That’s what I’ve got going on right now. A slowly burning fire that puts out far more heat than light and that is burning deep underground, like a coal fire.

That means I am in one of my brooding phases. I get into them when I have some heavy emotional shit to process and that is taking a lot of my mental and spiritual bandwidth so I am, on the conscious level, left with this sullen, brooding feeling.

It’s a fairly stable feeling despite the rumblings down below. It would take a pretty strong push from some external force to cause me to erupt on someone.

Fun fact : there’s been over 400 earthquakes on Mount Saint Helens over the last three months. But I’m sure it’s nothing.

To be honest, I know how she feels.

But as uncomfortable as in can be, I need this fire because I’ve got a lot of bullshit to burn. I have a lot of toxic residue and tarry ash clogging up all my pipes and ventilation shafts and I’ve got to turn up the heat and keep it on to burn that shit out of my system.

Boy, am I all about the fire imagery lately.

And that’s a good thing. Fire means energy. Movement. Inspiration. Purification. Fire destroys the old, dead growth in the forest to make way for new, healthy growth to sprout from its ashes.

And good lord, do I need that. I need it bad.

So spark up a bonfire. We have a lot of fallen leaves to burn.

---

Today was Therapy Thursday. I totally spaced on it.

Forgot that I had therapy today, or that today was even Thursday. Went to sleep around 11 am, thinking, “Do I need to set an alarm? Nah, I’ve got nothing going on today. “

D’oh. Oh well, no harm done, really, because I was woken up by the phone at one but didn’t stand a chance of making it to it in time, so I managed to get out of bed and sit down at the computer and wake up a bit before Doctor Costin called again at 1:15 pm, and that’s when I learned what time it was.

And I was a wee bit embarrassed. But no biggie, the session just went long to cover for the missing 15 minutes.

Bonus giggle : when the phone woke me up at 1 pm, I remember thinking, “Now who the hell would be calling me at this hour?”.

In my mind, it was still late morning.

It was an OK session, I guess. He was happy to hear of my progress in burying the past, giving myself permission to have a huge ego, and saying to hell with the rules of logic and reality if they get in the way of my happiness.

But our dynamic has definitely shifted ever since he officially gave up on trying to get my to do things after a particularly bitter and forceful denial of it every working by me.

And I feel bad about that now. It felt back for him to tell me he gave up, even though I had just told him how pointless it was.

I think that’s part of what started me on the path to where I am today. It was the shock I needed to get things moving, like an avalanche, to the point where I realized I needed to break from my previous conception of reality entirely.

And that’s what finally broke my fucking shell.

More after the break.

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---

Farewell, Baldur’s Gate 3

Well, I haven’t played BG3 in three days and I don’t really miss it.

Guess I am officially burned out on the game. Fair enough. I played the dang thing for many hours a day for three months and change.

I think I can say I got my $80 worth.

I know that there’s lots of things I haven’t seen yet and things I haven’t done. And I barely even touched the world of mods for it.

But meh. A world of meh. I can’t manage to care any more. Ergo, I am done for now.

I won’t rule out going back and playing more once I have let it lie fallow for a while. It’s still a very good game and I was enjoying my second playthrough before all my messing around with Stable Diffusion took over.

It’s just so much fun to make lewd art! And the clean stuff too, although it brings a different kind of joy.

Mostly the sentimental kind. Awww.

That’s a picture of Fruvous rescuing a little otter girl who had gotten separated from her parents at the spaceport where Fruvous lived. He cuddled her and kept her entertained with his silly antics until her frantic parents arrived.

He was gone before they even saw him.

But I need a video game to play too. Ergo I am currently in that uncomfortable “between games” period where I have to figure out what I want to play next.

I could always replay something from my Steam library. I have hundreds of games there. Surely there is something worth playing that I haven’t played in long enough for it to seem fresh-ish to me now.

Or I could buy something new. I could probably spare $20 for a game. That won’t get me the new hotness, but my machine probably can’t play the new hotness anyway.

My computer could only just barely manage to run Baldur’s Gate 3…. badly. Animation errors and other graphical glitches abounded.

Now I ache to play something that freaking WORKs.

So whether it’s something new or one from the vaults, it’s going to be something old or simple enough to run well on my machine.

And something that is NOT a top-down type isometric RPG. The last two games I played the crap out of have been those, and I am sick of them.

I need three dimensions, god dammit!

I imagine I will do my usual painful dithering over the whole thing before getting frustrated and grabbing the first thing that looks good.

What can I say. I know what I’m like.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My efforts to thaw myself out seem to be going well.

Opening the door to having a big ego has been key. Whenever I feel too cold on the inside, I can just bask in the glow of how awesome I am.

Because fuck humility. I’m amazing. End of story.

Besides, it’s about time the forces of evil in my head had some serious competition. And if that takes my developing outrageous levels of self-regard, so be it.

I’ll take whatever bus out of this podunk existence I can find. Hell, I’ll tie a wheelchair to the back of a Mack truck and ride it out of here if that’s what it takes.

Don’t take that as a knock against the people in my life, by the way. I want to make that abundantly clear. Julian, Joe, and Felicity, you’re all fantastic.

But this cloistered existence in suspended animation just won’t do. I need to make a life for myself and then live it. I need to be and feel alive.

And the only way I can really resurrect myself is to open myself wide to all the hot, passionate, fast-circuit emotions I have always instinctively suppressed in myself.

Why? Two main reasons : as a very misguided and heavy handed solution to anxiety, and as a way to maintain the delusion of self-control.

After all, if you never ever ever act on emotion, that means all your decisions are based on sound logical reasoning and therefore you can’t possibly get hurt, right?

What a load of factory reject crap.

So fuck it. I’m going to freewheel it. Improvise. Make life up as I go. All my trying to see problems coming so I can avoid them without having to deal with them in realtime seems so frustratingly futile to me now.

It can go straight to the worst neighborhood in Hell.

So fuck it. Crank up the furnace and kick open the vents. Put fresh logs on the fire and dump a bucket of water on the rocks in the sauna. And for God’s sake, open up some windows to let the fresh air into this dank and fetid crypt.

Yeah I know that’ll let the heat out. Fuck it, I can afford it.

And aim my solar reflector satellite at all that fucking Midnight Tundra inside me. Global warming is coming to my Tundra and it’s going to melt down the whole place and reveal the lush, beautiful, fertile, verdant land underneath just waiting to burst into rowdy life.

And finally, the land will come alive because summer has finally arrived and the time has come to cast off winter’s cold embrace and instead stand naked before the dawn of a brand new day.

And personally, I can’t wait.

More after the break.

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Aren’t antihistamines wonderful?

See, if I don’t take my antihistamine, I get allergy attacks.

But if I do take my antihistamine, I get allergy attacks, and resentment.

---

I am not my ice

One of depression’s oldest tricks is to convince you that it is you and what hurts it, hurts you, so you had better protect it from the forces trying to destroy it.

You know, evil forces like therapy and antidepressants and love.

But you are not your depression, and neither am I. The pain and fear you feel when your mental illness is threatened is entirely the product of said illness and thus can be utterly disregarded as essentially hallucinatory.

Mere phantoms of the mind, best ignored.

In fact, when you’re strong enough, you can even begin to enjoy the pain and fear your illness generates because you recognize that it is not your own, it is the suffering of your most dangerous and despicable enemy whom you are trying to kill.

Yes. Let the hate flow through you, Padawan. Then strike it down.

That’s why, in the fight against your depression, you must be without mercy. It will play the victim if you let it. Cloak itself in innocence. Pretend to be hurt to garner sympathy. And anything else it can do to prolong its existence and maybe regain its power over you once you stop paying attention to it.

But it is pestilence. Vermin. It deserves no more sympathy than a virulent infection, or an infestation of cockroaches, or hard radiation.

You must be deaf to its cries as you burn it from your mind and your soul with a cleansing fire that, like a fever, will sweat the foulness out of you so that you may, at last, be clean.

Tired and dehydrated, but clean.

And remember : it is not you. Nor is it a part of you. It is an evil alien thing that took up residence in your mind and spirit and it must be purged.

Now you know what you must do, young hero.

Your destiny awaits!

---

Well that got weird.

Let’s see. Well, otherwise, my day has been peaceful and quiet, which is nice. I did a bunch of image generation, of course… it’s very addictive.

Put a question about my adjective issue on the Stable Diffusion subReddit. Hopefully some kind stranger will tell me what I am doing wrong.

There must be some way to make sure adjective A (fluffy) goes to character A (Fruvous) and not to Character B (the planet Mars).

No aftereffects of last night’s three hours of hell. Glad I don’t remember much of it. I suppose when all you do is sit there and suffer, there’s not a lot to remember.

It came and went so suddenly and I was so out of my mind while it happened that it almost feels like it happened to someone else.

Or, like I said yesterday, like it was all a bad dream.

But I have a witness, Joe. He saw me at my sickest. He can attest to it.

This is starting to seem like an alien abduction story.

Well if it was aliens, I am at least glad they cleaned up after myself. No weird burn marks, glowing phalanges, or urges to sculpt mesas out of mashed potatoes.

Knock on wood.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry about the mess. My winter coat is coming in.

My Stable Diffusion rant

As you all know, I’ve been generating images via AI lately. I do this with a program called Easy Diffusion, which is a user friendly PC version of Stable Diffusion.

And when people hear you’re doing that, they will parrot, “Just tell it exactly what you want”, and I am telling you this is a LIE.

I tell it exactly what I want all the time, and the result looks like it took all my adjectives and put them in a hat then threw that hat into the air and assigned the adjectives to whatever noun they happened to land on.

I have been trying to get it to put a male fox (me) into the lap of a female gargoyle (my good cuddle buddy Ada) for days now, and something always goes awry.

I have resigned myself to the fact that I will spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to trick the damned thing into doing what I told it to do.

OK, rant complete.

---

A slight adjustment

I got sick of having breakfast at 8 am and lunch at 5 pm because that’s ridiculous.

It meant breakfast and lunch were 9 hours apart! And then lunch and supper(9 pm) were only 4 hours a part, and supper and midnight snack (guess) were only 3 hours apart. What an arrangement!

Well I got sick of that and so I am going to change it. Starting with yesterday, I am eating my lunch at 4 pm.

Still absurd. But less so.

When I am comfortable with that, I will move it to 3 pm, and then, eventually, to 2 pm, so that my meals can be 6 hours, aka a nicely even quarter of a day, apart once more.

I have also moved supper to 8 pm.

Maybe then, I will move supper to 7:30 pm to space it better with my 12 am snack.

Obviously, the timing for that cannot be moved.

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My anti-reality stance

To recap : fuck reality. Fuck “the Truth”. Fuck history. Fuck memory. And fuck anything else that is weighing me down or holding me back.

As far as I am concerned, my past is dead and gone. Buried in an unmarked grave. I neither want nor need it any more and therefore it had to GO.

I was just clinging to it as an excuse to avoid reality anyway.

Well I am moving on, and it ain’t invited on the trip.

Who cares about all the bad shit that happened in my childhood? So my childhood sucked. So did everybody’s, and some had it a lot worse than me.

But that was ages ago, and that sad little boy is long gone too. I’m an adult now, and it’s time for me to get on with it and make some kind of life for myself.

One I can live with, instead of this present farce.

I could do a hell of a lot of truly amazing things in this world if I just shed my cocoon already so I can spread my wings and fly.

And share with the world all the magic I have been saving up.

More after the break.

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Bringing what back?

I recently got the following song stuck in my head :

But as always, when a song gets stuck in my head, my mind automatically transforms it into something more amusing.

It’s a form of revenge, really.

Well my brain turned that song into, “I’m bringing Pepsi back”, which would have made a kick ass Pepsi ad back when this song was hot.

In my head, it’s a reply to an everyday situation.

“Hey Justin, where are you going? ”
“I’m gonna go to 7-11 for a drink. “
“Oh yeah? Whatcha gonna get?”:
“*music starts* I’m bringing Pepsi back!”

My imagination can be so much fun.

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A rough patch

Got real sick last night.

Hit me around midnight, though in retrospect the signs were there beforehand. Bad tasting burps, cold sweat, a weird feeling of suction in my lower right abdomen.

Then around midnight, the bomb went off, and I got incredibly sick. So sick that my memory of it is rather spotty…. thank God.

So sick that I could not even tell you what my symptoms were. Was I nauseous? Achey? Did my head hurt? What gives?

There were no symptoms. Only pain.

But I spent a lot of time sitting on the toilet and kind of scrunched over to one side because that was the only way to be even a little comfortable, and otherwise just sitting there and suffering.

I remember wishing I had brought my phone with me so I could tell Joe why I had not come out to hang with him at midnight like I usually do.

Otherwise, that time is a blur.

Nothing of value was lost.

Eventually, at around 2:30 am, Joe checked in on me and I was able to tell him I was very sick. He, of course, understood.

Not too long after that, the pain had receded enough for conscious thought to resume, and I could think about getting up and going to bed.

But I was too terrified to get up. It felt like something horrible would happen if I did.

Ergo, I then spent what felt like a long time struggling with myself in order to get myself to risk getting to my feet.

It felt like I was fighting my way up a hill, falling back over and over again but getting back up every single time, until I finally made it.

During this time, my bed became like the Promised Land to me. I knew that if I could make it there, everything would be fine, and I would be safe.

Eventually I did get up….. and I was fine. A little wobbly, but otherwise fine.

I made it to my bed and slumped into it.

Fast forward to around 7:45 AM, and I wake up feeling perfectly fine. Refreshed, even. It was like it had all been a terrible nightmare.

I figure it must have been a bit of food poisoning. I’d had a bologna sandwich earlier and I suspect the mayo may have been off.

I suppose I should warn Joe about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There I am, a happy, carefree child on his way to school, eager to play with all his friends in the schoolyard before attending his classes.

Because you know what? Fuck reality. Fuck the truth. Fuck history. I am going to give myself the happy childhood I deserved.

Holy crap, is this what they mean by “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood”?

Suddenly that seems a lot less insipid.

In the same vein, this is also me :

There I am after school, passing the time until my mother gets home by happily playing a video game. When she gets home, I will happily tell her about my day, and she will tell me about hers, and we will bond.

Then we cook supper together, joking around the whole time.

I mean, when you really think about it, what use is the past? What value does it have? What are all those painful, lonely childhood memories doing me?

If some alien decided to do me a favour and replace all those traumatic memories with happy, healthy ones like the ones in my new headcanon,. what would I really lose?

Besides a whole lot of mental illness.

So to hell with it all., This is my new truth now. A happy, healthy, wholesome childhood where I was loved and cherished and validated and given all the support and attention a little boy could ever desire or need, and where I never, not even for one moment, doubted that I was wanted.

And every night, the family would gather around the supper table and enjoy the meal my mother and I had cooked. And everybody got a chance to talk about their day, and everybody listened to them, and really cared about what they heard.

It looked like this :

I had lots of good friends, more than enough, and we hung out together and played and had each other’s backs, and learned a lot about life and how to live it as we grew up together in our happy homes.

Now I know I can’t erase or delete my old memories. But I can definitely de-index them. De-emphasize them. Drop them from active consideration. Declare them to be unimportant in the extreme and leave them behind as the useless baggage they are.

And go on to sleep like… well, like this.

Softly, peacefully, deeply, and well. Asleep the moment my head hits the pillow. And straight through the night every single time.

So yeah. To hell with my real childhood. It will always be a part of me but I hereby disown. I will no longer be beholden to it in any way, shape, or form.

And I am sure as hell not going to live there any more. I’m packing up and shipping out, destination the here and now.

If I hurry, maybe I can catch up with myself while I still can.

Above all, I am going to face the future and learn to see it as a good place to be.

No more hiding from reality.

After all, what’s there to hide from? The world is a beautiful place.

More after the break.

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I’ve never Peter Cushed

So it turns out that Doc Chao thinks I might have Cushing Syndrome. 

That’s what this whole cortisol testing business is about. Cushing causes cortisol levels to rise in the blood and that causes all kinds of problems… including muscle weakness.

Taken rationally (what can I say, it’s a habit), I don’t think that’s the case. I have a few of the symptoms, but not enough of them.

Which is too bad, because if I did have Cushing, fixing it with a cortical blocker or antagonist could solve a lot of my problems in one swell foop.

Like I said before, it causes depression, weight gain, and Type 2 diabetes.

Boy, would it be awesome to have all of those gone. I’d come out of the gate roaring like a lion, ready to take on the world and make it say “uncle”.

But I don’t have thin arms and legs, even though it often feels like I do. And I don’t have a fatty lump between my shoulder blades^[1], though I do get pain there sometimes.

But I am fat and fifty and I barely move. I get pain everywhere sometimes. There isn’t a part of me that doesn’t ache occasionally.

I get cramps in my eyebrows.

No stretch marks, but I have had them in the past, so… maybe?

My skin is neither fragile nor easily bruised. Which is a blessing considering how god damned clumsy I am.

I’d be one big broken bruise by now. Yikes.

Go not erection issues, knock on wood. My problem is on the other end of the cycle, climax, and that’s due to the antidepressants.

And I don’t have trouble controlling my emotions. There, too, my problem is at the other end of the spectrum. I have trouble letting go of the illusion of control enough to actually feel what I need to feel and do what I need to do in order to be healthy.

God damned emotional constipation.

“Moon face”? I don’t think so. If anything, my face is less fat than the faces of other fat dudes I have known.

Trouble concentrating or remembering? Yeah it’s called brain fog, and it can be caused both by depression and by antidepressants.

Ain’t that a peach?

Depression? Yup. High blood pressure? Yup. Infections? Had them. Bone deterioration? Radiologist though I had osteoporosis.

Hmmm. Maybe I have more symptoms than I thought.

Better get my Peter Cushed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, make that Yellow Alert Level 2. If not maybe 3.

Because I just made my trip to the kitchen to get my lunch together and it took a LOT out of me. My legs were really hurting.

And a more acute pain than usual. In fact, the really shocking and frightening thing is that the minute I stood up, the pain was as bad as it usually gets right before I collapse.

And with me here all alone. J&J are at Costco.

The situation is bad enough that I am worried about making it to Denny’s tonight. And that’s just a matter of rollating from the apartment to the car and from the car into Denny’s and then back again later.

I knew I wasn’t doing so hot after Wound Care on Friday but I thought I had gotten over that and was getting better.

Which is an easy thing to believe when you haven’t put your legs to the test lately, as I had not done since last night.

My heart was pounding too. I suspect that is because the weaker your legs are, the harder your heart has to work to move you around.

And judging by what I just went through, they are getting pretty damned weak.

But I am learning to be cautious about going to full on red alert. What just happened was bad but it was not necessarily a sure sign of how things will be from now on.

All chronic illnesses have good days and bad days and I could just be having a bad leg day, so to speak. Or it could be that when I am on my feet again and moving and committed to getting to Denny’s, my body shakes off whatever is going on right now, and I make it to Denny’s and back just fine.

On the other hand, this might be the end of me as an ambulatory being. It might be that from now on, I will be lucky to make it to the bathroom and back under my own power and that means it is wheelchair time for yours truly.

Presumably the motorized kind as my arms are becoming useless too.

All of this is pretty fucking grim. So I am not exactly a happy camper right now. In fact, I am on the verge of a major depression at the moment and I would probably have fallen into one if I didn’t have the prospect of Denny’s to look forward to.

So if it turns out I can’t go, well….. that would be bad.

Honestly, at that point, I should probably just press the big red button, go to full red alert, and call 911.

Because if I can’t make it to the car for Denny’s, I certainly can’t make it there to be taken to the hospital either.

At that point, it’s an ambulance or nothing.

Hopefully it will not come to that. But even if I make it to Denny’s, I get the feeling that I should see a medical professional of some sort ASAP.

More after the break.

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Post prandial prattle

It means “after eating”.

Made it to Denny’s and back without a problem. I am fine as long as I remember to take things slowly and smoothly. That’s how I made it through Wound Care last Friday and that is how I made it through tonight.

It’s when I forget I am sick and absentmindedly try to do things the usual way that I get myself in trouble. The trick is to move like I am a frail but dignified old lady pushing her shopping cart around Safeway.

One thing I want to note before I forget : one thing that needing the walker has shown me is that people are quite happy to help a disabled person out. I have had so many people open and/or hold open doors for me, clear out of my path with a smile on their face, and otherwise treat me very nicely that it’s honestly improved my opinion of my fellow naked beach monkeys a fair bit.

And given my many concentric layers of social issues, that’s a big deal.

That’s why I wanted to point it out here : to make it more real. I don’t date trust it to the crime infested neighborhood that is my mind because it would be all too easy for the forces of darkness in there to make that knowledge disappear before it threatens their regime of mistrust and self-loathing.

But now that I have “said it out loud”, it can’t be “:disappeared”.

This is how badly damaged I am : I am honestly surprised that people are extending to me the same courtesy and consideration that I have seen everybody extend to other handicapped people all my life, including myself.

Like I somehow though people would think I didn’t deserve it. Like they would instinctively react to my innate toxic horribleness by scorning and shunning me and giving me the coldest of shoulders.

Now that’s some seriously fucked up Avoidant Personality Syndrome stuff right there.

Ergo that is also worth putting down in words. I need to be reminded that no matter what my mental illness tells me about myself, all the real world sees is a fairly average big fat dude with a neutrally pleasant warm demeanor.

I am not some knd of shambling horror causing revulsion and nausea and contempt in the public at large wherever I go, and it is crazytown to think that I am.

I’m just some guy. Maybe a big bigger and broader than most and definitely not a paragon of fashion and refinement, but no worse than the millions of other big fat guys just like me out there.

And that means that I don’t have to be so guarded or scared. I can relax and just be a person, no better or worse than anyone else.

The bullies are long gone. I am not the schoolyard pariah I once was. I’m a perfectly delightful fellow people like to be around. I can go out and play with the other kids and be perfectly safe from harm.

At worst, they will think I’m a little weird.

Well, they’re not wrong, are they?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, sometimes when I am having good clean old-fashion perverted fun making images via Stable Diffusion, I end up creating something striking entirely by accident.

Such as this watchful fellow. Witness…. THE SOUP WOLF!

It’s her sworn duty to stand watch over the communal soup tureen and make sure nobody takes a second bowl until everybody has had some.

Cross her, and you will face her wrath in the form of her giving you such a look of doggy disapproval that you’ll feel just awful.

Best not to risk it.

And there is this scene of wholesome innocence and gentle closeness.

I love that I can make art like that now. It is, in a way, a kind of pornography, only instead of making you feel good in your bikini parts, it makes you feel all warm and mushy and good in that big throbbing muscle known as your heart.

Again, I say : I should write for greeting card companies. I understand it pays pretty well, and I definitely would enjoy being all sweet and sentimental for a living.

OK, time to get smutty.

I love that one. Note : not what bear penises actually look like.

Now to me, that is hella sexy. I just want to lean in, mount up, and pound that big fluffy bear butt with all the built in cushioning like I was Lars Ulrch and my dick was a bass pedal during a big drum solo.

He’s the drummer for Metallica. Now you know.

And just look at that sly, sexy grin. He knows he’s got the goods.

Time to get serious again. Here’s another piece of accidental art.

I call that one “I want to be the one on TV”, because the foxy resting his chin on the edge of the bed (no, he’s not beheaded!) is like the real me and the smiling lovely foxy on the TV is the version of me I project to the world.

I’d rather be that guy. He is so much healthier and happier than me. If I could, I would leave the real me behind and move into his world.

But seeing as that’s not an option, I’m gonna have to repair the real me.

One last pic. Something enthusiastically erotic, as per my style.

Oooh, this is a good one! Perfect for spreading an important message.

The message is that being gay doesn’t mean you can’t be strong, confident or cool. It doesn’t mean you automatically lose the masculine power struggle to all straight men. It doesn’t make you a wimp, a sissy, or “girly”.

Unless you want to be, of course. In which case, God bless.

But just look at our sexy dingo friend up there. Do you think he’s ceded any ground to the haters about just how awesome he can be? Do think that he would hesitate to step up to defend the innocent from the ignorant and the haters? Does he look like the kind of critter that plays second fiddle to anyone?

Follow his example, boys. You are just as much of a man as any straight dude.

Hold you head, and your fists, up high.

More after the break.

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The lame and the game

The lame is me. I mean, moreso than usual.

Ever since I came back from Wound Care yesterday, my right leg has been extra sore. When I take a step, I get this burning sensation all over the surface of the big hamhock type muscle at the top of my leg.

The gluteus maxima, according to Britannica.. Apparently, that involves more than just the butt, despite how the term is commonly used.

Makes sense, really. I mean, it’s a gigantic muscle with very robust tendons. It would be silly if that was there just to cushion us when we sit and give us something to spank.

Anyhow, so I am keeping an eye on that leg, metaphorically speaking. The pain is not very intense but the way it spreads over the muscle with a feeling like a static electrical charge followed by burning sensation like someone splashed my leg with uncomfortably warm water, or maybe a very mild acid, causes me concern.

So, Stage One Yellow Alert, or maybe Caution Level 1. Will monitor situation and report any changes immediately.

On another front, I was having trouble with Baldur’s Gate 3 crashing during important cutscenes, seriously hampering my progress.

And it’s that all too familiar kind of crashing too, where the monitor suddenly stops receiving information from the computer. Like I’d unplugged the monitor cable.

And the makers of the game, Larian,. just pushed another patch, so I figured that made it a good idea to see if my video drivers were up to date.

They were not. They were behind by 10.02 version numbers. Shocking.

I updated them and now it doesn’t crash. Yay me!

Sadly, my making of porns still crashes it sometimes. I was really hoping to have gotten rid of that issue too, as rebooting all the time is a serious fucking drag, man.

And making porns is so much fun! And learning to use these AI tools is an actual job skill these days. I should try to cash in on that somehow.

I finally found something technical that I enjoy doing so much that I will keep on doing it long enough to pick up actual skills.

And all it took was porn.

Is there anything it can’t do?

Oh, and I have looked into how much 32 more gigs of RAM will cost me, and it turns out to be super reasonable.

So I will probably be ordering some soon. Then it will just be a matter of whether I wimp out and ask Spuug to install it for me, or man up and open the case and install it myself.

I’ve been terrified of touching the insides of my computer for a long time, and it’s silly. From what I have heard, installing the RAM is literally just a matter of plugging a thing into a thing, like plugging in a toaster, so I should be able to handle that.

It’s just that the stakes are so high. I need my computer. I use it for everything. It’s the center console of my life.

If I fucked it up, it would crush me.

But I am trying to learn to not be such a pussy about everything. Fuck all my fear, I want to get shit done.

Be scared and do it anyway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Came up with that image last night, shortly after I finished blogging. And in a sure sign of synchronicity, it came out exactly the way I wanted it to on the first try.

That never happens. Stable Diffusion is a finicky beast and anything I generate is usually the product of a lot of fussing, cursing, and tweaking.

And the accidental creation of many visually appalling crimes against nature.

Not this time. That’s me up there, ready to face the world and spread those brand new wings and take to the sky.

And to hell with the rules. Things don’t have to make sense. Logic is an extremely powerful tool but it’s not the only one.

Especially not for an awesome dude like me.

Because face it, I’m amazing. There is truly nobody else in the world like me, and not just in the generic sense that technically, no two snowflakes are exactly the same.

No, I am a one of a kind marvel, with more magic up my sleeve than a dozen Cris Angell’s (sp?) and a never ending supply of out and out miracles.

Yeah, I’ve been sick for a while, and there is no guarantee I won’t get sicker. And my illnesses, both physical and psychological, have kept me out of action for my entire adult life, and that’s a crime.

But I have not been in a coma all these years. I’ve been alive and living and growing and learning and becoming the wonder that I am today.

And I’ve become what I am because all this time. I’ve been getting stronger. Smarter. Deeper. Wiser. Funnier. More charismatic. More empathetic. More charming.

And even more adorable, if that’s possible.

And so by now, I am one powerfully capable dude. I write better fast than most people write slow. My first drafts are so good I don’t even need a second draft. My writing is hilariously funny, according to many, and my dialogue is top notch.

Plus I am pretty sure I can write genuinely heartwarming sentimentality as well as fast paced idea rich science fiction and highly entertaining and provocative op ed stuff.

Basically, I can write anything. Horror, romance, high fantasy, light comedy, biting satire, song lyrics, epic poetry, and dirty limericks.

Just to name a few.

And that’s just my writing skills. I also have a gift for oratory, a charming and beguiling presence, a flashing rapier wit, and of course, a truly breathtakingly epic humility.

So that’s one fewer excuse for staying all cramped up inside myself. I have more than enough power at my fingertips to make a big splash in the big bad world and maybe even make a nice cozy litle niche for myself where I have a personal assistant, a lovely suburban home, and all the male company (in other words, COCK) I want.

The world is out there for the taking whenever I am ready to go get it.

I just have a lot of old fragility and fear to dispose of first.

Time to kick down the doors of Heaven and party till the end of time.

More after the break.

---

It’s just the weather

I know I’ve linked that before but it is just so fitting.

Because right now, I am feel depressed and dispirited.

I don’t know why, and I don’t care. It’s not important. Whatever kind of chemical fluctuations are dominant in my brain right now are sad ones, and all I can do is try to experience it for what it is.

And do my best not to fight it. Because here’s the thing : being blue is not an emergency. It doesn’t mean something is wrong. You don’t have to swing into action in order to fight it off. It is not an error.

In fact, it may be a perfectly healthy reaction to your situation and/or recent events. It could be that it would be unhealthy NOT to be sad or blue right now.

Or it could just be the god damned weather.

Either way, freaking out over it and/or treating it like it means something has gone terribly wrong only makes things worse.

Furthermore, it’s based on the flawed assumption that you SHOULD be happy. That to be a normal, healthy person means to be happy most of the time, and therefore if you are unhappy for “no reason (sic)”, you must a sick freak.

But nobody is happy all the time. Everyone’s moods swing high and low. Rich or poor, smart or dumb, traditionally beautiful or not, big or small, nobody is happy all the time and it would mean something was terribly wrong if they were.

It’s called mania, and it ain’t pretty.

And the more we accept that we are going to have highs and lows no matter what, the less we will wear ourselves out trying to fight the tide.

Just roll with it, baby. Like the surfers used to say, if it swells, ride it.

Oh, and one last thing : the fact that I feel down now in no way negates the happy confident feelings I had earlier today.

They are both expressions of who I was in that moment. And that means they are equally valid and good.

I am slowly learning to resist the urge to clamp down on my emotions in a futile effort to control them and to instead throw myself wide open to them and feel everything there is for me to feel no matter how rough that might be.

That way, no matter how bad things feel in the moment, when the moment passes, the emotions pass too. If you don’t suppress your emotions by shunting them aside, then they can come and go in a natural, healthy way.

There’s nothing to retain!

That’s how emotions are supposed to work and it’s how they worked when we were children. As we grow, we learn to suppress emotions in order to focus on the task at hand, or control our behaviour, or to deal with a crisis.

And in a healthy human being, that works great. But in a mentally unwell being like myself, that emotional shunting gets used far too much. It becomes one’s primary way to deal with everything, causing those shunted emotions to pile up far, far faster than our subconscious mind can deal with them.

And then we start choking on the backlog. And we become depressed.

For the millionth time, I wish we could just press a button and flush then all. Start over again. Ditch the baggage and make a run for it.

But the only way to get rid of emotions is to feel them.

No matter how much that might hurt.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

How McDonald’s thinks people play their Monopoly game :

Three possibilities :

1; Instant win
2. Collect and win
3. Input game piece code and win

How people actually play :

Two possibilities :

1. Instant win
2. Fuck it.

That’s how I wish to be. Naked, without my armor of cold grey metal, fearless and friendly and open to the world, and ready to embrace the sunrise and let it thaw me out.

There has to be a way for me to lower my defenses and let the sun shine in.

Today was Therapy Thursday. I had a turbulent but not entirely unproductive session.

It was good in that I was more emotionally real with Doctor Costin than usual. I managed to express how I really felt, deep inside.

It was bad in that he, of course, could not really handle it.

I was “looping”, which means I kept circling around and returning to the same point : that whatever mental substance lets people do things is missing in me and without that substance, no amount of advice does me a damned bit of good because it all relies on me having enough of that substance to do something new.

And if that’s the case, forget it. The best driving instructions in the world are worthless if the car is out of gas.

And without gas, you can’t get to the next place to GET gas, can you?

And I kept going around that point. I told him about how hard it is for me to feel hopeful. This, after he told me that I have to do whatever I can to make myself happy.

And I quite truthfully told him that I had no idea what that would be and that it was hard for me to believe that anything I can (or rather, would) actually do will make me happier.

That’s an important distinction. There’s lots of things I “can” do in the sense that there’s no demonstrable reason why I cannot… except that I am all out of gas.

So fuck what I “can” do. Because whatever it is, I won’t do it.

I can’t. But I can’t possibly prove that to anyone.

Oh, and he suggested putting me on a new antidepressant.

And I was like, okay, I am open to that.

But then he said that I would have to go off the Paxil first.

And I said, “Um, no. If I go off the Paxil I will become suicidal. I have been taking it for 20 years. No way going through withdrawal from that would leave me alive. ”

He was worried about side effects of combining meds. What I wish I had said to him was that there MIGHT be side effects to adding a third medication (I also take Wellbutrin) but there would DEFINITELY be side effects of going off Paxil.

We left it at that.

I may have overstated my case out of shock at the notion going off Paxil. I don’t know for sure that I would be suicidal.

But it would still be one hell of a risk.

It hurt me to hear that he had given up trying to get me to do things. It hurt even though I had just told me why it was useless to do it.

I felt like he was giving up on me, and I told him so. He said he wasn’t giving up on me, just on telling me to do things.

A fair point. But it still fucking hurt.

And I know I have frustrated many other people to the point of giving up on me as well. My mental illness has my mental strength behind it, and that means someone would have to be able to out-argue me in order to reach me.

And that’s impossible. Because nobody can out-argue me.

Not my family, not my teachers, and not my therapist. No wonder everybody abandons me sooner or later. Who can put up with that level of frustration?

But where does that leave me? Alone and abandoned, as always.

I am truly my own worst enemy.

And I don’t know what to do about that. How do I deactivate my defenses?

This is not some kind of hobby fight for me. This is how I perceive the world.

I guess if I am ever to be better, I will, of course, have to do it all myself.

Fuck the world, man. Fuck it.

More after the break.

---

Brand new wings

That’s what it’s going to take to get my out of my mess.

I am going to have to leave logic and sense behind and go where I need to go without waiting for the right road to be built.

I will need to make non-contiguous progress. Instead of doing what I usually do (because I do it so well) and following a series of logical; leaps to my destination, I will have to learn to skip directly to my destination without any need for connecting steps.

And once more, we are back to what amounts to magic. Or faith. The subject of a leap of faith came up in therapy today. And as usual, I internally scoffed at the notion.

But I am warming up to the idea. Why should I fee obligated to follow the rules of logic and analysis when they are no longer working for me?

I don’t follow rules. I am the maker of rules. I pick and choose which rules to follow because I know that rules are made and can be unmade, or made anew, because to me they are just machines.

And machines are judged by their output. Results. Nothing more.

So if playing by the rules results in an unhappy and broken me, then fuck the rules. I invoke my unlimited right to change the rules in order to produce a better result.

Time for me to stop following the well paved highways of logic and go offroad.

And if that doesn’t work, fuck it, I will fly.

It doesn’t have to make sense and I don’t need to justify it to anyone. Not even myself.

This is my world, and it follows no rules but my own.

Time to test my brand new wings.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I could use right now. But I can’t seem to manage it. Yet.

I’m part way there. I can get a cry started. But then some inner mechanism of the mind shuts it down again almost immediately.

And there goes the waterworks.

I can feel that whatever it is that shuts things down is doing so as some kind of defensive control method. Like some deep part of me reacts to my crying like it is some kind of attack, or maybe more like a containment failure, and swings into emergency mode to plug things back up again.

Which sucks. I am very, very sick of being a victim of male emotional constipation. I have a hell of a lot of emotion that needs to come out pronto before it causes some kind of internal meltdown.. or manifests itself as psychosomatic illness.

Expressing emotions is like using the bathroom – you’re a fool to think you can avoid doing it forever, and if you don’t do it in a controlled and regular way, you will end up doing it in an out of control and very bad way, and definitely not at a time and place of your choosing, either.

Hence guys who would rather beat their kids than cry,

Come to think of it, my father clearly needed a good long cry to help him get over all the evil shit his satanic father did to him. Not to mention the crap he took from his boss Ian.

But he took it out on us instead.

Jesus, it’s like Ian abused us by proxy.

Anyhow, once more I feel the need to communicate with my deeper self only to be reminded that for me, that’s a long distance call.

And there’s sunspots jamming the signal.

Turns out that the higher you grow, the less you know. That’s why people much stupider than me often appear to have great wisdombecause they are much closer to their deeper minds and are far more accustomed to listening to their instincts and acting on their emotions and “following their heart” than I am.

Because they have no choice. They don’t have all this mental hardware to rely on.

But lucky me, I do.

Women have a head start too. They aren’t socialized to keep their guard up at all times because if you don’t, someone will use your “weakness” to hurt you.

Boy I hope us Gen X types are the last generation to have that poison in our veins. Now THAT I will freely label as “toxic masculinity”.

There are so many of us men in the world, especially in British derived cultures, whose psychological torment could be ended by a really good cry.

And I am sure that I am one of them. I might be somewhat more enlightened about the subject than a lot of dudes but that doesn’t mean I am any less emotionally bunged up.

I just express myself better.

More after the break.

---

Learning to feel

It ain’t easy.

All my instincts are wrong. The deeper I probe, the more I realize how much being this painfully bright has cost me.

And all to maintain “clarity”. And staying “in control”. For fuck’s sake.

To keep these analytic tools of mine razor sharp, I have sidelined almost every emotion in favour of keeping my world utterly cerebral.

And Heaven forbid that I should do anything purely out of emotion. Oh no. That would mean being out of control and we can’t have that.

Better to be so numb as to be half out of my mind all the time. Apparently.

Like I keep saying (repeat until believed), I want to live. I want to feel. I want to be a real person and not this shambling half-real wreck of a potential human being.

I mean, intellectually, I know it’s my world that isn’t real to me, not vice versa. But that’s not how it feels to me. I feel hollow and empty and insubstantial, like the shadow of a ghost, and I can’t feel my world.

And when you really think about it, being a ghost in the real world is a lot less scary than being real in a ghost world.

At least then, most of your world is real.

Amounts to the same thing anyhow, at least subjectively.

The only path to resurrection (assuming I was ever alive to begin with) is to carve through all this dead or dormant flesh to get to the still-living core underneath and let that be the green shoots that lead to a whole new tree.

A living tree, where the sap runs and the dew falls and dead leaves give way to living green growth that stretches toward the sunlight, eager for its warmth and lght.

And its love. God do I need love. Lord knows I can’t feel my own.

I’ve always been on the outside looking in. Even within my own family, I always felt like I was not really allowed to be there.

They just put up with me out of pity.

In many ways, I was a family of one. There were my parents, my siblings, and me, the uninvited tagalong that was never allowed to relax and fit in and feel like he belonged.

Because he didn’t. They made that clear.

My parents had no time for me. After all, they had full time jobs and three growing kids to raise. They had no time to spare for unwanted surplus progeny.

I would have to survive on whatever morsels of attention and validation fell from the table of my betters like a church mouse living on communion crumbs.

Looking back, I am starting to see my whole childhood as one constant low grade panic attack, at least when other people were around.

It’s like I was always afraid of being told to fuck off and go away. Even with family.

I don’t remember that ever happening.

But that was the vibe I got.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went to see the neurologist, Doctor Madhani, today.

Went to all the trouble of bringing my tablet then forgot it in the car. And this, after forgetting it in my indoor walked and making Julian go get it for me while I waited down in our car down in the parking structure.

And then forgot it in the car. Grrr.

I get so sick of my own bullshit sometimes.

God, I frustrate my caretaker even when the caretaker is me!

Anyhow, sans tablet, I had to resort to “hospital mode”, which I should probably rename “Fruvous waiting” or “dormant fox” or something because it comes in handy any time I have to wait with nothing to do.

I just associate that with the hospital. Strongly.

I did spend 16 days in the hospital with nothing but crosswords and a book to use to entertain myself, after all.

I had to spend a LOT of time in the aforementioned mode.

It basically just involves me losing myself in my own thoughts and just thinking about stuff for a while.

It could also be called “school mode” because it is the exactly mechanism I developed to cope with all the boredom in school from my finishing the work in minutes then waiting while the rest of the class took half an hour.

Anyhow, enough digression.

She did a whole bunch of those “push against my hand as hard as you can” and “stop me from doing this” tests.

PRetty sure she tested every muscle in my body. Bravo for her thoroughness!

And as far as I can tell, I passed all of them. To the point where she brought up “subjective muscle weakness”, which is a nice way of saying it might all be in my head.

And I do have a history of psychosomatic illness. And not all of it in the distant past.

So its possible that this whole thing is a manifestation of my desire to withdraw even further from reality, somehow.

Possible, but not likely. I can’t imagine an illness of that sort lasting this long or progressing this slowly. Not to mention that it was definitely there long before I acknowledged it or treated it as a problem.

I was in pretty deep denial about it for a long time.

When I realized I had passed all her tests, I wished I had pretended to be weaker.

But for God’s sake, why? Why would I want the doctor to think I am sicker than I am? Why would I want treatment for an illness I don’t have?

And isn’t finding out I might not actually be losing muscle strength a GOOD thing?

Has this whole ordeal just been a long con by my sneaky subconscious mind in order to get my vast latent need for nurturing met?

I don’t think so.

And neither does Doctor Madhani.

She has ordered a whole bunch more tests, and wants to see me again in a couple of months when they are done.

The one downside of a psychosomatic explanation is that I would find it terribly embarrassing and humiliating.

Like I had wasted everybody’s time and energy.

For that reason alone, I hope there’s more to it than that.

More after the break.

---

I’m all shook up

I’m still shaken up by my encounter with Doctor Madhani.

But first, let’s back up to earlier this evening.

Once more, I completely forgot that there’s fireworks on Halloween until I heard them going off. That’s not unusual at all.

It is, in fact, practically inevitable.

What was unusual was my reaction. I was lying in bed trying to take a short nap at the time,. and when I heard the fireworks, anxiety and distress exploded in my mind.

Like a firework. But way less fun.

And the whole time the fireworks were going off, I was frozen to the bed in agony from a whirlwind of conflicting emotions swirling around in my brain.

In the mix were such diverse elements as (in no particular order)

1. Regret and chagrin at not being able to go do things like that
2. Anger at the surprise of it all
3. Panic set off by the first two
4. Confusion from being yanked out of my half-asleep state
5. The urge to get up and watch out the window
6. Frustration when I remember I still would to be able to see then

And so forth and so on.

This is not a normal reaction for me. But when Doctor Madhani (sorry, out of puns) suggest it was “subjective weakness”, it hurt like a dagger to the heart.

Not that I am blaming her. She had no way of knowing and was just doing her job.

But it still hurt and here it is, eight hours later, and I can still feel it. I think that news really struck at the heart of all I have been through and made me doubt myself on a very deep and penetrating level.

The very notion that it could be “all in my head” scares and disturbs me. I thought I got over all that 25+ years ago. And I am still not saying that I know that to be true.

It could still prove to be something physical but obscure.

All I know is that it’s been getting harder and harder to walk for a long time now, and harder and harder to life things for a couple months now

And even sitting here, I can feel the pain and weakness in my arms and legs. Maybe it’s not the normal kind of muscle weakness that Madhani’s basic tests can indicate, but something is going very wrong with me.

Whether the problem lies in my limbs or my mind is beside the point.

Either way, I am getting sicker, and something needs to be done.

We will see what the neurological tests show.

Damn. I wanted to stick with the emotion and be less analytical. Oh well.

Maybe next time I will write a poem.

I will talk to you nice people again to music.