So, had the Wound Care today,

And yay, the official Wound Care Nurse (the specialist) was there to shave down the callous on my right foot.

I was rather worried about that thing because when I changed my socks on Sunday, pre-Denny’s, I noticed the dressing had a big wet spot exactly where the callous was and that was… new.

It’s been a very dead and docile phenomenon until now. A callous is just an accumulation of dead skin compressed into a compact mass, after all.

But neither the regular nurse nor Nurse Janice the wound case specialist seemed to think it was a problem, so…. I guess it wasn’t?

Anyhow, having her “debride” ^[1] the wound was as pleasant as I thought it would be. In fact at various times I had two nurses working on me at the same time, one debriding the callous and the other changing my dressings, and that gave me that feeling of being pampered like I’m the Gran Poobah that I love so much.

I really need to get to a place where I can afford spa treatments. I get the feeling they could do a lot of good for both my body and my soul.

And who knows, I might even snag me a sexy masseur with big, strong, gentle hands and a real appreciation of the benefits of fucking a fat dude.

More cushion for the pushin’, baby!

Wounds update : things are looking shockingly good.

My left leg is basically fully healed. There’s still discolored areas where wounds used to be and wow do I need to moisturize that area a bunch, but other than that, the wounds are closed, the skin has healed, and I now have a healthy-ish leg.

I am, of course, tickled pink. It’s a sort of mottled pink with freckles, but still.

And my right leg is looking good too. A lot of the lesser wounds are gone. The big one is still there and looking kinda ugly, but still appears to be healing well.

In a month or so, I might actually be wound free, and my legs might be those of living human being again.

The trip home was eventful. First, Megan and I were on hold for like 20 minutes before she could call a cab for me.

Then an elderly couple took my cab. Sort of. Megan says she ordered two cabs but only one ever showed up.

I assumed my cab was coming so it was a no-brainer to let the super old couple who barely knew what planet they were on take the first one.

But nope, no second cab, So I had to go up and get Megan to call me another.

While waiting for that one, a young woman wheeled someone who looked liked Louie Anderson and Lou Costello had a kid and that kid was existentially worried 24/7.

So imagine my surprise when the woman said, “I’ll be right back with the car, Mum. ”

Holy crap, that was a woman?!? It was all I could do to keep my polite poker face on and I am pretty sure my eyes went super wide involuntarily.

So that was a true Encounter with Humanity. Very eye opening, so to speak.

Then my cab arrived and took me home. And as I got out of the cab, I had this horrible sinking feeling and yup…. I had FORGOTTEN MY KEYS.

Oh shit oh fuck oh double god DAMMIT. Visions of me sitting on the floor in the hall right outside out apartment like a lost dog filled my mind.

Luckily, Julian was home to let me in. Phew. Adventure over.

More after the break.

---

Taking another poké at it

Giving poké from Pokey Okey^[2] another shot, and this time I just went nuts.

Four different sauces (Pokey Okey Sauce, Wasabi Mayo, Miso Sesame and Ponzu Cirtus) , three different proteins (Juicey (sic) Chicken, Marinated Tofu, and Luau Pulled Pork) , tons of “veggies”^[3], and whatever else looked good, all mixed together by yours truly into a Merry Melange of Madness.

And it’s all delicious. Can’t believe how fast I ate that whole huge bowl o’ stuff but it was all so good, and because it didn’t have a lot of carbs or fat, the whole thing is quite light and tasty and good.

I am especially happy with the pulled pork. That is some tasty BBQ sauce. The perfect balance of tangy, sweet, and head.

A delicious meal that doesn’t weigh me down and is chock full of nutrition?

Sign me the hell up.

Meanwhile, in the Ruins of Appalachia

I can’t see that word without remembering Less Nessman pronouncing it “apple-a-cheeya”. LOL, he’s so cute.

Anyhow, in my current game of Fallout 76, I have almost cleared all the quests. I managed to into the fight with the Wendigo Colossus (seen here)…

…and stood no chance against the bloody thing despite being level 120, and for a little while it was just me and three other people of roughly the same level and we were dying a whole heck of a lot but luckily some Level 300+ types showed up and together we managed to slowly erode its health until it died.

It was one hell of a fight.

Then it was off to work on those god damned Pioneer Scout merit badges. Sounds real cute when you get the quest but those things are a lot of freaking work.

Finally finished getting my Archery, and one other I’ve forgotten badges this morning and that leave me with only one other task before I can say I did it all, and it’s the one I have been dreading the most.

Revive a Fallen Ally.

Which requires….actually having allies. Which is a foreign idea to me.

Is there a non-joiner option?

Because I am a sullen and antisocial Generation X’er and we don’t really join stuff.

In fact, we reflexively reject any group that presumes to think we are part of it.

Like I said before, we’re the “fuck off, you don’t KNOW me!” generation.

And of course I have massive issues of my own.

Kinda figures that after all these weeks of playing the game, the final boss would end up being my social anxiety.

I can slaughter hordes of Super Mutants, Feral Ghouls (zombies), Scorched (red zombies with guns), Cultists (they worship the Mothman), Blood Eagles (violent deth cult), and various monsters and wild beasts…I can take out entire evil secret societies and solve mysteries and repair entire power plants by myself… I can even fight through endless robot hordes to get a little girl her stuffed toy back…

But making a friend?

That’s way too big an ask.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Well, semi-live anyhow.

Just woke up all fried by bad sleep. Dizziness, headache, a little nausea, a lot of disorientation, and a deep, cold, pervasive tingling throughout my entire body to remind me that I have just barely fought my way back from the brink of death.

In my sleep. Kind of impressive, really.

Of course, I wouldn’t have this problem if I could make myself use my CPAP machine. In theory, at least, it would neutralize my Obstructive Sleep Apnea by pumping a steady stream of air down my throat to keep it from relaxing and obstructing my airway with its general flabby flappiness.

It was weirdly fun to explain it out that like. Cathartic too.

It’s a matter of summoning the willpower to force myself to do it. And keep on doing it for as long as it takes for it to become a normal part of everyday life,

Simple. Easy. Reasonable. No problem. Piece o’ cake.

Just like all the other things I should do but don’t.

I’m so inwardly directed that it makes any sort of external effort towards change very difficult. It’s like all my energies go into maintaining the stability of this life destroying pattern that smothers as it supports me.

Like I said once before, a long long time ago, I feel like I am a dog on a very long leash tied up in a very big back yard. I have plenty of room to roam around and explore an I use it to fool myself into thinking I am free.

But I’m not. I just cover the same old ground, over and over.

Dammit, I need a little nap. I will be back soon.

---

And by soon, I mean two hours later. Sigh.

I hate being interrupted when I am writing, especially by myself.

Anyhow… where were we? Oh right, the complete futility of my existence.

Part of the problem with a safety obsessed mindset is that in most ways, it actually sets the bar pretty low.

Am I safe? Good. Then everything is fine and there’s no need for change, especially change that increases danger and all change does.

It doesn’t matter if you are depressed, stifled, miserable, repressed, hating your life, dying on the inside, or in terrible pain. It doesn’t even matter if your shitbox lifestyle is causing your body to rot away as we speak.

If you are safe, everything is fine, and moving to a less safe state for absolutely any reason, even to save your own fucking life, is impossible.

So I sleepwalk through this zombie life of mine, alive on the outside but numb and gone on the inside, seemingly free but actually buried alive in my mental illness.

Waking up from this state of undead dreaming is not going to be easy. But there is a coal mine fire raging within me and it’s going to burn its way through all that is keeping me locked inside myself, or die trying.

Whatever the consequences of that are, I accept them. Because nobody and nothing is going to hold me back any more.

More after the break.

---

Stoking the fire inside

Because I want to live, god damn it.

Wake me from this nightmare and let me see the world in the warm and satisfying Technicolor light of dawn.

I don’t care if the light, it hurts my head. Whatever. Pain is bullshit anyway, the fear of pain doubly so. Whatever it is will pass once I relax and let myself adjust to it instead of treating every moment like it’s going to last forever.

Pain comes and goes. And when it’s gone, you’re still there. Fuck pain, man.

It’s not the boss of me.

Dry my eyes as I wake from this long night’s dreaming. Wipe away the salty sadness still clinging to my eyelids. Bid me to blink a half dozen times to clear my vision.

The way out of the maze has always been the same : stop needing it.

Accept a naked reality, with no labyrinth for this lonely old minotaur to hide in. No layer of convolutions and complications and rogue mentations and abstract formations to shield me and hide me from the world and be the backdrop for the absurdist melodrama that is my pretension of autonomy.

See? I am free to go wherever I want to in this maze! I can explore it forever and ever, safe in the knowledge that I will never find my way out.

Because the maze is me and I am the maze.

And that means I can pretend I am making progress all I like. After all, I have been moving forward towards some nebulous goal I’ve painted on the horizon, and therefore I must be getting somewhere, right?

Said the hamster in his wheel.

Wake me gently but for keeps. No more slipping softly into smothering slumber. No more plunging headlong into the next distraction in order to keep hiding from dread reality and all its complications.

No more choosing to be numb rather than deal with the pain.

Get away from me with that needle, Doctor Sleep. I’ve fallen for your deadly charms for far too long. Sure, you take the pain away, but at far too high a cost.

I can’t live with you in the twilight of night’s dreaming any more. This sunrise/sunset existence is rotten to the core.

I want the night.
I want the dawn.
I want the midnight
I want the noontime
I want disaster
I wand acclaim
I want everything your poison pills have denied me
Otherwise known as “life”

I want my world to feel real. I want to have faith in reality – its solidity, its permanence, its independence from my own consciousness.

I want to feel firmly attached to the cosmos instead of feeling like I am always just barely clinging to reality and the smallest slip could plunge me into the darkness below with all its madness and chaos and annihilation.

I am here.
I am real.
I belong here.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Warning, this is going to get horrifyingly medical and gross and it’s straight from my real life, so it’s all true.

Caveats over. Let’s begin.

A horrifying thing happened when I went in for Wound Care last Tuesday.

When the nurse, Joy, removed the bandage covering the major wound on my right leg, (brace yourself) some of the skin on that leg went with it.

Because the flesh of my right leg between the knee and the ankle is basically zombie flesh now and that’s the kind of thing that happens to zombies.

When the bandage came off, my mind immediately froze all thinking about what exactly that big pink patch of flesh meant.

Good work, brain. Kept me from freaking out.

Then again, who knows. Maybe freaking out would have got me more attention.

And some really good drugs. Hospital grade shit.

Nurse Joy sensed my potential panic like the great nurse she is and said there was some “discoloration” from a reaction to the adhesive in the bandage,

Which is technically true. It’s just that this “reaction” was the peeling off of the top layer of the epidermis in the affected area.

That area has now blossomed into a big nasty wound of its own.

And that’s the punchline : the bandage meant to help one wound heal ended up causing another major wound.

Because my leg is a zombie leg now and nothing about it follows the rules of the living.

I hate my stupid fucking life. I really do.

---

Been further pondering why it is so hard for me to get my life going.

It’s like I am in this deep self-induced hypnotic trance and can’t escape it. Everything I do just draws me deeper into the delusional state.

I’ve created this tiny inner world where I have the bare semblance of freedom but only as long as I participate in the illusion and don’t think any thoughts that might reveal the true nature of my tiny, wretched cell.

So I am like the prisoner who spends all his time looking out the window of his cell and in that sense lives his life “out there” and not “in here”.

Looking out the window is a very poor substitute for actual freedom, but it is all I have known for decades now and so for me, it’s reality.

That cell door could pop open and give me plenty of chance to escape but I would be too busy looking out the window to notice.

And even if I did notice, I would stay in my cell, because to leave would mean going away from my precious and beloved window.

But something is stirring within me. Something violent and savage and impatient and demanding that is sick and tired of my pathetic existence and is willing to kill crush and destroy its way out of these mess I have made of my life.

And every day, it grows stronger. Angrier. Tougher. Meaner.

And one day soon, it’s going to break its chains, kick down the walls of its prison, roar so loud it shakes the heavens, and head for town,

More after the break,

---

Fear of self

First off, a quick run through the formula :

I am afraid of my mental power because I am afraid of all the responsibility implied by it.

That’s not the only reason I fear my own power but it’s the biggest one by far.

The responsibility is too great for me to bear on my soul’s tiny shoulders. I am mentally gargantuan but spiritually miniscule and the difference between the two drives me mad.

Quite literally, in fact.

The other crux of my fear of my own vast powers is that other massive issue of mine, indecision. In order to use it, I would first have to decide what to use it for, and there are so many possibilities that choice seems impossible.

And it is impossible if desire is not a factor. The simplest answer to “what should I do?” is “do what you want!”, and I don’t know what I want.

Or maybe I do know on some level, but I am straight up afraid to want anything because my experience wanting only leads to the pain of not having or not getting, and so it is best to drown all desires before they are even born.

Between responsibility and indecision, it really seems like the deck is stacked against my getting anywhere in life.

The only thing that can save is strength. Not power- I have plenty of that.

No, what I am talking about is strength of spirit. And that boils down to calling on the power of the id. A greater and more reliable connect with my id-self could be the wellspring of energy that pushes me to the next level spiritually and that powers an entirely new outlook on life without this constant sucking void draining my vitality away.

The traditional and natural source of power for the id is one’s physical self, and as you all know, mine is kinda terrible.

So drawing on it directly is not an option right now. However, strengthening my connection to the real world of my senses and slowly weaning myself away from being so trapped in the abstract world of my mind and its stimulation is entirely doable.

It won’t be easy to just sit on my bed and open my mind to my senses to the exclusion of all else. I am bound to get scared and want to bolt back to the “safety” of my stinky little burrow deep inside my mind.

But if I guide myself with a firm but gentle hand, I can make it through. And if I hangin there through the worst of the storms of anxiety, I can emerge more whole and strong and pure on the other side.

So now I know exactly what it is I need to do,.

Now just to decide exactly when to do it….. hmmm….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Doctor Costin’s frustration with my lack of progress in our last session has really got me thinking about why the hell it is so hard for me to do anything that gets me anywhere.

So let’s try to hash that out.

The first level answer is : fear. A deep, overwhelming Leviathan of fear that crushes me like the water pressure in the Mariana Trench whenever I try to leave this tiny little shitbox of a life of mine, even just psychologically.

I can dream all I want. I often do. But like I have said before, as soon as those dreams try to turn into actual plans, the fear comes and ruthlessly kills those dreams and buries them in a shallow grave.

But where does this life-ruining fear come from? What does it mean? And what function does it serve in my psyche?

Where it comes from is one tough nut to swallow. It’s such a big part of me and it’s been there for so long. It binds and defines my life. It’s hard to imagine it not being there, even in the past.

But I know there was a Before Time, when I was functional and going somewhere. I know I have the strength and power to get pretty far in life if I could just leave this shitbox life of mine behind. I know nothing is holding me back but myself.

What the fear means is that I have a deep down terror of having to deal with the real world. On that deep level lies a belief in the ultimate hostility of the universe towards a malformed runt of the litter like me and the connected belief that I am far too weak an fragile and insubstantial to survive in the real world.

And I know that’s crazy, I know that the mean ol’ “real world” has no dangers I could not easily handle. I know that while I have my psychological issues that make it hard to cope sometimes, I also know that I have enormous strength of spirit and the stubborn determination to back it up when I need to do so,

But the fear remains. Deep down I still feel like an abandoned puppy. I still feel small and weak and completely incapable of making it on my own.

So I withdraw into myself and stay there instead.

Clearly, then, the function of the fear is to keep my world small and predictable and calm as a response to the chaos and danger and hostility of the world as I see it.

If I could somehow convince that frightened little animal inside that it’s safe to go out into that big bad world and find my way in life, I would be in a much happier place.

Some very deep healing would have to take place first, I think. In many ways, the root cause of the fear is the pain I feel from the wound being raped left.

When you are so deeply broken that it hurts to face the world, it doesn’t take long for that to turn into fear of the world in general.

So how do I fix that ancient injury?

More after the break.

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Ice as hard as stone

Where was I? Ancient injury, right.

Well whatever I do, if it involves change, I have to dream it before I can believe in it.

So let’s try to think past the problem.

Imagine I am healed. I have successfully dislodged and melted the ice as hard as stone around my heart and I am finally free to live and breathe and strive and thrive and be the full on amazing person I know I was always meant to be.

I have a job that pays me a comfortable living, my own apartment, a solid and reliable boyfriend, like-minded individuals to do things with, and the respect of my peers.

So how did I get there?

My first thought was “I got better”, which is hardly helpful.

Somehow, I found the deep strength to pull that jagged dagger from my heart and deal with whatever consequences may result from it.

After all, pulling the dagger out might have destroyed my heart instead of saving it. Maybe that thing was all that was keeping me from bleeding out.

But I didn’t care any more. Fucker had to go, come what may.

Now that I’ve dreamt it, I can feel it. That dagger in my heart. And I can imagine grabbing that fucking thing by the handle and ripping it out of myself like I was trying to become the next King of England.

It would probably hurt like hell, but fuck it. I am not afraid of pain any more. It’s just pain, It happens then it’s gone. It sucks but I am at least mature enough to be able to see past the pain to the vast relief I will feel at having the problem solved finally.

Like getting a bad tooth pulled. It hurts like hell when it happens, but then you feel so much better with that pain gone.

I might feel pretty bad right after, too. That kin of transformational change does not come easy. So much of my fundamental self is built around coping with that dagger and making sure not to touch it or aggravate it that when it is gone, it will leave a big hole into which a lot of the bits and piece of my being will fall.

It will be messy and painful and dirty and chaotic and for a while, it not seem like pulling the dagger out only made things worse. Where there was (terrible) order there is now nothing but (productive) chaos. How is this better?

But I know that is temporary, I will build myself anew. Build back better. Make use of all that freed up human capital. Harness the power of hope for once.

And when all else fails, I will deploy my secret weapon: raging egotism!

Fuck you, I’m awesome! And I am going to steamroll over all you weakass motherfuckers who try to get in my way.

I’m one of the most talented, intelligent, and quite frankly amazing people alive on planet Earth right now, and it’s high time for me to rise and shine like the magnificent coruscating life-giving magical star I am.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I thought I had it all figured out.

To get the initial blood sugar reading to calibrate my new stupid fucking blood sugar monitoring system (the one the province will pay for, Dexcom), I would just ask Doctor Caswell to take a reading while I was in her office today.

What could be simpler?

Yeah, turns out she doesn’t do that any more.

Seriously. My DIABETES SPECIALIST did not even have the equipment to take my blood sugar today. Apparently she stopped doing blood tests when Covid happened.

I am terribly disappointed in her. And I almost told her so but chickened out at the last minute because I’m a softie and she’s a sweetie and I didn’t want to be a meanie.

One of these days, though, someone is gonna get it. I am so tired of people fucking things up and doing me wrong. I am so much better than how I am treated and one of these days I’m going to say so, loudly and clearly.

And people are NOT going to like it.

So now I have to dig up my old school “please puncture the densest nerve clusters in your entire body” type glucometer and somehow convince it to give me one last reading before I can use the new one.

I am really missing the previous system right about now. The Libre whatsit. It was so much easier to deal with, with a vastly superior design and a ton more thought put into how everything would work together.

It just fucking works, more or less.

I told Doctor Caswell that I am getting so frustrated with the Dexcom setup that I am almost tempted to say hell with it, go back to the Libre, and pay the $200/month for the fucking sensors myself.

Don’t want to do that. That’s a lot of money,

But lordy am I tempted.

I also told Doctor Caswell about my muscle spasms, and she wants to check all possibly causes so she has ordered a blitz of tests on my blood.

No big deal, really. Just means they will need to take a LOT of blood. After that, I’m going to need a cookie.

And a transfusion.

But once the needle is in, taking eight tubes doesn’t hurt any more than taking two. And honestly, I really liked getting a whole fuckton of tests done.

Because I am not the most reliable of sources of information about my health. I try, but issues with things like not knowing what is normal or harmless and what is a warning of impending doom and having trouble voicing my needs and concerns get in the way.

Honestly, I wish we had medical tricorders already. Take my emotionally complicated self right out of the equation and just freaking scan me already.

“So, what does it show?”

“Nothing too surprising, besides that you are apparently .091 percent Tribble. ”

“On my mother’s side, yeah. Mumbled something about ‘what happens in space dock…’

“Well they are VERY cute…. and so soft….and warm….”

I’m so tired of being such a basket case.

Maybe I will even do something about it one day.

More after the break,

---

Now THIS is what I call fun

Got a guess what it might be? Think of it as you check this out :

In case you no watchy, it’s a video where a sexy guitar dude plays guitar riffs from famous songs so that you can try to identify the song they came from.

He plays the riff, gives you like 6 to 8 seconds to guess, then gives you the answer.

I freaking love it.

It’s like the perfect quiz for out of control music nerds like me. I have enormous vaults full of music stored in my head and it very rarely serves any purpose other than to make it a little annoying to listen to a classic rock station with me in the car.

Especially my fave station, Jack FM. Those people GET me, man. I can sing along with 90 percent of what they play.

Not sure what that says about me. Or them,

But who cares? I’ve been a GenX music maven since I was a tiny child listening to my parents’ records and getting tested on all that knowledge and getting to use my amazing “name that tune” abilities makes me so happy.

Of course, I totally kick ass at it. That always helps.

---

I’ll MAKE you work, god damn it!

I’ve found a potential workaround for my Dexcom issues.

Turns out you can tell the reader to stop the connection with the existing sensor and then apply a new sensor and sync the reader to IT.

That SHOULD work, although it will mean I ruined TWO sensors trying to get the god damned thing to work. And that is going to bug me for quite a while.

I’m so hard on myself!

Of course, if I have learned anything on this epic journey, it’s that what SHOULD work may not work in the slightest.

You might, random example, find your diabetes doctor can’t test your blood sugar.

Did not see that one coming. Life continually invents new ways to disappoint me.

I can never catch up.

Anyhow, I will give this new method a try. Hopefully it will work. I have the “sensor code” for the new sensor right here and in theory, I should be good to go.

But I am not getting my hopes up. At this point, it would not surprise me if just before it was going to properly activate, naked ninjas burst into the room and started pistol whipping the reader with their tits and dicks.

I’d just shrug and do one of these :

And then I would Google “naked ninja attack dexcom” and see what the internet said to do about them.

I dunno, maybe there’s a patch or something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

By my admittedly atypical standards anyhow.

First I had Wound Care. Cab there, cab back. Julian was busy dogwalking.

No big deal. Cabbies were very nice fellows. One of them was more or less Your East Indian Buddy’s Dad straight from central casting.

Big bear of a dude, too. So kinda hot in a DILF way. He had to be at least 6’5″ and 300 lbs and none of that was fat.

So a football player, essentially. But he’s probably only played soccer and cricket. Pity.

Wound Care went well. My nurse was Joy again. I like her. She is cheerful and competent and has a great smile.

There was some talk about getting one of the wound care nurses to “shave” the big honking callous on my right foot. I assume that means “pared away”, like that podiatrist did that once.

Works for me. I thought I would have to pay the podiatrist another $80 to get that done. Hopefully the nurses have some ideas on how to make sure the damned thing doesn’t just come back again.

Sadly, the Wound Care specialist nurse was on a home visit when Nurse Joy (!) called her today, so no getting my hoof trimmed for me today.

Joy put in a referral, though, and assured me that this meant that Janice the Wound Care Nurse would be there for my next appointment on Tuesday the 12th,

Groovy. It felt great when the podiatrist did it. Really feels amazing to have all that excess flesh carved away. MY foot gets lighter and the skin under the callous finally gets to breathe and suddenly I can stand flat on the floor again.

The area under the callous WILL be tender though. So I will be ready for that I will bring an extra pair of socks or two in case I need extra padding.

Got a big smile from Meagan in reception on the way in. So I gave her one on the way out. I’m beginning to think she fancies me.

That could get…. complicated.

Dear Emily Post : What’s the gentlest way to let a girl who might be into me know that I am gay and therefore the relationship can only go so far?

The thing is, I am biromantic. I can easily see myself falling deeply in love with a woman. For me, love is far more about the spirit and the soul than it is about the relatively boring physical hardware.

But physically, sex ain’t gonna happen. It pains me to admit it but I don’t do vaginas. They are nice and all but I don’t want to get to know them personally, know what I mean? I’m fine with remaining friends.

After Wound Care, I cabbed home in time for therapy with Doctor Costin.

He thinks I should go looking for a relationship. Not a totally crazy idea. Having someone to share my life and my days could do wonders for my stability and my self esteem as well as my sexuality.

Then again, maybe it is inhumane to drag anyone into the malevolent miasmic maelstrom that is my life.

But if it gets me closer to sanity, I can live with that.

More after the break.

---

It’s a jungle in here

To the tune of :

Woke up half an hour ish ago, at 8 pm feeling absolutely wretched.

Overheated. Nauseous, dizzy, and confused. And with a dark red pain throbbing in my temples and make every form of stimuli hurt.

Ain’t life a peach.

I figure it was mostly dehydration. I often overheat in my sleep and sometimes that means I sweat out all my reserves of hydration and wake up in a terrible state.

Like Utah. Or Mississippi.

And the thing is, I needed to blog n’ eat. And I really didn’t feel like doing either.

But I pulled myself together, made dinner, sat down and got some food and Diet Coke into me, and now I feel almost 70 percent human, and rising.

It will have to do.

Talked with Doctor Costin about the evil little voice in my head that looks at my mounting health problems and says “Shouldn’t you get off this train before it crashes?”

And maybe I should. Heck, maybe I will some day, when the health problems get so bad that there doesn’t seem like there is anything but increasing debility, decreasing mobility and dignity, and a futile and ignoble death in my future,.

So some day I may opt for what they are now calling MAID – Medically Assisted Induced Death. What we used to call “assisted suicide” back in the days when Doctor Kevorkian was dominating the news.

But that’s a long way off, hopefully. I can still have a lot of fun with this life of mine.

Who knows, when death gets so close to me I can feel its breath on the back of my neck, it might actually snap my out of my semi-comatose state and finally galvanize me into doing all the things I meant to do with my life.

It’s closing time, people. Drink up, hook up, and go the fuck home.

Doctor Costin is frustrated with my lack of progress, and I can hardly blame him. He’s been treating me for a decade now and the progress more or less stopped when VFS ended so badly and then the Daily Uno job ended and I got sucked into the Skyrim hole.

And never really made it out again. The games change but the addiction stays the same. I still spend most of my time hiding from the world in video games.

And that leaves precious little time or energy for anything like progress.

Instead, my life stays in a kind of walking stasis. A holding pattern, a feedback loop, a kind of standing wave of failure.

I have all this power and intelligence and talent and yet I am too sick in the soul to use it all to improve my life.

There’s got to be some way to get out of this trap.

Maybe I will run away from home after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been having muscle spasms.

No more denial. No more “oops, I guess I’m just extra clumsy lately, ha ha”. No more ifs, ands, or maybes. No more self-distracting bullshit.

“Gee, it kinda seems like my leg is on fire…. oh look, a pony!”.

The denial ended when I clearly caught myself doing it. I was standing in the living room talking to Joe with a cold drink in my hand when my wrist twitched and I had to catch the drink midair or it would have splashed onto the floor.

Subjectively, it felt like the thing jumped out of my hand. But not being someone who believes in poltergeists, I was forced to face the truth.

And lots of other things like that have been happening. That was just the clearest example. I’ve been dropping things, knocking things off flat surfaces, nearly falling when my knee or ankle buckles, and so on.

This is bad.

And it definitely now tops my list of things I really should be telling people about.

You know. Medical people. The sorts of people who know about medical things and what they can do about them with their medicine.

Luckily, I have an appointment with Doctor Caswell in a couple of days on Friday, and I can tell her all about it.

Technically, she’s not a neurologist, but she’s an expert in diabetes and these neurological symptoms are almost guaranteed to be diabetic in origin, and that makes her a good place to start.

Glad I already had this appointment set up, to be honest. That bypasses the whole issue with my having to decide to do something about it, which patient readers know is a very big problem for me.

This way I can just talk to her about it without having to make any decisions.

I will also take my new glucometer with me so she can get my blood sugar reading the old fashioned way (the pokey ouchy way :() and we can calibrate the motherfucking thing and finally get me back to active monitoring again.

Nothing is ever simple. |
Nothing is ever easy.
And nothing ever just fucking works.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Also probably neurological in origin is this pain I got in my upper right leg yesterday. Came out of nowhere and hung around for hours, In fact it’s still there, but way way less intense than before.

It feels like a cramp, but one deep in the muscle. Occupies a roughly rod shaped area, and for a while hurt enough to make me wince and cry out in pain whenever it pulsed.

It also burns a tiny bit. Makes me worry it’s lactic acid buildup again.

So to sum up, still dying. Everything is breaking down and it won’t be long before I am in hospital hell, strapped to the bed to keep me from pulling out all my tubes and living my worst nightmare every second of the day till the day I finally, blissfully die.

So what else is new?

More after the break,

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Hiding in the hustle

I’ve been dodging the blues all day.

I do this all the time. It comes naturally to me. I’ve never given it a second thought.

Until tonight. Tonight, I am asking myself why and how I do it, and if I should stop.

At first, the why is obvious : because who wants to be sad? Sadness is a negative emotion. It feels bad. It’s the sort of emotion we o our best to avoid.

And of course, being a depressive…. er, being a person with depression, that is (I am no my illness) , my “blues” include a lot more than mere melancholy.

There’s depression, and despair, and self-loathing, and malaise, and of course good old suicidal ideation, and many more horrors of the chemically depleted mind.

So who wants to deal with all that? Why not put it off as long as you can?

Well nobody likes paying their bills either, but they do it because they know things only get worse when you refuse to deal with them.

Similarly, as unpleasant as depression’s emotions can be, they do serve a function. They are the mind’s attempts to work through emotional conflicts and thus heal itself, and you are better off letting it.

Instead, we plunge headlong from one distracting activity to the next in order to stay too busy for our minds to get around to dealing with its emotions.

That’s how it is for me. The depression really only hits when I am between tasks. I will finish a session of Fallout 76 or blogging and have a few seconds to myself and that’s when that ol’ black cloud engulfs me, so I plunge into the next thing like a rabbit bolting for its hole when it hears a predator.

This is, by the way, why so many people find their depression is worst at night, when they are trying to sleep.

That’s the only time in their whole day when their bodies and minds are free enough to start working on those dark emotions. That’s when their black clouds engulf them.

But you can’t keep running forever. At some point, you have to stop and deal with the barking baying black hounds of your depression, and if you don’t do it voluntarily, eventually it will happen whether you want it to or not.

And that will be far, far worse than dealing with it now.

So I am going to do my best to let my blackness catch up to me. It can eat me alive if that’s what it will take to end the chase.

Take me. Take me now. Take me apart. Take me wherever you need me to go and tell me all the things you have wanted me to hear for so long.

I am yours, demon. Do with me what thou wilt.

But this shit ends NOW.

I will talk to your nice people again tomorrow.

That about describes my mood right now.

I feel tense and irritable and restless. My head hurts and my muscles ache and my joints feel like they are rusting shut. I have that “trapped” feeling like I’m a horny zoo animal who smells a female but can’t get to that sweet, sweet animal pussy.

Or cock, in my case. What I’m saying is that I am also horny AF.

I have the strong urge to growl at someone. Or get into some kind of knock down rag out physical fight. I want to hit and get hit until all my pent up rage and aggression is spent and I can go back to feeling human again.

I wish I was physically healthy enough to solve this problem with exercise. I could get one heck of a workout done with mad energies like these. And it would feel good because it feels good to discharge tension like that.

Which reminds me : have you noticed that amongst all the myriad ways people suggest trying to “fight the obesity epidemic”, nobody suggests making exercise hurt less?

Seriously. Have you ever heard anyone mention anything even remotely along those lines? Reduce the pain and exercise becomes way more popular.

But nobody even thinks about that because we all tacitly accept that fat people eserve to suffer for the crime of being gross to look at and only through a massive sacrifice of blood and pain can we redeem ourselves.

But think about it. Nature plays a cruel trick on us because the more you desperately need exercise, the more it hurts when you give it a shot.

And pain is nature’s way of saying “don’t do that!”.

Well-meaning people (and smarmy assholes) have no idea what they are asking for when they ask us to “just start exercising”. They are imagining what it is like when they, a relatively healthy person, exercising, and it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

But it will hurt us a hell of a lot more than it would hurt them. And it’s easy to tell us that it will be “worth it” but when is the last time most people voluntarily did anything that hurts that much and kept doing it for long enough to get the benefits?

Plus a lot of us have never been healthy and strong and thin, so we have no source of lived experience to draw upon for inspiration. No glory days to return to.

All of this could be solved if we simply made exercise less painful. Whether it’s pill, a special kind of exercise machine, new techniques, or whatever. Reduce the pain and strain and you will save a lot of lives.

But I bet people would accuse you of “cheating”. Better health outcomes be damned, we want to keep our sense of smug superiority to fat people and we don’t care how many of them die as a result!

Not that I am bitter or anything.

God damn do I need an outlet.

More after the break.

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The struggle is real

The struggle to get my new glucose meter working, that is.

I will try to stick to the highlights of my saga because a blow by blow would take forever to write and I am not in the mood.

So I got the “receiver” (reader) in the mail. Boffo. Now I can get my blood sugar readings again, and after only two weeks of bullshit!

So I got the reader out of the box and dug out the rest of the stuff that doesn’t work without the reader and therefore has been sitting and waiting for the reader to arrive.

In short : reader.

Instructions say boot up the reader and follow instructions. The instructions are sketchy and leave out a lot of stuff, but I am both clever and stubborn and thus only ruin one sensor in process of figuring shit out.

My bad entirely. Did not think to take the paper backing off the sticky part of the sensor. So sensor parted from applicator without actually sticking to me. Annoyed grunt!

So then after some futzing around and realizing I also fucked up my transmitter (which is technically separate from the sensor) and freaking out a while then finding the OTHER transmitter (thank Dog for redundancies), I finally got the sensor applied and could resume syncing up the reader, transmitter, and sensor and get going at last.

Or so I thought.

See, during reader setup, right after it had me apply the sensor and click the transmitter into it, I had been asked for a “sensor code” in order to properly calibrate the reader.

I couldn’t find it. The reader showed where on the sensor to find it, but it wasn’t there.

Then I realized : it must have been on the paper backing that I had to take off just to be able to apply the sensor!!!

In other words, I would have to have removed the paper with the code on it to get to the step where I needed the code!

Of all the Kafka-esque stupid fucking badly designed pieces of crap..

Oh but wait. It gets worse.

I had no choice but to skip the part where I enter the code. The reader told me it was optional, so no big deal, right?

Then it tells me it now has to “warm up” for two fucking hours before I can use it.

Two freaking hours? Crystal radio sets didn’t even take that long. What on Earth takes two entire hours to warm up these days?

Then when that process is finally done, what does the reader for my glucose monitoring system do to me?

It asks ME what my blood glucose reading is!

That’s YOUR fucking job! YOU tell ME!

So apparently that sensor code thing is only optional if you have another glucometer that actually works to give you the reading to use to calibrate the new one.

In which case, why do I fucking need the new one???

So I am officially at the end of my rope. I am giving up on the whole thing for now. Tomorrow I will look for a toll free number I can call so I can yell at somebody for what a freaking clusterfuck this thing is.

I may end up having to remove my current sensor and apply a THIRD one. And that assumes I figure out how to separate the transmitter from the current sensor so I can use it in the new one.

What a bloody palaver.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. We’re talking social reward again.

To recap : social reward is what I call all the ways in which we reward one another – or ourselves – that provides an emotional rather than physical reward.

That sounds complicated (sorry) but it really isn’t. It’s something we have all seen and experienced without having a word for it.

An easy example would be doing a favour for an attractive member of our preferred gender and being rewarded with a beautiful smile. Or with a sincere “thank you”.

Or it might be a few words of praise from a respected mentor. Or a big loving hug from a child whose wound you just kissed better. Or a quick kiss of thanks from your mate.

In fact, once you are aware of social reward, you will see that it’s all around us all the time, and is, in fact, the base currency of all social interactions and indeed, society as we know it.

The things we are physically and tangibly rewarded for are few. Everything else works on some form of social reward (or absence of social punishment).

Now I bring this up not to discuss it directly but instead to talk about people tend to react when I bring the subject up.

It tends to make people very uneasy and upset and the consensus seems to be that it makes people feel like someone is getting ripped off or victimized.

That’s flatly illogical, of course. Basic transactional capitalism says that if a reward is sufficient to motivate a behaviour, it must be enough for the person motivated and therefore nobody is being short-changed in any way.

Looked at scientifically, these rewards activate the reward center of the brain just like more traditional rewards.

Heck, Pavlov could have explained it.

And yet, this subject makes people upset in the manner described above. But why?

It must challenge some fundamental tenet of consumer capitalist society that runs so deep we’re not aware of it.

Somehow, the idea of considering something as ephemeral and intangible as a smile or a pat on the shoulder to be a reward sets off serious alarm bells in our heads.

To our very literal and quantitative capitalist minds, the only possible explanation for these alarm bells is that the rewarder must be getting something “for free”, and is therefore somehow taking advantage of the rewardee.

Perhaps it is an issue with zero sum thinking. The smile didn’t cost the person anything, therefore nothing of value could have been exchanged in the transaction.

Neither did the rewardee gain anything tangible. The pleasure and feeling of reward is real but quickly fades, so how can it be something good?

Then again, the same could be said of an orgasm, and people work pretty hard for those. It’s true of any pleasure, really.

There is definitely something about the subject that makes all kinds of craziness come crawling out of the depths of the consumer capitalist zeitgeist.

Now I want to have some kind of round table discussion of it so I can pick other people’s brains on the subject.

More after the break.

It really doesn’t

While we’re talking about one thing that makes the ghouls and goblins of consumer capitalism rise from their graves like Night On Bald Mountain from Fantasia…

..let’s talk about another one, namely whether money can buy happiness or not.

Like I said long ago, there is a fascinating dichotomy between how people react to the idea in abstract and how they react to idea when it is applied to them personally.

Most people would agree that money does not necessarily buy happiness. Sure, that guy who makes ten times what you do might be happier than you.

But ten times happier? Really?

And most people get, at least somewhat, that the important things in life are things like family, friends, the respect of your peers, and so forth – all things money cannot buy.

And science backs this up. The studies all show that above a certain income or asset level, diminishing returns set in and the amount by which a given quantity of extra income or assets with increase individual happiness drops off rapidly.

And this is self-reported happiness. People can lie to make themselves feel prosperous and successful all they want. And it still drops off.

Because there is only so happy anyone can be. Max that out and a billion dollar paycheck won’t change a damned thing.

So far, in the cocktail party in my head, everyone is agreeing with my broad points and feels better about their own relative lack of dough.

Obviously, it is now time to alienate people by asking them if they think more money would make them happy.

Suddenly a switch is flipped and people become doggedly adamant that while money might not make other people happy, it would make them utterly blissful.

It’s as though we are afraid that if we say money won’t buy US happiness, some angel of Providence will hear us and say “Well, I was ABOUT to give you a huge bag of money, but I guess you don’t need it, so…. forget it. ”

This is pure superstition, obviously, and reveals just how social a species we are. We relate to everything as if it’s a person – even the random hand of Fate.

And I am in no way claiming to be immune. I feel the same deep superstitious fear at the idea of saying that I don’t think more money would make me happier that everyboy else does. It is a deep and powerful feeling.

The same thing happens when you introduce the idea of saying you have “enough”. Even very well off people will balk at the idea of declaring they have “enough”.

Again, what are we afraid will happen? And does consumer capitalism keep us in such a state of spiritual starvation that the prospect, however irrational. of not getting “more” fills us with the same fear that cavemen felt during an eclipse?

Money is our one true religion and we are so afraid of offending it that we let its priest class of accountants, bankers, and heaven help us economists run the world.

Oh no, we can’t make the money angry! Here, decide the fate of trillions of dollars based solely on naked self-interest and half-baked economic theories that would get you laughed out of a Philosophy 101 class.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yeah I definitely have a chest cold or infection of some sort.

I first realized something was up when the trip from the car up the elevator and down the hall to the Community Care Center for my Wound Care left me feeling really tired and dizzy and just plain off.

And worst of all, little dangerous twinges of that “heartburn” feeling, but just a little sharper and more distinct than usual.

It was worse after the appointment, on the trip back down. Now my head was throbbing with pain as well and I felt faint and I was wobbling up and down as I walked in a way suggesting I was losing strength in my legs so my “shock absorbers” weren’t getting the job done any more.

So I lay down the moment I got back. Slept a little. Got up and played Fallout 76 for 45 minutes or so but I was still too tired to really concentrate so I was playing poorly. My head was still throbbing painfully too, and that didn’t help.

So I went back to sleep around 2 pm, despite that being when I should have been eating lunch. Yet another time sleeping when I am suppose to eat.

This shit’s got to stop. I’m losing what little control over my life I have.

When I woke up again around 3:30 pm, it was very clear I had some kind of infection. My nose was running and my head hurt and my lungs felt heavy and scratchy and gross and I have that overall feeling of malaise that always means I have an infection.

Just fucking lovely.

So I guess I won’t be going out to Denny’s tonight. I really want to, but I can’t afford to take risks with this kind of situation.

I REALLY don’t want to end up with pneumonia again. Might not recover from it this time because I am so damned weak.

That means I have to order my groceries online, which is a pain.

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And I just did it. The “previous orders” function on the Sav-On website is very handy. Most people get mostly the same things every week, so it saves a lot of time.

Got the usual 3 pm to 5 pm delivery slot. Delivery is $10. Reasonable for what I am getting. Having a human being lug my order out to their car and then up to my apartment should not be cheap.

There’s an option for only $5, but then the delivery window is basically “daytime” and fuck that shit.

Really gonna miss my Denny’s time. It’s always the highlight of my week. There is nothing like the basic human ritual of eating a meal you didn’t cook with friends.

It essentially translates to “feasting” in our primate brains and you only feast when things are going well so it makes you feel good.

That came out colder than I intended.

I swear, I don’t mean to be all robotic about stuff sometimes. It’s just how I think.

That’s a conversation for another time, though.

More after the break.

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I thought this was great :

Heartwarming, funny, and adorable. What more could you ask for? Brilliant concept, too. A+ all the way,

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Uncle’s Snack Box!

Couldn’t think of what I wanted to order for tonight’s dinner. Nothing I could think of appealed to me. Guess I was in the mood to explore.

So I clicked around some on DoorDash and decided to check out the “One Dollar Sign” menu featuring places with meals under ten dollars.

More like fifteen, to be honest, but whatever. Places willing to self-identify as cheap, which is rare these days when even McDonald’s pretends to be upscale.

Oh right, me and my hip, ambitious, stylish friends often share gossip and witty banter around a bottle of Chablis and a McRib.

Anyhow. that’s how I ended up on the menu for Uncle’s Snackshop. It’s basically a fried chicken place with a somewhat Asian flair to it.

It’s possible that it’s exactly like fried chicken places in China, or Hong Kong.

I ordered the “One Flavour Boneless Box!”. Gotta love that enthusiasm.

It’s so perky!

I was originally going to get the “Two Flavour Boneless Box!” but they only had one flavour I felt self ordering, “Original with Honey Mustard”.

The others were things like “Uncle’s Hot Sauce” and “Sichuan Chili Salt” and those sounded very dangerous to my palate and digestion.

I hate the wimpification of my palate.

Weirdness : the order arrived in less than ten minutes. What the heck? To be honest, I was not psychologically ready for it yet.

So my order arrives, and there’s my can of Diet Coke. Check. Tater tots, check. Little generic Western salad, check. A shocking large amount of deep fried chicken….um… lumps? Chunks? Irregular solids undefinable by human calculus?

Pieces. We’ll call them chicken pieces. But not pieces of a chicken.

At least, not as we define chickens on Earth.

And then there is an assortment of deep fried…..something.

Totally unidentifiable. I tried a few and still had no idea what I had eaten. I had to go back to the website to find out WTF it was.

And by process of elimination, I deduced it must be the “Vietnamese pickles ” mentioned in the description.

Everything else was accounted for. So pickles it was.

They have a very odd idea of what a pickle is in Vietnam, apparently, I suppose there might be some pickle somewhere in the deep fried batter but if so, I cannot detect it.

Anyhow, it’s a jeezly huge amount of food for $15. It’s going to easily be two meals for me and I’m a giant tubbolard fat dude.

One little quibble : salad is pretty flavourless. I mean yeah, it’s iceberg lettuce, but that usually has at least a little flavour.

So bring your own dressing if you want to eat the salad.

The chicken…. things are quite good, though. Nicely crunchy, with enough spice in the batter to make it interesting (unlike Fighter Chicken, which makes me shudder just thinking about it) and a nice “golden brown” base to the flavour.

The tater tots are tater tots, and therefore awesome. The “pickles” are basically just fried chunks of the batter from the chicken, and are okay I guess but whatever.

So I would give this place three out of five stars. Pretty decent but not amazing.

One final note : there are a lot of Asian-ish snack shops around here with Uncle in their name. Uncle’s Snacks, Uncle’s Treats, and so on.

This implies something about Asian uncles, but I am not sure what.

That they bring kids cheap, terrible, delicious food?

Works for me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.