Waffle and kvetch

Rubbery confession
I'm back in treatment for recurring bouts of distress. When I have these moments I've been forgetting where I am and what is happening to me—nor caring if I do not stop. 

I have OCPD which means picking at my body. I chose a part of my face and it got nasty. I cried to my doctor and he upped my head dose and prescribed a cream. So far the cream is holding against the urge to pick it but I had one last crack at ripping the scar from my face before applying. 

Last night I dreamed I tore a hole my face—like I'd taken a crossbow bolt through the cheek. 

I told him how I used to just have at my feet—limping to work in bloodied socks—but I got too big and old to reach them. I've had to go to meetings with band-aids on my face. 

If I was a dog they'd make me wear the cone. 

Manhole taken at speed
I was riding the BYB downhill towards a manhole—the concrete circle jutting with alarm up from the path.

I've always slowed for it but I was sucked into a "fuck it" and took it at speed. I yelled, loud and proud "YEE-HAA" like I was in a chase movie and I'd taken an out bridge at max acceleration to clear a river.

In the glide   I considered the gendered use of manhole and its possible reverse—but a ladyhole taken at speed with a trilling yell is just not nice, for the hole or the lady.

Stacked it and cracked it
Again with the turning and forgetting I've three wheels and not two. It was at a usual suspect, a crossroads with two steep bits. I circled left then turned to go right but the slope felled me to the grass. 

The fall scraped my leg and the Kirk-shoulder roll I effected left me rattled and battered.

The throttle control split and I thought the bits lost—they'd slid down to the base of the handle and the throttle turned on with a hint of provocation. 

I parked the bike on a different slope and dismounted to look for the parts I then thought lost.

That's when the bike took off—at full speed with no passenger to hold it. It circled round me like a bull then whizzed up the slope for parts unknown I grabbed the basket and held it as the front wheel lathed a gouge in the grass. 

This pulled the basket off its brackets and the front of the basket is where the eight kilo battery lives. 

So it came to be that I counter-weighted with what I could find and in a t-shirt on a chilly Canberra afternoon I held a basket up with one hand as I throttled home with the other.

It's a reminder—thanks, physics and biology both—that tricycles are for paths that are level, not not-paths that are not. Each time I've stacked a slope's been the cause of my fate. 

Sausages used to be my Sideshow Bob rake but now it's any form of non-level thoroughfare. 

theWife did her magic to jury-rig it together again so I'll see how I go when I next give it a go. 

I earned the next day off for impact of the impact, my back a solid mass of ouch and regret. 

Lennon
I was tasked with getting some frozen veg. "I was sent on a mission to give peas a chance," I said, pushing the packet across to the young counter girl, "... that's all I'm saying."

(... crickets...)

Illness and injury afflict relationships
I've had depression since ten then copped an injury at age but while the former was managed the latter made it sicker and afflicted those I live with. 

theboy was angry and wanted to be alone but I couldn't leave him without him knowing he was loved and I made it worse. My judgement is clouded when conditions are high. I added to his acute distress.

The worst is the managing. He manages me—he sees a look on my face and backs off with concern at stressing me out. It kills me he does it but I love that he does; because he worries about me. 

PTSD is contagion. The people who love you cop the crap of your sick; they react to sudden noise like you because they fear your response—your trigger, their trigger, PTSD inflicts PTSD.

Then I remember the injury would not have happened were I not ill. My OCPD makes me give a shit; I worry about others as I worry at my face. 

Balance, karma, the yin and the yang—my illness makes me strong as it cripples me weak. 

Getting up
Getting up from the stacked bike was easy; getting up from the relapse is hard. 

But I keep getting up because getting the fuck up is what the fuck I do.

WFTW.

Ping into the dark

A bunch of crappy crap landed and I had 48 hours of acute distress with all the trimmings—howling despair, physical pain and Mr Logic not being at home. The latter is the hardest one because when you fall into the void then reason falls away. You think things and feel things that are not true but in the moment of wrenching grief they are true—and the only truth you've ever known.

I should have munged Valium when it happened—and my back-up doc chided me for resisting using medication that is designed to address the symptoms I experienced—but I was so far down the dark hole that it seemed pointless. Why take the edge off darkness when it's all dark?

I came out of it—eventually. I still have an echo of that deep trauma. And it didn't help I had a raging ear infection from having poured a shower into the canal some days before so was caked in additional pain to the business as usual.

But it was once of the worst fits yet—I've not gone 48 hours in acute raging despair with bouts of recurring hysteria before. It was frightening. I couldn't summon the Mikey at the back of the head that says soothing words like "this is just a moment" and "you're having a reaction; what you're thinking is not normal". 

So what to do? Well I need to get the fuck back up. I've done it a half-dozen times now so I know I can keep doing it. 

As part of that I sent a ping into the dark. Like all the others it will likely be swallowed without a trace but, you never know—besides, to not to ping is to never get a bounce back. 

I fell over but I'm getting up—and I'll keep doing that until I am dead because that is what the fuck I do.

WFTW.

UPDATE: I sent a second ping—it's a pincer move! 

Monster keyboard

Having chewed through yet another cheapie from K-Mart I rode into town on my tricycle and bought a heavy duty gaming mechanical keyboard. It throbs with an unearthly green light. 

So far the keys have held up to my rapid pounding and they don't feel like they're going to lose their characters after but a week of use. It seems and feels robust.

Finally a keyboard that suits my typing style of furious, frenetic and a lot of backspacing.

Same bat-time; not the same bat-channel

theboy is the age I was when I got pulled out of a public school and thrust into an all boys private school—which is great for people whose bodies work swell and who are tall; it's not so good for the little, non-sporty guy. Not only did I suffer the first onset of depression I got sent to the school recommended psych for treatment who then promptly molested me during hypnotherapy. 

Maybe it's some sort of genetic thing in all of us but when I see a younger self, a child, headed for a period of life that was mostly pain I get angry. I get angry at the acute parental and institutional failures that pushed me down the slide of self-abnegation; that made me feel for most of my life that I had let the team down with my assigned physicality. 

I look back and even with the benefit of hindsight fail to understand how any thinking, decent person would have engendered that to happen and or then fail to acknowledge their failure.

Now I get that we have the internet so we know a lot more about parenting and how to positively support a child to maximise their desire to push themselves in a direction of interest and passion. And the idea of raising a child with kindness, love and practical wisdom with avoiding the trap of domineering, self-satisfied "I know best" parenting of anger and punishment is now the norm, not an aberration. 

But, fuck me if I am not bitterly, furiously angry at the fucking shit my younger self went through at the same age my child is now. I weep for that child even as I know the strengths he'll draw from his adversity and that the path he went down was atheistically angelic.

At least I've learned one lesson from the past; if you don't want an angry, bullying or sneering household then don't be angry, bullying or sneering when you have one of your own.

I think there's something in that for all of us.

UPDATE: Who am I to judge? I told him to fuck off and I meant it. Then stayed angry. Only I could piously intone how great I am and then void it with an angry shout. 

Earful of water

One of the many fails of my body, and curiously right from near start of life, is my propensity for middle ear infections. Without antibiotics I'd have been dead from multiple infections as a child.

I have stents in my ear drums to let out discharge from the middle ear but it's a two-way street and I have to keep water out of my ears lest it enter the middle ear then pool with intent. In then shower, when I roll my head beneath the pour, I fold over my ears to protect the canal. 

Today I didn't. I tilted my head and then a seeming fuckton of water poured straight into the middle ear. I yelped in agony, flailed about in the man rain and ended the experience naked on the mat with my head tilted and my finger jammed in trying to create a suction so the water would come back out when I removed the finger.

It's a basic reminder that I can't risk normal activity like a normal person without taking steps to look after my un-normal self. 

But then without multiple exposure to near-death events I wouldn't be the savvy cat that I am—and normality is over rated.

WFTW.

UPDATE: I put in ear drops in to dry out the water but I didn't read the label—it said not to if you have the stents (grommets). 

It may have been the single most painful 20 seconds of my life.

Teasing phlegm from a laptop keyboard

I have a weird body that does unusual things; one is the production and expulsion of "lung lollies", a combo of mucus, phlegm and lung-muck that I can (and do) cough from within.

Though I use a plug-in keyboard for the laptop, I hate the fiddly little keys and the weird position your wrists rest in when using the one in the machine, my lolly was expelled some distance and went deep into the crevices of my laptop's keys that lay behind the plug in. 

I head to tease the phlegm out with a McDonald's napkin—I keep the ones they give me for home use like this—and it's not easy when you have trembling hands from meds and injury.

I can see in the ruddy glow of the heater I did not get it all—there are snail trails on the V and M keys alone where the volleys of yesterday landed from the lung fire. 

It's just yet another piece of the me puzzle—disgusting oddities of balding-yet-neck-hair, missing toenails, more hair, short, bandy legs, fat, failing knees, mechanical hip and assorted other fails. And that's just physical; it's a yellow pages on the mental side. 

If I was a game I chose a hard setting. If this is reincarnation and I had a say all I can say is fuck you, me.

But better lung lolly volleys than dead in the dirt—or ash in the armchair (1)—as they say.

(1) My urn fell off the mantelpiece.

A Rescue Bots battle anthem

"Can Fly" as sung by Dani and Blades.

Giant's Bag Contents Table

Blood pressure rising
My blood pressure is way up and it's because I traded laborious intensive SoTPC exercise bike riding for glorious, not-laborious outside bike riding. At least that's the only thing that's different so I am on meds and back to riding the exercise bike. I'll still get BYB time but that's pure fun, not exercise (it is; it's just my body needs more just to keep even).

It is what it is; a trite expression but tight and apt. My body has to battle to stay within normal; I'm still fucking here, that's the main thing. To stay here I have to do unwanted maintenance; le sigh.

Back again
I read a deeply upsetting article that caused anger, hurt and angst to boil up as I fell into acute introspection. I kvetched to a friend and he said to watch something to take my mind off it. 

I chose the dragons' burning of the galley scene from GoT. 

Dragons; always there to ease the pain.

Broke it < a week
I got given a kewl tool which I immediately started using. Only I used it too much and I stripped the thread in the middle and ruined it.

That's why I shouldn't have nice things.

Dead patch in the mint zone
I had to change my outside wee spot from the side of the shed near the door because that's where the pen gate is. So I chose the wooden frame with the mint plants in it. I've killed all the mint in a clear half-circle.

The mint is the spawn of the plant foisted on me by a mysterious old woman outside a local shopping centre.

So I'm expecting a curse.  

All aboard!
I have to ride the SoTPC. I don't want to, but as noted, I have to. Exercise; a must do just to stay even.

Le Sigh II, the Sighening.