wound management.

That’s not going to be easy. I won’t go into the (literally) gory details, but the centerpiece of the whole gruesome tableau is a cavity in my flesh about the size of your thumb.

It’s so freaky to even know that’s there.

I assume that, at the point in the infection before it self-perforated and began draining on its own, this cavity is where the fluid collected.

Thank goodness for that self-perforation then. Probably saved me far worse damage.

The ultrasound was super thorough. Ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would. But I was lying on my back and being touched by a cute Asian guy the whole time, so I didn’t mind too much.

And hey, if Doctor Kwok (around the Blok) wants a highly detailed and rich dataset from which to draw his conclusions, I am all for it.

I just wish I could have a copy of the file. I would love to have a highly detail 3D scan of the wound as a memento of this whole fiasco.

What can I say, I am a very strange man and I find information comforting.

One last thing – when I got to the ER for the day’s IV antibiotics, I realized I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was almost 3 pm.

I was too sick to eat before leaving for the hospital.

So I asked for something to eat, knowing that Richmond Hospital pretty much always has sandwiches and juice around for just such an occasion.

And yay me being assertive to get my needs met! *applause!*

And as a reward for that, what the nurse brought me ended up being exactly what I would have asked for if I had been asking : egg salad sandwich and apple juice.

That hit the spot perfectly and gave me what I needed to keep my blood sugar from taking a nosedive.

So that’s pretty much been my day. After that, Joe drove me home, and I’ve been my usual lump of a self ever since there.

At least I’m a cute lump.

So there’s that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.