So once more, I am just back from the kitchen with my lunch and ready to dig in to the day’s blogging when oops. slip of the mouse causes it to slide upward and tap the power cord for Mister Computer here, causing it to reboot.

Argh. This keeps happening lately and my nerves can be seen fraying in realtime. For some reason, I can go months and months without it happening at all, then some tiny invisible barrier in my mind fails and it happens like two or three times a day for a while.

It fucking sucks.

But hey, all I have to do is wait until the system reboots. That’s what, ten mins? Fifteen tops? Big deal.

Ah, so young, so naïve. The true fuckery had yet to begin.

There was only one force that could make this experience worse, and that very fact made it manifest : a Windows update had downloaded.

So now I had to wait way more time as Windows installed some stuff, rebooted, then did it all again a couple more times.

Meanwhile I am dealing with how pissed off I am. The reboot itself had ignited me. The update was just another twisted of the knife.

Like I said, this has been happening a lot lately, so the frustration has been building. It’s especially bad when I am sitting down to blog because in my mind I am already gearing up to write and framing up what I want to talk about and all that good stuff.

It wouldn’t be true to say I don’t prepare for writing these daily massives.

I just don’t write anything down.

As one might imagine, this is a tender and delicate process, and so to have it rudely and unexpectedly interrupted like that really fucking hurts.,

It’s like being awoken from a very pleasant dream by being stabbed.

Speaking of which, The Pains (bladder, balls, and deep thigh tissue) are still here. They are faint, a mere shadow of what they were yesterday, but they are still hanging around.

The testicular tingles in particular were still enough of a problem that I didn’t make it to Wound Care this morning. I still get a fair bit of pain when I get up and move around, and with that pain comes that particularly distressing kind of nausea known to all male mammals who have experienced testicular trauma.

For example, when as mentioned above I sat down with my food to blog today, I was feeling a lot of pain and nausea from my poor little change purse area.

So the sudden extended reboot at least gave me lots of time to recover from THAT.

The nut based nausea has kept my appetite pretty low lately too. I’ve had to force myself to eat a couple times, and that’s always awful.

One more strike again the idea of “listening to your body”.

But really, what does a corpse know about how you should live your life?

Not much, I reckon.

More after the break.

---

One more segment

Well, here I am again, typing away.

Managed to get some halfways decent sleep, and that’s helped a fair bit. I feel more human now. I still need a lot more but it’s a good start.

Sleep has been especially tricky for me lately. I’ve had this feeling of restless agitation and unfocused anticipation haunting me for almost a week now, and it’s giving me that all too familiar “haunted” feeling.

Like I’m beset by some disquieted spirit who is struggling to understand the fact that it is dead yet still around.

I must admit, my depression has gotten worse lately. Well, more severe, any how.

I think I have opened some doors in my mind that desperately needed to be opened if I am to recover but there was some genuinely dark shit locked behind them and now I have to process it.

Which is all for the good in the long term. Unearthing buried trauma so you can finish processing it is more or less what traditional therapy is all about.

Take that, CBT!

And I am going to keep opening those doors no matter what. I have known for quite some time that the path out of my darkness leads much further into it and that if I want to get out of my dank little grotto I am going to have to get a lot closer to the edge of my ledge than I am normally comfortable with.

This, I can live with. I don’t mind wrestling with the darkness. It and I are old friends and I have a lot of experience fighting it.

And I know – and it knows – that it can’t win. I’m the Prime Mover, the one with volition, the one who decides it all. And my will to fight is unstoppable.

I’m the Juggernaut, bitch. And you’re just a phantom of the mind.

Granted, this is a new, higher level darkness. As I open up space in my mind, my emotional bandwidth increases as does my emotional sensitivity.

So I feel more now. Some of that terrible numbness is gone and parts of my mind are waking up and, like when your hand has fallen asleep and you’re rubbing it awake again, parts waking up from numbness tend to wake up cranky.

Well, crank all you want, parts. I’ve gotten a taste of feeling more alikve and more like myself, and I want more. Being able to access my emotions more is a blessing, even when some of them are quite unpleasant.

Feeling something is better than feeling nothing. I’ve had my fill of “nothing” and now I want my internal world to be warm and comfortable instead of icy cold and dreary.

I was never meant to be like this. I was meant to be bold and big and outrageous. I was meant to fill the world with my presence and light up people’s lives. I should be walking the world like a giant, not hiding from the light like a parasite.

And I am going to get there no matter what it takes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So yesterday, at something like 10 am, I had a sort of attack.

Remember that pain I have mentioned before? The one that goes from somewhere near my bladder down to my right testicle and then further down my right leg?

It hadn’t made an appearance in quite some time. But apparently it spent that time building up momentum because it came back HARD.

So now I feel like I got kicked in the testicle by a horse, there’s a burning ache hovering over my bladder like an evil spirit, and worst of all there’s a spot in the flesh of my right inner thigh that feels like a bomb went off inside it.

Because I live only to suffer.

I just got up and got lunch. That was a horrible fucking experience. All three of my pains hated that. But I made it back here with my food, which was (ha ha) futile because the trauma to my testicle has left me far. far too nauseous to eat.

Gosh, life sure is funny sometimes, isn’t it?

And of course, I know that I should probably be taking this latest body horror to the ER. But I ain’t gonna. Not yet, anyway.

Forgive me for not wanting to volunteer to bring my swollen testicle to the ER. Not only is that humiliating, they would of course need to poke and prod at it, and that would be extremely painful and sickening to me right now.

So right now, I am just going to sit on the problem (ouch!) and hope it goes away on its own. It seems like it’s going away on its own, though that might be wishful thinking.

Hell, it’s hard just sitting here at the computer, typing.

Why does life hate me? I’m such a pleasant fellow.

---

The diagnosis continues

More thoughts on Asperger’s and me.

There’s some Aspie traits I don’t have. Like I don’t love routine and predictability. In fact, I have a hard time establishing and maintaining any kind of routine.

I need some predictability in my life, obviously, I tried the whole “eat when you’re hungry, drink when you’re thirsty, sleep when you’re tired” thing and it ended up making me very sick.

So much for “listening to your body”. Turns out my body’s an idiot.

But I generally can’t generate my own routine. I cn only adapt to external circumstances, like the need to go to school or a doctor’s appointment or something.

So that’s an unchecked box.

But even less checked is the box marked “fond of rules and structure”.

Like hell I am.

I am a natural rebel and I instinctively avoid rules rich environments. There’s a reason I have never considered a military career, for fuck’s sake.

That isn’t a brag. If I had my druthers, I would dial that shit back a fair bit.

But it’s the personality I’m stuck with, and it’s not very Aspie at all.

Well, no diagnosis is perfect. I still think I have the Syndrome, but possibly not as severe a case as some.

Wow. I guess I really AM high functioning.

More after the break.

---

It gets better

The pains have faded. They are on the way out.

Disappearing as mysteriously as they appeared, of course. Typical. Oh well, beats the hell out of being stuck with it.

I wonder if it’s going to turn out that I have one of those mysterious diseases like shingles or MS or lupus. The kind of illness that can manifest as a dozen different illnesses and fuck with whatever part of your body it wants to based on its whim.

I sure as suck hope not. I had a distant relative with lupus and her life was hell. Never knew what horrors were in store for her, poor dear.

I must confess that when I heard she had died, I was kind of relieved.

Made an appointment to see Doctor Chao about all my recent health craziness. An increase in leg pain and back pain. Attacks of medium level flu-ish symptoms that last a day or two. Lots of weird random sharp pains.

And, ya know, the fact that he still doesn’t know why my legs don’t work.

It pisses me off that I keep having to remind him about that.

Him and the nice folks in Richmond Hospital. It’s like they lack object permanence. Or in this case, condition persistence.

If it’s not in their face barking for attention, it doesn’t exist.

And being a sane and cynical person, I honestly should stop expecting it of them. I should evaluate every doctor’s visit or trip to the goddamned ER in terms of whether there is enough data to hold their attention and if not, plan the next visit right then.

Because the most effective way to combat people’s “out of sight , out of mind” mentality is to refuse to vanish from sight. Keep coming back. Make yourself a persistent recurring phenomenon so you can shift the path of least resistance in your favour.

Make it easier to just give you what you want so you’ll go away.

And of course, at all times be pleasant and polite. Give them no excuse to reject you and pretend like their lack of performance is somehow your fault.

I hate that it’s come to this level of petty social manipulation but my life and my non-goober status are on the line here so I will do whatever the fuck it takes to correct for people’s atrocious incompetence and lack of professionalism.

I guess you can’t have faith in any kind of authority any more. Even doctors don’t want the responsibility of being an authority in your life, and that’s their fucking job.

I have actually had Doctor Chao look at me like I should have the answer.

Admittedly, that might be because I have a very strong presence and personality as well as an effortlessly dominating intellect.

Hmmmm. Maybe I would be better off trying to be more of an alpha stud.

If the only way to get people to behave properly is to dominate them, it might be worth taking on that much responsibility.

But I don’t wanna.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well after many years of maintaining an active interest in the subject and gathering what information I could about it and after watching a rather good lecture about it, I have come to the conclusion that I probably have Asperger’s Syndrome, and have all my life.

Ta da! Diagnosis. Presumably the euphoria is on back order,

Seems kinda obvious now. But I was held back from this revelation by a notion I had from long long ago that Asperger’s (and ASD, and autism) were intimately linked with empathy and theory of mind, and I have both of those in spades.

But this morning I realized I hadn’t seen empathy and theory of mind mentioned in connection with The Spectrum in a very long time, possibly decades.

And with that out of the way, it all clicked into place. Obviously I am on the Spectrum, and Asperger’s seems to be about the right level of impairment.

Does that make me high functioning? Doesn’t sound like me.

And I don’t function much.

Being Asperger’s explains so much. Why I was always so intensely cerebral, even as a preschooler. Why I just plain wasn’t like the other kids and didn’t want to do the sort of things they wanted to do, like play with toys or run around.

Those things seemed pointless to me.

Of course I get it now.

And why I just couldn’t make friends. I was just too damned weird. I completely get the Aspie “aura of weirdness” that repels people with its icy alienation.

It’s brutally unfair, of course. The Aspie kid isn’t consciously doing anything to alienate people. In fact they’re often trying very hard not to do so.

But there is a continuity of empathic connection that exists between neurotypical people. A signal that goes back and forth between them that tells them they are dealing with another human being and information is going back and forth.

When that is disrupted, like in Asperger’s, you get a person who is innocently very “weird”. They creep people out.

And my “they” I also mean “me”, of course.

At last I have an explanation for my “broken antenna”, a metaphor I have used in the past to refer to how I don’t seem to pick up the signals others can perceive that allow for things like close human connection and social intelligence.

I can sense what people are thinking and feeling. And I can figure them out.

But it’s all very cold and inhuman.

Maybe I really am an alien. It would explain a lot. Occam’s Razor, though.

I have talked a lot about my brutally emotionally cold childhood. So much time spent all alone with nothing but my thoughts, the TV, or video games.

And that’s all true. But I also have to wonder if I was even open to being warmed up at all. I like to think that the right adult, if they stuck with me despite how difficult I could be and weathered my attempts to reject them, could have finally dragged me into the sunshine and given me what I needed to crack my little shell and let me emerge into the sunshine of human community.

But maybe not. Maybe I was just plain born broken and never was never any hope of my turning out normal or functional at all.

I still want to crack my icy shell and get to the Good Place, where all the warmth and love and acceptance and affirmation I’ve always needed can be found.

And I will never stop trying to do so, no matter what.

But I have to accept that I might not ling long enough to get there.

More after the break.

So now what?

Hey, check it out, it’s Temple Grandin!

So now that I am pretty certain I got the Asperger’s, what the heck do I do with this info?

I feel like I should know. But I don’t. I guess inasmuch as I thought about it at all, I assumed this would be some kind of transcendental revelation that made everything clear and therefore so much better.

And there was some relief. I felt an easing of inner tension and that lovely revelatory feeling of chaos coalescing into order and harmony.

But as to where I go from here, I dunno.

I already know a fair bit about the disorder, both from my own “research” (aka just reading and watching things I find interesting) and my observations of people I know with a diagnosis and their struggles.

So I am not the kind of Aspie that will rush out and inhale all the information I can get my grubby paws on about the Syndrome. If I take in too much information too fast, there is no chance it will be digested and thus retained.

I am sure as fuck not looking to join any goddamned social clubs. Yes, you’re an Aspie, I’m an Aspie, she’s an Aspie, wouldn’t you like to leave me the fuck alone?

I’ve got my precious friends Felicity, Joe, and Julian, and that’s quite enough for me. I’d like to have a boyfriend, assuming that is possible for a mental mutant like me, but that’s pretty much the only expansion to my social circle I am willing to make.

I think part of the reason I am not that euphoric is that part of me really doesn’t want to be an Aspie. To this part, it feels like I am giving up on myself and resigning myself to spending the rest of my life as a broken man.

Clearly I have got some stuff to work on now. Can I integrate this information into my identity? Or should I forget the whole thing and go back to not knowing?

After all, it’s a self-diagnosis. I could be radically wrong.

Well, genie’s out of the bottle now. Cant un-know things. So I suppose I just have to keep plodding through the dense fog like always.

Maybe it will help me make sense of things. I dunno.

But I need to lay down now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has not been good.

In fact, I feel pretty crappy right now I’m overheated and my skin is dry and I have heat stroke. My head hurts and I am super thirsty all the god damned time.

And my old buddy, scattered muscle aches, is back in town.

I am particularly worried about the thirst. All afternoon, I have been drinking huge glasses of water, usually two, and then lying down to try to snatch some fever’d sleep.

Only to wake up around 90 minutes later with, of course, a very full bladder, and I am incredibly thirsty again.

So clearly the water is not sticking around, It passes right through me and not enough of it is being absorbed to actually slake my thirst and give my body what it needs.

I’m trying, body. Really I am.

Generally, if the water won’t stay, the problem is sodium. Your body uses dissolving tiny amounts of sodium into the water your bloodstream to control how permeable your cells are to water and thus to move the water in an out of your cells.

Without sodium, your body can’t retain water and you get symptoms like mine.

Of course, the thirst could also come from my diabetes. When your blood sugar gets too high, your body will try to dump the excess sugar out via your urine, and therefore starts manufacturing lots of urine in order to get the job done.

That blows through your water reserves pretty damned fast.

I definitely feel like some kind of fluid imbalance is going on. I feel bloated and puffy and like a soggy sack.

This is not good.

None of this reaches the “back to the ER” level of severity, thank God. so I am willing to just kind of ride it out and see where it goes for now.

Judging by recent personal history, it will all vanish as mysteriously as it arrived within a couple of days and all that will come of it will be yet another WTF event where my body apparently feels the need to fuck with me by making me miserable for random reasons.

It’s almost like someone is gaslighting me. Luckily, with a powerful mind like mine, that is far, far harder to do.

I’m primed to be a Philip K. Dick hero who uses nothing but his ability to reason and deduce to protect himself against a world gone mad.

For the record, I would still rather stay sane, though. The last thing I need is to get crazier. I got more crazy than I can handle already.

So no offense, Universe, but keep that shit to yourself.

---

Something about my recent lingering along the edge of the abyss struck me earlier : when the diseased part of your mind is really spewing its toxicity into your psyche, resistance is not an option.

It’s too powerful. You are utterly swamped. All you can do is cling desperately to whatever bit of flotsam or jetsam you can grab in order to keep you remembering the extremely vital truth that you do not want to die, and that no matter how bad you feel right now, it will pass, and you’ll be glad you gave yourself a chance.

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and hence foolish.

Which is putting it mildly.

This recent dark time really got me thinking about how it’s like there is this diseased organ in my mind that puts out these poisonous thoughts.

Clearly, it’s doing this as a way to deal with something. As a way to express it. So in that sense it too is serving a function, just in a really maladaptive way,

If I had to put a name on what I was expressing, it would be “darkness” I have a great and terrible darkness deep within me and containing it and dealing with it and keeping it from contaminating everything else is the bulk part of what my consciousness does.

No wonderful it doesn’t have a lot of resources left for frivolities like happiness.

I wish I could just pull over to the side of the road and barf it all up into a culvert., Just let it all out so the rain can wash it all away.

But so far, I lack that capacity for renewal, My psyche’s primary mission is to “just keep going”, no matter what. Stopping for repairs is not part of that agenda.

Lke I have mentioned before, a deep part of me is convinced that if I ever stop moving, even just to rest, something terrible will GET me.

You’d think the god damned thing would be getting tired by now. I sure am,

Part of why I have to just keep going is that I would not know up with this energy if I were to stop. I’ve been running this same program for 45 years. The mere possibility of doing something else disappeared over the back horizon decades ago.

“Back horizon”. That’s pretty good.

When I try to imagine stopping and giving myself a break, all I can visualize is the energy building up and up like energy in a spring and eventually going SPROING in a way that causes much destruction in my cranium.

But it has to at least be theoretically possible to redirect that inexhaustible wellspring’s energies into something more productive.

Like supporting my mood, for example.

I deeply intuit that the healthy majority have this sort of internal integrity field running at all time. Something that helps keep them together despite the slights and arrows of outrageous fortune. A force within them that uplights them at all time.

I don’t have that. At best, I am at the mercy of life’s vicissitudes Anyting can come along and knock me to my knees without even a saving throw.

At worst, my depression beats life to the punch time and time again. Any grand proclamations about how much life sucks I might be tempted to make should really be redirected to “how much life WITH DEPRESSION sucks.”

The hardest thing about being crazy is dealing with the fact that you’re crazy – that your perceptions of reality are deeply flawed and unreliable.

They are, however, all we have to go on,

So we end up believing them despite knowing better.

And that’s just plain crazy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right now. Like I have been, as my late father would have said, “rode hard and put away wet”, and it’s making living a real drag right now.

Not that I have any plans to quit.

There were some darker moments last weekend, when I was in the hospital, though. Times when I thought I was on the cusp of “going goober” and ending up living a heavily degraded life where I would feel awful all the time.

Right now, there’s breaks.

Now looking back, these feelings were unfounded, and based on how ad it feels to have breathing issues when your worst nightmare is smothering.

Glad I weathered it as well as I did, to be honest. I’m tougher than I think.

But reasonable or no. there were times where I was seriously wondering if I wanted to go on living or whether I wanted to get off this burning bus while I can.

This would be the mysterious “suicidal ideation” that the DSM-V seems to think we all understand. I say just ideation because no plans or intent were ever formed.

I just felt a lot closer to the rim of the void than usual. I wasn’t planning on jumping over the edge by any stretch of the imagination.

I was just looking over the edge. Like visiting the Grand Canyon.

Still, that’s the darkness I live with 24/7. Depression is so very taxing, That shadow of mine is never all that far away and it makes the days long and hard despite the fact that I have very little to actually do, ever.

Maybe that’s the problem, though. A speaker I saw on the TikTok was talking about the importance of purpose to the psychological health of boys and men and how when this one extraordinary researcher took it upon herself to analyze the words men used in their suicide notes, “useless” and “worthless” were the top 2.

And ouch, do I feel that.

I have felt worst than useless for my entire life. I have felt that I am a massive liability for all who have the misfortunate of knowing and caring about me.

In other words I’ve felt like a person with negative utility.

I can’t remember ever feeling valued or needed. I struggle sometimes to even feel wanted or welcome in places where I know I am.

But remember, the sun never stops shining, even when we can’t see or feel it.

And it always comes back.

Trying so hard to learn to make my own mood. That’s another idea I got off TikTok recently. The idea of taking responsibility for my own mood.

As opposed to who?

Still, the idea of making myself happy is a good one. I have lived under the unconscious assumption that I had no power over my mood and it just changes like the weather for far too long.

After all, healthy people cheer themselves up all the time. Should at least in theory possible for one such as eye.

So from now on, I will examine what makes me happier, and get me more of that.

More after the break.

---

What makes me happy

I honestly don’t know.

It seems bizarre even to me, but the very idea of trying to make myself happy seems alien and bizarre to me.

I mean , obviously, my day to day decisions are guided by some hedonic principle. When I decide to play a game or take a nap or order some food, I am clearly expecting to get some kind of pleasure out of the deal.

But it’s all very unconscious and therefore unintentional.

I lead a very unintended life.

Very little I do has a purpose or a goal beyond the standard “help me endure life”, and that’s all KINDS of wrong.

Seems like I gave up on actual happiness a long time ago. So long that I don’t remember it at all. All I can remember is twenty plus years of this same grey life.

A life without desires or passions or needs. Those can’t be allowed because for a powerless and chained being like myself, they can only cause pain because I am utterly incapable of fulfilling. So why torment myself?

Or so the story goes according to my depression. And we all know it’s full of shit.

For one thing, simply assuming that I won’t be able to fulfill any of the desires I have is one hell of a big leap in logic. How could I properly pre-judge all of such a huge category as “potential desires” enough to know with any certainty that they’re all futile?

That’s some stinkin’ thinkin’ right there.

It’s my depression using its access to my deepest self to make the ridiculous seem plausible not as actual philosophy but as a shortcut to what it wants, namely me continuing to eke out mere existence near the bottom of the heap.

It wants me squashed flat under its thumb and not going anywhere because it thinks that is the way to keep me safe.

The comparison to a totalitarian security state rears its ugly head again.

One could certainly make the case that my depression is a hardcore reactionary social conservative. It doesn’t want anything to change ever, for any reason.

Only in stasis can it feel safe.

Which is very sad.

But back to my passion free life. This is what comes of half-murdering your id. Of burying it alive and pretending it’s justified via a perverse and maladaptive “logic”.

Well if it’s all so logical, why am I so miserable? Logical methods do not lead to negative results. Clearly the process has been corrupted.

Now I find myself terrified by the thought of even asking what I really want.

Why? Because I have no idea what the answer might be. But whatever it is, it would almost surely involve leaving stasis and that scares the organic nitrates out of me.

I can’t face all those hallways with all those doors.

Choosing what to do is an unsolvable equation.

Unless I figure out what I desire. That’s how normal people choose.

But I’m so damned scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lately I bought & downloaded this magnificently mad thing :

It’s demented, adorable, twisted, and furry.

The only way it could make me happier is if it always perverted.

But the internet provides.

And yet, despite my gushing, I am still not sure I am enjoying the actual game enough to keep it.

I also can’t decide if I am legitimately uncertain or whether this is just the usual chickenshit feeling I get when I approach the literal point of no return on a new game.

The thing is, the game is kinda fun. It’s just as colorful and cute and over the top as the demo, and not nearly as full of horrible violence to cute cartoon animals as I feared.

I mean, it’s there, but at a reasonable amount.

But I’m 66 minutes into the game (meaning I have 54 mins left to make my decision) and so far I am feeling pretty meh about it.

For one thing, they’ve included this whole colony management aspect in it. I have to gather and tend my followers, making sure they have enough to eat, places to prostate themselves to my holiness in abject submission, someplace to get coffee, etc.

And to do so, resources have to be harvested from the environment and combined and followers have to go search for more and rrrrrrrrr my eyes are rolling into the back of head just thinking of how tedious all that shit is.

Don’t wanna do it. What’s the point of being a deity with slavishly devoted followers if I have to do the boring admin work? I ask ya.

The other part of the game is fairly generic ARPG dungeon crawler. Also not doing a lot for me, to be honest.

I mean, it’s not terrible or anything, but so far I am not impressed.,

And that’s pretty much the whole game. A tedious colony management game and a meh ARPG. Seems pretty bleak.

But the game’s getting boffo reviews, so I am willing to hang on with it a little more. Perhaps there’s more to it than I’ve discovered so far.

Or maybe I am just being chickenshit. Maybe I just have trouble making decisions and sticking with them, and lack courage, moral fiber, and backbone.

Yeah. That sounds about right,

Speaking of backbone, mine’s really hurting right now. It’s been flaring up in pain on a regular basis lately, since before the hospital, and I am getting worried.

After all, I have a cracked L4 vertebra there.

But it doesn’t feel too dire yet. It could still be only a slight variation in my usual digestive difficulties leading to center torso tension and hence back pain.

Still, I am keeping a close eye on it. Last thing I need is something going fucky there.

Spines are really important. I use mine all the time!

More after the break.

---

Annoyed with myself

I’m currently kinda annoyed with myself because, due to an ill timed nap, I once more forgot to make my appointment with the Stroke Clinic and now I will have to do it tomorrow and I even told them in a message on voice mail I’d do it today.

So, grr, me. Why must we be so hard to deal with? So smart and yet so clueless. Sigh,.

In that one sense, I suppose, it is better that I don’t have the helper of my dreams.

This way, I mostly aggravate myself. That seems fair.

I want to be easier on myself. Really I do. But I think I am too damn peppery for my own good. Too internally hotheaded.

Making me a one person child abuse scenario, essentially. I’m my own easily irritated and verbally abusive parent – my own version of the late Larry Donald Bertrand.

It’s not quite that I have my father riding around free in my head – it’s not that simple.

That, I would find easy to deal with. Just tell that part of me to fuck off. Easy peasy.

No, it’s the far more tricky issue of the doors to anger left open by a childhood filled with walking on eggshells due to his short fuse.

So far in my life, I have kept this irritability buried deep inside me and directed at myself. And that works out well for the world, I suppose. I’m not the menace I could be,

And I could be so very, very bad.

But not all slopes are slippery and moving in the direction of bad does not mean immediately sliding all the way to the most Mister Hyde meets Hannibal Lecter meets The Joker side of my personality.

That’s just a bullshit scare tactic of the kind my depression is fond of, the equivalent of putting big terrifying that say “This way lies madnesss!” or somesuch in front og all routes that might lead to my liberation and its destruction.

And I am learning to ignore that shit. It’s not real. These “predictions” have no basis except maybe fear. Pretty much all of my all-encompassing terror of going crazier is nothing but a big bulging balloon a-brim with bullshit.

I might feel like I am always on the edge of madness and the slightest wrong move could lead to my plunging screaming into the abyss of my own mind, all connection to reality severed and at the mercy of my inner demons forever – but it’s not true.

And yes, just typing that out has left me mortally terrified to the point where it’s hard to keep going – but that doesn’t make it any more likely.

That’s a mistake we all can make – our minds conjure up irrational fears but flooding us with how scary a scenario is so we forget how unlikely it is.

I mean, sure, if I was to fall into my own mind forever, it would be the worst thing possible other than being buried alive – but neither are very likely to happen,

Probability is your friend, friend. It’s the only way out of this bullshit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I hate this.

The time window for my phone call from Doctor Chao has begun, and now I have a potential two frigging hours in which to fret about when it will happen.

I don’t do this kind of uncertainty well. Give me a set time and I can wait for it patiently. But this time range bullshit is hard on my nerves.

And the fact that it’s medical news I am waiting for doesn’t help either. I might be about to hear terrible news about my brain and my neuroses know this.

They’re bad enough when they are completely unfounded and irrational.

But they’re even worse when they’re based on something plausible.

Oh well, nothing I can do about it, I guess. Not like I can just teleport in on Doc Chao and yell, “NO WE TALK NOW!”

Not without putting on some pants, anyhow.

Then again, it’s not like he doesn’t see naked people all the time.

Usually, though, he has warning.

This dislike of surprises makes me feel silly and weak. I know for a fact that it has kept me from doing things because my high strung nerves insisted they were too “risky”.

---

Well the Doc called. Nothing weird on the CT scan, thank goodness. He was just calling because he hadn’t heard from me in a while.

Which is nice. A little creepy, but nice.

I told him about my continuing cognitive issues. It still feels like I am thinking uphill. Like part of my mind turned to lead overshoes.

He told me to call the Stroke Clinic to make an appointment with Doctor Teal.

Which I did. But the pricks at the Clinic close shop at 4, so no dice. I’ll have to call them back tomorrow, dammit.

I want to find out what’s wrong with my brain while I still have a brain to find out with!

---

That’s it for today’s exciting agenda, I guess.

Tomorrow I got therapy with Doc Costin. I’ll tell him about my sad little hospital stay with the usual lack of closure.

After that, the next event in my life is hanging with Le Gang on Zoom on Friday night. Then nothing till Sunday night Denny’s.

Right now I am feeling glum. I think it’s just because I am tired. Sleep’s been a tad elusive lately and I am feeling down as a result.

The problem started in the hospital. I would try to sleep but some force in my mind kept me revved up and wouldn’t let me unwind and let go.

And as we all know, sleep isn’t something you do, it’s something you let happen.

Plus my back’s been acting up lately. Suppose I should have mentioned that to my GP.

Oh well. I never perform well in realtime.

I need to be in a turn based universe where I always have enough time to think through my options and pick the best course of action.

Knowing me, though, I would end up spending longer and longer between turns, until I end up just hovering in stasis forever.

At least it’s quiet.

More after the break.

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Dredging the depths

One part of this new heaviness slash solidity slash stupidity in my capacious cranium is that I think it will aid in my constant search for The Bad Stuff lurking in the inky black shadows of my mind,

Gotta find it, haul it to the surface, and reveal it unto the cleansing light of consciousness that it might be healed,

That’s essentially what traditional psychotherapy as practiced by Freud is all about. And it’s what works for me – every time I have a successful trauma hunt, I immediately feel a rush of relief and I feel like I get another little sliver of myself back.

Thus I feel more healthy, whole, and alive. Permanently.

But everybody knows what the big problem with traditional psychotherapy : it takes too fucking long. This hunting trip of mine has been in the field for an awfully long time, and I despair of ever landing my White Whale so we can just go the hell home already.

But every now and then I land major prey and it gives me enough hope to go on.

I can’t help feeling that there has to be a better way, though. Some alpha level change in approach that would turn the whole thing inside out and let me somehow steam directly toward my goal instead of fumbling in the dark toward it.

Something that would truly wake me up inside and let me see the world with eyes and heart and voice wide open and ready to let everybody inside.

Because I’ve been in this sad little tin prison of mine for far too long. Whatever I built it to keep out is long gone and it’s now far more of a liability than an asset. By all rational measures, it’s time for this egg to lose his shell.

It’s just a matter of convincing the little birdie inside that it won’t die without it.

I’ve grown up with grave doubts as to my viability as a specimen. I’ve always felt far to weak to make it on my own. My recent decline in health only underlines this.

And yet, I know I have all the skills and abilities required for survival. It’s not like you have to be particularly rugged to pay bills and rent and taxes.

In fact, it’s never been easier.

So it’s something more structural and fundamental I feel I am missing. A toughness and integrity – a grit – that I feel I utterly lack.

It’s like everyone else is real and I’m made of fancy tissue paper.

And that underwrites my timidity. I am so scared of the loud bright angry world because I feel so puny and faint compared to it.

Deep down, I am terrified of waking the giant that is the Big Cruel World, lest it notice me and what a vile and pathetic thing I am, and crush me like a bug.

And yet, here I am, brain the size of a planet, with godlike powers of the mind.

I tell ya, it just plain don’t make no sense,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I ended up in the hospital again.

Have been in an out since last I blogged. Last Friday I woke up (never a good idea) all congested with goo in the head, throat, ears, and lungs, and barely able to breathe.

So after the usual hemming and hawing I asked J&J to take me to the ever-loving ER. And it was swamped. Apparently we got some kind of bug going around in the region plus it was New Years’ weekend so things were extra fucky.

So I was there like six hours before I even got into the ER. Luckily, I was too busy concentrating on not breaking my lifelong breathing streak to get too bored.

I’d brought the tablet but was not really in the video game mood. Even less so for TikTok, my new virtual home.

Then when I tried, the WiFi wouldn’t work. Turns out you had to somehow invoke the webpage where you can type in the password.

January’s is “friendly”. Aww.

Eventually they had to let me in. Put me in the same bed in the side ward they put me in when I had my first “blood in urine” incident.

Small world, innit.

Now I could really settle down to suffer. And suffer I did. So much was wrong at the same time. Not only was I goo logged, my head hurt, my muscles ached, my bones creaked, and I couldn’t think worth a damn.

Oh, and I was extremely tired.

But in too much pain and panic to sleep, of course.

The medical monkeys showed up to do their jobs. Taking blood, pee, vitals, an EKG, and so forth and so on.

And the head monkey, Doctor Lee, would pop up now and then to tell me the usually equivocating bullshit about not being sure what’s wrong with me yet. we will wait for the results of this burning of the cloven leaf to see what’s up.

Eventually they put me on IV antibiotics (ho hum) despite them not even knowing if it was viral or germ….al. The symptoms cleared up so yesterday afternoon they sent me home, still undiagnosed.

Naturally. This is Richmond General Hospital. I could show up with one leg ripped off and they still wouldn’t be able to explain the sudden issues I was having with my sense of balance and walking speed.

I didn’t spend the entire time in the side ward of the ER. Oh no.

Eventually they moved me to… a tiny office, barely bigger than the stretcher. I honestly lay for like half an hour in some sort of office museum exhibit.

No button to push if I need help. No urinal bottle if I need to pee. Just this office thing.

But of course, they didn’t leave me there. Eventually, a handsome young Caribbean man came to take me to my new home in a…. cubby.

Or possibly an alcove.

Some sort of space off to the side but still in a corridor, anyhow. It looked like it had housed some sort of display or exhibit at one time.

They just wheeled my stretcher into it and left me there. And there I would remain for the rest of my stay.

And it takes a lot for me to get angry about accommodations being below my dignity, but come ON people.

This felt personal!

More after the break.

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Something is missing

I can’t shake the feeling that I lost something this weekend.

Like I am dumber now. Some potent fragment of the ever shining star at my core was ejected into the interstellar void, never to return, and now I am… lesser.

And I am not sure that’s a bad thing.

Because while I definitely feel less mentally agile and strong, I always feel a lot more solid. More calm. More settled.

And a fuckton less neurotic.

So maybe it’s all for the good. Maybe I am a bit slower now but maybe I was too fast before. Maybe I am better off without so much surplus intellect constantly poking and plucking and prodding at my tender consciousness without mercy or restraint in the name of metaconsciousness.

That’s a broken system for sure. And another effect of whatever the fuck happened and is happening seems to be that I have much better access to my emotional core and can truly feel my deeper self and who he might even be.

And the deeper I can go, the deeper I can heal. Maybe all this cerebral falderal is just a side effect of a fundamentally psychological process and I will get back what I have lost when this all is over and I am whole.

Or maybe the long term effects of neglecting my diabetes are bored with messing with my feet and fingertips and everything else and are finally going for my brain.

Don’t want to get too shiny about this whole thing.

I will find out more tomorrow. I have a phone appointment with my GP, Doctor Chao, tomorrow, and I am looking forward to that.

Thing is, his office called me. So it has nothing to do with my hospital visit. It must be related to my CT scan from a week and change ago.

So, probably not great news.

I am currently holding on to the hope that this will all turn out to have been some sort of inflammatory nonsense that has done no permanent damage to my mind meat and once the swelling goes down, everything will go back to normal.

Including my ability to walk.

After all, they have looked for something wrong with my legs themselves and found nothing. It has to be something on the neurological level.

So who knows, maybe the right anti-inflammatory or the right antibiotic could clear all this shit up.

Or maybe I am on the fast track to Goober City. Enjoy me while you can, folks.

Because alive or dead, you might not have me too much longer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.