So it’s an update. It’s kind of a pun…. type… thing.

(SFX : Crickets chirping)

Aaaanyhow, here’s the local new update.

Kinda sick right now. Constipated. Dunno why. But I suspect it’s because the local pollen count exceeds the limits of my 24 hour Reactine, and so some of the allergic inflammatory response is getting through anyhow.

So I have the usual cluster of symptoms : sinus headache, achy muscles, a slightly feverish feeling, sore testicles (don’t ask), and constipation.

That last comes from the walls of my intestines becoming inflamed and thus putting the squeeze on their contents, I suspect.

Point is I am somewhat miserable at the moment. I’ve fought the headache to a standstill by keeping my ears and nostrils clear and taking Tylenol, and that’s good, because the headache is by far the worst symptom.

It’s not just the pain, there’s also a particularly nasty kind of dizzy nausea that comes with it. Remarkably like the kind I get from my easily provoked heat stroke, come to think of it.

I wonder if there’s a connection. Something about my sinuses swelling and pressing against my brain, maybe.

There’s a pleasant thought,

Also on the health front, I finally got my eye measurement appointment moved.

The problem was that I had an appointment near VGH for tomorrow at 2:15 pm and there was no way I could make it.

Joe will need the car by then, so Julian can’t drive me. And I am nowhere near well enough to take transit there, seeing as I can’t walk even half a block without feeling like my heart is gonna explode.

So for the last week I have been trying to get the damn thing moved. The last thing I wanted was to rack up yet another no-show on my already spotty medical record.

It took this long because of phone tag, more or less, plus my slowness in figuring out how to get the phone numbers I needed.

At first, I left a message with the office that made the appointment for me, my ophthalmologist Doctor Faezi’s office. But (my bad) I forgot in that message to specify the important parameter in question : that it had to be in the morning.

Funnily enough, I thought they would actually call me to arrange the new appointment instead of changing it without telling me.

Then I call that office back and get them on the phone and tell them the new appointment won’t work either, and the receptionist gets all bitchy with me, saying “Well if you’re just going to keep changing it, you can just make the appointment yourself!”.

Great, take this personally, that helps.

So she gave me the number of the place doing the measurements, and I left them a message. That was yesterday. Today, that place called back and we switched the appointment to… get this…. tomorrow!

But at 10:45 am, which is totally doable.

All that palaver just to end up on the same day, just 3.5 hours earlier.

Oh well. The deed is done. By this time tomorrow, I will have gotten the damn thing ovr with and I can concentrate on fretting about the fact that they’re going to cut my eyeball open and scoop out the cataract while I am awake.

Should be pretty freaky.

More after the break.

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Mother and the Machine Redux

Time to talk about my disparate facets once more.

Lately I have been feeling like the robot Grandma from the Ray Bradbury story, “I Sing The Body Electric”, in that I have been pondering how to reconcile and unify the fact that I am, at the same time, warmly compassionate and coldly calculating.

In other words, both mother and machine.

Standard disclaimer : none of my facets are the real me. I am not my facets, I am the gem on which they shine.

Nevertheless, trying to conceive of a single unified version of myself which contains both of those is proving to be a rather tricky task.

Robot Grandma is about as close as I can get. It’s better than my previous conception, Friendly Alien, in that it includes my strong maternal side.

But it still doesn’t quite “click”. Closer, but not quite there yet.

I have this deadly glitteringly sharp analytical mind – what I call my Brutal Truth Machine. It blazes through obstacles to get to the heart of the truth, passing through relay bank upon relay bank of deductions clicking over like a million busy abacuses.

Abaci? Eh, whatever.

And this Machine of mine is incredibly powerful. So power that it sometimes frightens me, and it IS me….in part, at least.

It has powers of analysis and deduction way beyond what most people could even conceive. It has a sleekly efficient database of insight and understanding that is constantly being updated and optimized. It has a living model of the real world that it can access at any moment in order to compare new information to it.

It has all those things, and more. What it doesn’t have is mercy.

Not for me and not for anyone else. It excuses this by saying it only provides information, and that doesn’t hurt anybody.

And that’s true. Barely. It does not technically hurt anyone if I figure out their mind far better than they ever will.

As long as I don’t let them know.

And on the other paw, I’m a very warmly compassionate, caring, cuddly kinda person. I can be extremely sappy and sentimental. I have a very strong urge to nurture and protect people. especially those I love. In my dream life, I would spend all day spreading sunshine and happiness and lavishing care upon the world.

Somewhere between ice cold robot and big warm puppy dog lies Fruvous.

Traditionally, I reconcile the difference by telling myself, basically, that the Brutal Truth Machine works for the Mama Bear part of me. That all my calculation and pragmatism and analysis serves the goals, beliefs, and ideals of my deep empathy and compassion.

The Machine provides information and method, but it’s still Mama calling the shots.

And that works, as far as it goes. It does the vital job of keeping me emotionally grounded enough not to fall down the rabbit hole of self-referential auto-cannibalistic madness that a Machine like mine can fall prey to if left to run on its own.

One can try to dine on own’s own abstractions, of course. If one is lucky, one will merely starve to death.

But it still doesn’t fit into a single picture and I need that picture if I am to create a single whole and sustainable identity for myself.

At some point, I need to be able to answer that fundamental question :

What the hell am I, anyway?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has been rough.

Why? Because my blood sugar is out of whack. I can’t find my Trajenta (it’s on this desk somewhere, I’m sure of it, probably) and as it turns out I really need that shit because without it I am miserable.

And yet, I’m also fine.

Let me explain.

This is where the double mirror image thing comes in. For some reason, the way this diabetic distress is playing out psychologically is that part of me feels like quivering death and another part of me feels fine.

Weird. Very weird.

It’s like I am seeing two reflections of myself, one normal and bright, the other suffering and dark. It is a bizarre mental sensation and I hope it changes once I eat.

At least I am not foolish enough to worry about which is the “real” me. All my facets are part of me, but no one of them is the “real” me any more than my little finger is the “real” me. I am not my parts.

Not sure that actually follows logically from the stuff about the mirror images, but it needed to be said anyhow.

In between fits of typing, I am hunting for that goddamned Trajenta. I really do not like feeling like this. This feeling is a very good incentive for taking care of myself.

Letting it go this long before looking is extremely foolish of me. But then, I am slowly surrendering my idea of myself as sensible.

I mean, sensible is as sensible does, and I “does” pretty foolish most of the time.

So I am a stumblin’ fool. I can work with that. Sort of save up my common sense so that I have it when I truly need it.

Otherwise I guess I need to rely on the kindness of my loved ones.

I ask so much of them. I am not low maintenance.

But clearly they consider me worth the cost, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Going back to Trajenta, I have no idea how that big box of it I had could have gone missing. It’s a mystery.

Eventually I will have to start checking all the weird places. Under things, behind things, in between things, and so on.

Woops, sudden brainwave, got to do a forgive :

I forgive myself for being a slob. Some people are tidy and some people are sloppy and I happen to be one of the sloppy ones.

There are far worse things to be.

I’ve always been this way. I think it’s because nobody ever expected anything else of me. You can’t internalize discipline you’re never given.

Then again, I have been depressed for most of my life too. And there’s definitely a part of me that wants things to be neat and tidy and orderly and that is greatly distressed by the filth and chaos in which I live.

I’ve just always been too depressed to do anything about it. So I ignore it the best I can.

I get the feeling that’s my approach to a lot of things in life. Food for thought.

More after the break.

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Life in this association

I have figured out that I have spent most of my life in a disassociative state.

Well, semi-dissociative anyhow. If I was fully dissociative, I would be in a rubber room somewhere drooling on the padding while living in a world of my imagination.

And I am pretty sure I’m not. Mainly because I refuse to believe that my powers of imagination are so weak that if I was trapped in my mind, I wouldn’t be able to manage enough lucid dreaming to be able to imagine a fat pile of gold coins into existence on my bed right now.

Nope. Just tried it. Nuthin’.

Good, because if that had worked, I probably would have died of a heart attack.

Anyhow, so when I talk about living in a dissociative state, I am not talking about major psychotic break with reality level dissociation.

I’m talking something I will call “alienation from reality”, and it largely centers around feelings of unreality.

Feeling like I’m not real, feeling like the world isn’t real, feeling like nobody means anything they say (emotions aren’t real?), feeling lost in time and space, feeling surrounded by a howling maelstrom whose icy winds strip all warmth and life from your soul while the endless howling leaves you deafened and numb.

You know. Totally normal stuff like that.

And what’s more, repeated or long term dissociative states lead to other familiar things, like memory loss, depression, suicidal ideation, memory loss, repeated blank fugue states (mind wandering off at inappropriate moments), and difficulty focusing.

I have all of those more or less all the time. It’s kind of hard to imagine them not being there. I have lived in this land of fog and ice for as long as I remember.

Feeling disconnected, forgetting really basic things all the time, living in a constant state of disorientation, not noticing super obvious things in my environment.. these are fundamental parts of the basic structure of my reality.

And that’s not, like… normal.

And it’s not my fault, either. Time for another forgive.

I forgive myself for being such a space case. For being absentminded and spaced out and lost in my own head all the time. I forgive myself for mostly withdrawing from reality as a response to being raped and I forgive myself for never coming out of that bunked one inch more than absolutely necessary in order to deal with life.

It was never a choice. It was what I had to do to survive. And now, at long last, I am stripping away the layers of insulation and attempting my own liberation.

And throughout this process, I will remember that this “hunker in the bunker” reality of mine is not the only reality that I can experience.

I can be out there in the sunshine of the real world, coping and feeling and dealing with things with all of the rest of the kiddies.

And that’s my goal. My destination. My freedom.

Got a lot of spiritual ground to cover until then, but I’m not worried.

It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world to have to depend on others.

Maybe being incapable of standing on one’s own doesn’t invalidate one’s worth.

Maybe you can be a symbiote instead of a parasite.

Maybe there are worse things to be than a burden.

I have felt intense shame and guilt over my own hapless helplessness for basically my entire freaking life.

There has always been my physical coordination issues and visual issues making it hard for me to acquire the physical skills to help myself and forcing me to get help with the simplest tasks or do without.

I mostly did without.

Because I was also timid, so asking for help was almost impossible. I would shrink away from the slightest impatience or disapproval. Add in a highly adaptable mind and you have a recipe for “making do”.

And “carrying on”.

These are all factors over which I had no control. I was clumsy because I had lousy eyesight and I was physically uncoordinated because I had nobody to play physical games with for a large chunk of my preschool years.

And I certainly didn’t ask to be raped, or to be an unwanted child whos family forgot all about him when he stopped being cute.

In their eyes, anyhow. I’ve never stopped being downright adorable in my own eyes.

My point is that it doesn’t make sense and is grossly unfair for me to hate myself for all these things over which I had no choice and no control.

I didn’t ask to end up being kind of a mess. I’ve done remarkably well given the burdens placed upon me by fate and unworthy caretakers.

A lot of important people failed me in my childhood. Parents, siblings, teachers, school officials. I just trudged through life the best I could. Dragged myself through the days doing what I needed to do in order to avoid drawing attention to myself and never getting strong enough to choose a path and walk it alone.

For the most of that time, I didn’t even grasp that was an option, let alone an expectation. All I have ever done is survive. It’s been a bunker mentality for as long as I can remember. All that matters is making it through the day(s).

Having the luxury of occasionally looking around and thinking about where I want to go and who I want to be is a relatively recent development.

And the further back in my life I look, the thicker the fog gets. It’s like as recently as a couple of years ago, I was sleepwalking through life. That makes it all the more impressive that I have coped as well as I have.

It might not seem like it, but I’ve had it pretty rough.

Maybe not rough enough, though. I dunno.

Maybe I would have been better off in the long run if some tragedy or adversity had dragged me from the shadows and forced me to deal with reality.

So far it hasn’t, knock on wood.

Those kinda lessons I can do without.

More after the break.

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Sleep is a beast

Oooh nice. Very impressive sounding.

Like I’ve said, my overactive bladder has been making sleep especially difficult for me lately, and it’s never been easy for me in the first place.

Hard to pinpoint a reason why. Certainly my overactive mind must play a role. Overactive, and eternally hungry for stimulation.

So I spend all day stimulating it and feeding it a rich diet of information and virtual experience and of course, in my down moments, deep deep thoughts.

No wonder I always have a case of mental indigestion. It’s a wonder I can sleep at all. My deeply ingrained habit of living life like it’s a nonstop intellectual buffet leaves me precious little time to actually just slow down and process what’s already in the pipeline.

I think that’s another reason those times when I have ended up walking outside alone ended up leaving me feeling so much better. With that blessed respite from constant input, my poor battered brain was actually able to catch up with the backlog.

Most of the time, in my current life, that only happens when I am lying in bed either on the way to sleep or the way out of it.

Maybe that’s why I have such a hard time getting out of bed sometimes. I am not done thinking all the thoughts I need to think yet, and my brain doesn’t want me to go back to my smorgasbord existence until it is done.

So I end up just sitting on the edge of my bed staring off into space for a while. Call it Zero Input Program. Secondary Processing Maximization Routine. Think Mode.

Looked at that way, I should be far more forgiving of myself for those moments. It’s not that I am too depressed to move or that I am just “sitting there doing nothing”.

I’m just sitting there doing nothing conscious. That’s not just acceptable, it’s commendable. My poor beleaguered consciousness needs all the rest it can get. This high speed brain of mine tends to run it off its feet.

It’s like I am constantly running after a highly energetic and acrobatic toddler.

Well, might as well start doing this Think Mode thing on purpose. When I lay down after finishing my words for the day, I will deliberately clear my mind and open my consciousness up to be used to the max by all the subconscious processes that are always crowding one another in the hallways of my mind.

Have at it, little thoughts. Get done what you need to get done. Then you can release your resources back to the conscious mind and hopefully make the thoughts remaining easier to process with the extra resources, and start some glorious cascade collapse of cerebral complexity that leaves me very relaxed and calm.

And asleep. Sound, sound asleep.

Because for once, there isn’t a million different things going on in my head.

There is just me, my mind… and silence.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling heavy and dark and full of danger, like a heavy thundercloud, right now.

I can feel the bitterness and rage roiling within me like the first circular breezes twisting together into what will eventually be a mighty tornado.

I want nothing more than to howl my rage out over the land in an air-cracking blizzard that turns day into night and seems fit to scour the land of all living things, including humanity and their works.

Instead my wrath burns like a heat wave, blistering the soil and searing the grasses.

What I’m saying is I feel like weather. Bad weather.

Been feeling irritable and anxious again. Deep dissatisfaction with my stupid fucking life is growing within me once more, as is the even more serious feeling of being trapped in this life and this rotting hulk of a body with no way out in sight.

I don’t want to be me any more. I never really did.

“You must be Michael Bertrand.”
“Only because I don’t have a choice. “

So for the millionth time, I dream of escape. Of just walking away from everything and everyone and going in search of some place where I feel like I belong.

And when I find that place, start a whole new life there. One where I never talk about my past, where I invent a more competent and confident version of myself to take on the world and dream myself into a whole new reality.

There would perforce be a certain amount of lying involved. And a much larger amount of misleading and misdirection. Not happy about it but one does not get reborn without a certain amount of sacrifice.

And who knows, I might succeed in making some kind of life for myself that way. Make a heavy guillotine type cut with my poisonous past and all that trauma, and go into the future a whole new man, strong and pure and true.

I could even lie about my age. I mean, what the hell, nobody suspected I was in my mid to late forties at VFS until I told them.

I guess never reaching adulthood has kept me convincingly clueless.

But I still don’t hate myself. Those days are gone. I hate my life and what has become of it and I hate the situation I am in but I do not hate myself.

I’m an amazing guy. The evidence is overwhelming. I’ve never met anyone even remotely like me. The fact that such a sweet and special guy has languished this long in the doldrums of depression is a deep and terrible tragedy and a profound injustice.

There’s just no way out when you are too sick to help yourself. When your illnesses actively prevent their own treatment.

And depression does that like nobody’s business.

All I can do is make it through the day and do my best to get better. It sucks that I am essentially all alone in that struggle but I don’t see any choice in the matter.

Maybe group therapy would help me at this point. But given my explosion of rage at things like MyDepressionGroup.com, I severely doubt it.

What’s the point when you know they won’t understand you? When you know you will tower above them like a dark god and they will be left mute by the sheer power and darkness of the shit you have to say?

Maybe I should join MENSA after all.

Maybe then I could find someone who can understand me.

More after the break.

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And now I am back with my dine-in order of the week : chips n’ salsa then pulled pork poutine from the Flying Beaver Cafe.

Sounds like a CBC radio show. With lesbians.

I wasn’t sure about spending $4.50 on chips and salsa, but the salsa is fresh, so I will say that it was worth it.

I continue to get a little healthier each day. My digestion is almost completely back to normal now, thank goodness.

I get hungry at the right time, and my appetite doesn’t disappear at a random time after I start eating any more. And that’s a Good Thing.

My pooping is almost back to normal.

(WARNING : Poop talk incipit. It won’t be too explicit. )

For a while, I have been semi-constipated. My pooping became oddly…. quantized. I would poop a certain amount and that’s it. I could tell that my bowels were still at least 3/4 but no amount of straining could move the rest.

It was rather annoying. Trying, even.

But that seems to have abated. I was able to actually empty my bowels earlier today. The full job, no leftovers.

Now that’s how I spell relief. Phew!

Still peeing fairly frequently though. And it’s making it hard to sleep. I am pondering throwing my fate into the winds and taking one of my sleeping pills.

At this point, wetting myself in my sleep seems like a small price to pay to get three or four hours of solid sleep.

It’s either that or hook up a catheter, and while getting one after my gall bladder out in order to relieve my overfull bladder was not nearly as traumatic as I thought it would be, it was still very weird and not something I am eager to experience again.

Not when there’s choice, anyhow.

Well, the poutine’s pretty decent. The contents are quite good but the presentation is a tad off. In order to fit everything in the box, they just kinda dumped all the cheese, pork, and veggies atop the fries and filled the rest of the space with an order of gravy.

Gravy that can’t make it to the fries because of all the cheese ETC in the way.

A quibble, I admit. It tastes good and that’s what is important.

At the moment, I am feeling kinda mellow. A cholesterol laden meal tends toi do that to me. Now all I want to do is relax and maybe even take a post-prandial nap.

Hopefully my bladder will cooperate.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talk about the gaping hole in the middle of my soul.

It’s been there for as long as I can remember. It is presumably the ragged toothed edge of the wound left by my rape. That brutal violation of my being ripped a huge hunk of flesh from the very center of my self and it has never healed.

Perhaps it never will.

My problems flow from there. When I contemplate doing the sort of things that would enable my escape from this prison of ice and stone and that icy cold ghost rises up to stop me, that’s the force of my own coping mechanisms kicking in and stopping me from doing something that will cause me pain from my main wound.

This strikes me as a valuable insight. Go me.

All this coldness inside me is simply the active mechanism of the retreat into the nice cool world of my mind I did to escape my rape.

That was a very expensive trip. Cut me off from the rest of the world emotionally, for one. All my isolated loneliness came from that costly retreat.

Yeah, my school and my family both failed me and left me broken and isolated and so very very abandoned and alone, but I have often wondered if it would even have been possible for anyone to reach me.

This merciless mechanism of mine shuts down anything which might activate the wound, and that includes human connection.

This explains why none of the kids who tried to befriend me when I was a kid succeeded. Loneliness led me to let them try, but once my initial enthusiasm faded, the Cold Reaper manifested to shut that warm shit down ASAP. ^[1]

Nothing must wake the Giant Within.

I can feel it so clearly right now. All these hot, painful tendrils of traumatized emotion leading back to the initial trauma that shattered by four year old soul.

It’s a wonder I am as functional as I am, given the size of the wound I have been carrying around for 43 years.

I hereby congratulate myself on not ending up in prison for heinous crimes committed in a vain attempt to silence the shrieking demons that roost in my skull.

Way to go, me. You’re one heck of a guy.

I don’t know how one goes about healing a wound so old Different Strokes was on the air when it happened. Probably not the sort of thing one can figure out. My powerful mind is worse than useless in cases like these.

It actively gets in the way.

But it feels good to have gotten one level closer to the heart of the problem. I feel like the issue is now laid bare, and perhaps now the healing power of sunshine and fresh air can get to it and start making me whole again.

I want to live again. It’s been so long, Master. Please let me live again.

More after the break.

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Getting out of neutral

Well it’s a quarter after eight in the evening and I am here in front of Mister Computer instead of out doing McD’s with Le Gang because I am not feeling too good.

I feel very tired and yet also tense. This makes sense because the frequent need to urinate has been messing with my sleep and making me all dozy and out of sync.

So part of me wants to sleep for a year and part of me wants to run screaming into the night stark naked and foaming at the mouth.

So, par for the course, really.

Looked up the symptoms of a bladder stone or stones today. I have almost all of them. No blood in urine yet, thank goodness. And my abdominal pain only happens while I am peeing and for a short time after.

But the rest, yup. Totally convinced I have one or more bladder stones now. Which, like I said before, means these antibiotics aren’t going to do shit for my condition.

Should have made an appointment with Doctor Chao today. Dammit. I will have to do it on Monday. This shit always comes up on Fridays, dammit.

Speaking of appointments, I am still trying to cancel or reschedule my eye measurement appointment for next Wednesday.

Amazingly, the document I have for the procedure does not include the lab’s phone number. Or rather, it does…. along with the numbers for three other things in the same section of VGH.

And of course, none of them are labeled “eye measurement place”.

I left a message on the voicemail of the place marked Artificial Eye Lab. Seemed like the most likely one. I mean, to make an artificial eye, you’d need to take some pretty precise measurements of the originals, right?

It’s important that we get this sorted ASAP because if those measurements don’t happen then my cataract surgery on April 26 can’t happen, and I am really looking forward to it.

Could be quite life changing to be able to see almost twice as well.

Mostly, I look forward to being able to see without squinting so much, and the resulting decrease in eye strain and eye strain headaches.

Right now, my problem is neutral appetite. I really need to eat. But I really don’t want to eat. Nothing I can think of sounds good to me.

Even the thought of foods I love like beef spaghetti and watermelon can barely get more than a strained “Meh. ” from my appetite.

Nothing for it but to go put together some kind of meal and hope to be able to make myself eat some of it. Never a fun thing to have to do.

I could just skip supper. It’s a tempting thought.

But a very stupid one. I’d surely regret it. Skipping meals is dumb.

I still do it every once in a while, though.

Sometimes you just can’t make yourself do the smart thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Basically, I’m boneless.

Not literally, of course. That would be horrifying beyond belief. But in the sense of lacking internal structure on a psychological level.

Today was Therapy Thursday. Told Doc Costin about my medical misadventure last weekend. He said that if I think I have a bladder stone, I shouldn’t wait for the medical system to figure it out. I should look up the symptoms myself.

Good point. Like I told him, I guess I just want to be able to trust some authority figure(s) to have my best interests at heart instead of having to fight just to get them to do their goddamned jobs.

Anyhow, we ended up talking about how much trouble I have providing structure for myself, and that led me to this whole boneless thing.

On my own, I’m just a puddle of goo. I can assume any shape or form in order to deal with a specific problem, but only for a moment. Just long enough to deal with the problem. Then it’s goo time again.

And that’s a pretty lousy setup for sanity, let alone trying to actually live a life. Sure, this amazing mind of mine can do a lot of magic, but without a solid structure to build on and a strong engine driving things, it’s all just smoke and mirrors and special effects.

There isn’t even an audience. Well, except for you nice people. 🙂

I told him I was thinking about going back to school. I was surprised by how happy that made him. Apparently he had been wanting me to do that for a long time.

Of course, I’d have to figure out where. I am open to the idea of moving someplace new in order to go to school.

I have the grades and the abilities to go some place that’s actually, like, good. I should probably give that a try.

Of course, it’s hard to start looking for an institution when I don’t even know what it is I want to study yet.

Psychology would be the obvious choice. It’s a subject that I both love and excel at. Every psych prof I have ever had has been astonished by the depth of my insight and the quality of my analysis.

‘Cause I’m awesome like that,

Then again, one thing I discovered at Kwantlen is my dislike for the research aspect of taking psych courses. I will happily learn, analyze, discuss, examine, diagnose, and all the rest, but the whole “put your work in the context of the word of others” thing leaves me colder than cold.

Fuck that. I blaze my own tail. Others can follow me if they like. But I am not going to try to squeeze my big thoughts into their small boxes.

There’s also philosophy, of course. Not exactly a lot of big money careers in that but at least I wouldn’t have to fuck around with research.

I’m a thinker, not a scholar. Knowledge is a mindless thing. A book can know a lot, and it’s just paper and board.

But no book can think new thoughts.

I could take creative writing. I’m certainly good at it. And I think I would enjoy the challenge of writing different kinds of works.

I could probably make quite the impression on the professors, too. And unlike those assholes at VFS, they might even give a damn and be willing to help me get ahead.

And what the hell, I might actually learn something. I am certainly nowhere near as good a writer as I could be, and I would greatly appreciate any help I could get strengthening my writing and getting used to producing good quality work written to a purpose on a regular basis.

Stuff I might actually proofread. Imagine.

So yeah. Creative Writing sounds like a good starting point. Doesn’t seem like it is the kind of thing that leads to a career, but whatever.

I would be quite happy to enter academia and stay there for the rest of my life. I’ve always resisted that idea in the past out of a desire to make it in the “real world”, but you know what?

Fuck the real world. I just wanna get paid.

Besides. I know to my soul that I would be an amazing professor. I have the presence and the charisma and contagious enthusiasm. My methods would be unorthodox but the students would adore me and I would eventually win over all my critics, even that crusty old dean who tries to get me fired.

That might be a movie. Many of them, in fact. But I shittest thou not, I can totally see my actual academic career going more or less that way.

Oh what I could do with a Philosophy 101 class. Those kids are going to learn to think, god damn it, whether they like it or not.

There is also the option of going to a college to learn network administration. I am pretty sure I can handle the technical aspect of it. Underneath the jargon it’s just another system, and I am pretty good at understanding systems.

I doubt I would enjoy the work all that much, though. I mean, troubleshooting would probably keep my interest. That’s a challenge to meet, a problem to solve, a mystery to investigate and solve.

But the routine administration stuff would bore me to tears. As would solving really easy problems all the time. I’d probably end up being one of those guys who automates all the routine tasks and the solutions to routine problems so that I can get paid to sit in front of my computer and play video games all day.

So, like now. But with money.

So I dunno. Creative Writing still seems like the best bet. But I am a very talented dude. So I can apply my extraordinary gifts in a lot of different ways.

Guess I will cogitate upon this mystery some more.

No rush – it’s not like I’m dying or anything.

Oh wait….. um…..

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling more twitchy and pissed off lately.

Got that feeling like I want to scream in someone’s face. My natives are restless as fuck. I feel tense and unsettled and irritable.

Pain probably has a lot to do with that. I feel tired and achy. Presumably my antibiotic, Cefixime (Ce? Fix I/Me!) is waging war with my bladder infection and such warzones are not always happy places to be.

Go pill go! Kick that motherfucker out. I am tired of feeling sick and I hate having to get up and go pee so often.

It’s like I have the bladder of a hummingbird, for fuck’s sake.

Oh well. I will send some Tylenol after the aches, and soldier on.

Mood wise, other than the crankiness, I feel… odd. Somewhat alienated and/or dissociated. Kind of in the middle of things without touching anything.

Still have that haunted feeling, although at the moment, I feel more like I am the one doing the haunting.

Some days you’re the ghost, I guess.

Saw a list of signs of dissociation from depression on Facebook. There was about twenty of them. I’ve experienced every single one of them, and some of them are either daily occurrences or background constants of my reality.

So I appreciate the reminder that these things are not, in fact, normal, and that it is in theory possible to live without them.

The prospect of a truly clear mind terrifies and delights me. I get giddy just trying to imagine what that would be like. I have lived in this fog choked field for so long.

Of course, we know the main reason why : my life is so virtual that it’s no wonder that I feel so alienated from reality and disconnected from humanity.

I do it to myself. Some day soon I will stop, or at least push the other way.

Weather is getting nice enough for a tiny excursion into the Very Large Room Full Of Nature And Stuff. If it wasn’t for this damned bladder infection, I would have done it by now. But as it is, I am going to wait till I feel a bit more stable.

Not too long from now, though. A week at most. I took my 3rd of 10 daily Cefixime pills this morning, and hopefully by the time I take the last, I will be cured.

Then I can resume my usual miserable lifestyle.

I clearly have yet to develop my ability to vent my frustrations with my life in an entirely constructive way. Ideally, in a way that leads to things actually becoming better.

What a radical freaking notion.

But at least I don’t take it out on myself much any more. I know that I deserve better than this stinking fucking life.

And who knows, maybe one of these times my rage will actually jump the gap and arc to the other side of my depression and actually start my engine up.

Who knows where I will go then?

More after the break.

---

Slightly less grumpy

Feeling a tad less cranky than earlier. Still not in the best of moods but at least I don’t feel like screaming in a random stranger’s face any more.

A mildly assertive “Hey!” at best.

---

Brief break to go eat supper and watch stuff with J&J.

Well, a two and a half hour break. So not that brief. Anyhow.

Still in that weird “middle” mood. But I think I have started to settle down to Earth and thaw out a little, probably because I had a turkey pot pie with supper.

Now that I have my appetite (mostly) back, I am making a deliberate effort to eat some larger than usual meals in order to pump myself back up.

And that definitely means getting back into making and eating at least one Vitamin B12 rich meal a day. I’d been slipping on that front recently and it’s kind of important in that you really, really need it and eating it is the only way to get it.

And I feel a lot better when I get it. Warmer, stronger, more solid.

I should honestly get some with every meal. Which I could do via cheese, I think. Get used to making cheese toast for myself with every meal.

That seems doable and affordable. Of course, our cheese is Kraft singles, and those are basically sliced Cheez Whiz, so I would have to make sure that stuff actually has B12 in it as I am not convinced it qualifies as food.

Sure does taste good, though.

It’s very nice to be able to eat more or less normally again. Right now the main health symptom remaining is trouble urinating. Got that weird sucking feeling in my bladder when I pee, and everything in that area is very tender and sore after.

I honestly think I might have a bladder stone. A big one. That’s what is causing that sucking feeling – the stone is sitting on the exit to the bladder and partially blocking it, causing it to drain very slowly. The sucking feeling is the sensation of the urine creeping past the blockage, creating suction around the rim.

If so, then this Cefixime ain’t gonna do jack shit. It’s not an infection, it’s a rock. It’s going to take mechanical intervention to get rid of it.

Hopefully ultrasound can do the trick. That way they don’t even have to make an incision. Just a few zaps of the right frequency in the right place and the stone is reduced to a fine grit that passes without pain.

Of course, not being a doctor, I could be wrong.

It’s been known to happen.

But I don’t think I am. This problem has been growing for years and I have tried to explain it to various doctors but I can’t seem to get the concept across just by describing my symptoms to people.

Guess it’s time to just tell someone I think it’s a bladder stone and see how they react.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

Depression has a lot of ways to kill you.

It doesn’t have to put your head on those railroad tracks.

It can just keep you from getting out of the way.

---

Feeling better today. Still not out of the woods but the forest’s thinning and I am pretty sure I hear cowbells in the distance.

Still struggling with food. Well, the infection is still there in my bladder, so that’s probably throwing things off a fair bit. Took the second of ten antibiotic pills today.

It’s Auro-Cefixime, for the record. Auro being the manufacturer, I assume. So Cefixime.

I think I had it before. Wiki doesn’t list any alarming or exotic side effects. Just the usual stuff. Dizziness, headache, nausea, spontaneous manifestation of ancient spirits, the transmutation of flesh beyond the rational limits of the material plane, rash.

I was right. That WAS fun to write. I need to do more wacky writing in the future.

But I have to overcome this terrifying inner paralysis first. This icicle dagger thrust into the core of my heart has to come out and that’s hardly a linear process.

I have so much energy and talent to contribute to the world. And to myself. I deserve to be out there earning a living and yet when I try to point myself in that direction, the killer frost rises and kills the drive while also punishing it.

It makes me feel downright haunted. Like somewhere in my soul lives an ice spirit who is sucking my life force away as soon as it is generated. And the greedy thing only leaves enough for me to eke out my current bare subsistence.

I mean really. This is no way to live. Sitting all day in my filthy room in front of the computer, self-medicating with video games and falling apart at the seams while life passes me by at a supersonic speed.

I deserve to be out there with the rest of the kids, earning cash, doing something meaningful with my life, and proving my worth to the world.

But this goddamned mental illness holds me back. And like I’ve said many times before, I wish I could be all mellow and Zen about it and say that whatever may come will come and I will just concentrate on living in the moment and all that bullshit.

But I am simply not built that way. I have a deep restlessness that demands action regardless of whether action is possible, and being between it and the immovable object that is my depression is torture.

Like I am constantly having the life squeezed out of me. Like I am pinned down in the heart of an invisible inferno and it makes me want to scream the sky black. Like everything I do is just another way to cope with the pain of the flames.

I’m so sick of this shit. I want out. Open the castle gates, I’m coming out.

But the gates are already open.

I can walk out any time I like.

I just…. can’t make myself do it.

More after the break.

---

No real difference

I suppose there’s no real difference between being chained to the ground and being “free” but unable to move.

The second has a soupcon more bitter irony, I suppose.

Today has been trying. I go from fairly okay to various levels of dishability without warning. The only patterns are that eating is probably going to make it worse and laying down for a while will eventually make it better.

Tonight’s Malady du Jour (well, Nuit, technically) was dizziness. I was in the shower getting ready to go out when I starting to feel dizzy and heavy.

And I might have begged off of our usual Tuesday night McDonalds run. But I was feeling cranky and stubborn. Besides, this was my one chance to pick up the stuff my order from Sav-On missed.

Still not sure what went wrong this time. Somehow two of the three packages of cookies I thought I ordered never made it to the actual order.

So either I hallucinated ordering them (entirely possibly with my current level of mental degradation) or something very odd happened in the digital gizzards of their website.

Digital gizzards. I slay me,

So I sort of staggered and reeled through Sav-On to get my stuff. Two packages of cookies and a 2L of Fresca and another of Sprite Zero… type… stuff.

See, Sprite appears to be fucking with me, because sometimes it’s called Sprite Zero (as God intended) and sometimes it’s called Sprite (zero sugar).

And like, why? Are they the same thing, or what? If so, why have two names? If not, why have two products that occupy the same niche?

What is with this madness?

This is the sort of thing that keeps weirdos like me up nights.

7up never dicked me around like this.

Anyhow, I managed to make it through the shopping experience and the paying experience and then went to use the ATM only to find some morons had put displays up all around it, boxing it in.

Great. Because what I need most right now is to make shit trickier.

Joe moved one of the displays and I wedged in there and got my transaction on, but then when I went to unwedge myself the heels of my sneaks hit some pallet and down I went directly onto my coccyx.

Which seemed to absorb the blow. My tailbone is a little sore now, but otherwise I appear to be undamaged, which is a blessing.

There are so many ways that could have been so much worse.

I trashed the display I bumped into, and feel no shame for it. It’s their damned fault for crowding the goddamned ATM.

Some of us still use cash, ya know!

Now I am home and I feel…. rough. Sort of sore and bruised inside. What I need now is to lay down in the dark for a while and recharge.

So I will.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Neither of us knows what the hell we are doing

I’m a punch drunk husband and you’re my slap happy wife
We fumble through love and we’ll stumble through life

We (–) all our dreams and hocked all our charms
But as long as we fall into each other’s arms

And both of us just kind of lean on each other
To our great astonishment, we make it together

And continue to drunkenly waltz through our lives
Our cheeks pressed real close, our hearts side to side

And nothing we do will ever be right
We’ll be doing it wrong, but we’ll be doing it with style

And I’ll get punched by your dad, and you’ll be curse by my mother
But why would we care if we still have each other?

And at the end of the night, we’ll stagger on home
And finally pass out together, alone.

---

Well that went a lot better than the first time.

Looking back, the first time I tried to write this frigging thing, I started writing before I had any clear idea what I was writing. Just the general notion.

This time, the words starting coming to me while I was taking one of my ever so numerous pees, and I finished up then wandered over to Mister Computer to get as many of them as I could.

And I am quite pleased with that. Before now I almost always thought of stuff, enjoyed it in the moment, then filed and forgot it.

Actually interrupting what I was doing to write it down was too much of a disruption. Way easier to just mindlessly retain it with all the other latent ideas.

I have quite the extensive encyclopedia of them. If i could print, collate, curate, and package them all. I’d make a mint.

But I have been loosening up lately. My mind has been far, far too rigid and inflexible and bounded by fear for a very long time and that is no way for a healthy organism to live. So I am shaking out the rust, cracking the crust off the backhoe, and breaking some new fucking ground for once.

No predictions as to timescale, though. I’ve recently realized that I am way too future focused. I’ve known that for years but only in a vague way. Now I get the picture.

It’s like trying to live life looking through a telescope. There’s looking into the future because you want to control your destiny and there’s looking into the future because you can’t handle the present or the past, and that shit’s a recipe for failure.

Because how can you get anywhere in life if you never look at it directly? That future you escape to isn’t real. It’s just another fantasy realm in science fiction clothing and as nice as those are to visit, you sure as fuck can’t live there.

No matter how high you fly in your mind, your ass is still here on Earth, and that’s where everything you want in life can be found.

So the solution is simple : get the fuck up and do shit.

Everything else is just a complication.

More after the break.

---

Water to Dubai

You know how the city-state of Dubai gets its water?

From a never-ending series of water trucks.

Just a steady line from the nearest oasis to the actual city. Every hour of every day features an ant like line of trucks traveling between the two points in a nonstop bucket line trying to empty the oasis into the city.

Well I feel like one of those trucks today because my bladder infection has reduced the capacity of my bladder by about half, which had doubled the frequency (at least!) of my goddamned trips to the bathroom to pee, and it’s really getting on my nerves.

Especially because A) the infection is making urination somewhat painful, especially right after I finish when it feels like someone’s been using my guts as snow tires, and B) I have been drinking a lot of water because my body seems to want it real bad.

As in, I pour myself my usual 1.5 liter glass of water, start taking a drink, and by the time I am done the thing’s half gone.

I suck at listening to my body, but even I can figure that one out.

I seem to be improving. Knock on wood. I get my appetite back now and then, but eating is still really tricky because no matter how hungry I am, there’s a good chance that when the first bit of food hits my stomach, my stomach will clam up on me and the rest of the meal will only get into me if I force-feed myself.

And God do I hate doing that. Really makes me wish they would invent the Jetsons meal in a pill already.

Pills I can do. It’s food that troubles me currently.

Then again, the problem might be that I keep eating Smartfood popcorn. Popcorn is not an easy to digest food. I should not be restarting my digestive system on hard mode.

I should be eating nice gentle easy to handle foods, like noodles and pasta and soup and such. Low impact foods I can use to build back my strength, and THEN build my way back up my usual high impact diet.

Oh. And I probably should not drink carbonated beverages. Should not be adding gas to the fomenting cauldron that is my lower G.I. tract.

Never been quick to change my habits. I am a creature of them, after all.

But once I get my grocery delivery tomorrow, I will be in a better position to behave sensibly. My supplies are low right now and I have a bunch of stuff showing up between 7 am and 9 am tomorrow.

Of course, knowing them, half of what I ordered won’t show up or will show up wrong.

But I definitely told them NO SUBSTITUTIONS, so if one grain of sugar shows up, I will be seriously pissed.

Being sick has made me real cranky. Best not give me an outlet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

All right, might as well get this done.

So, yesterday, I felt awful.

Like I did in “There can be no doubt” in “Not so good” on Friday, but a whole lot worse.

My bad appetite turned into feeling like something died in my stomach, and it wasn’t happy about it. And progressed from there.

I got a sinus headache that made my skull ring like a church bell, and no amount of sinus draining seemed to make any difference.

My muscles ached all over too.

I had that weird sucking feeling in my bladder, too. Still do.

But the most important symptom was that I was having trouble breathing. Which is not an easy subject for me to handle. Jesus, I am freaking out just thinking about it.

Which is ironic because it might have turned out to be mostly a panic attack. Whatever.

Anyhow, all this got worse and worse till I decided it was time to go to the ER. I grabbed my meds and some books and such, and Julian was nice enough to drive me there.

Got admitted. Then waited. And waited. By the time an hour and a half rolled passed, i was out of patience and starting to wonder what the hell was going on when I kept seeing people who arrived after me be admittedly.

So by two hours, I was pestering harassing the triage nurse demanding answers. She said she couldn’t admit me yet because they didn’t have a bed,

Or at least, that’s what I figured out she meant later, when I calmed down. It was a perfectly reasonable reasons for delay but I was in way too much pain to be reasonable about my needs.

And while I feel bad about menacing that poor nurse for no good reason, I am also proud of myself for sticking up for myself for once. And in realtime, even.

Anyhow, got fully admitted. Put on the gown, laid there naked, had a heck of a lot of blood taken, various other tests

Including a Covid test. Which was waaaaaay more painful than I thought. I mean, I knew it was a big Q-Tip up the nose – I had picked that up from pop culture.

But holy frick did it hurt, especially the last inch or so.

At least it was brief. Crunch, Done.

And luckily I have Hospital Mode, where I doze at around 80 percent sleep most of the time. Makes the time pass and lets me rest while leaving me awake enough to wake up when someone needs me,

After all the poking and prodding and consulting with my doctor, it was determined that I had a bladder infection. Looking back, I think a lot of the problems were caused by the blood sugar crash that going so long without eating enough caused.

I’m too tired to rephrase that better.

I got home from the ER and just the effort of walking from the cab to the apartment damned near kill me, and I felt completely miserable. Absolutely wrecked.

And it just got worse and worse and I sat there glowering at the world because I had just spend 9.5 hours in the ER and I came back feeling worse than before.

Luckily, taking two extremely labour intensive poops made things way better. Turned out I was very constipated. Probably also from not eating enough.

Once I had a little appetite, I ate a quick meal. Too quick – I ended up bunged up again, and had to stay up till I figured out how to unbung again.

Turns out it was Tylenol. Gave me enough pain relief to sleep. Not what I expected.

Now I need more sleep. This will probably take more Tylenol. Over the next few days I Will have ot build myself back to being somewhat healthy.

Oh, and get the antibiotics for my bladder infection.

More after the break.

---

Where did that come from?

I have been trying to read a book called The Self Confidence Workbook.

Trying for a while now, in fact. And in theory there should be no problem,

I have the book. I can read. I have plenty of time.

But there is this nagging issue that holds me back : it makes me explode with rage.

Routinely, regularly, and for no sane reason.

It reminds me of what happened when I tried to join and participate in MyDepressionTeam.com, a sort of specialized social media site where people who suffer from depression can talk about their problems and offer each other support.

Sounded good to me. In fact it seemed like the sort of thing I could benefit from.

But then again, so did group therapy.

Instead, when I went to write or comment, this incredible rage that burned like a stellar remnant exploded in and made me want to scream and rant and spit in people’s faces.

This came as a shock. I had no idea I had that in me.

I’m going to try to give it voice :

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you, you dull, driveling, ridiculous people! Fuck you and your banal Pollyanna bullshit advice and your dull bovine support and your meaninglessly placid reassurances that you ‘understand’. Because ya don’t, you hear me? Ya don’t! Ya don’t understand a god damned thing. And you certainly understand me. And if you can’t even understand me, how the fuck can you help me? Spoiler alert : you can’t. So just leave me the fuck alone instead. I’d rather be alone than misunderstood. ”

That proved fertile. Turns out the real problem is the teenaged classic, “nobody understands me”, raised to the power of excess IQ.

It’s really lonely at the top of the IQ chart. Nobody understands you, and if you try to get help, you get resentment and jealousy instead because people can’t look past their envy long enough to see your humanity.

I’ve been metaphorically locked in this lonely capacious skull of mine for a very long time. I don’t even know if it is possible for me to let alone in.

No wonder so many people in my position become raging elitist assholes. It’s a way of dealing with all that frustrated rage.

I’m starting to wonder if they have the right idea.

I mean, at least some of them seem to be happy. \

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,