The thing I miss most from the golden era before this plague-ridden era we are living in is getting to do my standup comedy.

I was really starting to bloom. The last performance I gave went super well. Everyone in the bar was paying attention and they all laughed. Afterwards, people from the audience spontaneously told me how funny I was. I was finally doing something with my talents. I was even beginning to come out of my shell.

So of course, life had to shut that shit down. Just like when my parents took me out of college. As soon as I start getting somewhere, the fickle finger of fate fucks me over.

And it makes me so mad. It’s so unfair. I have so much to give the world. My wit, my point of view, my insight, my inspiration, my provocation.

And quite frankly, the world needs what I have to give. It’s in a pretty sorry state right now and I would love to be able to help.

But I am still locked away in this cage of depression, anxiety, dread, and fear. And I know it’s mostly to keep the world out and only sort of to keep me in, but it amounts to the same thing in the long run.

And I am just so tired of this bizarre life of mine. I know that there is so much more to this existence than my cramped little world of video games and blogging and sleep.

Yet here I sit, knowing damned well that when I am done blogging for now, I will take a nap and then be up and playing ESO for hours on end.

And it’s so hard to get a grip an how I should feel about that. I want to feel the restlessness and discontent as that is the only thing that might motivate me to actually do something to improve my situation.

But it hurts and the hurt doesn’t feel like it is going to go away any time soon. And it so easily turns into self-destructive judgment and yet another way my overactive superego tortures the life out of me on a daily basis.

And what do I do to escape that torture? Play video games.

It’s a self sealing system. A Catch-22.

I don’t know how to disarm the Prosecutor Within. Self-loathing is a hard habit to break. All that anger has to go somewhere. If not within, then without, and I can’t imagine it ever being okay for me to take it out on others.

Maybe I can channel it somehow. Learn to harness all the pent up steam power inside me and make it do work FOR me instead of working AGAINST me like it usually does.

Sounds good in theory but right now, I am too tired to give it any serious thought. My sleep has been even more fragmented than usual lately, and I never know when I will get the urge to nap.

Better grab that bus while I can.

More after the break.

---

Meant to be here half an hour ago, at 7:30 pm, but got so wrapped up in the plotline I was following in ESO that I lost track of time entirely and now it’s 8:02 pm.

In ESO, I decided with my new character I would give steal yet another try so my new character is a thiefy sneaky time.

An assassin, more or less, seeing as I almost never steal anything. Not quite never, because there’s been a few times I gave in to the temptation to steal something really awesome from people I figured could stand to lose it, but for the most part, no.

But I do enjoy getting all sneaky and stabbty, and lately, I’ve even starting sucking slightly less at the stealth.

My two main problems with stealth are patience and attention to detail.

I don’t have the patience for stealth. I don’t handle a low stimulation situation like stealthy approaches well. I want to be doing things. Slow, stealthy approaches are too boring for me to maintain focus.

Which leads to the other problem, attention to detail. I tend to have a highly focused POV when I game, to the point of having tunnel vision. That’s fine for my usual gung-ho frontal assault type gameplay, when details don’t matter nearly as much as delivering the damage as fast and hard as possible.

But stealth requires a high amount of situational awareness, and to put it extremely mildly, situational awareness has never been my strong suit.

I am what pop psychology calls “inner directed”, which means I spend a whole lot more of my mental resources on exploring and developing my ideas, thoughts, and emotions, and very little on exploring my physical environment.

In other words, I’m a head in the clouds dreamer who spends most of time in the world between his ears and only interacts with the so-called “real world”^[1] with great reluctance, and with the goal of retreating back into my mind ASAP.

Not claiming this is the only way to be. Those of us with our head in the clouds are proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road, after all.

But it has a lot of good points too. The world needs us deep thinkers. We are the ones who come up with the ideas that move us forward as societies and even as a species. We’re the one with the inner vision to be able to see possibilities that are invisible and inaccessible to the busier, more energetically engaged types. We are the ones who, by reaching so deep within ourselves, can find the place where all things come together as one and by doing so, find the common ground that touches everyone.

That’s why I like the metaphor of the blind soothsayer. The old blind man who can see the future but can’t see the present at all.

I identify with that kind of thing. I feel like it captures my own sort of savantism.

I’m not blind…. but I don’t see too good.

And I don’t have prophetic visions… but I sure as hell see a lot of things about the present and future that appear to be opaque to the less visionary types.

And all because I have developed my inner vision through all that dreaming.

Dreams are powerful shit, y’all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I was watching one of those Reddit videos I love so much and one of the Redditors said something about working on improving themselves when it hit me like a splash of cold water to the face :

I’ve never even considered improving myself. Ever. Even when I went to a year of Kwantlen and then did the VFS thing, I never thought of it as self-improvement.

To me, they were just things I was doing in order to get what I want.

Hell, I don’t even consciously think of therapy as self-improvement, and it most definitely is. Otherwise what’s the point?

So what’s the deal with that? Why have I never thought of anything I do as self-improvement, even education and therapy?

Well right off the bat, just to get this out of the way : around 20 percent of it was arrogance. I don’t need self-improvement because I am so sparkly shiny awesome it’s almost nauseating. The world just needs to connect to my ineffable amazingness.

But the other 80 percent is depression telling me that self-improvement is impossible and that I am too broken to ever get better and that I don’t deserve it anyways.

Funny how those two feelings can exist at the same time.

The issue of my poor sense of self is in there somewhere as well. It’s hard to think about self-improvement when your self is so weak and fragile and disconnected.

I mean, how can you improve yourself when you don’t know who (or what) you are?

Who is even being improved?

And what would self-improvement look like? It’s not like I can’t think of a ton of things I would change about myself if I could.

The first thing I would change would be my lack of drive and will. I would love to be a more focused, driven, and inspired person who sets a goal and doesn’t stop going for said goal until it is achieved, even if that takes a long time.

So I guess I would want to be more persistent and not nearly so easily discouraged as well. And of course, I could use a massive boost in confidence as well.

Although that’s a slippery one. I have a lot of confidence in my abilities. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I am super smart and hyper talented and very capable.

There are a lot of jobs out there that I could do amazingly well.

What I don’t have confidence in is all the little steps it takes to get the job in the first place. Starting with qualifying for the damned thing. I’m a 46 year old man who has never had a full time job and that’s a hell of a big problem to overcome.

If only there were some way to prove you can do a job before you even apply. Like some kind of vocational SAT test.

What else. I would like to have the wherewithal to act as smart as I am. They say stupid is as stupid does, and I does a lot of stupid things that are not in my best interests.

But when you are coping with depression, all you can do is make it through the day.

I’d like to be a healthier weight too. Or just healthy in general. It doesn’t bother me to be fat because I have been fat for my entire life.

I mean, I was a fat infant.

But I want to lose a lot of weight because it will make me feel better.

Yet another reason to get my blood sugar under control.

More after the break.

---

On Showing Off

I’ve always been a showoff. It’s a fundamental part of my nature.

I have always wanted to dazzle and amaze people with what I do. In my head, there is always an audience watching anything I do in an overt, seen by others mode. To me, the ultimate thing in life is to get way up high and shine, shine, shine.

That would strike some as selfish, and they are not wrong, because it is an expression of self. It’s saying to the world, “Look at me! Aren’t I amazing? Aren’t I so awesomely amazing that it makes you happy just to look at me?”.

And for me that has always been an active thing. So not “I am amazing” so much as “look at this amazing thing I am doing!”.

Again, this is a pure expression of self. And as such, there is a certain innocence to it.

But the problem is that at some point, that part of me got suppressed. Hard. So hard, in fact, that I remained unaware of it for a very long time and tried to operate in a word entirely of intellect and showing off how smart I am.

This, to put it mildly, didn’t get me anywhere. Without a strong sense of self and a healthy and robust amount of self-worth to back it up, that kind of thing is doomed to failure because it’s all light and no heat.

So it seems to me that when I suppressed this side of me that wants to show off all the time, I really threw out the baby with the bath water.

In fact, it was mostly baby. Very little bath water.

So now, when I am working so hard to connect with my primal self and the id that it can only spring from, it seems to me that the little showoff that was before I got raped needs to be up front and center and given his time to shine.

Standard disclaimer : When I declare my own awesomeness, it is not about you. I am not saying you are not just as awesome or even more awesome than I am.

Frankly, you don’t enter into the equation at all. Even in theory, or as placeholder.

Because it is not about you. It’s all me. Me being me as hard as I can.

And if that makes you feel bad because it makes you feel smaller by comparison, I’m sorry, but that’s your problem, not mine.

I’m tired of stopping low to make the pygmies feel taller.

Time for me to reach for the sky.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As per traditional norms, I am currently in a mental fog and all the rest.

But this time it is definitely all my fault because I stayed up till 10 am playing ESO.

It was sort of an experiment. I wanted to see how long I could play before fatigue or hunger forced me to quit.

And when I quit at 9 am (to eat and then go to bed at 10 am) I was not entirely done. I probably could have done another hour if I had pushed myself.

But why? This is, after all, a leisure activity and thus meant to be fun. When it stops being fun, ya stop doing it.

One related item of note : I signed up for ESO Plus, the premium membership plan which lets you access absolutely everything they have online, including all the content you would normally have to pay big bucks to access.

For example, it would cost me $40 to access Elseweyr in the game if I bought it separate. ESO plus costs $18/month and gives me access to everything.

The way I figure it, it would cost like $200+ to buy all the extra content separately, so it would therefor take around a year before I broke even paying for ESO Plus.

And while I am loving the heck out of the game right now, I somehow doubt I will still be playing it all the time a year from now.

Still planning on launching my latest plan to get food delivered tonight. Operation Try Closing Now will commence.

In other words, I am ordering from 7-11.

And that means that I get hot food at pretty dang good prices. I know I am going to get a smokey and the tasty crinkle cut fries. But that’s like, only $5, and I plan to spend around $20 total,. so I will probably get some spring rolls or taquitos as well.

And maybe a mildly naughty dessert. Like a couple of cookies.

Damn do I miss chocolate bars. That’s the one that still hurts the most. Chocolate bars are everywhere and I used to enjoy them so much that it’s downright painful to see them all over the place knowing I dare not have one even as a treat.

Way too naughty.

It’s occurred to me, though, that one pretty strong argument for my finally getting a working glucometer is that if I had one, I could occasionally have something super naughty and then just take a reading after and give myself as much insulin as it takes for things to get back to normal.

So there’s that. It doesn’t quite solve the problem by itself – the executive dysfunction of not being able to figure out which one to get remains.

But it gives me extra incentive to keep flailing away at the problem and one of these days, I will actually break through and clear the mental block.

And then I will say to myself, “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”.

But it was.

More after the break.

---

Sweet Sweet Victory

Or in this case, savoury victory. Why?

Because I am savouring finally getting food delivered! Finally, it worked, god damn it.

It even worked exactly like it’s supposed to. Simple. Easy. Reliable.

Specifically, I finally ordered from Dinesty Dumpling House. Yeah, I was going to order from 7-11 but I forgot that searching for 7-11 on Foodora does not get you 7-11 and while I was trying to remember the trick to making it show up,. I got tempted by Dinesty and so here we are.

So I have, at long last, the Cold Cucumbers With Garlic (pretty good) and my Garlic Steak “Bento” Box.

Bento my ass. I was very disappointed to get my order and find it was not in any sense packaged bento style. It was just two round dishes, one for the entree and one for the rice, with a couple of things (including half of a boiled egg) jammed in with the entree.

So I call foul. If I order bento, the packaging is the main feature I want. I absolutely love all the little boxes with their bits of food in them.

Dunno why, but for some reason, that presentation pleases me enormously.

It’s just so damned stylish!

So boo on you, Dinesty. This ain’t bento. It ain’t bento at all!

That said, the Garlic Steak is okay. Nothing to write home about but it’s decent. It has fresh cracked pepper, plus there is a little in the rice. And I am not fond of black pepper in any form, but it’s not a total dealbreaker for me.

Plus, when the pepper gets to be too much, I eat another piece of cold garlic cucumber, and the contrast between peppery rice and beef and nice cool cucumber is lovely.

Anyhow, mission frigging accomplished. I ordered. I ate. I won.

I am still planning on doing the 7-11 thang once I remember how to make it show up, though. Being able to get my usual sorts of things delivered could make a huge difference in my life, especially if I end up getting sick.

Gah. Got a large chunk of peppercorn on my tongue. Ow ow ow.

Anyhow, I admit, I am starting to worry about my getting (Your Codename Will Be) Covid-19. I know that if I get it. it will hit me very hard, because my immune system is compromised as fuck what with my blood sugar being so high.

So it would be pneumonia city for me at the very least. And I sure as fuck don’t want to be playing THAT record again any time soon.

God damn it, it’s like the pepper coated my tongue and won’t wash off. That is downright evil, in my opinion.

Oh well, this too shall pass. I hope.

But it’s going to make me pretty damned leery of anything with black pepper in it for a while. Nothing like a long term burning sensation to sear something into your memory.

Makes me wish I hadn’t been tempted to get the garlic steak and stayed with the pork dumpling I had been trying to order for ages.

Then again, that might have been full of pepper too.

This is why I have trust issues.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Bad sleep. Mental fog. Hard to think. The usual.

Anyhow, as patient readers know, I don’t edit. Like, ever. No matter what it is I am writing, I just write the thing and that’s it. I am done.

I don’t even proofread. But I am sure you have figured that out by now.

And the thing is, I get away with this. I have been submitting first drafts for my entire life and it has always worked out just fine.

Got high marks in school and everything. Even at VFS.

So how is this possible? Certainly, it would not seem possible to a studious, hard working, doing everything the “right” way kind of person.

In would, in fact, seem blatantly unfair. But as we know, talent isn’t fair.

And that’s the most obvious answer to the question : I get away with it because I am massively talented. I mean, I must be, otherwise my lackadaisical approach would crash and burn every single time.

But that’s a superficial and glib answer. What I want to know is, what exactly is going on? What is this talent of which we speak? How does it operate? What does it DO?

And I think I have figured it out. You know how I have been saying that some people get better at something by studying and learning, and others by just doing the thing a lot?

Well that’s the answer : by doing a lot of writing without editing after, I got good at that part of the process.

In other words, by only ever doing first drafts, I got really good at first drafts.

That’s not to deny the role of talent entirely, of course. This insane “strategy” of mine would not work were I not blessed with an overflowing cornucopia of talents.

But it at least explains how it is even possible to do like I do. And it kind of explains what I am doing with all this blogging.

I am not just expressing some of the words that are rattling around this capacious noggin of mine.

I am also practicing my first drafts.

And I think I am getting pretty good at them, don’t you?

---

Life’s been pretty quiet in this life of mine. Right now, I am enjoying that, after all the weirdness and stress of the last few days.

But I can feel the restlessness starting to grow even now. And so it’s only a matter of time before I have to go looking for some trouble to get into.

That’s a pretty new thought to me. Until quite recently, I suppressed my feelings of restlessness and the urge to engage with the world in a somewhat playful way that results from said feelings because they didn’t fit in my teeny tiny comfort zone.

In fact, it’s become abundantly clear to me that I have been going through life with a pretty thick set of blinders on.

After all, what’s the point of looking out at all the things in life you feel you can never have? It can only lead to pain and unhappiness, right?

So slap the blinders on and keep your eyes firmly fixed to the world inside your computer, ignoring everything that might suggests that’s not nearly enough of a life for you to be happy at all.

And by you, of course, I mean me.

And that’s the thing : it’s not enough. I need far, far, far more than I am getting out of life and I am sick and tired of trying to pretend that isn’t the case.

It is not enough. I am not okay. I am a deeply unhappy and frustrated man who is chomping at the bit to get out there and prove to the world just how amazing he is.

But this stupid wall of fear and suppressed rage keeps me trapped. It’s like I am dragging a huge ball and chain behind me all the time, and I am sick of it.

There has to be a way out of this trap of mine.

And some day, I am doing to find it.

More after the break.

---

Got a moment or two before go to another Parking Lot Summit with dear Felicity.

It’s a very strange era we live in. At times I am still amazed at how much the whole world has changed in such a short period of time.

I mean, here we are with 75 percent of the the world’s population unable to go to work and it all happened in the space of a month or so.

If you went back just two months and told people that in a month, the world would shut down three quarters of the economy and everyone in the world would be on board with this and do it mostly voluntarily, they would laugh in your face.

But somehow, that’s exactly what has happened.

And I take this as being an extremely hopeful sign.

In fact, I think this is what the New Age types have been calling for and prophesying for a very long time : a global consciousness raising event.

We now know that there is such a thing as a global consensus. We now know that concentrated government action can solve problems if they are motivated enough. We now know that all the cries of “We can’t possibly afford that” are absolute bullshit.

You can afford it just fine. You just don’t want to. Because doing nice things for low status people is too wimpy and girly and gay for you.

And this knowledge will not disappear when the crisis ends. Sure, things will go back to normal in bad ways as well as good, but people will remember what this is like.

It’s like when WWII ended and all the women left the factories and went back to being housewives. Sure, it looked like conformity and the patriarchy had won the day….

… but those ladies remembered. Even if they now paid lip service to the ideal of feminine fragility, they knew in their hearts that it was all lies.

People will remember when we all came together to get through this.

And they will ask themselves why we can’t do it again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What is unusual is that here I am, only beginning my day’s blogging at almost 6 pm!

Once, that was normal. On days where I had nothing in particular going on, I wouldn’t blog until I ate my dinner at 7 pm or so.

And I kept that up even after I started doing my blogging in two shifts. I would do the first part at 7 pm and the second part at 10 pm.

Seems sort of stupid now. Which is, presumably, why I switched to doing the first part with lunch and the second part with supper.

But today was unusual in that I didn’t have lunch until after I had my therapist’s appointment (over the phone, natch) between 12:45 pm and 1:45 pm.

And that was enough of a disruption that I totally forgot to blog until now.

Funny how it only takes a tiny variation to throw us off, isn’t it?

I just finished a rather long session of Elder Scrolls Online. Still enjoying the heck out of that game. Pondering maybe buying myself one of the expansions once I have my financial ducks in a row.

I just checked my reloadable VISA and yay,. the money is finally there. I now have a balance of $599.95 on the damned thing.

“But what about the $8.95 that was already there?” I imagine you asking.

That went to pay for Amazon Prime for the month. Something I don’t actually use very much but it’s so so nice when I do.

And hell, in this trying age of ours, I might end up using Amazon a LOT.

I’ve already read news reports about how Amazon is absolutely snowed under by orders, which should surprise nobody. They are apparently hiring armies of new people to work at their warehouses.

They are also asking their customers to donate actualreal to them in order to help meet the increase in demand.

That’s right, the world’s richest man who runs the world’s richest company wants you, the consumer, to give him even more money of your own accord just to make sure your Amazon deliveries make it on time.

The sheer level of scumbaggery on naked display is appalling. Not to mention the GALL of this fucking faulty android to even ask.

It;s called using your own money JEFF. It’s called being able to wrap your brain around the mind-boggling concept of you having less money and that being completely acceptable and even the right thing to do.

You and your billionaire buddies have been so spoiled by generations of permissive governments that the very thought of literally any level of sacrifice whatsoever makes you curl up in a ball and cry like the whiny, wimpy, fragile fucking infants you are.

It could be something that would cost you one extra nickel and you and your cronies would scream like you’re getting a hot lead enema.

Well too fucking bad. The people are sick of this shit and they are gathering torches and pitchforks as we speak.

And they (we) are going to introduce some much needed discipline in your lives. And if your media pets get in the way, we’ll burn them at the fucking stake.

We, the people, let you be rich. Wealth is a privilege, not a right.

And we don’t like what you are doing with that wealth, we will take it away.

More after the break.

---

Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick, there is STILL some kind of problem with my payment.

The money is there. And my credit card works, I just used it on Steam.

The curse isn’t done with me yet, apparently. Currently doing text chat with support.

Apparently. all Abhishek here can tell me is to contact my bank. WTF?

Well that was the last straw for Skip the Dishes. I just deleted its bookmark. They are dead to me now.

Ya know who knows how to take my money? Foodora. Even though they treated me badly in the past, I am now a Foodora man.

Fuck you, Skip.

Got a nice bento box coming and I am going to enjoy it extra hard because it’s tghe order I have been trying to make through them for like a month.

I assume it will be contactless delivery of some sort. Ideally, they call me to say they are outside the building, I let them in, then they knock on the door to tell me it’s there.

I am just stoked that after all the bullshit I have been through, I am finally going to successfully order in.

I suppose they could leave me the wrong thing again, or the phone could mysterious not be able to receive their call, or a zillion other things.

So I don’t want to jinx things by counting those tasty chickens before they arrive. The curse is still in play until I take the first bite of food.

One thing I like about Foodra is that I can order from 7-11 via it. That could come in handy if I need stuff but there’s no convenient time to get to 7-11 myself.

Plus I can order some of their tasty hot food that is pleasingly inexpensive.

Oh, this brave new world, that has such wonders in it.

---

Mother FUCKER. “Oh fudge, they had to cancel./” The curse lives!

Trying one more time with Foodora. This time, I am ordering nice normal Subway. Wow is it more expensive when you get it delivered. What normally costs me $14 is costing me $24 this way.

But whatever. It’s so not about the food any more. Or the price.

It’s about actually getting this shit DONE.

Normal people do not know what it is like to live with the compulsion to complete whatever you start doing.

It has led me to keep trying in a lot of situations where I would have been better off quitting. And at the cost of escalating frustration levels.

Oh. And Subway closed before they could fill my order.

The curse wins…. for now.

I’mma go EAT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had some adventures with the new normal today.

My verdict? It sucks.

First, Julian was kind enough to drive me to my bank so I could cash my monthly check. First, I was stopped by a door by a lady who wanted to ask me the standard questions about whether I had been out of the country or come in contact with anyone who blah blah blah etcetera.

And that’s fine. I am fine with being asked a few questions before I bring my viral load into a public building.

But this lady’s accent was so thick that I could barely understand a single word she was saying. So what might have been a short one minute pause turned into five long minutes of frantic gesticulating and stress as I tried really hard to understand her.

It’s not entirely on her. Age is catching up with my hearing and that means I sometimes have trouble understanding people who are speaking flawless unaccented English.

People have started to “mumble”, subjectively speaking. Age related hearing loss starts at the top of the audible frequency range and works its way down over time. That’s why only people under a certain age (25, I think) can hear the “mosquito tone” that was all the rage for a while back in the day.

And like I have said before, the tiny noises and pauses we use to tell where one word ends and the next begins are very high frequency, and so that’s the first really noticeable thing to go in most people, starting at around 45 years of age.

So sometimes things come across to me as one long cluster of incomprehensible phonemes and I have to get people to repeat themselves and a nun ci ate ver y slow ly and care ful ly.

And I hate that. I hate having to break the flow of conversation. I hate have to make young people go slow just for my sad old self.I hate feeling helpless about it.

And it only gets worse from here folks!

Anyhow, so I make it into the bank, and they have these circles on the floor to show you where to stand in line so people stay six feet apart. Plus, they have these clear plastic partitions in front of each teller to protect them, I assume, from errant coughs.

So that was slightly alienating.

Then I get to Pricemart and I am about to go in when a security guard tells me there’s a lineup and points me in the right general direction. I follow the lineup and it stretches all the way around the side of the building, for fuck’s sake.

I assume they are practicing neutral occupancy – people can only go in when others go out, one for one.

So I had to wait in line, in the cold, for fifteen minutes before I even got in the damned store. Then I had to do my usual shopping.

And that sucked. I should not be on my feet for that long even in the best of conditions, let alone out in the cold, with the cold making my muscles contract.

So I got lots of pains and cramps in my legs now.

Something tells me that I will be ordering my groceries online from now until all this mishigas is over. Either that, or getting stuff from 7-11.

Good ol 7-11. They just put down a bunch of plastic containers in front of the checkout counter making it physically impossible to get within 6 feet of the cashier.

Simple,. rugged, practical solutions. God how I love them.

More after the break.

---

Where’d my money go? I just dunno. It really makes me tense.

God fucking dammit.

So I got to the bank today, deposited a big fat $600 on my card, and decided that to celebrate, I was going to order in tonight.

I should have known better.

So I go back to my beloved Skip the Dishes, having forgiven them for not letting me do cash orders any more for something that was beyond my control.

Still a little pissed off about that, but too hungry to care for the most part.

So I put together my order of Lamb Vindaloo with Rice and 2 samosas, and go to pay, and it says there’s a payment error.

Mother FUCKER. God damn it, even in the future nothin’ works. Why am I cursed to be denied when I try to order food?

Did I piss off the god of delivery at some point?

So I carefully re-input all my credit card info on the theory that maybe Skip had my old credit card info and I hadn’t updated it when I got my new card.

Nope. Same result.

So I go to make sure the money is actually there byh checking the balance on my reloadable VISA and lo and behold, it says my balance is $8.98,

Well there’s your fucking payment problem. The money ain’t there! I was trying to pay for $30 worth of Indian food with $9 worth of balance.

Now the easiest thing to do at that point would be to panic, because um, where the fuck is my $600, assholes?

But I have been through this before, so I did not panic. Much.

For whatever arcane banking reason, sometimes the transactions on my card don’t actually post until the next day.

Keeps the customers on their toes, I suppose.

And it helps to remember that I was in the bank minutes before it closed at 3 pm. So if ever there was a time when things might have to wait until tomorrow, that was it.

So for now, I am willing to wait until tomorrow. I will check my balance tomorrow afternoon and if the $600 is there. boffo, everything is five by five, no problemo.

If it isn’t there. THEN I will panic.

It’s nice to have these things planned out in advance, I find.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Slept somewhat better today. As a result, I am not currently blogging at you through a harsh and bitter fog of toxic brain fumes.

I am instead blogging at you through a nice soft, grey, soothing fog of healthy sleepiness. And that’s much much better.

Got two more antibiotic pills left to go. That means I will be taking the last one with tonight’s midnight snack.

Can’t say they did me any good. Any progress on the boil, which is what they were meant to be treating, came from my own expiation efforts.

Then again, probably didn’t do me any harm, either. I certainly didn’t notice any side effects and for all I know, it helped me fight something I didn’t even know was there.

One more day till cheque day. I can hardly wait. Tomorrow I will probably end up taking a cab to the bank to cash my cheque, put most of my spendable money ($600) on the card, then walk to Pricemart to do some shopping before taking another cab home.

Hope the weather is nice or at least tolerable.

Once I got the money on the card, I can do stuff like order groceries or delivery online, and maybe buy myself a game or two.

Tonight I will be hanging out with Le Gang, after a fashion. We are going to be in the same parking lot, in separate vehicles, six feet apart, vehicles parked in opposite directions so the driver’s sides line up, yelling to one another.

When Joe first brought up this idea Sunday afternoon, my initial reaction was that this was just way too sad a thing to do. And it never occurred to me that we’d actually do it.

Then, Sunday night, when Joe said they planned on actually doing it, I was shocked, and did not go. It was too sudden for me.

I don’t do sudden.

But tonight, well, I guess I am willing to give it a try. It still seems pretty tragic to me, but I do miss Felicity, and this is the era we live in.

These are the times future children will learn about in history class. By any standard, the era where the whole world shut down in order to keep a virus from spreading is pretty freaking unusual and noteworthy.

I suppose people of the future will be asking us what it was like.

I get the feeling we don’t even know yet. This crisis is still pretty new and we don’t know even half of the economic effects of these drastic measures yet.

\Let alone the psychological effects of people being far more idle and confined than usual. I mean sure, lots of jobs can be done from home, but most can’t, and that means there’s a lot of people with nothing to do until this thing is over.

It’s like the whole world has a high unemployment rate now, and take it from someone who grew up in a high unemployment region, it can get pretty ugly.

At least everyone is still going to get paid. Either by their jobs or the government.

The scary part is that nobody really knows what they are doing because nothing like this has ever happened before. It’s an unprecedented global crisis and I get the feeling that we will learn some harsh but valuable lessons on what not to do before it’s all done.

And who knows when it will be done? It could take years. And quite frankly, I don’t think the world can last that long like this.

We might have to go back to normal prematurely just to save ourselves from the total collapse of life as we know it.

Won’t that be fun.

More after the break.

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My friend the hamster

My friend Lenny is a hamster who loves to run on his fancy hamster wheel. It’s so fancy, in fact, that it had an odometer on top.

“You do know that you’re not getting anywhere, right? ” I asked one day.

I was getting worried about how much he ran on his wheel, and this was the only way I could think of to express it.

“What? ” he said, little furry feet pumping away.

I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me over the squeaking of the wheel. So I repeated what I said but a little louder, and with emphasis.

“I said, ‘You do know that you’re not getting anywhere, right? ‘.

He stopped abruptly, but the wheel kept going for two or three rotations, causing him to get flipped over several times in a way which was comically humiliating.

He got himself sorted out, stepped out of the wheel, and looked up at me through the fringe of fur that so adorably hung over his eyes. “What do you mean, I’m not getting anywhere? I’ve come a very long way, in fact. ”

“But you’re still right here, in this cage. ” I said.

“No, ” he said impatiently. “I’m 1000 away from where I was before!”

“A thousand what?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Look. ” He came all the way out of his wheel then pointed to the odometer with his nose.

“See that? It says seven thousand. It used to say six thousand. Therefore, I am now one thousand closer to where I am going. ” he said.

“And where are you going?” I said. I was beginning to feel lost. This had all seemed to simple when I started out.

“It doesn’t matter!” he said again, this time with that particular hauteur that you only get when you try to make an impatient person think. “What matters is that I am closer than I have ever been before to getting there?”

“And what will you do when you get there?” I asked. I now had a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach that I usually only get when I am about to do something I will regret.

Of course, that feeling doesn’t actually tell me what that thing is.

“Oh, I don’t know. ” he said offhandedly. “Probably get out and have a good look around. See the sights, take in the air, that sort of thing. ”

“And by get out, you mean open that little door there and leave?” I said while pointing to the door of his cage.

“Well of course. How else would I get out and see the sights? I will open that door and leave. It’s a perfectly normal thing to do. After all, ” he said ” it’s not like I’m a prisoner. ”

And that was it, that was the moment my stomach was warning me about. This was my chance to save myself a lot of guilt and shame.

Part of me really wanted to ask, “Have you ever opened that door before?” Or even, “have you even tried to open that door before?”.

But I didn’t. Because why would I? Why would I crush this little guy’s delusions just because I knew that’s what they were? What possible good could come of my showing my little friend the reality of his situation?

Maybe he needs his delusions. Maybe we all do. Maybe delusions are the only thing keeping a lot of people from falling into a deep dark pit of despair over the general rottenness and evil of the world.

Maybe delusions are the most important things some people have. Maybe they can survive damned near anything as long as they still have their delusions.

Maybe I should just shut up and let Lenny be Lenny.

So that’s what I did. I shoved all those questions and doubts out of my mind, and wished me good friend, whom I love dearly and would never ever hurt, the best of luck on his journey, and told him I was sure he would get where he was going soon.

And left it at that.

Because really…. why try to make Lenny think my way?

Better to just let Lenny be the best Lenny he can be. Something, I am sure, he knows a lot more about than I ever will.

That’s the day I learned it’s better to be wrong and happy than right and miserable.

And those are words I try to live by to this very day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Another day, another bout of having to write in my blog through the fog of bad sleep.

I might give my CPAP machine another try some time soon. Because I am very very sick of waking up feeling like utter crap.

Plus, of course, sleep apnea is very very bad for you. Funnily enough, repeatedly smothering in your sleep has adverse health effects.

But mostly it’s the feeling like crap thing.

If I was capable of being motivated to making changes in my life by mere definite long term dire consequences, I would have a glucometer by now.

Gave that another try last night. Was going to get an Accu-Chek. Got to the end of the process and it was like, “OK, now here’s the PDF of a coupon for you to print out!”.

And I am like, what the actual fuck? What millennium is this again? Who the fuck even has a working printer any more, let alone the inclination to print something out and then mail it in for a rebate?

So, fuck that noise. I will try again soon. I really want to get my blood sugar under control before my skin finally just gives up on me and sloughs off just as both of my feet die and go zombie.

It happens more often than you’d think.

So that’s the plan. Get the glucometer. Keep taking insulin till it gives a happy reading. Repeat at least twice a day after that.

It will probably make me feel a whole hell of a lot better too. It’s entirely possible that a lot of my depression is the result of physical as opposed to mental illness.

It’s depressing to feel terrible all the damned time.

Plus, there’s the whole not dying thing. Which is a plus. I guess.

I mean, I don’t want to die any more. At least, most of the time. And I definitely don’t want to end up in a lot of distress, pain, and unpleasantness. The kind that fucks things up severely my life and cuts me off from what little pleasure I do get.

That’s what would happen if I ended up in the hospital. Unless they let me somehow install my PC in my hospital room.

In which case, what the hell, do whatever you want to me. Just as long as I can go back to playing my games after.

To be honest, in many ways it would be a lifestyle improvement. After all, I would be eating healthfully, my living space would be very clean, someone would be making sure my blood sugar was good, and I would even have clean bedding.

But then again, I have always known I had the potential for Munchausen’s Syndrome. That’s when people do whatever it takes to stay in the hospital because it’s an environment where they feel safe and cared for.

That could totally be me….. if I had my PC. If I didn’t, boredom would definitely drive me to get better ASAP.

I mean, when I was in the hospital for pneumonia, I at least had a tablet on which to play games when I was bored. Between that, crossword puzzles, reading, and the fact that the pneumonia fatigued me enough that I was sleeping 12 hours a day, I was able to get by without the boredom driving me loco.

Wow, I totally forgot to finish this section off earlier. How unlike me.

Well it’s done now!

More (shortly) after the break.

---

I just realized that all of the above could be construed as a very good medical argument for why I should not be allowed to have my PC while in the hospital.

Hope that doesn’t come back to haunt me one day.

“You make an excellent argument, Mister Bertrand, but as you so clearly stated on your blog on March 23rd of this year, ‘ That could totally be me….. if I had my PC. If I didn’t, boredom would definitely drive me to get better ASAP. ‘ Well put, sir. ”

And damn it, I’d be right.

---

Today has been uneventful. Just another day in the life of a strangulated genius who longs to go out and romp in the green grassy fields with the other kiddies but is stuck inside with a never ending flu called “depression”.

I want to be out there. I want to have a life. I want to use my prodigious talents for my own personal gain for once. I want to be a living, breathing, active part of real life instead of always sitting on the sidelines, unnoticed and disconnected. I want to stretch and grow and engage and live and breathe the hot and heady air of freedom.

I’m not supposed to be like this
But it’s okay
I’ll try to find a happy game… to play.

Jesus. Until now, I had no idea the title of that song was “The Wrong Child”.

That hits me right in the feels. I have felt like The Wrong Child for my entire life. Like I wasn’t supposed to be here, I wasn’t supposed to be so broken and weird, I wasn’t supposed to have this much trouble socially, and I definitely wasn’t[ supposed to be taking up resources that could have gone to someone worthwhile.

So while technically I am no Boy in the Bubble like the one in the song, I sure as hell have felt that way.

And when you think of it, there’s really no difference between not being able to go outside because you’re physically sick and if you can’t because you are mentally ill.

It occurs to me just now that there is a whole lot of unfinished childhood in me. A lot of childhood that was supposed to happen but all my issues got in the way, and that still luies within me as developmental potential, just waiting for the signal to grow.

But to try to have a happy childhood when you are 46 years old is such a daunting prospect. I don’t even know where to begin.

But I do know one thing : there is no direct, logical, simple path to it. It’s not that kind of thing at all. It’s the sort of thing that can only come from one’s deep emotional core.

And for me, that means exactly one thing :

I can only get there by dreaming.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The spring is sprung, the grass is riz.

I wonder where the boidie is.

They say the boidie’s on the wing.

But that’s absoid. The wing is on the bird.

anonymous

That Anonymous guy sure writes a lot of stuff. Too bad we don’t know who he is.

I guess we’ll never know.

Another day, another bout of waking up feeling terrible. Got no idea what to write about but that’s never stopped me before.

I suppose I could resume talking about being too adaptable. I kind of went off on a long, long tangent when I tried talking about it yesterday.

A long tangent, but a fruitful one. Got some deep and dirty stuff expressed. That’s bound to be helpful in the long run.

But yeah. I’m too adaptable. Too likely to try to shapeshift my way out of a problem rather than buckling down and facing the damn thing head to head.

And all because adapting is easier. And not just in term of being less effort. It’s easier in that it involve less concentration, less ambition, less focus, less drive, and most importantly of all, less courage.

Also even darker things, like less having to be a real person, less treating myself like I matter, and less having to deal with how badly life has treated me.

But that’s what happens when you don’t stick up for yourself. Life walks all over you.

One of the hidden rules of life on Earth is that you have to put out certain low-level aggressive signals that tell the world “hey, don’t fuck with me” just to avoid abuse. At the very least, you have to be able to convince the two legged predators of the world that you are not one of the sick and scraggly sheep lagging behind the others and they should look elsewhere for easy prey.

And in a less sinister vein, even non-predatory people can end up harming you because they expect people to set and express boundaries that tell them how far they can go and they find these boundaries by testing them.

When you fail to put up those boundaries, they push harder, trying to find them. This works with most people, so it’s not like they are being mean to you.

They just don’t know how to deal with someone as broken as you are.

Take myself, for example. Please. I have no idea how to set boundaries and express them in a positive way. I have boundaries and limitations and things I just won’t do, but I don’t convey them except by, on a good day, raising the alarm when they are violated.

And that’s not good enough. It forces people who love me and don’t want to hurt me to walk on eggshells around me because they literally don’t know what will set me off.

So I want to learn this whole boundary setting thing. But it’s very hard to do when you are so unused to it and didn’t learn it socially as a child like a normal kid does.

And I don’t want to end up hurting the people I love. So it’s slow going.

But I will get there somehow.

And that will go a long long way towards making me feel safe.

More after the break.

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I did the thing

A thing needed to be done, and I did it. Twice, in fact.

Specifically, I tackled the huge amount of garbage piled up all over everything in the kitchen. Threw out two big garbage bags’ worth of stuff and managed to, at long last. prove definitively that there is,. indeed, a counter under there.

This counter is quite filthy at the moment and I would rather not be the one who cleans it because. at this point, there’s so much random crap stuck to the counter that getting rid of it will probably take a chisel or possibly a sand blaster.

But I did the thing. I got things moving. I stepped up to be the spark plug that gets things moving despite all the accumulated stasis and neglect. I invested my own energy in making things better instead of waiting for someone else to do it.

And I plan to do much more to clean this damned place up. There is more garbage to be bagged, included a massive pile of chip bags and other snack bags that. as it turns out,. are in theory, recyclable but need to be washed first, and well that shit’s not gonna happen, so they accumulated.

Pretty soon I am going to say to hell with moth nature and throw them out.

It’s not like anyone is going to feel like washing them all.

And once they are gone, we can start over. Keeping up with the recycling is not that hard. Washing a chip bag or two before setting them aside for future recycling is no big deal and as long as we keep up, it never will be a big deal.

Most of said bags come from me and my purchases, so I will take it upon myself to wash them out when I am done with them.

A quick hot rinse should suffice, I would think. The inside of the bags is slick for obvious reasons, and thus should be quite easy to clean.

And none of this “letting the garbage can under the sink get full to the point it’s overflowing and thus hard to empty” nonsense, either. .

Fill it, tie it, toss it, replace the bag, that’s it, done. If it has to be me that does it, so be it.

What happened today was that I finally got sick enough of the mess that I stopped worrying about hurting Joe’s feelings via the criticism implied by my doing them of his NOT doing these things.

He’ll live. He even thanked me for doing it. So…. so there.

From now on, when something about my environment bothers me, and I have the ability to change or fix it, I shall do so.

Might seem obvious to others but to chronically passive me, it’s a revelation.

Which is sad.

But at least I’m getting better!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

All muzzy headed from bad sleep. All the usual BS going on. Dizziness, disorientation, mental fog, lightheadedness. Bleh.

At least I still have ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) to play.

Otherwise, not a heck of a lot on my mind right now, which is going to make blogging pretty tricky. Well, all I can do is open my mind and see what comes out.

Oh hey, it’s that loonie I lost. So that’s where it went.

The goo in my lungs seems to have become agitated and wants out. This is good news and bad. The good news is that it means my cough is more likely to be “productive” and I will finally be getting rid of the stuff.

The bad news is that before that happy day when my lungs are clear, I am going to be doing a lot of coughing and hacking and hocking and horking and other fun things.

And be “fun” I mean “disgusting, unpleasant and vile”. Ya know. Fun.

Still, I wish there was a respiratory equivalent of sticking my finger down my throat so that I could just get it all out and be done with it.

Been taking my antibiotic, Cephalex, which would make a great name for a world-dominating computer. All hail Cephalex.

A lot of modern antibiotics have a sickly sweet smell like rotting corn to me, and this one has it in spades. It’s not really an unpleasant smell, just a tad cloying, so it doesn’t bother me much. Notable but not important.

Right now, I wish I could just wander off to some place sunny and bucolic. Somewhere with blue skies, green meadows, yellow flowers, and an ambient temperature of about 20 degrees, with a light breeze.

I would find a cozy spot to flop down on my back in the grass and gaze up into the endless blue yonder and let my mind drift without a care in the world.

Just watching my thoughts go by, really.

I know damned well that more time spent outside would do me a lot of good. But my agoraphobia and/or social anxiety makes that impossible.

I could only do it if there was a way to get to a nice park without having to pass through streets filled with people.

Maybe this upcoming summer will be the one where I finally get it together enough to go to the beach at Garry Point Park.

I love the beach. I love being near the water. I find there to be something quite soothing about being near the ocean. It’s like all my stress and pain and fear dissolves in that huge body of water as the heat from the sand bakes the toxins out of me.

Maybe I could give Joe $10 to drop me off and pick me up. At least the first time.

Of course, I would have to be well slathered with sunscreen. Being a latent redhead, I do not tan well.

In fact, generally, I have to burn once, then I can tan.

This kind of sucks. I don’t want to burn. Then again, I don’t want to tan either. I just wanted to enjoy the sunshine and work on my Vitamin D.

There’s always our patio, of course. I could rearrange all the stuff out there and make a little nest of some kind for myself where I can go to get fresh air and a bit of sun.

I could even take naps out there. Might do me a lot of good to sleep in cool fresh air.

But knowing me, I will likely just hide from everything as usual.

But I might not.

More after the break.

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The Reluctant Chameleon

One thing I have been pondering recently is the idea that I am just too adaptable.

Methinks that requireth some explanation.

In life, there are many challenging changes which can be dealt with in one of two ways :

1. You face the challenge head on and defeat it, resisting change, or
2. You simply adapt to the new situation

Both of these can, of course, be the right or wrong response to any given situation.

However, I have always erred on the side of adaptation. If one has the mental and emotional flexibility for it, adaptation is, quite simply, a heck of a lot easier.

And I have always felt a sort of pity for people who lacked that fundamental flexibility and had no choice but to fight what comes along to challenge them because adapting to it was simply not an option.

That always seemed like a terribly stressful way to go through life. Tiring, too.

But like I said, there are times when fighting is the correct response, and as I look back on my life, I can think of many things where I wish I had fought instead of merely assuming fighting would not change the result and adaptation was my only option.

In fight, there are times when fighting definitely would not have changed the result and I still wish I had fought like hell.

There is great value in knowing you did all that you could to stop something bad from happening to you, even if it was utterly futile.

And that’s a truth that did not come to me easily because it’s foreign to my usual strategic pragmatism, which would assert that you evaluate your odds in every situation and if the odds are against you, you give up and conserve your strength and energy for fights you can win

And that’s perfectly logical, but that does not make it correct. To be correct, it would have to conform to reality, and the reality is that life is not a game of chess, and trying to live as though it is might reinforce a certain sense of control (I know it does/did in me), but it ignores a lot of important emotional truths and therefore yields bad results.

And part of the deal with all pragmatism is that there is no such thing as a correct method that yields bad results.

So clearly, there is something very wrong with looking at life as a chess match. It’s another case where the purely logical route yields results that seem right, but feel wrong, and seeing as the point of all this is my happiness, if it doesn’t feel right, then it is wrong, no matter what the logic says.

Felicity has been trying to tell me these things for years but I guess I had to figure them out in my own terms. Sorry, dear.

Now where was I? Oh right, fighting the inevitable.

For instance, I wish I had fought like hell when my parents told us they were taking my brother and me out of college so they could take early retirement.

My mother said that they would only do it if my brother and I agreed to it, and to my eternal chagrin and massive guilt, I agreed to it right away and that made my brother feel like there was no point in him objecting and so I, in a way, doomed us both.

I was a different person back then. I agreed to whatever my parents asked of me. I thought that was my role back then. I was used to sacrificing whatever was needed in order to make life easier for my parents.

Things would go a lot differently now. I would fight like hell. I would tell them they promised all us kids that they would pay for our undergraduate degrees and they had already done it for the two girls and they were damned well going to do it for me and my brother and if that meant not retiring yet, so be it.

Tough it out for another two years, god damn it. You owe it to us.

But no, I just rolled over and told all my friends that I wouldn’t be at UPEI next year like it was no big deal. Later I learned that this lead to my group of friends falling apart.

Turns out I was the glue that held it together. Go fig.

Meanwhile. I was falling apart as well. That was what led directly to my psychological collapse in my early 20s. And while I did eventually manage to drag myself back from being utterly insane, I still haven’t recovered fully from the massive psychological rupture that my parents caused by taking me out of college.

So yes, Mom. That’s exactly why I fell apart and never put myself together again. When you asked me whether you and Dad pulling me out of school was the reason I was such a mess, I said no, but I was wrong. That was exactly the reason I fell apart.

And even after all these years, I still haven’t recovered from it.

Starting to think I never will.

So…. great move there. Mom and Dad.

You broke your kid out of pure selfishness.

And I am the one who has to live with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.