Did the Wound Care thing today.

My nurse was Joy, which was also her name. I thought I’d had her before but she didn’t seem to recognize me and so I was too shy to ask.

Being me can be so hard.

Otherwise, nothing of note happened. I confessed to my crime of picking at my freshly finally healed over old (as in four years old) wound and she put a bandage over it so as to save me from temptation in the future.

I am so ashamed. But, lesson learned. Leave the damn things alone.

The great thing about having my various leg wounds covered by these lovely white bandages (so breathable!) is not just that it removes the ability to pick at the scabs, it removes the temptation too because covered wounds don’t itch.

Instant theory as to why : because the scabs only itch when they dry out and become crusty. That doesn’t happen if they are not exposed to the air.

Whatever the reason, I appreciate it.

The fresher and nastier wound on my right leg is doing very very well. After trying for so long, it has finally partially closed. There is a strip of continuous flesh stretching across the wound like the sash of a beauty queen.

Very encouraging. Go for it, wound! You’ll close up and heal up before too long and we will be able to put this whole thing behind us.

And I’ll have proved to myself that I am not dead yet and can actually heal from things.

---

Tear a hole in the sky

My mood is fairly decent at the moment.

The black cloud of rage and despair that has been hounding me seems to have retreated and I can actually conceive of something not entirely unlike hope.

The image from the title of this section, tearing a hole in the sky, came to me spontaneously while I was lying in bed last night.

The full thing is an image of a hole being torn at the very apex of the vault of the sky. As if the sky was just some big domed ceiling and the hole was being torn at the highest point in it.

And it sounds bad. Possibly even apocalyptic. I mean, a hole in the ozone layer was bad enough. But a hole in the whole sky?

But it’s actually an image of great hope to me. It represents overcoming my current dismally “realistic” world view and its woefully limited view of existence and letting in all the glorious sunshine and beautiful love and laughter and light I have been too numb to feel for far too long.

I don’t need to be limited by “reality” any more. I can create universes and populate them with wonders beyond measure with this magical mind of mine. I command godlike powers of both imagination and reasoning. I’m a wizard beyond compare.

To limit myself to the merely mundane truths of pragmatic reality when you are as amazing as I am is sheer madness.

Not to mention downright silly.

So I shall dream my way home, one way or another. I will make my own Heaven and dwell there eternally even as my Earthly palace falls apart.

Reality never did me any goddamned favours anyhow.

More after the break.

---

Visions of the past

Thought I would share some videos from my video clip collection from long, long ago.

By which I mean the 90’s and early 2000’s.

This is stuff that was very old when I copied it and the rest of the contents of my old hard drive when I first bought this computer and that was when I was going to Kwantlen so we are talking six to eight years ago.

Here’s me being my usually silly ass self :

I had so much more energy and verve back then.

I am much saner now. But way less functional. So…it’s not necessarily a net gain.

Well all I can do is keep plugging away, doggy paddling in quicksand for all I am worth.

And now, one of my favorite anythings ever.

So glad it’s back on YouTube. It disappeared for a while.

Everything about that video is gold. That distorted beat. The clever and hilarious lyrics set against his very serious and respectable tone. Every little fill-in and musical accent is brilliant and sounds amazing. The way he editing himself into the existing footage is damned near flawless.

I just can’t possibly gush enough about it.

Some day, I am going to make something that good.

But um, don’t hold your breath.

And now, gird your loins and take a Xanax because you are about to see the most exciting three minute action film ever.

Holy crap, right? I feel like I went through a week’s worth of adrenaline just watching it.

And it’s such a brilliant production because it looks fantastic, almost professional, and yet most of the shots are thing easy to shoot even for amateurs and they clearly made an effort to include lots of friends and family and whatnot.

This could only have been achieved with meticulous planning. Detailed shot by shot storyboards, pinpoint precision cinematography, every stunt rehearsed until it could be executed flawlessly and at breakneck speed.

Hopefully not literally.

I wanted to link to an original source for it, but the only name I have for it is “The Escape” and that’s not real helpful in finding out where it comes from.

So I had to upload my copy to YouTube instead. And YouTube noted that it was under copyright, but didn’t link to the original, so here we are.

If the copyright holders want me to take it down, I will.

But I would appreciate a link to a legit version in return, please.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

Currently on hold with Dexcom in an attempt to get that damned receiver (reader) for my new blood glucose monitor.

Nice generic on hold music. It’s mild but not entirely uninteresting. Pleasant two-guitar harmonies, subtle backing strings, little twinkly piano accents. Not bad.

I am forcing myself to do this now, even though lunch and blogging are waiting, because I don’t want to lose momentum and end up “forgetting” about it and letting things slide until it’s half a year later and doing it seems impossible.

I know my own foibles. I develop aversions far too easily. Once I start avoiding a task it is very hard for me to stop.

The only solution is to get that shit done ASAP.

It will never be easier than it is RIGHT NOW.

---

There! Done. Tout finis. I will be getting my receiver in the mail either late this week or early next week. I have gotten shit done.

And that feels really good.

Weird. But good.

After being on hold for ten minutes I had a pleasant conversation with a fellow named RyAN who had an eduCATED Quebec acCENT and therefore put the emPHASIS on the wrong syllABLES but whose EngLISH was otherwise superb and rather melodious.

Made me a little homesick, to be honest. Though the people back home do NOT sound like that unless they are being really, really sarcastic.

---

I’m especially proud of getting it done today because I am having a sleepy day and skipping it was very very tempting.

So was skipping lunch entirely but I know not to do that. It leads to bad things like low blood sugar incidents and extreme hunger and feeling very stupid.

Because it is.

So now I am eating my lunch and doing my words and basking in the glow of my self-victory, which feels so much better than self-defeat.

Weirder. But better.

Better get used to it, Trog!

---

My mood is still trending towards badness. Anger and irritability are rising despite my attempts to stay positive.

So instead I am trying to harness this accumulating energy for the cause of good. Use it to lift up my mood instead of dragging it down. Use its vital energy to force open the doors of my mind to let some sunshine and joy for a change.

This is new territory for me but I am eager to explore it. Might even be able to get a little transcendence out of it if I play my cards right.

God knows I could use it. I have wallowed in the miasma of my own sad self for far too long. I need something beyond myself that I can draw upon as a source of renewal.

And lacking an early religious indoctrination, I will pretty much have to invent it myself. It would be nice to believe there is some vast cosmic reservoir of love, hope, strength, and goodness out there somewhere just waiting for me to tap into it, but I know there is no such thing and that whatever I find in my mind is me, no matter how it presents itself.

But I have a powerful imagination that creates potent and compelling things all the time, just as a matter of course.

Dreaming up a sort of personal version of God that works for me seems well within its capacities. After all, it doesn’t have to be totally real.

Just real enough.

Weird. But real enough.

More after the break.

---

Another lost evening

Got sushi from Otaru on the way, Yay.

But I feel depressed. It’s been dogging me on and off all day, Like a noxious black cloud waiting to engulf me at the worst possible moment.

Everything seems so stupid and pointless. The world is dying, I’m dying, and an evil little voice in my head keeps saying, “why delay the inevitable? Get off this death train while you still can! End it now, beat the rush!”.

Fuck you, you evil little shitstain. I’ll stay alive just to spite you.

It’s not the most noble of reasons not to kill yourself, but it works.

And as always, suicide is never really about suicide. It’s about wanting the pain to end. It’s about needing to escape your inner prosecutor the only way you can imagine. It’s about being so very very tired inside that you would do anything to finally get to rest.

That’s why so many of us abuse substances. One of the only surefire ways of turning your brain completely off and forcing a reboot is to get blackout drunk, or the equivalent with other drugs.

It’s the same principle as when they use ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy) to treat depression. A little voltage across the right part of the surface of the brain and the patient has a completely painless and harmless seizure which they will not even remember, and that forces their brains to reboot and suddenly all those half-finished thoughts and unprocessed emotions and other mental debris is gone and you brain is running so very much better.

I still want to try that, even though TCMS (Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation) is a far more sophisticated and subtle tool.

Fuck suble. Just knock me the fuck out already.

It’s like rebooting your computer when it’s starting to run slow and/or get a lot of errors.

But the computer is your BRAIN!

---

LOL.  My DoorDash delivery person on the phone : “Um, hello, this is DoorDash and I;m at…the door?”. 

Awwww. So shy and awkward. Poor girl, must be new.

You did just fine, dear. 

---

Feeling a little better than before. The Diet Pepsi^[1] is helping, as is the sushi.

This time I avoided tempura like it was black olives (shudder). Got the beef roll I wished I had gotten last time.

It seems to have a little bit of yam in it. Oh well, I am still getting my B12.

---

What a tasty meal that was! And with nothing to make me sluggish or weigh me down.

Part of me is still screaming for carbs, but fuck that. It’s just an addiction. If I refuse to feed it for long enough, it will die.

And good fucking riddance.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time for another medical misadventure.

So I picked up my brand new no finger poking needed continuous glucose monitoring system the Newcomm G6 at the Regency Pharmacy today.

The pharmacist was very nervous because, as he admitted, he had no idea how the dang thing worked and neither did his staff, so there was nobody to instruct me.

So I had to do some social/verbal fancy footwork to keep him from making one of his underlings look up the instructions online and read them to me. Sheesh.

I assured him that I would figure it out. Honestly, I figured it would work just like the previous one^[1], the one the Province won’t pay for (the pricks).

I just wanted to get back to Julian, who was waiting in the “ten minutes maximum” parking area right next to the building.

And I was eager to get home so I could play with my new toy – er, I mean, begin sensibly and maturely managing my diabetes like a sane and rational adult.

With my new toy. Yay!

Eventually I escaped and got home and started unboxing stuff. I had the sensors, check. A whole whack of them, more than a month’s worth.

With very cool applicators that look like some kind of pointing device from the future.

And I had a couple of the transmitters. Not something the Libre needed, but apparently the Dexcom design is not quite as elegant.

Whatever. As long as it works, I don’t care.

Yeah. About that.

So I had the sensor, and the transmitter… but no reader, or “receiver” as Dexcom calls it. And obviously, without that, the thing is useless.

So I call the pharmacy, figuring they forgot to give me something. They don’t know what I am even talking about at first. Sigh.

Then they figure it out and tell me that I have to call Dexcom’s 1-800 line (well, 1-844, technically) to GET my receiver.

They give me the number, and I dial it.

And get a Ford dealer in the Interior.

I try again. Same thing. What the intensely personal fuck.

So I call the pharmacy back, thinking I copied the number down wrong. Nope, all ten digits correct and in the right order.

So I try once again, and this time get the right people. I must have been misdialing or misreading the number before.

I lasted about twenty minutes on hold before I was completely out of spoons and had to hang up and take a nap.

I will try again tomorrow.

I figure they don’t give you a receiver with the rest of it because they figure most people will just download the app for their smartphone so why spend money giving people a separate device they won’t ever use?

I am such a dinosaur for not having a smartphone.

So I will likely have to wait till they ship me one of the damned things. Sigh.

Nothing is ever simple, nothing is ever easy, and now I need another nap.

More after the break.

---

Smoke on the horizon

So here’s what has me worried right now.

Last night, as I was hanging out with Le Gang sometime after midnight, I realized that my face felt really hot.

Really, REALLY hot. Like someone had locked me in a tanning booth and turned it all the way up. ^[2]

I immediately asked Joe if I was flushed. But nope. I wasn’t sweating or dizzy or hearing any weird sounds either, so it seemed unlikely to be a fever.

But the feeling persisted, and still hasn’t gone completely away. It just faded into embers like an underfed fire.

When I got up to go to bed, I realized that the backs of my legs also felt hot in the exact same way. I then checked myself in the mirror but I didn’t see any signs of flush or fever or anything else, either.

Now what the unanticipated fuck is that? I’ve taken my life in my hands and Googled it as a symptom^[3] but I didn’t find anything that seemed to apply to me.

Could be clogged pores. I haven’t been able to shower for a while. Need to ask the wound care nurses to shrink-wrap me again.

Either that, or make peace with having to give myself a thorough “bed bath”, as we used to call it before that phrase made everyone mentally add “and beyond”.

That way I can at least flush out the scent traps and get everything from the waist up at least vigorously wiped down.

Another area of concern is my urinary system. I have been getting weird little twinges of pain in that area near my prostate where I had trouble before.

They are quite faint but still concerning. And that feeling of having to strain to pee is back as well, also suggesting a resurgence of the issue.

Oh, and (grossness alert) sometimes there is an odd odor to my urine. Sort of meaty. Possibly ketones. And my urine is extra yellow, almost orange, at the time.

So that’s another thing I should probably be telling someone about.

Like Doctor Caswell, for instance. Just saw her last Friday. Would have been the perfect time to ask her about it.

But there never seems to be enough time and I end up just going with the flow.

So to speak.

That’s my default mode : cooperative and eager to please. Asserting myself at the risk of disrupting, upsetting. or angering someone is hard for me.

Those of you who have seen my feistier side might find that hard to believe. But it’s true. I can assert myself intellectually with great vigor and skill. I can express and defend my position. I can even assert my own interests if something makes me mad enough.

But usually people are quite reasonable and I am left to my own wildly inadequate devices and there’s no real solution for that.

I want to learn to stick up for myself like I would stick up for someone I love.

Yeah… about that….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

The direction? Down.

Feeling pretty depressed at the moment. Little things going wrong. Knocking my bowl of trail mix and Smartfood popcorn on the floor. My computer spontaneously rebooting if a fly farts in the general direction of the power cord. A brief scare where I thought I had forgotten an appointment with Doctor Ebtia. The sensor for my blood glucose meter falling off my arm while I slept and there being no way to put it back on.

None of those things are all that major but together they leave me feeling anxious and afraid and overwhelmed and I just want to crawl into a hole and die for like, a day.

Sadly, death is always permanent. And I am just not ready for that kind of commitment.

I mean, what if I change my mind later?

The sudden reboots are what are really shredding my nerves. I move something on my desk and that pushes something else towards the power cord and boom, reboot.

It’s happened multiple times in a row too, which in addition to being a shock to my neurons is frustrating and maddening and makes me feel really clumsy and stupid.

And the thing with the sensor is just plain depressing. Over the last two weeks I have grown accustomed to being able to get a blood sugar reading whenever I wanted and I have found the ready availability of that information very soothing to my nerves.

So of course that had to end. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and arbitrarily. Went to sleep with it firmly in place, woke up and it was lying on the bed and nothing I did could get it to stick back on.

Not enough glue left, I guess. And even if I had gotten it to stick, its little needle probably would not have punctured my skin again so no readings anyhow.

Luckily I should be getting the new system tomorrow, and that will be that. But it’s amazing how insecure I feel now without that information.

My blood sugar could be up to all kinds of crazy shit and I wouldn’t even know!

Oh well. I am pretty sure that the previous time one of the things fell off in my sleep, it was in the same spot on my upper right arm, so I will avoid that spot in the future.

Must be something about the way the muscles flex under the skin on my dominant arm. Because when I put it in the same spot on the other arm, it stays.

So yeah. Feeling sort of beat up by life, which now seems booby trapped. No way of knowing when something is going to blow up in my face out of nowhere.

Were I a healthier and more robust specimen of humanity, these sort of things would not get me down because I would have a reservoir of positivity from all the human connection and happy memories I have.

But as is, I am as fragile and weak emotionally as I am physically and it does not take much to make me ill in either sense.

God my life sucks.

More after the break.

---

Words, words, words

Well, time to come up with another 500-ish words.

Not feeling it at all, to be honest. I just feel tired. Life is definitely taking more out of me than I am getting out of it lately and that means some time soon I am gonna run out of gas and have to collapse for a while.

I have been putting it off for a while now. I have felt like I was running at a loss for a few weeks now but so far, I have always dug deep to find more energy somewhere and kept going the way I wanted, not how my traitorous body dictated.

And I am going to keep doing it. I am royally sick of always wilting away from things at the slightest hint of trouble. Of being eager for escape from things before I even begin. Of eying the exits even when I am having a wonderful time.

I am not that weak. Not any more. I demand more out of life and I am going to goddamned well get it. I am strong and powerful and competent and completely qualified to face life head on and bend it to my goddamned will.

Yes, I am a very sick man, and that means I have to be careful not too much myself too far too fast. I accept that.

But that doesn’t mean I have to keep acting like I’m a limp noodle when I have a solid steel spine, nerves like high capacity transformers, and a mind so powerful it warps reality around me without me even trying/

Mental note : start trying. Could be a heck of a lot of fun.

And that’s what I want out of life : fun. I want to enjoy what time I have left as much as I can. My main objective is to entertain myself and the boring ol passive way of just playing video games all the damned time just won’t cut it anymore.

I need more. I need a more active kind of fun. The kind that involves other people and utilizes my powers of mischief and disruption to really mess with people who richly deserve the kind of mockery I can deliver.

The kind that can use my hypno-magnetic charisma to attract young, idealistic followers ready for the new consciousness I want to give to them so they can spread it in the world. And not in some bullshit transcendentalist way : truly seeing the world better.

The kind that involves using my gifts to write things that charm, inform, and delight people, and leave them better off as people as a result.

The kind that makes me the figure of controversy and notoriety that I have always known I was destined to be. Some will love me, more will hate me, but everyone will know my name and a new age with begin with me,.

I can do it all, and so much more.

And all I have to do to unlock the magic is toughen up inside a little.

I think I can manage that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Not a lot going on right now, to be honest.

Did the wound care thing this morning. Nothing to report there, all quite routine. The nurse rushed through it a bit and I missed Dwayne’s steady, craftsman-like touch.

I won’t be forgetting him any time soon. Soooo damned hot.

Otherwise it’s a pleasantly quiet day. I don’t even have any forthcoming appointments that I know of besides good old wound care.

The wounds are looking pretty good in general. The old one on the left has sealed over completely, or at least it had until I tried to remove what looked like dried skin and it started to bleed a little.

Lesson learned. Ne touche pas. Leave the damned thing alone.

Still very pleased that it has sealed up after staying open and refusing to heal at all for literal years. I guess being sealed off under a bandage and protected from the elements (and me) was just what it needed.

Or maybe all I really needed was someone to care for me and show me some TLC. The relationship between our bodies and our emotional states is very complex and intricate, and patient readers know I have massive unmet nurturing needs.

Somewhere in the deepest levels of my brain is a little boy who concluded that because nobody cared for him, he wasn’t worth caring for, and who therefore kind of gave up on life and stopping caring about himself too,.

This is not a mindset that promotes the sort of wholesome and active engagement with life that is most conducive to healing.

Like I have said before. at one point in elementary school I just laid down in a snowbank and willed myself to die.

I suppose I should be glad it didn’t occur to me to take a more practical approach and actually attempt suicide.

That would have drawn attention to my plight and I couldn’t have that. That went against the rules of my personal universe.

No matter how much I suffered. it was still my job to stay out of the way and blend in with the furniture and pretend I did not exist.

I wasn’t even supposed to be there, let alone have needs and desires that required any effort or expense from anyone ever.

I deserved absolutely nothing ever, not even existence. My entire life was a mistake, an accident, a tragedy. An ugly truth to be minimized and denied as much as possible.

That total negation of self lies at the heart of my mental health issues. I am still afraid to live because deep down I feel like I will get in trouble for reminding the universe that I exist and have needs and such.

So yeah. Maybe all I truly need in order to heal and thrive is for people to show they care enough to care for me and thus validate me as a person who is worth something to somebody somewhere, instead of being nothing but an accursed burden who should just go away and die somewhere far, far away from the rest of humanity.

I know people love me. I know people care about me. I know they want me around.

But I don’t feel it.

And part of me refuses to believe it.

And it’s so very, very cold in here.

Midnight tundra, all the way down.

More after the break,

---

If this beverage is a SlurpEE, does that make me the SlurpER?

---

I’m a Poke Man!

So I am finally getting around to the newfangled (well, recentfangled anyway) cuisine they call Poke, pronounced ‘poké’ (or “poke, eh” for you Anglos).

It’s a traditional Hawaiian food and it’s basically just a bowl of various foods plus a sauce. It starts with a base of rice then you add meat, fresh veggies, accents like fried onion or garlic, and then a sauce or sauces.

Then you limber up your elbows and mix it all together till it’s basically a complex salad.

I’m quite enjoying it so far. I chose a citrus sauce which is quite delightful and a smoky teriyaki sauce which, alas, I cannot taste.

Oh well. I knew that was the likely outcome.

Sadly, the protein options were mostly fish. Not surprising given that it’s an island cuisine, but still, a little disappointing.

The only options that had never lived underwater were marinated tofu and “juicey” (sic) chicken, and after some consideration. I doubled up on the chicken.

I have nothing against tofu but “marinated” is way too vague a word for my comfort.

Marinated in what? Lemon juice? BBQ sauce? Molten lava?

I need details, people!

What I like most about this cuisine is that it’s low carb. Originally, I was going to get Chinese food, but then I looked at my usual order – chow mein (noodles), fried rice (rice), and sweet and sour pork (breaded, fried, AND served with a sugar laden sauce) and decided that was way, way too many carbs for me.

Et tu, Chinese food?

So I got my poke on instead.

I wish we knew which hole he’s gonna poke her through.

Nothing can explain Tim and Eric. It’s not even what you would usually call comedy.

What are the odds that two people with the same extremely weird sense of humour would meet in high school and have the grit and ambition to actually produce a show based on that extremely specific and bizarre sense of humour?

Let alone have it actually catch on with weirdos like me.

Anyhow, back to the point, poke is great. Not exactly a bizarre concept, like I said. it’s pretty much just a complicated salad. But I like it.

You want weird, try BlackBall Taiwanese Dessert.

It looks like this :

..and is so abstract and bizarre that I was honestly tempted to try it till I saw the “dessert” in the name of the place and figured it was not for me.

Who wouldn’t be delighted by a hearty dessert of what appears to be, clockwise from the upper left, chicken entrails, gelatinized rice in a Skin of Evil sauce, red beans that have led an unwholesome and unfortunate life, what they insist on calling “peannuts”. and every child’s favorite, olives blacker than the sky in space.

Go home, BlackBall, You’re drunk. And probably an alien.

Get your drunk alien ass home right now!

God damn it, I thought you were one of the good ones.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But I’m not sure.

Okay, time to pick through what I learned at Doctor Bui’s office this morning, besides the fact that driving downtown suuuuuuuuuuucks and that St.Paul’s is freaking HUGE.

But we already knew both of those things.^[1]

Basically, what he told me was that he doesn’t want to risk doing the sort of open heart bypass surgery that was discussed before because of my obesity, history of infections, and the damage diabetes does to one’s blood vessels.

He think there is too high a risk of serious post-operative complications. Healing from having one’s sternum cracked and heart rerouted AS WELL AS having an artery taken out of one’s leg is not (irony intended) for the faint of heart.

Someone who heals slowly and/or poorly like myself would have a very hard time with it and the risk of post-op infections would be high.

Ergo, it’s too risky. Apparently my case is very complicated and tricky.

Which fucking figures.

Luckily, there is an alternative to open heart surgery. It might be possible to prop the partially blocked arteries in my heart open with what are called stents.

They are expandable tubes inserted into arteries and then expanded in order to open a blocked artery back up and keep it open.

No surgery is required. It can be done via the same wire-probe method that they did my angiogram. In fact, in theory, they could have done it while they were in there.

The people in that department (sounded like he called them “interstitial cardiology”?) have to okay it first, though. Hopefully I will hear from them next week.

If they turn me down, though, it’s back to square one. And I don’t have enough information to know what to do next.

For instance, I don’t know how much danger I am in right now. Having three 90 percent blockages and one 80 percent blockage in one’s heart sounds pretty bad. Like maybe it makes me a ticking time bomb, But I dunno.

So it’s hard to assess whether the open heart route would be worth the risk. If the alternative is certain death, then obviously I take my chances.

But if not…. well, let’s just say I now have insight as to why my case got passed around between surgeons. None of them could figure out what to do, which is how it ended up in Doctor Bui’s hands, according to him.

Not sure what to make of that. I hope it means that Doctor Bui is the best and therefore he gets all the toughest cases that nobody else can handle.

But on the other hand, it might mean he’s the bumblefuck of the group who gets all the hopeless cases because the GOOD surgeons don’t want doomed people like me messing up their performance metrics.

And I am not sure how to process all this new info. So I am trying to just stay calm and let my subconscious mind sort it out.

I am sure it will tell me the answer when it is through.

More after the break.

---

They call them chicken tenders but they don’t tend chickens.

---

The politician tried to capitalize on capital punishment in order to build political capital in the capital city.

Live for fun

My immediate response to the grimness in my life and in the world was despair.

What can I say, as a depressed person it’s kind of my go-to response for everything.

But now I feel more inclined to retreat into a childlike hedonism where I don’t give a fuck about anything except how to best entertain myself in the very near future.

Like now. Or later today. Tomorrow at the latest.

The sad thing is, that would be a far healthier response than despair. At least I would be dealing with the issue. At least I would be forming some kind of functional response that might actually help me cope with the harsh truths of life. At least I’d be trying.

That’s way better than just giving up on life and becoming a numbed out zombie.

It even could lead in a therapeutic direction. By protecting me from the corrosive effects of the harsh truths of life, this mildly delusional state could allow me to heal far faster.

I have never given myself that kind of shelter before. In my sublime stupidity, I thought it was always better to face the truth, no matter how harsh, and prided myself in not being as rampantly “delusional” as the common person.

You know, that common person who is infinitely stronger, healthier, happier, and way more functional than I have ever been.

Surely that’s a coincidence.

---

Oh, I also had therapy today. Nothing profound about the session but my therapist sounds very sick and I am worried about him.

He’s in his 70’s, after all. And I would hate to lose him, and not just because he’s one of the only private therapists in Richmond.

Not that location matters any more. I could have a therapist in Timbuktu. it’s all going to be over the phone or Zoom anyhow.

Might be tricky for them to bill the province though.

I also saw Doctor Caswell. Three doctors in one day, oh my, it’s enough to make a girl blush with coquettish modesty.

The upshot of that visit was that the approval for my new glucose meter, the Dexcom one, the one the province will actually pay for, has come through.

I ordered it via the pharmacy on the first floor of the medical building across from the hospital and will pick it up Monday.

That’s cool because I have really enjoyed being able to get a reading whenever I want and now I will be able to do it without begging Doctor Caswell for a new sensor every couple of weeks.

So things are looking…. up-ish.

Too bad civilization is doomed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] And yet my small town mind still has trouble understanding how a single, complex use building can be so goddamned big. [[1]

Something I forgot to mention when I told you about my trip to Doctor Vaezi’s office :

I mentioned that the magical talisman of good drug Triesence that Doctor Vaezi wanted to inject into my poor widdle eyeball costs $50.

Well when I went to pay. the main receptionist told me to sit and wait for a bit while she checked something. So I sat there for a bit with my $50 bill in my hand.

Then, to my surprise, she told me Doctor Vaezi said I didn’t have to pay.

Well that was very nice of him! I very much appreciate this kind mercy.

---

The Triesence still hurt going in, despite Doctor Vaezi doing everything he did the first time he gave me a shot and I felt nothing.

Dunno what to make of that. My eye was definitely numb. I could feel it. And when the last set of drops were applied I could barely feel them.

Yet it still felt like getting poked in the eye with a needle when it happened. Either he is sticking the needle in deeper than the numbing agent can reach or I am somehow resistant to the stuff in a really terrible way.

Probably the former. I will gently suggest a gentler touch if he ever has to stick a needle in my eye ever again.

Because it really freaking hurt.

---

But it definitely seems to be working. The inside of my eye feels very cool and calm, which makes sense given that the drug is a powerful steroidal anti-inflammatory.

That’s the problem the doctor and I are trying to solve. Persistent swelling in my left eye. It is what is throwing off my vision the most.

Once that’s solved, I suspect I will still need a new pair of glasses, which I will be paying for out of pocket.

Le sigh. Oh well, that’s what savings are for : unplanned expenses.

But this time, I will definitely be shopping around for somewhere way cheaper than the place I went last time, IRIS.

Turns out they are the priciest place around. Fuck. Lesson learned.

Next time I will get my prescription and shop it around to see who can hook me up with a nice pair of cheap, functional glasses.

Maybe even get them online from one of those new glasses mills in the US.

What a brave new world that has such businesses in it!

---

Still out of plotlines in Fallout ’76.

So right now, I am mostly just dicking around. Exploring the map. doing Events, tweaking my character, and so on.

There are things I could be doing, like the final heist, or getting a nuclear code and launching a nuke.

Both are the sort of things that take a long time to complete and progress can’t be saved in them. Which makes completing them an endurance test.

And mine ain’t great. Heart problems an all.

The nuclear code one is especially insane because it forces me to actually solve a complex cipher. And while the steps in doing so are not too hard, it’s stll a heck of a lot of skullduggery for a non-cryptographer like myself.

Still, I am not giving up yet. I will get these things done.

I just need a nap first.

More after the break.

---

The hand in your pocket

….wears a diamond ring.

There is an absolutely beautiful, wonderful, magical phrase making the rounds these days. One so perfect I jealously wish I had coined it myself.

The phrase is “wage theft”. It refers to all ways in which employers try to screw their employees out of the money the employees earned fair and square.

And the reason I love it so much is that it cut through and destroys any obfuscating opaqueness that employers and their flying monkeys try to hide behind and states the bare truth of the matter.

This is not some obscure accounting language or a fit of legalese. It’s not a matter of a quibble over some deadly dull detail of payroll administration. It’s not some high speed shell game you have to have an MBA and a doctorate in mathematics to follow.

It’s employers stealing money from their employees, and anyone can understand that.

The fact that they often do it before they give said money to the employee doesn’t make one bit of difference.

Theft is theft. That money belongs to the employee(s) who earned it. It is not some gift the employer generously decided to give their employees and therefore it is not up to them whether or not the employer wants to pay it.

And to try to deny that money to your employees is theft, plain and simple.

Damn would I make a great union rep.

Let’s examine the words. First, “wages” are inherently earned. It’s baked right into the very definition of the word. If you didn’t earn it, it’s not wages, it’s something else.

So right away, we have destroyed a lot of employer’s wiggle room. This isn’t about a salary or a bonus or a generic “payment”, this is about paying the price you agreed upon for the labour you definitely got, otherwise known as “wages”.

And then there’s “theft”. No wiggle room there either. Theft is inherently wrong, You motherfuckers are trying to steal wages and we’re calling you out on that.

You have your hands in your employees pockets and are trying to get away with getting something without paying for it.

Sounds like wage theft to me.

No wonder these assholes are always trying to convince you that it’s the government that is picking your pocket.

They want you nice and distracted while they pick YOURS.

And all to benefit people who already have more money than they can ever spend, an way more than anyone could ever need.

Well to hell with them. Stop the stealing and demand that your elected representatives get tough on these criminals and show them that they can’t steal what is literally their employee’s hard earned money without facing the consequences.

Demand that your representatives represent you, and not them.

Take back your god damned money.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was busy.

First, there was an appointment with Doctor Vaezi, my eye guy. He’s the surgeon who operated on my eyes back in May and he and I are still trying to get my naughty left eye to settled down and behave.

During my previous visit a couple weeks back, I was given the assignment of finding out if this drug he wanted to try on my misbehaving eye was covered by my BC disability medical coverage or not.

So I called my pharmacist on Monday to find out, and of course it wasn’t covered.

After all, we can’t make things too good for these disabled people, or people will start making themselves disabled just to get a taste of the good life!

Besides, it’s all they deserve, the no good lazy bums getting away with mooching off of the good, hard working people of the world just because they technically can’t work!

Not that I’m bitter.

So the fact that it wasn’t covered didn’t surprise me. Or that it would cost me $57. What DID surprise me was my pharmacist telling me that there was none available period and wouldn’t be until late November.

Um. Well okay then.

So when I went to see Doctor V this morning. I had no idea what was going to happen. All I could do is tell him we were SSOL for now and see what he sai.

Luckily, it turns out his office ha its own supply, and they were only going to charge me $50 for it.

So I got the shot anyhow. And it still hurt like fuck despite Vaezi and his nurse applying TONS of freezing to my poor lil eyeball.

Oh, and get this : the name of the drug is Triesence, pronounced “tri-essence”, and that totally sounds like the magical whoozit from a fantasy RPG.

“Thousands of years of peace, harmony, and a truly top notch sushi scene were shattered when the evil wizard Taintboy shattered the Tri-Essence… ”

You know, that kind of thing.

Then it was off to Wound Care, and today my nurse was Dwayne.

Now being a male nurse is already stereotype shattering, but then there is Dwayne.

Dwayne is no tall, thin twink. He is a short muscular square dude, broad shouldered and thick built, with hairy arms and an air of stolid working class pragmatism about him like he is here to fix something in your house.

In fact, apparently they don’t make nurse uniforms for guys like him, because all he was wearing along those lines was a white plastic smock, making him look like a butcher.

Not what you want to see in a medical setting.

But Dwayne was awesome. He went about his work like a master craftsman, making me feel like I was a piece of furniture being restored.

In the best possible way.

The whole experience was a trip. I certainly felt like I was in good hands. He did everything with precision and care.

It was honestly kinda hot. Sex with this dude would be amazing.

But luckily, I managed to keep myself from thinking about that until afterwards. Otherwise, well, things might have gotten mighty awkward.

And I’d hate to be That Guy, the one who creeped on the poor nurse just doing his job and made his day worse.

Unless he was into it.

Then it would have been a totally different kind of health care.

You see, I have this terrible swelling…

More after the break.

---

I got sushi!

In other words, I got nuthin’.

I can’t think of anything to write about so I will just start with the fact that I ordered sushi from my fave place, Otaru Sushi, tonight, and I am now eating it.

Starting with my beloved miso soup. Damn do I love that stuff. Not only is it delicious in and of itself, but I also find it very soothing.

Something about it pleases my body enough that if it was a kitten, it would be purring.

And now the scene stealing supporting cast member of the meal, my vegetable sunomono^[1] salad. I won’t lie, the fact that they have this as an option is the main reason I am loyal to Otaru.

You might even call me an Otaru Otaku!

But probably won’t.

God I love this stuff. The sauce is based on vinegar and lime juice and if you had asked me before I tried sunomono if that sounded good, I would have said it sounded like a good way to ruin some innocent lime juice.

But damn do I love it. Add in some decent quality fresh veggies and I am a happy man.

Heck, this sauce makes even avocado taste good to me, and I never liked it before.

Sushi is a good meal for me because it is relatively low carb, at least compared to a comparable sized Western meal.

I mean, the sunomono has “glass” noodles (translucent rice noodles) and the sushi obviously has rice, but compared to pizza or pasta or a burger and fries it’s practically a low carb keto feast.

We eat WAY too many carbs in this culture.

And then on to the actual sushi. Being non-piscivorous^[2] my sushi options are limited, but there’s always my much adored kappa maki, aka cucumber roll.

What can I say, I love cucumber. To me, it’s the watermelon of vegetables, and I do love me some watermelon.

My other sushi choice, vegetable tempura roll, I now regret. The tempura is delicious but it’s basically fried carbs and I don’t need that in my life.

I ended up ordering sushi tonight. Wednesday night, instead of the usual Tuesday night because after finding out both Otaru and Subway were closed, I gave up and ordered a Hungryman sub and my usual 2L bottles of Diet Coke from the 7-11.

But the sub never showed up. I wasn’t charged for it either, so no big scandal there. I can only assume that they were out of them.

So to compensate for my loss entree/salad/entire meal, I got sushi tonight.

Well, now my meal is done, and so is today’s entry.

Time to find out what to do with all these code pieces.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Google Translate says It means “vinegared food”. How oddly disappointing.

[[2]] For the Latin impaired : I don’t eat fish,

To the tune of :

I wonder if Leonard Cohen would have been as famous if he’d had a high, thin, reedy voice instead of that awesome gravely rumble.

Anyhow. Progress at last on the cardiac front. Got a call from my surgeon Doctor Bui’s office a little while back. Got an appointment to see him or her at 9 am on Friday at good old St. Paul’s hospital.

FINALLY, for frick’s sake. Sad that I had to repeatedly remind the system I existed and even then I had to luck out and get the receptionist that actually gives a shit and does her job instead of the lazy lying bitch I had been getting before.

But at least it’s finally on track to actually happening. I suppose it’s possible that doctor Bui, like Doctor Soong before him, will have a nice chat with me then hand me off to yet another surgeon and then nothing will happen.

But I hope the system now grasps that I am willing to be a pain in the ass until I get what I want (not dying) and that therefore the path of least resistance is to do their goddamned jobs and fix my freaking heart.

Now I can finally resume fretting about having my sternum cracked like a Christmas walnut and my heart rewired and restarted to avoid the blocked vessels like we’re dodging a traffic jam.

I have a lot of fretting to do before I can be calm about the operation.

So I had better get right on it.

---

Finished the Brotherhood of Steel plotline in Fallout 76 and that was the last major plotline except for the (spoiler) big heist and nuking something.

So now I am doing something I almost never do : random exploration. I am just wandering the Appalachian Wasteland in search of plotlines.

I am not eager to get to the big heist because I tried it once before and holy shit was it hard. Legions of enemies attacking all at once. Chaos and cacophony as the enemies and my companions do battle.

And my companions are freaking useless. They get knocked out of the fight pretty much instantly and then it’s just me and a million Mole Miners.

I will go back eventually. But I will go back in my best Power Armor and weighted down with heavy weapons and ammunition.

If I have to be a one man army, I am going to act like one.

The nuke thing is a pain because it involves tracking down eight pieces of launch code from eight different carriers and then somehow decoding the pieces.

So I really hope I find some more quest studded plotlines somewhere.

I don’t want to return to the Before Times!

---

The Beaverton totally nails the recent election.

God, I love those people. They were wildly inconsistent and struck a very odd tone at first, but they clearly have it down now.

I wonder if they are hiring….

---

This is genius.

---

How low can you go?

Too low, apparently.

The other day I was shocked to find that my blood sugar was too low.

I was hypoglycemic when normally I am hyperglycemic. (Dang those Greeks for making those sound so much alike. )

My reading was 3.4 mmol/L and healthy for a normal person starts at 4. Healthy for a diabetic like me starts at like 6.

Luckily. I had this macadamia and white chocolate chip cookie I stupidly got from 7-11 a couple of weeks ago that had been sitting on my desk ever since.

So I ate it. Apart from being dried out, it was suspiciously well preserved. Not a trace of mold or bacteria or any other form of rot.

Like it laughs at our puny Earth pathogens that only work on things made by nature.

Anyhow, it was dry but still yummy. Damn I love whatever they put in those that makes them taste sort of like toasted marshmallow.

Possibly actual toasted marshmallow. But… not as WE know it, Captain.

And within half an hour my blood sugar was 4.5 and climbing. Phew!

Still, it scared me. As patient readers know, both high blood sugar and low blood sugar can kill you, but low blood sugar can do it a hell of a lot faster.

And I had no symptoms, although that might have been because I wasn’t fully awake yet. I had no chills, no trembling, no sweating, no feeling of death pissing on my grave.

I apologize for that image but I refuse to retract it.

So clearly hypoglycemic peril is in the cards for me now. I can no longer assume that I only have to worry about my blood glucose levels being too high.

And that’s some scary shit, man. Low blood sugar could cause me to slip into a coma or even die. and that seems like a particularly horrible way to go given how bad I have felt during LBSIs (low blood sugar incidents) before.

I’m just lucky that I have this emergency mode that clicks in during times of crisis where I am very calm and can carefully and methodically do what is needed to get my ass out of the danger I am in.

I think I got that from my Dad. He was very cool in a crisis.

And a hotheaded prick the rest of the time, god damn it.

Hopefully this LBSI was anomalous and not a sign of things to come. One of my worst fears is becoming what is known as a “brittle” diabetic whose blood sugar levels swing wildly all over the places at the slightest prompting.

Because those people tend not to live long. Not without full time hospitalization and even then, they might not fix it in time.

Figures the universe would find a way to make my recent lower blood sugar levels into a bad thing.

At least I am forewarned. From now on, I have to look both way when crossing my bloodstream, so to speak.

And just to be on the safe side, I got another cookie.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just had one of my moment of existential flux.

I was putting my lunch together and went to get my usual half a 2L bottle of Diet Coke to have with my meal when I opened the fridge and beheld an anomaly.

One of the bottles was already half empty.

And this made no sense as I just did the weekly shopping last night and therefore there should have been two FULL bottles of Diet Coke in there.

As if I had already had lunch today. But I knew I hadn’t.

Or… had I…?

So I stood there stock still for a few tense moments as my mind whirled with confusion and I tried to figure out if I had lunch yet.

But then I remembered that, quite unusually for me, there was a half bottle of iet Coke left over from the previous week’s supply.

Phew! Reality restored. That was a hell of a trip, made possibly by the fact that my entirely forgetting a meal is sadly quite plausible in my sleep deprived world.

And, of course, by viewers like you.

---

Pre burn part 2 : Explanation

I realized after the fact that I never got around to actually explaining why I called Part II of yesterday’s blog entry “The Pre-Burn Phase”.

Got lost in my tangents, as usual.

So here it is : what I meant by that is that I feel like my mood is building up energy for another of my periods of burning rage, frustration, and angry apathy.

I need a name for that. Angrathy? Nah.

This periods are not exactly pleasant, although I am learning to weather them better, but they serve the vital function of letting me burn through another incinerator load of emotional garbage that is holding me back.

So ultimately the whole thing is therapeutic but it also hurts.

So expect some angry rants and big emotional expectorations in the near future as I go through one of my phases.

Pink Floyd said it best :

---

Space-time anomalies aside, today has been OK.

Was a little shocked but not that surprised when I checked my blood sugar this morning and it was 18.7 mmol/L.

After all, I had spaghetti and meatballs at Denny’s last night and that’s pretty much all carbs. Got to start ordering more healthy fare.

Anyhow, that’s at least 6.7 points too high, so I got the three fast beeps of warning instead of the happy little chirps of okayness from the reader.

So I injected 80 fairy farts of insulin and checked again an hour later. It had barely moved. So, another 80 units.

Couple hours later things were finally headed in the right direction.

Small problem : now I gotta eat. Which will send it back up again.

Blimey, this adjustment of blood sugar levels is more complicated than I thought!

I am sure things will work themselves out eventually. Maybe I will try a little bit of (very) light exercise in hopes of using up some of that nasty glucose.

More after the break.

---

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

I don’t know.

And I don’t know why I don’t know, either.

On the surface, it seems like the easiest question in the world. Just state your desires. Even a little kid can do that.

But of course, it’s not that simple. Despite having little problem writing 1K words a day about them, I am actually profoundly alienated from my own emotions.

To the point where I have to write about them just to find out what the hell they are.

And that ego (in the Freudian sense) of mine always gets in the way with such monkey brain madness as to what I should feel or what I want to feel or what I can logically deduce I must feel and other such inanities.

Logic can be such a bore.

So while I am capable of deep reflection upon my own soul and its foibles, it’s all very clinical and antiseptic and intellectual. Emotions frozen and sliced and place under a microscope for “examination”.

But it’s not really science. It’s simply a compulsive rendering of the scary, realtime, chaotic, and unpredictable world of emotions into something my supercooled superconducting supercomputer of a brain can handle without melting like snow.

This mind of mine comes at one hell of a price.

And of all the species of emotion that I cannot handle without rendering them inert, by far it is my desires which are the most inherently unpalatable to the Overmind.

Because desires by their very nature make you want to do things and that means leaving the icy confines of my frozen palace of the mind where I can pretend life is as rational and controllable as a game of chess and entering into the far less ordered and comprehensible world of ,mundane reality.

And mundane reality is so much messier than life in my frigid palace. It’s full of chaos and overstimulation and anxiety and suddenness and dangers and emotions and an overall total lack of ability to control things.

And if i am not in control, I am not safe, and if I am not safe, I can’t cope at all.

Shames me to admit it, but it’s true.

One of my worst fears is to be left completely exposed to the world without anywhere to hide and then be forced to deal with everything in realtime, without any chance to reflect and choose the “right” option.

To have to improvise, essentially, and go with my instincts.

Well, I assume I have instincts. So far, we’ve yet to meet.

Part of that is fear of my own later judgment. Of that time afterwards when I am kicking myself for my “stupid” decisions when it is “obvious” that I should have done X instead and I would have known that if I had only taken time to think.

So let’s en that shit right now : I made the best decision I could in the time I had.

I have very little experience with going with my gut. In fact, I have avoided having to o so to a deeply and tellingly pathological level.

So it should be no surprise that I am not great at it.

Guess I need more practice, then.

It’s the only way to learn.

By being a real(time) person for once.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.