I have no idea how much of my lonely childhood was due to my being ignored and resented and how much was my just being too wrapped up in my own little world of pain to be able to see those who wanted to help me, let alone let them in.

And I suppose I will never know. And honestly, the exact ratio is not really all that important. There is some truth to both sides of the equation.

That will have to do.

Like I have said before, when I look back on my lonely childhood, I get this profound feeling of wrongness. All those days of getting up on my own, getting ready for school on my own, going through my school day all alone (if I was lucky), then coming home all alone and going to my room to be alone with my distractions, only coming downj long enough to eat supper and maybe watch some TV before going to bed.

And yet, people were there. My parents, my siblings. And I had conversations with them. I hung out with my mother while she watched her soaps between 4 pm and 5 pm. I hung out with my Dad to watch the National and the Journal. I hung out with my brother Dave and played video games and board games with him.

So maybe my internal narrative of abject solitude is more of a product of my current state of depression than a true reflection of my personal history.

Maybe it’s all one big oversimplification.

It’s not entirely fictional. My school experience was really that bad. Bullying and loneliness and boredom and fear.

And yet I know I was a very closed off person then as well. And that there were people who did try to befriend me but my walls were too high and too thick and I was far too good at being evasive for them to stand a chance of reaching me.

And there’s the fact that I was a very weird and extraordinarily bright child. So I just wasn’t compatible with other kids. I wasn’t like them at all. I wasn’t interested in the same things and I didn’t see the world they did

In theory, I might have become friends with another weird nerdy kid, if I had met one. Someone as bright and as unusual as I was when I was a kid.

I didn’t find that until I went to college.

So it’s clear that my internal narrative needs to be updated to allow for more nuance. Yes, I had a lonely childhood, but it wasn’t all loneliness. Yes, I had a sad childhood, but it wasn’t all sadness.

There were good parts too, Times when I was happy. Times when I was not, in fact, totally alone. Times when life was pretty darned good.

That doesn’t mean my bad childhood is somehow instantly good. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have genuine grievances about how I was treated as a child. It doesn’t mean that it was no big deal that I had no friends and no peer group in my formative years.

It just means that I have grown enough to see the real picture and not just some simplified black and white version of it.

I guess I can handle that.

More after the break.

---

What really happened?

Yup, still digging into the substrates of my subconscious looking for the truth.

So what really happened in my lonesome childhood? It’s not as bad a question as it sounds because I have no reason to doubt the reality of my memories.

It’s not ;like I am only now coming to realize that I might not have been abducted by aliens and made their king when I was five.

No, as is always the case with neurosis and depression, the real issue is not reality but the interpretation thereof.

I recall a time when I was in college and a group sitting at a table broke into joyous laughter as I walked by, and in my mind and in my heart I knew they were laughing at my pathetic self.

This was lunacy, of course. It’s way more likely that their laughter was because of something one of them had said that had nothing to do with me. It was far, far more likely that they had absolutely no idea I ever existed.

Like a wise person (me, but lots of other people too) once said, you would worry a lot less about what people think of you if you knew how seldom they did.

But that’s the egotism of neurosis. Everything is still about you, even if you are interpreting everything negatively.

Whether you’re King of the World or King Shit, you’re still king.

Anyhow, what I want to do now is dig up some of the most traumatic moments of my life and see if there is another, more reasonable and balanced way of interpreting them that is not so cartoonishly oversimplified as my usual internal narrative would suggest.

I have to admit, I am a tiny bit embarrassed by the realization that so much of what I think and feel about my life is tinged with bullshit.

My self-image as a ruggedly realistic pragmatist type has taken a ding.

But then again, I am too realistic and pragmatic to think I am perfectly anything, no matter how ego-gratifying it might be.

So on the whole, no, I am not surprised to find that I still have a lot of illusions to dismiss before I can be free.

Chagrined, perhaps, but not surprised.

So I know where my journey takes me next, though I don’t feel quite ready to start down that path just yet.

I need to do some serious psychological surgery, and that’s never easy, I will be drilling deep into my trauma and hauling my demons out into the light so I can examine them and learn their true nature.

Probably be kinda gross.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

I am very, very worried about my immediate future.

Because I keep having these near-catastrophes. Falling but catching myself in time. Tripping but landing on the nice soft bed instead of the cruel hard floor. Standing up too fast and getting so dizzy that it feels like blind luck that I happened to stick my hand out in the right direction to stop and steady myself.

And as any good D&D player knows, there’s only so many times you can make your saving throw in a row before you fail and get your ass toasted by a dragon.

Or in my case, my neck broken by 280 pounds of fat dude suddenly coming down on it on a weird angle.

And I am trying so hard to do things carefully and slowly and with forethought, but this shit just keeps happening anyway.

I can’t fucking win. No matter what I do, life is going to make me its chewtoy whenever the hell it feels like it and all I can do is hope to survive.

What brought all this up is that I just got back from today’s errands.

First I went to LifeLab for the all important lactic acid test. This will tell me and my doctor if my lactic acidosis is a chronic problem rather than a one time fluke.

Seems pretty unlikely to be a fluke.

And honestly, I am kind of hoping for a high score. I know I should be hoping for a normal score instead because that would mean I’m healthy, but I’m not.

Because quite honestly, if this is what healthy feels like, shoot me in the cerebellum.

And a high score would explain so much. Why I am so weak now. Why I get this burning sensation in my muscles sometimes. Why my liver function is off. Why I have felt so physically depressed lately.

Trust me, I know the difference between emotional and physical depression,

Emotional depression makes you feel like you want to die.

Physical depression makes you feel like you ARE dying, like right now.

Anyhow, so I got my testing done at LifeLabs. The wait was long-ish, about half an hour. But I get that they’re kinda slammed now.

And the actual testing was very fast. And painless! I didn’t even know she had done anything and it was over.

I should have asked for her name. Assuming they do requests.

Then we went to PriceMart so I could shop, and that’s what got me thinking about how sick I am now, because just the walking required to do my shopping, with Julian pushing the cart, wiped me the fuck out.

So much so that I had to sit in the car and let Julian pack the vehicle himself. Even though it was 99 percent my stuff. Which was humiliating and depressing.

The amount of things I can do for myself is dwindling and I have no idea how to handle that. I am becoming more and more of a burden on others and I have always assumed that I would be going in the opposite direction by now.

The only thing I can think of is getting professional handlers somehow. People who are paid to look after me and therefore for whom I am not a burden, I’m employment.

That would take care of the guilt, at least. And who knows, the way things are going I might soon qualify for the province to pay for it.

And if that’s true, my life will be dedicated to three things :

1. Play Skyrim (and other games)
2. Working for E and D
3. Suing the fuck out of Doctor Andrew Smith

More after the break.

---

Back so soon?

Yup. Here I am, blogging again already, even though it’s only 2:09 pm.

Thing is, when I blogged earlier, it was not during lunch like it normally would be. I was too sick from my supermarket exertions to eat.

But now I am eating, ergo I am blogging,

It makes sense unless you think about it.

And I feel awful. I got aches and pains all over and a burning sensation in my muscles that is no doubt the lactic acid burning through my tendons.

Feels like people with ball peen ^[1] hammers have been practicing percussion on my entire body, and being very thorough about it.

Doing my grocery shopping should not hurt this much. I should not be in pain for hours after the fact. I should not feel like I ran a marathon backwards right now. I should be able to walk one lousy block to the medical lab for fuck’s sake.

But I am quite fucked up right now. It’s an easy thing to forget about when I am being a slug with internet access like usual, but the second I try to do anything more than that and I am reminded of just how busted and broken I am.

Work with E and D is semi-stalled. I will work on version 4 of this character profile tonight, when I would normally be doing my evening blogging. so it’s not like I don’t jave work to do.

But I am getting a little antsy about the whole thing. I have done a lot of unpaid work so far and they are acting like I am writing part of the official show bible now and I really thought this was just a writing exercise for me to show them I can do the work.

I don’t mind writing the show bible. I can totally do that,

But not for free. If they are looking for professional quality work, I am going to need to be paid,. Maybe not a lot, but something.

I get why it is taking them a long time to decide to hire me. But constantly asking for more and more work is not the way to handle this.

I’m not saying my work is perfect and therefore needs no notes or suggestions. Far from it. I am totally down with collaborating, I get that real world creative work involves a lot of this kind of back and forth.

But that’s when people are hired. Right now, I feel like my audition has gone on forever and the audience has started showing up and I am getting kind of nervous.

So I am pondering asking if I can just write an 11 minute episode for them, I know I can do it and it will be a much better example of what I can do than this dev work,i

I want to show them my real skills.

Maybe then, they will decide to hire me,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

Well, here I am, all fucked up by bad sleep again.

At least I think it’s bad sleep. Might be something more. Whatever.

All I know is that it’s almost 4 and I am only getting around to eating my “lunch” now because I have slept all day except for a few brief moments when I had to go pee.

And I feel pretty wretched, My head hurts. My mind drifts. My lungs ache. Feels all hot and twitchy and weird in the ol’ bronchae today,

Still got my sense of smell, so hopefully it ain’t the Covid.

But as a person with badly controlled diabetes, I am in a high risk category. I honestly shouldn’t be leaving the home at all except for medical appointments.

Speaking of which, it doesn’t look like I will be going out to do my grocery shopping and hang with Felicity in the McD’s parking lot tonight. Not feeling like I do,.

Hell, I am probably contagious as fuck right now. I certainly feel it.

I imagine I will be doing a lot more sleeping. Yay.

I suppose it’s even possible that I might wake up feeling better at some point. Maybe the real root problem is that my sleep debt has come due.

Wouldn’t explain the feeling in my lungs, though. That has me worried.

And it’s so hard to think and stay focused. My mind keeps wanting to drift away and go back to the magical land of sleep. I have ot keep dragging it back to the here and now and force it to make the words come out.

It’s a bitch,

Not much else happening in the empty space where my life should be. I’m going to go get that lactic acid test done tomorrow morning, Julian will drive me at 11 am.

While I am out and about, I will do my grocery shopping at Pricemart, or if I am feeling extra assertive, I will ask Julian to take me to my usual Ironwood Sav-On.

At first I thought I would order my groceries online, like I have done in the past when this particular situation popped up. But then I remembered what a hassle that can be and how they always seem to be mysteriously out of half the things I find no problem when I do my shopping in person.

That plus the fact that I will be going out tomorrow anyhow made me decide to get what I need when I go out for the testing instead.

Very exciting news, I know. Fee free to rest between paragraphs. If you experience any of the following symptoms, consult a medical professional : flying lung, the heartbreak of psychosis, deranged nipple syndrome, aggressive manhandling, your ad here disease, fractured fairy tail, radar erections, spotted dick, bubble and squeak, or the shits.

That was fun to write.

Well I suppose I better go surrender to the tide and ride the waves back to my sleepy island. I don’t want to go there, but who can fight the tide?

Only the lowly barnacle.

Andthat’s too much of a commitment.

More after the break.

---

I don’t know why

But I am in one rotten mental state right now.

My head hurts and I can’t think. My mind is full of jagged ice and molten sludge. Seems like every way I turn, there’s pain.

And the worst part is that I can’t decide anything. I just spent 20 excruciating minutes lying in bed trying to decide to get up, with several false starts where I said to myself, “OK, no more dicking around, now I am going to get up. ”

But I didn’t.

Once I finally made it out of bed, I then had to decide what I would have for supper, and that was painful too. So many possibilities, so little will to decide amongst them.

Eventually I ended up ordering sushi not because I wanted sushi or even decided to get it per se, more because that was the result of a few random coin flips of the mind.

Oh well. I have food now, including some wonderful life-giving soothing miso soup, and so I will eat and blog and hopefully feel better soon.

At least I feel somewhat caught up on sleep now. I am not exactly feeling bright and chipper but I feel more awake than I did this afternoon.

It’s a painful and confusing kind of alertness, but what the hell.

For me, waking up has always been almost as hard as falling asleep. It’s always taken me a while to get to the fully conscious state.

Or at least, as close to it as I ever get.

My reality is so unreliable. I never know what kind of state my personal reality will be in when I wake up. Maybe the world will feel warm and safe. Maybe it will feel harsh and jagged and cold. Maybe it will feel numb and tingling and I will feel like I am not even really here. Maybe it will feel like I am floating in empty space.

So I hunker in my bunker and lose myself in Skyrim or whatever and shut out the howling of the maelstrom within and that gets me through the day.

But not through life.

Because it’s my stubborn inactivity that powers the maelstrom in the first place. The more I live my cloistered life, the more my unspent energy has nowhere to go and ends up just swirling around inside me, looking for a way out.

And over time, all that latent energy builds up into one hell of a psychological cyclone inside, and the winds get louder and louder, and I hunker even deeper into my bunker, and even more of my energy goes unspent, and the cycle continues.

And all because I lack the courage and/or strength and/or intestinal fortitude to turn and face the fury of the storm and by opposing end it.

All I can do is leave the bunker door open a tiny bit and hope to grow.

And on good days, I do.

And on bad days, I don’t.

But I never, ever, ever lose ground.

So some day I will win.

Assuming I live that long.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Took my sleeping pill at around 9 am this morning.

It’s now 3 pm and I am still sleepy as fuck,

And I have work for E and D I need to do but I am in no fit state to do it.

Kind of wishing I had skipped the fucking pill now.

It doesn’t help that my seasonal allergies have been kicking my ass lately. My 24 hour Reactine pills just aren’t stopping them. I need something stronger.

Like a medically induced coma. That sounds nice right about now.

I keep having allergy attacks despite my antihistamine. Big ones too. Sneezing so hard it leaves me feeling dizzy, running nose, sinus cavities fulla goo, dizziness and disorientation, itchy palate, the whole works.

More worrisome is that I feel a tiny bit of a wheeze developing in my breathing. Allergies come and go, but lung infections are serious fucking business in this day and age.

Please let it pass too. I don’t want to end up in the hospital full of tubes.

Hopefully I will feel a lot better after a bit more sleep. Or a lot more Diet Coke. Or some combination of the two.

Got me some Pizza Hut last night. Was craving pizza so I got me some. And that’s a good thing all by itself.

I need to act on more whims. I have ignored my desires in favour of just keeping my head buried in the sand via my usual distractions for far too long, and it’s left me deeply alienated from myself and my desires.

So in many ways I have no idea who the fuck I really am.

And yeah, money’s been a limiting factor. But so has my agoraphobia and social anxiety. People love to say there are so many things you can do for free, but 80 percent of them involve leaving the house.

And most of the rest of them involve having a lot more energy than I feel I have. Maybe I have it, maybe I don’t, but I sure as fuck don’t feel energetic.

I honestly could use another B12 shot right around now. That had me feeling much better for a couple hours yesterday, and reasonably good for most of the day after.

All gone now though, or so it seems.

I read that there are conditions which make it hard for the body to absorb B12, but I don’t think I have any of those. They all seem pretty harsh and definitely not the sort of thing you could have and not know it.

Hopefully a diet with more animal products in it can fix the problem in the long term. I plan on picking up some lunch meats and cheese when I do my shopping tomorrow night so I have an easy way to have meatier meals.

Plus a few onions. They make any lunch meat type sandwich better.

Oh, and I must remember to get some sugar free jam,

I should probably be writing this all down on a list of some sort.

But I think I will just go nap instead.

More after the break.

---

My happy place

Once more, I repeat unto myself : I am happier when I am busy.

Did some work for E&D just now. Absorbed some notes, replied to some of them, trying to figure out how to make my own notes.

I’ve asked E via FB because presumably he knows.

Once I clear a few things up with him, I will be able to send the document back with my own notes and replies added, and then I can get down to work on actually making the necessary changes to the damned thing that I need to do.

Clearly, I need to get up to speed on how modern collaborative creativity works, because this whole notes thing is quite the strain on the brain for me. It smacks of multitasking and patient readers know that is NOT by strong suit.

I am much happier being given a list of tasks and/or goals from a single, well defined source, and executing them in the order in which they are presented to me, and then awaiting further instructions.

I am a serial program in a parallel world. It’s becoming a whole “thing”.

I am trying to come up with a way to explain this to E&D in a way that doesn’t make me sound sort of useless to them.

Because the truth is that doing things my way means more work for them. They have to figure out how to present things to mean in a linear way instead of just jamming things together organically and trusting me to figure it out.

And what the hell, I do make it eventually,. Might take me some time to process and digest the notes but eventually clarity emerges.

So maybe I don’t need to bug them about it. I dunno. I’ll have to think it over.

Got McD’s on the way. Big Mac combo. A rare circumstance where the most often ordered thing is what I want too.

For a highly unique and original guy like me, that’s rare.

I feel a little guilty ordering in two nights in a row. Especially since I still have tons of pizza from last night.

But what the fuck. The point of money is to spend it, not hoard it.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I am feeling financially constipated and needto remind myself that money can actually make me happier.

I’ve never had a hard time understanding Scrooge, or any other miser. Hoarded wealth can make you feel safer and more secure and I totally get how someone might get addicted to that feeling of increasing wealth far, far beyond and besides anything they might actually do with the money.

But I am, above all, a pragmatist, and so I always ask myself, could I use this money to make myself happier somehow?

And that’s a hard question for me to answer. It’s a lot like a “what do you really want?” type question and I just plain don’y know.

Like I said, I am so alienated from myself that I have no idea who I am or what I want.

I somehow trained myself tnot want things to avoid the pain of not getting them.

.And it’s becoming increasingly clear that in that case, the cure was much worse than the original disease.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

That title needs something, Possibly burial.

Did my errands today, sort of. Mostly.

Went to the doctor. Surprise! He was only 20 minutes behind schedule. When I left, it was 11:40, so I made it to the bank before noon, no problem.

I didn’t have to wait in line at all. No line outside, no line inside.

Of course, the two people occupying the two available tellers were both doing intricate transactions involving deep verifications of their identity, but you can’t win them all.

This one guy – short, fat, and bald, basically East Indian George Costanza – was applying for some kind of loan or line of credit, but I don’t think will get it because the second they asked about his job, he suddenly got all cagey and shifty and asked them what, exactly, they meant by “job”.

Protip : don’t do that.

Anyhow, back to Doctor Chao’s office. I got my B12 shot and feel a fair bit better now as a result. Warmer, and calmer, and more relaxed.

So yay for that.

I told him about the whole lactic acidosis thing and we determined that Metformin was probably not the culprit, as it only causes lactic acidosis in people with poor kidney function and my lab tests show that my kidneys are doing OK.

But that still leaves my lactic acidosis. Doc Chao pulled up my test results from my last visit to the ER and my lactic acid level was 3.5

Normal is 2.2.

So he’s ordered another test, which is what I wanted. If my levels are still sky high then i am going to officially start hunting Doctor Andrew Smith’s hide.

I mean, according to an article Doc Chao pulled up while we discussed the issue, lactic acidosis has a fairly high mortality rate if left untreated.

Oh, and my trip to the ER was May 15. So it’s gone untreated for five months.

Motherfucker could have killed me. He still might. But if I am going down, I am definitely taking that fucker with me.

And then there’s this :

If you have diabetes and experience any symptoms of lactic acidosis, call 911 or go to an emergency room immediately.

https://www.healthline.com/health/lactic-acidosis#lactic-acid-and-diabetes

Silly me, when I was diagnosed I was already in the ER. I should have left and come back in again!

Now let’s take a trip through the symptom list for lactic acidosis :

First, the medical emergency ones :

A. Fruity-smelling breath (a possible indication of a serious complication of diabetes, called ketoacidosis)

Not that I know of, but I will get Julian to look at my eyes to check.

B. Confusion

This chases its own tail, because I am confused a lot and hence I am to confused to know if my confusion has to do with lactic acid or not.

C,. jaundice (yellowing of the skin or the whites of the eyes)

Not that I know of, but I will get Julian to check while he’s gazing into my eyes.

D. trouble breathing or shallow, rapid breathing

I’ve had incidents of both. Not a lot, but now and then.

Hmmm. Not quite enough for an 911 call, at least, not yet.

Here’s the rest :

E. exhaustion or extreme fatigue

Yes, fairly often. Hard to tell with my sessile lifestyle, though.

F. muscle cramps or pain

Cramps, no. Pain, yes, often sudden and without apparent cause

G. body weakness

All the time. I mean, some days I can’t even crack the ice cube tray.

H. overall feelings of physical discomfort

Um, hard pass. Way too vague to determine.

I. abdominal pain or discomfort

No more so than usual.

J. diarrhea

Nope! Thank goodness.

K. decrease in appetite

I don’t think so. Often the opposite lately.

L. headache

Um, another hard pass. Between eye strain, allergies, and too much screen time, I have way too many reasons to have headaches for me to be able to attach it to anything.

M. rapid heart rate

Dunno. Not the sort of thing can just guess at.

---

Well, there you have it. Not definitive but it’s definitely possible that I have had lactic acidosis for at least five months and maybe a lot more and a real live actual doctor knew this but decided it was too much of a hassle to tell me and admit me and treat me and so on, so he just told me it was no big deal and sent me home.

Oh, I also showed the nightmare on my scalp to Doc Chao. He prescribed me an ointment and referred me to a dermatologist,

After the bank, we went to my pharmacist to get my prescriptions filled, and that would have been a mad genius time to do my lab work too as there is a lab next door to my pharmacy, but I did not think of it.

Instead, we came home, and I tried to see if I could figure out where the heck in Richmond Center I could find Bailey and Nelson, and ended up on their website, and happened to notice that they did not offer direct billing for eye exams in BC.

Instead, they would give me an invoice so i could apply for reimbursement.

Um, diamond hard pass on that. That route is a huge hassle and the government will try to get out of paying any way they can, so fuck that noise. I called up and canceled.

I am going to find a place that bills the BC government directly like a normal clinic.

So sadly, I did not get my long overdue eye exam today,. Back to the drawing board on that score. But I got my B12, my doctor is on the case re: lactic acidosis, and I have goo to put on my head.

Plus, I now have over $300 spendable money on my card.

So things could be better, but I can manage them just fine. All in all, things are going okay for me right now.

Other than the fact that lactic acidosis might kill me at any second.

I’m going to have to ask Julian to drive me to the lab soon, which is embarassing because it’s only a block away.

But that’s the life I lead now.

Here’s hoping I get to keep on living it,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

Well, apparently I did not have therapy today.

I may have been told this last week. I may have therapy tomorrow instead. I may not. I honestly cannot recall.

Clearly, I’ve got to start writing this shit down. Yay, yet another thing I used to be able to trust my brain to do but now it drops the ball.

If I can get the gumption together, I will call my therapist and ask.

That is, of course, the sane and sensible adult thing to do. That much is obvious.

But of course, it’s not that simple. Using the phone is hard for me, especially when it requires phoning someone out of the blue

The healthy part of me knows they will not be irritated with me or get mad at me or resent me for barging into their lives making demands.

I mean, people get phone calls all the time. It’s not a big deal.

But the scared little animal in me is afraid. And it insists that nobody ever wants to hear from me, people hate it when I’m around, everyone thinks I am the most pathetic loser in the world and it disgusts them to even think about me, let alone actually deal with me, and that everyone would be happier if I just crawled into a deep dark hole and died.

And I know all that is bugfuck crazy. People like me, they really like me. I’m funny, I’m charming, I’m goofy, and I am pretty darn cute. No problem.

But the emotional delusions persist. Like I have this malevolent force in my mind that is far more powerful than my puny reason and it can override all evidence, common sense, and direct observation.

Like I’ve said before, you know you’re insane when you realize that there are things you know to be untrue but that you have no choice but to believe anyhow.

And that’s a scary thing to confront. Much easier to go on pretending it’s all justified somehow. To go on thinking your perceptions are accurate and things really are as bad as they feel no matter what the evidence and people who love you say.

To truly face the truth of your distorted perceptions and the fact that your mental illness means you cannot assume that what you feel is actually real takes a lot of existential courage and is not going to be easy, but you can’t truly recover until you do.

Depression lies. It tells you things are far worse than they really are. It makes you think nobody loves you when many people do. It will convince you that you are ugly and disgusting and horrible when you are just like everyone else. It will attempt to destroy everything genuinely good both inside and outside your head, and the only way I know to stop it is to cling all the harder to the evidence and reason and try my best to keep an accurate perspective on everything.

Other people have other resources to draw on. Religion, family, friends, work. I do not.

It’s just me and my fucked up brain versus…. well, me and my fucked up brain, basically. Or me versus the fucked up part of my brain.

I may not be able to take it out in one fell swoop.

But I can grind it down over time.

And that will have to do.

More after the break.

---

People are not entertainment

This one cuts rather deep for me. Here goes.

I am an entertainment based entity. Growing up lonely meant that books and TV and video games were my real friends. As a result, I see the world through a very entertainment based lens.

In this day and age, we all live entertainment saturated lives. With the internet in our pockets and a galaxy of content in every TV, we can cram absolutely every free moment with something to keep us entertained.

It worries me. People have lost the ability to just sit and be with themselves. It locks them into a high level of stimulated agitation and that kind of stress has got to be bad for both body and soul.

I’m one to talk. I play Skyrim all day.

But that’s not strictly true. Besides the time spent eating and blogging, there are periods where I am not doing anything on the computer at all.

These are my “naps”. I put that in quotes because sleep is not necessarily involved.

Sometimes I just mellow out for a while and when I am done, I just…stop.

Admittedly, it’s a fine distinction. ^[1]

Anyhow, when I nap, I reset my stimulation level to zero. So I never get too agitated.

Maybe more people should live like me. Heaven forbid.

Anyhow, the point I am stumbling gamely towards is that when it comes to living the entertainment saturated life, I am a native.

So I feel like I can speak with some authority that people are not entertainment.

It is not their job to entertain you. You can’t treat people like a video you can switch off when you get bored. Human relationships follow a completely different set of rules and this is something the entertainment based people of the world need to always keep in mind when they are dealing with other humans.

Here’s my example. I once had a conversation with my then roommate David Ihnen (aka Skylos) where he was telling me about some problem he was having in his job at a sysadmin, and I understood almost none of it.

But you know what? That didn’t matter. Because I wasn’t listening to him looking for entertainment, I was listening because he is my friend and I love him and everyone needs someone who listens to them,

I understood the emotional message – that he was very frustrated – and that was more than enough for me to listen sympathetically.

The lesson here is : so what if someone in your life is “boring”? People are not entertainment. There are many reasons to listen to someone even if they aren’t talking about things you find interesting.

And the main reason is that everyone needs to be listened to, even you.

So listen to them as you would want them to listen to you, okay?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Made an appointment for a full eye exam at the Bailey Nelson clinic in Richmond Center for 1 pm this Friday.

At first, I made the appointment for 12 pm. But my doctor’s appointment is at 11 am, and (grr) Doctor Chao is perennially WAY behind, so I can’t trust that I will actually be out of his office by noon.

That’s okay, though. I have other errands to run that day, so I will just do those in between Doctor Chao and the eye exam and things will work out fine.

Still wish my GP was more reliable, though.

Heck, with my luck, this will be the one time when he’s right on time, thus leaving me with the maximum possible time to fill.

Oh well. Worst case scenario, I will just go home and wait.

Or have lunch with Julian at the Richmond Center White Spot.

I dunno, though, It will be smack dab in the middle of the lunch rush. Might be a tad too crowded and loud for us sensitive souls.

Whatever. Maybe lunch a la food court would suit us better. Richmond Center has a pretty epic food court.

We will work something out I am sure.

Hmm. It occurs to me that one of my errands is to drop by my bank to cash my GST cheque and put a bunch of money on my card.

I find myself quite a bit ahead of my budget, and I have checked to make sure next month isn’t a five week month, so I will have around $300 to play around with.

Not sure what I will do with it. Springing for fancier lenses for the glasses I will inevitably be getting is a distinct possibility.

Like ones with special coating for people who sit in front of a computer all day. Supposedly cuts down on eye strain and makes screen text easier to read.

Sounds good to me.

Looking forward to being able to see properly again.

Or as good as I ever do, anyhow.

Also looking forward to talking to my therapist tomorrow because I want to pick his brain about my whole medical malpractice deal.

He’s an MD, technically, so he can probably tell me a lot about how malpractice works from the other side of the stethoscope, so to speak.

I’m not looking for money, although that would be nice. I am looking for justice. I want this asshole Doctor Andrew Smith to pay for treating me like trash and I want to make sure he doesn’t do it to anyone else.

Whether that takes the form of a stiff reprimand from the BC College of Surgeons and Physicians or me raking him over the coals in court is up to him, and them.

But the more he or the system resists, the louder and more public I will get, and the more expensive my justice will get.

And I can be very loud and extremely expensive.

This fucker knew I had a life-threatening condition and he downplayed it to me because he was in a hurry.

That can not go unpunished.

I will get my justice, even if I have to destroy his life to get it.

More after the break.

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So now what?

Well, I used up all my chatty newsy stuff in the first half, so now I have to actually think of something to write about.

I could talk about the upcoming US election. Make tonight’s entry all historical and such.

Honestly, I hope Trump dies before Nov 3. I am not afraid to say that I hope he dies confused and terrified and gasping for air as drowns in his own lies.

Metaphorically speaking. But only barely.

And I know this is not the “nice” thing to say. What we are all “supposed” to be saying is that we wish him a swift recovery, get well soon, XOXOXOX.

Well fuck that. I want him to die, die, die. I don’t swish him a swift recovery and any card I sent would say “Get well never. Die, you monstrous pant-shitting toddler.”

That would get me on some lists.

The only thing that would make me happier is if he was declared mentally incompetent for the office and they invoked the 25th Amendment to remove him from power.

Imagine just how sweet it would be to see Donald “Golden Shower Boy” Trump declared too stupid to be President right before the election.

Imagine just how angry that would make him. Might make him so mad he throws a tantrum so intense it kills him.

Hopefully on live TV, in as messy and degrading way as possible,.

Now as a good mostly-liberal type person, I do not cast this curse lightly. I am no bellicose monster spewing toxic hate willy-nilly like some rotary head sprinkler of evil.

I am, for the most part, a good and gentle soul.

But I have had enough. Fuck Trump, fuck Pence, fuck Mitch the Bitch McConnell, fuck every Proud Boy and Libertarian and all the other overfed maggots of democrazy who claim to love freedom but really want its annihilating opposite, fascism.

Fuck them in the ass with a broken bottle. They are loathsome products of the putrefaction that in my lifetime has taken American conservatism from people I could respect (and agree with on many levels) but disagree with to demons actively pursuing the highest of evils without even bothering to wipe the spittle from their slavering fangs once in a while.

I fervently hope that this coming election throws them all out of power, and not just by a little but by a landslide. I want them to lose so badly that even the most thickwitted of GOP operatives can’t deny that they must have done something wrong,

Furthermore, I want their very names to become so toxic that being associated with them is worse than being associated with the Klan.

I want their castles burn, their cities sacked, and the ground salted so deeply that nothing can grow there for a thousand years.

And I am not afraid to say it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Should probably take my sleeping pill again soon.

My sleep has gone back to being highly fragmented, and that’s no good. Patient reader know that in the past, I have not treated broken sleep as a problem.

To me, napping all the time was fine. Better than fine, really, because I used sleep as a way to reset my mood and hence quash the rising background anxiety that is quite simply my price for being alive and awake.

Probably should do something about that.

Patient readers also know that I am more enlightened now. /I recognize that broken sleep is not good enough. Not enough deep REM time.

So I will likely take my sleepy pill tomorrow morning, with breakfast, in hopes of getting a good four or five hours of uninterrupted, dream-rich, soul nourishing sleep.

My soul needs all the nourishing it can get.

I think part of the reason that sleep has always been difficult for me is that my mind is so very good at stimulating itself.

That’s what all that deep deductive thinking is about when you break it down to its most basic emotional level. All those hours of being bored out of my gourd in class as a kid made me into a deep thinker because when you think about it (lol), deep deductive thinking requires zero input from the real world.

It just takes what is already known and correlates and connects it and processed it deeply so that new information is derived.

So it’s a great thing to do when you can’t do anything.

Remember, most of my teachers in elementary school wouldn’t even let me read when I had finished my work way before the other kids.

So yeah. Boredom made me a deep thinker. And that has buckets of benefits.

The problem is that there’s no end to that process. There is always more to think about, especially when I can get all the input I want in a steady stream from the internet and all the mental stimulation I want from video games.

Even if I was, via some utterly horrible circumstance, cut off from all fresh input (like, say, being full of tubes in a hospital), there is so much stuff to process in my mental queue that it would take me years to finish

And there’s always another, higher level of processing and integration. Who knows how long it would take me to turn literally everything I know into a single, massive whole.

I am not sure my brain could even index something that size, let alone sustain it.

I am thinking there would be a lot of loss. Everything would get boiled down to its barest essence and a lot of detail would be lost.

But who knows…. maybe what would really happen is I would become Enlightened. All the illusions of separation would melt away, and i would become one with the cosmic wholeness that is the birthright of all sentient beings.

That would be cool.

More after the break.

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The secular mystic

You know, looking at that thing about the dragon yesterday and that paragraph about my becoming Enlightened above, you would me forgiven if you concluded that I must be some kind of mystic poet who writes in a room full of clouds of hashish smoke and the the hypnotic drone of a digeridoo.

And I do write that kind of thing in a state of heightened consciousness. The images and words flow freely and I don’t stop to weigh and consider them because I am too caught up in the flow to want to slow down or stop for any reason.

Before I know it, I have spun another dream, and I feel cleansed. That kind of writing uses up a lot of the latent energy I am trying to release into my writing whenever I sit down to blog, and that feels amazing.

Once more : doing things makes me feel better. I have tons of excess energy and if I discharge it via activity, I feel great.

But if I stupidly try to hoard it. it’s like driving with the parking brake on.

Except in this case, I don’t actually get anywhere.

Anyhow, back to magical mystical me. Had I been brought up in any sort of religious tradition, I would no doubt interpret these little poetic outbursts of mine as some form of religious vision sent to me from some supernatural entity.

And while there is a lot to say for thinking of oneself as divinely inspired rather than merely very weird in words, I am still glad to be writing for myself.

Dragging in God or Allah or whoever seems like it can’t possibly be worth it.

And maybe I am a spiritually desolate product of excess Western individualism, but i want all the credit for what I write, god damn it.

None of this “I am but a humble conduit for the Divine Message” bullshit for me. I am not a humble conduit, I’m an amazing fucking writer, and don’t you forget it.

Speaking of the amazingness of my writertness E and D continue to dither about me, and send me notes on the character profile I have been working on, and in general don’t seem to be in a hurry to figure out who is going to write the dang show.

And they have no reason to hurry. This is a side project for them now. They both have real jobs that pay money. They can afford to take it easy.

All it costs them is my nerves. Ha ha.

I’m tempted to just go ahead and write an episode. Maybe not a full length one, though. just a quick little five minute job to let them know how funny and wacky and heartwarming my writing can be.

And how well I handle the themes, plotline, and characters, of course.

Not only would it be a way to show off my mad skillz, it would help me get a sense of how the show comes together as a whole.

Either that, or I will volunteer to write the whole bible for them. I’m tired of dicking around with the character profile.

I thought it just going to be a sample of my writing, but now they are treating it like it’s going straight into the final show bible.

At least they now want me to add the character’s backstory to the profile. And I am looking forward to that. That’s more my style.

But there are also notes to be executed, and that stuff’s a drag, baby.

That’s the job, though. No more getting away with turning in rough drafts. This is the big time and that means working with the bosses until they are happy.

I just wish I was getting paid for all this.

Or at least knew whether I would be paid in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I guess I am back at this part of my mood cycle (now available from Peleton),.

Back to the nihilism. The smoldering black rage glowing on the horizon. The feeling that everything is futile and pointless and absurd.

And not the funny kind of absurd, either.

More like the bitter, mirthless laugh kind of absurd.

I pictured myself as a massive dragon, black as night. Sleek as an oil slick, as strong as a raging bull, and deadly as the airless void between stars. With claws that glisten with ebony ichor, a tail that ends in a wicked tip like a spear, and eyes that glow like the hearts of a dozen mad stars.

And as this mighty beast, I would look out on the world with icy hostility and let the rage, disgust, and contempt build within ,me till I turn my head sideways and belch forth billow upon billow of obsidian flame that annihilates all it touches like hate itself in its purest form was unleashed upon this unworthy world of ours to wipe the universe clean of it and all its unclean children.

And then the doors of night spring open, and all our demons, both personal and general, come screaming forth like they’ve been vomited up from the belly of a very sick god. And they make revel as our sins consume us and the moon and the stars come crashing down to their ignominious deaths and God dies weeping.

And I, the dragon of darkness who started it all, stand tall and strong upon the tallest cliff, and glare down at the chaos and the sacrilege, eyes glowing madder and hotter than ever, and nod once, my vengeance complete.

So, you know. Typical.

I wonder if this is the sort of mood Lovecraft wrote in. It would explain a lot.

Heck, that passage above is almost like the Book of Revelations. And we all know whoever wrote that had to have been in a weird fucking mood.

As am I. But then again, I might be sick.

Or maybe it’s just allergies. Which are a kind of being sick, I guess.

Point is, I had a massive sneezing attack earlier today, and I have been sniffling and snorting ever since. And all day I have felt tense and irritable, like I am ready to snap like a dry twig at the next person who pisses me off.

Not that I want that to happen and certainly not that I am planning on letting it happen.

I’m just acknowledging that my cup boileth over right about now. It would not take much of a downturn to turn me into the ranting psycho that lurks beneath my warm and pleasant normal self.

I really should do something about that. Find some way to vent all that bile before I end up choking on it, or worse, letting it turn me into something I don’t want to be.

It’s Doctor Jekyll’s and Bruce Banner’s repression of their ids that creates Mister Hyde and The Hulk.

Me, I want to integrate my id in order to balance my psyche,

But I have been so cold for so long.

I don’t know if I will survive the thaw.

More after the break.

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Pretty darn sure

Pretty darn motherfucking sure I am sick (as in, infected) now.

I wasn’t sure earlier because all my symptoms matched an allergy attack, and for some reason, we don’t usually consider those to qualify as making you “sick”.

Maybe they’re just too common. Or too transitory. We tend to reserve the “sick” label for the sort of things that might force you to miss work or school.

Anyhow, I am sure I am that kind of sick now. For one thing, my symptoms have persisted for over 6 hours beyond the initial attack, and that’s rare for allergies.

For another, new symptoms have cropped up, and chief amongst them is feeling feverish. I am burning up inside.

Not that I think I have an actual fever. I never do. No matter how hot I feel inside, I never turn out to have a fever.

Dunno why. Maybe my skin is so fucked up that my internal heat doesn’t make it to the surface and that’s why I feel so damned hot.

But no, the ear thermometers get the same result.

It’s frustrating. I bet if I did finally get a reading that indicated I was running a fever, I would feel a weird sense of triumph.

Like, “Finally! I knew I was too hot!”.

I mean, right now, I feel like I am glowing like a star in the infrared.

Nerdiest metaphors on the internet!

I also have a touch of the malaise. Not too strong, just a general feeling of strain under load throughout my body.

I’m doing my best to stay hydrated. Gotta keep the sweat flowing. Only thing worse than sweating when you don’t want to is not sweating when you need to.

Homeostasis is a serious game. Fuck it up and there’s hell toupee.

Meant to jump on getting an eye exam appointment today but ended up sleeping through the afternoon instead.

I want to cultivate the habit of doing things the second I think of them, thus denying my general absentmindedness the opportunity to make the thought disappear back into the primordial pressure cooker from which it emerged.

But for that to happen, I need to work hard to unlearn decades of energy miser thought patterns. I want to stop thinking I have no energy and start looking to my environment for the energy I need to do the things I want.

In other words, become just a little more extroverted.

Or at least become a less repressed and bottled up introvert. Learn to unclench a little and relax and enjoy life instead of squatting in paranoid misery in my dank little cave.

I will never walk in the sunshine till I learn to leave my cave behind and face the world with all its levels of stimulation and hang in there until I get used to it all.

Easier said than done, I suppose.

But then again, what isn’t?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up just 15 minutes ago, so you know I am feeling the usual level of post-sleep crappy. Dizzy and disoriented, with cartoon smoke coming out of my ears.

---

The burrito I ordered from Taco Del Mar last night is so big that I honestly don’t know how to eat the thing.

Frankly, I am a bit intimidated.

---

I find it mildly amusing that I now have to remember NOT to take my Metformin. I am honestly thinking of putting it away somewhere so it won’t prompt me with its presence.

From the very first day of my diabetes diagnosis fifteen years ago, I have been taking two Metformin and one Glyburide twice a day, once with lunch and again with supper.

So it’s a hard habit to unlearn.

But I’ll be damned before I take any more of that stuff. Not when it could be destroying my liver, among other nasty lactic acidosis symptoms.

The only way I will take Metformin again is if Doctor Chao does an exceptionally good job of convincing me it’s okay.

And even then, maybe not.

---

Burrito’s pretty good. Shredded beef, refried beans, rice, pico de gallo. Pretty much a complete meal in wrap form.

Much more nutritious than the tube sock full of brown goo that Taco Bell calls a burrito.

Still miss Taco Bell, though.

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The words are not coming easy today. My brain is thick with sleep sludge. I am probably going to need a couple more hours of sleep before I can truly qualify as awake.

So what the heck, here’s something cute from Tumblr.

I mean, the story itself is totes adorbs, but it’s “nemnems” that really slays me.

It never occurred to me before just how hard it is to say “m and m’s” when you are a new speaker and have trouble with certain consonants.

Is there such a thing as a prosonant?

Then there’s this gem :

I was a smartass kid, but not like that kid. I could never have been that cute about it.

I just pointed out more obvious (to me) flaws in adult logic.

Come to think of it, I still do that.

OK, one more :

I can totally imagine people doing that. Back when I had a tablet that worked, I would get the urge to do the same thing and only my deep sense of logic stopped me.

Instead, I would play Android games incessantly.

See,. more more sensible.

Anyhow, checking the other, smaller internet might not make sense, but the ways you interact with the internet on a PC versus on a handheld device are sufficiently different to make them feel like totally different experiences.

People probably have things they only do in the one place, even.

Twitter on the device, Facebook on the PC, and so on.

We are context bound creatures.

It’s like when multilingual people talk about how some thoughts are easier to think iand express in certain languages.

Makes me wonder what thoughts I can’t think because I only know English.

More after the break.

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My day, part deux

Still not a heck of a lot on my mind.

Did the shopping and McD’s thing. Had a Big Mac because red meat has the most vitamin B12 and I want all of that that I can get.

I vaguely recall Doc Chao saying at one point that chronically low B12 levels like mine are often the result of a digestive issue (something enzymatic no doubt) that impairs the body’s ability to extract B12 via digestion.

That’s why I have to get B12 injections from my doctor. Any B12 given to me orally would have to be absorbed via digestion, and face the same issue.

Hopefully that’s something that can be repaired, maybe with some kind of probiotic drink that puts the right stuff in my gut biome.

Science words are fun.

I’ve been pondering getting one of those probiotic drinks for a number of reasons. For one, they supposedly can cure irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and that sounds pretty good to me.

Though honestly, I have had IBS for over 20 years, so it is hard for me to imagine what life without it would be like.

I can’t imagine my digestive systems being calm and solid and reliable, as opposed to the simmering cauldron it is now.

Might take me a while to get used to it. Like someone who is from the busy noisy urban heart of a large city experiencing the quiet of a country night for the first time.

Eventually it will be quite soothing, but at first I might be jumping at all the noises that are not there.

Another reason to look into probiotics is that gut biome research suggests that the health or lack thereof of one’s internal flora and fauna. had have a profound effect on one’s mental health as well.

Makes sense. If you lack the micro-organisms to extract certain nutrients from food, a lack of said nutrients could have a strong effect on the brain and thus mood.

Would be darkly funny to find out after all the psychological wrangling and metaphorical pacing back and forth that my mood issues had nothing to do my terrible childhood and emotionally neglectful parents and everything to do with poor digestion.

Turns out the emotional starvation I feel is do to actual starvation!

Well, malnutrition, anyhow.

In fact, here’s a thought : what if we invent the perfect nutritional supplement containing every vitamin and nutrient we need and that is odorless and flavourless and therefore can go into all processed foods without changing the taste at all?

Oh, and is so cheap that adding it to everything won’t cost companies much?

Say it becomes universally adopted. It’s in everything. What then?

The nutritional standard of the whole human race would go way up. And people could eat whatever hell they want and still get full nutrition.

So we’d all end up eating like kids because all that mattered was how it tasted.

Then again, that wouldn’t fix the problems of getting too much of certain things.

Then again again, maybe those wouldn’t matter so much if you were also getting the full spectrum of your nutritional needs taken care of.

It’s an interesting concept, if I say so myself.

And I do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.