I’ve been thinking about my inner coldness lately, and how much of it is self-induced.

I’ve talked many times about how strange it is that I am both a very warm and sensitive and caring person and extremely cold, analytical, and pragmatic.

I calculate because I care. But that’s not important right now.

What is important is my difficulty in fitting both these truths into a single conception of self .I can’t think of anyone, fictional or real, that encompasses such seemingly incompatible polar opposites.

Just lil ol’ me.

And I worry about what damage I have done to myself in the building of this massive megamind of mine. Is that where my instincts and drives went? Sacrificed on the altar of maintaining an “objectivity” so cold it’s superconductive?

And what’s the fucking point of that anyway? It is easy to justify it all quite flippantly by saying, “you’re always better off knowing the truth”, but I fucking doubt it.

In fact, I am pretty damned sure that you are better off being self-deluded, even if that delusion mainly takes the form of that collective veil of ignorance known as “normal”.

Oh yeah, I’m so much better off miserably freezing to death in my Midnight Tundra knowing the “truth” than those happy sheep living inside where it’s cozy and warm.

Generally speaking, there is nothing more important than being happy. Even ,my much vaunted merciless search for the truth has the ultimate goal of keeping me safe by letting me see the “big picture” and thus know what is really going on.

But how much reality do I really need? And at what point does my crystal clarity become more of a liability than an asset?

I want to feel warm and alive inside. I feel things so deeply and strongly sometimes. I want to connect, and cuddle, and care. I want to give people the love and hope and understanding they need in order to feel safe and warm.

And maybe, by giving it to them get some for myself as well.

Because I have all this love and care and understanding in my heart, so why can’t I give it to myself? Why is it all addressed to others?

Why can’t I feel my own light? Why am I freezing to death in the heart of a star?

Why am I so god damned numb?

Is it all jus a horrific overcorrection for anxiety? Because I am more than willing to say right now that anxiety is looking pretty good right now.

Could it really be worse than this arctic nightmare? Maybe I would be better off freaking out a lot. At least I would be feeling something.

Might be worth it if it let me come in from the cold.

It feels like I have no control over that. But that can’t possibly be true. How things have always been does not have to be how they will always be.

But to change that means to change me, and that means surrendering stability and safety in order to do some much needed repairs.

More after the break.

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Doctor, doctor…. one down

I feel like I still haven’t said what I set out to say in part 1.

But it will have to stew for a bit because right now, I got nuthin’.

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Saw Doctor Number One today, That would be Doctor Chao.

Went in there with no idea why I was there because they called me. And when you’re over 40 that is never a good feeling.

Because you know it ain’t good news. It’s not like I was going to go see Chao and have him tell me my latest test results were so good, they went to give me an award.

Nothing fancy. A small ceremony, a catered brunch, a few speeches. Business casual.

No, like I have said before and will likely say again, having the doctor’s office call you when you’re over 40 is the adult equivalent to being called to the Principal’s Office.

“Oh god. OK, give it to be straight, Doc. What did my body do this time?”

Luckily, this time, it was relatively benign. During my last visit. I had my history taken by a medical student.

Don’t worry, she gave it back later.

And afterwards, one of the suggestions that the student had to explain my symptoms was a cortisol disorder.

Doctor Chao thought that was an angle worth pursuing. So we’re doing that.

What that will entail is my taking a drug that mimics cortisol shortly before I go to bed and then getting my cortisol levels tested in the morning.

If my cortisol cycle is normal, by the time I wake up, my cortisol levels will be back to a normal low level by the morning.

But if the cycle is out of whack, my cortisol levels will remain high.

I suspect that will turn out to be the case because my sleep sucks. I rarely wake up feeling refreshed. Generally my best result is “eventually less tired than before”.

And if something is interfering with the removal of cortisol in my blood, that coujld explain a great many things.

Like that “rising background anxiety level.” Cortisol is a stress hormone and if it is accumulating in my bloodstream, that could make me feel anxious.

And get this, the symptoms of chronic high cortisol include weight gain, diabetes, and psychiatric disorders like depression.

So in that case, putting me on a drug that lowers my cortisol levels back to normal could make me skinny, non-diabetic, AND sane!

Not bad for one pill!

I won’t be doing the test tomorrow because tomorrow I have my all-important appointment with the neurologist, Doctor Madhani.

Hopefully, that will result in positive action towards a diagnosis and maybe even a referral for some physiotherapy to help treat my muscle weakness.

And who knows, maybe even let me walk again, thank Jesus.

I won’t tell you not to take being able to walk for granted because being grateful for all the bad things that are NOT happening to you is physically impossible.

But it wouldn’t hurt if. every once in a while, you thanked your legs for working.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think that, at an early age, I learned to protect myself by projecting innocence.

And by that, I mean as a gut level, “when in doubt look cute” level defense. It’s never been something calculated or planned, although I would be remiss if I did not admit I have consciously played it up after the fact a few times.

And it makes sense as a defense for the youngest of four kids, with the closest in age being my brother Dave, who is 4.3 years older than me.

When you’re the youngest and smallest and weakest, your best defense may well be the fact that you are cute and innocent looking and therefore your parents or other siblings will intervene on your behalf if one sibling tries to hurt you.

Heck, your assailant themselves might feel bad and stop.

And that works when you are a genuinely dumb and clueless little kid. But things get more complicated when you enter school.

The innocence defense doesn’t work on bullies. In fact, it attracts them like flies on shit.

And it only gets worse as you age. Trust me when I say that the innocence defense is not going to help you a lot when you’re a 50 year old fat dude.

People kind of expect you to have your shit together by now.

And one thing the bullies taught me was that the same behaviour that gets you sympathy when you are little arouses disgust and contempt when you get to be of school age and face the politics of the schoolyard.

Far worse, though, is the fact that in order to maintain your shield of innocence, you have to remain passive and harmless and helpless.

It feels like your very survival depends on it.

Which means that in a very real sense, you can’t grow up. If you did, you would lose your shield of innocence and despite all the hard lessons it has brought you, that is still the only defense against the world you know that works.

The only defense you have. That you know of.

And I guess it has, in a terrible way, worked for me so far. I have managed to dodge reality thus far, in large part, do to it.

And this is where this subject turns into a mental minefield full of ninjas for me because it combines doing a deadly dance with this instinctual innocence of mine, it adds a very twisty, tricky element of metaconsciousness to the mix.

Because it is nearly impossible for me to even think about this subject, let along write about it, without dealing with the issue of intention.

Talking about it makes me sound, even to myself, like this is all some kind of Machiavellian mind game of mine.

I guess the deliberate and strategic, chess-playing way I express myself sometimes could give people that impression.

To confound the fact, I can’t even say myself where to draw the line between instinct and intention. I know that I don’t ever “act innocent”. I am a very honest and sincere person, and I am not capable of that level of deception.

But that’s exactly what I would say if I was trying to seem as innocent as possible.

I swear I am not. It’s all instinct. Something I learned before I even had words to use to defend myself. When in doubt, be cute.

In that one sense, I guess I truly am “innocent”.

All in all, I think I’d rather have a life. I’d rather be happy.

Even if that means not being so innocent after all.

More after the break.

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Less than a leg

It’s looking like the worsening of my “condition” is permanent. Damn it.

Ever since last Thursday or so, I have felt heavier than ever. I just stand up and my muscles start screaming. Just making it to the car and into Denny’s and back took a lot out of me tonight. More than ever before.

Luckily, I can compensate somewhat by being very careful with how I grip the walker. I am learning (out of necessity) how to keep my body somewhat rigid so that my weight is distributing more onto my bones and the walker and less on my major muscle groups.

Because like I said before, it’s in my arms now too. And that really scares me. Not being able to walk any more. even with the walker, would be terrible, don’t get me wrong.

But I spend most of my time sitting or lying down already. And wheelchairs are a thing, and they are roughly as wide as my walkers, if not a little smaller, so if I can get around in my walkers, I can get around in my wheelchair.

Ergo, if my legs stop working entirely, it would be horrible, but survivable.

But I don’t know what the hell I would do if my arms stop working. I would presumably have to get braces on them or something if they become too weak to hold my hands up so I can type.

Luckily, as far as I can tell, that’s a long ways off. My arms feel heavy and weak but are perfectly fine for ordinary tasks like typing and eating and such.

But the writing is on the wall. If I don’t find a way to halt the progress of this disorder – whatever it may be – then it’s a steady slide into gooberdom, where I will end up paralyzed and full of tubes and unable to do anything but lay there and internally scream myself hoarse out of the sheer gibbering madness that my locked in state has engendered in me.

And all because my FUCKING GP dropped the ball on my case.

Well my trip to the neurologist this Tuesday is Doctor Chao’s last chance. If that produces something approaching an actual result, then Chao is off the hook.

But if, as I suspect, this Doctor Madhani turns out to be even more useless than Chao, I am going to complain to the College about both of them.

And then I am going to start contacting lawyers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

Too bad it still holds all the cards.

By the deeper mind, I mean the deepest, truest, most fundamental level of your consciousness that exists. It is the “you” that has always been. It was “you” before you were even born. And it is the “:you”: that has answered to your name ever since you were old enough to know what it was.

Everything you are and have become is built upon this foundation. And no matter how tall we grow, it remains the soil in which our tree of life grows.

And it is very, very stupid.

How could it not be, if it came into being when we were nothing years old? Compared to it, our adult minds are dizzyingly complex metropolises full of bustling thoroughfares of thought and emotion and enormous office blocks of memory and knowledge.

But all of that is merely an extension of that early, primitive, deeper mind. We are like vast computer networks full of powerful microchips and intelligent machinery hooked up as peripherals to a calculator.

No matter how high we climb and how big we grow, it is still “us”.

This is a primary truth that cannot be altered. And yet, we try to escape it by any means we can. We are constantly deluded by our latecomer rational minds into thinking that if we just let it have its way, we can somehow escape our deeper selves and become beings of “pure thought”, or somesuch.

As if a tree can grow tall enough to no longer have roots. Such is the folly of asceticism.

I am convinced that many of our most persistent and crippling psychological and/or spiritual issues involve terrible injuries to this deeper self, and that these injuries cannot truly be healed by dealing solely through the higher branches that we think of as “us”.

True healing, the kind that lasts because it does more than merely alleviate the symptoms, it fixes the problem, can therefore only come from dealing with this deep and fundamental self and giving it what it needs to repair itself.

And that might well be something that strikes the advanced adult mind as absurd, or obscene, or humiliating, or just plain wrong.

Do it anyway, folks. Because unless it will ruin your life by landing you in traction and/or jail, it will be so much more than worth it.

It may well fix your entire life.

All of this is kind of bad news for lofty intellectuals like myself. I have obviously gone down the intellectual path for many a mile.

I mean, just look at how I talk. And write.

And that is never going to change. And it doesn’t have to. It is not necessary for us to abandon the city of the mind in order to work on the shotgun shack of the deeper self.

All that is needed is for us to surrender our intellectualism and bow to the fact that even we mightiest of minds are still nothing but calculators with fancy peripherals, and if we are to be whole and healthy and happy, it is the calculator that we need to fix.

And in the future, we will be vastly better off if we remember what we really are.

More after the break.

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Life on Mount Olympus

It is metaphorically obvious that if, like me, you live with your head in the clouds most of the time, you are going to be very out of touch with whatever is going on way, way down there in the roots of our psyche.

Which is a shame, because that’s where the crazy lives.

But while I consider myself a pragmatist and therefore far too sensible for such obvious nonsense as asceticism, I am nevertheless extremely cerebral by nature and have been withdrawing further and further from the real, extracranial world ever since I was raped at the age of 4, and that means I am very far from those roots indeed.

So trust me when I say that this loss of contact with your true, fundamental self can really fuck you up good. Intellectualism seems like a good refuge from your troubles, and it can be, but by that very token, it can keep you from solving them, too.

This is how I became so detached from the world of the senses. Which is not very realistic or pragmatic of me.

I have a strong and defining lifelong pattern of keeping my contact with the real world of the five senses to an absolute minimum, preferring to get almost all of my input via the consumption of media like books, TV shows, video games, and YouTube.

Thus my contact with the real, sensory world is reduced to only the “safe”: audiovisual world of life seen through screens.

Which doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that the world of the mind without sensory input from the real world is highly unstable. The mind needs to be grounded in the sensory world or it becomes a very dangerous echo chamber that amplifies and multiplies every little fear, doubt, and evil voice until you can’t hear yourself think.

I know the exit from my depression runs directly through the world of the senses. I need to make and maintain firm contact with the real world so I can get the hell out of my head and maybe establish to my dumb deep self’s satisfaction that the world is real.

It’s real and true and unlike the eternal internal tempest of my mind, it is stable and predictable. My bed will still be there tomorrow whether I put any effort into believing in it or not. It doesn’t need my mental resources to stay real.

Unlike all my thousands of hours of virtual experiences, which exist almost entirely of data and have only the weak input of screens to keep them real.

I know a lot. But without sensory memories – experiences – none of it is real.

Right now, I don’t know the way out of this mess. I know that none of my usual tools like analysis and intellectual insight will get me there. I am going to have to go far deeper than such crudely logical tools can ever go.

And that means I have to stand there staring at the chasm between me and the real world until I learn to fly.

Knowing that the only way to learn may be to jump.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

If I’m lucky.

I am very afraid that my “condition” has gotten worse.

By “condition” , I of course mean whatever the fuck disease I have that has been making my muscles get progressively weaker over the last five years or so.

You know, that disease Doctor Chao forgot all about for six months. Six months in which I assumed he was hot on the trail of a diagnosis and maybe even treatment for me.

But no. Must have slipped his mind.

It’s not like I am kinda bitter about that, though.

It’s that I am INCREDIBLY bitter about it, and if things continue to get worse and I lose my ability to walk completely, I am going to both file a complaint with the College of Surgeons and Physicians about him AND sue the pants AND underwear off him.

He’ll be lucky if I don’t take the crotch lint too.

And that point might not be that far away, because for the last three or four days, walking has been both more painful and more tiring than ever before.

Or at least since I got out of the hospital last August.

This morning’s trip to Wound Care was a real trial. Wound Care is the hardest thing I do in a week because I have to walk from the parking lot to the elevator, then through the door into the Community Clinic, through the reception area, then down a long (for me) corridor to the waiting area, then into the room where they do my Wound Care where I wash my hands then go to whichever cubicle we’re using this time.

Then it’s back out to the corridor, through reception, down the elevator, and back to the parking lot where Julian is waiting with the car.

Back when my legs worked, that would have been no big deal, even for a fat fuck who is so out of shape he’s non-Euclidian, like me.

But now it’s a grueling death march, and every time my condition gets worse, it gets longer and harder for me.

And I am pretty sure this is my last stop on the locomotion locomotive. If my condition gets much worse, I will have to switch to using a wheelchair.

I know I have said that before, but this morning was so bad that I think this time it is really and truly for real, dawg.

However, I must point out that this could all be temporary. The cause could be something transitory like an infection or a subtle injury, and I might well wake up Monday and find that things are back to the previous level of misery.

And I might not.

And mine is a temperament that demands that I work out the worst case scenario in my head in order to be able to calm down about something that worries me.

It always makes me feel better to take a nebulous, unquantifiable, shadowy fear and transform it into something defined, limited, and known.

There’s a price, though, because once you do that,. it’s real. No backsies.

More after the break.

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Timeline of an “attack”

An attack of what? Fucked if I know.

Around 8:30 pm, I got out of bed after a brief nap. And apparently, I got up too fast, because I immediately start feeling very ill.

I settle in to play some Baldur’s Gate 3 anyhow. I had been stuck on a very hard fight with a (non sentient) spider queen the size of a backhoe for a long time, and I wanted to get back to playing the rest of the now spider free game.

9 pm, I order myself some lovely food from Donair Dude. And once more I notice how reasonably priced the special is. $12 for lamb, my choices of sauces (creamy garlic and Halifax sweet donair), and four of those odd spherical boiled potatoes.

Throw in a 591 ml of beverage plus tax, fees, and tip, and it comes to $23, which is $4 less than my usual McD’s order runs me, and way healthier.

But my future enjoyment of it is in great peril because I am feeling worse and worse. And according to the app, the food is taking an oddly long time to be prepared.

I assume that’s just because a) it’s Friday night and b) the food is so damned good.

9:30 pm or so, and my symptoms have gotten so bad that I have to stop playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and lay down and do crosswords on my tablet instead. I am very nauseous, I’m sweating like an icecube in July, my head hurts, and my heart is pounding hard on my ribcage.

And that really hearts.

Plus I have that feeling like someone is very firmly holding my heart in their hand.

And it just keeps getting worse. And my food is going to arrive around 10 pm.

Just before 10 pm. The food arrives and I have to tell Julian to put it on my computer chair when he fetches it from the door for me because I have to go poop NOW.

About 10:15 pm, I have evacuated my bowels (please form an orderly line in front of the anus) and I feel a million times better.

So I guess the whole thing was an all too familiar kind of IBS augmented by sinus (and eustachian tubes) congestion attack after all.

The cardiac type symptoms were just a red herring, I guess.

But I do know one thing : that was not mere heartburn. I mean, I don’t think it was a heart attack or anything, but there was definitely more going on than acid reflux.

I can only assume that there was some kind of soft blockage in my lower intestine that caused a buildup of pressure behind it, and when I finally defecated, that let the blockage pass and suddenly the pressure was gone and I felt way, way better.

Gotta love those residual endorphins.

I’ve had dozens of attacks like that in the 30 years or so I have had IBS. I don’t have them very often, maybe two or three times a year, and often they are milder than the one I just had, which is why I did not recognize it as such right away.

So in the end, it was just another evening in the exciting, action packed life of a 50 year old fat dude who is slowly dying of something or other.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is impossible for me to be calm about money.

Maybe if I had more of it – a LOT more – I could relax and not sweat the expenses, but until that hallowed day, I will worry about money.

Especially lately, having just survived a god damned five week month.

It’s a fundamental part of my Taurus nature. Taurus is an Earth sign and the Earth signs are bound to the literal, physical, practical stuff of life.

Taurus in particular has the karmic mission to accumulate value, whether that is in the form of money, or knowledge, or decorative coasters with topless women on them.

We are the sign of the hoarder. Not the only one, but the biggest one.

And that means we are always aware of how much money we have and how much the things we want cost.

For me, emotional security and financial security are virtually the same thing. I can only be calm and content if I do not feel I have everything covered, money wise. If I am worried about how I am going to pay for everything, I am going to fret about it.

That’s why these fucking five week months do such a number on me. They wreck my sense of emotional and/or financial security

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And speaking of fucking with my sense of security, I just lost around 150 words of work when my image rendering crashed my computer.

Which means no making pervy images while I blog for me for a while. Damn it.

It’s so much fun!

What I don’t get is how I lost so much when I have it set to back up my work every five minutes. And I am prolific but I can’t type 150 words in five minutes.

That would be two words a second! 120 WPM!

And as very patient readers know, losing anything I write is like a death in the family for me. The things I write are a part of me, an extension of me, and so to lose even 150 words is a terrible blow to me.

I’m telling you, being sensitive is not for wimps. Normal people don’t go through this shit. They don’t feel things as deeply as I do.

But I would not trade places with them for anything. Being the sensitive, empathic, caring person I am brings me more than it can ever cost.

Anyhow, where was I?

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And even the end of the five week famine^[1] doesn’t immediately make things better because I ran out of a lot of things in those five weeks, so now I have a spend a whole bunch on groceries just to get back to normal.

It never ends.

Not until I get a way to earn money that I can handle, anyhow. That would cure both my poverty and my feeling like a worthless, toxic, loathsome burden on society.

Yeah, I know that I am not supposed to feel that way any more. I’m working on it.

Well tonight I am going to treat myself to some McD’s to make up for last night’s debacle with the non functioning Skip code.

More after the break.

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More pervy art!

I just love that word “pervy”. It’s like a cuter form of “perverted”. Way less pejorative and nasty and judgey too.

I mean, only very nasty people are perverted. But we’re all a little pervy, ay?

Thanks for that one, Brits!

On with the smut!

But of course,. first we start with something wholesome.

Nothing to see here, just your standard clownfish in a bowtie at a party in space pic.

It’s fun to throw random words together and see what kind of picture they make.

Got my McD’s. MY usual Big Mac Extra Value Meal (medium fries, large Diet Coke) plus a Carrot muffin.

If Skip the Dishes was a person, I’d be able to just tell them I want “the usual”.

Now for something racy…. and lacy.

Fair warning, though, I already have a pretty good idea what’s inside.

(stage whisper) IT’S A PENIS!

And boy, does it look enticing like that.

Up next, some prime, grade A beefcake.

That, of course, is Chief Bogo, voiced by none other than Idris Elba, from the furriest movie of this century, Zootopia.

And to think,. I can summon him up with but a few words, and make him do whatever the hell I want him to do.

God damn we live in an age of miracles and wonder.

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God damn I am getting sick of rebooting.

You see, when my computer is not crashing due to my overtaxing my graphics card with all this image rendering, it’s suddenly disconnecting from the internet.

Which is kind of a pain when you’re in the middle of blogging. Grrr.

I fucking hate being interrupted!

My only solution to this has been to completely power down the computer, including switching the power off at the power supply, waiting five seconds, then turning it back on and booting it up again.

That seems to remind it that the internet is a thing.

It’s been happening often enough that I feel the need to find a less drastic method of recovery though. Like re-intialising…. something.

Anyhow, back to the smut.

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Running out of words, so I feel I now owe you people something completely filthy.

Let’s see what we have… ah, how about a nice healthy squirting?

Because remember, boys (including you straight boys), you will never cum faster, harder, or better than when you prostate is being stimulated.

Hmmm. What am I missing. Well, I haven’t done any ladies. Or pee.

I have just the thing! Take it away,. Donna Duck!

In this figure, we see our good friend Donna Duck demonstrating her novel and highly efficient method for keeping her favorite dildo moist while she is using it.

One more pic. Something truly nuts. Um, within limits.

Trust me when I saw I am not putting a lot of my most perverted works here because I don’t want to completely alienate my readers.

I mean, most people can handle some pee, but….

Speaking of which, here’s our finale.

Daffy, being a duck of refined tastes. prefers his man-piss to be as fresh as he possibly can get it, so naturally, he drinks it straight from the tap.

As you can see, he clearly approves of this vintage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Like I said before, I have started my second playthrough of Balfur’s Gate 3.

This time I am a ranger named Illit. No reason or meaning for the name, I was eager to get started and it was literally the first thing that popped into my head.

Not sure how I ended up with a ranger. I thought I was making a rogue who was good at archery. Apparently, to the game, that means “ranger”.

Not that I mind. Rangers are cool. And I get to have an in-game pet. I chose a wolf. But not an ordinary wolf, oh no. Not in a fantasy universe.

He’s a fluffy, shaggy wolf. Who is the size of a cow.

He came to me with the name Lupus, which is laaaaame. That’s just a step a way from having a dog named Dog.

Oh sorry, a dog named Canis. Yeesh. Boring AND pretentious.

It’s a bit of an adjustment to get used to not being a heavy duty spellcaster any more. Especially when combined with the usual second playthrough shock of going from my mega powerful first incarnation to my wimpy low level second one.

The urge to wipe out a band of goblins with a lighting strike lingers within me.

But filling them with arrows will have to do. If I really get desperate to fling spells again, I could always start over as a Necromancer.

That’s an actual subclass of Wizard in BG3, which is cool. I have played a Necromancer in other games, and what I love most about them is having minions to send into battle so they can get beat up instead of me.

It’s even better when you’re a Summoner because then you don’t have to find a dead person before making a new minion.

Sadly, there is no Summoner class or subclass in BG3. And being a Necromancer sucks at first because you don’t actually get the spell to raised the dead as your mindless thrall until you’re level 5.

Maybe someone out there made a Summoner mod.

Speaking of which, I have started the process of modding my BG3. I don’t usually mod games on the first playthrough except if there is a fix for a really annoying interface issue or something else that makes things a lot easier to deal with.

But now that the game doesn’t hold a lot of surprises for me any more, I feel free to mess around with it in order to spice things up.

Kind of like buying a sex manual to spice up your marriage. But nerdier.

My main concern with modding BG3 is that I have not exactly been playing the game the normal way, through Steam.

Way way back when I first got the game and it was crashing all the time, I did everything I could to minimize resource usage, and that included running the game directly from its directory instead of going through Steam.

That means I have to shut down Steam every time I play.

If I forget to do that, a “data mismatch error” pops up, and that is what makes me concerned about mods not working right.

Oh well. I can always uninstall and reinstall the game and hope I can find a way to stop the crashing while still using the Steam version.

Who knows, maybe there has been a patch since then that fixed the whole thing.

More after the break.

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God damned Monopoly

McDonalds Monopoly, that is.

I was so excited when Felicity kindly gave me the $20 gift code for Skip the Dishes she won as an instant prize from this round of the McDonald’s Monopoly game.

Not only was that a lovely and generous gift, but it came at just the right time because I am out of money on my credit card and was therefore not going to be able to order in tonight, and Tuesday is one of the nights I order in.

And that would make me sad.

But with $20 from Felicity’s Monopoly win, I could still order in! Yay!

And that was the plan, but god damn it, for some damned reason the code on the playing piece does not work.

I had to get Julian to read the code off to me because the letters and numbers are way too small for my weak old eyes and my glasses make me farsighted so they’re no help.

And we went over that code a zillion times and the code we were entering was definitely the code on the playing piece, so we have no idea WTF.

I even tried entering the code into the McD’s app on the weird off chance that

And it really pisses me off and makes my mood foul because it’s two things I can’t stand : a disappointment, and something that makes no sense.

Patient readers know that I do not handle disappointment well. It tends to completely wreck my mood. Just throws into right down into the basement with all the mildew and dust and centipedes big enough to be audible.

God that thing scared the crap out of me.

And it doesn’t make any fucking sense. What series of events could possibly lead to an incorrect code ending up on a Monopoly piece?

On the other paw, I am sure Julian got the code right. He is very conscientious, and so he checked it a bunch of times to be absolutely sure.

So I dunno. None of it makes any sense. I have no choice but to suck it up and move on, because short of buying a big ol magnifying glass so I can read the damned thing myself, I can’t think of a way to fix it.

In retrospect, I could have ordered from Pizza Hut instead, because as long as you are ordering from their website, they still take cash.

And I have cash. Just not in a “spendable online” form.

I really need to get myself some kind of virtual credit card that can take direct deposit so I can point my monthly check to it and have it ALL be spendable online right away.

And to hell with PayPower AND Vancity!

I will talk to you nice people again tmorrow.

Have I used that title before? I’m too lazy to check.

Anyhow. I have been getting impatient with my proclivity for napping.

Patient readers know I nap a lot. My sleep is broken up into one and a half hour naps distributed more or less evenly throughout the day.

This is not healthy. Normal sleep is eight hours in a row at night (minus occasionally getting up to pee) for a reason. We need sustained deep sleep in order to truly refresh and renew ourselves in both body and mind.

And most people don’t even reach deep sleep for at least an hour.

What bothers me even more, though, is my emotional dependence on napping. Patient readers also know that I use napping as a somewhat crude way to regulate mood vis a vis using my naps to reset my always rising background anxiety level.

And it works. But at what cost?

Because the need to nap influences more than just how much I sleep. It weighs on my entire day as the thought of having to go more than, say, three hours without sleep fills me with dread and doing anything that takes me away from my bed for too long makes me very anxious.

It’s like sleep is the hidey hole I dive into when I am feeling freaked out and need to hide from the entire world for a while.

Because, like I have said before, sleep is like death without the commitment. It’s the closest thing we have to being able to die and come back.

When you are asleep, you don’t have to deal with anything. You are safe from the world and all its pressures, demands, emotions, and stimuli.

It is therefore the ideal refuges for those of us who are so fragile that even the very low stimulus life of a reclusive shut-in can be (and often is) too much for us.

But I don’t want to be that way any more. I want to be robust and healthy and strong. I am sick to death of being deathly sick and timid and fragile and weak. I want to be strong enough of will and fiber and wherewithal to face the world and handle it instead of hiding from everything like a victim of shellshock.

That kind of cowardice is unworthy of me. I am a god damned wizard, Harry, and my great powers demand respect. I am, by any reasonable standard, an amazing human being, and I have no good reason to cringe in shame and scurry into the shadows like a startled cockroach whenever struck by the light of day.

Fuck that, and fuck YOU if you think I deserve to feel that way.

I am magnificent. I am incredible. I am supreme.

And I can do whatever the hell I want to do because I have the power.

I have the power, the ability, the courage, and the confidence to rock this crazy old world and show it I mean business.

I don’t have to hide from the world.

The world should hide from me.

Cause I am coming for it, and I am going to shake. Shit. UP.

More after the break.

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Kickstart my heart

Still think there might be something up with my heart.

I am still getting occasional attacks of feeling very ill indeed when I stand up,

Heart pounding, head throbbing, stomach churning, room spinning, palms sweating, no good, very bad feelings abounding attacks of some sort.

And the bad feeling lingers on. Not at the same intensity, thank God, or I would probably die (or at least call for help), but I sat down after getting food half an hour ago and I still feel fairly ill.

My appetite sure as fuck disappeared in a hurry.

If it wasn’t for the pounding in my chest, it could all be attributable to my chronic low grade sinus issues plus whatever it is behind my temples that gets squeezed by the sinus pressure and makes me feel just awful.

I should probably mention that issue to someone medical some day. It’s just that I have so many issues that it’s hard to remember them all.

But the heart palpitations are new. I can feel them in my chest and head them in my ears and feel them pulsing in my head during these attacks and it worries me.

It’s true that the people at the ER gave my heart a good check. Chest X-rays, EKG, two rounds of bloodwork. All aces on that front.

But they were looking for the sort of things that might kill me right then and there. They were not looking for the more subtle things that warn of future badness.

Or that might be my latent hypochondria talking. I dunno.

But for very good reasons, I am quite paranoid about my cardiac health. I am at just the right age for things to start going boom in my ticker just like with all my male relatives, so the phrase “ticking time bomb” is not necessarily hyperbolic.

I get prolix when I’m nervous.

Luckily for me, I don’t have a lot of the risk factors they had. I don’t have a lot of stress or pressure in my life, I don’t have an unhealthy diet full of cholesterol and salt and fat and excess carbs, I don’t drink alcohol at all except on Christmas Day.

On the minus side, I barely move. I spend most of my time either lying in bed or sitting in front of this computer. There are people with desk jobs who move more than me.

At least they have to get to and from their cars and to and from the vending machines and the break room.

Me, I toddle back and forth from bedroom to kitchen three times a day and that is the closest thing to exercise I get.

And one of those times involves me sitting down and watching TV with J&J for an hour to and hour and a half part way through.

And I want to change that. I want to move more. But I am afraid.

Afraid that moving more will actually make things much worse. That it will set something off in my muscles or my heart or my blood sugar or whatever.

So I am not going to start pushing myself more than just a little without having something who knows about these things supervising me.

Basically, I need physio, or something a lot like it.

Maybe then I can get my legs back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Early this morning, around 4:30 am, I beat Baldur’s Gate 3.

And I am happy with the ending. I beat the Elder Brain known as the Absolute and saved all of the titular city of Baldur’s Gate, and probably everyone else in Faerun, from her cruel and selfish mind control.

Well, the voice was female and she is referred to as female throughout the game. It’s not like she had a giant vulva or anything.

SPOILER WARNING : From here on in, I will be discussing the end-game portion of Baldur’s Gate 3 in some detail, so if you plan on playing the game yourself and don’t want the end spoiled, spin on.

Unfortunately, in order to beat the Mother Brain I felt I had to take the final step and become an illithid (or Mind Flayer) myself.

Looking back, it might not have been strictly necessary. I didn’t use any of my cool illithid powers in the final battle, after all. Just my awe-inspiring sorcery.

And the final battle was suitably epic and difficult and lengthy to be the climax of a very long and detailed (and well written) game, without being too crazy about it and making me want to beat my head against the wall in frustration.

In fact, throughout the game, I found the challenge level to be about right for me. Not so high as to destroy all hope but hard enough to make me have to really think about how to go about certain battles and trying various tactics till I found one that worked.

And I enjoyed that.

I beat the Mother Brain on around the fifth or sixth try. There were a lot of problems to overcome (including a full sized freakin’ dragon) and I had to figure out how best to use my newly acquired “summon allies” ability.

See, one of the neato things about the game is that as you adventure, you help people (or at least, I do, because hero) and in return, they promise that you can call on them when the time comes for you to fight the final fight.

And you can! And I never would have won against the Mother Brain without them.

After all, someone had to keep that freakin’ dragon busy while I did the thing with the thing to make her vulnerable.

All that work (including starting the whole fight over once) really paid off though, because in that last, successful run I completely kicked ass.

My people and I deployed our allies to keep the various Mother Brain minions off my ass while I cast the necessary spell.

The final obstacle to beating her once I gained entry into her inner sanctum had been the fact that when I damaged her there, she unleashed a “brainquake” that that damaged me in return.

So this time, I made sure to save my ability to cast a single sixth level spell until I got to her, then cast Globe of Invulnerability on myself so I could fry her ass with my lightning spells with impunity.

That felt pretty darn good. I was very proud of myself for pulling that off.

And of course, after going through the ending cutscenes et al, I did what I always do these days and immediately started another playthrough.

It’s how I deal with my tendency towards post-victory depression. And it works.

I debated having my new character be a necromancer. Having an ever-growing army of of the undead sounds like a lot of fun.

But I decided that was too similar to being a sorcerer like my previous character, so I opted to be my other default character type, an archer/sharpshooter.

Dunno why I love playing those, but my Moon sign is Sagittarius, which is the sign of the Archer, so…. ?

Dunno how long my second playthrough will last. Rarely do I end up going though the entire game again, though it’s been known to happen with really good games.  

There is still one thing in the first playthrough I might do, though. At the end, you are given a choice : destroy the Mother Brain, or enslave her to and conquer the world.

I, of course, chose to destroy her.

But I must admit, I am kinda curious about the other ending….

More after the break.

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Mood plus one, plus one

Feeling a bit better lately. A bit more chipper and positive and optimistic.

I think it’s because I’m on an upswing after a low point. Yesterday morning I had one of my moments when all my frustration and disappointment and impotent rage and untapped energy reaches a crescendo and I feel like screaming my head off.

And for many, many years, I feared and dreaded these moments because they were very painful and scary and really made me feel like I was going insane.

But now I relish them because I have finally learned to take that energy surge and focus on the iceberg around my heart like a laser beam and get some serious melting done.

My other image of this process is of my using the energy to pry open the jaws of my depression and push them off myself.

Like I am forcing my heart to finally open the hell up.

Either way, it works. And I hope to learn to do this miracle of redirection all the time and not just during these rare surges.

Any time I am feeling frustrated or bored or hopeless, I will take that energy and turn it on the blockages in my spirit that are cutting off my life energy like I have a bad case of arteriosclerosis of the soul.

Hopefully, if I keep blasting away, I will open up the channels within me and my life force will flow to all the areas it needs to go and I will finally be truly alive.

Possibly for the first time in my life.

And I am making myself ready for it. I am opening my mind as much as I can in order to make it ready to accept and embrace the higher level of stimulation that being truly alive represents, and to hell with what my Trog has to say about it.

He is on his way out anyhow. I am chasing him out of every corner of my mind where I find him and sealing the doors behind him as I go.

He’s old news. Bad news. And I don’t need him any more.

Maybe I never did.

Either way, motherfucker has got to go.

So consider this your eviction notice, you whiny little wimp.

We are moving up, so you are moving OUT.

So fuck you forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what my username on e6ai.net should have been! Lou Dart!

Because I make lewd art. Get it?

Anyhow, I keep making the stuff so I figured I would share some more of it.

DISCLAIMER : The following is absolutely filthy in more than one sense of the word.

But we will start off, as usual, with something wholesome.

Awww, ain’t he a sweetie? I just want to pick him up and cuddle him and nuzzle his lil ears and the top of his head.

Or give his fluffy lil tummy a good rubbing. I bet he’d love that.

I also did this one,.

He looks like he’s going off to have an adventure!

One last wholesome piece. This one comes with a story.

That’s a good question because the wombat on the left, in the red jacket, just showed up spontaneously when I was messing around with Captain Wombat.

I wanted to give Stable Diffusion a challenge so I told it to draw a wombat in a bomber jacket and a captain’s hat drinking a milkshake.

I never told it to give him an “affectionate companion”, but here we are!

I’d say that was his First Mate, but no, that was ages ago.

On to the smut! Starting with a master giving his dog his favorite treat.

This is the only time I have managed to make a pic of cock sucking where more than just like half the tip is in the mouth.

So of course, it came while I was trying to get it to depict rimming. Something I have yet to get it to do.

One would think showing a furry with their tongue against someone’s butthole would be a lot less complicated than a penis disappearing into a canine muzzle, but here we are.

And now for the token bit of female content for this set of pics.

This is what Simba saw right after Nala gave him that “come hither” look in during “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” in Disney’s The Lion King.

I love her eager, playful, horny expression. She knows that she’s got the goods and she is looking forward to putting them to good use.

Whereas she saw something kind of like this :

And of course, into everyone’s life, a little rain must fall, so…

Here we catch Professor Dingo in the act of marking your homework.

Professors often need relief from the buildup of academic pressure.

And here we have a handsome rat demonstrating the two major kinds of shower :

I wonder if he needs help scrubbing?

And finally, we see what happens when one of our golden boys goes pro.

I love my imagination. Don’t you?

Don’t ask why the pipe is there, though. It just showed up too.

More after the break.

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Pain heralds growth, growth brings pain

Growth often hurts.

That’s because fall into the trap of having a fixed sense of self that resist all change, no matter how positive, as if it was a threat to our very life.

And so we fight our own evolution, Often successfully, I’m sad to say.

None more so than me. My bunker mentality of continuous crisis mode has made me cling to the life I have like it’s my only shelter in a killer storm. One that is barely big enough to fit me because it was made by and for a child, and therefore I have had to stay scrunched up in a ball just to stay minimally “safe”.

And certainly, in such a fix, growth is out of the question. In fact, all growth must be brutally suppressed as the mortal threat it surely must be.

After all, we don’t want to end up out there in the storm, do we?

But there is no storm. Hasn’t been one for more than thirty years. I’m living in fear of a crisis that simply does not exist, and that’s the hard truth of the matter.

In fact, the fear persists despite all the evidence against it precisely because the system relies on it. If I was to truly accept and embrace that nuclear winter is over and it’s safe to leave my underground bomb shelter and return to the surface. my whole way of life would collapse and I really would have to grow and evolve and adapt.

And by this point, that would be such an enormous change that it really does feel like death. Or worse than death, chaos.

There are a lot of times people would rather die – or kill – rather than live in a world that no longer makes any sense to them.

And it only gets worse as you get older and less able to adapt. Including myself. So if I am going to get over this whole fixed sense of self nonsense, it bad better be soon.

So here goes.

Who I am now is but one step towards who I will be tomorrow, and that person will be but a stepping stone to the next, and the next, and so on till the day I die.

Just as I know that I am the same person that I was when I was a child, despite how much I have changed since then, I know that no matter how much I change in the future, I will still be me.

There is no threat to who I am as a person, no matter how I grow, or how much I change, or who I become.

So there is no need to fight to stay the same. Let the changes come. Let the growth begin. Let the walls fall down to let the sunshine in.

Let me become.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve told this story here before, so I will try to be brief.

Once, when I was a miserably depressed elementary school student, some well meaning adult at my school told me, “everything is going to be all right. ”

Clearly that person (I forget who it was) was trying to soothe and reassure me.

But I was an occasionally quite volatile little bundle of brains and nerves and mental illness, so I replied by angrily saying, “You can’t say that! You don’t know that! You can’t predict that! You don’t control that!”.

As I recall, they were quite shocked and upset by my reaction. And the truth is, despite the fact that I was a child at the time, I do feel a little bad about that.

On the other hand, I stand by my statements, and I am not sure that my reaction would be any different if someone said that to me today.

Don’t come to me with your mindless positivism. Fuck that shit. The truth is, statements like that hurt me terribly and that’s why I lash out.

Because the tone in warm but the content is bullshit. It’s nonsense. It has no actual content to it but it acts like it does and so, to me, it’s like an Xmas present with nothing inside – an empty promise containing nothing but bitter disappointment.

There’s something very Gen X about that sentiment. I had to deal with a lot of puerile positivism from useless goddamned ex-hippies in my childhood.

Guess I am still bitter about it.

But I wanted to talk about that bad reaction I had today because it’s been on my mind as an example of how things went wrong with me somewhere.

Because that’s not a normal reaction. I can’t say I understand it, but most people find statements like that reassuring and appreciate hearing them.

That goes triple for kids.

I can only assume that, for the unbroken, the sentiment is what is important and the actual content is secondary, They are, essentially, reassured because someone is reassuring them, and it’s as simple as that.

There is also the question of faith. The simplest definition of faith is the belief without evidence, and if one is capable of that, then believing things are going to be okay just because someone (like a parent) you know and trust said so is not that big a deal.

I wish I could do that. It would make things so much easier.

But when I lost my innocence to a stranger’s cock when I was four years old, I lost my capacity for trust and faith at the same time.

I figured out at far too young an age that adults were full of shit and didn’t know any more than I did (and often a lot less) and I think that really hurt me.

I intuit that faith in one’s parents and adults in general is necessary to healthy development because it acts as the foundation for the child’s entire ability to trust in their own safety and without that, the child becomes incredibly insecure.

Just like me.

And well, if one of those adults turns out to be a monster that rapes you.. and you can’t even tell anyone about it or think about it or anything… and you have no religious faith to run to either…. well, faith and hope never really stood a chance, did they?

And being bullied while the teachers ignored it took care of any chance I had to believe in the system as well.

No wonder I am still broken after all these years.

It’s a wonder I can function at all.

More after the break.

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Getting the bad out

When a patent repeats a behaviour over and over, it generally means that the behaviour is expressing something that the patient ha no other way to express and that the behaviour cannot express fully in one go, so it has to be repeated.

That’s why I end up talking about the same crappy things from my childhood over and over again in this space. I have a lot of long, cold, lonely days stored up inside me and bitching about them on this blog helps let some of that coldness out so I can thaw out, at least a little bit.

I wish I knew how to speed up the process and bring on the Flood. Melt the iceberg around my heart once and for all, and to hell with the consequences.

But I am too stable and sensible for that. I have built this frozen fortress prison of far too well and it is not going to come down any time soon.

Not without some major source of heat, anyhow.

And that could only come from my long suffering id. I was talking with Doc Costin yesterday about how I knew about my dark side and why it was there.

I told him how there was a part of me that wants to say to hell with everyone else and just do what is right for me, me, ME.

To leverage all my many gifts in order to get all the money, power, and sex I can. And that would mean becoming a scheming, manipulative, greedy con man who swindles, cheats, and arm-twists his way through life not giving a damn about the trail of human wreckage he leaves behind him.

He’d be a monster of incalculable proportions.

But Doc Costin was right when he said that I am not actually capable of being that person. Nevertheless, thinking about him from time to time comforts me.

He’s a monster, but like the evil Kirk, he’s really just the product of a profound imbalance of the mind, and if I could ease up on him some, he would stop being such a monster and maybe actually give me the heat I need to melt my heart.

Or at the very least keep me warm at night.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.