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.

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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.