On today’s journey into my broken palsied flesh, head mucus.

Because right now, my sinuses are stuffed up and giving me a headache and making me a little dizzy and lightheaded as their bony protuberances squish my brain.

Of course, that’s only a theory.

And the thing is, I feel like this a lot. And I am beginning to wonder about that, because I have felt like this for a long time.

I’m starting to think head mucus isn’t the issue. There’s just something fundamentally fucked up about my skull.

Because why should it be any different than the rest of me?

I vaguely recall my mother telling me that my Pepe had a serious sinus issue that required surgical intervention and that his life was way, way better afterwards.

Food for thought. Something to bring up with my GP, assuming he still exists. I have been trying to call him about a pill refill for days now.

The kicker is that one time the line was busy. Suggesting someone is there, they are just not picking up the phone.

Well, or that someone else was trying to call at the same time. It behooves me to try and keep my raging paranoia tamped down from time to time.

But still, I need my doctor and my doctor ain’t answering the phone. I need those pills to control my diabetes god dammit.

There’s nothing else for it, I’m gonna have to call my pharmacist and ask for an emergency refill. They can totally do that.

Doesn’t make me any less mad at my frigging doctor, though.

---

Pharmacy phoned. Emergency refill obtained. Julian will pick up my pills in the near future. Problem solved.

LIKE A BOSS.

In other extremely local news, I am giving Instacart another try. They are a grocery delivery gig economy type thing, and I tried them before but they didn’t like my credit card, and I had a sad.

But this time it seems to have worked. The website is way slicker and more attractive now so I think they finally got their poop in a group.

If so, I may never order from the 7-11 or the Ironwood Sav-on again, because I am sick of 7-11 not having 2L of Diet Coke any more and just as sick of Sav-on not actually giving me what I ordered.

Same charge though. Ten bucks. Oh well.

This time I ordered via Canadian Superstore. They always have good prices.

But get this : They didn’t have 2L of Diet Coke either! I ended up ordering 4 500 ml bottles instead, which I paid too much for.

Shit… that should have been 8. I drink that shit 1L at a time.

Oh well. Perhaps I will order from someplace like Pizza Hut tonight. Someone that can sell me my precious 2Ls of Diet Coke along with my meal.

I have to admit, this is starting to feel personal. Like the universe is attacking my one little pet vice. 2L of Diet Coke are my habit and they are getting weirdly scarce.

It’s like they are secretly plotting to replace Diet Coke with Coke Zero! NOOO!

Oh right. Going to keep a lid on the paranoia. Riiiiight.

Still, it’s weird.

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Not even nihilism.

Watched the vid above today as part of my new obsession with deep analyses of Rick and Morty as expressed in the medium of YouTube videos.

First, let me get an anti-nihilist rant off my chest. Then sane analysis will return.

Ahem. Nihilism is a childish overreaction to the discovery that the universe doesn’t come pre-installed with an inherent meaning, purpose, or plan. Oh boo fucking hoo. Toy actually have to create meaning and purpose yourself. Big frigging deal.

I’ve never understood why people would think there was an inherent meaning to life in the first place. Meaning to who? As for purpose, whose purpose? Where would all this meaning, order, purpose, and free cheese fries every Tuesday night supposed to come from? These are concepts that cannot exist without a mind. Whose mind?

God. The only possible answer is God. It might be a God of profound cosmic vagueness, an idea that there is “something” out there, but call it what you like, you are still saying that where there is a clock there is a clockmaker.

But there isn’t. There is no cosmic parent watching us play. Nobody to punish the bad kids and reward the good kids. Nobody trying to keep us from harm. No ultimate source of moral guidance. No grand shepherd to lead us to the good life and happiness and all that other neat stuff.

We are tiny, we are helpless, and we are alone.

There isn’t even a cosmic mind to dream us all up. There is only us humans. We are the grownups. We are our own keepers. We are on our own.

We are in charge.

And nobody else seems to see that. Perhaps it takes someone raised completely outside religion like myself to see it.

You’re welcome, world!

My best guess as to the origin of this persistent delusion of cosmic meaning and purpose is that it’s our tribe based social instincts telling us that somewhere, there’s a chief, and work that needs to be done, and a job you are supposed to be doing, and as long as you are doing that job well, you are “good”.

But there is no chief, tribe, village, or job. There’s just us monkeys, man.

This does not make me despair, though. Perhaps that is because I never thought there was meaning in the first place, but my point is that despair is not the only option.

I find it quite liberating myself. We are free to make the world we want to live in, with no intergalactic overseer to tell us what we can and cannot do.

We’re all alone with a million Legos, folks.

Let’s see what we can make,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Warning, this will involve poop and pooping.

So this morning, I defecated. Perfectly normal operation, no complications. Bombs away. Was quite sure I had emptied myself out.

But then as I rose, the strangest sensation passed through me. It felt like the entire contents of my digestive system had suddenly petrified. I went from feeling almost empty to feeling massively full in the space of a second, maybe less.

So now I was dealing with a gut full of wet cement. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling and immediately killed my appetite and my ability to sleep. Even just lying down felt weird, like my organs weren’t in their usual positions.

Would not recommend.

Since then, I have managed to empty myself out some more, and for the moment there just seems to be a small coprolithic deposit right above my bladder to shift.

Hopefully this banana and the caffeine from my diet cola will help.

This has been happening ever since my bladder issues showed up, but never this fast and this strong before. It was all so sudden and extreme.

Like Medusa looked at my recent CT scan. ^[1]

I dunno exactly how my bladder issues could interact with my IBS to cause this but the timing strongly suggests that’s the case.

And I prefer to think they are linked because otherwise I have two entirely different issues and one of them might send me to a proctologist.

And I would really rather not.

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It’s Therapy Thursday

Talked with my shrink Doctor Costin today,

Ended up talking mostly about medical shit. Not what I wanted to talk about but kind of hard to avoid telling him all about my recent hospital voyage as it’s a rather major life event for me.

One good thing did come out of it : Doc Costin suggested I try a stool softener for my issues with constipation.

And I was like, duh, I forgot those were even a thing. And unlike laxatives or firmatives, stool softeners are safe for IBS sufferers like myself because they don’t stimulate the bowels to push or anything, they just soften one’s poop to make it easier to pass.

Sounds fantastic to me. Whatever gets this freaking sludge out of me.

I also talked with him about the lack of dopamine in my brain, and he suggested exercise. Apparently it pumps dopamine levels.

So the cure for my lack of motivation is to somehow get motivated enough to exercise.

It’s a heck of a catch, that Catch-22.

Still, I am determined to at least get out into the sun some time soon. I need fresh air and sunshine and time out of this musty dusty stinkbox of a bedroom.

Maybe I will go to the beach one of these afternoons. I could benefit from some time spent lying on a blanket on the sand, letting the radiant heat bake the toxins from my skin and letting the magic of being near water soothe me.

I only hope I get healthy enough to take the heat.

More after the break.

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Tales of Toughie

My grandfather on my mother’s side, my Pepe (pronounced Papie in English) , owned and operated the electronics store in my home town. He sold and repaired radios, TVs, and so on. He was a very quiet, softspoken man who didn’t say a lot. But one day, some drunk asshole came into the store, said the wrong thing, and my Pepe picked him up, carried him outside, and threw him literally across the street. See, my Pepe was into bodybuilding way back before it was cool. When most people, in fact, thought it was pretty gay. In the armed forces, his nickname had been Toughie. He was known for being quiet, strong, and incredibly loyal. Nobody messed with Toughie or his friends. So that drunk guy picked the worst possible guy to fuck with. I love this story. And I admit, if I had a time machine, I would go back and find out what that asshole *said*. Because it had to be pretty bad to bring the Toughie out of my Pepe.

I love this story

Wrote that in the comments section of a Reddit video about seeing “the fury of a patient man” and liked how it turned out, so I thought I would share.

Man, I’m not even a real writer yet, and already I’m plagiarizing myself.

We were never close – I was never close with any of my mother’s family despite living in the same damned town – but still, I miss my Pepe.

He was a hell of a guy. A total rock. Exuded the steady calm of a mountainside. Quiet, unprepossessing, simple of manner and style.

But with an understated sense of power I found quite soothing as a child.

If there’s a heaven, I hope he’s there letting my Meme (Mamie in English) do most of the talking so he can do most of the listening, just how he likes it.

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That dope o’mine

All depressives are addicts. We are addicted to whatever means we use to get enough of that sweet, sweet dopamine to live.

My addiction is video games.

Not a huge revelation in the context of this blog, but my recent education in brain chemistry continues to expand my mind and I just realize that keeping that trickle of dopamine going is why I spend all my time playing video games.

It’s my firmly fixated dopamine source. It’s my lifeline. That’s why I find it so hard to imagine life without it. That’s how fixation works.

Even if I try to imagine myself as ridiculously wealthy (the best kind of wealth), with unlimited options for my entertainment, including hot male prostitutes (!), part of me would still be thinking about the next time I would be able to play video games all by myself and get my fix.

In that sense, nothing would have changed.

That’s how I know I’m an addict. I could be having the time of my life and there would still be part of me scheming to get back to my comfort zone, sitting here on this computer, alone and engaged.

That’s where I get my dopamine. That’s the only time I feel truly safe because all the excess energy that usually goes into anxiety is tied up with the game. It fills my mind and displaces all the bad stuff in the process, and for a while, I am okay.

Reality is scary. Video games are not.

Like all addictions, mine is very unhealthy and a big barrier to my having some kind of adult life, but that doesn’t make quitting any easier.

Somehow, I need to find another source of dopamine. Then convince myself that it can be “just as good” as video games, or better.

Even the thought of leaving the video games behind long term – like, for more than an afternoon – gives me the cold sweats.

Hello, my name is Fruvous, and I have a problem.

Where else can I get my dopamine?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I was Facing Book this morning when I came across an ad for some asshole’s book telling people how to live without God and religion, and I thought about it for a few moments, then this came spilling out :

It really says a lot about the fart-sniffing arrogance and autocoprophagous egotism of modern atheism that someone thought the world needed them to explain to them how to be an atheist right. You people are the reason that, despite my complete lack of religious upbringing, I refuse to publicly identify as an atheist or a skeptic any more, because quite frankly, you people are appalling. Just another group of stuck-up unholier-than-thou narrowminded hate-filled bigots who think they have found the one group it’s okay to hate and are clinging to said hate because it’s more precious than fissile material to beady-eyed sadists like you. You really want to transcend your narrow minded religious upbringing? Love one another. Love everybody. Love people who are absolutely nothing like you. Truly embrace difference by loving the churchgoer, the redneck, the hunter, and everyone else on “the other side”. True enlightenment has no side, no team, no religion, no nation, and no flag. Smarten up, or admit that you were never any better than “them” and they were right to see the world as an amoral competition between groups. Lift your goddamned head out of the mud and SEE.

me, on facebook, venting some shit apparently

I knew I had a lot of anger towards the Dawkins worshippers of the religiously intolerant atheist hate front, but I must admit that I was surprised at all that came out.

And all so eloquent, too. In my usual sloppy sort of way.

I hope for more of these Facebook ketchup bottle explosions of rage in the future. They are quite cathartic and therapeutic and in a weird way, fun.

Not fun in a normal way because I was super pissed off when I was writing it. And that’s the only way it’s going to go down because I am all about the sincerity and I am not going to pretend to be angry at something I am not purely for the lulz.

I feel nauseated even typing the concept.

But fun in the way that exercising a muscle can be fun when it’s a muscle like my writing muscle, which is swole AF.

And I feel like the above rant was a good first step towards my goal of using the power of my authorial and orator’s voice to decry the evils of the world and maybe do some good in the world, or at least get into interesting trouble.

I’ve always wanted to be a figure of controversy. An honest one, of course. One who is expressing his opinions in the most powerful and persuasive way he can.

And that just happens to mean “at a sky-shattering volume” in my case.

But the way I see it, pissing people off to the point of apoplexy is a necessary consequence of saying anything truly important. My kind of visionary rhetoric yanks away the moral blanket of cheap evasions people are hiding under and exposes their hypocrisy to themselves. It blasts away illusions and shows people the vitally important truths they have been ignoring. It comes at them from a totally unexpected ankle where they are extremely vulnerable and quite sensibly their first response will be to fight back against the smug motherfucker who just hurt them.

I know my intent is pure. I know that I am not looking to hurt people but to bring them closer to the truth and maybe even help them resolve some of the internal conflicts that are making them unhappy because deep down, something just isn’t making sense.

But I’d be a fool to ignore the clear historical fact that people don’t like people like me and even if I achieve the sort of cultural revolution I seek, it only takes one nutjob who never leaves that “I hate you for this pain” mode and it drive him to blow my frigging brain out at close range.

Don’t want it. But my destiny might demand it any way.

Is this the equator? Because that turned dark quick.

More after the break.

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My missing ailments

Told you I’d probably forgotten some!

Like my IBS. Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Calericos Trepas.

I just call it “Grumpy Bum. ”

Admittedly, I have had it for so long that it’s background noise to me. I have trouble imagining it not being there, even thought I didn’t get it till I was ~22.

Basically my guts are always in motion. Bubbling. Gurgling. Swishing about. Sometimes, but not very often, issues develop, and three or four times a year, I have a Very Bad Time In The Bathroom.

That would make a killer name for a children’s book. It would be about a kid trying to do normal bathroom stuff but increasingly crazy obstacles get in his way.

Cue his mother saying “What’s taking you so long in there?”.

That could be a smash hit. I’m so goddamned brilliant that genius ideas just drip off me like perspiration on a hot day.

Anyhow, there is also my clogged pores. They cause me a lot of overheating and other strife and the cure is simple : shower every day.

Not gonna happen. Once more my dopamine deficit blocks my path.

Man, I am getting really sick of that shit.

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And now, a confession

One last little thing about my recent bloody hospital stay.

I was quite disappointed to learn that I was not going to be admitted.

Also relieved, but that’s normal hence unworthy of discussion.

I can acknowledge this profound disappointment now that more than 24 hours has passed since my discharge. And it’s not really a surprise, though it is somewhat humiliating on a personal level.

Because part of me was really looking forward to having a nice bed someplace QUIET (the ER ain’t) and settling into my shameful oral-retentive groove in a place where I am surrounded by people looking after my needs and paying attention to me and caring about what happens to me and wanting me to get better and I can just relax and concentrate on being charming and cooperative just like the infant I am deep down.

Hence the humiliation.

I’ve always vehemently rejected this infantile side of myself, but now I am starting to think I should hold my nose and explore it because arrested development does not get better on its own.

I will try to bring it up tomorrow in therapy. Not going to be easy because I know my mind will fight me on this subject, but I have to try.

Got some serious emotional work to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(WARNING : Gross, disturbing medical shit in today’s entry!)

The last 20 hours have been interesting.

It started around 6 pm. I was fully into the mode where I am peeing every ten to fifteen minutes. No fun.

I’m having to strain to get it all out, especially the last 10 percent or so, which takes as longer to get out than the first 90 percent because it will only come out in tiny painful squirts and lazy drips.

So I got to pee one of my many pees at around 6:15 pm when I notice there is a hint of… color, in my urine.

Uh oh. I wait for the next one, and sure enough, there is definitely blood in there. And it only gets worse from there, to the point where I am basically pissing blood.

So I decide this seems like one of those really seriously type symptoms and that therefore it is time for a trip to the ER.

But then I had to poop. And then, poop again. Goddamn constipation.

Eventually, I got dressed and got Julian to drive me to the ER. I was still in “gotta pee” mode, so I had to pee before even going through Admitting, then a bunch of times before triage, and so on.

Looking back, I think it wasn’t the usual need to pee. It’s that my bladder was filling with blood. Hence that being what was coming out of the, er…. faucet.

Look, I warned you this was going to be a nasty one.

So by the time I made it out of the waiting room, it was around 9 pm. I got shifted around a little in the ward but then settled down for the unbounded purgatory that is the emergency room life.

Periodically, people would show up to poke and prod. Got my blood sugar taken a LOT, which is no surprise, seeing as it was 22.7 when I came in and normal is 7.

So, more than triple normal. Not good. Gotta get on that shit. Testing is probably still beyond me now – if anything, getting tested like 10 times while I was there confirmed that. There is no way my dopamine deprived brain can generate enough motivation to overcome having to lance my fingertips regularly.

Fuck that noise.

But injecting insulin is seriously no big deal. It’s absurd that I stopped doing it. Lack of dopamine strikes again.

Well I will fix that god damn it.

Anyhow, after spending from 9 pm Monday to 2 pm Tuesday (today) in the freaking ER, the doctor says she has referred me to a urologist who will take it from there.

And she almost slipped away on me like so many have before but this time, to my credit, I stopped her and asked her why I had been peeing blood.

She said, basically, that they did not know. They were going with the theory that it was an infection and putting me on a different antibiotic, but mostly, they were booting it to the urologist to figure out.

Motherfucker. A urine test, at least 16 tubes of blood, a dozen blood sugar pokes, a lot of time spent peeing blood into a bedside “urinal” (basically a wide mouthed cardboard jug), two different IV ports put in my and a whole lot of IV fluids put through them, two blood cultures taken, and a full abdominal CT scan, and they still dunno.

I suppose I can infer they they didn’t find a bladder or kidney stone on the CR scan, assuming CTs can pick that shit up.

Oh well. I will hear from the urologist soon, and start taking the new antibiotic with tonight’s dinner, and we will see what happens from there.

I am not a happy camper.

More on this later, after the break.

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My horrible ailments

Meant to write this before I ended up in the hospital. Said hospital stay kind of highlighted the need.

Translation : having medical professionals hovering about asking about all me ailments really make me realized how many I have and how ill a person I am.

So let’s list them, shall we? Good.

Starting from the top : there’s the weird scabby shit on my head. One nurse thought it looked like an infection and took a sample.

For most people, that’s a serious ailment. I barely think about it any more.

Same with my fucked up sinuses and their tendency to run and clog and give me serious sinus headaches and many secondary effects. And the allergic condition that sets it all off and makes me inflamed all over, which has OTHER nasty effects.

Even makes my balls hurt. Waddy fug.

Oh, and there’s my totally untreated sleep apnea. CPAP sucks. And there does not appear to be an alternative.

Next, my teeth. They’re a nightmare. I never brush. Just don’t have the goddamned dopamine to make myself do it. And I eat tons of popcorn, and the shells from the popcorn get wedged between my teeth and get packed in there many layers deep and as the new layer is jammed on top my teeth get spread further apart and make room for more popcorn shells.

Lastly, I have serious depression. So serious it keeps me from taking care of any of the other ailments on this list, and will ultimately be what kills me.

And now, the torso. I have a massive hernia. My guts, including my bowels, stick through it. Apparently this is not that big a deal because I am too fat for the normal surgery and it hasn’t killed me yet so meh.

Also chronic wrist pain. Arthritis, I guess.

And whatever it is that is making me weaker and weaker all the time. I assume it’s something cardiovascular but it could be neurological as well.

Or both. What fun.

On to the legs. They’re quite fucked up too. I am always getting random pains, twitches, spasms, and other neurological symptoms from my poor legs.

And my knees are on their last legs. So to speak. I’ll miss them when they’re gone.

And then there’s my feet. Not only are they even more fucked up than my legs and are slightly asleep almost all the time, one of them has this super calloused area that makes it feel like I am always walking on a flat stone. Fun.

And there’s my under-treated diabetes as well, which is super serious.

All in all, I am a catalogue of disgusting diseases from head to toe.

And I am sure I have forgotten some.

I am probably not long for this world unless I clean up my act.

But then there’s the dopamine issue. SO hard to get myself to do the right things. So much easier to keep playing games while my doom approaches.

I am trying hard to find the mental path between me and daylight. But it’s taking way too long. I need something more powerful than I to intervene.

But there is no such thing.

I need help with life. I can admit that now.

But I don’t know where to get it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More from this article I so casually linked yesterday.

The gist of the piece is an explanation of the actual brain structures involved in depression’s infamous “lack of motivation” and how a lack of dopamine in these structures makes it impossible for them to generate enough of a signal to actually motivate you into action.

Music to my brain nerd ears. Makes me feel a whole lot better about my inability to do simple tasks like cleaning up my room or taking care of my health properly by using my CPAP and testing my blood.

It’s not a lack of character or some profound personal failing or any of that depressive bullshit. I literally do not have the chemicals in my brain that would make it possible.

This is the sort of information which soothes me.

The article explains these things in order to make its case that folks with depression like myself should stop beating ourselves up for being “lazy”, and of course I knew this on some level but seeing it put into precise scientific language does me a world of good and really helps me to believe that I am not at fault.

So I forgive myself for only doing what I am able to do. Um, again.

It’s also quite awesome that the article discusses what does and does not work in my situation according to the author’s own clinical experience. That also means a lot to me. No more of this airy theorization, this is actual hard data.

It does put my current situation in stark relief though. I need to take better care of myself if I want to live and don’t want to end up a miserable bedridden mess for my few remaining years of life.

And yet, I can’t. I just… can’t. The dopamine just plain ain’t there. My prefrontal cortex can’t analyze my options and choose among them. My nucleus accumbans can’t summon enough pleasure to make it seem like the tasks would be rewarding enough to justify action. And my dorsal striatum’s routine generating energies don’t stand a chance of activating anything.

Damn I love the science words.

I wonder how one ups one’s dopamine levels in a safe, non-addictive fashion that doesn’t burn out my receptors.

Ironic that the first recommendation for getting past this block is to take care of your physical health first.

Yeah that’s…. kind of the problem.

Next one is self-compassion, and I am working on it. The hard brain science will help. But I still lack the separation from my diseased self necessary to be able to look upon myself with compassion.

I don’t love myself yet. I wish I did, but I don’t. It’s taken me this long just to stop being overwhelmed by toxic self-loathing when I so much as think of myself.

I know all my wonderful traits. Warm, caring, smart, talented, and so on. I know other people think I’m pretty amazing. I know that my lurking self-loathing is purely a product of my madness and that I have nothing to be ashamed of.

But until I shift this massive wound at my core, I don’t think I will feel it.

More after the break.

Or not. To be continued tomorrow.

This morning was rough.

Had a period between 3 am and 8 am where I was peeing and/or pooping every 15 minutes or so.

And that was pretty freaking irritating.

Made sleep impossible, obviously. At least when it takes as long to get to sleep as it always has me.

Too tired to structure that sentence any better.

At the worst point, it felt like some kind of juvenile curse. Slave to the bathroom. All that changed was where I was reading : in bed waiting for the next “mission” or in the bathroom “on mission”, so to speak.

Warning, more poop talk upcoming.

Was doing that “quantized” pooping too. Only able to get a fixed amount out at a time, instead of being able to empty my bowels like normal.

Learned a little more about that : apparently, these solidified hard stools are a result of something slowing the lower GI tract down enough that the intestines absorb all the moisture from the waste and you get something like concrete in your guts.

So yay that.

I tried stopping the pee train by ceasing all fluid intake, but after abstaining for two and a half hours I was peeing just as often and was very thirsty, so I gave in and got myself the usual glass of water.

Apparently, my frequent hydration is more habit-forming than I thought.

Things seem to have settled back down to once an hour or so now that I finally managed to empty my bowels. My theory is that my blocked bowels were displacing even more of my precious bladder space.

And I have managed to get a couple cumulative hours of sleep since then.

It’s rough being me.

Better get to work on that whole sanity thing so I can heal myself before I die.

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The local effects of global warming

Speaking of my sanity, I feel like that glacier sitting on my heart is smaller and more manageable than ever before.

Perhaps spring time is coming to my frozen realm after all.

The image of myself coughing up dirty snow keeps popping into my mind. Or throwing up soiled ice crystals.

Quite gross, I admit, but still an apt image for what I am going through right now. An image I find oddly amusing. Even comforting.

I suppose a wise animal knows that as horrifying and disgusting and painful as it can be to vomit, this is what will lead to it feeling better.

I am quite eager to achieve a thoroughly purged state. Maybe then I can finally be reborn unto a new and healthy life.

Healthy. What a concept.

It really is a race against time now. Can I get sane enough to take care of myself properly before my self-neglect straight up kills me, or worse, cripples me to the point where I can’t even live my current crappy life any more?

I don’t want to end up full of tubes and strapped to a bed.

And they would have to strap me to the bed to keep me from pulling the tubes out in my totally freaked out panicked state.

Just sedate me till they can come out, please.

More after the break.

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I am a cripple

Got another harsh lesson in my new reality tonight.

Went to do my Sunday shopping. Bzzzt! Sav-on closed early because it’s Easter Sunday. No can do, sucker!

This weekend is threatening to turn me into some sort of Easter Scrooge.

Hah bunny hug!

So we waited for a bit then did the McD’s in the Ironwood parking lot thang with Felicity. I knew there would be a conflict between our usual sit n’ chat and my 45 minute bladder alarm cycle, but I figured I would just go next door to the gas station and use their convenience store’s bathroom no problem.

And it’s true I had no problem going next door and using their facilities. I even did my usual 7-11 shopping while I was there. Smooth.

But getting back…. ah, getting back.

Problem. Very much problem.

Ya see, to get back to the car I had to go up the three concrete steps I had come down on the way to the bathroom et al.

Down had been a little tricky.

Up turned out to be damned near impossible.

Because my knees simply will not hold under strain any more. Trying to walk with any extra strain feels like I am trying to balance on toothpicks now. I could not go up those handrail lacking stairs the normal way at all.

I had to kind of swing one leg then the other onto each step, which felt extremely dangerous and risky and was very very scary.

But I made it up and back to the car.

45 mins later, I had to go again. So much for the hope that I would be able to last until we got home. Nope, it was now or…. well, now in a bad way.

And again, getting there went fine, although this time I just baaaarely made it. But then it was time to get back up the hill again.

Well, if the stairs were the problem I would just bypass them by walking on the dirt next to the stairs. Why that’s genius, Holmes!

Um, nope. That’s not dirt, it’s mud, and I skidded right the fuck out and ended up almost landing on my knee (!!) but instead was sitting on the top concrete step.

And now I had no way to get up. Not with my weak knees. I was stuck.

Luckily, Joe and Julian had seen my fall and came to my rescue. And between me and Joe we managed to get me up on my feet.

But clearly I just plain can’t walk around any more except where it is totally flat. Luckily, I live in Richmond, and it’s mostly flat, but still.

I clearly need a prosthesis. A cane, crutches, a wheelchair, one of those goddamn scooters, a team of burly dudes carrying me on a litter, something like that.

And that means I am officially crippled. I can’t make it around on my own. I need help just to go a block to my pharmacy.

I see being confined to a bed in my future, and I don’t like it. Hopefully the specter of ending up in a bed full of tubes will be enough to motivate me to take better care of myself and maybe save my own life.

Surely it is not an Impossible Task.

Surely somehow I can save myself from myself.

Surely I am not doomed to die a stupid, painful, humiliating death before I even have a chance to get a life.

Surely life will grant me that one small mercy. I’ve been ever so good.

Well, I haven’t been that bad, any way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Haven’t wrestled with this bag of thorns in a while. So allons-y.

I’ve come to realize that I have a sort of protective innocence mode that has both helped and harmed me.

When I am shocked or surprised, I go into this mode where my eyes go very wide and I move very slowly and I look the person who shocked me right in the eyes, silently pleading for clarification, and I might as well be a trapped fawn, I’m so innocent.

This is all subconscious, of course. I don’t think I am capable of doing that kind of thing consciously and deliberately. I am not in the habit of faking anything.

Everything you see is real.

But you don’t see everything.

Being subconscious does not preclude it being a learned response, however. I think I learned it as the youngest of four very brainy kids, and what I am doing when I am in that mode is waiting for someone to explain things to me.

FruBot need iiiiinput.

At least, that’s how it started. I think over time it developed other functions, like :

1. Giving me time to think when I am too surprised to be able to think right
2. Covering for me when social anxiety is creating major conflict in my brain
3. Passively punishing people for not just spitting out what they mean in a way that forces them to put their thoughts into words
4. Protecting my own innocence – a strange notion

It’s that last one that has cost me sooooooo many sexual opportunities. So many people wanted to get with me but I was too socially clueless to pick up literally any sexual clues whatsoever and so I went into my innocent routine instead.

To be fair, when I was that young, I had trouble imagining anyone being attracted to me on any level, least of all the sexual.

So no matter how blunt the signals, my mind would still interpret them as non-sexually as possible, as with any nervous nerd.

Thank god both my self-esteem and my social sophistication have improved since then.

It’s also part of my “learned helplessness” suite of responses too, I suppose. That wide eyed pleading look screams “rescue me”. Often from my own clueless nature, which each rescue only reinforces.

I still need to exit that mode. You can’t develop adult self-esteem when you are relying on others to handle reality for you. I will never be the strong and self-sufficient person I know I can be if I don’t learn to stop running away from everything.

Perhaps that is obvious. I don’t know.

I want to grow up. I want to be a real person. I want to be able to hold my head up without shame. I want to live without being in a constant state of cringing apology.

I want to stop living in fear of the moment when someone asks me what I do for a living.

Nothing, okay? Absolutely fucking nothing. I exist entirely because society takes pity on the halt and the lame and the fucked in the head.

I desperately need a way to make money that I can handle. And get.

There’s plenty of work out there in the gig economy that I could do. I could always go back to UpWork or similar. It’s all out there waiting for me.

But…I can’t. My guardian ghost won’t let me. Freezes me with fear when I try.

So that’s why I need to heal this goddamn wound at my center.

Nothing will get done until it is gone. Gone for good.

More after the break.

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The Unwanted Child

Typed this in as a comment to this video :

I was unplanned and unwanted. I defied my mother’s tubal ligation to get here. My whole life every resented me for being around and having needs. I grew up feeling like a guest who has vastly overstayed his welcome but cannot leave. I was never once treated like I was an equal member of the family. There was my parents, my older siblings, and me. Every time my parents had to buy me a winter coat or winter boots or really buy anything for me, they resented if. They made me do my own clothes shopping starting when I was 8 years old. I could never go to anyone for comfort, advice, guidance, or even just a hug. My vast inferiority was simply one of the rules of the universe. I should be glad they let me stay, I deserved absolutely nothing.

Me, my life, such as it is

Not even life itself.

None of that is news to my regular readers, but I liked how succinctly and powerfully I put it and it seemed like a good enough jumping off point for tonight’s bloggage.

Obviously, a Reddit video about unwanted children kind of triggered me, having been one. In fact, one of the reasons I keep coming back to this subject is that I still don’t think I rightly measure and comprehend how vastly I was betrayed.

And my surviving family have no idea they did it, or at least, how bad they hurt me. I remain in the same hermetically sealed compartment that I have always been in to them, Even my mother.

Like I said in the above….there were my parents, my siblings, and me.

And I simply did not count. I deserve no attention, resources, time, or effort on their part As always, they prefer to simply pretend I do not exist, and resent reminders of my existence. Been that way since the goddamned day I was born.

And as always, I deserve so much better. At the very very least, I deserve them acknowledging how badly they raised me and how little they thought of me and how I had this dazzling intellect and even didn’t care because they didn’t care.

What I am owed is a decent childhood like the one they got. Impossible to get now, obviously, but it’s still what I deserve. A childhood where I was respected and valued and given the same guidance, protection, and support they got.

Honestly, that’s all I want from them. Acknowledgement. I don’t want money and I am not looking to punish them in any way other than via their conscience.

All I can do is point out how horrible you have been.

It’s up to you whether you feel bad about it or not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hear me out here.

Nobody has ever truly understood me. I have always been operating on a level above most people’s capacity to comprehend, and it’s a major factor in my feeling of severe isolation and loneliness.

I want to connect with people. But I have so little in common with them. It makes it very hard to relate. And it’s been that way since my first day of school.

I had zero interest in the sorts of things kids my age normally did. The sandbox, monkey bars, and most toys had zero allure for me. I didn’t want action figures from my favorite cartoons. I didn’t want marbles or jacks or jump-ropes. I didn’t want to play a sport or be a singer or a fireman or whatever.

You know what I wanted? Books. Lots and lots of books.

Who could understand a kid that weird? Nobody understood me and I have lived in a little world of my own as a result.

My question for today is…. is that really such a big deal? How important is it to be understood? Is it really an insurmountable barrier to interpersonal connection? Or is it something that can be negotiated?

I understand them, after all. With startling clarity sometimes. I can get where they are coming from and that should be enough.

The hurdle there is that I can’t see a way of taking that kind of attitude without looking down on people. Tolerating them and indulging them and loving them, in a broadly humanitarian way, but not seeing them as equals at all.

And that idea, frankly, grosses me out.

I am emotionally allergic to elitism. I’ve loathed it all my life. I want equality. I want to relate to people on their own level. I want to be with people, dammit.

But is that possible when I have to talk with them in a way I find artificial and cannot truly express who I am with them?

You know what I want? The common touch. My father (RIP) had it. He could talk to absolutely anybody on their own level, as an equal, with respect and decency.

I think the secret for me would be to stop trying to relate to average people on an intellectual level. They are never going to see eye to eye with me there. No matter how good I get at expressing myself, there will always be a large gap on that level.

But that’s not the only level there is. You can relate emotionally, socially, even sexually. There is more to human existence than the life of the mind, and I would be much better off if I concentrated on developing those sides of myself instead of constantly banging my head against the brick wall of trying to make myself understood.

Right now, I feel in need of rescue. I need someone to come find me in my lonely castle on my lonely island in the middle of my lonely kingdom. Find me, and take me by the hand, and lead me out of my grey domain and into the sunlit lands, where at long last I can be happy and healthy and free.

Pretty sure that hero is going to have to be me.

God damn it.

More after the break.

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That crippling wound

Let’s talk more about that profound and very deep wound at my core. The one that my whole life and very being has been built around. The one I got when a total stranger raped me in the showers of a fancy exercise club.

You know. That one.

Talked about it a bit with Doc Costin yesterday. Told him that it was clear that real recovery can only happen if I deal with that primary trauma.

All my other problems lead back to there. The whole reason I can’t get anything done is that the ice ghost of my depression freezes the impulse from my blood in order to keep me from doing anything that so much as looks like it might brush up against the wound and cause me pain from it.

It’s the reason I am so weak and timid and lacking in backbone. It’s hard to be strong when you have such a terrible injury to the very heart of your soul.

It’s like having a severe spine injury. Right next to the rib cage. Untreated. You might learn to get around but you’re certainly not going to enter the Olympics ever.

And that’s how I have lived my life. Crippled. And crippled in a very inobvious and subtle way that has taken me all these years to figure out.

Unfortunately, there’s no crutches or prosthesis for the emotional cripple. I can’t go get a wheelchair for my weary soul, or a truss and belt to hold me up and keep me upright. And there is no miracle surgery to make me whole and healthy again.

God damn it.

But I closing in on the solution now. I feel this wound as a distinct and named thing now, and that is always the first step towards being able to deal with something because now my conscious mind can help.

It does have its uses, after all.

Right now, I feel like a dog gnawing on a wound. Gingerly, at first, because I don’t know how deep it goes or what it’s attached to.

But eventually I will dig deep and rip that motherfucker out.

OK, so that would actually kill the dog. Look, there’s no such thing as a perfect metaphor. Not even from me.

And I’m a man who makes great metaphors.

Perhaps surgery would work better. Or that old standby of mine, the soldier using tweezers to remove bits of shrapnel from his flesh with nothing but whiskey to use as both antiseptic and anesthetic.

And each little piece gets dropped into an emesis pan with a clink. And there are a lot of muttered curses because it hurts like a mofo but I never stop because it also feels real good to be rid of the stuff.

Well this is the biggest piece yet. Goddamned thing must be as big as a dinner plate and as thick as tank armor.

No quick yank for this one. Getting ready to remove it will take some time.

But when it is gone, the rest should fall out too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Warning, this is going to be one of those posts where I rant like a megalomaniac a bit.

Been watching (well, listening to) the following vid :

For those of you who aren’t in the mood for a long vid, it’s about various ways to exact justice on rude customers without violating store policy.

And that is so my kind of thing. Making the bastards pay while seeming completely innocent and sweet is like a drug to me. I would work pretty hard just to get the opportunity to do this.

So we’re already in the um…. creepier part of my personality.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pounding. The thing is, not only would I thoroughly enjoy hurting bad people, I would be very, very good at it.

Too good at it, actually. Here comes the crazy bit folks.

See, I know, without a doubt, that I could manipulate the average person in such a way to cause them immense cognitive and emotional pain without them having any idea what I am doing to them or why this sweet, friendly, patient, helpful fellow is causing them such fear and confusion.

This is what happens when you are smart (and fucked up) enough to act on others at such a remove that it doesn’t seem like you’re doing anything at all.

This is the true horror of superior intelligence. It’s what makes people like me potentially very scary despite being a super nice person 99.9 percent of the time.

Certain kinds of power generate fear no matter how trustworthy the person with such power might be.

Certain kinds of power you cannot afford to trust.

And there’s all kinds of things I could do to mess with someone’s head without people even knowing what I am doing. I could introduce odd little pauses and stutters into my speech that go by too fast to notice yet build a subconscious “uncanny valley”. I could phrase things in such a way that they could be interpreted as insulting but also be defended as being completely innocent. I could stare into their eyes just a little bit too intensely so that it looks like I am listening politely but sets of their “predator stare” fear/anger responses off and goads them into attacking me “unprovoked”.

And those are just the first three things off the top of my head.

I can do some truly terrible things to people and get away with it. And I can neither fully condemn or fully embrace that part of myself.

The chilly predator. The heartless killer. King Lizard in all his rippling reptile glory.

He is repulsively inhuman and obscenely ruthless and true maniacal madness is at the controls when he rises from his slumber.

But so help me God, I also love him, because he is my power. My protector. My dark guardian ready to rise and destroy and devour my enemies if they choose to oppose me or threaten those I love.

His deadliness is my defense. Stroking his scales like I am doing tonight makes me feel safer. Knowing I have such immense and fatal power at my command makes me feel a lot less abandoned and vulnerable in the world.

So as awful as he is, I can never rid myself of him.

Because god damn it, I need him.

More after the break.

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Paying the piper

I’ve been catching up on sleep today.

Which means I have been pretty miserable, over all.

That’s how it goes in my personal reality. When I have been getting too little decent sleep. that ol’ bastard sleep debt starts to accrue, and eventually will become a strong enough force to overcome whatever is keeping me awake and/or from getting enough quality REM sleep.

As patient readers know, lately that has been my freaking overactive bladder. Can’t go more than an hour, tops, without having to empty a very full bladder and jumping Jesus on a pogo stick am I sick of it.

Whatever happened to just needing a wicked piss when you wake up? Oh right, that was before I had a huge rock in my bladder, taking up valuable pee storage space.

Well today was the day the dam broke and my body and brain left me very little choice but to sleep for most of the day.

It was a little tricky to make sure I ate my meals between the naps, to be honest.

Now when the sleep dam brakes, it is a good thing… eventually.

But in the short term it suuuuucks, because the sleep I get at that point is not the happy calm relaxing fluffy sheep in green meadows kind of sleep.

No, this is the brutal, intense, punishing kind of sleep when your brain has a huuuuge backlog of REM sleep (aka dreaming) to catch up on as quickly as possible and to hell with your comfort or pleasure.

So those times when I am awake between those binge-naps are quite unpleasant. I feel like I have been running a marathon underwater. Like I am recovering from being squished flat as a piece of paper. Like I just came out of a coma.

Which I suppose I did, in a sense.

I always wonder if this is what it’s like when a mystic visionary comes out of their trance when they are having a vision. It certainly leaves me drained and weak and confused.

Anyhow, luckily, I have learned to feel the presence of the mental tension that leads to this overcharging of the brain and I can feel it getting smaller with each nap.

That’s way better than when I had no idea when this shit would stop and hence start getting REALLY freaked out.

So, bring on the napping. It sucks while it’s happening but I will feel so much better when I am done.

Then I guess this bullshit will start all over again.

Oh happy day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Finally got the frigging eye measurements done!

Julian and I left promptly at 10 am. Then I realized I didn’t have a mask on me, so we had to go back upstairs to the apartment to get one.

We then left promptly again, this time at 10:06 am.

The drive there was uneventful. We found the place at around 10:30 am. It’s one of many squat square office buildings nearish to VGH.

That’s “Vancouver General Hospital” for you non local types.

First problem : there’s some walking uphill and then walking up stairs involved in getting from the parking lot to the building.

The horizontal distance was trivial – a quarter of a block or so.

But I am quite feeble these days (should probably get that checked out again) and so for me it was brutally hard. There was a point when going up the stairs to the building where I thought my knees were going to buckle, but I managed to stay steady on my pegs and get in there.

Then a nice lady greeted us and asked us the usual COVID questions and gave us fresh masks. Up the elevator and down the hallway to Section L.

It was, of course, on the opposite end of the building from the elevator.

Into the office and on to the high precision eye measurement tests that were apparently so damned important that I had to haul my ass to Vancouver to get them done.

I was feeling pretty cranky by this point. Pain does that to me.

The first part was a lot like a more elaborate version of one of the tests I’ve done like three times for my local ophthalmologist, Doctor Faezi.

And I am thinking, did I really need to come here for this bullshit?

But the second part was…. very weird.

The technician put this plastic cup with your standard red laser inside over my eye and tells me to look into the red dot.

Slightly uncomfortable, but no problem.

Then he fills the fucking cup with water. Without even frigging warning me first. What the frick, man?

The water was cool and clean and didn’t hurt, but still, freaky deaky, dude.

Then he turns up the laser a little and the machine makes a series of cute beeping type noises as he looks for the spot it wants and then flash, done.

That was the right eye, which is only a little…. cataracted? Occluded? Distorted?

Fucked up, anyhow.

But now he had to do my left eye, which is extremely…. cataract-bearing, and I begin to appreciate why he didn’t warn me the first time because knowing it is coming made it way worse. Plus, it took him way longer for him to find the spot the laser wanted because, guess what, it’s hard to shine a light through an eyeball that is so cataractified that I might as well replace it with a clear marble.

So that sucked. This time it did start to hurt a little, mostly from the coldness of the water. He really should heat that shit up to body temp.

And then we were done. Back down the elevator and out to the parking lot. Got into the car while Julian went to get himself a veggie wrap at a nearby wrap joint.

And immediately realized I really needed to pee.

My bladder has been extra overactive today, so this was not a surprise. I was honestly surprised I lasted till then.

And this is when like a million panicked thoughts and emotions went through my head. There were no truly discreet locations nearby and yet peeing was rapidly becoming non-optional, so I had to get out of the car and pee up against the pillar of the parking structure and hope not to get arrested.

Mission accomplished. Relief on multiple levels. Julian came back and we came home.

More after the break.

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My ups and downs

It occurred to me quite recently that there is a pair of questions that is rather key to my entire existence and yet I somehow have never even asked myself.

Namely : What makes my mood better? And what makes it worse?

I’ve been depressed for 25 years and somehow I am only asking this now. It’s like being on a desert island for 25 years before it occurs to you to wonder in which direction you might find land.

And how far away is it, anyhow?

I suppose it’s a consequence of the sort of death march mentality I have operated under for all these years. A mindset in which all that matters is surviving the day by putting one foot in front of the other unto infinity.

When you think like that, you don’t look around for ways to make things better and you don’t pay attention to what makes things worse.

You just keep going. Slowly, of course. Grindingly so.

But without ever actually stopping.

And really, why look around? Whatever is out there is outside your sad little race and belongs to an entirely different reality than your own.

Better to keep the blinders on and keep plodding along.

So what brings me up? Obviously I am hardly about to produce a definitive list in the space I have left, but I want to get things started.

Let’s see. Sunshine seems to perk me up. Sunny days are happier days for me, especially in the spring before it’s gotten really hot. My entire idea of “happy” is drenched in sunshine. So there’s that.

Getting money used to make me happy. But then I got my inheritance from my Dad and now I have $1200+ on my reloadable VISA and I don’t have that feeling of financial starvation any more.

Plus I have faced the reality of not being able to decide what to do with it.

Reading makes me happy, as does playing video games. In both cases, the quality of the product heavily influences the quality of the experience.

What else. I love high quality conversation with intelligent, curious people of lively mind and inquisitive soul. People who enjoy thinking about things and who are intellectually strong enough to entertain alternative perspectives.

Smart people, more or less.

I wonder where I could find more of that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.