Another one coming to you via TikTok, although it’s also been crossposted to YouTube as well, of course.
I like doing my talks on TikTok (TikTalks?). It’s breezy and easy and I have become rather good at talking to the camera with a minimum of um and ahs and stammers and such, so I can just blab into my phone and have it come out pretty good.
Plus I use a saturated colors filter which makes things look nice.
Anyhow, here’s me venting my neuroses about being sleepy a lot :
Of course, falling asleep during exercises at the Kinsmen put me in pretty good company. There’s a lot of people who are prone to nodding off in our group.
Of course, most of them are thirty years older than me. Hence my worry.
I must say that going to the Kinsmen does, on the whole, make me feel young. As far as I can tell, only Judy and I are Gen X aged. Everyone else is in their 70s and 80s and a few of us are 90+.
And we have varying degrees of mental clarity as well, of course, from “perfectly normal” like Lynda (who is 80) and I to “here but struggling” like an elderly ex-firefighter at my table all the way to “barely here at all” like Margaret who moves very slowly and often has no idea what is going on.
So I guess I can see a preview of my future there. I will experience all of those stages of life if I insist upon hanging around and not dying.
And I plan on it.
I could go on and on about how I’ve not even lived yet but that doesn’t seem productive.
I’ve been trying to shock myself into action by pointing out my own failing to live to myself in an attempt to galvanize myself into changing things.
And it has an effect. I can feel parts of my sleepy mind trying to wake up in response to the defibrillator current I’ve been pumping into myself (Clear! *bzzzt*) and the numbness recedes a little bit more every day.
And who knows, maybe one of these days a vital circuit will finally wake up and start feeding power to the rest of my machine and suddenly this whole damned haunted carousel will start up and resume spinning and I will finally be, like… awake.
But maybe not. I might die living exactly the same way I am living now, and that might happen soon or by some miracle of modern medicine I might live to be as old as my friend Lynda and never have escape my petty little pit of despair at all.
Earlier today, I was pondering the idea of being comfortable and how to get anywhere in life you have to sacrifice some comfort in favour of action.
You can’t live life getting somewhere while doing nothing, like you’re being carried around on a litter. And the most comfortable thing to do will always be nothing, so in order to do anything, you have to accept a lowering of your comfort level.
One useful definition of decadence, therefore, might be the unwillingness to do that.
Or you can learn to accept that the comfort of ennui in the doldrums of life is not worth preserving if it comes at the cost of going absolutely nowhere in life in a way that gets more humiliating and depressing with every birthday.
And by you, I of course mean me.
More after the break.
Oh, and the skin on my hands continues to peel. Still dunno WTF is up with that. I am thinking I will make an appointment with Doctor Chao tomorrow because while it’s a mostly harmless phenomenon right now, it could be a sign of something much worse.
And it’s just plain freaky. The skin underneath the peeling looks exactly like the rest of my skin, maybe a little pinker, so it’s not like it’s some horrible skin eating crisis.
But it’s very much not normal, and that has me worried.
What on earth could cause something like this?
More about my skin
so far, I have been operating on the hope/assumption that this skin peeling on my hands is a freakish, one off thing and that, therefore, once I peeled off this layer of dead skin, that would be it.
But now I am maybe seeing that the skin beneath the stuff I have peeled off has started to peel itself and that therefore this skin thing is just my new normal now.
In which case I may have to escalate from “I will make an appointment with Doctor Chao tomorrow” to “I guess I should (sigh) go to the ER or UC.”.
I dunno. It’s hard to know how much of a crisis this is. Harmlessly peeling skin does not exactly trigger panic but holy crap is this weird and I have so far not been able to find anything that might cause this online and so it’s freaking me out, man.
I tried to ask Microsoft Co-Pilot but it seems to be down, so I tried Google Gemini AI and it gave me fairly in depth answers and a bunch of possibilities but none of them seemed to cover it happening to all the skin on both hands.
I am not pushing the big red panic button just yet because I am not sure that I have been the same area twice yet. So I am trying to remember where I have peeled.
Even if it only needs to be removed once, it’s still a god damned weird thing to happen to a fella and I am going to want answers.
And that dipshit Doctor Chao better have them for me, at least eventually. If he gives me another answer that amounts to, “I dunno, whatever”, I’m going to scream.
In his face, more than likely.
I am so tired of his bullshit.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.