Didn’t make it to Wound Care this morning.

I started feeling rather off late last night. My limb were weaker than usual and I felt hot even though it was after midnight. And I was dizzy, too.

Making my midnight snack was an adventure in my weakened condition. I was lurching around our tiny kitchen and desperately clinging to the cabinetry the whole time.

So I warned Julian that there was a chance I would not make it to Wound Care.

And when I woke up this morning, I knew I would not be going, because in addition to my previously listed symptoms, I now had the all too familiar heaviness and scratchiness in my chest and a swollen, scratchy feeling in my throat.

Plus weird aches and pains in random parts of my body. Like the lower tendon connecting my right kneecap with my leg, and the first joint of my right pointer finger.

Hmmm, that sounds inflammatory. I will take an Aleve and see if it helps.

So yeah, yet another Wound Care missed. Which also means I did not get a chance to cash all these little checks.

You see, yesterday, I got a stack of envelopes in the mail, all from some place I had never heard of before.

I opened them up and found a bunch of checks for amounts as low as $0.03 and as much as $9.98. 7 checks totaling a little under $30.

How unusual. But it didn’t take long for me to solve the mystery when I spotted the word “Paypower” on the accompanying documents.

What I was receiving was the little bits of money I had left over at the end of the month when I switched from one month’s card to the next.

Mighty decent of the Pay Power folks to be so honest. I always assumed those bits o’ cash were gone forever.

In theory, there should be a metric buttload more of these little checks coming because I was a PayPower customed for WAY more than seven months.

I admit, it will be mildly embarrassing/amusing to go to my VanCity branch and cash all these little checks. But it’s a five week month and I really need the money.

And what the heck, I’m certainly not going to be the first person they see in such a fix.

I’ve also been pretty sleepy today. Another day where it takes a long time for me to get out of bed because I keep falling back asleep.

Makes me feel like I am trying to escape sleep’s gravity well.

On the video game front, I’ve beaten Cryptmaster. Not much of an ending, but whatever, it was a fun and wonderfully weird game to play.

There’s a limited about of continued play value as I have not unlocked all the character’s attacks and memories, so I can continue to fight monsters in order to get the letters to do that.

But meh. I’m iffy on that. For one thing, the game makes it oddly weird to find monsters to fight. I swear, there were a lot more monsters when I was still participating in the plot.

Guess I already killed most of them. Damn.

I also completed the main plotline in Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey. Honestly, the ending did not really feel very climactic. I mean, yeah, I killed the bad guy introduced in the early part of the game, but he was no match for me as an opponent and it wasn’t that hard to get to him and overall I was left expecting more.

And then the coda was basically :

“Isn’t it great that we’re together as a family again?”
“Yes, it sure is. ”
ROLL THE CREDITS

Um… okay then.

But of course, I am nowhere near done with the game. There’s still members of the Cult of Kosmos to hunt down, leveling up to do, and several DLC storylines to complete, not to mention the ridiculous amount of other types of sidequests and such these kinds of games are loaded with.

So I will probably keep playing for a while at least.

And I still have Pathfinder : Kingmaker going. And, ya know, hundreds of games in my Steam library and the rest of Steam at my fingertips when I have the $4.

So I am pretty much set.

More after the break.

---

The deep down dark

Feeling depressed at the moment.

But not in a bad way. Well, not all THAT bad anyhow.

It’s more like a darkly brooding melancholy. I don’t hate myself or have any inclination towards self-harm or anything.

I kind of hate life at the moment but not for any particular reason. Though I am sure I could come up with quite the laundry list of reasons if I tried.

So I won’t try.

As always, I feel like I am rocking back and forth between darkness and light.

The darkness comes when I have yet another batch of long suppressed black emotion to burn and the light comes when that batch had ended and in its wake I have a precious little space in which I can strive with all my might to learn to be happy.

Because I am more convinced than ever before that it’s a skill. You have to make yourself happy, it doesn’t come naturally. It takes effort, and that’s why depression’s anti-effort bias is so god damned toxic.

Like so many other things. it’s like a muscle of the mind. One you use to elevate yourself without waiting for a priori permission from the real world.

Right now, that’s a struggle I am still fighting. A good working name for this ability to elevate oneself would be “faith” and I still don’t have much of that.

I grasp the principle, and I have for a long time. I even encapsulated it as : “We hope not because there is reason to hope, but because it is better to hope.”

But articulating it and putting it into practice are radically different things, at least for me. To make it come true, I have to dream it first, and then hold on tight to that dream long enough for it to create something lasting in my mind.

Or at least, something that doesn’t instantly disappear when the lights go out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had the visit from the lady from Assisted Living this morning.

About an hour before the 10 am visit, I was getting so (irrationally) nervous about the whole thing that I decided to take an Alprazolam to steady myself.

What then followed was a fascinating feeling of my anxiety and the drug duking it out in my blood stream. I could clearly feel my mind trying to assert its adrenalized state against the calm, cool feel of the Alprazolam.

Every time I say the name of that drug, I expect a genie to appear.

I did manage to get some cleaning done before our morning guest arrives. My funky little grotto is nowhere near clean but it’s a lot cleanER than it was before.

I will continue to peck away at the job, a lil here and a lil there, until I have cleaned up my room for the first time since we moved in here a decade ago.

It’s important that I have gotten the job started. I am going to try my best to solidify the lesson that cleaning is really no big deal, despite what the forces of evil in my mind say, and I am free to make my environment more pleasant and decent whenever I like.

OK, enough preliminaries, on to the visit.

She was nice. Had an accent I couldn’t place. Kind of like Russian but not quite. So maybe her language of origin is a related Slovak tongue of some sort.

Basically, she asked me two tons of questions about myself and my needs. I was glad that Julian was also there, as that helped me stay calm almost as much as the Alprazolam did. Thanks Julian!

On the less fun level, tussling with my anxiety this morning did remind me that I am, in fact, a crazy person.

And yet, in a weird way, that made me feel better. It felt good to feel anxious because it still beats feeling numb. I’d rather get freaked out and take a pill than just feel nothing.

At least being scared makes me feel alive.

Anyhow, we went over a ton of stuff. For example, there’s a sort of drop in program for people with disabilities she wants me to try. They meet once a week and stay from around 9 am to 2 pm, having lunch together as well as occasional snacks.

And I know it’s something I should at least try. I need some way of breaking out of my limited world of Denny’s and Wound Care. I need to meet new people and learn to socialize and essentially finally get the kindergarten education I missed way back when I was of preschool age.

But obviously, the idea of doing that REALLY sets off my socially anxious/Avoidant side. So if I am to give this thing a try, I will have to climb that mountain first.

Undoubtedly I would take another Alprazolam before heading there.

We also talked about a program where once a week, I could go to an old folks’ home and the staff there would use their walk-in tubs and such to give me a shower.

I… really would rather not be washed by another person. Like most people, I have not been washed by someone else since I was a toddler. I would much rather go into the walk in tub by myself and wash myself, with a staff member standing by in case something goes wrong.

She is also referring me to an occupational therapist who will assess my physical needs. I didn’t bother telling her that I had seen one twice, both times when I was leaving the hospital after a long-ish stay, and yet, somehow, nothing came of it.

Probably because there was something I was supposed to do to get the ball rolling but I missed it in the deluge of information they keep subjecting me to.

And the social worker this morning was no exception. So much information given to me all at once, without a break, and I am expected to somehow remember it all?

I can’t do that. By this time next week, I will have forgotten most or all of it.

If these people want me to do a whole bunch of things, they are going to have to make me an itinerary.

Otherwise my foggy mind won’t be able to retain any of it.

More after the break.

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Two kinds of memory

I can hear you asking, “But Fruvous, you are so academically gifted. Why can’t you apply that to all the medical information they throw at you?”

At least I think that’s you I hear asking. Might be Floyd.

Good question, you and/or Floyd. Why can’t I treat these medical infodumps like lectures at school and just passively absorb the info?

Well, for one, it’s not a lecture in that it is aimed directly at me, not an audience of students that happens to include me, and therefore it is a lot more stressful, and stress inhibits memory formation.

Also, it involves a mix of things I’m supposed to remember and things I am supposed to do, and that’s a lot more complex than a regular lecture.

Additionally, there’s the fact that I am out of practice when it comes to academic learning. Haven’t been in school since 2018 or so.

And finally, academic learning tends to fit into an overall pattern of knowledge that I have been subconsciously learning through the whole course, whereas these medical tsunamis are quite out of context in my life.

What I really need to do is take my tablet to these meetings and record them. Along with taking pictures of whatever documents they hand me.

Eh, who am I kidding? I would probably still end up utterly lost.

And yet, it’s not like I am being treated any differently than anyone else. So these infodumps must not be a problem for most people.

At least I have Julian to help me make sense of it all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The one that was inflicted directly and voluntarily by my parents when they took me out of university and made me move back into my childhood home and, indeed, back into my childhood bedroom.

Is it any wonder that I fell apart? After two years of UPEI and my awesome group of nerdy friends, I was finally starting to blossom as a person. I was even thinking of trying to find or start a GLBT at UPEI type club so us fags could meet n’ greet n’ so on.

But then my parents dropped the news like a guillotine’s blade that they were withdrawing funding so they could take early retirement because my father just couldn’t take two more years of being a provincial civil servant.

And the worst part is, they did it with my blessing. When they took my brother and me out for dinner and told us about their plan, my mother added that they would only do it if we agreed to it.

Which I did. Because that was my role in the family. Everything was always A-OK with me. Whatever they wanted to do to suit themselves, I adjusted and adapted to it and never uttered a single word of complaint.

Did it cheerfully, even.

So I readily agreed to let them rip my life into pieces and leave all my friends behind to live in Summerside again and stop having dreams.

And in doing so, betrayed my brother as well as myself. When I so readily agreed to my parents’ plan, he felt there was no point in him objecting, so he tacitly agreed to this horrible plan too.

I feel horrible about that. I both betrayed him and misled him.

And there is an even more painful coda to that terrible night : the night a few days later when I cheerfully and blithely told my college friends that I was leaving for two years or so and they would not see me for that long, long time.

I honestly did not see why that would be a big deal. Then, as now, I have a really hard time believing that people actual enjoy my presence and that it matters to them whether I am around or not.

Part of that is low self-esteem. But another part is my deep down need for autonomy. A part of me doesn’t want any kind of attachment or obligation, and so it’s easiest to think that nobody really needs me around.

I don’t like that about myself. It’s irresponsible. I have a strong effect on those I am close to and I need to take responsibility for that.

II can still remember how shocked and bummed out my friends were when I gave them the news. Their crushed expressions haunt me to this day.

And there I was, acting like it was no big deal, totally in denial of my needs and my responsibilities and my connections.

That has to have made it much, much worse for them.

Later I found out that my friend group fell apart without me. I had been both the organizer and the spark plug that initiated getting together and without my leadership, they didn’t have what it took to stay together.

I was the lynchpin and the leader and I just walked away like it was nothing.

It took me many years and a total mental and physical collapse that lasted for almost half a year for me to even realize how badly my parents had fucked me over.

Ya wanna know why your bright little boy failed to launch, Mom and Dad?

It’s because you clipped my fucking wings.

And then you had the nerve to bug me to get a job when I was deep into depression by then and employment was simple not in the cards for me.

“I don’t understand. Why isn’t he automatically doing what makes things best for US?”

A boomer mystery for the ages.

More after the break.

---

Which wound is worse?

It’s hard to say.

The Wound from being raped as a toddler is certainly deeper and older and it hurts in such a deep and intimate way that it’s hard to imagine that anything could be as bad or worse for me than that.

I mean, I was only 4 years old. I hadn’t even completed primary brain growth yet. That means it hurt me on a fundamental neurological level.

It fucked up my brain, is what I am saying.

But being taken out of university by my selfish Boomer parents when I was just beginning to blossom as a person hurt me in a deep and terrible way as well.

A way which was made far worse by my inability to even recognize that they had done me wrong. Even when I was at my sickest, when I was dehydrated and malnourished and unable to keep any food down and I could do nothing but lie on the couch and watch TV all day, I did not think of it as my parents’ fault.

That’s how programmed I was to just do what I was told and to do so cheerfully and without even a hint of hesitation or reluctance.

Honestly, I was so glad to get any sort of attention or input from them that of course I would do what they said.

Most of the time they didn’t notice me at all. I might as well have been wallpaper.

So in many ways, these two tragedies bookended my adult life. One happened when I was 4, the other when I was 21.

Who knows what would have happened had I strenuously objected to my parents’ plans to take me out of school? My mother said they would only do it if we agreed to it, but maybe my father would have said, “Well we’re doing it anyway, like it or not. ”

I still would have been better off, though, for having stood up for myself and my right to have my rights and welfare be a priority in the lives of those close to me.

Maybe I would have had to break with my parents entirely and go on welfare in Charlottetown and learned to live on my own there.

And the sad thing is, I still would have been much better off if that happened. Instead, I went back to my childhood home and lost my fucking mind and rotted in place as I completely lost all life momentum and became the shell of a person typing these words to you today and that’s who I became after pulling myself out of being far, far worse off.

But it’s still not enough for me to make a satisfactory life for myself.

I’ve got a lot of repair work to do.

But I am going to make it, god dammit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh shit…. and P.S., the lady from Assisted Living is coming tomorrow at 10 am and I don’t have the energy to clean up first.

Oh well. She wanted to see my living conditions. And I live in filth.

…is pretty weird.

This mostly has to do with socks.

See, after wearing a pair of socks for approximately eight hours, the right sock starts falling off of my foot. It just slides right off. I am always having to either pull it up, or worse, go looking for the damned thing.

Sometimes, I get so frustrated from the search that I just put on any random sock I happen to come across.

This is slightly offensive to my sense of order, but fuck it.

And I honestly don’t know what my foot is doing to cause this to happen. I can only surmise that it somehow changes shape due to swelling of some sort.

But you’d think that would make the sock tighter, not looser.

So maybe it’s something that my foot is doing to the sock while I am wearing it. Stretching it out in some way that it can’t instantly snap back from.

But how? Like, what de fuck, man. What is one foot doing to the sock that the other one does not and why is there a difference?

What the fuck is wrong with my right foot?

I have no idea. It’s possible that my foot changes shape somewhat during the day due to diabetes complications. Lord knows my feet are not anyone’s idea of healthy.

Hence my having to go get the bandages on them changed twice a week.

One last datum : whatever my foot does to the sock, it recovers from it when it is washed. And that’s also strange because you’d think that something that changes the relationship between my foot and its sock to such an extent that the sock literally just slides off at the slightest provocation would leave a lasting mark.

But nope. Either the foot changes back or the sock changes back or both.

My feet are so weird.

Feeling kinda tired and worn out today. Makes it hard to even imagine doing anything but the usual burning through my remaining time on Earth playing video games and blogging to you fine people.

I have come to one conclusion, though : my entire approach to getting out of this hole is wrong. I put way too much pressure on myself and then crumble and flee.

Like, take those two sites, FlexJobs (remote work) and Notd (people can subscribe to your writing) , that I have mentioned before. The main reason I haven’t done anything with those two sites is that I have laden them down with portent in my mind as the big thing that could change my life forever.

For the better, mind you. But that’s still scarier than most fuck.

Once more, I return to the idea of treating life like a game and sites like FlexJobs and Notd as merely toys with which to amuse myself.

After all, life is stupid and nothing means anything. So I’m just gonna fuck around and enjoy myself any way I can get away with.

Taking things seriously is positively toxic to actually doing those things. All this neurotic baggage immediately attaches to it and I instinctively flee this high pressure situation and hide in my distractions, waiting for it to go away.

It never goes away.

So fuck all that bullshit. I’m too cool to be dragged down like that. I don’t have to make a big deal about things in order to get things done.

In fact, the opposite is true : making a big deal about them kills them.

I know it’s not going to be easy to implement this new attitude. But the basic components are already there in my personality. It’s just a matter of bringing them to the forefront and letting them take charge.

So what if I’m laughing cynically at the world as I try to conquer it?

Everything is stupid and nothing matters.

So do whatever works.

More after the break.

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Well that sucked

I knew I was in trouble the second I stood up.

That’s when it hit me : pain and weakness throughout my body and my heart beating hard and fast (and loud, at least to me) and I had a trip to the door and back to do.

The whole reason I stood up was to go get my Donair Dude order from the apartment’s front door. Normally this is not a problem for me.

I can’t really afford the food at all, but what the hell, I will manage somehow. And this is a mighty tasty mega-donair.

Anyhow, I managed to stagger back from the door to the kitchen and set down the food, and then I faced a quandry.

I was feeling rather woozy and my muscle pain was clawing at my sanity and I kind of felt like I was going to pass out.

Which would be bad as I am all alone here in the apartment.

I should get one of those medic alert button thingies.

Normally, what I would do when I get my neato Donair Dude 2-for-1 is stop in the kitchen to put one of the orders in the fridge before taking the other one to my bedroom for the usual eat n’ blog.

And I had originally planned to do that this time too. But after hesitating at the edge of the kitchen for some very long seconds, I realized that there was no way I could make it through the steps of separating the two orders and sticking one in the fridge and still have a decent chance of making it back to my room.

And that’s when I did something clever. I noticed that my order came in two bags (one for the donairs, one for the drinks) that had been stapled together at the top. So for the return trip to my bedroom, I draped the stapled section over the side of the walker, creating a saddlebags kind of effect, and voila, I did not have to carry my order.

It’s little things like that which remind me that I really am clever, as befits a fox.

The trip back was still touch and go, though.

Oh, and I figure the problem was, you guessed it, dehydration. The moment I started drinking my 591 ml Diet Pepsi, I felt a whole lot better.

That makes me wish that I had status bars like in a video game where I could just glance at them and know I was dangerously low on hydration.

Presumably, I would also hear and see some kind of flashing alert message.

On a more practical level, I am going to try to keep some water in a glass on my night stand so that the minute I wake up, I can start replacing whatever water I sweated out while I was asleep.

Because this shizz be cray-cray, y’all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s back, baby.

For those of you who are new here, or have just forgotten, what I call my “demon hunger” is a period where I am incredibly hungry and nothing seems to satiate me for very long. When it’s really bad, even a large meal barely slows it down

So far it’s not too bad. My usual meals appease it for a while, at least. And hopefully, whatever drives this phenomenon will get whatever it wants soon.

I assume it’s some sort of nutritional deficit, in which case, I wish it would be a little more specific about what it wants me to eat.

MORE FOOD NOW does not give me a lot to go on.

Could be my diabetes, of course. Somehow, despite my best efforts, sometimes my blood sugars get seriously out of whack^[1] and it takes something big to restore balance to the force, so to speak.

That one theory, anyhow. And seeing as in the past I have been able to cure this condition with a shot of insulin. I’d say it’s a pretty good theory.

That’s about the only time I take insulin these days. Jardiance, the miracle drug with the terrible name, keeps my blood sugars down to a healthy level via controlled ketosis.

Believe it or not, that’s what is behind the “keto” diet. Some people think that if you avoid certain foods and eat other specific foods, you can get the same effect as with Jardiance but without those icky actually medically tested and scientifically accurate prescription drugs from Big Pharma.

This is patently untrue, but if tagging a magic word on to what is merely a sane and sensible diet gets people to eat better, I am all for it.

Just remember, kids, there IS such a thing as too few carbs. Your body needs carbohydrates to function. They are the fuel life runs on.

Remember, moderation is the key. Aim for the middle.

Like I always end up saying, being hungry all the time is really hard on the nerves. It’s like this irritating voice droning in your ears that only gets louder over time until you finally can give it what it wants.

Normally, it’s enough for me to keep some kind of snack cracker on hand, like Cheez-its or Vegetable Thins, to munch on when my tummy gets too rumbly.

But when this goddamned demonic hunger strikes, that’s not enough. And while I have obviously made headway against my “no eating between meals” policy, I still can’t imagine having even a small meal between the usual big meals.

So it’s definitely partly my fault for being so damned stubborn.

We Taurus types can be our own worst enemies that way. On the plus side, it can make us incredibly tenacious and firmly committed to our beliefs.

On the minus side, it can lead to making life worse for ourselves by sticking to a point or a position that we don’t even remember the justification for.

Let’s see. Hunger aside, it’s been a decent day. Did the Wound Care thing this morning. Found that while my muscles were weak and hurt a fair bit on the way in to where I get my Wound Care, on the way out my muscles had warmed up and felt pretty good.

Not fully healthy, of course. But a lot less weak and ouchy.

Makes me wonder if I should try getting some exercise on my own. ^[2] I have been pondering doing laps of the hallways leading from the elevators to the apartments on my floor. They are conveniently laid out in a square, making doing laps feasible.

And I would do them while using my outdoor walker, which can also be used as a seat, so if I am way on the other side of the floor from our apartment when I run out of gas. I would be able to sit for a bit to rest up.

It will probably never happen. But it’s nice to pretend it might.

More after the break.

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The fundamental motivation issue

This is going to require some serious rethinking on my part.

I have never fully believed in this “motivation” stuff. It’s always seemed like BS to me. Something made up to cover up the gap between the things we want to do and the things we are actually prepared to do, for real, right now.

“Woops! I mean, I totally want to do it, but I just don’t have the MOTIVATION!”

Yeah, and you never will. At no point in the future will doing the thing seem any more appealing than it does right now, so just be honest with yourself and admit that you don’t really want to do it. You just like the idea of doing it.

Crap, I have threadjacked myself again.

What I was going to say is that I have been beating myself up for the lack of this motivation stuff when the truth is that I have a profound psychological injury that has been weighing me down and holding me back for my entire life.

It’s not a lack of “motivation” that keeps from from trying things any more than it’s a lack of “motivation” that keeps a paraplegic from dancing.

I am broken deep down inside and until that changes, I’m not going to get very far. Time and again, the pain from my Wound and the fear that tries to prevent that pain will gang together and stop me before I get anywhere because I am too damned injured to do it.

So from now on, digging into, cleaning out, and healing that wound is my number one preoccupation. Maybe I will poke around and check out some spiritual wisdom to seeif any of it makes sense to me. Maybe I will dig into the better therapists on YouTube’s archives and see what I can find there.

Or maybe I will do jack shit except lie in the dark thinking about stuff.

But one way or another, I’m going to heal that wound.

And then maybe I can be a real person once more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy Thursday.

And one of the things I ended up telling Doc Costin about ^[1] was my feeling that I am getting better at dealing with things on a purely emotional level.

I can “feel my way through” the darkened forest of my emotions a lot more easily than ever before. I can leave my useless and highly suspect powers of logical analysis behind and just explore my emotions by feeling them.

It’s actually quite thrilling. I have this whole new world inside me just waiting for me to let go of the delusion of control long enough to see what has been there all along.

If this is what being out of control feels like, then I am totally down with it. Fuck logic and intention, let’s roll.

Besides, there’s a reason I called it the delusion of control. It’s not really being in control of myself – if it was. I would get shit done as that’s what I want.

But I’m not in control and nothing gets done.

Seen from that angle, it’s obvious that what I used to think was self-control was only the feeling of being in control of myself, not the real thing.

And I get the feeling learning to tell the difference between the two is rather important.

It amuses me to think of how scared of leaving the bright white light of “reason” behind and entering the deep dark forest of my emotions I used to be.

It doesn’t seem like a big deal to me any more. It’s true that it’s dark in there, at least from my ego’s perspective, but there are other ways to find your way around besides logic and you can find them once you have the courage to be there.

And now, that is also adding to my feeling that whatever happens, I can handle it. And that is a vitally important thing to know about yourself.

For far too long, I have been scared of life with my head turned toward the wall, pointedly and panicked-ly ignoring reality in favour of my screens.

In a setup like that. where you feel like you’re made of spun sugar and the slightest unexpected event can shatter you into a million pieces, of course you’re going to be an urban hermit who hides from the world you don’t think you can handle.

Most people get over that phase of life because they have to in order to get through school and their traumatic first months of employment

But not me. I’m too “smart” for that.

As a result, I’ve barely grown up at all. I’m 51 years old and yet a big part of me is still that terrified toddler whose whole life was ripped apart by a stranger’s dick, and until I heal the grievous wound left by that heinous attack, I won’t be able to grow up at all.

And I want to be a grown up, not a timid baby. I want to be able to lead a normal life instead of remaining in this cloistered closet for the rest of my life. I want to feel strong and confident and ready to take on the world.

But I have to get myself healthy at first.

And that will take some time.

---

I want to make videos just like this one!

The humour, the information, the density with all the little text gags, and the rather lovable presenter are all fantastic and things I totally will steal one day.

Hey, bad are copies, good art steals.

---

This is also quite good :

It’s about the narrator’s journey to an ADHD diagnosis and it got me thinking about my own experience with trying out Adderall.

It didn’t do anything for me. I felt exactly the same. Le sigh.

---

Forward and deeper

I feel like one of the ways in which I have made progress lately is that I have developed the crucial sense of what it means to go forward with my emotions.

I now have a clear feeling of development. I know now, on an instinctual level, that there is a sequence and a motion to my learning to deal with my emotions, like I’m a steam locomotive on a one way track. and that whenever I feel like it, I can move forward on my track and hence go deeper into myself in search of my Wound so I can finally soothe and comfort and heal it.

There’s a highly allegorical children’s book in all of this, I’m sure of it. Call it the Phantom Locomotive or somesuch.

Perhaps have some mentor figure repeatedly saying, “You have to get there eventually as long as you keep going forward!”.

Or the other way around. Whatever.

And of course, from a storytelling point of view, trains are great because you can just your plot points in whatever order you like along the tracks and the hero will naturally encounter them in that order without it seeming obviously forced.

Hmmm. Perhaps I shall cogitate on this further.

But probably not. Like all my other brilliant ideas I think of all the time, it will arise, I will say, “wow, neato!”, and then it will subside back into the fertile topsoil of my mind.

Oh well. The further I travel down this lonely train track, the closer I get to being a happy, functional, capable version of myself and that future person will be capable of getting good ideas and seeing them through for the sheer delight of bringing something beautiful and meaningful and new into the world.

But I need an audience. Performing for myself accomplishes nothing. I have a desperate need to express myself and that perforce requires someone to express myself to otherwise what’s the point?

Knowing that somewhere on my hard drive lurks some very brilliant writing is not enough. I need people to see how amazing I am, and bask in my glow!

I truly just want to make people happy, as others have made me happy, through art.

I’d rather make a million people happy at a dollar each then one person happy for a million bucks. I am a man of the masses. I want to make the whole world sing.

But first, I need to 86 this Wound.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling super sleepy just like I did yesterday. In fact, it’s a bit worse.

This is not unusual. These “catching up” periods always last for at least a couple of days and can drag on for three days or more. I am in it for the long haul.

Doesn’t make it any less irritating, though. Insert standard bitching and whining about not wanting to sleep but wanting to DO THINGS instead.

I don’t want to sleep all the time, I want to have fun! I want to do fun stuff! Like eating meals and playing video games!

Man, I really am a toddler. But with more masturbation.

Otherwise, things are going alright. I don’t seem to be getting those weird little periods of slight chest pain and shortness of breath when I lay down today.

Still, I uh, should probably see someone about that. Those seem like pretty ominous symptoms. I should probably get Doc Chao to take a look at my ticker.

And while he’s at it, my heart. Ta bum tish.

It really does feel like it’s something cardiovascular, and that’s not the kind of thing a fat dude in his fifties can afford to ignore.

I have a phone appointment with Doctor Chao on the 31st. So I can talk to him about it then. Unless it gets a lot worse, then to the ER I go.

It’s especially bad if I lay on my back, which I like to do from time to time because it takes all the pressure off my back and thus lets the poor thing rest for a bit.

I can’t sleep that way, sadly, but it makes for good relief now and then anyhow.

But lately, the longer I lay on my back, the harder it gets to breathe. It’s like there is something small and heavy sitting right on my heart and it just gets heavier over time.

So yeah. That’s kind of worrisome as well.

I always sleep either laying on my front or my side. And there’s this definite feeling when this problem is acting up of it being something like a sticky gear shift. Like instead of being a smooth transition from sitting and alert to lying down and resting, my internal gearbox gets stuck between gears now and then.

Or something like that.

It’s not good, is what I am saying.

The 31st is one week from today. I guess I can wait that long. But of course, as always, if it gets worse I am heading straight for the ER.

Got to be gentle with this heart of mine. It’s quite tender.

Let’s see, what else. Well this site is amusing in a very crude way.

It’s a parody of all those tasteful ads for custom candles that are supposed to offer a slow symphony of scents as the candle burns down through the layers.

Here’s something I have always wanted to know : what, exactly, is burning when you light a candle? Is it just the wick? Is the wax just there to make the wick burn slowly?

Because wax does not seem like it would burn. And if all that is happening is the wax melting, doesn’t that mean that you could gather up all the melted wax and form it back into a candle shape around a new wick while it’s still warm and pliable?

It seems obvious to me that it would work. And yet, in the days before electricity, people were always fretting over using candles when they could not afford more, or somesuch.

Surely it has to have occurred to them to just re-use the wax.

Or am I the only one who sees this? I often am.

More after the break.

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I’m better than you

But then again, I’m not. It’s…. complicated.

Once more we return to the dreaded topic of superiority. Faithful readers will already be familiar with how my vast intellectual superiority over most people has been a complicating factor for me for my entire life.

And sure, it alienated me from my fellow students in the school system – I simply could not relate to them nor they to me. And it meant I was mostly bored out of my mind in class. School work was never challenging to me.

But what I want to talk about tonight is specifically that thorny knot that is my being “superior” to others.

I am anti-elitism. I am a dyed in the wool humanist who thinks we’re all fragile beings trying to make it through this carnival of obstacles and chaos called life and I don’t want artificial barriers like gender, race, religion, or ability to come between us when, for me at least, it is intuitively obvious that we are so small and the Universe so big that we’d be fools not to stick together.

And that’s all well and good, but that pesky intellectual superiority of mine makes it hard to feel like I am on the same level as others. Like it or not, I tower over them, and no amount of scrunching down will make me blend in with the pygmies.

And I don’t know how to deal with that. When I try to imagine how I could deal with the indigestible yet undeniable truth, all I can think of is me as a shepherd walking among his sheep and making sure they are okay.

And while I do find that a somewhat comforting thought – at least then I’d have a role, and a job – I doubt the “sheep” would feel the same way about it

And that’s why I have to take this issue out and beat it all about now and then. I am trying to work through all the complications inherent to the issue so that I can eventually reach some sort of peaceful resolution to the conflict.

The other image I have of the everyday folks is that they are children, and I am pretty sure they would hate that even more than being sheep.

So once more, I ask : how does a big brained egalitarian like me learn to find his place in this world of childlike sheep (lambs?) and do good ibn the world without having to suppress his abilities in order to keep from spooking the herd?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oy. Just took me almost an hour to get my ass out of bed.

I kept drifting in and out of sleep, never fully entering either state. It was a strange twilit world where what remained of my conscious mind felt like it was trapped in a whirlpool that was pulling it down into the depths of consciousness itself.

Which kinda sucked.

Even sitting up didn’t fully release me from the whirlpool’s grip. I was still floating in and out of consciousness, although I was at least not going as deep into sleep as before.

Eventually I actual pulled a quorum of my marbles together and was able to get up and go put my lunch together then come back here to type to you lovely people.

In local news, the sheet and the blanket are now on my bed.

So yay, I did a thing.

And I have taken one nap in their embrace and as you can see by what I have written above, it went well (?).

One of the many paradoxes of my bizarre existence is that really good sleep usually leaves me feeling really messed up because of all the REM activity is suddenly trying to catch up on now that I am actually sleeping deeply enough for it to happen.

So like I always say, it leaves me feeling like some kind of seer or mystic that has just had their mind hyper-activated by having a vision.

That kind of thing can take a lot out of a fella. You end up burning through a hell of a lot of brain calories all at once.

But what the hell, I’m down for this. Go ahead, brain, burn through all those latent dreams. Throw them onto the inner pyre and let them blaze.

I am perfectly willing to suffer like this, or worse, if in the end I actually reach a well rested and rejuvenated state.

I barely know what that’s even like. For most of my life, it has only happened by accident. The random forces of tension, anxiety, paranoia, and sheer neurosis achieve some state of equilibrium in my mind, like different sine waves just happening to converge into harmony now and then, and I wake up feeling great.

But who knows. Maybe with my wonderful new bedding, I can make it happen more often, and actually live a much calmer and more restful life.

That could be huge. Or at least, very nice.

Now that I am digging into my history with sleep, I realize that even as a kid I had a hard time getting to sleep and my sleep was anxious and troubled. It was nothing for me to wake up to sweat soaked sheets wrapped around me in knots, or to be awoken by falling the foot or so from my bed to the floor.

Like I said before, I’ve never been very good at sleep.

Gee, you’d almost thing something massively terrible happened to me at a crucial stage of my childhood and that trauma completely derailed my growth and kept me from completing many important stages of development.

No wonder I can be such a toddler. No wonder I completely failed to develop normally. No wonder I never had an imaginary friend nor did I play with toys.

I retreated from reality into the world of my burgeoning mind and so I became a highly intelligent and articulate man-baby who despite his prodigious abilities can’t pull himself together enough to actually do anything with them.

And it’s all because of that crippling psychic injury I refer to as the Wound.

It’s hard to deal with life when you are crippled in a way nobody can see. I bet it wold not even show up on an fMRI scan of my brain.

All I can do is feel as much of the pain as I can take at any moment, and work my way through it that way.

God knows how long that will take.

But it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

More after the break.

---

It’s not my fault

This is something I need to remind myself on a regular basis because I tend to forget.

It’s not my fault that my life has turned out the way it has. I have done remarkably well given how very psychologically damaged I am and have almost always been.

Too well, perhaps. Never letting the world see my pain. Always pretending everything is fine when other people are around. Always presenting the same cheerful, lovable, engaging, funny face to the world.

But let’s try to stay positive.

I have done nothing wrong and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Yeah, my life has not gone the way I would have wanted it to, and it hurts to think of all my peers that have gone on to have actual lives, some quite successful, without me.

But I ain’t dead yet. Not quite. And I am determined to overcome this massive mental injury deep inside of me no matter what it takes.

Maybe I should be looking into deep spiritual practices. Shamanistic stuff, even. But it would be very hard to get past my knowing that it’s all bullshit.

I fear what would happen would be that it brought out that dark rage in me and I would just end up screaming at some poor well-intentioned practitioner about how they can’t help me because they’re not even remotely strong enough.

The darkness inside me would eat you alive, kid. Best leave it alone.

I guess that, as usual, I am just going to have to figure out how to do it my own way. If neither secular nor spiritual aid can reach me, what else is there to try?

So I guess I have to do everything by myself, as usual. I don’t even know what it is like not to feel like I am completely alone in my fight against my problems.

Doctor Costin tries, but he’s not strong enough either. And he is in his seventies. If I was to truly let loose with the “real me” it could literally kill him.

Maybe if I was in some kind of institution, I could let it all out. Some quality time spent screaming in a rubber room might do me some good.

Or make me worse. I don’t know.

I could try to learn to channel it into my writing. That could lead to some amazing and disturbing stuff that could rock the world.

If anyone read it. Which they would not. Because first I would have to share it with the world and I am too chickenshit to do that.

But, um. It’s not my fault.

I guess positive was just not in the cards for me tonight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have got the part of my bed I sleep on mostly cleared off now. Pretty soon, it will be time to open up the packaging on my new blanket and sheets and dress that part of the bed and then slip into my chosen sleepwear (nudity) and take a nap on a nice clean bed for a change and without even having to rent a motel room first.

I’m looking forward to that. I may even summon up the gumption to give myself a very deep and thorough bed bath first so that I will be putting a clean me on those clean sheets and under that clean new blanket.

So I am looking forward to it, yes. It will be very nice to sleep clean for once.

But I am also anxious about it, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Because I think I am getting close to figuring this shit out, at least cognitively. Wherever I feel fear like I am feeling now, the deep dark pain of my Wound is the real cause.

All my anxiety stems from an attempt by my basic autonomic systems to keep me from doing things which make that big ol’ Wound hurt.

That’s what I am really afraid of, deep down. All my more superficial anxiety has roots in this terrible pain and it is this pain which cripples me emotionally.

Because when there’s a nightmarish injury at the very core of your being, there is not a hell of a lot you can do that won’t make it hurt.

It’s like some grotesque spinal trauma. No matter how good I am at hiding my pain from everybody, I still can’t function, and can’t explain why even the simplest things are beyond me because everything hurts so bad.

But it’s not all doom on the horizon. I feel like when it comes to dealing with this Wound of mine, I have leveled up.

I have a much greater understanding of just how bad the damage is and how deep it goes now, and that makes me feel more like it is something that, while massive, is still finite, and therefore it is something that can be handled.

And it’s not like I have anything better to do.

Hello, Wound. You’re my project now. You should fear this.

I know that the real solution will not be a matter of logic and/or analysis. One way or another I need to penetrate the defenses around my Wound so I can finally finish experiencing all the pain and trauma and fear contained within and thus finally be free of this crippling injury once and for all.

The only way to get rid of emotions is by feeling them. Only then can your deeper self let them go, because now their job is done. The message has been received. The transaction is now complete. The books can be cleared.

And that’s going to bring about some pretty big changes in me. I mean, it has to. That Wound has been festering there for almost my entire life. My entire personality structure has been built around it. I have no idea what life is like without it.

And that scares me. But it excites me too. I see a bright and glorious future ahead of me where I can finally emerge from the shadows and shine for the whole world to see.

I am an amazing guy with incredible abilities and a heck of a sweet personality too. I could make very big waves in this world if I could just stop being crippled by an injury so old that it remembers disco.

Now to take what should be a very pleasant nap.

More after the break.

I want more from LIFE.

And now I am willing to admit it.

I know that I have talked about finding my life to be unsatisfactory (a lot) in this space before, but this is different.

This feels a lot less cerebral and a lot more primal. This is like a mighty monster from the Jurassic era rising from the muck and mire of my freshly thawed Midnight Tundra and letting out a giant roar to proclaim its existence as a warning to all.

And I think that’s pretty neat.

Basically, I walk the dinosaur.

It happened when I was grabbing some food from the kitchen. I felt this surge of energy and frustration but instead of it just tormenting me, the whole dinosaur sequence from the above prose happened in my mind in a heartbeat, along with that sentiment from the title : I WANT MORE FROM LIFE.

And I find that quite encouraging. Clearly my id is waking up and making itself known and that makes me so happy. I have known for a long time that the icy cold of my tiny tomb comes mostly from a lack of id power to balance my overpowered ego and over-enthusiastic superego. I would be a hell of a lot warmer if I could just let the sunshine in.

Oh what the hell.

But something is going to have to “die” first. That little piece of myself that you have to give up in order to be free just has to go, and I think with me it has a hell of a lot to do with giving up my ice-bound perch in the chilly world of the mind and letting myself melt and become a real, live, whole person instead.

I am not the frozen version of me. Therefore that version of me can melt and become something more than itself and nothing has “died” or become lost.

I think that at some point in my development, the flight from reality and the icy detachment required for logical analysis overlapped in my brain and I have been hiding out in this frigid cave of mine ever since.

Well I am not afraid any more.

Let the spring come.
Let the thaw commence.
Let the flood waters cascade down and flush out all the toxins and garbag that have accumulated in my soul
Let me surrender all form and be reborn unto a brand new world
Let me live again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The “it” being just how disabled I am at any given moment.

As in, yesterday, I felt reasonably good. Moving around didn’t hurt too much and I felt reasonably strong and alert. I was doing alright.

And yet, today, I have that terrible heavy feeling again. Even just getting up to get water from the bathroom makes me feel like I am wearing a cement suit. Just going to the kitchen to grab a can of pop and come back has worn me out like a brisk hike.

I suspect that the problem is that I’m dehydrated. That happens so easily now. Not only is the summer heat draining my fluid reserves to produce sweat, but the miracle of Jardiance controlling my blood sugar comes at the price of my body having to manufacture a lot of urine because that’s how Jardiance smuggles the sugar out of your blood and out of your body.

And just as I am typing that, Julian knocked on the door to say goodbye for now and I was able to ask him to get me some nice cold clean water from the Brita pitcher in the fridge, and thus provide me with some high quality hydration.

I still wonder if Brita water only tastes better because it’s cold.

I guess I would have to do a blind taste test, Brita water versus refrigerated unfiltered tap water, to figure it out.

You know, for science.

Anyhow, we will see if I feel perkier once I have more water in me. Luckily, the water from the Brita should at least give me enough energy to get more water from the sink in my ensuite should I feel the need.

And I will try to keep dark thoughts about whether I am going to fall apart and end up in the hospital full of tubes before dying a stupid and tragic death out of my mind.

Because hey, it’s a beautiful sunny summer Sunday, I am going to have dinner with my friends at Denny’s not too long from now, and there is no need to dwell in the darkness when there’s lots of light to be had.

On the bedding front, both my new sheets and new blanket have arrived and have been removed from their Amazon boxes. Now I just need to clear about half of the space on my bed so I can lay them out and cuddle into them for a good night’s sleep.

And therein lies the problem. I should never put another task to be done before deployment of my new bedding. That creates a classic gumption trap where I need to find the motivation to do thing A before I can do thing B and that is already too complicated for my very weak id to handle.

And I wish I was not like this. I wish I could just decide to do things and do them instead of ending up stranded in a no man’s land of dithering and indecision all the time. I wish I had the force of will and the drive to make my will manifest in the world instead of constantly crouching behind my invisible wall hoping nobody notices me.

While at the same time being desperate for attention.

I’m a complicated man. And no one understands me but…. umm… no, that’s is. Nobody understands me, period.

. Not even my therapist gets me. He couldn’t handle the “real me”. No one can.

That’s why all anyone gets from me is a version of me. It isn’t fake or an illusion because everything in it is 100 percent me.

But it’s nowhere near being all of me. Let alone the “real” me.

I’m not a teenager. I can’t just let loose with all my emotions and then sort through them to figure out who I really am.

My shit has consequences. The volcano at my core is mighty angry.

And it makes me feel like if I relaxed my self-control, I would go crazy and end up hurting a lot of people before I found my new equilibrium.

It’s not worth it. Yet.

More after the break.

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So Biden dropped out

I learned about this hours ago and my jaw is still on the floor.

I mean, it makes sense in retrospect. All those fucking traitorous and hysterical liberals calling for him to step down as if that was going to improve their odds of beating Trump.

Um, no. This is actually the worst thing that could have happened on the Democrat side, because there is no Barack Obama waiting in the wings to swoop in and take up the nomination and inspire people to vote in record numbers on a wave of hope and inspiration and determination to make things right.

Biden getting Covid was presumably the last straw for the poor guy. He’d already been stabbed a million times by members of his own party and was bleeding out, but the Covid probably made him feel like this time, he was not going to be able to get up off the mat and keep fighting.

And all because his poor debate performance made liberals panic and turn on him because now he had loser dust on him and they lacked the emotional maturity to see that he was still their best bet for beating Trump.

You’ll note that the right wingers would never do what the lefties did to Biden. That’s because unlike my fellow liberals, they understand loyalty.

Now we’re fucking doomed. There is nobody who can replace Biden and have even half the chance of winning he did.

Camela Harris sure as hell can’t do it. She’s the only vice president to make even fewer public appearances than Dick Fucking Cheney. She clearly knows that she is NOT a politician and has negative public appeal and for her, engaging with people can only lead to disaster.

There’s one way she might win, though. She needs not just to run against Trump, but to prosecute him. That’s her greatest strength. She is one hell of a tough prosecutor and she’s potentially going up against a very wimpy and vulnerable criminal.

She is well equipped to lock on to Trump and just keep hammering away at him until she has reduced him to a blubbering incoherent mass of malfunctioning grey matter who can barely even cry for momma any more.

She might not be able to win the election, but she can make Trump lose it.

But she has to give up on the false liberal ideal of niceness. Fuck being nice. Trump is the biggest threat the USA has faced in my lifetime. The time for playing nice is over and it’s time to go to war and go for the jugular.

I’d rather be a bastard that wins than a nice guy who would rather lose than do anything that the liberal masses might see as “mean”.

After all, being in power might mean making tough decisions.

Better to just let the world burn as you keep your hands clean.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.