Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

One of the things discussed was my concern about my recent revelation about giving myself permission to change how I look at things fading from my mind before it can lead to any real change, and how I don’t know how to prevent that.

I think I must have given Doc Costin the wrong impression because he thought it sounded like I my have ADD/ADHD. ^[1]

Um. no. I have considered that in the past and I have even joked about having a form of ADHD which is purely mental, but no.

I do have an extremely active and restless mind but only at a distinctly subclinical level.

I have never had trouble paying attention to conversations, or staying focused on something I am watching, or sitting still.

Trust me, when it comes to sitting still, I am a dragon level master.

I’ve had trouble remaining focused during lectures, but who hasn’t? Being an interesting and dynamic speaker has never been a prerequisite for being a teacher or professor and if it was, the entire system would fall apart.

And I am always paying attention. I absorb the information presented.

Given my lack of studying, I kind of have to.

But it is rare that this takes up enough of my mental bandwidth to prevent boredom.

Hmmm. “The first price of genius is boredom.” Gotta use that somewhere.

Also hmmm…. is having trouble sticking to a topic a sign of ADHD?

Anyhow, my point is that I have far too few of the symptoms of ADHD for it to be considered worth the time to go take an online test for it.

Heck, I could make a better case for my being some flavour of autistic, and an online test DID rule out that diagnosis,

The truth is, modern science still doesn’t know what the fuck is wrong with me, a fact I find to be almost tragically unsurprising.

I could be wrong. There might be a diagnosis out there somewhere for me and one day I will stumble across it and suddenly it will all make sense,

I doubt it, though. I am pretty sure that I am a bizarre one-off creation that cannot be defined let alone diagnosed.

What else. Well I still haven’t beaten that boss in Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, But luckily, I thought to check my save games to see if I had one that could keep me from having to start the whole freaking game over, and I do!

It’s a save I made right before I made my 6th and final character. So now I only have to go back that far. I made very different choices regarding said character this time, and hopefully that will let me beat that damned boss when I make it back to him.

If not, what the hell, I will do the whole thing again! Remake my sixth character yet again and go at’r.

And I am glad it worked out this way because I tried lowering the difficulty level and I still couldn’t beat that boss because I still couldn’t hit him!

This fucker is irrationally difficult.

More after the break.

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Fighting my way upstream

The stream, in this case, being SLEEP .

Man am I sleepy. Dunno why, I got my usual amount of nap time today. And I don’t have any sort of infection that I know about, knock quite firmly on wood.

And yet around 8:45 pm, the sleepiness came upon me like a flash flood. One moment I had cheerfully sat down to play my game (Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous), feeling chipper and looking forward to digging in to the task of getting back to where I was, when a wave of tiredness hit me and it was all I could do to finish the fight I was in at the time before laying down for a while.

And the timing is crappy because I normally have my supper at around 9 pm these days and needed a nap at that time kinda throws off my schedule.

And boy was it hard to get out of bed when my tablet’s alarm rang. My body did not want to be away and upright. Hoo boy.

But eventually I managed it. Got up, got my sleepy self to the kitchen, made myself a PB&J, grabbed some fruit and a can of pop, and returned.

Now, I am running on adrenaline. I know that if I stop typing for too long, the sleepiness will return, so I am doing my best to keep this stream of consciousness flowing.

Hmm. Another stream. This one, I have to fight to keep going instead of fighting to make progress against the flow.

Man, it always comes back to water with me, doesn’t it?

Speaking of upstream, I wonder if there’s salmon that make it part way back to their spawning grounds then say “fuck it”, deposit their milt or eggs wherever, then bugger off back to the ocean.

If so, I wonder if they live longer than their more conventional compatriots because they didn’t expend every ounce of energy they had in a marathon upstream swim.

Those would be the salmon I identify with. The ones who look around at the desperate race to spawn, with people dying from exertion or getting eaten by bears all over the place, and say, “This sucks!” and give up.

They know enough to say, “Let’s lose the game”.

That song has enormous spiritual meaning for me. It represents the idea of freeing yourself from the competitive mindset and leaving it all behind in order to escape the traps and pitfalls that rely on our aversion to loss.

Go ahead. Lose the game. Be a quitter. Let them think they won. Who cares what they think? They’re idiots anyhow. And you got what you wanted : freedom.

Fuck your competition. Fuck your god damned rat race. Fuck your putting a shiny trinket on the top of a dung heap expecting us to claw each other’s eyes out to get it.

Fuck your materialistic treadmill. Fuck your vapid careerism. Fuck your ladders, corporate or otherwise. And fuck your fucking hierarchy too.

Keep the ball. We’re going home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Last night, an idea popped into my head that I absolutely MUST immortalize in this space because it represents a big game changer in how I think.

A triumph of recontextualization, if I may say so myself.

And this is MY blog, so nobody can stop me!

Anyhow, the idea is this : instead of looking at my journey as me having to leave the cozy chrysalis of my comfort zone and strike out on my own into the big scary world, I will now think of it as leaving my old, crappy comfort zone in order to transition to a new, clean, superior comfort zone.

Kinda like switching to a better hotel room after a free room upgrade.

That is way less scary and daunting a prospect than having to leave my comfortable world behind forever. I can do almost anything if I know that I will safe at home at the end, even if it’s not quite the same home as the one I left.

Heck, I could look at it as the same ol’ comfort zone after renovations and a good professional cleaning job.

Damn that sounds good. I wonder how much it would cost to get this room cleaned?

Anyhow, the important thing is that I have changed how I look at things in order to better accommodate my own mental health and I think that is very significant.

It’s the sort of thing I need to do in order to move forward and therefore something I need to give myself permission to do.

One of the problems with the “logical” point of view is that it inherently drives you to think there is exactly one absolute objective truth and only one correct way to see it and everything else is illusory bullshit.

And while the objective truth of the hard cold world is, in fact, singular and absolute, the way we look at it definitely is NOT.

There is no “correct” point of view. There can be dozens of equally valid and objectively truthful ways to look at the same thing and we are therefore free to choose whichever one works best for us.

Because after all, the point of all this, including the search for truth itself, is our happiness, not flawless clarity or perfect objectivity.

So optimize for THAT, my big bad beautiful brain. I hereby empower you to completely discard any depressing or unhelpful point of view as being inefficient, insufficient, and injurious to our objectives.

I mean, come on. Why hurt myself?

It’s true that sometimes the truth hurts, but that doesn’t mean that which hurts is true.

That’s one of depression’s biggest tricks : to cut off your ability to feel pleasure via anhedonia and then use that to convince you that only pain is real and then use THAT to convince you that all kinds of errant bullshit is real because it hurts.

It’s one hell of a scam, I will give it that.

But pain is no better indicator of truth than pleasure. And there are always a myriad ways to look at things. So why not choose the one that makes you happiest?

More after the break.

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Bring me my brain hammer…

..because I am trying to pound the lesson from Part I as deeply into my skull as I can before the tide comes in and washes it all away.

So I guess the lesson is written in sand.

In this metaphor.

Which seems unwise.

What I am trying to get at is that I know how my depression works and it is very good at playing the long game.

It knows that no matter how wonderfully enthused about my most recent revelation I am now, eventually I will become distracted and let it fall out of my mind entirely and then my depression will simply put things back to “normal” and erase all my gains.

That’s why I keep having revelations and then remembering that I had the exact same revelation before. Sometimes multiple times.

Making real change happen in this messed up mind of mine is going to take a lot more than merely panning for gold in my stream of consciousness.

And that’s where things get complicated because actual change has to happen in the layers far below the conscious mind, beyond (and below) the reach of the rational, conscious, thinking mind, and that’s where my map of the universe ends.

Past that, there’s only an impenetrable blackness with “here there be…. stuff?” written on it in day-glo purple crayon.

Like, I know there are lots of things there – most of my mind, in fact.

But I am still scared to go there because it is the Unknown to me.

Jesus, I am way off track, aren’t I?

This is how it happens! My bad self knows it can’t directly attack a thought I am trying to defend because I am way too strong for that.

But it knows it just has to lay down a trail of breadcrumbs made of fascinating insights and it can lead me far, far away from the actually important insights that could pose a threat to its godawful regime.

This is where my usual lack of focus gets me.

And off the top of my head, I don’t know what to do about it. I would love to be able to nail my resolve to the horizon so it would always be there to remind me of what I need to hold in my mind instead of letting it go out with the tide.

My intuition tells me that if I want something to stick, it has to really mean something to me, and I agree.

But that scares me a LOT. That would involve those deep layers of my mind where I keep my most tender parts safe from the hostile and horrible outside world.

The one with my rapist in it.

And nobody gets to touch that part of me. NOBODY.

Least of all me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In video games. And in life, I guess.

I’m stuck in both my main games : Hearthstone and Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous,

in Hearthstone(a CCG or Magic : the Gathering type game) , I am technically double stuck because I am stuck in the main campaign I was working on, the Book of Mercenaries, and the one I started up because I was stuck in the first one.

The second one I will probably resolve just by throwing myself at the enemy enough times to stumble upon a winning strategy.

But the Book of Mercenaries one really has me pissed off. It has 10 story paths, each 8 fights, and on the second-last path I was confronted not with an enemy but puzzles.

Basically, here’s this setup, here’s these cards, figure out how to win. Like a chess puzzle for people who find chess too boring. Like me.

This is not the first time the game has made me do these puzzles. But this time there are eight of them in a row and I can’t save my progress after solving one of them so in order to get through this fight I would have to solve them all in one sitting and that is just plain not gonna happen.

I mean, the solution is the same each time, so I technically “know” the solutions to the first three puzzles but these are high level puzzles with lots of cards so the solutions are not the sort of thing one can easily memorize.

And here’s the thing : repetition defeats me. I can’t stand doing the exact same thing over and over again. There are games, Final Fantasy 7 being the most prominent one, that I have abandoned forever because they made me go through a whole elaborate and difficult series of steps over and over and over again just to get to the part where I die yet again.

Nerp. Not gonna do that. That shit is fucking Kryptonite for my soul. I’m gone.

The other game I am stuck in is the one I have been playing for months, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous. The Midnight Isles DLC.

I have hit a boss who seems impossible to beat. He has massively powerful spells, he is nearly impossible to hit, and he has a million hit points.

And it is especially frustrating because I have been doing this damned DLC for weeks now and I am finally getting somewhere near the end.

Now I am not giving up. I have been at this point many times before in games and have always figured it out eventually and moved on.

But I must admit, I had not hit a brick wall this thick in a long time. So it hit me (or I hit it) rather hard and it is taking me some time to get over the shock.

I have at least googled how to beat this fucker, So far, the solutions all seem to involve spells I don’t have and character classes I didn’t select, but I have at least confirmed that I am not the only one who found it super hard.

So did this guy.

More after the break.

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Now and forever

Got another gay furry smut comic recommendation.

It’s called Now and Forever and it is about the wonderful romance between two gay Pokemon. It fills my heart with joy and my eyes with happy tears.

I know that I don’t always show it, but I really am a romantic at heart, and very sentimental. And that comic pushes all the buttons in my big soft squishy heart.

It IS a porn comic, so there is lots of happy loving gay sex in it too. I, of course, heartily approve. For me, the sexiest sex is always the kind that expressed true attraction, on all levels, not just horniness.

For me, sex is deeply spiritual. It is two souls reaching out to one another, looking to make that amazing connection that can break the seal of solitude and connect us to another human being in a way that nothing else can.

To me, sex is a miracle. It’s this incredible source of mutual bliss that anyone can enjoy for free and I think that’s why so many people are afraid of it – because it is so emotionally and spiritually powerful.

That is why they want to tie it up with rules and taboos and other bullshit. Like a person who is afraid of dogs and won’t come to your house unless your poor dogs are locked in a cage, they can’t feel safe unless sex is locked away in rules.

To the point, especially in American religion, of insisting that sex be limited to basically the bare minimum necessary to perpetuate the species.

That’s what is behind that “for procreation only” nonsense. They would eliminate sex entirely if they could, like the Quakers did, but obviously belief systems that forbid procreation don’t last real long.

So the erotophobes have to begrudgingly admit that some sex is necessary to keep the species going but that is the only allowable kind of sex.

How childish! To run away and hide from the manifold wonders of human sexuality out of fear of its power.

Grownups don’t run away from powerful things. They learn to use them, and thus they not only tame the beast, they can occasionally even harness it in order to do good.

Besides, suppressing sexuality can turn it into a dark and chaotic force because it takes one of our strongest drives and forces it into Jung’s shadow.

And trust me, that energy WILL find a way to express itself. All the suppression does is guarantee that when it does emerge, we will be powerless to control it.

The places with the highest teen pregnancy rates are always the places with the lowest sexual literacy rates.

Thank goodness the teens of today can just look stuff up online and there is nothing their fucked up parents can do about it.

Go for it, kids! Be safe and be sexy! Don’t let anyone tell you it’s dirty or wrong. The only thing dirty about it is the filthy minds of those who want to suppress it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…by shattering the old ones.

My current comfortable but dead end and far too limited life can be seen as a self-reinforcing pattern, like a standing wave, which is extremely stable – and that’s the problem in a nutshell.

Because it isn’t good enough. I need so much more out of life than just video games and masturbation. I can do so very much more than merely entertain myself and I am eager to go out into the world and prove myself and make my mark.

But I can’t find the offramp. Everything in my life reinforces the existing inadequate pattern and all roads lead right back to the exact same dead end town.

That can only mean one thing : the pattern has to die.

And that means deliberately destabilizing my life, and that goes every instinct I got. I inherently seek stability, safety, and comfort, and the problem with that is that sometimes that which is the most stable, safe, and comfortable is also toxic and repressive and stifling, and the only way you can be happy is if you leave the comfortable place in search of a better way to live.

And that is exactly what I have been too scared to do, especially since my hospitalization last summer. That whole experience, with its stultifying boredom and crippling dizziness and soul scarring humiliations (like using the “shit in a box” portable toilets and… not using them but pooping anyway), really broke any sense of stability I had and I don’t think I have entirely recovered from that.

After all, it’s not like life went back to normal after I got out. I have to use a fucking walker to get around now. The problem has still not been fixed.

Or even diagnosed properly, for that matter. For fuck’s sake.

Don’t get me started.

And that reinforces my feelings of weakness and fragility and puts a big thick double underline under my need to escape harsh reality by staying in my nice safe world of virtual diversions and mindless amusements.

It certainly does not make my timid, frightened self feel like going out into the big bad world to find my way at age 50.

Not alone, anyhow. And that’s the only way I know how to do anything.

My life has been so solitary and sealed off from the world that I never did learn how to play well with others.

If I had someone to hold my hand and keep me anchored and talk me down when I am freaking out and help me get out of the emotional pitfalls that leave me suddenly feeling utterly lost and confused and helpless, then maybe I could move on.

But I don’t have someone like that and I doubt I ever will.

And it is easy to say, “You will just have to be that person for yourself”, but you can’t escape a pit by standing on your own shoulders.

If I had the strength to “be that person for myself”, we would not even be having this conversation. Where exact do these twittering twats think I am supposed to get the ingredients to make this person anyhow?

I don’t have a source of power external to myself to draw upon in order to perform this miracle of creation. I am an obligate introvert. What I have is all I got.

And it just plain isn’t enough.

More after the break.

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The paradox of wealth

Rich people are, by and large, not happy.

And that is the paradox, because while we all tell each other money can’t buy happiness to each other in order to better cope with our envy of the rich (in a sour grapes kind of way), the truth is that we all think we’d be happy if we had more money.

And this is true of absolutely everybody, including the rich.

Our need to believe that money will make us so strong that no amount of money can contradict it. We are perfectly capable of repeatedly convincing ourselves that the next acquisition, big or small, will be the one that takes us to our happy place, no matter how many times in the past this has proven to be false.

The alternative would be to face the truth that all those material things do is, like a drug, make you happier for a little while but then it becomes the new normal and you have to get back on that treadmill of acquisition in earch of your next fix.

And this is true on every income level. That’s why there is no such thing as “enough” for these socially deranged billionaires. They have to keep hoarding wealth in order to keep the dream that more will make them happy alive.

And the thing is, if you’re poor, more money DOES make you happier… up to a point. The latest estimate puts the plateau between $60K and $80K a year.

That’s where diminishing returns sets in, and the amount of happiness each income increase brings drops off rapidly.

Because that is the scientific truth of the matter : there IS such a thing as “enough”. It begins when you no longer worry about money. There is enough money to live a comfortable middle class life with a nice home in a good neighborhood and enough left over for vacations, eating out, going to the movies, and other indulgences without having to worry about whether you can afford it or what you will have to do without in order to pay for it.

Past that, you have to make increasingly absurd expenditures to keep the dream of future happiness alive.

Simply sticking the surplus money in a bank account is unthinkable. Then you would be committing the ultimate crime of settling for less!

Ergo people are compelled to find things to spend it on. But their real needs are well met. so they have to dream up fake needs in order to keep the lie going.

And all because in a society fanatically devoted to “more”, saying you have enough, thank you, is to betray all the other greedy little piggies squealing for more.

Because if “more” won’t make you happy, what on Earth will?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This blog was just spewing out errors – something about not being able to contact a database^[1] – and that has put me on Fuckery Alert.

Only Stage One : Beware, of course. Something else would have to mysteriously go wrong out of nowhere for me to advance it to Stage Two : The Fuckery Is Afoot.

That’s when I know the universe has decided to fuck with me again and I enter an advanced stage of paranoia while waiting for the third shoe to drop.

Note : for the purposes of that metaphor, people have three feet.

This heightened paranoia doesn’t really help prevent the next attack of fuckery, if there is one. It can’t, because the fuckery, by its very nature, is always somethin that blindsides me with something I never could have anticipated or prepared for.

But it makes me feel a little better knowing that I am at least on to what the universe is up to and I am watching it.

You can’t fool me! I know you put well curated chaos into my life in order to try to teach me to handle the unexpected and respond intelligently to it so I can build up my confidence in my ability to handle things and not feel so god damned vulnerable all the god damned time.

Unrelatedly, there is no such person as the Universe and to think some entity out there is manipulating fate just to teach you a lesson is nothing but pure anthropomorphism and quite frankly reeks of narcissism or at the very least a profound self-centeredness.

Now where was I? Oh right, how the universe fucks with me.

But that’s the thing about anthropomorphism – even someone as aware of it as I am and who has tried to eliminate it from his mind can’t help but do it.

We automatically relate to everything as if it is a person, with consciousness and capable of free will, and that goes for everything from the entire cosmos to this stupid suitcase that WILL NOT STAY CLOSED!

In fact, all of religion, from the animism of the shaman to the Jesus of the megachurch, can be seen as an expression of this anthropomorphism. Because of it, we are convinced that there has to be “people” – whether in the form of spirits, gods, or angels – behind everything that happens and that, in the case of monotheism, there must be a single all powerful patriarch who knows what is going on and who planned the whole thing and so we can know the relaxing comfort and peace of the well tended sheep.

The truth is that there is nobody in charge. We have no shepherd and there is no flock. Leadership in a transpersonal sense is so ephemeral as to be semi-mythical. The politicians we elect becoming secular demigods in our minds, invested with powers far beyond mere top adminitrators.

But this truth – that we are unled – is absolutely intolerable to the human mind and soul. And so we make up ways to deny it, to imagine that someone, somewhere, is in charge of everything and this is all part of their plan.

Indeed, the existence of elaborate and intricate conspiracy theories demonstrates how we would rather believe that we are rule by dark gods for reptile brain reasons than believe we are ruled by nobody at all.

More after the break.

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My baby don’t mess around

Don’t worry, I am not going to go off on another weird and uncomfortable rant about how strange it is that we have this massive taboo against pedophilia yet we call our love ones “baby” or anything like that.

I will probably revisit that topic eventually,. but not tonight.

No, I just want to meditate on sexual fidelity in general because it has always puzzled me. I have never understood why people would bet their entire marriages, families, and futures on their ability to never sleep with anyone else for the rest of their lives.

To me, that seems like a foolhardy investment. We are a horny species and we need variety. in order to stay stimulated. I would not blame my spouse for wanting to fuck other people eventually.

Ergo, I would not make that commitment. Not unless my partner wanted it, because I don’t personally see myself as having trouble with that commitment.

But I have never been in a relationship, so what the fuck do I know? I find it entirely plausible that the same instinct that makes other people demand sexual fidelity from their mates will kick in once I am in a relationship, and I will be driven mad by the thought of my husband in the arms of another just like everyone else.

Because I know for sure that I am capable of enormous jealousy. It just does not revolve around sex. It revolves around attention and intimacy.

What my hubby does with his genitals when he’s not around me does not concern me as long as he practices safe sex.

But if I feel like he is ignoring me in favour of someone else, or god help me, I think he is falling in love with someone else, there WILL be fireworks.

When it comes to love, I do not share. Tried it twice, hated it. I need someone to whom I am their everything, because that is what they will be to me.

And you can’t have two everythings. That’s just math.

I know that if I am in love with someone, I will be passionately devoted to them. Not in a creepy psycho stalker ex kind of way, but definitely not in a restrained British way either.

My love is big love. Whoever I am in a relationship with will have to be able to handle that. And for a lot of people, it is overwhelming, and they can’t handle it.

Fair enough. I can restrain my enthusiastic and effusive nature somewhat for the right man. But I will not shrink my heart for anybody.

Whether it is loud or quiet in public, my love will continue to be big and heartfelt and passionate and full on.

And the one for me will have to be someone who can take it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s what I mean by that.

I have once more been pondering how I have always had trouble with transitions – by which I mean those times when you stop doing one thing to do another.

It doesn’t matter how much I enjoy either activity. I could be going from one orgasms and potato salad party to another and part of me, the Trog part, will still feel like it’s being snatched from the warm and loving arms of its mother and thrown out into a cold winter’s night on that Midnight Tundra.

And this bothers me. It means that to jut go about my sad little life, I have to go through that traumatic sequence a dozen times a day.

I never get used to it.

It is like I feel compelled to repeat this abandonment scenario over and over, perhaps because there is some lesson in it I am just not learning.

That happens, you know. Repetitive patterns of behaviour, obtrusive and disturbing memories, PTSD, even a serial killer’s modus operandi can all be signs of the mind trying to process a memory but being blocked by another part of the mind because the memory is too painful and traumatic to handle.

So they are really a civil war of the mind. The memory system can’t stop trying to process and integrate the memory, and the emotional center can’t stop blocking it.

Anyhow, back to transitions. I think perhaps the problem is that I get really comfortable in whatever I am doing and don’t want to leave that comfortable little nest.

Transition trauma, therefore, is the price I pay for this nesting urge. If I could develop a more robust internal framework instead of being such an invertebrate, I would not need to settle into place quite so firmly and would not then have to crowbar myself out of that place when it is time to do something else.

Like, for instance, it being time to get out of bed, get some food, and start blogging.

By my Lilliputian standards, that’s a huge change. There I am all cozy under the comfortable, with a steady and reliable source of video games and pornography in the form of my tablet close at hand, and now I am supposed to stand up, go to a completely different room, gather food, come back, and then write 500 words?!?

And it’s made all the worse by the fact that I have to instigate and execute this entire scheme on my own initiative and under my own power.

It is a lot easier when I have to do it because of something external, like needing to go to Wound Care or the like.

It’s still no fun, but at least I am not constantly haunted by the knowledge that I could stop doing the thing right this second and there would be no immediate consequences.

,God do I lack self-discipline. I need context and structure from outside myself in order to get anything done.

Like I said, I’m an invertebrate. No backbone of my own. No skeleton.

I’m jusf a vague and diffuse cloud of lifelike goo floating in the water on a microscope slide in the back closet of the biology lab of an abandoned high school in Mississippi.

Basically, I’m an amoeba.

Pleased ta meetcha.

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Struggle or adapt

Lately I’ve been thinking that I am too adaptable for my own good.

For instance, as patient readers know, a couple of weeks ago my keyboard had a stroke ^[1] when it recovered, it had lost the Q, S, and X keys.

Since then, I have been using an awkward combination of the Windows Visible Keyboard{{2}{ (the one I used during my previous keyboard troubles) and copy n’ paste in order to be able to type “normally”.

“Why not just buy a new keyboard?” you ask.

The answer is that I found it easier to just adapt to the situation. Come up with my own inelegant but workable solution.

But there is no practical, sensible reason I can’t just hop on to Amazon Canada and order a new wireless keyboard.

I can afford it. I have the money on my card. It would be so easy to order it. Just a couple of clicks and I could have it tomorrow.

But for some reason, something inside of me resists doing that. After all, I have a (poor) solution already. And on some deeply fucked up level of my male brain, I think I feel that if I buy new keyboard, my current keyboard wins.

It succeeded in making me go out of my way to buy a replacement. When it malfunctioned,. it challenged my dominance and the last thing I am going to do is let an inanimate object get the better of ME.

Ladies, I swear I am not making this up. This is how our brains work,

So until I get over my little snit, I will not buy a new keyboard.

This is what I mean when I say I adapt when I should struggle instead.

And I have done so all my life. I don’t confront problems and solve them. I just adapt to whatever shitty situation the problem causes.

Because for me, that’s easier. In the short term. And the problem is still there and making my life worse and of course they accumulate and eventually you get me squatting in my own filth because it’s easier to ignore it than to clean.

I’ve adapted to the horrible chaos around me. I never clean anything and so it just gets worse and worse and I hate the mess I live in but I can’t do anything about it because ignoring it is easier.

This is where the path of least resistance gets you, folks.

Your whole life goes down the drain.

And here I am,.in the sewers of life, waiting to reach the sea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] For the fairly rare letters Q and the X. Q moreso than X

[[3]] For the very common letter S, except that I have to use the WVK for capital S

There’s a lot, including my trip to see Doctor Caswell yesterday, today’s Wound Care, and of course, the lowdown on Therapy Thursday.

Let’s go logically… chronologically.

Yesterday I went to see Doctor Caswell, my diabetes and sleep apnea doctor, to go over the results of the labwork she had ordered a few weeks back.

Labwork I actually got done promptly for a change. Yay me!

And the results are actually pretty damned good! My hemoglobin A1C, which measures blood sugar over time, was 7.6, and 7 is normal, so we are almost there!

I was pickled tink at that. Usually that test only gives me bad news. Like how I managed to beat my previous high score. 🙁

But nope. This time it was good news all the way. Means that the Jardiance and the Ozempic she put me on are really doing the job.

Kidney function was a little off, not much. Same with liver function. And creatinine, whatever the heck that is.

According to the Wikipedia article, it is a measurement of kidney function.

Cool. That’s all I needed to know.

All these almost right results make me wonder : is this what it’s like to be a C student?

I told her about the return of my dizziness upon rising (BTW : my dizziness on rising is back) and she did the test where she took my blood pressure when I was sitting down and again when I was standing.

And sure enough, just like last time I had this problem, my blood pressure plummeted thirty points when I stood up.

Yup. That tracks.

So she is going to hook me up with one of those 24 hour blood pressure monitors and based on the results from that, she may take me off one of my blood pressure meds.

And that makes sense because there is a direct relationship between blood SUGAR and blood PRESSURE. The higher the blood sugar, the more viscous you blood is, and the harder your body has to work to pump it around, resulting in high blood pressure.

Ergo, it makes sense that if my blood sugar is down, my blood pressure had gotten a lot lower too, and the meds are now making it too low.

Whatever. I am just sick of getting dizzy every time I stand up. Hopefully this all will lead to a solution to that issue.

Wound Care this morning was uneventful. The nurse was very nice. I liked her.

She knows my name now, so I must learn and/or remember hers.

Jennifer, maybe? Doesn’t really jibe with her sunny South American appearance and accent and demeanor. but who am I to judge?

The main foreign sources of nurses for this area seem to be, in no particular order, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, India, and for some reason Russia.

The trip TO Wound Care was eventful as fuck, though.

First, I completely spaced on having Wound Care today, forcing poor Julian to have to knock on my door to remind me, which I am sure he finds difficult.

There was no way we were going to make it on time, so I called the Community Care Clinic to tell them I would be late.

:Made me feel almost like a grownup.

Megan. to my surprise, told me that my appointment was at noon, not 11:45 AM like I had thought it was.

I think she just moved it to give me more time.

On the way down to the car, the elevator took forever to arrive, forcing me to stand there waiting for way way too long.

As you know, standing is much harder on my handicapped legs than walking. I think it’s because when you walk, the muscle groups holding you up constantly change, whereas when you stand they don’t.

As a result, my legs were very unhappy when the elevator finally showed up.

More after the break.

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My angry feminism

My formative years – ages 0 to 7 – took place in the Seventies and I feel like I absorbed a lot of that wave of feminism on a cellular level.

A big part of that was the message that women can do anything men do and that women did not need a man for anything.

Remember, this was an era where people debated whether women should be allowed to work outside the home. Where a woman needed her husband’s permission if she wanted to open a bank account or apply for a credit card. Where domestic violence never happened or if it did happen it was rare and if it wasn’t rare she must have done SOMETHING to deserve it.

And remember, these were the daughters of the robot housewives of the 50’s abd 60’s. They saw how dehumanized their mothers were by domestic servitude and serial pregnancy and they were damned sure that was not going to happen to them.

So hell yeah the feminism of the era was angry. It had to be. Women were fighting for equality on a fundamental and very intimate level. This was ideological trench warfare and so it can be forgiven for going over the top sometimes,.

And I feel like I inherited that warlike feminism. I am ready to defend women anytime, anywhere, and against any one. There is no negotiation and I don’t care if anyone’s feelings get hurt. I will defend equality on all levels to my dying breath.

And as usual for me, that means I am often angrier about an issue than the women are. Women who are too young to remember Seventies feminism and the necessary militancy of the era so they don’t understand my rage.

I won’t put up with injustice in any form and yes, that has made me seem like a psycho from time to time.

But my beliefs run to the very core of my being, and I must act accordingly. It doesn’t feel like I am making a choice, any more than I choose whether to pull my hand away from an open flame when I feel the heat.

It is who and what I am. And if that makes me a fanatic, so be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a very strange place. Connected to and contiguous with the one you live in, but definitely its own unique address.

First off, it is mostly virtual. Like so many of us urban lemmings, I see the world through screens. Most of my day is spent staring at my expensive computer monitor or my inexpenive Amazon tablet, with occasional vacations to the living room to watch TV with my dear friends.

And I know that’s not a healthy way to live. I have so little interaction with the real world, and even less to do with the world outside this apartment.

It’s no wonder I tend to feel like I am clinging to the edge of the cliffs of insanity by my cuticles while dangling over a thousand foot fall into utter madness all the time.

Makes sense that one of my worst nightmares is that I will lose my grip on reality entirely and end up a drooling catatonic in a back ward somewhere as I go through every possible personal hell with my signature silence.

Well, I wouldn’t want to bother anyone.

Part of me wants to be able to lift a giant middle finger to the world and tell everyone who ever “ignored” me to go fuck themselves sideways with a wire brush, but I know that would not be legit.

Because I hid my pain from everybody for my entire life. If you’d met me, you would have no idea that I was ill, mentally or otherwise. I would have seemed like a warm, cheerful, friendly fellow with plenty of confidence and charm who effortlessly radiates intelligence and personality and hasn’t a care in the world.

That’s how I always seem when my smooth façade is in place, and it is always in place if there are other people around.

I can’t imagine things being any other way. This façade of mine is the wall I built around myself to keep people away from my tender, wounded inner workings, and it forms a hermetic seal around my soul.

And somewhere inside lurks the real me, the central me, the person that was born with my name and has been around ever since. The master controller who runs this whole show from within an inky black envelope of secrecy so impenetrably dense that like some obscure Cold War spy service, it denies its own existence.

Pay no attention that misshapen troglodyte behind the curtain. He is not important.

And inside that shell is this strange little world of mine. My own private playground full of games and puzzles and diversions to keep me too busy to think about the vast world outside my bubble and why I never go there.

It seems like a happy place but it’s built over a toxic waste dump and the more time I sped there, the sicker and sadder I get.

And I spend almost all my time there.

Because I can’t stay out. The outside world is too scary for me now. The world inside might be toxic but it’s familiar and I feel safe there.

And I find it so hard to make myself believe things could be better.

So I guess I am going to stay here until it kills me.

Or I somehow learn to believe in magic.

More after the break.

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It’s just an ordinary day

I didn’t think much of that song when it first came out. It seemed okay and I was glad to hear from Newfoundland’s own Great Big Sea because I love those guys for taking traditional Maritimes music into the mainstream in a highly effective and most importantly credible way.

So not just some blow dried pop dipshit “sampling” the “sound” for one track in an attempt to leech some authenticity out of it like a goddamned vampire.

Yes, I am salty about that. Look, when you grow up near the Atlantic Ocean and in the shadow of the big important world that happens elsewhere, you grow up salty.

Especially, I suppose, if you’re GenX like I am. We’re a salty bunch. I liken us to badgers. Harmless if you leave us alone but if you get too close to our den, watch the fuck out because we will defend our territory with great ferocity and tenacity.

As illustrated in this primal GenX scene :

“GET OUT MOM!”
“Listen, I just want to..
“Listen! I said, GET OUT of MY ROOM. ”
“Listen, young lady, I pay the mortgage. here..
“I DON’T CARE! FUCK OFF and GET OUT!”

And our poot Boomer parents are wondering where the hell this terrifying stranger came from and where their usually quiet (if sullen) kid went.

Don’t get me started, Boomer. Trust me, you don’t want to know.

I will give you this : when you grow up feeling besieged by advertising and consumer culture absolutely EVERYWHERE, you become very protective of whatever little island of sanity that only contains YOUR CULTURE you can carve out.

BACK OFF, you fucking Madison Avenue JACKALS!

Nobody understands us.

Anyhow, like I said, I didn’t think much of that song when it came out but every time I hear it now, it impresses me more., both with its production and its message.

The message especially, because to me it sounds like it’ about finally making it to a happy place after a long hard struggle with the demons of depression.

Hence the refrain of, “It’s not so bad,,, ”

And that’s the place I am trying to go. I am trying to express all my pent up rage, bitterness, disappointment, and all the rest so that the storm raging inside me is robbed of its energy source and can finally blow out.

That is the only way I am ever going to know peace. I can’t find peace by ignoring the storm and pretending it’s not there just because I have a tiny shelter, barely a rickety shack and barely big enough to fit most of me inside.

And I can’t impose peace upon myself through contemplation, rationality, and the seeking of some kind of spiritual apotheosis.

The only way out is to deal with my shit, and that means feeling the emotions and dealing with them instead of just pushing them offstage.

Yeah, a lot of them go directly against that smooth facade of mine and are in direct violation of the person I am trying to be.

And the person I think I am.

But for enlightenment to be born, the false self must die. I am in the process of finding out who I really am, and learning to accept that person, warts and all.

And he’s not so bad a guy. He’s a lot less calm and mellow than the facade, and he’s not all that practical or wise. In the end, he will probably be less pleasant to be around because he won’t be afraid that if he is not 100 percent pleasant, people will realize what a piece of shit he is and flee.

But I am sure he will be a heck of a lovable guy, regardless.

Have patience, buddy. I’m still giving birth to you.

And that’s never pretty. Or easy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This shit is getting monotonous.

Every time I wake up, it’s the same old thing : objective reality EVERYWHERE.

I mean, would it kill reality to give me a little harmless recreational psychosis?

Actually… I guess it would. At that.

Forget I asked.

---

Red lantern district

I highly recommend a gay furry comic called Red Lantern, 

Everything about it is top notch. The art is superb – every panel is a painting. And I know that might be mostly Photoshop tricks, and I don’t care, it looks fantastic.

The writing is incredibly good too, and that’s a minor miracle in and of itself. It is so rare to find high fine arts skills and good writing in the same place.

The characterization is rich and evocative. The characters’ personalities come through with great clarity and feeling. And I love the dialogue. The dance of conversation is rendered with great delicacy and precision, whether it’s conniving hyenas, mysterious and deadly lizards, or a jealous canine underling trying to undermine the admiral’s authority under a façade of professional outrage.

Face it, puppy doggo, what really makes you angry is not that the admiral is bad at his job, it’s that he’s amazingly good at his job without having to make all the sacrifices you made in the service of your ambition that turned you into such an unpleasant prick.

And I identify with our admiral protagonist on that score. My whole childhood I was resented by the keeners in the class because they sweated every test and studied their asses off and I never cracked a book and didn’t even seem to take school seriously and I got better marks than them.

And like I have said before, that is objectively unfair. It violates the labour theory of value. Why should I get for free what others work so hard to achieve?

I did everything wrong. I was unorganized, unmotivated, unambitious, and unfocused. While they toiled away in ways I can barely imagine, I just wandered here and their like a moonstruck child without a care in the world.

That’s got to be pretty fucking galling.

That said, I refuse to feel guilty for it or apologize for my gifts. And I am never going to pretend something was harder for me to do than it really was.

Like my hero Isaac Asimov, I will be equally honest about the fact that I am incredibly intelligent as I am about the fact that I am clumsy and clueless.

So yeah, screw you, guy who can’t stand that the admiral is a damned good leader without having to be an uptight cunt like you.

And pretty god damned sexy, too.

Give it some thought and you might just find that real leadership is about dreaming, not screaming, and understanding, not imperiously commanding.

To me, that was the big lesson of the famous book, “How To Win Friends And Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.

Everything that book teaches comes naturally to us soft and sensitive types who are normally considered completely unfit for the world of business.

Turns out we’re perfect for it.

Who’d have thunk it, huh?

More after the break.

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Simmer down now

Once more I have to realign my energy state from the intense and energetic engagement of playing my current video game to the more contemplative and introspective vibration so I can write.

I know I had like a dozen different topics in mind for what I would write about now but I can’t remember any of them and even if I could, I would probably consider them old news by now and want nothing to do with them ever again.

That’s why I don’t write the ideas down. Once they are captured in words, they are dead to me and I have to move on.

My need to express myself is so strong that it won’t even let me express the me of five minutes ago. The me that wrote down that idea is dead and gone, and is now as gross to me as used Kleenex.

I have one weird muse.

To be honest, I am still trying to figure it out, and I think I will be doing so till the day I die. It is the central mystery of any true artist’s life and their true religion as well.

It can be like dealing with a magical goblin like Rumplestilskin. You give it what it wants and it will spin words into gold for you.

But it won’t tell you what it freaking wants! Goddamned riddles.

To be honest, though, I know what it wants. It wants to be in control. It wants to be able to inspire me and have me jump into action to create what it inspired me to create. It wants to be able to express itself as easily and freely as humanly possible.

But so far, that has been far too much to ask of poor lil ol me. A life like that would be far too jarring and chaotic and unpredictable for me. I would not be able to stand not knowing what I would be doing or where I would be going at any given time.

I feel the prickly heat of panic in my forehead and on the back of my neck just thinking about it as I type these words.

I am not built for that kind of life. Maybe if I got to the point where I felt calm and secure enough to relax and be comfortable, I could indulge my muse that way.

But I would need a lot more material security before that could happen.

In other words, money.

Enough money to get my own apartment and create my own space tailored to my own needs and tastes where I can feel truly at home.

And a job of some sort to generate that money, of course. It would do me a lot of good to finally feel like a part of society and not merely its ward.

I want a real life, god dammit. Not this shadowy farce of illusions and mirrors and tiny little puffs of smoke.

I want to do things that matter to me.

But I’m all broken inside.

And it hurts so bad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Er, my aching back.

It’s occurred to me recently that a lot of the trouble I have with walking comes from pain in my back, not my legs.

This was illustrated to me last Saturday night, when I had my run-in with the forces of fuckery in the form of getting Subway delivered via Skip.

What I didn’t mention in my recounting of the tale was that as part of that misadventure, I went from my computer to the apartment door and back without using my walker.

My legs were a little unhappy with me after and I wouldn’t have wanted to have to do it again right away, but I did it and it was no big deal, all in all.

And that is kind of a big deal.

After I realized I had done this, the question of how exactly I would know if my legs had gotten better loomed large in my mind.

After all, it’s not like any sane person, or me for that matter, would regularly try to walk without assistance just to see if a miracle has occurred and they can walk again.

So now I got something to think about, that’s for sure. I am going to have to finally get around to doing a few test walks to find out where I stand, so to speak.

It’s a thought that admittedly has crossed my mind from time to time this year but I was always too scared to try because the consequences of having my legs give out on me could be pretty dire.

I could have a nasty fall, and when you weigh as much as I do, the force of a fall is much greater than it would be for a more svelte person. I could end up lying on the floor unable to get up, like what happened in the period leading up to my hospitalization last summer. I might end up twisting in some unnatural way and spraining something.

And so on and so forth.

But I think I know a way to do it fairly safely. I will need Julian or Joe to follow behind me with the walker so that if I feel weak I can just grab it.

The physio people and I did something similar when I was in the hospital. In order to convince my hyper cautious self to get up and walk, they followed right behind me with a wheelchair. The wheelchair was so close that all I had to do was to flop down backwards like I am sitting down in a big overstuffed chair and I would be there.

Hmmm. So maybe I would be better off if someone pushed my computer chair behind me instead of the walker.

However I do it, if there is a possibility of my leaving the walker behind at least some of the time, I have to know.

Because I never thought I would say this, but I really miss walking.

Don’t take your legs for granted, folks.

More after the break.

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More adventures in ordering in

Why do I put myself though all this just to pay too much for food?

Had a heck of a time ordering in because I apparently slept through the alarm I set for 9:15 pm and didn’t end up ordering until almost 10 pm.

Which is when a lot of places close. Dammit.

So in the middle of being my usual dithering self, wrinkling my nose at the prices some these places charge ($23 for pork fried rice? I don’t THINK so, Wing Kee!)., I also had to deal with the places I finally decided to order from closing on me.

I started off looking for Chinese food, but as I have mentioned in this space before, the city I live in, Richmond, has one of the largest ethnic Chinese populations outside China in the world and yet the one thing you can’t get around here is Chinese food.

The Canadian kind of Chinese food, that is. You can get all kinds of exotic and bizarre food that is so Chinese it’s studying for government exams, and completely unrecognizable to a wide eyed Westerner like me.

One place had such intriguing items as Fried Uterus, Pickled Aorta, and Poison Mushroom On Rice.

There has to be a translation error on that last one.

Maybe it should be in quotes, like “Poison” Mushroom.

But there are not a lot of places that do what we Canadians think of as Chinese food. You know, egg rolls, chow mein, fortune cookies, etc.

I can only assume it seems pretty weird to actual Chinese people. Like ordering a burger in Tokyo.

It will not look or taste normal to you. Or so I have read.

I eventually gave up on Chinese and made a lateral move to Japanese. But all the places I knew like Ninkazu and Edo closed at 10 pm. Dammit.

And the places I didn’t know were all too expensive. And oddly had their entrees priced at around $23 too.

$23 for beef donburi? I don’t THINK so! Not unless it comes with miso soup, sunomono salad, and a blowjob.

Eventually I gave up on Japanese cuisine and everything else interesting and just got myself some fuckin’ McNuggets.

Nice old reliable McDonalds. Might not be as fun or nutritious as what I was looking for but at least it’s always there for you.

Kind of makes me feel like an errant husband coming home to have sex with the wife after striking out at the singles bars.

That’s probably not a thing any more, right? It’s a very Seventies “Did someone say ‘Free Love’?” kind of thing.

Pretty sure hookup apps have made singles bars obsolete.

And good riddance. They were a ridiculously inefficient way to find sex anyhow.

Now women are at long last free to admit they are horny and want to fuck and there is nothing more to it. Just like men have always been free to do.

Go get some, ladies!

Who knows, maybe some day straight people will know the freedom to be freaky uv gay men have always had.

At least, that’s the dream.

Imagine a world in which straight people have bath houses too!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.