The one I want to cough up before it finally kills me.

What I am talking about is the big blockage between me and the world. The big ol’ clog that causes my energies to back up on me and make me sick and either makes me want to take it out on myself or turns into anxiety and burns out that way.

I wish I could just, in one mighty coughing jag, hork the goddamned thing up and finally be rid of it. I know it’s just a wad of scar tissue and toxic residue and I would be infinitely better off without it.

But I can’t do that, because as it’s keeping my energies from going out, it’s also keeping reality from getting in.

Without it, I would have to face reality, naked and bare and unfiltered, and I haven’t been able to do that since I was raped.

When I was raped at the age of four, I fled deep into my own mind, and I have depended on that wide and airless gap between me and reality to keep myself “safe” for the rest of my life.

And I am 47.

That’s why “be here now” is a concept that has always freaked me out. I mean, I agree with it philosophically and spiritually. It definitely seems to be the way to go if you can pull it off. Forgetting everything but the one moment you can be sure of, the now. Sounds like a great way to clear all the clutter of half-digested thoughts and moods and memories and plans and intentions and so on that accumulate in our minds as we live our modern complicated lives.

But when I try to go there myself, I get really scared. I can’t live in the present moment. Then I would have to deal with reality directly, no clog no filter, and that would leave me without the defenses I have built.

Like the big one, intellectualization. As maladaptive mechanisms go, it’s really quite extraordinary, as it allows you both to detach from events and feel like you have power over them at the same time.

After all, if I am fascinated by something, that means I have frozen it in place in order to better examine it, and thus rendered it inert and harmless. And if I then analyze it, I figure it out, and file the information away, and that gives me a feeling of power.

Almost like I have triumphed over it via the power of my mind. It started off as potentially stressful and scary, and now it’s wonderfully safe knowledge.

That’s how an icy intellectual defines victory, I suppose.

But I know, intuitively, that I am missing something. Like a19th entomologist who thinks he knows everything about butterflies from examining dead ones mounted on plaques, I get the feeling of understanding everything while having never seen life alive and moving and complex.

To truly understand things, I would have to deal with things in the hot and heavy now. No distance, no freezing, no detachment, and definitely no time to figure it all out before I accept it as true.

And that’s the rub : I can’t function without that gap. And yet, so much of life is completely inaccessible without being able to handle things in the here and now.

More after the break.

---

The silent ice

The other thing I get from my illness is a preternatural calm.

It is the quiet of the grave, of course. Not a natural, health calmness based on being in harmony with life and its forces and thus coming from a strength of spirit.

Oh no. That’s far too stable and healthy and alive.

No, it is the calm of death. A place where the stuff of life has been frozen out of everything and nothing that lives can survive. My icy tomb where I lie in state, frozen and frightened, superficially powerful but frozen into immobility by the same deathly chill that froze everybody else.

So all I can do is lie there and do my best to melt.

Being frozen serves a sort of purpose, though. A deeply and tragically maladaptive one, but one nonetheless.

It keeps me calm. It is the opposite of anxiety. It keeps all that ambient adrenaline cooled off to the point of being nonreactive, and thus tells the sleeping giant of my massive anxiety to chill the fuck out, dude.

It’s a terrible way to live. A healthier organism wouldn’t rely on so primitive and crude a mechanism just to cope with being alive.

It would just fucking learn to deal with shit. Via life experience spurred by instincts.

But I have always seen too much and known too much for that. I saw the world through an adult’s eyes when I was still in elementary school. I knew the follies of various eras of life and I smugly thought I was avoiding them with icy detachment and a wry (but still very humanistic) sense of the absurd.

I was so fucking stupid.

All my classmates simply went with their feelings a lot of the time, and by doing so, actually completed the developmental stages we are meant to complete in order to grow into functional adult human beings.

Whereas my ever so smart frozen self never developed at all because I “knew better”.

I really want to reach back in time and tell that kid to wake the fuck up, stop hiding from the world, and go out there and get some goddamned experience already.

Why is it that my stern advice to myself always sounds like it’s being delivered by a grumpy old gym teacher with a heart of gold?

Of course, I could tell myself that now too. And I want to. I want to run out there and take on (and take in) this big ol crazy world.

But right now it just hurts too much. I have a lot of damage to heal first.

Until then, I am going to have to expand my world via tiny baby steps instead.

Just watch my toes twinkle.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time to squeeze a wound to milk it of its poison and clear my poor infested system of a couple dozen parasites.

More or less.

My mood is not good right now. Physically, I feel a little better than yesterday, but emotionally I feel moody and depressed and poetic.

Makes me want to go to my Gothic mansion at midnight and brood, my heavy brow furrowed, as I peer down at the waves crashing against the jagged rocks below my parapet, and wonder how a just and loving God could permit the creation of such a benighted and illborn creature such as I.

Then I’d go angrily bugger a frightened but eager stable boy.

Well this is MY Gothic mansion, after all.

I suppose I am not so much depressed as melancholy, which is not quite as bad. At least I actually feel sad, which is a far healthier emotion than depression.

I’d rather feel sad than bad.

In fact if I try real hard, I can even feel sorry for myself. Historically that has not been possible because historically, I have not felt like I deserved better.

But now I do feel like I deserve better, more often than not. I am learning that despite what my terrible childhood taught me, there is nothing horribly and irrevocably wrong with me that makes me a toxic liability like nuclear waste that no person could love or even tolerate without wearing a hazmat suit.

I am really on fire with the imagery today.

Point is, there’s nothing wrong or gross or repulsive or whatever about me, and I deserve a nice happy fulfilling life as much as anybody else.

Kind of sad that the above is a radical, life-affirming statement for me. I spent most of my life feeling like I didn’t even deserve to take up space, let alone be alive.

There was a commenter in one of my Reddit thread videos that talked about how her family seemed angered and/or irritated by everything she did so her solution was to try to disappear, to be invisible.

Her circumstances were much more severe than mine – but I can relate. Nobody seemed to want me around. Nobody paid attention to me. I was this amazingly bright student and nobody gave a shit. Not my siblings, not my teachers, not my parents.

So neither did I.

I have very few memories of feeling relaxed and accepted around my own family. I was always kind of scared.

A lot of that was due to my father’s volatile temper. granted. But even when he wasn’t around, I felt like I wasn’t really wanted and people were only tolerating me, and then only when I did nothing to remind them of my existence.

And that negated me. It destroyed my sense of self. I felt, and feel, like I don’t exist, don’t matter, don’t count, don’t deserve anything ever, and shouldn’t be around.

I am so glad that I am finally learning to overcome all that bullshit.

I deserved, and deserve, better. I deserve to be up there in the light and the warmth of the sun with everyone else, and god damn it, I am going to claw my way up there or die in the attempt.

Meanwhile, I will play a lot of video games.

More after the break.

---

The real me

I get to decide who that is.

It’s the ultimate expression of existential freedom.

I contain multitudes. We all do. The choices we make in life reinforce some of those multitudes at the expense of others and that, in turn, becomes the “real” us.

Excessively self-aware people like myself get to make these choices consciously. Most people do not. They choose based on an instinctual sense of self.

I lack one of those. Though I am working on it.

So instead, I choose more consciously. And my first choice, the one that opens the door to all the rest, is to reject and absolve myself of all previous notions of who I am.

It’s tabula rasa time, baby. A clean slate.

So that sad flailing fat dude wasting away on the shelf because he’s too scared and depressed to go outside his tiny little safety zone?

Gone. Poof. Dried up and blown away in the wind. Dust.

Because that was never the real me anyhow. The fact that it was the person I thought I was for a very long time has no bearing on its truth.

A lie does not become true merely because it persists.

No, the real me is confident to the point of cockiness, upbeat, determined to make the best of every situation, willing to scrap for what he wants, and never lets anything get him down for long.

So sayeth the fox.

The real me is also a big gooey sweetheart. Compassionate and caring and with a strong desire to support and nurture others. The real me wants to give the whole world a big warm hug and ask it how it’s doing.

Then listen…. REALLY listen….to its reply.

The real me is also a hardnosed pragmatist with no patience for idealistic bullshit that does nothing but increase how pleased with themselves the speakers are. He wants solutions that work, not ideals that accomplish nothing.

The real me is also a deep-water mystic who probes the depths in order to find the place where everything comes together and bring back golden truths from the dark bosom of the night.

The real me is also a trickster and a magician and a wearer of masks. Gifted in illusion and master of semblances, he hides his true self behind the brilliant illusions and fantastical tales he weaves.

All these facets are part of my real self. To ask which one is the real me is like fanning out a pack of cards and asking “Which one is the REAL card?”.

All of them, or none of them, or both. I am every single one of them.

Though I am beginning to suspect I might not be playing with a full deck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh right. Angry and arrogant.

They’re not the prettiest of emotions but they lead in the right direction and that is all that really matters to me right now.

The truth is that progress will come only from embracing and strengthening my poor starved and neglected id (like that old dog….) and that means embracing a lot of unpretty things like anger, jealousy, ambition, greed, selfishness, lust, the craving for power, and all the other hot and heavy emotions that aren’t cute or nice.

I’ve pretending to be above or beyond these things for most of my life, but it was a lie. Because it’s not like I ever overcome those darker emotions. There was no transcendence. I never did the spiritual legwork.

I just suppressed them and that is nowhere near the same thing.

So in order to construct a healthier me, I am going to unsuppress these id based emotions and deal with them so I can integrate them into a fuller, realer, more complete and balanced version of myself.

Time to take off the fake angel wings and get down there in the dirt with the rest of the grunting, struggling, corruptible naked beach apes humping and fighting and squatting down there in the real world so I can learn to be a real little boy and not this artificial angel with imitation innocence and no knowledge of Eden or snakes or anything.

Surrendering my fake innocence might be the hardest thing of all. It’s been my reflexive defense against the world for so long. Staying out of that dirty world of competition and crudity and compromise has cost me everything and then some.

And that goes double for my so called objectivity. I have preserved it at the brutal cost of my humanity and my ability to connect to others for far too long. And for what?

To preserve a smugly superior sense of knowing what was “really” going on? To keep getting high off a feeling of “clarity”? To partake of the mystery cult of secret knowledge and being “right”?

Considering the cost, I feel confident in saying : NOT FUCKING WORTH IT.

Not much point in being one of the Secret Masters of Reality if you are too emotionally weak and impotent to do anything with it.

So fuck my objectivity. It was bullshit the whole time anyhow. Sure, I see a lot of things far more clearly than most, and that is definitely awesome.

But when it comes to the really deep shit that matters, like the things on which self esteem and emotional stability are based, I am as wildly delusional as the most rabid Trump supporter, so what’s the fucking point?

So to hell with my magic powers. They are useless without the non-magical kind. Without motivation, ambition, or even some goddamned active curiosity (the kind that gives your the urge to explore), all my ever so amazing abilities don’t mean shit.

Time to fire up my engines and get this big black truck of mine rolling.

This pit stop has gone on long enough.

More after the break.

---

Still fading away

Feels a lot like I am dying lately.

Sure hope that’s just the hypochondria talking.

But I feel so tired and weak all the time and I am afraid it is getting worse. It feels like some invisible force is squeezing me all over and slowly putting every inch of me to sleep like in a sleeper hold in wrestling.

Every day, it becomes harder to get out of bed. It takes forever for me to get the energy, will, and focus together. I end up just laying there for long periods of time and getting up in widely spaced out phases.

1. Roll over onto back. Stare at the ceiling for a while.
2. Move to the edge of the bed. Spend a long time in a null consciousness state.
3. Finally move to the computer chair a foot away

Hilariously. I have been beating myself up for being “lazy” about this sequence of events, and it’s only just now that I realized it’s a part of my being real real sick.

Ain’t that a kick in the pants.

So go to the hospital already!

And tell them what, exactly? It’s the sort of thing without a focal point to point at and say “This is what is wrong with me!”. It’s a pervasive feeling of weakness and malaise that gets worse very slowly over time, and none of that screams “emergency” to me.

And that’s just typical, innit? I seem to have a genius for getting sick and dying very, very slowly. Glaciers progress faster.

And so there’s never anything to trigger a response. Heaven forbid that some panic about something actually worth panicking over should make it through the numbness.

We have to reserve all that panic for insane bullshit that isn’t even real!

I fear it’s going to take something extreme, like literally not being able to get out of bed, to spark me into action and make me call 911.

Of course, my phone is on my desk, so I would have to yell for one of my roomies to call 911 for me.

Sure hope someone’s home at the time. Maybe I need one of these :

Or the modern equivalent. Probably an app for the smartphone I don’t have yet.

Guess I should get on that. That, and a million other things.

I really do need someone’s help to keep me focused and progressing. Someone to keep track of my appointments and remind me of things I intended to do and in general help me cut through the mental fog.

Dunno how one gets one of those, though. Might be able to get one via provincial disability, but then again, Covid.

Covid really does fuck everything up, doesn’t it.

So I dunno. I feel very lost and adrift. The doldrums on steroids, basically.

Guess I’ll just die, then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had my phone appointment with my doctor. Told him all about feeling weak and tired and sick after even pathetically small amounts of exercise and how I was worried about what happens if it keeps getting worse.

I don’t want to end up a bedridden invalid.

Not even if it comes with a sexy male nurse.

He asked me a lot of questions about how I feel when I have overexerted myself, and I told him about the pounding in my chest and head, and the headache and nausea and feeling shaky and weak.

He’s referring me to a cardiologist for a dreadful thing known as a “stress test”.

You might have seen one on TV or in a movie. It looks like a middle aged dude walking on a treadmill with no shirt on and with tubes and wires everywhere.

Basically, when they suspect you may have a heart problem, they hook you up to all the usual medical probes (heart rate, blood oxygen, evil thought levels) and make you run as hard as you can so they can get valuable information when you die.

I am probably exaggerating.

But it still seems like a rather extreme way to get info.

“We think you might have a problem with your brakes, so we need you to drive real fast at this brick wall…”.

I mean. realistically,. seeing as everyone who sees cardiologist potentially has a serious heart problem, they must have a way to do this which minimizes the chance of killing or seriously hurting them in the process.

But what little I know about the procedure makes it seem very unpleasant. Like they are not really trying to kill you but they are willing to come pretty close.

So, not looking forward to that. Get the feeling that when the day comes. I am going to be very sarcastic.

Look, that’s what happens when you make a funny fat dude exercise, okay?

---

A recent fantasy

I’m in a store when a Karen (or her male equivalent) has a meltdown.

I listen to her shit, nodding, I subtly place myself between the Karen and the employee she’s berating so that she turns her attention to me.

Once she runs out of air and pauses. I pounce.

“Hi! I just wanted to tell you that you’re a garbage person. An absolutely terrible person. Just, you know, the worst. Here you are in your grown up clothes throwing a tantrum over some little thing. You know who gets their way by throwing a tantrum? Toddlers. INFANTS. Retarded kindergartners. Behaving like this marks you as unfit for adult privileges and in a just society would get you put back into diapers with a pacifier in your mouth until you learn to behave like a grownup. Barring that, I’m going to need you to apologize to your victim here, then go away forever.”

They will flip like a clamshell cellular phone, of course. And I will let them until they say something about getting me fired.

Then I say “Oh, I don’t work here….I just think you’re a cunt. “

And then I walk out the door while they sputter and fume because they have absolutel no power over me.

And once I am outside, I assume my true form, that of my namesake Michael the Archangel, put my flaming sword of justice back in its sheath, and leap astride my personal Pegasus and fly off into the sunset.

Look, I said this was a fantasy, didn’t I?

More after the break.\

---

Avoiding the traps

Been watching this :

Lots of good solid advice in there.

Like not getting addicted to games. Ahem.

I wouldn’t say I don’t even enjoy them any more. I do still enjoy them. But I would def cop to playing them less because I want to and more because I don’t know what else to do with myself and I am terrified of facing the world outside of them.

And it’s killing me because it takes up all of my time and that pretty much precludes doing anything more productive with my life.

Like the sort of things that might actually get me out of this oubliette life of mine. Freelancing via UpWork. Submitting my work to potential purchasers. Trying to netwrok with other comedy type people online.

Stuff like that.

All stuff I “could” do, but would have to stop playing video games to do, and I am far too addicted to escaping from reality via games to do that.

So really, the takeaway from my last week of blogging is that my problems all boil down to anger and video games.

They’re not as unrelated as it may seem. I vent a lot of anger by killing demons n’ zombies n’ other bad guys.

Without that outlet. I might be a far angrier person.

What I need to do is get well and truly pissed off about how unsatisfying and humiliating and cramped my current life has become.

I deserve way, way better than this. I am a goddamned genius and it’s time I started making that pay. Fuck video games, they’re killing me on the inside.

I want money, and power, and a dignified lifestyle. I want to be able to support myself and stop feeling like such a burden to everyone. I want to live in pleasant surroundings doing work I enjoy and sharing domestic bliss with the man of my life.

And I am not going to get any of that if I continue to let gaming suck my life away.

And it’s not like I have to go cold turkey. I just need to carve out one or two hours of my waking hours a day to do Other Things.

It won’t be easy, especially not at first. but I’ll be damned if I let a mindless addiction dominate my life.

Time to pick myself up, dust myself off, and go out there and explore.

At least some of the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got off the phone with my therapist and this is what is on my mind.

We talked about how I have always felt like I am on the outside looking in at the bright warm welcome world most other people live in.

A fundamental part of that is the feeling that no matter how much I long to be part of that world and to feel included, there is something fundamentally wrong with me that makes it impossible.

Picture a sad little robot boy peering through a window at a big happy nuclear family and wondering what it would be like to be a part of it, but his happy imaginings are interrupted when the matriarch of the family sees him out there and opens the window to say “Shoo! Go on! Get out of here, you creepy little robot!”.

Spoiler : the boy is me.

And like any proper robot boy, I want to be more human. I don’t want to keep skulking in the shadows of life’s outer edge. I am tired of being cold and detached and “objective”. I want to feel warm and human and alive.

And I want all the emotions my squandered id has cost me. Anger, passion, inspiration, ambition, motivation, hell even good old fashioned lust.

I want it all. I want everything I can get my hands on that might help finally bring balance to my lopsided psyche and make me fully and truly human.

A real little boy at long last.

Maybe then I can work on growing up.

---

The guru smiled as I took in view from his ashram high in the Himalayas.

“Yes, I can see a lot from up here.” he said. ” But it is also very cold. “

---

I feel the stirrings of life deep within my soul.

Something is trying to wake up. A hibernating bear smells spring and feels a flush throughout its body. A dormouse stirs from winter’s dreamless slumber. A bored farmer eyes his tractor as he sniffs the air and wonders.

Something in me wants to be born. My icy water broke and now the long dormant life force within me starts squirming in discomfort and eyeing the exits.

Dare I give birth to myself?

It’s bound to be painful and disgusting. Rebirth is no cleaner than birth, after all.

Then again, dare I interfere?

Now that the baby is awake, it’s going to want out.

Who knows what havoc a long denied child could do to my insides?

I’d better give it what it wants before it’s too late!

So, breathe in life. Breathe out death. Breathe in strength. Breathe out weakness. Breathe in power. Breathe out fear. Breathe in joy. Breathe out despair.

And get greedy for that oxygen. Stuff myself with it. Gather it, hold on to it, stockpile it, hoard it. use it to build my ladder to the sky.

Gorge myself on life’s rich buffet until my soul has no choice but to grow.

Let my poor starved id get fat and sassy.

Lord knows it deserves it.

More after the break.

---

What’s up with Fru?
Oh I dunno.

I just know that something happened while I was laying down and suddenly I was incredibly tense and agitated and I had to get out of bed and get moving because lying there had become physically painful.

Doing 30 of my vertical pushups helped burn off some of the overcharge and that let me focus enough to go make supper, but still, like what the F, man?

It also made me very hungry. Could it be a blood sugar crash? That’s possible. I did exert myself an unusual amount when I got my groceries earlier.

And by “unusual” I mean “more than my usual sluglike pace”.

I ordered more stuff from Sav-On today in order to try to compensate for how almost none of the desserts I ordered Sunday night showed up.

So on a whim, I ordered a ton of stuff, mostly of the sugar free ice cream category, plus my usual sugar free Voortman cookies.

I now have a freezer full of two cartons of Chapman’s sugar free ice cream, one vanilla and one butterscotch ripple, plus a box of Chapman’s sugar free ice cream sandwiches and Chapman’s sugar free cones.

Have I mentioned how much I love the people at Chapman’s lately? They got us diabetic folk’s back on the whole frozen treats front.

I was surprised that all the frozen stuff I ordered actually showed up. I’ve ordered it before and it never made it. It was always “out of stock”.

Meaning the shopper didn’t want the hassle of dealing with frozen stuff and the time pressures they entail. In my opinion.

But I got them this time!

Oh, and the shoe dropped on the Mystery of the Seventh earlier.

Turns out it was surgeon who will be fixing my hernia with whom I had an appointment today. Luckily, he called me and we did the consult over the phone.

His office will call to make an in-person appointment soon. Spiffy.

I need to put my appointments into a calendar app, methinks. I have notes on a bunch of appointments in my Google Keep notepad but that is not the proper display mode for this type of data at all.

So says the sad robot boy in my head. If I really thought about it, I could probably come up with a more human way to express that.

But fuck it. I’m a robot, world. Deal with it.

I feel so tired lately. Definitely the number one thing I want to talk to my GP about when he calls at 1 pm tomorrow.

Can’t remember what my original intent when I made the appointment was. Could have been so many things. Oh well, it won’t go to waste.

If I keep getting weaker, I am going to become one of those scooter bound fat dudes.

And I really do not want that. It sucks on so many levels.

But I might be too weak to prevent it.

Wouldn’t that be a bitch.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No, not this guy,

No, in this case, GINO stands for “garbage in, nothing out”.

In other words, I’ve come to the planet-crashing conclusion that the reason my room is always so cluttered and filthy is that stuff comes in but never leaves.

I have garbage cans but never use them because they are always full. That’s because I never empty the damned things.

Houston, I think we found the problem.

As to why I never empty them, well, that’s where things get murkier. There are a lot of equally true potential answers.

Like “it never occurs to me”. Technically true but kind of begs the question. Why not?

And it’s totally true anyhow. When I look at an overflowing garbage can, it does occur to me to empty it, but the jagoff part of my brain is so good at blocking such potentially productive thoughts that the thought never goes anywhere because it get strangled in its crib instead.

It’s a harsh image but I’m standing by it.

So the real enemy in this equation is that same old beast that is my anti-action bias. My will smothering superego. My inner prosecutor, hostile and corrupt.

And what powers it? Inwardly expressed anger.

It always comes back to that.

No matter which way I look at things, it always comes back to that Rage Silo of mine and its toxic contents and the paradox of my inability to deal with it.

I don’t want to keep drinking that same old bathwater but the alternative is to feed it to someone else and I don’t know how to do that.

Ethically, I mean. Pragmatically there are a million different ways to vent your anger on others and thus inject your venom into their bloodstream for their kidneys to handle instead of your own overtired system

But I can’t imagine actually doing it and being able to live with myself after.

What choice do I have, though? It’s the only way out. I certainly can’t go on stockpiling all this bile as it grows more and more concentrated and carcinogenic over time.

Sooner or later it’s going to melt the walls of the silo and God knows what will happen then. Presumably it will take my sanity with it.

So, says a part of me, what’s more important, maintaining my moral purity, or not ending up a fucking catatonic in a back ward somewhere?

With or without leaving a long trail of murder and destruction behind me first.

But it’s so hard to even imagine being able to spew all that emotional emesis into the world. I am not sure who I would even be without it.

Maybe Secular Jesus would finally take over and I would transcend the petty divisions and hostilities of this fractured world and become a being of pure holy benevolent love.

Or maybe I would just become really pretentious and dull. Who knows, really.

It’s clear that I need to work hard on dreaming up a new version of myself. One that can express anger in a sub-criminal way and get all these old ghosts out of my skull.

Maybe I need to learn to make very angry art.

So um… grr.

Needs work. More after the break.

---

Everything is falling

That’s how I am feeling right now. Like everything is very slowly falling and I am the only thing in the universe that is standing still.

Or, in a relativistic sense, I am slowly drifting upwards.

Either way, it sucks.

Must have fluid on my inner ear or something.

Still feeling quite sick. Still haven’t figured out my medical appointment situation.

Tomorrow is the 7th and that sounds… vaguely familiar. Which is why I have been dreading that date. Pretty sure I am supposed to see someone tomorrow.

I will find out when I get the angry phone call from some specialist’s secretary tomorrow.

Sorry, lady, but I clearly can’t handle jack shit right now. I can’t run my own life and there is nobody to run it for me, so I guess I will just have to get used to life stomping on my face constantly forever.

I suppose I deserve it.

At least I finally got my fancy new butt plug plugged in. Yes, now it can be revealed that I spent some of my Xmas Amazon.ca money on a high tech butt toy.

Namely, this bad boy :

There were two models with roughly the same features for roughly the same price, so I went with the one with the more amusingly stupid name.

I mean, Paloqueth? Teh fuck you say? Sounds like some extremely overwrought fantasy setting for a series of bad sword and sorcery novels.

With terrible writing, cardboard characters, and plenty of butt stuff.

Of particular attraction to me is that this model claims to be a “thrusting” vibrator. Those existed in 2019, the previous time I went looking for good vibes on Amazon, but that feature added at least $80 to the price so it was a no go.

This year, the marvelous machinations of global capitalism have democratized this feature and I got my artifact of the long lost land of Paloquent for around $40.

And needless to say, in the world of vibrating butt toys,being able to do the thrusting itself is what you might call a FEATURE.

Hell, if they make one that can cuddle me afterwards, I might not need a boyfriend at all.

I had a hard time getting the damned thing plugged into a USB port to charge it, though. The USB ports on this PC are too close together and it make insertion (!) tricky.

But it’s in there now, god damn it, so in an hour and a half, it’s party time.

No pressure, though. I will try it out when the energy is right.

Doing my best to maintain enthusiasm without it spilling over into anxiety.

Kind of a handy skill in all kinds of situations, some barely involving my anus at all!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I already feel crappy, so why not take this opportunity to do a deep dive into a difficult and thorny subject?

What can I say, I get a little mazzo^[1] when I am sick. Go ahead, bring the pain, give me some concrete suffering to replace this malaise for a while.

So here’s the question : do I have a choice on whether to behave the way I do?

Traditional Western culture says yes, of course I do. One of the bedrock assumptions of modern democratic culture is that we always have a choice in all moments and all situations, and we can therefore be held accountable for said choices.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Nobody would argue that when a mugger says “your money or your life”, it’s the exact same kind of choice as “want fries with that”.

And on the personal level, were I to fully accept that I currently have the ability to choose any of the millions of ways I could improve my lot in life right now, it would logically follow that I can and should be held accountable for all the things I have done (and not done) during my 25+ years of depression.

That would be a burden of guilt and culpability so massive that there is no way I could shoulder it without it shattering me utterly.

I am far too delicate and ill to handle something like that.

But disempowerment sucks too. If I was powerless to do any better at life before now, then I am still powerless to do anything better now.

Perhaps something has changed? Maybe I have the power now but didn’t have it then. Or maybe I will have both the power and the accountability some time in the future.

Or maybe this is all just another layer of madness wherein I torment myself because the anger has to go somewhere and if it can’t or doesn’t go out, it vents inward.

And that’s bad. But it’s what I am used to. I have so far been unable to imagine a morally acceptable way to vent my anger outward, despite knowing that is exactly what I need to do in order to increase the peace inside my skull, and so for the moment at least, the inner torment continues.

I wish I could just stick a tap in my head and drain all that anger away, and maybe give the damage that causes it a chance to heal.

But it’s not that easy. The only cure for emotions is to express them. That’s the only way to get rid of them and that means experiencing them on the way out.

Goddamn that sucks.

Maybe there is a way to harness anger and thereby turn it into something less destructive and thus way less scary to me.

Turning it into petty, grasping ambition seems like a potential lateral move. Still pretty destructive but a lot less likely to land me in jail.

I’m going to go out there and get everything I deserve! Everything that life has cruelly denied me will be mine no matter what it takes!

Yeah. That could work.

More after the break.

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A little fuzzy

Reality seems a bit fuzzier today. And not in the cute way.

I guess it’s a side effect of all the sleep I have been getting. At least it’s still fairly healthy type sleep and not the tortuous kind.

I still sort of resent how much of my life is spent sleeping these days, but to be honest, I probably need it, and there are worse problems to have.

Like getting regular root beer instead of diet with my A&W order. Grr.

I knew it was the wrong one the second I took a sip. The deadly sweetness of it made my head ring like a struck bell then moments later I felt a certain hot rush like I had just come out of a steam bath and I knew Something Was Up.

I’ve put in a complaint and accepted the automatic compensation offer. $4.20 in DoorDash credit isn’t a lot for something that might have killed me, but I do not feel like making a big deal of it right now.

Though I totally could. I feel pretty ill right now. Reminds me of when that ditz of a waitress gave me a regular sugary Coke at the White Spot at Richmond Centre.

That was a fun walk home.

Called up Doc Chao^[2] today and got an appointment, or rather, got reminded of an appointment. I suspected that I had already made one and my suspicions turned out to be correct. I have a phone appointment at 1 pm on Friday.

I suspect I have other appointments lurking out there too. I guess I should have gotten on top of that by now, but I have been sleeping so much that it’s very hard to gather enough of my wits together to do it.

More of that fuzzy thinking.

Oh, and my UPS packages from Amazon non-arrived today. Got the stupid “sorry you were out” notice telling me where to go to pick them up instead.

Yeah bullshit I was out. You’re not fooling me. You didn’t even try. Why bother when you can make the customer come to you instead?

So now I need Julian to drive me to some mini-mall to pick up my packages. At minimum, there should be a personal device and some sugar free mini York peppermint patties waiting for me.

Would be nice if the gifts for my friends I ordered a week before Xmas were waiting for me too. Guess I should see what’s up with those, too.

How come nothing ever just fucking works?

At some point, I will get an email from the office of the surgeon who will be patching up my hernia giving me the link to a video meeting with her.

Plus there is definitely something to do with my cataract surgery coming up. And an appointment with the dermatologist.

But all I want to do is sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or whatever. I can’t tell my body to make up its mind, because its mind is my mind, the one that lives in my brain, so…aaaanyhow.

Form a consensus, corpus!

There. That’s a nice, normal, naturalistic mode of expression.

My points, inasmuch as I have one, is that my body can’t seem to decide how sick I am.

I felt pretty okay this morning. Mellow, even. And I slept. A lot. Decent quality sleep too, not the tortured underwater death marathon that sleep apnea and overactive REM cycles deliver unto me sometimes.

No, this was good quality relaxed sleep. Which was lovely and all.

But then I wake up around 1 pm, take my usual post awakening massive pee, and immediately want to go back to bed because despite having already slept for seven hours, I am still all cozy-sleepy and want more snooze time.

I decide against naptime, though, as I will need to eat at 2 pm anyhow, and my Sav-On order will be arriving between 3 pm and 5 pm, so, no sleep for me at least until my grocery order shows up.

So I start playing video games, and find my thoughts drifting to thoughts of summer over and over again, despite it being Jan 4. Weird.

Then I suddenly realize my toasty warm cozy feeling is indicative of having a mild fever.

No wonder I kept waking up super thirsty, with dry mouth so bad it felt like the inside of my mouth had turned to cheap leather.

Mystery solved, I guess.

So now I am in the unusual position of knowing that I am sick even though I do not feel sick at all.

Which is a bummer, to be honest. Why couldn’t I just feel good for a while without there needing to be a sinister reveal?

Oh well, this too shall pass. I will get my groceries and a bunch more sleep and hopefully I will get over whatever this is, and be better off for the experience.

Somehow. We can sketch in the details later.

The frustration with doing nothing but waste my life playing video games continues to grow. There has to be something more fun and interesting to do with my time.

And if said thing was also productive, that would be keen.

There has to be some way out of this dead end playpen of a life. I have all this magic in my mind and wonder in my soul just waiting to burst like fireworks in the night sky and shed some much needed light on this benighted world, and yet all I do all day is sleep, eat, poop, and masturbate my mind.

And that’s just so sad. And stupid. I deserve better. I deserve a nice, comfortable, fun life where I can use my gifts to spread sunshine in the world and make a decent middle class living doing so.

Also : a good husband, a pleasant and cozy home, and SO. MANY. CATS.

Sounds reasonable to me. I don’t need wealth, or status, and fame would be fun if it got me on talk shows and such, but anything more would be more of burden than a boon.

All I really want is a happy, pleasant, grown up kind of life.

Should be doable, right?

More after the break.

---

The adventure continues

Things just keep getting worse.

Got my groceries. Bunch of stuff I wanted failed to arrive, as usual. Don’t worry, I was not charged for them. They were just “out of stock”.

I have my suspicions.

Slept a bunch more, dozed for most of the rest of the time. Finally got up at 7:45 pm. Was going to eat, but realized I felt terrible, so I sat down in front of the computer and did codeword puzzles till 8:15 pm.

I am pretty good at them. Sometimes I need help starting. Sometimes I don’t.

At 8:15, I got up to go get food, but I got up way too fast.

You’d think I would have learned from what happened when I got out of bed, but nooo. I popped up like a balloon with its string cut and instantly became very ill.

The usual Sinus Suite : headache pounding, nausea surging, eyes watering, oh, and the room spinning as a massive wave of dizziness washes over me as my blood apparently rushes in all directions at the same time.

Despite this, I made it to the kitchen and got some food in a bowl. So far so food. But when I went to get my ice for my Diet Coke, the top ice tray was stuck to the bottom ice tray causing the bottom one to fall to the floor, ice cubes shooting out everywhere.

Which I then had to bend over and pick up.

You know what really sucks when I am all dizzied up like this?

Bending over and picking things up.

I survived that, somehow, then made my way back to my computer. On the way, I nearly brained myself on a random wall twice due to dizziness and got quite lost on my extremely short journey for a moment or two.

Starting to think I might be really, really sick now. Not just “fighting something off”. Seriously ill. The dizziness, the feverish feeling, the nausea, all of it.

It all adds up to some serious shit.

So I think I will be calling my GP for an appointment tomorrow. It’s not nearly bad enough for the ER but it’s def reached GP level.

And it seems to be slowly getting worse, so I might land in the ER yet.

I don’t think it’s the Covid. I can smell and taste, and my breathing is okay. But my nose is running, and has been, on and off, for about a week.

And I definitely feel feverish. So there’s that.

Here’s a question : what the hell happens when they ask me if I have had fever and/or runny nose and I say yes?

They can’t kick me out, can they? At least, not from the ER.

I picture it as being like when that poor monster comes back from a mission with a sock stuck to him in Monsters Inc.

It would be terrible for my social anxiety, but also kind of fun. Very exciting.

And I would enjoy being the center of attention for once.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once more, just now, I woke up feeling extra super crappy.

I feel so very very tired. And not in the healthy, relaxed, soft and sleepy way, oh no. In the sickly, physically depressed, tortuous way that makes me feel like I am dying, or at least fading away a little.

My chest is still scratchy and heavy. I feel dizzy and confused. It’s very hard to concentrate. I keep having to drag my focus back to my blogging.

As a result, the words, they are not coming easy right now. It’s like trying to write while a hot air balloon is trying to pull me away and into the sky.

Please pretend that made sense. Thanks.

90 percent sure I have some kind of bug. A chest cold, most likely. Which means I am going to have to stay home and not do my usual Sunday shopping and doing the McD’s hangout thing after.

And that’s going to cause logistical issues of much annoyingness. Sigh.

Specifically, it means I will have to do my usual Sunday shopping online. That’s not that big a deal in the long run. Mostly, it just means the usual hassle of not knowing how much of what I order will actually show up.

Ain’t that fun.

Whatever. These little hassles will pass. The important thing is to stay home, nurse my health, and not end up even sicker.

And speaking of medical issues, tomorrow I will have to face the Great Forgetting.

Because I am sure I have many more medical appointments in this new year and I do not remember aaaaany of them.

Really need to start using a calendar program for all this shit. Which will be a pain, but it’s better than missing a buttload of important appointments and getting snippy phone calls from various receptionists to boot.

I know there’s appointments related to my cataract surgery, my hernia repair, and my scalp condition. Plus I might have made an appointment with my GP.

Luckily, I know how to recover the information. Tomorrow I will call around to the various medical offices and ask them what appointments they have down for me.

And this time, I will write it all down, god damn it. Dunno why I didn’t do it before except for my usual tendency to get overwhelmed by stuff.

I really do need some kind of assistance with life. I clearly cannot cope on my own. I can admit that now.

I need help with staying focused and organized. I need help with remembering what I am supposed to be doing and I need help with cleaning up and keeping things clean.

And all the other things I am currently too tired, sick, and confused to do for myself.\

How I get this help is anybody’s guess. But I am done thinking it is impossible. There has to be a way to get the help I need.

Maybe I will do the unthinkable and actually contact my case worker. Or a case worker anyhow. I don’t think we get our own any more.

God forbid the system treat us as individuals on any level.

Or maybe I should Google up some disability advocates instead. They know how to work the system.

Point is, this shit is doable.

I refuse to confuse “difficult” or “scary” with “impossible” any longer.

I might have to do these things slowly, but they can be done, and I will do them.

More after the break.

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A knack for cabinetry

My friend has a knack for cabinetry – he’s counter intuitive

it’s a pun! no really!

OK, so it needs work. The connection between cabinetry and counters is far too weak.

Anyhow, the counterintuitive thing is that not going out tonight turned out to be a lot of work. First I had to order my meal from KFC, then my 2Ls of Diet Pepsi from 7-11, then my weekly groceries from Sav-On Ironwood.

And that’s a lot of work, albeit mostly mental and emotional work.

I was originally going to do my biscuit oriented style meal from KFC, but decided to get my accustomed 4 piece Big Box instead and just throw in an order of biscuits.

Said biscuits are sitting on a shelf at the moment, awaiting my desire for them,

Should probably put them in the fridge, come to think of it, with the Diet Pepsi.

Wrangling together my Sav-On order is always a bit of a chore. Although it would have been a snap if I hadn’t forgotten that last time I ordered from them, I had added a lot of my usual products to my “favorites” on the site.

D’oh! That would have saved me a bunch of searching and scrolling!

Oh well, whatever. Next time, maybe.

I feel a little better than I did earlier, probably because I have some solid (if greasy) nutrition in me now plus I had a long nap between parts 1 and 2 of today’s entry.

Gonna nap some more after this, too. When you are sick, you can’t go wrong with getting plenty of hydration and sleep.

Hydration because your body goes through a lot of water as it heals or fights a bug. And sleep because that way, your body can use all its resources to fighting or healing without wasting any on superfluous things like consciousness.

That’s why you get so tired when you are sick. Your body is giving you a hint.

Hopefully I can nip this shit in the bud and get back to my usual level of not being quite as wretchedly ill.

And what the hell, the sick part of my mind will enjoy the excuse to check out of reality even moreso than usual.

Fuck all y’all, I’m hibernating. Wake me when life is easier. I am so fucking tired of driving with the parking brake on. I want to drive free like everyone else and thus finally get somewhere in life.

And the traffic better get the fuck out of my way if it knows what is good for it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ludlum meets Suzanne Collins.

My appetite has been quite random lately and it’s really getting on my nerves. I go from very hungry to mild negative appetite (food seems gross) in a matter of half an hour or less, and always at the worst possible time.

Which leads to such damnable perversity as having no desire to eat, then forcing myself to eat, then half an hour later being SUPER FRIGGING HUNGRY.

And that’s just so….ARGH. Like my stomach said, “Forcing me to eat? Well then the famine must be over, TIME TO FEAST!”.

And I’m like, “I just wanna eat, man. “

Plus my keyboard’s spacebar’s action had gotten rather stiff. I have to press it rather hard in order to get a space, and even then, it doesn’t always work.

So that is pretty irritating too.

Other than that, things are going okay. Taking an Alprazolam before bed yesterday was quite effective in clearing the sleep blockage I was experiencing. Got lots of decent quality sleep yesterday.

Decided not to take another this morning. I will hold off and keep a close eye on my sleep quality and quantity (sleep efficiency?) and take another when I feel like I need to thaw out my tired brain again.

I like the effect more than I did with Lora Ze Pam, too. With Lora, it felt like part of my mind went stiff and numb, and I did not care for that at all.

My mind is already way more stiff and cold and numb than is good for me. The last thing I need is something that furthers that effect.

Al Prazolam, on the other hand, made my mind feel genuinely warm and relaxed. Like the best part of being drunk. And that is way more my speed.

I need something that helps mellow out the harshness, man. And my pal Al will do at least until I finally buy me some CBD (the relaxing part of pot) products.

I have neither desire nor use for the hallucinogenic buzz of THC. I find sensory effect of pot to be interesting for a little while then actively irritating.

I’d probably find it irritating right away if the CBD wasn’t mellowing me out at the same time, to be honest.

Thursday night’s very low key New Years Eve celebration went fine. After flitting about for a while (which I haaaaate) we settled on the celebration with two people we like, Community alums Joel McHale and Ken Jeong.

Kind of disturbing how good Doctor Jeong has gotten at being all unctuous and fawning like the other network personalities. He ended up doing most of the talking, ick. But at least that meant Joel could stay cool and just throw in the occasional hilariously acerbic comment now and then.

Sometimes they would cut to Kelly Osbourne (Ozzy’s kid), and she was all fake and syrupy too, which was even more depressing.

But then she let a “fucking” (bleeped of course) slip out, and that made me feel a whole lot better about the world.

She’s still an Osbourne after all.

More after the break.

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Rain, rain, rain

That song has a healthy attitude towards depression.

Anyhow, feeling kind of sick right now. Might be coming down with something.

Or maybe it’s just my sinuses. Who knows.

I just know I feel rather crappy right now. I laid down for a snooze and when I woke up, my chest felt heavy and scratchy, my head hurt, I felt nauseous and disoriented, and I felt like someone turned up both the gravity and the air pressure.

It’s Covid! screams my latent hypochondria. I’m gonna end up in the hospital full of tubes and end up dying alone! AAAAAAAAGH!

Yeah yeah, whatever. You say that about everything. Your panic burned through all its credibility a long long time ago.

Now, you’re just a tiresome voice from the back closets of my mind.

Now if only I could do the same thing with my social anxiety.

Well, what led to my overcoming my hypochondria 25 years ago?

Getting well and truly sick of its bullshit, basically. Getting mad enough to make me grimly determined to claw my way out of the deep dark hole I had fallen into where I was malnourished, dehydrated, and otherwise very physically fucked up.

Seems like a hundred lifetimes ago now. I can barely recognize the person I was back then. I have come so far since then.

And yet, I would swap places with that version of me in a heartbeat if it meant I got to be 22 again, knowing what I know now.

For one thing, I would get my depression treated right away. Back then I had no idea what I had. I thought I just kinda…. sucked.

Not sure what treatment options there were in 1995. Prozac, I assume. And some of the other early SSRIs.

No therapy, though. Not back then, not on PEI. Hmmmm. Guess I would have to claw to somehow find that too.

And try to get my ass some kind of job.

After all, I am going to need seed money to start my investment firm.

Because what’s the point of traveling back in time if you are not going to get rich exploiting your knowledge of the future?

Some Apple stock here, some Microsoft stock there, Google and YouTube and Netflix when they come around.

With the money I made that way, I could go to whatever goddamned university I wanted. Any place that would have me, and because I would be a rich genius, that would be a lot of places.

Then again, if I am rich, why bother? I could go straight to my dream of being a jet setting intellectual who spends all his time at conferences, symposia, conventions, and other big brain type events all over the world.

I could even get in on the ground floor of the Ted talks.

Being a Ted speaker is my dream, after all.

Of course…. I could do some of that right now. Like getting a job. Freelancing.

But that has to wait until I am healthy enough,

Or does it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,