Two things getting on my nerves lately.

First off, my anti-bad stuff software, Spybot Search and Destroy 2, keeps identifying my copy of the Tor browser^[1] as malware and quarantining it so that the system can’t access it and I can’t use it.

And I can’t seem to call it off, as it were. It has a list of files it has quarantined, but Tor isn’t on there, so I can’t tell it to chill the fuck out about it.

I’ve tried all kinds of things, like uninstalling Tor then reinstalling it in a totally different directory in order to sneak it past my own security system, but to no avail.

I am getting ever close to the nuclear option, which is to uninstall Spybot entirely.

Hopefully that would work, though it would leave me feeling a tad vulnerable. So I am going to try everything else first.

It’s just so frustrating to have to struggle with my own damned computer just to use Tor. I feel like a victim of an autoimmune disorder.

My computer’s defenses are attacking healthy cells!

I am sure there has to be some way around this, though. Besides uninstalling Spybot. Most anti-mean programs software has an “allow” list where you can tell it specifically that this program is not a virus, but if Spybot 2 has one, I can’t find it.

If I do end up nuking Spybot, I will reinstalled Malwarebytes. Forget why I uninstalled it in the first place, though I am pretty sure it wasn’t because of a situation like this one.

The other aggravation is this maze in Skyrim. It’s part of the awe inspiringly good Legacy of the Dragonborn mod, and it’s super frustrating.

Mazes and I do not get along, especially in first person. Even in the real world, where there are far more landmarks to distinguish one place from another, I have a terrible sense of direction.

I like to say my sense of direction is so bad, I can get lost in an elevator.

Add the abstraction of a 3D video game world and I am hopeless. My only salvation is that mazes, unlike the real world, have a sort of internal logic to them that lets me mentally mark off passages I have tried before.

But that only works up to a certain level of complexity and this maze exceeds that.

So it’s remarkably nightmarish for me. in a low key way. It feels like some fever dream I might have when I am overheating in my sleep.

I’ve had nightmares like that, where I am trying to get somewhere and I keep taking paths that seem like they will take me there but I just end up back where I started.

Having poor spatial awareness can really be a drag sometimes. And yet I get the feeling that it is somehow connected to my creativity.

I guess seeing things as rigidly spatial doesn’t fit with creativity’s relational nature.

I’m going to go see if the left hand rule works in video games.

Wish me luck.

---

Update : Yes, it works. Sorta. Like a lot of sets of instructions, I feel like there is a hidden assumption that is not contained within the instruction set itself and without which the instruction set is worthless because they just won’t work.

Like with this thing.

In searching for that image, I discovered that there’s an entire reddit community inspired by it where people post images of other unhelpful art lessons.

And that makes me very happy. I am glad others share my bitterness and rage about how useless art books that say they can “teach you to draw” are.

Oh, and for the record, if your answer to “And how do I do that?” is to say “Like this!” and do it, that’s not good enough.

If all I had to do to learn to draw was watch someone draw, I would be Leonardo Da Fucking Vinci by now because I have watched my friends draw SO much.

I’ve never been able to copy someone’s actions.

Maybe I have the wrong kind of mirror neurons, I dunno.

In other words, ordered from Taco del Mar tonight, so I am in Mexican food heaven. It has been so long since I had anything like actual Mexican food that even fast food and/or food court level Mexican food seems like heaven to me.

I’m currently 75 percent of the way through an order of loaded nachos with pico de gallo (basically, salsa without the vinegar), cilantro^[2], cheese, and….

Swell of dramatic music, please.

and… CARNITAS!^[3] I love carnitas so much and I hadn’t had it since I lived in Silicon Valley. So when I saw that as an option I POUNCED.

What’s more, I have a bigass burrito and chips n’ queso in the fridge, and I am going to have them for lunch tomorrow.

And the quality’s pretty good,. at least with my nachos. The pico and cilantro taste very fresh, which is very important to me.

Not as much cheese as I might have liked. Perhaps they are trying to get me to pay the extra $1,50 for extra cheese next time.

If so, it worked, because I totally will.

At the risk of being declassee, though, I do still miss my Taco Bell. It is, objectively speaking, worse Mexican food, but it’s the first Mexican food I had besides when my Mom would make tacos from a kit, and I will always be fond of it no matter what.

Plus, I am nuts for that nacho cheese goop that comes from a pump.

What can I say, some of us have a weakness for artificial cheez flavour.

I mean, who do you think keeps these things in business?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] Glad I got over my aversion to cilantro. Now it just tastes like parsley to me, and i love me some parsley. [[1]]

wp:paragraph –>

Took my sleeping pill (Mirtazapan) for the first time in ages this morning.

As expected, this led to me sleeping a LOT.

Hence my eating lunch at freaking 3 pm. I managed to sleep for six consecutive hours, which is good because I obviously needed it.

And I am still pretty damned sleepy, so I assume there’s more to come.

Oh well, I knew this would happen when I took it.

And it had to be done. My sleep has been atrocious lately. Just a scattering of one and a half to two hour naps over the course of a day.

So I did the smart, sane, adult thing and took my sleeping pill despite knowing I would be wiped out for the majority of today and would not like it.

Patient readers know I always hate it when I am sleepy all day because I don’t want to sleep all day, I want to have fun.

And I could try to emphasize the escapist element of the whole experience. Enjoy being able to completely avoid having to deal with life via sleep.

Like I always say, sleep is death without the commitment.

But I am way too afraid of getting to like that escape far too much, and ending up retreating even further from reality by trying to sleep all the time.

I have to be damned careful with my escapes. My escapist tendencies are very strong. So strong, in fact, that part of me wants to escape from life entirely.

Salvation for me, therefore, is found in persistence. Staying in the game instead of folding immediately so I can run away and hide.

And that takes courage. Grit. Character. Wherewithal. Call it what you like.

At this point in my life, I tend to only have that when I am angry.

Hulk smash, and all that.

That’s something to keep in mind when it feels like my escape addiction is pulling my back into the land of the dead again.

Speaking of which, it’s time for me to go back to sleep.

---

My recent resurrection

Slept a bunch more. Think I am up to around seven to eight hours now.

For me, that’s remarkable. For other people, sane healthy wholesome types, that’s normal. Natural, even.

But then, I have always been an unusual creature. Wild and strange and unearthly. A creature not entirely of this world. Uncanny wise, and more than passing strange.

Perhaps that’s the norm for us trickster types. Maybe we’re all moon children whose traps, tricks, and games are really just the only way we know how to relate to people.

If so, that’s pretty sad.

Anyhow, I feel better now. The sleepiness is mostly gone. There’s still a few cobwebs lingering in the hard to reach corners of my mind, but they are easily ignored.

Been playing lots of Skyrim, naturally. Play through a quest mod called Teldryn Serious which was fairly good.

And it worked, unlike other mods I have tried recently. I am seriously considering ripping out every single sex mod and everything else I can live without to see if I can make some of these mods actually freaking work.

Because the truth is, I rarely use the sexytimes stuff. I like having the option, though. It gives me a happy warm feeling to know there’s this world of horny fun at my fingertips.

It’s so much happier and friendlier than the real world. The whole world of pornography is like that. Gone are all the stupid barriers that keep us apart and people can be intimate with one another in a free and joyous way that I find quite beautiful.

Sexuality is pure and innocent. Childlike, even. It is only the filthy minds of those ultimate perverts we call “prudes”^[!] that make it seem dirty.

In my utopia, people would be fucking as much as they wanted to, however they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. And without any guilt, shame, or inhibition.

Fucking is a perfectly natural, normal, ordinary thing to do, and people should feel shame about it any more than they feel shame about eating or sleeping.

So my guess is that there would be a lot of good, wholesome, healthy fucking going on. There would be areas set aside specifically for fucking, and in those areas, people would be free to fuck how (and who) they please.

I picture these areas as being sort of free floating orgies that function like a pick-up sports game. People drop in, play for as long as they like, and leave when they feel like it, no questions asked.

In fact, in my vision, human habitats would have fuck rooms just like they have bathrooms, and for the same reason.

Namely that wherever there is people, there is the need for a place for them to take care of their natural bodily needs.

And people need to fuck. It’s a deep biological drive, and the fact that unlike breathing or sleeping we can live without it doesn’t make it any less important to our wellbeing.

After all, we can survive without love, acceptance, romance, and the approval of our peers as well, but that doesn’t mean we can be healthy without them.

I could say more, but I have to write down something important now.

---

This is a little complicated, but here goes.

I lost the cap on my bottle of good ol’ Metformin. So I decided to google “metformin storage”. That brought me to an article that began with this :

IMPORTANT WARNING: Metformin may rarely cause a serious, life-threatening condition called lactic acidosis

And my mind instantly rewound to the last time I went to the ER and Doctor Andrew Smith told me real quick , at the very end of my examination, that technically my blood test showed very high lactic acid levels, and “that sometimes means you’ve had a serious infection, but there’s no other signs of one, so it’s probably no big deal. “

Not knowing how process this information, I just stored it away. Until now.

Turns out, high lactic acid levels can fucking kill you, and that doctor (Doctor Andrew Smith) was criminally negligent when he pretended they were no big deal so he could move on to other, more worthwhile patients who actually deserved to live.

Add in that my GP Dr. Chao recently told me that my blood tests showed unusual liver function and lactic acidosis specifically attacks the LIVER, and you can see why I am super pissed off right now.

Well I am sure as fuck not taking any more metformin, at least until I see Doctor Chao next Friday. In fact, I might just call him Monday to see if he can see me earlier.

I want him to test me specifically for this disorder and if it turns out that I really do have extremely high lactic acid levels and therefore lactic acidosis, I am going to report Doctor Andrew Smith (if that is his real name) to the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians of BC for gross negligence.

And if that doesn’t get the results I want, I will sue the motherfucker for malpractice and take every goddamned penny he has.

This is the level of care fat people get, folks.

And it’s about time someone has to pay for it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

UPDATE : There are two Andrew Smiths in the Royal College’s directory.

One is a med student. So it’s probably not him. He definitely introduced himself as Doctor Andrew Smith and med students know not to EVER EVER do that.

So it’s probably this guy :

Name Andrew Joseph Smith

Registration Status Active, Practising FULL Family Practice

• Certification in the College of Family Physicians of Canada
• Certification in the College of Family Physicians of Canada – Added Competence in Emergency Medicine

Business Address
Get Directions SASAMAT PO
PO Box 72006 Rpo Sasamat
Vancouver, BC
V6R 4P2T: 709-749-6718

Gender M

MSP Number 82654

He has no regulatory actions against him.

That might be about to change.

Tell me, Doctor, what about me made you decide my life wasn’t worth saving?

[[1]] Think about it. Humans are a naturally horny species. We have a strong need to fuck. Therefore, the only unnatural sexuality is one that denies this. [[1]]

Had my doctor’s appointment this morning. Got therapy in 20 mins.

It’s a busy, busy day for me!

Doctor was an hour late. Par for the course for him. I have given up complaining about it to him because that just makes him all flustered and embarrassed and nothing changes so what the hell.

What really bugs me, though, is that ever time I complained, it was like he’d been shot, that’s how much of a shock it was to him. I can only assume that I am one of the few patients who ever actually complained about it to his face.

Plausible. After all, we’re all Canadians, and we’re not the most direct people in the world, especially with authority figures.

By Canadian standards, I am mildly more assertive than the baseline.

Anyhow, I got to see him eventually, and agreed to let a second year medical student take my history.

Glad to help. Canada needs doctors.

Got my first B12 shot. Got to admit, I feel a bit better. Warmer. Less agitated. Hmm.

Looked up what foods have B12 in them. Short answer : meat. Meat and other animal products like eggs and dairy.

So I am going to bump up my animal product intake. I never planned on being a vegan, I just became one accidentally. I only eat meat when I order in or go out.

So that’s like, four meals a week tops. Not good enough! I plan to up that to at least one animal product focused meal a day.

Glad dairy products are on the list. Adding cheese on toast to my diet seems like a fairly easy first step.

Eventually I will get lunch meats at least. Maybe the occasional rotisserie chicken.

And of course, my blood sugar was sky high. Not a surprise, seeing as I don’t monitor and I don’t take my insulin.

But still depressing to hear. Well I don’t know about monitoring but I can at least get back into taking insulin on the regular.

I was worried that without monitoring, it would be a bad idea to take insulin at all, But the doctor told me that I need to do so because diabetes is a progressive disease and as it progresses, my body produces less and less insulin.

So I gotta replace that shit or all the dietary restraint in the world won’t be enough to save my sorry ass.

Both tons of it.

Still, I am hopeful about my future because I now have a two word mantra to propel me into the right behaviours : FEEL BETTER,.

If I get my blood sugar down, I will FEEL BETTER.

If I get my B12 up, I will FEEL BETTER.

If I get myself moving more, I will FEEL BETTER.

And lordy, do I want to feel better. I feel so crappy all the time that I totally forgot that feeling better was even a thing till my doctor mentioned it.

I can make myself feel better.

I might even make myself feel GOOD for once.

And surely that’s worth a bit of work.

More after the break.

---

My kind of fight

Somewhere out there, there’s got to be the fight for me.

One where I can not only shine but reign supreme,

One where the side of the angels needs my strength, my power, and my skill in order to secure victory against the forces of evil.

One where I can fight with all my might instead of always holding back.

One where I can fight like the giant berserker bear I truly am.

One where the enemy is so wicked and so powerful that even exerting myself to the utmost might not be enough to defeat it.

One where I can finally unleash all this power I have been hoarding for so long without knowing why I was doing it

The fight I long for would finally give my power a reason to exist

It would finally give me a reason to exist

And it has to be out there, somewhere.

Call to me, O battlefield of my destiny, and I will come to you

And at long last I will find purpose, and form, and meaning

---

Hmm. Guess that turned out to be a poem. Go fig,.

But yes, I feel like there must be a battle that needs me somewhere in this wild and fucked up world of ours.

There’s no shortage of evil. The world’s on fire, plague stalks the land, America stands on the brink of civil war, right wing horror shows are rising to power all over the world because people lose their higher ethical faculties too when they get old, and civilization itself seems on the brink of manic suicide.

And then there’s the bad things. Ba dum tish.

And I know I am an extremely powerful communicator. My words have serious mojo. The kind of mojo that can reshape the world if wielded properly.

But I need a focus. An enemy, or a system, or a cause. Someplace where I can bring the pain to the corrupt bastards of the world, and with the power of my words, strip them of all moral legitimacy and reveal them to be the mindless parasites they really are.

Tell me, senator, can you name something that you wouldn’t do even if it made you a lot of money and you knew you wouldn’t get caught?

No, that’s not an “unfair” question.

But I need to know where to go.

Or maybe that’s just cowardice talking, I can’t tell. Maybe I am just too chickenshit to face the awesome responsibility inherent in my power. Maybe dithering over where to start is just my cowardice’s stalling tactic to avoid having to come out of the darkness and be not just really but bigger than life.

The power to remake the world, and I too scared to use it,.

Spider-Man would be so disappointed in me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

Yesterday’s post was… cathartic.

Even I was a little surprised to find out just how much generational bitterness I had stored up inside me, and I am glad I had the chance to vent it.

Now obviously, you nice people know me well enough by now to know that there was a heck of a lot of my own personal issues mixed up in that trans-generational screed.

And I am fine with that. This was a tortured ragged scream of rage, not an academic treatise. I was not looking to be perfectly objective.

Plus, to be honest, personal or not, it all remains true. I retract nothing.

They say that the most universal messages often come from the most personal of places, and that seems to be what I’ve done with that post.

And I know this because after I wrote said post, I posted a link to it to the Gen X Facebook group that inspired it, and got some positive feedback.

Which thrilled me to no end. I am used to whatever I say on social media generating absolutely no reaction whatsoever, like it never happened.

So honestly, even negative feedback would have pleased me.

At least I would have had a freaking effect.

Positive feedback is even better, though, and what’s more, I even managed to generate a little discussion.

And that makes me very happy. My dream is to have a forum where people discuss whatever I post about and have intense, detailed discussions about various topics and issues related to said posts.

Or what the hell, even the occasionally flaming argument about them. As long as they stay on topic, I’ll allow it.

I would really love to contribute to public debate like that. I consider people discussing their views and sharing perspectives to be an inherently good thing. I think that the more those wheels of public discourse turn, the better off we are as a group.

Because discussion, as futile as it may seem sometimes, is actually how we process our emotions and our world as a group. It’s how the body public digests things.

And I would love to be a part of that.

What else… got my chest X-rays yesterday. It was uneventful for the most part.

Forgot the piece of paper they gave me for my appointment, but it wasn’t needed. I think they just print something out because people expect it.

Wore my mask the whole time I was outside the apartment, and I am proud of that. It wasn’t easy. I had my claustrophobia slash fear of suffocation breathing down my neck the whole time, but I managed to keep it at bay,.

The secret is to not let myself begin obsessing over it. Keep my mind moving so it can’t settle into a fixated pattern.

And then, once I have managed to forget the fear for a while, when it comes back, I tell myself, “Hey, you were breathing fine five seconds ago, so you can breathe fine now. “

Sometimes my inner life coach is really good at his job.

More after the break,.

---

Do your homework!

Left my latest assignment from E&D to the last minutes, thinking it would be easy, but boy was that a mistake.

The changes D wants are pretty fundamental, and are going to take a lot of intense skullduggery on my part if I am to do a proper job of it.

I am possibly going to just start the whole character profile over again. Past a certain point, renovating a building becomes pointless and it becomes easier to just knock the building down and build a new one.

Makes me wish I had started yesterday. Then I would have had a whole day to process the changes and figure out how to integrate them into my work.

Instead, I have like…. four hours.

Tsk tsk me!

Lesson learned, though. Don’t assume acting on notes will be easy!

---

Felt fairly okay today. Then again, I did very little. And that’s kind of the problem right there isn’t it?

The whole reason my slow demolition went undetected by me for so long is that my life is so completely sedentary that I could be damn near dying and as long as I could still walk around the apartment and sit on my ass playing Skyrim and blogging, I would have no frigging idea.

And I know how wrong that is. I imagine the main reason changing my diet to eliminate most of the carbs did not solve my high blood sugar is that with so little muscular activity in my life even a much smaller amount of carb intake still exceeded demand,

If that makes sense.

So if I want to get healthy and not die (and I mostly do), I am going to have to move more. Which is ironic, because moving has never been harder or more painful.

Let that be a lesson to you, kids. Stay active – the longer you are lazy, the more saving your own life is going to hurt.

I try to imagine myself being more active – if I can dream it, I can do it – but the inner resistance to the idea is so strong that it feels downright impossible to overcome.

Because moving hurts. The path to recovery involves so much pain and for so long a time that it feels like it would crush me utterly before I even got anywhere.

Still, I think I have a hack. I just have to think of exercise as something I am doing for the immediate reward of reducing my muscular tension and overall agitation.

By moving the reward closer to the pain, I hope to maximize hedonic return and hence make it much easier to motivate myself to do things which will hurt me.

I mean, that’s just basic conditioning and/or pet training.

Who knows, it might even work,.

Nature is so stupid. The thing that could save me – exercise – is the thing nature is punishing me the hardest for doing.

So much for intelligent design.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

They told us we could be anything we wanted to be. Then told us it was our own fault we chose to be “losers” and “slackers”. They pushed us into the world with the cold indifference of a dive bar bouncer and expected us to get the good paying middle class jobs they refused to vacate or mandate and left us adrift in an economy, in a world even, that didn’t want us, didn’t care about us, and didn’t even want us to be there, and then judged us hard for not doing what they did – the difference being their parents worked hard and sacrificed for them and invested in them, and they were far too selfish and greedy to know or care, let alone do it for their own kids. We were the “are you still here?” generation and it shows. We were the latchkey kids, the first generation to grow up without a full time parent, the products of parents who wanted to “have it all”… leaving nothing behind for us.

Me, facebook, today

In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before something on my Gen X based Facebook group triggered me.

Turns out it was this :

Triggered by Fight Club – how cliché,

But yeah, My Gen X rage kicked in. We were (and are) victim of the vast soul sucking selfishness of the Boomers who raised us.

But we weren’t raised, we were “parented”. “Raising” children sounded like way too much work and (the most unspeakable thing) too much like they would have to make personal sacrifices in order to do it.

Well clearly that was absolutely unacceptable. Nothing could be more evil than having less for themselves.

So instead, they “parented”. That sounded a lot more like a hobby than a real commitment, and like any hobby, it could be done in whatever spare time you happened to have, assuming you had any.

Hence the invention of “quality time”. These two words were all they needed to justify spending almost no time with or on their kids because of course, what is important is not the quantity of time you spend raising your kids but the quality of said time!

And seeing as there is no way to quantify time quality, you are free to offhandedly imagine whatever tiny amount of time you spend with and on your kids is of such high quality that it’s still enough.

It wasn’t. Kids need parents, not parenting. Thinking your kids will be fine on whateer scraps of time you accidentally give them is like thinking you can live on 100 calories a day because that lettuce leaf you eat for breakfast is so darn nutritious.

SO our parents pursued their own self-interest with nary a thought for the kids they left to raise themselves.

Then they had the gall to claim they sacrificed so much for us when we complained.

Bullshit. You didn’t sacrifice a god damned thing. You would have had the exact same career in the exact same job making the exact same money if you had never had kids.

Sure, you spent money on your kids. And that’s not nothing.

It’s just not enough. It’s not nearly enough. In fact, you have to be pathologically selfish and self-absorbed to even think, for one second, that whatever the kids ended up with would just automatically turn out to be enough via the magic of “quality time”.

Kids need so much more than a roof over their heads and food on the table and jackets in the winter. Thy need love and caring and attention and guidance and assurance and discipline and all the other things our parents would have never dreamed of giving us because that would have meant less for them.

They could spend money. But they couldn’t share. They couldn’t accept having less so that their kids felt wanted and valued. They couldn’t conceive of it ever being acceptable for them to have less of what really mattered to them for any reason ever.

And so they raised us to say yes to everything. Yes, of course it’s okay that you skipped my recital to have lunch with your boss. Why would I object to barely seeing you at all and when I do see you, you’re too busy to even look at me? What possible problem could there be with me being raised by and bonding with a babysitter who will be far more of a parent to me than either of you and who will suddenly disappear from my life when I reach school age because to her, it was just a job?

Whatever meets your needs is A-OK with me, Mother and Dad.

After all, when you’re starving for attention, you’re sure as fuck not going to be picky about what tiny scraps of it you get.

You’re expected to be grateful that you get anything at all. Food, shelter, clothing, the occasional warm afterthought, birthday presents, the joy of :(silently) basking in their presence for minutes at a time – you should be grateful for all of it because you don’t deserve anything at all and your parents owe you absolutely nothing.

And if you dared to remind them you existed and assert your basic needs, what did they do? Send you off to boot camp.

Because to them, paying strangers to abduct your child in the middle of the night and take them God knows where to do God knows what to them for three weeks was, to their selfish souls, better than having to spend precious “me!” time talking with their children and possibly facing the truth about their own selfish “parenting”.

No,no, whatever we give them, no matter how little, is “enough” and if the kid wants more, it means they are broken (must be all that rap music) and you get to ship them off for three whole weeks (three weeks childless – what bliss) and feel virtuous for doing so.

We are Generation Nobody. We don’t exist. We don’t even get negative attention – all the memes are about Millennials versus Boomers.

The Boomers didn’t raise the Millennials – we did, got damn it.

But as usual, people – especially Boomers – forget we exist.

No wonder we’re a bitter and resentful bunch.

You would be too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Doctor Chao called while I was out not getting my chest X-ray today
^[1] . I am guessing he wants to discuss my test results.

I’m guessing they’re not good. Doctors don’t call you up to talk about how healthy you are, I would think.

Should be a fun conversation.

Well whatever it is, I can take it. Go do a bunch of much scarier tests? Sure. Go directly to the hospital and check yourself into the hazmat wing? Gotcha. Start making funeral plans because you’ve only got one month to live?

I’m way more okay with that than I should be.

That’s the ugly realization that came to me while we were out. There is a part of me that is looking forward to dying. That is enjoying my getting weaker and more tired and is hoping it goes all the way to my turning away from reality entirely and hiding in death, having finally escaped everything.

That sees death as a way to finally truly get some rest. In peace, even.

That feels me fading away and says “Almost there…. finally it will be over….”

So if I truly want to live, I am going to have to deal with this dark and deadly part of me before it dooms me.

Not really wanting to live is bound to negatively effect outcomes.

Even if I continue doing what I am told to do by medical folk. You can give two patients identical treatment for identical diagnoses and one of them recovers and the other dies almost right away.

The only difference is one had a lot more will to live than the other.

And I am not sure how much will to live I have.

Heck, I am not sure how much will to not die I have.

It would be so easy to give up and die. It wouldn’t even feel like I was committing suicide. After all, I didn’t slit my wrists or jump off a roof or walk into traffic.

In fact, an argument could be made that I didn’t do anything at all.

On the outside, at least.

So I need to be working hard to connect with my primal will to live and all the things I have to live for in order to shore up my resolve.

Starting with getting good and mad at the petty forces that DARE to try to ruin all my fun by getting their dirty little fingers all over my righteous and noble self.

Well fuck that.I am going to fight back against all my illnesses and ailments and kick their bloody teeth in. I’m hopping mad at all this bullshit and I intend to do whatever it takes to get healthy again.

So fuck you, illness, disease and death.

I am not your friend.

More after the break.

---

A little too on the nose

Just noticed that in Chrome, there’s a tag to the left of the URL that says “Not secure”

How inappropriately appropriate.

It is referring, of course, to my connection. Both to my website and reality.

I know that a lot of my internal insecurity – that maddening maelstrom in my mind – comes from having so little input from reality.

I ignore reality most of the time and focus on my rich inner life instead. I’m a dreamer, a seer, a thinker, a visionary. A wizard of the mind and sorcerer of the soul. Being so internalized gives me great power and insight.

But none of that matter when you are too fucking crazy to do anything with it.

What I need is balance. Or something closer to it, anyhow. I need enough ihnput from reality to balance out all the mental activity and leave me feeling grounded and secure and stable instead of feeling like I’m naked at midnight at the North Pole.

But the road to reality is littered with land mines of self-loathing, anxiety, dread, uncertainty, and pain.

This is not an accident. My depression put all those land mines there. Both to serve its own desire to keep me under its control and to make me feel better about how constrained and pathetic my life is.

I guess those are basically the same thing.

After all, what better way to keep the animals quiet in their cages than to convince them that to set foot outside their cages means instant death?

We’re not keeping you locked up. We’re keeping you safe.

And isn’t that the most important thing? To be safe?

And the answer is : no. The most important thing is to be happy. Safety, like all other virtues, is just a means to that end.

And if the concern for safety gets in the way of my happiness, then fuck it.

I’d rather be dangerously happy than safely miserable.

Besides, deep down, this particular version of “safety” only means “lack of anxiety”. It’s about feeling safe, not about being safe.

That’s how someone like me can live a self-destructive life of self-neglect and wholesale fear of reality in general and human connection in particular, where I have lost my entire adult life to depression and continue to struggle with it every day, all because that’s what my anxiety forces me to do in order to feel “safe”,. and not see the problem.

I’m not safe. My recent health issues prove that. I’m actually in terrible danger of an entirely predictable and on paper preventable sort precisely precisely because the desire to feel safe made it impossible to do the things I needed to do in order to actually be safe in reality.

The irony runs thick and strong in this head of mine.

And i don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think it’s that kind of problem, the kindI can solve with my oh so clever mind.

This is the sort of thing that only going deep and dragging all the old bullshit in my head out into the light so I can finish processing it can solve.

And the problem with that is that it takes for freaking ever.

And I may not have that long.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

But not really.

The question is : how do I convince myself that I am not, in fact, utterly and completely alone and abandoned in the world. That in fact, there are many people who love and cherish me and think I’m something pretty special.

And here’s the big one : how can I learn to let their love in?

It’s a rather sticky question because there are so many factors working against me.

Like bad brain chemicals. Feeling alone and isolated and afraid is my brain’s “normal” and it will fight to return to that state no matter how I feel about it.

It doesn’t matter that it’s an extremely negative “normal”. That’s not the kind of value judgement primitive brain chemistry can make.

All it knows how to do is maintain whatever state is recorded as the default, and in my case, that’s Lonelytown.

Then there’s the fear. I was hurt so badly and so often as a child that my deep self is terrified that if it opens up the door to let love in, annihilation will come instead.

In fact, the sad truth is that it’s very very hard for me to even imagine a scenario in which truly opening up to people doesn’t result in instant doom.

I guess that’s what happens when fear runs that deep for so long.

This isn’t the person I want to be. I want to be open and loving and warm. I don’t want to be closed off in my own little world, detached and aloof and unreachable.

But it’s where I am right now.

There is also the issue of my broken machinery – my “busted antenna”. The brutal truth is that I did not get the socialization and/or social stimulation I needed at a very critical time in my development, and so it’s entirely possible that vital parts of my social machinery are broken beyond repair.

And it’s so damned frustrating because here I am, a warm and caring human being who can dimly perceive the sunshine filled world of normal human connection he wants to join, but there is this fucking dead space between me and it that thwarts me.

I dunno. Maybe I should stop trying to fix the unfixable and just accept that this is who I am. I’m a broken robot, a friendly alien, here but not here, sensitive and caring but trapped in an ice cold cage of traumatic scar tissue and fear.

But no. I don’t think giving up and making the best of a bad situation is an option for me. I will continue to struggle and fight the numbness and the pain and the fear for as long as it takes to crack these prison walls and let the sun in once and for all.

And then do my best to not get totally freaked out by that and end up skittering back into my deep dark hole to hide like a startled roach.

I know there is a vast universe of human emotion waiting for me to clear the clogs and get my true emotional self up and running.

And when I do, maybe I will be able to truly connect with people.

And then I won’t be alone any more.

More after the break,

---

My strange universe

My personal reality is emotionally unstable.

I never know how things are going to feel.

My total emotional affect varies wildly from moment to moment, and it is only by clinging hard to whatever I can that I create any sense of stability amidst the superstorm of pure chaotic flux that is my emotional state at any given moment.

No wonder I cling so hard to whatever stability I can find and need my world to be super predictable in order to be able to function at all.

I can only cope with the maelstrom within if I have the opposite outside.

If I was ever to lose that hyper predictability, I am quite sure that I would, at long suffering last, go completely insane.

Part of me feels like the sense of relief alone would make it worth it. I have been fighting to stay sane despite my mind being a madhouse 24/7 for so long that finally just letting go sounds almost divine.

And who knows. Maybe if I just stopped trying to hold myself together, I would finally have my much needed nervous breakdown and emerge from it a far stronger and saner person with a stable and reliable mind.

There are times when breaking down is the smartest thing to do, and it’s my insistence on always keeping on trucking no matter what that is the madness.

But that’s the only way I know to to get through life. Just keep going no matter what. It got me through the regular school system. It got me out of the total physical and mental breakdown I had when my parents yanked me out of university.

And it’s gotten me to where i am today : 47, dying without having lived at all, watching with deathly passivity as my health falls apart while feeling no particular drive to do anything about my situation.

I mean, I know I should.

But that means next to nothing. I am quite used to not doing things I should be doing. There’s always millions of things I should be doing.

I can see them through the bars of my cage.

But they can’t reach me. Nothing can. That’s what the cage is for, after all,. On the deepest level of my mind, there I sit, impassively alone, staring out at the world with the crystal clarity of the truly mad, seeing all, touched by none.

I know so much about that world beyond my cage. The view is excellent from my cozy corner of the place where all things come together. Sometimes I look at those above who think they know what is going on, and I laugh, because they know nothing.

At least, not compared to me.

I could crush them all if I cared to.

Good thing I’m dead inside, then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time to take a crack at another topic I really don’t like talking about and is therefore something I need to talk about.

So here goes.

When I neglect myself, I’m not the only one who gets hurt.

The people who love me and care about (and for) me get hurt too as they helplessly watch me slowly falling apart and dying right before there eyes.

And there’s not a damned thing they can do about it.

I know I have written about this subject before, but I feel the need to revisit it what with my recent dramatic turn for the worse.

And god damn me, because I tend to forget.

My emotional landscape is an isolated wasteland by default. Even when I am with my friends, a little part of me is locked away alone.

That scared little animal is always there, at the very core of my being, terrified and angry and freaking the fuck out all the time, 24/7. even when I am asleep.

It’s that part of me that never came back after I took my mind away when I was being raped at the age of 4. It’s in there with the part of me that never got up after I laid down in a snowbank and willed myself to die.

Thank god that doesn’t work.

So even when I have people in my life. I feel like I am all alone. It’s like those other people aren’t even there.

And I hate that. I hate it so much. It fills me with guilt and rage to think that my fucked up emotional state shuts out the very people who really do love me and care for me and who consequently find me so hard to reach, let alone help.

It’s not right and it’s not fair. I love these people and I want them to know it. I want them to feel it. And I sure as fuck don’t want to be freezing them out.

So add that to the list of things I need to remind myself of all the time : doing things makes me feel better, and I am not as alone as I feel so therefore when I neglect myself, I hurt those who love me the most.

I will no doubt tighten up the phrasing on that one in future iterations of the list.

Hopefully, this will help me bypass the dead circuit between me and the motivation to take care of myself by letting me approach it from a different angle : caring for others.

Caring for others comes naturally to me. The thought of hurting those I love, even unintentionally, fills me with horror and guilt. I need to take care of myself for their sake, so they aren’t left feeling helpless and defeated and alone.

I need to keep and hold that image – of my friends being in pain because of their connection to me – in my mind if it is to lead me to right action.

And brother, do I need something to lead me to right action.

More after the break.

---

Yay for my paranoia and intrepidity.

First, the paranoia : As you know, I had two things i was gonna do today – go to Brooke Radiology for a chest X-ray and go to LifeLabs for the usual blood and urine tests plus a bit of heart monitoring.

The flag was green on both things because in both cases, their website said they would be open today.

But about half an hour or so before heading out, I had a sudden paranoid hunch about Brooke Radiology, and called them to make sure they were actually open.

And they were not. My hunch was correct. They were closed till Monday.

Always fun when my paranoia verges on the paranormal.

Ironically, this was not the solid win it might have been, because it turns out the LifeLabs closest to us that is open on Saturdays is in the exact same building as the closest Brooke Radiology, so we ended up going the exact same route to the exact same place as if they had indeed been open.

So all I really achieved with my phone call was avoiding being pissed off and disappointed. Which is not nothing.

Intrepidity, well, when I went to order food tonight, I was going to use DoorDash like i have been doing for a while, but then it occurred to me : I wonder if Skip the Dishes (weird named for dishes) would accept my new credit card when it had rejected my previous credit card.

And it did! So not only can I use my delivery service of choice again (sorry DoorDash), but I can order from 7-11 again! Huzzah!

So tonight’s dinner was three chicken strips, six wedges, two dips (forget how big they are, only needed one) and a Big Bite hot dog.

Normally, I would have ordered samosas, but I had those for lunch.

Oh! And speaking of my intrepidity, I finally got around to doing something I had been thinking of doing for ages now : ordering a stupid huge amount of sugar free hard candy from Amazon so that I will always have something nice to suck on from now on.

Add your own innuendo. I’m tired.

My order arrived today and yup, that is a crazy huge amount of hard candy. Enough to keep me happily sucking away for quite some time.

But I have to be careful that I don’t overwhelm myself. My plan is to keep most of it ina box in the cupboard and only put out a cute little dish of them at a time.

That way, the “clean your plate” part of my brain doesn’t take a look at the sheer quantity of stuff and get sick of it in advance.

It’s possible to lead a pleasant life when you are weird AF, but it takes work.

So all in all, I am fairly pleased with myself this evening.

Sure, I may be dying, but at least I feel like I am living now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But it ain’t easy.

I think my fear about my health has transmogrified^[1] into a general state of agitation. I feel jumpy and edgy and kind of cranky.

I feel like I want to scream my pain into the sky, or slap a dozen strangers, or have crazy sex involving dairy products and farm animals and stainless steel funnels.

Let’s go crazy Wisconsin style!

It’s made it hard to sleep. I lay down and relax as much as I can but all I get is an hour or so of dozing before I have to get up and do stuff again, even though I’m very tired.

Tired but not sleepy. Tired n’ wired, I call it, and I hate feeling this way.

So I am doing my best to keep moving and not focus on it. I suppose writing about it could be seen as doing the opposite of that, but what the hell, that’s how I deal with things, I write about them.

Writing is a vital part of my emotional coping strategy.

And besides, writing about it burns more energy than just sitting around thinking about it and feeling miserable.

This is actually making me feel somewhat better.

I feel like I should print “doing things makes you feel better” on a thousand sheets of paper and paper my room with it so that I don’t forget.

Because depression, that filthy disgusting liar, tells me the opposite. That the only safety lies in staying very, very still, like I am hiding from a predator.

But the predator never gives up and goes away. So I stay in hiding.I’ve been hiding for so long that I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to do anything else any more.

I have forgotten what it’s like to not be afraid of the world.. To feel comfortable and relaxed outside of the hyper controlled environment of my bedroom. To be able to go where I please like any normal adult without having the fuse to the time bomb that is my anxiety burning down at an alarming rate.

I can cope with it, when I have to, I can make myself do things. I can maintain my wall of frost that keeps the world at bay even when i am out in it. I can get by.

But the fear is always there, waiting to come out and ruin me, I tend to think of myself as more depressed than anxious, and compared to a lot of people with anxiety disorders that actively torment them all the time, I have it easy.

But still, the anxiety is always there nipping at my heels. It is the depression’s enforcement mechanism, ready to freak me out if I should even think about escaping.

Well fuck you, anxiety. I’m ready to face the maelstrom and spit in its eye. Let the winds howl and the timbers creak and the sea scream out my name – I will sail into the heart of the storm with a song in my heart and a grin on my lips.

More after the break,.

---

How much does a sub way?

Decided to treat myself to some Subway tonight.

It’s been ages since I have been to one, and I’m quite fond of the place. It’s one of those rare places where the food both tastes good and leaves you feeling good.

I recognize that some people say it no healthier than McDonald’s, and I suppose if you focus on things like cholesterol or fat, they’re right.

But I am objectively getting way more meat and vegetables than I would if I got a Big Mac, and that’s got to count for something.

Speaking of the Way of the Sub and nutrition, though, what kicked off my Subway craving was a news item about everyone’s fave sub shop.

It seems that the Irish Supreme Court recently ruled that because of its high sugar content, the “bread” in Subway’s subs is not actually bread, and is in fact a “baked confection”, like a donut or an éclair,.

So now I am picturing a Subway sub, but the bun is a giant Long John.

The issue at hand was whether or not VAT (Irish for GST) should be charged on Subway subs. Because if the bread was bread, well, bread is a “staple food” and the VAT doesn’t apply to those.

But if it is basically a crusty cruller, that’s a luxury food and VAT applies.

This sounds a lot like the sort of folderol we’ve had to go through with the GST, and is a prime example of how a seemingly simple law gets very complicated very quickly when you try to balance everyone’s concern.

Meanwhile, on the home front, life’s been okay. I haven’t felt too bad today, presumably because I didn’t try to walk anywhere,

But I also think that my anxiety about my dying and such was partially assuaged once there was a plan in place.

I’m going in for testing and X-rays tomorrow, then that info will go to my GP, and I will hear from him some time next week.

So it’s out of my hands, and that’s a relief. Now, all I have to do is do what I’m told.

Kind of like being a kid, really. There is comfort in knowing your role and what is expected of you. I’m not particularly good at figuring it out myself.

I’m just too protean and malleable. The eternal shapeshifter, never able to make up his mind what form to take, so he takes none.

Anything else is too much of a commitment.

That’s why I need an external force like school or a job to give me purpose and form.

On my own, I am everything all at once but nothing in particular.

But once I have a role to fill, I can take form and be whole.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, I will update you all about my health etc soon, but i need to get this off my chest as soon as I can because I have been carrying it for far too long.

So here’s the story.

When I was growing up, both my mother and my father had full time jobs. Jobs with roughly the same salary, even… never more than a couple thou a year apart.

The difference is that in addition to her actual job, my mother did ALL of the housework. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, the whole shebang.

This was supposedly fair because my father did all the “outside” work. Lawn care, painting, gardening, and so on.

Bullshit. The amounts of labour are not even comparable. The only proof needed was the fact that my father could do all of his jobs on the weekend, whereas my mother worked like a slave every goddamned day of the week.

Can you imagine coming home from a hard day of work knowing that you still had to cook supper for six (including you), clean the table after, do laundry, and whatever other chores have piled up for you?

It was so blatantly unfair. My poor mother’s life was one of drudgery. She had very little time to just relax and enjoy life.

And the thing is, I figured this out when I was still pretty young. I knew that thewhole setup was brutally unfair.

But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to have to do the work myself.

Hence the guilt. I cannot claim ignorance. I knew what was going on and I knew it was wrong. But I selfishly decided to protect myself at my mother’s expense.

For young people for whom this setup is incomprehensible, let me lay some very messed up history on your young and impressionable minds.

When I was a kid in the 1970’s, there was a lively public debate about whether husbands should allow their wives to work outside the home.

That’s right, kids. Things were so sexist back then that a wife needed her husband’s permission to get a job that would add to the income of the household.

So from that toxic point of view, my father was actually doing my mother a favour by letting her have a job at all.

How fucking magnanimous of him. How very progressive of him.

Me and my siblings are not entirely guilty in this matter. On multiple occasions we offered to do more around the house. And I was 100 percent on board for that.

But she treated it like this was one more unreasonable demand being placed on her, and angrily told us it wasn’t worth it because we wouldn’t do it “right”.

Similarly, when one of us would try to pitch in anyway, she would get mad at us and take it away from us because if we did it, she would “just have to do it over again”.

So we tried.. But she was too impatient to endure the temporary inconvenience of having to teach us how to do things her way in order to acquire the permanent benefit of her having way less work to do.

People not being patient enough to teach people to do things is a running theme in my childhood. Not that this prevented anyone from making people feel guilty about not being able to do it for themselves.

Admittedly, that was mostly me. I knew i was an unwelcome burden on others from my first day of school.

Probably before that too, I just hadn’t had the conscious thought yet,

So we tried to help her, and she wouldn’t have it,. I still feel guilty about all the times I was silent – Xmas day looms particularly large there – but she also brought it on herself,

Plus she had to deal with Larry all the time,

But that’s a different story,.

---

On the plus side, I suppose I feel like less of a failure now,.

After all, I am a very ill man, and that means the bar is very low for accomplishment.

That’s a sick way of looking at it, but it’s what I’ve got.

Speaking of my wrecked health, had my over-the-phone doctor’s appointment with Doctor Chao, my GP, today.

He agreed that my symptoms sounds pretty dire, and has ordered up a chest X-ray, some lab tests, and an ECG for me,.

Seems like my problems are either cardio or pulmonary, so that should cover it.

Over the phone, it really sounded like he said ECE, not ECG, I got a laugh from my therapist. Doctor Costin, when I said ECE stood for “electro cardio encephalogram?”.

Who knows, with modern technology, maybe they can scan my brain and my heart at the same time. That’s 2/3s of Dorothy’s crew right there.

I suppose an fMRI would be needed to see if I have “the nerve”.

I’ll go do all the testing et al on Saturday, probably in the afternoon. That way, it will be easy for Joe or Julian to do the driving.

It’s not like I can walk there. Even though there’s a Lifelabs just a block away from me.

But if I could walk a block, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

it feels weird to know that I’m a for-real invalid now, instead of just have the lifestyle of one. Being this feeble and weak makes me feel so vulnerable and small.

I keep telling myself that little has truly changed. After all, it’s not like I did much walking before now. Realistically speaking, my lifestyle can continue unchanged.

But there’s a vast difference between not exercising an option and having that option taken away from you.

Use it or lose it, I guess.

But at least I am close to getting my dream job. It’s very important that I cling like hell to that hope in this dark time in both my life and my world.

It feels fitting somehow that my greatest crisis and my greatest opportunity are coming at the same damned time.

There is no progress, there is only a shift in balance.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.