Ah yes, this blessed and holy when we celebrate a term invented by retail workers to refer to the absolute worst day of their year by swarming to stores all over North America in a mindless consumer friendly and punch old ladies in the cunt in order to get a slightly cheaper big screen TV.

And that’s the true meaning of the season, Charlie Brown.

Myself, I will be looks for good deals on games I want but can’t usually afford. I almost picked up a game called Homeworld for a song because the reviews of it are amazing (93 percent on Metacritic) but then I read it was based around RTS (real time strategy) type gameplay and I don’t care for that.

I need time to think if I am to make strategic decisions. Otherwise I just panic.

Installed Fallout 3 recently, and today I finally got around to playing it. It’s the game that came before Fallout New Vegas, and Fallout New Vegas is largely built with all the same assets and same game engine, just new content.

Had a bear of a time getting it to fucking work, though. Apparently. there is enough of a gap between when Fallout 3 came out (October of 2008) that there are some fundamental incompatibilities between it and Windows 10, and I had to futz with it a lot in order to get around them.

More or less a process of looking up solutions online and trying them till one work.

Ended up watching this video of mindboggling fuckery.

Hard to imagine how things could go that bad that fast. Bethesda was once of the most respected names in gaming, and for good reason. Thye made big, beautiful, top-quality game that become mainstays of real gamer’s collection.

But apparently all the wrong people took over at some point and the company turned from elder statesmen of gaming to a non stop wretched farce of everything wrong with gaming today, and more besides.

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Well goddamned great greezly fuck, I am sick.

Woke up from a nap feeling pretty bad. Dizzy and disoriented far beyond my usual post sleep fog. And it doesn’t seemn to be going away, either.

So I am a tad worried. Even just sitting here typing, I feel dizzy, and ever little motion of my head clinging to the bow of the Titanic as it tilts and sinks.

Even just staying focused on the task of writing is proving quite difficult. My mind keeps reeling and swaying off in random directions and I then have to struggle to get back on course once I get my bearings once more.

I get the feeling that I might not be going out to eat with Le Gang tonight. Ibn fact, I get the feeling that I might be doing more more than lying in bad waiting fo the world to stop spinning and settles the fuck down.

I will try yo get my sinuses to drain and see if that helps.

Man does this suck.

More after the break.

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Got a bit more sleep, feel somewhat better. Still weirdly dizzy, but not quite as bad, and I cna think better. I think maybe what I really need is fresh air.

Or at least, that’s what I hope.

This is a pretty unpleasant state of existence. I feel like gravity can become malevolent and is determined to have me lying in bed and helpless to its power.

I’ve also been having trouble with temperature lately. Seems like there’s always parts of me that are too hot while other parts are too cold.

That suggests that I have an infection of some sort. Which would suck. And of course, this would have to happen on a Friday night, when my GP is off doing whatever and I would not even be able to make an appointment till Monday.

My limbs feel very heavy. So does my head. It’s hard to stay focused on the screen and the words are cominf very slow, with a lot of breaks where I space out for like fifteen seconds and to drag myself back to reality.

It’s like everything I do, I do fighting my way upstream, like a horny salmon.

All I really want to do so lay down and sleep some more. But not before I get some decent food into me.

Only a fool skips meals when they are sick. And my appetite is fine.

Honestly my only worry is whether I am too dizzy to make the food find my face

Well if I have troubles, I can always just lick it off the floor.

I’m going to try getting up and walking around for a bit, maybe crack a window for a few deep breaths of cold clean night air.

Wish me luck.

---

Dunno if that helped or not. Time will tell.

Turns out,. the window in my bathroom is already open a hearty crack. So there goes the theory that I was a victim of poor air circulation.

Guess I am just fucked up in the head. So what else is new.

Having a handful of munchables seems to be helping. So maybe it is, in part, a good sugar thing. I can accept that.

But I am pretty sure the main cause of it is my very stuffed up sinuses. I have been and will continue to try to get them to drain and maybe even give me a chance to breathe and relax and think clearly once again.

I think, when I am done blogging here, I will take a few more trips around the apartment then take my shower and get myself into some clean clothes,.

Maybe then, when I am feeling more human, I will be ready to hang out and EAT.

All I know is that it’s 9:30 pm, I haven’t eaten yet, I feel like I am underwater in a fish tank full of Vaseline, I’m still sleepy as fuck, and I want to go spend time with my friends.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No, that’s not it.

Close, but no.

There we go!

Had therapy today. Talked with my therapist about how I am trying to loosen up inside and let myself be more emotional, which I didn’t know was true until I said it.

It just works out that way sometimes, especially if you’re a writer. You process your emotions by writing about them that means that sometimes you do not know what is going on inside you until your write about it.

Hence, this blog. I write about my feelings and my depression as a way of processing things as I express them.

Often, I feel like I am pulling the top emotion off a stack of unexpressed emotions, like dealing cards, and I honestly have no idea what is coming next.

Might be more of the usual mustiness. Might be something totally unexpected that I did not know was even in there.

It’s actually pretty exciting.

I had the weirdest feeling earlier today. It was around 11 am, and I got this cold, despairing, sinking feeling like all hope had gone out of the world and all I wanted to do was go back to bed and stay there forever.

It was quite disturbing. I’ve been depressed in many ways over the years, but I have never felt something quite like that before.

It was probably a blood sugar crash of some sort. At least, that’s where my desires for an accurate answer and a non-scary one coincide.

I still need to order myself a new blood sugar meter. I broke down when it came time to pick one because there are so many out there and option paralysis is a thing.

Especially with me.

If I had a meter, I could actively manage my diabetes and be much, much, much healthier. Right now, I just take my pills and pray, which probably means my blood sugar is too high most of the time and that means my sludgy syrupy blood is currently damaging me all over but most especially my nervous system.

The clock is ticking on that. I know it. Right now, it;s confined to weird pains and twitches, but any moment now, I could end up in the hospital again, and this time for something even more serious than pneumonia.

The kind of serious which makes you unable to walk, or talk, or use the bathroom by yourself ever again.

And I try to focus on that thought in the hopes it leads to a constructive panic and sense of urgency, but the dead flesh of my soul refuses to respond.

And that’s probably what is going to kill me one of these days.

I think the real dark truth is that I can’t do this by myself and yet I don’t feel like I can reach out for the help I need either.

I am so scared of making myself that vulnerable to rejection. Anjd if I reached out for help and got rejected, that would just about kill me.

I’d rather risk physical death, I guess,

More after the break.

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You know, when I was a child, I thought Americans on TV were all wimps because they got all stressed out by “subzero temperatures”.

And I was like, big deal, it’s called winter. Obviously the temperatures are going to be below freezing. That’s why there’s all that white stuff on the ground!

Of course, the Americans on TV were talking about temperatures below zero FAHRENHEIT, and seeing as zero Fahrenheit is almost -18 Celsius, yeah, that’s pretty fucking cold all right.

But fair’s fair. A lot of Americans know as little about Celsius as I do about Fahrenheit, so they look at weather maps on TV and see that it’s 32 degrees in Detroit and zero degrees in Windsor, and think “wow, it really IS colder in Canada!”.

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Think that would work as a standup comedy piece? It’s funny, relatable, and keenly observational. So it works on paper, at least.

But I have misgivings. Something about it isn’t quite right. It could be stronger. Funnier.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it.

Which would be quite the thing, because it would mean that not only have I written down a joke on my computer for the first time since I started doing standup, but that I will also have worked on something after I completed it.

And patient readers know, I am Mister First Draft. I write it and fire it into the world and forget all about it.

In my defense, it’s always worked out fine for me. I have been submitting first drafts for grades for my whole academic life and I’ve always gotten great marks regardless.

That grinding sound you hear is countless keener high achiever types grinding their teeth at how unfair that is.

Well, talent isn’t fair. I didn’t do a thing to earn my gifts.

Deal with it.

Bringing it back to comedy, I am thinking it is time for me to start taking it more seriously. I have done three open mics now. I am not quite the fragile embryo I was when I first started. I have done it enough to know I like it and will keep doing it. And I really do want to improve.

So, it’s time to get more into it.

Which means writing down the jokes from my joke list. This serves two functions :

1. it saves them to my computer and/or the cloud so that if I lose the pieces of paper, I don’t lose the jokes, and…
2. once they are typed in, I can work on them as text instead of as thoughts in my head, and that will go a long way to making them better

And then the real jokesmithing can begin.

After all, I already know that I am a very talented comedy writer. It’s just a matter of adapting that skillset to writing jokes.

Plus I am also getting the urge to write longer things. Bits, not just jokes, and eventually maybe even whole routines.

No rush though. These things come in time.

And remember, sperm whales come in waves.

And wrestler come in small packages.

I slay me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s a big day for me because tonight, I will be doing my third standup performance at the Kingswood Pub’s open mic night.

And I haven’t written a single new joke. But that doesn’t matter.

Just to add extra challenge and making this a totally Hardcore Mode challenge, before the performance, I will be having dinner with Felicity’s uncle and his wife Valentina.

Two total strangers who are no doubt perfectly normal Canadians and thus are the kind of people I find really hard to relate to or connect with and therefore the meal should be replete with the exact kind of awkward failure to connect I dread the most.

But that doesn’t matter either. Sure, it pumps my social anxiety into the stratosphere, but you know what? Fuck it.

I’m not going to fight my fear.

And I’m not going to give in to it and chicken out of everything to stay home, either,.

Instead…. I’m going to ride that motherfucker.

Like the surfers used to (homo-erotically) say, if it swells, ride it. Surf the fear and use its energy to propel me forward. Ride that rocket as far as it will take me.

Maybe I will succeed beyond my wildest dreams. Maybe I will crash and burn. Maybe I will completely lose my freaking mind.

But whatever happens, I am not going to let fear get the better of me.

Fuck fear. Fuck limitations. Fuck anything that holds me back or drags me under.

Light the fuse on that sumbitch and let’s RIDE.

---

But before that, I got to get some sleep.

Decided to skip my sleeping pill. Ran out of mirtazapine so I have been taking zopiclone for sleep instead.

I have plenty of it hanging around.

But for what seemed like merely whimsical reasons this morning, I decided to skip the pill entirely and see what happens.

I didn’t sleep. That’s what happened. Duh.

Well, technically, I got around two hours of sleep, then woke up to go pee and found I was completely incapable of getting back to sleep.

So I got up and played FONV for like four hours. Then came lunch and blogging. When I am done blogging, I will definitely give going back to sleep a try.

If I find I still cannot sleep, I will take a zopiclone and try again. I am a little leery of taking the big Z pill at this point because I can’t always predict how long I will sleep as a result, and I have to get in the shower at like 5:45 so I don’t have a lot of time to sleep.

On the other hand, I want to get at least a little more sleep before my big evening. It would increase my stress level exponentially if I was trying to deal with all that while very very sleepy.

On the other hand, it might give me just the right manic edge to be truly, truly terrifying to the audience.

I can make that work for me. I think.

Time for a nap. I hope.

More after the break.

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Did the comedy thang for the third time, making it, I suppose, my Junior performance.

That’s how it goes, right? Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior? I don’t know. We didn’t have that kind of thing at UPEI.

Anyhow, my bit went reasonably well. Got kind of lost around halfway through, and hence lost the audience too. Fair enough. I’m new.

At least I have finally found something where I am neither spasmodically incompetent nor naturally so good at it that it’s not even a challenge.

It’s something I can work on, and I plan on doing do every single week. Like I said to Felicity’s Uncle Paul and Aunt Valentina (forgot to tell her how beautiful her name is), there’s two ways to get good at something : studying all about it, and doing it a lot, and I am very much in the second camp.

Hence my writing in this a-here blog every day. I’ve written millions of words into this thing and each one of them made me a better writer. By writing all those words, I exercised that special muscle that turns thoughts and images into sentence and paragraphs, and I benefit from that both in text and in speech.

Anyhow, I didn’t exactly blast them to the back wall with my personality like I planned. Something happens when I actually get up there that has a tendency to scramble my mind and make it hard to follow any plan.

I now know this and will be ready for it next time, and thus hopefully I will be ready to keep my mind from trying to go every direction at the same time and maybe actually put some energy into my performance.

Right now, it’s pretty “all over the place”.

Dinner with Paul and Valentina went fine. I was not all that anxious. Felicity did most of the talking, and I buried myself in my joke list and contributed now and then.

That kept me from getting too freaked out. Just little twinges of panic now and then, easily swept under the rug.

Was thrown a bit of a curveball when I had ordered the bangers and mash and then it turns out they were out of bangers.

So I switched to the house specialty burger, called the Wood Burger, which is very good but very large and I forgot that with that size of a burger, you basically have to eat it with a battle plan in mind, and so the thing ended up falling apart.

Oh well. Next time.

One of these times, I will go up there with gun blazing on my outsized personality and really take the Kingswood by storm.

It probably won’t be any time soon, though. I need to get more experience so that I can concentrate better when I am up there.

Right now, I am still getting used to it.

But little by little, I grow stronger.

One day I will be be stronger enough to leave the next and fly, fly away,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

… until morale improves.

God, do I feel like shit.

Dizzy, weak, disoriented, aching all over, head feels like it’s full of half set jello, headache, nausea, and that oh so charming feeling that I have been squished flat like a cartoon character who had a run in with a steamroller.

All that plus the general feeling of crappiness that comes from oxygen deprivation, and you get the warped hellscape that I call “sleep”.

My god, does it suck.

This is the sort of thing that makes me stop taking my sleeping pills. Not that it doesn’t happen without them – I won’t lie to myself about that. It happens without the sleeping pills too, they just make it worse somehow.

Maybe without them, I’m more awake to fight the symptoms. I dunno.

I’m pretty fucking sick of this bullshit, though. That I can tell you.

Maybe I should give the CPAP machine another try. It is not without its issues but at least when I am on it, I am getting enough oxygen for a while.

I could start off just wearing it while I am awake, to get used to the thing again. And if I happen to fall asleep while wearing it, so much the better.

The problem is that the thing is so alien and loud. Mkaes it hard to relax and get to sleep when all you can think about is Darth Vader.

Or is that Darth Vapor.

But I gotta get healthy. So many of my problems would disappear if I didn’t feel so lousy all of the time.

And it’s not like I don’t know how. Eat less crap, move more, get some vitamin supplements. It’s really not that complicated.

But as patient readers know, the problem is never truly not knowing what to do, I’m a very smart guy. I always know how to solve a problem.

What I don’t know is how to get pas all that sadness inside me that strips all the energy from me and makes me turn my head to the wall and say “No. ”

That sadness is a real motherfucker. It kills me inside, over and over. Against it I am completely helpless. I can no more override its dictates than I can overrule gravity and fly to the fucking moon.

And it is so very, very cold. The kind of col that destroys life. It is, in fact, the antithesis of life – stasis. The epitome of nullifcation. The summation of all “don’t”.

Yeah. The Edge gets it.

And the thing is, despite it all, I know that once I stop blogging, I will go back to sleep.; I don’t have a choice,. I need more sleep.

And knowing you have no choice but to do something that you know will end up making you feel worse is not a good feeling at all.

I’d rather stay awake, play some FONV, maybe masturbate. But no.

I will instead spend that time going through hell in my sleep.

Oh what fun,.

More after the break,

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Take a deep breath….

….and shout it out loud!

I’m feeling very full of id at the moment. I feel feisty, and scrappy, and spoiling for a fight,

Were I a working class tough from a tough neighborhood, the kind that’s angry and defiant and up to no good, this is when I would go out looking for a fight at the half lit arse end of a Tuesday night.

Stop me before I rhyme again.

Tomorrow night is another night when I will be doing standup comedy at the Kingwood pub, and I have decided that this time, I am going to concentrate on my performance rather than worry about writing jokes.

Specifically, I am going to concentrate on putting the force of my personality behind my material. I have the sort of personality that can really project, and that can be one hell of an asset for a comedian.

But first I have to learn to use it. And that starts with my doing my best to get up there and turn that fucker up to 11 and see how it goes.

And that is not without its risks. In your face charm and outright rage are very close together on the ol’ personal expression dial and I have to make sure that I maintain the energy without it spilling over into anger or anxiety.

Or both. That’s a gruesome thought. If I ended up channeling an anxiety attack into rage, God knows what the fuck I might up saying.

But I won’t let that stop me. I’d rather be hated than ignored. Of course, best of all would be to have people love me, but there are situations where I might settle for merely making sure they leave with a strong impression of me.

I could make myself into one of the most hated people on Earth without much effort. All I would have to do is let my demons off the leash for once in a public enough forum and I guarantee you everyone will soon know my name.

All the better to curse me with.

And believe me, it is tempting. I have wanted to be notorious since the moment I learned what the word meant. I could have enormous fun playing the dark trickster who challenges people’s assumptions and forces them to think about what they believe and why, even though he know they will never thank him for it.

Remember, the truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off.

But I know I won’t always feel like this, and that most of the time I take great pleasure in being really nice to people, and that public villainy would lose its appeal pretty fast.

It’s not the world’s fault that I have such a massive buildup of unexpressed id. That part of me wants to set the world on fire just to prove that I’m alive and force people to deal with me for once.

I keep talking like people ignore me, but the truth is, I hide.

Can’t fault people for not going out of their way to find someone they do not even know exists in the first place.

So it’s all up to me. I must learn to be seen. I must learn to decloak.

And then I have to deal with what that means.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Spent most of today asleep. Which I hate. As you know.

It always makes me feel like my life is being stolen away. I don’t want to sleep all the goddamned time. I want to live, and play, and enjoy myself.

Just like I am enjoying these turkey stuffing flavored chips. Yum. They have that savoury flavour that makes Stove Top Stuffing so addictive.

There’s a certain richness missing, but I assume that’s because it does not contain any actual turkey drippings.

Anyhow, my point is, I am once more pissed off at being asleep for most of the day. Patient readers know I have been to this place many, many times before, and so they know what I am going to say next too :

I wish I could just be philosophical and Zen about the whole thing. Just relax into it and treat it as a little tread – an island of relaxation and tranquility amidst my usual turmoil.

But seriously – fuck that. I’m too alive for that bullshit. I want to fight and struggle and strain, not lay down and play dead.

Al’s got my back on this.

And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. As much as I value harmony and calm, the truth is that I am an ornery, feisty, fire-spitting kind of guy deep down.

And if I ever hope to actually be calm and strong and all those other things, it will be because I have harnessed that part of me instead of just blanket suppressing it because it doesn’t fit some bullshit inner image of myself.

One of my biggest challenges is to dream up a better inner image of myself – one that includes all of me, in all my many dimensions, and excludes nothing.

Everything in me is me, including things I would rather not own like all my rage and bitterness and neediness, and until I can view it all as a single version of myself, I will continue to suffer from all that raging inner turmoil.

As it stands, I find it impossible to imagine all of myself at once. I am so used to presenting selected parts of myself to the world that I have come to see myself that way as well. And I honestly don’t know how else to see myself.

Hell, I have taken parts of myself and turned them into a whole different persona – a cute little fluffy foxy named Fruvous – and come to see him as an idealized version of myself, as opposed to being, ya know, me.

It occurs to me that it is time for all my shadows to come together as one. For all these versions of myself to merge into a single solid entity of extraordinary depth and dimension who can then walk forth upon this world as the real me.

It’s an awe-inspiring and terrifying thought. I am actually afraid of this new, integrated version of myself. He seems like a powerful being indeed.

But I know he’s the next step. No more fucking around with shades of myself. Time to bring it all together into one fully integrated monolithic self.

I hope he’s nice.

---

I’ve slept some more. Still pretty tired.

And so it goes.

This idea of many shadows merging into one has really caught my imagination. I imagine some denizen of the night noticing that his back-alley universe seems to have a lot of people who despite their pitch black outer clothing do not seem to belong there, and he gets curious and follows one.

Through twists and turns that would make the Minotaur dizzy, his awkward, hurried prey navigates with unerring accuracy and flawless purpose.

This man, thinks our narrator, is moving through the most dangerous neighborhood in a city of millions, past places where murder is a leisure activity, and directly through territories of a thousand varieties of human predator, and he might as well be hurrying home to fuck the wife after church.

Eventually, it dawns on our increasingly incredulous pursuer that there are many others just like his quarry scurrying toward the same destination.

Finally they arrive and disappear down a cunningly hidden hole in the back of a side alley so thin you could pass it a thousand times and never know it was there.

Our observer pauses to curse the gods for making him such a fool before plunging in after his quarry.

More twists and turns, but this time underground, in halls made of nothing more than packed earth, with the occasional crucified skeleton wreathed in rotting leaves and with a single tooth… the right upper incisor… removed.

After an interminable time following these, our hero emerges into a rough hewn auditorium filled with ancient clay loggia. At the base, instead of a lectern, there is an enormous roaring bonfire, and the loggia are filled with black-cloaked figures just like his prey, all of whom are shouting and roaring as one of them approaches the fire.

The figure at the fire turns to face the crowd, waits for them to fall silent, then screams “Ut in æternum vive: non necesse est mori!” then leaps headfirst into the fire and is instantly and completely consumed.

The crowd roars with lusty approval, and our observer is horrified to see that, one by one, all present willingly and eagerly, and with a sense of relief, meet the same fate.

And as they feed the fire, a great shadow forms from the smoke and slowly takes the shape of an enormous black cloaked figure just like

Finally, all are gone except for our hero’s prey and himself.

The prey pulls back his good, and our hero is startled to see the face of his councilwoman, a rich and well loved woman of great statute and grace.

She smiles at him like a proud mother, and says “And you, my child, are to be last. You are the New Blood, and by your power we shall be reborn in Him. ”

She gestures to the shadow, which is now so thick and dark as to almost seem solid.

“But I don’t want…. ” begins our hero.

The councilwoman quiet him with a finger pressed to her lips. “Hush, child. That is nothing but your shadow speaking. It is time to cast aside the illusions and be reborn in Him. Look into the fire, my child. It will tell you what you must do. ”

And with a laugh, she leaps into the flames, and disappears like the others.

And for a time, our hero merely stares into the flames. As he does so, he feels something inside him die and slip away. Part of him remembers that what died in him seemed very important very recently. But now it means nothing to him.

And once it is gone, he can see that the fire is not a fire. It’s a brilliant golden radiance, warm and splendid and inviting, and inside it there are thousands of souls just like his own, once cold and alone but now joined in harmony.

And all he has to do to join them is to… let go.

So he does.

And once he too is consumed, the great shadow stands, and from within its inky blackness bursts a golden, heavenly light,

“WHAT WAS LEGION NOW IS ONE IN ME!” it intoned in a voice that people miles away could feel in the soles of their feet.

And nothing was ever the same again.

I will talk to tyou nice people again tomorrow.

Well phooey. Seems like I am getting sicker.

Right now, I feel pretty wretched. Not full on misery, but I am miserable enough that it meakes it hard to do my usual things.

Specifically, I seem toi have a cold or similar. I am sneezing, I have a tunny nose, and my palate is itchy.

Normally, all of these can be attributed to my hayfever\allergies or whatever. But I have my antihistamines in me yet the symptoms persist.

Plus there’s that overall “oogy” feeling that comes with having an infection, and a burning sensation in my middle earts that has me worried about ear infections.

And I am still sore from inside my ears all the down my throat.

I am not having a great day, is what I am saying.

I am definitely feeling stupid. And contagious. So I won’t be going to Felicity’s place after Denny’s tonight and that sucks.

Not as bad as infecting her elderly parents would be But still sucky.

This is the sort of day for hibernating, preferably with soup. Sadly, I have no soup. Maybe I will get some when I do my shopping tonight.

I could use something both nourishing and soothing like soup, or stew, or perhaps a zesty ragout would hit the spot.

The words, they are not coming easy, All the fluid in my skull sloshes around with the slightest of head movements, and that is making it hard to focus enough to write.

Feels like I am trying to hit a moving target with my words, to be honest.

It’s kind of like being drunk. My head spinning and lurching. No doubt I would be quite the sight if I had to do something hard like cross a street or have a complex conversation or thread my way through traffic or somesuch.

Right now, all I want to do is lay down until the world stops spinning. Ideally, this would also involve some form of sleep as I am quite tired and need downtime.

I hate being like this. All mussed up and messed up and massed up and missed up and…. mossed up, I guess.

And myssed up, but only sometimes.

The itchy palate thing has me weirded out. Normally, I only get that in the middle of an allergy attack. But I definitely took my antihistamine not ten minutes ago, soi you would think it could not be an allergic reaction.

It’s possible that it’s just a really bad allergen day. Some plant is in blood and ejaculating its pollen into the air with herbivorous abandon and it’s more than mere mortal antihistamines can handle.

All I know is that I am sick and it sucks. I wish I could just curl up in a ball and hibernate.

Damn I need to get me some Alleve. An analgesic would do wonders for me at the moment. My head is pounding and I feel dizzy and nauseous and shaky.

Screw this. I will be back after the break.

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Suspension of Animation

Holy batshit, Fatman! For your science fiction becomes reality file, I hereby present : suspended animation is now a thing!

Scientists at the University of Maryland successfully placed a human volunteer into a state of suspended animation for two hours. They did it by replacing the body fluid with a particular saline solution.

Thus, cellular rupture is prevented because the saline keeps ice crystals from forming when they cool down the tissues.

We’ve known how to use cold to suspend animation since the days of Freud. It’s having them not turned into freezerburned mush in the process that’s been the tricky bit.

I have to admit, I am just the tiniest bit disappointed that the solution (so to speak) turned out to be boring old saline.

I always assumed it would turn out to be something exotic like nanoparticles of carbon or some strange fungus from deep in the Amazon that would do it.

Oh well, it’s tremendously exciting nevertheless.

Of course, the article talks about the direct medical application : giving medical professionals more time in which to do what they need to save a life.

That’s an extremely good application and certainly well worth the investment of research funds as well as the risk to the reputations and careers of all involved.

They might not have been able to bring the person back, after all, which by anyone’s measure would make the experiment a failure and by some people’s narrow minded definitions would make everyone directly involved murderers.

But you see, I am neither a scientist nor a journalist, so I don’t have to limit myself to well founded theories supported by all the pertinent facts.

I am a science fiction writer, and that means that wildly theorizing about applications for this breakthrough is not merely allowed but mandatory.

And what’s more, I’ll enjoy it.

So here goes :the article makes is clear that there is no known time limit to this process. That means that it is at least possible that people could be suspended for an indefinite length of time.

And suddenly, cryogenics is a reality. You could have yourself frozen until there’s a cure for whatever ails you, or even just do it as a way to time travel into the future.

Might become all the rage, for a while at least.

And of course, like it says in the article. that could open the door for space flight. It would be far, far easier to get a crew of humans to Mars and back if during most of the trip, the crew’s metabolic demands were almost nil.

But even more exciting is that we could see a future with almost no death. People wouldn’t die, they would simply go into suspension for however long it took to fix them, even if it took years.

The only people who will die will be those whose death is too sudden or remote for them to be put into suspension in time.

Imagine a future where even the old do not die. They just go into suspension until they can be rejuvenated, young and energetic once more.

This discovery might just be the key to a whole new era, folks.

You heard it here first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I have been to the ER and back, and the skinny is that they found nothing wrong.

The fat is that my lungs are clear and my blood oxygen is normal and I don’t have a fever, and those were the three metrics I was concerned with, so everything is cool when it comes to the serious problems like the pneumonia I thought I had.

I still have a heavy feeling in my chest and my breathing is somewhat constricted. I have a sore scratchy dry throat (which is probably why my breathing is tricky) and the pain in the throat goes all the way up into my ears via my Eustachian tubes.

That last bit has my worried that this will turn into a sinus infection, or an inner ear infection, or some other ailment of the otolaryngological area.

But the main thing is that I did not end up admitted to the hospital and that is a relief.

And also sort of a disappointment. Part of me, I suppose, was looking forward to a bit of an adventure. Something to take me out of my ordinary life for a while. Something that gave me challenges to overcome, things to endure, issues to face.

So clearly I am looking for change in my life. I am just not ready to provide it for myself.

And sad as it is, I think some part of me was looking forward to having people nurture and look after me for a while, even if it was in a clinical environment.

I have a massive unmet need for nurturing that I have no idea what to do with. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing one can solve as an adult middle aged male.

Especially one of elephantine proportions.

I’ve mentioned getting rich enough to have staff before. That’s the solution that always springs to mind when I try to imagine a solution to this.

But logistical and practical issues (like “how would I do that?”) aside, I am not sure that would solve the problem. Deep down I would know that however nice people were to me, they would be doing it because I was paying them, not because they truly love and care about me, and so it wouldn’t really fit the bill.

I suppose I could look for a “daddy” in the gay scene. I have unresolved daddy issues as well. They stem from a lack of an acceptable father figure in my childhood.

My father was unacceptable for many reasons and hence could not provide what I needed in terms of firm guidance and encouragement to take risks.

My mother wasn’t that great at her role either, come to think of it.

This sort of thing is why I hate it when people say that it is never too late to have a happy childhood. Bullshit it ain’t.

Happy childhoods come from good parenting, and if you’re a big huge guy in his forties, that ship sailed a long long time ago.

The only alternative is to parent oneself, but I can’t. The very weakness and helplessness I am trying to treat prevents it.

So I’m fucked. Ain’t that a fine how’d you do.

More after the break.

---

Life has really been cruel to me, ya know?

Starting with the big one : me being raped by a stranger when I was only four years old. That did immeasurable damage to my poor little redheaded self. I retreated into my own little world in order to escape the truth, as so many other victims of sexual assault do, and that crippled me for life.

Locked away a lot of my potential and my strength as well. There is a reason I have been this weak for this long. Why I have always had this paradoxical combination of great intellect and talent with strange weaknesses and incapacity.

I really am, in many ways, a big brain in a diaper. Overdeveloped mind, underdeveloped soul (or spirit or will or whatever).

Moving on. The thing about being an emotional cripple as a child is that it invites the world to damage you even more.

People just love piling on, I guess.

In my case, my intellect (and attitude) caused me to skip kindergarten, thus setting me up to be way behind my peers socially when I went to school for grade 1.

But even that might not have been so bad if my emotionally crippled state had not kept me from being able to defend myself from my bullies.

Looking back, it’s so clear to me that I have had this sort of emotional semi-paralysis ever since I was raped. Something died in me that day and it saps my willpower and pulls me away from reality and bollixes up my ability to deal with things.

The right person could have helped me, though. It would have had to have been a pretty amazing person, but it was still possible.

Anyhow, my childhood was extremely lonely. I had no friends. I never learned to make friends. I was a pariah and that’s very, very bad for one’s development.

See how one evil (the rape) led to others, like being bullied and isolated?

Isn’t that fun?

Eventually, I stumbled into some friendships. But those were not great for me because, due to my being so awkward and wimpy and strange, my “friends” were as likely to abuse me as be good to me.

I must have gotten something out of the times when it was good, though.

By the time I hit grade 10, I was back to being isolated, and stayed that way throughout high school. All I did with my life was go to school then come home and consume media : watch TV, read books, play video games.

Were I not an emotional cripple, my natural instincts would have led me to do normal teen things like hang out with my peers, experiment sexually, maybe get into my first relationship, and so on.

But nope. School. Home. Video games.

And that’s how I live now, only without school.

All because being raped at the age of four left me too crippled to take care of myself.

It’s the gift that just keeps on giving.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK. Here it goes. I know this will likely give me a panic attack, but whatever. Needs to be done nevertheless.

Here it is : I’ve been having trouble breathing lately.

Not all the time, but fairly frequently. Just today, I had a scary incident where the moment I lay down to sleep, I started having trouble breathing. It was like something was resisting my taking a breath. Like I was breathing through a tube, or like something was sitting on my chest.

That is bad. Very bad.

I tried just calming myself and doing my usual breathing exercises, but the resistance remained. So eventually, I had to give up on sleep and get up and do some of my vertical pushups (pushbacks? pushouts? pushaways?) in order to stimulate my breathing via a little cardio and then sit down and play Fallout New Vegas for a while in order to distract myself so that I could calm down.

Eventually, I calmed down enough to go back to sleep. But when I woke up again around half an hour ago, I still had some resistance to my breathing.

And that’s where I am right now. I can feel that resistance in every breath, and it takes some doing not to freak the fuck out and make the whole thing worse.

Clearly, I have to go see my GP.

---

Just called his office. Turns out he’s away till Monday, the 25th. Lovely. That means I can’t even make the appointment til Monday, and who know how long it will be before I actually see him?

I am so tired of his shit.

Why do these things always happen on Fridays?

My main worry is that my pneumonia is coming back. This feel eerily similar to it. Looking back, I can see that my breathing has been getting slowly worse over the last week or so but I have been subconsciously ignoring it until today.

I could go to the OR. I really don’t feel up to it, but I could. That would be the smart, sane, adult thing to do.

But I really don’t feel up to it. So I don’t think I will.

Not today, at any rate.

Tomorrow. I will get Joe to drop me off at the ER tomorrow. There, they can check my blood oxygen and whatnot and tell me if I need to be admitted.

That will give me a day to mentally prepare myself for the possibility of ended up in the hospital with an oxygen mask on my face again.

That would suck so bad. But it beats dying. And it beats ending up in the hospital with tubes down my throat.

Or maybe I will end up going in tonight. I don’t know. I need time to think it over and talk myself into doing the smart thing.

Time to go be a grownup and do something I really don’t wanna do.

I hope I can get my old tablet working. There’s only so much reading and doing crossword puzzles I can stand.

Maybe I will catch it earlier this time, and not end up in the hospital for ten days.

More after the break.

---

Back again. Still not in the hospital, obviously.

I am back to leaning more towards going tomorrow. My symptoms haven’t improved much but I still can’t face ending up admitted tonight.

If only I could bring my PC with me. Then I would be totally fine with an extended stay. I mostly play games all day anyhow, so as long as I had my PC with me, it honestly wouldn’t be much of an imposition.

Even if I had no WiFi, it would be cool. I have around a dozen games installed right now, and I could install more before I went in, just in case.

But I am having trouble imagining how being in a hospital bed and using my PC would work together. And that’s assuming they would even allow it.

I would not blame them for forbidding it on the grounds that all the cords and things might get in the way of their treating me.

I would see their point.

On the other hand, I know that some of the rooms have a little table and chairs tucked into a corner, presumably for visitors. So maybe I could set it up there and it would not be in the way too much.

At least then, I would have someplace to put the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Otherwise, even if it is allowed, things could get crazy pretty fast. Sure, I can put my monitor (which is fairly large) on that table thing you eat off of during mealtimes, but there would be no room left over for both the keyboard and the mouse.

The keyboard, I suppose, could sit in my lap. The mouse needs a firm flat surface though, and that might be hard to find.

There are some games I could play by mouse alone, I guess. Not FNV, though.

If i had to choose between mouse and keyboard, though, I would choose keyboard because then I could write.

Give me the ability to write and play video games, and a hospital stay stops being an imposition and becomes something more like catered sloth.

I wouldn’t even have to get up to make my own meals!

Of course, it might turn out to be nothing more than a chest cold and could therefore involve no hospital time at all.

That’s a nice thought. But I doubt it. This labored breathing of mine, plus the feeling that it has been getting worse bit by bit without my noticing, seems awfully familiar.

Then again, I don’t feel sick otherwise. I don’t feel fevered, I don’t have a headache, I am not nauseous, or at least, no more nauseous than usual.

Nausea and I have been through a lot together.

I guess I will see how I feel when I am out tonight and then decide if I need to go to the ER tomorrow or if it can wait till I see my GP.

Whenever the heck that would be.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow, if I can.

…this must be about today’s therapy session.

Therapy Thursdays. It’s a thing. Not as fun as Taco Tuesdays, but much more helpful.

Not a great session. I was feeling tired and cold and somewhat stupefied, and so like last week, it was mostly just me talking without getting to anything of substance.

I blame the fact that I forgot to eat before going to therapy, and thus had low blood sugar and was in a foggy, unfocused state of mind.

Would have been better off in a shitty, cranky, snappish mood. Those can be very therapeutic in therapy. Means my defenses are down and I am ready to talk about how I really think and feel instead of just sleepily going through the motions.

Mental note for next time : be more of an asshole. It works.

I am also a little off because I could not find my Wellbutrin(Bupropion) yesterday and so I missed my dose.

Luckily. I have been taking it for long enough that missing one dose doesn’t have a huge effect. But missing two in a row would be very bad, so I am going to have to really, really look for the damn things.

Phew! Found them. Crisis averted.

On the plus side, it’s nice and sunny out, and that is helping my mood. I always feel better when the sun is shining.

I keep telling myself I will get full spectrum bulbs for all my light fixtures but I never seem to get around to it.

It’s a roof-mending thing. When it’s sunny out, I feel too good to want to think about feeling sad, and when it’s cloudy, I am too depressed.

Maybe I will get myself some for Xmas.

Speaking of which, I am looking forward to my fave part of Xmas : buying gifts for people. Or more accurately. giving gifts to people.

I love to give gifts. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting them too. I am as much of a product of a materialistic consumer society as anyone else in that regard.

But to me, the greatest pleasure is in the giving. It’s a way for me to express my love and appreciation for a person and I love doing that.

If I had more money, I would be buying gifts for everyone I can think of. People I am close to would get loads of gifts from me every year.

It would probably get to be embarrassing for them, to be honest. That’s kind of the natural byproduct of my exuberant and affectionate nature.

Something I don’t express nearly enough in my real life. I do it all the time as Fruvous the Fox. That’s like one of his main things.

But in the real world, I am always too afraid of overwhelming people. I know that I can be a lot to take in even as Fruvous. As myself, all of that ebullient energy gets magnified by the fact that I am 6’1″ and 300 pounds and can seriousl scare the bejesus out of people with my sheer amplitude.

Maybe I go too far in the other direction, though.

Surely the world can handle me at half volume, maybe?

More after the break.

---

50 shades of Fru

Not everybody is a shapeshifter like me. I get that. I’m a very strange dude.

Also, water is wet.

But I can’t imagine having a single fixed and immutable identity. That would be far too restrictive for me.

Who I am on the inside is far too complex and chaotic to be limited to one exact precise persona. Perhaps that’s true of a lot of creative people.

Like Nietzsche said :

“…one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star “

Nietzsche

My chaos makes fixity an impossibility. If I picked one final form to match who I am inside, a heartbeat later I would change inside, and then be trapped in the wrong form for all eternity.

Such existential dysphoria would be a hellish nightmare to me.

The thing is, I am still a Taurus and so part of me craves order, stability, harmony, and predictability. Part of me will always be saddened by the chaos.

But the rest of my chart contains three of the four mutable signs : Moon in Sagittarius (Mutable Fire), Venus in Gemini (Mutable Air), and Mars in Pisces (Mutable Water).

If I had a planet in Virgo (Mutable Earth) , I would have the full set.

And mutable signs have to be free to… mutate, I suppose. To change. Any kind of rigid, permanent, inflexible system is going to make them feel trapped. They have to be free to adapt to changing circumstances both within and without.

So while I crave order and predictability in theory, I hate them in practice. That whirling twirling sizzling sparking star inside me won’t permit it. Whatever kind of order I try to create in either my inner or outer worlds, the other forces within me angrily attacks it, rips it apart, and renders back into its constituent components.

My massive unresolved anger issues probably have a lot to do with that as well.

This makes a lot of trouble for me because you can’t have a stable sense of self without some degree of order, and without a stable sense of self it’s hard to have a stable self-worth, and without a stable self-worth, it’s hard to get anything done, and so forth and so on til you are lft in near perfect immobility like I am right now.

And there is no clear logical solution to this problem. I can’t even conceive of a form of order I could live with. Anything I imagine, my inner turmoil would devour.

So clearly, there is no rational solution. The only way this sort of thing gets fixed is if I tackle the forces that keep that psycho shitstorm raging inside me, and that’s not something that mere thinking can accomplish.

If it was, I would have done it years ago.

Instead, I will have to go on an expedition deep into the dark forest that lies outside the bright circle of light of my poor overtaxed reason.

Should be a lot of fun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight will be my second time going up on stage to do standup.

I feel how I usually feel before a performance. Excited, scared, nervous, maybe a tad squirrely and a tiny bit paranoid.

I am continuing to follow my “zero pressure” strategy. The closest thing to preparation I have been doing has been to keep the paper I used last week handy, along with a pen, so I can jot down jokes if I happen to think of them.

I am explicitly not trying to write jokes. That will come with time, but for now, I will simply capture those that occur to me.

Like I have said before, I have been writing jokes for a very long time. I have loads of them lying around this capacious noggin of mine.

The only thing that has changed is that I write them down some of the time now. And now I am doing it with specific purpose in mind.

Before now,. they were just a byproduct of being me, more or less.

Comedy is how I cope with the world.

Which explains a lot.

I am going to bring a bunch more paper and many writing implements with me when I go to the open mic tonight because I know from last time that listening to the other comedians’ jokes will either remind me of or lead me to write more jokes of my own.

I am looking forward to performing tonight. It felt real good when I did it last time, and I anticipate enjoying it again.

Honestly, I think I just really like being the center of attention, with everyone there listening to me, wanting to hear what I say.

As patient readers know, nobody paid much attention to me. One might call it my own form of attention deficit disorder. And I suffered pretty badly as a result.

In many ways, that kind of neglect is worse than actual active abuse because at least if you are being abused, your existence and to a certain extent your importance is being validated by the abuser.

I grew up feeling like I was worthless. Or worse, like I was a liability. Like the world would have been a better place if I had never been born.

In my defense, that’s how my family treated me.

Every interaction might as well have started with, “of course, you understand that you are not important and deserve nothing at all and therefore should be infinitely grateful for what you do get whenever we get around to caring for you. Your needs mean nothing and your desires even less. You shouldn’t be here, you are not welcome, your very existence is an atrocious imposition, and heaven help you if you should ever have the unmitigated gall to ask for something. I mean really. ”

And I just…. went along with that. I didn’t know any better. I still feel that way about myself a lot of the time. I’m learning to resist it but it’s still my default setting.

At least I can make people laugh.

That has to count for something, right?

More after the break.

---

And now I am back, having had my sophomore show.l

Paid more attention to the audience this time. Did not get a lot of laughs. But then again, neither did anyone else.

In comedy lingo, it’s a pretty cold room. Hard to get a laugh from people.

It doesn’t help that for a lot of it we had an audience of two. Five comedians, two audience members. So most of the people laughing are comedians.

And even when we are doing our best to be supportive, comedians can be a tough crowd because we’re all super into comedy and have refined our comedy palate over the years to the point of being rather hard to please.

On my own part, I do my best to set my comedy impedence level to as low a setting as I can,. To put that less strangely, I make it as easy to make me laugh as I can.

And that’s the best I can do. I cannot and will not laugh at something I do not think is funny. That kind of insincerity is anathema to me. I simply will not do it.

I exist to express myself. Ergo, to express something other than myself is foreign and alien to me.

That could end up not being in my best interests some day, but I do not care. I am rapidly learning how to live who I am, and that’s all I plan to do till the day I die.

Now where was I? Oh right, comedy.

So no, not a lot of laughs, but I got some, and that’s not bad for my second time ever. I know that I am now moving into a phase where I think more about my comedy and do more during the week to work on it, and I am fine with that.

The point is to let this whole thing proceed naturally and without undue stress. That means minimal interference from my over-powerful but corrupt superego. But it doesn’t mean that I will suppress my natural tendency to worry and fret.

That, too, would cause conflict and hence tension and stress. The top ideal is to prevent such conflicts and minimize or eliminate instances where two forces in my mind come into direct conflict.

Tear down the walls and let the waters collide. It time, the conflicts resolve themselves if they are left free to do so. Holding them at bay solves nothing.

The resources used to support those walls are better used elsewhere.

Right now I feel that cleansing coldness all through my chest. That’s the ice around my heart melting and it feels bad, but it does me a lot of good.

Now I am going to lay down in the dark and relax my mind so it can work things out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.