I’m not fond of it.

I’ve been in denial about my dislike of change for a long time because it doesn’t really fit with the sort of person I like to think I am or my philosophy of life and other beliefs.

After all, as a dedicated reformer, I want to change the world quite a lot. And I am a forward-thinking liberal. who believes in science and progress and the possibility of a stronger, saner, smarter, superior future!

So I couldn’t be one of those old stick in the mud fuddy duddies who is all. “Grr! Change bad! Make things like they were before!” types, can I?

And it’s true that I am not looking to roll back the clock to some idealized previous era. I am too progressive and pragmatic for that.

The thing about the past is that it’s passed. It’s gone forever, never to return. We can’t go back to it and we can’t turn the world of the future into it either. It is over.

But on a more personal, day to day, moment to moment level, I don’t like change at all/. I resent anything which disrupts my routine, I hate surprises, I adore certain forms of predictability, and and I have a big problem with transitions.

AKA going from doing one thing to do another. Even if I am going from one thing I enjoy to another thing I enjoy, there is will still be part of me that doesn’t want to do it and that part then has to be dragged forward by the rest of me over and over again.

And that’s just so goddamned inefficient. Why fight myself like that?

It’s that wretched old Trog of mine’s fault. Remember him? He’s the part of me that wants nothing more than to just stay hidden away from the light of day way in the back of his deep dark smelly cave and who squalls and screams like a banshee with cramps when absolutely anything takes him out of it., and reacts emotionally like he’s being taken away to be killed, or worse., made to deal with the real world.

Come to think of it, it’s that part of me that is mainly responsible for my being a lonely frozen planet far from the sun. It and its fears are what keeps me from getting closer to the big warm wonderful world and being a part of everything because it can’t tolerate the rise in immediacy and stimulation.

That little bastard.

That makes me want to pry open that cave and haul him out of there for good. Dynamite the cave so that the mountain falls in on it and fills it in so there is literally nop cave there any more.

But he’d probably just go squat in the rubble, back turned to the world,. face pressed to the wall, sobbing.

Because he’s really just that scared little animal deep inside me that craves safety above all other concerns and who has been running running running for so very long that he has forgotten that stopping and relaxing is even a possibility.

Because that’s just when they’ll GET you.

Honestly. at this point, they can just fucking have me. I give up.

Just let me get some sleep before you kill me.

More after the break.

---

This “Trog” thing

Lets dig deeper into that. I think I’m on to something there.

And that is corroborated by the fact that part of me REALLY doesn’t want me to do this.

Well fuck you, fear. Here we go :

This Troglodyte phenomenon reaches all the way down into the very bedrock of my mental illness. It comes direct from The Wound and has probably been there since the rape that was my primary trauma back when I was four years old.

So some time in 1977, approximately.

It makes sense that there would be part of me that has been more or less permanently scared out of its tiny mind ever since then. The Trog, therefore, is just the manifestation of that endemic flight response.

And what does a fleeing animal want most? Safety. It wants to hide from the predator until it goes away – in other words, to go from Flight to Fade.

But when the predator is in your mind, you can’t possibly escape it. You can only evade it for a while, but sooner or later it’s going to GET you.

Unless you keep moving. Ergo to rest means death in your primitive mind. You never get to complete the flight sequence programmed into us by nature where it actually ends and the animal relaxes when the predator is no longer around.

So how do I convince that scared little animal inside me that the coast is clear, the predators are gone, and we are home safe and sound now?

It’s a tricky question because paranoia like my SLA has requires extremely little proof to get going. It can convince you that it is the only thing keeping you safe by keeping you too scared to actually check to see if the predator is even still there.

Well I am pretty goddamned sick of being too scared to do things. I am officially declaring war on my straightjacket of fear and dedicating all my mental strength to prying this goddamned thing off of me.

Even if I have to dislocate a joint or two to do it.

Freedom often comes at a cost. So be it.

I’ll say it again : there is nothing in my mind or soul that I will not sacrifice in order to free myself from this pathetic purgatory of mine. If it is between me and freedom, then it’s got to go. No justice and no mercy, just destruction.

I will focus all my rage and frustration into a laser beam from Hell in order to burn out the part(s) of me holding me back.

I deserve to rise above all this petty bullshit and take my rightful place in the sky, where I can shine and shine for all to see..

The fact that someone like me leads a pathetic life like mine is a tragedy.

Fuck you, world. I’m amazing.

And some day soon, I’m going to prove it

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

The following is a cluster of related questions.

Why am I so hard on myself? Why am I constantly judging myself by standards both draconian and unfair? Why is my feeling of self-worth always on the line and why is the deck stacked so high against it? Why is my inner world so god damned dark??

My first answer to these questions is that it’s all part of how the pattern of internalized abuse works. Like all abusers, my internal one needs tools it can use to justify and enable the abuse because that’s the only way the abuser knows to regulate their emotions : to take their anger out on their chosen victim. me.

And like any other abuser, my inner tormentor is perfectly willing to lie, cheat, manipulate, arm-twist. and uses terror tactics to get the sweet release that comes from putting the negative emotions that you can’t handle uourself into someone else and thus expressing them via proxy.

That’s why abusers are often super nice – even apologetic – right after the abuse. They got the stress and anger out by putting it into you, and now they feel great.

Internalized abuse has the same sort of high attached to it, but seeing as you are also the victim, it doesn’t help much.

Nevertheless, the tension et al is relieved.. in the worst possible way.

And I have wandered off from my own specific case and into the greener meadows of the general concept with which I feel safe.

Back to the basics : Why am I such a dick to myself?

Of course, there is more to it than self-abuse. That is only a possibility because of my often tragically low self-esteem.

Which is a product of the self-abuse as well, naturally.

And my mind will invent all kinds of reasons for me to hate myself but the truth is that the emotion comes first, the explanations second./

I don’t need a reason. The emotion is there whether it’s justified or not.

Which brings me to The Wound.

That’s what I call the enormous mass of psychological scar tissue and unresolved emotion that I have been carrying around ever since I was raped when I was 4.

That’s where my toxic self-hatred comes from. and until I can resolve this primary trauma somehow. the self-hatred, shame, and pain are not going to go away.

But it’s such a daunting task. Toxic though it may be, this primary trauma is at the very heart of my psyche. So much of who I became was structured around this Wound of mine – to protect it, shield it, sustain it, and deal with all the costs associated with keeping that brutal monster down.

So what happens when it’s gone? I keep telling myself that it’s impossible to drive yourself insane just by thinking the wrong thoughts, but I ain’t buying it.

Still, it’s something I have to do. I have to climb up that mountain and face my most ancient of demons and that means feeling a lot of very bad stuff that I have had on pause for 45 god damned years.

Maybe I will fall apart as a result. That will just make room for me to reboot myself and start over fresh with a much healthier mind, body, and soul.

And I will still be me.

Because that’s all that I can ever be.

I guess we’ll see.

More after the break.

---

Another sunset storm

Another brain frying late afternoon into night nap.

Oh well. Whatever. Guess is the new normal. I can live with that.

The tragically absurd thing is that this is the closest I get to normal sleep;, because at .least I am sleeping at least mostly at night and in a large bloc as opposed to an hour and half here and two and a half hours there.

This time I slept for almost five hours! That’s gotta be a record.

Back to my Wound. (yay?)

I’ve carried this damage around for so long that it’s hard to imagine life without it. When I try, I get this silly image of myself suddenly growing so light and shiny that I float off into the sky.

I’ve had nightmares like that.

I wonder if for a less neurotic person., that would be a glorious dream of flying.

Instead, I get a terrifying battle with oblivion as I cling to the ground in a desperate fight not to disappear into the brigjht blue sky forever.

That has to be symbolic as fuck, doesn’t it?

One of these times I should just let goi and see what happens. I mean, it’s just a dream. Worst case scenario, I wake up scared.

Oh, and I might have to kick Freddie Kruger’s ass again. Man, that guy never learns.

One thing that came up in yesterday’s therapy session was that I haven’t remembered a dream in quite a while.

Doc Costin suggested a technique by which I might start remembering them.

And my first thought was, “But I don’t want to remember them!”.

Which was a surprise. I had no idea I felt that way. But my mind balked at the very notion of remembering my dreams.

Apparently, my subconscious has stuff going on when I sleep that it feels the need to keep hidden from my conscious mind.

I can’t blame it. My conscious mind is not to be trusted. It’s crazy and dangerous and reckless and ruins everything it touches.

I wish I could purify it. And I probably could if I could get my act together and keep my blood sugar and get more exercise and use my CPAP and all the rest.

No doubt I would feel one hell of a lot better, and you would think that would be sufficient to motivate me to do it.

But you’d be wrong.

For one thing, I have felt this way for a really long time. So I don’t have a memory of feeling better to draw me forward towards that incandescent goal.

So it’s all theoretical to me. And theory doesn’t motivate.

Who knows, though. Maybe one day the flood will come, and I will be reborn.

I hope I do a better job of being born the second time around.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

It was Therapy Thur, er, Friday this morning and had a really good session.

Now let’s see how much of it I can remember.

Let’s start with the Inciting Incident.

Yesterday morning, I was on TikTok just scrolling through random yet mostly delightful video clips when I came upon this one very upbeat and sunshine-y dude.

I quite liked him. He was positive yet cool, which is hard to pull off.

And he started talking about how important it is to have purpose and to stay humble and other generic advice like that.

Now, this dude did nothing wrong. With the best of intentions. and a lot of relaxed charisma, he recorded a video to try to help people and cheer people up.

But it didn’t cheer me up.

Instead, it set off a huge explosion of bitterness and anger and darkness in my soul. By the time that harmless little video ended I was filled with a black rage that made me want to reach up into the sky and blot out the sun by squeezing it in my hand.

This is not normal for me.

And I didn’t know how to deal with it. So I went to sleep.

A very sad way of coping, I agree.

But whilst I felt a lot better after sleeping, I still remembered this uncharacteristic upwelling of negative emotion from before and figured that is the exact sort of thing one should discuss with one’s therapist.

Luckily, I had a session scheduled for later that day.

Sadly, as you know, that didn’t happen. My therapist had a problem and couldn’t do the session and had to reschedule for 10 am this morning.

Grumble, grumble. Hate surprise changes. But whatever.

So today’s session started with me telling my therapist Doctor Costin about my little emotional hellstorm and drawing a parallel with a previous rage tsunami unleashed when I tried to join up and participate on mydepressionteam.com.

It’s a sort of Facebook-like site where people with depression can go to support one another and help one another heal. I signed up and signed on.

And seeing these well intentioned people genuinely and sincerely help one another with words of comfort and support set off an even bigger tactical nuke of darkness and bitterness and burning rage in my mind.

And in both instances, when the dust had settled, I was left wondering WTF was that

So that’s where I started today’s session.

OK, so NOW we will see how much I remember.

---

I remember that I started out by theorizing that maybe I got so mad because it tapped into so much of the pain I had felt all my life from being so different from everyone around me that it left me emotionally isolated to the extreme.

And that’s most definitely part of it. I have been isolated for so long that it is normal for me and so I don’t notice it on a conscious ;level and haven’t since I was a kid.

But just because I’m not conscious of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It hurts like hell all the time. The mind knows what should be there and what inputs it should be getting from the outside world, and I got and am getting none of them.

It’s amazing how long you can starve.

More on this after the break.

---

More morning bounty

Another thing that came out of this morning’s session is the conscious realization that at a cerfain point in my life, I just gave up.

Gave up trying to get along with others. Gave up the idea that anyone could help me. Gave up on the idea of getting the warmth and love I so desperately need. Gave up on

It was Therapy Thur, er, Friday this morning and had a really good session.

Now let’s see how much of it I can remember.

Let’s start with the Inciting Incident.

Yesterday morning, I was on TikTok just scrolling through random yet mostly delightful video clips when I came upon this one very upbeat and sunshine-y dude.

I quite liked him. He was positive yet cool, which is hard to pull off.

And he started talking about how important it is to have purpose and to stay humble and other generic advice like that.

Now, this dude did nothing wrong. With the best of intentions. and a lot of relaxed charisma, he recorded a video to try to help people and cheer people up.

But it didn’t cheer me up.

Instead, it set off a huge explosion of bitterness and anger and darkness in my soul. By the time that harmless little video ended I was filled with a black rage that made me want to reach up into the sky and blot out the sun by squeezing it in my hand.

This is not normal for me.

And I didn’t know how to deal with it. So I went to sleep.

A very sad way of coping, I agree.

But whilst I felt a lot better after sleeping, I still remembered this uncharacteristic upwelling of negative emotion from before and figured that is the exact sort of thing one should discuss with one’s therapist.

Luckily, I had a session scheduled for later that day.

Sadly, as you know, that didn’t happen. My therapist had a problem and couldn’t do the session and had to reschedule for 10 am this morning.

Grumble, grumble. Hate surprise changes. But whatever.

So today’s session started with me telling my therapist Doctor Costin about my little emotional hellstorm and drawing a parallel with a previous rage tsunami unleashed when I tried to join up and participate on mydepressionteam.com.

It’s a sort of Facebook-like site where people with depression can go to support one another and help one another heal. I signed up and signed on.

And seeing these well intentioned people genuinely and sincerely help one another with words of comfort and support set off an even bigger tactical nuke of darkness and bitterness and burning rage in my mind.

And in both instances, when the dust had settled, I was left wondering WTF was that

So that’s where I started today’s session.

OK, so NOW we will see how much I remember.

---

I remember that I started out by theorizing that maybe I got so mad because it tapped into so much of the pain I had felt all my life from being so different from everyone around me that it left me emotionally isolated to the extreme.

And that’s most definitely part of it. I have been isolated for so long that it is normal for me and so I don’t notice it on a conscious ;level and haven’t since I was a kid.

But just because I’m not conscious of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It hurts like hell all the time. The mind knows what should be there and what inputs it should be getting from the outside world, and I got and am getting none of them.

It’s amazing how long you can starve.

More on this after the break.

---

More morning bounty

Another thing that came out of this morning’s session is the conscious realization that at a cerfain point in my life, I just gave up.

Gave up trying to get along with others. Gave up the idea that anyone could help me. Gave up on the idea of getting the warmth and love I so desperately need. Gave up on finding peace and pleasure in this icebox dungeon of a life.

Gave up hope. essentially.

And when you give up most forms of reaching out, the only way left is in. I withdrew even deeper into myself and my amusements.

And got farther and farther from the real world.

And I went from having friends to being utterly alone. When I graduated from junior high, like so many nerds, I got abandoned as too uncool to be seen with in this new and more challenging social setting.

So no more Jason Heisler or Michael Copeland. They weren’t the greatest of friends but they were somebody. They gave me a reason to reach outside myself and stay attached and interested in the real world.

Without them, I collapsed into myself almost completely. That’s when I gave up.

I was a robot that went to school.

This is a good time to remind myself, though, that I have not always been alone. I have had friends. There was Kevin and Trevor in grades 5 and 6, and Jason and Michael in junior high. And the Pit Crew when I was in the University of Prince Edward Island.

So there’s been people there. The idea that I have been Forever Alone is a total myth fabricated by my depression to make it seem like it’s always been in control and to extinguish its biggest threat, which is hope.

Ergo I must remind myself that just because I can’t feel it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And that goes for people too.

Depression’s numbness (and social anxiety) might have kept me from connecting with the friends in my life as deeply as I wanted to and left me too emotionally isolated to feel the warmth and goodness in my life when I had it, I have had people in my life who liked me enough to be friends with me at least some of the time.

I just need to remember the message of one of my favorite songs :

No matter how dark the night, dawn comes. 

Thank you. Honey Bear. I needed that. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

---

WARNING : Scary bummer ending.

Woke up with that song playing in my head, so I thought I would share, both because it’s an excellent piece of animation you really should see and so that now the musicwill be stuck in your head TOO.

Sharing is caring!

Today was supposed to be Therapy Thursday, but the therapy never happened.

Normally it’s at 1 pm. That time came and went/ Then the phone rang at 1:15 pm.

It was my therapist, Doctor Avrum Costin. Turns out he took his car into a repair shop and there were complications so he was stuck there.

After all, they had his car. He couldn’t get home without it.

And he couldn’t do my therapy from the shop because he had zero privacy and that would violate the therapist/client bond.

Personally, I could not give less of a shit if strangers hear one half of our conversation. They wouldn’t learn anything anyhow, and even if they did, what would they even do with that information?

But whatever. I didn’t think of any of that before he hung up. Of course. We agreed that he would call me back at 3 pm.

That was a little problematic because I usually eat lunch and blog around 3 pm. So this would be a sudden and unexpected disruption of my routine.

And I hate that kind of thing. Grr.

But not being an Aspie, I am not going to have a shrieking hissy fit over it. I was totally gonna just roll with it.

But he didn’t call. Not at all. Drove me up the wall.

Excuse me while I take my anti-speaking in rhyme pills.

You know what they say, there’s a treatment but there’s no cure, so once you have the disease it will be with you for the rest of your life.

Anyhow, he didn’t call. And I know what I was supposed to do in that circumstance – call HIM and ask wassup.

But that didn’t occur to me. I suspect my social anxiety and general timidity got in the way and pre-rejected the notion.

In fact, it took me till just now to think he might have emailed me.

Yes,, I have my therapist’s email address and he has mine. And I am so tempted to go all “What About Bob?” on him, but I resist.

Otherwise I would be emailing him every introspective navel-gazing though in my head as well as copy/pasting every damn blog entry to him every day.

He even told me once not to worry about that and to email him whenever I wanted.

Oh Doc,. ye know not what ye sayeth.

What else… oh, the cushion and I continue to adjust to one another. My butt takes more time to start hurting every day and hopefully one of these day it will just plain forget.

But don’t worry…. the cushion itself will remember..

After all., it’s made of memory foam!

I feel known.

More after the break.

---

Take it out for a spin

Slept through sunset again. Tried to resist it but my body had other plans and got to the “lay down or fall down” state with alarming speed at around 5:30 pm.

Woke up at around 9 pm. Thought, oh crap. I better get eating and blogging beccause I am an hour late!

Took a while to get out of bed. My body did not want me to get up. I almost had to break out the electric cattle prod.

But finally I get up, head to the bathroom to refill my water glass…. and discover I am pretty darn dizzy.

Oh lovely., This shit again.

There goes my plans to go to the kitchen and fetch food. It would be way too dangerous anbd difficult in this state. I’m just going to have to improvise a meal from the stuff I keep here in my room with me.

And hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. In the recent past, my dizzy spells have all been due to dehydration and so hopefully the water I am drinking as I tippity tap type to you wonderful people will make the world stop spinning before midnight so I can hang out and watch stuff and eat my usual midnight snack without bouncing off the walls.

This dizziness feels different, though. It seems to be located in my temples rather than the usual inner ear route.

Dunno what that means but it doesn’t sound too good, does it?

I do not approve.

And while we’re on the subject of my deteriorating flesh, I am freaking out some about an incident from earlier tonight.

Lately, I have been getting the feeling of not being done when I pee. Not every time but a lot of the time. Feels like there’s still liquid somewhere between bladder and urethral opening, and I just can’t pee it out.

That’s a bad sign.. One I’ve been warned to look out for.

So I was already worried.

But earlier tonight, one of the things (along with incontinence) I was told over and over to keep an eye out for the most : I felt the need to pee, but just…couldn’t.

Uh oh. That’s real bad.

I stood there for at least five minute just willing my system to start discharging waste water but I got the distinct feeling of my body trying but there was something bunged up in there and trying to force it was like trying to start a seized engine.

Obviously, this is serious shit. I need to be able to pee. It’s kind of important.

So an awful lot is riding on the next time I feel the need to pee. Hopefully, it’s that my earlier need to pee that was fake – just a sign of an irritated bladder – and the next time I will pee just fine.

I just drank a liter of water, so we will see what happens.

Obviously, if I don’t pee some time soonish, I am going to have to go to the ER. Being unable to pee is not something you ignore. I might have to go.

I sure hope not, though. I hate the frigging ER. It’s secular purgatory.

But I have a very worrisome cramping feeling in my lower waterworks that tells me bad shit is going to happen… and I don’t like it.

I’m worried I might have a stone somewhere. Which would be Bad.

Hopefully I will pee that liter of water out soon and this will go back to being something to go see my GP about.

Only after this incident, I will actually do it.

I will see you nice people again tomorrow.

Just for a change of pace, let’s talk about how hard it is to be this smart.

It leads to a number of conflicts in the mind.

Like the conflict between my genuine desire to love everybody and respect everyone and get along with every person on Earth, and the undeniable and inescapable fact that compared to me. most people are children.

Intellectually, that is. I am a lot more childlike than most adults on many other levels. In fact, in some ways, I never made it past the age of around 11 or 12.

How could have matured past that when I cut myself off from both the world and my instincts at such an early age.

Because I thought I knew better.

But I didn’t know shit.

Hence my image of myself as a giant anthropomorphic brain in diapers. A bizarre anmd disturbing image. I suppose,. but it really encapsulates how uneven my mental and emotional development has been,.

And how helpless I feel. I have all these smarts and yet I can do almost nothing with them because I have so little else going for me.

Plus I’m crazy. Hemmed in by fear that acts like the restraints Alex wears in A Clockwork Orange when he’s being forced to watch the videos.

Don’t look around, keep your eye on your screens, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, he’s just your depression holding you hostage ad infinitum.

Anyhow, back to my intellectual gigantism.

This conflict between my intellectual stature and my desire to get along with people and see them as equals also informs my lack of respect for authority.

To me, it’s always been perfectly clear that authority is largely arbitrary and voluntary and so I have felt no inherent need to obey it… or disobey it, for that matter.

I go where I want to and do what I think is right and that’s it.

This lead to what might have been my most socially damaging aberration : I talked to teachers and other authority figures like they were equals.

But never in a snotty or disrespectful way. Even though that might have been a lot of fun. But even when I was openly defying my teachers, I was polite.

This put me in the awkward position of making people- teachers. stidents, and staff alike- super pissed off with me and dearly wanting to hurt me but never giving them a reason to do so.

No wonder they didn’t like me or want anything to do with me. Like I have said before., I might actually have gotten along with people better if I had copped a major attitude and been arrogant and sarcastic and all the rest.

At least then, there would have been conflicts and arguments and people would have had their shot to put me in my place.

It wouldn’t have worked. A lot of people, even with my friendly attitude, have tried to take me down a peg, and so far my peg ain’t move at all.

But at least people would have had their shot.

More after the break.

---

No man’s land

Been messed up by napping through sunset again.

I gotta stop doing this. I feel very fried right now. Totally out of it. I am evben swaying back and forth slightly as I type these words.

And this is what happens when I get good sleep. The kind with lots of REM activity. The kind that is closer to actually being normal and healthy.

This is how the Universe punishes me for doing the healthy thing for once.

Ergo, I am feeling pretty lost right now. I wander aimlessly through the shadows of my mind, which are pretty thick and dark right now.

Occasionally, I remember who I am and what I am doing, and wander back to reality to type another cluster of words.

Then I wander off again. Not because I want to but because I can’t stop it. I am being carried away by the current.

Yes, we’ve switched metaphors to something water based. Sorry.

This sensation is kind of like being some kind of subaquatic plant. The kind that is rooted in the seafloor, not the floating kind.

The sea swirls around me in fickle currents, and I sway and twirl with it. I stay anchored to reality but the sea is always trying to dislodge me.

So I dig my roots in even deeper. Clinging to the last remaining shred of sanity and stability life the desperate umbilicus.

What did you do today? Jujst like every other day. Spent it not going crazy Takes up most of my time and effort.

No wonder I can’t get anywhere in life.

But something I do wonder if I would be better off if I just let the sea take me where it wants me to go.

Cast off my anchor and see where life takes me. After all, I might not be a plant at all.

Maybe I’m a fish who temporarily thought he was a plant, and I can let go and swim the ocean blue any time I want.

No word a lie, that idea scares the shit out of me.

That’s the real reason I cling so hard. It’s better., says the dark part of my mind, to tstay here in my stagnant and diseased puddle, than have to face the the mind shattering task of trying to figure out what the fuck to do with myself.

The possibilities are endless. Like all my childhood media told me, I can be and do anything I want!

Great. What do I want again? Because I have no idea.

When I try to figure it out, my mind just barfs out static and confusion and panic. I am far too bound up inside in trying to figure out what is safe to want.

My true self has yet to speak up on the subject. Or much of anything else.

So all I can do is go primal id. What do I want? Food and sex. I want to go to a buffet of food and cocks and see if I can stuff both ends at the same time.

So um, start arranging that, Universe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The good news is that I don’t feel like death half warmed over any more.

I still don’t feel great but this bug’s deathly pall seems a lot thinner now. I still feel artificially heavy and tired but the effect is ebbing away. i think. knock on wood.

Didn’t do Wound Care this morning. Back then, I was still feeling pretty down. I was supposed to have Wound Care at 10:30 am this morning. Called in at around 9:45 am that I wasn’t going to be able to make it.

Seriously, it felt like I was wearing lead pajamas.

At least it was a warm kind of heaviness. Sometimes that shit comes with the chills and that combo is a wee bit too much like death to me.

I’ll have plenty of time to be dead when I die, thank you.

Still trying to ice skate uphill when it comes to focusing on what I am doing. My mind must have itchy feet because it just keeps wandering around and I got to use the comically large shepherd’s crook to haul it back to the here and now.

The cushion remains okay. It’s doing a decent job. Still not enough to extend how long I can use this PC by much, sadly. That remains in the “unsolved” category.

I think next time I will try to find something big and floofy instead of something all ergonomic and complicated.

Annoys me that these ergonomic numbers all claim to be so good for your back and your tailbone (aka your coccyx) and so many other forms of pain and injury butt that does not include injuries to your actual buttocks, it seems.

When I try to google a solution, all I get is links to either the ergonomic ones or those donut shaped ones and those don’t work for this either.

I know that because Joe got me one a while back and it seemed to shift my weight directly ON to the injury.

Which reminds me of something amusing that happened last time I went to Wound Care. I was discussing one of my foot injuries with the nurse when she asked me. “Have you been floating it?”

Time freezes, or possibly just my brain. “Pardon?”

“I asked you if you had been floating your injury. ”

I am experiencing a reality fault. My mind is, in fits and starts, trying to imagine what on Earth she could mean by that.

Luckily, my deeper mind came to the rescue and provided the solution : “Oh, you’re asking if I’m OFFLOADING the injury!”

Phew! Thanks sincerely, deeper mind. That was a bad couple seconds.

I’ve gotten pretty good at understanding nurses’ accents (very few of the nurses here are from here) but that was a tough one.

Anyhow, back to donut pillows.

I suppose I could try putting the donut atop the ergonomic cushion and see if that helps. I doubt it will, but it’s easy enough to try, so what the hell.

And of course, eventually my butt wound will heal completely and this will all be moot.

The painful area has already grown smaller. So, fingers and butt cheeks crossed.

I will be so glad when this annoying condition is gone. gone. gone.

More after the break.

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Stir fried Fru

I’ve got to stop taking these naps that start before sunset and end well after it.

They always mess me up. L:ike I said before. we’re not meant to sleep in the day and wake in the dark.

That’s why working the graveyard shift is so hard for so many people. Our minds and bodies and our circadian rhythms naturally rebel at such bizarre events.

Mother Nature clearly wants us to wake during the day and sleep at night.

But then again, while I’ve always loved Ma Nature, I have never been very good at listening to her commandments.

Side effect of all that IQ she gave me, I suppose.

Speaking of which, took an online autism spectrum test called the raads-r.

As I figured, I do not have autism or Aspergers. The highest score in the four categories it measured was a 30 in Social Detachment, and a score has to be at least 65 in order to diagnose the participant as autistic.

The others were under 15.

I felt the need to take the test because of a lot of little things that made me wonder. Mostly social things,. come to think of it. But also some strange sensory incidents.

But the results did not surprise me. I’m too warm and empathetic a person to rate as any kind of autistic.

I wasn’t surprised, but I was a little disappointed. Would nice to have a label for just how fricking weird I am.

But as it turns, I am weird even among other weirdos. Which figures.

It’s lonely being unique. What works for others doesn’t work for you at all. You are constantly forced to invent your own solutions for things.

And that’s hard.

But yeah, I’m not autistic. What I need is some kind of meta-conditional test that tells you what the fuck might be wrong with you and links you the test for THAT.

No wonder I’m way more humanist than I am human. I am just not like the other birds and I can’t manage to flock together with them no matter how hard I try.

So I don’t try. I’m always friendly and nice from my Olympian perch, but I am very socially damaged and that’s very hard to recover from all alone.

And people aren’t exactly lining up to help.

Not that helping someone as Socially Avoidant as me is easy. Far from it. Avoidant Personality Disorder is a Group C disorder, along with thing like Narcissist and Borderline and those are all very hard to treat.

Still, I would welcome all the medical health I can get. I would love to check in to some kind of asylum where I would get daily therapy, both group and individual, and maybe actually make some kind of breakthrough.

But I guess all I can do is keep plodding along.

I will tslk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Spine Clinic thing this morning.

And now I feelk pretty sick.

Thank you, VGH!

I hope I didn’t pick up some nasty bug while I was there. Especially given the results.

Or lack thereof. Basically,. I went there, they took X-rays, saw the spinal surgeon Doctor Dandurand, she did some tests and looked at the X-rays. and concluded that there was no surgery she should do that would make my condition any better.

Thank you, Doctor D!

And when pressed she admitted that she didn’t see how my leg weakness and my spinal injury could be related.

She then punted me back to my GP.

Well isn’t that lovely. The entire trip profited me absolutely nothing. In fact, I am in the red because at least before I went, I had the hope of getting some answers.

Now, I got bupkis. Except a possible infection.

Because I feel pretty rotten. I feel sore all over and stiff and my back hurts.

Thanks, Spine Clinic!

Plus my nose keeps being a little runny, despite my use of my antihistamine. That also suggests a bug of some kind.

Oh, and the most fun part was that this all set in while I was taking a nap. leading to the always life affirming phenomenon of waking up sick.

Damn I hate it when that happens.

Right now, as per the usual when I am writing a blog section, I am trying to eat a meal. But my appetite is pretty iffy and so it’s going slow.

All in all, today has been pretty sucky overall.

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Here’s an idea

Maybe if I take another nap, I will toggle back to “healthy”.

My new cushion has become much softer as the memory foam memorizes my butt. But I am still not sure it is good enough to cradle my poor posterior and let me get more computer time before having to rest my sorry ass.

Which means it may not be up to the job I need it for the most. And that, in turn, means that I could return it.

But I have already been sitting on it sans clothing. So that would be weird.

I might give it another try, though. This time with an emphasis on softness.

Because my one exemplar of what I want is my couch in the living room. I cn sit there for hours without getting so much as a twinge in my injured butt cheek.

Maybe I should just take the cushion off the couch and use THAT.

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Many happy returns

Butt contact issues aside, I haven’t even figured out how to return that weird little keyboard I bought by mistake.

I assumed these Inteltech people would contact me to arrange pickup, but so far no dice, so there must be some step I need to do that I wasn’t told about.

Almost like they don’t want to give me back my money at all.

I wiull have to do some reading on the Amazon website to figure this shit out.

Thanks, Amazon and Inteltech!

More after the break.

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What I believe

What I believe, I believe very strongly.

Thats because my beliefs are an expression of who I am. They flow directly from the very core of my being and that means they are a vital part of my psyche and in a subjective sense are as much a part of me as my arms and legs.

This gives me a great deal of strength of conviction. So much so that it can be a bit scary, both to others and to myself.

Because when you speak with total conviction in normal conversation, it’s a shock to most people. especially when backed by my force of personality et al.

Not to mention that I am, technically. a 6’1″ monster of a dude who can be pretty scary to people who don’t know me well enough to know what a pussycat I am.

When I meow, I mean it, dammit!

Speaking so vehemently also contrasts with my usual casual demeanor. By default, my affect is that of a friendly,. pleasant. nonthreatening “gentle giant” type person.

So when the conversation turns to something about which I have strong convictions and I am suddenly Mister Fundamentalist, it’s like I suddenly pulled out a bullhorn.

I’ve had little incidents like that ever since I was a teenager. And I suppose they might have alienated some people. They might conclude that I am a dangerous fanatic and steer clean of me entirely.

But I can do no else. This is who I am.

The world will just have to deal with it.

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And now the news

Still feeling pretty crappy.

In fact, I am now also dizzy and lightheaded in addition to all the other crapola. It makes it hard to stay focused on the screen and what I am inputting.

My mind keeps drifting away. It makes writing to you fine people a lot harder than usual because I keep having to drag myself back to the here and now

My back aches in that place between the shoulders that plagues me sometimes. Dunno if it’s the new cushion or the extra effort it took to get into and out of the clinic or both.

And I am so damned tired. How long can this go on?

The moment I am done typing to you lovely people, I am going to flop into bed and turn out the light and get some more sleep.

Until then, I type, even though it feels like I’m walking uphill against the wind.

Luckily, I am incredibly stubborn and refuse to give up until the job is done.

Even though I have now started to sway in my seat a little.

See how much I suffer for you lovely people? That’s real love there!

Tomorrow I’ve got Wound Care. Lovely. Hopefully I will have recovered from today by then or I might have to cancel.

Don’t wanna do that, though. Habit is repetition and I am trying to build better habits.

OK. Damn near became a QWERTY-head there. Time to go.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow/

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It sure gets hungry sometimes.

So my brand new ergonomic cushion arrived last night and I have been testing it out.

So far, results are mixed.

On the plus side, I am pretty sure it’s much better for my back. For one thing, the second I first sat down on it, I noticed that my back was now making full contact with the back of my office chair, and that makes a huge difference.

Because I have had the problem of always hunching over the keyboard since hugh school, and I think that was the source of a lot of my lower back pain.

So right then and there the thing justified its cost by solving a problem I’ve had since I was a teenager.

On the minus side, however, so far it’s not doing as well on its primary mission which was to make things easier on my poor wounded buttock.

The right one, in case future scholars want to know.

The cushion I got is pretty firm. But that, at least in theory, will change. See, the cushion is made of memory foam and it will take some time and exposure to my body heat before it can properly memorize my butt.

So the jury is still out as to whether or not this thing can become soft enough to cradle my butt with the tenderness and care it so richly deserves.

I really hope it can. I want to be able to spend more time at Mr. Computer and less time in bed.

I long to return to those happier, healthier halcyon days before my hospital stay when I sat in front of a computer playing video games instead of doing it lying down.

In fact, I am getting pretty sick of lying down in general. I realized last night while we were watching stuff off the PVR in the living room and I realized I felt a lot better than I had all day.

Because by Whoever, I was actually sitting up. Which is what we evolved to do. Sit up, stand up, even walk around some.

I miss that world.

So hopefully this cushion will be a lot softer in the future.

I want to be able to play PC games again, dammit!

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of the Android games I have been playing. But they are all casual games. You can’t do a proper PC game on a handheld device. It just doesn’t have the hardware or the interface for it.

I’m never going to play a Skyrim or Fallout 4 on my Amazon Kindle Fire 10.

Not only that, because all mobile games are aimed at a casual gamer audience in order to appeal to as many people as possible, there is a limit to how complex or in-depth they can be as well.

And I am getting pretty damned sick of swimming laps in the kiddie pool.

I’m an OG gamer, motherfucker. I’ve been playing video games for almost as long as there have been video games. I need something more than even the more grownup of my tablet games can deliver.

So go go butt heat! Make this a throne suited to my regal stature instead of what it is now – a royal pain in the ass.

More after the break.

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Oh, and you’ve probably already figured this out, but I am back to 1K words a day.

Just thought I’d make it official.

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From butt to spine

First, an update from my butt.

The new cushion has already become softer and gently on my big fat tushie. Yay!

I guess the memory of its memory foam is pretty fast. Almost eidetic.

So my ass will hopefully sit easy in the future and I will be able to get back to business.

Hang in there, butt! Things will get better soon.

And now, the spine.

My next appointment at the Spine Clinic at VGH is tomorrow..

And thank goodness I had the forethought to set a reminder for today because otherwise I would have completely spaced on it.

And it’s rather important. Not only because it’s an appointment with a specialist and therefore if I miss it I might not get another till next February, but because this is the next step in finding out why the fuck my legs don’t work.

So it’s a good thing that when I got the appointment, and saw that it was more than a month away, I remembered my tendency to forget appointments that are that far in the distance and set a reminder.

Bravo, me. I am learning to compensate for my., um,. memory issues.

It’s especially good because wow, has this month gone by fast. The reminder caught me completely flatfooted. Somehow, I knew the appointment was around this time of the month, yet it did not occur to me that said time was like, NOW.

So I have been going through a bit of temporal shock tonight. My mind has to catch up to the present and get me ready to go to VGH.

I think the real problem is that said appointment had been comfortably in the future for me for so long I just kept thinking of it that way.

Sad, I know. But whatever. I will go and I will do the things they want and hopefully, somewhere along the line, I will get my answers.

There is a real possibility that whatever is wrong is not fixable. So I will be crippled for the rest of my life.

That would suck. But fair enough. I would still rather know.

Maybe then I will get off my pampered posterior and actually buy a new walker. One built to last, with four wheels and a built in seat and everything.

Or maybe I will give up entirely and get a fucking wheelchair. They seem like they might be more hassle than they are worth, but maybe not.

It’s not like life’s all that easy with a walker,. either.. And a cane or canes are a no go unless I lose a LOT of weight.

If there is government aid in paying for the wheelchair… maybe.

I will think about it.

Amd I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One of the many ways in which I have a strangely chimeric personality is my position regarding reason versus intuition.

I reject the question and refuse to choose. Bloody false dichotomies.

Because I use both, together. Asking me to choose one over the other is like asking me which hand is the most important.

I’ll keep both, thanks.

This refusal to take sides is also behind my equally stubborn refusal to choose between math and science, and the arts.

I like both. I’m good at both. Those insisting one must choose are woefully narrow-minded and zero-sum. To me, they aren’t the same but they ARE equal.

This outright refusal to participate in these petty struggles is a sign of just how seriously I take my mental integrity and my eternal search for the truth.

But it’s also a sign of just how stubbornly indecisive I can be. I don’t like having to make that kind of choice and therefore I minimize the times I have to do it.

Deeper than that lies the fact that I don’t really experience people as their material selves but rather as their minds and emotions and personalities.

The only physical attribute I pay much attention to besides the minimum required for identification is voice. In a sense, the people I know IRL really ARE their voices to me.

Thus my POV is, by some measurements, transcendental. I experience and “see” people as souls and therefore I am a “higher” being.

Well I wouldn’t say THAT. You can, though. I don’t mind.

This sort of thing is why I somewhat confusingly call myself the world’s only rationalist materialist mystic poet. I haven’t the slightest doubt in my mind that had I been raised with religion, I would have become some kind of religious official.

Whether it would be the kind that wears a cassock and shakes a censer or the kind that wears blue genes and shakes a tambourine full of coins is anyone’s guess.

Probably something in between, I suppose.

But when you combine my copious amounts of empathy, my oratory prowess, my strong beliefs that spring directly from the core of my being, and my attraction to the role of therapist/healer, a religious career would have been pretty much a lock.

Makes me wish there was a religion that didn’t strike me as utterly full of crap.

Guess I will just have to start my own. Religion as a phenomenon is long due for a cleansing firestorm of reform anyhow. Something that will drive out all the old, defective, destructive beliefs that outlived their purposes by millennia and make room for new. healthy, LIVING beliefs that actually serves the people’s needs to take their place.

Sometimes all you can do is preserve the good, toss out the rest, and start over.

It’s funny to imagine myself becoming a messiah-like figure via my secular sermons and having to repeatedly assert that I am not a holy man… which would only convince people that I am, indeed, a holy man.

I picture myself as a grumpy saviour snarling. “God damn it, stop worshipping me and do what I tell you to do already!”

Could I be a secular messiah, do you think?

More after the break.

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Eating cold hamburgers

Yup. That’s what I am doing.

See, last night, I woke up from a nap around 8 pm and was quite hungry, so after finding out that my first two choices were closed (grr), I ordered some A&W.

The Mozza burger, of course. That’s my second favorite thing at A&W, and most of them don’t serve the Whistle Dog any more.

And even when they do, I hate having to explain the concept of “instead of relish, onions” to people five times before it penetrates their work-mode brains.

You’d think I was telling them to put the baby in the fireplace. One gal looked actively terrified by the whole conversation, like I’d just handed her a note telling her I was heavily armed and she BETTER get my order RIGHT.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, cold hamburgers.

So I ordered the A&W.,,, then I heard Joe’s voice in the living room and suddenly remembered that he had yesterday off and we had already agreed to have McDonald’s in the living room at 9 pm.

Annoyed grunt! I am such a flake.

It arrived, of course, just I was going to the DoorDash website to cancel the order. So I got my order anyhow.

What could I do? I was stuck with it.

So I had to tell Joe to just stick it in the fridge so I could have it for supper tonight.

And I had intended to heat it up before eating my burgers, but then I panicked when I was in the kitchen and in pain from my legs and got all confused, so I just hauled the whole order to my room and ate the damned burgers cold.

Such is my life. I’m an odd and fragile creature, like some crash landed alien who is not really fit for life on Earth.

Only there’s no creepy government agency waiting to stick me in a lab and experiment on me when I finally get tired of running.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be. They could learn a lot from me.

But as it stands, nobody wants me. The fools.

At least my package has arrived. Get this : I ordered an ergonomic cushion for my computer this morning and it arrived today.

Man I love living in the future.

You have to understand that I am from Prince Edward Island, where for most of my life getting something within a month of ordering it was lightning fast delivery.

So to get something on the same day as ordering it blows my mind. The only way it could get here faster is if they teleported it.

I haven’t tried the thing yet because my delivery dude left the package at the entrance to my building not the entrance to this apartment and that’s too far for me to go on my own. I don’t have that kind of mileage in me any more.

Not without serious risk of a fall, anyhow.

Ah, here’s my roomies with the package. I will regale you with how it goes soon.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.