So my killer hunger is back. Can’t say I have missed it.

I mean, there’s real irony in being hungry enough to eat a bison when I had a blood sugar reading of 27.7.

Clearly I need to get that shit down. Luckily, despite the sanity shattering hunger, I was smart enough to remember that these demonic hunger pangs come from there not being enough insulin response to get the sugars from my blood to my cells, and the cells pumping out hunger hormones as a response, and so the appropriate reaction is to get some more insulin into me ASAP.

Even though that feels like the most insane thing ever because it feels a lot loike my blood sugar is too low.

So it’s good that I can verify which kind of hunger it is now that I have a glucometer. I took some insulin and that took away enough of the hunger to let me get some lunch happening so I can attack the hunger the old fashioned way.

Still, clearly I need to get my blood sugars down. It’s taking a lot more focus and drive than I thought it would, and those are in short supply when you have depression.

So it’s complicated.

I know what I need to do. I need to spend an afternoon exercising, taking insulin, and exercising until I get a decent reading.

But that’s hard. Especially when I have been so sleepy lately. The exercise part is tough, even though I know it will make me feel better in the long run.

But having to poke my finger over and over is harder. Damn it.

Maybe I can combine this with my desire to run away. I could just get dressed, go out the door, and start walking. Keep on walking until I feel better or I am utterly tired out.

Then take a cab home from wherever the hell I am, I guess.

That’s the sort of thing I would do if it wasn’t for certain facts, like the fact that every step causes me pain in my feet, or that we live in a time of plague and you’re not supposed to be wandering around for no good reason if you don’t have a mask on.

And I can’t do masks.

I still like to think about it, though. I feel like if I had gotten a better start in life, I would have turned out to be quite athletic, or at the very least very active.

i sometimes fantasize about being able to just run. Run open and wild across endless plains like a feral stallion. Get out there and really stretch my lgs as I run full speed, nothing held back, until I am so tired I drop down onto the grass and stare up into an endless blue sky and let its cool infinity soothe me.

If I could do that when i wanted to, I might actually burn off all my excess energy and lose all the nervousness and anxiety and madness for a while.

That sure sounds nice.

More after the break.

---

Some small victories

Scored some little victories today.

For one, I did exercise. Which was a little depressing because it turns out I can’t exercise for very long.

Not exactly a surprise, but still rather saddening.

I had planned to do my pushouts for five minutes and pace for five minutes for a total of ten minutes of exercise.

This seemed like a modest and attainable goal.

So I started off with the pushouts and I did 40 of them before I was way too sore to do more so I looked at my timer to see how close I was to being done.

Only a minute and a half had passed. Woops. Clearly it is time to adjust my expectations given my age and total lack of exercise.

The same happened with the pacing. Went back and forth 10 times in each direction. Was utterly knackered.

Only two minutes had passed.

Now part of the problem could be that I was pushing myself too hard. Normally, in those rare moments when I do exercise, my goal is to burn off excess energy and tire out my body so I can relax.

A rather hedonistic motivation, but it works for me.

When exercising to relax, I don’t go by time, I go by reps. And even then, sometimes I just play it by ear and go till it stops feeling good, basically.

And I think that is how I will do it in the near future. I clearly need to build myself up from a very low point. So I will forget timed exercise for now and go back to reps.

My other victory is that I threw myself into finding a new webcam.

First, I tried to get my old one to work, but it is D E A D dead. As in, when I plug it in to a USB port, Windows basically takes one look at it and says “WTF is this supposed to be? It doesn’t even respond to a DeviceID request!”.

So it’s dead in the water.

Ergo, I went looking for a new one. And I tried to be smart about it. I looked up lists of the best webcams for YouTube, and I tried to understand the fire hydrant torrent of information attached to each model, but I lost the ability to comprehend that kind of thing roughly about the time the Pentium debuted.

I mean, I understand all the terms, but I have no idea how to put them into the context of my modest needs.

All I want to do is record video of my own smiling self talking so I can then add images and clips to it and make it something worth watching, not just me talking.

In theory, I could probably make do with like, the cheapest webcam out there. But I ordered one with good reviews that was around $90 CDN, $75 of which was the birthday gift certificate for Amazon that my sister Anne got my for my birthday.

Thanks Anne! I am going to record a video thanks on it for you when it arrives next Monday, assuming it works.

It had better work.

After all, it is my key to becoming a world famous YouTuber.

Now which voice will I use…. fire and brimstone Martin Luther style, fair and balanced liberal style, beatific secular Jesus style….

So many choices!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s my birthday today. I’m 47.

Can’t say I am particularly excited about it. Just adds another digit to my failure to getmy shit together and make some kind of life for myself.

Yay, another year for me to do fuck all except blog and play video games. Sure, it’s not enough,it’s not nearly enough, but it’s not like I am going to do anything about it.

Got lots of pretty ideas. Most of them might even work. Podcasting. Becoming a YouTuber^[1]. Invade Cracked forums and try to write for them. Cash my check next week, put it all on the card, buy a bus ticket to some small town, and bugger off to try to start a new life with a fictionalized past free of my 25 years of abject failure.

Or give up entirely and finally become a crazy homeless person.

I have to admit, it would take a lot of pressure off me. I could finally stop fighting all the craziness in my head and go completely fucking nuts.

Might make for a pleasant change. The only tricky bit would be to make sure I end up in the loony bin, not jail.

Though come to think of it, jail has certain perks for a gentleman of my persuasion.

Anyhow, at least I have a new game to play. A whole bunch of them, in fact. And for once, they are all from the same series.

I’d been looking over my wishlist on Steam, lazily pondering my next purchase, and one of the possibles was a game called F.E.A.R., a combination of supernatural horror and FPS that had a high score on Metacritic and a strong recommend from Maelkoth.

Then I check out what’s up on Humble Bundle and lo and behold, they have every single game in the series in one big bundle for $15!

The normal price for that on Steam is $55. Well I ain’t one to hesitate when I see a bargain like that. Kind of made up my mind for me.

So I bought it, and I have started playing the first one, and I am very impressed.

It looks very good for a game from 2005. Sure, the graphics are low res compared to today’s offerings but they are so well made and placed that the environments feel like real places regardless.

But what I really love is that the whole thing has a cinematic feel to it. The action portions feel like an action movie and supernatural parts feel like a very spooky movie. I love the feeling of being inside a movie.

The game is rather repetitive though. The whole first part of the game takes place in this endless factory/warehouse that is supposed to be a waste water treatment plant and it’s just the same elements combined over and over.

And so far, there’s been exactly two kinds of enemies : light solider and heavy soldier.

I’ve finally made it to the next part, and it’s in an endless office building. Which is better, I suppose, though I am getting sick of it as well.

So it’s not impossible that the repetition might ultimately be a dealbreaker, In which case I will shrug and try F.E.A.R. 2.

I mean, what are the odds that I won’t like any of them?

More after the break.

---

I’m not here

Let us proceed with the next phase of my moral strip-tease.

Part of the reason I was so blind to the effect my deterioration was having on others was because I have a deep seated feeling that I don’t exist.

Not in a literal sense but in an emotional sense. I spend so much of my formative years alone that my sense of self dwindled to the point where it felt like at any second, I would disappear entirely, the the flame of a candle when it is snuffed.

Patient readers will recognize that this is an example of the numbness of depression reaching a horrible maximum. I became so numb that I could not even feel my own existence any more.

And while I am much healthier than that now, that feeling like I am not really here persists. My world is so virtual that it provides very little in way of physical feedback, and without said feedback, I can’t really feel the world around me.

And it’s not a healthy way to live. Especially when that numbness blocks all the necessary emotional inputs from the real live people in your life.

That’s bad for everyone involved.

The thing is, when you feel like you are not really there and that nobody notices anything you do and nothing that you do counts or matters, the last thing on your mind is your effect on others.

How can you effect others when you’re not even there?

How can anyone miss you when you were never truly present in the first place?

How can I be important to anyone when I am not even important to myself?

Why would anyone care about me more than I do?

And after all, if they want me around. they can “just ask”. Right?

Right back at you, Mister Social Anxiety. You know damned well how hard it can be to “just ask” anything. How it can seem like there is a vast dark chasm between you and reaching out to someone.

How it can feel like if you tried, you would fall into that chasm and die.

So I repeat to myself : I am not the ice. I am that which is frozen. The only thing that can die when I contact others is the ice that grips my soul, and I am not that ice.

It is not a part of me. If it dies, I will still be here. In fact, if it dies, I will become more myself than ever as long-dormant parts of me finally can activate and integrate.

And at long long last, I will finish waking up, and be able to truly live for the first time since I was raped at the tender age of 4.

And what a holy, blessed day that will be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been getting that restless and irritable feeling lately.

Like I am a zoo tiger in too small of a cage, pacing back and forth and just waiting for the first opportunity to rip someone’s face off.

So clearly, I need to do something. Got to discharge this energy somehow.

I could go look for a fight on the Cracked.com forums (fora?). I’ve been meaning to launch an invasion of that place soon anyhow. The idea is to sign in and look for places where I can show off how hilarious, hip, and observant I can be in the hopes of attracting the attention of the Cracked staff.

Of course,the main way I will do that is by trying to write for them,

One of the many ways in which they are awesome is that they do the vast majority of their content via open call. Anyone is free to pitch to them via the fora (forae?) and if they like your pitch, they green-light it, you write it, and you get paid.

Sounds good to me.

I will have to grapple with the research issue though. Their bread and butter is listicles and I would love to write those but I dunno how to do the initial research.

Like, I would love to do, say, “11 WTF Episodes Of 80’s Sitcoms”, but I would have no idea how to find said episodes.

My mind doesn’t work like that. I need something to prompt me to recall something, then I will recall that specific thing, and that’s it.

My mental database lacks tags.

I am sure this can be overcome, though. Part of the solution will be to try to saw through this mental block of mine by trying various tricks to acquire the Google Fu required.

I will also look around the forae (forices?) to see if it’s okay to post to one of them asking for entries to a list.

Then again, I could masturbate.

That’s always good clean fun, and if I am lucky, will help discharge this excess energy, among other things.

And what the hell. Even if I am not “successful”, it still feels good and raises my heart rate and so on, so it counts as aerobic exercise as well.

Or if I don’t feel like risking my nerves by trying to get off, I could cut out the (sexy, sexy) middleman and just exercise.

A radical idea, I know, but desperate times etc.

It’s a habit I want to inculcate, anyhow, as it is the best way to reduce blood sugar besides insulin. When you exercise, your muscles suck up and burn off that excess blood sugar, and that sounds more fun than insulin to me.

So when I am through blogging, I will get up and then (after, of course, taking a piss) do my usual vertical pushups and pacing for at least ten minutes.

And then I will take a blood sugar reading. Hopefully the exercise will lower it. I would find that very encouraging.

I am going to lower this goddamned high blood sugar if it kills me.

More after the break.

---

On not taking care of myself

It doesn’t just hurt me. It hurts everyone around me.

Because they can see me falling apart. Joe and Julian see the sores on my legs all the time due to my tendency to lounge around naked. It must be extremely painful for them to see me dying right before their eyes and not being able to do anything about it.

And I am so, so sorry about that.

Felicity doesn’t see the sores on my legs, but she knows about them from reading this blog, and she must be very worried about me too.

Sorry dear. I will try to do better in the future.

Luke worries about me to. Fair enough, I worry about him too.

We are both terrible at looking after ourselves. For me, it’s depression expressing itself a apathy and self-neglect – of not feeling like I am worth the effort.

For him, it’s depression expressing itself as being ornery as hell.

Well, he IS a porcupine. They’re… prickly.

So I apologize for all the people I have made watch as my house burns down with me in it and the fire department only a phone call away.

It tears me up inside to imagine putting people I love and who love me through that kind of pain and I promise I will keep that in mind in the future.

Now, an earlier and more ignorant version of myself would have said, “But if it bothered them, why didn’t they say something?”.

Because I am just plain not that approachable, that’s why. Despite my glowy shiny self-image as the epitome of user friendliness, understanding and gentle and kind, the truith is that talking to me about this kind of thing is not easy.

Why? There’s a number of factors, but they all boil down to how I project myself into the world when I am around others.

I’m a very intense dude.

Not in the glowering, brooding sense, More like I project my personality very intensely, especially my emotions, and this makes it kind of scary to talk with me.

I am a projecting (and receiving) empath, and that means that people are afraid to tell me things that might upset or anger me because that emotion will get blasted back at them like a gale force wind.

Plus there is that electrical field I pump out that tells people I am super smart. That could be very intimidating, especially to people who don’t know me and who maybe are not as intellectually self-confident as I am.

So no. I am not super approachable or easy to talk to. At best, I am easy to chat with, but anything more than that and I can be quite scary.

And it'[s high time I owned and took responsibility for that.

No more false innocence! I am not the innocent child I pretend to be.

Anyhow, one last time : I am extremely sorry for any pain, stress, worry, or distress I have caused those who love me with my self-neglect.

I promise to do better in the future. If not for me, then for you.

Because I might not be worth the effort…. but you are.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been feeling depressed lately. More so than usual.

Specifically, I have been getting these intense attacks of depression that make me feel like I am going crazy.

Suddenly, out of the blue, darkness overtakes me and makes me want to scream from the pain and despair of it. My whole body tenses and I can feel my bones grinding against one another. It’s like I got pounced by a blanket shaped creature who is trying to smother and consume and destroy me.

It only lasts a few seconds before my long practiced psychological defenses kick in and throw it off my, but those are some very bad seconds.

When I was sicker, these would have been the moments when I felt the most suicidal. When you feel that bad, you just want it to stop no matter what it takes.

But I am healthier than that now, psychologically anyway, and so I just defend myself against the pain for the few moments it takes to shut it down.

Still, these bad moments are not a good sign. They indicate that something is deeply wrong in the wasteland of my psyche right now, and I need to dig it out.

We’ll start at the top. I am, of course, depressed about the crazy era we are in. I am especially depressed about all the early openers in the States who are going to die because they could not wait for things to get back to normal and the Toddler in Chief is sending them mixed messages so they feel it is perfectly okay to protest for their right to kill themselves and/or others just so they can can get a haircut.

I have likened it to having a friend who is determined to drive drunk. That’s what it feels like to be a Canadian for me right now.

There’s not a damned thing we can do to stop them. They are going to die by the thousands. And all we can do is watch.

More personally, there’s my health issues. Now that I have finally managed to wake myself up to the danger I am in, I am very scared.

I don’t want to lose a leg or a foot. I don’t want to end up in the hospital full of tubes. I don’t want my life to get so much worse. I don’t want to end up in pain and fear as my body falls apart on me.

And yet, I am still having trouble getting my blood sugar to go down. Even with insulin. I haven’t given up yet, not by a long shot, but I can’t avoid the creeping feeling that maybe I have fucked up so bad that it can’t be fixed.

I’ve put a lot of insulin into me and it’s still sky high.

So I am going to radically reduce my carb intake and see if that helps. When I do my Sunday shopping tonight, I will eschew my usual carb laden junk food in lieu of almost, peanuts, and wasabi peas.

That’s helped me get healthy before, so I have high hopes of it working again.

I am also going to get serious about exercise. Vertical pushups (pushouts?) and pacing will figure heavily into that.

Has to be stuff I can do in my room, otherwise social anxiety will prevent.

And of course, I will keep taking readings to see how I am doing. It sucks to have to lance my poor fingertips over and over but I need data.

Hopefully I will be able to save my over-sweetened self from diabetic oblivion.

And if not, I will at least know I went down swinging.

And now, to plunge into reckless escapism via video games.

More after the break.

---

A need for clarification

I feel like I was not entirely honest earlier.

It is true that I – me – the full and rational entity named Michael John Bertrand – does not want to get way sicker and end up full of tubes in the hospital and all of that.

But there is part of me – the sickest, blackest, most self-destructive part of me – that wants that outcome very much.

Hell, it craves it.

Why? Because then all responsibility would be taken away from me. If I was terribly sick and barely holding on to life, nobody could possibly expect me to anything but do my best to get better, and thus I would be free.

That’s pretty goddamned crazy. But that’s how that part of me thinks. It wants nothing more than to have all my possibilities swept away so that I don’t have to face the infinite hallway of infinite doors any more and the cacophony of voices in my head all trying to get me to go their way would finally shut the fuck up.

And everyone would be super sympathetic to me and feel bad for me and be nice to me and all I would have to do was be my usual charming and sweet self and people would talk about how brave and strong I am to be so nice when I am so sick.

To this sick part of my mind, that would be heaven. It’s like an oral retentive fantasy of a life where you don’t ever have to do anything and everything you need just comes to you and everyone protects and nurtures you.

A return to infancy, essentially. Pathetic.

But ignoring that part of my mind does not make it go away. Giving it voice does, which is why I chose to write about it tonight.

It’s is a dark and desperate thing to admit about yourself. That part of you would trade even your very physical health in order to give up on having to be a grownup.

It is that part of my mind that made being suicidal so scary because that was the part of me that would have done anything to make the pain and fear stop, so that was the part of me that I had to be on guard against 24/7 in case it took over in a weak moment and made me walk into traffic or jump out a window or something.

Thank god I hardly ever have to think about that now. I still have my dark moments, but they pass, and I am my non-suicidal self once again.

Like all suicidal people, it wasn’t that I really wanted to die.

I just wanted the pain and fear to STOP.

Thank goodness I never went through with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still pissed off about getting the brushoff at the ER yesterday.

What is it about me that makes it so easy for doctors to dismiss me?

Is it that I am too timid? That’s at least part of it, I think. When push comes to shove, I ended up being the one pushed and shoved around.

I really tried to get the nurses and my ER doctor to take my leg sores seriously, though. i kept bringing the conversation back to them. But no matter what I did, the doctor insisted that I had the sores because my skin got itchy and I scratched at it too hard and that somehow resulted in these sores all over my leg.

And there’s some truth to that, I suppose. But that doesn’t change the fact that I got these nasty wounds all over my legs that really look to me like they could use bandaging with some kind of antiseptic applied.

Ya know, like they did when my leg got super infected last year.

But nope. Instead, I got what I always get : brushed off so that the doctor can go on with their busy day and move on to a patient more worthy of their attention.

They just can’t wait to be rid of me. Just like everyone else.

Empathy is part of the problem too, as I have said before. I can feel their desire to be done, and my sense of self is not yet strong enough for me to be able to resist the urge to give in and give them what they want.

I get something out of it too : the encounter ends, and along with it, the tension.

And we all know by now how I can’t resist that instant relief high.

I am still trying to get my blood sugar level down. I had the bright idea to try fasting this morning. I just skipped breakfast.

Tested my blood around 10 am. I hadn’t eaten in around 10 hours.

Still got a 19.2 though. So this is proving trickier than I thought.

Back to rounds of taking insulin and testing, then, quite possibly with some exercise included as well.

Because this shit’s getting serious, y’all. Got a brand new sore on the left side of my left knee. Burns. Like someone is pressing a hot curling iron against the skin.

The doctor at the ER said that my blood tests came back with high levels of lactic acid. Apparently, according to my research, that can be caused by poor blood circulation.

But I can’t seem to find out what to do about it. All the treatment options focus on improving the circulation and not how to get rid of the lactic acid I have.

Oh right. Another thing that can cause lactic acid buildup is a strong infection.

And as I type this, I feel quite hot and a bit dizzy and a little nauseous.

Good thing none of this is a big deal. Otherwise I might get worried.

More after the break.

---

The clouds have parted

Well glory be. My credit card works with DoorDash.

I gave it a try expecting absolutely nothing. After all, I had tried Skip and Uber Eats ane they both barfed my card back at me.

Butr surprised, surprise! I successfully ordered my fave meal from my fave Indian place.

For $32. Yikes. I mean, I can afford it, but still. Yikes.

Oh well. It will all seem worth it when I am aglow with happiness from being full of my beloved Lamb Rogan Josh.

And at least I will get two meals out of it.

Oh wait. I somehow added some naan^[1]. So that price I quoted is probably high.

Probably more like $30 even.

Anyhow, point is, I am getting tasty foods.

Now if only DoorDash did 7-11!

---

On cancel culture

I am rapidly becoming a huge fan of this lady.

Her discussions are so good! Intelligent, witty, even-handed, clear-minded, deep, eloquent, and informative.

Oh, and she also always looks fabulous. And the thing about trans girls is that you know that if they look, it’s because of their own hard work and skill, not a genetic accident.

And she rocks at least one totally new amazing look per episode, each unique.

I admire that so much.

But of course, it’s content that counts. And she has content that matters. Content that has substance and worth.

I linked to the “Canceling” episode because it really opened my eyes to the fact that this is a real thing. Before watching it, I thought it was just one of those meaningless right wing buzzwords they deploy in order to avoid having to think.

But no, it’s a real thing. And it destroys innocent people then moves on without ever looking back to see the wreckage it leaves behind.

It is the same sociological phenomenon as lynch mobs and other forms of mob justice, only made infinitely more efficient by the internet.

Now, instead of a a handful of excitable citizens with pitchforks and torches, it’s millions of people online howling for justice as a form of recreation.

Not that these people are insincere in their outrage. It’s just that the outrage is the point of the exercise, not justice.

Justice sometimes changes its mind based on new information. And that’s no fun. What could be worse than someone interrupted the fun of being part of a torch wielding mob by pointing out that the victim is innocent?

Being part of a lynch mob feels good. You feel pure and righteous and sure of yourself when you get that sweet moral outrage going.

It’s basically anger addiction writ large. Those people in the lynch mob get the same rush that people with anger issues get.

But I am not too worried about it because I have seen the backlash to it growing, so I am fairly certain that the hive mind we are all building via the internet is learning to moderate its worst impulses, and that there will soon be enough people who react to the outage inducing clickbait headline by fact-checking it that the counter-response will be swift and provide much needed balance.

Because the nice thing is that “That person everyone is mad at is INNOCENT” also makes for a pretty good clickbait headline too.

This hivemind of ours is growing up.

I couldn’t be more proud of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m going to the hospital to have them look at the ulcers on my leg at 2 pm today.

I will arrive prepared to be there for a long time.

Books, change of clothes in case I get admitted, and so on.

This ain’t my first rodeo.

It will be my first one in an ER, though.

I hope the cows don’t get infected with the coronavirus.

Then they would have to change the name to COWVID-19.

I am a very silly person.

Kinda of worried about going to a hospital when I know my immune system is compromised by sky high blood sugar, but that’s the hospital paradox for ya.

The place you go when you are sick is the place you are most likely to get sick because it’s full of other sick people and their germs.

That was bad enough in the Before Times. It’s even worse in the era of COWVID.

But I can’t afford to worry about that right now.

I need treatment for all these goddamned wounds.

Why does this shit keep happening to me on Friday?

---

On kicking the habit

Going to try to marshal my thoughts on addiction.

The main error in how we think of addictions is that we do not take into account the forces at play.

Addictions of all kinds hijack the part of the brain that governs cravings and rewards. This is the part of the brain that, in a state of nature, keeps us alive.

When an animal is thirsty, it drinks. When it is hungry, it eats. This is more than a matter of pleasure or scratching an itch.

“Giving in” to cravings is what leads an animal to do the things needed for survival.

And this is true of all animal life, from the protozoa to the killer whale. That means that the part of the brain that addictions hijack is very, very old, and very very powerful.

Defying it is not easy. Nature does not give animals a lot of choice when it comes to doing all the things necessary to live. It can’t afford to.

And that applies to us naked beach apes as well. Like I have said before, our self-control is entirely dependent on how well our basic needs are met.

It is only when we have food, water, and shelter that our drives will relax their grip enough to give us options.

And that’s the part of the brain that addictions hijack. To a human being, subjectively speaking, there is no emotional difference between starving and needing the next hit of your particular addiction.

It doesn’t matter that survival is not at stake at all and that getting that next hit will actually decrease your chances of survival.

To an addict, the emotions are exactly the same.

So that’s what any addict, whether their addiction is crossword puzzles or heroin, is up against when they try to kick the habit.

Kind of puts all the moralizing and self-flagellation about our own moral failings in perspective, doesn’t it?

Think twice before you judge anyone for giving in to their addiction.

After all, they truly feel like they are starving.

More after the break.

---

How the world seems to me

But first, this

Made this earlier today :

I really do feel that way. The fact that the left leans towards math averse types who would rather lose a limb than deal with elementary school level math drives me absolutely frigging insane.

The forces of evil bent on destroying civilization bank heavily on people’s belief that all financial matters are “complicated” and that they “couldn’t possibly understands them” and so we have no choice but to “trust them” with like, all the money.

Even though they clearly are not to be trusted with such power.

So this is not mere intellectual snobbery. Being someone who lives at the intersection of Art and Science, I don’t look down on either side for being how they are.

But the stakes are so damned high. We have to learn to pierce the veil of this new priest class of accountants, economists, and those professional liars know as “stock brokers” and reveal them to be the cheating fraudsters that they are, and that can only happen when we learn to read the Bible for ourselves.

That doesn’t mean every liberal needs to become a math whiz. It only means that we have to stop falling for these bastards’ bullshit and recognize that this shit is not actually all that complicated and that some of us, at least, are perfectly capable of reading the tea leaves ourselves and calling these evil motherfuckers out on their lies.

You know these people cannot be trusted. So why take their word that they and only they understand the great god known as The Economy, and we must do as they say or it with strike us unbelievers down with poverty and despair.

Fuck that. It’s just numbers. We can do this.

And what’s more, if we truly want to save the world, we must.

---

Meanwhile, back in Fanhattan

Went to the hospital. Told them about my symptoms. Showed them the sores on my legs. They said they were no big deal and they would heal once I got my blood sugar down to something reasonable.

Not sure I believe them, but that probably says more about my own paranoia about not being taken seriously than it does about the staff of Richmond Hospital.

Because to me, they seem like a pretty big issue. I have these open wounds on my freaking body. I thought they would at least bandage them up and send me back to the the Wound Clinic for regular dressing changes.

But nope. my high blood sugar was the easily understand variable and my leg sores were all, like, complicated and gross, so I got nothing.

Well, except for the realization that I possess a Hospital Mode, where I just lay in the bed and drowse, letting my mind run on momentum.

It lets my mind finish processing all the stuff I feed it all the time, and helps the long waits pass more quickly too.

Otherwise, the whole thing left me feeling like they missed the boat because once more, when I try to convince someone I need help, they just brush me off/.

I will try it their way for now.

But if it doesn’t work, I will be back with a vengeance.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got off the phone with my therapist.

Which reminds me : earlier this week, I finally got the gumption together to call my doctor’s office to make an appointment about all these fucking lesions on my legs.

I was told that he was no longer seeing patient in person but that I could make an appointment to talk to him on the phone.

And for whatever reason, this rattled me badly. In retrospect, that was a highly predictable outcome. No doctors are seeing people in person right now.

In fact, you could say doctors are avoiding their patients like the plague!

Cricket, cricket. Someone in the audience coughs.

But at the time, it came as a shock and I was definitely not ready to contemplate talking to him over the phone so I told the receptionist I would call back later.

That was three days ago, and so far, I have not called her back.

Because what the hell can my GP do for me over the phone? I can’t show him the lesions on my legs over the phone. Maybe I could do if I had a smartphone, but I do not.

And how can he know ho to treat them if he can’t even see them?

The only alternative I can think of is to go to the hospital. Maybe the ER, maybe not.

But at least at the hospital, they still see you in person.

Actually, forget calling them lesions. According to this webM article, they are ulcers.

It says I should be cleaning them once a day and keeping them wrapped in bandages at all other times.

Which is… a challenge. Not sure I could keep that up on my own.

But it’s possible that if I took this to the ER, they would get me on a regimen like I was on when I got my first big massive super infected ulcer (which never finished healing) where I go to the wound clinic three times a week so they can change the dressings and see what progress is being made.

That, I could handle.

According to the article, there could also be some kind of topical ointment to apply to them as well. That, too, I can handle.

Of course, it could be that the ER is pretty slammed right now from all the people like me who have the sort of thing a phone call can’t fix.

Plus COVID-19, of course.

And I imagine anti-contagion protocols will be quite strict.

But I have to do it. My legs are covered in these things. It’s only going to get worse unless I do something about it.

And if it gets much worse, my legs themselves might be in danger.

And I use them like, half a dozen times a day!

So it is decided. I will take my ulcerous legs to the ER some time soon.

Now it’s just a matter of working up the will to do it.

I will talk it over with Joe and see what time works for him to drop me off at the ER.

Time for me to buy another giant book of crossword puzzles, I think.

More after the break.

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The sweet life

WARNING : Not as cute as it sounds.

Well, I finally did it. I got myself a new glucometer.

Went to the pharmacy yesterday to pic up my psych meds (only ten days after my therapist phoned in the prescription!) and went through the manual to set everything up and make sure I know what I am doing.

After all, much to my shame, it has been many years since I tested. Patient readers know I have done a piss poor job of managing my diabetes, and my only defense is depression can kill you in a lot of different ways.

Suicide is only one of them. It’s far more likely to kill you via one of the ways you self-medicate, whether it’s booze, drugs, or in my case, food.

So I am not arguing with the fact that I should have been taking better care of myself.

But I can’t afford to think like that because one of the strongest and most deadly component of why I didn’t go to the doctor for my skin ulcers is shame.

I was too ashamed to show a doctor what a bad job I had done of taking care of myself. To take this to my GP would be to confess failure to an authority figure, and that is hard enough for the mentally healthy.

For someone with serious social anxiety like me, it is Herculean.

Anyhow. so I got a new glucometer, set it up, and now I have taken some readings, and holy shit am I fucked up.

Like, I don’t know how I am even alive with blood sugar this high. My blood must have the consistency and viscosity of cold maple syrup.

So right now, I am trying to figure out how high it needs to be before “take some insulin” turns into “call 911”.

I mean, this afternoon I got a reading of 28.8 mmol/liter, and normal is 7.

I get the feeling that four times healthy is probably bad.

So far, all I can find is the danger range listed using the American system, which is 250 milligrams per decilter.

Because, being America,, they have to do things their own way, namely stupid.

Brainstorm! I thought to look up how to convert the American numbers to Canadian. Turns out it is super easy : just divide by 18.

That gives us a danger range starting at…. around 14.

So…. that 28 was double the emergency range.

Yeah, I am thinking the ER is in my near future.

What I am going to do is finish eating, wait an hour, test my blood, and if it’s still something ridiculous, I will go ask Joe or Julian to drive me to the ER.

No sense in calling 911 when I can get there just fine on my own.

I will also exercise before the reading in order to get that number down.

But I suspect that I will still end up going to the ER, and so along with exercising, I will pack a bag with some books, a change of clothes, and so on.

I highly doubt I will be admitted for the blood sugar, but they may admit me once they get a look at my legs.

I admit, I didn’t expect my results to be THAT bad.

Here’s hoping it’s not too late for me yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Alright, time to pass this stone.

It’s occurred to me lately that I can be rather…. thoughtless.

Specifically, I rarely give any thought to how much my presence in people’s lives affects them. It almost never occurs to me that someone might miss me or that I should take time out of whatever it was I planned to do in order to go see people who might be craving my company but are too shy to ask for it.

And I could blame it all on depression. It’s true that I still have trouble imagining anyone actually wanting me around. A deep part of me is still convinced that people only put up with me out of pity and that they wish I would go away and leave them alone.

But there’s more to it than that. That’s a rather conveeeeinient attitude to have when the basic problem is that I have a very strong need for autonomy.

A need so strong that precludes thoughts that might interfere with it. Thoughts like “I should drop that person a line” or “I should see what so-and-so is up to” or “I should stop playing this video game and log on to Tapestries so people who loves me there get to see me for once;. ”

It’s that last one that’s the real kicker. It exposes the rotten face of my video game addiction and shows how much of my life it has hollowed out from within.

Like I have said here before, there was a time before Skyrim happened to me that I spent a lot of my time in front of the computer logged into Tapestries so I could chat with my fuzzy friends there while doing whatever on the Web.

These days it would mostly be Facebook and YouTube.

But then Skyrim happened, and I became strongly addicted to it, and while I eventually kicked my Skyrim habit, the underlying video game addiction never went away.

It just moved on to different games.

But worse is the realization that my drives for autonomy is so strong that it makes me want to avoid any actual emotional and/or social obligations.

And that’s not cool. Not cool at all. It’s certainly not consistent with all the griping and moaning I do about feeling isolated and lonely.

In theory, I should welcome commitment and the closeness it brings.

Instead, it gives me that claustrophobic feeling of being trapped and makes me want to bolt for yonder horizon like a spooked mare.

So yeah, I am lonely, but it’s not because the big mean world coldly ignores me despite how cute and lovable and amazing I am.

It’s because I don’t even know how to be close to people. And the very thought of it actually happening makes me want to scream into the cold dark night.

Something very important in me broke when I was raped. When I retreated into the world of my mind to escape, steel shutters slammed down inside me and cut me off from the richer emotional world that exists beyond the cerebral realm.

It’s a wonder that I didn’t end up autistic.

Instead I’m just like, really really smart.

And that’s all I know how to do. Be really really smart.

And it makes me a wizard.

But it also makes me alone.

More after the break.

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Parkinson’s Law of Triviality

Just learned about this from a Cracked podcast, and it blew my mind.

In its original form, it goes like this :

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality

That works in a sort of “pithy quotes for business meetings” sort of way, but it doesn’t get at the root of the genius of this observation.

To get closer, we will explain “bikeshedding”.

It revolves around an anecdote from Parkinson about being in a high level meeting in the British government where a 30 billion pound nuclear power plant was approved in minutes with no hint of a debate, but the next items on the agenda, whether they should build a 350 pound bike shed AT said power plant. was debated hotly for many many hours and was not, in fact, resolved at that meeting.

From this we can derive a better formulation : The simpler the issue, the more people will be willing to express and defend a position on that issue.

In other words people are most willing to have and express opinions on issues simple enough for them to understand.

That nuclear power plant was a huge issue with many many layers and in order to really have an intelligent opinion on it you might even need to have some idea of how they work, and so mum was the word.

Bike sheds, on the other hand, are easy to understand. A child could understand the issue. And so that’s the battleground people are willing to fight in.

It might seem super obvious when put like that, but it explains so much.

For example, this is how wedge issues work. The issues that actually matter are complicated and nuanced and pretty scary to the average person.

But reduce it to “gays are coming for your kids!” or “it’s minorities’ fault they get shot”, and now it’s simple enough for people to get behind.

As an aside : this creates a kind of trap for conservatives where they think they understand an issue but then get their ass kicked when they present their terrible arguments to the general public.

Anyhow, clearly it is incumbent upon real liberals to create their own wedge issues that move people in the right direction for a change.

Things like “Donald Trump wants poor people to starve!” or “The Republicans want you to be poor” or my personal fave, “rich people are stealing your money!”.

Because they totally are. Where do you think the money for tax cuts comes from?

Another part of this is a willingness to tell people that they ARE smart enough to understand these things and that their opinion matters.

Which is true. You might not understand macroeconomics, but anyone can understand why giving tax money to the super rich is wrong. They may not get the details of the social assistance system, but they understand that families should not be left to die. They might not get the intricate details of how the GOP has manipulated them, but they understand that people who treat you badly don’t deserve your loyalty.

We can totally move the goalposts way to the left if we are willing to accept that most people are not liberal intellectuals and that the only way to reach them is to reduce things down to a level they can understand, even if it isn’t the complete truth.

After all, we aren’t doing this for marks.

We’re doing it to save the world.

And that’s way more important than your fussy elitist feelings.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s occurred to me recently that on a deep level, I am always having a panic attack.

It never ends. There’s a part of me that is in a constant state of freaking out, and nothing I can do or say will calm it down.

It started running when I was raped at the age of 4 and I am going to be 47 in a week, so that is 43 years of having that scared little animal inside of me, telling me that I need to hide, that to be exposed is to be destroyed, and that safety trumps all else.

It’s the root of all that fear that depression uses to keep me down. The source for all my crazy. The bane of my existence.

And I am getting really tired of it.

I mean, what do I have to be afraid of, really? Let me recast that : what could possibly be worse than my current unsatisfying life?

At least if I push my boundaries, I might get some things done and thus rescue some of my self-worth from its current vortex of oblivion. Have something to show for my time on Earth instead of having my limited time on Earth drift past me as I bury my mind in video games and other distractions.

I dunno what would calm my scared little animal down. A sense of safety would do the trick nicely but I don’t understand how I would convince it that everything is okay.

And it is. I lead a ridiculously safe life, and that’s no accident. When you are hemmed in from all sides by tall walls made of fear so pure it requires no justification, a hyper-safe life is the only way you can feel at least a little sane.

And even then, that scared little animal barely even slows down.

I am safe. I am safe. Repeat one million times. Whatever real threats I have experienced in my life are long gone. I lived with people who love me and care for me, I have no enemies that I know of, and I am totally capable of contributing so much to the world if given the chance.

And the only thing keeping me from going out there to conquer the world is these massive walls of unreasoning fear.

They seem to multiply and overlap on a daily basis. I develop new fears so easily and get rid of old ones so rarely. No wonder they often seem like one massive complex chimera of all negative emotions melted into one nasty beast.

Other times, it’s more like I am floating in an ocean of toxic anesthetic, and I have to keep treading water as hard as I can just to keep from drowning.

All because my scared little animal forgot what it’s like to stop running and feel safe.

Well come with me, little critter. It’s okay. You’re home now. Come inside and I will fix you a nice, nourishing me and we can curl up by the fire and I can stroke you and pet you and tell you everything is going to be all right.

You’re a good boy, little one, and I love you.

Now come insider.

More after the break.

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The virtue of being a zombie

So I was flailing away at that bit of Doom Eternal that has been giving me so much trouble and which I described as giving me a fascinating sensation of sensually lush agony as the coldness left my soul, and a new thing happened.

I realized that as I fought and died over and over that a very deep part of me was relaxing. Some fell tension in me was slowly unwinding, and it felt quite wonderful.

Even better, I think I can recognize that tension now and make the conscious decision to seek out an experience that will relieve it now.

I don’t really know what to call this particular kind of tension, or what unmet need it represents. “Challenge” makes a certain amount of sense but doesn’t really capture the flavour of it. “Effort” is also in the right ballpark.

“Strain”, maybe? A bit closer, but still not quite right.

Tell you what, in the interests of clarity, I will further confuse the matter by using an old analogy : “the ox needs the plow”.

What I mean by that is that for those of us of a certain temperament there is a deep need for something to work against. A burden to carry, a cart to pull, a challenge to overcome, a plow for us to push.

When I was trying to get past that sticky part of the game, it taxed my ability to keep going and keep trying. It took willpower and personal strength to keep hammering away at something so frustrating and unrewarding.

And that’s where that beautiful feeling of the tension draining away came in. My usual wimpy lifestyle, where I give up on things the moment they seem like work and respond to any real challenge or strain by falling apart and running away, does not give me anything to push against. Turns out I need something that taxes more than my mind.

And in order to get that, I have to be willing to mindlessly keep trying something until I succeed. Not even think about whether I should keep going or whether I could be doing something that was more rewarding or really anything at all.

Just trying over and over again, like a zombie, as if I had no choice.

And you know what? It worked. I got past that part earlier today. Mindless persistence paid off. I conquered. I overcame.

But more importantly, I got a glimpse of the true virtue of persistence. It’s not just that it leads to success… that much is obvious.

It’s that in doing the same thing over and over, you give your subconscious mind (which is most of it) a chance to learn how to do things better without all that messy and counterproductive interference from the conscious mind.

Many times in my journey I found that I had completely zoned out for ten seconds or so and yet, I had not died as a result.

Somehow, acting totally by reflex and with the conscious mind gone, I had done reasonably well at the game.

And that is huge. I feel like I have one of the secrets of the universe now. I now know that there are many ways to learn something and that the conscious, cerebral way you learn at school is only one of them.

Time to teach my subconscious some new tricks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Particularly slow start to my day today. Slept until 2:30 pm and I am still pretty freaking sleepy. When I am done with Part 1 of the day’s blogging, I will likely go right back to sleep. Guess this is one of my sleepy days.

I know I shouldn’t resent them like I do. It’s counterproductive. I would no doubt be better off if I could treat them as cozy little vacations from my usual life. A time to relax and enjoy the warm comfy feelings that come with sleepiness, knoing that this too shall pass in its own good time.

But I can’t help it. I’m a stubborn and ornery kind of person and I fight back. I can’t stand the feeling of my life slipping away from me as I sleep and sleep and sleep.

Not that I was going to do anything amazing with my time anyhow. Oh no, I am falling behind on all my video game playing.

The world needs my mediocre gaming skills!

And we’re back to my feeling that there is something I should be doing. Not sure I have any choice about that one either. I have tried many times to give myself permission to live the life I currently live without any anxiety about all the millions of things I could be doing and therefore should be doing.

I think I stumbled upon something huge when I talked about option paralysis being the result of trying to process far too many variables at the same time.

Well I said something along those lines, anyhow.

I think perhaps that creative types tend to have parallel processing type minds. Creativity requires that kind of complex reasoning.

Creativity, after all, is all about finding connections, and you can’t find the connection between things if you can’t hold those things in your mind at the same time.

And that is fine when the number of variables you can perceive does not exceed the number you can process.

But when it does, the whole damn system crashes. And if, like me, your mind is hyper specialized towards this parallel thinking, you have nowhere to go from there.

So what is needed is to develop my serial thinking skills. Creative types like myself tend to look down on serial thinking types as being dull people who lack imagination, but they don’t get stuck in this kind of quagmire (giggity) because their linear approach to things inherently limits the number of variables they have to deal with at the same time.

I have never been good at doing things slowly and methodically. I attack things with the overwhelming power of this big ol brain of mind and conquer them that way. Slowing down to do things step by step along a well established path makes me want to scream.

But if it allows me to avoid option paralysis, it might be worth a scream or two. Anything that frees me from the infinite hall of infinite doors would be a blessed relief.

Dunno what such a method of determination might look like. But it will probably involved deadly dull things like making lists and setting formal priorities and such.

If I must, I must.

More after the break.

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The problem is they’re stupid

Or perhaps I should say “differently intelligent”.

Patient readers know the setup for this intractable issue. Basically, it boils down to this impolite and inappropriate question :

What if some fully enfranchised adult human beings are simply not smart enough to really understand what is going on?

What if, from the point of view of those of us with above average IQ (heretofore referred to as “intellectuals”) the average person simply does not possess the mental hardware to see and understand the world as we do?

What if that means that the average person will always be “stupid” in that sense?

If that is true, then I have no idea how one solves this problem. We certainly can’t pat them on the head and tell them to just trust us because we’re smarter than they are.

That’s a non-starter. It’s completely at odds with everything we are taught as free citizens of a modern democracy. Baked deep into the very structural elements of democracy is the notion that every citizens has both the duty and the right to figure things out for themselves and come to their own conclusions about the issues of the day, and vote accordingly.

And I am sure that made a lot of sense in the early days of modern democracy, when the only people who could vote were educated landowners.

And then the march of egalitarianism demanded that everyone get that same right. And there was no way said march would have even stopped to consider whether this was something the average citizen could actually do.

After all, the people leading the march were liberal intellectuals and as a class we have a marked tendency to imagine that everyone is just like us, and that they too can see the world as we do if we only take the time to educate and inform them.

This often fails. But we keep trying anyhow.

After all, it’s not like we have a choice. It’s not like we would support the formation of some kind of intellectual aristocracy where only the smart vote.

Well, some of us WOULD support that, but most of get that such a class would rapidly become corrupt and tyrannical and far, far worse than democracy ever was.

So the only solution is to shoulder the burden of leading the flock. It is up to us to explain ourselves in language the average person can understand and use our superior minds to lead them to a better tomorrow.

And if we cannot or will not do so, we have only ourselves to blame when things fall apart because we decoded it was better to let stupidity prevail than to “lower” ourselves to the task of explaining complicated things in simple words.

We are, after all, the shepherds of society.

And if the herd goes over a cliff, do you blame the sheep?

No, you blame the shepherd.

The responsibility lies with us.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.