Feeling pretty down on myself right now.

Why? Because I am falling apart. Like, physically. At an accelerated rate.

Let me tell you what happened yesterday.

I was lying in bed when, out of nowhere, I felt this pain in my right leg. Felt like I was being stabbed with a hot needle. At first it was bad. Then it hurt like a bitch. Then it hurt REALLY bad, and then when rubbing the area like one does in response to pain, I discover a brands new freshly formed lesion on my skin.

Or whatever the hell these skin things are. Besides nasty and terrifying.

(TRIGGER WARNING : Cronenberg level body horror. )

This is on top of another horrifying incident from last week. This time it was my right big toe. I looked down and saw what looked like a bit of dried out dead skin. So I gave it a gentle tug to see if it was ready to come loose.

And boy, was it ever ready. So ready that this whole loonie sized area of skin came right off leaving another big lesion on my right toe.

And there’s been other ill omens. Sometimes when I am lying down, my feet get so cold from lack of circulation that it feels like I have skin-tight frozen socks on. I have to wiggle my feet and my toes for a while just to warm them up enough for me to sleep/

The other night, it was so bad that it felt like each big toe was trapped in an ice cube.

No wonder my feet are dying. Along with the rest of me.

And i am going to make an appointment to see my GP about these things. But it’s not like I don’t already know what he is going to say.

Because I know exactly what is happening. My blood sugar is so high that parts of me are simply not getting enough blood and are dying.

That’s what happens when your blood is as thick as cold maple syrup. It clogs.

And it’s no mystery as to why it’s out of control. I eat way, way too many carbs. I get almost no exercise. I spend all day sitting on my ass in front of the computer.

Hell, I couldn’t find one of my meds – Trajenta – about a month ago, and instead of doing what any sane person would do and searching through the two foot thick layers of detritus on my desk for it till I found it, come what may,. I just… stopped taking it.

Even more me, that’s insane.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I am insane. Literally. I am a very sick man who is, unfortunately, being cared for by a mentally ill person who happens to be me.

Clearly I have got to get my shit together or I am going to die.

And that should be more than enough motivation for anyone.

But will it be enough for me? Who knows. I am trying my best to justifiably alarm myself enough to maintain a sense of urgency, but who knows how long that will last.

All I can do is row upstream while I still can, and try to get to a better place.

Because it’s either that or turn into a walking fucking wound.

Stay tuned to see which happens, folks!

More after the break.

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In a word, bleh

I am not in the writing mood right now.

What I feel like doing is taking a nap. If I didn’t need to write right now, that is what I would be doing. Sleeping.

Or maybe not. It’s complicated. I am quite tired but I am also full of diet cola, so I am both alert and weary at the same time.

Like I said…. complicated.

Plus I kind of need to poop. That’s something else I will need to take care of before I sleep. Another unwelcome but necessary roadblock to slumber.

Going to sleep when you need to poop is a young man’s game. Older people know better. There are no good outcomes in that situation.

Best case scenario, you will wake up and have to go anyhow.

Worst case scenario is the same, but without the waking up part.

A wise man (named Dave Barry) once said never to take a laxative and a sleeping pill in the same evening.

I have similar advice about Robaxacet and alcohol, although admittedly the consequences in that case were far less dire.

Still, I would not recommend.

Been buying little packs of games lately. I could review them all. but for the most part, I have more important stuff to blog about.

Important to me, anyhow.

One notable acquisition came to me totally by accident. The clever bastards at Humble Bundle got me – I selected this bundle for like $7.76 and went to pay, and it said “o wait, that price for the bundle only kicks in if you buy $8 or more of stuff! Oh, and by total coincidence, you can get two of our Mystery Keys for $2.50. ”

Normally I would never buy one of this grab bag type keys that give you a totally random game because my Taurus mind simply cannot process how to decide if something is worth the price when I don’t know what that something IS.

Pretty sure I get a “divide by zero” error on that one.

But what the hell, they got me. I had already decided I wanted the games for the price and so I paid the extra for the keys and figured, what the hell, might be fun.

And that’s how i got a game called Let Them Come, a game I only vaguely knew I have wanted for a very long time.

Many times,. I have had the idea “I just want to shoot things. Mindlessly. Endlessly. Just shoot a very large number of things. I want to shoot them a LOT. ”

And that’ what you do in the game. You shoot endless waves of alien enemies with a very big gun. There’s a lot more to it than that, with all kinds of upgrades, different kinds of ammo, and so on, but the heart of it all is something as pure and simple as the desire to shoot the shit out of very many things.

And I love it.

But now, it’s time to crap and nap.

Not at the same time. But in that order.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We were almost home…. as in, we were already in the parking structure… when I realized I had the wrong popcorn.

I had meant to grab a bag of the oh so delicious Orville Redenbacher’s Movie Theater Popcorn that I love and crave and very slightly worship. but instead, I had the Salty Kettle Corn variety, which is no doubt delicious but I can’t eat it as it has sugar.

Julian said “We could go back… ”

And I said, “yeah, okay. ”

And that was huge for me. All my usual self-minimizing thoughts and emotions were right there and ready to go. Oh no, don’t bother,. I’ll make do, it’s more trouble than it is worth, fuck it, I just want to be home safe already.

But I chose differently. I chose to get the right popcorn, the one I love. I chose the option that was not the path of least resistance. The path that meant I was claiming resources and taking up space and being a real person and all that jazz.

By choosing to go back, I was asserting my right to exist.

And that felt good. Scary, and hard…. but good.

I have no reason to hide from the world.

I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I am a good thing. I am a good person. I have worth. I have value. I am not a liability. I am not a burden. People are not worse off for knowing me.

And having to tell myself these things over and over does not make me broken, weak, pathetic, or worthless.

Neither does having to tell myself THAT.

There are lots of people who are better off for knowing me. I bring sunshine into people’s lives just by being my funny, witty, deep, interesting self. There are many peole in this world who are happy to have met me and love having my around.

The world needs me.

And I need it.

Now it’s just a matter of tunneling through my scar tissue so I can make the connection I need to the white hot center from which all life flows.

I am alive, under all that snow. My heart beats and my blood flows. Being numb is not the same as being dead. The sun doesn’t stop shining when it’s cloudy.

All the warmth and life-sustaining love and acceptance that I need is inside me right now, waiting to break through and turn my eternal winter into spring in rowdy bloom.

I will rise from my grave.

I will live again. I will be alive and present and happy to be here just like I was before I was raped at the age of 4.

I will escape my internal labyrinth. I’ve always known the way out.

Just stop needing it. To hide in. To keep my mind occupied. To be the hamster wheel with an odometer to give me the sensation of going places and doing things without me having to go anywhere or do anything.

Some day I won’t need it any more and it will disappear.

Until then, I have a lot of scar tissue to digest.

More after the break.

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A better conservative

Fuck it, let’s do politics.

It really bothers me that a monster like Trump has unlimited access to the hearts and minds of the millions of Americans and can, in effect, make them believe whatever he wants them to believe because he is their chosen leader.

To say he abuses this responsibility is an understatement on the scale of referring to the heart of the Sun as “hot to the touch”.

He is, in fact, the worse kind of person to be given this kind of carte blanche access to the souls of millions. He’s erratic, inconsistent, heedless, incoherent, and unstable.

So even apart from politics, I would love to free these people from his thrall.

But being, above all, a pragmatist, I know that it is virtually impossible to convince a conservative to become a liberal, or vice versa.

I mean, there’s pretty compelling brain science on this point now.

And you know how I loves me some brain science. \

Luckily, Trump is so terrible a human being that it is entirely unnecessary to convince his followers to be good liberals.

You only have to convince them to be better conservatives.

Because no matter what you imagine conservatism to mean, Donald Trump is as horrible a conservative as he is a human being.

I mean, he’s not even Christian.

To me, this means there is an enormous market opportunity for a superior conservative. Someone who is just as loud and aggressive and who has impeccable conservative bone fides but who can attack Trump on the many, many, many ways in which he has betrayed everyone who has ever supported him, made their lives miserable, forced them to betray everything they ever thought they believed, and has led them to a very dark place from which there seems to be no hope of escape.

I would almost be willing to volunteer for that role but it would not quite fit me.

If I have any kind of bona fides, I’ve yet to see them.

But I can imagine maybe going for it as long as I was promoting my own version of conservatism. The kind I all too briefly believed in when I was a teenager in the 80’s, before Mulroney cured me of that forever.

That conservatism is about being the grownups in the room. It is about being the sane, sober, practical people who see the world for what it is and don’t balk at getting their hands dirty with the nitty gritty numerical realities of life.

It is a conservatism that is realistic without being pessimistic. It believes there is such a thing as right and wrong and that if something is wrong, it;s wrong no matter who does it. It has very high standards and expects them to be met. It is not afraid to judge people as being just plain wrong if their actions warrant it.

It’s a conservatism that faces the facts, then rolls up its sleeve and gets things done.

Yeah. That’s the kind of conservatism that I could see myself selling.

But who the heck would buy it from me?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still not in the best of moods.

Been sleeping a lot. Probable cause : running out of Diet Coke. Normally, I would have re-upped my supply last night, but I ended up not going out to eat with Le Gang like I normally would on a Tuesday night so I had no shopportunity to buy more.

First, Joe was too sick to go out. Then I got sick too. The “very rough time in the bathroom” kind of sick. Took hours after that for my stomach to settle down enough that I felt it was safe to eat.

So that was fun.

Gonna do the comedy thang tonight. Not really in a joke writing mood, but whatever. I will get it done.

And who know how I will feel a couple hours from now? This current neutral-black mood I am in might evaporate and leave me feeling relatively okay.

Seems likely. Whatever I am going through right now is probably more physiological than psychological. I will be done with it soon, no doubt.

If nothing else, I at least have faith that the eternal chaos within will deliver unto me a fresh hell soon enough.

And after all, they say a change is as good as a rest.

Came across this nifty little website that tells you what songs were number one hits on your birthday, starting with the first one.

So here are my results.

On the day I was born, this was the number one song :

And that’s an awesome song… for the most part. It’s bright and optimistic and happy and full of Wonder’s musical fabulousness.

But that initial riff ends with some chords that must contain whatever high frequencies that I am sensitive to because they jangle my nerves every single time.

It’s like nails across the chalkboard of my entire nervous system.

So I could never totally like the song. Not without reservation.

On my first birthday, the top hit was The Streak by Ray Stevens. That seems entirely apropos. It’s a silly, wacky song about a rude dude who runs in the nude, and quite on brand for the person I would eventually become.

Second birthday? This classic :

Pretty goddamned funky. I can dig it.

But the top hit for my birthday is Silly Love Songs by Paul McCartney, which I will not link here because I can’t stand the song.

Ironically, I just heard that interminably insipid little ditty while dining at White Spot recently, and I commented on how I didn’t like it at the time because it reminded me that not everything my music hero Sir Paul did was brilliant.

Then there’s four years where I do not recognize the songs before hitting 1980 and my 7th birthday and this all time block rocking song :

Debbie Harrie will always be an idol to me. Just so damned cool.

And then the hits just keep coming.

1981 – 8th birthday – Betty Davis Eyes by Kim Karnes. So very very good and so very very 80’s. If nothing else, this list is proving that the 80’s really are my decade.

1982 – 9th birthday – Ebony and Ivory by Sir Paul and Stevie Wonder. Music genius from two musical geniuses with a great message to boot.

1983 – 10th birthday – Let’s Dance by David Bowie. My first conscious impression of Bowie was this song and its video. I only learned of the stuff from the 70’s like Ziggy Stardust and Space Oddity later.

And finally, 1984 – my 11th birthday – Hello, by Lionel Richie. One of my all time favorite songs and by far my fave Lionel Richie song.

After that, the only one I really care about is With or Without You by U2 when I turned 14 in 1987, and that seems to signify the change in consciousness that took place in the 80’s when I was a teen.

Then there’s Vogue, by Madonna, on my 17th birthday in 1989. It’s a good song but I have never liked its superficial message. I know that all that fashion and glamour stuff means a lot to some people, but to me, it’s shallow and boring and I see it as emblematic of something from the 80’s for which I am not nostalgic.

Then that portion of the list ends with Jump by Kris Kross, and that is definitely “after” my time because I didn’t hear that song until way later in the Nineties.

So I guess, in a sense, my musical consciousness ended in 1991. At least when it came to taking in the music of the era.

Coincidentally, that’s when I went to UPEI and didn’t have cable and therefore no longer had MuchMusic and endless amounts of free time on my hands.

I wonder if there’s a link…..

A little more after the break.

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The Beast Has The Key

And by “a little more”, I meant like 183 words or so.

About the title : this is another of my metaphors. For “the Beast” read “my id” and the key is the key to this cage I have locked myself into for all these years.

So “The Beast Has The Key” basically means that if I want to be more of a human being, I am going to have to learn to be more of an animal.

“Think less, feel more!” is my motto.

Tonight fit nicely with that lesson. I showed up for comedy and realized I had left my list of jokes at home.

Total panic and self-condemnation. The only way I could have fucked tonight upo after having written the jokes, and I did it.

Well you can’t fault my failure for lack of ambition. It knew what it wanted and got it.

So I borrow a pen an paper from Felicity and try to write some jokes. But panic has frozen my brain and I can’t think of any.

Eventually, I think of a few. They are pretty lame, but whatever. Getting anything besides a distant muffled whimper fro m my brain at this point feels like victory.

I go up, and what do you know, I do quite well.

My theory is that my expectations were so low that I totally relaxed and that made me a much more natural and effective comedian.

So what the hell. Maybe that’s just the way it works with me. Maybe preparation is not the right approach for me and I will do better if I just say loose.

Maybe I should forget my jokes more often.

But right now, I am just going to call it a night.

Good night, dear readers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Theses are some fresh and raw thoughts, so bear with me as I birth them.

I recently had an intuitive flash that my problem was that I am always trying to take on everything at the same time. I don’t divide things into discrete tasks which I then do one by one, in order. Instead, I am the eye trying to see everything simultaneously.

And that’s just plain madness. And badness.

It’s like I am indecisive on a cellular level, in that I am so incapable of setting priorities and choosing one thing over another that I have no choice but to try to figure everything out at the same time and the stress of that literally drives me crazy.

Or something like that. Like I said, these are new thoughts.

This is definitely the root cause of my propensity for feeling overwhelmed. Without the ability to limit my horizons so I can focus entirely on the task before me, my mental bandwidth is constantly overloading and so I just shut down and hide.

And that’s how I spend most of my time : shut down and hid.

Hence the infinite hallway of infinite doors. When I try to imagine the steps it would take to improve my crappy life, that infinite hallway is always there to overwhelm me and scare me off.

But I am positive it is nothing but a hall of mirrors. A trick that my depression uses to keep me in my place. Yeah, there are millions of possible actions at any given moment, but that is only a problem if you are trying to choose from all those options in order to produce the optimum outcome.

In which case, yeah. The odds are millions to one against whatever you choose being the optimum choice. Ya got me here.

But why put it in those terms? Why hold myself to the standard of perfect choice? Why isn’t it good enough to just do whatever seems like a good idea at the time and not worry about whether I could have made a better choice?

I mean, that’s what healthy people do, or so it seems to me. Sure, they have regrets, but what they don’t have is this perpetual option paralysis where there is practically nothing they can actually do because whatever they do will probably be “wrong”.

As opposed to doing nothing. Which can also be wrong, and in my case, invariably is. But it feels like the least wrong option because no choice has been made and so life has not blown up in my face due to choosing the “wrong” thing.

Instead, I just slowly fall apart physically due to easily treatable medical issues because it’s so hard to actually decide to do things.

It’s so much easier to just ignore everything and hide out in my mental bunker, and let the days go by while my life slips away from it and the day I finally land in the hospital for good approaches and I could totally stop that from happening but I don’t.

Because deep down, I am actually looking forward to that day.

Because then I won’t have to decide what to do any more.

Because, then, finally, someone else will be in charge.

More after the break.

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Looking at what I wrote earlier, I have to wonder if there is a deep part of me that has been waiting for someone else to take over for my entire life.

Patient readers know that I feel I more or less raised myself. There was never anybody there for me on an emotional level. My parents were both tired and uninterested and preferred to simple ignore my existence. I didn’t have any friends to talk to. The teachers were worse than useless and just wanted me to leave them alone.

Just like my parents, really.

And so I had a very lonely childhood. And not just lonely – alone. Words cannot describe how incredibly isolated and alone I was for large parts of my childhood.

And that’s just plain wrong.

And I think part of how I coped with that is that on a very deep level, I told myself that this was temporary. That eventually, some adult would notice my plight and rescue me from being entirely in charge of myself all the time and take over and look after me, guide me, discipline me, and otherwise care for me and relieve me of the burden of my own terrible, terrible autonomy.

It’s what my babysitter Betty had done for me, after all. And unlike the other kids, I didn’t go to kindergarten so I had absolutely no transition period between “cared for all the time” and “nobody cares fuck off”.

So part of me is still waiting for someone to come along and take over. Hence my constantly going on about clearly not being qualified to care for myself.

It seems like you can’t just skip developmental steps. I was given full autonomy far, far too early in life and that has left me with deep feelings of abandonment and isolation as well as severe self-esteem issues (because if nobody cares for you, there must be something horribly wrong with you, no matter how “gifted” you are, right?”) and absolutely no faith in my ability to care for myself.

There was nobody there to give me structure – so I never learned to structure myself. All I know how to do is keep myself entertained. I never learned self-discipline because I never needed to. Everything was so easy.

I never even had to learn to focus on the here and now.

And because I never (past school age) had anyone watching over me to keep me safe, I just plain stopped exploring and buried myself in my media consumption instead.

And here I am at 46, body falling apart due to neglect, leading a pathetically small and sad life when I have abilities many would kill for, stuck inside the invisible playpen walls I constructed when I was six years old, and wondering why I am so damned unhappy.

I guess it will remain a mystery forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So last night, I went to Pricemart to do my weekly shopping, and because I wanted to get my usual cookies, I went to Customer Service and told the lady there that might usual sugar free cookies were not where the used to be, and asked whether they had had just been moved to another part of the store.

And even before I finished talking, I knew I was in trouble, because she was doing that thing that people with insufficient English for their jobs do where they stare directly at your mouth and actually mouthe some of your words along with you.

That is a sure sign they are not actually following what you are saying and are just looking to parrot a few words back at you and hope that works.

But I didn’t even get that. Instead, in a very, very patronizing tone, she said “Nnnno.”

Well I guess I don’t get my goddamned cookies then. I took her at her word.

Fast forward to when I have got the rest of my purchases and am heading to the frozen confection center to get me some more of those Chapman sugar free delights when what do I come across but display with my cookies in it!

She didn’t even try to answer my question. She just said no in, again, the most patronizing way possible because she knew that would end the conversation and she could go back to sucking at her job.

And I don’t care that English was clearly not her first language. ^[1] You either speak the language well enough to do your job or you don’t, and there’s a lot of people in my area that don’t and try to fake it, and it pisses me off.

It would be one thing if they were simply honest about it instead of trying to bluff their way through it. If they were honest, I would cooperate with them by phrasing things simply, talking a little slower, and so on.

But no, presumably they told the job interviewer (who might also be ESL) that they spoke great English, and the interviewer didn’t know enough English to be able to know they were lying, and so now I have to deal with people who pretend to listen to me then just more or less guess at the right answer.

Popular gambits include :

1. Not listening at all and then saying “No” at the end because that works more often than not and who cares whether actual communication occurred
2. Just smiling at you after you finish speaking in hopes of getting you to say a bunch more things that might contain a word they know
3. Nodding along like you understand then just launching into one of the English sentences you do know because who knows, it might apply
4. Avoiding all eye contact then suddenly pretending like they were never talking to you and doing some busywork instead
5. Trying with their eyes to make you turn to another employee while still nodding in apparent but bogus agreement

And I could go on and on.

Oh, and to top it all off, there was one lady ahead of me in the line for Customer Service, and the lady behind the counter dealt with HER in English, but like, a really simple pidgin English.

Screw you, Customer Service lady. Despite how it might appear, white people still live here and if you can’t speak English well enough to deal with us, then you are not qualified for your job.

More after the break.

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Life is stupid

Not in the best of moods.

Right now, I feel cranky and bitter and resentful. Nothing is worth doing and I wish I could just disappear for a while and not have to deal with things at all.

If I was rich, this is when I would lose myself in a world of sin and excess. Just throw myself into mindless hedonism and hope to over saturate my depression with pure primal pleasure and thus force it to let me feel good, or at least, feel nothing.

There’d be a lot of butt stuff.

Instead, I sit here and get frustrated by whatever game I am playing and angry at the world in general and my life in particular and deal with the urge to throw my computer out the window, followed by myself.

Anything to break up the monotony of being myself.

Were I less of a shut-in, I suppose I would go to a gay bar, drink too much, hook up with random dudes, and end up lying in a gutter somewhere.

Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Just to complete the tableau.

But as tempting as that scenario isn’t, the reality is that, for now, my mental illness prevents such debauchery.

Well, that and not having the money. But that can be worked around.

The most important thing, though, is to stay angry and cranky and bitter, because as unpleasant as those conditions might be, they are still better than internalizing the anger and having it become depression.

I might want to run screaming into the night but I don’t hate myself. I hate my life instead, and believe it or not, that is way, way healthier.

At least I am externalizing the anger for once.

Who knows, if I cultivate this restless, angry feeling enough, it might accumulate enough dark energy to break through the walls of ice within me and actually motivate to do something about my crappy life.

Because right now, that ain’t happening. All motivation to change hits this wall of numb terror and dead space, and I can’t go any further until that changes.

It’s like I am stuck in the video game of life. And there are no Wikis or FAQs or Walkthroughs to help me get unstuck.

There isn’t even a shitty YouTube video for me to impatiently follow.

I can read faster than I can watch, people!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Right now, like I said before, I feel like I am grieving for my father in small pieces.

Eventually, I will increase the pace. Of that I am certain. It’s just that this is brand new territory for me. I have done no major grieving up to this point.

The closest I have come to serious grief (if you know what I mean) before now was when Robin Williams died.

There are the times each of my grandparents died. But I was never close to any of them. I was away when my Meme died. I was home when my Pepe died but that was in the middle of when I was a very sick man, both physically and mentally, in my early 20’s. And I was never close with him, either.

My mother had her original family and her married family and for the most part kept us compartmentalized from one another.

I regret that a lot now. I wish I had been closer to my Meme and Pepe and my uncles and aunts and cousins and such.

Who knows, if I had hung in there and gone to enough events, I might have gotten over my social awkwardness and finally gotten properly socialized for once.

That could still happen if I ever decided to move back home, I suppose.

And every now and then, it tempts me. When I get homesick and I miss my family and think about how I have this enormous extended family back home and how nice it would be to meet them and know them and be a part of that.

And I am sure my $1185/month disability check would go a lot further in Summerside than it does here. I would just pay the $500/month in rent that I currently pay to Joe to my mother instead.

No way would I freeload if there was literally any choice.

Of course, to stay on BC disability, I would need to have someone here take care of things for me. Or I would have to get on PEI’s equivalent.

Some day, perhaps, I will move back. Most of us expat Islanders do. The Island is in our blood, and eventually it starts calling to us, and we return.

And most of my so-called lifestyle is very portable. Doesn’t really matter where I plug in my computer and get WiFi. I can blog and play video games wherever.

But I sure would miss my friends here.

I guess that’s life, though, really. Sooner or later, it will be impossible to be with all the people you want to be with. It’s always going to be a choice between different groups who will miss you when you are gone.

For example, there was a time when all my hanging out as Fruvous time was done on IRC, in a channel called #softpaws. And I had a lot of friends there, just like I have a lot of friends on Tapestries, and no doubt when I switched back to Taps, there were a lot of people who missed having a certain silly little fluffy foxy around.

But I can’t take on the responsibility for everyone’s emotions. Part of me wants to. I am a very sensitive dude and hates to think of causing anybody pain for any reason.

But too much of that and you lose track of yourself and who you really are.

And part of me finds THAT appealing. There are times when I would given anything not to have to be myself any more.

At the end of the day, though, I am me, whether I like it or not.

Might as well get used to the idea.

More after the break.

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Don’t feel much like going to FRED right now.

Mostly feeling kinda grumpy and sour. My head hurts and I’m slightly dizzy and I have enough gas to float the Goodyear blimp.

The headache is probably a sinus thing. I will see what I can do to get those motherfuckers to drain. Over the years, I have learned many way to trick them into letting go of their deadly cargo.

Like clearing out my ears. Gives the pressure somewhere to go.

Oh, I haven’t completed my tale of woe from last night. Believe it or not, my meal misfortunes were not over with ordering my food via Foodora.

SO I manage to finally order. The delivery person arrives, hands me a bag, and leaves. I open the bag and immediately know it’s not the right order.

I ordered Scrambled Eggs With Beef and a Mango Pudding. This was some kind of fried rice and a whole whack of dumplings.

So I immediately hop on to their support text chat thingy, and tell them about the mistake. They say they will be happy to fix the mistake… just as soon as I send them a picture of the order I got.

What the considerable amount of fuck?

I tell them I can’t do that because I don’t have a cell phone or a digital camera. They say they can’t do anything without the pic. I grumble and tell them if that’s the case, I am going to just eat what got delivered. They say that’s fine because even if I had been able to send a pic, they would have let me keep the original delivery anyhow.

I am not a happy camper at this point but I figure WTF.

But then I take another look at what got delivered and realize both fried rice and dumplings contain shrimp, and I can’t eat shrimp. I am allergic to it.

So now I am SUPER pissed off, and I fire off an email explaining to Foodora that I want a full refund because I refuse to pay for food which is toxic to me.

I then order some goddamned Pizza Hut. Good ol reliable Pizza Hut.

It all ends well, however. This morning. Foodora emailed me back with a full refund plus an extra $20 credit to my account.

So consider me mollified.

But it still boggles my mind how ordering food on a Saturday night has turned into this stressful and complicated thing all of a sudden.

I shudder to think what the universe has in store for me next week.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just woke up after some bad sleep.

Feels like I just survived a shipwreck. Like I just barely made it to shore and collapsed in the sand after a lot of hard swimming and swallowing a lot of sea water and getting all bloated and wrinkly and dehydrated.

And now, having finally made it to shore, I am lying there in the sand, and the sand feels so very warm and soft and dry, and I know I will have to get up and look for water soon but for now I am just enjoying the sublime bliss of having beaten death.

Call it the Survivor’s High.

Bought a game this morning, System Shock 2. It’s quite ancient, came out in 1998. So its graphics are somewhat primitive, but at least it supports the maximum resolution of my monitor, so at least the somewhat primitive graphics are smooth and look good.

I bought it because it was fairly cheap (around 10 bux) and it has a Metacritic score of 92, and it sounded pretty interesting.

The basic premise is that you’re a cybernetic soldier of the future who wakes up out of cryo sleep on a starship to find that the place has gone berserk and it’s up to you and some lady who talks to you over the intercom system to figure out what the fuck is going on while not getting killed.

I’m a bit over an hour in. And so far, there has been no combat whatsoever. SO not exactly feeling the danger.

Plus the game did something which pissed me off solid. I get to this part where it is obvious that I have to duck and/or crouch to get through your typical person-sized air duck…. but they haven’t told me what the crouch button is yet.

And I can’t do what I would normally do, which is look up which button it is in the Options section where they let you reassign keys, because this game is from before that became a standard thing.

So I have to hit every key till I find it.

Turns out it’s Caps-lock.

Despite the lack of combat, so far the game is interesting enough to keep me going. I am currently stuck behind a door I haven’t the skills to hack and can’t find the right keycard for, but I am sure I will figure it out.

Or look it up. Whatever.

Still, I suppose I could still return it. I don’t want to, largely because I don’t want to get in the habit of being unable to actually commit to a game and getting cold feet over and over when the game isn’t perfect.

Plus the game is pretty darn good so far. Great sense of presence in the environment and atmosphere, cool science fiction plot and setting, good voice acting.

Kind of wish I was seeing action but I am sure that will come with time.

Plus I have plenty of other games to play around with. Bought a bundle off of Humble recently. Might do reviews eventually, if I run out of angst to vent.

But uh, don’t hold your breath.

More after the break.

---

Fie upon the world!

After struggling with the universe for nearly an hour, I finally managed to order some goddamned food from Foodora.

I thought my plan was good. Can’t order without receiving a verification text? Fine. I will just sign up for one of those free SMS website like I have done before and give them that phone number instead of the landline and the problem will be solved. Yes?

No. Turns out the world of free text messaging has gotten WAY more complicated and now, if there is a way to RECEIVE text messaging for free, I have not been able to find it before running out of patience.

I tried three different services that said I would be able to receive text messages but did not for various tricksy reasons.

Finally I just called Joe and asked if I could use his number, as he is the only person with a cell phone whose number I have memorized.

So I used his number, and he called me to tell me what the verification code was. Hated to impose on him like that, but I was a desperate man.

Just for that extra kick to the adenoids, in the middle of all this, the place I was originally trying to order from closed, and I had to start again from scratch.

Why must the universe vex me so?

The crappy cherry on the shit sundae of all of this is that I now have to call Joe back to tell him to expect a phone call from the driver when my order arrives.

I clearly did not think this through too well. Classic tunnel vision caused by focusing super hard on the current obstacle and not thinking about what comes after.

I am never doing this shit again.

Sorry, Foodora, but you are not friendly to us folks without cell phones.

Is there such a thing as a cell phone that costs nothing if you don’t use it?

---

Otherwise, today has been okay. More bad sleep, but what the fuck.

C’est la vie chez moi, non?

My resistance to a card-based lifestyle is at an all time low. I am very close to just depositing all my cash onto my reloadable VISA card every month so that I will be free to spend it online if I so choose.

The problem with that is that I would have to then either get cash out of ATMs on a regular basis or pay with the card with attendant small hassles.

Plus I would be paying to access my money, which I find galling.

So I don’t know. Perhaps a compromise would work, where I figure out the amount I am likely to want to spend online (like the $20-$30 I budget per week for my Saturday ordering in) and put THAT on the card, but leave the rest as cash in pocket.

There’s always the possibility of wanting to buy games online too, though.

So I dunno.

Clearly, I need to go think this whole thing over.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life

Tom lehrer, “Bright college days”

Still got that scraped raw feeling, like I had been gently but thoroughly abraded by being dragged naked over roads coated in black ice and frozen gravel.

But ya know, other than that, I am fine.

Feeling a slowly spreading kind of panic when I contemplate the world without my father in it. So I am taking it in small sips. Thinking about it a bit at a time, here and there. Might work my way up to slow, thoughtful gulps eventually. Might not.

Here’s something I think he would have enjoyed.

A friend gave me that link today, and I ended up watching the whole thing, absolutely entranced by all I beheld.

I call this kind of thing “competence porn” because to me, having the competence to pull off something like that is like magic.

But better than magic, because it’s all real and not very hard to understand.

And wow, does that guy have awesome tools. Vertical belt sander? Check. Circular steel lathe? Check. Infinity Gauntlet? On back order.

What I truly love is that the videos are made with the same level of craft and skill and understanding as the restorations. No irritating music. No wordy explanations. Not a single second wasted.

Just the good stuff : watching someone deeply and thoroughly defeat entropy.

Apparently, “I make a new one” is the channel’s catchphrase, and it’s apt, because when he said that in the video above, I was like “whaaaaaat?”.

Amazing stuff. If I could do that, I wouldn’t need to do much else. I would just spend all day looking in junkyards and such for stuff worth rescuing and then restoring it till it’s good as new or better.

Well, and presumably then selling it to pay the bills.

According to the friend who gave me the link, one of the reasons this guy’s restorations are so satisfying to watch is that he doesn’t half-ass anything.

He knows exactly what he is doing and so he always does everything right. To the point that if he doesn’t have the right tool for the job, he borrows it rather than try to use the wrong tool and fucking things up.

That is enormously appealing to my inner Walter.

I don’t think I would get that unhinged about bowling, but I am sure there are things which would push me to this point.

That’s why even if carrying a handgun was an option for a Canadian like me, I wouldn’t do it, because I know that I’ve got a head full of crazy and that I am not stable and that if the right buttons got pushed in my head, I might do something crazy.

The only reason I haven’t done anything super crazy in my life is that I have isolated myself from most common stressors and led a super sheltered, timid life.

Put me in the wrong situation and who knows what I might do.

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

And that, in turn, means I probably wouldn’t do the crazy thing.

But I still might.

More after the thing.

---

LOL, I meant to type “more after the break”, of course. But I am way too amused by my error to fix it.

Still feeling raw. No big surprise there. I can only imagine that I will feel this way, or worse, for quite a while yet.

No wrong way to mourn.

This is my first time grieving a close family member. Well as close as anyone in my family gets, anyway.

At least, with me.

I have been pondering the role of depression in my childhood lately. How being raped by a stranger at the age of four put this impenetrable barrier between me and others that I was too young to perceive.

I mean, I guess on some level I knew there was something wrong with me. But this was decades before people even knew there was a thing called depression, let alone that it was something a child could have.

I imagine there are even people today who would not think a child could have it.

But I had it alright. I had it pretty bad. And if there had been someone – anyone – in my life who was paying attention to me and who took an active interest in my wellbeing, they would have seen it.

But no. There was nobody in my life to do that. There was nobody in my life at all, really.

Then again, I got pretty good at fading into the woodwork due to the bullying. A good day at school was one where nobody noticed me.

Well, not my fellow students, anyhow.

I guess that’s when I learned to just keep going no matter what. What choice did I have? If I stopped, someone might notice me and I would get into trouble.

So I learned to trudge miserably onward, not happy but not broadcasting my unhappiness to the world either.

Same as now, really. This blog is the only place where I let my unhappiness be known. Otherwise, I keep it to myself.

Heck, even my therapist doesn’t know half the stuff I put into this here blog of mine.

I’ve wondered about giving him a link to this blog. He’s not quite the digital innocent he was when I first started going to him a decade ago. He could read it on his phone.

But I dunno. Might make me too self-conscious about what I write and that would defeat the purpose of this thing. The whole idea of this blog is to let stuff out of my mind and on to the page without any other mission but self-expression.

Now and then, I ponder moving this thing to another platform so that it might attract more readers and maybe even help me connect with others.

But I always chicken out.

It’s so very hard for me to stop hiding.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, is it my turn all ready? Cool.

Just got back from therapy. Cashed my check and did some shopping at Price-Mart. Got myself some sugar free frozen confections because the section where I normally get my sugar free Voortman disappeared and a big display of gold Lindt bunnies took its place, god damn it.

I mean, replacing diabetic-friendly cookies with overpriced chocolate bunnies? Really? Talk about a slap to the face of us sugar-intolerant folks.

But luckily, the wonderful folk at Chapman’s ice cream had my back, and have both ice cream sandwiches (awesome) and ice cream cone-styled things (whatever they call them in your area) that are gloriously sugar free, so I got those instead.

And now when I want dessert, I have to actually GET UP and go to the freezer to get it AND THEN walk all the back to my computer and sit down to eat it. ^[1]

Surely no other has suffered such as I.

At the checkout, in the candy section, I spotted some kind of candy display that said “Kick the sugar. Keep the candy. ” on the side.

Oh ho, what’s this, I thought.

But then I pick up one of the bags and it says “3 grams of sugar per bag. ”

Well then fuck YOU for getting my hopes up. It should be illegal for them to say “kick the sugar” when they really mean “kick some of the sugar”.

That’s what prompted me to post this to Facebook :

Out : calling it “diabetes”.
In : calling it “sugar intolerance”.

Because if the world of food can bend over backwards to cater to people’s imaginary gluten issues, it can sure as fuck do the same for those of us with real problems.

Because yes, I am quite bitter about how the anti-gluten people have enormous numbers of products specifically designed for their entirely fictitious belief that gluten is bad for them when there are tens of millions of diabetics in the world with real actual scientifically verifiable medical issues and we have to limp along with a tiny number of products and even those might disappear any minute in favour of GOLD BUNNIES.

Is it any wonder I’m in therapy?

It went well enough. The death of my father is a huge topic, so it’s not like we could cover it all in one session. I am building up to writing that letter.

Although I dunno. Maybe I am doing myself a disservice by building it up as this big important thing. Maybe that’s just asking for procrastination.

Maybe I should be just letting out my feelings about my father’s death out in whatever form they come out and not worry about some big deal artificial exegesis.

I know that so far, I have barely nibbled the tip of the iceberg that is all the feelings that are going to come up now that he is no longer around.

Hell, I know that his death isn’t even really real to me yet. I know, intellectually, that the world no longer has Larry Donald Bertrand in it, but it will take some time and a lot of catharsis before it really hits me emotionally.

Well there’s no wrong way to grieve. I will do whatever makes sense at the time and feel my way through the process and get whatever needs doing done.

My word, I think I am actually starting to miss him.

More after the brake.

---

Picard is harsh

No spoilers. Just : latest episode ending? Ouch,.

Feeling kind of raw and tender, and not just because of Picard. I think my father’s death is beginning to truly sink in and, unsurprisingly, it hurts like hell.

This is the sort of thing that is difficult to intellectualize. So I won’t even try. I do that way too much anyhow. All the matters now is the emotions.

He was my father. He was a short-tempered, impatient asshole who could not or would not stop himself from attacking those he loved and, as far as I know, ending up dying alone as a result.

He was a survivor of a hellish nightmare of a childhood due to his father, my grandfather, basically being Satan.

Grandpa was the sort of guy who steals money from his employers in order to go out drinking and gambling and chasing women, and when he got himself a gal, he would take her home to the house he shared with the wife and kids and fuck her right there on the bed he shared with my Grandma.

He beat the crap out of his wife and kids, including my father, whenever the hell he felt like it, molested any kid he could get his hands on, stole and/or embezzled from everyone he could con into hiring him, and was the main reason my father had a transient childhood because wherever they went, it was only a matter of time before they would have to flee the jurisdiction due to Grandpa’s evil, evil ways.

Makes me wonder what the fuck HIS childhood was like.

So compared to that, my Dad did quite well. Grandpa set the bar pretty goddamned low.

But I still lived in fear of my father’s temper growing up. We all did, my mother included. One of the happiest times in my childhood was when he was gone on some kind of government job for two weeks.

We were so relaxed and happy then!

And so there’s doing better than his Dad did…. and there’s nevertheless still doing a pretty shitty job overall.

When he was on his tirades when I was a kid, he would say “Oh that’s right, I’m such a bad parent. Look, I don’t drink. I don’t gamble. I don’t chasewomen… ”

And I would think, woop de frigging doo.

But when I learned about his childhood, it all made sense.

My father was a very poor parent.

But I loved that son of a bitch, nonetheless.

And I miss him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still working up to writing my Letter To A Dead Dad. It will probably happen after I come home from therapy tomorrow, as I am sure as fuck going to be talking about it there.

Right now, I am still processing the emotions and getting them into a form which can be expressed in words.

So instead, let’s talk about crankiness and I.

Patient readers know that expressing anger in the form of crankiness is sort of a “thing” for me. I grew up in the shadow of my late father’s short temper, and it caused me to resolve to never take my bad mood out on others.

Small problem : I forgot to include actual legit targets for my bad mood. So for me, a bad, cranky, cross mood had nowhere to go.

And when that has nowhere to go, it just becomes depression. Depression can be defined as anger turned inward, and is often a form of internalized abuse.

The child of the parent who take their anger out on their kids become the adult who takes it out on themselves.

And while I would never be able to live with myself if I started abusing people like my dearly departed Dad did, and I have been internalizing my anger since forever, what occurred to me just a short time ago was that those are not the only two options.

I mean, the world is not divided between angry abusers and passive self-haters with depression. Most people must find some sort of middle ground. Some way to express their crankiness without taking it out on those they love.

My first guess is to how this might be is that they express their anger TO the ones they love, but not AT them.

So they bitch about their lousy commute, their idiot co-workers, and their dickhead of a boss to their friends and family, but never direct that anger at them.

I think I have finally deduced how healthy families work.

Took me long enough.

Plus there are various aggressive hobbies that could help with the physical stress involved. Whether it’s ping-pong, Halo, or chess, there is probably a socially acceptable form of aggression based upon mutual consent to compete out there for everyone.

Not sure what it would be for me. Multiplayer video games activate my social anxiety, and that’s a whole “thing” unto itself.

I suppose I could try things like word games or the like. With those, I could at least have the feeling that I am going into them with the core skills necessary to win.

But I would still feel like I was conspicuously a “noob” and not as good as all the experienced players there.

So maybe the real issue is the one that plagues a lot of us former child prodigies : not being willing to just plain suck at something for long enough to get better at it.

Academic success came to me way too easily as a child and that meant I never had to just tough it out and keep trying something till I got it.

Those things that didn’t come to me naturally, like gym and arts and crafts, I either passively resisted or just plain refused to do.

Still can’t believe I got away with all that. But I guess when you crush it at the academic stuff, people aren’t that worried that you can’t glue things to a piece of paper properly.

Or kick the soccer ball right.

Can’t fault their priorities, I suppose.

But bad things can happen when the smart kid goes unchallenged.

More after the break.

---

On Total Candor

We’ve been watching the new Star Trek show, Picard, and on it there is this Romulan sect that practices what they call Total Candor, which in their case means speaking their exact emotional truth at all times, no matter what.

Which is, of course, very non-Romulan^[1] of them.

And this plus other factors has got me thinking about my own relationship with candor, or rather, its rough and tumble cousin, bluntness.

Because there was a time in my life when I was thoughtlessly blunt. I just said whatever popped into my head.

But then my siblings managed to get me to realize the consequences of doing that and showed me that I was hurting people by not choosing my words more carefully and I certainly didn’t want to hurt anybody, so I changed.

Eventually. And somewhat reluctantly. But I changed.

But there’s still a little part of me that wants to be able to say whatever the fuck I want whenever the fuck I want to say it. To just tell it like it is 24/7 and not have to worry about the consequences to others. Fuck them if they can’t handle the truth.

it’s all very “id”.

And while to give in to that side of me entirely would make me a monster ten times over, I do think I might have overcompensated somewhat.

Again, as with the above, I forgot to open some kind of pathway to the expression of how I really feel.

Sure, being totally blunt would be monstrous, especially for someone with my gift for powerful and impactful self-expression.

But total candor and total suppression are not the only two options.

For example, there’s diplomacy. As I have noted in this space before, when i was a kid my definition of diplomacy was “the art of getting away with telling the truth.”

See, I had figured out that often it’s not what you say but how you say it, ergo if I was diplomatic enough about how I said what I felt to be the truth, I wouldn’t get in trouble for saying it and I might even get praised for my being so gentle about the whole thing.

Of course, as I grew up, other factors came into play, like emotional sensitivity, personal politics, situation awareness (never a strong suit for me), and the desire to hear as much of someone’s POV as I can so I can add it to my own came into play.

But deep down, there is still a part of me that wants to get away with being blunt.

I’ve just managed to turn it into being an open and honest person.

And I think thbat’s pretty awesome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.