Especially ones involving my resources.

So yesterday, I ordered groceries. And, as usual, they fucked it up.

Not only did they give me the wrong god damned cookies again (I ordered sugar free, got sugary version instead), I didn’t get my usual 1 KG package of No Name™ Original Trail Mix nor did I get the big box of frozen chicken strips I ordered.

The chicken strips I can do without because I also got a box of Jamaican patties and those will serve as entrees for my suppers for now.

But the trail mix thing really pisses me off because that’s a cornerstone of my diet right there, sad as that may be. Luckily I also ordered a 600 gram bag of a different trail mix (the 1 kg No Name one never quite lasts a week) and that DID arrive, so I am not without my Fruvous kibble just yet.

But there is no way that 600 gram bag will last a whole week.

Now I am not blaming my DoorDash dude for things being out of stock at Real Canadian Superstore, although a paranoid little voice in my head makes me wonder if they REALLY looked or whether, in order to save time, they just skip some things.

Don’t look at me like that. They are paid per delivery. They have ever incentive to cut corners in order to do more deliveries per hour, and I just have to take their word that it was out of stock?

I truly can’t stop myself from thinking like that

But anyhow, paranoia aside, I don’t have my damned trail mix. And in the longer term, I am getting really tired of not getting what I god damned ordered.

It’s injurious to my ability to relax like I am supposed to. I loathe surprises in general and surprise food shortages are more or less guaranteed to really throw me off and I am beginning to seriously wonder if I need to go back to asking Julian to get my groceries for me because I know he will bring me what I asked for, even if he has to try a few different stores to find it.

I’m not gonna get that from DoorDash.

And speaking of unwelcome financial surprises, I just checked the balance remaining on my card and found out that DoorDash charged me the full $70 that the groceries I ordered would have costs if everything had shown up.

But everything did NOT show up. So the charge should have been a lot less.

Like, about $30 less.

God damn it, I don’t need this shit. Why must the universe fuck with me?

Then today, Julian was saying that I need to pay more than the $600 I have been paying in rent since forever to cover the household expenses.

But Joe and I have an agreement. I pay him $600 a month and that covers everything. Rent, food, cable, utilities, and so on.

if Julian wants to change that agreement, he needs to take it up with Joe. Joe is, effectively, my landlord.

And as far as I know, Joe’s paycheck is still being deposited in his bank account regularly, despite him being sick with cancer and hence not working, and I have a feeling he’s been spending remarkably little of it, poor guy, so that is where the money for groceries et al should be coming from.

It is, after all, Joe’s money, not Julian’s. If Joe wants to continue to charge me only $600 a month for everything, that’s his business.

Julian is only part of the process as an administrator. and as such, he is there to do what Joe wants him to do.

And he only wants to charge me $600 a month.

Sorry I had to bitch about this here, Julian, where you will undoubtedly read it, but our conversation this afternoon really upset me and I needed to vent.

Anyhow, here’s two minks in a sink.

More after the break.

---

The real me

That’s an incredibly difficult concept for me.

Because something in me refuses to say any of me is “fake” or “unreal”. It’s all me. I refuse to cut off parts of myself just to fit under a label.

Fuck that. Make the label bigger instead. Or just leave me the hell alone.

Besides, everything I do, I do as an expression of myself. Self-expression is my primary mode of existence, after all, and therefore everything I do falls under that banner.

Perhaps that is why I am so feisty about not being labeled or defined. Definitions, by their nature, defy individuality and reduce people to easily digestible categories.

Well fuck THAT. My brand of self-expression does not allow for the expression of anything other than my true authentic self. And that self does not bend, bow, or break for any god damned archetype.

I hate to break this to you, folks, but I’m real.

Hi. My name is Mike. Pleased to meet you.

This is all very Gen X of me, of course. As a generation, we sullen, withdrawn, insular, somewhat unpredictable, and we refuse to be defined.

As individuals, of course, we’re whatever.

But labels aside, like I was telling Doctor Costin last Therapy Thursday, I find it nearly impossible to conceive of a single identity for myself.

What conception of self could possibly encompass all my many modes, moods, and complexities? I can tell you about all my many different facets, some of which seem to contradict one another (I’m passionately empathic yet I am also coldly logical and calculation, for instance), and I can say with total assurance that I know that I am not any of my facets, I am the gem on which they live.

But I have no idea what kind of gem that is.

And lately, I have come to suspect that the “real me” lives inside that gem, and uses the facets as filters through which to glimpse reality while “I” stay safe and warm in my gemstone home locked away from the world.

And it could be that if I want to get well, I will have to leave that bedazzling bunker and some out into the world as my sad little self.

And that feels like it would kill me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I’m such a nice fellow. It just isn’t fair.

Today’s evidence of the malign nature of the cosmos vis-à-vis yours truly happened today when I went to Wound Care.

I felt perfectly fine and was looking to my twice a week pampering (sorta kinda) but when I went to sit down on the exam table (or whatever you call it), I slipped right off it and on to my knees.

I’m lucky the bed thingy was set to be low to the ground or I might have been seriously hurt. As it is, all that happened is that my knees are mildly sore and my ability to relax and trust the universe took yet another hit.

You know, I keep telling myself to relax and not take life so seriously, but things like this come out of nowhere and make that very difficult.

i suppose if I were as happy go lucky as I aspire to me, that kind of thing would just bonce off me impenetrable bubble of self-righting optimism.

I’d just say, “Huh. That was weird. ” and then go on with my life without ever thinking about it again.

And part of me admires and envies people with that kind of resilience. My Moon in Sagittarius thinks that’s the best way to be, hands down.

But I am not a Sagittarius, I’m a Taurus with Sagittarius tendencies, and so this kind of life just spanking me out of nowhere upsets me.

It’s just not fair. There was no way I could have seen that coming.

How could I? I still have no idea what the hell happened.

I know I wasn’t feeling dizzy at the time. So it wasn’t that. That turns the spotlight to something weird happening with the muscles in my butt that made them not work right to grip the surface of the bed, or whatever it is they do to keep this from happening most of the time.

I know I can’t blame the bed because I sat on it just fine after that.

So I dunno. At least this happened when I was in a room full of nurses and so they were right on top of it, checking my blood pressure with the inflate-o-cuff thing to see if there was an answer there.

There was not. Blood oxygen was fine too.

And for me, that’s just bloody typical, innit? I swear to God, one day I am going to be in the ER covered in flames and bleeding out of both eyeballs and the doctor will be saying, “Well, your tests all turned out normal, so we think you’re faking it. ”

That image occurred to me as I sat there with the nurse working on my foot wounds as I wondered what the fuck happened to me.

Even when I’m upset, I’m hilarious. Bitterly hilarious.

Anyhow, I guess things are okay now. I haven’t felt woozy or found myself suddenly and inexplicitly lying on the floor or anything.

That means that theoretically it could all happen again at any moment. After all, if I don’t know what happened or why, I can’t take steps to prevent it, can I?

But I am in deep dish doodoo if suddenly I can’t even sit safely.

Sitting is half of what I do all day! Sit in front of this computer!

The other half is lying in bed, and I would hate for that to be my only option. I know from my hospital stays that staying in bed all the time sucks.

Next time I am in there, I am going to come up with reasons to get up and out of bed and maybe sit in a chair for a while unless I am specifically instructed not to.

You have no idea how good it can feel just to sit.

More after the break.

---

---

Nothing on my mind

But I’ve never let that stop me before.

I think the reason I have nothing in particular on my mind right now is that some very deep mental healing processes are taking up a hell of a lot of my brain’s CPU cycles, leaving very little left over for stray thoughts or random pondering.

Fine by me. I can wait. My mental overflow generally goes to waste anyhow as it produces very little except rambling verbal expectorations, so I am perfectly content to just sit on the sidelines while my deeper self takes care of business.

I have pondered where exactly my genius comes some, and I think it may be exactly that kind of overflow. I spent a lot of my childhood bored out of my proverbial gourd sitting in classrooms where I was not even allowed to read to entertain myself.

I guess to a (bad) teacher, me finishing the work in moments then curling up with a good book looks a tad disrespectful.

Well then challenge me, bitch.

Anyhow, trapped as I was, the only thing I could really do is think about things. And I was already inclined to live in the world between my ears due to that being where I took refuge when I was being raped. The massive boredom only caused that to become deeper and more complex as my mind, bereft of fresh input, instead worked on connecting and correlating everything that was already in there.

Thus, a deep understanding of how things work emerged. From an early age, I had to learn not to say, “Isn’t it obvious?” because odds are, it was not obvious to anyone else.

And thus the question is maddeningly patronizing.

Fast forward to today and my mind is still running that same old program. Said program has endowed me with the kind of rich, deep, and unique insights and ideas that, with a little luck, could have me declared a visionary.

But that ol’ program makes me smart but not happy. Happiness is well outside its wheelhouse. If I am going to seek my own happiness – and I am – I am going to have to learn to think with my emotions as well.

Which just sounds wrong in my head. Stupid Western dualism.

But I’m doing it anyway, god damn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Come to think of it, I never did tell Doctor Costin about being depressed this week.

Oh well, can’t think of everything. It was not that big a deal anyhow, especially not compared to the lows of the previous week.

I guess I could have told him about being really sleepy, too. Technically, that might be therapeutically relevant, as increases (or decreases) in sleep can be a sign of mental illness getting worse.

Meh. Whatever. I’m getting better, not worse. I am positive about that.

Getting better might involve feeling worse from time to time, granted. But that doesn’t bother me any more.

I can feel things waking up and coming online deep inside my mind, where my scare little animal lives. Spring is coming to my little world just like it’s coming to the big world outside my window, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

And I know that’s going to fucking hurt, too. Like I said to Doc Costin today, it’s like waking up your hand after it falls asleep.

You know it’s going to hurt. Pins and needles and maybe even a cramp or two. But you do it anyway because it’s so terrifying to not be able to feel part of your body.

That’s where I am now. My campaign of directing my energies down to the very roots of my psyche is really picking up speed and it’s thawing me out down there at an accelerating pace as every bit of progress adds to the energy available for more.

Ain’t that somethin?

Best of all, I think I am finally starting to tap into the healing power of frustration. Like I have said a million times before, I am really fucking sick of this stupid little life of mine, but this time I am forcing myself to realize that there are things I can do about that.

I can make things better. I can fix things. I am not some helpless hopeless waif without power or agency. I’m an astoundingly intelligent and resourceful and competent grownup and there is nothing I can’t do if I just put my mind, soul, and will behind it

I am through with being scared to try. Try, get hurt, whine about it, then try again.

After all, I am fucking amazing. So why be scared? I am going to kick this mean old world’s ass until it likes it.

As far as I am concerned, I am owed the world, and I intend to collect. I have suffered in the shadows for a very long time and now I am going to come out swinging.

Don’t call it a comeback. I’ve been here for years.

Another rather bracing thing that came up during therapy was just how much of my life has been spent (wasted) staring at screens.

TV screens, computer screens, game console screens, now my tablet’s screen. The vast majority of my life has been experienced through a screen rather than, ya know, actually dealing with reality.

And that’s a horrifying thought. No wonder my world doesn’t seem real to me sometimes. So much of it isn’t, and hasn’t ever been!

At some point, probably about when I pulled myself out of that deep hole I fell into in my early 20’s, I fully adapted to this self-entertaining lifestyle where I do nothing but amuse myself without anything to show for it.

Well that’s not enough any more.

I want things. And nobody is going to come along and give them to me. I am going to have to go out there and get them.

And for once, I feel like that’s worth doing.

More after the break.

---

That cold, black cloud is coming down

Love those vocal harmonies. So beautiful!

Anyhow, that’s just my melodramatic way of saying I feel depressed. And unwell. I feel like there is an evil spirit hovering over me and draining my life energy.

More specifically, I feel lethargic and out of sorts. I think maybe the sleep apnea was particularly bad during my last nap and it’s left me feeling oxygen depleted.

I should take another stab at getting a blood oxygen meter. I bought one for like $6 off of some Chinese site once and, big surprised, it did not work.

In fact, I am pretty sure they sent me a display version of the product, which was totally the right product on the outside but there was no electronic guts on the inside

Oh well. These days, if you pay that little for something, you know it’s a gamble. Maybe you will get what you ordered. Maybe you will get the sort of thing I got.

And maybe you’ll just get a card that says, “Stupid foreigner! You really think you get an air fryer for two dollars? We laugh at you! Ha ha ha! ”

Anyhow, I have been doing my little breathing exercises to try to get that blood oxygen level back up. Mostly doing the “maximum exhale”, where I do my best to push ALL the air out of my lungs.

That’s a pretty uncomfortable thing to do, but it usually works. Get the bad, used up air that I think accumulates in the bottom of my lungs out.

Like there is something wrong with my lungs that means I don’t quite clear all that de-oxygenated air out of my lungs when I exhale, and thus, it accumulates over time.

That’s my theory, anyhow. And presumably it gets even worse when I sleep.

Makes me wonder if I could get therapeutic benefit from just hanging upside down for a little while now and then.

Then the bad air would end up at the top of my lungs, where it is more easily exhaled.

Not sure how I would do that safely, though. Hmmm.

I need two big burly men to hold me by the ankles.

For a variety of reasons.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still feeling pretty sleepy. Guess I’m not caught up yet. Dammit.

As a result. having minor thinking issues. Nothing serious enough to be considered a symptom, just minor difficulty concentrating and/or staying focused.

Hey, did you know that cat and dog food would be perfectly fine for human consumption if they didn’t deliberately add a chemical to make it taste horrible and make us sick?

Why do they do that? Is the meat industry behind this? Or is it to maintain the distinction between humans and animals to make it clear to our messed up instincts that we are still definitely higher status than them and therefore what we do to them is OK?

Including grinding them up to make pet food?

Anyhow, where was I… oh right, trouble staying focused.

Of course, the real problem that always comes up when I have one of these sleepy periods is that my sleep is terrible.

I get around three or four hours of sleep at night, which sadly enough is still better than when I had no nightly sleep period at all, just naps.

So progress IS possible.

The rest of my sleep I get in naps of like an hour and a half at most that are scattered throughout the day at somewhat random times.

But like I have said here before, there is more to it than that. I think I retreat into sleep during the day when I can’t cope with even my sad and sordid sequestered reality any more and I need to hide in sleep.

When you’re asleep, you don’t have to deal with anything. You don’t have to cope. You are as close to dead as you can get without actually dying.

Death is too much of a commitment.

I mean, what if it turns out I don’t like being dead? Then what?

Besides, I don’t want to be dead. I want to be alive and having fun. There is so much of life I have yet to explore. I have so much to look forward to if I just let myself have hope.

I’m working on it.

Lately I have been thinking about levity. Effervescence. Lightness of being. Giving your soul a lighter than air quality so that your mood always rises up despite whatever life throws at you.

It’s an exciting notion, but also kinda scary. I guess to the old, sick, obsolete part of my mind, it seems to much like going “out of control”.

But healthy me is like, “So what?”. So I am out of control. So I might do things I don’t expect and lose some of that feeling of deadly predictability.

There are worse fates. Right now, everything is predictably bad. My soul is choked by this oppressive blanket of numbness that makes doing even the simplest of things nearly impossible because in order to do them, I would have to WAKE UP MORE.

And that is apparently not an option. Sheesh.

Well I am going to change all that. I keep pumping energy into the deepest layers of my psyche and doing my best to think gentle, loving, forgiving thoughts about myself in order to convince that scared little animal inside of me that it’s safe to come out now.

It’s okay, little fella. You can come play outside. The sun is warm and the ground is dry and the sky is blue and everything is waiting just for you!

It’s a wonderful world out there full of fun things to do and great experiences to have and maybe even a man or two to make your life even brighter.

So step outside, breathe the clean fresh air, and be free.

More after the break.

---

The ultimate prosthesis

Let’s play, “what would Fru need in order to be functional?”.

Hopefully, this is the last time I will need to do this. More on that later.

Well, to start off, my “prosthetic” would have to be a person. My issues are way too complicated and nuanced to be solved by a mechanical device or app.

I think what I need the most is someone who can hold my hand while I do things in such a way that I feel grounded and safe, and thus remain calm.

I could do damned near anything just so long as I have some way to keep from panicking. My tendency to get freaked out over the tiniest thing is my greatest weakness and ultimately the main thing holding me back.

Which reminds me : Doctor Costin wants me to try that Xanax he prescribed me. Now where the heck did I put it?

Of course, any effective assistant of mine would have to not only help me not to panic but to keep me organized in order to prevent these exact situations.

I’d be able to just hand them things and they would tuck them away somewhere safe until I asked for them at a later date.

Seems simple enough, but to me, that would be miraculous.

And it would help with the first part too. I would be a lot less high strung and overwrought and thus prone to panic if I knew what what I needed would always be there when I needed it without my having to remember where I put it.

What else…. well massages sure would be nice but I am not sure that I could consider that to be an acceptable part of their duties.

Maybe if they were a licensed massage therapist, I would ask. But otherwise it would be rather creepy of me to demand it, n’est-ce pas?

And of course, standard assistant duty, they would have to keep my calendar so that I don’t have to worry about appointments, dates, gatherings, and so on.

Right now Julian does this for me, and I love him for it. 🙂

I hope this is the last time I make a list like this because I am trying to stop thinking of myself as so pathetic and helpless and encourage myself to realize that I can do things to help myself and improve my situation without anyone else’s help.

But realistically, there may be a limit to how far I can go with that. It could turn out that no matter how fiercely independent I learn to be, there’s some things I just can’t do.

And for those, I would still need my “prosthetic”.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

By mean ol Mister Sandman himself, no less.

I am having a very sleepy day. Seems like all I want to do is sleep.

Which made it rough to get to Wound Care today. Getting out of bed felt like climbing a frigging mountain. I kept drifting back into sleep for a second then having to yank myself back from the edge and wake up again.

And it just wouldn’t go away. I mean, it’s 4 pm now. It was 8 am when I (sorta) woke up. And I have slept twice since getting back from Wound Care.

And I am still really freaking tired!

As usual, I am trying, and failing, to be mellow and philosophical about it. It would be great to be able to just relax into the experience and savour the calm, peaceful, soothing nature of reality at this moment as a rare bit of freedom from my usual anxious and overwrought mode of being.

But I’ve got shit to do, man.

Not a lot of it, mind you. In fact, this blog is pretty much it in terms of responsibilities.

But being super sleepy makes that pretty stressful too.

Hell, I was so sleepy this morning that I kept almost falling asleep while the nurses were working on me.

And that would have been so embarrassing! How very rude of me. How declassee.

That’s French for “not classy”.

Then I had a few microsleeps when I stopped in the waiting room to rest my poor legs on the way back down to the car.

Falling asleep there would have been less acutely embarrassing but I would have still felt pretty guilty about making Julian wait, or worse, come up to find me.

Jesus, ever burp so hard it feels like it gave you whiplash?

Anyhow, where was I. Oh right. And I was originally going to go do some needed bloodwork after Wound Care but I was way too sleepy to even contemplate it.

I need to be awake and alert to deal with that frigging LifeLabs location, It’s very stiff and sterile and clinical there, and there is always a lineup, meaning you always have to do the whole “take a number and wait” thing, with the added bonus that you have to wait for your number to come up on a video screen like you’re an old lady watching to see if her Keno numbers get selected.

For those who dunno, Keno is basically automated Bingo.

Then, to top it all off, my plan of going directly to sleep when I got home from Wound Care had the kibosh put to it by the fact that the sheer effort it took to get from the car back to the apartment left me too keyed up to relax right away.

So I had to sit at the computer and fuck around for like twenty minutes while the adrenaline slowly left my system till I could finally relax again.

And I hate, hate, HATE that “tired and wired” state of mind where you are too wired to sleep but too sleepy to do much of anything at all.

Because sleepiness has given you a case of the rolling stupids and even simple things like watching a fucking YouTube video are beyond you.

It’s thirty seconds in and I have already lost track of the plot of this cat video.

And I think that’s the most stressful part of these sleepy periods : having to deal with reality when my brain just plain ain’t working for shit.

Very, very frustrating for a super cerebral dude who is used to having lots of brain CPU cycles on hand like me.

More after the break.

---

Some unfamiliar tunes

Check out this bit of old OLD school metal :

Consider me to be headbanging slowly but emphatically throughout the song.

Seriously, like I said in the comments, this reminds me of Black Sabbath in the best possible way. And to think, I only clicked on the link because I loved the title “Stoned Back To The Bomb Age”.

In case you’re too young for the joke, that’s a pun on saying the US should “bomb them back to the stone age”, whoever the current “them” is.

The equally racist counter to that is, “So that would take them back to what, last Thursday? ha ha ha. ”

That kind of shit is why I do not miss the past that much.

But speaking of the past, Felicity turned us on to this track :

It is 100 percent a Christian song and it is fucking awesome. It is the best example I have come across yet to support my belief that faith based music does not have to suck. There’s no reason why it can’t be just as good as the mainstream stuff.

Except, perhaps, that the Christian music audience fears mainstream things. Hmm. And I suppose there is a certain amount of that perverse, “if it doesn’t hurt, it can’t be good for you” reversed logic at work too.

In fact, some sects, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, seem to have a morbid fear of people actually enjoying themselves.

This is what happens when a counter-decadence movement outlives the decadence it was reacting to in the first place.

It has to find fault in the world in order to continue to exist so if it is to survive, it must find new things to rail against. New things, previously thought harmless or even beneficial, must be declared to be decadent and worldly and, ya know, icky bad.

This illustrates a fundamental part of fundamentalist thought : preserving dogma and practices far beyond their rational justification.

Like Judaism and Islam forbidding pork. Which made total sense if you’re a desert people living before the advent of refrigeration.

Trichinosis is very nasty and so it was probably not worth the risk back then.

But now? We have, like, freezers and such. And yet, this bizarre belief is preserved not because it makes sense but because of “tradition”.

The important thing is that the beliefs and practices are not analyzed, justified, or subject to any kind of rational evaluation.

After all, once you start asking those questions, the sheer absurdity of a lot of traditional practices and restrictions will become evident and enormous chunks of various religions will crumble into dust immediately.

And if you are emotionally invested in those absurd beliefs, that would make you look and feel very foolish, and obviously we can’t have THAT.

Solution? Just say it’s “tradition”. and therefore does not have to make sense. You are doing it because your ancestors did it and for no other reason.

As someone (not me) once said, “Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.”

Brilliant. Could not have said it better myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No wonder I am usually so anti-histamine!

I ran out of antihistamines on Saturday and I am really feeling the effects today, Monday. I seem to have about a 24 hour grace period, give or take eight hours, between running out and becoming symptomatic.

But last night, I had an allergy attack, and ever since I have felt pretty “off”. Because it’s not enough that my allergies give me the usual sneezing and runny nose, oh no. That’s just the most overt problem.

It’s really a system wide thing that causes inflammation all through my body. And that can manifest as a lot of different things, from headache to nausea to joint pain.

My life is so much fun.

Oh well, For now, I have Aleve to alleviate ^[1] the inflammation and I am sure that Julian will get me more Reactine Complete soon.

At least I think that’s what I’ve been taking. The box is blue.

On the video game front, I am nearing the end of my time with Dragon Age : Inquisition. I am running out of sub-quests, side-quests, and other forms of generally dicking around, and have been forced to actually advance the main plot.

And I will have to do it again soon as once I have finished what there is to do in Frostback Basin, I will have more or less done everything worth doing in the game.

I will have drained it of almost every drop of content. Which is sort of impressive.

Plus I am, understandably, getting pretty burned out on it. So far I have played it for 123.6 hours according to Steam. By the time I am done, that will probably be more like 150 or so hours.

Not bad for a game that only cost me seven bucks.

I can always tell when I am getting burned out on a game and it will soon be time to retire it when playing it starts to feel less like playing a fun game and more like going to work at a pleasant but dull office.

Plus I have lost the will to loot. Normally, amassing, evaluating, and selling off most of the weapons and armor and such that I get in games is a major part of the fun.

What can I say, it does my greedy little mercantile heart good. I have a lot of middle class merchants in the French part of my DNA, and I love selling things.

So when I stop caring about the loot in a game, it means I am just about done with it.

And I already have my next game lined up, another golden oldie called Dragon’s Dogma that was released way back in 2012.

You know, the year the world ended.

I bought the game with my earnings from Salad, that app I told you about ages ago that lets you rent out your computer’s CPU and GPU when you’re not using it.

The earnings are tiny. I make around a buck a month. But then again, it’s for doing absolutely nothing besides installing it, so what the hell.

And the clever clogs at Salad HQ realized that what a lot of people wanted to do with their Salad earnings was buy games off Steam, so they just sell you the games themselves instead of making you get a virtual gift card.

By sheer coincidence, I will be playing Dragon’s Dogma right after its long awaited sequel, Dragon’s Dogma 2, was released on the 22nd of this month.

I suppose if I really, really love the original, I might wanna buy the sequel.

But I kind of have to fix that pesky “crashes my computer forcing me to reboot” problem I have with modern games on this PC first.

Time to get a new power supply for it, and hope that does the trick.

More after the break.

---

I appear to have an IMDB page. One with nothing on it, but still. Weird.

---

The road ahead

It’s still very hard for me to think about the future.

My mind really does not want to go there. It’s too scared of the answer. Scared that my future is that I don’t have one and that the rest of my life will consist of things getting worse and worse until I die an ignoble and ignominious death in a hospital bed with tubes going everywhere (yes, even there) and my mind twisted into a dense, tense knot of throbbing terror as I finally, at long last, fade away.

And all without having achieved a single thing with my life, not even the bare minimum of adulthood of employment and a relationship.

Just a dumb, dumb death after a dumb, dumb life. He died as he lived : a big fat loser.

And how I wish that vision of my nightmare future was enough to light a fire under my ass and make me wanna rush out into that big old world to life my life to the fullest and make my mark upon the world while I still have time.

But it isn’t. In fact, it’s not even close.

Because that’s not how people like me respond to challenge. Faint souls like myself respond by giving up and waiting for the end, basically.

We respond with despair. Not action. After all, giving up is a lot easier.

And we always do what’s easiest. Not best… just easier.

Path of least resistance my ass. The path of least resistance sucks.

Still, it’s good to get all my fears for the future out of my head and onto the page now and then. Articulating my pain can be very difficult but emotions expressed are emotions released and once I release the “bad” emotions, I can calm down enough about the subject to think about it more rationally and see things in perspective.

Right now, my prospects for the future look bleak.

But that can change.

I can change it.

And some day I will.

This, I predict.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Having trouble waking up after an afternoon nap. Took me a few minutes just to remember when, where, and who I was.

I had a fairly good grip on what I was. A human, probably, based on the fact that I woke up in a bed and not hanging from a tree.

As to why I was, really, does anyone know?

Actually, we know, we just don’t like the answer. There is something very deeply rooted in us that insists there must be some sort of reason for our existence and some sort of meaning to our lives.

But the fundamental existential truth is that there is no such thing. We weren’t put here for a reason (by who?) and we have no cosmic mission or purpose (for who?), we merely exist, just like the clouds in the sky, the fish in the sea, and that dog turd you almost stepped on in the parking lot.

Who the fuck walks their dog through a parking lot, anyway?

The fundamental existential conclusion is that there is no meaning to our lives except that which we give it ourselves. Within a creator to imbue us with their divine intentions, we are free to decide for ourselves what our lives mean and why we are here.

People don’t like that answer at all, though. It makes them feel cheated. And in a very real sense they were because our very strong social instincts tell us that we must have a role and a job in this big tribe we call life on Earth, and so we would rather think that we have a purpose and just don’t know it than face the fact that it just ain’t there.

Me, I am fine with a universe in which my existence has no intrinsic meaning. Honestly, I have been wondering why people thought there was a “meaning of life” ever since I was a little kid, and it took me a long time to come up with an answer.

It being my answer, it is based primarily on evolutionary psychology. We evolved to be members of small tribes in which we did, in fact, have a job and a role and a purpose.

But then agriculture happened, so towns happened, and groups too big to be a tribe happened, and then cities happened, so having to get along with throngs of total strangers happened, and eventually atheism happened, and suddenly the question of our purpose became an open ended one.

The last ingredient was expanding knowledge of the universe. With every major advance in our knowledge, our role in creation became smaller as our world became bigger and we stayed the same size.

Ironically, it’s stated quite well in this song about God.

That’s a take on religion that makes a certain amount of sense to me. It doesn’t cure me of being a nontheist, but that seems like a form of theism that is at least sustainable

I doubt anything can cure me of my lack of religious faith. Nothing logical, anyhow. Maybe when I am filled with terrible pain and death is coming for me and I am facing the grim grey void of nonexistence, the emotional appeal of theism will finally be strong enough to make me leave my logical mindset behind.

I wish I could do that now. And in a way, I am working on it. At the very least, I am trying to expand my logical mindset beyond mere logic so it can also encompass aspects of human existence that have nothing to do with knowledge or cognition.

I’ll let you know how that goes.

More after the break.

Thoughts on adrenaline

I apologize in advance if I end up just saying stuff I’ve said before. I did enough of that in part 1 today so I hate to do more of it, but this is what is on my mind right now and so this is what I’m gonna write about.

That is, after all, what this blog is all about.

Now then. Adrenaline. More specifically, the adrenalized state, otherwise known as the “fight, flight, or freeze” response

We all know that when we’re excited, whether it’s by lust, fear, or rage, we make bad decisions. And we all know that there are times when even the brightest amongst are functionally quite stupid.

I offer myself as a humble example.

But I don’t think people appreciate how deep the adrenaline effect goes. Adrenaline signals our brains to switch to a completely different modethan the one we use in our normal, every day lives.

We modern monkeys operate primarily on the slow circuit of the brain. This is the circuit that gives us reason, restraint, complex symbolic reasoning, and all the other higher brain functions that make us human.

This is, therefore, the part of the mind we consider “us”.

But adrenaline switches us to the fast circuit and it is all about NOW. It is optimized to make split-second “good enough” decisions rather than well considered ones, and most importantly, it immediately dumps out our immediate sense of the past and the future in order to make room for process the NOW.

The built in assumption of this fast circuit is that you are in some kind of life or death situation where all that matters is what is going on RIGHT NOW and to hell with the past and the future.

This immediately blocks all complex recall tasks. Hence your mind going blank before the big exam despite how much you’ve studied.

The fast circuit is also very sloppy in its reasoning because it’s all based on making sufficiently good decisions in realtime rather than better decisions at leisure.

See why I keep going on about not judging decisions made in the moment by the standards of our brains at rest?

That’s based on actual brain science.

It is almost like we are two different people in the same mind. There is slow circuit us,. often associated with lofty things like reason, logic, and the ego and superego, and then there is fast circuit us, whom we most likely associate with almost all the bad decisions we have ever made.

Judging one by the standards of the other makes no sense at all.

Now if only I knew how to stop doing it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Be what you are. Be like yourself.

Why is it such a painful thing to be self-conscious?

I think it is because there’s a kind of feedback loop involved. You’re trying to control yourself while also being the thing being controlled and that makes it impossible to be happy because it’s like you are biting your own tail.

Whereas we are at our happiest when we forget all that and just relax and be ourselves. Often, that takes doing something that fills our minds and souls to such an overwhelming degree that there is no room left for self-regard.

That could be anything, from a church service to rock climbing to singing in a band to playing video games all goddamned day.

You know. Just to pick some random examples.

Writing can do the trick too, at least for me. When I am sitting here tippity tap typing my words for the day, there is very little chance for me to be self-conscious.

I’m too wrapped up in what I am doing. Not quite to the extend that I am when I am playing video games, and it’s certainly not the same form of engagement, but it gets the job done anyhow.

This opens some fascinating new vistas for me. I tend to have a rather extreme view of what life outside the warm comforting realm of gaming is like. That it’s harsh and cold and I would feel vulnerable and self-conscious and my inner demons, no long distracted by gaming, would come and GET me.

Nothing good ever comes to GET you.

But if I simply broaden my perspective to include anything that could keep my mind busy enough to keep the bad voices suppressed, that could be all kinds of things.

Maybe even things that actually productive. Imagine that.

In fact, it’s even possible that if you include an attitude shift along with that perspective shift, you could turn anything at all into such an engrossing task simply by bringing yourself fully into the moment.

But, um, I think that’s for the advanced students. I’m a tyro now.

I have so much to learn. So much growing to do as a person. So many long dormant parts of me to activate and awaken and bring online.

But I truly believe I can change. I can change who I am and still be myself because I am the one making the changes, therefore they reflect me.

And what’s wrong with trying to perfect yourself? Things can always be better.

Hmmm. I’ve kind of veered far away from the original examination of self-consciousness I started out to do today.

So what else is new? Throughout the history of this blog, I have almost never ended up at the place I was heading for at the beginning.

And I’ve been doing this thing since 2011.

And I have arrived at what is probably the most important revelation I have had lately : there is life beyond video games for me.

I can get what I get from video games from other things if I just open my mind to the possibility of fully engaging with what I am doing.

And even if what I am doing is not all that engaging, that doesn’t mean I can’t also be doing other things in other tabs or windows to keep my mind busy.

For example, writing this blog is almost never the only thing I am doing at the time. I am almost always reading a webcomic or watching a YouTube video or otherwise occupying myself while I write and just jumping between the tabs whenever I need to in order to contain my ever-flowing mental energies.

There’s a lot of them.

So the way I do this blog is itself proof that I can keep myself occupied without video games, and I have been doing it without a problem for over a decade.

Now I am going to go lay down because I have a hell of a lot to think about.

More after the break.

---

What can I do?

Quite a lot, actually.

But first I need to get over my reality aversion. Or, if not exactly get over it, find some way to work with it.

And towards that go. I will again remind myself that I don’t need to make some big, dramatic, irreversible leap into the void, necessarily.

I mean, it may come to that eventually. I may find that baby steps just aren’t getting the job done and the only effective cure is to fling myself from the parapets and hope I learn to fly on the way down.

But we are not there yet. For now, starting with baby steps seems like the best move.

And if it isn’t, who cares? I’m under no obligation to always do everything the best possible way to get the best possible result.

Especially not in realtime, which is, after all, where (and when) we live.

That’s why I keep going on about not judging our past realtime, split second decisions and actions by the standard of the calm and uninvolved present.

There will never be a time when my brilliant and agile mind will not be able to think of a better decision than whatever option I actually chose.

Ergo, pleasing that particular part of my mind is impossible, because if left to its own devices. it would set the bar so high at “there is only perfect, and failure” and clearly that is a wildly unreasonable standard for literally anything.

i keep coming back to the idea of just worrying about being me. I’ve been told “just be yourself” my entire life and until fairly recently that’s always struck me as insipid.

I mean, surely there’s a bit more to life than that.

But I think I get it now. Shifting the focus to just being yourself removes the possibility of investing your emotions in outcomes you cannot directly control.

The only thing you truly control is yourself.

So concentrate on doing that, instead.

As a jaded GenX type, it’s a little galling to realize a lot of the dipshit stuff morons have been mindlessly regurgitating to you for your whole life is actually true.

But luckily, I’ve a good enough sense of humour about myself to find that very amusing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is so very, um…. me.

Today’s the day I did my monthly banking. And that went fine. The people at VanCity are always very nice to me and are accommodating of my needs as a disabled person.

Mostly my need to sit down.

Walking bad. Standing much worse.

After I withdrew my cash, it was time for phase 2 of my monthly banking, the buying of that month’s prepaid credit card.

And that’s when our odyssey began because it turns out that our last source for the ones I have been using, ones provided by a company called Pay Power, have dried up. We went to four different places looking for one to no avail.

So I finally relented and got Julian to get me a card from Pay Power’s apparently triumphant rival called (I shit you not) the Joker Card.

And you have to admit that, as names for credit cards go, Joker’s wild.

So Julian kindly fetches me said card with my usual $500 on it and we go on to my weekly Doctor Chao appointment.

I get home, and the first thing I want to do is get my new credit card registered.

I have trusted an entirely new group or entity with the lion’s share of my monthly budget (the rest stays in cash) and I am very nervous about it.

So I get home, type in the URL for the website, and click Register New Card.

It immediately tells me that I am blocked.

Apparently, the website thinks I might be a hacker. Why, I have no idea. I am certainly not up to anything hinky, and none of the suggestions as to why it may have blocked me seem to apply to me.

Unless there is a “robot” on our network that I don’t know about.

If there was, I bet it would look like this :

I had no idea what to do about that, so I played Dragon Age : Inquisition for a while.

Luckily, when I got up and tried again, it loaded normally. Yay, finally I can register my card and things can go back to normal!

So I type in all the numbers, and it tells me that it “cannot process my request at this time”. And I am like, “motherfucker!”.

My hostility and suspicion explode and I am so pissed off. These fuckers have stolen my money and I want it BACK!

Seething with rage, I took a nap.

When I got back up, I tried inputting everything via Microsoft Edge instead of my usual Chrome, but that didn’t make a difference.

The website had said that if I kept getting that error message, I should call their Cardholder Services line at the number on the back of the card.

Everything on the back of the card is in letters way too small for me to read.

After fretting and fuming for a bit, it occurs to me to just Google the number. This works, and I call it up.

The very nice service rep (doing a pretty good job of suppressing her Quebecois accent) wanted me to read her some numbers from the back of the card.

I did my best but that was simply not gonna happen.

I really should invest in a magnifying glass.

Anyhow, she tells me I can read her the numbers on the front of the card instead, and i is while I am doing this that I notice that there’s a tiny bit of the sticker they use to cover up those numbers left on the card.

I remove it, and voila, a 6 becomes an 8.

Turns out I was typing in the wrong number this whole time!

I apologize to the service lady, end the call, and try the newly corrected number, and what do you know, everything works just fine.

So like I said, it’s a very “me” story because it involves a silly, simple mistake causing me to leap to a ridiculously negative conclusion and end up making a fool of myself.

But you know what? I’m under no obligation to be any more reasonable and/or sensible and/or “smart” than anyone else.

So I did a silly thing. So what? It could happen to anybody.

Thought possibly not as often…. 😛

More after the break.

---

So I’m a doofus. So what?

All my life, I have been clueless, easily confused and/or overwhelmed, not tuned in to my environment, a maladroit and a klutz, and in general, I have kind of stumbled through life like a sleepwalking zombie.

And for almost all that time, I have been acutely ashamed of it. It was impossible for me not to notice all the problems and troubles I had that normal people did not, and how that made problems for those who loved me too, and so I felt inferior.

The fact that I was mentally superior to most people did not seem like sufficient compensation to me.

And this is about a lot more than just embarrassing myself, though that is bad enough. Subjectively, it makes my world very hazardous, and it means that at any moment, I could do something that causes me great pain and/or humiliation, and it all traces back to the same essential root cause :

I am pathologically internalized.

Almost all of my cerebral resources are dedicated to internal processes. as opposed to, say, processing sensory information.

Not hard to see why. When I was being raped at the age of 4, I fled to the only place available to me. namely deep into my own mind.

And I have been like a turtle in its shell ever since. It has given me extraordinary powers of insight and deduction and creativity, but left me semi-crippled in the world outside my skull – and I was like that way before my current neuromuscular issues.

No wonder I have always been so timid and afraid of the world. I’ve been trapped in a viscous cycle of reality being harsh to me because I am so withdrawn and then responding to that by withdrawing even further.

It also means my world has a big thick jagged line dividing what is In Here (in my inner world) and Out There (reality), and at any moment, I am ready to retreat into my shell and let everything Out There fall apart.

After all, why should I care? I’m safe In Here.

This is no way to live. There has to be some way to encourage my deeper self to go out into reality and stay there long enough to get some positive reinforcement and therefore some examples of there being things worth going Out There for.

Right now, as brutally sad as it is to say this, if it wasn’t for my friends and video games, and food I guess, reality would have precious little in it I cared about.

And that is one rotten attitude to have. Even I can see that.

But it’s not going to change until I change.

Time to become a god damned butterfly already.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still feeling pretty bummed out.

But like I told Doctor Costin during my Therapy Thursday session today, I feel like it’s all serving a purpose. That my metaconsciousness is processing some very deep and painful emotions that can be traced all the way back to my initial trauma of being raped by a stranger in a public shower stall when I was four years old, and that is some seriously heavy mojo, so no wonder things aren’t peachy keen up here on the conscious level where my usual “self” lives.

I can feel it churning away deep inside me. And I know it’s going to end. I already feel better than I did yesterday and yesterday I felt better than I did Tuesday, and so the trend is positive.

I just have to try to stay relaxed and let things unfold naturally without trying to interfere with or control the healing process.

I am slowly learning to accept that some things work better when I do nothing but sit on the sidelines and watch the parade go by.

I know that I am healing, despite the pain. Healing is often painful. But the fact that the cure often hurts worse than the disease is no argument against treatment.

Sometimes things have to get a lot worse before they get better. But it’s worth it because, well… they get better!

And there’s no way doing nothing is going to accomplish that.

And I have known for quite a while now that in order to become more sane, I was going to have to get a lot closer to being crazy.

That’s part of the deal. The path to sanity was always going to involve dealing with a lot of severe issues that my usual “ignore everything and play video games” lifestyle would usually leave undisturbed.

Before you can dispose of the toxic waste properly, you have to dig it up, and that is going to be a mighty disgusting and dangerous job.

But leaving it down there is not an option. It’s contaminating the ground water and making everybody sick. And that’s only going to get worse over time.

Time to dig deep and keep digging until it’s all gone.

Luckily, all I have to do is hold on and maintain. This is one time when my extreme passivity is actually a bonus.

That said, my role is not entirely behind the scenes. I am “doing something” in that I am sending my deep healing energies down to that poor scared little animal way down deep inside me, and encouraging myself to wake up and fight all the lethargy and lassitude that has built up over the decades of my mental illness.

It’s a tough to fight because being a lazy lump staring at screens will always be easier.

Not better, just easier.

And giving up will always bring instant and profound relief. Relief like that can be extremely addictive, almost like a drug.

Trust me on that.

But there is no giving up now. Now, it is actually easier to just let the healing process continue rather than go through all the hassle of trying to stop it.

Besides that, I am intensely curious as to where all this is going. I am totally invested in the plot and characters now. Every episode is like a revelation. And if I was to somehow interrupt it all, I would never know how it all ends.

And that would drive me crazy.

More after the break.

---

Little known fact : there is a sequel to Farewell to Arms called And Fuck Legs, Too

---

Pity the ingrate

Everybody says that one of the best ways to counter depression is with gratitude. You need to learn to feel grateful for all the little joys of life.

And I just can’t do it. And I’m not sure why.

Maybe my overdeveloped sense of irony is to blame. Gratitude like that is stupid and lame, suitable only for the empty-headed and vacuous who are also soothed by inane platitudes, oversimplified political messaging, and reality TV.

Or so that bitter, snarky, defensive part of me insists. I’m not sure I agree.

Overall, I would rather be happy. Like them.

And yet, when I try to imagine myself with an “attitude of gratitude” (gah). that rage and bitterness and contempt is all I feel.

I mean, gratitude for what? All the ways life ISN’T screwing me over? That is beyond insipid. Gratitude doesn’t work that way, at least not for me.

Even if you could manage to be grateful for literally everything that is not happening to you, you would burn out almost instantly.

And grateful to who? There is no entity deciding my fate. No “person” I have to thank for all the good things in my life.

Nor do I have anyone to blame for all the crappy stuff that has happened to me.

I am sure that this gratitude shit works for a lot of people. People who aren’t as bristling with rage and sarcasm as I am.

But it’s definitely not for me. I am grateful to and for the actual people in my life who help me. I am endlessly grateful for Joe and Julian for all the ways they have made living with my illnesses far, far easier.

I am grateful that I have a great friend like Felicity. Love you, dear. 🙂

And I am grateful for all my fluffy friends online. Critters like Ada, Niva, Coaldust, Sylver, Jetta, Windchaser, and the rest of the gang at Merriam’s on Tapestries MUCK give me a place where I feel like I can relax, fit in, and belong. Where I can make friends, hang out, get the positive attention I crave, and even have a little frisky fun once in a while.

I only wish I could function that well in the real world!

But that’s as far as my gratitude goes. It’s as evidence based as the rest of me, and I cannot fathom being any other way.

I can’t just manufacture gratitude.

The other great cure for depression supposedly is exercise, and I can’t do that, either.

Fuck this god damned life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.