On being frail
Just got back from the kitchen. Quick trip, just went there to grab a can of beverage and a piece of fruit.
Now I am sitting here heaving and panting like I took a job around the block, and wondering where the fuck my life is at.
Part of that is hating my past self for sitting around on his ass all day playing video games and stuffing his face with junk food and not taking his diabetes seriously at all.
Which is understandable. I imagine we all wish we had been better people in the past. But the past has passed, and nothing we can do can change it.
All we can do is something much harder : try to be the person today that we will wish we had been.
Anyhow, just feeling glum about how fragile I am, I suppose. It’s kind of hard for me to build up any kind of confidence in my ability to handle reality when it hurts to move.
Well, it hurts to walk, anyhow. Thank God (knock on wood) I can still do what I do best : sit on my ass and play video games.
But I gave up the junk food and cut way back on carbs and thanks to Jardiance, my blood sugar is under control, and my suite of blood pressure meds has my blood pressure under control.
So statistically, I am actually a lot healthier than I used to be.
Too bad the damage is already done.
Speaking of meds, watched a fascinating video about how grapefruit has a chemical in it that interferes with the enzymes in your gut that usually block about half of any drug’s effect.
This is a problem because drugs are designed with that enzyme’s effect in mind, meaning that a glass of grapefruit juice could make your next dose of a med twice as potent, effectively double the dosage.
And there I was, with empty cans of grapefruit soda (made with real grapefruit!) next to me wondering what in the hell I have been doing to myself.
So I immediately looked up what drugs have been proven to be prone to this citrus based interference. I found a list, and scanned it, and I thought I was out of the woods at first.
But there, near the bottom of the list, was a pill I take every day : clopidogrel. Damn it.
Luckily, all grapefruit does is maybe make it less effective. Which is still bad – that shit is protecting me from getting a stroke-inducing blood clot after all – but it’s still way better then finding out it makes it toxic, or radioactive, or soaked in the blood of Satan.
I wouldn’t put anything past Big Pharma these days.
Ergo, the next time I am ordering canned beverages, I will have to leave the diet grapefruit soda off the list and replace it with diet something else.
Ginger ale, maybe? We’ll see.
But they’ll have to pry my diet fizzy lemonade out of my cold, dead hands!
More after the break.
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Afraid of time
I’m tempted to call it “temporophobia” but I am pretty sure that would mean something else.
Just as I was finishing today’s Part 1, I realized I am afraid of time.
What I mean by that is, when I look at the calendar and see that it’s later in the month than the last time I looked by more than a day, I panic.
I am actively distressed to find that I have slipped even further into the future. It’s as though there is some kind of deadline approaching and I haven’t even started the assignment yet.
But there’s no deadline. The reaction makes no sense on the face of it.
Neither does my reaction, which is to further retreat into myself and pointedly ignore any and all thoughts about my future.
This helps nobody.
The healthfully inflected version of this would be to actively look forward to the future. To see it as an exciting and wonderful place to be.
And I can imagine that, but only in the abstract, as an idea. As soon as I try to fill in the specifics, it all falls apart in my head.
I can dream. Wouldn’t it be nice if… say, I got a writing gig that paid the bills. And I can dream about how much better my life would be if…
But the moment I try to imagine a path to that goal, it all falls apart again. Once it becomes a matter of requiring personal change, I freeze up, and it goes nowhere.
It’s like my depression and the rest of the diseased part of my mind will let me dream my big dreamy dreams as long as it keeps me distracted and docile, but the moment I start actually contemplating revolution, the secret police crack down on me hard.
Depression is a fascist state. Or at least mine is.
But the deep dark dirty truth is that this cold stone prison of mine protects me as it confines me. It keeps me from having to deal with the big bad crazy world outside its walls. It saves me from all that chaos and overstimulation and overwhelm waiting for me out there.
It keeps me from having to grow the fuck up already.
And that’s the worst thing about it, in the end. Not that it’s a prison but that it’s a crutch. I front like I am a prisoner in this icy tomb but the truth is, that door ain’t locked. Nobody is forcing me to stay in here. I can walk out into the sunlit world any time I want.
But I don’t want too. I’m far too scared. Something went terribly wrong in us failure to launch types that makes us certain that the real world will destroy us utterly.
And that’s not wrong. If we go out there, “we”, the childlike adult us who is scared of everything, will die. We will be forced to become whatever is next.
The caterpillar will die. But the butterfly will live. And even though we will have changed into something radically different from what we are now, we will still be us. We will still be alive. We will remain the same person we have always been, just in a new form.
After all, once I was a tiny child. Now I’m a fully grown man. I could not be more different than what I once was. But I am still that same person. I never died. I only changed.
Guess it’s high time I stop fighting it and go ahead and pupate.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.