A Deeply Personal Rant From CaptainCaption (Patreon)

Hey folks, I'm dealing with some shit right now and my best method turned out to be rambling in text about it in a slightly unhinged way. I hope you all are ready for some hot takes!

On Tuesday, October 25, 2022, Miss Lou, my cat of 17 years, died after slowly fading away from over 3 months. Because of planning for a funeral for my uncle who passed away on October 20 and whose funeral service was yesterday, we were not able to bury her until today, October 28, 2022.

My family and I got her on Saturday, October 8, 2005, which was one day after my 12th birthday, at a PetSmart a few miles from my home in Atlanta, GA. We weren't intending to get any animal that day, but we were playing with the animals available for fun when the sweetest, smallest little kitten you've ever seen latched herself to my shirt and refused to let go.

The employee running the adoption told us that she was a hurricane Katrina rescuee (she got the name "Miss Lou" from the states affected by hurricane Katrina) and that she was fairly malnourished when they got her and that she would likely have size issues later in her life (she was a Maine Coon, a large breed with females that get up to 12 lbs; Miss Lou never got anywhere close to that weight).

With a pleading look, I asked my parents if we could get her. They somewhat reluctantly agreed, but she turned out to be the best birthday present I've ever gotten.

Birthdays are a weird thing for me. I'm on the tail end of a season of birthdays in September within my family and the festive spirit has usually fizzled out by the time it's my turn, but they were still fairly lively occasions with good memories. Also, by coincidence, re:Dreamer's anniversary is on my birthday (October 7th), and that's somehow reclaimed the date as one of celebration from one of dread.

My 21st birthday was also the worst day of my life. I went into a hospital near my campus after being refereed for chronic pain and stiffness in my right fingers, hand, and wrist. I thought I was merely suffering from RSI from writing so much for school, but I got the curveball of my life and was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

The doctor who broke the terrible news to me was not remotely qualified to explain the difference between a 21-year-old in good physical health getting diagnosed with PD and a 60-year-old getting diagnosed with PD, and I was handed some pamphlets.

I threw them out years ago because they were a harsh reminder of a traumatic event, but these pamphlets talked about making the most of my time left (about a decade, if not a bit less), managing the horrifying symptoms I was soon to experience, and it had referrals to in-patient care and hospice facilities.

I walked out of that hospital feeling like I was staring into an abyss, except it was all around me.

The road of my life behind me had been fairly rough: ADHD, strict pressure to succeed and a rather insane family situation (the craziness of Zach's mom is only a slight exaggeration of my mom; if anything, Zach's mom is shaping up to be more sympathetic with her craziness), depression, getting sent to an expensive wilderness therapy program and therapeutic boarding school after middle school that I shouldn't have been at, becoming a pariah for some of high school for this, and OCD and schizoaffective disorder in my freshman year that went undiagnosed as I was an out-of-state student with no support network.

Seriously, I was crippled by my OCD. I had vivid intrusive thoughts about murdering random strangers and myself that I couldn't escape from, my brain was like a movie for everything I've ever felt ashamed about (thoughts, things I've said, actions, etc.), I had to obsessively create lists of random things in my head and I'd keep losing my place as I counted the list and added stuff or took stuff away and it felt like my chest was going to explode if I didn't do this.

Despite all that, I had pulled through. I had gotten help, I was on medications that controlled my symptoms, I was recovering my GPA and in a major that I could manage with less stress as I switched from Mechanical Engineering to Classical Studies, aka Ancient Greek and Roman history, as OCD had largely destroyed my ability to do complex math. I'm not exaggerating when I say I still struggle with basic multiplication an elementary school student could do unless I write it down, largely because I have to obsessively check my work and there's something about the numbers being in my head that I don't trust.

Hell, I had gotten a girlfriend in college who I liked quite a bit! I thought my life was on the upswing and that the road ahead of me was going to be smoother, but I had suddenly been told that it was going to be the rockiest stretch yet before becoming bare dirt and plunging off a ravine less than a decade from now.

I don't think I've ever said this anywhere, but I strongly considered killing myself that afternoon. The only things that stopped me were a crushing sense of paralyzing numbness and apathy, not wanting the shame of someone finding my body, and not wanting to traumatize my parents.

Avoiding that end yet still feeling like a coward for it, I went to bed really early that night, at around 5 PM.

I couldn't fall asleep, but I got woken up at 8 PM by my dorm floor barging into my room to wake me up for a surprise 21st birthday party, being literally dragged out of bed to the dorm room of a frat boy, and being told how I had a lot to look forward to as I drowned myself in the shittiest alcohol I have ever consumed and tried my absolute hardest not to burst into ugly tears.

I dropped out soon after that and returned home, only to be berated for a new excuse for my laziness. That year back home the roughest of my life, as I struggled to keep my head above the crushing ocean of depression I had fallen into while being yelled at my parents for being lazy and told that I needed to work a job if I didn't want to be kicked out.

Barely able to even function at this point in my life, I jumped between the shitiest jobs I had ever worked (a deli cashier at a grocery store, several stints as a warehouse picker, pizza delivery). I didn't last long in any of these except pizza delivery, and every failure made me feel even more worthless.

The one silver lining in all of this was that I had finally managed to convince my mom to let me see a specialist at a local medical research facility for my Parkinson's disease in July. She did not and largely still does not believe I actually have it as my symptoms aren't the most common and has told me that she thinks that I made it up to medically disenroll of college because I fucked up my semester; she later got her suspicions proven right when I went back for a semester in 2016 that I was not ready for and disenrolled again.

Anyways, nearly right away, my new doctor told me that the doctor who had diagnosed me was an idiot. I was a day away being diagnosed with Juvenile Parkinson's disease and had been "upgraded" to Young-Onset Parkinson's disease, an age group ranging from 21 to 50.

This is important as the younger you are when you are diagnosed, the slower the progression of your symptoms. Your ability to physical and more particularly cognitively function stay intact for far longer than those who are diagnosed later, and there's a chance to completely avoid any of the cognitive problems from PD (like dementia).

This age group also suffers from more side effects or lack of beneficial response to dopamine-aiding drugs (levodopa being the most common). It took a team of doctors and later a single specialist literally 7 years to find medication that consistently works for me (although there are limits to its help as I've explained before).

The first new doctor I saw was very clear that I still had a long life ahead of me, but I pushed him on the issue and was told that I am likely going to start having mobility and potentially cognitive issues by 35, likely need assisted care by 45, and should not expect to live past 55 at the very latest (a more realistic date is 50, but good health can extend that to 55). I am currently 29.

I was already an interesting case to work out as I have a very atypical subset of Parkinson's disease called corticobasal syndrome (seriously, my doctor is one of the leading experts on parkinsonism and she's still not sure why my disorder is so atypical), but my atypical subset in an atypical diagnosis age range is particularly atypical and has made me a focus of medical study.

Admittedly, not a published study, as I was told that my personal information would be used to publish about me and thought it was going to be way more invasive with personal details that it would have wound up being and declined to let the literal team of doctors I had working on my case publish about me. This was a massive mistake as I am now down to a single specialist, but she's fantastic and is very appreciatively the right blend of being blunt yet sugarcoated, which is very helpful when I had the bad experience with doctors I have had with my PD.

Anyways, let's talk about why my PD/CBS is so weird.

As you can see from this link, my physical symptoms are localized almost entirely in one extremity for now, which is my right hand. It gets very stiff, it randomly trembles and twitches, and sometimes gross motor control of my right arm is hard (especially within the past few months, but I don't know how much is from my steroids and how much is from my baseline symptoms genuinely getting worse).

There's some stuff there too about my mental symptoms, such as a decline in my ability speak with primary progressive aphasia and dysarthria. Thankfully (as thankful as I can be with this), my mental symptoms are almost entirely verbal communication issues as my written communication and reading skills are almost entirely if not wholly unaffected by this. That's the part that's so interesting to my doctor, as by all means I should not be able to write or understand language this well at this time.

I have less severe mental issues with my PD, such as a decrease in my locative sense (I get lost pretty easily now when I used to be able to drive complex delivery routes without consulting a map), and a potential decline is still something I very much have to keep an eye on, but I am counting my blessings for now.

I'm still deeply ashamed of my speech every time I talk and it's a constant and worrying reminder of how fucky my brain is getting. For reasons you'll see later, I was unable to even form coherent words as I started writing this rant. I know that there's no reason to feel shame for a medical condition I can't control, but I still do. I feel like a defect unable to participate in one of the most basic human acts. As you'll see later, humanity is specifically the thing I cherish about the world. This is probably why I few furry stuff as antithetical to my enjoyment and even vile on an instinctual level, but I'm going to be pissing of more than enough people with this rant later without dragging a vocal fetish community that my producer/boss is a prolific member of.

Even worse is that I've largely had to drop speedrunning, a gaming activity I very much enjoy, as the demands are just too hard on my hand. Simply stated, I get RSI at the drop of a hat and can't reliably use a mouse or controller in a high-stakes setting like a speedrun when there's a risk of my right hand twitching or feeling like an alien part of my body without warning. I can still do lower-APM runs, but those aren't the types of games I am interested in running.

Part of the reason I have such a cursed keyboard setup is to put the workload on my good left hand. That weird 24-key numpad on the left is used so I can quickly tap macros and numeric values into it to very quickly output common text strings, such as expressions, variable checks for C.H.E.A.T.S., and the text substitution method I've started doing recently. Something like this isn't just faster, it's a lifesaver for when my right hand can't do as much.

I think one of my biggest fears, the one that really keeps me up at night, is losing my ability to communicate on all fronts, and I'm not even the most social person. Talking is already quite hard and not reliable for me as my ability to properly enunciate ebbs and returns seemingly at random, but I'm at risk of not being able to type as well. If that happens, I'm basically going to become unable to do anything in a conversation or do anything besides listen or read.

As a full disclosure in no uncertain terms, I am at risk of not being able to finish re:Dreamer due to forces outside of my control that I can't predict. If that happens, I'd probably go fucking insane within a year and possibly kill myself as this game is the thing keeping me together (maybe it's not that extreme, but I sometimes feel like it's that way).

A decade ago, I had dreams of starting a family by 30 (despite my job as a porn game writer, I am not that lacking in an ability "to get bitches"). I've just buried those dreams in the wake of my PD and not wanting to pass on my genes and put any potential future family through my suffering and decline. As I was diagnosed so young and my grandpa has PD, it's almost certainly genetic, and I while I can tell a future spouse all of this and she might consent to being with me anyways, a baby can't consent to being born with bad genes and I do not want to put hypothetical people I love through the trauma of watching me wither away and die within 25 years in the best-case scenario and risk having that cycle repeat.

I got really lucky with finding (rather, Espeon finding me) and getting another dream with re:Dreamer. Hell, maybe that's subconsciously where the title of this game came from as it's a second chance at a dream for me. It sounds wild, but I keep running into things with the game that were unintentional but either something I later planned or worked better than my own plans and am starting to think my "accidents" with success are simply unrealized deliberate thoughts. I couldn't have planned many parts of re:Dreamer better than it turned out without a rigid structure.

Anyways, I don't think I am going to get a third dream if this one disappears.

I'm by no means a Marvel fanboy, but these panels from Secret Invasion Aftermath: Beta Ray Bill - The Green of Eden #1 resonate with my personal philosophy almost harder than anything else I've ever come across. Coincidentally, the most I've ever had any piece of media resonate with my personal philosophy is Lex Luthor's speech to Amazo from Justice League Unlimited - The Return. I may not be a Marvel fanboy, but I'm a bit of a D.C. one even if the entire comics industry is in rough shape right now (thanks MCU!)

If you'll allow me to put on the trilby I mistakenly think is a fedora because I'm an edgy 16-year-old atheist incel with no idea of what a fedora actually is and just bought this thing at Walmart to be unique in high school, I'm firmly convinced that there's nothing after this life, and this is one of my strongest personal beliefs to call it a "belief" isn't quite accurate. It's something I know, and I'm not even willing to humor the notion that I'm wrong.

Even if God exists, he either doesn't know about us or doesn't care. A perfectly moral being as he is described wouldn't do either. I don't care that free will is the greatest gift of a divine creator, and that apparently doesn't exist in Heaven anyways. Also, have you read the Old Testament? God is a fucking petty, jealous, spiteful, and megalomaniacal asshole! A being like that does not deserve our love and devotion. He deserves our pity at best for being such a warped entity. Who touched you as a kid, God? Did you get bullied at school too much? If humans can write, Hell, if humans can be more moral characters than the all-knowing perfect good of God, he's not such hot shit. I've seen fellow humans have such outstanding moral integrity that inspires me to be better and improve the world so more of us can be like that. All I've seen of God is people trying to sell Him to me.

And that's just the theological concepts of monotheistic religion (I have thoughts about polytheistic religions, but those aren't too relevant in the modern day).

Organized religion prays upon the weak and desperate with a false hope while the rich and powerful co-opt it for their own gains. It's obscene witnessing people telling themselves that this life doesn't really matter. After all, it's merely a test, so they can delay their happiness, offset their grief, and ignore suffering as it is merely a temporary state.

Seeing all the ceremonies with a Catholic funeral for my uncle devoid of any consistent reason made me even more sure that the heavens are empty of a great guiding force than I already was. Hell, my uncle wasn't even Catholic (he was Methodist), but the church was the nicest in the area and I guess his family was like, fuck it, we're doing the funeral here. I felt so uncomfortable witnessing the sheer lengths of delusion people will go to with religion, because, religions, as I see them, are not about love or togetherness or anything more than the perpetuation of accepting the status quo through ridiculous rules that bind people not together like a hug but down like a shackle.

Despite this strong opinion (which I mostly keep to myself as bringing up religion to shit on it is like poking a lion that's asleep to prove that you're brave), I still came up at the open mic part of the service and talked about how my cat just died, how my dead uncle always tried to pet her and got bit for his troubles, and how he now had an eternity in Heaven for him to get that cat to like him "because he loved everyone and with enough time could make anyone love him."

I didn't believe a word of what I said. I didn't even like my uncle that much. Not only was he a bit of a misogynistic asshole, he also embezzled $500,000 dollars from the family trust living significantly outside of his means (yes of course CaptainCaption is a trust fund kid) and there's a good chance I won't be able to afford more expensive medical care I was relying on getting later in life with the trust on life support.

But funerals for the living, not the dead, and I liked or at least had no ill will to most of the living people in that massive room (seriously, my uncle's entire elementary, middle, and high school class showed up and there were like 600 people or more in attendance). Sure, my words were a lie and as hollow as the giant plastic crucifix over the main podium was, but I felt like I was still making good with telling the anecdote and doing the right thing. Hell, most of the room even clapped after that and I got a bizarre number of compliments for my nice speech at the reception later. Not bad for something I thought up as I walked up to the podium with little more to go on than the topic of my dead cat and my uncle, but it is weird that I can bullshit this well.

Going to today, my cat has been dead for over 3 days by now and we've been keeping her outside in a closed box placed inside a recycling bin. She's in there with a small towel I used to pick her stiff body up and put it in there, and a super ball (she quite literally used to play fetch with them as a younger cat; I'd post a video if I could find it since it's very impressive seeing how she would do insane jump shots swatting the balls out of the air and chasing them down the main house hallway as they bounced).

I know she's not going to a place where she's going to be able to play with that ball, but I'm a sentimental bleeding heart and funerals are for the living, not the dead.

As I took her out of the recycling bin, she smelled quite bad and firmly reminded me that we are all just hunks of meat in the end. Georgia's soil is basically hard red clay, so it took way too long to bury her a tiny grave, even with my dad helping (although it definitely felt like too many cooks in the kitchen at times because we were really just taking turns with digging the small hole because our shovels got in the way). I also have viral asthma right now and kept coughing my lungs out during this process because of the soil dust and the smell of my dead rotting pet.

When Lou was finally in the ground and covered up (this happen roughly at 3:00 PM), I reflected on our years together. 17 years of a good life with a loving family and passing as peacefully and painlessly as possible is about as good as it gets for a pet, but she left nothing in this world besides fond memories and a corpse. That's great for a pet, but I find the thought of a person's legacy being nothing but good memories and a corpse unsavory to a degree I can't even begin to articulate. The thought of that being my legacy fills me with a dread that paralyzes me, like I'm standing on the sloping fenceless side of a mountain and all I would have to do to fall off is step forwards one or two more steps or slip.

I hate Hamilton to a nearly psychotic degree for reasons I have explained, but I'm writing like I'm running out of time because I am (possibly sooner than I think).

re:Dreamer has at least 4 years (more likely 5) years of work left to it before I'd consider it "done" but I'm not even sure I have that because my health could decline fairly rapidly at any moment.

This unfinished game has touched so many people in deeply important ways that I couldn't even fathom a pornographic gender bender visual novel being capable of when work on it started a bit over 3 years ago.

For as much as this pornographic gender bender visual novel has become a gender story with an egg crack counts in the dozens, I was pretty embarrassingly transphobic about 6 years ago as I fell for bad-faith arguments from shitty people like Milo Yiannopoulos, thinking that trans women were making a major mistake, that it was self-harm, and that they were too mentally ill to make the choices they were making.

I softened 2 years after I stopped listening to clowns like that, and it's all extremely embarrassing to admit in hindsight, but I guess like many people in the Discord (invite), I've gone through an arc after being exposed to dozens upon dozens of trans women. That shame is a sign of progress... I think? Many are mentally ill, but the pot can't call the kettle black here. Plus, I’m like legitimately getting borderline militant with being an ally.

Hell, I (not the visual novel) actually cracked someone in voice call last night. According to someone being told the story, they had a Linux penguin as their profile picture and code in C++, so it's not like I did anything that impressive.

I'm still weirded out by how good I was at it and that I, a cis man and one of the few in the server regulars, was the person bluntly explaining to someone that they seriously needed to be introspective about their identity as what they were doing was making them miserable, and that they get one shot at life that they need to make their own and not the one that everyone expects of them... but I won't deny that it felt a little nice helping someone to that degree. Only a little though, and I'm still quite conflicted about it because this person came into a VC for the first time, while quite drunk, and got sucker punched hard by an impromptu therapy session about issues they've been ignoring for decades and I still feel like it isn't my place to be doing this because I do not have the answers they are looking for, only questions they can ask themself.

Source: kasoku on pixiv 

People have unironically called me tsundere, but at least the "OC" I use everywhere for my writing stuff isn't actually an OC, just fan art of a genderswapped character from an anime about writing I have never seen before.

Look, Espeon is the one who made this image, not me. The question still stands unanswered about whether it's better or worse that Zach/Zoey is my primary OC, but I'm trying to figure more important shit out first.

Again, it was still weird doing this, but I guess someone was possibly right when they said that the new arc for CaptainCaption is the unironic egg cracker one. You know, putting an end to the unintentional (not ironic) egg cracker arc that's been running for 3 years.

I guess in the end, I don't really have a point or a purpose to this rant. I think it started out as a way for me to get my thoughts out of my head, to deal with the grief of losing a pet I've known for most of my life, and to calm down from a borderline panic attack after burying her, but I guess the theme of what I've been doing for the past 3 years is that if you take the time to look at things in a new way, maybe things aren't so bad after all, and it's the process of finding that purpose in life that's important. Destiny isn't anything but your life playing out.

Yeah, I got dealt a shit hand in life in many ways, but I'm a far more interesting person for all of that and I'm telling a better story with so much passion because the deck I'm playing from is so weird.

I don't believe in God, but I'm still praying I can get that story done because I'm starting to think it's got a good chance of leaving a lasting mark on the world that might outlive me. I hope everyone reading this gets to see that.