Current mood : very not good.

But I ain’t worried.

Had an appointment with Doctor Caswell, my diabetes/sleep apnea doc, earlier today.

And it wasn’t until I was sitting there, telling her all the ways in which I am a total failure as a patient, that all these repressed feelings of grief and fear and frustration and guilt surrounding my waning health and the part my apathy played in it hit me with tsunami force, shattering my mood.

I went there looking for her to put in a special authority request to get me that Freestyle Libre 2 glucometer that is the only one that has actually worked for me.

The month I was using that thing, my blood sugar was perfect. Getting the newer one now that there’s a chance that the government will pay for the sensors for it ($100 each, two a month) would make a radically huge impact on my life because I would finally be able to control my blood sugar in a way that I can handle.

She hadn’t heard that the government’s position re : the Libre had changed. So she was not sure my request would be approved.

But she Googled it and the government guidelines don’t mention which CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitor), otherwise known as “the new ones where you don’t have to poke your finger”, it will pay for.

So there’s at least a chance it will be approved. Finger crossed.

Back to my mental breakdown.

I think having to, as it were, confess to all these crimes against myself triggered a massive release of tension and fear that had built up in my mind regarding the state of my health and my own role in it.

Combined with all I wrote about apathy yesterday, I think this led to a real dam-burst of thawed out emotions at Doctor Caswell’s office.

And that is very, very much a good thing. In fact I’d like more of it, please and thank you. Whatever leads to real catharsis helps me enormously.

This glacier of frozen and suppressed emotion I am sitting on has to go. The more it melts, the more of myself I recover, and the more alive I ultimately feel.

Fuck being numb. I want to feel everything.

The more of my emotions I consciously experience, the better I feel. Every single bit of catharsis I have ever managed to wring out of my cold and broken soul had led directly to a permanent improvement in my mental health.

So you’re damn right I believe in catharsis. Like a dying man believes in his childhood religion, I believe.

It’s the only form of salvation I believe in. The only kind that has ever worked for me.

And if your organized religion enables this kind of emotional release, believe me when I say God bless you. Whatever God that is.

So no, I am not worried about myself, despite the fact that I feel pretty lousy right now. I know that this is only a passing symptom of my catharsis and that once I get enough sleep and hydration, I will feel a lot better.

And with that, it is time for a nap.

More after the break.

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The new depression

Otherwise known as Depression Lite, Depression 2.0, or Depressed, But Okay With It.

Because the thing is, I have all the symptoms of being depressed. Low mood (waaah) . feeling irritable (grr), loss of motivation (whatever), low energy (zzzz), trouble concentrating (wha?), memory issues (grr?), and so on.

But I don’t really care. It doesn’t upset me to be this upset. It’s like the depression is bad weather and I am just patiently waiting for it to pass.

Because I know it will. This mood is just some mental garbage my brain is burning now that the emotion has been spent, and when it is all over I will feel a lot better.

Perhaps even a little better than I did before the storm began.

One can only hope.

This means I am no longer afraid of the Big Bad Wolf of depression. It’s all bark and no bite. It can come and throw all its usual bullshit at me and I will see through all the tricks and the lies and the corruption of reason and deny it any input into my sense of what is really going on, and just let the neurochemical bullshit wash over me without interference or concern.

Like, whatever. I am staying out of it. My mind can do what it needs to do to heal itself and I will watch with detached interest like I am watching a dull parade.

Oh look, more majorettes. In deeply age inappropriate uniforms. How nice.

The less I resist, the faster I will heal. I have been like that caterpillar who thinks turning into a butterfly will mean its death for far too long. It’s time for me to stop fighting myself and let myself become whatever it is I need to become.

I have so much magic and wonderment all bunched up inside me, just waiting for me ot stop clenching down so hard on it and just let it propel me towards the sky just like Jack’s famous beanstalk, and be okay with finding out where I’m doing when I get there.

Whatever. Life is an adventure. One you can’t write in advance. The truth is that no amount of forethought can completely eliminate surprised and shock from your life, nor would you want it to if you could because that would make life ever so dull.

Besides, feeling safe is overrated. Especially when you don’t even know what the hell in your moribund life you could possibly be working so hard to be safe from.

The danger is long gone. There’s no monster hunting for us, no enemy troops to hide from, no bullies to evade. It’s perfectly safe to come out of the woods now.

Time to leave our makeshift shelter, lay down our puny weapons, return to the world of everyday people, and go home and get some god damned rest.

I won’t lie, I am truly scared of that big bright confusing overstimulating world out there and I fully intend to freak the fuck out about it at first.

But that will pass. And then I will look around and realize nothing scary is actually happening and it’s actually a very nice world once you get used to it.

Time, at long last, for a new adventure.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

SO I am probably not going to end up returning the incorrect RAM I bought.

Which means Amazon wins because they have successfully made it such a hassle to just freaking return something that I am giving up and investigating alternate routes.

I am going to give craigslist a try.

You know. This place.

Reminds me of something that still pisses me off to this day : the disappearance of the craigslist personals section.

It happened just as I was coming out of my shell and messaging guys on there and pondering doing hookups and all that good shit.

One day I was a happy little homo, messaging away and starting to strut my stuff, and the next the whole personals section was just gone, baby, gone.

According to this article, they were taken down after Congress passed an anti-child trafficking law that would have made companies criminally liable if someone misused their personals section for illegal purposes.

That’s criminally stupid. It’s not like there was a “for sale by parents” or “child sex services” section of the damned site. They already had ways to shut that shit down hard, one would presume. Nuking the entire personals section for every single craigslist in the world because of a theoretical liability for a very unlikely crime is utter madness and makes no sense at all.

Which is how I know that this law is not the real reason they shut it all down. That’s just the excuse they used to do what they had wanted to do all along.

The real reason they shut down the craigslist personals is that a lot of us freaky type people were communicating and hooking up with one another via said personals and that made the people behind craigslist very, very nervous.

Even though nobody was getting hurt. It was just consenting adults finding one another for private sexytimes fun.

But whenever us freaky type people find a place to relax, be ourselves, and let out freak flags fly, there are going to be those who find the mere presence of such open and free sexuality intolerable and those people will always find an excuse to shut things down.

It occurs to me that what all us freaks should have done at the time is invade all the other areas of craigslist and start using THEM as our perverted playground.

And if anyone complained, tell them well there USED to be a place where we could do all this far away from the public eye, but SOMEONE shut that down.

We furries can be as freaky as we want to be because we have our own little slice of the internet to ourselves and so we don’t make people feel like there are a bunch of wild eyed weirdos getting way too close to them.

Even then, we have to be vigilant and when necessary we have to self-regulate by coming down hard on those who refuse to play nice and not spook the herd.

That’s what dooms a lot of subcultures : the inability to punish bad actors.

Luckily, so far, we haven’t had that problem.

I hate excluding people as much as any weirdo, but sometimes, ya gotta.

More after the break.

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The high cost of not caring

Lately, it seems to me that the worst symptom of my depression in terms of actual damage to my life and self-interest is the apathy.

Because for me, the worst symptoms are never the sadness or the pain. It’s the nothing,. Emptiness. The void within.

The absolute and deadly silence of the devourer of all things.

The black hole at the center of my soul.

It’s the apathy that keeps me from doing all the things I should be doing, as well as a lot of things I want to be doing too.

Exercising. Keeping my blood sugar under control. Looking for ways to expand and improve my life. Trying to meet new people online. Going back to school.

The list goes on and on. All great ideas. All utterly doomed.

But the brutal truth is that I just don’t care. Not in any meaningful way. Not in a way that stands a snowflake’s chance on the surface of the Sun’s chance of happening.

Because I am just too god damned numb.

But not entirely numb, When I can stand to think about all those I should care about, I do feel a tiny tingle of something vaguely like motivation in some frozen corner of my mind, far away from the light.

But it dies right away because there is no way for it to actually reach the action part of my brain. There is way too much numb flabby paralyzed flesh in the way and it smothers the signal before it can draw its first breath.

So I don’t care. I don’t care that my body is falling apart. I don’t care that my life is passing me by while I rot in this decaying carcass of a life. I don’t care that when I turn 50 in May that will most likely be the last decade-ending year of my life.

Because there is no way I will live long enough to turn 60;.

Not unless someone kidnaps me and locks me in a cage and controls everything I do for a couple of years.

Hey, as long as the cage has my PC and WiFi, I’m cool.

Otherwise, if I remain in my own care, I will continue to slowly neglect myself to death until I die a very stupid and pointless death.

And I know I should care about that. I know that the certainty of a slow and painful death where everything about me breaks down till I am just another jabbering goober in a ward somewhere should be way more than enough to get me to change my ways. I know that if the looming specter of a long and painful death does not motivate me, then nothing on Earth will.

I know all of this very, very well.

I just don’t care.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I can’t believe I never realized how deeply the term “executive dysfunction” applied to me before I watched this video.

But of course I have serious executive dysfunction. That’s what all my “infinite hallway of infinite doors” is all about! And my difficulty with simply deciding to do a thing. And my tendency to agonize over even the simplest of decisions. And my comments about how my problem is that there are so many problems where there are too many variables for me to actually calculate a response and so I end up just going with my gut.

In short, my whole problem with decisions in general.

And of course, I have tons of experience with not being able to make myself do something. That’s basically been my life up till now. A whole raft of things I know I should do and that in the abstract I want to do but can’t force myself to do.

I think in my case at least, depression’s dirty rotten tricks are behind it. I think that in order to enforce stasis, depression overloads my mind with options and artificially makes all options seem equivalent in order to create a log jam in the cognitive portions of my mind that makes decision making impossible.

Got to figure out a way to shut THAT shit down. I know that I can be a very swift and decisive person when my depression isn’t in the way. I just have to tunnel through all that dead scar tissue in my mind to get to that point.

And he is absolutely right about video games dulling executive function. In fact, the games I love the most are the ones with a large number of quests that tell me step by step what I need to do.

The games I hate have open-ended goals with no instructions as to how to achieve them. The ones, in other words, that require executive function.

So yeah. My chronic indecision and my video game addiction are probably intimately linked, as is that whole fear of having to figure out what to do with myself.

Like, why is that so hard? There’s no wrong answers! Just do whatever appeals to you at that moment and don’t worry about whether you could have done better.

This is what’s wrong with the whole “live your best life” bullshit, by the way. Oh great, now life is a test and only a score of 100 percent is good enough.

Are you living your best life? Fuck, I don’t know. Probably not. But who is? Who wants to lie in bed at night wondering if their life could have been better that day.

Like I need that extra level of neurosis.

Anyhow, yeah, I definitely have serious and pervasive executive function issues. And like in the Two Kirks episode of the original Star Trek, the solution is to embrace my id and uses its primal energy to propel me into making decisions.

To go with my guy when the brain just ain’t working.

It’s better than nothing.

Repeat until believed.

More after the break.

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The tragedy of the fixed self

Let’s talk about the fixed sense of self as opposed to an open sense of self, shall we?

First, a quick review : the fixed sense of self is the caterpillar who thinks it is going to die when it becomes a butterfly. Because of its fixed and rigid definition of who and what it is, it actively resists all forms of change and thus blocks its own growth and healing.

The open sense of self is the wiser caterpillar who understands that the real self – the one that it has been since birth – will not die, just change shape. It embraces the truth of the self of eternal becoming that is always growing, changing, and evolving. It knows it will not be the same when it becomes a butterfly but that the essential self – the one that answers to its name – will be the same.

Hmmm. Not as quick as I would have liked but whatever. Moving on.

So how does the fixed self happen?

It happens when the self is under threat. This happens when strong external forces – like bullies, or abusers, or developmental deprivation – threatens to destroy one’s integrity of self and the self must rigidify in order to survive.

Which would be fine if it always went back to being fluid when the threat was gone, but some threats never truly fade away.

They become a permanent part of the self and thus the threat never goes away. The self loses the ability to accept change and invests heavily in being as rigid and inflexible as possible in order to weather life amidst the turmoil of mental illness.

No wonder it makes change feel like death. It was forged in a situation where the self was under threat of annihilation. In that situation, change WAS death.

But now the threat is gone. It’s now just a phantom of the mind, a deadly illusion. You can let go of your rigid sense of self and let yourself heal.

You can exit the paradoxical loop that longs for healing without change. By definition, if you get better, that will change you – it changes you from a sick person to a healthy one.

Ergo, I think a good starting point is for you, the sufferer, to visualize a healthier you. Imagine all the good things that will come to you when you’re better. Picture yourself with the dark and choking fog of mental illness removed from your mind so that all the good things about you can finally shine through.

And if all that is too much for you, just imagine yourself happy.

Then hold on to that feeling. Let it fill you and complete you. Wallow in that feeling like it’s a hot bath and let it soothe and cleanse you.

Then, when you feel strong enough, ask yourself – so how did I get here?

The answer may surprise you.

So I am watching one of those Reddit videos of which I am so fond when, pursuant to the discussion, someone refers someone to the r/transgendered subReddit.

And as soon as I read/hear r/transgendered, this golden joy filled me up inside and I started thinking about wonderful place that must be.

Then I stopped myself and said, “Uh oh. ”

Because like, what the fuck is up with that?

And I got scared, because the truth is… and please don’t take this the wrong way, folks… but I do not want to be trans.

I have nothing against others being trans but from my point of view right now, it seems like adding trans to my identity would bring on so much complication and confusion and hassle and pain that I just plain do not want to go there if I have a choice.

And I do. Because it turns out I am not really trans.

See, the first thing I did once I got a grip on myself was probe my psyche for trans thoughts by imagining various ideas and then see how they made me feel.

And as far as I can tell, I have no idea to become a woman. Neither socially or physically. I have never felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body. I have never felt a “wrongness” about my physical form.

I can’t stand “The View.”. The list goes on and on.

So I don’t think I am actually trans. But I will leave the door to the possibility that I actually am trans open a crack because it’s always possible that my trans-ness is buried under many many more layers of suppression and denial and one day it will pop up for real and I will have to deal with it.

But for now…. no.

That still leaves the question of why the mere mention of r/transgendered made me feel all sparkly inside for a moment unanswered, though.

It was definitely a feeling of liberation. Like suddenly I was free. Like something inside me suddenly opened up and all the old baggage fell away and I could finally feel the sun and breathe the fresh air again.

So if that didn’t signal that I am actually trans, what did it mean?

That’s a tough one. I can only guess.

Maybe it just triggered a general opening up of all that fog and tension and heavy emotional baggage inside. The mere idea of trans-ness was enough, in that moment, to activate an emotional potential that already existed in me.

If so, then damn, I want more of that because it was fucking amazing.

It could also signal a deep interior dissatisfaction with how I am expressing my sexuality in general. There is so much of my sexual being going completely unexpressed. Being able to bust out and be all flamboyant and vampy and fab-ulous would be divine.

But *sigh* I’ve still got this rotting whale carcass of a body to drag around.

Physicality is so depressingly arbitrary.

More after the break.

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So what am I?

Some people wonder who they are. I wonder what I am.

Because I am not like other humans at all. I have known that since my first day of school. Even then, I walked among my classmates like a bewildered anthropologist, desperately trying to figure out what all this tumult was about.

I had never experienced anything like the playground at school before. I had been to the playground around five blocks diagonal from my home, and enjoyed myself well enough even though I was basically alone in the crowd.

I didn’t play with the other kids much. I just did my own thing.

Even back then I was a loner. It just comes naturally to me I guess.

I just played on the slide and the swings and waded happily in the pool. The idea that I could have been trying to make friends with the other kids did not occur to me.

Again I must ask : what the fuck is/was wrong with me?

The schoolyard was different than the playground. It was way more crowded and loud and I had the constant feeling that I was missing a lot of what was going on.

That’s what being socially blind can do to a person.

Then the bullying started and the schoolyard became hell.

So I have never known what kind of beast am I. I knew I was incredibly intelligent. I knew I was incredibly lonely and scared on the playground and incredibly bored when in class. I knew that nobody seemed to like me, not even my teachers.

Despite that, I was ridiculously emotionally dependent on my teachers because they at least had to be kind of nice to me and I got along way better with adults than I did the other kiddies my age.

After all, the teachers always kind of reminded me of my mother.

I was friendly, but I didn’t know how to make friends. I was lonely, yet I couldn’t help being a loner. I was academically gifted, but nobody valued it. In fact, the teachers tended to see it as an annoyance because it made me harder to teach and nearly impossible to challenge.

And I was so independent that I challenged their authority just by sitting there. They could tell that I did not view them with awe like most kids.

Some did not take that well.

Dragging myself by the hair back to the point, the closest I have come to knowing what the hell I am came when I learned I was an INTJ.

When I read that description, it blew my mind. Personality tests were worthless to me up until that point. None of them produced anything that applied to me.

But the MBTI one, INTJ, described things about me that I had never told anyone. Things I thought were unique to me and me alone.

Suddenly, I knew there were other people like me.

That meant a lot to me.

And I imagine that’s true for a lot of us INTJ type people. We are a lonely and strange bunch, and finding out we are not, in fact, aliens can really help us out.

Extend that into the future and you can see why there are so many INTJ videos out there. We are desperate to understand ourselves and furthermore we need a regular fix of that feeling of not being alone.

At least, that’s what I get from it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Specifically, failure is no excuse to stop trying.

But don’t take that too literally

What I am talking about is depression, anxiety, and a far too easily triggered flight response. When that flight response is triggered, all we want and all we can think about is escaping the situation.

No matter how much damage that does to ourselves and our interests.

And the worst part is that the moment we do escape the situation, that response is immediately rewarded with a profound sense of relief as all that anxiety and tension disappears and we suddenly feel so much better.

Keep that up and giving up because your preferred response. Your go-to defense for absolutely all occasions and the number one reason your life sucks.

And all so you can get that sweet sweet relief as often as possible.

In fact, it’s a short drive from that to what I will call pre-failing, which is when you decide will fail without even trying first. On a deep level, you have determined, through flawed reasoning and based on no evidence, that you definitely WOULD fail IF you tried so why bother even trying?

And from there it’s a short slide into never trying anything new ever and thus being stuck in the same endless loop for years or even decades.

Congratulations, you’re a loser. You’re a loser because you give up too easily. You give up too easily because of your constant need to escape at the slightest sign of hurt, fear, pressure, or even just the urge to exceed your limitations.

The only cure for this, as far as I can tell, is hot emotion. Anger, passion, lust, inspiration, courage, and so on. Only these things can provide a countervailing force to all that inner collapse and surrender.

Only hot emotion can give you a reason to hang in there and NOT give up and give in like you usually do. It can give you strength you didn;t know you had and fuel the kind of resolve that lets you endure all the pain, fear, distraction, and all the other dirty tricks your mind uses to try to make you surrender until you pop through to the other side of all that and find that not only are the dirty tricks over, you feel a lot better about yourself and your ability to be effective in this mad world of ours as well.

For me, what works is to get pissed off. Fed up. The times in my life when I have made the biggest changes have all been when I was sick and tired of my situation and used that energy to fix the situation.

That is, more or less, how it’s supposed to work. And how it works for the mentally healthy, I can only assume.

But for those of us who fell down into a very deep well of fear, anxiety, depression, self-loathing, and so on, it’s a god damned revelation.

Taking refuge in the world of the mind like I have done for so long has never been a good long term strategy. Anything I need in order to be happy and fulfilled is out there in the real world, waiting for me to grab it.

And I am do tired of this do nothing life of mine.

I don’t want to be half dead any more. I want to live. even if that means living with pain and fear and all that other scary stuff.

So I am going to use my rage to burn my depression down to the ground.

No mercy for corrupt software.

More after the break.

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The fuckery is afoot

Starting with me.

Spuug came over to install my new RAM.

That didn’t last long because it turns out I bought the wrong kind. I bought DDR4 ram and my motherboard only takes DDR3.

And there is no way to bridge that gap short of buying a new motherboard. So I screwed up, and feel dumb.

Thing is, he told me it was DDR3 ram the previous time he was here and had the computer all naked with its case off.

I just forgot. And didn’t see the DDR4 in the product title amidst the data spurt of all the other info coming at me all at once.

So I am a dumbass. D’oh.

I am going to try to return the incorrect RAM. I got it from Amazon America, so that might cause complications.

At the very least, I am not going to get my $20 import fee back.

If I can’t return it, I am going to have to sell it. On eBay, I guess. But I also might put an offer up on craigslist to swap it for an equal amount of DDR3 RAM.

Think about it, the person I trade with is getting a free one generation RAM upgrade. It’s like swapping a PS3 for a PS2.

What the heck, it might work.

---

Turns out I can return it for a refund BUT I have to print out two labels in order to do so.

Fuck you, Bezos. Who even has a printer any more?

Felicity, that’s who. I will have to get her to print them out for me. Sigh.

Oh well, at least I will get a refund of most of my money (minus restocking fee, of course) and maybe even use said refund to get the RIGHT memory this time.

Tonight’s other featured fuckery is that I finally manage to sit down and have dinner at 10 pm and go to have some more of that delicious tzatziki I bought last week.

Only to find that my tzatziki is FREAKING FROZEN.

The top rack of our fridge gets coldness leaks (??) from the freezer sometimes and so random things end up partly frozen.

Normally it’s a beverage, which is no big deal Even kind nice. Like a crude Slurpee.

But this time it kinda sucks. Some things are not meant to be frozen!

Oh well. I am ordering more groceries tomorrow. If I can find room in my budget, I will buy myself some kind of treat to make myself feel better.

You owe me, world!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The other symptoms have faded a little, but not the feeling of malaise.

If anything, it’s gotten a little worse. I feel so tired and oppressed. Part of me wants to just sleep all day and night but I am way too stubborn and ornery for that.

I’m going to get up and have fun, god damn it, even if it kills me.

And I am getting tired of the other shit too. My lungs are heavy with gunk. My nose keeps running. I got ache and pains all through my body.

Man this sucks.

I really should take some insulin. It’s the best boost for my immune system I have. Plus I have felt a resurgence of that god damned Demon Hunger and a shot of insulin is the only way I know of to stop that shit cold in its tracks.

Figures that the only way to get me to take insulin is if not doing so hurts. If only my blood sugar irregularities were always this unpleasant.

I’d be a perfect patient.

But they aren’t. Whatever symptom of high blood sugar I am experiencing most of the time have been my normal for so long that I honestly don’t experienced them at all, let alone seeing them as some kind of problem.

I try to hold on to the memory of the times when my blood sugar was normal – like when I was in the hospital and therefore under the care of a dietician.

But that doesn’t help because I was sick for other reasons then, so I can’t exactly use those times as a source of memories of how good it felt to be “clean”.

That’s how I felt for that one golden month where I had the Freestyle Libre up and running and could therefore actually actively control my blood sugar – clean. Like my circulatory system had been gummed up like blocked sewer and getting my blood sugar under control had cleaned everything out.

And that did feel fairly good, I suppose. But not nearly good enough to get me to change my lifestyle to keep it that way without the Libre’s help.

So back when the government wouldn’t pay for the Libre sensors, and the fucking things were $100 each and only lasted two weeks, I was screwed.

Well, back to dying, I guess.

But the thing is, I really did have rock solid perfect blood sugar when I was in the hospital, and it wasn’t due solely to the lack of sugar in my diet because I almost never have any sugar in my diet at home either.

I wonder if it was the increased amount of vitamin B12 in my diet. Every meal had meat in it and often some dairy too, even if it was just a little carton of milk.

Right now I make sure I have one meal a day with B12 in it. Some kind of animal product, either meat or dairy. But perhaps that’s not nearly enough.

Honestly, it would be possible to have something B12 laden with every meal if it wasn’t for my physical limitations and the dietary limitations they enforce.

Like I could totally get myself canned soup, chili, stew, and so on but I have no way to transport it from the kitchen where I would be heating it up to my bedroom to eat it.

I’d need a fairly large Thermos with a VERY good seal.

And there would still be the issue of having to wait for the microwave to do its thing. But I could do the rest of the setup while that happened.

Point is, I could probably figure something out. It would probably further bloat my already plump grocery budget, but what the hell.

Beats dying. Most days, anyways.

More after the break.

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Further thoughts on food

I could get a microwave for my room.

It would not be a simple task, though. I have no idea where I would put it. Microwaves create a lot of heat so you can’t just stick one on the beside table and run it.

Maybe I would be better off with a hot plate. No, that’s even worse. Hmmm.

I certainly won’t eat my chili or chicken noodle soup at room temperature. And I really want to be able to have hot meals.

As opposed to living off cold bologna and cheese sandwiches like I do now.

I could look for more things like this tzatziki I am eating. Dairy based, so there’s plenty of good B12 in there. And zero prep time.

I got tzatziki, I got Triscuits, I got baby carrots, I’m a happy man.

Too bad I do not, in general, like yogurt. Plus the flavoured yogurts are almost always loaded with fucking sugar.

I hate it when they take a healthy food and fuck it up. Like what they did with oatmeal. Pretty much turned it into a dessert.

And don’t get me started on the drinkable desserts Starbucks calls “coffee”. What a scam. They get away with selling the equivalent of two hot fudge sundaes to people because it’s technically still “a coffee” and everyone drinks coffee, right?

We have this whole cultural edifice around coffee being a normal, productive thing that everybody drinks throughout the work day. It’s so prevalent that every office has to both have a coffee room and designated times of the day allotted for the drones to go drink more profit juice.

It’s objectively very bad for people, and yet, it’s now an institution and there would be blood on the streets if you made people go back to an actual coffee.

Eventually they won’t even bother with actual coffee any more. They will just put artificial coffee flavour in there and nobody will notice the difference.

Hmmm. Apparently I’ve been carrying around bitter thoughts about Starbucks for quite a long time. Them and the whole dessert-ification of coffee.

I guess bad nutrition still pisses me off sometimes, even though I am far from being a health food fanatic.

But eat some fucking vegetables, people.

I promise I won’t tell your parents.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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Well I feel a little bit better than the last time I wrote for you nice people. Probably because I’ve gotten plenty of sleep since then.

In fact I’ll probably go right back to sleep when I finish this half of the day’s writing.

That’s how freaking drained I feel. Guess my body is really going all out against this infection. Good for it.

Beats the hell out of ending up with pneumonia again.

Speaking of which, it’s move into my nose and lungs now. Runny nose, scratchy feeling in throat and lungs. Lovely.

Even more annoying is the mental drain. I am finding it so very hard to concentrate right now. My mind wanders all over the place like a dog deciding where to poop.

Still have my ability to dream up gross imagery, though, it seems.

Well it all comes down to pooping in the end, anyway. When you think about it,.

Anyhow, as a result of this brain drain, the words are coming pretty slow right now. I’m having to play that fun game where I repeatedly have to drag my attention back to the screen after it wanders off on a series of tangents yet again.

I had to do it three times just while writing that last sentence.

I’ve started to cough, too. Dunno whether that’s due to fluid in my lungs or my post nasal drip reversing and dripping into my throat instead.

Gross, I know. But all too real.

I feel a little guilty because I would rather be writing about something more in-depth and interesting for y’all but talking about my symptoms is about the best I can do right now.

I promise to return to my usual brand of navel diving real soon now.

It’s a nice sunny day out. Reminds me of all those times as a kid when I would stay home sick from school only to feel better by the afternoon just in time for the weather to turn gloriously sunny and nice.

We could have been in the grips of a hurricane in the morning with me in a frigging coma but by afternoon it would be postcard perfect out and I would be ready to turn cartwheels on the front lawn.

But no dice, because we had a rule that said that there was no going outside on a day you stayed home sick from school.

Perfectly reasonable. If you were really sick, you shouldn’t go outside, because there’s extra germs out there. And if you were faking it, you would be punished for it by having to stay inside and see all that lovely child enticing sunshine out there. knowing you weren’t allowed to go enjoy it.

Reminds me about old fashioned references to kids “playing hooky” and having to dodge the truancy officer.

Because apparently back then, kids were so prone to not bothering to show up for school that the school district had to hire a full time employee to round them up.

Boggles the mind. I can’t imagine decided to just…. not go to school. I would have gotten into so much trouble!

It really seems to me like, despite what old people have always thought, kids were a hell of a lot more wild and badly behaved back in the old days.

And yet society was more conformist and oppressive back then.

Almost like there’s some kind of connection. Hmmm.

More after the break.

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On knowing too much

We (Joe, Julian, and I) just finished watching the latest episode of Picard and it got me to thinking about what it means to be a smark.

That’s a portmanteau of “smart” and “mark” and in this sense, it means to be someone who consumes media with the knowledge of how it all works.

For example, in the episode we just watched, the ship and crew are in a seemingly no win scenario and it looks like the ship will be crushed by gravity and everyone will die.

But of course you know that’s not true because then the show would be over and the studio would lose a host of beloved characters and everyone would quite rightfully be extremely angry and possibly storm the studio.

We Star Trek fans are a passionate lot.

It’s not just a show to us.

Anyhow, what knowing that kind of thing means is that for me, there was no suspense. I knew they’d be fine. I never felt like there was any real danger.

But I know it’s not that way for everybody. Some people can fully suspend disbelief and let a show or a book or a comic completely become their reality temporarily and not have the sort of media savvy cynical Gen X snarky POV that I do.

And I envy those people. They must get so much more out of media than I do.

But I know I could never be like them. I was this cynical when I was still a child. I knew everything would be fine at the end of an episode of Scooby Doo or Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends or even Family Ties.

Even back then, if a character said, “We’ve only got one chance!”, I said “Well then it will work. ” to myself.

Because the truth is, analysis and looking for patterns is my mode of being. I can’t stop doing it any more than I can stop breathing. I analyze, therefore I am.

And while this does give me a very deep understanding of the world and how it works, I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to be ignorant and innocent for a while.

I’ve always known too much and seen too much for my own good. I saw through people and knew what they feeling via empathy and analysis and often knew more about them than they knew themselves from far too early an age.

Because this wide open mind of mine offers absolutely no shelter from the harsh realities of life. At some point, perhaps out of some deep seated paranoia, I chose crystal clarity over comfortable shadedness, and I have lived in the harsh light of such unguarded truth for my entire life.

I chose to pursue the truth with no regard for my own emotional well being.

And that’s a very harsh choice to have made from such a tender age.

I could honestly do with a healthy dose of self-sustaining delusion right now.

No wonder that when I imagine myself lost on that Midnight Tundra, I am always naked.

I’ve been naked before the truth my whole life.

And I am really fucking cold.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still awesome. Still feelin shitty.

And I can feel the temptation to just give up and slump back into self-loathing growing. Like I said yesterday, feeling like you are as bad as you feel is so much easier than maintaining the distinction and I am quite new to the latter.

Plus, I just realized, there is evil’s best friend, the unwillingness to face how unjust something is. If I full accept that I am an amazing person who feels awful, then I am left dealing with the truth of how monumentally unfair that is.

And that’s a hell of a lot to deal with.

Again, it is so much easier to either pretend that everything is fine or just ignore the entire issue outright.

This is the exact same phenomenon that kept things like spousal abuse and child rape a dark secret for so long and let horrible people get away with these crimes with almost total impunity for many decades.

You could believe your kid, and have to go to the police and swear out charges against someone the whole community loves and respects and thus violating the social pecking order in a way that will turn your entire community against you and destroy the lives of you and your family all for the sake of charges that stand no chance of actually hurting the perpetrator of the abuse, or….

…you could tell your kid to stop making up dirty stories.

Similarly, for me to truly face the injustice of my depression head on is to face the fact that I have been the victim of a terrible disease that has robbed me of my entire adult life for 25 plus years.

Not that I ever thought I deserved it, exactly. It would be more accurate to say that I never thought I deserved better.

It’s a fine distinction but an important one.

Things get pretty complicated when a chemical imbalance is forcing you to think things that don’t make any sense.

It’s the same thing with my tragic childhood. What kept me from realizing how bad it was for many years was that if I did, I would have to face how horribly wrong the whole thing had been and what was I going to do then?

Put a contract out on my parents?

And even after that wall came down, it didn’t come down completely. In fact, I don’t think it came down completely until quite recently and I am almost 50.

Mental note : make plans for 50th birthday party.

Top of the list of activities : not killing myself.

So dealing with the truth of my depression on an emotional level is not going to be easy.

But I refuse to give in. This time I am going to defend my feisty new outlook no matter what, and continue to insist on making it clear that just because I feel bad does not mean I am bad.

In fact, I think I might be coming down with something.

And how silly would it be to hate yourself for a failure of your immune system?

More after the break.

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Smell my dairy air

It’s a joke. A pun. Say it out loud if you don’t get it.

Warning ; it’s extremely immature.

Well I am definitely coming down with something, or fighting off something, or something like that.

I definitely feel worse than usual. Weaker, somewhat dizzy, and way more tired than usual. And that classic “under the weather” feeling of malaise.

Tomorrow I have Wound Care at 9:15 am. If things don’t get worse before that, then I can still go. But if they do, well, I may have to stay home.

Which I do not want. I don’t want to have to wear these bandages for another damned week. Plus there’s an errand I need to take care of on the way home.

It’s that time in this disabled person’s month when I have used up all the cash on the card I bought at the beginning of the month so I need Julian to go buy me another so I can buy my groceries this Friday.

Then again, this mysterious malaise of mine might just vanish all of a sudden, just like it’s done many times before.

Thus my oft-repeated theory that I have an infection that my immune system can subdue but not eliminate so it keeps coming back once a month or so.

Like a cartoon supervillain. “Drat! Doctor Virus got away AGAIN!”

A virus would explain why I have been so tired and out of it lately. It just took a while for me to gather enough evidence to show that this was not just my usual state of depression having a peak in intensity.

Such is the life of the scientifically minded but chronically ill.

It also explains why I kept wondering if I had taken my antihistamines for the day because my nose was running all the time.

And boy, are its nostrils tired!

I happen to think the anklet looks quite stylish,.

Seriously though, I do feel quite crappy. I just need to fix in my mind that I did nothing to deserve this and that I am therefore currently a victim of injustice in the broadest possible sense of the word.

And that it’s okay to admit to myself and the world that I feel terrible. I don’t have to pretend that nothing bothers me or that I am tough and stoic,.

Because I am neither.

What it means is that I now get to explore something with which I am unfamiliar – self-pity, also known as feeling sorry for yourself.

I’ve never felt that way before. I guess I just figure whatever happens, happens, and whether or not I deserve it doesn’t really matter.

But that is the diseased thinking of an undefended ego. Whether or not you deserve what happens is vitally important to your sense of self.

It all comes down to justice. Even an infant knows to cry when it is in pain so that someone will come remedy the situation.

But I was the baby left to cry. So I guess I gave up on that.

I didn’t deserve that, either.

Jesus Christ my life has been a sad one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I applied for three different gigs on UpWork this morning.

Didn’t really think about it and I definitely didn’t plan it. I just did it. Started scrolling through my job feed, saw some I liked, and submitted a proposal for them.

One person wants me to write a children’s book and get this : the main character is a fox! What are the odds?

So you can bet I pounced on that like… well…

The story is quite sweet and charming and has some good lessons in it that kids can take into the future with them, and so I really meant it when I said I would love to do it.

It’s like the gig was made with me in mind! I’ve been a fox for decades, I am a superb writer, and I have always wanted to write for children.

So I want it bad.

Another job also seems made for me because they want gamers writing about gaming. The prompt was to write about your three favorite games and why you like them, along with proof of how many hours you have played them.

And it took a lot of digging, but I was eventually able to find a URL on Steam that would lead to my list of games I’ve played the most and how many hours I’ve played them.

So that took care of proof.

Now I have never been able to list my Top Ten favorite whatevers. I have simply experienced far too much to choose. My internal list of things I have seen or done or heard or played is miles long.

Trying to rank those against one another is like trying to sort a million card deck all at once, at least for me.

So instead, I chose the game I love the most (Witcher 3, with expansions), the game I have played the most (Elder Scrolls Online, 1,670 hours), and to prove I have mad gamer cred, an incredibly obscure game (Etherlords 2) that I absolutely love.

That’s a deep cut, yo. To the point where for a while in the 2010s the game basically did not exist. Could not get it anywhere.

I started to wonder if I had hallucinated it.

Luckily it made its way to Steam eventually. And I bought it, natch.

Now if only I could uncover proof that Psychic Dust existed…. it was a really good game and it’s like it never existed!

But I’m not crazy. I’m not. Nope.

The last of the three jobs is a ghostwriting gig, so I can’t say much about it.

I am okay with ghostwriting. Not the ideal gig but work’s work. I’m just not going to invest my heart and soul in it. It would be a completely professional gig, not something I am doing to express myself.

I’ll still enjoy writing it, but I am not investing in it emotionally.

If the client is happy and the money comes through, I’m happy.

More after the break.

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The role of faith in business

And I am not talking about anyone’s religion.

No, what I am talking about is the sorts of decisions a business might make that you can’t make a solid business case for and that cannot be guaranteed to work, but you do them anyway because you have faith that if you treat the customers well, they will come to you for your product and/or service.

Like paying for comfier chairs in your waiting area. Will that generate enough new revenue to cover the costs? Probably not. Will it help in attracting new customers? Not by itself, no. Will it get us press coverage? No, no news day is THAT slow.

But it will make things nicer for people and make them feel like the business cares about them and doesn’t just see them as walking wallets or sheep to shear.

It also lends a sense of warmth to what might otherwise be a sterile and alienating waiting room environment, and thus will help our customers relax and feel welcome.

And that is something that the corporate hiveminds cannot do. There is no such thing as corporate warmth. Too many of the moving parts of a corporation are cold hearted and narrow minded bean counters who absolutely cannot handle concepts like warmth and friendliness and being welcoming in any kind of real way.

They can try to fake it, but they will fail miserably and only end up creating an Uncanny Valley nightmare of fake emotion and forced conviviality.

Thus, there is still room for small independent businesses. It’s not a LOT of room, but it can still be done.

I know that I would go to a business that makes me feel warmly welcome over some heartless corporate big box with slightly better prices every single time.

And obviously, corporate hiveminds can’t do anything on faith. They need proof that the thing will work, is working, or has worked in the past. They want track records, business cases, feasibility studies, and so on,.

My late grandfather ran his business on that kind of faith. He was the single owner of the business and thus made all the decisions himself, and he would never have bothered with a business case or a cost benefit analysis or any of the rest of the things a corporate hivemind excretes and consumes.

He just treated people right, and the people in my home town were intensely loyal to him and his business as a result. He did what he thought was the right thing and made sure to have what people wanted and he supported a family of six that way.

I miss him. He was a good man. Quiet but with a deep and unshakable integrity and great inner strength that you could feel when you were around him.

And his store will always be my go-to example of business done right.

And you can take your corporate hucksterism and shove it up your ass.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling kinda depressed right now, so it’s the perfect time to take out my shiny new puncture repair kit and learn how to keep this newly minted big ego of mine afloat even when I am feeling down.

For starters, it shouldn’t make the slightest difference. An awesome person is still an awesome person even when they are sick. Even if they get sick fairly often.

And that’s all my depression is : a sickness. A disease. A chronic aberration of the mind which causes delusions of one’s interpretation of reality that makes things seem quite different than they are in reality.

Its symptoms, therefore, are as irrelevant to one’s value as the flu or the common cold.

Depression lies. That’s all it does. It lies about everything because it distorts everything, tilting it toward the negative any way it can.

It’s hidden the truth of my radiant amazingness from me for a really long time. Worse, when it couldn’t do that, it actually convinced me that it was a bad thing!

Had me bitching all the time about how hard it is be so smart. And while all those concerns are legit, they should not get in the way of also appreciating and enjoying just how god damned smart I am.

And nice. And funny. And adorable. The list goes on and on.

And yet, somehow, this disease of mine convinced me that no matter how long my list of assets grew, it was never enough.

Of course it seemed like it was never enough – depression had its thumb on the scale!

So ya know what? I’m still an awesome guy even though I feel like shit.

I AM NOT HOW I FEEL. Mood is meaningless relative to self-worth. You’re the same person no matter how you feel, or how the world feels to you at that moment. And nothing you feel can change that.

Don’t get me wrong – thinking you are as bad as you feel is easier. There is a tension and a drain involved in maintaining the difference in your mind. There is a very important wall that needs to be maintained with a constant (tiny) input of energy and depression will try to use that to convince you to give in.

But it can’t make you do it. You always have to choice to just hang in there no matter how much pressure and/or pain it applies to you, all you have to do is focus on how much you hate your depression for everything it’s ever done do you and how much you would hate to let it win and you can power through.

Or at least that’s what works for me.

And the great thing is that depression has intensity but no endurance. So if you hold out long enough, it will give up, and suddenly you will feel a whole lot better.

And you will have proven to your depression that it’s not in charge any more.

And that will make the whole thing worth it.

More after the break.

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Hate and spite

They have their uses.

I know that’s not a very “liberal” thing to say, and that’s part of the problem. Liberals of the modern era are afraid of strong emotions of any kind but especially ones related to anger. There is a sort of mutual puddle of niceness that modern liberals like to soak in with other liberal minded folk and enjoy the shared smugness of knowing just how much nicer they are than everyone else.

Well fuck that. That shit is toxic to the cause. Getting angry as hell might not be “nice” but it gets shit done. And it sends the message that you won’t let the bastards on the right push you around.

Sometimes in order to fight for what is right, you have to go full reptile brain and make your opponents afraid of you. Every conservative pundit and politician should be just as afraid of what you are going to say as you are of what they are going to say or preferably a hell of a lot more scared.

The Americans need to take a hint from parliamentary politics because our system creates an opposition that is constantly seeking to undermine and undercut the party in power on all fronts, and to do that they are constantly looking for weaknesses in the majority’s policies and statements.

They do this not out of duty but because our system dangles the ultimate prize in front of their greedy little noses : in theory, they could actually bring down the government via a vote of no confidence and force an election – one they might even win.

Like a lot of British things, it seems more civilized on the surface but it’s actually far more savage than American politics. The opposition is on a mission to politically assassinate the party in power and that really keeps them on their toes.

Plus we have the biggest gem in the parliamentary crown ; Question Period. It guarantees that the party in power must answer the questions of the opposition. Silence is not an option. It would be political suicide in our system because it would let the opposition say whatever the hell they want, unopposed.

Now imagine if Donald Trump and his traitorous cronies had needed to face direct questioning from the Democrats every single day.

And imagine if the Democrats could cause his government to fall if they got enough public sentiment turned against Trump.

He wouldn’t have lasted a year.

I mean, talk about losing confidence in his ability to govern.

I see that I have once more completely threadjacked myself. I set out to write about hate and spite are a big part of my recent uptick and ended up talking about politics and systems of government instead.

Oh well. The whole point of this blog is to get thoughts out of my head and into the world, and I have done that.

So what if I didn’t end up where I intended to go?

I still went somewhere worthwhile.

Thank you all for putting up with my literary meanderings.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.