Last night, I was very sick.

Felt like an alien creature made of thick black smoke had crawled into my body through my pores and was slowly murdering me.

My energy level was catastrophically low. My mind was battered, tattered, and scattered. I felt like there was a blast furnace in my inner abdomen. And my head was pounding with the sort of pain that obliterates reason.

I couldn’t concentrate well enough to play Skyrim or do Facebook stuff. So I tried lying down for a while. But the malaise was making me restless and the headache was making me cranky so, despite how tired I was, I couldn’t escape into sleep.

And then…I had some kind of attack.

I felt like I was smothering. I could feel the air moving in an out of my lungs, but it might as well have been chocolate pudding for all the oxygen I was getting out of it. My lung hurt and things started to blur.

Luckily, it was over before I could truly start to panic. I sat up and that made things better. Then I got out of bed and sat in front of the computer and that made me feel a whole lot better.

And doing my little breathing exercise where I push as much air out of my lungs as I possibly can in one long exhalation helped a whole lot more.

I seriously felt like I had just barely survived an assassination attempt.

Guess I don’t want to die after all.

At least, not if it’s going to hurt.

Just thinking about the incident is freaking me out. So let’s switch over to the comfortably cool detached world of science.

My theory for a long time has been that somehow. when I exhale, I don’t quite get the job done. Some CO2 remains in my lungs. Over time, this builds up.

When I was younger and healthier, this manifested harmlessly as the occasional deep sigh. Well, harmlessly for me, anyhow.

If my mom was in the room, she would worriedly ask me what was wrong. Because from her POV, I just heaved a deep, heartfelt sigh of trembling despair.

Sorry Mom. It’s just part of how I breathe, apparently.

So I figure that what happened was that this CO2 buildup reached critical levels. And this had something to do with the fact that I was lying down. Like in the prone position the CO2 pools in my lungs more easily.

So when I sat up. the CO2 moved to the bottom of my lungs and I could get good air via the now cleared top part of my lungs.

Manual exhalation took care of the rest.

Right now, I dunno what to do with this information. Tell my doctor, I suppose. See if he knows of a way to learn to exhale better.

I feel like my heavy gut is involved somehow. Like it pulls on my lungs so that it weighs down every breath I take, and that keeps me from getting all the bad air out.

Would explain the sleep apnea too.

Now I need to go lose myself in Skyrim till I calm down.

More after the break.

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The edge of annihilation

I looked at the last line of Part 1 and, at first, i thought “Calm down from what?”.

So I guess it worked. I went through my freaking out period and now my personality uncanny ability to get back on its feet and keep going has kicked in and convinced me that everything has gone back to normal.

It hasn’t, of course. I am as overheated and tired and dizzy as ever. The Demon Nipple is still there and being a Cronenbergian nightmare.

Don’t worry, I’ve promised myself that if it starts to moan, weep, chant, or speak backward Latin, I’m dialing 911.

So far, the heavy dose of Sulfatrim^[1] I am taking is not producing any side effects that I know of. That’s how it tends to be with me. On the one hand, I have IBS and a rather fussy digestive system.

On the other hand, I almost never get side effects from meds. Go fig,

Well I’ve dicked around enough. Time to justify that title.

Never in my life have I feared for the future as much as I am right now.

Things are getting worse. The climate continues to heat up. California is an inferno and the rest of the West Coast isn’t doing much better. Various completely predictable effects of global warming rock the world 24/7. At the same time, the sociopolitical equivalent of global warming continues to add energy to the zeitgeist, raising people’s ire and shortening their tempers and making us, as a species, a time bomb.

And I am no longer able to avoid thinking : these could be the last of the Good Times.

Because that’s how we’ll refer to these golden days of unprecedented peace and prosperity on Planet Earth once everything goes all to hell. When global warming destroy so much of the world’s food-growing capacity that real scarcity kicks in and people start losing their minds out of uncertainty and fear.

When the very foundations of modern life like firefighting and the police and especially public utilities like water and electricity start to break down from the strain.

They were not designed to handle bullshit like this.

When people, en masse, start losing faith in the forces of civilization to the point of banding together with people they already know and establishing tiny fiefdoms.

When all of us alive today who survive will be called upon to justify our standing idly by while the world burns because 20 billionaires didn’t feel like sharing?

That’s the future nightmare I envision. Everything gone to shit. A shattering of the stability and safety and security of modern life that we never appreciated until it was far too late for us to save it.

Some day, this will be known as the Final Golden Age.

Future humans will revile every single fucking one of us for not being willing to sacrifice literally anything to save the world.

And that’s really starting to bug me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.