Welcome to Mordhaus

Given that this is my first post ever, I suppose I should say a bit about my blogging intentions. However, to do so I have to actually know my intentions in this regard, and I can't say that I do.

I have chronic illness and pain. Despite my best efforts I seem to be getting more ill and more impaired, and as a result the last few years have been...well, shitty. Sure, I still have some pleasant or even good experiences, and I don't spend every second of every day in agony. On the other hand, I haven't had a day without pain in so long that I literally can't remember what that feels like. (My best guess is that I last experienced a blissful pain-free 24-hours sometime early in this century.) I also have the priviledge of having a sleep disorder (i.e., narcolepsy) and some gastrointestinal and muscular problems on top of my pain, and I am continually amazed at the creative ways my various symptoms can interact with, and intensify, each other.

It has been a rough decade.

I often ponder the distinction between whining about one's troubles and facing/coping with/adapting to them. I intellectually understand the difference between these behaviours, but one of the many joys of chronic pain and illness is that it can be hard to tell the difference when almost all of your attentional capacity is devoted to the liquid fire that has appeared to replace all of the fluids in your body. However, I don't care nearly as much about other people's opinions of me as I did in the past, and I've come to realize that I am willing to take the risk of being viewed as a whiner if it means that my cogitating helps me figure out how to make my life less shitty. And if my yakking here is at all useful to any of the many other people who have to deal with pain and illness, then I say "yay."

Ok, I'm going to wrap up this oh-so-exciting first post by answering two possible questions that might occur to any people who somehow meander by this blog:

What do herring have to do with anything? And why in the world are they juggling?

Well, my friend, if you're asking this you clearly haven't watched enough of Golden Girls. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Anyway, if you read the herring references at the top of the page you might be able to come up with some way that Rose's words can be interpreted in light of coping with chronic pain and illness. Feel free to do so, as did I, but when it comes down to it I just fraking love that Golden Girls scene and the mental image conjured by the phrase "herring juggling act."

What is Mordhaus? Why are you welcoming me to it? And do I really want to be here?

No, you probably don't. Mordhaus is the wicked cool (read: dark and creepy) home of the band Dethklok from the animated show Metalocalypse. This show is brilliant. Should I actually continue to post to this blog I'm fairly certain there will be many posts that reference Metalocalypse. I have found it to be a very effective distraction tool, and it seems as good a place as any to end this post.