If that still says “Another heart pun”, it means I couldn’t think of one. Sorry.

So I went to Urgent Care. The sign says take a number. I look around. The thing with the numbers in it is nowhere to be seen. Julian can’t find it either.

Thank goodness there was a father waiting with an infant in his arms who was kind enough to tell me that they take the numbers away when they are at capacity and can’t take any more patients.

Which is blatantly retarded without a sign telling people that. How was I to know?

So off to the ER we went.

I was waiting in line at reception and taking advantage of my outdoor walker’s (aka my rollator’s) built in capacity to be used as a seat when the person ahead of me in line moved and I wanted to move with her.

So I thought, “this thing has four wheels. Why get up, when I can just push with my feet and rollate the short distance?”

Snap! Oh, so that’s why. Because if you do that, it snaps the bolt holding one of the front wheels on, and now you’re fucked.

And how was I to know THAT?

Luckily, when you’re an enormous fat dude complaining of chest pains in the ER, you tend to get seen pretty quickly. So I was out of the waiting room and admitted to the ward in record time.

And the hospital has plenty of fit young people to go get me a wheelchair and push me around in it.

So I am admitted to the ward but end up on a gurney in the hallway. Tough luck for me. Doesn’t really bother me much.

I can ignore the people going by easily enough.

The good news : everything checked out fine. Bloodwork was good. EKG reported no problems. Chest X-ray was A-OK.

Glad I went, though. Better to go there when I didn’t need to than to end up one of these guys whose last words on Earth are, “Eh, it’s just heartburn. ”

Which it probably is. Once actual cardiac issues were ruled out, that became the leading theory. The doctor gave me a prescription to help with that.

An acid blocker, I presume. Antacids are so pre-millennial.

The one problem I have with that is that it still feels to me like someone is holding my heart in their hand, loosely but firmly.

Oh well., I’ve done what I could. I am still going to be taking things nice and slow and gentle until I am sure my ticker can take it.

If I have a heart attack at this point, at least it will be a medical mystery.

I find that oddly reassuring.

Spent most of the wait time in the ER (around 5 hours) playing games on my tablet and snoozing. There was the usual annoying complications that come with trying to use my tablet while there’s a blood pressure cuff on my left arm and blood oxygen reader on one of the fingers of my right hand.

But whatever. I got through it.

And then all I had to do was get home.

Um yeah…. about that.

More after the break.

---

The saga of the return, or there and… back again?

So there I was, with a clean bill of health from the ER doc^[1], ready to put my clothes back on and call Joe and tell him I’m ready to be picked up.

First, I need a phone. One of the nurses fetches me the portable phone they give to patients in the ER.

Mine is not the only one still in use, it seems.

And it sucks. Very hard to use. Took me forever to even figure out how to hang up.

Screw you, Panasonic!

Anyhow, I call Joe. It goes straight to voice-mail.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I try again. Voicemail. And again. Voice-mail.

I admit that I thought some unkind things about Joe at this point. My ever simmering feelings of abandonment and neglect boiled over.

Totally unjustified, as it turns out.

So I call Julian, even though I know he is at his parents’ place for Thanksgiving dinner. He agrees to call Joe on the land line and tell him I need to be picked up. And he will tell Joe I am going to call him on the land line soon.

I hang up, and brood for a bit.

I call back around five minutes later to see how the convo with Joe went.

Julian says he got through to Joe’s cellular no problem. Figures.

He says Joe is on his way and that apparently Joe’s phone was automatically blocking the hospital’s number.

Wut de fug?

My brain then completely misplaced the fact that he’s on his way, and I revert to “call him on the land line”, and I therefore keep dialing the land line because apparently my mind reverted to the previous instruction.

For the second time that day, I am mad at Joe for no good reason.

Eventually I do get him on his cell. Turns out that he had shown up at the ER with my other (not meant for outdoor use) walker but the receptionist said they have no record of me so he left in confusion.

My call brought him back.

Apparently, once a patient is released, they stop existing according to the system.

So Joe is on his way back and I have a problem.

I can’t walk without a walker (hence the name). but I have to get out of the ward and on to the waiting room for Joe to be able to find me.

I then wage war with my assertiveness issues for a while.

I’d love to say I won, but in fact, my nurse noticed I was still here and asked me what the problem was.

I was CRAZY grateful for that.

She arranges for me to be transported via the now standard “travel” wheelchair to the waiting arms of the waiting room.

When I get there, Joe is once more trying to get a clue as to my location from the very unhelpful lady at reception.

We hook up, and I finally get to go home. The end.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As I have mentioned before in this space, I sometimes have trouble making the transition from “busy getting my food together” mode to “sitting down and making the words come out my fingers” mode when it’s blogging time.

They’re very different modes. It almost feels like they are perpendicular to one another.

Well today I am getting an extra dose of it, it seems, because wow does my brain not want to have to slow down to write right now.

Instead, my brain wants to either go back to sleep or play Baldur’s Gate 3.

Things are picking up in that game. I beat the second of the three Chosen I need to defeat in order to have all three Netherstones (had those once, very painful) so I can finally confront and defeat the big evil brain that wants to conquer and/or destroy the world with its mind control powers.

So ya know…. pretty standard stuff.

The second baddie was an incredibly nasty lady named Orin who was the Chosen of Bhaal, who in this game is the god of murder.

So yeah…. even in a world without Christianity, people can’t stop slagging ancient pre-Christian religions by making their gods evil demons.

And really… a god of murder? That warrants its own god? Kind of suggests that the Forgotten Realms is a pretty horribly violent place, doesn’t it?

Orin was horrible and gross, reveling in blood and gore and stabbing and sliting and the glory of taking a life and so forth, so I was glad to take her out.

And the first one, Ketheric Thorm, was all about the necromancy, so he was gross too.

The last one, Gortash, is just as evil as the other two, but he is the Chosen of the god of tyranny, so it’s at least a clean kind of evil.

Plus he’s more my kind of evil anyhow. Scheming, Machiavellian, manipulative, intelligent, devious, clever enough to try to compromise and subvert the heroes rather than fight them outright.

So still totally evil, but the kind of evil I can respect. Fighting him and his schemes feels like a true “the Doctor versus the Master” kind of battle.

Fighting the other two felt more like pest control.

And I have been gathering allies for the final battle. I just rescued Duke Ravengard, father of my party member Wyll, from an underwater prison called the Iron Throne.

Dude is such a dick that the first thing he says to the son he hasn’t talked to for years and who just saved his life is, “To be rescued by you of all people is a shame I cannot bear! Freed from one Hell only to be placed in another!”.

Or something to that effect.

Luckily, I got that whole thing straightened out. Turns out it was all a big misunderstanding and now Dad and son are reunited.

Still, dude. WTF?

And my current mission is the ultimate recruitment trip because I am going far below the city to enlist the aid of an ancient dragon sleeping there.

As allies go, that would be quite the “get”.

More after the break.

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The cost of owning a Fru

It has come to the attention of the leadership here at Fuzzycorp that one of our most popular pet models, the Fruvous, is beginning to garner a reputation as being too expensive to own in the long run.

We, of course, maintain that none of our products, pet or otherwise, are unduly expensive to own and enjoy provided you care for them as specified in the owner’s manual you were issued as part of your initial purchase package.

However, we recognize that this is easier said than done. The Fruvous model in particular has been engineered to be extremely charming and lovable, and this can make it difficult to discipline them when it is needed.

Thus, we are faced with a deluge of reports of health insurance claims related to the Fruvous model, and whilst we bear the financial burden of this phenomenon without complaint, we are most upset to see the emotional toil seeing their beloved Fruvous take ill puts on their owners.

This problem is compounded by the fact that the particular personality matrix used in the Fruvous model, with its emphasis on empathy and understanding, has been shown to have the unintended consequence of making it difficult for the Fruvous model to tell its owner about any health problems.

Hence the rise of the “I had no idea they were even sick until one day they keeled over” narrative. Trust us when we say we find these reports as harrowing and upsetting as you do, and are working hard to come up with an effective workaround.

Until then, all we can do is insist that all Fruvous owners take their pet in for a full set of health diagnostics at least twice a week.

As always, Fuzzycorp will absorb any and all costs associated with these checkups.

Above all, do NOT rely on your Fruvous to self-report any issues. Do not ask them how they are or how they’re feeling or if there is anything wrong and expect an honesty reply.

They will tell you whatever it is they think you want to hear, and they won’t even know they are doing it.

They just want to make you happy, and can’t stand to tell you anything they think will make you less happy, and thus they have trouble sharing unpleasant truths.

In order to mediate this issue, we encourage owners to try to make it clear to their Fruvous that news of them having a health problem will not upset you and that you will, in fact, be glad to help them get better.

There is a small chance this will lead to some Fruvouses inventing fictitious minor ailments in order to please you, but we think you will agree that as problems go, that is vastly preferable to the alternative.

Finally, to answer the implied initial question, yes, owning a Fruvous can be emotionally expensive in the long run.

However, we think most Fruvous owners would agree that the decades of friendly, warm, affectionate, understanding, and adorable companionship one can expect from one’s Fruvous make them far more than worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, so I haven’t gone to the ER or Urgent Care yet.

And I really should have. I have that “heartburn” feeling constantly now and it brought a friend, namely a feeling of tightness in the general vicinity of my heart.

Pretty sure that’s, like, bad.

So as one might imagine, I am taking it real easy. I am getting up and sitting down as slowly and gently as I can, and trying to moderate the speed of my kitchen trips.

It’s not easy, though, because weak muscles do not like going slow. It is way harder on my muscle tone and conditioning to go slowly, and I don’t have much of either left.

So, like so much of life, it’s a balancing act. I take it as slow as I can, but I still have to do things in strong muscle impulses then coasting, rather than fluid motion.

Kind of like my life, in a way.

Where was I…. right, like I know I should have gone today. But I just did not have the wherewithal to do it. Could not face the prospect of a long boring wait at Urgent Care or the ER of Richmond General Hospital^[1] today.

Perhaps I will go tomorrow. I probably should. For all I know, my ticker could be ready to go off at any second.

But if not tomorrow, Monday morning. For sure.

And here I was telling Doc Costin how happy I was that I had managed to go a whole week without landing in the ER.

Guess I jinxed it.

---

Follow the money

It doesn’t help that I am also under financial stress as well.

Ya see, it’s one of those evil five week months for me. The months when, due to a funny little quirk in the calendar, people on assistance like me are expected to survive for five weeks on what normally only has to last us four.

Because four weeks is a month. That’s how long months are. Normally.

And I have not handled it well. I have overspent, largely on my ordering in habit, and now my finances are way behind.

I “should” have skipped one night of ordering in a week and used the money saved that way to pay for that fifth week.

But no, I kept up with business as usual and now I am paying the price.

Or unable to pay it, as the case may be.

I certainly won’t be ordering in tonight. I will instead order some Amazon stuff (yay Yupik) and save what little I will have left of this week’s budget for groceries.

And that’s not even counting the fact that I have to pay for Denny’s tomorrow.

But hey, at least the province is doing whatever is easiest for them.

More after the break.

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Very good, dear. Now do “Total Eclipse Of The Heart”.

Oh, and yup, that’s Bono singing with her.

So that’s what it takes to get him to do a fuckin’ U2 song these days.

---

Does anyone else feel like the start of the Trump/Covid era was a thousand years ago?

---

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Nah.

---

The search for the Truth

It ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It used to be my Quest. I would search out the Truth, and fight on its behalf, and make the world safer for people and less safe for bullshit.

And that is still a high priority for me. To be honest, I don’t think I really have a choice in the matter. My basic nature compels me to be a truth seeker and a soothsayer and an enemy to harmful bullshit.

But it’s not a holy crusade any more. And it never should have been.

That whole “veritas uber alles” bullshit I used to promulgate was ultimately just a way to stick a halo on a brutal and inhuman ethic that made absolutely no allowances for mercy, tenderness, restraint, or human frailty.

The lesson I am still trying to learn from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neil is that people desperately need their bullshit. The antagonist of the play thinks he can come liberate his old drinking buddies from their delusions by giving them the means to actually pursue the dreams they always talk about.

Thus they will find out said dreams are impossible, and be freed.

But really, that’s the fallacy of the unbounded middle. His plan is like…

1. Free buddies from their harmful dreams
2. ???
3. Everybody is happy!

That kind of “liberation” rests on the assumption that everybody is better off seeing the truth and facing reality, and that just plain ain’t the case.

Without their delusions, the bar’s lowlife patrons are bereft of hope and purpose. What the salesman thought was a kindness was about the cruelest thing he could have done.

I mean, what exactly did he expect would happen? That they would thank him for destroying their last shred of hope and suddenly stop drinking, get a job, and become model upright citizens?

The play means a lot to me because for a lot of my life, I was that salesman. First time I read the play, I was on the salesman’s side right up until we see the sad and broken men his god damned crusade left in its wake.

And then I was like, “Well, what did I think was going to happen?”.

And I had no answer for that. So I had me a good long think.

I like to think that I am wiser and gentler and more human than that now. I now see the relentless drive for the Truth as a cruel, mechanistic, dehumanizing, fascistic substitute for a real ethic that might dress itself up as a noble endeavour but is nothing but an excuse to revel in the pleasure of brutalization in reality.

And that’s the truth.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Came across this article called A Guide To Writing Contests.

And I was like, “Thank god, because I have no idea how to write a contest. ”

Ba dum bump.

Hi there folks. It’s me, your weird friend with the even weirder blog, here to give you your daily dose of the unstructured ramblings of my unhinged mind.

Writing this thing has been a little trickier lately because, like I was telling my therapist today, I have not been feeling very introspective lately.

Possibly because I have been feeling better, and don’t want to jinx it by poking around in my brain and thus ruining a good thing.

But also because I’m kind of tired of my constant self-analysis. It’s very hard to say whether it does more harm than good or vice versa.

I know that probing my psyche for pockets of latent emotion then drilling down into them to let the craziness out does me a lot good overall.

But I don’t know if that justifies the strain of always being under my own microscope.

At some point, you have to stop poking around in the engine and just close the hood, get into the car, and drive. Ya know what I mean?

And that’s how I feel right now. I want to concentrate on feeling good (ish) and living life and doing my best to heal.

I’m pumping every erg I can spare of personal energy into the strenuous but rewarding task of regenerating my mind and spirit and soul by thawing out all the parts of myself that got frozen by all my years of total isolation and never getting the light and love they needed to grow and bloom.

I have lost so much from being far too wrapped up in myself. From the rape onward, my default response to stress, challenge, anxiety, and the rest has been to withdraw further into myself until things don’t seem as scary.

Like I have said before : like a turtle who never leaves his shell.

And that assumes I will know if things become less scary, and the truth is, I stopped checking a really long time ago. I just stay buried deep inside myself on the assumption that the world is a horrible place containing nothing worth the effort to obtain.

And if you never check your assumptions, you can go on thinking they are correct.

Ladies and gentlemen, conservatism.

But looked at rationally, the notion that I know enough about the universe to support such a broad conclusion as, “there’s nothing worth the effort out there for me” is insane.

The real truth is that I want to believe there is nothing worth getting out there because that makes me feel better about my total inability to go out there and look.

It’s sour grapes, all the way.

The intelligent and pragmatic view is that there are probably tons of things in this wild old world of ours that would totally give me more than they cost me.

I just lack the strength, courage, and inner fortitude to go looking.

But it is all out there, waiting for me to be ready to handle it.

Until then, all I can do is heal.

More after the break.

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Oh, my aching heart!

And I mean that quite literally.

I’ve been up for almost an hour and a half now, and my cardioid region still aches. I’ve had another “attack” and while there was still no sharp pains or the like, that “heartburn” feeling came on rather strong.

Plus I felt flushed, and dizzy, and faint, and a bit nauseous. And my head hurt.

It felt a lot like when I have had heat sickness, actually. All that was missing was the faint, distant sizzling sound.

I am officially worried about this shit. Enough that I am pondering a trip to Urgent Care to have someone give my heart a quick listen.

Because not only do I have a lot of heart disease factors (like untreated sleep apnea and years of under-treated diabetes), but I have such an extensive family history of heart disease on the male side of my mother’s family that it’s basically not a matter of if you will get it, but when.

So the phrase “ticking time bomb” comes to mind.

And I am thinking it can’t wait until I see Doc Chao on the 18th. That’s 12 long days from now and I might not make it.

I mean, I plan on getting up much more slowly for the time being.^[1] And that should help prevent another incident (fingers crossed).

But I am still gonna worry. A heart attack can really ruin your day. I really, really do not want to have one.

Then again, I really don’t feel like spending my Saturday at Urgent Care or the ER. But as boring and depressing and low-key stressful as those places can be, they still are better than dropped dead because my heart went boom.

But it’s close.

Seriously though, my main question is whether or not Urgent Care can do an EKG. I am pretty sure they can, in which case I will go there because while I am very worried about this temperamental ticker of mine, it’s not exactly an emergency.

I know they do EKGs in the ER. I got one the last time I landed there. I assume they didn’t find anything wrong then.

But my heart does not feel right tonight. And that “attack” I had earlier was pretty bad. I definitely do not want to see what comes after that in this sequence.

So I am probably gonna get Julian to drop me off at Urgent Care tomorrow. Part of me is tempted to leave it till Monday morning when it will be a lot less busy.

Why does this shit always happen to me on the weekend?

Either way, I am gonna end up somewhere. I need to have a doctor give my heart a once-over and tell me what to do.

Maybe it’s just heartburn. Acid reflux. Something like that.

But maybe it ain’t.

And I better find out which it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I have been feeling lately. And I have also been sleeping better.

I am sure these factors are somehow related.

Lately I have actually been sleeping at night. At almost a normal hour, even.

Well, closer to normal, anyhow. Like 2 am.

And then I sleep for around five hours. Wake up bleary and feeling terrible, but in a healthy kind of way.

Like, I have always woken up slowly and reluctantly. Even when I was a little kid. I think almost everyone wakes up feeling that way.

Hence the popularity of coffee.

But then for the rest of the day, I feel more clear-headed and energetic and focused and am, in general, in a better mood.

Dunno what I am doing right, but I sure hope I keep doing it.

I still nap a fair bit. That hasn’t changed. I suppose that means I am sleeping for more hours total now, which is not a bad thing at all.

I wonder if it has something to do with what I’ve been eating lately? It seemed to start last Sunday and that’s when my latest Amazon grocery order came in.

Since then, I’ve been eating a lot of sunflower seeds (no shell, roasted, salted) and sesame sticks (garlic flavoured!), both from the lovely folks at Yupik.

Neither are entirely unique to my diet as they have both shown up in various trail mixes (trails mix?) I have eaten in the past.

If I had to pick one of them to be the change maker, I would have to pick the sesame sticks as when they were part of Yupik’s Village Mix trail mix I was finding them REALLY , really delicious, like my body was saying, “Yes! THIS! Eat this!”.

And that’s usually the thing I should be eating.

By themselves, the sesame sticks are still tasty, but after more than a handful of them a certain unpleasant undertone to the flavour takes over.

Basically, they start tasting like dry dog food.

Lesson learned. They taste better as part of a mix

Not sure what, exactly, would be the magic ingredient to my sleeping better. Maybe they somehow have vitamin B12 in them?

If so, vegans really need to know about it. They desperately need a non animal based source of vitamin b12.

As far as I know, there ain’t one. Which really messes with their worldview, dunnit?

Whatever the magic nutrient is, I am a lot better off with it in my system. I mean, my days aren’t filled with golden bliss or anything – that would be creepy.

And like I said, I still do a lot of napping. Hard to say whether I need to do it or whether it’s just a habit.

I suspect it’s more that I use it as an emotional security blanket. Like I have mentioned many times before, a nap resets my background anxiety level which would otherwise creep up slowly all day until I had a full blown panic attack.

But I dunno. Maybe if I let that happen enough, I will get over it, and be better able to deal with the 9 to 5 world.

Then again, why bother?

More after the break.

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My new perverted toy

WARNING : NSFW images will ensue.

I have joined the AI revolution for the noblest of reasons : masturbation.

Ya see, I downloaded a program called Easy Diffusion, which is an easy (ish) to install and use version of Stable Diffusion, the now world famous AI image generating tool that generates images from text you type in.

I did so because I saw some furry art a friend had generated and I wanted in. She pointed me to the program and a vitally important add-on for it.

You see, by default, what the program generates is nice, but dull.

For example, here is what you get if you type in “a photograph of a bear” :

Impressively realistic, but I’m a furry. We don’t do “real”.

However, if you switch to an image generation “model” called YiffyMix which has been trained on thousands of pieces of furry art, you get this :

Still realistic but much closer to the cartoon aesthetic we fuzzies prefer.

Well then, what if I type in “a cartoon of a bear”?

Holy crap, that’s children’s book illustrator quality art! And doesn’t he look like friendly, cuddly, avuncular sort.

And yet, something about him just doesn’t feel “furry” enough. He needs something in order to make this truly a piece of furry art.

Bigger ears? No. A fireman’s uniform? Nah. A festive bandana? I don’t think so.

Oh, I know. He needs a penis!

HEY THERE MISTER BEAR! You uh… need help keeping your lap warm?

That big ol cock of yours sure looks tasty. Well, don’t be shy on our account, get yourself some of that!

You can even add some basic body functions!

Clear urine. Clearly, Mister Bear is well hydrated.

Great, now I’m thirsty.

And finally, in the interest of equal representation, we present the other side.

And so forth and so on. The perverted possibilities are endless, making this the best dirty toy for naughty (grown up) children ever.

Sadly, I have only managed to make it do solo stuff so far. It might be that the home version can’t handle the complexities of physical interconnection as it is not really modeling anything in 3D.

Or maybe I just don’t know the right way to phrase it yet.

I hope it’s the latter, because as stimulating as the solo stuff can be, porn isn’t truly porn unless there are multiple participants.

Is this not an age of awe inspiring miracles we live in?

Now how do I get my hands on that AI voice synthesis….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

WARNING : The following is about as sad as it gets. Heed the warnings at the beginning very closely. This shit could break your heart.

Went down the rabbit hole of animation memes today, and ended up here :

And after watching that, I understandably had a bit of a cry.

And that is something I desperately need to do : cry. Even time something manages to make me cry, I feel a whole lot better once I have had a nap afterwards, and from this I conclude that I have an inland ocean of frozen tears inside me yearning to get out.

Like all North American men, really. Our culture is so fucked up.

I went through a lot of bad shit when I was a kid. I got raped, bullied, ignored, neglected, brushed off, thrown to the wolves, and treated like I shouldn’t even be alive.

And that’s just the active stuff. I also went through hundreds of hours of boredom and social isolation as the pariah of the school who was too smart for his own good and spent his days bored in class and terrified of his fellow students, all alone.

And through all that hell, I never cried about it. Not after the first year of school or so. Typical emotionally constipated male, taught to bottle everything up by a society that punishes any sign of vulnerability or weakness in possessors of a Y chromosome.

I mean, if I had cried back then, it would have attracted more bullying. Blood in the water effect. It was bad enough that I cry when I’m angry.

Crying when I was sad was out of the question.

And even when I was alone, I did not cry. I didn’t know I should. I was so alienated from my own emotions, locked away in the airless void of my intellect as I was, that the notion that crying might make me feel better would never have occurred to me.

I mean, crying sucks. It feels bad. Nobody wants to cry. And crying makes you feel out of control, and being out of control is the greatest of all male sins.

So why not avoid it entirely if you can?

It’s only been within the last five to ten years that I have gained enough wisdom to be able to answer that question : because avoiding it costs you more than you can possibly imagine. You have to be dead inside to keep all that emotion at bay, and that is way too high a price to pay for anything.

Like I keep saying, I wish I could just turn a valve and have all my repressed emotions melt and rush out in a massive, glorious, world-shattering flood.

Sure, I would probably lose my mind completely for a while. But after the waters receded and the land dried out, all that would be left would be what is truly me, without all the issues and problems and emotional garbage piled up and pretending to be me.

And who knows. Maybe when I grow wise enough, I will be able to find that release valve and use it to let absolutely everything go.

Until then, I dig.

More after the break.

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Don’t give up

Oh crap, why do I keep watching these things?

Also sad, and very much about depression.

But it has a happy ending!

When I was watching that video and thinking about our one-eyed protagonist and his relationship with the fluffy white kitty who is trying to understand him, I found myself feeling glad that I had gone through all my depression alone because that meant I wasn’t also dragging someone else down into my own personal hell.

Guilt like that would kill me.

But then I thought, that doesn’t sound right. Maybe if I had someone else in this sad little world of mine with me, it wouldn’t be as sad. Maybe the right person could have helped me find my way back to the light. Maybe instead of dragging them down, they could have lifted me up.

It’s at least possible. But I know I don’t really believe it at all. To my diseased mind, the only thing that could happen to someone who tried to help is that I would drain them of all the positivity and hope and encouragement they had and they would end up broken and depressed just like me…. and it wouldn’t even help me for long.

I mean, I even have to be careful not to destroy my therapist with my negativity. I have tried to truly open up to him and he was just as terrified and helpless in the face of my darkness as anybody else.

Which was depressing.

But more importantly, that video made me aware of a deep and terrible fear that I didn’t even know I had, one that set off another crying jag.

I am terribly afraid that the people who love me will get tired of trying to connect with me and failing, and will, with sorrow in their hearts, give up on me and leave.

And that’s why I don’t get that close to people. The wall stays up and people stay at arm’s length because I am convinced, deep down, that if they get any closer to me, my darkness will try to devour them and I will either destroy them or they will run away screaming and never come back.

Makes me feel like a starving vampire who knows he can’t get too close to any mortals or he won’t be able to stop himself from feeding on them.

I know that sounds crazy and I know that nobody who knows me would agree with my dire assessment of myself.

But that’s because I have been protecting them. Shielding them. All the fluff and sweetness and silliness and wit rests on an all-devouring void that roils and rocks with rage and hate and chaos and greed and the mindless desire to destroy.

No wonder I would rather be the person I pretend to be.

And I don’t know what to do with my pet void monster. There has to be a way to express its energies in a constructive way and thus dissipate it over time like Hawking radiation.

I know I need to do more. Be more. Take all this madness in my head and use it as the fuel to, as the video says, keep climbing.

So please don’t give up on me, my friends. I know it can’t always be easy to love a guy like me. But know that I do truly love you dearly and I am trying as hard as I can to cross the interstellar void between us and find my way back home to you.

I love you all so much. You’re my lantern in the window on a cold dark winter night.

Please keep the light on for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My imagination has stalled. I am having the hardest time thinking of anything interesting to write about. I’m turning the key, but the engine ain’t turning over. Turn.

If this keeps up, I might end up having to talk about my “life” in Baldur’s Gate 3.

Instead, let’s attempt a sort of “where am I in life” report.

I know that there are plausible pathways out of my current morass. Writing contests, trying to get an agent, hell maybe even emailing some of my old instructors to see if they have forgiven me for being kinda gross yet.

Actually, I think my real crime with them was that I challenged their authority. Unlike the millennials who were my classmates, I wasn’t desperate for their approval, I had my own mind and my own opinions, and I even dared to disagree with them now and then.

Worst of all, I talked to them like we were equals. Not in a snobby way or a suck-up way, but the truth is that I was the same age or older than most of them, and I have always spoken with a certain kind of unstated self-assurance, and I think that made me seem like a threat to them.

They refused to recommend me for any jobs in their field because they were scared of me. Is what I am saying.

In my defense, I talk to everyone like they’re an equal. It’s the only way I know how to relate to people. I show deference to those “above” me but with the clear message that I am choosing to defer out of politeness and/or respect, not that I believe myself to be in any way inferior to them.

And that pisses some people – weak people – right off.

Some people simply cannot handle equality. Zero sum types who think everything is a matter of hierarchy or some such nonsense.

I pity those people.

OK, tangent over. I know there are ways out, is what I was saying.

And I know there’s never going to be an escape route easy and safe enough that it doesn’t require me to overcome fear, anxiety, and all the rest.

That whole “you can’t get there from here” thing I have talked about, where I feel like there is no route I can see for me to get from where I am to where I want to go, assumes a fixed sense of self where I could never acquire a greater ability to travel to my desired destination.

Either I can do it right now, and very easily, or it’s literally impossible for me.

What a depressingly limited and limiting point of view.

And I don’t have to accept it. I can do more. I can BE more. For my whole life, I have been told I had all this potential waiting to be used.

So why not use it? Why not expand both my self and my sense of self and what I am capable of doing?

There is so much more to me than what I am right now.

The real me is strong, confident, decisive, brave, and rolls with the punches.,

This sad creature that I am right now is just a temporary waypoint. A place to rest before getting back into the fight.

And I can – and will – be better than what I am.

In a sense, I already am.

More after the break.

---

To live is to grow

Therefore, stasis is death.

That’s something that I have always believed. And a shallow interpretation of my life, in which I have changed very little for the last 25 years,. would call me a hypocrite.

But my life is a cramped but cozy tomb. I have been trapped here for decades and it has led to my rotting from within. In many ways, I feel like one of the walking dead.

I have been sleepwalking through life for so long that it’s as though I am dead. Or worse, in some kind of deep and terrible self-hypnotic trance.

TOo be honest, I often feel like I am in a trance. And I hate that idea. I want to be awake and alive and experiencing life, warts and all.

But I am also too scared to wake up. To truly be awake, without the numbness and the brain fog and the endless labyrinth of my mind to protect me, would be such a radical increase in stimulation levels that to my current mind it seems like it would smash my brittle state of mind like a hammer.

And maybe that’s right. Maybe it really would shatter my mind. Maybe I would even go full on crazy for a while.

But that’s not fatal. And at least I would have a change to build back better.

Maybe that would be the hard reset that my mind really needs. That cold restart that is what the urge to commit suicide truly represents.

I don’t want to die. I just want to stop. To completely silence my mind so that I can finally truly rest in peace.

I would prefer to get back up when I am done.

Makes me ponder a radical therapy for the suicidally depressed where you tell them you are administering a lethal dose of chemicals, but in reality you are putting them into a medically induced coma in which you monitor their brain activity for any disturbances that should not be present in a dormant mind, and treat those.

The patient then wakes up feeling fresh and new and clearheaded for the first time in a long time, and hopefully feels a new zeal for living.

Whether or not they wake up in a coffin during a fake funeral is optional.

Back to the point that I was making.

Wait wait, don’t tell me, I’ll figure it out myself….

Let’s say what I was angling towards was the revelation that an annihilation level mental event might be just what my mind needs in order to get the space and time to heal.

I am honestly too stable for my own good. I have amply proved that I can stay exactly as I am now for an indefinite amount of time.

Till the day I die, even. However far away that is.

Ergo I don’t technically need to change. And the default setting for all human beings is to only change when we have to, not because we want to.

But I want to change. This crummy little life of mine just ain’t good enough any more. In fact, I outgrew it a long time ago, and I have been all cramped up inside from trying to stay in that tiny little shell for far too long.

Time to hatch already.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Life has, for the most part, been too easy for me.

Even when it was also very hard on me, like when I was getting bullied in elementary school, there was still an element of excess ease because the actual school part was so damned easy for me.

Still is, too. I breezed through Kwantlen (except for that one linguistics course) and then went on to the “intensive” writing program at VFS and never even felt the strain until the last semester and even then it was no big deal.

I can’t help feeling that academic gifts like that should mean something, ya know? Most people can’t do what I do. Surely spectacular gifts like mine are worth something to someone somewhere, wouldn’t you think?

Anyhow, there was nothing in my life to prompt me to learn to strive and struggle and achieve and, most importantly, learn to overcome myself, and in doing so learn the invaluable lesson that what you think are your limitations CAN be exceeded.

I realize now how casually, even flippantly I have accepted my limitations in life. My toxic attitude has always been, “well to hell with the things that I don’t instantly understand because there are so many things that I do“.

The idea of keeping on trying until I get it right would not have occurred to me. I was far too lazy and self-indulgent for that. Trying hard with no guarantee of success is difficult and stressful and absolutely no fun at all, so why bother?

And there was nobody to tell me why. Or maybe there was, and I blithely ignored them in my young genius arrogance.

I was not, I repeat, not easy to reach.

It’s easier to get through to the cops after an earthquake.

In my, let’s say. “defense”, I knew damned well that I was smarter than all the adults who were supposed to be there to guide me.

I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that way at the time – nor would I have wanted to do so because my faith in the adult world was hanging by a thread at the best of times and the truth of how alone I was would have crushed me.

So with great concentration, I managed to stay mostly within the tiny little box allotted to kids my age. It was far too small for a mind like mine, but I managed.

These days, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had gone completely rogue. If I had faced the fact that compared to me, my teachers, my peers, and even my parents were idiots and I had just stopped listening to them and forged my own path instead.

I can’t see that going well. No matter how bright a kid is, society will still expect them to go to school and get an “education” and will punish them harshly if they do not.

But it might have forced the system to deal with me and find some way to challenge me.

Or maybe it would have gotten me run out of town on a rail for being so goddamned smug and obnoxious,

Either way, at least it would have been different.

More after the break.

---

Earth to Fru

Conversations with me have always been a long distance call.

That’s what happens when you have withdrawn into yourself in order to escape the cruel world as deeply as I have.

Even when it seems like I am here, I’m actually far away. What you are seeing is only a projection of my true self. I front like I am really here, but I am really the little man behind the curtain from the Wizard of Oz.

And I bet there were times when he wished he was really the Wizard, too. Even days where he kind of forgot that he wasn’t.

And in a fix like that, it’s no wonder we are hard to connect with. I spend many years not even knowing there was a “real” me buried deep inside me that has,. in a sense, been running the whole show ever since I was raped at the age of 4.

It’s that scared little animal who has been running and hiding ever since.

Convincing him that it is safe to come out and play and rest and be loved will not be easy. He is terrified of the real world. That’s why he hides so deep, under layer after layer of projections and illusions and reflections and protrusions.

That is at least in part due to the self-reinforcing nature of phobic panic. A phobia makes you feel like every exposure to its trigger will cause something terrible to happen, and it’s right, something terrible DOES happen : the phobic panic itself.

I suppose the existentially gritty response would be to trigger the panic and then ask oneself, over and over, what is REALLY happening.

Like, would this be a terrible experience if I wasn’t panicking?

That might work. The idea is to ground yourself in reality so that you have a base on which to plant your feet and push back against the fear.

So go ahead, freak me out. I won’t care, because you’re not real. You’re just some electrochemical noise that got stuck in my head. Your activation signifies absolutely nothing. You are a broken smoke detector capable of registering nothing but false positives and it’s about time I took the battery out of you so we can all get some god damned sleep for once.

You’re the boy who cried wolf. And if there ever really is a fire, we won’t hear about it from you, because all those false positives have taught us to ignore you when you go off because it’s far, far more likely to be a false alarm than the real thing.

So fuck you and your mindless, pointless, meaningless fear.

I’m eventually going to figure out how to deactivate it completely.

But until then, I will just ignore you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

wp:paragraph –>

And I ain’t talking about my video game life this time.

Let me tell you about something that happened last week,

It was time to hang out and watch stuff with Le Gang, like we do, and so I got up and went to the kitchen to start making my midnight snack.

As has become my custom, when I got the kitchen, I immediately rested my arms on the counter and my head on my arms in order to secure myself against the wave of dizziness that I was inevitably going to experience.

And sure enough, the dizziness came. Boy, did it come.

It hit me way harder than it has ever hit me before. And not just one wave that hits and then recedes, oh no. This was wave after wave crashing with storm surge force into my head like I had pissed off Poseidon.

They hit me so hard, in fact, that I was battered to the ground, just like I had been assaulted by a physical force.

Luckily, I landed on my butt, which is basically a built in crash pad, and so I didn’t sustain any serious damage except to my pride, which is located in my butt.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s so needy.

So there I was, sitting on my butt on the kitchen floor. As always when I take a fall, I was dazed for a bit, then I tried to get up but could not.

That often happens too. My legs get weak after a fall, like they too are in shock.

Plus, standing up from being seated on the floor of our tiny kitchen is rather complicated and involves doing things I just can’t do, like lift all my weight with one leg for a moment.

So after trying over and over again, with J&J watching over me worriedly and offering to help me up^[1], I eventually gave up and crawled on my hands and knees to the living room, where I could use my couch to pull myself up enough to flop over onto said couch in a more or less normal seated position.

This was bad.

I’d never been hit with dizziness that hard before, and I have had a LOT of dizzy spells in my sad life. It was like being beaten down by a giant.

And having to crawl to safety after did not make me feel any better.

But that’s just what my life is like. At any moment, I could suddenly find myself in genuine peril and struggling with some really fucked up shit, and there is not a damned thing I can do about it.

Just now, when I went into the bathroom to take a leak, I was just about to assume the classic male urination posture when I tripped over a bit of my sock that was sticking out and for a horrible moment I was in free fall, arms wobbling in an attempt to keep my balance, and I was sure I was about to take a nasty fall.

Luckily, I had retained enough balance to grab on to the back of the toilet and the side of the vanity, but it was a close call.

Just another life threatening adventure in the life of a 50 year old cripple.

That’s why I feel like one of these days, it’s gonna get me. The disaster I keep narrowly avoiding. Eventually it will happen and I will fall and break a limb or smash my head open on something or otherwise get savagely hurt.

The kind of hurt you don’t come back from. The kind that acts like a big thick black dividing line in your life cutting it forever into “before” and “after”.

I try my best to be careful. But I often have my head in the clouds, and that’s not safe.

One day it’s going to get me.

Until then, I am just biding time.

More after the break.

---

WARNING : The following is very good, but also very sad.

I luckily would never have that problem because, despite being very shy in many ways, if I am really into someone, my need for them to notice me and hopefully connect wiht them will draw me to them and eventually force me to make contact.

In fact, that’s when my “fuck it” mode kicks in, my shyness completely inverts, and I actually become very bold and make a play for the person’s attention using all my charm and wit and silliness and, of course, my being totes adorable.

If it works, great. If not, I will still feel better for having tried.

I truly believe it is better to have loved and lost, even if that love was just a passing fascination with someone.

Of course, that’s me as Fruvous. I dunno if it would work the same here in the real world, where I am not, alas, an incredibly cute and fluffy anthro fox.

But what the hell. I am still funny and adorable and have lots of goofy charm.

So why not go for it?

Now if only RL had the same sort of system as Tapestries where I could look at someone wixxx and instantly know if they are even into dudes.

That would really help break the ice.

I guess in the real world, the only way to do that is to go to gay events and maybe hit on someone there. Odds are, they are at least a possibility.

Or I guess I could use a hookup app. Barf. 🙁

I don’t want to “hook up”. I want to meet people. I’m attracted to people’s personalities and their minds and their souls.

What they look like us barely a consideration.

And I am sure as hell not going to “hook up” with someone based on the 12 extremely banal words they put on their profile.

To hell with that. Give me a reason to think you might be fun to talk to.

And if you have nothing like that to say, then to hell with you.

Move on, sister. Cause I ain’t buyin’.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Shut down all the trash compactors on the detention level, please, life.

I am feeling very, very pessimistic. It really feels like the walls are closing in on me and my ability to connect with the world at all is slowly abandoning me and I can’t get Doctor Chao to view that as urgent and it really feels like I am sliding downhill towards an unkind fate as a helpless drooling diapered gimp in a hospital bed who can barely even swallow any more and so takes all his meals via IV.

And there I will be in my ultimate hell, buried alive in my own body, and full of tubes, including the dreaded one down my throat that will make me feel like I am eternally being smothered despite the fact that it’s actually the only thing making me breathe.

The failure of the neurologist’s office to process my referral on time was the final nail in the coffin of my hopes. Now I have to wait another month before I see anyone about my condition and who says I even have that long?

I will do my best to see Doctor Chao and Doctor Caswell ASAP. Maybe I can finally get one of them to take me seriously enough to actually try to save me.

Plus I have the rashes on my legs and perianal region to show to Chao. Those, I am fairly confident, he is competent to handle.

Although who knows. Maybe all I will get from him is a referral to a dermatologist who won’t be able to see me until Christmas… 2025!

If he and I can’t resolve my issues together, including the progressive muscle weakness, I am going to have to complain to the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians about him and request a new GP.

One who is capable of understanding the concept of continuing to search for an answer until you find one, no matter what.

After all, my symptoms are persisting. So should he. Right?

I need to get angry and stay angry because otherwise I will take the “easy” way out and succumb to fatalistic despair and self-pity and withdraw even further from the harsh and arbitrary cruelness of this shitshow I have no choice but to call “life”.

It’s very tempting. It’s the path of least resistance, after all. The path that requires the least courage, effort, and self-discipline. The path I am most familiar with.

The path that feels like home.

But I can’t do that. Not to myself but especially not to my friends.

Because if I give up on myself, I am also giving up on them, and leaving them to helplessly watch their dear and special friend fall apart and die and do absolutely nothing to save himself.

And if I’m not helping myself, how can they help me?

So I will try to keep my rage burning fierce and bright despite how hard it is for me to stay focused and fight the tide.

Despair might be a lot easier.

But fighting is a lot better

More after the break.

---

---

The “wrong” direction

I’ve been going downhill my whole life.

By that, I mean I have been just going with the flow… and water flows downhill. I have a life long pattern of just doing whatever was easiest. I have done very little in the way of actively steering my own destiny and even then, it tended to be a matter of choosing which downward slope to ooze down.

I have almost never fought my way upstream in order to forge my own destiny.

The one exception was my whole Kwantlen/VFS journey. I am still proud of doing that, seven years later. It was not easy doing all that commuting, but I did it, day after day, rarely even missing a single class.

But even then, the main initial appeal was that I only had to get the process started. After that, the educational process provided all the momentum.

The path of least resistance was to go to class. So I did.

And that’s fine for school. But the rest of life ain’t like that. Jobs expect you to have actual experience and verifiable skills, not just academic brilliance, and that is something I clearly do not have.

Despite being 50.

Good at school, not at life. Typical former “gifted” kid.

But this does suggest a potential way forward : more school.

This time, though, there would be no fucking academic bullshit. I would be going the directly, even brutally vocational route.

I would be learning something that leads directly to employment because it’s an in-demand skill and emphatically not the dream job of thousands of starry eyed losers who will have to compete like hell for the dozen or so actual jobs in the field.

I exaggerate. But not by much.

I could still try to get jobs in my field, television writing. But my VFS education is seven years old now, and therefore a tad stale.

So I would have to take the route of entering competitions in order to try to make some kind of name for myself and establish a track record.

For that, I would need to access my long dormant killer instinct and go into those contests determined to smash the competition with my mad writing skills.

Because I’m fucking awesome, god damn it. And it’s time the world learned that.

So yeah. Maybe I can do this. I could find contests that appealed to me and then work like hell to make something truly amazing, and blast lesser talents away with just how easy I make being amazing look.

That might be the only way to inspire myself to get over the whole “submitting first drafts” thing and actually stick with something long enough to make it as good as I possibly can before sending it out.

Because I want money, glory, and opportunities.

And I am finally willing to just god damned take them.

And hey, it would give me something meaningful to do with however much time I have left as a slightly functional citizen.

So…. yeah. I could probably do that.

Doubt I will. But it’s nice to know there’s a way out when I am ready for it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.