So it looks like civilization will more or less shut down for the next two months.

Like i have said before, the impact on my particular lifestyle will be minimal. Mostly it means that I will not be going out to eat with friends any time soon.

Because not only is Felicity on lockdown out of concern for her elderly parents’ frail health and the resulting high risk from (With Our New Special Ingredient) Covid-19 , but the restaurants themselves are all closing down.

So what used to pass for my social life is pretty much kaput. And I know that is going to start bothering me eventually, and probably by this time next week, I will be going at least a wee bit stir crazy.

Today, on Donahue : Stir Crazy Agoraphobes And The People Who Love Them.

There is also the problem that I will not be leaving the apartment to go out to eat, and therefore I will not have my usual opportunities to do my shopping.

In the long term, I will solve this by putting most of my next cheque’s spendable portion on my reloadable VISA card so I can buy my groceries online.

I imagine a hell of a lot of people will be doing the same thing, though, so it might take a while. I dunno.

Maybe I would be better off just going to and from Pricemart in a cab. I will think this over before then.

I got lots of time, my cheque isn’t showing up till the 25th.

Speaking of Pricemart, I was just there. Joe was nice enough to lend me some money, so I did my usual Sunday amount of shopping on a Friday.

Oh how very.

It wasn’t very crowded. Lots of people with those masks on. That’s going to take a lot of getting used to for me.

For some reason, the sight of people in those masks has this visceral effect on me. Like a kick to the gut. I suppose it’s because I associate those masks with disaster and disease (rightfully so, as it turns out) and so I find the sight of them deeply alarming.

Pricemart happened after my doctor’s appointment today. He took a look at the rash on my back and prescribed me an ointment.

One I will need my roomies’ help to apply, for obvious reasons.

I mean, it’s that or buy a paint roller and pan and apply it that way.

Sign of the times : the waiting room was empty when I showed up for my doctor’s appointment. I guess people are staying home from the doctor too.

Good thing I got my non-psychiatric meds refilled recently. And my therapist will phone in the prescriptions when my psych meds run out at the end of April.

I imagine there’s a lot of phoned in prescriptions these days too. Good thing the pharmacies aren’t shutting down.

I mean, they couln’t. Millions would die.

And I have gotten back into Elder Scrolls Online, a game I can happily play for hours on end with the time flying fast.

Guess that means I must be having fun.

More after the break.

---

Just got back from the front

But not the front…. of the back.

Great, now I have it all back to front.

What I mean to say is that I just finished a rather grueling session of Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) where I had to go all around a dungeon jam packed with enemies (who respawn) and while none of the enemies were particularly hard to beat, after a while the sheer effort of fighting your way around catches up to you.

But I finished it, god damn it. Checked off all the boxes for both of the quests I had that took place in that dungeon then turned the quests in for glory, flame, gold, and XP.

Mostly the gold and XP, come to think of it.

And so now I am legit tired from all the effort. I mean sure, the physical effort was minimal. All I did was move and click the mouse and use the keyboard.

But mentally and psychologically, it was brutal.

In other news, Costco happened today while I was at my doctor’s office. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Joe had no idea we were out of fruit, so he did not get fruit.

That makes this entire meal, and indeed my existence, fruitless.

This is where the control freak part of my mind started nattering on about how this is what happens when you trust people to do things right without you being there, and that I should have told them to wait until after my doctor’s appointment so that I could be there and supervise, and blah blah blah. The usual.

I have some serious fucking trust issues.

In my head, my control freak/trust issues side sounds like a cartoon nagging housewife.

Anyhow, they know we are out of fruit now, and I am sure we will get some soon.

Haven’t tried the lotion (it puts the lotion on its skin) yet. Working up to asking one of my roomies to apply it. Honestly pondering ways I could do it myself.

Social anxiety is a bitch.

Oh, and my dumb ass forgot to eat lunch before we headed out to my doctor’s appointment at 1 pm, and so I ended up not eating until shortly before 3 pm.

I keep doing that to myself. One of these days I am going to push that shit too far and have a blood sugar crash that lands me in the hospital.

Then again, I dunno, it’s not like being in a coma wouldn’t have its upsides. Like the fact that it’s literally impossible to overeat when you’re in a coma and being fed through a tube by nurses.

Just think, I could wake up thin and with perfect blood sugar!

Meh, I could never be that lucky.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sign of the time : I just had my first ever over the phone therapy session.

I wasn’t happy when I heard the message from my therapist that this was how it was going to be for the near future.

I wasn’t surprised either. Everything is going virtual these days. With all this Covid-19 panic in the air, nobody wants to be around strangers any more.

Welcome to my world, humanity.

Anyhow, I wasn’t happy about phone therapy because I get nervous on the phone. All else being equal, me and the phone don’t get along so good. I would much rather communicate with people in text chat or email.

But it wasn’t that big a deal in this case because I have known my therapist for like a decade now, so it was nothing like talking to a stranger.

It still made me nervous, though. I think the problem is that I can’t express myself the way I want to over the phone.

I’m Acadian. We talk with our hands.

When I answered the phone^[1] for today’s session, I had only been awake for about fifteen minutes and hadn’t gotten dressed yet, so technically, I did therapy naked.

And I was so amused by the idea of naked therapy that I pictured it as being this whole “thing” back in the 70’s, complete with the therapist being interviewed by the sensationalist media and saying something about how nude group therapy helps break down the emotional barriers between people by removing the physical barriers that keep up from truly seeing one another, and so forth.

The session started slow, but they always do with me. It always takes me a bit of time to switch to the necessary mode. I’ve gotten better at it over the years, but there are still times when I slip into intellectual discourse or funny storytelling or some other mode where I am entertaining my therapist, not actually doing therapy.

What can I say, I am a mesmerizing raconteur.

In other news, I have decided to get back into Elder Scrolls Online. It’s a great game and the only MMPORPG that I have ever played for more than a few hours.

In fact, according to Steam, I’ve played it for a total of 995 hours and last played it on October 30, 2018.

And I only stopped playing it because I had done pretty much everything in it. Well, everything you could do for free, anyhow.

Now, it’s been long enough that I feel like going back. So I have reinstalled the game, which was a bit of a trial, because the goddamned thing is 75 gigs and took around 20 hours to download.

And I bet when I finally boot up the game, there will be a shitload of updates too.

Still, I look forward to going back and seeing all the old familiar places. And of course, seeing everything that has changed in the last one and half years.

Think I will go check it out now.

More after the break.

---

I fucked up again

And this one’s a classic.

Turns out this was the five week month I knew was lurking out there, waiting to fuck me up. I thought yesterday was check day, but nope.

It’s not till next week.

And the worst part of it is that when I did my little calculation about whether NEXT month was a five week month, I saw that the check day for this month was the 25th, but it didn’t click that this meant my check wasn’t for another week.

I can’t even say that I thought yesterday WAS the 25th, Truth is, I didn’t think about the date at all.

Just shows that you can never be paranoid enough. I thought I was being shrewd and checking for dangers ahead like a smarty pants type like me should, and it turned out that I was looking in the wrong direction entirely.

Le sigh. If I had known it was a five week month, I would have adjusted my spending accordingly. $120/week instead of my usual budget of $150/week.

With such forethought, it’s not that hard to deal with.

Without such forethought, well, let me put it this way : I got 90 cents to my name and a week to go till my next check.

And I might be good at being frugal but I ain’t THAT good.

Luckily. Joe has agreed to lend me money. I am going to borrow $100 from him. Normally that would be insufficient, but Felicity is on full lockdown now due to (The Secret Formula For) Covid-19 and so I get the feeling that I won’t be eating at a restaurant any time soon.

Speaking of which, I took another stab at using my $20 voucher at Foodora again. What inspired me to give it a shot was that I thought maybe I could get around whatever problem I was having by using a different browser.

So I booted up Microsoft Edge, or as it’s known back in the old neighborhood. Internet Explorer. And once more, I came close to victory.

I even overcame a potential barrier when I was selecting the “pay with voucher” option but the “OK” button was below the bottom of the screen (if you know what I mean).

I looked up how to switch screen resolutions for Edge, because it was running at what I am guessing is the right size for tablet use but for the PC everything was HUGE.

Turns out you can’t switch resolutions in Edge. But the answer I read reminded me that I could just hit Ctrl-NumUp to go down a size.

That worked. Victory! But then I clicked the OK button, and it just hung there. Throbber on the screen, going around and around, but never actually completing shit.

So once more, I was thwarted. Damn it. It’s beginning to seem like the gods themselves are working against me.

This, of course, makes me even more determined to make these people give me my fucking free food.

Maybe I will try again Saturday night. I could really use a free meal in place of my usual Saturday night paid-for-in-cash delivery meal.

But I won’t get my hopes up.

Clearly, the wheels of fate are turning against me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Right now, I feel like a spaceship being slowly but inexorably toward the event horizon of an all-devouring black hole.

And I am tempted to point my ship at the center of the thing and press the pedal to the metal so I can get this over with already.

The problem is I am sleepy. Dunno why. It kind of came out of nowhere. I was happily playing Neverwinter Nights (just got back into it) when all of a sudden, a welter of sleepiness rose up from the floor of my consciousness and engulfed.

So right now, I am feeling that particular kind of grumpiness that I get when something is forcing me to be awake when I want to sleep.

In this case, that thing is my need to eat. And blog.

Trying to make a doctor’s appointment on account of this rash on my back. It seems to have spread to cover the entire upper half of my back now.

The itching is annoying but scratching it feels amazingly good. Almost makes it worth it.

Basically, my skin is a nightmare. Lesions, some quite large. Big boil on my neck. A rash all over my back.

It’s a wonder I have an inch of healthy flesh left on me. But give it time, give it time.

The reason is diabetes, I assume. Either primarily or secondarily. Having blood the consistency of tar from high bklood sugar has a tendency to hurt you.

Still haven’t gotten myself a god damned blood sugar meter, aka a glucometer. I at least know that I should ask my pharmacist about it. But that would still involve generating the will and initiative to get dressed and leave the apartment and walk the block to my pharmacy and ask the dude about it.

Maybe sometime soon, but definitely not right now.

I should probably be taking some insulin now and then just on spec, as it were. Assume my blood sugar is high and react accordingly. Kind of taking a shot in the dark.

So to speak

My doctor’s office isn’t answering the phone. I think they’re out to lunch.

I also think they’re getting food somewhere.

Have made a start on finally doing my taxes this year. Starting is always the hardest part. Once I get going, I breeze through without a fuss.

Got to get that sweet $75 they use to bribe ius poor folk to do out taxes wending its way to me to help with this upcoming month’s expenses.

See, I know that next month is a GST cheque month. So my prediction is that it will also be a five week month.

Otherwise, us poor folk might actually get ahead, and we can’t have that.

Actually, I just check it with my date calculator thingy and nope, just the four months.

Hmmm. I am suspicious but open to the possibility.

Wonder what I will buy myself. Probably a AAA video game like Borderlands 3.

What the hell, go with what you know. It’s not like any of the times I thought buying something would magically make me able to be productive, it worked.

So might as well keep myself entertained.

I’m very good at keeping myself entertained.

More after the break.

---

Personality At One Hundred Percent

I have this sort of scenario in my mind – a kind of (non-erotic) fantasy of mine.

Let’s call it the Imaginary Audition.

And in it. I am auditioning for something or other (doesn’t matter what). And I go into it with my personality on blast mode. Turned up to eleven. Shining at one hundred percent intensity, come what may.

Because honestly, if I am going to go to the trouble of auditioning, I am going to go big. Fuck caution and restraint. They are not my strong suits and I would not get very far that way as a result.

And honestly, I can’t imagine a role I would want bad enough to be strategic about this shit. Fuck it. I succeed on my own terms or not at all.

And that’s one of the things that made me want to write this all down. I realized that I value being fully myself more than a lot of other things.

Success is one of those things.

Anyhow, so I am in the audition, and first I crack some jokes in my inimitable cute, funny, and outrageous style. Maybe these are jokes I have written beforehand but probably not. I am better off improvising.

Then, I do my piece. I do the lines I was given, of course, but if a monologue is required, heck, I might improv that too.

I think it’s high time that I started leaping into things with both feet and counting on all my amazing abilities to see me through, don’t you?

Better to be a glorious failure than a mediocre success, in my books.

If a song was required, I know exactly which one I would do.

This one right here :

It filled a lot of people with the urge to defecate. In that it scared the shit out of them.

God, I love it so.

I chose that piece because I know it back to front and back again, and it would show off my versatility because I would, of course, be singing all the parts.

And it’s the sort of thing where there is no such thing as over the top, which would suit my rather high intensity talents.

I could do subtle, nuanced. deeply informed acting. But I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.

I have even written a bit of doggerel to finish off my cavalcade of calamity.

Maybe you want to hug me
Or maybe dismember me
But while you may not hire me
You WILL remember me.
Peace out y’all!

And then I exit to thunderous, riotous applause from everybody, even my rival actors.

Well, I did say this was a fantasy, didn’t I?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Addendum : Proud of myself because I made a doctor’s appointment, did my taxes, and finally got my boil to drain today.

Just wanted to write that down for future historians.

I have been giving further thought to the idea of trying to connect to my latest spiritual and/or intuitive and/or deep emotional self.

Because that’s the only avenue to it I have, I think. The only times in my life when I have felt anything like true spirituality – in the sense of letting my mind enter a state like a waking dream and letting the images come to me without need for explanation or justification – is when I am writing in a free and fluid way.

And I feel like I have been fumbling towards this particular solution for a long time now. It’s just that so far it has mostly come out as prose in this blog.

You know, those long heavily imagistic paragraphs where I go off on one heck of a tangent and essentially write poetry in prose form, usually following the hell out of some metaphor or other as I struggle to express what I need to express.

The next step,then, would be to make the leap into fiction. I remember what it was like when I was writing my experimental NaNoWriMo novel and doing my best to impose no structure or limitations and just let the images flow.

It was amazing.

Didn’t last long – I soon lapsed back into storytelling. Perhaps it was all too intense to maintain for a spiritual neophyte like me, I don’t know.

I suppose that if I was to embark on that journey once more. knowing what I know now, I would last longer. I would resist the urge to fall into story structure and concentrate on staying in that dreamlike state where my mind is open to creating what it needs to heal.

That’s what I mean by “make the art that heals you”. I think a lot of the most powerful works come from a creator using their art to express something deep and complicated and difficult within themselves, and that’s as true for a grand symphony as it is for one of those cheap novels they sell in supermarket checkout lanes.

Because this works are produced in that dreamlike state, they are not bound by waking logic and can, in theory, access our emotional cores directly. And that’s the kind of art that transcends its form and becomes something more that mere media.

And I’d like to make stuff like that. It sounds neat.

So really, it’s just a matter of working up the courage to actually do it now. It’s a scary prospect because I would truly be stepping into the unknown. I would be walking off the brightly lit paths of reason and knowledge into the dark mysterious forest of my mind.

But the answers I need can only be found out there, in the unlit lands. I have taken reason as far as it can go and while it provides answers, it has no solutions.

Not for problems like this, anyhow. Not for the problem of how to grow your soul. Reason can’t tell me how to catch up with my peers emotionally.

In other words, how to grow the fuck up already.

It’s amazing how much maturity you can dodge when you are hyper intelligent.

More after the break.

---

Back after doing Subway with Le Gang.

Shit’s getting real out there, y’all. Everything is being shut down. Pretty soon we will be down to supermarkets and hospitals. Very scary and theatrical.

Of course, for me, it’s just another day at the office. In my little world, this all seems like something that is happening around me but not to me.

Reminds me of what it’s like for the likes of me in a financial crisis. Sure, I feel bad for all the people losing everything they got. But when rock bottom is already your home address, not much is going to change.

I still think this whole thing is an overreaction. Not that I feel any need to try and stop it. I might feel and act like a prophet sometimes, but I ain’t gonna try to fight the tide.

I mean, if the whole herd decides to stampede off a cliff, I’m not going to argue. I’m just going to get the fuck out of the way.

I do worry about the fallout from all this hysteria, though. Mostly the economic fallout. There has got to be some serious motherfucking consequences to shutting down almost everything for an unknown period of time.

But this is what we have to do in order to limit the spread of (Initiate Self Destruct. Password: ) Covid-!9. This shit is a concentrated attack on all the standard operating beliefs of a free and individualistic society and calls on every human on this planet to put aside their selfish and short-sighted self-interest for the common good.

And amazingly enough, it’s working.

Now if only we could get this kind of global panic going about something more important than a not very deadly virus.

Like global warming, for example.

But I suppose global warming is still too abstract and distant and removed for people to feel like it’s a true threat.

That will change. Things will get worse. Eventually, the whole world will be like Australia and there will be no more safe havens and we will have all the political will needed in order to combat the new extreme-weather hellscape – or at least to find the bastards responsible and make them pay.

Because believe me, when things start to go seriously south (and people start going seriously north), people will be out for blood and looking for scapegoats.

And I, for one, will be more than happy to lead the torch wielding mobs right to the doors of the bloated billionaires who doomed the planet in order to keep from losing a tiny percentage of a fortune they could never hope to spend in ten lifetimes.

With great power comes great responsibility, and money is power. Ergo with great money comes great responsibility, and I, for one, will be eager to hold these motherfuckers responsible for what they have done to us AND THEMSELVES.

So track these people, o citizens of the earth. Put them on your GPS. Make sure you know exactly where they are at all times.

That way, when the mobs come, you’ll be there to say “They went thataway. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or, “What am I waiting for? No seriously…. what?”.

Nothing in particular, I suppose. Waiting for life to start. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the starter’s gun. Waiting to be less crazy.

Waiting to finally grow the fuck up.

Waiting for all that frozen fear to go away.

Waiting because I literally have no idea what else I can do. There’s millions of things it seems like I could do but the fear gets in the way. I know lots of things I “could” do to get out of this rut and get ahead, only I can’t do them, because fear.

I’ve pondered going back to school for something more practical than TV writing. Something with computers, like network administration.

It’s hardly my dream job, but it would pay the bills and get me out of this hole I am in and give me the dignity of paid work.

People who have never been long term unemployed have no idea what it does to your self-worth. And that sucks, because low self-worth is a big reason why some seemingly able bodied people stay on the system.

They have lost the ability to believe they can work. Work now seems like an unobtainable higher realm full of people who are infinitely stronger, more worthy, and better than a lowly stinking jobless person.

Anyhow, I could go back to school for something or other. Heck, I could go back to Kwantlen and do the rest of my degree in psychology there.

Would only take me two more years. Yay being able to handle a heavy courseload!

Though honestly…. I could probably do better than Kwantlen. Like…. way, way better. Hell, one of my profs there told me so, which she totally should not have done.

I sure appreciated it, though.

If I went back to school. it would be with the knowledge that I am an academic superstar in mind. Not because I want to brag and make others feel bad but because I want to actually use that to get ahead instead of having it just be this thing about me that I neither exploit and enjoy.

It’s so hard to value something that comes so easily to you, but I am willing to try.

I think I would be more focused, too. And ambitious. I have always just kind of floated through life but if I went back to school, it would be with achievement in mind.

Starting with scholarships and other such things. And then other academic honors. Whatever I can find that suits my talents.

I’ve always been a high achiever without even really trying. Imagine what I might be able to do if I had the raging flames of ambition to fire me up and keep me focused.

I’d also work on making myself more likable and acceptable to my profs. So no more being a slob. I think my slobbiness is a big factor in why my teachers didn’t like me and didn’t want to have to deal with me or even think about me.

So I would make sure to at the bare minimum meet the standards of my peers.

Hmmm. This is seeming like a better and better idea. I think I might be talking myself into doing it.

But where the heck would I go?

More after the break.

---

An Apt Description

A phrase popped into my head yesterday that I thought was particularly apt.

I was (am) an emotional orphan.

Sounds melodramatic but it’s true. For most of my childhood, I was utterly alone in the world. Sure, I had food, shelter, TV, and all the rest of a middle class childhood, but emotionally speaking I had absolutely nobody.

Nobody to talk to. Nobody to confide in. Nobody to offer guidance or help. Nobody to explain life to me. Nobody to hold my hand when I was sad or kiss my boo-boos when I got hurt. Nobody to calm my fears, smooth over my doubts, or soothe my insecurities.

And certainly nobody to ever, ever tell me everything was going to be all right.

So on that level, it was like being an orphan. Neither of my parents were of any use to me. My siblings lived in worlds that did not include me. The teachers at school could barely stand talking to me.

And my fellow students loathed me and wanted me to die.

I am very glad cyberbullying was not a thing back then.

So I was all alone in the world until Grade Six, when I at least managed to make sort of friends with Kevin and Trevor.

They were as likely to abuse me as accept me at any given moment, but at least I was no longer completely alone.

We bonded over heavy metal.

And I feel like I can never even measure the amount of damage that did to me. At a tender age, there was absolutely nothing to fight that inner tide dragging me deeper and deeper into my own mind and so I got in pretty damned deep.

And I mean, can you blame me? What in my life rewarded coming out of my shell? Nothing, that’s what. Reality was something one endured because they had no choice. Contact with it was so painful that it was to be minimized at all costs.

The only thing that made reality worthwhile at all was media. TV shows, books, video games, comics, whatever. That was my “real world” and the rest was just boredom, terror, and misery.

Something vital rotted away in me from that. Like an unused muscle in a bedridden patient, very important emotional machinery atrophied into uselessness.

And it’s still mostly dead.

Here I am, 46 year old superbrain, and the truth is what I really need is kindergarten. That’s how far I would have to go in order to undo all the damage my emotionally orphaned childhood did to me.

Something tells me that is no longer an option.

So here I float in outer space,
A great big brain without a face
Searching for a special place
Where bad childhoods can be erased

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And turning away from the sun.

Feeling much better today, thank goodness. Still kind of sick, but that’s nothing compared to how miserable and scared I was 24 hours ago.

The secret, I think, is that I finally got some decent sleep. I hadn’t gotten much sleep since Friday afternoon, and what sleep I had gotten was of the crappy, shallow, never actually completely asleep kind.

Luckily, at around 4 am, after lying there for about an hour feeling like low level shit, I was able to drift off and get some good deep sleep.

Woke up feeling a lot better. Got up, ate breakfast, went back to bed. So far I have slept around eight hours total.

It also helps, I would imagine, that Joe and Julian went grocery shopping last night and so there is fruit in the house again. Finally. So my nutritional picture is greatly improved. Things were pretty damned bleak there for a while and I think it was affecting me on many levels both obvious and subtle.

So that’s put right for now, at least. We have bread, too.

Right now, I feel okayish. I am still pretty tired, so I expect more sleep will happen. My lungs still feel stiff and gunky inside, and my breathing is somewhat labored as a result. And I feel a tad lightheaded, possibly from the aftereffects of sleep.

But otherwise, I feel pretty good. Heck, I even look forward to the nap I am going to take after I am don Part 1 of the day’s blogging.

And I don’t look forward to nearly anything most of the time. Most of the time, my waking hours are something I ignore and endure and I don’t think about the future at all, if I can help it, because that tends to lead to a shit storm of anxiety and dread.

People say you should just take life one day at a time. Concentrate on making it through that day and forget about the rest.

But that’s what I have been doing and its lead to the stupid and pointless life I lead now. Clearly, just making it through the day is great for people who have jobs and families and relationships and so on, and therefore have life momentum.

But for someone like me, who has languished in the doldrums for decades, just making it through each day isn’t enough. Not any more. I need a sense of purpose, direction, and progress. I need to feel like I am getting somewhere. I need a source of validation. I need affection. I need love and joy and all the rest.

I need a life, basically.

Problem is, I have trouble imagining how I would get one. That is, I can imagine many paths to the destination, but none that I would actually take.

I still have way too much pure, toxic fear in me. The kind that makes it impossible for me to do anything that involves dealing directly with reality. The kind that freezes me in place if I so much as look outside my cage.

The kind that makes me hide in my own shadow by turning away from the sun.

And until I escape my own shadow, nothing else will matter.

More after the break.

---

Resuming : so how do I get rid of all that fear and dread and terror and anxiety and rage and probably a whole lot of other emotions that keep me frozen in place?

I can’t help but wonder if I would know or be able to come up with an answer if I had been raised in some kind of religious or spiritual tradition.

It’s become abundantly clear to me that there are major advantages to having a sort of escape hatch installed into one’s sense of reality. It allows the mind to perform the operations needed to restore its balance without the need for logical justification or indeed, to go through the rational mind at all.

After all, reality might just plain not give us what we need, emotionally speaking, and then the choice is between generating what we need ourselves via said escape hatch or doing without and emotionally starving ourselves for no good reason.

Sometimes, reality ain’t enough.

It gets me thinking about how I never had an imaginary friend as a child. The more I think about it, the more I feel the terrible wrongness of it. There is a reason most children have one at a certain stage of development. It is, in effct, their practice run for religion and all other “escape hatches”. The child’s mind generates the companion they need and said companion is therefore a perfect fit for whatever is missing in the child’s life. And while most people outgrow their imaginary friend, the mental machinery that generated it remains in the mind and can be repurposed for use by religion.

But not for me. I was too logical for that. Too logical for my own good. I knew the friend wasn’t there, just like I knew stuffed animals were not real animals and that there was no Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.

I mean, they weren’t even plausible.

It can be argued, then, that I never had my age of wonder, where everything seems magical and it’s possible to believe that dragons are real and fairies live in your garden and your stuffed animals all have their own personalities, likes, and dislikes.

I skipped that step, or at the very least, I have absolutely no memory of it. As far as I can tell, I never believed in things unseen. From the earliest I can remember, I have been sensible, logical, and very very broken.

I think it’s safe to say those things are related. I guess when I retreated into the icy clarity of my rational mind as a response to being raped, that capacity for self-healing was lost to me forever.

Now the only way I can think of to access it is to write and see what pops up.

I should probably do that more often.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Actually, if it was barren, it would be cleaner.

I have to get this shit off my chest : this apartment is a pig sty. There is garbage everywhere because the garbage can under the sink never, ever gets emptied and has been overflowing for months now. Everything is filthy because nobody ever cleans anything. There’s no room to even put things down because Joe is a hoarder and his hoarded stuff is stacked all over the place. In theory, a third of the living room is mine but there is literally no room for any of my stuff out there. I seriously worry what effect the quality of air in here is having on our health.

The last straw was when Julian got sick. That meant all of us were sick, none of us were even leaving the apartment most of the time, and that meant we just plain stopped getting groceries at all.

So it’s been weeks, coming up on a month, since I’ve had any fresh fruit. Normally, I have a piece with nearly every meal, but that was during the Before Time. And today, I ate out last piece of bread.

No fruit. No bread. I only realized today just how terrible my diet had gotten. I was living off of junk food exclusively. Bread and fruit were my two avenues of actual nutrition.

And yet, I don’t feel like I can complain about any of this because these are all things that I could, in theory, solve myself.

After all, I am physically capable of going to the store and buying some fruit. I am physically capable of cleaning. I can bag the garbage and shove it down the chute.

Psychologically, it’s a whole lot more complicated. I have a lot of issues surrounding feeling totally incompetent and unable to do anything for myself because I suck so very hard at life and I have weird spatial issues and can’t do anything right.

And so forth and so on.

And my roomies know this. It’s why (much to my crushing shame) they have done most of the housework for all the time we have lived together.

But then Joe had his eye surgery and was off work and unable to drive, and somehow that meant no housework got done and we stopped doing Costco or really any other kind of shopping and since then everything has gone to shit.

And I feel so utterly helpless. This is the problem with being so dependent on others. I can’t very well demand that my roomies resume caring for me, something they were doing out of the kindness of their hearts.

And yet, I can’t really fix the problems myself either. I don’t have any money on my card so I can’t order groceries online. My psychological issues (plus not wanting to seem like I am rebuking Joe by doing stuff myself) preclude my cleaning up.

I might just be able to pick up the garbage and stick it down the chute.

But this place would still be filthy, cluttered, and oppressively small for the amount of bullshit Joe insists on keeping around.

It makes me wonder if I would be way healthier living somewhere else. Like maybe get a little bachelor apartment somewhere near a grocery store. Someplace nice and small and therefore easy for me to keep clean on my own.

I am so sick of living in this madness.

There has to be a way out of here.

I just have to find it.

More after the break.

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Hot and bothered

Today has been rough.

Why? Because something weird is going on in my body. I have this headache that keeps coming back and I feel too hot and too cold at the same time and I keep getting this feeling like I am being squeezed gently but firmly by a giant.

The headache is sinus-related (thanks for nothing, Reactine Complete) so I can stop it for a little while via blowing my nose and/or cleaning my ears (that fluid has to come out one way or another), but the rest of this shit is a mystery to me.

And I am worried. Not quite emergency room level worried, but still plenty worried. This is some weird and unpleasant voodoo weirdness and I have no idea WTF is going on.

Is someone holding a doll of me over an open flame somewhere? Sure feels like it.

It might be a reaction to the antibiotic I am taking, Cephalexin (sounds like it has something to do with squid). According to this page, Side effects include :

• diarrhea;
• dizziness, feeling tired;
• headache, joint pain; or
• vaginal itching or discharge.

I have all but one of those.

Nothing about feeling hot as an oven, though. And that plus the squeezed feeling is what is making me miserable right now.

Specifically, it is making it hard to think (damn you, adrenal response) and as I have noted before, a lot of what I do with my day is thinking intensive. so my actions have been somewhat curtailed.

Luckily, there are two things I can almost always do : scroll Facebook, and read.

So now I am rereading All Creatures Great And Small by James Herriot for the first time in a long time but by no means the first time at all.

I adore everything about Herriot’s books, and going back to them is like revisiting an old friend. His books are filled with warmth and wit and wholesome goodness, and reading them makes me feel safe and warm.

So that’s my little refuge in this mad, mad age. James Herriot.

Makes as much sense as anything else, I suppose.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P. S. Couldn’t figure out where to fit this in, so here goes :

Get this. I am around fifty pages away from finishing Dragon Wing by Tracy Hickman and Janet Weis, and I turn the page, and the last fifty pages just…. aren’t there. Instead, there is a reprint of pages 19-60.

What a fucking bummer! I am the victim of a printing error. Now if I want to know how it all ends, I have to buy another copy or just plain pirate it.

Probably the latter, honestly.

Anyhow. goodbye til tomorrow.

Someone has to say it : Covid-19 is no big deal.

Odds are that you will never get it. If you do get, there’s an 80 percent chance that you will experience only mild symptoms or possibly no symptoms at all. If you are in the 20 percent that get more severe symptoms, odds are overwhelmingly in favour of you having a rough time of it but pulling through. And all the people that have died from it were people who were already very sick.

Are you currently very sick? no? Then you have nothing to worry about. Relax.

And yes, this means that the whole world has gone nuts over this thing for no damned reason. 99 percent of the stuff being done by governments and organizations all over the world it completely unnecessary and being done not because of the effect it will have on the virus but because people are falling all over themselves to be seen to be “doing something” about the pandemic, no matter how stupid that something is.

So why all the fuss? My theory is that people simply need something to panic about now and then. A lot of background stress builds up about intangible things like terrible presidents and global warming and once it reaches a critical level, like lightning it discharges by the shortest available path.

When this happens, it creates what sociologists call a “moral panic”. It’s a period when, arguably, everyone goes just a little bit crazy and sincerely and fervently believes things that will be seen as justifiably completely absurd when the panic passes.

This time, it’s (Secret Agent) Covid-19. Other times it was the Satanic Panic of the Eighties or the falderol about “Rainbow Parties” in the Nineties (clearly the product of someone’s sick, sick imagination) or “Vodka tamponing” in the 2000s.

Now just to make things crystal clear : I am not saying the virus is a hoax, or that it’s nothing, or that anyone is lying or being deliberately misleading on the subject.

This goes beyond that. It’s more like a riot, where no one person decides to burn the cop car and yet there it is, on fire. And later, once people have come to their senses, they are at a loss to explain their own actions.

The only things that makes this moral panic different than others is that a) there is a solid kernel of actual science at the center of it all and b) with the ubiquity of the internet, there has never been a time when the resistance to the rapid spread of a moral panic has been lower.

Otherwise, it’s just the same old thing. When the time is right, when the dark fears in people’s minds have built up enough unexpressed energy, when the walls of public reality can no longer hold back the black tides of panic and hysteria, something will emerge to form the tiny nucleus of a vastly disproportion response.

And afterwards, people will move on to the next thing and for a while will forget about all that fuss they were making about something that seemed really important at the time, and once it has lain dormant for a while, people will look back and say “Wow, what were we thinking? Did we really believe all that?”.

And the answer is yes, you did.

But don’t feel bad. You weren’t really yourself at the time.

You were caught in a moral panic.

More after the break.

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So today has been…. fun.

Went to the doctor. Showed him the thing on the back of my neck. He said it was a boil. Never had one of those before.

But I was glad it wasn’t another carbuncle, because the last one damn near killed me.

He gave me a prescription for an antibiotic called Cephalex. Sounds like it would give me psychic powers in a Cronenberg flick.

I will be taking it four times a day till it runs out. So, with meals. Not that it needs to be taken with food. It doesn’t.

That’s just the easiest and most effective way for me to remember to take it four times a a day, more or less evenly spaced out.

I also brought up the latest development, which is that my cold (or whatever it is) came back. I woke up this morning and realized I was having some trouble breathing and my chest felt tight and sort of stiff and I had muscle aches and a headache.

The headache was a sinus headache, but the rest was new.

The doc checked my temperature – dead normal. Well, the high end of normal. actually, come to think of it. 36.6 degrees.

The cutoff for fever is 36.7 degrees. So I almost had a fever. And I have felt too hot all day. But that could be the result of a system wide inflammatory response.

The doc also listening to my lungs – no signs of pneumonia. Good. But he sent me for a chest X-Ray to be absolutely sure.

A chest X-ray is pretty much the gold standard for detecting things like pneumonia.

So we went to Brooke Radiology (also known as Brooke Medical Imaging, which I think sounds way cooler). And I was anticipating a long and alienating experience, just like all the other times I had been there.

But nope. Took a number, it got called around five minutes later. X-ray dude comes ot get me. Dude knew exactly what he was doing.

It was like, “Face this way. Hold your breath. Click. Now face this way. Hold your breath. Click. Okay, we’re done! “

And at no point did I feel pressured or rushed. So the guy’s professional demeanor was on point as well.

At this point, it’s “no news is good news”, I assume. If the X-ray shows a problem, I imagine my doctor’s office will call me.

But if it’s okay, I imagine they…. won’t.

Hmmm. That ended suddenly.

So that’s the health update. I still feel quite sick but I am hopeful.

Oh, one last thing : the doctor wants me to um…. ,manually encourage the boil on my neck to drain.

Not to squeeze it like a zit, but still… he says I will recover way faster if I get that gunk the fuck out of there.

And I can do that. Not looking forward to it, but I can do it.

Gotta psych myself up for it first though.

If anyone needs me, I will be tough-talking to myself in the mirror.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, I couldn’t think of a title.

Just got back from therapy. It went alright. Told him about being pretty depressed for the last few days, maybe more. Feeling all raw and weak and painfully numb. Compared it to having frostbite all over one’s body,

But I suppose people of this region don’t have a lot of lived experience of frostbite.

When I was growing up, frostbite was how you learned where the chinks in your winter armor of sweaters, parkas, scarfs, mittens et al were.

I vividly remember having frostbite in a very precise V shape on my neck from the gap between my scarf and the top of my parka collar.

That was fun.

So I talked about my two recent health scares : the lump on the back of my neck, which I am pretty sure is growing in size and getting hotter, and the fucked up business with my right big toe which I will not go back into because it was hard enough to talk about it with him and I am going to have to talk about it again with my GP tomorrow and in the meantime I don’t want to talk or think about it at all.

One small thing : took a lot at the toe and it seems to be healing nicely. So that’s good.

I feel somewhat better today than I did earlier this week. Perhaps it’s because I got a little sunshine and fresh air today. I dunno.

Plus, 7-11 has this deal where you get a cheddar smokie (which are beef not pork now, apparently) and crinkly cut fries for something like $4.50, and when I got it today, I realized this is the first time I have been able to have a hot dog and fries as a meal since I was a kid and that made me very happy.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that end up meaning oh so much to us.

I remember that when I was living on my own, one of my all time favorite meals was hot dogs and french fries. I would put them both on the cookie tray and baked them together, and when it was time to flip the fries, the hot dogs would be fully cooked and I would set them aside on a plate.

Either that, or I would wait till it was time to flip the fries before adding the hot dogs, and then everything would finish together.

And this meal always made me very happy. And seeing as it was not exactly a nutritious meal, I have to assume that most of that happiness was psychological in origin.

Damn it, I just ate a hot dog and fries and now I am craving it all over again!

It wouldn’t be hard to arrange. Oven fries are cheap. Hot dogs are cheap. I suppose I would have to deal with our oven’s eccentric ways, where in order to get the oven to turn back on after you have opened the door you have to thump it quite firmly.

That is such a pain in the ass, and it’s one of the things that discourages me from getting back into baking,

But maybe some day. Would be nice to have tons of home made baked treats lying around again. And it would save me money because i wouldn’t be buying $10-$12 of Voortman products every week.

Or maybe not. I don’t know.

Nap time! there will be….

More after the break.

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Still in a pretty shitty mood.

Frustrated, angry, restless… the usual. I think the root cause may be a sinus headache I have been wrestling with all day, but I think something bigger is going on as well.

I think something big is moving within me. Some long denied emotions have managed to break the surface of my pool of consciousness and are struggling to find a way to be expressed, and are not going to go away until they are.

I can live with this. My emotions really do need a stronger voice and the ability to bully their way into my consciousness if their needs are not being met.

It’s not pleasant time to be me, to put it mildly. But I know this is all leading somewhere. Something important is struggling to be born, and it’s going to cause me a lot of pain and fear on its way out.

Well, birth is always a bloody and painful affair.

But I believe in transcendence. I believe that from great pain can come great bliss when the transition is completed and the new you is born unto the world. I think that we all have the capacity for transformation. Even stick in the mud rational materialists who lean way too hard on their emotional cutoff switches can be reborn.

It just takes us longer.

And I truly long for rebirth. I long to be fresh and clean and new and healthy and strong. I want to shed this sick and corrupted skin and face the world all pink and wet and new.

And reason sure as fuck isn’t going to get me there. I have to do it all by feel. Luckily, I am getting better at that.

After all, all I basically did last night at comedy was trust my instincts, and it went fantastic. I might just have a natural gift for comedy.

Clearly, I need to go with my gut more often. Think less, feel more, indeed. And the great thing about going with your gut is that even if you fall flat on your face and end up wondering what the fuck you thinking for years to come, it is at least a real experience.

And it’s just occurred to me now how badly I need things that make my world – the real, physical, immediately world I inhabit – feel more real to me

It would go a long way towards making me feel more grounded and less lost.

The world is real. It really is. I know it often doesn’t seem that way to me because I spend all my time in this room, in this chair, ignoring the real world in favour of the one inside my computer and hardly ever feeling the wind, or smelling wild scents, or otherwise letting the real, natural world into my tightly guarded mind space.

But there really is a real world out there, one that won’t go away if I stop paying attention to it, one I can count on to keep being there no matter what.

I just need to find a place to drop my anchor….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling particularly irritable today. Got that “animal in too small a cage” rage going on. I feel frustrated, restless, and pissed off at the world.

Kind of like when I was a teenager. Only with, alas, far less masturbation.

Oh, to have all that effortless vigor again,.I miss Horny Me. We had so much fun.

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh right : grr!

Been going around in circles about the whole “what should I be doing with my life?” issue. Seems like it’s one I can’t resolve.

Part of me wants to blanket forgive myself for any and all lack of life progress, from the distant past to my so called future, on the grounds that I am not at all well and that all society expects from a sickie like me is that I do what I can to get better.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But it ain’t that simple.

Because another part of me rails at the thought of that. It seems too much like giving up, and if I give up on that level, then why the fuck am I even here?

Giving up like that, as sane and smart as it might be, is just not in the cards for me. I have too much restless energy yearning to break free. All that energy has to go somewhere. I can’t just make disappear with the flick of a switch.

Right now, that energy mostly goes to my depression. By that, I mean it thrashes around in its cage and doing a lot of damage to me in the process.

Inasmuch as it is expressed at all, it’s expressed as anxiety and depression. I would be a far healthier man if I could only harness this energy to something productive.

But when I try to gently turn myself towards literally any kind of productive endeavour, that arctic chill blows in and stops me in my tracks, frozen stiff and in great pain.

Clearly, this is my depression pulling yet another dirty rotten trick to keep me from escaping its clutches. And I know this. And it helps.

But like i alluded to yesterday, it’s raw emotion now. I have rid myself of all or most of my destructive thought patterns by sheer force of logic and now I am left with just the naked truth that I am massively wounded inside and trying to to productive things just plain hurts, like trying to put weight on a broken leg.

And yet, the only way out that I can see for myself is to go right ahead and walk on that leg. I have to endure the pain and fear that my depression uses to break my will and just keep going at something – anything – in order to break its hold on me.

But I feel so very weak and tiny inside. Puny, even. I suppose that’s more of depression’s doing, but lately I feel like I am just too tired to fight back and all I really want is to be left alone to suffer in peace.

And yet, I rage against the dying of the light.

Somehow, this duality must resolve itself.

But for now, I need to sleep.

More after the break.

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Well that went well

Went to comedy.

Had perogies and sausage (with sauteed onions) for dinner – dee lishus.

Did my comedy thang. Felt very at home up there. Relaxed, natural. I’d even go so far as to say it felt like this is where I’m meant to be.

And I did quite well, to boot. Lots of laughs. Some people told Felicity and I that we were both great. One lady said she had tears in her eyes from laughing so hard.

Which means…. I did it. I made people happy. Mission accomplished.

And that feels so damned good.

It also reinforces the wisdom of my “take it easy” approach to comedy. I don’t prepare. I write some jokes in the afternoon and then I go do them in the evening. I don’t practice my jokes. I don’t hone them for hours and hours till they are “perfect”.

Fuck that. Perfection is a noble goal but a treacherous destination. You will never get there and within sane limits you will kill yourself trying.

I’m perfectly fine with “good enough”.

Anyhow, my point is that according to all known wisdom, theory, and advice about being a standup comedian , I am doing absolutely everything wrong.

And I don’t give it shit. That’s just par for the course for me. I do best in life when I simply invent my own solutions to common problem rather than trying to do what others do and getting frustrated and upset when it doesn’t work.

And here’s the thing : every possible argument about my doing everything wrong can be countered with two little words : they laughed.

I made the audience laugh. That’s the gig. That’s the job. That’s what I am supposed to do when I am up there with a mic in my hand.

The fact that I can do it without going through the blood, sweat, and tears that other comedians go through is, in an abstract sense, unfair.

But you know what? Talent isn’t fair. And I don’t care. I have done things easily that others find very difficult for my entire life. And I refuse to feel bad about it.

I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I’m just being myself. And that happens to involve showing off and using my bumper crop of talent and intelligence without restraint or inhibition and in doing so, being true to who I really am.

I guess I’ve reached that phase of life when you stop worrying what other people think or how they will react to the real you shining through at last, and you just concentrate on being yourself as hard as you can, and damn the consequences.

Self-actualization transcends other needs, at least when those other needs are met well enough. Being fiercely myself is a new concept to me, but I like it.

Watch out, world…. baby’s gonna shine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.