Not really, but I needed a title.

Things are okayish at the moment, at least. I have no major health issues plaguing me.

That dizziness upon rising is still with me, but most of the time it’s mild enough to be ignored. I just got up and made my lunch without it bothering me much, for instance. So there is that.

I haven’t mentioned this before (I think), but I’ve got a gross boil on the back of my left shoulder. It’s Cronenberg level nasty looking, oozing and everything, but for the most part it doesn’t bother me as long as I am hanging around naked (except for socks), as I am wont to do, and therefore there’s no clothing pressing against it.

I am currently taking Cephalexin to fight it. I’ve been on it for a week and I am not seeing much of a difference, although it at least stopped this ache that was developing deep in the core of that shoulder and scaring the heck out of me.

Because it was a scary kind of pain. Seemed to go all the way to the bone. Made the ball hurt in a grainy way as it rotated in the socket. Alarming stuff.

So I am glad it got rid of that. But I fear it may not kill the boil.

I will complete the prescription and see where I am then.

Feeling frustrated and cranky. I definitely need something to do with my energies when I get like this. Something far more energetic than playing video games.

Which means contending with my old nemesis, the Anti Action Bias(AAB). Otherwise known as my depression’s overwhelming insistence that I do and move the absolute minimum at all time, as if every erg of energy I exert cost me money.

That’s utter bullshit, as we all know by now. In fact, a vast majority of my problems are caused by all this pent up unexpressed energy.

I’m running a surplus, not a deficit

The obvious answer is exercise, and I can do that. I have my weird horizontal push-ups (push-outs?) and there’s always pacing.

And if those aren’t an option because I am not feeling well enough or the dizziness is back and kicking my ass, I can always lie in bed and rotate and stretch my limbs.

So it’s just a matter of associating the feeling (pent up frustration) with the cure (light exercise) strongly enough that feeling like this gives me the urge to exercise.

Get that going and things will more or less take care of themselves. But I have to get the AAB out of the way first.

I get so scared sometimes, though. I guess that’s the real problem. My Avoidant tendencies are rooted in a very maladaptive way to control my anxiety by avoiding pretty much anything that triggers an adrenal response.

Including such radical and extreeeeeeme things as doing things and feeling inspiration and experiencing joy and even (gasp) acting without thought.

Geez, no wonder I’m so scared of it all.

That shit’s got to go too.

More after the break.

---

Oh yeah, more words

Feeling so mentally adrift that I almost forgot I wasn’t done yet.

That would have sucked,

I baby myself

I really do. And lately this has been striking me as problematic.

Because it means I have never learned to toughen up. That means I’ve remained as weak and frightened of the world as, well, a baby.

Toddler at best.

The sort of lessons I need to learn involve getting into tough situations that force you to dig deep and find your inner strength to overcome them and thus not only make that strength of will and spirit available to you in the future but also show you that whatever comes along, you can handle it.

Right now, I can’t handle jack shit, as far as I know. I’ve been a wimpy lil baby boy for my whole life. When the going gets tough, I fall apart. I have absolutely no faith in my ability to overcome difficulties.

Even though I have done so, come to think of it. Everything about Kwantlen then VFS was pretty damned hard, especially for me.

Don’t know if I could do that all again. But it’s something to think about. Going back to school would at least give me something to do with my life.

And maybe I could go to a good school this time. Kwantlen has many fine qualities but it’s pretty crappy in terms of overall kwality of education.

I actually had two different teachers on two different occasions take it upon themselves to tell me I could do a lot better than THIS place. A LOT better.

That’s nice to know.

I have pondered the “academic superstar” life path before. After all, I am extremely good at school. Should be possible to turn that into a career.

Just have to get somewhere where my brilliantly iridescent mind can be seen by the sort of people who might want to mentor me.

Or at least help me up the ladder some.

All these brains have got to be good for something, dammit.

I could see myself being an eccentric academic bad boy, known for my unusual and controversial views which I will happily defend against anyone anywhere at the drop of a hat due to my friendly but feisty personality.

And boy would my intro to philosophy course be a bear! I would take my duty to activate young minds and teach them to think very seriously.

So imagine Dead Poets Society, but with philosophy.

Call it Dead Greeks Society.

But the real fun would be shaking up academia with my radical but extremely well thought out opinions. I would take great joy in being an electrifying and polarizing figure due to my uncanny ability to cut right to the heart of issues and ideas and lay bare their logical absurdity and moral bankruptcy.

Yup. That could be one hell of a lot of fun.

What the hell, I might even try it.

But I will need a mentor first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not the real me. Not really.

So I am always holding back. Being a good giant. Stepping carefully so that I don’t tread on any poor Lilliputians. Keeping everyone safe.

Because of that (and other things), I’m very alone. I can’t really confide in anyone. It would blow them away. Not even my shrink can take it without getting freaked out.

Speaking of whom, today was Therapy Thursday. Decent session.

One thing that came up was my feeling that I would be happier if I could get more of my creative energies out. That the happiest times I have had in recent memory were when I higher creative output, like when I was doing my Million Words, or putting out X minutes of video a day.

And it would be nice to get back to doing something like that. Right now the ol’ webcam is on the blink but I am sure if I fiddle with it enough, I can resurrect it.

I am reassured by the knowledge that if all I can manage on one of my worse days is to talk to the camera a while, that’s not the end of the world.

That kind of content is increasingly tolerated in this world where a YouTube video is as likely to be listened to as watched.

I’d rather do a lot more, of course. The beauty of video is that it allows for a much more vivid and dense and demanding form of self-expression and thus will require an exponentially larger input of my constantly coruscating creativity.

Came across my old cheap webcam recently, so in theory, if I am using one of these modern multicam recording programs, I could in theory record myself two camera style, like in a TV studio, just like I’ve always wanted.

That way, I can switch angles for visual interest. Just like on TV!

I might even try to make my own little fake news show in the style of Daily Show.

After all, they’re sure as fuck putting their heart into it any more. And I certainly have plenty of snarky things to say about the news these days.

I just need a suit. Newscasters wear suits. Hmmm.

Another thing that came up was looking for freelance work via UpWork. Getting paid to do things would do wonders for my self-esteem and could lead to more joyous things like upgrading this dang computer of mine.

I want to be able to play the new hotness, dammit!

So all in all, I have ideas to make my life better. Give it more content. More places to go. More outlets for all this crazy energy swirling in my head.

Maybe I will do these things. Maybe not. That’s not important.

What’s important is that I am thinking ahead and making plans. And that means I am looking to the future and thinking that maybe, just maybe, there’s a place for me there.

It’s about bloody time. Feels like I’ve been waiting forever.

More after the break.

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The end of nothing

I’m making good progress in my constant mission to burrow through the ice and dirt and frozen tears caked in thousands of layers on my frozen fragile heart.

I want an end to the numbness, therefore I forsake its protection. Let me feelin a thousand million terrible things – but let me feel.

Death to the void. Long live life.

Long live the new flesh.

That means that if I want to truly be alive, I have to give up the smug privilege of viewing life through a lens of icy detachment, aloof and remote, “seeing all”.

I’ll have to learn to deal with life dynamically, close up and in realtime, with no chance to think things over and therefore no choice but to go with your gut.

Less nerd. More jock. Need balance.

And that means doing the unspeakable : letting the id make the call, at least some of the time. My oh so sharp brain will be there, of course, working as hard as it can to show off just how gosh darn BRIGHT I am, but it will have to work way, way faster and without any time to check its work.

Pretty sure that means I will end up relying on a smug, cocky attitude to see me through. It won’t be pretty but it’s what I have available.

Besides, it could be kind of fun.

Told Doc Costin about my theory that part of me doesn’t want me to get better because it feels like the more healthy I get, the higher the intensity of stimulation from life – the “louder” life will get – and that sounds worse than Hell to me.

I truly think that has blocked my progress in the past. I start to improve and my mind wakes up and so do my senses and while I in the short term feel better, deep down I am getting overwhelmed and freaking out and eventually that forces me to shut down again just to escape the dread cacophony in my head.

That strange way things seem to echo in my head sometimes that I mentioned once before, long ago, must play a big part too.

Gotta learn to turn THAT shit off.

The only cure I can conceive of for my oversensitivity to overstimulation is graduated exposure. Turn the volume up on life nice and slow so I can adjust and acclimate myself to the higher levels, with the goal of eventually being able to handle actual life.

Then again, maybe that’s all wrong. Maybe that’s just another bullshit delaying tactic my depression has cooked up and the REAL path to success is to simply throw myself off the deep end into some high commitment situation where there is no backing out and I will have no choice but to deal with things as they come.

Birth the new me in fire and pain as God intended and finally cleanse myself of all this weakness and self-pity so that I might rise anew, whole and strong and clean.

But first, I’m gonna need a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just realized that my lack of things to look forward to is due to my lack of looking forward. And that’s got to stop.

Trouble with the future is a known symptom of depression. The pessimism endemic to the condition makes it nearly impossible to see the future as anything but bleak.

And for me, that’s only gotten radically worse since my health started steeply declining. Before, when I tried to imagine my future, all I got saw was an angry wall of grey static. My mind refused to go there. It knew better than to stop at that dismal station.

However, by default, like all young people I assumed that whatever the future held, I would be there to experience it living more or less the exact same life.

But now all I see is things getting radically worse until I am a gimptard lying in a hospital somewhere unable to move a muscle, tubes everywhere, drooling and twitching until the day some bored nurse unplugs my ventilator so she can charge her phone and my walleyed angel of mercy finally does its job and put me out of our misery.

Not that I’m bitter.

But I can’t leave it like that. Despair is a luxury I can no longer afford. Giving up loses its appeal when it can actually kill you.

I’m not goddamned dead yet. I can move, I can think, I can have fun. I can get something out of this stupid goddamned life before it’s too late.

And my life is not undifferentiated misery for fuck’s sake. I have fun. I play games and listen to interesting YouTube videos and write this crazy frigging blog and I don’t exactly do these things because I hate them.

And I treat myself to ordering in three times a week. That’s something to look forward to if I can be bothered to look forward.

And with a little extra effort, I can build more things to look forward to into my life. I can buy neat things online and anticipate their arrival. I can start saving up to upgrade this ol computer of mine. I can try out different virtual hangouts and expand my social vistas a little bit at a time.

And those are just off the top of my head. I am sure I can come up with lots of other ways to enrich my life if I could just burn all filthy frost left behind by my negative attitude off of my otherwise mega potent imagination.

If I want to live, I have to exit survival mode. ^[1] I need to start thinking in terms of what will make me feel like life is something to enjoy, not just endure. I want to find the things that pull me forward and then hitch my wagon to them and RIDE.

I have a lot of mental dead weight to shed first. But I am getting there.

And if there’s one thing I am sure of, it’s that I will KEEP. ON. TRYING.

More after the break.

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The only way to let it in is to let it out

It’s like our hearts have only one door.

And that door is either open or closed. Totally binary. No middle ground.

And so the only way to let something in – like love – is to open that door and risk letting the bad stuff in too.

Or letting something else out.

My door’s been sealed tighter than an airlock at pressure for a long time now. Forever, really. When I reacted to being raped by withdrawing deep within myself, I closed that door and welded it shut on the way in.

And like I said recently, I’ve never been truly close with anyone since. I’ve had friends, and loved them dearly, but that only gets you so close. We hang out, talk, laugh, have fun, love each other’s company, and share wonderful companionship.

But that is nowhere as close as one is supposed to be with one’s parents, siblings, lovers, and other “inner circle” types.

I have rotted in the dark without them.

But that’s just the setup for a much bigger and scarier question : could anyone get any closer than that to me? Or did I seal that door too tight?

Truthfully, it’s possible, but unlikely. I don’t know how to be closer than that. I want to be. I long for some way to breach the inner silence and stop being so goddamned alone.

I’ve heard it’s possible to not be lonely. Like, at all. Strange.

But I have trouble imagining it. Maybe if I can dream it, I can make it possible. My imagination is just that powerful.

There’s magic in this mighty mind of mine.

But as to whether someone could have gotten close to me, well, yes, but they would have to have been a pretty extraordinary person.

They would have to have been strong of mind and will and very stubborn yet also gentle enough not to spook me. Having great personal warmth would go a long way.

I am drawn to personal warmth like a cat is drawn to a dryer vent.

My inner world is so desperately cold that even the smallest of warm gestures can leave me close to sobbing with gratitude. It’s like food for my starving soul.

For everyone else, I am quite the challenge to get close to. All the moreso because I am such a master of illusion. I can seem completely honest and open and my high powered insight and empathy means I can get to know you very well very fast, and that sure makes it seem like we’re close.

But it’s all just a projection, and the real me is buried so far away it can’t be reached by slower than light communication.

One thing is for sure : if anyone is ever going to get close to me (or vice versa), I am going to have to help them a lot.

Maybe if we both push as hard as we can, we can pry that door open for good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went to see my CPAP guy, Ray, at Coastal Sleep this morning.

He was able to give me a crash course on how to deal with the facemask. What stopped me last time was that I kept getting very confused as to what bits went where and how to know whether the thing was inside out or not.

Ray quite cleverly cut the Gordian knot on that by wielding a Sharpie to label what part goes on top of my head and what part goes on the back of my head.

So I should be all set now. Honestly, it was not that hard a puzzle and I probably could have worked it out myself if there weren’t so many tough emotions involved.

Sometimes feelings make you dumb.

I am determined to make this CPAP crap work. My motivation – the golden, shining prize that draws me forward like the Holy Grail – is good sleep.

If strapping this freaking hose monster to my face so it can shoot carefully compressed air down my throat to keep it from closing up thousands of times an hour while I sleep can get me a regular supply of decent REM sleep, it is all worth it.

I don’t care about the long term health benefits of not smothering repeatedly in my sleep any more. They’re nice but they don’t motivate me. They’re too remote and indirect.

We’d all be better off if long term cumulative harm motivated us just as strongly as immediate and painful harm, but as a species, we’re just not that smart.

Getting decent sleep on a regular basis could make a huge difference in my life. Right now, I am always running way behind on REM sleep. Occasionally I will have one of my sleepy periods and get back to a somewhat more stable state – or at least one where my consciousness doesn’t have so many holes in it, and that scary bright shiny patch of blankness doesn’t seem so big….and hungry.

Getting my groceries delivered soon. Had to order my groceries online due to not wanting to end up all shaky and weak and sick like the last time I did them in person.

It’s always sort of exciting to order them online. When they show up it’s like a mini-Xmas, even though it’s the exact same boring old stuff I always get.

Well, except that I always end up getting those sugar free ice cream sandwiches and sundae cone type things as well. I can’t get those when I shop there in person because our next stop is always Denny’s and they would just melt while we ate.

I’ve also been known to add the occasional case of some diet soda I can’t get in my customary 2L bottles, like Diet Orange Crush.

Plus other odds and sods. Some sugar free stuff they only sell in bulk. Various meaty convenience foods so I get my vitamin B12 on.

To be honest, I should spend more on groceries so I can widen my diet. I want to do that for both nutritional and quality of life reasons.

Eating the same stuff all the time is a waste when I could spend a bit more and get things like frozen entrees and have food I look forward to eating.

Something to ponder, I suppose.

More after the break.

---

Getting more out of life

There’s got to be a lot of ways to make this shit more fun.

I just have to think of it as a puzzle for my amazing mind to solve, and clear out a lot icky brown bullshit that has been gumming up the works left over from living in survival mode for so long.

And not just survival mode. Minimized survival mode. A survival mode that assumes the only way to be safe is to live as little as possible and thus have the least chance of attracting life’s attention to you.

That’s what the Avoidant Personality Disorder life is like. You are so deep into a permanent Hide adrenal mode that you are afraid of life itself and try to flee the light of day by burrowing into yourself like a panicked mole.

I’m used to feeling like I’m being buried alive, day by day.

But I’m also the guy with the fucking shovel.

If I was not so scared of life, I would not need to spin this deep dark forest all around me for me to hide in and pretend to be lost in.

I ain’t lost. I know exactly where I am. I’m in the middle, like always. This whole bullshit setup radiates from me and it’s only real purpose is to keep me busy locked off in my own little world where the big bad world can’t find me.

It’ll all go away when I don’t need it any more. As such, it’s basically meaningless and not really worth the attention I pay to it.

It’s all just more carnival bullshit and fun house maze. Images and reflections and delusional directions and mindless fodder for the Machine,

But all it’s really eating is itself, in the end.

Oh sure, it sucks up all that stimulation from all the wonderful things a computer brings. That’s all fresh input, more or less.

But without fresh action and new experiences, it all ends up tasting the same anyhow.

I’d love to be able to get up out of this chair and go out there and lead a life. And some day, god damn it, I will.

That is, if I can manage before my health deteriorates to the point where my current lifestyle ceases to be optional at all.

But even if I am stuck physically, I can roam virtually. There’s a lot of life to be lived on and via the internet. I am in no way getting all I can out of this life of mine.

I am determined to squeeze the juice out of life and get drunk on its wine.

Fuck this freezing in the frigid confines of my own timidity any more,.

Let’s light that sucker and start the fireworks show.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I grew up largely unparented.

Nobody was watching over me, monitoring my growth, making sure I got what I needed. This hothouse flower was a lot more like a weed, growing however I grew using whatever I found wherever I ended up.

Like a weed, I was technically unwanted, but the truth was, nobody gave a shit either way. Live. Die. Explode. We don’t care,

Just leaves us the hell alone and quit reminding us you exist.

We really enjoy pretending you were never born. Those were such blissful, you-free days. So innocent and pure, without a care in the world, just sunshine meadows and big blue skies everywhere all the time.

Then you had to show up and insist on being born and it’s been downhill ever since.

So yeah, no shit there was nobody watching over you. Nobody could even stand to be around you. Watching over you would required remembering and acknowledging your existence on a constant, long term basis.

Actually caring whether you live or die or your head catches on fire is absolutely out of the question for the likes of you.

So yeah. Basically raised myself, alone, with absolutely no social support system. No friends, no siblings, no parents, no sympathetic authority figures, nada.

Not so much as a friendly crossing guard.

Once more I wonder how I didn’t end up much crazier than I am. It could have been so much worse. Especially in my teen years, with all that rage and lust bubbling in my head with no place to go.

I guess I am just fundamentally stable. Perhaps that’s because of my cold unemotional nature. The crazy thoughts never get very far because my basic instinct is to shut down anything that might lead to action, good OR bad.

And I have that core of stubborn rationality that insists on things making sense. Crazy thoughts by definition do not make sense. My powerful logic engine has a lot of problems but it keeps me marginally sane.

Well, maybe not, but it keeps me from becoming the more colorful kind of crazy.

The kind that leads to crazy actions.

The kind that actually gets the attention of the powers that be, unlike us boring depressives who never do anything fun.

Not that I’m bitter.

Honestly, the only thing keeping me from seeing if being batshit crazy is any better than being only kinda crazy is I am way too paranoid to lose contact with reality because that’s exactly when it would sneak up and GET me.

Which is, of course, crazier than the ten most popular brands of fuck.

Because I grew up unparented, I guess I can claim to be a self-made man,

But only because nobody else wanted the god damned job.

Very short paragraphs.

No wonder I have so many pieces missing. A lot of who people become comes from other people. Influences, inspirations, guidance, counterexamples. Family, friends, roommates, lovers, co-workers, bosses, people you met on the bus.

I have none of that.

So what the fuck am I, then? A puppet with broken strings? A cipher of ice and dirt? A meaningless squiggle of flesh and intellect given life by a bored God who was thinking about something else at the time? A worm on a hook in a pond with no fish? A broken frozen memento of a carnival nobody visited? The misbegotten spawn of an ill advised attempt to make something interesting?

Surely, with all this power and potential, it is at least theoretically possible to make somethin functional and worthwhile of myself.

But with all this toxicity and pain making me crippled and weak…. I can’t do it.

Not all by myself.

And nobody in this whole fucking world can help me either.

More after the break.

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I…. walk along,,,,

Feeling like this right about now :

Yes, it’s that “long dark corridor” feeling again. Like I am moving slowly and smoothly through an endless darkened corridor in a seamless silence. Its walls are an unbroken chargoal gray and I travel without effort, as if my forward motion is as much an inherent property of my being as my height or weight.

Gee, it must take a lot of energy to keep being bipedal like that.

I’d consider this one of my spooky “haunted” moods. There’s a lot of quality space for ghosts in these corridors. I have that feeling like my soul’s not quite stuck to my body properly and at any moment my ghost might accidentally pop out of my body like an ectoplasmic wardrobe malfunction.

Complete with an eerie floaty feeling in my head. But that’s more or less a constant these day. more’s the pity.

Even when I am lying down and completely still, it feels like part of my head is floating around like a lazy balloon.

Yet another of those things I should probably tell someone about. There’s so many.

Today’s been quiet. Had Wound Care in the morning, which was quite weird given that I was just there two days ago, on Saturday.

And I won’t be back until next Saturday. Most peculiar, mama.

Oh well, nobody ever said scheduling was easy. I don’t envy Megan, the gal who handles that at the Community Care Clinic where I get my Wound Care, her job.

Finding it hard to say focused. My mind wants to ramble. Wander around and see what there is to see, without any strings, like the balloon it is right now.

Oh well, soon I will be Dun Bloggan and able to slip away under the cover of night and resume my important self-imposed mission to play video games and nap until I die for very stupid and/or tragic reasons.

He died of not being able to adult in a situation with a great need for adulting.

He died of being too sad to live. Also diabetes.

He died by drowning in his own inner quagmire. It was brutal. It took years.

He died of making wordcount.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript

Check out this video from my pyramid headed buddy the Illuminaughti :

Love her content. Her videos are always deep, thorough, and fascinating. Plus I find her voice quite pleasant to listen to. She’s serious without being stiff and focused while still being credible, and neither of those are easy to pull off.

Anyhow. About the book.

To me, it’s clearly someone’s art project. They had all the skills to make one of the illustrated science books of the era. Possibly they even did some.

But one day they started doodling and came up with an illustration for something that was not quite real, and then they added something that looked like the right sort of accompanying text, and they liked the results so much, they just kept going.

If so, I love it. That’s art worth doing, in my opinion. It’s an exploration of the form of something isolated from its substance because the substance is blank.

It’s the sort of thing I would do if I had the skills. Bravo.

Presumably, they didn’t mean to create an everlasting and “unsolvable”^[1] mystery. It’s not their fault that their creation got cut off from its creator and all other context and now haunts the halls of history.

However, if they DID intend that, mad respect, dude or dudette. That would make it an even greater work of art.

That’s like, Warhol level shit, man.

---

I think I’m making some kind of peace with my current condition.

Either that or I’m just getting better. Either or.

But my happy go lucky mode seems to have kicked in. I feel cheerfully fatalistic at least some of the time. Whatever is gonna happen is gonna happen and so I might as well relax and enjoy the ride.

Sounds good, but there’s a ball of deadly apathy at its heart. A part of me that just can’t be bothered to care what happens to me any more and has therefore given up on trying to steer this fucking ship and has retreated to the galley to get drunk and surrender my fate to the winds.

Maybe through this, I will give my soul the space and rest it needs to renew itself and actually be able to come back to the wheel refreshed and ready to plot a course and get somewhere for a change.

Sea’s wide open, after all.

Or maybe I will just learn to get through life with less pain. It’s not like constantly fighting myself is getting me anywhere. Maybe I can make all this work for me.

To be honest, I am not even sure what I would be giving up. Or giving up on. Nothing worth all the angst, surely, when I could be embracing self-love and learning to be my own best friend good parent so I can guide myself through life with love, tenderness, wisdom, compassion, and a big warm sense of humour about this big bad technicolor shitshow called life.

There’s sunshine in my heart. It’s always there.

I just have to put that hard intellectual edge away and let myself feel it.

More after the break.

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Home for a rest

Feeling fairly good. Managed to make it to Denny’s and back in one piece. Had a great time as usual. Getting to and from the car was a bit of an adventure – especially to, because I started off by standing up too fast and making myself dizzy that way,

So once more getting to the car felt like I was trying to get to the bottom floor of cruise ship during very rough seas.

But whatever. Fuck that noise. It doesn’t matter. Nothing does. Fuck everything always. I just want to have a good time, god damn it, is that so wrong?

I think I am learning to weaponize my angry apathy.

Eat nihilistic void you fucking neuroses!

I was glad to find that my appetite was back at Denny’s. It had gone en vacance for a couple of days, leading me to my undereating.

Like i have said before, one of the dumbest things about the human body is that hypoglycemia – a condition rectifiable mostly by eating – kills your appetite.

So fuck you, intelligent design. That’s terrible code.

Pretty tired at the moment despite all that Diet Coke I just drank at Denny’s.

Insert usual ranting about how much it sucks that I don’t seem to get what other people get out of caffeine. Maybe it perks me up. Maybe it makes me sleepy. Maybe it gives me a splitting headache. Spin the Wheel of Caffeination and find out!

Looking forward to the moment when I am done blogging and I can lay down in bed and surrender all consciousness.

Fuck you, world. I’ll be back when I’m ready.

It feels quiet and dark inside me right now. In a good way. Like those moments when the family is tired from a fun group activity and so everyone curls up here and there and snoozes before the next thing starts.

Nobody called naptime. This was in no way planned. We all just ran out of gas as one and are taking a spontaneous and natural break.

I’ve had a similar feeling when I would wake up in the middle of the night, everyone else asleep, and I drink that deep and drowsy stillness in and languish in its embrace.

These are the moments at the apogee of life’s busy parabolas when all the forces are in balance and we can be, for one brief moment, motionless.

See, I can write nice things too.

Maybe if I keep digging myself out of this hole, I can write even more of them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Wound Care thing this morning.

Uneventful. The wound type thing on my foot is about the same as ever. On the previous visit, Nurse Vivian gave it a severe debridement, meaning she used her little scraper to shave the calloused part down to nearly nothing, so it’s a much smaller issue to deal with at the moment.

Nobody has a solution to make the damned thing go away forever though. That’s because that would take a podiatrist and the gubmint doesn’t pay for those.

Well, technically, it pays $25 a visit for them. Which is waaaaaaaaay less than they cost. So it’s LIKE they don’t pay for them, only more insulting.

Well obviously, if they paid for the whole thing. us dirty rotten poor people^[1] would go get foot diseases just for fun.

It honestly seems like someone just hasn’t bothered to update the amount paid in a really long time. Like, since the Cretaceous.

Well, it’s not like we’re important or anything.

The trip up from the car to the Community Care Clinic wasn’t too bad. I got dizzy and sick but it was manageable.

But the trip back down was pretty damned bad. Felt quite wretched when I got ito the car. Head and heart pounding, stomach full of radioactive bile, dizzy, the works.

My world really sucks right about now.

Gonna need that wheelchair soon. I feel like there’s the ghost of one following me around now. Waiting patiently for when it becomes obvious to all concerned that this dizziness on standing ain’t going anywhere anytime soon and so if I want to be able to actually leave the apartment, I’ll need wheels.

Assuming I continue to be able to make it around the apartment OK.

---

Which is by no means guaranteed, judging by the hard time I just had simply getting up and getting my 7-11 order from the door then pouring myself a Diet Coke.

Oh god, please don’t make me a total cripple. I swear I’ll be good. I really don’t want to have to rely on other people to do really basic things like get something from the kitchen. I don’t want to be too feeble to deal with life’s basic challengesI don’t want to need help in the bathroom.

Guess I better get my poop in a group then.

Make some doctor’s appointments. I need to see Doctor Sherri again. Which means I have to get that lab work done…. assuming I can find it.

I am so bad at this life thing. Fantastic magical powers but stumped by things like sleeping and taking care of myself.

I’m a hothouse flower in dire need of a gardener.

Or a hothouse, for that matter.

Instead, I have just gotten accustomed to shivering all the goddamned time. It’s always so goddamned cold in my bare little patch of midnight tundra.

The view’s amazing. But nothing grows here.

Not even me.

More after the break.

The end of the world

I think I’m going to have to be very sad for a while.

No point fighting it. Scary shit is going down in my life and I need to process and express those emotions and that means feeling bad for a while.

Whatever. It’s not like I have anything better to do. Might as well curl up and suffer.

I feel like I am dying. Just getting up for a pee hurts me. By the time I sit back down, I am nauseous and headache-y and the rest. From a pee.

And so I am getting pretty scared. Death’s pendulum blade swings a little closer every second and I feel like I am sliding ever closer to the edge of the waterfall.

And them rocks down there look mighty pointy.

And the sick and evil part of my mind is all excited. Finally, after all this time, its evil plan is coming close to fruition. It will finally have committed the ultimate act of self-hate and killed me, and thus itself as well.

And then this long pathetic humiliating face can finally be over and I can get some peace and quiet at last.

Part of me never sleeps.

Like a lot of depressives, I don’t truly want to die. I just want the pain to STOP. I want it to be OVER. I want to ESCAPE THIS HELL.

But I will settle for not ending up a gimptard.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. I have a lot on my plate right now and I didn’t order any of it. I want to rescue myself from this malaise. I want to be able to rally my efforts and do all the good things and get way healthier and show the people who care about me that their love is appreciated and not rejected by my apparent refusal to help myself.

But I can’t help myself.

I’m very sick inside and that sickness keeps me from taking care of all my other sicknesses. If I could control my blood sugar and my sleep apnea, I would no doubt feel a million times better.

So why does that idea terrify me?

Deep down, the Trog feels like that would just make life far, far too loud on every level and with no place left to retreat to.

That sounds worse than Hell, to be honest.

Well that explains why I find it so hard to help myself. Part of me is terrified of feeling better in case that makes life overstimulating

Not sure what to do with that information but it’s good to have nevertheless.

If only I could raise my stimulation tolerance. But I am pretty sure that’s hardwired. I have always hated bright light, loud noises, emotionally loud people, and so on.

So what’s a poor fox to do?

There’s got to be a way out of this somewhere.

Besides the obvious, that is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Alert level raised to Hard Yellow.

So I just got back from Doctor Chao’s office and the results are a little grim.

Turns out it really IS a matter of low blood pressure. As in, my blood pressure drops thirty points when I stand up.

That’s a lot.

Doc Chao’s theory is that it’s the Jardiance doing it, so I am off that for now. I am not entirely convinced. That would fit with my previous theory, but my gut says there’s more.

But I will stop the Jardiance and see what happens over the weekend. Hopefully that will do the trick.

Because right now, I am kind of scared to stand up.

Just the amount of standing I had to do to get from the cab to the apartment damn near killed me. It took a serious act of will to force myself to grab some food and Diet Coke on the way from the apartment door to sitting down in front of this here computer.

But I knew I had to do it because I have been undereating lately and that’s pretty bad. Low blood pressure is bad enough without adding low blood sugar.

The fight against low appetite continues. Making myself eat when I have low or no appetite is frustratingly like trying to feed a recalcitrant toddler.

No matter how determined and focused the grownup part of me is to get that food into me for my own good, my inner child finds ways to shy away at the last second.

Really makes me wish I could take meals in pill form like on the Jetsons.

I suppose I could get me some of those meal replacement shakes. I’ve never liked the idea of them – they seem like too pat a solution and I feel like there must be some shaky assumptions made in their design.

But it sure beats hypoglycemia and/or malnutrition.

There might even be situations where even “naughty” foods served a purpose. But only mildly naughty things, like say plain ice cream (no sauces or whatever) or a muffin.

Too naughty and it makes me physically ill. Like the worst Halloween night sugar sickness ever times ten.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch. I am worried about myself. Knowing something like that blood pressure drop is going on is pretty frightening.

That’s not just some nebulous thing like high blood sugar that I know is very bad but that doesn’t really hurt or have obvious immediate effects.

This is low blood pressure, which feels like it’s killing you because it is. Cells in the body are not getting enough oxygen because they aren’t getting enough bloodflow to keep up with the demand.

So I will be taking it REAL easy for now. Don’t want to end up passing out and braining myself on something jagged.

At this point, I’m close to needing to be carried around on a litter.

I swear, that wheelchair is coming to get me. And if it does, a fuckton of things are going to have to change about my life.

Because there is no way a wheelchair could make it through this hoarder’s hole of an apartment. I would have to live somewher else.

More after the break.

---

My life as a powder

So according to my research, the main problem might well be dehydration.

Jardiance lowers your blood sugar by dumping the glucose into your urine. Your body has to make lots of urine in order to keep up with this newfound demand. And so on.

Just realized I explained that before. Sorry.

So dehydration makes a lot of sense. I already knew it was one of the common side effects of Jardiance. I just hadn’t totally connected it to low blood pressure yet.

Seems obvious in retrospect. But so do a lot of things.

I am also a victim of my own arrogance because I just assumed that, as someone who already drinks and pees a lot, I surely didn’t need to start drinking MORE water just because I started Jardiance.

Was that even possible?

Well it had better be. Because clearly I ain’t been keeping up.

Time to reconstitute myself.

---

It doesn’t matter whether there’s a way out of this forest or not.

Because I’m going to keep looking either way.

What else is there to do? I don’t know how to do anything else. Stopping is not a possibility. Or if it is, it sounds far worse than death.

So I will wander, search, and discover.

And find the exit when I no longer need the forest.

---

I continue to have periods of fairly intense depression. Often in the afternoon.

Every year, I manage to forget that once the weather warms up, afternoons become difficult for me. They are the nadir of my diurnal mood cycle and every single one of them is going to try my soul until it’s winter again.

Ain’t that just ducky.

The heat is presumably the primary factor, but not the only one. Because it’s so much more than mere heatstroke.

I think that due to my vampire sleeping habits,. the afternoon is actually my “middle of the night” and so the middle of the afternoon is actually my “dark hours of the soul” where all my faculties are at their absolutely lowest, my defenses are down, and my spirit lies naked and exposed to the harsh light of the world.

That might actually be useful. A good time to try and get some serious emotional work done. Our defenses are often our worst enemy.

And now that I have consciously recognized this pattern, I can at least brace myself for the daily deluge of depression. Maybe even lessen its effect via hydration and rest.

Stranger things have happened.

Meanwhile, my body falls apart and the day when I am a pathetic twitching gimptard who had so much potential but threw it all away grows near.

Where’s my mentor, damn it?

Oh right, nobody can help me because I’m smarter than everyone else and nobody can actually handle my problems.

Can’t imagine how I managed to forget that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a brainwave this morning that I am so impressed with that I just have to share it.

OK, so. my GP said my recent dizziness upon standing might be due to low blood pressure. I’ll find out more when I see him tomorrow afternoon.

Well if my blood pressure is low, the cause might actually be my Jardiance.

See, blood pressure and blood sugar are intimately linked. The higher your blood sugar, the more viscous your blood is. And the more viscous your blood, the more pressure your body has to generate in order to pump it around.

Which is gross to think about.

But if my Jardiance is doing its job, my blood sugar has gone down by a lot over the last week or so, and ergo, so might have my blood pressure!

Which would be fab. Two stroke risk factors taken down at the same time. Whatever makes me less likely to end up a gimptard is fine by me.

Only problem is, I am (was) still on two pretty powerful blood pressure lowering meds, Ramipril (your new co-worker from India) and Atenolol (those ancient headache pills in your grandmother’s medicine cabinet).

Ergo, blood pressure being too low. Possibly dangerously so. Eek.

But I haven’t taken either of them since I got off the phone with Doctor Chao. He said I should probably skip them just in case they really are the problem.

Fine by me.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the problem seems to have slackened somewhat. Or perhaps I am just getting better at dealing with it.

Either way, I can get around the apartment just fine now. Thank goodness. The clock still starts ticking when I stand up, but I can get my meals together and get my bathroom duties done without much issue.

Getting to my appointment tomorrow will be… interesting. I will have to stay standing for as long as it takes to get from the apartment to the cab,

Pretty sure I can do it. It’s not as bad when I am moving purposefully, So only the elevator ride down should be a challenge.

Golly, this life of mine is sure full of fun adventures!

---

Massy Fecked Saga

So I had already started re-playing the original Mass Effect when I came across a really good deal on Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is the first three games in the series compiled together and remastered.

Perfect! I thought. It had been long enough since I played the original games that I barely remembered them at all, but I remembered them as being very good.

Ergo, perfectly replay fodder. And a good way to get over having totally burned out on Oblivion after a mere 450 hours of playtime.

So I bought it. And downloaded it/ Which took FOREVER because the mofo is 106 gigs. Plus I had to do a TON of HD space clearing to make room for its fat ass.

But finally it was here! Hello, nostalgia!

It didn’t work.

Turns out my computer’s CPU doesn’t have enough cores.

For a revamped version of a game from 2007.

Life freakin’ stinks.

More after the break.

---

Well that sucked

Once more, life punches me in the gut. Literally, it feels like.

So at like 7:50 pm or so I was chilling in bed feeling kinda depressed and dispirited when I realized I needed to pee.

In fact, my back teeth were floatin’.

So I got up, went to my bathroom, assumed the male urination stance, and started to pee. But this time, peeing came with a bonus dish of extraordinary pain.

Felt like someone was feeding my bladder through a meat grinder. I could clearly feel that my pee was having to force its way past some kind of blockage or narrowing of my waterworks and that was not a fun process.

Worse, as often seems to be the case with me, this pain was also reflected in my testicles. Felt like someone was trying to crush them in an iron fist. This, in turn, made my head hurt in that center of the forehead spot so popular with my symptoms lately and THAT pain also made me nauseous.

Any man who’s had a tap to the sack knows the sort of nausea I am talking about.

So I was suddenly in a world of fucking pain. And it all started with that blockage or narrowing somewhere around the exit to my bladder.

This was not entirely a surprise because that’s the exact area that was at fault the last time I got a prostate infection – the one that had me peeing blood.

And I have been noticing a sort of slick foam forming on the surface of the water when I peed for a couple of weeks now.

Last time THAT happened was not long before that peeing blood incident.

And whaddaya know, the main side effect of Jardiance besides frequent urination is an increased risk of urinary tract infections (UTIs).

So I know what I am likely up against, god damn it. And I know I should probably go to the ER right about now, But I don’t want to.

The ER sucks.

So right now, my semi-adult plan is to sit tight and see what develops. I am close to going, so it will only take one more little push to get me out the door.

Like if, say, the NEXT time I have to pee, it hurts as much or more. And of course, if I start peeing blood again, I am out of here.

The other alternative is to wait and bring it up with my GP Doctor Chao tomorrow. That is probably stupid, but that doesn’t mean I ain’t gonna do it.

Right now, the only after-effects of the incident are a lingering soreness in the affected region and an overall hot, feverish feeling.

That fever certainly suggests an infection, doesn’t it?

The hits just keep on coming, don’t they? Ain’t life a peach.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.