In this case, the plane of limbo known as Urgent (ha) Care.

So this morning I made the weekly pilgrimage to Wound Care at the good ol’ Community Care Center here in Richmond.

I was worried that I wouldn’t make it because after my latest run in with my flu-like symptoms last Tuesday, my muscles are weaker than ever, and I was worried that I would not be able to make it to the car.

But it was fine. Painful, but fine. It hurt more than before and it tired my poor muscles out at wildfire speeds but I made it.

Once there, I was on my way for the usual care when I was stopped by Vivian. She is a “wound care clinician” and a senior nurse. She debrides my foot calluses (calloi?) now and then, and I like how she fusses and clucks over me.

What can I say, I didn’t get much of that as a kid. It’s kinda annoying but it also feels very good to have someone care enough to do it.

Anyhow, she stops me and looks at me all worried and tells me that I don’t look well and that my breath smells acidic and we have a discussion and she tells me that once I leave the CCC I need to go to the Urgent Care Center.

Well, she’s a senior nurse, and the junior nurse working on my feet agreed with her so strongly she actually pushed me in a wheelchair down to the parking lot rather than have me huff and puff the way down myself.

Glimpse of my future, that.

So I got Julian to drive me to Urgent Care. I mean, when a senior nurse looks at you with worry in her eyes and strongly urges you to go to Urgent Care, you go.

I didn’t wanna go. Urgent Care sucks. So much waiting! It’s like the ER but somehow even slower, and without the air of excitement and danger.

I was there for four hours or so. I felt like I had been swallowed by a huge but sluggish beast and I had to wait patiently while I was slowly digested.

Eventually I saw a doctor. I told her my story. She gave me the “resist my pushing you” type muscle tests I’ve had before. This time, I was really trying but I offered almost no actual resistance to her movement.

That’s not good.

They took chest X-rays. No probs there. The tech was irritating, though. Very pushy and chirpy. Did not see the connection between me needing a walker and me not being able to stand for very long.

I was then sent off with a big fat lab req. I will get the lab work done soon.

But not today. Today was…. more than enough.

More after the break.

---

A musical interlude

WARNING : The following is kinda noisy and synthy, but I love it.

I love that gabber-style use of vocal samples as a kind of deconstructed audio texture that kind of massages the language center of my brain.

And it could use a good massage. It works very hard all the time.

Whether I want it to or not.

No wonder my sleep sucks.

---

More from my mind

I guess that could be the title for this entire blog.

Come read all the weird dark twisted shit that this one deranged dude drips out onto the virtual page for all the world to see!

His lack of boundaries can be your ironic entertainment!

Not that I think what I write here is entirely without merit. In fact, I honestly think some of what I have written in this obscure little corner of the World Wide Web^[1] as I struggle to express all the dark, strange, borderline inhuman thoughts in my head is actually uite brilliant and worthy of being read by other intelligent persons or entities.

Of course, it’s mixed in with a lot of porn, mundane journaling, pointless meanderings, bizarre prose that reads like poetry, and of course, porn.

(Offscreen voice : You said “porn” twice!)

Me : I like porn.

Then again, James Joyce wrote in a crazily stream of consciousness subjective3 style that almost nobody could comprehend and he’s consider a literary giant.

I’m not saying that I, too, am a literary giant.

Just a literal one. Ha ha.

Anyhow, I am not saying that I know for sure that I am a literary giant.

I am just saying that weirder things have happened. History is full of us cramped up weirdos whose inner demons force them to toil away in the dark on things that make sense only to them that turn out to be geniuses creating masterpieces.

Of course, most of us….. don’t.

Most of us stay in our dank warrens and carve our emotions into the walls in weird little caveman hieroglyphics and die, as we lived, in utter obscurity.

The ones lauded as geniuses today are the lucky ones who somehow managed to get noticed by people who are extroverted enough to tell all their friends about this brilliant writer they found and encourage them to go read their stuff.

I don’t know those kinds of people. The people I know seem to be as instinctively unable to be that overt as I am.

When you avoid social exposure like Dracula avoids sunlight, the idea of drawing attention to yourself in order to draw attention to a friend or a find is unthinkable.

Shy folk don’t “network”. We have our little circle of friends and we are perfectly content with that. We live in our own little worlds and that suits us just fine.

But that shyness is the reason that there are so many people like me who can create wonderful things, but can’t bring themselves to show them to anybody.

That’s why we need agents.

Of course, I don’t know any of them, either….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But hopefully not in a surgical way.

In the more usual spiritual and/or psychological sense. I’ve lived so much of my life all wrapped up in myself and buried deep within that fortress deep inside my soul, treating almost the entire world like it’s a foreign invader that needs to be repelled, that I can help wondering what life would be like if I could just learn to relax and let go.

Constantly bristling with hostility and defensiveness while bracing yourself for the next assault is exhausting, even when you only do it on the inside.

Hell, especially when you only do it on the inside. Because then you’ve got the smooth façade to maintain as well. And it has to be so good it even fools me most of the time.

The person that I want to be and try to be comes from the same place as the person I really am, but there is not a lot of connection between the two.

Like I have said here before, I’ve been a scared little creature hiding in the darkness of my inner tomb and pretending to be healthier than I am for a really long time.

Ever since I was raped, essentially, and that was 46 years ago.

And it’s hard for me to imagine how I could bring that poor little fox inside me out of the darkness and into the light so that I could integrate all my sides and parts and complications into some kind of coherent sense of who I am.

One person. Undivided. Whole.

It’s a heady thought.

---

At least I agree, in principle, that I need to open up.

I want to be able to do it. I want to be able to stop curling up in a ball and blocking everything out except for a very short list of allowable inputs. I want to be able to open my arms wide and embrace the world and life and accept it all for what it is.

Because this tiny island fortress of mine really stinks. In more than one way.

And I feel like I am making progress. Slow progress, which is the only kind of which I am capable it seems, but progress nonetheless.

Every day, I open the door to my tomb a teeny tiny bit more. Let in a little more fresh air and sunshine and light and warmth. Let out a little more of the toxins and darkness and coldness out. Make room for healthier things.

I don’t worry about the end point of it all any more.

All that matters is that it feels good to do it and I feel better afterwards.

That’s enough to keep me going for a while.

---

Why are there still trees everywhere?

Oh right, because I am not out of the woods yet.

Depressingly, I must say that I feel a little worse today than I did yesterday. Maybe that’s only cause I am more awake to feel things, I dunno.

But I definitely feel some of that drained feeling hanging around, and my runny nose has ganged up with my allergies to really make me go through a lot of Kleenex, not to mention giving me the usual sinus pain and headache.

Ergo, the decision on whether to go to the ER still hangs in the balance. I was really hoping I was over this thing but like a squatter this bug refuses to leave.

Get out of here, you god damned parasite! Go infect a Trump supporter, damn it! You know they’re not immunized against you!

More after the break.

---

The truth about me

I live at the bottom of a pile of shit.

Filth everywhere. Every possible form of human detritus surrounds me. Garbage of all kinds. Food waste. Miscellaneous leftover packaging from both Amazon and food deliveries. Used tissues. Various medical things I should be using but don’t.

And that’s just here in front of Mister Computer. The bed is far worse.

Every form of biological leakage has occurred there. My comforter has decades’ worth of dead skin cells and feverish night sweats caked into it. My mattress cover has rotted out from under me and the mattress springs poke through and do me injury. It has absorbed even more human effluvia than the comforter.

There is no place in this room which is even remotely clean. If I could, I would pack up my computer and my clothes and a few of my books and burn the rest.

Fire can only purify.

And it’s not like I want to live this way. In fact, I hate it. I hate it so much.

But that hate does not come with the motivation to fix it. Even though it seems to an outsider that even with my physical limitations, I could “easily” clean this place up and make it somewhat fit for human habitation, I just can’t.

I could apply to the province for help. If I had a diagnosis for whatever the fuck is wrong with my legs. But I don’t.

And I ain’t gonna get one any time soon.

I won’t be seeing the neurologist until the 28th of this month. Hopefully he or she will be more focused and capable than that joke of a doctor I have as my GP.

Fuck you, Doctor Chao. I’m going to end up in a wheelchair because you can’t handle my case and I am going to sue the shit out of you AND complain to the College.

Back to my disgusting existence.

One angle on my inability to clean is that when I was raped when I was 4 years old, I reverted in age and never completed my anal stage of development, ergo I am unable to move forward til I, as it were, “catch up”.

I know this : when I imagine myself cleaning, I am always crying too.

Perhaps I am mourning the little boy who has finally been forced to grow up despite having gotten almost none of the emotional nutrients he needed to grow and thrive, and we know something precious inside me had to die before I could get to that point.

Call it the smoldering remains of my crippled innocence.

Call it the sickening refuge of fractured child.

Call it a fluffy little fox named Fruvous.

It’s all just filth in the end anyway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But it beats the alternative. Allegedly.

Well, like my man Nietzsche said, nobody is in a position to judge life, because they are either alive, and therefore biased, or dead, and unavailable for comment.

Witty AND wise. When my boy Freddy is both, he’s golden.

My version of it would be that nobody is in a position to judge life because they have only lived one life and that’s no basis for comparison.

When someone says anything about “Life”, they are only ever talking about their life at that moment. They pretend to be judging all of life when all they are judging is how they feel about it in one split second out of eternity.

And this is easy to discover with the right questions.

A : Life stinks.
B : Really? All of life?
A : Yeah! Life fucking sucks, man.
B : Really? For everyone? Even rich people?
A : Well…. I guess some of them might be happy. But it sucks for everyone else.
B : So life sucks for everyone you know or have ever known? They have all been miserable people who knew no happiness?
A : Well, no…. some of them seemed pretty happy. But my life sucks, man.
B : Has it always sucked? Even on Christmas Day as a kid?
A; Well, no…. I guess some parts were pretty good….
B : So what you’re really saying is that your life sucks right now.
A : Well yeah…. I guess.
B : Now think about this : you’re now mad at me for convincing you life’s not that bad.

That’s because he was trying to express an opinion, not win a debate, you ASSHOLE.

But hey, i am learning.

Learning a lot, really. as I work hard to expand my consciousness beyond the world of abstraction, isolation, and misery I grew up.

I’m trying to be more human. That’s at least a big part of where my redemption lies. I’m going to follow my big warm heart and my considerable empathy and use them to explore my own humanity and through that the humanity of others.

I know there’s a way for me to become a real person at long last. I haven’t even really felt like one. There was always this wall of glass between me and other people that let me see them and even feel them but kept me from ever being one of them.

I can see why that would lead some people to conclude that they are really aliens. Or elves, or werewolves, or ponies, or anthropomorphic foxes, or whatever.

For better or for worse, I am too “realistic” for that. But I can see how these sorts of conclusions would be a lot easier to swallow than the truth, which is that what you really are is a profoundly alienated human being with no tribe anywhere.

I mean, I’m Mister Realist, and yet typing that gave me a horrible chill.

Just another stop in my journey to get over “The Truth”. There are so many subjective truths and answers that lie somewhere in between and continuing with my Mister Bigdicked Skeptic attitudes will only get in the way.

Yeah, I see the world more accurately that most people.

Big fucking deal.

Most people are sane,. too.

More after the break.

---

A pornographic interlude.

Hidden behind a link. for discretion for once. (It’s a naked and aroused Bugs Bunny.)

Homina homina. God DAMN do I wanna fuck that bunny. I mean, Bugs is always smokin’ hot but in that picture he’s almost compulsively fuckable.

That’s why it was so brilliant of the artist to put two “point of view” hands on Bugs’ hips, with a nice firm grip and Bugs looking back with delighted anticipation.

It really sells the idea that you are about to fuck this incredibly hot cross (dressing) bunny and it’s going to be MIND BLOWING.

And other parts blowing. Ya know. After.

A friend linked that pic on Tapestries this morning and I just had to share.

I should start a porn blog.

---

I forgot to mention

I’m mostly over my “flu”.

At the very least, the major symptom, that draining fatigue, is mostly gone. And good riddance to that. Being out of my mind with fatigue was awful.

My memories of yesterday are episodic and fragmentary at best.

My nose is still runny and I still have a fair bit of that residual “icky” feeling. I’m feeling odd little twinges in my muscles. And while my energy level has improved drastically, it’s still not back to my usual level of upbeat sluggishness.

I still feel a bit of that heavy drain. It’s gotten worse since the sun went down. Clearly, my body wants me to stay closed for repairs for a little while longer.

Fair enough. I’m at a crucial juncture in Baldur’s Gate 3, but the nice thing about single player video games is that they will wait as long as you need them to.

So when I finish blogging, I will go back to sleep. Maybe I will wake up in time to play some BG3 before I hang out with J&J at midnight, maybe not.

One thing’s for sure, sleep is one hell of a lot more productive than playing BG3.

Playing video games feels productive. Especially the RPGs I favour. I can fight and struggle and achieve. My characters level up and grow more powerful as a direct result of my efforts and endeavors. I consistently fight back the forces of evil.

Real life should be so reliable.

To me, it’s obvious : put people into a situation where effort translates directly into reward (the more you work the more you make) and they will work their asses off.

Modern global capitalism doesn’t like that, though. It’s not exploitative enough for it. Feels too much like treating the workers as equals. As if they could be a vital part of the business equation instead of mindless grunting beasts to be worked to death.

They would rather lose profits than change that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how life feels to me right now.

The last 20 hours or so have not been fun. The feeling of energy drain is very strong this time around. And with the energy goe my ability to concentrate, and that means simple things lke moving my big fat butt from my bed to my computer chair takes like half an hour because my mind just keeps drifting away from the task at hand as the tiredness and mental drain overtook me and I was out of for a while.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been sleeping a lot. Not a lot of other things you can do with your time when under such a state of drain.

I Was too fried to even play games on my tablet, and that’s like my ultimate fallback position. The final citadel before we surrender completely.

i think I am gradually getting better. I feel a little livelier now than I did this morning.

But I still have all the usual flu-like bullshit going on. My nose is sore and runny. My throat feels raw and scratchy. My stomach is not a happy place

Hell, my balls are even aching for some god damned reason.

IT doesn’t help that I ended up not eating much of anything for a while. Kind of hard to feed yourself when you’re barely even coherent.

I’m getting some food into me now, at least. Now I just have to deal with a grumpy stomach which views all food as a potential invader.

We need nutrition, stomach. So get over yourself.

Well that’s about as much as I will be able to do this time.

Time to return to the hibernation chamber.

---

OK, let’s see if I can make it to 500 words this time.

Usually, I do 500 words with lunch and 500 with dinner but given how ill I am, I have had to subdivide the task further.

One distressing thing : I am having trouble seeing things on my computer screen. The white background of my blogging window seems too bright now and I have trouble making out the letters of what i have typed.

Also distressing : breathing trouble. I assume it’s related to the heaviness et al in my lungs. But sometimes, when I am in certain positions, I find myself “running out of air” even though I am breathing normally.

It’s like the oxygen level in the room suddenly plummeted.

Those are both pretty serious symptoms, and combined with all the rest, I clearly need to start thinking about the ER or Urgent Care.

Not my favorite places to be, but I am becoming genuinely worried about what the fuck is going on with me and I don’t want to be another “if only we had gotten to it sooner” statistic like some stubborn old coot.

I haven’t reach coot status yet. I’m not even a geezer. But I hope to make it there.

So, barring a sudden worsening of symptoms, I will wait until tomorrow afternoon and reassess then. If I am not any better (or worse), it’s off to the ER I go.

Oh well, at least I have a tablet to use to entertain myself,.

More after the break.

---

Here we go again

Let’s see how many words I can do this time.

I might me on the mend. I feel a little more3 energetic than I did this afternoon. Whatever the fuck is going on with me, my body is fighting it.

Go, white blood cells, go!

I at least can make it to the bathroom and back. Which is kind of important.

I mean, I have my receptacle for when I need to pee, but otherwise… that does nbot bear thinking upon.

I might even be able to make it to the kitchen and back, which is normally a twice a day “adventure” for me. It would have been out of the question earlier – I was way too tired and incoherent to make the trip.

This doe beg the question, though, of whether or not I could move enough of my food assets into the bedroom here to avoid having to make that trip.

The answer is no, methinks. Not without gettinga full sied fridge n’ freezer in here. There’s keeping my cans and bottles of pop cold, and ke\eping my my frozen confections frozen and nice.

I have a mini-fridge that might be able to be put back into service. That would at least do the job for my canned pop. It has a freezer compartment, so it’s possible that it could hold a box of delectable treats from Chapman’s.

The idea of rearranging things so that I don’t have to go to the kitchen any more makes me kind of sad,. though. Those kitchen adventures, as painful and stressful a they can be, are the only times I leave this goddamned room of mine on most days.

The last thing I need is to make my world even smaller.

In fact, I should try to add one thing a week where I leave the apartment for non-medical and non-Denny’s reasons.

Something just for me.

The logistical issues would be significant, granted. Obviously a quick jog around the park is out of the question.

To be honest, I have no idea what I would do. That is unsurprising, given that I had no idea what to do back when I could walk, either.

I’ve lived such a home-bound life. Regardless of physical health, I just haven’t gone out much. I have my computer and the internet. Why go out?

All kinds of reasons. More than I could possibly enumerate.

But part of dealing with mental illness is pretending that your mental restrictions, however severe, are a choice.

“Oh no, I’m not chained to this radiator. I can leave whenever I want! I just choose not to. I don’t feel like it. ”

After all, you won’t feel trapped if you never try to escape, right?

And it’s true. I almost never think about how restricted my life is. Why upset myself?

But I am getting better about that, hence my grumbling about it in this space. I now know that I have to keep getting pissy about it if I want to have any hope of escape.

Because only rage can break these bonds.

Now excuse me while I rip this fucking radiator out of the wall.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You’re right, Peter and Spongebob. It doesn’t even matter how hard you try.

Because there is nobody watching and keeping score. Nobody is going to intervene and say, “We can see how hard you’ve been trying, so here’s that thing you wanted so bad. We thought it was only fair that you got it. After all, you earned it. ”

Not gonna happen. You still have to go about things the right way in order to get results.  

Look at it this way : say someone wanted to punch a hole through a mountain. And say they were trying to do it by throwing Cheerios at the mountain.

Would it really matter how hard they tried? How good they got at throwing Cheerios? How many courses on Cheerio physics they took? How they could hit the exact same spot on the mountain 1000 times in a row? How they held the world record for the most force applied to a rock surface by a thrown Cheerio? How their dear sainted mother is watching at home and waiting for that first trip through the new tunnel? Would it matter how wonderfully nice they were or how much they “deserved” to succeed?

No, because that’s a fundamentally stupid thing to do and the universe itself does not give you points for effort.

“Earning” things is entirely a human concept. So is justice, and fairness. These principles ultimately function as ways to compel other humans to do things.

If it’s something nobody could actually give you, you better go about getting it the right way, assuming there even is one.

Some things are just plain impossible. That’s not injustice. That’s life.

Maybe there “should” be some guaranteed payout for effort sincerely contributed even if it was not done the smartest way, but there isn’t, and there never will be.

But we fall into the trap of thinking hard work can get us anything because that’s the lie society tells us to keep us “working hard” to make money for our owners while believing they make more than us because they just “work harder”.

That’s more full of crap than a fertilizer factory.

Hence the recurring delusion in straight men that they can “earn” a woman.

This is clearly hogwash, and if you don’t think so, straight boy, tell me what I would have to do to “earn” you?

But the truth – that there is no guaranteed path to sex and/or romance – is simply too hard to bear in a society which judges a man on how hot a chick he can bang.

The truth for both genders is that if you want to find your special someone, the secret is as simple as it is unwelcome : meet new people.

Each new person you meet is a ticket in the romance lottery and just like with the real lottery, the odds are terrible but you have to keep playing to win.

There are things you can do to improve your odds. Be clean. Smell nice. Use good manners. Above all, smother the self-destructive voice in your head trying to goad you into sabotaging yourself so that the anxiety producing situation will be over sooner.

But ultimately, it’s a numbers game.

More after the break.

---

I am not well

So somewhere around 8:45 pm, I start feeling distinctly unwell.

Came over me suddenly, like a miasma engulfed me. Now my head hurts in that particularly terrible way where something in the “third eye” region of my skull. between and above my eyes, starts throbbi9ng with a very sinister kind of pain that brings with it nausea, dizziness, disorientation, and a feeling like I am trapped in a very hot room that has too little air.

I hate that feeling. So much.

I guess I’ve been blowing my nose more than I usually do lately. It’s kind of hard to te3ll when, like me, your nose never completely stops running.

There’s always at least a little trickle going on, just waiting to get backed up and put me through hell when both my ears and my nose are stuffed up.

No exit. Traffic havoc ensues.

But this feels a little different. I feel like the sinus symptoms are being triggered by something bigger and deeper and darker than mere hay fever.

Possibly that fucked up recurring infection-like thing that hits me like a ton of bricks then disappears a couple days later,. leaving me weaker than before.

That has got to be some autoimmune bullshit right there. Every now and then my body go berserk and attacks itself and does yet more damage to my nerve tissues and muscle fibers and pushes me still further toward that nightmare future when I am strapped down to a bed an full of tubes and my claustrophobia is going absolutely berserk and there is nothing I can do about it.

That’s the nightmare hellscape I need to keep in mind for when I need motivation to live better and get healthy.

That would be a novel and enlightening experience for me because I have never held on to a negative emotion so it can keep motivating me before.

With me, negative emotions tend to get a black silk bag slipped over their heads before being dragged offstage and throttled.

Not a healthy way to live by any stretch of the imagination. I would be far better off listening to what they have to say, even if it makes me scared and/or anxious, and doing the best I can to really hear the message.

I’m so very Seventies. Like wow, far fuckin’ out, man.

I realized earlier today that I still have Seventies dreams of getting together with some people with open hearts and open minds and just like., you know,. encounter each other. Be human with one another and try our best to really relate to one another in a safe environment of love and nurturing and kindness and understanding.

Like, pull up some floor and sit and tell us absolutely everything you feel the need to tell anybody and I promise we will listen, not judge, and embrace you afterwards, and tell you how happy we are that you shared that with us.

I swear it can really happen! But only if we make it happen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…to have a happy childhood.

What a load of crap.

It’s the sort of platitude mouthed by people who don’t think very much when the situation twigs a regurgitation reflex in the word part of their brains.

What made my childhood unhappy was a lack of nurturing and care and general parenting from any of the people tasked with providing that for me.

Try getting that when you’re a dirt poor 50 year old unemployable loser who has never had a job or been in a relationship and therefore is far less than worthless in the eyes of traditional male society.

If I was rich, it would be easy. I’d check myself into some kind of fancy medical care and/or assisted living facility and they would give me all the TLC I could ever want.

They wouldn’t be doing it out of love, granted. But I’d still take it. At least it would be something I could actually get.

Being the broke bitch I am, though, all I can do is rot in pieces until the system is ready to put me back in the hospital where people will be legally obligated to be kind of nice to me for a while.

That is honestly my best, most realistic prospect right now, and yes, that is indeed incredibly tragic and sad in a pathetic kind of way.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet…

But at least I am finally being realistic. The odds of my recovering enough to finally getting around to getting an actual adult life going are diminishingly small.

The smart money is on my continuing on exactly as I am doing now, wasting my few remaining years playing video games and letting the days go by (and the weeks, and the months, and the years…) just like I have been doing for the last 30 years (almost like there’s a trend) until the day I die.

I’m going to be trapped here, buried alive, until I finally run out of oxygen and this whole sick fever-dream of a life I have been living will finally be over.

I don’t want to die.

But the idea of dying is not nearly as scary to me as it should be.

Death should be the scariest thing ever. The idea of dying should scare the organic nitrates out of anybody.

And while I do not, I repeat, want to die…. I can see the upside.

At least this painfully long and brutally unfunny joke of a life will have a punchline.

“… and he died without ever even becoming a real grownup! What a LOSER!”

Well, I told you it wasn’t funny.

Whatever plans I make for the future, they can’t rely on my making any kind of big change to my life because that shit just ain’t gonna happen.

There is never going to be a magic moment when all my mental health issues fall away and I “walk in the sun” at last.

And you know how I know that ain’t gonna happen?

Because I would have to change my behaviour first.

And all I can do is think about stuff.

And write about it.

More after the break.

A different path

So my life story so far is nothing like it is “supposed” to me.

No jobs or relationships. Very little personal growth. No worth at all in traditional male terms. 30 years “wasted” as a fugitive from reality with no parole in sight.

Well, so what? Why does that bother me so much? Who cares?

So I have taken a different path through life. A very unusual and some might say unwholesome one. What’s wrong with that?

Well, for one, it hurts. I can feel the pain of all that I have missed out on very keenly. All that potential left to rot on the vine raises quite a stink and I can finally acknowledge to myself that most of that potential is gone, gone, gone.

I didn’t use it, which caused me to lose it.

I can tell myself and the world that I can still do all kinds of amazing things with this incredible brain of mine and all this raw talent. And like all my self-dooming statements, it is true.

But what is not included in it is all the mental and spiritual machinery that has to be built between me and the world in order for those amazing things to happen.

It’s like I have the mineral rights to millions of dollars worth of crude oil but absolutely no way to extract, refine, and sell it.

And building that machinery will take a lot of work and require me to spend extended periods of time outside my grotty little tomb and away from the big smelly security blanket of video games and that means having to actually figure out what the hell to do with myself and I don’t know that I am ready to do that yet.

Honestly, I don’t think I am. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.

I cannot foresee a future for myself where diving into the deep end will seem any less scary and hard and so on. It’s not like I can learn to handle things like that while still safely on shore.

And I can’t imagine what would even have to happen for that kind of thing to be easier for me. As far as I can tell, I would need to already have the very success I am pursuing, and that ain’t gonna happen.

The only way forward is to kick myself out of the nest and hope like hell to figure out how to fly before I hit the ground.

Maybe I can find an agent. I don’t have a lot of success to show one to prove I am bankable, but maybe I can find one willing to invest time in talent alone.

My instructors at VFS all thought I was an amazing writer.

Maybe an agent would feel the same way.

And that certainly sounds better than having to try to sell my works and my skills myself.

That would be the other route. Doing all the things that writing books tell you to do. Submit my works to every publisher asking for unsolicited works. Sign up for every writing contest under the sun. Network with everyone in the entertainment biz. Start a podcast. Have a YouTube channel. Post to TikTok.

And so on, ad infinitum ad nauseum.

I can’t do all that. I am not a go-getter. I don’t have that kind of energy.

Like always, there are no shortage of things I “could” do., but can’t do.

Lots of solutions built for someone other than me.

Lots of roads leading where I want to go but none that I can reach from where I am right now. No connectors, no offramps, no ferries.

Lots of broken questions with no answers.

So I am stuck, as always, in a situation where I would have to invent a whole new way of doing things just to be able to get anything done.

And I’m so damned tired.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A fuzzy friend posted this pic on Taps today :

Now that is clever. A smart set of observations present in a fun and powerful way.

It’s the intersection of D&D and BDSM that intrigues me. Makes me want to see if I can get together with some groovy people and invent BD&DSM.

Dungeon Master (me) : Now roll to see how many times you’re flogged….

I’m not into that kind of kink myself, so I could be wrong, but I would think that would add an element of chance and danger to one’s playtime.

Plus I have this great idea for a geek product : a malt liquor called Nat 20.

The ad would feature a nerd animatedly retelling a tale of his adventures in a D&D game he played recently.

YN : So there I was, facing the biggest, meanest hobgoblin I had ever seen, and he was screaming for my blood, so I thought for sure I was one dead paladin. But then… just when I needed it the most… I got a Nat 20!

As he describes the action, we see it on the screen, and when he gets to the Nat 20 part, we see a big studly barbarian hand him the product, which he drinks and then kills the fuck out of the hobgoblin.

Voiceover : For those times in life when what you need the most is to get a Nat 20.

Alright, now we can do the deep stuff.

---

The Eternal Neverchild

It really feels like I was never really a kid.

Not even in my preschool years. Important developmental stages sailed right past me without anyone noticing because I was so goddamned brighs

But looking back, I think someone should have noticed my lack of interest in toys and the absence of imaginary friends (and real ones) and wondered what the heck is up with that Bertrand kid.

Is he OK? Is he developing right? Should we be concerned?

Um, yeah. Probably. Especially after the rape.

Plus I was such a serious and self-contained child. I didn’t run around and holler. I didn’t play make believe. I didn’t relate to other kids my age at all.

And all through my childhood and adolescence, I just kept blowing past developmental milestones at warp speed.

No peer group in high school. No friends, no dates, no fumbling attempts at sex and/or romance, no crazy hormones making me butt heads with people.

Well if you were never really a child, how can you be a teen? Let alone grow into an actual functional adult?

And that’s why I am fifty pathetic years old and still as helpless as a child before even the most basic of life’s challenges.

I keep telling myself that I am just taking an unusual path through life and that this will all lead to something amazing some day, but that is asinine bullshit.

I ain’t going anywhere. The only thing in front of me is the grave. I will keep ignoring reality and hiding from life until I land in the hospital for good, and there I will languish until someone finally feels strongly enough about me to be bothered to pull the plug.

That’s my trajectory right now. And only serious change in my life will alter it.

Might as well get my loser’s gravesite picked out as soon as possible.

I’m sure there’s a landfill somewhere that will take me.

More after the break.

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What went wrong with me?

Or, to be more politically correct, what went “different”?

I wish I had a better memory of what I was like before I was raped when I was four. Because I think I was a fairly weird kid even before then, but I can’t be sure.

I know for sure that I was not nearly as fragile or painfully shy as I would become. I remember being very friendly and charming and, of course, precocious as all get-out.

Basically, I was the freckle-faced redheaded precocious little brother straight from Central Casting. I remember kind of taking being the center of attention for brief moments wherever I went for granted.

It’s possible the moments were more brief for me than they were for those cooing over me given my very short attention span.

And I know for certain that it was the rape that drove me so deep into my own mind. Like a lot of victims of sexual assault, I escaped to the only place available to me by tunneling deep into my own soul and making a cozy little burrow for myself in there.

But living life without leaving that cozy little burrow is very hard. I often imagine myself as some kind of amorphous sea creature sending out pseudopods into the world while remaining very firmly attached to the ocean floor, like a barnacle.

And you can get by that way but it’s very clumsy and awkward compared to actually being emotionally present and dealing with life directly. I would be much better off if I could let go of the ocean floor and evolve myself some actual legs and go out there and experience the god damned world already.

But in the real, non-metaphorical world, my legs stopped working.

That’s no excuse for not living, though. I could be getting a lot more out of life if I was just willing to put more of myself into it. To really invest in life instead of eking out a meager existence doing only high yield low investment things.

Like playing goddamned video games.

I could be having a lot more fun than video games could ever bring me if I could just put the video games down for long enough to try new stuff.

And all from the comfort of this computer chair of mine.

The internet is an entire world unto itself these days. I could be doing so much more with it. There’s all kinds of stuff happening here that I could be a part of.

But I will have to let go of the video games first. Not forever. Just for a couple of hours here and there. And with the games always there and ready for me if I get too freaked out by the bigger world and need to retreat to safety.

Time to progress from my sessile larval stage to my active adult stage.

And start looking for a mate.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s gorgeous out there.

But not in here. Where I am.

In here, it’s always cold, and dark, and lonely.

So like the narrator of this song, I can sit and watch those children, but I can’t join them.

Warning, this song is not depressing, but it is very sad.

I often felt like that kid growing up. Except that there was nothing wrong with me physically back then. I was just very depressed, and scared.

And nobody noticed, or cared.

But that’s because I hid it well. I don’t know why. I suppose all males have an urge to hide vulnerability, or did at least.

God, I hope it’s better now.

Back then, though, in the 70’s and early 80’s, vulnerability in boys was punished, usually by other boys. We were socialized to reflexively seize upon and mock any sign of “weakness” or femininity or softness in one another and so we learn at an early age to hide that shit and front like nothing bothers us.

But it does bother us. We’re just not allowed to show it.

Not even to ourselves.

And I guess I learned that lesson along with all the other boys despite being a big fat weirdo who was socially isolated and mostly clueless.

Gee, thanks, cultural osmosis.

But like billions of other men, I have discovered the truth Bill Withers wrote about in one of my favorite songs of all time :

To wit : Please
Swallow your pride
If I have faith
You need to borrow
For
No one can meet
Those of your needs
That you won’t let show

In other words, if you aren’t getting any TLC, maybe it’s because you’re not asking for any. If you go around pretending you’re invulnerable, nobody is going to give you the love and warmth and tenderness you crave.

To this day, I don’t “act” all sad and broken and depressed. When other people are around, my slick façade is firmly in place, and I seem friendly, open, confident, and bright. Nobody would suspect that I am deeply ill on so many levels.

And I don’t know how to change that yet. Our social mask is not easily discarded. It’s almost as old as we are. We learn to mask ourselves not long after toilet training and going against that deep a level of programming takes a lot more than willpower.

Plus I don’t even think it would be worth it. What would I gain by advertising my pain? In my experience, all it would do is make people uncomfortable and put them through the effort of brushing me off.

No wonder I got so bad at Doctor Chao.

Maybe when I was a kid, I might have attracted the attention of an adult who could help me if I had been able to drop the smartass attitude and shown them my pain.

But probably not. I wasn’t human back then, nor am I now.

I’m just some gross fat guy.

Just scrape me off and wash me down the sink.

More after the break.

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Love this to bits :

You should see him at Disneyland.

NDT (into bullhorn) : That is not a real mouse! Real mice are much smaller and they do NOT wear shorts. OR GLOVES.

Can’t stand him OR Bill Nye any more.

They have both become demagogues speaking only to their idolaters and spewing anti-religious hate and weaponized ignorance to the masses.

Damn do I miss Carl Sagan.

---

The mystery of Mustafa

Must not slip up and call him Mufasa.

Anyhow, ordered in. Donair Dude. Love their food and the price is pretty dang good too.

Our pal Skip tells me my driver will be Mustafa and he is on the way to DD. Boffo. It says my food should arrive in 30 minutes.

Works for me.

I play BG3 for a while, but quit because I mistakenly think the half hour mark since I ordered is coming up.

It had only been 13 mins. Could have kept playing. D’oh.

Oh well. I didn’t feel like loading the game up again so instead, I went to buy a month of the program I used to gank mp3’s off of YouTube.

That’s how I have done it for years now. When I want to get something, I buy a month’s subscription for like $12.

Not an option any more. Minimum buy is half a year. Well poop.

I say what the heck, toss them $35 CDN for a whole year. What the heck, I have the cashflow at the moment, and this way I don’t have to think about it for a year.

Oh. And it’s not called Music Keeper any more. Now it’s Aqua Tune, which sound to me like a toothpaste for singers. Whatever.

I get all that done and check on how Mustafa is doing with my order as the half hour mark had come and gone a while ago.

HE IS STILL ON THE WAY TO DONAIR DUDE.

What the fuck, Mustafa?

I look at the route he has taken. He passed right by Donair Dude twice!

Dude cannot find the frigging place.

I am pondering which hairs to pull out when I look at the tracker again and see that Mustafa is gone and now Francis is delivering my order.

At least in theory. Nothing has shown up yet and I ordered at 9:10 pm and it’s 10:15 PM.

Tracker says Francis is 7 minutes away. We shall see.

But I want to know what mysterious fate befell Mustafa.

I figure he fell into one of those reality glitches where you turn down a familiar road and end up in a completely unfamiliar neighborhood that you had no idea even existed, let alone how you could have missed it so many times.

I’ve had dreams like that, man. They are freaky, especially in retrospect.

Final arrival : 10:20 pm.

Whereabouts of Mustafa remain unknown.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I once heard an interview on the good old CBC with this follow who had achieved a simply absurd amount of success in both science and the arts, so the interview had to ask him : what’s the secret of your success?

And he thought about it for a moment, then said “Do the next thing. Always do the next thing. Don’t give yourself time to lose your way. Just do the next thing. ”

And that has stuck with me over the years because it intuitively struck me as correct. That seemed like the right way to live to me. Stay busy. Keep your irons hot. Rest when you need to, but only for as long as you need to, and with the aim of getting back into the action ASAP.

High energy people either learn this or end up deeply miserable. Take top comedian Kevin Hart. He is infamous for exercising a LOT. Like, he’s the kind of dude who starts his day by running the equivalent of a marathon for fun.

And what do you know, he’s one of those small-bodied high energy dudes. ^[1] And he has talked in interviews about how he had a lot of mental health issues growing up – ADHD, OCD, anxiety, and so on – and he didn’t get over them until he joined the track team in high school and learned to use exercise to relax.

Now there’s a dude who does the next thing.

But that lesson is a lot easier to miss if you are a lumbering lummox like myself. That same life force is pushing a lot more body, and that makes us more reluctant to invest energy in active things because everything we do costs us so much more.

That kind of thinking is a trap, though. We have these energies within us and it is not a matter of using them or losing them.

It’s a matter of using them or, like a young Kevin Hart, having them drive you insane.

Hence the wisdom of doing the next thing. I have wasted my entire adult life – and I am 50 – hiding from life and treating all the things that might make me feel more alive as if they were a horrible invading force trying to kill me.

And I want to change that. And I am trying to do so.

But it’s not going to be easy or fun. I have thirty years of bad habits and self-destructive fears to overcome. My entire being is geared according to this “grovel in the dark and try not to exist” mindset, and so while I have started pushing in the other direction, it will take a long time before my heading actually changes.

No matter what, though, I will not stop trying.

And the farther I go, the more of my energies I reclaim, and the stronger my efforts become, and so my rate of progress grows.

Now I just have to live long enough to reach that distant tipping point when it will all start running in the other direction.

The happy direction.

More after the break.

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I’m a bad boy…

…because my dinner doesn’t have any vitamin B12 in it tonight.

I’ve been pretty good about getting some B12 bearing animal products into my dinner most nights. It’s easy when I order in, because being a product of North American culture I am incapable of conceiving a meal without a meaty entree.

Heck, sometimes, like when I have a big Mac attack, there’s also cheese involved. That makes TWO sources of vitamin b12.

But tonight, I just…. couldn’t. I could not make myself put together a bologna and cheese or bacon and cheese sandwich. Neither of those looked good to me and my legs were hurting so I abandoned my kitchen mission early and came back to get my frigging munching and blogging on.

I have food here in my room with me. There is always my current trail mix handy, and I usually have a jar full of something snacky for between meal munching.

For decades I just plain did not eat between meals. It was a holdover for my early days in the GVRD when I was on regular welfare and it was a struggle to get enough food just to cover regular meals.

Snacking was out of the question.

And once I internalized that, it was a very difficult habit to break. I automatically and compulsively live as if I am trying to survive the Apocalypse and have to make absolutely every resources last as long as I possibly can stretch it, and that hasn’t been the case for 20 years.

It’s a stark reminder of how hard it is to get myself to just freaking relax and enjoy life. Hypervigilance is pervasive with depression and it can express itself in many different ways depending on the depressive’s personality.

In me, it doesn’t come out as overtly suspicious or mistrustful behaviour because a) I trust my empathy and perceptions to tell me who I can trust and b) overtly paranoid behaviour only attracts attention whereas being blandly friendly lets you blend in with the background to better monitor those around you.

More realistically, overt paranoia simply is not compatible with my laid back low energy low stress personality.

Paranoia is way too much work, man.

But when I try to break my austerity mindset and figure out how to actually enjoy life, all kinds of crazy shit comes crawling out of the woodwork and I realize that I have my own private brand of being loco in the coconut.

The truly bracing experience of mental illness comes when you know the thoughts in your head are crazy and you can’t stop thinking them anyway.

I struggle with that all the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.