I am deeply into Dragon Age : Inquisition.

There’s just so much content in it! Dozens of regions, each full of quests and plot points and monuments to find and resources to claim and enemies to fight.

Plus there’s this character who is your chief scout and she greets you every time you go to a new region and gives you a quick run-down of the salient details.

You know, what the region’s like, what its plotline is, who to kill, and so on.

Touristy details like that.

And I find I am beginning to really like that head scout. She’s so friendly and informative. I look forward to seeing her when I go somewhere new.

If only the real world had nice, friendly, well-informed people to greet me when I enter new and unfamiliar places full of strangers.

Might help with the social anxiety. A lot.

Anyhoo, I got so into playing DA:I this afternoon that I completely lost track of time when when I finally emerged from my state of suspended animation long enough to look at a clock, it was almost 4 pm and time to get my lunching and blogging done.

Which was a bit of an issue because the moment I stopped playing the game, I sagged into feeling very tired and sleepy.

But I was not willing to delay the blogging et al. Discipline is repetition. The more you do something, the easier it is to do. If you start letting things slip, you are only betraying yourself by breaking the pattern you’ve established.

And ultimately undermining your sense of your own reliability.

So I went and got my food and came back to Mister Computer (mark 2) and sat down to gather my second wind and get to work.

And I am proud of that. A previous version of me would have said, “Oh, well, under the circumstances, delaying my meal and blogging for an hour so I can take a nap is not that big of a deal, right?”

But it is, Former Me. It’s a huge deal. You are injuring yourself in a deep and terrible way. You just can’t see it yet.

And Lord knows I need things that are regular and reliable in my life. Like I have said many times before, I have done a terrible job of being my own keeper, and if I want to feel better about myself, I have to be better to myself.

And that’s so hard to do. I have all this red hot angry energy which I cannot externalize and therefore which can only vent internally and end up scorching me.

In other words, I can only attack myself. And I do that a LOT.

They say depression is anger turned inwards.

Well it sure as heck is for me.

And that means that in order to stop the constant self-abuse, I have to find something else to do with all that anger, and that’s a huge problem because I absolutely refuse to take it out on anyone else.

And I have no idea where else to put it. Obviously, the best solution would be to not have the anger in the first place, but that is not an option and never was.

I have been hurt so much in life and I have never had an acceptable way to vent the anger that pain brought me that I have a massive backlog of rage to deal with.

And I don’t know how to deal with it. I can’t shake the feeling that if I was to start trying to express it, the sheer energy density of it all would cause a massive explosion that would explode my brain.

Or at least my sanity.

There’s just so much of it. I don’t know what to do.

Anyone need some inchoate rage? It’s free!

More after the break.

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It was kind of a hobby

The ease with which I completely give up on things is beginning to disturb me.

I mean, it’s not right, and it’s not normal, and it might not even be sane/

Take all those AI generated pictures I made with Easy Diffusion. I was really enjoying doing that. Even the pics that were NOT porn.

Made that one with the Microsoft Designer generator. All it took was a prompt that was something like “two bears cuddled up in bed together”, and presto.

What an amazing tool. What a magical technology. What unlimited possibilities.

I haven’t so much as glanced in its direction for more than a month.

Now part of that is because my “new” computer crashes when I try to run Easy Diffusion (the software I used to make all that porn) processes. Not every time, but often enough to make it feel like it’s not worth it.

Working on that problem, by the way. According to the Tom’s Hardware forum guy, my power supply is “not good”, so that’s the next thing I will upgrade.

That will have to wait until the next Deposit Day, which is a week from Wednesday.

I can’t frigging wait. This five week month stuff sucks shit.

Anyhow, it started with that problem, but I could have gone on making practically anything (G-rated) I could think off with the Microsoft website.

But that’s too wide open for me. I guess I need structure. Constantly trying to convince Easy Diffusion to make the porn I wanted gave me focus.

But “make whatever you want” does not.

I did make this, though.

I saw this pic and immediately loved the guy. I mean, I bet his jokes are terrible – pea sized brain and all – but you still gotta love him.

Oh, and I made this.

That’s where shit starts to get spooky, dunnit? It doesn’t quite look perfectly real, but it could plausibly be an inexpert Photoshop.

Oh, and one last thing.

Pic posted to reassure you that being unable to make porn does not mean that I am not still a deeply disturbed individual.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got distracted by masturbation (damn you, penis) and ended up not ordering my groceries until like 4:15 pm.

You know, when I would normally be eating.

Actually, I decided yesterday that it was time to move lunch to 3 pm, which makes the meals a lot closer to being evenly spaced out and thus is healthier.

But today, I forgot that I had decided that.

Changing one’s habits can be complicated.

Eventually, I will move lunch to its new permanent home at 2 pm. That way, it’s six hours between breakfast at 8 am and lunch at 2 pm, then six hours until super at 8 PM.

And then only four hours till my midnight snack. But that’s not movable because I get together with other people to watch stuff off the PVR then.

And then it’s eight hours till breakfast at 8 am.

To fix that, I would have to start getting up early to eat at 6 am every day. And who knows, maybe that would be a lot healthier in the long run.

I have often pondered the potential health benefits of keeping your circadian rhythms in sync with external time. That old, “early to bed, early to rise” schtick might have some actual wisdom to it.

Maybe getting up with the dawn and sleeping with the sunset makes sense and if we did it, our bodies would feel a lot less stressed that way,

Don’t know if I could pull it off, though. I’ve been a night owl for decades now. I recognize that it’s not the healthiest lifestyle but it seems to suit me.

When everyone else is asleep, I feel free. It’s like a great weight has been lifted and I can truly take deep breaths and feel alive for a change.

Which is pretty mysterious once you really look at it from a scientific point of view. Just what are these signals that change when people go to sleep? What exactly is it that I am picking up on?

It can’t be pheromones. I can’t possibly be smelling all the people in the apartments above, below, and around me. How would all those smells even reach me as I sit here in my apartment with the windows closed?

I honestly feel that human beings have some kind of electrical perception that lets us “sense” what the humans around us are doing even through the walls.

I’m sure pheromones play a role too, especially in things like crowd behaviour and mood synchronization events like concerts, plays, sports games, and church services.

And heck, even going to the movies. While that movie is playing, if it is any good, that crowd of strangers is temporarily united by a shared experience that they are all experiencing at the exact same time.

Anyhow, so I feel best when I have the night more or less to myself. Somehow, I know.

Which reminds me of the times when I have been on the streets walking home late at night and felt absolutely fantastic. Like I was walking on air with a song in my heart.

I am started to wonder if the biopressure from other humans has always been a problem for me. One that was very difficult to conceive of, let alone articulate.

Makes me wonder how I would feel if I truly “got away from it all” by going to some remote location where there’s no other humans around for hundreds of miles.

Maybe this is why people have to fuck off to some mountainside in Tibet or some remote cabin in Alaska in order to “find themselves”.

If so, than this ability to sense the presence of others around us is something so endemic to the human condition that we all accept the truth of it without questioning it or wondering how it exists.

I mean, what was with all that crap Thoreau talked about the virtues of solitude?

How would our bodies even know whether we’re in a crowded high density apartment complex or a remote retreat in northern Nepal?

Pretty spooky stuff!

And just think : if we could figure out how this all works, we could come up with a way to block the signals and create artificial solitude.

And wouldn’t that be nice?

More after the break.

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Basically, charcuterie is crudité for carnivores.

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The wrong thing

Holy fucksauce, am I tired of getting the wrong things when I order groceries.

Tonight, I ordered 9 items, and 4 of them were wrong. Two fatally so.

I ordered All Dressed flavoured No Name chips, got BBQ instead. I do not particularly like BBQ chips. I will probably still eat them, but still.

I ordered a bag of “Everything” trail mix. Got “Mixed Berries” instead. Shit is half dried fruit at least. Dried fruit is not great for diabetes.

But much worse was that instead of the Voortman’s No Sugar Added Fudge Striped Cookies, I got fucking NO NAME full sugar Fudge Striped Cookies.

They don’t even look faintly alike. I mean what the fuck.

AND I ordered my usual Russell Stover’s No Sugar Added Fruit Flavoured Candies and I got freaking full sugar LIFE SAVERS instead.

The final piece of the puzzle is that my order arrived an HOUR late.

To me, this paints a picture of someone who was running way behind and just throwing whatever looked vaguely right into the cart in their haste.

I put in a complaint to DoorDash and they refunded me for all the wrong items. I then used that money to get myself some McD’s.

Which was dumb in retrospect because it would have made more sense to use that money to try to get the things they fucked up.

Now I will have no cookies and no hard candy until next Friday unless I come up with some clever financial shenanigans to pay for them.

I guess I could ask Julian to go get them for me. That way I could pay cash. And I can spare the cash because apparently we are not doing Denny’s this week.

Apparently Joe, who tested negative for Covid when he first went into the hospital last month, has now tested positive for it. And that means Julian might have it as well as he has been spending so much time with Joe.

I could still do Denny’s with Felicity, she would just have to pick me up on the way.

But whatever. I will manage. I always do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Writing this into an LibreOffice document because when we headed out to Doctor Chao’s office, Julian decided our router needed a rest and unplugged it, then forgot to plug it back in when we got back.

So I am slightly annoyed with him. I am pretty sure the router doesn’t actually need the little rest periods he gives it sometimes, but I don’t say anything about it because usually, it’s a harmless thing and if it makes him feel better. who am I to say no?

But the time previous to this, I had to remind him to plug it back in, and let me tell you, when you are relying on ME to remember something for you, you are in dire straits indeed.

I mean, who do you think you are, Mark Knopfler?

And now this time, he forgot, I forgot to remind him (see?), and then he took off to go see Joe in the hospital, leaving me sans internet.

And I didn’t notice at first because I was playing Etherlords 2 and that does not require an internet connection to function.

I mean, the game’s from 2003. There barely was an internet back then. I was organizing the local furry community via email when that game came out, for crying out loud.

Come to think of it, I have no idea how I even heard of the game, let alone where I found it. I can only assume I stumbled across it on some “warez” site and pirated it.

I did a LOT of software piracy back then, as did all of us cool internet residents. I could not afford to buy games, and even if I had the money, I wouldn’t have had access to a credit card to pay for it.

But at some point, I got onto full disability, my income improved, I got a reloadable VISA from my bank. VanCity, and suddenly paying for games became an option.

And I haven’t pirated anything since. Guess I grew up a little.

I’m as surprised as you are.

Now where was I? Oh right, the router.

Julian came home and plugged it in somewhere around when I started on the whole “piracy and me” tangent, so I gotta da interwebs back.

But I am going to keep writing this in LibreOffice because it’s a remarkably comfortable environment in which to string together words.

Partly because it defaults to putting things in Liberation Serif, and I quite like how my words look in that font. Makes what I type seem more important and fancy somehow.

I was annoyed when I tried to play Dragon Age : Inquisition sans internet and it would not load. Because, of course, it can’t run without EA’s stupid online marketplace there to hold its little hand and reassure it that Daddy still loves it.

I have a lot of issues, don’t I?

Did the Wound Care thing. The nurse wants me to moisturize my right foot and it’s not hard to see why. The skin on the sole of my foot looks like dried out pink parchment, or maybe the remains of a particularly gay paper wasp nest.

It’s bad, is what I am saying.

Also did the Friday B12 shot thing. Brought up a weird issue while I was there.

Warning, the following will be gross.

See, lately, this yellowish white greasy substance has been precipitating out of my urine and ending up on the bottom and sides of my pee receptacle.

So I asked him what it was, and he didn’t know, so it’s time for another pee test.

I’m not worried. My urine has always tested well.

More after the break.

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All about journaling

Check out this guy’s system.

I enjoyed the heck out of that video. Everything he says makes so much sense and seems like it would really work.

For someone other than me.

Like I said in the comments, I could never be that organized and structured about doing this a-here blog of mine. This thing only works for me because it has no format and therefore I can always write whatever is on my mind when I sit down to blog.

If I tried to go into it with a plan and goals and a specific direction, those would be the things my neurosis latches onto and uses as the nuclei for a whole chain reaction of option paralysis, self-loathing, and ultimately, giving up in frustration.

I am sure his system works for the kind of people who are soothed by rules, structure, limitations, and so forth.

And part of me really wishes I was that kind of person. They seem like they would be so much more effective in life than me.

But that’s not who I am. My muse is willful and defiant and would make me absolutely miserable if I tried to be that structured.

So I will just keep staggering along, trying to figure out how to deal with my volatile and highly reactive muse.

I think learning to take life less seriously will help a lot. Seriousness (or gravity) short circuits me because seriousness raises the takes and what do high stakes lead to?

But you know what? Life’s not that big of a deal. Sure, from a certain narrow POV. it’s the most important thing there is, but any given decision within that POV is honestly not important enough to tie yourself into knots over.

Again, it’s all a product of that post-game analysis. After the decision is made, the slow circuit of the conscious mind has plenty of time to analyze the problem and find what depression really wants : a way it could have been solved better.

And then you kick the shit out of yourself for being an idiot, and the downward spiral of self-excoriation begins, and just like that, you are your own abuser.

But just like with real world abusers, you cannot let yourself be fooled by their justifications into thinking they are right.

Abusers NEED to abuse, and they will find absolutely any excuse to do so, whether it’s legitimate or not. That means they will lie, cheat, manufacture evidence, and do whatever else it takes to make you feel bad and hate yourself.

Don’t believe a word they say. They are thoroughly corrupt and dishonest.

And especially don’t believe their post-game analysis.

They fucking LOVE that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because otherwise, I might have had to get really creative with what I eat.

And honestly, given that this emergency order from 7-11 cost me $32, I kind of wish I had gone that route instead.

Admittedly, $7.50 of that went to cookies. Apparently 7-11 doesn’t have sugar free ice cream any more, but they do have this new kind of sugar free cookie.

I got the birthday cake cookie kind. Sounds yum, right?

But they are going to have to be pretty goddamned tasty for $7.50 for a small “snack” sized sachet of them.

Feels like about 6-8 cookies, or about 0.94 to $1.25 a cookie.

And these are not full sized cookies either. More like McDonaldland sized.

So unless they deliver a flavour orgasm in every bite, I doubt I will get them again.

I felt I had to get something because I ran out of trail mix yesterday and I don’t order groceries again till tomorrow, so I needed something for today.

Or so I thought. I am having spender’s remorse right now. I could have just popped an extra bag of microwave popcorn and eaten in instead of splurging today.

Oh well, can’t do anything about it now except learn my lesson.

What it means is that I will not be ordering in tomorrow night. The stuff I got todau was my ordering in for the week.

The only way I will be ordering in is via Pizza Hut because I will have to pay for whatever I order in cash. My “card”: budget won’t take it.

Cash wise, I have something like $89 that’s spendable. Which ain’t half bad. Deposit Day is two weeks from yesterday, so I should be reasonably OK.

There may be a certain amount of financial dos-y-dos with cash v. card in the last week. Hopefully not, but ya never know, I might give in to temptation and either order in on the card’s dime tomorrow night, or um…. overshop.

I do have a tendency to get a little crazy when I shop for groceries. I have a strong feeling that if I ever have a big, grownup sized grocery budget, I am going to end up being a food hoarder overnight unless I practice very strict budgetary restraint.

There’s just something about acquiring food that brings out the greedy little animal in me. Like I am a bear who just stumbled on a HUGE patch of berries and I feel like I have to eat EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.

I mean, just look at all this FOOD. I want ALL OF IT!

If I was am eccentric billionaire (as opposed to now, when I’m an eccentric hundredaire), I would just have a Safeway in my mansion where I would go to “shop” and get all I want of whatever the hell I want, budget be damned.

I mean, I would own the Safeway and everything in it already. So why hold back?

Did i mentioned being eccentric?

Anyhow, that’s the pulse pounding, hard driving, brutally honest update from my personal finances and such.

Sorry for drawing out the suspense.

Oh, get this : I have yet ANOTHER MRI in Vancouver at VGH next week. Which means I now have one next Monday AND next Friday, both late at night.

And I am going to really need me some Ativan because the first one is going to be 45 minutes long and the second one will be AN HOUR AND A HALF.

An hour and a half of having to sit perfectly still in a metal tube? Um no. That would make my claustrophobia go absolutely berserk.

So it’s Ativan or no scan, basically.

I wish I could just sleep through the whole thing.

More after the break.

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That irritating hum

I thought this was pretty interesting.

Those poor people! Imagine being tormented day and night by a sound only you can hear. That must be a nightmare.

Not surprise that people on “the spectrum” are heavily represented in the “hearer” category. We all know they process sensory input in an unusual way.

I hope people like the fellow who made that video figure out what the heck is going on, though. So that some day, we might be able to turn the damned thing off!

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On lightening up

It’s not like I am philosophically dedicated to taking things way too seriously.

In fact, I think that without depression holding me down, I would be a cheerful optimist. That has always seemed to be to be the better way to live.

To always be as happy as you can manage to be. That’s livin’.

And yet, this project of mine to learn to calm the frick down and lighten the frick up and stop being such a god damned downer to myself seems so hard.

I have so much ingrained negativity to overcome. I feel like I have to completely reroute the way I process emotions in order to fix the problem.

Somehow, I will learn to turn the same emotional potentials that now go into negativity into a force to bring my mood up instead.

I know it’s possible. I’ve seen glimpses of it in the past. I know it can be done.

But I feel like I have a lot of negative emotion to process first. And I am doing my best to get that done but I feel like I am stumbling around in the dark as I do so.

Now where’s the fucking light switch?

Somehow, I need to clear away this dark miasma that clouds my mind and keeps me in perpetual darkness and leaves a foul smelling sticky residue on everything it touches.

Basically, I’m polluted. I need burly dudes in hazmat suits to come up with their big industrial hoses and complex disposal procedures to come in and pump the pollutants out of me then sequester them somewhere where they can no longer harm me.

But I suppose that’s impossible.

I will have to pass it all through the kidneys of my mind instead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Man, this Alan Watts fella was smart.

I had my first serious misgivings about the division between work and play when I was in still in elementary school.

Nothing I could have articulated, of course, just a vague feeling that there was something wrong with dividing our time like that.

I suppose the fact that for me, school was not very hard played a role in that. For as long as I can remember, the worst part of school for me was the walk there and back.

Well, and the bullying. But the actual school part was a breeze. I

It wasn’t until college that I got the chance to really articulate it. It ended up coming out when I was writing my big paper for my Philosophy of Education course and I was spooling out my thoughts about how bizarre it is that we have an educational system so fundamentally wrongheaded that it can actually teach a child to hate learning.

Children are learning machines. They naturally love to learn. Even in play, they are exploring the world and testing their abilities and learning everything they can.

But like Einstein said, even the most voracious of predators will be put off its food if it’s strapped down and force fed for eight hours a day.

And he knew what he was talking about. All his teachers were Prussian.

Anyhow, back to work and play.

Of all people, it was Mary Poppins who had it right :

And there it is, the secret to a happy life, in easy to remember song form.

Because she’s absolutely right. If you can find a way to see everything in life as a game, then the entire concept of work goes right out the window.

But we’re so indoctrinated into the “work bad, play good” mindset that we automatically reject such thoughts as naïve, simplistic, or just plain wrong.

But think about it. The dividing line between work and play is not a matter of effort or work. A lot of the most popular forms of play are at least as much work as the jobs we do, and yet we do them joyously and of our own free will.

And it’s not about the nature of the task, either. There is no job so bad that there is not someone in the world who would find it to be a lot of fun.

No, the difference is simple : choice. Work is the stuff you don’t choose to do but are forced to do anyhow. Play is the stuff you choose to do.

And that starts with that force-feeding factory known as school. That’s where we learn to divide our day into “the good part” and “the part that sucks”.

And this rule is socially enforced. Woe betide the child who openly enjoys school. Their peers will swiftly and mercilessly correct them.

It can be socially disastrous to like the wrong things.

In fact, it can make people wonder aloud what the hell is wrong with you. Often they will conclude that you are either retarded or crazy or both.

But imagine if you could simply reject the whole notion of work and take Mary Poppins’ lesson instead, and see the world as full of fun and games, some of which people will actually pay you to do.

You’d be king of the world, wouldn’t you? You’d never work another day in your life, and you didn’t even have to get rich first. You could be working a dead end entry level job and still be having the time of your life. It would be amazing.

So who cares if everyone thinks you are the dullest person on planet Earth?

You’re having fun, and that’s all that matters.

More on this in part 2.

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But how do I get there?

I have no idea.

But I am going to try to get there anyway, and if I find the way, you’ll be the first to know.

I know I have a lot of deprogramming to do. I have to disable or destroy the part of me that reflexively scoffs at the idea of treating life like a game.

I mean, you obviously can only do things right if you take them super seriously, right? At least as seriously as they are important, anyway.

But that’s a dangerously shortsighted way to see things. There is actually no correlation between how important something is and the optimal level of seriousness with which it should be treated.

Sure, if you’re not taking it seriously enough, you risk disaster. But the same goes for taking it too seriously. When you take things too seriously, you end up wasting a lot of mental resources by trying to pour more mental effort into something than it can hold, and that excess energy spills into things like anxiety and distress.

And all because of a deep fear of not taking things seriously enough that causes you to wildly overcompensate in the opposite direction.

Which is why I am trying so hard to learn to calm the fuck down about things. I would not be nearly as terrified of life and reality if I could learn to treat it all like a game (a video game, even) and fundamentally stop caring so much about outcomes.

I mean, yeah, bad outcomes suck. It’s good to avoid them. But taking everything too seriously turns almost all outcomes bad by raising the stakes way too high.

So what I really want is to somehow learn to ease way back on the throttle in order to stop throttling myself with tension.

But where does all that throttling come from? Energy looking for a way to express itself, I think. I have talked about how unspent energy manifests as anxiety in this space before. It’s like whatever gets generated but not used spills over into anxiety and neurosis like unused energy in a system turning into waste heat.

So what do you do about that? Do more work, basically. Use more of that energy up. Shout down the energy miser in your head and do everything you can to use up all the energy you produce so that you are completely exhausted at the end of the day.

And if I can figure out how to get myself to do THAT, I’ll have it made.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I thought I had this problem licked.

In last Friday’s shopping, I bought an extra 600 g pack of trail mix to supplement my usual 1 kg bag of No Name Original Trail Mix and said to myself, “OK, surely THIS will be enough to see me through until next Friday. “

But it’s only Tuesday and I am staring in disbelief at a mostly empty canister of Trail Mix and wondering how the hell I managed to devour almost the entire 1.6 kg of various trail mixes over the course of just four days.

I mean, I know I ‘ve been super hungry lately, but I haven’t increased portion sizes to compensate. I don’t do that kind of thing.

At least, not consciously.

But the only explanation I can think of as to where it all went is that because I knew I had “plenty” of trail mix this week, I subconsciously increased my portion size by taking bigger handfuls from the canister and now I am almost out and it’s only Tuesday. I still have two more days plus the rest of today and Friday morning to cover.

There’s no way I can make it that far. I am going to need to either order my weekly groceries two days early (gack) or order a supplemental batch of groceries to see me through til Friday (and pay an additional delivery fee, argh). .

Or, ya know, learn to eat like a grownup despite my limitations. Ha ha ha ha…. ha.

No matter what I am eating, whether it’s trail mix or steal tartare, it has to last through the whole week. It makes me wonder if I need to get one of those little kitchen scales so I can measure my portions more precisely.

I would hate to have to get that anal about things, though. I hate that shit.

One nice thing about trail mix is that it’s something I can keep with me here in my bedroom, no trip to the kitchen required before I can eat it.

The trip to the kitchen is highly problematic because there are so many simple, easy meals that I just can’t have because I can’t transport them and use my walker at the same time. I just don’t have a hand free to carry them.

Like my beloved soups, stews, and chili. They are quite reasonable in price and I adore them, but how the heck do I get a bowl of soup back to my room via walker?

This is why I looked into getting myself a big Thermos when I first became crippled. Sadly, I don’t think anything ever came of that.

Something to shop for when I get my next deposit and thus have escaped the confines of a fucking five week month.

That’s the only reason I am stressed out about portion size. When it’s not a five week month and therefore I am not expecting to live for fives weeks on what nomally only has to last me four, I manage, by some miracle, not to stress about my groceries much.

Ergo, I greatly resent this fucking five week month bullshit coming along and disturbing my equilibrium and making me all neurotic about this shit again.

I mean, I find myself having to ponder how many meals a given edible item will cover and therefore how much per meal it costs.

I haven’t had to do that since my first days here in BC, way back in the early 2000s, when i was on regular welfare and hence starving.

Now I am getting almost three times the amount per month I got back then and yet I am still beset by the same neurosis every three or four months.

And it pisses me off.

More after the break.

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I’m not alone

But I dunno, Michael. I sure as hell feel alone. Incredibly alone. Completely alone. And I don’t remember ever feeling differently.

It’s better when I am with my friends, usually. I feel less alone then. I am still a long ways off from them but I can get close enough to feel some warmth.

Especially the warmth they get from me. That’s the only way I can enjoy my own glow. I need people to be in my orbit, reflecting my rays back to me, before I can bask in the warmth I share so freely with others.

It’s my life hack for bypassing depression’s anhedonia. And all those ways in which the rules are different for me than for everyone else.

Because you see, anything coming from me is invalid, because I am horrible and terrible and completely disgusting and far, far less than worthless.

I am a walking talking liability. A canker sore on the anal lips of life.

Or so the dark voices in my head tell me.

Ergo, by having my light reflected back to me from others, it gets “cleaned up” by not being totally from me any more, and then I can enjoy it.

And that’s why this foxy shines so bright. The end.

Anyhow, back to feeling alone.

I know that I am not alone in life. That there are people who care about me and love me and want me to heal and prosper and glow and be OK.

But the brutal truth is that I can barely feel it. And that’s all on me, not them. They are not doing anything wrong. It’s my own problems that keep me frozen in the dark.

I can feel the part of me that is supposed to be able to reach out and connect with others and I can feel it struggling to spark up and come online so I can finally come in out of the cold and come home.

But there is so much Midnight Tundra between me and that warm safe home. I feel so far away from others. The very idea of being able to reach out and find love seems alien to me. The kind of thing that only happens for other people.

But still, I hold out hope. Perhaps the right man (or series of men) could piece my shell and bring warmth and heat to my inner realm and finally melt the ice around my heart that I might live again.

I just hope I live long enough to find him (or them).

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m been tormented by my “demon hunger” lately.

And it’s really driving me right ’round the bend. Regular sized meals barely take the edge off. I had a whole Denny’s meal last night – starter salad, big chicken and ranch sandwich, lots of fries – and at the end of it all, the best I could say is that I wasn’t SUPER hungry any more.

But I could have gone for a big banana split right about then. And some cookies.

And I know why I am in this predicament : I have missed a couple of meals lately. Which I know I should never do, but end up doing anyway, blah blah blah and so on.

You know you’re not getting anywhere in life when your problems recur so often that you get tired of explaining them.

Patient readers know what I am talking about.

And as always, it’s very stressful to be super hungry all the damned time. The fact that my supplies have to stretch for five weeks instead of four does not help either. I can’t necessarily just decide to eat bigger meals a few times.

Plus we’re out of fruit. I keep forgetting to tell Julian that. So if you’re reading this, Julian, and I haven’t mentioned it to you yet, guess what?

We’re out of fruit.

And I eat a lot of fruit. Scientifically speaking, as cannibalistic as it sounds, I am quite “frugivorous”. When I can, I eat a piece of fruit with every meal, and I eat four meals a day, so that’s 28 pieces of fruit a week.

Which Joe (and now Julian) kindly pays for out of his own pocket when the amount we get with the weekly Costco trip is not enough.

The care and feeding of your Fruvous can become quite expensive, especially as they get older and require specialized care.

Good thing we’re so darn cute.

A new kind of fail

The world never stops inventing new ways to fuck with me.

I was taking my morning dose of Gabapentin when one of the two capsules fell apart just as I was putting it in my mouth, causing the powder inside the capsule to instead go directly on to my tongue, where I reflexively swallowed it.

This freaked me out. That’s not how things are supposed to go, and I know medications are engineered to work one specific way and you mess with that at your own peril.

So I tried to Google the problem but that was no use. All I got was websites telling me not to crush pills or open capsules to make them easier to swallow.

Well duh! I know that! It happened accidentally! Now what do I do?

But even after several rephrasings of my Google search in order to try to make it more precise to my needs, the closest thing I got to an answer was basically, “Oh, that happened? Yeah, that’s probably pretty bad. ”

Finally, one place had a useful suggestion : call Poison Control.

So I did, and got PUT ON FREAKING HOLD. I was on hold for twenty god damned minutes while I waited to see if I would DIE.

Luckily, it turned out that Gabapentin is engineered to be self-stabilizing, meaning the more your body absorbs, the less it CAN absorb.

Plus it turns out that all the capsule does is dump the powder into your stomach when it gets there anyhow, so swallowing the powder directly only sped the process up a bit.

So I was safe. I experienced a weird tingling numbness in parts of my body, but that was as likely to be from the panic as from the drug.

Still, stress like that I do not need.

More after the break.

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The wrong end of things

Feeling kinda shitty right now.

Which makes eating supper… tricky. My appetite is DOA so I have to force myself to eat this plain peanut butter sandwich.

Not the most appetizing meal but it’s the food my stomach objects to the least right now so I am kind of stuck with it.

Right now, I guess I would rather be lying down in the dark. I have a sinus headache and I am trying to get my sinuses to drain but they are being stubborn. I will have ot make sure my ears and nostrils are as clear as I can make them in order to create all the drainage that I can.

But as bad as I feel right now, it’s still better than how I felt earlier. I had this deep, terrible feeling that something was wrong with me, physically,. and the worst part was that I couldn’t put a label or a description to it.

Makes it kind of hard to take your problem to the ER.

Intake nurse : And what brings you to the emergency room today?
Me : I feel…. oogy.

It did seem to sort itself out eventually. But I have no idea what the hell was going on. Could have been something with my brain, or my heart, or even my nerves.

Or I could simply be going crazy. Proper crazy, none of this neurotic faffing about.

In a weird way, that would be kind of a relief. I feel like I have been dangling over the precipice of utter madness for so long that the idea of just letting myself drop into the void seems oddly soothing in a very unwholesome way.

And who knows, maybe it’s not even that steep a drop. Maybe I would find that I had been dangling a few feet off the ground all these years and now I can get up and walk around on solid ground just like everyone else.

But I dunno. I think in order for that to happen, I would have to be willing and able to become a lot more normal, and I don’t know if can do that.

I feel an attack of vertigo coming on just thinking about it. I’ve been the oddest of ducks for so long that it is very hard for me to imagine being in there with all the other critters of daily life without running screaming for the hills.

I am not say that this is a good thing. It’s not, it’s bad. It’s a primary symptom of my total social maladjustment and I really don’t know what I can do about that.

Whatever the solution is, it won’t be arrived at via the direct, logical analytical thought that I use to do pretty much everything else.

It will have to be a change to something deep, deep inside me on a deep, deep fundamental level well beyond my paltry powers of reason.

And that scares the hell out of me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kind of a lame title, I know. Sorry.

But I don’t have a lot on my mind at the moment. So ya get what ya get.

Talked to Joe on the phone today. Was great to hear from him, even though for obvious reasons he didn’t sound like himself.

His throat, among other parts, has been through a lot.

One thing that emerged is that I may very well have saved his life. Turns out that in addition to lymphoma and an opportunistic lung infection, his kidneys were on the merge of shutting down ’cause they were clogged up with the calcium crystals that are the forerunner of actual kidney stones.

Oh, they also found out that his spleen was three times bigger than it should be. Apparently that can happen as a result of infection.

So um, yeah. Good thing he went to the ER when he did, at my insistence.

I may have saved someone’s life via nagging. How apropos.

He had a room to himself for the first couple of days because they didn’t know what he had ergo best to treat him as infectious until proven otherwise.

I can relate. During my last stay at the Hospital Hilton, I had the ER’s specialized eye room all to myself for a couple of days.

I was in there for my eye going kablam, after all.

But then they kick you out into the regular ER and wow was that a nasty transition. Went from having a nice quiet little box of a room to myself to being right behind the big doors between the waiting room and the ER, and got to listen to the intake lady ask the same questions to patient after patient.

Oh well. I at least got to spend my last day there in a very nice ward. I am pretty sure it is usually a sort of semi-ICU ward where they normally put patients who require a lot of monitoring and care but not to the point of taking up a regular ICU bed.

It was very quiet and comfortable there. Most of my fellow patients were quite old, which is something I’m getting strangely accustomed to.

No wonder I had a dream in which I was the newest and youngest resident of an old folks’ home. Don’t laugh…. I may end up in assisted living yet.

Apparently poor Joe did not have the best selection of roommates when he was languishing in the ER. He had a screamer (howler, actually) in a semi-comatose state and a non stop talker who ain’t exactly saying nice things.

That kind of thing fascinates me because it happens in a space between clear conscious thought and the animal mind. Clearly, we can continue to talk even when our ability to think is severely compromised, and then what comes out can be a total stream of consciousness speech pattern as the barrier between thought and speech breaks down completely.

Hence such phenomena as Tourette’s, pseudo-bulbar affect, and talking in your sleep.

Sorry. Had to brain nerd out there for a minute.

Compared to all that, my Helmut from when I was in there in 2022 seems like a pussycat. Sure, he was rude, demanding, and a prick, but he didn’t scream in incoherent pain all the time, or never stop talking.

Now Joe is back to his childhood home, with his parents and his sister looking after him, and the rest of his medical treatment will happen there.

Sounds quite lovely, honestly. I would be so happy to be able to go home to my birth family when I got out of the hospital.

I still miss Joe a lot. But it’s a lot easier to deal with now that I have heard his voice.

More after the break.

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Anarchy and rage

By and large, I am a typical “peace, order, and good government” Canadian. I might advocate for some pretty radical ideas – like outlawing the stock market – but I am not an anarchist or a radical. I consider myself a reformer.

I want to repair the system, not tear it down.

But I get where that rage comes from. I have that rage too sometimes. There are times when watching the news makes me so mad I want to scream like an enraged monkey and throw a flaming brick through a window.

I just don’t let that side of me do the driving, so to speak. I will always be very passionate about my beliefs and my ideals and my principles, and that passion will always come out in my speech and mannerisms when I am aflame with inspiration.

Even though that tends to make my fellow Canadians very uncomfortable. We are not usually an impassioned people. Passionate people frighten us.

Oh well, I am what I am. A firebrand. Perhaps it is the French in me.

And yeah, I call myself a reformer, but even I have to admit that when you want reforms to the most basic levels of society and you would change nearly everything we do in the political sphere if you could, the difference between “reformer” and “anarchist” becomes somewhat academic.

And there is a hell of a lot I would change. Certainly enough to seem like anarchy to those people I would topple from their exalted but unwarranted perches way up high.

And make no mistake : if I was in charge, a hell of a lot of people would come crashing down to earth. The only penalty the rich and powerful fear is being made poor and ordinary, and that’s exactly what I would do to the one percent.

My government would take everything. Leave them right down here in the lower economic zone with the rest of us.

Have fun learning to cope, fuckers.

The difference is that I don’t jsut want to tear the system down, I want to replace it with something better. I still believe in government, I just want to make it better.

I guess that makes me a radical reformer.

I can live with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(I’m going to bitch about you, Julian, so you might want to skip this one. )

So, Joe has cancer.

Lymphatic cancer, to be specific. Cancer of the lymph nodes. Which is pretty bad.

And how I found this out was less than ideal.

Felicity, Julian, and I were on a Zoom meeting together, and Julian tells us Joe is doing well, resting comfortably, and they are still trying to figure out the exact DNA of the kind of lymphatic cancer he has.

This was the first either Felicity or I had heard that he had cancer, and we hadn’t even really been told. Julian just dropped it into the conversation like we already knew.

It gave me a vivid flashback to when I learned about my father’s death when my sister Catherine called me about his funeral.

And as in that case, this time it was the shock of it all that hurt almost as much as the news itself. If Julian had actually, properly told me, I would (of course) have been extremely sad to hear that about my dear Joe, but it would not have been nearly as big of a shock.

And I know why it happened. It’s because Julian is so timid. Actually telling us would have been scary and hard and a lot of responsibility, plus with nobody actually telling him to do it he would have needed to do it on his own initiative. and there was absolutely no way that was going to happen.

Julian, in general, makes other people do the thinking and make the decisions for him. He is terrified of doing thing based on his own judgment, at least if others are involved.

And usually this is, at worst, mildly annoying and a bit of a drag at times. But this time, something very important was involved, and he fucked it up. And I got hurt.

It didn’t help to then learn that they released Joe from the hospital, but instead of coming home to us, he went back to his childhood home elsewhere here in Richmond to be with his parents and his sister.

And I do not disagree with that decision. It makes sense for him to go back to his childhood home and be with three people who love him deeply and who can care for him more or less around the clock.

But it still hurts. I have been waiting for him to come home for so long that the idea that they released him and he didn’t even tell us, just fucked off back to his parents’ place leaving me to think he was still in the hospital. is very painful to me.

It sucks. But I’ll get over it. Again, I agree that it was the right move.

But now I have no idea when the hell I will ever see him again. It’s not like he’s going to just go back to work and life will go back to normal now.

Being a cancer patient is pretty much a full time job. Hopefully, they caught the cancer early and it has not metastasized and spread to any other part of the body yet.

In that case, removing the lymph nodes might be enough. That’s still not good, as the lymph nodes are kind of important, but you can live without them as long as you take the right drugs and monitor your health carefully.

But there is no normal life for Joe now. Not unless they can get all the cancer out with the lymphotomy and some after-treatment, and after that it goes completely into remission and stays that way.

I hate the thought of him having to do chemo and radiation, although I am sure those are both a lot less harsh and barbaric than they used to be.

The world is a darker place now. And I always knew that would happen.

I just assumed it would happen to me.

More after the break.

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Bad things, good people

I’ll tell you one thing – the fact that Joe has cancer is all the proof I need that there ain’t no fucking justice in the world.

Because Joe is an awesome guy. And I mean that literally. I have often been in awe of how effortlessly competent and reliable and just plain solid he is.

In countless ways, he’s the person I wish I was. A true Taurus, a rock, an anchor, someone everyone can rely on to be there when they are needed and to do the right thing without even hesitating.

I only wish I could be like that. But I’ve got a head full of crazy to contend with.

Now patient readers know that I don’t believe the world to be fair. How could it be? There is nothing and nobody to make it fair.

Justice is a manufactured product. It no more is found in nature than an iPhone is.

But I am still human enough to feel like what has happened to Joe is terribly unfair.

Not that there’s anyone in the world who deserves to get cancer. (Well, maybe Trump). But of all the people to get it. my Joe? My dear sweet wonderful buddy Joe , whom I adore and with whom I have spent so many hours watching the Daily Show and Colbert and having so many wonderful conversations about everything under the sun.

As a human being, one of the hardest things to contend with is the sheer unthinking callousness of fate. Deep down, we all want to think that we are in control and that we can keep ourselves safe from all the harsh random shit that happens to others.

But we can’t. You could heave the healthiest lifestyle on the planet and drop dead of a heart attack. You could be kind and nice to everyone you meet and still get screwed over by someone who hates your guts. You could be the world’s safest driver and still have your car be totaled by someone who is the worst driver in Canada.

There truly is no justice in the world save for the justice we make ourselves.

And even that doesn’t always work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What the hell, let’s talk about my Dad again.

Thoughts about my father, the late Larry Donald Bertrand, were stirred up when I recently watched a video in which a British fellow talked at great length about how his apparently quite evil mother died, he felt nothing.

To which I commented something like, “Friend, if you really felt nothing, you would not have made a 35+ minute video talking about it. ”

He replied with something along the lines of, “No, I just found it interesting how… “.

So I told him about when my father Larry died, I convinced myself that it meant nothing to me. I hadn’t seen him in decades. He was entirely not in my life any more. I rarely even thought about him. So his death meant nothing to me. Right?

Wrong. That was pure intellectualizing bullcrap.

Absolutely nothing can make a parent who raised you no longer matter to you.

We are born with slots in our heads for parental figures and once they are in there, they are in there forever whether or not they deserve the job.

All I did by telling myself I didn’t care was uselessly delay my own grieving, And that’s what I told that British bloke.

Mourning my father isn’t easy for me, which is why I am still doing now despite him having died shortly after the beginning of the pandemic.

Meaning we never got to get together as a family and have a funeral for him. Oh well.

I know that in order to mourn Larry, I have to take my memories of him out of cold storage and do my best to feel them completely and thus rid myself of them in the only way that actually works.

And they are not all bad. He and I got along fine when it was just the two of us. He could relax and calm down, and therefore, so could I.

That was later in life, though. When I was a teen. As a child, I was just afraid of him, just like my siblings.

And that meant we tried not to be around him, and I know that hurt him deeply.

But it was his own damn fault for being so impatient, cranky, and irritable. You can’t expect your kids to want to be around you when you make being around you so tense.

It was like living with an ogre.

As a result, I grew up without what old school psychology called a “competent father figure” . Sure, he was there, but it’s not like he taught me how to ride a bike or threw the old pigskin back and forth with me.

And I sure as fuck couldn’t talk to him about my problems. He would only make things worse by getting mad about it. Including possibly getting mad at me.

Yeah, fuck that.

So because he was such a prick, most of my early childhood memories of him are of being afraid of him and having to walk on eggshells around him.

To his credit, he did manage to be calm and pleasant more Christmases than not.

Nevertheless, like I said, that was still my Dad. My father. He was the only father I will ever have and despite everything, I did love him, so I am no longer prepared to pretend that him dying meant nothing to me.

And I do miss him. And it hurts me that he died lonely and alone, even thought that too was his own damn fault for being so verbally abusive.

Drove everyone who might have cared about him away. including my sister Catherine and his second wife.

So dying all alone was the ending he deserved.

But it still hurts.

More after the break.

On being crazy

Still trying to wrap my head around the knowledge that I can’t expect sane, rational behaviour from myself.

Don’t get me wrong. I will always strive to make the best decisions that I can based on my best judgment and my highly incisive analytical faculties and such.

I can do nothing else. Those are the tools I have been given and I will use them the best I can when I can.

What has to change is the post-game analysis, as it were. I need to learn to accept that no matter how wise and insightful and deep I might be, when it comes time to act, I am quite likely to make poor decisions.

Or at the very least, imperfect decisions. And therein lies the rub.

Because I have such an incredibly brilliant analytical engine in my brain,. I will always be able to see a way in which any given decision could have been better.

But that doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision. The stakes are far too high for there to be only two possibilities : perfection, or failure.

That’s a recipe for self-loathing, a way for the depression to maintain itself while seeming, at least superficially, to be being merely having high standards.

Not acceptable. Nor is it truly logical. If high efficiency is the goal, then setting the standards impossibly high is antithetical to that aim.

Constant failure does not encourage continued striving.

That’s all just a fancy way of saying I need to forgive myself more. And I really want to. God knows I deserve it.

But it’s a hard thing to do. It requires a lot of very deep rewiring of the fundamental way I process the world and form my evaluations. It requires me to grow my humanity and learn to let go of the machinelike severity that my mind developed over all those lonely hours of thinking and playing games, and instead strengthen my sweet, loving, forgiving, understanding side that just wants people to be happy… including me.

I know that I can be a more strong, healthy, relaxed person who is comfortable in his own skin and not plagued by demons of my own devising who have grown fat and spoiled from all the latent potential they have consumed.

But I also know that getting there will not be easy. Change never is, and I am going to need to change a lot if I am to stop being the world’s oldest caterpillar and finally launch as a brilliant shining butterfly.

I hereby surrender myself to transformation.

Long live the new flesh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.