I’m beginning to worry about how easily I become dehydrated.

I followed a hunch and asked Microsoft Co-Pilot (which is my Jesus) whether there’s a link between Jardiance and dehydration, and yup.

I figured there might be because Jardiance’s whole deal is that it removes excess blood sugar from your bloodstream by passing it into your urine via controlled ketosis, ergo it might lead to increased urine production and thence increased hydration demand.

Apparently the dehydrating effect is particularly strong if Jardiance is taken at the same time as good ol Metformin, and hello, yeah, I take that too.

Seems like that shit might be contraindicated. Ain’t that a hoot.

That would explain why my pharmacist, Simon, seemed surprised that I was on both Jardiance and Metformin, and mumbled something about how usually when they start you on Jardiance… then trailed off.

You’d think either he or Doctor Chao would have put a stop to this. It’s their job to know about shit like drug interactions. I shouldn’t have to consult AI to learn about this.

Oh, and here’s some of the symptoms of severe dehydration :

Rapid Heartbeat  : Yup, experienced that during my recent bad patch.
Rapid Breathing : Yeah, that too.
Dizziness : So bad I couldn’t even turn my head without the room spinning.
Confusion or Irritability  : Lots of confusion. Probably would have had irritability too if anyone had bugged me.
Skin Inelasticity : Aka skin that doesn’t bounce back when deformed or pressed against something. Yup. Was kinda weirded out when the impression of a McD’s bag I accidentally sat on stayed on my ass for like, an hour.

So it would seem that my theory that recent spate of ill health was drive by dehydration was right on the money.

Now I just need to program my brain to remember that when I see or experience things like that. it is an emergency and I need to hydrate NOW.

Oh well. Like I was telling Doc Costin today, part of the problem with my recent run in with illness is that my judgment, never great in the first place, is one of the first things to go when I am sick or scared.

Hence my never making it to the ER. Yes, going to the ER or UC would have been the smart thing to do, but when I was feeling really bad, the last thing I wanted to do was get dressed and get my butt to the car and then out of the car to deal with the ER (or UC) and then wait God knows how long in a waiting room before they can get around to seeing a low triage priority case like mine.

And even when they finally saw me, there’s a fifty percent chance that after all that waiting and them running tests on me and so on, they would have just told me that they couldn’t find anything wrong with me then sent me home.

So yeah. Going to the ER or UC would have been the objectively sensible thing to do.

But I didn’t do it and now you know why.

I told Doc Costin about my conclusion that I am not a sensible man.

He seemed bemused and nonplussed.

The next step after that would seem to be to ask how one copes with life as a dumbass. And I don’t have a good answer for that now.

All I can think of is that it means I have to rely on my support network (Joe, Julian, and Felicity) to keep me from walking into the open manholes of life and otherwise all I can do a kind of muddle through the best that I can.

It’s true that I have no self-discipline.

But how the fuck was I supposed to develop it? And when?

More after the break.

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I am the Breadman! 

Coo coo cashew! 

WARNING : The following is German comedy. 

So glad that this time, when I came across something about this unusual German show about a clinically depressed loaf of bread, I actually looked it up.

Bernd is a perfect sad sack/grouch character. His entire existence is ridiculous and absurd, his very low affect sad reactions to the insane things he’s being put through are very funny and relatable, and he seems to live in the world of screens, and really, don’t we all these days?

Just had to share him with y’all.

---

On growing up

I feel like it might just be too late for me to do it.

I was talking about that with Doc Costin today. I might have missed the bus to adulthood entirely. I might never grow up. I might be stuck being whoever and what I am now for the rest of my life.

I’m certainly not going to find my destiny in traditional employment. Who would hire a 51 year old crippled loser without a degree for anything?

For that matter, what the hell can I even do? It’s not like flipping burgers is an option, seeing as I can’t remain standing for long.

No, I think I am going to have to invent my own job, and that means one thing : YouTube. It’s time to finally stop dicking around and become a YouTuber.

Prince Edward Island boy becomes a Tuber. How apropos.

And that means I have to stop waiting to figure out what I “should” do as a YouTuber or what category I want to work under or any of that bloviating bullshit.

Like I’ve said before, I need to just start doing it and figure out what the fuck I am doing as I go, just like I did (and do) with this blog.

Just get the webcam rolling and whatever comes out, comes out. Maybe all I will ever produce is talking head videos. That’s fine, a lot of people listen to YouTube rather than watch it anyhow.

Or maybe I will get ambitious and do fun and silly things like I did a long long time ago.

Point is, it will put me out there and give me a place where I can express myself more fully than mere words makes possible, and that could do me a lot of good.

And who knows, I might even develop a following and get my idea out there into the world where they might do the world some good.

And net me a modest income. Just being able to support myself would be great.

But first I have to learn to exit my current mode, at least for short periods.

And it’s always so, so much easier to change nothing and just keep letting the days go by without me.

So this is going to take a very specific investment of will.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I seem to be back to normal. Knock on wood.

I mean, I dunno, I’ve thought I was OK many time before in this recent period and instead things just picked a new way to fuck up, but I have eaten many times without ill effect today and I don’t feel dizzy or ill, so I am taking the W.

Still dunno WTF made me so miserable for four plus days. Which means I still should go see a doctor or two about it all. That would be the smart, grownup thing to do.

But I know I won’t. Like a little kid, once it stops hurting I forget all about it and any resolve I had to subject myself to the lengthy and boring Purgatory that is going to the ER or Urgent Care is long long gone.

I could book an appointment with my questionable GP, Doctor Chao, but it’d be a week before I could even get him on the phone, so meh.

My best guess as to a diagnosis is that it started with the same bug Joe got (he’s fine now by the way) and that emptied me out (and how) and that, in turn, set me up for a serious level of dehydration.

Which is plausible as far as it goes but it doesn’t go all the way. I did manage to get water into me throughout the ordeal, though maybe not enough. There has to have been another factor at play.

Which brings me back to the idea of an inflammatory response of some sort. The fact that Naproxen (generic Aleve) helped me feel better during the crisis is telling but far from conclusive in and of itself.

It could easily have been the placebo effect.

Assuming it wasn’t, then it could have been histamine related. It’s possible that aging has cause my allergies to get worse, just like it made my mother’s eczema worse.

I did have a number of sneezing fits recently. Not super severe ones but more than just a sniffle or two.

So that could be what triggered all this nonsense. I am planning on acquiring some antihistamines in order to test this theory.

It could be that by treating the inflammation and not the allergy, I was addressing the symptom and not the root cause.

Whatever. It’s absurd that I am trying to diagnose myself in the first place. Logic and sense would dictate that I stop being such a child and go to the ER or UC already.

That’s what Joe did, and they fixed him right up.

But he’s sensible, and I am not. And I need to learn to accept that. I’m terribly smart and incredibly bright and I can even be extremely wise when giving advice to others but I am not a practical, sensible, grown up type person like he is.

I’m a strange alien child-thing who is ill suited for life on Earth and who is definitely going to continue to do foolish things for emotional reasons out of a lack of self-discipline and an inability to focus.

And the sooner and better I accept this about myself, the sooner and better I can stop trying to force myself to be someone I am not and start adapting to who I really am and seeing what I can do with what I’ve actually got.

And that means shedding a lot of my bitterness and cynicism, I think. I think that one of my assets is a capacity for enthusiasm and belief and if I am to unlock that potential that means I have to jettison a lot of the negative thinking that I habitually employ and prepare myself for the possibility of disappointment and disillusionment.

Maybe it’s not always better to never have hope in the first place.

More after the break.

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The evening after

So far so good.

I still feel kind of off, but that’s to be expected. Heck, I rarely feel 100 percent well even on my good days, so if I did feel that way now I’d suspect delirium.

In other words, I have returned to my standard level of pain and misery.

My appetite is still strong, which is good. I have some catching up to do. After all, I ate very little for four days.

I think I was victim of impaired thinking for a lot of that unpleasant time. The pain, the stress, the fear, and the uncertainty combined kept me in an adrenalized fog and prevented me from thinking clearly about my situation.

But maybe that’s just my current, calm, rational-ish mind judging my fogged up mental state by its own standards quite unfairly.

Maybe I did the best that I could. Imagine that.

Somehow, I gotta let myself off the leash. I know that there’s a part of me that wants to run free and wild and let life just wash over me as I run around experiencing everything that I can without feeling the constipated left brain need to know what will happen before I even make a fucking move.

How the hell am I supposed to learn and grow like that?

I need to follow my heart. But I don’t trust it. I can’t verify its intentions. I can’t make sure what it wants is safe before I take its direction. I have no idea where it will take me.

And I know that’s okay. That’s life. That’s how just this whole wacky game works.

But I am so scared.

Scared deep inside, where it’s hard to reach. That poor little boy that got brutally violated by that horrible man is still in there denying the reality he is in in an attempt to negate the horror he’s experienced.

That’s far too high a price to pay, but he doesn’t know that. What’s happened to him is bigger than his entire world and worse than he can even comprehend, so what can he do except wish it all away?

He learned that monsters are real when he was still afraid of the dark.

And that’s too young.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Eating seemed like a good idea.

Around noonish today, I was feeling fairly good, so I decided that would be the right time to go to the kitchen and get myself some food.

I figured that if eating made me feel worse, tough. At least I would get some nutrition into me. I didn’t feel like eating, but I made myself do it anyway.

Plus my esophagus and stomach were feeling very acidic so I figured it would be a good idea to put something in me for that acid to work on.

The good news is, it stayed down.

But other than that, it made me feel worse. I got this weird sickly-warm feeling that started in my guy but slowly spread through my body. I became quite prone to dizziness, to the point where so much as turning my head makes the room wobble a tiny bit. And with that wobble, big or small, comes a surge of nausea.

Even more disturbing, though, is this heaviness of limb and sluggishness of circulation I am feeling. I feel very “off” in a way that makes me very nervous and it is clear to me that the time for equivocation is over and it is time for me to go to the ER.

But how do I get there when I can barely make it to the bathroom and back?

The obvious answer would be 911. I call them, some healthy young people show up and put me on a stretcher and take me to the ER.

But what do I even tell the 911 person at this point? I’ve been through so many phases with this mysterious ailment that I would have no idea what symptoms to even talk about. I’ve gone from incontinence and diarrhea on Friday and Saturday to agitation and splitting headaches on Sunday and Monday to this bizarre new permutation that I am not even sure how to convey.

The other possibility would be getting Julian to drive me to the hospital. Who knows, maybe they can put me and Joe in the same room, ha ha.

Honestly, for all I know, he’s already home. Wouldn’t that figure.

I will figure this out. I definitely feel a strong need to have medical people take a look at me. Shit has been going down that is NOT NORMAL.

And who knows, maybe this is all just a severe case of dehydration and a few hours on IV fluids will fix me right up.

I’ve been trying to keep up with hydration but it’s tricky when you have no idea whether it’s even safe to stand up or not.

Right now I seem to be in a “better” period. I am even a tiny bit hungry, which is nice. Hydrating and taking a Naproxen (generic Aleve) seems to have gotten me to some sort of point of stability. So now would be a good time to make a break for it, whether it’s via Julian or 911.

But now, of course, because I am a man without character, my resolve is wavering. Because I don’t waaaaana go to the hooooospital. It’s boooooooring there. I want to stay here with my compuuuuuter!

I am such a child. But there’s some good reasons for that.

There’s also another weird angle : last time I put pants on, I had to take them off almost immediately because my legs immediately started to overheat like crazy.

Serious. It felt like they would stifle.

So I guess my only hope for a pantsless trip to the ER would be 911. I mean, I’m sure they wouldn’t exactly turn me away at the door for not meeting the dress code, I would like to retain what tiny shreds of dignity I retain.

So I dunno. Knowing my own spinelessness, I will now completely forget about going to the ER or UC and go back to my usual lifestyle until I either get better or drop dead.

I guess I’d rather live.

After all, I still have almost $50 saved up on my Steam account and $120 on my Amazon.a account to spend.

So ya know. I got commitments. Things to see. People to do. And so on.

More after the break.

---

Well I ate

Ergo, I now feel terrible.

But this too shall pass. The food will make it past the hernia and then things will go back to being sort of okay for a while.

I really do need to get to the ER or UC. Sure, I don’t wanna go, but sometimes you have to do the grownup thing and make yourself do something.

I’ve had to do that remarkably little in my weak and herniated little life.

I sometimes wonder if my problem is that I’ve had it far too easy in life. Things like school came to me so easily that I never had to learn to overcome myself.

I find myself thinking about the idea of traveling through Europe as a college aged kid a lot lately. Or something equally adventurous.

I think I grasp how such a thing can help you “find yourself”. Having to deal with a whole new continent all by yourself and survive by your wits must make people have to reach down deep and draw on their true selves.

Sitting on your ass playing video games all day, on the other hand, requires jack shit. So I have been able to stay so deeply and fundamentally underdeveloped.

I always seem to have people to deal with reality for me around, too. Good people who are willing to deal with a troublesome but charming critter like myself and who seem to think that all the hassle is ultimately worth it.

This is what I mean when I say, “it’s a good thing I’m cute”.

I guess I keep hoping I will just… get better. Than my body will catch up with whatever the fuck is going on and I’ll be able to go back to normal.

Oh well. At least I won’t take “normal” for granted again for a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been toggling back and forth between sick and okayish since Friday night and it is really starting to get on my nerves.

The fact that I’ve barely eaten can’t be helping. But can you blame me? My latest bout of feeling really ill was triggered by my eating a handful of trail mix.

Bad mistake. Only easy to digest foods for the time being. Got it.

Honestly, I probably should have gone to the Emergency Room or Urgent Care by now. But my symptoms never quite seem serious enough to get me to push the button.

Basically it takes fear and/or pain to get me to call 911 or get Julian to take me to the ER or UC, and so far, neither of those has quite been bad enough yet.

Speaking of UC, Joe is at one right now. He has had it far worse than I have this weekend. Projectile vomiting like crazy, poor guy.

Can’t help but wonder if maybe he and I have the same bug. My symptoms have been mostly digestive in nature, though with fun stuff like splitting headaches, chills, and for some reason general agitation thrown in.

It could be that the main difference between me and him is that I have my mother’s bizarre resistance to vomiting. So instead of throwing up, I just feel really terrible, and I am denied the relief that throwing up might have provided.

Can’t say I really miss it, though. Barfing isn’t fun.

Another possibility with me is that my long dormant umbilical hernia has finally gone awry. Right now the locus of my issues seems to be a troublesome area about six inches to my right of my navel and that’s the right general neighborhood.

Hmmm. Interesting. I was able to eat my sugar free fudge striped Voortman cookies without a hitch, and the orange I just ate only caused a minor ripple.

So ease of digestion definitely seems to be the key in getting food into me.

I wonder what else I have lying around that goes down easy?

Besides me, of course. Nyuck nyuck.

I wonder if getting some Meaty Marinara rotini from Pizza Hut would do the trick. Pasta is quite easy to digest and I would get carbs, veggies, and meat out of the deal.

That’s not really in the budget for this week but I think I can make an exception if it’s for the noble cause of me not starving or dying in a blood sugar crash.

Ya know. Priorities.

What really sucks is the yoyoing between thinking I’m getting better and then getting yanked back into the sick tent.

Julian is home. Good to know that if I do decide I need the immediate attention of trained medical professionals, I have transport.

Decide being the operative term here. I’m not so good at deciding things.

Especially when one of the options is as inconvenient and disruptive and boring as taking the ER/UC route. I mean, both of those places involve long waits in rooms soaked in stress and boredom pheromones and that is just not a wholesome environment for a sensitive soul like myself.

I suppose in a way, getting my tablet working again could be seen as a health investment seeing as I would be a lot less resistant to the ER/UC if I had some way to take the Internet with me.

But I still don’t really miss the damned thing. It was a plague upon me.

I suppose I will go make yet another attempt at sleep. Like I said, I’ve been weirdly agitated lately. Dunno if it’s related to other ways I am sick or not.

Wish me luck.

More after the break.

---

My latest sin…

..was getting up to empty my pee receptacle, apparently.

That’s what seems to have pressed the “next” button on the “shuffle” mode that is my health lately because I felt fine and was even pondering a pasta purchase (see above) until I got up and emptied my receptacle (something I normally do three or four times a day) with a bit too much enthusiasm because the moment I sat back down I got the exact kind of sick headache I dread and boom I was quite nauseous and my head was throbbing with pain and I felt like I was trying to pass a stone through my “third eye”.

Eventually I staggered to the bathroom once more and was able to empty my bowels (mostly voluntarily, yay) while wondering if the universe heard me talk about having my mother’s nausea resistance and said, “Oh yeah? We’ll see about that!”

I see to be past the worst of it now. It helped a lot when I was able to unclog my ear and thus allow for sinus drainage again. That’s a frequent problem of mine.

It’s like the ears are the overflow storm drains of the sinuses. If they get clogged, hey pressure just builds and builds until it’s squeezing my brain in its vicelike grip.

And that really smarts.

Things are relatively quiescent right now but I have some rumblings in my tummy that have me worried.

So much for my idea of actually eating a meal tonight. Food is the furthest thing from my mind right now.

Wait no, that’s my feet. But food’s pretty far too.

Overall, I wonder if I am in the grips of a system wide inflammatory response, and if so, what am I responding to and can I please please be rid of it?

Something occurred to me recently that seems blindingly obvious in retrospect : what if all these times when I was sure I had a fever but the ER thermometer said no, I was actually seriously inflamed?

That would make me feel really hot too, wouldn’t it?

Maybe instead of pasta, I need a large quantity of Aleve. And maybe a referral to an inflammatory disease specialist.

I am so damn sick and tired of being sick.

The tired part I can live with for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I…think I’m getting better?

Today’s still been pretty damned nasty. Incidents of “leakage”, having to clean up as best as I can in the times where I feel somewhat better. going through a hell of a lot of TP and Kleenex, not being able to eat much at all.

Makes me really wonder what the heck is going on with me. I can only assume that I’ve had a stomach bug of some sort, although food poisoning is also possible.

You know, that’s a pretty fucked up thing to call that particular ailment when you think about it. Food poisoning.

That’s not a disease, that’s a crime!

Anyhow, despite various levels of unpleasantness, I don’t feel nearly as sick as I did 24 hours ago. In fact I feel fairly okay. So I am hoping that means that the primary cause of this being a very shitty weekend (literally) has left the building.

Which is a better prognosis than I was giving myself earlier today. Yesterday, it also kind of seemed like I was getting better but then my recovery seemed to stall so I was worried that I might have to go to the ER or UC after all.

I mean, this is not a healthy state to be in. Even if I hadn’t gotten any worse, living without being able to eat and never knowing when “leakage” might occur and feeling vaguely toxic is simply not sustainable.

In fact, I’m kind of amazed that I haven’t had a big blood sugar crash. But I suppose the fact that I’ve not been able to do much beside listen to YouTube videos throughout this ordeal helped with that.

I definitely need to get some solid nutrition into me ASAP. I think that right now, my system’s mainly unhappy with me because it’s empty. Digestive systems don’t like being empty, especially mine, plus it means I don’t have a lot of nutrients on hand in order to help with rebuilding things.

So I am pondering getting myself cleaned up and going to Denny’s with Le Gang. Might seem like an odd choice given what I have been through in the last couple of days but it would give me access to a broad spectrum of nutrition for relatively little effort and it would do me some good to hang out with my friends after two days of isolation.

But I’m not committing to Denny’s just yet. I’m going to get up and move around some first and see how that feels.

Because I would die of shame if I was in our little home away from home at Denny’s when I suffer a “containment breach”.

That simply does not bear thinking upon.

If I don’t end up going to Denny’s, I will likely end up ordering in. Heck, I could even order in from Denny’s if I wanted to.

I have a real hankering for a turkey dinner right about now.

The important thing is nutritional intake. There’s only so long I can keep going on plain potato chips and the occasional cookie.

And not that many of those, either.

I also have trail mix, but my body is totally not ready to be digesting nuts right now. I tried eating some trail mix earlier only to get that “hot gravel” feeling again.

Honestly I just want this whole thing to be over. It’s been a miserable (and deeply disgusting) couple of days and I just want to get back to my life.

Maybe that’s the silver lining to this ordeal : I appreciate my usual humdrum low affect event free life more now.

Because things can always be worse.

More after the break.

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Well this is different

I kind of miss this afternoon.

Because back in those halcyon days I felt like I was almost well again and that soon I would be healthy enough even to go to Denny’s.

But the wheels started coming off that bus around 5:45 when I began to feel these chills. Uh oh, I thought.

Yet I managed to hold on to hope all the way to eating some McD’s while on Zoom with Julian and Felicity. I thought, surely I will feel a lot better once I get some food into my and my system can start rebooting.

Not so much.

Turns out I just feel terrible in a new and exciting way now.

For starters, I did not making it very far into my McD’s. I managed to eat around 2/3 of my Big Mac and a handful of fries before my stomach gremlins caught up to me and I had no choice but to stop.

The problem seems to specifically be a stomach thing. Things would be fine up top and more or less fine down below but the period where the food was actually in my stomach was not so good.

And the chills keep coming. And I hate having the chills. There is something so profoundly soul-destroying about feeling like there is a cold wind blowing directly through your bone marrow

While, of course, also feeling like you’re under a heat lamp on the surface.

Bit of a cock-up on the bodily thermostat front.

So I dunno what the fuck is going on with me but you can be damned sure I am keeping an eye on things in case they should take a turn for the worse.

Metaphorically speaking, I’m holding the phone with “9-1” already dialed.

The most frustrating thing is that I am still operating on insufficient nutrition. I mean, I am glad I got some Big Mac into me but I’m still running on close to empty.

But I cannot imagine being able to force myself to eat at this point. Not only do I feel nauseous and overheated I also have a serious headache and, of course, chills.

I need to get myself one of those massive bottles of 500 ibuprofen and maybe some antihistamines or anti-inflammatories.

Man am I sick of being sick.

But hey, at least I’ve learned that these are a thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been quite sick for the last 16 hours or so

I’ve felt nauseous and sweaty and dehydrated and very. very ill. I’ve not been able to eat or sleep and the contents of my lower intestines have been pulverized and liquefied thus have not been staying in.

I have pooped the bed at least half a dozens times. And it is definitely not normal feces. It’s that pale and sickly poop the color of sand that is almost completely soft and it has turned all my farts into sharts.

It got all over my poor blanket. Damn thing seriously needs to be laundered now, I am pretty sure that what is on there will wash out fairly easily, but it’s still pretty bad.

My current state of dishabile is really the culmination of days of feeling increasingly unwell. Looking back, I wish I had been more on the ball so that I could have gotten out ahead of this problem instead of more or less stumbling sideways into the deep end.

All my symptoms fall under the general umbrella of IBS. I think I have some sort of timeline established in my head because I know I was fine when I ate my McD’s last night, and I know I was in South Central Hell by midnight. so presumably things went awry somewhere in between.

Of course, this shit feeds on itself. Feeling very ill makes it nearly impossible for me to eat which means I get sicker and sicker as my blood sugar drops, and so on.

Coming up with the words is not easy right now. My brain does not want to work to express itself right now. It would rather I somehow withdrew entirely from reality so that I could wait until the issues clear up on their own.

But there is no guarantee that they will.

I’ve tried eating a little bit of trail mix but my stomach did not like that. Made me feel like I’d swallowed a handful of hot gravel. Not good.

I need some softer, easier, friendlier foods that go down and stay down easy. That way I can get some solid nutrition into me and maybe get things moving in the right direction.

That would sure be nice.

I’ve got to remember to refill my water before I run out completely. That’s the only way I will be able to stay out of the pits of dehydration, and let me tell you, those pits suck.

The idea of going to the ER or UC has flitted through my mind a few times, when I felt particularly bad. Right now, there’s nobody home but me, so I would pretty much have call 911 to get there.

And I don’t think my problem is serious enough for that.

Although honestly, being put on IV fluids would probably do me a world of good. It would get me some direct hydration, without having to involve my shaky digestive tract at all, and that would probably do me a lot of good.

What really appeals to me is being able to go to the ER and just let them take care of everything. Here I am, ready for you to repair me and hopefully take me out of this very unfortunate state of being,

Of course, that assumes I can trust the nurses to be competent, on the ball, and focused, and that sort of trust is quite tricky for me.

I shouldn’t need to feel like I am my own case manager when I am under the care of the medical establishment. I should be able to relax and trust

But I can’t

I will talk to you nice people after this.

More after the break.

---

Grits and gravy

That’s basically been what has been coming out of me/

The gravy portion is a mostly translucent liquid that I assume is normally just one constituent element of fecal matter but that because of how very disordered my digestion is right now it’s appearing on its own in some godawful form.

This substance is both slick and gritty. The total output is a combination of the thin slick fluid mentioned above and a gritty almost gravel-like substance which seems to me to be made of the hulls from all the popcorn I eat.

So it’s a matter of extremes. A very thin, loose fluid and its opposite.

And that’s what just keeps coming out of me. As a result, this substance is all over my bed despite my vigorous attempts to contain it.

It is a terrible thing to feel a feces adjacent substance sliding right out of you with no chance of stopping it.

It makes me feel so helpless.

Luckily, our mystery substance doesn’t have much of an odor. So it is not, in fact. feces, at least not in any meaningful sense. It’s not entirely odorless. mind you : it has a vaguely burned odor. making me wonder if somehow I have swallowed a fair bit of hair and it’s passing through me in my “grit”.

I am doing what I can to make myself at least drink water. Trying to work my way up to eating some actual food but it’s quite rough.

My stupid body doesn’t like even the concept of food right now.

Like, putting stuff in my face where I chew and swallow it and eventually it gets torn apart and turned into part of me…

Like, what’s with that?

I think that my digestion is slowly returning to normal. Dunno what made it go completely berserk and drag me through Hell but it seems to be over. I gues

I guess I probably won’t end up in the ER or UC. It looked pretty bad there for a while but hopefully things will go back to normal now.

Making the words come out is very hard right now. It’s very difficult to express my thoughts on a cogent and coherent form.

I keep having to type words over and over until they come out right.

It’s very irritating.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did my grocery shopping online today, and was extremely relieved to find that Superstore’s DoorDash site has gone back to normal.

Phew! I was worried that I’d find that they had even less of my usual stuff than last week and I’d really have to re-think my diet.

But no, things are back the way they were. God bless the status quo.

Meanwhile, I have started to worry about my health. I feel ill a lot lately and I keep waking up all sweaty and dehydrated and disoriented from overheating in my sleep.

To the point of wondering if my newish blanket is too cozy and warm.

Maybe I should look for something lighter on Amazon. I still have a fairly large chunk of the $200 in Amazon money my sisters gave me for Xmas.

I should probably spend that on a new power supply for my computer though, so I can play the latest games and render AI graphics without worrying about crashing.

Speaking of which, I decided to pick up a copy of a truly ancient game from almost 30 years ago called Master of Orion 2.

It is what these days is called a “4X” game where you eXplore the setting, eXpand your empire, eXploit the resources you find, and eXterminate your enemies.

So it’s a game like the Civilization series. What I think of as an empire building game. Only as the title suggests this one takes place in space.

So you get to explore the galaxy, discover habitable planets, build colonies, research new technologies, and build yourself an empire.

There’s also war but I don’t care for that side of things. As in Civilization, I usually just peacefully co-exist as much as possible while sinking all my resources into science until my enormous technological edge over the other empires kind of discourages aggression, at least amongst the more sensible races.

Usually there will be one or two opponents who think that because I don’t have a huge military force and never attack anybody I must be easy pickings.

I very much enjoy teaching them how very wrong they are when they are coming at me with spears and catapults and I am responding with cruise missiles and orbital lasers.

Anyhow, I had been pondering getting this game for a little while because I have very fond memories of playing it way way back in the late 90’s and so when the thing went on sale for $1.29 I kind of felt like that was a sign.

I’ve got my empire started now and the basics of how to play the thing are coming back to me and I look forward to conquering all that I behold, or whatever.

It’s not my next big-deal RPG that will keep me busy for a while, but it’s fun.

Oh right, talking about feeling crappy.

As always, it’s very hard for me to tell the difference between physical and mental unwellness. Certainly these rough patches where I feel anxious and depressed for no obvious external reason are most likely just a side-effect of the lowered Paxil dose.

Perhaps I am merely becoming more aware of what has been going on inside me for a long time but I was too numb to feel it.

Now that I can feel it, my mind might actually be able to heal it. I have every confidence in my mind’s ability to re-align along healthier lines now that the long dark winter of Paxil paralysis is finally coming to an end.

But the process is probably not going to be real fun. Things kind of have to go more wrong before they can go all the way right again. First the chemical suppression of my symptoms ends and I thaw out, then my mind slowly assumes a healthier shape.

It’s the part in the middle where I am anxious and depressed that’ll be a bitch.

But I am on the right road at last and I am determined to keep driving.

There has to be a morning after.

More after the break.

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More about more

Let me take another crack at talking about doing more with my time.

No commitment, just exploring possibilities.

There are, of course, billions of things I could be doing with my time. That’s the problem. It makes how to spend my time impossible to compute. That’s a total dead end.

It’s not the sort of thing even a big brained buffoon like me can figure out.

The only alternative, then, is desire. What do I want to do? And that is where the second problem comes in because I don’t know.

I have my dreams of creative success. Of getting a job as a TV writer, or becoming a big league YouTuber, or heck maybe even a science fiction novelist.

And those are nice to dream about as long as they remain only nice ideas that make me feel a little better.

But the moment I start trying to figure out how I would go about making any of them come true, all my issues show up and overload my emotional circuitry and short circuit my brain until it has no choice but to give up and shut down and go away.

And I know that this is an emotional problem. The shrieking spirits that come screaming out of the void when I try to make practical plans are the ghosts of all the versions of me that I might have been if I had led a healthy normal life and they don’t intend to let me rest and move on until I deal with them somehow.

Maybe I should hold a funeral. Stand over a mass grave and mourn all the people I might have been had things not gone terribly wrong.

Say a few words then say goodbye to it all.

You have to let go of the past before you can grab hold of a new, better future.

All those possibilities are dead and gone. The arrow of time only points in one direction. Whatever might have been (or even SHOULD have been) doesn’t matter because there is no force in the universe that can give me all those years back.

So yes, I want to stop being stuck in the past and move forward with my life. Find my way to a future where I can actually be a real life grownup.

But I get the feeling I have to deal with all those dead soldiers inside me first.

Shit. I still didn’t talk about doing more.

Oh well, I can try again in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And live again.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Managed to completely forget it was happening today until I literally had Doc Costin on the line, but whatever.

I’m really good at just rolling with that these days. I don’t need to “prepare” for Therapy Thursday. Just put the phone in my hand and watch me go.

At least today I had an excuse for forgetting therapy was coming. I had Wound Care in the morning and did my monthly banking after that.

My nurse’s name was Lana. She told me that when we first met. I was glad because I am still too shy to ask them myself.

I am such an odd little critter.

Speaking of which, I talked with Doctor Costin about my recent revelations about how my attention can be like being in a spotlight and sometimes people just do not want to deal with that shit.

The tragic irony is that I pump out so many lumens because I am so desperate for attention and validation. So when I am finally getting some, I turn up the Klieg lights and put on a big show.

And being my audience that way can wear people out. I try way too hard. So I need to learn to dial it back a tad.

Or go the total individualist route and say, “Fuck that! I’m not going to hide my light under a bushel just because some people think it’s too bright! I am going to keep on shining brighter than the sun and if they can’t handle it, fuck’em. The people who CAN handle it will be my friends. So there!”

That sounds good and all, but I feel like I have missed out on a hell of a lot in life because of my absolute unwillingness to accommodate others and insist on being ferociously and completely myself at all time, so I might wanna dial THAT back too.

As hard as that might be for me to do.

I also lamented all the developmental stages I have missed in my weirdly intellectualized life. From having no interest in toys or the jungle gym at the park nor having had an imaginary friend or a stuffed animal I carried everywhere or a security blanket or any of that all the way to not doing pretty much any of the “normal” adolescent things like falling in love super hard, seeking sexual partners, developing an extended friend group, and all the rest.

I missed pretty much all of that. Mostly I was alone. No friends, no attention at home, no mentors or guardians or wise elders.

I more or less raised myself. With the help of my only real friend, television.

And the truth is that I don’t even know how to mentally encompass what it means to have completely missed out on almost all of the important stages of psychosocial development. 99 percent of common wisdom would say that such a thing is flat out impossible. That surely I must be exaggerating for dramatic effect. Surely it is not possible to somehow not grow up like a normal kid by that wide a margin.

But nope. I am living proof that you can miss the bus on a normal childhood entirely.

And I wonder if I ever stood a chance of being normal. I mean, I learned to read when I was 3. That is beyond weird. And like I said, no toys, no imaginative play, no imaginary friend, none of that.

I was a very strange child even before the sexual assault.

Maybe I was simply born to fulfill a very unusual destiny. And that demanded that I have a very unusual life.

My strangely isolated and detached life has certainly given me a unique point of view and a clarity of thought that can be extremely powerful.

Plus, ya know, massive amounts of raw talent and a gargantuan intellect.

Who knows, maybe I will even find a way to make that shit pay some day.

That would be nice.

More after the break.

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Our convenient era

I just wrestled with trying to order something from DoorDash for 45 minutes, and lost.

Admittedly, the mail culprit and instigating irritant which is the fact that I had $22.69 left on this month’s credit card and as it turns out that is an impressively useless amount.

It’s just barely not enough to be able to order a normal fast food meal. Couple more bucks and I probably would have been able to do it. But no.

So my attempt to order me some Subway bombed. Subway is where I usually go when I am low on dough and if things had worked normally that would have worked because my usual 12 inch Cold Cut Combo would have worked out to a bit over $20.

But sometimes the system does this fun thing where it returns an “insufficient funds” error when the funds are, indeed, quite sufficient.

I think it maintains some kind of $5 buffer or something.

So then I thought I would get some stuff from 7-11. Good ol 7-11, always there in the pinch when you need to eat cheap.

But their DoorDash site was all fucked up. Another place where most of what I wanted to order was mysteriously missing.

I shudder to think of what I will be dealing with when I order my groceries tomorrow. Lord knows what’s still on the shelves these days.

What’s worse, the Hungry-man sub I had in my basket disappeared while I was looking for other things.

So then I decided to try those new kids in these parts, Circle K.

Also a weirdly limited selection but not as bad as at 7-11.

So I put a few things together and the total is around $13. OK, no problem, right?

I go to pay and suddenly the total is $28 freaking dollars?!? What the hell?

Apparently Circle K has a $5 delivery free IN ADDITION to what DoorDash charges.

Well fuck THAT noise.

So, no ordering in for me tonight. The money left on my card will meet the ultimate fate of all uselessly small remainders and end up on my Steam account.

And I’m just out 45 minutes of frigging aggravation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s clear to me that my energies are surging beyond what my current extremely low strain lifestyle can contain.

And as my Paxil dose decreases, that’s only going to get worse. So if I want to keep the anxiety at bay, I need to open up my life and my soul to the possibility of doing a lot more with my time than just sitting around playing fucking video games.

And that means I have to break the autohypnotic spell I live under and truly wake the fuck up, and be emotionally present in realtime, and truly commit to really living in the world instead of constantly trying to live entirely in the world between my ears.

And of course, that all scares the fertilizer out of me. Obviously. I survived being raped as a toddler by putting a very large part of me to sleep and waking that part of me up so that I can be whole means facing the reality of that terrible event not simply as a fact but as a memory and that scares me more than nearly anything else.

My whole psyche is built around keeping that atrocity suppressed. It’s like my entire massive maniacal mind is one giant containment unit and everything else in my mind is just a sideline to the massive machinery required to keep me from remembering it.

It’s not just a matter of tagging the memory “do not open” and it’s certainly not something I can simply erase from my mind by force of will.

By suppressing it so hard and for so long, I have in effect preserved the horror of it all in ultra HD, uncompressed and lossless, and when I release that beast, it’s going to be very angry at having been kept in the dark and the cold for so very long.

Memories want to be processed. Our minds never stop trying to digest them. And simply knowing something happened is not nearly enough.

That’s just knowledge. Occasionally useful but it does nothing to handle the emotions involved and those are what are holding me back and clogging me up and keeping me from doing more with my life.

A wild return to the topic appears!

It’s like there is this giant block of ice sitting in the only path out of this nasty little cul de sac of mine and in theory “all I have to do is get it out of the way”, but of course, it is not nearly that simple, at least not yet.

Because that block of ice is the very thing I have been hiding behind all these years. It’s no cartoon villain, it’s a vital part of how my mind is structured and if I yanked it out of there just because it seems bad, the whole damn thing could come crashing down.

And I’d end up being nothing but a drooling goober in a back ward somewhere.

Although I dunno. Maybe that’s just the mental illness creating catastrophic visions of the future in order to keep me from threatening it.

I don’t fucking know.

I know I’m sick of it. Sick of the fear and the anxiety and feeling hunted all the time. Sick of not being a functional human being. Sick of being massively underdeveloped on nearly every single psychological level and that making it nearly impossible for me to cope with any of the realities of adulthood. Sick of being an emotionally stunted loser sitting on a massive hoard of intellectual riches that I can’t spend to get myself places in life because my spirit is just too god damned weak to support it. Tired of drifting from shadow to shadow in life without making any kind of mark on the world.

I could disappear with nary a ripple at any moment. A few people would miss me and be sad that I am gone but the world at large wouldn’t even know I was gone.

Because everything is stupid and nothing matters.

More after the break.

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No sudden moves

I don’t like the fact that I don’t handle sudden changes or other surprises very well.

It makes me feel weak and fragile and vulnerable to the whims of fate. I would rather be a more rugged specimen that can handle whatever life throws at me, like some kind of tough all terrain vehicle.

Then again, I’d be a hell of a lot tougher if I had gotten actual life experience instead of hiding from the world for the last 30+ years.

But I didn’t get that life experience because I was too fragile to leave my comfort zone in order to go get it.

And the wheel goes around and around and around.

As far as things go right now, I don’t see my life changing very much very soon. I’m gonna be stuck on this god damned treadmill until something forces me off it and the only thing that is going to do that is my health getting worse.

Or better, I suppose. Perhaps if I was healthier I would feel more robust and capable and confident and then I would naturally end up taking on that big old world out there.

Or maybe nothing would change except that I’d feel a hell of a lot better. Which would also be good.

There’s definitely still something wrong with me physically. Something subtle that makes it really hard for me to pull myself together and focus, let alone actually engage my drives and let them take me anywhere.

Something that leaves me feeling weak and tired and fragile most of the time. A feeling which makes me feel like I have no choice but to hunker in my bunker and live in emergency mode even though everything seems to be fine.

At the moment at least, it doesn’t feel like it could be something purely psychological, thought I don’t know that I could explain why.

But I worry whether my heart is doing OK. I haven’t seen my cardiologist in years. I don’t even remember her name.

Could my problem really be that this body of mine has a gutless engine and THAT is why I can’t get it up to speed?

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants? I thought it was a lack of moral character when it was a hardware issue all along.

One they can fix, hopefully.

It’s sad when having a heart defect would be the happy outcome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m not the easiest fellow to help.

Just ask my therapist.

I’m too good with words, too mentally maneuverable, too bulletproof in my persona for my own good. In order for someone to truly help this messed up (but magnificent) mind of mine, they would have to be able to show me what I can’t see myself and point out the blind spots and illogical thinking holding me back so that I can fix my own thinking and/or release some of my vast sea of blocked emotion.

And that’s not easy with a guy as complicated and quick as me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between emotions and the world lately. I can only assume that with healthy people, emotions are something that just happen in response to stuff in a natural and organic way, and they just have to deal with them.

Not me though. At some point I cut my emotions off at the root and installed a very humorless and punitive gatekeeper on them and its job is to suppress all but a very narrow band of emotions before they even reach my conscious mind.

Hence my being incredibly repressed. That’s not how emotions are supposed to work. I suppose that it happened as a response to having a lot of really bad emotions to deal with. I wielded the power of my mind to create an artificial and very icy island of false calm in my mind so I could think and didn’t feel so bad.

But that was a cure far worse than the disease, at least in the long run.

This anti-emotion campaign must be part of my being withdrawn, too, and hostile to stimulation. If your emotions are all blocked up with no way out, anything that stimulates them, either physically or emotionally. is going to hurt like hell, and thus this condition conditions you to avoid all but nice safe mental stimulation.

So I have been hiding out in this semi-mobile fortress of the mind for my whole life. My coffin on wheels which keeps the world out as I protect the sleeping part of me by pretending I am dead.

And this god damn crypt has been stifling me in the whole time. The good parts of the world and the good parts of my own emotions get cut off just like the bad.

And there’s an innocence to it all, and a desire to avoid growing up. In a very real sense I have remained extremely immature and hiding it via my shows of intellect.

And “maturity”. I’m not ill-behaved or anything. That takes emotions. And even as a child I was eerily self-possessed.

But my emotional state is fragile and it has grown far too dependent on this nothing of a life of mine to keep my anxiety at bay.

It’s that anxiety that’s really choking the life out of me. Has been for a long time. I kept withdrawing deeper and deeper, and every time I did, the space I withdrew from got filled in with yet more fear, till I was painted into the tiny little corner that is my life.

And so the only way out is through a wall of concentrated and compressed fear.

And I just don’t have the wherewithal to make myself push my way through that most of the time. I can only struggle against this oppressive system of mine on rare and random moments and the rest of the time I just go limp.

I don’t want it to be this way. I want to be strong and confident and capable. I hate being ruled by my god damned fear and trapped in this interment.

But I don’t know how to get what I need to do better.

More after the break.

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The occasional power surge

I’ve been having panic attacks lately but I’m not, like, freaking out over it.

My anxiety is less chemically restrained by Paxil now so it was bound to return. But so far I have been able to handle it.

It tends to happen in little spurts, usually when I am switching activity and/or stimulation levels, like going from playing a game to laying down.

But sometimes it happens in the middle of things too.

And I know what’s going on. It’s what I talked about last week : my energies are awakening from their very long slumber and my mind doesn’t really know what to do with them yet so they end up becoming free floating anxiety.

Whatever. This too shall pass. I’m beyond taking the electrochemical bullshit in my head seriously. Go ahead, do what you need to do to heal, brain. I’ll be okay.

Though the idea of leaning into the anxiety keeps recurring to me. Maybe there are emotions trying to break through the ice of my consciousness from the deep waters underneath and if I just help them I can get some serious healing done.

I’ve given it a try a few times now but I don’t think I have found the handle for the emotions involved yet, so it’s like trying to open a locked door.

Nothing moves and I just end up feeling stupid. And a bit sore.

I will pick that lock eventually. Maybe I should try seeing if I can have a good cry. That has helped me a lot in the past.

I just have a lot of cultural deprogramming to do first. Fucking toxic male bullshit.

Said bullshit is why I only get a good cry out when my inner system bursts like an overloaded pipe and releases the waterworks.

And even then, my emotions have to be unusually close to the surface AND I have to encounter something very sad or depressing or upsetting.

That is definitely way too high a wall to have enough my emotions and I would be better off being able to vent them at a far faster rate.

But it’s just not that simple.

God, I envy women sometimes. They know the value of a good cry.

Can they teach me?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.