Life continues to spiral out of control to the point being closer to an amusement park ride than something with me behind the wheel. The wheel is mostly there for decoration and there are no brakes. I don't expect this condition of helplessness to last forever but, while it does, I need to enjoy what I can. After all, amusement park rides are fun for those of you without reconstructed skulls and necks. I have been in a productive writing period trying to describe what life in constant pain is like. For the longest time, I was afraid that I might answer the question of how I survive by downplaying the pain. I had a terror of someone saying that I was some con artist playing the system and living an ideal life no matter how unqualified they might be.
My parents made such accusations but hardly ever explicitly. A pair of losers once wrote me emails explaining in great detail how I was wrong about everything important and so I should kill myself. With my history, that's the last thing I needed but that wasn't going to keep me from writing. Worst of all, thinking about anything other than pain and suffering results in a nice sucker punch to the gut from guilt. I'm not supposed to be enjoying this!
Chances are that I will die in agony sooner than I would like and there's nothing that I can do to change that. That is a terrifying prospect but accepting it does not bring despair. The perception of guilt is what provides me with despair and I focus a lot of effort on fighting off that corrosive guilt. It's been a few years since I promised myself that I would make some changes. I was going to stop feeling guilty about being sick. The second part was going to be tougher but I was going to stop feeling guilty over Melissa caring for me. We both take our wedding vows seriously and I do what I can for her. In order to be easier to care for, I was going to make coping with my symptoms and their complex effects my number one daily priority. I came to the realization that dealing with chronic pain that's this bad is a full time job with hours that no one would accept by choice.
For those of you who wish to tell me how self serving this concept is, I have nothing but agreement. That's the point of it. I'd like to take a bit of the burden off Melissa but it's more self serving than that. I have two general approaches that I could take to all but knowing that I'll die in agony someday. (It's not a diagnosis but I'm living in agony so it's not much of a stretch.) One is deciding to hurry things along and we're tossing that one out the proverbial window. The other is to concentrate on the things that I enjoy the most while trying to keep things from spinning out of control. Once things are spinning this badly, I refuse to yell at any helpless son who may be in the room so my choices are to enjoy the ride or to projectile vomit. Thankfully, I have a strong stomach.
The alternative to holding on to those aspects of life I cherish is self destruction. Once upon a time, that was my default position. I'm not going sit by and watch while the wolves come smashing down my door and destroy everything. When the time comes, and it should be a matter of a week or two now, I'll fight my best fight. Chances are that I will face quite a few setbacks but my goal is to avoid kicking myself for failing to avoid them. Let's make it a given that setbacks will be the direct result of some poor decision making. It's also a given that I would have made different decisions if I weren't bombarded by pain.
I will learn from these mistakes, I will attempt to make positive changes based on what I learned but I will not accept ultimate blame for them anymore. If I weren't in absurd amounts of pain, I wouldn't be making these mistakes. I'd make other, more entertaining mistakes.
All of that said, I'm enjoying some things about my life right now. I have some tremendous games on my Android tablet right now. "Star Wars: Uprising" is getting better and better as I learn to play it. It's a role playing game, which means something a little different in computer games than it does in the paper and dice games I miss. Instead of engaging with other people on the level of imagination, you do similar things with the graphics right in front of you. The greatest strength of paper and dice RPGs is the unlimited imagination potential involved. If I want to make the bad guy truly terrifying, I might borrow a few real crimes committed by historical serial killers or I could go the other route and invent a cereal killer. (He's...ummm... "crazy" about Cocoa Pops.) A computer RPG will tend to pull back on anything graphic (pun intended) and have you kill endless numbers of nameless stormtroopers.
Computer RPGs depend on a player's willingness to perform tasks usually called "grinding." (Other times, it's called "farming.") In order to be powerful enough to sneak aboard the Star Destroyer, you have to battle stormtroopers in skirmishes a few hundred times. Grinding isn't all that bad if the game is balanced right. For every x number of hours spent grinding, you get y number of cool new abilities. Just when I was getting bored with how badly the troopers outgunned me, I acquired a new weapon that put out a greater volume of fire.
I am getting tired and I'd love to write about more of the better things in life (without embarrassing Melissa who is the best part of life - Oops!) but I learned long ago that begrudging myself naptime is an idea bad enough to be trademarked. Just remember that nothing has changed except what I'm showing you. There's pain, fear, doughnuts and coffee.
