Just had a very unpleasant experience.

I was plugging away, playing Pathfinder : Kingmaker, deep in concentration as usual, when I suddenly realized my stomach was positively boiling with acid.

What’s worse is that I could also feel my blood sugar start to sleep. I got this feeling I have had before, like something vital is rapidly draining away from me. It comes complete with a splitting headache and a case of the greasy sweats.

Sorry for that image.

So I did the only thing I could do : I ate. Good thing I always have food nearby. I started noshing on trail mix and Cheez-its and just kept on eating until the acid beast in my stomach was placated.

Luckily (and probably relatedly), it was almost time for lunch anyhow. So now I am doing the whole blog and eat thing.

And fretting, as I so often am, about resources.

This was a bad week to end up needing to eat essentially two and a half meal’s worth of trail mix because I already have a deficit.

See, every week, I buy a 1 kg bag of No Name Original Trail Mix and a 600 g bag of some other trail mix from the friendly folk over at a company called Basse.

I originally got just the 1 kg bag of the No Name stuff but I found I was running out by Wednesday (I shop on Fridays) so I added the Basse stuff to my routine.

Plus it gives me some variety in my feed.

But this week, instead of the 1 kg bag of the No Name stuff, I got another 600 g bag from Basse. Meaning I have a trail mix deficit of 400 g.

Oh well, at least they didn’t saddle me with one of the Basse mixes that’s like half candy this time. I can’t eat that shit.

Plus it offends the 70’s health food nut in me to see nice wholesome trail mix turned into junk food to make it more palatable.

Don’t get me started on granola.

Anyhow, I just know I am going to run out of trail mix before the week is over and that is the kind of thing that stresses me out.

I hate running out of things. The idea is to buy more before you run out. That way you never have to deal with the heartbreak of having none left.

So now I feel like I have failed somehow, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. My instincts make me feel like I have let the village down and as a result this winter is going to be a hard one.

I’m a complicated dude, is what I am saying.

So yeah. I guess it was my stomach’s turn to freak out on me.

Actually, it was probably primarily a blood sugar thing that expressed itself, in part, as a highly acid stomach.

Dunno what precipitated a blood sugar meltdown. It’s not like my activity level went up in some radical way.

Then again, I did start playing Kingmaker right after a long and intense session of Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey, and I suppose that in my gimpy world, that would count as an unusual increase in activity.

Normally, I would lay down after a long session of a fairly intense game like Odyssey, but today I decided to push myself a little and see what happens.

Won’t be doing THAT again any time soon.

Plus it’s high time I started eating lunch at 3 pm and not 4 pm.

Or I started eating breakfast at 9 am instead of 8 am.

My point is that eight hours is too long to go without eating even for people who are not diabetic, let alone my No Sugar Added ass.

I am so bad at living.

More after the break.

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This joke needs work, but :

I’m thinking of changing my chicken’s feed, she’s getting way too many Trump stories.

Stupid goddamned algorithm!

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A fire in the darkness

Remember, if you can’t take the heat…. you’re pretty much fucked.

That’s how I am feeling right now. It’s around 8:30 pm and the sun is setting and it is finally, FINALLY starting to cool off.

But I have felt many varieties of shitty today and the heat’s to blame.

Well, that and airborne pollen. Basically, summer is out to get me.

If money wasn’t so tight, I’d get myself some antihistamines. But the god damned hellspawn shitlicking 5 week month made that impossible.

I can’t even get Felicity a birthday gift and her birthday was 11 days ago.

And besides my lovely brush with hypoglycemic death earlier, I know my IBS is mssing me up to. Right now, I should be eating supper, but my appetite is DOA.

I’ve managed to eat a Mandarin orange (Cantonese oranges are too expensive) and I will try to nibble on some of my White Cheddar Cheez-its in order to keep body and mind together for now.

But mostly I am hoping my midnight snack will compensate for my missed meal.

The White Cheddar Cheez-its are pretty good, by the way. But be warned, this “white cheddar” tastes a lot like Parmesan cheese to me.

This adds fuel to my theory that “white cheddar” is really just white-bread Parmesan.

Think about it.

And yes, I see the irony in skipping a meal on the same day that I had a blood sugar crash. I know that I might be dancing with death on this one.

But he’s light on his feet and really knows how to Charleston.

I won’t get into the whole “it sucks to try to eat when you have no appetite” thing. Whatever. I have more or less given up on that fight.

I know that I could make myself eat if I really, really had to. I’ve done it in the past, and it has saved my ass a few times.

But I already essentially ate two meals for lunch today, so I am sure I will be fine. I only have to make it to midnight anyhow.

I’m sure my body has enough latent calories for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think my condition is getting worse. But it’s hard to tell.

Today’s trip to Wound Care was really rough. I barely made it from the car to the waiting area of the CCC (Community Care Clinic).

The second I was on my feet, I was exhausted and weak. It reminded me of the bad old days before my hospital stay of July 2022 when my legs were getting weaker and weaker and less flexible and harder to coordinate.

Back then, I didn’t have a walker, so the trip from the Joemobile to the CCC was excruciating. Many times, i thought I would not make it. By the time I made it to the waiting area, I was red-faced and sweaty and short of breath.

And yet, it took waking up to find my legs just plain would not support my weight at all before it occurred to me to do anything about it.

Sometimes I look back at past me and I am agog with confusion and horror. What the hell was wrong with me that instead of seeing someone about my leg degradation, I just treated it like it was normal and kept motoring along?

Maybe that’s the problem : I just keep going. There is a fundamental restlessness at the core of my being that insists that I keep moving and grooving no matter what, hungry like a shark for mental stimulation and never truly coming to a rest.

That’s kinda fucked up.

Also, before we leave the topic, I need to once more apologize to all my friends for putting them through the nightmare horror show that was watching me develop enormous infections (cellulitis), slowly lose my ability to walk, and acting like it was all perfectly normal and no big deal.

I’m over that now, I think. But I still feel bad about what I put you through. Sorry.

Anyhow, on to my current degradation.

The trip from the CCC back to the car was pretty bad too. Not as bad as the first trip as my muscles had warmed up somewhat but I still felt quite wobbly and weak, and experienced great relief when I finally sat down in the car.

Pretty bad, huh? Probably a good reason to go see Doctor Chao again. Well, that and my recent attack of sleep incontinence.

I could also take it to Urgent Care or the ER. Insert standard whining about not wanting to go here. They both suck enough to make making an appointment with Doctor Chao seem like an appealing alternative.

But I know that there will probably be at least a week’s delay before Chao can see me. Possibly more. Like all GP’s, he’s becoming super busy as the Boomer bulge hits their most medically demanding years – the last ones.

Plus my faith in Doctor Chao has taken some big hits. It’s clear to me that he is not capable of sticking with a problem like my muscular deterioration until he actually comes up with a diagnosis.

With him, it’s out of sight, out of mind. I only exist to him when I am talking to him, in person or on the phone, and so if I am not there demanding answers, I might as well have dropped off the face of the Earth.

Silly me, I thought the doctor’s job was to do whatever it takes to heal people. I never knew there was a “unless I run out of inspiration and can’t think of a possible diagnosis in which case fuck it” clause.

Not that I’m bitter.

I swear, if I end up in a wheelchair, I’m going to sue that man.

More after the break.

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Intermission : Funny bunny comics!

Some of these are absolutely brilliant!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9zIENibhXY

I love seeing things like this. They remind me that bright young minds can keep advancing the art of comedy long after I am dead.

When you get old, it’s easy to get jaded. But stuff like these comics cut through that. And that gives a grizzled old coot like me hope. Hope that I can avoid ending up hating everything because nothing makes me laugh any more.

Keep up the good work, kids.

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It gets worse

Not only was today’s trip to Wound Care especially rough on me, but now I feel like I received a light but thorough beating as I am stiff and sore all over and even just getting up to refill my water glass can make me groan.

Luckily, an Aleve seems to have done some good.

But I am officially quite worried now. This is not normal for me. I have definitely become more disabled. I am going to have to seriously consider the ER.

Or Urgent Care. *sigh* I really should relax about that place. Yeah, it somewhat sucked before they opened the second one, but I understand it’s a lot better now.

But anyhow, I am going to see how I feel over the next 24 hours or so. If I continue to feel all beaten up, I will have to go to UC or the ER.

God, I wish my tablet worked.

But it’s almost totally dead now. Even on the rare occasions when I can get it to charge at all, the moment I start actually doing anything the charge falls back to 1 percent and then the whole thing shuts down.

That means I am going to have to prioritize getting a new battery for it. And that will cost me something like $35. I was also going to try to get a shower chair with next month’s money, but who knows, the Occupational Therapist who is going to visit on the 21st might have the power to get the government to buy me one.

And that would be nice.

Since hooking up with my case supervisor Galina (the lady who visited a while back), things are, amazingly, actually happening for me.

And so far, all I have to do is show up for stuff.

This is ideal.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well that fucking sucked.

I just had the worst dizzy spell I’ve ever had.

And that’s saying something!

I had just exited the drowsing state that accompanies my waking up from a nap in the afternoon these days and walkered my way to the kitchen when it hit me like a ton of lead to the forebrain. Hit me so hard that the only reason I didn’t take a nasty fall was that our kitchen is tiny so I was able to shoot out my hands and grab hold of the cupboards on either side of me.

And even then I was in mortal peril because the room was still tilting from my point of view. A fact I learned when merely shifting my weight caused the world to do another violent shift that would have laid me out without the support of the cupboards.

Thanks, cupboards. You went above and beyond today.

Julian rushed over to see what was the matter, So he went above and beyond too. I managed to tell him I was dizzy. He asked what he could do as he helped me get the walker back upright. I honestly couldn’t think of a way he could help.

Some things you just gotta go through alone. Maybe if two burly interns with excellent reflexes has been there to hold me up, that would have helped.

But maybe not. I dunno.

Anyhow, I did the only thing I could do, namely hang on tight and wait for the dizzy spell to pass, which thankfully it did quite rapidly.

But that was very, very bad. I could have injured myself dozens of ways as my mighty mass came down on some poor part of me all at once. At my age, and with my osteoporosis, I could have broken a lot of my bones, too.

Makes me feel like I should go around in one of those safety harnesses that mountain climbers use. Plus a six inch layer of bubble wrap.

Now obviously, I got up too fast. That’s clearly the trigger in this situation. I was drowsing siesta style and then suddenly woke up and remembered that it was time o make my lunch and do part 1 of my blogging for the day, and that caused me to leap to my feet and walker to the kitchen far too quickly.

But that’s merely the inciting incident, not the root cause.

The root cause was probably dehydration. I get dehydrated so easily these days. So easily that I have to drink more or less constantly just to keep ahead of it.

So that combined with my circulatory issues is probably why I had such a severe onset of dizziness. And now I am left, as I so often am, wondering how seriously I should be taking this incident.

My normal, childlike reaction is to say, “well I am okay (ish) now, so I’ll forget about it. ”

Look, I’ve been telling you people I am not a competent caretaker for myself.

The other possibility would be to go to Urgent Care. And I don’t wanna. Ditto the ER. I am not in the mood to pack up some stuff and go to the UC or the ER and end up just sitting there bored out of my gourd (due to my fucking tablet not working any more) only for them to eventually tell me they can’t find a problem and so yay, you get to go home now. Aren’t you excited?

Go fuck yourself with a rusty bedpan, you knob. I wanted answers, not a pat on the back. Your lack of scientific curiosity offends me.

More after the break.

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People who hate utilitarianism

My theory is that the people with a strong hate for utilitarianism are people who fundamentally hate math.

And all other forms of quantitative thinking. The idea that a moral problem – any moral problem – could be solved by simply looking to see which of two numbers is bigger is extremely offensive to them.

To these people, morality is warm and human, and numbers are cold and inhuman, therefore morality can never, ever be reduced to anything numerical.

These forces are fundamentally at odds with one another. They are opposites, more or less. to these people and that is a hill they are totally willing to die on.

Despite the fact that said opinion is an aesthetic one, not a logical one. They don’t have an articulate argument for their rejection of utilitarianism, just an emotional reaction to it.

And here’s the thing : the logic of utilitarianism is ironclad and irrefutable. All
utilitarianism boils down to is choosing the greater (or greatest) good.

Ergo in order to argue against it, you’d have to argue for the lesser good. And that would be downright silly.

I think a lot of people get a bad impression of utilitarianism because of the extremely contrived questions in ethics 101 books where utility would demand that you do the thing that IS right over the thing that FEELS right.

Like, say, pressing a button that dooms one man to die so that five others might live.

Now me, I would press that button. My morality would demand it. Five people surviving is better than only one person surviving. That’s so basic it’s elemental.

But I won’t claim that I would walk away from it feeling good. In fact, seeing that one person die and knowing they died by my hand would probably haunt me for the rest of my life. I’d have nightmares.

But, and this is a real sticking point for some, morality is about doing what is right, not what feels good. And that’s what really sticks in some people’s craw : the idea that those two things can diverge from one another, at times quite radically.

Oh, and one last thing : I know and accept that utilitarianism is not for everybody. There are many people in the world for whom my personal brand of precision pragmatism is quite simply incompatible software. They can’t think like that and it would be highly injurious to them emotionally to even try.

And to that I say, do whatever works for you, people.

After all, that is always the pragmatic choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So today started out pretty shitty.

And by now you know I mean that literally.

Brown alert, poop talk ahead!

So the day started out fine. I had trouble unwinding so I ended up staying awake until like 6:20 am this morning.

But after that, I was finally tired enough to sleep.

Slept until a bit before 10 am. Got up, ate breakfast, hugged fuzzy folk. My usual morning routine, two hours later.

Whatever. Not important.

I still needed a lot more sleep, though, so I had to bid farewell to my fluffy paramours and go back to sleep far earlier than I would have liked.

So I went back to sleep and slept quite heavily…. too heavily, as it turned out.

Because yup, sleep incontinence struck again, Man I’m getting tired of this shit (ha ha).

Woke up quite groggy, felt the by now sadly far too familiar wrongness in the general vicinity of my butthole. put my hand there, got the very bad news.

So then I had to go through a ton of Kleenex cleaning both bed and butt to the best of my ability given the steel spikes shooting up through my mattress trying their best to impale me so I bleed out, because that’s just the way my life works.

Not that I’m bitter.

Oh, but life was not done being shitty (hee) to me. Not by far.

See, once I finished cleanup, I realized I needed to pee. And luckily my receptacle was close at hand and there was room for even a sizable micturition in it. So I figured I would make use of it.

But in my hazy and pissed off state (terrible combo), I forgot that for some reason, sometimes when I pee, I get the urge to poop during the act.

Sometimes the urge vanishes the moment I stop peeing, suggesting that the problem is that something is making my bladder press against or otherwise stimulate my bowels.

And not in a fun way.

So the moment I started peeing, I felt a great mass of stuff slithering out of me uncontrollably. Understandably, my heart sank as my bowels emptied.

And this was WAY more stuff than had come out of me the first time. So not only did I have to start the cleanup all over again, it was a much bigger and grosser task this time.

Ain’t life a peach.

Oh, and this time, it wasn’t the somewhat harmless half-digested bits of food like the first time. This was some serious (literal) shit.

I can’t promise I won’t make more shit jokes.

So I cleaned up THAT mess with an even more enormous quantity of Kleenex, and when I was sort of done, I realized I had a huge wad of extremely soiled tissues that I needed to dispose of.

So I reluctantly wadded them up, carried them into the bathroom, dumped them into the toilet, and flushed.

Which was dumb, dumb, dumb, because of course, the toilet instantly clogged and began to overflow.

This was getting farcical in a completely unfunny way.

Luckily, I knew what to do. Gently got the plunger in there and with a few swift form plunges, I unclogged the mofo.

It was a very low level clog, easy to defeat.

So that was my wonderful morning. Just another sunshine-y day in the life of a lost genius trying to finally get a life at the age of 51.

And I haven’t even talked about the shower thing yet. A total stranger hosed me off like I was an elephant at the zoo today.

It felt pretty good.

More after the break.

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The Rosewood Incident

So after Poopgate Number Whatever, I was able to relax by (what else) playing video games for a little while until 1 pm rolled around and it was time for me to head off to a local old folks’ home, Rosewood Manor, for a shower.

My first in well over two years, mind you.

And I was nervous, but as Felicity had suggested, I had popped a Xanax around noon so I was not panicking or freaking out.

Amazing stuff, that Alprazolam (Xanax). My anxiety was completely gone. And yet, I wasn’t stoned or sleepy or silly or dizzy or anything.

I was just chemically unable to panic. Bitchin’.

We arrived a little early. The appointment was for 1:30 pm and we got there at more like 1:20 pm so neither my case worker Tina nor my caretaker Harjit were there yet.

Plus, we were having trouble getting the car registered for parking. Parking was free for the first two hours, and we were only there for an hour, so that was all good.

Eventually we were led down a long corridor to a “spa room” that had some weird high tech kind of bath tub and a sort of stall with a detachable shower head and a device resembling a wheelchair as imagined by Fischer Price in it.

I got undressed and got in the chair and Harjit washed my hair and showered me all over. Thanks to Xanax, it was no big deal. I have always said that I somehow got a lower dose ot the nudity taboo than others and so it honestly was no big deal for me to just sit there and enjoy the luxury of FINALLY showering after all this time.

Well, being showered. You know what I mean.

I might ask to do it all myself next time. I’m not sure. It’s a strange thing to trust a stranger to do for you. It’s so personal.

But I must admit, my oral-retentive side loved being taken care of like that. And that is kind of distressing. I don’t like that side of myself and don’t want to cater to it because I don’t want to end up as even more of an overgrown and overbrained infant than I already am. I much prefer to be independent.

So in sense, it’s the classic struggle between decadence and autonomy. It’s a territory I am going to have to explore more and more as my debility advances and I am going to have to get used to preserving my dignity and freedom however I can.

Overall, it was a pleasant experience, although when I got home my legs were not happy with me due to having to go down that long corridor and back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Doug Henning, that is.

Fuck you, Doug, and all your empty headed talk about “the power of IMAGINATION!” and how we could “be anything we wanted to be” because if we only wanted it badly enough, our biggest dreams would come true.

Yeah, Jiminy Cricket can go fuck himself with a can of DDT too.

And it’s not just you, Doug. I loathe your entire generation of vacuous pinheads regurgitating your formulaic “pro-social” pablum about how great cooperation and friendship are and how we shouldn’t exclude people just because they’re different.

Fat lot of good that shit did me when I was a friendless weirdo child who never even got the chance to cooperate with anyone because I was different.

I mean, my fellow students must have had that shit repeated to them over and over again every Saturday morning too, yet somehow they still didn’t get the fucking memo.

Like a lot of inclusive and empathic ethics, it’s not something you actually do, it’s something that makes you feel good when you hear it.

Actually being nice to people sucks.

They got the memo about cooperation, though. They all cooperated beautifully when the entire student body of Parkside Elementary was chasing me around the playground with harmful intent.

All that crap about the power of friendship really hurt me back then. It was like the normal people were mocking me and grinding my face into the dirt about how wonderful being normal like them (and not “gross” like me) was and how I would never know the simple social pleasure of having a peer group because I was broken and disgusting and wrong and didn’t even deserve to go anywhere where others could see me.

But that would never have occurred to you, would it, Doug? Your evacuated cranium would never have conceived of there being a downside to jerking people off by telling them how great something most of them already had was.

But it wasn’t just the children’s entertainment of my formative years that I hate. I hate that whole generation of hippie dippie Boomer teachers who didn’t want to be seen as an “authority figure” and therefore let my fellow students run wild like Lord of the Flies.

God, do I hate that book.

My whole childhood was marred by the unintended consequences of all those Boomer teachers preferring to try to be our “friend” instead of having to actually live up to their responsibilities and take charge of the classroom.

As a result, I, like many other Gen X kids, grew up in a world without authority figures. And that made us, or me at least, very nervous and uncertain because we lived in a kind of anarchy where you had nobody to turn to when you were scared or weirded out or just plain don’t know what the hell is going on.

Human beings experience enormous stress without leadership. Whether the limp wimps of the world like it or not, we need hierarchy.

That doesn’t mean anything fascist. It just means there needs to be someone who understands the big picture that people can turn to when they don’t know what to do.

Without that, everyone gets stressed out by all the uncertainty. Nobody even knows if they are doing what they are supposed to be doing and if so, if they are doing it right. Discipline falls apart (if it ever existed) and people do mindless, aimless things like cattle in a feedlot. Everyone is miserable, including the teachers.

But hey, better that than forcing a Boomer to actually take responsibility for the things they actually have responsibility for, right?

No wonder they made such lousy parents.

More after the break.

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Not that I’m bitter

Oh wait, yes I am. I’m bitter as hell about the way my life turned out.

But I am trying to get over it because it’s not helpful. I know that my harsh, bitter, angry, scornful internal narrative is hurting me in the long run because it gets in the way of my moving on with my life by causing me to dwell on my past.

Or more correctly, dwell IN my past.

And that’s no good. If I want to move on into the future I have got to make peace with my past somehow, and that won’t be easy.

And it can’t be done by fiat. It has to be earned by working through all of the emotions involved until some degree of resolution is achieved.

Not “closure” because nothing is ever truly completely closed. But it can be sufficiently resolved so that the wound is closed and you can use that part of you again.

Right now, all that bitterness and rage over where I am today and how I got there as well as the massive amount of grief and torment I feel about all those years of my life in which all I did was playing fucking video games plus all the self-loathing that comes with being a 51 year old loser who’s never even had a job adds up to a massive amount of stuff for me to process and there is no quick and easy way to do it.

I can’t possible swallow that mass of indigestible dreck all at once. So all I can do is eat it one mouthful at a time and hope that some day, somehow, I will have eaten enough to make a difference in my life.

And that means giving myself permission to be mad about stuff that might even, in the final analysis, be my fault.

One of the biggest and most soul-wrenching questions that I face over and over again because I can’t seem to resolve it is : how much am I to blame for being who I am today? Could I have done differently? Or was I destined to tread water for 30 years before I could even begin to get my shit together?

The thing is, both answers to that question are bad. It’s bad to imagine I was helpless to do any better and it’s bad to imagine that I totally could have ergo this is all my fault.

Maybe it IS my fault. But if it is, I can’t handle that at all. Accepting that would crush me. I might never recover.

But the question then becomes, if I stay like this, is it STILL my fault? Or can I make it better for myself?

I’ve been proceeding on the assumption that I can. And in tiny ways, I have.

But part of me yearns to reach out for more. So far, my negative demons have been keeping me from doing so.

But some day I will finally reach outside myself and meet the world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What the hell, let’s talk about what is going on in what passes for my actual life.

It ain’t much but it’s all I’ve got.

I finished Cryptmaster, Not felt the need to play more just to fill out more words yet. I guess I sort of miss the game. I wish it had some kind of “new game plus” mode where I could keep all the words my heroes know but start back at the beginning of the plot. Then I would have something more interesting to do than just mindlessly fight monsters.

But I can’t even find the option to start a new game at all, which is tres tres bizarre.

Over in Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey, I am continuing to enjoy ancient Greece despite the fact that I finished the main plot last week or so.

The end of the main plot was really lame.^[1] Sure, I killed the main baddie from the early game, but he didn’t even put up a fight. I guess that was supposed to seem like I had finally caught up with this skeevy coward who committed so many evil deeds from the shadows and finally gave him the brutal justice he deserves, but it was just way too easy to feel like victory.

He didn’t even have tough bodyguards or anything.

Oh well. At least I have also fought the Minotaur, the Cyclops, and will eventually fight the Medusa. And one other classic Greek monster I can’t think of at the moment.

Not the Hydra, sadly. The 12 Labors of Herakles are canonical fact in this universe so good ol Herc already took of that one.

I was pretty disappointed when I got to the exterior of Medusa’s lair and it turned out that I was not high enough level to do the quest to get inside.

I was all pumped up and ready for another tough boss fight! But no, alas, I have to go do other stuff in order to level up.

Luckily there is this whole secondary main plotline to keep me busy. It’s more or less an echo of the first main plot, with two new groups of conspirators (the Hunters and the Order) for me to hunt down and kill. And I haven’t even finished killing the first one (the Cult of Kosmos) yet!

I’ve been busy. I will get around to it eventually.

Over in Pathfinder : Kingmaker, I have once more ignored my kingdom to the point where the people rose up and destroyed it. Ooops.

The thing is, I don’t actually know what I am supposed to do to prevent that. And reading documentation for the game doesn’t seem to provide the answer, so I have decided that I am just going to turn on automatic kingdom management and let the computer worry about keeping my peasants from slitting my throat in the night.

Kind of a bummer, really. I mean, I have built all kinds of cool shit for the citizens of my barony. And as far as I knew, I was treating them quite well.

But apparently that’s not enough. Yeesh.

What do you people want from me??

It was a lot easier in the sequel, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous. Way less hands on management of your kingdom because you are kind of busy prosecuting a war against the demons streaming out of the World Wound.

Dramatic, is it not?

There’s even a few mentions of the World Wound and the goings on around it in Kingmaker, which is exactly the kind of continuity porn we nerds love.

Hey look, this thing references that other thing! And that rewards me for paying attention and knowing the lore! And I really, really like that.

We’re not that hard to please, really.

I guess that’s enough for now. Hopefully I will think of a better topic for part 2.

More after the break.

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You know, in a way, I’m still a child genius. Because I’m still a genius. And emotionally speaking, I’m still a child.

My aching back, redux

You know what pisses me off? I still have no idea what’s wrong with my back.

None whatsoever. And neither does my GP, Doctor Kelvin Chao. And furthermore, he doesn’t care. That’s very clear to me now.

Around twice a day, when I get out of bed and stand up, the small amount of jostling that walking subjects my spine to will set off excruciating paroxysms of spasmodic back pain that feels like a giant with iron hands is grabbing my spine and squeezing it like it’s a recalcitrant tube of toothpaste while also twisting it like it’s trying to turn my spine into a spiral staircase.

I paint pictures with words.

I am trying to get better at making sure I leave myself some water in the glass before I lay down because I can get from the bed to the computer chair without much pain and once I am in the computer chair, I can take my muscle relaxant, cyclobenzaprine, and within ten minutes my back is relaxed enough for me to move without whimpering

But only if I have the water I need to take the pill.

Back to Doctor Chao, it’s clear to me that he considers a patient who has stopped complaining to be cured. What the actual problem is, he does not give a shit. He wrote you a prescription, you stopped bitching at him, he’s done.

This is wildly inadequate. I mean sure, the cyclobenzaprine controls my symptoms, but my back is still terribly fucked up and without knowing why or how he has no idea if it is going to get worse or what I should do to make sure it doesn’t.

But who cares? He got the fee for my visit, so everything is fine from his end.

So he doesn’t know what’s wrong with my back or my legs or my arms, and he’s perfectly fine with that because the longer things go undiagnosed, the more often I have to come in and see him, and the more fees he gets to make.

I rest my case.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh hey, it’s another video from this dude, with a list for me to reply to and everything!

And it’s abut being a burden to others, which I um…. know a lot about.

So let’s dive in!

First, the list. You have this problem if you are:

a) Afraid to ask for help. Ayup. Even from people whose whole job is to help people like me, like receptionists and nurses. This does have the beneficial side effect of my learning, out of sheer nervousness, to be very warm and personable to these people. I guess I am trying to charm them into helping me?

b) Afraid to inconvenience anyone else. Same thing, really, so ayup. I automatically assume that I am not important and unworthy of anyone’s time or effort.

c) Afraid to burden anyone with your problems. That’s me alright. And that even includes my therapist, although over the years I’ve at least gotten over that with him. And of course, I can write them down here whenever I need to.

d) Afraid to put too much on anyone. Kinda the same thing, so yeah. I do, in a sense, try to avoid putting too much of my bullshit on any single person, knowing full well that there isn’t a person a live who could handle all of it. Even me, really.

e) Think everyone is either too busy for you or has their own problems to deal with. Roger that. I am nobody’s priority. I assume myself to be an afterthought at best. Nobody really wants to hear from me and people are better off if I don’t bother them by reminding them of my existence.

f) Don’t think you’re a priority or are worthy of people’s time and energy, Um yeah. See the previous response. My whole childhood drummed this lesson into me : I deserve absolutely nothing. I don’t even deserve to take up space.

g) Don’t want to be “too much” for people because they may abandon you. That’s the fear, yeah. I feel like people barely tolerate me to begin with so the last thing I want to do is overload them.

h) Afraid to look weak, dependent, or needy. That ship sailed a long time ago. Whether or not I am afraid of it, it’s happening. So no to this one.

i) Proud of being a strong, independent person. Pride yourself on being self-sufficient. Permit me a dry, ironic laugh. Ahahahahaha, no. I am 51 years old and I have been dependent on others for all but about a year of that. And even then, I needed help from Ravenwood to get my bachelor apartment and to apply for welfare.

j) Conclude that the goal in life, and the sign of being healthy, is to be self-sufficient – to not need anybody. Another big NO from me on this one. I mean yeah, that’s my long term goal – to finally be able to do everything myself, or at least get it done by paying someone to do it. And that would be a sign of being healthy to me. But that’s not going to happen any time real soon.

k) Are validated for taking on lots of responsibility and helping others. I wish! Maybe I will be strong enough for this eventually. But not now.

l) Think people will judge you if you ask for help or are incompetent to do things on yur own. I have always assumed that this is happening. I would be very surprised if nobody but me was doing it.

m) Convince yourself that you don’t have needs or shut down so you can cope. A tentative yes on this one. In the moment, I can totally convince myself that I don’t really need anything per se, because the alternative would be to ask someone for something and that’s clearly not on. See a).

n) Take any sign of others’ tiredness, or “having a hard day”, as a reason to not ask for anything. Oh god, yes. Nothing would make my resolve to ask for something shrivel up and die faster than sensing that the other person is already tired or feeling put upon by life.

I think that’s enough for now. I will do the other 4 after I get home from Denny’s.

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o) Often feel abandoned – nobody cares for you. Another resounding YES. Feeling abandoned and forgotten is always on a hair trigger with me – it’s a feeling that can pop up in an instant at any time, even when it’s patently untrue. I mean, Julian literally cares for me, and yet, that feeling of bereft isolation is always there just below the surface, waiting to rise up and take over. It’s a bad tape I need to erase.

p) More alert to the needs of other than your own. Eh, I’m iffy on this one. Truth be told, I am often too lost in my own pain to put someone else’s ahead of my own. That said, when I do sense that someone is suffering, I feel great waves of sympathy and concern and I desperately want to help them. I want – maybe even need – to be the person I needed when I was in acute distress.

q) When you have a need you need help with, instead of admitting it, you conclude that it must only be because you are weak, too tired, or having a bad day. I’ve gotten a lot better about this kind of thing but I still have a long way to go. MY default mode is still, “I am suffering because I suck”, basically. This problem of mine, whatever it is, is entirely because of my inherent awfulness which I am helpless to correct and yet still hate myself for, and the last thing I want to do is confess this awfulness to someone else in order to beg for help. That could not possibly lead to a good outcome. It could only make people push me away in revulsion and contempt and thus leave me TRULY abandoned and alone.

r) Conclude that the reason you have needs is that you are too lazy. More or less yes. Too lazy, too broken, too pathetic, too disgusting, too weak, too unworthy, too worthless, too clumsy, and too much of a liability. To name a few.

That took up more words than I thought it would.

As you can see, my self esteem is still not so great. On a good day, I can not only remember how awesome I am, I can even feel it a little.

But for the most part I remain weary and limp and unable to generate the impulse to do anything but the usual with myself.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s get this out of the way first :

It occurred to me that one of the barriers between me and activating all the parts of me that I mothballed in order to become the stable but pathetic version of me you know and love is that doing so will make my life a hell of a lot more complicated.

That’s what dealing with the full range of human emotions is going to mean for me. And this complication, in turn will result in something still worse, at least according to the old bad unhealthy part of me :

It means I will lose “control”.

My inner world will no longer be tightly circumscribed and therefore hyper predictable and so I would have to deal with not knowing what will be happening in my mind and my soul from minute to minute.

You know. Like normal people.

Normal people don’t question their emotions like I do. They don’t squash nearly all of them in order to achieve an entirely fabricated and unhealthy inner “calm”. They don’t demand justification for their every little action.

They feel things, act on those feelings, and take it from there. Eventually they learn to control their emotions and think things through and so on, but not before establishing a solid emotional base from which later growth can spring.

But me, I fucked all of that up.

Not on purpose, obviously. It happened as a result of my withdrawing into the world of the mind when I got raped. That caused my development to skew wildly towards the mental and left my emotional development mostly stunted.

And all because things had to “make sense” to me. I didn’t play with the other kids in the sandbox because it seemed pointless and stupid to me. I didn’t have a stuffed animal I lugged around everywhere with me because I knew it was just a toy. Same with having an imaginary friend. I knew they were not there. So what was the point?

Mind you, that’s a question most adults couldn’t answer either because they have never thought about it. It’s play, and play doesn’t need to have any kind of point because play is supposed to be inherently rewarding.

And if it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong.

Looked at through that lens, the fact that I was asking for some kind of justification for doing what all the other kids did was wrong from the very beginning. It was rotten at the root and spoke of something being desperately wrong with me.

I mean, who even says these things? I was such a weird kid.

I keep looking back and wishing I had just relaxed and let myself be myself back then. Forget trying to control and predict. Go ahead and have that huge ego everyone is so afraid you will develop. Go through life with a cocky, smartass attitude that might not always be pleasant to be around, but would have at least let me be a whole person with a basis for further developing myself instead of being this emotionally emaciated cripple who is afraid of everything.

And I know it’s not too late to become that person. Indeed, I can feel that version of me struggling to free itself from its chains so it can be born and replace this tired, worn out, decaying version of myself before it’s too late.

But so much has to happen first.

Or maybe it doesn’t. I dunno. Maybe that’s just another layer of bullshit.

Either way, my big transformation isn’t going to happen right now.

But maybe not too long from now. Maybe.

More after the break.

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Break the seal

No, the seal I am talking about is the hermetic seal around all the vacu-locked parts of me that have been sequestered away for so long.

That will not be an easy seal to break because, in a sense, it does not want to be broken. That seal has been protecting my internal state from all the anxiety and severe depression that used to plague me for 20 years or so, and so my deep programming still thinks that it needs to keep that thing intact or all Heck will break loose.

And I suppose it will, in a sense. In order to truly reclaim my human potential, I am going to have to open that big steel door inside me and let all my monsters and animals loose in order to get at and fix the stuff that got locked in there with them.

And I think that’s one of the things holding me back, which is why I am talking about it tonight. Hopefully by talking (typing?) it out, I can defuse some of the emotion surrounding this attempt at unleashing Bedlam, thereby making it something that is easier to deal with.

I wish I was the kind of person who could just throw open those big steel doors and let pandemonium reign as things work themselves out, but I am not.

One of my many deep and binding fears is a fear of losing my mind completely and thus losing myself as well.

I don’t want to end up in a straightjacket in a rubber room somewhere. I don’t want to get lost in thought and never come back. I am terrified of losing the last tenuous wisps of my grip on reality and end up locked up inside my mind forever more.

Maybe that could never happen and it’s just more toxic bullshit that my depression uses to keep me under its thumb. I dunno.

But it sure feels like it could happen. I have had doubts about my grip on reality for a very long time. And that makes sense given how little I interact with reality except through one screen or another.

I probably should try to make good on that whole “spend some time outdoors alone” thing. But I know damned well that I won’t.

This harbour of mine is still icebound.

And there hasn’t been an icebreaker in this region in a long, long time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had to miss Wound Care again, this time because I have a head cold or somesuch.

Might be a sinus infection, I dunno. My head feels weirdly solid, like someone filled all my sinus cavities with rubber cement.

And I feel very feverish. Like the whole front side of my head is facing a recently opened oven door. Or like the heat coming off the pavement at night, when the sun has gone down but the pavement is still radiating the heat it absorbed.

Those were always some of my favorite times as a kid because the sun wasn’t making it hot any more but the heat from the pavement kept it from being cold.

The result? Toasty warm happiness.

Anyhow, back to what I was talking about.

I am pretty upset about missing two Wound Care appointments in a row. That’s not healthy. I almost wish I had gone this morning no matter how I felt.

But that would have been stupid and irresponsible of me. I was not about to bring whatever virus or bug I have to a place with a ton of old people.

That said, I will show up to my Tuesday appointment no matter how I feel. The only excuse I will accept is if I am in a coma at the time.

And even then, I’ll try.

Luckily, before I woke up sick this morning, I replaced the dressing on my right foot. It fell off, so I had no choice. Luckily I have some of those type of bandages lying around.

The left foot, though…. I am not looking forward to changing that. The wound there is like a wedge was cut right out of the fleshiest part of the heel and that makes bandaging it tricky even for the nurses.

For a maladroit like me, it’s like trying to sink all the pool balls with your break.

I will keep it covered with something, somehow. I have a supply of these extra absorbent big blue bandages that look like a very boring mouse pad, but those don’t come with their own adhesive so I would have to use the clear medical tape to secure it in place and I can’t even wrap a present without it looking like a tumour so this is going to be real, real fun.

I’m kinda fucked when I can’t just defer to someone who is actually competent.

It’s insane (sic) how overspecialized I am. I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and yet I get lost easily, have spent far too much of my lifetime confused by things most people don’t even think of as a thing, and need someone else to help me so much as leave the apartment.

And that was mostly true even when my legs worked.

I am a classic absentminded genius. I am capable of amazing feats of mental strength, insight, and agility, and yet I languish in the doldrums and rot in place because my brain is frozen in a very bad mode and I don’t know how to free myself.

Or maybe I do know, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Whatever.

Once more, I circle back to that bit about how in order to be truly free, you have to give up a little part of yourself.

I believe that to be true. After all, the main thing keeping us from being truly free is always ourselves. In order to level up your being, you have to sacrifice whatever part of yourself is holding you back. Kill it, mourn it, and move on.

And I don’t know what part of me that is, exactly. But I can feel it there in my mind quite clearly, and eventually the urge to gnaw that part of me off will be stronger than my fear of the pain and the damage, and I will free myself from myself.

Until then : same dumb life.

More after the break.

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Something’s gotta give

And the sooner, the better.

For a long time now, I have been trying to force myself into some sort of crisis state that will break down my defenses with the sheer power of its inherent conflict so that my mind can reshape and reform itself into something far more healthy.

But my whole deal, in a way, has been that I created this form of myself to maximize stability, and so destabilizing it is not easy.

Plus, I mean, we are talking about changing who I am as a person, and that is always going to be the scariest kind of change.

But I think I can do it. Because really, the idea is not to change who I am, but to unlock it. I want to become more like myself, not less.

I want to unlock and unfreeze all these parts of my being that have been hidden away from me since my breakdown in my early 20’s.

What are they? Nothing much, just most of human development.

I mean, arguably, a lot of my development was locked in permafrost when I was raped at the tender age of 4 years old.

That has to be why I completely missed out on all the normal developmental milestones and was such an eerie child.

I guess the school system did try to correct my deficits. There was a period, around grades 2 and 3, when I was the subject of a LOT of scrutiny by the school board and I got tested a zillion ways for a zillion things.

But I obviously aced all the cognitive tests. The sensory tests showed mostly normal. I buried the needle on creativity and verbal skills too, naturally.

So I think they had no idea what to do with me. My kind of problem, social retardation, did not show up on their tests. So they threw their hands in the air and gave up on me.

And because they gave up on me, so did I.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.