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.

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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.

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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.