Therapy Thursday happened today.

And Doc Costin said something that stuck with me.

Well, first he reminded me that I am NOT my depression – and I needed to hear that.

Being around for a long time – my entire “adult” life – doesn’t change the fact that it it something that happened to me, not who I am.

And being so vast that it’s hard to remember that the sun still shines out there somewhere doesn’t make it my entire life either.

So thanks, Doc. I needed that.

But then he said that I was a naturally cheerful and upbeat person – and I instantly knew that he was right.

I was a bubbly happy outgoing kid before I was raped. And there is still an overflowing effervescence to my soul bubbling away under all that darkness.

And I have always resisted jadedness, cynicism, and pessimism with great fervor.

I am positive that if I could manage to excavate myself from underneath all this permafrost and dead scar tissue, my natural optimism would burst forth like the sun emerging from behind a cloud.

I think part of me would have to die in order for that to happen.

Fine. Good riddance. I will burn my very heart on a funeral pyre if that is what it takes to disinter myself from this living grave.

Remember, we do not hope because we have reason to hope.

We hope because it is better to hope.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ukraine and Iran

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

At the very least, these are interesting times.

In Ukraine, David is kicking the shit out of Goliath. The Ukrainian forces have retaken most of Ukraine and they may soon retake the rest.

And Putin’s regime is crumbling. Out of desperation to finally beat Ukraine, he announced he was going to essentially draft 300K Russians to fight in Ukraine.

And now he’s fucked because the Russian people did NOT like that. The whole country has exploded in rage. Recruitment offices are being burned to the ground. Russian citizens are fleeing the country. There are protests everywhere.

And there’s nothing Vlad the Imposter can do about it. Even the most brutal of crackdowns would do little to stop the protests but a lot to inspire more of them.

Because as Russian history shows, there is no stopping a wide scale popular uprising.

No army or police force can suppress EVERYBODY.

And as Russians burn recruitment offices, Iranian women are burning their hijabs.

Glorious and magnificent acts of total defiance sparked by the death of a young woman in police custody are taking place all over Iran… and all over the world.

Women everywhere are protesting in solidarity with the Iranian women. Those women are already at a late Suffrage level of rage and frustration.

Looks like that regime will also fall… if it knows what’s good for it.

Trust me, geezers, you don’t want to be there when the women break through the barricades and storm the equivalent of your Bastille.

Angry women in large groups are hella scary. They will quite literally tear you to pieces.

Time to write a quick “Sorry for the oppression” note and GTFO.

Interesting times indeed, n’est-ce pas?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow .

I’ve never belonged anywhere.

Not even in my own goddamned family.

Even there, I was isolated. I was never welcomed in to the family. I never even for a heartbeat felt like they had my back. Nor did I ever feel like there would be someone there to catch me if I fell. I never had anyone watching over me. I never had anyone to turn to when I was upset. I never even had anybody to talk to.

Forget about fitting in at school. I was ostracized almost from day 1. My fellow students treated me like a leper. The teachers barely tolerated me. My school days were the classic killer stress cocktail of boredom and terror.

Even when I had friends, it was clear that I didn’t belong with them. And they made sure I knew that.

The closest I ever came to belonging was when I was with my friends in my UPEI days. When we were hanging out having fun and playing games, I relaxed some. There was still a strong undercurrent of anxiety present at all times, but at last I was among fellow nerds who understood me and I understood them.

And by the end of my second year at UPEI, I was finally starting to blossom.

So my parents had to come pull the plug on THAT by taking me out of university.

Since then, I have been a world unto myself. Even when I am hanging out and watching stuff with my friends, whom I love dearly, the majority of my being remains trapped in icy isolation behind a thick wall of anxiety, numbness, and fear.

It’s a wonder that I didn’t end up being a serial killer.

There’s still time, though.

More after the break.

The eternal outsider

Having been on the outside all my life, I really have no idea what it feels like to belong.

What is it like to actually relax around others? To trust them enough to be my genuine self and not the filtered version the world knows?

Remember, everything you see is real.

But you don’t see everything. Not by a long shot.

I worry that certain very important parts of my psyche related to relating to others have died from stimulation starvation and will never come back.

That my antenna is permanently broken and therefore my great and powerful loneliness cannot and will not ever be broken.

It certainly feels that way. There are people who love me and care about (and for) me, and I am very grateful for that… but I don’t feel it.

It’s hard to feel the sunlight when the sun is so very far away. I wish it wasn’t so. I feel terrible about not being able to feel that love.

It makes me feel… ungrateful. Like they keep sending me gifts and I leave them to rot on the porch.

Depression is a cold-hearted bitch. Being crazy sucks.

I am just so goddamned numb from the cold of my isolated life.

I hope my heart hasn’t died from it all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The sleepiness is back.

Pain in the ass.

Once more I say : this is when I actually miss caffeine.

Specifically, when I have something I want to get done – like blogging – and I’m having to fight to stay awake the whole goddamned time.

That is such a drag.

It’s like I’m wrapped in this heavy, clinging blanket that drags me down and makes it hard to think or concentrate on anything.

Like I always say, I wish I could be all groovy and Zen about the whole thing. Then I could stop fighting myself and just accept this gift of peace and have a nice long nap punctuated by the occasional need to get up and pee.

Some things no amount of mellowing can change.

But no, I am way too feisty for that. I freaking hate this goddamned blanket and fight it as hard as I can just out of sheer orneriness.

Now if only I could use that same combative energy and apply it to things that might get me out of this rotten little hole of mine.

But I suppose that it is always easier to fight to get things back to normal than it is to fight to change them.

I’ve also been going a few rounds with my demon hunger again. My appetite has been revving out of control lately and I know that there is only one way this can end.

Namely with me hunting up my insulin injector and giving myself a fat dose.

Now if I were as capable of rational action as I am of rational thought, I would simply do that right now.

But I’m not. I am, in fact, a foolish person who makes poor life decisions.

So while I know I’ll do it soon, there’s no way I can do it yet.

More after the break.

The accidental vegan : meat and I

As patient readers know, I have a chronic and severe vitamin b12 deficiency due to the utter lack of animal products in my everyday diet.

I only ever eat things like meat and dairy when I eat out or order in.

This is not intentional. I have no objection to the eating of meat and other animal products on any level, for me or for others.

It’s just that I somehow fell out of the habit of eating those things. And I have had the devil’s own time getting back into it.

I was doing somewhat better before my mobility issues became severe. I bought cans of low-effort meat products like soup and chili and lunch meat.

And on a good day I actually ate them.

But my busted legs place a hard limit on how long I spend in the kitchen and the need to transport the food places its own limitations too.

Pretty hard to get a bowl of hot chill to my room via walker.

Not impossible. I would need a Thermos. But tricky.

What I need is some form of b12 rich food that doesn’t require refrigeration and is as user friendly as the trail mixes et al I keep in canisters next to my computer.

Those are very tough specs to meet. There is such a thing as meat snacks, like beef jerky and such, but those wreak havoc on my digestion and are therefore no solution.

There’s cheese snacks too. Those don’t wreck my digestion, but I don’t like eating cheese all by itself.

Maybe Cheez Whiz? It’s fake enough not to require refrigeration and I could see eating it on a cracker or the like.

Looks like I have some research to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow .

Here I am, waiting by the phone for a man to call.

Unfortunately, he’s not a true “gentleman caller” coming to court me.

He’s a nurse coming to change my bandages. Le sigh.

At least in theory. Truth is, he was supposed to be here at 3 pm and it’s 3:39 pm and the phone has yet to ring.

I hope he’s okay.

If I haven’t heard from him by 4 o’ clock, I will call the CCC and inquire.

I did a quick check and my bandages seem OK. So if I have to go a couple more days, I should still be all right.

This will be a bit of a trial for me.

In fact, I kind of hope he is unattractive because between my attraction to men in caring professions and the fact that he will be touching my body (including my butt), I could see myself getting a tad overheated.

Never realized before what a boon it is for me that most nurses are female. No chance of them getting me hot under the collar.

And even when dreamy Dwayne was ministering to me at the clinic, I had the fact that we were hardly alone to help keep me in check.

But holy shit, this dude will be touching my bare BUTT in my BEDROOM on my BED while we are COMPLETELY ALONE.

I am feeling peaked just thinking about it.

Maybe it’s for the best that he has not shown up.

O crap, he’s here!

More after the break.

How to save the world

So here is what’s happening tn my home town.

That is not normal for the region, or any region really.

The actual real science based apocalypse is upon us, and as usual it’s the innovative who suffer first.

The “debate” about climate change is over. It’s real. It’s happening.

The deniers are rapidly dwindling in number and be safely ignored; They no longer warrant a seat at the table.

So what are we going to do about it?

I have the solution.

But people are not going to like it. It will be more expensive than anything anyone has ever done and require more cooperation between governments than there has ever been in the history of life on Earth.

But it will save far more than it costs in property damage prevention alone and I predict that governments will get very cooperative when the shit really hits the fan and the real panic in the populace sets in.

Cause baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet. This is nowhere near as bad as it’s going to get. Pretty soon we will be as painfully nostalgic for these days as we are now for the days before Trump abd Covid.

Alright, enough preamble. What’s the goddamned plan?!?

Basically, we need to weatherproof our cities.

That means enormous tall dykes along every shoreline. Massively beefed op drainage systems to prevent flooding. Equally massive windbreaks surrounding municipalities. Government money to weatherproof your home or other building. A single unified and integrated weather prediction system to track all the Biblical shit going on.

Oh, and a global water distribution system that works just like the power grid in that it will take the water flowing in from rain in rainy areas and route it to areas of drought.

Will this lead to a single world government?

Probably. It will certainly require the development of a real and robust global layer of government and that branch will need to be given a LOT of power in order to do what it has to do.

And this effort cannot be seen as just another “isnt that nice” green project.

This has to be seen as nothing less than a war. That’s the kind of focus, purpose, urgency, and willingness to sacrifice this is going to take.

Sadly, the future might be less prosperous, less comfortable, less private, and yes, I’m sad to say, a lot less free.

But it CAN be done. Civilization can survive the coming catastrophe relatively intact. We can make it through the dark night ahead.

But a lot of things are going to have to change.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, as a fat guy, I can really put it away.

In that I really like putting things away.

I always have. To the point where when I was in elementary school and spent recess and lunch in the library because I both loved books and needed a space where there was always a teacher watching and bullying would be hard to conceal, I so loved re-shelving books that I would “steal” books from the “retuned books” bin and even from behind the librarian’s desk just to put them back on the shelves.

I was weird.

And putting them away has always been my favorite part of getting groceries. And that’s saying something because I love grocery shopping in general .

And now that my weekly online order includes stuff bought in bulk, an exciting (to me) new component has been added to the process : putting bulk things in canisters!

Ooh, just thinking about it makes me tingle with excitement!

I am still weird. Very, very weird. I have, in fact, continually weird for my entire life.

There have been no non-weird periods.

I got my weekly Sav-On order delivered today. Usually I order it Sunday for delivery Monday, but I was running really low on a lot of stuff so I ordered a day early.

And they had everything I ordered in stock… except the two things I wanted the most.

Once more, they didn’t have my Russell Stover No Sugar Added Starlite Mints.

And they didn’t have the big variety pack of lunch sized bags of chips I ordered.

I got them to add to my meals as a “carb supplement” to bump up my carb intake to healthy levels again.

Oh well. There is probably a smarter way to get my carbs anyhow.

More after the break.

Carbs and me

As you know, I had a very illuminating conversation with a hospital dietician recently who confirmed what I already knew : there IS such a thing as too few carbs and I was hurting myself with my very low carb diet.

That was about a month ago and I still have not modified my diet to include more carbohydrates. I find it hard to modify my habits sometimes.

The variety pack of Halloween sized bags of chips was my first big attempt to fix that problem and now that it failed to materialize, I’m back to square one.

It was gonna be so cool! 30 lil bags of chip in five varieties, 6 of each.

Math is cool.

And I love variety packs because I love variety. It keeps me from getting bored because I bought too much of a single thing.

I get bored easily. It’s one of the side effects of genius, I’m afraid. I have a restless and ravenous mind that is always circling, looking for food, like a shark.

No wonder I play video games so much. Nothing else can possibly be as mentally stimulating as a piece of actively interactive media.

But in a way, I am glad the chips didn’t show up. Immediately after I ordered them I began having second thoughts.

I mean, sure, I need more carbs, but potato chips are a VERY simple carb and have a sky high glycemic index.

I think I should go with something more moderate .

Maybe some Sun Chips?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did it succeed? Yes and no.

Yes, I got to my usual bank, Vancity, and made the usual withdrawal.

You know what withdrawal is, right? It’s how Southerners talk!

The fabulous felicity walker

Everything went quite smoothly. Julian and I even lucked into the parking space closest to the door. Score!

Once inside, I sat in one of their comfy chairs while Julian stood in line for me.

BTW, thanks for all your help, Julian! Love you.

The line moved quite swiftly. I barely had time to relax and enjoy my bank’s exquisite AC before Julian made it to the front of the line and it was show time.

First thing I did was ask the teller for my balance so I would know how much to withdraw from my account.

And that’s when things got surreal because she told me it was over $2700!

I swear I heard a whooshing all around my head and felt the room shift like in a reverse zoom shot for a second. That’s how big of a shock it was.

What should have been in there was somewhere between $1350 and $1400. So my leading theory is that the ministry somehow managed to deposit my payment twice.

So I doubt I will get to keep the money.

But if I do, woohoo, new computer time! Cha ching!

Or maybe a really sweet, cherry, tricked out walker.

There is also the faintest glimmer of a possibility that I somehow managed to go 5 weeks without spending LAST month’s payment.

That would be wild.

I wonder if they would still take it back?

More after the break.

My life is an adventure!

Just a really, really shitty one.

Ordered some 7-11 tonight.

Weirdness : wanted 7-11 hot dogs but they were nowhere to be found on their DoorDash menu. Waddy fug?

This furthers my suspicion that DoorDash has some kind of limit on how big or how many items a menu can have.

And that’s not a problem for most restaurants. They only serve like maybe 30 items.

But now that they have places like drug store and supermarkets enrolled, those places have to make tough decisions about what products justify their “shelf space”.

I guess hot dogs didn’t make the cut. Weird.

The trip to the door and back was fun. I think a big part of me refuses to accept my new mobility limitations, and so even though I know better, I still end up thinking, “Ah, it’s just a trip to the door and back. No big deal.’

Then when reality reasserts itself and the pain begins, that same dumb ol’ part of me is like ,”whoa, what is this strange new feeling? Something has gone terribly wrong!”.

And thus this part of me is traumatized all over again.

Well here is a message to that part of me : “Hey, guess what? Things suck now! Our legs don’t work right and that’s probably permanent! So you’d better get used to it!”.

Sometimes you have to get really tough with yourself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My nurse du jour is on her way.

The last one warned me that these home visits won’t last forever. That’s up to them, I guess. And I have been thinking about it and I suppose I am prepared to give getting to the clinic one more try.

But my finger will be hovering over the abort button the entire time. I just finished taking the daily dose of Gabapentin and Naproxen I have needed for pain control ever since that fateful day three weeks ago when I experienced terrible pain when I got home.

Home from that very same clinic, I might add.

I may have done myself permanent harm that day. Then again, I have been doing remarkably well on my tiny sojourns sans walker lately.

So maybe I am ready, maybe not. We will see.

But if they cut me off from home care when I am certain that the next walk from the car to the CCC could be my last walk anywhere ever, my MP will definitely hear about the people who made me choose between crippling myself or not receiving necessary medical care for my wounds.

And if push comes to shove, pretend you’re not home. Maybe then, push will find someone else to shove.

Seriously though, if push comes to shove, I will tell the people at the CCC what will happen if they cut me off.

Hell, I will go full Karen if I have to. If they make me.

Because to them, it’s a job.

To me, it’s my goddamned life.

More after the break.

Shove’s not here, man

So the nurse came and changed my bandages.

Don’t remember her name, and I feel bad about that. I don’t ever want to stop seeing my caretakers as individuals and start seeing them as interchangeable background characters in the grand farce that is my slow and meaningless death.

Wow, that got dark so fast I thought I’d moved to the equator for a second.

To make things worse, we didn’t talk much.

I guess neither of us are the type to find it easy to start and sustain conversation with somebody we don’t know.

But I swear I used to be able to do it. But somewhere along the line, I turned even further inwards, and that little part of me that kept track of potential conversation topics and socially useful tidbits of information about people just plain died.

These days, I feel lucky if I remember a topic I wanted to discuss with my friends.

And it’s so…un-Acadian of me. I feel like I am disappointing my ancestors.

And a big part of me wants to be more social. I am happier when I am around people, despite what my crippling social anxiety and video game addiction would say.

They don’t know what the fuck they are talking about anyhow.It’s not like following their rules has made me happy.

At best, they distract me from how goddamned sad I am.

That’s not even treating the symptoms, let alone a cure.

I am rotting on the inside in more ways than one and if something doesn’t change real soon, life will crush me and spit out my broken bones.

And I have been told by multiple people that if that happened it would be tragic.

I’ll have to take their word for it.

I will talk with you nice people again tomorrow .

Title ref. here.

Leave me alone!

Yeah, I’m still sleeping a lot. It’s quite annoying.

I did manage to do some research into my quest to never have to go to the bank or buy another dumb prepaid credit card again.

First I went back to Koho because I remembered them sounding promising the first time I attempted this quest.

I gave up that time when I figured out that they were ALL going to require that goddamned two factor authentication (2FA) and at the time, I had no device that could do SMS (aka text messaging) so no 2FA for me.

Anyhow, I went back to Koho only to pour over that page many times without being able to figure out if they could take money directly from my bank account or not.

I mean, they probably could, seeing as they have no physical locations and therefore they have no other way to get your money.

But this is MY money we’re talking about here, so I moved on.

I tried some Google searches to no avail before finding this promising prospect.

It’s backed by one of Canada’s big banks, which means it’s probably legit, And it seems to be exactly what I am looking for.

Not sure if I checked it out the first time.

So that is where the search stands now. If I decide to go that route, there will still be the question of opening a new account at RBC and transferring my VanCity balance there, and setting up my direct deposit to go there.

But at the end it would all be worth it because I would have the seamless financial life I have been dreaming about.

More after the break.

Sit, Fruvous, sit! Good fox! *rarf!*

Title ref. is here.

I have come to the radically unsurprising conclusion that my lying down all the time is bad for me.

I will now pause to let the gasps of astonishment and cries of “My god!” and “Of course!” and “Finally, the new millennium has truly begun!” die down.

No word a lie, that is exactly how my fantasy /TED talk ends.

Hey, if you’re gonna fantasize, why hold back?

Anyhow, lying down all day cannot be good for a person. We are designed by evolution to function in our natural upright posture. That puts all our organs in their proper places, our spines in the right shape, and our circulation flowing freely.

Whereas when I am lying down, blood is flowing perpendicular to gravity and my weight presses down on all the veins and arteries near the surface.

And that’s most of them.

Not to mention the specter of muscle atrophy.

Check this : I actually miss the good old days when I had a much healthier lifestyle of sitting down all day.

Plus I am starting to really miss PC gaming. But that’s irrelevant.

So clearly I need to spend a lot more time sitting up.

But I got a big wound on my butt. So I have to sit somewhere soft.

Softer than this string of typographic characters to indicate swearing computer chair, at the very least.

So I need a new seat. Doesn’t have to be an office chair, just has to be comfy and fit behind the computer.

Now where the heck will I get something like that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Writing this about an hour later than usual because I ended up needing to take my pain meds about an hour and a half early today and they made me very sleepy so I had to, once again, sleep through the time when I should have been eating and blogging.

Not one of my better sentences. Sorry. It just kept getting longer and more complicated as I wrote it.

In my defense, I am still pretty sleepy.

I’ve never had this reaction to the pain meds before. From now on, I will have to be cautious about when I take the full regimen of two Gabapentin (200mg), two Naproxen, (440 mg) and three acetaminophen (1500 mg).

The sleepiness probably came from relief, to be honest . I woke up this morning in a frightful state. Mississippi .

Ba dum tish.

Seriously though, I woke up wracked with pain from an attack of body wide muscle tension. Made me feel all wound up tight like the rubber band that spun the propeller on an old fashioned toy airplane.

So after failing to solve the issue with muscle stretches and a little light exercise, I decided to get out of bed and take some meds.

And then I pooped. Come to think of it, it was probably the combination of the meds and the pooping that made me so sleepy.

I often get sleepy after I poop. I call it the “crap and a nap” effect.

It’s from the release of muscular tension, I think.

So you combine that with the pain meds magnifying the effect and you get a sleepy Fru.

Well then. Mystery solved. Good work, everybody.

Same time next week?

More after the break.

I said, “FLOW MORPHIA SLOW”, god damn it!

Song ref. for title here.

OK, this sleepiness shit has officially gotten out of hand.

Been sleeping most of the day at this point. When I wrote Part 1, I didn’t think I was all THAT sleepy, I hadn’t been fighting sleep the whole time or anything.

But when I lay down after, I tried to play my dragon game and just couldn’t. I was nodding off over and over again, the tablet nearly falling out of my hands.

Don’t worry, it would have been fine. It would have fallen maybe an inch onto my bed.

So I shut down my game and then powered down my brain by letting sleep take me.

Woke up three hours later, thought, “That was a nice nap.”, got up and took a leak, lay back down fully intending to get back into my game, and then not even making it as far as “waking up ” my tablet before falling asleep again.

I figure that if I hadn’t needed to pee, I wouldn’t have woken up at all.

When I woke up again at around 9:30 pm, I knew I had to get out of bed to blog and eat NOW, and still it took fifteen minutes of battle with my sleepiness tp actually get out of bed and get to the computer.

And the worst part is that I had plans for today. I was going to launch a concentrated campaign to find some way to spend the money in my bank account online so I don’t have to go to the bank or buy these silly cards any more.

Guess that’ll have to wait. Dammit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I’ve never been emotionally close to anyone. Ever.

I know this isn’t technically true. I know I was close to my mother before she went back to work. And I was close to my babysitter Betty until she left me too when I started school. And after that I was still kind of close to my mother until she abandoned me emotionally by freezing me out.

But I can’t really remember what it was like. I have a vague recollection of warmth and that is all. Perhaps those memories don’t even make any sense given the long cold decades of emotional isolation that followed.

Or maybe they are simply too painful to recall and my mind is just protecting me.

Sometimes the happy memories are the most painful of all because they remind you of what you have lost.

So you tell yourself it’s always been this way, and it helps.

Either way, there has been a (thus far) impenetrable barrier a mile thick around my inner being, the “real me” underneath all the layers of illusion and intellect and evasion.

I can’t imagine how it could be breached from the inside by yours truly. At least not deliberately. My systems are far too compromised to heal themselves.

It would take something far more powerful than my palsied soul to force an operating system level change on my mind and make me whole again.

Wha could do that , I don’t know. Religion? Fat chance of that. I’ve been too skeptical for far too long for any magical thinking to take hold.

Romantic love? Possible in theory but dunno how I would meet the guy.

A long weekend filled with nonstop gay sex? Could be effective and with your donations I would be willing to give it a try.

More after the break.

When the walls…

No secret as to where that unbreakable invisible wall came from… the rape.

When a stranger’s cock shattered my tiny four year old’s soul and gave me a wound from which I still bleed to this day, 45 years later, I retreated ro the only safe place I could – the deep dark depths of my mind.

And, unsurprisingly, I slammed the door behind me then welded the door shut, never to be opened again.

After all, I was just a kid. A painfully bright one, but still just a kid. Thoughts of how to get out of this shark cage I had constructed were beyond my powers of forethought.

So I became like some kind of sessile sea creature that can extend its tentacles into the real world but at the slightest sign of trouble reels them all back in, closes up like a clam, then shapeshifts to blend in to his surroundings.

I became, in a word, avoidant.

And it’s a very effective defense mechanism, but no way to live.

If you can call this living.

I’ve made my outer life match my inner life.

Isolated. Closed off. Almost immobile.

And so very, very alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.