But I have a potential excuse.

First, the error : Woke up from a nap at around 3:35 pm. Blearily sat down right here in front of Mister Computer with the intention of fucking around on the Web for a while, just until my usual 4:05 pm lunch time.

But somehow, I ended up lying down and going back to sleep instead.

I don’t remember doing that. I don’t remember deciding to do it either. I just remember waking up ar around 5:45 pm and now here I am.

And that is…. troubling.

And now I feel quite feverish. I feel hot all over and I’m dizzy and incredibly thirsty.

So thirsty that I filled my usual drinking glass with water from the bathroom sink sat down, and drank the whole 1.2 L of water in a matter of minutes.

Got Julian to bring me a can of pop and to refill my drinking glass from the Brita pitcher. That’s something like 1.5 L of fluids total.

Bam. It’s all gone too. Only took slightly longer.

And now I’ve realized that I am incredibly hungry as well. I have already eaten what would be my usual portion of trail mix and now I am eating another equal portion, plus some Vegetable Thins, plus an orange.

And, thank God, that seems to have at least slowed down the Hunger Express.

Oh, and to top it all off, I am having trouble reading what I am writing off the monitor for some reason, and I am committing a fair bit more typos then usual.

I am not well.

I suspect my blood sugar was crashing too. That would explain the mega-hunger and the visual distortion and perhaps the extreme thirst too, although I associate that more with high blood sugar than with low.

But not the feverish symptoms. Those must be something else. Something viral, maybe.

I honestly possibly should have called 911 or gotten Julian to drive me to the ER, but I was far too mentally disjointed and out of phase to even contemplate doing that.

Even getting dressed feels out of reach at the moment.

I seem to have weathered the worst of it, although I suspect I am going to need still more trail mix and crackers before the hunger demon is truly sated.

So I am not feeling at all well. That’s what I am driving at, I guess.

Thus the temporary suspension of my hardcore self-exploration here in the pages of my blog. The blog that is the only thing I’ve actually produced for many years.

It’s OK, I guess.

And people do seem to be impressed when I tell them I write 1K words a day. I have written literally millions of works over the years (do the math) and I sure as hell can’t even imagine stopping .

I mean, what the hell would I even do with myself then? This blog is the only thing holding me together. It gives me something to do every day that is well within my capabilities and that serves my overwhelming need to express myself in words.

Arguably, something more ambitious would serve it even better. But I do what I can.

I have no idea what I just survived an attack of. Low blood sugar, for sure, and dehydration, but what caused those remains a mystery.

As is what led to me taking that weird extra nap. Like, WTF was up with that? I don’t like blank spaces in my memories. They disturb me.

Of course, I am going to be monitoring myself for more weirdness and if things get bad, I am going to call 911.

Now I am going to lay down and sleep.

This time, on purpose.

My life is so weird.

More after the break.

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Another late meal

Seeing as I had “lunch” at 5:45 pm, it should come as no surprise to you that I am here eating my “supper” at 9:45 pm.

Well, at least the 45s line up.

The good news is that I feel one hell of a lot better now. Whatever weird fit overtook me earlier seems to have vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.

It’s not 100 percent gone. I still feel a little overheated, and I’m a tiny bit dizzy. But at least the rapacious hunger and throat-parching thirst are gone.

So I am back to the sad state that is my “normal”.

And this time, I did lay down to sleep on purpose, which is good, but when I woke up I realized I hadn’t set an alarm or even looked at what time it was first.

Which is unlike me. And that’s troubling.

But it’s all over now so I can just forget the whole thing ever happened and go on with my life exactly like I always do!

Not the smart way to live, granted, but if I ran to my doctor or the ER or Urgent Care every time my health did something weird, I would basically never leave.

Not to mention what that would do to my latent hypochondria.

Ergo, I have to be judicious about what constitutes an emergency.

Or if not judicious, at least flippant.

Hopefully I well be good to go (g2g) for tomorrow’s Wound Care appointment. I’ve been getting pain in the wound on my left foot again, so I look forward to a dressing change.

Seems to happen more when I am wearing my beloved “hospital socks”, otherwise adorably known as “Padded Paws”, the cozy non-slip socks that they get you to wear in Richmond Hospital so that you don’t end up slipping and sliding on the floor.

I love these socks. But I get the feeling that I should never wear them for more than a day, otherwise the hurting starts.

Normally, I only change my socks when I am changing my clothes to go out of the apartment, and that only happens three times a week.

I probably should fix that. I am sure Julian would not mind washing more socks. It would make so little difference to his workload.

And my feet would thank me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK. Time for an actual plan. Let’s do it.

Oh, I don’t frigging know. There’s too many possibilities and so I end up in that Infinite Corridor of Infinite Doors again.

Even though I know it’s all bullshit. If I really wanted to make a go of this Notd thing, I would just enter kamikaze mode, jump in with both feet, and figure it out.

And I am sure they have tons of resources for us writers on the site too. Suggestions for topics, tips for getting started, guides to general writing styles, and so on.

So really, the problem is that I am conflicted. I want to go out into the world and try to make something of myself, even if it’s only on the Internet, but a much deeper and stronger part of me is scared shitless to go out there and until I convince that part of me that exposure is not a fate worse than death, I’m not going anywhere.

Until then, I will not be able to plan jack shit. Damn it. When I try to imagine actually doing the thing everything in my mind just falls apart and shatters.

So once again, we end up where we always end up : with me trying to convince my inner child that it’s okay to go out and play.

The mean kids are long gone. I am not going to get bullied or attacked or mocked if people can see me. I don’t have to live like I’m hiding from the fucking feds.

Yes, going out there will trigger a massive rise in stimulation levels. Even when it’s safely mediated by my beloved screens. Being seen and interacting with others, possibly even in realtime, is definitely gonna freak me out.

At first. But everything sucks at first. That’s common knowledge. And if you want to get anywhere and/or do anything in life, you have to learn to hang in there and keep going until you make it through the beginning part that sucks.

Which involves getting over a too easily triggered flight response, I guess.

I am reminded of how my beloved babysitter Betty helped me get over my fear of loud noises when I was a preschooler.

There was a train going by just after we had crossed the tracks, and normally this would have sent me running because it was so loud. but Betty held me there, with the train passing five feet away, and stroked my hair and said things like, “See? Nothing’s happening. You’re okay. ” until the train had passed.

And you know what? It worked. I stopped being scared of loud noises right there and then. She helped me persist long enough to learn that the noises were no big deal. They couldn’t hurt me. I was fine.

I am going to try to remember that day. In that simple way she helped me to become less of a pussy, and I am eternally grateful for that.

Unfortunately, she was not there for the rest of my childhood.

Anyhow, enough reverie, back to the topic.

Which, as it turns out, is my fear. The fear that keeps me from being able to plan what I am going to do on Notd.

I feel like I can face my fear head on now. I can deliberately trigger it hard in myself and then just wade all through the fear till I pop out of the other side of it.

It’s not quite “leaning in” but it’s close.

And I am pretty sure that by doing so, I reduce the fear. Make it smaller. Deprive it of some of its power. Take control away from it.

And in doing so, be Betty to myself.

You see? Nothing bad is happening. You’re okay!

More after the break.

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This can never be enough

It just… can’t.

If I honestly thought that this stupid pointless worthless fucking life of mine was all I was going to get until the day I die, I would just plain give up.

I would just go to bed and wait to die. Might as well get it over with. It’s not like I am going to be missing anything, and the world can sure as hell go on without me.

So I have to believe that I will one day rise from my grave and join the world and be an actual human adult some day.

I’m not asking for a lot. A job, a boyfriend, a place of my own. The sorts of things that normal, healthy, decent people take for granted.

It’s that or rot to death in this sepulcher of a “life” and that is just plain not acceptable. I deserve so much more than that and it’s not like people are lining up to rescue me so it’s up to me to git that shit done.

An argument could be made that my dreams of escape are what are hurting me the most as I continually reach out for something I cannot grasp and feel the heartache and frustration all that dreaming causes me.

My brother would tell me to just try to make some kind of life for myself.

Well that’s what I am trying to do. I’m not pining for superstardom, though I would not turn it down. I just want a simple, decent life where I have some dignity and some resources and someone to share a bed and a life with.

Like I wrote in Part 1, the problem is that my fear is still holding me back. But that is going to end some time soon. I am going to keep raising my demons so I can banish them permanently until there is nothing left to hold me back from reaching on out to that big ol world out there and finding some kind of way to be a grownup.

Because this bullshit eternal child genius existence sucks. I am so damned sick of only knowing how to entertain myself and thus letting all my fabulous gifts rot on the vine.

I should be able to rise like a god and shine like a star for all the world to see.

But barring that, a decent job would be nice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I find it mildly humorous that, despite my having been doing the blister packed medications thing for over six weeks now, and as a result taking my meds with breakfast and supper instead of taking them all with lunch. I still get this surge of energy at lunchtime as my body and mind get ready to take all them meds.

Well, you do something (like taking your meds with lunch) literally thousands of times in a row and I guess it becomes pretty deeply ingrained.

So ingrained, in fact, that its remnants remain active even a month and a half later.

Like old-school nuns, I am a creature of habit.

Reaching the end of my rope in Pathfinder : Kingmaker. There is very little left to do. There will eventually be the final confrontation with Nyrissa, the eeeeevil fae queen and/or sorceress and/or goddess who is the main antagonist of the game but until then, I have kind of run out of steam (but not Steam, ha ha. ) in the game.

The only quests I have left are ones I have no idea how to pursue, and presiding over my “shittier than underneath the outhouse” kingdom where problems keep coming up that I can’t solve because my kingdom is falling apart and therefore all the problems have a 0 percent chance of my people solving them is really gtting me down.

To the point where I am seriously pondering using a save game editor to force my kingdom into being fully of shiny happy people holding hands and then praying to one of the game’s many gods (Pharasma?) that I can keep it that way.

It’s either that or start a new playthrough. And I am not quite ready for that yet, although my current level of passive frustration makes it a tempting idea.

But I might just live long enough to finish the whole goddamned thing, so I am not going to start a new anything until then.

It’s a good game. But it’s a marathon. So far I have played it for almost 220 hours, according to Steam, and it ain’t done yet.

Same with Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey. I’ve played it for 182.3 hours now and the end is nowhere in sight.

I am very impressed with all the time and effort into the Elysium DLC expansion. It’s pretty much an entirely new game to play after you finish the main campaign, and that, I am sure, was fantastic for people who had beaten the game when it first came out and are looking for a reason to start playing again after all these years, but for “late in the game’s life cycle” gamers like me, it’s a pain.

That probably should have been more sentence. Oh well.

Come to think of it, I’m also pretty stuck in Fallout 2. I have done all the quests I know how to do around Klamath, the Umbra Tribe village, and The Den, and yet I am still nowhere near strong enough to make the trip to Vault City to the east.

The encounters in that direction are way too tough. Huge gangs of bandits, even huger mobs of monsters, bleh.

I am going to need nearly godlike strength to deal with that shit.

And more teammates. So far it’s just me and Sulik, my fellow tribal, and he’s awesome and all but not nearly enough to deal with the kind of numbers I am facing.

So all I can do is explore. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world, I suppose, but I much prefer to be driven forward by the plot.

But what do you expect from a game from 1998? That’s over 25 years ago! A quarter century! That’s millennia in gamer years.

I should be grateful that it doesn’t have a command line interface! 😛

More after the break.

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Not quite right

Got myself some Subway tonight and things about it are…. off.

First off, the sub. I decided to try something new on my Cold Cut Combo : the Smoky Honey Mustard sauce. I like smoky flavoured things. I like honey mustard. Sounded like a winning combo to me.

And it tastes good…. but then it doesn’t. It has an odd chemical type aftertaste for me, a sort of sickly sweet rubbery tang that I do not like at all.

And the best part is, I have another six inches of sub to eat after this one! Yay!

So now I feel stupid for having gambled my entire sub on an unknown sauce. I wish I had stuck to my usual mayo + garlic aioli instead.

Which is basically mayo + mayo + garlic.

I’ve realized why I almost always get the Cold Cut Combo, though : it’s the sub that tastes the most like subs tasted when I was a kid.

When I was a young’un, there was only one kind of sub, and that was it. Even during the submarine sandwich craze of the 80’s, the basic Captain Submarine^[1] sub was still salami, pepperoni, lettuce ,onions, and green pepper.

There were other options, like bell peppers and mushrooms, but the basic formula was exactly the same.

Then Subway came along and all heck broke loose! 😛

Then there’s the drink. Amongst the options offered to me was Pepsi Zero Sugar, so I clicked on that when I was ordering.

I would have preferred regular Diet Pepsi, but whatever.

So imagine my horror when what showed up was CHERRY Diet Pepsi Zero Sugar.

I haaaaate cherry cola. That stuff is godawful in my books. So I was now struck without an acceptable beverage option.

I’ve been trying to take drinks of the stuff now and then to see if I can acclimate to the taste of it and it seems to be working a little. At the very least, the horrible cherry flavour isn’t as much of a shock now.

But still…. ick.

I like cherries but I don’t like cherry flavoured things. And especially not maraschino flavoured things, gah.

Give me my darker sweet drinks every time. Caramel, not white sugar.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Have I done this premise before? Eh, whatever.

Watched a video about Jungian psychology that talked about how it is by exploring your shadow – that place where you hide everything you can’t or won’t accept about yourself – that you can find not only true mental health but maybe even your purpose in life.

Now I dunno about that second part. I don’t disagree with Jung per so, just like I don’t disagree with Freud, but both men fell into the pathfinder’s trap of thinking that that marvelous new thing you’ve discovered explains EVERYTHING.

Hold your horses, gentlemen. Let’s not get carried away.

But the idea that you can increase your mental healthy by making the subconscious conscious seems sound to me if not overapplied, so what the hell, let’s try to figure out what all I have shoved out of the light about myself.

There’s a lot.

In fact, from a certain POV. it feels like there is a whole universe of it. For lo these many years, I confined my consciousness to a very narrow corridor of possibilities and everything else got chucked into the fuck-it bucket of my subconscious.

Well I’ve told the bucket where it can stucket (sic) and now it’s like I’ve just landed in Oz and I am seeing life in color for the first time.

Anyhow, enough wittering away. What’s in there?

We’ll tick of the simple, easy ones first : all my basic lizard brain level emotions have been redirected there. Rage, lust, ambition, resentment, bitterness, and so on.

There’s oceans of all that stuff hidden in my shadow because I have never had the guts or the wherewithal to deal with that stuff at all.

It takes a certain amount of boldness and grit to follow your urges in order to slake them, and I have not had that in me.

Instead, I just stick my head in the sand until they go away.

But of course, there’s far, far more than that in there.

Take the entire realm of romantic love. I’ve barely ever been there, and when I did have it, it was online and via text based furry environments and thus rendered “safe”.

Actual normal adult romance has never happened to me, and I honestly don’t know if it ever will. As things stand right now, I can’t see how that could ever happen to a furry urban hermit like myself.

I mean, how would I even meet somebody, let alone become romantically connected to them? My life is so sealed off.

I presumably have all these needs myself but I cut myself off from ever following my instincts and/or doing things purely for my own emotional satisfaction a long time ago, and forced myself into a cage made of logic and cowardice, then managed to forget all about what life outside that cage might mean in regards to myself.

There’s no family or intimacy or sense of connection for me right now. I feel very remotely removed from the human race, and I long for greater connection, and yet I also doubt my ability to maintain such a connection.

I can only imagine myself fleeing from connection because it’s all just too intense and “real” for me and I need to escape into my flickering shadows once more.

And for the stuff in the green zone, I have two kinds of confidence, total, and absent. There are intellectual arenas in which I am completely confident, to the point of seeming arrogant, and I am not sure I could say that I am not.

Maybe being so sure of yourself really IS a form of arrogance. I don’t know.

But outside those areas I am the sad little critter you know and love. Clumsy, shy, and easily confused, I stumble through the scrubby underbrush of the world afraid of everything and doing nothing.

Well, nothing of note, anyhow.

Video games don’t count.

And I long for some confident, competent, noble soul to come scoop me into his arms and give me the comfort and reassurance I need in order to go out and play with the big kids and finally learn how to get along.

More after the break.

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More pyramid stuff

I honestly believe that as simple and obvious as it seems, Maslow’s hierarchy as illustrated above actually contains great wisdom.

Taking another look at the green zone, I guess I started off as a very unique individual and I have never been anything else.

I never felt pressure to conform. Whatever frequency that shit is broadcast on, I don’t receive it. The most I ever had was very vague, diffuse thoughts about what it would take to get along with the other kids.

But it never felt like something I could actually do.

They were as alien to me as I was to them.

Ironically, I actually do better with the stuff at the top of the pyramid, in the purple zone. Creativity I have in spades. Morality has been a deep part of me ever since my early teens, when I first understood that people have a moral stance and it’s something they need to fight and stand up for.

And I have been stockpiling inner potential for so long that it’s like I am stockpiling canned food for the Apocalypse.

So I suppose I am kind of built upside down. I have the top zone and the bottom zone covered, more or less, but everything in the middle is missing.

I have a long way to go before I am truly human. My higher self cannot sustain me without my lower self’s energy and love and warmth. I have been trying to live up where the air is rare for far too long.

Time to climb down and see what’s going on in the real world.

I have insights to share! Anyone want some?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Totally forgot that I did not, in fact, have therapy today.

My therapist is out of town today, and unlike other times, he can’t still do our phone therapy because his family is dragging him off to some resort way up a mountain where the cell reception is terrible.

Knowing how people feel about their dependence on technology these days, I am betting that for this resort, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.

“Oh dear, not a place where there’s no cell reception and no WiFi so my family will be forced to get off their goddamned phones and actually look me in the eye when we talk And how will my boss, who doesn’t understand how being on vacation means I can’t solve his problems at work, get ahold of me at all hours, day or night? Darn. ”

It must be so much harder to get away from it all these days, mainly because we carry “it all” around in our goddamned pockets.

And just think, it used to be that all you had to do was go for a rest in the country.

Anyhow, I forgot I had no therapy today. ^[1] So there I was waiting for that weekly phone call and getting increasingly nervous and tense as the minutes ticked on by.

Then, at 1:17 pm, just when I was gearing myself up to phone Doctor Costin myself (not easy with my Avoidant nature), I suddenly remembered that I would not, in fact, be hearing from him until Friday, the 13th of September.

It’s an easy day to remember, that Friday the 13th of September.

So then I felt dumb, of course. But it’s a familiar kind of dumb, a dumb grounded in my tendency to be very absentminded.

Then, just now, I sat down to eat my lunch, and started looking around for that can of pop I was sure I had just put down on the desk in front of me.

And I looked and I looked but it was nowhere to be found, and I was staring into the face of a flat out Fortean mystery when I suddenly remembered that there was only one can of pop chilled in the fridge so I decided to leave that one to have with supper and therefore the can of pop I was sure I had gotten out of the fridge to have with my lunch was, in fact, a hallucinatory belief.

So I am not having a great brain day.

Meanwhile, on the “Fru makes actual life progress” front, seeing as FlexJobs slammed the door in my face yesterday, I must now turn my attention to Notd.

And not in some flighty, airy, “ooh, I could do THIS or I could do THAT….” kind of way like I have done befoe.

I mean… making actual, executable plans. The kind that require…. decisions.

And decisions are very much my cross to bear. There is something about my highly creative mind that makes it hard for me to pick an option and go with it.

It’s like my mind can’t help but try to go in all directions at once and that, of course, instantly jams the system and I don’t pick anything.

And I know this is somehow linked with creativity. Like that going in all directions at the same time is how my creative mind approaches a novel problem, or something.

But the real bogeyman behind the scenes is, as always, fear. Fear of choosing the “wrong” thing and getting hurt.

But like… who the fuck cares? Make mistakes, get hurt, learn, grow. That’s life.

And I am going to have to make peace with that if I want to more forward.

More after the break.

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A bad moment

Brown alert, poop talk ahead.

So, I pooped.

And it was kinda rough. There was definitely some pain on exit. Kind of felt like my poop was covered in broken eggshells. Not good.

But I checked the bowl – no blood – so I added it to the ever growing list of “weird shit (sic) my body does that’s not enough reason to go to the ER” and put it out of my mind.

Until about ten minutes or so later, when I was sitting in front of the computer and a terrible sharp pain shot through me from right in the middle of my guts.

Kind of felt like I was shitting the proverbial brick.

Luckily, it passed through me in about three seconds and I have felt relatively fine every since. But that freaked me out some.

I am worried that something is happening with that umbilical hernia I’ve had forever and that the surgeon didn’t think warranted surgery.

It was a risk versus reward thing. It would have been a pretty deep surgery that would have taken a long and difficult time to recover from in order to repair a hernia that did not seem to be causing any trouble.

I’m worried that the last part of it might have changed.

A lot of my gastrointestinal issues seem to center around a spot directly behind my navel, and that’s exactly where my umbilical hernia is, logically enough, located.

And that’s where the pain I had earlier was located too.

So I dunno. It would make sense if the hernia has gotten worse and has started to push up against everything else in my gut, making the spaces for those things smaller, that this would create both a fecal and a urinary bottleneck that causes issues.

If so, someone might need to finally get around to fixing it. And I really don’t want to have to go through all that. There would be so much pain and so much scariness and so much time stuck in a hospital bed in a hospital ward and there are so very many things that can go wrong and the whole thing scares the bejesus out of me.

So I won’t be sounding a brown alert just yet.

But another incident like the one I had tonight and I will have no choice.

I still kind of feel like I ate peanuts with the shell still on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My life has become more painful lately.

And it really highlights one of the problems with have my meds blister-packed.

First, the pain. The wound on my left foot has been hurting all day. It’s a stinging pain followed by a tingle, ergo I am naming this sensation a “stingle” or “stingling”.

Don’t use that without my permission. It’s mine, dammit! 😛

And it’s beginning to worry me. I’ve had this sensation before but not this frequently. It makes me wonder if the nurse got the dressing wrong yesterday and now it’s letting in more sweat and the salt in the sweat is stinging me.

It’s literally rubbing salt in my wound.

And I have skin ulcers in my perianal region ^[1], which makes my usual sessile nature somewhat more painful than it needs to be.

I shift in my seat a lot. I hope that counts as exercise.

And my poor deteriorating muscles are hurting more as well. I am feeling distinctly rusty today. I might take my second-last Aleve to help deal with it.

Speaking of pills, there’s that disadvantage of blister packing I mentioned.

See, back in the days of pill bottles (it seems so long ago), if I was having an especially bad day with the muscle pain, I could just take more Gabapentin.

But not now. I don’t have access to my medications, they are locked away in plastic bubbles and I therefore do not have any control over my dosages.

At this point, I am tempted to tell Simon, my pharmacist, that I want to go back to the bottle(s), but he puts so much work into blister packing my meds away that I feel like it would be a dick move to give up on it now.

But I still miss my bottles. I had a system. It worked.

Oh well. I get the feeling that this next phase of my life will involve me discovering a lot of feelings that I didn’t know were there because they were locked behind my wall and not allowed to get anywhere near being felt, let alone expressed.

I’m visualizing it as me sitting with a friend in the front room of a pleasant but sparsely furnished suburban home having declared an open house so we could meet the neighbors and having no idea who the heck will show up.

But I’m not afraid. For I am armed with GINGERBREAD COOKIES.

Oh, and speaking of moving on with my life, I gathered all my courage this morning and decided it was time to log in to FlexJobs and find myself some work.

Only to find the motherfucking website wouldn’t take my credit card.

Son of a bitch. After all the avoiding and delaying and telling myself I am just not ready yet, I finally get my shit together to embark upon my long delayed journey into adulthood and the boat fucking sinks on launch.

I tries to keep the energy going and switch over to Notd instead, but getting that up and going is gonna take a hell of a lot more gumption than I had on hand at that moment.

So many decisions…. I know, I know, just play around with it.

I’m working on it.

So that was a kick in the taint. And I have started to be in a really bad mood in the morning before I eat, just like my late father and my brother, and that’s not at all a welcome development in my life.

I guess that’s just one of the emotions I didn’t know I had.

Welcome to my home. Have a cookie.

More after the break.

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“Now you’ll really be a POTTED plant!” I said as I got my begonias drunk.

---

Well I’m here

As are you. Thanks.

I feel rather scattered at the moment. It’s been difficult just getting my thoughts lined up enough to start making the words happen. My mind wants to run around and play like a big dog let outdoors for the first time since last fall.

So I keep having to direct my attention back to what I am doing, and that’s a pain.

That aside, though, I am feeling better than I did early. I feel more solid and more healthy and overall more robust and alive, and that’s a very good thing.

Not sure what made the difference. If I had to guess (and I do), I would say I either got caught up on sleep or hydration or both.

I will try to remember how I feel right now the next time I am being lazy about getting up and refilling my water glass in order to stay hydrated.

I just get so tired of the whole “a river runs through me” routine. Getting the water, drinking the water, peeing, lather, rinse, repeat.

My bladder gets especially tired of it all. I’m not sure if it’s healthy and normal or a sign of something wrong in my waterworks, but sometimes I get this ache in the lower right quadrant of my torso when I have been peeing a lot and it makes me wonder what the heck is going on in there.

I’ve probably said this before, but I really wish we had the medical beds from Star Trek so I could get absolutely everything scanned at the same time and doctors could see my entire body to any degree of magnification so they could fix everything that’s wrong and I could experience actual health for once.

Oh, and it would kick my hypochondria out on its ass too.

I need DATA, god damn it!

Plus I am positive that wild holodeck orgies would really reduce my stress.

Ah well. Maybe some day I will have the money to go to some fancy spa and have good looking men with big, strong hands do nice things to me for a while.

Will that include wild orgies?

Only if my doctor okays it and/or participates.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been weird.

Did the Wound Care thing. That was normal. Got a nurse called Emily, who had seen me as recently as last week.

I really wish I could have the same nurse each time. That way I could get to know my nurse and establish a relationship with them.

Like what is happening with me and Albert, the fellow who gives me my shower on Fridays. Over the weeks, I am sure we will get to know each other a bit.

After all, he’s already seen me naked and touched my junk.

With a facecloth. But still.

After Wound Care, we came home and I got some more sleep. Woke up around 1:30 pm or so and decided it was time to tackle this really hard fight in Pathfinder : Kingmaker. and finally kick its ass.

Thus began my very deep involvement in the game. I have to hand it to the devs at Owlcat, who made the game. It took all I had to beat that fight.

Plus I lost twice before I managed to cobble together a winning strategy. And the winning fight took over an hour to complete.

By the end of it, I was sweaty and punchy and totally exhausted. That’s why I was just sitting there, stunned, when it slowly dawned on me that I was hungry.

And from there, with dawning horror, I realized I was really REALLY hungry. And tingly. And feeling a bit faint. And in the background, I felt this dizzy, falling sensation that I know all too well.

I was having a blood sugar crash.

And it’s not hard to see why, in retrospect. First I went to Wound Care and back, and that burned a lot of blood sugar. Then I spent a long time locked into strategic combat with a video game and that took an intense mental effort that must have burned a hell of a lot more brain calories.

Our brains are very greedy beasties, after all. One fifth of all our metabolic output goes to keep those hungry engines in our heads fed.

Just thought I’d share that little factoid. You’re welcome!

So I think it was all that skullduggery that triggered my blood sugar collapse. My body is not used to that level of metabolic demand. I probably blew through my entire metabolic reserve when I was playing that game.

Obviously, my blood sugar crashing is an emergency, so I stopped everything and started stuffing my face with Cheez-its and trail mix.

And that seemed to do the trick. I could feel that the collapse had been halted and then it was just a matter of eating enough trail mix to get my blood sugar level up.

My trail mix supply has obviously taken quite the hit, but whatever.

Looking back, this was not that bad a crash. I caught it early and luckily Cheez-its and trail mix were enough to halt the decline, unlike other crashes I’ve had where I try eating trail mix and my body is like TOO SLOW! NEED SUGAR NOW!

Bodies can be so bossy.

After I recovered, I checked the time and it was almost time for lunch. And blogging.

So I called Julian, hoping to get him to bring me some things so I could slap together a crude but effective lunch.

But he was not at home. Damn it.

So I had to get up and go to the kitchen to make my lunch. And when I got there I realized that I was quite dizzy.

So that made making lunch an adventure.

Another exciting day practicing the delicate art of not dying.

So far so good.

More after the break.

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On unleashing the tiger

Although in my mind, it’s a sexy slinky cartoon tiger, like Shere Khan.

Seriously, though, I know that by opening the door to my id and all the Jungian shadow creatures locked up behind it, I am inviting chaos into my life.

I accept this truth. I know that there will be a certain air of lion taming to my life for a while. I will have to deal with my fuzzy demons on a case by case basis instead of simply suppressing damn near everything equally, across the board.

I can’t get the image of myself strapped in place and forced to look directly forward a la Clockwork Orange out of my head. It’s like when, long ago, in my early 20’s, I had to pull myself back together after a total nervous breakdown, I did so by getting to a somewhat stable place and then nailing myself there.

And then, the real trick bit came : hiding the fact that I had done this from myself. And thereby setting up a kind of virtual environment in my mind where it seemed like I could look around and see amazing things about how things work and understand so much that other people find utterly opaque and mysterious and so I could not possibly be locked in a jail cell if I can do all that!

But it was all just images projected on the walls of my tiny room. I could maintain the illusion as long as I didn’t actually try to go anywhere or do anything, but that is one hell of a hefty price to pay for a little mental respite.

Now, though, I am determined to get the fuck out of here. I have opened the door and now, I suppose I am waiting till I feel “ready” to go through it.

But what am I doing to get ready? Arguably very little.

I might just have to activate kamikaze mode and just fling myself into the void and trust that I can learn to fly before I hit the ground.

I mean, here I am at the end of the high dive board, looking down at the water and knowing that I need to jump.

In order to jump, though, I will need to kill another little part of myself to set myself free. I will have to damage myself in a deep and terrible way. And it’s gonna hurt.

But I don’t think I will ever feel “ready”. And I sure can’t wait around for it any more.

Time to shout, “Aieeeee!” and leap into the void.

Aaaaany minute now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I may have had some sort of cardiac…. event… last night.

I was just lying in bed with the lights off, like I do, when I got this really “funny” feeling in my chest. A weird, wet, tingling kind of feeling. And at the same time, I became dizzy and nauseous and a tiny bit faint.

So I sensibly continued to lie there in the dark while this happened, and the dizziness and nausea soon passed but that “funny” feeling hung around for hours.

And I don’t know what to make of this odd occurrence. I can’t very well call it a heart attack as my symptoms were quite mild and there was no pain or major discomfort.

But then again, I have no idea what would have happened if I had tried to stand up or even sit up during the incident. It might have gone very badly for me.

And it weirds me out that this came on when I was doing absolutely nothing. I think my body would have been experiencing more stress and strain if I’d been asleep.

So apparently some part of myself threw a wobbly without being triggered by anything I did. Some important thing in my heart got to the point where it was just fundamentally fed up by what was going on a so it pitched a fit.

This frightens me terribly. If I am not even safe when I am at a point of bare minimum strain, then I have no control over this shit at all.

Well, except for one thing : I can take it to the doctor. Which I think I am going to have to do. I was already thinking about getting Julian to take me to Urgent Care after Wound Care (and then on to Urgent Wound) tomorrow because the stitch in my side has actually gotten worse, and then this thing happened.

At least this shit isn’t hitting me on the weekend, so there’s a chance that Urgent Care won’t be TOO slammed.

The stitch and the cardiac event might be related, might not be. I will present them both to the UC doctor as potentially related.

And that stitch has been there for over a week now. And like I said, it’s gotten worse. I think that whatever happened in my sleep to cause it the first time happened again, so now it’s more painful and seems to involve more muscles.

Which is another good reason to get my big bad beautiful butt in front of a doctor while it’s still a problem I can live with.

Luckily, it mostly only hurts when I sit up or stand up or twist my torso while reaching for something, and stuff like that.

But I guess my period of relative quiet and peace and at least the illusion of stable health is over and it’s time for things to start going wrong again.

It was nice while it lasted. I will miss it now that it’s gone.

Of course, the most probable outcome of my going to UC remains that they will find absolutely nothing wrong with me and I will feel silly and stupid for wasting everybody’s time by acting like some minor thing is a big bad disease.

Either that, or I simply have an atypical ailment that the usual medical screens don’t catch and so I actually am sick but in a way I can neither justify or explain.

And I shouldn’t have to. I’m the patient. I show up, describe my symptoms, comply with the doctor’s instructions, and then my part is over.

It’s up to them to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me.

Yeah… good luck with that.

More after the break.

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It ain’t good

Today has been rough.

My mysterious condition has been kicking my ass today. I just staggered back to this computer desk of mine after making my supper and I was in a LOT of pain.

Something to remember the next time I get to wondering if the whole thing is psychosomatic. I can’t make this shit up.

There was too many areas hurting all at once, and in different ways, for it to be something projected by my imagination.

But it was real bad. Pain all through my knees, my thighs, my forearms, and in all my major joints. Oh, and a sick headache like from heatstroke, too.

Life is like a box of chocolates. I can’t eat it or it will kill me.

So I am not in the best of moods right now. I have honestly been feeling cranky all day, even since that little cardiac incident.

I guess pain and fear can make a fella ornery.

But you know what? I embrace and accept my shitty mood. Excrement occurs. Now that I have stopped suppressing and compressing my emotions in order to create an artificial state of eerie calm, every possible emotion is in play.

And I like it that way. It feels good to feel things again. I want to be alive inside and ready to feel my way through this world as I explore it and to keep on listening to my emotions instead of stuffing them in a closet with a rag in their mouth.

Harsh image, but apt.

And I am just getting started. I’m still standing in the doorway enjoying the breeze and luxuriating in the glorious feeling of fresh air on my skin. I am pausing at the threshold.

There is so much more for me to open up and explore. Right now, the weight of possibilities is keeping me from going forward. That whole, “but then I would have to figure out what to do with myself” thing still lingers on.

But I am working on a solution. One that says it is better to make the wrong decision impulsively and learn from it than to linger forever in indecision.

There are far, far worse things than making the wrong choice.

So fuck it. Flip a fucking coin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, they can be.

Just got finished playing an epic session of Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey.

I’ve almost finished the Elysium part of the post-main-plot expansion (which is turning out to be so…. frigging…. long… ) and that means I have to fight Ros.

I knew Ros for most of this section as a sweet brown doggie who looks kind of like a greyhound (a brownhound?) and seemed to show up wherever I went and whom I would always stop to say hello to.

Sadly, that’s all I could do.

In this game, you cannot pet the dog.

And I knew the game was probably up to something with him, but I didn’t expect that at the end of this part of the game, he’d turn into a giant three headed dog.

Oh. Ros. As in Cerberos. Very cute, game.

So that’s the boss fight I am currently stuck on. Makes sense, I already fought the Medusa, the Minotaur, the Cyclops, and the Sphinx, so what famous Greek monster was left for me to fight?

Makes me wonder who the boss of the NEXT section will be.

I bring this up not just to wank on about the game I am playing but because it brought up an issue I have always had when it comes to things like boss fights in video games.

And that issue is focus.

It’s extremely hard for me to remain completely focused on and engaged with the here and now, in realtime, without daydreaming or other secondary mentation.

And that’s fine for most of modern life. Very little in the modern world requires your completely undivided attention. A guy like me who is never quite all in one place can get along fine most of the time.

But boss fights, like sports, require completely focusing on what you are doing and that’s what trips me up every time because it is extremely difficult for me to remain focused on what I’m doing and what is happening in the game.

In fact. I just realized as I was fighting Ros that when I am doing something like that, I am continuously fighting my own mental wanderlust in order to stay in the zone and beat that dang boss.

And it’s not an easy thing to fight. It’s like trying to stuff an octopus into a box. As you are stuffing one tentacle in, two more slip out, and so to keep the dang thing in there requires a constant struggle.

Plus, it really pisses off the octopus.

And I think this might explain my whole clumsy fumbling dyspraxia life. Doing things like sewing or writing longhand or whatnot requires a continuously engaged consciousness in order to keep your hand steady and get it to do what you want it to do.

My, at best, only periodically engaged mind just ain’t gonna cut it.

And I really want to change that. If I was to join some sort of monastery or ashram or whatever where they teach things like meditation, my main immediately goal would be to acquire the ability to focus my mind whenever I need to.

I find my current inability to do so incredibly frustrating. I like to imagine that I am in control of my mind and I can make it do what I want it to do, and I certainly can do a lot of amazing things with it, but focusing it is not one of them.

And I get the feeling that if I could just get my mind together and flowing as one, I would find it a hell of a lot easier to get my life together, too.

More after the break.

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The format is to not have a format

Every once in a while, I pondering trying to create something more…. commercial.

Ya know, the sort of thing that might appeal to people who are not my dear friends. Strangers, even, who haven’t even met me in RL and found out just how cute I am.

And the thing is, I know I could do it. I have the skills to write all sorts of more generally accessible things. I could write short stories, or start another webcomic (AI art plus text balloons?), or try to do a novel again, or do a humour column or a political one.

And so forth and so on, anon.

I could do all sorts of more commercially works, and make all kinds of things.

But it won’t be THIS thing. This thing you’re reading right now.

And now. Aaaaaand…. now.

Spooky, isn’t it?

THIS thing is my big pile marked “miscellaneous”. Whatever I need to output, it can take as input, because there’s no format to get in the way.

Everything I write comes from deep inside me. Therefore, it is dictated by whatever it is I have going on in there. That precludes any sort of preconceived formula for what can and cannot go into this thing because what comes out might not fit the format and well, fuck that, I’m going to write what I need to write regardless.

I could do the “suite of pseudonyms” thing, where I have different pen names for different sorts of writing.

One for my political screeds, one for my humorous takes on things, one for my science fiction, and so forth.

But even that feels too restrictive. I deeply mistrust categorization because no matter how many categories I make, something is going to fall between categories, or worse, belong equally in more that one category, and so I will chuck it in the “misc” bin, and then more and more things will end up in “misc” as my high powered analytical brain produces more fine distinctions between categories, and before you know it, you have a dozen categories with exactly one thing in them and a “misc” folder with everything else and the kitchen sink.

So fuck that. I will write whatever I need to write at the time I write it and somebody else can figure out where to file it.

Like an agent, for example. Oh, what a lovely fantasy it is to imagine having a wonderful, magical agent to whom I can send anything and they will know exactly who will buy it.

Of course, I’d have to do something to attract their interest first…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.