Facing The Music

I took the last half tablet of the steroids this morning. That may be significant in that the VA probably won't prescribe me any more for a while. I don't know the story on that, but the grape vine tells me that steroids aren't prescribed with refills, and I might not get any more for a while. I just hope I don't need 'em. They sure have been a big help to me. I was just miserable.

I seem to have lost all my enthusiasm for playing the digital piano. I mean, if playing the piano leads to what happened, I can live without it. Bah! Humbug! I had a shot at turning real pain into real pleasure, and it didn't happen. I needed medical intervention to get myself outta that corner. So? I'm not a true masochist. Worse, probably, I'm not a true sadist either. The whole S&M thing has never worked out for me. I've been living pretty much as an eunuch for the last thirty years, staying faithful to a woman who I never satisfied in the first place, so, where do I go from here?

I used to go to the greasy spoon for breakfast a while back. I went about the same time every day at around eleven o'clock in the morning. That gave me a choice of having the regular breakfast menu or the blue plate lunch buffet. There is a gaggle of older people who showed up more or less to have the same choices, but other older people who showed up to be around other older people. Older people die, naturally, so other people get older and take their place, but not necessarily because they want to.

The Golden Rule seems fairly applicable in this situation. These older people treat other older people like they wanna be treated in order to show them how they should act to get along with them, cranky or no. This dynamic might make it seem that old people want other old people to come around to their booth or table with their plastic generational smile, smoozing, and ask about their health. They would want you to stand there why they lay it out for you, although standing there listening might be uncomfortable because of your own health problems while they recite some singsong litany about their medicines and the side-effects. Like I do here.

Assholes. They're all assholes. I've pretty much stopped going because they remind me that I'm just another asshole too. Who needs that?

More than once I've thought about how much pain I experienced with this recent rheumatoid arthritis bout, and the letter I got from my doctor at the VA stating in no uncertain terms that I've been officially diagnosed with this dis-ease. I'm on the computer as a certain kind of person who permanently has a condition that ain't gwine away without a new miracle drug. What I've thought about was the people this has happened to before steroids to radically ease the pain. I'm seriously humbled by what would have happened to me. I'm fairly sure I would have wanted to die as soon as possible to get shed of that pain.

Now, I guess I'll just sit around doing nothing to prevent another bout of extreme pain by careful inactivity. Right. Like that might help. The only real hope I entertain is to rev up my old meditation practice. Meditating can bring about the same chemical conversion I experienced in my old float tank when I was on that sensory deprivation gig. This RA (rheumatoid arthritis) is not just about bones, but muscles too. I haven't looked that up on the internet. I'm experiencing it currently.

After I had been in the float tank for around an hour or less, my body went through a chemical conversion such that all the lactic acid in my muscles changed to something else that took all the tension out of my muscles all over my body. Doing that might help me suffer through this crap a little more comfortably, but I'm not giving up on trying to become a masochist and learn how to get off sexually on pain. But, I'm not getting my hopes up either.