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.

---

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,.

---

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

---

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.