Or maybe it’s the regular amount of crappy and I am just really fucking sick of it.

Just woke up, dizzy, headache, feeling like I was rolled flat then re-inflated likeI was a cartoon character, lightheaded, disoriented, etc.

Do not feel like blogging right now. Do not feel like doing anything except maybe thumping my head against the wall till I black out.

That sounds nice. Sweet oblivion, and all it cost me was a little brain trauma.

At least I would finally have the ability to knock myself unconscious. I have wanted that for so long. Because then I could bypass the ever frenzied monkey swarm in my head and go directly to sleep in a way that my conscious mind can’t fuck up.

My conscious mind is all kinds of fucked up.

It deserves to get cut out of the equation.

But I have never found the magic bullet to slay that nattering imbecile in my head. Sleeping pills, even fairly strong ones, are very little help in getting to sleep.

At best, they just help keep me asleep once I get there. Which is a lot of help when it comes to catching up with all those missed REM cycles – with all that entails, sigh – but it doesn’t solve the problem of overcoming my messed up mental state.

In fact. in the past, it has taken a conscious effort to keep myself from unconsciously shrugging off the effect of a sleeping pill like a horse flicking a fly with its tail.

I can only assume that my conscious mind has a lot of complex energy in it that is hard to subdue with a chemical.

It’s like trying to cancel out the motion of a tornado by blowing into the wind.

I suppose I should be glad the surgical grade stuff works and I am not some anesthesiologist’s worst nightmare.

I’d hate to wake up in the middle of my open heart surgery.

Whatever you do, do not look that up.

You do not want to know.

Gah, it’s so hard to think of things to write when I feel this way. Maybe some acetaminophen will help clear my head and get the words flowing.

---

Took some acetawhatzit. Hope they do the trick.

Called Doctor Ebtia’s office just now, trying to get a phone appointment with her. Apparently, I had a phone appointment with her back on July 26 but I must have spaced on the date or something because nobody answered the phone.

I think there might have been trouble with the phone lines that day?

Anyhow, now the secretary has to ask Doctor Ebtia if she wants to give me another chance. Like this shit is optional or something.

I’m sorry I fucked up, but I still need to have a cardiologist. So if she just can’t bring herself to trust me again, she at least needs to refer me to someone else.

I’m a very sick man with a very sick heart. Surely a cardiologist would be professional enough to put her annoyance with me aside in order to be a good doctor to me, right?

One would bloody well hope.

And now I am very sleepy, and I would normally take a nap after blogging, but I am waiting for the secretary to call me back and tell me if the Queen of Hearts will deign to grant me a fucking audience.

Fuck everything forever,

More after the break.

---

Big frigging surprise

She never called back.

This was my one lifeline back to maybe getting my heart fixed before it goes boom and I die, and I got the cold shoulder there, too.

Well I am not going to take it. I will call back tomorrow. I will pester them. I will make it clear that I am not a problem that will just go away on its own.

Because this is my fucking life on the line here. Literally. As in, whether or not there is still a Michael John Bertrand from Summerside Prince Edward Island in the world.

I’d rather there was. All things considered.

And I am willing to get as engry as it gets in order to save my fucking life.

I am not willing to die from being too polite.

And I have vast powers of self-expression to bring to bear on people who get in my way. I can be super scary when I drop the cute and fuzzy act and show them the angry bull that also lurks within me.

I can also bring a whole lot of logical AND rhetorical power to bear in any conversation. Throw in my ability to read people and get where they are coming from and I am a serious force to be reckoned with.

I have never tapped into even one percent of these powers. I have either been too timid and self-negating (sigh) or not had the need because my life wasn’t at stake.

And honestly, often a tiny percentage of my power is all I need.

Well that shit is over and done with and I am willing to build the bonfire of my rage as high as it needs to go in order to get what I need. I will make the powers that be fear my name and tremble at the thought of facing my wrath for their transgressions if that is what it takes to get justice.

It probably won’t come to that. But I am prepared.

Because I can destroy all their bullshit. I can reveal them as the pathetic ignoble little shit weasels they are.

And the only way to stop me is to give me what I want.

And all I want is to be treated like a human being with a life worth saving. Someone doctors actually care about despite my obesity and its complications. Someone they are as eager to cure as if I was a young superstar athlete of their preferred gender.

It is within my powers to turn myself into a cause celebre and make those who treat me like crap into the Internet Villains du jour.

So don’t fuck with me, assholes.

Or I will fuck you up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Turns out even “credit unions” can be dicks sometimes.

But first, medicine ; Did the Wound Care Clinic thing today.

Two nice surprises : my nurse was Stephanie, who was my fave nurse from my time in the IV Antibiotics program because she’s a little wacky and a lot of fun.

Dunno if she remembered me but I doubt it, seeing as she asked me where my big leg wound came from.

It was an infection…. don’t you remember? Did our time together mean so little to you?

Just kidding. I like being melodramatic sometimes.

The second surprise was that the actual wound care nurse (name forgotten already, damn me) from the hospital was there too, and she was very pleased with how well the wound was healing.

That was good to hear. I thought it was doing well. It’s way shallower than it was before, meaning my body is filling in the hole with pink new flesh.

Migosh, I’m actually healing. Hurray!

She spent some time thoroughly trimming the “slough” from the edges of the wound and cleaning things up in general.

And I like that. I need all the TLC I can get, and it feels good to have the wound all clean and ready for more healing.

Plus I have finally figured out why I never get the same nurse twice : none of them work there permanently. They just rotate through.

I imagine it’s a relief to just do wound care for a day when you are used to dealing with things far more dire and stressful like heart attacks.

And now, to the motherfucking bank :

So I cashed my check today and got told that I can’t add money to my reloadable VISA any more. Apparently they actually canceled the whole damn card way back in May, which someone really should have told me.

And some time between my previous check and this latest one, they stop letting people add to their balances.

So just like that, I am back to walking around with a wad of cash in my wallet.

Like a motherfucking caveman.

And there is no new reloadable VISA program for me to join either. They are just plain not doing that any more, presumably because it made poor people too happy.

So I applied for a regular VISA instead. The kind where they lend you money and you pay them back at the end of the month.

I have the fucking money, but they would rather make me beg them to loan me the money then pay them back.

So the new plan is that I just charge stuff to the new card and pay the balance off at the end of the month just like my father used to do.

Drove the bank crazy. They kept upping his credit limit in hopes of tempting him to get into more debt with them so they could juice us with interest charges.

We both found that pretty fucking funny.

Anyhow, so I am going to use cash until the new card comes through. Makes me seriously consider changing banks to one which HAS a reloadable VISA.

I vaguely recall Money Mart had one. But they charge me three percent to cash a check. That would be like $40/month!

Not my first choice.

I will work something out. I just deeply resent having this senseless complication thrown my way by the forces of fate.

Plus I ended up having to stand at the teller’s window for a really long time and I got dizzy and my knees started to turn to jelly because I am not supposed to do that.

Coupled with my Fallout ’76 issues, I am having a frustrating time lately.

Which, to be honest, is probably good for me. In the long run.

Funny how that works.

More after the break,

---

A rare treat

I ordered in from White Spot tonight, a Wednesday night.

I never order in on Wednesdays. Tuesdays and Fridays only. But I really felt the need to treat myself after all the aggravation and hassle at the bank today,.

So I said screw it, and treated myself with a $34 meal from White Spot.

What the hell, I can afford it. And more importantly, I think it is a good sign that I am actively taking care of my mental health and mood this way.

Anything that reminds me that I do have the power to make myself feel better sometimes is a good thing.

I have been made passive by depression and despair for far too long. It is paradoxical if looked at from an outside perspective. I have all this power from my talents, intellect, and personality, and yet I act like an invalid too weak to leave his sickbed.

Well there is power and there is the will to use it. And not just will, but strength and spirit and courage and grit.

And under it all there’s the fear of the implied and inescapable responsibility.

I could do a lot of harm with my superpowers if I used them carelessly or thoughtlessly or selfishly. Of course, I also could do a lot of good.

That’s pretty scary too, though.

I don’t want to be a messiah. I just wanna have fun.

Bit late on that whole “dying young” thing though.

But I am trying to put a positive spin on my age. I’ve had decades to grow and learn and change and become who I am today.

Most people are too busy living their lives for that. I have accidentally been given the chance to become the most fully grown and well developed hothouse flower ever.

That makes me the rare and magical creature I am. It might not be the path most people take through life, but then again, I’m not like most people.

Like, at all. I’m a high flying weirdo with my own unique point of view who gives people the impression he’s coming to them from another dimension.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

In fact it could just mean that I am something truly amazing.

But hey, what are the odds of that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling a wee bit nutzoid at the moment.

Ya know, crazed. Manic. Angry but with extra velocity. I feel like I am about to jump in and out of my own skin a dozen times in a row. Like I want to scream like wounded elk and run out in to the street, (you guessed it) naked, and shout imperious and terrifying gibberish at passersby who are mesmerized by my ranting and, in some cases, by my uncircumcisized penis flapping in the breeze.

It’s how all males humans are born and yet here in the barbaric wilds of North America, many people have never seen an intact male.

Circumcision. Don’t get me started.

Anyhow, feeling like bull (but gay) moose in rut makes for a nice change from feeling like I am adrift at sea on a slowly dwindling iceberg.

Sure hope I learn how to swim in time.

Can’t imagine how, though. I’m afraid of the water.

At times like this, I wish I could have my own gym/dojo. Somewhere where I can go to work out by beating the shit out of a heavy bag or a practice dummy. Where I can scream and yell like the lunatic I am as I vent my rage in a socially acceptable fashion.

This is why I love Worf’s “Klingon calisthenics” holodeck program on Star Trek : The Next Generation so much. He can go to the holodeck and fight all the virtual enemies he wants without any need to restrain himself because they are not real.

I would be one mellow fellow if I had access to something like that.

Admittedly, the crazy holodeck sex would be a big part of that too.

Though here’s a question : Can a hologram penetrate a living person? And would you have to disable the safety protocols first? Hologrammatic entities are supposedly just force fields and light. So how could that holodick plow me deep?

Anyhow, back to violence. Heck, half the reason I play video games so much is that they help me burn off excess aggression and anger.

But sometimes they cause it too. Naturally. Right now, I am very frustrated with Fallout ’76 because there’s this monster I have to kill for a quest and it just keeps kicking my ass and I am all out of healing (Stimpaks) and they are so expensive that I normally never buy them and make do with what I get via looting but there is no way I am going to beat this thing without a ton of them.

So I am pursuing another plotline for now. Both to hopefully loot enough Stimpaks to fight the fucking thing and to give me time to cool down in general.

I will fight better when I can think better. Anger is a weapon only for your enemy, etc.

Seems silly to be this worked up over a video game, but if I didn’t care so much, they wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to play.

And wouldn’t that be a shame!

More after the break.

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More frigging headaches

So now I am stuck in the quest I started to get away from the previous quest with the monster I just could not beat^[1].

This time the problem is logical, not tactical. After a super, super. SUPER long trip through a shockingly enormous steel plant, I have reached a locked door with no means of opening it whatsoever that I can find.

And it makes me want to scream and throw a brick through a window, preferably one with whoever made this stupid level sitting conveniently close to it.

Probably the same schmuck who made that level where you have to run a race course marked by red arrows and eventually said arrows just… stop.

What kind of an idjit doesn’t get that if you are marking a path with arrows, each arrow has to lead to the next arrow? Directly?

They understood that in Skyrim! Each one of those little Inukchuk-type stone thingies was visible from the previous marker! That’s the whole idea!

Anyhow, my current predicament broke me and I had to quit the game.

I would have preferred to just leave the game on pause till I recuperated, but this is an MMORPG and there IS no pause.

Nor could I just tuck my character away in a safe corner somewhere and leave the game running, because a) there are no safe corners. the game will send someone to attack you wherever, and b) even if there was safe places, the game will log you out after a half hour or hour of inactivity anyway.

Because why should you be using a connection to the server someone else could be using to just have your character there going derp?

But here’s the thing. Because I quit while still in an interior space, there is a chance that none of my progress in the giant steel mill was saved.

I hope not. The game told me it had “Checkpointed.” at various key plot points, and I hope that means everything got saved.

But if I lost everything, I’m going to lose it. Because that steel mill is WAY longer and harder than i thought I would be and I am almost out of ammo and healing and there just keeps being MORE of the fucking place.

If I have to start over…. I might just decline. True, I am saving a small child from killer robots in the mission. But the kid’s tough, she’ll be OK.

If and when I go back, it will be with an enormous supply of meds and ammo. There is no such thing as “enough”, apparently, because you never know when the game is going to throw a super long quest or a super hard enemy (or both) at you.

Like the game doesn’t already feed my paranoia too much. Now it’s setting off my Northern European “never enough, always need more, winter is coming” hoarding instincts and that can’t be good.

Thus begins the long slippery slope leading to my spending real money for virtual currency in a game I already paid for.

Lord help me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not really. Just something that popped into my head when I was thinking about how I was woozy from bad sleep and didn’t feel like writing right now.

And it struck me as funny, So I thought I would share.

Today is nice and slack. Tomorrow is Tuesday and I have Doctor Vaezi at 8:10 in the fucking AM. Next day is Wednesday and I got Wound Care at 11:45 AM. Then on Friday I got Caswell at 11:40 am or so.

Who knew being very ill was so much work? I wish I could just check myself into a hospital, go under deep sedation, and be woken up when they have fixed everything.

Might time them a long time but at least I would not be making Julian drive me around to all these different places any more.

I know you don’t mind, dear Julian. But still.

But I suppose you have to be very rich to get that kind of treatment. And if i was that rich, I would also have a big burly Scandinavian dude named Sven or Ole to wheel me around in a wheelchair and be my chauffeur and to help with all my… personal needs.

I’m TALKING about my PENIS. And also my BUTT HOLE.

It’s a very pleasant fantasy. Being sick would be way easier to take if I lived a life of luxury that included both limousines and getting a deep and thorough dicking.

I’m so damned horny.

I am sure I had a half dozen really good ideas for what the blog about earlier. But now I have forgotten them all.

But you know what? Those are all just pages in a book. Moments that were sufficient unto themselves without any nee to outlive their brief lifespan.

Maybe it’s enough to just watch them come and go like ocean waves. To stop trying to stop the wheel of life as it turns and instead let it spin however and wherever it feels.

To stop feeling like I can create my entire life… clearly I can’t.

And to therefore stop holding myself responsible for everything… that can’t be true. There are so many factors beyond my control.

And I can’t very well seize the reins of power when my depression leaves my mind too cold and numb to even be able to feel them.

I feel like I am in a constant state of fulmination as I am trying to bring myself back to life and learn to open myself up to life’s joys an sorrows and everything else.

It’s so god damned cold in here. I am sick of being numb. I hate the icicle teeth constantly chewing on my petrified hear. I want to live and feel and love and hate and have big arguments with people and experience conflict and frustration and all the rest.

I want to live, dammit.

But life won’t seem to let me.

More after the break.

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The other 500

Wow, the previous section ended up being exactly 500 words long.

Which is particularly ironic given my “500 words of HELL” bit from the title of this entry.

Well, 500 down, 500 to go.

481 now, in fact.

Let’s get going.

---

Springtime in Siberia

I’m feeling somewhat better today.

Dunno why, but it’s possible that for me, happiness only comes when I have completely exhausted my capacity for depression and despair.

Which makes me wonder where said capacity comes from in the first place. Is it just a matter of frustrated energies and unprocessed emotions? Is the main action of my depression simply to burn through an accumulation of emotional debris?

Seems almost insultingly trivial given the emotional weight of what I go through, but it nevertheless still be the case.

Certainly makes a strong case for getting up and moving around more rather than remaining a lump in a computer chair whose brain has to put him through ten different flavours of hell just to deal with the consequence of his sessile lifestyle.

It means “unmoving or fixed in place”, like a barnacle. Look it up.

Action is not the enemy. Repeat until believed. The goal of life is not to completely avoid all forms of effort. That’s a deadly dark and depressed way of looking at things and is the exact opposite of the sort of life-affirming growth I need.

And yet, that intense anti-action bias remains. Just quietly contemplating living a more active lifestyle – even one still confined to this apartment and involving no actual exercise – chills me all the way through to the very core of my heart.

And that’s no good.

Once more, I am faced with the conflict known in some way to all humans at one point or another : knowing you should do something doesn’t make you want to do it.

Or even make you capable of doing it.

The resistance within me is so very strong. This pit of eternal winter in which I dwell is deep and dark and deadly and so far, I don’t have what it takes within me to generate the kind of stellar heat it will take to overcome all that cold.

But I am gathering firewood and testing my lighter. Some day the amount of fire in me will equal then exceed the weight of all that ice and I will have my springtime.

There’s going to be a hell of a lot of tears that day. Happy tears, sad tears, tears of relief, tears of shock, tears of pain, tears of joy – all will fall like rain on the first day of the springtime of my heart.

The air will fill with the sounds of ice cracking and crumbling, and groaning under its own weight as it falls apart like an iceberg in the Sahara.

And there will be a cool breeze filled with the complex smells of generations’ worth of memories thawing out at the same time.

And big gentle shudders will shake the land as its permafrost melts into a rich and ancient clay. fertile from the life unlived dissolved in it.

And I will stand there naked so I can feel this new sunshine all over, and I will be filled with a joy that includes and flows from the simple innocent eroticism of a child and radiates out into the world in joyous waves of affirmation and exultation.

And all shall be made clean by the waters of the pure, and I will be born anew.

And all will hear my humble and sincere “Amen”.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got an appointment with my ophthalmologist Doctor Vaezi this Tuesday and I have some fun questions I am going to be asking him.

Like, wasn’t the whole point of cutting my eyes open and mucking about in there twice in May to make my eyesight better?

Because I hate to break it to you, but it’s been three months plus and I have the worst eyesight of my lifetime.

I can’t see shit. Even at the distance to the computer screen, which was supposed to be the place where I could see the best, things are blurry and I feel like I am trying to view the screen through rippling water.

And other distances? Forget about it.

Clearly, something went terribly wrong. Either I screwed things up horribly by showing up to the operations with sky high blood sugars and then not understanding the instructions for the eye drops, or you fucked something up when implanting the new lenses into my eyes, or some or all of both.

So level with me, Doc. What’s the situation, and can it be fixed? I am not looking to assign blame, I just want to know what happened and whether my eyes are going to get better or not.

It could be that I just need to get a new pair of glasses. Fine. I can afford them. I would not be thrilled about it but at least I would be able to see again.

But it could be that my eyes are permanently fucked, and if that’s the case I want to know what happened and why.

Because something has to have gone very very wrong, Doc.

And I need to understand what.

---

Did the Wound Care Clinic thing today, otherwise known as the Changing of the Bandages and Packings.

I could have sworn that the previous time I fucked up my leg, the wound care nurses really worked with the wound to make it heal faster. They rubbed and trimmed and fussed over the wound, at least at first.

But this time, apart from the first time at the ER, all they do is change the bandages, and that is something I could theoretically do myself.

Not as well. But it could be done.

Oh well. My nurse today was named Joy and she was quite sweet. I had to confess to her that I had added two more wounds to my right leg by picking at the “devitalized tissue” (as one doctor put it) on my leg all around the formerly infected area.

“Devitalized” sounds so much better than “dead” or “necrotic”, doesn’t it? Essentially all the epidermis between my knee and ankle on my right leg is dead.

But it can’t be removed, it appears. Because underneath it is a forest of wounds and lesions just waiting to be unleashed.

But with all that dead tissue atop them, how will they ever heal?

Anyhow, I was on the phone for my weekly phone therapy session with Doctor Costin and wrapped up in the conversation and my hand wandered down to try to remove some of that dead tissue with my fingernails.

So that gave me two brand new wounds. Yay.

To top it off, this time the nurse decided that some of my lesions didn’t need to be covered any more because they were all scabbed over and dry.

And I was too embarrassed to admit that they were only scabbed over and dry because the bandages kept me from picking at them.

Like the Collar of Shame they put on dogs to keep them from biting their stiches.

So now I have to battle myself to keep from picking at them and making them worse.

The universe is inherently hostile to my dignity.

More after the break.

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Periods of agony

And not the kind that responds to Midol.

I’ve had some pretty rough patches today, where I felt like every bone was slowly and tortuously grinding against its neighbor and my head felt like it was going to pop like a zit and I just wanted to scream like an enraged ghost.

A big one. The kind that used to pick on Casper.

Luckily, these periods always have the same cause : sinus pressure. So I can make them end by clearing my nose and my ears so the pressure can get out.

Best not to think about exactly what that entails.

Fine, it’s snot. It lets the snot out. Ya happy??

Sleep continues to be a maddening phantom always just out of reach. No matter how sleepy I get, my sleep remains brief, fitful, and unsatisfying.

That’s what SHE said. (Shoot me. )

I am honestly considering booking a cheap motel room for a couple of nights just to give myself someplace clean to sleep.

The ideal situation would be to spend a few nights at a decent motel while professionals come in and thorough clean this incontinent pig’s sty of a room I live in.

I can’t clean it myself. I am too tired and weak for such a big job. If this place is to be cleaned, I will have to bite the bullet and hire professionals.

And then fuck off while they do their work so I am not hovering over them getting in the way while my stomach ties itself into knots from my fretting.

And shame. Oh god, the shame. I am not proud of having let my living space get this bad. So much cringe. So it would be best if I am not around while they clean.

I am perfectly fine with trusting them to know what they are doing and not wreck my shit. They can do what they want with everything but the computer itself.

And I mean, the stuff in the computer case. They can clean the monitor, mouse, speakers, and so on till their heart’s content.

It would be like one of those home makeover shows. I go away then come back and ooh and aah over how transformed my humble space is.

Expensive, probably. But worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh right, the one that’s on fire.

Still, I am not entirely without hope. I am not the only one saying “it’s only going to get worse”. I think the great sleepy beast we call the zeitgeist is slowly waking up to the trust that we are in danger and we are going to have to do something about it.

So perhaps the first few sparks of the revolution have fallen onto the dry grass of this global climate change. May they spark the kind of political inferno it is going to take before we stand a chance of escaping the worst of this environmental holocaust.

We need a two pronged approach : keeping things from getting worse, and dealing with how bad they are going to get.

Keeping things from getting worse is the harder part. The necessary political reforms won’t happen until the powers that be really start to feel like if they don’t get out of the way, they will lose a lot more than a little money.

Guillotines are still a thing. I’m just sayin’.

On the consumer front, we will have to greatly accelerate the greening of our everyday lives. No more internal combustion engines period. Electric cars only. No more coal powered electricity either. Clean energy or no energy at all.

The target should be a zero emissions world by 2025. Not 2050 as a lot of these jackoff politicians are talking about.

That might as well be half past never because that’s so far away that it is really another way of saying “we ain’t doing jack shit” while sounding like you are doing something.

It’s like your lazy teenager saying they will take out the trash “eventually”, so quit bugging them about it.

No. Do it now, while I watch.

Dealing with how bad it’s going to get is not as difficult in the sense that it doesn’t require a big political and cultural struggle.

But it’s going to be tricky nevertheless. We are going to have to spend a lot of money on things like building seawalls and dikes around major coastal cities, vastly increasing our forest fire fighting capabilities, making air conditioning available and affordable to everyone, and building public shelters to let people escape the worst of it when they get their homes wrecked by massive weather events.

That means we are going to have to face the fact that shit is going to get really bad. Right now we’re still in active denial. The bad things happen, like massive forest fires, and we admit they are bad and we know why they are happening, but for the most part we refuse to see the pattern as a whole.

Because it’s too damned scary. And it means we are going to have to snap out of our usual state of passive stupor and actually leave the comfort zone of our daily lives and do something in order to make things happen.

And we don’t want to have to wake up and exit our comfort zones. We don’t want to have to take to the streets and fight for our right to exist. We just want to keep going to work and spending time with our families and living life as we have known it. As we had expected to live it for the rest of our lives.

But if we don’t want this bus to crash, we’re going to have to wake up and steer.

More after the break.

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I’m not in charge here

Here it is. 9:12 pm, and I just ordered my supper.

Why? Because once more, when the time came, I ended up sleeping instea of doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Normally, on Saturdays, I order my supper at 8 pm. But despite trying hard to fight it, this time I had yet another “nap attack” and had to go to bed instead.

So I just woke up around 9 pm. Then I spent ten minutes dithering about whether to order in like I usually do on Saturdays or just eat what I already have.

Obviously I chose to order in. But I just 7-11 because I knew they would be quick.

So kind of a compromise.

But I hate that what little control I had in my life – like choosing when and what to eat – seems to be slipping away from me. These nap attacks where I sleep when I should be eating are really getting me down and pissing me off.

And in a larger sense. I am tired of having so little power and control in my life. I feel so helpless and yet, thanks to the miracle of depression, I also feel like everything is my fault because I suck.

I want to be better behaved. I want to be the cheerful, optimistic, determined person I know lies buried underneath all the depression. Someone who does all the health things he is supposed to do with a sunshiny exuberance because he loves himself enough to want to care for and nurture himself.

And because he wants comfort and praise from his doctors. That wouldn’t change.

Instead, I am constantly battling despair and that makes things very hard. I can barely function at all some days, especially lately when my depression has taken a turn for the worse and the feeling of despair has only deepened.

Maybe my best bet would be to embrace fatalism. Whatever happens, happens. I’m not in control here. It’s all up to fate.

Hence the name.

That would relieve me of this feeling of constant failure to do all the things I should be doing…. both known and unknown.

Or maybe I should just give up and go completely nuts. Let my lunatic trickster take over so that me, the person what writes this thing, can go to sleep.

Or maybe I should find Jesus. He’s got to be around here somewhere. Maybe I left our Lord and Savior in my other pants.

I’m already a big fan of His work. Would it really be that big a deal to let the idea of Him into my imagination just to have someone or something to surrender unto?

The answer is yes, it would be a huge deal. And it might not work, either, because I would know He was just an imaginary construct and thus not “real”.

But imaginary things influence us all the time, whether it’s lines on a map or the limits we place on ourselves in order to protect our fragile hearts.

So why not embrace imaginary Jesus?

What the hell, it’s worth a shot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am… in danger.

This morning, I had an attack of depression so strong that it made me start thinking the bad thoughts about how nice it would be to just end it all and escape having to live through the hell that awaits me in the future.

That’s what triggered it : thoughts about how both me and the world are doomed.

My own prognosis is terrible. I have so many things going wrong in my body all at the same time. And that’s just the stuff we know about.

There’s probably just as many issues that are as yet undiscovered.

And it would be one thing if I was doing everything possible to get better but I am not.

My diabetes is running rampant. I don’t check my glucose or take my insulin. As we speak, high blood sugar is wrecking my every organ and destroying veins and arteries.

I don’t use my CPAP either. Not even with my new nose-only mask. I have tried to make it work but I can’t seem to get enough air through my nose even with the CPAP doing its job. Or maybe I am just panicking, I don’t know.

I have a serious hernia in my gut that doctors won’t fix because I am too fat. My legs and feet are half dead. One foot has a huge weird callous on it. Both legs have lesions from stasis dermatitis and sizeable open wounds from infections.

And underneath it all is my depression. It’s the eminence grise of this whole empire of decay because it’s the reason I haven’t taken care of myself properly and why I continue to neglect myself.

I know all about the things I should be doing to get healthy.

But I don’t have the energy, focus, or motivation to do them.

I feel like I am trapped on the roof of a burning building with no hope of rescue. I see the flames spreading higher and higher and know that long before they reach me, the whole building will collapse with me still on its roof.

So why not just jump? That’s the thought I keep thinking.

There has to be some way out of this despair. Some way to find hope. I don’t want to want to die any more. It’s getting way too scary.

I could call my therapist. He’s told me many times not to be afraid to call him, day or night. if I feel like my symptoms are getting worse and I am in danger.

Check and check. I would have to overcome a lot of shame and guilt and the feeling like he doesn’t really want to hear from me and doesn’t really care and that I would be interrupting his life and all the rest of that avoidant bullshit. And that’s not easy.

There’s also suicide prevention helplines and such. I can’t imagine them being much help, though. My problems are massive. Even my therapist can barely handle them and he’s got 50 years of experience. I can’t imagine some well-intentioned volunteer being able to even listen to me without being crushed by my issues.

It’s not that my pain is worse than anyone else’s.

It’s that my powers of self-expression plus the labyrinthine complexities of my highly creative and intelligent mind make how I express them so much more than most of the human race can handle.

Luckily, I have you lovely people to read my words.

I feel better now that I have talked this stuff out some. So I think the immediate danger has passed. But the fundamental issues remain lurking just out of sight.

Anyone know how to learn to live life in the moment, without thinking about the future?

Because that would really help right now.

This is not an easy thing for me to write about. Normally I don’t let anyone know about my struggles because I don’t want to worry or upset them.

So bravo to me for taking this step.

More after the break.

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Boogying down with the boogeyman

Just like this!

I mean seriously. That song packs more fun per second than an orgasm.

Anyhow, my point was that I am not as depressed as I was earlier, but I feel like I am constantly dodging the demon of my darkness in order to achieve this state.

So I feel sort of okay. But one wrong step and I could fall so hard I leave a crater.

Not fun. I am hoping getting some more sleep will help clear things up.

I have learned to never associate with depression what can be adequately explained by being really fucking tired.

Took a Trazadone this morning. Took a lot of dithering and soul-searching to get to the point where I would take the fucking pill.

I was all ready to do it but then the fear hit me and I had to fight that first.

I was scared of what I knew would happen, which was that I would sleep super heavily and wake up almost completely impaired and have to get my meals and blogging done that way even though I feel like I am dying and that shit could last for days, y’all.

So the passageway to a well rested me is a very harsh one indeed. I wish there was an easier way but if there is, I don’t know it.

Sleeping pills don’t make sleep apnea any better. The opposite, in fact.

And that is so fucking unfair.

Of course, what ended up happening? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Never even felt a thing. So fuck ME.

I swear, sometimes it feels like my whole life is a setup to a joke at my expense.

So I dunno. I can’t seem to get along with CPAP and sleeping pills either fuck me up horribly for days or do nothing whatsoever.

Guess I am just doomed to the shitty sleep which is killing me and making it so hard for me to concentrate and remember things.

My working memory doesn’t.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Whether you are talking about my health or the climate crisis, things are only going to get worse from here, folks.

And for the same reason : not taking sufficient action.

Every summer will be hotter and more of the world will burn. Every winter will be milder overall but with more extreme weather fluctuations so there will be times when it is much, much colder overall. Extreme weather events like hurricanes, tsunamis, and an tornados will become more and more common. Life as we know it will slowly be destroyed by the highly predictable consequences of our inaction.

“But what can one person do?” came the thundering voice of 7 billion doomed human beings as their world burned.

“Why didn’t you do everything you could to stop it?” our grandchildren will ask us when they learn about the World That Was before billions of us died when climate change destroyed all the food crops and the rest were forced to live underground because we’ rendered the surface uninhabitable.

“Well, because that would have meant annoying a hundred billionaires by making them slightly less rich, dear.” we will reply.

“So it was a matter of the emotional comfort of a hundred rich people versus the fate of the entire human race? I see how that was a difficult choice. ” said none of them ever.

Lucky me, then, that I am so sick I will not live to see it happen.

“But why didn’t you do everything you could to prevent it?” my loved ones will ask when I am lying on my deathbed.

“Well you see, I was very very sad. ” I weakly reply.

“So it was a matter of your emotional comfort versus a lot of pain, humiliation, and fear leading to your dying before you’re fifty? Difficult choice indeed. ” none of them will say.

I know what they would choose. They want me to live and be happy because they love me and love having me around.

And I want to give that to them. And to me. I don’t want to get sicker till I die. I want to get better so I can truly live for the first time.

But I also don’t. The Trog doesn’t care. He just wants to squat in his cave and ignore the world and never ever leave. Even if it kills him.

It’s worse than that, though, because deeper than him is the dark force that wants to die. That wants this whole farce of a life to finally be over so we can finally commit the ultimate act of escapism and escape life itself.

Second best would be to get so sick that I end up in the hospital permanently and thus live in a child-like world where people take care of me 24/7 and all I have to do is do what I am told and be my charming, funny self.

But deep down inside me I know there is a force powerful enough to make me truly passionately want to live and be willing to kick the Trog out and burn the clutching cloak of suicidal passivity to cinders so that I can one day be free.

All I have to do is find it and connect to it and use its power.

And I am working on it. Good lord, am I working on it.

But I have a lot of bullshit to dig through first.

More after the break.

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The grand song of apathy

In other words, this :

It’s been playing in my head a lot lately as I struggle with my own angry apathy and search for a way to find hope in my bleak situation.

But so far, all I can dream up is an image of myself as a evil goat-legged figure dancing in the flames as the world burns and cackling like a demon.

“Die, all you stupid ignorant petty motherfuckers, and good riddance to this stupid fucking world! Burn, baby, burn! Burn hot and high and deep for me! Because this rotten old world is finally getting the roasting it deserves!”.

And so forth and so on. It only get pettier and more grotesque and depressing from there on in.

That’s part of me but that’s not who I am. That’s just the mad rantings of a frustrated trickster trying, in his twisted way, to stir people into action by playing the villain.

I get it, Joker, I really do. I know what makes the madman howl at the moon. I know how hard it can be to see all the evils of the world and trying to tell people about it but they just won’t listen. I get how that can make you feel like you’re going crazy because you want to do crazy things just to get their goddamned attention.

Doesn’t justify evil, though. Just so ya know.

As I have said many times before in this blog, this kind of angry apathy I am dealing with is an overcorrection in response to feeling overwhelmed by anxiety and worry.

It is as though too much activity on that circuit trips a circuit breaker that triggers a big dump of anxiety’s opposite, apathy.

Which is great in a healthy mind. It helps a person stay calm in stressful situations and keeps them from being overwhelmed by circumstances.

But in an unbalanced mind like mine, it’s an irrational overcompensation for an irrational level of fear, and not a sane and rational response that actually solves the problem.

Still, the struggle represent progress. At least my mind is fighting back against my anxiety and trying to balance itself instead of just numbing everything out.

And with struggle, there is always the hope of resolution. After the fires of war have died down, you might just find a new balance has been struck and true peace can begin.

Violent conflict might be the worst form of conflict resolution…. but it works.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

An odd thing has been happening when I play Fallout 76 lately.

As I boot up the game, this voice inside me starts kicking up a fuss like I am dragging it off to be slaughtered and fighting the whole process.

It’s like it is shouting, “No! Don’t take me back in there! I don’t wanna go!!”.

And sometimes it will start its routine while I am playing, too. And I will stop playing and ask it what the problem is and what it would rather be doing.

So far, no answers. So I figured I would try and write it out.

Because the thing is, I am, enjoying teh fuck out of the game. It totally rocks. Best game purchase I have made in a long time. I can play it for hours on end without getting tired of it and it’s always hard to stop.

And maybe that is the problem. There is something in me resisting the absorption of my consciousness in the mode it goes into when I am playing a really good game.

A mode where I am totally wrapped up in the game and its world. Where i completely forget the real world and there’s absolutely no room left in my mind for the usual doubt, fear, anxiety, and depression.

For the entirety of my adult life, this has been a highly desired nay prized state. But now something inside me is fighting it and I am pretty sure it’s getting stronger.

So what the fuck is its deal?

For context, a general discontent with spending all day playing video games has been building in me for a very long time and it kicks up while I am gaming now and then.

This is a known thing.

But it’s never been this clear and strong before. So I am wondering wassup.

The thing is, it’s going to be business as usual until I can answer the question of what else I would rather be doing.

Because I honestly don’t know what else to do with my life. Sure, there are millions of things I could be doing besides spending all day playing video games, but that is not the same thing at all.

It’s not about what I could do, It’s about what I want to do.

And as usual, I don’t know. There are plenty of productive, creative, and healthy things I could be doing to keep myself amused and build up my self esteem through increasing my sense of accomplishment. Happy things that sound like great ideas.

Doesn’t make me want to do them though. At all.

Maybe I am just afraid to want things. I have accepted my own impotence and helplessness in all things and made do with whatever I happened to get for so long. And a big part of that is teaching myself not to want things because it can only lead to pain.

No point in wanting what you can never get, right?

And now I have no idea how to want things any more.

More after the break.

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And the horse you rode in on

Feeling angrily apathetic once more due to incomplete masturbation.

God damn it, I need to get off. My balls are bluer than a Smurf’s and I need some release. Instead, my balls ache, my head hurts, and I’m ready to start taking hostages.

“Sir, he says he wants ‘a long hard cock to fuck him up the ass for at least two hours consecutively or four hours in total but for sessions no shorter than twenty minutes. Age. race, religion, appearance and species of cock unimportant, length, hardness ,and vigor key. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he will start fucking the hostages. And sir… he will not be gentle. “

And it would work because I have nothing to lose. After all, what can do? Put me in jail, where I will get what I want anyway?

I’m just speeding up the inevitable by skipping a few steps.

Seriously though, I am beginning to understand why female animals often fight the males who eventually fuck them.

It’s not that they don’t want the male’s D or don’t know that it’s that vitamin D that will cure that burning cunt of theirs.

It’s that being horny and unfulfilled has put them in a really bad mood.

Male : “Hi, can I fuck your vagina with my penis?”
Female : “What? How dare you! You asshole! You pervert! That’s the most disgusting thing I have ever heard of! I have never been more insulted in my life! Yeah, okay. “

I pity heterosexual men so much.

This is why the one fantasy that unites all porn aimed at straight men is of a woman or women who communicate their desire and permission to fuck them very very clearly.

I doubt there is much of a market for porn where the woman is mysterious, mercurial, and liable to fly into a rage if you make a single wrong move.

Still, we are getting there. Hookup apps and hookup culture are emboldening women to cast off the shackles of self-denial in the name of not wanting to “seem like a slut” and opening the door for them to be as honest and open and up-front with their horniness as as gay men are.

I dream of a world where there are unisex bathhouses where everyone, without any hint of shame or self-doubt, goes to fuck.

If you’re there, you’re horny and looking for sex. That doesn’t oblige you to fuck whoever asks but it does mean you are not pretending to be a virgin.

There would be different areas for different gender combinations and sub-sections within those areas for various fetishes and activities.

And dead center would be the free for all zone where anything goes. Implied consent, total bisexuality, no holes barred, absolutely anything can happen.

Not a lot of people would be brave enough to go there. But those that go there could have one hell of a time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

183

Wrote this in a comment on a Youtube video about parents who have disowned their children and why earlier today :

My parents never disowned me because that would have meant noticing me and also would have been too much work. Turns out you can ignore a child and treat them like they don’t exist and aren’t worth anything without going through the hassle of throwing them out. I was an unplanned and therefore unwelcome child and was treated as such. I had no friends, was bullied and outcast at school, and my teachers didn’t like me either because I was such a pathetic, contemptible child. So why waste compassion on someone so worthless? Plus I was way too smart for my own good. I had a very cold childhood from which I am still thawing out at the age of 48. Very little warmth or light reaches my frozen, distant heart. I can’t get really close to people because I have never been. Even my beloved best friends are not truly close to me. On the outside I am a funny, bright person but on the inside I am as cold as the interstellar void. And I don’t know what to do about that.

me, youtube, august 31 2021

Would have included a link to the video but my browser lost all my tabs. Grr.

Nothing new to my loyal, patient, and wonderful fans in it. But I guess the video knocked some more icicles of trauma off my frozen heart.

I guess i have an urge to tell people about my tragic childhood partly because I could not tell people about it at the time.

I didn’t have the words. The rape took them. Locked them away with the rest of my emotions when I fled what was happening to me the only way I could : by retreating deep into my shell.

And that continued into the rest of my crappy childhood. I could talk about a lot of things of an intellectual nature but I didn’t have the words to talk about how unhappy I was.

I didn’t even have the awareness to realize how wrong it all was. Neither did I have the self-worth to feel like I deserved better.

I just coped as best I could, like any abandoned child.

And like I said in the comment, I am still thawing out from that cold as midnight tundra childhood. I am acutely aware of the profound wrongness of how I grew up and I can feel all the places where the love and joy and human connection were supposed to go.

I know that I have profound interpersonal issues. Exactly how profound they are I will not know until I am healthy enough to actually attempt to connect with people on something like a normal human level.

You don’t know how broken something is till you try to use it.

I try to imagine truly trying to connect with a lover or even just a close friend with benefits. A fuck buddy, if you will.

And it’s not a pretty picture. As much as I like to think of myself as easy to get along with and fun to be around and a very open person, I know that the truth is that anyone trying to get close to me is walking through a minefield and I can’t help them avoid setting off some kind of explosive traumatic reaction in me because I don’t know where the mines are any more than they do.

I’ve never gone down this road before either.

So I imagine there would be a lot of mood swings. I have too much pride in my self-control to take them out on my paramour du jour, but some would be bound to spill over via my projecting empathy anyhow.

Sorry, whoever has to deal with that. I’d protect you from all of it if I could but when you’re as broken as I am, it leaves a lot of shrapnel lying around for folks to step on.

More after the break.

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Dream to me now

So I was talking to my friend+ Luke online today and I joked about sneaking him in to Canada and claiming he is my long lost cousin.

And he said, “Yeah. Very lost. ”

So I said, “Me too. But if we’re lost, let’s be lost together. ”

Then I sent him a link to this song :

And eventually he replied that he didn’t have a reply song for that.

I told him that didn’t matter. What mattered is if he liked the song.

And he did.

And I feel really good about that whole little interaction. I feel like I reached out and shared a little magic with someone I care a lot about by connecting via music. I feel like for just one little moment, I made the world of imagination come alive for Luke by oing something you would not usually see outside of a movie or TV.

And that felt really good. More than that, it felt right. Like for once, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.

And I want more.

Not sure what to do with this information right now, though. As a writer, I already try to create that kind of magic for people. To connect them with something bigger and better than life and take them out of themselves for a little while.

But that’s a pale imitation of what I did with Luke today. For one thing, sharing that song with him was very personal. It’s a song I love that means a lot to me. Sharing it with him was like sharing a little piece of my heart with him.

I can only hope that it was magical for him too. That it made him think I am someone really special, because I am.

I have real magic in me. Not the bullshit with spells and magic symbols and so on. The kind that really exists and can, through the power of shared imagination (aka art), can fill us with wonder and joy (and laughter and fear and all the rest) and make us feel like we have truly touched something bigger than our mundane lives.

That’s the true Disney magic, and it’s my magic too.

And I want to share it with the world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.