Today’s a working day.

Gonna write a document for the job I am trying to get. One that details where i see the series going. Should be fun to write.

But I can feel the neurosis creeping in. Trying to freak me out about the whole thing and make me averse and avoidant by seeing it all as “too much” and “too soon” and making me want to crawl back under my rock till the “danger” (aka this golden opportunity) goes away and I can go back to being a puddle of goo.

And I am not unsympathetic to these feelings. They come from a genuine place of hurt and worry. That thinking has been with me a long time.

But I am not going to listen. I am not going to let it run and ruin my life. I am not goingto let fear and weakness rule me.

I will soldier on.

i will do what needs to be done even if it scares me.

I will persevere.

And I will win.

---

Not right now though, as I am having a sleepy day.

It’s my own fault. Been not taking my sleeping pill lately. As a result, my sleep quality has been poor and the quantity hasn’t been up to snuff either.

So I have been finding it harder to concentrate and think lately. I try to talk and the wrong word comes out. And it’s so hard to think of the right one.

And that’s terrifying, You can take anything else but leave me my words. They are all I have got. If I can’t speak properly, shoot me in the head.

That’s why I took my sleeping pill, Mirtazapine, this morning. I did it knowing that it would trigger a sleepy day where I catch up on my sleep debt.

In retrospect, I wish I had not done this on a working day, but whatever. The job will get done. Just later in the day than I had thought.

And I will get caught up on sleep, and be smarter.

Or at least better at being smart.

---

Crap, my internet just died. Writing via LibreOffice for now.

Still pissed off about my stolen $120 and my cardholder company’s lousy attitude about it.

Going to talk to someone about it when I go to cash my check on Wednesday. Vancity has been sympathetic and helpful in the past, so who knows, maybe they will help me even though they claim to have nothing to do with the reloadable VISA card with their name on it.

I am not afraid to throw my weight around a little on this one. I want my fucking money back, and I am willing to bring all my powers of personality and persuasion to bear to achieve that goal.

And if that doesn’t work. I might just start trying to get the media interested in the story of a poor disabled guy who had his money stolen and then got hurt again by the people who were supposed to be protecting him from this kind of thing.

Well, internet is still out. Time to reboot.

More after the break.

---

Hard work is a lie

Does anyone even believe that keeping your head down and working hardand doing your job well is how you get ahead any more?

Because that’s total bullshit and always has been,

You know what working hard gets you? Labeled as a drone. A drudge. Someone the system likes right where they are, doing all the work so that the real people who understand how things really work can devote all their time to what really gets you ahead, namely sucking up to the person above you.

A lot of people think that’s unfair. And they are right. The system told them that hard work and doing a good job gets you ahead , but they only say that because they want you to maximize their return on labour – to get the most work out of you they can.

But the really dirty side of it is that it’s all based on our hardwired social instincts being hacked by those above us.

We are born with the labour theory of value, which states that working for the collective is what has value and should be rewarded proportionately.

Imagine a hunter bringing a fat kill back to his village and getting cheered and lauded for providing for everyone and you get the idea.

Problem is, society is far too complicated for that now. Sure, labour is still the primary generator of value, despite what the corrupt economist elite will tell you, but the connection between our labour and our rewards is tenuous at best.

Yet we keep beavering away because that’s what our social instincts tell us to do. And the system continues to exploit that instinct while feeling absolutely no compulsion to keep up their end of the deal.

My dad worked hard all his life, and you know what it got him? MORE WORK. His became the desk where all the real players dumped their work because they knew that as long as it came from someone above him in rank, he would do it without question or complaint every single time.

I am positive that they must have laughed at him behind his back for imagining that being a total drudge and a doormat would be rewarded with anything but contempt.

And more work, LOTS more work.

And then he would come home from work and take his frustrations out on us, his family, rather than actually learn to assert himself at work.

So believe me when I say hard work is a lie. My dad lived that truth. And I saw the toll it took on him. And through him, the toll it took on the rest of us, too.

Want to get ahead? Be useful to your boss’ career. Be as like them as possible. Make sure they get a nice warm feeling every time they think of you.

Then, when it’s time to dole out the rewards, they will give them to you.

Whether or not you do your actual job is irrelevant. Get a drone like my late father to do the work for you.

You need all your time to curry favour and kiss ass.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So this happened :

PLEASE SHARE SO OTHERS ARE WARNED. Alert : DO NOT USE Vancity’s Reloadable VISA. I just got $120 stolen out of my account and have to fill out an actual pen and paper form to start the disputing a charge process, and that will take 60 to 90 days for no good reason. I mean seriously. Vancity is clearly on the side of the criminals because they make disputing a charge super onerous, hoping you will give up. There is no reason why there is not a little button marked “dispute this charge” next to each charge when I view my transaction history. Clearly, they feel the need to give the criminals ample time to make their getaway. Well guess what? I am not giving up. I am getting my god damned money back. Sure, I won’t get it back till Xmas, if I am lucky, but I am getting it back. In the meantime, I have to survive till next Wednesday with no money. It’s either that or borrow money, and I would rather make due. I am a disabled person and a very sick man who has to get by on provincial disability, and losing $120 is a huge blow to me. Fuck whoever stole my money, and fuck Vancity for letting some shady company run their reloadable VISA program. PLEASE SHARE SO OTHERS ARE WARNED.

what I posted to Facebook this morning

So yeah. I went to check my reloadable VISA’s balance this morning and discovered two fraudulent charges from companies I have never heard of, and when I called the company to complain, they told me I had to print out a form then fax or mail it to them, and then it would take 60 to 90 days for the “dispute process” to complete.

I guess I can’t really add much to my Facebook rant. It’s all in there.

So obviously, I am super fucking mad. I can be reasonable about a lot of things but my money is not one of them. I am going to get it back and I don’t care whose nuts I have to put in a wringer to do it.

I actually imagined this scene this morning :

Me, to Vancity : Tell you what. I’m going to make you the best offer you’ll get today : if you give me my money back, I will go away right now. But if you continue to dick me around, getting rid of me will get increasingly expensive to get rid of me. I will sue if I have to and I am a disabled person who can be very, very persuasive, and so I will win. I will also generate as much bad publicity for Vancity as I can, and that is a LOT. So why not grab yourself a bargain and just pay me back now?

And who knows, it might come to that. My next step is to appeal to Vancity for succor.

Because even though that have told me many times that they don’t “administer” the card, their name is all over it, and it’s their name being associated with a shady cardholder company that makes things easier for criminals with their insane policies, so I am holding them accountable.

I mean, they’re a credit union. They’re suppose to be cool.

Once I get my check next Wednesday, I will be looking for a new reloadable VISA. One that takes crime more seriously.

If it wasn’t for this crazy era we live in, I would just go back to doing everything in cash. But a lot of things can’t be done via cash now.

And I like being able to buy stuff online, dammit.

Now I am going to go burn off some anger by killing shit in Skyrim.

---

On being hard

Not, not like that.

I’ve always been a soft, squishy sort of person. One without sharp edges, pointy corners, or stiff ridges.

And that suits me. I like being soft and comfy like an old couch. I want to welcome people in and make them comfortable. I like being soft.

And being an amorphous blob that changes form to fit the situation appeals to me too. One of my biggest fears is to get locked into one shape and thus deprived of the shapeshifter’s main form of defense : adaptability.

So there’s definite benefits to being shapeless.

But it also makes you kind of useless on your own.

Without hard surfaces and deep structure, you are far weaker than more fully committed organisms. All that flabby softness might cushion you from the shocks and bumps of life but it also makes those things more likely to happen because of your lacking the strength to take command of events and pursue fixed outcomes.

Sure, you can adapt to any situation. But without strength, the best that you can hope for is to be the key for this particular lock, or maybe just blend in with the background.

You certainly can’t expect to be in control of your life. Sure, you can adapt to situations, but what controls the situations you have to adapt to?

Random circumstance with a sprinkling of self-destruction, I guess.

You are a body without a skeleton. A house without a foundation. A knife far too soft to hold an edge.

The only solution is to harden up. To accept that some permanent, committed, fixed structure is needed in order for all that shapeshifting to mean anything. Toon some levels let yourself become a harder and more calloused person.

I’ve always resisted that. Even in moments when I knew I should be stiffening up, I denied it. Instead, I did what all us chameleons do when fact with the predator of hard inflexible reality – shed my skin to get away and run like hell.

Enough. I now accept that in order to get better, I will have to become a harder man. Less flexible, less sensitive, less squishy, less weak. Stronger, tougher, more durable, more resistant to the world’s bullshit, more able to choose my fate.

But it’s so painful to do. Every instinct I have cries out against it and wants to instantly tear apart any structure that I build within myself in order to maximize adaptability in order to be “safe”.

“Safe”… and miserable. There comes a point where you have to ask yourself, “could whatever potential consequences I fear really be worse than THIS?.”

Nope. Scarier, perhaps,. because it’s unknown. But worse? Meh.

Hardness is needed. You can’t be goo forever. Sooner or later, you are going to have to stop fighting it and become a goddamned butterfly already.

Yes, it’s limiting. But it’s also empowering. And you can’t get anywhere in life without embracing your own power and the responsibility that comes with it.

Pick a root form, shapeshifter.

It’s time to spread your wings and fly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Thought I had therapy today, but apparently not.

Want to call my therapist to confirm but I lost his number when Google Keep didn’t keep it. Apparently Chrome hiccupped and logged me out of my main Google account, and I have forgotten the password to the main one, and there is literally no way for me to get the password back because every one of the methods they offer involves an email address I can no longer access, or a phone number I no longer have, or some other god damned thing on this Kafka-esque merry-go-round.

So all that information is gone to me. All my phone numbers, a bunch of passwords for other sides, a host of story ideas, various other info-bits – locked away forever.

I dunno. Maybe I can get them on the phone somehow. Or otherwise prove my identity in a way that is actually available to me.

But this question of identity can’t help but feel existential to me. I am reminded of all the dreams I have had where I am defending my right to exist.

Those always end with me screaming myself hoarse into the black void.

Glad I don’t remember much of them, to be honest. Just the basic plot. I get the feeling they would not make me happy if I remembered more.

Besides, I can justify my existence, at least on good days.

I have the same right to exist, be present, take up resources, take up space, have my needs met, and get what I need to thrive as anyone else.

The sad thing is that I have to keep reminding myself of that because of how I was treated by my family as a child.

That feeling of total negation of all rights, including existence, is still quite strong in me. I can handle it when I am calm and writing about it like this, but it is still my default state and thus is always waiting in the shadows for a chance to reassert itself.

So it’s a struggle. I feel like I passed a major milestone when I realized that mental health requires a constant investment of personal energy – energy I was conserving because I thought of my energy as scarce.

It’s exactly like how so-called “austerity” programs meant to see government through tough times actually make those tough times far worse.

Now knowing I need to “give back” those energies I stupidly stole from very important mood support systems and actually doing it are two different things.

That’s why their names are different.

Right now, it’s hard for me to focus enough to do it consciously. But I have been feeling pretty good overall lately, so maybe I am learning it subconsciously.

Plus, the fact that I have the prospect of gainful employment in my chosen field and get to talk to these great guys who seem to like me and my writing sure as hell brightens up my dark and gloomy little world.

Here’s hoping I land the gig and start making serious money and can finally get off disability and start living my life.

I know there’s lots of things you can do without money – but cash makes one hell of a good security blanket.

More after the break.

---

Better than the drive-in

I don’t like eating in cars.

You can blame my dad for that. He made me so scared to drip or drop or smear anything that the whole thing became tense and unpleasant.

He could do that with anything. It’s a special gift that he had.

I still feel intense panic when trying to buy shoes.

As a result of his irrational anger, when I was out on my own, I put effort into avoiding eating in cars, even when I had to be a pain to do it.

“I want a sit-down restaurant!”, I would whine. “Or maybe we could find somewhere with picnic tables and have a picnic.”

Anything but eating in the damned car. Sorry, miss, but I clearly asked for my meal to be panic attack free.

And so I went decades without eating in a car once.

But then Covid happened, and the only way I could get to see my best friend and comedienne extraordinaire Felicity Walker was by eating in Joe’s car while it was parked next to Felicity’s in the McDonald’s parking lot.

And the first few times were rough. I had a panic attack on the back burner of my mind the whole time. But I soldiered on.

And I am cool with it now. I would still prefer to eat at a table, but the panic is long gone.

For one thing, Joe is way less angry and scary than my Dad. i know that if I accidentally make a mess, he won’t scream at me.

But for the most part,. it hasn’t come up. Turns out I am totally competent to eat a meal in a car without wrecking the interior.

I’m as surprised as you are.

Lately, though, with the air outside being toxic because the world’s on fire – turns out Covid was just 2020’s opening act – our parking lot confabs are on hold.

Now, and how sad is this, we get our food separately and “teledine” together via Zoom.

There was a time when I thought “teledining” as it was presented in 80’s futurism was the saddest thing in the world.

And I still do.

But it beats the hell out of not seeing Felicity at all.

Still, the Big Mac levels in my bloodstream were dipping, so I ordered in.

And I have to say, it was rather nice to eat it sitting down properly, in my cozy bedroom, with the ghost of my father far, far away.

If you’re reading this from beyond the grave, Dad, just know that your anger became my anxiety, and that’s true for Anne, Catherine, and David too.

Hell, Mom too.

So if you want to know why your genius son never went anywhere in life. it’s directly because of you.

When you took me out of college, you broke me forever.

And I am trying to forgive you. After all, what’s the point of all this bitterness and rage when you’re dead as a doornail and I will never “make you pay”

But it’s really hard. I am painfully aware that there is a massive crack down the middle of my soul, and it leads right to you, Larry Donald Bertrand.

Guess you got away with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So far, the only side effect of my antibiotics is loss of appetite.

Which is always a pain. Right now, I feel like I have a brick in my stomach. I’m not nauseous or sick, but my stomach feels full even when I should be hungry.

But as patient readers know, this is old hat for me. My IBS kills my appetite all the time, and I have learned to eat when I don’t feel like eating.

It’s always hard, though. It involves tangling with one our most primal and powerful drives, namely hunger, and it always puts up a fight.

So it’s always a negotiation. It’s a lot like trying to get a cranky toddler to eat.

Me :How about this? You like this.
My stomach : No. It’s icky.
Me : Well how about this? It’s one of your favorite foods.
My stomach : No. It’s weird and gross.
Me : Well we have to eat something!
My stomach : Nuh uh!

And so forth and so on.

---

Consider this the budding beginnings of a business plan. I’ve talked about this before in this space but I want to pull the ideas together into something more coherent so I am going to “talk them out” by writing them down.

What I want to do is open a sugar free candy store called Sweet Nothings. In it, you would find sugar free versions of as many of life’s sweet things as possible.

So not just candy, but also ice cream, chocolate pudding, pies, cakes, pop, cookies, and anything else you can think of that is sweet.

It would be a brick and mortar business because a huge part of the appeal is having everything in one place.

That requires a place.

But of course, we’d sell online too. The idea would be to build up Sweet Nothings as not just a store but a brand synonymous with delicious treats for everyone.

Ideally, I would be able to develop it into a franchise. Because this is a business with a mission : to bring sugar free delights to everyone.

If I had my way, it would grow so big that it becomes one of those businesses people just expect to be around, like Pizza Hut or 7-11.

Back here on Earth, the most important thing about the decor is that it should convey the feeling of a regular old-style candy store as much as humanly possible.

We want our shoppers to feel that magical childhood feeling of excitement and wonder when they come in the store. As if they have stepped into a magical world where they can have whatever they want regardless of their dietary restrictions.

Which brings us to marketing : This business plan started because it’s the sort of business I wish existed as a diabetic. And diabetes is running rampant right now, to the point where endocrinologists say it’s not a matter of if you will become diabetic but when. Elderly onset diabetes in particular is on the rise.

But it would also be for anyone who wants to cut sugar out of their diet for any reason. Maybe they just want to eat healthier. Maybe they are dieting. Maybe they like the candy store atmosphere. Maybe they are just curious.

But it’s not just for diabetics. And absolutely nothing in the store(s) would suggest anything medical, clinical, or “healthy”.

This is a candy store, period!

More after the break.

---

Bleed a little more

Sometimes, it just feels good to bleed.

It’s never been a mystery to me why some of my fellow depressives cut themselves.

The pain releases endorphins and those combat depression. Physical pain also cuts through the emotional numbness which is depression’s main mechanism – hence so many cutters talking about how “they just wanted to FEEL something”.

On a more emotional level, bleeding maps neatly onto catharsis. If you are dealing wit an intolerable conflict and the emotional pressure has no other way out, watching yourself bleed can substitute for letting yourself talk.

Plus, cutting yourself is a daringly subversive thing to do. It violates all the rules of nature, and as such can give a person the same sort of rush of power and mastery that other transgressive acts can trigger.

You’re being bad and getting away with it! Yeehaw!

Myself, I’ve never been a cutter. I get it, but I have never done it. I think it’s done mostly by people who on some level feel pressured to be perfect, so much so that their own true feelings get pushed way down in favor of continuous flawless performance.

Nobody ever pressured me to be anything. In theory, I was pressured to get good grades, but in reality, those came so easily to me that there was never any conflict.

My problems flow in the opposite direction. Nobody took any interest in shaping me in any way. Nobody tried to motivate me either. Nobody did anything.

So I was left to raise myself. I got up and went to school alone and it was up to me whether I had breakfast and whether my clothes or body were clean.

From the first day of school on, I was on my own.

Metaphorically speaking, I was that last hour on Friday when everyone has already mentally checked out and no work gets done.

My parents checked out when I started going to school. Where I got bullied.

And they kept checking out all through my childhood. They stopped paying a babysitter to make me lunch at home in favor of Mom packing me a lunch.

On the one hand, walking home and back for lunch sucked.

On the other hand, so did bologna sandwiches and having to sit in the lunchroom with the other kids.

Eventually, Mom gave up on making my lunches too. Didn’t replace it with anything. Sje just… stopped. No explanation. No justification. She just…stopped.

And I was far too timid to ask why.

So I didn’t have lunch for around a year. That’s how long it took for me to get up the courage to make them myself, sure that at any second, someone would appear to tell me I am doing it all wrong and that I shouldn’t have tried and that I am making a huge mess and I should be ashamed of myself.

But that was wishful thinking. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. As far as they were concerned, I shouldn’t exist and they were doing me a huge favour in letting me stay, even though it was a huge imposition.

The less I reminded them I existed, the better.

But you nice people know all this already. Forgive me. I know I repeat the same sort of things over and over.

Believe me when I say that it helps me every single time. The more I write about it, the more emotions I process and release.

That’s how I bleed : by writing.

Thank you for helping me bleed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And enjoying life more.

Been having modest success in letting myself act on impulse more often. The idea is to dismantle almost all of the “cautious” machinery in my head that has smothered my id and made me so weak and cowardly.

It’s all just bullshit I invented so I didn’t have to face reality anyway. Just layers and layers of excuses and lies and dodges and obfuscation and numbness and dry dead tissue whose only purpose was to push reality further and further away and let me live in a world of media consumption and little else.

And all in the interests of “safety”. But not true safety. Safety defined as freedom from anxiety. And that means doing whatever the anxiety demands of you, no matter how soul-crushing and life-destroying it is.

The kicker, of course, is that this so-called “safety” is far worse than most of the things you are afraid might happen if you stray outside the strict confines of your fear.

It’s heartbreaking to realize you have chosen reliable unhappiness over actually getting out there and living life.

And all because my parents stopped paying for college and moved me back home. That’s what did me in.

Like I’ve said before, that sent me into a psychological death spiral that might have killed me. My mind just plain fell apart. I was dehydrated, malnourished, paranoid, depressed, and miserable.

And I dragged myself out of that all by myself. Forced myself to drink water and eat and get off the couch more and fight back against the madness plaguing me. And I got myself to where I could at least function on a low level.

But went no further.

Fast forward 25 years to today and I am still all jammed up. It’s like when my development was interrupted, all those vital life energies that were flowing into making me grow froze in place and clogged up the system.

And it’s that almighty clog that has acted like a lump in my throat, choking the life out of me and making it hard to live, for all these years. I’ve never been able to shift it.

And that’s because deep down, I don’t want to. Horrible as it is, I have grown accustomed to this truncated lifestyle, and the idea of no longer having the clog as a barrier between me and the world terrifies me.

So I write my words and do therapy over the phone in order to slowly reduce the size and weight of the clog.

And as it shrinks, I grow.

And because it’s a slow process, I have time to adjust to the changes and don’t have to face the existential terror of sudden exposure to the world.

But who knows. Maybe one of these days, I will have made my clog so small that it washes away like a log jam cleared by the spring thaw.

And then I will finally be able to breathe free, walk in the sun, and go on to live my life.

It’s about time.

More after the break,

---

Had another meeting about Secret Project tonight and I thought it went quite well. In addition to E, the guy who brought me into the project, I met the other half of the team, D, and we talked over series bibles and season arcs and such.

And I was late. D’oh! Not the worst crime in the world, in the grand scheme of things but I personally haaaaaaate ever being late for anything.

On an emotional level, to me, an agreed upon meeting time is a promise, ergo being late is tantamount to breaking a promise.

Now that I have typed it out, I realize it’s a pretty severe view.

But that’s just how I’m built.

The meeting went fine anyhow. I really enjoyed the discussion. I felt very relaxed and comfortable talking to these guys.

And what’s more, it felt right. It felt like I was finally where I belong. This was the connection and the camaraderie I thought I would find at VFS.

But of course, nothing against my classmates, but they were a somewhat random group of very young people who thought they wanted to write for TV and movies.

That was not the powerful selector I thought it would be. I thought I would be rubbing elbows with high energy creative types like me, but that was wishful thinking.

But today’s meeting was great and I can’t wait to do more of it.

This is gonna be awesome!

---

Healthwise, my Demon Nipple remains. It’s looking less demonic,though. It’s more pink than red now, and its chanting in backwards Latin sounds a lot less angry.

These antibiotics go great with holy water, too!

Seriously though, the thing is still there, and still leaking. I was worried when i ran out of the big bandages/dressings they gave me at the hospital and was still getting a lot of discharge from my unwanted guest.

But it turns out I can just jam a Kleenex in there and my flab holds it in place.

Try THAT with a skinny body!

So I have been changing Kleenexes now and then all day.

It ain’t fun, but it works.

Warning, medical grossness level upgraded to “severe”.

The discharge appears clear but on the tissue, it’s yellowish and greasy. Makes me wonder if I am leaking adipose tissue AKA fat.

If so, go for it. Bleed me skinny, Demon Nipple.

Bet nobody’s said that before!

At least I feel better now. I still feel kind of infected in that I still feel more tired than usual and I am too hot, but it doesn’t get me down much.

Oh, but I have been having dizzy spells lately. Gotta write that down before it gets lost in the chaos of my mind.

They happen in moments where normally my sense of balance would fix it in a second. Like when my leg brushes against something as I walk, or I stumble slightly, or I step on something accidentally that surprises me.

Those things happen and I am instantly very dizzy and there have been three or four times when only my reflexes and the fact that in a small apartment like this, there’s always something nearby to grab or lean against handy that saved me from having a serious fucking accident.

So I am being very, very careful as I move about.

Because only a fool bets their life on always making their saving throw.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Before you wreck yo’self.

Ordered my groceries online this week because we are witnessing the dawn of the Apocalypse and it turns out, the first seal is making the air bad to breathe.

I guess we’ll have to learn to breathe something else.

So the groceries arrive and the first thing I notice is that they gave me the full sugar version of the vanilla wafers I ordered, DESPITE the fact that I explicitly said in the “note to your Sav-On employee” section of the order form, “Do not substitute sugary versions of things for the no sugar version!”.

Or something to that effect. I probably phrased it better.

Luckily, the delivery guy was still standing there, so I handed the evil sugary cookies back to him and added a piece of my mind as a tip.

Clearly, and this plays into my trust/control issues SO BIGLY, I can’t trust these dipshits to actually read the note. so from now on, I will just say “no substitutions”.

I’ve avoided that up to this point because I wanted to treat these people like grownups. Ones that can handle basic instructions.

I’m done with that now.

Oh, I forgot : this whole thing started with me being woken up around half past noon by a phone call from said deliverers saying they would be there in ten minutes.

But I was sure I had booked a 3 pm to 5 pm delivery slot.

So now I had to wake up in a hurry and get some pants on. So I was already feeling cranky before the guy showed up.

I get grumpy when I have to wake up in a hurry. And wear pants.

This is the sort of thing that turns us placid Taurus types from being Ferdinand the bull, happily sniffing his flower into a raging Hank Hill ranting about how “we’re the only ones with any gott dang sense around here!”

It really does feel that way sometimes. Even for me, someone who is not actually all that sensible or practical.

And yet, I am always seeing simple, effective solutions to problems that seem obvious to me and yet humanity at large couldn’t manage to find them if they stuck a dowsing rod up their ass.

And it can drive you crazy if you let it. The only way to make peace with it is to accept that you have a special gift that makes certain things obvious to you that are by no means obvious to others.

And with that comes the humility of knowing there are lots of people in the world who can see things you can’t in just the same way.

Admittedly, being hyper-intelligent like I am complicates matters. It amps the problem up to 11 because I legit see things nobody else does and yet I also stumble around like a damned fool doing dumb shit all the time.

I’m a hothouse flower, is what it boils down to. It’s not how I would choose to be. I would rather big rugged and practical and tough.

But there’s a reason people build hothouses to grow delicate flowers like me.

Because oh, how we bloom.

More after the break,

---

I did a thing

Feeling better . Antibiotics must be working. The malaise is gone, thank Jesus, and I don’t feel tired all the time.

Still feel very hot though. It’s either a serious, life-threatening fever, or August.

It doesn’t feel like the heat is coming from outside my body, though. It feels like someone turned the furnace on waaay too early. Like I got space heaters going full blast somewhere mid-torso.

It might be clogged pores. I need to take hotter showers, and more of them. Get my thrice damned big pores flushes out so I can sweat properly.

Another inheritance from my mother’s genes. Big, clog-prone pores. Makes me wish I had my own little sauna.

The dry kind, of course. The other kind isn’t a sauna, it’s a steam room.

Tried the one at UPEI once. I swear to god, I barely made it out alive. Turns out it activated my tendency towards heat stroke ALL THE WAY.

Pretty sure some of the old guys in there must have helped me out.

No, I like the dry heat. Feels amazing as long as I can keep my easily overheated head from making me ill.

My favorite thing about being on the beach is laying on a towel on the sand, letting all that radiant heat broil the toxins from me body.

Having fun in Skyrim. Think I found a cure for my tendency to get bored with my current character around Level 30 and start a new one : respec potions.

Oh, NOW the title makes sense!

To respec your character in a game like Skyrim is to get all your skill points (or whatever refunded so you can spend them differently.

Usually, this is used to correct mistakes. Skills you regret investing in, spells that were totally not worth learning, erasing that one crazy night with the elf ranger and his dog.

You know, normal things like that.

But there’s nothing that says you have to invest a single point in anything you invested in before.You could completely rework your character into something that only has one thing in common with the previous incarnation and that’s a name,

Don’t you wish real life had that option?

“I’d like to move all the points I put into video game into actual marketable job skills, please. Oh, and how much IQ do I have to refund to get social skills?”.

I can spare a few points. I’m smarter than I know what to do with anyhow.

What am I forgetting? Oh, the thing I did!

I sent my notes to E, my guy on thsis show I might be writing, and he liked them and so I am going to start Phase 2, which is characters.

Shows live and die by their characters. You either enjoy spending time with these people or you don’t.

Luckily. I happen to be extremely good at making funny, lovable characters.

After all, I’ve played one for many years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Normally, as patient readers know, on Sunday I do my grocery shopping before doing McD’s with my friends in the Ironwood parking lot.

But I won’t be doing that this week, partly because I am sick, but mostly because the world is sick.

It’s developed a terrible fever. I mean, it’s really burning up. And that means that where I live, Richmond, the air is not really fit to breathe out there.

Why it’s any better when you’re inside is beyond me. People do know that inside air and outside air are the same air, right? It’s not like we live in hermetically sealed isolation units. What’s outside comes inside and vice versa.

Oh well, I suppose people need to feel like there is something they can do to protect themselves. What else can the government say when it’s the motherfucking air we breathe that is the problem?

We’re all doomed? Head for the hills? Time to bash your neighbor over the head and steal their go bags and SUV?

Actually, I would love to head to a higher elevation. Particulate contaminants are heavier than air, and thus tend to settle in low lying areas over time.

So now might be a very good time to visit your friend who lives on the mountain. As opposed to being where I am, which is below sea level.

At least we have the sea breeze to keep the air moving.

As I mentioned yesterday, I am very worried. My thoughts are increasingly stark. Potential acts of eco-terrorism keep popping into my head.

And even eco-war. The stakes on climate change are getting higher and higher. Eventually we will stop asking bad actors to stop killing the planet and take matters into our own hands, even to the point of invasion.

And as things get worse and worse, the feeling of being called to fill the world with my voice grows stronger. I no longer feel like I have a choice. This calling will eventually overcome my enormous inertia and I will get into the thick of things somehow.

Yeah,. somehow. That’s the question now. How do I get my voice heard? Where is the most proper and effective point of entry? How does a nobody like me get enough people’s attention to get the ball rolling on making myself into a pundit?

I am sure there are places online that could give me some tips. But how do I know what tips are good?

Part of me – my id side – wants to just say fuck it, pick a point at random, and trust that the power of my voice and my words and my message will attract an audience regardless of where I start.

I feel like a diver on the edge of the high dive board. I’ve gone past the point of thinking I might climb down out of fear, and now I am trembling on the brink, waiting for the energy to be right.

Of course, I could just dive in. That’s what I will do eventually, after all.

But there’s some shit I have to go through first.

More after the break.

---

There are things far worse than silence

Looking at the above, it occurs to me that my biggest fear is that wherever I take this voice of mine, I will make my big entrance, clear my mighty throat, lay down some words of blood and fire laden with wisdom, insight, and the will to destroy evil words….and get absolutely no response.

And I mean nothing. Not even cricket chirps. Zero reaction whatsoever. Like so many times in my life, it will be like hadn’t even been there.

Opposition I can handle. Hell, I thrive on it.If I made a post on Reddit then went to bed, and in the morning I found my inbox jam packed with hate emails, I would be the happiest man on Earth. I would dance with joy.

That would be worth far more to me than a lot of tepid agreement. People saying “Gee, I guess you’re probably right. ” and “I’m glad someone finally said it” and “you know, I never looked at it that way before. ”

Thanks…. I mean that. But what are you going to DO about it? I’m not doing this to entertain you, I’m doing it to inflame and inspire you.

I want to build a network of hardheaded pragmatic liberals determined to fix the world by any means necessary.

Even bribing billionaires to stop fucking with democracy. These people are compulsive money hoarders. If we attach a big fat tax cut to our election finance reform bill, they will not be able to stop themselves from biting that hook.

Come to think of it. I could sell it to the billionaires as a way to stop people from hating them. We only hate billionaires because they fuck with our elections.

If they stopped doing that, and paid their taxes, nobody would care.

Anyhow, back to silence. I can’t guaranteed that I won’t get ignored the first time I post to my chosen subReddit. Or the tenth time. Or the hundredth time.

But I know that I am capable of analyzing the posts that do gets lots of replies and activity, and learning from them.

And I can also analyze my own posts and figure out what went wrong and apply those lessons to future posts.

So really, it’s just a matter of picking a place and going for it. And trusting in my ability to really, really piss people off to take care of the rest.

It’s about time I used that power for goodish.

The way I see it, it’s okay to be an asshole if all your assholery is directed at much bigger assholes than you could ever be.

People like that kind of asshole. Enough to, ya know, buy their merch. Pay to hear them talk. Maybe even work for the cause.

Who says you can’t get rich doing the right thing? At no point will I compromise my morals for money. This entire enterprise is a moral crusade on my part. I want to use my voice to destroy the hateful smallminded garbage passing for morality these days and get people back in touch with the pure, wholesome, uncompromised morality that not only leads to doing the right thing but purifies the soul as well.

I’m slightly ambitious.

So yeah. I can see this thing happening.

The only question is…..when?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Last night, I was very sick.

Felt like an alien creature made of thick black smoke had crawled into my body through my pores and was slowly murdering me.

My energy level was catastrophically low. My mind was battered, tattered, and scattered. I felt like there was a blast furnace in my inner abdomen. And my head was pounding with the sort of pain that obliterates reason.

I couldn’t concentrate well enough to play Skyrim or do Facebook stuff. So I tried lying down for a while. But the malaise was making me restless and the headache was making me cranky so, despite how tired I was, I couldn’t escape into sleep.

And then…I had some kind of attack.

I felt like I was smothering. I could feel the air moving in an out of my lungs, but it might as well have been chocolate pudding for all the oxygen I was getting out of it. My lung hurt and things started to blur.

Luckily, it was over before I could truly start to panic. I sat up and that made things better. Then I got out of bed and sat in front of the computer and that made me feel a whole lot better.

And doing my little breathing exercise where I push as much air out of my lungs as I possibly can in one long exhalation helped a whole lot more.

I seriously felt like I had just barely survived an assassination attempt.

Guess I don’t want to die after all.

At least, not if it’s going to hurt.

Just thinking about the incident is freaking me out. So let’s switch over to the comfortably cool detached world of science.

My theory for a long time has been that somehow. when I exhale, I don’t quite get the job done. Some CO2 remains in my lungs. Over time, this builds up.

When I was younger and healthier, this manifested harmlessly as the occasional deep sigh. Well, harmlessly for me, anyhow.

If my mom was in the room, she would worriedly ask me what was wrong. Because from her POV, I just heaved a deep, heartfelt sigh of trembling despair.

Sorry Mom. It’s just part of how I breathe, apparently.

So I figure that what happened was that this CO2 buildup reached critical levels. And this had something to do with the fact that I was lying down. Like in the prone position the CO2 pools in my lungs more easily.

So when I sat up. the CO2 moved to the bottom of my lungs and I could get good air via the now cleared top part of my lungs.

Manual exhalation took care of the rest.

Right now, I dunno what to do with this information. Tell my doctor, I suppose. See if he knows of a way to learn to exhale better.

I feel like my heavy gut is involved somehow. Like it pulls on my lungs so that it weighs down every breath I take, and that keeps me from getting all the bad air out.

Would explain the sleep apnea too.

Now I need to go lose myself in Skyrim till I calm down.

More after the break.

---

The edge of annihilation

I looked at the last line of Part 1 and, at first, i thought “Calm down from what?”.

So I guess it worked. I went through my freaking out period and now my personality uncanny ability to get back on its feet and keep going has kicked in and convinced me that everything has gone back to normal.

It hasn’t, of course. I am as overheated and tired and dizzy as ever. The Demon Nipple is still there and being a Cronenbergian nightmare.

Don’t worry, I’ve promised myself that if it starts to moan, weep, chant, or speak backward Latin, I’m dialing 911.

So far, the heavy dose of Sulfatrim^[1] I am taking is not producing any side effects that I know of. That’s how it tends to be with me. On the one hand, I have IBS and a rather fussy digestive system.

On the other hand, I almost never get side effects from meds. Go fig,

Well I’ve dicked around enough. Time to justify that title.

Never in my life have I feared for the future as much as I am right now.

Things are getting worse. The climate continues to heat up. California is an inferno and the rest of the West Coast isn’t doing much better. Various completely predictable effects of global warming rock the world 24/7. At the same time, the sociopolitical equivalent of global warming continues to add energy to the zeitgeist, raising people’s ire and shortening their tempers and making us, as a species, a time bomb.

And I am no longer able to avoid thinking : these could be the last of the Good Times.

Because that’s how we’ll refer to these golden days of unprecedented peace and prosperity on Planet Earth once everything goes all to hell. When global warming destroy so much of the world’s food-growing capacity that real scarcity kicks in and people start losing their minds out of uncertainty and fear.

When the very foundations of modern life like firefighting and the police and especially public utilities like water and electricity start to break down from the strain.

They were not designed to handle bullshit like this.

When people, en masse, start losing faith in the forces of civilization to the point of banding together with people they already know and establishing tiny fiefdoms.

When all of us alive today who survive will be called upon to justify our standing idly by while the world burns because 20 billionaires didn’t feel like sharing?

That’s the future nightmare I envision. Everything gone to shit. A shattering of the stability and safety and security of modern life that we never appreciated until it was far too late for us to save it.

Some day, this will be known as the Final Golden Age.

Future humans will revile every single fucking one of us for not being willing to sacrifice literally anything to save the world.

And that’s really starting to bug me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Currently, my health trajectory is fatal.

Oh sure, it won’t happen all at once. That’s the beauty of it. My ship of health is sinking so very slowly that it’s barely perceptible. It could not be easier for me to convince myself that everything is okay.

And I won’t have to do anything overtly stupid, either. All I have to do is continue on my current course of healthy-ish eating and unhealthy almost completely sedentary life and I will slowly fall apart until I die way too young without even having lived yet.

So ya know. At least I have a plan.

The dark truth is that death does not frighten me. I know it should, but it doesn’t. The idea that I am going to die young should scare the crap out of me and motivate me to change my life like nothing else could.

Heck, if not for me, then I should at least care enough to take care of myself so that my friends and family don’t have to go through my dying young while they are helpless to do anything but watch me destroy myself in slow motion.

But when I contemplate my own death, I feel nothing. Less than nothing. A null set. The interstellar void. Hard vacuum.

Actually that’s not entirely true. I do feel something : relief.

Death actually sounds kinda good to me. Not enough for me to cause it myself – I am not suicidal per se.

But enough for me not to feel strongly motivated to avoid it, either.

And I suppose that in a way, that’s kind of the same thing. Only milder.

I mean, I no longer want to step into traffic, but if an out of control driver was barreling toward me at top speed, I might not get out of the way.

Harsh but true.

And I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if it can be fixed. My mind keeps trying to invent some kind of escape scenario where I flee this burning building before it crashes down around my head, but that’s kind of impossible when the building is your body.

So it’s repair, or succumb.

And obviously, my answer “should” be repair. That would be the sane response.

But I am not sane. I am crazy. And my crazy ass looks at all the work that fixing myself would take and all the changes that would be involved and how alien a new, healthy life would be and despairs.

So it chooses succumb.

Because dying seems a heck of a lot easier.

It would be different if I didn’t feel so abandoned and alone all the time. I have people who love and support me, and I am grateful for that, but I don’t feel it.

Emotionally, I am still that same kid who laid down in a snowbank and willed himself to die. I’m still there. Alone, forgotten, abandoned, left to die in the dark cold void.

Hell, not even left to die. Just…. left.

They didn’t care what happened to me after that.

And I don’t know how to deal with that.

More after the break.

---

I’m getting sick of this

God, being sick sucks.

I’ve used up my ready supply of patience and forbearance and now I just want my god damned energy back. I can’t stay awake for more than an hour and a half, two hours tops, and it’s just that there’s so much to do, and I’m tired of sleeping.

And worse than that is the overall feeling of malaise. I feel like I am wilting under the heat of a dark star. Like some form of vampire is draining me with sensual slowness. Like the furnace of my life force is guttering.

Oh well, it was never very hot anyhow.

Right now, my challenge is to get myself to eat. I know I should eat, I know I need to eat, but right now I am at Appetite Level Zero. Food seems like something alien to me about which I have fond memories to which I can no longer relate.

Well, at least the verbal flourishes are on point.

Maybe I should take a crack at being a poet. Seems like a sweet gig for someone as talented and prolific as me. Write a hundred words with lots of line breaks about how I am feeling at that moment, and voila, fame.

Of a sort. A very limited sort. And there’s no money in it, either.

So I would have to be doing it for entirely personal reasons. Reasons of self-expression. Often, when I am trying to put my thoughts and feelings into this little blog o’mine,I fee like I am fumbling towards poetry of a sort.

Poetry, imagistic prose, pretentious symbolism…. it’s a continuum.

I’ve always thought Bukowski had a sweet gig. All he had to do was write tiny little poems and he got to be world famous in his lifetime.

Probably didn’t get rich off it, but still, he is a known poet.

Where was I? Food. Right.

It is so tempting to just skip supper. To hell with it. Save my appetite for when I have my snack around 1 am. I will probably be hungry by then.

But of course, it ain’t that simple. For me, missing meals can have long term repercussions that last for days.

So i have got to eat, even though I don’t feel like it. Maybe I can get some of my leftover pizza down, plus some ice water.

We’re out of fruit, too, which doesn’t make things easier. Generally speaking, when I need to jump-start my appetite, the best thing for it is a nice red juicy apple.

They almost always look good to me. And often once I actually start eating, my appetite comes back, which is a weirdly backwards way for things to work.

“Have something to eat!”
“No thanks, I’m not hungry. “
“Why aren’t you hungry?”
“Because I haven’t had anything to eat!”

In conclusion, human bodies are dumb.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went to the hospital. Doctor gave me a scrip for antibiotics and took a sample of the discharge from my Demon Nipple.

I’m not happy about that because he never told me what it was I had and dealt with me in such a friendly but peremptory fashion that I still don’t know WTF.

And all of that is very clear to me…. now.

But at the time, it all happens so fast that I don’t have time to even figure out what is going wrong before it’s all over and I am left there bewildered and lost.

So obviously, I need more than just a feisty attitude. No matter how determined I am to advocate for myself as strongly as possible, I just don’t have the mental speed to process what it going on in realtime.

So that’s it. I need a medical advocate. There is no other solution.

I don’t like admitting this. I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, with extraordinary verbal and intellectual skills, admitting that I need someone to hold my hand when I go to the doctor because I think too slow.

I’m telling you, being a genius is demoralizing and confusing because for every area in which you excel, there’s a dozen in which you are far below average.

I can see why in the comics, people like me end up megalomaniac supervillains. Having to inflate one’s ego to compensate for ones crippling inadequacies and invest that ego in one’s small reserve of mega-competencies would make anyone unstable.

At least the outfits are cool.

Oh, but my having a workable but unsatisfying experience at the hospital was just the beginning. I took a cab home, and as I got out of the cab, I glanced down to the place on my chest where my keys should have been, and yes, they were not there.

And as often happens in these circumstances, I have a moment of total clarity, like a high def snapshot of myself taking my keys off so I could put my shirt back on and not putting them back on.

And not having a cell phone, I couldn’t just call Joe or Julian.

So I tried using the buzzer. No answer. Tried like twelve times. No answer.

So I waited outside the front entrance to my building and quite cleverly slipped in while someone was holding the door open for a UPS guy.

It’s amazing what brown can do for you.

Then I banged on the apartment door. No answer, I banged harder. No answer.

So I sat down on the floor outside the apartment and just kind of mellowed out there for a while until the stress chemicals wore off enough for me to be able to think rationally.

It wasn’t what you’d call a plan, but it’s how it worked out.

Then I borrowed a cell phone from some nice guy who was helping people move int the apartment next door, 602.

Called Joe. He said he’d rouse Julian. Faboo.

But nothing happened. And the problem with borrowing some rando’s phone is that Joe couldn’t call me back.

And now I really needed to pee.

So after dithering about it for a while, and with my bladder screaming at me, I pressed the down button then got on the elevator when it arrived.

I live on the sixth floor.

It immediately went up to the 13th.

Then the person who had called the elevator to the 13th floor decided she didn’t want to get in the elevator with me.

Then we went down to ninth. A probable nanny joined me.

Then down to the fifth, where another joined us.

Then down to 2, because one of the probable nannies needed something from her car,

Then finally down to one, aka the ground floor, aka “the one with the outside on it”. I made a beeline for a spot in visitor parking I had previously noted as being well suited for illicit outdoor urinating.

Walls on three sides and a parking spot on the fourth.

Operation Micturation complete, I then saw the nice fellow who had let me use his phone before and borrowed it again.

Told Joe I was still not in. Then said the words I dreaded so much : if you can’t get hold of Julian, it’s going to have to be you.

He was not happy.

I was not surprised.

I mean, I hate surprises and disruption too. So I get it.

Still, he left work to come rescue me, and so I finally made it home. Now I am finally home, getting my blogging done, and getting ready for one hell of a nap.

Wish me luck.

More after the break,

---

Where was I? Oh right…. problems.

As always when I am the victim of my own dumbfuckery, I seriously consider the possibility that I might be mentally handicapped.

Not in the low IQ sense, obviously. But you have to ask yourself : at what point does absentmindedness stop being a character a flaw and start being an “issue”?

I got brain problems, man. I get confused, I get mentally lost, I lose executive function entirely, and in general, I go through life gripped by a cold grey fog.

It just struck me that this might not be normal. You know. Health wise.

i suppose a better term than “mentally handicapped” would be “cognitively impaired”. Despite my intellectual skills, i have serious thinking issues. And they have a severe impact on my mental and physical health because they make it so hard to make the right decisions. and take the right actions for my long term wellbeing.

It all gets swallowed up in that devouring void at the very heart of me. That grey fog of mine is positively carnivorous.

And part of me likes it that way. It likes that it doesn’t have to deal with life because the fog keeps life from ever even reaching it.

And it can hunker down in its bunker and ignore the world while I die.

It’s fine with me dying too.

At least then it would be over.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.