Took my sleeping pill for the first time in weeks this morning.

Kind of regretting it.

Because right now I am super sleepy and bleary-eyed and in general messed up and it is making this whole blogging thing rather tricky.

Like I am walking into the wind.

This is what happens when I resume taking the damned thing after not taking it for a while.. Suddenly, I am catching up on sleep debt and while that is a lovely thing to have done and I will surely feel a lot better when the process is over, until then, I have a lot of extra thick mental fog to fight through.

Makes me wish I could just stay asleep until the whole thing is over. Just snooze the day away and wake up feeling good.

But of course, it ain’t that easy,. Nothing ever is.

Because I still need to eat and drink and blog. So I have to muddle my way through until I clear said activities and only then will I be free to get back to bed.

Another exotic adventure in the action packed thrill ride that is my life.

God damn is it hard to stay focused right now.

Downloaded a free trial of Corel VideoStudio 2020. Going to give it a shot once I am awake enough to do so.

So glad there’s a free trial. I am pretty fussy about video editors so I need to know if I can live with the thing before I buy it.

I will do my best to adapt to it. I want it to work. I want to go back to making videos via my new webcam and I want to make them look as professional as I can.

And for that task,.no rinky dink Windows Movie Maker is going to cut it.

Think I will break early ’cause I am all out of words.

More after the break.

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Well it’s 7:15 pm and I have gotten a bunch more sleep and I feel a lot more human.

Plus I have a whole bunch of sushi on the way, and that’s always a happy thing.

I guess this means I am at least marginally caught up on sleep. I can feel that there’s still some sleepiness lurking in the background of my mind, and I will probably need to go right back to bed after I eat and finish the day’s blogging, but at the moment I am at least conscious, upright, and able to think.

Half an hour until sushi. Plenty of time.

Wonder how much of my recent depression was caused by lack of good sleep.

Yet another thing I should really be paying more attention to simply out of my own rational self-interest. Oh well, add it to the pile.

But I can see now how badly I have been sleeping lately. I had fallen back into my old pattern of never sleeping more than maybe two hours at a stretch, and that is just plain not enough. It takes longer than that to even reach deep REM sleep, let alone actually spending enough time there to truly recharge.

But it’s a classic frog-boiling question for me because the lack of deep sleep is easily ignored. It builds up slowly over time, and displaces a little more of my conscious mind each time it grows, and so I can get deeply into sleep debt and not even know it.

Well I am catching on now, and as much as I hate sleeping all day, I am on the case now and I can feel how much better I feel now and I want more.

So I will quiet my frustrations at missing the day and just keep on sleeping until I get caught up, even if it takes all of my available time tomorrow, too.

I hope it doesn’t come to that, though. I want to do stuff!

---

Just got some bad news. Joe just informed me that :

1. He’s not feeling very good, and so he doesn’t think he will be up for our usual watching stuff at midnight. Personally, I know that from my own experience that a lot can change in the roughly four hours between now and midnight, but I also know that when I feel really bad, it can be a big relief to have a future social engagement off my mind, and so I understand where he is coming from. I just hope he doesn’t end up regretting it when he feels better later. On the personal level, I don’t like this disruption to my expectations. We all know that I don’t like surprises, especially bummer surprises. But I understand. And…
2. Apparently his laptop can’t handle the latest Zoom update, so he can’t Zoom any more. That’s going to put a real strain on our social life.

Oh well. Sushi’s here. I will be back once I have eaten.

---

Not bad. Ordered udon. First time ordering it for delivery. Apparently they give you the broth separate from the noodles and meat.

Presumably that’s to keep the noodles from getting too squishy. Nobody likes udon noodles that fall apart when you nab them with the chopsticks.

I know I don’t.

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On being around

I recently wrote about my feeling like I did not exist or matter and how that led to a fair bit of irresponsibility on my part.

But I backed off and let myself become distracted by some side points before really getting to the meat of the issue, so here it is :

People miss me when I am not around.

My locking myself away in my world of video games causes real pain to people who love me and care about me and who want to see me.

I owe it to these people to pull my head out of my ass more often and venture out into the world to where these people can see me and hang out with me.

Even if it’s all online.

And that means overpowering all that fear of exposure that has been holding me back and getting used to the idea of voluntarily increasing my social stimulation levels.

---

Woops, spaced on finishing.

You get the idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just spent an hour on my feet waiting in line at my bank so I could cash my cheque.

Now that they have raised the amount for Covid, it’s officially a cheque, not a check.

Anyhow, being on my feet for that long sucks. There’s a reason we fat dudes hate having to stand for a long time. The blood from our oversized bodies pools in our feet because our circulatory systems are not designed for such loads, and that makes our feet swell up and get sore.

Luckily, I have learned to shift my weight around in such a way as to minimize the effect, so it stayed in the sub-agony range, but still. Ouch.

So I am going to look into switching to direct deposit. Fuck this physical cheque bullshit. I’ve already switched to a card based lifestyle. Might as well complete the modernization of my finances by going paperless.

Then again, now that I have a webcam, maybe I can do that freaky thing where you can deposit a check just by sending them a picture of it.

I mean, that’s all that electronic cheque readers do anyhow :scan the cheque and then turn that picture into the relevant information.

But it still seems a little bit like magic to me.

Like…. the money is in my account. And yet, I still have the cheque. The cheque did not actually go anywhere. To the primitive part of our minds, cashing a cheque means exchanging the cheque for money.

How can that have happened if I still have the cheque?

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Let’s talk N-value

This is a concept I have been pondering for a very long time.

One day, I was reading Reader’s Digest (don’t judge me, they have jokes), and it suddenly struck me that people have an inherent sense of how novel or new something is, and this valuation guides a lot of their consumer behaviour.

Let’s call this value N-value, for lack of a better term. Different people have different preferred N-value levels.

For example, some people have a very low tolerance for things that are too new or different. They actively avoid high N-value things, viewing them as “weird” or saying they “haven’t stood the test of time yet” or similar.

Basically, new things scare them.

Another person, however, might be bored by anything with too low an N-value. For them, familiarity truly breeds contempt.

What intrigues me most about this phenomenon, however, is : how do people know? How is it we can tell something’s N-value? How is it that we all have this sense of things yet nobody ever talks about it?

It’s like it’s such an integral part of our social perception that we don’t even know it’s happening. Fish don’t know they’re wet.

And despite the fact that it happened on a level too deep and primitive for us to even perceive, it also must include dozens of intricate calculations based on countless variables like what we have heard about the thing, how long ago we first heard about it, what sorts of people we associate with the thing, and many many more.

This subject has been on my mind in particular lately because I am reaching an age where my normally near-unlimited N-value tolerance has been compromised by the ravages of time to the point where, for the first time in my life, I find myself thinking, “What the hell is that? God, another new thing for me to learn?”.

Not too hard to see how that will be “Too new. Forget about it. ” before too long.

More after the break.

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Boiling that frog

We’ve all heard the bit about how a frog will jump out of boiling water instantly but if you raise the temperate of the water slowly, the frog will sit there and calmly boil to death.

Poor little froggo.

Luckily, in the real world, this is not true. What happens with both people and frogs is that once the water gets to a dangerous temperature, the pain it’s causing will cross the sensory threshold and the individual will feel like “suddenly” the water is way too hot and get the fuck out of the pot.

But metaphorically speaking, it has merit. And I should know, because I am one piping hot frog right now.

The thing about my health issues – some of which are quite dire – is that they are easy to ignore. They don’t hurt. They don’t impair my actions. They don’t make me feel sick.

They just slowly kill me over time. In essence, they frogboil me.

So I feel like I am in a house that is very slowly burning down. Intellectually, I know the house is burning down and that if I don’t do something about it soon, the house will fall down on top of me and I will die.

But the emotion is missing. I know the danger, but I don’t feel it. I look around and nothing seems wrong. I am living my same sad little life. I still waste time playing video games all the goddamned time. I eat, I socialize, I sleep, I poop.

Sure, there’s a hell of a lot going on in my head, but in the extra-cranial universe, my life is the same as it has been for over a decade.

So where’s the fire? There is nothing to goad me into action. Not even the sores on my fucking legs are enough to get me to focus on the here and now and get things done.

Clearly, by default. I am just waiting for something really bad to happen. Something painful and scary and impossible to ignore. The sort of thing you call 911 over.

It’s not like I want something like that to happen. But clearly that is what it is going to take to get me to really take care of myself.

Or more likely, to end up having other people take care of me in a hospital and then back home with far less health and mobility than before.

And who knows, I might take care of myself then…. if they assign someone to check up on me on a regular basis.

Because clearly, if it’s all up to me, I’m fucked.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the therapy thing today.

As I’d planned, I started off by saying “I suppose I should explain why Joe tried to strangle me… “. As I predicted, he laughed.

I figured there was a 75 percent chance he’d laugh and 25 percent he’d be shocked and say something like “Oh my god, what happened?”.

What can I say, I could not resist milking my story for dramatic effect.

So I told him about the argument and my role in its escalation to violence. As I was explaining it, it also occurred to me that I think my recent journey to try and unlock my id and learn to assert myself properly played a role.

As I slowly integrate my missing id into my psyche, I am bound to go too far with anger once or twice because my usual way of controlling my temper, namely utter annihilation of emotion, is hopefully going to stop working.

I mentioned how I demand iron self control of myself and how I thought that wasn’t healthy and people need to let go now and then.

I think that, being a product of Western civilization, he misinterpreted that as my saying :I should be able to take my rage out at people whenever I feel like it now”, which of course is a million miles from the truth.

What I was saying is that any healthy psyche needs some time where the grasp of the ego and superego is relaxed and you can just be yourself, au naturel.

With my disconnected id, I never get that. There is never a time where I can let my metaphorical hair down. I never get a chance to totally relax.

My inner child never gets to go outside and play with the other kids.

And that is a serious problem. No wonder I am so damned miserable. I never get to just be me, the person I am outside all the rules and strictures I impose upon myself.

Gonna work on that. Somehow.

I dunno, it’s a very hard thing to grapple with. Deep within my psyche is the belief, borne of a difficult childhood, that all these strictures keep me safe. And that to open that door even a teeny tiny bit would lead to total anarchy, chaos, and doom.

Doom, I tell ya!

Of course, that’s total madness. Logically, I could probably get rid of like 90 percent of the fascist inner laws I live by and not only survive it but be way better off.

So sure, it’s crazy. So am I. That is the hand I have been dealt by life. I have irrational, delusional beliefs. All the rationality and clarity in the world won’t make them go away.

I can’t out-think them. I know they are irrational and delusional.

I can only out-feel them by digging deep to find the unprocessed emotions that underlie them and do my best to release them by feeling them.

If I felt safe and secure, my inner fascist regime would collapse.

And dawn could finally come to my gloomy little realm.

More after the break

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Trapped in amber

I’ve been feeling rather…. stuck lately.

Like I am powerless to change anything. Like I have no agency. Like no matter what I intend to do, want to do, or hope to do, my life will stay exactly the same.

Blood sugar is still sky high. I assume. I haven’t been able to get a reading lately, but it stands to reason.

Why it can’t reason sitting down I’ll never know.

I have all the tools I need to get my blood sugar under control. Well, all except the actual focus, will, and determination it takes to actually do it.

The bullshit with my glucometer has really taken the wind out of my sails, and they never had much wind to start with. It doesn’t take much to discourage a depressive and the fact that half the timeI just get errors instead of results is more than enough to put the activity back behind the same wall of impotence that keeps me from doing all the other things I “should” and “could”.do.

So I guess I’ll just die.

I see the freight train coming but I just can’t get my shit together enough to get out of the way. And afterward, people will be saying, “I don’t understand. Why didn’t he just get out of the way? Wasn’t impending death motivation enough?”.

Hell no. Not when there’s a part of you that wants to die, or at the very least, that wants to have all the decisions taken away from you so you don’t have to face life any more.

I cannot choose
And so I lose
I cannot even choose to lose

The weird pains in my legs and feet are getting worse. Guess I won’t have them much longer. I will miss them when they are gone.

I’ll probably want to kick myself for not doing everything I could to keep them, but that’s kind of hard to do without feet.

At least I’ll lose weight.

I feel surrounded.

Like everywhere I look, I see danger, and there is no safe or sane course.

I feel like with every move I make, the ropes that bind me twist tighter and cut off more of my circulation. I am slowly being crushed to death and I can’t escape.

In short, I am really fucking depressed.

And I really wish I could just give up already. Go to some strong caring authority and tell them I couldn’t make it on the outside and have them put me somewhere where I can’t hurt myself and they take care of my health for me and all I have to do is do what I am told and everything will be okay.

Because I sure as hell don’t feel like I am making it. I feel like I am drowning under a tidal wave of my own incompetence and it’s anyone’s guess whether I will escape before I run out of air or just die and am forgotten at the bottom of the sea.

And now I am going to go hide in sleep a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well,in color, anyhow.

Hmmm. So that’s what I look like. I seem nice.

So yup, I have a working webcam once again. Which means I can make videos again, and I plan to do that very thing.

Sorry about the rough bits in the above video. I don’t currently have a working video editor, so I couldn’t edit them out.

I will fix that shortly.

My beloved (formerly Ulead, currently Corel) Video Studio is currently broken. Sad emoji. I looked up what the latest version would cost me.

Around $80 CDN, as it turns out. Ouch. Then again, I would then have a legit copy of the latest hotness and that could be seen as an investment in my future as a YouTube star of some sort.

Probably as a take no prisoners firebrand commenter, to be honest. There’s other directions I could go but that is the one that is calling to me.

I want to hit the YouTube political pundit scene like a motherfucking meteor strike, and lay waste to a lot of horrible ideas and toxic beliefs. I want to deny shelter to odious opinions. I want to wake the shame in the shameless and force thought upon the thoughtless and make all those iron hearts feel again.

And if that happens to also make me some money, that would be nice.

I particularly want to kick some right wing ass. There is a lot of bullshit floating around that calls for my cleansing fire to destroy and purify it. So much that needs to be said that only I (as far as I know) can say.

I know that sounds crazy. But it’s also true. I know that I could make a mighty big contribution to public discourse if I just got out there where people can hear me.

That’s always the tricky part, isn’t it? I know that I can make high quality content of many different sorts.

It’s getting people to notice it that has stymied me in the past. And not just because I am one lone voice in a world full of billions of others also trying to get people’s attention.

It’s actually mostly because I have to fight my own strong urge to remain hidden and not attract attention to myself. My heart equates hiding with safety and exposure with death, and so no matter how badly part of me wants to leap onto the world stage and shout “Huzzah!”, another part of me really, really, really doesn’t.

What I need is an agent. Someone who can do the bulk of the promoting for me. Or at least someone to break the deadlock of fear in my mind that keeps me frozen in place when I so much as contemplate exposing myself to the world.

You know what I mean.

But I know that somewhere inside of me there is a crazy wacky attention loving ham that forgets all fear in his zeal to make the world love him.

I just have to find him and finally let him out of his cage.

More after the break.

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I’ll deal with that later

Like hell I will.

I’ve become more aware of how I freeze and store emotions that I don’t want to deal with. Recently, something (doesn’t matter what) provoked a surge of anxiety in me, and I very distinctly felt myself hit pause on the anxiety and then change the channel.

In fact, the image that occurred to me at the time was of some kind of missile launching system, like maybe the torpedo tubes of a modern sub. It was like I shoved the anxiety into a torpedo casing then hit the button to shunt that torpedo to the side and load a new, non anxious torpedo.

Not sure that image was worth the effort. Oh well, moving on.

This emotional procrastination of which I speak is quite deadly when it becomes your primary response to any kind of negative motion.

Sure, it seems like you made the emotion go away. But it’s still there. It’s just frozen. And the more and more frozen emotions you accumulate, the colder and more numb you get as a result.

Eventually, that cold numb feeling gets so strong that it turns into depression. You are far too numb to feel any kind of pleasure or joy from anything except things with an extremely high reward per effort value, you can’t feel the love and connection with other human beings that all humans need any more, and the lack of reward in your life convinces you that you must be a very, very bad person.

All because of this pattern of abusing your emotional cutoff switch.

Now I am not claiming this is something you, or I, can just stop doing. For one thing, it happens so quickly and at such a deep level of consciousness that attempting to stop yourself from doing it as it happens is like trying to quit blinking forever.

It requires a subtler solution.

I think the key is raising your tolerance for negative emotions. The root of the problem is that instead of simply enduring the negative emotions, you shunt them out of your consciousness and put them in cold storage.

Nested within that is the tendency to respond to negative emotions as emergencies that must be ended immediately, regardless of the cost.

This is understandable in those of us who have had traumatic events in our lives that created such enormous negative emotions that they threatened our very sanity.

But at some point, you have to start feeling all the things you have put off for so long.

That is more or less what therapy is about. Taking out those old emotions and feeling them in a safe environment is the only way to actually be rid of them and reduce the numbing chill inside so you can start to feel the world again.

I still find it hard to be something to do deliberately and directly, though. My mind is too good at hiding all the nasty stuff it had stored away from my conscious mind.

So I need help. Help from my therapist, and help from the wonderful person currently reading these words.

Without you, I couldn’t do this. I have to know that my words will be received or I just can’t even begin to write them down.

So in case I haven’t said it lately : I love you all. And you are helping me so much.

I will talk to you nice, wonderful, patient, understanding people again tomorrow.

Well, Joe just tried to throttle me.

But I had it coming.

I was pushing his buttons. I did not mean to do it, but I was.

It’s made me realize that I needle people without consciously meaning to do so. You would think that my arguments with my sister from long ago would have taught me that lesson, but apparently I forgot.

In my stupid ignorant head, all I am doing is defending my position. I tend to forget that other people are (a) way more emotionally involved in that kind of thing than I am, because (b) they don’t have my kind of skill with argument, ergo (c) from their point of view, I am torturing and tormenting them for no good reason.

We were arguing about my plan to save the world, and that is my only explanation (not an excuse) as to why I took it as far as I did and pushed back as hard as I did, and I said a lot of insulting things that I wish I could take back because they were not fair and not the sort of thing one says to someone they love.

Some of those insulting things were true. But that doesn’t matter.

I will, of course, be apologizing profusely to Joe. I let thing gets way out of hand. Part of me knew how angry he was getting with me and again, from my battles with my sister, I should have known that absolutely no argument matters enough to keep going when one person is clearly in a lot of pain, but I was defending my thesis and so I kept on going to the point where Joe tried to strangle me.

I mean, not seriously. It was an outpouring of extreme rage, not a murder attempt.

I am especially ashamed of interrupting him a ton of times. That’s not cool even when everyone is calm. It’s even worse when they are not.

---

Maybe i shouldn’t be writing this down, but this is how I process things.

Well, he just came in and apologized to me and I started to apologize to him and he,…. broke down crying. Huge wracking sobs that shook his whole body. Maximum tears.

And he told me how he has been doing so much for so long and how he knows I can’t help it but doing all the housework and taking on all the responsibility has been stressing him out for a really long time and that the rent went up and is now freaking $490/month each so my $500/month means I have only been contributing like $10/month towards food and bills he’s been paying the rest and how all of this is why he’s been unable to work for a long time because he’s been too damned depressed.

And yeah, he could have told me about the rent thing and a lot of other stuff before it got this bad, but like I have said, I know that I am not, in fact, easy to talk to, and so I understand why he kept it all bottled up instead.

And the pain of the guilt from having caused him all this pain without knowing it is god damned killing me. It’s like a long cold blade through my heart and all I can do is keep pushing the blade through a little at a time until it pops out the other side.

It kills me to see this man I love and owe so much to in so much pain. I feel like such an asshole for being such a dick to him earlier. I wish I had never brought up my goddamned plan, or at least that I had recognized how mad he was getting and did the right thing by hitting CTRL-C on the whole conversation before things went critical.

I held him as he cried and I apologized to him and told him it was okay and that I would be paying $600/month from now on and I would learn to do more of the housework as long as he was willing to teach me and that I was so, so, so sorry that he had suffered so much for so long.

I’m going to have to handle this guilt with care because while I believe it to be deserved, I can’t afford to let my depression take hold of it and run with it because if I did, I would become suicidal pretty fast.

In fact, I feel like I am keeping those suicidal thoughts away by force of will alone.

This will pass, so don’t worry. I am not in danger. I can hold myself together until I have calmed down enough to remember that I won’t always feel like this.

I am having my own good cry now, and that’s always a good thing.

And in the unlikely event that I start feeling even worse and start pondering self-harm, all I have to do is imagine how bad my hurting myself would make Joe feel and that alone would keep me from doing anything.

Sometimes, the thought of how much my suicide would hurt others has been the only thing that kept me from doing it.

Whatever works, man. I am glad I am still here. Even now, I am glad I am still here.

Eventually, I will sleep. Might have to take my sleeping pill (just one…). Might just collapse out of sheer emotional exhaustion once the adrenaline wears off.

But one thing is for certain : I will dance with my demons, and kiss them too. I will reach out a hand to the ghost that haunts me. I will swallow the pill that makes me ill. I will drive that icy dagger straight through my heart and give it a twist.

But none of it will defeat me.

And when dawn finally comes, I will greet it with open arms and a smile.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have that haunted feeling today.

It’s hard to explain.I feel both spooky and spooked. Kind of like I am not really here, but also kind of like I am here twice, like I am a ghost haunting my own body.

It’s like my soul is not quite as firmly attached to my body as usual. Like it wants to go roaming around the astral plane without all this sick and tortured flesh to drag around.

Or maybe I just need to go for a walk. I dunno.

Oh, and here’s my plan to save the world :

You can’t get Covid-19 twice.

Once you have it and get over it, you’re immune.

There is no reason for people who are immune to suffer the same restrictions as everyone else as the immune can’t spread the disease.

Ergo, what we need is a way to publicly identify those who are immune and use them as the front line essential workers who deal with the public.

I propose a system where the government sets up rigorous standards for testing people and certifying that they both do not have the virus and that they have the antibodies to fight the virus.

These people would then be declared “cleared” and that would qualify them for various up front jobs (assuming they are otherwise qualified).

It would also free them from some of the restrictions of this era. There is no need for a cleared person to wear a mask in public, or stay at home. They could also congregate in public freely.

They’re immune. It’s like they already have the vaccine.

Unfortunately, the certification as clear would not be free. The sad truth is that if you want a lot of something done fast, it has to be profitable.

Once the program has a proven track record, governments might start paying for the testing as a way to get the economy going.

Businesses might also pay for it for their employees so they can re-open with all cleared staff.

If this program really caught on, the world could go back to normal almost as fast as it shut down. Testing businesses would make a lot of money, people would go back to work, and we can all go back to living our lives.

Plus, when the vaccine finally does arrive, we can make sure it only goes to people who need it because we have this vast database of people who don’t.

So there you have it. Test people, clear them as immune, let them go back to work, and we can have this problem licked within a month.

Doesn’t that sound good?

me, just now

Wrote that and posted it to the blogging site Vocal, which claims that it pays bloggers based on how many views their blog entries get,

Who knows, if that article makes even a tiny bit of money, I might migrate this blog to it.

Either that, or I will start a totally new thing there.

I dunno though. Then I would feel pressure to write to please an audience as opposed to just venting my thoughts,.

Or I could be a radical outside the box indie writer who writes from the heart and the balls and who would never compromise his integrity or his commitment to speaking truth to power by catering to the lowest common denominator.

People love that kind of thing.

More after the break,.

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Because I feel like it

I thought of this topic, judged it to be a good one, formed the intent to write about it, did a bunch of of stuff, forgot the topic entirely, decided to write about something else, then when thinking about the other thing stumbled upon the topic again.

Just felt like sharing that bit of my process.

The real topic is doing things for emotional reasons.

I need to do more of that.

But that’s not as easy as it is simple. All my life, I have attacked life with the power of my big bad boss of a brain. Whatever it was, I would apply my mighty mental muscles to it and conquer it via logical analysis, complex reasoning, and brute brain force.

And that shit is powerful. So powerful, in fact, that it’s very easy to fall into the pattern of using that big ol hammer for every nail you see.

And when your hammer is that big, all you see is nails.

But there is so much more to life than that. And so many problems that simply cannot be solved that way.

Especially the personal, emotional kinds of problems. Like depression.

There is no magic formula for me to figure. No equation to solve. No clever solution that shows out how gawrsh darn smart I am.

It’s not that kind of problem.

The only way to “solve” depression is to go into the deep dark forest of emotion and feel my way through it.

I have known this for a while, but I feel like it’s only recently that I have truly started doing it. And it is, of course, very slow going at first because I am walking blind.

I am extremely unused to emotional reasoning of any form. I have been dazzled by my own brilliance for so long that it’s going to take a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Right now, I have no idea what I am doing.

And that’s fine. It’s perfectly okay to not consciously understand what is going on, where I am going next, or what is going to happen to me.

It doesn’t need to be a panic inducing thing. I can just sit here in the dark, not moving, staying calming, knowing that I am safe here too.

And who knows what I will see once more inner eye dilates? Fantastic beasts and wizard’s towers? Demons and darkness and the living dead? Vintage ads for Doritos starring Jay Leno from back when I didn’t hate him for what he did to Conan?

I hated him because he was just really fucking irritating?

Time alone can tell. That inner realm of my emotional core has been cloaked in darkness and denied a voice for a very long time. It’s still quite young.

I look forward to helping it grow up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So far so good!

Best glucometer reading so far : 14.3! So I am getting there.

Why, that’s barely in the “call 911 you fool!” range.

But I am still having trouble getting myself to bleed. I am beginning to think that there must be something wrong with my technique. Like I am pressing the clicker to my finger too hard, or I am subconsciously twitching away from it, or something.

Luckily, I have been looking into Alternate Site Testing, which is using the clicker on parts other than the dense nerve clusters on your fingertips in order to get the blood to test, and so far the results are encouraging.

According to what I have gleaned from this website, it seems like the only reason they have been making us poor diabetics lance our fingertips for all these years is that there are a lot of blood vessels close to the surface there, and thus they are good spots for reliably drawing blood.

In other words, the important thing is to get the blood. Where it comes from on the body is not important. It’s not like blood from the fingertips is somehow special and the only possible source of accurate readings.

So fuck this fingertip bullshit. I am going to try the clicker on other parts of my body to see if I can get blood from some place way less sensitive.

Hell, I could pick at the sores on my legs to get the blood. In theory, at least.

Unfortunately, I’ve had to call a ceasefire in my war against my blood sugar because I seem to have misplaced my insulin injector pen.

Figures, dunnit? Two steps forward, one step sideways into a pothole that makes your twist your ankle before you fall down onto the street and get run over.

i can’t get my blood sugar down fast enough considering my symptoms. I get all these weird aches and pains all over my body, especially my legs and feet. Sometimes it feels like my muscles have turned to stone.

But of course, that’s impossible. I hope.

More likely, neuropathy is causing the nerves in the muscles to get stuck in the “on” position, meaning they tense up all the way and then stay that way,.

If so, that’s pretty damned bad. I hope it’s reversible, but it might not be. Nerve damage often isn’t. And so it might be that the best thing I can hope for is to keep things from getting even worse.

But there’s no sense in beating myself up for not taking this shit seriously earlier. Absolutely no good can come of it. I can’t change the past, only the future. And hating on myself for being too depressed to take care of myself properly is a sure fire way to ensure I stay that way.

Instead, I am going to concentrate on my goal of feeling better. That is something I can work towards as a simple, pleasant, hedonistic goal.

And I want it so bad I can taste it.

More after the break.

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How to live

That’s what I am trying to figure out lately.

How to be me. How to go about this thing called life. It’s like I am trying on various sets of clothing to see what fits me best before going out into the world.

Only the clothes are more like….. attitudes towards life? Something like that. Ways to approach life. I really need to negotiate some kind of deal with life where I get more of what I want in return for things I either have in abundance or can live without.

I know that there has to be some sacrifice. In some way and on some level, I will have to leave the fetid embrace of my mucky little bolthole and go out into the big bad scary world in order to find a better life for myself.

After all, in order to be truly free, you have to give up a little part of yourself.

I also know that if I want to become more robust and durable and thus more able to take on that big bad world, I have to build slowly to keep from becoming overwhelmed by it all and end up running back to my hidey hole and burying myself deep again.

Between those two demands – sacrifice and sustainability – hangs the current tightrope. I am gingerly exploring the space around my tiny comfort zone, looking for a bridge to the next step short enough to be crossed in baby steps.

Okay, even for me, that was a clusterfuck of metaphors.

My point is that I am looking for a way forward that I can actually do. I am through with looking across the chasm at the things that “should” work and all the things I “could” do and feeling terrible because none of them are doable for me.

There is no more “should” or “could”. There is only that which works for me and that which does not, and the first qualification for whether something works for me or not is whether I feel like I can do it.

If it seems impossible to me, then the gap is too large and I need to try something else. It doesn’t matter whether “realistically” or “logically” there is “no reason” why I can’t do it, all that matters is whether it feels possible enough for me to at least try.

And if I try something and it doesn’t work out, no judgment. Again, nothing “should” work. Should doesn’t mean shit.

It works or it doesn’t. Do or do not. Above all, pragmatism.

Somewhere out there in the n-space of my possibilities lies a path I can take to get to where I want to go in life.

It might not look anything like other people’s paths. And it might not make a lick of sense to anyone, not even me.

It might, in fact, be utterly baffling to my usual logical mind.

But if it feels right, nothing else matters. I will follow that path no matter where it leads.

I have blind at heart for far too long.

Time to learn how to see.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Alright, time to get into it.

What, exactly, are my odds of psychological recovery? Will I ever get better?

Well to start off, depression has no cure. So that’s not going to happen. It can go into remission and you can be symptom free for a long time, but it will always be there.

But that’s not what I am getting at. What I really want to know is if I will ever escape this tiny prison of emotional isolation that I have been in since I was raped when I was 4,.

And that’s a very tricky question, not the least because the brain I am using to try to figure it out is compromised by the very mental illness I am trying to escape.

So in order to get any kind of decent, workable answer, I have to fight the voice inside me that wants to declare myself incurable so it can revel in my despair.

No, that makes it sound too demonic. The truth is that I would be the one reveling my my own despair.

Because the sick truth is that there is a great release of tension when you give up all hope. It provides a strong hit of that sweet relief that is the reward for failure.

And it’s addiction to that reward that makes someone a loser.

Back to the thorny question of prognosis. Despair addiction aside, it’s a very tricky question because there are a lot of complicated and difficult factors involved.

For example, my physical health. It’s bad. Very bad. And that has a very strong effect on my mood. I tend to think of the two sides of my health as being separate and distinct but that is garbage thinking.

If I want to feel better, it would be helpful if I didn’t have blood sugar so high my blood tastes good on waffles and I didn’t smother in my sleep over and over.

Radical idea, I know.

In fact, I think that will be my rallying cry going into the future : FEEL BETTER. I want to feel better. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired all the goddamned time.

Forget all the high level enlightened self interest things that should motivate me to do what it takes to, ya know, not die. They clearly do not work. They are not enough.

I just want to stop being in pain. I want to be able to relax in my own skin. I want to feel good for a change.

I want to stop feeling so god damned toxic.

That seems fairly doable to me. It is a direct and immediate goal that I can picture in my mind and work towards.

Just imagine how good it will feel to finally feel healthy again. How glorious it will be to finally lay my wounded burden down and walk strong and tall and free.

That’s the kind of relief that I should be looking for, not the loser relief of giving up.

Hmmm. Well, I didn’t reach a prognosis, but I think I did myself good anyhow.

Maybe I will try again later.

More after the break.

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My diabetic dilemmas

Or should that be dilemmae?

I swear, I had it going on I tackled my high blood sugar systemically this afternoon. Test, still too high, take 60 units of insulin, try again an hour later.

Even got some exercise in too. And while there is definitely a limit to how many pushouts I can do, I ended up doing twice as many “crosses” (aka crossing the room once) with my pacing as I had planned to do.

So bravo to me there.

Even better, towards the end I was really feeling the tension leaving my muscles as I gave them something to do. I had a wonderful sensation of the pain draining away from me as the exercise depleted the excess energy in my bloodstream.

Which was kind of the idea.

So I was going great guns there. But every time I testing my blood sugar, it seemed to get harder to get a decent reading.

For one thing, I kept having to dial the tissue depth up on my little clicker (the thing that does the poking with the lancet) in order to get any blood to come out.

And that makes no sense. It’s like my blood vessels were getting further away from the surface in reaction to the poking.

Either that, or I am like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable and this is how I find out I have superpowers. In which case I am totally going the Spider-Man route and making a bundle as a showman with my gifts.

But don’t worry – I don’t even have an Uncle Ben,

More seriously (boo!), it might be that I am flinching at the last second. At least, I hope that it’s something like that, because I have the tissue depth dialed up to the max now and I am barely getting a tiny bead of blood.

I think I might be developing an immunity. To lancets.

And the worst time was the last time because I couldn’t get a reading at all. I went through the whole palaver over and over again : insert the lancet in the click, twist off the cap, get a test strip out of the film canister they come in (not easy because they are tiny and light and I have nerve damage in my fingers from my – you guessed it – diabetes) and insert it in the reader, prick my finger (do I not bleed?) and bring test strip and blood together so the magic can happen.

But instead of a reading, I just got “Er4” over and over. Time to look at the manual. Oh, how helpful, apparently that can mean like five different things, all of which boil down to “something went wrong with the test strip, I guess?”.

So for now, I have given up. I took another 60 units of insulin on spec and I will try to get a reading later to see where I am.

The last reading I took was 17.1, which is terrible, but (sigh) also a big improvement.

I am determined to beat this goddamned thing. Now it’s personal. The more it defies me, the more determined I am to make it do what it is supposed to do.

No, YOU have some serious fucking issues.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Look, this isn’t rocket science here.

Money is power. Everyone knows this, although for some strange reason, a lot of people get uncomfortable when you talk about it.

Money is power, and power corrupts, ergo money corrupts. That explains practically all class struggle right there.The more money someone has, the more corrupt they become, and there you have the scientifically proven fact that wealth and power – even if they are ill-gotten and the person did nothing to earn it and very blatantly had a huge unfair advantage to start with – money and power lead to worse moral behaviour.

Ergo, the concentration of wealth leads to people simultaneously gaining more power while becoming less worthy of wielding it.

For that reason alone, any sane civilization would ban the accumulation of wealth.

But wait, there’s more. The biggest threat to individual freedom is individual power. Freedom requires equality. If any citizen becomes far more powerful than the others, they can use that power to force the others to do what they want, and that, you may recognize, is the opposite of freedom.

Another reason any sane civilization would ban the accumulation of wealth.

Then there’s the effect it has on the rule of law. Everybody knows that rich people have fancy lawyers that can get them out of almost anything. So not only does the wealth make them more likely to do immoral things, it makes them less likely to suffer any legal consequences from their evil acts.

Reason enough to ban the accumulation of wealth.

The only alternative is to divorce money from power as much as possible. That requires laws to keep money out of politics, and those laws require enforcers who can resist the power of money to corrupt them.

Easier to just keep people from getting the money in the first place.

Rewinding a bit, I think the reason people get uncomfortable when you talk about money being power is that with power comes responsibility and we don’t like thinking of our own money that way.

We think of our own wealth as being exclusively for our own pleasure and not as something we should worry about using “right”. It’s a lesson all of consumer society reinforces and for the most part, there’s little harm in it.

And if you do start to worry about how you should be spending your money, consumer society also provides charities you can donate to make yourself feel better.

I feel acutely uncomfortable talking about money being power and I am the one who brought it up in the first place.

Discomfort, however, is a poor excuse for letting the rich destroy freedom. To sit by and do nothing while the one percent steal our money and then use that money to pay politicians to suppress the vote just because we do not like how admitting money is power makes you feel would be a moral failure of the highest degree.

So let’s get together and do this : raise the top tax rate to 98 percent. Prevent the private accumulation of wealth.

Because money is power.

And power corrupts.

More after the break,

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On being naturally gifted

Most people are generalists. That means they have no one talent in which they excel but instead have a few minor areas of specialization that suit their personality and that, in turn, guide their career choices, but do not define them.

This may not make them superstars but it does make them ready for life.

Some of us, however, are freaks. We have a crazy huge amount of one thing or another (beauty, charm, intelligence, and so on) and next to nothing anywhere else.

This is a very poor setup for basic survival. A person like that is going to need to trade what they have in surfeit for all the other things they have in deficit.

In other words, they have to trade what they’ve got for what they do not.

Luckily, in modern society, our robust interrelationships make such trades possible. Us hothouse flowers can find partners of various forms to make up for what our extreme specialization denies us.

A singer with a golden voice can find a manager, a naturally beautiful person can work as a model, the intellectually gifted can work for the NSA, and so on.

This is, in fact, our only viable survival strategy. It comes, however, with a subtle but powerful error contained within its assumptions.

There is a very strong tendency in gifted mutants like myself to want to believe that whatever we have plenty of should be the only thing we need to have in order to get everything they want.

So if it’s beauty, the person might feel like the world owes them unlimited indulgence just for being nice to look at. Or if it’;s technical skill, the person might chafe at the very notion that any other skill should ever matter in technical workplaces.

Like, say, interpersonal skills, or social skills, or communication skills.

And if you are a major Professor McSmartypants like myself, you dream of a world where you are paid to just sit around being brilliant all day.

As far as I can tell, the closest thing to that is being part of a “think tank”. And even then, you presumably need to actually contribute to the solution of a problem.

Still sounds good to me, though. Sign me the fuck up.

The tendency, then, for us mutant savants, is to believe our talent(s) should act as a kind of universal currency that we can trade for whatever we desire, and when that turns out not to be the case, we rail against the injustice of the world.

This is understandable. But it only makes things worse by sheltering our one trick pony mindsets instead of making us realize that we need more than out outsized abilities to get through life and that there is nothing unfair about a world where certain abilities get certain things but not other things.

For example, I have always had way more brains than I know what to do with. And many in my situation develop a world view that says everything should come to us because we are so gosh darn special.

But big brains only get you certain things. Like high marks in school. A greater grasp of issues than the average person. The mental strength to overcome certain obstacles.

And so forth.

But it does not get you love. It cannot effectively compensate for being socially awkward due to bad socialization in one’s formative years. It can’t be traded for groceries or used to get yourself the intercourse of your dreams.

You’re going to have to actually do things to get those. Being ever so special isn’t worth jack shit if it doesn’t lead to ability and performance.

Because why should someone trade what they have for your worthless specialness? People trade to profit. A good trade profits everyone.

But if you aren’t willing to produce something someone wants, you can’t go around whining about how unfair the world is.

It’s perfectly fair to expect you to do what everyone else is doing : producing.

And the sooner you accept this, the sooner you can get on with living.

Nobody owes you an easy path made entirely of steps you find easy and fun and not scary at all.

It’s up to you to decide whether the path is worth traveling or not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This will be interesting.

Due to a concatenation of events, I will be doing all 1000 words of my daily blogging in one sitting for the first time in a long time.

Basically, I wanted to eat before therapy, but I was not yet ready to blog and didn’t want to blog before therapy gave me something to blog about anyhow, so I did not blog as I ate my lunch like I usually do.

Then after therapy, I felt too depressed and emotionally fragile to blog, so I said to hell with it and punted the day’s blogging to my alternate schedule, 7 pm and 10 pm.

But then I forgot all about that and ended up watching some stuff with J&J as I ate supper, and as a result of that I started blogging at like 9:15 pm.

That leaves me 2.75 hours to do 1000 words.

No problem. Piece o’ cake.

Therapy went okay, I suppose. But I realized that I have a problem with my therapist that tends to lead to my coming away from therapy feeling worse.

Stop me if this sounds familiar : he’s always jumping in to try to solve my problems when all I really want from him is for him to listen to my problems.

It’s almost like he’s from Mars and I’m from Venus.

And it was especially ironic today because one of the things I was trying to tell him about is how doctors keep brushing me off like my concerns are trivial and don’t matter like the doctor from my most recent ER visit did.

And I know my therapist is doing this with the best of intentions. He is trying to help. I can’t fault him for that.

But it’s very depressing to me because it makes me feel like he is yet another person who isn’t listening to me and choosing to talk over me instead.

So he and I will need to have another talk about this. The subject, broadly speaking, has come up before, although not in this exact form.

But it’s my therapy, dammit, and I should not be sitting there listening to him go on and on about stuff I already know.

I’m not looking for solutions. I already know all the things I should be doing. I always do.

Doesn’t make them any easier to do. In fact, it has the opposite effect. I would be better off banishing the entire concept of “should” from my mind and starting over.

And I keep trying to do that. But eventually the shoulds return when I fail to put anything else in their place.

I’m still working on that.

No, what I want from a therapist is intelligent listening. I want someone who understands mental illness to listen to me talk about mine and occasionally ask a question that either keeps the emotions flowing or forces me to look at my issues from a different perspective and thus shed new light on it.

I do not need life advice. It never truly applies to me anyhow. Even when it’s coming from my therapist, who should know better.

But no, even his advice misses me entirely, and instead is meant for someone with far more motivation and far less fear than me.

“You should do this! and this! and this!”.

Yeah yeah. Add it to the pile of shoulds in the corner. None of that is going to happen. You might as well be telling me to sprout wings and fly away.

Because the things you are suggesting seem just as impossible to me. I will shrug and agree that yup, that sure sounds like something I should do.

But nobody thinks to ask me whether I will do it or not. The answer may surprise you.

And as you know, my depression has been pretty bad lately. Hence the title of this blog entry. It feels like a cold dark night even when the sun is out during the day, and I have two states : distracted, and miserable.

So I try to stay distracted.

I really feel like I am going through something. Processing some large chunk of emotion, perhaps. Straining to push it through like I am trying to pass a stone.

Of course, the massive allergy attack I just had despite having taken my Reactine today is not helping matters any.

Guess the pollen count must be pretty damned high.

But anyhow, back to my emotions. I feel like I have mental indigestion, and it always makes me wish there was the psychological equivalent of serum of ipecac so I could make myself vomit up whatever it is that is ailing me and be done with it.

Barring that, I guess all I can do is wait it out. Maybe try to guide my mind towards the point of greatest catharsis in order to “lean in” to this crisis and get it over with.

I will gladly set fire to my pain in order to destroy it. Let it burn, the flames purify me with their agony and their clarity.

There are worse things in life than pain. Pain can wake you up and make you feel alive. Pain can teach you many things. Pain can cut through the fog of your mind and banish the numbing clinging miasma that is killing you like sunrise burning off fog.

I’ll trade physical pain for emotional pain any day of the week.

I am choosing to stay with my pain this time. Normally I would escape up into the aerie of The Big Picture and look down at my problems from an Olympian height as if that was a way of dealing with things.

Transcendence is not that cheap. You have to feel the fucking emotions first.

At least I am making significant progress against my own bullshit. It’s a cliche, but the greatest enemy truly is our own illusions and it is only by stripping those away that we can finally deal with our problems.

Luckily, I already have a mercilessly truthful point of view, and so stripping away my own illusions is just an application of a pre-existing skillset self-referentially.

So I am perfectly capable of aiming the scalpel of my mind at the excess fatty tissues of my all too bloated mind.

Physician, peel thyself!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.