I will do it tomorrow

I swear that I will go to the ER or Urgent Care tomorrow, after Wound Care.

And yeah, I really don’t wanna, And hey, I don’t feel bad today, so maybe it’s all over forever and I can just forget about the whole thing!

Um, no. That’s Jagoff thinking and I have done far too much of that in my life. The lower digestive tract issues I have been having are the sort that I would be a fool to ignore because they could very well be the harbingers of something far, far worse.

So I need to get that shit checked out. It will in all likelihood turn out to be nothing, or at least nothing that standard testing can detect.

That’s how it goes with me. I have genuinely worrying symptoms. I dutifully do the grownup thing and go to the ER. I wait their for hours and hours, because whatever I have has a very low triage score. They finally get around to doing a bunch of tests on me. All of them come back negative. They shrug and say, basically, “I dunno. You must be making it all up, I guess. Go home so we can get to work on a real patient. ”

And then I go home with the exact same symptoms I came in with and no closer to understanding what the fuck is going on. And feeling intense social phobia and/or shame for wasting everyone’s time and resources on nothing.

Because that’s all I ever am. Nothing.

Of course, I always give myself a “better safe than sorry” speech afterwards, often in this very space. If asked, the doctors and nurses will give me one too.

But I can tell they only partially mean it and are actually kind of disappointed that it turned out to be nothing because honestly, where’s the fun in that?

Hard to feel heroic saving someone from absolutely nothing.

Which is all I ever am. Nothing.

Anyhow, my point is, I will go anyway. As tempting as it might be to just tell myself it will turn out to be nothing again, I am far too much of a worrier and a negative thinker to trust in that always being the case.

My mind immediately flashes to a vision of a doctor shaking her head sadly at me and saying, “If only we had caught it sooner. ”

That is seriously how my mind works. And I know that’s not very healthy.

But it’s my solution to general anxiety. By thinking of the worst case scenario, I turn my fears from an unbounded unknown into something concrete and real that I can imagine myself being able to cope with somehow.

So when everything is going as it should, it’s actually a way to calm myself down.

When things are going askew, though, it just leads to my tormenting myself with visions of extremely improbable negative outcomes.

Sooner or later we are all made victims by our coping mechanisms.

My tablet is not feeling like charging at the moment. I will order the new battery soon. A little disappointed that it apparently won’t qualify for Prime shipping, though.

I suppose it’s not exactly a hot item that is flying off the shelves. Replacement parts rarely are. Especially not ones that are so specific to one exact product.

Admittedly, part of me wants to buy a new tablet instead. But thanks to the five week month stealing my birthday money, I can’t afford it.

I basically had no birthday this year. Every dollar given to me went to paying my expenses for that extra week.

Still pretty pissed off and hurt by all that.

More after the break.


Holy crap, someone is BBQing chicken and the smell is driving me nuts.

I am feeling VERY carnivorous right now, which is rare for me.

I’d get KFC but I’m broke


The Grand Purge

Yup, Brown alert. More poop stuff.

Had a bad time on the toilet today. Sat there for around an hour because every time I tried to get up and wipe, more came out, and it no longer felt safe to leave.

Even worse, the longer I was there, the more each eruption hurt. A burning pain with a cramping chaser. By the end of the performance, it hurt bad enough that I kept worriedly checking the bowl to see if there was blood.

There was not, thank goodness. So far so good.

I am moderately hopeful that the worst of it is over. I feel like that big event cleaned me out pretty food and thus probably got rid of whatever it was that was irritating my irritable bowels so much.

In fact, the whole time I was feeling ill, I was telling myself that it will all be over once the bad stuff passes out of me.

And it was true, more or less.

Guess I should be taking mental notes because I just know I am going to have to repeat all this to first a triage nurse then a doctor tomorrow.

If my tablet was working properly, I could take notes there. I imagine that there must be some very good voice-to-text dictation programs out there these days, and for me that would be the best of both words.

I suppose that will put a lot of transcriptionists out of work, though.

Progress always comes at a cost. And that cost is usually paid in jobs.

But remember folks, all the people saying that nobody will have jobs in the future because automation will do everything are nincompoops.

Automation costs jobs at first, yes, and it definitely puts some individual out of work more or less for good.

But what capitalism wants most is not savings but productivity, and therefore automation becomes used primarily to increase the productivity of each worker rather than reduce the number of workers.

Besides that, even if automation caused a major contraction in the job market when all out jobs are taken over by AI and robots, who will those robots be making products for when none of us have jobs?

This is why I think Universal Basic Income is going to come about whether we want it to or not. The future may be one where the only way the economy can keep going is if the government taxes the suddenly super profitable corporations and then takes that money and gives it to the masses.

Thus, consumer choice still drives the economy.

And people suddenly have a lot more free time.

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