So Operation Financial Freedom was a success yesterday.

Joe drove me to the bank and waited in line for me. He even had the genius to notice a office type chair WITH WHEELS he could push over to the teller window for me.

So I even got to sit down during my transaction! Heaven.

Ergo. I was able to withdraw $1400 from my account, leaving a bit under 50 bucks in there just to make me feel like a grownup.

It felt so good to have that lovely hard cash handed to me.

Then we went to Price-Mart (shop smart…. shop Price-Mart) and Joe went in and bought me a new PayPower card. Eee!

Then the final step : coming home and registering the card online.

That one I can’t do alone because it requires reading a ten digit series of numbers off the back of the card and they are way too small for me to read.

I really need to invest in a magnifier of some sort.

Speaking of investing, I am finally ready to invest in some sort of modern device where I can get and send texts.

Maybe a tablet, maybe a smartphone, maybe a phablet.

That’s a real thing – it’s halfway between a phone and a tablet. Hence the portmanteau.

I am thinking of forgetting about the whole phone part and just getting myself a good Android tablet, though. Because articles like this one are convincing me that I can text message from any Android device.

No special SMS chip needed. And like I said before, I can do the actual making of phone calls via one of the bazillion Voice Over IP (VoiP) programs out there.

Now I just have to pick which one I want.

And here comes option paralysis. There’s so damned many!

I just have to make peace with the fact that I cannot actually compute an answer. I can’t possibly rationally and logically assess all the relevant variables and derive an answer based on all the fact.

Not gonna happen. That’s just way too much information to process.

Variable stack overload!

So I will ask my fuzzy friends on Tapestries for recommendations. A lot of furries are in IT in one way or another so someone probably has the knowledge I need to inform my choice, like which companies are trustworthy.

Plus, I will Google around, of course. Check out online reviews. See what the experts say. Things like that.

And then, in all likelihood, I will end up just buying the first one that makes me excited about it and then kick myself for all the factors I did not consider and all the quests I did not ask before committing my bux.

I try to make smart decisions. I really do.

But I lack the emotional stability to truly pull it off. I am too wired to work by intuition and inspiration, which is great if you’re a California mystic who does holistic therapy for pets, and it’s even better for creative work, but rational decision making is not its forte.

I’m not perfect.

I’m just amazing.

And that will have to do.

More after the break.

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The call of pasta

This amused me.

I was all set to order some Chinese food tonight. Had been thinking about it all day. Chinese food it was going to be.

Then when it came time to order, a deep male voice in my head said SPAGHETTI.

With the bold and the caps and everything!

And I am like, does it have to be spaghetti? Because Pizza Hut only does rotini…

SPAGHETTI, it reiterated, this time with a hint of menace.

And I am like, so we’re saying no to the Chinese food then?

SPA-GHET-TI, it said again, this time with the tone of an ancient god about two seconds from issuing a smiting.

So spaghetti it is. Who am I to argue with such a clear directive? I was raised to believe that our bodies tell us what they need and all we have to do is learn to listen.

Well I listened, all right. Ordered me some spaghetti in meat sauce from the friendly folk over at Boston Pizza..

Which when you think about it is kind of an arbitrary name. Because it’s not like Boston is a city known for its high quality pizza.

New, from the people who brought you Boston Pizza, it’s Chicago Egg Roll!

Coming soon : Albuquerque Sushi, Baton Rouge Schnitzel, and Boise Baloney!

Because c’mon. There was no way I was only going to make ONE of those.

It’s just too much fun!

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The Bad Patient

I am being a naughty patient today because despite my doctor’s clear instructions, I did NOT go to Urgent Care today.

He wants them to check out my spinal situation re : my pooping the bed and see if there is something bad going on there.

What I wish I said at the time : Um, you have a CT scan of everything between my navel and my knees. What can they do that you can’t?

Care enough to put in the effort, I guess.

That’s unfair, though. Doc Chao cares about his patients. He really does.

He’s just timid and easily intimidated by heavy responsibilities and complex diagnoses and thus in no way qualified to make life and death decisions all the frigging time.

See, that’s much better.

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Nevertheless, I will try to go tomorrow. Better to do it on the weekend, when rides are more readily available, than try to cram it into a weekday.

And honestly, I should want to go, because they might have doctors who are actually confident and competent and feel some sense of urgency when I tell them my legs get weaker every day and I am scared I will lose my ability to walk entirely.

I mean. Doc Chao has that CT scan for an entire WEEK and did absolutely nothing with it, and would have continued to do nothing with it if I hadn’t booked an appointment with him specifically to talk about it.

Pretty sure that’s something his office is supposed to do.

It shouldn’t be up to ME to make HIM do his goddamned job.

And yet, here we are.

I need a new GP.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Congratulations! You are now the lucky owner of a top of the line purebred Fruvous, and have many years of enjoyment and quality companionship with this fascinating and highly rewarding breed. You will loves its wit, its intelligence, its cuddly nature, and its love of being by your side no matter what. You will never find a more loyal, affectionate, and sensitive pet no matter where you look!

But they are not low maintenance. Fruvous fanciers describe their beloved pets as “high maintenance but worth it ten times over”, and who are we to disagree?

The following guide, then, is designed to help you, the new Fruvous owner. understand and meet your new pet’s needs so that the both of you can get the most out of your brand new bonding experience.

Let’s begin with the basics.

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Care and Feeding

The bad news is that your new pet has a fairly large appetite. The Fruvous is a highly energetic species and all that energy has to come from somewhere.

The good news is that they are not fussy eaters. They can and will eat almost anything you eat and are just as happy with cheap fast food and dollar store mac and cheese as they would be with filet mignon and lobster thermadore.

That said, they don’t eat absolutely everything.

The big no-no is seafood. They will turn up their nose at anything even vaguely fishy. The rule is, if it has gills, skip it.

The other things make for an eclectic mix and this is where their completely untrue reputation for being fussy eaters comes from.

For example, they do not like and will not eat blueberries, cheesecake, ham, Twinkies. or Wonder Bread.

If there is a pattern to these aversions, we at FCS (Fruvous Central Services) would like to hear about it.

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Grooming and Hygiene

This is where the “high maintenance” part kicks in.

Your Fruvous requires a fair bit of grooming and cleaning in order to keep being the cheerful, adorable creature you first fell in love with.

However, this need not be a burden. In fact, experienced Fruvous owners universally report that the time they spend with their pet grooming and cleaning them rapidly became the highlight of their day due to how much the Fruvous enjoys being groomed and how it often brings their playful and affectionate nature to the forefront.

Left on their own, their self-grooming is often neglected due to their happy go lucky nature and curiosity getting the better of them, and their beautiful coat becomes greasy and knotted and their pores clogged and unhealthy.

At no point will your Fruvous complain about this. They are intensely loyal to their owners and won’t want to bother you with their problems, so it will be up to you, the owner, to keep an eye on their health and wellbeing as they will almost never tell you.

But sure, ignore and neglect them. They won’t ever complain.

You will just have to look into those sad little eyes and know that it is all your fault.

More after the break

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Keeping your Fruvous chipper

The most important ingredient in keeping your Fruvous’ tail wagging is cuddles.

When we say this breed is affectionate, we need it. Your Fruvous needs a lot of physical affection, especially during the initial bonding period.

After successfully bonding with your Fruvous, he will know that you love him and so his need for physical reassurance will lessen and you will be able to get away with the occasional heartfelt hug or pat on the head to keep him happy.

But do not think this means you can ignore him most of the time. The Fruvous breed is extremely sensitive to being ignored and needs your attention in order to feel validated.

This need is so strong that your Fruvous might even begin to uncharacteristically act out in order to get that attention.

Acting out behaviours such as leaving messes in prominent places, hiding important objects. and making sarcastic comments during your favorite Netflix shows are not unheard of with this breed.

Luckily, the solution is simple. If these behaviours do crop up, simply find your Fruvous and gives them a big hug and tell them you are sorry for neglecting them and then spend some time giving them the hugs, cuddles, and scritches they need so much.

You will have your happy, waggy, silly little fluffball back in no time.

Fruvous and sex

Of course, all this “physical affection” business includes sex.

He IS a fox, after all.

And as your companion he is almost always up for a good time. In fact, if he ever turns you down for sex, you should immediately check to see if he’ s sick.

And he is quite open to most forms of sex. He will try anything once and loves to make you happy so he is perfectly willing to do something he’s not that into if it gives you pleasure you will treasure.

There is one unbreakable rule, however.

Absolutely nothing that involves violence, real or stylized. Sorry, kinksters. If you want a BDSM fucktoy, get a Doberman.

They are freaky as fuck.

To your Fruvous, violence is the exact opposite of sex. To him, sex is intimate and sweet and affectionate. Even when it gets hot n’ heavy, you will still need to be careful not to make him doubt that you love, value, and appreciate him or he might go cold at very inconvenient moments.

To sum up

As you can see, responsibly owning a Fruvous requires a great deal of time and energy on your part, so please do not even consider adopting one if you are not willing or able to make that kind of commitment.

The rewards, however, justify the cost. In return for your efforts, a properly looked after Fruvous will provide many years of high quality companionship.

You will never find a more entertaining, loyal, affectionate, intelligent, and above all lovable pet than a well maintained Fruvous.

You are about to embark upon a wonderful, wonderful journey.

And I should know – because I’m a Fruvous too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, it’s happened three times now. Twice in the last two days.

I wake up. I am vaguely aware of strong tingling sensation from roughly my lumbar region to the bottoms of my buttocks. I am not yet awake enough to register this as being a problem, though that might change soon.

I sit up a bit, and that’s when the sensation of REALLY NEEDING TO BE ON THE TOILET NOW NOW NOW hits, and I hoof it for the toilet.

But it is already too late.

Because I have already…. started.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have literally shit the bed.

And probably dropped some highly unwelcome brown deposits on the way the to the blessed relief of the toilet too.

So in essence, I have starting shitting the bed in my sleep.

Gee, turns out I DID have some dignity left! Bye bye.

Now I have been specifically instructed multiple times and by multiple medical professionals to alert them immediately if there is any change in my bowel or bladder function, and lordy does this shit count.

So to speak.

So when I talk to Doc Chao on the phone tomorrow, this will be the first thing I bring up. Yes, I still want to talk about the CT scan, but this is, I think, more pressing.

And more depressing.

I mean, not being able to walk is bad enough but looking at a future where I have to wear a diaper to bed is far, far worse.

I mean, I will do it if I have to, I guess, but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

But there is a reason the medical world wants to know right away if something like this happens and that’s because it’s a pretty bad sign.

To put it lightly.

When the bathroom functions start to go, that generally means something pretty bad is going down on the neurological front.

This could well be a sign that my spine is fucked, and that could mean anything up to and including losing the use of my legs entirely.

I pray it doesn’t come to that, but it might.

And all I can do at this point is shrug and say “I guess this was destined to happen”, because it only looks like there was all kinds of things I “could” have done to prevent things from getting this bad.

But I couldn’t. Still can’t. I can’t make myself do them. I don’t have enough of whatever you want to call the internal resource it would take – willpower, motivation, chutzpah, sheer bloody-minded determination, whatever – for me to be able to power through my aversions and overpower my inner demon and get things things done.

Any of the many, many, many horrible things my undertreated diabetes had done to me “should” have been enough to motivate me to shape the hell up and live right.

But they weren’t. In fact, they never stood a chance. The brutal truth is that if it doesn’t keep me from playing video games all day, I don’t care about it. Or myself.

Horrible skin lesions? Whatever. They don’t hurt and thus are easily ignored in favour of feeding my video game addiction.

Pneumonia? Scary for a while but I got over it. No big deal. Back to the games.

Nasty infections gunning for my life? Antibiotics. Gone now. Whatever.

I simply do not have what it takes to survive. My mental health is too poor for me to look after my physical health, and my poor physical health is a major factor in why I have such bad mental health.

I cannot care for myself.

Left to my own devices, I will die, because my devices suck.

Depression can be seen as a disease of the devices, in fact.

So all I can do is wait till I end up in the hospital where trained medical professionals will be forced to care for me.

And that’s just what the sickest part of me wants.

More after the break.

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Moron water abuse

Sorry, that should read “More on water abuse”.

I’ve been cutting down on the water intake. Trying to wean myself away from needing to be drinking water all the time.

I think part of it is simply being addicted to the pleasure of drinking water. It’s a small pleasure, admittedly, but extremely reliable and accessible.

It’s so easy to keep that water glass full so I can give my little sips of pleasure every few minutes and/or when there is a natural pause in what I am doing (video game loading screens are great for that) and it’s such a wholesome seeming thing.

I mean, what do they tell people to do when they are sick?

Drink plenty of fluids!

Anyhow, so far it has not been too onerous to slow things down a bit. I am not experiencing any withdrawal symptoms besides that vague sense of wrongness you always get when you are trying to change a habit.

Some part of your mind is like, “wait…. there’s something that is supposed to be here… something is usually happening at this point…. ”

No big whoop. I will just wait it out. It is, at best, mildly annoying.

Intriguingly, salty foods are beginning to taste really good for me. So my body is clearly trying to get back to the right sodium level.

It amuses me to think about how I am probably the only fat dude in his late 40’s who has to add MORE salt to his diet to be healthy.

Overall, I am glad I never had the SUPER unhealthy eating habits. Mine were pretty bad when I was using chips and other salty snacks as a side dish for every meal, but that is nowhere near the “always eating junk food” fat person.

They do that both because they are deeply addicted to food pleasure and because one (terrible) way to treat a sugar crash is another sugar high.

Those are the poor people who are driving their health into the ground at meteor impact speed. I do not envy them THEIR journey towards health, which will be far harder than mine will ever be.

I’ve never been a binge eater. I almost never ate my emotions.

Mostly that was due to not having money, but still, it counts.

That’s why it was really no big deal to change my diet to eliminate carbs. I miss the cheap carb laden snacks of yesteryear sometimes, but I don’t crave them.

The bad food was never a deeply ingrained habit for me.

Switching from chips and pretzels to nuts and berries (aka trail mix) was just a matter of switching from food I like to food I like almost as much.

I miss the flavours of things like Doritos, Cheetos, and chips but I do not miss the carbs.

Can’t believe I lived like that for so long. Disgusting.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well this morning’s mission to rescue my money from the evil clutches of my behind the times bank credit union could not have gone much worse.

Not without involving terrorists and/or spontaneous human combustion.

It started off wrong when I woke up at 10:06 am. Fuck! I just started my day and I am already behind schedule.

I apologized to Julian as I went to retrieve a shirt.

What followed was me realizing I would have to do a buch of walking around just to get ready to go.

Accompanying this was the realization that I was out of clean clothes.

So yay, I got to get into dirty clothes! I just love that!

But I had no choice, so I just fucking did it. Luckily, I was already in a shitty mood, and those really help when you have to do something you don’t want to do.

I was in no mood to put up with my own whiny bullshit about eww it’s so gross, maybe we should wait, wah wah wah.

Shut the fuck up. We’re doing this.

Said my internalized angry dad.

Then I spent twenty goddamned minutes just looking for my belt. At least that gave my legs time to recharge after moving around to get clothes and to pee.

Not at the same time, of course. Ha ha.

It wasn’t until a little after 10:45 am that I was ready to go. When we had originally planned on leave at 10 am!

Son of a bitch.

The trip down to the car was brutal. I had not fully recovered from moving around my room to get ready, and the pain in my legs was redlining by the time I got into the car.

Pretty sure I was mere seconds from going flop-butt.

I am learning to pay real close attention to when the pain in my legs goes twitchy. That is what heralds another incident of my knees giving up on me for a bit.

Would be particularly bad if it happened between here and the car.

There would be no helpful hospital worker to help me into a wheelchair.

Anyhow, so we go to the bank. Julian says he will repark, and I say “Great, I will go in and find someplace to sit. ”

So I do that. Find a nice comfy chair where I can sit and wait for Julian to come in and wait in line for me.

And wait. And wait. And wait.

Finally it dawns on me that he has completely forgotten that he was supposed to come into the bank with me. And I have no way of reminding him because it’s not like I can go out to the car and tell them then make it back inside THEN stand while I do my transactions. And I have no smartphone (yet) with which to text him.

I’m thinking of getting a phablet.

So now I am sitting there fuming and waiting for there to be a free teller with nobody else waiting for it.

Luckily it’s quite slow in the ol’ bank pretentious bank today.

Unluckily, the customers who ARE there are the kind that just hang around doing god knows what – refinancing the national debt I guess.

Still, eventually a slot opens up. Finally! I hobble up to the teller. Angels sing. Bluebirds tweet. The lion lovingly buttfucks the lamb.

Don’t worry, the lamb is WAY into it.

Then I open my wallet and realize that I left my fucking bank card at home so this entire exercise was completely pointless and a waste of my leg mojo.

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So we’re gonna have to do the whole thing again on Friday.

I can’t do it again tomorrow because I got Wound Care at 11 am. So I would have to do the bank BEFORE Wound Care and I am pretty sure I do not have nearly enough leg mojo in me to do both.

Gotta make that trip to Regency Pharmacy for crutches or whatever real soon.

More after the break,

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It’s a flop

Yay, another of my little falls.

This was the “best” one yet, though, because I was in our tiny kitchen when it happened and therefore had plenty of surfaces in easy reach for me to catch myself on.

Still. Every time this happens it freaks me out.

The world is not supposed to suddenly leap up like that.

Breaking the water habit

Hello, my name is Michael B., and I am addicted…. to water.

I know that sounds absurd, but hear me out.

There is only one way I could have ended up with the sodium deficiency Doc Chao has been on my back about, and that’s by drinking too much water.

Until recently, I didn’t think there was such a thing as drinking too much water. So I was in total denial about cutting back on my water intake.

But then, not long ago, I was thinking about what the symptoms of sodium deficiency would be and I came up with the following :

Well, you’d be thirsty all the time, and need to drink water constantly in order to stay hydrated because without enough sodium, the body can’t retain water properly.

And then it hit me like a 2×4 right between the eyes : I have had those exact symptoms for years now!!

I just never considered it a problem because the “solution” was always right at hand : more water, please.

But I now accept that the constant water drinking habit I picked up to deal with the Silly Con Valley heat has metastasized into something dangerous to my health.

I still haven’t changed my habits though.

Because I know it’s going to be rough. I am going to have to taper off very slowly so that my body has a chance to catch up.

The last thing I want is to be sodium deficient AND dehydrated.

Especially now that we’re in thick of the summer heat.

And it’s not exactly the sort of think where you can quit cold turkey.

I will still need water to live. But I have to get my sodium levels up. The thirst and lack of fluid retention are the most obvious signs of sodium deficiency, but sodium is also an electrolyte and electrolyte deficiencies can fuck you up on a cellular lever because now your body can’t regulate electrical conductivity properly.

You know what that causes? Nerve damage.

Holy batshit, Fatman, I think we’re onto something.

Of course, I can also add more salt to my diet. That seems a lot easier than curbing my habitual water intake.

But I am already on blood pressure meds. So…. maybe not.

I will solve it somehow.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ho hum, another day of self-distracting insipidity masking a truly gargantuan talent in what can only be described as a truly epic act of total mediocrity.

I mean, it’s one thing for a perfectly average person to waste their life in the dulldrums of depression… but I’m fuckin’ amazing.

Not that saying that helps any.

But some day it might.

I won’t be this numb forever.

On the financial front, I have made a date to go to the bank with Julian tomorrow at 10 am. While there, I will withdraw most of the money now sitting there as lovely, blessed, easy to deal with cash.

Then, if I have the leg mojo to spare, I will ask if I can reset my PIN while I am there.

I only pray that you can still do that in person in your local branch.

And that it doesn’t somehow still require I have a smartphone.

I want to get a smartphone. Really I do, Or better yet, a nice big tablet that can also send and receive texts.

I can use VoIP for the “phone” part. I’ve done it before. It’s awkward AF, but it works.

Ya have to treat it like a speakerphone.

Once I have the cash, I will ask Julian to drive us to my usual Sav-On at Ironwood and buy me that PayPower card I wanted but provided the wrong PIN for.

I thought about waiting till my GST cheque arrives so that I could cash it while I was at the bank, but that won’t be for like five days minimum and fuck that noise.

I will make a separate trip for it. Or figure out some other way to deposit it. Or something along those lines.

Hopefully I will get said card tomorrow and at least be able to live life normally for a while. I will still have to figure out how to get Joe his rent for this month, but at least I will be able to order my groceries online and such.

One silver lining to this very annoying dark cloud is that because I have been unable to access most of my money in my usual fashion, I haven’t spent a dime of it this month. My entire monthly cheque is still there, untouched, and there’s only two weeks till the next one, so I am quite a bit ahead.

I will probably use that extra cash on that tablet I spoke of. The fact that I want something big will inflate the price, methinks.

But I want to be able to type on this thing and I got big fat fingers and that means I need a big fat tablet.

Other than that, the specs don’t matter much as I do not plan on doing much gaming on it. Those mobile games can be crazy addictive and I would rather keep dealing with only one form of video game addiction, thank you.

So something big, slow, and old is fine by me.

Yes, “just like me”.

Trust me, the irony was not lost on me.

More after the break.

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An uphill charge

My body does not want me to be awake right now.

Once more, I got SUPER sleepy at around 8 pm, which is exactly when I should have been doing my blogging and eating.

And normally, I would be happy to be sleepy like this because it’s the good kind of sleepy. Soft, relaxing, soothing, and leading to a nice solid nap.

But this is not the time for that. Stupid time.

So right now I have to go get some food together to have my “supper” here at 10:06 pm. I should have done that the moment I got up, but I had to go pee instead and that took too big a chunk of my leg mojo for me to pile a trip to the kitchen on top of that so I had to sit and recharge for a bit first.

And if I am sitting here, I might as well blog.

But enough of that. Here I go, wish me luck.

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And I am back.

Mission accomplished. Now I can start accumulating leg mojo for the all important trip to the bank tomorrow.

Hopefully they will give me my money back if I show up in person with my bank card and ID and all that good stuff.

But the way things are going, I would not be in the least bit surprised to find that for some bizarre, out of left field reason, they now require people to have a smartphone to even get into the bank, let alone get at their money.

We the phoneless are rapidly become a persecuted minority.

I’m working on it.

Turns out you can TOTALLY get a smartphone at 7-11 for only $30/month!

Such wow! Affordable yes! Here money, take it!

Oh…. and $109.99 up front. For the actual cellphone.

Aw, so much boo hiss boo! Stupid plan. STUPID plan!

So I will go back to the tablet with text idea for now. And keep an eye out for like the cheapest smartphone that will work.

I would buy used, but…. I would prefer something I am going to touch a lot and even hold up to my ear to be like…. fresh.

Ya know what I mean?

But like I said above, I am not looking for top of the line performance or a huge amount of storage or any of that.

It just has to have basic web access over WiFi and SMS send and receive capabilities and I would be a happy man.

I’m not looking to be a technonaut. I just want to meet the minimum standards of modern society so I can sign up for things and get texts.

I am tired of being the modern equivalent of that old guy in my town who stubbornly refused to get a telephone in his house.

Went to the neighbor’s house when he had to make a call. Relied on said neighbor to come get him when someone called for him.

Over and over, relatives offered to pay for the phone themselves. But he turned them down. Said he refused to have some “clanging contraption” in his home that could go off at any minute of the day or night demanding his attention.

We all thought that guy was pretty hilarious.

Well I am starting to feel the same way. Anachronistic.

And I am looking for a cheap way to fix that.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A lot of people are, for very good reasons, very angry with organized religion. Especially the one into which they were born.

They rightly decry the massive corruption, hypocrisy, and decadence of the religious organizations of the world. They see the conflicts between their scriptures and their own actual morality, see how the Great Book contradicts itself over and over and how much of what it contains is quite frankly horrible, and follow the health of their own mind rather than lobotomize themselves for Jesus.

They reject the goddamned Pharisees and their sinful ways and thus reject the religion of their birth, which is no longer tolerable to them at all.

But somehow, they never take it all the way.

When they reject the people in charge of their faith, they inadvertently leave those people in charge of said faith. They tacitly cede that those people do represent their faith and are the forces of piety and righteousness and then therefore have to adopt some paradoxical “anti-moral” position which is doomed to failure from the start because of its inherent self-contradictory nature.

You can’t expect to go around saying “morals are bad” with a straight face and expect to get anywhere with it.

If there are no moral, then nothing is bad, including morals. Right?

No. You have ceded far too much ground to the enemy. You have to be willing to say that these people do NOT represent good, morality, righteousness, or the will of the prophet. They never have and they never will. They are everything all the prophets railed against – cruel, ignorant, small-minded, vicious sinner whose only claim to represent your faith is that they wore the right clothes to church and performed the right rituals for all the wrong reasons.

The brutal truth is that, in Christian terms, the Devil runs your church. Satan has won in a deep and terrible way if your religion has turned to hate, division, intolerance, and fearmongering. Jesus is not and never was on their side. They do not speak for Him just because they say they do.

To them, Jesus is just a word to bash people over the head with to make them obey you. The truth is they have nothing but contempt for Him because they have nothing but contempt for all of His teachings.

In their heart of hearts, Jesus is a pussy-ass liberal faggot they would love to drag to death behind their truck. All that talk about peace, love of your neighbor, and turning the other cheek…. what kind of commie bullshit is that?

I realize that this is a hell of a pill to swallow. It’s far easier to reject the people in charge than it is to question their legitimacy from its very roots.

Technically, if you believe what I am saying, the only solution is to take back your church by legitimate, peaceful means.

And that’s kind of a big deal.

Alternately, you can start your own version of a fundamentalist sect of your faith. Only instead of being about being harsher and stricter in a bid to be “holier than though”, your sect will be all about the kindness, good will, understanding, and other things your prophet actually wanted people to focus on.

Just be nice, people! Is that so hard?

More after the break.

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If it makes you happy

That title has little to do with what follows. It’s just that when I sat down to blog, that song started to play really loudly in my head.

So I figured, what the hell, let’s go with it and see what happens.

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Did the Wound Care thing today. Nothing much to report.

Wound Care Specialist Nurse Vivian showed up to do a quick debridement of that pesky ever-regrowing callous on my right foot.

That’s always nice. It must not have needed it all that bad, though, because it did not take her very long.

There’s been times when she’s been scraping away with her sharp metal ball on a stick for half an hour!

I suppose I shouldn’t use that as a standard.

And as usual, she chided me on not getting new sneakers yet. My current pair are definitely on their last legs (so to speak) so she is absolutely right.

And my bad shoes are probably not helping my foot wounds heel.

But it’s hard for me to get enthused about new shoes because I know they are going to collapse and leave me flatfooted like all the rest.

MY current pair were supposed to be especially good for fat people and the arches collapsed minutes after I put them on.

Shoes always end up letting me down.

I dream of arch support. And walking without pain.

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Adventures in dining in

So tonight I ordered from the Wing Kee, a Chinese place right around the corner.

Won’t be doing that again any time soon.

Because not only have they gotten WAY more expensive (at least $5 more per dish) but I ordered chicken chow mein and fried wontons and I got chow mein and fried shrimp.

I can’t eat shrimp. Pretty sure I am allergic, given the reactions I have had from just handling some shrimp.

So I had to call and complain and they are sending my wontons too.

Problem : I don’t think Joe or Julian eat shrimp either. So I am stuck with quite a lot of battered n’ fried shrimp with nobody to love them.

I really hope we don’t end up having to compost them. Both because I hate to waste food and because I know that people who love shrimp REALLY love shrimp and so I want these shrimp to be making one of those people happy.

Oh well. As long as the shrimp know this is not their fault. I am sure they are delicious.

Great, now I feel sad for shrimp.

The things I do to myself!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not like I used to do, anyhow.

Like a lot of my fellow icy intellectuals, including my hero Gil Grissom from CSI, I grew up with a very strong emotional attachment to The Truth.

After all, if you have no solid spiritual core to drive you forward like the warmer types, The Truth makes a workable substitute in order to give those overpowering analytical abilities something like a moral focus.

It is very easy to fall into the mindset of thinking that in a world full of bullshit and lies, it is up to you and your powers of analysis and deduction to seek and find those precious few nuggets of truth in all the dross, and maybe even fit them into some kind of logical framework that makes sense of the whole thing.

Sounds all good and noble.

But it’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.

Because while the pursuit of the truth sounds noble, it is ultimately an amoral act. It says absolutely nothing about what the hell you do with the truth once you find it.

Instead, it put the entire load on the intellectual epistemological side of things and obsesses itself over the question of what is true because deep down it knows it can’t handle the other half of the question, which is what do we actually DO?

Thus, it is a mindset custom fit for us soulless cerebral zombies who have no idea what to do or what we want or even who we really are because all of that involves dealing with one’s emotions and instincts and all that other hot, messy, “irrational” stuff that freaks us out because it’s so “chaotic”.

So we worship The Truth instead. And it makes for a lousy idol.

So now I see it as something I need to overcome. Like Nietzsche said, to overcome ourselves we must go under, and I am going under the waters of my emotional self looking for the connections to the real world that I have buried under layers of suppression and denial for so very long.

It’s a scary prospect. The part of me that is still beholden to the old regime of truth worship and intellectual bullshitting is still alive and kicking and bound to freak out and try to convince me that I will drown if I go down there and that the only way to stay alive is to stay cold and dry (and helpless and decaying and dying) in its cold storage hell.

One of its biggest lies is that if you don’t feel bad, then there’s no problem.

But not feeling bad is not the same as feeling good. And there is a big difference between not feeling bad because nothing is wrong and not feeling bad because you are too damned numb to feel anything at all.

Just because the Vicodin is blocking the pain doesn’t mean that having lost an arm in a car accident stops being a problem.

I have a lot of bad shit going on under the hood of my emotional self and the only way I am going to to fix that is if I get in there with my cerebral detachment detached and with my heart open to whatever the fuck needs to be felt in order to get things moving again.

Amen and pass the Paxil.

More after the break.

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Frustrated and depressed

That’s how I feel right now.

I thought I had it sussed. Hat in hand, I would ask Joe and/or Julian to take my debit card and my PIN and go to Sav-On and buy me a new PayPower card.

Which means that I am temporarily admitting defeat in my war to somehow get to use my bank account money usable online.

I hated to ask it of J&J as it is a bit of an imposition, but I am at wit’s in and would really like my money now, please.

I am SUPER regretting going to direct deposit now. I should have known better than to trust a bank with all my money. They always find a way to jam me up.

Oh, how I miss the blessed simplicity of a wallet full of 50’s right now.

So anyhow, my foolproof plan was a bust because the PIN I gave them didn’t work. And I am caught flatfooted by that.

I swear I have used that PIN at ATMs plenty of times. But nerp.

Maybe it was the PIN to the credit card I used to have through Vancity before they decided to punish us poor people by joining apparently the entire Canadian banking world and not doing reloadable VISAs any more?

This despite them being the most secure form of credit card imaginable because you have to give them the money FIRST?

Anyhow, I hit another fucking dead end. And it’s driving me crazy. Joe and Julian tried the card plus PIN at an ATM too, and no dice. I clearly have it totally wrong.

I looked up how to reset my PIN. Apparently you call a toll free number, tell them you want to reset your PIN, and then they mail you a new one.

5 to 7 business days. La de frigging da.

So my only option is to actually show up at the bank in person and withdraw the money as cash. Then I can at least pay Joe his rent and get J and/or J to go buy me a card in cash like I used to do all the damned time.

Stupid direct deposit. I should just cancel it, seeing as I have to go to my bank in person to get my money anyhow.

The whole point of getting direct deposit was to keep me from having to go to the bank once a month to cash my check!

But apparently I don’t get to do that.

Not without getting a smartphone first. The lack of one is become a real barrier to modern life. Everyone has one but me.

But how the hell do I choose one?

All I want is something that sends and receives texts.

Maybe I should just buy a burner phone at 7-11. It’s probably phone enough for me.

Oh, and all this frustration comes at the same time I am being frustrated by a seemingly unbeatable final boss in the game I am playing.

Son of a bitch.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been fun.

WARNING : Gross stuff involving body fluids coming up.

So I get up and I am playing my video game while I slowly wake up when I suddenly get that special terrible feeling that tells me my blood sugar is crashing.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

So I managed to stagger to my feet and lumber into the kitchen to grab my leftover Pizza Slut and an apple from the fridge. Got back to the Home Base here in front of this computer of mine and started eating the heck out of that apple.

I started there because it was the sweetest thing I had and I wanted to get some simple sugars into me as fast as I could.

So I finish the apple and start in on a cheesy breadstick when I notice that I am getting this very heavy congested feeling in my upper chest.

Had I been calmer and more awake, I would have recognized this warning sign. But as it was, I was shocked when I suddenly horked up a big ball of phlegm and good.

Told ya it was going to get gross.

Worse is yet to come.

What followed was my being unable to swallow anything without it coming right back up and thus having no choice but to spend the next hour horking up yet more balls of undigested food and goo until finally I cleared it all and could breath normally again.

Oh right. It was making it hard to breathe, too.

So that was pretty fucking awful. For a while I was contemplating a 9/11 call because being unable to swallow is a rather serious symptom.

So is all that horking, for that matter.

But luckily I was able to clear it on my own.

I’ve had attacks like this before. Dunno WTF it is besides deeply unpleasant. Doesn’t happen nearly often enough to tell a doctor about. Not with everything else I got going wrong with me.

Once I am clear, I become quite sleepy from the aftermath of all that stress and fear, so I go to bed.

Wake up and immediately realize I needed to poop.

I mean, that’s what that weird tingling feeling in my back forty must mean, right?

Sat up and went from “I need to poop” to “OH GOD NO” in half a heartbeat. Bolted for the bathroom and got seated as fast as I good, but I knew there had been…. leakage.

So that was real fun to have to clean up.

So this morning’s itinerary was :

1. Blood sugar crash. Had to dash to the kitchen to grab some food to eat so that I do not die.
2. Bizarre food getting trapped in my chest somehow thing. Had to spend a long time horking up nastiness before I could breathe and swallow again.
3. Sudden dire incontinence. Another dash, this time to the toilet. Did not quite make it in time, had to clean up little messes.

God I hope that’s everything.

More after the break.

Time for timer

Just think, at some point, some exec said “You know who the kids will really relate to? This pear on legs with an old fashioned watch. Oh, and make sure he has a voice like a less butch Jim Nabors. Yeah, that’s the ticket. ”

Anyhow, today, the timer in question is the one that determines how long I can stay upright before collapsing.

I think that particular hourglass has a little less sand in it every day. Eventually, it will run out too fast for me to be able to do much of anything,

Going to the kitchen and back will be out of the question, let alone making it to the car.

At that point, I will have to give in and declare myself crippled and go to the ER.

I should probably be proactive and get myself some crutches or braces first.

I like the idea of braces or some other, similar structural support system. That seems like the least obtrusive solution. No having to support my weight on my armpits. no having to learn to navigate the world in a wheelchair, no enduring the brutal indignity of a freaking walker.

I would still have to learn to put on and use the braces, of course. But they at least seem like they would make me feel more whole and let me walk upright.

Still, I will take the advice of whoever handles my inquiries at Regency Pharmacy. Not blindly, of course, because their interest is in getting the most money from me, not in making me happy per se.

But still, I assume they know more about their field of expertise than I do.

I assume this will costs me a fair bit no matter what. For the most part, people are not shopping for medical prosthetics at Regency because they want to. They have no choice – they need those crutches (or whatever) in order to function at all.

They are, therefore, inherently highly motivated buyers and that tends to drive the prices of things up something fierce.

Kind of like those bastards in the funeral industry.

One good question is whether the province will pay for this kind of thing for me given that I am on full disability.

One would think the answer is yes. I mean, I assume that people with disabilities worse than mine are not expected to pay for their own wheelchairs or colostomy bags or prosthetics or whatever.

I imagine the folks at Regency would know a thing or two about that.

 If not, I can always call the welfare office. In general, I prefer to leave them alone and not draw their attention, but for the right cause I will risk it.

Not that I have any reason for this paranoia. It’s not like being on welfare, where somke of them are just aching for an excuse to kick you off it.

When you are on full disability, it’s assumed that’s permanent.

Oh well, As usual, I am sure I will figure things out eventually.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what Gabapentin gives me.

At least, that’s my feeling about it at the moment. It doesn’t kill the pain I feel when I stand and/or walk entirely – nor would I want it to, that pain is telling me something important – but it does dull the pain enough to make it more bearable.

And that’s exactly what I asked for, so – score one for Doc Chao.

I took a gabba right before heading out to Wound Care and it helped a fair bit. My legs still hurt but it was somewhat muted and the pain did not radiate as deep into the rest of my leg tissues as before.

There was a SNAFU with my appointment Of course. When I arrived I found the door to the clinic was locked. So I did what the sign in front of me said and waved my hand in front of the sensor. No dice. Waddy fug?

Then some dude on the way out let me in, but told me I was *supposed* to press some button I had not seen and wait to be let in.

Whatever. There was absolutely nobody in the reception area (because it’s Canada Day, duh!) so I just headed straight to the waiting area.

And waited. And waited.

Eventually I got tired of waiting and decided to go peek into the Clinic to see if anyone was even in there.

The irrational thought that I had been booked for an appointment on a day when nobody would be there compelled me to do this.

There I met my nurse of the day, who had been waiting for ME.

Turns out that because I had not pressed the right magic button to be let in, she had no idea I was there. Derp.

Normally they just check the waiting area but she was operating on the fully reasonable assumption that nobody would get in without her buzzing them in first.

What a silly little mess. Ah well, no harm done.

Still looking forward to my scan tonight. I wonder what CT unit I will get?

They have two, and they are both awesome in their own way.

There is the older one, which is awesomely 60’s science fiction in style. That’s the one with the spinning magnetic ring that surrounds you and makes soft whirring and grinding sounds like you’re inside a giant hard drive.

So that’s what I love about that one, and that’s the one I have experienced most often. It’s located right off the emergency room, so it’s the one ER patients go into.

The other is awesome because it’s a combination X-ray, ultrasound, AND CT scanner.

So it’s basically the copier/printer/fax of the medical imaging world.

Only been in it once but man, was it cool.

So hopefully tonight’s scan will shed some light on what the hell is happening to my legs to make them so damned weak.

It would be very nice to be able to walk normally again.

I swear, I will never take being ambulatory for granted again.

When I get better, I am damned well going to exercise.

Just little walks at first, but eventually I am going to be able to walk wherever I want to go without it even being a thing.

Heck, I might even take up hiking.

Can you imagine that?

More after the break.

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Oh the decadence!

Ordered more Pizza Slut tonight.

Because that’s just the kind of devil-may-care Sybarite I am.

Joe was nice enough to pay the dude (with my money) and tote it to me, saving me a painful trip to the door and back.

Thank you so much Joe.

Just to mix it up. my pizza’s all crazy tonight. It’s got pesto and raw tomato chunks!

Because the edge is the only place I want to be, baby

It’s pretty good. Dude from the Hut called me to ask if I wanted just pesto sauce, or pesto on top of the usual tomato sauce.

I chose the latter. Because I’m crazy.

Holy crap does Billy Joel look sleazy in that video.

I wouldn’t leave him alone with my pets.

I am pretty sure that as a child of the Seventies, I absorbed the information to stay the hell away from dudes who look like that via cultural osmosis.

I mean, he could be the villain in a “Stranger Danger!” PSA and they wouldn’t even have to stop filming. Just keep rolling and have him say something about having puppies in his van and boom, millions of kids will be safer for his effort.

Now where was I.

Well the scan is soon. Too soon…. I honestly wonder if I should have waited to eat, seeing as there is little chance I will finish this half of the blogging before I have to get dressed and leave for the scan.

But whatever. If I end up having to finish up that last little bit when I get back from having my spine scanned, so be it.

Quick review : pesto + pizza sauce + tomato + pineapple + Italian sausage adds up to a pretty dang good pizza

I have been wanting to see if I liked raw tomato on pizza for a while, because while I do not like raw tomato itself, I thought it might be keen on a pizza.

And it is! Being cooked on the pizza is enough to make it not raw to my tastes buds, and all that lovely zesty flavour is still there.

My dislike of raw tomato is mostly a texture thing.

Today’s been relatively OK. The heat has not been bothering me, thank the stars. Probably because I have been hydrating aggressively.

That might be the cause of my sodium deficiency : drinking too much water. That’s what Doctor Chao says anyhow.

But I am having trouble accepting it because I refuse to believe that there is such a thing as drinking too much water. I was raised to think that the only way to drink too much water is if you drink so much it ruptures your stomach and that most people do not drink nearly enough water to be healthy,

So I’m gonna go with that for now.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Look, titles are hard.

Was supposed to have therapy at noon, but Doc Costin got sick. Poor guy. I have a terrible feeling that he is hitting the “everything goes wrong at once” stage of aging, which tends to be the last.

I hope not. He’s a great guy. But he and he wife are in there seventies, so….

My nontheistic prayers are with you, Doc Costin.

Tomorrow’s my Big Day. Wound Care at 2:30 pm and then my spinal CT scan at 9:40 pm, though of course they want me to arrive early.

Because it’s late at night, the main doors will be closed and locked, so I will be going in through the Emergency department.

You know, they call them departments, but they never depart.

Wait, there they go.

Going in through the ED is no big deal for me. What with all the time I’ve spent there due to ER visits and the times I did IV antibiotics there (before the hospital had its own neato little ward for that), I honestly feel right at home there.

I assume I will go through the admitting clerk first. Show her my CareCard, get the little wristband, yadda yadda.

Then off to Medical Imaging. Pretty sure I already know the way there from all the times I went there on a gurney during ER visits.

Once more, the idea that I should have just gone to the ER with my leg issues rears its ugly head. But no, I did what I am supposed to do instead.

And that really hurts. Because I am not some rule humping sheep. I don’t follow the goddamned herd. I make the strategically best decision based on my goals, morals, and interests every single round, every single time.

This is what I get for trying to be “good” and do things the “right way”.

And, I cannot help but conclude, this is also what I get for trusting in the competence of others. Turns out I just plain don’t get to relax and let others take care of me.

I’ve always got to be paranoid and hostile and suspicious because the alternative to to trust my fate to people who may not have my best interests at heart and who may not even see me as fully human.

I mean, I’ve seen how some nurses look at me, and it’s not good.

Admittedly, that was in Burnaby, not Richmond, though.

But still, I have read the reports of fat people getting shitty treatment from the medical establishment, so I am on guard for that.

But that’s not enough. Apparently, it’s up to me to provide the focus and drive for my own medical treatment. Doc Chao means well but he is too soft and meek to really fight for his patients and that’s not gonna work for me.

I want a doctor like Quincy or Bones(either of them). Compassionate, courageous, combative in defense of their patients, and stubborn as hell.

One thing is for sure : I am just about ready to give up being polite and doing what I am told and ready to given in to my controlling side and start bossing people around.

Seems to be what I have to do in order to not get run over by the system.

SQUEAK SQUEAK said the wheel.

More after the break.

This all sucks

But you all knew that already.

Forgive my snarkiness but as usual. I am fresh from a truly painful and upsetting trip to the kitchen to get food.

Having leftover from last night’s Pizza Slit order was wonderful. Magical, even. Because the leftovers stayed in the room with me (instead of going i the fridge as usual) and therefore had two glorious, wonderful meals where I did NOT have to make the perilously painful pilgrimage to the kitchen and back to get it.

Kind of makes me want to order more food. In bulk.

More sanely (and cheaply), I am thinking of moving some of my food into the bedroom here with me to save me some of those damned trips

In fact, it’s occurred to me that if I had a spare microwave on hand, and I can get my mini-fridge working again, I could basically have my own little kitchen in here.

Fridge and microwave are all I ever use in the kitchen, after all. Well, that and the bottom two shelves of my personal pantry cupboard.

The top two shelves are full of baking stuff I never use any more.

So recreating at least part of that in here is plausible.

Sure, it would take work to set up, but it would be the best kind of work. Namely the kind that saves you a lot more work in the long run and thus is a big net reduction in effort.

Thus speaketh the voice of enlightened laziness.

A lot of my fellow depressives don’t like it when I talk about things like enlightened laziness because it sounds suspiciously like it means having to actually do things.

And they are totally against that.

That’s the madness of the anti-action bias in action. You could incontrovertibly prove ot someone with depression that a given choice of action would vastly reduce the amount of work and hassle they have to deal with in the future and they would still firmly reject it because that would mean doing something.

I fight that feeling as much as I can. I tell myself that effort is not the enemy and that I would be a much happier man if I moved around more and did more.

And I know that’s true. The happiest times in my adult life have been when I was busy doing meaningful things. Finally something was draining all that excess nervous energy and I could finally relax!

You would think that would be enough to keep me moving. But no.

And my health issues seem to be conspiring to make sure I lose the ability to do much in the first place.

But still, I struggle.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.