Well it didn’t go great.

I certainly didn’t read him the Riot Act like I had imagined myself doing. I had whole scenes written like they were the closing arguments in a legal drama swimming around in my head as recently as yesterday.

But of course, when he was actually right there in front of me, I reverted to being my usual attentive and submissive self, like I always do around doctors.

The closest thing I did to really asserting myself was try to get praise and/or approval by showing off my layman’s knowledge of medicine.

So, fawning, nerd style, essentially.

I did convey how worried I was about my worsening condition, and I told him about the recurring flulike periods with the energy drain and runny nose and muscle aches and so forth and so on.

So I got that done, at least. But I am disappointed at how meek I was despite how pissed off I truly am that the initial incident where my legs stopped holding my weight was last August and we still don’t know what the fuck is going on.

We know it’s not my soine and it’s not my cardiovascular system. The stroke people said it might be neurological, might not be.

So what the fuck IS IT?!?

I want my goddamned legs back, damn it. Either that, or a diagnosis.

I think they owe me at least that much.

Doc Chao said it could be directly related to my uncontrolled blood sugar. Fair enough. I won’t be able to address that until I see Doctor Coswell again and she gets me to do the stupid diabetic training again so the government will pay for my testing strips.

It’s always something, isn’t it?

But yeah, it could be that my diabetic neuropathy is attacking the nerve endings that control movement in my legs and elsewhere

Once I get my diabetes under control again, we will see if things then improve.

I guess I can live with lancing my fingertip once or twice a day. Assuming I can get it to actually do its job.

What defeating me last time was not being able to get an actual reading no matter how many times I punctured myself. I would either get an error or it would tell me there was not enough blood on the strip.

By the time I had done this like ten times, still with no success, I was done. Yes, a saner and smarter person would have kept trying until they got it right, even if that meant they had to call some call center somewhere, but I am not that kind of person.

Instead, I just gave up forever. Simple, really.

That’s the problem with a fear based emotional ecosystem. You are always looking to escape, even in situations where hanging in there and dealing with things is way easier and better in the long term.

I’m always poised to flee. And if I can’t flee, I freeze up.

And if I couldn’t do either of those, I supposes I would fight.

But only as a last resort.

More after the break.

---

Oh, quick update : gave up on beating that demon boss after the game started just plain not letting me get to the third and final stage.

I would kill all the second wave enemies and then…nothing. My peeps were left just standing around with nobody to fight.

Screw that. I bugged out of that fucking place post-haste.

---

It’s all in your head

But then again, what isn’t?

I mean, we’re all ultimately just brains in skulls experiencing things. Everything you have ever done,. no matter how sensory or emotional, has really been electrical impulses firing rate speeding up or slowing down or staying the same.

This bothers a lot of people because it seems to reduce us to “just” a bunch of neuroihemicals talking to themselves.

But mind that word “just” because in this kind of context, it’s extremely deceptive.

For example, the Mona Lisa is a brilliant work by one of the most talented and inventive people to ever walk the earth…. but it is also “just” a blob of oils stuck to canvas.

The works of Shakespeare continue to teach people how to write effectively centuries after his time and are produced by dozens of troupes all over the world every day.

But they are also “just” a bunch of symbols stuck together.

Absolutely anything, no matter how magnificent, can be reduced to some mere collection of random components if one wishes to see them that way.

The question becomes, why do you want to see it that way?

The real scary truth is that those fluctuating neurochemicals are connected in a pattern so complex and intricate that it contains an entire living breathing person, lock stock and two smoking gametes.

So just like the words you are writing now are “just” a string of ones and zeroes on a computer somewhere causing your own neurochemicals to change electrochemical states in a million different ways, we are all “just” a bunch of proteins with anxiety.

And I think that is absolutely wonderful.

---

Feeling fragile and timid and weak right now. And terribly worried that I am facing a future of increasing debility and that before too long I will be stuck in my bed unable to even get up to go take a leak.

Well, that’s what certain containers of mine are for right now.

But as for, um, the other, I have managed, despite my hospital stays, to avoid ever using a bedpan in my life.

Luckily, they have moved on from those. So I am probably in the clear. They have what amounts to potty chairs for grownups now, and while they do not exactly afford one a great deal of dignity, it beats the hell out of being expected to squat on a bucket.

I mean my god…. what if you MISS? I shudder to think of it.

Sure inspired me to get the fuck up out of bed and make it to the bathroom, though.

Being told I need to get up and move around is one thing.

Having the alternative be the bedpan is quite another.,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I seem to be gaining ground.

Health wise, that is. Geographically, I control around as much territory and resources as ever, and the stalemate is almost old enough to vote.

Did the Wound Care thing this morning. Had a very new and nervous nurse along with Vivian, the Wound Care Technician (or something like that) who takes care of my feet when they need debriding or whatnot.

And boy, did the wound on the heel of my left foot need it. Initially I was surprised to see Vivian because she had shaved down the one on my right foot quite recently, as in less than a month ago. So I wondered WTF.

But I hadn’t considered the wound on the left foot. It hasn’t needed to have the dead skin and callous removed from it very often in the past.

In fact, when Vivian or one of her colleagues has worked on the right foot in the past, the treatment of the left one has seemed downright perfunctory.

But whichever nurse it was that put in the request for Vivian’s services knew what the heck they were doing because my left foot needed it so bad.

As in, Vivian had barely touched it with her neato little “sharp ball on a stick” tool when big curls of dead skin started raining down, making it look like somewhere a pencil sharpener in dire need of being emptied had exploded.

So it feels good to have all THAT gone. My foot breathes better now.

And just in time for Summer!

Which reminds me : I need to trim this mop on my head soon. I want to have the maximum amount of ventilation possible for this heat sickness prone cranium of mine before the next “hottest summer ever” hits us.

I don’t want to end up in Afternoon Hell every day like I did in years gone by, when the heat would make some part of me that’s right between my eyes and above the bridge of my nose swell up and press again some important bit of my forebrain and make me feel dizzy, nauseous, “out of it”, and very, very ill.

That’s what heat sickness is like for me. For the real Afternoon Hell though, you have to add in that my sinuses are going berserk because of all the pollen in the air.

So there is even less room that usual for the part of my head responsible for all this to expand, and it’s basically pushing down on two balloons full of snot.

I swear, I did not set out with the intention to gross you nice people out today. Sorry.

So yeah. I do everything I can to keep that shit from happening. Largely, that means hydrating very aggressively and keeping the fans on all the time, and never laying down without one pointed directly at my forehead because that is the center of the badness when it comes to my heat sickness.

Um, so, to sum up : I am feeling better. Etc.

---

---

This is so fucked up that I just have to document it.

With my McD’s order tonight came a free cookie and a note.

The note goes on to say thank you for your patronage blah blah, but leads with, and I quote, “The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one. “

Holy shit, MacDonald’s. is that a threat?? Was that meant for me or your employees? This is some serious psycho controlling boss level shit here.

I mean, it’s not even subtle enough to be considered propaganda.

Makes me imagine employees reading this and deciding it sounds like a great idea. Being without a job sounds WAY better than working in this crap factory!

Anyone want to help me shoot a pro-unemployment PSA?

I want these pricks to understand that you have to treat employees well enough that poverty doesn’t seem like a better option.

Our inability to sacrifice

I have this fun theoretical I like to ask people at a party or similar gathering because it really makes people think.

And this makes me very popular and I have lots of friends. No really.

Anyhow, it goes like this : What if Clarke-level aliens came to Earth and offered to solv any of our big problems – cancer, global warming, people who put regular garbage in the goddamned recycling bin – but only if we agree to sacrifice something from our lives that really hurts to lose.

What would you be willing to give up?

An example might be : we’ll take all those greenhouse gases out of your atmosphere but only if you, as a race, give up chocolate.

Or we will give you a foolproof cure for all forms of cancer, but as a species, you are no longer allowed to have lawns.

So what you give up, and for what?

It is fascinating to me to observe the unexpectedly enormous can of worms this question brings up. Not only are people flatly incapable of answering the question, it makes them angry at the aliens.

People are upset by the very idea of having to give something up to get something. Societal programming means live in a constant state of false austerity which causes us to believe that whatever consumer goods we have now are just barely enough for us to get by and therefore losing anything at all would basically doom us.

This way,. consumer capitalism keeps us constantly wanting more. After all, if what we have now is just barely keeping us afloat, then surely that next purchase – be a latte or a Maserati – will make things so much better it will be like a backstage pass to Heaven.

And it doesn’t matter how often that turns out to be completely untrue and the new thing only makes us happy for a short while then leaves us feeling even emptier.

This is addiction we are dealing with, and addictions make you do bad things just to get that jolt of pleasure from the reward center of our brains.

It’s a corruption of our fundamental drive to survive. The drive, like I have said before, that makes a hungry animal eat and makes a horny animal fuck.

These pro-survival activities activate that all important reward center and thus the organism is instantly rewarding for doing things that aid its long term survival.

But we over-brained monkeys have found lots of ways to get that reward center jolt with way way less effort, and our brain rewards us for that, too.

Our primitive systems say, “Oh, what a clever animal you must be to get so much reward for so little effort. Here, have even more reward!”.

And you feel not just good but like you’re getting away with something smart.

This is the root cause of “laziness”. The pleasure of laziness is entirely dependent on having some sense of the work you are avoiding doing.

WIthout that, laziness would just lead to boredom.

Anyhow, back to the aliens.

Clearly, this are some smartass Twilight Zone aliens here just to fuck with us. They know what this kind of question will do to us.

Some people I have tried this on even, quite seriously, suggest that they would whine to the aliens about how unfair they are being, and say “Why do I have to give up ANYTHING AT ALL?”

AIn’t that the million dollar question. What makes us so incapable of even imagining sacrificing anything at all in order to get something incredibly valuable?

And how does this connect with people who are mad about taxes?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Bit frustrated because I am up against my video game archnemesis in Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous right now, namely the long hard multi-stage boss battle.

Because they are hard, I end up having to do them over and over again. And because they are multi-stage, I end up having to do the same shit over and over again just to get to the part where I die.

And I freaking HATE that.

I have very low repetition tolerance. Kind of comes with my outrageously high need for mental stimulation. Repetition is by its nature not very stimulating.

I’ve had that overwhelming need for mental stimulation my whole life, by the way.

That’s why I had little use for toys and loved books. Books provided the steady supply of stimulation I craved.

Between that, TV, and eventually video games,. I got by.

Anyhow, this t is frustrating me, though I am glad to know I am not alone in this.

Because the fight is brutally unfair. The first phase is challenging, fighting the baddie Areshkagal as a group. The second is trivial – it’s just a bunch of the exact same enemies you’ve been fighting by the dozens just to get through the dungeon and get to this damned boss fight in the first place.

But in the third stage, Arrest Kegels splits into four equal versions of herself and that’s just way too much to handle because any one of them can shred one of my warriors without even slowing down, and there’s only six of us.

My healer Daeren can bring people back from the brink of death (and beyond), but only one at a time, and when they can take out 4 of you each turn, math is not on your side.

So things are rather rough. I’ve tried optimizing in every way I can think of – and I can think of a LOT – and I have made some progress.

Now, on a good try, I can take out 2 of them. So I am half way there.

Plus, I have two exit strategies :

1. The classic : get the fuck out of there and come back when I have leveled up and can bring more firepower and hit points to the game, or…
2. The shameful one : Actually just give in to the demon’s demands and agree to be her agent in the world.

And that’s not that bad an option. She mostly just wants me to kill someone I was totally going to kill anyhow, so it’s not like it’s a huge compromise.

So right now I keep going mostly out of sheer stubborn pride. Eventually I may give in and take one of those two options but for now, I keep slugging away.

But that does put me in a kind of low key funk. That’s always the case when I am stuck in a video game. I suppose that’s part of the price of admission, at least if the game is good enough to get me emotionally involved.

If it wasn’t, I’d just play something else.

More after the break.

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Bump in the road

Typing this into a LibreOffice document because there has been an oops.

Seems Joe forgot to pay the Shaw cable bill, so right now, we don’t got no internet.

Which sucks, obviously. Them intarwebs is mighty handy. Practically everything I do involves the Net (remember when we called it that?) on some level.

For example, of the five games I happen to have installed on my tablet, only one of them, a goth-y sort of action game called Shadow Hunters, works sans internet.

Even though none of them have a persistent world they need to constantly update, nor do they rely on a whole lot of interpersonal communication.

I wonder if someone has written a “dummy internet” program for Android that emulates an internet connection in order to keep these nervous Nelly games happy enough so you can play them.

It could even monitor what the games are sending and receiving when you play them online so it can replicate it when you are offline.

Um, actually, now that I type that out, it sounds all kinds of shady. Forget I said anything. In fact, forget this entire conversation. If this sort of thing is possible, don’t come after me when someone does it.

I am a science fiction writer and that means I have a license to speculate about technology!

Anyhow, so yeah, no internet for the moment. Julian is currently out on a mission to rectify the situation by paying the lovely people at Shaw the money we owe them.

I played a small part in this diminutive debacle because I have fielded a few robocalls that said they were very important billing messages from Shaw but I hung up on them because, being obvious robocalls, I thought they were scammers.

We get around six to ten scam calls a month here, so it’s not implausible. What was not plausible to me was the notion that Joe wasn’t paying the cable bill.

Nonsense. We are solid, sensible people, and we don’t do that kind of thing.

One of us is even employed.

But I cast no stones. My house is nothing but glass. I have a long history of letting things slide and behaving in an irresponsible fashion in regards to things remarkably like this, so trust me when I say I am not judging Joe in the slightest.

Shit happens, man. Excrement occurs. These things can happen to anybody.

Hopefully it will not be an extended outage. But I admit to grave misgivings. Shaw is kind of a monopoly and they do things when they feel like it.

Actually, forget all that. It appears Julian’s mission was a rousing success and the blesses of the Inter-tubes once more rain upon our domain.

My fears of monopolistic foot-dragging were, it seems, unfounded.

Thank freaking God.

---

Yup., we are now back in the safety and comfort of my browser and God is in His Heaven and all is right upon the land.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The sins, in this case, being gluttony and sloth, I suppose.

WellI am really reaping what I have sown now. I feel sick all the time, I get weaker by the day, I feel dizzy and fragile and ready to collapse at any moment, and it’s clearly only a matter of time before The Big One – and there are many possibilities, like stroke, heart attack, and diabetic coma – comes to get me and make my life so very much worse and/or over.

Funny word, that. Over.

I feel like the walls are closing in on me and pretty soon this grave I have been digging for all these years will collapse in on me and bury me alive under the sheer weight of all these unhealthy days.

That’s the thing about being a fat person. You wear your sins around your guts. Your big fat form testifies to everyone how badly you have lived.

And yet, I can’t even be sure I had any choice.

That’s the titanic question of my very existence. Am I a helpless victim of mental and physical illness whose entire minecart trip to Hell was pre-ordained and there was nothing I could ever have done to prevent my sticky end?

There’s a shameful kind of comfort in that thought. But it comes at the price of being doomed to die horribly.

And that’s bad.

The idea seems a lot less comforting when you realize it denies future agency.

The alternative is that I am fully culpable for all the things happening to me now because I could have prevented them so easily with just moderate changes to my behaviour and I chose instead to keep sitting on my ass hiding from the world and playing video games and not doing anything to help myself besides take pills and modify my diet.

Which was clearly not enough.

That level of culpability could very well crush me psychologically. The demons of my depression could really have the proverbial field day with the notion that everything I am going through is ALL MY FAULT.

But I dunno. Maybe that isn’t all that bad. Not if it opens a path to survival.

I mean, I have hated myself for a really long time, so it’s not like I am unaccustomed to the demon’s prickly little pitchforks.

Yeah yeah. Hellfire and brimstone and self-loathing. Whatever.

So yeah. What the hell. It’s all my fault. I did it all. I neglected my health, I lived quite stupidly, I chose to stay hidden and buried in my games, and it’s my fault I never swam against the tide and by doing so toughened up so I could finally DEAL with things.

That sucks but it’d a burden I am going to have to grow into because I definitely don’t want to die a gross and painful and above all STUPID death strapped down to a hospital bed in some back ward where they put all the really non-telegenic cases they’ve more or less given up on.

They’ll die soon. We’ll be rid of them. It’s okay.

So yeah. I officially take responsibility for all the dumb shit I have done. It’s not going to be easy to process, but it’s what I have to do if I want to live.

Besides., I can’t just think about my immediate psychological comfort any more.

I have to think long term if I want to get out of this thing alive.

And that means taking responsibility.

More after the break.

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I almost died last night

So let’s talk about that.

To refresh your memory, the complete cessation of appetite I experienced yesterday meant that I ate nothing the whole day.

This was bad. This is something I should not do. Something which should not happen. And something which hopefully will not happen again.

Because as a direct result of being radically unfed, last night I entered a state of blood sugar crash that damn near killed me.

As in, I was, no exaggeration, minutes from death. I could have crashed out and fallen into a diabetic coma and then threw off this mortal coil as all the cells in my body starved to death.

What a horrible way to go. Would have been ironic, too.

Fat guy starves. Ha ha ha.

And unlike my usual pattern, I am going to hang on to this near death experience and do my best to learn from it.

Usually, I am like a kid. Sure, it’s bad when the crisis is going on, but once it’s over, I bounce back and put it behind me and don’t think about it again.

And while such resilience has its advantages, it makes it very hard to learn from experience because experience doesn’t stick.

I just shake it off and go back to my usual mode. And that’s not good enough.

If I want to live, I am going to have to hold on to experiences like I had last night long enough for them to actually modify my behaviour.

Which means, in this case, that I need to have a plan for when my appetite dies.

I definitely cannot afford to “indulge” my lack of appetite by not eating. I have to be able to force some food into myself even when absolutely nothing appeals to me.

Fruit seems to be something that can penetrate a lack of appetite for me. Like I said yesterday, fruit is highly appealing to me, and is not as “challenging” to my lack of appetite as something with meat or bread or even popcorn.

I guess a dearth of appetite really pares one’s tastes to the bone.

Perhaps I should invest in something like Fruit Roll-Ups, which are fruit in a form that is fairly shelf stable and therefore will keep if I just stick it in my “pantry” and leave it there on a strictly “in case of emergency break glass” basis.

They have added sugar, though. So I would have to search for an all fruit brand.

I mean, the added sugar wouldn’t be a problem if I am crashing, but what I want it something I can get myself to eat when I can’t eat anything else.

More directly to the point, I hereby vow to myself and the world that I will never miss another meal. Even if my appetite is DOA, I will find SOMETHING I can eat that has enough carbs etc to keep me alive.

It’s not going to be easy. Forcing yourself to eat when nothing is appetizing never is.

But I don’t wanna die.

So I am going to have to get used to it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what it feels like I am made of right now. Wet issue [a[r held together by busted alasic bands and drops of muscilege.

Today’s been pretty rotten, and I don’t see things getting better any time soon. My flulike symptoms are threatening to come back and my appetite to a left turn at Albequerque and asn’t been seen since, so I am once more faced with the prospect of having to somehow force myslef to eat so that lack of nutrition doesn’t make things even worse.

But nothing I have on hand seems edible. I ordered some stuff from 7-11 last night when I was ravenously hungry and by the time it arrived, my appetite had fled town and I couldn’t eat a god damned thing.

I managed to very slowly get around half of a beef and cheese empanada last night when I was watching stuff with Joe and Julian. That felt like torture but at least I got some protein, fat, and carbs into me.

Since then all I have had was an apple and an orange for breakfast at around 9 am. That was around ten houjrs ago and I am starting ot feel not so nice so I am going to have to eat someting from my available stocks soon.

Let’s see, I have one and a half beef and cheese empanadas. two slices of 7-11 pepperoni pizza, and a wrapped brownie I stupidly bought.

And absolutely none that sounds remotely edible to me.

Makes me wanna puke just thinking about it It’s all so heavy and greasy and thick that I feel like eating it would be like chugging lard. Grody to the max, man.

What I want is light and sweet things. Like more fruit. Fruit is the perfect food for me when I am in this state because it’s very visually attractive, tastes light and delicious, and provides loads of needed vitamins.

But I don’t have any fruit available to me here in my room and I am reluctant to try to get some myself from the fridge because I have no confidence in my having the energy or the wherewithal to make it back safely and I sure as hell don’t want to end up sprawled out on the floor with a serious head injury from when I collapsed.

Especially because I am all alone right now. So nobody would know for hours.

The chills are back too. Along with frequent yawning. I yawn, I stretch, and as the muscles stretch a very cold wind blows through my muscles and tissues and leaves me shivering and shocked. under the comforter on my bed.

It gets weirder. That only really happens when I am lying down in bed. The momnet I sit up, I start warming up, and soon I am back to what passes for normal around here.

So I am free to take a life-giving nap as long as I can do it without laying down.

Methinks there are serious shenanigans afoot with my circulatory system. And that is very bad. But I can’t afford to get upset about it.

So I will just stumble onwards the best I can, with the portable phone close at hand in case I need to call 911.

My life is so much fun.

More after the break.

Not any better

In fact, a lot worse.

Because I was unable to make myself eat lunch OR dinner, I am currently fighting off a potentially fatal blood sugar crash.

Don’t worry though. I got thing under control. Lucky that I bought that brownie after all because it was just the thing to get my blood sugar back on the way up.

I am going to choke down as much brownie as I can. It’s hard because my mouth is so dry. I have to take a hearty swig of water with each bite to wash it down.

And I am almost out of water. Which means I will need to get up to get more when I just did that twnty minutes ago.

Hopefully my legs will forgive me and not, say, chooose to completely collapse out from under me like they sometimes did before my hospital stay.

You know, that hospital stay would have been a great time for doctors to really take a crack at figuring out what was wrong with my legs.

Instead they just did what they know well, namely put me on a long course of antibiotics and when that was done, declared me cured and kicked me out of the hospital.

I am developing a theory of a tragic lack of vision on the part of the medical establishment around here. They are so focused on treating people quickly that if it requires any in depth thought or analysis, they just fucking skip it.

They latch on to one thing they DO understand – like an infection – and then treat THAT and pretend that was the real problem all along so when that’s done, go home!

But I don’t want to go home yet. Nobody has told me what’s wrong with me yet.

Nobody even gives a shit.

Some serious ass kicking is coming their way. I am through with being jerked around. M legs stopped working right around a year and I still have no idea why. Someone is going to tell me something concrete or I am going to go critical.

Clearly nobody sees it as their job to cure me. They all have their own tiny specialist points of view and anything that does not fit into their easy categories get ignored.

:Like it just hits them in the head and falls to the floor like a half deflated basketball without them making so much as a “derp”.

So I am going to have to go to war. I will have to keep pushing and pushing and using my acerbic wit to its full extend to punish noncompliance until someone figures out what the hell happened to my fucking legs.

Sorry if I’ve been repeating myself. But I want to stay mad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve created all kinds of neato things. Books, videos, music, and of course being ex-VFS I have written a ton of scripts.

But it’s all basically meaningless because I can never bring myself to submit the wonderful things I make to anywhere that might do something with them.

Like a publisher. Or a studio. Or a contest. Or even a frigging subReddit.

And I am far from alone in this conundrum. It is reflective of a fundamental tension beteen the kind of people who become writers and the writing game itself.

We writers tend to be a shy, furtive, introverted lot who prefer to work alone and who instinctively avoid the limelight.

Swing the spotlight towards us and we scatter like cockroaches.

This is exactly the kind of person who is going to find it very hard if not impossible to do something to deliberately attract attention to themselves.. like show their work to others.

It’s an especially acute problem for us Avoidant Personality Disorder types. Avoiding draw attention to ourselves like we’re hiding from the Nazis is kind of our thing. We have been programmed by circumstance to feel like exposure is death and only in being completely hidden and alone can we find any degree of safety at all.

And we desperately want to be safe. Our inner worlds are hostile places full of demons, ghosts, and raging whirlwinds of unexpressed rage and grief and terror and all the other emotions we can’t handle so we banish them to our Jungian shadow.

And then we wonder why it’s so hard to be us. Um, maybe it’s the cyclone of unprocessed emotions you create with all your suppression of emotion.

Nah. That makes too much sense.

So the problem of promotion is simply that the kind of people who become good writers are the same kind of people who avoid drawing attention to themselves which is kind of a problem when you want to be famous or at least to make a living at it.

Me, I want to be famous enough to get invited to conventions, all expenses paid, as the guest of honor.

That’s if I go the science fiction author route, obviously.

If I write for TV I just want huge stacks of money. Fame can go fuck itself.

Anyhow, for me, this problem is especially acute. Whenever I approach the problem of promoting myself, that cold and bitter wind of fear and doubt that makes so many things impossible for me starts up and I freeze up inside like always.

And the thing is, it’s not that I don’t think I am talented enough. I am hella talented. I totally deserve to be scooped up by some agent and/or mentor and/or editor and groomed to be the fantastic writer I know I can be.

But when I approach that precipice and the cold wind blows, suddenly I have no confidence in anything I have ever written and it all sucks and I would make a fool of myself if I showed it to anyone and the Trog wins and I go back to squat in my cave.

Hence my recent ego trips. I am doing what I can to build up my belief in self to the point where I can go out into the world and practically demand my piece of the pie.

Not in so many words, obviously. That would be strategically unwise.

But with that kind of attitude.

There is something to be said for having a raging, out of control ego. It might not be nice to be around, but it gets things done.

More after the break.

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Not so great feeling

Everything was fine until I had to pee.

There I was, bopping along, playing my game. I was happy because I had solved what I thought was going to be a major pain in the ass situation relatively easily and was looking forward to implementing the rest of the solution.

But then… (portentous music sting) I realized I needed to pee.

My legs were still tired from doing Wound Care earlier oday, so decided this would be an um… receptacle job.

I have a big plastic jar I have been using as my short to mid term urinal for a while now and it was once more pressed into service.

Everything was fine during the operation but the second I stopped urinating, I got this not so good feeling in the general aea of my bladder.

It was like when I finished peeing, my body suddenly and violently slammed on the emergency brake and my bladder got caught in the middle.

Accompanying this new sensation was a feeling like I had been lightly kicked in the balls. My testicles also decided to get in on the fun.

I tried to keep going with my game, hoping it would pass, but it did not. So even though it was already 8:30 pm and I hadn’t had supper yet, I had no choice but to save my game then lay down for a while.

I wake up at around 10:30 pm with a lot less urinary and testicular pain but CRAZY frigging hungry, probably because I hadn’t eaten since 3:30 pm or so.

See, this is why I can’t do the 10 hour fasting a1c diabetes test. Only seven hours and I slreaqdy feel like gnawing off my own leg.

So I got Julian to bring me some food. But I knew it would not be enough. So now I have ordered some this n’ that from 7-11, and the future where I will technically be due for my midnight snack soon be damned.

I will figure something out. The easiest thing would be to simply skip my snack tonight but that would be dee you em bee DUMB because the last thing I need right now is to miss a fucking meal.

I could hasve skipped the 7-11 and counted on the midnight snack to pick up the slack, but again, that would mean missing a meal.

So I will have to figure something out. Maybe instead of my usual snack, I will make myself a couple of sandwiches for later.

Or just make the snack and… not eat it right away. We will see.

So that’s tonight’s adventure. Wow, it’s a new Hell every day!

I will taqlk to you nice people again tomorrow.

)

OK, let’s take another stab at this.

Today was Therapy Thursday and this is what I attempted to talk to Doc Costin about : I have realized that I carry around a massive burden of shame, grief, horror, and despair about how badly my life has turned out.

Patient readers know the litany by heart. Never had a full time job. Never supported myself financially. Never been in a relationship, barely even dated. Never had my own place that I could turn into a home. Never had to struggle with life and overcome it.

When I look back over all those wasted years of my life ^[1],. three decades of the prime of my life that I could have been using to build a life and become a full person but that I spent hiding from reality and playng video games instead, the pain and shock and all the rest that I feel seems insurmountable.

I don’t know how to get over a thing like that. The sheer wrongness of it all overwhelms me and makes me feel like I am going to choke on my own failure.

I am the biggest loser I have ever heard of. Even other “failure to launch” types have generally had some failed jobs or doomed relationships or SOMETHING. Something other than blogging and video games.

But not me, no. I buried myself deep in the social assistance program and thus was free of all pressures to find employment and make something of myself, and I sure as steel belted fuck wasn’t going to find that motivation in myself, so the years flew by.

Now I am going to turn 50 two weeks from tomorrow, and I keep getting waves of feeling like there is no point in going on. That my life is absolutely ruined and is far beyond repair and that all I have to look forward to for the rest of my life is getting sicker and sicker till I end up full of tubes and tied down in a hospital bed, eking out the feeble moments of a pathetic life in mindless terror, all alone.

I don’t want these thoughts. I don’t agree with them. I don’t want to harm myself. But the thoughts come from the emotions and the emotions come from a place of truth.

God, even articles about Failure to Launch are talking about guys who are 25, not 50.

I mean, surely by THEN they will have sorted themselves out,right?

Not if they are so fucked up inside they can’t cope with almost anything at all. Not if they are so terrified of the big bad world that they can do little else but cower in their urban bunker and entertain themselves, which is all they know how to do.

No set of natural instincts was going to lead me to leaving the nest and figuring out how to fly. Those instincts were buried until layer upon layer of fear and avoidance and stood no chance of even being consciously felt, let alone acted on.

Whatever shoots and tendrils those natural and wholesome feelings tried to push through the permafrost of my mind were ruthlessly destroyed by the killer frost of my icy detachment and implacable numbness in the name of “logic”.

A “logic” that said, “we’re never going to make anything of ourselves, so these instincts can only bring us pain., Ergo…. *CHOP.”

I have been my own demented captor for so very, very long.

More after the break,

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Armor made of sunshine

One of my problems is that I don’t seem like I need help.

Blame my parents, I suppose. From them, I learned to put on a bright and cheerful face no matter how I felt because showing my distress could only lead to my pleas being ignored, which is bad, or to thuddingly awkwarrd conversations where they tried to pretend to care without any risk of having to actually get involved and remember I exist and have ot expend time and effort on me, which was worse.

So the conversation would be along the lines of, “But you’re basically fine, RIGHT?”.

It was not okay to not be okay. Not even remotely.

So I learned to use my perky, friendly, “no problem” side as my shield and my armor and my disguise. Whenever anyone asked (which was rare), everything was A-OK with me. No problems here. No sir-re jack. Everything is just fine.

Now go back to your self-involved Boomer life and leave me the hell alone. Forget I exist again. I know it’s what you really want to do.

I’ll just fade into the wallpaper once more and go back to my own little world of reading and TV and video games.

I know nobody really cares anyhow.

In this way, I was accidentally taught to hide everything dark or unpleasant aboujt myself, hence my never seeming like I have any problems.

And that goes so deep in me that I don’t even take off that armor when I am talking with my therapist. At best, I take out the heaviest outer layers but that is the best I can do.

I have no faith at all that anyone will still be there for me after I show them the real me. The me inside the armor. The me that suffers.

Nobody wants to see that. Least of all me. I spend all my time laying video games and such specifically to avoid having to deal with my real self and my real issues.

Much easier – in the short term – to just keep my mind so busy that there is no room for the bad thoughts and the dark impulses. Instead they get pushed out by all that mental activity involved in playing the kinds of game I like.

And this is why I can’t get into slow games like Beacon Pines. They leave way too much room for the bad thoughts to get in.

Well, back to playing Pathfinder, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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write about boundaries

New record : “lunch” at 7 pm.

I give up. I clearly can’t get this shit under control. My meals will be randomly spaced from now on and to hell with the consequences to my health and wellbeing.

And the thing is,. I know that my harsh self-judgment in this area is only making the problem worse. It turns eating a meal into the exact kind of high stakes pressure event that I instinctively dodge or delay, coward that I am.

But no. I don’t have to be like that. It’s how I have BEEN but it is not who I AM.

I can always choose to be better. Nothing is set in stone. I choose who I want to be, day after day, and it’s never too late to choose better.

I will overcome all my bullshit. This I swear.

I’m just feeling crappy because I just got back from making some food in the kitchen and it took so much out of me and hurt so bad it’s freaking me out.

All I did was go to the kitchen, put some peanut butter on some Triscuits, grab a piece of fruit and a can of pop, and come back, and yet I feel like I’ve taken a beating.

And it’s not going to get any better. I had my phone call with Doctor Chao yesterday and instead of dealing with my very real issue of neuromuscular degeneration, we got totally sidetracked by my request for more Clopidigrel and by the time I managed to drag him back to the point, the call was over and he just fed me some hasty bullshit and then it was all over.

I have an in–person office appointment a week from today, on the 10th. Hopefully I will be able to keep him on fucking target this time because the fact that my muscles just get weaker and weaker every time I get one of these flu-like attacks is kind of a great big deal more important to me than a fucking pill.

I don’t want to end up in a bed fulla tubes.

I honestly would rather die. SO either they keep me under heavy sedation for the whole time I got a tube down my throat, or I will elect to choke on my own vomit and die.

Harsh, but true. Suffocation and things associated with it is my all time worst fear, no doubt due to my sleep apnea, and major phobias are nothing to sneeze at.

You know what is? Pollen. You can totally sneeze at pollen.

And this is definitely not the sort of thing where my powers of reason will be any help at all. Make all the logical arguments for why the tube is a good thing you want, I will be too busy trying to pull the thing out to listen.

It’s the same with oxygen masks. Yes, I know that I am, if anything, getting better air through that thing than I do in normal life, but if it covers my mouth and nose, I am going to be ripping it off the minute I can.

Some things even my considerable powers of logic and restraint can’t cope with.

More after the break.

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But then again….

But then again, fuck logic and restraint.

I have lived in a cage of pseudo logic based on flawed assumptions and corrupted by my diseased ego and superego for far too long.

That’s why one of the healthiest things I do in this head of mine is scream “SHUT UP!” to all the nattering negative nagging in my head and then thump those voices into silence with a club made of pure primal rage.

That’ll show them. Sometimes, when the smart part of you is raging out of control and all your higher faculties have been hijacked by your inner demons and they are taking you through a joy ride through Hell, the only thing that can save you is your pure untainted primal id coming to kick ass like the world’s butchest gym teacher.

In fact, I am developing a voice in my head I am tentatively calling Coach and he’s the voice of that other kind of wisdom, the kind that jocks and other active types know but don’t have the ability to articulate.

Things like “get right back on that horse. ” Why? So that you don’t have a chance to become afraid to do so. So that the memory of falling is immediately overwritten by one of doing it right… even if you have to fall a few more times to get there. So that you come away from the experience feeling confident because you overcame difficulty and gained confidence and a brand new skill.

They know and understand that kind of thing. But they can’t explain it to you.

They are also right when they say you should toughen up. Not because you have to meet some minimum level of male performance before you are acceptable, but because being tougher makes life a lot easier.

It’s like having work gloves on. Sure, that makes your hands a lot less sensitive. That’s the point. But having those gloves on lets you handle things and do things you could never do with just your bare hands.

I truly wish I had toughened up at some point in my life. Preferably early. That’s why if I could send a message back in time to a younger self, the first thing I would think to say would be “Toughen the fuck up! Life sucks when you’re a wimp! Change that!”.

I wouldn’t send that message because I know my younger self would not be receptive to that message at all.

But it;s true nevertheless. Trying to toughen up at this point in my life, when my body is falling apart, is so damned hard. I have decades of wimpy instincts to overcome.

That’s why it’s good fgor me to tao into my anger. Anger and spite can do wonders for motivation where logic and understanding of the future fail outright.

Now I am going to very boldly and courageously lie down for a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve always felt the need to show off.

Show off how smart I am, how funny I am, how much I know, and so on. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to perform in a flashy way that earns me praise and that makes the people around me happy.

I guess that makes me a natural performer, despite my crippling shyness.

Somehow, all that shyness vanishes when I perform, though. Patient readers know that I have never had a problem with stage fright.

I am, in fact, way more comfortable performing for a group of people than I would be if I was at a party with them.

Unless, of course, I’m performing at the party.

Like I have said before, manty times, when I am on stage, all the complexity and confusion of life suddenly disappears and everything crystallizes into just me and the audience and the audience is there to watch and listen so the relationship is really just me doing my best to entertain them.

Like Will Smith says…

I can totally relate, Prince. Me too.

I guess it’s because when you are performing on a stage, you have one hundred percent societal permission to make it all about you. To dominate people’s attention as much as you want in order to show off in front of them as hard as you can.

It’s the exact same behaviour that gets hams like myself in a lot of trouble as kids because in regular life, it’s quite rude.

In real life, you have to share the limelight, take turns in conversation, and in general making things all about you is terrible behaviour.

The fact that sometimes you can get away with it if you are entertaining enough just sends the wrong message to spotlight seekers like myself.

Now as to why I feel this need, I couldn’t tell you.

I can say for sure that it has been with me as long as I can remember. I was trying to make people laugh and make them happy when I was still in footie pajamas.

So any psychological theories involving it being a response to trauma on some level has that to contend with.

If anything, the trauma of being raped and bullied explains the opposite : why I have done so little with this performing urge in my lifetime.

Because I am too damned shy, and who’s fault is that?

I know it’s not natural. That’s so clear to me now. The natural me that I was meant to be is expansive, confident, charismatic, charming, and the life of the party.

The current me is… not those things. Yet.

This all seems to indicate that I should make another attempt to get into standup comedy. Even though my mobility issues make that rather complicated.

Well I could always do it online. Record performances via my tablet, figure out where to upload them where they might get noticed.

I need an audience, though. Besides the one in my head.

Maybe I could live stream?

More after the break.

On being in charge

My relationship with being in charge is complex.

On the one hand, like any free spirited creative type, I loathe the thought of having all that responsibility. It would feel like a rope around my neck. I can’t be tied down like that, I have to fly free.

Because if I have the responsibility, I will have to take it seriously and do the best I can for people. There are no other options for me. It’s how I am built.

The fact that as the youngest of four, I have next to no experience having responsibility to others probably factors in there somewhere.

I was made responsible for myself at far too young an age. I supposed my adult-like way of talking and acting was all the excuse they need to fob off their familial responsibilities on a child who was still in elementary school.

And to be honest, I kind of collapsed under the weight of it all. As always, I got done what needed to be done like doing my laundry, but other things like packing my own lunch I just abandoned.

No one to pack a lunch for me? Then I just won’t have lunch any more.

In a strange way, this was how I protested my treatment. Part of me wanted it to be clear to the world that I was being neglected and I had been abandoned.

Did not work, of course. Nobody saw my lack of lunch and my untidy appearance and so on and said, “Oh my, this poor boy is obviously being neglected at home! Quick, call CPS, and get this poor boy some lunch, stat!”

No, they went, “This kid is gross, Eww.. And he’s such an arrogant little shit. Let’s ignore his cries for help and do absolutely nothing to keep him from being bullied and treat him like a leper when he comes to us for help.”

Yes, I can admit it : my natural air of intellectual confidence probably played a part in it. The fact that I wasn’t afraid of the teachers and treated them sort of like equals while I zoomed light years ahead of what they were trying to teach me probably caused at least some of them to sour on me and treat me accordingly.

I was never rude or difficult. I’ve always been naturally cheerfully cooperative to the best of my ability as a default.

I occasionally did challenge their authority by pointing out an error in whatever it was that they were teaching. But I swear I did it from a place of total nerdiness.

I honestly thought they would want to know.

But overall, I was a very strange child who did not act at all like the other children and whose reactions to things were entirely unpredictable.

And people hate people like that.

We disrupt society just by being who we are.

And do you really want someone like that in power?

I don’t think so.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow

Called up the nice folks at the Community Care Clinic and moved my next Wound Care appointment from 11 am tomorrow, where it conflicted with my very important phone call with Doctor Chao, to Friday at 11:30 am, where it does not.

So yay, I did something productive and intelligent instead of refusing to deal with things and burying my head in the sand.

In this case, the sand is video games.

I’ve come to realized just how much I have done that : refused to deal with things I really should take care of because dealing with them is too hard, too scary, too weird, or too whatever else for me at the time.

And it fills me with shame. That’s not who I am. I’m not someone who can’t face reality head on. I’m not some intellectually weak coward.

From now on, I am going to respond to things I find hard to deal with by rising to the challenge instead of running away with my tail between my legs from something that is less of a threat than my own shadow for fuck’s sake.

And my incentive for doing so will be the feeling of victory it will bring and that oh so rewarding feeling of self-mastery, when you know you could have failed in an allo too familiar way but instead you conquered yourself and Got It Done.

This is one benefit to tapping into my anger and aggression : the thirst for victory.

It’s enough to keep the thought of the pleasure of getting things done in mind as an incentive for overcoming my usual bullshit instead of folding like a crappy old card table the moment things get difficult.

A lot of life gets way easier when you just stop looking for a way out all the time.

And the thing is, I am a naturally feisty person. Give me an actual opponent and I will fight like a beast. I am fearless, brilliantly innovative, and can go ten rounds and still be hungry for more.

So why have I been such a pussy about everything until now?

Not sure, but I think not wanting to grow up and face reality was a big part of it.

And being dominated by that Wound of mine. It had me stuck in Freeze Mode and feeling weak and tiny and puny in the face of even the mildest of challenges.

But I don’t have to be that way at all. I can be brave and strong and fierce. I can be a hard-muscled champion always eager for a fight.

In fact, I can be whoever the fuck I want to be.

Why? Because I am fucking awesome, that’s why. I’m so incredible it’s like magic. I have the intelligence, charisma, personality, and talent to make it huge in whatever I decide to do. All I need is the courage.

And you’re always as courageous as you are willing to be.

And I am ready to bury the needle, baby.

More after the break.

Kickstart my heart

Yup. Another :”the song Fru has stuck in his head” entry.

If I ever have a heart attack – and it’s likely – I want that song playing in the ambulance as they rush me to the ER.

And to think, when I was a highly dogmatic teenage metalhead, I had nothing but contempt for bands like Motley Crue and Poison for being mere “hair metal”,

I only liked REAL heavy metal like Metallica and Iron Maiden. You know, SERIOUS heavy metal, not that superficial hair metal crap made by pretty boys who only cared about doing whatever it took to become rich and famous and get their sex drugs and rock n’ roll lifestyles.

Personally, that lifestyle never seemed all that appealing to me. Probably because I’m an introvert so all that “party hearty” bullshit seemed like nothing but a headache and a nightmare to me.

No thank you, I would rather not go to a loud crowded party right after I perform and put all my energy out there on the stage.

I don’t want to take off, take drugs, and take a groupie to bed.

I want to take off, take a bath, then take a nap. ALONE.

Anyhow. Back then, I had a lot of opinions about what was “serious” and what was not.

Marvel was “serious” because they had stories that were gritty and dark and had complex heroes with problems and struggles.

DC, on the other hand, was the fucking Superfriends. Kiddified pablum with simplistic storylines suitable only for those with single digit ages and/or IQs.

Admittedly, when I read Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” in Jason Heisler’s bedroom, I had to adjust my thinking on DC a little bit.

Well, on Batman at least. He wasn’t just Adam West to me any more.

And “star Trek” was “serious”. Star Wars was not.

Yes, I was one of THOSE nerds for a while, looking down my nose at Star Wars as being nothing but adventure movies and not “real” science fiction.

Despite having been as rabid a Star Wars fan as every other child in the known universe back when the first one came out and I ended up seeing it three times.

But is there any contempt more venomous than the contempt a teenager has for the “kiddie stuff” they used to be into?

Thank God I got over that bullshit, and more importantly, over myself.

Now, I don’t give a flying fuck what anyone thinks of any of my tastes. I openly love cartoons and animated features and plush animals and all sorts of “kiddie stuff”.

Because for us nerds, the “giving up of childish things” is strictly optional. Thanks to differential development, our overdeveloped intellects and underdeveloped social instincts combine to let us retain our sense of childlike wonder well into our adults years, and thus we stay curious, creative, and open to new things.

And to me at least, that’s the right way to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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It would be funny to hear Flava Flav say, “I wouldn’t give him the time of day.”