Wanna know how I feel right now? Press this button!

Because the results from my lactic acid test came in, and they are perfectly normal.

And I was not ready. Sure, I had foreseen the possibility intellectually, but emotionally I was not in any sense prepared for that result.

I was looking for a smoking gun, but the smoke turned out to actually be steam coming off a freshly shat pile of bullshit.

Now it was still wrong of Doctor Andrew Smith to send me home with a lactic acid level of 3.5 when normal tops out at 2.2. So I honestly still have a good case that he made the wrong call there.

But without evidence of long term consequences to my health, it would be a tougher case to make for any lawyer I engaged.

And it certainly wouldn’t get me a conveniently large settlement.

And now I feel dumb for getting all het up about it.

Even though I now that it was a perfectly sensible and smart reaction given the information I had at the time.

On some level, I still feel like I went off half cocked and made a fool of myself.

That’s social anxiety for ya, I guess.

Whatever. The good news is that I am healthier than I thought. I am not, in fact, slowly dying as lactic acid dissolves my muscle tissue.

The question remains, however, as to how I got so weak. Why do little things like getting my groceries make me feel like I ran a mile through snow uphill? Why do I get so tired for apparently no reason at all? Why do I hurt so much?

And I know it will be up to me to remind Doc Chao of the original complaint that brought me into his office in the first place. Doctors have very narrow vision and once they order the tests, the results of those tests are all they see.

If the results say you’re healthy, that’s where it ends. Even if your original complaint remains an open question.

I have another appointment with him in two weeks, I suppose it can wait til then.

Oh, the other good news is that the shots are working and my B12 levels are up to normal. So that’s one less way in which I am dying.

I am still going to add more meat to my diet. My “one animal product based meal a day” plan is still on.

But the steaks are a lot lower. (Ha ha ha. )

All in all, I feel rather tossed about and bruised. Life threw me a curveball today, and the fact that I saw it (potentially) coming only makes it worse.

But this will pass. I will mope for a while but then get over it and move on.

And when I do, I will go looking for answers to my illnesses all over again.

Oh. And finally get around to injecting some goddamned insulin so that I am not ravenously hungry 24/7.

That shit really gets on my nerves.

More after the break.

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Stop trying to escape

Here’s another old bone to chew.

So much comes down to panic. Panic changes everything.

Once your internal panic button has been pressed. your mind starts focusing on escape plans to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Considerations like whether or not escape is what you actually want to do. And whether or not you are doing serious harm to yourself or your long term self interest. And whether it will hurt someone you love. And even whether you know, for a fact, that you will hate yourself for the stupid and awful things you do to escape.

Panic doesn’t care. Panic, like its cousin rage, doesn’t care what harm it does. Panic will do absolutely anything to get the escape it craves, consequences be damned. Panic is so selfish and shortsighted that it will rip a hole in your life just to escape through it.

Oh but it gets so much worse. That’s just active panic. That might be somewhat manageable. It’s the passive panic that kills you.

Because it makes you avoid things that might make you panic. And that’s a negatively recursive process because even thinking about something that might make you panic makes you panic a little bit. and that makes you stop thinking about the panic trigger, and then stop thinking about things related to the trigger, and then you stop thinking about things related to THOSE things, and so far and so on until you are completely isolated, can’t do anything, and panic has made you its bitch.

That’s basically how an anxiety disorder works. In a sense, it’s an addiction, and like all addictions, it hollows you out.

And we all know the reward for giving into the addiction : relief. No matter what the long term consequences are for fleeing, the relief is immediate. You go from a very negative emotional state (panic) to a deeply pleasurable one (relief) when you escape,. and that’s what keeps you doing it even when you know it’s hurting you.

The anxiety disorder will even ramp up the panic as fast as it can in order to get to that sweet sweet relief as soon as possible. Over time, this smooths the path to panic os much that even the slightest stimulus can set you off.

No wonder we all end up living the urban hermit life.

And as far as I can tell, the only way to fight back is to refuse to listen to the urge to escape. To stay in the game instead of quitting. I wish I had a less painful and scary solution, but I just don’t.

All you can do is grit your teeth and hang in there even though your panic disorder is going to throw everything it has at you to try to make you quit.

Eventually, it will run out of ammunition, and you will emerge on the other side of it feeling so much better.

And what do you know, you got your relief after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a topic and an anecdote and a video, And at first, i thought they were separate, but then I realized they dovetailed rather nicely.

The anecdote first.

One funny thing about my recent game of Trivial Pursuit with Badger 1 was that I kept having to stifle the urge^[1] to help her when it was her turn. Give her hints and such.

That’s how happily helpful I am, as well as how little competition means to me. I would happily help my opponent because helping people means far more to me than winning any sort of friendly competition.

Things would be different if there was money on the line.

But I have never been comfortable with “winner takes it all” situations.

Which leads to the video :

I can’t possibly explain how much that song means to me. It expresses things about myself that I thought only I experienced. It’s almost like I wrote it.

Except i don’t know or understand myself well enough to do it.

Which brings me to my topic.

There has always been a very deep and mysterious and sensitive part of me that my irrationally rational mind didn’t understand and couldn’t access and therefore feared, yet I also understood that it was incredibly and deeply important.

In fact, I felt quite helpless against its depth and power, and that scared me, but still, I sensed that I needed it badly.

Now that I am learning to overcome my “rationality” and accept the irrational as valid and important, I can see that this was my Mars in Pisces deep connection to the intuitive and the unconscious that made for a poor fit with all my ego-brained bullshit that it was like a foreign resident in my mind.

I remember one other instance where something grabbed me in that way and in that case I don’t really know why.

It was when my sister Anne was listening to this song :

I was passing outside her room when I heard the song and something about it grabbed me. I sat down on the stair and listened to it, not knowing what was happening, but knowing it was something profound.

And for months afterwards, the song would pop into my head and repeat and it soothed me in a way I did not even remotely understand.

And I am still not sure what about it gave it that power. I mean sure, it’s still one of my fave Rush songs, but it doesn’t have the impact on me that “Winner Takes It All” does.

It’s just another Rush song.

My best guess is that I was taken by the strong sense of freedom and liberty in the song. It soars in a way my rational mind could never provide.

Transcendence is not rational. The rational can only reach the heights by climbing the stairs. It has no wings to fly nor can it generate the winds of inspiration to ride.

Stupid fucking rationality.

It’s clear to me now that my salvation lies with that deep mysterious Mars in Pisces part of me, It connects me to the deep emotional irrational heart of all things, that primal pulse that drives all life, from the amoeba to the ape.

The id, in other words. But not the grunting humping pooping id. Something far more profound and powerful yet simple and true.

It’s what I have always admired in people I consider to be spiritually superior to me. Their sense of connection to something far greater and more wonderful than our silly little selves with our silly little lives.

There is no doubt in my mind that such people are much, much healthier than I. They are connected to something transcendent within themselves that operates outside the confines of the rational and the real and therefore can serve as a source of renewal and reinforcement when the real world just isn’t meeting our needs.

This, in turn, gives the emotionally whole person what they need in order to go out into the world and get those needs met for real.

It’s like the emergency fat reserves of emotion.

It’s also the source of the mysterious rebalancing force I wrote about a while back. That strange X factor that inputs the emotions, or at least their cognitive tags, that our mind needs in order to regain a balanced healthy state.

This process is known to the layman as “healing” or “getting the fuck over yourself”.

I’m working on it.

After all, why should I be a fool who plays by the rules? Who says I can’t just arbitrarily declare myself to be happy not because I have a reason to be happy, but because I choose to be happy? Why can’t I hit the reset button and reboot my emotions when life stops being fun?

So like, fuck the rules, man. I am he who walks through walls. The one who can see and act in dimensions and ways that are outside reality for most people and hence make me seem like a fifth dimensional wizard to them.

I am the maker of rules, not the follower of rules. I am he who sees not just more of the chess board than others but the chess players, the audience, and even the light outside the window of the room in which we play.

And most of all, I am he who knows that it’s all just a game.

So to hell with reality’s rules. Consider me to be metaphorically flipping the table. From now on, I play by my own rules, and if those rules interfere with my thriving, I will change them without pause or regret.

Because this is my game, and its only mission is to make me happy.

Anything outside of that can go fuck itself nightly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Nothing quite like having to skirt the edges of Death’s dread realm for your health.

Finally got my tired ass into the lab for my lactic acid test. This required me to fast for ten hours, which leading endocrinologists agree is “stupid” for a diabetic like me.

And I was okay up until around noon. I had the flutters and shakes but those I can love with as long as the end is near.

So to speak.

But around noon, I started to feel really, really cold. And not the normal kind of cold you feel when you are outside in the winter, oh no.

This was a creeping, oozing cold that slithered around in my body like my blood had frozen into slush and wasn’t so much flowing as sluicing around in my body.

And I thought about a fuck it and chuck it solution, but we were leaving at 12:30 pm so I made the rational adult decision to risk my life in order to not have to try again tomorrow or on Friday,.

Look, I wasn’t at my smartest, okay? And one thing I know about myself is that when all my other faculties are messed up, I fall back on my primary programming, which is to pursue whatever my current goal is with fanatic zeal.

Basically, my primal mode is stubbornness.

Luckily, when I got to the lab, it was empty. Not a single other patient there.

That may have saved my life.

Because by that point I was extremely cold all over and things were starting to dim. But I managed to give the receptionist my info and get myself seated in the little room and wait for the tech to come for my blood.

She seemed a little nervous, which made me a little nervous, but the whole thing went off without a hitch and she left with three tubes of my blood.

What can I say, I have always been a giving person.

Blood – it’s in you to give.

Once she told me I was free to go, I took the apple I had thought to bring out and ate it while we drove to 7-11.

The apple kept me going enough to get myself three 2L bottles of Diet Coke (gotta feed the addiction), three samosas, and a naughty dessert.

I can legit say that the sugar dessert is medically needed to boost my blood sugar.

I meant to get chicken strips instead of the samosas for the B12, but at the moment of truth I forgot and just got what I normally get.

There is no B12 in chickpeas. I just Googled it.

And I ate the last of my little turkey pot pies last night, so I am currently without a meaty entrée for tonight’s supper.

Oh well, I was probably going to order in anyway. Plus it give me an extra kick in the pants towards doing my meaty order from Sav-On or wherever.

Gonna get me some good quality hot dogs, some cold cuts, more little pot pies, some good all beef bologna, some chili and some meaty soups… it’s going to be a carnivore’s carnival up in this joint.

My fangs are dripping just thinking about it.

More after the break,

---

Just posted this to Facebook :

Sure, I’m, the highest paid sculptor at Deer Park, but I’m the best there is, and that’s why I make the big bucks.

a witty fox

My only worry is that not everyone knows that “buck” is another word for “stag” and so some might not get the joke.

But there’s only one another animal called a “buck” and that’s a “broncing buck”, those horses they ride in rodeos, and even fewer know that.

Got me some pizza tonight. Got the Meat Lovers, because B12, and on a whim decided to try the “homestyle” crust.

So far, I quite like it.

But be warned, it is not radically different from the regular crust. It’s more or less the same, only softer, crustier, and more like bread.

Clearly they were going for something more like home made pizza, and they sort of succeeded. It’s not nearly as good as home made pizza when done right, but it’s closer than their usual crust.

I remember one time when my mother made a pizza that basically used biscuit dough as the crust, and OMG NOMF.

Anyhow, it’s pretty good.

Oh, but I must mention my recent social adventure.

I bought a piece of software called Tabletop Simulator. It lets you play any sort of tabletop game on your computer.

And here’s the thing : the games are (mostly) free, and there’s over one hundred thousand of them,

Not bad for eleven bucks!

My friend Maelkoth has been bugging me to get it for ages. He’s a big fan of it and so every time it went on sale (it’s normally twenty bucks plus), he would pester me to get it so we can play stuff together.

.This latest time, I realized that I really had no reason NOT to get it. It sounded like a lot of fun and I could certainly afford it,

And despite my bovine stubbornness, I am not immune to being nagged and prodded.

So I got it, and found it’s a lot more complicated than I thought. They take the “simulator” part very seriously, and that means I had to learn how to turn game pieces and roll dice and whatnot from a tutorial,

Seems absolutely pointless to me, But I am coming at it from the viewpoint of a gamer who is used video games, where the standards for efficiency in interfaces are very high.

In TTS, you have to do everything yourself. Turn cards, throw dice, move playing pieces, and so on.

In any video game version of a board game, the computer would do that shit.

So the learning curve has been rough. Makes me feel very old. And the fact that I know part of my resistance is my own stubborn objections to the interface makes it worse.

I can be such a locus of friction!

So the first two games I tried were too complicated for a tyro like me, I just stared blankly at the screen trying to figure out waddy fug.

So the third game I downloaded was Trivial Pursuit. Now THERE is a game that I know inside out, upside down, and rotated into non-Euclidean dimensions. My brother Dave and I played that game for hundreds of hours.

We got to point where it was pointless to play because we both knew all the answers to all the questions.

We basically finished Trivial Pursuit.

So I downloaded it and started a game of it, leaving it open for anyone to join.

Trivial Pursuit is really not a game you can play by yourself.

I ended up playing against a 24 year girl I will call Badger 1. And as soon as we started playing, I came to the sickening realization that the game had changed a lot when they relaunched it in 2006.

The new rules make the game play much faster. What were once the “roll again” spaces are now “random subject question” spaces – good riddance.

And the rule is now that when you land on a color square, you are stuck on that square until you answer a question of that topic correctly.

This is bad news for someone who is REALLY REALLY bad at one of the topics, but it makes getting the wedge in a topic WAY easier and WAY less annoying.

Oh, and one more thing : play always goes to the next player at the end of your turn. If you roll and land on a blue square, then that determines the topic of the question for the next time it’s your turn.

That’s the hardest thing for me to adapt to. But it means it avoids one of the deadliest board game sins : it taking forever for it to be your turn again.

Anyhow, I approve of the new rules, even if the crusty old phart in me is not fond of them and wants things to go back to “normal”.

More importantly, I played the entire game with a total stranger (who kicked my ass) and fended off at least six major panic attacks to do so.

So, chalk that up as a victory against my social anxiety.

Wow, this had gone long, Guess I better finish up.

So um….bye!

Well I did an oopsie.

Forgot I was supposed to fast before my lactic acid test today, so I had to punt the task to tomorrow. Ate breakfast at 8 am and I have to fast for at least ten hours which would mean taking the test at 6 pm and by then Joe (and his car) will be at work.

I am not at all happy about this fasting bullshit. I just plain should not go 10 hours without eating. I’m diabetic, for fuck’s sake, my sugars could crash and then I would truly be up a puddle full of shit with a creek,.

Or something like that.

And I looked it up and the test doesn’t necessarily require fasting. It’s purely up to the doctor. So if my blood sugar crashes, I can blame Doctor Chao.

But I think he ordered the fasting version because he figured that if the result might launch a malpractice suit, he had better make it the most accurate version.

And the fasting is definitely more accurate. Doctor Andrew Smith’s lawyers won’t be able to claim my lactic acid levels were high because I had a three egg cheese omelet with my breakfast or some shit.

So I will do it. But I am going to be watching how I feel very closely. A bit of the flutters and shakes I can handle, but if I feel that deathly cold creeping in, I’m going to tear up the lab req and tell Doctor Chao to order me the non-fasting kind when I see him Friday.

Hopefully it won’t come to that. I want to get this shit over with.

Like I have said before, It’s always possible that I will produce such a high reading that I will have to go straight to the ER from Doc Chao’s office. That would suck.

I will have to remember to pack a go bag and take it with me just in case. Probably won’t need it but I’ve always been a “better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it” kind of dude.

Speaking of being prepared, I plan to bring a snack with me to the lab tomorrow so that the minute they have my blood, I can eat.

I picture myself with one arm with needle in it and the hand on the other side holding some giant carbo-loading type muffin, ready to eat the second the needle comes out.

“You done? Good. *nomf!”.

Might even take advantage of the situation to eat something mildly naughty, Like one of those rice crispy treat things from 7-11.

Hey, it’s for my health!

Speaking of which, I came to an uncomfortable realization recently.

I’ve been struggling with the Demon Hunger lately, where I am incredibly hungry most of the time and it’s a constant grind on my poor nerves and mood.

Unrelatedly, I ordered the big cookie with my pasta last Friday because sometimes you have to let the self-destructive urges get a small win now and then.

It’s the only way to shut them up for a while.

And when I ate some of the cookie, I was surprised to find how much better I felt.

The relief practically made me cry.

And the Demon Hunger was gone. Stayed away for a couple of days.

It’s not hard to see why, The problem wth Type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance. I was so hungry because I did not have sufficient insulin response to transport the glucose my cells needed from my blood stream into the cells.

Eating the damned cookie “solved” the problem by drastically increasing the sugar in my blood so that even my weak insulin response could get enough glucose to my cells.

Obviously, this is a terrible solution. The proper solution is to take my damned insulin so my body has enough insulin response to get the job done.

Still, it makes me grateful that I didn’t end up in the death spiral some in my position do where instead of getting medical help, they constantly self-medicate with sugary foods until system collapses from the strain, often taking them with it.

Oh, and speaking of other health demons, the Demon Nipple on my left side continues to shrink. It’s more or less flush with the surrounding skin now, so while it still looks absolutely horrible – like the mosquito bite from Hell – it is at least going away.

And while the big nasty evil sore on my left leg that started it all is still as big and awful as ever, a lot of the others that popped up after have either disappeared or diminished.

So progress is possible.

More after the break,

---

Wow, I wrote 783 words in that first part!

And to think, I started out thinking I had nothing to say.

But there’s always something. I just have to dig a little, and remember that the important thing is to empty my head onto the page without judgment or preconceived ideas.

It’s never a matter of going through my head in search of the perfect thing to write about with all the discernment of a five star chef shopping for produce.

I couldn’t operate that way even if I wanted to.

I feel a nervous breakdown coming just thinking about it.

No, it’s a matter of opening the door and pointing to the three nearest ideas and saying “You, you, and you. You’re coming with me,. Let’s go. “

That’s why I say I don’t believe in writer’s block.

I mean, obviously, it’s a real thing other people go through. I am not saying it isn’t real.

But for me and only me, it does not exist. I will use whatever the hell happens to be in my head, no matter how trivial or personal or just plain stupid it is.

It’s only a launching pad, after all. A starting point. A seed for the random number generator in my head.

I almost never end up talking about what I started off talking about anyhow.

Creativity is not linear.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or don’t. It’s complicated.

Took my sleeping pill, Mirtazapine, this morning with breakfast. Ended up having a hell of a time waking up. Hence my eating “lunch” right now, at a quarter to three.

It’s more like a blending of lunch and supper, which I’m calling lupper.

As I eat my lupper, I am tempted to go on one of my tirades against the damned sleeping pill for making it so hard to wake up and causing me to have the bad kind of sleep where I wake up all sweaty and confused and disoriented.

This would usually end with my swearing off the pill until I “need” it again, and the whole cycle would start all over.

But today is different. Today, I think I have leveled up a bit because today, it occurred to me to ask, “What if I need the sleep?”.

Maybe this whole crappy sleep thing is just a byproduct of the fact that the pill is actually doing its job extremely well and I am finally catching up on desperately needed sleep.

And why should I take it so hard when I wake up in a bad state now and then? A lot of people wake up feeling terrible as a matter of course. Why should I make a fuss over it and use it as an excuse to not take my sleepy pill?

So for now at least, I am going to keep taking it with breakfast. That way I can be assured that I will, eventually, catch up on sleep.

I just might have to go through some periods where I wake up all muzzy-headed and have to get up for a little while to let my poor head cool off along the way,

---

Meanwhile, in Skyrim

Finished my latest incarnation in Skyrim, my Wood Elf archer. Got him up to level 42 and with 700 exhibits in my beloved Legacy of the Dragonborn museum.

Ended up playing him for so long that I basically started a new character without starting over. I maxed out his Archery and Light Armor skills, so eventually I switched to Heavy Armor and Two Handed Weapons.

I had fun building up the new skills while still having my kickass Archery as a backup skill for when things got too intense.

And who knows, maybe I won’t start a new character. Maybe I will keep plugging away till I max out Heavy Armor and Two Handed Weapons, then start developing magic skills as a third mode.

Depends on whether I find a cool custom race I want to try. One thing you can’t change about your character is race.

Then again, starting my Legacy collection all over again sucks.

Either way, I am looking to really freshen my Skyrimming by getting new mods for things like overhauling the magic and skills systems,

I’m calling it Operation Overhaul. Should really perk things up.

---

We’re still doing this?

So I have started my new incarnation in Skyrim.

A High Elf (aka Altmer), because I wanted to make a mage and they are the best at magic and also kinda sexy in that elfin way.

Not that I plan any sexytimes fun for this character. Step 1 of Operation Overhaul was uninstalling all my happy little sex mods.

Because the truth is that I almost never actually used them, and they took up a lot of system resources and are probably the cause of a lot of mods just plain not working, so they had to go.

But it was a sad farewell. I got pretty emotionally attached to them. And while I never used their functionality, I took a certain warm comfort from them being there.

I suppose that’s how it goes when you’re an older male. You might not have all that much actual lust left in you, but you still have the warm memories of all the intimate fun you used to have, and those comfort you.

Anyhow, they had to go. Out with the old, in with the new. They might come back eventually, but I am giving myself at least a week without them to see whether or not I really miss them,

I am a bit bummed that I couldn’t find a race mod that I liked. And I checked out around a hundred of the damned things. But none of them matched my criterion for this incarnation as a wizardly type.

Other incarnations, though, I will totally be there. There is one race out of a pack of races where you can be a molten rock creature and can use mineral ores you find to give yourself temporary defense bonuses, and that sounds fun

I did find one crazy ass mod I liked : Phenderix Magic World.

It adds an insane amount of content, including new spells, new lands, new quests, new enchantment, and custom penises.

Not sure about that last one, but it’s implied.

So I have Phenderix installed, and I will try out its content once I have got my new guy (Sirus the Callow) up and running and well established.

One fucked up thing : I used a mod called Imperious to give the races available in Skyrim more interesting.

Under it, each race has three racial abilities plus a fourth they can unlock with a quest. And for most of the races, the quest is something like “use this ability X times”.

But for the High Elves, the quest is “pull the wings off of 40 butterflies. ”

In other words, kill 40 butterflies. Cute, harmless, pretty little butterflies.

Shows that the mod maker basically thinks of High Elves as a race of prissy sadistic pricks, and they are not wrong.

And normally, I would disdainfully ignore such quests, but I happen to know that the ability it unlocks, Contingency, is super frigging useful.

It lets you set spells to automatically cast when certain conditions occur. An example would be a healing spell that casts itself on you whenever you are below 50 percent health, or an illusion spell that turns you invisible when it detects someone searching for you, or even an explosive fireball that triggers on death.

That would be the “I’m taking you motherfuckers with me!” option.

So I guess I am going to kill me a bunch of butterflies. Dammit. Oh well, it’s not like they bleed or beg for mercy.

They just go directly from being butterflies flapping about to dead butteries in your inventory without any fuss.

So I can do it. Sure I can.

Sorry little guys. But I want my magic!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

Time to cudgel 500 words out of this tired old brain of mine.

It’s not going to be easy because I haven’t been awake for very long and I honestly would prefer to be in bed asleep right now anyhow.

Took my good ol’ sleeping pill this morning, knowing this would be the result. Lots of sleep on a sleepy day.

And for once, other than making writing a bit harder, it’s not really bothering me.

The sleep I have gotten has been pleasant enough, and I look forward to getting more of it in the future.

Skyrim, as always, can wait,.

---

The truth can kill

Let’s start this with my feelings about nostalgia.

Patient readers know that when I was a child, I saw adults thinking their childhoods were wonderful even when they were not, and I vowed to resist this madness and retain a crystal clear image of just how shitty my childhood was.

Like a lot of the ways in which I unknowingly sabotaged myself, it makes sense and seems logical but is, in fact, quite toxic.

Because what I realize now is that what I read as adults saying ” In retrospect, my childhood doesn’t seem so bad because I have forgotten just how bad it was to be a kid” was actually them saying “in retrospect, my childhood doesn’t seem so bad because I have processed the memories enough to make them less painful. ”

By vowing to keep things clear and fixed and “real” in my mind, I prevented my own processing of my memories into something easier to handle.

I would have been much better off “forgetting”.

And this is a big part of why I find myself endlessly rehashing my shitty childhood instead of moving on. Why I have to keep writing about it.

Writing about it and talking to my therapist about it are the only ways I know of to process the emotions, and they are very, very slow methods.

I would be far better off if I had the capacity for transformative transcendence that religion in its myriad form enables. It does so by providing a solid cognitive framework for the mind to act outside the limits of reason and objectivity in order to heal itself from psychological trauma and to otherwise see to its own emotional needs.

But dumb ol genius me is too “smart” for such “bullshit”. I’m Captain Fucking Objectivity with the power to see things far more clearly than others and see a bigger piece of the puzzle than everyone else! Thrill to my trenchant insights! Gasp in awe at my ability to see simple, effective solutions to complex and vexing problems! Fall to the ground in stupefied wonder as I blast through bullshit with my LASER BEAM EYES!

My only weakness is, you know, everything. Life. Coping. Drawing enough emotional nutrition from my environment to sustain myself.

Instead of thriving, I am barely surviving. I am a dying immortal getting weaker by the day, locked deep inside my icy cave in the core of a dead planet, wasting away without even the hope of death’s sweet release.

More after the break.

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Obey your thirst!

I’ve been drinking a lot of water lately. Like, more than usual, and I usually drink a lot of water as a matter of course.

I’ve been drinking more because my body wants me to drink more. It tells me this by making me thirsty, then when I obey said thirst, it gives me all kind of happy feelings as if it is saying “yay! Way to go! We love this!”.

In my head, my body is represented by little anthropomorphic blood cells.

So essentially, I am now obeying my body when it asks for stuff. Which begs the question, why wasn’t I already doing that?

How did I get to the point where I ignored my body’s demands? Ignored them to the point where I was not even hearing them any more? Why did I feel like I could just ignore that shit like it was meaningless babble?

I mean, what kind of sick form of rationalism is that stupid?

Even at my most robotic, I should recognize that cravings and drives and such represent primary data that is invaluable in the proper maintenance and operation of a human body on Planet Earth.

Imagine running your car like that.

“Yes, I know my dash is flashing ‘no fuel’ but I have learned to ignore such random and irrational nonsense, instead choosing to believe that because I think there should be plenty of fuel left, there is, in fact, plenty of fuel left, and the car will start moving as soon as it stops being illogical and bows to my superior powers of reason. ”

Seems silly but that’s how absurd a lot of the excesses of the ego work if you take the time to put them into words.

“I am prepared to wait as long as it takes for the dead person to apologize to me personally BECAUSE REASON!”

Because our powers of reason can be just as irritational, over-emotional, and just plain stupid as the id, only it’s worse because they can stick a halo on it and make the dumber parts of the brain think they are being smart.

And the superego is just sitting on the sidelines, shaking its head.

So hell yeah I am drinking a ton of water lately. My body knows what it needs. And I will keep on flushing my system with lots of water until my body tells me to stop,.

Heck, that’s part of the primary therapy for lactic acidosis too. Plenty of fluids, both oral and IV, to flush the excess lactic acid out of your tissues.

And building on this, I am going to try to figure out what else my body is trying to tell me.

I truly wish we had the Star Trek medical beds already. Somewhere where you just lay down and let it scan you and it tells you absolutely everything about your health.

Being healthy would be so much easier with the right data!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And boy, is that bird rich.

I have now received my two thousand bucks. And frankly it’s left me a tad giddy.

That’ the most spendable cash I have ever had all at once, and it’s quite the thrill. I feel like I just learned to fly and this is my first wild, crazy flight.

I’ve already talked about a lot of the possible purchases. A new computer chair, a new monitor, a VR unit like the Oculus Rift.

I also could use some new clothes. Pants, especially. Might be time for a trip to the good ol Big N’ Tall downtown. Get myself some more jeans.

Maybe even fulfill my long held dream of having a pair of pants for every day of the week. Seven pairs of fully functional wearable pants! At the same time!

Such delectable luxury!

Speaking of delectable things, I am definitely planning a largish order of meat from Sav-On in order to kickstart my new higher animal product diet.

Seems ironic that while all the other good liberals are cutting back on animal flesh and even becoming vegan, I am medically mandated to go the other way.

So I will order cold cuts, precooked bacon, some of those pot pies I love so much, and any other non-vegan goodies I can think of.

Got to be careful not to over-shop and end up with more than I can store, though.

I haven’t yet found a way to explain to my doctor that while I am not a vegan, I ended up eating a vegan diet most of the time kind of by accident.

Not sure when or how that happened. I know that even when I was super poor, I would at least buy turkey based hot dogs and burgers ’cause they were dirt cheap.

Then again, I was younger and more energetic and willing to cook then.

That’s why this time through, I am concentrating on super easy foods. Nothing that requires preheating the over or heating up a frying pan. Just stuff that is either already cooked or just requires a bit of time in the ol’ microwave.

There’s also a strong possibility of my hiring some cleaners to clean my room. I am especially keen on getting the carpets cleaned in the bedroom and the linoleum and tub cleaned in my bathroom.

Tidying up is something I could, at least in theory, do myself. But the kind of deep cleaning of carpet and such I want takes special equipment and training.

Ideally, I would get people to come in and sanitize the whole joint. Top to bottom, wall to wall, every square inch of surface, bed abbd bedding and everything else left so clean you could perform open heart surgery on it.

That might get rather expensive, though.

The point, inasmuch as there needs to be one, is that I now have the means to make some real improvements in my life.

Or at the very least, have a lot of fun for a while.

And that makes me happy.

More after the break.

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Thought this would be fun to do.

1. Blackjack chewing gum and Teaberry. This is my 0,5 because I totally remember Blackjack chewing gum. Lovely stuff, tastes like licorice and made the inside of your mouth all black and gross, which means a lot to a kid. But I have no idea what Teaberry is. It rings the tiniest of bells from very far away, and that’s it.
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water. Yes, sadly. I suppose they taught a valuable lesson in cynicism because they looked delicious and were so, so, so very NOT. Wax is not food, dammit. And that sugar water tasted like ass.
3. Candy cigarettes. Yup! Both the ones I liked, the Popeye brand, and that other brand that had some sort of sports trading cards along with them. Might have been made by Topps, dunno. I liked them because you got a lot of them for your money and I really dug the flavour.
4. Pop machines that dispensed glass bottles. I’m going to give myself a point for this even though it’s sort of cheating because until fairly recently, pop was ONLY available in glass bottles on PEI. That’s because our anti-littering laws forbid selling any beverage in a non-refillable container. Not non-recyclable – no-refillable. So I was in my teens before I drank Coke from a can.
5. Coffee shops or diners with table-side jukeboxes. This one is a total question mark for me. I think I recall being at one once, but I was so young at the time that it’s hard to be sure. I saw them later but only in “kitsch cafe” type places.
6. Home milk delivery etc. Nope. I think my siblings might remember the era of the milkman but I only know them from pop culture. Seems very nice though.
7. Party lines. Nope. Thank goodness. Pretty sure between social anxiety and sensory overload, I would have been terrified of the phone. Well, MORE terrified.
8. Newsreels before the movie. Nope. I barely remember cartoons before the movie from my horrifying forays into watching the matinee in my home town’s theater. That’s a tale for another time though.
9. P.F. Flyers. No idea WTF. See Teaberry in #1 above.
10. Butch wax. Ditto. Do I even want to know?
11. TV Test Patterns. Oh yeah. I can still see the one all the Canadian channels used. Kind of miss it. This is what happens when you let TV raise your kids, folks…. test pattern nostalgia.
12. Peashooters. Another question mark, but this time it’s more of a technical question. I certainly never saw someone shoot actual peas but we definitely used straws to shoot spitwads, and that seems like basically the same thing,.
13. Howdy Doody, Nope. Way before my time. I’ve seen clips and found him to be quite horrifying. But millions of kids loved him, and clowns. WTF happened?
14. 45 RPM records. Otherwise known as “singles”. And yeah, totally, of course. I remember vinyl in all its glory. I don’t miss it, though. Let’s just say it was not compatible with my clumsiness.
15. S&H Green Stamps. The mother of all rewards programs. But double no. No because I don’t think we had them here in Canada, and no because even if they did, it was way before my time.
16. Hi-fi’s. Hell yeah. I was too young to be a part of it, but I remember when there were serious social stakes to having the best stereo setup around, because that’s where people would go to listen to records, ergo that’s where the party was, ergo the chicks would be coming to YOUR PLACE to get drunk and high and turned on by the tunes, and even a pretty ugly dude can get laid in THAT situation. So you had all these dudes living in shitty apartments with AMAZING stereos.
17. Metal ice cube trays with a lever. Nope. Only remember the plastic ones you crack with your bare hands, like a man.

Well that was fun. I scored 7.5 out of 17, or 44 percent.

It was clearly made with a late Boomer/early X audience in mind. I could make one for us Gen X types that would REALLY make them feel old.

But like….why?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went to the doctor this morning. Whole thing only took half an hour.

For Doc Chao, that is laser fast.

But I still had to wait in the waiting room and that is becoming increasingly unpleasant because the TV in the waiting room is tuned to what appears to be the 24/7 Politicians Giving Boring Speeches About Covid Channel and to be honest, when I am in the doctor’s office, I would rather be watching something cheerful.

I mean, this shit makes vapid breakfast television type shows look appealing, and I fucking hate breakfast television.

I mean seriously. Listening to cheerful dingbats natter on about recipes and fashions and oh so adorable human interest stories is enough to make me hate humanity.

Anyhow, I got to see the doc and got my B12 shot. And I do feel better. But not quite as good as other times because I went in there in a somewhat crappy mood.

No particular cause. I figure I’ve just hit one of those periods of irritability and depression that my deep emotional processing requires now and then.

I soon had a cause, though, because when Doc Chao went to pull up the hotly anticipated results of my lactic acid test, it turned out the lab didn’t do one.

Instead, they did an A1C diabetes test, which was NOT on the lab req at all. All that was on there was the lactic acid test (no electric kool-aid involved), and they somehow managed to fuck that up.

So I have to go back, dammit. This time, I am armed with a paper requisition form, so I can point at the lactic acid test portion and say “HERE. DO THIS THING. “

That pissed me off solid.

Then it was off to the bank. Cashed my cheque, got the $600 in bills to pay Joe the rent, put the rest on the ol’ reloadable VISA.

Which means they have won, basically. They made it hard enough to dispute a charge that I never had the energy to do it and I certainly didn’t have the energy to find another bank, so I am going to keep using the same ol’ reloadable VISA that failed to protect me from thieves before, only with a new card number.

I will just have to be extra paranoid about where I enter said number from now on.

On the way out of the bank, I dropped my wallet. Luckily, I noticed before we were even a block away, and when we circled back around, the nice people at the bank had my wallet at the customer service desk.

Phew! I got enough stress without having to replace my wallet, my ID, and my rent money because I’m such a spaz.

I still haven’t gotten the money from my sister. I fear I have been forgotten.

Story of my life, really. Especially when it comes to family.

Oh well, I left her a FB message, I am sure she will get back to me eventually.

I have two thousand reasons to be patient.

More after the break.

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Getting ready to fight

Been checking up on Canadian medical malpractice law today.

The gist of that article is that doctors in Canada all belong to the
Canadian Medical Protective Association, or CPMA.

It’s basically like a massive insurance racket, and all claims of genuine medical malpractice (as opposed to civil suits) go through them,

And according to the article, they’re bastards. No surprise. really, i am sure they have silos full of rabid lawyers raised on nothing but medical malpractice horror stories (all I did was staple her eyebal to her elbow, and now I have to sell the summer mansion! ) ready to rip into me for daring to raise my voice to The Medical Establishment.

But if they think that will intimidate me out of taking them on, well,

That kind of thing just fires me up. I was born to spit in Goliath’s eye. I am a bug they cannot quash and like I have been saying, the harder they fight me on this, the louder i will get and the more expensive it will be to shut me up.

I am perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to make Doctor Andrew Smith pay for deciding my life was not worth his time. And that goes for any and all who try to protect him from my justice, whether it’s the CPMA or the little old lady who lives next door.

I will crush all opposition to my will. I will smash every tactic used against me like a fucking wrecking ball. I will turn myself into a cause celebre.

Hell, I will make myself a motherfucking hashtag if that’s what it takes.

And I know I can do it. My body might be weak (gee, I wonder why) but my powers are still vast and I can make the sky rain fire on those who piss me off.

So if the evil forces of corporatism are ever reading this as they look for dirt they will foolishly think has the power to stop me, this message is for you :

You cannot stop me. You cannot even slow me down. I will hammer away at you from every angle until your defenses shatter like dry mud. So my true, legitimate advice to you is to give up as soon as you can, give me what I want, and thank your lucky stars that you had the good sense to stop before I got REALLY mad.

Once I have confirmation that my lactic acid levels are still incredibly high, I will contact a lawyer and get their input on the case and they will tell me the best way to make these fuckers pay for what they did to me.

Honestly, I’m kind of looking forward to it. I know damned well that I can’t be browbeaten, intimidated, obfuscated, bullshitted, doubletalked, buried in jargon, snowed under with minutiae, or strangled by red tape.

But I dearly hope they try.

I could have a lot of fun with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, there was therapy.

I told Doc Costin all about Doctor Andrew Smith and his dismissal of my high lactic acid levels as not really worth his time to investigate.

This was my first chance to tell him about it as I did not have therapy last Thursday. I didn’t know that, though. I am sure he told me he would be away that week, but I completely forgot, and so I waited for a call that never came,

Ideally, he would call to remind me of these deviations in routine, but realistically we are both absentminded due to age (him much moreso than me) so the odds of that are low.

Whatever. I figured it out eventually.

So we talked it over. I can’t say I came out of the session with much in the way of new information or fresh insights or the like, but honestly, it feels really good to tell people about my plight and my grievances no matter who I am telling.

Doctor Andrew Smith better watch the fuck out, is what I am saying, Because I will keep telling people until he pays for what he did to me.

This shit could have permanent repercussions for my health. I might never get the strength in my muscles that I’ve lost. I might end up needing a wheelchair to get around because this asshole didn’t think me worth the hassle of treating.

And it could get far worse than that. The disorder could attack my heart, or my kidneys or my liver. I could get much, much sicker than I am now.

And if I do, I will make sure that Doctor Andrew Smith pays dearly for treating my life as disposable in favour of his getting on with his day and treating someone worthwhile.

Anyhow, after therapy I had a rough afternoon because I have fallen into this awful (and sadly familiar) pattern where when I am sitting at this a-here computer of mine, I get very very sleepy.

And not the sick kind of sleepy. No, it’s the nice, soft, warm, cozy, healthy kind of sleepiness which I treasure because of its promise of good sleep.

But when I lay down, the sleepiness drains out of me like sand through an hourglass and I go from nicely sleepy to medium awake to tense to the point of pain in less than half an hour.

So then I have to get up, the hourglass flips over, and the cycle begins anew.

This is extremely frustrating. Clearly I need the sleep, but something is happening when I lay down to fill me with tension and irritation and drive the sleep away.

I assume it’s something to do with breathing and/or oxygen levels.

Right now, I am mostly focused on my doctor’s appointment at 11 am tomorrow where I will get a B12 shot (glee!) and learn the results of my recent lactic acid test.

Big numbers, no whammies.

Oh, and there is one more thing on my mind : what’s the best computer chair?

More after the break.

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The other weird thing

The other weird thing about today is that, out of the blue, my big sister Catherine messaged me on Facebook today and told me that my late father had a life insurance policy worth $10K and that I was going to get my share of it, which is of course $2K.

So I got two thousand bucks coming my way as soon as she gets some technical issues ironed out.

Which is why I am thinking computer chairs. If I could get myself a really good computer chair that’s comfy and cozy and has excellent back support, that could make a huge difference in my life.

I’m also pondering monitors. Playing my games in higher def sounds real good to me. Not only would everything be prettier and more realistic, there’s a pretty good chance the games would literally be easier on the eyes as well.

More detail equals less squinting, after all. As does a physically larger monitor.

So I got some ideas.

I could also get one of the neato new VR consoles. But my friend Maelkoth says they are still mostly a gimmick. That there is only one game made specifically to be VR, which is Half-Life : Alyx, and that other games implement VR very poorly, and that even the golden angel choir inducing holy of holies, Skyrim VR, is quite buggy,.

So I am not going to go buying a VR unit any time soon. I will, however, look into renting or borrowing one so I can test it out and see for myself whether I think it’s worth whatever hassles I might need to endure to use it.

Now I know what you might be thinking, and don’t worry, I looked it up.

Specifically, I looked up whether I needing to worry about the government clawing back my windfall by deducting it from my check.

Consensus seems to be “no”. It qualifies as an inheritance and inheritances are exempt from being deducted.

Phew! That would have sucked.

That does mean, through, that I really should declare said income on that monthly statement thing that I haven’t thought about in like nine years.

Suppose I’d need to get one first.

My general policy has been to stay under the government’s radar. I figure when it comes to government bureaucracy in general and social assistance in particular, the less they notice you, the better.

So it will take a certain amount of faith and trust to declare this income. And as patient readers know, faith and trust are not my strong suits.

Cynicism and paranoia are more on-brand for me.

So we will see.

The main point is, I am getting some serious ca$h, and I am going to do my best to use it to make my life better.

Maybe via major purchases.

Maybe via small indulgences.

Probably a mixture of the two.

Either way, things are looking up for me.

And that makes me happy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First confession : I have been lollygagging on work for E and D.

I have had the assignment to add a personal history section and tighten up the phrasing etc. on the character profile work a week now and I have done very little work on it.

And other than being a bit sickly in general, I have no excuse. I’ve just been being self-indulgent and lazy and choosing to fuck around and play Skyrim and dodge the task.

Now it’s true that I was not given a deadline. If I had, I would have done it by now. I never ever miss a deadline, ever.

Heck, unlike some of my fellow writers, I love deadlines. Deadlines give me a goal and when I have a goal, I can organize my time according to the goal’s demands.

But when things are more nebulous, I have a harder time focusing.

Deadline or no, though, being lazy for like a week about it is unacceptable, and so I hereby swear I will get this shit done before the end of today.

Quite frankly, I am tired of putting up with my own bullshit on this and I want this phase of things to be over god dammit.

Relatedly, I asked about writing an episode and he said he didn’t want me to go to all that trouble for free and suggested I do one act and then outline the rest.

I’d rather just write the whole thing, to be honest. For me, that’s easier. And I am eager to work with the property directly both to show off my mad skillz and because I want to start developing the style and approach and whatnot with E and D,.

But that’s a hard thing to explain in a Facebook chat.

My other confession is that I haven’t showered in ten days.

See, when Joe’s shift shifted back to 3 pm to 11 pm, we stopped being able to get together in person via McD’s parking lot on Tuesdays and Fridays. Instead, we get together via Zoom, like the rest of the world.

But being about to go out was my trigger to go shower. No going out, I don’t have the usual prompt to shower.

So I was already down to one shower a week. Gross, I know.

But then, last Sunday, I ended up not going out then either. I was too sick and too tired to go out.

So I didn’t shower then, either. Hence it being ten days.

And I know this is wrong and gross and everything, so don’t bother telling me so.

All I can say is that if you knew how hard it was to get myself to a place where I showered right before leaving the house, every single time, you would understand how staying in has broken that fragile system.

So I need new prompts. My stopgap measure is to shower before we get together via Zoom even though I know I don’t “have” to.

But eventually, I will get to the point where I can motivate myself to take a shower just because I feel like taking one.

Depression is an ugly disease.

More after the break.

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Until the crystal cracked

Well I didn’t shower yet, but I at least got the history part of the character profile done.

Only to have the ground shift beneath my feet again. I straight up asked E if I was writing a pitch document, the show bible, a writing exercise to show my skills, or what?

He said he definitely probably wants me to write short, snappy prose like I am writing a pitch document. This, after, I write a one page biography for the character.

This shit is wearing on my nerves, man.

I get the idea that what this project really needs is strong leadership, but seeing as they are not even sure they want me as their writing flunky yet, I am sure as heck not going to volunteer to lead them,

I’m pretty crafty though, especially when I am annoyed. I may yet figure out a way to get things moving without it seeming like I am taking over.

Because I’m not taking over. I don’t want to take over. I don’t want the producer job.

Not for free, that’s for fucking sure.

I just want thing to keep moving, and that requires someone to provide focus, coordination, and direction.

And all my little control issue demons are saying “It has to be you! You’re the only one who can do it! This project will never go anywhere without you as the spark plug!”.

To which I silently reply, “No! I don’t want to be in charge. Why can’t I just be an employee for once? Just do my job as instructed and that’s it”.

Because people are idiots wandering in the dark and need someone to herd, drive, and direct them, reply those damned voices.

That doesn’t mean it always has to be you. There have to be plenty of perfectly competent leaders, manages, and administrators out there. (Doesn’t there?:?).

But it seems to be my destiny to keep ending up in situations where I am the only one who sees the big picture and understands what has to happen to keep this big machine we’re all in humming along and maybe even going in the right direction.

And the wise part of me, as always, tells me that it is foolish to try to fight your destiny and that I would be far better off just surrendering to the inevitable and learning to like being in charges.

Then call me a fool, you supercilious prick, because I am going to keep on fighting it. I don’t want to end up being the boss, with all that commitment and responsibility.

So if I am ever to surrender to it, you will have to make a pretty ironclad argument that there really is no other way.

Because as long as there’s another way, I’ll take it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.