You can’t reject your past without rejecting the person you are today because your past made you who you are today.

It’s a matter of acceptance. You want to learn to accept that whatever is in your past happened and there is nothing you can do about it now. Those things happened and left their mark, good or bad, on you, and you can’t change a single moment of it.

So there is no point in fighting your own memories. That doesn’t mean you have to dwell on them, or IN them for that matter.

It just means you have to do what you can to minimize the urge to push the memories down in your mind or try and pretend they never happened.

They happened. They are over and done with. They represent unalterable truth.

What you CAN change, however, is how you interpret your memories.

Like, nowadays I look back over my memories of my elementary school days and realize what a difficult child I was despite having the best of intentions.

For one, I was highly unpredictable. You never knew what I was going to say or how I was going to react to something.

About all you could predict is that whatever I said or did, it would not be normal.

I was also very blunt. Tact was a concept that did not really sink in for me until grade 5 or so. I grasped the concept easily enough. I could tell when characters on my beloved sitcoms had thoughtlessly said something they shouldn’t have, and I could judge them for doing so.

But it took a while for me to learn that this meant I have to kind of review things I was going to say before I said them and maybe not say them at all.

I think I was still trying to be the cute and clever kid from said sitcoms on some level, and those kids were always adorably blunt.

And I was, well, kinda pathetic. And gross.

I was a slob even back then. I was always rumpled and wrinkled and mussed. And I wasn’t the neatest of eaters, either.

As to the rest of hygiene, I can’t recall what my bathing schedule was like, or how often I brushed my teeth, and so on.

But with nobody paying much attention to me, I can’t imagine I took care of myself very well. After all, being a mess was my way of silently advertising the level to which I wa being neglected at home.

Of course, nobody saw it that way.

And I had a role in that as well because even back then, the smooth façade was in place, and I did not necessarily seem like a neglected child because I was so intelligent, articulate, and self-possessed.

And I am still like that today. I honestly can’t imagine letting my smooth façade slip. It is the shell in which I dwell, and I have no idea who I would be without it.

Someone a lot crankier, that’s for sure.

More after the break.

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And fade to black

I have this feeling like I am fading away today, so I thought I’d write about it.

It’s been hard to stay awake. I’ve been bouncing in an out of Dreamland all day. Even when I am awake, I sort of feel like I am falling asleep any time I come to a rest for more than a minute or so.

It’s kind of a drag, man.

And emotionally I feel sort of listless and disjointed and angry in a very flat affect unfocused Black Hole Sun kind of way.

Obviously I have to link it now.

With occasional flareups of nihilistic rage as some dim part of me tries in vain to wake up and get my engine started.

That never lasts.

But I have been thinking a lot about the role of attitude in our subjective experience of life lately. One of depression’s subtlest tricks is to convince you that there is only one way to see reality – its way – but there’s actually a heck of a lot of wiggle room in how we react to life events both external and internal

So I tell myself :

“You are not objective. You are crazy. You are mentally ill. The version of reality you live in is a product of that mental illness and in your own,. less severe way, you are every bit as deluded as any psychotic. Don’t fall for depression’s old trick of making you think that if you FEEL bad, it’s because you ARE bad. ”

“Sorry kid, but life ain’t that fair. Good people can feel terrible for years without having done a single thing to deserve it. Your whole life could be massively unjust and unfair and there is no force in the universe whose job it is to set things right. ”

Wouldn’t it be wild if there were millions of people hating themselves and wanting to die because the alternative would be to face just how brutally unfair the universe is?

I’ve said before that one of the hardest things for the human mind to accept is the meaningless nature of the universe.

Things both horrible and sublime can happen and it means absolutely nothing. The universe isn’t trying to tell you anything. There is no great plan or great planner. There is no meaning of life and no inherent role for any of us that, if we can just find it, will mean that we are definitely doing what we are “supposed” to be doing and everything will be okay from that point on.

What meaning and purpose there is in life is there because we human beings manufactured it, not because the universe is just like that.

Even our pain has no meaning save the meaning we impose upon it.

The true lesson of existentialism is that this is not a bad thing. It is, in fact, quite liberating, because it means we can create our own rules and our own justice and continue to perfect them generation after generation until the end of time.

I’ve personally always seen the world as meaningless, heartless, and cruel.

To me, that just makes being kind to each other all the more important because if we don’t look after one another, nobody else will.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Came across this fun and profound (profund?) Reddit vid recently :

So I thought I would go through the quotes and comment on the ones that I like.

“Do not believe everything that you think.”

Man do I need to wrap my brain around this one. My conscious, rational self still acts like it’s the only part of me that is real and I still find myself thinking that way sometimes. But I am so much more than this overpowered clattering chatterbox I call my mind. I have a soul as deep and mysterious as an underground lake, a spirit that soars and shines like a golden eagle, and a heart that beats with love for all living things. And I would still have all those things if I was dumb as a post.

“It is easy to fool someone. It is hard to convince them they have been fooled. ”

Solid. And this is exactly how Trump operates. He does whatever it takes to compromise them, then counts on their automatically believing whatever it takes for them to not have to face how deeply they got fucked over. That’s why he still has a death grip on around a third of the American electorate. I

So think twice before hating his people for not waking up to what a pathetic excuse for a charlatan he is, and think about what exactly you are asking of them.

You are asking them to admit to themselves and the world that they have been being fucked up the ass by a cheap con man for 5+ years and been thanking him for it and telling him how proud you are to be his bitch the whole time.

And that. my friends, is a mighy big ask.

“I will try again tomorrow. ”

I need to hear this,. often and loudly. I think I let my frustrations with my lack of life progress color my world view too much, and that leads to my not giving myself credit for how hard I struggle and how difficult it is to be me and how heroic it is that I get up and keep going no matter what. I’m like the Energizer bunny. Fox. Whatever.

I will never stop trying. Trying to grow, trying to heal, trying to find my way out of this labyrinth I generate to hide the world from my eyes.

It will go away when I stop needing it.

And I am working on it.

“The axe forgets. The tree remembers. ”

Covered that one a long time ago, but I like that person’s spin on it. And it reminds me that what is a spur of the moment joke to me might be a life scarring burden that someone will take to their grave to them. Sobering.

“It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life. ”  – Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise.

This speaks to my sense of strategy. You can make only moves that are optimal based on everything you know and still lose due to factors you don’t know and/or things beyond your ability to control.

Me, I am still trying to get over the need to control outcomes. Or rather,. judging myself with brutal harshness for my inability to do so.

Whatever, man. I’m not in charge here.

More after the break.

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More on quotes

Here we go again.

“Living in the future is anxiety. Living in the past is depression. The only solution is to live in the present. ”

Right. Because it’s just that easy,

Then why does the thought of living in the present fill me with anxiety and depression? I don’t know how to live in the present. My deep, deep paranoia demands that I always look to the future in order to spot dangers in time to evade or neutralize them as opposed to have them take me by surprise and force me to deal with them in realtime.

I hate both surprises and dealing with things in realtime.

Living in the moment, therefore, seems like a recipe for overwhelm for yours truly. I have to live in my strangely abstract time delayed safety zone dimension.

Without it, I would be naked before a vastly overstimulating reality.

“Your kid isn’t giving you a hard time. They’re having a hard time. ”

That’s just beautiful. It is so important to remember that however someone, grownups included, is acting, the odds are that they are not doing it deliberately to annoy you.

They are reacting to the situation and their own emotions, just like you.

Remembering this will help you skirt the edges of interpersonal conflict without getting sucked into it and help you remember to be as gentle and understanding as you want others to be with you.

Sometimes being compassionate requires a dispassionate POV.

“You train people how to treat you, unconsciously or not. “

I only figured this out relatively recently. In big and small ways, you reward some reactions and punish others.

And a lot of interpersonal problems can be traced back to rewarding the behaviour you don’t want and punishing the ones you do want.

It’s surprisingly common. Take someone with a history of ending up in abusive relationships. Sure, maybe they just have terrible luck and/or taste.

But it is also possible that they unconsciously training people to abuse them because for them, that is their “normal”, and like an animal seeking its natural habitat, they keep looking for their “normal” no matter how horrible that “normal” is.

I feel like there is something I need to learn from this. Put a pin in it.

Often the real truth only emerges when you ask them hypotheticals like, “imagine you got into a perfectly healthy, loving, totally non abusive relationship. How does that make you feel? Calm and happy? Or anxious and angry? Would you start thinking of your lover as boring, or irritating, or clingy? Do you think you would reward this positive behaviour with love and approval, or punish it with moodiness and irritability? What lessons do you teach with your reactions?>”

That’s a very rough journey to take someone on, and I would never just spring it on someone because I know from experience that some of the worst moments in recovery are the ones where you have to face the ways in which you cause your own pain.

Life is much simpler when you cast yourself as the innocent victim of a cruel world.

But the truth is almost never that simple, and perpetual victimhood denies agency.

If you think of yourself as a victim, then getting better would violate your identity.

And that’s kind of a problem.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well it’s definitely officially summer now because the honeymoon period where it was nice out but not too hot clearly is over and now three long months of afternoon misery from the heat can begin.

Clearly I have still not caught up with the increased need for hydration, as I feel quite heat sick right now. I have a headache throbbing away in that special place in the middle of my forehead that causes me so much pain. The food I am eating seems too dry and lands in my stomach like wet cement, which is a sure sing of dehydration based salivary deficit. And I feel fluttery and faint.

Welcome to my world. Summer edition.

Luckily, I have fans. And I love both of them. Both the one on my desk and the one on my bed. And as long as I keep them pointed at this all too easily fever’d brow of mine, I can keep the worst of heat madness at bay.

My problems actually started last night. I was watching stuff via Zoom with Le Gang and feeling fine when I felt this squishy, gurgling feeling detonate approximately two inches above my navel and when you are an IBS sufferer like me, those are never good.

Sure enough, pain and nausea started radiating from that spot and in less than a minute, I went from feeling fine to feeling very ill.

Ergo, I had to go to bed directly after the Zoom meeting as opposed to the usual hanging out with Le Gang in the living room watching stuff off the PVR for around 90 minutes or so.

And I hate that it came to that. I need my social time. And I hate feeling like my friends are off having fun without me.

It makes me feel excluded, even if I am the one excluding me.

What can I say. I got issues.

Since the initial incident, there have been two aftershocks of, thankfully, diminishing severity. And there has been nothing all afternoon, knock on wood.

So hopefully this was just a little of the random weirdness to which my body (and my life) are prone, and not a sign of something worse to come.

Knock on wood. Redux.

---

I am getting sick of the shenanigans of the DLC expansion for Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous that apparently has a death grip on my mind lately.

tt’s called Midnight Isles and it’s pretty lame. Feels very slapped together at the last minute as it takes the assets of the original game and sort of bolts together a plotline based on randomly generated dungeons and the search for these purple gems.

What is pissing me off now is a sudden nearly vertical jump in difficulty after I got my second or third gem.

I went from fighting zombies and cultists to being AMBUSHED BY DRAGONS and fighting my way through hordes of enormous Fire Elementals in one step!

So now I am contemplating having to start over at the beginning AGAIN because my party is clearly not up to handing all this shit.

The thing is, the fights were quite easy up until this point. Nothing my peeps couldn’t handled fairly easily, No big whoop.

Then BLAMMO, motherfucking dragons.

I will give slogging through with my current party one more try. If I can make it back to port, I can resurrect my dead party members and get back to normal.

But if that doen’t work, sigh, it’s reset button time.

More after the break.

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Two eggs, over extremely easy

I have discovered that I can buy hard boiled eggs sans shells with my grocery order,

I ordered some last week and they are quite good. And I feel extra happy about them because I made the logical leap to think to look for them.

I was hoping such a thing existed because it is a great solution to the problem of how to get something with vitamin B12 in it in my diet once a day with minimal effort.

Two eggs makes for an egg-elent entree and eggs have lots of B12 so I am covered there. And they are tasty too, natch.

They are not cheap. It works out to about a buck an egg. But they are so convenient that I know I will get more when I order groceries tomorrow.

And it’s just so nice to have whole and wholesome food like eggs instead of all the PB&Js and trail mix I eat otherwise.

It’s odd. I eat a lot better than a lot of people I know. I credit my early childhood education in nutrition for that. It taught me about the body’s need for variety.

A lot of people I know (not naming names) eat almost unintentionally. They either eat a random assortment of whatever they have lying around or they eat bizarre and eclectic meals like gas station sushi and a Cinnabon.

There is no planning or intentionality to it. Reason is not involved. They are just following the most vague self-feeding instincts.

And that saddens me. Quality of nutrition equals quality of life, people.

And I am no paragon. But I have managed to cut a lot of the crap out of my diet.

I don’t buy Smartfood popcorn any more. Don’t need to eat popcorn with EVERY meal.

And I buy way fewer packages of Voortman’s sugar free cookies because I don’t eat them with every meal any more.

In both cases, I only have them with my midnight snack these days.

And I don’t really miss them, either. The cookies I don’t miss at all. Never do I finish eating a piece of fruit (my real dessert) and wish I had cookies to eat next,

The popcorn I miss a little. It’s tasty stuff. But I think I am better off in terms of bowel health without a constant barrage of roughage and low grade cheese.

I know that when and if I have a boyfriend or husband, I will nag them about their eating habits. There is no way I would be able to stop myself.

What can I say, I get pushy when I care.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, the summer is here. So where are the boys??

I was promised boys. DON. Cute ones. In speedos.

Oh right, they are in the world outside my apartment. Never mind then.

I miss being able to go places by myself sometimes.

Not that I ever did that very much. Agoraphobia is a bitch. especially when it is backed up by social anxiety and/or Avoidant Personality Syndrome.

But still, it was nice to be able to do now and then.

And the thing is, I always felt a lot better after I had done it.

For two main reasons, I think :

Psychological. It felt good to establish that despite my mental illness, I was still a free and autonomous adult who could do what he wanted to and could do it wherever and whenever he wanted to do it. I’ve often felt trapped “in a house with unlocked doors” as Green Day put it so well in their song Longview :

God, that album had a huge impact on me. Like with The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, it spoke directly to my profoundly depressed “failure to launch” self and helped me to feel less alone at a time when my mind was falling apart and I needed to feel like I was not as alone as my depression told me I was.

Oh right, the other reason :

Physiological. I’d actually gotten off my butt and moved around in the fresh air and sunshine and those old school doctors knew what they were doing when they would prescribe that for their patients with “melancholy” because it really does help.

Sadly, my options for that are quite limited these days. As I feared, I failed to go outside for so long that the option was taken away from me by illness.

Thank god I still masturbate.

A trip to the great outdoors is not impossible for me now. I could get Julian to drive me to some nice little park bench or spot on a beach and leave me there for an hour or so.

It would take some fairly advanced logistical planning on my part to make I had everything I might need – like sunscreen and bottled water, for instance – but it could in theory be done.

And I miss the world. Sort of. Kinda. I dunno.

My feelings about not being home are very complex, shall we say.

I am still wrestling daily with The Trog, otherwise known as the part of me that just wants to hide away in his tiny dark cave forever and that will be just fine and dandy for it because all it cares about is being “safe”.

Safe from what, though? There’s no danger. Nothing is waiting outside to “get” me. My bullies are almost n entire Canada away.

I think the real danger is overstimulation. That is what the Trog is really afraid of. The world out there is so much more stimulating than the one in here because in here, everything stays the same and is therefore tuned out by my nervous system.

Out there, everything is horrifyingly fresh and new and novel and I am getting loud inputs from all my senses and my atrophied sensorium is like a massively overloaded fuse box and my mind just wants to shut down.

That is the real danger lurking outside waiting to “get” me.

And I know that if I just give myself time to get used to it, everything will be fine. Better than fine, really, because I will be getting that fresh air and sunshine.

But I am so damned scared.

More after the break.

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The old familiar sting

Holy crap, it’s Trent Reznor AND David Bowie doing “Hurt”.

Well of course they go away in the end. Them going away is what ends it!

But I get it, Trent. Nothing lasts forever, not love, not friendship, not family, not anything.

There is no permanence. Change is eternal and flux is the only rule. Those of us inclined to seek things that last have to be content with things that last a while.

Things that last long enough.

One of the hardest lessons for a Taurus like you and I. Trent, is for us to enjoy things while they last and let go when they are done.

Just typing that gave me a heartache. I want there to be a final equilibrium to be reached where everything is good and stays good for a good long time.

But that is not really possible. Keeping things the same takes a whole lot of energy and you end up, like our fellow Taurus, Bono, says….

There is no town called Happily Ever After.

Happiness is always going to take work.

The best that you can hope for is to find work you can handle comfortably and that gives you enough happiness to make it worth your while.

I know that, for some reason, depression hates the very thought of a long term, open ended investment of effort.

I guess it’s all part of depression’s harsh austerity mentality where every single erg of personal energy is zealously guarded and spent reluctantly.

But as counterintuitive as this is, that is actually wildly inefficient.

You have to ask yourself, where does personal energy come from? What is the income source for this precious resource?

And it turns out that it takes energy to make energy. Hoarding every tiny bit of effort keeps you from being active and making the smart investments of effort that expand your capacity for effort and thus result in more effort to invest.

Treating effort like it’s precious beyond measure only results in less energy overall.

It’s like a car that won’t start because you won’t spare the energy it takes to run the spark plugs. It makes no sense.

And I know this. And yet, I still hide from the world and do very little.

Because I am scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

’cause I’m special. So special.

How can I not love a song about being desperate for someone’s attention?

And trust me, I will get it. whatever it takes.

I hate feeling like I am being ignored. Makes me increasingly willing to do crazy shit just to get the object of my attentions to acknowledge my existence.

Which is not very introverted of me, is it?

I guess life is too complicated to be reduced to a single two position variable like the whole introvert versus extrovert thing.

I’ve craved attention for as long as I can remember. But I have also been shy for just as long. I’m drawn to the limelight yet get nervous when I am the center of attention for too long anywhere else.

If I ever won an Emmy, I would be far more comfortable giving my acceptance speech than at the cocktail parties after the ceremony.

It would be simpler – though by no means better – if I had never put the brakes on my ego train way back in my late teens and blossomed into the truly obnoxious and self-absorbed young man I was once poised to become.

On the one hand, I wound have been such a colossal asshole. A real heinous anus, if you will. Selfish, self-righteous, vain, pushy, and so in love with the sound of my own voice that we’re making wedding plans.

One the other hand, maybe I would have actually gotten somewhere in life instead of hiding from the world and never even supporting myself.

With a huge ego, I would have had the confidence to pursue all the scholarships and bursaries I could get my greedy paws on so I could have been able to go to a decent university instead of UPEI.

And from there, who knows? I might have attracted some mentors who saw my obvious genius and wanted to foster and shelter it, and help it (and me) climb the ladder of success till I reached the top.

Or at the very least, got tenure.

They’re the same thing in academia, really.

But no, my parents yanked me out of university and wrecked my life.

And I was a dumb kid who did not realize how extraordinary my gifts were and how they could be my ticket out of my crummy little small town life and into something big and bright and beautiful, but only if I took charge of my life and dreamed big and followed through on those big dreams.

To be honest, I had no idea I was even in charge of anything.

I mean, since when? My whole life, I had just followed the usual script. Go to school, get good marks, go to uni, ditto, get a job with your undergrad degree or hit the snooze button on life and go on to get a Masters, get a career, a life, a husband, a house, a truly top notch TV… the whole shebang.

But then I was forced to regress. Go back to my comatose hometown, move back in to my childhood home, even the exact same bedroom.

No wonder I fell apart on all levels. They cut me off at the knees.

But that was thirty years ago.

What’s my excuse now?

More after the break.

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One hundred percent entertainment

That’s what these fine young men provide.

Note that they got their one black member to sing Circle of Life (and do a spectacular job), and their whitist member to do the racially cringe-fest that is “I Wanna Be Like You” from Jungle Book.

If you aren’t familiar with the latter tune, limber up your cringe muscles and take a gander at a scene/song that has aged like day old milk.

And in case you are wondering, yup, that’s a black dude singing all those lovely lyrics about wanting to be human, too.

Because, you see, he’s reached the top and had to stop being a monkey and become a real human being.

Thank God Mowgli (the kid) isn’t white.

He easily could have been. He basically has the Tarzan origin story. He could have been whiter than Irish linen.

I mean, this is Kipling, after all.

Personally, I would not have included the song in the medley or anything else.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the song, and I have since I was a kid. But I also loved this now racially intolerable ditty :

But I have explained my feelings about that one in a previous post.

My point is that sometimes things get disenfranchised by history through no inherent fault of their own, the times have just changed.

Makes you wonder what things of today will be politically toxic in the future.

It’s impossible to know, of course. I can’t think of a group that is currently being oppressed but is on the rise.

Well, I can think of one, but I don’t wanna go there.

Trans people are currently in the crosshairs of the bigots and haters, who may have secretly been surprised to learn that they have always hated drag queens.

No wonder they need to watch Fox News et al so much. How else would they keep their false reality up to date?

It would be so embarrassing to be caught expressing your lifelong belief in something that their overmind now informs them is bad and has always been.

When you have such an elaborate shared universe to maintain in your head, with constant updates, it’s no wonder they can’t spare the brain power to think for themselves or vote to protect their own self-interest.

The current crop of Trumpeters has been politically lobotomized and the truly tragic thing is that some day they might realized how badly Trump raped their minds, hearts, and souls, and what a horrible day that will be for them.

My thoughts and prayers go out to them for the dark times ahead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not a long time.

But that’s not really true.

They say life is short, but it’s the longest thing you’ll ever do.

Anyhow, stop me if you’ve heard this one : I woke up with that song playing in my head and figured it made a decent enough jumping off point for today’s blogging.

Because its “live for the moment” philosophy is so alien to me. I am compulsively future oriented. To a fault, because it keeps me from embracing the moment I am in.

In fact, I hate to even be reminded of the moment I am in. I can’t handle life in realtime. There is too much going on all at once for me to process. I have to have my shield of icy intellectual detachment in place or I get overwhelmed.

But I know that despite the superficial air of pragmatic good sense that clings to the idea of being an ant instead of a grasshopper, like anything it can be taken too far and true Aristotelian wisdom can only be found somewhere between the extremes.

I am way too much of an ant. I need to move in a grasshopper-y direction.

To wit, I want to learn to simply relax, be comfortable in my own skin, and just be in the world. No media consumption, no distractions, nothing to keep my mind too full for me to remember to be neurotic.

Just sitting there in bare reality, calm and easy, knowing in my heart that I am perfectly safe, everything is reasonably okay, and nothing bad is going to happen if I turn off the hypervigilance machine and truly rest for a change.

That means that scared little animal inside can finally come home and curl up by the fire and get all the petting and love and affection he has wanted for so long.

It is all there waiting for him.

But like Jonny, he has to stop trying to escape first. He has to stop running. Stop seeing a predator in every shadow. Stop flinching at every sound louder than a whisper.

And that’s a tall order.

For he has been living the life of a hunted animal for so very, very long.

The real threat has been gone for 40 years. Any confirmation of my hunted status that remains with me is entirely delusional and self-referential and therefore means less than nothing in any objective sense.

I am safe. I know that I am. My life is, if anything, TOO safe.

So why is it so hard for me to believe it?

And I mean truly believe, deep down, in my heart. That’s where all the deep programming, the operating system level stuff, lies.

All the writing in the world is nothing but moving abstract symbols around like so many building blocks without the hard emotional work it takes to modify that code.

I’m working on it.

Writing my words in this space, at least, does help.

But I wish I could hack my source code and get it all done at once.

More after the break.,

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Just to catch you completely off guard…

….I am going to continue where I left off!

Feel free to take a break if you need to towel off your extremities.

The obvious reason I can’t believe in my own safety is that my entire psyche is structured around the feeling of danger and ways to flee it and if I truly believe I am safe,. a great deal of my mental house of cards will come a-tumblin’ down.

And by default, our psyches always act to preserve stability. And they will do whatever it takes to do so, up to and including falsifying facts and memories.

Remember that when you are wondering why some person can’t just change their mind when presented with the facts.

That might take such a radical shift in worldview that their minds would fall apart due to a lot of load-bearing assumptions having to be changed, and that is a hell of a lot to ask of someone just to make themselves less politically irritating to you.

And if you are still feeling smug, ask yourself this : when was the last time YOU made a change that big to your entire worldview?

Tangents aside, my point is that to believe I am safe would require a radical restructuring of most of my mind, and that’s kind of a big deal.

Ergo, I know that I am willing and I might even be ready,. but I don’t know if I am able to make the necessary changes to my mental landscape.

That’s why I wish I was capable of transformation. I know that what I need cannot be reached incrementally or gradually.

You can’t leap the chasm a little at a time. At some point you will have to cover the remaining distance in one big leap into the void with no idea where you will land.

And I don’t know how people are even capable of that. I can only assume that the trick is not think about it much.

This is why incautious and thoughtless people get much further in life than us careful and cautious types.

They are the baby birds that fly when kicked out of the nest.

We are the ones who die asking, “Wait, what happened? Where did the nest go? Why am I cold now? Should I be flapping? Wh… “/.

That’s why I can’t seem to escape the thought that needing and/or expecting the world to make sense is a curse.

Because what if what you need does not make sense to you at this time? What if the only way to make sense of things is to accept a lot of things that don’t make sense to you at all and won’t for a long time? What if the next step can’t be skipped and seemingly leads right off the edge of a cliff?

If you are me, you will be stuck on the edge of the cliff forever, unable to overcome my fears enough to take a single step away from what I already know.

That is what a complete lack of faith leads to. Faith is about so much than religion. The ability to believe in things not in evidence is vital to having a healthy, functional mind that does not get stopped by the first gap in logic it runs into.

Even the feeling that everything will be all right is beyond me.

Because how would you even know that? Let alone have the kind of power over time and space to make that come true?

You can’t. Nobody can. So kindly fuck off with that positivity crap.

You are trying to appeal to a part of me that simply does not exist. There is no part of me that “wants to believe”. That is looking for an excuse to let it feel good for no reason. That is shopping around for a new kind of delusion.

I don’t have any of that crap installed, okay? I am not claiming that is the right way to be, I am just telling you it’s how I am.

And that’s one of the many reasons I am so hard to help.

Because you don’t have to dig too deep before all my bitterness and rage comes gushing out like you just struck oil.

And who the hell is going to put up with that?

Hell, who could even survive it?

So I might as well get comfortable on the edge of this cliff.

Because I am going to be here forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, the opposite of this :

Man, they’re an amazing band.

Anyhoo, the good news is that my legs are back to their usual level of weakness and dysfunction after last night’s little tumble.

No, brain, I will NOT put in a link to “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” by Culture Cl;ub.

I guess I was right when I said that my legs were just angry with me for the fall. I have had other incidents where they were temporarily a lot weaker after a spill and no more came of it than being a tad wobbly for a bit.

Well, wobblier than usual, anyhow.

Still, I’ve got to be more careful. A serious fall could really fuck me up, and it would be even worse if there was nobody else home.

I need one of these :

Don’t laugh, falling and not being able to get up is a real possibility for me.

And I know I don’t take such things seriously enough.

To be honest, I’m not sure I can.

I am utterly lacking in the maturity to be able to contemplate and deal with scary and unpleasant things without getting freaked out by them.

And my default program says, “above all us, minimize anxiety” and the only way to do that is to ignore most of the serious shit I really should deal with in a mature adult way.

But I am not a mature adult. In terms of my emotional development, I have barely made it into puberty. I have had precious little life experience and as a result, while I am intellectually parsecs ahead of most of the human race, even the lowliest of mentally handicapped Burger King workers is way better at life than I am and more mature too.

I put way too many character points into Intelligence and ended up with less than nothing in all my other stats.

In my defense, I had no idea what I was doing. There was a path before me and I took it because it seemed to lead to ever more fascinating places.

And it did. But fascination is nowhere near enough to live on. And it’s such a chilly emotion to boot.

Like I keep saying, it’s all light with no heat. A purely intellectual thrill and humanity cannot live by the intellect alone.

But everything else scares me.

I only feel safe (and confident) in the world of the mind.

In fact, I stride through that land like a giant, afraid of nothing. powerful and complete.

But the rest of me is feeble and weak and underdeveloped. Like I am some big brained aliens with feeble little wimpy bodies from heavy-handed 60’s science fiction.

There is so much more to me, though. I just have to find it and access it and accept it into my fundamental conception of self.

I’m warm and kind and funny and charming and sweet and a truly unique person unlike anyone you’ve ever met before, or since.

And I know I could perform miracles if I could just escape my own shadow.

But it’s so bright and loud out there…

More after the break.

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It’s too late

As in, it’ freaking 11:15 pm.

Talk about a late supper! I never should have laid down in the first place.

But how was I to know when I laid down at 7 pm that I would sleep for four fricking hours? I never sleep for that long.

Not that that is a good thing. It is what it is.

And now I am dealing with the whole “going to sleep when it’s light and waking when it’s dark” confusion and that’s no fun.

My circadians are all over the frigging place right now.

But what the fuck. I am at 640 words and it’s 11:25 PM. That means I have 35 minutes to write 360 words.

Not a problem. No sweat.

I’ve been pondering ways to re-frame my life in a more positively. I know that my internal narrative of pain, misery, futility, and aburdity is toxic and I know that it actively poisons my recovery.

But it also expresses how I feel. And it feels good to vent my negatives in this space. I always feel better once I have gotten my badness out.

But when does that stop being healthy catharsis and start being wallowing in your own misery and making things worse?

So anyhow, on to the positivity.

My life isn’t that bad. I am comfortable and safe and I have the best roomies ever. I have my computer and my video games and my blog.

It might not be what would traditionally be called productive, but I manage.

And I don’t spend ALL my time playing video games. There is napping and reading comics online and blogging and masturbation.

And of course, there is my internal development, which is extensive.

It was not a coincidence that I became this smart and talented in isolation. In a weird way, my screen based life is like monastic seclusion.

The only difference is that instead of contemplating God, I slay imaginary orcs.

My time has not been wasted over all these years of illness. That’s all I am trying to say. I may not have had anything like a normal life but my cloistered life has led to my becoming the unusually brilliant and unique person I am today.

Because in my own way, I am beautiful. I am a strange and delicate creature, capable of infinite wonders but fragile as a butterfly’s wing.

I might not be like other people but that’s not a bad thing. I have trod the path laid out for me by fate to the best of my ability and I think I have played my admittedly crappy hand of cards rather well.

After all, I have survived mental illness for almost 30 years, and that’s amazing.

And I did it all without suicide attempts, hospitalizations, or drama.

And I think that’s pretty darn good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Melba. Ha ha-ha ha. (SFX : Clinking glasses, a smattering of indulgent laughter)

But seriously, folks. There is something important I have to tell you.

I really fucking missed toast.

See, up until today, I thought making toast was off limits to me because it involved either standing around waiting for the toaster to pop (not an option) or going to the living room and sitting on my couch until I hear the toast pop up.

I didn’t think that was an option either. Seemed like too much work to have to go to the living room and back just for toast, not to mention the effort of sitting down then getting back up again when the toast is done.

These are the kinds of calculations you have to do when you’re a cripple.

But today, I am feeling extra perky and energetic, probably because of the weather. It is sunny and gorgeous out there in the Sunlit Lands Above, and that usually puts me in a good mood, all else being equal.

So I decided that to hell with it, I am going to get me some toast. Loaded up the toaster, dialed it to my desired level of toastedness, and pressed the lever.

Then I went to the living room and sat down for a bit.

And you know what? Subjectively at least, it didn’t take that long. And the trip back and forth was not that big a deal.

I don’t know if I will feel the same on days when I am not all jazzed up on solar energy, but for today at least, I got toast.

And that makes me happy.

---

Fun fact : the reason toast tastes so much better than bread is that the toasting process pushes some of the natural sugars found in bread to the surface of the bread, where the heat caramelizes it.

This is also why toasting bread changes its color.

Ain’t science cool?

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Now I know what you’re thinking.

Are wombats just bats with wombs?

But you’re also wondering if I have considered that I might have Seasonal Affective Disorder? I mean, if sunshine makes me this happy, it’s a possibility, right?

And I have considered it. I even bought an SAD treatment kit that was basically your basic makeup mirror with built in lighting but the lighting was full spectrum.

And I tried it once. Was surprised that the light was blue, but then again, so is the sky, so if the idea is to replicated a sunny day, mission accomplished.

And it felt kinda nice on my face. But then my face got too hot, so I turned it off.

Then completely forgot about the damned thing, leaving it to disappear into the untamable morass of my belongings, never to be seen again.

How very…. sad.

So the idea that I have SAD is still very much alive. And by golly, if how good I feel today isn’t enough reason to take the bull by the horns and solve this, nothing is!

But it isn’t enough.

Because nothing is.

I am dangerously dead on the inside and it makes progress impossible.

And so all I can do is rot in place.

And by golly, if THAT isn’t reason enough…

You get the idea.

More after the break.

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A little fall

Got myself some Burger King tonight.^[1]Went to the door to get it. Damn it, it was the drink and a small bag.

I have been lucky lately in that all my recent orders have come in a big bag with the drink inside it. Makes it so much easier to just pick up and carry.

So what then follows is a slap-schtick routine of me trying to reach down and pick up the bag and the drink without falling over.

Also, randomly but pleasantly, a new neighbor named Michelle introduced herself to me. I like people who are friendly like that.

And frankly, I envy them. I wish I could be perky and chipper and approachable.

But my virtues lie elsewhere.

Anyhow, I got my stuff, and made it back to my room with it.

Carried the drink (Diet Coke, natch) by very carefully placing it in one of the side bags of my walker then very VERY carefully piloting it to my room.

Kind of amazed that worked, to be honest,.

But alas, I choked at the finish line. I was two feet from my computer chair when disaster struck. I was not paying attention while trying to transfer my drink from my walker to my desk. got my feet all tangled up in the legs of the walker, and down I went, Diet Coke flying all over.

Luckily, I landed on my built in crash pad AKA my butt. So no real harm was done, although my legs are not happy with me.

When I tried to get up on to my feet after my little spill, my legs did not seem to want to hold me up. I therefore had to get up via a more indirect route.

I would describe said route but it would take me a lot of words and it would read like a technical manual, so, mebbe not.

So I am a little worried about my legs. I hope I can stand up once I have rested them a while by lying in bed.

Otherwise, well, it’s the god damned ER for me again.

After all, my legs refusing to hold my weight was what landed me there last August.

Of course, nobody knows or cares WTF that was. So there is no reason it couldn’t happen right out of the blue again.

If so, well, I have a hospital to terrify into competence.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There is only so far you can go into manliness before it turns gay.

The reason why is simple : past a certain point, manliness excludes women and femininity entirely, on every level, and for ANY reason.

A real man doesn’t need women for ANYTHING. Get it?

Male status struggles play a role too. If you are part of a culture that heavily emphasizes manly virtues, you can guarantee that it views women as the weak fragile, and ultimately worthless opposite of that.

Not sure why that is. The opposite isn’t true. You never heard a woman tell another woman to stop being such a man, and woman up.

Well, maybe in college feminism classes.

But if women are the ultimate evil opposite of manliness, how can you expect all your strapping young men to still be interested in them sexually?

No, they are going to be attracted to the manly men around them in your no doubt male only sexually segregated society. Not only are they the only sexual objects present during the vital formative years when we imprint on what sex is TO Us, but you have taught your young men to revile everything feminine and love only masculine things.

And what is more masculine than another man, and his manly parts?

This is how you get societies like the ancient “women are for babies and men are for fun” Athenians, the uber macho and SUPER gay Spartans, the Persian derived cultures that were enthusiastically pederastic, and so on.

Eventually, women simply do not fit into the equation at all. The only chance the heavily cloistered and oppressed women of such a society have of getting any dick at all is when their husbands want to sire children.

And even then, they may subcontract it out.

I can imagine there being an extremely hush hush service that employs a number of virile young men of a broad range of appearances so you can pick the one that looks most like you and have HIM impregnate you wife.

The wife gets some strange dick and you get kids without doing the icky part.

In fact, it occurs to me that societies like that make their women stay in the home and sew themselves into sack not to protect them from the eyes of other men but so that they themselves don’t have to see them.

Because eww, right?

On the other side of the equation, you of course have rampant lesbianism. And generally speaking, it is tolerated and/or ignored so long as it does not interfere with the whole baby making and raising thing.

Ditto with the male homosexuality thing too, come to think of it. You boys have fun together all you like just as long as you father the next generation.

This… I could live with.

Seriously though, personal preference jokes aside, such societies show just how badly distorted and downright unnatural a sexist society can get.

My late father told me that he thought that both genders go crazy without the other one around, and I think he was right.

Try to remember that if you are a heterosexual who is really mad at the other gender.

Admit it : you’d go crazy without them.

More after the break.

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My head hurts

So what else is new?

Did the grocery shopping today. Joe was nice enough to bring them in for me as getting to the apartment door multiple times and bending over to pick up heavy bags of groceries on each trip is dangerously taxing on me.

Julian is off dog- and house-sitting, leaving me without his usual assistance for a total of ten days, about five of which are left.

Julian does show up to get me to Wound Care twice a week, which is good. Joe works a 3:30 pm to 11:30 pm shift, and the Wound Care appointments are alway in the morning, so getting up to take me to them would be a major imposition on him.

And getting there by myself would be… tricky.

Even if I took a cab, it would be a nightmare. Because I would have to navigate the uneven part of the cobblestone sidewalk outside our building and that is the very place that I fell twice and that was BEFORE I had to use a walker to get around.

And even if I made it into the cab alive, I would then have to fold up and stow the walker in the cab and that is not easy when you are all alone and can’t stand on your own.

So no cab for me. I get a ride with someone nice enough to help me with the walker and the rest, or nothing.

Dunno why I felt the need to go into that level of detail about that whole thing. And yet, I feel better now that I did.

Neurosis is weird.

But what the hell. Not everything I do needs to make sense, to me or to anyone else.

“I felt like it” is all the justification you need sometimes. And that’s a hard truth for me to accept. Just looking at it there gives me a strong urge to delete it.

But I won’t do it because a big part of my spiritual quest right now is all about trying to expand my mind, my heart, and my soul beyond the confines of mere reality so I can find my source of power and strength and forgiveness the real world has denied me and maybe, just maybe, get my head on straight for once.

Like I told Doctor Costin today during Therapy Thursday, I think that people with healthy minds have this source within them. On some level, probably a pretty damned deep one, they have a mechanism which feeds their conscious mind just enough reward, pleasure, happiness, and so on for them to maintain a minimum level of mood and thus keeping them from sliding into actual depression.

But “smart” people like me don’t have anything like that. To me, there’s reality, and that is it. I have no capacity for religious faith, belief in magic, UFO worship, or any of the other ways in which people access this miraculous mechanism.

As a result, I am deeply mentally ill and can’t do a thing to improve my situation because an ancient severe trauma blocks all my attempts to pull myself together and focus my energies towards anything more than my sad little life.

I want more. But I can’t have it. And that sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, proprioception.

It’s the sense we have as to where our limbs and joints are in relation to one another, and it’s a vital part in how we manage that complex feat of routine acrobatics scientists call “bipedal locomotion” but the average person calls, “walking”.

Don’t think walking is complicated? Ask the people trying to teach a robot to do it. They have been trying for over a century and we are still nowhere even vaguely close.

Just think about that. Something any toddler can do but computers cannot.

Anyhow, that’s proprioception, and mine is busted.

Not entirely, thank Dog, or I wouldn’t even be able to get out of bed. But it doesn’t work so good any more.

Ditto with my spatial awareness, in particular the part where you sense where the objects around you are located so that you can avoid bumping into them.

That’s kinda fucked up in me too.

Between these two malfunctions lies the secret of why I keep bumping into things, knocking objects off of surfaces, pushing objects into other objects which push into other objects, and in general being even more of a spazz than usual.

These are all classic signs of neurological degeneration, by the way.

Food for thought.

And this degeneration is really getting me down. Not just because of the dire implications for my future health, but because not being able to navigate one’s environment without wreaking accidental havoc is really fucking depressing.

It makes me feel so helpless and lost. Like I can’t even trust reality enough to be sure things won’t seemingly fly off of tables and shelves or that it won’t seem like gravity doesn’t always follow the same rules.

Oh right. I should also mention my vestibular system, otherwise known as one’s “sense of balance”. Because that’s fucked up too.

Hence the dizziness, which is back with a vengeance. I have to assume now that every time I get up and go to the kitchen or living room, I am going to arrive there VERY dizzy and have to spend time just waiting for the room to level out again.

Add it all up and add that subtotal to the ongoing weakness in my legs, and all that comes with that, and you can see why I am worried about my general health.

That, in turn, can mean only one thing : I have to go back to see Doctor Chao again, and this time actually read him the goddamned Riot Act and put the fear of God into him about my health emergency and get him to take it seriously.

My condition keeps getting worse and if something isn’t done to stop the process soon, I’ll be in a wheelchair by Christmas at the latest and the morgue by this time next year.

Personally, I am beginning to wonder if it isn’t our old friend, lactic acidosis.

Remember that one? Long time ago now.

But I had been to the ER and the doctor in charge of me came to me with a big group of his friends at around 5 pm or so and told me that everything checked out normal EXCEPT that I had very high lactic acid levels, BUT that it would probably go away on its own and if they took it seriously I would have to spend a lot more time in the hospital and I didn’t want THAT, DID I?

I said, ” I guess not…” and off he went to, I assume, have a night out with his friends.

Fast forward to my next visit to Doctor Chao and I tell him about the incident and I specifically ask him to order a lactic acid blood test on me.

Fast forward again to the next visit, and Doc Chao comes into the examination room all bouncy and chipper, and I pointedly ask him about the results ot the lactic acid test on my blood, “because you didn’t forget all about it. DID YOU?”.

And this clearly caught him totally by surprise, and in a strangled voice he said, “Oh, it was fine. Perfect, even. Just where it should be. ”

I curse myself for believing him.

And that was many years ago. Years in which high lactic acid levels could very well have been eating away at my muscles and nerves.

Causing the very symptoms I have been experiencing ever since.

If that theory turns out to be true, I am going to put at least two doctor’ asses in a sling and sue them for all they are worth before this shit finally kills me.

Oh, and did you know that one of the causes of lactic acidosis is Metformin, a drug I have been on for 20 years?

Interesting, isn’t it?

More after the break.

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Oh, and because I forgot to say it earlier : Super-calla-frag-a-listic-Lactic-Acidosis!

There. I feel…. complete now.

Also : Um diddle iddle liddie um dilly aye!

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Kinda amazed and pleased with how much I wrote in part 1. It goes to show how when I have a story to tell that is more or less already written in my head, the actual writing of it feels effortless because I am not constantly figuring out what to say next.

There has to be a way to harness this power. Some way to increase my output by pre-writing stories in my head.

I dunno. Sounds like a lot of work,and pressure, and those kill my creativity, so perhaps I should leave well enough alone.

What I could really use is to find a way to take life less seriously,. I know that a flexible, playful attitude towards life is much healthier in the long run.

And I certainly have some of the ingredients. I can even be that way… as Fruvous.

But as myself, I am far too serious for my own good. Life is real and so are the consequences and bad shit can happen at any time, and that makes me paranoid and in my own way hyper vigilant.

Life IS serious, and I don’t know how to escape that.

Even though I know I would be better off if I did.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.