In that I am sick today.

Some kind of flu, I think. I woke upo this morning with some of the classic signs – full body muscle ache, deep set weariness that keeps me on the edge of sleep at all times, throbbing headache.

So I definitely have something.

And wow did I feel bad at that point. Enough that I was seriously wondering if I should go to Urgent Care and have them take a look at me.

Eventually. I mean, last time it took three hours for them to get around to me.

“Urgent Care” must be one of those ironic nicknames, like calling a big fella “Tiny”

But then an odd but quite lovely thing happened . I hadn’t had a sufficient breakfast and I was feeling super tired so I decided to go to the kitchen for a can of store brand diet cola and a banana.

Yeah, I am back for a limited engagement with caffeinated beverages. My non-excuse for adding a case of diet cola in cans to my order last week was that Sav-On doesn’t have anything caffeine free in cans.

The real reason, though, is that I miss caffeine. And there have been a number of times besides today when I really wished I has something caffeinated to drink because I really needed a boost.

My only defence besides the above is that because it’s in cans, I will be having my “doses” of caffeine 333 ml at a time instead of the previous regime’s 1L at a time.

So I’ve at least gotten rid of two thirds of the problem!

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Oh right, the cool thing

I almost forgot. Man, am I tangent prone.

The cool thing was that after a fair bit of initial discomfort, I found that the effort of getting up to get my banana and cola actually made me feel a whole lot better.

Exercise can make you feel BETTER? We’re through the looking glass here people!

The flu fog cleared and mu muscles stopped aching so much and I got a good healthy sweat going that really cleared the gunk out of my system.

So maybe I never had the flu in the first place. Maybe I just needed to get up and fucking MOVE.

So I am doing my best to hold on to this lesson for as long as I can so it has the best chance of actually penetrating all those thick layers of habit and depression that keep me thinking that effort is always the enemy and laziness must always be maximized.

It’s so stupid and so wrong but I can’t seem to convince my deeper self that such heresy as effort making me feel better could possibly be true.

Even though I know damned well it can totally be true. Like it was today.

I felt so much better after a little strain and sweat. It got my juices flowing, stretched some of the pain out of my muscles, and made me sweat some of the garbage out of my system..

All for a fairly paltry investment of effort.

Sounds like a wise and prudent move to me.

And besides, what’s the end game of all this laziness? Doing nothing at all?

No thanks. I’d rather be alive.

More after the brealk.

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Out, out damn’d Spot!

How’s that goddamned dog keep getting in here, anyway?

Typing while spots dance in my eyes once again. This is getting real old real fasr.

I still feel somewhat okay., although an afternoon nap fucked me up some.

Sleep is always a gamble for me. Maybe it will make me feel better. Maybe it will leave me feeling a whole lot worse. If it were optional, I just wouldn’t bother.

I don’t play if the odds are that terrible. I am no fool.

But it isn’t optional. Trust me on that. I quite foolishly treated it like it was for much of my misspent youth and suffered greatly as a result.

Such pointless suffering.

Like with my recent chat about carbs with the dietician. My almost no carbs diet is so obviously wrong when examined with even a speck of rationality. I used to make fun of people who foolishly went no carb back when Atkins was king.

Such fools these mortals be, said I Don’t they know that carbohydrates are the basic fuel of all life and the only thing your brain can use as food?

And yet, in response to another dismal a1c test (they show long term blood sugar levels), I decided that the solution would be to cut all remaining carbs from my diet.

That seems insane to me. Talk about making the equal and opposite error. Sure, there was a time in my life when I ate way too many carbs. Every goddamned meal had its side dish of chips, pretzels, cheesies, and so forth.

I ate like a fucking child, is what I am saying. No wonder I have health issues now.

But eliminating most of the carbs from my diet was a very wrong solution.

I suppose it appealed to me because it didn’t involve me having to exercise. I have never found dietary restrictions to be a cause of much suffering.

I am lucky enough to have been raised with a very flexible and open minded view of food that allows me to believe that there is plenty of tasty food out there no matter what restrictions I am under.

So yeah, I miss all those carb laden junk foods. But I don’t crave them. I sometimes wish I could still eat them but then reality kicks in and reminds me that I totally could but they would just make me feel ill and be an overall net loss for yours truly.

So I miss the flavours and the fun. But I am in no risk of backsliding

That stuff all seems pretty gross to me.

If I am to add more carbs back into my diet, it will be in a radically different form.

Something more like real food.

I hear good things about brown rice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

THad my arranged phone conversation with a hospital nutritionist at RGH today and she firmly confirmed what I had started to suspect :

There IS such a thing as too few carbs in the diet!

She said I should be getting a minimum of 130…. somethings of carbs every day, minimum.

She didn’t specify and I didn’t ask. Grams, I am guessing?

She said there should be thirty in every meal, and here my dumb ass has been having the vast majority of my meals with none at all.

Shows the dangers of nutritional absolutism. Never thought I’d be one to fall for that.

She said that what happens when your body isn’t getting enough carbs is that it pulls the glucose it needs from your muscles, leaving them weak.

Um. That sounds familiar. Wouldn’t it be wild if I found out the real cause of my weak leg muscles was not the spinal fracture but carbohydrate deficiency?

In extreme cases, your body will even digest your own fat and tissues in order to get the glucose it so desperately needs. In order to keep the brain going.

Because brains run on glucose and that’s it.

Another thing that happens when you take the whole low carb thing too far is that your body signals the liver to release its stored up glucose into your bloodstream.

And you know what that leads to? High blood sugar!

So um… yeah. Kind of need to put some carbs back into my diet.

But in what form?

Not chocolate bars, presumably. Those are still bad, mmmkay? But my time in the hospital showed that having some of the no-no carbs like bread and rice and mashed potatoes with each meal is OK.

So I will be looking at things at that approximate level of carb complexity.

I will certainly be looking into the exciting new wave of healthy snacking options in the world. Like all the potato chip and tortilla chip clones made of something other than potato or corn.

And of course, I am always looking for no-sugar cookies, candy, and so on.

And speaking of tortilla chips, I might get some of those, along with some salsa. I am fairly certain that real plain tortilla chips (not that Doritos junk) is a fairly friendly sort of carb.

And of course, I have to always been careful to get low-effort foods these days.

Even with the walker there to lean on, I can only stay on my feet in the kitchen for a short time before my legs start to buckle under me.

Which suuuuucks. I hate having to hurry. I miss being able to spend however long I needed in there.

Beats having other people prepare my food, though. Not only would I hate to have to impose on Joe and Julian to that extent, I have have doing food my way for a very long time and the thought of either having to put up with it done “wrong” or teach others how to do it “right” appals me.

So I will continue doing food myself for as long as I am able.

I’m serious. Even if I was a billionaire, I would probably still make my own meals.

I’d just be doing it in a super modern kitchen filled with all the latest kitchen gadgets.

And maybe a sous-chef or two.

To be honest, that seems like way more fun that having to wait for my personal chef to make me a meal that he or she might very well get wrong,

More after the break.

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It’s getting dark

Well today’s been shitty.

First, my web host, Fatcow, seems to have disappeared into the seething void.

When you try to go to my blog, you get an Fatcow error page telling you about how they can’t find my blog and how if I am having a problem I should click the link to Fatcow’s primary hosting site.

Click that, and you get an internet error saying that they can’t get there from here.

Lovely. When it was just the Fatcow error, I assumed it was just one of those things where I didn’t update which credit card Fatcow had on file for me and so I missed a payment.

Annoying, but easily fixed with a few minutes’ work,

But now that it can’t find Fatcow itself, I have no idea WTF.

Then I developed this weird pain that extends from my bladder down to my right testicle then further down the inseam of the right leg.

It’s got me pretty worried. I’ve had urinary issues before, including ones that made me pee blood, and so any weirdness in that general area has me on high alert.

The pain gets worse when I move and the muscles around that area have to flex.

I sure hope I am not going to start peeing blood again.

Finally, I have been feeling overheated out of nowhere again, which suggests that I might have some kind of infection resulting in an inflammatory response.

I am going to take some Naproxen, aka Alleve, and see if it helps.

Oh, and my back pain is much worse today after a lovely period of it being fairly mild.

Not hard to guess why, seeing as I can feel a large bolus of semi-digested food just hanging there n my lower colon like a bowling ball in a hammock.

I paint pictures with words.

The bladder/ballsack pain might be related. Hard to tell.

I decided that what with my digestive system in a questionable state, I should not eat the curry I bought on Saturday night just yet.

It will have to wait for when I feel more settled.

Now is not the time to introduce even a mild curry to my system. That seems like i would be playing a very dangerous game – East Indian cuisine roulette.

“This might make things much worse…. or much better. Now EAT! Mao mao didi mao!”

Both are possible with me and spicy foods. Which is weird.

Then again, so am I.

Oh right, one last thing : my dizziness on rising is back, too.

Same to you, life. But double.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s trip to Wound Care and back was fucking miserable.

Partly my fault, because I overslept. As in, we were planning on leaving at 10:30 am for my 11 am appointment and I woke UP at 10:30 am.

Well, 10:28 am, technically. Whatever.

So then I had to get ready in a hurry, and doing things in a hurray is never good for me. It always stresses me out and puts me in a bad frame of mine where I feel impatient and angry and irritable.

Practically turns me in my ever-impatient late father.

Then I had to actually get to the car via my walker, and I am still on the fence on whether that thing helps more than it hurts.

I mean, I remember what it was like getting around without it and how my weak legs made walking incredibly painful and draining, and I don’t want to go back to that.

But having to constantly push against an excess of friction on the rear legs of the thing is very draining too, and makes me feel like I am suffering some kind of ironic punishment doled out by the Fates.

Makes me think it’s time for that trip to Regency Pharmacy at long last. Maybe they have a superior solution.

Which reminds me : my nurse at Wound Care said that my walker is mostly a home model and not meant for outdoor use.

That explains a lot. It’s OK for getting me to the kitchen and back, even if I have to do the lunge and follow a lot of the time, but kinda sucks outside the apartment.

Oh well. It’s all I have got right now. So I will use it when I go to Denny’s tonight despite its lack of rugged outdoor features.

Life is such a drag for me right now.

Not all the time. Just during the parts where I have to actually do things.

Complex, challenging, death-defying things like taking a leak, or getting food from the kitchen, or going to much needed medical appointments.

Making it from the car to the Community Care Clinic really sucked. I felt so beaten down and tired by the time I walkered my way into the building, up the elevator, and through the larger clinic to the CCC.

Was my first post-hospital Wound Care and hence the first one where one of the nurses had to change the dressing on my butt wound.

She told me said wound was quite red and that i really needed to stay off my butt if I wanted that wound to heal.

Which means I need to work harder to be able to blog from my tablet. Sure, it will suck to either use a virtual keyboard or speech to text in order to blog, but if I can find a way to blog lying down, this whole problem will go away,

I will be able to avoid the painful kind of sitting almost entirely. The kind that involves this stupid uncomfortable computer chair.

Oh, how I wish I had gone with my original plan of looking for one in the $200 to $300 range instead of going with a cheapo $70 model.

Oh well. Time to get off my fat ass and back into lounging with tablet mode.

More after the break.

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So much potential

Early on in life, I was told how much potential I had.

Not hard to see why. When a kid shows up to first grade already able to read and write and do simple math (everything up to but not including long division) and already talks like a tiny adult and in fact seems smarter than most grownups, it doesn’t take a Piaget to see that this kid has potential.

Many adults predicted that I would go far with a brain like mine.

None of them seemed eager to help me in that direction though. I honestly think they all thought I didn’t need them, I was amazing without them,

And I was. But I had no idea what to do with all that mental power. I could have really used the voice of a knowledgeable adult to point me in the right direction and give me some sort of sense of what was expected of me and what I could maybe do to turn my talents into a career.

But nope. I remained sans guidance of any sort. And so I continued to just kind of wander through life without a real focus or goal.

And that’s never gotten any better. I still have no idea what to do with all these brains and all this talent. I have all this potential stuff but no route to turn it into anything useful, both on a practical level and, more importantly, on the psychological level.

I am like a great heavy storm cloud with an enormous electrical potential but no route to ground, no ability to discharge.

All potential, no result.

And the sheer voltage I have accumulated creates its own issues. I cannot even conceive of a project or goal that could possibly absorb all the energy I have been mindlessly saving up for all these years.

Metaphorically speaking, it kind of seems like anything I try to plug into this overloaded power supply in my head is going to be blown to pieces by the intensity of the current.

What I could really use is a non-intellectual way to discharge some of that electricity so i can lower my electrical (and personal) to a safer and easier to handle level.

It has to be something that bypasses the intellect because then it can evade interference from my overweaning superego and its eager minion the ego.

Both of those forces are corrupt as hell in me and will sabotage any attempts I make ti break free of their enslavement and servitude, so they must be outfoxed.

Basically, my id needs to get all clever and sneaky, like a wily and experienced hunter, in order to fight the system.

Because hear me now : I am busting out of this goddamned prison by whatever means prove necessary, and that means any and all of the voices in my head need to be on short fucking notice that if they get in my way, I will kill them without hesitation.

So get right by me or get the fuck out of here.

I’m finally using my reptile brain and it says ID SMASH!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well it’s been a week and a day since I got out of the hospital and I think I have made a successful transition back to normal life.

It was touch and go there for a while and as patient readers know. There were times when I sincerely thought I was going to have to call up the hospital and ask them what the procedure was for going back in.

Assuming there is one.

But I am doing pretty good now. That awful Tuesday afternoon where I had the “containment issues” seems to have been a turning point because after that I have felt a heck of a lot better.

My body must have gotten rid of something toxic along with all the rest of the stuff that came out of me that day.

(WARNING : Semi-explicit poop talk ahead!)

Heck, yesterday I even passed solid stools for the first time in at least six weeks, Actual poops, not the pudding-like stuff I had been putting out for so long.

And that’s a very good sign. Although it hurt on the way out, A kind of prickly feeling, like the poops were covered in broken walnut shell fragments.

I will chalk that up to my general butthole issues and the fact that my anus had gotten lazy over all those days of low effort defecation.

OK, I hear you, enough with the poop talk already. Look, this is what is happening in my life. I can’t help it if some of it is a tad over-intimate.

I’ve never been very interested in holding back.

I’d tell everything to everyone if I could.

Joe was nice enough to take me to the bank so I could withdraw my latest cheque pau him this month’s rent money, and get him to buy me my latest credit card,

It’s kind of funny how fate keeps forcing me to save money. First I went a month without being able to access it properly while I was trying all those different ways to spend money online directly and then I end up in the hospital for 16 days and you can’t really spend money there even if you are healthy enough to do so.

As a result, I am only cracking into last month’s cheque now, and I will be getting another one a week from next Wednesday.

Dunno what to do with the money, to be honest. I suppose I could start saving up for a new PC that can play the latest hotness, but right now I am quite content to play games on my tablet instead.

It’s a very different world from the world of PC gaming and I find that refreshing. Plus I am as perfectly happy doing crosswords and hidden object type quests and match-3 and other forms of “grandma gaming” as I would be slaying orcs and looting treasures and so on in a PC game.

It’s not the same but it’s just as good.

And unlike PC gaming, my brand new tablet is ALWAYS good enough to play whatever I find on the Android app store!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have baby dragons to feed.

More after the break.

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My time in Indjah

“Indjah” as in the way an Edwardian upper class twit pronounces “India”.

Decided to order in some Indian food tonight. My usual fare : Lamb Rogan Josh from Tandoori King Cafe plus some veggie samosas and some steamed rice.

Lovely stuff, Rogan Josh…. despite sounding like it’s how someone named Josh Rogan is listed in the phone book.

It’s a creamy curry, which is something I had no idea I wanted till I tried it. But the creaminess makes such a marvelous background for the (mild) spiciness of the curry that I fell in love with it instantly.

I ordered this delightful cuisine despite knowing that I would have to make a voyage to the door and back to fetch it myself.

Joe and Julian are hanging with Joe’s family as is their habit on Saturday nights and soI am all alone in Fanhattan right now.

It wasn’t too bad of a trip. I even had enough pep left to go get myself two very necessary things – my Decaf Diet Coke and a big spoon – AFTER I had got back to Mister Computer and could have just said “fuck it” and done without.

Admittedly, eating my curry without a spoon would have been.,…. unpleasant.

Right now I am puzzling over how to serve the curry to myself without making a huge mess. In the Days Before, I would have divided it in half in the kitchen then carried my apportioned portion on a plate to the computer.

But that would be pretty darn tricky to do while using the walker.

So now I am seriously considering skipping the curry and just eating the samosas plus some leftover trail mix plus peanuts I got kicking around.

That doesn’t really solve the problem, though, just kicks it further down the road. Sooner or later I am going to want to eat that curry and that means that I need to figure out how to make that work in my particular circumstances.

I’m thinking Tupperware. If I can find the appropriately sized sealable containers, I can split up the portions and stick one half in the fridge while I very carefully transport the other half in the sidebags of my trusty walker.

Yeah. That should do the trick.

It’s either that or try to eat the whole thing in one sitting!

No way that would end well.

Otherwise, today has been soothingly dull except for the banking. And it wasn’t too bad. The line was not very long and I had no problem with my legs while making my transaction with both my walker and the counter to lean on.

I am getting over feeling self-conscious about using the walker in public.

Who cares if it makes me loud and attention getting? So what if people wonder why a seemingly healthy middle aged fat dude needs a walker?

Fuck’m. I got shit to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am so goddamned sick of this whole “live your best life” Oprah schtick.

Easy for you to say, Winfrey. You’re a goddamned billionaire. You can lead any frigging best life you want.

Image : Dragon sitting on enormous hoard of gold and treasure, saying “But really, it’s the things money can’t buy that really matter. ”

And what does it even mean to “live your best life” anyway? Who even knows what their “best” life would be?

Does Oprah think we’ve all been leading knowingly shitty lives and honestly just need her to tell us to live the better ones we all know how to get to but haven’t yet?

Typical empty-headed false positivism.

It’s like all that “live life to the fullest” bullcrap. Oh great, another thing to constantly fail at as I neurotically obsess over my suboptimal performance.

I mean, sure, I might get to the point where I am enjoying my life more than I am now, but would I really be enjoying it to the FULLEST? Am I really living my BEST life, or could I be doing better? How sure could I ever be that I had wrung all the happiness and enjoyment I possibly could out of every possible moment?

Fuck that noise. That shit is so toxic it glows in the dark. I am going to keep doing the best I can with the withered and palsied soul I have and continue to try to learn and grow and stretch towards a healthier, happier, stronger me, and fuck you, Oprah, and all your idiot followers for trying to make me doubt myself on yet another fucking level.

Besides, you’re only the rich airhead you are today because you stole Phil Donahue’s show format and turned it into nauseating Pablum for the Eat Pray Love set,

I still miss you, Phil. I learned a hell of a lot from your show.

But you, Oprah, can go suck shit through a paper straw.

---

As you can see, i am feeling kinda cranky today.

I have reached the point in my mood cycle where something in me is trying to wake up and become active but the forces of paralysis and fear are still too strong to allow it and so the energy gets trapped in a half-born state.

And that really hurts.

Still, i make sure this latent energy in me keeps trying as I do my best to clear the path ahead of it and reduce that burden of soul killing frost and snow that clings to my soul like a smothering blanket of death’s fatal chill.

i would so totally rule any goth poetry slam.,

I keep at it because some day, this cranky energy will be the spark that ignites my soul and allows it to finally burn out all that old emotion, blocked passion, and incomplete thought and then rise from its own ashes as a wholer, stronger, saner me.

I just have a lot of healing I need to do first.

And trust me, I am working on it. Somehow, the life in me will burrow its way to the surface and leave the dark cold subterranean world of depression behind.

Seek the love. Follow the light. Move towards what heals you.

And never look back.

More after the break.

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Healing is hurting

The problem with all that healing I gotta do is that it pretty much has to hurt.

There is no royal road out of depression. No easy, pain free, totally not scary way to recover from decades of depression stretching back to my early childhood.

And you can be sure as shit sandwiches that nobody is (or can) go ahead of me and smooth down the path like a snowplow parent to make things easier for me.

No, the path ahead is paved with pain and I will have to do a lot of things I really don’t want to do at all and sacrifice a lot of my precious comfort and ease if I want to ever escape this leghold trap of a life and make something of myself.

Because I ain’t nothin’ round about now. Not to the world and definitely not to myself. I can no longer hack this dead end existence of mine.

Over and over, as I waste yet more of my precious time on Earth mindlessly playing video games on my tablet, I find myself thinking,, “There has to be something better I could be doing than THIS. ”

And by “better”, I don’t mean “more productive”. Whatever THAT means.

No, I mean better in terms of being more satisfying, fulfilling, and/or likely to produce a sense of pride in myself for having gotten something done for once.

Something that is meaningful to me. Use my astounding abilities to make something good. Something cool. Something others might actually enjoy.

I have been a pile of untapped potential for far too long, and lately it has occurred to me that nobody is going to come along and tap me any time soon.

I pretty much have to tap myself. It’s up to me to exploit myself as a resource in order to extract some self-worth and dignity from this rotten old life.

Nobody is ever going to just show up and say, “We detected large amounts of IQ and talent in this area and we are here to give you scads and scads of money just for being your extra special self. “

No, the world weirdly insist on you giving them worth at least what they are paying you in order to get that money, so sooner or later you have to produce.

And I know I can produce like a mofo. I write 1000 words a day just for fun,

But there is a lot of harsh reality to deal with before I get paid for my abilities and that has been far too long a journey for me up to this point.

And I am trying to train myself to be more ambitious and greedy so that have some solid and reliable reasons for putting myself out there.

But I have lived a life of constant indolent self-indulgence for so long that my self-discipline is shot and my real functional pride is nonexistent, so it’s hard.

Someday I will make it.

Hopefully BEFORE I die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s my motto these days.

Because objectively speaking, my life does not look real promising right now. I have spinal damage making my legs weak and my lower body in general messed up. I got high blood pressure and get super dizzy when I stand up. Overall, I feel feeble and weak and sickly all the time.

And I can’t handle all that. If I think about it too much, I get all freaked out and depressed and the Bad Thoughts about things being “OVER” start up and it gets harder to talk myself out of them every day.

So all I can do is narrow my focus to the immediate moment and keep myself distracted and entertained like I have always done, but this time with a purpose.

I’d rather find some way towards being functional despite all this health crap. I would love to be one of these inspirational types who turned to their art as a way to escape the bleak realities of their harsh existence and created amazing things as a result.

And I am not ruling that out entirely but it would take some sort of spiritually energizing event, positive or negative, that would force me to wake up and be in the here and now and actually focus for once because for once, I actually want something.

Even if that desire is something as basic as, “I want to make my mark before I die. ”

Right now, I am still wandering through the heavy fog of my inner world. Truth be told, I don’t truly care about anything. Not in an active, meaningful sense.

Not in a sense that might lead to action. Heaven forbid.

I mean, sure, I want to get better more than I want anything else in this entire world, but not enough to actually do stuff about it.

I mean, let’s get real here. And by that, i mean “remain delusional”.

My biggest problem is translating emotion and intention into action. I have so much amazing and powerful stuff floating around in this megavolt mind of mine but it might as well be museum pieces for all the good it will ever do in the world.

To truly wake from my long, long night’s dreaming and face the world so I can actually do something with myself would mean abandoning my cloak of night and committing yo being real and present and now, and that is not a price I am willing to pay.

Not yet, anyhow. Maybe someday, Maybe not.

So I will keep sleepwalking to my grave and not thinking too much about it. I can imagine a different, healthier, more vitally alive version of myself, but I cannot yet convince myself to make the transition.

The change would feel too much like dying. Or worse, becoming more alive than I have ever been before and thus having to face a much louder, brighter, and altogether far more intense existence that I have no faith in my ability to handle.

More after the break

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A little more distant

If the voice you hear in your head when you read these words sounds like it is coming from a little further away today, that’s because I have devised a somewhat unique solution to the problem of my butt wound not liking it when I sit on this terribly uncomfy computer chair of mine for very long.

The solution ; not sitting on the damned thing.

I am instead typing while sitting on the edge of my bed and using said torture device/computer chair as support for my keyboard and mouse.

As solutions go, this one is pretty crappy, as in exchange for less butt pain I get more back pain from my now completely unsupported lumbar region.

So honestly, I can see myself alternating between the two positions (distant and sitting like a normal human being) depending on which part hurts the most at that moment.

Today’s been dull, but in a soothing way, for the most part. Slept a fair bit, fucked aroiund on the tablet (in other words, played games) on the tablet a fair bit.

Finally remembered to email my therapist, Doc Costin, that I am out of the hospital. Gee, and only six days after I got out!

I often forget that other people are affected by my lack of action. I feel so completely alone all the time that it’s hard to remember that I am not, in fact., a ghost.

Or at least, no more so than anyone else.

This leads to a strange sort of misbehavior where I do things that are uncharacteristically thoughtless or cold or even grossly irresponsible because i sincerely forgot people cared about me and liked having me around.

My internal emotional landscape of Midnight Tundra does not allow me to feel the lve and caring of others very strongly.

I feel terrible saying that because the last thing I want is to give those who love me the impression that their love and care doesn’t matter to me.

It does matter to me, it matters SO MUCH,

It’s so cold and lonely on my tiny planet far from the sun that every single photon of love that actually reaches me is precious beyond compare.

So just know, my beloved friends, that if I seem lost and lonesome and a million miles away sometimes, it doesn’t me that your love doesn’t reach me or that it doesn’t help or it doesn’t count.

I would love to be able to orbit closer to you all but it is my sad and twisted fate to wander the cosmos, untethered and alone. and only come within radio range of other planets every once in a while.

I do not yet understand the forces within me that compel me to avoid others so much and to need so much space and autonomy all the time.

All I can say is that I am a very poorly socialized monkey and that leads me to places both dark and vile that the other monkeys will never have to see.

I wish I had more trust. I wish I could stop seeing my fellow monkeys as a threat first. I wish I could wipe all those bad tapes in my head that tell me over and over that I dom’t belong in the sunlit world of healthy humanity.

But for now, I have no choice but to be the squirrelly and paranoid critter I am.

But I love you all. Never, ever doubt that.

I just lose contact with humanity from time to time.

Try not to take that personally.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling fairly chipper at the moment.

Mostly because I actually got the motivation together to take the Walker Express (hint : don’t both using the wheels, fling and follow old school style) to the kitchen and make myself some lunch that I could carry back to Mister Computer via my walker’s sidebags.

The one thing I could not transport that way was my beloved Decaf Diet Coke, so I still had to get Julian to bring that to me then take the half-bottle back to the fridge.

I plan to solve this problem in the future by getting my pop in cans instead.

2L bottles don’t fit in my sidebags but cans of pop totally do.

And when I had those cans of Decaf Diet Pepsi recently, I rediscovered the strange magic of canned soda : I was as completely satisfied with a can of pop, which is 333 ml, as I was with my usual half-a-bottle of Decaf Diet Coke, which is 1L or 1000 ml.

Equal satisfaction for one third of the quantity. That’s magic all right. i wish I could do that with everything I eat and drink,. I would be so happy.

So yeah. A switch to cans seems to make sense to me.

Also on the supply front is the fact that neither of the bags of trail mix I ordered with last week’s groceries actually showed up. Out of stock. Dammit.

Stupid supply chain issues!

In retrospect, I could have seen this coming, though. Before I went into the hospital, I had encountered the same issue and had bought some of my stuff directly from the bulk food section of Sav-on’s instead of in the “prepackaged bulk” form I am used to.

Don’t try applying logic to “prepackaged bulk” , You and logic will both end up feeling foolish if you do.

So I figure I have to make a rare second grocery order this week in order to secure the supplies I need and probably some sugar free treats too.

Sucks to have to pay a second $10 delivery fee in the same week, but what the hell, I will consider it a cost of learning a lesson and move on.

And what the hell, I can use it as an excuse to get stuff I don’t normally get.

More upsetting than the lack of bulk trail mix was the lack of bulk bologna.

I am so used to getting those big huge packs of like a zillion slices of bologna that the lack thereof makes me feel like, in one small way, we are failing as a civilization.

I wanted the baloney because my immediate short-term sloppy kludgy solution to my Vitamin B12 deficiency is to get the most low-effort kind of meat I can so that I can always just add a couple of slices of bologna to a meal and bingo, it has meat.

No prep. No fuss. Ya don’t even have to heat it up.

It is ready to eat the moment you buy it. You don’t even have to open a can.

And I find it is best to plan and program my life with realistic assumptions about my future laziness in mind.

Especially now that my leg pain limits the amount of time I can spend on food prep.

Still, to return to our thesis, I am glad I got myself moving and made my own lunch today. I needed the exercise and it felt good to focus down and do for myself and actually spend time in an activated state for once.

Oh. And breaking in a new keyboard is hard.

More after the break.

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Pain in the ass

Did another kitchen trip. This time I pushed myself a bit too hard and had to rest on my couch in the living room before traveling the rest of the way to Home Base here.

Another lesson learned.

Speaking of my ass, that’s one of my persistent issues right now : the fact that the longer I sit in front of here computer on my “I paid too little for this” cheap uncomfortable computer chair, the more it aggravates the wound on/in my butt.

It’s basically directly in front of and beside my nethermost gate and that is a crazy bad place for it to be for sanitary reasons alone.

Don’t think about that too much.

But the real problem is the pain. No wonder I do all my gaming on the tablet now. I only come here to blog and chat with my fuzzy friends.

And I might not need to do those things here any longer if Alexa’s speech to text capabilities are as good as they seem to be.

In theory, I could blog via just dictating to Alexa and having it going into a text file.

And I must admit, I am curious as to how needing to say things out loud in order to blog them would change the tone, tenor, and content of my blogging.

Then again, I could just vlog instead. And I am seriously considering it.

After all, the whole point of this blog o’ mine is self-expression and whilst I express a lot of myself in these words of mine after all these years of practice, I feel like I could express so much more of myself and who I am as a person via video.

And besides that, on YouTube, I might actually attract a following.

And then I could live my dream of becoming a mighty force to be reckoned with in the world of public opinion as I write my words of blood and fire across the sky.

Or at least really irritate a lot of stupid. crazy, and/or evil people.

That would make me so happy.

The tablet makes recording video ridiculously easy. Editing it, not so much. So the PC might have to get involved too.

And you know what that will be?

A real pain in the ass.

Callbacks make things seem smart!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I am incontinent now.

It just oozes out of me when it pleases. Doesn’t even wait for me to go to sleep any more. Containment has been lost .

Guess I should be calling the hospital and asking whether I should be going back in.

And I will. Real soon now.

But going back in will be a disruption and a drag, so I need to work up to it.

Probably do it tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.

No sign of my new keyboard yet. So typing via clicking persists .

Hopefully it will show up soon.

More after the break.

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The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Hallelujah, he is risen. The new extremely unfancy basic black keyboard I got off of Amazon Basics is working just fine so far, so I am back in business.

Went three whole days without being able to type (and hence blog) properly, and it was hell. I need to blog It’s a biological imperative for me now. All these thoughts and ideas and emotions and so on must be vented (at least in part) or my brain overloads and I become a much less happy Fru.

So woohoo, it is good to be back, baby.

Now what have I been up to?

Oh right, shitting the bed.

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That seems to be over for now. The last time it happened was a lulu. Stuff just kept coming out of me and I had to use a ton of Kleenex and other highly unfortunate bits of paper that happened to be there in order to staunch the flow.

A little still made it to my bed but it could have been SO MUCH WORSE.

I tried the “plug the leaking dyke” method at first but that was insufficient because more kept coming out of me in extremely involuntary waves.

So instead, I just pretended I had just “gone” and wiped hard.

These are the traumatic and humiliating details of my life. Pooping the bed in mny sleep. Getting crazy dizzy when I stand up. Having to get Julian to bring me things from the kitchen because going and getting them myself hurts so bad.

And like I have said before, I am not sure I can handle being this dependent on others, ler alone imposing on them so much.

That makes it a sort of double whammy of trust issues and fear of abandonment.

A deep part of my basic programming insists that if I ask too much of people or make the mistake of relying on them being there when I need them. they will decide I am more trouble than I am worth and leave me forever.

That if I am not super careful with this narrow window or opportunity created by my wit, charm, charisma, and so forth, whatever spell I can cast that makes people temporarily forget what a horrible person I am will be broken and they will see the real me.

And the real me is enough to make a saint run for the hills

I know that none of that is true. That the extremely dark picture my childhood memories paint of people’s willingness to tolerate me is an obscenity and cruelly inaccurate.

But the feelings are still there. And I am so scared that the sicker I get. the closer I get to being far more trouble than I am worth.

And then I will truly be all alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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O wait, I’m not done yet.

I got like 400 words to go. technically.

What the hell, it’s not like I have anything better to do.

The word of the day is ARGH!!!!

This just happened : I moved on my bed and that nudged a thing which nudged another thing that nudged another thing and that caused my 2/3 full glass of Decaf Diet Coke to go splashing all over me and onto the floor.

Nothing like the shock of a sudden cold-ish splash of fluid to really hammer home the sheer slapstick futility of me miserable goddamned existence.

Because shit like this just keeps happening and it’s driving me up the wall. I try so hard to be careful and patient and yet my world remains boobytrapped everywhere and the only form of security I know these days is to lie in bed doing absolutely nothing.

Maybe reading or using my tablet. But that’s it.

And I know it’s because my spinal damage is making me spastic. I twitch and tremble and twist and flail so fast that I don’t consciously register it and so to me, subjectively, it seems like shit just flies out of my hands, falls over, falls apart, or otherwise is a victim of the non stop entropy show that is my life.

And there’s not a goddamned thing I can do about it. It’s just going to keep happening in new and inventive ways all the fucking time and all I can do is take it because it is beyond my conscious control yet I still wish to interact with my environs so I just have to take whatever brutal humiliations life has in store for me.

And it’s not hard to see the writing on the wall. Unless the Spine Team can fix me up, I will just keep getting more and more spastic and feeble until I am just a useless twitching slab of meat on a gurney in some back ward somewhere spending all day wishing I had killed myself while I still could.

Ain’t that a pretty picture, kids?

So it’s no surprise that I have been pretty depressed lately. I can’t say y life prospects seem real good right now and the future is someplace I don’t wanna be.

So all I can do is keepo plugging along in the home that dawn is still coming and with it will come hope, joy, and something resembling a life.

Guess I should have gotten my life started while I still could.

Oh that’s right. I couldn’t. Because I’m crazy.

Well that takes care of that, then,

I will still talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God, does being feeble suck.

Especially with all this goddamned heat.

And of course , virtual keyboard use continues to suck gorilla taint. But a potential solution is on its way.

I ordered a new extremely basic keyboard off of Amazon Basics today. Should be arriving some time tomorrow .

Then we will see if the same keyboard dead zones crop up with a brand spanking new keyboard that has not spent months under my computer desk.

Hopefully the answer will be no, the new keyboard will work flawlessly , and things will go back to normal around here.

I will go back to blogging like I always have and life will go on.

But if the dead zones do reappear , I will declare my computer haunted and burn it.

OK, maybe not . But I will have a very strange and persnickety issue on my hands

Sadly, that is all from me today .

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow .

God, I hate my stupid fucking life right now.

All I wanted to do was go to the kitchen, throw together some food, come back to Mister Computer, and eat it.

But the goddamned dizziness had other plans.

First I sat on the edge of the bed for a good long time, hoping that would spare me some of the dizziness I had previously experience when I stood up.

And for a few moments, as I wheeled the walker towards the bedroom door, it seemed like it might be working,

But nope. Then the motherfucking dizziness hit me, and it hit me hnrd.

nd now kybd n gd. FML.

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Because yesterday , just as I was settling into my blogging, my computer developed a bizarre error where some keys on the keyboard simply do not respond.

At first I thought the keyboard itself was broken . irritating but fixable.

But then I dug up that fancy ‘gaming ‘ keyboard I bought but never used ages ago and plugged it in, and it too had mysterious dead zones .

So now I am stuck blogging with a virtual keyboard on my own damned PC, and IDKWTF to do.

it’s such a weird problem that I don’t even know how to Google it.

To top it all off, I can’t seem to get WordPress working on my fancy new tablet . Otherwise I would be doing this there .

Expect much briefer entries till I get this shit sorted due to how much more work it is to type this way.

Life hates me.

More after the break.

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Back from Denny’s.

Guess I will at least get this mofo up to 500 words so I can say I did half a blog entry today, more or less.

But lordy do I miss typing .

Everything is so much WORK now. Just getting to the kitchen feels like a marathon right now. Getting to the car and from the car to Denny’s and back was brutal .

And that’s partly because of the weakness of my legs. And it’s partly because my muscles have atrophied from sixteen days of bed rest.

But mostly it’s a matter of friction.

See, my walker has two wheels up front, chariot style , and two legs in back.

The wheels roll fine, and the legs have these little skis on them to let them glide over flat surfaces like concrete or carpet .

But I am thinking they were not designed with behemoths like me in mind.

So I have to overcome a lot of resistance to get anywhere and that is very tiring.

Ergo, a better solution is sought. The drag on my chariot must be reduced .

Anyone have a tennis ball I can cut in half and stick to the feet of my vehicle?

42 words to go. I can do this .

Having this keyboard weirdness crop up now when I am so vulnerable really seems unfair Here I am , a day out of the hospital , and this bullsit blindsided me.

This is why I think life hates me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow .