Had good ol’ Wound Care today, a Monday.

It’s also a stat holiday, so I had to be buzzed in. The nurses work on stat holidays but the reception staff and all the rest of the admin workers do not.

The benefits of not having a crucial job, I guess.

I know there’s a better word for that. One we used all the time during the pandemic. And yet I cannot remember it.

Getting old sucks.

Anyhow, the new-ish wound on my right foot, the one that had the big blister under it, seems to be doing fine now. There’s no sign of the blister except a section of slightly reddened skin. So phew, at least that’s over and done with.

I still could hear from Doctor Chao about the swab they took, so I might not be entirely out of the woods yet.

In this case, no news is definitely good news. If I don’t hear from him about it I will assume they didn’t find anything too scary on the swab.

Or maybe… they found something so hideous and terrifying that they are afraid to tell me in case that makes it angry!

But probably not.

Other than the very minor annoyance of having to ring the bell and be buzzed in, it was a standard trip to Wound Care at the CCC.

I am getting to know the nurses there fairly well, though not by name I’m afraid.

It never occurs to me to ask their name. On some weird and no doubt insane level, that feels like an impolite question to me. Like I’d be prying.

Yeah it doesn’t make sense to me either.

Afterwards. we stopped at Pricemart and Julian was nice enough to go in there and get me a kilogram of BBQ peanuts.

I needed those because it’s very clear to me that my current supply of trail mix ain’t gonna last till Friday.

In fact, I am most likely going to run out tomorrow, Tuesday.

So I needed to supplement my supplies and when I have to do that I usually get peanuts because they are cheap, tasty, and nutritious.

And Julian was able to find lovely BBQ peanuts in the bulk section for me, and I haven’t had those in ages.

So like, yum.

It makes sense that my trail mix is running out because the recent disruption in my supply chain of groceries made it so that instead of getting my usual 1 kg No Name ™ Original Trail Mix and a 600 g bag of something from Basse, I ended up with a 750 kg bag of No Name Sierra Trail Mix and a 400 g bag of that praline mix from the friendly folk over at President’s Choice.

AKA, products for people who are too proud to buy No Name stuff but still want or need to get things cheap.

As you can tell, that only adds up to 1.1 kg which is 500 g less than my usual amount of trail mix, ergo, a shortfall.

Getting used to getting my stuff from Shoppers isn’t going to be easy. And that assumes that last week wasn’t a fluke caused by them still having some American products in the warehouse and next week they’ll be all out.

I may have to make even more accommodations and adjustments. Le sigh.

I don’t like this level of disruption in my life, but it’s a price I am happy to pay if it contributes in some small way to telling Donald Trump to go fuck himself.

Canadians are pissed off and I am loving it because it leave Polievre with absolutely no moves. He can’t agree with our PM or his MAGA-lite base will devour him like a pack of wild dogs, and yet he clearly can’t disagree either or he will be branded a traitor and get torn apart by literally every Canadian.

So at least Trump found a way to get PP to shut the fuck up.

And who knows, maybe a few of his supporters will start wondering how the hell they ended up in a bind like this.

Honestly, the world needs a “right wing but sane” movement almost as much as it needs a “angry liberal” movement.

More after the break.

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The longest dream

My entire journey of recovery has felt like waking up.

As if part of me has been in deep sleep for a long time and therefore returning to myself is a matter of drawing that part of me out of its slumber so that I may be whole.

Looking back even just a couple of years makes me feel like I was dreaming back then.

And in a way, I was. The mind fog I live in thins out year by year. The sun slowly rises and its light comes streaming in, burning the mist away.

Hopefully the lowering of my Paxil dose will speed that along. It’s done me a lot of good so far. I might be less stable now but that also makes progress possible so I am quite willing to pay that price.

Stability isn’t everything anyway. Predictable awfulness is still awfulness.

There are times I feel anxious for no real reason. Nothing external, anyhow. I figure the real reason is that my awakening mind produces a lot more energy than before and yet it doesn’t really know what to do with it yet.

I’m working on it.

I still have very sleepy instincts. I still compulsively avoid doing anything truly energetic even though I know getting my energies out would make me a lot saner and happier. The somnolent part of me still does not want to wake up and it will do whatever it takes to the rest of me as long as it doesn’t have to wake up and face reality.

I know about reality but I’m not fond.

It’s not hard to envision how that came about. That dormant part of me went to sleep while I was being raped at the age of 4 and all I could do was flee into the depths of my own mind, telling myself, this isn’t happening, this isn’t real.

But it was and it is.

Ever since then, withdrawal has been my primary defense mechanism. Like a turtle, I retreat into my shell when threatened or scared or confused, and it takes a great deal of gentle coaxing to get me to come out of my shell at all.

And even then, the slightest thing will have me withdrawing again, and odds are that I won’t come out again for a good long while.

I’d like to stop doing that. I really would.

But when I try I just end up giving up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve had an insight as to why people don’t want to deal with me sometimes.

First, the problem : People have founds me kind of hard to deal with sometimes for my entire life. So very many times problems have come up where the obvious solution would have been for someone to just talk to me about the thing in question.

And when I bring that up, the other people involve just kind of stare at me blankly because they can’t explain why they didn’t just do that, even to themselves, and especially not to me.

And this puzzles and saddens me because as far as I can tell, I’m a very friendly and reasonable and approachable guy who is never cranky or difficult and who is usually quite happy to do or give whatever it is you want.

And yet people dodge me sometimes, and prefer not to deal with me, and this leaves me sad and lonely sometimes despite my pleasant demeanor.

So what gives?

I think the problem is that while my attention is usually quite pleasant, it is also intense.

It’s like I am shining a big bright spotlight on people. And that can be hard to take. There are times when people would much rather avoid these high beams of mine and it doesn’t matter how warm and pleasant and entertaining I am because the sheer brilliance of my dazzling display can really drain people.

The thing is, all of us occurs in that murky and mysterious zone of interpersonal interplay that is social empathy and that strange land contains much that our culture simply does not and maybe even cannot articulate.

So most people don’t even know how to explain why they find me tiring to be around and sometimes would just rather… not do that.

They are as mystified as I am because they too see me as pleasant and funny and nice and all those other stellar attributes of mine and yet they also have the lived experience of doing the equivalent of crossing the street to avoid me.

“Oh god, not him. Not today. Not right now. ” they think and frantically try to avoid dealing with me like they’re a celebrity trying to elude the paparazzi.

And like said celebrity, if they actually get caught in the spotlight they know they will have to be “on” and smiling and friendly and so forth.

Again, it’s not that my spotlight is unpleasant, just a bit… much.

And then they feel guilty, of course. After all, I’m so sweet and nice and funny and etc. And they can sense I crave attention and connection, and that if I knew I was being circumvented it would hurt me deeply.

And that guilt just makes me even harder to be around.

So I get it now. I want attention so bad that when I get it, the show is on, my megawatt personality turns on full blast, and I blow people away with all that personality.

It’s a tragedy of innocence, really.

Clearly, if I want to be a little easier to deal with, I need to learn to dial it back a little. To relax and just be myself and not try so god damned hard. To not turn every interaction into a song and dance act.

Maybe this is why people like me are more comfortable being the star of the show than we are at the cast party afterwards.

On stage, glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife is wonderful. It makes me into a mesmerizing and charismatic performer, a compelling orator, and a pretty amazing dude to be around if you’re ready for me.

But out of the spotlight I’m this odd critter that doesn’t really fit into the normal everyday world so I’m rather awkward and nerdy and strange, even downright spooky at times.

Maybe what I really need is a healthier way to express myself.

I need to get to work on that.

More after the break.

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The truth about touch

Here’s a bit about the modern view of touch :

I know that I deeply, deeply crave touch.

It’s the main reason I am such a snuggle bug as Fruvous. I don’t get cuddles and pets in the real world so I have to get them in text based VR instead.

It’s entirely possible that if I had a sufficiently snuggly partner, I would not feel nearly as driven to seek out cuddles in fox form.

Or maybe I would. It could very much be that when it comes to cuddles and attention, I am a “thirsty dog” who can never get enough.

In both cases, not getting enough of something at a critical age leaves a being craving that thing forever with no possibility of satiation.

A very sad thought, but one I need to face.

Touch is definitely a need I rarely if ever openly address. Like a lot of males in our society, I don’t believe it to be a need I am capable of addressing at all so my only choice is to sublimate it into my fursona and ignore it the rest of the time.

And of course, virtual cuddles don’t really fill the need. They only help with the cravings. Cuddles in reality are always going to be preferable.

Kind of like sex, really. Which could be seen as an extreme form of touch.

I definitely feel like I did not get touched nearly enough during some critical phase of my pre-verbal years and that this might have been the first of many, many developmental windows that would come and go without my even knowing.

Basically, my life has been a developmental train wreck. In purely scientific terms, I am retarded on many, many levels. So many things that happen to “everyone” never happened to me at all.

I am a strange and alien being.

Julian and I recently watched the movie IF, which stands for “Imaginary Friend”, and movie is quite beautifully made and acted but the plot makes no sense at all.

Anyhow, it got me wondering why I never had an imaginary friend. Or a security object, or a stuffed animals I treated like it was really alive, and so on.

And the only answer I can come up with is that something happened to me, before the rape, that kept me from ever having an “age of magic” where I was capable of imagining the friend I needed and believe them to be true.

As to what that thing was, I can only answer : intelligence? For as long as I can remember I have had this rapacious mind that devoured and digested the world in its attempts to understand everything.

And somehow that meant that I couldn’t have an imaginary friend because I knew that they were not there.

As far as I can recall, I have never believed in magic or had faith in things unseen. Things made sense. It all connected. There was no room in my mind for believing things without evidence or proof, just because I needed them to be true.

And I feel like I have suffered terribly as a result. I truly believe that a certain basic amount of faith – defined as a bit of “wiggle room” in reality in which you can generate what you need emotionally – is necessary for the mental health of even the most vehement of atheists, and without it, we wither on the vine.

It is toxic to need a reason to be happy.

It is far better to need a reason not to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

1108

A fuzzy friend of mine pointed me to this amazingly fun website that has “translators” that use AI to “translate” text input.

But not into real world languages, oh no. That’s boring. Google Translate can do that, as can countless apps today.

No, this site “translates” your text into fun stuff. For example :

Here’s the opening few paragraphs of yesterday’s blog entry :

The world has stopped making sense.

So I go to do my weekly shopping, buying from Superstore via DoorDash. I bring up the Superstore site on DoorDash and immediately know something is wrong because the “things you previously bought” strip only has ten items on it

What the great big galloping FUCK?

I click on “show all” and…. nothing changes. Instead of my usual screen full of like sixty different products, I got just those ten things.

And therefore I am completely lost.

some guy you know

Now here it is “translated” into Windows 95 : 

Error: System Failure! The world has encountered an unexpected glitch.
Initiating shopping protocol via DoorDash at Superstore. Homepage loading…anomaly detected: only ten items in the ‘previous purchases’ array.
What the blazes?!
Clicking ‘show all’… access denied. Instead of my traditional interface brimming with over sixty selections, I am left with a mere ten.
Fatal Error: System cannot proceed. Lost in the digital void!

And here it is “translated” into New York lingo : 

 

Yo, the whole world’s gone wacko. I’m just tryin’ to grab my weekly groceries, hittin’ up Superstore through DoorDash, ya feel me? I pull up the Superstore page and right away I’m like, something ain’t right, fam—only ten items in my ‘previously bought’ section. What the actual hell? I hit ‘show all’ and… nada, same ol’ ten. Usually I got a full spread of like sixty items to choose from, but now I’m just lost in the sauce.

But by far the most amazing “translators” are the ones that do rap : 

Yo, the world’s gone crazy, feels like a mess,
Headin’ to the store, gotta shop with finesse.
Hit up Superstore, DoorDash on the scene,
But only ten things, man, what does it mean?
I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ click ‘show all’ real quick,
Nothin’ changes, just a tiny flick.
Used to see sixty, now it’s just ten,
Lost in this maze, where do I begin again?

It’s not really great rap, but still. Wow. 

See, all the other applications of AI are very impressive and I certainly have had a heck of a lot of fun trying them out, but this is the application that tickles me the most on a purely personal level, with me being a wordsmith and all. 

And yes, pedants, I know that these “translators” might not technically be AI. 

Ask me if I care. 

So like, playing with language is kind of a “thing” with me. Other kids had toys, I had books and comedy and all the funny people on TV. For as long as I can remember, words have played a central role in my life. 

I mean, I learned to read when I was only three years old. That’s how far back my obsession with language goes. 

And my attempts to be funny. That’s one thing I can say for sure I am driven to do because no matter how often I completely failed to be funny, I just kept trying. 

And the end result is the nonstop cavalcade of comedy you know and love today! 

In a way, it’s weird that it took me as long as it did – until 2011 – to figure out what I really needed to do was write. 

I guess I long suspected there was a writer in me somewhere but it took doing my Million Word Year to really get that shit jumpstarted. 

And it’s been 1000 words a day ever since that ended. 

It’s kind of impressive, really. 

More after the break. 

---

There’s got to be something wrong with you

For years I have been saying that there’s got to be something wrong with you if you want to be an artist. 

And being one of them tricky artist types, I actually mean two things by this. 

There’s the obvious meaning, along the lines of, “yeah, you have to be crazy to want to make a living in the creative arts, ha ha!” 

But what I really mean is that I truly think there has to be something at least a little bit broken in your head for you to actually get good at it. 

Some process has to have started in your head that, given time, sprouts like a seed and then just grows and grows in some obscure corner of the mind over the years, being fed everything you experience and learn, until it’s gargantuan. 

The malfunction, so to speak, is what create the conditions for it to grow out of control like that. It’s the lack of a counterbalancing process, maybe even one that is normally vital in maintaining mental stability, that allows for this strange symbiote we call our talent to grow so enormous, even at our own expense. 

It certain feels like it feeds on me as much as I feed on it sometimes. 

This is why so many of us creative genius types are diagnosably nuts. It’s not a coincidence so many of us are plagued by our “demons”. 

Without those demons, we’d just be normal, well balanced, ordinary people. We might be happier, maybe by a lot, but we’d be just like everybody else too. 

So it’s rolling dice with the devil every single time. The demons might win, like they have with me for all these years, and keep you all to themselves, and not let you use that big bloated talent for anything productive, just lock you away in your own mind. 

But you also might win and get to harness those demons and have them pull you into greatness, or at least get you out of your damned head for a while. 

So far, I’ve been just hiding from the world while that talent of mine grows out of control and threatens to destroy its host. 

That still might happen. I might roll snake eyes and then my health goes boom and I die or end up in that hospital bed full of tubes, helpless to do anything with all this talent I have been growing over the years. 

But I might finally make it out of this goddamned gulag too. 

And if I do, I am going to burn my name into the sky. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world has stopped making sense.

So I go to do my weekly shopping, buying from Superstore via DoorDash. I bring up the Superstore site on DoorDash and immediately know something is wrong because the “things you previously bought” strip only has ten items on it

What the great big galloping FUCK?

I click on “show all” and…. nothing changes. Instead of my usual screen full of like sixty different products, I got just those ten things.

And therefore I am completely lost.

I am so used to relying almost entirely on that section for all my shopping. After all. like most people, I end up buying the same things over and over. So that “previously bought” makes things so much easier.

Oh well, I thought, mentally rolling up my shirtsleeves and squaring my shoulders, I guess I will just have to actually think of what things I need and search for them one by one the old fashioned way.

They weren’t there.

Seriously. Product after product just plain missing. Things you would not think would just like, disappear all of a sudden.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, they didn’t have my No Name Original Trail Mix!

In fact, when I did a search for “no name”, only three fucking products came up! Three! Superstore is like the world headquarters for No Name brand products and yet somehow they only had three things listed on DoorDash today!

I mean holy jostling jiggling fuck, Batman.

It has completely thrown me off. I feel very discombobulated right now. Once more, life has thrown a curveball at me. Something I could never have predicted would ever happen let alone seen coming. And it’s knocked me for a loop.

And I am left wondering what the hell is going on. What could cause this bizarre outage? Where did my products go?

The mostly likely cause is some kind of error on DoorDash’s part. Something fucked up and they accidentally delisted a ton of products and by tomorrow, god willin’, they will have fixed it and things can go back to normal.

Like I said, that’s the most likely cause. But it’s not the only one.

See, I went looking around other stores’ DoorDash sites and I could not find my products there either. It’s like they never existed in the first place.

So my thoughts immediately went to our turmoil with our mercurial neighbors to the south. Was it possible that all the products that have gone missing came from south of the border and are now under embargo?

Not likely, I admit. But I have to wonder. Presumably if something that enormous and impactful were going down, I would have heard about it somehow.

At least I think I would. It’s hard to say with me because I don’t have regular news reading habits. I tend to get my news from either BlueSky or Colbert.

And I don’t always check either of those. Colbert’s not on during the weekend, including Friday, and I check BlueSky whenever I feel like it.

In fact, in some ways, I am a man of irregular habits. I tend to sort of make things up as I go based on how I feel.

Over time, things do settle into certain patterns. I have my meals at the same times every day, more or less. And I blog with lunch and dinner.

And the odds are pretty good that if I’m not eating or sleeping or blogging, I am playing a video game. Sigh.

i want more out of life. I want a place in society. I want to feel like I am contributing and not just living off of others. I want to join that great big shiny productive connected interpersonal world out there that most people take completely for granted.

I want in, god damn it.

But I’m all broken inside.

More after the break.

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Armageddon ain’t over

I just checked DoorDash and yup, it’s still fucked up.

Well tomorrow is do or die time because I am officially out of trail mix now and I need a resupply stat. So if things aren’t rectified by early tomorrow afternoon, I am going to have to resort to something drastic.

Namely, putting together a shopping list and asking Julian to go shopping for me.

That, at least, will answer the question of whether these products are truly gone or just not listed on DoorDash for some reason.

If Julian goes there and there’s bare shelves everywhere and he can’t find my No Name Original Trail Mix anywhere, we will know that perfidy is afoot.

But if everything is normal and the Trail Mix is there, we’ll know it’s a DoorDash thang.

Which would be a lot better for yours truly. I don’t want to have to come up with a whole new shopping regime with brand new products because apparently mine are all gone.

I haven’t tried it in Microsoft Edge yet. Maybe it’s a Chrome thing, somehow.

If it does turn out to be that, I will give serious thought to migrating to Edge for good. I have no reason to be loyal to any particular browser seeing as I don’t do anything but go to websites and bookmark some of them, and all browsers do that.

So I will go where I have to for things to fucking work right.

I really don’t want to prevail upon Julian. And I really, really don’t want to have to make a shopping list. That’s so much mental effort! I have to remember everything that I need and that means mentally combing through the kitchen over and over.

Oh right, and if I end up needing Julian, that would mean paying for my groceries in cash instead of paying with the card and that would be a hassle too.

All in all, this whole deal has really knocked the blocks out from under me and I greatly resent this disruption to my routine.

I hope I can sort this bullshit out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My state is Minnesota. They seem nice.

Been ill today. Missed Wound Care as a result. Woke up feeling very hot, but that’s fairly normal for me.

I sleep hot.

But when I still felt like bacon would sizzle if it touched my skin an hour after getting up, I knew something was up. Something not good.

That’s when I took stock of myself and realized I also felt light-headed and disoriented and that my mind fog was much denser than usual. And I had a headache.

So I spent most of this morning with one toe out the door to go to the hospital if things took a turn for the worse.

Standard whine : I don’t wanna go. The ER is so boring and depressing. That would be the one time I would wish my tablet was in working order.

Otherwise, I am still quite convinced I am better off without it.

Then again, if I got it fixed, I could just have it around for emergencies. There’s no reason I would have to go back to being such a video game junkie that the moment I’m in bed I’ve got the god damned thing in my hands and I am playing some mindless and manipulative Android game.

Man, I do not miss that.

Well, except for the crosswords. Those were fun. And not designed to psychologically torture money out of you.

I ain’t ever playing that kind of “free” game again.

Not even on the PC. I downloaded a free MMORPG called Guild Wars 2 recently because the description made it sound good and it looked fun, then I played it for like 20 minutes and that was long enough for me to remember that I actually hate that kind of game and wonder WTF I was thinking.

Some lessons I have to periodically relearn, it seems.

For instance, that I really do not like corned beef. It sounds like the sort of thing I would like, which is why I keep forgetting that I don’t like it, but it’s actually quite gross.

Anyhow. Back to me.

I seem to be getting over whatever it is, knock on wood. I still feel pretty gross overall but I’ve been hydrating aggressively and that has kept the feverishness at bay.

I really need to get the medical kind of thermometer. I would really like to know whether or not I actually have a fever when I feel like this.

Knowing my life, the answer will be “no” and I will be left with a mystery as to how I can feel so hot without running a fever.

Wait, come to think of it, that could be from an inflammatory response.

It could also be from dehydration. My system is very unforgiving on that front. Falling behind on refueling my sweat glands can really fuck me up.

Well given how much I pee, I guess that’s not a surprise.

All that fluid has to come from somewhere

What else… did Therapy Thursday. I was not in an introspective mood, so it was slow going at first.

I’ve not been feeling introspective at all lately. That’s why these blog entries have been somewhat breezier and chattier than usual.

I don’t want to dive deep into the mucky waters of my fractured mind. I want to frolic about on the surface like a frisky seal.

I need time on the surface to dry out, groom my fur, and soak up some rays as I enjoy the benefits of having gone deep to dislodge more encrusted emotions.

With every successful dive, I free up more space in my mind for me to be able to think and breathe and grow and overall just be me.

It’s a long and tortuous process, like tunneling your way out of prison, but it will all be worth it when I am finally free.

And it’s not like I have anything better to do.

In the next section, the dumb things I have been doing lately.

More after the break.

---

Hard to swallow

In this case, quite literally. 

So I take a nap, get up, get some water, and take a big gulp. 

And damn near choke on it.

Somehow, in my sleep, something caused my throat to swell up and make it very hard for me to swallow anything. 

Nothing goes down easy, not even liquids. 

This was and is, to put it very mildly, rather alarming. 

It’s eased off somewhat since then, thank God, because if it hadn’t I would be in the ER right now. Not being able to swallow is kind of an emergency, especially if I can’t even get liquids into me. 

The only treatment for that would be to get me in a hospital bed and give me all my meals via IV drip. 

Wow that would suck. I love food. Me and food go way back. We’ve had great times together, food and I. 

Anyhow, I am doing better now. I can drink fluids, though I can feel some resistance. And I can eat food, though each bite burns a little going down. 

Before I discovered my swallowing problem, I was thinking I had a nasty case of heartburn. And I was paying close attention to that. 

After all, nobody has looked at my heart lately, and heart diseases runs in the family. 

Hell, it gallops. 

In fact, that initial, ill-fated sip of water was meant to hopefully dilute the acid in my esophagus and relieve said heartburn. 

But then I got sidetracked by swallowing issues. 

All in all, today has been kind of fucked up. Weird health shit appearing and disappearing at a much faster rate than usual. 

I hope things settle down because it’s putting a serious strain on my ability to not freak out about things. A much younger me would have been panicked by these weird and distressing incidents, and that, of course, would make everything much much worse. 

Right now, I am back to “one toe out of the door and on the way to the ER” mode. 

Dear body : please be nice. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

It’s been another medically busy week.

On Monday, I tried to hack the system by just passing a message to Doctor Chao that I needed my prescriptions renewed.

Denied! Well, it was worth a shot. Had to set up a phone appointment instead.

And it turns out it was good that, I did, because…

Yesterday, Tuesday, I had wound care, and the nurse took one look at my left foot and saw that there was a huuge blister under the wound there and immediately went and got Linda, the Wound Care Clinician, who also looked very distressed about it.

And you know she’s seen some shit.

So Linda poked the thing with a sterile needled and drained it, and then she trimmed away the big flap of skin left over.

The blister, or maybe hematoma, was a bit bigger than a toonie and a horrible mottled green/brown color, and you might well be asking yourself, why on Earth did it take a nurse to tell me there was something very wrong with my foot.

The answer to that question is surprisingly complex.

For one, there’s my general cluelessness. I am school smart and reality stupid. That’s what happens when you’re so withdrawn that you deal with reality only the absolute minimum amount it takes to not starve to death, soil yourself, or walk into traffic.

The hilarious but not in a haha way thing is that I had been wondering why my right foot felt “weird” when it was in a shoe – like there was something in the shoe with my toes.

And there was. It was a big fucking blister.

Once more I shake my head at how bad I am at taking care of myself.

Another reason I needed a nurse to tell me about the blister is that one nurse had already seen it, last Friday, and she didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.

I very often take my emotional cues from other people.

I’m just so impressionable!

My two nurses today seemed to think that the Friday nurse really should have caught the blister and done something about it.

But I don’t blame her too much. It’s very easy to get caught up in my aura and be part of my reality bubble and get swept along, and I usually don’t even know I am doing it.

I suppose I should fix that.

At one point, there was talk of sending me to the ER because the nurses were worried about the infection that caused the blister.

Thank goodness that after the whole thing was removed, they decided that I didn’t need to do that. It would have been such a pain in the ass.

They did take a swab and send it to the lab, though.

Later that day was my appointment to get a needle in my other eye, my right eye. That was no fun, still hurt like fuck, but it was over in a second.

I’ll be going back in six weeks.

Today, I had a phone appointment with Doctor Chao in the morning. I had three things to get done and I did all three, which I am proud of.

1. Tell him about the stuff with the blister, Check!
2. Get all my prescriptions renewed at the behest of my pharmacist, SImon. Check!
3. Get a referral to this place for physiotherapy. Check!

Hopefully enough physio can restore at least some functionality to my legs.

But honestly, even if it ends up just being exercise, that’s good too.

I just want someone who knows about these things to tell me what exercises I can do without harming myself.

I know that exercise will do me good on pretty much every level.

But I’m scared.

Stay tuned for the other adventure I had today

More after the break.

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Some fun stuff

If there is more of this comic, I wanna read it!

View post on imgur.com

Suddenly I have a deep desire to travel by train.

And then there’s this tribute to sneks and carbs.

View post on imgur.com

My fuzzy friends know of such neato things!

Now I’m really craving a good dinner roll.

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The last thing

The last thing today was finally getting that lab work done.

It had been at least two weeks since it had been assigned and I was feeling very guilty about not having done it yet.

As patient readers know, I tried to get it done last Friday but at that point, I hadn’t fasted, so I couldn’t do my good ol fasting A1C.

So I had to come back. This time, I was smart, and booked an appointment online in order to minimize the probability of having to wait in line.

That did mean waiting till today, though. Oh well.

Julian dropped me off at the LifeLabs just half a block away, There’s another one near us over on 3 Road but I don’t like that one.

The lady who took my blood was amazing because she got the needle in my vein on the first try with no hesitation or “searching”.

As patient readers know, I have veins that not only “hide” but that are also sort of rubbery in a way that actually deflects the needle.

So today’s super easy withdrawal from my personal blood bank was a testament both to her skill and my ability to communicate exactly where the good vein is in the crook of my right elbow via body language and telepathy alone.

Then came the pee test. And of course, once I was in the bathroom, I, who has to pee ten times a god damned day, came up dry.

And after I had deliberately drank half a liter of water right before I left, too. I guess it hadn’t made it through my system yet.

But luckily I knew just what to do this time. You see, I knew that when I strain to poop, often a little pee comes out as well.

So I just sat down on the toilet and strained (without pooping) and managed to slowly milk the requisite quantity of urine from my reluctant system.

Thus I foiled one of fate’s attempts to make me feel awkward and embarrassed.

And now you’re all caught up!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh wait, PS. I solved my video game problem.

I won’t go into the details, let’s just say, I was a victim of ambiguous language.

Anyhow. See you tomorrow!

A long time ago, I forget how this came up, but Joe said that he thought I wasn’t ll that grateful for the help he and Julian give me.

And I replied, “But I thank you guys! I thank you all the time!”

Which is true. I unfailingly thank them for every little thing they do for me. It’s very important to me. Politeness, manners, and consideration are all things about which I am meticulously^[1] correct, and not because I have some abstract sense of propriety or a love of “the rules) (ick) but because that’s what I believe to be right and I hold myself to an extremely high standard of behaviour as a reflection of said beliefs.

This, according to some, makes me manipulative.

And by “some” I mostly mean my brother Dave. Many times we had this same extremely dead end conversation :

Dave : No, you see, you manipulate people by being so nice.
Me : I’m just being the best person I can be!
Dave : Yeah, that’s how you do it!
Me : So what, I should start being rude and crappy instead?
Dave : Well no…

And… scene. Conversation has crashed. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, kill process, reboot.

It’s true that I behave so well partly in hopes of people being nice to me too. That kind of mutuality is something I seek with a missionary zeal.

And the roots of it all is that brutally depressing image of myself as a fox trying to be the best fox I can possibly be in hopes of being let back into the house.

Sometimes I can’t believe I wrote all that. It’s so sad. But it was something in me that had to come out, and as much as I cried when writing it, I felt a lot better afterwards.

And it represents a tragic truth of my life.

As patient readers know, I was a Christmas puppy, Before I was school age, I got loads and loads of love and attention. I was often the center of attention as a cute n’ precocious child who effortlessly entertained and bemused adults. And I was a happy little guy in the warm and comfortable world of my babysitter Betty’s care in the morning and afternoon and time with the family at night.

But then I got raped. And then I got bullied. And somewhere along the way, people got sick of me and went away, leaving me all alone in a world suddenly gone not just cold and lonely but savage and cruel as well.

And on some very, very deep level, far below conscious reason, I concluded that I had done something wrong and that if I was very, very good, I could get the attention back.

Problem was that my family did not provide any instruction on how to be good in their eyes. And even if they had, I doubt it would have made a difference. They had gotten sick of me, and left me tied up in the back yard, forgotten.

And all I know was that it was good, and then it was bad, and I didn’t know why, but it must have been something I’d done.

No wonder the terrible damage done to me by the rape led me to conclude, much later in life, that I was a horrible disgusting awful toxic thing that was the quintessence of repulsiveness and lowliness and completely impossible to respect.

Yes, that’s really how I used to view myself. I still feel that way sometimes, the difference is, I don’t believe it.

Not everything that feels true is true, especially if you have a mood disorder.

Anyhow, to drag myself back to the point like a bag of wet cement, the idea that I manipulate people by behaving well is a real mindfuck and I more or less just reject it out of hand because it’s a line of thought that goes nowhere fast.

I’ll just keep on being my dear sweet lovable self.

After all, it’s all I can be.

More after the break.

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Making being me easier

I know that I still have enormous amounts of inner friction.

Hence my “driving with the parking brake on” analogy. I know that there is a lot of inner turmoil roiling and writhing inside me. Parts of me are locked in conflict with each other so that my energies act against themselves.

And maybe that’s not an accident. Maybe that’s just how the sick part of me likes it.

After all, that way I can be “in control”. No pesky drives or impulses making me want to do new and unknown things that will take me God knows where. Everything safely ground to a halt.

I can gun the engine all I like, I still ain’t going anywhere.

And it all devolves back to a lack of faith. Deep down, my deeper self refuses to believe that following my drives and desires can be “safe”.

Only that which can be fully understood and predicted is “safe”. I have to know where the road leads before I set foot on it. I have to completely comprehend things.

And that’s just not possible with most things.

What I am missing is that vital faith in being okay no matter what happens. Faith in my ability to handle things, even very unexpected things, and survive them and be fine after them, maybe even profit from them.

Faith that it is, therefore, safe for me to explore and maybe find my niche.

I’ve been locked inside myself for so long, and as a consequence, I have never gained any of the life experience everyone needs in order to mature and grow and become strong enough to handle the world.

And now I’m fifty one and still terrified of the world and still stuck frozen in time and locked in the conundrum of being too scared to go get the life experience that is the only way to become less scared.

Something’s got to give. There has got to be a way to break this deadlock and get myself moving for once in my god damned life.

This ride sucks. I want off.

Next month of meds will contain a further reduction in my Paxil dose. From 30 mg two times a week to 30 mg three times a week.

We’ll see how that goes. I hope I can unfreeze my emotions enough to find my natural vibe and stop feeling so god damned frozen inside.

This year, Spring is coming for real.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I get it.

Except not really.

I have lived for a very long time trying to assert a level of supposed “self-control” that is quite clearly insane.

In the name of this farcical notion of “self-control” I have appointed a very narrow minded and emotionally constipated “committee” in my head that has to be looped in on literally every kind of decision and who is so rectally puckered that it rejects almost every impulse except for a very short list of “safe” options.

Well there’s a big difference between something being normal and something being safe. The fact that an option does not spark anxiety in me is hardly a recommendation and it sure as hell doesn’t mean said option isn’t bad for me in the extreme.

Right now, in my life, I am trying to pry open that clenched aperture and let more sunlight and fresh air into my soul, even if that means being, in the extremely narrow view of that inner committee, “out of control”.

Their idea of control is bullshit anyhow. If I was truly in control of myself, I’d be able to do whatever I wanted to do without having to overcome all this inner resistance. I’d feel free to pursue whatever path strikes my fancy instead of living my life as if video games and blogging are literally my only options.

Like I have as little control over my life as if I was on a very long Disneyland ride.

The real dirty little secret of it all is that I have been in control all this time. The reins are in my hands whether I use them or not. I’m as free as anyone else to pursue my own best interests. Or even just try to have a good time.

There’s lots of fun things to do that aren’t video games. I don’t necessarily have to use video games as my one and only way to absorb all my free time in order to avoid the existential black hole that is trying to figure out what to do with myself.

There has to be a way for me to develop the kind of “evil Kirk” killer instinct that would let me make decisions on my own behalf. I can’t spend my last remaining years sitting at the mother of all crossroads unable to make a move because I don’t know which is the “right” way to go and I am too scared of unspecified terrible consequences of making the “wrong” choice that I don’t dare move at all.

I wonder if anyone out there has exercises for one’s id.

Because mine’s a puny lil thing.

And that means my access to the primary energy of my being is weak and tenuous and that leaves me timid and fearful and easily spooked.

I’m still trying to wake up. To resurrect myself. A great deal of me has been completely dead and/or dormant for so long that sending all my spare energies down into the deepest parts of my mind in order to warm myself up and bring my soul fully online feels like pissing into a well sometimes, but I keep at it nonetheless.

It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

Still, I know that my progress will continue to be glacial in pace unless something bigger than myself, something I can’t even conceive of, breaks through all my barriers, wrecks the fuck out of the “committee”, and forces me to change.

I’ve never had something more powerful than myself to look up to, be protected by, have the support of, and in general not be so freaking alone in the world.

From an early age, my incredible intellect made me more powerful than all of the adults around me. It’s like I was the kid who puts people in the cornfield in the Twilight Zone.

And that sucks because it means I was almost impossible to parent. So much of how we raise kids relies on the adult being smarter and wiser than the child, and my creepy little self upended that equation.

How do you raise a kid who’s smarter than you?

Well loving me a lot would have helped.

More after the break.

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On second thought

On second thought, “impossible to parent” is a vast overstatement.

Granted, my sky high IQ made me somewhat of a handful. I could not easily be dominated by anyone. That approach to parenting would not have suited me.

And I know that cost me something. One kid’s domination is another kid’s safety blanket, after all. Knowing, deep down, that there is someone smarter and stronger and wiser watching over you must give kids a well grounded, secure feeling.

On the other hand, I was a ball of neurosis and anxiety. Afraid of the world because, deep down, I knew there was nobody looking out for me and nobody to pick me up if I feel and nobody to even give a damn what happened to me most of the time.

To be fair, they cared when they remembered to do so. Which wasn’t often.

Dragging myself bodily back to the point, I couldn’t be dominated but then again that was completely unnecessary with me. I was a naturally cooperative and eager to please and highly adaptable kid. I tended to obey adults not out of fear but out of a combination of wanting to help and/or participate and my natural desire to show off and get praise.

What? I’m no angel.

But what I really needed was emotional, not intellectual. That’s why my babysitter Betty could handle me despite having more of a street smarts kind of intellect.

I needed someone to help me feel grounded and oriented and safe. And that would only have taken love. Love I could feel. Love I could count on. Love that could reach me.

I wasn’t born with all this ice around my heart. The right person could have given me the emotional anchor I now lack. The right person could have made all the difference.

That person should have been my mother.

But she was tired.

And I was uninvited.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In a word, ugh.

Suffering from some temporal dislocation at the moment. I took a nap and for some reason, when I woke up I was convinced it was around 1:30 pm, and so when I finally managed to get up and get my butt in front of the computer only to find it was in fact a hair past 3:30 pm, I felt like I’d just had two hours of time and life snatched away.

And that feels bad. Real bad.

I will adjust, of course. The regular flow of events will help me get back in sync with the rhythms of the day and by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten all about it.

These are the strange little hazards and issues that my fractured psyche throws my way when fate is getting bored with me and wants to stir shit up.

So those are the depths I’m arising from : the depths of a temporal fugue and its accompanying sense of loss and confusion.

Meanwhile, my heater arrived early this morning. Ah, the miracles of the modern age, where I can order something Saturday afternoon and have it show up right on my doorstep Sunday morning.

I haven’t plugged it in and tried it out yet though because the place I had planned to put it on my bedside table turns out to be absolutely filthy and I am kind of afraid that if I put the heater there right now, the random gunk caked on there will burst into flames.

But I will probably end up plugging it in tonight anyhow, because tonight I will be sitting here in front of Mister Computer after the sun goes down and that is, of course, when it gets seriously fucking cold in my lonely little spot.

Not that it’s a tropical paradise right now, either. Le sigh.

Maybe I will check the thing out soon.

It’s basically a fan with a heating element in it. Which means that someone finally invented the “hair dryer” style heater that I’ve always wondered about.

Hopefully it will work and solve my lil freezing my butt off problem. I must admit that I am having second thoughts. Certainly, as with all space heaters, I am sure I’m going to have to fiddle with its exact placement near me to make sure I neither freeze nor fry.

Still stuck in my video game. I am going to have to revisit every single site listed as having a Blood/Star Stone and make absolutely sure there’s nothing there.

I did make a little progress though. As I have been rechecking old sites I came across an Inert Stone I had not picked up for some reason, and so I now have 11 of the 12 stones that I need to proceed with the god damned game.

At least I hope I only need 12. The internet is unclear on that. I might need as many as 15, and that would be a biiiiiitch.

My last resort will be to go to every single character in the frigging game and initiate trade with them in case I sold an Inert Stone to them.

If that doesn’t work then my playthrough is officially completely borked because it’s pretty unlikely that I will find another one just lying around somewhere.

Oh, one cute little joke : there’s a skeleton buccaneer you fight early in the game

And his name is “Pontius Pirate”. LOL.

I can only assume that after I defeated him, he washed his hands of me.

More after the break.

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Nostalgia is a lie

Or at least, that’s how I used to think.

And like most of the ideas with which I have poisoned myself over the years, it is irrefutably true. Nostalgia makes people remember things as being better (and simpler) than they actually were. It introduces an error into our recollections. Factually speaking, nostalgia is a lie.

But there is so much more to life than mere factual accuracy.

For one thing, there is what is emotionally healthy for us to believe. I have wasted a lot of my life and my own mental health pretending that my mental diet didn’t matter. That I could drive towards the truth at any cost no matter what and if that hurt, tough. It was worth it to know the Truth(tm).

After all, even if it hurts, even if in fact it’s outright soul poison, you’re still always better off with the hard truth than with a comforting lie, right?

Um, but why? How could I even know that? Maybe there are some truths you are genuinely better off not knowing or at least not believing. Maybe some lies and illusions are way, way better for you than the harsh and toxic truth.

Maybe we all need to maintain a certain amount of leeway for self-delusion to act as a kind of shock absorbers of the soul instead of insisting that we have to endure every god damned bump and rock and axle-wrecking patch of black ice on the road unfiltered in pursuit of some abstract notion of intellectual ruggedness.

I hope I can change my ways. I’m so used to lunging for the truth no matter what like an over-aggressive attack dog that there is some doubt. And of course it is logically impossible for any mind to willingly and consciously embrace untruth.

But there’s wiggle room, if you’re willing to dig for it. There is Truth ™ and then there is the assigning of meaning to that Truth ™, and that’s where that leeway can fit in.

And a whole lot of depression happens on that interpretive level. The actual truth might be, “I just broke something”, but the conclusion, “therefore I suck and am terrible and shouldn’t even be alive” is one hundred percent optional.

That has absolutely nothing to do with fact and all the people who know me would vehemently disagree with that self-assessment and I know for a fact that I am crazy and that therefore my interpretations are suspect at best, so why not bow to the opinion of everybody who is not me, remember that absolutely everyone makes mistakes, and let myself off the fucking hook?

So, so what if nostalgia is a lie? Maybe I could use some soft warm lies in my life.

It’s not like the Truth ™ has made me fucking happy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

l

The Rubicon has been crossed!

The wheel of fortune is spinning!

THE VERY FATE OF THE WORLD HANGS IN THE BALANCE!

In other words, I finally ordered a god damned space heater.

A desk model, of course. Not only was that like $20 cheaper than the big fancy one I was contemplating, but I realized that I don’t need to heat a whole room.

I just need to heat a whole me.

And even then, not all the time. And I like that I will be able to point it where it is needed the most, which is my poor numb hands.

Especially the right one. It’s cold all the god damned time.

Like I said before, the circulation in that hand must be truly terrible for it to always feel so cold. I am constantly pausing what I am doing to rub it, or to put my hands under my pants and atop my big fat belly.

Or parts south, but that tends to distract me from what I’m doing.

My video game problem persists. My other character did not have the Inert Stones I need to proceed in the game. I checked some other vendors that I had forgotten before, and they didn’t have them either.

I am tempted to despair and just start playing something else. Or God forbid, start another playthrough and hope I don’t get glitched out.

Assuming it is a glitch. I might still be missing something, and knowing me, it will turn out to be something so gobsmackingly obvious that I will clap my hand onto my forehead and shout, “D’oh!”.

Fine by me if it that’s what it takes to solve the damned problem.

I can’t even keep myself busy doing side-quests because all the quests left on my quest list are either parts of the main quest I can’t access yet or things I haven’t the slightest idea how to pursue and the instructions I find online make no sense.

I’ve realized recently that I have never been very good at following instructions. Doing so requires slow, careful, detail oriented reading that relies on a lot of hidden assumptions and “common sense” interpretations.

And I am good at precisely none of that.

Instead, I try to inhale the information like I normally do, miss important steps, fail to actually assemble a series of logical, methodical steps, rush into action, and end up completely and totally lost.

And then I generally need someone else to come rescue me in one way or another.

It’s a damned good thing I’m cute.

I think this is why I get lost so easily too. I think I know the exact route I should be taking but somehow there is always things I didn’t think of or hidden ambiguities and I end up utterly lost in suburbia somewhere.

Thank God I’ve never been even remotely outdoorsy. At least if I get lost in the ‘burbs I can knock on a random door and ask for help.

Which is when my real skill comes to the fore : being appealingly pathetic.

I don’t know why I lack “common sense”, that mysterious subconscious body of understanding that fills in the very blanks I stumble over.

I feel like my general nervous temperament must play a big part. If I were calmer and more confident, I would stay out of the adrenal state and keep my big brain fully engaged and not get so flustered.

Maybe all us geniuses (genii) are high strung and mentally fragile.

I mean, check out Walter Bishop in this scene :

Maybe all us giant sized brainiac types need reality assistance.

More after the break.

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Walter and Me

The thing that always made me burn with jealousy for Walter from Fringe is that someone noticed and appreciated his genius.

He was marked as a prodigy from a very early age and therefore the school system and all the other adults in his life invested heavily in him.

So he got a private school education, gifted classes. independent study privileges, and everything else that his young mind needed to grow and blossom into the world famous mega-scientist he became as an adult.

And most importantly, he got encouragement. He got praise. He got acknowledged as someone extraordinary and told in no uncertain terms that he had what it took to be someone truly important one day. He got recognition.

Eventually he went insane and spent decades in the looney bin, but that’s not important to my bitter little rant here.

But me, I didn’t get jack shit. I got to be bored out of my gourd, ignored, and deplored. Nobody felt like doing anything to make sure I was challenged or to at least point me towards challenging myself, and so I sleep-walked through school getting straight A’s without extremely little effort and nobody noticing or caring.

It’s not like I made a secret of how easy it all was for me.

A big part of the problem was that I didn’t stick up for myself. All I knew how to do was be a good boy and do what the adults told me to do. I rebelled against my babysitter exactly once as an experiment and never again. My parents were reasonable (if neglectful) and never gave me anything to rebel against.

So the idea of pitching a fit till I got what I wanted never occurred to me, and I wish it had. I know that I could have made my teachers’ lives a living hell if I wanted to, and maybe then I would have gotten some positive attention.

Or at least some respect.

It’s not like being a good boy got me anything but boredom and bullying.

I’m not saying that if they had invested in me instead of just going, “Well, there’s one I don’t have to bother with because they don’t need my help” and forgetting about me, I would be a super scientist right now.

But I sure as fuck wouldn’t be near the bottom of the totem pole either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.