Sometimes I forget that I am a cripple now.

Like just now. I told Julian that I would be fine walking home from the pharmacy. The pharmacy which is one scant urban block away from my home.

I was very, very wrong. I feel like I am dying right now. My lungs burn from the cold air, my eyes are blurry, my muscles ache like cold fire, and my heart is beating hard and fast like I got a rabbit between my ribs.

And it wants OUT.

So not gonna be doing that again any time soon.

This all started with my dermatologist’s appointment. First, there was stress because Julian had to dog-sit so he wouldn’t be able to drive me home.

No problem. I’d take a cab home. Easy peasy.

Then the appointment itself. Time for a new heading.

Not a good sign

When I took my hat off, the dermatologist exclaimed, “Oh my god, what is that?”.

Sounded even funnier in her South American accent.

Turns out that she can’t even tell what I have because the area is so scarred and inflamed and infected. So she couldn’t even take a biopsy.

This fits rather neatly into my view of myself as a mass of disgusting afflictions.

Which checks out.

So now I have a pill to take four times a day, a cream to apply twice a day, a stern dictum to shower once a day, and an even sterner dictum to stop picking at it already!

It’s a lot of work. But I will be a good boy and do it, because having a dermatologist, who has presumably seen some shit, taken aback by my problem is a real wake up call.

The tricky part will be not picking at it. I tend to do it when I am waking up and that’s not the best time for remembering not to do the thing your dumb ass wants to do.

I had a moment of sexism when the doctor first entered the examination room. She was this matronly woman in a purple/pink labcoat and for some very long and heavy moments I was stuck there thinking “Is this the doctor??”

Thank goodness I didn’t actually say it.

Had I been more on the ball, I would have said “Doctor Saldana, I presume?”.

I’m pretty suave when I am healthy.

Got therapy in an hour. Kind of wish I didn’t. After my ill advised walk, I really don’t feel up to it. Now that I have eaten, I just want to roll back into bed and put reality on pause while I regain my will to live.

I think I will call up and postpone. Even though that would be the second time I have postponed it, the first time being because it conflicted with the dermatologist.

But I really cannot imagine doing therapy right now. Not before a nap, some quiet gaming time, and a complete change of blood.

Actually, skip that last bit. Takes too long to collect it. And people ask dumb questions.

Time to call the doc and then flop with a vengeance.

More after the break.

---

But I can see

Well that sucked.

Woke up from a nap with my blood sugar crashing and my glasses missing.

Now historically, some of the worst mental states I have been in have all happened when I was freshly awoken. I am in a very vulnerable state then, and my anxieties and other demons can get to me while my defenses are down and really have a time.

I searched all over the sleeping area of my bed ^[1] for those goddamned glasses. Eventually, I regained a quorum of my faculties and was able to reason that I might find my glasses more easily if my blood sugar wasn’t crashing harder than a junkie.

So I managed to get up and go to the kitchen and git myself some food. An apple and a big handful of trail mix. I started eating on that while I ordered some more substantial grub from 7-11.

I’d been planning to do that anyhow.

Then I resumed looking for my lovely new glasses. No dice. I even looked in some really stupid places, as one does when things get desperate. Not there either.

Now I was really freaking out. I decided to jettison my dignity and ask Joe and Julian to help me. Woops, they ain’t home.

Not that they did anything wrong by leaving. I could hardly expect them to hang around just in case I threw a wobbly.

Then, right after my 7-11 showed up. with barely a conscious thought I suddenly reached behind myself as I sat at the computer and boom, there were my glasses.

Do you understand what that means? It means that on some deep level, I knew where my glasses were all along, and it was only when my mind was so distracted and stressed that I couldn’t think that my subconscious mind could guide me to them.

So that was an exercise in pointless stress.

And I was already not feeling very good after my ill advised one block marathon earlier today (see above). So right now. I am feeling pretty bad. I feel like my anxiety got activated and now it won’t shut down. My heart is pounding and so is my headache, and I feel very twitchy and paranoid.

Probably should not have been drinking diet cola with my meal, in hindsight. Nothing like a chemical stimulant to really give your anxiety lasting power.

So once I finish blogging, I will lay down in the dark once more in hopes of calming down and getting back to normal.

On the way to the bed I might do just a tiny bit of light exercise in order to hopefully drain some of my excess energy away.

This has been such a stressful day it makes me want to lay down and cry.

What the hell, I might do that too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I seem to have passed through the eye of the needle once more.

That’s how it feels when I go through one of these period where I am even sicker than usual. Like I have passed through the eye of the needle and been squished and compressed in the process, and had all those nasty toxins (both literal and psychological) squeezed out of me.

So I guess I got my big profound pain. It just came in as un-dramatic and drab way possible. No profoundly Zen experience where I see the face of God.

Just a few days feeling somewhat crappier than usual. Yay.

Still, it’s good to be back to my standard level of daily misery. I feel a lot better today than I did yesterday.

I’m not entirely out of the woods yet. I missed a lot of sleep when I was extra ill. Or rather, I missed a lot of decent sleep. I slept a lot, but never for very long, and the quality of sleep was atrocious.

So I am quite tired. And sleepy. I honestly would still be in bed if I hadn’t needed to get up and eat, blog, and make a phone call.

The phone call was to Doctor Costin to tell him that my 12:40 pm dermatologist appointment would preclude my being home for out usual 1 pm therapy by phone session and we’d have to reschedule.

I really hope the dermatologist will know what to do to clear up my scalp. I’m very tired of having this nightmare on my head. It’s super gross and disgusting, plus I am very tired of having to clear my scalp of (sorry) dried pus like three times a day.

I’ve tried just ignoring it. It only gets thicker.

Still have not made contact with the surgeon who is supposed to eventually fix my hernia. I tried calling their office yesterday, and first I got a long message about their hours and COVID policies and such, and then at the end of that it said “DO NOT LEAVE A MESSAGE”, followed by “*BEEP!* Please leave a message at the tone. *BEEP!*”, followed by “This mailbox is full!”.

All of which makes me think things have really gone to hell over there.

La piece de fuckery was that the message told me I could book an appointment via their website, and then totally failed to give me the address of said website.

This is not exactly filling me with confidence. I am suppose to trust this person to slice me open and patch me up when they can’t even get their voice mail game together?

I will give them one more shot. They mentioned the name of the clinic in the initial spiel, so I will Google that and see if contact can be made that way.

But if that doesn’t work then I am going to ask Doctor Chao for a new referral. And inform the BC College of Surgeons and Physicians that one of their members has fallen off the face of the earth.

This is all getting so complicated. I need to hire me a medical secretary.

More after the break.

---

Eh, who cares?

Caught myself trying to find the “right” jumping off point for part 2 of the day’s blogging.

But fuck that. That’s not how I operate. I just dive in and write.

That’s the only way it works for me because it obviates any possibility of hesitation. If I stop to try to think of the “right” whatever, that will give my doubts and fears and chronic indecision a chance to sink their teeth into me and I will never do anything.

That’s why I have a healthy disdain for perfectionism. It can be quite toxic. And when all is said and done, I’d rather make a terrible something than a perfect nothing.

Similarly, I am learning to just plain not give a shit about all the great ideas for blog entries I think of during the day and then forget long before I actually blog.

Fuck it. It’s all just part of the process. Nothing of value is lost. And there’s nothing I can do about it anyhow, as I can’t remember them and I can’t write them down either.

Patient readers know that if I write an idea down, I lose all desire to execute it. Whatever I was going to express via the idea has been expressed by writing it down, and I have now moved on.

Not at all how I want my muse to work, but smart artists do whatever their muse asks of them without trying to impose their own expectations and desires on it.

So I am trying to simply not get attached to the transient ideas. They are fine ideas but not the “right” idea because they came at the “wrong” time.

When I sit down to write, I just reach into my stream of consciousness and grab the first fish than swims close enough.

I think it lends a certain immediacy to my writing.

And that’s going to be the norm at least until I overcome my lassitude and ennui enough to become the sort of writer who gets an inspiration and dashes to the computer to immediately get to work on it.

Even typing that makes me feel tired. So uncomfortably energetic.

But who knows, that might be the depression talking, and if I manage to write my way to sanity one day, I might see things differently.

Still feeling relatively good. Or at least no worse than usual. So if my recent suffering did nothing else for me, it at least made me grateful for my usual level of health.

After all, it could be far, far worse.

Things can always be worse.

It does make me wonder what the hell I just went through, though. I’ve been through more or less the same thing dozens of times in my life and I have never known just what the fuck was going on.

I think maybe my pores get clogged and that fucks everything else up as I overheat.

Allergies might be a factor too.

And the crisis lasts for however long it takes my body to unclog.

Clearly, I need a more aggressive cleaning regimen. One that clears ALL the gunk out of my oversized pores on a regular basis.

Can anyone recommend a deep cleansing body wash?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Please dial again later.

I realized just now that I no longer remember what it is like to not be lonely.

Even with my friends, both online and in the real world, my heart remains mostly frozen and it’s hard for me to feel their love.

My family? Forget about it.

I know these people love me. All signs point to this truth and I have no basis for doubting them, I know that they love me and it hurts them that I am so cold and distant.

I am sure they wish they could help me. But how?

And yet, I don’t feel the warmth. I am still far too numb for that. At best, I feel a tiny warm spot on my frozen fractured flesh that may or may not be human contact.

And it’s hard to maintain faith in a truth you cannot feel. Even for a rugged mind warrior like myself. It requires constant reinforcement or that tiny bit of warmth will get swallowed up by the great darkness and disappear for a long long time.

It’s like trying to light a fire with the light of a candle a mile away.

Only more futile.

And I don’t want to be this way. I want to be open to life, and giving, and in touch with my fellow humans, especially those close to me.

But I am dead inside. Paralyzed, Therefore phantom love is all I can feel. I want to smash the wall between us, but I don’t have the strength.

Or the courage. Because it’s really going to hurt.

So all I can do is semi-patiently chip away at that nasty ass wall like a prisoner trying to tunnel his way to freedom and hope that one of these days, my pick will break the surface and I will feel the sun once again.

---

Worse than usual

My ailments are ailing me much worse than usual.

Starting with my back. Got up from bed (so, asking for trouble) and got a really bad spasm in my back.

The very worrying kind that I feel deep in the vertebrae and that remind me of times when I have broken a limb. It has that same feeling of WRONGNESS, like there’s an alarm going off somewhere inside me.

That, in turn, kicked me in the gut. That made that troublesome area at the bottom of my bladder/top of my liver act up and start aching in the usual scary way.

And for some reason, that also makes me feel like I have been kicked in the balls. Which means my balls ache in that way all men would recognize and that not only hurts but makes me feel like I am going to puke.

And that, in turn, sets off my IBS. So now I am cramping, aching, twitching, my head is pounding, my balls feel like they’re going to implose.

Time to eat! Joy.

I had to sit in front of this computer and fuck around on Facebook for 45 minutes before I could even contemplate getting up to get myself some lunch.

But I did it, now I have had some food. So I at least know low blood sugar isn’t going to going to join my gang of merry tormentors any time soon.

All in all, it really sucks to be me right now.

Moreso than usual, that is.

More after the break.

---

Still in hell

Feeling neither better nor worse than before.

Did not go out to do McD’s with Le Gang tonight. No surprise there. I’ve felt quite sick all day. And I still do.

I feel very fragile and weak. I’m even trembling a little, like a nervous mimosa. My head hurts in that sickening way it hurts when my sinuses are over-full.

Time to unclog my nose and ears AGAIN. Tenth time today, at least.

And I feel so god damned tired. Like I am fading away,

Except that would end my suffering.

What I need is a long hot shower to clean out my pores and flush the toxins from my skin and maybe even open up my sinuses so they can drain properly.

Not gonna happen though, because I know that when my sinus cavities are in the state they are in right now, my usual weakness to heat stroke is amplified by a million, and the hot water of a shower would damn near kill me.

So no, that’s not on the agenda tonight. I suppose I could try to take a cool shower instead, but I would have to be very careful to get the water temp right.

Because the sad truth is that in the state I am in, a chill could hurt me almost as much as becoming overheated.

I am such a delicate hothouse flower.

Anyone know where I can find a hothouse with an open bed?

My species was never meant to grow in the wild. We are adapted to very specific environments where the struggle for survival is far, far away.

Like academia. Or the entertainment industry. Places where highly creative and intelligent specimens like myself can take root and flourish. Places where a funny little fern like me can get the nurturing and protection I need to grow up big and strong and show the world just what a dazzling wonder I am.

But I am not strong enough to get that for myself.

I’m not strong enough to get it from somewhere else, either.

I am a car without enough gas to get to the gas station and get more gas. I am trapped by my own desperate weakness in a private hell full of frustrated desires, blocked emotions, clogged pores, and a case of emotional constipation that would fell a moose.

And all I can do is hang in there and resist the urge to jump off this fucking train because as much as this train ride sucks, it’s also the only way out.

And I need to get out.

Because this bullshit is ridiculous.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Moods don’t need to have a reason.

Emotions don’t always have to be based on reality.

i am free to simply generate whatever I need in order to feel better and maybe get some serious healing done without having to justify it.

There has to be a mood floor – a limit to how far down it can go before my automatic systems kick in to stabilize things.

This far and no further.

Because seriously. Fuck reality. It’s highly overrated. My reality has never contained even a tiny percentage of the emotional nutrients I need to survive.

I think by now I can be forgiven for looking elsewhere.

Fuck the truth, too. It’s never loved me back. My love of truth and search for answers has mostly just left me cold and isolated and unfit for survival as it drags me through the dirt without the slightest concern for how it will make me feel.

And that’s just plain stupid.

And I am so damned tired of being dragged through knothole after knothole by the big dumb dog that is my fanatical search for the truth. I want to be able to relax and enjoy myself without the constant paranoid demands of my brutal truth machine insisting that I constantly be trying to look in all directions at once while trying to figure out literally everything all the time.

Why can’t I just calm the fuck down and just be a person for a while? Why am I haunted by this deep restlessness that tells me that I must always be vigilant and that if I ever truly drop my guard, that’s when they will GET me.

I mean, health issues aside, I am perfectly safe. My life contains few dangers on even just the emotional level. By all external measurements, I am A-OK.

But try telling that to my anxiety. I’ve been afraid for so long that I don’t remember what it is like to be anything else. On the deep animal level, I can’t feel safe.

I just want to take that scared little animal inside me into my arms and stroke it and pet it and hold it and tell it that everything is fine now, the danger is gone and it can calm down and rest its poor little head on my shoulder and maybe get some sleep.

Poor lil guy. He’s been running for so long.

You can relax now, pet. You’re safe now. You’re home. And we love you.

---

….but what’s that on the distant horizon?

Is that the thinnest hint of maybe some kind of light?

Is that part of the stygian darkness of my midnight tundra maybe just a tiny bit lighter than it was before?

And is that the faintest traces of…. heat?

Perhaps this is the beginning of the coming of the thaw

Perhaps my frozen flesh can finally melt

It’s going to hurt like hell. I might not make it. It could be that I am far too damaged to survive the reanimation process.

But I’d rather die alive than live dead

And that’s all I got to say right now

More after the break

---

I’d rather bleed

Pain is better than numbness.

Because, at the risk of sounding like a total jarhead, pain makes you feel alive. It raises your consciousness, albeit in a less than preferable way.

Pain can also heal. Sometimes we hurt ourselves more by avoiding pain than the pain would have hurt us. One of the most revolutionary acts you can do is to stop running and just let the pain hit you.

Get it over with.

The fear’s worse than the pain. And screams beat whimpers every time.

Numbness is the opposite of life. It is nullity – the void. Death. It has its own cold comfort, but never trust it, because it will lead you straight to the grave.

Trust me… I know this truth intimately.

What got me thinking along these lines was my recent thoughts about wanting a profound pain to come and wring me out. Something big and horrible enough to smash my defenses like brittle ice and force me to deal with reality in real time, as a human being, not… whatever it is I am most of the time.

A wounded angel, maybe. One Heaven forgot all about and doesn’t miss.

I suppose to some it might seem strange to want a terrible external force to smash me open and release me from a prison of my own making.

Couldn’t I just….open the door and walk out instead? That seems much less extreme.

But the thing is, I have been numb for so long that I don’t even know where the cage ends and my dormant flesh begins. And I am far too weak to painfully pick the lock when all I have is my own frozen fingers to use as lockpicks.

Knowing what needs to be done and being able to do it yourself are not the same thing.

Still, I gather strength and power. Slowly, slowly I am learning to use all this megawatt mental energy to create the life-sustaining bloodflow my frozen heart needs. Slowly I am burning the bullshit out of my system and replacing it with good, wholesome blood.

So maybe I don’t need the boot of a giant to come crashing down to free me. Maybe it’s just a matter of working through the pain by giving it a voice to scream with. Maybe all I need is permission to be merely human. Maybe this feeling deep inside me that I am meant to do amazing things in the world does me more harm than good.

But I have always been a strange and unearthly creature, both here and not here, sidling sideways through the slipstream and haunting fragile minds.

So I must be special. All this power I have must be meant for something. Surely some day I will rise like a flare and shine for all the world to see.

All I have to do is keep my head down and keep digging.

I’ll excavate me soon enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In another life, with another version of me, in an alternate timeline, I’m the one being interviewed in this podcast :

Because that was what I was aiming for before my parents bounced me out of school. I was going to be a therapist of some sort.

And I would have made a damned good one.

Probably not a psychiatrist, granted. I was not interested in going to med school just so I could prescribe drugs.

But a psychologist. A psychotherapist. A counselor. Something like that.

Because I really want to help people. And I am very sensitive and caring. And I understand people and where they are coming from to an almost eerie degree.

Like Hannibal Lecter but nice.

And i would have loved to sit and listen to people and make them feel heard and give them the help they needed in order to let the demons out of their head.

Now if only I could do that for myself.

Oh right, that’s what this blog is for.

That’s why the podcast linked above is pure manna for me. Psychology is still my favorite subject and getting to listen to someone who has been right there on the front lines of the war on madness is a real treat for me.

Turns out YouTube is good for more than Reddit videos.

I’m as surprised as you aren’t.

It’s also always nice when I have content I can listen to while playing games. That keeps a substantial majority of my prodigious mind busy and thus gives me that “in the zone” feeling one gets from operating at the peak of their abilities.

I feel better when I am busy. Repeat until believed. Again.

Right now, I don’t feel very good, but that’s hardly a surprise. Part of my daily torment regime is at least one period (and often more ) spent feeling really terrible after having made the fatal mistake of sleeping.

Isn’t that fun?

I’ve found myself dreaming of pain recently. Which is absurd because my life is already full of a real Whitman’s Samper of pain.

Pain from my back. From my fucked up scalp. From terrible sleep. From lack of exercise. From swollen joints. From my aching head. From my sore feet.

And of course. from the long ragged wound that drips black blood you can find in the place where my heart should be.

I suppose the pain I am dreaming of is big pain. Horrible pain. The kind that can’t be ignored. The kind that opens you up and wrings you out.

The pain that purifies, I suppose. Which is also, of course, the worst kind of pain.

And the scariest too.

So I suppose I should be careful what I wish for, because if that kind of thing comes along for me – and it just might – I will definitely wish it hadn’t and curse myself for being the fool who brought it on myself.

But I guess that’s the only kind of transcendental experience I know. I am hardly set up for religious bliss. And I have no experience with tripping balls on drugs, nor do I want it.

I am barely keeping what few marbles I have left. I’m not going to gamble them.

Yet I long for something that is powerful and profound enough to break me open and empty me out. Something far bigger than my sad little world that can upend everything and burn the toxic bullshit from my veins.

And who knows. It could happen.

Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

More after the break.

---

The search for a playmate

For my whole life, I have been looking for someone with whom I could engage in my own particular brand of rough play.

Essentially, I long for someone I can play with without having to hold back. Someone whom I can hit as hard as I can and have them hit me back as hard as they can and we both can take it and we both get that it’s all just play and so nobody is upset or offended or feels like it was a serious attack.

But I have never found someone like that because I am a giant, both physically and (especially) intellectually, and so in order to be my playmate someone would have to be at least as big and strong and tough as I am, and nobody even comes close.

Especially in the realm of the mind. Mentally speaking, I’m a roided up ogre who can squash most opponents flat with the slightest flick of the wrist.

So there are no playmates for me, or at least, I have never found one.

Sadly, when I was in my late teens, I went looking for my dream sparring partner the wrong way : I challenged whoever was around.

It took multiple interventions by people to whom I am very grateful for me to learn that my desire to grapple did not obligate anyone to grapple with me and that the fact that they don’t “give up” did not mean they were consenting to keeping the argument going and that, as by far the stronger combatant, it was up to me to see when my playmate didn’t want to play any more, and end things.

Had to do so recently. It’s never easy – my pugilistic side always wants to keep going.

But friendships are more important than any argument, especially minor ones.

So while I hold out hope of meeting my match some day, I’m not holding my breath. In theory, there must be people just as strong of will and mind and as battle-crazed as i am amongst the seven and a half billion people on Planet Earth.

But I don’t know where to find my fellow warped souls. It’s not like there’s an intellectual MMA league out there where I could battle my way up the org chart until I finally found someone who can beat me,

As awesome as that would be.

So I will remain the Lonely Champion, depressingly undefeated, sitting in the corner of the ring and occasionally disconsolately batting at the ropes with a gloved hand.

Nobody will play with me.

Nobody CAN play with me,.

And it makes me a lonely boy indeed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So that’s the status quo. i try to feel alive, but I can’t. My soul is full of filthy cold water and big chunks of jagged ice. I have a constant feeling of deep contamination.

My powers of concentration are shot, probably because I haven’t been getting enough deep sleep. And I can’t find my sleeping pills.

I feel the constant presence of the shadow of death.

It’s haunting me. Taunting me, Wanting me. Tempting me. Calling to me.

Telling me how it could all be…. over.

But this morning, my usual YouTube peregrinations led me to this video :

And while the video did not provide the miraculous wellspring of life affirming inspiration i had hoped for, it did make me realize one thing.

I have no reason to live.

All I have is reasons not to die, and that’s hardly the same thing.

I have lapsed back into simply never thinking about the future. It’s a cold gray blur to me right now. And that’s as it should be for now because my future doesn’t look so good and a cold gray blur is better than the soul-crashing despair hiding behind it.

I meant to type “soul-crushing” but you know what? I like it like that.

At a time like this, the very idea of finding an actual reason to live seems absurd. Laughable. Like someone in the ICU talking about taking on Everest.

When I try to imagine it, I hear this instead :

But if i am ever to reach the surface and feel the sun, i will have to unlearn unhealthy negative thought patterns and replace them with healthy positive ones, and at least trying to imagine a reason to live seems like a good start.

So okay, I am trying. But I ain’t getting anywhere.

Because what do I have to look forward to? That’s what a reason to live boils down to. What future event could inspire me to want to see the future?

I’m just going to get sicker and sicker. My life is going to get worse and worse. I am going to lose more and more of my faculties until I am a pathetic wreck in a hospital somewhere, barely able to sit upright, my brains scrambled beyond repair, my life one of terror and confusion and feebleness.

But hey, at least I’ll have all the Jello I can eat.

It’s not like my life is going to get any better. I am not going to suddenly have the energy and courage and wherewithal to go get myself a job. I’m not going to find a brand new hobby that I love so much i look forward to every day. The clouds are not going to suddenly part so that the man of my dreams can be delivered to me on a sunbeam.

My prospects are bleak. What could possibly change how I feel about that?

Hell if i know. I will try again after the break.

---

The project continues

OK, this is what I have come up with so far.

One reason to live is to see what great media properties I may find. Every day contains the possibility that I might come across a great website, game, webcomic, video series, TV show, or line of obscene Hummels that will make me happy and thus make he glad I hung around to experience it.

A good game in particular can brighten my days as it gives me something to look forward to every day. I can wake up in the morning and say, “Hey! I get to play that awesome game again today!”.

So there’s that. Even when I am going through a dry spell in terms of media that makes me happy to get out of bed every day, I know that something will come along soon that brightens up my life.

It’s a small thing but it means a lot to me.

And there’s social time with my awesome friends. I always enjoy hanging out with my friends. They are great people and I love their company and their conversation.

And they accept and value me, despite what a hot mess I am, and that’s very important to me. I am not always the easiest person to be around, especially in my current state of degraded and degrading health, and so anyone who puts up with me and my utterly disgusting scalp condition is aces in my books.

Thank god I’m cute.

And then there’s my fuzzy friends, with whom I interact entirely via text (how oldschool!) but who in some ways are closer to me than anyone RL because that fictional fuzzy foxy named Fruvous is on some level more the “real me” than the real world version who is girded round with accidents of fate.

Accidents that do not reflect the inner me at all. Fruvous is the identity I made for myself. I built him from the inside out, and so in that fictional realm only, the outside matches the inside.

What you see is what I am. If you know how to look.

And in most way, Fruvous is my ideal. He’s the person I want to be – fur and tail optional. He’s the reason I know there is a happier, healthier, far more social version of me lurking in the shadows of my dark and twisted soul.

He’s cute, he’s charming, people adore him, and he gets lots of cuddles and petting. And he has access to a lot of hot dudes who may want to fuck him.

This is my desired lifestyle. Please make this happen.

In conclusion, while I might not have a huge neon sign flashing HOPE to guide me through the murky waters of an uncertain future, I at least have the good things in my life which I take for granted too often and which aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

And that’s something.

We’ll tackle the hope thing soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right now : oog.

It’s a combination of “oof”, “ugh”, and “argh”, with a little “ick” thrown in.

It’s a compound mood.

Finding it harder and harder to fight off the despair. My body is falling apart and it really seems to me that my life is just going to get worse and worse from here on in and it makes me want to just give up already and let the darkness take me.

Take that how you like.

It would be so much easier to stop thrusting against the pull of the black hole that is my life and finally let my little ship pass the event horizon and get kersmooshed.

That’s the proper scientific term. Look it up.

But I am hanging in there. Sometimes the best I can do is to keep myself together and wait for the break in the storms inside that will let me make some progress.

Right now my battle is with this killer chill inside that paralyzes me every time I try to make myself do the things I know I should be doing to improve my health.

Things like showering daily (don’t start), and learning to test my blood without getting errors all the time, and then actually testing my blood so I can manage my diabetes, and getting at least a little bit of exercise every day, and so on.

All of these things would help. That’s the problem. The dark and evil self-destructive part of my mind wants to die and therefore will not allow me to do anything to help myself beyond the things I already do.

And it’s killing me. My own mind is killing me. I spent a lot of years thinking I was beyond my suicidal urges, but it turns out they were just biding their time, waiting for the moment when it can truly do me in.

Then again, this urge for death has probably been behind all my self-neglect over the years, and if so, it’s not that it has been biding its time at all.

It’s been working in the shadows for all these years. What changed is that my recent health issues have dragged it out into the light.

Like I keep telling myself, there’s a lot of ways to commit suicide.

Some just take a long time. And disguise themselves as things like laziness, absentmindedness, or just plain flakiness in order to conceal what is really going on.

At least I am now fully aware of it. It can’t hide any more. I can feel it inside me like a mass of dead flesh. I can feel the terrible chill coming from it. A chill that feels like someone just opened the door to a deep freeze inside my soul. Like a cold mist coming off the glacier that is my heart.

Stupid overactive parasympathetic endocrine system.

And I know what I need to do. I just don’t know how to do it.

I need to do this :

Except that for me, it would probably take a necromancer.

Or a messiah.

More after the break.

---

Barely above water

The good news is that I am managing to keep my head above water, albeit barely.

The bad news is that I am floating towards a thousand foot waterfall and, so far at least, I am far too tired and numb to swim against the current and save myself.

Because part of me is looking at that waterfall with hungry eyes, seeing in it salvation via destruction and my final liberation from ever have to deal with anything ever again.

And sure, being dashed into pieces a minnow could swallow will hurt, but only for a second, and then at long last this farce I call my life will be Over.

And that’s this side of me’s mantra : Over. Over. It will finally over. No more pain. No more sickness. No more deep, cringing shame.

No more humiliation at my own rank incompetence. No more being the constant victim of my inability to handle reality. No more knife’s edge boundary between my potential and my output cutting through the sinews of my soul. No more dizzying indecision and soul deep vertigo. No more impotent rage mindlessly rattling its cage. No more feeling like I am constantly failing at everything. No more deep restlessness that robs me of good sleep and tortures me with the agony of my immobility.

No more weak and pathetic excuse for a life. No more living in my own filth because my sickness makes it impossible for me to clean anything ever. No more watching myself die from the basest of neglect and being powerless to do anything about it despite my super-ego’s constant refrain of what I could be and should be doing.

No more beating myself bloody trying to win the war with myself. No more feeling like I’ve been poisoned in both body and soul. No more feeling like the walking dead, with nothing but cold bones and dry, keening wind and broken stone inside me.

No more dragging my naked carcass through mile after mile of midnight tundra as the hardened frost scrapes my unprotected flesh bloody and the cold air feeling like a jigsaw blade sawing in and out of my lungs and my eyes so snowblind that I can’d even tell where dark land meets dark sky any more.

No more fresh body horrors. No more terror, no more dread, no more futility. No more trying to start my engine when there is no fuel, no spark, and no transmission.

No more feeling like I buried myself alive and I am running out of air. No more mindlessly clawing at the walls of my oubliette. No more guilt about the terrible toll my existence takes on those unfortunate enough to love me.

No more problems any more.

Because there’s no more me.

Not what I set out to write, but I am still glad i wrote it. I feel better now.

Thanks for reading it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have decided to ease off on the rigid self-control a tad.

So you know what? Sometimes I am going to be snarky. I am going to be sarcastic. I might even be downright obnoxious from time to time.

But mostly, i will simply be more me. Warts and all.

It’s an important first step towards becoming a real, fully fledged, actually present adult male human being. I have been so intensely suppressed at a fundamental level for so long that it’s taken me a long time to even realize it was happening, and now i am finally ready to do something about it.

So the world gets what the world gets. I am not giving myself unlimited license to be an asshole and i am certainly not abandoning all attempts at self-control.

Trust me, the world doesn’t want that. I’m a fucked up dude.

It just means that I will no longer be achieving self control by harshly suppressing nearly everything inside me. Every impulse, every instinct, every inspiration, and anything else that might lead to action – I’ve been suppressing it all.

Why? Control. i am terrified by the very idea of being out of control – specifically, making decisions and taking action based on anything less than well thought out reason.

And that’s no way to live. Human beings are supposed to be guided by both reason and emotion and trying to live life like it’s a game of chess is crushingly limiting.

Sometimes you have to act on impulse. Go with your emotions. Do things without carefully considering them beforehand. Try things and see what happens.

Walk the path without knowing where it leads. Only one way to find out!

I know that i have the potential to be a far less anxious and worried person. To be a more relaxed, take things as they come, happy go lucky version of myself for whom life is an adventure and every new morning makes the world anew.

Indeed, I think that’s the kind of person i would have been if I had not been raped when I was only 4 years old.

But to get there, I will have to ease off the brake and learn to actually drive this vehicle of mine with the emergency brake OFF.

And there is bound to be some…. bumps. Things I will do that I will wish i hadn’t done. Things I will say that would have been better left unsaid.

And that’s fine. There are worse things in life than regret. I’d rather do something wrong and learn from it than stay suppressed and die inside.

Get out there and get hurt. It’s the only way to learn that there are worse things in life than pain and that dealing with pain without giving in is one of the most important life skills you can have.

Pretty sure that’s what all our asshole gym teachers were trying to teach us but were far far too inarticulate to explain to us.

So anyhow, stay tuned to this space for my exciting adventures in trying to loosen up without becoming a short tempered prick.

There will be a health update in the other half.

More after the break.

---

The health update

Went to the retina specialist this morning.

9:10 am. Yeah, thanks a frigging lot.

Had trouble finding the place because I had completely forgotten that my bank is on the bottom floor of an office tower, so Julian and I ended up driving around looking for a storefront in the various strip malls near 3 Road and Ackroyd, looking for 5900 Three Road in vain.

Turns out, that’s my bank. Then I had more stress because I couldn’t find the place on the building directory.

That turned out to be because despite the fact that the stationery the fax for my referral came on saying Vancouver Retina Associates, I was actually looking for West Coast Retina Center, or something like that.

Plus it was in the middle of the list and therefore right in front of me, and as patient readers know, I have trouble seeing things that are right in front of me,.

So I made it to the clinic, and from then on it was typical stuff. Lots of tests, most of which I had already done at Iris.

But I suppose you can’t bill MSP for using someone else’s retinal photography.

More annoying was having to fill out the same information on half a dozen forms. Name, address, phone number, CareCard number, and so on.

It’s frustrating because it’s like someone asking you the same questions over and over and not listening to your answer.

I already told you all this!

So after all the tests and their attendant mild indignities inflicted on my poor eyeballs, I finally got to see the doctor himself.

And he did some more tests.

But eventually, we were done. And he showed me some pictures of my retinas (retinae?) and told me there were two problems.

One, my left eye had cataracts up the wazoo. He showed me the pictures of my retinae and one, the right, was clear and bright, and the other, my poor left, was red mist.

So clearly, that one needs fixing.

Which leads to problem two, which is that Leftie is also rather swollen from my diabetes, and they can’t operate on it when it’s like that. Could make things worse.

Luckily, there is a super effective treatment for that.

Unluckily, it involves sticking a needle into my eyeball.

So I have that to look forward to.

Luckily, the waitlist for cataract surgery is seven months long and I won’t need the needle to the eyeball until a couple months before that, so I at least have a lot of time to get used to the eye.

Still, i am going to ask Doctor Costin for a scrip for something to calm my nerves for the day of the eyeball piercing.

Something strong. Something powerful. Something they would inject into an out of control patient in a psych ward.

And of course, at the end of the appointment, I was given the usual flood of information i have absolutely no chance of remembering..

I dunno what they think they are accomplishing when they do that, but it ain’t happening. I mean, I’m a pretty bright guy and i can’t take it all in.

Somewhere in that infodump was the date of my appointment for some form of measurement that is only done at this one hospital in Vancouver.

I think it was January 27th. Hopefully it was on one of the piece of paper also foisted upon me at that time.

At this point, I’m tempted to just say fuck it and stay half blind. It’s really hard for me to handle overwhelming situations like this, especially when they involve somehow remembering an appointment that is more than a month away.

Why did things have to get so effing complicated?

And think, that’s just one of my serious health issues! I also have the nightmare on my scalp to deal with plus my massive hernia!

And who knows what will go next.

It would be so much easier to just die already.

But I will soldier on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t know his last time.

Mike was a roommate of my friend Peace (RL name Matt) and he was, like me, a big fat dude with Type 2 diabetes.

And like me, he didn’t take care of it properly. He didn’t test, he ate all the wrong foods, never took his insulin, and totally failed to take it seriously.

And so it got worse and worse and by the time he realized hey, this shit is serious, it was too late. He became Type 1 diabetic instead when his pancreas died and from there he became a brittle diabetic and from there he got so bad he needed to be jump-started by EMTs three to five times a week and from there he got dead. RIP.

And he tried to warn me. At that point, I wasn’t taking my illness seriously either, and he warned me that I had better get my shit together or I would end up like him.

But I didn’t. And now here we are.

I’m doing what I can but it’s clearly not enough. I’m going to end up dead of my own stupidity (or rather, my depression’s) and it could happen any day now.

And I try to horrify myself into action by writing things like these. And I can feel the motivation attempting to happen. A faint but detectable spark is occurring.

Only to be immediately drowned in the icy waters of my depression.

What a long and terrible way to commit suicide.

And you all know that is what this is. The sick part of my mind wants me to neglect myself to death so it can finally pull the ultimate act of escapism and escape the pain of being alive itself. And it’s that suicidal segment of my cerebellum that fills me with paralyzing dread and terror when i even think about taking better care of myself.

I wish I could just excise that part of my mind and throw it into a medical incinerator where it can burn up for good. I wish I could will myself sane. I wish I knew where to find the powerful positive input to counteract my toxic negativity.

i wish I could believe in God. Even for just a minute or two.

But the closest I can get to that is believing that there is, in effect, a God section of the human brain that can acts like an external reservoir of positive emotion that the psyche can draw upon to provide the minimum inputs needed to keep one’s mood from going all the way down into clinical depression.

And that it’s only righteous fools like me who rip that part of their mind out in the interests of their search for clarity and the “truth”.

After all, what’s the point of being happy if it’s irrational? RIGHT?

Well I don’t give a fuck about the truth any more. Bring on the delusions! The truth is poisonous and self-delusion is the only antidote. I am willing to believe whatever it takes to make me happy and I don’t give a fuck whether it’s true or not.

If only it were that easy.

More after the break,

---

Slick shiny black sludge

That’s what’s in my stomach and under my skin right now.

Or at least, that’s how it feels.

Today’s been a pretty bad day, health wise. I’ve felt various brands of awful all day.

I can’t seem to stay out of bed for more than a couple hours before I need to lay down for yet another hour and a half of tormented sleep. And I can’t find my sleeping pills.

Every time I pee (which I do like six times a day), i get this terrible ache somewhere at the bottom of my bladder and/or the top of my liver. Takes a while for it to go away.

i feel this thin, biting pain throughout my body. Like I’m not getting quite enough oxygen. Which might well be true, given how much I have been sleeping and how completely untreated my sleep apnea has been for like a decade.

My hands and feet feel huge and my head is full of goo because I ran out of antihistamines on Friday and I dunno when I will get more.

I feel nervous and twitchy and cagey, like a weasel with paranoid schizophrenia.

Haven’t had the focus or energy to pursue massage therapy for my back pain, which continues to pain my back when i get out of bed.

And I have that haunted feeling again. Like there’s a shadowy ghost lurking in my nervous system and draining the life out of me as it silently floats from one part of my tortured flesh to another.

All in all, I really don’t want to be me right now.

It’s clear that my life is going to get a lot worse and then end. At least, that is its current trajectory. And that doesn’t exactly fill me with hope for the future.

i keep getting that urge to just disappear. To flee my current life and go somewhere where nobody knows me and I can start again from scratch,.

Get a job, get a man, get a life, give living a normal life a try for a while. Run and hide from my problems and my history. Try and get myself an active healthy lifestyle of some sort and see if that straighten out some of my health issues.

Become a whole new person, basically. Because the person i am now is just about done. I’ve run this persona into the ground and I need some renewal.

Of course, none of that is going to happen. My sense of responsibility runs too deep. I could never do that to those i love.

But something’s got to give. Somehow, I need to get the strength and sunshine to get myself out of the cold black muck at the bottom of my soul and up to where i belong, in the warm sun, clear water, and cool caressing breezes where my wings can finally dry and I can leap into the air and soar at long last.

I suppose as long as I can still conceive of paragraphs like that, there’s hope for me yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not perfectly honest.

Or to put it another way, I am far too honest to claim to be totally honest. I know that, while I am a naturally honest person with little intent to deceive, there are times when I have lied to cover my ass and that, ya know, counts.

I also know that no matter how hard I strive to be honest with myself, my self-exploration has proven, time after time, that I still have entire continents of delusion and madness left to discover and exploit.

So while I might fool myself into thinking I have achieved some kind of existentially rugged mental clarity, deep down I know I am just another fool.

just one of seven and a half billion blind and dazed mud-faced monkeys bumbling through the dark alleys and blinding side streets and dead-end cul-de-sacs of life thinking they know something despite constantly stubbing their toes and barking their shins against the hard surfaces and jagged corners of our painful ignorance.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Today’s been OK so far, i guess. My back pain issues seem to be solving themselves. The brutal agony has dulled back down to hard twinges.

I’m still getting me some massage therapy though, if I can wrangle it. As far as i am concerned, that prescription for it is a golden ticket and I am totally cashing it in.

Besides, the problem is not completely gone. And it could come back at any time.

So I am getting a professional massage out of all this, god dammit.

---

Hey, some games

Got one of those packages of games off of Fanatical today.

it was a bit more expensive than usual. $20 for 5 games, as opposed to my usual like $8 for 12 games.

Then again, these are all top level games. Maybe not AAA, but A. A and a half.

There’s five but i have only played three of them so far, so I will only be reviewing the ones I have played.

I find that to be way easier on the imagination.

So, with only 21 more words of ado (long story), here is the ones I have played one two three four five six seven eight :

Undead Horde. The premise : you are a necromancer freed from the stained-glass vessel a paladin trapped you in by the peck of a curious chicken.

Whom you immediately kill and make into your first zombie slave.

There’s gratitude for ya.

As you can tell, it’s not exactly a totally serious game. It’s basically an RTS game with some fun features and a dry, droll sense of humour I adore.

And for what it’s worth, it does give me the feeling of what it is like to be a real zombie-raising necromancer, at least strategically. So far, my job consists mostly of hovering around the periphery of the fracas between the forces of “good” and my ever-growing army of the dead, ready to resurrect the casualties.

So far I am quite enjoying it. We will see how long that lasts. Generally speaking, RTS is not for me. I always do great at the beginning and then hit a brick wall where my brain cannot handle the computations in realtime and shuts down and that’s the end of that.

Still, the macabre elements might inspire me to persevere yet,. So the jury is still out on this one for me. Even if it ends up not being my cuppa, it’s still a fine cuppa indeed.

Shadows Awakening. A Diablo-type game (lord knows what those are called now) with a fun twist and an enjoyably grimdark tone.

I am totally down with the grimdark. Love it. Couldn’t be such a Witcher 3 fan if I didn’t.

This game’s version is a little more cartoony, but still my cup of meat. Full of demons and death gods and necromancy and sigils and all that wonderful stuff.

Plus a complication. You play a demon called the Devourer, and your main gig is possessing mortals and making them your Puppets.

What it amounts to is a dual-realms setup where you, the Devourer, live in the spirit realm and your Puppet lives in the world of the living and you can switch between them when you like.

And you will have to do so often to solve puzzles. Which is tiresome, to be honest.

So I don’t know if I will last with this one. Depends on how hard they harp on this whole realm switching thing.

Otherwise, it seems quite good. The sort of game I have been looking for, to be honest.

But this whole switching thing could really get on my nerves real fast. I don’t want to solve puzzles, I just want to kill stuff, dammit.

Tower of Time. In this game…. I have no idea. I haven’t tried it yet.

Yup, I messed up. Thought I’d installed four and tried three, but i installed three and tried two, so, here we are.

All that word counting for nothing!

Well what else. Oh, Rigmor of Bruma. Skyrim mod. Review.

Don’t go there. Seriously. I played through the whole fucking thing and so i can definitively say it wasn’t worth it.

Basically, playing it is like being trapped in bad fan fiction written by a teenaged girl. You spend way more time listening to her angst about her life than you do fighting evil, and I don’t play games to listen to scene after scene of melodramatic monologue.

Oh, and when there WAS combat, it was seriously unbalanced. It’s like it wasn’t playtested at all. Like someone just said, “Um, and then ten dudes attack you”.

Well there’s a reason you don’t usually fight ten enemies at once in the main game and that’s because it’s really fucking hard. The game isn’t build for that kind of combat. There is no way to defend yourself against that many enemies at the same time.

It maybe would have been fair if I was a mage with big area of attack spells, but I ain’t. I’m just some schmuck with a sword and a shield.

I only finished the thing because I am a compulsive finisher. And for what it’s worth, I did grow attached to the titular teenager.

Which made the final scene (SPOILER ALERT) where you have to tell her to go on without you all the more brutally devastating to me.

Do you know how hard it is for me to send someone I love out into the cold and dark alone? Gouge my heart out with a rusty grapefruit spoon why don’t ya.

Then I started playing the sequel, but luckily this time common sense and survival instinct kicked in and I ragequit the fucking thing.

So don’t go there unless teen angst is your fetish.

And if it is, this mod will probably cure you of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.