I feel a great deal of strain right now despite not having done much and I am assuming that means I am once more dehydrated.

But maybe it’s something worse. Who knows.

I do know that I am very much looking forward with talking to my GP, Doctor Chao, on Tuesday^[1] because I am quite worried about what has been going on in my health lately and I am eager to talk about it with him.

Who knows, he might even have something useful to say or even do.

Keep your dreams alive, kids.

The infection on my thumb worried me a great deal because I associate that kind of grotesquery with the bad old days when I didn’t take my diabetes seriously at all and had a1c readings in the 20s (normal is 7) and acted like there was nothing I could do about it, that was just life I guess.

What a fucking idiot I was. And I am paying the price for that idiocy now.

If my a1c has for some reason gone nuts again then I am going to have to go back on insulin and that means solving the whole blood sugar testing question.

Luckily, the province pays for the modern blood-free testing systems now where I just have to put a sensor in my arm once a month and it takes the readings.

I think we’re up to the Freestyle Libre 2 now, maybe 3?

And I am sure Doctor Shari (Caswell) can hook me up with something like that. So that should be less of a hassle.

And the thing is, it’s entirely possible that I could have the high blood sugar again despite there having been no change in my diet because diabetes is a progressive disease and so it could very well have just gotten worse on me.

And that could explain the other thing that has me worried, the sky high blood pressure readings they took when I was at Urgent Care for the thumb.

That’s very very not good. High blood sugar can lead to high blood pressure because high blood sugar makes your blood thicker and it therefore takes more total pressure to move it around your body.

There’s a few bits of naughtiness I could cut out of my diet. The muffins I get with my McD’s twice a week, the vanilla soft serve cones that I get now and then, also from McD’s come to think of it.

That place is no good for me, I tells ya.

And I could cut back some on the carbs, although I am leery of that given how badly I botched that before with my no carb diet.

Turns out that’s a bad idea. Felt ever so much better once I put carbs back into my diet. Then immediately felt stupid for my dip into nutritional extremism.

Because I know better, god damn it. But I guess “carbs bad” was easier to remember than “maybe less carbs?”.

Fucked if I know.

Oh right, and I did make a vid.

Speaking of nudity, I think my body misses me being naked a lot. Now that I have things arranged so that I can change into a clean set of clothes every morning, I spend most of the time clothed, only being naked when I shower and when I sleep at night.

Almost like a normal person.

And I have noticed that when I am getting dressed in the morning it’s like my body is going, “Oh god, no, not this shit again!”, like I was putting on ski clothes in the summer.

Maybe I need to start showering more than once a week in order to clean out my pores so that my skin can breathe and regulate my temperature better.

What I really want is a long hot soak in the bathtub.

But that’s not an option for my gimpy self any more. Le sigh.

More after the break.

---

Another tale of ordering in

And I am writing about it, so you know something went wrong.

Nothing major, thankfully. I just ordered Pepsi Free with my meal and got Brisk Iced Tea instead. Luckily, after finding where they had moved the Help button on DoorDash, I was able to put in my complaint and got an instant refund of the whole cost of my Cold Cut Combo meal, which was $10.30!

Now that’s Brisk, baby!

I also ordered this Bean Fiesta Side Salad for $3.50 which turns out to basically be salsa with beans in it and is quite tasty!

And much healthier than the red velvet cookie I almost bought. Phew. Those are very very delicious but very very bad for me.

I also got Miss Vickie’s Sweet Chili and Sour Cream chips with my order, which I had not had since I was at VFS. They’re still quite good, though not as good as my beloved Miss Vickie Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar chips.

But I wasn’t in the mood for those.

I love them dearly but they do insist upon themselves.

One niggling detail the refund couldn’t cover : my body is essentially pouting at me because it was promised caffeine in cola form and didn’t get it.

Well too bad, body. There’s no way you’re getting it now.

I don’t even like iced tea.

What else. Not a lot going on in my sad little life. I keep talking about doing new things in order to liven up my life and wake me up inside and such, but the easiest thing to do is always nothing and so far I have not been able to make myself actually do it.

I still come up against that feeling like if I do that I will somehow injure myself, like I would have to cut off a finger to do it.

Well, they say that to be free, one must give up a little part of oneself.

But it’s so much easier to just keep running on my cozy little treadmill, and like a hamster in its wheel, feel like I must be getting somewhere when I know I am going absolutely nowhere and that is, in fact, the idea.

Not better. Just easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went pretty darn deep on this one, and I am glad I did because I think this little therapeutic exercise did me a heck of a lot of good.

And now I am busy trying to hang on to its lessons so they penetrate my defenses.

Here it is :

It started as thoughts about how I have been doing really well with the catharsis lately. How I have been feeling larger amounts of emotional release when I trigger various feelings through my writing or talking and how great that is and that got me thinking about how to best take advantage of that and that’s where the idea for the little “letter to myself” you see above came from.

I think it makes for a rather intense and dramatic video, but then again, i might be biased, seeing as it’s all about ME ME ME.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I am holding on to the good feelings from making (and watching) the vid because I can already feel the usual chemical holocaust of depression and anxiety that rages in my head trying to put things back to “normal” and I’m not having it.

Fuck my “normal”. It sucks used monkey tampons. I deserve a far superior “normal” and I am going to change my default fucking settings or die trying.

Returning to “normal” is at the heart of so much of our pain and suffering and self-destructive behaviour. Perhaps one of the best things drugs like ketamine can do for us is release us from our “normal”.

Fuck normal. I want awesome!

And that’s a good thing to keep in mind as I fight to keep my mind from going back to its (my) self-loathing toxic swamp monster beliefs about myself.

I am not some kind of horrible nightmare being of maximum repulsiveness whom random people loathe on sight for having the sheer gall to think I deserve to be seen in public when I clearly should be locked away in a dark sepulchre somewhere.

Holy crap, I spelled “sepulchre” right the first time. Score.

I saw a short furry animation about social anxiety recently that really struck a cord with me, though I dunno if people without the disorder will get it :

So I wrote this comment under it : 

Oh, so very THIS. This is exactly the kind of insanity my social anxiety imagines happening to me only without the British thing to hang it all on. Just this pervasive feeling that everybody hates me for having the sheer gall to bring my clearly incredibly repulsive self out in public to nauseate the public and pollute time and space themselves with my toxicity. And that any second now I will do something that pushes then over the tipping point into mob violence and I will be chased out of civilization by a rage fueled torch wielding mob.

That was extremely cathartic to type. Phew!

And it really was. Like I have said before, sometimes I have to vent the negative thoughts and emotions in my mind in order to feel better, and those evil social anxiety delusions had not been taken out and aired in a long time, so it was time to do so.

And just like that, another fat drop of condensation drips off the iceberg on my heart.

I’ve made a ton of progress since the time of those unstable thoughts. I now know (most of the time) that feeling like that was just some biochemical noise in my brain and that none of that deranged bullcrap is true and most of it doesn’t even make sense.

Now I believe in myself and my abilities more often than not, and the more emotional detritus I jettison, the better off I’ll be.

More after the break.

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Industrial scale catharsis

Like I have said, I am very happy with the acceleration in my rate of emotional release lately. I feel like that lower Paxil dose is really paying off now.

But I am also itching for more. I guess it’s a sort of spiritual ambition. I want to start shipping out those latent emotions like I’m a heavily laden cargo ship being unloaded by stevedores getting paid a flat rate.

Not the most accessible of metaphors, but I yam what I yam.

One of the things I am just starting to wrap my head around about myself is that I think I am a lot less patient than I used to think I was.

In my natural state, I am a lot more dynamic and active. I want to go go go and keep going. And while that comes with a deep reservoir of energy and motivation and inspiration, it also comes with a certain amount of impatience as the energies inside of me clamor to be expressed.

Not an easy thing for a Taurus like me to admit. Patience is supposed to be one of our primary virtues. And I am still more patient than average, I would say.

But as I unpack and activate myself, I am going to have to do what a lot of young people end up doing as well and that is to learn how to harness those wild energies so I can express them in a productive and healthy ways.

I may need to let them run wild for a while first, though, because this wild horses of mine have been cooped up for way too long and they need to run.

Whatever the hell that’s going to mean.

Obviously I’m not going to be limbering up for the triathlon any time soon. That ship sailed many years ago. And I don’t immediately have any conception of how to let those energies out within the framework of my current life.

Maybe I will have to find a whole new mode of existence, and I have no idea where something like that may lead.

But I am learning to trust my instincts and not worry about knowing what is next as long as I am doing what my heart tells me is the right move.

The acorn has no idea it’s going to be an oak tree.

But it becomes one just the same.

I should be so wise.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first I will bitch about my therapist.

Today was Therapy Thursday and my last session before my fucking therapist buggers off for a three week vacation with his wife, meaning my next session with him isn’t until September 25, which is almost a month from now.

Because of course he doesn’t arrange a locum (substitute doctor) or anything. After all, only my mental health is on the line. and even professional psychiatrists like him agree that mental health isn’t important, doesn’t matter, and won’t suffer if you just decide not to provide treatment for a month.

This kind of shit is why the other medical specialties look down on psychiatry.

Imagine if an oncologist took that attitude. “Sorry, no chemo for a month, I am taking a vacay with some chick I met at the gym. Try not to metastasize while I’m gone!”.

Not that I’m bitter.

Actually, I have not even started being bitter yet because you will never ever guess where my elderly therapist is going on this vacation.

Go ahead and guess.

Give up? Well here it is :

HE IS GOING TO FUCKING PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND.

My home province! Which is where I want to be this time of year!

Oh but wait, there’s more.

HE WILL BE SPENDING THREE DAYS IN SUMMERSIDE.

MotherFUCKER. He is going to be EXACTLY where I want to be so I can see my family and hug my Mom and meet a bunch of Acadian relatives!

And all in the gorgeous summer in my home province, the time year all my happy childhood memories take place.

ARGH. I am unbelievable pissed off and bitter about this. Of all the goddamned places he could go in this great nation of ours, he chooses not just my tiny home province of only 180,000 souls but my exact home town of around 17,000 people.

That son of a bitch. When we were on the phone, I had to strangle the urge to scream “Take me with you, god damn it!”.

The province really is a magnet for old people. They like our slower pace of life and the fact that we’re always behind the times.

The very things that drove me nuts as a kid.

So while my mental health wastes away, my therapist will be having my dream vacation, and there’s not a god damned thing I can do about it.

Old people have too much money.

Anyhow, back to the topic. During today’s therapy call, the subject of my pugilistic side came up because I have been struggling to integrate it into the rest of my psyche lately.

Part of me always wants to fight. Not out of some need to prove I am dominant or some inherent desire to hurt people or express my rough and rugged nature.

I just want to very energetically engage with the world. To be able to exorcise my deep seated latent aggression outside the usual rules of civilized restraint.

But I learned at a (thankfully) young age that my desire for a good scrap does not mean that those around me have volunteered to be my sparring partner.

So I locked that part of me away. It never fit with my mild mannered and pleasant persona anyhow. I didn’t want to fight, I wanted to be loved on and adored!

And now, thirty years or so later, I am wondering if I went too far. Surely I could have found some way to use those powerful instincts instead of pulling a Doctor Jekyll and isolating my angry beast and ignoring it and leaving it to wreak havoc in my subconscious mind and make me all kinds of mentally ill as it desperately tries to find some way to express itself.

Well I hereby declare my intention to start listening. I know it may not have a lot of coherent words to say at first, the poor thing, but I will listen nevertheless.

This is now the top priority in my attempts to reclaim my id.

Oh, right, and I did a vid.

More after the break,

---

I feel known

Apparently this Kee fella has pretty much got me and my childhood pegged.

He gets that I was both an ignored child :

But I was also a hated child :

It was a very simple system. When they noticed me, they hated me.

When they didn’t, I was, by default, ignored.

I was very passively punished for being noticed. Like Kee says, it was in the way people looked at me like I was interrupting when I entered a room, or how I got blank looks like I had just beamed in from Mars when I tried to enter conversations.

Because apparently I hadn’t existed until I opened my mouth.

I never really felt like a member of my own family. It was always my parents, my siblings, and me, the odd one out. The one who didn’t belong. The one nobody really wanted around any more.

The one who was just kind of… there.

The one where the costs of raising me were an extra burden on already overburdened parents, as opposed to being the same as the costs for my three older siblings.

The one who was just callously handed his baby bonus money and told to go do his own clothes shopping. When I was barely old enough to cross the street alone.

“Here. This is all you get. We do not think you are worth any of our own time, effort, or money, so you get what the government gives us for you being alive and that’s it. ”

That’s so god damned cold. How could they stand to be so cold to me? What did I ever do to deserve that?

I didn’t decide to be born.

And I was such a sweet, bright kid. All I ever wanted was for people to be happy around me. It didn’t even have to be caused by me.

I just wanted to be loved and valued.

I just wanted to be treated like I was wanted.

I just wanted someone to tell me I was okay. Good enough. Valuable. Not forever locked in being a burden on people who resented my existence.

I just wanted some god damned emotional warmth.

And I still do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because I don’t. And maybe I should. But I can’t. Or can I?

First off, today’s vid :

Now back on topic. Do I believe in magic?

No, and that’s despite of (or because of) all the pro magical thinking propaganda I was bombarded with as a child in the 1970s.

We got so much bullshit about the “power of imagination” and how things can be true “if you just believe in them” back then that it’s no wonder we grew up cynical little Gen X’s.

Yes, Boomers, I am saying you made us this way. You meant well and were trying to give us the sort of support for imagination and creativity and vibrancy that your Greatest Generation parents couldn’t give you, but it was all a load of crap, you stupid hippies!

Anyhow, where was I?

Oh right, my lack of believe in magic. As far as I can remember, I was always a relentlessly logical child and belief in magic never really stood a chance with me.

I mean, I wasn’t even in elementary school when my relentless questioning forced my siblings to admit that Santa Claus wasn’t real.

And when I heard that, I was relieved because now things made sense again.

But the fact that being a rational materialist like I have always been is logical and makes sense does not actually make it a good idea, and that’s the sort of conflict I struggle with as I keep bumping against the limitations of logic and the internally and externally consistent mindset like a bee bumping against a window as it tries to get past a barrier it is simply not equipped to understand.

I can relate.

Because reality isn’t enough, people. That’s the conclusion I have come to. Whether we consciously believe in magic (or God, or ghosts, or whatever) or not, the human mind needs to be able to exceed the limits of the real world in order to generate the emotional inputs needed to keep one’s mood from going below a certain red line.

Essentially, the mind needs the capacity to be self-rewarding when reality is not providing enough reward center stimulation at that moment to keep us feeling like we are good little monkeys and a credit to our family and tribe.

It really does come down to that on an evolutionary psychology level.

That’s why I keep circling back to this subject and my pondering about learning to fly. None of the roads I am on lead to happiness. Happiness is out of the reach of logic and reason and the need for one’s knowledge to be one contiguous picture. At some point I need to leave the road and fly there instead.

And that doesn’t make any sense. Obviously. So the really big step – the leap of (or into) faith – would be to learn to be okay with that.

For the first time in my life, I would have to learn to accept that something can be true even if it does not make sense and is not justified or logical or reasonable.

Like, for instance, believing in angels. Just to pick a random example.

It’s a matter of believing things because you choose to (and need to) believe them instead of believing them because you have figured out that they’re true.

And that’s a pretty heavy concept, man. I don’t know if I can handle it. I have had this relentlessly logical mindset for my entire life and it completely defines my worldview and my mindset and my umwalt and departing from that feels like I would be embracing insanity and the unknown.

But other people manage it and they are much, much stronger and healthier and happiest and more well adjusted than I have ever been.

So no. I don’t believe in magic.

But I am going to get there somehow, by God.

More after the break.

My previous solution

The previous time I tackled this whole “learning to fly” thing, I ended by reminding myself what an awesome rebel who has never felt bound or compelled by other people’s rules I am so why should the rules of logic be any different?

Which felt quite good to type at the time but now seems… insufficient.

The truth is that there’s not going to be a logical solution to the problem of illogicality. The only solution is to step off the edge of my reality and plunge into a world that follows a different set of laws, ones that are primarily emotional as opposed to be rooted in something like an internally consistent model of reality.

My model might be just as full of shit as anyone else’s but it at least makes sense.

So I would have to decide, consciously and deliberately, that the new rule of my world is that I will be happy, period. And absolutely everything within my demenses, including reality itself if necessary, will bend to this new dictum.

I feel like this necessarily involve telling the world where, how, and with what common household objects it can go fuck itself.

And I am not against that. It does seem to suggest that there’s been some sort of anger at the world seething within me that I somehow forestalled via being so logical, as if I locked away a great deal of emotions via facile justifications.

Hmm. This warrants further investigation. I might be onto something there.

Perhap I have done that a fuck of a lot in my life : used my icy precise logic not just as a way to pursue truth but as a way to nullify nearly all of my passionate emotions.

By becoming detached from them. By escaping the emotional mode in which I felt exposed and vulnerable by retreating into finding things “fascinating” and studying them like some kind of ersatz scientist.

Have you noticed that the expensive words come out when I’m uncomfortable?

What would life be outside all this “fascination”? I honestly don’t know. I would have to take off this SCUBA suit and wade into the water with the rest of you, I guess.

I know how bad that makes me sound and you’re not wrong.

I guess I know the nature of this cage I’m in now. It’s made of logic and science and detachment and analysis and “fascination”.

Given that, there is clearly only way for me to get the hell out of here :

I’m going to have to learn to fly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This should be fun. Typing with my right thumb numb.

Not to mention eating.

So I went to do my usual deal at the Kinsmen today. I thought about not going due to the nasty infection on my thumb causing me acute social anxiety, but luckily our dear friend Xanax took care of that.

What a guy.

The special guest for today was a Chow Chow/Tibetan Mastiff mix dog called Mushu after the character Eddie Murphy voiced in the Disney flick Mulan.

Today was National Dog Day, so we had Mushu doing photo ops and we did a dog oriented round of trivia.

Sadly, I did not get to pet Mushu. He never came close enough to me. Dammit.

Oh, and the people at the Kinsmen center are fully aware of my diabetes now, so while everyone else got birthday cake for dessert, I got a chopped up apple.

It was a very good apple, granted. A Honeycrisp, I am pretty sure. Had a pear-like sweetness to it that was just divine.

But fat men have strong feelings about cake and I hate feeling left out so eating apple while everyone else had cake was a struggle.

It is a lot more work to type like this.

After Kinsmen, it was off to Wound Care. We were early but that worked out great because I needed to use the bathroom anyhow.

I showed the Beast That Ate My Thumb to the nurse at Wound Care and she said there was nothing they could do about it and that I needed to take it to a doctor.

No big shock. So it was off to so called Urgent Care.

The waiting involved wasn’t too brutal. I snoozed through a lot of it. I got to the triage stage right away and then it was a matter of waiting for the doctor.

Well, the nurse-practitioner. Not that I care. I knew it was not a complex task at all so an NP made sense.

She injected my thumb with lidocaine – twice, one on each side of the thumb – which put it to sleep, pretty much.

The injections were pretty painful, though. Made me wonder if her making the necessary incision without anesthetic would have hurt less.

It worked, though. Did not feeling anything during the procedure other than a vague tap from the scalpel now and then.

Anyhow, at one point, the NP said, “As a rule of thumb, when the…” and I grinned and said, “rule of thumb, eh?” and we both laughed.

So that was good.

Then it was off back home with a prescription for Keflex (four pills a day, yay) and some care instructions for the remaining scraps of skin and the wound left by the infection.

This ate up most of my most productive time of day (the afternoon), so things are a bit out of whack in my life right now.

I will try to record a quick video for today at some point as well as doing my usual blogging part 2 later on tonight.

No big deal. I am quite adaptable. I will get it all done no problem.

Yikes, it is almost 7 pm already. Maybe I spoke too soon.

I hope Keflex isn’t he antibiotic that made me sleepy all the time. That was a serious drag. Made it hard to get things done,

And that was before I did a video every day too.

Oh, and I will be ordering my meal online instead of getting Julian to get it from McD’s because I am out of cash.

All these confounded complications!

More after the break.

---

And here we go

And now to finish my blogging and then rest for a bit. If my rest is short, as they sometimes are. I will make it to our usual midnight Zoom.

But if not, well, dammit, I will have missed two of those in a row and I hate that, but I have been on the go all day and I am rapidly running out of steam and the finish line is only around 306 words away so I am not sure I will be able to make it for another hour and a half of watching Cops and other vids.

Life just keeps getting in the way, doesn’t it?

All I can do is trudge onwards and see how I feel when I am done blogging.

I feel like I am forgetting something. Oh yeah, I did end up doing a video.

I suppose I should post it now!

Completely redundant if you’ve read the first half of this blog entry, come to think of it, only this time the tale is magnified by my winning personality.

What it wins, I dunno. I should look into that. Maybe I’m owed some stuff.

Hmmm, anything else. Well we played dog trivia while Mushu was visiting. After lunch, we get out mental exercise, at least in theory, but I think most of my fellow oldies (my Kinsmen kinsmen, if you will) would agree with me that the questions were too damn easy this time.

I felt insulted, but that’s often the case with me. Others did too, though, and the odds of there being another sky-high genius in the bunch are prohibitive.

Oh well, it was kind of fun answer the questions anyhow, even if I did so with an air of exasperation. I mean, who doesn’t know that a bunch of dogs born at the same time is called a litter? Or that ones who form a single social unit are a pack?

It’s school all over again, dammit. I would have preferred to play that categories game again, that’s a challenge for everyone.

Well I guess that’s it for this long day. I am going to take a nap and see how I feel when I wake up around midnight.

Play me out, ABBA!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I figure I must be, by sheer size alone

There a lot of me.

But that aside, I know that despite my shyness and timidity, I have a pretty strong presence, and then there’s the sheer wattage of this gigavolt brain of mine.

I do think I intimidate some people with that. They have no way of knowing that I am a gentle giant intellectually as well as physically, and don’t throw my metaphorical (or literal) weight around unless it’s absolutely necessary to preserve the peace.

In the Canadian sense of the phrase. Like what Mounties do.

If they are the Mounties, who are the Mounters?

Oh right, I also did a vid today.

But back to my impressiveness.

My depression and anxiety (they’re a team) often make me feel like I don’t matter, I”m not even here, nobody notices me, nobody cares about me, and nobody would even notice or care if I disappeared forever.

But I suspect the opposite is true. I think that not only do a make a strong impression on people with my vibrancy and charisma and intellect, I think that if I am not careful I tend to “use up all the oxygen in the room”, so to speak, and it’s only my hesitance and civility that keep me from obnoxiously dominating every conversation I am in.

And not by being pushy or loud, either. Just by sheer magnetism.

Luckily I learned that lesson when I was at UPEI and learned to be a good boy who made sure everyone got a turn.

I sometimes wonder if I over-learned that lesson though. Maybe I would be a happier dude if I just let my enormous personality off the leash and let it get some exercise.

In some appropriate setting, obviously, otherwise I would be being a pain.

I never want to be the sort of person who makes people say, “Oh God, no, it’s him!” and avert their eyes when I walk in a room.

I suppose the Kinsmen event is apropos enough. Maybe when I go there tomorrow and when I have the Xanax in me I will try taking my light out from under my bushel and see what the heck happens.

I could be thronged by admirers.

But I hope not because that would freak me the fuck out. I mean, maybe not, if the Xanax is doing its job, but thinking about it in my currently alprazolam free state gives me the sweaty clutching panic.

Seriously though, I am not sure what I would be looking to get out of that experiment. Further connection with others, I suppose. Maybe even a decent shot of actually feeling like I belong somewhere and fit in.

There’s a heady thought. I don’t think I have ever felt truly like people wanted me around, even when they patently did.

Those old bad tapes in my head still play pretty loud.

I am low key panicking just from typing about this subject. I know that I have social damage that goes pretty damned deep and that makes me, for lack of a better term, alien to a lot of normal human things.

Because I grew up so alone. The animal studies of what happens then are quite conclusive and it’s not good.

You end up with individuals who may never be able to socially integrate at all. A vital developmental window was missed (namely all of them) and as a result I simply do not have the sort of social instincts all the other happy little monkeys have.

But I am quite friendly and lovable and charming for an alien. I may not be like the other kids on the playground but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

After all, weird is just another word for unique and interesting. I am a fascinating one of a kind and exotic critter, and that should get me a prized spot in this human zoo.

After all, I’m just so damn impressive.

More after the break.

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On and off

Sometimes I’m very ill. Sometimes I am perfectly fine. And sometimes I am in between.

Today’s been stressful because I have been sick on and off all day. This after the bullshit I went through last night.

I suspect the culprit is our old friend hydration. Somehow I have stumbled into that delicate state where failure to hydrate constantly and rapidly leads to dehydration symptoms across the board, from headache to nausea to faintness to weakness and back again, and at that point, as far as I know, I’m sick.

That’s why I didn’t make it to physio this afternoon. All morning I was toggling between feeling quite ill and feeling mostly okay.

The appointment was at 1 pm so I decided that I had to make up my mind at noon. When noon rolled around I felt awful, so I had to say no.

Damn thing’s a waste of time anyhow. Oh look, the government got you a physiotherapist, technically! It’s a woman you’ll see for half an hour a month and she will teach you one new exercise and then that’s it for the month.

Oh, and I have this new gross thing going on :

Hopefully, you got a look at it in there somewhere. If not, trust me, you ain’t missing much, it’s a disgusting blobby sac of… fluid,

And it keeps getting bigger, meaning it will probably pop on its own eventually. If not, I may get sufficiently sick of it to lance it myself with the tip of a pen.

I suppose it could be related to my other symptoms. They could be coming from my body trying to fight off the infection. It’s definitely possibility.

If the thing lasts long enough, I will show it to my Wound Care nurse tomorrow at 3 pm and see what they think. It seems too minor to take to the ER or UC.

I might take it to a pharmacist instead.

So, you know, my life is a Cronenbergian horror show that kind of makes me want to just check into the hospital now and when they ask me why I am there, i will say, “Nothing yet, but give it a minute. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wrote a song which may surprise you, and not just because it’s a country song.

But stay tuned because it’s not entirely what it seems.

Here it is :

I was tempted to skip the whole lyrics on screen (LOS) thing and save myself a buttload of hassle, but I felt like that would be cheating somehow.

Anyhow, the sneaky and subversive secret of the song, which I will only admit to here because nobody who doesn’t know me reads this thing, is that I wrote that song with the intention of turning people against Trump by reminding them of their actual values.

That’s why it’s a country song. I figured that’s how to reach the diehard Trump demographic who still believes he’s going to save them after he is done grinding their faces into the dirt.

Yeah buddy. Any second now.

So in order to complete my act of subversive media, I tried to think of everything I could that his demographic thinks they still believe and that he contravenes flagrantly.

Only now does it occur to me all the ways he goes against American values. You know, freedom, democracy, truth, justice, and the American way.

They think they still believe in all of that too. Hence complaining about “woke Superman” from assorted pinheads.

Fool. Superman would kick your white Christian nationalist bigoted butt.

Oh well, I guess I can tackle the Americana stuff in another song. Something in an over the top American patriotism style, with a military marching band and a male choir humming the melody in the background as Lady Liberty herself belts it out.

A project from some other day when I am feeling bored and in need of a challenge.

That said, insert my now standard whining about wishing I had spent more time on the lyrics here. I tried this time, I really did.

I had the idea for the song last night, as I was falling asleep, and when I got up this morning I wrote some notes for the lyrics.

But the bulk of the actual songwriting AND making the song AND making the video had to fit into the two hours between 2 pm and when I start blogging at 4 pm.

And the problem is self-discipline. I had like twelve hours or more between the idea and its execution and those are hours I could have spent writing the lyrics and polishing them and refining them until I couldn’t make them any better.

But that would have cost me precious fucking around wasting my life playing videos and watching TikTok on my phone time. How tragic.

So I need to get my priorities straight and accept that if I am to become the amazingly productive and dazzlingly talented and lavishly compensated creative megastar I know I can be, I am doing to have to radically realign my lifestyle and that means less time spent mesmerized by video games and the internet and more time spent doing fun stuff that might actually get me somewhere.

In other words, I need to grow the fuck up.

But not in a way that makes me stiff and boring and serious and tedious and all that. That is how a child views being an adult, and I ain’t having it.

No, I will still live to have fun and enjoy myself, I will just move on from the petty amusements of time-wasting games and move on to the way more fun and potentially profitable world of doing actual work.

I could really make a splash if I truly get behind myself and push.

And even if it all ends in failure, I will have had a good time doing it, so who cares?

More after the break.

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Life is trying to kill me

I have had a stressful night.

So I wake up from a post Blogging Part I nap around 20 minutes before 6 pm, and 6 pm is when I have my Sunday shower.

My one shower a week. But at least it’s one I can do by myself.

And as I sit in front of my computer pre-shower, I realize I feel a mite woozy. Oh well, it’s probably just because I just woke up.

So 6 pm rolls around and I get naked and put on the plastic cast cover I use to protect the bandage on my left foot and stand up to go get my shower.

Further wooziness. Hmmm. Not good. I briefly consider not taking my shower out of an abundance of caution.

But in my compromised mental state, if I didn’t take my shower, I would not be able to go to Denny’s with my friends, and that was a total nonstarter.

Like I have said many times before, Denny’s on Sunday with Le Gang is the highlight of my week and the only thing that would keep me from going is being in the hospital.

So I dry off and get dress and as I go to put on my belt I notice something is very off because I can’t get the belt on. The waistband of my pants is cutting too deep into my guy and I can’t get at the belt loops.

Using more sterling logic, I decided that if they were that tight, they would stay up without the belt, and I soldiered on.

About this time I should have noticed that I was feeling pretty crappy. But that really came to the fore when I did up the too-tight pants and the crappiness accelerated rapidly. I felt too hot and nauseous and dizzy and that only got worse when I made the mistake of standing up.

Luckily, on the way from my computer to the door of my bedroom, enough blood got to the right parts of my brain for me to realize that this was not viable in any way shape or form, so I grabbed a pair of pants on my way past and got Julian to fetch a belt for me and sat down on the couch to do a pants transplant.

A transpant, if you will.

And that helped a fair bit but I still felt terrible and I seriously considered very reluctantly bowing out of Denny’s this week.

But I knew I would be emotionally miserable knowing my friends were doing Denny’s without me, so I chose to be physically miserable instead and went down to the car.

Luckily, as I had hoped, the air conditioner in the car soon had me feeling better. On some intuitive level, I had surmised that I had heatstroke even though my conscious mind was too dumb to recognize it.

Then we made it to Denny’s and between hydrating and their aggressive AC I soon felt better, and we had our usual pleasant meal.

Then I go to pay with my credit card, and it’s declined. WTF? I knew there was enough money left on it!

So I have to borrow the cash to pay my bill because I have like $10 in cash left because deposit day is Wednesday and this was a five week month.

Then I realize I need to pay real bad, so I head to the bathroom, but oh fuck, the handicapped washroom is occupied so I have to use the regular one.

Or piss on the floor, which might have been safer.

Problem is, there’s four steps without anything to use to support myself between the bathroom door and the closest urinal.

I make it to the urinal and I get through the very long time it takes me to pee without only one hand to use to support myself (other one was, um, needed for something else) by resting my chin atop the urinal.

Disability destroys dignity.

Then I have to make it back to the bathroom door and through it to my walked, and my legs start to give out on me halfway there but I manage to rally and make it.

But my heart is beating REALLY hard and I am worried. So we hang around a bit longer so I can calm down.

Then, for one final jab, as I am on the way out of Denny’s, I have to pass through the area connecting the front of the restaurant and the back, which is normally no problem, but the busboy and his cart are there too.

I barely scooch past time.

So as you can see, I have had a stressful night.

And now I am gonna sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I explain the why and the how of it in this here video :

I won’t know for sure if practically gnawing on the camera as I speak will have solved our problems with low audio levels on my vids until Le Gang and I do a Zoom tomorrow night after Denny’s.

I suspect that the real culprit is Zoom and that maybe there’s some setting Julian can adjust on his laptop to boost audio output levels to something audible.

It’s worth a shot, anyhow.

Sorry about the sudden volume jump during yesterday’s bloopers, by the way. The camera falling was way louder than everything else and that was especially harsh on the people who had their volume turned way up so they could hear me.

Ouch. Sorry. Next time I will level the audio.

You have to admit that it’s some pretty cool footage, though, right?

You know, there’s footage and there’s mileage but there’s no yardage.

We should get to work on that.

Anyhow, like I said in the vid, today’s been a day of niggling irritations. Spellrogue crashed my computer a 4th time, so it looks like that problem is here to stay, ergo I can’t play my favorite game now.

And there’s only $3 left on my Steam account, so I can’t buy something new to replace it. And I ran out of steam with Darkest Dungeon. It’s a great game but I have reached a point where I can’t move forward without risking the characters I have built up over time in fights they will most likely lose, and I am just not built for that.

Some of them I am genuinely fond of and all of them have “been through a lot” with me, and represent a significant investment of time and effort, and I would hate to have to start over with a brand new slate of characters, so I am kind of at an impasse.

I think I am just not ruthless enough. In a time of war I could never order men to their deaths, despite otherwise having the makings of a brilliant strategist.

I just imagined how I play strategy games, making the decision to sacrifice these troops here to get those troops over there, and what that would be like if the soldiers were real.

And it’s a chilling thought. I feel cold right now just thinking about it. I could never.

Anyhow, that’s why I stopped playing Darkest Dungeon. I might go back to it and grit my teeth knowing my beloved characters are probably gonna die, but eh.

One has to ask how much emotional stress a game is worth.

I could also turn the difficulty down, but I hate doing that. It always makes the games so easy they’re downright insulting, at least to me, and I would rather leave off playing than end up disgusted with the game.

I’m a complicated man.

When all else fails, I can always dig through all the games in my Steam “library” and see if there’s a classic that I haven’t played for long enough for it to be fresh to me now.

That’s what I do with books, after all. I haven’t added to my personal “library” in ages, I just keep reading the same 100 or so books over and over.

That would be a problem if I still read as voraciously as I did when I was a kid, but I don’t. Right now I am old, so I prefer to sleep.

Kinda sad, ain’t it?

More after the break.

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A little bit more

Brace yourself, here comes more of my mundane minutiae.

I decided that this would be the week where I branched out from my usual Michelina’s frozen pasta entrees and saw what else was out there for a fellow on a limited budget and an even more limited time he can remain standing to eat.

And as I already knew, nobody can complete with Michelina’s on price. Their frozen pasta entrees are like ~$2.50 and nobody else comes even close. They clearly have mastered their little part of the market and that’s all there is.

The little pot pies I get and love come sort of close because they are ~$3 and are definitely a full meal unto themselves.

Well this week I decided to get one of these President’s Choice frozen entrees and see if I thought they were worth the extra money because they are $5.55.

So, three bucks more. More than twice the price. Yikes.

The one I am starting with is a Fettuccine Carbonara. For those of you unfamiliar with carbonara sauce, it’s basically alfredo sauce with little bits of bacon in it, and it is every bit as wonderful as that sounds.

And I am eating mine now, and it’s pretty dang good. I dunno if it’s worth paying twice as much, although I will note it at least has the decency to be around 30 g bigger.

Or heavier. Massier? Whatever.

Anyhow, the sauce is fantastic and the pasta is tender and delicious, so, rave review from yourself truly.

I dunno if I will get one every week, but I will probably check to see if I can squeeze that extra $3 into my budget that week or no.

It’s more filling than the Michelina’s too, which is a plus. Normally when I make a Michelina’s I have to make some garlic toast to go with it because they are not quite filling enough on their own.

These things are, in my opinion. So there’s that.

And in general, I am happy for any example I can muster of my looking around to see what else there is out there for me, even one as minor as this.

It shows that I am becoming a healthy enough animal to start showing an interest in exploring my environment and testing my boundaries.

And even in this, that took a lot of anxiety getting out of my fucking way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am pleased with how deep into my own personal pain I went in this one.

My quest for catharsis and healing will benefit greatly from this.

Warning, though, it’s pretty emotionally raw.

Then again, you probably already know this stuff anyway.

Anyhow, here it is :

I’ve been hearing for a long time that people like the really raw confessional type of content these days, and due to my massive social maladjustment I completely lack a normal set of social boundaries about what I tell people, so for once my mental illness and my artistic ambitions are in total harmony.

So voila, the terrible tragedy that is my life.

I mean, it’s not even dramatic. There’s no pathos to sitting in front of a computer for three decades. I suppose that in a movie, you could do a “the passage of time” montage where the days and seasons fly by as I remain seated at the computer slowly getting older and fatter and sicker.

But always seeming just fine. If anyone asks, I am A-OK.

I mean, I’m not. I’m sick, both mentally and physically. But what occurred to me today but didn’t fit in the video was that I do not know how to handle not being OK.

It’s one thing if it’s an alarming medical emergency like my recent trip to Urgent Care. ^[1] where the entire context is supporting me and I know my role and I feel like I have a reason to be there.

But the idea of telling someone how I really feel scares the hell out of me. I have been reliant on this smooth persona of mine for so long that the prospect of being totally “real” with people feels like death and doom.

Not necessarily in that order.

After all, according to the bad tapes in my head, if I am not entertaining and funny and easy to get along with and pleasant and such, people will realize how much I suck and how much they hate being around me and flee me like I’m radioactive.

And I am, though no moreso than anybody else.

And it’s not like this smooth persona of mine is some kind of constricting and burdensome mask I force myself into.

I like being Fruvous and/or Fruvous-like. It’s fun. And in that mode I can function. I am at least somewhat socially adept. I can handle things.

So what if it’s not “the real me” doing it all?

It’s the me I’d rather be and that’s what matters.

And that’s the real crux of the problem, isn’t it? I don’t want to be myself. My real self is a pathetic emotional cripple who hides away in the depths of my psyche because he can’t handle reality at all.

Why would I want to be that guy? If I had my druthers, I’d get rid of him.

Well, OK, maybe not, that’s too harsh, but it would be nice to be able to function in the real world without all my masks and shadows and illusions.

I have no idea what that would be like. My protective shell has been there for so long that the “real me” is a stranger to me now.

He’s just a scared little animal trying to find his way home.

More after the break.

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Beyond the lies

Watched today’s video with my friends tonight and they were kind enough to remind me that I have done all kinds of stuff, not “just” sat in front of the computer for 30 years.

Like organizing the local Freecycle. I helped a lot of people with that and kept a lot of good stuff from ending up in the landfill.

And organizing the local furry community for four or five years. I created a safe space for us fuzzy weirdos where once a month they could come together and let their fur out and be themselves and feel a lot less alone, and that’s not nothing.

Looking back, I am very proud of what I brought together and nurtured. I made sure the community remained gentle and accepting and welcoming, and I drew great pleasure from all the people I saw show up nervous and scared, get greeted and welcomed by me, and then left alone to find their own space in the community.

It worked extremely well. Too well, because eventually the events grew too crowded for me, but I am still happy I made it all happen.

And of course, not for nothing, I did a year at Kwantlen and a year at VFS to get my oh so fancy VFS…. certificate? Sure. Certificate.

A certificate cheaply printed out on someone’s inkjet and then slapped between two sheets of clear plastic.

But let’s not go there right now. Maybe some time soon though.

I have a LOT to vent about my VFS time.

Anyhow, point is, I did all that. Got through Kwantlen and VFS. And that’s not nothing either, especially the VFS part given the commute from here to downtown Vancouver and back every school day.

From the point of my sad tired 52 year old ass right now, it seems almost impossible that I really did all that.

So my years have not been a total waste. That’s just the depression talking, creating an unrelentingly bleak interior landscape because it makes for a tighter and easier to distort and manipulate personal narrative.

So I’ve done stuff. I’ve contributed. I’ve added value to society. And I continue to do so by doing a video and a blog entry a day.

One of these days I will get back to doing the wackier, more experimental videos like I used to do way back then.

Oh yeah. I’ve also made over 570 videos over the years. And that’s something.

Stay tuned, I might think of more stuff I did!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something is afoot with the right side of my right foot.

It looks like this. Hidden behind a link because it’s really gross.

What the FUCK.

Well, time to go to Urgent Care. According to the Wait Times website, the central one is less busy right now (wait time 90 mins) , so we’ll be going to it.

So much for my hope that the east one would be less of a hassle. Their wait time is 3 hours and change!

And the one for the ER is almost 5 hours. And it’s not even the weekend!

Now I don’t know how accurate those wait times are, but it’s all we have to go on so go on it we will.

I have no idea WTF is going on. It’s obviously infected AF. I am honestly taking a bit of a risk delaying the trip long enough to do a little blogging.

And to think, I had no idea it was like that until I decided to investigate why the right side of my right foot felt “a little funny”.

That’s all it was. It felt numb and sort of squishy. So I checked it out, expecting to find a bruise or an abrasion or the like.

So imagine my shock when I saw that god damned thing.

Because there’s no other symptoms than the numbness. It’s not sore, it doesn’t sting or burn, it’s not currently oozing anything.

But it might have been at one point. Lord knows where that scab crater came from.

So yeah, it’s off to medical attention for me. I am resisting the urge to just automatically go to the ER because it’s familiar and I trust them.

Then again, they at least do triage, and this nightmare on my foot has to place me substantially above the priority list.

AFAIK, Urgent Care just makes you take a fucking number.

And I don’t want to go to the central one, on Westminster next to Superstore. The care I have gotten there has been good but the wait times have been brutal and the intake staff seemed apathetic and incompetent.

We shall see.

Joe and Julian have plans to hang with Joe’s sister Melanie tonight, so that’s where they will be after 6 pm.

So they will drop me off but God knows how I will get home when I’m done.

I guess it would be a short cab ride at least.

If we go to the central one and the place is jam packed like it has been other times we went there, I might just opt for the ER regardless.

They have triage and places I can sit down.

Nowhere left for me to sit means I can not go. I can’t stand for very long. Even just waiting in line for a short time can mess me up and make my legs hurt.

Good thing the rollator has a built in seat. I can sit there if need be.

I’ll be bringing my phone and its charger. Maybe a book, Regardless of where I go, I will be waiting a long ass time.

Maybe I should tell them I have chest pains. Ha ha ha.

Oh right, and I did do a video today, before I noticed the problem with my right foot.

I think the title is amusingly pretentious given recent events.

Hmmm. Another argument for the ER is they have food and if I am there beyond say 9 pm I will NEED to eat or my blood sugar will crash.

Why do things have to be so damned complicated?

Well that’s it from me for now. I will update you when I get back.

More after the break.

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Must…. believe… doctor…

Well the doctor at Urgent Care said the monstrosity on my right foot was just a callous and I should just get someone to fill it off.

And I am really struggling to believe him.

I mean, he’s the one with the medical degree. He’s the one who went to med school. He’s the one society acknowledges as an expert on this kind of thing. I am merely a supplicant at his temple of knowledge and compassion.

But just LOOK AT THIS FUCKING THING.

Does that look like a callous to you? It has a fucking crater.

I will be at Wound Care tomorrow and I will ask the nurse there about it. And I will be extremely careful not to let them know a doctor has already pronounced on it.

Nurses hate contradicting doctors.

We also discovered that my blood pressure is extremely high. How high? So high that the nurse took my blood pressure three times to be sure.

And each time, the machine went BOOP BOOP BOOP warningly at the end.

Same when my doctor did it. Although weirdly, my blood pressure was high but dangerously, boop-inducingly high when he tried testing my left arm.

Which suggests there’s a problem with my right arm specifically. Hmmm.

Regardless, I am going to make an appointment with Doctor Chao for ASAP (so, a phone appointment, probably) to talk about a medication adjustment.

He might need to refer me back to my cardiologist for that. Fine. As long as it gets done I am okay.

I had been wondering about my circulation already because of how I seem to get cold even when it’s perfectly warm and summery out.

That’s not good!

So I will talk to Doctor Chao about that too.

But I swear, if he throws up his hands and says, “I dunno!” this time, I am going to reach through the phone and strangle him with the wires.

After all, that’s what he said about my swollen right foreleg and I am still pretty mad about that. I said as much to the Urgent Care doctor today.

“Oh, my GP knows about it, but he doesn’t know what’s causing it. Nor does he care. ”

I get my little digs in where I can.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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