I really fucking hate my life right now.

First there was the fuckery with my credit card. Still not resolved and it’s been a week. Tried to call today but forgot about the time zone problem (they are in Eastern, and I am in Pacific) so their lines had already closed.

Ain’t that a peach.

Then there was my recent health scare and the fact that life is even harder for me now. But I can’t do anything about that until Monday the fucking 14th because my GP, Doctor Chao, is on fucking vacation and nobody uses a goddamned locum any more.

Then today, I stuck my head into the bear trap of life’s fuckery by buying and downloading the hotter than the heart of the sun new game,. Baldur’s Gate 3.

The game’s long-awaited release has been met with universal and massive acclaim. It has a mind blogging 97 percent on Metacritic and a 93 percent from Metacritic’s users. All the furries I know have it and are playing it and loving the bejesus out of it.

So, not being made of stone, I decided to get the dang thing. I cashed in the $60 from my Steam wallet and added $25 from current funds and paid full price for a new game for the first time in a long time and downloaded all 100 gigs of it and got ready to play.

But of course, you can’t play shit these days without having an account with someone, either the devs or the publisher or whatever corporate leviathan in whose belly they swim around in.

Luckily, I already had an account with Larian, the makers of the game, from playing their previous games. Unfortunately, I had lost my password, and so before I could play my very expensive game, I had to do the whole “Forgot your password?” thing.

That accomplished, I loaded up the game, a-tingle with anticipation of getting to play the new hotness while it was still hot for a change.

And it fucking crashed my computer. That all too familiar crash I was getting with Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, where the screen goes back because the computer and the monitor just aren’t communicating any more.

And that is where I am stuck now. I even reinstalled my video driver and it didn’t help. At some random moment not long after I start playing, the screen goes black, a couple secs later there is a beep, and then five seconds later, I get the “no input” screen from my expensive monitor.

Oh, and while trying to deal with THAT, I knocked my can of beverage over onto my keyboard. Son of a bitch.

Now, they are still working out the bugs on the initial release of Baldur’s Gate 3, so the next hotfix might fix my issue.

Or what the hell, someone out there might know what to do. This might be the one time in my life I have a computer problem people have heard of.

But right now, I am very much in a “burn the world” AAAAARGH kind of mood.

More after the break.

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Staying out of circulation

Just got back from gathering foodstuffs in the kitchen.

And it was not an easy trip.

None of them are, but this one was particularly bad. Had to cling the kitchen counter and hold on for dear life when I arrived at the kitchen due to dizziness. Then felt like I was in a prop plane going through heavy turbulence and dodging flak.

By the time I got back to the computer, sitting down felt like being washed ashore. Then once I was seated it kind of felt like my blood hadn’t come to a full stop yet and I got this weird feeling like the tops of my forearms were in a light but steady wind.

That was probably partially the fan I have on. But the fan never felt like this before.

All in all, it was a most unpleasant voyage, and my problems definitely felt (and feel) circulatory in nature. I think my blood pressure is low because the Jardiance is working and lower blood sugar means low blood pressure and that means I don’t need to be on all these blood pressure medications. They are bringing my BP too low.

Guess I will have to bring that up with Doctor Chao when he comes back from vacation.

I will do my part by trying to remember to rise and sit a little more slowly. I have a habit of doing things abruptly and that can make this problem worse.

But there is not a whole lot I can do. Muscles as weak as mine do not allow for moving my weight slowly. That takes muscle tone I ain’t got.

I’m just glad I can still get around at all. I dread the day when I can’t get my own food from the kitchen and can’t get to and from the toilet on my own.

At that point, I would have to get home help. If not a nurse, then a professional assistant in some form. My needs would far exceed anything I could ask of Julian and he is the only person who is around to do things for me.

I already feel bad about prevailing upon him as much as I do. I hate being a burden on people. I guess, deep down, that I am always worried that people will find me to be more trouble than I am worth and abandon me.

I mean, I can only fool people into forgetting how horrible I am for so long, right?

At least that’s how it feels. But I know those feelings are crazy. I know they are as delusional as the hallucinations of a psychotic but harder to dismiss.

I feel like I am always doing this dance where I feel something crazy, recognize its insanity, and try to process this truth but only get part way through before the old reality reasserts itself and I feel crazy again.

But along the way, I make progress. I push back the wall of insanity clouding my mind a little bit at a time, and while progress may be incremental, it is permanent.

I never, ever go backwards.

So little by little, bit by bit, I beat back the tide and reclaim a little bit of dry land for myself and all I wish to do.

Can’t give you an ETA. It doesn’t work like that. I can’t even see the mainland from here.

But I know I will make landfall some day.

And that will have to do for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So it looks like I got a phone call to make. ^[1]

I have exhausted all my other ideas on how to get my fucking groceries and so now I have to call up Pay Power, the people behind my credit cards, and see if they can make their card work with Instacart or whomever.

And of course, it is taking me some time to summon the gumption to do it because it involves the phone and talking to a stranger and that triggers my social anxiety and/or Avoidant Personality Disorder and so it becomes a whole thing.

I will get there eventually. I just have a certain amount of getting over myself to do. I wish I could will myself into being the sort of no nonsense person who just gets thing done that I want to be, but I can’t.

So instead, I have to put up with my being a sniveling, dithering, whimpering, simpering, cowardly, untowardly, shuddering little lump of goo with no backbone, no courage, and not the strength of will God gave a cheese éclair.

But I am learning to love myself.

Part of pulling myself together and becoming a real little boy, though, means dealing with parts of myself that don’t exactly get along and forcing them to deal with one another in hopes of resolving the issue.

And part of me really hates that I am so scared about stuff and that I can’t go directly to the solution to a problem like I want to do, I have to take the long way around.

I’m a very direct person. I always want to go straight from point A to point B. And when I can’t, it really aggravates me. Brings out the Grumpy Bull in me.

But because I am such a fragile flower with a head full of crazy and a belly full of butterflies, I am in that position all the time.

I want to solidify, damn it. Stop being such a blubbering jellyfish, grow some vertebrae, and face the world and my problems head on. Like a real man.

Like the sort of person I could respect.

But no, now I have to wait until my emotions will let me address the problem. I live in a cage of fear and anxiety and suppressed rage. I am boxed in on all sides by aversions and compulsions and obsessions, and drained by an overall feeling of helplessness.

And it really fucking sucks.

But as I feed my anger, I grow stronger. And soon, I will be stronger enough to shove that fear aside and GET. THINGS. DONE.

More after the break.

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When you’re over the hill….

…you pick up speed.

When you see that written on a T-shirt, mousepad, or novelty tampon, you know that it is meant to be taken as life getting even better as you age.

But seeing as at the bottom of that hill lies your grave, it ain’t that great. Pretty sure most of us older folk would pay a lot of money to slow things down again.

I’m writing this now because I just had an attack of the feeling of time acceleration a little while ago. When I was in the kitchen making supper, I had this moment when I realized tomorrow is Thursday, and it feels to me like last Thursday was like a day and a half ago at most.

And that gave me a wave of that awful feeling of the days telescoping together until time itself becomes nothing but the same moment repeating forever.

Kind of like how the Tralfamadorians see time in Slaughterhouse 5 as an endless eternal present where everything that will happen has already happened and always has happened that way.

But way more depressing.

It really does feel like time speeds up as you get older. Minute by minute and moment by moment, time passes as it usually does, but the moment you look any further than that it feels like everything is in fast forward mode but you.

That’s part of what makes us older folk so resistant to change. From our point of view, things are coming at us incredibly fast and we can’t keep up. Feels like by the time you wrap your head around one change, they have already changed it again.

Eventually you give up trying.

I haven’t given up yet but it ain’t that far away.

There’s various reasons why this awful effect occurs. The main one, I think is simply that our sense of time^[2] continues to expand for our entire lives.

The same process that turns us from little children who feel like five minutes later means things are taking “forever” into adults who feel like a weekend is barely long enough to recover from our work week keeps going as we age and turns us into people like me who wonder where entire weeks went.

Fortunately this is all an illusion. Time continues at the same rate of one second per second it always has everywhere but inside our aged heads, and the days contain just as many minutes as they always have.

However, we live in the world inside our heads (some more than others) so when our sense of time continues to grow and creates this illusion, it can be very frightening.

And while the day continues to have as many seconds as it always has, I would argue that it has a lot fewer moments.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That is a reference to a line from this song :

In the intro to the song, Joe Elliot declares that it is better to burn out than to fade away.

Well I sure hope there is a third option because I am definitely fading away.

My fears have come to pass : once more, after a bout of flu-like symptoms, I have been left even weaker than before.

This was confirmed this morning when I went to Wound Care and found that the usual trip to the car and up to the Community Care Clinic and back was even harder than usual and my muscles felt even more like they were just hanging off my bones like I was a broken puppet than ever before.

So it gets worse, whatever “it” is. Whatever one calls an ailment like mine, it has a clear pathology : I will get these attacks every two or three months where I feel very ill and weak and awful, and when I recover from that, I am weaker than before.

Ain’t that a peach.

The downward spiral into a wheelchair then a hospital bed (tubes!) then an early fucking grave has never been clearer. I am on course to lose absolutely everything and at the current rate of decline it is only going to take two or three years.

So I hope you enjoyed having me around. This is my farewell tour.

God, even my elbows are tired.

Less fatalistically, I clearly need to go through with my plans to go see my GP, Doctor Chao, and hold his feet to the fire over the fact that I can barely feel my feet any more. He gave up on my problem after testing for a few things and that ain’t good enough.

I don’t wanna die and I don’t want to end up in a hospital bed full of tubes and I don’t want to need Julian to push me around in a wheelchair and that means I am going to have to get my poop in a group and make an appointment to talk to Doctor Chao and get him to focus long enough to understand that this is a serious, ongoing, life-threatening problem that isn’t going to go away until he fixes.

I will probably end up yelling at him out of sheer frustration and a desperate need to convey the seriousness of my situation to him.

God damn it, someone has to be able to take this all the way and it sure as fuck can’t be me because I’m too damned sick for that kind of focused long term effort.

Which is kind of the POINT.

And I know what that will take to get that done. I am going to have to get mad and stay mad until I get the medical attention I need. I am going to have to raise a stink and not let up until the system gives me a fucking answer, and hopefully, a cure.

And I don’t wanna do that.

But I don’t wanna die either.

So it’s time to choose.

More after the break,.

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When you think about it, coffee break is just recess for grownups,.

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It would be so easy….

It would be so easy to keep failing myself.

To keep on doing what got me into this mess, namely shrug and go back to wasting my life playing video games like a little kid.

To do absolutely nothing about my slow and ponderous mystery disease and let it keep on damaging me until I land in the hospital with something that totally have been prevented if I had just taken responsibility for myself and gone to the doc and done all those things I “should” be doing instead of letting the train run over me when I am not even tied to the tracks.

But to save myself, I would have to grow up. I would have to stop being so utterly passive and pull myself together enough to actually do things.

Real things. Important things. Honest to goodness adult type grownup things.

And that would mean overcoming this parasympathetic paralysis that has held me in its grip for my entire adult life. Shake off this monstrous lethargy and get into the flow of life instead of foundering on the sidelines and hoping life doesn’t notice me.

Trust me, little foxy. It doesn’t. It really, really doesn’t. The only real life people who even know I exist are Le Gang and my therapist.

My other doctors don’t count. They forget me the moment I am not in front of them any more. That office door closes and I might as well have been a mirage.

Not that I’m bitter.

Anyhow, back to me on the railroad tracks.

It would be so easy to keep laying there until the train takes my teeny tiny burden of choice away from me and lets me revert to childhood by being able to just lay there while nice people take care of me and all I have to do is be my charming and lovable self and people will love me.

Actually, scratch that. My childhood was never that good. That would be more like the childhood I should have had, where people actually care about and for me.

A childhood where I was welcomed into the only family I would ever have and given my fair share of the attention and approval and resources.

A childhood where people were glad I was there instead of resenting my unplanned intrusion into their lives.

A childhood where I was wanted even though I was unplanned.

Where my gifts were acknowledged, embraced, and celebrated instead of pointedly ignored because to them they just made me even more annoying to be around.

A childhood where the people who were supposed to love me and help me grow didn’t hate me for being born.

Yeah…. that would have been nice.

Pretty sure I can’t get that from a hospital though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We begin with a link to the podcast that started it all.

The podcast talks about the latest sizzling hot developments in pop psych and behavioural psychology that center around everyone’s most rewarding friend, the neurotransmitter known as dopamine.

As we all known, dopamine activates the reward center of the brain and is thus responsible for damned near everything we do because we are all ultimately looking to received reward and/or avoid punishment.

Pleasure and pain in the modern vein, if you will.

What has the world abuzz these days is that we can now see how homeostasis plays a vital role in dopamine, addiction, and depression.

See when something stimulates our dopamine response, our dopamine level goes up and we feel good.

But homeostasis demands that we go back down to our baseline level of dopamine, so our body immediately begins to scrub the dopamine out of our bloodstream again.

What happens, though, when something pumps our dopamine levels up crazy high?

You come crashing on down. Even though it is your own body doing it to itself, your mind can’t help but interpret that as things rapidly getting much, much worse.

And if it’s a bad enough overstimulation, it actually uses up your entire short term supply of dopamine, making that crash so much worse.

And so what do you do? You lunge for more reward stimulation, and end up solving the problem in the short term and making it far worse in the long term.

The harder you push on one side of the seesaw of pleasure and pain, the harder it swings back in the opposite direction, and (metaphor switch warning) you end up in a terrible tug of war with yourself.

Which is why the hot new buzzterm is “dopamine fasting”. The name is misleading – if you had no dopamine at all, you would die from total lack of motivation.

See where depression comes in?

No, what is meant by “dopamine fasting” is that you refrain from the highly addictive dopamine releasing activities modern society specializes in delivering to us faster and better than ever before.

And sorry if this is obvious to you, but I am NOT just talking about substance abuse. here. The internet has turned us all into addicts by putting whatever will most addict us in our pockets, whether that’s cheap unsafe sex (hookup apps), too much unhealthy food (delivery apps), or even crossword puzzles (so very many apps… trust me. )

Now the lady in the podcast recommended going four weeks without your addiction in order to let your dopamine levels “reset” (another buzzword) and then you can go back to life as usual but with a new awareness of how things can go out of control.

So maybe this time, you take things a little slower, and if you feel yourself wanting more and more of your particular dopamine release, slam on the brakes.

And if that doesn’t do the trick, you know what will make you feel better? Pain.

Yes, in what has to be the nearly the theoretical maximum of counterintuitiveness, just like pleasure got you into this mess, pain can get you back out. Pain pushes down on that half of the seesaw and thus speeds your way back to the midline.

I’ve noticed this myself. I would not consider myself a masochist, but there have been times when I could not help but notice pain making me feel oddly better.

I assumed it to be a product of tension relief.

But now I know there might be more to it than that.

More after the break.

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But what about me?

That’s enough of the fun stuff (brain science). Let’s get to my case.

Obviously, I am addicted to video games.

And I know that for sure because the mere idea of going four weeks without video games fills me with gibbering panic.

I can’t even imagine going an afternoon without them. Going almost a month without video games is far beyond the pale for me right now.

That doesn’t mean it can never happen. I believe the research. I know it would ultimately do me a hell of a lot of good. I am not one to balk at medicine.

Well unless it is CPAP. Or blood glucose monitoring and insulin. Or…

OK, let’s not go there. NOT MY POINT.

It could definitely happen. But it is going to take a heck of a lot of road-clearing and prep work before I can go there.

Video games have been my lifeline for way way too long. Ever since I feel into the Skyrim hole all those years ago, video games have been my life, or rather, what occupies the hole where a life should be.

They suck up everything I have besides this blog (thank you so much for reading) and that means they have devoured every bit of human potential I have, leaving next to nothing for me to use to make any progress.

And that’s just how my depression likes it.

And the addiction lurks at the edge of all my issues because their solutions all involve spending free time away from the god damned games and that’s a no go.

And like any good junkie, I both love and hate my “junk”.

I hate it because I can’t live without it.

But I still can’t live without it. Or at least that’s what I used to call the “cravings part of the brain” tells me.

And it all comes back to that central damning accursed question :

What do I do with myself?

What do I do with all those empty hours that suddenly open up when I contemplate putting down the games even for just an afternoon?

This is the existential nightmare faced by all disabled people. What the hell do you do with your time on Earth when you can’t contribute to society?

And that’s where the thoughts about life being pointless and stupid and my being a burden and the world being better off…

..yeah, let’s not go there either.

I know I want to escape the gravity well of video games enough to add something more vital and connected to the world and fulfilling to my life.

And that requires my making room in my life for other things.

But I am so scared of trying to figure out what the fuck to do with myself that I can’t even face the problem head on.

I have to shield my eyes and look at it with a sideways squint, like it’s a very bright light.

But there has to be a way out of this quagmire.

And I will find it, even if I have to build it myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Quick update : I am feeling better than I did yesterday. I still feel tired and weak but otherwise I am back to being only the usual level of ill.

Which is good because that means I will be able to make it to Denny’s tonight. And seeing as dinner at Denny’s with Le Gang is always the highlight of my week, that means a heck of a lot to me.

Le Gang, of course, consists of Joseph P. Devoy, Julian Castle, and Felicity Walker, and those are really all the friends I need.

But I know that for some people that would not be nearly enough.

And I might be one of those people as well.

Because you see, those are just my real life friends. In the realm of virtual text interaction known as Tapestries MUCK , I have dozens.

And they cover the full range, from nodding acquaintances to people I feel extremely close to like my darling Luke.

Right now, at the place I hang out, a pub called Merriam’s, there’s Ada, Windchaser, Sylver, Niva, Coaldust, Kusaro, Jaekob, and many more.

Plus, of course, my good gamer buddy Maelkoth.

And if asked why I have a lot of fuzzy friends, my pragmatic answer would be, “so that I always have someone to chat with and/or cuddle with and/or fuck.

That last one doesn’t come up much, admittedly, but I haven’t given up on it yet.

And that is really my strange introvert v. extrovert relationship in a nutshell. On the one hand, in the real world, I have three very excellent friends and I can’t imagine feeling the need for any more.

On the other paw, on Taps, I have tons of friends and I am always open to making more. In general, I am far more open and sociable as Fruvous than I am as the inestimable Michael John Bertrand.

We won’t go into why that is.

But Fruvous is an idealized version of myself, so I have to ask myself if a healthy and relaxed me would be a lot more like him than my current sad and sallow self.

I’ve tried to imagine living in the real world the way I live on Tapestries and my mind boggles at the notion.

There would need to be a real world location where I hang out all the time. Given that I want to keep option 3 open, it would have to be a gay bar or club or otherwise just very groovy in general.

I’ll hand-wave any logistical issue about how I get there et al.

And I would have to have made lots of friends there, which means I am way more open to talking to people I don’t know.

And snuggling up with them, if they’re amenable.

That’s the truly unimaginable part. I can more or less imagine a club where I feel comfortable enough to relax provided it was small and quiet enough.

But striking up conversations with total strangers? I shrivel up inside at the very thought.

Clearly I have a long way to go before I am truly Fruvous.

But I will get there some day god damn ir!

More after the break.

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I hear a calling

So tonight I learned that BCSFAzine (official publication of the British Columbia Science Fiction Association) has been declared dead as has Vcon (the Vancouver science fiction convention) and WCSFA (West Coast Science Fiction Association, who runs said convention) and deep inside me I felt a tug on my heart in a certain direction and heard a metaphorical voice calling to me and saying, “Do this!”.

This has happened very rarely in my life. And I have never regretted doing what it told me to do.

It bade me to order the original cast recording of the Rocky Horror Show soundtrack from a CD catalogue, and that changed my life.

It made me volunteer to direct a play (The Real Inspector Hound) another person had to abandon because the UPEI Theatre Department decided said person was spreading himself too thin, despite the fact that I had never even thought about directing anything ever until that exact moment and I didn’t even know what the hell a director did.

It called me to write my own play to direct and act in, even though that was an objectively insane reaction to the problem of not getting the right to the play I wanted to direct (The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard) and something nobody but a lunatic like me would ever think of doing, let alone do.

And now it is telling me to take over BCSFAzine, and what the hell, maybe even offer to chair Vcon and get WCSFA going again.

So I am gonna do it. I will take over BCSFAzine and put it out monthly. PDF only because print is a massive expense and hassle. I will have fun both soliciting and collecting content for it. I will use it as a platform for my own writing and ideas. And I will make it something worth reading every damned month.

And for me it’s a godsend because it already has an audience. That massive barrier of me having to try to figure out how to get people to pay attention in the first place has already been breached. Whatever I put in there will definitely be seen.

And by people who don’t even know me. Imagine.

I have finally found my next “thing” to do that will absorb more of my overflowing creative energies that blogging alone can’t contain.

Right now, my only worry is that in my effervescent enthusiasm I will make the thing too darned long for people to read.

I have a track record of this. I have made multiple English teachers openly ponder instituting a maximum wordcount for essays.

What can I say? I have a lot to say and a powerful need to express myself. With me it’s very much a “trying to sip from the firehose” kind of situation.

So wish me luck, Big Bad World.

I’m finally taking the next step.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now I am really sick.

IT hit me all at once ;last night at around 11 pm. One moment I was fine and the next moment I felt like a cold dark cloud has passed between me and the sun.

I felt weak, and sick, and nauseous, and depressed. My head hurt and my fingers tingled and I felt terribly cold and lonely and scared.

Presumably, I an playing host to some kind of infection. It’s just weird how it snuck up behind me and mugged me like that.

Knowing me, it probably built up over a long time and the “breakthrough” moment when it “suddenly” attacked was actually just the moment when the problem crossed the sensory threshold into my conscious mind.

Or something like that.

Luckily, it didn’t stay that bad for too long. A couple of hours later I felt a lot better.

Still majorly fucked up, but better.

Since then, I have in the grips of malaise. I feel fragile and tired and weak and most worrying of all I keep getting attacks of dizziness at random moments,

Three times now I have come very close to taking a tumble and with my health being as fragile as it is, a fall could really fuck me up.

It almost feels like there’s heavy weights inside my limbs and sometimes when I move those weights slide down to my extremities and totally throw off my balance.

Maybe it’s just a reaction to fluids pooling here and there. I dunno.

Dunno if I will get all my words done today. So far it seems doable, although my current level of mental impairment means I have to type very slowly and deliberately or what comes out of these fingers of mine will be a big ol’ mess.

Of course, as much as I hate the idea, I have to contemplate going to the fucking ER. I really don’t want to because the ER sucks as an experience, but my symptoms have been pretty extreme – like, more so than a normal cold or infection – so caution and common sense dictate that I have to at least entertain the idea.

But having given it some thought, I don’t think it’s necessary yet. I am doing reasonably okay now that I have gotten some hydration and nutrition into me and if I stay the course, it feels to me like I am on my way to getting better.

Which would make this yet another in a long string of incidents in which I get real sick all of a sudden and feel miserable for a while then it disappears like smoke leaving me wondering what the fuck is going on.

And of course, the world of medicine can’t help me because by the time I got to the ER and made it through the system to actually see a doctor, it would be gone.

So unless I want to keep a go-bag constantly packed so that I can rush off to the ER the moment I feel ille, I’m just going to have to put up with it, I guess,.

Why does my life have to be so fucked up?

More after the break.

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The fall at the end

Almost made it to the front door to pick up my Poke Okey order plus a fork to eat it with and back without a disaster.

And it was not easy. I am feeling a lot weaker than usual and I am usually pretty weak. I really hope this isn’t permanent – that whatever disease I have hasn’t just gotten worse as a result of this infection.

Thinking my trip to the door and the Pokey Okey order than prompted it were a bad idea because now my legs hurt.

Luckily, I have our good friend Gabapentin to hopefully handle that problem.

It might make me fall asleep sometime soon, but I won’t be in pain.

Oh right, the fall. Once more, it was the sitting back down again that doomed me. I was almost done with my journey when I tried to flop down into my computer chair and missed the chair almost entirely.

Luckily, this room of mine is totally dominated by my king sized bed, so I bounced off the edge of the seat of my computer chair and onto my bed. Phew!

And I just sat there for a while. Because falls are scary and leave me feeling vulnerable and weak and fragile, and it takes some time before I can calm down the point where I can trust the universe enough to move.

The Gabapentin is working its magic. No more leg pain. Damn, I love this stuff. The pain is gone and I don’r feel doped up at all.

It’s like it just turns down the volume on your pain.

Right now I just feel relaxed and comforted. Like I’ve been cuddling with a loved one and we are now in an advanced state of mellow.

Once I am done here, I am going to lay down and get some sleep. I slept for three hours earlier, which is unusual for me.

Usually I am lucky if I make it to two hours.

And yeah, I know that’s bad but I don’t know how to fix it. Either that or I know theoretically how to fix the problem but I lack the energy and focus to do it.

That’s how it goes with me. All my problems could be solved…. if I was someone else. Someone functional and fully conscious and so on. Someone who has at least a controlling percentage of their of their shit together.

In other words. someone who wouldn’t even have my problems in the first place.

But I’m not that guy. I’m me. I’m broken. My attempts to get my poop in a group end up being like a bird trying to fly with a broken wing.

You have to admire them for trying but you know they can’t succeed.

Me, I have a broken spirit. Things that “should” work for me don’t because they require me putting weight on my broken spirit and that’s impossible.

Couple that with a total lack of motivation, meaning there is nothing I want to do badly enough to actually do it, and you get a dude who is 50 and has done practically nothing with his life but play video games. Like me.

And I dn’t know how to fix these issues. I don’t know how to convince myself that it is safe to want things. I don’t know how to lose these blues and be more positive. I don’t know how the fuck I am supposed to fly with a broken wing.

Guess I’ll just die, then.

I will talk to you nice people agan tomorrow.

Well so much for the idea that I can just go back to ordering from Sav-on.

I forgot my password to their site and apparently so did Chrome, which is tres bizarre because I ordered from Sav-on Ironwood for years from this very browser and it filled my password in for me flawlessly back then.

Hence my not being able to remember it.

And I didn’t add it to my notes either, which is unlike me, but (ahem) not as unlike me as I would like it to be.

I keep forgetting that I’m absentminded.

So I am back to square one in regards to ordering my groceries. And increasingly resentful of Instacart for putting me through all this shit.

I don’t know why retail websites occasionally decide they hate my credit card and refuse to let me use it.

Maybe they just can’t believe that anyone honest genuinely gets a new credit card once a month. If it wasn’t happening to me, I might not believe it either.

But now I have to find another way to get my damn groceries and it pisses me off.

I wonder if Real Canadian Superstore has a non-Instacart option for delivery?

---

Warning, Gen X rant incoming.

I wrote this in a YouTube comment earlier today and thought it was interesting and well written enough that I wanted to preserve it here :

I think one of the things that unites Gen X is the universal assumption by our parents that they could do whatever the hell they wanted and we would just have to adapt.

I think I hit the nail on the head there.

Our Boomer parents, the “me” generation,. did what they wanted it and it was simply impossible for them to even conceive of putting someone else’s needs and desires before their own.

Oh sure, they love to bitch and moan about all they “sacrificed” for their kids, but let me ask you this : how much did they REALLY sacrifice?

Do you really think that if they had never had kids, they would have been happy flipping burgers or digging ditches? Of course not. They went for the middle class life they wanted and got the middle class jobs they wanted and just happened to have kids along the way because they thought they wanted those, too.

And by the time they figured out we actually had needs and desires of our own, it was too late, we were already there.

No problem, they collectively thought. We’ll just ignore our kids needs and desires if they conflict with our own.

After all, what are they going to do about it? They’re just kids!

And so we X’ers grew up knowing we were not the most important things in our parents’ lives. They were.

That is why they invented the concept of “quality time” spent with your kids.

Because they knew they were way too self to spend QUANTITY time with us.

So they effortlessly convinced themselves that spending an hour here and an hour there – you know, whatever they felt they could spare for doing something they didn’t get anything out of – would be just as good as what came before.

Or it wouldn’t be. Who knows. They didn’t care. They didn’t give it a single thought.

After all, they were all about “me, me, ME!”.

The only thing they “sacrificed” was money, and you have to start from a nearly sociopathic level of selfishness to consider absolutely any money you spend on something other than yourself to be a big “sacrifice”.

“I’m a hero because I actually spend some of MY money to clothe, feed, and house the children I decided to bring into the world!”

“Oh well I’m an even bigger hero because I even let them live with me and touch my stuff I even gave them their own separate room in the house!”

Oh, how you have suffered.

More after the break.

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Hmm. My McD’s order somehow went from 13 mins away to 16 mins away.

This means either that McD’s has somehow gotten further away (quick, follow those arches!) or my driver went the wrong way.

This should be good. With the way things have been going lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if he got sucked into an alternate timeline where Hitler was a high successful cabaret performer in Stuttgart.

Let us see what shall arise.

---

We stand on guard for…

…a bunch of shit that probably isn’t even real.

No complications with my McD’s. I wonder how many times they will have to deliver competently before I stop being paranoid and hostile about it.

Knowing me, probably way too many.

Then when it DOES happen again – as it inevitably will – by the bizarre calculus of depression/anxiety, I will blame myself for relaxing my vigilance.

That makes literally no sense.

How in hell would being “alert” help? Am I going to message my driver with detailed and very patronizing instructions every time? Will I be lying in wait for them in the foyer? Am I going to spring for Kleig lights to point at this apartment?

No. That would be crazy, he said in an eerily calm voice.

For the most part, trying to control outcomes by anticipating problems is a waste of time. I only end up robbing myself of happiness and contentment with absolutely no tangible or meaningful benefit to compensate for it.

I can’t see a way out of it except to go in the opposite direction and decide I don’t give a fuck what happens to me, I am just going to grab all the enjoyment I can before the whole damned thing goes up in flames.

A very anti=pragmatic idea, which is probably why it appeals to me. My lifelong pragmatism is great for remaining focused on what matters on an operational level, but it doesn’t leave much room for rainbows and glitter and little red foxes who don’t want to be tied down to the real any more.

There might not be more to the universe than what is materially real.

But there’s a hell of a lot more to life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There I was, minding my own business, having put together my grocery order like usual, via Instracart, when the damned thing refused to take my latest credit card.

It didn’t reject it, though. It just said it was unable to add the card at this time. And I know I got the numbers all right, I triple checked.

So who knows, maybe it will start working any moment now. Or maybe it will never work again and I will have to find another service just like I kept having to do with dining in.

And I don’t need this aggravation, dammit.

Probably unrelated, but this is the day a much anticipated and hyped to the point of consumer hysteria game, Baldur’s Gate 3, has finally been released, and so at the very least the entire GAMING internet is totally clogged with people buying and downloading the game and bitching because it’s downloading so slowly.

For some reason.

As for me, like any true Gen X’er, I am positively allergic to hype and as a lifelong lifestyle contrarian I would not even contemplate trying to fight through the rest of the stampeding fucking sheep to get something hot the day it comes out.

No thank you. That’s for the middle of the herd types who do things just because they are the “normal” thing to do. Or because everyone else is doing it.

You know. Wack jobs like that.

No consumer product is ever going to be worth putting up with shit like that to me. I will do as I have always done : hang back at the edge of the crowd until it disperses and only then do I go get some for myself.

And the thing is, I usually end up getting it only a few minutes later than if I had battled the hordes and waited in line with the sheep anyhow.

That’s how I handled the scrum at the cafeteria when the noon bell rang when I was in high school. While me classmates stampeded to get into line and wait for their turn, I just sat at a table with a clear line of sight to the lineup and read while keeping one eye on the line.

When it dispersed roughly fifteen minutes later, I would get up and casually saunter over and get my order.

Usually a pizza finger (deep fried pizza roll), fries, and gravy. Heaven.

And I would get the occasional snarky comment like, “Oh NOW he gets up!” or “He thinks he’s so special just because he.. ” and the like.

And you’re right, random person. I do think I am special. Because you fools just acted like cattle rushing ot the slaughterhouse trampling each other to get in line while I had a nice rest and read, yet I got my food just as fast.

That’s because you are sheep, and I am a bear. And as a bear, I don’t give a shit what you think of me. All I care about is my own comfort, wellbeing, and dignity.

And what do you know, I still have all of all three of those intact.

And you can’t STAND it.

More after the break.

Interrobang caret ampersand question mark exclamation mark!

Well the fucking thing still won’t take my credit card.

So it looks like I am going to have to migrate yet again.

The good news is that I can just go back to ordering directly from Sav-on. I was miffed with them when I switched to Real Canadian Superstore via Instacart because Instacart seemed like a much better deal at the time.

But it wasn’t. I still had a $35 min. order to deal with, they still had patchy inventory so I never knew if they would have what I needed^[1] and I still got the occasional idiot fucking… Instacarter? um, sure… who can’t figure out how apartment buildings work.

Oh right, they call them “couriers”. Which I would only accept if the groceries were delivered by a fresh faced young man in a bellhop type uniform who scans the crowd saying, “Mister Bertrand? Mister Michael Bertrand? I have groceries here for a Mister Michael Bertand? Is Mister Bertrand here?”

I would then raise my hand and signal for him to approach. “I’m a Michael Bertrand!” I would jape. He would fake laugh because he’s heard that a million times… today,.

He would put the bags of groceries at my feet, say “There you go, sir!”, then hover expectantly, waiting for a tip.

I’d let him sweat for a few moments while I pretend to inspect my groceries. then make it up to him by tipping him a whole dollar.

Hey, that’s a lot of money back now in the 30’s.

Anyhow, where was I? That was very fun to write.

I ought to pay more attention to what I enjoy writing. Writing that scenelet up there was so much fun it barely felt like work.

Terry Pratchett said that writing was the most fun you could have with your clothes on.

And um, take it from someone who has adopted a pants free lifestyle., the clothes part of that is strictly optional.

I only put on pants when I am leaving the apartment. Otherwise I am naked ‘twixt waist and ankles, and quite comfy that way.

I might change my tune when it gets colder, but for these lazy hazy crazy days of summer, giving Big Daddy and the Twins maximum ventilation seems to be the smart thing to do.

Due to that plus my robust hydration policy. I haven’t felt heat sick even once this summer except at the very beginning when I hadn’t gotten my hydration game going just yet and needed to catch up.

Nothing like a sick headache, nausea, dizziness, disorientation, and the feeling like something living in your sinuses is trying to get out to remind you that maybe you should have a glass of water or ten.

It’s annoying to have to pee as much as I do, but it’s definitely better than heatstroke.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not from the story of our little vulpine protagonist, though, I am afraid.

He needs more time to rest up.

But I have been doing my best to open myself to happy, positive vibrations. I’m trying to trim back the cynicism and bitterness their harsh reaction to happy things.

Why should happy things make me angry and give me the urge to destroy them? To shit all over them with sarcasm and irony and even a towering, screaming kind of rage, like I felt with that online depression support group I tried joining?

The easy answer is that happy things represent something that I want but cannot have, and proximity to them is so painful that I feel the need to lash out and destroy them.

And that’s certainly true. But it’s not the whole truth.

I am going to leave it there, though, because I just realized that I set out to write about what gives me the good vibrations and immediately went in the opposite direction.

Well, ya gotta let out to let in, I guess. Like I said yesterday, opening up means both letting the bad stuff out and letting the good stuff in.

But okay. Let’s try this again. Good vibrations.

What makes me happy? What puts me in a good mood? What are my good vibes?

Well, like any other human being, I enjoy the company of like-minded people. That is why I am so damned happy at conventions, both sci-fi and furry.

I just know – I can feel it in my bones – that I am with my own kind. And the panels reinforce that feeling because they are intelligent discussions of things I care about.

Speaking of which, might as well get the big one out there : my favorite thing in the whole wide world is intelligent, stimulating conversation.

Nothing else makes me feel so happy and activated and alive. Nothing else makes me feel more like there is some point to my being here. Nothing else satisfies my soul the way good conversation does.

And yet it feels weird to say that because it makes me sound so cold. Like I am some kind of alien robot that lives only for intellectual stimulation, Earthlings.

I mean, I’m not a frickin’ Vulcan. They’re all full of crap anyhow.

And there are plenty of warm things I like, too. In fact, I am greatly drawn to sources of emotional warmth because my inner world is brightly lit but cold as Hell.

Which is, I guess, a very cold reason to crave warmth. Sigh.

But I can be warm, too. As Fruvous, I am a super snuggly warm n’ waggy bundle of floof. And I love to cuddle in the real world, too.

And I love being able to be kind and warm and emotionally present for people when they need me. I’ll do whatever it takes to make someone I care about happy, like clown around and be silly, or cuddle up all cute and fluffy, or just sit quietly and listen to them as they vent about their day.

Doing things like that can also make me feel like there is some point in my being alive.

I desperately want to help people.

And that’s not cold at all, is it?

More after the break.

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A strange beast

Two videos for this one. This somewhat obvious one :

But that’s a little esoteric and abstract and I am trying hard to come down to Earth, so let’s go with a deeper cut :

Because you see, like Tigger, the most wonderful thing about Fruvouses (Fruvii?) is that I’m… the only one!

And Tigger seems to handle being one of a kind quite well. Like me, he’s bouncy and friendly and nutty and one of a kind.

I just wish I had his carefree point of view. Talk about someone who lives in the moment. He just does whatever seems like the most fun at the moment and doesn’t worry about what’s to come at all.

Like I tried to convey via my little foxy yesterday, he knows how to enjoy the now to its fullest and let the future take care of itself, figuring that whatever comes, he will be able to handle it, so why worry?

And to me, that is a proper and sensible way to live. Seems a lot more functional than my gloomy and fearful point of view that has me oddly willing to live this brutally circumscribed life just to feel “safe”.

Well, not willing, exactly. It’s not like I ever actually chose this unsatisfactory life. I have made very few choices on that level.

Every time I changed addresses, it was because I had to, not that I wanted to.

But no, this live burial of a life of mine is the result of years of self-neglect and my stalwart refusal to face the future and reality and to bury my head in the Internet and video games for decades instead.

I didn’t choose anything about it.

I didn’t ever feel like I had a choice.

I know different now, sort of. It’s a hard thing to figure : do I actually have the power to make my life better, or do my mental and physical challenges lock me in place?

Believing I have a choice seems on the surface to be the wiser, healthier option. And it is certainly what my therapist and more or less the rest of our highly individualistic Western society would tell me was the correct point of view.

But if I can change my life, well then… I kind of “have” to do it, don’t I?

And that means figuring out what I want and then figuring out how to get it and then doing those things to get it plus all the other unforeseeable things that will undoubtedly pop up along the way and I am thoroughly exhausted just from thinking about it.

Even that first step feels beyond me. What do I want? I don’t fucking know! I have very little experience in wanting things.

Wanting things is hard. It really hurts when you can’t ever have those things. And when you feel as utterly powerless as I do, that covers everything. More or less.

And I know that POV is disgusting and wrong but I can’t see my way out of it. I don’t know how to convince myself that it is safe to start wanting things.

I am afraid to want things. It feels like such a doomed thing to do.

But I am going to have to grow up and learn to live with wanting things I cannot have and striving for the things I can just like everybody else.

And it’s gonna hurt.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is a lot harder than it sounds.

I know that in order to get better, I am going to need to learn to open my heart and let the sun shine in after I let a lot of the bad stuff out.

And that’s where things get tricky. It’s easier – though still not easy – for me to let the bad stuff out in this space because it does not involve making myself vulnerable.

Not the way I see it, anyhow. It’s an act of elimination. Just push it on out there.

Letting the good in, however, is a whole different bodily function. Ingestion, I suppose.

And inherent in that is the possibility of letting the wrong things in as well, and getting hurt, and that is a very scary prospect.

In fact, the very thought of opening up that way sets of lots of very big alarms in my head. We are talking about the walls that went up when I was being raped and I had to dissociate from reality and hide inside my head to escape what was happening to me.

And that scared little fox inside me has been trapped there ever since, hiding in the dark ness and pretending he does not exist.

And he doesn’t ever want to let anyone or anything into his sanctum.

Problem is, he’s starving in there.

And its so very cold, and dark, and a wind so cold it would freeze the marrow out of your bones blows right though you all the time there.

Basically, all my Midnight Tundra, that realm of infinite frozen ground in all directions in which I wander endlessly, is in there.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly,. I am starving and freezing in there. It is a dead and frozen land without sunshine or warmth, and whatever lives in there (me) has to generate all its own sustenance just to keep going.

And that is possible. Barely. But it sure as shit ain’t healthy.

So I am going to try to write my way out of it.

And so it came to be that after centuries of ice cold darkness, the Sun finally rose on the realm of the Midnight Tundra. And immediately all the ice and snow melted and the land dried out and what had been a featureless hellscape before burst into riotous bloom and soon the ice was replaced witj verdant hillsides, lush green meadows, majestic forests, and beaches upon which a brand new endless sea broke.

And the fox, who had by this point forgotten what warmth felt like, trotted through this brave new land dazed by wonder and abuzz with delight, until he found himself on the beach, a breeze blowing in from the sea, and on that beach he found a little clump of sandy grass that made a perfectly little bed for a weary fox, and so he sprawled there. his back on the grass and his tummy and four little paws in the air, and snoozed.

More after the break.

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Later that same day

When the fox awoke, the sun was high in the sky, the air was filled with birdsong, and life was sweet, simpl,e and easy.

He rolled over onto his feet, stood up, shook out his fur to maximize the amount of fur exposed to the wonderful, life-giving sunshine. then flopped back down, tail wagging merrily, to take in more of this beautiful new world.

“I’m safe. ” he thought to himself, the words sounding foreign and hollow in his head. In fact the thought itself resisting being thought, as if the pathways of the mind needed to think it has rusted shut over the years.

And yet, he knew it to be true. The very nature of this new world told him so in every little detail, and beneath it all, supporting it, was a mighty current of love and affection and approval and reassurance that all were free to partake of without cost or obligation and in whatever quantity was needed.

“Is this what faith is like?” thought the highly intellectual fox lazily. “Is that current…. God? No wonder people of faith have always looked at me like I am crazy for nor believing as they do. This is amazing. Am I…. in Heaven?”

But such heavy thoughts could not stay in his mind for very long when the whole world felt like it was singing a happy song just for him.

Under those conditions, it was no wonder that the fox, who had wandered for decades through that Midnight Tundra, fell asleep once more.

But as he dozed off, he decided to himself that, for once, he didn’t care what came next. Maybe this was all a dream and he’d wake up back on the Tundra this time. Maybe this “perfect” world had unimaginably horrendous predators who would be after him any minute now and he’d be back on the run yet again. Maybe he was wrong to trust this world like he did. Maybe he was going to get hurt.

But all we ever truly have is the moment we are in. And this moment right now, with the sun and the sea and the shore and his little nest in the grass, was absolutely perfect.

All the future moments could take care of themselves.

For once in his life, he would fully enjoy the now.

With these happy thoughts drifting through his mind like clouds in the sky, the fox once more fell asleep.

Well that felt productive. Expressed a very hopeful and happy vision of my future while also writing a little fiction to do it.

It is, admittedly,. dramatically a tad threadbare and fairly low on plot,. but it did what I wanted it to do nevertheless. At this point in my life, nearly all my writing is done with therapeutic intent, and on those terms, it went quite well.

Who knows, I might write more about the adventures of our little foxy friend.

By now, you all know what his name is, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.