Talked to Doc Costin during Therapy Thursday about a change in medication.

He shot down the idea of an increase in my dose of Wellbutrin. According to him, my daily 300 mg is the ideal dose and the costs (like insomnia and anxiety) of going to 450 mg far outweigh the benefits (more energy).

I had a feeling it was a bad idea but I had to check it with him.

Instead, I am going to finally start reducing my dose of Paxil. It’s something he’s been bugging me to do from time to time for a while now, and I dealt with it via my signature move of agreeing but not actually doing anything about it.

That’s the path of least resistance when you’re Avoidant like me. You don’t have to confront the person by disagreeing with them and telling them you’re not going to do it, but you also don’t positively promise you’ll do it either.

You just agree that it would be a good idea.

Well this time, I am going to go through with it. We will be starting out by my having only 30 mg of Paxil twice a week instead of my usual 40 mg a day, and see how that works out for two or three weeks.

I am honestly kind of excited about the whole thing. I want to have better access to my emotions and Paxil works by damping down your emotions so it is most definitely getting in the way of where I want to be.

Plus Doc Costin says Paxil is an “old” drug with “all kinds of side effects (??)” so he would rather I was on something more modern and safe.

So, rah rah for tapering off. Apparently, and unsurprisingly, just suddenly switching to a different antidepressant is very much not a good idea.

It is, as they say in medicine, contraindicated.

That seems like such a clumsy way to say it, but it’s honestly less clunky than says “known to be a bad idea”, and a lot clearer too.

In Greek penis news, I am investigating a nude patch for Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey so I can wallow in the prurient joy of climbing around a version of Ancient Greece that looks like an all nude remake of 300.

Wouldn’t that be a treat?

This being ancient Greece as well as being a super violent game. most of the people I actually end up fighting are men. Makes sense, most of the them are soldiers

They are also all tan and muscular, which makes sense because why the heck not.

The maker of the nude patch claims he is trying for “realistic” nude models for all the characters, and that means I will be watching for two very important details :

1. All the men must be uncircumcised, This is something about which the historical record could not be more clear. The ancient Greeks were utterly horrified by the Egyptian practice of circumcision, and mocked it in their depictions of them by having their crotches adorned with a big X shaped scar.
2. Everyone must have buttholes. You would be amazed at how often they get left out. It’s become kind of a “thing” with me. In Skyrim, for example, not even the animals got buttholes. But there’s plenty of food around. Hmmmm. Even mods that explicitly include anal sex somehow manage to skip the actual orifice in question. Like, what the colorectal fuck, man?

That said, the buttholes are not a dealbreaker for me. I will be seriously disappointed but I can live with it.

But if those wangs are shorn then to hell with you people.

Nude patch UNINSTALLED.

More after the break.

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The eternal struggle

Once more, I have no appetite, yet I must eat (by Harlan Ellison).

Same as last time, the immediate causes is pooping. I took a dump and it went fine and all but afterward my lower intestines were kind of tied into a knot, which is something I did not notice until I sat up in bed as part of getting out of bed.

I have to get out of bed in stages these days in order to avoid that hellish grinding pain in my upper back that I have mentioned before.

Come to think of it, the rheumatologist asked me about back pain and I was like, “oh, no more so than usual. ”

I try. I really do. I try to answer doctors’ questions thoroughly and accurate and ignore my strong urge to tell authority figures what they want to hear so they will leave me alone and I can scurry back into the shadows.

And yet, I end up not telling them things anyhow. Le sigh.

Anyhow, end bracket end bracket. Point is, I am once more stuck unable to force myself to eat anything more than a tangerine for dinner, meaning I will once more miss a meal, and that frigging sucks.

Especially when that meal is supper, because that’s when I get my Vitamin B12. I guess I’m not going to get any of that today unless maybe I can work it into my midnight snack.

Assuming my appetite shows up for THAT.

I suppose this would be a good time to have those meal replacement shakes or something similar on hand. They are far from perfect but at least I could probably get one down without too much trouble.

One bit of progress : I am going to stop telling myself that, “next time, I will just force myself to eat no matter what!” after these incidents.

Because no I won’t. When I get like this, there is no negotiating with my stomach. Something is stopped up in the area right behind my navel and my body is very firm about not accepting any serious input at this point.

I could have the finest meal in all of creation handed to me on the proverbial silver platter right now, and I would still be unable to so much as look at it.

Why does my life have to be so fucked up?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s make another attempt to pick apart why I am unable to get on with life.

Like I have said before, subjectively speaking, it feels like when I try to even contemplate making actual moves to improve my lot in life, liquid nitrogen dispensers pop out of the walls and freeze me to the spot.

Chemically, this is presumably a parasympathetic response. On some deep level, my system learned to respond to all potential adrenaline responses – aka any and all motivation activation responses – with a vastly overpowered adrenaline scrubbing response that not only keeps me from getting anywhere but actively punishes me for even thinking of trying.

That liquid nitrogen spray really fucking hurts, man.

But where does that come from? It has to be at least somewhat connected with the dire “decision” another part of my deep core programming made that wanting things I don’t have is bad and I am better off always making do with what I’ve got.

There’s a decision I’d like to appeal. With a hammer, if necessary.

So I would be better off if I could pry open the vault in which I have locked away all the natural desires that lead healthy humans to want things and even occasionally go to a heck of a lot of effort to get them.

Sounds stressful. And exhausting. But that’s the unhealthy part of me talking.

After all, there’s a hell of a lot more to life than being mellow and lazy.

To put it mildly.

I’d much rather be lively and engaged and feeling good, even if that means I risk sometimes having a massive panic attack when things go wrong.

So what? Big deal. Panic can be dealt with. It’s not the worst thing in the world.

It sure as fuck ain’t worse than being frozen in place for decades, unable to move forward with life at all and languishing in the doldrums as you rot away from the inside.

Which is what I have been doing. For my entire adult life. And I’m 51.

But how do I disarm this freezing mechanism? How do I convince my deep programming that it’s okay to want things again? How do I let go?

At the moment, the whole thing seems like an elaborate system to both keep me in this teeny tiny tomb of a life and keep me distracted enough with my entertainments that I don’t get restless and try to escape.

But if I do, it punishes me.

Seems pretty fascist, honestly. But I have mentioned that before.

The core question is, what does this freeze response protect me from? What am I getting out of this maladaptive reaction?

It’s protecting me from everything, basically. Sad but true. It keeps me from having to face reality, deal with my problems, take responsibility for myself, and grow the fuck up.

So part of the solution is to fully and totally decide that I want to do all that. And I know that deep down, I don’t want to do that. I want to keep crouching down in my deep dark cave avoiding the light and living the same stupid grubby disgusting kind of life.

That’s not what the full conscious me wants but there is a very deep layer of me that is still stuck in that mode and if I am to get on with life, I’m doing to need to get it out.

With love. Love is the only thing that will work. Anger and aggression will only lead to it burrowing deeper into my consciousness.

But love might just melt its frozen little heart.

More after the break.

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So damned tired

Another part of my problem is that I am so damned tired all the time.

Kind of makes it hard to work up the ambition to try anything new. I almost always feel like I am only a few minute away from drifting off to sleep, and doing things like going to the kitchen and making myself some food leaves me panting and wheezing.

And it’s true that I have real physical problems to which this fatigue can be attributed.

But I suspect it is also something in which I hide from the world as well. Let’s just say that the unhealthy part of me is in no big hurry to gain more energy.

Why, that would just make us restless and uncomfortable! It would make being a passive slug in front of a computer far less pleasant, and what else is there to be?

There’s that fixed sense of self again.

I think I need to try to learn the lesson of esprit. It says that you should open yourself wide and embrace all of life and thus grow your soul and spirit into something that can embrace even more, and so forth and so on.

I definitely need something like that. Something that leads me away from life lived with my had stuffed up my ass. All locked away inside myself where I suffocate and stagnate and waste away from all my health issues, mental AND physical.

I have to open myself up to clean waters so that they may flow through me and carry all this toxic gunk and bad mentation away and leave me clean.

Raise the curtains, open the widows wide, and let some sunshine and clean air into this stuffy old head of mine.

And for that I will need to stop thinking of personal energy as a zero sum game, where I have a very finite amount of it and when that’s gone, I am dead in the water.

Bullshit. There are activities that can give me energy. More energy than they cost.

They turn a profit, so to speak.

Once more, like with pleasure and joy, it’s a matter of reaching out into the world and finding and taking what I need instead of this bullshit austerity bunker I have been living in for so long.

There’s been no holocaust. The world is as full of wonderful things as ever. It is beyond absurd to be living like a miser in this lush and plentiful age.

I just need to unbend enough to look around for what I really need.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I am starting to think they never will.

Went to see yet another doctor, Doctor Merhani, today. He’s a rheumatologist. I found out about the appointment yesterday afternoon.

Apparently, Doctor Chao, my GP, referred me to a rheumatologist last freaking November, and yet I only got this appointment in the end of May because someone had canceled at the last minute.

Jesus flying Christ. Healthcare has some fuckin’ problems all right.

Luckily, it was a simple and non-invasive visit. Having only a vague notion of what a rheumatologist^[1] is, and having been told that the visit would take one and a half hours, I was a little worried that I was in for some sort of very weird and/or painful and/or humiliating tests and/or procedures.

I guess the mildly weird stuff Doctor Madhani put me through, plus having to get my eyeball lasered by a very weird man, has me a little on edge.

But no, it was just me answering questions plus those by now super familiar “don’t let me push your leg down” type muscle strength exercises.

I was mostly seen by a resident, Doctor Xu, as it turns out. Doctor Merhani only showed up at the end basically to quiz his resident.

That’s kind of a weird name for a junior doctor to be, isn’t it?

“Is she a doctor yet?”
“No, but she lives here. ”

Their conclusions were predictably inconclusive. Nobody knows what the fuck is wrong with me. I remain a medical mystery.

Now fasten your seatbelts and roll up your windows because we’re going to Crazytown.

Because I can’t help but feel like this is all my fault. As if this is the ultimate doom-level expression of my inability to give people the responses they expect and now it’s going to put me in a fucking wheelchair some day.

With that comes the idea that if I could just explain things to the medical professionals the right way, a light would go on in their heads and they would know exactly what is wrong with me and be able to cure it overnight.

That is pure madness, obviously. At the very least it sounds crazy. In fact it sounds like typical “I’d rather think I was the worst thing ever than face the fact that the world is cruel and arbitrary and I have been the victim of massive injustice” thinking that all mistreated children, whether they are grown up now or not, fall prey too.

It might not be better to think you are heinous and it’s certainly not accurate to do so, but it’s one hell of a lot easier.

Because say I do fully forgive myself and place all the blame on the people who did (or didn’t do) those things to me…. then what?

I go on a five province killing spree?

I mean, I’m 51 now. Whoever did whatever to me is probably long dead or too fucking old to even remember me any more.

I could launch tirades against the remaining members of my immediate family, but I am not sure what that would accomplish.

And I can no longer blame it all on them, either. Sure, they should have paid more attention to me, but I was very shy and furtive and self-minimizing, so I did not make it easy. Most often I just wanted to scurry back into my hole.

And I often wasn’t really emotionally present anyhow.

So sure. Yup. A lot of what I needed in my childhood just was not there. Love, support, hope, guidance, discipline, expectations. I had none of that.

Nobody gave a shit what happened to me. I was never anyone’s priority. Everybody was too busy with their own lives to care about that kid – what’s his name? Who cares – who is around here for some reason.

I don’t care what happens to him as long as he doesn’t expect a share of my stuff!

But what the fuck am I supposed to do about it now?

More after the break.

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Change and grow

Optional viewing, included as a reference :

The above talks about how important it is to have a growth oriented mindset instead of having a fixed sense of self.

And that’s something I have talked about in this space before.

The dots that I had not quite connected on my own yet were that a growth oriented person knows that by challenging themselves and taking on difficult tasks, they can make their abilities grow as they themselves grow stronger and more resilient.

This is far healthier than being a prolapsed gifted kid like me who is still looking to recapture his glory days when everything came easy to me (in school) and I got praise for doing what, for me, were super basic things.

That’s the problem with never having been challenged by school. I never learned to overcome challenges because I never faced any. Everything was absurdly easy.

To the point of making me feel insulted, but luckily I was never dumb enough to admit that out loud to anyone.

Ergo, the idea of expanding my capacities never came up. I already had way, way more capacity than needed. Why would I need more?

But from the point of view of a 51 year old loser, I can finally see that what I needed was to exercise and strengthen my wherewithal and will and nerve and grit.

I needed to stop being such a pussy, basically. Not to meet some arbitrary standard of manliness but because pussies lead sad, pathetic lives.

Man up and be happier, son. Something your gym teacher (or drill Seargent or angry father etc.) is not articulate enough to actually be able to tell you.

The most important lesson so far from the vid is that it is possible to go from the fixed mindset to the growth mindset and the first step is to simply admit to yourself that it is possible to be better. Than you are not a finished product. You CAN improve.

And I think I am ready for that lesson. I am ready to reach out and grab greater inner fortitude and capacity in whatever form I can find it and make myself a tougher, stronger, more resilient, more capable person instead of the spineless vacillating puff pastry of a man that I have been,

Yes, I have always had amazing abilities.

But now I need to get the ones that let me use the rest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I might not be quite as crippled as I thought I was.

The scene : I am making my lunch at around 4:15 pm (weird schedule, I know) when the phone rings. I answer it in the kitchen because… we have a phone there.

I guess that was implied. Whatever.

Turns out it’s a doctor’s office telling me I have an appointment tomorrow. 2:45 pm, a Doctor Khemani, who is a rheumatologist.

Makes sense. My problems could very well have something to do with rheumatism or some other related disorder.

But I’m in the kitchen, so there’s no easy way for me to take down the deets of the appointment. So I decide to switch to the phone in my room.

I am half way to my desk when I realize I have left my walker behind.

I hesitate for a moment or two, but the path is clear: I might as well go the rest of the way on my own two legs too.

So I do. And when I get off the phone, I walk back to the kitchen and finish making my lunch, all without being crippled by pain.

Hmmm. This could be big.

Now by the time I am seated in front of Mister Computer again, my legs are definitely not super happy with me. But they are still working. I did not end up in a heap on the floor as they just plain gave up on me.

Which is what I would have expected.

And the pain I was experiencing them, and am experiencing now, could just be from the atrophy caused by my not putting my full weight on my legs for coming up on two years now. Plus, it’s been 8 hours since my last dose of Gabapentin, which means I am 2/3 of the way to the next dose.

Could it be that my legs have actually miraculously recovered? Might I actually be able to walk like a human being again? Might I actually be FREE?

Maybe. It’s certainly worth investigating.

So I am now going to push my limits somewhat. I am going to make short trips sans walker here in the apartment and see how that works out.

I can’t imagine I will have regained full, normal use of my legs just yet. But it now seems like it might be possible if I get more exercise and maybe some physio.

Right now, the muscle fibers in my legs feel sort of tight. Like the beginning of a cramp. And there is a slight burning sensation in the big tendons connecting my leg to my kneecap, as well as deep in my heel and ankle.

So it’s nowhere near being a “throw the cane away” level miracle but it certainly emboldens me to test my limits.

Even if all I get out of it is the ability to go to the kitchen and back unaided, that would still be something. I might not need my “indoor” walker at all any more.

If that works out OK, what the heck, maybe I will try to make it down to the car.

But not being (that kind of) insane, I will have Julian push the walker right behind me the whole way in case I can’t make it.

I’ve had little incidents like this before but I was too chickenshit to follow up on them to see if I really have gotten better.

Could be that I have been using the walker for no good reason for a while now. How would I know? I just assumed I still needed it. Who wouldn’t?

Got to find out where I stand now, So to speak.

More after the break.

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The longest sigh

Feeling kind of melancholy right now. And wistful. Like I just want to heave a sigh that lasts an hour or two in order to let all the emotions out.

It’s a dark mood, but not a terrible one. I’d rather be sad than depressed any day.

Sadness has feet. Sadness moves. Sadness carries within it the notion that it will end. And sadness expresses something about your internal emotional state and therefore releases some of those emotions into the world.

All depression expresses is the cruel and hungering void. That vast yawning gulf inside of you that silently screams out the pain of all that is missing inside you because of depression’s killing frost.

Man, I should be a poet.

I guess I sort of am.

But depression does not carry within in it the feeling that it will end, even though it always does. It may not end completely but while the frost may remain, the storm that brought it never lasts.

Everything ends, even the bad stuff.

My Well of Pain feels restless tonight. Like some kind of primordial critter is splashing around in there like a bear cub.

Patience, little one. I’m drinking as fast as I can.

And that, too, feels like a process that will eventually end. Despite the apparent endlessness of my Midnight Tundra, I know that I will eventually empty that well and maybe even get to look around and take stock of my actual life.

Or at least become more alert to my surroundings.

What I truly need is a rebirth. A do-over. A cosmic hitting of my reset button. Something to definitively cut me off from my past and the vast amounts of absolutely nothing – no job, no family, no love affairs – it contains.

But I lack the spiritual resources to create such an event. I am still far too rational and stable for nervous breakdowns or spiritual epiphanies or mind-rending visions of a world that seems realer than reality.

I am way too boring for that shit.

Knowing the laughable limitations of my supposed “reason” does not, alas, automatically open up any alternatives.

I don’t know how one finds true spirituality this late in life apart from having a heart attack, but there has to be some way to build a bridge to that holy place that does not require me to make a leap of faith.

Or at least, only requires one small enough for even my faith to make.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not everything can be accomplished by trying.

Lately, I have been pondering this attitude of mine that I absolutely have to get my life together and that every day I do not do that is a huge personal failure.

Stated plainly and overtly like that, it’s obviously a terrible attitude. Clearly it is what is dooming me to never actually getting anywhere because this feeling of constant failure leaves me demoralized and depressed and therefore incapable of actually doing the life-affirming things that would lead to a better life in the first place.

In fact, this constant self-persecution is the very thing that I withdraw from reality into my world of video games et al to avoid. If I could just let the fuck up on myself and forgive myself for being how I am, I might actually start truly believing in myself enough to get some things done.

In order to achieve that blessed state, then, I have to somehow disarm and disable the atrocious belief system underpinning it all.

I have to stop hating myself for how I am and start loving myself both for the scintillating wonder that I am and the radiant masterpiece I can be.

And I am part way there. I definitely have some sense of my own unique amazingness. I know that I am an incredible creature with nearly magical level of talent and intelligence and a charming and witty personality to boot.

Sadly, my belief in that knowledge still comes and goes. When my depressed worsens and the mind fog thickens, I fall back into seeing my fabulousness as, at best, a useless ornamentation to my worthlessness, and at worst, the ultimate damnation of my rotted disgusting self because “look at all this potential I am wasting”.

It’s astounding how depression can turn a positive into a negative, n’est-ce pas?

But whatever. Depression’s gonna depress. It will just keep pumping out the worst possible impressions of every bit of information like it’s my own personal Fox (sic) News and just like that network, whatever the hell it says is less than worthless precisely because it is so hopelessly biased.

It still lives rent free in my head, but I am in the process of evicting it

I’m getting better at remembering how awesome I am, at least. IT takes far less of a mental effort to do so than it used to.

Yet I am not yet to the place where I can call upon this knowledge to help me feel better when my mood is dark, or even to let it pull me out of that dark place.

Sad to say, if I try to do that now, what happens instead is that I just find this sudden brightness irritating, like I was in a dark room and someone turned on the light.

This is a desperately unhealthy reaction and explains a lot about why I stay “in the dark” a lot of the time.

I’d be much better off just hanging in there until I got used to it.

But it does nevertheless help with the recovery. It might not get me out of the depths of depression but it’s very nice to have when I am on the way back up out of them.

Where was I? Oh right, toxic self-loathing.

The problem with self-forgiveness, or one of them at least, is that it leaves me with a lot of energy I don’t know what to do with. When one stops gnawing on one’s own bones, one must find oneself something else to chew on.

And that’s always my problem, isn’t it? What to do with all that anger when I am no longer directing it inward.

Luckily, I have one key insight now : anger is energy and energy can always be transformed. So all that rage need not necessarily be expressed in a dark, negative, destructive way that leaves the world a worse place.

It might even be possible to turn it into the very sort of upbeat, happy, warm energy that I need in order to be a healthier person.

I just need to get over finding that kind of thing really irritating.

More after the break.

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The Well of Pain

It’s actually more of a well of trauma, but that didn’t sound as cool.

It occurred to me recently that I have this well of trauma in me that goes all the way back to my primary trauma of being raped when I was 4 and that I have been drinking from ever since in an attempt to process said trauma.

But because I didn’t know this was going on, I have been drinking from it very, very slowly and hence not getting demonstrably better as well as feeling like I will never ever get through it all.

It’s been such a slow process mostly because my emotional aperture was so restricted. It was like trying to drink a lake through a cocktail straw. While I was still bound up in my false “logical” bullshit mindset, I could not access my emotions except in tiny little morsels small enough not to set off my anti-anxiety alarms, and even then they had to be rendered inert via intellectualization.

Like, say, only being able to truly process your emotions by writing about them. Ahem.

But I am getting better. I am widening that aperture and letting more and more of my emotions through and as a result I am drinking that nasty but necessary well water fast enough that I can almost forsee a time when that well will be empty.

And at least now I know what I am doing. I am drinking from my well of pain. Through this, I am processing that massive trauma from a long time ago, and probably a hell of a lot of other trauma too.

It all ends up in the Well. And you know what they say….

All’s Well that ends Well!

I’ll see myself out now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kind of like this :

….but not really.

Because I’m not singing to anyone in particular. In fact, it shocks me to the core to realize just how deeply and terrible I gave up on other people entirely.

That’s what happens when you just keep retreating further and further from reality, I guess. You can only be terribly lonely for so long before you become numb instead, like your loneliness center has shorted out from the strain.

And you despair. You stop being capable of believing that things could ever be different, and you turn almost completely inward, and the real world becomes a distant inconvenience that you deal with as little as you can possibly get away with.

And you pay a terrible price for that attitude. Many of them, in fact.

I keep saying that I live my life through screens, but it’s a lot worse than that, actually. Because I could be living a far more active and engaged life through my screens too. I have the entire Internet to use as my playground, springboard. jungle safari, and action filled fun park and instead I go to one place to socialize and everything else is passive.

The closest I get to a social media presence is leaving comments on YouTube.

And that’s not very close at all. Is my point.

Above all, it’s a sealed off existence. Nothing truly gets in and precious little gets out. My exposure to the world outside my capacious cranium is minimal and largely mitigated through the sanitizing chamber of my highly intellectualizing mind.

Through it, I can feel like I am handling things. In fact, I must be handling them so much better than most because I see and understand the world so much better than them.

But that’s some seriously rank bullshit. I don’t handle a god damned thing. Even the most basic of life functions, like those relating to hygiene, go to shit because I am too removed from reality to deal with them.

They are part of that world Out There that I pointedly ignore. That I abandoned a long time ago and left to rot so that I could stay in my inner bunker almost 24/7.

And maybe that’s my real addiction. The one for which my video game addiction is merely a sub-symptom.

My real addiction is fleeing from reality. Withdrawing as deep as I have to in order to escape the largely imaginary demons that come clawing for me as they try to rip me from my comfortable, safe tomb and drag me into the horrid light of day.

How dare they. I’m fine in here. Now let me get back to whining and pining for the day when I will feel the sun on my naked body and feel the fresh, cool breeze of freedom.

Because part of me definitely wants out but I am just too scared. The fear holds me back like suction and keeps me glued to this ragged rotten ridiculous life of mine no matter how much I long for greener pastures.

I know for a fact that I want to go there.

But it’s also a fact that I want to stay here, too. I am stranded in between the two extremes of wanting to escape but being unwilling to let go of what I already have.

And I can’t have both, though not for lack of trying. After all, this dark hole of mine is all I have known for a very long time whereas that big bright happy world outside my cell is so much bigger and louder and scarier than the world in here.

I mean, I guess it looks nice out there. Indeed, it has everything I could even want.

But right now it feels like it would overwhelm me and overload me and kill me before it could do me any good.

Probably not true. But it’s how I feel.

More after the break.

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It gets worse, spasmodic edition

I’ve been really spazzing out lately.

Going through one of these periods where I get very twitchy and my proprioception goes all to hell and I keep knocking things over and dropping things and banging my knuckles on things and all the rest.

And as always, it makes me paranoid that I am going to end up a twitching, jerking, spastic pile of palsied muscle who can’t so much as speak any more.

A vivid imagination is such a mixed blessing, don’t you think?

Anyhow, as also per usual, the problem has gotten so bad that it almost seems supernatural. The other night my bucket o’ popcorn fell on the floor, and I swear to God that it was just sitting there near where I sit in the living room perfectly stable and fine and then I felt and heard something hit the bottom of the bucket and the damned thing went ass over teakettle onto the floor.

And just now, I went to get my KFC from the door and my Diet Pepsi was in a cup on the floor next to the bag and I went to pick everything up but spazzed my walker’s wheel forward and kasploosh, there goes my drink, all over the floor. All of it.

I just left it all there. I sure as hell could not have cleaned it up, seeing as just bending down to pick it up was beyond me. When Julian gets home, he’ll see it out there, and possibly figure out what happened.

I wish I could have cleaned it up but I’m broken.

As you can imagine, having all these little things happen is very very frustrating and depressing. And yet another thing eating away at my sense of stability and safety.

Maybe the universe is trying to teach me to do without it. I don’t know.

Maybe this is all leading to me finally getting sufficiently pissed off to angrily make actual lasting important change in my life.

Maybe some day I will look back on this period and be glad it happened because it sparked change that made my life EVER so much better.

But probably not.

I’ll probably just die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well this ought to be fun.

Because I am incredibly sleepy right now. I am definitely going through one of my “sleepy times” and this one is a lulu.

I keep really needing to nap, and when I do, when I wake up I am in a really bad state where I am all brain fried and sweaty and confused.

As in, I just woke up and had to shamble into the kitchen like a somnolent zombie and manage to complete the mind-shatteringly complex task of making myself a PB&J and grabbing a piece of fruit and a can of sody pop.

It was touch and go there for a while.

It doesn’t help that misfortune continues to plague me. Like I don’t have normal peanut butter at all right now.

I have Kraft’s “Just Peanuts” crap, which is both disgusting and vile. For those who don’t know, this kind of “all natural” peanut butter is just peanuts put through a blender, so it is a shiny oily fucking liquid that looks like an oil slick took a syphilitic shit and tastes like a combination of nothing and depression.

Unfortunately, the record show me ordering this crap, which means I probably did order it by accident.

Fortunately, DoorDash is still nice enough to give me a refund. But I am still stuck with this crap for like a week unless I get Julian to go buy me the real stuff.

The kicker is that for me, this shit is actually a ghost from the past for me because back when my mother was a 70’s health nut, she bought some “all natural” “nothing but peanuts” “peanut butter” and it was just like the crap I have no, only crunchy.

Complete with having to vigorously stir it up yourself before every use because “natural” peanut butter has nothing in it to keep the peanut oil from separating from the peanut… puree, I guess, so you have to mix it up a bunch before it will be anything like a “butter”.

I wonder if sticking it in the fridge will help? At this point, it can’t hurt.

More serious than that is the fact that my tablet has stopped working. Won’t take a charge, won’t work even when plugged in.

Ain’t that a peach.

It’s been dying for weeks, so this does not come as a shock. Saddening but not surprising. For weeks now, it would only charge now and then, when it felt like it.

A little bit now, then nothing, then more later, and so on. Never knew if I would come back to find it almost at 0 percent or at 100 percent or whatever.

So clearly, the battery is dead. It happens. I have had this tablet for a couple of years and use it many hours every day, so this was bound to occur.

Luckily, the battery CAN be replace. Looks like a new battery will cost me around $35 CDN, which is a lot less than a new tablet.

And from what I have seen, replacing the battery is simple enough that even I can do it. I just have to pry off the backplate, disconnect one little wire, then replace the battery and connected it up etc.

So it’s fixable. But in the meantime, I will be sans tablet.

Guess I will have to go back to like, reading books and playng around on my synthesizer and other primitive, mundane stuff.

Which honestly might help me sleep a whole lo better.

Silver linings and all that. Not nearly so visually overstimulated all the time. Give my eyes a chance to rests on a nice safe static book page.

More after the break.

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Another tired evening

Another big component of my being unable to get my life started is just plain being tired all the damned time.

The reasons for that are extremely complex. Between physical and psychological issues, I have a lot of reasons to be tired, and trying to figure out how to address them is therefore a very multilayered question.

Am I tired because I’m depressed, or depressed because I’m tired? Could better nutrition improve my energy and/or motivation level, or just make it more comfortable and relaxing to do nothing? Would a higher dose of Wellbutrin perk me up or just make me a lot more anxious? Or both?

Sounds pretty stressful to me.

For that matter, would any medication change help? It boggles my mind that people can decide that they need an adjustment to their meds. How do they know? How can one possibly make that determination? Based on what?

I can only surmise that what these people have that I don’t is a mental image of themselves as a happier, more functional, healthier person that they can compare their current state to and say, “Hmmm, nope, I still don’t feel right. ”

But I don’t have that. I’ve felt like this for more than 30 years. This is what is normal for me. I have no memory of feeling better or even different.

In fact, it’s hard for me to even conceive of feeling any other way, except in the most abstract and abstruse terms.

I can imagine the concept of feeling better but not the reality.

I can’t even imagine what that would feel like.

I would not even know what to ask Doctor Costin for. I can’t imagine how one would figure that out either. I don’t even know what direction my mood needs to go.

Gee doctor, is there a drug that makes you feel more competent and capable? One that helps you organize your mind and your life? One that banishes all my brain fog and makes me feel like I can handle reality without falling apart like a candy rose in the rain?

Something tells me that those are all problems too subtle and nuanced for pharmacology, and psychotherapy seems pretty helpless against them too.

Which means, of course, that as usual, it’s all up to me.

Like that’s ever not been the case. It’s all been up to me since my first god damned day of elementary school.

Nobody can help me with these things and I can’t handle them myself.

So I guess I’ll just die, then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because at least then, I would have some.

I have never in my life been a self-starter. For the most part, I have just drifted through life doing what I thought was expected me and otherwise retreating into my distractions.

So as a kid, I would get myself up, get myself fed, and get myself to school, then get myself home at the end of the school day because that was the path of least resistance and to do otherwise would have taken initiative.

I just kept following the path laid out in front of me. Not by my parents or siblings, of course. They didn’t give a shit what I did.

They were happy to go on believing that if they didn’t hear anything from me, everything must be OK, while also passively punishing me for telling them anything wasn’t OK.

It was quite a neat little scam. Very efficient.

When I was a kid, it was definitely not OK to not be OK. So to this day, I have serious trouble not presenting a happy face to the world because to do anything else would be to make myself vulnerable and leave myself exposed.

And not in the sexytimes fun way.

But note that at no point in my childhood did I explore my environment. I knew the way to and from school but that was it.

I didn’t try to make friends with the other kiddies. My social pariah status prevented that from really being an option. Plus I had so little in common with kids my age.

Um, yeah, cool LEGO set. Can we watch TV now?

But it was about more than lacking common interests. I was fundamentally and qualitatively different from them.

I was a very weird kid. Not sure where I might have belonged. Though I carry within my head of me being the super young kid in the Head of the Class class.

But we tried that. It didn’t work.

As a kid, I did what I do : I adapted. And I remained exactly as functional and tuned into reality as I needed to be to get through my life.

But the truth is, I wasn’t all that into reality at all. I was far too absorbed in my inner world, the world behind that big thick invisible wall, to give the world outside my skull very much thought at all.

That’s why I had no initiative. Initiative requires maintaining an active interest in the world and I just can’t.

I can fake an interest in the world by talking all you want about books, politics, psychology, philosophy, science, video games, or any other of my interests.

But I got most of what I know about those things through screens, not the real world. Screens, and my own ever-churning mental processes forever attempting to integrate everything I know into one coherent picture.

I know it’s impossible. But I cogitate onwards nevertheless.

I guess on a deep level, I just want the world to leave me alone, which it has been all to eager to do. There was never any chance of someone coming to my rescue by trying to pull my frozen ass out of the mud.

And if they had tried, I probably would have fought them. And won, because high IQ and inveterate stubbornness plus a very strong will make for a devastating combo.

Maybe they did try. I dunno. But when I was raped, it put me in a very distant place where nobody could reach me…. so they didn’t.

And here I am, still living on my lonely little planet far from the sun.

Oh well. At least it’s got Wi-Fi.

More after the break.

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Victim of piracy

Porch piracy, that is.

So I ordered some supplies off of Amazon Canada last night. Some of that Village Trail Mix from our friends at Yupik and some Russell Stove’s sugar free hard candies, peppermint and fruit flavoured, to fill up my empty candy jar.

It was supposed to arrive some time between 4 am and 8 am. Um, what the fuck? Whatever. I’ll get Julian to go get it when he and I are both up.

I send him, and… nothing. There is no package for me. Son of a bitch.

I go to the Amazon website and report the issue. The website says, “Oh, gee, that sucks. Thanks for telling us about it!”

This answer does not satisfy me.

I dig a little deeper, and the website tells me that I will probably “find” my package in between 24 and 48 hours.

So it’s up to me to find the damned thing? I’m not the one who lost it!

I looked up the shipping information. It says they delivered the thing at frigging 5:15 am! And they left it OUTSIDE the building.

Hence my figuring it just plain got stolen. Someone was walking by and saw an Amazon package and went YOINK.

I can only hope that when all they found was trail mix and hard candy. they were disappointed that they’d only deprived a boring old person of their joy.

The other alternatives are that my delivery person just plain lied about delivering it, which is laughably improbable, or that my package just ended up stuck in a unlikely nook or cranny outside the building somewhere, which has happened in the past.

What suck the most is that Amazon has me in check. It still COULD show up in a day or two, so there is nothing I can do about the issue right NOW.

But if it doesn’t show up, I am going to expect at LEAST a full refund, and preferably a little good faith punitive damages too, like my next order of the same stuff being free or half off or something like that.

God, the world is working hard to miss me off and beat me down lately.

But fuck it. I refuse to let it. I am going to keep fighting my way toward the light no matter what kind of crap life throws at me.

I’ll be the happiest motherfucker in the ICU if I have to.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That thing where I might have died. That thing.

I’ve been calling it a blood sugar crash, but the truth is that I am not sure. All I know is that I went through a period where I felt really, really bad and death felt like it was, if not quite knocking on the door, within hailing distance.

It was bad.

Happened Monday night, a bit after midnight. I woke up from a nap and felt like something was wrong.

Then I moved, and things got way, way worse.

I was nauseous and there was a tingling all through my body and my head was swimming and I was sweating like a block of ice in July.

And I had this terrible panicky feeling running underneath it all. and a deep down trembling like there was a low level earthquake happening. And my stomach felt like a witches’ cauldron on full boil.

I had skipped supper due to lack of appetite (which I know is stupid and yet I do it anyhow) and so the first thing I thought of was low blood sugar.

So I started eating my trail mix by the handful. Not the ideal thing for low blood sugar, but the raisins have fructose in them so I figured it would help.

Well, it helped with my boiling stomach, anyhow.

During all this, I couldn’t do much. Sitting up and reaching for my canister where I keep my trail mix took a lot out of me and the trembling and the nausea made me afraid to move for fear of setting off something much worse.

And just fear in general, really. I was freaking out.

Eventually I got it together enough to grab my phone and call Julian’s smartphone and get him to bring me some food and some water so I could steady myself.

This worked. Between the food and the water I got myself back to a state where I merely felt a little sick, which was a vast improvement.

Looking back, I am not at all sure blood sugar had anything to do with it. I think I was having some kind of reaction to dehydration and overheating.

After all, the trembling was accompanied by an overheated feeling like I was having an attack of heat stroke, and low blood sugar events usually leave me feeling the cold hand of death instead.

And it was a different kind of trembling too. Low intensity, higher frequency.

But I dunno. Could have been a blood sugar crash as well. Fucking around with my body like I always end up doing despite myself always leads to bad shit happening sooner or later.

It’s kind of my body’s own fault though. Like, I didn’t eat supper that night because my body felt too sick for me to eat. My appetite was well into the negative.

And that sure as fuck wasn’t the brain’s idea.

Plus there is a certain lack of self-discipline in play. I lack the grit to force myself to eat when I know I should eat regardless of lack of appetite.

And at the very least, I should hydrate extensively. Often getting some cold water into me solves the appetite problem too.

Heat stroke/heat sickness doesn’t fuck around and I get the feeling I will end up there a lot this summer if I don’t hydrate aggressively.

Which means getting up and going into my ensuite to refill my water glass many, many times in the day, and I don’t wanna.

But I don’t want to get sick like I did Monday night again either.

I need to run a hose from my computer chair to the sink.

More after the break.

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Aaaaaaand there goes the rest of my money

Just had a painful conversation with Julian, the upshot of which is that it looks like I am more or less on my own financially now.

I will have to pay for ALL my own groceries and other sundries and that will suck.

But a lot more than the numerical drain – which I can probably manage – is the emotional pain of it all. I feel abandoned and betrayed and very cold. It’s also very disruptive to my life and means that yet more of my precious spendable income will disappear from my life.

And that really hurts.

I’ve emailed Joe about it. I hate to bring him into this when he is recovering from chemo and all, but I desperately need some kind of clarity on where I stand.

I know I am a burden on everyone around me and that it must really suck having such a high maintenance millstone hanging around your neck.

I’m starting to wonder if I should just leave. Find some bachelor apartment somewhere, or SRO maybe, and take care of myself as best as I can so that I am not draining the finances and patience of my friends any more.

This is all putting me in a bad place mentally. Nothing dangerous, I just have a lot of things to process, most of which have nothing to do with the current situation other than having been activated by it.

I have definitely got a lot to talk to Doctor Costin about tomorrow.

It’s not like I think someone OWES me extra support for me. If we were the regular kind of roomies, I would have been paying for all these things myself anyhow.

But patient readers know that for me, financial security and emotional security are one and the same and this destabilizes my finances and hence my psyche.

I will get over this. I always do. It is my nature to flip out over things on the way to being able to be calm about them and I am learning to accept this.

What I need is a solid earned income. Enough to replace my disability cheques, at least. That way I can have some sort of pride in my existence instead of feeling a deep and terrible shame for even being alive.

Means leaving my shell behind, though. At least some of the time. A couple hours a day, maybe. Or more…. I’m a workhorse once I have a clear defined task ahead of me.

So, anyone know where I can make at least around $1350 a month?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More specifically, I pooped the bed again. Yesterday afternoon.

Which means that technically I should have gone to the ER or Urgent Care already. But I have not.

Because I still don’t wanna.

So um….. third time’s the charm?

If it happens a third time then no matter how much I hate being in the ER, I will have to go and find out what’s up with my butt.

I must say, I am very disappointed in it. It used to do its job so well, but lately it’s really lost its shit.

Ha ha ha.

Fun addition : the area where the fecal matter pools the most is also the place where the springs poke up out of my bed and attempt to perforate.

Hmmm. Maybe instead of a new power supply, I should be looking for a new mattress. Or just someone I can hire to clear off my bed and flip it.

Anyhow, so I am going through a LOT of Kleenex cleaning up my mess when I feel a terrible lancing pain in my finger and look to see blood dripping from it because I had indeed perforated it on a spring.

Great, now they’ve tasted blood. And now I have a wound covered in poop.

That’s got to be unsanitary.

Luckily it was a very shallow wound and I was able to get it flushed out with hot water in the sink of my ensuite bathroom right away. And I clot quite rapidly.

But you can see why that made me feel particularly put-upon by fate.

I hope this pooping the bed thing passes like it has before. I would hate to have to get used to wearing adult diapers all the time.

That would pretty much supercharge my Avoidant Personality Syndrome and I would find it very difficult to leave the apartment at all for any reason.

I mean, I end up filled with shame and fear now, when I have no good reason for it.

Add in chronic incontinence and hence the real possibility of me walking around in public with a literal shitload in my pants and you can forget about it.

I wouldn’t even be able to go to Wound Care, and those (mostly) ladies are all nurses and presumably quite used to dealing with a lot of unpleasant bodily secretions.

I don’t care. When dealing with toilet issues, you are dealing with extremely deep and powerful emotions from the very dawn of us as human beings. Learning to control our bladder and bowels and to empty them only in the right place is basically the very first thing we learn in our lives and we learn it before we even complete primary brain growth, so those lessons are locked into the very structure of our brains.

No wonder we find poop jokes so funny even when we’re adults. Humor comes from tension and there’s a lot of tension to relieve when it comes to poop et al.

Anyhow, enough of that shit.

I finally cleared enough HD space to install Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey, so when I am done blogging for now, I’m gonna go play it.

The trick will be to avoid my tendency to be a one game at a time dude because if I do that, either Pathfinder : Kingmaker or Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey will end up gathering dust on the shelf while I obsess over the other.

And that seems wasteful.

So I will alternate. Unless it turns out Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey is like, really really really really good.

Then all bets are off, kids!

More after the break.

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Who shit in my grits?

Still haven’t played Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey because when I tried to launch it from Steam, it insisted in also booting up Ubisoft’s own gaming platform, Ubisoft Connect, which then insisted I make a new password for it.

Grumble grumble, but whatever. So I follow the instructions and it keeps telling me that the password-change URL I am using has expired or changed.

And I don’t know WTF to do about THAT, so for the moment I am stymied.

When I am less pissed off about the whole thing, I will go to the Ubisoft website and contact their support staff (assuming they still have any) and pass the problem over to them and see what they can do about it.

God does it ever seem like the universe is going out of its way to fuck with me lately.

At least I managed to get out of the prologue in Pathfinder : Kingmaker. Now I am the Baron of a brand new kingdom, and it’s up to me to both adventure around as usual while also stopping by the capital now and then to look after my people.

Same as in the sequel, actually. Although I get the feeling in this game that the kingdom administration will be a lot more detailed and hands-on.

My official honorific is “your Grace”. LOL. Not the one I would have chosen, but it’s fine.

Dunno what I would have chosen. Something that suggests a calm, firm, gentle kind of power. The kind that reassures people that they have a powerful but benign rule who is a deadly threat to any who would threaten his kingdom but a lamb to his people.

Or something like that.

No idea what honorific that would BE, mind you.

What bothers me most about this Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey business is that not only did I go to some amount of trouble to clear the hard drive space for it, it’s a gift from my good buddy Maelkoth and that makes me all the more eager to play it.

Because it comes with LOVE!

No word from my sisters yet. Whatever. Been emailing back and forth with my brother David, though, and I am going to follow my New Year’s resolution to not be so isolated and try to make sure that keeps going.

There are people out there who love me and care about me and want me to do well and it’s only my mental illness that keeps me from feeling that love.

That big thick invisible wall locks me in that Midnight Tundra, and that’s why I was so convinced that I am all alone in this world. Abandoned. Forgotten. Unloved.

But that’s a lie. There is love out there for me despite the cold, and I am determined to keep systematically destroying that invisible wall until I can feel it.

I can already feel a little of the warmth of the sun coming from above me. There is a place of light and love and happiness waiting for me.

And god damn it, I’m going to make it there!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.