The good news is that whatever nasty-ass infection I had on Friday seems to be completely gone, proving that even with blood the consistency of airplane glue from high blood sugar, my immune system still more or less works.

So, yay for that.

The bad news is that a new thing has cropped up – I am having trouble swallowing.

Right now it’s pretty mild, but still quite troubling. And over the last few days I have had some rather disturbing incidents where I went to take a drink of water either on its own or to take a pill and my throat seized up and did not want to cooperate at all.

Damn near choked me. And with no warning, either. I had no idea my throat was swollen at all. It didn’t hurt or anything.

I can feel the swelling now, though. And I ain’t happy about it.

Because it means I likely have yet another kind of infection. This is getting ridiculous. I am not a playground for contagious diseases dammit.

My only other potential symptom is that I feel fairly tired and it is making it harder than usual to concentrate on what I am doing.

But heck, that could be from not enough sleep lately. In both quantity and quality.

I probably should do something about that.

---

My funny pictures

It occurred to me recently that I have a standard fuckton of funny images I have accumulated over time.

This strikes me as a potentially useful resource.

So what the hell, I will toss a few into the ol’ blog-hole today and see if it can help me generate some content.

If it works, I might even have a basis for sellable articles. The kind of stuff that can draw the clicks and make me some extra cash.

But really, I do it purely for the love of the art.

Some people blame radiation for all the harm it does when the real problem is the radiation’s owner who did not properly discipline it.

Also, if he should offer to teach you something he calls “the electric boot scoot boogie”, remember to cross your arms over your head and scream “Damn You, Space Cowboy” just like you were taught in school.

Unfortunately, Motherfuckin’ Guido is the only one who can defeat Fantastic Dan permanently, and a consensus has yet to emerge on which is worse.

By the way, in case it isn’t obvious, these are real illustrations from airline passenger safety guides. Only the captions are new.

And frigging hilarious.

But I do care. I care a lot. Like, a very big lot. More than you, probably.

But remember, she’s more scared of you than you are of her, unless you’re a pussy.

Okay, I will do one more.

You know them sharks. Always be frontin’.

That’s enough of that for now. I love riffing but it does not help me hit wordcount real fast and I want to take a nap already.

Gives me fond memories of when I made a video every day.

I should do something like that again.

More after the break.

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Fruvous the Magician

Okay, this is freaking me out.

Somehow, I have made a half-full 2L bottle of Diet Coke…. disappear.

One minute I was taking it out of the fridge, then something happened, then I looked around and it just was not there.

I don’t know what that “something” was, hence the pronoun. Something happened that interrupted my flow of consciousness and “reset” my brain, and then I looked around and could not find the fucking thing.

I looked all over the kitchen and nada. Spent a good fifteen minutes searching for that fucking liter of liquid. Still nothing.

And paranoid thoughts about how I have been spaced out and had trouble focusing all day percolate into my mind. Is there something wrong with my brain? Did I blank out for a second there and do something wildly counterintuitive with the bottle then totally forget I had done it?

It doesn’t help that I am currently reading this book.

But that doesn’t make sense. How could I hide something as big as a 2L bottle of pop in a kitchen as small as ours? Even with the sternest of determination, like I am a jewel thief stashing the loot while the cops are pounding on the door, I could not find a place to hide a 2L bottle in that kitchen that was not the places I thoroughly checked.

And yet, I am positive that at some point, I will go into the kitchen and there it will be, sitting somewhere totally obvious, some place I definitely checked multiple times, and there it will be, plain as day.

Either that, or one of my roomies will find it, and come to me saying, “You left this out, do you want me to put it in the fridge?”

And with frightening intensity I will cry out, “WHERE WAS IT!?!?”

And they won’t remember.

Both scenarios imply that there is either something deeply wrong with the fundamental structure of the universe or something equally wrong with my brain.

I can’t decide which is scarier.

Oh crap, it could be both! Maybe there’s something wrong with my brain AND reality! What if was is wrong with reality is messing with my brain?

Hell, what if it’s my brain issue that is disrupting the fabric of reality?

To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised. My brain is both mighty and canny. Messing with the fabric of reality is well within its wheelhouse.

Regardless, I really hope this shit resolves itself some time soon because it is freaking me out and I want that to stop.

Normally, when I am done blogging for the evening, I flop into bed for a nap. But tonight, I am probably going to take a trip to the kitchen first in order to search for the bottle of Diet Coke that now contains both 1L of Diet Coke and the tattered remains of my sanity.

First, I am going to indulge in a little l’esprit d’escalier and write what I wish I had said in response to an incident from many years ago.

The scenario : I was thinking of finally joining the millennium and getting a cellphone, so I went to the Telus store to talk to someone about my options.

The snooty lady who was the only one working there (it’s one of the itty bitty Telus stores the size of a walk-in closet) took one look at me and my usual “recently homeless” disheveled look and turned up her nose.

When I started asking her about plans, she cut me off to very snottily say “Look, our plans START at $60/month. ”

And at the time, I couldn’t afford it, so I just slinked (slunk?) away.

But here’s how I wish I’d reacted.

I wish I had given her a detached, clinical look, then in my best dry intellectual tone had said “You do realize you were just quite mean to me, right? Presumably, because you assumed I was poor and therefore you could get away with abusing me because I would be unable to retaliate. I just wanted you to know that you’d done that so you can think about what that means about you, as a person. Goodbye. ”

I came up with that while lying in bed last night, and I freaking love it. As far as I am concerned, it approaches both verbal and moral perfection because all it does is hold up a mirror to someone’s evil and force them to look it in the face.

It hurts exactly as much as the person believes their own action to have been evil. My own anger and hurt isn’t even part of the equation.

Well, except as motive.

I think I might have stumbled on the blueprint for an effective life strategy for dealing with nasty people. Just reflect it back to them with perfect accuracy, adding or subtracting nothing in order to make it crystal clear that this is not about you and refusing to making it anything like a traditional interpersonal conflict.

Nasty people tend to be good at those.

But verbal Zen masters like me don’t play their game. We make others play our game. We change the rules that fools don’t even known exist, and that lets us defeat our opponents in ways they can’t even comprehend.

And that’s really fun.

Now I know my little indulgence here does nothing to change the past and causes no harm to the actual snooty lady who made me feel so bad.

But that’s not the point. I am really getting into correcting my internal narrative and for that purpose, a satisfying revenge way after the fact is almost as good as the real thing.

So what the hell. I’m not going to die. I am going to fight all my medical conditions as hard as I can and win, and emerge all the stronger for having my bullshit repeatedly purged by the flames.

I’m not a loser. I’m a future winner. I have incredible abilities and some day I will use them to rocket to the top on a pillar of light and share all my deferred love with the world like a glorious shining star powerful enough to make the whole world warm.

There. That ought to do the trick,

---

Joining enigmas anonymous

I am trying to wrap my head around how to stop being enigmatic.

I know where it comes from. It comes from indecision. Often situations which call for personal information to be revealed have an implicit decision buried in them and for a congenitally decision averse person like myself, the solution to this moment of crisis is to further delay decision by giving a vague answer that lies in between and doesn’t really answer the question at all.

I am a whiz at noncommittal answers given under duress.

So when I talk about being a very open person, I really am.

But I am also really, really…. not.

After all, if you want something to stay hidden, you have both hide the thing and then hide the fact that you’re hiding anything.

And I am very, very good at hiding.

Secondarily, it’s about information control. But on a gut emotional level. By default, I prefer to remain unknown to people. It makes me feel safe. If they don’t know you, they can’t predict you and that gives you an inherent strategic advantage. You are free to choose whatever stratagem best fits the scenario at leisure because you have the luxury of knowing you are invisible.

You maintain this illusion by moving out of the way when they attack where they thought you were. You’re a ghost, and they can’t know where you are, only where you’ve been.

Basically I’m a fucking ninja.

The third factor is that I obviously really enjoy being enigmatic and mysterious. To my lesser mind, it just makes me interesting.

And I have a very strong drive to be interesting.

But it’s not that simple. If people can’t know you, they can’t fully trust you. Coming across as way smarter than them doesn’t help either, and I do both.

And without trust there is no intimacy or even true connection. Nobody trusts someone wearing a mask, especially when it’s not always the same mask.

Have you met Intellectual Fru? How about Silly Fru, or Passionate Ideologue Fru, or Sarcastic Joker Fru, or the rarely seen Theatrical Fru?

Collect them all, kids. Trade them with your friends.

My point is, if people can’t know you, they can’t predict you, and if they can’t predict you, they can’t know you won’t hurt them.

And that’s true no matter how much of a sweetie you think you are. Or how charming, or how adorable, or how smart, or how irresistible.

Nobody trusts a trickster, no matter how nice they are.

So go head and be a ninja if it makes you feel safe, but do so knowing that if you ever want the love, affection, and affirmation you crave, you are going to have to slow down, stand still, and let yourself be found,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling a lot better today.

Low bar. Yesterday was awful. I was various forms of miserable all day. Dunno what kind of infection I had/have but I would categorize it as “pretty darn bad”.

Like I said yesterday, I was lucky enough to sleep through a lot of the day. The feeling of being drained was profound. Not entirely unpleasant. Rather relaxing a minority of the time, in fact. But still not real fun.

Right after I ordered my pasta from Pizza Hut, I ordered 3 2L bottles of Diet Coke from 7-11. Gotta feed the habit after all.

Why 7-11? Because I forgot to order them with my Pizza Hut. D’oh.

But after getting my Pizza Hut order from the door, I was way too messed up and tired and frankly freaked out to go get the 7-11 when it arrived.

So my two liters just sat there by our door until Joe got home from work and was nice enough to take them in for me.

The beginning of the end of my illness was when I fell asleep around 8:30 pm and woke up shortly before midnight and realized I felt a lot better.

Not out of the woods yet, but the trees were thinning and I could smell meadow flowers.

So much to my surprise, I ended up hanging out with Felicity (via Zoom) and Joe as per usual for a Friday night. I was not exactly at my sparkling best but I enjoyed myself.

I had assumed that was NOT in the cards when I was so sick. I figured I would be lucky to manage to eat, let alone hang with my friends.

I have been on the mend since. At first, I still had a lot of trouble eating. But not because of negative appetite like before.

Because food now gave me a sick, sore feeling in my stomach and while that was going on, eating was impossible, so I had to wait for the pain to go away between bites.

Which slowed things down considerably.

I seem to be past that now, knock on metaphorical wood. Currently eating my lunch with no issues besides a bit of gas.

So I figure that nasty bug is on its way out. Thank goodness. I really did not want to end up having to go to the ER with it.

It is not a happy place.

But if it had hung on, I would have gone anyway. Damn it.

I learned the second-hardest way not to fuck around with that kind of thing when I went to the ER for my pneumonia and they tested my respiratory function and told me that if I had waited another day, I might not have made it at all.

Yikes. Message received.

Honestly, what saved me was a come to Jesus moment where part of my mind said “Look, you idiot, this isn’t normal, get your ass to the hospital now!”.

Man had a point. Nice to know that in an emergency situation, there’s a sensible circuit in my brain that can override my usual hazy state of mind and make me focus on, ya know, not fucking dying.

The possibility of dying of a lack of common sense has lurked in my mind ever since I was an accident prone child.

There’s penalties for being a dreamer who spends most of the time in the world inside his head, even when he is also dealing with the world outside it.

More after the break.

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My life isn’t wasted

Okay, time for another bold step in correcting my internal narrative.

I’ve often bemoaned how I have wasted my life playing video games and hiding from the world while my peers zoom ever further ahead of me by having lives.

After all, here I am, almost 48 years old, with very little to show for my time on Earth.

Or so it would seem. But it’s not like I’ve been in a coma. I’ve lived. I’ve learned. I’m consumed staggering amounts of media. This all counts.

And I have thought. Thought deeply and well about all the things I have learned and all the things I see in the world. And by doing so, I have discovered patterns in the world that nobody can see but me. I understand things that are unfathomable mysteries to most of humanity. And I see things most people do not know even exist.

I am the rare fish who knows he’s wet.

In fact, my life so far can be seen as a long time spent gathering wisdom and generating insight into the world. Like a monk in a cell or a philosopher in drafty garret, I have isolated myself from the world and spent enormous amounts of time reading voraciously and contemplating this crazy old thing called life.

So while this is not the life I would have chosen for myself, it is emphatically not a waste of time or worthless. It’s made me who I am today, good AND bad, and I can’t reject the bad without rejecting the good.

And let us not forget that I am quite ill. I have Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD) and it makes true contact with reality very difficult for me. I have such a deep-seated fear of rejection that it keeps me locked in this urban hermit lifestyle even though I know I have all kinds of skills and abilities that would serve me well in the real world.

Given my illness, I have hung in there rather well. I socialize both online and in the real world. I write 1000 words a day on this here blog o’ mine. And I make it through the day.

And all this is leading somewhere. Some day, it will all come together, and I will be ready to climb down from my mountaintop and share my wisdom with the world.

I am serene in my sense of this destiny. This will come to pass. I will emerge from this long darkness in order to shed my light upon the world.

Assuming I manage to live that long.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I ended up having to cancel my cystoscopy today.

Why? Because I got really sick.

It was my fault. I kicked it off by skipping a meal. When I went out to have my snack at midnight and watch Daily Show and Colbert with the roomies, they suggested that we skip it this time because I had an appointment at 8:30 am.

Math doesn’t really work out there. I could have gone to bed at 2 like usual and gotten approximately six hours of sleep, which is plenty for me.

But whatever. I didn’t feel like fighting over it. So I just went back to my room.

People are always looking for excuses to get rid of me, anyhow. I can be kind of intense to be around.

Anyhow, the important thing is that I completely forgot that I still needed to eat. I can’t afford to skip meals, like, ever. My blood sugar will crash and I will end up in a very unpleasant and dangerous state.

What’s even worse than being that way? Waking up that way.

That’s what happened at around 5 am. I woke up feeling absolutely horrible and instantly knew just how badly I had fucked up.

Clearly I needed to eat something with nutritionally available sugars pronto. But that’s easier said than done when you are dying. I was filled with the terrible feeling of death that hypoglycemia produces. It’s like this intense cold tingling through every cell of my body, and even in that fucked up state, I knew that was Bad and I needed to Do Something About It.

After what seemed like hours of sitting on the edge of the bed, unable to make myself get up and save myself, I got up and saved myself. Specifically, I went to the kitchen and got myself an apple and two Mandarin oranges.

Staggered back to the computer and ate my fruit. I chose fruit because of fructose, but also because, as I have said many times before; low blood sugar very stupidly wrecks my appetite. Thus, it keeps me from doing the one thing I need to do, namely eat.

But I have a hack. Apples. Apples always look good and fresh and tasty to me. Fruit in general has a great deal of “food appeal” to me, enough to overcome a stomach full of ick if need be.

So I ate the apple and then the oranges and pulled myself back from the brink.

Then I went back to sleep, and woke up at around 7:20 am,

And I felt horrible.

Like, truly wretched. Not only was my blood sugar low-ish again but it now felt like I had a scared animal in my stomach trying to claw its way out. My head throbbed with pain and I was trembling and quite dizzy.

Well that sucked.

I sat on the edge of my bed again (funny how I always end up there in times of crisis) and tried to force my brain to decide whether to cancel the procedure.

Around 7:50 am, I moved into my computer chair, and that tiny motion made me feel like I was going to throw up, so that decided it, more or less.

So I called the hospital, and the voice-mail message said not to come into the hospital if you are feeling sick, and that sealed the deal.

We will hand-wave the obvious logical issues with a hospital turning away sick people for the time being.

So I canceled. Hated to do it. I was looking forward to having this thing fucking done. But I was in a very bad state.

Like… Mississippi. Or non-Austin Texas.

Since then, I have eaten more fruit and gotten more rest and managed to stick-handle myself back to feeling approximately human.

I am going to try for a large-ish meal in order to replace the midnight snack I missed. But I know I will have to be super careful because going too far too fast could end up making me sick all over again,

Wish me luck.

More after the break.

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So damned tired

No doubt about it, I got some kind of infection. I know this because I have been incredibly tired and dragged out today,

Presumably my immune system is at war with the infection and using all my energy in the process. And I approve, despite how much being this tired suuuuucks.

As in, I have slept more hours than I have been awake today. And as usual, it’s not too bad when it’s nice soft sleepiness that just makes me feel relaxed and groovy.

But that never lasts. I end up in the brutal sleep mode sooner or later. The tormented sleep that drains me and makes feel dizzy and disoriented and dehydrated.

Oh great. My wrists are swollen and it is making typing really hurt. Lovely.

I am gonna stop for now.

---

At least being this sick has banished any lingering doubts I had about whether I was legit sick or my anxiety had pulled some psychosomatic bullshit.

My subconscious mind is perfectly capable of convincing me that I am sick but the illness mysteriously vanishes the minute get out of whatever was making me anxious.

How very humiliating.

---

Well not this time. I am definitely sicker than a fairly sick dog. I just got up to get my Pizza Hut order and it was a freaking nightmare.

I was so sick and weak and dizzy. I could barely walk in a straight line. I obviously got up way too fast, which is something I do way too ofteb,

Usually doesn’t hurt THAT much though.

I am officially kind of worried. This seems like more than just the flu. I am thinking that if I am not better by tomorrow afternoon, it’s off to the ER for me yet again.

No way I can eat right now. Too sick. My pasta will have to wait until my system cools off and I get my appetite back.

But I’ve go to eat it. Or at least, eat something. I can’t skip a meal.

That’s how this whole thing started.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The three PDFs I apparently need to fill out and bring with me tomorrow have been put on a USB thumb drive and are on the way to being printed as we speak,

Thank you, Julian!

But of course, that seemingly simple operation had to end up being fucked up and complicated and aggravating too.

First off, my bad, I lost the USB drive Joe gave me last night. Plain black jobbie, simple, elegant, slick, and sleek,. Dunno how it happened. Best theory is that it fell out of my pants pockets at some point.

Having to tell him this was brutal. Us AVPD types are very sensitive to anger, rejection, disapproval, and so on, and he was, shall we say, deeply unimpressed.

I’m not happy with me about it either, Joe, but I needed to borrow your other one in order to get shit done, so I had no choice.

The other drive is in the shape of a tugboat because it’s a souvenir from nearby Steveston. And I love tugboats.

They are both cute and mighty.

But the tugboat shape makes it very fussy on how you can plug it in. Forget plugging it into a USB port above or below another USB port that is in use because it is going to take up ALL the space.

So I had to unplug my microphone to make room. No big deal, not using it at the moment, so whatever.

But then my mouse stopped working. And then it took my far too long to figure out that it was because I had unplugged it rather than the microphone.

In my defense, I had to untangle a shitload of cords to find this out.

Got things working again and got Julian the Tugboat of Destiny. With a total of nine pages of forms I have to fill out now.

What a bloody palaver.

---

This was also a Therapy Thursday, of course.

My poor therapist has had oral surgery recently. So he was in a lot of pain last Thursday, and mostly just listened.

Which is okay. Better than him interrupting me all the god damned time. But I think it works best when he asks me questions to get me going against when I run out of steam and have to think of some other conversational gambit.

Anyhow, in the last week the site of his surgery started bleeding again and he had to go back to the dental surgeon and get the whole thing done AGAIN.

That poor man!

So I did all the talking this week too. And I have to admit, I was somewhat gratified when at the end of the session, he told me he had a lot he wanted to say but couldn’t because of his oral issues,

Mua ha ha. That pleased the rarely activated “petty interpersonal bullshit” center of my brain. Too bad, I got to talk this time!

Still, I wish him a speedy recovery. I have had oral bleeding before. It is a horror show. Take all the scariness of bleeding from somewhere else and add the ever present risk of drowning in your own blood.

Luckily, I was preschool age at the time, and so the horror of it all did not strike me until I was much older.

Sometimes it is good to have only a shallow and immediate sense of what is going on.

I wonder if there’s a pill I could take for that. One that makes me shallow and stupid for long enough to get some awful task done.

Implications? What implications?

More after the break.

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Medical update : forms received

Julian got the stupid forms for me, and it turns out there was a certain amount of redundancy, so I only have six pages of forms to fill out, not nine.

Whoop de fucking doo.

I will do my homework when I am done my blogging. Which shouldn’t be too long from now as I am quite prolific.

Honestly, I wish this whole thing was over already. I can’t wait to put this whole crazy thing behind me.

Then the next thing is seeing the cardiologist next Wednesday.

Being a sickie is so much work!

---

Hanging in there

What makes the difference between hanging in there and giving up?

There’s a lot of potential angles to that question. I could talk about how failure is addictive to some people and repeat stuff I have said before about going for the instant, massive relief giving up produces instead of enduring the pain of staying the course.

I could talk about my lack of passion and id, and how if I could find a way to get really mad at my problems, my stubbornness and defiance might kick in and see me through.

I could even talk about my AVPD and how it makes me timid.

But instead I will talk about the massive psychic wound at the center of my soul that dominates all that I do.

It’s the pain of that wound which makes me give up. So much of what normal people do is impossible for me because of the incredible pain my wound causes when I do.

In therapy today, I likened it to having some kind of terrible back injury. The kind where moving at all causes brutal pain and you are left with only a very small number of actions you can do without intense, life-destroying suffering.

So it’s like that. But psychological.

And that is why I am a cripple. No exaggeration. This wound of mine cripples me and has done so since the day I was raped.

Really puts my problems into perspective. Really helps me forgive myself.

It’s a wonder I ever got anywhere at all. I should be patting myself on the back for doing as well as I have. I could easily have succumbed to my suicidal thoughts (over) and ended everything a long time ago.

But I hang in there no matter what.

I am just too goddamned stubborn to die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

They are horrible people. Every one of them is a criminal. I can’t believe anyone tolerates them. Everybody I know hates them almost as much as I do. They all should be thrown in jail, or better yet, let me and my friends kill them in extremely brutal ways. Every single one of them should be drug out into the street and shot. You know….those Jews. Oh wait, I meant Blacks. Ooop, no I meant gays! Wait wait, now I got it…. it’s pedophiles! It IS pedophiles now, isn’t it?

me, in a youtube comment this morning

I trust you can see the point I am making.

I would be worried about what people might think of me after that comment if I thought anyone would read the damned thing, but the video was quite old and had over 20K comments so I highly doubt anyone will ever read it.

Plus, one of the iron clad rules of the known universe is that people never ignore me harder than when I am trying to stir up trouble.

If it had been me and not Martin Luther nailing those Theses to the church door, people would have instinctively avoided reading them and in fact would retain absolutely no memory of that church even having a door.

Anyhow, for what it’s worth, I am glad I wrote it. It felt good. Pedophiles are the most persecuted class of people in the world right now and I can no longer sit on the sidelines while atrocious hate is spewed by purportedly “normal” people on a regular basis and nobody seems to think twice about it,

It’s the exact same kind of hate we homosexuals used to face. In fact, the lyrics are almost exactly the same. Only a few words have been changed.

And just like with homosexuality, nobody chooses to be a pedophile. My word, why would they? There is literally no upside and the blind hate of the whole world as a downside. Who would want that?

And yet, people persecute them anyhow. And note how people so easily (and illogically, and evilly) conflate “pedophile” with “child rapist”.

Why? Because the hate’s more fun that way! And it’s not like it hurts anyone who can fight back, so why not enjoy yourself?

Just think, we had almost reached a point where there was literally no group it was okay to brutally deny the right to live in peace. Phew, thank God we dodged that bullet!

See, “pedophile” just means “sexually attracted to children”. It says nothing whatsoever about what the individual has done with children, if anything.

“Pedophile” no more means “child rapist” than “heterosexual man” means “adult woman rapist”. Having the inclination and being willing to hurt people horribly in order to scratch that itch are very different beasts.

As should be obvious.

“Oh, but they want to!” A lot of people want to do a lot of illegal and/or immoral things, but we do not persecute people for what they want, only what they do.

“But they’re so gross!”. Being gross is not and never has been illegal or immortal. There is no person in the world that is so pure and average that there is nothing about them that nobody would consider gross.

“I just want to protect my children!”. Bullshit. Your children are fine and you know it. They are all educated on how to dodge child rapists these days, so don’t try to hide your hate behind parental concern. Every bigot does this and it’s fucking pathetic.

And yes, I am calling you a bigot. If you hate pedophiles, you are a bigot. You hate a class of people based on a morally irrelevant aspect of said group.

Pedohate is bigotry just like all the other hates.

Right now, nobody will defend pedophiles for fear of being tarred with the same brush.

But that doesn’t make hating them right. It only means you will get away with it.

Some day, the arc of justice will bend for pedophiles too. And when that day comes, all the haters will have to face what they let themselves become.

How will they defend themselves then?

More after the break,

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Living sucks, but it’s sucking just a little now

Source for the subtitle :

Love the heck out of that song. Happiest depressed song ever.

So get this : before my urological procedure (camera up the peehole) on Friday, I am expected to print out two or three different three page forms and fill them out by hand then hand them in like homework when I show up at the hospital.

The kicker is that these are forms for a urological clinic I am not even going to!

What a bloody palaver. I am great umbrage at this.

I mean, what millennium is this again? The forms are online but I can’t fill them out online? You want me to print them out? Who even has a printer these days?

So far, the plan is for Julian to get them printed at Staples or wherever and then I will fill them out here at home, seething with resentment the whole time.

And I have only glanced at them, but I already know they ask a lot of the same things and that almost everything they ask is in my file at the freaking hospital.

Isn’t everyone supposed to be on the same filing system now? Why do I, a sick person, have to do all this work to make their lives easier?

Fucking specialists. They know there are too few of them so they are a bunch of prima donnas who can demand everything be done to please them.

To top it all off, I don’t even think this procedure is necessary. Doctor Armstrong got excellent pictures of my bladder and prostate via anal ultrasound (not as fun as it sounds) and concluded that my infection was either gone or nearly gone.

And my urination is back to its usual frequency. It stills feel a little weird, but other than that my symptoms are gone.

And the anarchic and defiant part of me wants to just say “fuck it” and skip the whole thing, forms, procedure, and having to be at the hospital at 8:30 am and all.

But of course, I won’t do that. I am too responsible a person for that. Instead, I will do the damned forms and get a laparoscopic camera jammed where the sun REALLY does not shine and muddle through like normal.

But I will not be happy about. I am planning, in advance, to be cranky.

So like…. watch the fuck out, world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hmmm. I feel like I am forgetting something important.

Oh yeah… I’m dying.

Funny how easy it is to forget that.

Well it’s not like it’s fun to think about. And I have little faith that thinking about it will make the problem go away.

I will do my best to tackle my issues as they come up and that’s about all I can do besides my usual slow grinding journey through my mental health issues.

I kinda hope I become sane enough to take care of myself properly before I die or end up horribly crippled, but there is no guarantee.

All I can do is keep cautiously making my way through the jungle of my madnes and hope to win the race with my mortality.

I want to be taking care of myself right. I especially want to be taking care of my diabetes. But I can’t see a way of getting there with the moves I have available to me.

Hopefully I will eventually get to the point where I am willing to pull the trigger on buying that Ultra OneTouch Libre Variety Pack Mondo Cheeseburger Surprise.

Whatever. The one that does not require lancing my fingertips over and over again. Seems like a worthy investment in my health.

And a cool gizmo to learn and play with, which is always a plus. And one that actually produces actionable data.

How cool is that?

So I will get there soon, I think. It’s just a matter of crossing that unmapped territory between me and action that can’t be explained or justified but neither can it be dismissed or circumvented.

Sometimes, it takes a long time for me to get used to an idea. And only when I have completely adjusted to it can I act.

That is the best description I have for the phenomenon.

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A curious fact

So for about a week now I have been slowly making my way through this vid :

And along the way, I noticed a very curious phenomenon.

The songs I remember from being alive at the time start at 1971.

Here’s a link to the point in the vid with very first one.

Small problem : I was born in 1973. I was minus two when that song came out.

And yet, I remember it quite clearly. It’s that stupid and gimmicky a song. It really left an impression on me.

But what are the odds it was still being played when I was old enough to remember anything? Even a bright boy like me couldn’t have been making those sorts of memories until I was at least two years old.

So what are the odds that that dumb song was still playing four years later in 1975?

And not just that one. I remember Rose Garden by Lynn Anderson, also 1971. Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas, 1974. SOS by ABBA, 1975.

So how is it I remember these songs when I wasn’t even around for some of them and way too young for others?

It’s a mystery. It can’t be that I am misremembering when I heard these songs because my memories of hearing them as a child are quite clear.

Other entries from that era I know, but from hearing them much later in life.

Can my musical appreciation TRAVEL BACKWARDS IN TIME!?!??

No. It’s probably some kind of memory thing.

But it sure is interesting to think about!

More after the break.

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Whether or not

I can’t decide if I want to talk about indecision.

Eh, maybe I won’t.

---

Then again, maybe I will.

The aspect of indecision I want to talk about here is why indecision is a problem.

A shallowly logical take on it might say “So you can’t make up your mind right now. So what? Try again later. ”

Well, for one, conveniently ignorant straw man, that won’t make any difference. I will be just as indecisive if I come back later, even if it’s been a million years.

Time would not change anything.

Well there’s two problems with indecision : one practical and one emotional.

The practical one is the obvious one : sometimes, decisions simply must be made and an inability to stop dithering about them has real consequences.

Anyone who has waited till they got to the front of the line to decide what they want at a fast food place knows that.

I swear I never do that any more. And neither should you.

This goes for big life decisions too. Right now, I am planning on going back to school and trying to make a splash in the academic world.

After all, I’m a highly articulate genius. Seems like a good fit.

But which school? There are so many. How would I even choose?

Knowing me, I will probably agonize in indecision until I just can’t take it any more then make a very impulsive choice to take the first plausible thing I think of.

I am really not built for carefully and methodically comparing a wide range of options, all with valid pros and cons.

I make decisions intuitively or not at all, it seems.

Some genius, huh?

That brings us to the emotional part of the problem of indecision : it hurts. When I am dithering over some decision I am in a lot of emotional pain. Even if the stakes are quite low, I can work myself up into being very upset if I don’t watch myself.

No wonder I make impulsive, intuitive decisions in the long run.

I am starting to think I should just start there and save myself a lot of pain.

At least I now have a conscious understanding of the main source of my indecision : trying to solve problems logically which have far, far too many variables and ending up in a sort of “out of memory” loop.

Basically, my brain crashes. Which is quite painful.

And that means I need to make peace with making decisions in a way my legacy logical operating system insist is “stupid” because it is not technically “intelligent” because it is not the result of logic and reason.

How can I know it’s right decision if I can’t verify that logically?

Answer : I can’t. But there are far too many situations in life where I will not be able to make a logical decision and that means limiting myself to the situations where I can is far, far, far too restrictive.

Nobody can live like that, no matter how smart they are.

So I will learn to make “stupid” decisions. I will “go with my gut”. I will make impulsive, intuitive decisions and live with the consequences.

Damn the torpedoes, and so on.

There are far worse things in life than wrong choices.

For example, you can be so afraid of choosing the wrong thing you do nothing.

Well right or wrong, that shit is gonna stop.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The depression is strong in me today. Anger, self-loathing, bitterness, and frustration circle me like hungry predators. I feel like I want to leap, screaming, out of a window on the 100th floor of the Burj Dubai.

But you know what? This is good.

I like this. I’m enjoying it. Burn, motherfucker, burn. Build that holy bonfire so high the angels get their wings singed. Pile up all my fucking bullshit and anything else that gets in the way of my embracing the world and make that bitch burn.

Make sure to get that goddamned gate. You know, the one that doesn’t let anyone in no matter how sad, lonely, or cold I get? The one that keeps all the goodness and light and warm human connection from getting to my frozen twisted soul because it can’t tell the difference between melting and dying? You know, that fucking thing?

Yeah. Burn that bitch twice. Burn it like it’s plague blankets.

Oh, and toss those old tapes on the fire too. You know, the ones that have all that crazy childhood bullying recorded on them, along with every other time trying to socialize and connect with others ended in my being alienated and traumatized instead.

We don’t need those any more. Those times are long dead and those tapes do not represent my social reality at all any more. They only make me scared for no reason in situations where I am perfectly safe and I am so very over that bullshit.

So toss those goddamned things on the fire and let the fire cleanse them from my mind.

While we’re at it, flush those ancient toxins from my system too. I have been holding on to them for far too long. It’s about time I stop reflexively clinging to them as though they were something important I had to preserve. Like letting go of them would be some kind of unfathomable loss.

Like on some level, it would mean “they got away with it”.

Guess what? They already got away with it. It’s in the distant past. Yes, I was wronged by a lot of people in my fucked up childhood and I deserved much, much better. I was the victim of injustice on many levels and if I had a time machine, maybe I could make these people pay the price for their crimes.

But I don’t. So fuck it. I forgive you all. Not because you deserve it but because I am sick to death of carrying around a hot coal that burns my hand on the off chance I get to throw it at someone who hurt me.

So fuck all y’all. You can burn with the rest.

The best revenge I can get on you horrible people is to evict you from my mind and stop you from hurting me any more.

Finally, when everything else is burning and the blaze is hotter than a stellar core, I will throw myself into the blaze and be annihilated in a heartbeat,

Not just to die, but to be reborn. Phoenix from the flames. Light born of darkness. Power, glory and pride rising from the grave of weakness, cowardice, and shame.

I am done with his form, Master.

I demand another.

More after the break,

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The embittered ronin

Of course, there is no Master. No Captain. No daimyo. There never has been.

Perhaps there never could have been. I don’t know.

But as part of ridding myself of my evils, I might as well vent my bitterness over the fact that I never had anyone to be an authority over me.

And I desperately needed one, even if I didn’t know it. Without anyone in that role, I was left abandoned to the whims of fate. I had nobody to guide me or protect me or tell me what I needed to know in order to make it through life without getting hurt all the time.

What’s more, I had no sense of any power beyond myself, and that’s a very bad thing for a child. I have been self-determined from far too young an an age, and while I understand my own role in that (being so stubborn and intelligent), that doesn’t change the fact that I ended up more or less raising myself.

No wonder I ended up so cowardly. How else is a kid supposed to keep himself safe in a world that has abandoned him but to fanatically minimize risk?

Well, okay, another sort of kid would have been inspired to become a rugged individualist with a “fuck you” attitude and an iron willed determination to prove to the world that he didn’t need anybody.

But I got raped.

And that taught me to withdraw from reality to protect myself, like a turtle retreating into his shell to escape a predator.

So when things got even worse, that’s what I did. I turtled up. I became the wreck I am now, a wizard with earth shaking powers but who is too weak and wounded on the inside to do anything but consume media.

Well, and produce it. Via this blog. Technically.

I can feel the empty space where authority should have been very clearly. It burns like frostbite and I can feel the cold wind whistle through it like a toothache.

I try to imagine what kind of person could have saved me. It’s not easy. They would have had to been extremely strong-willed and persistent, with enough sheer power of personality to penetrate my little bubble and convince me that they not only cared about me but were going to stick around instead of giving up on me like everyone else.

They would not have needed to be smarter than me, though that would help obviously. But the important things would be strength of personality and persistence.

If they were kind of scary, that would also help.

Whatever helps them keep my attention. Charm, wit, mortal terror… it’s all good.

They would have had to be a pretty extraordinary person.

Or my mother. My mother could have done it without a struggle. I absolutely would do whatever she asked of me and listened to everything she said.

But she never wanted me in the first place.

And on a deep level, I knew.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More fruitful discoveries from my YouTube viewing and/or listening.

This one is about archetypes.

Normally, I view this kind of archetype based psychology with a skeptical eye. A lot of those types of approaches seem gimmicky and forced to me.

But I have watched all four of the episodes about Moore and Gilette’s theories about the archetypes of the Love, the King, the Magician, and the Warrior, and have determined that there is more than enough substantive insight for them to be worth discussion.

So like… vas-y!

I am talking about the Lover this time because of the comments about how the passive shadow form of the archetypes is The Dreamer.

The Dreamer is passive, detached, and lonely. They end up preferring their inner world – their dream life – to the real world because to them, the real world is harsh and cruel and unbelievably cold, and only their carefully cultivated inner life can meet their needs.

Not very well, mind you. But it’s all they feel they have.

They also shy away from the Lover’s rich and lively take on reality. Where the Lover embraces life and all its joys and sorrows in order to maximize their feeling of aliveness, The Dreamer maximizes detachment, withdrawal, and emotional guardedness.

Ironically, the coldness the Dreamer flees comes not from a cold and callous world but from their detachment from it. The warmth and life and connect they so desperately seek can only be had if they are willing to lower their guard and be real and alive and present in the moment instead of hiding far, far away.

Obviously, I am talking about myself here. I am totally the Dreamer.

I live in a tiny, cloistered world detached from everything except my beloved video games. The games (supplemented by my YouTube vids) keep my mind too occupied for doubt, anxiety, or depression to creep in. This has the effect of pushing them out of my mind and allowing me some precious time when I am practically sane, and safe from my inner demons for a while.

Hence the addiction.

It gets me through the day but it is killing me, emotionally and physically.

Video games can keep me busy, but they can’t make me feel loved. They can’t make me feel alive and present and real. They can’t melt the ice around my heart and let me live and breathe again.

I can love them all I want. But they will never love me back.

Still, I feel like this video gave me an important clue as to the direction I should go to help heal myself. I now recognize that my detachment is the problem and that the path out of my prison requires me to be alive and present in the moment.

That will not be easy to achieve. The prospect quite frankly terrifies me. It is a challenge to one of my primary defense mechanisms and that’s going to be a tough pill to swallow.

Might as well get started right away, then.

Hello world. I’m…uh, here now.

Please don’t hurt me.

More after the break.

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I am blown away by the fact that this fucking exists.

It’s a service called Musiversal (ick) and through it you can get top notch professional studio musicians to record your freaking songs, man.

That’s so amazing that I am not sure I can handle it.

Just thinking about the possibilities makes me think I am going to faint.

These songs I occasionally write could become actual music. Real music played by real musicians in a real recording session. A session I would supervise.

Un. Freaking. Believable.

That’s all I wanted to say about that right now.

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Scared to live

Let’s take a deeper dive into why I am afraid to live.

It boils down to intensity. The more alive you are, the more intense every experience is. It’s liking turning up the volume on life.

And I have always be afraid of loud noises.

So on those rare occasions where my juices are flowing and I am feeling better and more alive than usual, it has been this intensity intolerance that has been the primary force dragging me back into the darkness.

The light is too damned bright out there, in the sunshine, where I long to be.

But this is a childish reaction, because presumably if I just hang in there and refuse to bolt for my hidey hole, I would eventually acclimate to my new environment and the problem would go away.

And without having to sacrifice my healing and growth.

Maybe that’s what I am really afraid of : change. Change is scary. Change means waking up and being aware so you can create your new normal, and that takes effort, and is a risk.

It is far far easier to keep sleepwalking through life, dead to the world but numb to the pain with no effort or strain or energy to maintain.

Stop that, he told himself.

Easier but not better. Easier but a lot worse, in fact. Like I said yesterday, part of the price of healing and growth will be learning to choose the path of greater resistance. TO deliberately make life harder for myself.

And that’s not easy for a liquid type personality like mine. Water only flows downhill, after all, at least on its own. All my life, I have sought the easy way out, minimizing stress and strain while maximizing leisure and pleasure.

And I have gotten away with it because I had enormous natural gifts that made that which is very hard for others trivially easy for me and therefore I have skated through life on highly minimal effort.

Great way to get through school, but no way to get through life.

No matter how gifted you are, at some point in order to get what you want you will have to do things you don’t want to do no matter how hard, scary, or boring they seem, and that means you will need self-discipline.

Your parents were right about that, as it turns out.

So after a lifetime of mindless self-indulgence and the tragically sad life that leads to, it seem it is time for me to wake up and go to work.

Which is fine.

But I might just whimper a little as I go.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had an attack of “Is that really all I am going to do with my day?” this morning.

The “that” in question is, of course, play video games. And truth is that yes, that’s all I am going do with my day, just like every other day, and that truth hurt.

Hurt and frightened me and made me feel like I was teetering on the edge of the abyss because it made me realize what a meaningless void my life is.

All I ever do is entertain myself, and that’s such a sad way to live. Especially for a person with my extraordinary abilities.

The best thing that can be said about it is it lets me survive. It gets me through the day. It makes the time pass in a relatively painless way.

Then again, so does being in a coma.

And I know I want more out of life. I want a career and a relationship and a community. I want achievement and honor and respect. I want to be a real adult type person.

I want to finish growing up.

But in order to do all that, I have to pull myself away from my video game addiction now and then and spend time neither playing a video game or eating but actually doing scary things to advance my own interests.

And that’s like….. real hard for me. I mean, I call it a video game addiction for a reason. Even the idea of going without its comfort for even a short time gives me a feeling of cold sweat panic like doing so would literally kill me.

I’m not exaggerating. That’s what addiction does. It takes over the cravings center of your brain that normally keeps you alive by driving you fulfill your needs (the hungry animal eats, and so on) but installs itself as a need, and from that point on doing without that to which you are addicted gives you the same panicky feeling you would get if you were starving or dying of thirst.

That’s especially true for physical addictions because in that case your body really is missing some chemical it has stopped producing in response to your drug intake.

But it’s still very strong with purely psychological addictions like video games. This cravings part of the brain is very powerful and not to be denied lightly.

So I know what I am up against. And I know that I will never been content until I break the addiction and go find better things to do with my life.

And to do THAT, I am going to have to learn to swim upstream. To take the path of greater resistance. To willingly make life harder for myself.

That would be a very big change. I’ve spent so much time flowing down the river without so much as an oar in the water.

Heck, I don’t even row downstream.

But I can do it. I can learn and evolve and become more than I am right now.

For I am not all that I can be.

I can be so much more.

I can grow.

More after the break.

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The haunted child

Watched (listened to) this video earlier today :

And here’s the comment I left on YouTube :

I had no imaginary friends. Did not play with toys at all. Only cared about books and video games and TV. Never played in the sandbox, didn’t care about action figures or LEGO or all the rest. I was a strange, serious child who thought and spoke like an adult from a curiously young age. In short, I was weird.

me, dropping a truth bomb y’all

And it got me thinking about what a strange and spooky child I was.

Actually, not spooky. Eerie. I was an eerie child because I had the body and voice and stature of a child my age but I talked like an adult even before I entered school.

And it must be mighty strange to hear adult words coming out of a child’s mouth, in a child’s voice. It must have been downright uncanny, like I was actually some kind of child robot trying to blend in with human children (sort of true) or that I was the puppet of a very strange adult who was feeding me lines through hidden earphones.

Then there was the fact that I just did not think like a child either. Or really like any other human being known to science either, really.

I have always seen things my own way. With startling, even troubling clarity compared to others. This made me not only uncanny but unpredictable.

It’s one thing for the robot child to say normal things in a professorial tone. That kind of thing people can get used to. They’ve seen that kind of kid countless times on TV.

But no, I saw right through people. I could ignore the shared social illusion at will and completely ignore its rules and restrictions whenever I disagreed with them, and that made me not just strange but extradimensional.

Positively alien. really. And the fact that I didn’t seem to know that my powers were anything special only furthered the effect.

Plus, I can’t forget to include my total intellectual self-confidence. Kids are not normally nearly that sure of themselves because they are aware that adults are wiser and smarter than that and so are sometimes willing to defer to them.

Not me. I was completely confident in my opinions and perceptions because, I suppose, I had never had a smarter adult to put me in my place.

Still waiting on that, really.

So in summation, I was a spooky, extradimensional, smug little robot alien who seemed to think he was a human child.

And I was. But then again, I wasn’t.

This is what happens when intellectual development races so far ahead of physical and emotional development that you do not even seem human to others.

No wonder so many adults threw up their hands in frustration and gave up on me. Life was so much easier if you didn’t have to deal with me.

And I was very unlikely to insist upon myself.

So I was one sad and lonely robot child.

Maybe I can be a real boy some day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.