So how does a hone of a fellow like me find his Man of Life, or at least his Man Who’s Fun To Be With Now And Then?

I’m not picky.

Actually, I am. I can’t help it. I would rather be open to more kinds of men but like I have said before, my minimum IQ requirements alone eliminate most of humanity before things like personality and hobbies even stand up to be counted.

Which is why I have been staring at this list lately.

I figure I will stand a better chance of finding a compatible mate if I start with my fellow nerds, geeks, and so on.

My main problem with mainstream gay dating sites, and it took a while for me to be able to admit this to myself, is that most of the men there are fucking boring.

I don’t care about your age, race, ethnicity, religion, or what you are “into”, god damn it.

I want to know if your brains do more than just keep your ears apart. I want to know if you have a personality and if so, if it’s one I’ll like. I care a lot more about whether you’re a good person than whether or not you’re a good lay.

I’m an inherently trans-material kind of guy. To me, people are their minds and souls and personalities. Everything else is superficial and of only passing value.

In other words, I’m a hardcore deep nerd. Intellectual life 4 eva!

Hopefully, if I end up signing up for one of these nerdy dating sites, it will at least weed out all the hopelessly mundanes who would never be able to “get” more anyhow.

And that’s of utmost importance. You “get” me or you get OUT. Whoever I am close to absolutely has to be able to listen to what I sat, every word of it, and understand it well enough to respond intelligently.

If I can’t connect with your intellectually, then we are not going to connect for very long on any other level.

And I am sorry if that makes me seem closeminded or petty or elitist. Trust me, it’s not that I think I am better than everyone else.

But I have a very powerful need to express myself. So before I get close to you, I have to know you can receive what I transmit.

It makes me incredibly depressed when I am not understood. It’s like I held out a trembling, hopeful hand to the world only to have the world pull its hand back in a panic and say, “What? You’re weird. Go away. ”

And then I am left there in the cold and the dark with my hand sticking out.

Man, do I have issues.

Anyhow, that just covers a few of the problems I have with finding a man I like.

Multiply that by the fact that he has to also, for some reason, like ME, and the odds seem prohibitive to say the least.

I mean, I’m a highly lovable dude. But there’s a lot to look past, too.

So I dunno. Maybe I just need to hang out on TikTok more. Or some other modern social media app.

Where do people meet one another these days?

More after the break.

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Do you believe in magic?

And if you do, could you teach me to do it? Because I need some magic in my life right now but I don’t know how to get it.

I mean, I know you can’t teach it to me like you could teach me physics or line dancing or parapsychology, but I am hoping that with the right teacher, I can learn to let go of my iron grip on the harsh and barren truths of the evident world and learn to believe that there is something more to life than merely what we can know of it.

But that’s the problem because I know that it’s not true. Magic is not real.

I understand why people need to believe in it now. I get what magic (or faith or whatever) does for people. I finally understand why those who believe say things like, “There’s just GOT to be more to life than this!”.

To which my ignorant ass would reply,. “Um, no there doesn’t.”

And like a lot of the worst things I have said and believed,. it is literally true. There is no logical reason why there “has” to be more than what we see. No law of physics compels the universe to furnish us with unseen forces that correct for the emotional starvation of the “real” world.

But oh, do I wish I could believe that there was.

And that’s where my existentially stark journey leads me : can I believe in something I know isn’t “really real” in order to make myself sane?

I suppose that God and fairies and magic numerology space metal bracelets that realign your sacral shakra are not strictly needed for this function.

All those things do for people is give them a controlled way to give themselves permission to be happy for no particular reason.

In other words, to simply give themselves the emotional inputs they need in order to keep their head above water instead of drowning in depression.

And I can give myself that permission without dragging in some errant nonsense about a deity or voodoo dolls or lucky shirts.

Because I don’t think I could ever make myself believe that there is “something more”. Magic is not for me. It never could have been.

I was a literal minded child who never believed in magic at all.

Not even when I was a toddler.

I made sense of the world from the getgo.

And maybe there is something terribly wrong with the tiny child who doesn’t play with toys, never had an imaginary friend, and feels no affection for stuffed animals.

But that’s just how I am. I know there’s no Santa Claus. And you can’t make yourself believe that which you know not to be true.

It might be possible, however, to bypass all the bullshit and go ahead with being happy without needing to justify it.

And maybe that will be my own kind of magic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In a brooding burning funk because my game is fucked up in a couple of ways and it is causing me stress.

On the technical side, there’s this part of the game that is full of hot bubbling glowing molten lava that stretches off into the distance, and in said distance a four storey tall lava monster is wandering around like an absentminded Godzilla enemy.

And apparently, my computer can’t handle animating all that, because it keeps crashing. Crashing to desktop, mostly, which is a refreshing change from it crashing and hanging my entire computer, forcing me to reboot.

So refreshing that it is, in fact, kind of sad.

My standards are so low.

On the game side, the game clearly wants me to cross this insane field of bubbling lava. The area can be three things : ash, fire, or lava, and it shifts around in that order.

But not all at once. In a patchwork fashion which I find to be utterly chaotic and functionally .unpredictable and when I get it wrong my character dies screaming in a fire, so ya know, kinda stressful.

I have also worked very hard to get to this thing in that area called the Adamantine Forge, which is supposed to be able to make super awesome weapons and armor from the substance “adamantine” (hence the name), and I have collected three of the moulds for the adamantine to go into but none of the stuff itself.

And I have no idea where to get it, either. I have a terrible feeling that to get it, I have to have blasted a rockfall out of the way and “rescued” this drow called Nere.

I say “rescue” because the guy is such an evil bastard that the first thing he does when I free him from the poison gas filled chamber behind the rockfall is start murdering innocent people in horrible ways just because he’s in such a pissy mood.

So obviously I have to kill this motherfucker. HARD.

But that’s impossible because he calls on all his evil minions to kill my ass and there are just plain too many of them. I can’t kill them before they kill me.

And that’s kind of what battle is all about.

And it’s not through lack of trying. I have attempted that fucking fight at least a dozen times if not more and I can’t find a way to win it. There are no defensible positions for me to exploit to compensate for their numbers because almost all of them have a ranged attack that can nail me from almost anywhere and those that don’t can run fast enough to reach my position and overwhelm me.

I can’t even use my thief to sneakily assassinate the bad guys on the periphery commando style to thin out their numbers before the assault because somehow, if any of the bad guys are attacked, they all know instantly and come running.

Ergo, if winning that fight is needed in order for me to go forward, I am not a happy camper at all.

I am not entirely out of ideas as to how to do it. But if I continue to fail it I am just going to have to activate the nuclear option and move on to the next chapter of the plot.

You know what would really help in that fight? Adamantine weapons.

But that’s not going to happen either, is it boppers?

More after the break.

---

What is lava? Baby, don’t hurt me

I think I am learning.

I was about to try to cross the lava field again when I said to myself, “Wait a minute. What if there’s a way around this?”

So I looked around, and of course, there was. There was a way to bypass the lava entirely via the Jump command.

This is why I send Karlach on these solo missions. She’s my big bad barbarian queen, and my personal fave, and she has the highest Strength, so she jumps the furthest.

Plus, if she stumbles into a combat situation when I am using her to explore, she is such a righteous badass that she might well be able to take them.

Or at least live long enough to run away, run away,. run away!

Oh, and I found some ore to use in the crucible of the forge. Smashed a huge rocky deposit and got one teeny little piece of mithral ore. Go fig.

I suppose that is what you get when you mine via sledgehammer. Was mad awesome seeing Karlach smash that deposit, though.

So I put the ore in the crucible and pull the lever. Big piledriver comes down to give the crucible a whack. Very cool, very heavy metal.

And the platform the forge is on elevates and clicks in to a new floor, and the game tells me that mould and ore are not enough, the process needs lava to bind it.

And oh look, the new floor has a big wheel-type valve control that opens the floodgates and lets lava flow into the forge chamber.

Unfortunately, this also wakes up a huge hulking automaton of some sort. And all during his introductory cutscene, I was hoping against hope that we would not have to fight it.

But of course, we do. What’s more, parts of the forge chamber flood with lava at the same time, and woe betide any of my characters standing in the wrong place.

Kind of a dirty trick, if you ask me.

That’s where I am now. I am resting at camp in preparation for fighting the fantasy equivalent of a mecha monster and pondering who I want with me when I ffinally ight the fucking thing.

This means Nere dies. For some reason, the second I go to camp, he dies.

He will not be mourned. But I worry about what the evil Duergar (the dwarf equivalent of the fucking Drow) will do to their gnome slaves in retaliation.

I’m coming, little guys! I just need some extra firepower first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got to see Chao in person today, and boy did I lay in to him.

I doubt I got through to him, but he sure as fuck got a piece of my mind today.

And I am quite proud of myself for that. I was not a dithering and uncertain doormat who instinctively does what will make the other person happy today.

No, I was an angry and demanding prick. And on my own behalf too.

In fact, the very first thing I said to him today after “Hi, Doctor Chao!” was, “So, what’s your plan for figuring out what’s wrong with my legs?”.

And we were off and running.

That took him aback, and he of course said that he THOUGHT we were going to be talking about my blood pressure today

Of course he did. Because that’s a way easier thing for him to deal with because dizziness upon rising is a well known thing and he has presumably treated it dozens of times over the years and knows it inside and out.

Whereas whatever the fuck is happening to my legs and my other muscles is murky and complicated and mysterious and might actually require an ongoing effort where he stays on top of the issue and thinks really hard about what it might be.

And that’s not in the cards. Homie don’t play that.

Then he tried to get away with offhandedly saying, “Well, you’re diabetic, so it’s probably diabetic neuropathy” like that was an actual diagnosis.

But it isn’t. It’s a fucking guess. He hasn’t run any tests. He doesn’t have a report from a neurologist saying that is definitely diabetic neuropathy. He doesn’t have anything.

It’s a lazy diagnosis formulated by a lazy doctor who just took one thing he knew about me – insufficiently controlled diabetes – and said, “Eh, it’s probably that, then.”

But it’s worse than that because that’s not even true any more. The Jardiance has my blood sugar under control. My last A1C test came back almost normal.

Plus, diabetic neuropathy affects small muscle groups, not big ones, because it affects small capillaries and small nerve clusters.

So it’s a rotten diagnosis all around.

I told him I thought he was lazy. I told him I would go to the College ^[1] if he didn’t come up with a real diagnosis. I told him I wasn’t happy that here we were, a year after my hospital stay, and I still had no idea what the fuck is up with my legs.

And he did the thing where he says, “I COULD end this right here and refuse to see you again. I’m not GOING to. But I COULD. ”

Which is like pulling out a gun and putting on the table and saying, “I am NOT going to shoot you. But I could. ”

He even pulled the classic martyr trick of pulling up the College’s website and showing me the “make a complaint” button.

Big deal. I brought up the College first.

In the end, I let him fob me off on some neurologist.

But when that person finds nothing, I will be back.

And I will be pissed.

More after the break.

[[1}} College of Surgeons and Physicians., the governing and regulating body for all doctors here in BC. [[1]]

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What I wish I had said

Time for some l’esprit d’escalier.

In no particular order :

I wish I had asked him, straight out, what HIS theory as to why I have gone a year without a diagnosis is. Because I’m dying to here that.

Go ahead, you feckless twit. Explain to me, the jury, and the audience back home why there has been no progress on my case for at least six months. I can’t wait to see you try to tap-dance out of this one.

Because we both know that the real answer is that you forgot. We tried some things – spine, brain, heart – and when it wasn’t any of those,. you did the same thing they do at RGH : you shrugged and moved on.

It did not even occur to you that you needed to keep trying because you still didn’t know the fucking answer.

Imagine playing Clue with this guy.

“I know it’s not Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, or Miss Scarlett. Game over!”
“But you don’t know who the killer is yet!”
“Oh, um….. I guess it’s Mrs. White because she has diabetes. ”

The truth. Doctor Chao, and I say this with great reluctance, is that you can’t handle my case. It’s too weird and mysterious for your usual “here’s a piece of paper, now leave” approach to medicine. It is going to require a long term commitment of mental resources and effort where you stay on top of the case and you keep investigating until you actually have a diagnosis for me.

This seems pretty basic to me. But you’re the doctor. Odd that I have to tell you this.

I also wish I had asked him directly what he thought was wrong with my legs. And when he told me diabetic neuropathy, I would follow up with, “And you know this because…?”

And he would have had to admit that he didn’t actually know that to be the case, it’s just a theory he pulled out of his lazy ass when I was grilling him.

Get this – he had the gall to say that because diabetic neuropathy affects teeny tiny capillaries, it is “impossible” to test for it.

Bullshit, you mealy mouthed motherfucker. The tunneling electron microscope has been around since the late 60’s, and it can visualize individual atoms.

They totally could find small capillary damage if you could be bothered to look for it.

God, how stupid are most of your patients if you routinely get away with this bullshit?

Well I am not your average patient. I am, in fact. incredibly intelligent, and that means your facile bullshit doesn’t work on me.

So trust me, you ARE going to find a diagnosis for me.

Because if you don’t, you’ll find yourself hauled in by the College.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Depression blocks the conscious expression of our energies.

This causes us to believe that we don’t have any energy. We complain of lack of motivation and drive and end up leading very low effort lives.

But the energy is there. We eat food, the food has calories, our bodies have lots of calories to burn and produce energy to be used for whatever we like.

Depression merely hides that energy from us. It convinces us to stay in a false austerity mindset where we think and act as though we are in a constant state of energy starvation and that we must therefore somehow hoard our energy and spend only the absolute minimum effort on only our most trusted high reward activities.

Be those what they may.,

But you can’t hoard energy. Whatever you don’t spend is lost forever. You can’t accumulate it like it’s spare change in a jar.

Or rather, you can, but the form it takes is fat and that is its own curse.

Otherwise, no, you can’t save it for later like it’s leftovers. And the longer you go without spending it, the rustier the systems for using and expression your energies get and the more they resist letting you get things flowing again.

But those energies are still in there, trying to express themselves but are blocked by your depression’s bullshit.

This has the same effect as blocking the sluice gate on a dam. The energies get backed up as they continue to be produced without being used, and that pressure can only go one place and that’s the system itself.

Like, imagine if you turned on a faucet but then plugged it up. The water pressure would build up until it busted a pipe or a joint somewhere and got released that way, right?

That is what is going on in the mind and body of a person with depression. The blockage expresses its at its most basic level as psychological pain but it is most commonly felt as depression and/or anxiety.

That’s where the black moods and panic attacks and radical irritability come from. These are the equivalent of those pipes that burst under pressure from the blocked tap. The conscious expression of our energies is blocked by depression’s lies, and so it come out in these very destructive and maladaptive unconscious ways.

And all because depression has conned you into thinking you have no energy when the truth is that you have tons of it and depression just won’t let you spend it.

Depression is such a miser.

I propose a radical rethinking of the whole thing. Instead of going along with your depression’s wrongheaded fascist ideology, go in the opposite direction.

Treat the day’s energy not as something to hoard (which is impossible) but as a curse, something you have to get rid of every day in order to feel OK.

Trust me, if you can uncramp yourself enough to get that energy out – and it doesn’t matter how or whether it’s “productive” or not – you will feel so much happier, stronger, and calmer because your pipes are not all backed up any more.

The happiest i have been in the last 20 years was during 2011, when I was trying to write a million words in a year.,

Also good : the times when I was producing 30 or 60 secs of video every day.

If I do more, I will be happier. Dammit.

I just have a certain energy hoarding dragon to slay first.

More after the break.

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The heart of the disease

What it really boils down to is the lies depression feeds you when you are contemplating actually taking action.

That’s when the big guns come out. Depression forces you to focus on the grinding, shrieking, metal on metal pain that comes when you are trying to get a rusty old engine like the one in you going and convinces you that taking things any further than that will only make that horrible pain even worse, so you had better give up NOW, or else.

The one thing it does not want you to think about is the truth that the pain will go away once the pump is primed and everything starts moving again and the motion of the engine grinds the rest of that nasty old rust away.

Depression cannot afford to let you think about that. Ergo, it uses its evil power to control the focus of your mind via pain and emotion and makes you concentrate only on the immediate psychological pain, which it convinces you is building to a crisis point so you had better escape now or you will be utterly destroyed.

Depression/anxiety does this all the time. It takes some small fragment of genuine emotion then amplifies it till it gets what it wants, which is for you to give up and press the emergency abort button then wallow in the feeling of relief and escape that is your reward for being depression’s good little bitch.

That’s why simply staying with an unpleasant memory or emotion or realization without acting on or judging it is so damned powerful. By sitting with the emotion, you let yourself get used to it and make it harder and harder for your depression to panic you into knuckling under to it.

And the longer you just sit there with the emotion, watching it without feeling the need to act on it or react to it or otherwise try to control it, the smaller and more harmless it will become, until it is finally small and safe enough for you to deal with.

Be warned, though, that once you let all the panicky emotion drain away from it, what is left might strike you as laughably simple and easy, and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about it.

And that is a good and healthy place to be. But beware that depression is still lurking and will try to make you feel bad for getting so upset about something you “should” have known was no big deal.

Nonsense! Don’t “should” yourself, kid. Yeah it may turn out to be a little nothing that got caught in your mind and turned into a big something in much the same way a tiny bit of grit or sand can be turned into a great big pearl by an oyster.

But that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. In fact, by sticking with the feeling until the false emotion melted away, you did something far more right than most people wll ever do in their life.

So go ahead. Pull up that big bad feeling and then sit down and watch it. See what it does. Gage how it reacts to various stimuli. And watch the badness melt away.

Maybe one day, I’ll join you there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I really need to get out of this sepulcher of a life.

I spend all day trapped by my afflictions between these same four god damned walls, wallowing like the human pig I am in the filth and degradation of my inability to clean, rotting like a corpse from the inside out as my mental and physical ailments eat away at me like acid reflux, and all I can do is bear passing witness to my own degeneration.

I’m stuck in a negative gameplay loop where I hate the game and wish I could play almost anything else but find myself unable to stop playing for long enough to find something else to do.

I just can’t face that horrible feeling of not knowing what to do with myself again.

That existential void terrifies me. It feels like it could destroy me. Tear me apart. Pull me in so many directions at once that I am ripped apart at the molecular level and disappear in a heartbeat, leaving nothing behind but a lot hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and traces of everything else.

I am nerdy AF even in my self-excoriation.

Fear of that void keeps me locked in this filthy fucking cage of mine. Living in a cage like an exhibit in a really crappy zoo might suck moose nuggets. but you don’t have much of a choice when you can’t handle freedom.

Especially freedom with no power. I know this is a tragically narrow way to view things, but when I ask myself what do I WANT to do, any answers I come up with invariably would involve me having assets I do not possess and cannot acquire.,

Things like money. And health. The ability to walk. Or get around by myself somehow. The ability to travel. The ability to be social without fear. The ability to just be myself, and to truly believe that being myself is enough.

I feel so hemmed in by neuroses. No matter which way I turn, I am interdicted by a flashing red barrier of fear and panic and calcified aversion.

No wonder I stay locked deep within myself and mostly ignore the world outside my skull, which is where the majority of it resides.

In a sense.

Unable to face the reality of freedom, let alone the truths of adulthood and the responsibility of determining my own fate, I remain withdrawn into the cold and lifeless fortress of my mind and pretend there is nothing out there .

Nothing I can handle, anyhow.

Deep down, it’s almost impossible to make myself believe that there is anything out there in the big bad world worth leaving my stone womb for.

And that’s not good. You fundamentally cannot come out of your proverbial shell without some kind of belief that it might be worth it. That you’ll get more out of it than you put in.

Otherwise, no matter how bright and cheerful your intentions are, you won’t even try. Not really. You will go through the motions but just for the privilege of being able to say that you tried, even though you didn’t. Not in the slightest.

You put absolutely no effort, focus, drive, or commitment into it. Calling that trying is like calling sitting in the driver’s seat “driving”.

And it’s a one stop bus ride from there to telling yourself and other people you tried things and they didn’t work for you when you never did any such thing.

After all, if you really tried, you might succeed, and then you’d have to actually do things, and we can’t have THAT.

So go head. Lie that you tried just to keep people from suggesting things that you know won’t work because you don’t WANT them to work.

You want to stay exactly as you are because change is scary and hard.

But that won’t stop you from bitching about your life and how bad it is.

Because you like that part, too.

So why change it?

More after the break.

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Why would I leave?

I’ve asked myself why I would leave my shell behind and enter the world.

Now I am going to try to answer that question.

We’ll start with a blanket “because anything that make life worth living is out there”. That is an undoubtedly true statement and a good place to start bur it is too general and vague to pierce the thick grey funk around my true soul.

So let’s get more specific :

There’s money out there. Normally this would be a highly motivating factor. But the truth is, my current income covers my modest needs quite well, and with a bit to spare.

I’m not exactly living the high life, but I am comfortable.

There’s sex out there. And I am a desperately “lonely” man who has never had the chance to truly explore his sexuality in the real world at all. And I would really love a chance to fix that.

But there’s always masturbation. So while the prospect of finally getting to sow all these wild oats I got stashed around here it tempting, it’s not enough.

There’s men out there.  Now you’re talking. I’m not just “lonely”, I’m lonely too. I’ve never been in a relationship and I would really like to give it a try. I have a lot to offer a prospective beau, and would be quite happy to play househusband for the right guy.

My relationship requirements are quite strict, though. The fact that they need to have nerd level intelligence immediately eliminates 80 percent of men, and I am already pulling from the small percentage of men who are gay/bi in the first place.

So while my dreams of domestic bliss are very, very tempting, the prospect of trying to find my needle in the haystack (gaystack?) of dating cools that a bit.

There’s SO MUCH FUN to be had out there. Bingo! I think we have a winner. I need to stop taking things so seriously, treat life like a game, and get out there and have some seriously large quantities of high grade fun with life. I could be having such a good time if I just left the nest and spread my wings to fly. I could be doing awesome stuff with funky cool creative type people. I could be making mad good videos that rock the Net with their creative power. I could be getting access to powerful people who might actually let me make real big-time TV. There’s so much out there for me!

There. That ought to do it. Fuck everything else and think of the FUN.

Life can be full of things way more fun than any video game. So I need not think of it as “giving up” video games.

I can think of it as trading up instead.

Fuck this shit. Where’s the real fun at?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Which is silly speak for “I fucked up”.

Went to the bank after wound care today. Withdrew the cash to pay Joe the rent and to buy the usual monthly “reloadable^[1]” (ha) credit card with $500 (the max) on it.

See, I was really, really hoping that my new card would not suffer from the mysterious “we cannot verify this card at this time” error that fucked with me last month.

But what I failed to take into account was that by buying another card, I was betting rather heavily on it working this time.

And it did not. Same goddamned error. Argh.

And now I am in an awkward position because as things stand right now, I have $500 tied up in a card that I can’t use to buy groceries and there is no way to get that $500 back because these cards don’t allow cash withdrawals.

They are honestly kind of shady. But they are all I have if I want to pay for things online.

And seeing as last time I checked, I wasn’t Amish, I kinda do.

Right now, I have $375-ish in cash. That normally goes to pay for Denny’s, but I can pay for my Denny’s with the card this month, leaving the cash for groceries.

But I don’t think that’s quite enough for a month’s worth of groceries – or at least, that is too close to being not enough for my comfort.

It amounts to $93.75 a week, and honestly. my grocery bill is rarely that high, so it honestly should be fine.

And if I get really worried, there’s a few things I can get off of Amazon.ca, and they still accept my credit card, so they will get my moolah.

Hopefully, that will all turn out to be a stopgap measure and I will find another way to get my groceries delivered besides imposing on poor Julian to do it.

No matter how decrepit I get, I will still do everything myself if I can.

I’m the stubbornly independent type and I don’t like having to rely on others for the simple actions of life…. like buying groceries.

Dammit, with all the delivery services around, it should be a golden age for us shut-ins!

When my problems were mostly psychological, I was an urban hermit. But now that I am physically disabled too, I’m a shut in.

Anyhow, I will once more Google around to see if there is another store or service through which I could get my goddamned groceries.

Surely Instacart can’t be the only game in town.

Maybe the new card will work with that PC Express thingy.

It’s not likely, but what the hell, it’s worth a try.

More after the break.

---

This is brilliant :

Wonderful things can happen when math and liberalism get together.

---

I love that dude!

The Donair Dude, that is.

That’s who I ordered from tonight. Damn I love their food. It’s Mediterranean food in the same sense that Pizza Hut is Italian food.

Not that I am complaining. I have never given the tiniest of shits about how “authentic” the food I am eating is.

Authenticity is a bourgeoisie phantom through which the dominant white culture tries in vain to find meaning in other cultures by raiding them for whatever seems most “real” to them because to them it’s not part of the cultural background noise.

Once the dominant culture finds something “authentic”, they immediately swallow, digest, and excrete it with all the supposed magic of “authenticity” drained out of it because now, it too is part of the cultural background noise.

When I was a kid, Italian restaurants were everywhere and extremely popular. They had a Tiffany glass and subdued light aesthetic and they were nice family restaurants that were independently owned, often by nice families.

But then the pizza chains came in and bulldozed the little guys out of business. Now all of Italian food is just part of the mainstream Canadian diet.

It’s not even ethnic food any more. It’s just food. Spaghetti and meatballs, macaroni and cheese, lasagna. penne, fettucine alfredo, all completely mainstream now.

So no, I don’t give a shit how “authentic” your food is. It’s a meaningless term

All I want to know is if it tastes good. If it tastes good, and won’t hurt me, I will eat it. And I don’t care if it’s truly “authentic” or faker than a Twinkie.

Besides, when a restaurant claims to be “authentic”, you know they are lying because if the food was truly “authentic” you’d probably hate it.

Why? Because the real thing has not been adjusted to appeal to the Western palate.

If you were to teleport into a rural Chinese household and grab the plate out of the nearest person’s hand and try it, you would likely think it was disgusting.

But restaurant owners here know that most people have no idea what the “authentic” cuisine of their ethnicity even looks like, let alone tastes like, and therefore all you have to do is tell your customers your good contains this mystical, magical ingredient called “authenticity” and they will be happy.

It would be funny to have someone (I’m looking at you, Amos) give a group of pretentious white people a TRULY “authentic” Chinese meal, complete with low quality water, tiny servings due to government rationing, no meat whatsoever, and all of the produce still having tiny amounts of the cow shit used to fertilize it on it.

Wow, it’s like you are right there having an authentic Chinese experience of poverty, malnutrition, water born illnesses, no access to a hospital, and ruthless indoctrination!

You said you wanted a real, authentic Chinese meal! Well I hope you like it, round eye, because you all have dysentery now!

Or is that maybe a scootch too dark?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

To be honest, it’s not that great. Hah hah.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Talked about something I had not gotten around to talking about here yet,. namely how I have had that massive psychological wound at the center of my soul on my mind lately.

It’s such a central part of me and has been there for 46 of my 50 years and it is most definitely the source of the deep and terrible weakness that pervades my being and that keeps me from being able to pull myself together and get anything coherent done.

It is, therefore, my central mental health issue. It is the ur-Wound from which all my other issues flow, and lately I feel like I have been just kind of staring at it in a deep, brooding funk, contemplating its central role in my long slow downfall.

And this is progress, I think. It means I am bringing this weeping wound of mine into my conscious mind on an ongoing basis, and that is a good first step towards defusing the enormous emotional payload of an issue so you can deal with it with your conscious mind without it tripping your circuit breakers.

You don’t have to do anything with the issue. You don’t have to deal with it. You don’t have to try to solve it. You don’t even have to think about it.

You just have to look at it. Spend time with it. Get used to it.

You don’t even need to do it all in one go. You can just whip it out at odd moments and do it for a minute or two then put it away again.

It’s dead simple and very effective.

Anyhow, back to my suffering.

It is a hard thing to write about because it’s so big and so deep a part of me.

Think about it. I got this wound from being raped when I was 4 years old. That means that all the development – and lack thereof – that I have had in the last 46 years of my life has be built upon this deep and terrible injury, and that has warped, twisted, and polluted almost everything about me

That doesn’t change my determination to heal the god damned thing. I feel confident that at this point, the whole thing could disappear in a flash and the rest of my mind would be strong enough to hold together regardless.

And if not, who cares. My mind ain’t working that great in its current state of semi-sanity, so it’s not like I have a lot to lose.

Maybe going batpoop loco for a while would be the best thing for me.

More after the break.

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I thought this was quite well done :

Like I said in the comments, it is on-style and in-era and I am tres impressive.

Some of those references, though. Oy.

I mean, Douglas Frigging Fairbanks?

Yeah, there’s one for the kiddies.

I’m 50 and I barely recognize the name.

And I was raised by television!

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Why I don’t trust anti-virus or PC optimization programs

Because they have every incentive to lie to you.

Think about it. They sell you solutions to problems – problems THEY and only they tell you exist. You have to take their word that you even have these problems, and then they want you to buy their anti-bogeyman software for $20/month.

Shady auto mechanics only wish they had that kind of advantage over their customers.

In theory, I could write an app where all it does is generate a random number, tell you that’s how many viruses or broken registry entries or whatever it’s going to fix, shows that number counting down while generating random disc activity to convince you it is doing something, then tells you it is done.

Or worse, it tells you that you have all these problems but refuses to “fix” them unless you commit to pay them that sweet, sweet monthly cash,

I have seen programs that do that exact thing. Being the hard-edged cynical bastard that I am, I did not fall for them.

But think of all the vulnerable people out there who lack my level of mental kung fu and who are therefore open to being manipulated into paying real money to solve phantom problems because, well, better safe than sorry, right?

And it’s “only” $20/month (or whatever), and surely it’s worth it for the peace of mind!

And then you completely forget all about it because the money is charged to your credit card (or whatever) automatically. They get the $ without having to do a think.

It’s basically digital extortion. An electronic protection racket.

In fact, the only flaw in the scam is that there is actual malware out there and at some point your customers will expect you to actually be able to get rid of it.

That’s always the problem with any protection racket – eventually people actually need you to protect them.

I have AVG anti-virus installed. The free version. Real threats DO exist out there, especially with the sudden explosion of scammers, so I figure I need SOME kind of protection as I wander the Web.

But I won’t be paying for the “premium” version any time soon.

Call me hostile and suspicious, but nobody gets between me and my money,.

Try to rip me off and you will see this Ferdinand the Bull turn into el toro loco in a heartbeat. I’m a friendly, genial, lovable dude… unless someone is after my money.

Even growing up in my highly intellectual family, I was always light years ahead of the rest when it came to spotting scams, advertising bullshit, and other ripoffs.

I guess it comes from having the sort of mind that is always trying to spot life’s landmines before he steps on them.

I’d be one hell of a good judge on a show like Dragon’s Den. Maybe too good, because I would cut right through the bullcrap and expose the flaw in people’s business plans and/or inventions in a heartbeat and that’s not good television.

They’d have to make me go last.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, crummy. (Crumbly? That too. )

That’ how I feel today. I hope I am not coming down with another attack of flu-like symptoms, but I kind feel like I am.

I’ve been very sleepy all day, and my muscles are aching. Overall I feel kinda swollen and sore. My sleep has been fitful and restless and it takes me a long time to wake up.

Sometimes, my trip back from the Land of Nod is a long and perilous one indeed.

Ergo I am pretty sure I am coming down with or have contracted something. I definitely feel substantially crappier than usual.

Just be glad I didn’t title this entry, “Like a crap”.

To the tune of :

I get the feeling that I have had some pretty wild and intense dreams as a result of this nameless ague, but I of course don’t remember any of them.

At some point, I just stopped remembering dreams. Haven’t remembered more than tiny fragmentary half-moments in years. Not even real memories, just a moment of feeling like I’d been reminded of something but couldn’t remember what.

Which is, you must admit, kinda fucked up.

Speak of which, there’s something I find amusing in Baldur’s Gate 3.

This one character, Kaylach, swears. Says “fuck” and everything. It’s one of her many endearing traits and one of the main reasons she’s my fave character so far and also my kind-of girlfriend.

We haven’t fucked yet because she’s too hot for me. Literally. When she gets excited her skin becomes fiery and hot. Like lava.

Kind of cuts down on the cuddles.

Anyhow, the funny part is that she is literally the only person in the game who swears. And the voice actress does a great job but doesn’t quite make me believe she is is a person to whom swearing comes naturally.

Trust me. I grew up amongst those kinds of people. I’m one of them myself. So is the rest of my highly nerdy, well educated family.

And she’s not one of us.

It therefore makes her seem like a little kid using the bad words for the first time and trying to sound all cool and grown up about it.

Which is, of course, adorable. So it’s all for the good.

It got me thinking about my own odd family and how someone from a more traditional kind of family might react to our milieu. though.

To other middle class kids, the Bertrand household would have been incredibly confusing because we were all clearly highly intelligent, well spoken, and articulate, yet the furniture was all clawed up by the cats, we are seated around a big kitchen table, and of course we swore freely and in many ways talked like working class people as often as we talked like the bookish clan we were.

To someone with a more traditional, tightassed upbringing, these were seriously mixed signals. Just what kind of people were we, anyhow? Middle class or low?

We were free. That’s what we were. Thanks to our highly progressive parents, we were free of a lot of the pointlessly restrictive conformist bullshit other kids put up with and were free to be who we wanted to be most of the time.

My parents were a hell of a lot less than perfect, but they got that right at least.

More after the break.

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Like powdered fruit juice

In other words, dehydrated.

I think that’s the crux of why I feel crappy today. There may be other factors as well, but I feel the main issue is that I got behind on my hydration somehow.

And as far as I can tell, I have been drinking water at a more or less normal rate (in other words, constantly), so it is possible that what I really lack in my system is salt.

Salt is how your cells retain water, after all. By making tiny changes in the salinity of the water inside you, your body can cause the water to either pass through certain membranes or be stopped by them, and that’s how the body controls water flow.

But it needs to have the salt to do that with. And obviously every time you pee, some of that precious salt goes out with the tide, and you have to replace it via nutritional intake.

I remember this coming up way, way back when sodium was the nutritional villain du jour. People were eliminating so much sodium from their diet that they were ending up in the hospital because they were constantly drinking water but still VERY thirsty.

Eat a bag of Doritos, you dimwits!

Um, but enough of the science lesson. Man, what a tangent.

Part of my problem is that I did what I should never do, and skipped a meal last night. I ended up never having my midnight snack because at the last minute (ish), Joe announced that he was too sick for our usual Tuesday night hanging with Felicity via the magic of Zoom.

And he usually hosts the meeting, so no Joe, no meeting.

Were I a more robust living organism, I would have simply hosted it myself and had my snack and everything would have gone on as planned, sans Joe.

But I am a fragile being and so that was enough to totally derail things, including the meal that was supposed to happen.

This is, by far, the most frequent reason I miss a meal. Something happens to disrupt a midnight confab of some kind and I just…. don’t eat.

And then I end up sick in one way or another. Derp.

Oh well. I am catching up on my hydration now and feeling somewhat better. I still have some muscle pain but I am hoping catching up on sleep will help with that.

And if not, I have more Gabapentin. Wonderful, soothing, God given Gabapentin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got off the phone with Doctor Chao around ten minutes ago.

And it went well. I didn’t get angry with him like I was planning to do. Or at the very least get rather stern with him.

But I got him to understand how worried I am about my weakening muscles and how I feel like we have to take care of it soon or I will end up in a wheelchair, and that was the most important part of the mission anyhow.

I am particularly proud of the fact that, just as he was about to end the call, I brought the whole thing back up and how I wanted to be sure we (he) stayed focused on the problem with my muscles because I felt like in the past, we (he) had gotten distracted by other, less critical matters.

I felt I needed to say that because we ended up talking about my blood pressure slash dizziness on standing up issue and while I want that to be addressed as well, it is not nearly as important as my retaining the ability to walk.

Even if I need a walker to go more than six steps.

You know, they call it a walker, but I still gotta do all the walking myself.

Ba dum tish.

And in bringing things back to the point just when he thought the conversation was over, I forced him to go over the details of my case in order to prove to me that he had not forgotten them again.

I even got a little dig in when he said something like, “Your legs stopped working and you ended up in the hospital for 16 days… ” and I said, “And that was a year ago!.”

Yeah, remember that, DOC? That it has been an entire year with no diagnosis? Wonder why that is? Got any theories, DOC?

I feel pretty darn good about that.

He is going to ask Doctor Caswell’s office for the results of that blood pressure monitor thing I did a while back. I will see him in his office next Monday at 10:30 AM.

I suspect this to be yet another delaying tactic of his where he seizes upon some immediately actionable part of my case that lets him send me off for now and thus lets him go on to his next fee/patient ASAP.

Whatever. Having asserted myself successfully today, I feel confident that I have what it takes to keep pushing and prodding until I get a satisfactory result.

As for the lack of hauteur (it was, at best, warmeur), that’s all for the best anyhow. Angry insistence has never been my strong point.

I am much better at earnest persistence. No accusations, no crankiness, no bile. Just giving the unmistakable impression that I have a problem that will just keep popping ujp and making you feel terrible until you frigging solve it.

Kind of like my hero Columbo, actually. He almost never gets mad. And he is never rude. He just keeps popping up, all humble charm and sharp mind, and asking increasingly probing questions that really put the screws to the murderer.

That’s how I deal with bureaucrats and I guess it probably works on doctors, too.

I miss my Dad. I learned it all from him.

More after the break.

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I remember Larry

My father was the villain of my childhood. And I kind of regret that now.

Let me get this out of the way : it was his own fault. He was impatient, and short tempered, and verbally abusive, and demanding, and scary as hell to all us sensitive, nervous, bookish kids.

But in hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if I could have reached him somehow. Maybe showed him a way to relate to his kids in a more relaxed and human way.

Because I know he was not all bad. There was the makings of a pretty good father under all that crankiness. Maybe if he had access to some other way of working out his frustrations, he would have been easier to get along with and we kids would have been a lot closer to him. \

Not sure what would have worked for him. Kung-Fu?

Now on the surface of it, it might seem absurd to think that I, a child at the time, might have been able to “fix” my father.

But I know myself. I know what I am capable of. I can connect with people on a deep level and maybe even learn to speak their language in time.

Not that I am on any level or in any sense saying I should have “saved” him.

But I am mature enough to be able to look back and see a lonely, frustrated man who was greatly hurt by the lack of closeness with his kids but could not (or would not) calm the fuck down enough to fix the problem.

The fact that it was all his fault does not entirely prevent it from being tragic.

I wish I had known just how hellish his childhood had been back then. But he was never going to tell us. We had to learn it from his sister Mary Jane, who witnessed it all.

God knows what my Grandpa did to her. But I don’t want to think about that.

There is only so much of my spirit I want to invest in hating a dead man.

No matter how tragic our childhoods were, though, we are still accountable for our actions. Everyone has bad shit in their past and could use that to whine and complain justify their own bad behaviour.

But at the end of the day, we still expect people to goddamned behave themselves.

And my father, Larry Donald Bertrand (RIP), could not do that.

So he died alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right about now. Cranky.

Partly that’s because it’s 6:20 pm and I am only getting around to eating “lunch” now.

First I got too deeply enmeshed in my game of Baldur’s Gate 3 and when I finally thought to check the time, it was 4:20 pm.

And I would have immediately procured my lunch and set my ass to bloggin’ but I realized that after all that gaming I was very tired, and so I had to take a nap.

Woke up at around 5:30 pm. Took me till 5:50 pm just to get out of bed, because that’s become a thing again lately.

Just sittin on the edge of my bed
Watching my soul fill with dread
Sittin on the edge of my bed
Wastin’ time, ah-ah-ah-ime.

Also, in addition to my more customary forms of domestic agony (sore muscles, sinus pain, existential dread so thick you could spread it on toast) my back has also been hurting lately, and that’s always very distressing.

There’s no pain like back pain. It’s so alarming when you try to stand up and end up sitting right the fuck back down due to back pain bad enough to make you cry out.

I have been attempting my own brand of “auto-chiropractor” treatments where I push down on my spine in order to straighten it out, and it helps, but if this keeps on like this I will have to see Doctor Chao about it.

Ironically, I have a phone appointment with him between 3 pm and 5 pm tomorrow to talk about how it’s been over a year since my legs stopped working, and we still don’t know WTF is up with that.

But back pain is not an over the phone diagnosis type of thing, so that will have to wait until some as yet unbooked future in-office appointment.

Besides, my muscular atrophy has to take priority.

Another thing cranking me up is an upsurge in frustration with my stupid fucking life. God, can this really be all there is for me? Video games, blogging, and decay?

I have so much incredible potential rotting on the vines of my soul’s orchard because I am too weak to grab a stepladder and go out there and pluck it.

If something does not change soon, I will miss the bus on life entirely. I will go to my grave without ever having come within hailing distance of being an adult, and everything I ever was or ever was going to be will get poured down the drain like a rummy’s second last bottle of booze right before the AA meeting.

It will be one hell of a tragedy. That’s what they will say at my sparsely attended funeral. His death was so tragic and he died so young, and he was such an amazing guy.

Too bad he could not heal that terrible pain he felt deep down in time for him to do any of the things he kept telling himself he would do “eventually”.

But eventually never comes.

More after the break.

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Pain = Crank, part 2 : the Crankening

God dammit, this back pain is pissing me off.

I don’t think it’s indigestion related, like so much of my back pain. This stuff is too high on my back for it to be caused by IBS cramping or the like.

I’m also very sleepy. Apparently the nap I took after “lunch” only whetted my brain’s appetite for downtime, so now I feel like I need to nap like Rip Van Winkle.

Only not as folksy.

As a result, the words are coming very slow for me at the moment. Which sucks because the sooner I finish today’s word, the sooner I can go back to sleep.

Damn do I miss caffeine. Maybe if the results of that blood pressure monitor thing I did several forevers ago say my blood pressure is normal now,I can gently re-introduce caffeine to my life as a “sometimes” thing.

Like when I am falling asleep when need to make the words, for example.

Back in the good old days when I dranke 2L of Diet Coke a day (half with lunch and half with dinner), in my mind it was loosely tied to blogging. I “needed” the caffeine in order to be bright and focused when I write.

But now I have to manage without caffeine and it sucks. The rest of the world gets to use and abuse the world’s most popular stimulant as they feel fit, why not me?

Oh right. Because life hates me.

Everything I do hurts. And of course, I keep having to yank my awareness back to the screen and the keyboard like they’re errant dogs and I am pulling on the leash.

All of this crap has me in a pretty black mood. I don’t want to be awake. I donb’t wanbt to be typing. I don’t want to have to make the words happen. I don’t want to have to think of things to say.

Hell, I don’t even want to need to be vertical right now.

I want to be horizontal and covered in my comforter and deep, deep asleep.

I don’t wanna deal with reality at all.

Then again. I never do. Not really. My whole life is structured around keeping the amount of time I have to spend dealing directly with reality to the absolute minimum I can get away with without qualifying as catatonic.

“So what’s wrong, Doctor? Is Fruvous brain dead?!?”
“No, as far as we can tell, he just stopped coping. ”

And considering how badly I coped with life, it’s no great loss.

And I know that my extreme withdrawal from the world is all wrong and that if I want to ever be mentally well I need to be going in the opposite direction.

I need to be crawling up out of this pit, not wallowing deeper into it.

But the pain makes that impossible. And I don’t know what to do about that.

Will myself to heal, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.