An odd thought struck me this morning. I was feeling overwhelmed and depressed (happens to me a lot lately) when a strange voice in my head said, “Fuck it, I’ll be over here being happy. ”

This was accompanied by a thought of myself simply stepping out of the maelstrom within and wrapping my arms around myself to keep warm and sheltering inside.

And then something like the formula above occurred to me as a way to express what I was feeling. What if I just concentrated on whatever I am missing in order to be happy?

And then just kind of… gave it to myself?

It’s the distant progeny of my “what’s wrong with being happy for no reason?” thoughts. And it’s essentially a formula for religion, at least as I see it.

X is God, at least for some.

But not for miserable materialists like myself, presumably. We’re too “smart” for that.

Sometimes I get sick of my own god damned cleverness.

Still, the concept holds. I don’t need to drag a whole bunch of mystic dogma and logically absurd fairy tales and belief in that perfect Daddy in the Sky in order to get a sort of basic religion going on in my head.

I mean seriously. Fuck reality. It’s never done me any favours. It’s never met my needs. It’s never even come close. It’s never even tried.

It’s done such a shitty job of meeting my needs that I don’t even know what they are. X is a wide open variable to me right now. I have no idea what I need in order to be happy.

Better get working on that, I guess.

Most of the time I am just struggling to stay afloat. When you are barely keeping your head above water, you tend to lose your ambitions.

Maybe that’s the point, though. My depression generates all this turmoil to keep me thinking in terms of survival instead of having dangerously subversive thoughts about happiness, or maybe even….. thriving.

I’ve been in survival mode for so long that I have no idea what that even looks like.

Seriously. I try to imagine myself happy and all I get is static. Null input, no signal, channel not found.

Let’s try something else.

---

Talked with Doctor Chao on the phone about my dizziness et al today. He seems to think it is low blood pressure, which would be ironic.

Usually the problem is the opposite.

Got an appointment to see the doc in person at 3:30 pm on Friday. Dunno how I will be getting there. In a cab, I suppose.

Certainly not in the JoeMobile, he will be at work by then. Whatever. These things can be managed. Who gives a crap.

Not in the best of moods at the moment. Life seems pretty crappy right now. I continue to fall apart and birth fresh medical horrors on the daily.

I want to stop drowning and swim to shore but I dunno how.

Guess I will just give up and drown then. Find out what’s next.

More after the break.

---

I have to agree

I’m a fairly agreeable dude.

It’s how I was raised. My role in the family was to go wher3e I’m told and stay where I’m put. Whatever you need is fine by me. My needs and desires are completely unimportant and instantly disposable.

I was so eager to please and hungry for positive attention that I would never have dreamed of telling you that I can’t do that or that doesn’t work for me or that would majorly fuck up my life.

What’s the compared to the brief feeling of usefulness and competence I am aglow with when I can actually help someone?

No wonder I liked working retail so much,

That was demonstrated today when I made that appointment with Doctor Chao. He asked me if 3:30 pm on Friday was good for me and I cheerfully replied, “Sure! No problem! ” even though that’s actually a very inconvenient time for me.

But here’s the thing : In that moment, I honestly couldn’t see that. I literally could not imagine what might be wrong with that time.

Um, maybe it’s that by then, Joe will be at work along with the car? So no ride?

That occurred to me a few minutes later, but in that moment, nope. That’s how badly I want to tell people what I know they want to hear.

This is a particularly bad approach to handling medical situations.

I should always be telling everyone involved in my care the unvarnished truth about my problems and my needs. But that’s so hard for me.

The fact that doctors are not just authority figures but intellectual authority figures only makes it that much worse. It makes me want their positive regard all the more

Same thing with my teachers. And my mother.

Now some who know me – teachers especially – might be a tad shocked to hear me describe myself as agreeable.

That’s because while I am quite agreeable, I am also quite opinionated. And to most people that seems like a contradiction.

Well, one man’s contradiction is another man’s nuance.

My agreeableness takes the form of being fine with whatever you want. I don’t have strong preferences on a lot of things and I’d rather just get on with things so like, whatever, you know?

I do have strong opinions on a lot of things, though.

Front seat or back seat? I don’t care.
What restaurant will we eat at? Meh. Most places have something I can eat.
Who goes first? I don’t care. You, if you want.

But if the question is, “Are homeless people just lazy?” you’re goddamned right I care.

My (long lost) point is that there are times when I am far too agreeable for my own good. And I keep trying to compensate for that by telling myself I need to be truthful and direct in these situations, but apparently it takes a lot more than just a pep talk to tix.

Maybe if I tell myself that only the most truthful answers will make the doctor happy….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am probably not safe to get close to.

Right now, there is plenty of space between my demons and the innocent public at large. But if I ever got into a relationship or even a really deep friendship with somebody , that space would disappear and God only knows what kind of darkness and insanity would come crawling out of the depths of my subconscious mind looking to party.

I’m carrying around a lot of bad juju in this capacious cranium of mine. A lot of death and rage and hate and darkness and the rapacious void.

My lack of connect to or respect for my tormented id has left it pretty fucking angry and extremely hungry for release and I can easily imagine my sweet and harmless self suddenly freaking out when, as someone ie growing closer to me, they cross some line I had no idea was there and my alarms go off and I lose my freakin’ mind.

I’m real crazy, babe. Sorry you had to find out like this. Guess I’ll just go, then.

Then again, what do I know about what happens when you get close to someone?

I’ve never been close to anyone.

Not my parents, not my siblings, not my teachers, not my friends. Nobody has ever gotten closer to me than to be my friend. Not in my adult life.

I wasn’t even that close to my own mother as a small child once she went back to work.

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder why I’m not a serial killer,

Oh right, I lack the proper work ethic.

I mean EVERY DAY you’re dumping the bodies.

But yeah, it’s kind of amazing that I am as sane as I am (in other words, not very) given how emotionally cold my childhood was.

Somehow, I managed to make a person of myself, eventually, kind of. After my massive nervous breakdown in my early 20’s after my parents defunded my college education and made me move back home to Summerside and completely destroyed any hope I had of getting to be a competent adult, I had to claw my way back to sanity by sheer force of will and bloody-minded determination.

In the process, I invented and became the cheerful simulacrum you know and love.

Admittedly it doesn’t work that great. But it was a rush job. A first draft.

Still, it’s time to ponder an upgrade. I have a lot of good stuff about me, stuff that could be a major part of a new fresh powerful and comfortable in my own skin version of me.

My wit, my sweet nature, my natural enthusiasm, my sensitivity, how much I truly care about people, and of course, my magical mind powers.

I’m a wizard, god damn it. And not the spell books and magic wands kind. The real kind that has always existed and will always exist : scary smart people who can see more and do more than others to the point it seems like magic.

But it’s actually something much, much scarier.

More after the break.

---

So the answer is…?

What answer? Oh right.

No, I am not safe to get close to. Not with all this radioactive shrapnel and pestilence ridden rotting flesh lying around in my head.

And the thing is, this toxic dungheap of a soul is covered by a very friendly, enticing façade of a warm, witty, wacky, wonderful fella.

And it’s not exactly false. I am that guy.

But I’m a hell of a lot of other people too.

I am Legion, for I contain drunk veterans. many.

One of my primary existential struggles, in fact, is the fight to come up with a single identity through which I can express all that I am.

After all, identity is unity. When we ask ourselves who we are. we expect the answer to be in the singular. We can only ever be one person, no matter how keenly aware we are of all the other people running around in our heads getting themselves into trouble and jostling the furniture.

And so I strive to find that one final answer to the question of who the hell I am.

Or even what the hell I am. I have sworn to myself to stop asking that question as it seems self-pitying and unhelpful, but I keep coming back to it because I am so very unlike my fellow beach monkeys.

Big surprise, given my emotionally negligent childhood.

I have never met anyone truly “like me”. I’m a tribe of one, I suppose.

I’ve met other nerdy intellectual types with whom I have more in common than I do with most of the rest of humanity. They are my people and my tribe inasmuch as I have one.

Inasmuch as I CAN have one, for that matter.

Been thinking a lot about my antisocial nature lately. You know, the one I usually cover up by saying “I have always been ferociously myself”.

Yeah, but why? Why was I such a little psycho? Why was the idea of compromising in order to get along with others so intolerable to me?

Maybe that is what happens when you get raped as a toddler. You become one anti-social little monkey ready to attack and drive away anyone who dares to get too close.

You don’t compromise with a predator.

Let’s call this part of me Crack Monkey.

Crack Monkey cannot calm down or relax. He will never feel safe. He will never feel loved. He will always feel cold. Warmth and light will never reach down this far.

So Crack Monkey lives in a state of eternal paranoia in his fortress in the center of my soul. There he sits, surrounded by alarms and security monitors and weapons and all the rest of the elaborate apparatus he needs in order to feel safe.

It’s bad enough that Crack Monkey will never relax and be happy.

But it’s even worse that he seems to be in charge.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still haven’t recovered from last night, though I have gotten a little better.

But whenever I stand up, the clock starts ticking I start getting dizzy and nauseous and my head starts pounding along with my heart and I feel increasingly ill till I sit my fat ass down again and rest.

This limits my options

So I had to cancel my appointment with Doctor Caswell this morning. I did not feel up to going there. Not unless I went there in a wheelchair.

Doctor Sherri was nice enough to call me instead. We chatted a bit. I told her about my problem, and she told me I should take it to the ER.

And I will,. Eventually. But right now I just don’t have the wherewithal.

Going to the ER means at least three hours of waiting around in a place with a lot of stress in the air, and that’s hard for an empath like me.

Same reason I have always hated laundromats. There’s so much boredom encrusted everywhere. Makes the old fashioned ticket based laundries seem quite appealing.

“Here. Give these back to me clean. ”

Sounds good to me.

So right now I guess I am trying to build up the nerve to go to the fucking ER.

I really don’t want to. It’s bound to be an unpleasant experience, Or at least very very boring and tedious. I’ll have to go into “Hospital mode”, where I doze the hours away, only remaining awake enough to perk up and comply when they need me to do something then it’s back to standby mode.

Or, given my problem, sitby mode.

And ERs are loud, too, which is stressful Lots of beeping, conversational murmur when it is busy, doors opening and closing. people coming and going all the time.

Can’t be helped and I am not mad at anyone for it.

But it’s still stressful for delicate little flowers like myself.

I wish I still had a working tablet. That’s what saved my sanity back when I sent 5 days in the hospital for pneumonia.

I can put up with anything as long as I got games and the Internet.

But that tablet succumbed to battery death, as they all do eventually. Sooner or later, the battery stops taking a charge.

Sometimes they can still be used when plugged directly into the wall, which is an ironic way to use a “portable” device.

Or I could finally join the era and get myself a smartphone. They can do everything a tablet can do, plus make texts and calls!

The screens are so tiny, though. Feh.

I’d rather have a tablet that can send texts and take calls. Best of both worlds.

I think I may be getting over whatever the fuck this is. Last time I got up to get food it seemed like the Badness was accumulating much slower than before.

So maybe it can wait till I get to see Doctor Chao.

I dunno. All is Chaos. All is Flux.

and I am all Fluxed up.

More after the break.

Latest reading : not good

Well. I ordered in tonight.

Mostly because I am in desperate need of a decent meal. I have eaten way too little in the last 24 hours or so and I can’t afford to do that shit now that I am on Jardiance.

Man that’s an ugly name. Even by drug name standards. It hurts just to say it.

I first heard the word when Doctor Teal from the Stroke Prevention Clinic told me to ask Docor Caswell about it.

I thought he was talking about a class of drugs : Jardians.

Ya know, there’s statins, there’s anticoagulants, and there’s jardians.

Anyhow, I ordered in. Wanted some of my beloved Meaty Marinara past from Pizza Slut. But Pizza Hut was mysteriously closed.

Closed at 8 pm on a Monday night? Not unheard of but odd.

So I ended up ordering from am unrecontructed pizza place like the ones from my childhood called Canadian 2 in 1 Pizza.

The food’s okay. Not great. I would be more disappointed if it weren’t for the nostalgia factor, because this entire order could have come directly from 1986.

And there is comfort in that. I now know who to call on when I need some food that reminds me of my childhood.

I can almost smell our friendly neighborhood Pizza Hut.

Bet THAT one would be open on a Monday night!

Now f only there was a worldwide Acadian food chain.

---

---

What, it could happen! All of Canada eats Poutine now,. You can order it aqt Burger King (but don’t , the gravy is terrible).

So maybe we could get the world eating Rapure!

What can I say – it’s become clear that I do have some of the “French temperament”. The way I can throw a fit over something like rapure ‘s propper name proves it.

And my friends know this. I can see the looks they give me when I am pitching a fit over some minor thing – probably to do with language -, a look that says, “It’s a good thing you’re cute ’cause you’re crazy,. ”

But blessings upon them, they indulge me. And I try to keep the tempests short and relatively reasonable. Get it out of my system as efficiently as possible.

These are the things one must do to fit in if one has a French temperament in Anglo culture. From the Anglo point of view, all French people are crazy.

And that includes us adorable French-Canadians.

So here have been many times in my life where I find myself surrounded by people looking at me with real concern because from their point of view, I was perfectly normal then I suddenly started ranting and raving about something most people don’t even know exists, let alone care about.

And then comes the question : why do you care so much?”.

Um. I dunno. Genetics?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling cranky and nihilistic at the moment.

Probably because I just woke up with a mild headache. Which is still loads better than the rather nasty sinus headache I had this morning.

Ached all the way from the tip of my nose to the core of my brain. Kept me from being able to get to sleep. And that’s one of the reasons I am so sleepy right now.

And not being able to sleep when I am sleepy always makes me cranky.

The other reason I am so sleepy is that an oopsie in my supply planning has left me sans Diet Coke today, and so I this sleepiness is partly caffeine withdrawal.

As always in these circumstances, all I really want to do is go back to sleep right now. That’s what I will probably do when I finish this bit o’ blogging, assuming I have time before it’s time to go off for the traditional Sunday shopping and Denny’s.

At least at Denny’s, I will finally get my precious Diet Coke. The trick is staying away long enough to get there.

I could order Diet Coke from 7–1 via DoorDash if I really wanted to do so. But I would feel silly doing that when I am going o get come at Denny’s soon.

This experience will remind me to be more careful securing my supply!

Basically I thought I had one more “unit” (half a 2L bottle, to or one lunch or supper’s worth, translate from FruSpeak) than I did and so I am in his pedicklement.

I haven’t started truly craving the stuff yet. A nice cold Diet Coke sounds pretty good to me right about now but not more so than usua.

By the time we get to Denny’s, I will probably be jonesing for that sweet DC. VividThoughts of cola will suddenly burst into my mind unbidden

and leave me drooling for th stuff.

Not that I have a problem. I can quit any time I want! I’ve done it dozens of times!

Maybe it’s YOU that has the problem.

All I have right now is ginger ale. Not the same. Mighty tasty, though.

Maybe I will request a quick stop at the 7-11 on the way to shopping. Grab myself a quick 1L of Diet Coke to drink as I shop to help me stay conscious.

I dunno, though. That seems like it would mean moving out of the “ha ha, I am such an addict!” category and into the “I might actually have a problem!” category.

Let’s keep it light, fellas.

Forgot to get my labwork done this weekend. Derp. Caswell ordered some. The usual stuff. A1C, vitamin B12, fasting blood sugar.

Man, fuck fasting, It’s not safe. I don’t want to go hypoglycemic then end up having to break the fast anyhow, rendering my suffering pointless, like last time.

Especially now that I am on Jardiance and hopefully have a much lower starting point.

Must. Get. Glucometer. Working.

More after the break.

Better and better

Well I didn’t make it to Denny’s. God damn it. By the time I finished shopping, I was far too sick to go on, so I had to get dropped off home.

My head was pounding painfully and I felt weak and nauseous and faint.My heart was pounding like a kettle drum and I could barely stay standing.

I am slowly getting better as I sit here but I am not out of the woods yet.

So a trip to the ER is not out of the question before the evening is through.

Yellow alert for sure. This is some seriously nontrivial stuff. Not enough for me to call 911 quite yet but it ain’t good and I will keep a real close eye out for new symptoms or signs things are gettting worse.

The phenomenon appears to be focused in the center of my forehead. That’s where my headache was this morning and that’s where I feel the pounding and throbbing. It feels like there is something swollen there that is fucking with the circulation in my head.

Which given my stroke risk would be a very bad thing.

At least I am home end resting now. And I have an appointment with Doctor Caswell tomorrow so I can talk to her about it and see how freaked out I should be right now.

I may also be dehydrated. It’s one of the potential side effects of Jardiance. Your body gets busy manufacturing urine to dump that excess blood sugar into and whaddaya know, the main ingredient of urine is water so you use up your water supply fast.

Dunno how I am going to eat. I feel quite seasick and nauseous, a suspect anything that goes down will come back up if I try to force it.

But I gotta eat. Otherwise low blood sugar might come and get me. Bad.

sigh. It’s very scary and complicated being me right now.

What I think I will do is partially lay down for a little while. Enough so my body is at rest but not so much that I fall asleep.

That would be the kind of nap I might never wake up from.

The sick part of me says, “Meh. I should be so lucky. ”

Apparenty, it’s Jewish.

I suppose I should get some emergency glucose tablets to keep on the desk someplace visible just in case my levels go too low.

Or maybe some kind of candy I don’t actually like so I am not tempted to eat it in non-emergency type circumstances.

Maybe I’m already too late. I’m fucked. I kept on fucking around and not taking care of myself until I passed the point of no return, and now it’s all downhill from here.

It’s a possibility.

And the sick part of me shouts, “Victory at last!” Ah, the thrill of self-defeat.

Hopefully I can make the world stop spinning long enough to get something to eat.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wish I could. I am working on it.

But it isn’t funny to me yet. I have yet to discover the light side of my suffering. I know in my heart that there is no reason why I should not be able to turn my mental illness into comedy as so many others are doing right now, as I type thing.

I certainly have plenty of the two main ingredients : suffering, and wit.

But so far, no jokes. When I try, all I get is an outpouring of sarcastic bitterness that could flood the Grand Canyon like the mighty Colorado River.

And that’s not exactly going to get me booked at the Apollo.

Plus the unhealthy part of me starts saying thing like , “Other crazy funny people have actual events in their lives to joke about. What’s there to say about your pathetic life?”

“Then there was the time I did nothing but play video games all day. “

Repeat one million times. Ha ha ha.

And think of all the yuks to be had with a routine about being raped as a toddler! People love that kind of thing.

Then I could regale with tales of being bullied and that bullying being ignored by teachers and admins who all either thought I deserved it for being such a weird and obnoxiously bright child or at the very least didn’t think I was worth literally any of the effort it would take to protect me.

That’s for kids who are worth something, not pitiful, contemptible losers like me.

See? This shit is comedy gold, Jerry.

And even then, there is very little to talk about.

“Then there was the time I went to school, was bored out of my mind during class, hid from my classmates in terror during recess and lunch,

The hits just keep on coming.

And of course, Comedy 101 says there is nothing like talking about how you’ve never had a job or been in a relationship or really done much of anything with my life in order to get the audience really identifying with you.

Did I mention bitterness?

I have a lot of it I’ve been fucked over by life and I deeply resent it. The world let me be raped as a child and that left me far too wounded to cope with damn near anything and that, in turn, lead to an isolated and miserable childhood of emotional starvation and almost no maturation in a family that preferred to forget I existed.

And if that’s not hilarious, I don’t know what is?

Hint : I don’t know what is.

So I guess until I process all this negativity and bile, I am not going to be able to see the funny side of having my entire adult life stolen by mental illness and hving my body slowly destroyed by the lifestyle that resulted.

But surely, one day I will look back on this all and laugh.

And laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and keep right on laughing like a demented hyena until the men in the white coats come with the Thorazine.

More after the break

Six down, six up

Well that was depressing, And Irritating.

So I ordered in like I usually do on Saturday nights. Wihen my Doordash[[1]] Dude arrived and I was talking to him on our building’s intercom (the kind that works through the phone) he asked me to come down and pick up my order in the lobby because our building’s one parking spot out front was occupied and he didn’t want to park illegally and risk being towed.

In the three to five minutes they would be in the building.

Sigh. Idiots. They’re everywhere.

But I am agreeable by default. So I said yes. So then I had to get dressed and go down there to pick up my food.

That was the irritating part. The depressing part is how much that simple act took out of me. My heart has been repaired but the circulation in my head has not.

Working on it.

What I wish I had said to my non-dashing Doordash Dude was “Then use the clearly marked visitor parking right next to the door you are currently standing in front of.

But that would not have worked because they put a gate on our visitor parking out of paranoia about thievery meaning we essentially have only one visitor parking spot for this entire 120+ unit apartment building.

That seems both stupid and bad to me.

Anyhhow, the trip up and down fucked me up. Left me feeling dizzy and gave me a pounding headache and now I feel woozy and lightheaded again.

And seeing as I know I am at risk of stroke, this worries me.

So I am not going to do THAT again. They either bring my shit up and place it in front of the door or I cancel the order and leave a negative review.

I’m a disabled man with serious health issues. I can’t be risking shit like this.

I mean, all the other delivery people manage it just fine.

This Dude is lucky that I am not a vindictive person or I would log back on the DoorDash and leave a very negative review right now.

And you know that if I focused my rage through my verbal skills, those comments would be scorched earth level devastating.

That would, however, be disproportionate to the crime, in my opinion.

I won’t deny that it is tempting. But it would still be wrong.

In

[[1]] I refuse to call them DoorDashers until they also have WindowPrancers [[1]

In Reddit parlance, IWBTA (I Would Be The Asshole) if I did that.

I swear that if I do end up having some large scale serious negative health event, it will be because like tonight, I forgot that I am a gimp and can’t do normal people things.

Now to lie down and rest and hopefuully get my heart rate back down.

I wish I could just check myself into the hospital NOW, BEFORE the stroke.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No really. I do.

Today was Therapy Friday^[1], something I managed to completely forget until I answered the phone and it was Doctor Costin.

It was a good session. I felt like I got a lot of emotions moving in it.

Given my usual state of emotional constipation, that means a lot to me.

One of the resulting revelations was that I have been blocking my own growth and healing by letting the Trog have too much power.

Because the Trog hates and fears and fights change. It wants everything to stay exactly the same so that it never has to leave it cozy, polluted nest.

Hence my only be able to help myself through the relatively passive mode of speech. Speech is safe. I can talk and pontificate and intellectualize and cogitate till the cows come home as long as it doesn’t start making me want to do things.

Doc C nailed it when he said I block all emotions that might lead to action. In the frozen world of the avoidant, motion is exposure and exposure is danger and danger is death.

Ergo safety is all-important. Absolutely nothing – not even saving my own goddamned life – is more important than staying “safe”.

It’s like my soul is a fascist state suppressing practically every form of self-expression amongst its citizens in the name of “security”.

And because I block all action potentials as “unsafe”, I can’t do any of the things that might make me happy.

Like I said once before, it’s like my worst enemy is my own adrenaline.

Obviously, there is no change without action. And there is no healing without change. Healing IS change – a change for the better, but it’s still change.

So it seems like I need to step up my campaign to oust the Trog forever, or at least keep him locked away where he can’t do any harm.

Another thing that came up in today’s session was despite my vain self-image as a rational person, I am only as rational as the Trog lets me be. As long as I am not thinking the scary action oriented thoughts, I can be a goddamned secular Buddha for all it cares. Sitting here thinking my big thoughts and feeling superior to all the ignorant people who just don’t “get it” like I do.

But rouse the Trog and all rationality is gone, and I am that scared little animal hiding from everything and ready to fight like the proverbial cornered rat if anything tries to take it away.

Like, say, a healthy urge to do something productive.

So that shit has to go. I can’t let my most scared and irrational side hold me hostage any more. Somehow, I have to talk that psycho into putting down his gun and letting the hostage go before he gets us all killed.

But how do I convince him that the danger is long gone and we are safe now?

Where’s one of those police hostage negotiators when I need them?

More after the break.

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Well this is pretty damned good. Warning, contains explicit gay sexytimes.

For Emergency Use Only.

Damn right that mouse is cute! POUNCE!

---

Hot and bothered

I am not well.

I feel hot. From the inside. Like I have a furnace in my chest.

Worse, I feel dizzy and woozy and stiff. Getting around is rather trick because I am lurching around like a drunken sailor on a rough sea.

I have a mild headache with a focal point in the middle of my forehead, right about where my third eye would be. It feels connected with the dizziness et al.

Oh, and I have a detached, floaty feeling too. And it’s getting hard to concentrate. It’s like my mind is a cloud being pushed gently across the sky by a breeze.

No. Come back. I want to stay.

Pondering whether I should go to the ER. None of these symptoms seem quite bad enough on their own, but maybe together……?

Then again, I don’t think I could take showing up there and spending three hours plus waiting around in the ER only to be told it was nothing again.

I know I shouldn’t care. Better that than ignoring something major that could have been nipped in the bud if caught early.

But I do care. Way too much.

I guess my avoidant personality disorder is stronger than my hypochondria.

Fight, neuroses, fight!

The possible fever definitely makes this seem like an infection of some sort. But I did just start a new drug, Jardiance, and according to that link, known side effects of that oddly named drug include weakness, dizziness, and lightheadedness, and I am certainly experiencing all three of those.

Another side effect is joint pain, and I suppose muscle stiffness sort of applies?

Sad : was supposed to go to McD’s with Le Gang tonight but had to bow out due to symptoms. Was going to order in like I usually do on Fridays but decided low appetite plus not wanting to commit to walking all the way to the apartment door and back made that a poor idea.

I might still do it. As often happens with me, eating a little made me hungrier. Stupid low blood sugar. But I doubt it.

Speaking of hypoglycemia, got to be on the lookout for that. The whole point of Jardiance is to lower your blood sugar but that can go too far.

Better make a mental note to NOT SKIP ANY MEALS any time soon, too. No matter how non-hungry I am. Eat some fucking food.

Oh, another development : finally bought myself a B12 supplement.

I don’t like supplements in general. The best nutritional supplement is always food.

We did not evolve to get our vitamins and minerals from pills.

But I have failed miserably at my modest goal of eating one meal containing animal products a day and so I have to be realistic about it and get that shit elsewhere.

And when I say fail, like, there’s a can of flaked turkey in my cupboard with a “best before” date of almost exactly a year ago.

Is there anywhere I can buy boiled eggs in bulk?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s occurred to me lately that I never really had a childhood. Developmentally speaking.

Because you just can’t have a childhood alone. I was so isolated for so much of my biological childhood. And that meant a lot of development just… never happened to me.

No going adventuring with friends. What friends? No learning to make friends, for that matter, a lesson I desperately needed.

People tried. But I didn’t know how to let them in.

No learning to run and jump and skip and play. Hence my abysmal physical coordination. Playing like that is how we learn to move our bodies.

No learning to be sociable. The give and take of getting along with others. I was so stubborn and self-contained.

I guess you have no choice but to be self-contained when you are all alone, with nobody there to define yourself against.

It’s be self-contained or spill out and die, I guess.

And I was such an odd child, too. You all know the story. No imaginary friends. No imaginative play where I used toys to make up stories, Spaceman Spiff style. Always a very serious and well-behaved child. Never built stuff out of Lego or played in the sandbox or got hyper from too much sugar.

School was school and nothing more. I went to class, did the work, got fabulous grades, went home, and then it was books, TV, and video games till I went to bed.

Past grade three, I didn’t even have a bedtime. After all,. for me to have a bedtime, someone had to actually pay attention to whether I was in bed yet or not AND what time it was and then maybe even have to INTERACT with me enough to tell me to go to bed and there was clearly no way that was going to keep happening once they figured out they could get away with just… ya know, not doing that.

Plus all the other developmental milestones I missed. Never dated or learned to drive or fell in love or had any kind of sex except the solo performance kind. Still haven’t had a real adult type full time job. Never traveled solo.

What I want to know is what are the long term effects of lack of childhood development?

You end up very underdeveloped, I guess. That seems to apply to me. I could reasonably be described as the victim of childhood emotional malnourishment.

So I ended up as weak and as timid as I am now.

Mind like a canyon, soul like a thimble.

They say it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. What a cruel fucking joke. Maybe that’s true if your biggest problem is that you never went to Disneyland or get that pony you wanted, but when you missed practically everything… what the hell would that even mean?

Probably helps to be rich, too.

It hurts to think about my cold, dry, dead childhood. I can feel everything that is missing in me because of how things went down. It’s where all that Midnight Tundra came from in the first place.

I can’t see any way out of this shark cage of mine and till I escape it. I am not going to be able to get any of those nutrients I need.

So I guess I’m fucked

And not in the good way. That would probably help a lot. .

More after the break.

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A chink in the armor

Don’t worry, I’m not about to make a racist joke.

This prison cell of mine has one heck of a view. I can see a lot from here. And through my obscure magics, I can even make it seem like I am down there with the people. They can see me and hear me. They can even touch me, though they seldom do.

But I am not really there. I am never really there. I am always right here, in this cell, protected and trapped by its walls in equal measure.

I know that the door isn’t even locked. Not really. I could open the door and leave any time that I felt like it, and that the real thing holding me hostage is my inability to feel safe without these thick stone walls around me.

It’s just a lot less work to stay calm if I imagine that door to be impenetrably locked.

It amounts to the same thing anyway. I am trapped in here. And so I languish, for the most part. I wither away.

But occasionally I have the strength and/or impatience to look for a way out. There has to be some weakness in the forces which bind me that I can exploit to escape.

A secret passageway through the sturdy walls of my neurosis.

If only it were that simple. But those walls are made of more than mere stone. What looks like rock is really the dead flesh of a wounded and necrotized mind that centuries of exposure to the interstellar void has rendered harder than weathered granite.

So my escape relies on tunneling through that stuff. And there’s a lot of it. Every day I burn more away, and I can tell by the slow change of temperature that I am getting closer to the surface all the time.

But it’s taking so long. I want to be alive NOW. My blowtorch id runs hot and impatient. It permits itself to be used in the excavation project, but that takes only a fraction of its power, and the rest stalks back and forth like the caged predator it is.

Good thing I am also learning, albeit slowly, to focus more and more of my id’s power into my magic…. my words.

That’s the real escape plan, I suppose. To keep on writing , every word stretching this tiny opening into the world a little bigger, until one day I can wriggle through it and make my escape that way.

It might sound crazy but it’s the best plan I have got.

One of these days I will escape this rotten cell.

Because one of these days I won’t need it any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something is coming. Something big.

Something big enough to utterly destroy me so that I might finally renew myself

Something that will eclipse the sun and drown me in its shadow

Something that will blast me to cinders so that I can be reborn like the Phoenix

Something that will shatter me with a hammer’s blow like a cometary impact that’s been coming for 48 long years and is just now starting to make the pebbles dance

My hungry void will finally finish devouring me, and only then can I be reborn

So here I sit, trembling and nervous as a virgin sacrifice, knowing that I am about to die but eager to see what happens next.

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I’ve not been feeling so great lately.

Emotionally, I mean. Physically too, but you all know about that.

But for whatever reason, I have avoided talk about my increasing depression. Despair has been closing in, along with that ever so dangerous “trapped animal” feeling.

The kind that leads to a creature gnawing off a limb.

No danger yet, though. I feel increasingly anxious and restless and hopeless, but I am not feeling the impulse to self-harm just yet.

But if I go there, I go there. I’m not worried. It’s an urge I am very good at suppressing, both via simple denial and by recognizing it for what it is and doing my best to listen without actually always it access to the controls, so to speak.

And when needed, reciting all the reasons I know it’s a bad idea to myself.

You’re just feeling frustrated. This too shall pass. Don’t apply a permanent solution to a temporary problem. There’s still a lot of fun to be had.

And so on.

But I do feel like this is all building towards something. A crisis, I hope. A nervous breakdown. Some sort of spiritually epiphany. Something. Anything, really.

I will take whatever train can get out of this stinking dead end town I can.

Stuff me in the back of a cattle car. Make me bunk with smelly hobos. I will even shovel coal if I have to.

Just get me the hell out of here.

Once more I say : there is nothing in me right now that I will not sacrifice in the name of becoming a saner version of me. Absolutely nothing.

I will become a completely different person if that is what it takes. I will be anybody at all as long as that person is functional and happy.

I’ll try not to become an asshole. Big Bad Bear and all that.. But no promises.

Because there is going to be a reckoning. A purge, perhaps, or some kind of holy war. Things are going to be resolved at last, and all the mental trash I have built up over all these years will be put to the torch, and the in the flames I will be reborn anew.

And I will shout my joy unto the sky, and dance the dawn away.

More after the break.

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Getting tired of living in Oblivion

Boy, does that work on multiple levels.

But mostly I am talking about the video game. At least, for now.

As patient readers are somewhat aware, I have been playing the game The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion quite a lot for the last 4 months or so.

Most of that has been me exploring various mods and character builds. The last month or so, I have been checking out the various Quest Mods on the Nexus.

According to Steam, as of this moment I have played it for a little over 450 hours total. Fun with math time : that is 18.75 days, or 2.78 weeks, of my ever-dwindling lifespan spent staring at a screen and pretending to stab Orcs.

Time well spent? Time well….. spent, anyhow.

Who cares? At this point I’m waiting to die anyhow.

Anyhow, after a measly 450 hours of entertainment, I am finally getting sick of the game. The more unique elements are wearing thin and the fact that all I am REALLY doing is traveling from dungeon to dungeon with annoying city quest bullshit in between is becoming more and more evident.

And when the pattern becomes increasingly obvious like that, it’s time to jump ship and find a new game. Preferably one that is as different from the previous one as possible.

Coincidentally and serendipitously, my good buddy Maelkoth just bought this monster bundle of games in support of Ukraine, and offered me whatever games were in it that he already has.

Perfect! I went through the list, found some that looked good to me, and asked for 4.

The first was Dear Esther. The Stream description made it seem interesting and the trailer featured narration in a very striking and intriguing writer style, so I tried it.

Holy crap what a snorefest. The entire game consists of walking occasionally punctuated by narration. That is IT. You can’t even interact with the scenery, or run, or jump, or anything.

Maelkoth told me it’s the “game” for which the term “walking simulator” was coined. And it is not a term of endearment.

Then there’s Endless Space 2, which it turns out I already had.

Gave it another try. Remembered why I uninstalled it after trying it before : there is so much to learn right at the beginning!

Makes other, less onboarding intensive games look real good.

But I knew that going in this time and this time I am determined not to wimp out and actually learn the goddamned thing.

Everything sucks in the beginning, after all. And I am tired of giving up too easily on things. So I am going to hang in there and see what’s on the other side of the learning curve for once.

Then there’s Ring of Pain, a pretty decent take on the minimalist CCG RPG. Of the three, it’s the most promising. Fast-paced but still turn based. Best of both worlds.

There’s one more, Sunset Overdrive, which I have not tried yet. I doubt I will enjoy it, but the trailer was so merrily insane that I just had to give it a shot.

At least one of those is bound to be my new love, or at least keep me busy till I find it.

I am not entirely done with Oblivion yet. But I’m not far off.

Who knows, I might even get desperate enough to buy a brand new game!

Wish me happy hunting in finding one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I swear, every day I get clumsier and spazzier.

I was washing out some bottles to prep them for recycling when my right arm twitched and I ended up sweeping a bunch of other bottles onto the floor.

It’s weird and alienating as fuck to have your body do something without you telling it to.

Something that normally would require an act of volition. Like sweeping a bunch of plastic bottles onto the floor via a sweeping motion of the arm.

It’s like my arm suddenly wanted to make a dramatic gesture of rage and despair.

“And damn this bottles, too!! *flail(“.

Shit like that has been happening a lot lately. And not just like that.

I go to pick something up and end up dropping it. I try to put something down and miss the edge I was trying to put it on. I stub my toe or whack my hand because the floor and/or the surface I was aiming for is not where my body thought it was.

And it gets a little worse every day. The writing is on the wall : I am getting worse neurologically every day and soon I will be just a spastic, dizzy, twitching, flailing mess that can’t even take a crap without help any more.

Oh right. I get dizzy a lot too.

So I should quite honestly be bringing this all to my GP’s attention. right? That, and so much more. This is exactly the sort of thing that should spur me into immediate and focused action to save my own skin.

But it doesn’t. It won’t. It just makes me want to retreat even further from reality. Whatever emergency circuit is supposed to kick in when these things come up is broken and dead.

I don’t know how much more of this I can take. This falling apart is freaking me out and yet I can’t claim I don’t know what to do about it.

I just don’t know how to make myself do it. I don’t know how to defeat the part of me that wants me to fall apart and die so I can do the things I know I need to do in order to pull out of this nose dive.

If it isn’t already too late, that is. Could be that even if I would wave my magic wand and set my every indicator to its ideal level and have it stay that way forever, I would still keep falling apart until I die of neurological collapse a year or so from now.

And I feel so helpless. And frustrated. Frustrated because by all outward indications, I am not helpless at all. The things I need to do to help myself are simple and easy. Things millions of others do every day without even thinking about it.

But not my genius self, oh no. I am held hostage by a demon that wants me dead.

I’m so darn lucky. Really I am.

More after the break.

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If, at restaurants, a small appetizer sized version of a dish is “starter sized”, then an extra large version should be called “ender sized”.

Because trust me… after this, you’re done.

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My fabulous future

Call me Kreskin because here’s what is going to happen.

My health will just keep on deteriorating. But always so slowly that it is not hard for me to ignore it, telling myself that I’m being a hypochondriac and exaggerating my supposed “symptoms” when I am just fine, everything is as its always been, and I am cleared to make absolutely no changes as my burning ship drifts closer to the edge of the waterfalls and those really pointy rocks down below.

Eventually, something extra nasty will come along. A gross infection, peeing blood, partial numbness on one side, that kind of thing.

And that will scare me into going to the ER and then doing whatever is asked of me after that as long as it consists of going to appointments and taking pills and maybe doing something novel and easy enough to be fun for a while, like prepping a different kind of meal or taking a supplement drink or something.

But the moment the crisis has passed and it’s all up to me, alone, with nobody checking up to make sure I stay compliant, I will revert to my usual mode of doing nothing, neglecting myself, and falling apart piece by piece.

All the while whining about how sad it is and bitching about how helpless I feel, of course. Because I have that nasty demon holding me hostage and savouring the pleasure of destroying me slowly while I watch.

That mean old demon. Why, if it wasn’t for him/her/it, surely I would have leapt to my feet and dashed off to save myself years ago!

Sure, that sounds like me.

And each crisis will be a little bit worse until The Big One finally hits. A heart attack. A stroke. A major neurological event like a seizure or a nervous collapse. A more obviously physical type accident caused by my neurological issues. I get dizzy and fall down some stairs. I spaz out and knock something hot or sharp onto myself. Some part of me, a foot probably, just plain dies.

How tragic! Poor me. If only there was something I could have done besides anything.

And maybe that will be enough to make me straighten up and fly right, if it’s scary and/or gross and/or painful and/or horrifying enough.

But probably not. Oh sure, I will get better for a while…. specifically when I am in the hospital, and there are people controlling my diet, testing my sugars, and generally speaking running my life for me.

But when I am sent home, and I am left to my own devices once more, I will go right back to neglecting myself again.

And the clock starts ticking for the next crisis, which will be even worse.

And eventually one of them will GET me.

Because my devices suck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a mental weakness – a cognitive issue – that I have just figured out consciously has cost me a lot of progress over the years.

It’s the fact that when I am learning something, if I hit a spot where things don’t make sense to me, my mind just plain crashes.

Does not compute. Please resolve issue before continuing. Shutting down now.

This indicates that my usual way of learning things is to fit everything into a larger picture as I go, sort of like building the bridge as you’re crossing it.

That would explain my power of recall. That’s a very powerful way to learn things. It ensures that everything I learn is integrated with everything else over time and so to recall any single thing, I just have to follow the connections and boom, there it is.

But it has its flaws and they become evident when I hit something that does not fit. Everything screeches to the halt and I feel lost and helpless. I just plain can’t set the conflict aside and keep learning.

I evidently have a one track mind. It’s a very BIG track, but there’s still just the one.

This has cost me a lot in the past in at least three occasions :

1. That linguistics class. Once we got to that sentence diagramming thing that nobody could explain to me, I was fucked. Everything after that built on it, so the whole rest of the course was a loss to me, Hence my failing the course. Shame.
2. Trying to learn French online and/or from an app. This cognitive loophole is the reason none of these “natural language learning” bullshit apps work for me. The kind where they just give you the quiz and assume this will activate your language acquisition center that acquired your native language when you were a wee tot and you will learn the new language super well. I know this works for most people – before the apps there were French immersion classes and crash learning weekend seminars and such. But that’s not gonna cut it for me. If I get it wrong and don’t know why, I can’t go forward till I get the answer.
3. The worst one : learning music theory. When it comes to learning to read and write music, I hit that ol’ brick wall at keys. Keys make no god damned sense to me. Why not put everything in C? Why have this bullshit system where I am supposed to just know that in this piece, that D is actually a D#. Why not just write it as D# then? And because i makes no sense to me, my mind refuses to learn it, and so something I very much want to know and understand is lost to me.

And God, does that piss me off. I can live without understanding that hardcore linguistics and I hold out hope that somewhere there are books that actually explain how French works so I can learn it, but there’s no hope for my learning music unless someone can explain what the deal with keys is in a way that makes sense to me.

And that seems unlikely.

Maybe this kind of cognitive blind spot can be overcome. But I doubt it. This is something that operates on a very deep level of my cognition, so I would practically need an entirely new brain to change it.

Now about that book about French….

More after the break.

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Holy crap, structure!

Everything in the above the line portion of today’s blog entry came to me more or less as you see it. It just popped into my head almost fully formed. All I needed to do was add the very bit of phrasing and resolution to the words.

And that’s pretty exciting for a lazy creative like myself. To me, one of the most exhilarating aspects of my creative process is when things pop into my head in a super concentrated form like that. So concentrated that the real work of the project is in the slow unpacking of this hyper dense idea-stuff so that I can translate it into actual words.

It’s like putting together a model kit as you unbox it. You have no idea what the heck it’s going to look like when you are done. But it sure is fun to find out.

As you can probably tell, this is hardly my first encounter with this kind of improbably well structured spontaneous creation on my part.

Way back before this blog and the Million Word Year (finished in 11 months) project that preceded it, I would occasionally do what I will call wordletting exercises.

They were simple. Just open a new text file and start typing. Type whatever pops into your head. Give yourself as little time to think about it as possible. Just write and write, stream of consciousness style, until you were all out of words.

Sounds easy enough. But the oddest thing would happen. Despite my deliberate attempts to keep things as free-flowing as possible, order and structure appeared.

I would start off with weird sentence fragment, immediately move into a sort of imagistic blank poetry mode, then the sentences would turn into fully formed paragraphs and then, if I was able to keep going, entire stories would pop out.

This blew my mind. For once, I was the person saying, “People aren’t supposed to be able to do that. ” Write an entire story, with proper structure and a beginning, middle, and end and all the rest, on the fly, without stopping to think about anything?

That’s pretty impressive for an Earthling human being.

No wonder I have gotten away with turning in my first drafts all my life.

My first drafts are pretty fucking amazing.

Now if I could only slow down enough to do a second draft….

Oh well. Maybe that’s just not in the cards for the likes of me.

It might not be the muse I wanted, but it’s a damn good one anyhow!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.