I was in a good mood. And now I’m not.

I was happily making my lunch, which consisted primarily of toast and my leftover lamb rogan josh from last night’s order from Tandoori King Cafe. I had put the curried lamb dish on a plate and heated it up and was looking after the toast portion of the meal when I accidentally knocked the plate off the counter and SPLUT, there was my beloved curry all over the floor, ruined.

FUCK! I yelled, causing Joe to come out to see what’s up.

So now I am all pissed off at life and myself and I am shadowboxing with my depression, trying to keep it from spiraling out of control.

It’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone. I have to remember that.

And now I find out from Facebook that my friend from back home Philip Bushell is probably not going to live much longer.

This day has taken a sudden and horrific turn.

Phil and I were pretty close a long time ago. He even slept in our storage closet for a while when my brother Dave and I were attending UPEI.

I remember long conversations going into the night in the tiny little common area of our building. He would rehash his relationships as men often do. We would talk philosophy and religion and D&D. He came from a strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing – his parents were good people but extremely narrow minded.

He’s also a Scorpio, of course. I swear I attract Scorpios from strict religious upbringings. It must be my nonthreatening manner and freemindedness.

And the thing is, now I don’t even know what is killing him. That’s how far paart we have drifted. I knew from Facebook that he was in the hospital but somehow I just assumed he would get over whatever it was and things would go back to normal.

But nope, apparently not. Making this the first time in my life that a friend has died, albeit one more from my past than my present.

And I don’t need to know the specific diagnosis to know that it’s probably obesity related. He’s built like me and my brother Dave. Bear shaped. Fat.

So this will at least stiffen my resolve to take care of myself better in the future, as hard as that is going to be. Eat less crap, more decent food. Cut back on the carbs. Try to rescue myself from my diabetes before it turns into a one way ticket to the grave.

Because I don’t want to die. And I sure as hell don’t want to end up in the hospital with tubes going everywhere, confined to a bed, trapped.

I can’t die, I haven’t even lived yet!

Guess I should get around to having a life, then. I keep putting it off. It’s so hard to even imagine myself being free and healthy and enjoying life rather than just enduring it.

There has to be a way I can be free.

But first, I have to be a lot less sick.

More after the break.

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Okay, scary dark confession time.

There is still a part of me that does want to die. It’s still there and it still craves the sweet release of death and there is nothing I can do to make it go away.

That doesn’t mean I am suicidal. I am not suicidal. Haven’t been in a long time. All the routes between my desire for death and actually harming myself were severed long ago and have withered up and died since then.

But the desire is still there. And for it, death is the ultimate in escapism. To die is to truly, totally, and finally get away from it all. To die would mean to never, ever have to deal with anything ever again.

And that sounds pretty good to a very sick part of me. The weak part, the escape artist, the swift-footed eluder, the maniac cackling at the graveside. The kamikaze lunatic who, with the bright and shining eyes of the truly mad, would ride a busload of dynamite into the gates of hell just to make a point.

The part of me that really, really identified with The Joker. And Hannibal Lecter.

The part of me that is perfectly fine with my doing absolutely nothing to improve my health until I end up in the hospital again, because then the choice is taken away from me. I won’t have to decide to act. I won’t need the willpower to change,. I won’t have to sacrifice anything.

All those maddening options will be blissfully taken away from me, and I will return to a world where all I have to do is do what I am told and thereby please my caretakers.

And no doubt I will be a model patient, and get better, and get out of the hospital, and be smart and healthy for a while, but then go right back to my old ways the minute it feels like nobody is watching any more.

To that very, very sick part of my mind, getting run over by the oncoming train is preferable than having to choose when and how to move.

Now just how many kinds of fucked up is THAT?

All of them, I think. The entire alphabet of neurosis, from Anxiety to Zenophobia. ^[1]

And I don’t know why I have this powerful fear of decisions. It’s certainly not a question with a simple, straightforward answer. The answer lies somewhere deep into the Evil Kirk side of human nature where some savage instinct is needed in order to actually make decisions and without it, I am mist and mush and barely even there.

All I know is that I need to overcome this “freeze long enough and the decision will be taken out of your hands” bullshit if I want to save my own life.

And I do want to save my own life.

For the most part, anyway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And this self-destructuve