The bad news is that I have been coughing more.

Both more often, and for longer. Especially worrisome based on past experience is that the coughing often escalates into a kind of hacking wheeze that sounds remarkably like Dick Dastardly’s dog from Wacky Races.

OK, so I am still pissed off about not finding a clip of Marge telling Lisa, “you see what we mean when we say you’re too smart for your own good?” yesterday.

So anyhow, the coughing.

And I must say I feel a bit more sickly today. So I might be coming down with something. Not necessarily Covid, but something.

Or it might be yet another visit from that phantom illness that keeps seeming like it is coming on and then totally disappearing.

Apparently, my immune system doesn’t win every battle, but it always wins the war.

The good news on the medical front is that I chatted with Doctor Chao yesterday and he agreed to call to have my CT scan expedited.

For which I was grateful as I know he has assertiveness issues a lot like mine. He hides them well and I imagine most patients have no idea, but it’s obvious to empaths like me.

Sometimes I know what people are thinking better than they do.

The even better news is that despite Doctor Chao’s warning that it might still be two or three weeks till my scan, I got a call this morning and booked a scan for this Friday at 9:40 in the evening!

That’s right. It’s a night scan.

I don’t know what I mean by that, but it sounded cool, so I typed it.

I am excited to get the scan as it is the next step in figuring out why my legs are dying. It will be a scan of my lower spine to look for neurological issues.

Given my diabetes, neurological issues are highly probable.

And for bonus points, while I had Doc Chao on the phone, I actually remembered to ask him for something for my leg pain!

For me, that’s like a home run of both self-awareness and assertion.

Then, just to nail the dismount, I convinced my pharmacists to deliver the med Doc Show prescribed for the pain (gabapentin) even though he didn’t want to and had plans for after he closed the pharmacy.

I have given it a try, after first going through the apparently necessary step of looking the drug up online and getting totally freaked out by the side effects.

I know it’s a bad idea but I can’t even choose to remain ignorant about something important to me. I am way too paranoid about the universe for that.

It’s the stuff you don’t know about that lurks in the shadows waiting to GET you!

And I always survive the period of being terrified to take the damned pill and end up taking it anyway, so I suppose there’s no harm except for wear and tear on my nerves.

But I am slowly coming around to accepting that I might not be built for always doing things calmly. I might be better off freaking out but doing it anyway.

Beats not doing it at all!

More after the break,

---

More of the Fruvous Follies

Ordered pizza. Relaxed to listen to videos and play silly web-based games. Website said it would arrived at 9:44 am.

And stupidly, I believed it.

Meaning I forgot that because our Pizza Slut is only three blocks away, the stuff always comes WAY earlier than the website thinks it will.

So when the phone rang at 7:33 pm (or so), I was totally unready, and that is my only excuse for what happened next.

Because I….. hung up the phone on my fave delivery dude (Russian dude that says “Pizza!”) without actually pressing the button to let him in.

Of course. I didn’t know this until I had already spent all my….. leg capital? Leg energy? Leg…. mojo? Well OK.

Of course, I didn’t know this until I’d already spent all my leg mojo getting to the door of the apartment, opening it, seeing there was nobody there, realizing why that was, and then hoofing it back to my room.

And by that point I was spent.

Luckily, I am resourceful.

So I called Joe’s cell and asked him to come get the money from me then go pay for the pizza and bring it to me.

Thus, I got my pizza deal, namely an individual three topping pizza plus 5 boneless bites plus some mozza sticks and marinara.

And the pizza + bites was only $10! But the whole thing ended up costs me $30 because the mozza sticks were 8 (ouch) and the local Pizza Take It Up The Butt has jacked up their delivery fee to $6.95 (double ouch).

So while I like that one place still takes cash at the door, I do feel like I am paying a premium for the privilege. Sigh.

There’s probably other places that still take cash as long as you ordered directly from them and not through a delivery app.

Or maybe through a delivery app other than Skip.

But they said no to cash years ago, presumably because that VASTLY streamlines the process. Delivery drivers don’t have to keep a float or track their tips or deal with customers in person or anything.

They can just leave the stuff by the door and fuck off to the next job.

And this is how I like it too. I just can’t do it right now because all my cash is locked behind the apparently impenetrable barrier of my bank account.

I have one good lead on a solution, though : RBC’s Virtual Visa Debit.

It’s exactly what I am looking for : a way to spend money online and have it come directly from my bank account.

No more stupid credit cards, just spend it right from where it is directly deposited.

One catch (because of course there is a catch) : I can’t finish setting up an account there without visiting them in person.

Which will be tricky, given my mobility limitations. I will have to prevail on Julian to wait in line for me again.

But at least it should be the last time I have to do such a thing, because once I open the new account, I will switch my direct deposit over there, transfer the funds from my Vancity account, and kiss Vancity goodbye.

Sorry, Vancity, but you did not have what I was looking for and did not even seem to grasp the concept of spending money online, so, bye bye!

I figured I have to go to Wound Care at 2:30 pm on Friday anyhow, so I can do it after that if my legs will allow.

Hopefully it will not take long.

I really need to get those crutches.

That yo gabba gabapentin helps with the pain when I stand or walk, but my time up is still quite limited.

I will figured something out.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been listening to a LOT of Patton Oswalt standup lately, and that’s how I came across this little gem :

And it struck me as darkly humorous because wow, that is always what it comes do when American liberals hit middle age, isn’t it?

They started off as bright-eyed idealists out to change the world in college, but by the time they hit 40, it’s all “I am personally embittered and disgusted by this world and therefore EVERYBODY EVERYWHERE SHOULD DIE. ”

Gee, sorry the world failed to live up to your high expectations, but um, aren’t you liberals against the death penalty?

So why are you levying it against LITERALLY EVERYONE?

And this got me thinking about the bitterness of the disillusioned idealist in general and how while I sympathize, I do not empathize.

Because I never had those lofty expectations of the world to begin with. Like I say, I lost my innocence so young I don’t remember it. As a result, I have been a ruthless pragmatist determined to see things as they really are for my whole life.

I have never, in my memory, thought of the world as a safe place. Or a good place. Or in any sense a fair place.

It’s just a place. It is what it is. Trying to generalize about it is futile because it contains all the good and all the bad and everything in between.

And you can’t possibly know enough about it to deduce its “true nature”.

When people talk about “life”, they are really talking about THEIR life. It’s not that Life sucks, it’s that YOUR life sucks…. right now.

Allow me to illustrate.

a : Man, life sucks!

b : What, in general?

a : Yeah! Life is a never ending shit sundae, man!

b : So it sucks for Bill Gates?

a : Yeah… I mean… well maybe not for him…

b : It sucks for little kids laughing and smiling at a birthday party?

a : OK well…. maybe not….

b : It sucks for newlyweds on honeymoon? Old people living it up on cruise ships? Parents gazing at their first newborn baby?

a : Well…. no, I mean….. some people are happy….

b : Just not you.

a : Yeah. I guess. Has anyone ever told you you’re a dick?

You get the idea.

What idealism I have – and I must stipulate that I consider myself to have very high ideals – has survived depression, trauma, loneliness, social isolation, and every other sort of ill that has befallen me, real or imagined.

It has continued to burn bright despite being yoked to the brutal realities of true pragmatism and it is therefore an idealism and optimism that is chosen.

I choose to have hope and keep fighting back the darkness and wage my war against pessimism, fatalism, jadedness, hopelessness, and all the other tricks the forces of evil use to convince us to just let them win already and get it over with.

NEVER. I will die before I stop shining my burning beacon into the dark corner of the world and the darker things get, the brighter it shines.

And I will gladly submit myself to the harshness of the pragmatic, realistic world view that accepts no unjustified simplifications because I know that it is through its self-discipline that true, effective, REAL solutions can be found.

You know. Shit that actually WORKS.

And that’s worth any amount of suffering to me. Including bruising your ideals.

Wow, this did not go where I wanted it to go.

Oh well, maybe in Part 2.

More after the break.

---

Now where was I going with this?

(scrolls back) Oh right… ruptured ideals.

Hmmmm. Actually, I don’t think there is much more to be said. I never had a sense that the world was a good place to lose.

Building myself up from “truth” only was a very hard path to tread and there are times when I wish I had been a lot dreamier and less “realistic”.

Maybe that would have cushioned me from some of the hard knocks life was going to give me. Maybe I should have listened to all the cartoons of my youth when they went on and on about “the power of imagination”.

Erf. Eh, maybe not.

No wonder we Gen X people grew up to be bitter and cynical when we had to listen to that crap for our entire childhoods.

I guess that sort of airy idealism was never going to be in the cards for me. I was a weirdly pragmatic and realistic child even before I got raped.

Like I keep saying, I never had an imaginary friend and I never played with toys in the imagination based way I have seen in the media.

Because I knew the friend wasn’t there and the toys were just objects. The idea of infusing them with my own imagination and (sort of) pretending they were real would literally never have occurred to me.

Thus began my lifelong career in being so damn smart that I completely fuck up my own natural development via logic.

I mean, kids have imaginary friends and play imagination games for a reason. Both things help us develop our social instincts and expand our consciousness. Like other animals, we humans have a whole battery of instincts that normally lead us along the path to being a fully functional adult if we obey them.

But not me, of course. Because I thought I knew better.

And I really wanted to link to a clip of Marge Simpson telling Lisa, “You see what we mean when we say you’re too smart for you own good?” from near the end of the “Hungry Are The Damned” segment in Treehouse of Horror 2 here.

But I can’t find it. My Google Fu is so weak.

I laughed SO hard at that line when I first saw that episode. It was that special kind of deep, cleansing laugh you can only get when some bit of comedy hits the nail right on the head for you.

I mean, just listen to how hard these people laugh :

Clearly Lehrer helped these people release tons of repressed Catholic emotions through the miracle of laughter.

And that’s what the Simpsons line did for me. I’ve been too smart for my own good for my whole damned life. Felt good to hear it said out loud like that.

Of course, I’m pushing 50 and still have no idea what to do with all these brains.

But hey, at least I can laugh about it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got off the phone with Doc Chao.

Which was fortunate in and of itself, because I stupidly overslept and missed our 2 pm to 3 pm appointment range.

So I had to call back, hat in hand, and just hope he was still available.

Luckily he was.

So the precis of our conversation is that he is going to call and get my CT scan expedited, which is a relief.

But he warned that it still might be a while because patients from the emergency room get priority and the emergency room at RGH is pretty busy.

Fair enough. But then he said, “You know, if you feel like you’re in imminent danger of a fall, you could always go to the emergency room. ”

Gee, how come I never thought of that?

Oh wait, I did, I just chose to be responsible and not burden the system and go through proper channels and such.

Still, nice to know I have official permission to do so from my doctor to take that route if things get worse.

Of course, that was going to be the result even without his permission. What else would I do if I found I just can’t walk any more?

Crawl to the ER?

No, I am going to need to call 911 and get some EMTs to come retrieve me.

As is, I am already mentally bracing myself for the possibility that I will have to get to said CT scan on my own if neither Joe or Julian are over their Covid by then.

That, of course, assumes that I don’t have it.

And I might. Sigh.

Right now, my symptoms are a runny nose and some light coughing. And it could be that the runny noses is just allergies and the light coughing is from the runoff from said runny nose going down the wrong tube.

But I am really frigging worried regardless.

Because I don’t want to die.

Or end up in Ventilator Hell.

Or anything like that.

But I am already doing all that I can do. I wear a mask whenever I need to go get food from the kitchen and eating lots of fruit.

Of course, now we’re out of fruit.

I get the feeling I am going to need to introduce Joe to the wonder of online grocery shopping because right now, I doubt we have enough supplies to last until one or both of them is well again.

Meanwhile, I still haven’t found what I am looking for, namely some way for me to spend the money in my bank account online.

The latest farce was my signing up for this Tangerine thing and getting the whole thing filled out and set up only for the damned thing that because it couldn’t verify my identity online, I would have to go to my nearest Post Office and do it IN PERSON.

Son of a bitch.

That’s not completely impossible but it certainly an unwelcome complication. Once I stop being pissed off about it, I might be able to convince myself to take a cab to the local Shopper’s Drug Mart and use the Post Office there.

But Jesus Christ has this been a whole metric slew of fuckery trying to get this done.

More after the break.

---

A late dinner

Even by my standards.

Because it’s 10:02 pm and I am just getting around to eating. That is pretty sad.

But also a victory, because at least I am eating.

That means I won the battle with the crazy evil stupid voice in my head that was telling me I should just skip dinner.

After all, it would be so much easier.

Easier…. but not better.

Those ain’t always the same thing.

So I did go and put some food in a bowl and make myself a peanut butter sandwich and put something vaguely resembling a meal together, which I am now eating.

So, yay on me for that.

Random note : peanut butter sandwich + vanilla sandwich cookie = ick.

Made the vanilla taste medicine-y.

I tell you this so that you can profit from my suffering.

Oh…. and you’re welcome,

Boy am I doing a lot of short short paragraphs lately.

I guess I have a lot of separate thoughts.

Other than my appointment with Doctor Chao, I also slept through another important appointment today at a completely different time.

I was supposed to have Wound Care today at 11:45 am. I was not planning on going in, as I might be a plague carrier right now for all I know.

Where I fucked up, though, was I was supposed to call the nice people at the Community Care Clinic and TELL them I would not be in today.

Instead, I overslept, and was woken up by them calling to ask me where the heck I was.

GUILT. So very sorry, ladies.

On the plus side, I have gotten some high quality sleep today. And that’s a rare treat. I wish I know what cosmic forces aligned to let me sleep well, but for now, I will just content myself with enjoying it while it lasts.

What’s more, I have also had a lot less back pain and a lot less butt pain from sitting in this underpadded new office chair of mine.

For ages now I have found my ability to use my computer curtailed by the fact that after about 45 mins to an hour and a half, my butt and spine hurt so bad that I have to get off the computer and lay down for a while.

But today, not so much.

Unfortunately, sitting here can still make my LEG and KNEE hurt, so I am not out of the woods just yet.

But it was nice to have a little less misery and agony in my life for a little while.

Makes me wonder what changed. It could be just that I managed to actually empty my colon so there was nothing in there causing the tensions that lead to my back pain.

But why? Probably because there was a pause in my popcorn rich diet.

Which kind of suggests I should knock off the popcorn for a while to see what happens.

I will do this thing I have started plotting it. I will definitely do it soon.

But not right away. This is potentially a very big lifestyle change. These things must be approached with care and caution lest I spook myself.

I am such a timid and skittish creature.

I need special handling.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God, where do I even fuckin’ begin.

Let’s start with the big instigating incident news :

Last night, Joe informed me that he tested positive for Covid.

Which means Julian probably has it too because they sleep in the same bed and he has the exact same symptoms as Joe.

Hopefully, this will amount to just a nasty flu for them like with a lot of other otherwise healthy people who are triple vaxxed.

Get well soon, guys. I miss you aleady.

But that leaves me in a super precarious position because, as patient readers know, I am immunocompromised by my diabetes and therefore that Covid shit could straight up fucking kill me.

Or put me in a hellish existence where I can barely breathe and all my suffocation nightmares are dancing around the dying embers of my remaining sanity as total mortal freak-out level terror destroys my fragile mind.

But ya know. No big whup.

To be honest, I should be getting the fuck out of here. The last place a sickie like me needs to be is on a plague ship like this apartment. If the world were sane and fare, I would go stay in the country for a couple of weeks.

But of course that’s not an option. That shit takes money I don’t got, plus a support system I currently lack.

I have no family connections or powerful, competent friends besides the two I live with.. and they are both sick.

And all this while my legs are dying out from under me. If my legs were working properly, I could at least treat myself to a day out on the town or something. Maybe even see if I can swing a cheap motel room for a few days.

Then again, without my computer, what would I even do with myself?

Kind of a sad statement on my misbegotten lifestyle, really.

But as is, I am just a pussy hair away from being an actual cripple right now, and I can barely get around the apartment let alone around the GVRD.

I was pondering whether I was up to taking a cab to Wound Care tomorrow when I suddenly realized…. they don’t want me there.

I mean, what’s like the second Covid screening question?

“Have you been in close proximity with someone who has tested positive for Covid-19?”

Um, yup. That sounds like me alright.

So I will have to call them up tomorrow morning and give them the bad news.

And that’s just the beginning of the plague of fuckery that has descended on my life like locust drawn to ripe corn.

The other main fuckery hatchery is my decision to go with direct deposit for my monthly checks for my disability.

That means this month’s money is sitting pretty in my bank account as I type these very words, and it sure is safe there, because I can’t get at it either.

Not in any useful way. I can check my balance online but I can’t do anything with it because every single avenue for letting me spend my money online has flamed out on me in its own special way.

Interac Online? Only like 12 banks in Canada support it and Vancity ain’t one of them.

Other forms of online debit card transaction? Apparently, my bank card, which says “debit card” right on it, is not a debit card as far as the internet is concerned.

It doesn’t even have the right number of numbers on it.

Get a prepaid VISA? Oh right, those don’t exist in Canada any more. That’s why I have to keep buying those PayPower cards.

Make my latest PayPower card reloadable? Nuh uh. First it phones me and gives me an access code that will not work. When I submit that code, it then calls me again and gives me a different code. Which also will not work.

Sign up for Koho, which seems like the perfect thing for me? Ha ha ha, no. Instead of asking me for my phone number. it just plucked it out of the ether somewhere, meaning it tries to text my LANDLINE when I try to sign up.

And when I tried to email their support team to find out how to fix that, the email bounced back at me. Meaning the email address they have linked on their website and which is their main way of communicating with consumers does not exist.

I emailed one of the other addresses on the website to tell them,

Otherwise how would they ever know?

I am having trouble believing how hard it is for me to make a connection between the money in my bank account and the rest of the world.

At this point, I might have to go in to the bank and withdraw cash, which would defeat the entire purpose of direct deposit.

But for now, I will keep plugging along, I will keep thinking of new angles and trying them out. Surely somewhere out there in this big crazy world there is some way for me to spend the money in my bank account without it having to become cash first.

I mean, this is 2022 for fuck’s sake. eCommerce is everything! Trillions of dollars change hands electronically every goddamned day! I cannot possibly be the only human being on this planet with this problem.

How do other people solve it?

Does it involve having good credit? Nah, too many people don’t.

I seriously have no idea. Is it that bak accounts are things of the past and I am ridiculously out of date for even having one?

I am serious. I really need someone to clue me in about how use teeming billions are spending all that money on Amazon and SkipTheDishes and such.

Because as far as I can tell, it is god damned impossible.

So to sum up, here I am trapped on a plague ship without the ability to escape or spend my money or even pay Joe his rent.

Ain’t life grand?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am still wrestling with the question of my emotional self.

Because it’s not like I am a cold fish.

Not all the time, anyhow.

I am a warm, empathic, caring, friendly guy, more or less. I have no problem expressing my emotions when appropriate.

Well, that’s not true.

That’s how I like to think of myself, and it’s true enough but only up to a point. Past that point I am somewhere between “cold” and “just plain not there”, emotionally speaking.

But this isn’t about how I come across. It’s about how I relate to myself.

At the moment, I feel like my brain has bullied me for my whole life. I was “blessed” with such a powerful mind that it easily overwhelmed my far weaker emotional self and basically took over and shoved my emotional self into the back corner of my mind.

And I let it because I didn’t know any better. Like I said yesterday, resisting it never occurred to me.

After all, for all its flaws, it was at least a form of power I actually had, and it’s not like I had shit else going for me.

And so my world became very narrowly confined while seeming like I had the whole universe open to my incredible brain.

---

Then there was the documentary I did about the Jonestown massacre. It wasn’t very popular at first, but now it’s become a real cult classic.

After all, I can “see” so much. I “understand” so much. Things which are the sort of impenetrable mysteries that beggar people’s souls and define entire lives as people struggle to comprehend them are intuitively obvious to me. I understand more of how the world works than most college professors with PhDs. Even the supposed great minds of history seem so tiny and limited to me.

And that’s great and all.

Unless you want to actually do something.

Because then you have to stop looking and start doing, and that takes motivation. And motivation is an emotion, and therefore must involve more than just “seeing”.

And all my motivation is locked up in a tiny cage of fear. It’s this deep and terrible terror that freezes my motivation like an arctic blast whenever I try to escape that cage.

Something inside me is convinced that if I escape my microscopic comfort zone, something unimaginably horrible will happen, and so it freezes me out in order to “protect” me from that fate.

I can’t tell you what that horrible thing is.

Because it’s unimaginable.

But I have a guess or two. Maybe I am afraid of growing up. Maybe actually leaving this larval state will require me exceeding myself and that is always very scary if we have a fixed view of ourselves.

For every butterfly born a caterpillar dies, and all that.

I am the thing that can become the thing that I want to be.

Repeat until believed.

Time to surrender all form so that I might be born anew.

And this time, I mean it.

More after the break.

---

This thing I’m doing

As in, this thing I am doing right now, by typing these words.

Blogging. Journaling. Mental masturbation with an audience. Call it whatever you like.

But I still want to know what, exactly, I am accomplishing by doing it.

Besides the obvious things, like expressing myself, giving myself something purposeful (ish) to do every day, practicing my awesome writing skills, and that kind of thing.

What am I accomplishing psychologically? How does this aid my recovery? Is this getting me anywhere?

It feels like it is. The mere act of getting thoughts out of my head and into the world helps me a lot because it reduces the pressure of thoughts in my head, and thus turns down the cacophony a tad.

And that helps a lot. But that’s just symptom relief. Welcome, for sure. but it does not contribute to my long term mental health.

But I also feel this blogging thing does help with my recovery as well. As I write these words, I am essentially acting as my own therapist as I express my emotions and my problems and my illness through words.

This works because I feel safe with words. Words have been my friend for my entire life. Expressing myself on the page like this is probably the only true outlet for my emotions because it bypasses all my social damage and lets me express myself at my own pace, without fear of interruption, with nobody to dismiss my concerns or treat them like a personal attack or any of that destructive crap.

Lack of interruption alone makes it better than my therapy with Doctor Costin.

He knows I don’t like it but apparently he just can’t help himself. Just sitting quietly and listening as I ramble is beyond him, I guess.

Not that I’m bitter.

Anyhoo, my point is that this does accomplish something other than pressure relief. It helps me sort through my thoughts and dig deep into my psyche as the emotions I express cause others to pop up in their place.

And who knows what will top the stack next?

So this blogging definitely helps me in the long term.

But it does so very, very slowly.

Really, it almost seems like therapy in slow motion sometimes. Sure, I express my emotions here, but only a tiny bit at a time.

I guess that’s so I don’t feel like the whole reservoir is going to come splurting out at once in a torrential flood, destroying all that I am entirely.

Though honestly, that would probably do me a lot of good in the long run.

Forget “tear down the wall”. Blow up the dam! Loose the waters! Free us from having to spend so much of ourselves on holding back the flood! FLOOD THAT FUCKER.

Ah, if only it were that easy. Just say the magic words, and boom. Beneficial emotional crisis instigated. Time for the reckoning.

But who knows. Maybe I will get to the point where I am ready to unleash the flood some sunny day.

Or maybe I will get good enough at expressing myself that it won’t be necessary.

Or maybe I’ll just die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I decided to, at long last, set my monthly cheque to direct deposit.

That way, I don’t have to make a trip to the bank to cash it once a month. It just goes directly into my bank account. Simple.

And I have no doubt that this will be a huge gain in convenience…. eventually.

But right now it’s a huge hassle because I have to learn a bunch of new ways to do things now that I don’t have as much cash to spend.

But I am hot on the trail of a way to make this shit way easier, namely by finding a way I can spend my moolah online with it coming directly from my bank account.

So far, it looks like there is a way to use Interac online, but not a lot of places support it, especially those not in Canada (for obvious reasons).

However, Google Pay DOES support Interac, so I might end up signing up for it.

As annoying as this all is, it does feel good to be doing something purposeful.

---

Just got off the phone with the CT department at RGH.

Doctor Chao did NOT forget to submit my req.

They just have REALLY long wait times. As in, at least a month to six weeks.

That will not do. My condition is getting worse by the day.

So I am going to have to discuss alternatives with Doctor Chao.

Except that nobody is answering the phone in his office. Fuckers.

Nothing is ever simple and you never catch a break. Dammit.

---

Even making an appointment to chat with Doc Chao on the phone came with a complication, because the first time I was given was between 11 am and 12 am on Monday, and I have Wound Care at 11:45 am.

So I had to call back to reschedule. Now it’s between 2 pm and 3 pm.

This shit is starting to feel personal.

And that makes me MAD.

---

The other major complication, of course, is how I pay Joe the rent every month.

My first thought was Venmo. That seems to be how people do that sort of thing these days. I could just Venmo him the cash.

But I am old, and frail, and timid, and Venmo frightens me.

So I’ll l check out other options, like the Google Pay + Interact Online mentioned above.

UPDATE : Nope, doesn’t look like that’s gonna work. Apparently, only some bank type places support Google Play, and my bank, Vancity, ain’t one of them.

How irritating. But I will prevail!

My original thought was to use PayPal.

Remember them? That brings back memories.

Anyhow, as far as I knew, letting you use whatever form of payment wherever was kind of their thing.

So I went to sign in for the first time since the dawn of humanity.

Nope! Password does not work. Neither does the other password I have in my notes.

No problem! Click “forgot password”!

Nope! It errors out. And it has done so for the last three days.

So apparently nobody can get their PayPal password back at all and everyone involved is fine with that.

Probably because nobody even uses the damned thing any more.

Maybe I will try logging in with Internet Edge, see if it’s a browser thing.

But for now, I am taking a well earned time out.

More after the break.

---

The daily grind

Another meal, another torturous travail to and from the kitchen.

Man I miss when my legs worked properly. Seems so long ago now.

Got some interesting thoughts from this TED talk :

The big one for me was where she explains how when we are traumatized, our brain is disconnected from our hearts and that’s why we can’t find comfort in our logical minds.

Tell it, sister. I have been saying something similar for years, though without the whole heart/brain disconnect thing.

I know that logic cannot solve emotional problems. It can try and it can even fool you into thinking it is making progress, but any real progress comes from our emtions.

It is emotional labour, not the logical mind’s fancy magic tricks, which can fix what is broken in me and make me whole again.

But like I said in the comments to that video, that side of me is tragically underdeveloped. I have hidden from everything in the secret theme park of my mind for so long that I can’t even remember what being comfortable with reality is like.

Like I said in the comments, I can’t even feed myself, emotionally speaking.

And I don’t know where to go from here. Perhaps I am still trying to solve things too rationally, I don’t know.

But it’s all I know. Thinking. Figuring things out. Formulating theories. Cogitation and computation. The machinations of my terrifyingly efficient solution engine.

A lot of people are scared of their own minds….. right?

And for good reason, for that machine of mind pursues truth without mercy. It has absolutely no sympathy for any kind of human concern. I have, without meaning to, given it carte blanche to seek the truth like a heat seeking missile and whatever gets in its way is annihilated.

Including any tender bits of myself that are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So no wonder I am scared of it. It has hurt me thousands of times, and not even let me register the hurt consciously because it’s all in the name of the almighty Truth.

And the Truth, or even just the truth, is not enough to live on. We need more. We need positive emotions and human connection and areas of our mind walled off from the depredations of our mendacious mentations.

Impressive turn of phrase, n’est-ce pas?

So I guess it’s time I start standing up to my brutal truth machine (BTM) and demanding that it leave some soft and fragile parts of me alone, god damn it.

It’s a daunting prospect because I have given the BTM free rein for so long that even the mere thought of resisting it seems bizarre and alien and new.

But let me say this now : I am perfectly fine with deluding myself if it makes me happier.

Turns out we all need a little self-serving bullshit just to survive in this hostile world.

And by God am I ready for some.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t think I have a lot more time as an ambulatory human left.

Did the Wound Care thing today. Phew, finally. By that point, I’d had the same dressings on my wounds for ten days.

Ew ew ew.

But man, was it rough. From here to the car, from the car to the Community Care Clinic, from the CCC back to the apartment building, then from the car back to this room.

Oh, and while at the CCC, first to reception, then down a long corridor to the waiting area, then from waiting area to the actual CCC for Wound Care, then back down the long ass corridor to leave the clinic as a whole.

This journey seemed longer and harder than ever for me today. There were times I wasn’t sure I was going to make it at all. But I persevered.

But what really tells me my time being upright and bipedal is coming to a close is that while I haven’t had another full collapse like last night, my knees spontaneously buckle for half a second at random moments when I walk.

Right now, all that does is cause me to dip to one side and have to catch myself a bit.

But it won’t be long, I reckon, before I won’t be able to walk without risking a very bad fall at any moment when my knees give out on me.

So I guess it’s time to think about crutches. God damn it.

And Doctor Chao. Because if he had done his fucking job, I would have had that lower spinal CT scan days ago and we might be on our way to a solution already.

Instead, I am stuck in limbo, and it is now up to ME to get things started again.

All because that dipshit Doctor Chao forgot to submit the req for my CT scan.

That mother fucker.

I tried getting in touch with the CT department at RGH to verify that he had not, in fact, told them a damn thing, only to be blocked by nobody answering the phone at Medical Imaging, causing it to dump me to a voice menu.

There, a rather strained sounding robot voice told me that their system can totally take voice-mails, but that the Medical Imaging department did not subscribe to that service.

Well ain’t that fucking lovely.

I should have called back in half an hour or so, but I forgot. Plus I didn’t want to wait through the unskippable five minute Covid information dump that greets you when you call RGH again.

Bu I still should have called back.

I will call again tomorrow, and do my best to resolve the issue. Once I have confirmation that the people at CT have never heard of me, then I can call Doctor Chao’s office and arrange a phone appointment so I can yell at him.

Admit it, he’s got it coming. And from his POV, that’s better than my other recourse, namely complained to the College of Physicians and Surgeons about him.

That’s who certifies doctors in this province and they can be a real bitch to deal with if they think you are not doing your job well.

Doctors get real judgey about that kind of shit.

So we will see how that little talk goes. His saving grace is that I am still far more worried about results than revenge, so as long as he shows remorse and immediately gets things back on track, I will forgive and move on.

But if he doesn’t make me happy in that conversation, I will burn his ass at the stake.

More after the break.

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Twilight of the soul

Feeling pretty dark at the moment.

But not despairing or depressed, exactly. Just a very low, dark, brooding mood that makes me feel insular and contemplative and mildly antisocial.

Like what I really want to do is climb up a mountain till I find a nice sturdy rocky promontory to perch atop, like Batman on a gargoyle, and lose myself in my own turbulent thoughts so that I might find a new and better path out come dawn.

It’s my own clumsily poetic way of trying to process my emotions, I suppose. And I need all the help I can get in that department.

I know a million ways to fool myself into thinking I am making progress in my fight for mental health but the truth is, most of it is just the mental masturbation. Writerly wanking of a well-worn psychophallus that produces just enough actual catharsis to give this bullshit the flavour of progress but not enough to produce the real thing.

Because real progress is scary.

Real progress changes things.

Real progress requires doing the difficult and painful emotional work that can actually resolve age-old traumas instead of merely distracting me from my symptoms.

And I don’t know, off the top of my head, what to do about that. It would be glib and easy to say, “Simple. Grow a pair!” and berate myself for being such a delicate little daisy that I can’t bring myself to do what I know need to be done if I am to get better.

Psychologically, at least.

But that would not be helpful. Once again, I find myself feeling like I am stuck in a position from which there are no winning moves. There is no sequence of plays that will get me to where I want to go. No matter how I look at it, I just don’t have what it takes.

So then what? What now?

Well continuing to try to learn how to feed my soul seems like a good start. I have been in a state of spiritual starvation for as long as I can remember and I know there are good, wholesome, healthy, life-affirming things in this world that might really help me but again I have no idea how to find them, let alone access them,

But maybe that’s my problem. I need to know things before I act. I can grok the concept of “feeling my way” in terms of following my intuition instead of my overtaxed and untrustworthy reason, and I even agree that it would probably work, but….

That doesn’t bring me any closer to actually doing it.

I feel like I need to go on a long spiritual journey, but I am too sick to travel and have no spiritual tradition to start from in the first place.

So it’s going to have to be one of those Zen mystic journeys where it all happens inside my head and is all dreamlike and metaphorical and shit.

Frankly, I don’t know if I can summon the earnestness to do that.

I am Gen X, and we are not big on earnestness or believing in things.

But I don’t know where else to turn.

There has to be a way out of this labyrinth.

Even if I have to bash down the walls to make it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As far as I know, I have not heard back from the CT department at RGH about whether or not they heard from Doc Chao on my behalf or not.

I say “as far as I know” because I had planned to check our answering machine (remember those?) for messages when I was getting lunch, but I was in too much pain at the time and had to prioritize actually making it back to the computer.

So there might be a message for me waiting there right now.

I sure hope so.

I want to get to the bottom of this. I want to know what’s up.

I want to know if I need to get super mad with Doc Chao or not.

Because if he really did forget to put the req in for my lower spinal CT scan, I am going to go ham on that fucker.

This is my future as an ambulatory being on the line here. Smarten the fuck up.

The worst part, besides the possibility of avoidable dead legs, is how neatly this all fits into my internal mistrustful/controlling/suspicious narrative.

“See, this just proves that everyone is incompetent and stupid and that you can’t rely on anyone to do anything right without you watching over them like a hawk!” says a not very healthy voice in my head.

And the thing is, I suspected this would happen long before I had any proof.

Why? Because Doctor Chao didn’t print out the req and hand it to me. He didn’t even submit one electronically while I was there.

Instead, he told me he would do it after I left.

And then, it seems, neglected to do so.

And I hate it when that part of my mind is right. I don’t want to be a hostile, cynical, and suspicious Taurus who thinks everyone is an idiot until proven otherwise – in triplicate.

I want to be the expansive, genial Taurus who is possessed of a great bovine equanimity that lets him handle life’s little downturns with grace and ease.

But shit like this pushes me in the wrong direction.

I may end up having to make a special trip just to check the answering machine. Either that, or wait till there’s someone home to check it for me.

I hate being this hapless

I suppose I should be grateful that doing it myself is still an option, albeit a painful and somewhat risky one.

Earlier I had the bright idea to use the $16 remaining on my card to get a cheap lunch from 7-11 or the like.

But I had forgotten just how much SkipTheDishes adds to the total with their fees and tip. It’s often at least $10.

So I would have been looking for a $6 lunch, and not even 7-11 can do that.

I figure I will spend that money at 7-11 in person and cut Skip out of the loop entirely.

Go there after Wound Care tomorrow at noon. It means a bit more stress on my legs but I have been feeling a bit better so I might as well risk it.

Actually, seeing as the card is in no way tied to my identity, I suppose Julian could go in for me. Then again, my card might only work online.

I will figure something out.

More after the break.

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Another fucking adventure

Having barely functional legs makes everyday life so exciting.

So I ordered pizza and a Caesar salad from Pizza Slut (look, that’s what we called it when I was a kid) tonight.

I knew that actually going to the door, paying for it, and getting back to the computer in one piece was going to be a challenge.

Logically, I probably should be asking Julian to do it for me.

But I don’t wanna.

Anyhoo, made it to the door, paid my fave Pizza Hunt delivery dude (a bald Russian dude who yells “PIZZA!” when he calls up to be let in) , and was on my way back to the home base here when my knees gave out and I went whomp down on my butt again.

Always fun, that.

So then I had the fun task of figuring out how to get back up. Always a treat, as understandably my legs are kinda wobbly after one of these incidents, and for extra fun, I was in our extremely narrow hallway.

Like, only slightly more than a person wide.

So I tried to get up. Julian offered to help but I was being stubborn and I felt I really needed to do it myself if at all possible.

But it was impossible where I was. Too narrow. I could not generate enough lift with my arms to get up high enough to get my legs under me.

So I had to crawl on my knees over to the couch where it was easy to boost myself up to the correct altitude.

I really hated having to do that because crawling on my hands and knees was how I fucked up my knees in the first place, all those years ago at Nerdvana.

But what the hell, it worked, and I don’t think it hurt my knees any.

Still, I am going to have to really contemplate my stubborn insistence on doing thing myself because that just might not be an option in the future.

Or worse, it’s an option, but it’s a really STUPID option. A bad idea leading to unnecessary pain, suffering, and damage on my part just because I don’t want to suffer the indignity of needing help.

I so grok all the “No, I’ll do it myself!” scenes in movies about handicapped people now.

In general, I don’t like relying on people at all due to the serious trust issues I detailed in Part 1 of today’s blog entry.

I find it extremely hard to believe people will be there when I need them.

That’s just not something that has happened a lot in my life.

Not that people have NEVER been there when I needed them. Far from it.

But that fucked up basic programming is still there in my head and it tells me that people will always let me down because they don’t care enough about me to put themselves through even the slightest bit of effort and so when push comes to shove, they will shove off.

That might be crazy. It’s certainly not good.

But it’s what I’ve got to deal with, like it or not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sounds dramatic when phrased like that, doesn’t it?

Deliver me from evil, sweet Jesus!

But barring that, just deliver my groceries.

Everything is 5 by 5 this time, as far as I can tell. The order didn’t bounce due to insufficient funds, so I should be getting my stuff any minute now.

After all, it’s 4:07 pm, more than halfway through the delivery period of 3 pm to 5 pm.

By that same token, though, I am starting to get nervous. Maybe something has gone wrong again. That would be highly irritating.

At least I know it wouldn’t be MY fault this time.

I am probably just being paranoid because of yesterday’s SNAFU. It was rather a shock to my sensitive soul to have things go awry like that. Shook me up a little.

As patient readers know, I don’t like surprises. Even good surprises can throw me for a loop. And this was not a good surprise.

Of course, I know that in the grand scheme of things, it was nothing but a tiny blip, a bump on the road, if you will. Once I actually get my groceries, all of this will be forgotten and everything will go back to normal.

But until then, I will fret.

Which is normal for me. I’m a fretter. A worrier.

And it is more that mere neurosis. It’s a central part of how I operate. Worrying is how I keep important things in mind until they come to fruition.

Otherwise, I will forget.

Delivery dude just called to say he will be here in 5 to 10 minutes. So, phew that.

So anyhow, worry can be a good, functional thing as long as what you are worrying about is something active and relevant in your life.

Even if it’s something you don’t control – like when your groceries arrive – worry about it still keeps the issue emotionally alive in your mind.

At least, that’s how it seems to work for me. Your mileage may vary.

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Groceries delivered and retrieved. Sorta.

The trip to the door was relatively okay, and getting the groceries from the dude was going well enough, but then I made the mistake of bending down to get something I had temporarily put on the floor and that’s when everything went all to hell.

The combination of the change in head posture and the strain on my knees catapulted me into a very bad mental state where I was both very dizzy and in a lot of leg pain.

So I had to go sit down and try to recover myself while Julian gathered in the groceries.

I am thinking I may have to bite the bullet and leave the whole receiving the groceries thing to him next time.

I hate to do it but that was pretty rough just now.

So there goes another little chunk of my pride and autonomy, I guess. At least until my legs get fixed.

I am so sick of being a near-cripple. I want things to be normal again. I want my legs to work again. I want to walk around like everyone else.

But I know I am close to being a REAL cripple and it is freaking me out.

Which remind me. Just to ease my neurosis, I need to call the hospital to see about my CT scan appointment.

I won’t be able to stop worrying about it till I do.

More after the break..

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Me after the summer solstice : I think I will go straight to bed, honey. After all, I have had SUCH a long day!

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Quick update : called the hospital. They had no CT scan booked for me. Left a voicemail with the CT department. They are only around till 3 pm – you know, for convenience – so I will not hear back till tomorrow.

Quick update : called the hospital. They had no CT scan booked for me. Left a voicemail with the CT department. They are only around till 3 pm – you know, for convenience – so I will not hear back till tomorrow.

It appears that my irrational feeling that Doctor Chao would forget to make the req was, in fact, completely justified.

This is why I have trust issues

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We’re living on the ledge

Another meal, another pulse-pounding round of torture and fear where I slump into my computer chair at the end of food retrieval panting, sweating, and hurting all over.

But especially in my legs.

Been spending a lot of time sitting on the edge of my bed, staring off into space, waiting for something but I don’t know what.

As a symptom, it is chronic, but not continuous. It comes and goes. There are periods when I can get in and out of bed like a normal person and periods, like now, where even if I full intend to go straight from lying doing to being at my computer. I end up in that same old pleasantly blank state again.

Clearly, this is something my mind and/or body needs. So I do my best not to get mad about it or excoriate myself over it.

After all, it does no harm. So I spend some time staring into space instead of burning brain cells playing video games. So what?

Nothing of value is lost, I assure you.

Nevertheless, as an extremely theoretical scientist, the symptom fascinates me. What exactly am I doing when I sit there on pause?

My best guest is that this is how my brain catches up on processing all the input I subject myself to on a daily basis. It deliberately puts the active conscious mind asleep so no new input comes in and it can finally clear the backlog off its desk.

As it were.

Normally, this is the sort of thing that we do during REM sleep. But my sleep sucks, so I am probably not getting nearly enough REM sleep to get the job done, so my brain has to hijack a bit of my waking life now and then.

No big deal in my slackass life. Whatever.

It’s not like it’s unpleasant or painful. Far from it. My mood tends to be quite placid.

Like that of a well trained dog waiting patiently in front of a store for his master.

So it’s not a problem.

But it IS a bit of a mystery.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Would I get arrested if I answered the door nude when my groceries arrive?

Depends on what my poor delivery person thought of the view, I suppose. It would be great if it went all porn-y, with me asking them if they liked the view, and them saying yes but they bet it looked better up close, and me inviting them in.

It would certainly make for a more interesting afternoon than anything I have planned.

Of course, that is not the probable outcome. Far from it.

The most likely outcome is that I would terrorize and traumatize some minimum wage making young person with the sight of a huge naked fat dude with a beard and a huge scar up his belly and have to live with the guilt of that for the rest of my life.

So as hilarious as I find people’s freaking out over the sight of genitals like it can somehow harm them, I am a sensitive and responsible trickster and would never do that to someone just for my own amusement.

Consequences count no matter how much fun I am having. If I know it would probably hurt somebody and I do it anyway, then I am the villain, no matter whether I think they “should” be hurt at all.

So no flashing the help!

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I’ve pondered living in a nudist colony.

whether I would like it or not, that is. Not actually considered it as a valid life option because quite frankly I don’t dislike being clothed enough to justify all the expense and hassle of moving to one.

Nothing is keeping me from being as naked as I want to be in my own home. And being all Avoidant and depressed and so on means I spend most of my time at home anyhow.

So really, would being able to go to doctor’s appointments and Denny’s nude mean all that much to me?

I think not.

But as a theoretical, would I enjoy life at a nudist colony?

Possibly. It depends on what my fellow nudies are like, I suppose.

If they are laid back groovy people who don’t need a lot of rules in order to get along and who are serious about letting people be themselves, then I just love it.

Those are my kind of people. Sensitive freethinkers like myself who truly cherish individual autonomy and who understand that my freedom and your freedom are the same thing, therefore if I want to be left alone to do what I want, I have to leave everyone else alone to do their own thing too.

Americans don’t seem to get that. It’s “live and let live”, not “live and let me tell you what you should be doing….”.

So if the place had a super groovy artists’ colony vibe like that, I would love it. That’s the kind of place I have always wanted to live.

Honestly, the nudity part would be, in my opinion, just to keep the uptight uncool people away by waving out scary genitalia at them.

I mean, you know me. I’m a freak. You could fuck on your front lawn for all I care. Wanna masturbate while eating your burger at the malt shop? Avoid making eye contact with anyone and you can fap or schlick away. Wanna have a no body fluids barred bisexual fuck for all on Labor Day weekend? Fine by me – as long as you set it up in sch away that nobody can stumble in by accident.

And of course, vigorously wiping down all surfaces with sanitizer on an extremely regular basis would be a must.

If I ever get rich I am totally going to make my own horny little enclave somewhere. An extremely private resort where people can truly be free and where I can do my best to fulfill my big big dream of returning innocence to sex.

Sounds like a lot of fun, dunnit?

More after the break.

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There will be a slight delay

A little snafu beset me tonight.

Groceries did not show up in their appointed timespan, which was between 5 pm and 7 pm today. Hmmmm.

Checked that the phone wasn’t off the hook. That happened once. Nope! A-OK there.

So I hem and haw a bit.

You have to do both. Nobody like an unhemmed haw!

Could not think of what else might have happened. Checked my email.

A hah! Payment failed.

Yeah, that’d do it.

Cogitated for 3.17 moments then DING. “I bet some last minute payment went through on my card and then there wasn’t enough money left for the groceries!”

Yup. Checked my card’s account and the payment for my monthly DoorPass (gets me no delivery charge on a lot of places) had gone through, leaving my account around $4 short for the groceries.

So I tried to modify the existing order to eliminate one small thing. But that wasn’t doable. It was a dead order by then.

So I just did the ordering again. Slightly different stuff. It came to exactly $97.

I had $97.42 on the card.

Too close. Ditched one last thing, then put the order through.

It will now be arriving tomorrow between 3 pm and 5 pm.

And in the future, I will be a lot more careful before I set up a situation where I am spending the very last bit of money on my card and thus setting up this very situation.

One little extra charge, and *raspberry sound*.

Lesson learned, universe!

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Like I told my person I am in love and some kind of relationship with, Luke, today, “things haven’t gotten any worse lately!”.

Knock on wood.

That’s about as positive as it gets in my life right now. I am on a slow train to Hell and my “good days” are just the days when the train stops at a station for a while.

No word about that CT scan yet. I think I will call them tomorrow. This is highly unusual for them and I am beginning to wonder.

Did Doctor Chao forget to contact them?

Was I suppose to contact them first and nobody told me?

My legs are dying, for fuck’s sake.

It’s kind of urgent.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.