Open Bar: Curbside Pickup Only

[Doktor Howl]

I'm sorry to hear that, Altered.

Things aren't going well out this direction, either, but for very different reasons.  I was deeply unhappy.  Now I don't feel much at all.  I am once again in that glass hallway, and everything is QUIET.

[altered]

Time's basically up. I've been trying, but I hit a wall and tonight I realized I was woefully optimistic. Hilariously optimistic.

I have a week to go and nowhere to jump to next.

I'll just copy-paste my retrospective on the life I have lived from elsewhere. This world doesn't deserve more effort from me.



Copy-paste begins below.


It's done. I'd say it's been good, but this life has been miserable for me. Everything I ever interacted with went to shit before my very eyes. I was forced to struggle for barebones animal survival from adulthood to death. I will be dead at half the age someone like me should. I saw a lot of things, fell in love with ideas and people, and watched everyone i care about suffer and wither away. And now I get to watch the precious few I have left mourn me before I'm even gone. The world is in shambles and has been in freefall since as early as I remember. I had joy, only to have it repeatedly stolen from me. I got partners, and they all left or died or ended up being pieces of shit (not my most recent ex, but a much earlier one). I got HRT and then lost healthcare after just long enough to see the start of the changes. I went through police violence and sexual assault. I have experienced so much medical suffering. I had more smear campaigns launched against me than anyone with my kind of profile ever should.

People have asked me for years now why I'm so bitter, angry, why I lash out, why I hate so much of this world and why I can't just shut the fuck up.

Look at the legacy of my life: an endless parade of trauma, abandonment, disappointment and suffering, capped by one last hurrah for unrewarded sacrifice, ableism and The Free Fucking Market.

If you can say you wouldn't be mad, I wish you the worst.

[altered]

Another crosspost. Shit changes, and even when it seems better, it's not. Crosspost begins below.

I've been struggling to have energy to even keep my closest people up to date on my life in addition to trying to pack through starvation. Here is a... belated update.

I have housing. It's not pretty, it's not roomy, it's not perfect, but it will keep me alive. Packing is happening now. Slowly, with a lot of difficulty.

I still completely stand by that last post I made, by the way. It was said under the duress of feeling the end looming overhead, but even now, out from under that particular shadow, yeah. The words are true and I would say them now if anyone asked the right question. I will gladly sign that letter from both sides of the spiral into abyss. It's truth, unfiltered. There are like, oh, two changes I'd make -- factual errors based in reasonable but false assumptions -- but they're irrelevant to the overall message there. Good post, me. NOTE: Previous applies to the paragraph copy-pasted into my last post in thread.

The only reason I'm posting that above part here is to close out the posts I made here previously.


In other, more on-topic news...


My cognitive abilities are in sharp, sharp decline. I am basically forced to be done with things like Mafia and most of my creative work, in addition to just never working again. COVID has ruined my body and my mind.

Hallucinations are common for me right now. Complex hallucinations: I hallucinated a sheet of paper had gotten into my laundry and I threw it out. Ten minutes later when I realized I didn't try to see if there was writing on it, the trash can was devoid of paper, but otherwise exactly like the last time I looked in it to throw the "paper" out. I saw it, felt it, heard it hit the trash bag, and it didn't exist. This is just the most recent example of a recurring theme: unusual but plausible objects I move out of my way that, it turns out later, do not exist.

On top of that, my ability to understand speech is so bad that common words are gibberish in my ears without a lot of effort. My memory is worse than it's ever been, and I already had a memory bad enough that things like early-onset dementia were in the conversation -- like two years ago. I have caught myself having (thankfully well-controlled) delusions of being conspired against in impossible or improbable ways by people in my life. I'm very, very, very grateful for the self-work I did that makes me always ask about agendas when my brain tries to assign blame or fault, that subconscious stop sign is probably the only reason I haven't fully fallen into one of those pits.

Bodily, I've been having MCAS-like symptoms when doing literally just any amount of work. I should note that I did not have MCAS-like symptoms at any point in my life before this. I will also note that these are a known symptom of long-COVID. And when I say "MCAS-like", I'm being extremely generous in how much variance there can possibly be. See, I can get things done in the morning, when my sleep-aid antihistamines are still active, but by mid-day I have to go to sleep or find a daytime antihistamine, or I will have regrets. The burning and itching and horrible nausea from such onerous tasks as "taking a shower" or "lifting a 5 pound box" at the wrong time is unreal. This in addition to severe though intermittent muscle weakness, various signs that seem uncannily EXACTLY like peripheral nerve damage in all limbs (something I'm directly familiar with, though previously only in one thumb, a few fingers and one knee/shin), nigh-permanent dehydration and malnutrition regardless of frequency of hydration and diet, and more, and more, and more.

It's bad. I'm feeling really bad looking at the future I have ahead of me, which seems to be just progressively uglier variations on a theme of "disability". I don't have people who will/can take care of me, and I'm rapidly losing the ability to take care of myself. I was disabled before, but only in relatively mild ways I could deal with pretty consistently. There's no "dealing with" this.

I'm 34 years old, thinking about care-takers, advance directives and end-of-life planning, because one fucker didn't mask when they went to the store my ex worked at. Think about that.

Fuck everyone who says COVID is over, fuck everyone who doesn't mask up.

I might be alive, for now, but I don't know how much that means anymore. I suppose I could get better before the next inevitable turfing-out occurs, whenever that occurs, but I'm no longer able to really have hope for specific good outcomes without specific reasoning behind it. I know I'll probably survive, but that doesn't mean anything because the unspoken second part of that is "right up until I don't." I know lots of people who care, but they're all as powerless as me.

I'm alive. For now. But.

But.


That's all.