Well. I just got charged $260+ for a new pair of glasses.

This was quite a shock as I expected to pay nothing. I have never had to pay out of pocket for my glasses before and I usually only get charged like $20 for the exam.

Oh, and the best part if that I might get charged $120 more, depending on whether the province approves my claim or not.

Yes, according to the lovely folk at Iris Optical, the province will only kick in a maximum of $120 for everything : eye exam, lenses, frames, fitting, everything,.

And I have to pay the rest out of pocket.

This strikes me as unlikely.

My roomie Julian is on disability same as me, and he has never had to go out of pocket for glasses, same as me.

I really can’t imagine the max coverage being only $120. That wouldn’t have paid for my glasses and exam back when I was a kid in the Eighties.

Right now, I am willing to give my local Iris the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are working from outdated and/or incomplete information because they don’t get a lot of dirt poor disabled people in oh so chic Iris.

ButI might change my mind on that depending on what I discover via my own research and how they treat me at Iris.

I am perfectly capable of raising one hell of a stink – think Pepe LePew farting for an hour straight – if I feel I am being ripped off.

As in, how dare this faceless corporation victimize this poor defenseless disabled person by gouging him when he needed glasses so badly his old ones were hanging off his face with one arm missing.

And all during a pandemic, at that.

I was just lucky – sort of – that I actually had the money from my inheritance. Otherwise I would have had a shit fit right there and caused a scene and canceled my order with them right away.

As is, they are going to call me back tomorrow to tell me if my claim was approved, and when they do, there’s good chance I will cancel my order for the glasses and look for someplace a lot cheaper;.

They can keep the money for the exam – after all, they did one, and Doctor Lam was quite pleasant to work with – but I bet I can get a way better deal online.

So I will cancel my glasses order and get a refund on THAT, and then go shopping.

And they better not give me any back-talk when it comes to giving me the full results of my full health eye exam so I can shop around, either.

Because I am super pissed off right now and I am ready to tear someone a new one.

Oh, fun bonus fact : I can’t find the maximum the province will pay for my glasses listen anywhere. Lots of places that say “up to the maximum” but no places will tell me what that maximum actually IS.

Clearly, they don’t want us sneaky poor people deliberately getting the most expensive glasses they will pay for.

That sure sounds like something we poors would do!

So I have sent an email to the province and also consulted the hivemind on Facebook.

Oh, and I bought the game Wolfenstein 2 : Something About A Colossus and it crashes the second it stops playing all the logos.

Oh, and I have cataracts and probably will need surgery for them.

And for all I know, I am going to get a phone call from my doctor’s office tomorrow saying that the results of my ultrasound are in and they want me to put the receiver down and back slowly away from my liver.

But enough about me. How’s your day going?

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As sick as I can be

Like I’ve been saying, I have really been feeling like the walls are closing in on me health-wise, and death approaches me from an oblique angle.

But I still see it.

It’s blurry AF, but I see it.

And I feel helpless to stop it, Oh, on paper, there are lots of things I could do to help myself, but in practice all my health issues are ganging up with my mental health issues to keep me frozen in place like a wind-whipped snowman.

It always comes around to cold with me, doesn’t it?

Where the limbs of my self-preservation instincts should be you find only wizened, shriveled stumps capable only of generating the same cold dead signal, as from a microphone in a silent room, as it always has.

A silence that makes dead space seem chatty by comparison.

Whatever ability I have to act in my own best interests is nervelessly paralyzed by that terrible cold conversion that turns hot passion into a killing frost.

I guess I invented it as a way to counter my anxiety, but I took it way too far. We are all killed by our primary coping mechanisms, it seems.

Now not a flicker of flame or a poof of smoke can last long enough to melt my frozen flesh and take me out of this long dark winter and put me someplace happy and strong and good where I can overwrite all those bas social tapes in my head and replace them with the positive human interaction I deserve.

But until then, I am so very cold, and alone, and unhealthy, and depressed. Were it not for my traitorous depressed mind bolloxing things up with its death wish, I would be overflowing with energy for making lifestyle changes and doing all the things I should be doing and fighting my way bravely back to good health, taking it one day at a time and proving it takes more than being sick on every level to stop me!

Instead, I just await the inevitable and try not to hink about it.

God save me from my own semi-suicidal self.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m so tired of being tired.

So sick of being sick.

Lately, I’ve been waking up with back pain. The sort that comes when I have a lot of trapped gas in my guts. The blockage causes my whole lower abdomen to tense up and that makes my back tense up too and voila, back pain,

So that’s fun.

I can stretch and rub my muscles but that doesn’t provide long term relief. Only getting the gas out can do that.

I know tricks to help with that, Nothing exotic. Rub here, press there, gently squeeze another place. And so on.

And picking the right moment to poop. Seems absurd, but long experience has taught me that timing is everything in this situation. I have to wait until the chaos within has calmed – call it the eye of the storm – and then go for it.

Otherwise, I will be fighting my own gut to get anything done and that only makes things worse by adding energy to the system and getting Irritable Bowel Syndrome’s deadly pendulum REALLY swinging.

So add back pain to my daily torments. The walls are closing in on me, I can tell. Won’t be long before something really major puts me in the hospital or my grave.

And the Traitor Within still won’t let me do much about it, It compromises my will, saps my strength, and fills me with thick grey fear and confusion when I try.

Because it wants to die, or at least, to have all the decisions taken away from me so that all I have to worry about in life is doing what I am told by medical people.

Who’d be acting in loco parentis in my sick scheme to escape adulthood.

Sad to think that I am incapable of handling the crushing burden of responsibility that comes with being a disabled person.

I want to be so much stronger. But I can’t seem to find it in myself. I search and I search, but I never find it. It’s like I am floating in numbing amniotic fluid without anything solid to push against to propel myself people anywhere.

Instead, all I can do is flail and thrash around and convince myself that motion equals progress and that surely I must be getting somewhere.

It doesn’t do a thing to truly help me but it keeps me entertained while my extremely evitable doom approaches.

Look at the pretty pictures, little boy. The train will be here to crush you under its wonderfully cruel and unfeeling wheels soon.

Doesn’t that sound good? It will be your magic ticket to a place where nobody expects anything of you and everyone is nice to you and you are taken care of by professionals in an almost nurturing like way.

As close as a 47 year old fat man can get, anyhow.

I am so deeply wounded and in so tender and deep an area of my childhood. 4 years old my mind was shattered by a stranger’s cock and the wound went untreated for decades. It’s very much a part of me now, and I can’t imagine life without it.

And yet, it’s killing me.

Fuck you, child raping stranger. Fuck you to DEATH.

More after the break.

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The hound’s tooth

Sometimes my depression feels like a icicle toothed hound is gnawing at my heart and every heartbeat drives its teeth a little deeper into my tender heart’s flesh.

But I know it will never kill me, That would imply mercy.

Other times, it feels like a dark and dire winter spreading its unnatural cold and chill over a land draped in summer, freezing rabbits mid-hop and killing all that is green and wholesome and good with its deadly frost;

And other times it feels like there’s a terrified animal that thinks it is me trapped in my ribcage and desperately clawing to get out as claustrophobia and the feeling that predators are going to find it ANY SECOND NOW combine into a feeling that I am going to die any second because the predators will FIND ME and GET ME because I CAN’T GET AWAY because I am TRAPPED.

Except the real trap is, of course, my mind.

Sometimes it feels like I am naked at the north pole at midnight, absolutely alone and completely vulnerable and utterly abandoned oh so very, very tiny. And all I can do is curl into a ball and retreat deep into myself to stay warm.

Sure, I am dying from the outside in and eventually the bitter cold will breach my mental defenses and kill me, but at least I will be warm and cozy until then.

And what else am I supposed to do? Move towards warmth? Don’t be absurd.

I’m pretty sure I’d melt.

Besides, I’m too numb to even know what direction to go.

Sometimes my depression feels like icy eels are circulating in my bloodstream and biting me in random places now and then, when I least expect it. Always waiting for the moment when I am most vulnerable to strike, knowing this will only make me more paranoid and hyper-vigilant and scared.

I can almost hear them laughing. Almost.

Sometimes my depression feels like a cold, hard, brutal rage. Brutality personified. The urge to destroy embodied. The Void unveiled. Hate purified to its most essential form – hatred of all that exists. Nullity unleashed. Toxicity perfected.

A rage that could destroy planets. A mindless, impotent thing that just wants to make the world feel my pain as it dreams of stabbing and crushing and crunching and mauling without any regard as to target as long as they are alive and can feel pain.

Sometimes it feels like my skin is too tight and my bones are rattling and any minute my rickety airplane will shake itself to piece.

And sometimes it feels like nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. Everywhere. Forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.