I finally beat that damned douchey wizard I was talking about yesterday.

Beat him on approximately my fifth or sixth try. And I would love to say that my strategic brilliance eventually won the day, but the truth is that the bright and shiny paladin NPC whose welfare was the whole point of this question (Dickweed the Pathetic wanted to ENSLAVE her) got some really good rolls and that turned the tide.

Whatever. The fucker’s dead, as are his wormy apprentice, his magic robot, and, sadly, his halfling slave. I finished him off with a massive fire attack, which was satisfying.

Told him I had more power in my little finger than he had in his whole tower.

SORCERERS RULE, WIZARDS DROOL.

In the final cutscene, the paladin delivers an awesome speech of sheer self righteous fury, then lifted Fuckface the Buttmuncher over her head then smashed him onto her knee in a move known in wrestling circles as “the Backbreaker”.

Which was very badass and awesome, though a little too brutal for my tastes.

But then, interestingly, she said that instead of feeling victorious, she felt sad in a way that she did not understand.

My theory is that she feels bad because in that final moment, she didn’t vanquish a powerful enemy, she murdered a pasty nerd in a robe who was already lying on the ground moaning in agony and halfways dead.

He was done. Defeated. The point was made. My firebombing of him had done him in.

So I don’t feel good about what she did either, as badass as it was.

Oh well,. Modern games always have these moral grey areas and difficult choice in them. It’s how they make the same old tropes seem deep and relevant.

My generation had grimdark to do that. It was superhero noir, as expressed by the ur-God of grimdark, Frank Miller.

Now they have all the products of Robert Kirkman and George R. R. Miller to be their inspiration for the gritty and dark fundamentals of human storytelling.

Things like suffering, betrayal, personal politics, lust, revenge, tragedy, the cruelties of fate in an uncaring world, the daily struggle against despair, and all the little human moments that make life worth living.

And that become all the more golden and precious when seen against a backdrop of misery and darkness and despair.

Wow, you never really know when I’m gonna get real deep, do you?

I sure don’t. I just write whatever seems to come next. I don’t slow down to carefully consider every single word – if I did, I would never get anything written. I would be too paralyzed by indecision and self-doubt.

Hence the complete lack of format for this little blog o’mine. A format, subject, focus, or goal would defeat the purpose of this thing, which is to be a way for me to get whatever is in my head out onto the page so I can be rid of it and free up some mental space.

And I don’t know what the hell is going to be there waiting for me to express it when I sit down to write.

I just know that whatever it is, that’s what I have to write. Writing anything else would be sheer torture as what I really wanted and needed to write kept trying to pull me away.

I guess, then, that from that point of view, this blog is about as self-indulgent as it gets.

So thank you from the very bottom of my heart for reading this dang ol thing.

Because while I love my audience, the truth is, I don’t write it for you.

I write it for me.

Thanks for coming along for the ride anyhow.

More after the break.

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Not so good

That’s how I have felt since my latest nap.

I got up around 8:30 pm. Got out of bed in the usual way and sat my king sized butt down in the computer chair. Started up Baldur’s Gate 3 like normal.

And at first I was too sleepy to notice anything being awry. But as I woke up more I noticed that I felt kind sick and sort of wrong.

The usual gang of symptoms had shown up. Mild headache, check. Touch of nausea. yup. A little dizzy, uh huh. Feeling a tad lost at sea, yup.

But something else, something far more worrying, was there too.

My heart was pounding uncomfortably hard.

No actual pain, but I could feel it both in my chest and as a throbbing in my temples. Ka thump, ka thump, ka thump.

That worried me. I pay a lot of attention to what my heart does. Ever since I got my stents put in a few years back,. I have been quite justifiably paranoid about the prospect of having a heart attack or a stroke, so anything along those lines bears watching.

While also not letting myself panic over it because that would just make things worse.

Being me can be so complicated.

Thing have calmed down now, but my chest still feels funny. Kind of numb and cold around where I felt my heart pounding.

And to think Doctor Handsome thought I should start exercising.

Not unless there’s a goddamned cardiologist present.

And that’s not all.

POOP ADJACENT NEWS WARNING.

I have some kind of rash or something in my perianal region, otherwise known as the area directly around my anus.

I can’t see it, of course, but I can feel it, and I think it is getting worse. And I remember when I had something real, real nasty happening back there many years ago and had to bare myself quite intimately to the wound care nurses until it healed.

I don’t want to go through that again.

Oh, and I have some nasty spots on my legs again too. Joy.

All this means I need to get to see Doctor Chao pretty soon.

And that is assuming things don’t get worse. If they do, then I will have to go (sigh) back to the ER for the third goddamned weekend in a row.

For now, I am going to do my best to take it slow and easy, especially when getting up.

I hope I don’t have to go back to the goddamned hospital, or “Urgent” Care.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

… me masturbating and trying to get off, of course. What else?

Yup, it’s going to be one of THOSE posts.

I didn’t make it, as usual. And I used to blame that all on the side effects of my two antidepressants, Wellbutrin and Paxil (or Welly and Pax, as nobody calls them.)

But now I know what the real problem is and it’s porn.

NOT THE PORN! Say it ain’t so, Fru!

It’s so, kid.

But let me explain.

When I am jacking off to pornography, I am always looking for more stimulation. Nothing is ever good enough because part of me is always holding out for something even MORE stimulating, and that leads me to be, unconsciously, fighting my own orgasm,.

No wonder I can’t cum! My poor balls are so blue.

So I just wasted an hour of my limited time on Earth flogging away at my private little porkchop while trying to Google (or elsewhere) search up the mythological perfect piece of pornography to jack off to.

And that’s like chasing the horizon. You can never get there.

The first step of the solution, then, is to slow the fuck down. If I find a picture or video stimulating, linger there. Soak it in. Get all the stimulation from it I can. Be slow, even reluctant, to move on to the next whatever.

The real solution, however, is the more drastic one : give up the porn entirely. Rely instead on my sweet little imagination. That way, I don’t have to go looking for the next most stimulating thing.

I can just dream it up myself!

I mean, why look for things to spark my imagination when it can spark itself?

That’s what life was like before the Internet, after all. Back then, I had no access to porn (of my liking) at all, so my imagination was all I had.

And that actually worked just fine. Trust me on that.

And it resulted in a different kind of self-exploration. I had to plumb my depths (and depth my plums) in order to figure out what appealed to me.

When I think of how simple, even primitive, my fantasies were back then, I can’t help but find it downright adorable.

It’s like the growl of a puppy. Only with penises.

It is going to be a hard habit to break, though. The infinite well of erotic stimulation that is the Internet is so enticing, and there is much joy to be had exploring the depths of my own perversions via this happy medium.

Turns out they are pretty deep.

But when it comes to blasting off, porn leads me entirely in the wrong direction, and like many a reforming decadent before me, I am going to have to quit cold turkey for a while (also porn) before I can come back and maybe develop a healthier relationship with it..

I might use porn as, essentially, foreplay, but then I have to close the tab(s), close my eyes, and dream of what things may cum.

More after the break.

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OK, so I lied

I lied. There’s more poop news.

The good news is that everything has firmed up again. That orifice is once more passing solids and gases, not liquids.

Good lord, am I in a gross mood today. Blame it on having to take not one but TWO stool samples on consecutive days.

That’s bound to throw off my already none too steady sense of decency and decorum and boundaries and the rest of that boring crapola.

Get your gets the school supply they really want this year : this box of Crapola Crayons. 64 crayons in every box, every one of them Burnt Umber.

Anyhow, the long brown nightmare is over. In fact, things have kind of gone too far in the other direction.

What I am passing now is very, very firm. And dense. And weighty. And kind of spiky on the outside. And therefore not all that easy to pass.

The spikes are a tad ouchy and the turds are enormous agglutinized things that take a lot of effort and strain to pass.

I am not saying I miss the diarrhea. I am just saying that it was a lot less work.

Hopefully, this is a temporary phase. I imagine that what is happening now is that I am dealing with all the solid waste that my body could not handle and could not pass when all my gut flora were dead.

And that is potentially nine days of um…. backlog.

So to speak.

The spikes, I assume, are little bits of popcorn shell sticking out from the main mass.

As such, I assume they too will pass.

Again, so to speak.

Oh right, it’s Thursday

Had therapy today.

Which came as a surprise to me, as with all the kerfuffle about my supposed neurologist appointment today, I had totally forgotten that it was Therapy Thursday.

No harm done. I was just playing Baldur’s Gate 3 when the phone rang, and the nice thing about a turn based game is that you can walk away from it any time you like because you know nothing will happen till you take your next turn.

Right now I am tussling with a tough fight against the douchiest of wizards (and they start off pretty douchey) and his gang of elemental-warriors called Myrmidons.

I’ve lost to him twice because he has a lot of nasty tricks up his sleeve.

Then again, so do I.

And it pleases me to no end that, cocky sorcerer that I am, I get to tell him, “I have more power in my little finger than you have in this entire tower” before we fight.

It will be even better if I then kick his ass, of course. And I will. It’s only a matter of time and persistence as I try various stratagems.

Which are, overall, my favorite kind of gem.

Next time, I think I will ignore the Myrmidons and concentrate on pasting said wizard to the wall with a barrage of attacks that will hopefully kill him before he can get his defenses up and then I can mop up his cronies.

Wish me luck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I guess my problem is that I have never known what to do with my gifts.

I have so much…. intelligence, talent, charisma, charm, a roly-poly dad bod.

But it all just sits there, unused, in mint condition, because I lack the motive force within myself to pick a path and stick with it until the end.

I am stranded at an infinite crossroads and don’t know which way to turn.

So I end up going nowhere. And I am 50. And in poor health.

I can’t seem to shake the need to know which way is safe to go. I am terribly afraid of making the wrong choice and getting hurt.

So instead I get hurt by doing nothing. I have suffered greatly, both physically and especially psychologically, from my state of stasis.

All this depression, anxiety, angst, and other forms of mental misery stem directly from and are powered by my inability to act.

And I am unable to act because of those selfsame mental health issues. It is, sadly, a very stable self-sustaining cycle, and I suppose I am too scared of the world to tru;ly want to exit it.

After all, it’s keeping me “safe”. Ha ha ha.

And that all leads back to that terrible Wound of mine. Until that thing is healed, I will remain weak and diffident and diffuse because my soul is poisoned by it right down to its very roots.

And I can tell myself that I need to accept that life involves pain, and fear, and uncertainty, and risk, and so on. And that is undoubtedly true.

True, but not helpful.

Telling myself I “need” to do something only increases the pressure associated with said thing and that, in turn, makes me avoid said thing with a vengeance.

The only way forward for me is to frame it as something I want. Like fun.

That’s why I am considering fully embracing my trickster nature and treating life like it’s a game. Refusing to take anything seriously and laughing my way through life.

I don’t know if I am capable of embracing that point of view entirely. I am, despite my wit, an inherently serious guy and always have been. The jester’s POV may not really be an option for me.

But I could move in that direction. Try to learn to take life less seriously. Loosen up. Learn to forgive myself for my imperfections and start having fun instead.

Because this Nordic point of view, where everything must be sacrificed in the name of having enough food and supplies to survive a winter than never comes, has left me in a deep dark shadow that is crushing the life out of me.

I need to be a lot more Mediterranean. Learn to see each day as another chance to celebrate being alive and try my best to live life like it’s a non stop party.

Or well, one that last a while, any how.

A non stop party sounds exhausting.

But first, I have to loosen the deep hypnotic grip my Wound has on me.

Almost like I am afraid to look away. So a big part of me remains fixated, staring at it. keeping it contained, numbing it out.

And I want that part of me back, god damn it.

More after the break.

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Losing my religion

But Fru, you’ve never had a religion! What gives?

It’s true that I was never indoctrinated into any kind of religion. My mother, bless her probably nonexistent soul, is the kind of atheist the Catholic nuns used to produce in large numbers (until Vatican 2) and so religion has never played a role in my life.

But I did have a doctrine of sorts inculcated in me from a very early age, and that doctrine was the holy word of 70’s health nut…. ism.

My mother raised me to believe that natural is always better, that things made aty home from scratch are always better, that manufactured foods are nasty and bad for you, and that I should always strive to eat whole foods.

Yup. That’s where the name of the snooty grocery chain came from. They started off as a bunch of dirty hippies preaching nutrition heresy, and now the founder and owner is a big sellout libertarian like all rich people.

Anyhow, my mother never brought junk food into the house herself. All our groceries were good, wholesome products.

At first, she wouldn’t even used canned or frozen vegetables. Imagine.

But then she went back to work, and slowly her determination to feed us only the good stuff broke down in the face of her lack of time and energy.

At the same time, I began eating at other people’s homes, and a lot of what I had been taught got put to the test.

Kids’ cereals? Genuinely disgusting. Especially Froot Loops.
Canned vegetables? Not nearly as good as fresh.
Skim milk from powder? A crime against nature.

Cake from a cake mix? OMG so goddamned good.

Even, heresy of heresies, better than anything my mother ever made.

Her hippie desserts, good as they were, could not compete.

That was the first blow to my indoctrination. That didn’t quite finish off my belief that from scratch is always better…. my first taste of a store bought sheet cake did that.

Like the cake mix cake only even better.

Another blow came the first time I tried Cheez Whiz. I already knew how horribly fake and nasty it was. How it was basically cheese flavoured spreadable plastic – petroleum jelly with a facelift.

But then, one day, I was nuking myself a hot dog, and on a whim, tried some Cheez Whiz on it in order to make it a cheese dog, and my MIND WAS BLOWN.

I loved it SO MUCH. It was like, where have you been all my life? Love at first bite.

And I have loved over the top artificial “cheez” flavour ever since.

But I still retain a lot of the old prejudices. I think Twinkies are an abomination, and Wonder Bread to me means “wonder how they can get away with calling this bread”.

I still prefer the natural things from the produce isle. Fresh fruit and veggies rock my world, and I will always choose fresh over anything else.

I look down my nose at :”recipes” that start with a cake mix, and I quietly despair when my friends order their meals at Denny’s with the veggies overtly omitted.

But I try to keep it to myself.

Because along with the rest, I was also raised to be polite and respectful of others.

And that lesson will never fade away.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, Julian was kind enough to drop my stool ^[1] sample off at LifeLabs.

Not long after, I get a call from the folks at LifeLabs telling me that they do not process that kind of stool sample kit any more, and that I need to come back and pick up the new kit that they DO process.

And I am thinking, what the fuck? I got that kit from the hospital yesterday. How can it be obsolete? Where did that nurse who handed it to me even find the damned thing?

Because I can’t be the first person to encounter this problem if it’s the hospital’s fault. If they have a whole stack of these ancient poop kits somewhere, and have been blithely handing them out for any length of time, then surely someone would have noticed that none of the kits they handed out ever produced a report. Right?

At least I hope someone would have noticed.

But what does that leave me with? The theory that this one nurse somehow hadn’t gotten the memo on the new kit and also had one of the old kits stashed away?

It is a vexing and perplexing mystery.

For that matter, why doesn’t the hospital lab do that kind of thing? What, they can processing my blood, urine, sputum, and every other bodily fluid but they draw the line at literally putting up with people’s crap?

Hmmm. Actually, the pragmatic portion of my brain has pointed out that they can’t have people taking up space in the ER waiting till they need to poop. And that hospital labs are not set up to take in samples from random patients.

I have to admit, my brain is right on that score.

But that still doesn’t explain how I ended up with an expired poop kit.

Anyhow, now I have to go through the whole stool sampling routine all over again, only this time all I have to do is take a swab.

Presumably directly from the material in question when it’s in its usual receptacle.

I’m not going to be any more explicit than that. Figure it out.

So at least this time it won’t be nearly as gross as the first time. That other time, a special receptacle was involved, and a tiny spoon, and…. yeah.

But it still annoys me that I have to deal with my feces again. There is a reason our entire toilet system is designed to minimize the time we have to spend dealing with that end of things (so to speak). Poop is nasty stuff!

But oh well. I have that certain feeling of uncomfortable fullness so I guess I had better read the instructions then go get this shit (ha) done.

Oh well, at least my poops are firming up. I hope to be back to normal poopage soon!

More after the break.

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The news from here

No clear idea of what to write about. I seem to be in one of my lean periods where I don’t get ideas along those lines for a little while.

Ergo, I am forced to fall back on my default strategy of babbling about whatever and seeing what crops up.

First off, what I hope to be the last poop update for a while : things are back to normal. Had a perfectly ordinary bowel movement earlier. Huzzah.

And I will be through with the damned antibiotic, Cephalexin, after the dose accompanying tomorrow’s lunch.

And good goddamned riddance. The digestive side effects, while not serious, were not good either. Diarrhea, like I have said before, can come with some very nasty side effects as your body struggles to maintain homeostasis while losing fluids and electrolytes and trace minerals in a very weird way.

And well, it made me poop the bed. Twice. I take that kind of thing personally.

That said, if I get prescribed it again, I will of course take it. I am not such a fool as to gainsay a doctor when it comes to what antibiotic works against a particular bug.

Whether or not I need a water pill is another thing entirely. I was prescribed some furosemide as well, supposedly to help with the feeling of heaviness in my lungs.

For those who do not not know, “water pill” is a cute euphemism for “diuretic”, which is a drug that helps ride your body of excess fluids by making you pee a lot.

So it makes you “make water”, as they used to call urination back in the days of Swift. Hence water pill.

Like I said…. cute.

But I already pee a lot, and honestly the pill is only tangentially indicated for reducing fluid in the lungs, so to hell with it.

I think the doctor only prescribed it to shut me up anyhow.

And who knows, maybe some day I will be feeling extremely bloated and waterlogged and I will give the stuff a try.

Then again, give that the potential side effects include hearing loss and photosensitivity, um maybe not.

I mean, this is Lasix we are talking about. That shit is dangerous. That’s not something you just toss at someone casually like it’s fucking aspirin.

Honestly, this lowers my opinion of Doctor Handsome a little.

I really should not read the list of side effects of any medication I am taking. It always freaks me out and threatens to awaken my long dormant hypochondria.

Last bit of poop news : The new stool sample kit is WAY more complicated to use than the old one.

And get this : it expects me to put a layer of Saran Wrap over my toilet, between the lid and the inner rim, and poop onto THAT.

Ummmmmm…. no. I still have the oddly hat-shaped but eminently more practical cardboard receptacle that came with the obsolete kit, and I will use that.

And the new kit also demands that I get the sample to them the same day that it is obtained, so I have to wait till tomorrow to retrieve it.

They even want me to put the time of collection plus my name and health care number on the specimen jar AND the paperwork myself.

Clearly, this system is based on what is most convenient FOR THEM.

And all to investigate the off chance that I have c. difficile.

Well if I had known how “difficile” the procedure would be, I might have told the doctor to skip it.

That’s the news from here. This is your faithful correspondent, signing off.

I will talk with you nice people again tomorrow.

Went to the ER at 9 am (ish) this morning.

And wow, what a difference from the previous ER trip. I am so glad I decided to wait a day and go on a Monday morning and not a Sunday afternoon.

Because the ER was so much more peaceful and calm and nice than when I went a week ago last Friday.

This time there were a total of three, count’em, THREE whole people in the waiting room besides me.

Ergo, it did not take long for me to get registered^[1], go through triage, and end up in a bed in the ER itself. I was in the waiting room for an hour, tops.

Once I am in a bed, surrounded by privacy curtains, and relaxed, I am way way more patient a patient. And I had my tablet with me, so keeping myself amused was easy.

Hell, I could have taken a nap if I felt like it. In fact, I was halfways asleep when the doctor came to see me.

Turned out to be the same handsome young doctor I had seen before. Dunno his name but he is pretty awesome.

He asked me pertinent questions. Together we figured out that it was mostly likely just a side effect of the antibiotics and not something more serious or dire.

Which is what I figured would happen. I would not have even been there had I not been told specifically to return to the ER if I had bowel control problems.

I also let the doctor check me for “tone”. I had told him about my feeling of extreme rectal dilation during the incidents, and so he wanted to make sure nothing was going wrong back there.

This involved him sticking a finger up my butt and telling me to clench hard on it.

Not nearly as sexy as it sounds. In fact, it hurt, which surprised me because I stick my fingers up there all the time.

For um, relief.

There should be a bottom fag’s equivalent to “blue balls”. Blue butt?

Anyhow, my “tone”: was fine. So he sent me home. Not empty-handed though… with a (erf) stool sample kit.

A sample I collected just now. I won’t go into details, but while it was pretty horrible, it was a lot easier than the previous time I collected a stool sample way back in the mid 90s during my IBS diagnosis phase.

So that’s done. But one last hurdle : the instructions that came with the kit said, at the very end, that this kit could not be used for the diagnosis of c. difficile

. Well that’s the very thing the doctor wanted to have my sample tested for!

That and a few other discrepancies caused me to look on the instruction sheet for how old the damned thing was.

Turns out it’s from freaking 2008! 15 years ago!

Yeah, I think a few things have changed since then.

More after the break.

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Talking about things

Oh right. This is where I would normally engage in self-therapy by diving deep into the dark and dirty depths of my depraved mind.

The problem is that I don’t feel like being introspective. I’m feeling lazy and self-indulgent and for some reason low key pissed off at the world.

So I’m not going to plumb my depths tonight. Instead, I will do more diary style reportage about things in my life.

The problem with THAT is that you lovely readers are pretty much up to date on my actual life. Taking that stool sample was the last noteworthy thing I did.

Turns out the specimen container had a tiny little spoon attached to the lid, which proved to be quite handy.

Other than that, all I have done is sleep and play Baldur’s Gate 3.

So let’s talk about that.

Now, while I was asleep…. just kidding.

In BG3, I have completed a major chapter of the game,. become part mind flayer in order to gain vast psychic powers, leveled up, and made my way through two “you’re not QUITE in the titular Baldur’s Gate yet” areas, thwarted a plot to kill refugee children with exploding teddy bears(!!!), and made it into the city proper at long last.

Right now, I am facing a goddamned horde of Githyanki warriors I stumbled on when trying to retrieve some artifacts for The Emperor, a good guy (so far) mind flayer who lives in a magic box which is apparently one of the most powerful artifacts ever.

But of course, not in ways that help me in combat.

Right before quitting the game to come eat n’ blog, I lost to those warriors. I took out a lot of their high value targets like commanders and paladins, but they overwhelmed me with sheer numbers of low level combatants.

Clearly, in this case, “starting with the head” was the wrong stratagem. I need to depopulate the lesser targets before I turn my sights on the big guns.

Luckily, my main character is a powerful wizard with many powerful area of effect spells that can lay waste to many minor enemies at the same time if I can only keep her alive long enough to cast them

So… that’s the plan, I guess. Protect my MC while she casts her devastating magic spells to take out the minor enemies before turning to the majors.

I’ll tell you how it goes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. It happened again.

I pooped the bed.

This time I was mostly asleep, resting up before hanging out with J&J and eatyching stuff on the PVR at 1 am. . And it all came sliding out of me.

And accompanying it both times was the feeling of extreme dilation. It really felt like I was wide open back there. Painfully so. Like someone had been conducting sick anal experiments on me.

Probably someone German.

And that would explain the incontinence, I suppose. If I am someone experiencing extreme rectal auto-dilation, that might well make stuff fall right out.

I dunno though. Doesn’t seem like a sufficient explanation to me.

What makes more sense would be the all too compelling theory that whatever is fucking with my muscles is also fucking up the muscles of the bowels and all points in between the bowels and the anus, and so sometimes, if the bowels get too full, the muscles just can’t hold back the tide any more, and the dam bursts.

If so, I am staring down the barrel of an adult diapers future, and I don’t think I can take that. I already have so little dignity and I already feel like I am a big gross overgrown baby with no legit claim to adulthood.

Being in diapers would just confirm both of those things.

And my God, would my social anxiety explode. I already feeling conspicuously disgusting in public. Imagine how much worse that would be if I was walking around with my Pampers full.

I would probably never want to leave the apartment again.

But I might have to leave anyway, and permanently, because if my arms also keep getting weaker, I won’t even be able to change myself.

And there is no way I would ask that of J&J. I would die of humiliation from the very thought of that.

So I would have to be moved to an assisted living facility. Some nice place where professionals are paid well to put up with my crap (ha) and where they, I assume, keep their judgmental thoughts to themselves.

And if they didn’t, I’d get their ass fired.

My baby don’t mess around.

Now I know I said that if it happened again that I would have to go to the hospital. And I had originally planned to do that at 1 pm today.

But 12:45 pm rolled around and I was just not feeling it. I was feeling fragile and ill and in that condition I was in no shape to handle the ER.

Yes, I get the irony of feeling too sick to go to the hospital.

But I will be heading there at 9 am or so tomorrow morning. And hopefully, the ER will be way lazy crazy at like 9:30 am on a Monday than it would have been at 1:30 pm on a Sunday and way way WAY less nuts than it was on that crazy Friday afternoon.

Technically, my instructions were that if I was to find myself either unable to pee or losing bowel control I was to return to the ER right away. but I needed time to mentally prepare myself for hours of ER boredom and stress.

I will, of course, have my tablet with me, but that only takes me so far.

God damn the ER sucks.

Oh well. Adulting I shall go!

More after the break.

My failure to launch

I’ve realized it was really a failure to be launched.

It wasn’t my fault that my parents took me and my brother out of school so they could take early retirement.

It was them being typical selfish fucking boomers.

I did nothing wrong. In fact, it was pretty amazing of me to fight my way out of the deep all-encompassing depression having my whole life and future yanked out from under me caused. I was seriously crazy there for a while.

Being malnourished, dehydrated, having a massive electrolyte imbalance, and having undiagnosed and untreated major depression all at the same time will do that to you.

And to think, when my mother asked me if this was related to being taken out of school, I, like a good little robot, said “No, of course not. ”

And to think she believed me.

But that was the scam, wasn’t it? Teach your kid to always say they are okay by completely refusing to even process any other answer, and then believe them.

If I told them what was really going on, I didn’t get hugs and support.

I got them acting like I had suddenly teleported in from outer space and sputtering and stammering as they were momentarily reminded that I was a real kid with real needs that they completely ignored most of the time.

And they continued to fumble until they found a reason to go right back to forgetting all about me again.

“But other than that, you’re OK, right?”

At no point was “treat this child just like you treat the other three” an option. They never made any room for me in the family.

There was them, my parents and three older siblings, and then there was me, all alone, with no friends, no family support, no help from my teachers or school administrators,. no other adults to turn to either, and daily torment from my peers.

It’s a wonder I didn’t turn into a serial killer. Or some other form of criminal.

So why did this little birdie fail to launch? Because the whole god damned Cape Canaveral, fuel tanks, rocket guides, and launchpad included, were yanked out from under me when I was halfway through countdown.

I barely survived the resulting crash landing.

But I did, and I managed to get back to a state of relative health. I wasn’t crazy, malnourished, and so on any more.

But I was nowhere near functional. And that is where I have been ever since. For around 25 years, my entire adult life, I have been stuck in limbo, living like a child on summer vacation and completely incapable of facing reality and finally getting my ass up and flying at last.

The truth is, I can’t face reality and take responsibility for myself and get myself going. I fall apart inside when I try. Too many parts of me are broken and/or too weak to take the strain, and until that changes, I am stuck here on the ground, living a pathetic life wallowing in my own squalor, helpless and useless, with a brain the size of a planet and a spirit so weak it wouldn’t even register on a PKE meter.

And I don’t know how to change that.

In fact, I am pretty sure that is not even the right question.

What I need is too deep and irrational and personal to be solved by any sort of rational query and answer process, no matter how broad and deep and robust it is.

To get what I need, I have to leave the light of the world and head deep into that big dark forest that is my subconscious mind.

There lies the me that’s always been, the me that is still the person I was before the rape and the bullying and the years of isolation.

That’s the me that needs to be listened to and understood so that it can finally stop holding so much in and start healing.

And that’s not something I can solve by writing.

Or… can I….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Every now and then, my computer forgets that its network card exists.

Which is irritating, because nothing short of a cold reboot will make it remember. I have to shut the computer all the way off, not just reset it, and only then will I have internet.

This just happened. Except this time it came with a twist : my computer would not turn back on for me.

Icy panic gripped me. Like it or not, this computer is kind of the center of my existence. Without it, all I would have is my tablet, and being confined to that thing sounds a lot like hell to me.

Luckily, I was able to fix the problem by turning the juice off to my computer at the power supply level, waiting ten seconds, then turning it back on again.

But that was definitely some stress I did not need.

Hopefully that was a one-off anomaly and I won’t ever have to get a scare like that again. Or if I do, the same solution works again.

Please don’t scare me like that again, Mister Computer.

I swear I will get you a RAM upgrade real soon now!

---

Meanwhile, in local news, I ordered some stuff from Amazon Canada today.

Not noteworthy in and of itself, granted. That is a once a week thing for me now. Part of my whole groceries gathering routine.

The amount of stuff I ordered was a little unusual, because I was trying to use up all the remaining money on my latest card.

So in addition to a trail mix from the lovely people at Yupik (Village Mix, with the lovely little sesame sticks) and something snacky for between meal noshing (some “nothing but cheese” crisps), I ordered some sugar free stuff from Russell Stover.

And that is where things got complicated because this apparently caused my order to, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, become unstuck in time.

Because the trail mix will arrive tomorrow (normal), but the cheesy crisps won’t get here until Tuesday (because of “two day” shipping, even though today is SATURDAY), the two hard candy orders won’t arrive until some time between Oct 7 and Oct 11, and the sugar free candy bar I ordered won’t arrive till HALLOWEEN!

That’s five fucking WEEKS from now!

I tried to cancel that last one but I couldn’t figure out how to do so without canceling the entire order and having to start over again.

And fuck THAT noise.

Oh well, I will probably appreciate having a sugar free caramel and chocolate bar on Halloween. In fact, I may order more stuff for then.

And I have learned my lesson. I can’t go assuming I can get whatever I want within one or two days all the time.

Apparently some things have to be shipped in from frickin’ Mars or some shit.

And what galls me is that a lot of these things are Russell Stover products, so apparently they don’t keep them all in the same place.

I find that to be maddeningly random.

Oh well. All I can do is try to forget about the long term stuff so I can treat the arrival of each one like a happy little surprise.

More after the break.

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Feel first, think later

Dare I speak such blasphemy?

Pfft. Have you met me? I dare speak things far worse than that.

As I was lugging my INACCURATE order^[1] back from the door, which was a mighty struggle, it occurred to me that what is important in life is to refuse to gatekeep your feelings in the name of so-called reason.

The temptation is to block all emotions that might lead in the “wrong” direction – that is, to making logical errors which you will then hate yourself for.

Generally speaking, from the jaundiced view of the ego, it is the dark, strong, passionate emotions like anger and lust that are “bad” because they might lead to the ultimate sin of acting on emotion.

But that’s all wrong. That’s getting everything backwards. There are no “bad” emotions. Emotions are reactions to what is going on both in our minds and in our world. They represent an important truth, even when they are unpleasant or painful.

And to do their job they must be felt. Any gatekeeping has to occur past that point.

We must gatekeep our actions, NOT our emotions.

When we strive to filter out the “bad” emotions so we can think more clearly and maintain a detached and logical state of mind, we only end up creating elaborate convolutions and complications of the mind that only serve to make clear thinking nearly impossible because of the inner bureaucracy it creates.

The priority has to be on feeling everything there is to feel first, without judgment or restraint, so that suppression is not needed.

That way, one can live cleanly, without creating an ever growing pile of undischarged emotion that poisons the whole mind with its stench.

The tricky part for those of us who have taken the false path of “reason” before emotion is to separate the emotion from the action it points to.

If someone does something that makes you want to punch them in the face, that anger does not become “bad” just because acting on it would be wrong.

Feel the anger but keep your hands in your pockets.

At first this will be very difficult, and you will want to go back to pushing the “bad” emotions out of your mind and pretending they don’t exist because it’s easier.

Go ahead and fall back on that when you need to. But always with the full and sincere intention of getting right back to feeling things once you have recovered.

Above all, do not fear intense emotions. Sure, it can be scary to face the really dark and nasty ones and what they make you want to do, but nevertheless, emotions themselves are not the enemy.

And you will never be mentally whole unless you stop segregating your emotions into “good” and “bad” and start just feeling it all, no matter what.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1][ Fuckers at Pizza Hut gave me REGULAR Pepsi instead of DIET, and REGULAR Pepsi is POISON to me. Grr. [[1]]

I’ve decided to try to figure out just how much insanity there is in my family.

My guess is the answer is “lots”.

Let’s start at the top. My late father had rage issues out the yingyang. In regular, everyday life, he was short tempered, impatient, and demanding.

But when he sat at the dinner table after a long day of work and a nap when he got home, his blood sugar crashed and he became a ranting, foaming at the mouth rage machine lashing out at either my sister Anne or my brother David and make all our lives miserable with his tyranny.

He was a disturbed, volatile man wound so tight you could use his butthole to crack walnuts and who was such an out of control mad dog that he drove away absolutely everyone in his life – twice – and died utterly alone

And that sure as fuck ain’t sane.

My mother suffered from depression through a large part of my childhood. She denies it,. but I was there. I know what I saw.

I know what I felt.

She learned to cope eventually. I suspect having my three older siblings get old enough not to require so much care had a lot to do with it.

It was too late for me, though. She’d left me behind long before that.

That’s not real sane either.

My sister Anne, the oldest, is pretty functional now. But I know that there were three years where she was unemployed, depressed, and living on welfare. And I know from reading between the lines that she still battles depression every day.

So yeah. She is not entirely well either.

My sister Catherine is ridiculously functional. She is a high level exec at Stats Can and clearly got all the ambition in the family.

The rest of us are varying shades of nerd.

But I know where all that success comes from. All through my childhood, Cath suffered from extreme anxiety fueled by a fear of failure and a related fear of authority and would have these total freakouts when the anxiety got to be way too much for her and she had to go into total panic and cry about she was sure she was going to fail some upcoming test and that meant she was a total failure and so on.

Poor thing. This is why I still worry for her.

Sure, she’s crazy successful but at what a cost.

Ergo, not totally sane either.

My brother Dave and I are a lot alike, but he has always been far far more functional than I. He had friends growing up. He’s way more normal than I will ever be.

But he has fallen into the pit of depression many times. Unlike me, though, he managed to crawl back out again and put some kind of life together.

In many ways, he’s the most functional of us all, overall.

And then there’s lil ol bugshit crazy me. I’m roughly as crazy as the rest of them combined and I am not even remotely functional.

Never have been. Never will be.

And that’s just in my immediate family!

More after the break.

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On being inconveniently intelligent

I have a long, long history of being inconveniently intelligent.

From my very first day of school, I was a pain in the ass for my teachers because I was so overwhelmingly bright.

Luckily, my first grade teacher. Mrs. Gallant, was mega awesome and took it in stride. She was exactly the kind of sweet, sunshine-y, benevolent maternal figure I responded well to because she reminded me so much of my mother before she went back to work.

But started with that bitter twisted bitch Mrs. McNally in grade 2, I was a problem for my teachers because I was so far ahead of the other students that there was really no way for them to keep up with me without stopping the whole class to teach me individually.

Or at least devising a whole new lesson plan just for me.

And then there was the undeniable fact that I was smarter than my teachers in an academic sense. I am sure that this often unnerved them.

We are all lucky that I was, for the most part, a placid and eager to please kid and therefore unlikely to directly challenge their authority.

Well, not on purpose, anyhow.

And I now know that I was a very spooky kid. Hearing a seemingly adult voice, with proper diction and grammar and an easily facility with abstractions, coming from a little fat kid must have seemed like some kind of fucked up ventriloquist’s act.

Obviously I wasn’t trying to creep anyone out, though looking back, I mean, what the hell, might have been fun.

Talk like a normal kid one minute, then make my eyes go glassy while I talked like I normally would talk. Freak people out.

Wouldn’t have made me any more popular but I might have been able to get the bullies to leave me alone if they thought I could haunt their dreams or curse their souls.

Probably be more trouble than it was worth but the thought comforts and amuses me.

And I was inconveniently intelligent outside of school as well. I probably kinda spooked my family members as well, though not as much as they were used to me.

They had been there from the beginning, after all.

And all that time, I was simply innocently being my own weird, unique, completely surprising and effortlessly original little self.

It’s not my fault that I got this triple bonus scoop of brainpower. And yet I have suffered and been misunderstood greatly for it.

This is not fair. I did nothing wrong. I did not deserve my cruel and lonely fate.

But I am not that mad at those who had no idea how to handle an inconveniently intelligent child like me.

There were no other kids like me in that school system. I was light years ahead of even the top achievers. Nobody could have trained the teachers to handle a kid like me.

There were no other kids like me…. anywhere, really.

I really was too smart for my own good.

Still am, really.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

WARNING : Very detailed poop talk will follow.

So there I was, lying on my back in bed last night, playing games on my tablet, when I felt something… move… in and near my butthole.

Uh oh, I thought, not unreasonably.

Steeling my nerves, I put my hand in the affected region and sure enough, some “stuff” had come out of me, which I quickly cleaned up with some Kleenex.

I lay back, naturally somewhat upset, and pondered a bit, then with a sickening lurch of the stomach, it suddenly occurred to me to check the area under where my butt had been to see if I had more “stuff” to clean up.

Ayup. There was a whole pile of it there. More Kleenex based kleen clean up was needed and it was needed STAT.

OK folks, here’s where things get clinically fecal.

You might be wondering why I keep calling it “stuff” and not shit. Patient readers know that I am not normally even remotely inclined towards euphemism.

Well I call it “stuff” because this was not feces as we know it.

It was very dark in color, for one. Not quite black (thank God) but a dark enough color that it would look black in poor lighting conditions.

It was also very dense, and (brace yourselves) gritty.

It was definitely poop-like. Poop-adjacent, even. But too different from your average human defecation to really consider it shit.

Whatever the hell it was, I sure as hell didn’t want it coming out of me involuntarily. And this time while I was wide awake, and that’s definitely an escalation.

And afterward I had this weirdly dilated feeling. Like my butthole was wide open and anything, including a decent sized chihuahua, could come sliding out of it.

I did not like that feeling. It made me very paranoid about this bout of incontinence becoming permanent. Maybe my O-ring had been jammed open for good.

Thankfully, that does not seem to be the case. Phew.

My best theory as to what exactly came out of me is that, like with other fecal incidents, it was the product of incomplete digestion.

That would track with the fact that, ever since I got started on the antibiotics in the hospital, I have not passed any solid stools.

It’s been nothing but Hershey squirts for almost a week.

Which is not a huge deal in and of itself. It’s something that I have to pay very close attention to as both an IBS sufferer and someone who knows how rapidly diarrhea can deplete your hydration and electrolytes, but still, not a big deal by itself.

When I mentioned it to Doc Costin yesterday, he said it was probably a product of the antibiotics killing all my gut flora, and I was like, duh, right.

The incontinence, however, is more worrisome. As patient readers know, I was told that I needed to come back to the hospital if I ever found myself unable to pee or losing control of my bowels.

Well I am peeing well enough, but…. this….. is not good.

I have amended the rule to “go back to the hospital if it happens more than once in a very great while”, largely because I don’t want to have to go to the ER and tell intake and triage that I pooped myself unless it is absolutely necessary.

And so far, so good. No repeat incidents. Hopefully it will stay that way and I won’t have to spend ANOTHER weekend in the god damned ER.;

More after the break.

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What I want

Challenge level : things I might actually be able to get.

Might as well start with the big one : I want a job writing for television. The very notion of something I write being turned into an actual TV show, with actors and cameras and lighting and everything, thrills me and fills me with wonder and awe.

Hell, just the idea of employment seems impossibly magical to me. The idea of having something productive to do with my day (beside write these golden words for you, dear reader) and actually getting paid to do it on a regular basis blows my mine.

I’ve spent a very long time thinking I was less than worthless.

Being able to assign any monetary value to my existence and my efforts would go a long way to repairing that.

And the thing is. this desire is doable. I know how to go about pursuing it. I could beat the rushes for TV writing job postings. I could enter every TV writing contest I can find. I could try to use my connection with the few teachers from VFS who liked me to “network” and make contacts within the biz.

I know how to go about it. But I lack the courage and motivation to do it. It takes a lot of both of those to just keep campaigning for oneself until you get what you want.

And I feel far too small and weak and frail to do it.

Which brings me to another thing I want : an agent.

Agents exist because a hell of a lot of us writers are shy and introverted and therefore not exactly well suited for the job of self-promotion.

Me, I can get into a mode where I can really sell myself for a given job or task, but that takes a lot out of me and I could not possibly sustain it for a long campaign.

But when looking for an agent, I really only have to sell myself to them. Then they can sell me (so to speak) to interested parties.

Unfortunately, there’s only like thirty agents in all of Canada, so competition for representation is fierce.

However, I have something the competition does not : I am almost preternaturally talented. I write words good, and I can do it both fast and well.

So I at least stand a chance of landing an agent. From what I have read, it seems they are mostly looking for book queries, and I have written a bunch of books but none of them are exactly the sort of thing that gets read aloud on the CBC.

So maybe I should write The Great Prince Edward Island Novel, about fishing and farming and life on the beach. About the constant humiliation of tarting your culture up to appeal to tourists, and the grinding humiliation of long term unemployment and what it does to the souls of young men, and what it’s like to grow up someplace so sad and slow and quiet in a province that is barely even a joke to the rest of the country.

Hmmm. I actually have quite a lot to say on the subject of my homeland.

Maybe I really should write this damned thing.

I’ll have to have a good think about it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got back from getting my food in the kitchen, and boy are my arms tired.

And my legs. And my heart. And pretty much every other part of me.

Dunno how much longer I will be able to make the trip, to be honest. It takes a hell of a lot out of me these days. I was starting to involuntarily droop not even halfway through making my PB&J this time. I was honestly worried I would simply drop before I got back to Mister Computer here.

So it is looking like this might be my last rodeo. Next time my mystery illness comes for me, it’s going to leave me bedridden and helpless. barely even able to lift my arms far enough to take a drink of water.

And the time after that, I won’t even be able to breathe on my own any more. Those muscles will be too weak to do their job too, and my final nightmare will have come true : I will be stuck lying helpless in a hospital bed, full of tubes, unable to move, and going completely insane with claustrophobia et al on the inside.

And all because my GP, Doctor Kelvin Chao, is too lazy and cowardly to do his job right. Like the folks at RGH, he checked for some things, it was none of those things, and so he just… gave up.

But you still haven’t solved the case, Mister Holmes. We still don’t know who the killer is. All you have done is eliminate several suspects.

The killer is still at large and acting with impunity. He’s killed many times before and he is bound to kill again any day now. Only you can stop him.

But, ya know, you do you.

I don’t want to end up in my own little hospital room from Hell. I want to get better, god damn it. I want to walk again. I want to be independent again.

I want to continue to be able to shit and piss BY MYSELF.

So I am going to have to get my poop in a group and make an appointment with Doctor Caswell to get a second opinion. I will also consult heavily with that neurologist Doctor Chao finally begrudgingly referred me to when I see him on the 28th.

Hopefully between those two doctors, they can summon up enough competence to figure out what the hell is wrong with me and maybe even put a stop to it.

If not, well, if I end up in hospital bed hell, don’t expect me to live much longer. Even if they manage to keep me from committing suicide (and remember, I am very clever) the stress of freaking out 24/7 will kill me before too long.

But my fate is not yet writ in stone. There is time yet to change my trajectory and avoid a terrible and inhumane and unjust fate.

I don’t deserve this shit. I’m a sweet guy. I do the right thing to the best of my ability every single chance I get. I am gentle, and compassionate, and kind.

And pretty darn cute, too.

So please, Whoever, don’t let me die before I have even lived. Give me the strength I need to save myself from myself. Cut through the chilling clinging fog in my mind and melt the snow off my heart so that I might live and feel again.

Do that…. and I might even find religion.

More after the break.

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Afraid to want

Had therapy today, Wednesday, due to my therapist’s post-vacation scheduling issues.

And a key thing that came up is my being afraid to want things. How at some point, I made the terrible decision to deal with my feelings of powerlessness by pulling my head even further into my shell by training myself not to want thing I “can’t have anyway”.

Wow, was that the wrong road to take. Thanks a lot, BUDDHA.

Cutting off all my desires at the root was far too drastic a measure. Like, on a curing a hangnail via amputation level.

The cure was much worse than the disease.

Because those potentially unfulfillable desires are the root springs of all motivation. Wanting something you don’t have, whether it’s a hot dog or the respect of your peers, is the main thing that gets people going to do anything at all.

Ergo, it’s no wonder that I find I lack motivation.

I killed it.

And I kill it again., every day, out of habit. Shoot on sight, no questions asked. When motivation dares to show its ugly head, my whole defense system kicks in and hits it with a huge blast of liquid Freon to freeze it to death right on the spot.

As a result of all these years of suppression and denial, I find myself acutely afraid to actually desire things. I can’t yet shake the part of me that worries about what is safe to want, as opposed to simply wanting things first and going from there.

As a result, I find myself quite alienated from my own desires. I can manage a dream or two, but only about things with no real obvious path for me to achieve them.

Like, I can dream about writing for TV, because while there are known paths to get there (writing contests, open calls for submissions, etc.), realistically, that is far, far too many steps and too much uncertainty and my depressed brain could never handle it.

Ergo, it is “safe” to want that. Ditto with things like a job, a boyfriend, and my own place. None of these can lead to immediate action, so they are “safe”.

As soon as actual action taking enters the picture, I panic, and the ice hoses descend.

That means I want to turn that shit off sometimes and make my psyche a safe place for desires to plant themselves and grow into full blow intentions or even plans.

And if they are lucky, they will even become actions.

And that scares me. I fear anything that makes me want to leave my musty little socket in the arsehole of the universe.

But I want to do it anyway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.