Had my abdominal ultrasound this morning.

The procedure was no big deal. Ultrasounds are easy. Lie there, hold your breath when the imaging tech tells you, occasionally turn to one side or another.

Fasting for eight hours beforehand was unwelcome but doable. Originally, when I booked the appointment, the lady on the phone said twelve hours, and I said, “Um, no. I am diabetic, I can’t go for twelve hours without eating. ”

So we plea bargained it down to eight. Eight I can do.

But the appointment was for 8 am. so me and Julian couldn’t do our usual hanging out at midnight because that would mean eating after midnight and I’d turn into a Gremlin.

Wait no…I’d just have eaten too late for me to have gone eight hours before 8 am.

Easy solve : we just did our usual hanging out at 11 pm instead.

Getting up that early was a bit of a pain. For one thing, it was really fucking cold. And in general, I don’t like to have to deal with the real world before 10 am.

I’ve never been the “sleep all day” kind of night owl.

In fact, I am pretty sure that a detailed analysis of my sleeping patterns would reveal that I am not so much a night owl as a nap….. toucan.

I couldn’t think of a parallel.

But I have gotten better over the years. Patient readers know that I went many, many years without being able to sleep for more than an hour and a half.

And that sucked so bad. Rotten for my health too, both mental and physical. And yet I acted as though there was nothing I could do about it.

I’ve been pathologically passive for a very long time.

All because of that damned Paxil, too.

Speaking of which (sorta), also did the Therapy Thursday thing. Doctor Costin told me that he doesn’t put people on Paxil any more. It’s actually a very old drug now, and there are better alternatives with fewer side effects.

Now he tells me. I’ve been taking the stuff for more than 20 years. 20 years of going on and on about feeling cold inside and talking about Midnight Tundra and bemoaning the iceberg sitting on my poor little heart.

And blaming it all on my depression when, in fact, it was my antidepressant.

God does irony seek me out.

Ah well, at least I am thawing out now due to the lowered Paxil dose. In around three weeks, when I get my next batch of blister packs, the Paxil dose will go from 40 mg except for 2 days a week at 30 mg to three days a week.

I am looking forward to that. I feel so much more alive now. I was talking about thawing out a fair bit with Doctor Costin and how I feel like it’s going a lot faster now and how I am striving to become more actively engaged with reality and closer to the people in my life and to take charge of my own wellbeing.

To that end, I keep gently reminding myself that I have the ability to steer this beat up little boat of mine and I can actually go out and find my fun and other things that will enrich my life and help me to stay connected with reality.

Living in the world of the mind is hell because without the id to anchor it, the mind is not a stable place. It’s a land of flickering illusions and sinking sands and random drift, and nothing feels real, not even yourself, and you’d sell your soul for a bit of solid ground to call your own.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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One more day

Just one more day until Fruvous’ Very Busy Week is over.

I will kind of miss it. I could handle having one “thing” a weekday, although I would prefer they weren’t all some form of medical appointment.

Those are rarely fun, and never good news.

Oh well. After tomorrow I can try to implement some self-motivation. I’m coming to realize that I can, to a certain extent at least, choose to be motivated.

I can gather my inner strength, take a big breath, and fill myself with energy from my largely untapped id, and let that wave of energy carry me forward.

And that’s where things get meta, because then I have to ask myself if I want to want to do things or not.

I won’t commit to an answer to that right now because I feel like I am in a state of transition between the old, weak, timid. cowardly, cringing way of approaching life where I spend most of my time curled up in a little ball ignoring the world and into a new, strong, courageous, bold way of living where I wander the world with my head held high, looking for fun new things to do that will make me feel alive.

Very important, that feeling alive thing. I have spent far, far too long subconsciously choosing to damp down all feelings of liveliness in order to make doing nothing easier.

Ain’t that a boot to the nuts.

Above all, I’m going to learn to get excited about life. To find and hold on to things I can look forward to and if one of those doesn’t pan out, don’t wallow in my feelings of disappointment, just feel it all then go looking for something new to take its place.

Life is nothing to be afraid of. I can embrace it and learn it and live it and be all the better for it. I don’t have to keep hiding from it like a hunted animal.

Nothing is out to “get” me. I have no predators. People who know me tend to like me, in fact, and want me to be okay.

I should show myself at least the same level of consideration.

And I will learn to truly care about, and for, myself. I am free to stop repeating my neglected childhood and give myself the love I never got back then.

I can grow that missing inner resource that pushing to change things requires.

All it takes is love.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Posted this as a Youtube comment earlier :

OK, long story but bear with me.
1991. I’m a freshman, I have only recently discovered philosophy classes and I have been enjoying the hell out of mine. Holy crap, thinking about stuff is its own entire… thing!
One day, a philosophy professor I adored, Professor Trnka, took me aside and gently but firmly told me that I needed to stop dominating class discussions. That he understood that I was eager and bright but I needed to let the less confident and loud students get their chance to contribute as well, so I needed to tone it down.
This made an impression on me so I was thinking a lot about it as I made my way to my next class, another philosophy class, this one with Professor Koch.
After which he gave me the EXACT SAME TALK.
Almost word for word. These professors had not coordinated in any way or on any level. They just both decided I needed that talk on the same day. So as arrogant as I was back then, I took their lesson to heart. If it had been just one of them, I might have gone the arrogant neckbeard route of thinking, “Well, if they can’t keep up with my genius, too frigging bad. Boo hoo hoo. It’s not my fault I’m awesome. “
But by the time Professor Koch was done, I figured I must be the problem. So I learned to slow down and take my goddamned turn.

I was, in fact, the asshole.

And now I have come all the way back around to contemplating (planning?) being arrogant once more.

I mean, being arrogant doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole, right? It must be possible to have a very high opinion of yourself and your capabilities while still being a genuinely warm and decent person.

You don’t have to be a Trump.

Admittedly, I can feel my cocky and arrogant side trying to tug me away from my usual empathy and consideration and deep humanism so that I can spend more energy just basking in the glow of my scintillating awesomeness.

Well fuck that. That whole idea disgusts me. Even if I gave in to delusions of messianic grandeur (always a possibility with me), the idea of a life lived all cooped up in my own soul instead of exploring the magnificent multiplicity found in the minds and souls of those around me sounds like a slow burning but thorough version of hell.

Besides, there is no reason you can’t hold yourself to an extremely high moral standard because you think too highly of yourself to do anything low, base, petty, or cruel.

That shit’s beneath me, baby. Walk on by.

I think I may be slowly turning into a 60’s Vegas crooner.

Ring a ding ding, baby!

Anyhow, yeah. I think I can imagine myself as, like, a magnified version of who I am right now. Still a sweetie, still sensitive and deep, still caring deeply for people doing the best I can for them, but with the confidence in my own coruscating amazingness that I need to truly shine and fill the world with the wonders I create.

Or at least get laid.

But it has to start with opening up inside. There is much inside me that needs to come out. Just how much, I can’t tell you, but it’s a LOT.

The image I am currently using to facilitate this transformation is of a house with its windows being flung open to let the morning sun and all that wholesome fresh air in, and all my own radiance out.

And if some shadows need to slip out at the same time, so be it. I am slowly learning that my soul is like a packed nightclub in that I can only let the good stuff in if I let some of the bad stuff out to make room.

So I suppose that might seem schizophrenic to some. Sometimes I am upbeat and perky, the next I am bitter and angry and dark, and the next I’m thoughtful and deep, and the next I’m raging about politics, and the next…

I’m a million different people from one day to the next.

But they are all just facets of me.

More after the break.

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The world was our burrito

Strangeness : I ordered a 2 for 1 burrito special from a place called Ricky Ticky Taco. ^[1] Takes a while but it shows up. Yup, there’s my two burritos.

But they’re in a Quesada bag.

As patient readers know, I’ve also ordered my Mexican food from there. And come to think of it, the DoorDash menu for Ricky Ticky Taco was identical to the one from Quesada. Chin stroking hmmmmmm.

I feel like someone is pulling a fast one on me. Are they actually the same place?

Anyhow, when my food arrived, I discovered that moisture had caused the top of my burrito to stick to the wrapper, and thus when I opened the wrapper it ripped the top of my burrito off, thus making it much harder to eat.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to keep the thing together and just dumped the whole thing on top of the little bit of trail mix left in my bowl.

I wonder if that’s how the burrito bowl was invented.

“Oh no, my burrito is falling apart! I know, I’ll stick it in this bowl. Great, now how do I eat it? Well I have this spoon….. hey, this is pretty good!:

Aaaand….. scene. Thank you.

My foot appointment went fine. Nikki (yay, the nice British lady has a name now) made a bunch of adjustments to my giant Frankenstein shoes and hopefully that will keep them from flattening liek they did before.

Seriously, by the time I got to the G. F. Strong building today, they were basically oversized slippers. I could walk out of them.

So far they feel OK. I forgot to tell Nikki about how bad the shoes hurt my feet when she first put them on me. I hope that’s not important.

Today, though, they felt fine.

I suspect the real problem is that I have very weak ankles. So my foot kind of turns sideways when I walk.

Of course, that didn’t occur to me till I was home.

Oh, and one misadventure in the appointment : so I get to the building and Julian and I go through the lobby, down the elevator, and to the prosthetics and orthotics office.

Where the receptionists intercepts me and says, “Michael, come to the back office with me”, so I follow her allll the way through the offices and rooms there only to have Nikki tell her to go to the FRONT office so now we have to go almost all the way back to the reception area and I have still not had a chance to sit the fuck down!

But I am proud of myself for complaining about it. I said to the receptionist, “You really should not be running me around like this!” and “Remember me? The guy who fell last time I was here!?!”.

So yay that.

By the time I actually got to sit my legs were screaming the song of their people at me.

Turns out pain makes me assertive.

Anyhow, that was my day. I’ll be back there March 10.

And I am still annoyed about my burrito.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got another needle in the eye today.

Went to my eye doctor place, West Coast Retina Consultants, and they did the usual tests on me.

My left eye continues to be way, way blurrier than the right. It would be totally fair to say that my right eye is dominant. Dominant as fuck, really.

As in, with just my right eye, I read 8 lines of text of decreasing font sizes and with just the left I barely got through 2.

And the second one only had two letters on it!

So that’s depressing, but oh well. I can still see, knock on wood, and there’s doctors trying to fix that left eye of mine.

Hence the injection. Apparently this injection should firm things up a bit.

It fucking hurt, of course. It seems to be my misfortune to be somewhat resistant to the freezing agent they use on my eyeball, so even though that stuff is supposed to make it so that I barely feel it, I fucking feel it.

But it’s just a moment of (admittedly severe) pain and that is way, way better than going blind when my eye goes kablooey from the pressure.

I’m sure you would agree.

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Wake up, little foxy

To the tune of this, of course :

I seem to have cleared the cobwebs of unconsciousness from my mind for now.

Yesterday’s clinging sleepiness has, at least temporarily, retreated. I didn’t have trouble getting out of bed to go to the eye place and I didn’t feel sleepy while I was there.

In an extraordinary (for me) act of foresee, I even brought a book to read because I know these appointments often involve a lot of waiting.

Dang I’m clever.

Anyhow, this recent bout with Mister Sandman has got me once more contemplating my troubled relationship with sleep.

I feel like my mind plays around with sleep in ways that are not conducive to my long term health and best interests. I have a tendency to take naps out of what I am sure would turn out to be merely boredom if I were to really look at it.

I sleep because I don’t know what else to do with myself, and that’s sad.

And my journey towards greater mental health will be greatly expedited if I do my best to remember to actively engage with life. To be interested in things, and to pursue that interest with happy zeal. To feed my mind, not just keep it busy. To be intrepid and go out in search of fun and adventure, even if it’s only through my computer.

The mission is to find things in life that make me want to stay awake and engaged. That’s the opposite of my depression because it’s my depression that I am ultimately hiding from with all my napping.

And even as I type these words of wakefulness, I can feel the old and busted part of me moaning and whining about how all this energetic engagement sounds like way too much work and it’s better to just slink off and hide from the world in sleep for a while.

No, it isn’t. Sleeping is easier but it’s not better. I am determined to learn to open up and embrace life and connect with the soaring majestic firebird of energy within me so that I can climb high into the sky and shine my warmth out for all the world to see… and feel.

I would love the whole world if I could. So much darkness and pain in the world that could be solved by showing people just a little love and kindness.

Mama loves ya, baby. Never forget it.

More after the break.

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More about sleep

Being super sleepy then having that evaporate on me has really highlighted the difference between needing sleep and just not wanting to deal with life at all.

And it’s that second thing that worries me. That’s definitely depressive. And it points the way to how much work I still need to do to hook up my id and get my whole motivational system online after decades of neglect.

I think I am still afraid to actually be motivated. I am so fearful of the world that deep down I treat motivation like it’s something trying to tear me out of my smelly little socket and that still seems like the worst possible thing to happen to that deep down scared little animal calling the shots from my deeper self.

I guess I am that scared little animal. More or less.

That doesn’t seem quite right but I can’t think of what’s wrong with it. It’s incomplete.

Anyhow, so yeah, I think I resist being motivated because it seems like it’s going to drag me off to God Knows Where and that means not being fully in control of myself and what I do and where I end up and therefore that is chaos and madness and anarchy.

Or something like that.

The degree to which my inner programming demands control and predictability is appalling. I truly have no trust in the universe. Deep down I feel like the only way to be “safe” is to control my life to the point of total predictability and the only way to do that is to basically have no life at all.

That’s certainly the only way to maintain the tragically low stimulation level I now require. It’s like I slid down a long slope because of my apparent inability to ever choose to raise the stimulation level of my life and now I am stuck at the bottom.

At some point I am just going to have to just be scared. Accept that climbing back up will activate my anxiety and do it anyway.

I can always take a Xanax if I get too scared. Or even beforehand.

I know that I am determined to become more robust and engaged and ready so that I am not in such a weak and fragile state all the god damned time.

Somewhere within me lies a raging inferno of energy that lies like a breeder reactor ready to be tapped into so I can do wonderful, amazing, astounding things.

I just need to have the courage to hook that shit up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Showered for the first time in 2.5 years yesterday.

The new setup works great. I am incredibly impressed with the grab bars. They really feel sturdy and stable and that’s, like, their main job.

I’m still not going to be swinging around on them like a kid on a jungle gym, but i trust them not to come off in my hand, anyhow.

The new shower head works fine too. I now have the same hose-type shower head that I used when I was a little kid just learning to bathe himself, and that’s nice.

And being able to aim the flow directly at whatever part of me I want is very nice. Feels very good in some spots, including the ones you’d think.

Oh, and the shower chair also feels nice and sturdy despite being plastic.

All in all, a very rugged setup.

As for the shower itself, eh, I got clean. But my bandages got wet. As in there was a little lake in the bottom of reach bag when I was done. Turns out rubber bands don’t hold the plastic bags on tight enough to keep the water from getting in, so next time I’m gonna use tape like Albert used.

I’m gonna miss that guy.

But nevertheless, it felt amazing to be able to shower under my own power once more. It makes me feel so much more human. Like I always say, disability takes away your dignity, and the new shower setup gives me a big chunk of dignity back.

Plus there’s just something about being able to wash myself that makes me feel more human. It’s something most people completely take for granted but I have had to do without it for a long ass time and it’s good to be back.

Oh, and adding to the wackiness of my little watery misadventure, it turned out that both of the bottles of Head and Shoulders in my bathroom were empty, LOL, so I did not get to wash my hair.

Plus, because of my long shower free period, it turned out that there was but a single towel in my bathroom as well.

Ah well, next shower will be more complete.

The real psychological takeaway from the experience for me is to be proud that I didn’t take the whole thing seriously, so the little bumps on the road didn’t bother me much.

I am learning to just accept that I am not someone skilled at thinking things out beforehand and so my best course of action is to just jump into things feet first, make a bunch of mistakes, and learn from them.

This is not the prudent or “smart” way to do things. But it’s a way to do things, and doing things is infinitely better than the stodgy and stoic stasis I’ve lived in for so long.

Towards this end I will continue to cultivate a cheerful, sunny outlook on life. That seems to be the exact kind of shock absorbers this big ol bus of a mind of mine needs if it’s to actually propel me forward for a change.

I’ve been spinning my wheels for so long, baby, that my tires wore out a long time ago and now I’m running on my rims.

It’s the fear of making a mistake that kills ya. There’s millions of things way worse than being less than perfect, and being (and doing) nothing at all is one of them.

So I need to be less cautious and more adventurous. Accept that living life means making mistakes and getting hurt and that the fun makes it all worth it.

Above all, I want to become a lot more mentally tough and resilient.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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Trouble on the rise

I’ve started to find it very hard to get out of bed, and this worries me.

I don’t feel depressed. Just tired and lazy. I find myself just lying in bed, dozing, for way longer than usual and it’s not just sleepiness – I actively don’t wanna get out of bed.

Even though the only thing waiting for me when I arise is video games.

Maybe that’s the problem, I dunno. Maybe getting up to play video games just ain’t doing it for me any more and I need to shift into a higher gear.

But I fear it’s probably something not as simple as that.

The thing is, being unable (or unwilling) to get out of bed has never been a part of my particular depression. It’s a classic symptom, of course, but one I’ve managed to dodge.

But it’s becoming undeniable in my case right now. I am sleepy and/or tired all the time and all I want to do is burrow under the covers and snooze.

It definitely feels escapist. Like just dealing with my extremely low impact life is too much for me now and so I am retreating to the penultimate fallback position of hiding from the world in sleep.

If that’s the case, I’m in trouble. I’m going to have to tell Doctor Costin about this during Therapy Thursday this week and he might well decide that this whole “lowered Paxil dose” thing ain’t workin’ and I’m going to have to go back up.

Which would be, ironically, quite depressing.

But I don’t feel sad. Or depressed, or anxious, or anything else except sleepy. So maybe this has nothing to do with depression.

And that would be even worse because anything non-psychological that would make me sleepy all the time, like a virus or a brain issue, would be much, much worse.

It could be that I’m still just catching up on sleep debt. But I doubt it. This feels like more than that. I feel positively oppressed.

Hopefully I will get over it and it will be yet another weird health thing that disappears as mysteriously as it appeared.

Because life is at a pretty low ebb if I don’t even have the energy to play games.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I know, I cover this topic a fair bit. But it’s kind of important to me.

This won’t be the last you hear of it either, I am sure. So buckle in.

First, there’s the arrogance I have always displayed.

To me, it’s not really arrogance, but I will admit it’s a fine distinction. I have always been extremely confident about my intelligence and its products.

And why wouldn’t I be? To this day, I’ve not met anyone who is categorically smarter than me. School has always been super easy for me, college included, and this great big brain of mine gives me a feeling of power that makes me feel like I tower over other people like I’m fucking Godzilla.

For the record, I don’t like that feeling. I don’t want to tower over others. That would just take me even further away from the rest of humanity to a place where I would not even feel like a human being any more.

Or so I’ve always thought.

Anyhow, clearly, to some people, confidence is arrogance, and like I said, it’s a fine distinction at best. If you’re an average student watching the like of me saunter into class and ace a test I didn’t even known we were having that day, you’re going to assume that I must be as arrogant as I am superior.

But I never have been, at least from my point of view. Sure, I’ve never pretended to be stupider than I am (and I never will, unless there’s money in it for me, and it would have to be a LOT) but I never acted like I was better than everyone else or otherwise super special and precious, and I think I deserve credit for that.

Even if it was the product of crippling depression and very low self-esteem.

But as patient readers know, for a long time now I have been wondering if being arrogant and full of myself might actually be the smarter path.

At least then I would have the confidence to go out into the world and try to make a place for myself where I can be a real honest to goodness grownup.

And after that, who knows? Armed with the confidence of arrogance (and vice versa), I might conquer the world with my dazzling talents and powerful intellect.

I mean, not literally. I’m not some power mad megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur.

But I feel like becoming rich and famous is not entirely out of my reach.

I do know that there is no healthy middle neutral position possible for me. It honestly seem to be that I can love myself or I can hate myself but I can’t just be healthy and normal about myself.

I fly or I die. Period.

Maybe I could compromise and just develop an inflatable ego. One that I can pump up big when it’s time to go out and take on that big ol world and apply for jobs and/or try to become a YouTube star but that I can deflate back to more sane proportions when it’s time to just be a social human being for a while.

Sounds fairly doable, although I imagine living in two worlds like that can be stressful. I suppose every celebrity must face this conflict, and I do want to be a celebrity.

Admittedly, my talents are more behind the camera stuff like writing, but I can also be a charismatic and compelling orator, and that’s why I am thinking YouTube.

But then the question becomes : what the hell kind of YouTube would I be?

I’ll talk that through when I get back from Denny’s.

More after the break!

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What kind of Youtuber?

Hell if I know.

The problem is that I’m a very complicated dude with a lot of different facets to my personality, many of which I am still trying to figure out, so it’s hard to pick one of these facets as the one to which I give voice.

So here’s the broad categories :

1. Angry. There has definitely been a flourishing of things for me to be pissed off about lately, and part of me has always been kinda hotheaded, and that part of me really wants to scream and shout and foam at the mouth about all the fucked up shit going down on this fireball planet of ours and really attack the forces of evil with every last erg of my massive verbal wave motion gun’s power so I can destroy those opinions I find toxic like I’m the motherfucking Death Star.
2. Saintly. But then again, I really just want everyone to get along. I want to find common ground in the most unlikely and infertile places and help people see that we’re all more alike than we are different and that we’re all in this together against a cold and hostile world so we need to huddle together so we can fight the darkness with the warm glow of humanity, united, and at peace.
3. Funny. Then again, I could stay the hell away from politics, petty bickering, and punditry and just be a harmless humorist making funny eccentric little videos full of my signature charm and gentle good nature to make videos that are warm and friendly and appealing to everyone and maybe just make the world a happier and more welcoming place for the whole darn world.
4. Nerdy. Or I could concentrate on geek culture like science fiction, fantasy, and especially video games (might as well get something out of playing them so much.) I could embrace my zany side and make highly nerd-friendly content that is funny and geeky nerdy as all get out. Or maybe I could tap into my love of science instead and do highly accessible science explainer vids.

Or a million other things, I assume. This gem of mine has a ridiculous number of facets and for now at least, I have no idea how to unite them into a single identity, let alone if that is even possible.

Maybe I will approach the whole thing like I do this blog. No format, no outline, no script, whatever comes out, comes out.

It might work. My personality is the real product after all.

And maybe I’ll assign my different faces their own #hashtage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap, has this been a sleepy day so far.

And not the nice, quiet, healthy, relaxed kind of sleepy either. This is the heavy, sweaty, beleaguered kind of sleep that leaves me feeling beat up and knocked down then propped up for more beatings again.

And God, does it suck.

Now I have two main schools of thought on what is going down with me right now. One says that this is just the result of my usual weird sleep cycle where now and then my sleep debt catches up with me and must be paid up in full all at once.

That’s certainly what I’d prefer it to be. Then I would just have to wait it out.

It would still suck but at least I’d know it would be over once I catch up.

The other school of thought is that I’m coming down with something viral and my body is using up all my internal resources in the war against this fucking pathogen, leaving not a lot left for minor activities like consciousness.

Eh, consciousness is overrated anyhow.

At the present moment, the second school of thought has a sizeable lead. My chest and my throat are raw and scratchy and my nose is running and I have some aches and pains going on.

But that kind of shit comes and goes quite suddenly with me without any solid evidence of whether it’s a virus or just dehydration. So I dunno.

My life is very weird.

Oh well. Guess all I can do is do what I do best : keep trudging along. Make sure to get some solid nutrition into me plus plenty of fluids and, whether I like it or not, bedrest.

As per usual, I don’t wanna sleep all day. I want to stay awake and have fun and do stuff with my time. Sleeping all the time fucking sucks.

Oh, and standard disclaimer, as always, applies : if I get worse, I’ll go to the ER or UC.

I noticed on a poster at Wound Care that UCs are now “Urgent And Primary Care Centers”, or UPCCs, and that struck me as them finally admitting that, due to the fucked up nature of our health care system (thanks, Boomers!), UC is the closest thing they are ever going to get to having their own GP.

Guess I should be glad to have Doctor Chao after all. I’m still mad about him giving up on finding out what the fuck is wrong with my legs, but he’s better than nothing.

Then again, when I went to UC for my legs, they did a bunch of testing that Chao had never thought of right away, so who knows.

Maybe, despite my misgivings about the place, I’d be better off at UC.

Which reminds me. By now, there should be both an order for an ultrasound of my spleen, bowels, and kidneys and one for some bloodwork in the system for me, so I need to get to the Brooke Radiology building some time very soon.

Brooke is a great place. They do your imaging so fast and yet you don’t feel rushed. Their medical imaging techs are really warm and friendly and put you at ease.

The LifeLabs upstairs from them, on the other hand, is not exactly my favorite place to be. I find the place very cold and clinical and it definitely makes me feel like I am just another hunk of meat to be processed to them.

But what the hell. If I can get it all done in one day in one place, it will save me a lo of time and effort in the long run.

Then, I guess, I will just wait to see if Doctor Chao’s office calls.

I’m particularly interested in the ultrasound because I am very curious to know what my umbilical hernia is up to these days and if it has something to do with my weird poops.

If it’s been acting up, I might need surgery. Which would mean cutting my abdomen open, unless it can be done laparoscopically.

So, go laparoscopic surgery, go. I don’t want to have to get split open again!

More after the break.

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That distant shore

I seem to be through the worst of the attack of sleepiness.

I still feel pretty rough, and the chest, throat, and nose symptoms have not changed, but at least I don’t feel like yesterday’s crap any more.

So I dunno. These exact symptoms of runny nose, scratchy throat, and sore chest seem to just pop up periodically with me, and hang around for a bit, then disappear and lurk within me until the next flareup.

Is it a virus? Some metabolic oddity? An allergic reaction? An atypical reaction to dehydration? Or what?

I dunno. And I suppose, as irresponsible as this is, I don’t really care because the symptoms never rise to the point of being severe and/or scary.

I honestly pass through a lot of small periods of minor badness. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe my immune system really swings into action once symptoms appear and beats the ever loving snot out of whatever is monkeying up my works.

Or maybe this is all psychosomatic (attic insane) on some level too deep for me to fathom and this is how my body and mind deal with some deep dark emotional force within me that is otherwise unable to ride to the surface of my conscious mind to be dealt with in a mature adult way there.

Probably not. But maybe.

Eh, whatever. I am beginning to wonder what is the true cost of all my curiosity and analysis and yearning to understand everything. Surely there are better uses of my prodigious mental energies than an uncritical and omnivorous attempt to ingest, digest, and integrate everything I come across like a hyperphagic amoeba.

But even if there are better uses for this miraculous mind of mine, I am not sure I could even switch modes at this stage of my life.

I dunno. Maybe I could learn to adjust my attitude at least.

Because this negative shit ain’t good for me at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had my last shower with/from Albert today, and it was bittersweet.

He’s the person who has been giving me my weekly community showers at Rosewood Manor for the last three months or so, and I like him.

And not just because he’s the first man to touch my naked body in years.

No, it’s because I found him to be quite pleasant company. He told me about his life and his family in Montreal and his life in the Philippines and so on.

At first, he did most of the talking, and I am fine with that. I am happy to listen to someone else talk if they are interesting, and I find most people interesting because I am endlessly curious about other people’s lives. Lives unlike my own.

I’m crazy for hearing people’s perspectives so I can add them to my own internal model of reality. There is nobody alive who doesn’t have something to contribute to my understanding of life and the world.

Anyhow, I am glad to have my new grab bars, shower chair, and detachable shower head (the kind with a hose), and I am looking forward to being able to take a shower for the first time in two and a half years, but I will definitely miss Albert.

Life’s like that, isn’t it? Everything comes at a cost. Nothing is one hundred percent good. We are always weighing cost versus gain.

All we can really hope for is to trade up.

I have not tested my new shower equipment yet, even though it was installed on Wednesday and today is Friday.

To be honest, I was so preoccupied with my anxiety over having the installer dude here that I totally forgot to mentally prepare at all.

And right now I am going through my neophobia phase. When something new comes along, I sometimes need to let it just kinda sit there for a while in order to get used to it before I actually start using it.

It’s very Taurus of me, I know. We are notoriously conservative (in the emotional sense), even wacky freaky free spirits like me, and it can take a long time for us to warm up to anything new, even if it’s something we definitely want.

It’s pretty weird.

That’s why I have pieces of technology lying around that I tried once, did not instantly understand and/or like, and never touched them again.

I have a very cool waterproof bluetooth shower speaker sitting right in front of me that I tried for like five minutes to get to work, couldn’t figure it out, so I gave up and forgot all about it for literal years.

I have a very good, powerful massager with various heads, variable intensity and interval of vibrations, and even little programs of various vibrations that make up a whole session of massage.

Used it for a while. Lost track of the charging cord. Shrugged, forgot about it.

Heck, somewhere in this junk pile of a bedroom of mine is a self thrusting sex toy that I tried once, found the thrusting action kind of creepy, and never touched again.

And the same thing has happened with oh so many video games. I try them out, they don’t instantly grab me, so I return them.

I’m actually quite fickle.

But I am at least learning to cope with things like that. I know that when I get something new, I may have to force myself to use it the first few times in order to get used to it.

And that’s just sad.

More after the break.

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Why would you do that to yourself?

Atheists puzzle the faithful.

To them, it seems like atheists voluntarily live in a world that is far colder and harsher and more hopeless than it needs to be.

And all in the name of some abstract sense of what is really “true”.

To the faithful, that does not seem to be a trade worth making at all.

To them, objective truth is not nearly as important as emotional truth. And religion is, ultimately, about people’s unmet emotional needs.

Feeling unloved? God loves you.

Feeling unsafe? God will protect you.

Feeling lonely? Jesus is always there by your side.

Feeling scared by that great big complicated world? God makes it simple again.

This is why faith – the belief in things without proof – is vitally important. It might seem to a chilly intellectual like myself that unfounded belief is lunacy, but to the faithful, belief without the need for evidence or proof is belief that cannot be taken away by the shifting sands of our thoughts and ideas.

And we must always remember that confidence that you can figure out what is real and what is illusion and thus create one’s own understanding of reality is not universal.

The very thought of heading out into those murky waters of doubt and uncertainty terrifies a lot of humanity because they have no faith in their ability to find their way out again and so, to them, that’s a recipe for drowning.

Or worse, getting lost and confused forever, without even knowing which way is up.

So to them, we intellectual liberal types standing out there in the swamps of intellectualism calling for them to come join us are sirens trying to lure them to their doom in a place where we can survive but they cannot.

And all for the chance of being marginally more “right”? Uh, no thanks.

Because to the majority of humanity, the ultimate capital-T Truth is not of paramount importance. What they value is whatever makes it easiest to get through life, whether it’s “really really real” or not.

They intuitively grasp that there are some things that it is better to believe because the benefits of belief are enormous and the costs are, to them, negligible

Now myself, I don’t see religious belief ever being an option for me.

But that does not preclude me from extending my compassion and understanding to the faithful and the pious.

We’re all in this together, folks.

And I would never deny someone whatever helps them make it through the day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

Told my psychiatrist, Doctor Costin, about the “bad moments” I’ve been having lately, and how I regain my equilibrium pretty fast when they have them but that I am beginning to wonder if I should just let myself fall apart instead.

He said that was a bad idea. That having a breakdown leaves an injury that you never totally heal from so you are better off avoiding them entirely.

OK, fair enough. I will stay the course for now.

But I don’t know for how long, because the “bad moments” are becoming more frequent and lasting just a little bit longer each time.

So clearly something’s got to give.

Knowing me, all I really need is a good long cry. And that does, in fact, seem like a better idea than a total nervous breakdown.

So the next time that cold hard wind starts blowing inside me, perhaps I will see if I can release that energy via tears.

A fit of deep down ugly crying might do me a hell of a lot of good.

Might just be the emotional enema I have needed for a long ol time.

Speaking of being verklempt, I once more did not exactly bare my soul to Doctor Costin. I almost never do. I doubt I ever will. Letting down my guard and letting my emotions pour out in front of others is just not in my programming and it might be too late for me to add it in now.

Like so many other men, at some point I built these fortifications around my tender heart in order to protect it from the cold hard world, and keep it (and myself) from being or seeming to be vulnerable.

Because deep down, it feels like the second we’re vulnerable, the imaginary bully in our minds will pounce and use our weakness against us.

This is, of course, insanity, but nobody said being male and being sane were the same.

Due to my extraordinary intellect, the madness goes even deeper for me, because I can simulate vulnerability to the point where I even fool myself.

Like…. a lot.

But it’s time to confess what’s really going on : I am using the incredible speed and agility of my mind to bring currently inactive emotions to the forefront, in a purely conversational mode, and communicating them in that cauterized form.

And this is with my therapist. With everybody else, I am even more guarded.

And yet I seem very open and honest and forthright. And I am. As far as you know.

But on the inside I know, deep down, the sort of game I am playing. I almost never, even with my therapist, talk about what I am feeling right now. It’s always what I have felt in the past, or some abstraction of emotion devoid of currency or power, or maybe, on rare moments, the thoughts and ideas of the moment.

But none of that involves any true vulnerability. I am one thousand percent confident in my ability to move to protect myself verbally and intellectually from any threat, so I can seemingly bare all without ever really feeling exposed.

It’s all a rather complicated and elaborate game, but all it really boils down to is that, even as I type these very words to you, my sweet and gentle audience, I am not truly making myself vulnerable to you.

In the end, it’s all just analysis after all.

Jesus, no wonder it takes me so long to make any progress. I’ve been faking it.

More after the break.

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One little step

But I need to keep in mind that progress happens a little at a time and, and this is the key point, the fact that I can see how things might have been better does not mean that they should have been better and that therefore I have failed.

That is honestly the rubric I have been living under and as you can clearly see, it’s pure uncut looney tunes crazy town.

I can always think of ways things could be better. It’s part of my whole INTJ thing. I have an intuitive grasp of how things work and how things fit together and that means I am a natural optimizer, especially when human thriving is part of the equation.

But a harsh, sere inner environment where there is only one hundred percent total success or abject and total failure is some seriously psycho Asian parent stereotype crazy making bullshit.

It’s my evil superego rigging the game against me while maintaining the very thing impression that success is, technically, possible.

No it ain’t. Fuck off.

I think it comes down to frustration at its root. I have all this life energy and ambitious and passion that has been completely stymied by my mental illness for a very long time and that id energy is very frustrated and angry inside me and that, in, turn, leads me to take that frustration out on myself through corrupted inner judgment.

After all, if I could ever be good enough, I’d have to stop hating myself, and then what would I do with all that aggression?

I’m working on it.

I’m doing what I can to build channels for that raw human energy to be expressed in the world. At the very least, I want to learn to use it to bolster my mood instead of corroding it and making it crumble.

Deep inside of me is a voice driven mad by captivity that is constantly screaming and screaming and banging itself bloody on the walls of its cage.

And I need to liberate the poor thing while it still remembers that freedom is a possibility for it some day and therefore hasn’t gone completely insane.

I’m working on it, my lovely lunatic. I will find a way to let you go without putting others in danger – including me. I will find ways to harness your energies so that you can do something with them other than bang mindlessly on the bars.

God willing, I might even find a way to get you laid so you can get rid of THAT energy.

I have been trying to hide from reality in the world of the mind for far too long. There’s a real world out there which is way more stable and sane.

And I’m gonna make it there.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s tough to admit to myself that all or most of my feeling of being cold and isolated for the last 20 years was actually the Paxil.

It makes sense in retrospect. Paxil works on my social anxiety because it acts as something like an emotional anesthetic and numbs the amygdala so that it’s less likely to activate the FFF (fight, flight, or freeze) system prematurely and it’s that system that creates the symptoms of an anxiety disorder.

And that’s fine at the right dosage. But, as I have now learned, if the dosage is too high, that numbness cuts straight to the bone and creates a broken frozen inner hellscape that denies the patient access to really any motive power from the id at all.

No wonder I’ve been like Good Kirk, unable to make decisions, for so long.

And all because I was unable to recognize that my Paxil was the problem. Indeed, I have clung to my Paxil as my lifeline to sanity since I was first prescribed it more than twenty years ago because back then, Paxil was what enabled me to exit the maelstrom of insanity that was my extreme depression and social anxiety.

Paxil created a vitally necessary space between me and my insanity, and that space let me catch my breath and actually think.

So that made me label Paxil as not just good but my saviour. And seeing as it had been a long time since I had tasted sanity – there’s a really good chance that I have been crazy for my whole life – I had no way of knowing when the Paxil went too far.

I blamed all the coldness in my soul on the depression, when it turns out the real problem was my antidepressant.

Doesn’t that just figure.

Imagine that, all my talk of Midnight Tundra and feeling numb and cold and isolated all the time was really coming from the Paxil.

I might actually have healed from my illness a long time ago without even knowing.

Thank God I am thawing out now. The barriers keeping me in an emotional deep freeze are falling due to the decreased Paxil dose and I can feel myself coming out of the cold sleep I have been unknowingly trapped in and now I can be decanted from my strangely womblike hibernation chamber only to discover that the rest the crew is dead after a corpse falls out of a locker in a highly improbable way.

Like, what, they died leaning on the door at the exact right angle?

I am deliberately letting this revelation about Paxil and me circulate in my mind because I know that it’s something I am going to have to work through before I can truly grok it and accept the truth of it.

Part of me is super angry, of course. All these nonfunctional years – most of my adult life – robbed from me by my inability to realize what was actually wrong.

And there’s nobody to blame or even get mad at. Not even myself. I had no idea what was wrong, how could I?

It seems obvious in retrospect, but that’s hindsight.

And Doctor Costin had no way of knowing what my true problem was either. I never described the issue as a symptom of anything. I didn’t know what all that coldness was about so neither did he.

It’s just another way – maybe the biggest one yet – life fucks me over in ways I can’t see coming and that require major mental upgrade to understand.

Or even recognize.

All I can do now is continue with the plan to lower the dose over time and hopefully that will thaw me out enough for me to feel truly alive.

More after the break.

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The bad moments

I’ve always had them but now I want to dig a little deeper on them.

These are the moments when the sadness and depression and despair overwhelm my defenses and I feel ice cold hand clutch my heart and what I can only describe as a soul chill goes through me and I have to fight to regain my equilibrium.

Or do I? Like I’ve said before, maybe I would be better if I leaned into that feeling instead of squashing all those emotions back into the box and probably doing myself some harm in the process.

That might be better in the long run. Just let myself freak out and lose my mind and fall apart for a little while so that I can reap the benefits of a whole lot of the bad emotions getting expressed all at once.

But I don’t know if I have the courage to gamble with my marbles like that. And the instinct to instantly get back up and keep going is very strong in me.

Like I’ve said many times before, when there’s nobody there to catch you, you don’t dare risk falling. And if you do fall, you get right the fuck back up before the predators sense your vulnerability and swarm you.

Or something like that. We’re talking primal reasoning here.

Which brings up hypervigilance. On the surface, I might seem like a strange candidate for hypervigilance seeing as I am a lifelong space cadet who barely seems to know what planet he’s on most of the time.

That’s because my hypervigilance is mental, not sensory. I’m always trying to concentrate, anticipate, circumnavigate, and compensate for whatever life decides to throw at me.

But past a certain point, that’s impossible…. unless you live such a limit and proscribed life that you life finally becomes sufficiently predictable because you never DO anything.

Welcome to my world.

I have definitely spent most of my life in FFF mode, and that’s very bad. I can’t recall many times when I felt completely relaxed and safe. Part of me is always on the lookout for threats and dangers in all directions.

And that means constant biological stress.

And the thing is, I know that I am safe.

But deep down, I’m too scared to believe it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve always been very sensitive to vibes.

I mean, the kind of vibes are talking about these days when they talk about giving someone or someplace a “vibe check”. It’s the overall lingering emotional impression of them, kind of like the empathic equivalent of an odor, and for those of us sensitive to those kind of things, the feelings associated with the vibe can be quite powerful.

Trust me on that.

And for almost all of my life, I have considered those feelings to be entirely my business. It took a long time before it occurred to me that anyone else felt the same thing, even though intellectually I knew that I had heard people talking about them.

But to me, especially as a kid, they were just these weird feelings that came out of nowhere and forced me to have to deal with them all by myself because I didn’t want to ask anyone about them and have them think I was crazy.

They certainly made me feel like I was crazy sometimes, or on the way there at least. I’d be trying to deal with reality while these vibes were trying to make themselves heard, metaphorically speaking, in my head, and it made life stressful.

I honestly would have benefitted greatly from someone simply explaining that yes, this was a real thing, and I was not crazy, and that there were ways to integrate these psychic messages with the rest of my senses instead of fighting them all the time.

I could use that last part now, to be honest. I’m beginning to think that this vibe sensitivity might be a key part of my social anxiety as part of the stuff going on in my head when I am trying to interact with people that acts like a noisy radio station in my head that I have to work hard to ignore.

I honestly wish I could turn that shit down sometimes. Or off, even. Though I suppose if I did turn it off I would end up feeling incredibly lonely without these emotional impressions reminding me subconsciously that there ARE other people in the world living their lives and feeling their emotions.

So what the heck IS a vibe anyhow? I mean physically. Literally. Scientifically.

It has to be pheromones. That’s the only medium for these messages that makes any sense. I think that pheromones play a much larger part in our subjective lives than we understand or even recognize and it’s weirdos like me who notice them.

In fact, I think they play a key role in how there can be such a thing as a zeitgeist, which is basically a massive vibe. There is otherwise no avenue of rational explanation for how we can have a collective anything.

They are also an important component in empathy. Not the only component, of course. We get lots of info from things like vocal tone, posture, facial expression, and of course those minute shifts of tiny muscles in our eyes.

But there’s definitely a component beyond those things. Something you can pick up in the air without seeing anybody. A feeling of danger, for instance, or relaxed happiness, or jubilant celebration, or even those extremely volatile emotions that can turn a random group of people into a riot.

I know that for me, my subjective experience of vibes often feels more like electromagnetism than any sort of odor. Like my nervous system is acting as an antenna picking up signals from other people’s nervous systems.

I am sure science would not back me up on that, although I would love to see what happens if I go into a Faraday cage and am therefore isolated from absolutely everything in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Probably nothing. But maybe I would suddenly feel more relaxed than ever before.

It’s worth a shot.

More after the break.

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More on vibe science

I like to joke (even though literally nobody else will ever find it funny) that I am the world’s only rational materialist mystic poet.

I guess you had to be there.

It’s my way of expressing the awkward tension between my fairly hardcore science and logic based mind and my deeply sensitive and empathic nature.

I don’t consider them to be in full on conflict but they don’t always get along.

When they do get along, for instances when I am writing (like right now), it’s like a mainline connection between my deeper self and the world outside my skull. The words flow out of me in a stream of consciousness and I get my emotions out of cold storage so I can express them and thus be rid of some of my heavy burden.

And I think I am getting better at that over time. The lowered Paxil dose helps a lot.

Much easier to have a stream of consciousness when you’ve thawed out.

I think I am also helped that despite my scientific mindset, I have stalwartly refused to participate in any kind of inane false dichotomy between STEM subjects and the arts.

In general, never tell me I have to pick a side. Fuck YOU.

I’m good at creative writing AND scientific reasoning. I can joke around AND I can discuss cosmology. I love philosophy AND brain science.

And I refuse to cut myself in half and abandon one half of myself just so that I fit into someone’s neat little box.

Fuck your boxes. I’m a custom job. Can’t figure out where to file me? Too bad. Guess you will have to get to know me instead.

And to me, the connection between the intuitive and the rational is crystal clear, though I doubt I could define it. To me, it all comes from the same deep and mysterious place in my mind. A mind which uses whichever faculty works best in any given situation and is made far more powerful than the two halves combined as a result.

Now if only I could use all that power to make some freaking money.

That’d sure be nice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.