Feeling cranky today. Irritable. Restless.

While ironically wanting to do nothing BUT rest.

Heh heh. Butt rest.

I have this burning ache all through my muscles that suggests something inflammatory is going on. My teeth ache and my sinuses throb. I feel like every bone in my body is grinding against the ones next to it.

And it all makes me want to scream and stomp and break things like the Hulk.

Cranky Fru smash!

It doesn’t help that my therapy session got canceled today. Doctor Costin’s wife is still in a lot of medical distress and he needed to get her to an x-ray appointment and had no idea how long that would take and so…. etcetera, etcetera, and so on.

So he had call me and cancel. I raised no objections. He’s got enough problems in his life right now without me bitching and being difficult.

Plus because he called around an hour and a half before our appointment, he caught me in the pre-appointment anxiety and dread phase where the upcoming need to focus and think about what I want to talk about and so on is filling me with trepidation and I am fighting my weekly fight against the urge to run run run away like a rabbit with it ass on fire in the first place.

So I was not in the mood to object, really, much to my shame.

Now that it’s all over, I kinda wish I had put up at least a token level of resistance. Enough to feel like I made the world aware that something of value was being taken from me and that was like… bad. Or something.

I dunno, I am still new to this whole asserting my needs and desires thing. I usually just agree to whatever and adapt. It’s how I was raised.

It took finding out that my heart had three serious obstructions that might kill me at any moment to get me to assert myself with the cardiologists.

And even then, it took more than half a year. Mostly because my timidity made it take months for me to work up the nerve to call again.

Maybe I should learn to pretend I am someone worth saving, I dunno.

That’s hard to do when your default coping mechanism is to withdraw. Like a turtle. Sticking around and sticking up for myself is not something I have done much because deep down all I want to do is go back into my shell.

Giving in and giving up on myself is the fastest way to get there.

It’s different if there is a clear oppositional situation. If someone attacks me, then it’s on, motherfuckers, and I will fight like the wounded beast I am.

But that doesn’t happen much in my life. Most people are savvy enough beasts themselves to sense that tangling with me is a very bad idea.

So they give me a wide berth.

It’s not my fault I’m the biggest and the strongest. I don’t even exercise.

That and the fact that at least on line I come across as cute and harmless, so how would I ever find myself in conflict?

Once more I wonder if I would be better off being an arrogant, smug asshole.

Probably not. But it soothes me to think about it sometimes.

More after the break.

---

I suppose I should mention…

…that I’ve been really depressed lately.

It is a factoid that suddenly strikes me as noteworthy.

I tend not to notice or mention when things get bad because my attitude tends to be that I am in this for the long haul and the more attention I pay to my mood, the harder it is for me to jut keep going like I always do.

If that makes any sense.

But that’s no healthy way to cope with my issues. I can see that now. These things only get worse over time when you ignore them. Things grow strange in the dark, after all, and demons grow stronger and develop new powers when neglected.

Eventually they end up running the whole show and your conscious mind is helpless against the forces of evil so thoughtfully given room to grow and expand under the cover of your deliberate ignorance.

Face them or surrender to them. There’s no third option.

It shames me to think of how little of reality I can face and handle. I don’t think of myself as that kind of person, and yet here I am, in full retreat, unable to face the smallest of truths and hiding from reality in the deepest folds of my over-complicated mind.

I see so much and can handle so little. It’s almost funny.

One of my strongest instincts is to hide behind others. To attract and use other people as part of the wall between me and reality.

Shit shit shit…. I have a tight feeling in my chest and my left hand is REALLY asleep.

And now the left side of my face is numb.

I’mma call 911 now.

This could be it. I’ve really fucked up now. All that self-neglect is coming home to roost.

Too bad I was too crazy to have a choice,

Ambulance is on the way. It’s in their hands now.

Further bulletins as events warrant,

---

They don’t know and they don’t care

Well I didn’t die.

But once more, I went to the ER with something that seemed very serious. lay there liked a good little patient waiting to find out WTF was wrong, and left without them even answering the question.

At least this time, when the ER doc was all, “Good news, you can go home!”, I stood up for myself and said “But what HAPPENED??”

I mean, I went to the ER with the classic “numbness on the left side” symptom of a heart attack or stroke. That seemed kind of important to me.

But once more. my symptoms and indications didn’t match any of the usual things, therefore it didn’t matter what it was, it couldn’t have been important.

At least I got the ER doc to tell me that there was no indication of heart attack or stroke, both of which are rampant in my family’s medical history.

But it pisses me off that they don’t want to know what ACTUALLY happened.

It’s like your car burst into flame one day, and after putting it out you take it to the mechanic, and ask him what happened. And he say, “Oh I don’t know. But i know it wasn’t arson and it’s not on fire NOW, so…. problem solved! Bye!”.

So i am going to call Doc Chao and bitch to HIM about it.

Because I’m the person is happened to, and it was scary AF, and I kind of want to know what happened and whether it’s going to happen again and if next time it will kill me.

Maybe the problem is that I remain so calm and in control in these situations.

I can’t help it. I have the Larry Bertrand Emergency Emotional Override Circuit which cuts in and keeps me cool in emergency situations because that’s how I deal with shit.

Panic never helps.

But perhaps that makes it seem like it’s no big deal to ER personnel too.

Next time I’m going to lose my shit like a cracked out weasel and see how that goes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s some more, slightly deeper things wrong with my life.

This life is humiliating. I have nothing to be proud of and a lot of things I have to work hard to avoid being ashamed of. I have no accomplishments, no career, no relationships, no family, and nothing else to show for my time alive on planet Earth.

Except some video games I have beaten. Whoop de fucking doo.

The worst is when someone asks me what I “do”.

Sweet fuck all, okay? I don’t do a god damned thing. I play video games and write a blog read by two (wonderful… love you both) people. That’s it.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and that’s my total output. A pittance. Better than nothing, but only proportionately. A fucking joke.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

This life is unsatisfying. I have nothing from which to derive any sense of accomplishment or success. Nothing to tell me that I am a good little human who is a contributing member of the collective and therefore deserves to live.

All I can do is tell myself that I am a relatively insignificant burden on society. People wouldn’t be all that much better off without me. Taking me off the disability rolls would barely improve the books.

And I dunno. Some people seem to like having me around. Therefore I must be good for something, right?

Nothing I do truly satisfies me. I feel like a subsistence farmer, barely making it through the day, always hungry and never, ever full.

Only my malnutrition is of a strictly spiritual nature.

And I have been so very hungry for so long I don’t remember what it is like to actually have one’s needs met.

I can’t even remember what it’s like to not feel lonely.

No offense to my loved ones…. you are doing nothing wrong, and I love you so much.

I’m just lost on my own ice-cold lonely planet most of the time.

My life is also unrewarding. Both literally and metaphorically.

Literally in that I have no way to earn money, otherwise known as how society tells you that you did something that was worth something.

And the frustrating thing is that I know damn well I have a dozen Fort Knoxes worth of valuable job skills in this head of mine. I’m a fucking wizard after all.

But this mental illness of mine keeps me on a very, very short leash. I can’t go very far at all before it freezes me cold and hauls me back to my tiny little comfort zone.

And I am worth so much more than this!

It’s also unrewarding metaphorically, of course. Nothing in my life makes me feel like I have really done anything.

I live a distressingly frictionless life. No wonder nothing feels real. There’s no friction, no pushback, and no resistance.

Just me forever flailing helplessly on the smooth slick ice that coats my heart.

More after the break.

---

A quick observation

The previous section, completely randomly, ended up being exactly 500 words.

Such things please me.

Now to write the rest.

---

Another dark resurfacing

Just^[1] woke up from more bad sleep.

Went pretty deep this time. It’s a wonder I didn’t get “the bends”.

Or did I?

Woke up drowning in my own sweat like usual. Took me a while to even form a coherent mental state, let alone have any idea what planet I was on.

And because I went to sleep when it was light and woke up when it was dark, I had no idea where I was in time either.

Or do I mean WHEN I was, hmmm?

No. No I do not. Also, shut up.

I looked at the clock and it said 9:36 so I concluding it was morning.

Eventually something seemed wrong about that, so I move the clock so I could see if it said AM or PM.

Sure enough. it said PM. It was evening, not morning. With that vital datum, reality snapped into place with a painfully intense CLICK.

Oh right. The real world. I’d forgotten all about it.

Glad to know it’s still here.

---

I suppose most people don’t experience the sorts of extreme mental states that I do on a daily basis.

Between the depression, the sleep apnea, and the fluctuations in my blood sugar, the bus that is my so-called life makes a lot of weird stops along its daily route.

Perhaps the imaginary disapproving public in my head would go a little easier on me if they knew just how much mere survival takes out of me.

Depression is like living life with the parking brake on, I always say.

But nah. Those guys are dicks. They LIKE hating me and making me hate myself. They’re not going to let anything as lame as empathy and understanding get in the way of all that fun.

Gah. 167 words to go. That seems like forever away.

All I really want to do is go back to sleep. But it’s too close to midnight and watching Colbert with J and J for that.

I might not have much choice in the matter, though. I’ve put like half a liter of Diet Coke into me since waking up and it hasn’t made me any less sleepy.

Caffeine never fucking works right for me, dammit.

Today’s been the usual (haha) “snoozefest”. Didn’t do jack shit except blog, eat, poop, and sleep. Not necessarily in that order.

Yay for bare existence. Congrats, you didn’t die yet. Yaaaaay.

I still have his deep dark paralysis weighing on my soul and smooshing me into the ground like a battleship on my chest.

Well, let’s not exaggerate. A cruiser at most.

But some day soon I’m gonna shift this shit and find out what it means to rise.

No more excuses. Stand up and fight.

And heaven help whatever gets in my fucking way,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve gotten impersonally and perfunctorily fucked by life in many ways.

As have we all, really.

But every now and then, it behooves us to count our blessings and at the same time acknowledge our privileges and all the problems we are fortunate enough to NOT have.

Because that’s what privilege is, when you boil it down. Not a source of universal bliss or a badge of superiority.

Just a set of problems you don’t have.

And so today I am going to state, claim, and own my various levels of privilege in order to make a true moral/social accounting of myself and acknowledge that despite my frequent bouts of self-pity and self-criticism, I have a lot to be grateful for too.

Let’s start with the obvious things.

I’m white. That comes with enormous advantages, especially when compared with the alternative, which in my case is not being black but being Micmac.

I won’t got into it because it breaks my heart to think about it, but let’s say I never saw racism as an exclusively American problem after I learned how some of my friends and neighbors – the people I think of as “my” people – treated PEI’s native peoples.

As far as I know, I have never faced any racial discrimination whatsoever.

I’m also male and have benefitted from that in thousands of ways both overt and subtle. I’ve gotten listened to, had my opinion respected and given worth, been allowed into the room, and so many other things where a woman would not have.

I wouldn’t say that I have never been discriminated against for being male. I definitely have and it has been, at times, extremely hurtful and unfair.

But there’s a galaxy of difference between assumed to be a dangerous Neanderthal and having your right to have an opinion questioned.

I’m also big. Huge. I’m an ox, basically.

And that has its disadvantages but they are nothing compared to the massive benefit of having almost never felt physically threatened by anyone.

It’s what turns people like me into gentle giants. Even when I was being bullied in elementary school I wasn’t physically afraid of my tormentors.

How could I be? They were all tiny.

So I have felt perfectly safe in situations where smaller men and (especially) women would have feared for their lives.

I have been able to make myself heard with little effort just from the sheer size of me.

And all my life, people have been getting out of my way without my even knowing.

We all know where this is going, and here we are : I’m also hella smart.

Like, crazy smart. Implausibly (and inconveniently) intelligent. So smart that most people can’t even conceive of how much smarter I am than them.

Which is for the best, to be honest. Cuts down on the torch wielding mobs.

And while that has caused me myriad problems most people will never face, it’s also made life way, way easier for me on the entire academic level.

Patient readers are familiar with the litany of truths I’m still struggling to wrap my head around, which is why I keep bringing them up.

School was always super easy. Laughably so. Never sweated a single test. Passed everything with high marks without even having to study. Scholastic things always came to me without effort.

All my life I have passed in first drafts and got top marks. Getting the approval of the system in terms of academic achievement has always come so easily to me that I never saw it as valuable.

And that means I utterly bypassed one of the major sources of worry and stress in the average childhood : school. When my fellow students sweated and strained and crammed and worried and all the rest, I sympathized but could not relate.

Even my sister Catherine, who is smarter than me in many ways, worried about tests and studied super hard and all the rest.

But not me. I show up not even remembering that there was a test that day and get 90 percent on the test anyway.

And that’s some serious privilege there.

More after the break.

---

So what’s wrong with this life?

No really. What is it?

Because something is definitely wrong. I am not happy with my life as it is. There is no chance I will come out of this concluding everything is A-OK and all my issues with my life were “all in my head”.

No duh. That’s why they call it MENTAL illness.

So why? What makes it suck so bad?

For starters, it’s so incredibly limited and/or limiting. I’m like a big fat rat in far too small a cage. My Avoidance is so extreme that it’s almost like being held prisoner.

Like being in minimum security prison but without the exciting social opportunities.

And I need room to stretch my wings and explore the world. But my fears have always kept me trapped at home.

And there’s so little for me to invest my enormous energies into. Strange as it may sound, there is only so much satisfaction one can get from video games.

Scandalous, I know.

I could have the ultimate gaming computer and an unlimited Steam budget and my life would still fucking suck.

Of course, we can’t totally dismiss the fact that I am physically sick and have a lot of pain, luckily none of it too inescapably acute. Yet.

And I feel so fucking helpless to do anything to help myself. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, with godlike mental powers, and none of them can help me at all.

Because it doesn’t matter how powerful the engine is if the transmission’s broke.

And finally, it’s an extremely lonely existence too. Even with all these people in it. Lots of people love me and care for me but so little of that love makes it through that thick wall of clear ice I am crouching behind.

And that’s how it’s going to be till I feel safe enough to let my guard down.

In short, there’s a very good reason I hate my life : it sucks.

And now, back to the studio, with Wally the Weather Weasel with our forecast.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m not as lazy as I think I am.

That one popped out of the primordial soup of my mind last night and I immediately jotted it down because I knew it was big.

I have thought of myself as a very lazy person for more or less my entire life.

And not always in a negative way. I was chatting with a coyote friend this morning when I realized there was a positive correlation between cleverness and laziness.

I think the more clever you are, the more pleasure you get from avoiding work and, of course, the more work you can avoid.

But I have also viewed my “laziness” as a damning character flaw, and that’s unfair, because I’m not really lazy.

Instead, I am :

1. Timid. Afraid of the world. Wracked with anxiety. Makes it hard to want to go out there and take on that world because I’m positive it would win. I have extremely little faith in my survival potential.
2. Sick. Both physically and mentally. My physical illnesses limits my physical energy and my mental illness fucks me over in dozens of ways. Including making me timid as in the above.
3. Poor. Admittedly, this is not as much of a limitation in the direct sense as it used to be. My disability payments went up, things are fairly cool. So it’s more a matter of not knowing what I want and therefore being defeated by all those god damned options out there.
4. Lost. I have been spiritually adrift so long that I no longer believe in land. I have no momentum, no direction, and no goals. All I see is shapes without form in fog without end, signifying nothing.
5. Uninspired. I am sure I would be a much more energetic and productive person if I had a source of inspiration to keep me fired up and excited about life. Instead, I languish in the doldrums trying to get a spark out of wet matches.
6. Disabled. With all that implies.

I don’t want to be like this. I want to be full of energy and enthusiasm and engagement. I want to look forward to tomorrow instead of just tepidly accepting its inevitability.

And I am slipping into panic more and more. Like something is hunting me. Haunting me. And when it GETS me, something terrible is going to happen.

But there’s nothing. Nothing but the ghosts inside my haunted head.

This panic must be coming from energies that trying to take form and be expressed but can’t make it yet so they end up just fizzling out as the waste heat of emotions, anxiety.

At least that’s what it is for me.

But no. This is not anxiety. This is ENERGY. This is POWER. This is the molten metal that I will forge into a bright and shiny exoskeleton for my soft and flabby soul.

And then I will power it with pure psychotic determination and wreak havoc unto this cruel and wanton world until someone gives me a goddamned hug,.

More after the break.

---

Rise from your grave

Woke up feeling extra wretched just now. So that’s fun.

I feel very very drained. And sleepy as all fuck. As in, I just woke up from a three hour nap and yet I feel even more tired than I did when I lay down.

No big surprise. Before that nap. I had barely slept at all in the previous 24 hours. One of my thankfully very rare bouts of insomnia, where it feels like I’ve lost connection to the sleep server because no matter how relaxed and comfy and quiet I get, I can’t actually fall asleep.

Thank goodness that ended. And much sooner than usual. In the past, that shit had dragged on for days.

This time, it was barely even 24 hours. So bravo for that, at least.

I also have a heavy, scratchy, sore chest AGAIN. The notion that I have been barely fighting a case of Covid to a standstill rears its ugly head again.

Or some other kind of chest bug. No need to immediately leap to the worst possible conclusion, which would be great news if I could keep myself from doing it.

Regardless, I keep having these periods of malaise and distress and pulmonary fuckery that never quiet turn into a case of anything in particular, and I should be worried.

I’m not, or at least not often and never for long. But I should.

I’m too sick to worry about how sick I am. I just don’t have the energy.

Working on it, though. I am determined to excavate my half-thawed carcass from the not so permafrost of my soul’s deep and dirty tundra, and get to a place where I can live happy and free in the golden warmth of my own sunshine.

Because if I can shine for the rest of the world. I can shine for myself.

Migosh but the words are coming hard right now. Like each one has to be surgically extracted without the benefit of Novocain.

I feel so very very sleeeeeeeept. Like I got cement bags on my eyelids and sash weights tied to ever joint and all I really want is to lay down in the dark and sleep.

Less than 100 words to go. I can do this.

All this Diet Pepsi (they were out of Diet Coke) isn’t helping it all.

Dunno if I will make it on time to the usual snacks and Colbert at midnight. It’s 10:04 pm already and I feel a major snooze coming on.

If I don’t make it, sorry Joe and Julius. I meant well.

But my body and brain clearly need this.

Last 25 words or so. The finish line is in sight. My fans are waiting there and my nipples are bleeding and it’s time for the big triumphant ending.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up with a terrible feeling of anxiety and dread.

Like there was a shadow of fear laying across my very soul. Like a specter is crawling over my future grave. Like a thousand tiny demons are using my spine as a staircase.

It’s kind of interesting, actually. Spooky. But interesting.

I suppose that’s intellectualization at work, using my amazing mind powers to flash freeze fear into fascination.

It’s probably the root cause of a hell of a lot of my problems, but I must admit, it works.

Then again, all the deadliest maladaptive coping mechanisms do. That is what makes them addictive. They do solve the problem. They just extract too high a price, leaving you worse off in the long run.

Recovery, therefore, requires learning better ones. Ones that get the job done without fucking over your best interests.

However that strikes me as the sort of task that is easy to conceive but nearly impossible to achieve via direct action.

It requires the very kind of deep emotional work that I don’t know how to do and thus must keep doing via the awkward and indirect route of writing about it every day.

And I find that fascinating.

---

The other side of the wall

This is gonna hurt. But it has to be done.

As patient readers know, when I was violated by a stranger’s cock as a toddler, a very thick wall went up between me and the world.

It was made of transparent ice so as to be invisible. After all, the best first defense is to seem undefended and therefore not a threat to anyone.

And to be brutally honest, you’re always safest when nobody notices you.

So yeah. A lot of people’s ignoring and neglecting me was the fault of my own personal cloaking field. Without knowing it, I worked hard to be invisible.

And while it cannot be denied that people “should” have been able to see through all that and cared for me anyhow – and trust me, I am not letting people off the hook for that – the truth is that people can only do so much, realistically speaking.

So they can’t take all the blame and neither can I.

But the wound I can’t stop picking at is the question of how much of my childhood loneliness was the result of being alone and how much was the result of that god damned wall keeping people out.

I know people tried to get close to me but my bizarre invisible defense systems shot them down pretty fast.

No overt rejection, of course. That would be too overt and aggressive and require actually valuing myself enough to defend myself.

Better to just block their attempts at connection in subtle ways that really fuck with their heads while still appearing to be friendly and receptive.

I’ve fucked over a lot of people like that, but in my defense, I didn’t know I was doing it.

Still, I feel bad for those people. They were trying to be nice and open the door for me.

Instead they got a cold wind from a strange place.

And the worst part is, I doubt I could do any better now.

Thank goodness I somehow wound up with friends anyhow.

More after the break.

---

Speech for an old man

Imagine your favorite crusty old grump (who swears a lot) delivering this :

“You’re sick of it? Well I’ll tell you what I’m pretty frickin’ sick of….

“I’m sick of politicians who talk me like I’m some kind of spongeheaded shit for brains who doesn’t know shit about shit.

God gave me a damned good brain and I use it all the time. If that doesn’t suit you, then you can go straight to hell with no return ticket, because I don’t care.

I’m sick of TV stars feeding me bullshit and telling it’s pumpkin frickin’ pie. Like I am too dumb to know the goddamned difference. Like being old means I forgot how to think.

Well listen up, you media megastars : I don’t care how much you got in the bank. I don’t care how many of your bullshit books you’ve sold. And I don’t care how many other morons you’ve conned into following you. Bullshit is bullshit and I am going to call it whenever I see it and I don’t give a shit if that hurts your precious feelings.

Man up and grow a pair or you’ll get sent back to the kiddie table where you belong.

I’m sick of people telling me something is wrong when one side does it but perfectly fine if the other side does it.

I was raised to believe that some things are just plain wrong no matter who does it or color T-shirt they wore to the convention. I’ve had it up to HERE with this moral relativist bullcrap and think it high time people like me rose up and fought for decency, morality. and moral goddamned standards.

And finally, I am really sick of seeing just the worst dregs of humanity, people of such low character they have to take their shoes off to brush their hair, getting ahead in politics because they say the right thing…. even those a common fool can tell they don’t even mean them.

Call me old fashioned but I still think that character counts. That whether or not someone is a good person or not makes a big difference in whether or not someone deserves to lead so much as a kindergarten parade. That you shouldn’t trust someone with political office if you wouldn’t even trust them to feed your goldfish.

People like me are fed up with all this horseshit and we are ready to strike back. We are going to spread out over the nation and show up at every political rally and other even ready to call foul on every bullshit statement and moronic promise this jackasses make until they finally learn that we are NOT idiots and we’re not going to take it any more!”

And the crowd goes wild.

I Will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something big is brewing in this storm-tossed soul of mine. And I think I know what it is, though I am almost afraid to admit it.

I think my mind might actually be trying to close the Wound.

To finally close the gaping wound I have had in my psyche since I was raped by a stranger when I was 4 years old.

I think that is why said Wound has been on my mind so much lately. I think the healing function of my mind has been trying to get a grip on the edges of the wound so it can then pull the whole thing together and stitch it back up.

If so, that’s.., kinda big.

But I feel like it’s coming. Already the Wound seems much more… finite. Limited. The sort of thing that can handled and fixed and cleaned up after.

Something that can. in fact, be OVER.

And that has whet my appetite for destruction. I have scented blood and now crave the blood of my enemy from the depths of my soul and will not be able to rest until his fields are burning as I roar a roar of victory most brutal.

Fuck you. Wound. Time for you to die, die, die. You have been crushing and smothering and blocking me for far too long and it is time for you to GO so I can fucking LIVE.

And when I have finally excised this malignancy and taken all my antimetastatics, and this toxic burden has been flushed from my system, and the real me will step up from that operating table and walk away from that sad pathetic shit forever.

Amen and pass the Paxil.

---

Did Wound Care this afternoon. Routine.

Got the Russian nurse I like. She has a combination of brisk efficiency and comforting demeanor that I find particularly appealing.

It’s like she both soothes me with niceness while also reassuring me of her competence, and that means a lot to someone like me,

I never claimed to be easy to please.

Was going to get my back X-Rays afterwards. I need them so that my doc can figure out if I have a bone problem or a muscle problem.

It feels like a bone problem and it’s not at all out of the question that it is. A lot of guys as out of shape as me get early-onset arthritis or something similar.

And there is a definite creaking sensation when the pain is bad.

But my gut tells me it’s going to be something muscular. Something about the clutching feeling of the pain and the way it radiates around my back seems like it’s following the neurology of muscle to me.

Sadly, for no sane reason, Brooke Radiology closes at 3 pm on Saturdays, and Wound Care was at 3, so we were too late.

Fuckers. Now I will have to make a specific trip.

The back pain varies in intensity. It’s not been as bad yet as it was before The Great Movement last week so…. here’s to keeping regular, I guess.

More after the break.

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No town called Happy

Happiness takes work. Effort. An input of energy.

And not just once, either. You have to keep doing it. In order to be happy you have to keep doing the things that make you happy.

And it says something about the deep and terrible decadence and spiritual malaise of our era how much this statement pisses people off.

I mean, think about what you are saying, people!

“I want to be happy, but not if it’s work. I would rather be miserable because it’s easier. I literally cannot imagine anything that requires a long term commitment of energy to be worth it. I’m too lazy to be bothered being happy. “

In what universe does that make sense? Roughly speaking, happiness should be worth whatever effort it takes you get it, because when you get it, you’ll be happy.

It’s logically impossible for it not to be worth it.

But no. You tell people that in order to get happy and stay happy they will have to keep working at it and they look at you like you just shit in their sippy cup.

It’s that “happily ever after” bullshit. People want to believe that there’s a town called Happy and once you get there, you’re happy forever. without any more work.

And that’s bad enough. But when they can’t find this nonexistent place, they declare a state of emergency and decide something must have gone terribly wrong.

Either they are a wretched failure for not having earned their bliss ticket from society or society is brutally broken for not having given it to them yet.

When in truth, everything is exactly how it’s always been : happiness is like a car motion, it takes a constant input of energy to keep going.

You don’t get to just push the car once and cruise all the way to Malibu.

Nothing is broken except maybe your idea of how the world works. The universe has not singled you out for punishment or reward.

In fact, strangely enough, it turns out the universe isn’t about you at all. At least, no moreso than it is about anyone else.

Frankly, the universe just that isn’t into you.

But our social fabric is so frayed that there are a hundred million people in the world stuck in lives they hate and possibly even contemplating ending it all because nobody ever told them that happiness is something you have to actively pursue.

They’re sitting there rotting away in the doldrums of life doing absolutely nothing to make themselves happy and yet wondering why they aren’t happy.

It’s like waiting for an Amazon package you never ordered.

“What, you have to actually order and pay for things to get them? Never mind, I would rather be miserable. Man, life sure is unfair!”

So make peace with the fact that life is work. Just like you have to shower every day to stay clean and fill your gas tank regularly to get to work and bank, happiness takes regular effort in order to maintain.

And that’s true for everybody,. not just you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Deep inside my heart lies a mummified child.

It sits facing the wall. using its vast yellowed bulk to blot out the world it is so stubbornly and desperately ignoring.

It emanates coldness and sadness in equal amount. Neither invite closeness. So unsurprisingly. the child sits all alone.

Very, very alone. Just about the loneliest child in the world, in fact.

After all, who could stand to be as cold and sad as that?

That kind of thing could drive a person crazy.

The other thing you need to know about this lone child is that he is frozen solid.

It’s not obvious at first because the ice is as clear as glass. Clearer.

In fact, a great deal of care seems to have been taken to make the ice as invisibly clear as possible. Warmly colored stickers try to make the child look friendly and approachable. He’s clearly desperate for a friend but lacks the social skills to get one.

So he remains alone in the core of my heart.

So very very alone.

So incredibly, incredibly cold.

And so very, very dead.

Or numb, at least. Asleep, but not like when you sleep at night.

Asleep like when your foot falls asleep. Cold. Numb. Tingly.

And feeling so very far away.

And making a lot of very short paragraphs.

Like this one.

I swear to god, I was going somewhere with all of this. I totally had a plan and a theme and everything and now it’s all gone.

Time for a mode switch.

---

What I was trying to wander towards was an examination of this terrible numbness inside me that keeps me down and is slowly killing me.

It can also be seen as The Wound depending on if it’s running hot or cold right now.

Most times it’s cold.

Problem is. I am too sleepy to make the coherent thought thing happen so instead of being all deep and therapeutic and introspective, I am goofy as fudge instead.

Oh well. Must travel on.

What I am probably getting at is that this pain in my heart (woops, hot now) dominates my being and it is hard to imagine overcoming it even theoretically.

So much of my being has been shaped by the need to get through life without aggravating The Wound, and that’s not easy.

No wonder I choose to simply stay out of life’s way. It might not be better but it’s a hell of a lot easier.

But I am so sick of being so very timid and fragile. Somehow I need to get stronger whatever it takes, even if it takes acquiring a guardian.

Because if you can’t do it yourself, what other choice do you have? If you can’t stand on your own, the only alternative is a crutch.

And I know I could do it. Find the right guy, cast my spell on him. make him mine.

But could I live with myself knowing why I was doing it?

What choice do I have, though? Barring a legit miracle, I am not going to be strong enough to make it on my own any time soon. Maybe ever.

It’s get a man or get a whole lot of money.

Not sure which one is easier.

But it’s probably not the money,

More after the break.

---

The galloping thuds

Well this half ain’t gonna be much better. I still feel like shit.

---

Did a stupid. Selected a nice healthy Caesar Salad to go with my White Spot chicken burger. Patted myself on the back for evading Big French Fry once again.

Then promptly forgot I’d done that and ordered gravy.

Well duh. Old habits die hard, I guess. That was $3.80 wasted.

I suppose I will use it eventually. Somehow. On toast, or as a veggie dip.

No, those both sound atrocious.

I’ll try giving it to Joe, then.

---

And now, the further adventures of a guy trying to figure out WTF he’s talking about.

It’s harder than you’d think.

What I might be trying to get at is that I don’t have the spiritual resources to cope with my life, or life in general.

I have a distinct deficit in the wherewithal department.

That’s why I always feel so thin and cold and weak and insubstantial, even though physically I’m a freaking ox.

And I can’t just will those resources into existence. It’s not just a matter of willpower or moxy (foxy) or wit. I can’t just decide they are there.

Something very real and non-imaginary is missing in me, and I do not know how to get it. I have no direct access to that part of my soul.

So I fall apart and stay apart. There’s nothing to hold me together except mental magnetism and sheer force of will, and those are very low grade solutions.

I need something better.

But I don’t even know what it would look like.

I am a very lost boy.

---

There’s so much more to life than all my shiny bright light and fancy tricks can reveal. I know and can do so much and yet what good is a bag full of miracles if the one trick that isn’t in there is making yourself happy?

I don’t even know how to feed and maintain a healthy spirit. I feel like I wander through the dunes beneath the waves searching for spiritual sustenance when nobody even bothered to teach me to eat.

Let alone where the food is.

In many ways, my life seems like a joke.

Here, have a huge heap of talent, intelligence, charisma, compassion, and natural leadership ability. Pretty cool, right?

Too bad we also gave you mental health issues that make it all USELESS! LOL!

Pretty good joke. eh?

Yeah. Trust me, I’ll be laughing all the way to the grave.

There has to be some way out of this bullshit little town of the mind. Some way I can get the wherewithal I need to get the hell out of here.

I want to be alive. Zombie Boy requires resurrection.

But I can’t do it by myself.

Anyone got the number of a really good cleric?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve said it before and I am saying it now :

For every butterfly that is born, a caterpillar dies.

And if your image of yourself is fixed at “caterpillar” and that can never ever change, you too will die. After all, you have only ever known life as a caterpillar, then to become a butterfly is to lose everything that you have ever known. Is that not death?

It’s also to have what you know about yourself change. The exact version of yourself currently alive will absolutely disappear from the face of the earth, never to be seen again, and is that not death?

No matter how you look at it, a caterpillar dies. And you’re that caterpillar. So you’re dead. You died. That’s just logic. Right?

Or is it?

After all, you weren’t always as you are now. You were an infant when you were born, and since then, you went through all the stages of childhood, and during no point of that process did you look like you do now.

Scientifically speaking, not a single cell of you that was there the day you were born is still here today. You have, in fact, had a complete change of damned near everything every seven years or so since the day you were born.

Not only that, your mind, heart, and soul have changed too. And not just since childhood either. Even as an adult, you’ve seen the way you look at things change over the years. Odds are, the person you were even as recently as five years ago wouldn’t even recognize the person who you are today.

And yet you’re still you. You’re the same person who has always answered to your name. You remember all those other stages of your life and all those moments you spent as someone a lot different than who you are now. And yet, you’re still you.

Clearly, then, there is something about you that remains the same even though seemingly everything about you changes.

Something that we call “you”. Something that WAS a caterpillar that BECOMES a butterfly.

You even know, if you think about it (and you try not to, because it’s weird), that you will be different in the future too. You’ll get older and slower and hopefully wiser. You’ll see everyone you know change too. Spouses, kids, friends, relatives, even the famous people you see on TV. they are all going to change just like you are.

And some day they are all going to die, just like you are. One second there is someone there, and the next… there isn’t.

But maybe death is just another transformation too. Maybe it seems like we’ll be dead forever but in reality, we just turn into another kind of butterfly.

After all, if we can still be ourselves through our entire trip from nursery ward to hospice care, maybe we can still be ourselves after death, too.

Maybe we turn into something as incomprehensible to us as a butterfly is to a caterpillar, and we were therefore just as dead to our caterpillar selves.

But our real selves live on.

More after the break.

---

A profound movement

[TRIGGER WARNING : Poop and pooping. ]

As always, I will try not to be too explicit or gross.

So I wake up in the late afternoon after having had a productive blogging session earlier and once I am sufficiently wake, I notice that I am feeling rather full.

Like I am smuggling a medicine ball and a hundred steel ball bearings in my lower gut that I swallowed under extreme duress.

So I head for the bathroom and by the time I am seated, I am alarmingly aware that something truly profound is about to occur.

Like I was about to give birth to a freaking beluga.

What followed was not the most dramatic time I have spent on the toilet, nor was it the most painful, but it sure as heck was the most…. productive?

I pooped a hell of a lot, is what I am saying. Like, enough to have to flush twice. And the whole time I was wondering where in the hell I had been keeping it all.

Same thing that happens with me and pee sometimes. I swear.it is like I have this extra-dimensional space where excess effluvia are stored until one day it gets full and then suddenly the whole supply dumps back into the main storage tank.

And then I have a lot of painful work to do.

So yeah. By the time I was done, there was very little room left in the bowl. And even after all that work, I still felt (and feel) like there is a whole lot more to come.

But I sat there for another 20 minutes without any movement (snrk) so despite the feeling that someone tied a knot in my guts (complete with bow) and that I still have a quart of bricks in there, there’s nothing I can do about it now.

Now, we play the waiting game.

Pinky : And how do you play that, then?

Me : You wait.

Pinky : Oh I see. (thinks for a moment) Not really much of a game then, is it?

Now with hindsight (snrk!), I wonder if this logjam was responsible for all my back pain this week, Such clogs have been known to be connected with back pain in my past, and this could be a severe manifestation of that.

If so, I will be slightly embarrassed to say so at Doctor Chao’s office tomorrow.

I will have to see if the symptoms disappear when the blockage is gone. In a way, I sort of hope they don’t.

Less to have to explain about my bowels to my GP, the better!

But I imagine they will. It makes too much sense given my history. And I will have to talk to my GP about pooping.

While I am there, I will bring up my lungs. They ain’t working right either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sometimes, I wonder if I would be happier if my life had been harder.

Because the thing is, my life has been really easy. I have known very little hardship. I’ve barely toiled at all. Even when I was going to Kwantlen and then to VFS, the main difficulty was in getting motivated enough to get there and back.

The actual coursework was laughably easy, as always.

Other than that, I’ve just hidden from the world and played video games. And while that isn’t a happy life nor is it a heathy life, it’s certainly not a very difficult life either.

We are forged and activated by the challenges we overcome and I have overcome precious few. Life has more or less left me alone. Nothing ever forced me to grapple wih the big bad world.

I have almost always had a “reality assistant” or two in my life.

And while I love and appreciate and treasure those people who have deemed me worthy of assistance, I can’t help but wonder if I would have been better off in the long run if I had been forced to deal with things all alone.

Because that might have toughened me up. And woken me up. It might have snapped me out of this constant state of semi-dreaming and made me deal with reality.

As is, I live in a world of imagination, and that’s definitely not good for me. In a very real sense, the real world of the senses and realtime existence and actually living life and I are practically strangers.

I spend so little of my day in the real world. Is it nice? I’ve heard good things.

I’m always absorbed into the computer. And when I’m not, I’m absorbed into another screen, watching things with my friends.

Hell, even when I am on the toilet, I am listening to something off YouTube.

So I am only in contact with reality in the time in between getting into bed and, ironically, going to sleep.

Usually I am playing my synth during this time. Which is real but not THAT real. It’s not like I am actually taking in reality during that either.

I’m in touch with the music instead.

So really. getting food from the kitchen is the most real thing I do most days. The only times I am truly “here” are doctor’s appointments and Denny’s.

And grocery shopping. Mustn’t forget that.

So I book maybe four hours of “real time” a week. That ain’t much.

I would definitely be better off psychologically if my sense of reality was more grounded in immediate real-world sensory experience.

I mean no wonder my reality seems so fragile and unstable.

It’s mostly imaginary! It’s all in my head! I need to get the hell out of my imagination and spend some time in the real world just for balance.

Sounds good but…. I can’t see it happening. I have adapted to this unreal environment too thoroughly. I don’t see a path from here to there without having some sort of powerful talisman to keep my ghostly self together in the real world.

Not sure what that would be. Money would do the trick. Having enough money to insulate myself from harsh reality would be quite emboldening.

Other than that…. I don’t know… the right man, perhaps. Someone soothingly strong and stable and sure of themselves who could steady me and keep me grounded and safe in return for my gentle charms and compassionate embrace.

Gosh that sounds good.

I wonder if my plentyoffish account still works…

More after the break.

---

Some poopy sensations

Feeling pretty crappy today.

Started when I got back from Wound Care. I got this aching feeling in my balls that long experience has taught me is always the herald of bad tidings.

Or vice versa. Whatever.

And sure enough, in addition to some very testy testes, I also had a nauseous stomach, a pounding headache, tense muscles, and a general soreness of the everything.

And then came the tiredness. And with it, the desire to stay in bed forever so I never have to deal with anything ever again.

That’s new as an actual distinct and differentiated thought. And troubling.

Oh well, this too shall pass. I think the pain that came with getting me and my troubled spine to and from Wound Care got things moving in the wrong direction and my over-sensitive nervous system took it from there.

God, I fucking hate my life.

Been thinking that a lot lately too.

So I’m back to THAT again. Also not a good sign.

Hopefully this will burn out like a wildfire and make room for new growth. Always has before, after all.

So fuck it. Burn bitch burn. Drag me through the pits of hell by those swollen nuts of mine. Sweat the pain out of me and don’t spare the steam.

Fire cleanses all.

---

Who knows, maybe I am building up steam pressure for a useful crisis for some sort.

I know that if I am to escape my personal hell, slow incremental “safe” change is not going to cut it.

The best it can do is keep the pressure down, which ironically might be the worst thing for me and I would be better off letting shit go kaboom.

Not sure how to manage that. Close all the steam vents, I suppose.

Then sit back and wait.

Have to get used to the idea of losing control first, I guess. At least far enough to let things get to the point of explosion.

I dunno. Sometimes I feel like I want to just throw everything away. Fuck it ALL. Fuck everything. Spew all this sick garbage into the world in one grand expectoration and walk away. clean and empty and new.

Dunno who I would be there. Don’t really care either.

Sometimes growth can only come from an Armageddon of the soul.

I’m down with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty bleh today.

None of the topics in my notes file appeal to me. I feel vaguely annoyed and subtly discontent. It’s the sort of day when you want to give the middle finger to the world and go back to bed.

Not out of anger. But out of being terminally unimpressed with life.

This too shall pass, of course. Moods are like that, especially for the disablingly unstable like myself.

I don’t seem all that crazy on the outside, but on the inside it’s a malevolent maelstrom of mad machines, cruel cacophony, and venomous vortices.

I better exit that image before the alliteration overwhelms us all.

---

Got sick and tired of my quest mods interfering with one another and making each other impossible to complete, so I ditched two of them,

I will miss my lovely castle from Knights of the Nine : Revelations, with all my knights and my storage and my ultra shiny armor. but it’s worth it if things freaking work now.

I had to ditch the ultra shiny Holy Crusader armor anyhow because it was (for whatever reason) getting insanely expensive to repair.

As in, one piece would cost 12K gold alone. Fuck THAT noise.

I mean, I miss all the snazzy magic powers – especially the 25 percent protection from normal weapons – but that shit was just not sustainable.

Oh well, at least now I remember why I used to have a strict policy of never having more than one quest mod installed at a time back in my Skyrim days.

It’s a policy that prevents the madness inducing “the thing just plain isn’t HERE!” error.

---

Solving that issue reminded me that there was a whole official DLC for Oblivion that I had not even so much as glanced at.

That’s because the gateway to it was blocked by a missing texture error early in the game, and then I completely forgot all about it.

Well removing those two quest mods fixed that error somehow, and so now I am giving it a shot.

I thought about starting a new character first, but decided that would be too much novelty at once so I am still using my hammer swinging orc warrior.

Now the name of the DLC is Shivering Isles, and that rang a faint bell.

But then it hit me. That’s where the Daedric Lord of Madness, Sheogorath, lives! That’s his home realm! I am officially going to Crazytown, baby!

So this ought to be fun.

And I mean that. Sheogorath is quite hilarious in Skyrim and ESO. Also evil, technically.

I mean, nice people don’t drives humans mad just for their own amusement.

So he’s a bit of a troubling figure for me. Kind of like Handsome Jack in the Borderlands series of games. Also very evil and very, very funny.

And damned sexy as well. He’s basically evil Bruce Campbell.

So anyhow, it should be one wacky adventure. I would have preferred something slightly more normal, but what the hell.

I refuse to let Sheogorath out-weird ME.

Fuck you, old man. I shit weirder things than you after Sunday dinner!

More after the break,

---

The saga continues

At least I managed to talk to Doctor Chao about my back today.

So yay me on the “actually doing things” front.

Called his office yesterday, got a phone appointment for between noon and 1 pm today.

As an aside, I’d like to say that I am totally fine with this whole “between these two times” style of appointment.

Which is somewhat unexpected as I usually prefer things to be precise and definite.

Ambiguity pisses me off.

But seeing as it’s a phone appointment, I can be quite chill about it, because I am happy at home with all my creature comforts (and comforting creatures…. love you guys!) and therefore much more comfortable than I would be waiting interminably in his waiting room with a bunch of other sickies and the big screen TV tuned to the “All Covid related government announcements” channel.

I never though I’d miss those shitty daytime talk shows.

Anyhow, like I have said a few times before, I am capable of anything as long as I am comfortable. The more comfortable I am, the more powerful I am.

With the right armchair or La-Z-Boy, I could conquer the world.

Back to the fascinating world of personal medicine. So I talked to Doc Chao about my back today and told him about how I get the pain whenever something large moves in my back, and how it started off being only around the spine but now it can be practically anywhere in my entire torso, and how it’s a stiff or “rusty” kind of pain (I swear I can hear my joints creak sometimes) and so forth and so on.

Result : An actual genuine in-person appointment for 10 am on Friday.

Thank Jaysus for that. I kinda figured it was hard to diagnose a back problem over the phone. Hopefully he will give me a diagnosis and some kind of solution.

Besides just “lose weight”. Well duh. But what do I do NOW?

Because you know what really hinders weight loss? Crippling back back!

But nah, Doctor Chao is cooler than that. He’s a very empathic and understanding doctor and is more sympathetic to us fatties than that.

Speaking of us fatties, check out this bit of sweet, sweet validation.

Whaddaya know, science says obesity is an addiction.

I’ve been saying that for years! To me, it’s intuitively obvious. Us fatties get this way because we self-medicate with food.

We become addicted to that “medication”. Hence continuing to overeat even as health consequences start piling up on us.

Addictions highjack the primary motivating drive of all animal life. The one that makes a hungry animal eat and a horny animal mate.

So it’s kind of hard to “exercise self control” when the most powerful drive in nature is telling you that if you don’t have another cupcake you’ll DIE.

So once more, I am heartened by the sight of science finally catching up to my thinking.

Maybe I should do a series of videos called Fruvous Yells At Science.

“Wake up, you assholes! Light travels in waves of particles! Was that so hard??”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.