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.

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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.

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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,.