I am so sick of having to pee all the time.

And yet, I have no choice in the matter. My body punishes me if I don’t drink water almost all the time, and well, what goes in must come out.

It’s like “what goes up must come down”, only disgusting!

I had an annoying incident earlier. I woke up from a nap, and peed. So far so normal, nearly everybody has to pee when they wake up.

But then I dozed for like ten minutes then decided to go back to sleep, only to find that my bladder was full again.

No way my kidneys produced that much urine in ten minutes. I must’ve had a backlog.

Needed to pee this much is like having an annoying kid living with you who is always demanding attention from you.

“What, you have to go AGAIN? But you just went like half an hour ago!”

I can’t wait until he’s old enough to go by himself.

There are times when I get so frustrated by my constant urinary demands that I contemplate extreme solutions.

The kind that involve a tap, a hose, and a catheter.

I will leave it to the student to figure out how that would work.

That way I could hydrate (and urinate) constantly and stay flushed out. A river really WOULD be flowing through me.

That would probably be bad for my kidneys. But convenient.

Now, on to the medical report!

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It’s better than supersound, it’s….

Got my eye ultrasounded today.

Turns out all that talk of it taking 1-3 hours was, as I suspected, bullshit. Yeah, it said that on the appointment slip the nurse gave me, but I am pretty sure that was intended to cover regular appointments with the worthy ophthalmologists at West Coast Retina Consultants (Doctor Vaezi’s office), not medical imaging sessions at a busy clinic.

So, surprise! I made it to Wound Care with ten minutes to spare.

Actually getting to the ultrasound clinic was a serious pain for me, and i mean that literally. I knew I was in trouble the moment I got out of the car because the minute I was on my feet, my legs started hurting like an unpaid bitch.

I didn’t help myself when I wandered off in search of Clinic L down a corridor that, it turns out, only went up to G.

So then I had to go back to the elevator, and only then (and with Julian’s help) did I see the big friendly building directory. that told me that Clinic L was on the second floor.

So I go up the elevator, step out, and see that Clinic L is waaaay over on the other side of the god damned building.

Could not have been further from the elevator without it being outside the windows.

So I painfully made my way there. Had to stop for a bit on the way there. Luckily they have tons of seating at the Eye Care Clinic.

Got there and got the procedure. Took around ten minutes. Involved the imaging tech (his high class Indian accent makes me want to think of him as a doctor) putting a few drop of a numbing agent (or “numbant (sic) ” on my eye, and then dabbing on some of that goo they use for ultrasounds.

No pain. Just a lot of looking up or down or left or right when directed.

The walk was a lot more painful than the procedure.

Back home in sensible Richmond (where the parking roams free), I had a lady I quite liked due my Wound Care.

She was a big, jolly, good natured lady named Ray (Rae?), and she reminded me of Tyne Daly. We joked around as she changed my bandages.

Which was interrupted when Vivian, one of the wound car technicians, showed up to scrape down the callouses on my feet.

After that, it was home to rest for an entire hour before therapy at noon.

All in all, a very busy for yours truly.

More after the break.

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What the hell, smut

Another long day, another low-effort part 2.

Here we see what it takes to make a fox see God.

I truly pity all the straight boys and top-only fags who will never know the sublime pleasure of getting your butthole stuffed.

Not that I am saying taking it up the keister should be mandatory or that there is anything wrong with electing not to partake, far from it.

It’s just that every time I am enjoying that particular form of stimulation, it feels so overwhelmingly and amazingly good that I can’t help but feel bad for all the men who will never experience it.

But maybe those are just the thoughts of a bottom-ish bear like me.

Here’s Mickey Mouse showing us his favorite mouseketeer.

Cute AND sexy,. Talk about being my type! That voice, though. Eep.

With my sensitivity to high pitched noises, there is no way it would ever work.

I bet during sex, only dogs can hear him.

Cut to poor Pluto covering his ears with his front paws and whining.

While we’re taking a walk through the wonderful world of Rule 34 porn…

Here’s a picture of a princess pony being pounded in her pissy pussy.

There. I got my female content AND my pee content all in one pic!

How’s that for efficiency?

I picture her saying, “What? I told you that you make me wet… it’s not my fault you couldn’t tell I was using it as a verb!”.

When she gets wet, she REALLY gets wet!

And I jsut love her facial expression. She’s having a great time and she knows it.

Hmmm. Maybe one more?

Well. while we’re in Equestria….

…might as well take in the sights.

I guess that’s it for the day. Therapy was uneventful, mostly because I was so tired.

Hope you’re having a great day, readers. And as always…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling wistful, so I thought I would go back over my YouTube videos in order to reminisce about a time when I had a lot more energy and ambition, and to remind myself just how gosh darn talented I am.

For example. I made this silly thing :

The weird thing is, I look pretty much exactly the same now. I guess your appearance doesn’t change much between the ages of 24 and 50 when you spend all your tie sitting in front of your computer.

No Therapy Thursday today, my therapist, Doctor Costin, had an emergency. His wife needed a ride to and from the dentist.

We’ve rescheduled for noon tomorrow. I also have that ultrasound of my eye tomorrow morning somewhere nearish 9 am at the Eye Care Clinic in Vancouver.

My life is so busy lately! Relatively speaking.

I complain, but honestly, its nice to have places to go and things to do.

This is probably the most ambitious video I’ve ever made :

It was a heck of a lot of work to look up all those images, gank them to my HD, then stick them into the vid along with my hilarious misinterpretations of the lyrics, but it was a heck of a lot of fun, too.

I should try to get back into that spirit of just making stuff and putting it out there just for the heck of it. No big ambitions or precious dreams, no extrinsic motivations whatsoever, as pure and simple as a child fingerpainting.

Or masturbation. Take your pick.

Feeling better than I did yesterday, but still somewhat melancholy. Today I have been feeling like I am working toward… something… on the emotional level, and I am doing my best to just let it unfold without trying to control it.

With any lcuk, I will become something else. Something better. Fruvous 2.0, with all the features you love but without the stifled miserable storage closet of a life you hate!

Well, I hate it, anyhow.

Here’s one where a black void shaped like my beard explains how to defeat terrorism :

I am so darn deep.

I should upload some of these to TIkTok. It seems to be a place for people talking to the camera to express their thoughts.

Something I should do more often.

But I live at the bottom of a massive pile of “shoulds”. One more or less makes absolutely no difference to me.

I really should do something about that.

Finally, here’s one of my favorite bits of music I’ve made :

Warning : it’s silly.

I guess I’m a little bummed that I didn’t get to tell my therapist all about my most recent medical misadventure. But I will tell him all about it tomorrow.

And I will tell you nice people how the whole “ultrasound my eyeball” thing goes.

I really hope my eye can be fixed without surgery, but I don’t see the tiniest bit of improvement when I close my right eye, so I am not hopeful.

Oh well. I’ve had two cataract surgeries before. I can handle this one too.

More after the break.

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How long now?

Apparently, I’m to expect tomorrow’s appointment to get an ultrasound of my eye to take 1 to 3 hours. For some reason.

That would only be a mystery if I hadn’t goofed up today. I was supposed to call the Community Care Clinic where I get my Wound Care done to tell them that there was no way I would make tomorrow’s appointment as I will be at the Eye Care Clinic getting what appears to be a quite extensive ultrasound of my eye done.

i mean, 1 to three hours? Why the heck does it take that long? Doctor Low-Beer was able to do an ultrasound of my eye in like fifteen seconds with her portable unit.

What, is the ultrasound done by getting individual bats to chirp at my eye one at a time and then asking them for their impressions? fucked up and forgot

Or maybe an imaging tech has to hum at me?

Anyhow, because I fucked up and forgot to call the Clinic, and the Clinic opens at 8:45, and my ultrasound appoint is at 9 am in Vancouver, I have somewhat of a logistical clusterfuck to sort out tomorrow morning.

The only alternative I see is that I am going to have to call them from Julian’s smartphone while we are on the road to Vancouver.

That will be a little awkward, but it sure beats having to call them in the middle of getting my eyeball examined.

Luckily, I think the Wound Care appointment is at 10:15 am, so there’s some leeway. And lord knows, I have canceled ab appointment with less notice than that before.

What can I say, some days I don’t know I am too sick to go till I wake up in the morning.

Its always ironic to be too sick to go to a medical appointment. But irony does not obviate the fact that in order to go to the doctor, I have to be well enough to travel.

It’s either that or call an ambulance, and I am pretty sure you are not supposed to do that. They hate that kind of thing.

Ah, well. Life is full of little annoying details like this one. And now that I am taking microscopic baby steps towards actually being among the living, there is going to be a lot more of them.

Might as well get used to it.

Turns out the real world has, like, stress in it! Amazing.

I get the feeling that part of entering Actual Life ™ might be adjusting my opinion of just how calm and rational a person I am.

It’s entirely possible that said lucid placidity is entirely a product of my shiftless life and once I start really getting down to business, I might have a lot more crankiness and volatility to deal with than ever before.

If so, bring it. Nobody ever said learning to live was going to be easy.

I have a very, VERY large imbalance between the mental and the physical to address, and putting that right is bound to involve some serious fluctuations.

Well whatever happens, I’ll just deal with it.

I always do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I am feeling right now.

This, despite my having gotten a fair bit of rest since yesterday. I get the feeling this is the sort of weariness thatyou can’t cure with a quick nap.

Which is a shame, because that’s the only type of sleep I get, most of the time.

Sometimes I manage a solid 3.5 hours at night, after hanging out with J&J and watching stuff. But that’s more the exception than the rule.

And yeah, there are serious physiological reasons for my sleep to suck so bad. Sleep apnea would be the most obvious one.

Smothering in my sleep a thousand times a night does not lead to restful slumber.

Plus there is my ever-needful bladder. That shouldn’t be a problem but it is. The body is supposed to slow metabolic functions way, way down when you sleep in order to give you a chance at some serious Z’s.

Mine doesn’t do that, though.

Moving up from the urogenital region to the brain, there is also the very salient factor that I spend all day stimulating my brain with video games and such and it can be very hard to sleep when your brain is fizzing and crackling and popping like a hardwood fire.

All of those are very pertinent to my lack of decent sleep. But i don’t think they are the real root of the problem.

I think the real issue is that scared, paranoid, and perpetually freaked out little animal at the core of my being, and its hypervigilance.

The deepest part of me can’t ever relax and go to sleep. It is convinced, seemingly permanently, that danger lurks all around and is just waiting for me to relax and drop my guard then it will GET me.

And as I have discussed, this part of me can’t be reasoned with. I know that I have nothing to fear and that my predators (bullies) are long long gone and that I have nothing to fear and that my life is, health issues aside, actually quite safe.

But I don’t believe it. Not way down deep where it counts. That scared little animal deep inside me is like a crazed conservative, treating all evidence that is contrary to its worldview as just another trick to get it to make itself vulnerable.

And deep down it feels like it can’t afford to take the risk of believing. In its mind, the stakes are incredibly high, on the level of an existential threat – or worse.

You’ve heard of fates worse than death? To the insane mind (like mine), the dread of what will happen if I relax is so profound that death seems like a cheerful outcome.

It’s the fear that is bigger than anything else in the mind, possibly because it has been there for so long.

Since I was four, in fact.

And I suppose that as far as it is concerned, it has kept me safe so far, so why change?

Like I said, it’s very conservative.

And once more we end up at the same place : I don’t know what to do to convince it that everything is fine now and it can finally get some much needed sleep.

But I know that “convince” is the wrong word for what has to occur. Like I said, this part of me cannot be reasoned with. The evidence means nothing to it.

It’s not listening.

The only thing I can think of that would do it is a very big and profound feeling of safety, and I can’t yet generate that for myself.

I can imagine getting it from someone else. Probably someone male and paternal and strong, although a strongly maternal mother figure might work too.

They key is that it has to be someone who can make that wild eyed little critter feel like it can finally come in out of the cold and feel safe at home.

Lord knows where I would find someone like that.

More after the break.

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What I’ve got they used to call the blues

I’m feeling depressed right now.

TThere, I admitted it/. Right here in print. I, Michael John Betrand, being of crazed mind and diseased body, do solemnly declare that I feel very depressed right now, as I typed these very words.

But odn’t worry. It’s not the scary kind of depression. I just feel sad and blue. I find myself sighing a lot, and I have the vague feeling like I am mourning something.

And I don’t feel like doing… things. Even fun things. I guess you could say that I don’t feel like coping with reality at all.

But here I am., slogging away anyhow.

That tiny sparkplug deep inside me just keeps goading me forward like a microscopic cattle prod. I might not do a lot that the world world would consider productive, but it’s never nothing at all.

I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not.

I’m not too worried about being depressed, Like I am right now. It feels like it’s just a phase I am going through as part of my healing process.

Sometimes, you just have to be sad for a while. Life’s a rainbow of emotion and you can’t have a rainbow without the blues.

No point in fighting it. I will just stand aside and do my best to give it whatever atttention and energy it needs to get done whatever it needs to do.

I think out minds are a lot more capable of healing themselves than we give them credit for. The secret is to get the hell out of the way and let it.

When I am done here, I will probably lay down in the dark and put on some relaxing music and try to surrender all conscious control of my mind and set what happens.

Let all the stale stored energy in my soul return to the cosmos so I can breathe.

And if that means a good long cry, I’ll try to do that too.

Every day, I get a little bit closer to really being alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thank goodness, I was wrong.

Today’s visit to an eye doctor, a Doctor Mackay, who works out of the same office as Doctor Vaezi, was far more helpful and conclusion than my visit yesterday with those bumbling fools at Doctor Chew’s office.

This time, nobody was completely thrown off by their inability to peer at my retina with their instruments. They seemed to grasp that things can happen that make imaging the back of the eye rather tricky.

Hallelujah for that.

Also, there has always been something about my left eye (or oculo sinestro) that makes it hard to image.

Perhaps it is the seat of all my dark powers.

In which case, I better get it fixed. I need that shit!

First, I had to go through the same dang tests I did yesterday. Well, mostly the same. As it turns out, they actually do have a few machines they didn’t have at Doctor Chew’s.

Doctor Mackay was another handsome young professional, this one a ginger. He looked into my eyes in various ways (but not the one I really wanted, sigh) , and told me that the occlusion in my left eye was definitely blood.

I hadn’t thought of that. I guess I assumed blood would be blood colored. I thought maybe I just had some very aggressive floaters.

Oh no, they’ve unionized!

He’s referred me to get an ultrasound of that eye. Unfortunately, that means another dang trip into Vancouver, this time to some kind of eye clinic.

I took a long shot and mentioned to the nurse that they do ultrasounds at Richmond Hospital. She looked at me blankly then said “But this is the eye. ”

I figured there was no point in pressing the matter further. I know the sound of someone’s mind slamming shut.

I’ve heard it so many times in my life.

And I get it. If someone is talking about things that exist way, way outside your frame of reference, you have to slam your mind shut or you’ll go crazy.

There’s times when I’ve had to do it myself., It’s like the person is trying to add a whole new province to your mind and you simply cannot make the necessary adjustment.

I also didn’t bother telling her that Doctor Low-Beer actually did an ultrasound of my eye last Sunday night. She did it with a portable unit and it probably doesn’t even show up in my records anywhere.

Anyhow, I have an appointment around 9 am at the Eye Care Clinic in Vancouver.

Apparently, there’s just the one.

And then I have another appointment at the same office as today at around 9 am a week from today, for the follow-up.

Oh, and lest I forget, the finale of today’s interactions with Doctor Mackay was him sticking a needle in my eye.

Which hurt almost as much as you’d think it would. The numbing agent they use on my eyes does not seem to penetrate deep enough to save me from the pain.

But at least it was just a quick jab. Ouch! Then done.

The injection might solve the problem. But if not, surgery.

Got home around 4:15 pm. Had to go directly into blogging and eating. And tonight, we’re doing Denny’s because we couldn’t do it Sunday night with Joe sick and me still in the freaking ER.

I’ve been so busy lately!

Boy, am I looking forward to doing fuck all tomorrow.

More after the break.

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Some nice pictures

I’ve been so medically busy lately that I figure it’s high time for me to take a little rest and just post some of my recent happy fluffy G-rated art I did with Bing AI.

I guess the VERY strict ban on making anything even slightly smutty with Bing AI has had one good effect on me : it’s encouraged me to make more non-smut art.

And that’s a good thing. Gets me to stretch my visual imagination.

OK, let’s get started.

This magnificent lady is the Goddess of the Dawn

Isn’t she gorgeous? I wanted to make an image of pure, radiant Good, and she is what I came up with. She looks ready to tackle all the evil in the world with her shining sword, the Beacon of Purity, able to strike the evil from any mortal soul.

In my mind, she is amongst the wisest, most respected, most powerful, and most revered goddesses of her pantheon – but only during dawn, defined as the period between when the sun is first seen peeking over the horizon to when it first clears the horizon completely and is thus fully risen.

the rest of the time, she is just another shadow amongst the millions flitting around at the edge of the realm of the gods.

Why yes, I do tend to overthink things. Thank you.

Next, how about this lovely domestic scene?

I just love this pic. It really appeals to my deep homebody instincts. I dream of a deep, warm, calm, happy domestic life that is portrayed in this picture.

The sheep are optional. But certainly welcome.

And while we’re feeling all warm and fuzzy….

The title of this piece is “No Great Love”.

There isn’t much more I can say about that one. I’m too choked up.

This is what I got when all I typed in was, “a dog and a cat talk about sports”.

Bing AI is really miraculous. isn’t it?

If it did smut, I would uninstall Easy Diffusion in a heartbeat.

I really hope someone manages to jailbreak the Dall-E 3 model some day so us heait palmed deviants can get our sweaty mitts on it.

Hmmm, one more. Ooh, I know!

Limber up your “awww!” muscles then gaze upon this :

Aren’t they the cutest? I want to hug them and rub their fluffy tummies so bad!

Oooh, and fluff up those poofy cheeks!

Ahem. Anyhow, that’s enough for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow..

God fucking damn it, am I sick of being a medical mystery.

So my case got punted by ER Doctor Low-Beer (half the calories of a regular doctor but with all the flavour of a full one) to a Doctor Jesse Chew (yes, that’s how he spells his name – don’t ask me) and today, I went to see Doctor Chew (the number one gum among physicians who care about their dental health).

Julian dropped me off at the building at Burrard and Davie, and I made my way ot the elevator and all the way up to the top floor, the Tenth.

And you know what? It felt good to be able to do that m uch by myself. Becoming a cripple has really done a number on my already quite weak belief in my own competence and capacity and ability to be real live grownup person, so it felt good to be able to do something on my own for once.

Even before my legs went boom, it always made me feel very good to have done something by myself. I regret now that I did not take advantage of that ability very often.

I could have really developed my confidence in myself that way. Now I am so damned frail that I can’t even leave the apartment building alone.

Disability is the assassin of dignity.

Anyhoo, up to the tenth floor I went. Found the office (room 1025) and checked in with the receptionist, but had to shout a little to tell her my medications because I had to sit down before my legs gave out on me.

We went through all the usual tests that I am familiar with from my time with Doctor Vaezi, the guy that did my cataract surgery years ago.

Then I was admitted to an exam room with a handsome, fresh faced young doctor waiting for me.

There, the nurse/tech that did my eye measurements told him that the cameras on the instruments would not take an image of my left eye.

Red flag number one.

Doctor Handsome quite thoroughly examined my eyes. It was quite draining, to be honest. And what do you know, he’s having a hell of a hard time seeing into my left eye just like the cameras.

And suddenly, I flashed back to Doc Vaezi’s office and him and his people having the exact same problem with the exact same eye all those years back.

Red flag number two.

After struggling to get a glimpse of what is happening in my bad eye for quite a while, Doctor Handsome gets up and says, “I better go get Doctor Chew. ”

And I’m thinking, Well then who the hell are you?

He comes back with a older Asian doctor straight out of central casting, white labcoat, cheerful smile, and all.

I quite liked him.

He looks into my eyes too, and then has a confab with Doctor Handsome: most of which was in the doctor equivalent of “shop talk” so I could not follow it.

I’m bright but I don’t know everything. Yet.

Meanwhile, I am eagerly waiting for them to tell me what the fuck is wrong.

So imagine my shock and dismay when they told me they were punting me back to none other than Doctor Fucking Vaezi, while Doctor Handsome mumbled something about them having different instruments that might be able to see more.

I wish I had been quick-witted and on the ball enough to say, “Um no, Ive already been there, they don’t fucking work either!”.

So that’s where I am now. I go to Doctor Vaezi’s office at 2:30 pm tomorrow to see one of his associates. a Doctor Mackay, for further interrogation examination.

Which is almost guaranteed to be an utter waste of time because, again, I already know that their instruments won’t be able to penetrate my Eye of Mystery either.

Makes me wonder how he did the cataract surgery on that eye. Oh well, whatever.

Oh, and just to top it all off, when we got back to the apartment building, the elevator was being held up by some jackass having a deep and intimate conversation with someone while holding the fucking elevator door open.

This was bad news for me because I really had to bee. In fact, being close to home had kind caused my bladder to, shall we say, begin the pre-urinary process.

And we waited, and waited, and Julian kept on having to press the “going up” button because the light kept going out without an elevator showing up for us, and meanwhile I am having to dance around both out of urinary need and to keep my legs from giving out on me from standing for too long, and well…. there was a leak.

Meaning I wet myself.

Yup. There goes the rest of my dignity.

Got home, and had to change into one of my old pairs of Sans-i-belt slacks because they were the only things clean, and there’s a reason I stopped wearing those fucking things and it’s because they are way, way too big for me now.

Sans-i-belt can handle anything but you losing weight, it seems.

So today’s been just fucking ducky. And tomorrow is probably going to be really fucking stupid as well.

All this, and my computer still crashes when I try to play any video game with a serious 3D aspect to it. Like almost everything good.

The only solution is to turn down the graphics settings on my games, and do you know how depressing that will be when i have just spent a lot of money upgrading this computer to be super zippy amazingly fast?!?

My previous computer actually played these games better. In that they did not crash.

BG3 ran like used ass, but I had at least stopped it from crashing, dammit.

Life fucking stinks.

Whaddaya know I CAN still write 1K words in one sitting, if I’m pissed off enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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Or at least a stamp on my card so I can get a free sub.

So yup, I ended up in the freakin’ emergency room again today.

But I didn’t go there directly, oh no. I was a good citizen and took my “not really an emergency per se” eye issue to the Urgent Care Center first.

And at first I waqs stoked because the waiting room was EMPTY. Holy shit, I might actually get through the system quickly!

I got to the receptionist and ha said, “Are you here to see a doctor?”

I looked at him strangely. Isn’t everyone who comes in here? “Um, yeah… I don’t have an appointment to see one, though. ”

I was impressed with how deftly I deduced his intent.

He said, “Well in that, case, I can’t admit you. We’re full ”

And I boggled a little. They were full, and yet the waiting room was empty? Where were they all hiding? Or was this place down to a capacity of like, two?

My most plausible theory is that literally everyone was taking advantage of that facility’s ability to take your cell phone number and then they will text you when the doctor is ready to see you. That way, you can wait back home or whatever.

But that doesn’t really hold water with me. Surely there would still be some people who would be waiting in the waiting room. But the place, which seats at least 50 people, was completely devoid of occupants.

And there was only one receptionist on duty. Usually there’s two. Weird.

Anyhow, that’s why we ended up going to the ER. Which would have been my preference anyhow because I trust the ER at Richmond Hospital way more than I trust that weird Urgent Care place.,

Next time I will call ahead.

Julian dropped me off at the ER, and I went through the usual stages of intake, then waiting in the waiting room, then triage, then more waiting, then being admitted to the ER ward itself.

There, I was put on a bed in their special eye room. Kinda neat that they have one. It even has that thing where you rest you chin and head so the doctor can get a good look into your eye(s)..

I got a doctor whose actual name is,. I kid you not, Doctor Low-Beer. It was right there on her nametag. I had heard her name said on a previous visit, but I naturally assumed it was spelled like, “Laubier” or the like. Nope! Low as in not high, beer as in the drink.

But before that was the visual acuity test, the absolutely classic one with the eye chart with the letters on it and covering one eye and all that.

And that’s how I learned the horrible truth : My left eye has WAY more of a problem than just a dark spot. When I covered my right eye, I couldn’t make out anything. It’s like my left eye is covered with a gauzy film, translucent but not transparent, and it’s in this film that the dark spot and the ring around it are suspended.

Well shit. Now I was REALLY worried.

After that, Doctor Tiny-Lager examined my eye, I got a head CT scan, and the doctor even did an ultrasound on my eye.

But luckily, there was no weird shit where they had to touch my eyeball. Phew.

After all was said and done, Doctor Little-Stout concluded that I had not, in fact, had a stroke (good), and then she referred me to an eye doctor in Vancouver whom I will be seeing tomorrow at 1:35 PM.

And of course, I also have wound care tomorrow, at 10:15 AM.

So it’s going to be another busy day for me.

I am really getting sick of this shit.

And I really hope Doctor Chew (yes, that’s how he spells it) can shed some light as to what the galloping fuck went wrong in my left eye.

I have zero theories myself, which is rare for me. I don’t know what the hell could cause this film to form over my left eye, let alone a film with a big black spot over it.

It sort of looks like the sort of thing you might get if I had been exposed to a really dangerously bright flash or other light source. But that hasn’t happened.

So I dunno. An infection of some kind, maybe?

I hope not. That would be ick.

Oh well, I can function quite well with my right eye doing most of the work. And tomorrow, I will hopefully learn something more about what the heck happened.

And God willin’, Doctor Chew will be able to fix it.

I have a feeling that will involve surgery, though. Which is also ick.

All this, and my new computer doesn’t work right either.

Why does life hate me?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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Addendum : 27 rap styles

I was quite impressed by this vid.

Not only does it show a truly impressive knowledge of the entire breadth and width of the world of hip-hop, but some of the raps he comes up with to illustrate the styles are actually quite funny.

And for a total rap newb like me, it’s a very interesting and informative trip through mostly highly unfamiliar territory.

I can forgive him for crapping on heavy metal rap. Everyone does that. I assume it’s because the bands associated with it are the kind that appeal to white trash type individuals and therefore all the middle class and middle class wannabees have to crap on it to maintain class solidarity.

Kind of like all the ways people slander Denny’s food.

“Oh, the food there is TERRIBLE. Not that I’ve ever eaten there, of course. But if poor people feel comfortable eating there, it MST be terrible, right? I mean, if poor people could actually have good things.,. my entire world view would be shattered!”

Yeah. I hate that shit.

Anyhow, enjoy the video!

The art is kind ugly, but that’s true for everything these days.

Personally, I blame John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy ruined everything.

Seriously, though, I love that little cartoon up there.

It even stars a fox! Though in the context of one of the many slanderous and egregious “fables” that prick Aesop told about us.

At least in this one, the fox got to get the grapes!

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Here’s mud in your eye

I’ve got a dark spot in the vision in my left eye.

It developed yesterday. For much of the day, I didn’t notice it., Instead, I mistook it for a bit of hair flopping down into my line of vision, and kept trying to brush it away.

I should have known better. My hairline has receding too far for hair to get in my eyes./

b ut eventually, I realized it was there. and that was not a good feeling. As a diabetic, I am absolutely terrified of going blind, so that’s immediately where my mind went when I realized it was there.

But I don’t think I need to worry. I am pretty sure that the problem lies on the surface of the lens of my eye. Like a really big floater.

And when I turn my head or move my eye, the dark spot follows – but slowly. It takes a couple of seconds for it to float into the same position as before.

So I am thinking someone happened on the surface of my eye, although what it could be is beyond me. Whatever it was, it didn’t hurt, which is encouraging. Or at the very least, it didn’t hurt enough to ake me up.

Because I am pretty sure it must have happened when I was asleep.

Bad things happen to me when I sleep.

I am hoping that it’s just some minor, silly thing easily taken care of with eyedrops or a couple of days of antibiotics.

Slightly less desirable would be if the doctor I eventually take this to (maybe tomorrow?) has to interact directly with my eyeball. That’s always freaky.

I have this image in my head of the doctor taking one look at my eye, grabbing a Kleenex, then quickly dabbing the dark spot off like it’s something stuck to my glasses.

Not very likely, but an amusing thought nonetheless.

My biggest worry is, of course, that this is the first sign of something truly terrible happening to my eyes that will eventually lead to my going blind.

Like I’ve said before, if I go blind, put me on suicide watch immediately because I most definitely won’t want to live.

I mean, WTF would I even do with myself if I can’t see? I’m too old to learn braille.

But I am encouraged by the fact that the spot already seems less opaque than it was yesterday. Perhaps this is something my body can fix on its own.

Nevertheless, I am still gonna take it to Urgent Care tomorrow. I don’t want to. Urgent Care kind of sucks. But this is potentially serious shit and I want to get it in front of a medical professional ASAP.

Until then, I guess I will just have to keep an eye on it.

Ha ha ha.

More after the break.

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Another tech support visit

Spuug dropped by this afternoon for a little more tech support.

You see, my new computer has an old problem. Like I have said before, it crashes at random times when I am using the graphics card to play games or render art.

This is quite frustrating. I hate having to reboot all the damned time, and of course, being suddenly interrupted while playing a game is maddening.

It kind of ruins the mood, ya know? There I am deep in a game of Dragon Age 2 or Baldur’s Gate 3^[1], immersed in its world, when suddenly I am booted out into rude reality by the screen going black.

The fact that the audio keeps going uninterrupted only serves to underscore it.

So i Googled the problem and one of the solutions I found on Reddit said that my particular mondo beefy graphics card, the ” Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 ti ” to use its full Christian name, uses a LOT of power and therefore requires not one but two separate connections to the power supply in order to function.

This made sense to me, and it fit the evidence. It makes sense that the thing would cut out when it could not get enough power and it matched the evidence that this would take out the graphics but not the sound.

Makes me kind of wish it would give me a warning or a verbose error message instead of just abruptly and irrevocably crashing the visuals.

Or if it has to crash them, maybe give an audio error message. “Um, hey…. I know everything just went black… don’t panic, you’re not having a negative brain event, our graphics card just isn’t getting enough power and we don’t know why. Sorry. ”

All said in an apologetic California accent.

Anyhow, so today spuug came over to investigate and to set up that second power connection so we can see if that solves the problem.

This was very sweet of him, especially since he didn’t think it would actually help.

Well, time will tell. Like I said before, we’re testing for a negative condition, so we’re waiting for a crash to NOT occur.

Later on, when I have the time and energy, I will boot up Baldur’s Gate 2 and see how far I can get before the fucker crashes.

Hopefully, it won’t crash at all. But if it must, I hope it will wait at least an hour into my session to do it.

So far, it’s not made it past 20 minutes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So a stroll through this video triggered me.

So I guess it’s time for yet another dump of my emotions regarding my childhood.

As patient readers know, in my childhood, I just plain did not count and did not matter. I grew up with an overwhelming feeling that I had no right to be there. To be alive and have needs and need taking care of at all. I was given the clear message that nobody was going to go out of their way in the slightest on my behalf, even my mother, and the times when they had no choice because otherwise I’d die, they would discharge this nauseating duty very begrudgingly and only after making me wait and wonder if anyone even remembered me at all.

Inasmuch as anything whatsoever was expected of me, I was expected to shut up, never ask for anything, never draw attention to myself, and just exist as quietly and invisibly as possible.

To do my best not to exist at all and thus atone for my original sin of being born and alive when it was not convenient for my parents, or planned.

How dare I barge into their lives like that when they already had their hands full dealing with raising my three older siblings? Well just for that, we will treat you like an unwanted guest and completely ignore you most of the time, and resent every moment when we are forced to acknowledge your existence.

Oh, we might be a little nice to you now and then, when it occurs to us and we feel like reassuring ourselves that we’re actually parenting you.

But don’t hold your breath. We’re very busy with things that are far, far more important than you will ever be.

And that’s pretty much everything.

Of course, nobody ever TOLD me any of this. That would have involved remembering that I exist, noticing me, acknowledging my existence, considering me important enough to talk to, and (and this is the big one) saying words out loud that would kind of suggest they should feel bad about neglecting me most of the time.

And clearly, I deserved absolutely none of that. I mean, don’t be ridiculous. I should be happy they tolerate my existence at all and be glad for whatever they happen to feel like giving me on those rare moments when my being alive didn’t annoy them.

No wonder I spent all my time out of school watching TV alone in the living room or on my computer alone in my room.

Being alone beats the hell out of being around people who make you feel like you’re not even there, or shouldn’t be.

Oh, but my mother did eventually come to some dim realization that maybe I was not treated all that well as a kid.

I know that, because long after I entered adulthood, she made a point of telling me I was wanted and that she was glad I was around.

Too little too late, Mom. But um…. thanks, I guess.

More after the break.

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The saga continues

My relationship with my mother is…. complicated.

I love her more than I have ever loved anything or anyone ever. She’s my MOM, after all. There can be no other before her. After all….

Hmmm. I remember him asking her twice, the second time louder and more forcefully.

This love is, of course, non-negotiable. My mother is the best person in the world and that’s final. And so many of my best traits – my gentleness, my deep compassion, my love of animals, my sensitivity – come directly from her.

Heck, even my love of science fiction started when I read her copy of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, and was fostered by watching Star Trek (mostly TNG, with a little TOS… she does not like James T. Kirk very much ^[1])

She started me on reading by reading to me at bedtime when I was a wee thing. She read me Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (children’s expurgated version), then both Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, and then the entire Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.

Somewhere between that and Sesame Street, I learned to read when I was a few months shy of turning 4.

And yet, she was part of the problem, too. She withdrew from me emotionally when she was the one person in the world I thought I could count on. She was all I had at that point, and she abandoned me.

She was fighting her own depression, I think.

And other things she did for me went away too. First she went back to work, and I lost a full time Mom. Then she stopped doing things for me, like the laundry, and buying my clothes, and making my school lunches.

She was so disconnected from me that when I just stopped eating lunch altogether, she did not even notice.

And she, like the others, just kind of assumed I would be okay with whatever. That I would always just adapt to whatever she did, no matter what it changed in my life, and what it meant I now had to take on.

And she wasn’t wrong, technically. I did adapt to whatever.

But not without loss. Sometimes great loss. A loss I could not articulate let alone tell anyone about because I did not feel like I had a choice in the matter let alone any right to have my needs taken into account.

Like a lot of children of Boomers, I grew up with the understanding that their needs and what they wanted came first and we the feral children of the suburbs would have to squeeze ourselves into whatever cracks and crevices we could find.

Until something else changed, and once we got over being squished or crushes by the shift, we had to do it all again.

The truth is that, despite her being very sweet and caring in demeanor, she was deep down never a particularly warm person to me once she went back to work.

There is a detachment and compartmentalization that is a bedrock part of her psyche that keeps her from wanting to be emotionally entangled with people, even her kids.

I feel like I’ve inherited that, too. But I am working hard to get over it.

I am working hard to get rid of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OW. My legs are not happy with me right now,

That’s because I’ve had another busy (by my sessile standards) day with Wound Care in the morning and an appointment with my neurologist Doctor Madhani at noon.

Wound Care went off without a hitch, as usual. The only notable thing was that the nurse said the wound on my right foot it getting to be very small and shallow, so that’s a good thing. Hopefully it will heal up completely and stop causing me to develop awild, crazy, out of control callus on that foot.

Although I suppose that if my wound was gone but the callus remained, it would just mean having to get it pared down every couple of months so that it doesn’t start making me walk with a list to the opposite side.

Then we drove home, and that’s when I had my really dumb idea.

See, by then, ir was around 10:10 AM, and we had planned to leave for Doctor Madhani’s office at 10:50 AM to make sure we got there in time for my appointment at noon, I figured I would save myself the trip up to the apartment and back by just hanging out in our car listening to the radio (yay Jack FM!) as it sat in our parking structure until it was time to go.

I had this great picture in my mind of me just drowsing there while my beloved 80’s music played on the radio and

Genius, right? Wrong.

Because what if something happened and I needed Julian’s help> Lacking a cell phone (I know), I had no way to contact him.

And without him, I couldn’t even get out of the car because I need him to get my walker out of the back seat and set it up for me.

And without it, I might make it to the elevator but that would be pointless because by the time it got to our floor, I would lack the leg strength to get out again.

Plus I had to pee. ^[1]

This all kept me from relaxing like I meant to do. Instead, I listening to the radio and cursed myself out for being an idjit.

But whatever. I tried something and it didn’t work. Big deal.

I think I am finally getting the hang of this whole “I may be a person who has to run into a lot of trees before he figures out he’s in a forest” type thing.

Anyhow, then, after a brief stop at Real Canadian Superstore so Julian could get some diet root beer for Joe (that stuff is hard to find these days), we were off to the office of Doctor Madhani so she could electrocute me.

But that’s a story for Part 2 of today’s blog entry. The story leading up to this point took up a lot more room than I thought.

More after the break.

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Part 2 : Shock and Awe

But mostly shock.

OK, so, I went to Doctor Madhani’s office. Her receptionist settled me in and then she came along to administer the tests.

And I was not kidding about the electrocution. The first tests were nerve conductivity tests, and as the name suggests, those involve finding out just how conductive your nerves are by running increasing amounts of current through them.

So what happened was that Doctor Madhani had me lie down on the exam bed and hold out my arm and she then touched my arm at various points and made the muscles twitch as the current ran through the various nerves.

For the most part, this did not hurt. There were a few of the more intense zaps that did in fact hurt, but all that happened for most of them was the odd experience of seeing your muscles do something you never told them to do.

That doesn’t come up much in everyday life. Most of the time, if our motor muscles do something, it’s because we told them to do it.

So it was a mildly disturbing and/or amusing sight to watch my muscles twitch about.

Then the second part was coming up. Doctor Madhani said she was going to “insert an acupuncture sized needle into my skin and then move it around to take samples of various parts of my muscles ”

And that sounded absolutely horrible.

Was she seriously talking about taking tiny pieces of my muscle tissue out with a needle? While I was still awake? And doing this for many muscles?!?

No, thank God. The “samples” she spoke of were, believe it or not, sound samples(no really), not a zillion tiny pieces of my living fucking flesh.

In retrospect, I wish I had told her that her introduction for the procedure needed work. For starters, she needs to specify that these will be SOUND samples.

See, what they do to test the neurological response of your muscles is to pass a light current through them and then that current is turned into sound (static) by the machine and she listens to and records that sound.

This is a brilliant way to present the information because it uses the same part of our mind that understands music and recognizes patterns in other sounds to take what could be a very confusing mishmash of information and turn it into something you can actually hear instead.

Anyhow, compared to the torture I thought it would be, the procedure was a breeze. The needle going in hurt a bit, but the moving it around did not.

Apparently some people find the whole thing very painful.

You know, the evidence that I have a high pain threshold is really adding up. I wonder if that is part of why I tend to leave medical issues too long before I report them,

On the other hand, Doctor Madhani said I was “so good” and that she “wishes all her patients were as good as me”.

And that was nice. I must admit. I am, in general, a very docile and cooperative patient, as long as some fool nurse isn’t digging around in my veins like a hog hunting truffles.

The way I see it, why resist? These people are trying to help me, and I am there voluntarily, so I have already tacitly agreed to cooperate, and fighting back almost always makes things hurt a lot more, so… why fight?

As that nurse found out, I reserve the right to get mad if things go badly. But otherwise, I am a happy little lamb.

At the end, Doctor Madhani told me that she detected a few mild problems in my arm muscles and a few pretty major ones in my legs muscles.

well I could have told her that.

She’s going to go over her results and call me either tomorrow, Friday, or next Monday.

She raised the possibility of needing to get an actual sample of the muscle tissues.

Boy, I hope that means a traditional biopsy under general anesthetic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once more, I have no idea what I want to write about, so I will just start posting my arts and hope that the pics spark something in me.

We’ll start. as is traditional, with something wholesome and sweet.

People, I give you…. kittens!

Made that using the Bing AI image generator known as Bing Designer. Using it is worlds different from using Stable Diffusion because Bing AI uses an AI model called Dall-E 3 and it is way, way smarter than anything available for SD,.

And by “smarter”, I mean that it is way, way better at understanding what I type in. It’s so much better at it that it makes Stable Diffusion look positively retarded.

And that’s not just me saying that. The rest of the Internet basically agrees.

But of course, there’s a catch : no smut. Nothing even remotely naughty, You see, Bing AI is not something you can download and install and use on your own like I do with the Easy Diffusion distribution of Stable Diffusion.

Nope, you can only use it on the Bing website, and that means everything has to be squeaky clean lest us swarthy deviants use it to taint Microsoft’s brand.

Or brand their taint, come to think of it.

So I will definitely not be giving up Stable Diffusion any time soon. I love making porn with it. It’s like the world’s most highly developed way to masturbate.

Speaking of which…. here’s one way to beat the winter blahs.

Remember, fat guys give the best blowjobs.

Because we’re hungry.

On the gaming and/or computer front, I am dealing with the reemergence of an old problem : my graphics card crashing my god damned computer.

And always in the same way that I have described before : the screen goes black then the monitor tells me it’s not getting any signal and there is nothing I can do to fix that except reboot reboot my computer.

Which is a bitch entirely.

It’s no fun when it interrupts whatever I am doing as I use my Easy Diffusion installation to make my filthy dirty smutty pictures, but it’s especially a bitch when it interrupts me as I play a game,

Like this morning, when I finally beat Meredith in Dragon’s Age 2 then… crash.

i am hoping that it managed to automatically save the game before it crashed, but it’s a faint hope, and I will probably have to beat the psycho murder whore all over again.

Not the worst thing ever, but pretty fucking annoying.

I’m depressed now. Let’s do more smut.

Anyhow, the worst thing about this crashing issue is that I have had it before and solved it, and now I don’t remember how I did that.

Guess I will have to go back to one squared and start Googling possible solutions till I stumble across the right one again.

That should be fun.

More after the break.

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I have a what now?

So, turns out I have an appointment with my neurologist, Doctor Madhani, tomorrow.

I had no idea until her office called me today to remind me.

One ,might say that doing the reminder call a day before the appointment is leaving things a tad late, but that’s beside the point now.

I also have Wound Care tomorrow at 9:45 am, which is not a conflict with the Doctor Madhani appointment at noon, but adds to the stress and strain of the day.

So tomorrow will be fun. I am mostly curious about how this all happened, as when I am given an appointment, I usually immediately tell Julian so he can put it on the calendar and that way, I don’t have to remember it.

Because I won’t. Remember it, that is. History has shown that I can’t remember any appointment that is more than two weekends away.

Look, with the unstable nature of my absentminded brain in general. I am luck that I can remember that far ahead.

What the hell, more smut.

That’s #1 in my “Predator/Prey Relations” series.

And you’re right, Mister Wolf. Not only is fucking them up the ass a much nicer way to connect with them, you also can do it over and over again with the same sheep!

Doesn’t that sound better than all that hunting?

Anyhow, I will survive my busy day tomorrow like I always do. . I have forwarded Doctor Madhani’s address et al to Julian so he knows where we’re going, and I have emailed Doctor Costin because what with my appointment in Vancouver being noon tomorrow, and it involves a lot of testing, there is no way I will be home by 1 pm for our usual Therapy Thursday appointment.

I do resent the way my medical appointments seem to lie in wait for me lately. There will be nothing at all for a couple of weeks then, out of nowhere, I will get jumped by a whole gang of the things.

What I figure happened was that I did tell Julian about the appointment and he did write it down on the calendar, but today is January 31 and tomorrow is February 1 and therefore we haven’t actually seen this appointment coming because it is on the next page of the calendar.

And that’s just the type of silly shit that trips me up all the time. I swear that sometimes it seems like my mission on Earth is to make every possible mistake, no matter how obscure our unlikely, until I am ten minutes from death wen I will finally be wise.

Or at least not as much of a dumbass.

But hey, maybe some of us are destined to learn their way around by running into the wall a bunch of times.

It’s rough, but it beats being too scared to do anything.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.