In other words, this :

I’ve thought about it more, and yeah, I would move to the USA to write for The Onion.

How could I refuse? I would be jumping from the gutter all the way to the heights of modern comedy writing in one enormous Superman-like leap.

For that kind of opportunity, I’d move to Hell. Or worse, Trump’s America.

At least Chicago is a Great Lakes city, so sanity would be only a lake away.

Still, it’s a bracing thought. I would have to get my passport, which ain’t cheap, and have to deal with all the rigmarole involved with getting a work visa.

Becoming an American citizen is not an option. Dual citizenship, maybe.

As nice as it would be to be able to vote in their elections, and therefore have more of a right to have an opinion on their politics, I am not giving up being Canadian for anything.

I love my country. It’s a vital part of me. End of story.

Now I don’t know how far $70K USD/year goes in Chicago, but at the moment it’s worth a hair over $100K CDN, so I have to assume I’d be able to live a pretty nice life.

Not the heights of glamour and luxury, but those don’t appeal to me anyhow. I would just rent a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood with lots of trees in it (we humans love to live in the forest) and make a nice little nest for myself.

Sounds absolutely lovely to me. My own little slice of heaven.

But I probably should not be getting that far ahead of myself. For all I know, it’s a remote job, or can be.

In which case I would be living here off of $100K/year. And even here, that would get me a fairly nice life.

So this is a goal worth putting some damned effort into, is what I am saying.

As for the 30 Onion style headlines, it’s not like I have to write them all at once. The deadline is over a month away. Theoretically I could write one a day until then and still make the cut.

More probably I would write a few here and a few there and once I had the requisite number I would spend the rest of the time refining the fuck out of them until each one was as funny and sharp as I could make it.

Assuming I can pull myself together enough to start.

Heck, even if the gig is out of reach, it would still be a good comedy writing exercise, and who knows? Maybe I would launch my own rival satirical website.

Call it The Potato. Both because of my Prince Edward Island heritage and because “the Potato has many eyes. ”

You know. Like a news organization.

I suppose my prospects are not great. For all I know, they are not even taking applications from outside the USA, although if so, they should have said so.

But I would like to think the folks at The Onion are cooler than that. Why restrict your search for the funniest people around to just the USA?

For all they know, there’s a dynamite genius satirist living in Lower Angola who would be a major asset to their team.

Or. Ya know. Living in Richmond, BC. Ahem.

It’s certainly something to think about. I know that if I summon up the wherewithal (that ever elusive substance) to get my list of headlines started, I will probably finish it.

Then it would be a matter of coming up with a really funny cover sheet and a resume so hilarious that they don’t notice that there’s almost nothing on it.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am a hilariously funny comedy writer and bound to be better than like 90 percent of the other applicants, so I at least have a chance to get the gig.

Then I would go back to the VFS writing campus and SHOVE IT IN THEIR FACE.

More after the break.

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About not failing myself

The real trick with this Onion thing is holding on to it.

Because I know what will happen if I don’t do a specific intervention to prevent it. It will sit there in my mind, seemingly not going anywhere but in reality slipping slowly away as my fear and aversion not only keep me frozen in place and unable to move forward but very gradually pull it backwards in my mind in an attempt to (badly) solve the impasse until I have forgotten all about it until it’s way too late.

And then while my conscious mind is kicking itself for letting this golden opportunity slip away due to my inaction, a quieter but more deep and powerful part of my mind is going, “Phew, thank God that is over, we almost had to do something!”.

I can feel it starting to happen in my mind as I type these very words.

So I am going to need to prevent that by starting my list of headlines very soon. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Once I get that going, my need to complete what I start should take over and I will at least finish the list.

And at that point, throwing together a “resume” (hah) and a cover letter would be no big deal so why the heck not just do it and then forget about it.

I guess I can ask them whether they take Canadian applicants and/or remote workers in the cover letter.

If not, whatever, it was good to get activated like that regardless. I need to tap into my capacity for hope and optimism and ambition as often as I can because I am convinced that my ebullient nature is my ticket out of this hole I’ve been in.

It’s just a matter of overcoming the fear I have of using it.

Oh, because that would take me “out of control”.

Well fuck control. Control don’t work.

Time to try a little chaos.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I rather like how this turned out. And not just because I had to fight my technology just to get the damned thing done.

And I lost.

What you see there is the raw, unedited version of my little thought piece. I edited the heck out of that version like I usually do, and then Corel VideoStudio refused to output it properly so I was back to square one.

Oh well. The raw version is hardly unwatchable. I have been internally debating whether all the effort I put into editing out um and ahs and stutters and pauses is really worth it in terms of the final product.

I’m hardly inarticulate. I speak clearly and my little verbal imperfections generally flow with my speech patterns well enough.

Another thing to ponder as I explore the art of video.

I’ve done some more looking for a program to add the video clip and pictures for me so all I have to do is talk. That would be ever so handy.

No luck yet, though. I tried an app/site called Descript which has many amazingly powerful features, like editing a video by editing its script (!!), but it did not do what I am looking for, dammit.

I think I am going to have to break down and just go get the visual content myself. Maybe subscribe to one of those stock footage sites to make it a little easier.

If I start doing that, then I will be doing way less editing to my vids.

I’ve only got a finite amount of creative energy in me and if I have to come up with enough images and clips to cover a whole video, I won’t have much left.

In theory I could record the raw video then spend more than a day editing it and refining it and so on. I could try the whole “make it the best it can be until you literally can’t thing of any way it could be better” thing.

But uh, I don’t really operate that way. As with a lot of things, I travel perpendicular to that more logical and orderly approach.

I do everything wrong and yet somehow it works out. Just like Lister.

Maybe some of us just have to make things up as we go.

About the subject of the vid : I’ve been pondering it further and I think it has something to do with our modern idea of “earning” pleasure.

Looking at a sunset is free. In the capitalist brain, that means it has no economic value. It has a price of zero. So it can’t possibly be important or good.

But more than that, I think we fear things that violate what Nietzsche called our fundamental table of values. The idea of a world in which unlimited joy is available on demand is just too upsetting to us. We need some sort of structure to make sense of how you come to “deserve” things and a world in which you can get your happiness from looking at a picture of kittens at play violates the very concept of “earning”.

I think this is behind a lot of rules about sex, too. Sex can provide enormous pleasure, joy, and release for comparatively extremely little labour, and we fear that.

I mean, did we really deserve that orgasm?

On a spiritual level, I would really love to learn what we can achieve if such arbitrary limitations are removed. If we all suddenly remember that we made the rules up just to have rules and therefore we are free to change or abolish rules that no longer work.

Certainly, the immediate effect would no doubt be a period of unprecedented decadence as everyone indulged themselves to their heart’s content.

But we’d get over that, and then… well…

..we would get to see what we become when all our needs are met.

More after the break.

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Past the decadent

There is a reason why decadence leads directly to temperance.

Decadence is the pursuit of spiritual objectives by tangible means. For example, a feeling of emptiness or incompleteness is a spiritual matter.

Trying to fill that void with sex and drugs is decadence.

And that’s why addiction in all its forms is the plague of our era. Whether it’s substance use disorder (drug and/or alcohol addiction), being an adrenaline junkie, hoarding (aka acquisition addiction), serial relationships, video games, risky sex, or pretty much any other way to activate your pleasure center, damn near everyone has their addiction.

Certainly everybody with depression. We all self-medicate.

The true horror of decadence comes when the pleasure that has been fixated upon reaches the point of diminishing returns and yet the individual does not want to let go of it so they keep ramming their head against the wall trying to get enough of the thrill out of the pleasure as they need at least to feel normal.

This hurts. And yet, because of the nature of addiction, the addict has deep tunnel vision and can no longer see any source of joy other than the fixation.

So they are compelled to keep doing something that hurts like hell and that makes them angry at the world and that’s why decadence so often leads to sadism or masochism.

They have gone so deep down the decadence rabbit hole that only the extreme sensations of pain, giving or receiving, can penetrate the numbness.

Because that’s where decadence leads – numbness. The impossible cruel mechanism of addiction is that every time you use something to plug that hole, the hole gets bigger, so it takes even more next time.

Hence people going from being a free spirit hippie to being a Jehovah’s Witness or the like. Once they finally hit rock bottom and that releases them from the addiction enough that they can look for a way out, they find spirituality through extreme religion and that becomes the new addiction.

Oh well. At least Jesus doesn’t wreck your liver.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, of course, is today’s action-packed thrill ride of a video :

I’m still sort of brooding over where I want to take my content. I know I want it to be more than just me talking – this ain’t TikTok – but I dunno what else it can be yet.

This is the roughest part of the artistic cycle for me – when you know there’s something wrong, that something isn’t good enough or satisfying enough yet – but you don’t know what the solution is.

So it’s like… creative constipation.

Or, if that’s too gross for you, a difficult birth.

If that’s still too gross for you, this is probably not the blog for you.

I mean, I post stuff like this:

So, ya know, you might want to just scoot along if that’s too much for you.

Weird news : my phone is malfunctioning. As far as I can tell, the base is plugged in and I am definitely in range, and yet when I go to make a call, the readout says “Out of range or no power to base”.

So at the moment I have no phone, and that gives me a weird disconnected feeling.

Even though almost all of my outgoing calls are to Julian.

I’ve been pondering art from the creator’s point of view, and the eternal question of how to make good art.

And I think I have figured out the formula. The “secret” is to make whatever art you enjoy doing the most.

Indulge yourself as deeply as you can. Get as much fun out of creating as you can. Why? Because the idea is to make art intrinsically motivating.

In art, nothing is more important than whatever keeps you trying, and fun and enjoyable things provide their own motivation to do exactly that.

Nobody needs to find the motivation to eat a slice of cake.

If you make doing your art as enjoyable as possible, you will keep doing it just for the fun of it and thus you will inevitably get better at it.

Voila, the road to effortless excellence.

Of course, I don’t exactly follow these guidelines myself. Not yet. I know the sort of writing I enjoy doing the most but I don’t yet have the courage and the wherewithal to just dive right into it.

The most fun writing for me is comedy, of course. And fiction. Writing a story always requires a very high level of activation and engagement in me and writing something funny is a great way for me to amuse myself.

The late Terry Pratchett said writing is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

That seems like the right attitude to me.

Give my proclivities, then, it would seem that I should be writing funny stories. Preferably funny science fiction stories. And that suggests I give trying to write in the Douglas Adam vein of wacky sci fi another try.

I’ve tried before but it always has turned serious on me. I can’t seem to stay in the comedic vein. I start off all cheerful and light and bouncy and before long I am delving deep into troubling emotional complexities and dark and traumatic events.

It’s like being manic-depressive.

Or like how comedic actors always inevitably want to turn to serious work eventually. It’s like once you’ve gotten the comedy out of your system other things emerge.

Not sure even I could write emotionally dark and dense comedy. But if I could pull it off I am sure there would be a market for that.

I could invent a whole new genre. Comedy noire.

I will think about it.

More after the break.

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Why you can’t go home again

I sort of feel like I should save this topic for a video, though I don’t know why.

Anyhow, you can’t go home again because you’ve changed. Home has changed. The world has changed. Everything has changed.

You can’t go home again the same way you can’t wear the clothes you wore as a kid again. You’re not the same person you were back then. That space you occupied where you felt so safe doesn’t exist any more and if it did you wouldn’t fit in it any more.

We are born into a conveyor belt – a conveyor belt called time. And that belt carries us into the future and there is nothing we can do to stop that, let alone reverse it.

And all the things we know happen to everybody else will happen to us too. We will age, grow, learn, change, get old, and die. Nothing can stop that.

So it is wise for us to simply accept that nothing alive can stay the same forever – not even us. It’s never too late to try to become comfortable with the idea that we will spend our lives in the future, not the past, and we will always be in the process of adapting to the changes we made in order to adapt to the previous changes.

But fret not, my sentimental friends. The fact that you can’t literally go home again does not mean you can’t visit the home in your heart again.

That home never changes. It’s always exactly like you remember it. And it’s where the emotions you seek lie as well, and that’s what you’re really looking for anyhow.

These things don’t – and can’t – exist in the real world, the world outside your soul. any more. But do they really need to?

A lot of us have Wonderland – or Oz or Narnia or the Discworld or the Enterprise – in our hearts and we know that those places aren’t real and never were.

But that doesn’t matter because they don’t have to be real to be home. Home is a feeling, not a place or time, and you can feel at home anywhere because your real home is always right there, in your heart.

Yes, that all sounds very corny, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s what I decided to talk about today :

From the point of view of Elon Musk and his billionaire buddies, you are poor and you always will be poor and you should be grateful you get anything at all.

How’s that feel?

Okay, clearly, I am attempting to spark middle class rage. Nothing enflames the middle class than the truth about how the rich really feel about them.

That is always the ultimate irony of “upward mobility”. To them, you thinking you can become “one of them” is like a dog thinking that if he licks his master’s hand well enough, he’ll become a person.

It uh, doesn’t work like that.

And this is true – especially true – if they started off poor or middle class themselves. To them, the whole point of working so hard to get rich was so that they could, essentially, evolve into a higher form that could truly enjoy looking back at its humble origins with the contempt they always bore for it naked and in plain view.

Oh, they will be quick to point to their humble origins in conversation but only to show off just how far they themselves have come as a way of bragging.

But you’re different, you dirt eating peasant. THEY were clearly way better than all the filthy bottoms feeders around them from the start.

YOU, on the other hand, are scum like all the rest and should know your place, and stay there, down in the gutters where your kind belong.

And you should be obsequiously grateful that the rich let you have anything at all besides their bootprint on your forehead.

As if the feculent mobs of people like you have “rights”.

And think about it. If there was someone who was always trying to get in to wherever you are, who is grateful to the point of incontinence for literally any attention you give them, who is copying absolutely everything you do, and who treats the slightest crumb that falls off your table and into their lap like it’s gold from God, what would you think of that person? Would you respect them? Love them? Think they’re great? Think that one day they could be just like you?

Or would you have nothing but withering contempt and scorn for them, and use their pathetic desire to be like you to manipulate them into capering and clowning for the amusement of you and your friends, and laugh behind their backs as how easy it is to use them to keep the peasantry in line?

You’ll gleefully sell out the interests of ordinary peasants like you just for the privilege of sitting way, way, WAY back in the same room as them and being ignored by them in person because somehow that makes you better than the rest of the stinking mob.

No, see, you’re a HOUSE slave.

No matter what you do, no matter how deep you bow when you grovel, no matter how much you bleed just to bask in their presence, no matter how many of your fellow sheep you send to the slaughterhouse, they will never, ever, ever see you as anything but a delusional sycophant lower than the dirt on their shoes.

They will always be high, high above you, laughing at you.

Unless, of course, you bring them down. After all, there’s far more of us then there are of them, aren’t they? If you band together with your fellow peasants you could pull down those ivory towers they live in and force them to come down here with the rest of the mob and get a dose of what real life is like.

Make THEM beg YOU for the slightest scrap of approval. Look down your nose at THEM. Laugh at THEIR attempts to better themselves.

Because if the people in the middle take out the people on top, well… then they’ll be the ones on top, won’t they?

How does that sound to you?

More after the break.

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Karma from shawarma

Ended up getting myself some shawarma from a place called Osmow’s tonight.

Which was a bit naughty. I crunched the numbers and I can’t really afford it. To order in tonight I had to go around $10 over budget. Scandal!

But what the hell, Life is to be savored and enjoyed, not preserved for some undefined future point that will never come.

Repeat until believed. Then do it again.

I am trying to become more Mediterranean in my attitude towards life. Less ant, more grasshopper, that kind of thing.

Of course, I know I can’t actually become a grasshopper type. That is too much of a stretch. I will always be an ant at heart, with my eyes on the practical supplies and a focus on the future.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two from the grasshoppers of the world. I know that despite my comedy and my wit and my silly foxy fursona, deep down I take things way, way too seriously and therefore I would be a lot happier if I could learn to dial things back and learn to take a more flexible, adaptable, confident in my own ability to handle things kind of attitude.

That seems way more doable than trying to control circumstances then beating myself up when I inevitably fail at that impossible task.

You also need to be able to cope. To deal with surprises in a robust and competent fashion. You can’t ever predict or control everything and for those other things you have to be able to handle shit in realtime.

And that also helps you to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves too, and that is, quite obviously, profitable.

I recently lost out on three opportunities to get games I wanted at a price I can afford because it took me too long to actually decide to act.

And what am I so afraid of? Worst case scenario, I don’t like the game, so I return it.

I’ve certainly done that plenty of times before.

I guess it all boils down to my being afraid to truly be in the world. So I hide inside myself. And that makes it very hard to cope with life.

I should probably do something about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I decided I was going to try my hand at rabble rousing today.

And the result isn’t bad but I don’t feel like I really got my point across. Clearly I need to refine my methods and fine tune my arguments before I take this show on the road.

At least I remembered to post it to my BlueSky this time. That hotbed of outraged liberalism should at least be amenable to my message.

Knowing how things tend to work out for me, though, my message will go asbolutely nowhere because on some level, I still put out “don’t notice me” vibes.

Oh well. I guess I will just have to try even harder to be heard.

I wonder if I should go looking for the good kind of trouble on Reddit. I am sure there’s plenty of political arguments I could join in on there.

And that could be a very good way to vent both my energies and my aggression.

And what the hell, it could be a lot of fun too. What can I say, I love to fight. There’s something in me that needs to test myself against others and struggle with them. Wrestle with them verbally. Butt heads.

I dunno. Maybe that’s where my normal male competitive aggression ended up.

But it’s definitely not about winning, or some prize I desire. The fight itself is the reward. The opportunity to really let loose with a portion of all this energy that accumulates in my soul without having to hold back would be golden to me.

I really should have been a lawyer. I would be such a good one.

Oh, I did not end up going to Wound Care today. As far as our printed schedule said, my appointment was at 10:45 am, but somehow, when the phone rang at around 9:45 am, I knew exactly what it would be.

And yup. Just like I suspected, once more they moved the appointment without telling me. So I didn’t get my bandages changed today.

This is becoming a pattern. A very annoying one. I was ready to get my bandages changed. It’s always a pleasant enough experience. It feels nice to have nurses take care of my tootsies for a bit and clean fresh bandages always feel good too.

But alas, it was not to be today. And I can’t be sure I have a genuine umbrage about it because they might have emailed me or left a voicemail and I just didn’t check.

But I am pretty sure they didn’t, which means this is all on them. I was ready and willing but they dropped the ball.

And this time, I could not keep the aggravation out of my voice when I was talking with the nurse. And I have mixed feelings about that.

Mostly I feel good about it. It seems like an appropriate response. It’s not like I yelled at her or made a huge deal about it or anything, but she could definitely tell I was not happy about it.

Not her fault, presumably, but you have to give feedback to the system somehow.

Now I am not going to get fresh bandages until Tuesday. And that’s not a major crime or anything, that’s what happens when I am sick after all, but still.

The whole thing left me a tad miffed.

Oh, and I did the weekly online shopping and this was my impulse buy.

The second I saw garlic and herb pretzels I knew I had to try them. And it turns out they are every bit as good as they sounded.

So good that I’ve already eaten most of them. Ooops. 🙂

More after the break.

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So now what?

Well I’ve already told you all about my day, so now I have to actually think of something to say to you lovely people.

Reportage is so much easier.

Maybe I need to start having a way more interesting life so I can just blog about my life all the time and have it be engaging content.

But my real product is always me – my personality, wit, charm, insight, and so on. So I’d like to think I can make even writing about the mundane details of my life engaging.

Right now I am trying to look up WordPress crossposting extensions. I could expand the reach of these little posts of mine with very little effort if I installed something that would automatically crosspost them to sites like Medium and other blogging platforms.

Maybe there’s even one that would post a link to BlueSky for me.

Oh, and I came very close to finally buying a new PC game today. I was all ready to buy Cyberpunk 2077 but the sale that made it affordable to me ended like an hour before I I was going to make the purchase.

Now it’s back to being $80 like all the other AAA games. Le sigh.

Well the next time I get an email that something I really want is on sale at Steam, I am going to pounce on that bitch like I’m a starving dog and it’s a steak dinner.

I’ve had to stop playing Divinity : Original Sin 2 because the story mods I try to play always eventually corrupt all my save games and I have to start over.

Which really sucks. I may try to diagnose the problem or I might just move on.

Meanwhile, a fuzzy I was chatting with reminded me of the game Tyranny, so I looked it up and was pleased to find I already owned it.

I am way past the point where I have any idea what’s in my Steam Library. My game library has expanded as age has eroded my recall and at some point the two line crossed and now finding that I own a game I was thinking of buying is pretty routine.

Hell, I managed to completely forget I owned Borderlands 3 until I saw an ad for Borderlands 4 and thought, “Damn, I should probably buy 3 then!”

Anyhow, I’ve started playing Tyranny. I’ve tried getting into it a few times before but I was very turned off by its depressing setting.

Basically, you start an officer in the army of a very evil and incredibly powerful mage called the Overlord (subtle) and are put in charge of wiping out the last holdouts that are keeping said Overlord from total world domination.

Kind of makes me feel like I’m in charge of killing Asterix.

I understand from what others have told me that I will soon have the option of NOT being on the side of evil, and so this time, I am going to stick it out till I get somewhere in the game.

And what the hell, I can be a hardass no-nonsense administrator keeping people in line if I have to.

It’s well within my skillset.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, as usual, here is today’s video :

But the real news is that I have figured out the hard way that doing Therapy Thursday then recording and edit a video immediately thereafter is a bad idea.

You see, both activities are rather brain intensive and so doing them back to back really overloaded my poor circuits and has left me felt rather burnt out.

Lesson learned. From now on, I will either get my video generation done well before therapy or at least take a nap after therapy.

As you can tell, while I excised a lot of ums and ahs and stutters and so on, there’s still a lot of them in there too. That’s because at a certain point I just hit the wall and could not go on, so, ya got what ya got.

Even after a short nap I still feel burned out. i get the feeling I’m going to be a bit of a zombie for a while. Oh well.

One must suffer for art.

Speaking of excisions, I have been wondering if I am making too big a deal over my little stammers and hesitations and so on.

I mean, some of them have to go in order to make the whole talk run smoothly, but arguably snipping them all out makes things seem kind of artificial.

Or professional. I could go either way on that.

There is a charm and, more importantly, an honesty to raw video presented warts and all that is undeniable. I learned that during my time on TikTok.

I miss TikTok. I really enjoyed the directness of it and how it was a community of people speaking their minds without a lot of fancy bullshit getting in the way.

It made the whole thing seem kind of like a global conversation in a way that other social media sites never did, at least for me.

I suppose what I should be asking myself is, what exactly am I hoping to achieve with these videos? It’s not like I am looking to land a video editing gig or anything.

I just want to attract an audience. Build a following. Have people talking about my ideas and my comments and so on. Maybe make some money.

I want to be a pundit, basically.

I want to be listened to. I want people to pay attention to what I say so I can share some of the wisdom and insight I have accumulated over the years.

Or at least make them laugh, or smile, or feel a little better about the world.

While we still have one.

I know that I can really contribute to the world with my clarity and my communication skills and my passionate vision for the world.

But of course, I’d have to get out of this box I’m in first.

My living coffin.

I talked with Doc Costin about that today. About feeling like I’m dead and the link between that and my woefully underdeveloped id and how sometimes I think about the people like coaches and drill sergeants and gym teachers and what they were, in their meat-headed and inarticulate way, to teach me.

They were trying to wake me up to the real world, basically. The real, immediate, sensory world right in front of me, and the joy to be had in being an active and energetic participant in it.

It would have done me a lot of good to get out of my own head and spend some time just enjoying being alive on planet Earth instead of constantly being a million miles away on my own tiny frozen planet.

I still could use that. But the journey back home seems insurmountable.

I hope I make it there someday so I can remember what it’s like to be alive.

More after the break.

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The real world

Never been a fan.

In fact, the conclusion my entire being took from my being raped as a toddler was that reality was bad and I had to escape it any way I could and have as little to do with it as I could (un) reasonably get away with.

This does not help one cope.

In fact, it has stunted my growth and isolated me from the very reality of the world around me and left me trapped in the extremely dangerous world between my ears where everything is a shadow of a reflection of a passing thought and there is no solid ground to rest on.

So all I can do is swim, swim, swim.

No wonder my mind is so restless.

And I know all this. I’ve said it here many times. I know that I need a radical rebalancing of my mind’s humors toward the real and immediate and away from the galaxy of distractions and abstractions in my head.

But the inward tide pulls me in the opposite direction and from my point of view right now I can’t imagine that changing.

I can’t go out there. I’d be exposed.

That’s what it boils down to on an animal level. I feel like if I try to leave my grotty little grotto of the mind, reality will then surround me and attack me like a pack of wolves and I will have no idea where the next attack will come from nor be able to evade it.

And I’ll be overwhelmed and, ultimately, destroyed.

Hence my hiding away from that mean ol’ real world for so long. I have this deep mistrust of reality’s good intentions. As crazy as it sounds, on that deep animal level where young children live, I really do feel like the world is out to get me. That it is completely and universally malign and the only safety lies in avoiding it.

That’s a stark and sobering thing to realize about oneself but I will keep coming back to it because that’s where my deepest and most crippling trauma and pain lies and every time I visit that particular vault, a little more of that pain is released and a little more of myself is restored.

It all always leads back to the rape.

But I guess that’s no surprise.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once more, I share my valuable insights with the world.

Took me slightly more than an hour to do the vid, including primary recording and editing. That seems like a reasonable amount of my day to sink into making them.

I am still wrestling with the issue of adornment. My flamboyant side still wants to add all kinds of fancy stuff to my videos, even though I know that is not the style now.

The style these days is to accompany your spoken word with relevant video clips and/or pictures, and I know I could do that, but holy crap is that a lot of work.

So perhaps I will work my way up to that.

As will no doubtedly be the case going forward, the editing is the real work. I can record the original video in like five minutes because I don’t need a script or notes.

In a weird way, it’s as if I already have a script in my head, or at least, the idea that will eventually form one.

But then going through and editing out all the ums and stammers and odd pauses takes a fair bit of effort. And I have had to regain my tolerance for hearing myself say the same things over and over as I edit.

What I really want is a modern AI miracle site or app that will do all that for me. I am sure it must be possible. I have seen sites that almost do that.

The missing ingredient is that those sites that I have seen so far do not have an option for you to use your own audio. They all want to use an AI voice so that all you need to do is submit your script, which is frigging amazing, but not what I want.

I want it all to be me, me, me! 🙂

Which brings me to another issue, because I genuinely think that my oratory skills are amazing and a big part of that is how I present myself as I speak. How I emote and gesticulate and the look in my eyes.

And you can’t see those if there’s pictures in the way.

So it couldn’t be wall-to-wall pictures (so to speak) like the videos from some of my favorite YouTubers like John Michael Gautier. I would have to somehow leave room for cutting back to myself from time to time.

These are the issues with which I struggle.

I’d like to think that I am such a hypnotic and powerful orator that I don’t need anything except for my little old self in my videos, but I um, wouldn’t count on that.

After all, I don’t know anyone on YouTube like that. Even my beloved Refashioned Hippie has pictures she’s reacting to in her extremely witty way.

Which brings us to the subject of comedy.

I have learned from awesome folks like the guy behind the Jokes from Al channel (presumably named Al) that it is entirely possible to do entire skits by yourself and have it work out fine.

A lot of the time he doesn’t even change clothes for his various characters, he just shoots them under different lighting conditions.

And I could do that. And I know I’m a very funny guy. For that matter, I could just do stand-up in my videos.

But I am just not feeling it right now. So that idea can wait.

I suppose I could riff off the news like Colbert or Daily Show. Would be relatively simple to mix that with my political commentary.

What I really want is for someone else to do the hard parts so all I have to do is record myself saying things.

But I have no idea where to find someone who would do such work for free.

So it’s got to be lil ol me.

More after the break.

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The K to the F of the C

Enjoying a nice KFC meal right now.

Including onion rings. Dang they’re good. I got the onion rings instead of the fries this time because I knew that if I got my usual Mega Fries, I’d want gravy, and they now charge like $3.59 or so for a SMALL frigging gravy.

A large gravy is 10 freaking bucks!

I remember when a small gravy was 59 cents. And sometimes in the summer, they would give it to you for free because for a while in the 70’s and early 80’s the KFC in my home town did MAD business because that’s where people went in order to get the food they needed for a picnic.

That’s why KFC has always had those great big family meals. You could pull up in the station wagon, make one order, and roll off with a whole feast and then go to one of PEI’s many parks and beaches, find a picnic table, and dig in.

Not that my family ever did that. My mother did not care for picnics.

We had a few but she was scowling pretty much the whole time.

She came by it honest, though, because her father, my Pepe, didn’t like eating outside either. His opinion was that humanity had worked hard to provide shelter and modern conveniences for ourselves, so why eat outside?

He felt the same way about barbequing.

Eccentricity runs wild in my family.

Tonight I believe I’ve birthed a new habit. On a whim, I took all the components of my meal – chicken strips, popcorn chicken, and onion rings – and dumped them back into the box the meal came in, and found that I quite enjoyed having a box full of delicious crusty fried brown things by my side.

Kind of a portrait in cholesterol, but what the hell.

Reminds me of when I used to go to this Chinese buffet place near Granville and Commercial and felt a little guilty about the fact that I always immediately made a beeline for the egg rolls and fried wontons, which were easily the least healthy things in the whole place.

It made me feel conspicuously non-Asian.

But having lived in Richmond for 27 years, I’m quite used to that now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s video was a hell of a lot of work.

Today was the day I decided I was going to go all the way into the weeds and edit my video till it seemed at least vaguely professional.

As a bonus, that naturally put those little discontinuities in the video that make the whole thing less static looking to our eyes.

So yay that.

Anyhow, I enjoyed getting deep into video editing again and actually trying to make something as good as I can for once but I had forgotten just how much mental effort went in to that process and now I’m letting my brain cool off like I just took an exam.

In a word, phew.

Hopefully, tomorrow I will actually remember to do my video at 1 pm or maybe even earlier as opposed to today when I didn’t remember until just before 3 pm.

As a result, I had to go into blogging while the little grey cells in my brain are still venting steam. And even then I was late.

So don’t expect any intellectual gymnastics today. I can just about manage to type down what I am thinking and that’s about it.

I know the video ain’t perfect. But my original recording was six minutes and change and the finished video is only two minutes and a bit, so I excised a lot of extraneous crap and made it seem, via video editing magic, like I can stay on topic.

It’s an illusion that has an almost hypnotic level of appeal to me.

Heck, maybe I can learn a thing or two from my edited self.

One of the larger excised bits was me rambling on about why I thought we humans make up so many rules for sex.

Basically, I think deep down we are afraid of the power sex has over us, especially when it is suppressed and therefore has no release.

I mean, who thinks about food more, the well fed man or the starving one?

And sex is the key demarcation point between childhood and adulthood. The wholesale reject of sex by the prudes of the world is, therefore, really a rejection of adulthood.

The fact that we have socially developed a fairly long period between sexual maturity (menses or ejaculation) and adulthood does not change this.

It’s easy when you are a member of a fairly repressed society to believe that without strict rules, sexuality would rage out of control as being did nothing but fuck all day.

But like the unfortunate idea that retirement means doing nothing all day, this is an illusion created by deprivation because when one is deprived enough, the very idea of getting enough of the deprived thing seems insane.

That’s why I like posing the question, how much sex do you think people would have if everyone could have as much of whatever kind of sex they wanted at any time?

I don’t know the answer. Very few of us do. Even people who live marvelously libertine lifestyles don’t have that kind of access to sexual expression.

And hookup apps are limited by availability too.

But presumably one’s sexual appetite can be satiated just like any other fundamental drive and so one would then get to experience the marvel of a life free of the constant pressure of unrelieved lust.

Transcending earthly demands is easiest when you just give in to them already.

Honestly, I don’t know what life would be like then. I’d like to think that it would create a calmer, saner, smarter, more patient, more kind, and above all more relaxed world.

Pax sexualis, or maybe pax orgasmus.

People would finally be free to explore and express their full sexualities, and that, to me, would make the world a far better place.

So um, get to work on that, VR and AI. Chop chop!

More after the break.

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Oops wrong person

My friends have already seen this but the writing is so good that I just have to share it here so I can praise it :

The way it spirals out of control so beautifully is like a master class in comedic structure, including having the one center-point character who is trying to bring things back to some semblance of making sense.

Cody is my hero. He’s like a low affect trickster god warping reality around himself.

And the fact that he’s doing it basically to be included really tugs at my once upon a very lonely childhood heartstrings.

I so badly wanted to be part of the warm, friendly, relaxed, accepting, loving world that I saw all around me and that everyone else seemed to take for granted.

But I was locked away in my own cold lonely world by what I can now see as mental illness and severe social dysfunction.

By being raped then missing kindergarten my social development got severely delayed and the thing is, that kind of thing does not get better with time.

My social issues prevented me from getting the sorts of experiences that would have corrected it. I had no way into that big warm connected world.

If only there had been a kindly but very patient adult willing to work with me to teach me what I didn’t learn in kindergarten and help me find a way that I could go play with the other kids and maybe make friends.

I wanted to do that so badly, but I was not equipped to even understand what I was doing wrong, let alone correct it.

I wish I had possessed the courage to just go ahead and be an asshole. At least then I might have been worthy of some respect, like any good villain.

But instead I was a pathetic, whiny, bizarre little alien who was way too smart for his own good but it came at a terrible cost in terms of… well, everything else.

To this day, I am a socially retarded child in big boy’s clothes. Genius beyond the ken of mortal men but helpless as an infant to help myself.

At least I am working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the story of why I am starting my daily blogging an hour and change late :

You’re right, me. This is NOT fubn. Or fun.

Oh well, it at least puts a little variation into my day. A touch of the unexpected. Maybe I should get myself an actual alarm clock to prevent this kinds of hiccups.

Nah. Then the power would go out. And if it had batteries, they’d leak.

Jesus, do they even sell batteries any more? Let alone clocks.

So yeah, actually have my new glasses on for once. After having them on for the duration of the vid, I went to take them off. but then I realized that despite continued blurriness in their specs of mine, wearing them was relieving some kind of tension in my head so I decided to give wearing them in an attempt to get used to them another try.

Who knows, maybe this is all going somewhere.

I’ll try to keep them on for as long as I can. I can see the words I am typing right now well enough. They’re blurry but legible. I will try to stick it out.

I’m getting another needle n the eye tomorrow. The right eye this time. Maybe that will help. In theory, my eyes are not identical at the moment. The left one has been injected with the new medicine and the right has not.

And that’s an important distinction because my right eye is definitely my dominant eye and is doing a lot of the work ’cause the left eye suuuuucks.

I think the new medicine must be having some effect, though, because sucks substantially less than before.

So yay on that.

Who knows, maybe I will get to the now magical point of being able to wear my glasses all the time like a normal nerd.

Or at least have a pair that works for when I am here at the computer (which is most of my day) and another for when I am up and moving around and need distance vision.

You’d think glasses that work when you’re sitting at a computer would be an easy job, what with all the office workers out there.

But my eye problems are worse than mere vision correction can handle.

Best not to think about that too much. Or at all.

Before today’s computer mishap, I once more completely spaced on making a video at 1 pm. And like… what the fuck.

It’s like the warranty ran out on my remembering to do a vid. I did like seven vids in a row without fail then missed two in a row.

Then again, I feel more spaced out than usual lately so I’m probably not at my sharpest.

I think I must be behind on sleep. I feel this sort of lingering dopiness that indicates a need to rest these hardworking brain neurons of mine.

Plus I have noticing an uptick on my urge to sleep in general. Maybe my body has been trying to tell me something and as usual I have not been listening.

Ya know, maybe sometimes when I don’t want to get out of bed, it’s not because I’m depressed, it’s because I’m not done sleeping yet.

A radical thought well worth considering.

So perhaps this is the leading edge of one of my sleepy periods. So be it. They kind of suck sometimes, especially when i sleep hot and wake up all sweaty and dehydrated and the mental fog is so thick it’s edible.

But not very tasty.

More after the break.

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Teachers in the 70’s

Most of the teachers I had in the 70’s and early 80’s were fucking useless.

They were all Baby Boomers who were all about peace and love and “not being an authority figure” (God forbid) and they all wanted to be our friends.

Well I didn’t want my teachers to be my friends. I wanted them to be authority figures.

Someone I could look up to and count on and who made us kids feel safe and calm by being solid and strong and in control of everything. Someone who made us feel like we did not, in fact, live in lawless jungle anarchy. Someone who acted in loco parentis and was therefore, like it or not Boomers, our leader.

People need leaders. Not in every situation, but in a lot of them. There needs to be someone people can turn to when they don’t know what to do. This person does not even need to give order, they just have to be someone the others will look at for how they should be reacting to something.

And that’s especially true with kids. Kids look to adults for nearly everything and that definitely includes cues on how to react to and handle things. That means the most important non-parental adults in the lives of children, their teachers, have to be ready and willing to teach these vital lessons.

And you can’t do that if you “don’t want to be an authority figure, man, ”

“Hey, don’t look at me, I’m just the only adult in the room and the one whose job specifies actually being there for you kids but that’s, like, way too much responsibility for a spoiled Boomer like me and because I don’t want to do it I think I don’t have to. ”

And so you got these wishy-washy namby-pamby useless teachers who can’t control a classroom not simply because they were trying to rule us with peace and loves but because of their refusal and/or inability to project the kind of authority needed to make the kids feel calm and safe.

And it’s a particularly vexatious problem because the deep intellectual superstructure of our society makes it nearly impossible for most people to say, “the problem is that I need someone competent and strong to boss me/us around”.

Or even, “the problem is that I need to boss these people around”.

That flies in the face of our individualistic culture and so we end up saying vague things about leadership and management without being able to actually name the problem, let alone actually fix the thing.

Just an unplanned side effect of freedom, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t know if I really got my point across in this.

I feel like I missed something.

Oh well, at least it’s almost good.

Fun fact : that was written and performed by the guy who invented The Chipmunks.

How’s that for random?

I’m feeling okay today. My mood has been fairly stable. There’s still a hell of a lot of emotions in me that need to come out but for now they are quiescent.

Joe’s not feeling okay at all. Apparently he’s been very ill since yesterday. He didn’t even go to visit his family and play board games last night, and that’s something he normally does every Saturday night, even in this anti-social era he’s been in.

The paranoid part of me thinks, “Wow, he got out of not one but TWO social engagements this weekend, How efficient. “

But that is probably just my hurt feelings talking. I’ve already told you wonderful people about how hurt I am that Joe skips out on literally every opportunity he has to socialize with Felicity and I.

It’s like we’re just not worth the effort any more.

And I know what that’s like. After all, I suffer from depression too. I know what it’s like to feel yourself retreating from the world and abandoning all the things that normally keep your life stitched together like social time with friends and not being able to stop it.

Not that I am saying that Joe isn’t legitimately ill. I have no reason to believe that except for my own paranoid and somewhat self-centered way of thinking.

And as the skeptic community likes to point out, emotions aren’t evidence.

Which is undoubtedly true but possibly unhelpful. I am still in the process of learning not to insist on being naked before the truth any more as part of some strange kind of intellectual machismo need to be, essentially, “righter than thou”.

On the whole, I’d rather be happy.

That’s why I ask people if they rather be happy, or right. You can inflict a hell of a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering on yourself simply because you refuse to admit that someone you had an argument with a long time ago might have been right.

Your parents, for instance.

And that goes double for a naturally very stubborn person like myself. I know that I can be irrationally pigheaded sometimes. It’s something I have learned to watch out for in myself. Part of my routine, “Wait, am I being crazy?” metaconsciousness check.

When you know you’re mentally ill, you have to watch out for stuff like that.

Knowing you’re crazy is, in itself, kind of crazy. There is only so much yiu can do to try to compensate and past that point, all you can do is assume that the way you are perceiving things might not be correct, but for now you have to pretend they are.

You can’t doubt everything all the time.

What I have to be especially wary about is my emotional perceptions and beliefs. Depression is underpinned by delusions of that sort.

Like my thinking that everyone hates me and has nothing but contempt for me. I can still feel that feeling within me as I type this even though I have that feeling safely locked up and dismissed now.

People love me. I’m a very special dude.

But it’s like negative emotions grow so huge that they blot out the real world entirely. It takes a fair bit of cutting those big feelings down to size before you can see outside of them and realize how irrational they are.

I have mine locked away, like I said, as I struggle to build up my self-worth.

Luckily, I’m pretty fucking amazing.

More after the break.

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I heart this man

This is the sort of thing that makes me feel like my era has come.

Because finally, people are as pissed off and vitriolic as I am.

Turns out, all this time I was just waiting for things to get bad enough for my unhinged ranting to blend right in.

In crazy times, lunatics become prophets.

And people are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more!

And this is what gives me hope. My faith in the American people being stubborn and ornery and quick to anger and disinclined towards obedience is getting more and more justified every single day.

Oh, and so is the fact that they feel no need to remain consistent. Not only does the fact that they voted for Trump not keep them from giving their representatives hell at town meetings, it just makes them even angrier because they feel betrayed.

Now is not the time – and I can’t stress this enough – for saying “I told you so”.

Now is the time where we support these people with kindness and forgiveness and cheer them on in their profound sense of umbrage and be ready and willing to finally show them, not just tell them, that we are on their side and Trump is not.

Trust me, they are ready for this message. We, the left, have a golden opportunity to show the people what real populism looks like. Show them that we have plans that will help them the moment that we are in power. Concrete plans that address their needs in terms they can understand and see and most importantly feel in their lives.

It’s time for another FDR to come along to convince the rich that it’s this New Deal or them getting strung up by their thumbs and used as a piñata by an angry mob.

And if we can offer the people real, comprehensive, understandable solutions that will directly improve their lives, they won’t care if Fox News calls it socialism.

All they will care about is that their kids ate better this week.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.