Freshly awoken, feeling miserable, dizzy, etc. Wanting nothing more than to just lay back down and go back to sleep, but must eat n’ blog.

So what else is new?

Pretty depressed, too, but that’s purely physical. Of course I feel depressed when my head hurts and I feel weirdly floaty and listless.

That’s pretty depressing shit.

Oh, and also as per a more recent kind of usual, I am eating “lunch” at 4 pm.

This “sleeping when I should be eating” shit has got to stop.

I’ve figured out what it going on, at least. I get to the time where I would normally eat and then my dumb brain rebels at “having to” stay awake and eat and blog now and decides to “escape” into sleep instead.

God that’s pathetic. Sigh.

And once more I dream of escaping this dead end life where I have fucked up everything so badly on so many levels.

Maybe I should just give up on everything. Retreat into a hazy dream world where everything is soft and warm and out of focus and I completely abdicate all responsibility for myself and spend all my time asleep or nearly asleep while my health rapidly deteriorates and everything goes all to hell.

Nah. I could never do that to my friends. I would at least do what they told me to do, like any good child.

But I would have given up on trying to adult. Fuck it. I surrender. I am not qualified to care for myself. Someone is going to have to take over and deal with things.

Honestly, I should probably be in an institution. An asylum, a psych ward, a sanitarium, something along those line.

But the world is not that kind. I have asked around. They don’t give you a bed in one of those places unless you arrive there due to something much more serious than a case of being too sad to live.

I don’t even have a history of suicide attempts. Those are cries for help and I never cry for help because then someone might notice me.

And my Avoidant Personality insists that the only safety is in invisibility. Never draw attention to yourself. Blend into the wallpaper. You are a scared little animal hiding from a terrible predator and you can only do your best to stop existing at all.

And that never ever stops. Not even when you are alone, in your bedroom, at night, when you are trying to sleep.

Because the predator is always out there. Hell, there’s dozens of them. So the best you can ever hope for us to hide well enough to relax and get some fitful sleep.

It’s a fugitive’s mentality and there is, ironically, no escaping it.

Not even the swift and sure knowledge that I am totally safe and that my fear is completely irrational can save me from the inner hunter-killers.

It will only stop when I do.

More after the break.

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Tonight, at the X-Rated Shakespeare Festival : “Tight Ass Andronicus”, “Julius, Seize Her!”, “The Mating of the Shrew”, and “A Midsummer Night’s Ream”.

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I heart this dude muchly :

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This comic gets it :

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A quick note to a loyal fan

Sorry if the links above still don’t work for you, Felicity. Turns out people are uploading these things directly to Reddit and so there’s no easy way to upstream them.

I may have to rehost them on my own website.

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Time split in two

Had one of my moments of temporal fugue just now.

Looked at the clock and saw 8:30 and honestly did not know if that was AM or PM. Actually thought it was AM until I deduced that it was too dark for 8:30 AM in the summer and so it must be PM.

Yup. Had to derive whether it was day or night via abstract reasoning. Experienced serious reality flux until I resolved it and it’s left me feeling alienated and cold.

This kind of shit just should not happen to people.

Especially not me. I’m fragile enough without having my entire sense of time and space thrown into chaos and doubt every now and then.

It feels like my connection to reality, which is weak at the best of time, got a roundhouse kick to the solar plexus.

I wonder where my lunar plexus is located.

What does not kill me makes me sillier.

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Minor medical update

Went to see the super nice Doctor Caswell, my fat guy doctor (sleep apnea and diabetes, technically) today.

Not much came of it except one thing : she is going to call up those asshole in cardiac surgery at St. Paul’s on my behalf and leave them a voice mail of pointed inquiry.

I am still going to call my cardiologist Doctor Ebtia as she’s the one who is in their field and so they probably give her opinion more weight than a doctor like Doctor Caswell who specializes in two fields only weakly related to their own.

I mean sure, diabetes and sleep apnea are both connected to the heart, but what isn’t?

But I am glad for her moral support. It’s nice to know someone care enough to actually do something for me when I am not even in the room to make them feel bad.

There are probably a million things wrong with that last statement but fuck it.

Sometimes you just got to let yourself be crazy. Like Ford Prefect said, there’s no point in driving yourself crazy trying to keep yourself from going crazy.

And honestly, if I thought going full on Looney Tunes would definitely make me happy, I would go for it.

After all, what has reality ever done for me?

But alas, there are no guarantees that I would go (or stay) the happy kind of crazy.

It would probably lead to one of my worst fears coming true : being trapped alone in the darkness my skull with all my demons and no more ways to escape.

So I am still on Team Reality for now.

But I still hold onto becoming a full bozo whackjob as an option, and I take a lot of comfort from that fact.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry. This isn’t another sex post.

Not yet, anyhow. Ya never know where I will end up.

Anyhow, the hardness in question is not sexual. It is a hardness of personality and of temperament that I wanna talk about.

For as long as I can remember, I have had this sense of a pressure to “toughen up”. To be more solid and unyielding instead of my soft squishy self. To put some serious muscle onto my mind and soul so I am truly strong and resilient enough to face the truth and tackle my problems head on and really master my life.

And for all that time, I have avoided it like it was a deadly assassin.

Because in a sense, it is. I know that in order for me to “grow up” in this way, something inside of me will have to die. Something beautiful, and tender, and delicate. Something incredibly precious to me that I am simply not willing to give up.

Something I value more than life itself.

Call it what you like. A tenderness of temperament. A softness of the soul. A kind of trembling innocence hidden deep with my cynicism.

For most of my life, I have thought of it as my sensitivity. Not quite a precise enough term but whatever.

And I treasure it. Not just because it’s my secret garden where I hide from all the hate and ugliness of the world but because it’s also the source of my power.

Well, one of them, anyhow.

I know that this super sensitive part of me is the key to my deep empathy and understanding of my fellow humans. And from that flows so much else about who I am and what I do and how I see the world.

To me, my sensitivity is one of my senses and “toughening up” is like choosing to partly blind yourself or deafen yourself.

How can you willingly deaden yourself to things you know to truly be there?

But here’s the thing. There is such a thing as too much sensitivity. You can be far too tender to function in the world.

I think of it as being someone with a terrible skin condition that makes handling even ordinary objects extremely painful because your skin is now too tender.

The House of Usher would also be a good example.

There is a reason we sometimes put on gloves to do rough work. It allows us to handle things that would otherwise be too painful to do.

And it’s not black and white. It’s not a matter of being totally sensitive or completely insensitive. It’s not a matter of choosing between being blinded by the light or going completely and totally blind.

That’s childishly self-defeating thinking. The goal is not to abandon all sensitivity but to simply scale back the sensitivity to a level where I can cope with reality.

And yeah, for that a little of me has to die.

But in order to be truly free, you have to give up a little part of yourself.

I guess this is mine.

More after the break.

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A little less sensitive

There. That’s a good way to put it.

“I want to be a little less sensitive. ” I can handle that.

I think part of the problem is my fear of that dark Mister Hyde part of my personality I talked about last week.

The Monster. The Ogre. The Brute. The version of me that doesn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone but himself and feels no responsibility for the consequences of his lies and manipulations and distortions of reality.

In fact, he finds them quite amusing. Oh dear, what a mess I made, Those poor people.

Evil laughter ensues.

The more I describe him, the less of him there is in me. The true story of both Hyde and the Hulk is that neither would exist if Doctor Jekyll and Bruce Banner did not refuse to accept that their dark sides were as much a part of them as their higher motives.

I know I am both shadow and light. Like Good Kirk at the end of the Two Kirks episode of the original Star Trek, I triumph over my dark side by embracing it.

We’re all me in here. No need to fight.

I’m afraid of this dark version of myself because I know how bad I could be if I let him loose. There is enormous power in this broken body. The sort of power that could bend history itself to my vision if I stopped being limited by human decency.

i think what I am truly afraid of is my own power running away with me. Going to my head. I fear losing who I am in a rush of power and influence till all my noble intentions are dead an buried at sea and I am fucking with the world purely for my own twisted amusement and to further glory in my own power and genius and superiority,.

A lot of the world’s worst leaders were weak people who came into power with what at least started as good intentions but who soon became corrupted by the vast temptations to use the power to get back at those who wronged them and remark their world in their own image and otherwise gratified their wounded pride.

Maybe the people who deserve power the most are not the righteous downtrodden who have always been powerless but those who have had power for a long time without being a dick about it.

Just a thought.

Anyhow, I am not lying or exaggerating when I say I could be that kind of monster. A Hitler or Mao or Pol Pot (with whom I share a birthday).

I have the prerequisites : I’m a loser misfit who is charismatic and articulate and moved by a great sense of injustice who is a very compelling public speaker, the kind of person who distorts human reality around him by sheer power of personality.

Vastly powerful yet personally very weak and small.

That’s the formula for the worst kind of tyrant.

I know that seems like a ludicrous thing to worry about.

But I know what I have inside me.

And I am terrified of what I would become if I let it out of its cage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy great sizzling Jesus, am I horny.

Yup, it’s going to be one of THOSE entries.

Spin on if you like.

But this blog is for expression of my feelings of the moment and right now I am so horny I could pole vault.

And I guess I really am a bottom at heart (who hearts your bottom too) because what I really want right now is a big hard cock to fuck my fat frustrate lonely ass and scratch that deep bitch itch that is driving me mad until I can’t even walk any more.

Because the truth is, masturbation ain’t enough. I need the kind of sex that involves other people. I want to suck a mile of dick. I want to get fucked so long and hard and well that that release of sexual tension alone will bring on puberty in local tweens. I want to eat so much ass I gain weight.

In the end I am just a greedy bottom bitch.

GIVE ME ALL OF THE EVERYTHING PLEASE.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have a hot tight ass to fuck too, and getting your ick sucked by someone who really knows what they are doing is always a good thing.

But I’m a bottom at heart. And at dick and mouth and butthole.

And the thing is, my sexuality has gone almost completely unexpressed for my entire life. And not just because some of it is not safe to express.

Don’t ask. You don’t wanna know.

No, the real issue is that severe anxiety kind of makes sex with others impossible.

I mean, I have trouble calling up doctor’s offices to make appointments. Approaching another human being in person to try to sex with them? Impossible.

And that’s a crying shame because I know I can be sexy as hell. I have charisma, charm, wit, and raw animal magnetism. I can read what people want and give them what they need. I can become whatever their perverted heart desires. The stuff of their dirtiest deepest dreams and desires.

i could seduce dudes who never thought they would fuck a fat dude at all, Because with powers like mine, I create my own reality and draw others into it.

Or at least, I could, if I wasn’t so god damned scared of everything.

This straightjacket of fear has really got to go. I deserve to be able to live a normal, healthy, vigorous life full of joy and esprit. There’s no good reason why I can’t go out into this world and find fun and adventure and romance and everything else that I want.

All that is between me and a much better life is this thoughtless and meaningless fear whose sole purpose is to protect me from having to deal with life at all.

And I am sick of it. Fuck safety. Bring it on, life,. I am ready to leave the shell.

Now I need to poke a hole through it with my pecker.

More after the break,.

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From the desk of my penis

Just kidding. I am over that for now. Tried to masturbate, did not cum, but had enough fun to at least allow for some measure of calmness.

Now for the real headline :

The Eternal Implosion

AKA falling into myself forever.

When I retreated into myself to escape being raped when I was four years old, I started the trend that would become my primary defense mechanism and curse for life.

Whenever I can’t handle something (and I can’t handle much), I detach and flee deeper into myself to get away.

A turtle retreating into his shell makes a decent metaphor. Except that inside his shell is another shell, and inside that another, and so on unto infinity.

There is always another shell to retreat into. At no point is the turtle forced to hang in there and face his problems.

Escape is always close at hand, no matter what.

So that turtle is thousands of shells deep by now. Way past the point where he remembers what the real world is like. The shadows of his troubled past have chased him in so deep that he has no choice but to accept the shell realm as reality even though deep down he knows it isn’t.

It isn’t true reality. It’s just HIS reality.

Man can I run deep with a metaphor.

My point (I have a point? Cool!) is that I have never had to learn to stay and fight.

Not for myself, anyhow. For someone else, watch the fuck out.

And this propensity for escape has ruined my life and left me in the state I am in, broken in body and mind at the age of 48 with nothing to show for my time on Earth except for having played a LOT of video games.

And I am not happy about that. At all. Something has to change or I will end up dead before I turn 50 because I just plain gave up on life and let all my illnesses overtake me.

I mean, if this is all there is, what is the fucking point of going on? Why bother? What do I get out of carrying on this farce of a life all the way to its inevitable pitiful end?

Because make no mistake : the path ahead is dark as fuck. As I see it, I just get sicker and sicker and more and more miserable and incapacitated and I continue to waste my life playing video games all fucking day and eventually I die of things the whole world will see as entirely preventable and so I will have lived an entire lifetime without there being any purpose or point to my existence at all,.

I can’t live just making it through the day any more. I have to feel like there is some point to my life. That I am going somewhere. GETTING somewhere.

Otherwise I might as well just get off the goddamned bus while I still can.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Don’t worry folks. I am not suicidal. Just venting. Love you!)

Fucked if I know.

I know a lot of things about a lot of things. I either learn it or I deduce it and then I retain it in this ever-busy megabrain of mine.

But I don’t know jack shit about life. Or being happy. I have an endless supply of clever, compassionate, and wise things to say to others when needed, but the truth is that I on’t know shit about shit when it comes to truly living.

That’s because that sort of knowledge only comes from experience and I have had precious little. I have frittered my life away hiding behind a computer screen in order to completely avoid dealing with life and it’s the winning formula that got me to where I am today – dying having done nothing with the vast, vast potential I mistakenly possess.

If it was possible to give it to someone else when I die so that maybe somebody would do something with all my skill, talent, wit, empathy, and intellect, I totally would.

Hell, I might even let them murder me so they don’t have to wait.

Godspeed, my homicidal friend. Do all you can with it.

Back on topic. I don’t know a lot about life and how to live it because I have so little experience. The obvious and seemingly perfect but actually useless solution is for me to go out there and get the experience, ASAP.

Ha ha ha. Cute. Look, if it was that easy, I would have done it already. I am paralyzed by a killer combo of deep fear and option paralysis and that keeps me locked in place in front of this fucking computer until the day I die.

I mean, what does “go out and get experience” even mean? Where would I even start?

“Go do things you enjoy!”. I enjoy a lot of things. Still too many options. And it doesn’t make any of the fear disappear either.

To be brutally (and shamefully) honest, the only way I can imagine going out and exploring the world is in a thick, comforting cocoon of money.

If I had loads of cash to give me options and protection from the world’s harsh edges and cold climate, as well as some kind of status and standing in the world, I might be confident enough to go out there and splash around and figure things out.

But without something like that. the feeling of vulnerability and exposure runs far too deep and it feels like I would die from the sheer uncertainty of it all.

How can I be safe when I have so little control and there are so many variables and something horrible could happen at any second?

The prosaic answer, “however it is healthy people do it”, because these fears of mine do not represent any real threat.

They are just bad feedback loops amplifying nothing real. The fear feeds into itself and accelerates out of control as a way for my anxiety to keep me “safe”.

And my head got that message but my heart pushed the red button and sent it to voice-mail and I don’t even know my soul’s number.

I wish it was as simple as looking at myself in the mirror and very sternly and firmly telling my fear to GO AWAY because it’s NOT REAL.

But I know damned well it’s not real.

And it doesn’t help at all.

More after the break.

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A normal life

So I was on my way to the car after getting a chocolate Frosty at Wendy’s when I had the thought, “I deserve to live a normal life. Like normal people do. ” ^[1]

This thought surprised me, because like many other (in)voluntary freaks like myself grow up feeling like “normal” is a dirty word and one they certainly never want to be attributed to them.

Call it Freak Pride. If you’re one of the oddest of balls, you have no choice but to make that s virtue and a big part of your identity.

But I have done a lot of thinking about normalcy lately and what people get out of it, and I’ve decided that, at long last, I want in.

It’s not too late for me yet. I could still learn to sip the warm waters of the normal world.

Not so much that it robs me of my special spark, of course, Just enough to thaw out my frozen heart and free me from this icy intellectual gulag I am in.

i just need enough to bring me back to life, man.

To be honest, I need all the comfort of the herd I can stand I can get right now, Like many others who leave the herd behind, I have found that it is pretty fucking cold an lonely out here in the void.

Sure, I can go far beyond the walls of social reality. I see things you people wouldn’t believe. I move through the herd’s reality like I’m five dimensional. I can feel the patterns in things most people don’t even know are things.

But I do it all alone, in the cold and the dark and the aching screaming leeching void.

And I really need a break from being being a reality warping wizard. I don’t want to be a mighty wizard right now.

I just want to be a happy little animal, warm and safe and content. Cuddled together with the rest of the herd, knowing they watch out for me and care about me and want me to be well.

I don’t know what that’s like. I have felt totally abandoned since my first day of school.

I don’t even remember what being warm feels like.

I bet it’s nice,.

So somehow, I will learn to come in from the cold and be human for a while.

I can go back to being a shining stellar object once I feel better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here I am again, sitting at this here computer and typing away, trying to come up with the first 500 words of my daily justification for my existence.

It might not be much but it’s still damned nice to actually have one.

I remember what life was like before 2011, when I first started blogging, and it was so very much worse. Just endless hours to fill and nothing remote productive an/or meaningful to fill them wit.

So thank you, oh blog of mine. You keep the yawning maw of the void monster away from the tender semi-inert flesh of my sadly sleeping self.

And some day I will something more. Something big. Something grand. Something amazing. Something so powerful and fresh and new that it changes everything.

No pressure or nothin’ though.

I just know that I have true greatness inside me, eager to get out and show the world what it can do. I have such power within me, straining at its chains, desperate to escape the clutches of the internalized fascist regime that is my depression.

But I also fear my own power, and perhaps that’s the root of the problem. I am scared that if I lose control, I will run amok and hurt people and become something dark and terrible and brutal.

Might be worth it to be happy, though.

I’m just sayin’.

If becoming a malevolently mocking monster is the price I have to pay in order to find some peace, happiness, and love of self, I might just go for it one of these days.

Obviously, my conscience dictates that I do everything I can to explore every possible alternative before turning to the Dark Side.

I mean, for one thing, it would be so obvious. Oh, another raging impotent fat dude on the internet, how very fresh and new.

Plus there’s like, morality and stuff.

I don’t want to become the Ogre in my head. Think of him being a Doctor Jekyll in intellect with a Mister Hyde’s sense of ethics. A monster who uses all my powers – my intelligence, my devious and subtle mind, my charisma, my insight, even my empathy – to their full extent without mercy or restraint and purely for my own amusement.

Just bending and twisting and pushing and trapping and tricking those around me in order to get what I want and have my wicked fun doing it.

That is my dark side in a nutshell. A smug bastard deeply and passionately in love with his own cleverness who takes joy in wreaking havoc then skating away with speed and elegance leaving other people to deal with the consequences.

And that includes seducing people with my powerful presence and charisma and ability to tell people what they want to hear only to use them dumping grounds for my negative emotions then once more skating away.

Hey, why choke on your own bile when you can inject it into others and make them deal with it instead?

Empathy goes both ways, after all.

More after the break.

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Who are you and what are you doing here?

Man, if i had a nickel for every time a neighbor has said that to me….

Or put another way :

Startled Housewife : Who are you an what are you doing here?
Thoughtful Burglar (sits and takes a long sip from a latte): Well, isn’t what we all want to know? Deep down?

In other (other) words, I am just trying to figure out what my motherfucking deal is.

All the usual shit. What is my purpose? Why am I even here? What am I supposed to e doing with my life and my gifts? Where do I fit into the tapestry of life?

Hopefully someone with like, deer and horses, not dead kings still fighting each other.

I realized today that, quel shoq, that being smart enough to understand the origin of these questions and thus know that one does not need to answer them does not, in fact, obviate me of the need to answer them at all.

Once more, I find I have tried to substitute cleverness for humanity. As if knowing what i is “really going on” somehow exempts me from the very drives I so precisely “understand” but which apply to every human being but me, apparently.

Enough talking about the question in order to avoid having to answer it.

What is my purpose? That’s the problem : I don’t believe in them. I don’t think anyone is here for a reason or has a purpose because I don’t believe in an entity that has any sort of purpose or plan for us.

Why was I put here? By who?

What is my purpose? According to who?

What is the meaning of life? By whose definition?

The question chases its own tail infinitely if taken that way and that serves no purpose.

The only exit from that loop that I know of is to center it on the self. We, as thinking feeling beings, are not handed an assignment at birth, and as long as we do that thing and do it well, we will be okay.

This is extremely depressing to some very deep and profound social instincts. Ones that tell us that we grow up, find our place in the tribe, and serve society that way, and in return, society supports and protects us.

Well, no. Society has not been that simple since we built our first huts.

The only real answer to the question is that we find and develop our own purpose. One that expresses and feeds our own emotional and developmental needs and thus defines the lifelong process of self-actualization.

Dragging us back to the point, if I am to answer the question of what my purpose is, the first accurate but unhelpful answer is “whatever I want it to be.”

Yeah I am going to need more to go on than that. Freedom answers no questions.

Luckily, the question is not as arbitrary and open-ended as it seems. Rephrase it as “whatever will make me happy” and you have the beginning of an answer.

One I still don’t know, sadly.

But it’s a place to start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Honestly, like half the entries here could have that title.

Or the whole blog, for that matter.

This morning, I finally managed to make myself do my two injections (Basaglar, my insulin, and Ozempic, an insulin…. enhancer?) for the first time in over a month.

And I feel better as a result. A lot better. A lot of my feeling of malaise has evaporate and I feel sharper and more focused and overall happier.

And I knew this would happen. Obviously. My diabetic symptoms were getting worse and worse, starting with that demonic hunger that warns me things are very fucked up indeed^[1] and eventually adding constant dizziness, dark depression, and that superstar of diabetic symptoms, constant thirst.^[2]

So I knew I was suffering and that the injections would fix that right up. Relief was close at hand for weeks and yet I could not bring myself to access it.

And for fuck’s sake, WHY? What the hell is wrong with me that makes it so that obvious, easy things like doing my injections that I know will make me feel a lot better become as hard as deciding to cut off a limb with a rusty hacksaw?

I form these bizarre aversions at lightning speed and end up hemmed in by them to the point of paralysis in no time at all and I am getting really fucking sick of it.

I keep asking myself what, exactly, was I afraid would happen when I injected. The obvious and wrong answer is that I am worried I will trigger a blood sugar crash. but that’s akin to dying of heat sickness out of fear of freezing to death.

I mean, ya got to have priorities.

The only other answer as to why I do these things is fear of change in general, even when that change is likely to be very good.

That doesn’t seem like the entire answer either, but we’re getting closer.

I fall back on that feeling that I am barely holding my guts in and that I have to do as little as possible or everything will fall out of me and I will die.

Not literally true, obviously. But it describes what depression can feel like.

It’s what happens when the “hide” mode of the “fight, flee, or hide” takes over and dominate the individual completely. On the deepest possible level, I am convinced that if I move or change too much, something out there is going to GET me, and so I have to life the life of a halfassed statue instead.

Well fuck that. Somehow, somewhere, I am going to find the energies I nee to smash all the stupid aversions and start really living.

Everything I need is out there somewhere.

I just need to reach out and grab it.

More after the break.

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Better but still…

Feeling somewhat better since my injections but I still kind of want to bludgeon the world to death with a club made of pure black hate.

So, ya know, mixed emotions.

Did not quite make it to the phone call to Doctor Ebtia’s office today. She’s my cardiologist and I want her to find out what the fuck the deal is with my heart operation because I am getting weaker by the day and I am scared one of these days just getting out of bed will be too much for my tuckered ticker and it will pop.

And maybe I will just plain die. Or maybe I will live but be in such a horrible state of pain, humiliation, and debility that I will wish I had died. Or maybe I will get super lucky and somehow survive despite nobody knowing I keeled over because I spend most of my time all alone in my room.

Mental note : try to have seemingly inevitable heart attack while with friends.

Oh, and ponders getting one of those medic alert things.

Well if I have a heart attack while waiting for my surgery, they better hope it kills me, because if not I am going to scorched-earth sue the entire St. Paul’s cardiac surgery for dropping the ball on this one.

I am pondering how to handle the call, though, because Doctor Ebtia seems somewhat high strung as does her staff, so I don’t want to come on all thunder and death and scare them into ducking my calls.

I can be quite scary when I am angry, especially to petite, nervous women.

They don’t know I’m just a big goofy puppy dog with a rather large bark.

So my approach will be the two pathetics : sympathetic, and just plain pathetic.

Emphasize how worried and scared I am and how patient I have been and how I have heard nothing at all from these people.

And not so much the rage and feeling neglected and thinking the cardiac surgeons won’t do anything until a heart attack makes my case interesting enough for them to be bothered with and so forth and so on.

That’s the scary stuff. Might be cathartic but a poor choice in terms of strategy.

If I can’t get her to take me seriously, I will try Doctor Caswell again. Last visit, I spilled the basics out to her, but I don’t think she got the urgency of it all.

So I think another try when I see her on the 30th would work.

One way or another, I am going to make it RAIN on this motherfuckers.

I might be sick.

I might be crazy.

I might be poor.

But I am still a force to be reckoned with.

And I have precious little to lose.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel so blank lately.

Like there’s a Vacancy sign softly blinking in my mind.

Not that long ago my mind was teeming with ideas trying to get out via my craft and my typing fingers. But now it feels like coming up with any premise at all is like a junkie trying to find a good vein, or maybe trying to get water from a dry well.

I might not have ideas but my similes are on point.

I blame the summer. The heat fries my brain. Bakes the creative energies right out of this tortured gourd of mine.

That’s probably what is making my sleep somewhat more messed up that usual too. Well, that, and my nonstop sinus fucking issues.

On the CPAP front, I have not made much progress lately. After the incident where I discovered that my nose was way too clogged up to support my respiratory needs and therefore felt like I was smothering with the thing on, I have found it very hard to even think about trying again.

So back to square one, in a sense. Or maybe square one point five.

And the thing is, I have no way of knowing before I put the thing on whether my nasal air passages are clear enough to use it safely or not.

All I know is that I am once more hung up on some serious trust issues. I am actually considering giving the old full face mask another try.

I mean, what the hell. At least it works equally well whether i got a stuffy nose. I can just breathe through my mouth instead.

But I am still pissed of that fat ^[1] conspired to dash my hopes for CPAP yet again. I really wanted to get onto CPAP for good and discover what life is like when you don’t smother dozens of times an hour in your sleep.

Probably better, right?

Still, if the O in my Obstructive Sleep Apnea is located in the general vicinity of my nose and not somewhere deeper in my trachea, it might be operable.

I would happily put up with an operation to correct a deviated septum or similar if it led to actual restful sleep.

But doctors don’t like that option because it doesn’t make fat people suffer enough.

They like CPAP. It punishes us for our fatness for 8 hours a day A third of our lives!

Speaking of the medical world, still no word on my life-saving heart operation. I figure my next step is to get Doctor Ebtia, my cardiologist, on the case.

Originally, the plan was that I would call her after the operation. But that op might never happen if someone doesn’t light a fire under this motherfuckers and it seems to me my cardiologist seems like the most logical person to do that.

So when the spirit moves me, I will give her office a call.

Just trying not to die here. Don’t mind me.

More after the break.

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The Skinny Revolution

It had a proper medical name when it was first introduced, but nobody remembers what it was because everybody – from street-corner teens to heads of state and all points in between – called it Fatcracker.

The Fatcracker Cure was what they called it. A month in hospital and a year under observation was a pittance to pay for not only losing all one’s excess fat but for being absolutely sure it would never come back no matter what one ate.

It turns out the secret was in enzymes. A careful campaign ti exterminate only a certain strand of guy flora rendered the patient incapable of storing excess energy as fat, period. What fat there was on the patient at start of treatment soon melted away as the treatment cut off its energy supply and the body got rid of it naturally.

In fact, the received wisdom on the subject was that the enzymatic/gut flora part of the cure was absurdly simple and the only reason the treatment took so long and was so carefully monitored was to make sure people didn’t lose weight too fast and shock their system into going into starvation mode.

The Fatcracker Cure was a smash hit overnight. Even governments and insurance companies could see the benefits of a treatment that for a measly $75,000 USD could save the system millions in future health care costs for the obese.

The public, on the other hand, hated it.

For one thing, it didn’t work for them. It cured obesity and that was it. Those pesky ten pounds you can’t seem to lose before bikini seasons were immune to it.

It cured people of the conditions that led to obesity and that was it.

This ignited a wildfire of pseudo-moral outrage at how it wasn’t “fair” that these horrible fatsos got to be thin and healthy without “earning” it like all these people suddenly decided they had been doing it all along.

Anti-fat hate skyrocketed, with protests, riots targeting the manufacturer of “fat food” like chocolate bars and potato chips, and worst of all, the firebombing of the millions of Fatcracker clinics that sprang up all over the world overnight.

At the height of the hysteria. the anti-fat movement turned on itself via a pogrom of people suspected of not “really” being skinny but being the worst thing of all : ex-fat.

This “fat fire” raged on for six terrible months before burning itself out. Eventually, so many people had taken the cure that they vastly outnumbered the haters and even the most diehard anti-fattists realized there were simply too many ex-fats and ex-fat sympathizers to fight.

Thus, within a year of the Fatcracker cure being introduced, obesity was all but eradicated from the world and the only fat people left were fat by choice.

And people began looking back at their own beliefs about fat people from the Before Times, and realizing how easily they accepted hateful and dehumanizing beliefs about whose only crime was an unsightly addiction, and the Years of Confession began.

Turned out a lot of people had their own burdens they wanted to shed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. : What do you think of this kind of top-down storytelling? I enjoy writing it and to me, this is the “good stuff” in concentrated form, but I am curious about how other people see it.

So to recap :

1. Life sucks because
2. Everything hurts, and I
3. Don’t get to have comfort, stability, safety, health, decency, empathy, sympathy, worth, and least of all ignity
4. Waves of depression keep hitting me like tidal surges hitting a retaining wall
5. Everyone on me is broken or will be soon
6. I sleep so much I feel like I’m living only in the interstitials
7. My surgeons are in no hurry to fix my fucking heart
8. I am awash in specialists and appointments and it is way more than I can handle and yet there is nobody who can handle it for me
9. I constantly want to run away from everything and go hide from life even more than I am doing already, which is pathetic, and
10. My violent apathy gets more violent and less apathetic every day and the urge to lash out at this stupid fucking world is growing exponentially.

So ya know. I’ve been better.

Something somewhere has to give. I can’t become yet another incoherently ranting fat dude on the internet spouting garbled wharrrrrrrgarbl in a vain attempt to vent his mad impotent rage on the world which has wronged him.

But I feel it coming on. If I don’t find some productive way to focus and express my anger, I am going to pop like a bottle of champagne in an earthquake and my madness will overwhelm my articulacy and I will end up in the Downtown East Side living on a square of cardboard I call “home base” and screaming and howling at people as they get on and off the bus.

You know, that would be a terrible lifestyle, but might work as a hobby.

Could be very therapeutic.

Been playing Fallout 76 a lot lately. Bought it after repeated reassurances from Maelkoth that despite the game’s hilarious clusterfudge of a launch three years back, it is now a very good game.

Plus it was on sale for like $14. So I thought, what the fudge, and gave it a shot.

And yup. it’s very good. It’s pretty much an expanded version of Fallout 4, the previous game in the series, and my favorite in terms of gameplay in the series.

Fallout New Vegas has a better story, though.

Anyhow, the game rocks and I am glad I bought it. I am enjoying wandering the wastelands of a post-nuclear holocaust Appalachia dispensing white-hot justice with my trusty rifle and mad shootin’ skills.

Although I am beginning to regret my love of being a sharpshooter because I am constantly running out of fucking ammo. That’s why I carry so many guns around, so that I can use whatever ammo I find.

I picture my character having a golf bag full of firearms like I am about to finally get back at those assholes at the country club for mocking my swing.

I honestly wish I had decided to be a melee character instead.

Sure, a sword doesn’t have much range, but it never needs reloading either.

I am in a particularly bad spot because I am out of ammo AND money.

I really need a source for cash jobs that don’t take too long.

More after the break.

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A wasteland indeed

Things haven’t gotten any better for me in Fallout 76.

For one thing, audio stopped working. But only in hames. I can hear my mp3s just fine. But nothing else, not YouTube, not games, nudding.

Ah ha. Problem solved. Zoom fucked around with the inputs and outputs and had the audio trying to output to my microphone.

Not gonna happen.

So that’s one fewer crisis at least. I mean sure, I’m still drowning, but at least I clawed my way back to six inches closer to the surface and the light!

Now that’s what I call progress!

Well, lack of regress, anyhow.

Look, I’ll take what I can get.

Speaking of drowning, I am getting very sick of constantly having a runny nose and an itchy palate. It’s been more than a week since I committed the mortal sin of cleaning and hence kicking up dust and you would think I would be over it by now.

Honestly, I think the real problem might be that I am building up resistance to my Reactine. I have read that sometimes switching to a different antihistamine with a different active ingredient can greatly improve results.

And I am sure as fuck not happy with my current results. Only the fact that I know that things would be much, much worse without the Reactine that keeps me taking the damned things at all.

Eventually, I will have all the illnesses. I will be sick in every single way it is possible for a human being to be sick.

My continued survival will be hailed as a medical miracle.

But the kind that suggests you recently made an old Gypsy lady very. very angry.

Either that, or you received a boon from one of those Greek gods that doesn’t think things through too well.

Inspired by your great valor and peerless virtue, Apollo grants you the gift of immortality.

“Oh, so I will never get old and die?” you ask.

“Yes, my child. ” said Apollo wisely. “You will never die. “

“Right…. ” you doggedly reply, “… but about the growing old part… ”

But he was already gone.

And that’s how you became the most health conscious immoral ever.

Back to Fallout 76, I am currently a victim of my own stubbornness.

There’s a quest item I want to get but it’s being guarded by way too many Super Mutant, who are big and tough and very hard to kill.

I am in no way ready to fight them. I have too little ammo, my weapons do not pack enough of a punch to hurt these guys much, and my skills aren’t up to the task.

Were I sensible, I would go do other stuff until I am strong enough to fight these fuckers.

But I am not sensible, so I keep trying to beat them and getting my ass killed.

And the thing is, I usually manage to kill one or two before I die, so eventually this will work. I will have just died dozens of times in the process.

So…… that’s what is going to happen. Me dying. A lot.

Oh well, at least I have a laser sniper rifle now.

Too bad all my enemies wear SHINY METAL HELMETS.

Still pondering starting over as a post-apocalyptic barbarian.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am so goddamned randomized lately.

Hence my not getting around to eating my LUNCH until 5:15 pm, three hours before I eat again at Denny’s.

I didn’t plan it out this way, of course. I planned to eat when I got back from my Wound Care Clinic appointment, which was at 2 pm.

Got back at 3:15 pm. Took longer than before because I have so many dressings now. My nurse was a cute Gaysian named Steven, which was nice.

Not to knock any of the lady nurses I have had. I just have a thing for cute men in caring professions and that made the whole process that little bit better.

Not that I was sitting there with a boner in my heart and a creepy smile on my face the whole time. I would never do that to someone.

It just made being tended to and looked after a tiny bit sexy,

And that was nice.

Anyhow, got home at 3:15 pm but was way too sleepy to even contemplate making lunch, let alone eating it while blogging, so down I went.

So now I am here typing away this late in the day. It feels ridiculous, and like I have screwed up big time.

On a deeper level, I feel like things are slipping out of control and there is nothing I can do about it. These attacks of sleepiness when I should be eating are intense and not the sort of thing I can just shrug off.

Or maybe i could, if I wasn’t such a pussy.

But I am, so I can’t.

I am starting to wonder if I would be better off eating right before my usual times and seeing what happens then. That way, I would at least get the food into me closer to the usual time and exert some kin of control over my freaking life.

I would hate to have to go back to doing all my blogging in one sitting, at night. I really like my bipartite blogging system. It spreads things out just enough to keep me motivated and interested throughout the day,

But this random shit has got to stop. It’s not good for me and my diabetes. I do best when I eat at the exact same times ever day. That way my body knows what to expect and can get use to the routine.

But tell that to my goddamned brain. It keep usurping the body’s agenda by forcing me to sleep when I should be eating in the afternoon and until that shit stops, I am going to keep lurching through time like a drunken Lurch.

And my usual remedy of Diet Coke doesn’t seem like it’s strong enough any more.

What’s next, cocaine? Electroshock? Toothpicks holding my eyelids open?

The sad truth is that I am going to need even more sleep after I am done here, even though I only have an hour in which to nap.

I am sleeping my life away and it’s pissing me off.

More after the break.

---

So very weak

So while my surgeons ignore me, my heart condition gets worse.

Now, just getting from the apartment to the car feels like a marathon. All I am doing is walking from the apartment to the elevator and from the elevator to the vehicle, and yet it hurts in a way that makes me very, very worried,

Which is, ironically, bad for my heart.

My heart starts beating really hard, hard enough to be heard in my ears, and i feel like I am not getting enough oxygen, and I get all panicky and squirrely.

And I wonder if I should be telling someone about this. It seems pretty bad. But who do I tell ? And how do I know it isn’t something minor that won’t even show up on tests?

After all, earlier this month I was admitted to the hospital with symptoms I thought were pretty serious and they hooked me up to the heart monitor for three hours, plus did a bunch of other tests, and found nothing.

And despite my brave talk about it’s better to be safe than sorry, I felt guilty and embarrassed. And that makes me reluctant to bring it up again.

And I know that is definitely wrong according to medical dogma. The dogma says patients should tell their medical professionals about anything they might think the medical system ought to know, even if they think it’s probably nothing.

But that doesn’t take my crippling social issues into account. I am very prone to feeling like my concerns are unimportant and not worth bringing up and like wasting other people’s time for something that turns out to be no big deal is a terrible crime.

And that’s the sort of thing that just might kill me one of these days.

“Mister Bertrand! Why didn’t you tell the nurse when your eyes started bleeding?”

“She seemed busy. I didn’t want to interrupt. ”

That’s why I keep telling myself that the next time I am in the hospital, I am going to go ahead and be loud, obnoxious, and demanding.

Or maybe just snippy and officious and cold. That is a lot easier to maintain over the long term and can be quite fun too.

But even that, meh. My base personality is affable and accommodating and really wants people to like him. I am not built for grumpiness, however justified.

This is why I need a medical advocate. Not just to keep all my appointments and instructions and medications organized, but to speak up for me and advocate for me when I am feeling timid and confused.

Once I get my bearings and I am sure of my case, I ain’t timid any more. I can stick up for myself just fine once I get the facts straight.

But until then, I could really use a loudmouthed advocate who will protect my interests even if it means making a royal pain of themselves.

Anyone up for the job? 🙂

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I do not want to be doing this right now.

As usual, I am sleepy and dizzy and disoriented and I just want to be sleeping in my bed. Trying to stay focused on the screen is like trying to paint a sunrise onto a balloon while swinging on a swing.

It’s a weird image, granted, but trust me, it’s apt.

Gah, even typing seems like some kind of elaborate trick, like juggling chainsaws or shooting an apple off a very trusting person’s head.

Well, trusting or suicidal, I suppose.

Nope. Not gonna make it. Gonna exercise my rarely seen opt out clause and go nap.

Wish me luck when I wake.

---

Well OK. It’s like three hours later and I spent most of that time asleep. Here’s hoping that was enough rest to at least let me function.

I regret that latest nap. I feel like it was a lapse in self-discipline and I have too little of that even on a good day so I feel like I really let myself down today.

Then again, maybe I truly had no choice. Hard to say.

Aaaaand now I got to poop. Even though I just pooped. Apparently my bowels are demanding an encore.

I will be right back.

---

Phew. That was…. a lot, considering I thought I was empty.

I better get writing before the third wave hits.

Still not in the best of moods, pooping issues aside, as I am sure you can tell.

Some time soon I want to stop being lazy and/or avoidant and take that long hot cleansing bath or at least a very hot shower and truly cleanse my pores and get my skin back into working condition.

I know it will make me feel so much better.

And that should be more than enough incentive to do it.

But it ain’t. Trog says no. Trog doesn’t care what rationality and common sense say, it still views any attempt to take it out of its damp dark cave as a brutal and vicious attack to be resisted with maximum force so it can escape back into its hole.

Future reward does not even enter into it. The jackpot could be ten million bucks, a month long orgy with more cock than a rooster convention, and a personal interview with the ghost of Isaac Asimov, and my Trog would still veto the fuck out of it.

And I am sooooo tired of its bullshit.

I want to kick it to the curb, shouting “To hell with you and your lies! You are worse than useless and you know nothing! NOTHING! I am stronger than you! I am bigger than you! I am MORE than you! So get the fuck out of here with your toxic fears and bitter bile and never, ever come back!”.

So to hell with it. I just did it. Maybe I just ejected a vital part of myself. We will see.

But I refuse to be ruled by blind, infantile fear any longer.

Fuck you, Trog. And good riddance.

Now to go back to sleep.

More after the break.

---

I yearn to burn

I had a much better idea for a topic earlier but as usual, I have forgotten it.

So whatever. The wheel turns, the river flows, and time marches on.

I am definitely at the stage now where I crave ignition. I want that holy spark to fall on my dry kindling and start a blessed forest fire that will rage through all the dead vegetation and desiccated treefall in my soul and roast me until I am clean.

I don’t care if it hurts. Hell, I WANT it to hurt. There are far worse things in life than pain.

And pain can cleanse too. It has a way of clarifying the mind by shifting you onto the adrenal plane and thus driving out all those messy monkey brain thoughts going in all directions at the same time and leaving you with a much clearer view.

And what is a little pain compared to that kind of reward?

It’s like a five dollar ticket to paradise, baby.

So light the fire then build it higher, bitch. I want it good and hot when I dive in. The flames have a lot of work to do if they are going to flash fry the filth from my flesh.

I want the fire to burn me down and wring me out like a scourging fever that takes the feverish one within a stone’s throw of oblivion but ultimately purges the illness and leaves the patient utterly broken and drained…. but healed.

I want to pile my sins together in a great and mighty pyre and then scream my prayer of sacrifice into the cold mountain air and then light the pyre and through fire sacrifice my sin and pain to the sky where they can fall as gentle rain and be rendered pure.

I want to open a vein and let my filthy blood drain out of me to be absorbed by the good clean loving earth who takes away my toxic overflow and replaces it with the purest waters from the clearest springs and let this primal purity wash the last of the deep dark taint from my tortured flesh, and let me be reborn anew, wholesome and strong.

I was a good thing once. I can be one again.

I want to take my fevered brain from my skull and rinse it in the river of time so that it may finally know peace and clarity and freedom from the ghosts that haunt it.

I want the old me to die in flames so that the new me might be reborn from its ashes.

I want renewal, dammit. I have been a modern Western philosophical fool fighting the turning of the Wheel for far too long.

Let it spin, and make me whole again. Break me and remake me as many times as it takes to finally get it right.

Even if it takes more than a lifetime.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.