I recently rediscovered this manic gem of a song :

I adore this song to death. I love how silly it is, and how infectious it is, and how over the top it is. I even love that bizarre noise that sounds like a cartoon pig from a British children’s show being anally violated with a garden hose.

We-weel, we-weel, we-weel indeed, Mister Pig.

But what I love most about the song is the near-psychotic level of cheerfulness. It’s so upbeat and peppy that it makes me feel like I am about to go full manic. It sounds like the prelude to a very colorful murder spree, and I love that.

Because I’m a sick son of a bitch. But you already knew that.

When I hear that nutty little song, I get this urge to dance around like a demented child on crack with a huge grin on my face and high-stepping it like I am in the world’s fanciest and most ridiculous circus marching band.

It cheers me up, and that’s a precious thing in a life like mine.

Had therapy today. Doc Costin had oral surgery recently, and it wound up going into overtime. Ended up being far bigger a deal than previously thought.

Been there. When I was a kid, they put me under the knife to remove an abscess from my gums and found a tooth growing upside down, sideways, and backward underneath, and so a one hour surgery turned into three.

The end result was that Doctor Costin did not do much talking today.

Dang. I really missed his interrupting me to go off on some random tangent when I am trying to express a deep, intimate, and complex emotion to him.

Told him about the eye surgery, natch. Mentioned how I didn’t like the icy cold feeling the Ativan gave me, but it sure kept me calm.

I have a few of those kicking around here somewhere from when Doc Costin gave me a few to try. So it’s nice to know that they can get the job done.

Might come in handy if I ever escape this little rat cage of mine and go out into the big bad world and need something to keep my social anxiety dogs from barking.

Sure would be nice to experience the world without being in a constant low grade panic attack every moment I am out of the apartment.

It amazes me to look back at my life and realize how much of it I spent panicking. Pretty much all my time at both Kwantlen and VFS was spent freaking out.

I just didn’t realize it because for me, that was normal. That’s how I always felt around people. Even my own family.

It took gaining a lot of perspective for me to realize that no, that is not in fact normal. Most people are not terrified all the time, Some even can be relaxed and happy in a social setting, even around people they don’t know.

And all that anxiety contributed mightily to my social awkwardness because it’s hard to be smooth and friendly and open to others when your bloodstream is full of fear adrenaline that is screaming at you to fight, flee, or hide.

Thing is, I pretend to be fine. I put on a show that is more for me than the audience. Like I am trying to fool myself into being calm.

But what choice do I have? Letting my anxiety show would attract attention and then everyone would know what a freaked out freak I am.

So I smile.

More after the break.

Are you plastic?

I’m really getting into this guy’s stuff, despite his… um, less that natural delivery.

The meat of the vid is that there is a psychologist named Carol Dueck who speaks of a fixed versus a growth mindset.

A fixed mindset views itself as absolutely predetermined. You are good at X and bad at Y and you like A and hate B and you have this temperament and that personality and all of these things are as immutable and unchanging as your adult height and eye color.

This is bad.

Because it precludes, as Dueck points out, any possibility of growth. It states that you are all that you will ever be, and while there might be a certain comforting certainty about that, it is life-denying in the extreme.

And I have definitely been guilty of it for my entire life. Going back to Grade One, where I had a very hard time with arts and crafts due to being so uncoordinated and never having had someone to play with me in the right way in my formative years.

So I concluded that I was “bad” at arts and crafts, and largely refused to even try to do them from that point on.

And I got away with it because nobody wants to be the one to say “We’re holding this genius child back a grade because he can’t cut a proper paper doll”.

Never did it occur to me to keep trying till I got it right. I was spoiled by my precocious IQ. So many things came so easily to me that I never learned to overcome my limitations and that left me dangerously undisciplined, unfocused, and timid.

And it set me on the path of instantly giving up when things do not just come to me naturally, and that tendency has cost me one hell of a lot.

“Comes to me as naturally as breathing” is a heck of a high standard for acceptable new activities. It’s a very limiting attitude.

Even when you have frankly astounding natural abilities like I do. I could make a career out of doing things I find trivially easy, but in order to get there, I would have to do a lot of things I find very difficult.

And that means growing the fuck up.

The sad truth is that I know that on some level, I am waiting for some kind of magical opportunity where everything I want falls into my lap without my ever having to do anything scary or hard or just plain not fun.

Well it ain’t gonna happen. Staying a weak willed child has cost me too much. Remaining trapped in this pupal stage is no longer an option.

Staying within my comfort zone is killing me. So it’s time to throw that option right out the fucking door.

From now on, I am searching for a rocky path I can live with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, PS, forgot the all important affirmations.

I am not all that I can ever be.

I can become more than I am right now. I can grow, I can change, I can adapt.

My idea of myself and my limitations is just a rough guess. Because the truth is, I don’t know all that I am capable of.

And limits are there to be exceeded.

I am NOT limited to the person I think I am.

I can be so much more.

There, that oughta do it.

I have it.

Probably due to another unsuccessful attempt to masturbate.

I wish I could think of it in less judgmental way but what can I say, that’s what puts the J in INTJ. We’re a judgy people.

Especially about ourselves, god damn it all to Hades.

But yeah. I blame jacking without cumming for my current state of FFA. It’s so frustrating to be really into the whole masturbation thing and really grooving to all the usual greatest hits from my enormous porn collection and then suddenly just run out of gas.

It’s almost as if I climaxed but it was so weak I barely noticed it.

And I can keep on flogging but there’s no point. I won’t get anywhere and all I would be doing is making myself even more frustrated.

And sore. Very sore. Ouch.

I seem to be extra horny lately. Perhaps it’s the springtime in the air. You know, springtime, when a young man’s fancy turns to all the illegal sex acts he craves.

But can never have. Because oppression.

Still, I hold out hope. Maybe one day I will meet the right group of sexually enlightened folk who will introduce me to their open-minded playmates of all varieties.

Or hell, maybe I will become rich enough to have whatever I want. I am not above paying for what I need.

That wouldn’t be as good as my “intimate enclave” scenario, but I have needs regular society will not let me fulfill and so illegal prostitution has to be a possibility.

And who knows, if I managed to not die for long enough, I might live to see a time when the world gives up its last senseless sexual taboos and learns that consent comes in many forms, not merely the legalistic.

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh yeah, free floating anxiety.

Besides a sexually withholding universe, another reason for my FFA is how tense and depressed and angry I was about losing the clear plastic shield I am suppose to wear over my eye when I sleep.

I was really in a dark, dark mood over it, filled with self-loathing and frustration and rage on a slow simmer.

But luckily, Joe exercised his magic powers and came up with the shield he made for himself when he had his eye surgery, so not only am I covered, he put a strap on his and made it into a neato cool eye patch.

So I am back on track, all thanks to my wonderful roomie Joe, and his amazing powers of not only keeping everything but actually knowing where it is.

Problem solved. But because I am a very broken machine, that doesn’t mean the angry dark chemicals that bad spell summoned are gone from my bloodstream.

If my body was good at scrubbing stress chemicals out of my blood, I probably would be way less depressed. Instead, it seems to hold on to that shit like it’s out of stock.

Comes from having my deep sense of safety shattered by a stranger’s cock when I was four years old, I guess.

On a very deep level, I am chemically incapable of feeling safe.

I was only physically raped once, but psychologically, it’s still happening.

Every day, all the time.

No wonder I’m such a fucking wreck.

More after the break.

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On faring spirits

So my latest video game acquisition is a very odd game called Spiritfarer.

I got it because the reviews are spectacular and it was priced within 39 cents of the amount of money I happened to have in my Steam wallet after a bunch of returns, and so I figured, what the heck.

Now here is the official description :

Spiritfarer® is a cozy management game about dying. As ferrymaster to the deceased, build a boat to explore the world, care for your spirit friends, and guide them across mystical seas to finally release them into the afterlife. What will you leave behind?

accidentally or on purpose?

So I thought, kewl, an afterlife management game. I like management games. I figured I would be basically Afterlife Tycoon and I would be building structures and managing things and in general lending my natural flair for efficiency to the post-living community.

But um, no. The game is not like that at all. Nor is it a post-life farming sim like my buddy Maelkoth thought.

Instead, I am going around via a 2D platforming interface and sailing my boat around to follow a pretty linear plotline where I am Stella, the new Spiritfarer, which is the job formerly held by good old Charon, boatman of the river Styx.

Making my journey infinitely more pleasant is my pet, a fluffy sort of cat thing called Daffodil who curls up with my when I sleep, hops into my lap when I sit, follows me wherever I go, and generally charms the socks off of me at every turn,

In fact, the whole game is marvelously charming in a gently whimsical way. And with a very “Furry” sensibility. So far, two of the three spirits I have rescued have turned into anthropomorphic animals once they got on board, and get this – I can HUG them.

And not some perfunctory, robotic hug either. No, amazingly enough, they are the exact same kind of big, enthusiastic, affectionate, loving hugs I would give them if I met them as Fruvous, and words cannot express how much that means to me.

The game “gets” me in a way I never would have expected.

And that is what has kept me playing despite having no freaking clue what I am doing or what I am in for and it being like no game I have ever played before.

The novelty was overwhelming at first (damn, I hate getting old) but I am tuned in now and working diligently to suspend all genre expectations and just experience the game in the spirit of exploration and wonder that is so clearly intended to engender.

Last time I tried to play, it crashed, but hopefully that was a one time thing because I would hate to have to return it at this point.

I’m just getting the hang of it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What can I say, I am feeling meta.

Did my follow up appointment with Doctor Vaezi today. No big deal, just a few of the usual tests then a quick chat and examination with him,

He seems quite pleased with his work, which is good news for both of us. Apparently it was a very large, hard cataract, which is rare in someone as young as me.

That’s further proof that being super fat produces what I am calling “late onset progeria”, which makes us fat people start aging super fast when we hit the age of 45 or so.

So…. that kinda sucks,

One thing I didn’t mention about yesterday’s surgery was how embarrassed I was when they took my blood sugar and it was 32.

Reminder : normal is 7. 7. Single digit. SEVEN.

I felt like such a fool and a slob at that. The nurses almost canceled the surgery because my blood sugar was so high.

Clearly that shit has got to stop. No wonder I am so unhealthy lately, my blood must be the consistency of cold maple syrup.

So I am at the very least going to take a whack of insulin soon.

But the real issue is testing. And I can’t see my way to conventional testing any time soon. My last experience was of stabbing my fingers over and over again only to have the goddamned meter return error after error, and for now that means fuck that shit.

Not a rational response. A sane person would just keep trying long enough to figure out what was going wrong and get it working right and, you know, save their own lives.

But I am not a sane person. I’m a crazy person, and crazy people do crazy things for crazy reasons that make no sense even to themselves.

And I think it’s high time I stop pretending that I am a rational adult who is fully in charge of himself and own the fact that I am a goddamned lunatic doomed to do crazy shit that hurts me until it either kills me or I get better.

Every single thing I do has to pass through the chaotic committee that is my insanity first, and they are by definition unreasonable, and so doing even normal harmless things involves a protracted struggle.

It’s like dealing with a cranky toddler. With veto power.

So yeah, I plan on shooting up some insulin later and hopefully it will make me feel better as well as returning my blood to a more normal viscosity.

But realistically, I am not going to start lancing my fingertips again any time soon. Instead, I am going bite the bullet and buy that OneTouch Ultra Libre Turbo Professional Productivity Executive Deluxe thingamabob,.

The one where it can take readings without the need to draw blood at all. Yeah, it’s expensive – the system costs around $400 and the sensor units have to be replaced every two weeks because they get “full” (yeah right) and that’s going to be like $150 a month forever, and that’s a drag, man.

But on the other hand, I might not die before I am 50 if I use it, and I guess that’s worth the extra hassle and expense.

You know. All things taken into consideration. In the long run. Probably.

More after the break.

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And back again

Time for feeding and blogging again. No idea what the talk about. You’re all caught up on my medical stuff.

Here’s a radical notion : I will check my idea file.

What the fuck, it’s worth a shot.

---

Meh. Plenty of story ideas but I am too tired for fiction at the moment. My usual personal prose will have to do.

Took some insulin this afternoon. And I do feel somewhat better. So that’s good.

I suppose I could deal with the lack of testing by simply guessing that I will need a certain amount of insulin a day and taking that.

That’s so unscientific, though. And I would always be worrying that it would send me into a blood sugar crash.

Because that’s a real possibility when you are messing with your endocrine system, even if you are doing it for your own good.

It’s a delicate machine when you are diabetic.

Still, I can’t deny that I feel a lot better now. Calmer. More settled. Cleaner.  Cleaner in a way that’d hard to describe but means one hell of a lot to me on both a physical and a spiritual level. Especially the spiritual.

It is entirely possible that high blood sugar plays a large role in my constant malaise.

The same malaise that is a big part of why I don’t take care of myself because I am too depressed to do things like take my insulin.

I see a pattern forming. Do you?

I will take my insulin more often in the future.

Speaking of taking my medicine, I found out today that 2 of the 3 eyedrops I am taking are supposed to be taken 4 times a day, not 1.

Dunno why I assumed the frequency for one applied to the other two. Wishful thinking, in all likelihood.

Well I guess I will be busy for the next while.

Speaking of failing to keep my eye protected, I lost the goddamned shield I am supposed to wear when I sleep.;

Must have fallen through the hole in my pocket. Now I don’t know what the fuck to do. I am going to have to call Doctor Vaezi’s office tomorrow and beg for a new one, which I will then have to go to the office to collect.

That’s okay because I lost my hat, too, and it’s probably there as well.

I try so very hard to get things right and yet I fuck up on a near-constant basis anyhow.

I am clearly not competent to take care of myself but it’s not like there is anyway else to do the job so I am fucked.

Left to the tender mercies of a well meaning but utterly incompetent caretaker.

I guess I will just keep stumbling through life until I am sick enough to be institutionalized and then someone competent can care for me.

I honestly see no other path forward for me.

Sad but true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got my eye op today! Hooray!

Honestly, the waiting around was the worst part. I never like waiting uncertainly for things. Give me a time when they will happen and I will wait most merrily.

But when I am just waiting for something and I don’t know when it is going to happen, boredom and tension combine to keep me low-level pissed off.

Oh well. The procedure itself was weird and at times uncomfortable but not painful or scary. They had the Seventies hits still playing from the previous patient and I was totally down with that.

CCR, The Band, Murray McLachlan, and so on. All good stuff that I love. The only problem was that Doctor Faezi had to tell me to stop singing along.

Apparently that made my eye wiggle. Tsk tsk. So I kept my singalong going inside my head instead. Spoilsport.

Seriously, though, the music helped immensely. It gave my mind someplace to go to escape thinking about what exactly was happening to my eyeball at that very moment. That, and the Ativan they gave me. allowed me to stay mellow throughout the whole thing and treat the whole thing as a total trip, dude.

And there were moments that hurt a little and moments that stung a little and a lot of moments that were distinctly odd, like when he squirted the anesthetic gel onto my eye and left it there a while.

So having that stuff sitting there sticky and cold was pretty weird.

The worst part of the procedure was the occasional rinsing with water. Always with plenty of warning, but still, that water was cold and my eye didn’t like that.

Well it’s all over now. Now I just have to keep up with the eye drops for a while and wear this clear plastic eye shield when I sleep for the next four days.

Right now, the eye in question is a bit blurry, which is normal. The area is a bit swollen from all the poking around in it and things will un-blur when the swelling goes down.

Given that before now, looking through my left eye was like looking through a very dirty window pane, I will take it.

The eye shield thing is cool. Sort of a big clear plastic dome over my eye roughly the shape of one lens of a pair of huge Seventies sunglasses.

Technically, I could take it off now. I only need it for when I am sleeping.

Not sure why. I mean, when I sleep, my eyes are closed and hence quite safe. Perhaps it’s too keep me from rubbing my eyes in my sleep.

Like a Cone of Shame for humans, Fair enough.

Been getting into Spiritfarer. It is…not what I expected.

I thought I would be running the afterlife in a management type game but instead I am this pansexual person and their personal pet platforming around a big ship and sailing it here and there to either gather supplies or advance a very slow moving plot.

That said, it has oodles and oodles charm and a very cute and cuddly sensibility, so I will continue to do what is asked of me in it till I get to the game itself.

Erf. More sleepiness. Time to go back to Napland.

Shields up! Arm the photon torpedoes and full speed ahead!

More after the break.

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The seas are mighty choppy tonight, sir!

Getting dinner was fun.

Because as it turns out, I am quite dizzy right now. It truly is like being aboard a ship navigating some pretty rough seas.

Reminds me of being on the ferry between PEI and Nova Scotia in the early winter. It was slippy out, and mighty whuffy, and us poor passengers had to cling to something in order not to get tossed about.

Only back then, I was young and robust and resilient enough to view the whole thing as a great adventure. While others were sensibly staying in one place, I was exploring the ship and risking my neck just for the thrill of it.

I could be quite the thrill seeker back then.

But now, I just want the seas to settle. I was warned many times that the Ativan they gave me plus my usual unsteadiness might lead to a complex locomotion situation, and I listened as I moved very carefully from the eye center to the car, then the car to the apartment. So far so good.

But then I took a nap and forgot all about it, and let the familiar surroundings fool me into thinking things were back to normal.

Um no. Not yet. Ooops.

And speaking of naps, boy have I been sleepy. And it’s that kind of sleepiness that feels like someone turned up the gravity and you’re being sucked towards your bed, or at least lying down on the floor, by a black hole.

I think it’s because of a massive relief of eye strain,. My refurbished eyeball might not be fully operational yet, but it’s already seeing way way better than the previous version, and I think that eliminates a lot of the eye strain I was getting from the faulty parallax making my eyes work super hard to make a single picture of two very different inputs.

Whatever. The sleepiness has been irritatingly persistent but the sleep itself has been pretty good. I wake up dizzy and staggering about, but the sleep itself is pleasant and I have woken up in much worse states.

I will be glad when I finally catch up again, though. Sleepiness all the damned time is boring. I want to do things.

Important, productive things like playing video games all the damned time.

I have an appointment with Doctor Vaezi tomorrow. Due to logistical issues, I might be getting there and back on my own.

No big deal. I’ll take cabs. It’ll be like $10 each way, including tip. Big woop.

While I am there, I can cash some checks. Nice having my eye doctor be in the same building as my bank.

Well I guess that catches you all up.

Talk to you again soon! Because….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I got my eye drops.

I looked over the form with the prescriptions on it and luckily it said that they only had to be taken the day before my surgery.

Which is today.

Apparently, they are not covered by my disability medical plan, though, so I owe poor Julian $70.70 for these damned drops.

I’m going to pay him $80 to compensate him for the hassle.

At least I only have to do them once a day. There’s three of them, so having to do them a bunch of times would be a serious pain in the ass.

I will take them when I am done blogging. Not looking forward to it and I have read the descriptions of what each does and I am not sure they are all needed, but I am nowhere near foolish enough to think I know better than Doctor Vaezi.

Yes, it turns out it’s Vaezi, not Faezi. At least according to the labels on the drops.

Now that this issue with the drops has been resolved, I am much more calm about the surgery. I am guessing the stress of worrying about the eye drops used up the last of my tension about the thing and now I am eager to get it done.

Should be a pretty freaky experience.

I’m going to bring my Ativan with me just in case I need something to calm my nerves. But according to Joe, they will already have something to help keep me mellow during the surgery on hand, so I will go with that.

I am a firm believer in taking full advantage of any medically justified reason to get the really good drugs.

What the hell, it’s not like I can get addicted. Might as well enjoy the trip.

---

Having given it a lot of thought, I do not think I will make it out to tonight’s hanging out with Felicity outside McD’s.

My bladder is more forgiving lately but I still pee every hour and a half or so and so I don’t think I can make it yet.

Next week, though, for sure.

As patient readers know, there is no place accessible to me for me to pee near our usual hangout spots.

There’s a gas station slash convenience store nearby but between us and it is a set of three concrete steps which I can go down but not back up.

Between my overall weakness and the fact that my knees are quite fucked up, going up those steps is not an option and when I tried to go up the grassy embankment the stairs surmount I ended up in a much worse and more humiliating position.

So, not gonna do it. Not this time at least.

But I have a nuclear option in mind. If, by next week, my bladder clock is still running too fast, I will at least contemplate simply bringing an appropriate receptacle from home and, well, use it when needed.

That would be both gross and humiliating as well as awkward as fuck, so I really don’t want to do it, but I miss Felicity and I miss shopping in person, dammit.

Now, to play some Monster Train and listen to YouTube videos.

But first, to take these frigging eye drops.

More after the break.

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It’s an urban mystery!

God I hate being so fucking clumsy.

I swear, it’s like having a poltergeist. Subjectively, it seems like objects fly out of my hands, or spontaneously leap off shelves, or leap out of nowhere to trip me.

Logically, of course, these things happen because I am a klutz and increasingly spastic as well. There’s nothing supernatural about it.

But emotionally, I’m freaking haunted.

I just spilled gravy all over my computer chair. I had plated my KFC order and was carrying it to my computer and was almost there but I tilted the plate too far in the process of setting the plate down and the gravy slid right off the plate and went splut all over my computer chair.

God damn it.

At least I had already put gravy on my fries. So it’s not a total loss.

But that’s not the mystery, oh no. The mystery is where the fuck my coleslaw went! It was right next to the gravy and it’s not on the plate any more so it much be in this room of mine somewhere, but I dunno where.

And I really want to know because not only do I want to eat it, coleslaw strikes me as the kind of thing you REALLY don’t want lying around going bad in your living space.

So I hope to find it before it turns into sauerkraut and then something far worse.

There’s one tiny sliver of another possibility : that said slaw is still in the kitchen and I only thought it was on the plate.

Extremely unlikely but I will go check.

---

Yes! Slaw retrieved! WE HAVE THE SLAW!

And it stayed closed, so it is fully intact. And I didn’t have to go far, it was just on the other side of the corner of the bed from me.

So yay for that, at least. Always nice to score a victory against my own ineptitude.

Still, I fear a future where I can do nothing for myself any more and have to rely on others to do anything more complicated than typing and using the mouse.

So I better get my diabetes under control, pronto.

Yup. I sure should do that.

(SFX : Wind over a mesa)

Oh well, at least I got my eyedrops in. This is the first time I have administered eyedrops to myself and there’s definitely an art to it.

My main problem is my long eyelashes. Getting the drop past those is a trip. I ended up just holding my eye wide open with one hand and practically applying the drop directly to my eyeball with the other.

But I got it done. I can go off to my surgery tomorrow knowing I did my part.

Not sure if I am supposed to do the drops again before I go under the knife. Perhaps I will call and ask tomorrow morning.

Well this is it. Next time I talk at you I will be down one set of cataracts.

Or is it just one big cataract?

Maybe I will ask.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, so maybe “hate” is too strong a term, but I don’t have a song references for “I Mildly Resent This Partially Cloudy Saturday In Which I Feel Rather Cranky”.

Would be kind of hard to make that scan anyhow.

So yeah, I feel sort of pissed off and out of sorts at the moment.

Tried to masturbate but didn’t get anywhere, which does not help. God dammit.

I miss being able to get off whenever I wanted, more or less. I miss the animal warmth of innocent lust. I miss the excitement of sex, and the intimacy.

And the fun. Sex is like the best game ever, even when it’s only solitaire.

Trying to work through all the freaking out about the fact that they are going to scoop out part of my eyeball on Monday beforehand so I can be super chill on the day.

If only I did not have to be awake for it. They can do whatever the hell they want to me if I don’t have to be there when it happens, so to speak.

But no, I have to let them strap me into place then stay awake while they freeze my eye and then take the cataract(s) out and put an artificial lens in there.

According to Joe, they will shine a light into my eye so that I do not actually see the scalpel coming, and that is a huge relief.

I mean, having to sit still while a scalpel approaches one’s tender eyeball is alien nightmare level scary.

And I have had a small taste of what’s to come when Doctor Faezi put freezing in my eye and then gave me my first intra-ocular injection.

It was some stuff to reduce swelling in my retinas. And I barely felt it. So I am glad to know that it is, indeed, possible to totally numb the eye.

Of course, that took eye drops, which are annoying. But better than the alternative.

Speaking of eye drops, someone from Doctor Faezi’s office was supposed to have called me and told me it was time to get the prescription they gave me filled so I can start the eyedrops that will prep me for the operation by now.

So I am freaking out over that. I figure I am going to call the office and ask them whether I should do it. But it’s Saturday and they might not be open so I might have nobody to ask.

And the thing is, they called me yesterday to tell me the details of when and where my operation would take place. Maybe that’s when they were supposed to tell me but they forgot. I don’t know.

So that’s wearing on my nerves. I would hate to show up for my operation and find out that because I didn’t do the drops, they can’t operate.

So I may have to self-initiate.

Which is not my strong suit.

But I want to get my eyeball fixed, god damn it!

More after the break.

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Not this again

God damn it, I am all sleepy again.

Apparently when I took a nap this afternoon, I accidentally drilled into a large deposit of sleepiness and now have to wait for it to clear out.

Oh well, At least it’s the pleasant, relaxed kind of sleepiness and not the smothering sleepiness that makes me all dizzy and dopey and miserable.

So I will likely be sleeping a lot in the near future. Yay.

Ended up having chili and garlic toast for dinner because I got too hungry to wait for anything to be delivered.

In sober afterthought, I could have ordered in then had a snack, but hunger has a way of making people irrational and I was very very hungry.

And all because I didn’t eat my usual batch of popcorn plus trail mix last night. I ate the rest of the stuff I normally have – veggies, a piece of fruit, cookies. But I was feeling too sick for the whole popcorn thang, and as a result, I have been getting super hungry in the last hour before mealtimes.

It’s rather frustrating. I didn’t even skip an entire meal – just half of one. And yet my body is acting like I just ended a hunger strike.

Apparently I’ve been on a super strict schedule with no room for deviation without knowing it. Finding out is kind of a pain.

If this persists, I will have to plan an extra large meal to compensate. I am thinking it will probably be pizza, as that’s something where I always get more than one meal’s worth of food and thus scaling up the meal is a cinch.

I really hope it goes away on its own, though. Not likely, but it would be nice.

Pondering ponying up for a FreeStyle Libre, that glucose monitoring system that does not require me to lance the densest nerve clusters on the human body to work.

That’s the fingertips. Point is, glucose ,monitoring with no finger poking. No poking at all. A sensor is implanted and is read by the monitor via Bluetooth.

It can only give a reading every 5 minutes, but blood sugar doesn’t change all THAT much in five minutes, so I can live with that.

And it sure as hell would improve my health. Right now, my inability to make myself start lancing my fingertips again is the major barrier to my controlling my diabetes.

Without being able to test, I am reluctant to take insulin. Without insulin, I am most likely rocking a crazy high glucose level that is shredding my organs as we speak.

Honestly, if I could get my diabetes and sleep apnea under control, my life would be a zillion times better and I would not give the tiniest of fucks about my other issues.

Dunno how they would fix my sleep apnea. I would love to make peace with CPAP but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards right now.

Honestly, the biggest overall issue is how hard it is for me to stay focused on the immediate reality of my existence and take care of my own well being instead of spending all my time in the theme park of my mind.

Oh well, Time for more sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the ultrasound thing at Richmond Hospital today.

No big deal. They had me show up half an hour before my appointment instead of the usual 15 minutes “just in case”. so I ended up sitting in the waiting room and reading the Dilbert Principle for 25 minutes.

I could have played 10 more minutes of Monster Train, you assholes!

Speaking of which… more on that later.

The procedure itself was smooth sailing. Ultrasound is a breeze compared to a lot of other ways to get pictures taken of your insides.

Admittedly, there was a little pain as the imaging tech, an Asian lady, pushed the probe around against my tummy to get the shots she needed and kind of jostled and importuned my organs in the process.

Then came the rectal probe, which was performed by the very cute Doctor Armstrong. He reminded me of Doctor Greene from ER because he had the same combination of competence and nervousness, like he was trying SUPER HARD to get everything right but was scared to screw up, and wow, I find that hot ass fuck.

That’s not necessarily a typo.

What can I say, men in caring professions turn me on.

Now obviously a rectal probe was a total nonissue for me. I’m gay and vers and so I am not exactly a stranger to putting things up there. I was not worried at all.

In fact, I contemplated telling Doctor A that I was a gay man so I was not exactly going to freak out and/or feel violated by him probing me.

But I figured that would probably freak him out and make things weird, when my intention would have been to reassure him, so that was a no go.

Pleasant surprise : he actually told me what he found when we were done. I am so used to medical imaging being akin to a bizarre ritual you do because the medical priests tell you to and you have to wait for them to consult the omens and tell you what they say.

Scuttlebutt (heh) : he saw some small fluid filled sacs on my prostate, which are a sign of infection, but they were very small and not inflamed (or “angry” as he adorably put it) and seemed to be on their way out.

Great news, in other words. It seems the antibiotic I have been taking for three weeks or so, Sulfatrim, is doing its job.

I had noticed that I was peeing a lot less often and with a lot less pain lately, so I was hoping this would turn out to be the case.

So that’s one crisis handled, at least. I still have out of control diabetes, untreated sleep apnea, an unhealed wound on my left leg, a massive hernia in my sternum, diabetic neuralgia everywhere, oh, and whatever the fuck is making me so weak.

Oh, and a left eye fulla cataracts, but that’s getting taken care of Monday,

But at least I got my waterworks sorted out.

More after the break.

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AVPD and me, redux

Well the initial rush of diagnosis euphoria has worn off, and I am now willing to qualify my initial self diagnosis of Avoidant Personality Syndrome.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still the best damned description of my exact life and my exact problems that I have ever seen. It’s quite frankly been nothing short of a revelation.

But, I don’t match the description quite as fully as I thought.

For one thing, there is what I will call my paradoxical shyness. Basically, I am both incredibly shy and incredibly…. not.

Socially, I am cringingly, cripplingly, brutally shy. I am terrified by even the thought of having to deal with a bunch of people I don’t know. I hide from the world specifically to avoid that kind of thing. I can’t walk past other people on the sidewalk without feeling like every single one of them hates me and is outraged by my daring to subject the world to my toxic horrible awfulness and wishes I would just die. All my time at Kwantlen and then VFS was spent having at least a low grade panic attack.

Sometimes a lot worse.

But intellectually and verbally, I am bold as particularly bold fuck. I have no fear of anyone and will say anything to anybody at any time. I’m extremely opinionated and both promulgate and defend my often highly unique positions with vigor and precision. I have never in my life been verbally bullied – as if – and I have never hesitated to offer my opinion or lacked verbal self-confidence.

It’s a strange dichotomy. I don’t match the usual profile.

A timid little churchmouse I ain’t.

And even in social situations, my shyness is not universal. Sometimes it suddenly reverses itself and I enter kamikaze mode where I just plain don’t give a FUCK any more and just throw myself into the fray with wild abandon.

Granted, this happens most often when I am RPing as Fruvous, but still, the fact that I have this side of me contradicts my usual real world shyness.

This is what leads me to believe that I am naturally an extrovert, or at least way more extroverted than I have been, and thus if I could shuck my depression and AVPD, I could be a super charismatic and amazing dude.

I’m working on it.

Heck, I even enjoy doing customer service. Like I have said before, as long as I have a clearly defined role, my shyness stays at a reasonable level.

When I worked for my uncle (RIP, Uncle Sonny), I knew exactly what was wanted of me. People wanted me to ring up their stuff. I could totally do that. It was well within my arena of competence.

There was no gray area. No social no man’s land to navigate. To be honest, I was thrilled just to have something I actually could do. Loved that job.

The walk to and from work was scary, though.

Lastly : the literature on AVPD talks a lot about how us sufferers fear any kind of criticism or rejection.

And that’s half true of me, too,

Criticism does not scare me. I am totally confident in both my ability to defend against it if it’s false or accept it if it’s true. When someone genuinely corrects me, I am genuinely grateful to them,

If they’re thinking to challenge me with some bullshit, though, I will take them down like a bitch and leave them crying for their mama.

Rejection, on the other hand, terrifies me. I can’t handle it at all. Even the slightest hint of it – so slight that it’s all in my head – can send my whole psyche crashing down into the most brutal of self-loathing depression.

My verbal superpowers don’t do me much good then. Because of course, rejection fiys all too well into the negative narrative of my being an awful, awful thing.

What can I say. I’m a complicated man. And no one understands me. Period.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is me. ^[1]

Let’s check out the symptoms, shall we?

Do I avoid jobs that involve contact with a lot of people? Yes. By avoiding jobs entirely. I am so afraid of rejection that job interviews are impossible for me, as is the usual “apply for a hundred places and maybe one will hire you” method of job hunting. The fact that I have a 25 year gap in my resume and no job skills does not help either. Still, I do enjoy working customer service, so half a point here.

Am I reluctant to interact with people unless I know they will like me? Kinda? I guess I have enough faith in my charm to feel like the person will probably like me at first, but I know the clock is ticking on when I am going to say something weird or awkward and they are going to realize I’m an alien and want nothing to do with me. Maybe I should just start off being weird as fuck and get it over with. Another half point.

Do I move very slowly in romantic relationships? Well yeah. So slowly that I have never been in one. I warm up to people pretty slowly because of all my shame and fear. It’s hard for me to believe that someone truly likes me. The real me, not the fox I pretend to be because it’s the only way I can be myself. He can attract people because he’s cute and fluffy and silly and fun. The person playing him , on the other hand, is some kind of bloated swamp ox.

Am I preoccupied with criticism and rejection? From who? I am too isolated to face this much. If I was more engaged with life then yes, this would preoccupy me.

Am I inhibited in new interpersonal situations due to feelings of inadequacy? A million times yes. I feel so awkward and inferior in novel social situations that I want to run away and hide. I feel like I am a horrible, disgusting, unlovable freak who should not inflict his pathetic and nauseating self on an innocent world. So um. Yeah.

Do I see myself as socially inept, personally unappealing, and inferior to others? See the previous response for your answer. But in short : hell yes.

Am I reluctant to take personal risks? All the way yes. To the point of having very little in the way of initiative at all.

Oh, and I am completely unsurprised that people do not take this disorder as seriously as much showier ones like Borderline Personality Disorder because the very nature of AVPD makes us avoid attention and minimize our problems and disappear into the background and do our best to blend in with the wallpaper.

So of course it doesn’t seem as big a deal as the other disorders in its class. We don’t slash our wrists or punch cops or count our change dozens of times because we are sure that if we don’t, our moms will die.

We just… fade away.

And that’s where we stay.

Till the end of our days.

More on this topic after the break.

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More on AVPD

My theory is that our new pal Doctor Grande refers to Avoidant Personality Disorder as AVPD and not APD because APD already refers to Anti-social Personality Disorder.

Assuming that’s still a thing.

And now, more homework!

Relax, you don’t actually have to watch that one. I include it here purely for reference.

To sum up : Like with everything, there’s a genetic component and an environmental component to how one ends up with AVPD.

Genetically, there is depression all through my family. At least the Acadian part of it, anyway. Though I would not be surprised if it runs in the Ontario part of it too, given that my paternal grandfather was Satan.

Just an evil, evil man.

And my mother is shy in a way I find quite familiar. She’s never had AVPD, as far as I know, but that might be because she had a job and kids to keep her from ever retreating from reality like I have. Plus I am positive she suffered from depression when I was a kid but she does not agree.

“Environmental” seems like a funny term for traumatic life events. “Biographical” might make more sense but it would just remind people of Peter Graves.

Anyhow, yeah, I primarily blame my AVPD on my rotten childhood.

First I was raped when I was only four years old, wounding me so terribly that I have not recovered 43 years later (and counting). And I couldn’t tell anyone about it. I didn’t even have the words. How do you even talk about something like that?

Kids today know. They get the education about bad touches and such. But that came in the Eighties. I didn’t have it back in 1977.

Subsequent to that, I was emotionally starved during a very important developmental phase. I had no friends after Pat and Janet went to school ahead of me and I didn’t go to kindergarten either, so right there, before I even set foot in school, I was socially isolated right when I needed social connection the most.

Patient readers know the rest. Outcast at school, ignored at home, nobody wanted to deal with the weird sloppy precocious fat kid, not even my teachers, so I went through childhood alone till Grade Six.

By then, I was already the brilliant basket case you all know and love.

So yeah. That is why I am in the “neglect” category of AVPD. There were a lot of people who might have helped me but I was just too hard to deal with.

Kind of puts my present state of disability in perspective, doesn’t it? Given the atrocious conditions of my childhood, it’s a wonder I can function at all.

Oh, one last thing : another article mentioned that amongst therapists, AVPD is considered to be extremely hard to treat.

Well duh. I have shit I still haven’t told my therapist because I am too afraid he will reject me. We are a skittish and timid bunch prone to bolting for the shadows at the slightest sign of trouble. I spent years without any kind of therapy because it was so hard to bring myself to ask my doctor for it.

Damn right we are hard to treat. But I swear I’m worth it.

It just takes a lot of digging, that’s all.

Anybody got a shovel?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry the following thought experiment is so long, but trust me, it’s totally worth it.

And don’t worry, it’s not that stupid one about the future evil AI.

Obviously, the rest of this section of today’s blog entry will assume you watched it.

Wow, right? That was one heck of a ride. I absolutely adored the whole thing. Had me nailed to my seat for the whole duration.

Plus his voice reminds me of the voice of Jonathan Goldstein from Wiretap on CBC radio, which is a huge plus.

But man, not only is that my idea of good philosophy, it’s my idea of science fiction too.

Then again, those are kind of the same thing to me.

Anyhow, on with the analysis!

First off, no, this experiment did not “change my life” like the hyperbolic title suggests.

Bitch please. It’s good but it’s not that good. I found it to be a thrilling ride through some very dangerous philosophical territory, but that’s basically the neighborhood I grew up in and spend most of my time in, so forgive me if my life doesn’t change.

Strutting aside, though, I will start by answering the question implied at the end : would I exit the simulation, or stay in the world where literally my greatest dream just came true : I just gave a TED talk that convinced everyone I am a goddamned genius.

I can think of nothing that would make me happier. Seriously.

But I would exit the simulation anyway. Like I said in the YouTube comments, it would not feel like a choice. My entire mind is a truth seeking machine and I have spent my whole life climbing the tree of knowledge in search of greater truth and superior understanding of the world and how it works.

That means that if there is a higher level of reality, I have to go there. The alternative is unthinkable. Remaining in what I know to be an illusion would drive me freaking insane.

Like…. killing spree level insane. After all, I now know everyone else in my world is a fucking AI, so why not?

It reminds me of scenes in science fiction where someone is asked if they want to go with the aliens in their spaceship back to their home planet.

Um, yes. The answer is yes. If there are any aliens reading this, YES.

Because if I missed that incredible opportunity, I would kill myself.

I realize that exiting the simulation goes against my usual attitude of laid back pragmatic hedonism. I am usually the guy with the sardonically realistic answers to big questions of cosmology and epistemology.

I am not the type to obsess over the ultimate nature of reality or wonder what is “really real” or whether or not this could all be a simulation or whatever.

We have what appears to be objective reality. It functions exactly like objective reality would. So I readily accept it as such until such time as it is shown to my satisfaction to be anything else.

But when presented with it in the form of the thought experiment linked above, all my usual caution and pragmatism go right out the window.

I don’t care that I don’t know where exiting the simulation will lead or whether or not I will be happier there.

I got to go.

More on this subject after the break.

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About “The Machine” – No, Really This Time

Now about the machine referenced in the video… let’s call it the Perfect Reality Simulator, or PRS for short.

This theoretical device was a big hook for me personally. I mean, we went from my TED Talk fantasy directly into brain science! Holy crap!

Am I sure I didn’t write this? (joking, people)

This idea of not merely VR but a VR programmed to simulate all the things needed to maximize the individual’s happiness and well-being is a bold and fascinating one.

I am very curious about the exact details of its development, though, because I can only imagine that the seemingly simple dictum of “whatever makes you happy” would turn out to be fiendishly tricky to execute.

Because the thing is, we don’t know nearly enough about what makes people happy to pull this off. Maybe we will by the far flung year of 2147, but I doubt it.

Instead, I envision a rather brutal design cycle where they keep thinking they have everything covered but test subject after test subject is nearly driven insane because there is some subtle need going unmet and it throws off the entire balance of their psyche in a very drastic way.

This kind of psychic risk-taking is not everyone’s cup of tea and before too long they have lost all their volunteer test subjects because nobody wants to lose their mind, science be damned.

So they, the two people from the story and a handful of fellow scientists, are forced to test everything on themselves. But they are more determined than ever to make their neurogenetic paradise a reality.

Finally, after a particularly brutal final series of adjustments, the head of the project declares them to have finally succeeded. All the measurements agree that their simulation now contains absolutely everything necessary for human happiness.

So they jack in. And turn it on, And look around.

And discover that it is exactly like the real world. Down to the tiniest grain of sand.

Turns out, we already had everything we need for happiness.

We just didn’t know it.

---

Now I know that ending would piss a lot of people off. And I am fine with that, because while normally a total sweetheart, I can also be kind of a prick.

My point is that I think we have a lot of deep seated needs that the usual “electric bliss” scenarios of science fiction don’t take into account.

I mean, just look at this thing.

Do you really think a bunch of programmers and engineers can handle all of THAT?

And heck, first you have to make people forget they are in a simulation, and fucking with memory is a whole other can of worms.

Far easier to set up traditional VR and let people figure out the rest themselves.

Might still end up with areas of VR that are, in fact, a lot like actual reality.

But with eye lasers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sleep’s kicking my ass again today.

Feels like I am fighting the pull of a massive black hole just to stay away. I have the usual feeling of having recently been compressed. It’s very hard to focus.

And so forth and so on.

And maybe that’s part of why I am in such a crappy mood. The effort involved in forcing myself to stay awake and focus on the screen when all I really want is to go back to sleep already is making me cranky and irritable.

So what the hell, might as well tap this mood and bitch about my stupid life.

If you can call playing video games all day a life. I mean, technically, I’m alive and aware and participating in the time/space continuum so I guess whatever this tragic existence of mine is called, it qualifies as a life.

Just a really stupid and futile one.

I am so tired of just making it through the day, even though that’s all I seem to be able to do. I want so much more out of my time on Earth. I have so much that I want to give to the world. So much I need to prove.

So much magic I need to share.

And the fact that it is all locked behind iron doors of mental illness drives me crazy (!).

I mean, I do my best not to think about it. I try to be accepting of my tragic circumstances. I tell myself that all life requires of a sick person like me is that I do what I can to get better.

But there’s always so much more I “could” be doing on that front too. All kinds of happy shiny positive things I “could” be doing to improve my health, like exercising. making myself go outside, looking to expand my social group so I can get some exposure to novel social situations, looking into going back to school, and so on.

I “could”. Except that I can’t. Or can I?

Maybe I totally COULD be doing these things if I wasn’t such a pussy and manned uo and faced my problems like a grownup.

Instead, I life my so called life with my back turned to reality, huddling within myself, nursing a deep and desperate sadness that makes doing more than eking out this meagre subsistence damn near impossible.

And I get so damned frustrated. I want so badly to break out of this rut and actually get on with living but I don’t feel like I have the power to do so within me. My soul cries out for action and connection and liberation but all I can do is shake my tiny fists at an uncaring sky and curse the injustice of it all.

I deserve so much better than this sad and sorry life of mine. Not that it matters. It’s not like the karma police are going to show up, declare me to have suffered enough, and lead me to my dream life of being a media mogul. Or famous novelist. Or Jim Henson like creative leader.

Or something like that, anyhow.

I want so badly to follow my own light out of this dark cave of mine and into the soft sunlight of a far greater reality.

But all I can do is remain rootbound underground and do my best to grow in the direction of the light.

And I am so fucking sick of that.

More after the break.

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Fuck this shit!

That would look good on a T-shirt. Might be a big seller too. Lots of angry young people hitting their nihilistic phase in the world.

Could even do it in emojis.

Anyhow, spoiler alert, still feeling somewhat frustrated with life. But also bored with my own frustrated and anger. And a little contemptuous of said boredom.

This level of irony should not be attempted by anyone not of Generation X without the assistance of a member of said generation.

We do shit like this all the time, but be warned : we only make it LOOK easy.

Ordered some vittles from 7-11. Three chicken strips, three potato wedges, and a corn dog. Oh, plus a Double Gulp of Diet Pepsi ’cause I need a new drinking glass.

I’m classy like that.

Last time I got chicken strips, instead of my single container of my beloved garlic aoli dip, I got one of BBQ (ick) and one of the unholy crime against decency that is Buttermilk Ranch Dip.

Who the hell decided that what the already sour cream based loveliness of Ranch dressing really needed was butter?

Like, does cholesterol have its own lobby now, or something?

I tried that stuff once before under similar circumstances. It was not as bad as I thought but I felt really terrible about myself afterward, so never again.

I had a similar experience with pork rinds. I shudder at the memory.

Rewinding a fair bit, I suppose my frustration with my situation in life is ultimately a good thing because it is via intense aggravation that I change.

My default mode is stasis and the status quo. Inertia. Stability. Predictability.

In other words, death. Death in slow motion, but death nevertheless. Nothing which lives can remain the same. Even the apparently stability of biological homeostasis requires our bodies to make constant adjustments in order to maintain the same body temp, respiration rate, heartbeat, and so on.

Besides, biological imperatives aside, the only real argument for keeping everything the same is that you are perfectly happy where you are and wouldn’t change a thing.

And I ain’t. I’m an unhappy, frustrated, depressed, angry, stifled, powerless, rage filled desperate loser so far out on the fringes of society that that only way I could have less impact on society would be to become Amish, and that’s not a happy state to be in.

So clearly change is the answer, and that means growing as a person, and that’s scary.

Especially because it means I have to stop clinging to the side of this cliff and start actually climbing down from here.

And maybe I will fall.

And lose it all.

But I am finally sick enough of being here to risk it.

Fuck it. Maybe I’ll get bored enough to jump.

Either way, it will finally be over.

Take that, world!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. : Food arrived, still no garlic aioli. Grr.