What Are You Happily Afraid Of?

My bowels moved while I was sleeping.

I could feel it. It came from me like a very warm, thick fart. Something must have been wrong with my stomach. I don't know, but in seconds I was literally swimming in a pool of hot shit in the center of my bed. FUCK! I roll over, pull all of my sheets off, quickly rolled them up into a ball and stuffed them into a garbage bag. Then I duck walked, trying to keep my legs apart so that I could keep the squishy nature of my getting about down to a minimum, and grabbed my washcloth.

Now I live in an SRO, which means that my bathroom is down the hall a few yards, so I'll have to be exposed to the public for a few seconds before I could get to the shower. I took a change of clothes and listened to the door to see if anyone was in the hall. The shit was running down my legs, so I knew that I would be leaving shit puddles all the way from my door to the can, but what the fuck. I must be doing the same thing all over my room! So what? After a hot shower I'll return with hot rags.

I gained the bathroom with no one the wiser. I turned on the shower, then I carefully pulled up on the big tank top tee shirt that I wear almost like a dress to sleep in. I don't wear underwear, so you can just imagine the magnitude of my dilemma. I pulled my shit soaked T shirt over my head, knowing that I was getting it in my hair, cursing under my breath, and turned the shirt to see it for the first time. The front of the shirt surprisingly did not have a shit stained splash in the lower half of it.

HOWEVER, THE OTHER SIDE... didn't either. I flipped the tee over and over, and over again not finding a drop of warm shit anywhere. I jump in front of the mirror completely confused, turn around and look over my shoulder to see my fat ass, and there was nothing there. What the fuck? I leave the bathroom and return to my room, taking my sheets out of the garbage bag and throwing them open across the bed. Nothing. Not one drop of diarrhea. Now when I tell you how fucking vivid and lucid my dreams are, THIS KINDA SHIT is what I'm talking about.

Somewhere along the line of the morning, while disposing all of this shit, I was deep in a dream. The problem today? The dream occurred in familiar surroundings and my waking from it was too slow. If it was more abrupt I could have understood what the fuck was going on. But by it being a slow process, I was allowed to be animate, controlling my limbs. This is something that normally the brain blocks you from doing. In some people, due to certain factors, this blockage weakens or fails altogether, and they sleep walk, become highly animate or even physically violent in their sleep. This blocking ability of my brain is no doubt weakening in me, and it could also be because of Abilify.

So I remake my bed, look around and realize that it's another day. Another day. I boot up my computer, as I do every day. Drink plenty of water, as I do every day. Take a long assed leak, as I do every day. Make a cup of tea, as I do every day. Sit in front of my computer, as I do every day. And I worry, as I'm starting to do every day. My little routine keeps me busy so that I don't get the ten minute AADD. Soon, my OCD will kick in and I'll notice something in the room that needs to be done. And needs to be done NOW!

I see it already...I need to mop and wax the entire floor. A half hour for each part to dry. That's good, it will take all day almost and on top of that, I can do it while I do three other things. This is the start of a good plan. I have to hurry up with my plans because I only get about ten minutes to make them...unless I'm writing. But  here's another problem. I'm down to the LAST TEN PAGES of the most epic piece of work that I have ever embarked upon. Ten pages, and then it's all over. I'm dragging these pages out, doing a paragraph or two a day. Before I enjoyed doing a marathon beating on it. It was strong enough, or so I thought. It would never run out of sentences.

A quarter trillion sentences later and it's doing so rapidly now. And after that? Then what? Then what, huh? Nothing. I don't even have the idea of another story to write. I can't think long enough to construct one. I can't form an outline to begin off of. It would have to be free-formed, and for me, that normally turns out to be an exquisite waste of time. I'm afraid that I'll have nothing to do. Nothing to dream about. Nothing to hope in. Everything turns on a different axis when I type 'The End' at the end of the work. What then? Blog?

Oh you don't want to hear that one! Now that I've learned how to schedule my blogs in advance so that uploading them is no longer part of the work, I just go on and on. I type and load and the program holds it until my specified time, which is 12:15 every morning. The damn program can also tell me what date this or that post will post. Here's the problem. I can write several times a day. As soon as I run against something, something small, I write about it. So if you calculate the number of posts I do a day, to the number that the program publishes a day, you'll get the figure of how big my backlog is a day.

I'm writing this blog right now, today, and it probably won't be published until next week. Actually the 29th of the month. Not too far you say? Hey, most of my posts are still sitting in drafts. Once they get photos, which I try to take it slow on, they go into the 'scheduled' list, like a cartridge in the clip of a gun. That's the thing, and it just waits there. To make the story plain, I can't keep blogging to find something to do. I am so hyperactive that I pace like a panther in a cage, and I sleep just a few hours a day...if that. The good thing, I think my metabolism is going up again. I'm not certain, and you probably wonder about this, but I don't know how much I eat during the day.

It's because I have no real schedule. I used to say that when I wake up, no matter the time, that was the start of my day. That was until I started falling to sleep several times for twenty minutes daily. Then I counted days from sunrises and sunsets, and when you sleep in such a piecemeal fashion, it's easy to miss a day or a night, or even add one. Now I know what hard time in prison feels like. Now I see why hardened criminals HAVE to get out of their cells, walk  the halls, stroll the yard. If they didn't, they'd lose their minds.

Me, my prison is myself. I don't want to go out, and when I do, it's to get here or there and back. No fucking around, no window shopping, no strolls through the park. None of that shit. Do what needs to be done, be as cordial as possible with my fellowman and then get my ass back home. I am worried about this too. I have therapy coming in January, but I think I'll need to find some therapy sooner. Especially if Abilify doesn't slow things down soon.

I've been watching A&E and they have an amazing show on people with OCD (called OBSESSED) and how prevalent it is today, and so misunderstood. People think they understand OCD. Some see it as a joke. Some see it about some crackpot who has pointless rituals and are ridiculously focused on some minutiae.In many aspects, this is funny. It's almost hilarious how these nutcases behave, because you think to yourself, what is going on in the mind of that person? Why is he/she like this? Why don't they just cut it out? Why are they so self damaging over such stupid little things? It makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense. What if I told you that this person lives in terror? Could you understand that? What if I told you that this was a soldier in Afghanistan? Your heart would go out to him wouldn't it? He is under daily stress, not knowing if he would make it through the day, frightened that he would be brought to an end at any time, any moment, any second, for no apparent reason.

Now, what if I told you that one day an IED exploded in front of him, killing his friends before his eyes, and somehow missing him and his vehicle. HERE'S WHAT YOU MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT UNDERSTAND. That night, he cannot explain how he survived. How did he make it? How in the fuck was that not him but THEM? Life CANNOT be so fucking arbitrary. There has to be a reason why he didn't die that day. There has to be a reason why he was spared where in the warehouse across the barracks there are pieces of decaying meat that he used to drink and laugh with.

What if I told you that the next morning that he got up, he thinks about the day of his coming face to face with a quandary. He HAS to go out. He could die so arbitrarily that it is realistically senseless. Not in a fire fight, not rescuing a child, not making a decision to put himself in harms way, but instead stepping to one side and too close to an IED. Then he thinks of the morning just before.  What the fuck did he do that made a difference. Something had to. In the beginning, it's something obvious.

That morning, for some reason he put his shoe on the left foot first before his right. This was something completely new for him. Why did he do that on that day? It could be anything different. It could be that on that day, he took his cross from the locker, accidentally dropped it, picked it up and put it back into his locker. Now here's where it comes into play...how can people with OCD be so fucked up? This soldier, now terrified to go out into battle, feels the only thing that keeps life from being so arbitrary and absurd comes to believe that because he put his left shoe on his foot first, he was somehow protected from the insanity of death. He was passed over by the angel of death because of this. Or maybe it was dropping the cross? So he does both of these things the next morning before going out. And the next, and the next, and from something so small, this is how it starts. He is on the path to madness.

People under stress do this all the time. All of these behaviors are rooted in fear of the arbitrary. A baseball player has an excellent year one season. He made some amazing plays, spectacular saves, incredible runs and he can't attribute it to anything other than being at the right place at the right time. But life can't be that arbitrary. It can't be so ludicrously selective, so fucking random. There has to be some reason for his...luck? Can there be? Is there? What was a constant every time he had a day with some amazing play? He didn't use the team baseball bat. He used the team baseball bat given to him by his coach. Now in actually this bat is the same bat that everyone else uses. In fact there were many more days that he used that bat and fucked up miserably.

But he ascribes his success to this bat, and it becomes his 'lucky' bat.

Now that's two examples of OCD. This is rooted in fear and terror. How?

I'll tell you later.

Hobobob