Mar 10

 Bleh.

Like a stuck record.

Ill. Ill. More ill.

It's everyday now without fail. Part of a day will be ok - it can vary from feeling shit but eh I am ok I guess, to, ehhh feeling... mostly ok. And then part of a day will be, I feel very shit. I'm taking a lot of "naps" at the moment to try and manage it. It works more than half the time. Half the time it just seems to make it worse. Shitty.

Various pings have been going off. Weak legs. Tingly face. Raging tinnitus. Feeling .. just all round ill.. Groggy. Nauseous. Dizzy. Foggy. Flu like. It's like a roulette wheel. But they repeat. Same shit. Round and round. Sometimes the tingles will up and disappear for a good while. Or the dizzies. Touch wood I haven't felt dizzy for a while now.

It stops me in my tracks when it's bad. I can't do shit. At all. Except sleep. If that.

I slowly felt more grotty last evening. Flopped into bed. Awful. Lay there for a short while. No distractions. No TV. Nothing. I felt awful. A small creeping sense of... not exactly panic.. but dread... stole over me. I realised without distractions I really did feel extremely shit and that I was doing a bang up job of coping by distraction and keeping busy, but in reality, jesus, I was garbage.

Hum ho.

It is, long range, not unexpected. This is one of the possible paths. That over time I get worse until something "pops", and finally we get something on record that is.. probably.. killing me slowly, before killing me quickly. Time will shake things out.

But not to focus on the negative. That's only one path. There are others. That this is just a very long and complicated healing path. Or that we find something out and fix it and things get better.

Last year someone related their experience to me, anecdotal evidence for the win, about their journey with "Mysterious Problem" that was similar to mine. This conversation happened because at the time in desperation I put my symptoms out onto the internets to see if anyone could help - there are places you can get medical professionals to unofficially look over your shit.

The dude noted similar symptoms to mine. Cardio issues that couldn't be pinpointed. Morphing into a range of other shit. Neuro. Gastro. He said his gastro was fucked for a year and he had to be careful what he ate before things started returning to normal.

There is in there, a small glimmer of hope. That sometimes this path is very long. This stuff also falls well outside the experience of the medical profession. The anecdotal stories you get are interesting and helpful and give you similar experiences that you just can't even get a healthcare professional to look at properly for more than 5 minutes. Unless you lavish them with cash. Even then. Yeah.

I can't 100% blame the profession for being that way. It's hard. Difficult messy task. Easier just to put a token effort in and treat it piecemeal - at least your ass is covered when asked what did you do to help - and better yet to just sweep it under the carpet and pretend nothing is wrong. When something major finally breaks beyond all measure, then you can kick in a well trodden path of mitigation. Well trodden paths are the ideal. Then you can follow a set of tickboxes and meds. Easy. Lazy.

It is, when you get to it, human nature. Avoid the difficult thing. Act only when absolutely necessary. End up with a shit resolution. But one that required least effort.

That pattern repeats across all walks of life, all tasks. It is, human.

It's not good. Obviously. But it is human. It takes a good deal of motivation, discipline, general steel, not to be like that. So. I get it.

But. Let's be positive here. I am still - at this point probably idiotically - positive that I just need time to rest. Certainly a whole bunch of people around me are keen for me to rest. And probably also would like to think that rest just sorts me out.

Really smells like wishful thinking.

But heheheh. Think positive eh.

It does always make me think of the less travelled outcome path. People by nature don't usually think on the disastrous outcomes. The fatal end points. Those stories always happen to someone else. Except when they don't. But, it's in our nature to imagine all that bad shit happens to someone else. But of course it doesn't really work that way. And so maybe I am just one of those numbers in a statistic. A cautionary tale for everyone else. I mean. Someone has to be that, right ?

Yes.

Ehhhhh well. We all die. Not if, but when. Again another thing we don't like to particularly dwell on. But it's arguably the only absolute 100% firm fact that you know about you. You will die. And yet we skate away from it. I mean. Understandable. 

All of that is to say. It's not about dying. As shit as that is. See my previous rants about what a cruel waste death is. Death is - so far anyway - an inevitable. The only thing you have left then, is what you do with your time. Be that short, or long.

This is also not easy. Because in the main we "waste" our lives away by noodling around with the trivial to just pass time. Passing time until we die. When you say it like that, it seems utterly absurd. Shouldn't we like.. be.. doing something ... meaningful ?

Like what.

The Great Beast Nihilism will tell you the cold hard truth that nothing that you do ends up being meaningful. It is all dust. Heat death universe. No one will lament the passing of the entire human race 100 billion years into the future.

Dial it back a little mega brain. On the local time frame scale. Meaningful to those around you. Or your children. Or even, gasp, yourself.

We swirl back to existentialism. This old goddamn circular path. Make it meaningful to you.

At which point we can fairly reasonably arrive back to passing time until we die. Playing games. Making art. Noodling. Cooking. Eating garlic bread. I mean. Eating garlic bread is probably up there with possible meanings of life.

The wise man knows that he knows nothing at all.

Hey. Dude. I know how to fish. I can teach you that. Aww, you don't have to know nothing. C'mon, I will show you how to fish.

So goes the joke.

The wise man knows that he knows nothing at all. What the hell does that mean. Well. It's smeared in historical loss of information. Literally - it's Plato giving an account of Socrates ( his teacher ) when told he was the wisest man - and then Socrates denying this, saying I know shit, but perhaps that makes me the wisest, because I know that I dont know shit.

It's circular. And paradoxical. Of course. Nice. What does it actually mean ?

It means that you can know a lot. That's the wise bit. You don't get to be wise by knowing arse all. I'mma gonna eat this tasty looking mushroom I just found ( for instance ). Such persons do not make it to being wise. As a wise person however you also know that what you do know is on shifting sands. Subjective. Be open to that changing. And also the number of things beyond your comprehension dwarfs those within it.

In other words. Keep an open mind. You don't know it all. And you can be wrong.

Wise. And yet knowing you know shit.

Arguably imho, the foundation of wise - open mind, don't know it all, adapt, learn.

Where am I going with all this ?

Meaning of life stuff. How you spend your time before your die.

The wise man knows that he knows nothing at all.

It's one of those things that has a great deal of.. no answers. There is no point. One way of spending time is as good as another. Not everything can be known.

Be at peace with not having a definitive answer. Or of there not being a definitive answer at all. Not all questions have answers.

There is a nice concept in Taoism, written in the Tao te Ching. Which basically says, the unknowable can never be known, and if the unknowable becomes known, it was not the unknowable. The Tao te Ching is full of these cute little circular things.

What it's getting at is that not everything is possible. Not all things have answers. You can interpret that in many ways. Hard science - the nature of the quantum universe can never be known to us, because we cannot perceive it, it lies on a plane we cannot get to. A lot of quantum stuff fits nicely into Taoism actually. It's. Interesting.

Anyway. It's teaching you to be at peace with the shit you can never get to. And that the universe is like that. It is in its nature to be so. Like yin and yang. Black and white. The knowable and the unknowable. So suck it up. And be zen about it.

Heh.

In my mind I used to contort around it. Ok. I see what you're saying. The hole can never be measured ( it goes on about holes if I recall correctly ). But. I used to think. If I can measure around the negative space. The places where Nothing ISNT, then, by implication, the reverse then reveals the size of the hole. AH HA. I have measured your unmeasurable ! Take that !

An inverse way of measuring the unmeasurable. A bit like imaginary numbers. You can't have a square root of -1 ( i ) ! Yeah. But. What if we did ? The equivalent of stepping through the magic door. 2 + 2 = 4. 4 + 4 = 8. Square root of 9 is 3. Square root of -1 is.... i ?? WTF. Where the hell are we. Through the wardrobe and into Narnia where your numbers don't mean shit anymore. Welcome to the Nth dimension. Or just imaginary numbers if you're a mathematician. But still. Take a glance up and around. You've stepped through a magic door, a way of bending reality into a place that you cannot get to, that has no parallel. The fifth, sixth, nth dimension. Take a left, straight on, then a right, then turn yourself inside out and hop the fifth dimension. Easy.

Heh.

Anyway. Jesus. I have wandered into waffling about some pretty esoteric shit there.

The probable point here is, that yeah, on the one hand, we waste our lives passing time until you die. On the other hand, that's ok, don't go chasing the answer - because there isn't one. So just be zen with that. And smell the roses. If you come up with something you find meaningful, have a go at that. But again. No one is marking your homework here. You, do you.

Uh huh. 

So, in the end. We all die. And the way we spend time until we do. Eh. Doesn't super matter. But it's possible you can make it matter to others at the time. Or yourself. The small things.

We lead small lives.

That's quite a long and drawn out proof of what amounts to in the end, a shrug.

Ha ha. Show Your Working.

Back to my current situation.

I am still positive I can get better. Work through this. I have a bunch of plans. In some ways I am more motivated and clear in what I need to do that ever before in my life. The silver lining to all this bullshit is that it has really given me a very clear path forwards. If. I can recover.

Time and rest. That's all I need.

*shakes the magic wish fairy*

Positives.

Last day of work today. Then time to hardcore rest. Gonna noodle again with some art I think. Play games. Chill. I have nothing super scheduled for the weekend. Well. Other than attempting to sort out my stupid driving licence again. And sort a passport out.

And hope I avoid feeling ill.