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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

I have been feeling better lately. More present, more alert, less depressed, more willing to engage with reality.

But this does not mean suddenly breaking my video game addiction. In fact, it’s led primarily to my playing my games even more, and playing them harder and for longer periods of time.

That’s because it would be foolish in the extreme t hinge my psychological recovery on whether or not I overcome a habit that’s had me in its clutches for more than a decade.

Not sure when, exactly, it metastasized into a crippling addiction. Not even sure if I was living here in Fanhattan or back in Nerdvana.

But I do know what triggered it : Skyrim.

Mother fucking Skyrim.

So I don’t plan to set myself in opposition to that addiction just yet. Eventually I Will make space in my life for other, newer things, gradually, a little at a time.

But for now I will just enjoy being able to enjoy things more.

:right now I am mostly working on trying to make life outside video games seem more enticing. That’s a rough job, though, considering that addiction is very good at convincing you that life without the addicted “substance” is cold and horrible and miserable and basically impossible.

That’s the power of our tendency to fixate on the strongest source of reward relative to the effort needed to get it. Especially once the addiction has truly set in and the reward becomes even easier to get because we have built a royal road of neural pathways leading directly from the “substance” to the reward.

Like I always say when this subject comes up, for me, the big barrier is having to figure out what to do with myself and my time.

This used to be a huge issue for me. A big part of my depression in those pre-Skyrim days involved agonizing over what I “should” do with myself as I once again tried to navigate the infinite corridor of infinite doors.

Too many possibilities. Can’t be done. It’s like the Three Body Problem. It does not take long for the math involved to become so complex as to be unsolvable.

“But you can do whatever you want to do!” says a glittery-eyed children’s TV show host from the fucking Seventies.

Well fuck you, Doug Henning. It is not that easy. I have no idea what I want. Or rather, I can think of millions of things I want. So how do I sort through them all and pick one?

That’s how malnourished and underdeveloped my pathetic id is. I have no idea what I want because I have so little experience wanting things.

Like I have said before, at some point I made the life-wrecking decision that I had to little power in the world that wanting things could only lead to pain and so I learned to just make do with whatever I happened to have and not think of anything else.

This murdered my soul.

I don’t know if pining away for all the things I want but can’t possibly get would be any better but at this point I would be willing to entertain the possibility, at least.

At least then I would be alive, and have some clue as to who and/or what I am. At least then I would have tried to follow my desires inasmuch as I could and they would have led me out into the world to get some god damned life experience. At least I would have had some way to organize my time and possibly find meaning in my days.

Instead, all I have is the nihilistic negativity of this purposeless shambles of a life.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother.

More after the break.

---

Long awaited dawn

John looked at the clock as he picked up the phone. 3:40 AM. Who the hell would be calling at this hour?

His wife Sandra stirred in her sleep, thinking the same thing. She assumed whoever it was, her husband would brush them off so they could get back to sleep.

And that’s why it was so shocking to see her normally sedate and orderly husband suddenly sat bolt upright, eyes wide and hyper-alert, when he heard what the person on the phone said.

“Yes, I heard you. ” he replied in a voice quavering with suppressed tension. “Are you sure? Sorry… of course you’re sure. You wouldn’t be calling otherwise. Yes. Yes of course, I understand. I can be there in ten minutes. OK, I’m on my way. See you soon.”

“What’s wrong, John? ” she asked. She had never seen him like this and it scared her.

“Nothing. ” John replied distantly as he got dressed. ” Work. I’ve got to go in. ”

“To work?” Sandra asked. “But it’s almost 4 in the morning. ”

“Uh huh. ” said John as he threw a bunch of papers into his briefcase. “Don’t wait up for me. I don’t know when I’ll be back. ”

Now Sandra was really rattled. Where had her sleepy, gentle academic of a husband gone, and who was this rigid stranger with eyes like he’s a soldier about to go to war standing in his place?

“Well… goodbye. ” she barely managed to say to him as he headed out the door. With shocking suddenness, she heard his car start up and drive away, tires squealing at the sudden unexpected acceleration.

Sandra turned the light out and tried to get back to sleep. But a cold dark feeling of loneliness and dread now occupied her heart, and she could not shake the irrational feeling that she would never see her husband again.

She must have slept, because suddenly it was dawn, but she didn’t remember going to sleep. She got up and went through her morning routine woodenly, feeling like she was watching a robot version of herself from afar.

It wasn’t until she found herself staring at her two beloved Malamutes, Kitten and Rainbow, like she didn’t even know who or what they were that she finally had the good sense to break down and cry.

And she was still crying and stroking the immaculately groomed fur on Kitten’s head when the sun set again.

This is worse than if someone had died, she thought. At least then she would know what had happened. At least then her world would still make sense.

Eventually, she got up, fed the dogs again, then went back to bed.

But for reasons she did not care to examine, she slept in the guest bedroom that night.

---

AUTHOR’S NOTE : Um, sorry about the lack of closure. In retrospect, I should not have started the story this late in the day. But stay with me, folks, I promise this is all going somewhere and you WILL find out what was said to John and where he went very soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something amazing happened yesterday and I feel the need to capture it in the typed word to keep it from getting lost in the tidal wash of my mind.

I had just finished re-reading one of my favorite furry smut comics of all time, Comic Relief by the god-dragon-master of gay furry smut. Braeburned, ^[1]

And as I was basking in the glowing good feeling^[2] I get from the really good gay furry smut, something in me activated and a whole new wonderful feeling washed over me and sent my soul stretching towards the horizon.

Warning, this is going to get really metaphorical and/or spiritual.

I felt strong and alive and pure for the first time maybe ever. I felt like this stretching out in a new dimension was letting me transcend my usual deadly doldrums pig sty self-loathing mindset and tap in to something far healthier and cleaner than usual.

And that’s when I had the thought that I used for the title of this entry : it can be good. Life can be good. Existence can be good. My life does not have to be a matter of me being claustrophobically cloistered behind that ten foot thick wall of compacted scar tissue I have been hiding behind for my entire life.

It can be so much more.

And this wonderful feeling lasted for a while. At least twenty minutes. And all the time I was enjoying it, a little corner of my mind was saying : REMEMBER THIS. Remember this feeling, both its nature and its shape. Remember that things do not have to be the way they have always been. Remember this amazing feeling so that you can call it up later after it has faded away and use it to guide you toward a better place to be.

It’s a very hard feeling to describe, even for me. It was like cool, clean air flowing against your skin on a hot, sweaty day. It was like the purest, cleanest, most life-affirming water washing my being clean of all the usual filthy and gunk. It was like joy and exhilaration and the anticipation of something fantastic coming all rolled into one.

And now I know that escape is possible. I can leave this grubby little coffin of mine behind and exist on a completely different and vastly superior vibration, and all the guilt and shame and disgust with myself and that pervasive feeling of being something nightmarishly horrible beyond description can be washed away by a pure clean light and I can sample what it might be like to be normal.

In the sense of being healthy. I will be weirder than most fuck till the day I die.

And through it all wove a thread of semi-sexual fantasy of me being able to just get together with another dude for sexual fun and maybe a little bit more.

All without the obscuring mists of fantasy. It wasn’t a furry dude I was imagining, or some kind of wild scenario, or well *ahem* any of the sexual schema that I don’t ever talk about here either.

Just me and some guy. Not impersonal sex – foxy don’t play that.

But not too far from it. We meet online, through text chat, get to know each other, get a serious sexual vibe going, then get together and see if said vibe has real world power.

It would still be a little iffy if I would be able to handle that emotionally. For me sex is inherently intimate and that’s not really negotiable.

But I would be willing to give it a try. Maybe.

More after the break.

---

Living with gusto

Sadly, not with this guy :

But no. What I am speaking of is the idea of living life with enthusiasm and zest, as opposed to what I have been doing for most of my life, namely living hesitantly and with great fear, ready to abandon everything I have going on and retract into my shell at the slightest sign of trouble.

That fucking sucks. It’s no way to live. You end up doing far more harm to yourself by withdrawing from life and thus not getting the life-affirming experiences people need in order to thrive than you could possibility be avoiding through your timidity.

And by you, I of course mean me.

I use this blog to talk to myself a lot.

Plus I have been thinking about the idea of a “pilot light” for the soul lately. I think healthy people have one – a source of energy and life that never goes out and that can re-ignite their soul when needed in order to keep them from sliding down too far.

Us depressives, in our energy miser wisdom, don’t allow that kind of thing. Why, that would involve unplanned, uncontrolled energy expenditures and we can’t afford THAT!

Picture me sarcastically clutching the pearls.

Upon deep scrutiny, so much of my depression comes down to me thinking I know better than everyone else, or even know better than my instincts.

It all seems so arrogant and foolhardy.

Well I hereby grant myself permission to respond to a declining mood by revving up my engine to compensate.

If I want to be more engaged with and in life – and I very much do – then I am going to have to radically remold my entire attitude towards living, and that is going to mean reprogramming even the most basic and primitive of my emotional responses.

And that’s not going to be easy. All my instincts will be shouting at me that reaching for happiness is too much work and I should just know my place and stay sleepy and let whatever is left of my life rot away beneath me

Well fuck that. I’m going to live before I die even if it kills me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] A feeling which includes but is in no way limited to the sexual. The good stuff doesn’t just turn me on, it makes me feel better about life. [[1]]

Both against my depression and, ya know, life.

Still getting the sneaky sleepies. Almost fell asleep during wound care this morning. It’s just a matter of time before it happens unless I become a hell of a lot chattier.

If I was keeping up my side of a conversation, that would keep me awake. I hope.

Unless the conversation was really boring.

But I am not a chatty person. I respond to other people’s small talk but I am not capable of generating my own.

I don’t generate my own big talk very easily either. I swear there was a time when I could start conversations but now my mind just goes blank.

Maybe I used up all my creative energies blogging now. I dunno.

Going back a parenthetical, I did have an amusingly odd experience at Wound Care. I kept hearing what sounded like someone’s impression of what an old man sounds like.

No words, just gibberish in a corny old wheezing old man voice, kind of like some old person puppet in a kid’s show whom everyone seems to understand but us.

And whilst I was sitting there with a nice lady working on my feet, I pondered this surreal phenomenon. But the penny didn’t drop until I heard the nurse talking back to him and realized the conversation was in Chinese.

No wonder I couldn’t understand him! 🙂

Meanwhile, I continue to be somewhat depressed. To be honest, it’s beginning to grate on my nerves. I want to be rid of this pall that seems to be clinging to me and waiting to pounce on my when I stop being too busy to pay attention to it.

I wonder if it’s related to the sleepiness. Perhaps its all a sign of my untreated sleep apnea getting worse. I dunno.

I know the depression is at its worst right after I wake up. And lately I have been waking up in that sweaty, incoherent, don’t even know my name state quite often.

Not hard to see how that might leave me depressed even after I physically recover.

Just to be on the safe side, I will start doing my breathing exercises when I feel myself feeling really bad and see if those help.

If my oxygen level has been low, that sure would explain a lot.

But I can’t forget the psychological aspect too. I have been breaking down long established walls inside me and those walls, while toxic in the long term, were holding back my depression and anxiety in the short term.

Whatever. I will trudge on through. No retreat, no surrender. This tank is going to just keep rolling over everything in its path like a bulldozer from hell and whatever gets in my way will be crushed like peanut butter under the weight of my treads.

Slow. But inexorable. Like glaciation.

And of course, if things get bad enough, I will go to the hospital. Though it occurs to me that I have no idea what happens when you go to the ER with depression.

I feel like they would probably say, “Yeah, nice try, druggie!” and call Security, but that is probably just the depression talking.

I suppose I could call or text chat with a hotline or something instead. Talk to someone who will listen and hopefully understand my problems.

Or at least sound like they do. I know that I am not the easiest guy to relate to for most people. Even my fellow nerds can only meet me part of the way.

Being a unique little snowflake really fucking sucks sometimes, ya know?

It’s like I’m from another planet.

More after the break.

---

How to terrify a killer

This is EXACTLY what made the original Equalizer such an amazing show.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would do if I was a vigilante. Merely bringing them to justice would not be enough. Not for the real scumbags like this guy.

By the time I was done with them they would be BEGGING TO BE ARRESTED.

In my own highly refined way, I am a very brutal man. Not every criminal would warrant that kind of treatment, in fact, most wouldn’t.

I would specialized in those that did.

---

The friendly alien

I was pondering the conflict between being friendly and personable and being weird and alienating earlier today.

Maybe that’s why the idea of being an alien or a robot or the like appeals to me, and to a lot of other alienated nerds just like me.

Because then there would be a reason. An explanation. Instead of awkwardly trying to explain and/or justify myself to people (which never works), I could relax assuming people would just go, “Well no wonder he’s alienating, he’s an alien!”.

I definitely feel like I have been trying to be someone I am not. Not in the conformity sense exactly – I lack the social skills to conform even if I wanted to – but more like I have a software conflict in my personality that causes me to try to be Mister Wonderful when my weirdness always shines through and ruins it.

I would be far better off coming up with a persona that works for all of me. Hence the idea of being a friendly alien or robot or whatever.

Obviously I am not going to try to actually be those things, but they give me something to aim for in this world which has furnished me with very few role models.

Because there’s nobody else like me in the world. I am one of a kind. The most I have gotten from others is little fragments of identity like random pixels of a picture.

I still have nothing even approaching a single, unified, suitable conception of self that I can use to anchor my identity.

All I can do is improvise.

And that’s so very tiring.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

wp:paragraph –>

I want to get off.

Because I still panic when I notice the passage of time.

Like, for instance, today is Thursday. But to me, it feels like Sunday was yesterday. It therefore feels like I “lost” four days somehow, and that makes me panic.

There’s that “oversensitivity to loss” that seems to haunt me.

Because the thing is, you can only ever lose time. The moments pass and are gone forever, and them bam, you’re one step closer to the grave.

And I am well aware that my days are numbered and the number isn’t very high. I highly doubt I will live to see my 60th birthday. Not with the way things are going.

I do what I can to preserve my existence, but it’s not enough. My muscles continue to get weaker and weaker and soon I will be stuck in a wheelchair, and not too long after that, a hospital bed, and after that… after I have gasped out my last in terror and agony all alone and full of tubes as even the muscles that let me breathe abandon me – the next stop is my sad, pathetic grave.

I’ll miss me.

I know all this, but because I am all broken inside, it does not do what it should do, which is to fire me up to make the absolute most of every minute I have left in order to catch up to all the living I have never ever done.

But nope. All it really does is make me want to withdraw into myself harder than ever before and hide from the world until the end comes.

Not going to do that, I don’t think. But part of me wants to.

And now that I am uncorking all my old latent emotions, I have to contend with that part of me openly, and that’s not easy.

But I can’t go back to being numb. I am finally waking up inside and I am thrilled by every new feeling or sensation as I am finally coming to life after all these years.

The sleeper awakens. The dreamer stretches his limbs and looks around, trying to remember what the real world is like.

And the court jester laughs at the folly and the joy of it all.

Today was Therapy Thursday. Talked with Doc Costin about how a big part of me was sealed off when I was raped at the age of 4 and how I have beena cripple ever since.

So, for my entire life, more or less.

That’s what happens when you withdraw from the world like I did. The vast majority of your being becomes locked away in that special place in your mind that you created when what was happening in the real world was so horrible, and you were so helpless, that all you could do was run away inside yourself.

And that big ol’ wound left by the rape has been festering away all this time, poisoning me and all I do and tainting me in a dark and horrible way.

Still, given all that, I have done remarkably well by just not being a serial killer.

It’s a low bar, but I take my W’s where I can.

But it is time to escape my own shadow and face the light. And hold myself in place until my eyes adjust rather than screeching and going scurrying back into my hole.

It might take a long time. But I swear to God, I WILL return.

And when I do, this world will never be the same. I am going to unleash all the magic I have stockpiled over the years and let me tell you, things are going to change.

I can hardly wait.

More after the break.

---

I shouldn’t be doing this…

..but I am not going to eat supper tonight.

I have absolutely no appetite at the moment and the very idea of trying to force myself to eat makes me feel nauseous and dizzy, so nope. no supper tonight.

Not even going to bother going to the kitchen to make myself something.

I have enough stuff left over from lunch that I can improvise a crappy but acceptable meal, and that will be what is waiting for me if my appetite returns.

And it might. I am plying myself with water and nibbling a little on trail mix. It is entirely possible that this will get things started.

I will tell you one thing : I am beginning to worry about how high stakes and demanding my hydration game has become.

I have to drink water almost constantly just to break even. I have been assuming that it has something to do with my Jardiance and its magical ability to smuggle excess blood sugar out of my bloodstream via my urine stream, but I don’t know for sure.

It would make sense though. Before Jardiance I had high blood sugar for some reason^[!]. and now I don’t. Ergo, there must be a fair bit of sugar smuggling going on, and that takes a lot of urine, and that, in turn, takes a lot of hydration.

But it’s becoming downright stressful. Having to go get more water from the tap in my ensuite all the time is a hassle and a pain in the ass. Ditto with having to empty my pee receptacle four times a god damned day.

Moreover, I worry about what risks I am taking with my health. I don’t like feeling like I live on the thin edge of dehydration all the time. I feel like at any time, I could be too lazy to get more water (dehydration robs you of energy) and end up in some kind of negative spiral where I get really seriously medically dehydrated and thus end up in a 911 kind of situation.

I suppose I could ask Julian to get me more water. But I would feel silly doing that when my ensuite’s sink is like three paces away.

I am sure I will figure it all out.

Oh, And yeah. I do have a little bit of appetite now.

Guess I was dehydrated all along.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Must be the lack of exercise because my diet is quite good. [[1]]