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.

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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.

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

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

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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.