The Bloody Doors Off

You are, Auggie. You are.

So, looking back over the past couple of days.

If you take into account my Facebook ravings.

I’ve kinda come off the rails.

Which is worrisome.

But what’s really scary.

Is that.

No one’s called me on it.

Was awake a few minutes before my alarm. Able to mobilize fairly quickly.

Made The Boy^TM his lunch for school, doodled around on the computer for a while.

Managed to go out to the St. Lawrence Market and get some groceries for the clan, and the pharmacy for my prescriptions. Scored a rapid test kit from two different pharmacies.

So far, it’s been miles above the past few days.

Hope I don’t jinx it.

Some people say he has a death wish
Trouble is he tends to agree
Let’s not ask too many questions
It’s nothing to do with you or me
He remembers a time when even going home was sweet
Now he can’t feel the ground under his feet

Shakespeares Sister, The Trouble With Andre

The trouble with wanting to switch anti-depressants when you suspect they’ve stopped working.

You have to wean yourself off of the current prescription before beginning another.

I’ve done that before. With Pristiq.

It was. Not good.

Everything became a conspiracy.

That’s something I’d like to not relive, k thx bai.

I may not have a choice.

Things aren’t getting better.

The only time I feel in control is when I’m working.

It forces me to hyper-focus on the task at hand.

Shuts everything else out.

I’ve been using television as a substitute between emails.

It helps. A little.

But those moments. In between.

Are cavernous.

That’s all for tonight.

I’ve been emotional lately.

Panic attacks on the daily.

No discernible triggers. Just little things.

Or in this particular case, the absence of a little thing.

It’s not like I am/was blindsided.

I’m honestly surprised it’s an issue at all.

Yet, it stings.

No, I’m not gonna discuss it here.

You don’t need to know everything.

And it honestly is nothing.

It shouldn’t fucking matter.

It doesn’t fucking matter.

So why is my nose bent out of joint?

Goddammit. I hate this.

I’m gonna watch All Of Us Are Dead.

i’m not doing so good right now.

I just spent a total of twenty-one hours within the last forty-eight working on two presentations for a contract job I picked up on Thursday.

The first couldn’t have gone smoother. Everything just made sense.

Then came the second job. It’s on SharePoint as it’s a living document, with four separate individuals adding content. So I totally understand the need to work on it online.

There’s just one issue: SharePoint is several generations behind PowerPoint in things you can do. For example, you can’t create or edit a slide master in SharePoint. Which meant, one did not exist for this nearing one hundred page deck. Every page had to be eyeballed, fonts had to be manually changed, that sort of thing. Oh yeah, nearly forgot. Because of some reason I can’t comprehend, the text boxes would expand width-wise when I clicked out of them. Which meant, I got to recreate those too.

But here’s the thing.

If you’re gonna have these kind of limitations, best you have me batting clean-up. I spent seventeen hours on this deck, and as of an hour ago, that motherfucker was pristine. You could eat dinner off of that floor.

And I still had enough energy to assemble a salad for my wife.

No doubt I’m gonna crash hard tonight, and tomorrow is another day. There will be further requests for this presentation.

Bring it.

(TLDR: I made a thing pretty. I’m very tired.)

The past couple of nights, I’ve been suffering from waves of anxiety, with no known cause.

It got so bad last night, I had to take a Propranolol. The anxiety spikes my blood pressure and the pill helps slow my heart rate so I can calm down. It’s a fail safe; I take one maybe every five to six months, if it’s bad enough.

And to answer any lingering questions…

Unlike traditional anxiety medications, beta blockers are not addictive. Propranolol and the like do not cause drug dependency (or withdrawal symptoms when you stop taking them) and are safe to take occasionally over a long period of time.

The Mayo Clinic

The only reason I wrote this post is because the title popped into my head.

There’s no underlying point, no grand revelation.

Except, I think my anxiety is getting worse. And the low-grade headaches continue.

Oh, the seal on my CPAP mask is split and if I don’t tuck the plastic just the right way, it leaks.

When it leaks, I get less oxygen when I sleep.

And I snore more.

I ordered a new mask. I could’ve just ordered a replacement part, but a new model hit the market that supposedly deals with ‘chin drop’, and if it works, it should keep my mouth closed and reducing the chance of snoring further.

But it’s not here yet.

And last night’s sleep got fucked over because we lost power for two hours in the middle of the night.

So here I am, now-turned Friday morning (by a minute), and I’m stalling. I need to sleep. The Boy^TM has school in the morning and I need to be awake. Plus, I have a job incoming in a few hours.

I haven’t made a Snow Angel in decades.

When I was a kid. And I remember how we’d try not to leave footprints in the snow, so it appeared as if they appeared like crop circles. And every winter, my brothers would build an ice rink in the backyard and invite the neighbourhood kids over to play hockey.

They never did ask me to play. I mean, when they were selecting teams, I wasn’t high on anyone’s list. Most of the time I got to watch.

Not like I was any great shakes on a pair of ice skates. I never learned to properly stop. Usually I crashed into the boards. Or another person. I remember a community ice rink near where I lived. Markham Road and Ellesmere. Strange that I can remember it was on the southwest corner of the intersection, but have trouble remembering if I’d taken my metformin after breakfast.

I did a really douchy thing there once. I purposefully stumbled into a bunch of cute girls, and a few of them called me out on it. (Wish I could say it was a dare from one of my friends, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true.) That was a definite focal point in my life’s education. Treat women (and girls) with respect. End of story.

I’m not sure why I felt the need to relive that.

No, to confess it.

I knew what I was doing was wrong. I did it anyway.

And I’m sorry.

(Remember, I did tagline this blog as “confessions of a dangerous mind”.)

I’m gonna go to bed before I do something stupid, like confess to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.

Which would take a time machine, because I was born in ’66 and Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped in ’32.

And really, if I had a time machine, I’d go back and body check me into the boards as soon as I’d laced up the skates.

Twelve thirty now.

I’m packing it in.

*peeks in*

Hi.

I’m Paul’s Anxiety.

You can call me.

Well, I don’t really have a name.

After Harold, Paul didn’t wanna give anyone else the same recognition.

So instead I sound like Tyler Durden. Or was it the scrawny guy, he’s not Tyler Durden. Only he is, because he’s essentially suffering from multiple personality disorder.

Anyway.

I’m the fat kid who was always picked last for middle school gym.

The first time I played D&D in high school, they suggested I name my Elven character.

Scrotum.

Maybe I should’a looked that up in the dictionary first.

Too bad we didn’t have cell phones with Wikipedia back then.

Anyway.

Paul was having a hard time focusing because he’s having one of those “shit, I’m fifty-five and I seriously need to up my game when it comes to building websites and shit because that’s another revenue stream I should be tapping into” nights.

After his wife pointed it out to him.

He’d been ignoring that potential for a while now. And the thought Paul’d gone this long refusing to evolve his game, is fucking criminal.

Makes him wonder what other possibilities he messed up.

And that brings me, Paul’s Anxiety, to the fore.

I know he doesn’t want me here.

Who would?

That’s not the only place he’s been lax. Paul’s had this long-held belief that he needed to be inspired before he could write something of worth. (Marlo pointed that out to him this evening, as well.) That maybe, they could set aside an hour a day of “writing time” and you just doodle with words.

Maybe that will provide the inspiration.

It’s so simple.

And that’s why he hates himself right now. Because, even though he’s pretty smart.

Paul can be really, and I mean really, dumb.

But we’re not supposed to talk about ourselves like that.

It serves no purpose other than to beat us down and dampen our potential.

Oh hey, speaking of Tyler Durden.

Did you hear the Chinese government, when they finally allowed Fight Club to be released in their country, the ending was cut and replaced with a black card with white text, saying basically “the authorities found the perpetrators and brought them to justice.”

And the author of the book? He’s okay with that.

So, why isn’t Paul? Why is he holding himself back?

Ask him. Next time you see him.

See if he has an answer.

Later.

*exits stage left*

Lemme tell ya about my new best friend, Phil.

Phil works at Contemporary Computers. And he was on call Saturday when I dialed them up, desperate for help. (Contemporary Computers initially helped me back in December when I needed to swap out my hard drive for an SSD (from a rotational) and add 8 gig of RAM.)

Quick backstory: I’d spent approximately 6-8 hours Friday evening updating my company logo and designing a brand new website. Just after 1am I’d finished, but there was one hiccup. When the page went live, everything was in black and white. And I couldn’t figure out the problem. But that was fine; I’d just get it sorted in the afternoon. I even fired off an email to WordPress Support asking for assistance because I was stumped. (But that’s another story entirely, which I may fill in after I get back on track with why I needed to call for IT help.)

Cut to Saturday afternoon. I was waiting on a response from WordPress, and decided I wanted to add my tagline to the cover image on the site. Not knowing a shit ton of website design (I basically was using a pre-existing template and then removing their shit and adding my own) I thought the best way would be to add it to the jpeg. So I went to Photoshop to load the image.

Which no longer was there.

In fact, the two folders, and ALL the content I’d created the night before, had disappeared.

I checked my recycle bin. Maybe I’d accidentally deleted them.

Nope, not there.

So I ran a search in File Explorer to find out where they’d been moved to. After an excruciating five minutes, it came up with a list of folder and file names. Only they were all listed as Shortcuts, not actual file locations. And if I tried clicking on the shortcut, the computer would inform me the file did not, in fact, exist, and asked if I would like to delete the shortcut.

Eight hours of design work, down the drain. If this had been for a client, I would have to eat the time redesigning from scratch.

After a monumental mental breakdown, in which Marlo patiently listened to me rant and nearly crumble into tears, she suggested in call Contemporary Computers for help.

But they’re not open on weekends. Just an emergency line for ‘managed clients’. Of which, I am not.

I pressed the button anyway, and pleaded with Phil to help. I accepted the hourly quote (which was in triple digits) because I couldn’t afford to wait until Monday to bring in the physical machine, partly because I was starting a new contract on Monday and needed to make sure there was nothing horribly wrong with my year-old desktop.

He remoted into my system, and started poking around. Phil saw the file explorer tab that listed the missing folders and files as shortcuts, but there was no obvious evidence that it had ever actually existed on my desktop. So he loaded some software onto my external drive and instituted a deep scan of my hard drive.

It took 90 minutes and found, you guessed it, absolutely nothing. Well, that’s not true. It did find the Adobe Stock photo I’d purchased last night for the website banner, sitting in my download folder. (Which wasn’t there when I looked earlier.) But it did confirm there was no corruption on my PC, no malware or hacks.

He said, if he hadn’t seen the shortcuts in my file explorer, he’d think they hadn’t been created in the first place. (But I did have an almost working website to also prove I had the original PNGs of the logo.)

I stumped the expert. But Phil offered a parting gift: he only charged me for thirty minutes of his time.

I spent the bulk of my Saturday on the website. WordPress had gotten back to me and said the black and white issue was built into the template I’d chosen; there were two identical templates and I needed to switch the current one out with it’s twin.

Yeah, only when I did that, II LOST everything I’d laid out on the page. Ka-blam. I had to start from scratch. So I spent a couple of hours attempting to rebuild the site. Finally got it done, with an issue with the background this time, there was white around the edges and I wanted a pure black background.

Close enough.

I did a final save and went live.

Only it WASN’T there.

The original template was there in it’s place.

Yet, when I went back to edit mode. Yup, voila, there everything was.

You know what I did wrong? I built it on a Page, but not the Home Page. And even though I could open the List View to see the breakdown, I couldn’t copy it over to the home page.

I had to recreate the website for a THIRD TIME. Only this time I fucking got it RIGHT.

And it only took me half an hour to recreate the logo (once I tracked down the icon I chose), and since I’d already embedded the new logo into my invoices, I was able to retrieve the HEX colours.

It is now Sunday, and I’m happy to report not only is the website live and functional, but the stuff I’d created last night is still on my computer.

And yes, I backed it up to my external hard drive. Just in case.