Yup, you guessed it.

I was too sick to go to Wound Care today.

Woke up this morning feeling hot all over, just like yesterday. Especially my face. It felt like someone was aiming a hair dryer at it.

And I was dizzy and headache-y and such as well. God damn it.

So I sat there between 8 am and 9 am willing myself to get well and guzzling water like I was trying to create blue skies on the Arrakis of my stomach.

I drank over 3L of water in that time and while it made me feel a little better, for the most part it made no difference at all.

So I had to call up the CCC and tell them I could not make it. AGAIN.

And I freak haaaaaate this. I really didn’t want to have to make that call. I was looking forward to getting out of the apartment and have a nurse take care of my feet.

Oh, and just to spike the pain of it, the nurse I was going to see today called to make sure I was OK, and he sounded hot and had a mild French-Canadian accent.

So not only have I been cooped up in the house all day, but I missed having Jean Pierre and his sexy accent working on my feet. Dammit.

Oh well, At least I didn’t have to worry about getting an obvious boner, though I am pretty sure nurses are trained to ignore that kind of thing

Unless, ya know, they’re interested.

“What’s this sticking out of the bandage? Holy crap, it’s a phone number!”

It could happen!

Oh, and the kicker is that after I went back to sleep for a couple of hours, I felt a lot better when I woke up.

Not totally better, sadly. I still feel all heated up inside. But I don’t feel nearly as ill as I did this morning and I can live with the heat for now.

Hopefully that means that whatever this is, it’s on its way out.

It all makes me wish I had the option of getting a home visit from a nurse. I imagine getting an imaginary “ticket” every three months and being able to call in and instead of saying I am sick, I just say, “I’m using my ticket. ” and voila, I would get a home care nurse visit later that day.

Speaking of home visits, tomorrow the Occupational Therapist will be dropping by and teaching me how to weave baskets for cash.

OK, not really. She’ll be here to assess my needs so she can tell the province what they need to get me in order to make me better able to live a healthy. capable life.

As far as I am concerned, she is here for one reason and one reason only : to get me a shower chair, god dammit.

I want to be able to shower so bad. Sometimes when I am taking a leak, I look over into my shower and sigh wistfully because I miss being able to shower so much.

I may try to clean my room up some before she shows up. Not that I think she will judge me for living in such filth and mess. But her coming might give me the impetus I need in order to get my shit together and actually tidy up some.

My shit has been apart for so long that I don’t know if it even fits together any more.

That’s something I am going to try to fix. I want to feel together and focused and powerful and healthy and able to pursue my desires instead of being this being that’s all wrapped up in himself and still very emotionally isolated.

But that wall inside me is breaking down.

Some day, I will be strong enough to be free.

Oh, and if I still feel this way tomorrow, I’m going to Urgent Care.

More after the break.

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More about tomorrow

This trend of actually continuing to talk about what I talked about in part 1 is wild.

What’s next? This blog spontaneously evolving a format?

Well, technically, it has a format. The format is, “what Fru is thinking about when he sits down to write on his blog”.

Readers who are not my beloved friends might want more than that, though.

Like I said in the above, if I still feel all hot tomorrow, I will go to Urgent Care after the Occupational Therapy lady is gone.

And tomorrow is also Deposit Day, so I would really like to get my banking done so this five week month can officially be over and I can order the new battery for my tablet.

A tablet is, of course, a female tab.

Or would that be a “tablette”?

This feeling so hot I feel like I am glowing is Not Good. But it so far has not come with much in the way of suffering, and it would be all too easy to be a child about it like I have with so many things before and decide if it doesn’t hurt, it’s not a problem.

Kind of discount the very concept of preventative medicine.

But no, this has hung on long enough to force me to deal with it. If it’s still around tomorrow, I will have to assume it’s not going to get better any time soon.

Of course, knowing my luck, I will go through all the hassle of going to Urgent Care and they will do tests and take my temp and then declare there to be nothing wrong with me.

And then I will feel foolish and embarrassed and ashamed of wasting everyone’s time, even though I know the doctor will SAY it was the right thing to come in.

But I can tell they’re disappointed. Damned empathy.

As you can tell, I don’t have any faith that this mysterious condition will disappear on its own. My immune system has had a good chance to tackle it, and struck out.

So I am gearing up for an annoying, boring, and potentially humiliating experience.

No wonder I’m such a cheery soul.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I have been keeping myself busy sleeping, playing video games, and hanging out with my fuzzy friends in order to avoid thinking about it, but now that I have stopped to do the good ol’ eat n’ blog, I can no longer deny it :

I am ill, and I’ve been ill all day.

And there is nothing vague about this illness. I have felt hot since I woke up this morning, so I am pretty sure I must have a fever.

Look, it was that, or go on about “more cowbell”.

And I think my other symptoms are related to said fever. I feel dizzy – every time I move my head it’s like my brain is sloshing around in my head. I feel hot, obviously. And with the dizziness comes these little stabs of what amounts to seasickness.

My life is so very neato, ain’t it?

Luckily, so far there is not a lot of pain or discomfort involved. And I think I’m thinking clearly, despite feeling like my brain ain’t doing so great right now.

What pisses me off is that this might mean missing my Wound Care appointment tomorrow, making it yet ANOTHER time I am missing two in a row.

And I don’t want that! My bandages feel all gross. I want to get them changed.

But I can’t deny that I am unwell and fevers are generally caused by infections (your body is trying to cook the germs out of you) so it would be wildly irresponsible for me to go to the Community Care Clinic (CCC) and maybe infect some old people with something they are poorly equipped to fight off.

Not that I’m in that great a shape to do so myself.

Well, that’s not true. My diabetes is under control and my blood pressure is under control so it’s really just my sleep apnea keeping me from being, like, healthy.

That and whatever the fuck is happening to my arm and leg muscles, of course.

I know that I am going to have to goose Doctor Chao into getting back on the case. I still need to know what the fuck is going on and whether it can be stopped or not.

I’ve accepted that I am probably never going to walk normally again and that in all likelihood I will stop walking entirely and end up in a wheelchair soon.

I don’t wanna go there, but my condition keeps getting worse and nobody is doing jack shit to stop it so I can’t see any other outcome.

Oh well. Given recent advances in the energy density of batteries as well as the energy efficiency of all kind of electric motors, motorized wheelchairs must be getting pretty good by now.

Out of sheer vanity, I don’t want to be a fat dude on a scooter. People sneer at fat dudes on scooters and make rude comments.

Nobody talks smack about someone in a wheelchair. Plus it’s not just a matter of my not being able to walk far.

If I have hit the wheelchair phase, that means I can’t walk at all any more. And so I would need, like, a full-time vehicle.

I guess it’s still possible that the damage to the muscles in my legs and arms can be repaired somehow. Maybe there’s a drug for my condition out there somewhere, awaiting a competent physician’s actual diagnosis.

I have to shamefacedly admit that sometimes I wish I had the money to go down to the US and see a doctor there.

Their system may suck but at least you can keep their goddamned attention.

More after the break.

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Nobody loves Fru

Actually, lots of people love Fru. It just doesn’t get through.

So in some ways, reverting to thinking nobody loves me is just… easier. Easier than constantly reminding myself that, despite the message my feelings are playing on a loop 24/7, it just isn’t true.

Sometimes it’s a lot easier to believe a lie than to believe what you believe is a lie.

And it hurts to think of how incredibly sad and lonely my life has been. When I was raped when I was 4, that thick invisible wall went down between me and the world and it cut me off from all that is whole and healthy and vital and good.

No wonder I am always starving for affection. I need that touch, even if it’s only via text over the Internet. I am making up (I assume) for all the love and affection I did not get during a crucial part of my early childhood, both before and after that wall went down.

I think my childhood might have been a little fucked up even before the rape.

Speaking of that wall, it’s another thing that it’s hard for me to think about and so it’s hard for me to remember that it’s there.

Now that I am consciously aware of its presence, I can feel it in my mind. It feels like polished marble, the kind that always feels slightly wet to the touch. It’s hard and dense and kinda cold, and it is what is keeping me from feeling my world.

Not entirely, thank God. But mostly. That wall went up to protect me from the horror of being sexually assaulted when I was still young enough to be scared of the dark, and when it went up, no mechanism for lowering it was included.

In its own way, it was a final judgment on the entire world. World bad. Make world go away for good. Only let mind things in.

And that left me so deeply and profoundly disconnected. And like I keep telling myself, if I am to reconnect to the world, I am going to have to convince that deep part of me that was formed on that terrible day that the world is a good place after all and therefore it’s safe to let the wall go back to whence it came.

And then maybe I can truly come home again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More or less.

Finished the major overarching plotline of Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey just now.

Man, what a game. According to Steam, I have played it for slightly more than 150 hours so far. And I am not quite done yet.

To get the final ending, I had to defeat the Minotaur (aka the OG Taurus), the Cyclops (there’s only one in this game), the Sphinx (who followed tradition and tore herself to pieces when I answered all her riddles), and finally the Medusa.

After defeating each one, I retrieved an artifact created by the Precursors, or “Isa”, who are some Clarke level alien race who built Atlantis and irresponsibly left behind a bunch of way too powerful artifacts and build these sanctums (sancta?) full of impressively brutalist geometry and such.

What is it with alien races building everything out of pyramids and spheres and shit, anyway? How come you never see an alien base or ship that’s decorated with comfy furniture and bookshelves and a nice throw or two to warm things up a bit?

Not alien (or alienating) enough, I suppose. After all, they are supposed to be impressively enigmatic and far, far more advanced than us.

Which apparently means a lot of bare stone and the Platonic solids. I guess it shows just how impenetrable Geometry is for most people.

But I dunno. I suppose if someone from ancient Greece was transported to our time, they might be somewhat freaked out by all our very regular rectangular buildings and of course by cars and computer and such.

Yet I am pretty sure it could be made to make sense to him or her. They didn’t have cares but they had chariots. A rectangular building with rectangular rooms is not all that different from what the Greeks had.

Computers would be tricky to get over, I suppose. Call it magic book?

My point, and I do have one, is that an advanced alien race would not necessarily be completely opaque to us, like in Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke.

In fact, it was when reading a sequel to that story that I came to the conclusion that above a certain level science fiction can’t help but turn into religion.

After all, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I think that we can’t help but imagine sufficiently advanced aliens as gods, even when that doesn’t necessarily make any sense.

Basically, there’s two kinds of really advanced alien races : just like us with better gadgets, and space gods.

This is what comes of trying to imagine the unimaginable, I suppose. The truth is that, almost by definition, we have no idea what an advanced creature would say or do because we would have to be that advanced to think of it.

I think that makes sense.

But it’s a slippery problem because go back to the mid to late 19th century and you will see that much of what they had then is just a more primitive version of what we have now. Not everything, but a lot of things.

So you could probably get an intelligent 19th century to understand the basics of modern life, although the culture shock would be enormous.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey. 

I finished the big plotline, but I still want to finish assassinating all the members of the Cult of Kosmos. That’s the original evil cult trying to control the Greek world in the main plotline of the game. I pierced the heart of the cult and shut down all their evil plans, but there’s still like fifteen members of the cult out there up to no good, and I plan to exterminate every one of those motherfuckers.

After that, I will probably start a new game, but I won’t get far in it before my interest in the game completely dies.

That’s kind of how it goes for me. I lose interest in a game when I know what will happen next. I am a very plot driven dude. That’s why I write them well.

Maybe I’ll start putting my mad writing skills to use.

More after the break.

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On being productive

I came across a sobering set of facts recently.

Men commit suicide in much larger numbers than women.

In general, women are more likely to attempt suicide but men are far more likely to succeed, often due to a difference in methods.

You’re a lot more likely to survive swallowing a bottle of pills than jumping off a bridge.

And someone did a simply massive longitudinal study^[1] examining the reasons why so many men take their own lives.

And the biggest factor was, essentially, failure. These men felt like they were failures, or losers, and that is literally the worst thing a man can be in terms of society and status.

Worse than being a wimp. Worse than being a coward. Worse than being an animal.

Being a loser is a total negation of your value as a human being if you’re a man. And when that is how you feel, suicide may seem like the only solution.

Take it from one who knows.

Because the massive mountain I have yet to find a way to climb is feeling like I am a total loser for being 51 and never having had a job or a boyfriend or my own place to live or pretty much any other of the usual signs that you have become an adult.

Ergo I am not one, and that’s beyond pathetic when you are 51, and the worst part is, it’s the kind of pathetic that only gets worse with time.

With every birthday, I become an even bigger loser. Yay me.

Now I can see these beliefs of mine from the outside. I know that from a detached but sympathetic point of view, they are unfair, unhealthy, and just plain wrong.

I know that other people do not see me that way.

But that iceberg of shame and self-loathing still looms enormous on my horizon and I can’t seem to find a way around it.

I can’t seem to convince myself either that I am not a loser, or that being a loser is not that bad after all.

And while I am not suicidal, if my Titanic ever does sink, I know exactly which iceberg will have done it to me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Back home, around mid-spring, people start talking about the state of the ice.

You see, the ocean freezes over in winter. And once the ice is good and thick, people start ice fishing.

In fact, a guy caught two tons of ice one year. But when he tried to cook it, he drowned.

Look, I’m never gonna have kids, my Dad jokes have to go somewhere.

Anyhow, ice fishing is where you drill a hole in the ice and fish through that hole. People built little portable shacks for themselves so they can do this in comfort.

They tend to be around the size of a phone booth. Remember those?

In fact, every winter, a little village of these shacks springs up every year on the ice out behind the Waterfront Mall every year.

See, that way you’re never too far from the liquor store.

Fishing’s too boring to do sober.

Come mid spring, the ice starts to melt, and people start sharing opinions about whether the ice is “safe” any more.

Got to know when it’s time to take the shack home and store it till next winter.

And when people start talking about how the ice pack is breaking up, you know it’s time.

I told you all that to tell you this : I feel like my own personal ice pack is breaking up.

Right now I am still mostly frozen inside. But what was once a rock hard glacier is now large icebergs bumping and jiggling like ice cubes in a cocktail.

And when I give my frozen innards a little nudge to see if it’s time to pull in the shack yet, I can feel my cubes jostling around.

Right now, it only lasts a second before my decades of self-conditioning kick in and I reflexively freeze up again and regain my strapped-down eyes-forward fixity.

But for just a moment, things loosened up.

I get the feeling that, like the ice back home, my thaw will seem to be going incredibly slowly until suddenly it accelerates and comes apart completely in a couple of days.

Sometimes with big loud dramatic cracking sounds I could hear from my home six blocks away from the action.

So right now, it might seem like nothing much has really changed, but I know different. I know that underneath the surface, things are breaking up. The thaw has begun, and some time soon, the cracks will begin to show and then the whole damn system will start falling apart in big wet clumps.

It’s not the sort of thing that can be done intellectually. We’re talking pure emotion born from a terrible thing that happened when I was very young. The intellectual mind can, at best, administrate it.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t guide the process consciously. The secret for me is imagination. I have a powerful imagination and by using it to imagine the ice melting any breaking up and the sun shining on my soul at last, I can make it happen.

I can push myself in that direction. Guide my growth like I am kindly showing myself the way to a better world and, like a plant, I am growing toward the light from that world.

Part of my process of healing will be the complete separation and divorce from my ice so that I fully embrace and accept that my ice is not a part of me, it’s just something that happened to me, and it can all die and go away and I will have lost nothing of value.

And gained an incalculable amount in terms of being truly alive.

And my ice can learn what it’s like to be water again.

More after the break.

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More past blasts

Here’s some more fun videos from my ancient playlists.

This man is so funny it’s like bloody magic :

Plus he’s working the inexhaustible comedy mine that is misheard lyrics.

I’m not sure why misheard lyrics are so reliably hilarious. I guess they hit a sweet spot between error (novel ways to get things wrong are always funny), relatability (we’ve all been there), surprise (root of all comedy), and density (so much funny in so few words).

And part of the density factor is that they use cultural properties that are already in your mind and powerful because of their heavy pop culture weight and, of course, the fact that they are musical because music, like comedy, is magic.

One last thing : it shows just what a master of comedy Peter Kay is that he knows when to stop feeding the misheard lyrics to the audience because now they hear it themselves, without prompting.

Now here’s a VERY deep Canadian comedy cut :

You know it’s a deep cut when the only reason it even still exists to be found is that it got pirated for some bootleg Latino CD label.

I used to have the entire album that track came from. Recorded off the radio. Back when radio stations would play entire albums sometimes.

I won’t claim it was pure comedy gold but I liked it. It had the silly, slightly subversive sense of humour I loved back then.

Now they do stuff like… this.

Finally, here’s a piece from an animator I truly adore :

Not only does FattyDragonite do animations featuring gay furries (hello!), they are extremely well made and, unlike so many other furry things, actually complete, well written, professional, and just plain lovable.

I find it hard to relate to people who feel bound by the rules. I understand them and I strive to make sure I take their needs into account but for me, it’s always been intuitively obvious that the rules are, quite often, optional and can be disregarded when they don’t make sense or are being unnecessarily cumbersome.

That said, I obey most of the rules most of the time because for the most part, they DO make sense, and in fact make it possible for us cranky primates to share this world with one another peacefully.

But I have no sense of the rules as an independent force of authority that must be obeyed. To me, it’s always contingent on my own judgment.

As is everything else.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like, as my self-excavation continues, I am beginning to get glimpses of who I really am, underneath all the madness.

Like I have come to terms with the fact that I am, in fact, rather high strung. I might front like I am a laid back mellow guy, and I am… some of the time.

But I get the feeling that, sans mental illness, I would also be somewhat excitable and maybe even hyper, at least in spurts.

I know that I get waves of inspiration and I wish I could loosen up inside enough to be able to just follow those wherever they lead.

I wish I could be the sort of creative genius one sees in the movies where I get a sudden inspiration and then dash off to my computer to get it all typed down as fast as I can in hopes of bottling that lightning.

But I’m not that guy. Not yet, anyhow. Maybe never… my Taurus need for predictability and calm would find that kind of life very jarring and chaotic because I would never know when the next lightning bolt would strike and interrupt whatever it is I am doing to demand that I drop everything and follow IT instead.

I hate being interrupted. And I hate not finishing what I start.

So instead, the brilliant ideas last long enough in my consciousness to amuse, amaze, or impress me, then dissolve back into the rich primordial soup which birthed them.

I suppose that’s not so bad. But it’s not that good, either. There has to be some way to tap into more of that wild creativity of mine. A way that produces something of lasting value instead of just an ephemeral phantom of the mind.

And often my ideas are not really gone. They are filed away in some back office of my mind and will re-emerge at some salient moment when I need it.

Fruvous secret revealed : sometimes the brilliant ideas he appears to come up with spontaneously are actually ideas he is just remembering.

I mean, either way, they’re my brilliant ideas. So it still counts.

I also suspect that, buried under entire geological eras of insanity, I am actually a neat and organized and orderly person.

After all, it’s not that I like living in chaos and filth. I’d much rather have everything be clean and bright and well organized.

I just don’t feel like I can do that myself. Yet. But the impulse is in there and if I ever regain my energy and drive, I am going to start leading a much cleaner life.

Somewhere underneath the pain, I definitely have the nesting urge to clean and organize my living space to make it nice for myself.

But self-neglect, low self-worth, depression, anxiety, and learned helplessness all get in the way of giving in to that urge at all.

So I need to either get radically better self-esteem or find a way to make enough money to hire a housemaid and/or manservant.

I just love that word. Manservant. Give me chills just thinking about it.

Then there’s the ever-present anger issue. I don’t think of myself an angry person and I don’t want to be one, but as I loosen up inside and get in touch with my emotions and learn to feel them all, I am going to have to deal with all my latent rage and find some sane, safe, non-destructive way to vent it or it will eat me alive.

They say depression is anger turned inwards, and it sure as fuck is with me.

More after the break.

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Another sick day

Didn’t make it to Wound Care OR my shower at Rosewood today.

And I find that depressing.

The first hint of trouble was when I woke up and REALLY didn’t want to get out of bed. That’s quite rare for me. I have trouble getting out of bed fairly often but that’s more a lack of focus and motivation, not reluctancr.

But this morning I *hated* the thought of leaving bed.

But I got up anyhow, and sat there eating breakfast and chatting with my fuzzy friends like I do every morning, but I had this vague sense that something was wrong.

I was awake for half an hour before I realized what it was : I felt terrible.

So I had to get Julian to call Wound Care and tell them I was sick. And then a few hours later, I realized I was not getting any better, so I had him cancel the shower too.

I am bummed out at missing both. With Wound Care, I mean, it’s only been a week and change since I had to miss two in a row. Now I have to wait till Tuesday before I get fresh bandages on my feet.

And I am tired of this shit.

And this was only going to be my second Rosewood Manor shower ever. I felt like I was missing the second day of school.

The whole thing gave me a deflated feeling. Like I had been building up energy within myself to get these things done and then I had to just let it out again,

But I had that feeling like my whole head was solid again, plus runny nose, scratchy throat and lungs, headache, and general malaise.

And that meant I did not feel like it would be safe for me to be around old people with compromised immune systems.

I will admit, though, a small selfish part of me wanted to just go anyway. Ignore the risk to others, ignore my own suffering, and get my shit done.

But I am too sensitive and responsible for that. So I stayed home and nursed a little mild depression for a while.

I feel better than I did earlier today, but not by much. And now my face feels hot too.

I am so over this crap. I am tired of this mysterious bug popping up and wrecking my day. I am thinking that if I still feel bad tomorrow I might go to Urgent Care.

Maybe I just need more sleep. I don’t know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

I talked about how I now knew that all that chilly fear that grips me when I try to do anything outside my very narrow corridor of existence is my brain’s way of keeping that enormous fraction of me that’s been frozen and locked away all these years from thawing out and upsetting the whole system.

That is, in essence, what I am so scared of. That enormous icy dread that freezes me in place is simply my maladapted mind’s way of maintaining stability and keeping me strapped down, head immobilized, eyes pointed at the screen as if I was in A Clockwork Orange except that what I see on the screen I’ve taken to be reality for a long long time.

And it is. But just a narrow little slice of it.

It gave the illusion of reality partly because I can see very far and very deeply from my Barcalounger of doom. I know so much and understand so much that it never felt like my point of view was limited at all.

And it wasn’t…. on the intellectual level.

But emotionally and spiritually, quadriplegics have a greater range of motion than I.

Luckily, the illusion has (obviously) started breaking down. In those rare moments when I Am not playing a video game, I find myself wondering, is this really all I am going to do today? Is this all there is for me? What other things, new things, could I be experiencing? And most importantly of all….

…could I be having a heck of a lot more fun than I am right now?

The answer, of course, is yes. It’s not like video games, as great as they are, are the most fun things in the universe. There’s all kinds of fun things I could be doing. Things that do more than just keep me occupied and entertained. Things that enrich me and bring me joy and love and fulfillment.

Or things that just get me laid, god dammit.

These cold fears of mine have kept me from thinking about things like that. Anything that felt like it might awaken my soul was a source of nameless terror that paralyzed me and kept me from moving forward in the slightest.

And that’s bad.

It’s trapped me in this tragically limited existence for almost 30 years now. But now my soul is slowly thawing out and waking up and it wants so much more.

So these fucking fears and aversions have got to go.

G’wan, get outta here! Vamoose! Shoo! GIT! *chases inner demons with a broom*

Right now, I don’t have the mental resources to launch a full out assault on the system. I am still too scattered and weak and diffuse for that.

But a storm is gathering within me, and soon (I hope), I will throw my all at all that god damned ice and break it up so it can melt in the sun and be gone for good.

This will not be easy. The old bad maladaptive part of me will insists that I am going to die (no, it is), that the walls of reality itself will come crashing down and I will be broken beyond all hope of despair when that ice gives way.

But I am not my ice.

I am the sad motherfucker trapped in that ice. I am a living, breathing, id-bearing animal who has been cut off from the wellspring of life force by all this ice for far too long and I am just about ready to hook that fucker up and throw the switch.

I’ll take the pain, the fear, the nausea, the dread, the heart palpitations, the illusions of illness, and anything else the system can throw at me.

But LET ME LIVE.

More after the break.

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Digging the terminology

I am really digging calling my mental illness “the system”.

Taps into my latent anarchist side. I am good at subversion. I have a real knack for taking down bad order. I can jam “the system” real good.

If the system is just, I’m for the system.

If the system is corrupt, I’mma throw a brick through a window.

My love of good order and my hatred of bad order are two sides of the exact same coin as far as I am concerned.

Hence my being “neutral good” in RPGs.

The Odyssey continues

Playing Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey continues to pay out nicely.

After completing the main plot then more or less fucking around for a while, I did the bucolic quest of paternal bliss that I knew would result in a loved one dying in order to kick off a long bloody question for vengeance.

And yup. One minute I am enjoying the domestic life in the lovely little village of Dyme (dee-may) with my father-in-law and fellow assassin Darius and my wife Neema and my infant son, Elpidios. ^[1]

Aaaand the next minute a bunch of assholes from the Order of the Ancients show up, slaughter everyone in the village and burn it to the ground just to get me to show up so they can try and kill me.

And yet, their leader, Amorges, still thinks he’s on the side of justice! Bah. He’s a bloodthirsty monster who chooses the most vile and violent solutions to any problem and tells himself it’s all justified in the pursuit of “peace”.

Burning villages for vastly insufficient reasons does not promote “peace”.

Anyhow, that was the introduction to Chapter 3 of the game, which was a pleasant surprise to me because I had forgotten I was on Chapter 2.

I just finished chapter 3, where I killed Amorges, tearfully reunited with my infant son, and just as tearfully said goodbye at him as his grand-pater took him away to parts unknown because he’d never be safe around someone with as violent a life as I.

And I think that’s what I have enjoyed most about this game : being set in ancient Greece, they do not hold back on the emotion one iota. My hero, Alexios, cried like an infant when his wife Neema died.

And you know what? That’s exactly what his culture would expect of him. That’s so much more enlightened then our compulsive emotional constipation that keeps us all bottled up inside.

Let it out, Alexios!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

From what I can gather, I radiate intelligence like it’s my personal magnetic field.

At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with as to how people can tell me, “you’re obviously really intelligent…” when they have barely even spoken to me yet.

And I have always felt like I had a personal energy field that sometimes crackled with all my latent energies that I did not know how to express.

It’s not like I was going to take a quick jog around the block any time soon. Even though that honestly probably would have done me a lot of good.

Kinda too late for that now. I am still looking for some form of medically monitored exercise, like physio or the like, so I can work out without worrying that I am going to make my still undiagnosed condition worse.

I miss the workouts I could do way back in 1991 at UPEI.

But yeah, all my mental stimulation creates this static electric charge, like my brain is a giant Van de Graaf generator and it discharges in the form of inspiration.

So in a sense, that’s where all my brilliant ideas come from. Also my deep intuition, which can be eerily accurate sometimes.

What’ll really crisp your tapas is that afterwards, I can examine the event and see the incredibly long series of connections and associations that happened in the blink of an eye in order to make that intuitive flash happen.

It’s like I was subconsciously building this circuit made of logic and something beyond logic (meta-logic?) in my mind and the intuitive flash happened when the last piece was added to the circuit causing it to blaze into life and output into the conscious mind.

And the thing is, there is always far more energy than I know how to discharge. So I always have this crackling cumulonimbus cloud of creativity churning and sizzling away in my head to call upon when needed.

Problem is that when I am not tapping into my creative maelstrom, having a constant major weather event happening in your head kind of means you’re crazy.

There’s been times in my life when I have been tempted to say, “sorry, I couldn’t hear you over all the noise in my head. ” to someone, but I um, knew better.

No way they’d take it in the lighthearted, no I am not schizophrenic way I intended.

And that’s the thing. It’s not a sensory thing. I don’t literally hear voices or noises or whatever in my head, thank God.

It’s more their mental equivalent. A metaphor, I suppose.

And yet, despite that, I feel like I have been struggling to hear and understand people over the noise in my head for my entire life.

Sometimes there’s just a hell of a lot going on in the mega-computer that is this capacious cerebellum of mine, and the brain bandwidth left over for actually processing sensory input from the world gets mighty thin.

Which is pretty dang weird, now that I am typing it out loud. I don’t suppose it’s something most people experience except maybe when they are cramming for exams or have a major life decision to make or something.

But my mind always has a hell of a lot going on under the hood. That’s my magic gift, perhaps, is that I can generate a task in my mind, assign some subconscious resources to it, and then forget about it, thus freeing my conscious mind to do other things.

Like fantasize about Zootopia characters. (Me, Judy^[1], Nick, a bottle of carrot flavoured lube, two strategically placed throw pillows…)

But because these processes are subconscious, my conscious mind easily loses track of them and most of the time I actually have no idea what is actually going on in my head until when and if it outputs.

What I wouldn’t give to have the Task Manage from Windows for my brain.

Or honestly, just a reset button.

More after the break.

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Let’s play Pop-o-matic Trouble!

Because that’s what kids want from a board game….. REVENGE!

So I am in the second week of having all my meds bubble-packed. Yes, all my many, many medications are now sealed up in plastic bubbles the size and shape as the packet I get my hot mustard dipping sauce in when I get MacNuggets. #relatable

And honestly, it’s mostly a pain in the ass.

I mean, I guess it’s nice not to have to handle all those pill bottles every day, but I was and am extremely used to that by now. I’ve been on a lot of meds for like 20 years now, and so my day has included a lot of pill taking for a very long time.

You get used to it.

And popping the pills out of their pack is a pain. You have to do it very carefully or the pills will scatter all over the place and I have had to learn to sort of make a bowl of the hand they are being popped into in order to make sure the pills don’t slip through my damaged by diabetes numb fingertips and go astray that way.

So right now, I miss my pill bottles. I asked for the blister packing because my case supervisor, Galina, suggested it, and I still have two and a half weeks of blister packed fun to go though, and I know I am a grumpy old cuss who doesn’t like change and so I hate everything new at first, so I am going to see how I feel when I am done.

Who knows, when I finish my packed pills, I might love them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am at the tail end of another blood sugar burn-down where I feel really feverish but more importantly I can feel my blood sugar crashing and it’s making me, to borrow a scientific term, hyperphagic.

In other words, it makes me REALLY FUCKING HUNGRY.

Thank God I survived another one. It felt like I was in serious peril there for a little while. So I did what any hyperphagic bear would do and ate like crazy.

Ended up decimating the little bit of trail mix (mostly “Omega” from Basse this time) plus a few healthy handfuls of those White Cheddar Cheez-its I mentioned before.

No doubt as to the cause : I did not have my midnight snack last night. That’s because I, to my shame, slept through the usual “getting together with Julian to watch Colbert on the PVR at midnight” period.

I must have forgotten to set my alarm. Because I lay down for a nap after finishing blogging, like I usually do (writing to you wonderful people burns a lot of brain calories), expect that this time, instead of sleeping for like an hour and a half like I usually do, I slept from 9:30 pm to 1:30 am.

That’s four hours of sleep. That’s generally how long I sleep when I get my official “sleep at night” after I do whatever around midnight.

Colbert with Julian, watching Cops et al over zoom with Julian and Felicity, etc.

And I feel really bad about that. I treasure my time watching stuff with Julian. He’s great company and it’s the most social thing I do most days.

Well, that and hanging with the fuzzies.

Anyhow, what matters to this scattered narrative is that I did not eat my midnight snack last night and hence I had another period of extreme hunger, high fever (or something that feels like it), and a horrible draining away feeling that makes me feel like I am going to die if I don’t eat enough.

And I just might.

Clearly, I have to stop being so cavalier about missing meals. What I should have done last night is go to the kitchen and made my usual snack anyhow, and taken it back to my room to eat it while watching a Dr. Gabor Maté video.

Or whatever. But I really do love that guy. He’s a hero to me.

Anyhow, my point is that missing meals is very dangerous to me and I will have to take my meals way more seriously if I want to avoid meltdowns in the future.

And I do. Because they suck. And might kill me.

To avoid skipping the midnight snack on nights when we hang with Felicity, I either need to start doing the hanging with Julian thing after we hang with Felicity, which is unlikely because we’re both pretty tired by then, or I have to get used to going out to make my snack at like 11:30 pm or 11:40 pm so I can eat it while we watch Cops.

Man that show is compelling. I can see why it was such a huge hit.

And in general, I need to take my health more seriously. But that’s a tricky thing for me to do because I don’t want to trigger my latent hypochondria or otherwise give myself things to be neurotic about.

I might just be too fucked up in the head to take care of myself properly.

And that would suck, because it’s not like there’s anyone else to take care of me. Unless I find myself a nice cozy hospital bed to live in for the rest of my life, I am going to be the one in charge of me no matter what.

And yet, fundamentally, I just don’t give a shit about myself.

My childhood was so bad that even i don’t think I am worth any effort, time, attention, money, or affection.

And I don’t know how to fix that.

More after the break.

How to fix that

I will now uncharacteristically pick up where I left off.

I don’t know how to learn to value myself more. I have my list of genuinely awesome things about myself and I know, intellectually, that it all adds up to a pretty amazing dude, and yet deep down, I still feel worthless and pathetic.

Clearly I need to do some deeper work on myself. That message about how less than useless I am got installed more or less from birth but was countered at first by me being the cute little redheaded freckle faced precocious kid that charmed everyone.

But that wore off. Even the cutest puppies still become dogs. And then nobody even wanted me around any more.

That was quite the fall from grace. I wonder if on some level, I am trying to get back to that place where everyone loved me and I was the center of attention wherever I went without even trying.

I did go from being a cute little redheaded boy to being a cute little red-furred fox, after all. One who is funny and charming and sweet and lovable.

`And in some ways, I am more myself when pretending to be him than I am when I am forced to be who I actually ended up being.

Not sure how I feel about that, but it is what it is.

Geez, I just realized I value who I am when I am Fruvous more too. That’s the person I really want to be. Friendly, outgoing, vibrant, with a lot of friends and loads of charisma and appeal. Someone everyone loves.

And, fur aside, it’s not impossible that I could be that person in the real world. It would be a lot more work, especially at first, and I would have to accept that, just like on Tapestries, my charms would not work on everyone.

But if I had a place I could go in the real world where I knew a bunch of people and they were all pretty cool and quite smart, like at Merriam’s, I would be there all the time.

And maybe I could finally actually develop socially, after all these years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I recently decided to invest some of my hardly-earned Salad money in a 2014 remake of a very old game called Fallout 2.

It’s a game from way, way back before the Fallout series was even 3D, so it’s a 2D turn based isometric RPG like Baldur’s Gate, Pillars of Eternity, or Pathfinder : Kingmaker.

And when I installed it and started playing, I discovered something wonderful.

I have never played it before!

Everything I thought I remembered from playing Fallout 2 must actually have happened in Fallout 1. So now I have a completely new (to me) Fallout game to play!

And that is Christmas in August to an RPG nut like me.

Plus there seems to be a robust modding community, which makes things a lot more fun. I’ve already installed a few.

One of them adds a ton of content just by digging into the game files and implementing a bunch of stuff the original game devs meant to have in there but had to take out because they didn’t finish it in time or somesuch.

Presumably the patch completes or fixes what needs it then re-includes it in the game, which is pretty kewl.

So far, the main issue I have with the game is that everything is kinda tiny. I guess that’s what happens when you have an old game running at modern resolutions.

But playing it is giving me eye strain headaches, so I am going to need to find a fix. I will see if running at a lower resolution makes things more visible to my weak eyeballs.

I’ve had this problem with very old games before. It’s mildly amusing and/or ironic that the problem with playing an old game is that my computer is too new.

Luckily, I still have Kingmaker and Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey to play when I need to remind my eyes what things are supposed to look like.

Or I could just, you know, look away from the monitor at the real world, but where’s the fun in that?

Reality is highly overrated.

Meanwhile, had another adverse health event this morning. I was hanging with the fuzzies and eating breakfast like I usually do around 8 am when I started feeling quite unwell. I felt incredibly hot. Like, not just a little feverish, and not just like it was hot out. I was feeling so hot that it became hard to think and my head felt thick and the inside of my skull was tingling and it felt like something bad was coming on.

And I just sort of lingered in that state for a while because I wasn’t thinking very well and so the thought, “Hey, this could be pretty bad. ” took a while to happen.

The really ironic part is that I was still chatting with my fuzzy friends like normal. Somehow, that part of my brain was working fine.

Once I had gathered enough of my wits to form a quorum and therefore make decisions, I said goodbye to the fuzzies and then…. I was stumped.

On some level, I knew that I maybe should call Julian’s cell and get him to take me to the hospital, or maybe even call 911, but that kind of decision was so far beyond me that light from me wouldn’t reach them for thousands of years.

So I went back to bed instead. By default, essentially.

Luckily, I did not die or have an aneurism, so… that’s good. Looking back, I think the problem was that my pores had gotten clogged and so the “fever” lasted until enough sweat built up to flush the pores out again.

Or whatever. My body doesn’t need a reason to do weird scary shit any more.

More after the break.

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Telling people what to do

I have a lot of natural leadership qualities.

Intelligence, sensitivity, understanding, judgment, charisma, and a genuine desire to help people, to name a few.

Plus I am just enough of a socially detached weirdo to be impartial and fair.

I will do what I feel to be right every single time.

But I have never sought leadership roles besides low level community organization and the occasional directing gig in amateur theater.

And I duck or dodge leadership because I don’t want to be tied down with responsibility. I am an artsy fartsy free spirit type and I prefer to maximize my autonomy.

But I am starting to reconsider that position. I could do a lot of good if I found the right kind of leadership position – knowing me, one I would create myself.

What’s more, I am beginning to realize that I am, deep down, a very pushy person. Not in a domineering way, exactly. More like being the yappy little dog that nips at the sheep’s heels to keep the herd moving.

And I am very opinionated. And often I feel very frustrated when things are not going the way I think they should.

To me, this all leads in one very specific direction : telling people what to do.

Not in a mean way. If you have to make people fear you in order to get them to do what you want them to do, you suck as a leader.

True leadership means being the person people turn to when they don’t know what to do and to be that person you must seem smart, confident, and like you understand the big picture and have everything under control.

That way people will take your direction and not even feel like it’s someone telling them what to do. After all, it’s something they are seeking from you, not something you are imposing upon them.

What they want from you is whatever bit of action or information they need in order to go do their individual task.

Do that right, and people can relax about the big picture and concentrate on doing their part to the best of their ability.

And I think I could do that if I could just get over this childish aversion to responsibility.

The world needs me.

That should count for something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I can’t get enough of this guy.

Now I could write a million words based on that video alone but for now I am going to stick with his first topic, which is stress.

The world seems to have forgotten the basic theory of stress. Basically, stress kills because it keeps the body from repairing itself.

You see, when we are stressed, our adrenal response kicks in. When that happens, our body shifts priorities entirely to RIGHT NOW because it is assumed that you’re being chased by a saber toothed tiger or whatever and so what matters most is that you survive the next five minutes of your life and to hell with anything long term.

You have to survive the short term for there to even BE a long term.

And that means long term things like healing, cellular regeneration, clearing blood toxins, and so on are put on hold until the crisis ends.

BUT THE CRISIS NEVER ENDS. Modern humans face dozens of complex stressors all the time and that means we stay in this state of compromised renewal all the god damned time, and that is why stress is killing us.

That’s why previously fairly rare diseases like cancer have become so prevalent, along with things like hypertension, depression, stroke, anxiety, and birth defects.

And speaking of depression, it is poisonously ironic, Doctor, to tell people like me that our depression makes our medical outcomes worse across the board makes us very depressed and thus makes our medical outcomes worse across the board.

I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong, Doctor. The world needs to know these things. I am just commenting on the inescapable irony of it all.

It’s like, the times I’ve been the hospital, I have noticed (and greatly appreciated) how the nurses do their best to tell me things without freaking me out.

I would love to sit in on whatever course they take that teaches that.

As for disconnecting from ourselves and our bodies, I sure as federally insured fuck know all about that. When I was being raped at the age of 4, I completely divorced myself from the reality of the situation as a way to cope with the unthinkable, incomprehensible horror of it all.

I told myself, “this is not real, this isn’t really happening, I’m not really here” over and over again until, presumably, it was all over.

I don’t consciously remember the event except for bits and pieces. But I am positive it’s all recorded in me somewhere and that the effort it takes for my mind to basically fight itself in order to keep those memories suppressed has cost me far more than I would ever want to know.

I wasn’t always a wimp. I wasn’t born that way.

And of course, I never truly returned to reality. I reconnected with the world of the senses and the “real world” only as much as I absolutely needed to and the rest of me stayed suspended in the world of the mind and what was purely internal.

Like thoughts, ideas, emotions, words, puzzles, games, TV, video games, reading, and of course, eventually, the Internet.

That’s why my whole personal life has been lived through screens. If it hadn’t been too early for remote learning, I no doubt would have lived my scholastic life through screens as well. Screens screen out reality, with which I have somewhat of an issue.

And even as I am typing these very words, I know that I am mostly not really here. My physical self is unavoidably present, but my inner self is crouched down behind a screen scared out of his mind (literally) of the big bad world out there and sending these little strips of words out into the world to represent me instead.

It’s pretty sad.

More after the break.

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Two sleepy buddies

Guess what? I’m making images again, and I don’t even have to use my own computer.

Instead I am using this amazing website to make images like this :

The same site lets me make smut too, but I haven’t made any that I consider both good enough and safe enough to share…. yet.

But it’s comin’.

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Memory Lane, Sneak Peek edition

I’ve been going through some of my ancient YouTube playlists and have found some real gems from long ago that I just have to share.

But I’m pretty close to the end of today’s words, so I will only share a few.

Like this peppy and colorful little number :

(warning, not safe for people who hate it when things are in rhyme)
(I’m looking at you, Felicity!)

I admit, it’s a little twee even for me but there’s enough wit and invention to it (plus, ya know, murder and stuff) that I can put up with it.

Here’s another ancient morsel. It’s short but packed with… well you’ll see.

(warning, not safe for people who don’t like REALLY brutal satire)

Like I said, brutally satirical of a certain kind of middle class white lady, most likely in Southern California or Texas.

The super racist kind, to be specific.

And I think something particularly nasty comes crawling out of people’s minds when they have someone of definitely lower status who lives with them, like a live-in maid.

Especially when those people depend on them for their green card.

But remember, the white ladies lose in the end!

And finally, this little masterpiece :

(not safe for those sensitive to people hilariously desecrating classic 80’s music videos)

Oh, and watch the original video first, it’s good, and it makes this version much funnier.

That’s enough for now, I think.

I will probably share more of the best of the 2000s in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.