The real kind, not the bullshit abstraction that depressives long for and poets go on about and goths pretend to love.

Because real death isn’t some skeletal bloke with an hourglass and a love for old fashioned clothing politely waiting for your “time”.

No, real death is shrieking psycho covered in blood and coming at you covered in piss and shit and blood and bile and pain and horror and torture to take you out in as messy and humiliating way possible.

It will take everything from you, even the most basic of dignities like choosing when and where to poop, and grind you up like living sausage until you aren’t even a person any more, just a broken sack of meat that lives only to suffer until Death finally pities you enough to let you die.

That’s real death. It isn’t clean or dignified or final. It isn’t beautiful like a black rose or hauntingly touching like a Victorian graveyard or peaceful and quiet like a midnight sepulcher or dignified and regal like a royal tomb.

That’s not the real death. That’s playtime death, a mere Halloween toy. That’s a safe, sanitized, marketable death suitable only for contemplating people who want to feel dark and mysterious and deep. People who want to flatter themselves that they are somehow closer to The Truth because they not only face death, but embrace it. And that this supposed embrace makes them better – realer – than other people.

Bullshit. You’re just another fool in love with their reflection in the mirror – only not as deep. Your superficial death fetish is the same as all the other fools mired in their own vanity and trying to be “cool”.

The only thing that changed was the color palette.

The slightest hint of real death, with its rot and its stink and its destruction of all vanities, would scare you just as much as it would any cheerleader or suburban dad or old person who voted Trump.

More so, even, because unlike those people, you were fool enough to think that Death was your friend.

How very pathetic.

So go ahead. Dress in black and silver. Wear your skulls and scythes and tombstones. Have your unique subculture where you dance around in pretty clothes and socially compete and form cliques and exclude people…. so unlike everyone else!

But know that in the end, it was never more than fashion. Just another branding exercise to convince you that you can be better than everyone else by buying the right line of products. Another captured market, another tapped demographic.

And it was never about death. It was about Death(tm), a sanitized and pasteurized and Disneyfied cartoon of the real thing. A conformist like all the rest.

Just one with a slightly smaller herd.

There is nothing beautiful about real death. People don’t disappear in a pillar of light. They don’t get tidily escorted to the afterlife by some supernatural tour guide. They don’t lay down in a freshly starched grave and dramatically spire.

They just die. In shit and piss and hospital clothing, they die. On roadsides and in suburban homes, they die. In workplaces and wardrobes, they die. In wars and in warm baths, they die.

And there is nothing beautiful about it.

They don’t “pass away”. They don’t “move on to a better place”. They don’t “leave this vale of tears”, for fuck’s sake.

They JUST FUCKING DIE.

And there is nothing beautiful about it.

More after the break.

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My many ailments

Aw fuck, looks like I have to do this one again.

Time to list the many, many things wrong with my body again. It is never any fun to do so but it gives me a feeling of control to call my demons by name.

So here we go :

Diabetes. The Big Mack Daddy of my ailments. Totally out of control. My blood sugar should be under 10 but no matter what I do, it hangs out between 20 and 30. I keep taking insulin and it keeps making very little difference. I shudder to think about what that might mean. Am I just plain immune to insulin in all forms now? If so, how is energy getting to my cells? Or is it only the manufactured stuff that has no effect on me? What the hell do I have to do to get it down to a healthy level?

There is some lab work I have to do for Doctor Caswell on Monday. Hopefully she will have it by the time I visit her on Wednesday.

Although in a world where a simply document takes two weeks to get to a cardiologist, you never really know.

Sleep apnea. Untreated, out of control. Presumably throttling me in my sleep dozens of times an hour while I sleep. I tried CPAP and it did not work for me. I “should” have immediately asked about alternatives. Instead I just let everything lapse and it has been a decade since I did anything about it whatsover.

Why? Because it was easier.

Easier than having to call someone and ask for something. Easier than having to have the initiative to even think about doing that. Easier than taking care of myself at all.

And now my heart might go boom.

I am so very fucked.

Umbilical hernia in sternum. The same sternum they will have to crack to get to my heart and fix it. I suppose that I should mention that to someone in case they have forgotten all about it.

After all, they are busy, important doctors and don’t have time to read every piddling little thing in my medical file just because it might save my life!

Peripheral neuropathy in fingertips and feet. I am far too used to my feet being partly numb and tingly 24/7. It’s my normal now. But it’s not normal, is it?

Cartilage damage to my knees. Especially the left one. It’s been giving me little warning pains for over a month now. Might pop at any second, and then I will be howling in agony and wanting to die.

Sure hope I’m not alone at the time. Because finally, I have :

Suicidal depression. Not at a crisis level yet, but all this horrible scary news about my health has really supercharged those escapist impulses of mine that make me want to escape from everything, and there is only one way to do that.

Namely, by not be alive any more.

So I am keeping a close eye on that shit.

I wish I could just surrender to a high authority and trust that they have my best interests at heart and I can relax knowing I am in good hands.

But I am, deep down, deeply mistrustful of other people’s competence, commitment levels, and willingness to actually invest in me on any level and for any period of time beyond the immediate moment.

So I don’t know who I could ever trust like that.

Certainly not medical professionals, and I am not about to find religion.

Guess I will just die alone then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…surgery. My open heart surgery.

Yup, that is what is in my future. A triple bypass of some sort. At some future date. they are going to crack my sternum and install stents in my heart to get around some very dangerously narrow arteries.

Yippy fucking skippy.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

Had my angiogram today. It was fine. Not particularly painful or uncomfortable or weird. The worst part was being bored out of my mind afterward.

I brought a book but I was too agitated to read it. Damn it. And I was also too agitated to relax into my “hospital mode” where I am mostly asleep but still awake enough to answer questions and do stuff when asked.

So all I could do was sit there and be bored. That was highly unpleasant. Would not recommend. Zero out of five stars.

It was possibly the after-effects of the sedative they gave me during the procedure. My sedation might have led to withdrawal once the angiogram was done.

Of course, the fact that I was extremely hungry didn’t help.

As usual for things medical, I was not allowed to ear beforehand. This led to me going ten hours without eating, and that put me in a lousy mood.

Which was only made worse when I had to ask the nurses three fucking times before they gave me a lousy cheese sandwich.

This has happened before when I was in the hospital. The nurses do not want to fetch food for me. Is it because I am fat and they subconscious think I don’t “need” it? Or is it that they are too proud to serve food like some common waitress?

Either way, it pisses me off. I am freaking diabetic. Going too long without food could kjill me. They should take the issue a bit more seriously, god damn it.

Anyhow, the nurse looking after me was nice though her Latin American accent caused communication issues in the context of a noisy hospital.

In fact, I dealt with a lot of accents, no two the same. Another nurse was Pilipino, the orderly who scrubbed and shaved my wrist and crotch was Mexican (and kept calling me Boss, giving me Fantasy Island flashbacks), the sexy French Canadian doctor overseeing everything had a sexy French Canadian accent, and so on.

I love the variety but it makes for a lot of work to understand what I am being told.

The procedure itself, like I said, was fine. They had me on exactly the right amount of sedative to keep me calm without making me too sleepy to stay awake or too groggy to follow their instructions.

Works for me. Got the benefit without the irritating side effects.

The conclusion drawn for the test results is that I need that surgery. Which is a bummer to be sure. And scary.

But right now, I am far too glad to be done with the god damned thing to worry about the future. Now I can finally relax for a bit.

Hopefully the wait list for open heart surgery is nice and long.

More after the break.

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I wish I didn’t know

Wishing I had remained ignorant is a thought that I, being the rugged intellectual that I am, almost never think.

All knowledge is power, after all. I keep my mind open even in the coldest weather. Dedication to the truth allows for no rejection of facts.

And so on.

And yet, here I am, openly admitted that I wish I had not learned what I learned today.

And I think I can make a pretty good case that I was better off not knowing.

OK, so, part of the post-procedure instructions for my angiogram was to make appointments with my GP and my cardiologist.

So I called up Doctor Chao’s office. He would call back in an hour. Spiffing.

Then I called the office of Doctor Ebti, who is my cardiologist, and the one who ordered today’s angiogram^[1] and next week’s heart ultrasound.

I wanted to make an appointment with her, but when I told the receptionist I had just had the angiogram that day, she laughed and said she wouldn’t be getting the results for two weeks at minimum.

Now just step back and stare gobsmacked at the sheer mind-thumping stupidity of that. Why the fuck would it take her two weeks to get a copy of a document I was holding in my hand as I spoke with her? In this day and age??

I could mail it there faster than that!

She actually suggested I drop by and give it to her. Which I will probably do on Monday, sight. Haven’t these people heard of the fax machine?

Speaking of said document, I had my copy of it my hand when I talked to Doctor Chao. Originally, I had just planned to give him a quick update, but I figured while I had him on the phone, I would read it out to him.

Bad move, as it turned out.

The pivotal moment came when he explained that on the diagram of my heart’s blood vessels that was part of the chart, the numbers represented the percentage of blockage of blood flow.

And I had one spot that was at 80 percent.

And three spots that were 90 percent, all in a tight cluster.

Suddenly my situation seems far, far more dire. If anything at all happens to those 90 percent spots, boom, heart attack.

No take backs. No more second chances. No do-overs.

Boom, I’m dead. Or at least severely fucked up.

And while I am ambivalent about death, I am definitely not ambivalent about pain and suffering and really awful shit happening to me.

So I am going to be super extra careful to take it easy for the time being. No more exercise to raise my heart rate. No more bouncing around the apartment as I make my meals. And definitely no more doing my own supermarket shopping.

I will have to order my stuff online for the time being.

Dunno what I am going to do about my insane blood sugar levels now. I guess all I can hope for is that Doctor Craswell and I will find the right chemical solution.

Because the boat has kind of sailed on fixing it with lifestyle, and that leaves chemicals and diet, and I can cut back my diet more no problem.

But I strongly feel that will not be enough.

Looks like my health issues have finally hit the big time, like I knew they would.

And I am goddamned terrified. My pulse is racing just thinking about it.

Which is bad for my heart.

Which is why I would have been better off not knowing.

So like…. QED, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sung to the tune of the titular part of this :

Time to hash this out : why I am so anxious about my angiogram tomorrow?

Because I’ve been getting increasingly freaked out over it, and the more I think about that, the less sense it makes.

I mean, yeah, it sucks that I have to be sort of awake for it. I would much rather do it under general anesthetic. Just knock me the fuck out already. Wake me when it’s over.

But seeing as last month, I had my eyeball cut open and parts of it scooped out – TWICE – while fully awake, it’s really not that big of a deal in comparison.

At least this time, I will (hopefully) have sedation. For my eyeball scoopage, all I had (besides local anesthetic) was an Ativan.

Which helped a lot. But being half zonked out sounds even better.

What I am hoping is that it will be like that one time I had an endoscopy (camera down the throat – not my first choice) under the influence of a liquid Valium IV drip.

You most definitely can’t endoscope someone when they are asleep because then all their muscles relax and make pushing the camera through ten times harder.

So the patient needs to be awake and sitting up, thus making their esophagus one nice vertical tube down into the stomach.

But I had already had one endoscopy with no chemical help and it was extremely unpleasant. So the gastroenterologist (spelled it right the first time – score!) compromised by putting me on that sweet Valium ride.

So technically, I was awake for the entire thing.

But I don’t remember it at all. Prince Valium pressed pause on my brain and I just stopped recording memories at all.

So it’s like a reverse Total Recall. Because I don’t remember it, it’s like it didn’t happen.

As a bonus, when I woke up in the recovery room, I was flyin’, baby. Woo dog did I feel good. There was no tension or fear in me anywhere. I felt like Sinatra on a roll in Vegas. Confident, relaxed, and ready to take on the world because I knew, without a doubt, that I could do anything.

No wonder so many people got addicted to Valium. That shit’s amazing.

So hopefully it will be something like that. Granted, being zonked out on sedation isn’t as good as being totally out, but if it keeps me from remembering the procedure, it is definitely the next best thing.

So while the whole thing still seems a bit scary to me, I think I have talked myself down from my tree. It is honestly not going to be a big deal. Nothing to freak out over.

I still don’t want to have to get up that fucking early but whatever.

And the best thing is, by this time tomorrow it will all be over and behind me and there is nothing else nearly as scary in my future yet.

A heart ultrasound. Big freaking deal. Bring it.

More after the break.

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I don’t hate broccoli

Or brussels spouts, or spinach, or whatever else normal people grow up hating because their parents forced them to eat it when they were toddlers.

Patient readers know that I never had to go through that. My mother was a 70’s health nut who followed the teachings of a health guru named Adele Something.

I used to think it was Adele Stevens, but that’s Adlai Stevens’ wife. It might be Adele Davis, who was a nutrition guru, but I can’t confirm whether the following doctrine was part of her teachings or not.

Because I’m lazy and hate researching stuff.

Anyhow, her philosophy, whoever she was, said to never, ever force kids to eat anything. Doing so just makes them hate that food and possibly health eating in general for the rest of their lives, leading to bad eating habits.

Instead, you have plenty of healthy snacks available and leave the kids to figure out what they like on their own. That way. they don’t develop any categorical food prejudices and grow up to like healthy food and not like the bad stuff.

Yeah, about that last part.

The bad stuff still tastes amazing. It’s designed to do so. So while I retain a mild preference for more natural, organic foods, I didn’t exactly grow up immune to the appeal of a bag of Cheesies or a Coffee Crisp.

Still, the first part worked. I don’t hate vegetables, or any other kind of food, at least, not in the stereotypical way.

There’s foods I hate because I’ve tried them and went ick.

Olives come to mind.

But I like chocolate chip cookies. And I like carrots. I like Toblerone. And I like tomato sauce. I love York Peppermint Patties. And I love cucumber.

And honestly, I feel bad for people who were raised the old fashioned way because vegetables are delicious and I can’t imagine having that whole category of food eliminated from my diet because of some bullshit that went down when I was still eating in a high chair, for fuck’s sake.

As far as I am concerned, the key to healthy eating is the realization that, while the unhealthy manufactured carb laden stuff might taste a little better, the healthy stuff tastes almost as good and is also good for you.

So it’s really a no-brainer. You sacrifice a little taste and get a lot of nutrition, which will lead to feeling a whole lot better all the time.

That’s a pretty hefty net gain, don’t you think?

And you can still have the bad stuff sometimes. ^[1]

Just eat the good stuff first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went to see Doctor Caswell today.

She was very nice, as usual. I told her about my frustrations in getting my blood sugar to come down. She gave me a big box of a different insulin formation.

Before, I was using Levemir. Now it’s Basaglar.

So it still sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings. But instead of the elf Levemir, it’s the orc warlord Basaglar.

It hopefully will help. Plus, she ordered some lab tests, and based on those, she might have some other drugs she can bring into play.

Glad to hear that. Now that I have the actual realtime information about just exactly how fucked up my blood sugar is, it’s way harder to ignore.

Kinda makes me want to fix it ASAP.

Plus, I am increasingly aware of how horrifying it is to be around someone who just casually neglects themselves like I do.

And by extension, how horrifying it should be to me. By all logic, I should not be nearly so flippant or casual about how bad my health is.

Like when I went in for my first cataract removal and they tested my blood sugar and it was like 30 and I just shrugged and said I wasn’t surprised.

And poor Greta was like, “That’s… pretty high. ”

I agreed, with the same tone of voice as if she’d said “It’s really coming down out there”.

And that’s not right. And it sure as fuck isn’t normal.

It is, in fact, like, bad. Very very bad.

But I know what the problem is. Apart from the previously mentioned neglecting myself as I myself was neglected as a child, there is a matter of the profound apathy I developed as a response to my anxiety.

It resists getting very excited about anything, even things that by all rights should rouse me to great action.

Hence my flippant attitude to my own decay. Like, whatever. I will do what I can but I am not going to get all excited about it or anything.

After all, that’s what my plummeting health wants. It’s just showing off to get attention.

Ignore it. It will go away eventually. As will I.

Because I’ll be dead.

And the bad part of me is totally okay with that.

---

Looked up the procedure I am getting at St. Paul’s on Friday at (urk) 7 am.

It’s called a coronary angiogram and it looks like I will technically have to be awake for it, god damn it.

I say “technically” because according to that website, I will be awake but heavily sedated. To the point where I may very well just go to sleep, but will still be awake enough to wake up and do stuff if they need me to do so.

Which sounds pretty irritating, honestly. I hate being awoken. Just let me sleep god damn it. So I hope I don’t say anything too bitingly sarcastic when these medical people keep waking me up.

I am sure they have heard it all before, though. Well…. maybe not at my strength and potency, come to think of it.

But maybe they will just find it funny. God willin’.

I really don’t want to be awake while they are pushing a catheter into my femoral artery then sticking a wire up through it to poke around in my veins like some kind of plumber with a plumber’s snake.

The fact that I will have to get up way too fucking early to do so doesn’t help either.

But unless I lapse into a coma before then, I am going to go. This is something I need.

And who knows, they might just fix some stuff via balloon angioplasty while they are in there. I might wake up feeling a whole lot better.

But for now, I am just going to quietly fret about it.

More after the break.

Glad to be sad

I am truly grateful for the waves of sadness and pain I have been experiencing lately.

No really, I am.

Because they mean I am finally actually feeling something. I have managed to break through the icy numbness that surrounds my soul and found a hot, rich vein of genuine feeling underneath, and I am going to exploit the fuck out of it for all the healing and emotional work and spiritual progress I can get out of it.

I take no comfort in the cold any more. Cold kills.

I want to be alive and I don’t care if I have to crawl through a river of blood and fire and sacrifice everything I have and more in order to get there.

Bring it. Pain is bullshit any way.

So yeah, I can deal with these waves of sadness that I can feel in my heart and my lungs and in the deepest recesses of this convoluted mind of mine. Most of the time, I stop and do my best to let them flow through me, tears and all, because I know that catharsis is the only way to silence the demons they represent.

That’s too many words. Whatever.

And sure, being flooded with a choking sadness that makes me feel like I am weeping from the depths of my soul is not fun, but I just concentrate on the feeling of release that comes from managing to squeeze those tears out, and it’s not that bad.

And that IS what it feels like. Like after a long period of emotional constipation, I am finally able to bear down and squeeze out those tears from time to time.

Yeah, I know, I normally avoid the obvious gross physical metaphor. But fuck it. Sorry folks, sometimes it is simply too apt to ignore.

At times it feel like squeezing blood from a stone, which in the original folk story was accomplished by squeezing a rock so hard it cut the hero’s hand.

Ouch. Kept him from getting eaten by a giant, though, so it was worth it.

My point is, I am going to keep on grinding out the tears as much as I can until there are no more tears left in me and I am finally free.

And that goes for whatever other emotions I have on backlog. Anger, frustration, ambition, rage, even lust.

There is a LOT of lust.

It’s all got to go.

I am ready to push that rock up that hill as many times and necessary.

I mean, it’s not like I have anything better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And for once, I am NOT talking about my penis. (laugh track)

No, I am, of course, talking about my goddamned blood sugar, and the title of this entry is the first question I am going to ask Doctor Caswell when I see her tomorrow.

Because what I am currently doing is not working.

I exercise, and take insulin, and rest for a bit, and then I take a reading and it seems totally random whether it gets a little better, stays the same, or even gets worse.

I mean, what the ever loving fuck, right?

Dehydration might be a factor. I looked it up just to be sure and just as I suspected, being dehydrated can lead to false high blood sugar scores.

Dehydration leads to lower blood volume leading to higher relative blood sugar scores because the glucose is a higher percentage of the blood.

So not false, exactly. But misleading.

Ergo, it might be that what I really need is to get my electrolyte balance under control. I drink a lot of water (and Diet Coke) to stay hydrated, and that works, but if my electrolytes are off, that’s like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

Sure, it keep the bucket full, but it doesn’t fix the goddamned hole and might even make it worse over time.

And you end up going through so much water!

So there’s that. It might well be that the exercise does lower my blood sugar but I end up sweating enough that my relative blood sugar stays the same or gets worse.

But it could also be that I am not exercising hard or long enough. Ten minutes is all I can do so far. And while my heart rate and respiration definitely go up and I feel the strain and the burn, it’s not exactly the Ironman competition either.

The one without Tony Stark. Or Black Sabbath.

That said, I am not sure I can do much more. That light-ish ten minutes takes a lot out of me and I am hurting by the end of it.

Plus, without more information about my heart health, I am not even sure how much exercise is even safe for me at this point.

Would be ironic to have a heart attack because I was trying to get my blood sugar down. It’s like my health issues are competing for who gets to kill me.

So I dunno. On the id level, I want to just cut loose, embrace the pain, feel the burn, and exercise myself into a quivering stupor where I am absolutely spent.

That sounds good to me on both a physical and emotional level.

But of course, that would be very stupid. I am a sick and fragile man and I would likely end up making things a whole lot worse.

Honestly, what I wish I had was someone to guide me through exercising in a medically sound way. Someone who has all the knowledge and experience to be able to teach me to exercise properly and safely.

Sort of like a combination personal trainer and physiotherapist.

If I had someone like that whose competence I fully trusted, I would do everything they asked of me.

I am perfectly willing to put the effort in. Toil and strain and pain don’t deter me. I am ready to burn for my freedom.

But I am scared to go to far and be consumed by the flame.

Hopefully Doctor Caswell can point me in the right direction.

More after the break.

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Nothing is certain

But lots of things are damned near certain.

It’s absolutely true to say that absolutely nothing is totally certain because it is always possible to construct a scenario where it would be false.

The sky is blue? Well what if it’s night? Or sunset? Or a nearby forest fire has filled the sky with wood smoke and the sun is just a dull red ball in the sky? Or what if you’re having a stroke and your color perception is reversed?

What then, huh, tough guy?

Oh, you think water is wet? Well what about when it is locked away in mineral crystals? Or what about when it’s frozen, is it still wet then? The frozen part isn’t. The part that melts when you handle the ice becomes water, and thus no longer ice.

Oh, you think therefore you are? That’s cogito ergo DUMB. What if you just think that you think, huh? What if this is all a simulation and you are nothing but an AI programmed to simulate a thinking being but with no genuine internal life?

WHAT THEN, MOTHERFUCKER?

This has been an excerpt from my one man show, “Tough Guy Philosophy Prof”.

It was very fun to write.

Anyhow, point is. there is no absolute certainty. What does that leave you with?

Playing the odds, that’s what.

There is still probability. Some things are far, far more likely to be true. In fact, the odds are so heavily in their favour that the difference between them and certainty is statistically insignificant and unworthy of consideration.

Sure, when you drop an object, it might not fall towards the center of the Earth… but it probably will. A clear sky tomorrow might turn out not to be blue… but that’s the odds-on favorite. Water might not always be wet, but that’s where the smart money is placing their bets most of the time.

So forget certainty. Like perfection, its pursuit can lead to madness and destruction when taken to extremes.

It can even lead to preferring a negative certainty over a merely probable positive.

And that’s about as crazy as it gets.

It’s fine to pursue both perfection and certainty – they are excellent ideals. But ideals are directions, not destinations. They show you which way to go but you pursue them knowing that you can never actually get there, any more than you can finally arrive at a place called East.

Above all, do not delay happiness or fulfillment until you reach these impossible places.

There they be dragons.

So abandon the search for certainty and make friends with probability. In many cases, it’s just as good, and way less dangerous to demand of the world.

I think you will find that once you accept the merely extremely probable, you will find you barely miss certainty at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yeah, it’s like 21 minutes. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Un freaking believable. I am not joking when I say I think that place plus the House of Eternal Return are the coolest art installations I have ever seen.

Heck, they are the coolest art I have ever seen period.

Seriously, that whole thing blew my mind all the way out. When (spoiler) they open the cooler and it revealed the secret passage with all the bottles, my jaw dropped and stayed dropped till the end of the clip.

These are my kind of people. Bold and wild and surreal and dedicated to making something truly amazing. It’s weird and wonderful and wonderfully weird and I heart it so much it hurts.

The fact that the art trip begins in two of the most normal, mundane locations imaginable – a supermarket and a family home – makes it even better. It is the icing on the cake of these works of genius.

I feel like there are a million things I want to say about Omega Mart and Meow Wolf and all the rests, but they are all trying to be expressed at the same time and stampeding the exits and getting jammed in the aisles.

Know this though : I definitely want to visit both locations some day soon. And travel from here to Vegas is quite cheap, so it’s not entirely out of the question.

I would feel sort of guilty going to Vegas instead of visiting home in Summerside, but Vegas is way closer and cheaper and thus more affordable.

Then again, I just checked Air Canada’s website and they say they could get me to Halifax and back for $927 or so, and that is doable.

I’d be traveling rough – no hotel rooms for me, maybe Airbnb – and I am possibly not nearly healthy enough for that, but still. Might be possible.

I will have to think it over. Consult with the fam to see if either of my sisters are visiting home this summer so I can coordinate.

Would be awfully nice to see my family again. And my sleepy ol’ hometown.

Hell, I might decide to stay.

I’m old and slow enough to enjoy it now!

---

The war on sugar…

..begins in earnest today.

When I finish Blogging Part One, I will put on a video that is around ten minutes long and do my best to keep my heart rate up with exercise until it ends, then take a reading.

I will then inject a full dose of insulin and lay down for a while. When I get up, I will take another reading, and if it’s still too goddamned high, I will do it all again.

Because this shit has to stop. I have to start taking my high blood sugar seriously. As in, crisis level seriously, if need be.

Because it kind of is one. Having 20+ mmol/L blood sugar is very very bad. My blood is so sticky that it damages all my organs all the time.

That shit has to stop.

Plus I will probably feel a whole lot better to.

So, off to my adventures in actual health!

More after the break.

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The world is a vampire

Today has been pretty rough.

Been both very depressed and extremely sleepy. Possible that those two things are related. It would not be the first time I have confused tiredness with depression.

But I have slept a LOT today. Definitely the sort of day best described as puntcuated by periods of NOT being asleep on a page made of naps.

That probably made sense. Moving on.

It’s not been the nice kind of sleep either.

Of course not, that would imply mercy.

But on the other hand, it’s not been the super bad kind where I wake up sweaty and dehydrated and on the verge of delirium, either.

It’s been mostly somewhere in between. Restless and disturbed sleep where I wake up kinda sweaty and somewhat dehydrated but more or less fully compos mentis.

Had my first battle versus my blood sugar. Exercised for ten minutes while listening to my adorable new Ferengi boyfriend, Kevin from Vsauce2, explain stuff to me.

He doesn’t know he’s my new boyfriend, of course. Why ruin it by telling him?

Then I took a full pen of insulin and napped. Woke up an hour later, took a reading, my blood sugar was down three points.

Which isn’t nothing. If I had just kept the cycle going, I would have eventually at least pushed my blood sugar below 10.

!0 is not “normal” but it is “healthy-ish”.

But instead, I got depressed and went back to sleep and have not done another cycle since that first one.

Ah well, changing your habits is always hardest at the beginning. I will give it another try tomorrow and see if I can at least get two cycles out of myself.

Baby steps. No self-sabotage via all or nothing thinking. No saying “well it wasn’t instant total success, ergo it was all pointless” as a way to excuse giving up instantly.

Nothing good comes out of having panic and flight be your primary response to challenge. That shit is toxic. The constant need to escape makes one weak and pathetic because you never hang around long enough to get the experience that will toughen you up and make it easier to deal with life.

Suffering can, in the long run, make life much, much easier.

Jocks and other rough type people know this. They have felt it. They have lived it. They have experiences of getting stronger and tougher in both body and soul and seen how previously difficult and scary things became trivially easy over time.

But it’s the sort of thing you can only truly learn by doing. There is no emotionally convincing argument that will convince someone it is worth it when all they can see from the sidelines is the suffering, toil, and pain.

I mean, I’m the one making this argument and yet deep down I am not convinced. The smart part of me knows it to be true, but the stubborn animal/child in me still prefers to stay where it is safe.

Weak and feeble and humiliating and scared of everything, but safe.

Why does safety have to suck?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The long dark cloud’ll getcha down.

Had that rolling around in my head for a while. It’s a song lyric, I know that. In my head, it’s done in a mournful country-rock style, maybe a bit bluesy, with close harmony.

Who know, maybe I will be inspired to write the rest of it one day.

Prolly not, though.

My point is, I woke up feeling really depressed. I feel pretty damn low right now. A heavy shadow weighs on my soul and makes me want to find a nice cozy grave somewhere and curl up for a nice long nap.

A dirt nap, if you will.

I can’t handle anything right now. It took a lot of spoons just to get out of bed, and then I spent a long time in my classic “sitting on the edge of my bed feeling lost” mode.

It’s like I lose all momentum and drive and just sit there lost in my own little world, at equilibrium, in stasis, at rest.

It would actually be pleasant if I wasn’t so sad at the time.

Still, maybe I should learn to just go with it. Let it happen. Release all pressures to go do stuff and let the experience play out at its own pace while trying my best to relax and just enjoy the feeling.

After all, I know from experience that it will end naturally if I let it. Eventually I will just get up on my own without having to force it.

Seems less stressful and more efficient to me.

And at least it’s sadness and not numbness. I am way past the point of wanting to feel damn near anything rather than feeling nothing, and all the bad stuff that comes with it.

Numbness is death. It brings isolation, alienation, paranoia, and madness. My mind knows what inputs it should be getting and when it doesn’t get them, it hurts.

Worse than that, it feels just plain wrong. And with that sense of wrongness comes a kind of biological panic.

Like when your hand or your foot falls asleep, and you just HAVE to wake it up again right away because anything is better than the feeling of it being…. missing.

Maybe that’s just me.

But I am way past the point where I would rather feel even pretty negative emotions than to feel nothing. And when something does manage to trigger strong emotions in me, even negative ones, there is always a part of me that is practically weeping with relief at being alive and warm again, at least for a little while.

It’s a mind divided against itself, really. Part of my mind is generating the numbness that makes the rest of my mind suffer. Presumably it does so in response to that big Wound of mine just like my physical body would pump out endorphins in response to a physical wound of that magnitude.

So once more, we arrive back at that big Wound of mine. All my problems flow from it. The road forward always leads to it and I will continue to get nowhere in life until I heal it and get it out of my way.

And I am working on it. Every day I thaw it out a little more and reclaim a little more of myself. Maybe one of these days, the ice dam will crack and all the aqua vitae it’s been holding back will flood into my beings and I will be whole and safe and alive again.

I’m ready for my Springtime, Mother Nature.

It’s only a matter of time.

More after the break.

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OYID (Oh Yeah, I’m Dying) Episode One Million

Super depressed again.

I was doing okay there for a while. Managed to get myself out of bed and into the shower and into clothes before heading out for the usual Sunday shopping etc.

This despite still feeling pretty depressed and therefore really not wanting to go anywhere or do anything. The temptation to skip going out this week was strong. Would have been so easy to just say I felt sick and stay home.

Would have been true, too. Being depressed is a kind of sickness.

A really bad kind, in fact.

But no, I made myself do it. I am sick and tired of giving up all the time. Of just collapsing whenever I feel down and thus letting depression rule me.

So fuck how I felt, I made myself do it anyhow.

And it’s not like I was miserable as a result. Granted, I felt tired and down when I was shopping with Joe and Julian, but not intolerably so. And I was pretty grateful when I finally got to sit when we got back to the car with my stuff.

But my mood was still pretty good. And as always, I loved talking with my friends as tout le gang (Joe, Julian, Felicity, and I) hung out in the McD’s parking lot.

Oh, the privations of Covid. I would rather be at Denny’s.

But then, as we were chatting, I noticed what seemed like a harmless little skin tag on my left hand, smack dab in the middle of the heel of the palm.

So like I have done thousands of times before, I peeled it off. Normally, that removes it harmlessly. But not this time.

This time it hurt. And bled.

And I am sitting there bleeding and feeling bewildered and depressed. Yet another way my body has found a new way to fail and betray me and make me feel feeble and fragile like I was made of pipe cleaners and wet Kleenex.

So now I am quite depressed again, and feeling morbid and sad. My world has become treacherous and disturbing and gross. I feel like something truly awful is going to happen at any moment and that it is far too late for me to prevent it.

I don’t want to die.

I don’t want my life to be over before it ever began.

I don’t want to never get to be a grownup.

I don’t want to end up bedridden and full of tubes and living a disgusting and humiliating lifestyle where I can’t do even the most basic things for myself and any hope I had for even the tiniest shred of dignity is gone.

I am so scared right now. I wish I could slip this life of mine off like clothes and run naked into the twilight in search of another home.

But I am stuck with the consequences of a long term illness that I was too sick to fight.

I am scared, and depressed, and feel like there is no hope for me.

But you know what?

This is still better than feeling nothing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Clearly, my war with my blood sugar has to escalate.

It’s still very high. This despite my intermittent use of insulin. Preliminary results would seem to indicate that insulin’s effect on my sugar score is a lot less than dramatic.

This is, in retrospect, unsurprising. Devastating and depressing, but unsurprising.

Because the whole deal with Type 2 diabetes (aka Fatty Diabetes) is that your crappy diet caused you to produce so much insulin that you became resistant to it like you would a medication or recreational drug you took that long.

If anyone ever finds a cure for drug resistance, they will save a billion lives.

Anyhow, the whole disease is based around insulin resistance, so duh, guess what, I am resisting insulin.

This is a serious bummer. I guess I thought that insulin would miraculously put everything right and everything would be peachy keen from now on.

It’s the hope that kills you.

But no, clearly insulin and meds are not going to be enough to tame the beast, and so I am going to have to exercise the nuclear option, and actually…. exercise.

I knew one day it would come to this. And yet, I am still not ready.

Seriously, though, I knew my sedentary lifestyle would catch up to me eventually. And the hilarious thing is that the longer you avoid exercise, the more it will hurt when you finally have no choice but to get around to it.

Ha ha ha.

I am going to have to resist my natural exuberance and go into it carefully, though, because I am a lot more frail now and can’t just jump into things any more.

But it has to happen. I am pissed off now. That blood sugar has to go down.

This time, it’s personal.

And quite honestly, exercise would probably do wonders for my mental health too. And I honestly don’t have some kind of deep philosophical objection to exercise.

It’s just my video game addiction telling me that I will just die if I try to do something that takes me away from my precious, precious games.

But it’s not like I would be bored. The age of exercise being boring died with the advent of podcasts and listenable YouTube videos. I can just put on an episode of Vsauce or Todd In The Shadows or whatever and do my exercises.

It’s still gonna hurt, but I would rather be in pain that bored any day.

Pain is bullshit anyhow. Big fucking deal. Fear of pain has caused me galaxies more pain than physical pain ever did.

Not sure what exercises I will do. Right now, all I have in my bag o’ tricks is my standard vertical pushups (pushouts?) and pacing, and I don’t really like pacing.

I find it frustrating to have to turn around every five paces or so. Tends to wind me up as much as it cools me down, if not more.

But there’s plenty of other ways to exercise indoors. Heck, I can even do some while lying in bed. Lifting/bending limbs, stretches, air bicycling, range of motion exercises, and so on.

I’m a creative and intelligent person, I am sure I can work something out.

Well, that’s the blood sugar. Sex and magick will have to wait.

More after the break.

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Sex and magick

See, the K at the end makes it extra magickal.

Sex : I completed the plot with my girlfriend Sky, the grey (as it turns out) fox, in Amorous, the furry dating sim, yesterday.

This being a FURRY dating sim, the plotline ended with us fucking, of course. But the lead up to that was amazing, with her being all vulnerable and insecure and my being, of course, supportive and awesome and loving, and my falling in love with her even harder, and us getting frisky in the shower before ending up in her bed, and us having deep meaningful pillow talk before getting it on.

The sex was good too. I’m not one of those fags who pretends to be allergic to vaginas or anything. She’s even cuter naked, and we had lovely passionate vanilla straight penis in vagina sex.

It didn’t turn me on but it was very nice nevertheless.

Surprisingly, the game then ended. Roll credits. I guess that’s what makes it a dating sim and not a relationship sim.

Of course, if this was real life, I would be in so much trouble because I am way more into my kitty Seth and yet I just sweet talked my way into doing everything to convince Skye I was in love with her and she knows nothing of Seth.

Lesson learned. I know how I got into this situation : I can’t resist saying what will make people happy. Being sweet and loving to her made her so happy and I became addicted to that. Seeing her blossom under the sun lamp of my attention was deeply joyous. And to change course would have meant saying something to hurt her, and I couldn’t do that. Not to someone as sweet and nerdy and adorable as her.

Call it the Selfish Empath Trap. I loved the amazingly delightful vibes I was getting from her and did not want to interrupt them by making her sad, so instead, I led her on in a way that in the real world would be absolutely unconscionable.

So, new rule : no leading people on if I am not that interested in them. It’s selfish and destructive and I am glad I had the chance to learn this without anybody actually getting hurt in the real world.

Sorry, Skye. I really do love you. But my heart (etc) belongs to my Seth kitty.

As for magic(k), for some reason I have found myself thinking of myself as a magician again lately. Both kinds – the real kind like Gandalf, and the stage kind like Chris Angel.

For my purposes, they amount to the same thing. They are both people who can do tricks to amaze and astound people but who might have a hard time just being human.

It’s so much easier to use one’s powers of illusion to generate dazzling displays of enchantment and wonder for you to hide behind.

And it’s not entirely false. That would make it too easy to dismiss. There is a lot of me in the mask I wear. Ergo it is almost impossible to tell where the mask ends and I begin.

So I choose not to do so. Any of my masks are as much a part of me as anything else, and reflect the fact that I am a very complex individual who has yet to find the one mask that can always help me express how I feel.

Because that’s all they are, really. Ways for me to express various aspects of myself.

Maybe one day, I will perform my greatest act of synthesis of all time, and find a way to bring them all together into a single, unified persona.

Until then, well, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

He’s not the real me either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, I think I have been doing myself a disservice by imagining my finally coming out of my cave as this big dramatic decisive transformational moment.

That’s too many adjectives. Whatever.

You get the idea. Like at some point, I am going to throw off my shackles, kick open the door, and stride purposefully out of the drab and dingy darkness and into the warmth and joy of open sunlight, clean air, and soft green meadows.

For a while, I just stand there and bask in the warmth of the sun, letting it dry me out and cleanse me all over^[1] and feeling the soft breeze on my skin and smelling the fresh clean odors of grass and flowers and running water.

Then I square my jaw and my shoulders, set my eyes on yonder horizon, and walk off into the sunset, and destiny.

That was a lot of fun to write.

My point, however, is that while it might happen like that, it doesn’t have to. It can happen in timid little baby steps gradually over time, too.

Imagine a timid, skittish little mouse who only comes out of his mousehole to eat and poop and spends the rest of his time at his tiny PC playing video games.

Spoiler : The mouse is me.

Slowly, very slowly, over time, he spends more and more time in the world outside his mousehole, giving himself plenty of time to get used to new levels of exposure before venturing further out.

It might take him a long time but eventually he can lead a full mousy life.

Yeah, but he’s sick and won’t live long enough to escape that way.

I think the dramatic exit scenario is fun to think about and would be very satisfying, but depression is extremely sneaky, and one of the dirtiest and most devious ways it has of sabotaging you so it can have you all to itself is to get you fixated on a dream that will never happen instead of taking the more boring and practical steps that will work.

Once you start preferring dreams and imagination over reality, the rot sets in. Instead of learning to deal with things, you learn to avoid and escape them, and that leads to being too weak and feeble to cope with even basic things, and then you escape even harder and distance yourself from reality even further, and things get worse and worse.

And then one day, you realize that you are 48, riddled with disease, and unlikely to have the time, health, or resources to finally get around to having a life any time soon.

No one told you when you run. You missed the starting gun.

Sooner or later, it will be time to take a kamikaze run at life and throw everything you’ve got into trying to meet someone or do something or go somewhere.

Anything. Anywhere. As long as it takes me away from here.

But do it soon, because you might not have that much time left.

At some point, it will be just me on the roof of a burning building, knowing that I have to jump or I will die in the fire.

I wish I could say I am sure I will choose to jump.

But I might just choose to die instead.

Because dying’s easier.

More after the break.

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Easier, not better

Let’s kick this can around the block again.

What an unnecessarily violent image.

One of the most pervasive effects of depression is what I call the “anti-action bias”. It makes one hate effort. The chemical imbalance in the brain means that the signals that are supposed to lead to doing things are not strong enough to result in action, and depressed people like me feel this as a kind of overpowering resistance to action.

Life with the parking brake on, more or less.

And that means that we don’t invest effort into anything but the most high reward to effort ratio activities because only they can sufficiently reward us for the amount of effort we have to put in to do anything.

We don’t get nearly as much pleasure as healthy people do from literally anything.

It’s called “anhedonia” and it fucking sucks.

Hence our tendency to just do whatever is easiest.

Even if it’s terrible. Even if we know it is wrong. Even if we are fully aware that it is highly destructive to our long term self interests.

Even if it means we die.

Because no future consequences can make that dopamine appear. Adrenaline can compensate for the lack of dopamine for a while – perhaps that’s why so many of us depressives also have anxiety.

Perhaps some part of us is overcompensating.

But that only lasts as long as the fear lasts, and once our bloodstreams return to their (possibly terrible) baselines, the rust sets in again and we’re back to doing only the safest and most rewarding things we know.

Like, for instance, playing video games all day.

They are my refuge, as I have said before. While I have a game going and something cool to listen to playing on YouTube, all my depression and anxiety are crowded out of my mind and I can relax and be kinda sorta happy.

Or at least pain free.

The problem with always doing whatever is easiest is that getting better requires doing a lot of hard things. Things you don’t want to do, won’t enjoy, and which will always pale in comparison to whatever high reward activity or substance on which you have fixated.

To get better I have to leave my video game refuge and face reality naked of its shelter and protection and comfort.

And I don’t wanna.

It’s really scary out there.

It’s so much easier to just let everything continue to slide into the crapper. After all, I’m used to it. Things have been falling apart for a long time. That’s my “normal”. Why should I change what has “worked” for me for so long?

This is fine.

Time to learn to work harder than I have to.

I still don’t wanna.

But I’m gonna.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

When I was still living back home in Summerside, Prince Edward Island in the 1990’s, there was a news story about an eccentric couple who had somehow managed to very illegally acquired a mating pair of leopards which they raised on their farm.

Well that’s super against the law, so when the authorities found out, they arrested the couple and confiscated the kittycats.

Said kitties were then coaxed into a trailer and transported to a wildlife refuge in southern Nova Scotia. The door to the trailer was opened and then the two were left alone to get used to their new life.

The female of the pair immediately exited the trailer and started exploring her new environment, but the male did not.

Instead, he stayed in the trailer, face turned to a back corner, and ignored the world.

I am that cat.

It came up during my Therapy Thursday session today. I was talking about how I have spent so much of my life on a strictly minimum contact with reality diet.

Meaning like that poor leopard, I have been strenuously ignoring most of reality ever since I was raped as a child.

Instead, I retreated into the world within my mind and that special adjunct of my imagination known as “media”.

Consuming media was the best way to stimulate and feed my mind and my imagination with the absolute minimum possible contact with reality.

Whether I was reading a book, watching TV, or playing a video game, the nasty old real world was pushed far away and I didn’t have to face or cope with anything.

And that was fine when I had school to provide the structure and purpose and direction to my life. I could spend the rest of the time entertaining myself and no real harm was done, at least not at the time.

But then I got deschooled, And fell apart. Then barely managed to pull myself back together, but the only thing I knew how to do was entertain myself.

And I was far too fragile to complete the transition to adulthood on my own.

So I fell into the media consumption lifestyle I still live today, 25 years later. It keeps me alive but does not contain nearly enough nutrients for me to thrive. For a very long time, I have been too weak to do much to help myself. I spent a lot of time without even a therapist. My avoidant personality disorder made me too shy to even ask for one, and thus went largely untreated.

Meds can help with the symptoms, but they can’t cure the disease.

And like I have said dozens of times before in one form or another, the ultimate disease is one that prevents its own treatment.

My AVPD did a very good job of that for a long time.

But I am on the right path now. I am going to cure my Wound, get my rightful strength and power back, and make myself known to the world.

A great reckoning is coming, and after it is done, I will be the only one left.

More after the break.

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And we’re back

Well, here I am again, typing at you wonderful people.

And I mean it. You really are wonderful people. Reading this blog every day is the nicest thing you can do for me on a personal level and it means the world to me that there are people willing to read my 1K+ words every day and listen to my voice.

I know that in a TL;DR world, reading 1000 words of block text with no pictures or anything else to break up the wall of verbiage is a very big ask.

People do not like reading large chunks of text on screens. It’s draining, and there is always that maddening FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) demon cracking the whip and saying “What are you missing because you’re STUCK doing THIS??”

So know that I get it. Reading all this stuff is not easy. Especially when you add in the fact that a lot of what I write is extremely personal, dark, depressing, and unfun.

So again…. thank you all for reading me. It means more than I can say to me.

Which is kind of ironic.

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The cycle is quickening

Told my therapist, Doctor Costin, about how I have been cycling from positive to negative, mood wise, today.

Lately I seem to go from feeling somewhat perky and good – No, I’m not happy yet, but I’m way less sad – to feeling depressed and angry and violently nihilistic.

Fuck everything and everybody ever. Fuck it ALL. And fuck YOU.

Ya know, that kind of thing. Call it punk mode.

These have always been the opposite poles of my mood cycle, but the cycle is going a lot faster lately. What used to take a month takes around three days now.

And I am quite happy about that. Like I have been saying, I accept that it’s going to take some extremely energetic phenomenon to break me out of this self-sealing cage of mine, and that means going through some very unpleasant shit as I build up the raw primal id energy to shatter the cage my delusional “reason” has built and find the true strength to face the world without fear or shame.

No more cowering. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I am an amazing person with near magical level intelligence and enormous amounts of talent and creativity as well as being a genuinely nice person.

So what if I am somewhat feeble and pathetic? People have overcome far worse and gone on to greatness.

Besides, that weakness is not the real me. The real me is mighty and proud. The weakness is just an old wound overdue for a bandage change.

Some day soon, that Wound will be gone, and I will rise.

Is it just me, or do I end these things in manic mode a lot?

All part of learning to pump up my own mood, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.