Or, translated from Vulpine, “Fuck off, world!”.

Don’t mind me, I am just in a crappy mood. Not for any particular reason that I Can think of, mind you, just a lot of small frustrations building up into a big ball of angrily nihilistic grunge style passive aggressive rage.

Plus today is my first day on generic Loratadine instead of my usual Reactine Complete. I have switched (with Julian’s help) as a cost cutting measure because the generic stuff is like half the price of the Reactine.

But that does mean I Am doing without the other half of Reactine Complete, which is the pseudo-epinephrine, which is a nasal decongestant.

In theory, if the antihistamine is keeping me from sneezing, I won’t need a nasal decongestant, but we shall see.

Call it a pilot program. If I am not happy with the result, I will bite the bullet and shell out the extra money for the Reactine.

I do feel like part of my crap mood is a general and diffuse inflamed feeling, like my body is annoyed with me but refuses to tell me why.

My relationship with my body is… complicated.

Plus I just don’t seem to have a lot of words in me right now.

I blame the sunshine. It’s a lovely, summer-type day out today, and that has switched me into Summer Mode, which tends to make me feel lazy and self-indulgent and disinclined to focus down and think about deep stuff.

And that’s more or less what I do here. Talk about deep stuff.

Ot just rattle on about my inane life. Either/or.

Been playing Dragon Age : Origins, which as the name implies is the first Dragon Age games, and quite honestly the best one.

Sad but true.

It’s a great game but I am beginning to remember large swathes of the plot as I play, so it is possible that this playthrough will not last that long.

Oh well. The first time I installed it, I played through like eight to ten times, so I have definitely gotten my money’s worth from the game already

I feel a little ripped off, though, because I was really hoping that it had been long enough since I had played it that the game would seem new-ish.

But I guess when you play through an entire game eight to ten times, it ends up locked away in your memory more or less forever.

It was funny, though, how before I installed the game, I remembered almost none of it. Hence my feeling like it would seem brand new to me.

But the moment I had gone through the opening cutscene and made my character, it all started coming back to me in big, meaty chunks.

That’ just how my mind works, I guess. Ask me to tell you everything I remember about a movie or TV episode I have seen and I will draw a total blank except for maybe a few key moments or bits of dialogue.

But once I start watching it again, it will come back to me.

I think my memory is very much optimized towards specific queries. And part of why I was always so oood at school was that I got as much information out of the question itself that I possibly could.

Which is great for an exam or Trivia Night but not so much for open ended questions.

I mean, in my school days, I could still answers those, “Name three things about X” questions, but it was uncomfortable and awkward because my brain does not go in that direction of its own accord.

Anyhow, as fascinating as that isn’t, I am gonna go lay down now

More after the break.

Grr, bark, etc.

Still not feeling great.

Woke up from a nap when my alarm went off at around 8 pm. Time to go eat and blog. Problem was, I needed to poop.

Got that done, and found that process had upset my digestive system enough that I no longer had any appetite so supper was kind of off.

So now I am sitting here munching trail mix and drinking water as I type my words for the day out for you lovely people.

And feeling, in general, curmudgeonly. Cranky. Makes me wish I had a lawn so I could yell at some kids to get off it.

This one’s for you, Mister Clarke, my neighbor from around the block, who used to yell at me and the other neighborhood kids to get off HIS lawn.

I get it now. Mister Clarke. I really do.

Really. “get off my lawn” is just the urban version of “get off my land”. Either way, you are defending your territory from interlopers in a way that must hearken back to the days of almost universal agriculture.

Hunter-gatherers don’t need to defend their territories, just their tribes. Their peoples’ prosperity was not tried to how much land their could control.

But once we settled down and built farms, shit got real. And suddenly the idea of ownership of land and other goods came along to replace primitive ownership which says you only own that which you are defending this very minute.

Then again, even non-human animals can have territories for the express purpose of controlling the most important ancient resource of them all : pussy.

Maybe on some deep deep level, the old man chasing kids off his lawn is merely re-enacting the ancient drama of chasing away young rival males who are trying to mate with your females.

But whatever. I do go on and on, don’t I?

I am sure I will get over my pissy mood sooner or later. Nothing lasts forever, not even the bas stuff. And who knows, maybe I will get something useful done in the meantime.

Heck, my birthday is in 11 days and I still have no idea what I want.

Maybe I will buy myself a new game, or… something.

I imagine I will work it out in this space sometimes soon. Until then…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I love this little thowaway sketch from the Kids in the Hall :

It’s not one of their top skits. It’s more or less a, “yup, that’s the premise” skit.

But I love it because I identify with it. Not that I have ever been afflicted with sarcasm that I can’t turn off, but that could still be me because it is only through iron self-control and discretion that I avoid being that guy.

Because I have a strong urge to lash out verbally. It is something I have noticed about myself and something I know I really have to watch out for sure I ever get into a more intimate relationship because I can totally imagine myself, in the heat of the moment, saying the sort of thing that destroys relationships forever.

The kind of thing that you can’t walk back. And apologizing can’t fix it because the damage is already done. Having a rapier wit is a great thing if you’re writing desk jokes for Colbert but a lot less good when you can “nail” someone you love right between the eyes with a remark so cutting that it cuts right into their heart.

It gives me great power. And thus, like Uncle Ben said, great responsibility.

And I did not learn this lesson in a vacuum. There was a period of my life, in my late teens and early twenties, where I was in danger of going in a very neckbeard kind of direction where I was really reveling in my newfound verbal might and starting to feel like if people couldn’t keep up with me in conversation, too bad, so sad, but I am going to keep “being me” so you can suck my dust, losers.

In my very partial defense, I had felt extremely powerless for most of my life and I was emerging from the shadow of teenage depression when I went to UPEI and discovered that in this tiny pond, I was a pretty damned big fish.

So I was definitely heading in a bad direction. But then, one memorable day, TWO of my philosophy professors, completely independently of one another, pulled me aside to talk about how I was dominating classroom discussion and denying the quieter students a chance to speak and generally being a giant dillhole.

My words, not theirs.

And if it had been just one of them, I might not have learned my lesson. Or if I had, I would have learned it in a really half-assed, “oh well, I guess to be a nice guy I should let the peasants speak” kind of way.

But when the second professor started giving me a remarkably similar lecture on the exact same subject, I was like, “OK, I get it, I really have been being a verbal bully and throwing my considerable weight around and I need to change that. ”

It helped that the second professor was Professor Koch, a super sweet and sensitive Seventies kind of guy who was clearly nervous to be telling me all this but was doing it because he was sticking up for the meeker students.

It made him practically their poster boy. His words went straight to my heart. I have always been very open to appeals to empathy and consideration.

I’m a liberal, after all.

So I reformed myself. But that sarcastic prick is still there inside me, ready to lash out, and arguably is only kept in check because my sad isolated life makes sure I am never “pushed” particularly hard.

Romance or even just dating might change all that.

And I am afraid of what I might say.

More after the break.

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Getting out of here

Lately I have been wrestling with an old foe or not, namely how to focus on things and get them done without it turning into a form of pressure on myself that I then avoid.

I know the answer : it has to come from my own intrinsic internal motivations and not from some idea of what I “should” do then being imposed upon me by my highly untrustworthy ego and superego.

But I keep falling back into the old pattern anyway because it’s easier. Making brand new neural pathways is hard, especially at my age.

Falling back into the old ones, no matter how horrible there are, is always going to be easier, and the forces of evil in my bran know this.

And the bad guys in my head are so good at keeping me in check. No matter what move I make or try to make, they negate with the opposite move, and as a result, I never get anywhere.

Especially if it’s negative. My brain is way better at killing positives with negatives than it has ever been at killing negatives with positives.

It’s very biased that way. The negatives pretty much run the show.

A related issue is whether or not to view my situation as a crisis.

On the one hand, crises can motivate people into action. And to a certain part of me, it feels like nothing short of freaking out can break the deadly stalemate I am in.

I sure as fuck can’t do it myself.

But the problem with crisis motivation is that if it DOES NOT clear the blockages inside me, all that motivational pressure has nowhere to go and I end up anxious in an extremely non-productive way.

So take it easy and be mellow, right? Maybe. Probably, even.

Assuming I can do that. And I am not sure that I can. I might be too damned high strung for any passive kind of mellowness to take hold.

What I need is some way to express all these high voltage energies that is productive or at the very least harmless so I can get on with life.

But getting things flowing in the right direction is incredibly hard to do when so much of me is crosswired , backed up, clogged, misdirected, and ultimately self-defeating.

I am slowly working my way out of this straightjacket, but it takes so much time and energy to make even the tiniest bit of progress that it is easy to feel discouraged.

But there is no stopping me now. The processes already in motion cannot be stopped, and they will grind inexorably onwards no matter what.

And someday, I will be a real person.

Until then, I will, alas, remain dormant.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Could not make myself make the phone call to maybe get the ball rolling on a new pair of glasses for myself today.

I guess I still have some denial about the whole thing left after all. I don’t want to face the reality of my eyes going wonky on me and so I drag my feet and tell myself it’s really not all that bad and so forth.

Plus there is my usual problem with actually deciding to do things to contend with. Merely activating is often the hardest part for me due to how much the depression makes me inherently resist action.

I know damned well that I am happiest when I am busy and engaged. And yet I linger in my twilit realm of video games and sleep because taking any other kind of action meas increasing my stimulus level and I am so god damned afraid of that.

Not for any easily understood reason, of course. It’s more a matter of a murky response to my own anxiety issues. The solution my psyche for that is to make me afraid of anything that might trigger a panic attack by initiating an adrenaline response.

And when you have lived at the bottom of Stimulus Hill for as long as I have, practically anything at all part from my sad, narrow existence means a higher stimulus level.

Especially calling up a stranger and asking for something… like an appointment. Sigh.

I will get there. I have to. Things are getting way too squinty for comfort in my sad little life. I just reinstalled the first Dragon Age game, Dragon Age : Origins, which is an amazingly good game, and found out that I could not read much of the text in the game at all. Which made character creation tricky.

Luckily moving my face closer to the monitor more or less worked. For now. As did dropping the screen resolution a notch.

Might have to go down another notch before I’m done. Which is brutally ironic given all the time and money I put into upgrading this dang PC.

In fact, given that the only modern game I have, Baldur’s Gate 3,. kept crashing, I have honestly not seen much of an improvement in my gaming at all.

Oh well, at least Windows runs faster. So, yay for that, I guess.

Perhaps I will get that new power supply soon. Hopefully that will fix my problem with my fancy graphics card just conking out sometimes.

Or I could just get Spuug to uninstall the damned thing. Sure, maybe my graphics would be a lot shittier without it, but at least they would run.

Instead, I have been playing super ancient games that played just fine before I got the GPU, ironically enough.

Whatever, It will all work out somehow, even if I have to force it.

Oh, and I keep forgetting to ask Julian to buy my antihistamines They are a $30-$40 per month expense for me now.

Was awfully nice of Joe to pay for that for me for all those years. I miss him so much. He was my rock, my anchor, my reality intercessor for so long.

For jnw, though, it’s just Julian and me. Joe is a full time cancer patient now and I worry about him all the time, but I have faith and confidence that he will beat the cancer and come back to us.

And until then, Julian and I will get by somehow. I am actually a very competent and capable person when I let myself be.

I should take over as like, head administrator of the household. Would make me feel better about my life, at least.

More after the break.

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I can’t stand this life any more

Don’t mind me, I am just feeling overcome with disgust for my situation.

I live in filth because I cannot make myself clean. Everywhere you look, there is garbage and fruit peels and empty soda cans and various scraps of paper and, of course, a thriving ecosystem of insects that live off my awful heap of offal.

And all I do all day is wallow in my own stink. I haven’t had a shower in literal years. Most of the time I am lounging around naked because I never have enough clean clothes to get dressed every day, like I sometimes did when Joe was around. My bed has no sheet, just a mattress cover which, like the comforter that is my only blanket, has probably absorbed enough of my sweat and skin cells by now to be legally considered a clone in some jurisdictions.

And what is my usual response to all this? To just stay withdrawn from reality super hard so that most of the time I don’t notice it. I just stay absorbed into my screens, which is a truly elegant form of self-destruction because it it both the solution to and cause of all my problems.

Just like all addictions, really. You use the addiction to escape the problems caused by the addiction, and that’s a cycle that can’t be stopped until you decide to withdraw from the addiction and suffer the consequences.

Luckily, video games have no physical withdrawal symptoms. So carving out an hour a day where I do something productive would not cause me to go through the DT’s, the shakes, or a lot of group therapy in rehab.

Forced group therapy would not go well with me. My rage would come out. I would probably end up being quite the “problem” prisoner.

Anyhow, my point was that my like literally and figuratively stinks, I am rotting from the inside, my environment is terrible, and the only one who can fix it is me.

Hopefully, if I keep coming back to this disgust and frustration with my life, at some point it will overcome all my inner resistance long enough for me to do something to actually make my life situation better.

Aaaaany day now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And not the kind that leads to something fun.

For some reason, sitting in front of this a-here computer has started to cause me a lot of pain in the literal ass.

It makes my butt hurt, in other words.

Naturally, this is a serious problem because sitting in front of this computer is kind of what I do all day (that, and lying in bed using the tablet) , ergo and therefore having this pain in my dirriere puts a rather severe crimp in my lifestyle.

Such as it is.

I mean, not only does it severely limit how long I can stay on the computer, it’s kind of hard to concentrate on the game I am playing when my butt feels like a hungry bear is trying to tear it off of me.

Again, not in a way that leads to fun.

Leaning forward helps some because it takes some of the weight off my poor abused tuckus and onto my equally hard done by legs.

And I still have the inflateable donut shaped support thingy that Joe bought for me the last time I had this problem.

Because this has happened before. And I have no idea what I did to make it go away for all the years in between then and now.

But what I really want to know is, what the hell changed? What made me go from being able to sit comfortably to feeling like my hips suddenly decided to carve through my gluteus maximus (and my gluteus is VERY maximus) and make contact with the chair directly, cutting out the middleman?

I mean, I haven’t injured myself lately. I have taken no falls and had no big weird infections and I sleep on my front or side so there is no chance I “slept on it funny”.

As for a more intimate kind of butthurt, in that case thee pain would be, shall we say, more centrally located.

In my butthole!

Besides, its main malady is malnourishment.

So I have no idea what the fuck could have gone wrong four or five days ago to cause this thing to rear (pun intended) its ugly head.

I guess my body doesn’t need a reason to fuck up. Especially if it has anything to do with my muscles. My as yet unknown condition can strike anywhere.

Other than the donut (the only kind I can have, sadly), I am not sure what I can do about this problem. I could try putting a pillow between me and my chair but I have found in the past that this leads to me having back pain from typing and using the mouse at a weird angle.

I could take it to the doctor, of course. I will do that if it keeps hanging on. The pain has been around for three or four days now so another couple of days of trouble with my big pink bum and I will decide it’s here to say and take it to Doctor Chao.

No way I am going to take this to the ER or urgent care. Not only is it not all that urgent (yet), but I don’t want to tell strangers they need to look at my butt.

I mean, I am sure everyone would be all professional about it, but it would still be embarrassing. And potentially arousing, depending on the doctor, which would itself be pretty damned embarrassing.

“Um, ignore that, doc. He’s just… happy to be here. ”

Hopefully, like so many other bits of mdical weirdness, it will vanish as swiftly and inexplicably as it appeared.

And I will resume my life of being terminally online.

More after the break.

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The eyes have it

Well, mine don’t.

I’ve needed to talk about this for days and days now but I kept putting it off out of denial about what was going on and the fear attached to it.

But the truth is, my eyesight has gotten worse recently. I am having one hell of a time reading text on screens, which is kind of a big deal.

Especially when, as I hace been doing lately, I am reading comics online. I have been going through another phase of reading gay furry smut comics and it is getting hard for me to read the text balloons.

Luckily I remembered that I installed a magnifier doohickey in my Chrome a long time ago so I can magnify things now.

But that’s a stopgap solution at best and I clearly need to get my eyes in front of an optometrist ASAP so I can get a stronger prescription for my glasses and mybe actually get to see properly again.

That would be nice. Even before the recent worsening, I was stuck with glasses that made me farsighted because when Doctor Vaezi asked me how far away from the screen I sit, I guessed wrong, so mosf of the time I don’t wear the damned things.

Would be nice to be a full time glasses wearer who can actually see stuff properly again. like I have been for most of my life.

I was in denial about it because I had to wade through a whole lot of panicked thinking along the lines of, “oh god, this is it, I’m going blind! ” before I could finally make it to the saner solid ground of, “No, I am just overdue for new glasses. ”

I am beginning to understand that there will be times when the panic cannot be avoided and my best bet is to simply keep on slogging my way through it till it’s over

Obviously, I’d rather avoid the panic entirely. But it happens too fast. By the time I realize there’s a problem, it’s too late, the adrenaline and cortisol are coursing through my veins and now I have to deal with it.

So then what? I figure that, just as I learned to accept that I am a worrier by nature so there is no point in trying not to worry, I think I need to learn to accept that I am a high strung intellectual artistic type who is excitable and effusive and not nearly as introverted as I once thought, and that comes with a certain degree of panic.

So why try to fight it?

Let the freakout happen, then pick up the pieces after.

I’ll be a much better off in the long run.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. It’s going to be one of THOSE blog entries. The ones where I am almost unnaturally candid about something intensely intimate and personal in a way that is both offputting and oddly charming.

Well they say that raw, earnest truth is all the rage with the kids these days and it doesn’t get much more unfiltered than talking about how infrequently you get to actually ejaculate when you jack off.

It’s a serious problem. I’m all backed up. I got cum in my balls that date back to before the pandemic, for Christ’s sake.

Well I warned ya Candid.

Anyhow, it’s cum to my attention (ha ha) that the main reason I don’t get my happy squirting time very often is that I jerk off too damned much.

I have to let my poor bait n’ tackle rest up and regenerate if I want to be able to reach blastoff more than once a month.

And the thing is, I used to know this, sort of. In an earlier phase of my experience with antidepressants, my libido was quite sleepy. So only tooting my own horn every other week or so was no big deal.

That was roughly how often I craved it. Fair enough.

And if I got the urge sooner than that, it was no big deal to say, “Meh, not yet” to myself.

But over time, my horniness started waking up. I re-connected with my sexual self, at least to the point of wanting to whack it more often, and that, I think, opened the door to gradually becoming someone who masturbated many times a day.

I mean, what the hell. It’s fun, it feels good, and it even counts are cardio.

The problem, of course, is that I am fifty, not twenty. My intimate equipment can’t do what it did back then. But I hvave gotten into the habit of pleasuring myself as often as I did when I was a horny young man discovering FurryMUCK way back when

I guess it’s kind of like my video game addiction. I began to lean on diddling myself as one of my primary forms of diversion and ended up turning it into something that arguably was doing more harm than good.

Shame on me for my decadence! Tsk tsk tsk.

II discovered all this via challenging myself to go without the solitary vice from around 2 am last night to noo today.

So roughly ten hours without waxing my tadpole(s).

I figured this would be no big deal. Oh, how wrong I was! I didn’t go an hour without getting the urge to jerk the gherkin. And by the time I got up at 9 am for breakfast, it was getting hard (so to speak) to keep my hands off myself.

So what started as a simple scientific attempt to see if abstaining boosted my odds of a happy ending ended up illuminating a whole lot more.

So now I have to face a choice : keep going the way I have been going and accept that spilling my seed won’t happen very often, or cut back on the erogenous activity in hopes of actually getting to empty my balls some day.

AS is standard for me, I will probably come down somewhere in between. I will cut back some, but the truth is that there’s entire galaxies of delightful pornography waiting for me out there and exploring that world is just too much fun to slow it down too much.

Plus my lust is arguably the most intimately alive part of me. It keeps my flame of passion burning and even leaves me yearning for a partner, which would be objectively a way better way to express my wild oats.

Not that there’s anything wrong with waxing your own carrot. But I am long, long, LONG overdue to start exploring the world of sex with OTHER PEOPLE.

I mean, most people do that in either their teens or early 20’s.

I’m a little late.

Granted, my physical limitations and the post-apocalyptic state of this bedroom of mine make it kind of tricky to start hooking up with dudes via Grindr.

But I swear to Dog, I will get there somehow, and finally sow around 25 years’ worth of some very, very wild oats

More after the break.

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A video interlude

So simple and so funny.

---

Don’t be gay, Fru

I probably should not be introducing something this big this late, but whatever. I don’t want to wait till tomorrow. If I do, I will forget it or chicken out.

For all of my adult life there has been this fragment of iconflict and doubt regarding my sexuality. Sometimes. when I am jacking it the kind of gay furry porn I like, or otherwise dealing directly with my homosexuality, part of me will pull back in horror and alarm and disgust and with that comes a terrible feeling that this is wrong.

And I panic and freak out somewhat, and then of course I experience intense inner conflict because it’s not like this thought suddenly makes me heterosexual.

So if neither peepee or hooha are an option, that would leave me with….nothing.

And I am definitely NOT asexual.

The feeling passes and I go on with my life, having buried the thought deep with in my mind against, because… yeah, that’s a great idea.

But just today I have been feeling it very intensely and it’s caused me to want to bring it out and examine it and stay with the feeling until it resolves itself.

So, what the fuck it up with that?

The obvious answer would be internalized homophobia. Sure, I was not raised to be homophobic nor have I ever been homophobic in my life – I learned tolerance from Normal Lear vefore I even had a sexuality – I was still raised in a homophobic culture and I will not pretend that hasno effect on me because I am ever so enlightened.

But I think there is more to it than that we me personally. Like ot or very, very much not, my life has been defined by an act of homosexual rape when I was only 4.

And I think that both “made me gay” (probably) and made me, on some deep subterranean level of my prerational consciousness, made me via adult male homosexuality as a threat.

Hence this strange thought making me panic and want to flee. The feeling of threat is intense and palpable. And it is most definitely something that arises from the very deepest pits of my primordial subconscious, which… tracks.

And that’s why I decided that I needed to write about it. It’s the sort of thing that melts away when exposed to the light, and I am determined to resolve this issue so I can clear my mind to be the happy homo I have always pretended to be.

And who knows, maybe this will fix my RL sexuality issues too.

But those are for another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry, but that song has been stuck in MY head all day, so obviously, the only solution was tto stick it in yours.

Anyhow, on to the reportage.

---

Did the ol, Wound Care thing this morning. 10 am appointment, which is fine.

Any earlier than that, I get a little cranky.

My nurse was interesting. She came across as a total bimb at first, which made me nervous, but she was a pro and knew what she was doing.

Just maybe a tiny bit ditzy around the edges.

In my defense, the last bimbo type nurse I encountered was that brain case who fucked up inerting my IV over and over again, to the point where she worse out my considerable patience and forbearance and I ended up roaring at her.

Probably scared the poor girl shitless but there’s only so much stabbing (and then wiggling the needle around) a fella can take.

You gotta know when you’re in over your head, toots.

Anyhow, usually the setup is that I sit down on the exam table and put my foot up on a stool (of medicine!)) and we go from there.

But this lady suggested I lay down on said exam table and she could work on my feet with me in a much more relaxed position.

And I thought, that sounds interesting, so we tried it.

And I loved it! It was way more comfortable than the usual way. For both of us, I think, because she could raise the exam table to a level where my feet were easy to reach.

So I think I am going to suggest that from now on. It was so much better!

---

Also had a chat over the phone with Doctor Chao. Told him about my crippling back pain earlier in the week, which I am glad to say has mostly disappeared.

It’s still there, but it’s only mildly uncomfortable now I can feel the stiffness in that area of my back (roughly the middle) when I stand up or lean over, but compared to the brutal grinding agony I felt earlier in this week, it’s nothing.

I did some stretching and I think that helped. And with back pain and me, the idea that the source is ultimately digestive is always in play, although that usual causes back pain way further down my body, in the lumbar region.

But Doc Chao suggested it could also be some kind of inflammation, and if so, I dunno WTF. I can’t think of any particular trigger for inflammation in my diet recently.

There’s always rogue infections, I guess.

I am going to keep an eye on the situation and see if it gets worse again. The fact that it’s still there, lurking, makes me nervous. It could flare up again and this time, I think I would have to take it to the ER.

Oh, or Urgent Care if it happens to happen between 9 am and 10 am. Pff.

I dunno, maybe things are less insane over there now that the second Urgent Care place has opened in the east side of Richmond.

All I know is that the place over on 3 Road has severely unimpressed me and it will take some time and some reliable testimony to the contrary before I will trust it again.

Especially since, as sad as this is, the ER at Richmond Hospital is now comfortably familiar to me.

Over the last couple years, it’s practically become a second home to me.

If things get worse, I will start to know the staff there on a first name basis.

I already recognize some of them from other visits when I am there.

It’s only a matter of time.

---

This makes me so happy

Every time I watch it, I feel better about life.

The former gifted child

I love this lady’s work.

I was a gifted child – now a gifted adult – but hers is a keener story and I was a coaster.

Keeners work hard, get great grades, go on to great success.

Coasters like me did absolutely no work, coasted by on natural intellect, and end up crashing and burning.

I oversimplify, of course. A lot of keeners crash and burn due to the goddamned stress, too. Some of my former keener classmates went that way.

And that makes me sad.

But I have always wished we had some kind of testing like the GCSEs or the SATs here in Canada because I would have done amazingly well on them and would then have had official proof of just how god damned smart I am.

A selfish desire, granted. Would have been good for me but not so good for the majority of other folks. I would imagine.

My sister Catherine is more like the lady who does those videos. A hyper competitive keener haunted by a fear of failure so intense it would cause her to have huge emotional breakdowns on a regular basis when she was in college.

Her marks were better than mine. But at what cost?

But now she’s way up in the hierarchy of Statistics Canada and jets around the world to hobnob with the hoi polloi and live in Washington DC in a really swank neighborhood and basically be mega successful.

So I guess it all worked out for her.

But I still don’t know if it was worth it. What she went through to get there scared the hell out of me and made me terribly worried about her for more than a decade.

I worried that one day we would get a phone call telling us that she had suffered a total breakdown and was in a psych ward somewhere.

I can’t imagine having that kind of “ambition”. Even at my most smug and arrogant, I would still have taken my good marks for granted because it cost me so little effort to get them. All I had to do is show up.

If someone had told me that I was supposed to be getting scholarships and such, I would have gone for it.

But nobody told me jack shit about anything. I grew up with no expectations of me of any sort at all.

They would have to notice me and think about me and care about me for that.

So I just did whatever was easiest, and coasted.

Now I wish I had tried harder purely to prove how smart I am. That is the sort of motivation I can get behind.

50 years old and only now do I realize I crave excellence.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Bonus content! Extra story!

So I get this phone call this morning telling me that I had apparently missed my appointment with a urologist at VGH.

First I’d heard of it. Last thing I remember was the ER doc telling me that he was referring me to a urologist after my last “peeing blood” incident. In early March.

Maybe they called and told me, maybe not. Either way, it never ended up on the calendar so we were not there.

Then the secretary starts going into this spiel about how they have a no show fee of $100 that I will have to pay before the doctor will agree to…

And I interrupt her right there to say, “Then you will never see me again. ”

This completely catches her off guard. She tries to resume her spiel and I interrupt against and tell her that I am on a fixed income and can’t pay the fee.

She rallies and goes into the spiel again, and this time I let her rattle on til she reaches a natural stopping point, then say, “Then I’m a ghost. I’m a shadow. I’m gone. ” and hung up on her.

They’ve tried to pull this shit on me before and my response was the same, although I am quite proud of how assertively I handled it today.

And what I realized afterwards is that if they had not brought up that bullshit fee, the doctor would have gotten my business anyhow, but now he gets jack shit.

Nice policy ya got there, doc!

I guess most people don’t realize they have a choice or feel so guilty about missing the appointment that they pay up to atone.

But I live on around $1350/month. Ergo $100 is around 7.5 percent of my monthly income. That would be like a regular, employed person losing 7.5 percent off of TWO of their paychecks, at least.

And they don’t live in nearly as narrow a margin as I do.

So fuck them. I’m a ghost. I’m vision, I’m the shadow of smoke.

And fuck YOU.

This has been today’s bonus content.

Why do I keep playing Daggerfall?

It’s not much of a game. You get quests, go to dungeons, fight monsters, then go turn the quest in.

And most of the time the goddamned quests are broken! As in, cannot actually be completed by my character, and I end up having to use console commands in order to finish the damned things.

Like the latest one I did. I went all over that dungeon looking for the Nyah-Nyah of power or whatever. No dice.

So finally I use a command to just teleport me to where it is. And I immediately see what the problem is : in order to get there, I would have had to swim underwater down a very long corridor and my character could not hold his breath that long.

Oh wait, you didn’t put a bunch of points in Endurance? Sorry, it is literally impossible for you to finish this quest.

Not that we told you that or anything. Would have been nice to know that BEFORE I spent all that time killing harpies and giants for nothing.

Another time the McGuffin was behind a locked door, and there was no key lying around or anything. Oh no. So, not a Thief with a high lockpicking skill? Well then fuck you. No quest completion for you!

Yet another time the kid I was supposed to rescue was behind a SECRET door! Apparently I was expected to just stumble across it!

And yet I just keep on playing.

There’s not even much of a plot. Basically, you join a guild, the guild gives you quests, doing the quests advances you in the guild’s rankings, and… that’s it.

Besides the usual levels and treasure, that is. And the treasure is pretty crappy. The same bunch of armor and weapons over and over plus random amounts of gold.

Yippie fucking skippy.

The graphics are also pretty basic, and that’s with them modded up the wazoo. I shudder to think of what the game looks like unmodded.

And yet I seem to be hooked on the damned thing.

Even though I have access to much, much better games, including the later entries in the series like Oblivion, Morrowind, and Skyrim.

No word a lie, I am tempted to install Skyrim yet again. But that way madness lies.

Besides, I could still play the two I have not played, Oblivion and Morrowind. I own them both on Steam. It would be trivial to install one or both, and there are mods a-plenty for both of them out there.

And yet I will probably keep on playing Daggerfall for the time being.

Hell, it even took me making six characters before I made one actually worth playing. All my attempts to make mages were thwarted by the game’s atrocious magic system which makes it so that whn you start out, you can cast a spell twice and then you have to rest up to regen your MP.

That’s not enough spell power to kill anything.

The game was only playable once I made an archer. Sure, arrows are not infinite in supply, but at least I have enough of them to kill things.

Plus in Daggerfall, arrows are apparently indestructible, so you can always retrieve them from the corpses of your victims.

I guess I keep playing because, despite all its shortcomings, that dungeons and quests and leveling RPG thing is still very addictive and it has me hooked.

But I can feel its grip in my overheated brain slackening, so I am confident that the spell will be broken soon enough and then I can go play something from this millennium.

More after the break.

---

So very tired

It’s just occurred to me that I’ve been very tired most of the time lately.

It’s a hard thing to gauge, though, because as long I am active and engaged, say in a video game, I don’t feel tired.

But the moment I stop and disengage, it hits me, sometimes with the force of an avalanche. I get very sleepy and I have to lay down and take a nap even if I don’t want to do so.

That whole, “I should try to stay awake all day and see if it leads to better sleep” idea of mine has never seemed further away.

God, do I miss caffeine.

And yet, the fact that it can seemingly go away when I keep moving makes me wonder what exactly is up.

My fear is that this is a sign that my untreated sleep apnea is getting worse and moving into a more severe stage.

This theory is somewhat bolstered by these attacks of severe yawning I get from time to time. It’s quite strange to yawn so hard it makes your jaw ache.

Just looked it up. Apparently yawning is no longer considered to be caused by a need for an extra dose of oxygen to bring blood oxygen levels back up to normal.

I was just about to type to that effect when I suddenly thought, “wait a minute, I learned about that way, way back when I was a kid…. I better check that out. ”

And unsurprisingly, it’s total crap. Good to know.

I should probably do that more often. There are a lot of very dusty old books in my mental library, I should probably vet their contents more often.

Anyhow, I worry that my sleep apnea is worsening. I have done absolutely nothing to treat it except for very brief flirtings with CPAP, after all, and while sleep apnea itself can’t hurt or maim you, the heart attacks, strokes, and high blood pressure caused by smothering thousands of times a night in your sleep sure as fuck can.

Dunno what I can do about that, though. I keep telling myself that I need to take another, more concerted try to make peace with CPAP but my desperate fear of smothering (ironically caused by the sleep apnea) prevents it.

Even looking at the CPAP machine makes me feel panicky. While also making me feel guilty about how I just plain abandoned it without even telling anyone.

And what does that guilt make me do?

Continue to not think about it while I die, of course!

I am so very fucked.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It had a name. Everything does, after all.

But nobody who worked there used it. It was just some meaningless string of important but vague sounding buzzwords like “experimental” and “multi-phasic” and “dimensional” that the people who worked their heard once during their orientation then promptly forgot all about as they got on with their jobs.

Most of the time, they just called it The Facility.

It was as good a name as any. And nobody wanted to take on the daunting task of trying to encapsulate exactly what they did there in a more fitting title anyhow.

What they did there was The Dreamer.

That was the name given to the bizarre creature – basically a sentient energy field – that lay at the heart of the Facility physically and the heart of everything that went on there on a slightly more metaphorical level.

It had first been discovered Way back in 1956 by a trio of scientists experimenting with novel types of energy fields in order to test the limits of their equipment.

At first it was just some anomalous readings on the extreme end of their instruments. But they were young and playful and energetic so they decided to recalibrate their devices and explore further.

From that point on, their world changed radically on a almost daily basis.

First, by taking detailed measurements of the field densities of the phenomenon, they were able to make the startling deduction that the phenomenon was absolutely massive in size, occupying a roughly spherical section of dense granite at least twenty kilometers in radius deep under Mount Husband in Oregon.

The next revelation came after the first primitive Facility was constructed at the foot of the mountain. Located in a series of aluminum Quonset huts, the living was rugged but the results made everyone involved forget all about their rough living situation.

For one thing, this energy field was clearly alive.

There was no other explanation for how structured and orderly its functions appeared to be. Various forms of energy (mostly EM) flowed around within the bounds of the phenomenon in a way highly analogous to the circulation of fluids in a living creature, and these pulses were far too densely organized to be anything other than information.

So not only was it alive, it had thoughts, or something like them.

The next great revelation should not have come as a surprise to the team of youthful and enthusiastic young scientists, but it did.

Chalk it up to the wide-eyed heedless enthusiasm of the young.

The revelation was that these shifting electromagnetic fields had a profound and at times disastrous effect on the human mind.

At first, it manifested as dreams which rapidly grew in vividness and intensity to the point where they started seeming more real than waking life.

Then the waking hallucinations began, individual and transient at first, but soon becoming brutally strong group visions that caused full, psychotic breaks from reality that could last as long as six hours.

The fact that almost all of them survived this period with their sanity intact was all due to a skeleton crew of engineers who figured out how to shield the scientists from the effects of the phenomenon during their rare islands of lucidity.

This was the impetus for the new, official (but very top secret) Facility, with its state of the art redundant layers of shielding and almost as many layers of security.

After the crisis had passed, more psychologists and parapsychologists were brought on in order to collect as many first hand accounts of these hallucinatory journeys as possible in order to see if there were any patterns to their “trips”.

One soon emerged : all subjects described their experiences as “dreams”. “But, ” they would then add, “not my own dreams”.

The dreams were too alien and alienating to be anything even remotely human, or at least something the human mind could apprehend.

That left only one possibilities : these “dreams” came from the phenomenon itself.

Hence it being dubbed The Dreamer, a name which lasted through the intervening decades, even after the original “dreamers” were long gone.

Thus ends part one of this chronicle. Part two will come when I have the energy.

More after the break.

---

Not so good

Feeling pretty shitty right now. Hoping some hydration will help.

I waoke up from an evening nap when my alarm went off on my tablet at 8:02 pm. And I knew I didn’t feel good but I thought it was just the usual waking up blahs.

Then I ended up sitting on the edge of my bed for what felt like a long time. Pretty sure it was at least twenty minutes, maybe more.

And like I have described in this space before, this is not unheard of for me. I go through periods where I end up stranded on the shore of my reality like that on a fairly regular basis. Nothing specifically wrong but for some reason I can’t motivate myself to get up so I just sit there, in neutral, for a while.

That’s why I didn’t know I was ill until I finally started to get up and felt this enormous heaviness resisting my every move.

Aw shit. That’s not good.

I managed to go get my food and come back, but now I have no appetite. I am hoping the hydration will help with that too because I can’t go skipping meals without a damned good reason, like say, being deathly ill.

And I am maimingly ill at best.

At least I have nowhere to go till Wound Care on Friday. That gives me one and a half days (at present) to get over whatever this is, or end up having to once more cancel a trip to Wound Care due to being too sick to go.

It makes sense to do so but always feels slightly ironic. Too sick to do the health thing.

Well my appetite seems to be waking up, thank Dog. Gonna be weird to blog THEN eat, but what the hell, I will just watch some YouTube.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a telephone chat with Doctor Madhani this afternoon.

Apparently, I got the call because they had a cancellation and thus I was able to talk to my very busy and important neurologist before next Xmas.

To be honest, I had kind of forgotten who even ordered that MRI.

Anyhow, she called to go over the results, and alas, they were not good,

Or bad. Basically, she found nothing that could be causing my issues. Damn it.

So I will continue to fall apart for no apparent reason. Bummer. Neurological causes have been eliminated as have the related myoelectric causes. So we have made a certain amount of progress.

But it was not the diagnosis and treatment I was hoping for.

i shared my thought with her that it was actually some kind of pain disorder. Because you see, when she testing my muscle strength, my muscles were perfectly strong.

Turns out I have been calling it muscle weakness just because I could not think of a better term for what it means when it hurts like hell to put weight on a muscle.

And it certainly feels like my muscles are weak as a result. Certainly, in the runup to my August 22 hospitalization, when I could barely make it around the apartment without my muscles giving out on me and ending up slumping to the floor (all the while in terrible pain) ^[1], muscle weakness seemed to be the problem.

But when not being called upon to bear my enormous weight, the muscles seem to be able to generate power just fine.

So essentially, the problem is very, very weird.

It’s always possible that the whole thing is psychosomatic. It could conceivably be that this whole thing was a result of my subconscious mind making me even more weak and helpless than before as a form of hidden age regression.

But I don’t think so. My pain is very real and it keeps getting worse and I am now more terrified than ever that by the time they figure out what the fuck is wrong with me, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

Wouldn’t that be just fucking ducky.

One bit of good news : Doctor Madhani says that there is nothing indicating that it would be a bad idea for me to exercise.

So I might look into that. I know I will have to overcome a lot of raw internal resistance in order to get something like that moving, but I want to walk again, dammit.

I should also talk to Doctor Chao again about physio. I know I talked to him about it before but I don’t know where we came down on it.

And that’s a whole other story.

Also, if it’s a pain problem, then theoretically stronger pain meds, or just more Gabapentin, might be able to help with the symptoms.

I doubt it. This pain isn’t coming from nowhere. There has to be something seriously wrong with me in order for me to end up like this.

But it’s a thought.

More after the break.

---

Jimmy and Baby

It’s a tad too violent for my tastes, like I said in the comments, but wow, what a rip-roaring ride through Pandemonium! You don’t need to watch the whole thing, just watch a sample to get the gist of what an extraordinary piece of work it is.

If they just replaced the violence with sex, I would be SO into it! 🙂

I mean, it’s Hell! There should be some nudity at least.

YouTube might not like that so much. Damn it.

That’s what Pornhub is for I guess.

It’s such a happy place.

---

A weird space

I’ve been in a weird head space lately.

I guess that’s what happens when you are destroying the machinery and mass that has kept you down for so long. My psyche is undergoing a major restructuring and that is bound to create a weird “in between” mood temporarily.

So I feel like I have been both happier and sadder than ever before lately. On the one hand, I have been very “into” my gaming lately and getting a lot more out of it, and there are periods where instead of merely being too preoccupied to be depressed, I am actually feeling positive and good.

I want more of that.

On the other hand, there are these moments in between activities where the drop in stimulus levels triggers a terrible feeling of depression. Like my whole soul is sagging.

I can power through those pretty easily. But I am beginning to wonder if I should stick with one and see what it is trying to tell me one of these times.

I have done a lot of harm to myself in order to “keep going”. Slowing down and actually dealing with my shit might make for a refreshing change.

And I could finally do some much needed maintenance on myself. I am almost completely ignorant of the very root concepts of self-care. I do not know what to do to make myself feel better, nourish my spirit, or even just relax my bloated body.

I have spent far too long just plain not dealing with things. I am probably still doing it – I will not pretend realizing this makes the problem go away.

It’s a good start. But it’s only a start.

I wish some powerful and wise being from entirely outside myself could come into my life and make me feel safe and calm and teach me how to live.

But I don’t even believe in that kind of thing. No such person exists. I am, as always, completely on my own, without guidance or support.

I guess that’s going to have to be enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

John was amused but not surprised to see that the other members of the Facility’s Executive Committee looked just as haunted and restless as he did.

They had all known one another for years, sometimes even decades. And so as they took their seats around the conference table, complex, meaningful looks passed among them like carrier pigeons, and accomplished much of the committee’s work before anyone had even said anything.

“Now I know what you’re all thinking. ” began Kevin, the current Project Lead, “and I know that you all already know this, but just for the record, let me make this clear : Yes, the Dreamer is waking up. ”

A restrained murmur susurrated through those assembled.

“All the signs our statistical models predicted are present. The entity’s energy fields are increasing in power while decreasing in flux and shrinking in size. The gravitic and temporal anomalies have all but vanished and the entity’s ‘body’ has started to stir in its magnetic bottle. The ‘message’ traffic in its ‘mind’ is already more directed and coherent than we have ever recorded before and they have been following John’s predictions as to their rise in complexity perfectly. There can be no doubt about it. The moment we have, um…. anticipated… all these years is finally coming. The Dreamer will dream no more. May God have mercy on our souls.”

“More to the point, ” said Steven drily, “May the Dreamer have mercy on our souls. And the rest of us as well. “

Aileen laughed indulgently. “Why so worried, Steven? Do you have some reason to think the entity might not be entirely pleased with us?”

Hanford chimed in, “I know that if I woke up after a long nap to find myself with tubes and wires in every orifice and a small apartment built into my ‘brain’, I would not be in a particularly forgiving mood. ”

“Not to mention high definition recordings of all my dreams going back to the 1950s. ” added Sheila with a sigh.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, people. ” warned Kevin. “This entity is a complete unknown. We do not know if it even has anything we would recognize as motivations or desires, let along something as petty as a thirst for revenge. ”

“The thing about aliens… ” said Trevor. “…is that they’re alien.

“Exactly, Trevor. Well put. ” said Kevin with a nod. ”

---

And with that my brain suddenly ran out of gas. Man, this fiction shit is hard.

Don’t worry, I know what else needs to be covered about the Dreamer and I know the basic outline of how the meeting is going to go from here.

What happens after that, not so much. This is a rather big idea I have on my proverbial hook and it is not going to be easy to land.

But I am having fun so far, brain shutdown aside.

I am tempted to just tell you all about what is going to happen next in the story, but if I do that, I will never actually write the damned thing.

All my impetus to create must go into the actual creation of the thing or I lose all motivation. That’s why I can’t make notes or an outline beforehand.

If I wrote notes or an outline, then the idea would be out of my head and I would never want to see it again, much less stick with it long enough to get it written down properly.

I can’t justify or explain why that is. It’s just the way my particular muse works. And if you want to excel at your art, you do whatever it takes to get your muse to cooperate.

Happy muse, happy life.

Now to let the little grey cells rest.

More after the break.

---

Writing versus blogging

I mean, obviously, blogging IS writing. But you get the idea.

Writing fiction is so much harder. There is so much that you have to imagine. When I am blogging like I am doing now, all I have to do is express my thoughts in words.

That’s way easier for someone whose head is always teeming with words like me.

Too bad I can’t just blog for a living. That would be the sweet life. Just doing like I do but making a comfortably middle class income doing it.

That’s not impossible, of course, but it’s not bloody likely.

For one thing, people don’t read blogs as much as they used to. Back in The Day, when the Earth was still cooling from the impact that formed the Moon and the people of the world lived like children and the Internet was largely just text and imagines – yes, even before YouTube, children – everyone was trying to be a blogger and blogs were very well read and influential.

But now, I would probably be better off trying to be a TikTok star.

I wonder if Canada will become like a TikTok haven once the USA has banned it.

Who am I kidding, a) the parent company will probably figure out a way to make TikTok owned by a US company on paper, and if not, b) getting around a “ban” like that would be a trivial task for the billions of nerds of the world.

Hell, just use a fucking VPN.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, fantasizing about a life where I earn a living.

I know I could do it. It would not even be that big of a deal. The world is full of earn from home type possibilities and some of them aren’t even scams.

Or so I have heard.

Plus there’s my massive talent and enormous intellect and winning personality.

So I know that building up the idea of earning a living to the near mythically ascended state of being is not rational and not helping me. I would be far better off thinking about all the really stupid and lowly people who nevertheless have jobs and telling myself, “Well if they can do it… “.

But I would have to leave my little bathetic bunker to do that!

And that’s always been the real issue. I keep choosing to cling to the known rather than take any amount of risk by going outside my tiny, tiny world.

I can’t even learn to use VRChat because I panic when I try. Ditto Discord.

Is there any help for me at all?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.