But I am not quite out of the woods just yet.

So yeah, I am feeling somewhat better today. I’ve been hydrating aggressively and I think that has helped a lot. Always good to flush out the system now and then, especially when you’ve been ill.

I think (hope) the worst of this damn cold is over. My nose is still running and my lungs and throat are still kind of sore, and I am doing so much throat-clearing that it sounds like I am very broadly hinting that I am in the room, but I feel a lot less sick and I have more energy and verve.

And a lot less mental fog and dullness of wit. Which is good, because I need my wits to be sharp. They are how I cope.

It’s not like I can coast on my good looks.

And besides, how can I be hypervigilant in a vague but very draining way if I don’t have all my wits about me?

Without my hypervigilance, I might have to develop some actual faith and trust in the universe, or at least give in to a deep and profound apathy.

Pretty sure I can’t go back to not giving a shit what happens to me. Some of the things that happen to be are very ouchy.

I would rather avoid those. I care whether or not they happen to me.

And I am still struggling to awaken. Still fighting my torpor and trying hard ot remember what it’s like to feel alive.

Struggling to be reborn. This fetal lifestyle is just plain no good for me. It’s not enough, it has never been enough, it could never be enough.

I could survive this way indefinitely. It’s not like the province is knocking on my door and loudly warning me that they are going to cut me off soon. The government and I have a low key understand that they continue to fund my life and I try not to bug them too much with my needs.

Honestly, they could probably be doing a lot more for me. I bet there are tons of programs I could be accessing in order to make my life more comfortable and less painful and overall better in quality.

But I’ll never know because I lack the initiative to go look and even if I had the initiative I would have no idea where to even start.

This is what happens when your connection to your id is very weak. You end up stalled out in situations where a healthy person would be driven to do something that would fix the situation.

But me, I just adapt. I make do. I get by.

It’s all so tragic and sad. And yet, that doesn’t motivate me to do anything about it.

If anything, it just pulls me closer to the pits of despair. It would be so much easier to just give in, fall apart, and wait to die.

But way, way deep down, I am feisty. I still have a spark. There is still that part of me that is struggling to stay alive and that won’t let the rest of me go back to sleep.

And it’s that feisty little spark that keeps prodding me towards a more productive and connected and overall healthy life, despite making almost no progress worth noting.

It doesn’t need progress.

It has rage. Rage at all the things that never happened for me. The whole failure to launch litany, from making friends as a child to graduating from college with some kind of reason for someone to hire me. And all points in between.

I deserve so much more.

But I am too damn limp and tired to get it.

More after the break.

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Well this sucks

Here it is, 8 pm, dinner time for yours truly, and instead I feel nauseous and overheated.

The same thing happened last night when I was just about to meet with Julian and Felicity over Zoom to watch YouTube stuff.

Is this actually just a dehydrated form of panic attack?

Only one way to find out : I will drink water as I type and see if it makes me feel better.

Hopefully, it will work and I will be able to eat. I don’t want to have to miss a meal but right now I feel quite awful. Eating is not an option.

All I really want to do is lie down in the dark and point a fan at my forehead. I feel so ill.

Why does my life have to be like this? It’s like the universe does not want me to emerge from my chrysalis and throws new obstacles in my way any time I seem like I am making any real progress and sandbag the whole damned thing.

Maybe that’s the universe trying to teach me to rise to adversity instead of being crushed by it, or using it as an excuse to stop trying. I dunno.

I know I’m getting sick and tired of it. What do I have to do in order to feel healthy and strong? All these mysterious ailments like temporary partial pneumonia or transitory urinary tract bleeding are picking away at my very threadbare sense of their being any hope in my trying to do things.

Well, drinking water seems to have made me feel somewhat better. But I still can’t eat. Food seems like a hostile and foreign concept to me right now.

You want me to take things into my mouth, mash them into a paste with my teeth, and then swallow them? What a revolting idea.

Actually, try not to think about that description too much. It might make you sick too.

I guess all I can do now is implement the Suffering In The Dark plan and hope that whatever is fucking with my digestion passes through me and then I can remember clearly that food is a good thing, actually.

Historically, I’ve been a big fan. Very big.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But what else is new?

Had to cancel Wound Care this morning because I am officially sick. Just the common kind of sick, thank God, not the hospital kind of sick.

I have a cold. Runny nose, cough, fever, lightheadedness. Also a potentially related increased cognitive error rate, like I said yesterday.

I’ve been sleeping a lot, which helps. Gets kind of annoying when I would rather be playing my video games, but at least it’s good, wholesome sleep and not the sweat soaked brain frying hyper intense sleep I was getting yesterday.

I figure I reached some kind of critical mass in terms of not getting enough deep REM sleep (Stage 4) and my brain did what it always does and decided I needed to get caught up all at once.

This results in sleep where it’s like my brain is trying to cram three months’ worth of dreaming into three hours of sleep.

And that leaves a fella kinda depleted. Burns through your supplies of hydration and calories pretty fast, and depletes important brain chemicals to boot.

Don’t ask me which ones. As far as I can tell, it’s all of them.

It amuses me that, compared to other ways in which I have been sick lately, this feels like no big deal.

I’m neither bleeding through my genitals or losing my eyesight. This is honestly just a bog standard cold. I will be fine.

That said, I will definitely be keeping a close eye on it. Especially the respiratory angle. After all, I was in the hospital with pneumonia not that long ago.

I mean sure, it’s just a common cold now, but in someone like me, it could get much worse in a shockingly small amount of time.

Damn it’s hard for me to concentrate. I do not feel like an effective person right now. Staying focused on the task of blogging requires dragging my mind back to the page over and over again, and that’s such a drag.

Not that I am ever that effective in the first place. Then again, how would I know? I don’t try to do all that much.

I am fighting my way out of my mental illness, though. Being sick has slowed that down a little but I am still battling to push back the cold dark fear that has been locking me in this tomblike lifestyle for so very long.

And who knows. Many one day, the planets will align and all my best stars will be in the sky and I will just rise up like a pissed off Samson and bring the whole thing down.

Let’s just say I am open to the idea of have a total mental breakdown if that’s what it takes to get me out of this dead end existence.

I could do so many amazing things if I could just activate myself. But I suppose the unhealthy part of me is still scared that once I open that door, I will never be able to retreat from the world into the dank comfort of my depressive cave again.

Talk about commitment issues.

And I guess that’s a reasonable fear, at least in a sense. I am seeking to leave this part of my life behind forever. So far, my conception of a post-depression future does not include ever returning to this sad pathetic state for even a weekend.

But maybe it could. Perhaps I am thinking of this in inappropriately absolute terms. Maybe a more functional future would include needing to retreat to my world of video games and naps every now and then to recharge.

Hell, I could be living a much more activated life just from devoting like two hours a day to work outside my tiny life.

It’s worth considering.

More after the break.

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Chicken nuggets for the soul

Felt like I needed a treat so I got myself a 10 Chicken McNugget meal from McD’s tonight. After figuring out that I could afford it, of course.

I am, for the most part, financially prudent. I am a Taurus, after all.

The sensible and wise deployment of resources is kind of our thing.

So before I ordered in, I got the balance of my card and counted the change in my wallet and totaled it up.

And I’m fine. By going a while without ordering in at all, I managed to get my finances back in shape so that this five week month doesn’t make me so tense.

Like I have said in this space before, the state of my finances has a very strong effect on my emotions, and that’s not negotiable. I have to known the money will be there when I need it or everything falls apart and I will not be able to rest till I fix it.

Luckily, my actual needs are quite modest. That’s one of the advantages of a video game and internet based lifestyles. As long as I have a place to live, food to eat, and a place to plug in my computer, I’m good.

I mean, I want more. A lot more. But I don’t need any more.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. I dunno.

Perhaps I am just too used to ignoring everything as long as my needs are met. Were I a healthier specimen, my life-affirming instincts might well make me discontent enough to upend everything in order to get myself out of this mess.

I can’t imagine living like that. But I’m trying to.

That would mean loosening the death grip that my corrupt and malign overbearing superego has over everything, and learning that doing things purely because you feel like it without having every possibility thoroughly thought through and tested for :safety: is just fine, actually, and might even be a lot better even if it DOES sometimes lead to negative outcomes that in hindsight could have been avoided.

Oh well. I’m not made of glass. I can fuck up and move on. It’s okay.

Those are the lessons you are supposed to learn from your paternal parent.

Kind of makes the whole “mama’s boy” thing make sense, dunnit?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I am definitely not well.

I’ve been coughing now and then, a dry hacking cough, but I think that is more to do with whatever the hell is making me dehydrated so fast.

I dry out quite rapidly. Especially after I sleep – I have been waking up absolutely parched, like I have dust in my mouth, for at least a day now.

And there’s urinary complications, though those seem to be sorting themselves out. Earlier I was getting the urge to pee every 20 minutes or so, but when I peed, it was some teeny tiny amount that would barely fill a thimble.

So clearly something was triggering my urge to urinate besides urine. My best guess is that something in me is swollen and pushing against my bladder, thus invading its space and making it smaller.

Hence, a small amount of urine is a “full bladder”.

Luckily that seems to have ended. I have normal pees at a normal frequency now. I hope things just stay that way for a while.

Moving on from the bladder et al, I have also been feeling really hot. This is probably also tied to my dehydration. Maybe i am running a fever.

Probably not, though. I am not sure I am capable of it. I don’t know how many times now I have showed up at the ER totally sure I was running a fever of 100 degrees only to have the nurse scan my forehead and nope, normal.

So either I have a false sense of my own body temperature, or whatever genetic weirdness makes my veins both hard to find and hard to pierce also makes my body temperature not readable correctly by thermometers.

Because trust me, on the inside, I’m an inferno.

Most worrisome of all, though, is that my muscles are a lot weaker than usual. Even using the walker, my legs feel like spaghetti. I can still walk and move but it takes a lot of effort and I don’t feel stable at all when I am doing it.

Hopefully this is just a temporary symptom of what vague ague is passing through me this time. I keep feeling like I am going to sink to the floor and not be able to get up again, maybe ever.

Thank God I spend most of my time laying down or sitting.

Of course, that’s part of how I got these problems in the first place…

Anyhow, I of course live in fear of whatever is happening to my muscles getting worse and leaving me too weak to stand up or walk, or even worse, bedridden with paralysis.

So I am quite worried right now.

One odd thing : I feel feverish, but not in my usual “the furnace in my torso just turned on” way. It feels more like body-wide inflammation.

Time to take an Aleve and see if it helps. They contain naproxen, which is a very effective anti-inflammatory medication, so if it does help, I have my answer.

Damn, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I have this nagging feeling that there are things I am supposed to be doing for Doctor Madhani, and I dunno what they are, and that means I am fucking up my own health yet again.

I suppose Doctor Madhani must have a lot of experience dealing with people in compromised mental states, I guess.

But I try so hard and I fuck up anyway.

And that is very, very depressing.

More after the break.

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Further symptom alerts

Well, I am coughing more often now,

And I am definitely coughing against something. My body is trying to cough something up. Presumably something real nasty.

And my nose has been running all day (and boy, are its feet tired).. This, despite my having taken my antihistamine this morning, meaning it’s not just my vaguely defined “allergies” making it tun, it’s something else.

And the Aleve did help with the hot feeling in my body, so yup, it was inflammation. Right now I am experiencing a lovely coolness throughout most of my body.

Everything except my nostrils. Air breathed through them still feels oven hot. Also not a typical symptom for me and my “allergies”.

And the muscle weakness continues. Just making myself a peanut butter on toast. sandwich in the kitchen felt a bit like I was doing a high wire act.

Tomorrow I’m gonna have Wound Care. We’ll see how that goes. Could be that when I get up and get moving and get the ol’ blood flowing, everything falls into place and I am fine to make the journey.

Or it could be that I end up lying on the ground in our parking structure, helpless, and poor Julian has to call 911 then go downstairs to let the ambulance in.

Or anything in between, of course.

Only metaphorically related is the fact that there’s heavy winds in Richmond tonight. Nnot enough to make you feel the building bending in the wind, thank God. That only happens very rarely.

But you can feel the wind blow in the vibrations of the building, and it makes a spooky sound all around our crumpled abode. Gives me an all too familiar feeling of loneliness and exposure, and that’s why the moment I stop blogging I am going to be getting right back into bed and burrowing under the comforter.

Oh, One last thing. I seem to be making a lot more mental errors lately. Like forgetting whether I have taken pills, or what I am doing in the video game I am playing, or forgetting to bring things for my meal with me from the kitchen, et al.

I’m trying not to read too much into it but it’s frightening. What control I have in my life comes from this magnificent mind of mine, and I can’t rely on it, where am I?

Hell, who am I?

For that matter, WHAT am I?

I’ve never been able to answer that question. I am certainly radically different from everyone else in the world. I’ve never met or heard of someone who made me go, “That. I am one of those. That person is just like me. ”

Bits and pieces, sure. But nothing approaching the total me.

Well, time for me to make like Bugs Bunny and burrow out of here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The most important thing to know about taboos is that they are not logical.

In a way, it’s kind of amazing that the human brain can be programmed by society to react with outrage and disgust at literally anything. Anything at all.

For example, in North America and most of Europe, a woman’s bare breasts are taboo. We, as a society, have deemed the female breast to be inherently sexual in nature (even though they are meant for infants) and therefore to bare them in public is both socially scandalous and against the law.

Even though men can walk around with bare chests with no problem. That’s how arbitrary ridiculous (and sexist) this taboo is.

But there are parts of the world where the female breasts is not taboo. Ironically, these are often the same places where a woman’s FACE is taboo.

That might seem ridiculous to us, but is our aversion to breasts any more reasonable? A woman from that culture would be as embarrassed to have her face bare in public as a woman from our culture would be to have her breasts bare in public.

It’s all so arbitrary and meaningless. There is nothing inherently wrong or dirty or inappropriate about women’s breasts OR faces.

It’s all just rules we made up at some point.

And yeah, taboo is incredibly powerful. Once that part of our mind is programmed to see something that way, it’s incredibly hard to change.

And people will vociferously and with great passion (and possible violence) their ingrained taboos, and insists that they are logical and rational because some things are just “obviously” wrong.

Take interracial marriage. People used to think that was tantamount to bestiality. And based on that, they defended anti-miscegenation like their lives depended on it.

They called it “obviously wrong” and “unnatural” and against God’s will and all the other logic free bullshit that people come up with when they believe something strongly that they know cannot be justified logically whatsoever.

Yet somehow, we got over it. The races mix freely and nobody bats an eye except for a few old reactionaries.

And even they only talk about it in private.

And we could get over this aversion to interracial marriage precisely because there was no rational, sensible, believable justification for it. The arguments against it were pathetically absurd and so obviously went against the basic morality of equality and freedom that our society is built on that they could not stand.

Now imagine if that revolution never happened. What if interracial marriage was still as taboo today What would the internet look like?

Anyone who dared to suggest that there might be circumstance in which at least interracial sex was okay would get angrily shouted down, vilified, flamed, doxxed, possibly lose their job and their marriage, and might even be killed.

And the people doing all this would be just as convinced they are right for reasons that are “obvious” as anyone defending a modern taboo (like the female breast) would be.

All the evidence they would need is that thinking about it upsets and disgusts them, even those they only feel that way because of the taboo.

As far as they are concerned, the taboo justifies itself. Any sexual or romantic contact between people of different races is obviously and patently wrong, disgusting, immoral, and revolting to any right-minded person.

Imagine how hard it would be to stick up for interracial marriage in such a society. It wouldn’t matter what is right or wrong. All that matters is that sticking up for what we know to be right could absolutely destroy your life in a matter of minutes.

Makes you wonder how many of our modern taboos are similarly irrational.

More after the break.

Still not normal

Well, I still have no idea WTF is up with my urinary system.

I mean, I’m not bleeding and there’s almost no pain when I pee.(just the tiniest twinge), but all day my urine was coming out the color of apple cider vinegar.

What the hell is the “MOTHER”?

You know, it’s kinda funny how we’re in an age where products have to tout their total lack of preparation.

“Raw! Unfiltered! Unpasteurized! Untested! Unstable! Uncertain it’s really made of apples! Unhinged! Unhealthy! Unable to control the trembling! Uncertain! Unclear! Under house arrest for that thing with the kid! This isn’t even a real bottle! WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS IS!”

You know…. healthy.

Damn, I’m funny.

Anyhow, my urine has gone back to its traditional “weak lemonade” color now, so IO guess there was just blood and/or other gunk left in the pipeline from last night’s lovely encounter with exsanguination.

As you can imagine, last night’s “uh oh” has me a tad spooked. I mean, I know it’s nothing serious. They did enough tests to establish that. And the fact that it cleared up on its own with no antibiotics testifies to that.

The ER doctor (I swear, they’re all start looking alike to me^[1]) said that everything looked good and they will just await the result of the urine cultures and contact me if anything untoward comes up.

You can’t rush those. Bacteria et al reproduce at their own rate and so you have to wait for them to do their thing.

So much for TV show science. 🙂 On CSU they would get that shit back in an hour.

A part of me is a little pissed off that this weird and disturbing thing happened (peeing blood) and we still have no idea why, but meh.

I am just glad to be home and healthy. Ish.

I’m just glad to be home and back to my baseline level of sickness.

Now I can relax, kick back, burn my brain with video games, and await the next flurry of medical appointments and/or catastrophes.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Like a record, baby. Right round round round.

Had a really severe attack of dizziness last night. Felicity, Julian, and I had just finished Zooming together and I got up to go to the living room for the PVR portion of the evening and it hit me so hard.

(Carson audience : “How hard was it?”)

Hard enough to bring you people back from the dead, apparently.

Seriously though, it was horrible. As bad as these attacks have ever been. Felt like gravity was in violent flux all around and I was being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste by it the whole time.

And yet, I made my usual midnight snack anyway. And that was a foolish and dangerous thing to do. A sane person would have immediately sat down or laid down and waited till the dizziness wore off, or even maybe called 911.

Hmmm. I honestly doubt I could have worked the phone at that time. Everything was moving and shaking so much. It would be like trying to dial a phone in an earthquake.

An angry earthquake. In space.

But no, I set out to make my snack then sit down to watch things with Julian and Felicity, so that’s what I was going to do, god dammit.

This is not the first time when I felt like my deep need to finish what I start has causd me to risk my life unnecessarily, and it won’t be the last.

It’s like the waves of dizziness just made me more determined than ever to finish my task. Like I had to do it anyway out of pure spite.

That kind of determination could be a major asset if I focused it properly.

I mean, if I can make my snack despite gravity deciding it hates me, how big a deal is it to do something productive despite the waves of bone-deep icy fear hitting me?

I am tired of the tyranny of my fears. Fuck that. I do not submit to their rule.

The rebellion starts right now, and we will resist the tyrants on every level.

Anyhoo, I managed to not die while popping microwave popcorn et al and made it to my little couch in the living room in less than two pieces.

And when, about an hour and fifteen minutes later, I got up from the couch to go back to my bedroom and sleep, I was still dizzy.

That’s what really worries me. It conjures a memory of my Grandma, my father’s mother, and how when she died she was completely bedridden by vertigo.

I feel more or less normal now. I guess my blood pressure has stabilized, or whatever.

The thing is, this problem has mostly disappeared. I hardly ever have these attacks any more. So I have to ask myself, what changed?

Well, I had some KFC last night. Not sure how that could cause dizziness in yours truly, but I suspect cholesterol was involved.

So I will be avoiding KFC for a while, just in case.

Now, were I a sane person, such an extreme event would send me running to the nearest medical person, presumably in the ER.

Or Urgent Care, technically, but seriously, fuck those people.

But patient readers know that I won’t do that. Why? Because I just want things to go back to normal, and the ER is like the opposite of normal.

So I will wait and see. If it happens again, then I will go to the ER.

And now, this afternoon, I have been peeing every fifteen minutes or so, which is a lot even for me. And the last time I peed, I felt a terrible pain somewhere in my urinary system, like something was trying to force its way through too small an opening and that was making that entire system stretch out painfully.

So now that’s going on. Sigh.

I might end up in the ER anyway if there starts to be blood in the urine.

My life is so much fun.

More after the break.

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Cranberry Road revisited

God damn it, looks like I am heading to the ER again.

Because yup, there is blood in my urine now. There probably was when I wrote there wasn’t before, it just took me a while to figure out how to figure it out.

I guess I was in denial. I was peeing into my receptacle and the urine in it was not turning red so I figured I was OK.

But a few more pees later, I noticed the fluid seemed to be a little darker than before. A few more pees, and yup, it was dark now.

So I emptied the thing out into the sink and waited for my next pee. And sure enough, it was red like cranberry juice.

In fact, I think I’m just peeing blood now.

And that’s not good, but normally would not be a source of panic because to be quite honest, going to the ER has become quite routine for me.

Sad but true.

But normally it would be Julian driving me there. But he is quite sick himself and I do not wish to even ask him to do it because he might say yes and I don’t think he should do it.

He needs to concentrate on getting better, and that’s all.

And Joe, as you know, is already IN the hospital, so he can’t drive me. And while I am worried about my urinary health, this is not the sort of thing you call 911 about, let alone request an ambulance.

So if I am to get there, it would be in a cab. And I have not taken a cab since my legs first went boom. I have never gotten into a cab while using a walker before, and that makes me nervous.

I honestly don’t know if I can make it that far. I can probably make it to the front door of our building. That’s not a lot further than when I go from the elevator to our car.

But getting from the front door to a cab and then somehow loading myself and the walker into the can seems beyond me.

So I dunno. I guess, by default, I will have to wait and see how my condition goes.

I think that maybe the bleeding is tapering off. But I am not at all sure. It could be just that I have run out of pee and, like I said, it’s just blood coming out of me now.

Right now, I am in the throes of indecision. My best option is to take a cab to the ER and I am not sure I can even do that.

I guess if it gets worse, I will call 911 and consult with them. And if it gets better… good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Assuming I am not in the hospital.

Got to have my therapy session today, despite both me and Doctor Costin forgetting it was supposed to happen.

I swear, there are only a few few slots in my head for certain kind of information and if you try to put another iota of such info into my head, the one furthest back is going to pop out of the other end and be lost forever.

Hence today’s farce. I had first wound care and then an appointment with Doctor Chao to think about and the therapy session scheduled for 1 pm today completely slipped out of my mind and ran for the hills.

Oh well, it all worked out, despite my having to pause our conversation for 15 minutes to let the DoorDash person into the building with my groceries.

Speaking of which, time to bitch.

I ordered 1 kg of this trail mix called a “Poker Mix”. Doesn’t seem like one to me, it looked to just basically be mixed nuts. Real poker mix has pretzels n’ such.

Anyhow, mixed nuts are fine by me, nothing no-no there. But when the order arrived, I had 1 kg of another mix, called Yuppy Mix, and it’s full of candy coated chocolate!

I can’t eat candy OR chocolate! Damn it.

So I look up my order and it turns out they were out of Poker Mix so my shopper subbed the Yuppy Mix into my order instead.

And I can’t really be all that mad at them. Nowhere in my DoorDash info does it tell people that I am diabetic. He or she probably thought they were doing me a favour.

Nevertheless, I registered a complaint with DoorDash, because I am tired of this kind of thing happening to me. Grr.

And now I have these three little bags of candy-laden trail mix to deal with.

Which leaves me with three options :

1. Throw them away. Wasteful, but efficient. Bye, you bags of EVIL!
2. Pick the candy out and eat the rest. Certainly the most elegant solution as it saves the trail mix and segregates the nasty Smarties. Dunno what I would do with them though, as Julian wouldn’t eat them either and Joe is in the hospital. Plus it would be such a drag on my willpower to have to resist eating the Smarties.
3. Eat the whole damn thing, candy and all, then take some insulin. I like this because it means I get candy, but it’s still not healthy or smart.

So now I’ve got a conundrum to deal with. Thanks a freaking lot.

Wound Care went fine. I got the nurse that reminds me of Tyne Daily again, and I really like her. She has a combination of cheerfulness and competence that I find absolutely enchanting. Reminds me of my early childhood babysitter, Betty.

And Betty more or less raised me till I was old enough for school and my parents could finally legally not take care of me during the daytime.

I’m sure he goes to school, and his grades are good. Yippie, time to go right back to the utter bliss of completely forgetting he exists!

Glad I could help.

The trip to see Doctor Chao went fine too. We discussed what Doctor Manhadi had said to me, which was , “there’s definitely something wrong , the MRI will reveal what”.

Still waiting on that MRI. I hope I wasn’t supposed to call them.

I really do need a medical secretary. Things fall out of my mind so easily. My next big thought comes along and pushes everything else out of its way.

And then plop goes important details. Sigh.

More after the break.

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If you knew enough nudists, you could have a literal Naked Lunch.

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The phantom game

I got a personal Mandela Effect type thing going on here.

I am positive that I played the bejesus out of this game, Thronebreaker : The Witcher Tales, because I loved it so much.

It’s an excellent CCG game with the Witcher level of story and emotional reach and just plain amazingness of writing.

I went through so many emotions playing that game! Rage, triumph, compassion, betrayal, puzzlement, and more. And all with that Witcher level of emotional depth.

Must have played through it four or five times. And this evening, I thought of the game, and decided I wanted to download it and play it again.

Only to find that it is not in my Steam library at all. And that makes no god damned sense. How could I have played it so much without it being in my Steam library?

I know I sure as hell didn’t return it. I played the fuck out of it. But how?

The only answer is that I must have played it through some other game store. Every god damned game company has their own now because I guess they would rather get fewer sales because people never discover their games than share any of the profit from sales with the nice folks at Steam.

Not that I’m bitter.

Maybe I got in on GOG, known to its mama as Good Old Games? My taste in games ignores time , so it’s entirely possible that it was old enough to be pn GOG.com at one point, and that’s when I got it.

And GOG has their own damned app.

I refuse to have my games spread out over all these stupid marketplaces. It would take a very good deal on a very good game to get me to leave Steam.

I have a bunch of those dumb little marketplace apps installed but I never look at them. They just sit there in a folder on my desktop.

It’s lie, you COULD build your own little website to sell your homemade tchotchkes, and pay for the web hosting and pay the person who codes your little ecommerce shop and pay for online advertising and pay for everything else, or you could just sell the damned things on Amazon like everyone else.

OH WAIT, bonus bitchfest time.

Ordered me some KFC. It arrived. First shock : my Diet Pepsi did not arrive in my beloved 591 ml bottle, it arrived in a cup, like a slob.

And that was a particular problem because tonight I was getting my own order from the door (Julian is with Joe at the hospital) and it was very hard to carry both my KFC bag AND a fricking cup while using my walker.

And then, I find they forgot my honey mustard and I had no straw.

That means I have now submitted two DoorDash complaints on the same day.

At this rate, I’m going to get a reputation.

Well if they didn’t keep getting things wrong, I wouldn’t have to keep complaining!

Makes me kinda wish I had gone for McD’s instead.

They never get it wrong.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But then again, aren’t they all?

Seriously though, the man who’s been my therapist for over a decade, Doctor Avrum Costin, was too sick to do my therapy session today. We’re going to try again tomorrow.

He said that he had an upset stomach and “other issues related to his age” and so he could not do our session.

No problem, I said, we can do it tomorrow.

I’m flexible like that. Change is not nearly as big a deal for me as uncertainty. As long as I know when the next appointment is, I am good.

But of course, now I am worried about him.

He’s in his seventies, after all. That’s a very delicate age. Small things can turn into big things very easily. Abd big things can lead to death.

My mother turned 70 earlier this month.

I try not to think about it.

I don’t want to have to look for another therapist. Because there probably isn’t one. The psychiatrists are all dying or retiring just like the rest of the MDs, and I shudder to think of how long I would need to wait for one this time, seeing as it took them damned near a decade to find me Doctor Costin.

Maybe I would end up having to go back to…. group therapy. (dun dun DAAAAAH)

Actually, I would handle group therapy a lot better now. I am way more self-confident, aware of my surroundings, assertive, and self-possessed now.

I would not let myself get cut off by other people interrupting me, that’s for sure. And if I was feeling like nobody was really listening to me or cared about me, I would definitely bring that up instead of letting it fester away and make me emotionally detach myself from the group and go into that same passive mode I used all through my childhood when the older people were talking and I was just barely paying attention enough to know when someone was talking to or about me.

But I knew that I was not invited to the discussion and speaking up would just remind people I existed and they would act like I had just beamed in from Mars and farted in their faces, so I said very little unless directly addressed.

Back one parenthetical, I would handle group therapy better than when I was in the Core Program out of the Adult Psychiatric Outpatient department of Richmond Hospital all those years ago.

But I would probably be a lot less well behaved. I would be using that space to work through a lot of the assertion/aggression issues I should have handled when I was a teen, as well as the basic social instincts I should have learned in kindergarten and that means nobody would know what I was going to say or do, least of all me.

I think that’s been part of what is keeping me from finally growing the hell up : my unwillingness to just go with my emotional responses and suffer the consequences on the way to learning who I am.

I’m still treating life like a game of chess, thinking I can make the strategically perfect move every single time and hating myself when I fail at this impossible task.

That’s no way to live. I will get over that and learn to just be human, for fuck’s sake.

That’s why I keep talking about not judging actions taken in the moment by the standards of afterthought, when you have plenty of time to think about it.

That’s one of the primary ways my superego is corrupt. It pulls that shit.

More after the break.

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Brain = zero ergo smut

Feeling pretty mentally blank at the moment, so I figured it’s art show time.

We’ll start slow and soft with this lovely couple.

Aren’t they adorable? A blue jay and a squirrel. I picture their relationship starting as a squabble over an acorn that turned amorous.

And seeing as they are both male, the fact that they could hardly be cross-fertile doesn’t really matter, does it?

I mean, they’re not even in the same part of the animal kingdom.

Perhaps they will adopt an abandoned chick. Or baby squirrel. Or some third thing.

We homosexuals can’t be too fussy when it comes to outlets for our parental instincts. It’s adopt a kid or spoil the bejesus out of a cat or small dog.

Part of me still wants to raise a kid. I have so much maternal love in my heart. Such a strong drive to nurture and protect.

And I’ve never had someone to focus it on!

What else have I got… ah.

I call this one “Big Boys Love Cream”.

It’s even my favorite flavour.

Hard to describe my mood lately. Moody and broody, I suppose. I definitely feel like I have something happening way down deep in my soul, leaving my conscious self pacing in the waiting room like an expectant father.

I hope Joe will be OK. I miss him so damned much. 🙁

Got to give this next one a proper introduction. Ahem.

With a knick knack, paddy whack….

I never said I wasn’t sick.

What’s more, I enjoy it. I enjoy it a LOT.

Tomorrow is another busy day. I have both Wound Care plus a quick visit to Doctor Chao’s office for another dose of Vitamin B12.

I am going to make sure to book my next few appointments in advance so I can get my shot more often than like once a month.

In theory, the shots could jump-start my own B12 absorption and maybe then I could maintain a normal B12 level without the shots.

And that could change everything.

Maybe I wouldn’t feel so cold and weak and scared all the time any more.

Maybe it’s been a nutritional problem all this time.

Maybe all I have really needed was more animal products in my diet.

Maybe I could actually feel OK.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I recently FINALLY got around to switching my Windows 10 installation to Dark Mode.

For those who dunno, that means things default to having a black background, and other Windows elements are similarly dark.

You could call it Goth Mode, really. Or easily Overstimulated Due To Depression mode

Anyhow, it’s been quite soothing on my weary old eyes. Way less of that glaring white background makng things hard to read and tiring out my poor beleaguered eyeballs.

Speaking of which, Julian was nice enough to drive me to Vancouver for my eye appointment with Doctor Mackay at St. Paul’s Hospital at 1 pm today.

Google Maps told us that the trip would take between 26 minutes and an hour. Out of an abundance of caution, we left at noon, figuring that the worst that could happen is that we had to kill some time in the area before the appointment.

And thank God we DID leave at noon, because as it was we barely made it on time.

Not sure how Google Maps thinks it’s possible to make that trip in 26 minutes, but I am pretty sure it involves a police telephone box that’s bigger on the inside.

I checked in at reception, which was a bit of an ordeal because there was someone in line ahead of me and my legs were already hurting like hell.

My legs seem to be hurting more and hurting earlier in my walking around lately. I hope this does not mean my as yet undiagnosed condition is getting worse. I don’t want to have to figure out how to live without walking.

I mean, wheelchairs are great for getting around outside, but not so great for getting me to the bathroom or the kitchen and back.

I can imagine becoming one of those guys in a wheelchair with ridiculously well built arms and shoulders from hauling themselves around their living via ropes, trapezes, pulley systems, and the like.

I would really miss being able to get my own food. And, well, go potty^[1] by myself.

Anyhow. Made it to the appointment on time, and through reception, and then came the usual tests. Although I rather like the main eye imager at that Eye Clinic at St. Paul’s more than the clunkier way that do it at West Coast Retina here in Richmond.

The one at St. Paul’s just asks me to stare at a blue blinking light. And that’s very easy to do. It’s quite bright and shiny. Hold my focus quite well.

And I may be wrong, but it seemed able to take a number of different kinds of images of my eyeballs, unlike the rigs at West Coast Retina.

After that came the waiting. I should have known to expect a long wait before Doctor Mackay could see me, that’s what happened the first time.

But i was so wrapped up in just getting there and back that I didn’t think of it.

Next time, which is March 19, I will bring my dang tablet.

I fear no wait time as long as I can entertain myself.

When it happened, my consultation with Doctor Mackay was fairly brief. Basically, he told me that there were two potential approaches to fixing my wonky eye.

The first was surgery, which would take place next Tuesday, followed by some lasering to make sure the eye doesn’t start bleed again.

The other was to do another injection next month.

And seeing as the eye has gotten a lot better ever since the first injection, and I didn’t want my eyeball peeled and scooped, I opted for the injection.

Not looking forward to that, because it fucking hurts, but it beats the alternative.

More after the break.

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What if sunsets were enough?

At the risk of sounding like a nature nut, there is a spectacular and profound light show that happens twice a day, dawn and dusk, that anyone in the world, from the poorest urchin to Elon Musk, can see for absolutely free, and it’s beautiful and wonderful and inspiring, and most of use don’t even notice it at all.

Myself very much included.

And this is true for all the wonders of nature. Green is still green and pretty and it still feels lovely under our feet. Pigeons live their little live among us and we never give them a second thought. Blue skies are a nearly universal cause for joy.

But we don’t notice and we don’t care. Myself very much included.

But why? Is it a labour theory of value thing? These wonderful things come too easily for us to be capable of truly valuing them?

Maybe. But I think there is something more going on. Something a little darker.

I think that consumer capitalism raises us all to be greedy little piggies who are constantly grubbing for more, more, more.

And that makes us all inherently hostile to the very concept of “enough”. After all, if we ever say, even silently within our own minds that we have enough, then some element of the cosmos might here us and stop us from getting more.

As if, in our minds, we are imagining that the universe was just about to give us a million dollars but then heard us say we had enough and changed its mind.

And so when it comes to the pleasures of nature and other simple joys of life, we can’t allow ourselves to enjoy them too much or we might find that, horror of horrors, we have enough when we have very little indeed.

And that would be the worst, wouldn’t it? Imagine being content with a life of watching dusk and dawn, touching grass, and watching the birds.

People would think there was something seriously wrong with you.

And yet, wouldn’t you actually have it better than everyone else? Being happy with things you know you will get every single day? No competition, no struggle, no fight, and all completely free?

But we would still think someone like that was seriously broken.

So the question is : why?

What’s so wrong about it? Is it that this person has escaped the proverbial rat race and the continuous demands for more? Are we that disturbed by someone else’s happiness that we have to condemn them as crazy or retarded or both, lest we start feeling tempted by anti-consumerist thoughts?

Is it that much of a threat to society for people to be both happy and poor? And not just “happy being poor but with the expectation that there will me more later”, which is how middle class people see the temporary poverty of early adulthood.

No, I mean being both happy and poor with no desire for or expectation of advancement. Happy working the grill at McDonald’s till they are old and grey. Happy, even, living on social assistance.

What a loser, eh? There must be something seriously wrong with that guy.

But he is happy. And we… are not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Consider them pulled.

Why do I find my current life so unsatisfactory?

Let’s dive into that.

One of the main planks of my discontent is my utter lack of purpose. Nothing I do matters and I accomplish nothing that’s worth anything.

At least, nothing worth anything to me, and that’s the only person who counts.

I want to have things to actually do. Things that matter in some greater context. Purposeful things that leave a mark on the world and make my being alive and being who I am really count for something.

And relatedly, I want something to use up all the crazy amounts of excess energy my high voltage brain produces. I know I would be a lot happier if I was a lot busier, and yet my mental illness prevents me from going and finding new stuff to do to fill my time.

I mean, why bother, when video games fill the time so well? Sure, they might not matter and I am not actually achieving anything noteworthy, but while I am playing them I can forget about all that and stay absorbed in the game for as long as I like.

I guess that’s what addictions are like. Whether it’s video games, crystal meth, or needlepoint, all the signal that should be telling you to stop doing the addictive thing are silenced by doing the addictive thing.

That’s their deadly simplicity.

And video games are so good at simulating meaningful progress. Your character levels up. He has adventure. You get a wide variety of virtual experiences. It can feel an awful lot like actually having a life.

But in a safe, risk free way that you can exit any time you want if you start to feel overwhelmed and that only provides the comforting and familiar level of stimulation that comes from screens.

That provides a form of life I can handle. The stimulation is all mental. It sparks my imagination and feeds me narrative in a highly digestible form, A form which makes me feel like I am part of something.

More than that, that I am a hero, doing good and writing wrongs and kicking the bad guys’ asses as I deliver justice.

Is it any wonder I prefer that world over the real one?

In the real world, some of those things are not even an option!

Another reason i dislike this life of mine is that, well, it’s gross. And sad.

I live in filth because I can’t clean anything. I don’t know why. Maybe some deep and pre-rational part of my mind still feels like if I try to clean up after myself, someone is going to show up to tell me I am doing it all wrong and that I am only making things worse and then they will angrily take the task away from me and do it themselves while radiating resentment at me.

Those are some very old tapes from my childhood. But I am stuck with them.

All I know is that even thinking about cleaning up brings on that omnipresent and oppressive fear that makes me feel like I am losing my mind.

I guess it’s just another facet of my fear of dealing with the real world. I am only happy when I can stay in my inner bunker as much as possible.

It’s a wonder I can do anything real at all. But I guess no amount of rampant and systemic neurosis can cure you of the need to eat and excrete.

I still feel like I am struggling to wake up from a long, long nightmare.

And I’m make it LET. ME. GO.

More after the break.

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First person guilt

I’ve never known quite what to call it. Self guilt? Guilt about yourself? Auto-guilt?

It’s the guilt you feel when you have trespassed against yourself. When you know you have betrayed our own best interests, or violated your own principles and intent.

Tonight, I had to order a supplemental round of groceries because I ran out of trail mix today and needed something or other to accompany my meals until Friday when I will do my bulk grocery order.

Ended up costing me around $20 for two half-kilogram bags of roasted salted peanuts and a tiny thing of trail mix, ordered from Shopper’s Drug Mart.

I ordered from them because I only have to order $15 worth of stuff from them before they waive the delivery fee. Superstore wanted $35 worth.

Not a problem when I am doing my weekly shopping but a problem tonight.

The reason I bring this up is that I feel terribly guilty about it. You see, in order to make that order, I had to exceed my weekly budget of $100/week (damned five week months) to the tune of around $14, and all because I couldn’t make a 1 kg bag of No Name trail mix last the entire week.

For me, that’s double guilt. Overspending from overeating? Oy.

And let me be clear : this will weigh on my mind for at least a day or two. It should be okay once I buy my groceries on Friday, and the worst that can happen is that I go one week without being able to order in even once.

That would be depressing. But not all that big a deal.

And yet the guilt remains. And it’s a sort of guilt you don’t hear much about.

In my life, I’ve mostly heard it talked about when people cheat on their diets.

We tend to think of guilt as being about doing harm to others, so this self-directed guilt goes against that simple formulation, and therefore kind of flies under the radar.

Perhaps this type of guilt is triggered by the anticipation of future consequences, knowing you will have nobody to blame but yourself.

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it’s simply that, on a deep level, we care about ourselves as if we were another person, and we feel bad for hurting that person.

The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in between.

Whatever. A week from now it will be ancient history and life will go on.

More or less.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.