Last time I broached this subject, I got in a lot of trouble.

But in the off chance I do manage to summon a shitstorm again, I know what kind of things will happen from the previous time.

For instance, whole battalions of straw man arguments. It was amazing to see how many people ascribed entirely fictional comments to me because, presumably, it made it easier and more fun to dump their hate on me.

And it was hilarious how confused they got when I asked them to show them where I said what they just said I said.

Like their minds completely hallucinated the things they think I said then erased the evidence until I brought up that I had not, in fact, said anything remotely like that.

I found it most satisfying to trip them up with mere reality.

And, of course, carloads of guilt by association.

You must be ONE OF THEM!

Otherwise all these torches and pitchforks will just go to waste.

Because as we all know, it is literally impossible to express even the most basic level of human decency toward a group of people if you’re not part of that group.

I vividly recall telling people that they hate pedophiles because they’re allowed to hate pedophiles. It has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the children, any more than laws against interracial sex had anything to do with protecting white women from rape.

Society as a whole has pointed at the pedos and said, “Go ahead, dump unlimited amounts of the rage you’re too chickenshit to direct at irts actual cause on this, the latest designated target du jour. ”

And I literally had people declaring child molestation to be the greatest of all evils, worse, apparently, than genocide.

That’s how you know it’s societal scapegoating. People blow things way, way out of proportion because that’s what makes the hate the most satisfying.

So the scapegoat must be infinitely evil in order to justify an unlimited amount of rage dumping. Even if that is utter madness.

Heck, even reminding people that pedophiles are human beings pisses them off for that exact reason. It makes the hate less fun if they have to remember that they are directing their bile stream at real, live, living and breathing human beings who have basic human rights and a life and hobbies and stuff.

Never mind that nobody chooses to be a pedophile. Nobody chooses what they are into period. Just like everything else about our tastes, you don’t choose what you like, you just find out at some point.

At some point in our development as human beings, our minds take a snapshot of what sex is, and as far as we can tell, that’s what you are stuck with till the day you die.

Actually, it’s probably a series of snapshots, some pre-sexual, but you get the idea.

So yeah, those are the truths that got me in trouble. Understandably. The people who speak out against the lynch mob often get hanged with the same rope.

But that’s also how change happens. Enough people start to feel the prickling of their conscience when the outspoken one makes points they can’t ignore or dismiss that they either actively join the resistance or quietly decide to back them if it comes up.

It’s a politically unpalatable truth that the progress of the rights of minorities always depends on the conscience of the majority. It is by appealing to our shared values of equality, fairness, liberty, justice, and humanism that the majority can be swayed to cede their ill gotten power to the minority.

And there will always be those who fight like hell to keep that power both for the power’s own sake and to avoid having to face the guilt and shame of what they have done purely because society said they were allowed to do it.

That’s one of the many reasons that young people are the conscience of society.

They’ve never been part of the latest hate, and can oppose it uncompromised.

And generation after generation, the script repeats, and social progress is made, and we are dragged into the future.

It’s really quite beautiful.

More after the break.

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The other side of that

Unfortunately, a group can be so incredibly politically and socially toxic that almost nobody will be willing to stand up for them.

They are then at the mercy of anyone who wants someone they can denigrate, humiliate, scapegoat, or even torture and kill with impunity.

And all because people see them as less than human. They have been designated as evil and nobody will stand up for them because even if they can resist the social programming that says they are not human, standing up for them would absolutely destroy you socially and possibly even legally as you basically share their fate.

Ergo justice might be a long time coming. And when it comes, it will make martyrs of whoever is brave or foolish enough to join the cause at first. They will be made an example of to discourage the slightest hint of empathy for the damned group.

So odds are, they will be the very young. College age kids who have little to nothing to lose and are therefore still highly idealistic because they don’t have roots in the adult world to give them conflicted interests.

They might also be from a highly idealistic religious community. Social progress and religion go all the way back to Abolition, and despite the modern association of religion with social and political conservatism, historically Christianity has also been a wellspring of true spiritual humanism and greater compassion.

And like I have said before, as long as you’re a humanist, you are a brother or a sister to me. I don’t care if your humanism is secular or not.

What matter is whether or not you have the courage and greatness of spirit and wisdom to embrace the humanity in even the least and the most reviled of us.

And to therefore care with your full and open heart for them no matter what.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Otherwise known as “how to be seen”.

One thing that is not an option is to somehow gain the benefits of openness and vulnerability without becoming open and vulnerable.

That’s not possible. There’s just one route between our inner selves and the world and if you open it at all, you open in both ways.

And the only alternative is the hell of numbness, otherwise known as “turning the volume down on everything in order to escape the bad things”.

And then, as I have done, wondering why you feel so goddamn sad and lonely.

Because you’re starving, stupid. You have emotional anorexia and it’s making you refuse to eat rather than risk eating something that tastes bad.

And it’s shutting you off from the world as well. So you feel like you’re not even real, because that’s easier to take than feeling like it’s the world that isn’t real.

So you end up living a quietly miserable lifein a cold grey world all by yourself.

Welcome to my reality. But I am getting better. Feeling is slowly coming back to my long frozen mind and every day I not only reclaim more of my fear-frozen self from the forces of anti-life (efil?), the rate at which I do so increases a little bit.

Perhaps I will reach escape velocity some time soon, and be able to overcome the heavy pull of the void within enough to spark up my engines and GTFO of here.

Or maybe I will just keep living the same day over and over again with nothing really to show for them but my vids and my blog until the day of my tragically unimportant death.

You don’t understand. I could have been a contender.

Maybe that’s another kind of thinking I need to get rid of : thinking about all my wasted potential and what a tragedy it is that I have these massive gifts and yet I am stuck to the bottom of society’s shoe because of mental illness.

That’s all true, and legit, but maybe it’s still not a good way for me to be thinking. It wuld be one thing if I thought that those thoughts might lead to my somehow popping that enormous clog in my motivational system and liberating me, and I am not discounting the possibility of that working eventually, but in the meantime, I am repeatedly torturing myself in a way that I feel nullifies some of the progress it brings me.

I mean yeah, beating your head against a wall might break it some day, but only at the cost of leaving you a vegetable.

Far better is to learn to just stop hurting myself in the first place. And that means struggling with my eternal issue of how to vent my anger and other passionate emotions in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody.

Anybody who doesn’t deserve it, anyway.

It’s take it out on myself or put it into the world somehow. I would be far, far better off if I could find a way to burn off all my latent rage and excess mental energies, and I am working on it, but it’s going way too slow.

Hence my plan to try to use those energies to make myself happier and stronger. Redirect all available energies to the structural integrity field, Mister LaForge. If I can pull this off, it could elevate my life considerably.

It certainly will involve a lot of self-forgiveness. I need to dream up a way to look at my life that lets me find peace and contentment, not just distraction and entertainment.

I could do so much if I can just get out of my own way.

And maybe that’s what I am afraid of.

More after the break.

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Fear of change

I have written before that if we have a fixed sense of self – that you are the exact person you are right now – then personal change becoming impossible because any change in ourselves would mean we become a totally different person and to a human being, that is tantamount to death.

It is a side effect of the forces that stabilize our sense of self in the first place. WIthout those forces, we would be quite insane. We need to have some idea of who we are if we are to have any basis for acting in the world.

It all starts (and ends) with you.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that there has to also be room for growth and that means room for change. If the sense of self is too rigid and curtailed, growth turns inward (where else could it go?) and the organism becomes choked up and compressed as that rigid self gets denser and more twisted and unhealthy.

And how does the individual respond to this painful condition? Why, by making their sense of self even more rigid and incapable of change in an attempt to get things “under control”, of course.

Maybe you’d be better off just letting yourself fall apart for a while. Stop trying to keep everything down and keep everything in and let it all emerge however it needs to emerge and worry about cleaning it all up afterwards.

I’ve known for quite a long time that I am keeping something or other in. Something I am deeply ashamed of and therefore something I am terrified of ever having emerge into the light where others can see it.

I can’t tell you what it is. It has an obvious digestive analog, but I don’t know what exactly is in me that I feel the need to keep down.

I suppose if I knew, that would mean it had come out. It might well be something I am so deeply ashamed of that my deeper mind hides it even from my conscious mind.

Whatever it is, it lies at the heart of my conviction that I am some kind of impossibly awful wretched, disgusting, pathetic, revolting thing that should hide from the world rather than inflict myself upon it.

It certainly feels like it’s attached to my being raped when I was 4, but it’s clearly more than just the memory that it happened because I’ve been fully and consciously aware of it for decades now.

So maybe it’s the actual memories of being so horribly violated that sit like a virulently infected tumour deep within my soul pumping out toxic pollutants that make me feel like every cell of me is soaked in junkyard runoff.

That bastard who raped me left me feeling forever broken and violated and polluted and I bet he never ever gave it a second thought.

I hope he died in pain.

God knows I will.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I tried not to make this a lecture or a rant.

You can tell me if I succeeded.

It bothers me more than it probably should when people eat nothing but garbage. It always hurts to see people make the same mistakes you have.

Especially when, like me, you’re at the end stage of that and therefore suffering the very predictable effects of eating all the wrong things such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, stents in my heart, and (arguably) depression.

So I kind of feel like the ghost of Jacob Marley from “A Christmas Carol”, screaming at people to change their wicked ways before they end up like me.

Of course, realistically, I know the chances of convincing anyway to change are very low. People tend to have their lives people around things like their pleasures and removing one of those pleasures upsets the entire structure of their lifestyles.

They will have to replace that reward signal somehow.

Which brings us to the matter of addiction. Brains are wired to seek the strongest sources of reward and things like junk food exploit that by being unnaturally rewarding and hence a source of fixation.

Nature did not plan for the advent of Doritos.

So when trying to improve their diets, people have to contend with the withdrawal symptoms of cravings for the old bad foods.

That’s why I advocate for my “additive” diet. Don’t deprive yourself of anything because that will just convince the stupid part of your animal brain that you’re starving and we are only as in control of ourselves as we are sated.

It’s like our animal brains have our big human sentient brains on a short leash and only lets them think they are in control if the big brain does a good job of feeding the smaller and much older one.

So when cravings go unmet, no matter how self-destructive they are, the degree to which we can control ourselves dips and we “cheat”.

The only solution is to deprive yourself of nothing. There will still be withdrawal when the adding of the good stuff leaves less room for the bad stuff, but it won’t be nearly as severe and will be way easier to handle.

I mean, you can’t “cheat” on a diet that doesn’t forbid anything, right?

As far as I can tell, there’s no system solution for bad nutrition. Not one we are likely to adopt, anyhow. The nutritional extremist in me dreams of things like banning refined sugar in manufactured goods so that companies are forced to switch to much safer artificial sweeteners, but there’s no way that would ever happen.

Big Sugar would shut that shit down HARD.

More realistically (kinda), if someone could invent the killer sugar substitute that would taste exactly like the real thing but be perfectly healthy, in theory that would give the products that use it a market advantage.

Then again, we already have Splenda. That’s even made from sugar, so Big Sugar wouldn’t even get cut out of the deal.

And I don’t see Splenda based chocolate bars flooding the market.

So I dunno. One of the hardest things to do in the world is to get people to change. Change is scary and hard, doing what you’ve always done is soothing and easy.

Says the guy who keeps living the same day over and over again because he can’t bring himself to change anything at all.

At least my days create things. Without this blog and my videos, my life would truly be pointless and I would be even more lost than I am now.

I want to get out of this holding pattern I am in. But I am in no hurry.

It’ll happen when it happens. Or not.

More after the break.

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Investing in myself

It’s not easy.

I am trying to learned to direct my overflowing mental energies into my own psyche and its health and stability, and so far it’s been rather painful.

A lot of deeply frostbitten and palsied parts of me have to wake up and thaw out still, and that’s a lot like slapping and shaking your hand after it has fallen asleep.

It’s something well worth doing because it will get you your hand back, but there’s a lot of that pins and needles feeling in your immediate future.

And I’ve had a large part of my psyche – possibly more than half of it – asleep for a very long time indeed.

The hardest part is and is going to be the attitude adjustment. Shifting to directing my energies into my own happiness and wellbeing on a much larger scale than before feels like I am trying to pop a cramp that has been there for almost 50 years.

My mind doesn’t want to go there.

Well too bad, brain, because you’re doing it anyway. Fuck it, it’s only pain. Pain sucks but it’s temporary and if you’re a lot healthier for the rest of your life afterwards, it’s hard to say that it wasn’t worth it.

So I am well beyond giving a shit about psychological pain. The fear still grips me, though that is slowly fading, but the pain doesn’t faze me at all.

If anything, in a perverse way it feels good because, like with my sleepy hand example, the pain signals something coming back to life and warming up, and that feels good even if it’s accompanied by pain.

So wake up, ye sleepers! Spring has come, the long winter night has ended, the sun is high in the sky, and it’s time to crawl out of your musty fusty burrows and shake the dust out of your fur so you can run out and play.

And I know the sunlight hurts your little eyes, but that will soon pass, and you will be amazed by all the beauty you can see now that you’re awake.

Isn’t that a lot better than hibernating your life away?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, the vid of the day :

Nothing in that vid that is entirely new to the readers of this blog, and my voice is a bit weird, but I still feel good about sharing those particular thoughts with the world in a place a tad more accessible than this here blog o’ mine.

I could have gone a lot further into the whole right wing intellectual degeneracy thing. What is so hard for us liberals to grasp is that these people do not think they can figure the world out for themselves and therefore they need to pick people they like to do it for them and just believe whatever those people tell them.

The crucial point is that they feel like they have no choice but to believe what they are told by their chosen articulators, and will go through whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to do so.

When these articulators are corrupt or incompetent (or both), the cumulative effect of said mental gymnastics is to make people stupider as their minds are bent and twisted in all kinds of unnatural ways until they lose all cohesion.

The more holes that emerge in their shared delusion due to it becoming so directly contrafactual, the more those holes have to be plugged with raw emotion, and that’s why they get so mad all the time.

Anger is a highly effective way to keep yourself from thinking. Our brains, left to their own devices, do their best to make sense of things, and if you are deeply emotionally invested in believing things that do not, in fact, make sense, you need to keep getting hot rage injections to keep yourself from figuring that out.

Hence their need to consume right wing media constantly.

A leader like Donald Trump is actually the worst thing for these people because he very efficiency and effectively wriggles his way on to their “trusted source” list and then betrays them and hurts them when they are not able to exercise the correct faculties in order to now reject him.

Once you are on that list, you have a free hand to reprogram their minds however you like. It takes a serious reality breach to shake them. They vehemently do not want to have to rationally examine everything people say. They do not feel like they are capable of doing that and having it produce anything but terror and confusion for them.

And they might be right. They might not be smart enough to do it.

That thought weighs heavy on my mind.

Trump is such a terrible leader that he is managing to lose them anyway because he keeps doing things that actively hurt them or that deeply offend them in ways that are hard for them to ignore even with Fox News’ help.

In fact, he does things even Fox News, with all its resources, can’t defend. All they can do is ignore them and distract their audience with other emotionally charged things.

Right now, Trump is turning the contrafactuality machine up yet another notch by insisting that Portland is some kind of “blood on the streets” social conservative wet nightmare full of left wing hordes determined to destroy America.

And it’s just not true. And anyone can tell it’s not true. Any Fox News viewer can drive to Portland themselves and see that it’s not true. It’s entirely fictional, and there is no ambiguity for its delusional nature to hide in.

In fact, it’s not even plausible. It just plain sounds crazy. And so even for his fans who go strictly by their surface impressions of things – their “gut” – it doesn’t hold water.

And that is driving his approval rating down to the lowest level of any President ever. And it’s quite unlikely to recover because that would require Trump to change how he is acting and for that he’d have to believe he had been wrong about something.

Still, he has shown at least an animal level awareness of danger in the past, so he might try to fix it.

But he’s far too senile and demented now to succeed.

More after the break.

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Letting the energy decide

That’s how I have been conceptualizing my attempts to get around my decision issues by letting my intuition choose.

So when I am wobbling with indecision, I just ask “the energy” – also known as my emotions – what to do and it “decides” .

These, then, are the baby steps I am taking towards developing my connection to my will and my emotions. I figure that whether I am letting my routine or my emotional sate “decide”, it’s still an arbitrary and unreasoned decision, so I might as well go with the one that at least does me some good.

I mean, what the hell, if I let the “energy” decide I at least might surprise myself by going off in an unexpected direction or even starting something new.

A big part of this process is a slow and painstaking process of learning not to resist my own motion. To stop, as I have put it before, “driving around with the parking brake on” and learn to accept that sometimes I am still and sometimes I am in motion and either way is just fine.

I have been emotionally dependent on stasis for far too long. I want to be alive, dammit, and living creatures move and breathe and love and grow and want and will and change. They don’t desperately try to stop the world around them out of a devilishly disastrous attempt to be “in control” and “safe”.

Fuck all that. I ain’t controlling jack shit. If I was, I wouldn’t have a laundry list of things I want to do but can’t make myself do. And there are a lot of things I’m not safe from at all and they’re all inside my head.

If I truly want to feel safe, I need to get stronger. Then I won’t feel so puny and pathetic and vulnerable all the time.

And if I want to be in control, I need to deal with my emotions.

And that means feeling and expressing them, and being fine with that.

Bringing myself back to life will be neither easy nor painless.

But it will be incredibly worth doing nonetheless.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or, to be more precise, effort. Life is effort. This cannot be avoided.

Nor would you want to.

I go into it further in today’s vid du jour.

You wouldn’t want an effort free life because that would mean doing literally nothing. You’d basically be a plant at that point. Specifically, a vegetable.

That’s the logical outcome of the pathology of toxic laziness. It has nothing to do with some abstract notion of virtue or whether or not you’re “pulling your own weight” and everything to do with whether you feel alive and present and happy.

This is one of those lessons that someone, like a parent or a teacher or other adult, probably tried to teach you at one point but were far too inarticulate to get it across.

Some of us have high interface demands. We can understand a hell of a lot if it’s explained to us or otherwise in an articulated form but we are not going to just “pick up on it” via social intuition or whatever.

In my case, I think it’s what Mister Thompkins, my elementary school phys ed teacher, was trying to explain to me one day but I was too much of a little smartass to listen.

I honestly think that we nerds could learn a thing or two from the jocks of the world and their simple, robust, enthusiastic approach to life.

Chronic, insidious, invidious laziness makes you act like you’re constantly trying to get to sleep. Like any form of physical arousal – yes, even that one – is the enemy.

In the case of depression, it’s not hard to see how one gets this way. It’s that god damned anhedonia. We need a certain amount of reward in order to function and when the numbness of depression blunts our ability to even experience reward and thus makes everything less rewarding, we naturally seek out the activities with the highest effort to reward ratio in an attempt to punch through that resistance.

And the modern world is full of what scientists called “supra-normal stimuli”, incredibly potent sources of reward signals that the reward-starved like myself quickly latch onto like a drowning person grabs on to some floating debris and become addicted to.

If only something could interrupt the anhedonia and make those ice sheets of cruelest numbness retreat, the whole thing would fall apart. Our personal ice age would end and we would be able to feel all the good things in life as they truly are.

But nobody has a pill to specifically target anhedonia yet, I suppose. My Paxil saved my life and my Wellbutrin helps me be awake and alert, but I still live on a icy cold planet far away from the Sun where its warmth can barely reach me at all.

And that’s how depression kills motivation. It’s hard to be motivated to do things when you know in your soul that you won’t find them rewarding. The basic calculus of life as an animal says that you seek the most rewarding stimuli around and with anhedonia draining the fun out of everything, the entire equation of what is “worth the effort” shifts and very few things qualify any more.

So when people with good intentions tell us “do this, do that, it will make you feel so much better”, they might even be right, but from our point of view, trying to imagine how much we’ll get out of the proposed activities, it seems almost impossible.

Whether it’s junk food or video games or risky sex, our addiction of choice provides so much reward for so little effort that anything else, even things that should be more than enough for anybody, cannot possibly compare.

That animal calculus is very clear : do the most rewarding thing.

Even if it’s killing us.

More after the break.

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Do you remember TV dinners?

Well I do, because I am eating one right now.

It’s the classic Salisbury Steak with mashed potatoes and corn and a brownie (which I shouldn’t eat, but will) for dessert.

I was looking through the frozen meals selections as I shopped Real Canadian Superstore online this week and I saw this TV dinner ^[1] there and it was only $5.

And what I was planning to get, one of those President’s Choice frozen entrees, was $5.55! Easy choice.

And it’s pretty good! They got the sauce for the Salisbury Steak right. A lot of places seem to confuse Salisbury Steak with meatloaf and use a tomato sauce, and you end up with something a lot more like a burger with fancy ketchup.

And that’s OK, but it’s not right.

And the mashed potatoes are good. They’re instant mashed potatoes, of course, which means they taste good but don’t have the texture and heft of the real thing, but I’ve had them plenty and they’re pretty good.

But what really has me bowled over is the corn. My word, is it good! It tastes like it just came off the cob! I dunno how they did it but if there’s a way I could get that on its own I would buy it in bulk.

Needless to say, I will be looking to try the other two meals in the product line, a fried chicken dinner and a turkey dinner.

Assuming that the price stays the same and doesn’t go up, those President’s Choice frozen entrees might just be out of a job.

And I must admit, talking about Salisbury Steak, mashed potatoes, corn, and a brownie gives me a most pleasantly old-fashioned feeling, like I’m eating at an old time boarding house or having Sunday dinner with the family.

Whilst I consider myself to be quite open-minded when it comes to food, I will admit that there are times when a good old-fashioned “normal” meal straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting really hits the spot.

Oh, the brownie was pretty good too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Damn it, the sleepies have caught up with me during the day again.

Oh well. I’ve had much worse attacks. As long as I keep going, and keep sipping on my diet cola, I should be okay.

Once I’ve done my words, then I can collapse and nap till supper.

This is the entire reason I decided to let caffeinated cola back into my life. There are times like this when that prick Mister Sandman shows up at a bad time when I can really use that good ol’ caffeine to boost me back up.

And what the hell, it’s not like I’m allergic. I just gave it up for blood pressure reasons. And as far as I know, my blood pressure is under control, although those high readings I was getting a while back have me a little worried, and so I might as well join the rest of the world in enjoying the benefits of sweet mother Caffeine.

Or not. What the hell do I know?

Anyhow, here is today’s vid :

Now it’s an open question whether or not I am capable of the kind of mellowing out I talk about in my vid of the day. It would certainly require a large scale rerouting of my personal energies into maintaining and enhancing my psychic stability somehow instead of leaving those energies bouncing around inside me making me anxious.

A theory could be put forth that I am just basically squirrely by nature and no matter what I do, I will always be somewhat high strung and nervous. and that is certainly possible, but by no means a certainty.

I choose to believe that a fine tuning of my entire attitude towards life is at least possible and something worth pursuing.

I have known for a long time that this brittle, anxious, nervous, reactive, fearful, and cowardly attitude towards life is no bueno. I wish I had the sort of calm, confident, competent strength that I admire so much in others. And I know that, somewhere in me, there is a much more robust and healthy version of me waiting to emerge.

And I must say, he’d be one heck of a guy. Without the shyness, nervousness, and anxiety, I could be one very smart and dynamic and charismatic dude.

It’s actually a little scary how amazing I could be.

Then again, I have always been kind of scared of my own power. It’s what comes from being way smarter than everyone else but also unwilling to embrace elitism.

When you are a giant among pygmies, and you have a conscience, you learn to be very careful where you step.

And going full Godzilla always lurks as a possibility in my mind. I could just say “to hell with the consequences to others, I’m going to roar!” has a certain kind of atavistic appeal to my sorely underdeveloped and unexpressed id.

And I could probably square it with my super sensitive conscience if I kept myself to the rule of never deliberately using my powers for evil.

I would just have to worry less about accidental harm. Not forget about it entirely, just reduce my concern about it to a more reasonable and sane level.

People CAN take care of themselves, after all. They’re not made of candy glass and tissue paper. I don’t have to take all the responsibility for keeping them safe.

Really, my overgrown concern for others is just another trick my depression uses to keep me locked in its little box.

If I took the attitude that I should just rush out into the world in search of adventure and fun just like the other kids, regardless of my abilities, maybe I would be able to find some kind of healthy equilibrium between ability and responsibility that would let me live large and in charge without becoming a total raging arsehole.

At least, not permanently.

More after the break.

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I hope the timestamp works with the embed properfly.

There can be no testament to just how huge Michael Jackson was in the 80’s than the fact that his game could have this kind of thing in it.

I mean holy shit, right? The big green robot’s only attack is to thrust its enormous green wang at you.  There is no non-perverted way to look at that. 

And of course, in the game you rescue children and when you rescue them they say “Michael!” in a tone that suggests this is a transcendent moment for them. 

I would love to be a fly on the wall when Mister Jackson explained what he wanted for the boss of that level of the game. 

“It should have a big…. cylinder that it um…. pushes at the player in a sort of… um… thrusting kind of motion…. ” 

Graphic designer : “You mean like this?” 

“Um, no… the cylinder should be um…. rounded at the end… ” 

Graphic designer : Oh, you mean like a p… ow!

He yelps in pain as he is savagely kicked under the table. 

Executive : …like a perfect idea for a level boss, Mister Jackson! 

And then the Executive thinks, “Oh god, we’re so going to get roasted by the PMRC!”

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Wow, I got a lot of mileage out of that clip.

It just shows that I should do comedy more often. That little bit was easy and fun to write and it’s the sort of content that travels quite well.

Everybody loves a good laugh, after all.

I could even do it in video form, come to think of it. That would make it exponentially more likely to get spread around.

If I manage to get to a better mind space through attitude adjustment, I could see myself doing my best to make really funny, silly, wacky, wild content.

People might even like it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I chickened out and did not write this via the “talk to type” app on my phone.

I am doing the sane and simple thing by typing this into a LibreOffice document like I normally do when I have internet problems.

At the last moment, I decided that the hassle of learning a new program while trying to get my words done was more stress than strictly necessary. so here I am typing on the PC instead.

Maybe I will give the talky typing app a try when there is less time pressure. Maybe.

I sure miss my fuzzy friends on Tapestries, though. I normally have a MUCK window open while I blog and that’s not currently an option and that makes me sad.

I need to hug my critter crew, dammit.

The new WiFi via USB adapter will be arriving today between 5 pm and 10 pm. Sucks that I had to spend $35 out of nowhere and I am sure that when I crunch the numbers it will mean that I am not going to be ordering in any time soon.

Not until Deposit Day or thereabouts. When the forces of the universe in the form of the BC government will hit “refresh” on my finances.

Still wish I could earn a living instead of having to rely on the BC taxpayers’ generosity. And I know that such a thing is possible. I have mad skills and an enormous capacity for work. Surely somebody out there wants to let me make them lots of money.

I’m serious. I could make some lucky businesspeople mad cash and be happy to do it for only a token percentage of the gains.

But I would have to find a way to acquire such work that works with my current state of mental illness, and I am going to need to change a great deal to make even that possible.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Told my therapist Doctor Costin about my desire to correct my highly polluted and corrupt inner narrative of my life because I know damned well that said sad and stupid story is poisoning my mental health and it’s not even accurate or complete.

So no more thinking my childhood was friendless and lonely, full stop. There were times I had friends, like Bobby from across the street, and even during the friendless times I wasn’t exactly just sitting there feeling sad and lonely all the damned time.

So yeah, there was a lot missing from my childhood, but the real story is not nearly as neat and simple and hopeless as my depression has fooled me into thinking.

I spent an awful long time being so incredibly lonely that I didn’t even know how lonely I was. Maybe that’s where and why I learned to be so numb.

It was my brutally efficient way of protecting myself from my cold and lonesome life during those years when I had nobody.

That’s why I created this walled off world inside myself in which to live. And a version of myself, I suppose, that could be appealing and friendly and lovable and fun.

And exist only in text based roleplaying environments. Le sigh.

I did do a video for today, via TikTok, although I know I could have done it the usual way via webcam on this PC and then just waited to upload it till my WiFi arrived.

But I was feeling cranky and didn’t want to deal with the webcam. So sue me.

One annoying thing : some of my video games don’t play without the internet even though they do not, as far as I can tell, have an online component at all.

I thought we were past that bullshit. People want their games to be playable whenever they want instead of needing an internet connection so it can constantly check to make sure I am playing a legit copy of the game.

My days of game piracy are way, way behind me and I am still middle class enough to resent being treated like a criminal.

Oh well. I will get the internet back on this here PC soon.

More after the break.

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We have reconnected

So, mission accomplished. New USB WiFi network adapter installed, internet restored, and all is quiet on the land.

At first it didn’t seem like it was working. I plugged it into a USB port and… no connection sound. Same for other ports.

But then I remember that this computer o’ mine can be fussy about networking, so I just rebooted, and voila, the internet hath returned.

I didn’t even have to put in our password again.

So, that’s another crisis quashed. Cost me $35 but at least I still have internet.

Actually, it cost $22. The other 13 was me getting some mints from the people at PUR, the thin excuse for which was to bump my purchase up to the point where it was eligible for the super fast Prime shipping.

Plus they had a variety pack of the PUR mints and I am a sucker for variety packs.

Technically, only three of the five packs are actually mints. The usual assortment, peppermint, spearmint, and “polar” mint.

Never seen a polar-mint plant but I bet it works great in freezing potions.

The other two are cinnamon, which is fine, and mango tangerine, which not only sounds like an amazing flavour combination but the name itself is beautiful poetry.

Mango tangerine. Tango margarine. Wrangled submarine. Cool, daddio.

So after a flutter of chaos and random fuckery, normalcy returns and we can all heave a sigh of relief and go back to our lives.

I feel like I am forgetting something…. oh crap, the video!

Phew, got it in just under the wire.

To be honest, a little chaos probably does me some good. My life is very boring and predictable in the broad strokes and that’s no good. When things become too predictable our nervous systems tune them out and they start seeming unreal.

That’s particularly bad when it happens to life.

I have yet to master seeking the chaos out in some safe sane form myself, though I do, on my best days, feel alert and curious about my environment, like any healthy animal.

Most of the time I just stare at the walls of my cage, though.

What’s the real world like? I’ve heard good things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, it’s actually from me.

I am starting to think that my best stuff comes after completely blanking on what the hell I am going to talk about and therefore being forced to really rummage around in my data banks and pull out something that’s in there good and deep.

It is, of course, incomplete. There’s other stuff I could have put in there. In my world, nothing is ever truly complete or entire.

It’s all just whatever comes to me when it comes time to create. More things always pop into my head afterwards. I am getting quite used to that.

I wish I had the technical muscle to make my vid seem more like it comes from Fox News. It would be so much more powerful and impactful that way. It might even fool some people for a minute.

But alas, I do not have that kind of skill. Yes, I edit my own videos, but that is 99 percent just cut and paste work with the occasion adding of on screen titles, and the sort of graphics and audio work it would take to sell the Fox News thing are well beyond me.

This is why I need a team. A small, focused, dedicated group of subversive weirdos like myself who want to make outrageously amazing content that goes viral because of its hilarious comedy and politically provocative content.

Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Problem is that I lack the social skills to even know where I could find such people, let alone having the chutzpah to recruit them.

Still, with the help of Xanax, maybe I could pull it off. I know that I can be a charismatic leader if I can just get the fuck out of my own way and stop the shrieking banshees of anxiety from screaming in my ears and making it hard to get anything done.

That sounds like a job for Xanax to me.

I must keep reminding myself that any time I feel like anxiety is getting in the way of doing what I want to do, I have the magic pill to make it go away.

I guess I have lived under anxiety’s reign of terror for so long that it’s hard to remember that it is possible to exit it. Taking one before my Tuesdays at the Kinsmen Center is easy because I know I am about to enter a very anxiety provoking situation.

But doing it purely for something I am going to do here, at home, where I feel the most safe, is another thing entirely.

But I can’t deny that, home or not, I am still hemmed in by anxiety. I don’t actively feel it most of the time because I don’t actually fight it most of the time, so for me, it’s kind of like an electric fence is to cows.

They don’t have to get zapped all the time to know they shouldn’t go there. The painful association with the fence is more than enough.

And my fence is made of anxiety. And there are times when I feel like just leaning into that fucking fence and ignoring all the stupid alarms going off in my head in order to find out if I can break through to the other side.

So far I haven’t been either strong enough or nihilistically numb enough to do it.

But one of these days, who knows. Might be worth it just to feel something.

Sometimes feeling pain is better than feeling nothing at all. That’s why cutting is a thing.

I am glad I never heard of that when I was a very depressed teen. I would have started cutting myself, or doing something equally painful, for sure.

Come to think of it, I used to stick my bare hand into a snowbank to see how long I could go before the pain from the cold made me take it out.

But I gave up on that when I realized there was no limit. I could keep my hand in there for as long as I liked.

Because I was so damned numb.

More after the break.

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Not thinking of that

I have a long, long history of not thinking things through.

For example, as a child, I was super excited to get my very first Walkman… until I realized I had no tapes for it.

This did not occur to me until it was Xmas morning and I had my brand new Walkman in my hand. It had a radio, so I would not have been completely screwed, but luckily my siblings had anticipated my cluelessness and had made a mixed tape for me.

The subject is on my mind because I ordered some KFC tonight without stopping to think about whether Julian would be home to get it from the door for me.

Not a big deal in and of itself because I can get my stuff from the door when necessary. For me, the trip to the apartment door and back is a bit of a hike but I can do it.

But at the same time, my land line phone went on the fritz. So when the Door Dash dude arrived, he couldn’t get through to me via the buzzer, so he had no choice but to leave my stuff outside.

This is typical of how life conspires to fuck me over. It’s always via something random that I never could have anticipated even at my most paranoid.

How was I to know the phone wasn’t working?

Oh well, Julian came home and brought me my food. I had to eat it cold, which is suboptimal but not the end of the world. So no big time harm done.

And by itself, my mistake in not checking to see if Julian was around was not that big an error. If the phone hadn’t stopped working everything would have been fine.

Still, it’s a bitch and rather stressful to have to go through this bullshit.

Oh, and they gave me the wrong drink. I got 7 up instead of the Diet Pepsi I ordered, an obviously I can’t drink that.

Which is too bad, because the sip I took was mighty tasty.

I’ve put my complaint in to DoorDash. I will probably get a refund.

I’d rather have had my proper drink, but a refund will have to do.

Such is life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yeah, so, today has kinda sucked.

Learn all about it here :

Funny how I started off thinking I had nothing to say but ended up rambling on for almost ten minutes anyway.

When in doubt, start complaining, I guess.

That subject has been on my mind : complaining, and being crabby in general. It’s a somewhat acceptable way to vent one’s spleen, as long as you’re not attacking your friends and other loved ones or punching down, and so I have been examining the idea that I am just a crabby person and seeing if it feels like that suits me.

It’s a complicated thing to examine. It would certainly require reducing my compulsive need to be as lovable and pleasant and funny and fun to be around all the time.

A very deep and desperate part of me thinks that I have to use all my charm and appeal and so on to make people like me at all times or they will suddenly realize what a horrific nightmare of a person I really am and run away screaming.

Which is brutally sad.

Seriously. My god. I meant to just look up the song for the reference but found myself mesmerized by the recording quality.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, being crabby.

I keep thinking of Andy Rooney. He made quite a good living being crabby in a funny way^[1] and I am both crabby and funny and so it makes me go hmmm.

Perhaps one can complain about stuff a lot and still be liked. Fascinating.

I keep feeling like I need to do more with my videos, though I am not exactly sure what that would entail yet.

I just know that I am capable of so much more. I look at some of the more ambitious videos I made way, way back in the 2000s when we lived at One Road and Francis Road (aka Nerdvana) and I see how much more alive and vital and (in my halfassed way) enthusiastic and ambitious I was, and I can’t help but sigh.

I sigh a lot. Must be a sign of aging thing.

I mean, look at this strapped young lad :

Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to watch all 15 minutes, it’s just a sampler.

At least this time around, I know I need to put on a frigging shirt.

I keep pondering things like one person skits, fake newscasts a la Daily Show et al, maybe even (in a very separate space) some stories of kids, and I guess you could say brooding over the idea.

And who knows, maybe one fine morning I will wake up and launch into a whole new era of video making (videography?) and make really top quality stuff instead of mostly just me talking to the camera and maybe even make something of the whole thing.

It’s like that with me. Like my idea are eggs and I never know when one will decide to hatch and make itself known in the world so all I can do is keep it warm and safe in my big ol head and wait.

So maybe one of these days the energy will be right and I will say “Today’s the day!” and make something truly amazing.

Or maybe one day I will die living exactly the same way I do now, if not worse.

It’s really up to me.

So um…. don’t hold your breath.

More after the break.

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Every JRPG ever

I thought this was quite good :

Not sure if you have to be a veteran gamer to get the jokes. If so, sorry. I am hoping that the general idea comes across regardless.

For some strange reason, the gag I love the most is the Secret Princess being interrupted by the XP/GP screen.

Maybe I just love the way she just says, “Oh, OK. ”

Anyhow, on with the show.

---

Nothing to update

Because I feel more or less exactly like I felt when I wrote Part 1 up there.

The only thing that has changed is that I feel slightly less tired and dragged out. Other than that, the person standing on my chest hasn’t gotten any lightly nor has the sandpaper in my throat switched to a finer grit.

And that kinda sucks. Standard disclaimer, if things go on like that, I will have to consider taking the ER/UC route.

As far as I can tell, nothing else is going wrong. My usual muscle aches and “rusty” feeling in my joints from the inflammation haven’t shown up yet. My nose had been running but that’s almost certainly from seasonal allergies, not a virus.

Maybe the difference is that this time, I have been doing a much better job of staying hydrated than usual and that’s helping my body fight the bug, or at least keeping my muscles and joints lubricated.

Oh well. Maybe I should try to develop that “attitude of gratitude” that so many mental health people push these days. Be grateful for every day in which I am less sick and miserable than I could be.

Yeah right. Sorry, still way too bitter and cynical for that heinous bullcrap. The very idea of it fills me with nausea. What a pathetic, groveling, lowly way to live.

I dunno who that shit is working for but I bet they’re not Gen X.

My friend Lou was telling me that nobody born after 1998 – in other words, Gen Z – believes that things will get better or can ever be good again.

And I thought, wow, maybe they’re more like Gen X than I thought. The difference is, I suppose, that we developed nihilistic cynicism to hope with a world without hope, and the Gen Z youngsters don’t seem to have nihilism as a weapon.

Maybe I can teach it to them.

Homework assignment : watch the video for Black Hole Sun ten times in a row.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, the vid of the day.

Brace yourself, because it’s pretty exciting.

So yeah, my tootsies are burning. I’ve taken some Tylenol and that definitely helped some but they still feel like I tried the whole “walking on fire” thing and failed.

Ow ow ow, etc.

Dunno WTF is up with that and I suppose if it persists, I am going to have to take it to god damned Urgent Care.

Luckily, walking doesn’t make much difference to the pain, so I can do my event at the Kinsmen Adult Center tomorrow, all things being equal.

But I sure am tired of random shit going wrong with my health.

I also have Wound Care tomorrow, so I can ask my nurse about it. Like I say in the vid, I don’t see any obvious signs of the source of the pain, but the nurse might see something I do not.

Lord know I’m not exactly observant.

I missed the gang at Kinsmen last week. There was no get-together last Tuesday because it was a stat holiday. I missed my one day of being vaguely normal.

With the help of the almighty Xanax, hallowed be its name, of course.

Anxiety is such a bitch. My own nervous and endocrine systems are against me. That’s where my extremely overactive alarm system resides and I wish I could just short circuit that shit forever because it’s doing way more harm than good.

Still, it’s good to be able to perceive it as a meaningless malfunction I am temporarily stuck with as opposed to thinking it represents any kind of truth.

It’s just neurochemical bullshit my body does because it got into a self-reinforcing cycle of hypervigilance as as result of my depression and isolation, and now I have to live with the absurd result.

When I am strong enough, I am going to just muscle the fucking anxiety out of my way so I can finally get on with life.

Or not. Maybe I will be exactly how I am right now until the day I die. If not worse.

There’s a cheerful thought.

Admittedly, I’m not feeling very good today. In addition to the foot thing, I feel worn out and tired and physically depressed.

God, I hope I am not coming down with something. That would fucking figure. It would be like the universe is conspiring to keep me away from Kinsmen.

I definitely don’t feel well. Hopefully this is just another of my mysterious transient health issues and will go away when I have had enough rest and/or hydration.

God, I can feel my hypochondria trying to creep in. Maybe I should take a Xanax. That would head it off at the pass real quick.

I suppose it could be seasonal allergy related. Maybe I have some kind of histamine activated system wide inflammatory response shit going on, I dunno. I have been sneezing now and then, and inflammation would account for the burning foot thing.

Once more I tell myself I have to buy some damn antihistamines already so I can get this shit under control, but I know I will probably forget or be too lazy or indecisive.

I did manage to make a decision today. I bought a game called Marvel Midnight Suns, which has excellent reviews and promises to be a Marvel based deck building game.

But not just deck building. You can also build patios, porches, and verandas!

Ha ha ha. It’s $12 and if I don’t like it, I can return it, so it’s not THAT big of a decision, but at least I acted on the Steam Fall Sale before all those bargains disappeared.

And I am proud of myself for that.

After all, I missed the Summer Sale entirely!

More after the break.

---

Still not good

I feel somewhat better than I did earlier today but I still don’t exactly feel great

So the question of my participation in the Kinsmen activities tomorrow remains open. Maybe I will be over all of this mishigas by then, who knows.

Another attack of my flu like symptoms. Must be that time of the month.

Tried out Midnight Suns. So far so good. There’s been a lot of cutscenes, which can get annoying, but amazingly enough, the writing is actually quite funny in places, so I will allow it for now.

And there’s lots of people like the short haired military version of Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel, Iron Man of course, Blade, Doctor Strange, the Scarlet Witch, a character from the MCU called The Caretaker (sadly, not played by Kris Kristofferson this time) and various other Marvel heavy hitters.

Quite literally, for at least some of them.

System seems pretty simple so far. You get five cards a turn and you can play three of them, so a certain amount of prioritization will be needed. There is technically a spatial aspect, and you can use stuff in the environment for attacks (like, say, throwing a boulder at a bad guy’s head), which spices things up a tad.

Ergo so far it’s a keeper. I am making a very deliberate concentrated effort to not let my high strung anxious nature make me flip out and return the damn thing out of sheer nerves. I am going to give it a solid chance.

I have got to tame my rogue energies and get them all moving in the same direction instead of my mind going madly off in all directions all the damn time.

And that means continuing my efforts to integrate my long neglected id into my consciousness. I have lived in the numbing grip of intellectualism for far too long and I am long overdue for a spiritual tune-up to bring things into balance.

Hopefully without me having to go completely insane and/or become a raging impacted arsehole in the process.

But if I gotta, well….. I hope the world can forgive me in the long run.

I don’t wanna go there, but that might be my only way out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.