As a kid, like millions of other children all over the world, I loved Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Porky Pig and the rest of the Looney Tunes cast.

And one day I was watching the one where Bugs and Daffy do Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and, being a weirdly intellectual and analytical child, I started to wonder : what makes Daffy Duck tick?

See, some throwaway line from him had given me a valuable insight : he was so egotistical and had such a grandiose sense of himself as a way to compensate for a deep down burning hatred of himself.

His psyche had learned to balance itself and make him functional by generating a counter-force even stronger than the self-loathing, and this became his primary mode for dealing with life.

Sometimes, the way to counter being empty inside is to be full of yourself.

And there is some truth and wisdom in that. After all, Daffy Duck might be a vain, greedy, selfish creature, but at least he’s functional and talented and has a way to live life instead of being paralyzed by self-doubt.

Ahem. I believe this is where I come in.

Because I have been toying with the idea of finally letting myself develop a huge ego and see where it takes me for decades now.

After all, a lot of people with even one of my many gifts have big fat egos and very high opinions of themselves. Why not me?

I’m fucking amazing!

I have resisted the allure of egotism for my whole life because I felt like it would take me someplace I really did not want to go. A place where, like Daffy, I am vain, selfish, and arrogant, as well as being pushy, manipulative, scheming, untrustworthy, and at times downright creepy and Satanic.

Let’s just say I get where the snake of Eden was coming from.

But that’s the classic depressive “all or nothing” lie. It’s not like one step in the direction of positive self esteem will lead directly to narcissism and delusions of grandeur.

“Oh no! It’s better to freeze to death than to turn up the thermostat because that will lead directly to us all boiling to death!!!”

That kind of bullshit.

What I want is enough of an ego to function. Something commensurate with my abilities, which would I admit leave me with a pretty big ego.

Well if it gives me the confidence to go take on that big bad world, I’m all for it. I need something to counterbalance my crippling fear of exposure and the voices in my head that still insists that there is nothing but pain out there in the world for me and that the only safety is in staying locked away in this filthy bunker of mine.

It’s not enough – not NEARLY enough – just to know those voices are wrong. Who cares if they are wrong if they are still around? Knowledge is an intellectual solution that bears very little weight in the world of emotions.

Emotions require belief, not just knowledge. Only positive beliefs can cancel out negative beliefs and in the long run even override those negative beliefs by completely erasing the old tapes they reside on.

Because fuck self-loathing. I’m an amazing dude. The hate for myself is sliding right off me like I’m shedding my skin, and I am all glistening and pink and new underneath.

I don’t have to stay where I am.

I don’t have to be who I was.

And I don’t have to live like this.

I’m movin’ on up. Just watch me.

More after the break.

---

Another busy Friday

Between Wound Care, ordering my groceries, and showering at Rosewood, my Fridays have become quite hectic.

And I love it. At last, a day where I have things to do and get done.

I am someone who is happiest when he is busy who tragically lacks the ability to make himself busy. It has to come from outside.

I guess I still have a lot of trouble generating my own impetus. On some deep layer, I suppose I don’t feel like I am worth the effort.

Gee, I wonder where I would have gotten that idea.

Eh, fuck it. My tragic childhood is currently open to review, but pretty soon it too will be a part of me I shed like it’s cat fur in the spring and leave behind.

I am through with hiding from reality like I have something to be ashamed of.

I’m fucking awesome.

Anyhow, Wound Care went smoothly. My nurse was one who had changed my dressings once before, but thankfully, she didn’t expect me to remember her name.

Given that most of the other people in the waiting area with me before a Wound Care appointment are SUPER old, that’s a wise policy.

And I am terrible with names.

I need to learn to take a snapshot of my emotional impression of a person and label it with their name when I first meet them.

That’s more or less how I remember people anyhow. How they look is too unreliable for me, given my poor eyesight.

When I got home from Wound Care, I ordered my groceries, and this time I remembered to set the delivery time FIRST.

More on that later.

Then at 2 pm we left for Rosewood.

I am quite happy that it’s now going to be the same worker showering me each week. His name is Albert, which my brain insists on pronouncing “al-BEAR” because that’s how it would be pronounced where I come from even though it is extremely unlikely that he is French Canadian.

I hope I don’t ever call him that out loud.

That went quite well. Being showered by someone else really doesn’t bother me like I thought it would. It is, in fact, quite pleasant.

I think my general friendliness and agreeability covers any embarrassment I might have felt at first. After all, I wouldn’t want to make him uncomfortable!

Then it was back home to await my groceries.

They arrived slightly before 4 pm (grr, my window was 4 pm to 5 pm) and son of a bitch, I am now saddled with some stupid sugar laden mini-cookies instead of my usual fudge striped sugar free Voortman cookies.

And I even have a substitute set up! Son of a bitch, I thought we were beyond this.

But I guess a lot of people are completely puzzled by the fact that the sugar free cookies are not with the other cookies in the cookie section and just grab the closest thing they can find.

And, well, the mini-cookies ARE fudge striped at least.

But still, it pisses me off. I just want to get what I actually order, god damn it!

Now I am going to have to prevail on Julian to go buy them for me as I know he knows where to find them and isn’t going to bring me chocolate frosted Pop-Tarts or whatever.

Oh, and for sheer randomness, we also someone ended up with a loaf of bread I didn’t order. And it turns out the Door Dash system has no way to tell it you got something you didn’t order. It’s all based on problems with the things you ordered.

So, bonus bread, I guess. But I think it’s white bread, and ick. So boring!

I made the usual complaint about the cookies to Door Dash and got the usual refund, which is good and all, but that’s not what I want.

I want my cookies god damn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time, in this case, being my side.

Woke up this morning with what feels like a stitch in my side and from what I can tell it appears to be here to stay.

That’s unheard of for me, at least so far. Usually I can massage those things away, or stretch them out, which hurts like industrial grade fuck but it works.

But this one is hanging around and that has me worried.

For the record, it’s not quite in my side. It’s about two inches ahead of my right side, in what I will affectionately refer to as “the stretchmark zone”, though I suppose for you non-obese people out there it would be known more as my “love handles”.

And it definitely feels muscular. It’s too close to the surface to be some organ or other having an issue, though I could be wrong.

And like the classic stitch in the side, it really feels like some muscles have been stitched together, so that when I move it tugs on the thread painfully.

Right now, I am medium worried about it. It is persistently painful and the pain is bad enough to make me cry out, so on the purely childlike scale, it’s a problem.

But I am not quite ready to take it to the ER or UC yet. After all, for all I know, it might just resolve itself over time. I might feel that tiny pop you feel when you stretch out a cramp and then the problem is gone.

Things that would escalate this to “make it worth it to go to the ER” status include : the pain getting worse, the pain becoming constant, the pain spreading, secondary symptoms like fever or nausea showing up, or the sky opening up and a great booming voice saying, “Go to the ER already, you knob!”.

I’d have so many questions.

Meanwhile, today was Therapy Thursday, and I yakked Doc Costin’s ear off as seems to be my standard mode these days.

Makes his job easy. All he has to do is listen and understand what I am telling him. Which is not always easy, granted, but he’s known me well enough to have figured out how to speak Fru by now.

Just like my friends. Hi, Felicity and Julian!

I told him about the whole “opening the door and letting fresh air in” thing where I have been feeling better lately – better mood, more energy, more relaxed – and I credit that to having made that leap into believing that the world has all the things in it that I want and need and all I have to do is go out there and find it.

And I will do that soon. Any minute now. Honest.

I told him about how I feel like I can actively engage with my emotions now, without the need for analysis, intellectualization, or the imposition of false order.

Feels pretty good, to be honest. I feel so much more real lately. As I drill through all the calcified gunk that has accumulated in the plumbing of my soul and basically re-bore my entire subconscious circulatory system, more and more of me comes online and I feel more human and real with every passing day.

So psychologically speaking, I’m doing alright.

The old fear is still holding me back, but it’s getting weaker. Right now it’s just part of the gunk clogging up my mind and pretty soon it, too, will be flushed out.

The important thing now is to work up the courage to stop hiding. It’s time to decloak and make myself known to that big bad world out there.

But I’m not afraid. You know why?

Because I’m fucking awesome.

More after the break.

---

Sunny, with showers

Right now, I feel a bit depressed.

Which is fine. Now that I am in contact with my real emotions (LTNS!), that means all emotions will have a chance to express themselves, including the sad ones.

Besides, the reason I am feeling a bit low could not be clearer to me : I have not been getting enough sleep lately.

In fact, I think I’ve been rocking a slight hypomanic state. That would explain why I have so much more energy than usual, and why I have been napping way less.

Good riddance to the naps, I hope they don’t come back. I’ve been abusing sleep by making it my escape hatch from reality for far too long, and I am sick of it.

What’s left now is to program myself to ignore the pathetic cries of the old habit that I have to sleep when I can, before the opportunity is taken away by having to actually do something with myself like blog.

This attitude creates an entirely bogus sense of scarcity and urgency, and I don’t need that shit any more. Like I have to hurry up and nap before the door to sleep closes.

Whatever. I’ll just sleep after I do the thing. Worst case scenario is that I end up blogging or going to Wound Care or whatever when I am feeling super sleepy and that is rather stressful.

But it’s entirely possible to go from feeling sleepy to being wide awake without sleeping. And it doesn’t take caffeine or other stimulants either.

It just takes pulling yourself together and digging deep into your energy reserves in order to get you through the next little while.

This is something most people learn to do when circumstances force them to stay up when they would rather be asleep. Things like school, or work, or looking after the kids, or other similar obligations.

But I’ve done almost none of that shit, so I have to learn this the hard way. Even my most recent experiences with school only took up a total of like, maybe ten hours a week, and the rest of the time I could snooze.

Granted, when it was VFS, that sleep was bracketed with a 45 minute Skytrain trip in each direction, and there were definitely times when it would have been really nice to just drift off to sleep cradled by the gentle rocking of light rail.

But I can’t stand the thought of class happening without me. The mere thought of falling behind and missing out was enough to get me to class and back.

Thank God for FOMO, eh?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s take another crack at this one.

I’ve still got tabs for Notd (subscription based writing) and FlexJobs (remote work) open in the left hand end of my Chrome.

They both could be great opportunities to expand my world. I could try to build a subscriber base on Notd by writing tightly paced suspenseful stories designed to make the reader desperate to know what happens next.

Seems like a good way to get people to subscribe, n’est-ce pas?

And I have a number of ideas as to what kind of content might work. It could be fast paced high stakes action adventure. It could be a murder mystery with lots of twists and turns in the plot. It could be grand generational drama with scandalous revelations and a struggle for control of the family fortune. It could be a completely filthy smut story that leaves no orifice unfilled.

Heck, it could even be something akin to a sitcom, which would play to my strength of writing really funny dialogue.

But I would have to keep it short, which would be the interesting part of the task for my writerly side. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I do have a tendency to go on a bit and

So why don’t I do it? Therein lies the rub.

As it stands right now, I’m still too scared. My inner self knows that either FlexJobs or Notd could lead to big change in my life and it doesn’t care that it would be change for the better, all it cares about is that it would be disruptive.

I guess I haven’t gone through that door I just opened to the outside world yet.

Just typing this is producing waves of cold-sweat panic in me right now. It’s that kind of deep down primal fear that reason cannot possibly touch.

All you can do is work your way through it. Eat it up and get it over with.

I’m working on it.

And this is where pressure becomes a factor. My natural reaction is to put a lot of pressure on myself to just DO these things already.

But that virtually guarantees that it will NOT be done because I (just as naturally) avoid pressure and tension and all that stuff.

The pressure just makes me more avoidant, and yet I can’t seem to keep it from happening, and I don’t know how to depressurize the situation.

It’s like my desire to finally go out and play with the other kids is the unstoppable force and my fear and hesitation is the immovable object and the two combined produces one thing only : TENSION.

And thus far, my only solution to that tense conflict is to totally give up on whatever it was that was arousing my urge to expand my life and thus end the standoff.

But I’m not doing that this time. Those tabs stay there until I do something with them. And not just a token something, something that might actually go somewhere.

It doesn’t matter how much my eyes deliberately avoid looking at them, or how bad it makes me feel to think about them, or how conflicted I feel about them.

Some day I am going to use those tools to set myself free. Or if not those tools – if I just can’t overcome the aversion attached to them now – some other tools, or another path, or some other way to overcome myself to become more than I am right now.

I feel the powerful need for transformation and transcendence. But I just don’t know if I am capable of it. Baby steps might be the only steps I can take.

And even then, I still need to use my walker.

More after the break.

---

Gimmie a break

Decided to splurge and get myself some KFC tonight. My usual four piece meal. Four pieces of chicken, fries. coleslaw, and a surprise bonus, a little bag of popcorn chicken.

I guess that comes with the meal now. I gotta say, I am beginning to be suspicious of how eager they seem to be to give that stuff away.

My theory is that it’s made from the little bits of chicken meat that used to just be a useless by-product of chicken processing, so it’s dirt cheap for them to make and thus, what the hell, if it makes them even 5 percent more likely to order, we break even.

One last thing on the poulet de mais soufflé : because I had no idea I would be getting some. I was quite puzzled when KFC asked me what kind of dip I wanted. And would not let me order till I chose one.

I chose the honey mustard. It’s the only one they have that I both like and can eat. They got plum sauce, but that shit’s full of sugar.

Anyhow, I told ya that to tell you this : I didn’t get my dip. Order came, no dip.

Seems kind of anticlimactic now, dunnit.

Anyhow, all that plus an individual gravy (which is frigging $3.19 now!!) plus what DoorDash charges me plus tip cost me $30.66.

And part of me still balks at spending that much money on a meal. I could have had a baked potato and a chicken burger for nothing because I already bought them.

And that is no doubt I will have that tomorrow night. But tonight, I decided I needed a treat, and I knew I could spare the money because I didn’t have to pay for Denny’s last Sunday (sadly), so I just spent that money tonight.

And the thing us, you really do need to treat yourself now and then. You can’t let life become a long undifferentiated slog through grey mediocrity. Even if all the things you are doing are things you like, if they’re the same day after day they will fade into the background of your life and your life will seem less real.

And despite my occasion snarky comment about reality being overrated, I know better than most that when life becomes too unreal, you end up feeling lost and alone and scared all the time.

Like you’re, say, wandering the Midnight Tundra.

And we all know how much THAT sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is going to be a big one

Imagine that I am taking a metaphorical running start.

We begin with a question : what if my entire internal narrative is wrong?

What if my entire sad story of a neglected and ignored childhood is completely false and based not on memory but on how I feel now?

What if the people I needed were there for me, but I wasn’t really there?

What if I was only sad and lonely because that wall inside me cut me off from all the love and attention and affection I craved so much?

Have I been guilty all this time?

I have to ask myself these questions because I have to know the truth, and even a mild attenuation of my dark and negative internal narrative could do me a hell of a lot of good, so it’s a quest worth embarking upon.

Let’s start with school. Pouring over those memories in my mind, I can find no flaws. I definitely was a lonely social outcast with no friends for a lot of my school life and when I did have friends they were not great friends.

I was also kind of a bummer to be around too. So whiny and weak.

So there is no chance I am wrong about how emotionally cold that part of my childhood was. School definitely sucked. Boredom in the classroom, terror on the playground, and no friends or social group with whom I could have developed socially.

But I was so overwhelmingly bright academically and in my own way self-confident and assured that people didn’t see how sad I was.

I didn’t let them. Sigh.

But my family and/or home life is definitely up for debate. I have constructed a narrative of cold indifference to if not open hostility towards my very existence and my being timid and therefore neglected and abused and never truly a part of the family.

And there is some truth to that. It can’t be wiped away entirely. In the broad strokes, that characterization is essentially correct.

But the devil, as always, is in the details. Sure, I was not exactly warmly invited to be an equal part of my big family, but it’s not like my parents and my siblings weren’t there, or never talked to me, or treated me like Cinderella’s stepsisters when they’re on the rag.

They were all there, and I talked with them, and while it might not have been as equals, they treated me with respect for my mind, at least.

We were definitely not the warmest of families. In fact for most of my childhood we were pretty detached from one another. Everyone doing their own thing.

But we were definitely the smartest of families. And I could always go to my siblings for a question or to request an explanation of something.

And being a gang of nerds and nerds loving to share information, they were almost always happy to feed my voracious intellect.

And there was love there. I might not have been embraced and included in my family, but I never doubted that they loved me in their own somewhat chilly, intellectual way.

And I loved them too, of course.

So yeah, I was often lonely and alone at home as well as at school, but at home there were people who loved me and wanted me to be happy.

To which my bitter side adds, “Yeah, as long as your happiness did not require literally any kind of investment on their part : emotions, time, support, guidance, understanding, money, attention, protection…. ”

The new narrative is still a work in progress.

But I am open to the idea that my childhood was not as bad as my negative characterization of it makes it sound.

And I know that I will be better off without that negative narrative poisoning me.

More after the break.

---

More on internal narratives

One of the corniest things you can say these days is that human beings need to tell themselves stories in order to make sense of their lives.

Good thing I didn’t say that, then. Ha ha.

Obviously, the most important story we tell ourselves is our own life story. It’s the one story that turns what would otherwise be just a string of unconnected memories into something that makes sense to us as a whole.

And, of course, it’s the one story that is all about us. We’re the center POV character for the whole dang thing. We were there for all of it.

In our internal narrative, we ARE the Main Character.

But the thing is, we don’t remember most of the things that happen in our lives. It’s not that we can’t recall it, it’s that the natural compression of memories over time is not lossless and most of it gets deleted before it even gets into long term memory.

And what the mind does not remember, it reconstructs. And what does it use as a basis for that reconstruction?

That selfsame internal narrative.

So over time, that narrative becomes the blueprint of our entire psyche. Which can be a problem because eventually we stop adding our memories to the narrative and start adjusting our memories to fit the narrative instead.

Especially if, like me, you don’t have a lot of other life experiences to base it on. The narrative of my life hasn’t changed that much over time, but the changes that have happened have largely been negative.

That’s because they come from the long process of me realizing just how badly I got fucked over in life and so the story just gets worse over time.

But I think I am ready to turn the corner on that now. I am opening myself up to the world again and that means moving out and moving on.

And that means creating a better internal narrative for my psyche to be based on.

Maybe I haven’t finished processing my past yet. Well too bad, I don’t give a shit. Constantly rehashing the past is just a way of hiding from reality and I am done with that shit. I’m going in the opposite direction.

It’s time for REALITY to hide from ME!

OK, not really, but could you imagine? 🙂

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got up to go to the kitchen to make my daily PB&J and such, but then I paused half way to my bedroom door.

I could feel that I would maybe need to pee real soon. So the question I had to contemplate was, do I stop what I was doing, return to my computer chair, and use the receptacle to pee, or do I press on, make lunch, then pee when I get back?

Well, by default, I finish what I am doing. For me, following through is instinct. So I kept on going to make my lunch.

This was the wrong move.

I knew what would happen yet I did it anyway. And exactly as I expected, I was fine for the first half of getting my lunch together but during the second half, the urge to pee just got stronger and stronger, and when I started to head back to the bedroom, well, the waves crashed over the seawall as the contents of my bladder sloshed up against the urinary sphincter holding them in and a little escaped.

In other words, I peed a tiny bit. Involuntarily. While still in the kitchen,

Yup. That was the wrong decision alright, and I knew it would be, but changing my mind when I paused halfway to the bedroom door would have meant jarringly interrupting myself in order to suddenly switch tracks, and I couldn’t do that.

In that limited and incredibly subjective sense, going ahead to make my lunch seemed like the lesser of two evils. It might have been a very dumb decision that I knew would end badly but at least it wasn’t disruptive.

This is seriously how I think.

Of particular note, to me at least, is how easily I convinced myself that going ahead and making lunch would be fine, that I didn’t need to pee all that bad and that I had plenty of time to make lunch and get back before the flood was due.

This was patently stupid – I mean, why even risk it? – but it seemed like the only option given my horror of sudden change.

Even when that change is vastly superior.

But so what? So I did a dumb thing. Big deal.

Nobody is smart 24/7 and a lot of my fellow geniuses throughout history have not been very good at the practical side of life.

Hence the whole “absentminded professor” schtick. I have always identified with that kind of character. I too am a brilliant person who spends far too much time lost in the wilds of his own mind to pay much attention to the here and now.

But lately, it’s occurred to me that the world inside my head would be a much happier place if I got better at that pesky “objective reality” stuff.

The two are (barely) connected, after all.

Less snarkily, this is where my whole “the world has everything I need” thing really comes into play. Part of my walling myself off from reality in favor of living in the secret garden of my mind rests on the assumption that there is nothing “out there” that is worth the time, effort, risk, pain, and fear involved in going and getting it.

What a ridiculous thought. True, depression can make it hard to even imagine hope, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any.

Being unable to feel or sense the presence or reality of something does not mean it is not there. The sun never stops shining, even at night, when we can’t see it.

And no matter how dark the night or how rough the storm, you can have total faith in the fact that you will see the sun again.

So just hang in there.

More after the break.

---

I’ve opened the door…

…but I haven’t gone through it yet.

No rush. Right now, I’m just enjoying the liberating feeling of fresh air on my skin after being sealed in my own god damned juices for so long.

Sorry for that image. But it’s apt.

I know that I will eventually want to go through that newly opened door and check out my surroundings. Right now, I am still all congested inside and that makes it hard to form the coherent will to actually use that exit to check out something new.

But soon I will say to hell with my ice regime and I will reach out beyond myself into the big old world out yonder and say howdy.

After all, I can be seen and be safe. There’s nothing out there I need to hide from. The feelings of exposure and danger are relics of an ancient and irrelevant past, and thus can safely be ignored.

They won’t die easy. But they’ll die nonetheless.

After all, what am I so afraid of? These fears have not been justified by evidence for more than forty years. At these point, the fears perpetuate themselves by creating the apprehension unbidden and unhinged. Comme ca :

A : Of course I’m anxious! The last time I was here, something terrible happened!
B : Really? What happened?
A : I HAD AN ANXIETY ATTACK!!

There’s nothing there. It’s all just old tapes playing in an empty room. The sooner I defy them and do what I want to do anyhow, the sooner my engine will grind up those old bad tapes and spit them out as my motor clears itself and moves on.

And I swear I’m going to do it soon. Maybe even tomorrow.

But again, no rush. It’s not something I have to do, or else.

It’s something I want to do, for me, to make myself healthier and happier and freer.

I have awe inspiring powers of the mind. Intelligence, insight, creativity, analysis, charisma, power of personality, and of course, being pretty darn cute.

I have way more than enough to make a life for myself out there in the world. And I don’t even need to go out into the big bright noisy physical world out there.

I just need to roam to new places on the Internet.

And I can do that!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…that has no Denny’s.

Felicity took a home Covid test and tested positive, so she had to bail on Denny’s. She obviously did not want to expose us to it.

So she stayed home to spend time exposing her elderly parents to it instead.

Sorry, that was uncalled for. It’s just my disappointment talking.

Like I have mentioned here before, I do not handle disappointment well. It always wrecks my mood for a while because it gives me that deflated feeling that comes from when my enthusiasm and anticipation for something good gets punctured.

And that leaves me sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon.

Now, that’s totally a “me” thing. I don’t blame anyone else for it. Especially not in a circumstance like this, where it’s something totally beyond anyone’s control.

Felicity missing wouldn’t be so bad, but quite predictably, Joe seized this opportunity to say he wasn’t feeling well EITHER and so he wouldn’t be going to Denny’s EITHER.

And I can easily imagine the giddy relief in his voice when he told Julian that. I don’t know if he knows that I can hear that kind of thing quite clearly, and how much it hurts me when he sounds so relieved to not “have to” spend time with us.

I mean, I get it. I’m an introvert too, although perhaps less of one, because one thing on the introvert list I don’t identify with is feeling profound relief when plans to go out fall thought and you “get to” just stay home instead.

No, fuck that. That wrinkles my balloon. Sure, there is an element of relief, but it’s overshadowed by the disappointment by a country mile.

Even if it was something I wasn’t really looking forward to doing, like something I expect to be boring or painful or whatever, I am still disappointed when it falls through.

Partly is that like any Taurus, I hate surprises. There I was, with all the mental and emotional resources I would need to go out allocated and ready, and in my mind earmarked for going out exclusively, and then suddenly I have to release those resources and have them go back into general allocation instead.

But the real issue is that whole balloon thing. When something I am really looking forward to is coming, I get all pumped up with joy and when that thing is taken away it all gets released with a loud, wet, flatulent sound.

And I don’t expect anyone who is not like that to understand why that makes me so sad. It would be easy (and hurtful) for someone to say, “Well everybody faces disappointment. Get over it!”

Then again, people like that are assholes who just want to avoid caring about you. That kind of person will go to great lengths to avoid empathic entanglement with others.

After all, why should they be sad just because someone else is sad, right?

The answer, of course, is that it helps. As Spider Robinson said many times in his Callahan books, pain shared is divided, joy shared is multiplied.

And it can help a lot to know that someone else cares about you enough to share your pain and be with you in your time of need.

Sometimes all it takes is a squeeze of your hand and sitting in silence with you while you process your pain.

Everything is better when you don’t have to face it alone.

I will, of course, get over being bummed out about not doing Denny’s this week. And when I do, that will give me more time to spend being worried about Felicity.

Letting my truly gushingly emotional self shine through is getting… complicated.

More after the break.

---

Let it flow

I am embracing the slow destruction of my self-consciousness.

The whole idea of being self-conscious is to control how we are perceived so we can stop ourselves from doing embarrassing things.

But this is a painful and unnatural thing to do, which is why it’s such a negative thing to feel “self-conscious”. And why when we are in a flow state, all self-consciousness disappears and we experience what some mystics call “pure consciousness”.

For them, it’s a spiritually desirable state because in it, the false self, the one that is just our idea of who we are, disappears and the real self, the one that is the person we have been since we were babies, can emerge.

On this blog, I have spoken about the real me that has been hiding inside me and doing anything it can to avoid being perceived. And it eventually occurred to me that this inner critter of mine was a lot like a certain little red fox.

Hence my writing those Fruvous stories where he’s someone’s pet. It was a metaphorical way of depicting and then fixing my busted childhood.

We writers have weird ways to cope.

The destruction of my own self-consciousness follows a similar spiritual path. In an Avoidant like me, self-consciousness metastasizes wildly out of control and becomes a massive psychological complex that dominates and distorts your life.

In my case, it has a lot to do with trying to control outcomes, which is a fool’s game if you take it too far – and I most certainly have.

I will learn to accept that shit happens. That no matter how hard I try to control outcomes, factors impossible to predict and beyond my control will always be able to come and fuck up my shit.

So Plan B always has to be learn to cope with things like that.

Because I am extremely tired of leading such a cramped and tiny life just to keep from being surprised and/or overstimulated by things.

If I just hang in there, I will adjust to new things. I am perfectly capable of changing plans on the fly if the situation dictates it. I can open my world to the world at large and suffer through the freak waves and tidal surges of outrageous fortune and be just fine.

I’m open to anything, life. Surprise me.

(But please don’t make things worse!)

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I use indecision – that infinite hallway of infinite doors – as an excuse not to go forward in life and stay in my little coffin of an existence instead.

Or do I?

Ha ha ha.

I definitely do. It’s my catchall excuse not to do things, because of course all action requires first selecting an action out of the nearly infinite number of things you could do and then you have to decide which way to do THAT and blah blah blargh.

Yet somehow that infinite crossroads does not keep me from playing video games, or making tons of decisions in the playing of said games, or sitting down here and writing something or other.

That’s how I know that it’s all just more of depression’s usual bullshit. Depressives like myself grow extremely attached to our excuses, and use them as shields against reality that we can raise when anyone or anything is trying to make us grow.

We can’t grow! Growth is change and change is bad! Change is death! We have to remain exactly as we are right now or we will just plain die!

And that’s why we love our excuses, and will defend them with our lives and fight like a cornered rat against supposedly well-meaning people who want to take them away from us just because they’re hella toxic and keeping us down.

That’s why we get so defensive when people try to help us. They’re trying to take away our excuses, and we’d rather die than lose them, because without our excuses, we would have to face the world and like…. do things.

Perish the thought. Tangent over.

The indecision is phony, merely an act to cover rank cowardice. Being stranded in indecision is actually a super easy problem to solve if you actually want to.

Try exploring your options! That’s how healthy people pick a path. They check out their options and go with whatever choice seems right

And if they’re wrong and that road is a dead end, they are bummed out about that for a little while then they back up and try a different route.

And they don’t act like a wrong choice will result in instant death. That’s bullshit too. The world is not made of freaking land mines. Wrong choices suck but they are hardly the worst thing in the world.

And that’s easy to see…. if you actually want to get better and move ahead.

But if you want to keep hiding from reality and rotting away inside as the years pile up and every day your lack of growth gets more and more pathetic, well then the problem is clearly completely unsolvable.

Oh, and making a rash, arbitrary, or emotional decision isn’t the worst thing in the world either. It’s a hell of a lot better than languishing in your artificial doldrums while “waiting” for a decision you know will never come.

The main thing healthy people do is they keep moving forward. They don’t shed their momentum. They keep moving forward and in so doing they learn and grow and change and bloom and become more than they were.

Is that so bad? Sounds good to me. I desperately want to finally leave my chrysalis so I can spread my wings and fly high into the sky like the fabulously technicolor butterfly I am and have always been.

But to get there, I have to kill the parts of me that are holding me back. That’s the little part of myself I have to give up in order to be truly free.

I have to murder my excuses. What’s more, I need to break myself of the habit of hiding behind those excuses in order to avoid life.

That won’t be easy. And I get the feeling I will have to return to this particular crossroads many times before the lesson truly sinks in and I actually change.

But I am ready to transform. I know that I am meant to be is so much more than the sad little broken thing I am right now.

And I am willing to gnaw off a limb if that’s what it takes to free myself.

More after the break.

---

Oh great, now what?

I feel ill.

Ill enough that my plans to order in tonight just went right out the window. It would be a waste of money as I have negative appetite due to nausea and I am also dizzy and disoriented, so I don’t want to have to make the trip to the door and back.

I might fall.

In fact, I’m not even going to go to the kitchen. I’m going to eat stuff I have here in my room with me and call it a meal.

I hope this straightens itself out before it’s time to hang out with Julian and watch Colbert at midnight.

I’ve felt this way all day. It started this AM when I was taking a leak and felt this wave of dizziness wash over me along with an unpleasant gurgling in that tender area of my gut right behind my navel that causes me trouble now and then.

And I thought, “That can’t be good. ”

But it didn’t keep me from making and eating my lunch today. So I dunno. Maybe it’s something that mostly affects me when I just made that tricky transition from lying in bed to being upright.

At lunch time, I had already been siting here at the computer for a couple of hours, so I had time to get over whatever.

I just realized that I have a weird, hot feeling in my ears, too. Feels inflamed.

Looking back over my childhood, there were a lot of times I was randomly ill in one way or another. And I never did anything about any of it except wait for it to pass, which it always did, and then I just went on my merry way.

I know now that a lot of that was IBS. And it wouldn’t happen that often. Once every three months at most.

I think maybe I just have a fussy digestive system that gets irritated by stuff sometimes.

Ain’t life grand?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That could be the name of this entire blog, to be honest.

Anyhow, today has been quite a busy day by my reclusive standards.

I am an urban hermit, after all.

First was Wound Care, which went smoothly. In addition to the usual dressing changes, I had my seemingly monthly time with Vivian, the wound care clinician, so she could once again grind down the callouses on one of my feet.

The right one this time, for those keeping score at home.

Something I’ve picked up on is that Vivian and her other wound care specialists definitely seem to outrank regular nurses. The moment Vivian shows up, the regular nurse is immediately deferential and happy to act as her assistant.

And Vivian in particular seems to command respect. With the other wound care experts, the vibe is that the regular nurse is working with them to tackle those pesky callouses.

But when Vivian shows up it’s immediately a “master and assistant” scene.

Well she IS a senior nurse. I won’t try to guess her age but her whole aura is one of easy and cheerful authority.

Anyhow, where was I?

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve said that…

Next was the bank for my monthly transaction. Used to be cashing a check, now it’s withdrawing the cash after direct deposit.

I am still looking for some way to bypass this bullshit and spend my money via VISA and have it come right out of my bank account.

Instead I have to buy these Joker loadable credit cards every month just to be able to spend my money online, How god damned primitive!

And I still have to go to the bank once a month! And take out physical cash and hand it to Julian for the rent and to buy me the aforementioned credit card.

Surely there is a better way to do this by now.

Anyhow, the trip to the bank went super smoothly. There was an unoccupied teller when I came in so I just got her to go over to the one booth where you can sit down while you bank and did my banking there.

Then, it was home for a bit. until time for my shower at Rosewood Manor came around.

And that’s when disaster struck! Oh no!

See, I was doing my grocery shopping, like I do every Friday, and was going through the fussy but enjoyable process of establishing acceptable substitutes for the items on my shopping list when I realized I had not picked a time for delivery yet.

So I clicked the leftward pointing arrow button to go back to the main ordering page so I could choose the time.

But instead it just submitted my order! Outrage number one.

That is NOT what I told it to do, god damn it!

So then I tried to change my order. Nope! Orders cannot be changed once submitted.

Outrage number two!

So then I tried to cancel my order and was told that if I canceled my order, I would not get a refund. Can you fucking believe it?

Outrage number three and it’s a whopper!

So my only choices were to get the groceries at a very inconvenient time for me, or NOT get the groceries but end up paying for them anyhow.

That can’t possibly be legal.

Now I had groceries coming at 2:15 pm when I had to be at Rosewood Manor for my weekly shower at 2:30 pm!

I do not need this kind of stress.

Luckily, as it happened, Joe was at the apartment awaiting Julian driving him to the dentist, so he agreed to take the order.

But seriously. What do you mean you won’t give me a refund? Look, DoorDash, either you give me the groceries or you give me my money back.

Anything else would be flat out theft and/or fraud.

I guess this is to keep people from ordering a bunch of food and then changing their minds and canceling their orders when the food has already been made, but when you are talking groceries it makes no god damned sense.

Oh well, Now I know to change the time FIRST, before I even do the substitutions.

More after the break.

---

So how else are you?

I am doing OK.

My IBS seems to be rising from its long slumber. I suspect that’s because I stopped taking antihistamines and so my allergies are once more making all the tissues of my body a little inflamed again.

So far, it’s not bad at all. It just means that after I eat, there might be a period of discomfort as my meal makes it pas a particularly sensitive spot in my colon.

Overall, my mood is better lately, although I had a sudden slump into depression earlier today. I was just sitting here playing whatever and it was like someone pulled the plug on the jukebox of my mood and it went, “rrrrrr….” all slow and stopped.

Well, this is to be expected. I have destabilized my mood in order to enable healing and growth and that means my inner world just got a lot less predictable, but also one heck of a lot more alive.

And I would rather be alive and unstable than predictably moribund any day.

And it was kind of nice having a busy day. Like I keep having to remind myself, I am at my happiest when I am busy. This blinkered and half-asleep existence of mine where I limit myself to only video games and YouTube and blogging is the pits and the more I wake up inside, the more inadequate it will seem.

And if I keep going with waking myself up – and I will – eventually that in and of itself will make me actually want to get out there and find new cool stuff to do.

There’s a world full of life and opportunity out there waiting for my rebirth.

I’m working on it. Trust me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So the Occupational Therapist and her associate visited yesterday.

I was kind of nervous about it – meeting strangers and all – and had planned to take a Xanax an hour before they arrived.

But I forgot. And I was fine. No panic, no anxiety, no self-consciousness. The ladies and Julian and I had a nice chat. I walked out into the hallway outside our apartment door and back so they could see how I walk.

There was a minor kerfuffle about the appointment beforehand. Apparently my case supervisor Galina forgot to actually make the appointment. Oops!

But it turned out the OT and friend were available to make it at the appointed time anyway, so, no harm done.

Oh, and this isn’t really related, but in the morning, Julian had asked me if I was feeling up to going through with the appointment, and I cheerfully told him I felt fine and that I thought I was over whatever had been heating me up.

Not fifteen minutes later I felt much, much worse. Stomach in knots, sweating, feeling quite dizzy and faint. Figures, dunnit?

Luckily, taking a crap then taking a nap cleared all that up. After that, I felt even better than I had when I told Julian I was fine, and have felt great since.

It’s possible that it was something I ate that causes my feeling of overheating on Monday and Tuesday, and when it passed, so did the ailment.

Anyhow. Diversion over. Where was I?

Oh right, what the OT et al and I actually talked about.

They asked a lot of questions about what I can and cannot do, as well as checking out my two walkers, the indoor and the outdoor models.

The indoor one is the two wheel kind, which is a lot less dumb than I thought it would be way back in 2022.

I thought the non-wheeled back portion would just drag on the ground, but it doesn’t really. There’s a bit of friction, which is good because it adds stability, and I quickly got used to it.

I really should remember that I am quite adaptable more often.

They showed me some more advanced “rollator” walkers to maybe replace my four wheeler outdoor walker.

At first I didn’t think there was a point in replacing it, but the ones they showed me looked a lot sturdier than my current model and had a nice padded seat, too.

So I am not averse to an upgrade.

We also had a detailed discussion of landing me the ability to take a frigging shower. At first they wanted to install one of these shower bench things some people use where half of the bench is in the tub and the other half is outside the tub and you sit on the outside part then sort of scoot over to the inside part.

I don’t like that idea. It seems unsafe. I would worry that I would slip right off the bench and hurt myself. And I don’t really want to “scoot”.

But then I realized that the “outside the tub” portion of said bench would block access to my toilet, and that was the end of that.

We decided on a shower chair and some rails that I can grip to help get in and out of said chair, and that suits me fine.

Lord knows how long it will take before I actually get that stuff installed. First we have to get permission from the owner of our apartment, then we have to tell the ladies we got it, then they have to write a letter requesting the install, then that has to make it to Victoria then the government wheels have to churn out a response, then it will wait until the installer is free, and blah, blah, blah.

But the wheels are in motion and it’s out of my hands now anyhow.

More after the break.

---

Oh yeah, therapy

Today was Therapy Thursday.

Pretty average session. Doc Costin’s learned to mostly let me do the talking. It’s not that I don’t think he has anything worth saying, it’s just that I have such a strong need to express myself and so many words in my head that the best thing he can do for me is to listen with understanding and sympathy.

In that sense, talking to him is like blogging in fast-forward.

Which makes me wonder what the therapeutic effect of my becoming a YouTuber would be. On YouTube, I suppose I would have to limit myself by time not wordcount, but still, I could probably talk a lot faster than I blog, so… throughput would improve.

That reminds me of a question I have pondered many times : what if one day, I abandoned wordcount and just wrote and wrote and wrote until I couldn’t stand to type one more word?

Well, for once thing, nobody would read it because it would be huuuuuge.

But that aside, I think it might be quite good for me. I get the feeling that if I went on long enough I would start digging really deep for the next words and that could lead to all kinds of progress.

And maybe I will do that some day.

But I am still too depressed for open-ended investments of effort.

I told Doctor Costin about my breakthrough re : opening myself up to the world because I believe that everything I need to be happy is out there somewhere and the only way I am going to get it is if I go find it myself.

Not totally sure what that will involved, but finally getting off my ass and starting to crosspost this blog to Notd (subscription oriented writing host) would be a good start.

Or trying to make peace with Discord or VRchat again. In both cases, a combination of social anxiety and frustration at not being able to find anywhere where people are actually freaking talking have made me quit multiple times.

I tried to get back on to Facebook, but you need a working mobile device in order to do the stupid two factor authentication and I don’t have one right now.

Guess it will have to wait until I replace the battery on my tablet.

But I will find a way to be more social on the Internet, dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I believe that the world contains everything I need.

I believe that the world contains everything I need.

I BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD CONTAINS EVERYTHING I NEED.

Repeat until…. well, you know.

I was watching a video by my new parasocial pal Heidi Priebe and thinking that she was making a lot of good points but nothing that really grabbed me when she said something about how viewing the world as a cold and empty and hostile place makes you cut yourself off from the world (or maybe it goes the other way around) and so in order to heal, you have to believe that all the things you need in order to heal and be healthy and happy and strong are out there in the world and it’s up to me to go get it.

Ka pow. Mind = blown.

It seems so obvious now. I have been cold and hostile toward the world for a very long time. I guess that’s what happens when you’re raped when you’re a toddler.

But I have now realized that it’s a closed loop. What’s my evidence that the world is a cold and hostile and empty place? The fact that it feels that way to me. And why does it feel that way to me? Because I’ve cut myself off from the world. And why did I cut myself off from the world?

Because the world is a cold and hostile and empty place!

It’s like that snake that eats its own asshole.

Logically, I know that all generalizations about “life” or “the world” or “reality” are absurdly illogical and based entirely on how you feel about the world and not on any actual insight into the nature of things.

Because you can’t possible know enough to make that kind of judgment. And for any such massive assumptions you can find ample evidence of the opposite.

War. Love. Hate. Understanding. Ignorance. Enlightenment. Prejudice. Tolerance.

I could go on and on. And I often do.

I know all this, and yet I have had these misconceptions about “the world” for a very long time and I can see now that this nadir of negative narrative has to go.

I feel like I now have a key mantra to use in order to deconstruct that wall inside me. It’s giving me the inspiration and courage to lower my barriers and reach out into the world so I can find the things I am longing for.

That means I have to make peace with wanting things and not getting them right away. To instead just live with the longing until it is fulfilled.

That’s how reality works for healthy people. They don’t sunder and cauterize their entire ability to want things just because they might not ever get them.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. That’s a cure that’s far worse than the disease.

Of course, looked at another way, what we are talking about is my poor abused id. I need to not just connect with it but embrace it and love it and understand it so I can integrate it back into my personality.

And maybe somewhere there’s a lil red fox who can help him with that.

Fruvous is basically my inner child, especially in the solo stories where he’s a pet in a lovely household with a little girl who loves the dickens out of him.

But my regular ol anthro pervert fox form is my inner child too. He’s me without my inhibitions and limitations, free to be as flamboyant and silly and gay as I want to be.

I need to become that in the real world.

Just imagining that makes me giddy!

More after the break.

---

If I were Fru

For some reason, I’m hearing “If I were Fru” to the tune of this :

Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about actually becoming my potentially beloved anthropomorphic fox character Fruvous.

As awesome as it would be to be lap sized and fluffy and cute (and gorgeous), that would cause an awful lot of complications whether it’s happening in the real world (eek, a monster!) or a furry world where I would have to get a job or something.

I’d be a sex worker.

Remember kids, do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

Seriously though, I’d be trying to become a human version of my cute fuzzy pal Fruvous, with all his extroversion, charm, lovability, and appeal.

And boy, would I have a lot of…. um, paramours.

I don’t know how else to put it. “Friends with occasional benefits” is too long and too cold. “Guys I’m into but don’t have sex with per se” is just plain wrong. “People I think of as friends and often snuggles up with” works a little.

Would “cuddle buddies” be too cutesy?

Anyhow, as Fruvous on Tapestries, I am very extroverted, at least compared to RL.

Here’s my extroverted online traits :

1. Lots of friends. I have a pretty wide circle of friends on Tapestries. There’s a core eight to ten that I see and/or chat with regularly and then loads of people I either only seen once in a while or whom I consider acquaintances because we just keep ending up hanging out in the same places but I don’t really known them.
2. Pathological need for attention. This is a main driving force for me on Taps. I need constant interaction or I get sad and bored and leave to go find somewhere where someone might pay attention to me. It doesn’t have to be adoration or anything like that, just any level of friendly interaction. Cuddles a plus.
3. The nerve to just walk up to people and introduce myself. And to chat them up and make a play for them. As Fruvie, I will totally see someone I am interested in and turn on the charm and the funny and the cute. It can quite honestly be a tad overwhelming for some fuzzies but meh, I am what I am. And sometimes I get shot down like a SCUD missile and it doesn’t really bother me at all. I just tell myself that if they can’t see how awesome I am, I don’t want them anyhow.
4. Feeling free to really express who I am at full volume and with great enthusiasm and no inhibition. This might be the biggest one. In the real world, I am shy and awkward and tend to mute my big personality in order to not stand out or draw attention to myself. As Fruvous…. I don’t have that problem.

That’s why I think I am actually an extrovert turned into an introvert by mental illness. The true story is that I am probably somewhere in between. On the one hand, I will always hate crowded parties, need alone time, and love to curl up with a book. On the other hand, I could easily be the life of any party.

I will just need to take a Xanax first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.