But before we get into that, here’s a little something that I have to share because it made me so happy :

Like I said in the YouTube comments, I had goosebumps before I even consciously remembered what song was about to start.

I just knew, on a deep animal level, that something wonderful was about to happen.

Of course, by the end of the second repeat of the flute loop, I knew. So when the horns kicked in, I was HYPED.

Such an incredibly funky song, and from someone who was a prog rock legend who had never made a pop song before.

Hope it made you happy too, my fellow GenX types.

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And now on to the less fun stuff.

It all started around midnight.

That is when I realized that despite the nap I had taken from around 8:30 pm to around 11 pm, I was still incredibly sleepy.

So I had to call Joe^[1] and tell him I wouldn’t be able to make it out to the living room to hang out and watch stuff like we normally do on Saturday nights.

Well, technically, on Sunday mornings. Whatever.

That accomplished, I went back to bed and went to sleep.

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Only to be woken up at around 4 am in one of the worst ways possible that doesn’t involved being buried alive, namely by my crashing blood sugar.

You see, by not going out to hang with Joe and Julian, I also ended up skipping my midnight snack, and as I should know by now, I should NEVER skip a meal.

So I woke up feeling very ill. Nauseous, very cold, tingling all through my body, the whole hypoglycemic nine yards.

Luckily, I had my jumbo bag of trail mix handy, so I sat there eating trail mix for a while before concluding that the trail mix was taking too long to metabolize and that it was time to drink one of the little cartons of Boost that Felicity bought me for my birthday.

So congratulations, Felicity. You may well have saved my life.

Eventually, my blood sugar rose and stabilized enough that I felt comfortable going back to sleep, and drifted off again.

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Woke up around 7:15 am still very hungry but otherwise OK, or so I thought.

But then I saw that there was something brown spattered all over the side of my leg, and my blood went cold because I knew what it had to be.

A quick check of the general vicinity of my butt confirmed it : I had once more been incontinent in my sleep.

This had not happened to me since I got home from the hospital last year.

I went through a LOT of Kleenex cleaning up.

And all the while I was in turmoil not just because pooping the bed is inherently very upsetting but because when I was leaving the hospital last summer, a doctor told me in no uncertain terms that if either of two things happened, I was to come back to the hospital right away.

The first was if I found myself unable to pee. Got it. That would be real bad.

The other was if I had more night time incontinence.

Uh oh. Can I get back to you on that?

And I tried to convince myself to do the adult thing and get out of bed and call Joe and tell him he needed to take me to the ER and get dressed and all that, but there was just no way it was going to happen. I was way too tired, upset, confused, and strung out on stress to give it any serious thought.

But if it happens again, I will get my poor unreliable ass off to the ER.

More after the break.

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I am not a smart man

Don’t get me wrong. By the usual definition, I am a genius. IQ off the charts, never had to learn to study, high academic achievement, yadda yadda ya.

But stupid is as stupid does, like Forrest Gump’s mama said, and I does stupid. My actions are not all that smart. I do dumb shit all the time and at the heart of it is always my lack of emotional regulation.

I try to make my rational mind sing for its supper, so to speak, by getting it to figure out what the “smart” course of action is and then do that.

But it never fucking works. My rational mind can never handle all the variables and immediately gets bogged down with calculations that multiply in both number and complexity until, like a computer with a memory hole, all of my mental resources get filled up and the whole thing crashes.

And then I just make the decision rashly and emotionally just to get it over with and then lo and behold, I did a stupid.

And the problem is emotional. I don’t have the kind of killer instinct that makes a person decisive and commanding. A stronger person would be able to take the array of options posited by the rational mind, pick the one that seems best, and commit to it enough to see it through to the end, come what may.

I am too afraid of choosing the “wrong” thing. But there are far worse things in life than being wrong, and languishing in the doldrums of indecision is one of them.

And I know this. I know it well. I know it to be true.

But I don’t think I really believe it.

Knowledge is facts. Data. Calculation. It can be learned and it can be deduced and it can be acquired experientially. All without emotion involved.

But belief is an emotion. To believe something is to believe IN something and that requires emotional assets like commitment, conviction, and courage.

Knowing is easy.

Belief is hard.

And believing in yourself is the hardest thing to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.