Left this comment on this video :

Story 3 : Cards on the table : I am the youngest of four whose life was ruined when his parents decided to stop paying for my college so they could take early retirement. I couldn’t even get a student loan because my parents could afford to keep paying for my education but chose not to. So you know what? You’re the asshole. YTA all the way,. Youngest children are just as important and valuable as the eldest and should be treated the same and if that means reining in your selfishness for a little longer, so be it. There is no point at which you have sacrificed “enough” for your kids. Parenthood is not a loan you can pay off and be done with. You do right by your kids until they don’t need you any more, period. Anything less means you are a terrible parent who considers some of your kids to be disposable.

Clearly that thread struck a nerve with lil ol me. I could relate to the youngest girl’s plight all too well. Hell, her parents were even pulling the rug out after two years!

And I love how the parents talk about all they have done for their kids then turn around and act like it’s the most outrageous demand possible for their kid to expect them to delay their RV dreams for a couple of years.

But that would mean actual sacrifice as opposed to just doing what we would have done anyway but with kids in the house. It would mean actually putting their needs ahead of my desires in a way that really means something to me.

For heaven’s sake, it would even mean delaying the plans we made without once giving a single thought as to their effects on what’s her name? That girl I always see around here for some reason?

She says she’s our daughter and she’s technically right, but not REALLY.

This is why us youngest of four types can be pretty loud and mouthy. It’s like being a small yappy dog : if we don’t keep reminding people we exist, we get stepped on or sat on or forgotten completely.

When I was a kid. I kept being left behind places. Gas stations, picnic areas, and so on.

Like, how hard is it to remember you have FOUR children? And do headcounts?

And every expense related to raising me was considered “extra”. Like a sudden bill for fixing the washing machine. And you know why?

Because I wasn’t even in the budget. They knew I was there but they preferred to pretend that somehow, I would not costs any money to raise because I would be fine with whatever I got and they wouldn’t even have to add me to the grocery bill.

They bristled at the very thought of spending money specifically on me. When I needed a new winter coat and boots, my father acted like I was stealing from his wallet.

I was not supposed to exist and they let me know it on every level.

Even my mother, with the best of intentions, telling me that she was glad she had me when I was already in my thirties confirmed this.

Oh sure, you’re glad you had me now, when it isn’t costing you anything.

But back then I was, at best, an afterthought, and most of the time, I was an “added” burden unlike my three siblings.

No wonder I have such low self esteem despite all my talents and abilities.

I was never even supposed to exist.

More after the break.

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Well this was pretty darn cute.

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The pre-burn stage

I’ve been having these little moments of despair lately.

Brief but very unnerving moments when it feels like all the energy and will goes out of me and it feels like the flame of my life force has gone out and I feel cold and scared and extremely isolated and I can’t even begin to remember why I do things.

So far they have been brief and I dearly hope they stay that way because if my depression got worse and I stayed in that state for more than a moment, I would definitely be tempted to harm myself if only to be able to feel something.

Or even to feel nothing. Ever again.

Dunno what brought this on. Lack of decent sleep, possibly. It’s been weeks, possibly even months since I slept more than 2.5 hours in a row.

And that’s enough to let me get by but not enough to keep this crazy brain of mine healthy. I get way too little of the really important deep REM sleep that restores and reboots the brain so it can be all fresh and ready when I wake up.

And patient readers know that I have plenty of sleeping pills but I am afraid to use them because I am scared they will kick off a period of very intense deep REM sleep which will beat the crap out of me physically as my sleep apnea goes berserk and my bouily resources get burned through like I was having sacred visions.

I’ve always felt a kinship with seers. And peers.

So like I said recently, the first thing the sleeping pills bring is tortuously deep sleep punctuated by period of abjectly miserable consciousness where I am in a lot of pain and feel beaten and starved of oxygen and I can’t think at all.

I can’t stand not being able to think clearly. Thinking is how I deal with the world. When it goes out the window I am left with nothing I trust.

I am not well suited to acting on instinct.

So i don’t know how I would go about fixing my sleep deficit. Holistically, I suppose. No drugs, just doing self-care to get my body and my head as relaxed and ready for sleep as I can and let nature do the rest.

I wish I could afford massage therapy. Like, a lot of it. I have so much tension stored in my body and my stretches and such barely get me to “a manageable level of agony”.

Either that, or I need to convince a doctor to prescribe me a muscle relaxant.

Not as sexy as being massage manfully by a muscly masseur, but perhaps as effective.

Honestly, I just want to sleep. Truly sleep.

But instead, all I can do is nap.

And it’s not enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Just woke up from bad sleep. Still sleepy, too.

So right now, life seems like a total drag, man.

Everything seems like so much work. Even my extremely low-effort life.

When I feel like this, it’s hard to remember why I do anything. Nothing seems like it is worth the effort it takes to do it.

Luckily. I am wise enough to know that this, too, shall pass and I will at the very least find life slightly worth living soon.

It’s just a matter of waiting out the storms.

---

Gonna basically finish Fallout 76 soon.

Because even a game as huge as it only has a finite amount of content and can only support my playing it for like eight hours a day for so long before I have done it all.

After that, I suppose I will have to go back to playing whatever, lesser games I played before I discovered the wonders of Fallout 76.

I am sure there were many of them that I played a lot. It follows that I must have enjoyed them, as hard as that is to imagine.

Seriously though, I always get this way when I find a game I really like. All other games basically cease to exist as I gorge myself on the Really Good Game every day like a pig let loose at the Sizzler.

Man, I wish we had the Sizzler here. It’s a fat man’s heaven.

I know I am getting close to being done with the game because I am finally doing the Brotherhood of Steel plotline.

For those who don’t know, the Brotherhood of Steel is a military style organization in the Fallout universe dedicated to finding and preserving pre-nuclear war tech and knowledge and helping to rebuild civilization in general.

They’re hardass pricks but in general I get along with them. I admire their focus and drive and for the most part they are a force for good when they are not being run by a bunch of racists.

But their plotline requires me to actually join their ranks and I am, to put it very very mildly, not the military type.

The very idea of joining a group like that and subjecting myself to all those rules and all that discipline and groupthink and having no freeom and so on makes my skin crawl and a cold sweat break out on the back of my neck.

I have an extremely high need for autonomy and the military life is the anathema of the sort of free thinking relaxed life I need in order to be sane.

Well, sane as I am, anyhow.

I am a dedicated non-joiner and it is not a matter of choice.

So I have dodged this plotline for a very long time, doing almost every other quest before this one.

Which is silly because it’s just another series of quests like all the others. It’s not like I am forced to play through boot camp or some shit.

But it still freaks me out to think about it.

I just can’t let my identity be subsumed by another, bigger one. For me, that feels like death. Like the larger identity is going to engulf and erase me.

I know this is most likely because I am a very poorly socialized misfit who never had to learn to preserve his own identity within a larger one because he was always alone.

But the damage is done and I am not likely to change.

So I just have to go on being the wild and wooly weirdo I am.

There are worse fates.

More after the break.

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Today on “words you never thought you’d see together” : gummy bear butt plug

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The old dilemma

Namely. I must eat, but I have no appetite.

Ordering in likely I usually do on Saturday nights is right out. Hard to decide what you want to order when the thought of food disgusts you.

Got up and took a leak. That seems to have helped. Moved me from negative appetite (food is disgusting) to neutral appetite (food is something that happens to other people).

The next logical step would be to defecate, but I am just not ready for that level of commitment just yet.

But if I keep drinking my Diet Coke, the issue will no doubt resolve itself when the caffeine in it makes me need to poop anyhow.

Stimulants are not the recommended method for resolving constipation by any means. In fact, it is a singularly terrible idea that could backfire (so to speak) so many ways.

But it’s what I’ve got.

And it beats the hell out of laxatives, which are an even worse idea if you have IBS.

But enough about my butt. For now.

---

Turns out the Brotherhood of Steel plotline in Fallout 76 is even tougher than I thought, and not because of combat difficulty.

It’s tough because I have to choose between a leader, the Paladin, who wants to take my chapter of the Brotherhood rogue so she can build a better future for humanity and her immediate subordinate, Knight Shin, who is loyal to the Elders and the Brotherhood as a whole and who is a total asshole right wing type.

Philosophically I am way closer to the Paladin. I would not trust Knight Shin to lead a two car parade. He thinks in the sort of emotional, brutal, fascist terms his type favours and has little patience for anything like compassion or moral restraint.

On the other hand, taking a chapter of the Brotherhood rogue is one hell of a big step and I am not entirely sure I can trust the Paladin to have her head on straight about this whole thing and not be prey to some kind of messiah complex.

At least they let me say “I’m not loyal to either of you” in the last confrontation.

But I know that the next time, I will be forced to choose, and I will back Team Paladin despite my grave reservations.

Still better than whatever reptile brain wankfest that Knight Shin has planned.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P. S. I ended up skipping supper entirely. Not smart but WTF. My blood sugar is too high anyhow. Maybe this will fix it.

I think this thing I keep calling my “acid stomach” is getting worse and that means I am going to have to see someone about it.

I can tell them about the loss of appetite too.

Exactly who I will be telling is uncertain. The pain from it is getting bad enough that I am starting to worry about it, so there may not be a lot of time to wait.

So of course, this has to happen on a Friday, meaning that if it gets worse, I will have to go to the god damned ER with it.

For that reason alone, I hope it goes away once I have eaten. But I am not hopeful.

Might be heartburn. Or worse, “heartburn”. With my heart in the delicate condition it is in, I can’t afford to assume anything in that region is not actually a cardiac issue.

But it’s definitely a burning. acidic feeling, not just an ache. So there’s that. Still something to worry about, but not quite as scary.

Still could be something below the stomach, like the prostate, swelling up and pushing it up from below, reducing available stomach volume.

After all, if the same amount of digestive acid is going into a smaller stomach, it might overwhelm the usual mucous layer that keeps the stomach from digesting itself, right?

But it doesn’t feel like that. Honestly, I think it might be acid reflux. That happens when tummy turmoil (science!) causes stomach acid to splash up into the esophagus.

As if to provide evidence, two burps just came out to say hello. I feel a bit better now.

Man, the words are grinding out slow right now. I feel terrible. Might end up in the ER sooner than I thought, god damn it.

I hate being in the ER. So much waiting!

They should have one of those “virtual wait in line” systems where you can check in and then they message you when they are ready for you.

I’d much rather wait at home, where I have all my comforts, then sit there both sick and bored waiting to be digested by the system.

Trust me, I will be happy as a clam to wait as long as you like as long as I have my Fallout 76 and my tunes.

---

I feel kind of ill in general. Earlier I had that thing where some kind of intestinal disturbance causes my back to tie itself up in knots.

Trust me, it’s all connected.

So I might be in the early stages of a pretty bad time. I sure hope not, but it’s possible.

Whatever. I can handle it if it’s just the usual IBS type bullshit.

If it’s something worse, to the ER I will go, no matter how much that sucks.

And sigh, add yet another part of me that is broken to the list. At this rate, I will end up i living that “strapped down and full of tubes” nightmare yet.

More after the break.

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A zoophile is someone who thinks dogs are man’s best friend… with benefits.

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Smoke down below

Or would that be steam? Point is, the fire is out. Mostly.

My “heartburn” did subside once I had eaten. It’s not entirely gone. I can feel an ache and a slight hot feeling where it was.

Presumably that’s the after-effects of the acid from the previous issue. Good thing I stopped it before it damaged me even more.

I am still quite wary of the whole thing though. I will be monitoring the situation closely for at least the entire weekend.

I sure as hell don’t want stomach acid eating away at my esophageal lining. I remember the horror stories from back when acid reflux first made the news and they are not pretty. I sure as fuck don’t want to go there.

So I shall maintain a healthy paranoia about the subject.

---

Feeling very tired right now. Want to go take a nap instead of blogging and eating.

But i have been doing that too much lately. Sleeping when I should be eating. The drop in stimulus level from playing Fallout 76 to mundane reality is steep and it has a tenency to make me need a nap.

But food and blogging come FIRST, god damn it. I have to earn my nap! I will get my words one while snacking on a Hungryman Sub from 7-11 and drinking my Diet Pepsi and only when I have written word 1000 (and beyond) shall I rest.

And I’m around 3/4 of the way there, or 1/2 of this half’s words.

Now class, what is half of a half? A quarter! Very good!

You may get one cookie from the basket.

---

Food is here. Nomf. Nothing like a good sub to hit the spot when your body wants broad spectrum nutrition that also tastes good.

And quite frankly, I need the vitamin B12. After doing okay for a while, I have been totally slacking off on the “one meal a day with animal products and hence B12” front lately and I imagine myself to be once more in serious B12 deficit by now.

It’s not like I don’t have the food. I have some cans of soup that would fit the bill and we always have cheese slices for grilled or toasted cheese sammiches,

It’s purely a matter of laziness. Doing my usual meal of trail mix and Smartfood popcorn is the easiest option so that it what I do. It requires no ambition, focus, drive, courage, or any of the other related life-affirming virtues I lack.

Natively, anyhow. I can be inspired to them in great amounts.

Maybe I should learn to seek the winds to fill my sails.

But not until I am healthy enough to weigh anchor. There is still a lot of frozen sadness within me and until it thaws I am icebound.

But spring will come and my waters will flow and the sun will banish the night and my own personal ice age will end at last.

Just don’t ask me when.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wrote the passage that follows in response to this super long video.

The gist of it is that some cartoon blogger who called himself Cosmodore struck up an email relationship with a 15 year old fan of us when he was 19.

This involved exchanging something close to my heart (and other organs), rule 34 porn.

That’s it. They never even met in person. But somehow, this made him a “groomer” and a pedophile and and of course, pedophiles are the worst human beings on the planet and this was a MASSIVE betrayal of EVERYBOY EVER.

So I replied with the following :

So this guy exchanged some dirty emails with a girl 4 years younger than him, and that makes him the worst human being on the planet. And by doing so, he destroyed a community, because none of these people know each other or like each other or talk to each other any more because of him betraying every single one of them when he sent those dirty emails.

This is not about pedophilia.

This is about hate.

It’s about how much fun it is to get mad and dump on whatever group is the hate du jour

It’s about outrage porn and mob mentality and projecting all your anger onto some stranger because you know the others in the torch wielding mob will praise you for it and you get to feel good and righteous and justified as you dump your pain on a stranger.

And who could resist a nice wholesome good time like that? Kick the commie, kids! It’s fun!

But think of all the other groups the mob was so sure were in the wrong before. Immigrants. Minorities. Homosexuals. Jews. All blamed for evils far beyond their power to achieve, let alone their characters. All the victims of massive persecution and injustice merely because they could not fight back. All people that the normal, every day person who thinks of themselves as a good and decent and kind human being will happily fantasize about visiting the most cruel and sadistic acts upon in public and not only not be condemned but have other good citizens join in the fun game of what YOU would do if you ever caught a commie.

Are you picking up on the trend here, people?

Or are you going to keep believing that with pedophiles, we’ve finally found the one group who deserves the unlimited and unreasoning hate visited upon so many groups before them and that this time, people will never judge you differently than it does now, as we do the racists, homophobes, and other vicious bigots of the past?

Admit it….you don’t even care if he’s guilty or not.

Why let the truth get in the way of a good time?

I mean seriously. What did he even do? Exchanged sexually explicit images with a teenager. A fifteen year old girl. Images she could easily have found in massive amounts with a simple Google search.

In fact, she probably already had done so, seeing as she already had some.

And in this day and age, where the world of internet porn is a normal part of growing up and discovering your own sexuality.

To imagine that this somehow harmed her is to suppose that something about being a fifteen year old girl means that they are feebleminded, weak. and vulnerable in a way that is quite frankly completely insulting to both girls and women.

I am not saying that a fifteen year old girl is an adult or that she is old enough to make complex long term decisions for herself.

I’m just saying that she’s not so delicate that an anatomically correct picture of Pikachu is going to fry her tiny feminine brain.

Mark my words : the hate visited upon pedophiles, as well as the much larger chilling effect it has that makes people (mostly men) terrified to hold their own children for fear of thought of being “that way”, will come back to haunt us some day.

And this era of pedo-hate will be thought of in the same terms as we think of all the other periods of minority persecution.

Namely, as the shameful, hateful, viscously ignorant era it is.

More after the break.

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Knock it off!

The people upstairs from us in what I assume is Apartment 701 were having some work done today and man was it loud. Way too loud for me to nap.

Not that I can complain. It was happening in the afternoon, after all. If you can’t get your loud work done then, then when?

No, the problem was mine, as it always is with us day-sleepers. The world is not built for us nocturnal types who need to sleep in the day.

Ah well. I’ve always marched to the beat of my own octopus.

This comes with certain built-in costs.

I am pretty sure they were laying carpet up there.^[1] That would explain the constant hammering with what sounded like a tack hammer plus the frequent use of some power tool that sounded like someone with steel fingernails drumming them on the floor really, really fast and hard.

Your results, as always, may vary.

Also their work moved around the apartment in a really methodical way. So yeah. Carpeting, I am guessing.

Whatever it was, it annoyed me and disrupted the vague pattern of semi-random naps I call my sleep cycle.

Unsurprisingly, my sleep hygiene is terrible, too.

I never really learned to look after myself.

I guess I am still waiting for someone to come take care of me. Like if I wait long enough, someone will finally remember me and rush to take care of my long neglected needs and be all apologetic and sympathetic and everything will be OK again.

Not going to happen, obviously. The very idea of that happening to an adult male who’s big as an ox and fat as a house is absurd. Illogical. Irrational. Laughable. Insane.

But then again, so am I.

---

I have to get up when??

I thought tomorrow’s Wound Care appointment was at 1 pm. That’s what I was told on the phone. But for some reason I had this feeling that was wrong. So I went and got the schedule they printed out for me when I was there last Tuesday.

And sure enough, the schedule says 8:45 am! Kind of a big difference.

So, grumble grumble, not super happy to be getting up that early. I am sure Julian isn’t either. But I’m a trooper and I will get it done.

The good news is that both of my big wounds seem to be healing up nicely. That includes the one on the left leg that has been there for years, since the PREVIOUS time I had a nasty infection on my leg that required wound care.

So clearly we’re doing something right. The one on the left has almost completely closed. There’s just this little area the size and shape of a fingernail clipping that refuses to close completely.

I think the wound is just leaving itself an airhole so it can breathe.

The newer one on the right continues to fill in with nice new flesh. And the sides are doing their best to close but the wound is still too big.

It’s almost like my legs are truly alive.

Oh, and my blood sugar has been healthy ALL DAY.

Things, like people watching an air show, are looking up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what it might take for me to actually make my blood sugar go own when I want it to for once.

But I musn’t be hasty and leap to conclusions as I am prone to do. It’s possible that insulin just takes a while to kick in. The fact that an hour later I haven’t seen any definitive effect when I inject 60 fairy farts of insulin may mean nothing.

I mean, I got down to a healthy level somehow.

Plus I had not been taking my Ozempic (or Semaglutide, as its mom calls it) lately, and its whole deal is that it enhances the effect of insulin so you don’t have to take as much.

I decided to fix that today after my blood sugar went to 11.4 mmol/L (such a cool measurement) and then decided to stay there for a while.

That’s technically a healthy level, at least according to my reader. I was taught that healthy started at 10 and below for us fatty diabetics but perhaps there has been an update to the science since way back then.

But I want my levels below 10, dammit.

---

Just tried to find out what the internet thinks the healthy level should be for a type 2 diabetic but my Google fu was too weak and all I got was what the healthy level for a normal person is and where the diagnosis for diabetes begins.

I was diagnosed almost 20 years ago. I want to know what it should be now.

I just do not have the patience for research. Just tell me god damn it!

Best I got was a chart that said healthy levels started at 100 mg/dL^[1], which translates to 5.3 in the sort of units decent people use.

That’s way too low. So I am back to square one on that. However…

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Where the heart is

I finally got some action from Doctor Ebtia’s office.

I called them a little while ago asking if they had heard about my operation and I was lucky enough to get the other, far more competent and trustworthy receptionist because she called the surgeon Doctor Bui’s office directly and they got back to her and said I will get a call from Doctor Bui’s office some time next week.

Fantastic. Finally, there is motion on the heart surgery front. I might actually get my ticker fixed before it blows up and kills me after all.

And I’d call that a win.

And now, if Doctor Bui’s office does not call me next week, it will be them I call up and bug, not her, so it’s a win for the secretary too.

I am quite proud of myself for taking action to get things moving. Yay me taking an active role in my health and my life instead of just floating along.

Feels good. Feels damned good. I can totally be the spark plug when things need to be reignited to get things going. I am completely fine with that role.

Beats the hell out of waiting around for someone else to do it.

More after the break.

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Defeating the local champion(s)

It doesn’t win you friends.

What everyone wants is for the home team to defeat the threatening outsiders of the visiting team and thus establish that Here is better than Elsewhere and, by extension, they themselves are better than the vast mass of humanity and everyone gets their identities reinforced without having to do anything themselves.

Note that there’s opposite, equivalent phrase to “hometown heroes”. In sports films, the heroes are always from wherever the film starts them off and in the big final decisive game our heroes are always, always the home team.

So no matter what the circumstances, even if that local champion deliberately provoked the confrontation to the point of leaving you little choice in the matter. if you defeat them in whatever their arena is – whether it’s sports trivia or brutal combat or whatever – the locals will hate you for it.

If they are fair minded people and you won fair and square, they will grudgingly admit it, but they will still hate your guts for making the outside world threatening again and bringing disgrace to someone they like or at least admire when to them, you are a person of no standing or worth because you’re unknown.

Worse than that, though, is if you defeat them soundly. Just utterly crush them. Like they were nothing. Then you not only make them feel inferior and disgrace an admired member of the community, you don’t even leave them with the dignity of a worthy opponent who went down in defeat.

And worse than that, you demonstrate great power beyond their normal understanding and that’s about as scary and threatening as it can get. You have shaken the very foundations of their world and they will never be the same again.

Nobody is going to congratulate you for that.

And even worse than that is if you crush that local champion with so little effort that you don’t even seem to know you’ve done it. You didn’t even acknowledge their champion as a valid opponent nor did you at least do them the honor of standing over their metaphorical corpse and howling in victory.

Instead, your clueless ass is still smiling and trying to make friends and wondering why everybody is glaring pure animal hate at you now. The kind of hate that a sheep has for a wolf or a fly for a spider.

Welcome to my world. I have been that person many, many times, always in the realm of the verbal and intellectual. Someone would feel the intense smartness rays I apparently emanate and feel the need to challenge me and I would thoughtlessly (and innocently) crush them in self-defense without even knowing it and now everyone hates my guts and I have no idea why.

it’s not fair. I didn’t ask to be challenged. I didn’t know how my power would come across to others. I was just innocently defending myself.

But it’s very human, and I completely understand it. From their point of view, I am beyond a mere villain and more like a cosmic threat.

No wonder they hate me.

I might hate me too in their position.

Because I just wrecked their world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

P, S, – Had finished writing the above and went looking for a YouTube video to listen to when this video showed up in my YouTube feed :

[[1] That’s the units the Americans use, believe it or not. Because America has to do everything its own way even when its own way is stupid. Put THAT on the flag. [[1]]

Right now. I am not, strictly speaking, diabetic.

Or at the very least, I am not hyperglycemic. My blood sugar is a perfectly healthy 7.5 mm/L. If anything, I am now worried about it going too low.

And this is fantastic news. I have finally put an end to the organ-ravaging effects of having blood sugar levels so high your hemoglobin qualifies as frosting. I am beyond happy that I have achieved this state.

Not sure how, though.

I mean yeah. I took a whack of insulin lately but it didn’t seem to have an effect. I suppose it’s possible that the insulin had no immediate effect but kickstarted some complicated series of reactions that eventually led me to this happy state.

Or maybe it’s aliens. That seems equally possible to me right now.

Oh well, whatever. The point is that, for the moment at least, my diabetes is under control for the first time in a very long time.

And whatever the cause, that’s a glorious thing.

---

The forces of SNAFU

My trip to Wound Care was plagued by complications today.

First, the fact that it was on a Tuesday in the first place. When the scheduling lady told me that over the phone yesterday, I was too surprised to object. but Tuesdays are not good for me because Julian dogwalks on Tuesdays and Thursdays and hence is not available to drive me there.

So I had to take a cab. $10 each way. Le sigh.

But even that proved complicated because when I called for a cab this morning I was put on hold for a total of over 20 minutes, all the time growing more and more agitate an anxious as the time for my appointment approached.

And I mean, WTF, Richmond Taxi? Are you really that busy? That’s hard to imagine. I have never had to wait this long before.

My appointment was at 11:30 am, and I didn’t get an operator until 11:25 am.

So I was late. Only ten minutes late, because despite their phone issues, Richmond Taxi has been astonishingly prompt lately. Once I actually get to order a cab, it arrive in less than five minutes.

They must have a LOT of drivers circulating at all times for that to happen. That’s the only way I can see that happening.

So I get to my appointment late, and to save time, I skip the waiting area and go directly in to Wound Care.

I figured that was better than waiting for the nurse to come check for me again when I was already late.

I was told that the nurse herself was late and I was to go wait in the waiting area.

And at first I was relieved. I wasn’t late after all! I hate being late.

But then my wait got longer and longer. Turns out she didn’t come get me till 12:15 pm or so. Still better than waiting on hold but no fun at all.

The bandage change went off without a hitch, though. Phew. At this point, I would not have been surprised if we’ found a tarantula under one of them,

Harsh image, I know. Sorry.

They put the receptionist who called the cab home for me on hold for ten minutes too.

Get your shit together, Richmond Taxi!

---

I can’t tell if I’m truly honest or just too lazy to lie.

---

Scariest video game villain ever and it’s from the 80’s.

---

You can never step in the same river twice

So it seems like my blood sugar goes up and down on its own to a certain extent.

That’s not a huge surprise. Very little in nature holds steady to one value. Everything varies. Even that stalwart of steadiness mammalian homeostasis produces a boy temp that varies by a few tenths of a degree over time in a healthy mammal.

Migosh am I nerdy. I really do sound like Sheldon from BBT sometimes.

It’s a genius thing, I guess.

Anyhow, my readings are up to 11 to 12 right now, and I am currently eating a meal, so they will no doubt go much higher.

This all leaves me a tad confused as to at what point insulin is called for. I suppose it would be when the level goes too high and stays there.

Obviously, having seen the promised land of healthy bloody glucose levels, I want to stay there. This recent period of my readings being below ten were thrilling (no, YOUR life is boring) and I felt great, so I want more of the same, please.

So I will continue to monitor my glucose levels so I can shoot up some of my insulin/evil spacelord Basaglar when it seems like things are not getting better.

The endocrine system is so chaotic in the mathematical sense. Tiny changes can cause huge ripple effects. A butterfly farts in Guam and my glucose spikes.

So to speak.

At least now, I know that staying in the golden zone of healthy blood sugar is possible, and that’s a wonderful thing. If I stick to my usual diet and don’t eat anything crazy (like a huge KFC meal with fries.. and corn… and a biscuit…. oops) and make adjustments via insulin when necessary, I should be able to stay golden all the time.

And that fills me with more hope than I have ha for a long time.

I wish my sleep apnea would suddenly solve itself like this!

---

Addendum : Speaking of KFC, I am glad their weekday hours are a little more sane. Instead of closing at the absurd time of 7:30 pm like they do on Saturdays, on weekdays they are open till a far more rational 9:15 pm.

That’s more like it. Means I can get my KFC fix after all, just not on Saturdays.

And I really, really needed my KFC to drive away the memory of my experience with the godawful chicken from Fighter Chicken last week.

The horror… the horror…. the bland fatty gooey gag inducing horror…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I voted today.

Today was one of the advanced voting days for next week’s federal election here in the Great White (But Multicultural) North.

I’m not sure why we still call it advanced voting, seeing as it works exactly like regular voting on election day. I guess calling it “more voting” would take a lot of the sense of importance out of the actual election day.

Anyhow, this was a big deal for me because of my social anxiety. It was going nuts this morning as the time to go vote with Joe and Julian, 12:45 pm, approached. Many times I told myself I wasn’t going to go. That I would beg off and stay home.

That’s certainly what The Trog wanted me to do. Filthy little beggar.

In fact, I wasn’t sure I was going to do it until the very moment Joe came to tell me it was time to go.

But then I just…. went along. I’d love to be able to say that I overcame my fear in a burst of courage and strode purposefully into a glorious and satisfying victory, but no.

I just let the tide of events sweep me along, which is really more my forte. All the while feeling numb and nauseous and surreal.

Why so scared? Because it’s a novel social situation involving some place I have never been involving people I don’t knw which has rules I don’t know and where the possibility of my making a fool of myself in a way that makes me feel like a very stupid alien who should have stayed home in his pod seems infinite.

Look, I never said the reason would be rational. I am a lunatic, after all.

Rationally, it was nothing. We didn’t even wait in line long. Went in, showed ID and the little card I got in the mail, got handed the ballot and the Golf Pencil of Democracy, went behind the Cardboard Dungeon Master’s Shield Of +1 To Votingness, and marked my X then handed it to the election lady. She tore a piece of it then handed it back to me and I put it in the ballot box.

Ta da, democracy.

For those who care, I voted NDP. Because I will never trust the Conservatives no matter how “progressive” they make themselves appear around election time and Justin Trudeau is an embarrassment and a joke and pathetic and a huge disappointment.

That leaves the good ol’ NDP for those of us on the left. I used to have reservations about whether they were competent to lead, but then I realized there was little to no chance of them actually winning the election so it was safe to vote for them when I was once more disgusted with how the Liberals had devolved into a squadron of babbling weak willed squabbling morons.

And the more NDP there are in Parliament, the more of a conscience they can be for whatever party is in charge.

So basically, I voted for the Jiminy Cricket party.

And I was proud to do so.

AND I just successfully ordered my vaccine card over the phone. It should be arriving in the mail some time soon.

I am on a roll today.

I would phone Doctor Ebtia’s office next but they stop answering the phones at 4.

I will try not to die until tomorrow, then.

More after the break.

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I am the man

So I came back to the computer and it was turned off.

Too bad! You’re an inanimate object so you have to have sex with me whether you find me arousing or not!

Sorry. Stress makes me silly.

Anyhow, the computer was not on. I tried powering it up but nothing. I checked to make sure it was plugged into the power bar (which was delicious, by the way) properly and that the power bar itself was working and yup. everything was 5 by 5 there.

As I am doing this, the well developed disaster center of my mind is working overtime trying to imagine what life without a computer would be like for me.

And failing. I honestly have no idea what I would do without this thing.

There’s only so much a guy can read, play his synthesizer, and masturbate.

My god, I might even have to get a normal social life!

Luckily, I remembered that since I bought it, my computer has had a flaw where the socket where the power cord plugs into the power supply of the computer is kind of loose and if I even brush against the power cord near there, the power goes out.

Probably should have complained about that when it was still under warranty. But it is a very easy problem to forget about and ignore.

Just don’t touch the power cord.

Anyhoo, I was able to re-seat the plug and as you can see, all is now well again.

And I felt the thrill of victory. I had saved myself from the incalculable disaster of having to get a life and I did it all by myself.

I really am on a roll today!

---

Loss of appetite

Warning : This entry will go long. Also…

Trigger warning : explicit talk about potential digestive illness.

I am finally beginning to worry about my loss of appetite.

Don’t know why it took me so long. My appetite has been declining for at least a year now and yet, despite it being one of the most classic of medical symptoms, it only occurred to me today that it was a problem.

I guess when you have been fat your whole life, you only worry in the other direction. If anything, being less hungry seems like a gift.

Like the world’s easiest diet.

But it’s bad. It’s a sure sign something is wrong with any animal, man or beast.

I’ve gone off my feed. And I (of course) have a theory as to why.

I think something in my lower abdomen is swelling up and pressing against the bottom of my stomach, thus displacing its interior volume and giving me, in effect, a smaller stomach and hence a smaller appetite.

My best guess as to what is swelling is my prostate. Second place goes to that umbilical hernia the surgeon claimed I was too fat.to fix.

Either way, the tidings are bad. I am going to need to tell my GP about it. This is not the sort of problem I should ignore.

I don’t want to deal with this atop everything else.

But I got to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I tried to secure my very important BC vaccine card today,

It’s the proof of vaccination that will soon be required for doing all kinds of things. most of which I do not do, but one of which is dining at a sit-down restaurant and I am not giving up our beloved Denny’s.

Not after finally getting it back after missing it for so log.

And the restrictions kick in tomorrow, so I have left it a bit late.

Now some reason, you can’t just do it online. Too convenient, I suppose. I’d be happy to fill out whatever form the person on the phone is filling out myself and save us both a lot of hassle, but no.

So I had to get it via phone. Not easy for me due to my social anxiety and avoidant personality disorder. It’s hard enough calling my various doctors’ office for appointments or whatever and they already know me, more or less.

So I had to nerve myself up for it for a while. Finally, earlier today, I called the toll free number to get the damned thing.

And after navigating the automated phone menu (man I hate those things), I got connected with an operator, and immediately i was in trouble.

Because she had a thick East Indian accent. And the phone connection was not great. So I am discombobulated from the get go as I fail to make sense of what she is saying and have to keep asking her to repeat herself.

Even worse, she sounds bored and irritated, and my asking for repetitions makes it worse. So the part of me that always feels like I am interrupting people who don’t want to hear from me and wish I would just shut up and leave them alone was triggered.

And triggered hard.

Then it turns out I lost the little card that they gave me when I got vaccinated and therefore I don’t know the date of my vaccination and apparently without knowing that I can’t get the fucking card.

So that ended that. All the anxiety for nothing and all because i am a clueless idiot who can’t hold on to a very important little card.

I know it was in my wallet at some point. But now it is gone. And I know I cleaned out my wallet recently, but there is no way I would have thrown it out deliberately.

Might have happened accidentally though.

So the whole thing was a clusterfuck and life might get mighty tricky for me in the future without that damned card.

As a result, I am feeling emotionally bruised and rather depressed and honestly just want to crawl into bed and hide in sleep for a while.

Dunno if I will be able to make it to Denny’s tonight. Which would be ironic because tonight might be my last chance to go there for a long time if I can’t figure out a way to get this damned card.

I’m gonna nap now and hope to feel better when I wake.

More after the break.

For fuck’s sake.

---

What the fuck, diabetes?

So an odd thing happened last night.

While waiting for the next bit of Fallout 76 to load at around 2:15 am, I scanned my bloo sugar sensor, and was surprised and pleased when I got a reading of 10.4^[1]!

That, by my standards, is wonderful. In fact it’s so good that the reader made a happy little bleep/chirp like I had just picked up gold in a video game, rather than the low key warning sound I was used to hearing.

Fantastic! My goal has been to get it under ten. Technically, 10.0 is normal for a diabetic like me. Our systems are so used to a high blood sugar level that we are perfectly healthy at a level that would, ironically, indicate pre-diabetes in others.

So I was overjoyed. Clearly I was doing something right.

But then i scanned again around a half hour later, and it was 11.2.

What the perpetual fuck? I hadn’t eaten anything in two hours. How the hell can the level be going up?

And it just kept going up over the next hour or so. So I injected myself with 60 units^[2] of my insulin/evil wizard Basaglar.

Then checked again about half an hours later. And it was STILL going up!!

Sweet Jesus, am I going backwards in time?

So a half an hour after that, I injected the rest of that injector pen of insulin, which turned out to be 70 units.

Ten minutes later I tested and whaddaya know, it was EVEN HIGHER.

And I don’t know what to make of that. It makes no sense. How can my blood sugar go up when I have not eaten anything in hours?

My first thought was slow digestion. Sure, it might be hours since I ate, but some of that food might still be digesting and hence upping my glucose levels.

But that seems wrong to me. Maybe because you could use that to justify any blood sugar level at any time.

“Well, Mister Bertrand, you claim to eat only one small salad a day. Yet we just tried testing your blood sugar and got a reading of ‘Ow, my teeth!’. Care to explain that?”

“Must still be digesting that movie sized KitKat I ate when saw E.T. in the theater.”

It could be that blood sugar naturally goes up and down a fair bit over time, and I am making a big deal out of nothing.

Highly plausible, especially given my tendency towards hysteria. I have a long history of jumping to negative conclusions based on little evidence.

It’s 15.6 now. But we just got back from Denny’s, so no surprise there.

I will begin the battle anew tomorrow.

God as my witness, I will get it under 10.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had a rather extraordinary thought last night.

I realized that most or all those people who will never, ever, ever admit they are wrong about anything ever actually believe they are and have never ever been wrong about anything in their entire lives.

That blows my freaking mind. Imagine living in a subjective world where you utterly infallible. Anything you ever say is the golden truth just because you said it. In your mind is a version of the world based on everything you have ever said and absolutely nothing short of a serious brain event can change your mind on any of it.

Spelled out like that. I realize it can’t be that simple. Some part of their minds must be capable of amendment based on new information.

Try as they might, people cannot shut down their faculties of reason completely.

So it must be a bit like the “doublespeak” in Orwell’s 1984. Part of them knows the truth and is the guardian of their true but deeply buried sense of reality while the rest of them can frolic in the happy world where they are never, ever wrong.

Pride must be a major factor too. There’s never being wrong and there is never admitting that you were or are wrong.

It is possible to change your mind most of the way without ever having to explicitly admit you were wrong even to yourself.

It takes a surprising amount of mental dexterity in one who would appear so dull, thought. It’s like these people are constantly running to stand still…. dodging and weaving facts and reality like they’re Neo in the Matrix.

Still, it’s mindboggling to me to imagine living in a world where your being wrong about something is not even a possibility.

And it brings up a question that haunts me : can these people change their minds?

To me, it is entirely possible that being able to change your mind based on new information takes a certain amount of intellectual strength and flexibility that not everyone has, and that therefore in order to maintain any kind of stable sense of reality, some people absolutely cannot afford to doubt what they already know.

Nothing less that their entire sense of reality is on the line. They can’t separate and isolate one piece of knowledge about the world and remove it and replace it like a surgeon giving someone a new hip.

If one piece is taken out, the whole thing collapses. And that’s not even taking into account the various emotional needs their beliefs address.

Like, say, a white supremacist’s racism addressing their need for something to address a deep sense of inferiority fostered by a poor background. Or a social conservative railing against gay marriage (or whatever) because deep down they have a very deep need for predictability and order that makes them fear all change.

What I am saying is that asking people to change their minds is a pretty big ask. It’s about a lot more than abstract information.

Besides, when was the last time you changed your mind on something big?

That’s different, though, because you’re RIGHT. Right?

Unlike those sheep.

Yeah, not like them at all.

More after the break.

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Um, don’t read the title before watching.

Way to spoil the punchline, dickhead!

---

Fight, chicken! Fight!

Ever since we moved into this apartment and I started ordering in on Saturday nights on a regular basis, I have been tres annoyed^[1] by the fact that our local KFC, located three blocks away, closes at 7:30 pm on Saturday nights.

Which blows my mind. Friday and Saturday nights are the two biggest nights for any restaurant that does delivery and that is approximately all of them now, so… WTF?

It’s like closing your breakfast buffet at 8 am on Sundays when you are next door to a very busy church.

Like what, do you hate money?

So when it turned out fave sushi place^[2] closed before I could order (my bad entirely), I was bummed, and started scrolling through the homepage of Door Dash disconsolately whilst I struggling with my angst.

But just as I was about to start enumerating all the ways I’ve failed as a person (there’s seventeen!), I spotted a Door Dash entry for a place called Fighter Chicken.

So I thought, what the hell, KFC doesn’t want my money. so why not give them a shot?

Answer : because it turns out they are terrible.

Their chicken commits the two mortal sins of fried chicken :

1. The breading has no flavour. Not a hint of spice. None. I can’t put up with that. I am not looking for something to make me breathe fire or sweat like Sidney Greenstreet in Casablanca, but there has to be like a KFC level of spiciness or I take my ball and go home. Hell, the breading didn’t even LOOK appetizing. Instead of the usual golden brown it was a pale tan, like a black person who’s been sick for a long time. Disgusting. AND….
2. It was not cooked all the way through. Ergo, it was rubbery and fatty near the skin. So right under the flavorless breading was a layer of gooey grease and I absolutely cannot stand that. The breading thing is a matter of taste but the goo layer activates something far deeper and more primal in me : a full body rejection. Like a disgust reaction amped up to 11, but luckily without nausea. It links into my revulsion for all undercooked meat that I have had since I got serious food poisoning when I was 15.

So fuck you, Fighter Chicken. You suuuuck,

Now I need something to restore my faith in chicken.

Ah, thank you, Chicken Attack. Your gold-pressed comedy always makes me feel better about the world and life in general.

And because of that, I refuse to watch any of the sequels.

Don’t want to risk spoiling the magic of the original.

The modern world has made me very suspicious of sequels.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Saw Doctor Caswell today.

Got there n’ back by taxi. Julian was busy with a very rare Friday dog walking shift. The cab is $10 (with tip) each way.

No big deal. I can afford it. And it was nice to do something all by myself for once.

And neither cabbie was “chatty”, so that’s a plus.

I think of myself as friendly and approachable but deep down I am still a grumpy Taurus and I do not wish to suddenly need to converse with a stranger.

I don’t know you. You don’t know me. Let’s keep it that way, okay?

Anyhow, the visit was delayed because she was tied up at the hospital.

But enough about her private life. Ba um tish.

And then she was in a rush, so not at her warmest. I get the feeling the poor dear was in a tizzy from being run off her feet. And being late always stresses me out, too.

Still, I got a sensor for my OneTouch Libre 1 from her, so I at least can get blood sugar readings for the next two weeks.

Plus a prescription for more Basaglar, the orc/insulin I take. So I have all the tools I need to finally whip my blood sugar into shape.

And in a focused, concentrated way this time, not half-assing it from before.

Windows Spellcheck doesn’t thing assing is a world.

It is so very wrong.

Anyhow, I am glad to have the tools I need now. I am still overdue for a trip to the pharmacy because I need to ask the pharmacist if this medication Doctor Vaezi wants to shoot into my eyeball is covered.

And that seems like something I should not ask of Julian. Normally he is kind enough to fetch my meds from the pharmacy from me.

Can’t do it myself, despite it being only a block away. Bad heart. Tried walking home from there once. Felt like I was gonna die.

Speaking of which : called Doctor Ebtia’s office again today. Turns out she’s booking for November now, and that would not normally be a dealbreaker but I am kinda trying to save my fucking life here so that is not acceptable.

So I asked the secretary if I could leave a message and told her about not getting a reply from Doctor Bui’s office and she offered to call them for me instead.

And I said “sure!”. After all, a call from my cardiologist’s office has to carry more weight than one from little old me, right?

So she asked if she could call me back and I said “Of course!” and that was almost an hour ago and now I am like, d’oh, she got me again, just like yesterday.

Oh, and get this : when she answered the phone and I told her my name, she had the gall to say “I was just about to call you!”.

Yeah right lady. And I was just about to run a marathon.

I will call back, though it will cost me the rest of my defense against social anxiety to do something so bold and demanding.

More after the break.

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Getting kinda worried

Nothing quite like being very nauseous and extremely hungry at the same time.

Woo! Go diabetes, you crazy bitch-god who is eventually gonna kill me!

A few minutes ago, I was just hungry. So hungry that I was going to completely skip ordering in like I normally do on Friday nights when it isn’t summer, and eat the usual stuff I eat at home, but then the nausea hit and now i am completely adrift at sea.

I keep telling myself that I need to eat and that there is a very good chance that once the food hits my system the nausea will fade and I will be just very hungry again.

In which case, dig in, bon appetit, mon frere!

It’s the crazy appetit(e) that has me worried. I have had two 60-unit injections of Basaglar (the Elf Smasher) and I really thought that would have put my Demon Hunger to rest for a while.

But no. It’s rage of hunger was blunted but not sated. And it’s not just hunger because when the hunger gets this bad, it also bring acid stomach to the mix.

I might just have to get me some antacids even though they are weakly contraindicated for people like me with IBS.

Mostly because when they neutralize acid, they produce gas. And adding gas to the system when you have IBS can be a very bad idea.

Some of the worst attacks I have had came from combining overstimulating foods with drinking too much carbonated beverage too fast.

But, counterpoint, I also do not want an ulcer or worse.

I do not recommend looking up “worse”.

Anyhow, refresher, as patient readers know, diabetes leads to extreme appetite when there is not nearly enough insulin response to carry enough glucose into the cells for them to survive and they start to die.

In response, they secrete this hunger-inducing chemical that basically says “Eat already, you fucking idiot, we’re dying here!”.

And they are.

Adding more insulin to my system should fix that. And (newsflash) now that I have forced myself to eat the leftovers from lunch, the demon seems to be asleep.

Thank frigging god.

But I added some Tums to my 7-11 order (still need my Diet Coke) just in case. I don’t want to use them but it will make me feel better to know I have the option.

I don’t exactly feel good right now but at least I feel way less bad.

When I am done here, I will lay down and try to relax. Hopefully my endocrine system will sort this shit out and leave me in peace for a bit.

Oh! I called Doctor Ebtia’s office back. The secretary (who I am sure was about to call me again) told me that she had a call in to my surgeon Doctor Bui’s office (phone tag! you’re it!) and had also left a note for Doctor Ebtia about my problem.

So I am testing my glucose, using my insulin, and got the wheels turning on my life saving heart surgery.

Not bad for a day’s work in saving my own life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.