Impostor Syndrome keeps coming up on Facebook, so I thought I would share my thoughts on it today.

I may have shared some of these thoughts here already. If so, sorry.

Impostor Syndrome refers to the feeling that some successful people get that they are a fraud, that they’re not nearly as great as their accomplishments suggests, and that it only seems that way because they have everybody fooled.

Superficially, this seems paradoxical. I mean, if you do great things, you must be a great person, right? After all, you’re the one who did all those great things.

But it goes deeper than that. This phenomenon stems from a conflict between someone’s accomplishments and their low self-image.

If the accomplishments – aka reality – wins the fight, then there’s no problem. The person thinks more highly of themselves, and life goes on.

But for some people, their low self-image is a vital part of the very core of their identity – and in the human mind, identity reigns supreme. To actually change the self-image to reflect these accomplishments, therefore, is impossible. It would be too profound an injury to their fundamental sense of self for them to endure. Simply can’t happen.

And yet, they truly have done these impressive things. What must happen can’t happen. This creates a powerful state of cognitive dissonance in the individual. One that absolutely must be resolved.

The only way out is to somehow nullify the accomplishments. The individual creates ways of convincing themselves that their accomplishments or high status are false, That they don’t count. That they are not the result of the individual’s true worth, but merely the result of them having everyone “fooled”.

And as anyone familiar with celebrity biographies knows, this can go all the way to the top. You might be a gold medal athlete, an Oscar winning movie star, or the top scientist in your field and still think you are a fraud who doesn’t deserve any of the accolades or credit for your deeds.

In other words, you feel like an impostor.

I’ve felt this myself. Not in quite that straightforward manner, though.

My low self-esteem is more…. nuanced than that.

Like I have said before, on the one hand, part of me has self esteem so low that I think of myself as a massive liability to humanity in general and that the world would be a far healthier, cleaner, and happier place without me.

On the other hand, if someone showed up and declared me to be a super genius and handed me a whole lot of money in recognition of this fact, I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’d be like, “Oh, good. Thanks. ”

And on the inside, I’d be thinking, “Finally!”.

No, my impostor syndrome is a little more complicated, and mostly manifests in my tendency to instantly nullify and discount any of my accomplishments.

Like all those stellar grades I got in school. Meh, big deal, they don’t count. Grades don’t mean anything. And it’s not like they ever did me any good anyhow, right?

Besides, it was all too easy for it to really matter.

But that’s not how an outside observer would see it. They would see someone who effortlessly achieved an A average and think, “Wow, that guy is crazy smart!”.

And they’d be right. I am. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. By all rights, I should have a fairly high opinion of myself.

But I don’t. I declare that somehow all those grades and things “don’t count” instead.

At least I don’t think I have everyone fooled.

Mostly because as a lifelong smartass, if I truly had everyone fooled, I’d be proud of it.

More after the break.

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On not being pathetic

Relax, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

What I am talking about is my own learned helplessness and how to overcome it so that I can have a little fuckin’ dignity for once.

Man I am having trouble focusing right now.

Anyhow, learned helplessness is a survival strategy adopted by powerless children who feel they have no ability to directly influence their own lives and therefore must fall back on a child’s last line of defense : hoping someone will take pity on you and help you.

And if pity is your survival strategy, that is very sad.

It also means that you must then make yourself as pitiful as possible. Your strategy is to broadcast your helplessness in hopes of attracting nurturing responses and offers of assistance from those with whom you associate.

This is inherently infantile.

And I mean that literally. It’s exactly how an infant survives. For anyone beyond that age, it can be interpreted as a sign that something has gone drastically wrong.

Enter yours truly.

It’s clear to me now that when I was raped, I reverted. My journey into selfhood was cut off at the knees and I reverted to my previous successful life stage, infancy.

Makes sense. I figured out that I was oral retentive a long long time ago, and infancy is the oral retentive stage of life.

Oral retentive people tend to be passive, manipulative, messy, fixated on getting pleasure through the mouth (eating, drinking, talking, oral sex), and can be extremely selfish people who see the world as existing only to meet their needs.

The archetypical fat cigar-sucking amoral businessman is a common example.

And the thing about pity as a life strategy is that it is inherently inimical to growth. Any move to become stronger and more independent makes one less pitiful – less pathetic – and that means surrendering the only kind of power you have.

This explains so much about me. Like how I have never had any faith in my ability to survive on my own. What infant can?

And why I have a crystal clear pattern of attaching myself to stronger, more motivated people. Whether it’s my parents or my roommates, there has almost always been someone around to do the adulting for me.

And I just have to keep being my charming, adorable, pathetic self.

Clearly, that shit has got to stop.

But it’s all I know. Moving beyond it will mean going into the unknown on a existential level and that’s about as scary as it gets.

I just have to keep telling myself that I can help myself.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am really, really glad that school shootings were not a thing when I was a depressed teenage back in the 80’s.

Not that they have never happened – the one that inspired this song comes to mind.

But school shootings weren’t a meme yet. They didn’t have the “depressed loser takes revenge on his bullies” narrative attached yet. They weren’t something people thought could happen at any time, in any school, in any part of the world yet. They had no cultural tags other than “incomprehensible isolated acts”.

They weren’t a “thing” yet.

And I am glad, because I had all the ingredients for an incident when I was a depressed teen except, perhaps, a deep sense of grievance against a system rigged against me.

So maybe the real fortunate thing was that by the time I was depressed enough to do it, I wasn’t being bullied any more.

The source of my pain was far more ephemeral, and I wouldn’t even begin to understand it until I was in my early thirties.

It takes a long time to deprogram yourself enough to see what isn’t there, and trace your pain back to its roots.

But no, when I was in high school my bullies were long gone. I had banished them by, shall we say, asserting myself (by, amongst other things, throwing one of my bullies down a flight of concrete stairs) in grade 8, and I guess word got out that I am one with whom thou shalt not fuck.

Or maybe I just finally accessed enough of my primal teenaged testosterone to no longer seem like easy prey any more. I dunno.

But the whole school shooter meme wasn’t really a thing until around the same time this song popped up on Muchmusic :

I am not saying I would have done it if the factors had aligned back then. Odds are heavily against it.

But it would have been a possibility.

I knew where my father kept our guns and our ammo. I knew how to load and shoot most of them. I was incredibly depressed most of the time.

And what nobody tells you about depression is that for some of us – seems to be men, mostly – when it gets really, really, really bad we are capable of anything, including monstrous acts of violence.

You enter a state of mind where depression’s numbness starts driving you into an increasingly agitated state because you are so desperate to feel something and so numb to any sort of moral feelings that would normally restrain you that you will do whatever it takes to penetrate that chill fog clinging to your mind.

And the deeper the numbness, the more extreme an act has to be to do that.

Hence rappers talking about “bouncing off the walls when you are down”. That’s a reality for a lot of depressed men. At some point, the worm turns, and your depression stops sedating you and starts revving you up instead.

That’s when men beat their partners and their kids. When they get into fights. When they get drunk and commit stupid crimes.

When they kill themselves.

So when I was a depressed teenager thinking vague angry thoughts on the way to and from high school and spending my days in total social isolation at the exact time of life when I should have been taking my first steps into becoming part of a community and completely failing to grow as a person, I was capable of shooting up my school just to finally feel something.

Again, I am not saying I would have done it.

But if I had done it, I would have done it laughing.

Laughing my sick and crazy ass off. Laughing at all the people running around and screaming and crying because I’d shown them the truth I had always known : that the world is a horrible place, safety is an illusion, and nothing really matters.

It would have been mass murder as an act of mocking nihilism.

And maybe I would have killed myself at the end. Maybe not. Suicide would have been the artistically perfect way to end my abattoir masterpiece, but then again, I would really have enjoyed being a notorious killer.

I’m glad that never happened. I am glad that nothing has happened in my life that would have summoned up the evil in me and made it howl.

Because deep down, I am a seriously fucked up motherfucker.

Deep down, I am capable of anything.

Deep down…. there are things you are better off not knowing about.

More after the break.

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Getting your exorcise

Standard reminder : when I write stuff like the above, I am ridding myself of my demons by trapping them in text.

I’m a writer, so I deal with things by writing about them. This is my best and most effective form of therapy. In text, I can get out what I need to get out in a safe way where I can do things exactly as they need to be done and in a “place” where I feel safe and in control.

Same thing, really.

I have a lot of unresolved issues from my past, so a lot of what I right is at best somewhat dark and at worst downright disturbing.

Again, folks…. thank you so much for reading it. It means the world and several satellites of Jupiter to me.

I don’t know why I still feel ashamed for loosing my demons upon an unsuspecting world. I am hardly the only person turning private pain into public art.

H. R. Giger comes to mind, for one. Plus pretty much everyone involved in horror.

I don’t know why writing horror doesn’t really appeal to me, either. It seems like a natural fit on paper. ^[1]

Heck, it worked for Clive Barker.

But I guess I am just not that interested in scaring people. Whatever it is I am trying to communicate in my writing, fear is not a part of it.

Which is too bad, because I am sure that I could scare the heck out of people if I tried.

Hmmmm. I’ll think it over. Meanwhile….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Was playing Bastion – more on that later – when it suddenly occurred to me that I had to quit the game and do the blog/lunch thing, and I had nothing.

Nada. Zip. Not a thought in my head as to what to write about. Mind so empty that you can hear the wind whistle through it.

So I guess this is one of those days when I just sort of mess around.

What a great sound. Part rock, part blues, part hot jazz, all fun.

My word, are the words coming slow right now. And I’m not sleepy or anything.

I just rolled a natural 1 on my blogging roll today, I guess.

Anyhow, Bastion. Acquired it in the wee hours of the morning. Was itching for a new game and it was the second-highest rated game on my Steam Wishlist.

The highest is Terraria, but after my unpleasant experience with Starbound, I am not willing to take a chance on a similar game.

My deal with Starbound : after a very cool opening sequence…

…you grab some stuff from your ship and beam down to the surface of the planet and… that is it.

You’re completely on your own. Do whatever, the game doesn’t care. You have a quest but there is zero indication of how to achieve it. You are given a quick intro to the basic controls of the game and after that, the game has told you all it’s going to tell you.

And that is way too unstructured for me. I need a plot, goals, quests, direction.

I mean, I get the idea : I am supposed to explore and dig tunnels and build structures and gather materials and so on, in the Minecraft style.

But I am not that kind of gamer. I am many things, but a self-starter ain’t one of them. That style of game is commonly referred to as a “sandbox” game, and appeals primarily to the “builder” type who loved Lego as a kid and gets great joy from building and making and arranging things.

That ain’t me.

So I returned Starbound and got Bastion instead.

It’s a hard game to describe because it’s rather unique. I supposed “action RPG” makes a good starting point. You play an enigmatic character known only as The Kid, who survived a terrible event known as The Calamity that tore his world apart, reducing it to mere floating fragments of shattered reality.

And yet, it’s done in the art style of a much more cartoonish and lighthearted kind of ARPG. It makes for a very interesting combination.

One minor annoyance is the omnipresent narrator. When I read the phrase “completely narrated” in the game’s description, I wondered what that could possibly mean.

I mean…. anything with narration is completely narrated, right?

Turns out, in this case it means “a narrator that talks a LOT”. Like all the time. And while I usually like old-timey cowboy style narration, this guy is downright obtrusive.

And always in the storyteller third person, telling me (as The Kid) what I think and feel about what is going on.

“The Kid knew that this would be a tough fight.”

“They thought they were in charge, but The Kid set them straight on that real quick.”

“The Kid could feel a warm soft breeze on his taint. ”

I’m getting used to it, but still, I never thought I would think a game had too much narration. I love that stuff!

More spoken word = good, right?

More after the break.

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We’ve (Still) Got Religion

These days, it’s au courant to laugh at how way back in the 1930’s and 40’s and even in the 50’s, it was fashionable for the more optimistic intellectual types to predict that this new understanding of industry and science surely meant that the end of organized religion and all other foolish superstitions was in sight.

I mean, surely by the unimaginable year of 2021, religion would be a distant memory view with the same sort of uncomprehending horror with which we view human sacrifice or, at the very least, the same indulgent disdain with which we now view all that falderol about phlogiston and the aether.

Um, nope. Religion is still here and going strong. It diminishes over time here in the modern world, true, but it does so very very slowly.

So it’s not too outrageous to say it hasn’t lost much ground.

Where I differ from the other intelligentsia on this is that I do not consider this to be some kind of tragedy.

It is the inevitable result of the secular world’s complete failure to provide serviceable replacements for so much of what religion does for people.

Overthrowing an outdated cosmology and shooing religion out of the factories and laboratories of the world was only the beginning, and to believe otherwise takes (and took) an act of staggering ignorance.

Because what does “logic” and “reason” have to offer a grieving mother who just buried her only child? You could be the world’s leading expert on the science of grieving and it wouldn’t make it hurt any less.

To whom does a person suffering through an incredibly painful and serious illness reach out for comfort and strength? Einstein? Carl Sagan? Bugs Bunny?

Where does someone go to for guidance as to how to lead a good life? A therapist? A life coach? Doctor Phil?

And most importantly, what does science and reason offer by way of giving people a sense they have a place and purpose in this crazy huge universe of ours?

If anything, science goes in the opposite direction by reminding us how small and insignificant we are.

Until we develop the spiritual tools to offer superstition free alternatives to these and so many other religious functions, religion will be alive and well in 3021 too.

And that assumes that replacing them is even possible.

Because the truth is that religion’s unbeatable advantage is that it can give people comfort, guidance, and joy without needing to justify it.

Whatever you need, it’s got. Through it, a human being can synthesize whatever emotional inputs they need in order to continue to function.

Science can’t ever replace that. Reason needs reasons. Religion does not.

I am not religious myself. I was raised atheist and became agnostic out of politeness. I will admit that I think that in the long run, humanity would be better off without it.

But only when we have truly come up with something better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Therapy Thursday. Doc Costin and I hit upon some seriously fertile soil.

The precis : my inner world is so turbulent and unstable and unsafe precisely because it’s the world of the mind, with very little input from anything real.

I mean, think about it : my environment never changes, and thus it faded away a long time ago. Plus it’s such a toxic mess that I don’t like looking at it anyhow. So clearly the mature option is to just stay fixated on my screen.

So I effectively get zero conscious input from my real environment.

And by spending all my time in the world of video games, I reinforce that sense of unreality. My world is so cerebral that ideas, emotions, stories, and the products of the imagination are a lot more real to me than reality.

That is not good. No wonder I feel so insecure. The world of the mind – the intra-cranial universe – is chaotic and unstable compared to solid reality.

So if I want to escape the cacophonous madhouse of my mind – and I do – the thing I need to do is spend more time away from the computer and my bed and make a habit of sitting out in the real world getting physically grounded in extra-cranial reality.

At least now I understand this thing I would sometimes do when I was going to VFS.

Sometimes, when I was on my way from school to the Skytrain, I would stop and sit somewhere on that stretch of Granville and just kind of… let the flow of traffic, both pedestrian and automotive, wash over me as I sat there and soaked it all up.

And contrary to what my social anxiety would have predicted, I found this very calming. When I finally got back up and continued my journey home, I felt a whole lot better about this crazy old world.

Now I know why. By sitting there while the Granville Street chaos flowed around like I was a rock in a river, I was giving myself a chance to acclimate to my environment, and reach a kind of equilibrium with it.

In doing so, I made peace with my surroundings and stopped feeling so scared and eager to get home to escape the chaos.

More importantly, I grounded myself physically by taking myself out of the claustrophobic chaos of my inner world and into the much more stable and “real” world of physical reality.

This is important. It means I know the way to calm myself down and escape all the bullshit in my brain and it’s as simple as going downstairs and sitting in the lobby while I read, or maybe going out to sit on a nearby bench when the weather is nice.

Reality, and especially nature, is my anti-depressant.

I’m as surprised as you are.

There’s also the balcony, but Joe tends to get pretty defensive when I ask him to clear out a section for me to sit in – hoarders get real grouchy about that kind of thing. Plus there’s so much stuff piled everywhere that it’s hard to even get to the balcony.

So I am going to set that option aside for now. Start with the lobby sounds like a smart move. It’s a very short journey and a quiet environment most of the time, but with enough stimulation from people’s comings and goings to keep it from fading out of my sensorium like this room has done.

At long last, I’ve found the way out.

Turns out, it’s going out.

More after the break.

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The Humble Giant

Time to take a crack at the (for me at least) complicated issue of “humility”.

On one hand, I am all for humility – my version of it. To me, humility means remaining humbly realistic about yourself. It is the virtue of knowing that you are just another beach monkey stumbling through the darkness trying to find your way home, no better or worse than another in terms of intrinsic worth.

It’s the virtue of knowing that despite our vanities and the lies our social status instincts will tell us about being better than other people, we’re just frail conglomerations of organic chemicals putting on airs.

This does partially map to the religious definition of humility – being humble before God does have something in common with being humble because you know the universe is large and you are small and the cosmos doesn’t care if you live or die.

I mean, how could it? It is not a conscious entity. It cannot care about anything.

And humility in my terms is the necessary counteragent to pride. It’s the force that keeps pride from taking us to crazytown as our swelled heads take us up into the stratosphere like hot air balloons and leave us there.

I’ve had to resist that force hundreds of times in my life. Humility is my anchor.

On the other hand, I vehemently oppose the version of humility that says “you are crap, you are nothing, hang your head in shame for just being alive, and never ever have pride about anything about yourself ever!”.

That’s not humility – that’s humiliation.

See what I did there?

Well fuck that shit. I was born extraordinary and I refuse to be ashamed of it. I’m not the sort of person to deliberately shove someone’s face in the dirt in order to make myself feel superior, so I feel no obligation to keep it from happening from mere exposure to my superlative attributes.

Plus, that kind of humility might score you bonus points for Heaven but you know what it doesn’t get you? Dignity.

I used to sidestep the issue of dignity. It never seemed like much fun to me, and ran counter to my strong tendency to be a goofy, wacky clown.

But now I know that people need a certain amount of dignity in order to function. And I want some. I need some.

Which means I need to learn to pull myself together and stop being such a hot mess and learn to carry myself with at least a soupcon of gravitas.

And I don’t care if my standing tall makes someone else feel small.

I’m a giant. Deal with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, let’s take another stab at this whole “be here now” issue of mine.

In this space, we’ve established that when I was raped, I withdrew deep into my mind, and this created a sort of buffer zone of total emptiness between me and the world.

It is this void that is the crux of why I am not really here. Ever since then, I have never been truly one hundred percent emotionally or mentally present. I do everything by remote. It’s like instead of dealing with reality directly, I extend tentative tentacles across the void and manipulate reality that way.

And at the slightest sign of trouble or pain, I reel those suckers back in and withdraw within myself once more.

Obviously, this is a bizarre and clumsy way to deal with reality. It puts me at a distinct disadvantage on many many levels. I would be far better off if I just closed the gap and committed to being present in the present so I can learn to deal with life in realtime.

It is, of course, not that easy.

It’s never that easy.

That gap was installed via the brutality of sexual assault when I was only four years old. It manifested to protect my fragile psyche from the reality of what was happening to me.

And that’s still what it is doing 43 years later : protecting me from the reality of the rape – from its memory.

So to close the gap, I would have to remember the incident that shattered my psyche and made me a shell of my former self and crippled my mind, heart, and soul.

This seems…. doable, now. I am fully and consciously aware of the facts of the incident, so there is no tender tissue of denial to delicately remove.

It definitely happened. I was definitely raped by a stranger in a shower stall at a gym called The Spa. I clearly remember making the decision to take my mind away, telling myself “this isn’t real, this isn’t happening”.

This happened right after I had almost drowned in the gym’s pool. Luckily, I was rescued by a stranger, possibly the same one.

Perhaps he felt I owed him. After all, the hero always gets the girl, right?

Or in my case, the cute little redheaded boy.

I still don’t know why my father brought me there in the first place. I also don’t know why he abandoned me twice – once in the pool and once in the showers.

I have a dim recollection of the steam in the shower making it hard to breathe, and feeling the humidity. And of the soap and water circling down into the floor drains.

But the actual rape is still locked away in my vault. It’s been there for a very long time. And keeping it there has exacted a terrible price for all that time.

But this I know : it won’t be there forever. Some day soon, the walls will fall and I will finish experiencing the worst moments of my life, and after that, I shall be free.

It’s only a matter of time,

More after the break.

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How French am I?

Weird question, I know, but work with me here.

It’s a question I ponder fairly regularly because it seems like a way to get in touch with and understand the parts of me that don’t fit in my hyper rational “British” mindset.

Largely, this revolves around emotion. Feeling it, trusting it, following it, expressing it openly, and so on.

The “British” part of me is the part that demands total self control at all times… despite the fact that it rarely gets it. It’s my overactive punitive superego that constantly holds me to impossible ideals of rationality and efficiency and all that rot.

It’s the side of me that says “be quiet, don’t draw attention to yourself, don’t make a spectacle of yourself, sit down and shut up, nobody wants to hear from you…”.

It is inflexible, unforgiving, and inhuman.

My nascent “French” side, then, is the opposite. It’s bright, happy, energetic, demonstrative, eager, and filled with esprit and bonhomie.

I also think of it as my “Mediterranean” side. My people come from the sunny south of France, after all, not the practical but frigid North.

It is therefore a potential key to adding necessary balance to my psyche by introducing a healthy dose of “grasshopper” to my excessively “ant” personality.

I always identified with the ant in that story. Ant was smart and planned for the future. The grasshopper was an asshole to the ant and lived for the moment.

But that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.

One of the main “French” parts of me I want to tap into is my passions. I am actually a naturally passionate, emotional, enthusiastic person, which is why I have languished away in this tiny restrictive cage of false “reason” and “logic” I’ve been in ever since that fateful day when I was four.

When you retreat that deep into your mind, mind becomes your whole universe. The real world, not by accident, is pushed to the fringes of your consciousness.

But there is so, so much more to life than the “safely” stale, sterile, and stagnant world of the mind.

And some of that shit is super important for the healthy functioning of the human psyche. Things like connection to others, sensory feedback from your environment, a sense of belonging, and that all important feeling of love are all to be found exclusively outside the cramped playpen of infantile intellectualism that keeps me trapped in this woefully inadequate and unsatisfying life of mine.

Man, do I write long sentences. What can I say, I have very long thoughts.

Everything I want and crave and need lies outside my crushingly cramped cage.

All I have to do to get it is throw the crib doors wide and forsake the entirely false sense of “safety” it created in order to finally… finally go out there and explore.

Because I need more, god dammit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got back from the podiatrist.

Irony : turns out his office is right next door to my surgeon Doctor Nguyen, the guy I visited yesterday. My podiatrist, Doctor Jung (hard J, so not pronounced “young”), is in office 360 and Doctor Nguyen is in office 355.

Small world, and all that.

Doctor Jung appeared to be operating out of a GP’s office while the GP was away. Fine by me. I am sure the average GP has everything a podiatrist needs laying around.

First I waited till he got off the phone with another patient, or rather, their hospice. Sounded like he was trying hard to convince the caretaker that there was no point in taking the patient back to Doctor Yung and that the patient really, really needed to go to the ER ASAP.

Man, being a doctor is hard. I have never questioned their big salaries.

Well, not here in Canada, anyhow.

Frankly, he handled that phone call way better than I would. By the end I would have been screaming, “Listen, are you stunned or just lazy? GET HIM TO EMERGENCY OR HE WILL DIE AND IT WILL BE YOUR FAULT.”

I only seem calm and steady of temperament because I have so little stress in my life.

If I was a medical professional and lives were on the line…..watch the fuck out.

Anyhow, once he got off the phone, we had our consultation. We had to go through the whole taking down my personal information on a paper form thing.

WTF is up with that? Why the hell are people like surgeons and podiatrists still using paper records when I know damned well that the BC medical system has centralized patient records now?

Even Doctor Chao, my GP, seems reluctant to use the information off the computer. I have to tell him, “Well, there SHOULD be an X-ray attached to my file…” or say “doesn’t it say that on the screen?”.

Perhaps the problem is information overload. We made all this information available to doctors without upgrading their brains to handle it all.

The bottleneck is the cerebellum!

Anyhoo, information over, he took a look at my feet^[1] and examined the problem area (quite painful in parts) and declared that what I had was a serious buildup of callous that probably covered something non-good.

So he took a “before” picture, then used a scalpel to pare away all that nasty callous. And that was mostly pain free, as a callous is just compacted dead skin and thus has no nerve endings to register pain.

In fact, it felt sort of good, in the way picking a scab can feel good. Suddenly the skin underneath can breathe again and the itch is relieved.

So while he was carving away, it occurred to me that I had spent the last few weeks stalwartly avoiding picking at the damned thing when it turns out that would have saved him a lot of trouble.

Not really. Probably.

So once the site was excavated, lo and behold, there was the culprit : a diabetic ulcer, AKA a hole in my foot.

There it was, on the “after” picture. Site looked way better with all that yellow callous gone, but right in the middle was a little black hole.

Bodies should only have a certain number of pre-approved holes.

So the doctor put some antibiotic on it then covered it with a band-aid. In order to continue to care for it, I am going to need :

1. The antibiotic prescription Doctor Wishlow at the ER wrote me filled. Pretty sure I can send Julian for that. By now, my pharmacist must know Julian well enough from Julian picking up prescriptions for me that him filling one won’t be weird.
2. Bandaids. Luckily, the hole is small so just your regular genetic band-aids will do fine. We may already have them. And….
3. Neosporin, Polysporin, or another antibiotic spray. No prob, stuff’s cheap.

And of course, lose weight and control my diabetes. And stay off the affected area, and when I can’t. put the weight on the heel.

No big deal.

Of course, at the end of the visit, I had to pay him. Cash. Which felt dirty and wrong. Like paying a priest for taking your confession, or paying your Mom for lunch.

I sincerely hope I never have to do that again. And it’s not just the money. I mean, sure it sucks to be out $75.

But the real issue is how it made me feel, and it made me feel gross.

That’s just plain not how things are supposed to be here in Canada.

I feel violated.

More after the break.

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Just a stub

Wow, that previous section is 800 words. EXACTLY 800 words.

Guess I was really cookin’. I really am happiest when I am writing, or at least doing something meaningful and productive.

Now if only I could hammer that thought through all these think layers of emotional scar tissue that keep me from pursuing my own happiness as well as all my ennui and emotional inertia in order to have that actually motivate me to be productive.

Depression makes it so that even knowing doing something will make you happy is not enough to make you want to do it.

Because there’s still that profound resistance to action. The Great Friction. Driving with the parking brake on.

And in some ways, I am trying to learn to generate enough power that I can power through all that resistance and live something like a normal life.

But on another level, I am also trying to relax the resistance and let things flow smoothly and naturally instead of being all cramped up inside.

When those two lines meet, it will be my moment of liberation. Rebirth. Renewal.

But also, um, like, science and stuff.

Who says I can’t be a transcendental rationalist?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went to my appointment with the surgeon who would do my hernia operation today.

Had a bad moment when I thought I was going to have to go up three flights of stairs. That would have been bad enough way back when I was going to VFS.

But these days, where I can’t even walk a block without feeling like I am going to die right there on the street, it would have been a nightmare.

Luckily, this was just another all too typical case of my jumping to a crazy negative conclusion out of sheer neurotic paranoia.

The elevator was right behind me. D’oh.

I’m so wacky.

Talked with the surgeon, Doctor Nguyen. Turns out the “g” in “Nyguyen” is either silent or represents some subtle consonant we don’t have in English.

I think I heard something between the “N” and the “uyen”, but I’m not sure.

Anyhow, we discussed options. He said the sort of operation it would take to repair my big ol hernia has a very high failure rate in fat dudes. The mesh they use can’t really take the pressure of all that adipose tissue for long.

And seeing as, as far as I know, my hernia isn’t causing me pain or health complication or whatever, it just doesn’t make sense to go through what would be a MAJOR operation (involving opening up almost my entire lower abdomen and all the complicated digestive pluming in it) for something that would fail anyhow.

But I have been slowly but steadily losing weight for a while, so when my BMI gets low enough, I will call him up and we’ll have another talk.

And I am fairly disappointed. I was looking forward to getting myself patched up and seeing what effect it has on my life.

But whatever. Currently, it’s a nonissue, so I am content to wait. Obviously, if I begin to experience acute abdominal and/or digestive issues, I will go to the ER and it will be an entirely different game of ball.

Tomorrow’s the podiatrist. Yesterday I withdrew the money (grr) I will have to pay to get my legitimate and serious medical condition treated here in CANADA.

I feel like that is not going to stop pissing me off any time soon. Just thinking of it makes me imagine my eyes turning red, a snort of steam coming out my bovine nose, and the sound of a roaring, crackling fire.

I have a highly cartoonish imagination.

Lord knows what will come of the appointment. If the answer is “a whole lot of even more expensive appointments”, I dunno what I will do, because I can’t afford that.

And yet, unlike the hernia, I am pretty sure this is not the sort of thing I should or could ignore. It will likely only get worse over time and could even threaten the foot itself if it gets bad enough.

And yet, apparently, podiatry is a luxury, as are feet.

That makes no fucking sense.

More after the break.

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A very Richmond experience

So I am waiting to cash my check at the bank last Friday when I observe one of the tellers, a big Caucasian girl, trying to explain something to a tiny Asian old lady.

It goes something like this :

Teller : No, you see, because you put 400 here, you…
Lady (tiny but defiant voice) : I have eight hundred and forty two!
Teller : No, what I am trying to explain is that you put…
Lady (a little louder) : I have eight hundred and forty two!
Teller : Yes, you GAVE me eight hundred and forty two, but now…
Lady : I HAVE EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY TWO!

A few more rounds of this, and then the teller heaves a huge sigh of utter defeat and says “Cantonese or Mandarin?”

She then calls over her very Fresh Young Asian Executive looking co-worker to come take over the transaction.

Obviously, I have no idea what they said, but body language told me that he was doing a classic “deferring while trying to keep the transaction moving” kind of two step.

I think everyone who has dealt with the elderly has learned that move.

“You’re right, Obama was definitely an alien, now if you would just sign here… “

All in all, I quite thoroughly enjoyed observing such a wonderfully human moment.

Made the wait for a teller whizz on by.

Like Alan Funt said about Candid Camera, “we catch people in the act of being human”.

And as the success of the show proved, that’s marvelous stuff.

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That’s good eating

Had a much better than average supper tonight.

Instead of the usual mix of popcorn and trail mix, I had a can of Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Corn Chowed I picked up as an impulse purchase a while back plus some melted cheese on toast/.

And I really should eat that way more often, because not only was that soup crazy delicious (unpaid endorsement… for now at least. Call me, Campbell’s!) it was also very satisfying and gave me a healthy, hearty feeling I don’t normally get from my usual tasty but unsatisfying grub.

I have long wondered exactly how much nutrition I get out of my various trail mixes. I’ve often felt like my body just couldn’t handle all those nuts.

I have no science to back that up. It is merely, as it were, a gut feeling.

But given how good I feel after an actual decent meal, I am willing to bet that at the very least, there was something missing from my diet.

Like B12, for instance. I have to keep reminding myself to get meat and cheese and things like that into my diet.

I ate all the bologna I got in my last order from Sav-On. Not in sandwiches, mind you, just a couple slices with a meal.

Less carbs and less work that way.

I should probably do another order, and this time include some hearty soups and chili and such. Go whole hog on that stuff.

Check out the prices on microwave friendly pot pies, too.

Maybe some eggs too? Hmmmm.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, here’s my psychological dramatis personae so far :

1. The Secular Messiah – My highest ideal self. He sees the world as filled with unnecessary barriers between people that keep them from seeing one another’s true humanity and understanding that we are all flawed, fragile creatures looking for the door into happiness and we all have far more in common than we have that is different and that if only we lower our guard, we can be human with one another at last and live in peace, harmony, and love. He’s sweet but he can be a bit much.
2. The Ogre – AKA The New Guy. Pretty much pure aggressive id. Think Mister Hyde but more intelligent and devious. This is the side of me that wants to use all my gifts to crush all who oppose him and take whatever the fuck he wants by whatever means strike his savage fancy. A barbarian king who wants to rape the world and make it like it. New to the group but making serious waves. Home to all the reptile brain urges for sex, money, and power that I have long suppressed. Not someone you want to cross, or even be around.
3. The Sly Trickster – My oh so clever side. Devious and tricky and a master of illusion, in love with his own cleverness and glorying in the feeling of intellectual superiority over all those slow witted fools he could cheat blind without even trying. Full of mocking contempt and derisive sarcasm and a deep and terrible bitterness about the loneliness and isolation of living in a stupid, stupid world where nobody understands him and he can’t relate to anyone. Dangerous due to his mercurial nature and constant need to prove how smart he is.
4. Big Mama – My big sloppy gooey sentimental side. The side that wants to hug the world and soothe its nerves and help it unburden its stresses so it can relax. Affectionate, loving, caring, and incredibly sentimental, Big Mama longs to look after people and comfort and protect them. She’s always ready with a hug and a cookie and a sympathetic ear. Effusive and compassionate. Does things in big waves of emotion. A tad smothering, perhaps, but a really nice lady.
5. The Dark Master – Think somewhere between Hannibal Lecter and Emperor Palpatine. Ruthless in pursuit of his long term goals. A player of pawns and master of manipulating circumstance to his advantage. Fully aware of how much more of the board and how many more moves ahead he can think than the average person and completely willing to use that to maximum advantage. Patient as a spider in its web and as fixated on his distant goals as a snake is on its prey. And just as coldblooded because all his pleasures are cold. The cold satisfaction of advancing towards your goals, the icy thrill of bending people to your will, the snow-slick satisfaction of watching hotheaded fools reap the whirlwind from their own sentimentality and lack of self-discipline. Not necessarily evil – those distant goals might well involve the betterment of society – but definitely not nice.
6. The Motley Clown – Anything for a laugh. Silly, clumsy, goofy, and charming, he will seduce you with disarming wit, self-deprecating humour, and being just plain cute. Like a flop-eared puppy, his affection and enthusiasm are contagious and impossible to resist. Not inclined towards fidelity as he just wants someone to charm and get affection and nurturing from. That doesn’t mean there aren’t people he loves like the dickens, it just means that if they aren’t around, he will go find an audience somewhere else. A bundle of happiness and joy, but don’t get attached.
7. The Seeker – Intuitive and insightful and deeply deeply sensitive. A gazer into abysses and contemplater of infinitities and seeker of the deepest kinds of truth. A philosopher, a scientist, a scholar, and a monk, all wrapped into one. Driven by a deep desire to understand. Determined to figure it all out. Shockingly more successful at it than most seekers. Possessor of deep secrets and powerful truths. Fascinating to listen to but unearthly strange and a tad unnerving to be around. Knows an uncomfortable amount about the world. One freaky dude.
8. The world’s only Secular Humanist Mystic Poet – A soothsayer without a god, a prophet without inspiration, and a receptacle for knowledge sent by nobody. A seemingly highly rational (to a fault) individual who nevertheless can tap into a deep layer of the zeitgeist and shape its substance into words. Writes in a semi-transcendent state where nothing is planned and the words and images come to him unbidden and he just does his best to keep up with them. Does not always understand what he has written, just knows that it feels “right”. Wants to be understood but it’s far from his top priority.
9. The Soapbox Activist – My shouty strident side, AKA the Tortured Visionary. This side of me really identifies with Cassandra and all other doomed soothsayers. This guy can see more of the board and more of the future and more of the hazards coming our way than everybody else and drives him crazy. He wants to mount a soapbox in the busiest part of the town square and scream “WAKE UP!” into a megaphone till he passes out. Not only does his telescopic vision drive him crazy, so does the constant tension of trying to put his visions into words. Treat with caution because if you let him go too far, his mind will break and he will descend into frothing lunacy. Not for the faint of heart. Heck of an orator, though.
10. This Guy Named Michael – The tiny fragment of me that is the host to that cadre of nutballs and who is a fairly normal, average, regular type Canadian guy who grew up in an obscure pocket of the Maritimes and occasionally gets nostalgic for Mister Dressup and Switchback and who doesn’t know if Canada is the best country in the world, but its the best in his eyes and always will be, eh?

That’s the main ones, anyhow.

Standard disclaimer : these are not separate personalities, I don’t have DID or MPD, I am not that kind of crazy. This is just a step in the process of my figuring out how to unite all my sides into a single identity. Step one, enumerate the problem.

Everybody got that? Good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.