I got waaaaaaay sicker overnight.

Right now, I am one sorry critter. My stomach is upset  – it was so hard to get myself to eat. My head aches like someone shot off a blank next to my ear. My nose is running and I have that damned dry tickle in my throat making me cough.

But worst of all is the ague, aka muscle pain. Every muscle in my body screams like a off-key string glissando played on non-Euclidean instruments every time I move. Even standing up is a stiff and painful process.

I don’t think I have ever felt quite this rusty before.

Well that was more trouble than it was wortth.

The muscle pain is proportional to trhe mass of the muscle moved, so just sitting here typing isn’t too bad. I get little bits of pain but it’s manageable. So thank goodness for that small mercy.

I’d hate to be stuck with nothing to do but lie in bed and sleep.

Right now, I know I will experience a little bit of sleep weirdness purely from the fact that when I went to bed last night, I felt reasonably okay, but when I woke up at 8 am or so I felt horrible and when I managed to get back to sleep and woke up at around 11 am, I felt even worse.

So part of me doesn’t want to go back to sleep in case I wake up feeling even worse.

I am super tired all the time, though, so I kind of doubt that I have a choice in the matter. I will consider myself lucky if I make it to halfway through tonight’s words before having to take a bit of a breather.

I did a stupid today : I skipped lunch. Well, that’s no strictly true.I had two mandarin oranges. which I was delighted to find I could convince my ill body to eat even though I felt quite ill and had a strong anti-appetite.

I guess my body was willing to make an exception for something so obviously packed with Vitamin C.

“Gimmie some of that!” I imagine it saying.

No, YOU’RE crazy.

The weird thing is that underneath all the wretchedness and pain, I feel a tiny little bit of euphoria. I think it must come from my getting punch-drunk from all the pain. Somewhere in my bloodstream, there’s a lot of androphins pumping about, and that gives me a kind of giddy feeling like I am dizzily dancing on the edge of a precipice and high on the adrenaline.

That is something I have been working on lately, by the way. Turning anxiety into excitement. Seeing some large quantity of anxiety coming my way and instead of trying to hide from it. embracing it as a thrill.

It’s potentially quite powerful if I can make it work. Instead of huddling for safety when the anxiety storm comes, I will run out inro the fiercest part of the storm and scream, “Is that all you got? BRING IT MOTHERFUCKER. ”

It’s kind of psycho, but I think it can work. It’s an extension of what I used to call my “kamikaze mode” where something causes me so much anxiety that some kind of surge protector kicks in and suddenly I am all “For the honor of the Emperor!” then throwing myself into the thing wholeheartedly because I just don’t fucking care any more.

It’s a sloppy mode, so it would not work for things where I will need to be precise and on the mark about things. I have found that I can do remarkably well at things despite how giddy and silly I feel, but I would not want to bet my life on it.

It’s a rare mode where I do thing more or less by instinct, I suppose. I am certainly not operating in my usual careful, cautious, clever, and considered mode.

And some exasperated part of me says “For once!”.

My efforts to free myself from the dehumanizing and life-stroying effects of my logic box continue apace. It’s early days yet, but I am definitely learning to be human and a big part of that is accepting my own humanity. Warts and all.

It’s my own form of the ol’ transcendental bullshit. I have spent a long time hiding from reality behind a a layer of cool reflection and an inhuman level of detachment. This let me pretend that I was somehow above all the petty goings on which sadden me so much in the world. Let other people wallow in their jealousies and resentments and social competition. I am Different!

Bull SHIT. The only reason I could convince myself of that was that I am so uninvolved in life that most of the things which would stimulate my reptile brain emotions are completely absent from my life.

And even if I was “different’ that way, who says that’s a good thing? What horrible things did I have to do to myself to get that way? How much of who and what I am had to die in order to maintain the illusion? How much of my humanity did I have to sacrifice?

I cna feel the places where the emotions should be. They feel like the frostbitten and palsied flesh of a fresh stump. I feel a terrible coldness when I try sticking my tonguerin that particular dry socket.

I know that there are things that should be there. Good. living, human, strong emotions unmolested by an ego gone wild weilding a scalpel. These cold empty places fill me with dread as I worry about whether the damage can ever be repaired, or am I doomed to be an emotional amputee all my life.

Maybe those cold areas are my touch of autism and I am no more going to recover from that than a shizophrenic is to make the voice go away forever.

The damage is done. I’m a gimp.

I guess I will just have to learn to live with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.