Black Cat Blog

Thoughts, Stories, and Ideas

Category: Mental Health

  • Monday Morning Loading Dock

    I have just started my new gig working on Monday and every other Tuesday mornings at my favorite site. I will enjoy the easy extra money. I am tired from working last night from 3-11 but it’s not like the shifts are even that stressful ordinarily. I might need to take a nap when I get home but that’s fine. At least this dock shift is only a 4 hour deal so it makes things easy.

    Tonight is date night with Denisse and boy am I looking forward to it. I love the simple pleasures in life like spending time with the love of my life. I will make certain that my phone is in a completely different room so that I have no distractions. We will have pizza, canned pre-mixed margaritas, and maybe one or two other little goodies. I plan on being a space case tomorrow and that is okay. I’m giving myself permission to relax.

    On Wednesday, I will have to be some sort of productive and I am okay with that. I’ll spend time working on my website and a few other matters. I got invited by VGM to drive for them on a contractual basis. Uber is testing out an all electric fleet of Lucid high-end vehicles. The nice thing is that it is hourly compensation with all tips going to the driver. If that comes through and it makes financial sense, I’ll resign from OPS. I’ve had it with security and struggling.

    My brother’s birthday is on Friday of this week and I want to get him a birthday gift for all the things he has done for me. I’ll probably get him a $100 gift card to Amazon. This should help him out considering he and his wife use Amazon a lot.

    I’m definitely ready for the next step in life which includes turning off the TV, reading, and educating. It’s time to go back to what I love which is learning. For me, learning is fulfilling so I want to go back to those activities. I want to do so much in life.

  • Better Day Today

    I am doing a lot better today than I was last night. Last night was rough because of the situation with my mother. I got a good long cry in and I feel better. I just wish I wasn’t so exhausted. I am going to have to stand up regularly so that I don’t fall to sleep at work. I feel like I am nodding off. A security guard that falls asleep is no good to anybody and does the profession a real disservice.

    I got back on Mastodon after a hiatus from it. I found myself really missing the interactions. Of course, I will need to rebuild an audience from scratch but that is very doable and I’m in no particular hurry to do so. I like the decentralized nature of the Fediverse (Mastodon) and that, to a certain extent, I have a little more control over my data. The only way to have almost complete control is to run my own Mastodon server and I am not going to do that this time around. It’s just too much work and I don’t have the time.

    The coming week is going to be a fairly long one. I have to work an extra 4 hour shift tomorrow so I will really be only off for 2.5 days. Next week, I will only have a day and a half off. It looks like, for the foreseeable future, every other week 2.5 days off. It’s going to be its own form of hell but I’ll take it. I need the money as Denisse will need more help in the coming months. I don’t mind because I love her and once she gets on her feet, I know that she will be able to reciprocate more. I am excited for her phlebotomy schooling.

    Denisse and I are going to make the trip to see mom at Lodge Lane, her memory care facility. She doesn’t know that we are coming and that is for the best. Sometimes, I think mom tells me to stay away because she doesn’t want to inconvenience me and might experience some shame and remorse about her condition. Ethan, my brother, helped me to realize that mom really needs family now more than ever.

    I hope that my relief is on time and won’t lolly gag around. I’ve got to be back at the worksite at 7am tomorrow morning. I hope that the supervisor won’t be in a foul ass mood and stick me on the x-ray machine. If he does, I will most likely tell him politely but firmly that I won’t be doing this. If he gets an attitude about that, I’ll tell him to speak with the manager, Chris. Chris told me the shift would be a dock shift and I get to sit down and raise and lower the dock entry door. Those are my expectations/boundaries and I will stick to them.

    Tomorrow evening will be a date night for Denisse and I. I am absolutely looking forward to it. We are going to watch the latest episode of The Pitt and catch the franchise finale of the Halloween movies. The finale is called (with an utter lack of imagination) Halloween Ends. Still it should be entertaining. I like the cheesy horror genre. The shows don’t frighten or scare me anymore but I still enjoy the story lines.

    Well that’s about all I have to write for the time being. Stay tuned for another exciting entry tomorrow – LMAO.

  • My Mom

    My mom is dying from Alzheimer’s. She’s my rock and we always had a special relationship. She may not make it through the summer. Mom had another fall and was hospitalized. Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease and I am beginning the mourning process. Is it bad that all this sadness has me looking back on my life at the missed opportunities and everything I did not complete or do.

    I’m growing older and I am realizing how finite time is. I’m filled with remorse for the way I treated my body. I’m not honoring my mom. I am sick mentally and physically. I have to see a vascular specialist because I’m losing feeling in my feet up to my ankles. Maybe the best thing to happen to me would be a stroke that kills me. At least I would not feel any pain. Few would miss me anyway. I did nothing noteworthy; accomplished nothing. I ran away from every opportunity in fear.

    My life has passed me by and I have nothing to show for it. I’m just old. I’ve lost friends and lost touch with people. I have little of value and I’m learning that having some material things can be helpful – short of hoarding of course. I miss my stuffed seal which I named Sealy. I loved that stuffed animal. When I was a boy and had no friends I played monopoly with Sealy. I’d roll the dice for him and play the game. Stuffed animals are wonderful.

    My mom is a salt of the earth person. I am hurting so much. I always assumed I’d have her into her 90s. She’s turning 81 in August. She might not make that. I’ve never been impacted quite like this. Typically I deal with death by celebrating a life versus mourning. But I am mourning because this is hitting me hard. Hell, I thought my mom would outlive me and part of me had hoped that would be the case.

    I feel like a child in an adult’s body. I don’t understand how to grapple with this. I know that being autistic and developmentally delayed might explain the difficulty. Maybe it is better if my mom passes quickly versus suffering from this god awful disease. We had great hopes that an infusion treatment would help mom. The infusions did absolutely nothing other than give us false hope.

    I am scared that I am headed towards addiction and substance abuse. It’s just going to take time. I have a good therapist at that’s going to help with distress tolerance. I am just listening to some music to help get the emotions out. I now know why my cousin committed suicide. He and I are so similar in that we are both on the autistic spectrum. He had much of the same difficulty that I have. I feel his pain deeply. I sometimes hate the empathy that I have.

    I wonder if my cousin simply overdosed and I am hoping that is what he did because that is the least painful way to go. But his generation would probably have hung himself. That’s more common in the late baby boomers. I am not ready for mom to go. I am losing my precious mommy. I have no relationship with my father. I feel so alone, helpless, and adrift. I don’t see how I can keep on living.

  • Really Scored Today

    I really scored some neat stuff at the a really free flea market that was held in the parking lot of the Bellevue Community Center nearby me. This is just a way for people to get rid of things that they no longer want and benefit the community. I got some DVD-Rs, a good quality bluetooth speaker Tribit speaker, and a Logitech web cam with the Carl Zeiss lens! I made out like a bandit.

    Denisse was with me and she also scored some stuff. She likes collecting squishmallows and some stuffed animals. She also spotted a great Christmas decoration and a really unique handbag labeled with Asshole and Emotional Baggage. That was hilarious and screamed her personality. We got some playing cards. In the end we filled a small cart.

    I am at work now and pretty happy about it. I am at my favorite site which is a locked down building. I can relax and enjoy. It is literally collecting an easy paycheck for watching over things. I am really grateful for this gig. In an ideal world I would do double shifts here on Saturdays and Sundays because this is easy and peaceful.

  • Sometimes Arch Linux Frustrates Me

    My favorite distro of Linux, Arch, is really frustrating me. My desktop completely petered out after the last power failure. It corrupted a whole lot and basically I needed to rescue my system. I was able to get all of the data backed up but I need to reinstall Arch. I am okay with that because it was an old install.

    I decided to work on the reasons for my failure to get Arch Linux going. So I set up a VM on my laptop and fired up the installer. It turns out that I did two things wrong: (1) I never added the lvm driver to the boot loader and (2) I used the wrong partition UUID. Both are critical for my setup to work. I use full disk encryption for my desktop stuff because I believe in the fundamental right to privacy for “digital” papers and effects.

    I often write a fair amount of controversial things and I could be in the cross-hairs of the tRump Administration. Fortunately, the courts have generally ruled that someone cannot be forced to give up a decryption passphrase. However, courts have ruled that people who use devices locked with biometric data can be forced to provide that. I keep all my stuff encrypted with passphrases just for that reason.

    Good golly I am tired tonight. I really want to go home but I still have 2 hours left on the clock. I really want to hit the 10:15pm 13 bus to get home for only $0.80 versus a Lyft which is easily $15-$20 on Friday night. There’s no love for the working man. Buses stop at a ridiculously early hour for route 13. I need a vehicle badly!