Not feeling too great at the moment.

Just woke up from a long afternoon nap. Bad sleep. Troubled and unsettled and left me feeling like bargain basement crap.

Took me twenty minutes just to get out of bed. Kept drifting in and out of sleep, spending most of the time in that no man’s land somewhere in between.

Call it… Shitty Limbo. A low budget bardo. The Motel 6 of interdimensional flophouses.

And when I did make it out of bed, everything ached. So I had to rest in front of Mister Computer here and try to gather enough wits together to form a bare majority and outvote the body’s motion for us to just go back to bed already.

Fuck that. Gotta blog. Gotta eat. Gotta masturbate. Probably. Eventually.

These are the things for which I live.

Had a weird and distressing thing happen last night. I was concluding my business on the toilet when this strange hot feeling flooded my face.

It really felt like my face suddenly filled with hot water. I can only assume that this is what a hot flash feels like.

Only this flash just keeps going. My face has yet to cool back down. It still feels like a rock hot from the sun, right after the sun goes down.

I’ve also had some unfun feelings in my chest. Nothing I would classify as chest pains but a good deal of chest discomfort akin to heartburn.

Which is what it probably is. I don’t think it’s a cardiac issue. For one thing, I just had an EKG last Friday and they didn’t find any problems.

But I have been having trouble catching my breath sometimes lately. And my endurance is very erratic. Sometimes I start panting the moment I stand up. Other times some other mode kicks in, and I can move around like normal.

I better get my buttocks to (sigh) Doctor Chao over this stuff if it persists.. Or maybe just make an appointment with my cardiologist Doctor Ebtia.

Either way, I would have to say that my health has taken a downturn lately.

Things have been unsettled at the nether end of things too. I have pooping a fair bit but none of it solid, I think because my body is used to getting regular doses of the delicious fiber-rich roughage known as “popcorn” and I hadn’t had any lately largely due to my being too ill for midnight snacking.

Well I am back on the snack train now, so hopefully, things will firm up.

Over in my “real world” of video games, I have reached a big bad boss fight in Baldur’s Gate 3. Unfortunately I had to go traipsing through a Mind Flayer base to get there, and if I though the nautilus from the opening of the game was gross, this place, sheesh.

But after way too much trudging over skinless flesh and muscle past various throbbing and pulsating organs and orifices and hearing way too much organic squishing, I got to the final (I hope) fight with the big baddy Ketheric Thorm.

And at first I was intimidated with hw tough the fight was, but then my magnificent mind started taking it apart and analyzing it, and now I know I can take him down.

Almost did it once but then had a bit of an oops with my Ice Storm spell.

Next time, Ketheric! NEXT TIME! *thumps table, scares MadCat*

More after the break.

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Let’s talk about sex, bay BEE!

And here is a link to what I consider “the good stuff”. 

In other words, gay furry porn comics.

I’ve been pondering my vastly underfed and malnourished sexual self lately. It has not had much expression in my life, and hence, not much development either.

Developmentally speaking, I’m a tween at best.

Mostly because of that whole “needing to involve others” part of sexual development. There is only so far I can go with the Internet and my right hand.

And quite frankly, it’s not very far.

Sure, I can get off, at least occasionally. I can have a good time. I can get my favorite form of aerobic exercise.

Hey, anything that gets your heart and breathing rate up for more than five minutes counts as cardio, right?

Try coming up with a FitBit that counts THAT.

“Just a minute, I haven’t gotten all my faps in yet. ”

Obviously the one for women would be called the ClitBit.

Meanwhile, back at the plot…

I think about my vastly underdeveloped sexuality because there has to be consequences to having all that sexual potential dammed up inside me.

Emotions don’t go away when we suppressed or ignore them, after all. They just go underground and fuck things up as they try to get themselves expressed.

And when you are talking about something as powerful as human sexuality, leaving something so primally powerful untapped cannot be good.

Not to mention all the other forms of human growth drives that my depression has kept from being expressed, like ambition, the need for a romantic partner, the desire to build a home and make it my own, the drive to prove myself to the world, and so on.

All of this potential lies within me, ready to blossom and unfold. It’s been buried deep under the permafrost of my depression for a very long time but it’s still there, and every day I make a little more of that frost a lot less perma by melting it away.

Kinda like my own global warming. But in this case it’s welcome, because it’ coming along to end a long and terrible ice age.

And I feel like a sexual awakening in me could go a long way towards thawing me out. But I keep coming up against the “other people problem”, or the OPP.

How can I explore my sexuality when I lead such a cloistered existence? How can I invite other people into my bed when this room is such a pigsty? How can I considered getting naked with a stranger when I have such crippling social anxiety?

I can’t exactly go cruising at the club when I can’t even walk.

Fine. I have barriers. Of that there’s no doubt.

But barriers can be overcome with time. This incredible mind of mine can turn what looks like an insurmountable problem into a nonissue if I can just get out of its way and let it do its work.

I don’t have to be scared of my big bad brain.

I can put it to work on improving my life, and make it a force for good.

It’s only a monster if I make it one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am feeling pretty healthy today.

The energy drain feeling has dropped in intensity to the point where it is easy to ignore given my natural wellspring of enthusiasm.

My muscles are still pretty weak. That’s not gonna change, I fear. I have that appointment with the neurologist in ten days. Hopefully they will have some kind of insight into my condition.

Maybe they will even be able to help reverse it.

Probably not, but one can hope.

At the very least I need somebody to stop it. Like I have said, it has spread to my arms and that is freaking me the fuck out.

Because I use my arms all the time, man. In fact, I’m using them right now! Whoa.

And my arms feel pretty heavy these days. Even holding up my tablet tires them out alarmingly fast. Thank God that typing these words is still more or less the same, though I can feel the extra strain in my forearms even doing that.

Please, God, do not take my arms.

I need them to masturbate!

I have some antibiotics to help kick whatever is going on in my lungs as well as my leg. Good old Cephalexin. We meet again, my old friend.

It’s been a while. Perhaps too long. Perhaps not nearly long enough.

I will, of course, take every damn pill, with meals, as instructed. Blah blah, my usual anecdote about how back in my UPEI days, I stopped taking the antibiotics when I felt better and got so sick that I don’t even remember my hospital stay.

Thank God I had my bother and my gang of friends to get me there. I was completely out of my mind by that point. I must have had a really high fever.

Also thank God that we survive the dumb shit we do as young people.

After all, we have to live long enough to learn not to do it!

I will, ergo, never EVER stop taking my antibiotics early again unless I am experiencing life threatening side effects. I know damned well I dodged a bullet Matrix-style back then and I am prudent enough to know you don’t count on that happening again.

It’s a nice sunny day out, something I appreciate all the more after four or five days of actual fall weather with the grey skies and the rain and the reminder that there is going to be six months of that shit coming soon so we better enjoy Indian summer while we can before the weather turns…. Vancouver-y.

As always, I wish I could get out there and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine in person. And I feel a real sense of loss knowing that it will all go away soon and I never got to have any outdoor fun in it at all.

And I know that’s not a helpful way to see things. But it’s how I really feel, and lately I have been heavily prioritizing feeling things over trying to control and suppress them.

Feel first. Then figure out what to do about it.

More after the break.

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A small indulgence

Ordered me some McD’s tonight, even though it’s a Monday and hence not one of the three nights a week where I order in.

What the hell. I can afford it and after four long days of illness and hospitals and worry and boredom and stress, I really need a treat to balance the reward system in my brain and get me back on an even keel.

Well, as even as my keel ever is, anyhow. To be honest, I’ve been listing to the port for so long the cook’s gone walleyed.

Not sure if that makes sense, but it sounds right.

That suicide video

I’m too lazy to dig it out and link it here again, but when I posted it last week, I threadjacked myself and completely forgot why I posted it in the first place.

It was for the part where, on the subject of passive suicidal ideation, he talked about not caring what happens to you.

And as patient readers know, that was me for a long time. A lot of the other tropes of PSI were there in my head too, like wanting to get hit by a car or have some other disaster take me out of the picture, but those were brief flashes that my ever ready internal censor quickly and brutally suppressed.

It’s occurred to me that the same system in my head that has been keeping me down has also been keeping me alive.

I really do have to get deeper into the darkness in order to find my way to the light. I have to stop playing it safe and risk it all, and live with that risk.

Anyhow, back to suicide.

I was entirely apathetic to my own fate for many years. I was too damned numb and depressed to even give a shit whether I lived or died.

The best I can say is that I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t care if I did.

Which is why the PSI video was so important to me because back then, I was not, technically, suicidal. I had no lasting desire to kill myself, just occasional impulses easily suppressed, and I have never made plans to kill myself.

But I was not a healthy man. And the video gave me a phrase and a context for how I felt back then. And that helps me process that vast segment of my past.

Today, I am better. I don’t want to die. Death scares me. I don’t want to stop existing. I want to stick around and have fun.

There is so much of life I need to see and experience and do. And I am determined to get there no matter how much dead tissue and frozen flesh I have to drill through in order to do it.

I have a very sharp drill, and it is powered by my rage.

Nothing can stop us now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had to go to the hospital one last time today.

Was a lazy shit and didn’t go till 4:30 pm, so here I am with only around 50 mins to do 500 words of blogging before we leave for Denny’s at 7:15 pm.

Hey kids, can YOU figure it what time it is?

Nothing eventful about today’s journey. Went to the ER, and got the pink (purple to me) form, went straight into the ER, put the form in the tray, and sat down on one of the lovely comfy chairs in the waiting/IV area.

I need a chair like that. Not sure how that would work vis a vis using the computer, but I would be willing to do a LOT of rearranging of things in order to get to do my computering in a really comfy chair.

Hell, I’ll hang shit from the ceiling if that’s what it takes.

IV went smoothly. Having been through the IV antibiotics program at the hospital at least three times, I am super comfortable with the routine.

The nurse shows up, takes your vitals (temp for sure, maybe blood ox and pressure too), cleans the area around the IV needle site (or, as I like to call it, my circulatory port), hangs the IV bag, programs the IV pump, hooks it to said port, and presses go.

Some time later, the pump beeps 6 times and the process is complete.

I find it quite soothing, to be honest. It’s usually nice and quiet (for a horse spittle) and it has to be the world’s laziest way to be doing something productive without actually doing anything at all.

That appeals to my oral retentive personality to a positively unwholesome degree.

Eventually chatted with a doctor. He asked me if I thought the leg was getting better. I had to admit that I had never experienced any symptoms in the first place.

If Doctor Woods hadn’t noticed that my ankle looked red and swollen, I would never have even known I had a problem.

Makes me wonder how many other infections I have had without knowing it. I thought I was beyond that crap now that my blood sugar is under control.

I only have to look at all the scars on my legs to be reminded of all the really very dangerous cases of cellulitis I had many years ago, and how blasé I was about the whole thing at Wound Care.

Like it had nothing to do with me. These things just happen. Oh well.

And the nurses tried to get through to me. But I suppose my psychological defenses were up and so I listened politely then did nothing.

How the frick am I even still alive? My legs were covered in nasty wounds that I now know could have gone berserk and spread to my organs and killed me in a lot of truly grisly ways, and I was still, “Oh well. ”

Caring about someone like me must be so frustrating and confusing and downright crazy-making sometimes. For that, my loved ones have my deepest apologies.

“Holy shit, Fru, your head is on fire!!”
“What, again? Oh well. Shit happens.”
“Don’t you think you should do something about it?”
“Yeah, I probably should. ”
“Like…. RIGHT NOW?!?”
“I’ll get to it soon, I am sure. ”

More after the break.

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I can’t fit in

I can’t fit in.

I can’t be normal.

I will always be a weirdo lurking at the edges of society.

No matter how much I long for an audience, and comrades, and somewhere where I feel welcome and wanted and needed and useful, I absolutely cannot and will not change in order to blend in with the herd.

Not an option. Never gonna happen. I am offended by the very thought of it.

From the very beginning, I have been ferociously myself no matter what. Maybe if I had gone to kindergarten, I would have learned to bend a little.

But I did not. And so I was my own very odd and occasionally downright spooky child. An off-putting child for the way I talked like an adult trapped in a child’s body and how confident and self-possessed I was for a child my age.

I spoke to adults as if we were equals. I neither showed them deference nor rebelled against them. I remained my own little island fortress no matter what.

And there have been times when, looking back, I wish I had been more flexible. It would not have killed me to bend a little in order to get along with the other kiddies.

There are a lot of possible settings between “total sheep” and “edgy loner”.

But then I think it over and wonder if that was ever even an option for me. It’s hard for me to imagine taming my fiery temper and hotheaded stubbornness and generally combative nature enough to conform to anything, really.

But perhaps I could have found some kind of compromise I could live with.

Then there is the issue of this gigantic brain of mine. I was thinking about it recently and realized that the soft, tender, human part of my soul are absolutely terrified of the robot monster that is my powerful intellect, and that their greatest fear is that one day the robot will devour them and take over my mind and its resources completely.

And now that’s my greatest fear, too.

A very deep part of me knows that the fucking robot always has the highest priority access to all my mental resources and that the rest of me – the simple, gentle, animal parts of me – have to exist on whatever it’s not using at the moment.

And at any moment, I could start thinking a really big thought and the tender bits of me will get pushed out of the way suddenly, rudely, and with great force.

And that’s not right. It’s supposed to serve me, not the other way around.

I built it, I upgraded it, I feed it and take care of it. It’s my goddamned pet!

And I, the real me, am the only important thing in my little universe. You’re all here to serve my happiness. My wellbeing. My entertainment, even.

You have no agendas of your own, effective now.

 We need to get our shit together if we are ever going to be one, unified, whole, and healthy person, and that means being ruthlessly selfish in my priorities.

Make me happy, my imaginary underlings.

Or I swear I will kill your and give your resources to someone else.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time to update you lovely folks.

When last we met, I had endured a positively wretched Thursday where I felt very ill, my legs had once more stopped working, I couldn’t even get my sweaty butt into my computer chair until the sun went down, and spent most of the day asleep.

I pondered calling 911 because my legs were so weak, but to be honest, I was not really coherent enough to make that sort of judgement call.

Well, the next day, Friday, I was feeling a lot better. My legs were still weak but I could at least get around my room okay and I had an easier time stringing thoughts together.

Which allowed me to focus on my OTHER symptoms.

Namely the fact that my lungs felt enormous and abraded and I was having trouble breathing fully and was feeling dizzy and faint.

Oh, and my hands and feet kept falling asleep.

Those were the same symptoms that prompted me to go to the ER to get myself checked out a long time ago, and that’s when they discovered I had pneumonia.

Pretty bad case of it, too. My blood oxygen level was so low that the triage nurse called another nurse over to see it (never a good sign) and when the other nurse saw it they exchanged a “holy shit!” look (a VERY VERY bad sign and they immediately went to get a doctor to see me.

Well that’s one way to cut through that ER red tape.

I ended up being admitted and put on oxygen and heavy antibiotics for eight days.

You can see why this time, I was going to err on the side of caution. So I got Julian to take me to the ER at around 1:30 pm or so.

Thus began my ordeal. Didn’t leave until 12:20 AM, or almost 11 freaking hours later.

No surprise, the place was packed on a Friday, and the problem with erring on the side of caution like I did is that your triage priority is going to be, quite justifiably, very low.

I mean, there were some obviously very ill people in the waiting room with me, and those are just the ones who can afford to wait.

I am sure cases that were even more urgent were coming in via ambulance.

Luckily, I had prudently brought my tablet with me and was able to get on to the local WiFi, so the hours flew by fairly quickly.

There were the usual stations of the cross : triage, then an EKG, then bloodwork, then some X-rays of my lungs, and then a nice long wait before they actually let me in to the ER proper and stick me in an outpatient bed.

Then more waiting, but better, because at least I was lying down. Though sadly, I found I could not sleep. Too stressed and drained.

Two sucky things that suck more together.

Final verdict : no pneumonia, but the doctor, Doctor Woods, saw that my left leg looked a little red and swollen, so she put me on IV antibiotics and ordered me to come back the next day for an ultrasound and more antibiotics.

Which brings us to today.

More after the break.

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The saga continues…

Today also sucked.

What I thought was going to happen was that I would go for my ultrasound at 3:30 pm, then afterwards I would mosey over to Emergency and get my second dose of IV antibiotics and then go home.

But there was more to it than that.

For one thing, when I got to Emerg, I was told to go wait in the waiting room with everyone else, like I had just been admitted.

This seemed wrong to me, and it was. I was supposed to have been admitted straight to the ER and gone to the IV room with the comfy chairs.

Luckily, eventually a nurse came along and corrected that after I had been cooling my jets in the waiting room for like 45 minutes.

Then the IV happened, and I talked to a doctor, and he wanted to get an X-ray of the wound on my left heel, and blah blah.

Ended up stuck there till around 7:30 pm.

This was especially bad because I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. I had stupidly thought I would be back soon enough that it didn’t matter.

And that was triple espresso bad because I had barely eaten at all for the last three days. Between sleeping all of Thursday and being at the hospital for all of Friday, and a sharp lack of appetite besides, I had barely eaten at all for three frigging days.

Luckily, I managed to force myself to eat enough not to FREAKING DIE.

But I was not taking any chances when I got home. Thank GOD I had gotten my appetite back by then, because I ordered myself a staggeringly huge donair from Donair Dude so I could get my meat and veggies on.

Plus a muffin I got from McD’s. And a 591 ml of Diet Pepsi.

That should keep me going for a while. Plus that big crazy meal got things moving on the other end too, which was also much needed.

Because when you don’t eat….

And now it’s 11:20 pm on Saturday the 16th of September, 2023, and I am still worried about my health. I can feel that my lung capacity is reduced and even small amounts of movement leave me wheezing, and so even if it ain’t pneumonia, something ain’t right.

But at least some of my energy is back, and my appetite came back, and I don’t feel nearly as incoherent as before.

So who knows. I might yet live.

But I have to go back for my third and final dose of antibiotics tomorrow, and when I do I am going to grab someone’s elbow and tell them how bad I still feel and how I am still worried I got something nasty eating away at me, and I am gonna get some damned attention paid to THAT instead of letting this phantom leg infection end up being the shiny object that lures them away from the thing they STILL HAVE NOT FIXED.

What do I have to do to keep these people focused?

Hot-glue a fidget spinner to my fucking forehead?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, my legs stopped working again.

Plus my back is fucked up. When I try to do anything that involves the large muscles of my back, I get this horrible wrenching pain.

The kind of pain that says, “Don’t do that. ” in no uncertain terms.

Add that to my legs turning into limp noodle with less tensile strength that an ancient pack of pipe clearners and you can see why it’s taken all afternoon just to get my ass from the bed to my computer chair so I can blog.

I’ve also got weird little cramps all through my torso and my wrists and ankles are aching and I am finding it very hard to concentrate.

There’s probably more but that’s enough for now.

Like lst ear, the onset of my symptoms coincided with my waking up from a nap. The transition from sleeping to awake and realizing I’m in deep shit was not an easy one.

I am, of course, considering calling 911. I certainly can’t get to the car in my current state, so if I am to get to the hospital, it’s an ambulance or nothing.

It will be mildly embarrassing to explain that my symptoms showed up at 1 pm and I am only getting around to calling 911 in the evening.

But to be honest, I have been pretty incoherent all afternoon. I did not have the mental wherewithal to actually decide to call 911 and then call them.

Sucks to be me, don’t it.

Now that it has started to cool off a bit, I can think better and thus I am better able to exercise my executive function and actually make plans and execute them

You can make it remarkable far through your day with that shit missing.

Mostly I just dozed or slept all afternoon.

Of course, I don’t want to call 911. That’s gonna end up setting offf a huge amount of hassle, discomfort, boredom, and unpleasantness.

And after all that , those fuckers at the ER will still end up telling me that they couldn’t find anything, “but hey! great news! you get to go home now!”

But I don’t want to go home. I want to know what the fuck is happening to me and how we are going to prevent it in the future. And I want you to keep on looking till you actually have a god damned answer.

Crazy, I know.

Man, it is not easy to get the words out right now. All I want to do is crawl back into bed and resume my somnolent state so I don’t have to deal with anything any more.

But I got 64 words to go.

I can do this. I know I can.

I know I should call 911. But I am not very good at doing what I should do.

I guess that’s because I have an almost total lack of self-discipline. I never learned to force myself to do things and now I am paying the price.

Everything about me is so… flabby. And weak.

I Want to be a man, dammit.

But that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon for me.

More after the break.

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Let’s do it again

All rigfht, let’s see how far I can make it this time.

I think I am starting to feel better. I don’t have much trouble getting my butt to the computer chair any more. It’s not exactly a smooth as glass transition, and there’s a certain amount of groaning involved, but I manage it just fine.

And that’s progress, I couldn;t make the transition at all this afternoon. No matter what angle I approached it from, I simp;y coul;d not get my body high enoug to park it on the chair or thereabouts.

And just like last year, I found myself giggling at the futility of it all while also kind of panicking because my body was not working right and I could not do the things I normally can do.

And that’s some freaky shit, man.

I guess I won’t be calling 911, Kinda glad I didn’t do it earlier, to be honest, although I am not sure that I should be.

Arguably I really should have called 911 and gotten my ass to the hospital. That would have been the sane and rational adult thing to do.

So, ya know, completely out of character for me.

I was neglected by my caregivers as a child and I neglect myself as an adult. Nobody ever gave me the impression that I was worth anything as a kid and now I find it incredibly hard to find the motivation to look after myself.

I’m just not worth the effort. That’s what it all boils down to.

You’d think the consequences of self-neglect would be enough to motivate me. But the thing is, the consequences are rarely immediate, direct, or startling.

If failing to monitor my blood sugar caused a clown to appear out of nowhere and kick me in the nuts, that would probably incentivise me sufficiently.

But no, I can get away with a lot of atrocious self-abuse without the connection with how I feel becoming evident at all.

And even if it did, I wouild still feel too shitty to do anything about it. I can think of all kinds of things I “could” be doing to improve my lot in life and I don’t have the energy or the motivation to do any of them.

Ya just can’t get there from here.

But really, who fuckin’ cares. Nothing matters, nothing is important, and nothing counts. The world is a steaming ball of shit and we are but flies crawling on it.

I feel like I want to throw up for a year. I’d almost be willing to drown if I died clean. I have been living filth staining reality for far too long.

I know I won’t always feel this bad.

But I also know that I have no way to get out of my own shadow long enough to dig my way out of this hell hole.

I don’t even know where to start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, let’s see if we can move the ball a little further down the field on this one.

One of the main reasons I hide from the world is that I am hiding from the terrible responsibility of having to figure out what to do with myself.

This is something I have been unable to do because my overly rational and analytical approach to life breaks down when trying to compute an equation with the entire world and all of human possibility as variables.

It’s literally impossible to solve. Complex orbital mechanics and the three body solution from astrophysics have fewer variables.

Given that it is impossible to figure out what I “should” do – there is no computable optimal path through life – the problem reverts to what I want to do.

And the truth is, I dunno.

And the reason I dunno is that I am too alienated from my own drives and desires to be able to simply ask them.

I have spent such a long time ruthlessly quashing all desire in an objectively atrocious attempt to stay happy here in my tiny little pinewood box of a life that the question of what I want is still subject to the tyranny of what it is “safe” or “okay” to want.

I am still terrified of bringing up desires I know I can’t fulfill and that will only torment me and make my life hell now that I have awoken them.

Not very rational sounding, is it?

In fact, looking back, I have done a lot to stay small. I have sacrificed almost all of my human potential on the altar of not growing up and I did it so that I would not outgrow this tiny life and become discontent with it and start actually wanting to DO things.

That can’t be allowed! That’s not right! That’s not safe! There’s too many variables out there and to a fundamentally controlling mind like mine, if I can’t predict the outcome, then the outcome will be bad, or at least, be presumed to be bad.

And thus we double back to another of my themes, my fundamental distrust of the life, the universe, any everything. The idea that every outcome you cannot predict and control will be negative is a profoundly paranoia thought and very unhealthy to boot.

It may operate like logic but it is ultimately simply rampant, naked, undifferentiated fear. Animal fear, the kind that comes from that freaked out little critter deep inside me.

It’s the fear that runs so deep that almost any kind of sensory stimulation above a certain amplitude is translated directly into anxiety and an overall feeling of threat.

Less like a fox and more like strung out deer ready to FREAK THE FUCK OUT.

And I know how crazy that is. And like… bad. I wish that I could just carve all that ready fear and latent panic out of my soul so that I can relax and live life in a calm and mellow and groovy way.

I don’t want to be jumping at shadows. I want to be all sunshine and happiness with awesome people! I want to pet cute fuzzy things and cuddle little babies and immerse myself in all the warm and joyful vibes I can get my hands on.

But first, I gotta get out of this cave.

Door’s not locked. I’m just too scared to open it.

More after the break.

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The golden tide

Man, have i been peeing a lot today.

Both frequency and volume have increased. I’m peeing more often and peeing more when I do.

This always makes me feel like I must be putting out more than I am taking in. And this is not as impossible as it sounds, at least in the short time.

Obviously everything I pee out is something I took in at one point. But there can be periods when my body is releasing stored water and I really am putting out more than I am drinking in on this date.

Anyhow, same old, same old.

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Back to the corridor

So what do I do about my wimpy will and my inability to know what I really want?

Clearly I need to do some serious introspecting. And I have to remain open to unconventional ways to expand my consciousness and grow my soul and learn to be human and alive and part of the world I live in.

I’ve lived behind this glass wall for so long that I find it hard to imagine what that would be like. Part of me is definitely very, very, very scared of the idea.

That part of me fears the real world in general and wants to hide from it in the deepest, darkest cave it can find and quietly cower there.

But that’s not me. Not the real me. That’s just a bunch of mindless fear left over from a very unpleasant childhood. Its alarms and protestations mean nothing because it’s afraid of and freaked out by absolutely everything so it’s like the smoke alarm that goes off at the slightest hint of steam.

And I am finally ready to take the batteries out of that fucking thing.

Go lie in your graves, fears. I don’t need you any more.

If I want to get out of this trap, I am going to have to figure out who I really am and what I really want out of life.

I realize now that when I was young, I looked down my nose at the whole journey of self discovery trip. I thought it was something for navel-gazing self-indulgent pretentious yuppies who needed an excuse to STILL refuse to grow up even though they have a spouse and children and a career now.

Man, I have so much latent bitterness in me. Comes to life at times like these.

But I got to go on one now. And I know it damn well won’t be easy. I will have to face myself over and over as I peel back layer after layer of false self in search of the real me hidden deep inside.

I’m not saying I know for sure it’s a fox.

But I am reasonably sure it goes, “Arf!”.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap has today been rough.

Because I have been super sleepy all day. It been downright ridiculous. I feel like sleep’s gravity well has gotten way more intense and that makes it incredibly hard to stay awake and actually do things.

Like eat. And poop. And masturbate.

Not at the same time, though.

That would be hard.

Anyhow, I don’t think this is a return of my flu-like symptoms. And thank God for that because it’s only been a couple of weeks since the last attack and if they start coming this often, I will be a paralyzed puddle before Christmas.

But no, I am mega sleepy and tired but nowhere near as incoherent and out of my mind as I was a couple weeks ago. And I feel very tired but in a sleepy way, not the energy drain way from before too.

That said, this is not the good, relaxing, gentle kind of sleep. On no, this is the kind of sleep that leaves me all sweaty and dizzy and disoriented because the REM activity in this ponderous cranium of mine is so very intense during these periods.

I assume that what is happening is that my shitty sleep does not give me nearly enough time in deep sleep for proper REM cycles, and therefore I am always way behind on them and suffering because of it.

My medium term memory is constantly overcrowded with memories of my life my brain does not get enough time to process into long term memories.

And every now and then it reaches the breaking point and forces my brain to become very very sleepy so I will sleep all day and thus give it all the chance to process things and catch up with the backlog.

If I could sleep like a healthy person, all at once and at night, I probably wouldn’t have this little problem.

But between the sleep apnea and my overwrought mind, I am stuck in my usual mode of rarely getting more than two hours of sleep in a row, scattered throughout the day.

And the CPAP machine is right there on my bedside table, as always. At any time, I could pull myself together enough to give it another try.

If I could only make peace with the god damned thing, it could change my whole life around. I’d be able to sleep well and that would improve everything – my mood, my energy levels, my outlook on life, everything.

But I can’t. I think about trying it again and the memory of when it stopped working because of a kink in the hose while I slept and my having to rip that fucking mask off my face so I could fucking breathe comes back, and I just… can’t.

A stronger and more robust person than I would be able to get over that kind of thing. They’d be able to shrug it off as a bad experience, take suitable precautions in the future, and put the whole thing behind them.

But I am not that person. I am weak, and small, and cowardly. What are molehills to others are mountains to me, and my engine simply does not have anything like the horsepower needed to “get over” incidents like that.

I probably WOULD have the horsepower – if I got decent sleep.

It’s a heck of a catch, that Catch-22.

More after the break.

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The valley of death

MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING : The following is about suicide. Do not watch it if that is a bad thing for you to hear about.

It is for me. But I watched it anyway because I am crazy.

That video is actually what got me thinking about the whole “touch the flame” thing. It came up in my YouTube feed and my first instinct was, “Yikes, there’s no way I’m going to watch that! I have to protect my mental health by avoiding stuff that is bad for me!”.

But then another influence, one that drew me to the video, manifested itself in my consciousness, and something deep inside me told me that this was the impulse to follow if I wanted to continue my spirit’s journey.

And I did. I do. I want to do the hell out of that, actually.

And I am glad I did because as triggering as that video was, I feel like the journey it took me through left me, at the end, with way less emotional baggage then when I began it.

Which brings me to something I forgot to say yesterday : in my case, touching the flame means, in part, that in order to become more sane, I have to get closer to my insanity.

I have gotten to my pathetic current state by fanatically sticking to the middle ground. Not too crazy but not very sane either. Sensibly avoiding the deep dark end of my pool of craziness by senselessly avoid damn near everything else. too.

It’s a stable position. You can survive for a long long time that way.

Trust me on that.

But you won’t get any better, either. You will be on the same trajectory I am : you will live like a child until you die.

You will maintain your hold on the middle ground. You won’t attempt suicide and you won’t do anything seriously crazy and you will, in that sense, continue to be a good boy or girl and be left more or less alone.

But you won’t be functional, either. You will not be able to live an adult life with a job. a place of your own, a mate, and so on.

I know that in order to gain my sanity, I have to take risks. I have to go toward the darkness inside me and confront it so I can release it. I have to get a lot closer to being insane in order to defeat my demons and prove to them that they can’t control me with phantom fears and grisly ghosts any more.

I will blow past all of it and drive right in to the winner’s circle and fuck anything that gets in my way.

I’m going to win, god dammit.

And nothing is gonna slow me down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been re-evaluating what constitutes a self-destructive impulse.

Previously, it was simple : a self-destructive impulse was an impulse to do something that seems self-destructive. Something that is not smart or logical or sensible or profitable or safe or maybe even sane.

Makes sense. But then, it would, wouldn’t it?

But now I am re-thinking things. It seems to me that labeling impulses self-destructive merely because they violate prudence is very short-sighted and limited of me.

Sure, some impulses are to be suppressed because they are, well, bad.

But some that seem bad may, in fact, come from my deeper mind seeking the inputs and experiences it needs in order to help me grow and heal and change.

Maybe sometimes you have to do the seemingly stupid self-indulgent short-sighted things in order to gain the painful wisdom and have the important experiences that you need in order to move forward in life.

Maybe the problem with us “sensible” types is that we never have the negative experiences that translate mere theoretical knowledge into the far more visceral, gut-level knowledge that actually changes you deep down in your soul and makes you a wiser, deeper person instead of one who trying to live their life by reason alone.

All through my teen years, I patted myself on the back because I wasn’t one of those teens obsessed with going to parties and getting drunk and doing drugs.

I was too “smart” for that.

Yeah bullshit. I was way too much of a pussy for that. I was a socially scarred scaredy-cat who chose to stay at home and consume media rather than go out into the big bad scary world and have actual experiences.

The truth is, you’ve got to do things to learn things. That’s what most people know that I have not, historically. Sometimes you have to follow those crazy impulses in order to see where they might lead. Sometimes you have to test your impulses to learn which ones you can trust. Sometimes you have to indulge your impulses in order to feed them and keep them healthy.

Sometimes, you have to reach out and touch the flame.

Even though you know it will hurt. You know it will damage you. You know that it’s a completely insane and stupid thing to do.

But that’s just theoretical knowledge. And theoretical knowledge is a cold and tenuous thing to build a life on. Without experience to add weight and substance to your soul, all you have is a sad little skeleton shivering in the dark and wondering what is wrong with the universe that it has so little nourishment in it.

Well, little skell, the truth is that life’s a feast and most poor bastards are starving to death. You wonder why you’re starving but the truth is, you barely even believe in food.

If you could just empty your mind and free your soul, you could be an omnivore and take your emotional nutrition wherever you find it, like everyone else.

You don’t have to be so special just to be okay.

So bow your head, and dig in.

More after the break.

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Burns so good

When I was a little kid and bored on a hot summer day, sometimes I would find a section of sizzling hot pavement and press my hand on it for a moment, and hear the tiny little sizzle sound.,

And yeah, it hurt a little. But it also felt really good. The cooler (than the pavement) air against my newly “cleansed by the flame” skin felt amazing.

Above all, it was a really clean feeling. Like once all the dead skin on my hand was burned away, my skin took a great big breath through its newly unclogged pores and heaved a hearty, blissful sigh.

That’s how I learned a tiny lesson in how suffering can bring relief. And by extension, how a narrow interpretation of hedonism as purely a matter of avoiding pain can lead to greater suffering by blinding you to that kind of relief.

And lately, I have felt that kind of lesson calling to me.

Something in me wants pain. Literal, physical pain. And as per our discussion in part 1 of today’s entry, I am pondering how to give it what it wants safely.

It’s definitely not out of some sense of being a bad person who deserves to be punished. I don’t think I even have that circuit installed.

No, it’s more like I have this restless ache that I know, deep down, the right kind of pain could relieve. A kind of deep tension that cries out for pain to come and turn a vague but maddening lingering pain into a moment or two of intense suffering then relief.

It would make sense if this is what finally gets me to start exercising. After all, the main reason not to exercise is that it hurts.

And it might do that eventually. But I have so much of depression’s anti-action bias built up that it is going to take a while for me to hack through till I can actually connect need to desire to intention and finally to action once more.

Right now, feeling like doing something and actually doing it are miles apart for me. I am far, far too accustomed to just burying and ignoring 99.999 percent of all my desires and intentions and drives and only acknowledge that tiny number that I am used to.

And even then, I do those things (like playing video games) more out of habit and not wanting to have to figure out what to do with myself than any real desire.

I just compulsively bury my head in my usual activities and make a point out of never lifting my head and looking out at that big bright beautiful world out there because it will only make me sad.

No, that’s not true.

It will also make me feel scared and overwhelmed. Maybe because I am trying to take it in all at once and that’s not possible. I dunno.

But I am constantly nudging myself closer to the light.

And I am not afraid that it will burn me any more.

Because it’ll burn SO good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What’s really got me freaked out after the latest attack of flu-like symptoms is that this time, I can really feel the muscle weakness in my arms, too.

Now I could live with not being able to walk. It would be horrible, but wheelchairs are a thing as are crutches, canes, braces, and so forth.

It would suck. But I could cope.

But if I lose the use of my arms I’m gonna kill myself. Because with my arms and my wrists I have no hands and without my hands I can write or play video games or even take a shit without help, and I can’t handle that like, at all.

Ergo, I REALLY REALLY hope I can get some kind of treatment before I have another one of these little attacks of mine, because I am terrified that after the next one or maybe the one after that, I won’t even be able to lift my arms any more.

And I do not want to have to learn to type with my eyes like the late Dr. Stephen Hawking. I would get such bad headaches!

More seriously, I suppose that it is at least possible to write via speaking these days. Speech to text works amazingly well and with modern AI it should be damned near perfect relatively soon.

The video games would have to go, though. If I can’t type or use the mouse, then what is left? Eye tracking and forehead movements?

Good luck trying to play a first person shooter THAT way.

This is why I am thinking of biting the bullet and filing that complaint against Doctor Chao. If I am going to end up a cripple-gimp because of his incompetence, you better believe I’m gonna take him down with me, and let the whole world know just how badly I have been failed by that cocksucker.

My condition keeps getting worse. He has no idea why. And he is fine with that.

Does not see what the big deal is.

After all, he checked several things and it was none of those and by that time my case had gotten boring and hard and no fun any more, so clearly, his job was done and it was time to move on to patients that didn’t make him sad.

And to think that I wasted all that time doing nothing to pursue the matter because I very naively assumed he was on the case.

Nope! Until I brought it up on the phone, he had completely forgotten about the body-wide deterioration of my entire muscular system.

I’d like to think the damage is at least somewhat reversible. If not with meds or surgery, than at least with intensive physiotherapy.

It seems like the kind of problem where physio could work wonders, probably in conjunction with some pills to help boost neuromuscular sensitivity.

Or something like that.

I am glad I finally addressed this issue here. I feel like by letting the thoughts out onto the page, I have talked myself down from a pretty crazy ledge.

More after the break.

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Check this out, Felicity! And play it for your Mom!

That’s the kind of breathtaking music you get when you have a massively talented pianist writing music he himself will find interesting to play.

Now do Watcher of the Skies!

No reaction at all

I realized today that I get absolutely nothing out of reaction videos.

I must be the wrong generation for them or something. I tried watching one where a classical composer reacts to the piece the kid in the previous section played and I watched maybe five minutes of it before it dawned on me that I just did not care.

I am not wired that way. The only thing I felt was a vague irritation that this guy’s reaction was interfering with my appreciation of the piece.

And that strikes me as a very Gen X, raised by television, sullen and withdrawn kind of reaction to reaction videos.

We never shared our reactions in realtime. What an awful thought. No, we experienced things at home, by ourselves or with family, then went on with our lives as our subconscious minds processed said things and noticed commonalities or themes or whatnot, then we came up with our own observations and theories about said thing and shared those with others.

To me, watching how someone reacts to something in realtime makes me feel like I am intruding on what should be a private moment for this person.

I don’t want to see you take a crap in realtime either.

And it’s all so fake and forced anyhow. It’s not like these are their REAL reactions. They cannot stop themselves from playing to the camera and trying to give the camera what they think it wants. What the audience wants, likes, and expects.

So it’s all kind of pointless anyhow. To me, watching someone play a video game or listen to a famous piece of music for the first time or eat a meal or whatever has no intrinsic value. Maybe if they are funny or interesting or both, I might get something out of the video. But otherwise, no thanks, I’m good.

I’m a lifelong loner. Not by choice necessarily but more as a result of fears and aversions and compulsions that made associating with others impossible.

As a result, the only people I want to share experiences with are my real life friends. They are my buddies, my audience, and my chosen family.

Watching some rando react to something just makes me feel like there is an uninvited guest in the room and I am wishing they would just go away so I can relax.

But of course, as in all things, that’s just my reaction to them.

Your results may vary.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I played BG3 right up to 5 pm, when I have been having my “lunch” lately,

Should be 3 pm, dammit. But I just can’t seem to get my shit together to make that happen these days.

More on that later.

Now I could easily have used this as an excuse to further delay my meal, because obviously, after playing a deep and intensive game like that, I couldn’t possibly go straight into blogging and eating. I need time to let my big ol brain cool off!

It sickens me to thing of how often I have listened to the Jagoff in my head talking to me just like that while I nod and stroke my chin and say, “Makes sense to me!”.

Well fuck that. I hate that guy. He’s been nothing but bad for me. He is the voice of my laziness, my lack of ambition, my encyclopedia of excuses, my cowardice, my addiction to failure, and my long long history of continuously failing myself.

Yeah, that’s a thing. And it still counts. In fact, failing yourself is the worst kind of failure because no matter what you tell yourself, you are the one being hurt and disappointed and saddened by your inability to follow through for yourself.

You are your own shitty, unreliable, lying bastard of a parent.

“We’ll play catch next time, Timmy. I promise!”

Yeah, double fuck that sideways in a tornado. I don’t want to do that to myself any more. And that means I have to kick the Jagoff out of my head and start trying to reprogram myself into someone who actually seeks challenge, disdains the path of least resistance, and dares the world to take him on.

I know my life has been too easy. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t also been flat out terrible in places and I have suffered a great deal all through my lonely childhood.

But at no point did I have to learn to overcome myself. To persevere. School was and still is ridiculously easy for me. I never even had to learn to study.

And unlike a lot of child prodigies, that never stopped for me. There has yet to be the point where the real world catches up with me and I flame out spectacularly and I have to pull myself together and learn to focus and strive.

Nope. Still waiting. I did a year of Kwantlen and then VFS and it was still all absurdly easy to me.

The most I can say is that during the last semester of VFS, I was starting to feel strained. The workload, at least, was a tiny bit challenging.

But the work itself? Never.

And by all reasonable measurements, that makes me one extraordinary dude. Not a lot of people can claim these attributes. It makes me wonder, yet again,. what would have happened if I had aimed for something super hard, like law or medicine.

Would I have finally gotten my wings clipped?

Or would I have breezed through them, too?

It’s an amazing thought.

More after the break.

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I thlammed my penith

Have I mentioned how much I love the internet lately?

This is a meme going around on YouTube lately :

People are doing their own versions and it’s been glorious.

Similarly, there is this bizarre phenomenon :

Because no matter how you slice it, at the end of the day, the sun sets.

the barnacled hermit

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Talk up, tear down

I honestly have no idea what I am doing.

I just try to capture some of the thoughts, ideas, and emotions and hold them still long enough for me to translate them in the words, and trap them on the page.

There’s no rhyme or reason to it. There’s no plan. No concrete thing I am trying to accomplish by spilling my words for you wonderful people every day.

It’s honestly just pressure relief. Like I have said before, the main purpose of this blog is to give me a place where I can relieve the pressure of all these words in my head and thus make it possible to be at least a little sane.

If I was truly serious about that, though, I would write one hell of a lot more. I am barely keeping up with the pressure right now. By the time I am done for the day, I have more or less reduced the pressure by the amount it rose that day.

Real progress would require me to at least double my wordcount. Back when I was
writing my Million Words, I was writing 2, 739 words a day, and as I recall, I felt pretty good at the time.

The evidence has been clear from the start : my path to sanity is to find an outlet for all of my boundless creative energies.

If I could do what I do with this blog but at a much higher rate, I might actually be able to reduce the pressure in my cerebellum enough to think clearly and know who I am.

That is also a heady thought.

It could be amazing. But the prospect also scares me, and that’s interesting. Clearly, my deeper mind is afraid that with all the babble and drabble gone, something will be revealed that it does not want revealed.

Something it knows is there, but does NOT want to deal with. Something it keeps hidden in all the mental trash and clutter in my mind. Something it has been dodging for a very, very long time.

So long, in fact, that it seems to my deeper mind that to confront this deep and terrible thing would mean its utter annihilation.

But revelations can’t destroy the real self.

They can only destroy the false self. The illusion of self. The image in the mirror.

So what the false self sees as annihilation, the true self sees as its liberation.

Maybe we should all try being who we really are for a while.

See how it feels.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.