Still got the blues, although they at least have changed form.

Now, instead of being like an oppressive form of gravity pushing me down and keeping me there, it’s more like a pervasive melancholy that makes me sigh sadly now and then like I am awaiting my Gothic romance novel lover who is off at sea and overdue.

You know, I try to stay positive, but that’s hard to do in this gloomy castle next to the pitiless seas that roll endlessly against the rocky shore.

Hmmm. That was rather fun to write. Maybe I should try my hand at writing super dramatic bodice ripping historical romance novels.

There are worse ways to make a living.

Anyhow, I am still finding it hard to get out of bed. The urge to just stay there so I don’t have to deal with the world at all is strong, and I guess that’s a bad sign.

I honestly can’t tell if my depression is getting better or worse. It’s been such a constant in my life since my parents took me out of university waaaay back in 1992 or 1993 that I can’t perceive myself as something separate from it any more.

I can imagine it not being there as long as I don’t try to imagine how I got there. I can imagine myself full of life and energy and enthusiasm spending the working hours of the day doing creative things like writing, video editing, comment moderating, taking meetings with collaborators, and so on.

That all sounds pretty good to me. As a fantasy.

But if I try to actually imagine myself in that position, all the howling horrors of my depression leap into action and make me feel like I couldn’t take it, I’d be overwhelmed, I’d be terribly terribly exposed and vulnerable and trapped in scenarios where all I would want to do is run away and hide in this dank dark hole of mine, but I wouldn’t be able to.

Meaning I would be TRAPPED! Like a hack performer trapped in a spotlight when all he wants to do is run away from the booing and jeers of the crowd.

And all of that might happen. But I also might get over it.

After all, a lot of things are at their scariest and most unpleasant in the beginning. One of the most common and fatal mistakes of us Failure to Launch types is to judge entire things by just the sucky part at the beginning.

That’s a great way to fuck yourself out of a lot of things you would totally enjoy if you could just resist the urge to run for the hills the second things are less than peachy.

I am sure there is something in the layers of that about being a reactive type who responds to stimuli too strongly and runs themselves ragged.

But those are newborn thoughts not ready to face the world just yet.

I can relate.

And it’s not like I am going to have to jump straight from “current unsatisfying life” right to “busy all day doing grownup stuff”.

I mean, in a way, that would be nice, because it would mean that I am having outrageous success right out of the gate, and that would be most gratifying.

And you know what? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I’ve had success come easily to my for my whole life, after all.

And I am outrageously gifted. It would make sense!

Very improbable, though. So I would be able to add extra stimulation in the form of actual productive labour slowly, a little at a time.

But first I have to convince my deeper self that it’s safe to go out in the world.

And that ain’t gonna be easy.

More after the break.

---

A life of leisure….

…is a myth.

Can’t be done. Is actually logically impossible if you think about it, because leisure is irrevocably defined relative to our labour and therefore if there is no labour, there can be no leisure, and it becomes something else entirely.

Something rather nasty, as it turns out.

It is exactly analogous to rest. You can’t rest forever. Rest is inherently about recovering from doing something, just like leisure.

The dream of unlimited leisure comes from how much we enjoy our leisure when it is a part of our busy lives. In that sense, it is as pure and simple as a child’s dream of having a mountain of candy.

But as many of us learned as children after overindulging after a night of trick-or-treating, too much of a good thing can in fact make you sick of it.

And from it.

It also stems from the “work bad, play good” model of life we all first internalized as “school bad, home good” as children.

This somewhat arbitrary division of life into “the good part” and “the part that sucks” stems from the highly unpleasant way we teach kids and continues on to color our attitudes towards work versus our home life.

To the point where we react like offended wolverines at the very thought of giving up one second of our off-work time for any reason.

Good thing most of us get over that when we have kids.

When leisure is overextended, it turns into decadence, and decadence is always profoundly dangerous, especially spiritually.

Decadence always comes from trying to meet spiritual and/or emotional needs via earthly means. Whether it’s eating because you’re lonely or drinking in bars to escape your depression or engaging in wild, impulsive, dangerous sex with strangers in order to feel alive, you are engaging in the addiction loop of treating the symptoms of the problem by distracting yourself from them rather than addressing them directly.

Often, this is because we don’t even know how to address them. We lack even a meaningful vocabulary for dealing with the needs money, spending, and consumerism simply can’t address.

I mean, a million dollar shopping spree on Rodeo Drive might make you feel better for a day or two, but in the end, you still end up cold and alone in your mansion and the fact that the bed cost more than most people make in a year doesn’t really fucking matter.

But rich people keep trying, and worse, they force their kids to try. All to live up to some crazy idea of “living the good life” and/or “being part of the leisure class”.

But there is no leisure class, people.

Just people driving themselves insane trying to play all day forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty down in the dumps lately.

No particular reason that I can think of. I just seem to have hit a low point in my mood cycle, assuming I have one.

As a result of this downer, it’s been taking me a really long time to get out of bed. I end up just laying there wanting to get up but lacking the motivation.

Then I will sit up, and stay like that a while, then sit on the edge of the bed for a spell, and only after I have done all that will I actually exit the comfort of my bed.

Which is pretty sad given that all I am going to do is sit at the computer and play video games for hours on end.

Lately, even that has seemed like a challenge, and I have to actively fight the urge to just stay in bed with my comforter and my tablet all day.

I guess I should be worried about that. After all, I’m a lifelong depressive with a history of suicidal ideation. Feeling this depressed is probably a sign of something or other going wrong and maybe I need some kind of treatment.

But that seems absurd to me. What kind of treatment? More drugs? I am not against the idea if it will help, but I am already on Paxil and Wellbutrin.

Not sure what they could add. Heroin?

But I know that’s the best I could get. It’s not like the likes of me could be admitted to a psychiatric facility for intensive therapy for a couple of months.

They need those beds for the serious crazies like the psychotics and those with borderline personality disorder and such.

Not us garden variety pathetic depressives.

Heck, I have never even attempted suicide. How boring can you get?

Whatever. This will pass, whatever it is. Nothing lasts forever, not even depression. Eventually I will feel better and go on with what I laughably call my “life”.

But if I still feel like this Thursday, I’ll talk to Doctor Costin about it during our usual therapy session. Who knows. maybe a med adjustment would actually help.

I doubt it. But then again, I am super depressed right now. So I am probably not the best person to be estimating the odds of something positive happening.

Eh, it’s probably just a buildup of emotional crud in my bloodstream. I have never managed to express my emotions in anything like realtime and so they build up over time until I finally get around to venting here, in this space.

So um, fuck my life. Fuck everything. Fuck everybody. Everything hurts, so everything can go fuck itself with a rusty razor blade. I hate my stupid fucking life.

I’m an unparalleled genius and a really sweet guy with loads of charisma and so very very much to contribute to the world but none of that matters because it’s all locked away behind a wall of mental illness and it will never see the light of day.

Nor will I.

I’m a pathetic son of a bitch who can’t get even the simplest aspects of being human right and who is stuck in a body that is falling apart and it’s only a matter of time before I am confided to a wheelchair or mobility scooter then to a bed and finally end up in a nice warm grave somewhere having done absolutely nothing with my time on Earth.

Well at least it won’t be much of a loss.

Sometimes I wish I could just burn all my pain away in a grand bonfire build on a ledge on the side of a mountain in the middle of a windless winter night.

But I can’t. All I can do is feel what I can, when I can, and try my best to learn to fly without knowing why.

That’s called faith. And I have never had any.

But I am willing to try.

More after the break.

---

I feel somewhat better

Getting that negative stuff out of my head did, in fact. help with my depression.

Wow, it really IS anger turned inwards, isn’t it?

I feel like there is a lot more I could say – arguably, a lot more I SHOULD say – but I don’t have the energy to “go there” right now.

Plus, I don’t want to spoil the good mood I’m in because I finally got to see Joe again tonight, albeit only over Zoom.

That is honestly probably for the best because apparently, modern Covid is spreading like wildfire in Richmond Hospital despite everyone being masked and such, so I should probably stay the heck away from there for now.

I shall practice coughing into my inner elbow just in case. \

I also had my follow-up appointment with my eye doctor, Doctor Mackay, today. I was optimistic because the dark spot in my left eye’s visual field is completely gone, and all that remains of my previous ailment is some pretty heavy duty floaters.

Or so I thought. Until the nurse had me cover my right eye and try to read letter off a screen and I could barely even read them in the HUGE font.

So the vision in the left eye is definitely shittier than the vision in the right eye. Which means me and Doctor Mackay ain’t done yet.

In a bit less than a month, I will be seeing him at St. Paul’s again, whereupon he is going to laser whatever blood vessels in my eye still need sealing.

Oh. And despite my optimism, I did have to get a needle in the eye again. Sigh.

And it hurt. But not as much as the previous one did. So… progress?

Doctor Mackay applied the freezing stuff a bunch of times. That did the trick.

In fact, if he’s used just a tiny bit more, I might not have felt it at all.

But he’s a smart fella. He just darts in and gets it done when you’re not expected it. He’s in and out in a split second, so while it still hurts, it’s over quick.

I like this. Gives me a lot less time to dread it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m going to try to pull together some disparate threads of my thoughts on some related issues and see if I can macramé together some kind of coherent theory.

We need pleasure. Specifically, we need for the reward center of the brain to be stimulated. That is how nature guides us toward doing the things we need to do in order to survive and perpetuate the species.

To keep us alive as individuals and as a species, Mother Nature rewards us with mental pleasure for doing the things that help with that (eating, drinking water, fucking) and punishes us with pain for doing the wrong things (starving, dying of dehydration, going around with blue balls all the goddamned time).

This is the motivational mainspring of all animal life. From the amoeba to the blue whale, every single action by a living animal is driven by this need to get pleasure/reward and avoid pain.

To this end, our bodies keep track of how much reward we’ve gotten lately, and the lower that reward level gets, the more our rational minds are pushed into the background in order for our primal instincts to take over and get us what we need without our stupid brains getting in the way.

This is what we are up against when we’re trying to fight addiction.

Addictions rewire our brains based on very strong sources of reward. A basic part of the “seek reward” system streamlines our behaviour towards preferring the largest and riches sources of reward.

In nature, that’s fine, because in nature, the rewarding activities are the ones that promote survival. Whether it’s a bear gorging itself on honey or a coyote filling its belly with water or an elephant using a handy tree to thoroughly scratch an itch, even the most “addictive” type behaviours rarely cause enough harm to be selected against and most often leads to a greater chance of survival.

But the modern human is a very complicated beast with many layers of motivation that can often come into conflict with one another.

It’s nowhere near as simple as “eat when you’re hungry, drink when you’re thirsty, and fuck when you’re horny”, like it is for simpler animals.

Even our companion animals are more complex. Sure, your dog wants food, water, and sex, but they also want your approval, a nice warm soft place to sleep, a family or “pack” to belong to, sticks and toys to chase, and so forth and so on.

Then along comes supra-normal stimuli. Things that activate that reward center of the brain so strongly that the normal, natural reinforcement of the most rewarding behaviours turns into the horrifying “hollowing out” effect of addiction where everything besides the addiction gets pushed out in favour of it.

Still, most people do not end up dangerously addicted to anything. But around 20 percent of people do, or at least can.

What’s the difference? Depression.

One of depression’s worst symptoms is anhedonia, which is a vast reduction in pleasure and reward the patient gets from any and all activities.

This, in turn, creates reward starvation, and the resulting lack of autonomous control of our actions. Or rather, it would, were it not for supra-normal stimuli.

Only these hyper-strong reward stimuli can penetrate the anhedonia and hit that reward button. This creates a starkly contrasting world where life is mostly unrewarding except for that one bright, shining, magical stimulus.

No wonder, then, that said stimulus ends up taking over the addict’s life. It ends up getting all the reinforcement meant for other things and can soon become literally the only thing the addict cares about.

Not family, or friends, or work, or relationships, or sex, or anything else. Only the One True Stimulus remains, and any consequences arising from abandoning those other things can be made to go away for a while by indulging in the stimulus.

More after the break.

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Oh yeah, the solution

So what do you do about addictions?

I don’t have a magical cure or anything. But first off you have to face the true severity of the problem : that in order to free someone of addiction you are going to have to grapple with the very drive that keeps us alive.

That is not to be undertaken lightly.

And forget everything pop culture says about “willpower”. Willpower is a lie. It’s a myth created to make the un-addicted feel smug about themselves without them having to do anything. Mistaking the lack of a vice for a virtue.

People love that kind of horseshit. They’re hooked on it.

If you are lucky enough not to be addicted to anything (it happens, I am told), it’s not due to “willpower”, you just never got exposed to a supra-normal stimulus while you were in a deeply anhedonic frame of mind.

Pursuant to this, fuck cold turkey. That shit is madness. If you suddenly yank a major plank out of your reward stimulus, you are just asking to end up in that under-rewarded frame of mind where you lose control of yourself and relapse.

Not because you are “weak” and lack “willpower”, but because your brain and body literally think you are dying and need the chosen reward NOW.

Nature doesn’t know you won’t literally die if you don’t get those Cheetos. Or crack.

The solution, therefore, is two-pronged – first, taper off. Have a little less every day. Give your body and mind time to adjust to the lower reward stimulus level.

Secondly. replace the stimulus. As you taper off. look for another, healthier pleasure that you can use to replace the usual stimulus.

It still won’t be easy. Again, your mind and body think they are dying. Your deep survival instincts are going to fight you all the way.

But if you taper off and replace the pleasures you are taking away with something healthier (and probably less supra-normally rewarding, sadly). and forget everything you think you know about “willpower”, you might just make it.

And if you happen to relapse, remember : you did not fail morally.

The choice was taken away from you by your instincts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I swear I am going to remember the really excellent idea for a post I had earlier.

But in the meantime, I guess the usual drivel will have to do.

---

Not much going on yesterday and today, thank Dog. No medical appointments, no testing or imaging, no trips to the bank, no nuthin’.

And that’s quite a relief after that crazy busy day I had on Friday.

Now it’s a nice quiet Sunday and I have been indulging my video game addiction and catching naps and occasionally snacking between meals.

I am starting to wonder if I would be best off with a lifestyle of constant, low grade snacking. Just always having something healthy on the go.

With the occasional “sometimes” food as a treat.

It seems like a radical idea, and maybe it is. I admit, the vision of my turning into the constantly eating fat dude who is the butt of many jokes crosses my mind.

That reminds me. I haven’t posted anything shockingly obscene here lately.

That feels wrong. One sec.

Here we go!

The world needs more hot gay jungle butt sex.

Preferably with AC, though. Don’t want people to pass out from heat exhaustion before they have a chance to pass out from SEXUAL exhaustion

Like I said before, I haven’t been doing any AI art lately. Which is odd, really, because I was making that stuff as a hobby more or less all day long for like months.

But my “new” computer crashes when I try to do a render, so, grr. A very fun hobby nipped in the bud by a mysterious hardware ailment

I am pretty sure it’s an issue with my power supply. Next Wednesday, when my deposit drops, I am going to order a new one.

Something ballsy and powerful. But not TOO expensive. I need to go through a period of normal spending levels in order to regain my equilibrium.

I mean, I might even end up punting the new power supply purchase to April’s deposit purely to give myself a break for a month.

Better to let a surplus build up than to go into debt anyhow.

I can’t wait to be able to get back to my usual level of groceries. I could only afford one fridge buddy of cans of pop this week.

So I got a week of nothing but Fresca ahead of me.

And don’t get me wrong, I love Fresca. But I need variety, too.

What else…. I have been having a lot of fun farting around with side quests and whatnot in Dragon Age : Inquisition, but that itch to continue the actual plot of the game is building up and eventually I am going to have to give in.

Like I’ve said before, they were clearly trying to make their own Skyrim, and the game has the buckets and buckets of content to prove it.

One interesting choice that differentiates it from Skyrim, though, is that there is no physical “world”. There is a main map and you go between different lands through it. I can’t go to the Hissing Wastes and start walking and end up at the Forbidden Oasis.

And I am fine with that. The novelty of having a whole “open world” to explore wore off a very long time ago.

I mean, the last thing I need is for games to trigger my agoraphobia. I’d be fine with a came that took place almost entirely indoors.

You know. Cozy. But with monster slaying.

More after the break.

---

What’s with my life?

Earlier I was feeling pretty ill. My head hurt, my stomach hurt, my testicles hurt, I felt feverish and nauseous, and my appetite could only be expressed in negative numbers.

Big ones, too.

And while I was feeling crummy, it suddenly came to me in a flash : this has been happening to me for my entire fucking life.

As in, I have memories of going through periods like that when I was still too young to go to school.

And my whole life, I have treated it the exact same way : suffer a while, then it goes away, and I forget all about it and go on with my life without ever telling anyone about it, least of all a doctor.

Now what the fuck is up with that??

Gods, it’s like there’s no end to the ways in which I am messed up.

Yeah, I know, that’s way too negative a way to look at things. But it’s all I have until I learn to be more positive.

And that’s going to take a change that goes far deeper than mere education.

Anyhow, it’s like I am a little kid who gets hurt playing but goes right back to playing the minute it stops hurting.

Which, come to think of it, I also did. I would come home for supper after playing outside all day and my poor Mom would exclaim, “Michael, you’re bleeding!”.

And I would look down at whatever cut, scrape, snag, or whatever like I was seeing it for the first time ever and say, “Wow. I am. Huh. ”

I’m not the easiest person to care about, am I? I wish I could be more in touch with my surroundings and my body so I wouldn’t put my loved ones through all this.

But I am an introspective introvert to a nearly pathological degree, and I don’t know how to fix that. I can tell myself I “should” do this and I “should” do that, but none of that shit is going to happen until something far deeper and more fundamental in me changes.

After all, my primary trauma of being raped when I was four years old happened so early in my life that I have very little memory of life before it.

And having to go that far back to find renewal is hard, especially when you are an over-brained weirdo like me who has gone way too far in the direction of the ego and superego and therefore had a weak and puny id.

And the id is the primal life-force. It’s the drive we share with all animals. It is the spark that drives the engine that we call ourselves.

No wonder I feel like one of the living dead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s mostly been about recovering from yesterday.

As you recall, I had a very busy schedule yesterday.

First, I had the usual Wound Care at 9:30 AM. That went mine. My nurse was a little timid and shy, which was adorable. My bandages were in terrible shape from having been on there a whole week.

Remember, I didn’t make it to last Tuesday’s Wound Care session because I was so totally wiped out from last Monday night’s MRI.

As a consequence, the one on my right foot was in tatters and the one on my left (grossness warning) was so full of discharge that I think I was technically floating.

Ew. Anyhow, after that, it was back home for around an hour. It’s an awkward amount of time to fil especially because it means going from car to apartment and back for my poor fragile leg and arm muscles.

One of these times, I will bring my tablet and stay in the car. I am sure I can fill an hour by doing one of my jigsaw puzzles.

They’re very relaxing.

God damn, am I old. Next I will begin to crochet.

And I barely even know what that means!

The visit to Doctor Chao went fine. I am kicking myself a little for forgetting to mention my back pain to him. I only got as far as telling him about having more pain and fatigue lately when we both go swept up in my urinalysis results that everything else got forgot.

Oh wait, that’s wrong. That should have been “forgotted:>

Honestly, my back pain issues are a lot more important then some minor pee ailment. I get these intense stabbing pains in my lower back sometimes that scare the poop our of me, and I should probably get that shit looked at.

The kind of pains that make my back spasm and my spine to instantly straighten like the cane of a too-hastily opened umbrella.

Anyhow, after a prescription for an antibiotic for my pee fungus, we came on home for the big wait until 10:30 pm or so when we would head to Vancouver for my second MRI series of this week.

During that wait time, I would both go to the door to retrieve my groceries, and then, three hours later, go to the door to get my shawarma.

Getting my shawarma went fine, but the grocery trap was a nightmare. In no way should I be carrying anything that heavy at al, let alone all the way to the other end of the apartment to my room.

What happened to my perfectly sensible plan to only move the groceries inside the apartment, leaving them right there by the door?

That would have been way easier. But as patient readers know, I am a crazy person who does crazy things for no good reason, so instead I picked up two big bags of groceries and headed for my bedroom.

I felt like I was dying before I had even made it half way.

But I survived, and eventually it came time for the MRI. And I felt very agitated due to my busy day beforehand and the stress and pain I had already been through.

I was seriously considering hitting the panic button so I could GTFO.

While waiting, I took 2 Ativan 1 mg pills, melted under the tongue .As usual, that took like ten minutes when it’s only supposed to take 20 seconds.

Everything about me is weird.

But onc things got going, I was fine. I just mellowed out and went into my “internalized but awake” mode and dozed my way through the whole thing.

And it was a LOT, because there were three scans : one for each arm (30 mins each), and then a pelvis to ankle scan (45 minutes), so I was in there for 105 minutes, or an hour and 45 minutes.

Still, whatever. Thanks to Ativan keeping my panic suppressed, it was no biggie.

More after the break.

---

Another fucking adventure

Wanted to order in tonight, but my card is tapped out. so he had to be Pizza Hut.

Fine. I order, it arrives, and I make my painful way to the door to pay for and retrieve it. To do so, I brought a fifty.

Fucker at the door says, “Oh sorry, I didn’t bring any change. ”

He knew I’d be paying in cash and he brought no change?”

“All I have if a 20. ”

My bill came to $30.16. So in order to avoid stiffing him by sixteen centers, I have to go all the way back to my bedroom to retrieve a five then come all the way back to the front door to pay him.

THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING FOR ME TO HAVE TO DO.

By the time I get back to the door, I am dying from the pain and the exhaustion. I manage to pay him and he leaves, I turn around to start plotting how I am going to get it all back to my room, trip, and fall down onto my knees.

My muscles had gone on strike and were refusing to hold me up.

So now I was on the ground cry-laughing from the pain and absurdity of it all.

I honestly think the dude’s scam was to make it so inconvenient to pay him properly that I would just hand him the fifty and say “keep it!”, thus getting him a nearly $20 tip.

Well fuck you, asshole. Clearly you didn’t count on me being willing to risk my life to go get that $5 to pay you properly.

And the fact that you would try to pull this scam on a very clearly disabled person speaks very poorly as to your character.

You unmarked sack of discount shit.

So that was my Saturday Night adventure I am hoping Julian (hi Julian!) starts working earlier Joe-attending shifts so this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

And I guess it’s a bit of an ego bruise to the part of me that thinks I can do all these things for myself if I really have to.

I don’t like the idea of what I do being limited in what I can do based on whoever happens to be around at the time.

And poor Julia is looking after two sick people, me and Joe, so I don’t want to make his life any more stressful than it already is.

Maybe I need to start getting my pizza via Amazon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am worried that my mystery muscular disorder is getting worse.

Lately I have been getting so tired from such small amounts of activity. And that feeling that my muscles are just hanging off my bones like so much meat is getting stronger.

But I have thought that before, and it turned out to be something transient. So I am resisting my usual urge to jump to (negative) conclusions.

I mean, I already know I am fighting off an infection.

A UTI, specifically. My second urine sample tested positive for nitrates (the kind produced by germs) and an even higher staph count than before, so yup, I definitely got something nasty lurking in my waterworks.

Luckily, the particular variant of staph is vulnerable to pretty much all antibiotics, and so Doctor Chao was able to pick the one that kills this particular bug the best with minimum damage to the good gut bacteria so vital for digestion.

Meaning there’s a chance that, for once, I will be able to take antibiotics without ending up with diarrhea.

I learned all this when I went to see Doctor Chao for my weekly B12 shot, of course.

Hmmm, come to think of it, he should be ordering new bloodwork to see if my B12 levels are healthy now.

Boy, I sure hope so. That shit could have many beneficial long term effects.

Today’s going to be a rather busy day for me and my poor tired muscles, because not only did I have Wound Care and Doctor Chao’s office (for my B12 shot) this morning, and not only will i be doing MRI #2 tonight, but in between I will be bringing in my own grocery order and whatever I order for dinner because Julian is currently “on shift” with Joe at the hospital today.

So for me, today will be a freaking marathon. No probs, I can handle it.

About Julian being “on shift” : It is very, very wonderful how Joe’s family has organized themselves into a rota in order to make sure Joe has someone with him all the time.

That is exactly the sort of warm. understanding, supportive act of kindly sacrifice and consideration that my awkward and distant family would never do.

Not even for the kids they like, aka, not me.

However, if I were Joe, I would secretly find it really irritating. When I am sick, I want to be alone with my misery.

I love getting visitors, mind you. They puncture the terrible feeling of isolation that being in the hospital can cause, and remind you that you have a life and people who care about you and you will be back to both some time soon.

But the nice thing about visitors is they leave. I enjoy their company for an hour or two and then they leave and I go back to the important task of suffering.

See, I can’t help but be “on” when other people are around. It’s kind of sickness. IF there are people around, I am performing for them.

I have no other way to relate to people, really. Sad but true.

I know that my loved ones don’t expect me to entertain them all the time. It’s just that when I try to imagine myself having people I know and love in the hospital room with me and either ignoring them or being cranky with them, my brain melts.

That could really screw me over some day, given my unstable health. I guess I will have to deal with it when I finally end up a permanent resident of medical care facilities.

Not looking forward to that, but it seems inevitable.

And I can barely be bothered to care.

More after the break.

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Just the tip

The good news is that despite overestimating the amount of money that would be left on my card after today’s groceries by about ten bucks, i did manage to order in.

The bad news is that in order to do it, I had to cut the tip my Dasher (seriously, that’s what DoorDash calls their drivers) from $3 to $1.

Well I never said it was bad news for me.

Seriously though, I do feel bad about, in a loose way, stealing some of my Dasher’s tip. If money was not so tight, he would have gotten $2 more, so…. sorry dude.

But facing the possibility of not being able to order in at all because of insufficient funds when I had been looking forward to my “treat” was just too damned depressing.

So think of this as a mental health donair.

And this was after a long journey where I was taking thing off the order and trying the charge again only to get the insufficient funds error.

The breakthrough came when I realized the wraps were WAY cheaper than the plates I was trying to order from the shawarma place.

Like, $5 cheaper.

And yet I still had to, um, shave my Dasher’s tip.

Oh well. For karma’s sake,. when my finances go back to normal next Wednesday and I am ordering in, I will pad the next guy’s tip.

Doesn’t help my most recent Dasher but it will help assuage my conscience.

I am so damned bourgeoisie.

For the record, the beef “donair” wrap is quite delicious. Which is good, because I chose the restaurant totally on a whim.

Saw the listing on DoorDash, said, “That looks good!” and ordered.

And I am proud of that. I did something spontaneously and without a heavy amount of attempted forethought and it worked out just fine.

Had it turned out badly, I might feel different. Then the struggle would be to resist excoriating myself over how STUPID I had been and how if I had just given it TWO SECOND OF THOUGHT and so forth and so on.

Breaking myself of that habit is going to be tough. It’s like it hijacks my usual bad response to disappointment and turns it into raw hot self-loathing.

And I don’t deserve that. It’s not my job to do absolutely everything in the smartest way possible at all times. That’s not a standard anyone can meet.

Even the brightest of us are stupid most of the time.

But we all do our best.

And that means giving ourselves lots of room to be human.

Not an angel, or a robot, or a holy man, or a pedagogue, or any of the other ideal selves that dwell within me but can never be real.

I might have the power to seen larger than life, but I am still just some dude.

And it would behoove me to remember that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like there is a conflict raging inside me.

And that’s good. Conflict is good. Conflict gets things done.

The war is basically between the old guard and the new hotness. Between the old sick part of my mind and soul and the new, strong, healthy part that wants me to rise and grow and get some kind of a god damned grown-up life for myself.

I feel like the door to my emancipation is wide open. I’m just having trouble deciding t go through it. The part of me that doesn’t want to have to change holds me back.

Hence the war. The part of me that is alive and healthy is fighting to overcome all that freezing fog and glacial ice inside me in order to take over and finally heal me, fully and completely, without the old guard’s fucking interference ruining things.

And the new growth will eventually win. It’s inevitable. The old guard is fixed and moribund and unliving. The new growth is vital and resilient and strong. The new growth will grow and spread and bring new life to the frozen plains of my Midnight Tundra, and soon the land will live and grown again.

Spring at last. Sweet lord almighty, spring at last.

And I can ease this process along by remembering to deliberately send energy down into those lively, vital parts of me in order to energize their growth and make sure they can overcome all that dead scar tissue and the husks of old emotions to reclaim my soul and my self from the fell clutches of mental illness.

Lord knows I have lots of energy to spare. My body might be tired and sick and depleted but my mind is still an electromagnetic powerhouse that generates gigawatts of raw electricity merely as a byproduct of the massive amount of mentation going on at all times and at all levels.

This mind of mine is pretty fucking amazing. It can do so much. I’m a freaking wizard, Harry, and yet I languish in the Failure to Launch zone because I’m also crazy.

And part of that insanity is being afraid to grow up. The central pathology of Failure to Launch seems to revolve around this feeling that to grow up is to die, because growing up means going out into that mean old world out there, and we are convinced we cannot possibly “make it” out there.

And that’s definitely crazy, because like… why not? Getting a job is horrible but doable. Finding an apartment is also bad but doable. Paying bills is easy in this day and age. Housework is not that bad, especially if you keep on top of it.

So what’s the big deal? It must be that whole “fixed sense of self” thing I have alluded to in the past. To grow up is to change on a deep and fundamental level, and to the fixed self that seems like death.

Try to convince a caterpillar that turning into a butterfly won’t kill it. That it will still live on as a butterfly.

Similarly, becoming an adult won’t kill me,. Or rip me out of my cozy tomb and throw me to the wolves. Or cost me some important part of myself.

But it will mean change. The kind you can’t back out of. It means changing as a person and that’s always super hard and scary to do.

There will be pain. And fear. Maybe even some (metaphorical) blood.

But I will emerge from my chrysalis as the radiant glory that I truly am.

And all the world shall be warmed by my glow.

Plus I’m going to get MAD laid.

More after the break.

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Journey to the Center of the Earth

I wonder what a chronology of the public perception of “the world” would look like.

And I mean, the modern perception of “the world” as a spinning ball of dirt with a bunch of different nations and cultures on it.

Obviously, if you define “the world” as “all there is”, we have had an idea of “the world” ever since our “world” was just one tiny slice of Olduvai Gorge.

This question first came to me as a child in the 1970’s, when it was very common for people to bemoan “the state of the world” or to say “this world’s got problems!” or to ask one another “what do you think of the world situation?^[1]“.

And I am pretty sure that was new. I don’t think people in the 50’s and 60’s thought that way, or though about “the world” much at all.

Despite the rise of mass communication (like TV and radio), things that happened in far off countries could just as well be happening on another planet.

But the Seventies brought a rise in mass communication power and intensity. Color TV came along, as did international phone exchanges and touch tone dialing. Satellite communications allowed for live coverage of anywhere on earth to be beaming directly into your living room. The baby steps of the internet happened in the Seventies.

Mostly nerds at universities and military bases text chatting with one another.

“The world” was getting smaller. Small enough to fit inside people’s heads, I suppose, at least as a conceptual space.

I suppose before there was “the world” to complain about, people complained about “life” or “this life” being harsh and cruel and full of misfortune, misery, and woe.

The difference is that back then, it really freaking was. War, famine, plague, and death stalked the lives of pretty much everyone.

Anyhow, that pessimism about “the world” and the universal belief that “this world has a lot of problems” is something that a lot of us Gen X types grew up with.

And people wonder why we are so sullen and cynical.

WE LEARNED IT FROM YOU!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

When’s the last time you heard someone say that, eh?

Anyhow. Being me has comes with a certain amount of back pain ever since my second growth spurt. when I was fifteen or thereabouts.

Nothing terrible or crippling. Just occasional aches in my lower back that make me really, really appreciate chairs with good back support.

But lately, the pain has gotten worse, to the point of occasionally being “acute” (defined by me as “bad enough to make me cry out in pain”) and I am starting to worry.

The old man noises I have been making as I move around have taken on a sharply plaintive tone, and there have been a number of worrisome incidents.

Like this one time I was getting out of bed (always the biggest challenge for my back) when my back muscles spasmed quite painfully and pulled my spine ramrod straight, causing me to fall back onto my bed in a dazed state.

That was pretty bad.

And in general, the creaking of my spine has been more painful and the muscles there have become far more likely to be an impediment to my moving around than the long term issues with the muscles in my legs and arms.

It took a while for this to penetrate the paranoid parapets of my consciousness because it sort of blended in with the pain from my limbs.

It took a while for it to get acute enough to stand out and make itself known.

But as recently as last Monday night, when I was doing the MRI thing, I noticed that it was my back aching that limited how much time I could spend walking far more than my leg and arm muscles.

I’ve been trying to sort of bully the muscles in my lower back into relaxing via pushing my spine straight with my fist, and of course via rubbing, and both of those things feel good and seem to help but the root problem remains.

Meaning it’s probably a digestive issue at heart. (Or at spleen. ) Somewhere in that troubled territory known as my lower intestine(s) is some kind of soft blockage and my peristaltic attempts to pass it down the line are making the entire area tense, including the lower back muscles that are, after all, right behind it.

Sounds weird, but trust me, I have been through this before.

Not a lot I can do about it except to hydrate aggressively in order to try to flush the blockage downstream, and to keep it moist and thus less likely to get stuck and clog things up as well as making it more likely to break into easier to pass chunks.

Oh well. To coin a phrase, this too shall pass.

But just in case, I will bring it up with Doctor Chao when I see him on Friday morning for my weekly B12 shot.

That’s going to be a busy day. Wound Care and Doctor Chao in the morning and then my second of two MRIs late at night.

I will be a lot less nervous about the second MRI because now it’s a known thing. I am always a lot more calm when I am no longer dealing with an unfamiliar place and all the overstimulation that comes from that.

I really am a fragile, timid creature, aren’t i?

But I am working on that. By hook or by crook, somehow, I will pull myself up out of this deep dark well and find a way to be real and feel good in the real world.

I don’t have to be an urban hermit any more.

More after the break.

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So damned tired

It feels like the simplest of things takes so much effort lately.

I don’t know if I am at the bottom of a cycle or what. But it sure feels that way. Just getting to the kitchen to get food and back feels like a marathon. I am breathing hard and sweating and a little bit dizzy when I get back.

And I really, really don’t want to lose the ability to go get my own food. It’s like my last line of defense against the erosion of my personal capacities.

Well, that and being able to go to the bathroom on my own. But that does not bear thinking on at all.

It would be ironic if, having regained the ability to order my own groceries online and thus saved Julian from having to go grocery shopping for me for him to then have to start making my meals and bringing them to me.

Actually, at that point, I would just request help from the province. I know they office meal assistance via some kind of meals on wheels deals deal sometimes.

Back home, when I was a kid, Meals on Wheels was simple : they came straight from the hospital kitchen, just like you were an inpatient there.

I do sometimes wonder if I would be better off in an assisted living facility. It would unburden poor Julian and take a lot of guilt and worry off my conscience, plus they could monitor my vitals and head off issues before they become problems.

And to be honest, relying on me to self-report is a terrible system. Between a lot of problems not showing up unless I am up and moving (which would happen even less in a managed care home) and my just having no idea how I am supposed to be feeling, my ability to know when I am sick is more or less entirely based on whether or not I can still use my computer to play video games.

Sad, ain’t it? I am a piteous creature, n’est-ce pas?

Sometimes I wish I could just give up and start over. Just magically leave this life and this body behind and start over in some small town up the coast where nobody knows me or my history and I can start over with a clean slate and decide who I am from there.

Like V did in V for Vendetta.

But with less murder.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And its name is Ativan.

Did the whole MRI thing last night. The good news was that the scan took only 15 minutes, not 45. Apparently they have better machines now.

Makes me wonder if they keep telling people the older, longer times because it’s so nice to tell them it will only be a third as long in person.

The first nurse I encountered was not pleasant. He was one of those high strung Asian dudes who basically radiates tension and who treats me like a particularly dimwitted pack animal that needs constant goading to get to do even the simplest things.

Really, really not a good fit for me. I mean yeah, I move slowly and cautiously, but it’s because your nattering at me overloads my verbal processing center with commands.

STFU for a second and give me time to process what you’ve already said. Geez.

I suppose I could just tune you out and do whatever seems to make sense, but occasionally there’s actual, important info in what you say, so I have to listen.

Luckily he handed me off to a way, way nicer nurse who was kind, gentle, and funny, and that’s what I respond to best.

She even laughed when, after some painful maneuvering and accompanying old man noises. I said, “Being sick is hard work, ya know. ”

Which I thought was a cute, funny thing to say. Turns out I was right!

Anyhow, she shepherded me through getting ready for the scan. Thankfully, it was a thorough modern and sleek looking machine (smoothly contoured white plastic and ceramic, very sci fi) and not the bizarre monstrosity that looked like an industrial dishwasher fucked an iron lung that I went through before.

IT didn’t help that the chamber with Monstro in it had all the grace and charm of a gym basement, or maybe a storage room under your municipal pool.

Anyhow, this place was much nicer. Soon, I was settled in to the head vice (or whatever you call the thing to keep your head steady) and then she put a sort of mask over my face that looked like the mask they made Hannibal Lecter wear as re-imagined by Fisher-Price. Or maybe Lego.

I’d already taken my Ativan when I was in the waiting room. IT produced a kind of icy calm in me which was vastly preferable to freaking out but which I don’t enjoy.

I am already far too cold and dead inside. More of that is hardly welcome.

Anyhow, I was relaxed through most of the scan, but by the end of it. I was beginning to become agitated again and I came dangerously close to entering the “I feel trapped!” realm which can only lead to panic and anxiety and misery.

So I think that before the scan on Friday, I will take two Ativan. Not looking forward to a double dose of ice and snow, but it’s better than freaking out and going through phobic hell during a scan which promises to be twice as long.

i can easily imagine me losing my shit completely and trying to escape the machine by any means necessary.

Well, they give you a sort of kill switch, so presumably I would just squeeze that and everything would shut down.

Not as dramatic as going full on Beast Mode, but probably a lot safer and a lot less likely to get a big red flag added to my medical file.

WARNING : Patient appears calm, intelligent, and well-behaved, but the second something goes wrong he Hulks out.

Nobody wants that.

More after the break.

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At a van

So far, the main side effect of my Ativan use has been sleepiness.

I’ve had a pretty sleepy day.

And sadly, it’s not been the nice warm cozy kind of sleepiness.

No, it’s been more the “dragged unwillingly back into the void by the tentacles of a malevolent interdimensional whirlpool over and over again” variety.

Well, I was warned that Ativan might interfere with sleep apnea.

Actually, scratch that. Nobody warned me about that at all. I had to do my own research and find out about the potentially dangerous interactions between both Ativan and sleep apnea AND Ativan and Gabapentin on my own.

Now I am pretty sure there would be no reason why my pharmacy would know about my sleep apnea. It’s not like I take drugs for it.

They definitely know about the Gabapentin though.

Oh well. In this life, you’re on your own.

Cant trust anyone to look out for you. Because they might not. Especially if, like me, there’s something about you that makes people not want to think about you or deal with you in any way.

I am not saying people are callous or evil or neglectful. although it feels that way sometimes. It’s more like I am just too much, ya know? I have such a powerful effect on people with how I express myself that when people are not around me, it subconsciously makes them want to avoid me just to preserve their own identity.

Or something like that.

And I am sure it confuses people because I am a sweet and nice and kind fellow who is funny and fun to be around, so why do they cross the street to avoid me?

Which sadly is just another reason to avoid me. I am just so confusing!

To average folks, that all just comes across consciously as my being “weird”. And, ya know, guilty as charged. I’m weirder than most fuck.

But it’s more than that. There is an aura I generate that gently warps reality to be more like what I am trying to project.

If I ever decided to use that in a focused, drive way for my own personal gain, I could easily become a charismatic demagogue with a special cadre of “true believers” ready to have their lives and their reality defined by me.

But like Paul Atriedes, I don’t want hordes of fanatics screaming by name as they cut a bloody swatch across the world in a brutal jihad.

I just want to fix the system and bring a small number of billionaires down.

And if that takes brutal bloody violence, well then…. maybe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight’s the night I go for my first of two MRI scans at VGH’s Blackmore Pavilion.^[1]

Not looking forward to it. Glad I had the forethought and chutzpah to get me some Ativan to take to ease my nerves.

Hopefully, the drug will keep my claustrophobia at bay long enough for them to do their 45 minute scan. of, I think, my head and shoulders region.

Scanning for dandruff, no doubt. Ha ha ha.

If the drug can keep my adrenaline response tamped down enough, I think my built in self control and/or self-discipline will take care of the rest.

Ideally, I will just lay there in the machine lost in my own thoughts for a while. Tonight, the procedure will be around 45 minutes, maybe slightly less.

And I really hope it goes well because the one on Friday night is double that., 90 minutes, and that seems like death to me right now.

So, three cheers for Ativan. Without it, I would simply have to refuse to do it.

And I would hate to have to do it. I don’t want to be a “difficult” patient. My shy and accommodating nature cringes at the thought of it.

But phobias don’t negotiate. My claustrophobia is immune to reason and logic and rational restraint. I know full well that I am not in any danger, the walls are not closing in on me, and I am not about to be smothered.

My adrenaline response, however, doesn’t listen to any of that rationalist bullshit. This is the part of us that keeps us alive in the wild, and it knows that it is better to run from something that isn’t dangerous than to fail to run from something that is. so it defaults to sounding all the alarms when the right (or wrong) stimulus occurs.

Essentially, our bodies are built to assume that our rational mind is too stupid to know when to run from danger (or fight, or fuck, or whatever) so our instincts are hardwired in to our motivation center so that when the shit goes down, it can take over and run the show, leaving the rational being we think of as ourselves helplessly relegated to the sidelines, where it can only gape.

Oh fuck. I am intellectualizing again. I need some sort of alarm that goes over whenever I start lecturing instead of venting.

Anyhow, back to the MRI machine.

I don’t have much experience with these modern fast-acting anti-anxiety meds. I understand that they can be extremely effective in keeping the panic at bay, and I have wanted to have some around for quite some time now.

Mostly to act as a kind of security blanket for when I decide it is time to exit my teeny tiny comfort zone and try to expand my world a little.

I am never going to get anywhere in life if my fears keep calling the shots. Ativan might just be the key to having the actually positive social interactions that can overwrite those old old bad tapes of mine with critical new information.

Like that I am perfectly safe. That’s an important update.

So it would be real nice if it turned out that Ativan really does work for me and I could maybe use it in the future for other, less medically imposing situations.

I know that Doctor Costin will give me more if I ask. He knows I can be trusted. I have been his very slow to change patient for more than a decade. He knows the score.

Well, it’s time for me to rest up.

More after the break.

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Reluctantly crouched at the starting line

Yeah, i know I already linked this recently.

It’ a little under an hour till we depart for my VGH MRI, and I am not happy.

For one thing, I should totally be eating, but I’m not. I can’t. I am too agitated to eat. My appetite is gone and my every instinct is telling me that if I eat, my “nervous stomach” will make me very ill.

And that would really suck right about now.

I am compromising by eating just a little bit at a time very slowly. Just enough to justify taking my night medications.

Last thing I wanna do before doing something about which I am nervous is skip my Gabapentin, aka my painkiller.

Apparently, there is a chance that taking Ativan while on Gabapentin will make the Ativan side effects of dizziness, lack of coordination, and sleepiness worse.

Yay. All the more reason not to take the Ativan until like 20 minutes before the procedure. Presumably then I will be around a team of medical professionals who can help me get in and out of the machine when needed.

Would be all too ironic if I make it there despite my misgivings only to be waylaid by a god damned drug interaction that should have been caught by the pharmacy.

Jesus, maybe I should take an Ativan NOW. I am freaking myself out here.

Relax. Breathe. Hydrate. Remember that it’s only 45 minutes of my life and after that it will be all over until next Friday.

When I will have to do it for twice as long. Yeesh. This life of mine.

Oh well, I can simply choose to see tonight as a trial run for next Friday. If I can make it through 45 minutes tonight, I can probably make it through 90 minutes later.

Hmmm. According to the internet, a dose of Ativan lasts between 6 and 8 hours. Which means I could take a dose right now and be sure that it would still be in effect around 140 minutes (2 hours 20 minutes) from now when the procedure starts.

I might just do that. I would very much like to stop panicking right now.

Well fuck. I just had to go poking around. Turns out that you are not supposed to take Ativan (or any of the Benzodiazepines, including Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, and Ativan. ) if you suffer from sleep apnea.

I have serious and completely untreated sleep apnea.

Now what the fuck do I do?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.