This just in : laughter is not, in fact, the best medicine.

“The best medicine is medicine. Actual medicine. ” said a medical spokesperson for Reader’s Digest. “Honestly, I don’t know what the fuck we were thinking. ”

“What’s next?” grumped one long time reader when given the news. “Are you donna tell me that all those reports of government overspending are not, in fact, outrageous?”

We declined further comment.

---

More seriously. had a phone appointment with Doctor Chao today, which I completely spaced on until the phone rang and it was him.

Oh well, no harm done. We had a nice chat.

First bulletin was that my vitamin b12 levels are still way too low. Dammit. They are much high than they were when they were so low they could not be measure (so basically zero) but they are still not high enough for me to be considered healthy.

And what do you know, one of the things most impacted by a b12 deficit is your nervous system. And mine has a LOT of issues. Hmmmm.

Ergo, Doc Chao is going to start giving me weekly shots of b12 in his office for a while to see if it improves my general condition.

I must admit, I am little disappointed to find that my campaign of making sure I have one meal with b12 in it a day has not been enough.

Hopefully the shots will have the desired effect of kickstarting my levels.

Guess I need to figure a way to add more b12 to my diet, too. Maybe get myself milk in some convenient single-serving form, like a juice pack.

The other big news from my latest round of lab work is that according to a test called an ESR, I am absolutely riddled with inflammation.

This does not surprise me in the slightest. Kind of makes me wish I had kept taking Aleve on the regular, though.

Might have to start that back up.

Chao is referring me to a rheumatologist as he suspects I might have polymyalgia rhumatica, and as the name suggests, that would be right up an rheumatologist’s alley.

He also suggested that he and/or said specialist might do is put me on some sort of steroidal treatment, which is THE thing for fighting inflammation these days.

But he said that steroid treatments can make both diabetes and high blood pressure worse, and that sounded like too much risk to me.

But if both he and the rheumatologist recommend it, I will go for it. After all, that kind of thing could make me feel a million times better.

I will definitely try some Aleve first. It helped a lot after I first came out of the hospital in 2022, but I stopped taking it because I thought I didn’t “need” it any more.

No, but it might bloody well help.

I make a lot of dumb decisions. But all any of us can do is the best we can given the circumstances. The real problem comes when we judge those decisions based on what we know now, after the event, when we are calm and rational and able to think deeply about the decision with the benefit of hindsight.

We will never be able to meet that highly flawed and biased and unrealistic test.

So stop doing that to yourself!

More after the break.

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Wall shaped bruises

That’s what I have after bouncing off the walls all day.

It’s sort of a joke.

But yeah, I have felt sort of tense and twitchy and I have been having a little trouble settling down to do one thing when my mind is zooming around in all directions at once.

Makes it hard to settle down long enough to write, that’s for sure. Making the words come out feels like herding cats right now.

Angry, incontinent, sexually frustrated cats. With bad hair.

I suppose if I had to pick a cause, I could pin it on the medical news I got today, which wasn’t very dire but it was enough to maybe stir the pot some.

I dunno, though. That feels right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. I feel like I have something more fundamental agitating to get out.

There’s always horniness. Maybe part of me is feeling the stirrings that inspire normal people to go out looking for some action, or hop on to a hookup app.

Those are…. not options for me. And not just because of my physical disability. Long before now, when my legs still worked (sigh), I was still in no position to go looking for casual fun, or even something more long term.

My psychosocial issues are way too profound to allow for meeting up with strangers. My being so Avoidant makes that impossible.

It’s hard to date when you are compulsively invisible.

And I know I don’t have anything to fear, really. But my intense burden of deep seated shame says otherwise. It says everything about me is horrible, toxic, and wrong, and all exposing myself (heh) to these theoretical rando men would do is cause them to recoil in disgust from my very being before attacking me verbally with all the awful things I already know to be true about myself.

It’s a nightmare when you look at it. And of course it makes no sense. I have nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not my fault I am disabled (or is it?) and can’t support myself. I have a lot to offer a potential love interest.

Kindness, affection, understanding, empathy, wit, benevolence, warmth, and a big soft shoulder to cry on whenever it is needed are but a few of my advantages.

But all of that shrivels up and dies when hit by the harsh frost of my massive phobias.

I need to learn to overcome that shit. I am fed up with being pushed around and restrained by all this ice cold cowardice. I am more than that. I am mightier than that, I am beyond that bullshit.

I may stand tall but my roots run deep. And they can draw power from the molten core of the earth itself if I so choose.

So fuck you, fear. You’re not the boss of me now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s dark and it’s cold and it’s heart-crushingly lonely.

But other than that, it’s a fabulous place to live.

I hate it but I need it. I know damned well that it’s not cold and dark in my sad little pit by accident. I have the mother of all freeze responses going, and the overwhelming dogma of the freeze response is that light and motion and nearness to others are danger and therefore the only safety lies in crouching down in lightless stasis forever.

Which is kind of hard to achieve when you’re still alive.

Hence my feeling like one of the walking dead a lot of the time, and talking about my efforts to resurrect myself, plus all the talk of tombs and coffins and morgue freezers.

There has to be a way to reverse polarity on that shit. Chipping away at the ice does work in the long term but at this rate, I’ll have been dead and buried for three years before I see any real progress.

And I need to live, god damn it. And that means shedding all this goddamned fear that grips my heart and freezes me in place whenever I try to break free.

Fuck this incremental change. I need a revolution.

And that means opening myself up to radical change. I have mentioned feeling like I am too stable for my own good many times before and lately that lesson has been really hitting home. There are worse things in life than chaos and instability, especially when those things are necessary steps towards a happier and more harmonious hole.

View that way, sacrificing short term stability and predictability in order to get great stability and happiness in the long term seems eminently reasonable.

I mean, it’s not like I am all that stable now.

It only seems that way because I lead such an isolated life in which very little happens at all. My life is remarkably free of events. Very little can or does happen to me.

And the few things that do happen tend to be medical in nature, and very rarely are those things any fun at all.

I want things to happen in my life, and yet, I’m also terrified of that, and that brings me to what for today at least I will call my central dilemma :

The part of me that yearns to be alive is not yet stronger than the icy grip of my fear, and I feel like that is not an accident. I think that as long as I remain under the tyrannical thumb of my fears, my depression is begrudgingly willing to allow me the illusion that things are getting warmer in here because it knows its position isn’t TRULY threatened.

And it won’t be for a long, long time.

So it’s like how the rich people of today are perfectly willing to spend oodles of money in order to appear to be concerned about climate change.

And they will make all kinds of big commitments to end carbon emissions.. by 2050.

Clearly, if we truly want to save our lives, we need to stop following their timetables and start telling them how long THEY have to get their shit together.

Otherwise, we’re coming for them.

And we are taking EVERYTHING from them.

More after the break.

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Another gallery night

No emotions currently clawing to get out of my head.

Might as well share pics until I think of something more to write about.

Starting with this glowingly wholesome scene.

I totallty see it as a poster to encourage kids to read. Thanks to a filter I applied to it, it even has that warm, happy, magical “glow” to it.

All my best childhood memories have that kind of sunshine-y glow to them. I am sure many of yours do, too.

We really are creatures of summer, aren’t we? As a species. It’s such a fundamental part of us that we rarely stop and wonder why we love the sun on green grass under a blue sky on a warm summer day.

I wonder if there’s a “:Savannah Syndrome” kind of like Jerusalem Syndrome, but instead of thinking you are Jesus (or whoever), you are overwhelmed by feelings of connecting with your ancient ancestors who roamed the Serengeti, and you kind of “go native” in a way you will find crushingly embarrassing when you recover.

Because I can totally imagine that happening to me if I ever take my “rise of humanity” tour of the world, starting at Olduvai Gorge.

Or wherever modern science things we started.

This one has a funny story attached to it.

I swear to god, I didn’t add the second dude.

I was just messing around with the dude in the white shirt have a nice walk through a lovely park when I decided I wanted to see what he looked like in blue Lycra shorts.

Generated the new imagine, and poof (sic), it adds an entire boyfriend and they are now holding hands while going for a stroll.

Apparently, blue Lycra shorts imply entire gay relationships in the fascinating world of modern AI modeling.

It’s not wrong.

Oh hey, I don’t think I have shared this one here yet.

That is me, Fruvous, all cuddled up with my dear pal Ada.

And that’s us most weekday mornings in Merriam’s on Tapestries. She’s my cuddle buddy and I am her lap ornament. 😛

We do silly things together.

One more pic. Time for some smut.

How about a nice pork rump?

I never really thought of pigs as sexy, but there is something about that big beautiful juicy pink piggy butt that makes my mouth water and my hips twitch.

Must…. hump…. piggybutt….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Because to do it, you have to calm yourself down. And not just in the present tense. You have to be prepared to let go of all previously stored emotions and all the assumptions and perceptions that come with them on the subject at hand.

You know, whatever it is you want to help yourself with.

And letting go like that is truly the hard part because all the stuff attached to the subject comes to be part of your sense of reality. They are taken as real, at least subjectively, and it is always a delicate business indeed to peel the residue of illusion away from the truth of our reality.

When peeling off that residue, your best tool is often Occam’s Razor. A lot of the convolutions and complications of the mind that cause us such distress really do not stand up to the Razor’s test.

For example, say I am traveling in public and I pass a group of people who burst into loud laughter as I walk by.

The immediate conclusion my Avoidant insanity would leap to is that they are laughing at me because they can’t believe I have the audacity to drag my horrible and contemptible self out where people can see me.

Or something like that.

But isn’t the simplest explanation that one of them said something funny that had absolutely nothing to do with me? To presuppose all that crazy nonsense makes no sense, and is rather narcissistic to boot.

Like dude, you’re not the main character. Not everything is about you. Chillax.

And that is undoubtedly the truth. But that does not mean it immediately becomes what you believe. Belief is based on a lot of things, of whom logic is only one.

If you still feel the same way, the lie will simply regenerate.

That’s why the ability to modify your emotions based on new evidence is so vital. An what do you know, that’s the hardest part.

Our emotions don’t want to change. They are the central pillar of how we see the world and therefore need to have a very robust ability to resist the winds of change that blow from our ever vacillating conscious minds.

In general, when they come into conflict. our minds assume the emotion is correct and the thought, idea, or information is wrong or mistaken.

Explains a lot, dunnit?

But the toxic, harmful lies NEED to be changed and that’s where the bullet hits the bone when it comes to getting out of your own way.

Once you have scraped the surface convolutions away and revealed the emotions they were expressing, it’s time for the showdown.

This is where you don’t fight the erroneous emotion – that will just make your mind fight you back and you cannot win against yourself.

Instead, you just watch the emotion. Calmly. Neutrally. And with a clear eye. And as you watch, the errant emotional will wither and crumble away because it fundamentally does not make sense and the mind has ways to get rid of beliefs that do not make sense.

You just need to get out of the way first.

More after the break.

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Welcome to Darkness Falls

Population : Me and a fuckton of demons, spirits, ghosts, ghoulies, and things that go hump in the night.

Don’t worry about the nasties. They are only harmful to me, provided you keep your distance. Get too close and they will suck the warmth right out of your soul.

Such hungry little beasts they are.

Feeling pretty depressed right now. Got the whole waves of sadness and despair rolling over me and smashing me against the rocks of mental illness over and over thing going on in this rusty ol head of mine.

This time, I am trying to just kind of go with it. Let the emotions take me where they need me to go so I can feel what they need me to feel. All of it. Every drop.

I am not interested in avoiding suffering at all costs any more. I’m fine with suffering. Sign me the fuck up. I will suffer the torments of Hell if it gets me closer to sane.

Plus I can concentrate on how good it feels to feel things after a long frozen life. Even the pain of the pins and needles that come when a sleeping limb awakens can be a welcome thing when you have been numb for as long as I have.

But how do I convince that scared little animal inside me that I am safe? That it can let me unfreeze and nothing bad will happen? Nothing is going to GET me.

But I guess we’re beyond that now and have been for some time. My icy prison doesn’t need logic or evidence to stay the way it is.

It learned to self-refrigerate a long long time ago.

So I don’t know how to convince my deeper self that everything is OK now. It still feels like I am surrounded by hostile forces and that my only hope of survival is to remain unnoticed by them.

And therefore that I have to stay in this morgue freezer of a bunker way down in the deepest sub-basements of my soul.

Maybe it’s as simple a this life being all I have ever known, making any deviation from it a trip into the unknown. the void,. the merciless Outside, and I am scared out of my mind to go someplace like that.

After all, it’s cold out there. And loud. And bright, and busy, and loaded with stimulation of all kinds, and I can’t handle that shit any more.

Bunker life has ruined me from the outside world.

Even on a virtual level. The thought of headed out into the digital wildness in search of work and/or networking opportunities chills me to the core and freezes me in place.

More of that god damned freeze response.

So yeah. I dunno. I guess this is it until I die, then.

See ya later folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, this is a really emotional topic for me and it might piss some people off.

But this is something I need to do.

Christmas is less than a month away, and once more, I will not bother to make a list of things people can get me.

Because clearly nobody gives a shit what I actually want.

For many years, I would make a list of potential gifts for my birthday and Christmas. I would do so full of hope and goodwill and cheerfulness and then email it off to the people who love and care about me.

Only to have them completely ignore it and just get me whatever absolute minimum thought and effort gift they were going to get me anyway.

And that really, really hurt me. It brought back painful memories of being treated, at best, like an afterthought as a child and feeling like I didn’t matter to anyone.

And I know why it kept happening : because when it came time to get me a gift, they just couldn’t be bothered to look at my list.

That clearly would have taken far more time and effort and willpower than I am worth to people. I mean, it’s bad enough they have to put up with me at all.

Actually giving a shit what I like and want is beyond the question.

And that wounds me so very deep. Not only does it involve a jumbo dose of disappointment (which I never handle well), but it confirms how little value people place on me as a person and how I am not equal to others at all in their eyes.

I’m that dumb old dog they got for Christmas, after all.

And the thing is, I know that part of the reason they do it is that they know they will get away with it. They know I won’t complain about it. I won’t guilt them over it. I won’t retaliate in any way. I won’t argue about it.

In fact, as long as they are willing to ignore the crestfallen look in my eyes and the sound of my tender little heart breaking, they get off scot free.

And they know this. And they exploit it.

And that’s not likely to change much, I guess. It’s not in my nature to look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter how sick the horse is or how its teeth are falling out.

I can’t make people care more about me, but I can at least not participate in my own neglect by making a list and getting my hopes up.

Sometimes the only way to keep from falling is to stay down.

So no gift list from me this year, or ever again. Just get me whatever the hell you want. I am sure that whatever you get me will be just fine, as far as you know.

I will pull myself together, and if I really do want something, I’ll get it myself, as usual.

More after the break.

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About what I just wrote

I really needed to get all that off my chest.

When I started thinking about the subject this year, I realized just how hurt I was by the whole thing, and that’s when I knew I had to write it all out of my system.

And everything I wrote up there is true to how I feel. Whether it is true to reality is another story. Either way, it feels good to have expressed it.

Going to have to get a lot better at expressing what I feel instead of bottling it all up inside if I want to get better.

And I do.

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A deep and mysterious world

There has always been a lot going on in me that I can’t explain or justify.

Thoughts that flicker through my mind like shadows on a TV screen. Emotions without form or name circling the glowing center of my being. Ideas that are born and die without ever becoming conscious.

Ghosts and spirits and wild-eye imps cavort inside my haunted head.

And a good deal of effort and life potential has gone into me trying to find a way to express all that to people that do not understand it because they do not live inside my head like I do.

Be glad of that, people. This is not a nice neighborhood.

:Looked at that way, I feel like I have been trying to explain myself to the world for my entire life., I’ve been desperately trying to bridge the gap between my inner world and the real world for as long as I can remember.

And I am pretty sure that’s how I ended up developing such amazing verbal skills. They are just a side effect of my lifelong attempt to articulate myself to the world.

And somewhere deep inside my mind there is a deep almost mystical belief that if I can just find the right words, I will somehow unlock the door of my lonely little cell and “people” and I will finally get along well because now we understand each other.

And maybe that’s an impossible quest based on the magical thinking of a very lonely child. If so, I am okay with that.

After all, it is in pursuit of that fabulous quest to write my way out of my cold dank prison cell that I have been writing 1K words a day on this blog for the last 12 years.

And in doing so, I have developed my writing muscles to sleek, athletic perfection. Wherever I go in life after my unfreezing,. I will go there with writing abilities beyond the reach of most mortal writers.

And for that alone, I can stop thinking of all these locked away years as having been “wasted”. I’ve gotten a lot out of them.

And now I am finally healthy enough to want more.

So much more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s started getting dark already, and it’s only 4:12 pm.

Truly, we have entered the twilight of the year. And things will continue to darken and the night will continue to devour a little more of the day every day until the Solstice, shortly before Xmas, and maybe that’s why I am feeling morbidly depressed.

With lots of irritability and anger mixed in there too. Just like yesterday.

In fact, this is the soundtrack to my mood right now :

Two thirds dark, shadowy brooding, and one third bright and shiny rage.

I must be really going through some heavy emotional shit lately. Good. I need to do a hell of a lot of emotional heavy lifting if I am to get out from under my own avalanche.

It can be warm and cozy under ten tons of rock. Nobody can get at you there. And it’s nice and quiet and nobody expects anything of you down there.

Surely that makes a slow and tortuous death as your internal organs are pulped by the pressure worth it, right?

I mean, as long as it only happens a little at a time, so you have time to get used to it.

I don’t know why the notion of other people’s expectations weighs so heavily on me. And it really is just a notion, because nobody has ever expected anything out of me for my entire life.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Obey them, ignore them, or resent them, other people’s expectations of you form a key part of your personality as you grow up, and as patient readers know, my personality is notoriously formless and malleable.

Literally nothing was expected of me as a child, not even my continued existence. Nobody gave a shit about me. And that’s on a good day… on a bad day, when I had dared to have needs that cost money (or time or effort or attention or… ), they wished I would just fuck odd and die.

Or at least that’s how it felt to me.

Ergo, I spent my entire childhood feeling like my family could finally decide they were sick enough of my shit to be bothered to kick me out and abandon me.

And that therefore, my only safety came from giving them what they wanted by pretending not to exist and never asking for anything or drawing attention to myself in any way so they could pretend they never had a 4th kid.

If they had expected things of me, that would have meant they valued me, and that was definitely never going to happen.

Consensus was clear : I was an unwanted, unloved, unwelcome, worthless, useless, pathetic, whiny liability who never should have existed and who should really just crawl off to die somewhere. Quietly.

Again. That’s how I felt. I don’t know how much of it was “true”.

But those feelings didn’t come out of nowhere. I can tell you that.

More after the break.

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The past is always present

And it will be in the future, too.

I suppose it’s one thing to declare your past to be dead, buried, and forgotten about, and another thing to actually move on.

Clearly, I have not moved on. I don’t know that I can, Not yet, anyhow.

I can’t move on because those old wounds are still open and fresh for me. And bitching about my past here and in therapy is the only way I know to release some of the pain and anger from those old wounds in order to allow a little bit of healing.

And while the wounds remain, so does my terrible childhood. To say it was all a long time ago is technically accurate but metaphysically nonsense.

If you lose a leg in an accident when you’re 12, it’s still gone when you’re 60. If your lungs were ravaged by police when you were a baby, you still need help breathing when you are 45.

The past is gone but the wounds linger on.

And I have been pinned under the weight of my wounds for a long long time. I know no other life. A long time ago, I managed to crawl out of the much deeper hole that I had fallen into when my parents took me out of UPEI, and I was barely able to stabilize myself into the form you find me in now.

But that was not a healthy form. I am still a shattered man. What’s more, I am shattered in a way (Avoidant Personality) that makes me avoid treatment in favour of continuing to hide from the world and act like I don’t exist.

I keep telling myself that I have just as much right to live and breathe and take up space as anyone else and that I am a worthy and valuable and quite frankly amazing individual, and it helps each time I do it, but the message doesn’t get through to my ruptured inner self where it’s needed the most.

But I keep on trying. That mean ol ice keeps melting, bit by bit, and that overpowering freeze response gets a lil weaker every day, and some day I might just be able to get enough dopamine through to my sodden heart that I can feel kind of okay.

Honestly, if I can make it to happy, I don’t care what happens after that. Even if I am living this exact same stupid pathetic life when I turn 60, it won’t matter a bit because I will be happy.

I want more, of course. A lot more. So much more.

But I will settle for being happy as I am, if that’s an option. I guess.

Pragmatically, I know that happiness is what we are all looking for and that if you are happy in life, nothing else matters.

But I have so much thwarted ambition! I need to be big and bright and shiny so I can prove to the world just what a wonder I am.

Is that too much to ask?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ya know, I think I need to learn to be cool about having to learn the same lessons over and over again.

Some lessons don’t penetrate the whole way the first time. Sometimes it takes a lot of hits with a clue by four to make it really sink in.

Take the subject of this vid :

Patient readers know that I figured out long ago that the reason I find it so hard to do anything is that I have been stuck in a deep, extended freeze response for a long time.

Like, my entire adult life. And I am 50.

And yet, the video is like a revelation to me. I guess there is a difference between passively “knowing” something and truly understanding it on the deep, spiritual level that brings the healing you need.

Hopefully this swing of the hammer gets me somewhat closer.

Of course I am stuck in a freeze response. I mean, duh. That’s why I am always going on about thawing out the ice around my heart and talking about icebergs drifting south and not being my ice and all the rest.

But now I have.. relearned it? Maybe it would be more accurate to say that it has been brought to mind by that dude’s video just when I needed it.

I love synchronicity like that.

WARNING : The following video will 80’s the fuck out of your eyeballs.

Excuse me while I wipe off the drool.

Where was I? Oh right, freezing et al.

The thing is, I don’t think I am capable of applying his cure. I have no doubt that it is effective for some, but it is just so cheesy and stupid and lame and I honestly think the amount of bitter, angry sarcasm it would elicit from this crusty old Gen X heart of mine would be positively toxic.

To the point of threatening the lives of innocent bystanders.

I just can’t praise myself for sitting up in bed. Not even a little bit,. let alone doing it as lavishly as he proposes. My overdeveloped sense of irony won’t let me, as well as my entire sense of perspective and valuation.

I can just imagine where it would go.

“Well look at you, you sat up. Wow, that’s great. You’re so amazing for doing that. What’s next for you, Chief? Ready to tackle OBJECT FUCKING PERMANENCE?!?”

Yeah, that would not help.

But I can try to apply the lesson in some less overtly fatuous way. I don’t know what the hell that would be yet, but I will set my mind to figuring it out.

I grasp the idea of trying to exit the freeze state by feeding yourself little doses of reward. But to make it through to my mind, it can’t be fake, exaggerated, forced, insincere, or a flat out lie.

I just can’t do that shit. The very thought of it sickens me. I honestly think it would only make me hate myself more.

And I don’t know where to go from there. I don’t know how to make my life more rewarding without introducing a lot of cotton candy bullshit I can’t possibly hack.

I don’t know how to make myself happier.

I don’t know how to be more forgiving to myself.

Every potential solution proposed requires a lot of that mysterious substance – call it reward, or maybe serotonin – that I just plain lack.

It’s not there. There is no fuel in the gas tank. And that means that all the stupid fucking suggestions in the world can go fuck themselves because I can’t get there.

And if you’re too stupid to understand that, then leave me the fuck alone.

More after the break.

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Like a crank

In other words, cranky.

I got pretty grumpy at the end of the previous section.

And by and large, that’s a good thing. I have a lot of anger that needs to be vented because I have been unable to express anger for a long, long time.

It was so bad at one point that this counted as a breakthrough : after a group therapy session at VGH, the 9 bus I needed to get back home to Duchess Street pulled away just as I was getting to it.

The breakthrough? That I yelled and shook my fist at it as it departed.

That’s it. Way, way back then (20+ years ago), it was a massive breakthrough that I actually expressed that much anger at all.

And I know that it’s a sickness. Anger is an important emotion. It’s a key part of both our psychological defenses and our motivational structure.

And I clearly have issues in both those departments.

I am not sure where this inability to express anger comes from. A (probably exaggerated) fear of my own power, I suppose, all mixed up with knowledge of what darkness I have inside me and the seriously crazy thoughts that go through my head.

But it’s all bullshit. Ghosts and shadows and rickety old puppets that my depression uses to keep me in its power by convincing me that if I let go even the tiniest bit, madness and disaster and acts of outright evil will inevitably ensue.

Like I am always only one little slip up away from turning into Mister Hyde.

But Mister Hyde only exists because Doctor Jekyll is so repressed. If I could find my way to expressing my anger more – even if it comes out as angry rants – the dark side of me would fade away and I would be a much happier person because now my emotional state can self-regulate a hell of a lot better.

Emotions need room to breathe. And they can’t do that if you’re all bottled up inside.

Maybe I will start ranting on TikTok again.

I suspect I might be really, really good at it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Threw that together last night when I was feeling angsty and needed an outlet.

I am happy with how it turned out.

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What is the deal with this guy?

I thought it was a pretty good little documentary on the man, so I am sharing it.

Hate the thumbnail, though.

I think he became so good precisely because he was a dull, flavorless kind of guy without a strong personality or charisma, so he just studied absolutely everything about stand-up comedy and grabbed all the stage time he could in order to practice, and internalized it all, and what do you know, it worked.

I don’t often like him but I will always respect him. He became a near-billionaire by being genuinely funny. That, my friends, is success.

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Tempest on a Thursday

Today was Therapy Thursday, and the session was rocky but fruitful.

You see, for whatever reason, when therapy time came around, I was feeling tense and frustrated and irritable.

Ergo, Doc Costin got a lot more emotional honesty out of me than usual because I vented to him about how pissed off he was making me.

See, I was trying to talk to him about feeling cranky and irritable et al, and he kept harping on about how that was because I had been physically ill recently, and that made me feel like he wasn’t really listening to me or taking me seriously.

I got loads of issues with both of those.

Looking back, I can see that it was a classic case of cross-communication, where I didn’t think he was hearing me and he didn’t think I was hearing him and so we both ended up repeating ourselves in an increasingly heated way.

Then there was a pause before I spoke those fateful words, “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but…. ”

Those words have heralded much change in my life. Some good, some bad, but usually precipitous to say the least.

Then I launched into a rant about how I felt like he was more worried about protecting himself from my emotions than my wellbeing, and I told him about how much I hold back from him in therapy because I feel like if I don’t tone it all down and keep things neutral-ish, he will leave me.

I had no idea I felt that way until I said it.

He assured me – and he had to do so repeatedly – that no matter how “difficult” I became, he was not going to abandon me.

And I will eventually believe him. Right now, this revelation is facing fierce opposition from the entire existing structure of my brain and everything I thought I knew, but it is unquestionably true, so it will win in the end.

And it occurs to me that I have spent a lot of my life protecting the world from my big bad self at the slight cost of crippling depression due to total emotional repression.

I know that my natural weapons are quite deadly and I have an enormous amount of raw power at my disposal, but I am thinking I have taken the need for restraint too far.

A big part of my recovery will be un-suppressing myself, and that scares me, but it is something I have to do in order to bring myself back to life.

And if things go boom, so be it.

I will apologize to the pieces as I pick them up.

More after the break.

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Thunderbolts and hellfire

I am in such a shitty mood right now.

In fact, I am so pissed off and cranky, I can’t eat.

I mean, I could force some food into myself, but I know that when I am this upset, that would amount to playing Russian Roulette with my IBS.

No thank you.

All right, so, take what a shitty mood I was in when I talked to my therapist and multiply it by some poor quality napping and this :

I decided, on a whim, to spend the last few bucks on my credit card on a game called Final Fantasy XIV Online.

Gamer consensus seems to be that it is, by far, the best MMORPG in town, and I’ve been meaning to give it another try for a long time, so WTF.

I tried it once, a long time ago, when it was relatively new, and while it seemed fine, I was deep into Witcher 3 at the time and therefore in full grimdark mode and was not in the mood for FFXIV’s cutesy, cartoony aesthetic.

I notice as I buy the thing that it says “not eligible for refunds”, which disgruntled me a little, but with a game like this, you just know people would buy a copy, play for a while,. then return it for refund over and over again.

So I get where they are coming from.

I buy the damned thing anyhow, and go to install it, and it wants my Square Enix ID and password. Grumble grumble. Pain in the ass.

I look at my notes and the ID is there, so I put that in along with my usual password.

No dice. Me no log in.

So I go through the whole “forgot my password” deal, reset my password to something I will hopefully remember, and try again.

Still no dice. And I know the password is now correct, so the ID must be wrong.

There is no way to get my ID from them.

They say that it will be in the password reset email, but it ain’t. Now I am out $24.99 for a game I can’t fucking play.

I put in a support ticket politely pointing out the flaw in their system. God knows when they will get around to answering that. Not any time soon, I will wager.

What’s more, that was the money I was going to use to get McD’s tonight.

This is why I never do things on a whim, people. It never goes well. It always blows up in my face in some terrible, humiliating fashion.

Now to see if venting has calmed me down enough for food.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Boy I hope this is not permanent.

Because I am way more debilitated than usual right now. I just got back from the kitchen and that trip was way, WA/Y harder than usual.

This could be it. Next stop, wheelchair, and needing help in the bathroom.

Before I even left my room, I was wheezing, and all my major muscles were on the verge of conking out on me.

The whole time I was out there, I was hanging on to the countertop like a man lost at sea clings to a piece of driftwood. The wheezing only got worse, and there came a point where I was not at all sure that I was going to make it back.

Not without a lot of help from Julian, anyhow.

But I managed. Somehow, I managed, and now here I am, sitting here wondering what fresh hell awaits me now.

And it wasn’t just my lungs and my muscles, either. My heart was pounding like an angry kettle drum too, as was my head.

Those tend to go together with me.

It’s so fun.

And that’s just the latest catastrophe. Today has ben fucked. All this morning I was drifting in and out of a very unrestful kind of sleep, stuck in an oxygen starved state until I finally remembered that I knew what to do about that.

Just like last week. Sheesh. I just don’t learn.

In general, I have been feeling increasingly shitty lately. My muscle pain has been getting worse, and has spread into both my shoulders, and from there radiates down some nerve all the way to the tip of my index finger.

Along the way, it also makes a bunch of the muscles in the back of my hand cramp up and ache. Luckily. these problems seem to be fading away, but they are still quite worrying to me nevertheless.

God, I don’t wanna die. I don’t want to suffer. I don’t want to fall apart. I just want to keep living my dumb little life with maybe a chance of making it better.

But shit like this rocks me all the way down to my foundation. I guess it forces me to face the fact that I am, in fact, a very sick man who might get a lot worse any second.

Not a happy thought. And not one I can afford to entertain for very long. Not with my mental health being as fragile as it is.

Especially right now. I feel like an icy cold wind as sharp as a knife is cutting through my soul, and I am powerless to do anything about it.

All I can do is hide under the covers and hope the whole thing blows over.

Oh, and I was dealing with really terrible circulation yesterday. Felt like there was a cold wind blowing under my comforter. I had to force myself to get up and move around to get the blood flowing around like it needs to.

Makes one very aware of one’s status as a creature heated by its blood and if that blood isn’t make it around in sufficient amounts, you are fucked.

Now to stand up for a little while in order to get the blood flowing to as many parts of me as I can manage before collapsing back into bed.

More after the break.

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Misery minus one

Feeling a little better than the last time I was typing at you.

Mostly, I have slept, and whaddaya know, this time it helped. It was even decent quality sleep instead of the half-stifled death trance from this morning.

So there’s a light.

I’m gonna have to get my plus sized butt in front of Doc Chao soon though. My health seems to be getting worse lately. I feel very fragile, like my muscles and tendons are made of used bubble gum and my nervous system is down to bare wires.

Ergo, I should see my GP.. But then I will be faced with the nigh on impossible task of conveying my symptoms to him in an earnest and medically accurate way.

I don’t relish fencing with his stupid goddamned “derp, I’m a doctor!” attitude, but I can’t see any other choice.

Maybe this time, I will finally give in to the temptation to yell, “Look, are you fucking stunned!?!” and practically goose step him through how to be a fucking doctor.

Probably not. That would not be in my best interests.

But it’s nice to think about, you know. Cathartic.

Of course, knowing my stupid fucking life, I will convince him that I am super sick, he’ll order tests and x-rays and such, and they will reveal absolutely nothing.

According to medical science, I’m fine. Or I have like, stealth ailments who know how to hide from the tests.

Or I have something super obscure that normal tests don’t detect. I guess if it turns out I have Cushing Syndrome (too much cortisol), that would qualify.

If so, I will have to send a little thank you gift to the charming med student who suggested Cushing to Doc Chao.

She seemed like such a nice girl.

God damn I’m old.

Hopefully I will be feeling more human tomorrow. Right now, I feel more like some proto-hominid, like Australopithecus or homo habilis.

Which is better than feeling like a fish trapped on dry land, gasping for air, like I did this morning, My life is truly fucked up.

Maybe the lesson I will take from all this is that I should treat each day where I feel okay as a precious gift, and try to get the most of life that I can.

Problem is, I have never known what the fuck that means. My powerful but impaired imagination has no idea how to get this mythic “more” out of life.

All I know how to do is survive. Make it through the day. Hold myself together enough to see another sunrise. Live til tomorrow.

I haven’t the slightest idea what “more” would look like, let alone this mystical and arbitrary “the most” or “the fullest”.

Fuck that Mediterranean crap. I am firmly Northern European and I need practical advice, not your god damned “don’t worry be happy” empty-headed bullshit.

Fuck all optimist, man,.

Because you have no fucking idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something big was moving. and nobody even knew what it was.

What was worse was that nobody even knew how they knew. Whatever it was reflected no light, emitted no sound, and had no scent.

Nobody had ever touched or felt it, and yet it left blades of grass bent in its wake, and puddles of water splashed from the impact of its heavy tread.

All the witnesses – and there were many, as what the media dubbed The Presence traversed the land – could tell you is that they had experienced a sudden and terrifying feeling that something massive and alive was nearby, like they had felt the breath of a dinosaur on the back of their necks, only without so much as a slight breeze.

At first, reports were scattered and unreliable, and most people just made note of them in passing and waited patiently for the inevitable reasonable explanation.

And the scientists tried, albeit halfheartedly. Phrases like “mass hysteria” were tossed around irresponsibly, and random mutterings about “gravitic fluctuations” and “magnetic lava flows” flew around the Internet like homesick carrier pigeons.

In fact, it wasn’t until the trickle of reports became a deluge that anyone started taking the phenomenon seriously at all. People began frantically compiling statistics on the reports, trying to figure out what and where the damned thing was.

And one thing rapidly became apparent : there were enormous gaps in the coverage obtained this way. Clearly the number of people experiencing the phenomenon without reporting it to anyone vastly outnumbered the number of those who called it in.

Everyone agreed that this was a problem.

But it wasn’t until an Icelandic app developer released an app called Skrímslaveiðimaður (Monster Hunter) that tracked the Presence automatically that the data became more complete.

The Google Play and Mac stores were slammed with more traffic than they could handle within minutes of the app being released. Truly heroic levels of emergency colocation and rehosting of files were employed to try to stem the tide, and even then people had to wait up to an hour for their download.

This led to considerable tension and unrest. Already, those who had not yet experinced the Presence were bitterly jealous of those who had.

This delay only made things worse.

But then, a programmer in Sri Lanka added a “send a copy to a friend” option to the app (now called “Skrim” by the cool kids) and that solved the problem, or at the very least, spread the blame around.

The Skrim data set was much richer, and the picture it painted was a puzzling one.

The Presence seemed to be taking a tour of all the major (and many minor) urban centers of population in the world. It was as though it was on a mission to encounter the maximum number of humans it possibly could in a limited period of time.

Based on that assumption, a rough idea of its future path was put together, and for the rest of its stay, the Presence would follow that path like it was its itinerary.

When it disappeared, reaction was mixed. Some were relieved that it was all over and life could go back to normal now. Others were disappointed for the exact same reason.

But that was not to be, because a few hours after the Presence exited, a great gleaming spaceship the size of a shopping district landed with total precision on the lawn of the White House, and from it descended three elegant, delicate aliens of great beauty and grace descended at a stately pace.

Then one of them detached from the other two, came forward, and spoke in tones of incredibly paternalistic affection when it said, “People of Earth. It is our finest pleasure to finally meet the people we have… ”

“What’s the deal with the Presence?” cried a voice in the crowd.

Billions of eyes were riveted to the lead alien, who seemed confused. Rapid, whispered explanations soon made it to the lead alien.

“You mean to tell me… ” , the alien incredulously asked, “… that you people could actually tell our… um, machine was there?”

A sea of nodding assent from around the globe.

The alien frown, and looked to its two compatriots. Then back to the audience.

“Well…. shit. ” said the alien.

---

I’ve done it again, haven’t I?

People are gonna want to know what happens next and I dunno. For me, that is where the story ends, making the whole thing kind of a joke.

And I’m very very unlikely to go back and add to it, because as patient readers know, one of the occasionally maddening quirks of my particular muse is that I never go back.

This car has no reverse gear. I can only go forward to the next thing, or do nothing at all. Those are my only options.

And so by any writing instructor’s standards, I write like a lunatic. I do everything wrong. No outline, no notes, no rewrites, no polish. It’s all wrong. Wrong to the point that many would think that it is impossible that my quality of writing results from it.

It’s like the Triple Fried Egg Cheese and Chili Chutney Sandwich.

Nothing I do should work. But it does.

And I can’t really explain it. All I can figure is that maybe my methods maximize internal freedom and flexibility in a way that lets me do thing intuitively and naturally that others have to do consciously and methodically.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my methods to anyone else. Don’t try to write like your old pal Uncle Fru kids. It ain’t gonna work.

The only way I would even attempt to teach someone to write like I do is if they are feeling crushed and oppressed by all the advice and rules and structure and other nonsense people fill young writers’ heads with on “how to do it”.

I’ve been there. It sucks.

To them, I would talk about how none of that stuff really matters. There are legendary writers who couldn’t even spell, let alone observe all the “rules” of paragraph structure. They too did everything “wrong” and still became canonized because what really matters is whether or not you have something worth saying.

Formally perfect nothing is still nothing. One cannot fumble one’s way to genius via method. Method is crap compared to actually knowing what you are doing and having something worth contributing to the world.

So if the usual formal way of learning the creative arts ain’t working for you, don’t sweat it. Do the things that will get you the piece of paper that can get you jobs, and on your own, throw the rulebook out and do whatever works for you.

Because it’s not your instructors that are the boss of you.

It’s your muse.

Give that bitch whatever the hell she wants. Feed her and treat her well, and she will lay her golden eggs for you.

And to hell with anything and anyone else.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My mood has been all over the place today.

One second I am sleepy and languid, the next I am ready to tear out my hair from the feelings of frustration and being stifled, and the next after that, I feel like nothing matters. everything is stupid, and there’s no point to doing anything at all.

I call that last one “teenager mode”. Only thirty five years too late.

I figure I am going through a period of growth and adjustment, and that’s why my mood is unstable. And I can live with that.

I already know than instability is the first price I have to pay in order to get better. I have been way too “stable” for all these sad and sidelined years. So “stable” that I have remained in the same stunted and confused state for more than 25 years.

Stability is only a virtue if your current state is sufficient. If it ain’t, then you need to change, and that means instability.

You can’t get anywhere lying down, after all.

Another price I’ll pay for progress is fear. With instability comes uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes fear, at least for me.

And historically, it’s been the fear that has held me back. It is my depression’s primary tool for keeping me under its thumb, and I have grown far too used to treating all my fears, anxieties, and aversions as if they were uncrossable lines that gave me no choice but to live this urban hermit life of mine.

But that’s bullshit. I can cross those lines any time I want. I just have to be willing to put up with the fear that will result.

For too long, I have fallen for the con of my depression saying, “it’s not so bad, look at all the infinite things you still can do! “

And yeah, they are infinite, but only in the sense that there are an infinite number of possible numbers between 0 and 1.

That’s still not nearly enough room for me. I am a great and mighty spirit who has spent far too long chained to this screen bound life of mine, and I need to fly free and make a place for myself in this big ol crazy world.

And I’m working on it.

But that means learning to take care of the needs not just of the mind and the body but those of the heart and the spirit, too. And that means making peace with doing things without necessarily being able to justify or explain them to myself.

The fact that it feels like the right thing to do should be enough. Following my heart is not optional. It has needs that go far deeper than the mind’s fleeting desires.

Who cares if they don’t “make sense”. Making sense like that is a scam and a dodge anyhow. It’s nothing but an attempt to pretend like there is some kind of cosmic purpose from outside the self to what I do.

But there ain’t. I’m a shambling mass of carbon compounds trying to make their happy light turn on just like everybody else.

So fuck making sense, I want to make myself happy instead.

More after the break.

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Back to the gallery

Time to show off some of the art I have done recently.

As always, we will begin with something wholesome and pure.

Here’s a sweet doggo having cuddle time with his master.

I find it funny and kind of sweet that once I had the ability to summon images with the power of my words, the thing I did most with this power besides porn was to make soft and cuddly scenes of simple animal closeness.

I’m such a sweetie.

Speaking of which…..

Technically, that’s an orc, not a gamma ray monster, but that did not stop me from saving that image as “Hulk loves kitten”.

It’s weird how I can be a coldly logical and pragmatic INTJ one minute and a big gooshy marshmallow of a guy who loves pictures like that the next.

I suppose an unsophisticated onlooker might think I seemed schizophrenic. Which one is the real Fruvous, they would wonder.

All of them, of course. I’m highly multifaceted. A complex individual with a lot of different layers of personality, any of which might catch the light and be visible at any time depending on the situation.

And if I don’t already have one that suits the occasion, I’ll invent one.

Here’s some more of the warm glow of intimacy.

I did a whole series of those. Called them “Campfire Memories”.

I seriously should work for Hallmark. Or their furry equivalent, Scentmark.

Now check this shit out.

I can’t believe I had something to do with making that. It looks like the cover of an issue of Heavy Metal or Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Guess who found the Boris Vallejo filter?

I will now be taking your van art commissions.

Now for something a little spicier.

Hey, it just goes to show that if you give the public what they want, they’re come.

And so will he, but he’s saving that for the big finale.

Of course, it’s not all bright lights and public adulation for Bugs. Sometimes he prefers to just relax and let loose on his farm.

See, on this a-here farm, we just do whatever feels natural.

Sometimes with friends.

Guess who discovered the magic of the word “orgy” in a prompt.

Finally, have you ever wondered what it’d look like if Jack Kirby drew fur porn?

No? Well, here it is anyway.

And now you know what a Kirby penis looks like.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.