The trash fire, that is. Turns out I got way more trash to burn than I thought.

I’ll jut shovel it on top and keep going, then.

---

Wake me up inside

Mandatory video link :

I am well and truly sick of living in the cold and the dark.

It’s all about the numbness. That deadly chill that detroys everything alive inside me is just a manifestation of the neurochemical reality of my incredibly overactive parasympathetic nervous system seeking and destroying all my adrenaline.

Result : midnight tundra abounds. And I wander endlessly over its frozen plains, naked and alone and scared and abandoned to my fate by a world that never wanted me in the first place and doesn’t have a place for me even now.

Guess I’ll have to make my own. . Even if I have to hack it from the permafrost myself.

Being dead inside is a lousy way to deal with anxiety. Maybe one cause the other : anxiety burns out certain receptors in the brain and the lack of input from those dead receptors i what makes someone like me feel so cold and dead inside.

Part of the reason I throw myself into these enormous emotional expectorations periodically, besides simple catharsis, is that a deep part of my mind is desperately trying to jump start my flatlining amygdala and get omething like a full and normal emotional cycle going for once.

Instead of this deep storage morgue of a mind I have which allows my superconducting brain to operate at peak efficiency but at the small cost of killing me.

Live organism can’t think like I do, I guess. Only us zombie brains can do it.

Does this mean I would have to give away all my magic gifts in order to finally be able to walk in the sun? I hope not.

I don’t know who I am without those gifts. They are all I have to offer the world. When you grow up gifted, the only way you can make peace with how weird this makes you compared to your classmates is to, on some level, decide it’s the GOOD kind of weird, the kind that makes you special in a GOOD way, and that means you end up identifying with those gifts pretty strongly.

I must have other assets. A kind and gentle personality, for instance, and great charisma and charm, and those have nothing to do with how smart I am.

Pretty sure that, without the magnum sized IQ, I would have ended up being a salesman or product rep or the like.

But deep down, I feel like my intellectual gifts are the justification for my existence and without them I would not deserve to live.

Harsh, I know. But true nevertheless.

And I know I am capable of great things. Things nobody else could ever do, things most people wouldn’t even consider possible, and they aren’t…. for them.

But I’m more than a little magical, and someday, my spells will dazzle the entire world.

I just have a lot of psychological bullshit to shift before I get there.

Anyone want to pic k up a shovel and help?

More after the break.

---

Wahed ashore, barely alive

I hate it whensleep fucks me up like this.

Because I feel truly bloody awful right now. I feel dizzy and naseous and terribly disoriented and my whole body ache in a rather wprrying way and overall I feel like I wasjhed asho0re after a particularly nasty shipwreck and now I have collaped on ome lonesome beach and I couldn’t move even if omething was trying to eat me.

That turned weird at the end.

I know what the problem is. I am dehydrated AF. Despite my warnings to myself, my hydration has in no way kept up with the increased demand brought on by summers’ heat and now I am reaping what I so stupidly sowed.

In an attempt to rectify the situation, I’ve gone through about 1.5 L of water in less than five minutes. Just drank it all down in big fat gulps like it was nothing.

That pretty uccinctly verifie my dehydration diagnosis. Problem is, now I need to get u to get more water and I really don’t feel up to it.

I will nurse this can of diet A&W root beer for now, and hope it give me the trength I need to get my ass to the bathroom and back for a refill from the sink.

This will involve once more ignoring my clogged toilet because I am too tired and messed up to do the necessary plunging.

My life is so fun. And filled with so much dignity and pride.

Blogging like this is about all I can manage at the moment. And even doing that makes me feel like I am trying ot ice kate uphill against a headwind.

But I carry on. Must do words. Keep on typing. Collapse later.

It was the trip to the kitchen and back that really did me dirty. When I woke up, I was already feeling really shitty, but I forced myself to go to the kitchen to grab an apple and a can of pop anyway.

Kind of wish I had gone with my first instinct and just stuck with whatever food I have lying around in my bedroom because that little trip made thing much, much worse.

Dammit, I hate it when my worse instincts turn out to be right. It’s not fair! I am uppoed to be rewarded for doing the right thing, not punished.

I mean. doesn’t the universe know anything?

Don’t make me ask to see the manager!

But that’s the thing : life ain’t fair because there’s nothing to MAKE it fair. There is no natural justice in the universe.

That means that if we want life to be fair, we have to make it that way ourselves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well this is it. Today is my 50th birthday. I have officially been alive on Planet Earth for half a freaking century. And have precious little to show for it.

Speaking of which, let’s get this trash fire burning.

Let’s start with my litany of self-loathing : Here I am, 50 years old, and I have never :

1. …had a full time job
2. …supported myself financially
3. …lived on my own
4. ..been in a relatiohip
5. …been in love
6. …had any serious dates
7. …been much of anywhere
8. ..done much of anything besides play video games

..and so forth and so on.

And when I look back at all my wasted years – almoit all 30 years of my adult life so far, the prime years of my life – what I feel the most is grief.

Like a part of me, a very big part, has died and can never come back. All my best years poured down the drain by mental illness and moral cowardice and all the rest.

Mine is a classic case of failure to launch, and I am still lying there on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, forgotten and disused.

So consider this blog post to be, in part, a funeral. Today we lay to rest all the Michael John Bertrands who might have been had my soul not been crushed when my parents took me and my brother David out of college.

That hurt me so bad that it’s been 27 years and I still haven’t recovered.

So fare thee well in Fiddler’s Green, all the Michaels that might have been. We hardly knew ye even as possibilities, ;et alone realities.

I could have been so many things. A therapist. A comedian. A science fiction writer. A television writer. Pretty much any kind of writer besides technical.

And don’t give me that, “you could till do all those things! You’re not dead yet! All you have to do i pick which dream to follow then work incredibly hard towards that one dream and then some day, you can find out you don’t really like it after all!

Not that I’m bitter.

Besides, we are here to bury the past, not plan the future. Today we gather to remember all the good men that might have been but are now gone forever.

I wish I could have saved you all, other Michaels. I wish I had been strong enough and wise enough and sane enough to pull my head out of my ass, get my shit together, and actually focus on getting myself out of this hellhole once and for all.

I wish that now, too. But all I can do is keep banging my head against the wall of my insanity until it crumbles.

So fire up the bagpipes, boys. It’s time to put this old boy to rest.

May pretty flowers bloom where you lay, old friend. And may you oon find the strength to come out of your warren and stop hiding.

Frustrated with myself

Well, while I am venting my negatives, I might a well do the most recent ones.

I am pissed off at myelf for suandering this day. Your 50th birthday is supoed to be a big deal that you celebrate with a big party or at the very leat have some guests over o you can do the whole cake and candle thing.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday oh fuck it.

But I have done jack hit to celebrate my big 5 0. No celebration, no special treat for myself, no birthday cards. I haven’t even logged on to Tapestries to oak up all the birthday attention from my friends.

And why have I not done these things? Because I am too much of a limp noodle to arrange any of it, let alone carry it out.

Making this day special for myself would have required the eact kind of focus and drive that I find so very hard to summon up.

So I did what I always do : another thrilling day of video games and sleep.

Really living the high life over here. If you can call this living.

Or a life.

And I am so damned tired of being like this, all wimpy and passive and unable to do even the simplest of thing for myself.

Like I was saying to Doctor Costin today, I don’t want to be this way. I want to be trong and happy and healthy and connected with the rest of humanity.

I want to be a part of things, not always apart from things.

But there is something deeply and fundamentally broken in me that keeps me from being able to do much of anything on my own initiative.

For example, the one birthday thing that happened today was a phone call from my mother, and obviously she initiated that.

Hell, I haven’t even been able to come up with any ideas as to what the hell I want for my birthday. Not a single god damned thing.

Why? Because I am completely incapable of knowing what I want. Or need, for that matter. That’ how low my vitality ha ebbed.

I can’t even bring myelf to want things. Wanting takes too much energy.

So now I feel like I have failed my friends and myself by not being able to come up with anything, even though they asked almost a week ago.

Even just writing this section of the blog entry for today has exhausted me. What I really need right now is a long nap, but because I only got around to eating/blogging at fucking 10 pm, I will only have like half an hour before midnight rolls around and it’s time to be social with Le Gang.

And I feel like crap. I was hoping food would perk me up, but nope. it just transformed feeling ill and hungry to feeling ill and full.

In short, happy fucking birthday to me.

I just wish I’d been alive to see it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling cranky again, this tine from the pain and dizziness associated with getting up and getting my food together so I can eat lunch.

At 5:30 PM. Le sigh.

I guess I am jut getting sick and tired of being sick and tired again. My life is so much harder than it used to be and I can’t always stop myself from thinking about that.

That’s a shitty way to go through life anyhow, “dealing” with things by just not thinking about them. I am better off if the things I need to deal with make pests of themselves until I gave them their due.

I’m positive that’s how it works for people with normal emotions.

Normal, healthy emotions, with instincts and drives that compel them to do things they might not understand or be able to justify but which contributes to their development a whole, healthy human beings.

You know. Weirdos like that.

The very idea of doing things without knowing why blows my mind. I recognize it as often being the smarter way to go in terms of healthy development and yet I still cannot imagine myelf doing it.

I have never been able to accept “just because” as an answer.

It’s all part of the curse of needing things to make sense.

Wanting things to make sene sounds sensible on the surface of it but it is actually brutally limiting because it means you can’t learn things until you understand them.

And a lot of very important things just don’t work that way. They have to be absorbed first and then understanding comes later, when you have digested the info.

This includes a hell of a lot of lessons about how to live. There are a lot of people in the world who aren’t nearly as “smart” as I am who nevertheless know a hell of a lot that I don’t because they know how to be happy.

They know how to take care of themselves on an emotional level and that is precisely because they act on their emotions without having to understand why.

That way. their souls can get their needs met directly, without the god damned stupid rational mind asking a lot of inane and unhelpful questions.

Some people know better than me. And they can’t always prove it. Wisdom and articulacy do not necessarily coincide.

I feel like I have gone about everything wrong in my 50 years minus a day. My whole pseudo-rational outlook was fundamentally flawed and the fact that it took me this long to realize that is just proof of how wrong my entire mindset has been.

And still is, really. I’m working on it.

It’s such a hard transition to make. Makes the idea of abandoning wisdom and becoming another obnoxious egotistical intellectual on the internet instead seem appealing, in a tongue in cheek way.

“I’m incredibly angry for reasons I utterly refuse to examine and instead blame it all on… um… that guy. ” Points to random person in crowd. “SCREW YOU, THAT GUY!”.

More after the break.

Oh right, more words

Guess it’s time to make with the word again.

I don’t mind admitting I’m not feeling it right now. All I really want to do is go back to lying down in the dark with the fan pointed at my forehead and some New Age relaxation type music off of YouTube playing on the tablet so I can mellow out.

Ya know, stuff like this :

Finally, someone realized that the boringness of New Age music had a therapeutic use!

That’s only half a joke. If the above “music” was actually interesting, it might keep you awake because you’d be waiting for the next good bit.

But you know there is no good bit coming. It will be the same slow progression of chords with just enough variation to keep it from bing predictable throughout.

And some of these vids run for over 10 hours!

Nobody could possibly sit there at their synthesizer keyboard,. slowly and regularly changing which note they are holding down, for ten hours.

I give it three hours tops and that would require some truly outstanding weed.

So there has to be a major amount of copying and pasting involved. It’s not like average listener will notice if it’s the same exact 20 minutes of chords repeated over and over.

The very act of listening closely enough to notice that would render the listener’s mind too flaccid and mellow to care.

Kidding aside, I am uite fond of the stuff. It helps me get to sleep, or to that near sleep state I keep trying and failing to explain to people where I am completely relaxed and not really taking input from my environment and my breathing is regular and in all ways I am apparently asleep…. but I am, in fact, still slightly awake.

It’s like if sleep was the surface of a pond, I am a bug hovering right above it.

I wonder if I developed this strange ability as a way for my mind to get some of the benefits of sleep, especially the physical ones, without having to put itself through the trauma of my sleep apnea.

For the likes of me, sleep taketh away more than it giveth a lot of the time.

It is a lovely state of being, anyhow. Extremely mellow and relaxed and groovy. tenion jut melts right off me and when I emerge from this state I feel refreshed.

It can only go so far, though. The body might feel better but the brain still needs its REM cycles so I am still going to need some actual sleep.

And that means getting my ass kicked by sleep apnea yet again.

I need a way to sleep without having to breathe. Or a way to breathe in my sleep without having to strap a mask to my face and trust it to keep me breathing.

I still get the cold sweats just trying to imagine trusting that fucking thing again.

I am so programmed against myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Trying not to get bummed out about having to face three long hot months of summer.

As long as I remember to step up my hydration, I should be OK. As long as I keep sweating, I can keep cool.

I haven’t pumped up my water intake enough yet. It will take a little time. I’ve spent the last nine months with the hydration stakes being much, much lower, after all.

Kinda like how it always takes a bit of time to adjust to not needing a coat when I go out. For a little while, I will suddenly wonder where my coat is. Oh no, I lost it!

No…. no…. you didn’t bring it. Calm down. It’s summer.

---

Lost my keys

My S, Q, and X keys are still not working.

And it’s still a pain in the ass. Beats having the whole thing scrambled but still.

And the download time issue seems to have resolved itself, which is nice It was driving me nuts to think that I would not be able to download stuff off of Steam any more.

Threaten my video games, will you? Now that’s hitting me where it hurts the most : my hopeless video game addiction.

Why, without video games, I might have to do things. Actual things! With all the overstimulation and overwhelm and anxiety that brings.

I really am a fragile little flower, aren’t I? Sigh.

No wonder I am so scared of life. I have spent so much time away from it that I am no longer strong enough to handle it. If I ever was.

I have my doubts.

And it all boils down to that god damned escapism. It’s my real worst addiction : giving up and running away.

I have so little experience with hanging in there and staying in the fight until I win. Or at least lose honorably.

But no. I instantly give up and when I give up, I give up forever.

Take my sleep apnea. I have a CPAP machine. I’ve had one for over a decade. It just sits there gathering dust because I had one bad experience with it and that apparently means I can’t even touch the damned thing again.

Result : I continue to smother in my sleep dozens of times an hour and that is very bad for my heart and my lungs and pretty much everything else.

So even if I get my diabetes under control, I will still have sleep smothering to deal with.

And I just feel so weak and fragile and small all the time. It makes it hard to even imagine doing the sorts of things I would need to do to get myself out of the doldrums and into real life.

It’s all I can do to keep my head above water these days.

I need to figure out what makes me feel stronger and get me lots of that.

There has to be some way to pull myself together and strive.

I don’t want to live in this dead zone any more.

More after the break.

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Life is shit

Yeah, I am back at the “nihilistic rage” setting on my mood dial again.

Because I just hate everything and everybody right now. Everything is stupid, the world is shit, life is worthless and doomed, and everything hurts.

But then again, the world still has amazing stuff like this in it, so it can’t be all bad :

I had no idea that song was by Stevie Wondere until it came up in my recommended videos just now.

I just knew it as “that incredible song from the end credits of Sing”.

Makes perfect sense, though. Only a musical genius like him could produce something that moves like that.

Makes me wanna shake my jumbo sized butt and sing along.

And doesn’t Ariana Grande look awesome in that video? Like the queen of the city streets going on promenade to spread beauty and joy to her people.

And all while looking nerdy AF. So damn hot.

And I love that huge gospel sting at the end. Holy crap is that sweet, and the perfect ending for the song.

It just increases my awe for the enormity of Stevie wonder’s talent.

It’s his world, man. We’re just living in it.

So thanks, YouTube algorithm. You algorithms get a bad rap these days, with people talking trash about how they “aren’t just trying to chase some algorithm” with their content, but this time you gave me eactly what I needed.

Me, I’d be happy to chase an algorithm. Because I know that even with that restriction, whatever I make will be fucking AMAZING, and making the algorithm happy would just ensure it made as many people happy as possible.

And, ya know, bring me beaucoup de bucks. Which would be nice.

Hell, if I had enough money, I could just hire people to take care of me and do stuff for me and I wouldn’t need to feel so helpless and weak.

Bet I would get really bossy, though. Because when you can only do things through others, and said others are your employee(s), you end up expressing your frustration at your helplessness by hyper-controlling said others.

I totally get how people end up being the sort of person who flips out because their assistant brought them the wrong bottled water.

Because I guarantee that is not the only seemingly simple thing that somebody screwed up for that spoiled celeb that day.

And you tell them exactly what you want. And then you get something else. What the FUCK is wrong with people?!?

The truth, of course, is that doing exactly what you are told to do exactly how you are told to do it is actually really frigging hard.

There’s a reason the armed forces has to work so hard to train soldiers to do it.

Anyhow, that’s my ramble for the evening.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Realized today that when I use my walker, what mostly hurt is my arms, not my legs.

Which I guess means my arms are going too. Not a huge surprise, really. Would be weird if my musclular degeneration was limited to my legs.

I am still pissed off at myself for wimping out when I was at Doctor Chao’s office last week. I was all ready to tell him how upset I was about the lack of progress on my case and to demand he do something about it but instead I was my usual eager to please, tell people what they want to hear self.

I did get across to him how worried I was about where this all was going, and he looked concerned, but he didn’t really address my concerns, he just told me to get my diabetes under control and to get a Covid booster.

Like all GPs these days, his main concern is getting you to leave. He is paid per visit so he just wants to get as many butts through that turnstile per hour as he can.

Clearly, rehearsing what I am going to say to him in my head beforehand is not enough. I have to vividly imagine he is sitting in front of me with his usual “open but serious” look on his face and I have to say things to him that I know he won’t like and that might make him upset and I have to be FINE with that.

It’s not easy being as empathic as I am.

That’s why I like to say being sensitive ain’t for wimps.  

Well, that plus it’s funny.

---

Back to my arms.

I think part of the problem is that I have shifted how I relate to the walker. I have finally used it enough that I can walk at a more or less normal speed while pushing it in front of me, and that is a good feeling.

But to do so, I think I began leaning on the thing with much more of my weight, and that meant a lot more strain on my poor flabby nerd arms,

And given that I only leave the apartment three times a week, it might be some time before my arm muscles catch up with the new regime.

It’s always something, ain’t it? Just one thing after another.

That’s life for ya I guess.

---

Went to see Doctor Caswell, my diabetes and sleep apnea specialist, today. Just in time, too, because I had just run out of Ozempic and Jardiance.

Thanks to Julian, I have both of them now. Phew. For me at least, medication panic is a real thing and something I have had to deal with in the past.

Especially if it’s my psych meds. I will let almost anything slip before I miss a dose of Paxil or Wellbutrin. Those two are the only reason I am as sane as I am.

I remember life before Paxil. It was,,,, dark.

And not just in the sense of being bleak and depressing. Also in the sense of being so much more numb and detached from reality.

To the point where I felt like my life force was ebbing so low that one day it would go out like a candle flame when it’s blown out.

So yeah. Thank you Paxil. You got me on to the path of waking up inside that I am still on twenty years later.

Turns out it’s a very long path.

More after the break.

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The looming financial crisis

Of a strictly personal nature.

As patient readers know, every month I buy a credit card from Pay Power and deposit $500 (the limit) on it.

They are theoretically reloadable but when I try to register a card for that I get this screen asking me for a PAC and nobody on God’s green Earth know what what is.

Not my bank. Not Pay Power. Not even the internet in general. It’s just another of the ways I always end up with weird problem nobody has ever heard of.

Like, say, having ytour computer’ keyboard suddenly lose its mind and scramble itself.

Anyhow, I have been doing the Pay Power thing for years now. When my bank, along with every other bank in Canada (??), discontinued its own reloadable credit card, I had to find a substitute, and Pay Power was it.

Until now. Because I can’t reach the Pay Power website any more, and I fear the worst.

The worst, in this case, being Pay Power going out of business as the CEO disappears to Cabo with all our deposits.

Without Pay Power, I will be forced to do everything in cash, and that is crippling in today’s online world.

The only way I will be able to get groceries will be to hand Julian a shopping list. I can’t do it in person any more. I can’t stand up for nearly long enough.

And I hate to further impose on poor Julian but I don’t see another way.

Plus it will be a pain to have to make a shopping list every week. I haven’t had to be that organized about anything in a long time.

But if the Pay Power website stays down, it will be impossible to register new credit cards to activate them, and boom goes Pay Power.

Well if anything is going to prompt me to resume my search for a better bank than Vancity, this is it. At least one Canadian bank must offer Visa Debit by now, and that’s the one that will get my business.

That way, the money come out of my bank account directly and I won’t need Pay Power at all any more.

Monthly “check” gets deposited and is immediately spendable online.

That’s the dream.

I am even willing to go to the branch once to sign up for this shit.

But it’s got to be what I jut described or no dice.

The ball’s in your court, banking industry. Who wants my service charges?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sweet : my keyboard issues seem to have ALMOST fixed themselves. I can type every letter of the alphabet except S and X.

X is easy to live without, but S is one of the most common letters in the English language, so having to still use the virtual keyboard for that one letter is a pain.

I might get desperate enough to reboot just in case that brings my S back. Then again, it might reverse whatever benevolent magic made the damned thing work again.

Perhaps I should quit while I am ahead.

Oh. Turn out I can’t do Q either.

This is all so stressful! Why are my problems always so weird?

Work, god damn you!

Anyhow, that’s not what I meant to talk to you about today. This is :

---

What’s in my shadow?

Ooh, how mysterious!

{ am speaking of my Jungian shadow in this case. I watched (listened to) a video yesterday about the shadow and how important it is to explore your shadow and reclaim everything in there and embrace and accept it back into our identity and it made me realize how slippery an issue this is for me.

Because I am someone who has done a fair of intropection in my attempts to fix my fractured mind and I have no problem facing harsh truth about myself and I have a loing history of fearlessly plunging ahead like a pack of wild dogs after the truth and so it is easy to imagine there is nothing in my shadow because I am far too honest with myself and open to myself to even HAVE a shadow.

Which mean mine is doing its job very, very well.

It job is to hide the thing we can’t accept about ourselves from us, after all. Like Freud’s subconscious mind, it lets us generate a sense of self we can accept.

Gah. I’m intellectualizing again. Stop explaining and dig deep!

So what’s in mine? I don’t know. I can’t immediately think of anything I have trouble accepting about myself.

Which again just means my shadow is very good.

But perhaps I am looking at this all wrong because I am looking for deep dark secrets filled with shame when the real things I can’t accept about myself are virtues.

Like just how powerful and special and unique I am. Sure, I technically accept the bare truth of these aspects of myself, but I am far too scared to come within a dozen parsecs of really accepting these astounding truths about myself into my core identity.

It’s just too much. It feels like if I did that, I would instantly lose my mind to delusions of grandeur because there is no way to fit all that power into a merely human identity.

Plus there is the enormous responsibility implied by so much power. That scares me too. If I truly took ownership of my abilities, I would feel obligated to do great things with them, and then what?

What would happen to my life as I know it if I let that happen? It would be destroyed.

And asking an overgrown caterpillar like me to give up everything he knows in order to enter a completely foreign and alien new life is asking one hell of a lot.

But that’s what comes next if I want to move forward.

So do I?

More after the break.

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Taking the reins

So yeah. That whole “owning my power” thing.

The very idea of it make me feel dizzy and nauseous. Like I almost stepped over the edge of a steep cliff and just barely pulled back in time to not fall.

It’s a lot like vertigo, come to think of it. But the heights involved are metaphorical.

But to me, very very real.

The thing is, I don’t know how to live with the constant present knowledge of jut how much you tower over other people intellectually. I have always dodged the question by concentrating on my flaws instead.

Like my current fave, adding “fat lot of good it does me!” or the like to any statement, internal or external, about my extraordinary gift.

This is more than just depression cutting me down. It’s an active strategy to avoid having to deal with the reality of my position over others.

As such, it treats the knowledge of my giftedness like a threat that must immediately neutralized lest it upset the whole system.

There is also the fear of “falling into the sky” as the knowledge of my advantages makes my ego inflate and take me into the stratosphere far, far away from the rest of humanity and into some kind of esoteric realm of abstraction from which there is no return.

Again, such a fear might seem bizarre and improbable and easily dismissed to other but I assure you, it is extremely real to me.

And I know this all might be pure humbug generated by my depression to keep me under its thumb. But that, sadly, does not give me the power to wave my magic wand and make it all go away.

These things are part of my mind and I have to deal with them whether or not they are “real” in any other sense.

It all comes back to the fact that I don’t know how to BE a person with amazing gifts, even though I have been one for my entire life.

I mean, I learned to read when I was only three years old, for Christ’s sake.

But I suppose, looking back, that my default strategy for dealing with that fact has been to very badly pretend to be like everyone else.

While also, of course, violently refusing to change in order to fit in.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

Well then here it is: I am a once in a generation intellectual giant, and I am just going to have to get used to the idea.

…

Great, now what do I do?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My fucking keyboard is borked again.

Oh, and the fridge froze my precious mini cucumbers. Which means they are garbage now because even when they are thawed out, they’ll be mush.

AND it froze my potato salad TWICE. After I discovered that the fucking fridge had frozen it yesterday, I deliberately put it back in the fridge on the BOTTOM shelf so that it could thaw out while staying fresh and edible far away from the freezer and hence any chance of it freezing AGAIN.

But of course, some kind citizen noticed that my potato salad was in the “wrong” place in the fridge and put it back on the “right” shelf, the top shelf, where it froze AGAIN.

Luckily , Joe was able to microwave the potato salad back in edibility. Tasted around the same but lost considerable ground in terms of texture.

I just pretended it was fancy mashed potatoes.

---

But it’s the return of my keyboard issues that’s really pissing me off.

I thought this was a solved problem. I thought switching to a wireless keyboard did the trick. I thought I’d put my days of using the Windows On Screen Keyboard behind me.

I had, metaphorically speaking, turned my back on it.

But apparently it just took it this long to figure out ho1w to go wireless, because I have the exact same problem again, and it makes me want to take a running jump out of the nearest open window.

Because if going wireless doesn’t work any more, it returns to being a completely unsolvable problem that even the Internet is stumped by.

And that means I am fucked.

More bitching later, but I need to rest now.

Hell, I haven’t even told you about my internet problems yet!

More after the break .

---

OK, now where was I?

My internet problems. There are two.

The first is that I can’t connect properly to Tapestries any more. 🙁

When I try, I get booted off the server every 3 to 5 minutes with a “connction aborted due to error” message.

My client reconnects automatically, so it would be possible to just put up with it. And it may yet come to that, because I NEED to see my fuzzy friends.

But for now , it’s just too chaotic for me.

The other problem is even worse : my download speed has dropped to rates not seen since bandwidth was measured in baud.

As in, I bought an expansion for the game I’ve been playing, Pathfinder, today .

I beat the main game so it’s DLC time!

The expansion is 7.8 gigs. It is currently down.

Estimated download time : 3 DAYS.

Yup, you read that right. DAYS. In fact, it varies wildly. 3 is just an estimated average. I have seen it as low as 6 hours and as/ high as one YEAR.

A fucking YEAR. What the actual fuck?

Something screwy is going on with our internet, that’s for sure. And I want it fixed pronto. This is utterly unacceptable.

I mean, it’s messing with my friends AND my games? And the keyboard shit is messing with my blogging?

Those three things are my entire life. I ain’t got shit else.

It makes me feel like fate is coming for me.

Well I ain’t going without a fight. I am going to hunt down and destroy every one of these problems, and be all the stronger for it.

I am tired of giving up.

Time to give trying harder a shot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And not the fun kind with like, feather boas and sequins.

Was pretty depressed earlier this afternoon. Had one of my attacks of sadness and despair where there doesn’t seem to be a point to anything and everything seems stupid and ugly and like a very bad idea.

Luckily, it passed after I got a bit more sleep. These things don’t usually last very long. They reach a peak and then recede.

The peaks are bad. Very bad. But even in my worst moments, I know that I will not feel this way forever, and therefore all I have to do is hang in there and wait for the worst to be over and then things can go back to the current local definition of normal.

I am certainly far, far beyond the point where I might do something permanent based on a temporary emotion. I do get suicidal feelings sometimes but I recognize them for what they are, namely an expression of extremely frustration with my own unhappiness and not a true desire to die.

We depressives rarely want to die. We just want it to be over. We want the pain to stop so we can finally truly rest or maybe even get some real sleep.

You can see how that desire can easily be confused with an urge to die., especially by the depressed person themselves.

It’s what the blackout drunk is looking for, too. They drink so heavily in search of something that can force their brains to stop and rest and give them some peace.

So it’s like suicide in a bottle, but without the commitment.

I can see the appeal. I really wish I had a way to force my brain to halt all processes and shut down like a good computer. Let me do a cold reboot so I can clear out all the dead processes and memory fragments and clutter and remember what it was like when my mind ran clean and clear and crisp like it was right out of the box.

Obviously, I am not going to take up drinkin’. MY health is already terrible, thank ye kindly. No way I would live long if I turned to the bottle.

Same with any other kind of chemically induced effect of a similar nature.

What I really want is for my brain to run well for a change. For the fog to clear and let the warm sunshine in and let me just live love and laugh without constantly being hounded by my inner demons of self-hatred, uncertainty, and lack of vitality.

A hard reboot might be one way to achieve that. Purge the system of errors by restoring from a clean backup, otherwise known as your long term memory.

The right antidepressant also might do the trick. I could ask to try ones other than Wellbutrin and Paxil, see if that makes things better.

But I doubt it would. My gut tells me that my mental health problems are too complex, deep, and personal to be solved by a chemical.

I need to get deep into my very operating system and make changes to some very old code that has been running for a very long time and that called upon by nearly every program in my mind.

And that ain’t easy.

More after the break.

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What I want for my birthday

I don’t fucking know.

I never do,. It’s far too open ended a question, with far too many possible answers, for my poor brain to calculate.

And when I ask myself what I want, I tend to come up with unhelpful answers like “a job” or “a boyfriend” or “love”.

Because the problem, as always, is that I taught myself not to want things. I figured there is no point torturing myself with longings for things I can’t get, so I learned at a very young age to not think about what I don’t have and to instead concentrate on enjying what I’ve got.

Which sounds all wise and shit, but it’s actually just an expression of a deeply wounded soul afraid to truly look outside itself so it remains self-absorbed.

I’ve been extremely withdrawn and frightened for so very very long. Afraid of having to deal directly with overstimulating, confusing, anxiety provoking reality, I just kept burrowing deeper and deeper into myself until I had no idea what the real me even was any more or which direction was “out”.

I only know the Russian nesting doll version of myself.

When I look back over my almost 50 years of life, I am amazed to see how unnatural it all has been. How bizarre it was that I listened to absolutely none of my instincts and kept living this sad, sorry, stultifying life while the whole time my health was slowly falling apart and I had my metaphorical fingers in my ears, singing “LA LA LA, everything is fine, even if it’s not!”.

I can’t shake the feeling that there has to be something deeply and terribly wrong for a person to have lived this preteen life for as long as I have.

I mean, I am going to turn fifty a week from yesterday, and all I know how to do is entertain myself. With video games. And blogging. That’s it.

That’s not a life. That’s not even life.

That’s some kind of diagnostic loop gone berserk. A test pattern that grew legs and arms and a mouth and took over the empty shell of where a human life should be. A dozen lines of code accessed a million times a second despite not having been updated since they were installed in 1977.

I feel so weak and helpless and sick sometimes. And small. So very, very small.

I just hope that one day, I can find the rest of me and be a real little boy again. One with instincts and desires and drives and everything!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling cranky because I am once more at an impasse in the game I have been playing so much of lately, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous.

This time, the culprit is a big nasty demon with the highly unlikely name
Khorramzadeh. He is completely unfair. He can, at will, unleash a series of lightning based spells of devastating power that completely kills at least 2/3 of my party with there being absolutely nothing I can do to prevent it.

And he casts these spells one after each other, all in the same turn, which totally breaks the rules of the game and so it super extra tasty and crispy unfair.

From what I have read, he is sort of the final boss of the game. Not in a literal sense, because there’s plenty of adventure left after him.

But he’s the biggest and baddest boss in the game, according to my fellow players.

Which I suppose is a relief. I’d hate to face a monster that could kick HIS ass.

But it’s all got me kind of bummed. And it has be contemplating things I would normally be far too proud to do, like lowering the difficulty level, or using cheats.

I’d hate to do either of those, but I might have no choice because it’s rapidly becoming clear that my only alternative would be to just give up on the game.

And I have invested too much playtime in this thing for THAT to be an option.

And I am not entirely out of ideas yet. There are techniques I have yet to try to maybe gain an advantage over this motherfucker.

But it’s all put me in a crappy kind of mood.

Live by the game, die by the game, I guess.

---

Was late for Wound Care this morning because, despite having been reminded of it by Joe and Julian last night, I once more forgot that they switched me back to coming in twice a week to have my bandages changed.

I am not happy about this.

I liked once a week. At that frequency, I had a whole week to recover between visits and thus they never seemed like a big deal.

Twice a week now feels like a serious imposition.

And the only reason I got switched is that one of the nurses who worked on me recently “thought” that “maybe” one of my bandages, the one for the wound on my left foot, was wet with a lot of discharge that one time.

That’s not nearly enough of an excuse to fuck with my time, in my opinion.

But what can I do? I am merely a lowly patient. The Nurses have spoken and their word is law in my little kingdom.

I do plan on making my feelings on the subject known. I was going to do so today but then I arrived late and kind of lost the moral high ground right away.

Next Tuesday, though. I shall be a little crabby about it.

Watch out. I may get mildly cross!

Oh, and I finally made an appointment to see Doctor Caswell today. It’s something I have been needing to do for more than two weeks, but I kept putting it off and putting it off till it became this whole bete noire.

Feels good to have finally gotten it done.

Take that, Bette!

More after the break.

---

From the depths of the FruBrain :

“For you see dear, it was never that I wanted to hurt you. I just didn’t care whether or not I did. And I think I deserve some credit for that. ”

I could probably write three times as much in this thing if I just wrote down all the stuff that my brain just naturally produces.

Like the above bit of dialogue. That just came to me. I wasn’t even thinking about writing or anything. It just coalesced out of the rich and flavourful gumbo of my mind.

It’s like the primordial soup. Only caliente!

---

---

Still haven’t killed that goddamned demon. Tried a few things that the internet suggested, none of which worked.

I’m getting to the point where I might be willing to “respec” all my characters.

No, I didn’t forget the “t” in “respect”. Aretha Franklin taught me better than that.

No, to “respec” a character is to reset the character so you can choose all their skills, abilities, spells, and so on over again based on what you know now.

It tends to be a lot of work, especially in a system like Pathfinder which runs very deep, but the reward is that you get to choose only the skills etc that you now know are useful and skip the ones that turned out to be duds.

It’s basically the fantasy of starting your life over with what you know now. Only it only works in video games.

Which is too bad because I would respec the hell out of myself.

Because as you know, you got to respec yourself before others will respec you!

---

Today’s been a flabby kind of day.

Well, not the morning. The morning had Wound Care and all that entailed. That trip from the car to the Community Care Clinic just gets longer and longer for me.

Before too long, I will need Julian to push me there in a wheelchair.

Not looking forward to THAT. Although I do look forward to developing those awesomely ripped wheelchair guy arm muscles.

Assuming any of my muscles still work.

Okay, let’s stay out of the medical funk for now. No good can come of dwelling on it. If I want to prevent my dire fate, I know what I need to do.

I need to stop fucking around and get my diabetes under control.

I need to make that my primary task and just keep going at it till I get what I want instead of giving up and running away the minute things get tough.

It’s not going to be easy. In fact, it’s going to hurt like hell. I have babied myself for so long that even the slightest of strains feels like it will tear me apart.

But I dont wanna die.

I don’t want to end up in a wheelchair, unable to walk at all.

I don’t want to die tied down to a bed because if they don’t tie me down I will try to pull my tubes out.

I don’t want to become completely and utterly helpless.

My self-esteem is already pretty shaky. I already feel like I am an overbrained infant who should have invested more of his character points in actually being good at life.

But it’s not like I can respec myself now.

All I can do is try to be better and do better and maybe actually save my life.

Even though it’s probably going to be a lot of work. Sigh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We’ve finally got some real honest to goodness sunshine happening here on the Wet Coast, and I think it’s doing me some good.

I feel somewhat more enegetic and “up” today than I have lately, and boy, do I need that. It occurred to me during Therapy Thursday just how down I have been lately.

Nothing like explaining something to my therapist for me to realize how true it is myself. I figure out a lot of things about myself that way.

Honesty, doc, I had no idea how much I hate her till I told you I did.

Told good ol’ Doc Costin about my dissatisfaction with my interactions with Doc Chao yesterday. There’s just something about being there with a doctor that turns me into a passive and eager to please child.

I think it’s the fact that a doctor takes a sort of parental role in your life. You bring them your problems and they solve them for you. You (mostly) do what they tell you and accept that they have the authority to do this to and for you.

And they do it from a place of superior knowledge and experience, just like adults do when you’re a child.

So I react to them like I reacted to my parents, by telling them whatever it was I thought they wanted to hear so they would go away and leave me alone.

And yes, I know there is so very much wrong with that response, It means I was an active participant in my being ignored because when people did pay attention to me, I told them what they wanted to hear, which was that everything was fine and therefore they can go away and stop thinking about me again.

All I can say is that I didn’t arrive at this response by accident. It came about because if I told them the truth about how hard things were for me at school, they wouldn’t stop everything they were doing to deal with it, like some sitcom family.

Family meeting, everyone!

They would just stand there looking awkward aqd shocked, their eyes silently pleading for me to do what I was supposed to do and give them permission to leave.

If I had been someone with less empathy and a stronger sense of self and self-worth, I would have refused to rescue them and let them deal with the truth of my pain.

But I knew they didn’t really care. So to hell with them. I’m not going to let them kick me in the head over and over again on the off chance that THIS time, they mean it.

It’s amazing how so many seemingly complex parenting issues basically boil down to “stop punishing them for doing the thing you want them to do!”.

If when your kids call you, you rant and rave and attack them verbally, don’t be surprised when they stop calling you.

My father never learned that lesson. So he died completely alone.

God as my witness, I have no idea where I was going with all this.

Oh well. Whatcha gonna do?

More after the break.

---

That salad I love

Did my weekly-ish online grocery shopping today. Ergo I got potato salad.

As I have mentioned before, I really love potato salad. So I get it when there is room in the weekly buidget for it and I am in the mood.

I shouldn’t.. It’s basically carbs and fat and protein from the eggs.

Oh, right. It’s actually potato and EGG salad, which is way better than just plain potato salad in my books.

Those of you becoming overwhelmed by the sheer thrill of this hot news are advised to find a dim, cool place to lie down, fan your forehead, and drink cold fluids.

A shot in the arm

..can be surprisingly painful.

So picture this. Yesterday I notice that the flesh part of my left shoulder hurt. Felt like I’d gotten hit there with a rubber bullet. It was very uncomfortable and sore.

So immediately I think, oh god, another random malfunction of my body. Another part of me developing a weird fault out of nowhere. Another part of me that is going to end up taking out a chunk of my flesh.

And on and on like that.

It was hours before I suddenly remembered that I had gotten two shots, one for the flu and the other for pneumonia,. when I was in Doctor Chao’s office that morning.

And they had been, of course, intramuscular shots in that exact spot.

D’oh. I felt pretty silly about my outrageously negative earlier assumption. But that’s where my mind goes when suddenly stressed.

I instantly leap to the most negative of conclusions based on vastly insufficient evidence. It’s like I am always expecting the worst to happen and soI will immediately conclude it has at the slightest provocation.

I’m really not a sensible person, am I? Sigh.

Thank god I’m at least cute.

Anyhow, I don’t get where this negative assumption comes from. It’s not like I have hads a lot of really terrible things happen in my life.

In fact, my life tends to lack events of any kind at all. Which is its own problem.

So maybe I leap to negative conclusions in part because I am so eager for ANYTHING to happen in my life that even a bad thing happening has a certain appeal.

Could be worse. I could leap to absurdly POSITIVE conclusions and then be absolutely crushed when I have to come back down to earth.

At least when I get a grip on myself and counter the negative conclusions, it’s a relief.

Phew,. things are not nearly as bad as I just thought they were. Thank God.

Can’t help but be a little disappointed too, though.

For a minute, it seemed like something was going to actually happen.

I need to think about what I can do to make GOOD things happen in my life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.